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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28453 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Mike Lindell has been ordered to pay up for his challenge to disprove some election interference evidence.

It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.

The great thing is that the man who met the challenge voted for Trump twice. (I wonder if he will a third time.)

If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.

Had Lindell set the bounty to prove the veracity of the evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt), he’d still have his money.

This is like the inverse of the Balaji Srinivasan bet on inflation and Bitcoin. I think it’s great when the wealthy put their money where their mouth is. We need more bets taxing bullshit.

If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.

As I understand AAA rules, both parties picked arbiters and those two arbiters picked a third.

And then they voted unanimously against Lindell.

If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.

I realize that I’m skirting close to the ‘if pro-lifers really believed abortion was murder, surely they’d…’ argument, but there is a case to be made that this kind of applies to Trump himself. Like, if the deep state stole the election from him once, why would he have any faith they wouldn’t do it again, especially now “they” have the presidency and thus surely even more power and less oversight?

I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.

That leaves two possibilities. Firstly, that the deep state is too weak or his margin of victory will be too great to cheat him of the presidency again or, secondly, that he never really believed he won the first (well, second) time, but was just using the claim of interference as a political tool (both to rally his supporters and maybe as some kind of gambit to stay in office).

As I pointed out a few times earlier, if Trump honestly believed the 2016 election was rigged against him with millions of fraudulent votes (they just barely didn’t have enough to quite win the electoral college…), then his first order of business should have been a major investigation such that it couldn’t happen again.

Actually, even if he didn’t believe it and was merely saying it for propaganda purposes, it would have been a classic political maneuver to use a pretense for a major corruption investigation to defeat enemies and ensure ongoing political power.

Trump has the right instincts to be a strongman, just not the heart to follow though. Same thing goes for the meddling in the 2020 election outcome and that whole bit where Pence was supposed to play along, but instead there was a March on the Capitol to threaten his decapitation. It’s like a LARP of a would-be autocrat (along with threatening to imprison Hillary, bombing various countries, etc.). Trump has plausible deniability in the minds of many due to the half-hearted and bumbling attempts. I’ve had arguments with Trump supporters/defenders where one will say “of course he doesn’t mean it” and another will say “I’m excited for Trump to expose the corruption and jail the pedophiles.” A lot of MAGA takes him seriously and literally.

While I think plenty of Trump’s most vocal critics have cried wolf more than once (I define “TDS” as anyone who is more critical of Trump than I am), it does amaze me that people I formerly respected as “constitutional conservatives” don’t seem too concerned about Trump’s antics in terms of their present effect, or the potential effects down the road. I’d be a lot more concerned if Trump was 55, but his lasting effect on the GOP might still be pretty bad after he is out of the picture.

Hopefully we regress to a more sane political climate mean instead of pursuing a downward spiral.

was rigged against him with millions of fraudulent votes (they just barely didn’t have enough to quite win the electoral college…), then his first order of business should have been a major investigation such that it couldn’t happen again.

Trump tried to do this but Barr basically refused to take it seriously.

(This user has me blocked, but this is worth pointing out anyways.)

If he wins the popular vote there are basically two possibilities:

  1. He wins
  2. The deep state has to interfere in a big and obvious way to make him lose

Either way he wins so long as he gets enough popular support, right? Not too different from a normal election.

If he wins the popular vote

Even if he wins he is surely unlikely to win the popular vote, given historically unpopular Hillary had 3 million votes on him in 2016.

If he does win the popular vote, I agree given Republican electoral dynamics that means he’s won comfortably and undeniably, but it’s unlikely.

I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.

It's possible Trump believes it is rigged, but sitting it out is 100% chance of loss, vs a rigged election and some chance nonetheless.

My personal but totally evidence free belief is that Trump, circa 2020, wanted to be bought out. It makes perfect sense from a real estate development perspective: if you have a claim, even a weak claim, you hold onto it until someone pays you. A weak claim might not be worth a ton, but it'll be worth something to get you to shut up.

It's extremely common in complex real estate transactions. "I have a letter of intent from two years ago, that pre empts your deal!" "Actually the estate was never closed and THIS brother claims a share in ownership!" "According to organization by laws we did not have a quorom at the meeting where I was removed so I'm still in charge and my successor had no power to sign those documents!"

Trump didn't think he won, and he didn't think he'd win. But he thought he had enough that the Democrats would buy him out, would offer him a deal to step down. It would have been the rational thing to do, give Trump something to make him go away. But the Dems were never going to do that, they're not equipped to do that.

What kind of deal are you proposing as hypothetically possible here?

I don’t think that tracks. To this day he’s acting as if he believes the election was stolen. He never gave any indication that he believed otherwise. He did back down from other beliefs. At first he took COVID seriously enough to send a hospital ship to New York, and to go along with the CDC on lockdowns. He changed his mind later, and his statements back that up. But he’s absolutely firm on the stolen election claim. He’s never changed his story, even when he should stand to benefit from at least backing down from the claim.

I don't see where he'd benefit from backing down, what would that look like?

I think the fact that 4 years later he’s still talking about the stolen election probably hurts him in the polls among mainstream voters who don’t think the election was stolen.

It would have been the rational thing to do, give Trump something to make him go away.

Once you pay the Dane-geld, you'll never be rid of the Dane.

What did the Dems have to offer him? Not prosecute him?

I don’t think that has any value to Trump. It’s why voters vote for him because he legitimately won’t back down. Now I think Trump mostly just cares about Trump and wants the crown for his own ego.

I think just agreeing to enhanced election security measures for future elections would have assuaged Trump's ego.

Not prosecuting him is step one, but there's lots of other things to offer. Public Acknowledgement. An appointment to a powerful and important position. One or more Trumpian policies publicly enacted, with full credit given to Trump. One or more of his children, or Kushner, appointed to important positions.

Ok so you know there was zero chance the Dems are every giving him a high ranking position?

I mean yes, we know that. But why is it true? Why couldn't they do that? Trump, of course, would have to play along, which is the most major impossibility. But Kamala called Biden a racist just before campaigning on his ticket, Dems are perfectly capable of flipping the narrative when necessary.

Certainly Ivanka or Kushner could have been given a plum job, and if Trump in turn conceded and mildly endorsed Biden it would have been a win-win.

Trump was also friends with people like the Clintons before he ran against them. He created chants of "lock her up" and then did nothing to precipitate that. I just don't think Trump sees political acrimony as a permanent, fixed thing. He thinks they're just being theatrical and playing the game, as he is.

Exactly. Trump could accept it. But he'd need to behave and color inside the lines to be successfully co opted.

Trump didn't think he won, and he didn't think he'd win

You did say "evidence free" so I don't want to slam you in an unfriendly way or anything. But Trump absolutely believed he was going to win 2020, and nothing has ever come out to indicate he pushed election fraud claims for cynical reasons.

Sorry, that wasn't clear, I meant that I don't believe Trump ever actually thought (past maybe December 1 2020) he was going to succeed in retaining the presidency by procedural games. His actions throughout the process make far more sense if seen in the light of trying to solidify a weak claim, rather than in light of an attempted coup d'etat (justified or unjustified).

I appreciate the kid gloves for my shit post.

On the third hand though what other choice is there? Make your own America? You fight until you are no longer physically capable of fighting, even if the odds are stacked against you. You will surely have a better chance of ousting the deep state as a president, even a hated one, than as a rich civilian.

Like, if the deep state stole the election from him once, why would he have any faith they wouldn’t do it again, especially now “they” have the presidency and thus surely even more power and less oversight?

The argument is that in 2020 urban political machines used mail-in ballot rules to harvest ballots. This isn't an infinity-vote generator, it's a powerful-but-limited tool. So, the argument develops like this:

  • The pandemic is over and so the same playbook of last-minute changes to election rules will not be in effect.

  • Trump and his ilk now plan to build their own ballot harvesting machine instead of trying to deny the Democrats theirs.

  • Trump is performing better now than he did in 2020, so the amount of necessary fraud to steal the election goes up.

  • Biden is performing worse than he did in 2020, and key parts of the Democratic constituency may not be mobilized like they were before.

that he never really believed he won the first (well, second) time, but was just using the claim of interference as a political tool

People like to say this, but nobody has ever produced any evidence that Trump doesn't believe what he's saying. Indeed, all the leaks from the Trump White House (infamously, they are legion) indicate that sometimes, Trump was the only one who believed in election interference.

The argument is that in 2020 urban political machines used mail-in ballot rules to harvest ballots.

No, that's not the argument Trump advanced. He claimed that the election was stolen via fraud, and asked Bill Barr to have the Justice Department investigate. Specific claims advanced at the time include over 3000 people in Nevada voting after moving to another state, or that Pennsylvania postal employees conspired to backdate late ballots.

These claims were all, of course, false.

Ballot harvesting in States where it is illegal to deliver someone else's ballot is fraud.

By "fraud" I mean something that causes invalid votes to be counted, or valid votes to not be counted, or coerces, bribes or disenfranchises voters. I'm not sure if any jurisdiction considers ballot harvesting in the absence of these other activities to be fraud. Texas, for example, explicitly defines "vote harvesting" as separate from "electoral fraud", although engaging in fraud as part of a vote harvesting organization can result in enhanced penalties.

Trump was warning about mail-in ballots since before the votes were counted. ("Complaining about," if you prefer.)

Otherwise, I'm not sure what point you're making. Some fraud accusations are weaker than others, and we should only discuss the ones you find weakest? The version I have expounded is extremely reasonable, answering OP's idea that "the deep state stole the election," why-wouldn't-they-do-it-again.

Trump was warning about mail-in ballots since before the votes were counted. ("Complaining about," if you prefer.)

Yes, he was complaining that they were more susceptible to fraudulent voting ("millions of counterfeit ballots").

Some fraud accusations are weaker than others, and we should only discuss the ones you find weakest?

This thread is about Trump's state of mind: why would he bother running again if his claims of election fraud were made in good faith? In that context, it's relevant that he did not invoke the reasonable scenario you presented, but rather a wide-ranging conspiracy where millions of votes can be fabricated.

I think this is a bad argument made in service of an ultimately correct position.

Even if Trump did believe the election was entirely stolen ... I mean, what would you do, if you imagine you're have the beliefs of a genuine conspiracy MAGAboomer? Just give in and say "yeah, the libs own the country now because they're more willing to commit crime with us"? No, it's a sufficiently important issue that you'd keep fighting.

I know right wingers who believe the election was stolen and as such are essentially checked out of electoral politics. It's an internally consistent position. There's no point fighting if you literally can't win.

I honestly don't know what Trump really thinks about 2020, but I do know he would be better off if he just admitted he lost because people were angry about COVID, but "we'll get them next time". He essentially blackpilled portions of his base by claiming Democrats are capable of large-scale election conspiracies.

Here's my reference: in 1948, Lyndon Johnson created and harvested hundreds of thousands of ballots for his election to Senate. Robert Caro has documented this extensively in the second volume of his LBJ biography, "The Means of Ascent". It took decades for the people involved to come forward and talk to Caro, and only a few of them were really required. If you scale that up from one state to a dozen, millions of votes are not an implausible idea. And millions of votes were not even needed given the final tallies in a few swing states.

Now, there's a very obvious mechanism here: mail-in ballots can come from anywhere, and once they're mixed up with regular ballots it becomes impossible to prove which votes are "real". It's hard to prove what has happened. And everyone has motive. This does not need to be a "wide-ranging" conspiracy.

Trump has said many things about the election. I've never heard him say, as above, "the deep state stole the election". I've never heard him say, "there was a wide-ranging conspiracy". I have beard him say that mail-in ballots are not secure.

The idea here is really plain: the election wasn't stolen by some unalterable cabal that runs the world in secret. There is not a central committee that decided 2020 was not Trump, so that now we have to answer why bother with 2024 at all. Election fraud is boring and quotidian stuff. It can be greater or lesser depending on lots of contingent factors. And Trump can think he has a better show this time, while still also thinking 2020 was stolen.

Before that Mike Lindell has been deplatformed and one of the target of the ire of the left wing establishment which includes plenty more rich people collectively working together than what Mike Lindel represents. Where their behavior is not held accountable.

There is no reason to consider this as an example of a bet taxing bullshit. That perspective would only merit entertaining if we see courts forcing liberal establishment figures, including in powerful corporations and NGOs having to pay large fines, or getting them to pay relating to technicality, including prove me wrong bets, to the extend there is some parity there.

Even this hitpiece article against him shows how Lindell has been targeted for his political opinions although they have a celebration paralalax line. https://www.newsweek.com/rise-fall-mike-lindell-1830372 and he has been banned from social media platforms and had other interference with his affairs https://www.axios.com/2023/09/22/mike-lindell-cellphone-seizure-court-constitutional

The message being given is that if you oppose us or support Trump, we are going to get you. And then throw a line of weak deniability. But it would be about your political opinions.

Moreover, the collective media hitpieces on this guy is just utterly horrible behavior. It seems that a culture of liberal voyeristic sadistic glee has developed where certain figures especially, and their general opponents become the afixed target. But especially there is a focus on particular individuals as a tactic to isolate the opposition. This culture definitely leads to increasing injustice and indifference to injustice, because the priority is "getting them" whether Trump, Lindell becomes a value that replaces actual moral principles.

This culture of feeling pleasure over the misfortune of the hated Lindell promoted by such media and such echochambers might be influencing your happiness at his misfortune.

Another issue to ponder, is what would happen if everyone who made claims about russiagate, election interference, supported riots, made destructive false partisan claims, not just politically incorect but including all political correct false narratives, etc, were targeted. Not to mention controversial issues that aren't cared about like supporting warcrimes, aggressive wars, and more. Who would be left of the political establishment?

This culture of feeling pleasure over the misfortune of the hated Lindell promoted by such media and such echochambers might be influencing your happiness at his misfortune.

it is hard to frame him as a victim, imho. Mike profits from pillow sales by generating media attention. Likewise, the mainstream profits from ad revenue despite also being wrong a lot. The incentives encourage lies and sensationalism on both sides. There is no downside for the media being wrong. They book the ad revenue profit, issue retraction after the damage has been done and ad revenue realized, and move on and people forget.

“A bet is a tax on bullshit” is not meant to say “government fines are a good thing.” The guy who wrote that article is not really a fan of government power being used to decide such things.

Lindell choosing to place a bet is a good thing. He just made a bad one for himself. His “misfortune” on this particular issue is all self-imposed by him, it just took a judge to force him to comply with his own promise.

Lindell is not being punished such as he is for supporting Trump. One can, theoretically at least, support Trump and not engage in blatant lies and other violations that will attract the ire of social media platforms.

The super ironic thing is that Lindell lost his phone due to an FBI investigation over election tampering at the county level. Contrary to what a lot of posters here believe, the US government takes election issues quite seriously and Lindell trying to doing vigilante election security backfired on him a bit. Somehow I doubt if that Mesa County official ends up convicted it will change anyone’s mind, because the case hasn’t made enough of a dent in people thinking it’s not too hard to screw with county election results.

Not that it proves you wrong, but it’s hard to take your complaints seriously based on how say Hillary got treated. Both sides of the aisle do a lot of shit that is indecent.

ends up convicted it will change anyone’s mind, because the case hasn’t made enough of a dent in people thinking it’s not too hard to screw with county election results.

Not that it proves you wrong, but it’s hard to take your complaints seriously based on how say Hillary got treated.

How was Hillary treated? There is an extremely high likelihood that she directly ordered her staff to break serious laws in serious ways, with serious consequences, then ordered them to cover it up, and both she and her staff were given a pass.

By “break serious laws” do you mean the email server? Or are we talking the theories out there about darker stuff?

If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance. And, well, Trump has her beat with his personal presidential library he had going.

If you mean something more serious than the email server, then we are going to be in a disagreement about the evidence for those claims.

(If you bring up claims of general corruption related to the Clinton Foundation then I’m going to laugh at you, for reasons that should be obvious.)

  • -16

I think like the documents case affecting Trump, the situation depends quite a lot on two questions: what did the person actually have, and how much security did they have in place to protect it.

If the emails contained nothing of consequence, then it’s a crime certainly, but the damage done to the country by them being hacked is pretty minimal. If all Trump took from the WH were secret recipes for really good steaks, it really isn’t going to hurt anyone. Within any office environment are papers with varying degrees of security and even within that there are things that are controlled that really aren’t that important or useful to other companies. New products in development are important to guard. Proprietary processes and technologies are important to guard. There might be other things like marketing plans that are less important. Not that they can be leaked with impunity, but there wouldn’t be nearly as much harm actually done by them getting out. In the realm of statecraft, things like the names and locations of spies, military intelligence, military technology, strategic planning, etc. are extremely important to keep secret. Dirt on heads of state, including our own might be embarrassing, but unlikely to be fatal.

The other question would be the security of those offsite storage facilities. How hard is it to crack Hillary’s server? How hard is it to get into the closet Trump had documents in? If the security was lax, it seems like such a thing should be treated like a leak. Not because we can prove it actually happened, but because the security was so light that anyone with the slightest understanding of security would know that the server or closet was almost certain to be breeched at some point. My understanding of the server was that it was basically an off the shelf Outlook server protected with a password. Trump had the documents in closets and empty rooms a Mar-a-Lago which is a facility with lots of staff and probably multiple keys to every room in the place and few other security features to keep people out of those rooms. In either case, I think it fair to treat that type of security as no security at all.

You should also consider that Hillary was doing what she did in the course of her duties as SecState and was permitted (stupidly) to have the server. She complied with the investigation.

Trump took very sensitive documents because he wanted to own them. He did not comply with the investigation.

Trump is being prosecuted because there was no way to let this level of violation slide.

It’s mostly about two things:

  1. The sensitivity of the info.
  2. How badly/brazenly/irresponsibly rules were broken.

The Hillary server was known to the State Department and others in government because she used it for her job. It was a bad idea and poorly executed, but clearly de facto permitted. The emails were not classified, but upon investigation some of them had content should have been.

This last bit is not a result of the server; it’s a result of the State Department constantly straddling classified and unclassified worlds. I have no idea if Hillary and her close associates were more or less irresponsible than average people in her position because we don’t have investigation results to compare. I do know that the classification business is a pain in the ass and can involve judgement calls that are easier in hindsight.

Trump, on the other hand, absconded with dozens of boxes of highly classified documents, as if he wanted a personal collection. We know he talked about them and shared them, and not for official US government business. And when the US government asked for them back, he put up a fight. If he had just given them back the chance it would have gone any further was very low.

The remarkable bit is that the president is the absolute classification authority and Trump (falsely) claims he had declassified them. Now, if he had gone the formal declassification route then that would have been a scandal (declassifying sensitive things because you want them in your collection is not a good luck), but he wouldn’t have broken the law. (At least, I’m pretty sure there is no legal restraint on a president declassifying things because it’s an executive branch program; the reason congress is so cavalier with classified data is because they can’t be prosecuted for breaking those rules.)

Hillary made mistakes. Trump (almost certainly) committed a crime.

Ok pretend I'm an idiot, it shouldn't be hard, what reasons that should be obvious are there for laughing at the Clinton Foundation? Because the insane amount of corporatist and nepotistic graft and influence peddling that flows through that place seems obvious. As does the fact that Clinton Foundation affiliates recycled Build Back Better from Haiti to the USA.

I’d laugh in this context because the Clintons at least waited until leaving office to start their grifting, whereas Trump was still actively involved in running his company, despite the million different opportunities for conflicts of interest and other obvious ethical issues that should have been unthinkable to permit.

It's because the sclerotic voting system has ceded significant power to the establishment of each party through the presence of safe seats and the internal selection process. Influence is worth serious bucks, and special interests and lobbyists have significant influence within the local body politic. Nancy Pelosi for instance, is an institution herself within the Democrat party. The same goes for Joe Biden, but Bushes are no better either, nor Kennedys. The business of politics is the biggest business around, with the government wielding a massive budget. At a time when voters themselves have less impact than ever, they are presented with hand-picked options that will change fundamentally nothing about how politics itself will be run.

As I understand it, the significance of the email server was that it was carefully set up to allow Clinton to evade scrutiny of her communications, whilst also exposing very sensitive information to any halfway-competent hacker. It's bad on security grounds and its existence suggests further wrongdoing. A little like Nicola Sturgeon deleting all of her WhatsApp message rather than allow them to be examined by an enquiry.

Meanwhile, Trump and Biden both seem to be guilty of nothing more than having taken paperwork home and not giving it back. Trump is Trump, and also tried to deny wrongdoing in an obviously false manner, so he got dinged while Biden didn't, but there's not really any suggestion of anything untoward and the risk is much more limited.

Your theory is self-contradicting.

If you’re going to set up your own server to evade scrutiny, then you should probably also invest in making it highly secure.

Government IT tends to suck, which Clinton knew, and so she stupidly tried to avoid that by just using what she already had. It should not been allowed and certainly won’t be ever again.

Clinton turned over many thousands of emails to the State Department. The FBI managed to find even more. But at the end of the day there was no bombshell and it’s wishful thinking by her opponents to believe she successfully covered up all the really nefarious stuff. (Anyone with half a brain would do the nefarious stuff separately anyway.)

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-emails-secretary-state/story?id=42389308

You’re just immensely wrong about how you characterize the Trump case. You have to significantly downplay the dozens of boxes of very sensitive documents he purposely took, and then the refusal to comply on top. It’s par for the course to have a situation like Biden’s and many other senior officials and presidents have. Trump is on his own golf course here with a totally unprecedented effort to keep classified material.

Some of the Trump documents were sufficiently sensitive that the classification itself is classified, due to belonging to special programs, and has to be partially redacted in court documents.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-are-the-classified-documents-in-the-trump-indictment

So all of the “but her emails” crowd who thought Clinton was terrible for exposing sensitive information that should have been classified in the course of her official duties as SecState, if their true concern is the responsible handling of classified information, ought to be utterly outraged at Trump for simply wishing to possess and share very classified documents for his own personal benefit.

If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance. And, well, Trump has her beat with his personal presidential library he had going.

Given the complete lack of security on Clinton's email server (during her first two months as Secretary of State she connected to it over an unencrypted connection) Trump's "presidential library" would have to be of the lending variety to be anywhere near as egregious.

You’re wrong for at least four reasons.

First, Hillary as SecState was found to have some emails that should have been classified. State Dept lives in between classified and unclassified worlds and so these things are going to happen. So clearly dumb and bad, but not to the level meriting prosecution.

Second, Trump is known to have shared the classified information for his personal interest.

Third, Trump took some really classified stuff.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-are-the-classified-documents-in-the-trump-indictment

Fourth, he refused to comply, necessitating a formal effort to seize the documents.

If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance.

She destroyed the evidence with BleachBit. To then claim there is no evidence of "darker stuff", is to abandon adverse inference.

Well the FBI disagrees with your sentiments and you do not seem to be accurately representing how events transpired.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-emails-secretary-state/story?id=42389308

Furthermore, using a tool to mass delete data, particularly that contains PII, is a standard practice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/11/trump-fbi-search-hillary-clinton/

She was an idiot for mixing personal and business emails, but she would have been an even bigger idiot to have used it for whatever it is you mean by “darker stuff”.

I don't understand how this is possibly the court's fault. I haven't heard of this challenge before, so maybe the article you linked about it is misleading somehow, but it sounds like the sequence of events was:

  1. Lindell proposes a challenge claiming he has evidence related to cheating on the 2020 election, offers a $5 million prize to the first person to prove him wrong to the satisfaction of him or an arbitrator he chose.
  2. Someone in fact convinces the arbitrator they have fulfilled the requirements of the prize; Lindell doesn't pay out.
  3. Just now, a court confirmed that, yes, the arbitrator really was convinced and that means Lindell has to pay out.

The court very explicitly did not look at the election claims; they only said "this was the terms of the bet; they were fulfilled, so you have to pay out".

It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.

I'm really not sure why you think evidence of election interference isn't investigated by government authorities (reworded because I'm not sure if law enforcement or the secretary of state's office / election board is the appropriate authority, probably depends on the exact case). It sounds like Lindell didn't have any evidence and just threw together some unrelated obfuscated numbers and didn't expect anyone to call him out on it.

Assuming you didn’t accidentally respond to me vs. another commenter, I’ll take this as a compliment that I presented the facts in a way that someone could think I actually think Lindell has been wronged.

On a technical point, the court had to agree that the terms of the challenge were fulfilled, which means they believe the evidence provided by Lindell was in fact demonstrably false. So fans of Deep State theory can stay believers if they want to. “The rot runs even deeper than we thought.” (No one ever seems to explain how the Deep State tried so hard to defeat Trump in 2016 but failed so narrowly.)

If you look at my comment history, you’ll find we violently agree about Lindell and general claims of election fraud.

The most charitable I can be about someone like Lindell or Sidney Powell (or Trump) is that they are mentally ill, and not just straight out con(wo)men. I can’t use that for say a Giuliani or a Michael Flynn, given their past careers, and Dinesh D'Souza is a longstanding grifter.

I'm probably going to be corrected by some theology major (I don't care) but let me give my best explanation of Calvinism:

Before you're born, it's already predetermined whether you're going to heaven or hell.

"So why, pastor, should I be good and righteous"

"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."

As a persuasive technique, this probably works just as good as anything. It's often difficult to tease out causality in noisy data. I point this out in the context of Scott's latest post. Look at the graphs here and tell me what you notice:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory

I notice that choosing to be monogamous or polygamous barely matters at all across many aspects of wellbeing. But there is one key difference: fertility. Polygamous people have many fewer children.

Does polygamy cause infertility or does infertility cause polygamy? Does it matter? It's extremely dysgenic and bound to go the way of the Shakers.

For a trait to go extinct due to natural selection not only requires that it be straightforwardly genetic in way that's easy selected over (which is far from certain here), it also requires many generations of constant selection pressure.

Basically no one was discussing polygamy as a valid lifestyle when I was 20. What the world will look like when I'm 60, I have no idea.

So far this relationship between polygamy and fertility has lasted for much less time than a single generation. Given how contextual and cultural it seems to be, I wouldn't make any sweeping predictions which require that contemporary relationship to stay unchanged for a hundred years.

To say it doesn’t matter whether it’s causal… and then to immediately make the causal claim that polyamory is dysgenic is baffling. Clearly it does matter to you that the effect is causal!

It’s annoying when people are crying “correlation doesn’t imply causation” when the causal claim seems intuitively true to you. That doesn’t mean those criticisms of your argument aren’t valid (regardless of the truthfulness of your conclusions).

"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."

And my response to this is: "So what? If I'm destined for eternal hell in 80 years I want to have an absolute blast before I die and being around people just like me will help with that." Signalling that I'm the kind of person going to hell is a good way for us hellbound to recognise each other and get together so that we can turn our lives into one continual orgistic rave of pleasure that we couldn't if we were all separated from each other. It far beats living a life of austerity and then ending up in hell anyways.

If you can’t comprehend that 80 years is an instant compared to eternity 🤷🏼‍♂️

Your being destined to heaven/hell is not disconnected from your life—God's providence involves both, and the former depends on the latter.

So your suggestion's a bad move.

The point of predestination is that God, being timeless, already knows whether you're going to turn out to be a good person or a bad person. It's not as though you get a Hell mark on your forehead which dooms you no matter how many good things you do. It brings up awkward theological questions but from the point of view of the patient, trying to be a good person still has worth.

Saying, 'I'm obviously the sort of person who will go to hell so better sin as much as I can beforehand,' is silly and self-fulfilling.

So being a virtuous Calvinist is like one-boxing in the Newcomb's problem?

I understood every word in that sentence but not the sentence itself :P Could you explain, please?

Newcomb's problem is a thought experiment where a mysterious entity, who's known to be very good at predicting people's behavior, presents to you two boxes: one is transparent and contains a 1000$ and the other is opaque and might contain either nothing or one million dollars. You're given the choice of either taking only the opaque box (which is what I call one-boxing) or of taking both boxes. The entity tells you that it decided whether to put the money in the opaque box by predicting which option you will choose. If it predicted that you'll take both boxes, the opaque box is empty. If it predicted that you'll only take the opaque box, it put the million inside. What do?

If that was too muddled of an explanation, then have a Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox

Or alternatively, have a link to the explanation by everybody's favorite bombastic rationality guru: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality

That sounds about right. But I don’t see why you would ever take both boxes. The wikipedia page seems to suggest that it’s because you don’t trust the entity to predict correctly. I suppose it you really need $1000 that’s sensible but otherwise it looks like being a case of ‘so sharp you’ll cut yourself’.

Causal decision theory implies you should—after all, the money's either in the box or not, so there's no harm in taking it at this point; it's not like the money is somehow going to disappear.

I think it's wrong in this unusual case, but it is a thing it would advocate.

That's a good comparison:

In both, it's already known what the outcome will be (at least, to God/Omega). In both, what actions you take is tied up in it.

But you can't try to exploit the outcome being fixed, because it's dependent upon the intermediate steps—if you took the other option, you would find that it was that option that was fixed instead. So it makes sense to choose the better option.

There's a little more causation in Calvinism, but yeah, that's a good comparison. (Note, this analysis only requires knowledge: any system that has an omniscient God, which is to say most, will end up with the same result.)

I assume this is also the way that compatibilism works in general, including to atheists.

Yep. Only instead of a correct-so-far predictive alien, it’s the literally omniscient unfoolable inventor of human brains.

And instead of a thousand bucks or a million, one box holds a hundred years of short-sightedness and uncaring utility of others’ suffering. The other holds an eternity with billions of caring, noble people who would never betray you and a loving God even more amazing; in a body not subject to entropy and a mind not capable of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or any mental illness; freed from the Dunbar Number of friends you can make and able to explore universes of new places and thoughts.

Here's my guess as someone who knows literally nothing about Calvinism:

It's analogous to googling for symptoms of a disease in an effort to self-diagnose, particularly for something incurable and terminal like ALS. Your knowledge of the outcome has no effect on the outcome, but a certain anxious personality type will want to know the outcome anyway, for the peace of mind.

Exercising your willpower and moral judgement is the best method you have of gathering evidence. If you're able to abstain from sin, it's taken as evidence that you're predestined for salvation. If not, you're in trouble.

And since abstinence from sin is a human impossibility, God provided an escape hatch: tell Him you don’t want to be that way, accept Jesus’ sacrifice as payment, and have certainty that you now have the good end firmly in grasp. Thereafter, expect to see your choices change as the Holy Spirit sanctifies (cleans) your choicemaker.

Dude, TDT. If you sin, then you are the kind of person God would have condemned to hell in the first place. If you don't, you are the kind of person who would be saved.

Think of it this way. There are two instances of you; one in the real world, and another one that God is simulating to decide whether to predestine you to heaven or hell. They are both sufficiently similar that they cannot logically choose different actions. If you sin, then you live in a universe where the copy God is simulating sinned as well, and you are going to end up in hell. Conversely, if you are virtuous, you live in a universe where God's copy of you was virtuous, and you are going to heaven.

While God may know your fate you, as a mortal, do not. By sinning as much as possible, you've merely proven that you are not one of the chosen. There is no chance that, having lived a life of sin, you will join the elect anyway.

This persuasive technique can be effective. It's famously employed by American sports coaches who say:

"Adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it".

Well, there is in the sense that God does convert sinners, but yes. Those who die godless are damned.

I'm probably going to be corrected by some theology major (I don't care) but let me give my best explanation of Calvinism:

Then... what was the point of the pretend summary?

I’m preregistering my skepticism that a long, hypercorrect definition of Calvinism will be better than the one I gave.

It's not quite correct, in that your actions are also predestined. There is more of a direct motive—it's not like your choice doesn't matter, because the predestining itself is bound up in the choice. You can be directly motivated, not just by the evidence it gives.

I get that that's causally tricky to parse. It applies just as thoroughly to a world where God is only omniscient, even if not foreordaining, which is many people's alternative—he knows what's going to happen, which produces the same tricky-to-think-through-but-not-actually-weird-in-practice results.

It's also not quite correct in the sense that all that is not unique to those following Calvin, but it is what people colloquially refer to as Calvinism, but that's pretty irrelevant.

To be fair, it was more or less accurate

Calvinist predestination (which is the only truly contentious point out of the five in Calvinism) is basically Schrödinger's cat: the only way to know where one is predestined is to die, and there is a single truth value in the future which cannot be directly known from the past.

However true it may be, though, it is also possibly the single stupidest way to approach Christianity, faith, free will, and eternity.

Jesus has guaranteed that whoever turns from wickedness and asks Him for forgiveness will have eternal life in the presence of overwhelming love; the kind of love which cares for all victims of others’ misdeeds, and seeks that none should be wicked. If you ask, then, what God finds wicked, He asks you what you find wicked when others do it and asks you to shun it from your choices, now and forever.

Calvinists affirm that all those who have faith in Christ will be saved.

Calvinist predestination (which is the only truly contentious point out of the five in Calvinism) is basically Schrödinger's cat: the only way to know where one is predestined is to die, and there is a single truth value in the future which cannot be directly known from the past.

If you consistently do really shitty things as a devout Calvinist, can you kind of deduce you’re going to hell?

It's Bayesian evidence in that direction, but God can and does save sinners, which we all were. (See Paul!)

No. Because you don't know what's around the corner. You might have such an experience of grace next week that you're saved on the spot. You might do something even better, you might go from Saul to Paul.

IIRC(not a Calvinist) that the answer for a doctrinaire Calvinist is no, it is not, the reprobate have no knowledge of their fate but the elect do.

Of course there are not so many doctrinaire Calvinists these days and lots of them are in cults so you can’t ask them.

I always thought predestination was a really bad way of dealing with theological fatalism.

The Orthodox style of biting the bullet and telling you that mystery doesn't have to logically make sense is probably the solution I respect the most, but even if you're a westerner that has to find a logical trick, there's a plethora of compatibilist arguments that are all much better.

Predestination just seems poised to generate either quasi-nihilist fatalism or a belief in universal salvation that renders Christian morality moot. At least in this world.

It is nobility for the non nobles. Effectively, middle class people wanted to give themselves a noble title as elect without having the responsibilities of being a noble. They didn't actually want to fight in a war or take responsibility for society, they wanted to be special individuals with no real obligation to the people and rest of society. There isn't really chivalry, there is just being special by being born special.

I have read a fair bit of Calvinist theology from John Calvin himself up to contemporary stuff and I've never had a sense that there was some sort of class struggle going on behind it. Where did you get this idea?

What do you mean by predestination?

Calvinists are generally compatiblists. We're neither nihilists, fatalists (in the Oedipean sense), nor universalists.

There is an undeniable tension between (God's) omniscience and (the gift of) free will, I call this tension theological fatalism.

Christians have varying ways of resolving this problem, and my understanding of the Calvinist solution (predestination) is that it essentially negates the impact of free will in this world. It has already been ordained whether you'll be saved and there is no act on your part that can change that. Your only way to find out is to die.

I see religion at least in part as a tool to shepherd humanity in this world, so I find this problematic for similar reasons I find strict Thomism to be flawed. It makes little sense to me that God that sacrificed himself for us wouldn't be trying to guide our actions even here. Or that he would gift us with free will if free will didn't allow us to prevent evil.

Now I suppose strictly speaking predestination is a sort of compatibilism. But compared to other compatibilisms it seems nominal at best. If one can't prevent their damnation, how free are they really?

There's some ambiguity in your comment, but I'll try to answer it.

It has already been ordained whether you'll be saved and there is no act on your part that can change that. Your only way to find out is to die.

There might be some readings of this where this is technically correct, but that's a pretty bad way to look at things, at least. Calvinists, as Protestants, think that our salvation is dependent upon our having faith. This is both necessary and sufficient for our salvation. Your lives are relevant to your salvation/damnation: you're damned for your sins, and saved due to faith in Christ.

But this is part of God's plan; in fact, the turning of people to him is itself his work.

It makes little sense to me that God that sacrificed himself for us wouldn't be trying to guide our actions even here.

You seem to be saying that God doesn't care about how we live our lives, and that this somehow follows from predestination. This is not true. For one thing, he told us things, in the commandments. For another, he actively works in us, giving us a new heart. Predestination isn't something laying out some separate path of salvation that has nothing to do with this life. Rather, those who were predestined and will ultimately be saved in the meantime go through thiselife, and, by the work of God, are brought to faith in Christ, are sanctified unto improvement in the Christian life and good works, etc.

Or that he would gift us with free will if free will didn't allow us to prevent evil.

We just don't want to.

Sorry, but libertarian-style free will is always really bizarre to me—you dislike the idea of any of it being determined, but then you end up with everything being arbitrary, which is plainly worse. My actions are based on things—whatever I like more/think is better/whatever other motivations shape my choices and ultimately result in whatever I choose, and it's weird to me that people would prefer that they didn't have reasons for choosing things.

If one can't prevent their damnation, how free are they really?

Given that you brought up Thomism, I assume you're catholic. Looks like Trent disagrees:

The holy Synod declares first, that, for the correct and sound understanding of the doctrine of Justification, it is necessary that each one recognise and confess, that, whereas all men had lost their innocence in the prevarication of Adam-having become unclean, and, as the apostle says, by nature children of wrath, as (this Synod) has set forth in the decree on original sin,-they were so far the servants of sin, and under the power of the devil and of death, that not the Gentiles only by the force of nature, but not even the Jews by the very letter itself of the law of Moses, were able to be liberated, or to arise, therefrom; although free will, attenuated as it was in its powers, and bent down, was by no means extinguished in them.

But I don't especially care whether we call our wills free or not; it suffices that we recognize that people are the sources of their actions and morally culpable for the choices they make. I am perfectly willing to affirm that people are unable to will themselves out of damnation. Eph 2:1.

I am perfectly willing to affirm that people are unable to will themselves out of damnation.

I guess this is where our disagreement truly lies, on what this means. It's evident that Calvinists still preach that one should live a godly life, but their doing so ultimately only successfully to the elect, while logically consistent, doesn't sit right with the essential meaning of salvation in my opinion.

I understand the position is that salvation is solely due to grace, but I believe synergism, whether Catholic or Orthodox makes a lot more sense as a solution. Regeneration preceding faith seems to sap the miraculous nature of grace and to obviate the need to preach the wicked.

Regeneration preceding faith seems to sap the miraculous nature of grace and to obviate the need to preach the wicked.

The opposite, rather. Regeneration preceding faith (logically, not temporally) makes our salvation a miraculous work of God. Preaching to the wicked is essential because God works through means, and we don't know who will be saved, (and, of course, he told us to).

What's your theological background?

we don't know who will be saved

I expected this answer, and it's the most coherent with the premise. But preaching the wicked simply being going through the motions of humility seems to undersell our purpose.

What's your theological background?

It's complicated. I think the best approximation for the current standpoint I study religion from at this time is the same sort of theistic rationalism as Thomas Jefferson. I'm most familiar with Catholic and Sunni theology but I'm always curious of the minutiae of any successful credo since it must contain at least in part a measure of eternal wisdom. That said, so far I have not found a unique philosophy that provides a comprehensive solution to Mystery.

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For what it's worth, historically Reformed theologians did resort to something more like compatibilist arguments. I know this claim sounds unlikely in a world where Calvinists proudly adhere to determinist views and claim there is no free will and so forth, so let me provide a source for it. Unfortunately, it turns out that through liberal theology on the one hand and anti-intellectual fundamentalism on the other modern Protestantism has jettisoned quite a bit of its theological tradition.

Whether there's free will is in part a semantic issue. Luther famously wrote "The Bondage of the Will". What he's talking about there is about free will but primarily through a moral lens: you are not free to do good. I'm pretty sure some have affirmed free will, but not in a compatibilist libertarian sense. People fight over the meaning of the term.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the book—at least, a summary of where it gestures to in those authors. My impression was definitely that determinism was mainstream; that's what I've picked up from my own reading of old authors.

Those authors were later, not first or second generation reformers. (The earliest is the third generation Zanchi, I think.)

Not expecting to see Gomarus on there, since I thought he was a supralapsarian (and maybe Voetius as well)?

EDIT: Made the comment better. Also, this review seems relevant, if you can access it.

EDIT 2: Compatibilist->Libertarian. I misspoke terribly.

I cannot access the review unfortunately.

To put it briefly, the view described by @urquan is pretty much the view that the theologians described in the book have. There are a lot more details about things like different types of necessity, how free choice functions before the Fall, after the Fall, after regeneration and after glorification, etc. but the overall view is pretty much what urquan described. Also, the book deals mostly with free will specifically, not with all the doctrines of elections. So the text provided for e.g. Gomarus deals with all sorts of philosophical ideas about how free will works, but he does not go into supralapsarianism or anything like that.

However, you are also correct about Luther and Calvin not having that view! The authors of ‘Reformed Thought on Freedom’ actually acknowledge that explicitly in the conclusion of their book when discussing possible objections. I know that it sounds implausible that Calvin and Luther had anti free choice views whereas pretty much all their successors the next couple of centuries did try to retain a notion of free choice. However, based on what I’ve read in the book, I am inclined to believe that. The later theologians all using a scholastic philosophical apparatus are very careful to retain free choice, despite affirming a very high view of God’s sovereignty. For what it’s worth, Calvin at least does hint at a little bit of nuance in his views at some point in the Institutes. I’d have to take some time to find the passage again, but I remember that somewhere in the Institutes Calvin says that fallen humans sin ‘necessarily’ but aren’t ‘coerced’ to sin. So they can’t not sin, they sin freely in some sense. This seems to hint at something more like the view that Urquan described and which later Reformed theologians also defended, albeit without the careful technical scholastic language used by later Reformed theologians and there are other places where Calvin does not seem to show this nuance.

Note that I am here specifically claiming the Reformed tradition as Reformed Orthodoxy developed retained a notion of free choice, not that they didn’t believe God foreordained everything. How there can be an omnipotent and omniscient God, who knows and allows and in some sense causes everything that is, while also somehow not being the author of evil and allowing for human freedom, remains a tricky question. There is a long tradition from the Church Fathers, through the Middle Ages and into Modernity of theologians grappling with that problem. I am not even claiming here that the Reformed scholastics were particularly successful in their approach to answer this question, just that mainstream Reformed theology from the sixteenth up to and including the eighteenth century, stands in the same line as the Medieval scholastics trying to reconcile Gods sovereignty with human freedom. In fact, somebody like Bernard of Clairvaux who made some distinctions between different types of necessity gets cited approvingly a bunch of times by different theologians discussed in the book. Some of the theologians seem to not like the standard Latin term for free will ‘liberum arbitrium’, although they all acknowledge that the Church Fathers used that term and so they also seem uncomfortable (unlike Calvin and Luther) with completely rejecting that term. However, when you read the treatises in the book, it becomes clear that they are accusing their Roman Catholic and Remonstrant interlocutors of something like what we would call a libertarian free will view, while they themselves argue for something more like what we would call compatibilism today.

You specifically mention Gomarus, so let me try to summarise the treatise on free will from Gomarus provided in the books. Gomarus first talks about what free choice is:

Free choice is the free power of a mind-gifted nature to choose from those [means] leading to a certain goal, one [means] proposed by reason above another, or to accept or reject one and the same [means].

He goes on to make a distinction between free choice (liberum arbitrium) and will (voluntas). The will is concerned with what we want, i.e. with goals, whereas the free choice is concerned with means, i.e. making a concrete choice between A or B. Let me give an example to try and explain this distinction. If somebody is thirsty and wants to drink a glass of water, the thirst and the goal of satiating that thirst, is the voluntas. Nobody thinks somebody made a conscious free choice to be thirsty and desire a glass of water, that’s not what people talk about when they say ‘free will’. The person in the example then has a choice to drink a glass of water or not. That’s the liberum arbitrium. Unless he has knowledge that the glass of water is poisoned or something he will more or less certainly choose to drink the glass of water, but he was completely able to choose not to drink the glass of water.

After a bunch of specific definitions and distinctions and technical terms and stuff as is common in scholastic theology, Gomarus goes on to describe free choice in four states, the state before the Fall, the state after the Fall, the state after regeneration and the state after glorification. As I understand it, the key here is this distinction between liberum arbitrium and voluntas. The potency to choose either A or B, i.e. liberum arbitrium, is affirmed by Gomarus in all those four states. What changes, is the voluntas. The fallen unregenerate man has a corrupted voluntas that is no longer oriented towards God, but towards sin. Therefore, though he is completely free in the choices that he makes, he will always use that freedom to sin, because that is now his goal:

Although the unregenerate are not able to do anything but sin, they do it freely, for they elicit the exercise (exercitium) of an act in such a way that they are able not to elicit it, and they are in a way masters of their own acts. However, with respect to the kind (species) of act, they are determined, since they are able to do nothing else but sin and have evil as their object, under the pretext of good. Besides, it is not otherwise for the good angels, who, confirmed in grace, are necessarily determined with regard to the kind of act, for they are able to do nothing else but good, even if [the exercise] to elicit an act here and now is totally free for them.

So Gomarus does not deviate from Reformed ideas about total depravity and such. What he argues is that man being fallen and in some sense not able to do anything but sin, is compatible with humans being free. They sin, not because of some sort of necessity, but because, their nature, being corrupted after the Fall, they want to. The argument Gomarus uses here about angels is also used a couple of times by other theologians in the book. Can good angels, glorified saints in heaven or even God sin? Christians typically believe it’s certain God is not going to sin, or that glorified saints in Heaven are not going to fall into sin again, but it would also be rather absurd to claim that God or glorified saints are not free. So this must mean it is possible for your will to be so strongly confirmed in good, that you will certainly always freely choose to do good. Likewise, for the unregenerate man, their will is corrupted to the extent that they will always freely choose to do sin.

I am not saying that this view is perfect or that the Reformed scholastics are able to answer all the questions this raises in a satisfactory way. But it is clear that somebody like Gomarus, who has a reputation of being a hardcore Calvinist, because he is the one who originally started the beef with Arminius himself, surprisingly actually confirms humans have liberum arbitrium, even in their fallen state, despite John Calvin and Luther rejecting that term.

See the second edit to the previous comment: I misspoke.

Anyway, to be clear, Luther and Calvin were able to talk about the will being free in a moral sense—your will is free when it's in alignment with God's will, rather than a slave to sin, etc. etc. They denied free will in fallen man, but not e.g. in glory.

This fits well with a compatibilist understanding (which I would affirm) but isn't quite talking about the same thing.

It looks like you're saying that people developed a broader understanding of free will afterwards, in a compatibilist sense, which makes complete sense. (Didn't Edwards, as well?)

It was arguing that they were misreading Turretin, mostly. I haven't read either the book or Turretin, and only skimmed the review, so I have no idea of the extent to which that is true. There seems to have since been more scholarly argumentation from people in response.

Thanks for the analysis of Gomarus. Much of this might be a terminological dispute, as they all believe in an exhaustive divine decree, and not in a Molinist sense either.

I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize Luther and Calvin as compatibilists, in the sense that they think that we are genuinely making meaningful choices, that they depend on us, that there's moral responsibility, etc. even though they think that they have qualms about the term free will. My impression was that something compatibilist-ish was just broadly mainstream within the Reformed world. But this is interesting, I wasn't really aware of these debates.

My understanding is that predestination wasn't originally interpreted by Calvinists as eliminating free will -- the argument for predestination wasn't total determinism, it was total depravity. So, the view was that people have free will (in a philosophical sense), their will is just totally entangled in sin such that it is impossible to choose the good without prevenient grace. Which, well, is essentially the Christian consensus since Augustine (at least in the West; the Orthodox are harder to pin down, though they would certainly insist that salvation is totally connected to cooperation with grace), but the unique proposition of Calvinism is that such grace is given only to the elect, and is irresistible.

This view is correct as far as I can gather from the book I linked to. Albeit with the caveat that John Calvin himself and Luther did reject the idea of free will. That being said, the book presents authors who for instance contributed to Reformed confessions and are all influential figures in the Reformed tradition, so I think it is reasonable to say that the Reformed tradition had a view similar to what you describe, even though Calvin himself did not.

I don't think there's much of a distance between the views.

It's worth noting, when you talk about people having free will, that that does not mean libertarian free will—it is fully compatible with determinism. (And yes, this fits with Augustine and others)

The Reformed theologians did affirm determinism, and had a notion of providence fully extensive over the world, such that nothing occurs without first being decreed by God. Nevertheless, @urquan is right that that is not what the word "predestination" usually referred to, it referring specifically to the choosing of people unto salvation.

To be clear, I agree that Luther and Calvin were more concerned with a moral sense of free will as you put it in another post. Actually in the conclusion of "Reformed Though on Freedom" the authors of the book touch on this topic as well:

We can distinguish between the religious intentions behind playing down free choice and working this out in an explicit ontology. Given the context of the Reformation, it is quite understandable that Luther and Calvin combated the idea that man is free to work out his own salvation, although with divine help. The moral and spiritual consequences of sin are at stake, and in this respect the Reformers rightly teach the total corruption of man.

So yeah, the view of the book which I think I agree with, isn't that Luther and Calvin were completely wrong and later generations of theologians fortunately completely rejected their view. Rather, Luther and Calvin correctly emphasized the corruption of fallen man over and against a more optimistic view of human nature that was common in the late Medieval/ early Modern period, but in doing so they made some statements that have unfortunate philosophical consequences. Later generations of theologians had more or less the same idea about the spiritual and moral consequences of sin, but were a little more careful and nuanced in working it out philosophically. While, to be clear, I don't think this should lead us to a negative view of Luther and Calvin at all, I don't think it is a completely theoretical point either. I know at least in the Netherlands, where I am from, there are some very conservative Reformed groups that fall into some sort of hyper Calvinism who would benefit greatly if they were told that contrary to popular belief, people like Gomarus and Voetius believed in free will.

Without using the words free will, what wrong beliefs do they end up having?

I guess I don't see what unfortunate philosophical consequences Luther/Calvin had.

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Total determinism is normal. See Calvin, Institutes book I, chapters 16-17, where he lays out an exhaustive model of providence.

This wasn't unique to Calvin, Luther also thought we were predestined, along with many Catholics (especially Dominicans/Thomists). You're right though, that's more explicitly talking about sin and salvation (as does Calvin later in the Institutes), but they also thought that all creation was predetermined, I believe.

I wonder if polygamists have fewer children because they aren’t very likeable? Many of my polygamist/polyamorist/swinger/ethical nonmonogamist/very enlightened friends routinely post online about how awkward they are and how they hate flirting and want to just get straight to the sex (le heckin’ sexy timerinos, natch).

This mentality, as well as the idea of explicitly rejecting the concept of pair bonding, seems like anti social cope to me.

To steal man it: polies recognize that a lot of what we consider normal human interaction isn’t very enjoyable to them, and they reject it. As long as they stay inside of their ingroups, they believe this will work out well for them.

As others have pointed out: it is definitely causing some /priors updating/ that anybody takes this data even remotely seriously. This would be like polling a bunch of redditors about religion and then reporting on it as if this was a meaningful sample.

Come and poll my church and see if the people who self report as cheating on their wives are more happy in their marriage or not.

I wonder if polygamists have fewer children because they aren’t very likeable?

Well, there's poly for the right reasons ("because I actually am a high-decoupler and am unironically capable of treating sex as a toy or tool"), and then there's poly for the wrong reasons ("because I'm not attracted to -> don't want to primarily pair-bond with my husband or wife, I just want to be able to have my cake and eat it too, and my partner doesn't have enough self-respect to call me out for doing it").

I think there are significantly more people who are poly for the wrong reasons- and people who are just trying to get out of doing the work they're supposed to be doing tend to be substandard partners. As for the people who are poly for the right reasons, their standards for a partner are going to be higher than normal, so they're going to pair up -> have kids less.

I mean, how many high decouplers are there really? Even among very intelligent people it’s rare, and some degree of significant intelligence is likely a prerequisite, so we’re talking about less than 1% of people.

Even among very intelligent people it’s rare, and some degree of significant intelligence is likely a prerequisite, so we’re talking about less than 1% of people.

They're also intelligent enough to keep quiet about it and are probably too busy enjoying the sex to post about it; you're more likely to hear it as "friends with benefits" from them... because they're usually also smart enough to know saying "poly" is a blunt instrument typically used by the people who are doing it for the bad reason I mentioned in the other comment.

(Same thing with every sexual expression that isn't "I'm straight and normal", really; the phrase to expose the other capabilities is probably more along the lines of "but if it's you, it's OK".)

What, specifically is "having my cake" and "eating it" referring to here?

In this case, "enjoying the stability (emotional, financial) of a husband/wife relationship" and "fucking whoever I want on the side".

In other words, the people for whom "poly/open relationship" means "cheating is bad only because it's not discussed up front; I don't like you enough to commit exclusively but I still want you to pay my bills". It's an attempt to actively exploit a power imbalance in the relationship and people who do that are generally bad people.

This is why "swinging" is generally viewed slightly more positively than "poly", since it can be a good-faith attempt to fix marital problems (age related and otherwise) and implies an already established track record of "turning my partner into their best selves"... whereas poly is [currently] the "cash up front" equivalent.

I think I understand. Someone having their cake and eating it too is someone who hypothetically would commit, or can commit, because they don't see sex as a toy. But they might try to abuse someone's infatuation to get sex without putting in commitment.

On the other hand, swingers view sex as a toy and keep that decoupled from their emotional attachment to their spouses or whatever.

What exactly is unethical about the first case though? It sounds like taken to it's logical conclusion, hookups and casual sex are unethical for normal monogamous non-swingers. Or is it only unethical when there's a "power imbalance" (which is really just an infatuation imbalance)? Clearly this cake-having cake-eater is capable of decoupling sex from commitment, because that's what hooking up is?

On the other hand, swingers view sex as a toy and keep that decoupled from their emotional attachment to their spouses or whatever.

Maybe I'd be more sympathetic to poly if both partners go to a bar and one partner is actively wingman-ing for the other depending on the day. Which to me is the key difference- swingers read to me as "I want you to get as much satisfying sex as you can because I am happy when you have sex you enjoy (but I'm not going to get locked out of what I want, and if it starts to grate on the relationship it's always up for discussion/give-and-take"), while poly reads "I want me to get as much satisfying sex as I can; what my partner does is simply not my concern, and if I'm not in the mood for them or if they aren't getting as much sex as I am they can just fucking deal with it".

Perhaps that's an abuse of the term(s), but swinger is not [claimed to be] an orientation, whereas poly is, and orientations have "they can just deal with it, I was #bornthisway" baked in by definition. Not that that's inherently a bad thing- straight people do that all the time, after all- but "fucking whoever I want whenever I want is my orientation" has the ability to destroy a relationship in a way no other orientation does (though "I'm not a [gender I was born as]" or "I'm not attracted to you" can do it for mostly-but-not-completely-unrelated reasons).

I don't want to say it's unethical to be poly, or inherently abusive even (and negotiating it up front is probably the best thing to do in that circumstance anyway)- but that most people that invoke "poly" as "inviolable/orientation" are only doing it when their interest in being exclusive to their partner runs out, and that is not the mark of someone you want to continue to trust. The people you do want to trust are those that have been committed for a long time and can actually take their partner saying "no" for an answer... which is why swinging is something they do, not someone they are.

Fuck around and not lose at least 50% of joint assets.

I'm just going to guess polyamorous people are less religious than monoamorous people, and religiousness tends to be the one thing in modern society that might lead to people having large families.

As others have pointed out: it is definitely causing some /priors updating/ that anybody takes this data even remotely seriously. This would be like polling a bunch of redditors about religion and then reporting on it as if this was a meaningful sample.

Right, that killed me. From Scott, emphasis mine:

I was surprised how certain people were that poly relationships were disasters that couldn’t work, compared to how little of a sign there was of that in the data. I like Aella’s explanation that most mono people’s experience of poly people is mono people “experimenting” with “opening up their relationship”, which is a natural danger zone. An alternative is that Aella got a bad sample (but her sample ought to be much more representative than mine), or that poly people lie / misremember / have a hard time answering surveys.

More representative, maybe, but still not even vaguely representative. "We only polled the people at the back of the church! How religious could they be??" I think Scott's ~asexuality just means he is typical minding really hard on these subjects.

As others have pointed out: it is definitely causing some /priors updating/ that anybody takes this data even remotely seriously. This would be like polling a bunch of redditors about religion and then reporting on it as if this was a meaningful sample.

I can't remember if it was here or back when we were still on plebbit but someone posted one of Aella's polls about sexual satisfaction in marriage and the number of people here defending it with all sorts of weird rationales ("Of course representative, sexually well adjusted men follow prostitutes on Twitter and participate in their polls!") was baffling to say the least, and made me lower my already low estimation of much of the rationalist movement.

I would guess that a possibly important outlier for polygamous people is the "roving seducer" type of guy who fathers large numbers of children because he moves on after impregnating each woman. It's just that this kind of person isn't usually considered polygamous in the modern rationalist community sense of "polyamory".

Playing typology with these things beyond self-identification makes it mush in seconds, when we talk about Monogamy vs. Polyamory we are asking people which relationship style they ideologically affirm, not which one they practice. If we're doing practice, it's a mess. We'd have to equally distinguish between varieties of monogamist. If we really wanted to drill down I would propose a spectrum of practice running something like:

  1. "First kiss at the Altar" monogamists, who have never had significant romantic entanglements with anyone prior to marriage. The most ideologically committed monogamists.

  2. Virgins at marriage monogamists. What it says on the tin. May have had romantic, but not sexual entanglements prior to marriage with other partners.

  3. Widows/Widowers who remarried, along with extreme cases of divorce "victims." Last exit in traditional religion.

  4. Serial monogamists. Have had multiple romantic/sexual partners that did not result in marriage, prior to marriage or after a failed marriage, but had some form of "commitment" and exclusivity with each, never had more than one partner within the same time period.

  5. Serial monogamists with exceptions. Trended toward monogamy as a goal, but with occasional periods of hook-ups or hiccups in between. Probably also the right place to put people from 1-4 who cheat. The last of the ideological monogamists.

  6. Hookers up. People who have had multiple partners they are not committed to. They may not have actually had multiple partners within the same time period, but the relationships did not formally preclude that possibility as a condition to the relationship. Drift towards a 5.5 where they have monogamous partners, drift towards 6.5 where they are committed to the bit.

  7. Limited Polyamorists. People who have multiple partners within a ruleset with a primary partner that inherently limits the number and nature of those relationships. The first "real" poly category. Restrictions on Gender, location, care, etc. are common. Typically a requirement of being added to the "circle" is that one is equally ideologically committed to polyamory on this model, so that ie Cheaters are frowned upon.

  8. Equal Polyamorists. People who have multiple partners who are all equally able to draw on time, attention, resources. No primary/secondary distinction within the group. Extremely rare in the wild.

  9. Fully Open Relationships. A relationship structure within which everyone is free to pursue sex with whoever they please, at any time they please. No restrictions are placed on anyone. Typically the strongest believers in the value of "free love" etc.

1-4 are definitely Monogamists, 7-9 are definitely Polyamorists. 5-6 are a little mushy, one can label them either way. If you profess Monogamy but fuck around are you really monogamous? If you fuck around but don't get into the all the emotional and ideological stuff, are you really Polyamorous?

Then you get into the problem of lifetimes. Lots of people I know started out aspiring to 1 or 2, dropped into 4-6 for their twenties or even play at a 7 or 8, and have since rounded down to 4 in their middle age. Where do they fall? Some people get married as a 1 or a 2, then cheat or get divorced and land at a 4 or a 5.

But I hope what's obvious is that trying to poll that precisely is going to be useless, but at the same time trying to conflate categories is going to be useless. A 4 and a 1 are both "monogamous, but I would bet on them having very different TFRs. Ditto 9 and 7 with polyamory.

"First kiss at the Altar" monogamists, who have never had significant religious entanglements with anyone prior to marriage. The most ideologically committed monogamists.

Religious entanglements?

Doh good call

Then you get into the problem of lifetimes.

Until I got here, this is where I was going to object. Among educated, high-income groups that aren't in the Bay Area or rationalsphere sorts of tastes, I would say that (4) and (5) are modal life arrangements, but with the capper being a completely monogamous and normal marriage sometime in their late 20s or 30s. Thinking about people I'm close to, this isn't just modal, it's the almost exclusive pattern. Mess around a bit as a teenager, go to college and date a few people with varying levels of commitment and varying levels of intermittent hookups, then start dating seriously after college, then after a couple relationships settle down. It's entirely possible that I'm in even more of a bubble than I realize, but it seems like not doing that is basically looked down upon among the upper middle-class.

Exactly normal, but also distinctly different from having a partner count of 1.

This kind of guy was never considered polygamous since polygamy always referred to marriage, and even now amongst Bay Area types refers to some kind of ‘open’ (in the sense that it is not secret) relationship. Similarly, having a secret second family with your secretary/mistress isn’t polygamy because your wife and (original) family don’t know about it.

Just on point: Christian priests were celibate until recently, but they were very influential through the last few hundred years. It's quite possible for polygamy to survive as the luxury tip of a society, provided the society is self-replicating on balance.

(Reader, it is not.)

Catholics also had large enough families that the occasional kid choosing the priesthood didn’t cause TFR to drop below replacement.

As a catechumen I have some trepidation about this with my own kids. I’m old enough that we’re simply not going to have a big family, we have one kid, hope for two, if we’re very lucky might have three.

If our one kid chooses the priesthood I’ll be proud of his piety but sad about my family line.

Except that virtually every current polygamist was born to a monogamist, just as virtually every homosexual was born from sex between two heterosexuals and every transwoman came out of a biological vagina. Polygamists aren't an insular ethnic tribe whose fertility matters, they're a meme, they can spread even without having children.

In Elizabethan England, London was a population sink, without a constant flow of people from the countryside London would have emptied. By your logic therefore, London was Dysgenic and bound to die out (as were European cities in general at the time). Between the fertile countryside and London, which was more influential on the future?

By your logic

This is usually a thought-terminating phrase and should probably be avoided here. Arguing that because someone thinks X about Y, they might also think A about B, and since you disagree with A and B, they should reject X and Y has several problems.

  1. There are lots of other confounding variables (In this case London in the 16th century and Polygamy in Portland) that make the comparison meaningless
  2. We don't know anyone's beliefs of A and B, so framing the discussion is just your opinion
  3. People don't reflexively have consistent opinions
  4. The phrase itself connotes a negative stereotype of an annoying twitter or forum arguer.
  5. It's easy to dismiss your parable example and is therefore unlikely to be productive (Yes, London would've been a population sink if not for factor η)

Ok cool you've attacked my turn of phrase, any thoughts on the question of genetic vs memetic spread of culture?

By your logic

This is usually a thought-terminating phrase

Where I come from we call it "proof by contradiction" and it's a fundamental tool of logic.

I don't think that's an accurate characterization of how it was used here or how it's typically used (Which is often the inverse, e.g. 'Oh republicans want to save unborn babies? then by their logic they should also support free universal healthcare for everyone ;) ') At the very least the total population of London vs the surrounding countryside is not an apt comparison to the portion number of people in LA or Portland or wherever that practice a certain lifestyle, and is certainly not a demonstration a formal logic syllogism.

"By your logic" isn't a claim about what the other person thinks or believes, it's a claim about what the structure of their argument logically implies. If polygamy is bound to die out because its practitioners fail to reproduce, then the same reasoning should generalize to other analogous situations. If it doesn't generalize, that implies the claim being made is either wrong or insufficiently precise.

Surely you believe it's based around what the logic of the argument implies, not the structure of the argument. A structure is just how it's organized. Anyways, the comparison between London's population flows 500 years ago and the individual mating practices of the people in Scott Alexander's blog are obviously not bounded by the same arguments or logic. It's totally meaningless.

"Structure" as in logical structure. If you argue "Polygamy's practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore polygamy is bound to die out," then you've made an argument with the following logical structure: "[Thing]'s practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore [thing] is bound to die out." If someone can find a value of [thing] that falsifies the claim, it implies that there is something wrong (incorrect or incomplete) about the logical structure of the argument presented.

So you agree that additional information is needed beyond effects on population growth. Which was the entire purpose of the analogy.

Neither. Polygamy is generally hyper-fertile, but polygamy as practiced in the Bay Area by socially awkward screen addicts seems not to be.

Probably more about the selection effect and less about the polygamy.

Is the polyamorous tfr actually the same as the Bay Area as a whole?

I do agree with your point, though, polyamory is not the same thing as trad polygamy.

Polygamy (as opposed to polyamory) is obviously universally hyperfertile for the male, since multiple pregnancies are possible simultaneously and the fact of the polygamy means he’s usually wealthy enough to provide for many children. That it’s hyperfertile for the women depends typically on the fact that only the most trad and/or impoverished women in the modern world will agree to polygamous marriage, and both traits are strongly predictive of fertility rate.

Among polygamous ultra-rich Saudis post-2000 or so, my impression is that the women often have a much more modest number of kids, which I think suggests that tfr (which is of course calculated per woman) is not necessarily elevated by classical polygamy in and of itself.

That is a good point. The social status of having more children levels off pretty fast with living standards, I seem to recall. I'm guessing for hyperfertility to survive the middle class income trap, it needs both above average income and ideological commitment, probably religious. Mormons, Amish, Quiverfulls, etc.

Wait, why does Scott trust Aella’s data? Aella is an internet propagandist for polygamy and promiscuity. Many happy monogamists who find polygamy disgusting would never subscribe to her or follow her. Her monogamist followers are preselected with being unsatisfied with monogamy, and her polygamy followers are preselected with finding polygamy satisfying (hence why they are following a promiscuous woman who talks about it all day). Her most die hard followers are the most likely to take the survey, even just because they see the link more often, and the followers are those who have found the most benefit regardless of how it affects the median polygamist. “Just in, atheists are unsatisfied with atheism, as proven by a survey of atheists who follow Bishop Robert Barron on Twitter.” Am I missing something?

Aella is an internet propagandist for polygamy and promiscuity.

You're making me like her even more than I already did. But yeah, I wouldn't necessarily trust her data unless it confirmed my pre-existing preferences, in which case fuck it.

If there are things that are less likely to vary differentially with "how likely am I to see/respond to Aella's poll" then you can trust them more. Not sure how best to evaluate that, though.

Wait, why does Scott trust Aella’s data?

If it's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing with Made-Up Statistics.

I'm... skeptical, for a variety of reasons, but the underlying concept isn't obviously wrong. Bad data is still data if it's coming from an honest actor, and for the sort of really clear effects we should care about even a dishonest actor becomes a lot more obvious if they're just completely making things up.

I don't really think that article is applicable here. In Scott's case he's arguing about using made up numbers in the absence of data, not in favor of using whatever data was available. It's easy to imagine ways that data biased in ways you may not know can lead you away from the truth.

Her monogamist followers are preselected with being unsatisfied

i don't think this is a given, i'm repulsed by the idea of poly relationships and i follow anybody crazy enough to be entertaining on twitter (and the girl who showers once a month yet has time to bang 3 different guys a week is a goddamn spectacle). I could definitely imagine there being some selection bias in the data seeing as she reports polling in Fetlife and some un named "friend’s personality testing website" being about a quarter of the data.

The bigger issue is that it's self reported polling data collected in a somewhat conspicuous way. Anybody with any agenda about how many partners a person should have can add their 2 cents , and polyamorous people aren't going to say "yeah poly prettymuch sucks" on a poll they know people are going to gawk at on twitter.

That’s probably because you’re interested in diverse ideologies as a personality trait, which themotte userbase is generally selected for. I’m fairly certain that the median social media experience consists of people following accounts they agree with and which propagate their sense of identity. Consider also that in many healthy straight relationships, a person would be reasonably upset with their partner following a prostitute / pro-promiscuity egirl. If this is true, then I do think a whole class of people in healthy monogamous relationships with rules are much less likely to see the poll link, let alone participate in the poll.

Consider also that in many healthy straight relationships, a person would be reasonably upset with their partner following a prostitute / pro-promiscuity egirl

I think following on Twitter is a little different to following on OnlyFans, here.

A lot different but a husband would probably still have some explaining to to if a conservative wife fully understood what Aella is. Even more so if the first exposure was one of Alele's thirst posts. You're not getting a divorce over it but it's not going to be a fun conversation.

In practice, "preselected with being unsatisfied" isn't going to mean "every single one is unsatisfied", it just means "being unsatisfied is disproportionately likely". You may be personally satisfied despite this being true.

...polyamorous people aren't going to say "yeah poly prettymuch sucks" on a poll they know people are going to gawk at on twitter.

My impression is that this can be generalized across quite a few life decisions. People that have a huge amount invested in uncommon decisions that many people told them are bad ideas probably aren't going to regularly proclaim that they should have just listened to the crowd. Some will, of course, but many people will insist that their weird choice is actually excellent and superior to the normies.

WHY is there a culture war?

I think most people around here accept the existence of a red tribe and a blue tribe, and accept that most of what happens in western society and politics, from George Floyd to Taylor Swift, follows from those two tribes trying to weaponize events and ideas in order to dunk on their enemies. As a description of the world, our culture war theory works very well. But as an explanation, maybe not. Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.

But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn. Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s? In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, the suggestion is that the tribes are too similar, and so therefore hatred is somehow inevitable. He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.

So: 1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively? 2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe? 3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?

To a first approximation there is a culture war because different groups of people have different ideas about how society and government ought to be ordered and these ideas are often mutually incompatible. Disagreements about these questions are often acrimonious because they are moral questions about justice and fairness. This can turn disagreements about these issues into a perception that other people are immoral or evil for their position on the issue in question. Each tribe hates the other for approximately symmetrical reasons having to do with believing that the way the other side wants to order society is bad (for different definitions of bad).

3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?

To concretize my first paragraph a bit you can read the deluge (1, 2, 3) of stories of women with life-threatening pregnancy complications being denied abortions because they weren't life threatening enough. I think the legislatures that inflicted these conditions on these women are evil.

Those examples are from a culture war in full swing, like saying "we hate the other soldiers because they shot a bunch of our guys in the last battle." My question is why is there even a war going on.

Well where do you think the laws against abortion came from? They didn't spring forth fully formed, they came from people who believed those were the right thing to do, and the people that supported them doing so, and those are ideas based off of (in the US) a worldview that has been constructed over decades and centuries. The status quo was put in place, and if you want to change the status quo, the people who support it now, are a problem (from the POV of someone trying to change it), even if they weren't around when the status quo was introduced.

So, does your question reduce to something like "why do people disagree about how society should be ordered?" The answer is probably some unsatisfying mix of historically contingent facts.

I think what he may be bringing up is very often the debate is almost entirely on false terms.

America does for instance have too much gun violence. The debate is almost always over limiting white people from buying AR-15 which numerically are a very small part of the problem and nearly no risks to the activist class in red or blue tribe.

Where gun violence is an issue it’s mostly harms blue tribe people or politically tribeless people.

Where the debate on pro-gun/anti-gun happens is in area that is a trivial problem. Hence it seems like just tribal fights for status.

America does for instance have too much gun violence.

The optimal amount of any crime is non-zero, short of lizardman constant situations. This is true for gun violence as much as anything else.

Besides, since some gun violence is self-defense, the optimal amount of it isn't zero anyway.

This is a motte and bailey. American is way above other areas.

American gun violence is unequally distributed by race, which makes comparisons to other areas hard.

Or easy if the other areas feature some races but not others.

White American firearms homicides are still much higher than most other high-income countries’ total homicides.

No, America’s very high rate of firearms deaths mostly hurt red tribe people(through suicide) and black tribe(which is its own thing with its own cultural quirks) people through murder. Mass shootings are the only real way blue tribe elites are threatened by america’s gun violence problem, even if they’re factually not particularly common.

Well basically I either don't care about or actively dislike conservative values and therefore don't want to live according to those values and don't want them to be those according to which society is shaped. I think it's pretty simple. Does that mean I hate conservatives? Not on a personal level.

This goes back to waaaaaay before Covid, though. I feel your pain, but it's not an answer to the question.

The question of who is the aggressor in the culture war comes up here every once in a while. As every other reply seems to be certain that the Blue Tribe is the aggressor against the Red Tribe, I feel like I should point out that the Blue Tribe believes the opposite. From the Blue Tribe point of view, they want equality and rights for everyone regardless of identity, and they believe that's the default if only the Red Tribe would stop discriminating.

If the definition of discrimination hadn’t shifted from “treating people as members of a race” to “treating people as if they’re not members of a race”, we’d be there for 90%+ of red tribe.

Honestly, I think it’s because of our diversity of ideology. We’re a country trying to work together despite widely varying cultures and thus norms. You have a relatively conformist and religiously conservative group, a bohemian culture where the worst thing you could do is impose your worldview on another person, you have the various ethnic cultures that still maintain some distinction from the rest, you have the grindset culture where you just work for as much money as possible. In such a country, especially if the government is able to impose its will on the culture, there’s just naturally going to be a scrum for the levers of government. And those leavers can only be taken by people banding together around their values. And one great wat to do so is to get your tribe to rally around your causes to fight real or imagined threats to your tribal culture.

Why is there a culture war?

Because we're still operating within the Reagan/Thatcher/Washington Consensus/End of History/Fukuyama paradigm, and we're well past due for at least the outline of a new paradigm but we can't seem to come up with one, and we're trapped in it. There's a theory among historians and political scientists that the American political paradigm shifts whenever a president wins re-election and then gets their chosen successor elected after them. Across the twentieth century we had Teddy, to FDR, to Reagan. And we're stuck on Reagan. Clinton and Obama and Biden have all operated within that Reagan paradigm, within the Washington Consensus. Obama himself said in a debate:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Arguably, Trump did not in some ways, but in other ways he tacked back in that direction from the moderate changes of Obama.

Reagan made a compromise: corporate capitalist economic structure, managed social change. Reagan did not put any serious effort into rolling back racial integration, or turning the tide on the sexual revolution. In exchange for accepting Capitalism, social outliers got grudging and slow but growing acceptance. The right wing defeated Communism, at home and abroad, but accepted the left's social gains to 1980, and further managed change in the future. As much as gay activists might like to whine about AIDs or Black radicals might like to talk about crime bills and crack, Reagan's legacy was leaving any idea of a right-wing built around segregation behind, and any idea of rolling back the sexual revolution was DOA after we elected Reagan.

The culture war becomes the only realm of politics in that paradigm. The old saw about having a Pro Life Corporate Party and a Pro Choice Corporate Party. There's no serious effort to overthrow capitalism, only to reward Red or Blue corporate groups, or to alter the degree to which the less productive are buoyed. Communists are no more relevant than segregationists in today's American politics, a freak show fringe. The parties, and the tribes, are optimized to fight over the frontier, not to strike deep behind enemy lines. Hyper-optimizing for the degree of change.

1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?

Yes. It's naive and self-serving. No one hates anyone defensively. The whole idea is silly. Defense vs. offense is just a matter of where you set the date. Ukraine says it is in a defensive war because it sets the date at 2014, Russia says it is in a defensive war because it sets the date earlier, and so on and so forth. Same anywhere. Rome conquered the world in self defense, Hitler framed his wars up to Barbarosa as essentially defensive, redressing German oppression after Versailles.

2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe?

A variety of reasons. Ressentiment, conservatism, fear, will-to-power. There is no real desire for secession at this point, the winner of the culture war seeks to impose their will from sea to shining sea.

  1. Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?

Virtually no Blue Triber perceives themselves as having been born into a Blue Tribe world. They perceive themselves as born into a red tribe world and having to fight their way out of it.

Take gay people as our principal example: Gays aren't born to gays, they are born to straight parents, until recently in a largely straight world. They have to fight their way out, find themselves, find acceptance, gain rights, etc.

One possible answer is the Bryan Caplan answer: the left hates markets, and the right hates the left. See Bryan for further exposition.

Another possible answer is the William Riker answer, what he calls "herestetics". The idea is that because the population will always have a distribution of preferences over possibilities, any voting mechanism will be subject to strategizing, changing the order/method by which things are considered, raising novel concerns that you think can split what would otherwise be unified opposition to your own preferences, etc. This is now done on an industrial scale, and the importance of national politics (given a strong federal government) raises the stakes significantly. Sprinkle in a little FPTP and negativity bias, and maybe that's just the fundamental reason for the culture war.

One thing I would note that would seem to support Riker's ideas, in my mind, is that when I watched Ken Burns' documentary on prohibition, I was amazed by just how poorly the political divide at that time mapped on to the divide today. Maybe someone could have gone through issue by issue and explained how I was misunderstanding, and that the same fundamental explanatory principle harmonizes them, but it really makes me think that it's all herestetics and path dependence; one group of folks try to bring up and really focus on Issue X, because they think it'll get them over whatever hump, then another group of folks tries to crack that coalition by coming up with Issue Y, and eventually lines start to get drawn.

One thing I would suggest/request for how to do a better job of getting to the real answer would be to survey across time and across the world. Is there anywhere where there ISN'T a culture war? Can we get a measure of, "In this area, the level of culture war is like a 0.3, but in this other area, it's like a 0.8"? Then, is there anywhere that is persistently low?

It's not like members of the blue tribe don't have cultural memory or even (due to the patchwork nature of American legislation) personal experience of the red tribe "punching" them, such as in the case of abortions, labour laws or drug prohibitions. On top of that, the tribes have conflicting aesthetic preferences that they wish to impose on the same commons - a young Democrat prefers the joint proposition of ethnic restaurants and ethnic gangs in the same measure as the boomer Republican would prefer their absence as a package deal. Finally, there are those things that still have a majority but are carried by a red-tribe backbone - car culture, militarism (though this one is shifting?) and relative libertarianism in matters such as food safety.

In America, it’s out of a political polarization spiral that started with bush and became irrecoverable under Obama; both sides can’t quite understand why their president and his merry men is so uniquely alienating to the other side and so make up motives. It’s because he’s black, or because they hate America, or whatever.

You can couple that with a preexisting liberal elite prejudice that we’d be just like some fantastical utopian version of Denmark if the typical red tribe demographics would stop preventing it(never mind that these people do not know what Denmark is actually like), and it’s a recipe for different interest groups banding together in a no-criticism-allowed way to beat up on their opponents. That’s basically where the culture war comes from.

Started with the Clintons.

All that hate for Hillary wasn’t new.

But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?

Factually: no, they did not, and the utopia envisioned doesn’t look much like Denmark or indeed anything else that exists

However, it’s important to look at the theory and interests here- cousin Merle not having any incentive to support public transportation is pretty obvious, for example. He already owns a pickup truck and doesn’t go into the downtown areas where it’s less useful all that often. He’s an easy scapegoat for things like that. There’s other examples, too, of course, that’s just an easy one. But ‘preference for rural-coded lifestyle choices’ has been a progressive scapegoat for not having the same nice things they think Europe has for quite a while. There’s something to hlynka’s point that the Twitter DR are more progressive than conventionally conservative because a lot of them are the same, they just blame blacks instead(and factually blacks and rednecks get along much better than commonly believed).

The red tribe still has significant political power. Especially in state legislatures where they are not afraid to flex their power to do things like ban abortion.

He's "clinging to guns and religion" and stopping progressives from solving the gun crime problem.

And that was Obama trying to be charitable.

US is already spending high levels on social spending.

https://twitter.com/data_david1/status/1759013986023190724?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

Why is there a culture war? Because the study and practice of politics is professional, and the culture war creates cheap single-issue voters. Getting cheap votes on auto-lock means that they can spend their resources on their own interests and the interests of important constituents such as the median swing voter. Politicians have gone a long way to ensure that internal party processes are often the only way for them to actually be unseated from their positions, so it vests power within the party infrastructure itself and takes away power from the people they are meant to represent.

But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself.

You've already got it:

They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red blue tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.

Suffice to say that liberals do not share conservatives' assessment about the balance of power.

Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?

Yes. The red tribe's hate for the blue tribe (and vice versa) is fundamentally normative. The red and blue tribes hate each other because they have values that are not in alignment and which they are not willing to compromise on.

WHY is there a culture war?

A proximal cause is "fellow travelers" being more able to find each other and create echo chambers where they don't have to spend time becoming exhausted by arguing their viewpoints for their neighbors (by chance or fate) with different views. This doesn't just happen online; since people who trust governments more than private citizens tend to congregate in cities and live in apartments and condos, cities become progressive and the rural and suburban areas become conservative. The busybodies and meddlers in each group who can't stand being told what to do by "those people" try to push laws and regulations and ordinances and speech codes to interfere with "those people" getting their way, even if they themselves would never consent to being ruled in such a manner. Thus, the cold culture war.

I do offer an ultimate cause, however, and I hope it'll blow a few minds.

My sensemaking journey began with a simple pair of concepts: The physical world and the world of logic operate on separate sets of attributes and rules, and emotions are a third and equally separate realm like unto the others.

  1. The physical: temperature, color, proximity, size, weight, direction, and so on - The What
  2. The logical: axioms, premises, hypotheses, conclusions, categories, if-then-else, and so on - The How
  3. The emotional: desires, needs, relationships, identities both singular and plural, attribution and transference, and so on - The Why

Upon first making a list like this, I realized that the physical essence is masculine, the emotional essence is feminine, and the logical essence is neither. ("Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" and geeks are from Vulcan.) I've called this worldview Triessentialism.

More recently, I observed that physically intuitive people tend to be red tribe/conservative while emotionally intuitive people tend to be blue-tribe/progressive, and logically intuitive people tend to be grey tribe/libertarian. In animal metaphors, the red tribe acts like a pack, the blue like a herd, and the grey like a hive; asymmetric but equivalent. Since coming to these conclusions, I've rarely been surprised when it comes to politics, which tells me my beliefs pay out in prediction.

I could go on and on about these mindsets, and I could even point to Jon Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory as a root cause as to why these mindsets tend to be the three fundamentals. I'd love to talk with him about looking at his data and suggesting three, not two, moral foundation mindsets, with the third being somewhat rare. But for me, I've sensemade enough to consider my theory substantiated.

If I had to guess...

The culture war exists because of an inherent tension between two principles of the post-enlightenment order. The first is the drive to equality and liberty, which has broad appeal for various reasons but especially those tied to a Christian and post-Christian guilt complex, and to those who identify with groups or individuals they consider to have been unduly oppressed by powerful institutions. The second is the drive to civilization, which necessarily involves the construction of hierarchies, the concentration of power and the structured application of [extreme] violence; it is unequal and illiberal.

All Hegelian narratives contend with this core tension between a hierarchical, orderly impulse and a liberal, equal one. Both are 'human', and both have their ultimate foundation in our primal nature.

Can’t you do pretty even split in the US over just liberty vs. equality/equity? Aka limited government vs. social democracy, with a corresponding “rural vs. urban” fight over culture and lifestyle options.

As soon as the shift from “equal under the law” to “equality of outcomes ensured by government intervention” became dominant on the left, that fight was going to happen, and most other fights align around it.

I don’t think the civilizational/hierarchical one works, given how much the Blue Tribe wants to use state power to ensure equity. The Classic Conservatives/Theocrats aren’t the main force on the right in the US.

It would seem that "culture war" chiefly, in the end, boils down to two separate culture wars, once concerning the status of religion (chiefly Christianity, chiefly inside that evangelical Protestantism) in the American society, with reverbations to issues like feminism, status of LGBT people and so on, and the other concerning the status of ethnic minorities (chiefly Black Americans) in the American society.

Both culture wars, in the broad sense, have been going on for centuries and the predecessors of the red tribe have flexed their power considerably when they've had it, so creating some sort of fundamental a victimology narrative for either side does not seem prudent.

In my view it goes back to Albion's seed. See how many modern characteristics of each tribe you see in their descriptions here.

The blue tribe is the Roundheads who left England in the time leading up to Cromwell's revolution and then after the restoration of the monarchy and the Quakers.

The red tribe is the Cavaliers who were given lands in the US as a parting gift of Charles I before he was beheaded along with the Borderers.

The Cavaliers and Roundheads have both hated each other for more than 400 years, with fundamentally incompatible views of how society should look. Most of the US governmental quirks are ways to keep the two groups separated and they only really worked until the stakes got big enough to be meaningful as the post New Deal government became more influential on citizens lives than their state government and the US dominates the political and financial worlds.

I've always thought that, considering the full Albion's Seed descriptions and Scott's summaries of them, the blues are primarily remiscient of the Quakers and the reds primarily of Borderers. Particularly the "blues are Puritans" narrative just seems like an attempt to associate the blues with a word that immediately would cause a negative reaction in most everyone.

I associate 'Puritans' with one of the most productive groups that ever existed, but I'm not from US.

Don’t leave out the part where the Founding Fathers were made up of both Roundheads and Cavaliers (were any prominent ones Borderers?) and the constitution was designed as a truce on the culture war of the time, while allowing states to have the bulk of the power to define how life would go.

The culture war of the time was of course Protestants vs. Catholics/insufficiently Puritan Protestants, and the Founding Fathers probably all had recent ancestors directly affected by those civil wars in the UK.

The modern day culture war is more about Borderers vs. Roundheads (now puritan progressives), whereas the Cavaliers strike me as more of the business wing of the GOP.

Of course, this is very loose. The Bushes are New England WASPs, as is say Mitt Romney’s ancestry.

Of course, this is very loose. The Bushes are New England WASPs, as is say Mitt Romney’s ancestry.

GHW Bush was Blue Tribe and everyone knew it - in 1988 that was perfectly compatible with being a conservative (to the extent that he was) and a Republican because the party system had not fully aligned with the culture war, but the Red Tribe ultimately rejected him - the 1992 presidential election was the last time a Republican underperformed in the South.

GW Bush became Red Tribe by religious conversion - he left the (predominantly Blue Tribe) Episcopal Church and joined the (mixed-tribe, but he was in an evangelical-aligned congregation) United Methodist Church, announced that he had been through a born-again conversion experience, and generally said and did the things that Red Tribe Christianity requires of its adherents with visible sincerity. (He also bought and lived on a dude ranch, but that wasn't decisive.) Jeb Bush didn't, so the Red Tribe treated him as outgroup and decisively rejected him in the 2016 primary.

Mormons are neither Red nor Blue Tribe - they are their own tribe. They are political allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it (just as African-Americans are not part of the Blue Tribe). Romney was only able to win the 2012 primary because Gingrich and Santorum split the tribal Red vote, allowing him to pick up a lot of delegates with narrow pluralities in winner-takes-almost-all states.

I think this is correct.

Though at this point, some Utah Mormons have gone full Red Tribe and there are internal divisions in the Utah GOP along “Mike Lee vs. Mitt Romney” lines.

Also the LDS church is fairly pro-immigration and pro-vaccination, which caused issues for some of the faithful.

I think you're asking an interesting question, and I look forward to reading the answers. Just wanted to add something

Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s?

It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6).

To the extent that I've heard blue-tribers be defensive, it's in relation to the dominance of 2000s era Bush-style evangelicals. I know many who at least claim to still live in fear of those folks, the religious Right, thinking that they'll come back and totally rule the country at any moment.

Also, a lot of them want revenge for Trump.

I think a lot of it comes down to political science. Duverger's law: Any country with a simple-majority, single-ballot system like the US, will inevitably split into two political parties. We can't have just one, because we don't agree on everything, and we can't have more than two, because the third parties are just losers and nobody wants to lose. The two parties formed almost immediately after the constitution was signed, and they've been around ever since, albeit in different forms.

I know the culture war isn't exactly the same as the two parties and formal elections, but it is aided and abetted by them, and follows those elections pretty closely.

I know the culture war isn't exactly the same as the two parties and formal elections, but it is aided and abetted by them, and follows those elections pretty closely.

I think it is the other way round - the parties follow the culture war. Sometimes this is deliberate in search of new voting blocs (e.g. the GOP Southern Strategy), but more often they are forced into it by hostile takeovers in the primaries (e.g. Trump and MAGA more generally, McGovern back in the day) or the threat thereof (Hillary going woke as a weapon against Bernie, Kerry moving left to beat Howard Dean, Romney insincerely tacking right on immigration).

Both party establishments think (and I think they are right) that elections are won from the centre and swing voters don't like candidates who escalate the culture war.

Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation.

You are missing why they are fighting in the first place. This is not a case of "I know I'm wrong, I'm just arguing to piss you off", the red tribe holds fundamental moral values. The most basic of oughts is that one ought to promote what one deems moral. Why wouldn't they fight against someone promoting something they don't think is moral?

But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn.

This is again missing the point. You don't need an explanation for why this particular culture played out the way it did to understand 90% of it. The Blue Tribe holds different values and will fight for its morality, simple as that.

Humans set their standards by their environment, which is why nerds and jocks will self-segregate despite the countless things that make them similar. You cannot point to the far group(s) and ask why a tribe doesn't organize with the other tribe against the remote tribe, it's very rarely relevant. Failure to understand this is bizarre given that you've read SSC's Outgroup piece.

It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all

This is so blind to anything the Blue Tribe says that I have to seriously consider if you are just casually speculating with no research on what either side alleges. The Blue Tribe accuses the Red Tribe of a whole host of things, which can largely be grouped into two categories: bigotry (racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.) and irrationality (in particular, deriving views based on "common sense" and religious beliefs).

Hey now don’t forget selfishness from opposing government size/scope.

Since 2020, I've been lurking Japanese websites regularly. Easily the biggest contrast between the English and Japanese net is the total lack of any real CW or political energy over there. Japanese people hardly vote, they don't follow politics, and if Marx is brought up they'll discuss him calmly from a historical/economic perspective rather than an ideological one. There's a palpable sense that Japanese are somehow immune to the Culture War -- that it's just fundamentally never going to happen, barring a World War II-style shakeup, and even then I seriously doubt it.

So why are they immune to the CW? The keyword is society. Japanese people (and other Asians) have a fundamentally different relationship with their society compared to Westerners. Over there, "society" is basically a sprawling, abstract, ephemeral organism that's almost like a father figure. You may not always like his authority, you definitely don't understand him, but if you listen to his rules and obey his commands, you will probably be happy. You'll be safe, you'll have clean streets, a wife, a career, expendable income, medical care, good food! Society is -extremely- stable, so virtually all risk is removed. Trust in society, and you'll be happy. Disrespect society, and you'll be shamed on national TV.

Western society -- especially America -- is the opposite. As authority is stripped away from the social body and granted to the individual, society loses its ability to fix norms and values, and so every individual is left to determine his own truth rather than inheriting some default opinion from above. The more atomized and individualist a society is, the smaller the corpus of collective knowledge/belief gets, and the more pressure is placed on each person to find an answer themselves. This is why even in Scandinavia, CW potential is much lower because they're collectivists, despite being very developed, terminally online, and fluent in English. For CW to become truly big in Scandinavia, their collectivist culture would have to decay.

I don't really think the average person wants a Culture War. They just have this void in their lives -- no social organism they can feel proud contributing to, no God that brings purpose to their life, and 2008 butchered any remaining Y2K optimism with an axe. Seems natural that mass political utopianism is the move.

My understanding is that Japan had a highly polarizing culture war in the 1950s, with street violence and riots, in which right-wing nationalist parties and organizations duked it out with communists, Weimar-style. This of course boiled over into the assassination of socialist political candidate Inejirō Asanuma by a hardcore ultra-nationalist on live television.

While I think there’s something real that you’re pointing to - and though I’ve never been to Japan (although that will change this year!) my naïve outsider’s impression jibes with what you’re saying. Knowing that Japan was roiled by bitter ideological civil conflict so recently, though, is enough to make me deeply skeptical of the claim that its current cultural/political harmony is the result of some deep primordial aspect of Eastern communitarianism, as opposed to Western individualism/idealism. (See also: the entire history of China.)

@Hoffmeister25 I belive you're correct about the post-war riots.

https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1187711152/ja/%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF%E3%83%95%E3%82%A9%E3%83%88/high-angle-shot-of-a-crowd-of-labor-union-protestors-who-are-gathered-on-an-urban-playing.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=p28vxdNNaeQ9m1WAvwUzAH0uSn90dj_6dILjbKARG1w=

https://www.gettyimages.co.jp/detail/ニュース写真/tokyo-japan-left-wing-japanese-trade-union-members-in-tokyo-are-ニュース写真/515935648

Japan is technically a democracy but practically it's a one-party state. The same party (Liberal Democrats) has been in power for most of the last 70 years; it has a cosy consensus with the news sites and bribes a lot of demographics pretty openly. For example, the recent scandal where the party turned out to have been cooperating with the Moonie cult (Unification Church) in exchange for the cult ordering its members to vote Liberal Democrat. Or the massive amounts of money that are funded to unnecessary building works to prop up local labour. People don't see any point talking about politics because the situation is mostly comfortable and there's no prospect of change.

Don't let the party label fool you. In Asia, democratic parties are much less of 'political parties' in the American or especially European sense, roughly fixed coalitions with a breadth of ideological representation, and far more personality-based coalitions of factions. You don't support the Party, as is the European norm, or even necessarily the Person of a specific geographic area as is the American practice, you support the political faction, which can be substantially more dynamic than in Europe as factions even within the same party maneuver.

In Japan in particular, the Liberal Democratic Party factions are basically parties-within-a-party, such that 'the Liberal Democratic Party' is just the current coalition government of internal LDP factions, whose breadth and diversity can marginalize, co-opt, or subsume parties outside of The Party. If you want a more pro-China Japanese government, you don't need (or want) to start a pro-China party for people to vote for- you're better off just pumping up the current more-pro-China factions so that their factional strength influences the party's internal coalitions and maneuverings. Voting directly affects these, as LDP candidates can run against eachother as much as opposition parties- meaning that instead of a 'here is your only possible candidate from the one-party', you can have as many LDP candidates as opposition candidates running in a slate. Nominally they may be from the same party, but in effect they are each from distinct factions or faction-alliances, meaning that the victory of 'the party' is not synonymous with the status quo.

Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is 'one-party' in the same sense that the American 'bipartisan consensus' is 'one party'. There have been many people who feel there's no point in voting because there's no prospect of change and that all the candidates are the same, but they'd be just as wrong in either country.

The Japanese electoral system was changed in 1994 to a mixture of FPTP and list-based PR so that same-party candidates no longer compete directly for popular votes. This was supposed to encourage anti-LDP leadership politicians to join opposition parties rather than anti-leadership factions within the LDP. I don't know why it didn't work.

The single biggest factor I've heard/been convinced by is that the 1994 reforms didn't go far enough in providing public funding for the operations of the politicians. Faction support is financial not only critical in funding for the election phase (what US political parties serve as), but in the daily operations of the candidate and their staff to, well, work. What the government provides as an operating allowance is often insufficient, and so a faction provides the function for staff and systems and such.

In short, it's a power of the purse issue.

I see, so basically you’re saying that the primaries are where the magic happens?

The UK Tory party for controlling candidate selection with a tight fist, so I guess I’m not really used to this perspective. In theory paid-up party members get a say but not really in practice.

It's not a primary issue per see, because Japan isn't First Past the Post, and so it's not solely one candidate per geographic area. Additionally, the Party isn't so unified to have total control of candidate lists (hence the factions), nor does it control the money to candidates (which is the factions key leverage/reason to align with a faction).

The Japanese system post 1994 reforms is a mix some seats being elected via plurality voting (as in, the most votes even if not a majority), and a party-list proportional voting across 11 regional blocks (voting for the party gives the party the proportion of seats on hand, but the party selects the candidates). The proportional aspect is what favors the LDP as a party, while the plurality system is what favors the factions.

The plurality seats in various regions favor the factions because this is what lets a faction have key relationships with key local players (and donors) to the point that they can be the biggest individual party/faction in an area. Key donors / electoral influencers can enable a faction to win a seat in an area, even if not a majority coalition, and these faction-candidates are thus the influence the party as a whole needs to court/convince the faction to support the government. This is part of the post-1994 reforms dynamic reverted back to LDP dominance, because LDP/former-LDP types already had the key relationships/economic relationships to win pluralities where a FPP system would have required more comprehensive majority coalitions.

The proportional representation party-list is why it's better to be a dissident-faction within the party rather than an opposition party. Part of the political game is the push/pull/negotiation of how much of the LDP's list is aligned with your faction (or, alternatively, who you think might join your faction after being elected). As long as LDP remains dominant, it's better to negotiate/play for a share of the LDP's share than to try and fight for a share outside of the LDP. Naturally, this is a self-reinforcing cycle.

One of the key tools/roles the factions play in this, which is distinct from most other modern democracies post-election phase, is the role of providing financial support for government operations. The public funding allowance provided by the Japanese government to politicians is reportedly far less than what those in the US or European electoral systems expect. This makes party money critical not only for elections (as is the expectation for the US), but also daily operations post election for things like staff and systems to, well, do the job. Except that in the Japanese political context, the critical money isn't necessarily coming from 'the Party'- the LDP as a whole- but also 'the Faction'- the patrons (political and business relationships and donors). You, as a candidate, need someone's patronage if you intend to do things / be influential- or provide patronage yourself- and who you align with can be ideological or mercurial.

This is why the intra-LDP politics can be so dynamic, even as inter-party politics just seem like a LDP monolith. Factions that gain or lose major patronage streams- such as the changing business climate making new winners/losers- may gain or lose the ability to support / attract as many candidates. Personality conflicts between a faction's key leaders may drive off people who were only there for the monetary support, while a particularly charismatic person may be able to bridge ideological divides and create a new power center. Factions are ideology + money, in a framework where it's often still better to be within the LDP than outside it.

As a consequence, though, the LDP/factions lack the sort of party control mechanisms that developed in the US/Europe for maintaining party discipline and control. There isn't the same equivalent of the UK's Leader-control over the party list, which can be used to de-select dissident party members who oppose the leader like. Because plurality-seats, there can be / are 'independent' and politically critical geographically-tied political power centers that tend to be wiped away by pure proportional systems, which weakens national-level party control to enable lower level actors (and factions). And because money comes from factions, not just the national party, there isn't the sort of national party control (by way of controlling funding) that empowers the more centralized US party setups. All of these- plus other cultural/social dynamics- prevent the LDP's current leader from having the sort of ability to discipline the party as a whole that is normal for democratic party-based-systems, or for non-democratic party-states.

While it's not the normally desired way for a national system, in many respects the LDP is it's own political eco-system, within the broader Japanese national eco-system.

Thank you for the very interesting and detailed reply.

You are quite welcome.

Sure it happened. What country would this not happen in, when the entire foundation of their world view is rocked? When you go from dominating your half of the planet, and viewing your emperor as a literal god, to becoming an economic vassal state of foreign powers and everything you believed in was violently flushed down the toilet? I can't imagine any scenario or any culture where this goes smoothly.

The fact it only took 25 years for all conflict to die off is amazing. There's no residual fighting, no scars left over from the transition, no one really cares about American military bases or the treaty or communism anymore. It didn't involve some enormous deal-with-the-devil style compromise cough Korea cough to lift them back up. They had the perfect opportunity to go apeshit and tear up the country for their beliefs, but it simply didn't happen. When Mishima committed suicide in 1970, he was laughed at for his extremism like he was Chris-chan. Bear in mind, this man was a teenager when Kamikaze pilots were killing themselves for the emperor. His extremism is nothing like a Civil War LARPer trying to revive the confederacy -- it's like a guy born in Alabama in 1845, waxing poetic about the Antebellum era, and getting laughed out of the room by Reconstruction-era southerners. Japan's entire world view collapsed and they moved on like it was no big deal. 25 years is amazing.

People switch from ‘agree to disagree’ to fury when there is a practical issue at stake. The specific reason for the culture war shifting into high gear is that the left discovered two superweapons and began using them widely.

  • Mass migration, which acts as a ‘win’ button for democracy and anti-traditionalism.

  • The doctrine of disparate impact, which boosts the above and leads to affirmative action, getting footsoldiers where they’re needed.

The sharp shift in power (and fear of where it will lead) makes red lash out. Conversely blue sees an opportunity to win and so sees no reason to hold back their loathing (which they had before but suppressed). Blue is also angered by red’s resistance and fearful of backlash in the case of failure.

My favorite model of politics is that, at least in the west, our primary axis of political division splits people who benefit status-wise from transnational managerialism (AKA the Globalist American Empire, GAE) and those who don't. That supporter class, which we can call the 'blue coalition', consists of people with cushy bureacratic jobs they got due to credentialism (blue tribe proper), unemployables who could never be respectable in any system, and migrants who would be in a favela without transnational open borders. The opposer class, which we can call the 'red coalition', consists of everyone else.

So blue-tribe-hates-red-tribe and red-tribe-hates-blue tribe is a cipher for class antagonism, much like the guelphs and ghibellines, the optimates and populares, the federalists and anti-federalists, and a million other disputes that seem impenentrable to the modern eye because the contours of their society's class landscape didn't come down to us in detail.

Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.

Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.

On the contrary, social status is zero sum. In recent decades social status has been docked from some and redistributed to others — the blues say this is a good thing and that, in fact, reds still have a cache of unearned social status that should be stripped. This goes beyond racial justice ideology, to be clear; you will often hear school teachers or even PhD's complaining bitterly that plumbers make more than them, as if the plumber's salary is somehow decreasing theirs. Or decrying that liberal arts degrees don't secure a "good job". By this they mean "social inferiors have prominence that should be reallocated to me".

Blue and red class interests are fundamentally opposed.

This makes sense. I am a teacher, and it's worse than that, though. The teachers hate KIDS because the kid has an Audi that his dad bought him.

To be clear, in your teacher example this is 100% one sided. I am a tradesman and nearly all tradesmen agree that teachers should be paid more, even if most of us would look at the pay scale and say ‘doesn’t seem cartoonishly low to me’. Most of us don’t support just giving money to school districts in the hopes they’ll use it for teacher pay raises, sure, but support for teachers making more money through something or other(state bonus program or whatever) is near universal among actual plumbers and HVAC techs.

Its a religious war, not a culture war.

The left hates everything non-left because the fundamental tenet of their religion is the erasure of distinctions. As I posted downthread:

I'm not sure I agree with NRx that extreme blank slatism and communism were inevitable extrapolations of liberalism; that as soon Jefferson penned "all men are created equal", CRT and HAES were a matter of time.

To clarify the timeline, the Identicals have been preaching and attempting to enforce blank slatism, and the erasure of all distinctions whatever, for thousands of years before Jefferson was even born.

The identicals force us to believe that being is identical to nothing. That p = !p in the literal and metaphysical sense. Kabbalah did it, the gnostics and hermetics did it, Hegel ("Nothing is, therefore...altogether the same as, pure being.") said so, and so on. Blank slatism and HAES are just modern Identicals finding new domains in which they can enforce the belief that everything is really just the same as everything else. Fat is healthy. All people are equally capable of all things. p = !p.

The left hate the non-left for their existence, as their existence itself is a fundamental distinction between persons which must be eliminated.

This is at least AN answer. Can you expand upon the leftist impulse to erase all distinctions, or point me to someone who already has?

To briefly introduce the concept, compare the quote I provided here and ponder the behavior of people like Pol Pot.

For and in depth answer, with quotes and examples linking the concept cohesively from Plato through to the modern period, see my recent post, which is a summary of a book on the subject..

Could you elaborate on how the P and NP complexity classes are related to this?

Because my fingers are running faster than my brain. p = !p or a = !a is the point. Thanks for the heads up.

I've seen people make the argument that the liberal ideology is universalist. Its not enough for California to totally conform to leftist ideology - the whole country must conform. Better yet, the whole world. I dont know how to square this with cultural relativism, but now that I think about it, that's not something you hear a whole lot about these days despite the fact that I recall it being a big part of the political conversation from the left about 20 years ago. The universalism of the left does ring true to me. It seems to me that they cannot tolerate pockets of red tribe anywhere they might exist.

Sure, but why? Whence the universalism? Is it a holdover from Christianity? From Communism? They don't seem to care about what happens in Mali, for example, the way Christians and Communists do.

It is universalist. Cultural relativism squares perfectly because the thing that the left is trying to make universal is the elimination of distinctions. Cultural relativism is an argument they derived from the dialectical method, which is the name for the rhetorical technique they use to eliminate distinctions. 'Its not that your morals are wrong, its that the concept of morals is broader than you think, your morals are really just one aspect of a much wider conception of morality, and viewed this way, all moral perspectives are really just the same, aren't they?'

Insofar as the red tribe is Christian, particularly Evangelical Protestant, it is by necessity also universalist and believes that the whole world should be converted (it's quite literally in the name "evangelical", after all), and works quite consistently and strongly to support missionary work, often with an implicit or explicity spread of general American cultural mindset alongside, all over the world.

This isn't just a blue tribe/liberal thing however. Pro-life people are pushing for abortion to be outlawed through out the US, not just where they live. It's a simple outgrowth of a moral judgement. If I believe X is wrong, then people should not be allowed to do X. It's the fundamental basics of civilization. If I think murder is wrong, I can't simply not murder, I have to try and stop other people murdering. Otherwise Christians could simply not try to outlaw abortion, just simply not get one themselves. But that isn't enough. Not for Christians and not for liberals. We want to live in a society that does the things we think are good, and does not do the things we think are bad.

  1. Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?

Not really; despite protestations, even the blues' language betrays that they know they're the aggressors -- they call the reds "reactionaries", and in order for there to be a re-action, there must be a principal action.

  1. Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?

Because they stand in the way of them amassing power for themselves at the cost of primarily red demographics. Blue tribe is a racial spoils system, it's minorities exploiting white guilt to grab as much unearned advantage for themselves as they can; it's women flying the flag of feminism to advantage themselves and disadvantage men. Anyone professing an interest in "fairness" and "justice" is either doing so cynically to cover for their own grasping hands, or naively having never examined the actual motivations of their peers or effects of their ideology.

Blue tribe ideology is the ideology of singling out one group, white straight men, and agreeing amongst themselves to appropriate and steal everything possible from that group and divide it amongst themselves. Everything that comes after that is post-hoc justification as to why not only is this necessary, but a good thing -- but the fact remains, the base desire is simple looting for self-enrichment.

The culture war exists for the same reason all war exists; person A wants what person B has, and has decided to take it via force.

My theory is that the modern culture war in the US stems from gay marriage. Basically, gay marriage did not win democratically in the US, it was imposed from above. Therefore blue tribe is deeply insecure in their victory. And they have responded by trying to crush any and all dissent.

It would have been healthier if blue tribe had to win gay marriage the old-fashioned way, through the formal constitutional amendment process. Win referendums state-by-state. It would have taken longer, but having your fellow citizens vote with you gives confidence in the result, that it's unlikely to be taken from you.

Perhaps the loss in the California referendum spooked blue tribe, and made them think the amendment path was impossible. Personally I do think Americans would have eventually voted for gay marriage. "The pursuit of happiness" is deeply entrenched in the American soul.

A couple analogous situations. Women's suffrage was rejected by the Supreme Court. So it had to be done via amendment. But doing so made it utterly accepted.

Canada passed gay marriage with two free votes in Parliament. One under a Liberal government and one under the subsequent Conservative government. Both votes passed, and thus gay marriage has iron-clad legitimacy in Canada. This is how the process is supposed to work, what Parliament is for.

You’re thinking about this the wrong way.

The battle over gay marriage was won so fast both legally and popularly that progressives think they can repeat that with say trans issues.

I don’t think conservatives think they have a chance of ever reversing gay marriage. Best they can do is fight to have the freedom to not bake cakes for it.

The battle over gay marriage was won so fast both legally and popularly that progressives think they can repeat that with say trans issues.

Moreover, they did so by just lying about what is known about reality, enforcing it through pure social power, then freely admitting that they totally lied. There have been, and there will be, zero consequences for this lying, so ISTM that they feel emboldened to repeat the same tactic on any issue of choice.

Leaving aside the whole issue of government involvement in the institution of marriage and the court deciding things, the popularity battle was not won by lying.

I can grant your claims of some lying, but the biggest factor is that what the gays wanted was not that much of an ask, overall. It was about social acceptance, without too much of a real burden. The exceptions, of course, revolve around the trade offs with religious rights, because freedom of association and freedom from association are murky unresolvable problems.

This is not the case with trans issues. There are significant health concerns, as well as the major biological differences between men and women being pretttty difficult to overcome. It’s asymmetric of course; almost all the Culture Warring is over MtF issues.

the biggest factor is that what the gays wanted was not that much of an ask, overall

In comparison to what? There is a reason that the lies were focused on making it, "...compared to having to 'live a lie' and betray your very identity that is as core to your being as your DNA, and as a result, never ever have the chance to live a happy and satisfying life." If you lie enough to make the alternative YUGE, then you can make it sound like what you're wanting is not that much of an ask. It's baked in to your thinking that it's not that much of an ask, and you probably can't extricate it from your mind to look at it any other way.

It’s just literally not much of an ask in concrete terms, relative to say implementing the ADA, or the Civil Rights Act(s), or the various complexities of trans issues.

The gay people I know personally are quite gay, and disproportionately the type who risked/suffered a great deal personally to live as such. They weren’t lying about their reality. Some countries still execute gays. Hell of a preference to satisfy.

I’ve seen a number of instances where religious gay men tried to make a heterosexual marriage work and it didn’t pan out. The “genderqueer/fluid” crowd is a different beast, as is the whole thing with bisexuals, but most of that has emerged in more recent times and among the youths, after the popular perception tide had turned.

Graduating high school in 2006 is utterly different than in 2016 with respect to the gays. The people that can’t remember 9/11 also can’t really remember a lack of societal acceptance of gays. Even if the courts had not ruled in favor of gay marriage when they did, the cultural change was already a foregone conclusion.

Graduating high school in 2006 is utterly different than in 2016 with respect to the gays. The people that can’t remember 9/11 also can’t really remember a lack of societal acceptance of gays. Even if the courts had not ruled in favor of gay marriage when they did, the cultural change was already a foregone conclusion.

I don't know that this happens without the lies, though. That NYT article said that it was "critical" to tell people these lies so that they could effect a cultural change. Again, I think you're so swimming in the result that you really just can't fathom how important it was for the culture to change. How many people felt just utterly bullied into changing their perspective, because they felt they couldn't say anything in response to, "The Science says!" They had to retreat to, "Well, I might not personally like it, but if that's who they are," or some people even said, "...if that's who god made them to be, then..."

Graduating in 2016 meant being most exposed to peak propaganda on precisely this issue. Literally 2015 was Obergefell, when the APA told SCOTUS that a bloody opinion poll settled the science on the issue. The lies were literally more like the water they were swimming through than at any other time.

Frankly, this is just reinforcing my original point. They were sooooo successful with pushing these lies to effect cultural and legal change that you can't even see how important it was. It's no wonder they think they can just boldly do it again on any issue they please. You might personally see through it the next time, but there will be a train of people who graduated in 2026 instead of 2016 or 2006 who will be right there to say, "But you just don't understand that there was a cultural change," and completely not grokking how that cultural change happened.

To put a finer point on it, you have the causation backwards.

Even if I grant you all the lies, the lies happened because there was already critical mass where it was important. The “science lies” were a prop, not a significant load-bearing element of the cultural change machine. Now the Hollywood propaganda was load-bearing I think, but the gays had already long conquered the arts so what can you do.

I was raised in a very religious environment and served under DADT. I personally made the transition to support gay rights, and witnessed that in many others, including the devout. “The science” was an afterthought compared to knowing gay people. (I think I made the shift before actuality personally knowing a real-life homosexual, due to reading a prominent gay intellectual for several years as a teenager.)

The biggest factor for most people was the personal relations bit. Back then, being gay was certainly not a fun preference to indulge if you were from a background like mine or wished to serve in the military.

The same playbook won’t work nearly so well on trans issues because of the complications I already described, as we are witnessing.

I’m telling you that I lived through that transition and the lies you allege were just not a significant factor.

It’s not like the Red Tribe is convinced by “well if science says so”, and the Blue Tribe accepting it was a foregone conclusion, science or not. What gives this issue a strong majority is similar to the case of abortion: independents and a decent chunk of right-leaning people support the other side.

More comments

The broad scale picture of two enemies at war flows fairly naturally from our election system, as it forces there to be two parties. As it exists specifically, it's due to differences in values. The right is a mixture of pro-religion and pro-liberalism forces (though the latter is waning post-Trump) while the left's predominant concern is about fairness and oppression.

I second what @07mk said about it being taught in schools—one of the big moral things that they push in schools is that slavery, racism, etc. are bad. And justifiably so. But that lends itself to the support of the left, whereas the right's values are less likely to be taught. Social media of course contributes, in the further emphases on flaws, and in the spreading of ideas within each other and the formation of a culture.

The left doesn't see things as them having power and oppressing the right. They see it rather as them, with their institutions, trying to combat a vast societal undercurrent of evil. Remember, every disparity is a sign of oppression, of failure—the wealth of the wealthy, racial gaps, everything. They are people struggling against the racism and oppression everywhere. Everyone wants to be the underdog.

And they see the right as legitimately evil. To side with the slavers over the slaves! What do the billionaires need? Why are you supporting the white people, who have perpetrated centuries of harm upon others, and (as is evident by the disparities) are still profiting? Would you treat half the world as lesser, merely because they are female, as if they needed to depend on men? Why would you let our pristine world go to waste, in the pursuit of selfish profit? They see society as a bundle of flaws and problems, and take the good it does for granted.

You point out that the left is punching down. Yes, they do. But they see themselves as attacking human scum.

To answer your three questions directly:

  1. It's kind of a mix. The red tribe does genuinely have contempt for the blue tribe, it's not merely defensive.

  2. The red tribe hates the blue tribe because it sees evil. A world of injustice, where people (they could be the victims) are mistreated because they are white, where the institutions that our society runs upon are being subverted or torn down, where the children are slaughtered by the millions. A place of debauchery, where people promote the ugly and disordered everywhere, from piercings to art to the disordered gender relations that LGBT consists in to the assault on the justice system. People lose jobs for having views like them. Christianity is attacked. Why would anyone prefer the ugly over the beautiful, or disarray to health?

  3. As I said above, the left hates the right, because it promotes oppression and injustice. Why would you side with those perpetrating harm, with the selfish, rather the with the victims?

He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.

As someone who was essentially born into the Blue tribe of the culture war and raised to be its soldier, I think you almost have it with "legacy of slavery," but rather, it's the broader oppression narrative, of which the legacy of slavery is one type. When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in the bluest of blue areas, this oppression narrative was just taken for granted as Obviously True, with the notion that all the Bad Stuff like slavery, misogyny, homophobia, etc. in our society could be gotten rid of, while keeping all the Good Stuff we like, if only those ignorant people would stop holding up these old, decrepit, sexist, racist patriarchal structures. There was generally a real sense of pity for these ignorant bigots, though certainly there was some disgust as well.

It seems that in the decades since I was in school, this kind of teaching has only become more common in schools in less-blue and non-blue areas. It also seems to me that encouragement of active disgust instead of condescending pity has come into vogue in that time. Given that, I don't think Blue tribe's nigh-genocidal hatred of the Red is that surprising.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction. Much of the ideas behind this oppression narrative came from academia, and specifically parts of academia that are largely allergic to empirical testing. Sans empiricism, success in the field became even more about winning status than it normally is, which freed people to make more and more extreme statements (e.g. any old idiot can argue that murder is wrong, but it takes a true genius academic to argue that murder is right) without the messy real world getting in the way. And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.

Of course, that just moves the question back another step: why did the Blue Tribe allow the humanities in academia to be so freed from empiricism and basic checking as to allow status games to dominate over truth? That one's probably above my pay grade, but my guess would just be generic laziness, nothing interesting in particular. Doing rigorous analysis of anything is tough, and the appeal of taking shortcuts is always there even when you know others will critique your work. When you can be confident that others won't, and this becomes common knowledge among everyone in the field... it'd be surprising if it even accidentally produced truth even once.

A whole host of those subjects have never been and will never be empirical in any real sense. They might be occasionally rigorous (I would argue the philosophy is rigorous, but outside of the logic subcategories are not really empirical. You can create perfectly logical arguments that run counter to empirical reality if you desire.) or create a pseudo-empirical structure (like psychology, sociology, and anthropology have) where terrible research methods (don’t get me started on self report) can be run through statistical analysis and conclusions can be drawn. There are ways to teach these subjects that are at least honest (historical analysis of literature or the intent of the author over a [outgroup] analysis of whatever literature).

But if you insist on empirical evidence and research in the arts, you essentially cannot have it. There’s no real scientific methodology to creating literature and thus no way to make it rigorous in analysis. And thus you either stop doing it and simply teach the undergrads to write coherently, or it morphs into a cesspit of whatever is socially and politically radical (because it’s impossible to fire someone for bad research when the entire field is unempirical) with no checks.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction.

I think this is the wrong answer. Your answer should naturally prompt the question 'if its just arbitrary status games across all relevant areas and institutions, why do they all cohere to exactly the same result?'

These people already shared a framework which lead to all of them to arrive at the same conclusion regardless of their subject/position/domain. That should key you in to the fact that its not the competition per se.

As you mention:

And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.

The end-points were predetermined because they were all competing to do the same thing for the same moral reason. The end points existed before the institutions did. They were always driving towards them.

The academics in question are largely leftists, and leftist have always held that distinctions between things and people is the moral evil and that people who support fundamental distinctions between things are therefore the least moral persons. For example:

We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need....We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses. We consent to everything for it, to make a clean slate so that we hold to it alone. Let all the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains!...We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property!... Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

Let there no longer be any difference between people than that of age and sex. Since all have the same faculties and the same needs, let there then be for them but one education, but one nourishment. They are satisfied with one sun and one air for all: why then would the same portion and the same quality of food not suffice for each of them?

Already the enemies of the most natural order of things we can imagine raise a clamour against us.

Emphasis mine. Manifesto of the Equals, Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals 1796. It goes thousands of years back before this but this quote is the one I had at hand.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe?

From the inside:

Thanks to science and reason, we know how to solve all our problems.

Given that we know how to solve all our problems, if a problem isn't solved that necessarily means that someone is choosing not to solve it, or is otherwise obstructing the solution.

Therefore, if you have a problem you can't solve, the solution is to find the people blocking the obvious solutions and get them out of the way.

From the outside:

Progressive ideology doesn't actually have workable solutions. When the solutions their ideology preaches fail, they need scapegoats. Their relationship with Red Tribe is built around this scapegoating behavior.

But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much?

My own theory is best summarized by a tag I often use on Tumblr: "Puritans gonna Puritan." See Albion's Seed and Yarvin's days as Moldbug.

In his posthumously-published The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, William J. Stuntz devotes an entire chapter (chapter 6, "A Culture War and Its Aftermath) to an earlier culture war waged "[b]etween the late 1870s and 1933," essentially by Puritan-descended New England elites, against various "vices." The most famous being alcohol — the one area where they failed — but also Mormon polygamy; lotteries and gambling; prostitution and "white slave trafficking" (see the Mann Act, and the original name thereof); Mormon polygamy; and "obscene materials" (including pamphlets on birth control techniques; see the Comstock laws).

And as a different author (I don't remember which) noted, these moral crusades began pretty much as soon as the spread of the telegraph became possible for teetotal New England Puritans to read in their newspapers about how Borderers and Cavaliers down South or out West lived. Because those people were Doing Wrong, and thus had to be made to behave right.

Mencken defined "Puritanism" as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," but a better definition might be "haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be doing wrong." You are your brother's keeper (after all, remember the origin and context of that phrase). "Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing." "An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere." And so on.

A friend of mine once told me, years ago, about how a coworker of his came in one Monday morning teary-eyed and demanding a meeting so that the business could decide what they were going to do, collectively, to help address the plight of the Rohingya. A week ago, this woman had never heard of them, and probably wouldn't have been able to locate Myanmar on a map. But she saw a news report about them, and that was enough for her to feel the burning need not only to "do something" herself, but to recruit everyone else she knows to do the same. It's something I see all the time online "you don't want to intervene in [bad thing X]? Then you obviously approve of [X]!" Don't want to send more into Ukraine? Then you must think the Russian invasion was 100% justified, you Putin boot-licker!

There is a certain kind of person for whom moral disapproval and the drive to intervene are one and the same thing, inseparable. To them, a lack of a burning need to stop a thing is proof that you don't actually disapprove of it. It's the classic stereotype of the D&D Paladin played badly: "see evil, smite evil." They are constitutionally incapable of shrugging and saying "none of my business." And the Blue Tribe is full of them.

Consider every missionary of an evangelizing, expansionist faith who has set out to convert the heathen — by fire and sword if necessary — because it's their duty, it's the right thing to do, and it's for the heathen's own good. If you have the One True Faith, the true set of Universal Human Rights, the Objectively Correct Morality, then you have a duty to spread and enforce it everywhere you can.

Why fight the Red Tribe? Because if you don't, you are complicit in every wrong they do. If you let the Red Tribe keep being transphobic rather than try to stop them, then the blood of every trans kid in a Red Tribe area who commits suicide is on your hands. Like Kendi says, you are either actively anti-racist, or you are racist. It's one or the other. You are either fighting evil, or you are evil.

Why does the Blue Tribe hate the Red Tribe? Because it's in their nature to hate anyone who fails to share their values. Because this need to be a moral busybody, a crusader, a Social Justice Warrior, is a core characteristic of the Tribe, woven into their culture (and probably also a non-trivial amount of genetic predisposition).

Why does the Blue Tribe continually attack the Red Tribe, trying to force them to convert, or otherwise eliminate the "Red culture"? Because they're fundamentally incapable of not doing so. They can't stop themselves, and thus they will never stop.

That's my view, at least, for whatever it's worth.

What escapes me about all this: where does the moral certainty of the progressive "Modern Puritan" come from/what's it grounded in? What faith are they even evangelizing? To recall a recent topic around here, what's their answer to Nietzsche?

Most charitably we could credit them with a form of liberal humanism -- "we believe in self-actualization, and in the righteousness of removing all the oppressive obstacles to the self-actualization of others". But that seems like weak gruel for the Puritan soul. How to make an orthodoxy of human freedom? How do fanatics whip themselves into frenzies of 'you do you'? Isn't it paradoxical, even more paradoxical than a good religion needs to be?

Not to get all TLP here, but I think we can see the core progressive aesthetic as a fetishization of the self-actualizing process, a kind of social BDSM. The process is understandably more easily fetishized when it manifests in a YA novel trope of a special individual's picturesque struggle against the constraints of societal expectations than when it manifests in a more opaque internal process of self-cultivation. We're seeing now that it's also possible to fetishize an individual's righteous struggle for freedom against the constraints of personal biological reality.

It's the visible struggle against outward restraint that arouses the moral energy, and which draws focus away from the oppressed individual's goal in the struggle. The actual human victim's personal hopes and dreams -- tawdry or outright distasteful as they might be if laid out for sober scrutiny -- can be set aside during the ecstatic spectacle of liberation. But then, the goal achieved, the ropes untied, the scene completed, the post-nut clarity setting in, the unsettling condition of being reasserts after the spasm of vicarious becoming. What will the liberated do now with liberty (ever so exquisitely attained)? Do we really want to know? What, indeed, will we do with ours?

The answer, of course, is clear. Find a new character who can reenact the performance. The emptiness of freedom compels the search for fresh veins of righteous struggle. Better hope oppression is a renewable resource, or sooner or later we'll all have to stand around looking at each other's naked flabby souls in the cold light of full luxury automated gay space communism.

The answer, of course, is clear. Find a new character who can reenact the performance. The emptiness of freedom compels the search for fresh veins of righteous struggle

Of course, the best way to make your "righteous struggle" eternal is to make it against reality itself. Oppression is indeed a renewable resource when you're being "oppressed" by the very laws of physics themselves.


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