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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28228 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.

All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.

There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?

You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.

The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.

But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either:

  • Jon Stewart gets called "one of the good ones" with some bizarre anti-cop writing. I think it's written in-character from Harley's perspective, but still.
  • Most of the (mind-controlled, hance they're the bad guys in the game) Justice League die pathetic deaths, in one case almost getting literally pissed on. But somehow Wonder Woman is immune to Brainiac's brainwashing and gets to have a dignified, dramatic moment, at least comparably.
  • Also WW: her society is brought up as superior to ours, having solved issues such as toxic masculinity.
  • And then there's the case of Miles Morales having wrong country's flag in his home. Representation!

Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.

A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.

Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.

It will blow over, because it is missing the primary ingredient that caused GG to explode: topic ban. GG got huge because there was a scandal (rightly or wrongly, not weighing the original spark) and people who wanted to talk about it were not allowed to - even on 4chan. This lent an air of "what else are they hiding" to the whole game journalism industry, and then it all snowballed. It always confuses me when people don't understand that part, or that phenomenon in general. This time, no dice. There's no undercurrent of hidden misdeeds, it's just a discussion about a disliked group doing disliked things in the (relatively) open.

Whereas I would say it's missing the primary ingredient that precedes and causes the bans: a specific victim.

If the community picks out one specific woman who works at SBI and decides to make a hate circle around her, publish her home address and start SWATing her residence, make hundreds of hour-long hate videos directed at her with lots of focus on her appearance and personal life, build a mythology around her supposed criminal activities and personal failings, send mountains of rape and death threats, etc., then we will start to get the ban waves you talk about, and then it will turn into a big war again.

  • -34

If the community picks out one specific woman [...] and decides to make a hate circle around her, publish her home address and start SWATing her residence, make hundreds of hour-long hate videos directed at her with lots of focus on her appearance and personal life, build a mythology around her supposed criminal activities and personal failings, send mountains of rape and death threats, etc.

But enough about JK Rowling!

To make myself clear: I was there, David. I was refreshing the threads on /r/TumblrInAction back in 2014, seeing the TFYC game jam fall apart months before the whole situation exploded after Eron's post, browsing and saving all the screenshot compilations. And much of what you allege is just that, allegiations. Strangely left little to no pixel trail. One specific extant thing I remember that could be treated as harassing was Rich Kyanka's review of Revolution 60. (Well, extant in the form of screenshots, the review itself has been removed from steam it seems).

There was probably a nonzero amount of threats, yes. Everyone gets those. I get anon death threats on tumblr once every few weeks, and I don't even post that much!

And if your argument to the latter is that it's bad and nobody should get those - don't. I very much prefer the internet in which I get an occasional hate mail to the one in which such a thing is infrastructurally impossible, because it would have to look much more like the Chinese internet. A site like the one we're on would be illegal/impossible/dangerous to host, for one.

(And if the argument to that is that my preferences aren't universal and we should have accommodations for people who want a controlled equilibrium rather than a free-for-all equilibrium, then of course we should! Facebooks and Linkedins for the normies on one end, SA, chans and niche subreddits on the other! The thing is, van Valkenburg herself spoke about frequenting Something Awful, so I find it wildly implausible that she was unprepared to handle some amount of heat. Or is that too mythology-building?)

But, arguendo, if the amount of insults that you're insinuating is true, this seems largely comparable to the 24/7 firehose of junk that's been directed at Rowling for the past five or so years. She has the courtesy to sometimes provide screenshots and quote tweets of those, even. I know that UK has some pretty strict laws about speech, so that probably reins in her domestic antifans a little. But other than that, nobody cares. There are no sympathetic articles, no wikipedia articles about the phenomenon. Why is it that some women are more equal than others?

There are no sympathetic articles, no wikipedia articles about the phenomenon. Why is it that some women are more equal than others?

I've noticed that the people who tend to emphasize how bad online abuse towards women is tend to carve out an exception for Rowling because she's someone who managed to convince lots of people to voluntarily hand over billions of pounds to her and as a result has substantial resources at her disposal. In a very real way, this is an honest and straightforward way of analyzing the situation based on the privilege framework that such people tend to subscribe to. The fact that such a thing is an exception rather than the rule would have been an interesting observation at some point in the past, but that seems banal now.

If someone is famous enough to be an obvious example, then they're privileged and so don't count.

If someone isn't famous enough to be an obvious example, than no one's ever heard of them or knows to use them as an example, so they are ignored.

Gina Carrano is famous enough to have been heard of, but doesn't have billions. If it could be demonstrated that she suffered serious online harassment and that this harassment has been ignored, would that advance the conversation, or would the answer be that she's still too privileged?

Gina Carrano is famous enough to have been heard of, but doesn't have billions. If it could be demonstrated that she suffered serious online harassment and that this harassment has been ignored, would that advance the conversation, or would the answer be that she's still too privileged?

I think the claim of privilege would probably be thrown to see if it would stick, but I suspect most people would predict that it wouldn't stick due to the fact that she's not all that "privileged" even merely by Hollywood standards, to say nothing of the standards of Rowling. It doesn't help that her skin isn't super white, though I don't know if she has any actual heritage that would win her some oppression points.

I can only speculate about what the actual tactic would be. There are a couple common tactics that immediately come to mind. One is just minimizing the harassment she faced, saying that it's unfortunate, but why do you care about that when there are literally trans people getting genocided every day in America? The other is just retreating from the position that women deserve special protection because they're women and saying she fucked around and found out or played stupid games and won stupid prizes. This is actually the same basic position as the people who call out the Sarkeesian defenders of the world as catastrophizing what was standard part of online discourse that was already cliche 10 years ago. Of course, logical inconsistency has also been a cliche in discourse in general, and so this shouldn't be surprising; that said, when an ideology specifically denigrates things like logical or rational thinking as being something white oppressors imposed on the rest of us, my guess is that followers in that ideology are more susceptible to pushing logically inconsistent behavior and rhetoric.

and as a result has substantial resources at her disposal

Yeah, that's not the reason. Posie Parker isn't rich as far as I can tell, and they're more than happy committing actual physical violence against her, and any detrans girl gets as much or more shit flung their way as Sarkeesian did.

Sorry, I miswrote my comment. The part that says

tend to carve out an exception for Rowling because

should have said

tend to carve out an exception for Rowling based on the stated justification that

Rich people and major celebrities getting harassment and flack has always been the norm. Whether or not that's morally 'ok' is a complicated and long-argued question, but 'they can cry themselves to sleep on their piles of money' feels like it has been the general consensus going back at least to the 80s (probably earlier, I just wouldn't be aware of it before then).

GG offended sensibilities by applying the same level of catastrophic scrutiny to folks that most would consider 'normal people', names you've never heard of who don't own a vacation home and don't have much real-world influence.

GG offended sensibilities by applying the same level of catastrophic scrutiny to folks that most would consider 'normal people', names you've never heard of who don't own a vacation home and don't have much real-world influence.

Yes, like Eron Gjoni, who was an abuse victim, abused further by anti-GG.

When I say a person or group is bad, it doesn't mean I'm saying their opponents or political opposite is good. That is arguments-as-soldiers thinking.

To make myself clear: I was there, David

I do hope this is autocorrect pulling a fast one on you, rather than some veiled "I have your dox" threat.

I assumed it was some kind of reference that I just didn't get.

I would laugh my head off if it was an autocorrect of Isildur.

What I'm getting from this is that you agree this pattern of abuse exists and that it plays the causal role I'm talking about, but would also like to criticize the left for attacking a person and then not banning people over that?

My response I guess would be that there's some ways in which the situations are different and some ways in which that's real hypocrisy, but bleh. That's a boring conversation, the same one we have every day about everything.

I'm just making a point about what it would take for this to explode the way past instances have.

  • -10

If the community picks out one specific woman who works at SBI and decides to make a hate circle around her, publish her home address and start SWATing her residence,

Conflating "the community" as a whole with very particular (and dubious) accusations about a few specific people is doing a lot of work for you here. I would go so far as to say that the gamergate you are describing doesn't exist -- which makes it simple to predict it won't happen again. (Actually, maybe that makes it more likely: things that never happened are happening all the time.)

Some people have a political commitment to toe the party line on GG, regardless of the thin air it turned out to be.

I remember when the stock line was "Gamergate is driving women to suicide online". I don't recall any body counts materializing, or any posted receipts, but everybody moved on as if they hadn't proclaimed an utterly vacant falsehood. They memory holed that particular spike of hysteria, casually downgrading back to the ambiguous but exploitable terrain of 'harassment campaigns'.

If there is a single death I can even tangentially connect to the GG saga, it would have been the suicide of Zoe's ex-boyfriend after she marked him for a feeding frenzy. That there was a concerted effort to suppress the criminal, dead-fucking-obvious irony of this among journos and fellow indie developers showed me how strong the woke meme game is when it matters.

You're saying it was stochastic terrorism, and can't be held against any group or movement?

That's cool with me, but keep in mind I'm going to say the same thing about BLM and the distinction between protestors and rioters/looters.

  • -12

We're both smart enough to think of a dozen exceptions that make this apples-to-oranges: but sure. I'll take blame for all the death threats made by Gamergate (if you can find any that were more than rumor) if you take blame for all the deaths, arson, destruction and damage of Black Lives Matter. This is a fun comparison!

If JK Rowling is too rich to count as a legitimate target ("punching up" and all that), consider all of the people targeted by Andrea James.

You'll have a hard time persuading me that J. Michael Bailey's prepubescent daughter deserved to have her photo circulated on the internet and labelled a "cock-starved exhibitionist" for the crime of having been fathered by someone who doesn't toe the line on gender ideology. On the progressive stack, where does a cisgender female child sit relative to a transgender male adult?

I must say, it sure is weird that when you started talking about women on the internet facing harassment, death and rape threats, doxxing etc., all of the recent examples that popped into my head were from transwomen attacking women, members of a group with whom they supposedly feel a profound spiritual kinship that transcends mere anatomy. Also pretty weird that these transwomen talk about said women in a manner indistinguishable from the way creepy men talk about women in the comments of PornHub videos. Also weird that I can't think of a single example of a trans man behaving in this way.

On the journalist side, Gamergate was a mask-off moment; on the gamer side, it was a revelation. But the masks have mostly stayed off since then, at least for those with eyes to see. Gamergate took place on the eve of the Current Year. By now most of us know what side we're on, and our threshold for a story turning into a rallying flag that outlasts the <weekly Current Thing outrage cycle is much, much higher. Maybe some of the very young will be swayed, although most of the commentary I've seen on this story has been from millennial Gamergate veterans ginning up their audience to mobilize for WWII, some of whom I think are mainly motivated by nostalgia. (That's why they're dragging Anita Sarkeesian back into the fray: getting the gang back together.)

Besides, the original Gamergaters were utterly vanquished. Gaming is one of the wokest industries now, unlike back then when there was a sense that it wasn't too late to claw it back from the brink. Pretty much all that's left for them to do is make half-ironic self-deprecating jokes about gamers being the most persecuted race and the like.

Besides, the original Gamergaters were utterly vanquished. Gaming is one of the wokest industries now, unlike back then when there was a sense that it wasn't too late to claw it back from the brink.

Would not say utterly vanquished, it was a pyrrhic victory for the press and wokies at best. Gaming journalists barely exist anymore, sure some of that can be blamed on existing trends towards independent video bloggers and streamers and the threat of AI, but you know what would have surely helped them weather these conditions better? Not having alienated the very core fandom of the topic they're covering, those that would have kept consuming high quality written content about their favorite topic, if that had been what was on offer. As for the game industry itself, it's not doing so hot, especially on the western AAA side. Again, alienating the core fans lost them the support they would have needed in these tougher economic times. Meanwhile, it's not like gamers could really lose to begin with; they're the one with the money and who drive the transactions. If the western AAA market refuses to make games they want, well, if there's demand there's gonna be some clever indies or 2nd tier devs snapping up the opportunity. And there's always Japan. And the past can't be taken away from them, there's an essentially infinite back catalog to explore.

Again, alienating the core fans lost them the support they would have needed in these tougher economic times.

That's what high ESG scores are for — who needs "core fans" to buy your product, when you can get that sweet, sweet Blackrock money to see you through instead? Go woke, go broke have Larry Fink pay to keep you afloat.

There is interesting coverage by Asmongold (A major gamer influencer) where he drew the direct link between game studios hiring these DEI consultants > Good ESG rating > More funding from Blackrock/Vanguard subsidiaries.

Also some major anti-woke movie critics like Critical Drinker have also picked up on Sweet Baby even though its out of their wheelhouse. The interest there was the direct evidence of creators hiring DEI consultancies to improve ESG.

Basically there is evidence now of the chain of causality of injecting DEI into content to attract investment, while before there was only suspicions.

Gaming diversity ESG scores (which don’t seem to have any substantial positive impact on valuations except in oil and gas and tobacco, where the divestment trend has existed for decades and isn’t driven by private sector ESG ratings at all) would be best served by hiring more POC and women staff across studios, not in writing. Writers make up fewer than 0.5% of the average AAA game’s development workforce, there’s no way diversifying the writers room counts more than just hiring more Hispanic QA testers or whatever.

Honest question:

let's suppose you're an average internet user who was either too young to comprehend what Gamergate was when it was happening, or you're just unaware of it all for any other reason, you just weren't following it etc. You fire up your browser and start looking up information.

Is there any realistic chance that you'll find any description, interpretation or commentary that is not written by the ideological allies and sympathizers of Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu?

Very good question with ripples through the culture war.

What does it mean to fight a battle when the winners get to write history?

Writing history becomes fighting a battle.

Rent a warehouse. Make a museum. It's what I'm doing if I turn out to be right about the trans stuff.

Rent a warehouse. Make a museum.

There are more (privately owned) Confederate museums and monuments than ever before.

Monuments are cool, but a bit limited in how much of the story they can pass on.

Based. I missed the museums part the first time I read the comment.

Well. the usual suspects are worried about them.

Private Confederate Monuments

The truth is that there are few tools for removing Confederate monuments on private land. And frankly, even if constitutionally permissible, it may be unwise to try to limit landowners having the freedom to build monuments (regardless of the subject matter) on their land. However, this Article urges local governments to consider ways to minimize the impacts of such monuments.

Well, like I said, it becomes the battle.

Ironically the chinese wikipedia has a proper description of gamergate, the rest of the intrnet if it wasn't specifically written by gamergaters or "true" gamers is the usual lies by the game journo pro list cabal.

PSA Sitch's GamerGate video is still the number 2 search result on youtube, in an anon-tab.

Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.

Yeah the fact that anyone is still buying these things is wild to me.

When it comes to video games these days (and pretty much all other media) I mainly stick to smaller niche releases and retro stuff.

I know we've had some heated discussions on this forum in the past about the notion of "conservative alternatives" (to culture, to institutions, to infrastructure). I don't think that focusing on alternative cultural spaces should be viewed as defeatism. It's better to focus on spaces where you can actually build something and make a positive contribution, instead of endlessly seething over lost causes.

The KotakuInAction people are all over Japan. I'm very much just not a weeb, so I don't really relate to that -- and it doesn't help that the big issue for a lot of KIA people is that they want scantily-clad women, and this is the one horseshoe-theory area of agreement between me and the woke. I don't like the weird uncanny valley female face thing, but maybe a little less cleavage and a little more practical armor for female characters is a good thing. I still don't know WTF BioWare was smoking when they created the outfits for female characters in Dragon Age Origins.

I don't buy too many AAA games, but I also didn't buy too many AAA games before wokeness. Actually, I probably buy more now, because my gaming tastes are broader. though the ones I buy are more selective, and usually older anyway. I recently bought BioShock -- never played it before. And I'm going to admit, despite my hatred of the cyberpunk genre's aesthetic, philosophy, and morality, I have enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077. (It helps that I had essentially no context before buying it, and so wasn't offended by the shift from RPG to action adventure.) For the most part, it's genuinely difficult to find a game in my library that released after 2017, indie or otherwise. I play games basically on a 15-year delay, and I only play games that come highly recommended.

It's probably the same with my film watching nowadays, I just recently watched Goodfellas for the first time. My recommendation to everyone for everything is: don't engage in stuff just to engage with it, find good stuff and enjoy that. Life's too short for bad games, bad books, and bad movies. And there's too much good stuff not to just enjoy that.

I wonder how the media reaction to this will be, compared to what happened in 2014. I was a much more avid user of Twitter back then, as well as a much bigger gamer compared to now, and I was able to watch in real-time as various gaming media outlets formed their narrative about misogynist gamers harassing women which was about as close to the exact opposite of the situation as one could get if one actually intentionally tried (which I suspect was the case). Even back then, media outlets had been losing readers in favor of social media, but they still seemed to have enough credibility that plenty of more casual gamers just naively took them at their word. 10 years later, and social media has continued to rise and media outlets have continued to lose credibility, and I believe the viewership/readership numbers have reflected this.

That means that if people sympathetic to SBI want to set the narrative again, then doing the same thing as before, where some sympathetic writers at a handful of media outlets rewrite the narrative (most likely in uncoordinated fashion, I'd guess) to flatter the people they like and denigrate the people they don't, might not be enough to achieve the same level of success in convincing people. I primarily learned about this situation from a YouTuber/Twitch streamer who regularly gets 6-7 figures in views on each video, where he was just straight-up shitting on SBI for being ideologues trying to sell something that customers don't want to buy and calling out one of the media outlet authors as racist for stating the very standard - downright cliche at this point - modern "progressive" line "you can't be racist against white people." And there are plenty of smaller "content creators" similar to him saying similar things who still get 5-6 figures per video. That kind of ecosystem wasn't really around back in 2014.

Now, this ecosystem also definitely produces people who are sympathetic to SBI. And, who knows, maybe there are YouTubers who get 7-8 figures per video who basically parrot the lines Kotaku and Polygon spit out? But even if that's the case, I think the presence of the ecosystem of more diverse viewpoints would make it harder for the SBI-preferred narrative of "oppressed minorities being harassed by bigoted gamers who want to exclude them from their spaces" to take hold. It's not a true marketplace of ideas, but it seems at least half a step closer to one than what it was in 2014, and that half a step could be enough for contrasting ideas from diverse viewpoints to win out.

To take a more bird's eye view of this, I think the past decade since the affair of reproductively viable female worker ants has shown that the Anita Sarkeesians of the world had a complete victory in that time period. SBI has been around and modifying games for a while, and it's only now, after plenty of damage has been done to multiple formerly well-regarded franchises, that fans have even begun to notice them to any significant extent, much less push back. And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry. The future is not yet set, of course, and this particular episode seems to be at least a blip in the other direction, but what I'd expect right now is that the people sympathetic to SBI will come up with some new technique that I don't even have the capability to imagine right now to continue to subvert the industry in ways that paying customers are even less able to notice or control.

And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry.

Grapevine says it is due to ESG investment monies, by involving SBI they get access to more funding from institutions that demand woke capitulation.

I've seen people claim this a lot, but as best as I can tell, this is a naked claim without any actual evidence. Are there any documents anywhere showing what scores different companies have, how putting in uglier women or more pathetic men into their products changes the scores, or how much investments into these companies get affected by that score? And is investment from institutions that demand woke capitulation that big of a factor in financial success in the gaming industry when compared to simply putting out a good product?

In any case, assuming every single claim about ESG scores being the driver of this phenomenon is true, that would explain how the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry.

It's not ugly women and pathetic men that makes the score go up, it's just interacting with SBI, and corporate decision-makers see no reason NOT to chase ESG, since to them "quality" is a vague untrackable nonsense term uncorrelated with the financial success of a product, but ESG rating IS trackable and legible

"Seeing like a State" continues to stay relevant.

Interesting stories, fandom goodwill, and developer reputation continue to be the illegible benefits of the varied forest biome. All sacrificed for a cadastral map of Norway Spruce accessible to investors who can only work by algorithm.

At the level of abstraction that a Blackrock index fund is looking at, even hiring SBI doesn't move the needle. ESG schmas are not sector-specific (they probably should be) so the "Social" component of an ESG score needs to include things like "does not use slave labour in Africa" and the wokeness points are for generic things like "has women on the board" and "has a small gender pay gap".

Within the universe of companies my GSIB employer does business with, every non-evil company gets near-perfect SG scores, and the variation in ESG scores is driven by environmental issue (by construction of the scores, mostly carbon).

Within the universe of companies my GSIB employer does business with, every non-evil company gets near-perfect SG scores, and the variation in ESG scores is driven by environmental issue (by construction of the scores, mostly carbon).

Do we actually have numbers on that, that we can look at, instead of people just saying how they think this works?

If you are interested, here is the following from James Lindsey @conceptualjames on X:

Gamergate 2 is underway.

Former game executive and develop at Blizzard Mark Kern @Grummz: "The way games are funded you don't use your own money. Even EA, it's games are hugely expensive to make they're they're upwards of you know 250 sometimes 600 million dollars it's for certain live games it's incredibly how expensive they are and to do that uh your CFO is your best friend.

"You're counting on your CFO to get you tax breaks to get you in to put studios in regions which are financially favorable and you will borrow the cheap money you will get a cheap money to do it. Even EA does this. I worked with EA; we were putting together a deal where they were taking bailout money from the banks in the last financial crisis that we had, and they were applying that cheap money towards games same thing with Covid money. They're applying that cheap money towards games, and what has been the cheapest money while interest rates were still low, you know a couple of years ago it was ESG financing, and so they're going to take this money."

"Because the returns on investment have been so poor on Wall Street for ESG funds, that source of Revenue is drying it up. This Woke machine cannot continue in the way that it is now for AAA gaming, and I think unfortunately, it's so entrenched that you're not going to see—you're not going to see much of an ability to course correct because the studios are—they're just gonna shut down."

Part 2:

Mark Kern explains how ESG money comes with strings attached inside corporations and is used to make companies partner with DEI consulting companies like Sweet Baby Inc:

"Everyone needs to realize is that it's not that these Studios are funding the games out of their own pocket; that would be very expensive for them. Cash is king. They will preferably go out and get money from other sources if it's cheap enough to help spread the risk of these massive titles, and so you have a lot of quid pro quo happening, and I can tell you that developers have been approaching me and giving me some inside baseball on what's been happening, and there are deals funding deals out there for studios—and I can't get too specific; I don't want to out sources—that have certain strings attached like a company will suddenly sign with a developer and now that developer needs to hire a DEI director and needs to go out and hire consultancy firms to gender balance."

"Their staff quite specifically go out and hire companies like SBI to consult on their writing and do sensitivity reading and changes for that, and what does, all this does, it boosts their ESG score. It allows them access that funding so ESG is not going away entirely."

"It's [ESG] become an evil brand. People are waking up to this... You have you have a rebranding going on right now. They're not calling it ESG, but it's still out there."

https://x.com/conceptualjames/status/1767208090150060079

To add onto 07's reply (and WestphalianPeace's, kind of), this feels a little hard to believe when SBI is potentially the Kiss of Death for developer studios. We are currently in an era of layoffs across literally any industry connected to technology (including journalism and especially including game development above the indie or mid-market level), and Suicide Squad will be the end of Rocksteady if it isn't already.

Sure, the publishers wiping their tears with stacks of cash while the developers are left to look for new jobs is not a new story by any means, but I suppose it casts some doubt on this narrative.

This is a very reasonable critique.

I should be clear that the Cadastral Map Bias lens is my strong prior of first resort for inexplicable behavior by companies. I am not well read enough on SBI to back up the truth of the grapevine claim.

What on earth is going on with the layoffs btw? Did the industry over hire? It seems really inexplicable from afar.

The simple story is afaik that covid was very good for gaming so they hired a lot and now it has normalized again, so they have to lay people off again. This is compounded by loans/financing being much less available currently than expected. Whether it was a mistake or just calculation is hard to tell, though I lean towards something like they knew it'll probably normalize again at some point but didn't know when so it would have been irrational to not hire more people for the time being when there's money to be made now. And as usual, there's probably a spectrum ranging from savvy experts hiring deliberately in a way that firing them later down to road wouldn't hurt the core business on one end and naive idiots hearing that everyone else is hiring a lot and business is booming so they just buy studios and hire like crazy on the other.

This is likely true. I'd like to add, as someone who has been playing online games since the text-based ones of the 90s over dial up, there are far too many of them. This leads to situations where say a mix of 20 mid to good online games ultimately fail for lack of a large enough player base, where if the bottom 1/2 of those games never existed in the first place the other 10 would probably have been fine. Everyone wants to be the next GTA 5/Online though, raking in billions for comparatively low continuing* effort by the publisher and the studio.

*not the original effort to make the game, which was a large project, but the "keeping the lights on" mode where most of the earnings actually occurred. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-grand-theft-auto-revenue-and-costs/

I don't even think it's "too many online games" that's the problem, it's more "too many online games that rely on matchmaking queues or any other server infrastructure the devs have to maintain themselves." If an online game that can run off of end-user-maintained dedicated servers comes out and bombs, it's sad, but it won't also be lost to the sands of time.

That could explain why the writing of Ragnarok was so much weaker than the brilliance of the first game. And the parts with Atreus and Angrboda were atrocious and torture.

Women in Ragnarök were mixed bag - Freya was way uglier than in the first game, Faye was not quite the looker too, Angrboda was kinda ok, Sif was hot, Thrudd was having a case of terminal thiccness, And the dwarf woman was aquired taste, Valkyries were under helms.

I agree. Ragnarok was generally pretty good, but Atreus and Angrboda just dragged, seemingly because the writers wanted a black girl to teach Atreus how to be peaceful?

I also remember cringing at the "be better" lines that they scattered through the game. It seems that is the standard woke writing line, since it was also in the Falcon TV show.

All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant)

I thought she was publishing a lot, it's just that she could barely get more than a 1000 views per video.

Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.

Indeed. One of the saddest sights to see is people still debating Pop-Culture-War. At this point you're doing it to yourself.

You know what angle I never see brought up in the "gamers are up in arms about X or Y" events? Most people who spend many many hours playing games aren't playing the traditional boxed story games that everyone talks about. The best selling game of the year might move 15 million copies and take up 80 hours of the average buyer's time. Meanwhile 151 million people will play a game of league of legends in the average month. Final fantasy 14(an mmo) and World of Warcraft have 2.5 million and 2.2 million active subscribers. Most hours played by games are not spent on these story games and yet it's all that is ever really discussed.

Nobody cares enough about the stories of a dota likes, not unless they are putting the clothes back onto the women (League of Legends).
The other main contender to LoL, Dota2 has Gaben on top, so there isn't any "woke shit" going on there. Thus you will not be hearing about wokeness in Dota likes.

A recent hit like Last Epoch which is sort of a middle ground between Path of Exile and Diablo has apocalyptically bad story telling, yet the gameplay is fun enough and forgiving enough for it to get like 90-100k daily players.

League of Legends does have a substantial amount of lore and story, it just isn't told through gameplay. Judging from the subreddit, a sizeable amount of the dedicated players are aware of and do care about the story. It's very much not immune to identity politics either, although I think it handles it fairly well. They do actively consider what nationalities aren't in the game yet when designing new champions, creating characters like K'Sante who's a fantasy version of a sub-Saharan African, or Akshan who's south-Asian, or Kai'Sa who's white South African, even when trying to fiddle with the character's lore to justify them having a certain accent doesn't really jive with the wider setting's lore. One of the champions released a few years ago, Neeko, being gay was a sizeable news story- my roommate at the time didn't play the game but he still heard about it.

FF14 kind of is a story game. Even if that's not what you spend most of your time doing.

There's a lot of people who put FF14 as the #1 story in gaming. Including myself. Yeah, the way the story is told is kinda weird because of the MMO format, but the story beats themselves, I believe, are top-notch, or at least for me they resonate super hard.

I guess any sort of diversity and cringe writing just isn't as much in the face of players in gameplay-focused games. Whenever some new character who isn't a male and/or isn't white drops in Apex Legends, the Noticers flare up for a bit but there isn't really much else to talk about, and the gameplay is good (usually).

Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.

You're missing out on death stranding, 2019's best game about covid.

Isn't that by Kojima (a Japanese Westaboo, but not exactly western)?

I missed the "western".

A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped...

So, the problem is you're missing the inciting incident here, which is understandable because all the articles on the subject completely missed it. Things blew up when an employee for SBI tried to start a campaign to mass-report the curator group and the curator himself to get him banned from Steam. That all the articles on the subject skip that IS why it's a big deal. It really is the "Gamers are Dead" articles all over again.

My own thoughts on SBI more broadly? I think it's a really bad sign when a company is advertising itself as being behind a few of the big stinkers of the last year or two. (Suicide Squad, Forsaken, Saint's Row). There's a lot of games also on their list that people thought took a step down or two. But...honestly I think not really because of SBI.

I think North American AAA is in really bad shape right now. I actually do think it's linked to Progressive culture, in that the ego and hubris, and frankly, the narcissism doesn't just go away when you sit down to do your job. I think the Modern Online Progressivism that's in vogue right now is essentially a Moral License factory...it has to be given how toxic some of their ideas are to actualize.

The thing is, I don't think it's Western. I think Alan Wake 2, even though it underperformed, AND showed up on the SBI list was pretty good (although it probably could have been better), I think Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the best games out there. And while Cyberpunk 2077 was buggy and lacked features...I think there was a lot of good in that game (and post 2.0 update I think it's superb)

So yeah. Just don't bother with North American AAA. It's boring and vapid.

But the controversy is the same. The media people want us to believe that Progressives are all pure and wonderful and rainbows and sunshine when our eyes tell us other things.

Thanks for the writeup! I was wondering what was happening with that since I only caught the edge of the drama.

Is this why I’ve seen Sarkeesian in the news twice, lately?

I’ll agree with the other commenters: in today’s internet, this is a nothingburger. They’ll have to get way more unhinged if they want to generate a 2014-level outcry. Same reason we have “subverting expectations” in media: if you can fit the story into an older pattern, it’s not nearly as likely to catch on.

Well she also apparently threw herself a wedding themed 40th birthday party which is why she is actually trending right now. Because of the levels of cringe that inspires in so many people.

I may be making assumptions about why she picked that theme, but that's not cringe, that's depressing.

Please give me the sauce

I would say it is both cringe and depressing https://instagram.com/anitasarkeesian/p/CwvaHCwPMeI/?img_index=1

I showed this to my girlfriend and said "this is how I feel about women who celebrate Galentine's Day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galentine%27s_Day_(observed)

This has been going through a number of the podcast & youtube circles I listen to, and there's a few points made by some of them that I've pretty much come around to.

First, that as one put it, Sweet Baby Inc. is just successful Feminist Frequency. This bit of "Gamergate 2.0" just serves to illustrate that the gamers lost in the original.

Not that it was ever really a battle worth winning. That's the second point. "The only thing faker than Trump was Gamergate," as a podcaster put it. Because video games — like movies, comic books, football, etc. — are just an escapist "release valve" keeping people idle and passive. That the attitude of the Gamergaters — including the current anti-SBI crowd — is really just "burn my society down around me, I'm fine with that, just so long as you let me have this little corner of escapism."

It's treating a symptom (a potentially useful one at that) instead of going at the disease. I remember one of the videos had clips from one of SBI's top people, which included what was basically encouragement of a "nice video game studio you've got here; shame if someone were to call it sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic" strategy. But why does that strategy work to begin with? Another reason firms like SBI work is ESG scores and the corresponding low-interest money. Why is that a thing? Because our society lets fat-cat finance capitalists like Larry Fink go unstopped.

Without video games, or Marvel movies, or football to keep them passive, maybe young men would start getting up off their butts and get active. Don't "fight" to take back gaming or comic books, fight to take back your country, to take back Western Civilization. Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.

Without video games, or Marvel movies, or football to keep them passive, maybe young men would start getting up off their butts and get active. Don't "fight" to take back gaming or comic books, fight to take back your country, to take back Western Civilization. Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.

What do you think they are fighting when they are fighting for escapism to be free from wokeness? What the hell is "Woke" anyway?

I'll spit out a definition and see what happens. Woke is anti-enlightenment. We owe so much of modern way of living to enlightenment ideas. We owe Western Civilization to its ideas.

One of the things that has allowed Western Civilization ideas become so prevalent even outside its modern central nation state of US is entertainment in any of its forms. Books, Movies and now in this modern age Games. The centerpoint of this latest gamer drama is a Brazilian guy that noticed that consulting company that does sensitivity reading inject anti-enlightenment ideas into the stories. So he recommends against the games, closes down the public forum and writes a note full of the shibboleths that woke tries to accuse anyone who contradicts them.

This is the culture war in its essence, the fight of anti-enlightenment ideas that has infected the western civilization and is about to kill the host. The pathway it uses to infect others are media in any of its forms. It started with a slow burn of entertainment and education but it is continuing infecting our institutions. Because when it kills the host then we are back in the middleages with how people are governed, like the non-western civilizations... Russia, China, Large parts of the middle-east and most of Africa.

We owe so much of modern way of living to enlightenment ideas.

Yes, and (outside of technology), that's a bad thing.

We owe Western Civilization to its ideas.

Hard disagree. To quote Scott's "How the West Was Won":

I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear their skin. But in this case, he’s become hopelessly confused without it.

I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it included things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

"Western Civilization" is Greek philosophy meeting Abrahamic theology. It is what used to be called "Christendom." The "Enlightenment" is what's killing it (I don't think it's quite as dead as Scott believes).

Because when it kills the host then we are back in the middleages with how people are governed

I'm a monarchist, and a supporter of hereditary aristocracy. "Middle ages government with modern technology" is pretty much my entire goal and political project. While most Americans' visions of the future seem shaped by (some subset of) Star Trek (with some going further to Banks' "Culture"), I'm sitting off in the distance with Battletech, 40k, Dune, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Crest of the Stars, and so on.

Well if we are ignoring the superficial political alignments you are essentially getting that end result. Feodalism is the end goal of todays elite when they travel to Davos for the WEF summit. The the mainstream wokism only purpose is to subjugate the plebs allow the elites to become rentseekers. To discuss the finer points enlightenment has given or not given the modern world is pointless since the "inferential distance" is so big between us.

Well if we are ignoring the superficial political alignments you are essentially getting that end result.

Except that what you call "superficial political alignments" is the survival of what I consider "my people." My problem is that today's elites are both lousy "aristocrats" and, more importantly, hostile to the continued existence of my tribe. Hence, the need for a real aristocracy — a warrior elite, as all real aristocratic classes have been at their start — to kill the pretenders and take power.

(Edit: removed bits that were from wrong thread)

Well the modern aristocracy keeps "their people" on top by suggesting that Asians are "white adjacent" when applying to universities and making BIPOC the benchmark for affirmative admission, miseducates the black youth by saying that math requiring correct answers is racist(so they can't succeed when they get older) and so on. If you look closely by the elites woke policy outcomes and if they don't benefit you are not part of the elite. You'll end up paying rent like the rest. Sure violent uprising could happen but chances that you end up being warrior elite from behind they keyboard are slim.

Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Let's gameplan it. If you could wave your magic wand and get masses of people to follow your guidelines. What kind of scchedule / timeline / milestones are we looking at?

Is there killing? Brainwashing? New laws? Revoking of old laws? What institutions are torn down and which remain?

Let's gameplan it.

I'm not sure I can go into much detail; not without going beyond the limits of what this place allows.

But the ideal scenario, as for methods, is Caesarism — we get an Augustus seizing power. Worst-case scenario, then, is probably Boojahideen — the Left gets to see what an actual "Christian Taliban" looks like.

Is there killing?

Definitely. The question is how much will be necessary.

Brainwashing?

Russell conjugation: I educate, you indoctrinate, they brainwash.

New laws? Revoking of old laws?

Both, and massively so.

What institutions are torn down and which remain?

As with Augustus, the surface forms of some old institutions would probably survive, but the substance would be radically replaced.

For example, with academia, our Caesar's actions should fall somewhere between Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries and 1960s Suharto.

Is this meant to appeal to conservatives?

Who do you mean by "conservatives"?

The GOP establishment, for whom lower taxes on Big Business is priority one?

The "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me" trailing edge of the perpetual revolution, who want to go, as Neema Parvini puts it, "back to Fresh Prince"? Or the Obama voter who's now voting Republican because they have nostalgia for the 2009-2010 "post-racial moment" and think that rationing covid vaccines by race is a step too far?

The "conservatism" that Michael Malice called "progressivism driving the speed limit"? The one of which Robert Lewis Dabney wrote in 1871:

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.

American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.

Or maybe there's the "paleoconservatives," perhaps the sort about whom Wikipedia says:

Samuel T. Francis, Thomas Fleming, and some other paleoconservatives de-emphasized the conservative part of the paleoconservative label, saying that they do not want the status quo preserved.[15][16] Fleming and Paul Gottfried called such thinking "stupid tenacity" and described it as "a series of trenches dug in defense of last year's revolution".

As one of the Brits at the Lotus Eaters podcast put it recently (this is from my imperfect memory), "we live in a revolutionary time, so any 'conservative' opposition must actually be counter-revolutionary."

So, do I expect to appeal to the temperamentally conservative sort who stands athwart history yelling "slow down just a little"? No.

Do I expect it to appeal to the people who hold to some standard beyond a mere affection for the status quo? Who believe there's precious little left to conserve, and that every day we keep on "playing the game" by the current rules we see a tiny bit more of it chipped away? Who see that, much like planting a tree, the best time to "flip the table" was 30 years ago (or more); the second best time is today?

Perhaps.

But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either

There are maybe 10 AAA games that have ever been released with passable writing, and probably two thirds of them are from two studios (Rockstar and CDPR). That’s passable, by the way, not good (which would lower the number to maybe one or two, though I’d rather not debate which exactly they are).

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people.

Gawker was famous for paying writers for clicks, she seems to be doing a very good job. Amusingly, the same practice on the same website (then under different ownership of course) led in substantial part to the original Gamergate moment.

Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something.

Japanese games always anime-ify all their characters’ faces, even in the rare cases in which they use facial capture. It’s extremely jarring when playing yet another Japanese game with ‘realistic’ (by which I mean not-cartoon or exaggerated in art style) environments and anime plastic skin triangle face NPCs, where everyone looks like the picture Koreans bring to the plastic surgeon. But that’s a personal preference, probably.

Western games tend to go for direct scans rather than yassification. I think there’s a general emphasis on ‘more real’ characters, but it’s pretty common across the board. British TV tends to avoid casting extremely beautiful actors in many roles (especially in comedy and ‘gritty’ drama) and it seems to have been that way for a while, and probably isn’t the result of feminism. And, for example, the women in ‘Suicide Squad’ by Rocksteady, which you note these consultants worked on, don’t seem to have been made particularly unattractive physically in the clip you link, judging by Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman at least.

Mass Effect Andromeda

This really brought me back. But really, the face model for Sara Ryder does seem to look a lot like the final character model, people just cherrypicked pictures in which the model was mewing/posing instead of smiling or moving her facial muscles and therefore showed her prominent jowls and squareish jaw.

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Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage

I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good". I assure you that they're not.

The average work of canonical literature is, in my opinion, not that good, and most of these works have "stood the test of time" only due to accidents of history, rather than their own intrinsic merits. This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity. The average sci-fi story ranges from "meh" to "ok", just like how the average work of "literary" fiction ranges from "meh" to "ok". It's debatable how many truly Great Books have ever even been written - think of how many physics books/articles throughout history have truly advanced the frontier of understanding in a deep and meaningful way, compared to the mountain of unread and irrelevant papers produced each year to feed the tenure committee machine. All domains of human activity function in essentially the same way, including art, including "high" art.

Of course I'm by no means advocating for total aesthetic anarchism. Some works are better than others; some works are really bad and some works are really great. And being conversant in artistic theory and the history of art will help artists produce better works instead of worse ones. I just want to be careful that we're not engaging in a knee-jerk elevation of the classical just because it's classical. In fact 20th/21st genre fiction has made clear advancements that were largely undreamt of in previous eras of literature, particularly in terms of the range of plot structures and character types that it treats.

I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good". I assure you that they're not.

The property is called "not having a second leg to stand upon". Genre fiction has two legs: the literature leg and the genre leg. It can have bland characters that talk like it's an autist convention, but it's offset by also having murder mysteries, aliens, dragons, dark and handsome billionaires that are into BDSM, superheroes, scary supernatural shit, funny antics or cultivation (I can't get over how much this sounds like farming) etc.

Classical literature has only one leg. It has mundane characters that are stuck in mundane situations. How do you make the readers eagerly follow the brooding stream of consciousness of a father of two (three) that has every component of the American dream, but is deeply unhappy, if you can't lure them with murder mysteries, aliens, dragons, dark and handsome billionaires that are into BDSM, superheroes, scary supernatural shit, funny antics or cultivation?

Classical literature has only one leg. It has mundane characters that are stuck in mundane situations.

The "second leg" of literary fiction is form and prose quality; the language of the book itself making itself apparent as an independent object with intrinsic aesthetic merit, instead of acting as a transparent window through which the content of the story is viewed.

See: Joyce's Ulysses, Nabokov's Pale Fire.

How do you make the readers eagerly follow the brooding stream of consciousness of a father of two (three) that has every component of the American dream, but is deeply unhappy, if you can't lure them with murder mysteries, aliens, dragons, dark and handsome billionaires that are into BDSM, superheroes, scary supernatural shit, funny antics or cultivation?

There's no law that says that "classical" literature can't have anything interesting happen.

The Iliad has many elements that would be at home in a Marvel movie. Shakespeare racked up quite the body count over the course of his oeuvre, particularly in the lesser-known but notably violent Titus Andronicus. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow caused some commotion upon its release due to its lurid sexual content.

The "second leg" of literary fiction is form and prose quality; the language of the book itself making itself apparent as an independent object with intrinsic aesthetic merit, instead of acting as a transparent window through which the content of the story is viewed.

That is the part of its first and only leg, I guess I did a poor job of implying that. Unless you meant one could write great literary fiction that was masterful prose, but told nothing and went nowhere.

There's no law that says that "classical" literature can't have anything interesting happen.

The Iliad has many elements that would be at home in a Marvel movie. Shakespeare racked up quite the body count over the course of his oeuvre, particularly in the lesser-known but notably violent Titus Andronicus. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow caused some commotion upon its release due to its lurid sexual content.

I didn't say that. Something Happened is one of my favourite books and is filled with mundane, but interesting events.

I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good"

If you want to be classy you don't write sff, you write "speculative fiction"

Atwood's infamous talking squids comment comes to mind.

This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity.

It's the Matthew principle all over again! The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I think it's probably best to see "literary fiction" as a genre, not a quality marker (TM). It's a style and set of focuses that people, even today, choose deliberately to write in -- and some don't. And, within the modern literary fiction works, few are very good, and even fewer than that will ever be remembered.

Our view of the past is colored, always, by what has survived. Sometimes things survive because they just truly are brilliant and inescapably good, and people can't help talking about them. Sometimes, however, they survive because of being in the right place at the right time. The Great Gatsby is pretty good, I enjoyed reading it. But no one today would ever have heard of it had it not had it's post-war resurgence due to soldiers reading it during the war. It was, like you said, a historical accident.

Of course, the works that end up being selected are probably better than the contemporary average, if the selection process adds any value whatsoever.

But yes, there are no special qualities to classics, nor are English departments especially powerful selectors for value, especially when there's inertia to maintain.

That is not to say that the books are bad—the Count of Monte Cristo is delightful, Les Miserables is enjoyable, A Tale of Two Cities is fun, Austen isn't bad. Verne's nice (though is that veering into the realm of science fiction)? Of course, some are much worse.

Perhaps one reason, though, that @2rafa considered science fiction and fantasy garbage is if they are meant more to entertain, whereas the other books are meant to shed light on the human condition or something.

I would think, though, that science fiction often does that better, by putting humans in more radically altering frames (saying this as someone who has not read much science fiction).

(This is not the only way in which things could be considered trash.)

I would think, though, that science fiction often does that better, by putting humans in more radically altering frames (saying this as someone who has not read much science fiction).

As someone who has read a fair bit of sci-fi, this is exactly the strength of sci-fi, using the fantastical to ask the hard questions. A number of sci-fi books are made school-required reading for this reason.

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

All the same, I will gladly take the ending paragraph after beating Quake, pictured below, to the utterly preposterous current year demoralization nonsense crammed into every nook and cranny of a modern AAA game. Bizarre out of context quips shitting on capitalism, men, white people, etc. There is something totally orthogonal to the quality of the writing going on here. There is a naked contempt, a visceral unmasked casual hatred, that oozes out of every pore of modern AAA game writing, totally independent of it's quality. The only thing the quality achieves is putting a thin veneer of artistic acceptability on it, where as the worst examples are just unhinged.

Edit: Tried to attach the screenshot of Quake's victory screen, threw an error, you can look it up. Sorry.

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

I think it really speaks to the utter incompetence of the types of writers that work at and are sympathetic to Sweet Baby Inc that even by these extremely low standards, the writing they produce is recognized as significantly worse than the standard dreck of AAA game writing. The way that they allow their ideology to completely subvert their ability to write "good" characters and narratives - again, "good" only by the extremely low standards of AAA video game writing - is actually pretty fascinating, especially given that these are people who specifically claim to have insight about how to write good characters and narratives. This seems to be the same phenomenon as in the film/TV industry where even literal Marvel movies have had what little artistic merit they had nearly completely destroyed in a large part due to this type of writing, with the financial consequences that follow.

I think it's a good reminder of the fact that, in life, things are never so bad that they couldn't get worse, and whether or not it does get worse matters.And, in fact, it's often the case - certainly in this one - that many people are actively pushing to make those things worse while telling you that it's better.

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

D&D geeks have been writing nothing but in-jokes and sci-fi references since before MCU films were good, and WAY before they were bad. I'm surprised you didn't use the boo-word "capeshit." Being incredibly derivative and tropey are would be an improvement over woke writing.

D&D geeks have been writing nothing but in-jokes and sci-fi references

Excuse me, sir, we don't call those "in-jokes and sci-fi references", we call that "allusion and intertextuality".

There are maybe 10 AAA games that have ever been released with passable writing, and probably two thirds of them are from two studios (Rockstar and CDPR).

Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale 1 and Heart of the winter, Planescape Torment, Batman Arkham Asylum and City (lets pretend the others didn't happen, please), VTmB, Silent Hill 2 & 3, Soul Reaver 1 & 2, Clive Barker Undying, Portal 1 (okay, not quite AAA but brilliant), Portal 2 (weaker writing than portal 1, but classes above most of the modern crap), Assassin's creed II, Fallout New Vegas,

I would say that in the golden age of PC games - roughly 1997 - 2007 -sh good writing was expected from games that were supposed to have writing.

Edit: Freya in God Of war and god of war ragnarok have quite the visual differences and not in the favor of the ragnarok ones.

You didn't even mention Deus Ex

Half Life 2 was interesting. Breen's speeches about collaboration were kind of thought-provoking. Humanity got stomped in the war, it makes sense to collaborate and evade total destruction. He wasn't a stock bad guy, even though the collaboration he oversaw was the slow death of humanity.

There's lots of rich ambience going on in that game, lots of implications left for players to come debate: G-man, the Vortigaunts...

Fall From Heaven 2 also has pretty good writing IMO, at least the base version of the mod does. The modmods get a bit crazy and weaker.

It's one of the few pieces in a subgenre of science fiction that I love which is seeing humanity deal with getting colonized by a much more powerful force.

There's V of course, but that's kinda campy by today's standards, Colony was great but got cancelled, and Captive State was really well executed but still fairly obscure.

I think it's underutilized which is a shame because it's a setup that allows you to completely erase cultural and ethnic lenses and deal with colonization as a pure concept and understand how people who may think of it completely differently from you are coming from.

HL2 is also cool in that I think it legitimately contains the most totalitarian society ever depicted in fiction. I've yet to see worse than the Combine. And yet it seems so understated and natural (unlike the more typically gloomy ambience of the beta). They're not cackling in your face, you just see the effects of a system, and the implications are horrifying if you think about it for a minute. It's great storytelling.

The Three body problem series gets into that kind of thing, albeit from different angles. There's also parts of the Xeelee sequence that deal with it.

HL2 was great, I think a big part of a game's quality is in how many fanatics it generates. The people who go to great efforts making mods. Gmod, Entropy Zero 1 & 2, Black Mesa... the Half-Life franchise produced an enormous fountain of creativity.

Baldur's Gate 1&2,

Look, I love Baldur's Gate as much as the next DnD geek, but its writing on its own was not very good. I love Ed Greenwood and Forgotten Realms as a setting (I am currently running a DnD game set near Neverwinter right now) but his writing is, well saying derivative is putting it very kindly. Icewind Dale is renowned for being even more of a combat simulator than BG1 and 2. I thought the Arkham's were good games, but their story was just very basic Batman.

I will definitely give you Planescape, VtMB and New Vegas though. Portal was ok, Silent Hill were very hit and miss. Undying I will say was very true to Clive Barker, but he is definitely an acquired taste.

Look, I love Baldur's Gate as much as the next DnD geek, but its writing on its own was not very good. I love Ed Greenwood and Forgotten Realms as a setting (I am currently running a DnD game set near Neverwinter right now) but his writing is, well saying derivative is putting it very kindly.

Yea, worldbuilding and attention to detail are Ed's strenghts, if you like fantasy kitchen sink world of pseudohistorical cultures where everyone has lots of fun.

Ed answering his fans questions on Realms discussion forum, Twitter or Discord is example of this creativity.

"Dear Ed, in 1992 supplement "The Shithole Lands" in chapter five "The Plague Swamp" on page 142 there is map of town of Rotting Hollow. On the map key number 116 marks house of Grug the Grumpy. Who is Grug and what happened to him he is so crotchety?"

And Ed immediately answers with long detailed treatise about Grug, his origins, his family, his friends, his exploits, his business deals, his hobbies and his sex life.

Exactly right, and I think that is certainly why it has been the most popular DnD setting for a long time. It is great as a setting for a game, it is entertaining.

Well, Hasbro hadn't thought so and burned it all down.

True fans do not forget and do not forgive. Grey Box forever.

It's ok, it all went back to prior to Spellplague pretty much. That's the gas leak edition. I've always been leery about Forgotten Realms having in universe reasons for edition changes. It's not like Greyhawk did the same, though of course Greyhawk is an intensely bland setting.

Why not Fallout 1/2 and Arcanum as well?

Fallout was good but changed a lot between 1 and 2. Arcanum was excellent though. One of my favorite games of all time despite the gameplay being very janky.

How did Fallout change from 1 to 2? I played both and found it to be a straightforward continuation of all the good stuff the first brought.

At the time, there was a lot of vocal critics of the tonal shift from 1 to 2. 1 was a much darker, dirtier, more hopeless portrayal (with some few exceptions, the Tardis and so on), where 2 leaned much more into comedy. You can see some of the follow through of that into New Vegas and beyond where you could take perks or enable the "sillier" elements (Wild Wasteland trait I think). Indeed that trait was a compromise between the developers who preferred the wilder and wackier tone against the more "grounded" one.

To steal a random comment or two:

"I played Fallout 1 and 2 back to back. Fallout 2 felt insulting to Fallout 1. Sure, there's a lot more content, but it's absurdly immature.

LOL PORNO. LOL MAGIC THE GATHERING. LOL ASIAN PEOPLE. LOL SCIENTOLOGY. LOL GETTIN' RAPED BY A SUPER MUTANT. LOL DAN QUALE."

"Fallout was kind of like Wasteland, but different. Fallout 2 was kind of like Wasteland, but worse."

"I'm old and played the games as they came out, though I was young. Fallout is a masterpiece, Fallout 2 is too silly for me. I like the darker tone, which is probably part of why I loved 3 as well. It sucks that 2 didn't even improve the gameplay. Contrast that with Baldur's Gate, which was a great game followed by a sequel that is probably my favorite PC game of all time."

And of course if you want to start an argument on RPGCodex you can simply mention that the retcon (in Fallout 2) about vaults being social experiments rather than actual attempts to save people, was a superior choice and watch the fires burn... not as hot as if you claim Fallout 3 is a good game of course, like the chap above. We prestigious monocled gentlemen have standards after all.

If I'm remembering correctly, the extremely hardcore Fallout fans complain that Fallout 2 had different humor. I can't remember how. Maybe Fallout 2 had too many pop culture references? Or it was more wacky and zany instead of dark and dry?

I, like yourself, noticed no such thing on my contemporary plays through them in 1997 and 1998.

Fallout 2 is very wacky and experimental in a good few ways and a few obnoxious ones (eg, that fucking temple tutorial). While the original Fallout had more than a few references and direct jokes, such as a Doctor Who popup as a random encounter, 2 integrated them much more heavily -- Goris as a talking deathclaw was a big pinch point even into the mid-00s, and there's a lot of emphasis on sex jokes. I don't mind the change, and 2 was still really dark comedy at times, but it was definitely a change.

((It was also a good bit more rushed; even today and with third-parties trying to fill in the gaps, there's a lot of jank or trimmed content. At release, it was just buggy. Having a mandatory combat final boss pissed a lot of people off.))

On the flip side, 1 was complete because it was comparatively tiny.

Too much pop culture and too wacky and zany were exactly the complaints yes. I like both and probably lean slightly towards 2 being better. But it was a big deal back in the day and still can cause flame wars in the right spaces.

Planescape likely has the highest volume of text among those infinity engine options. But if you were to compile every bit of it into a pdf book, which some have, and read through it as a novel without the game giving it an interactive body, you’d find it is pretty lame and cringe standing on its own. I don’t know of any good writing in games off the top of my head, save for a recent run though Disco Elysium.

I'm not sure how compelling "game writing is bad if you remove it from the context of the game" is meant to be?

Yes, just reading a text dump of the game isn't very entertaining. But games are games, and the writing in it serves the purposes of the game as an integrated whole. It's like pointing out that just reading a film script is usually worse than reading an equivalent novel. Of course it is! It would be bizarre for it not to be!

Ironically I actually disliked Disco Elysium - I found it clunky and unappealing as a game, and I found its writing a bit too precious; notably I actively disliked the gimmick where your skills talk to you, as if you're a schizophrenic. But I think the point holds. Game writing ought to be evaluated in the context of an entire game, and it is no sign of bad writing that it doesn't stand up if removed from that context.

Let me take a specific example. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is often considered one of the best video games ever made, and I'd argue it has great writing. If you just read its script you might find that surprising, but I think its script contextualises its gameplay really well, and successfully contributes to the overall success of the game. Some of the game's most effective moments work because of the writing - stepping out on to Hyrule Field for the first time is a very memorable moment, and that's achieved due to the graphics, music, etc., but also because the story has contextualised what that means by making you spend the first hour or two of the game in this restricted, dense forest environment while reminding you that Link has never left this area, that nobody ever leaves the forest because they fear they'll die, and that Link is nonetheless adventurous at heart. The huge field rising before you, the horizon, the iconic swell of music is all powerful, and the writing contributes to it. Even if no one element by itself is that amazing.

To me, that's what good game writing looks like.

as if you're a schizophrenic

What you mean, "as if"? The detective is quite obviously mentally ill.

almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

If you put Marvel movies, Tolkien, Lem, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Vernor Vinge and Ursula K. Le Guin in the same quality bag then it is not a very useful bag.

Unless by "science fiction and fantasy garbage" you meant "garbage tier materials from this genres", not "all fantasy and SF is garbage"?

Tolkien isn’t fantasy garbage, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that the average quality of fantasy writing that fantasy writers consume is even remotely close to Tolkien’s level. To be clear, I’m not making the point that all literary fiction is on the level of Joyce or Austen either, but the average quality in the fantasy space - particularly in games - is much lower.

Oh, I am not suggesting that all fantasy it of not terrible quality. But the same goes for classical literature.

Except that for old stuff higher-quality is less likely to be forgotten.

I was protesting against "understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability" being necessary (unless you count say Tolkien as classical literature).

I am not going to argue how average work in fantasy compares to average work in literature, in both cases at least 90% of things will be terrible waste of time.

almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage

I've no idea where you get your ideas about 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' ? Bottom of the barrel WH40k or Star Wars novels ? But generally popular and acclaimed writers of either can write. I'd argue that SF writing in the last 30 years completely pwns "Golden Age of SF" writing. Standards have risen.

Problem isn't what they read, problem is they don't practice writing much. Which is why they suck.

I think it’s kinda both. I think in order to be able to write passable fiction in science fiction and fantasy it’s absolutely essential to get out of that genre in your reading. Not because science fiction and fantasy are all bad, but because without a rounded literary toolkit you end up lacking tools that can make your story more interesting. Use mystery and clue dropping to get more tension in a story rather than simply info-dump. Use stuff from romance so your characters feel like they’re actually hot for each other. Use horror elements to make enemies that are actually scary.

I’ll also suggest that I suspect that a lot of game writers are failed screenwriters and novelists.

Use mystery and clue dropping to get more tension in a story rather than simply info-dump. Use stuff from romance so your characters feel like they’re actually hot for each other. Use horror elements to make enemies that are actually scary.

You don't read recent sf much, right? You could learn all that without ever leaving the genre-

I was tempted to make reference to Half-Life, which was a revolution in storytelling in games (or FPS games, at least), and that game's main writer was indeed a sci-fi writer who had published some works in the 90's before coming to Valve.

Marathon had some of the best writing in a video game I've ever encountered. Incredibly immersive.

I agree, but at the same time, Marathon is kind of a unique case thanks to it being part of Bungie's insane rabbithole of deep lore (not even the bouncing ball from Gnop! is safe!).

Of course there are science fiction and fantasy writers who ‘can write’, often better than the majority of literary fiction writers. But those who can are only very rarely writing film, let alone video games. Look at BG3, you can tell it’s trash written by fanfiction writers.

I'd still like you to defend the idea that the problem is SF writers not reading enough classics. I recently had a "Ima reconnect with my roots" moment, and decided to read one of the books that was on the mandatory reading list when I was in school. I even picked one that I spontaneously recalled the other day, thinking about the state of the world, so it should be interesting, seeing how it popped up when I was thinking about stuff, but it was just... mid. My memory of it's themes and message was better than the actual thing itself. The only way you can appreciate it, is if you have deep passion for history, and want to figure out how and about what people used to think in the past, and/or the history of literature, and you enjoy watching how the medium evolved over the years. But the thing in itself? Absolutely, horribly, disgustingly, mid.

I swear, if all that survives of our current era of media is Marvel movies, people like you will be absolutely adamant they're classics, and modern plebeian writers are shit, because they don't have an appreciation for them.

Look at BG3, you can tell it’s trash written by fanfiction writers.

Bad fanfiction writers too. There's a fuckton of them on DA, and most are trash. But some are actually decent-ish.

E.g. the guy who's written the best (erotica genre redacted) Witcher fanfics I've read would probably do a better job than the BG3 writing team.

Peter Watts and Richard Morgan co-wrote the script for Crysis 2, and their absence shows in 3. Crysis Legion is a rare example of a "tie-in videogame novel" that stands alone as great military scifi. Hmm, maybe I should re-read it.

That makes me think of one of the big points at the end of Shamus Young's excellent writeup on what went wrong with Mass Effect. Writers have a particular style that shows through in their work, and you can't just switch writers in the middle of the series without alienating people who were enjoying the first writer's style. Sounds like Crytek ran face first into the same trap as Bioware did.

Watts is doing almost nothing but games / TV writing now, saying publishers aren't interested.

Seems to be almost all uncredited. Talked about NDAs often too. Imdb has nothing so. He's not googleable - Peter Watts is an incredibly common name. I should ask him, I swapped a few emails with him over the years.

Not sure how this is connected to his online spat with the murderously sociopathic SJW Thai Chinese lesbian heiress. Assuming that's something that probably makes him more than toxic.

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I was going to make a similar comment about how VG writing is just bad, but I don't think it's just because they're nerds. It feels almost like the human race has become worse writers in the past few decades, it's like the torch was never properly passed on and it's become a lost art.

I think it's because everyone just does less. People used to be travelers, craftsmen, soldiers before they were writers, and the decades of life's experience flowed into their work. Nowadays people sit passively browsing information for hours on end, and base their writing on other books they have read, one more layer removed from reality.

I think there's something to this. Particularly in how so many character dynamics seem to reflect stuff that might be the most stressful part of a modern writer's lives, just transplanted to some fictional setting, such as, e.g. a fantasy princess rebelling against her arranged marriage in favor of her lesbian love interest, as was the case in Willow, I believe. Or in Star Wars, Admiral Holdo talking down to her hotshot male underling Poe for being a hotshot male who is upset that, as the leader, she hasn't communicated to her troops any information that would give them confidence that she has a plan for keeping the Resistance alive. There's just no sense that the writers had any understanding of the way people in these roles and with these responsibilities think and operate.

This extends to action scenes, of course, which break laws of physics in egregious suspension-of-disbelief-breaking ways that, say, Jackie Chan or even wire-fu Jet Li films didn't, which shows how little the choreographers or directors knew about actual combat and making it look believable (not necessarily realistic) within the setting. To say nothing of the even greater crime against good taste with the terrible camera work and uninteresting choreography you see in so many works (e.g. even the terrible The Matrix Revolutions from 2 decades ago had better choreography in its worst action scene than the even worse Resurrection had in its best one).

But I think there has to be more than this, because one very common refrain you see from writers in general and certainly the types of writers who support the promotion of (certain) agendas in writing is the power of fiction and narrative to change and influence people. There is no shortage of fiction from the past that they could learn things like how military structure works and why it works that way and how that would look when transplanted to a similar situation in a galaxy far, far away. It takes non-trivial research to get all this right, but personal experience, direct or indirect, isn't a requirement for writing these things well, or at least much better than what we're seeing these days.

And the fact that we see incredible incompetence in following basic narrative rules like characters going through arcs or setup and payoff also points at a deeper issue. These are things that someone who got a C in an undergrad creative writing course would understand and avoid. Some of it is surely that the garbage of the past got forgotten, so we're comparing the best of the past to the average of today. But there are like-for-like comparisons that can be made. E.g. the recent live-action Pinocchio remake presenting Pinocchio as an innocent bystander who only ever got dragged to doing bad things instead of giving into his temptations and learning from the negative consequences of them, along with his iconic lying-leads-to-nose-lengthening being used to help him get out of the cage instead of being punishment for lying to the fairy, shows that the writers simply didn't have a handle on the underlying themes of the story. They say that rules are made to be broken, but they also say that you should understand a rule before you break it, and the understanding of why these narrative rules were determined to be so good and useful that they were labeled as "rules" in the first place seems to be missing.

I think a lot of the problems stem from the professional inbreeding of writing and filmmaking. You are certainly correct about people having less lived experience. I would argue that in a lot of ways it goes much much further. In order to make it in Hollywood, you have to go to film school, and by the nature of college and student loans, you have to come from a certain stock to have the ability to study film, creative writing, or acting in school, As in at least upper middle class with a mommy and daddy able and willing to not only foot the college bill but support this budding Hollywood star for years while they worked on getting in. So we’re talking about at least 50 years removed from the time when their ancestors did ordinary manual labor in a factory, repair shop, store, or building site. They exist both in their families and among their peers in a world where nobody takes religion seriously. They also are not the kinds of people who watch boxing or MMA on TV and certainly have never been in a fight themselves. They don’t know anyone who’s been in the military. All of this means that not only does our author know nothing, but he’s surrounded by know nothings. And he’s likewise been taught by no nothings.

There’s not much of a chance that a person who’s never seen a real fight and never took so much as a karate lesson is ever going to understand fighting. And someone who doesn’t know anyone who’s ever been a cop or soldier can’t possibly understand the mentality of those professions.

I think you're right but it's not just a torch being passed on. Writing in general became about representation both from the author and in the writing. Look at the many amazing reviews of the writing for the new True Detective series because it was run by a woman and was about women. Or basically any of the many threads we've had about book awards even among those that people acquiesce is well written it also almost always is about something that has an ideological purpose/bent to it.

It's probably harder to identify the good when you have to include a bunch of other conditions on the writing for it to be considered worthy of praise/awards these days. I'm not saying it doesn't exist but even before this became a big part of identifying what is "good art" these days there was a glut of basically everything that no one has time or really care to dig through.

I wonder what happened to ghost writers for movies though. Used to be you'd get people like Tom Stoppard rewriting almost all of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quentin Tarantino punching up Crimson Tide, Aaron Sorkin rewriting the Rock or even Tony Gilroy and Aaron Sorkin improving Enemy of the State, so even in these popcorn action movies we'd get some quality dialogue. Now, I guess they figured out that it didn't matter or don't care or the writer's that would be ghostwriting are just making indies? It's a mystery but I think it's why modern action movies often feel soulless compared to older ones because they don't ever bother to try to improve them. Or more likely people don't care about the difference, say what you want about Joss Whedon but there is a stark difference between his writing and someone aping his writing but I'm sure most people don't care to notice the difference. A large portion of people like Fallout 3 better than New Vegas and can't even understand how the writing is any different. And most people who are into "good" writing don't care about making things that are pulpy better they want Disco Elysium they don't want the next God of War to be written like that or even care if it's rewritten by a better writer just to make the dialogue better. I wonder if anyone who likes an action movie that was rewritten several times to get the script in a better state could ever identify that they liked that movie because of the writing, anyway?

Yeah, I think there needs to be a kind of environmental momentum, and the critics are part of that. From the critic side I think it's a combination of ideological capture plus the poptimism movement which I think is actually the worse offender in terms of lowering standards.

And yeah your thoughts on punch ups makes a lot of sense to me. My imagination just tells me no one wants to say no to the writers room, everyone just wants to flatter each other and avoid confrontation, that kind of thing, that seems to be the attitude in the air these days.

It feels almost like the human race has become worse writers in the past few decades, it's like the torch was never properly passed on and it's become a lost art.

You're just not paying attention, is all.

Writing is a craft. Maybe there's slightly fewer writers now, and sure publishing is broken, but ..are you really reading? ( There are solid younger writers out there. No, they're never g oing to be featured in any magazine or be famous, though.

When it comes to literature I am certainly not paying enough attention, I basically don't read anything contemporary besides excerpts here and there, and so I don't really have the grounds to make such a sweeping statement. But regarding "scripted" media, screenwriting, I feel pretty up to date on how things have degraded from what highs we managed to reach in the past.

On the other hand, when you talk about writers who can't even get in a magazine I feel like I just don't care. It's like when everyone says there music is just as good these days, you just have to find certain bands etc. It's just nothing like the amount of experience and culture of excellence in the music industry in say the 70s that elevated everyone together. Art goes beyond individuals, and plucky youths can only get so far. I don't think there are exceptions to this rule, I think great art always comes through the world as a movement, and dies out with the movement, and the fame is part of that, because it's how the culture spreads, it orients people's motivations, and puts great expectations on the artists to continue to grow and deliver, see Goethe. Even Van Gogh, the talented loser, wanted to be famous, and was part of a great movement, even though no one gave a shit about him till he died, he was still elevated by the works around him and elevated others in turn.

On the other hand, when you talk about writers who can't even get in a magazine I feel like I just don't care. It's like when everyone says there music is just as good these days, you just have to find certain bands etc. It's just nothing like the amount of experience and culture of excellence in the music industry in say the 70s that elevated everyone together.

This is a good framing of the issue, because saying things like "everything sucks now" rounds off to old men rambling about the kids these days, when it doesn't matter how talented the kids these days are, when the cultural infrastructure to support that talent is just not there. It's also more in line with the pop-culture-war criticism that's been accumulating over the years.

Japanese games always anime-ify all their characters’ faces, even in the rare cases in which they use facial capture.

Death Stranding seemed to have pretty accurate facial models (except iirc Mama, who was definitely better looking in game than irl imo).

British TV tends to avoid casting extremely beautiful actors in many roles (especially in comedy and ‘gritty’ drama)

Are there any extremely beautiful British actors?

Christian Bale, Tom Holland, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Idris Elba, John Boyega, Colin Firth, Ewan McGregor, Tom Hiddleston, Henry Cavill, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Nicholas Hoult, Orlando Bloom, Charlie Hunnam...

Note that all these people came to prominence in Hollywood, though. Beautiful Brits go where the money is - we're left with the remainder.

Are there any extremely beautiful British actors?

Henry Cavill, Robert Pattinson, Keira Knightley, Rachel Weisz, Ellie Bamber? A few that come to mind quickly.

In any case, in a country where being very hot isn’t a large part of the requirement for casting it would be expected that fewer very hot people would go into acting.

WPATH Files

Hey guys have you heard about the WPATH Files? Well, you did, they were already brought up earlier this week, but unlike our resident doomers, I think they're worthy of a top level thread.

No, this isn't about the Eunuch Archive story breaking containment (although Genevieve Gluck is striking the iron while it's hot). Long story short someone on the inside of WPATH contancted Micheal Schelenberger and released some of their internal discussions. So what's all the hubbub about? At a cursory glance might even look like the WPATH members are urging additional caution. Well, let's take a step back.

To avoid going full-Putin, I'll start at Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage. A lot of the arguments presented in the book aren't new, but it's a convenient compilation - transition is serious shit with huge health implications, kids don't know what they hell they're talking about and shouldn't be taken at face value with regards to such a serious decision, past research shows most of would-be trans youth desist after puberty, new research indicates there might be a social contagion component to the recent increase in trans kids, puberty blockers themselves might be pushing kids further down the trans rabbit hole, etc., therefore we should hit the breaks on the whole thing.

A lot of the counter-arguments are also conveniently compiled in critical reviews of the book, or critical responses to positive reviews, for instance:

Within medicine, gender-affirming care for transgender and gender diverse youth is not controversial, outside of a few fringe groups like The American College of Pediatricians (an anti-LGBTQ group that is not to be confused with The American Academy of Pediatrics). There is broad consensus from The American Psychiatric Association, The American Academy of Pediatrics, The Endocrine Society, The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and The World Professional Association for Transgender Health that gender-affirming medical care is appropriate for transgender youth so long as clinicians follow guidelines set forth by these major medical organizations (e.g., The Endocrine Society Guidelines).

(...)

Furthermore, those studies were of very young prepubertal children. Under the current medical consensus, gender-affirming medical interventions are not offered to prepubertal youth. They are only offered after youth have reached adolescence. Once youth reach adolescence, it’s rare for transgender youth to later decide they are cisgender.

(...)

She notes that only 1.9 percent of adolescents who started pubertal suppression in a large study in The Netherlands did not proceed to gender-affirming hormones (i.e., estrogen or testosterone). This is not because pubertal suppression made them identify more strongly as transgender. Rather, it is a result of the strict guidelines followed in the Netherlands before an adolescent is considered eligible for pubertal suppression: six months of attending a specialized gender clinic and undergoing rigorous assessment.

(...)

Though Shrier is quick to provide anecdotes from teenagers like "Riley" and stories from estranged parents as evidence, she is relatively less interested in the peer-reviewed scientific research that shows the benefits of gender-affirming medical care for transgender adolescents. I've listed several in the references for those interested in reading more.

The message is clear: We know what we're doing. We have strict standards that filter out those that might not benefit from transition. We have scientific consensus and studies, all you have is speculation and anecdotes. It is the departure from this deadpan, "we know what we're doing" discourse, delivered with iron confidence that I commented on earlier this year, and which is a useful lens to look at the WPATH Files through, given that it's one of the explicitly named organizations responsible for setting these supposedly strict standards.

Part of the Files is a video of the "Identity Evolution Workshop" held on Zoom by the WPATH, a significant portion of it is devoted to the question of informed consent:

Dianne Berg: Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on all of the importance that comes up with the informed consent.

I often see people who, because there's such a backlog of therapists to do some of the mental health therapeutic support, I often see people who have already engaged in some sort of, and this is again with youth, some sort of medical intervention. And so one of the things I do is sitting with the youth and their parents and I say "so tell me more about what you know about that medical intervention", and kind of like what Dan was saying, children and young adolescents... we wouldn't really expect them... It's kind of out of their developmental range sometimes, to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. And so I think I, I try to do whatever I can to help them understand, as best I can. But what really disturbs me is when the parents can't tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for. And so I think informed consent has to happen very differently for parents.

(these are slightly edited for the removal of awkward speech patterns)

So there's a few ways to look at it charitably. One that comes to mind is "they aren't talking about issues with the current state of gender affirming care, they're describing the sort of problems a clinician will run into, and how to handle them". The problem with that is that they themselves would disagree with that interpretation:

Dianne Berg: I worked in an intersex, or disorders of sex development clinic for a number of years as the psychologist. And I would come in to the session with the parents and usually these were very young kids. (...) and the pediatric endocrinologist came out and said "yeah, they totally get it, they're on board, I don't have any concerns about their understanding". I would go in and I would say "okay, so tell me what you learned from him", and they'd just be like, "we have no idea what he was talking about." Because they, they feel deferential.

(...) And so I think the more we can normalize that it is okay to not get this right away, it is okay to have questions, the more we're going to actually do a real informed consent process. Then what I think has been currently happening and that I think is frankly, not what we need to be doing ethically.

One of the reasons for this state of affairs that they brought up is a simple lack of resources - "backlog of therapists", "20 minute medical appointments" - which is consistent with info that got out of the Tavistock or through whistleblowers like Jaime Reed. The other way to look at it is @gattsuru's "urging additional caution", which they are indeed doing throughout various excerpts of the Files, but if additional caution needs to be urged, because patients, or even their parents, don't understand what they're signing up for, that paints a very different picture than the one that Jack Turban painted in his review. This is a lot less "we know what we're doing" and a lot more "this is all new, and we're still figuring it out", the difference is portrayed in this analogy:

I don't know if other people do, but I really struggle with it, because I kind of want the kids that I work with, whether they're 9 to 13 and looking at puberty suppression or hormones in some ways to be a little pediatric endocrinologist. Like I want them to understand it at that level in an age appropriate way. And I struggle with that on one level because, well, when a kid takes diabetic medication, do they have to understand?

The reason for the discrepancy in the level of understanding that is expected, is acutally later explained by Jamison Green:

Jamison Green: They may be able to get their hormones prescribed through their primary care provider who doesn't really know necessarily everything about trans care. They're basically trying to be supportive and, you know, our health care system leaves us in the lurch all the time. I agree that we don't necessarily need to be able to have... If you have a known condition, like diabetes, you don't have to understand every nuance about what the insulin is going to do to you, in order to give informed consent, because there's so much experience with that. But in this field, this is all new, this is all contentious, and that's where we run into problems, because everyone's afraid.

And I know for a fact, people, even adults, even well educated, older adults, accessing care for the first time, sit down with the person who's going to prescribe their hormones, and they look at an informed consent form that says your hormones are going to do this, this, and this. They don't take any of that in yet because they're so scared that they're not going to get what they need. They're just.. "so show me where to sign".

The issue brought up in the second part of the quote, that patients might not want to read, talk about, or ask questions about their treatment because they're afraid this will result in them not getting it, is brought up later in the conversation, but this is where things go from bad to worse:

Dianne Berg: At least with the kid that I worked with, where we kind of got to, was not wanting to talk about things, because they were at that kind of [non-binary] place. But also that they really thought that if they said anything about this, and really delved into it, it would mean that their options for any of that medical transition that they had always thought they were going to do, would be off the table. And so they were like, I can't, I don't want to explore that the non-binary shift, because if I explore that, that means that I'm never going to be able to get estrogen, and it was kind of like having some education around - no, it doesn't mean that. What it means is we are trying to meet your embodiment goals.

(...)

It's a growing edge for me, so I certainly don't want to misspeak, but my understanding and what I'm trying to kind of incorporate in my clinical practice is, in some ways, moving away from what is your identity and therefore because you have this identity, you're going to want to do these particular medical interventions to change your body. Not having it be as identity driven, because I think that's been the historical basis of how things have operated.

(...)

At least I have had many clients tell me "I did not tell you the truth about a lot of things about my sexuality, because I figured if I told you that, you would gatekeep and assume it was a fetish" , or, you know, some of the terms that we no longer are using. And so I think there is a huge historical context to sexuality being seen as a way that creates barriers to access to care. And I think it's very important that we acknowledge that historical context, and that we work against that historical context, by talking more about positive sexuality and pleasure and that that they can go together and that it's okay, and not create barriers to care, because people have that belief that that's what we're going to do.

Ok, simply put: you can't tell me how you have it all figured out, how you have strict standards that filter out people who might change their mind later, and how rare it is for trans youth to change their identity, and how all the concerns raised are invalid precisely because you have it all figured out so much, only to turn around to talk about patients' shifting identitties, how they were hiding their motivations, or didn't want to ask questions because they were afraid tripping that filter stemming from those supposedly strict standards, and then for your response to be "don't worry about it, we'll give you the treatment no matter what".

This already got quite long, and I already got one or two other angles to approach this topic from, so I think this will become a series*. My general conclusion is: contrary to Jack Turban, and the general pre-2022-ish pro-trans discourse, gender affirming care, especially it's pediatric variant, is not uncontroversial within medicine, it's not The Science, it's an experiment. There is, of course, room for those within medicine, psychiatry and/or psychology, but rule #1 of ethical experimantation is that you tell people they're participating in an experiment. You don't tell them things like "would you rather have a happy daughter, or a dead son", you don't dismiss critics because you don't like their politics, and you don't try to push through bizarre social reforms on the back of The Science that just isn't there.

As always, time will tell if my conclusion is correct, I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased, and it's only natural for someone biased in the other way to come to a different conclusion, especially that a lot of people in these WPATH Files comments and transcripts come off as quite sympathetic. But before signing off, I'll allow myself a bit of speculation: this is either the tip of the iceberg, and/or WPATH members themselves think the organization is no longer credible, as WPATH membership dropped from 4119 to 1590 from January 2023 to 2024. This is after the Files were announced, but way before they were released, but it's hard not to get a "fleeing a sinking ship" impression from it, and in fact such a sudden departure of so many members might even be the cause of the Files being leaked (out of many disgruntled people, some decided to leak stuff), and the effect is yet to come.

*) Hey mods, are we still doing the "Culture War goes into the Culture War Thread" thing? I would really rather have these as standalone posts.

First, this is utterly predictable. Patients won't read 10 pages of medspeak, especially when they've already made up their minds.

I want to zero in on that last bit; I'm pretty sure everyone who shows up at a gender clinic in 2024 AD knows what they want, when they want it. Parents who aren't sure about transitioning their kid won't take them to a gender clinic. Everyone knows the outcome of stepping into that building. And doctors know it too, and they also know that saying "no" just means the patient gets hormones anyways, just from an abortion doctor instead because planned parenthood can't resist jumping into something left coded for any reason, ever. I'm not sure what exactly that means here; I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness, but the idea that the medical system can self-regulate in a culture war heavy topic is also risible.

Second, this is utterly predictable. "The experts" tm being firmly on the left of the culture war for anything controversial and willing to misrepresent their theoretical area of expertise if not outright lie about it shouldn't be a shock to anyone who lived through Covid. Trans is pretty central to the culture war.

Third, and going for variety here, this shouldn't be a shock to anyone. Everything we know about trans people should point to them being difficult patients at the best of times; they disproportionately have additional mental illnesses, lots of them don't trust non-trans people, high percentages of them are unemployed/underemployed people who get on poorly with their families and thus have insurance difficulties which make everything more complicated, and most of them are literal teenagers who probably have a higher rate of lying to begin with. In that environment of course it's going to cause this type of problem.

WPATH is confirming things we already knew. It's a valuable confirmation, but there's not a lot of new information there other than that WPATH knew about the obvious problems and was choosing not to say anything, which was already my assumption- they're ideologically motivated, not stupid.

I want to zero in on that last bit; I'm pretty sure everyone who shows up at a gender clinic in 2024 AD knows what they want, when they want it.

This may be an exercise in throwing stones in glass houses, but you need to log off. Plenty of people know next to nothing on the issue, and when their kid says they're trans they just go "welp, better make an appointment with the psych / doctor". Funnier still, even psychologists and family doctors tend to know next to nothing on the issue, and just refer.

WPATH is confirming things we already knew. It's a valuable confirmation, but there's not a lot of new information there other than that WPATH knew about the obvious problems and was choosing not to say anything, which was already my assumption- they're ideologically motivated, not stupid.

It was also my assumption, but I wouldn't describe it as "what we already knew". "Suspected", yes, and only for a given value of "we". And other than the confirmation being valuable, it also shows that, like I keep insisting, the vibe has shifted on this issue.

Plenty of people no next to nothing on the issue, and when their kids says they're trans they're just go "welp, better make an appointment with the psych / doctor".

Or they are pushed to go by the kid's school.

Plenty of people no next to nothing on the issue, and when their kids says they're trans they're just go "welp, better make an appointment with the psych / doctor". Funnier still, even psychologists and family doctors tend to know next to nothing on the issue, and just refer.

Trans is a hot topic. Everyone in America in the 2020’s has an idea of what it is which at least rounds to trans.

There are people who don’t think they know how to respond to it, sure, but those types know full well that the medical system will respond with transition, everyone knows that. Maybe not the finer details, but once you add on that ‘trans kids’ pretty much all come from well off blue tribe families- ‘non-affirming’ parents or parents who have a willingness to be skeptical of the official narrative do not seek medical treatment for their trans kid, they pull the kid’s pants down and say ‘look at how God made you and get used to it’.

those types know full well that the medical system will respond with transition, everyone knows that.

No they don't. They may think "well, I don't know if trans is correct for my kid, I'm sure the doctor can figure it out". They'll assume that the doctor would act like a professional and diagnose based on objective standards that might say yes, but might say no.

There are people who don’t think they know how to respond to it, sure, but those types know full well that the medical system will respond with transition, everyone knows that.

+1 to Jiro's "no they don't". I'll add that even in the event they actually have an opinion on trans care, paradoxically it's the "allies" that may be to most vulnerable here, because they will tend to assume that the talk of lack of guardrails is a right-wing moral panic. But the majority simply have not followed any of the back and forth.

I think you may be typical-minding. Countless people on Maury have denied fathering a child for absurd reasons like “we only had sex one time.”

There’s plenty of people sleepwalking through life seemingly without ever making an informed decision. “I didn’t know I couldn’t orgasm after removing my penis” sounds absurd but I would be more surprised if it didn’t happen.

This has been a general problem with mental health disorders in general and especially ones that you get a prescription for. The difference between someone who’s sad and someone who’s depressed is ten minutes with a psychiatrist. And adhd tends to work this way as well. If you’re seeking help for something that doesn’t leave physical evidence, the way to get what you want is to insist that it be given.

I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness

I'd be more careful with absolutes.

My burning hatred for presentism and general displeasure towards technocrats and their solutions to human problems can't be overstated; but they do all have a point in that the phenomenon behind "trans" is a real thing that has existed for pretty much all of history in some form or another.

The present obsession with it and its political implications helps nobody, but let's not pretend the problem doesn't exist. It's not just a symptom of other mental illnesses.

Call it its own type of mental illness if you will, we certainly used to, but it's real and we don't really understand the cause of it.

It is this ignorance that's the fertile ground for would be experts to push convenient solutions they swear have no drawbacks. The way out isn't more willfull ignorance. The flawed frame of understanding that is leading to the present problems must be replaced with the truth, whatever that may be. Not a different sort of convenient lie.

FWIW I agree with both @hydroacetylene and you here, and I expect that he'd agree with you too. What I would mean, and what I expect he means, by "trans isn't real" is that none of the people being classified as "trans" are "born into the wrong body" or "assigned" the wrong gender, nor are they "really" (in some sense) the opposite sex -- that it's not just a matter of overdiagnosis and a classification of some people as "trans" who aren't, while there is still some smaller subset who are "really trans" and where that the most appropriate treatment is the constellation of "gender-affirming" (what a euphemism!) treatments of hormones/surgery/social transition/etc.

I do agree that there is a separate mental illness (probably more than one) which correspond to "trans" -- that it's not just depression or anxiety or whatever that causes boys/men to want to be girls/women (or vice-versa), or to be unhappy because they aren't, or to (at times) convince themselves that they "really are" what they want to be. And I get that there are some people who don't believe that and think that the entirety of "trans" is just some current-day-cultural nonsense. But I do think that there is a meaningful and important sense in which "trans isn't real" is true, and I think that's what he's getting at.

Yes I doubt we all disagree very much, but some things deserve to be stated at least inasmuch as it allows us to map things out.

The story we've all been told (i.e.: there are people born with brains that correspond to the other sex and bringing their bodies in line with their brain heals them) has many problems, not least of which the fact that it has incredibly little to no evidence supporting it. In this at least, "trans isn't real". But the problem is the alternatives, like Blanchardism, are really no better on that front.

There's a deep irony in the fact that learning more would require pretty wild experimentation that would and has been suppressed by a political movement that is hell bent on large scale experimentation but only of a very specific kind.

If there's one thing we ought to learn from this it is that building identities around specific medical treatments is a terrible idea. And it's a mistake we keep making. See the weirder parts of the deaf community for another example.

I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness

What's the working definition of real here? Do you believe that mental illness is real?

I think that the median case of, at the very least, depression, ADHD, and most anxiety disorders are just med-seeking or munchausens, yes, and I think all three of those things have a closer correspondence to reality than the claims trans adherents make about themselves.

I suppose it might be relevant to bring up my own n=1 anecdotal experience with a voluntary surgical procedure. About a year, maybe a year and a half ago, an acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance posted on twitter that they were seeking a kidney, as they had begun to enter renal failure and while thanks to modern medicine they were stable, their lifespan had changed from an easy seventy or eighty years to about forty without a transplant. So I figured hey, this guy needs a kidney, and whadya know I've got this spare lying around not really doing anything. Let's see about getting rid of it.

First I had to figure out if I was compatible. I was. What followed was a surprisingly rigorous battery of examinations, questionnaires, interviews, pre-recorded educational modules, and re-interviews. Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? Did I know the potential surgical side-effects? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? What about the possibility of complications? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? What was my support structure? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? Did I live in a building with an elevator? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? Could I get groceries without physically lifting more than 20lbs? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? You get the gist. Once I had managed to convince my donor liaison (appointed by the hospital as my advocate) that I knew the risks, that I knew I could withdraw consent right up until they gassed me (my words not theirs), that I was of sound mental health, then came the actual tests.

I am something of a connoisseur of hospital blood draws - for whatever reason the vagaries of life have resulted in my giving a significant percentage of my blood to various medical apparatchiks - and let me tell you the blood tests they ran on me were exhaustive. I think they filled about twenty of those little blood vials in one sitting. Then were more tests. Looking back at my records about thirty in all, from an EKG to a full metabolic panel. Then after all these tests were done, I sat down with a nephrologist (kidney doctor). The nephrologist, a very nice woman, looked at all my tests, and politely told me that she was declining to move forward with my donation. She thought that (1) at 26 I was too young, and (2) one of my kidney function tests was not perfectly centered in the "normal" function range. She was very clear that it was mostly a function of age, and that had I come to her when I was 30 she probably would have given me the green light, or at least been willing to take a closer look at what was causing the slight abnormality in that one test.

And that was that.

I can't help but contrast this, a potentially life-saving surgery with very minimal long-term knock on effects (kidney donors do not have a decreased life span or at most lose half a year to a year, various foundations and the recipient's insurance cover all medical and associated bills including transportation and recovery fees, the total hospital stay is one to two days, with full recovery in 3-4 months) with what are ultimately cosmetic surgeries with largely unknown long-term effects, and the difference in treatment a transitioning teenager receives (full endorsement and full surgery at 18) versus my own. I'm not upset with my treatment mind you, if the kidney doctor says no then the kidney doctor says no, and she probably knows best. It's just... an odd juxtaposition.

My own personal experience is that scientists and people with genuine expertise in a subject are way more softly spoken and uncertain about the topics they hold expertise in, particularly in friendly company and in private, than political activism would like. From personal experience, to keep things vague since the topic is niche, I actually had to tone down a claim that I already thought was already very modest about whether [some human activity] would increase levels of [some dust], even if it was the best way to link research to real-world impacts. Climate change is the obvious one, where IPCC reports are incredibly modest compared to claims made by activists, to the point they might as well be speaking different languages. And to bang my usual drum, claims about "The Science" for covid restrictions often didn't exist at all in literature, or were contradicted by it. Even something like lab leaks will see surveys reported as Virologists and epidemiologists back natural origin for COVID-19 when actually the survey findings was that said experts averaged 77% probability of zoonosis and 23% of lab leak, and only 25% of scientists reporting to be near certain that it was zoonosis, hardly a consensus.

As for this topic in particular, doctors who are inclined to cooperate and not "gatekeep" due to political pressure, and patients who are told to defect by lying to "gatekeepers" and get the drugs faster, is going to lead to disaster. Even if you're trying to implement standards in good faith here, they're just going to get instantly eroded.

My own personal experience is that scientists and people with genuine expertise in a subject are way more softly spoken and uncertain about the topics they hold expertise in, particularly in friendly company and in private, than political activism would like.

Jack Turban, Steven Novella, and David Gorsky - the authors of the two reviews I linked - are all doctors and scientists. Turban specializes in trans care, Novella and Gorsky don't, but their entire claim to fame (such as it is) is being part of the Skeptic movement, and the entire point of their blog is to inform the public of the actual state of evidence, not to repeat the activist line. If they talk differently in friendly company and in private, that means they're deliberately misleading the public.

Maybe none of this should be surprising, but the system that exists today wouldn't survive, if any significant number of people internalized that.

There are definetly plenty of those with more mixed feelings. Experience shows that whenever there is an opportunity for scientific authoritarianism that gives scientists special status, whether with covid, climate change, or scientific marxism, plenty of them are willing to jump along. And they don't need to be all of them or even a majority, to be highly influential.

Calling something a science, and censor opposition as unscientific, are strong elements of modernity's fundamentalism. In a way that is convincing of plenty of scientists. Another possibility is those in charge to say that certain views are scientific truth and exclude from journals those who aren't going along.

Trained in a culture of peer science and trusting authority of the scientific clique, many are going to go along with it. Especially if they already have pro left wing biases.

This means that being a good scientist and doing science effectively is different and can in fact be opposite with the class of scientists and people called scientists, and their prejudices and preferences, which can show group think, and unwillingness to examine their conclusions.

It is the courtier phenomenon. Where power goes, there are always some people who go along with it. Another aspect of this can be that the media and people who belong in factions promoting group think have a benefit in associating science/scientists with particular views, and fostering a divide between them and then those who raise objections or oppose certain policies. Another facet of this are some edgier and more fantastical objections to claims on political charged issues that are focused upon over more substantive disagreements. For example

microchips

vs

Origin of covid. Lockdowns. Vaccine effectiveness.

Add to that censorship of dissent, and it would be a mistake to expect the people we have given the title scientists, or rational, to succeed in opposing this, any more an ideology given the title scientific will succeed at being scientific, just because it claims to be that, or to aspire to that.

Great post, thanks.

Can anyone give some context on where WPATH fits into the broader ecosystem of such organizations? I assume there are other organizations that give guidelines or do research - is WPATH bigger/smaller, newer/older, more/less funded, etc?

I haven't heard of anyone trying to map it out this way. My guess is that WPATH is probably the biggest and oldest one focused on the subject. Their closest competitors would be Genspect, and SEGM, but they are just now finding their footing, and they've been mostly founded simply as a reaction to the current state of affairs. Other than that you're going have organizations devoted to wider branches of medicine / psychology, like the ones listed by Turban at the beginning of my post. Each country has their own, and not all of them are pro gender affirming care (and I don't mean something predictable like Saudi Arabia being against - Europe seems to be leaning anti-trans-care, at least for kids).

Yup, CW in the CW thread.

We do appreciate the level of effort you’ve put into this breakdown.

because you have it all figured out so much, only to turn around to talk about patients' shifting identitties, how they were hiding their motivations, or didn't want to ask questions because they were afraid tripping that filter stemming from those supposedly strict standards, and then for your response to be "don't worry about it, we'll give you the treatment no matter what".

1: Why should people who don't understand the different sexes and how they're supposed to work together ever come up with the best course of action for legitimately transgender individuals (i.e. not just men with a terminal case of "it's ma'am")?

The flipside of not being able to have a proper answer to the question of what a woman is means that you don't have a good answer for what a man is. Which I believe is a pretty scorching indictment for an organization, an entire "scientific" field, and to a point the Tribe backing it that claims to have an answer to whether a man should become a woman- if the distinction between genders is meaningless, then dysphoria shouldn't exist (and thus shouldn't even be acknowledged), right?

An organization that's supposed to support transgender health first and foremost needs to understand, and understand properly (as in, the good-faith scientific distinction and not the common definitions), what gender even is in the first place (and communicate that definition coherently). If they don't understand it, or have definitions that are first and foremost self-serving (perhaps if their salaries depends on them intentionally misunderstanding it), then they have no business telling men when and when not to become women and vice versa.

I'd argue that rejecting the bimodal distribution of gendered behaviors, or trying to push men further and further into being women (for various reasons, ranging from a simple failure of preventing the male biological niche from getting destroyed by market forces to the actively malicious gender supremacy movements) is one of the reasons we even have an explosion of ex-men in the first place. The collapse of a positive, approachable masculinity also creates ex-women, since the tolerance of tomboyishness as a subgenre of "woman" collapsed with it (and without a positive, approachable masculinity, femininity had nothing to constrain it from becoming toxic).

the Eunuch Archive story breaking containment

2: Why should people who don't have a healthy sense of pro-social adult sexuality be able to come up with a solid answer for when trans is and isn't a fetish (or to have any hope of understanding what productive development/expressions of child sexuality should be)?

"I spend a bunch of time writing online about how great it would be if basically every boy on the planet was castrated" is not the mark of someone who has a well-rounded view of what co-operative/productive sexual expression looks like. The elephant in the room on the Blue side is that this way of thinking, and everything they do to express power, is itself some shade of castration; men with a healthier (as in, less internalized androphobia) understanding of how the sexes interact have quite accurately noticed this tendency, it's why the memes specify a ball-busting bitch.

The problem is squaring the circle between "patholotical androphobia" and "children are sexual beings". How are we supposed to expect that an answer that depends specifically on getting the latter right is going to be correct when the minds of everyone working on that answer are utterly consumed by the former? I'm pretty sure Boku no Pico is a healthier and more productive treatise on male sexuality than anything high-ranking WPATH personnel will ever come up with.

(As an aside, it's probably worth noting that the main difference between adult sexuality and child sexuality seems to have something to do with the presence/absence of biological impulse to play power games with sex- so expecting someone whose entire sexuality is nothing but explicitly malicious power games to try and make things better for people who inherently lack the understanding/biological drive to do them is so, so much worse. "It's ma'am" is the model transperson to people like this, and it is those power games that lend themselves to the bad faith consequences: suppressing de-transitioner literature, placing ex-men in women's prisons, and so on.)

only to turn around to talk about patients' shifting identitties (lol), how they were hiding their motivations, or didn't want to ask questions because they were afraid tripping that filter stemming from those supposedly strict standards

3: Given the above, why would a movement whose entire motivation is some abstract form of "fuck you, Dad" ever be able to ask the "are you doing this out of spite?" question and be able to engage productively with the fact that the response is sometimes 'yes'?

In the interests of stirring the pot, I'll link to this person's attempt at a fisking of the WPATH files, pointing out examples of factual inaccuracies, things taken out of context or similar. Without having read the WPATH files I can't speak as to whether their characterisation is accurate.

I think the only take away from that is to ignore all the editorializing and only look at the actual pictures. I agree that the people who wrote the files are pushing an agenda and playing fast and loose with the facts, but the stuff in the actual WPATH communications is just as crazy.

This mostly seems like an attempt by the author to get people to avoid looking at the actually damning stuff.

and playing fast and loose with the facts

I can understand the agenda bit, though I'm not sure how much agree (worst case scenario they're about as ideologically biased as WPATH itself), but what made you think they're playing fast and loose with the facts?

I saw that scrolling by recently, though haven't read the whole thing. I'll add it to the reading list, and say what I think when I'm through it, but I'm putting high odds on it being cope. For one, the argument I made in the post doesn't rest on anything being taken out of context. The other files are comments on some sort of internal discussion platform they're using, I didn't see anything there being taken out of context or misrepresented either.

Still gets me that the word "fisking" - a word invented by online warbloggers for their supposed eviscerations of Robert Fisk articles and which, insofar as I remember it, often devolved to just laying the article out sentence by sentence and replying to individual sentences with "Oh come on!" and "Surely no-one can believe this!" -style fare - continues to live, even though most people would in fact probably agree that Fisk was more correct about whether Iraq War was a proper decision or not than the warbloggers.

I really don't understand any of the lines you're drawing between excerpts here.

On the one hand, we have statistical data about low desistance and high satisfaction. On the other hand, we have anecdotes about patients trusting their doctors and not being medical experts themselves (scandal!) and anecdotes about patients angling for the care they want instead of giving the doctor extra information because they are correctly scared of political manipulations interfering with their care.

And your claim is that the latter somehow disputes the former? How so?

If you think Turban's citation is valid statistical data, it's your funeral, but before we continue this line of debate I would like you to comlnfirm that you looked into the argument and this is, in fact, what you are saying.

And your claim is that the latter somehow disputes the former? How so?

Have you...have you read my post? I really don't know how else to respond other than to repeat what I said there. These doctors are explicitly saying they aren't putting barriers to entry to treatment, saying this is all new and not a known problem like diabetes, and that the patients are not informed enough to give informed consent, and that they are currently falling short of ethical standards. It's explicitly contradicting several of Turban's claims.

Are you saying this is all fine? Can you elaborate on why? Do you think we know enough on gender affirming care that doctors can confidently prescribe treatment knowing it will improve the condition the patients were diagnosed with, like they do with diabetes? Why do you think they themselves disagree with that?

patients trusting their doctors and not being medical experts themselves (scandal!)

I mean, yes, abuse of trust is pretty scandalous. Doctors shouldn't fake confidence in front of the public, and talk about how they're winging it behind closed doors.

patients angling for the care they want instead of giving the doctor extra information because they are correctly scared of political manipulations interfering with their care.

Well, if you want to say "there are no rigorous guardrails on the process, and that's a good thing", say it with your chest. The problem is that if you claim guardrails do exist when responding to critics, you are showing yourself to be deceptive.

anecdotes

This is a category error. It's like dismissing a confession to murder because it's just an anecdote.

I had originally posted this in the Friday fun thread but it turns out that it was killing the vibe in there. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway...

Note: I will completely qualify Portugal Europe and Portland Oregon in this article because they're easy to mix up.

Is liberalism peaking in Oregon?

In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.

Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal Europe model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the 2.3% of the population that's black.

As an occasional drug enjoyer, I do find it a relief to wander the streets of Portland Oregon squirting ketamine up my nostrils like I'm a visionary tech CEO without fear of police. But in broad strokes it appears to be a disaster.

Indeed, the ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions.

By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.

https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/02/21/fentanyl-overdose-rate-oregon-spikes

Oregon's fatal fentanyl overdose rate spiked from 2019 to 2023, showing the highest rate of increase among U.S. states, according to The Oregonian's crunching of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal Europe's system. Some stark differences!

https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf

Briefly, Portugal Europe uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe.

In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.

The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.

Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)

“Portland [Oregon] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.

That's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.

After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.

The NYT again https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/oregon-drug-decriminalization-rollback-measure-110.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/3zksH)

Several prominent Democrats have expressed support for a rollback, including Mike Schmidt, a progressive prosecutor in the Portland area. After the decriminalization initiative passed in 2020, Mr. Schmidt implemented its provisions early, saying it was time to move past “failed practices” to “focus our limited law enforcement resources to target high-level, commercial drug offenses.”

But he has reassessed his position, he said in an interview this week. The proliferation of fentanyl requires a new approach that treats addiction as a health issue while holding people accountable, he said. The open drug use downtown and near parks and schools has made people feel unsafe, Mr. Schmidt said.

“We have been hearing from constituents for a while that this has been really detrimental to our community and to our streets,” he said. Mr. Schmidt said the new bill still prioritizes treatment and uses jail as a last resort. That, he said, could ultimately become the model Oregon offers to states around the country.

The governor has indicated that she would sign.

Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use. I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help, but fentanyl complicates the situation substantially. People need to hit bottom before they seek help (or so goes the popular saying) but fentanyl is so potent and unpredictable that they're dying of an unexpected OD before they find themselves at bottom, ready to seek change.

Frankly, I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.

I believe this shows Oregon is not quite as ideologically liberal as previously led to believe. Or, at least, not anymore.

A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon. So my analysis is mainly focusing on Portland, because that's both where the problem mainly is and where the political will driving all of this originates from.

So: In my opinion, many far-left beliefs are luxury beliefs adopted for their value as status signals. The practical considerations tend to be secondary to the value as a social signal and the costs of these beliefs aren't paid by the people espousing them. People who want to abolish the police aren't typically at risk of being robbed, people who want to subsidize homelessness don't usually live near the homeless, people who want to ban all guns don't usually need to physically protect themselves from violence, people who want to legalize drugs don't interact with drug addicts.

The current state of Portland makes the costs of these luxury beliefs ubiquitous and impossible to ignore. Several events have compounded each other to produce this situation:

  1. Portland has incredibly lax policies around street homelessness that approach subsidization. This started with then-mayor Charlie Hale's "Housing State Of Emergency" in 2015 which forbid sweeping homeless camps and has gotten worse ever since. Homeless camps filled with people literally driven insane by drugs are ubiquitous. Local governments have gone as far as distributing tents (22,000 in two years!) and even foil and straws for smoking fentanyl to the homeless.

  2. Following the nine-month anti-police protest/riot/siege at the Portland Justice Center in 2020, the city has massively de-policed. This is a combination of the police deliberately reducing enforcement as a "silent strike", the cops being massively under-manned, and city policies that prevent police work. We are talking multiple-hour response times for everything except life-threatening violent crimes actively being committed. Someone I know personally caught a guy trying to steal the catalytic converter off of his car then followed the perp in a car chase with 911 on the phone for an hour and a half until he lost him. The cops never showed, they contacted him by phone the next day to take a report.

  3. We legalized drugs completely, as you noted.

These factors have combined to make the drug/homelessness problem so bad at this point that it is seriously negatively affecting everyone in the city. Every person I know who lives in Portland has, in the last couple of years, has been victimized by crime and had multiple negative interactions with the drug addicted homeless. Business are closing and the downtown core of Portland is dying, office workers are refusing to return from work-from-home because of how unsafe it is, and Portland is losing population for the first time in living memory as people flee the dysfunction. The luxury beliefs are finally extracting their costs from the belief-holders, and that's why the tide has turned on this specific issue. However, I don't think you can extrapolate this shift to any greater shift in progressive sentiments. I've had a lot of conversations with people about this: almost universally being a "good progressive" is still very much a core part of the identity of most Portlanders and they are only very begrudgingly ceding ground on drug legalization specifically. They absolutely do not draw any conclusions from this about any of their other beliefs; this threat to their identity is compartmentalized away.

A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon.

This is basically every state in the US, except the exact balance differs. Every single city is blue, every single rural area is red. Only the population balance determines the "red-state/blue-state"

This is basically every state in the US, except the exact balance differs. Every single city is blue, every single rural area is red. Only the population balance determines the "red-state/blue-state"

While roughly true there's significant variation in just how red or blue the cities or rural areas are. Urbanisation by state correlates with partisanship but only moderately, with notable outliers (Utah is among the most urban and most Republican states, whilst Vermont is among the most rural and Democratic states).

Certainly, my point was just that Oregon politics are more or less uni-polar centered around Portland.

Great comment overall in general.

I'm still astonished that the Oregon legislature re-criminalized. Maybe this won't affect anyone's sense of liberal identity, but it at least shows luxury beliefs have a limit, and can be abandoned if confronted with enough harsh reality.

I hadn't thought of it until your comment, but this is another argument in favor of deeply held personal belief in a transcendent value system.

Yes, I'm talking about Christianity. Or, more inclusively any sort of tradition rooted religion.

Back to the main point - I think it's close to common knowledge that everyone develops a sense of identity throughout their life. Failing to do so, in fact, is recognized not only as a major developmental failure, but potentially a mental illness. What you anchor that identity in is incredibly important.

With the fall of religiosity and the rise of secular humanism, I'd say it's a safe assumption to make that people are now anchoring more and more of their identities in politics and culture. These aren't inherently bad things on which to build an identity. The problem is they can and will change. The above post makes this clear. For a long time, being a "good progressive" meant militant support for drug legalization. That happened and it failed. So ... which part of the identity gives? The past-identity that was pro-legalization, or the now-identity that is using evidence to update beliefs? Either way, it's a loss, because you'd have to point to your identity at some point in time and go "I was wrong." This is destabilizing even for the most ... stable person.

How does religion solve this? Religiously informed beliefs are, at their core, transcendental. They are most important in an after-life situation and can neither be confirmed nor disproved in this life in this world. That's a sort of summation of the notion of faith in general. From an identity perspective, this lets believers commit themselves to something they known will never change because it never "was" in the same sense that material things are. I'd be remiss not to tag @TheDag at this point given his post on materialism from earlier today.

The summation here is straightforward; castle made of sand, shifting foundations et cetera. Build "who you are" (whatever that means) on things that are, frankly, eternal. I've seen people who have rooted their identity in seemingly "forever" things have some nasty reality checks; military dudes ("I'll always be a Marine!"), career A-types ("Nobody can take away the fact I was the youngest VP in corporate history!"), and even family ("My sister and I will always be close").

Why does this very nothing to do with religion post deeply remind you of Christianity? Because there are policy mistakes/changes happening being linked to causes/luxury virtue signaling beliefs? These beliefs being disprovable unlike the bedrock trueness of one of 10,000 religions? That is a pretty weak segue into a sermon.

Regarding people being upset when their reality changes vs religious people. As you say, hard to have a reality check if you don't accept reality.

What about when religious people become atheist or leave their religion. Have you see what that can do to families and people? Especially in those many many religions that treat an apostate like garbage.

Is that not a greater risk as rather than updating a small part or even a large part of your political or scientific world view? Your whole unchangeable/unchallengeable forever belief system has crumbled to dust instead. Often taking with it your family and friends.

These beliefs being disprovable unlike the bedrock trueness of one of 10,000 religions?

Never asserted this. In fact, a major thrust of my original comment was that religious belief is neither provable in a positivist sense nor falsifiable. Faith itself is an ongoing and continuous act.

What about when religious people become atheist or leave their religion. Have you see what that can do to families and people? Especially in those many many religions that treat an apostate like garbage.

Bad things are bad, I agree. But my comment wasn't looking at people-within-social-circles, it was looking at the self and identity (the self-concept of self).

Your whole unchangeable/unchallengeable forever belief system has crumbled to dust instead.

Forgive me for nitpicking. A belief system is one thing, the anchor to an identity is another. I agree with you that a belief system ought to be informed by rigorous epistemic evaluation. I think identity is a separate concern that cannot be totally built on a simple amalgamation of "facts." It put it up there with abstract concepts like "justice" - these are not definable in a mathematic proof sense.

As you say, hard to have a reality check if you don't accept reality.

Couldn't agree more.

The fact that abstract concepts exist doesn't mean we should believe in actual magic. Also something being abstract doesn't make it worthy as an identity touchstone. Lateness is an abstract concept, it doesn't follow that we should anchor our identity on being punctual.

Fine say you're not shunned when you lose your faith, your world has still be turned upside down and now your concept of self is shattered if that is what built your identity on. Unprovable and unfalsifiable is the same as not existing at all, and should be treated with the same weight.

Hot take: the unfalsifiable identity anchor thing is behind the evolution of Wokism to Transism. You can argue with citations about the forces of Whiteness™, but when trans ideology comes down to gender as a metaphysical / spiritual thing which someone experiences, rather than physical sex or physically detectable brain or hormonal abnormalities, it enters the realm of unfalsifiable identity anchor. Previous attempts at having Whiteness or The Patriarchy fill the role of unfalsifiable spiritual force are less personal, and more antagonistic, whereas Transism is about personal identity.

Hot take: the unfalsifiable identity anchor thing is behind the evolution of Wokism to Transism.

That's not a hot take, that's the entire point of the argument. Unfalsifiable identity anchors are natural for humans, they're not just behind Wokism and Transism, they're behind Chrstianity, Islam, Buddhism, national identities, etc. New Atheists promised that if we get rid of the Unfalsifiable identity anchor of religion, we will usher in a new era of rationality. Christians warned that people will simply replace it with a new one ("god-shaped hole"), and there's a good chance it will be worse than any of the traditional religions. Time seems to have proven them right, and the most depressing thing about the whole ordeal, is that this is hardly the first attempt yielding the same result.

What?

Assuming you’re correct about needing this particular thing you're labeling “identity”—which I don’t think is quite the right word—that’s still a terrible reason to believe something false.

Embrace any of the existing traditions, and you’re anchoring your “identity” back to material, falsifiable beliefs. Now you can be shaken by schisms and sex scandals!

If those are off the table, you don’t have a “religiously informed belief.” You have some personal experience that you decided to parse as transcendent and meaningful. In short, vibes. There’s no guarantee that those will stay, either. Job 1:21.

From my very secular perspective, it’s far better to pursue a durable, secular philosophy. Something that allows updating your beliefs without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Something that lets me adapt to the truth without grasping it too jealously. I think a religious version of this acceptance is possible; I don’t believe you’ll get there by anchoring to a transcendent belief as if it were your football team, or your political allies. You need a healthier relationship with the belief, and with your belief in belief.

“identity”—which I don’t think is quite the right word

That's fine. May I solicit an alternative term or concept definition?

Now you can be shaken by schisms and sex scandals!

Big issue here. Schsims and sex scandals relate to belief and/or allegiance to an institution (to wit, the Catholic Church). My post argues that's a a bad thing to wed yourself to. Values are where it's at. As much ire as I have for secular humanists, it's quite likely I have more for legalistic Catholic doctrine Nazis who seem to view the Catholic faith as SCOTUS arguments on steroids.

If those are off the table, you don’t have a “religiously informed belief.” You have some personal experience that you decided to parse as transcendent and meaningful. In short, vibes. There’s no guarantee that those will stay, either. Job 1:21.

I agree with this passage on its own, but I get a little lost in how it threads into your overall argument. I am sorry for not catching your point.

From my very perspective, it’s far better to pursue a durable, secular philosophy

What is the rubric for durable?

Something that lets me adapt to the truth without grasping it too jealously.

Is it possible to fully known "truth"? I'd say both religious tradition and secular philosophy (Popper comes to mind here) would argue it is not, though we may approach it.

I don’t believe you’ll get there by anchoring to a transcendent belief as if it were your football team, or your political allies

I agree with this. If you turn a transcendental belief into something materialist, worldly, and immediate, you've ruined its value. The Christian proverb here is "Be in, not of, the world"

You need a healthier relationship with the belief, and with your belief in belief.

Prayer traditions are largely based on constant re-examination of belief-in-belief.

I think a religious version of this acceptance is possible.

This makes me quite happy.

Alright, I've been chewing on this for a bit. I appreciated your response, and I'm still not confident that I've done it justice.

The reason I wouldn't choose "identity" is because I believe there are two phenomena at work. Identity as prediction and shorthand for social-interactions: call it "role." Identity as a set of value judgments: call it "touchstone."

Roles support if-then reasoning. If I go to this party, then I'll be associated with the cool kids. If I mention these talking points, then my tribe will know I've got their back. If I experience a certain emotion in church, then it's something understood by my tradition, and I can feel comfortable sharing it with my fellow Christians.

You can't apply the same reasoning to touchstones, because they're operating at a different level. I value associating with the cool kids. I value my political tribal alignment. I value my fellow Christians.

I think your points about developmental failure and mental illness make sense for roles, but not touchstones. A person who fails to model others' reactions has a serious disadvantage. One who picked unwise touchstones? Not so much.

Picking transcendental beliefs is only addressing touchstones. The question, then, is whether stability comes from the touchstone or from the role. If the latter, then holding an unfalsifiable belief--an immutable touchstone--would still leave one exposed.

When I talked about "durable" philosophy, I was thinking about the ability to adapt to new evidence. Whether this is accomplished through serenity or courage, it demands a certain resilience. I don't think this comes from the touchstones, but from how one reasons about them. Consider the Homeric heroes, oath-bound to besiege Troy. The cosmological beliefs are set dressing. Their particular honor culture was one of countless that followed the rule: if one swears an oath, then one must keep it. I'd call that a role.

When I talked about "durable" philosophy, I was thinking about the ability to adapt to new evidence. Whether this is accomplished through serenity or courage, it demands a certain resilience. I don't think this comes from the touchstones, but from how one reasons about them.

This is awesome. Very well said.

I think the only addition I might offer is to ask the following; is there a risk in confusing or, maybe a better word, misplacing a touchstone value for a role based value?

Thanks for the tag! For what it's worth, I wrote about my conversion experience below, and this was another factor that helped me along the way. I have had many various ideologies I've tried to pin my identity to throughout the years, from communism to anarchy to libertarianism to effective altruism. Ultimately I've found that Christianity has been far more 'stable' for me, in part because it's transcendental, and in part because there is plenty of room for doubt and even periods of lack of belief while still being welcomed back such as with the parable of the prodigal son.

Critics are out in force, arguing that...the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts... I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help

Object level conversation already lengthy below, but want to take this in a tangent... about this reverse moral proscriptive perspective of government. It's not quite horseshoe theory because it inverts around pure liberalism.

On the one side, you have this idea that the government can prohibit or regulate certain behaviors. Rules against drugs, prostitution, gambling, buying alcohol on Sundays, etc. have traditionally existed within a concept of appropriate government power. These things may be associated with social conservatism, but more broadly the whole range of government's regulatory power is not broadly understoods as allowed only narrowly through a liberal perspective but as a (varyingly constrained) right of the democratic government to govern.

In the middle you've got a liberal ethos, where we should be maximizing personal freedom, only intervening where it threaten's another's freedom. Here most government regulation would be understood as only justified through protecting freedoms.

But then you get to the other side where you allow behaviors but demand socialized payments for the costs of those behaviors. Here the idea is flipped from the right to regulate to the obligation to provide additional services. Instead of saying, 'hey you can't gamble" to the gambler, we say, "hey, you have to subsidize the externalities of his gambling" to his neighbor. The druggy has the right to drugulate, but I don't have a right to not pay for the addict's access to hotlines, resources, etc (let alone the costs I have to pay for the infrastructural externalities).

I'm struggling to find the right words to describe this framework, but it's definitely a phenomenon.

And I want to add that very rarely would any individual be maximally inside one of these three frameworks across their political beliefs, but rather it's about the proportion and scope. All forms of general welfare do exist inside of this third frame, but it's traditionally seen as something to be limited and something that ideally comes from true disadvantage and need, not as a ballooning response to greasing self-destructive 'freedoms'.

To go full circle:

I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help

I completely disagree, and this is a runaway bad idea. If you want to make something legal / unregulated, then it stops being the government's job to prop it up against it's bad effects. Leave that to charity and NGOs.

If drugs are illegal, then I'm all for also pouring tons of money into helping people who use them. I'm all for a flexible justice system that can substitute help and supervised second chances for punishment and imprisonment. But if drugs are legal, then suck it up and use your freedoms responsibly. Don't demand the rest of the public to pay for the government to be the 'cool parent' who bails you out for the rest of your life.

I could not agree more.

I can think of very few world views I fight more hostile than one which boils down to "Other people have every right to do self destructive hedonism, but no responsibility to reap the obvious consequences. And you have no right to try to stop them, and total responsibility to deal with the consequences for them." It is the ethos of the spoiled child writ large.

That is a brilliant analysis. Trying to put it in my own words so that I can steal it, I realise that there is a British NHS way of framing it.

The three founding principles of the NHS are that: one, it is funded out of general taxation; two, free at the point of use; three, treatment is based on clinical need, regardless of the ability to pay. The fourth principle was silent; one didn't say out loud. The NHS didn't ask why the patient needed treatment. No-one was refused treatment because their illness was their own stupid fault.

There have always been worrywart who feared that the silence wouldn't hold. Treating liver disease and type II diabetes is expensive. Why is the tax payer on the hook for peoples' drunkenness and gluttony? The question gets asked and used to justify the government intervening in peoples lives, making alcohol harder to get to spare peoples livers, and making fatty food harder to get in the hope of shrinking their waist lines. Both to save the NHS money. Both current UK public policy.

The previous paragraph is very British. An alternative response to the very same question, uses the issue to justify cutting the funding to the NHS. Fund treatment for illnesses that strike at random, but stop subsidizing bad lifestyle choices.

I'm struggling to find the right words to describe this framework,...

Me too. Here is my attempt:

  • tight budget paternalism The government has the obligation to raise taxes to pay for rescuing people from the bad consequences of unwise choices AND the power to limit peoples choices by punishing expensively bad choices, with the aim of discouraging them.

  • no budget freedom The government protects people from others who would tell them: No! Bansturbators tolerate this in return for not having to pay for rescuing people from the consequences of their own bad choices.

  • budget busting freedom The government has the obligation to raise taxes to pay for rescuing people from the bad consequences of unwise choices. Bad choices multiply and get worse until the money runs out.

Another attempt:

When there are potentially bad choices that can be made, do you

Limit the ability to make such choices

Allow them to make such choices (and to suffer the consequences)

Support them in making such choices

I'm keen to get some mention of budget or money into the short name.

Why? I reckon that the way that Support fails is that the proponents come up with a plan. The plan is good in itself, but costs ten times what is politically feasible. The plan goes ahead anyway, with 10% of the funding that it really needs. Fails badly :-(

A good comment reminds us of Scott's epic critique of addiction research. Perhaps we don't have affordable answers to addiction, and Suport has a good plan that requires 100 times the politically feasible funding. Gets 1% of the funding it needs; fails very badly.

You propose a new dichotomy between right and left in the US at least. A very common online critique of the right is that it is happy to eternalize the cost to companies who defect (food stamps for Walmart employees and bailouts for banks). Your addition would be that the left believes we should do so at the level of the individual (instead of demanding personal responsibility).

It’s a sort of measure of the things we shrug at.

I honestly have to ask who the hell thought this was a good idea. Junkies, notoriously prudent and sensible people, will use the new policy wisely and rationally. Yes, that seems plausible.

I understand people want to be compassionate and to avoid harsh criminal penalties where rehabilitation is better, but this was like handing the keys of an off-licence to an alcoholic and expecting them to stick to the no-alcohol beer section.

I suspect Rat Park has something to do with the modern view on addiction and these bleeding heart laws.

The moral framework is

  1. drug addicts exist
  2. but they wouldn't, if society wasn't failing them in some way (too much like rat cage, not enough like rat paradise)
  3. since it is society's fault, we should not be putting addicts in jail. that's just cruel
  4. so, lets not put them in jail
  5. instead, offer them high quality mental health services instead!

That is, someone who was happy and healthy and content with life would not be an addict. Lets fix, I dunno, global capitalism or something.

I guess the problem is we, by far, can't offer anything like rat paradise. Further, high quality mental health services don't work very well at curing addiction. Worse, what the state offers isn't high quality but rather what you'd expect. Worse still, addicts in the full depth of addiction often don't want treatment. And finally, making life more like rat paradise doesn't stop people from becoming addicts.

As per Scott's critique Against Rat Park, people that are totally content and have every reason not to want to be hopelessly addicted tent city fentanyl addicts end up there anyway. Drugs really do re-wire your brain.

Many of us would strongly prefer Rat Park be true. The moment I heard that explanation I adopted it as my default view of addiction — the idea is too good to check. And it's one of those rare too-goods-to-check that transcends political faction. Are you a bleeding heart progressive? Rat Park morally pardons the downtrodden. A small government libertarian? Rat Park makes drug repression and imprisoning people for bodily choices unnecessary and barbaric. A political extremist of any variety? Rat Park condemns our current society as dystopic and in need of correction.

Sadly, it seems I (Party B) must admit that true bodily autonomy does actually create a class of useless junkies, who must either be supported or left to die in the street. It's a hard pill to swallow.

mostly I just see this as a problem with citizen's ballot initiatives, in general.

Any "citizen" can put anything they want on the ballot. All you need is signatures... a lot of signatures. 120k for a statute in Oregon, which is way more than any normal citizen can gather from their friends and family. But it's peanuts for a PAC, just pay a bunch of pros to go canvas the streets all day. They can gather that many signatures for anything, from bored/crazy people who just want to be left alone.

Once it's on the ballot... who knows? Who's got time to read that shit? Most voters are not exactly legal experts. They vote for team D/R, plus their local incumbent, and that's it. They do not weigh the fine points of "how is this thing implemented." They just take a quick look and see if it feels good.

If they vote against it... well, just reword it slightly. It'll be back on the ballot again next election. Keep trying, it will eventually pass.

Once it passes, it becomes state law. Possibly even part of the state constitution! Now the state legislature can't touch it, they have to implement it as it is. No amendments, no legal challenges. The police don't know what to do, so they just leave it be.

In this case, their was a noble idea (we should help drug addicts instead of throwing them in prison) but the ballot measure was worded in a terrible way (just let them do drugs) and that's what we got. Frankly I'm impressed Oregon was able to repeal it. We're still stuck with the fluoride ban, the arts tax, and the bottle deposit, which have also had disastrous effects, all from stupid ballot initiatives.

In Washington we have a rich guy funding initiatives to roll back unpopular laws that there was no popular demand for. For example, a capital gains tax, or the state withholding the location of runaway children if they say they’re transgender.

Our legislature has a problem in that we’ve been colonized by Californians fleeing the results of their voting and it’s become incredibly unlikely for Democrats to ever lose control. But we do have this one check on their most outlandish ideas.

Who is the rich guy?

Bryan Heywood, he started Let's Go Washington: https://letsgowashington.com/

Right. The state legislature did touch it in this case! They rolled parts of it back and re-criminalized drugs.

Initiative petitions are often a clown-show, but on the other hand, they're a good vehicle for testing risky policy that career politicians might never put their name on. If it's a huge disaster the career politicians can step in and take credit for rolling it back.

This seems good, actually!

Bit of a tangent, but what disastrous effects have been caused by having a bottle deposit?

It has effectively become a tax to subsidize vagrancy and drug addiction, because its an easy, low commitment way to get cash. A little while back oregon doubled the bottle deposit to $0.10 per bottle, and a dose of fentanyl is about $0.80. Junkies root through trash cans looking for redeemable cans (leaving any non-redeemable trash they remove on the ground, of course). Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash. The large bottle redemption centers have become magnets for crime and violence to an insane degree.

Meanwhile, Oregonians have a very high default rate of recycling in general (they are, after all, "good progressives" with all the good and bad that entails). The city of Portland has also decreed that residential trash pickup is biweekly, while recycling pickup is weekly, so recycling in general is heavily incentivized. I suspect that if they got rid of the bottle deposit it would make a minimal difference in the rate of can and bottle recycling.

Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash.

All-time great "solve for the equilibrium" moment.

yeah, all of that. the only thing I would add is that it has become a real hassle to actually return bottles, because of all the crazy homeless and security around bottle drop sites.

Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash.

So you're telling me there's a business opportunity to make the largest cases with the largest number of the smallest bottles possible that can be stamped with a bottle deposit, so as to reduce the wasted expense?

I was going to ask if you had evidence for the PACs farming signatures, but I realize that’s kind of why they exist. Organizations designed for collective action are doing stuff that’s too big or tedious for individuals.

So…how should it work instead? Do you rely on the legislature to do everything? What if it’s gridlocked, held up by one brinksman, or otherwise nonresponsive? The optimal amount of shitty ballot initiatives is not zero.

Why do you think that ballot initiatives are worth the costs?

Oh, I’m not sure they are. Or rather—the marginal ballot initiative probably isn’t worth it. I support them in principle.

I wrote about my experience with the Texas process here. All but one of these passed. Not surprising, as contrary to the OP, Texas requires 2/3 majorities in its legislature to put something on the ballot. In another state, all of these could have been passed outright. We just had to comply with our infamously tough constitution.

But what about that last one? Texans decided not to make a modification to judge retirement ages, even though the legislature already thought it was fine. I suspect this arose from a reflexive distaste for one-time exceptions.

So there’s the steelman for ballot initiatives. Sometimes the game of telephone results in a misalignment between people and policy. Maybe it’s from partisanship, or misinformation, or different incentives. The ballot initiative lets voters correct such an error directly. That sort of civic responsiveness is good for morale.

For additional evidence for the signature farming: the existence of companies like Fieldworks, or the fact that you can find the job "Political Canvasser" on job search engines and it pays $25/hour. Not a lot of places for that money to come from but PACs.

I don't know, man. Political science is hard. But it seems to me that banning ballot initiatives and having all laws go through the legislature of professional lawmakers is not a bad situation.

One simple improvement might be to increase the pay of state legislators. A lot of them get paid pathetic salaries, like less than minimum wage. So either they're rich people doing this as a hobby, or they're indebted to lobby groups. Make it a full time, paying occupation.

State legislators just don't do that much work for it to need to be a full-time occupation. If anything, state legislators should be doing less work less frequently and there should be enough of them that being a state legislator is a hobby for regular people, e.g., in New Hampshire there is 1 state legislator for every ~3,500 residents and they only meet intermittently for a few months every year.

If we look at federal legislators, they do make good money and command substantial office/staff budgets. Does this stop them from being indebted to lobby groups? Does it make federal law better? It doesn't look like it. Laws are still badly written with frequent intralaw contradictions.

I’m generally in favor of technocratic governance. In this case, though, I think more insulation from the voter base is a bad thing.

Yeah, sometimes voters are going to make bad or short-term decisions. Sometimes lawmakers will do that too, no matter how well you pay them. The incentives aren’t always aligned. Letting the professionals work may be more efficient, but it also errs towards regulatory burden, caution, graft.

I’d say that the ballot initiative is best suited for procedural and constitutional changes, since those are most likely to be misaligned.

In this case, their was a noble idea (we should help drug addicts instead of throwing them in prison)

Was it noble?

It looks like the sort of help on offer was help to do more drugs.

Prison is a kind of help.

If one compares drug decriminalization, or general decriminalization policies with countries that follow law and order, the later not only have less drug abuse but also don't have to imprison that many people. The influence of such policy of drug criminalization for most of the world with such policies is for people successfully be dissuaded from abusing harmful drugs.

Drug abuse is a societal scourge and it is another example how libertine policies and attitutes lead to greater suffering but also greater imposition on people's freedom than the sacrifice required from making good trade offs and abstaining from harmful behavior. For the loss of what is good by becoming addicted to drugs is quite greater.

At the end of the day the libertine's have a cope that their policy leads to worse consequences but people get good and hard what they choose. But we shouldn't accept this cope way off thinking. The worse outcomes and society sucking more under such policies is good reason to not respect this course.

Same could also be said with obesity, or even the long term problems of lack of children.

We live in an age where there is a crisis of lack of smaller self sacrifices, for ultimate a greater negative end. In line with the proverb "An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure".

Now, you can't force people to have children, or not get fat, in the same way you can enforce criminalization of drugs, although there are things you could do, but the moralists on these issues are correct. Contrarily the people who have been spreading apathy and downplaying have had a corrosive effect on society.

Beyond just policy, there is also a morality involved with society that does end up relating to what happens and pressures people and also affects the law. So we can judge and contrast the libertine morality with more conservative one on drugs and other issues.

The ridicule of the people trying to dissuade people from bad behaviors and such campaigns, especially on drugs have been one of the most unjust reactions and self destructive ones for society. That kind of judgementalism against wise moralism is disastrous. We need the right kind of moralism. A good society is one where there is moral pressure in the right directions. While a completely non judgemental society is impossible.

Now that we see decline in various important issues, we should appreciate more the conservatives of the past who maintained certain good mores and actually fought to preserve them. Of course you need the right balance of enforcement, or conservatism, but modern conservatives have mostly not been too much on the excessive conservative side in the recent past on such issues. Seeing the effect of liberals taking control I do appreciate actual conservatives more, while in the past I had more mixed feelings about them. People should go back and see what each faction was pushing and claiming, examine how things played out and praise those who got them right, and criticize those who got them wrong.

Oh and the point is good trade offs and knowing what you are doing instead of relying on wishful thinking. Drug restriction policies have had a good track record in modernity. So the idea is for a general ethic of societal discipline for long term good on important areas. Still, no reason to enforce restrictions in a manner that the excessive restriction is more damaging to society than the gain. Or at least to persist where it would be unwise. See covid lockdowns which have been the more excessive uncharted waters type of policy, although serious enough diseases could justify such impositions.

If one compares drug decriminalization, or general decriminalization policies with countries that follow law and order, the later not only have less drug abuse but also don't have to imprison that many people.

How do you explain the entire history of the failed War on Drugs, which seems to contradicts this?

The war on drugs policies in most countries that have been followed have resulted in low prison populations and lack of drug abuse.

In the case of the USA, from what I have read much of the drug related prison population was there related to more serious crimes and they got them related to the drugs. Or drug dealers who sell poison to people. USA is a more violent country with more violent crime and so a larger share of imprisonment actually does have a protective element.

We have seen indeed an increase of crime as decriminalization and reduction of prison population has become the goal.

A small percentage of the population commit the most violent crime, so rather than encouraging more people to join them by decriminalization policies (which will not lead to more people imprisoned as crime increases since we got decriminalization), I would side with the majority preyed upon by violent criminals and against the criminals.

Now, you can't force people to have children, or not get fat, in the same way you can enforce criminalization of drugs, although there are things you could do, but the moralists on these issues are correct. Contrarily the people who have been spreading apathy and downplaying have had a corrosive effect on society.

Are you sure you can put the blame for the obesity epidemic at the feet of morality? I don't know how thoroughly the Chemical Hunger hypothesis has been discredited, but it seemed plausible to me and a bunch of the issues they raised make it impossible for me to take morality based explanations for the obesity epidemic seriously - unless you want to claim that there's a correlation between altitude and moral fortitude.

Though that said I am actually open to a more mystical morality play interpretation. The idea that environmental damage caused by oil extraction (the same energy resource responsible for our current prosperity) is poisoning the population in a way that makes them more dependent upon extravagant energy expenditure propped up by fossil fuels is poetic enough that I want to believe it is true even if it actually isn't.

The chemical hunger hypothesis is not the default hypothesis for the rise of obesity. The default is that we have a rise of a more obisogenic environment but it is also hard not to see the rise in general of detrimental behaviors related to superstimuli and people avoiding better for long term health of society self sacrifice.

Anyway, the blame of the individual can be reduced by the fact that people are affected by society and by what habits it fosters. And part of the default thesis is that more addictive "hyper palatable" food is affordable and more available to people today.

People eat more calories, and have larger plates.

I think moralism of the kind promoted by certain people which is only about the individual is going to be inadequate and you need greater societal transformations which go further. Japan is an example of a place where the norms at such that promote lower obesity, while their cuisine still has plenty of tasty foods.

One of my points is that if people adopt good habits early, and a society under the reigns of sensible moralism promotes long term greater happiness with less of the worse outcomes that arise from a society that avoids the self discipline. We know for example that is much harder to lose weight after you become obese than to remain fit. Same with drugs, easier to not become addicted than to get rid of the habit. This also relates to the valuable ancient understanding of freedom which isn't the only way of freedom that matters, but it does. Which is about people being free from their vices and living a life that better fulfills their potential. The later also relates with modern understanding, which we have seen in various metrics a decline upon, even if in other metrics we have seen a rise.

Part of the hostility to this kind of moralism has to do also with avoiding blame, and responsibility, but it is true that the decline in such norms has lead to a more irresponsible society with worse consequences for it. So lets admit that unpleasant truth and seek pragmatic responses.

The chemical hunger hypothesis is not the default hypothesis for the rise of obesity.

I agree with this, but I don't think that actually provides a justification for the "moral failing" hypothesis - the moral failing hypothesis just can't explain what's actually happening. There are just too many odd correlations and relationships within the data for the moral failing hypothesis to be that plausible - at most it can be a small contributor to part of the problem. What's the 'moral failing' explanation for why obesity is correlated with altitude/water-tables? Don't forget that this obesity epidemic is impacting animals as well - it doesn't seem plausible to me that the decrease in willingness to sacrifice for society has caused feral rats to start overeating and getting fat.

You mentioned Japan, but I found myself losing weight there extremely quickly and easily without making any changes to my moral behaviour or character. Similarly, shifts in my weight that occurred outside Japan seemed much more correlated to environmental exposure than to the specifics of diet/behaviour - I have personal experience with rapid weightloss, and the moral failure hypothesis just did not match up to my inner experience at all. I found that when I (accidentally at the time) lowered my exposure to the kind of environmental pollutants hypothesised to cause obesity what followed was a sudden increase in energy and a decrease in appetite. Previously I'd lost weight by caloric restriction and strict dietary control which required a lot of willpower, but that loss was correlated with a lot of negative side effects and lethargy (as the chemical hunger hypothesis would suggest) - whereas I actually had to exert willpower in order to avoid losing weight on the "cut out pollutants" diet, rather than the opposite.

I just can't see the justification for endorsing the morality hypothesis when there are so many facts that it just utterly fails to explain - and there's no real predictive power there either. If you're right, we'd be able to look back at other instances of societal trust/morality collapsing and find obesity epidemics there too - but to the best of my knowledge, this just hasn't happened. I'm more than happy to be convinced that your hypothesis has legs, but you're going to have to provide a bit more evidence and explain a bunch of the questions that chemical hunger raises before I can accept it as more than a small contribution.

I'm willing to believe that our society has less self-sacrifice in it - hell, I'm substantially less willing to shoulder sacrifices for the sake of my society, but I think that's in large part due to my society endorsing and encouraging things I morally disagree with. There are a bunch of corrupt criminals shoving their faces into the collective trough of society, and I see no reason to make personal sacrifices just to empower them and leave me and my family worse off - as far as I'm concerned, making personal sacrifices in support of the Global American Empire is far more immoral than restricting my circle of care to those close and dear to me.

I found that when I (accidentally at the time) lowered my exposure to the kind of environmental pollutants hypothesised to cause obesity what followed was a sudden increase in energy and a decrease in appetite. Previously I'd lost weight by caloric restriction and strict dietary control which required a lot of willpower, but that loss was correlated with a lot of negative side effects and lethargy (as the chemical hunger hypothesis would suggest) - whereas I actually had to exert willpower in order to avoid losing weight on the "cut out pollutants" diet, rather than the opposite.

Could you elaborate on this? What was the pollutant you lowered your exposure to, and how did you do that accidentally?

Sorry for taking so long to reply - I went on a holiday and don't post on the Motte when away from work.

As for the pollutant, I believe it was lithium. I got into drinking black cold brew coffee which required me to filter all of my water, and I discovered an incredibly tasty recipe for roast vegetables. Because I was peeling all the vegetables, I wasn't consuming anything that directly contacted food packaging without being washed. Similarly, the main source of nutrition for me was potato/sweet potato - and the weight just dropped off me with ease. This is exactly what the slime mold time mold people said would happen when I removed lithium exposure from my diet, but I did this accidentally (thank you recipetineats) and before I even heard the chemical hunger hypothesis.

You mentioned Japan, but I found myself losing weight there extremely quickly and easily without making any changes to my moral behaviour or character.

By living in a society governed by a different morality, you were exposed to a less obesogenic environment, with smaller plates, less hyper palatable food, I probably should have mentioned this too, but also food choices that are less calorie dense, and more satiating probably too. You probably also mimicked how other people behaved and how they ate.

Basically, you benefited by the fact that you were living among the Japanese in a society organized and ruled by their laws and public morality. Yes that does kind of change some of the calculus of individual vs collective influences which are the result of multiple individuals behaving in a way that promotes a certain dominant behaviors and habits.

Also, in comparison to someone consuming enough calories that would make them overweight, by behaving in a way that is better for your long term, you did change your behavior in a manner that was an improvement morally. The amount of self sacrifice once society adopts better norms might not be that great, indeed. This is a selling point!

It actually isn't that big of a sacrifice, to follow from the beginning the kind of habit that avoid harmful drugs, don't eat too much calories, you walk around (which studies have shown to reduce depression). The point is that it is a worthy trade off and the decline of moralism has lead to greater suffering that is definitely not worth it. I guess, it is debatable how difficult it is to do so once you have experienced the other habits, and what would happen if we put obese people in places like Japan on the long term and where their weight would stabilize at. I know what would happen if you replaced the Japanese with enough of the obese, Japan will become fat as they will be following those habits and norms and foods and the food industry, laws and public expectations, shaming, all will change.

I found that when I (accidentally at the time) lowered my exposure to the kind of environmental pollutants hypothesised to cause obesity what followed was a sudden increase in energy and a decrease in appetite. Previously I'd lost weight by caloric restriction and strict dietary control which required a lot of willpower, but that loss was correlated with a lot of negative side effects and lethargy (as the chemical hunger hypothesis would suggest) - whereas I actually had to exert willpower in order to avoid losing weight on the "cut out pollutants" diet, rather than the opposite.

But why are the pollutants the issue and not the fact that the available food you had to choose from was less likely to make you fat? Because lower calories and more satiating per calorie. Less amount of oils probably too.

Some foods are also inherently more satiating. Harder to become fat on them than on fast food. Hence, by changing the dominant diet and promoting more Japan style the norm that people should eat say balanced meals, not too many calories, prefer more satiating foods, the result will be a reduction in obesity.

Too bad for the fast food industry which will decline, but a type of food industry is here to stay even with people eating less.

Like the perceived impossibility of crime in places like El Salvador where Bukele was able to deal with it in a manner where the trade off was certainly worth it.

I guess, one could note that action is more effective than convinsing people. Maybe just changing the available food choices would end up resulting in less obesity than just talking about individual responsibility. Although there is a symbiotic relationship between big business and consumers consuming bigger plates, and more addictive hyper palatable food.

I'm willing to believe that our society has less self-sacrifice in it - hell, I'm substantially less willing to shoulder sacrifices for the sake of my society, but I think that's in large part due to my society endorsing and encouraging things I morally disagree with. There are a bunch of corrupt criminals shoving their faces into the collective trough of society, and I see no reason to make personal sacrifices just to empower them and leave me and my family worse off - as far as I'm concerned, making personal sacrifices in support of the Global American Empire is far more immoral than restricting my circle of care to those close and dear to me.

Well, I agree with you that the GAE isn't worth sacrificing your life for it and that is a hostile empire to you and yours. I sympathize entirely with that. I am also not a keen of the negative influence it has by trying to promote cultural marxism, or the warmongering and color revolutions. I am more talking about sacrifices for the greater good of the people involved.

Indeed, parts of the problems of GAE is anarchotyranny and decriminalization policies promoted by elites like Soros, biggest corporations endorsing BLM, etc, etc. The changes I advocate, including other changes not focused upon here will go against plenty of what the people in charge of GAE preach to the detriment of those under their influence.

I agree with this, but I don't think that actually provides a justification for the "moral failing" hypothesis - the moral failing hypothesis just can't explain what's actually happening. There are just too many odd correlations and relationships within the data for the moral failing hypothesis to be that plausible - at most it can be a small contributor to part of the problem. What's the 'moral failing' explanation for why obesity is correlated with altitude/water-tables? Don't forget that this obesity epidemic is impacting animals as well - it doesn't seem plausible to me that the decrease in willingness to sacrifice for society has caused feral rats to start overeating and getting fat.

I recall reading a lesswrong post linked in the old subreddit which argued convincingly against the chemical hypothesis and directly addressed the water altitude arguement.https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium

Ed Yudkowsky doesn't even accept the truth that is CICO, so don't take this as me endorsing rationalist thinkers as an authority. Just on its own merits I found then when I read it that article to be good and made a better case than the slime mold time mold blog.https://slimemoldtimemold.com/

That article would do a better job arguing specifically against the chemicals hypothesis than I would, so I would recommend you read it for the counter.

By living in a society governed by a different morality, you were exposed to a less obisogenic environment, with smaller plates, less hyper palatable food, I probably should have mentioned this too, but also food choices that are less obisogenic and more satiating and less calorie dense probably too. You probably also mimicked how other people behaved and how they ate.

But why is the pollutants the issue and not the fact that the available food you had to choose from was less likely to make you fat? Because lower calories and more satiating per calorie. Less amount of oils probably too.

I ate vast quantities of extremely fatty and oily luxury cuisine, to the point that I had ¥9000 breakfasts five days in a row. I also had more than one occasion where native Japanese people told me that I was eating a lot. At the same time, I had much more oily and fatty food - ramen, A5 marbling wagyu, otoro tuna, bizarrely flavoured gourmet kit-kats, crepes, viennese coffee, montblancs, fried street food, etc. I still lost over 5kg in three weeks. At the same time, my subjective experience matched up to when I accidentally adopted a diet similar to the potato diet recommended by the chemical hunger crowd - I felt like I had vast amounts of energy and simply ate whenever I was hungry or wanted to taste something interesting. In contrast, when I used willpower to eat an incredibly restrictive diet consisting largely of unpalatable food (protein sparing modified fasting) I found myself with intense cravings and lethargy that I only overcame with the usage of caffeine and whatever other stimulants they included in preworkout powders). This is why I blamed the pollutants rather than any sort of moral difference - because that's how it matched up to what I actually experienced.

I recall reading that counterpiece and then the SMTM refutation of it - but I'm not too eager to rehash that argument given that I haven't bothered keeping up with the literature for the past two years. If there are any argumentative data/food nerds here, I'd love to read a serious discussion on this hypothesis! I took a quick glance at the SMTM blog and they are still doing research on the basis of the chemical hunger hypothesis, so I'm not too sure that it has been comprehensively defeated. But even if it was, my own personal experiences are not ones that match up to the moral failing hypothesis at all. That all said, I do think there is actually a moral element to societal influence on food choices. The biggest difference from my perspective was that if you try to eat cheaply in Japan without access to a kitchen you would largely be eating riceballs, seaweed, fish, soybeans and other largely healthy choices. Trying to do the same in western nations leads to eating some incredibly unhealthy products (HFCS, McDonalds, etc), and this is the kind of issue that I think a healthy government would step in and address - but god knows I wouldn't trust current western governments to do this well...

CICO is just a fact which we know from countless experiments of bodybuilders who count the calories they eat and from randomized control trials.

I ate vast quantities of extremely fatty and oily luxury cuisine, to the point that I had ¥9000 breakfasts five days in a row.

I guess this supports the fact that while the environment matters, people are also going to eat more out of their own desire and change the environment too. If there was a greater share of people with your desires over average Japanese, this would affect the Japanese food industry...

At the same time, my subjective experience matched up to when I accidentally adopted a diet similar to the potato diet recommended by the chemical hunger crowd - I felt like I had vast amounts of energy and simply ate whenever I was hungry or wanted to taste something interesting. In contrast, when I used willpower to eat an incredibly restrictive diet consisting largely of unpalatable food (protein sparing modified fasting) I found myself with intense cravings and lethargy that I only overcame with the usage of caffeine and whatever other stimulants they included in preworkout powders). This is why I blamed the pollutants rather than any sort of moral difference - because that's how it matched up to what I actually experienced.

French fries are a food that was associated with obesity but potatoes are otherwise a satiating food.

The best diet advice is against people going with very restrictive diets either in terms of removing food categories, or dropping drastically calories. Going more smoothly down but keeping at it and not reverting back, until you reach the point where it would be a good weight to maintain. Of course if you go very restrictive in diet you will have significant cravings.

There are people who have success with more restrictive diets, but it isn't necessary. And it necessitates more investigation and effort to get all the vital vitamins, minerals.

If you examine the history of food, there have been restrictive fad diets that were unnecessarily restrictive. I am more about wise self sacrifice and willpower relating to that.

Also, the willpower required to turn things around is different one someone becomes obese. Becoming that changes your appetite. It is still worth it, even if harder and there are also always ways you can fall down worse. Avoiding getting diabetes, heart disease, and other problems is well worth it, or reducing the severity. But it is even more important to do things right early, so people don't become obese to begin with.

Anyway, you decided to buy the meals you mention, and same previously. Surely, willpower plays a role in that? Although it was still bellow what you usually eat in the USA if you lost weight. Maybe you also were more active.

I guess a part of this has to do with having the right norms individually and collectively, and the term willpower might not capture it entirely, because it also relates with correct knowledge and action relating to that. While another part of it does relate with self sacrifice for one's own greater benefit but also a will to promote this norm in general. Moreover, like it or not, how much individuals decide to consume does affect the industry. And what the industry tries to market and promote, does affect the consumer.

The biggest difference from my perspective was that if you try to eat cheaply in Japan without access to a kitchen you would largely be eating riceballs, seaweed, fish, soybeans and other largely healthy choices. Trying to do the same in western nations leads to eating some incredibly unhealthy products (HFCS, McDonalds, etc), and this is the kind of issue that I think a healthy government would step in and address - but god knows I wouldn't trust current western governments to do this well...

Yes, I agree.

I took a long break from posting to go on holiday so feel free not to respond to this post in an ancient thread, but I wanted to reply anyway.

CICO is just a fact which we know from countless experiments of bodybuilders who count the calories they eat and from randomized control trials.

Yes, and I'm not disagreeing with it at all. This particular sort of diet intervention involves tackling the CO part. The claim is that these particular diets change some part of your internal chemistry in a way that prevents calories out from decreasing along with calories in. If this hypothesis is correct you can essentially get a free ECA stack with no side effects by shifting food consumption patterns in ways that prevent you from consuming environmental contaminants. That's absolutely worth investigating, and it would be regardless of whether CICO is true or not (I think it is, for the record).

Anyway, you decided to buy the meals you mention, and same previously. Surely, willpower plays a role in that?

In the sense that I actively wanted to eat tasty food that I could only purchase and consume during my limited time in Japan, yes. I wasn't paying any attention to my diet.

Although it was still bellow what you usually eat in the USA if you lost weight. Maybe you also were more active.

I don't live in the USA (but I do live in a FVEYS nation so not much of a difference). At the same time, I stopped going to the gym and working out while I was there - so while I did walk a lot more, I'm not sure how the total amount of exercise changed beyond losing the lifting portion.

Ultimately the core of my disagreement with your view of willpower being the determinant is that I have lost weight both through a lengthy and sustained act of willpower (protein sparing modified fasting + intense exercise routine), and through a dietary intervention that required no willpower at all - and in fact actually required me to exert mental effort/energy in order to eat enough junk food that my weight was stable rather than falling. There was a very clear subjective difference in my inner experience between the two, and the second felt a lot "healthier" - I had more energy and was more capable in a variety of ways when going through that second diet, and having gone through both types of intervention I'm actively trying the potato diet because I found that something equivalent worked that much better for me.

There are studies that show that the addition of vinegar in a carb rich meal lowers glucose and insulin response in healthy individuals, which is associated with weight loss.

My understanding is that Japanese food has a lot of vinegar in it, which may have contributed. I don’t know if it would offset 9000 calorie meals.

I had a lot of obviously bad food that didn't have any vinegar in it - but it probably was present. That said the meals themselves were 9000 yen, not calories (big difference).

Doesn’t the phrase “law and order” assume the conclusion?

There is a trivial way to have a perfectly law-abiding society: just don’t have laws. Descend into the Hobbesian state of nature. The problems with this approach make it very unpopular, of course, in a manner I’d describe as lacking “order.” Thus, Portland.

I’m making this distinction because decriminalization has not, in fact, raised the prison population. This Laffer-curve equivalent is cute but probably not accurate.

No, it is disingenuous and anti-intellectual to pretend that the phrase law and order assumes the conclusion. The conclusion that law and order is different than decriminalization is a given, and it is an exercise in trying to promote confusion and misunderstanding of reality for political purposes to make this an issue.

The kind of gotcha split hairing that submits nothing that is out there to win everything that is bad for discussion and for societal norms. Not for the motte which doesn't matter in a special way, but for society which matters and is lead astray by any prominence of such approaches. You are trying to shut down discussion here since if we can't distinguish between decriminalization or law and order policies, we can't actually discuss the issue. Furthermore, we are also diverted to discussing what we shouldn't be wasting our time on.

Not everything is negotiable. If your approach is a decriminalization approach, you should own it.

There are sufficient differences between different approaches to earn them different qualitative descriptions. There is really a libertine, decriminalization approach on drugs that supporters value and a law and order approach that is valued by its supporters. Different supporters believe in different narratives, one of which is correct and the other incorrect.

And we should NOT be wasting time making this clear, but spending the time examining the trade offs and wisely choosing based on having wise priorities as a society.

Plus, it is especially unwise to raise this distinction in response to a post that argues that decriminalization drug policies lead to societal decay and drug abuse and law and order policies promote better functioning society. It is like you were hyper focused on winning a point.

I’m making this distinction because decriminalization has not, in fact, raised the prison population. This Laffer-curve equivalent is cute but probably not accurate.

But my comment was about non decriminalization policies. I wasn't commenting about decriminalization resulting in more imprisonment. I was claiming that drug decriminalization lead to destructive societally drug abuse, while drug criminalization policies don't end up having to imprison that many people.

Although, if drug decriminalization policies raise behaviors that are criminal but come along with policies of general decriminalization, including certain areas in a city lacking police enforcement and becoming den of junkies, that is also a problem. Effectively, you raised crime but aren't enforcing it.

You aren't really addressing the substance of the issue.

There is a trivial way to have a perfectly law-abiding society: just don’t have laws. Descend into the Hobbesian state of nature. The problems with this approach make it very unpopular, of course, in a manner I’d describe as lacking “order.” Thus, Portland.

Of course if you don't have laws, you obviously don't have law and order but the opposite and someone defining this as law and order is promoting inaccurate labels and diverting understanding to a lower level. Plus distracting people through having them to discuss with their inaccurate description from the substance of what is happening. Actually, by not having laws you are obviously going to have huge problems with all sorts of crimes, and people in the state of nature societies are full of rape, murder, etc, etc.

The ideal of state of nature being idealic is just a falsehood that crumbles when meeting with reality and actually examining hunter gatherer societies. Civilization, and societal norms don't constrain people from an idealized state, but most of them tend to lead to societies that lack the kind of abuses found in hunter gatherer ones. So, I wouldn't even describe as philosophy but as a wrong concept the idea of an ideal state of nature that is undermined by civilization. I wouldn't describe the very idea of less strict law, if relating to a particular law as anti intellectual as it can be valid of course.

But you absolutely after a point too low and you got libertine norms and decriminalization, and after a point enforcement you got law and order and maybe after a point of strict laws you might even have totalitarian societies. There might be a subjectivity to any of these standards but they do exist and deserve a label so we actually understand the world. Only by disagreeing with an example should one disagree with the label, as general deconstruction is anti-intellectual.

In a similar note, understanding that perfection doesn't exist anywhere, I would distinguish a free society, from an unfree one based on degrees, with the free one having to pass a sufficient standard to qualify. And as always there are trade offs. I am willing to admit that some things I am willing to support might come at a cost of certain freedoms. For example, if I supported lockdowns on the basis of thinking the result to be worth it, I would be asking for a sacrifice of certain freedom, based on seeking a certain benefit.

I would be engaging in partisanship and sophistry if I didn't admit it. Which is part of our problem, people want to have their cake and eat it too. Still, certain trade offs are better in terms of other trade offs since the sacrifice is smaller versus benefit, and even in freedom there is also both a sacrifice but also a benefit. What fits in the proverb of an ounce of prevention, a pound of cure, where the sacrifice is less than the necessitating later sacrifice, including what people are going to have to do to treat themselves and we expect and know they will do to deal with. As the alternative of not caring about even treatment will be even worse. An idealized claim of libertine freedom doesn't deal with that pragmatically.

So when it comes to not admitting anything, I would just marginalize this kind of sophists who try to deconstruct us from useful understanding often in partisan directions, so this kind of fruitless debate is rare and also the public norm and morality is to look down to it and focus on reality. With having an understanding and distinction between sophistry and actual valid points. Indeed a lot of our problems relate with people preferring convenient narratives over what is true. Including politically correct narratives which are meant to shut down further analysis.

I don’t believe I’m pretending anything, thank you very much.

Up until 2020 Portland had law but not enough order. After decriminalizing in that year, it had less law and less order. But this didn’t magically give it “greater imposition on people’s freedom.” I don’t think you can show that decriminalization made people less free. It made them more free to make bad choices.

Portugal is the usual example. People became more free, and made bad choices. But they remained a law-abiding, ordered society. Their situation has improved a lot since implementing the policy. Decriminalization is compatible with order.

How does your theory explain Portugal?

The idea that not only the freedom to consume drugs matters, but also the freedom from addiction, or from crime, is not something that can be so easily dismissed as "magically" giving an imposition. It is a real trade off where there is a net loss for freedom. Similiarly a hunter gatherer society might lack certain rules, but the freedom of its members is undermined by all the crime, especially the murders and the rapes.

Not taking that seriously is an intellectual blindspot which makes policy failures inevitable. Especially a blindspot that is dismissive from you when I already made the argument. So what I would conclude is that you would just prefer those genuine problems of freedom relating to bad choices that affect others but also might result in a loss of autonomy for the person it self, to not be taken seriously. But they should be put on the scale, even if you prefer they weren't.

Now, the Portugal case is a more complicated one, and a case of a decriminalization that is closer to the center than what happened in Portland Oregon. Which isn't to say I consider it centrist, but definetly closer than Oregon's.

I don't have the one sidedly positive view you have about Portugal's reforms. See bellow for a contrary view.

https://www.dalgarnoinstitute.org.au/images/resources/pdf/dart/The_Truth_on_Portugal_December_2018.pdf

Even the Wanshington post which rather partisan in the liberal direction is willing to promote some criticism

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/

Portugal still forces drug addicts to follow treatments and selling drugs is illegal. Even its supporters claim that "Cops still work aggressively to break up major drug gangs and arrest people committing drug-related crimes like theft. They also disrupt open-air drug markets like the ones that have emerged in some U.S. cities."

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/25/how-portugal-eased-its-opioid-epidemic-while-u-s-drug-deaths-skyrocketed/

Cops also pressure drug users to follow programs.

The reality is that the decriminalization side who bring Portugal as a positive example, or claim to be trying to do something similar, tend to be quite partisan and lacking in intellectual humility that requires genuinely dealing with trade offs. Ultimately, they operate based on tunnel vision. The end result is the negative story of the problems I mentioned of rise of drug abuse, violent crimes, certain areas becoming full of junkies. If this side were seriously trying to deal things in a wiser manner from various angles, some of these issues would have been ameliorated.

See also this: https://unherd.com/newsroom/blue-states-are-learning-the-wrong-lessons-from-portugal/

On all sorts of issues we have seen this vulgar excessive policy and movement as more representative of what you are getting in response to the more conservative and restrictive in those directions past, rather than a right balance between getting rid of only some conservative restrictions but only in a considerate way. Or even compensating by some new restrictions like forcing drug users to get treatment. Changing things while retaining the benefits of the more conservative time is really hard. At worst is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Since this discussion is about Oregon, bringing up Portugal as a winning move is trying to find a loophole. When actually the vulgar policy is what decriminalization movement is more represented by today and pushes.

The pro decriminalization side in the USA promised in fact that they could push not only drug decriminalization but other policies of decriminalization, reduction of imprisonment without rising crime rates, and other problems. This failed to be the case. Contrarily those that wisely predicted the rising violence and social problems were proven correct.

This shows why it is so important that in practice we can and should distinguish between a law and order side and a decriminalization side whose approach does undermine law and order in outcomes.

The point of bringing up Portugal is that there must be more than one way to get to “order.” Going full Reagan is no guarantee, or America would look pretty different. Going full Portland obviously doesn’t work either. But there is a Portugal option where decriminalization with teeth improves the situation.

And it did improve—the Australia link makes a big deal out of going from 3.4% to 3.7% having used any drug. Never mind that those numbers went back down in the next five years. They’re doing the thing where picking the right endpoints lets them support whatever they want.

I think this is partly just Oregon being Oregon. Oregon has historically been a leader in direct democracy and ballot access (first to use ballot initiatives, first to directly elect Senators, first to use universal vote-by-mail), and as such they sometimes pass half-baked initiative policies that are unwound later (like the initiative-based supermajority requirements on local tax increases).

Fortunately, Oregon seems pretty open to actually testing policy to see how it works -- this is the state that literally A/B tested Medicaid expansion. It was also, surprisingly, the first state to roll back federal covid quarantine requirements, and kept them rolled back after seeing that they were no longer making any difference.

You may be right though that disillusionment is setting in with certain liberal policies. Oregon's green-space-preserving laws that make development outside of cities almost impossible are also coming under attack recently as the housing situation worsens. At least Oregon finally overrode labor interests and its general nanny-state tendencies enough to let residents pump their own gas.

First off, I'll note the schadenfreude, as someone who has absolutely zero percent sympathy for users of what surveys would describe as "other substances". What did they think was going to happen? As usual, progressives don't bother to check what the European policies they plan on aping actually are, or what context makes them work.

But "public drug users still get beaten by the police and forced into treatment" speaks to a lot of progressive biases. First, drugs are at least not-evil, they aren't the cause of problems, quitting drugs is mostly ancillary to improving your life. Second, requiring people to make good decisions for the sake of themselves is anathema. Covid vaccine mandates were justified with the danger to grandma, not to yourself. Third, the hard arm of state power should scrupulously avoid hitting already unfortunate people, even though the already-unfortunate are the ones that most need to be smote by state power.

Now I have opposite biases, but the general progressive ideas seem both interesting to note and explanatory as to why the idea appealed.

What did they think was going to happen? As usual, progressives don't bother to check what the European policies they plan on aping actually are, or what context makes them work.

While this is true, isn't it the case that the decriminalization of hard drugs has failed in Europe as well?

It failed much more softly because "decriminalization" may be the term in use for what Portugal did, but it is not an accurate term. As far as I know Portugal's drug legalization turned out to be a bad idea, but it was not a disaster.

The same logic can be used in favor of banning private gun ownership, and for that matter private knife ownership too.

You can take a fraction of those overdose deaths on yourself if you want to, and it makes some sense in pure cause-and-effect calculation. But I would not say this is a good argument against liberal drug policy. If you lived in a country where private knife ownership was banned and you voted to legalize private knife ownership, you could also take some of the resulting knife deaths on yourself, and that too would make some sense. But it would not necessarily be a good argument against private knife ownership.

There are already laws against most of the obnoxious behaviors that heavy drug users often engage in. Society can simultaneously legalize recreational drugs and at the same time do a better job of enforcing the laws against those obnoxious behaviors.

I think criminalizing both proxies and also directly the harms is sometimes beneficial and is already the case in other cases:

-Child molestation is illegal AND so is convicted pedos living near schools or even working with children.

-Causing a traffic accident is illegal AND so are speeding and driving the wrong way

-Speeding and driving the wrong way are illegal AND so is driving while high or drunk.

Very compelling and cogent read. Thanks for the post. I agree, seems obvious to me now that we are in a dynamical system where we need to push and release to get balance. Child care, criminology, whatever it just seems basic that you cant just slide over to one end of the scale and expect good results...

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.

I was hyped about it myself, even though I had read in enough detail about Portugal as an analogue to have some concerns.

I was also concerned about the location of running the experiment. I wasn't familiar with Portugal's drug culture prior to its efforts, but I am at least passingly familiar with the culture of drug use on the west coast and its role as a haven. Even if Portland's weather is terrible in comparison to San Diego, they were starting off the bat with lax policing and a permissive populace. The referendum was putting in writing what was really already going on.

Was 4 years long enough to run this experiment? Could it have performed better in a more neutral territory to remove some confounding variables?

I thought the same thing too until I saw that Oregon's overdose rate was among the lowest in the country at time the law was enacted and continues to be relatively low even after the recent spike. West Virginia has the worst rate in the country and it saw a similar doubling over roughly the same period, and that isn't exactly a lax jurisdiction. I wonder how much of the surge is simply due to an unusually low base rate in an area where you'd expect it to be higher.

What are the numerator and denominator in the overdose rate?

It's peaked, in as much as they can't get any more liberal and have nowhere to go but down.

More effort than this, please.

It's a fair cop. I'll do better.

This sort of reminds me of teh debate over statistical trends right after somewhere legalizes prostitution.

I'll say the same thing I have there: the long-term new status quo of a dramatic policy change is hard to deduce from the short-term reactions, and the trends in a world where something is legal everywhere are different from the trends where it's illegal everywhere except for one place.

Of course it would be better for the legalization argument if the day after everything was legalized, overdose deaths dropped 50% and never went up again. But that was probably never realistic...

The long-term vision is that we move to a model of treatment rather than criminalization, and lifting stigmas and fear of arrest makes it easier for people to find treatment or be targeted for it. But was a comprehensive and experienced treatment infrastructure deployed on the same day that the measure took effect? Did insurance start covering such treatment? Was the social stigma immediately lifted?

The long-term vision under legalization is that reputable, regulated corporations can start selling safe versions of drugs, complete with doctor-approved dosing instructions and Surgeon's general warnings and hotlines to call for help on the side of the package, instead of people getting unsafe street drug fro dealers that are incentivized to push them into more and more addictive shit. But did the measure even make it legal for corporations to operate in such a way, let alone have they actually started doing so?

The long-term vision is that people growing up under legalization can seek treatment and talk to people about the problems early in the process, and be less stigmatized and less pushed into a criminal part of society, and therefore make better decision and have better average outcomes. But what we're seeing today is mostly existing long-term heavy addicts suddenly having an easier time getting their fix, not anything about long-term trends for people growing up in the system.

And, of course, if a particular vice is legal one place and illegal everywhere surrounding it, lots of 'enthusiasts' will travel/move there to indulge, tainting the statistics.

Again, obviously this data is not good for the legalization argument, it is in fact evidence against it. But there's lots of reasons to expect short-term reactions to be bad in a way that the long-term equilibrium might not be. Especially in the case where you want to replace a bad solution to a problem with a good solution to a problem, but have so far only taken the step of removing the bad solution, which is mostly what I think is happening here.

I'm still optimistic about long-term trends, particularly if people actually devote the resources and effort into installing the new solution.

I'll say the same thing I have there: the long-term new status quo of a dramatic policy change is hard to deduce from the short-term reactions...

How do we define "short-term" reactions? A year? A decade? A century? How do we disambiguate from the highly convinient and entirely degenerate "n + 10 years, where n is equal to the current time since the policy's introduction"?

Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?

and the trends in a world where something is legal everywhere are different from the trends where it's illegal everywhere except for one place.

If implementing a policy locally will cause it to fail disastrously and the only way to do it properly is to implement it globally, isn't it on the people supporting the policy to know this ahead of time and not to push for local implementation?

Of course it would be better for the legalization argument if the day after everything was legalized, overdose deaths dropped 50% and never went up again. But that was probably never realistic...

I would certainly agree that complete drug legalization dropping OD deaths 50% is not a realistic expectation. Of course, I am not an advocate for total drug legalization. What did the advocates expect? What predictions did they make about what their policy would achieve? were those predictions accurate? If not, why should people trust their new predictions?

But was a comprehensive and experienced treatment infrastructure deployed on the same day that the measure took effect? Did insurance start covering such treatment? Was the social stigma immediately lifted?

If these steps were necessary for the policy to succeed, how did the policy address them, and when it became clear that they would not or could not be addressed, why was the policy not promptly reversed?

...Every point you make superficially resembles a valid critique, but at no point do you explain why these issues were not foreseen and accounted for, or why the policy was implemented despite them. Would you expect this policy, as implemented, to dramatically increase drug deaths, drug abuse and human misery generally? I would, because I think the policy itself is ideological lunacy spouted by idiots who have no understanding of how the world and humans in it function. If you think the general idea was good but the implementation sucked, it behooves you and people like you to make that clear in advance, and to fight like hell to prevent the bad implementation from happening. Because what actually happened here, it seems to me, is that a standard pillar of Progressive ideology was implemented under favorable conditions by true believers, promptly failed catastrophically, and that you are now explaining why we shouldn't learn anything actionable from the highly visible and extremely dramatic results. This is probably the best possible play, given the givens of situation and commitments, but one feels justified in pointing out that it is not a very good play in an objective sense.

Meanwhile, other questions linger. How many people has this policy killed? How many lives has it ruined? Where does it sit on the scale of contemporary American atrocities, in a concrete sense? I have no actual idea, but I'd be interested to know. It's very easy to be carried along by the journo-engineered affect of a story while establishing zero grounding to what the facts of the story actually mean in concrete terms. This story describes a lot of bad things, but "a lot" is not very specific. Maybe it really is not that big of a deal! But if it is a big deal, people should be able to recognize the bigness, right?

If Reds implemented a policy with similar consequences that you feel were entirely predictable, would you take a similar long view? How does this compare, in concrete terms, to the Red repeal of Roe v Wade? Better? Worse? Different, and if so, why? I'm sure if Roe has resulted in a dramatic, undeniable uptick in horrifying outcomes, that information should not be hard to find. If, in an objective sense, this policy killed more people than the repeal of Roe, should we consider it a worse policy than the repeal of Roe? If people nonetheless considered this no big deal and Roe a five-alarm emergency, is that interesting information? And obviously the facts could go the other way, and the reverse would be true as well, and Roe is a national policy versus a state policy in this case, etc, etc, but I imagine you get the drift.

How likely do you think it that some other location within the US is going to try the same policy again, and are you willing to predict the results of a reproduction? I personally think it's quite likely, given the long history of our social systems proving incapable to learn from experience, never mind example.

If these steps were necessary for the policy to succeed, how did the policy address them, and when it became clear that they would not or could not be addressed, why was the policy not promptly reversed?

I think the key point here is that without federal legalisation, there can be no reputable drugs industry, which means state legalisation just lets the criminals run rampant and magnifies rather than eliminates the dirty-drugs problem. I think you are correct that without federal legalisation everyone involved should have HCFed and not attempted state legalisation anyway.

Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?

I bite the bullet on this. I claim that America's experience with the 18th and 21st amendments is the template for how these kinds of things usually play out.

Its starts off with X fully legal and embedded in society, despite a vociferous minority pointing to the substantial harms that X causes. Eventually X is prohibited by law. The shop shelves are swept bare. The factories shut down. Xaholics get a brutal wake up call. Many quit X cold turkey. Some get medical help tapering. Perhaps some die of withdrawal or toxic substitutes. By the end of the first year prohibition is looking like a great success. Skeptics predicted a tidal wave of prosecutions for X-offences, but it doesn't materialize, because people cannot get X.

(Possession of alcohol was never illegal, just manufacture, sale, and transportation. Initially that was tactically shrewd. Ordinary people could see it coming, stock up, and then consume their private stocks, expecting others to do the hard work of campaigning for the 21st amendment. The day of the last bottle of wine was different in different households, weakening coordination against prohibition. In the long term that was perhaps the undoing of prohibition. Only the seller faced legal penalties, so the black market that developed was asymmetrical, with lots of undeterred buyers and a few sellers, well paid for their legal risk.)

Time passes and the initial success wears well. At least it seems to. Networks of friends are gradually forming. Brewing at home. Making a still. Getting hold of a bottle of wine to share with trusted friends over Sunday dinner. It is all metaphorically flying under radar. The Prohibitionists don't see that their victory is rotting. Now-a-days there would be drone smuggling, literally flying under radar :-)

Home brewing and piece meal smuggling are annoying for those who just want a drink. Money starts changing hands. The black market grows. Prohibitionists start to realize that alcohol is still for sale, but covertly and for a fancy price. Some are inclined to turn a blind eye. If it is too expensive for people to afford to become alcoholics, that mitigates the harms. Other prohibitionists resent the disobedience and insist on stronger penalties.

Full time employment in the black economy now splits into insiders and outsiders. Outsiders get rich on the high price of booze, but they sometimes get caught and go to jail. Insiders don't get as rich because they share their money with the police as bribes. It gets complicated. The bribe-taking police need to make a show of doing their jobs. The insiders resent the endless supply of outsiders in search of easy money, increasing the supply and lowering the profits. Fortunately they have the police on their side to enforce their monopoly of the alcohol supply. They tip off "their" policemen. It gets more complicated, with rival groups of insiders setting their own paid-for police on intruders on their turf who are also insiders, just bribing other policemen.

Meanwhile the smugglers are tackling the volume issue. The secret compartment has a limited volume V. The more potent your version of X, the more doses you can fit in V. In the 1920's that meant smuggling spirits rather than beer. Today that means smuggling fentanyl rather than heroin. Then there is the business of cutting drugs, adulterating them to increase the bulk after smuggling.

Eventually the situation is out of control. Every-one who wants X knows the secret handshakes and the special places. They get their hands on it. Some of it is adulterated and death rate is higher than before prohibition. The point I like to emphasize is that this takes twenty or thirty years. By the time the death rate comes back up and exceeds the old death rate from legal X, the world has changed.

The world has changed, but how much? You get one group of public health experts saying that prohibition has failed and must be repealed. Others saying that we must pivot to harm reduction. Still others say that the world has changed a lot and for the worse. Thank God that we have prohibition keeping a lid on the problems of X. If we repealed prohibition the death rate would soar still higher. Who is right?

My claim is that prohibition is a dangerous policy option because it may well fail, and that the American experiment with the prohibition alcohol was untypical in exactly one way: it proved possible to repeal it. You should expect that prohibition of X works well for the first five years. When thirty years have gone by and it has clearly failed, you will not be able to repeal it. Campaigners for prohibition will have happy memories of the first five years, and consider that short term success proves the eternal correctness of prohibition.

prohibition of X

I think this reasoning fails to get off the ground, for reasons that may be coincident with what FC is getting at. "Prohibition of X" is different for different values of X. What is the nature of X? How does it come to be? Where? By who? What is its size? Use? Alternatives? Etc. That is, people have prohibited alcohol, drugs, prescription drugs, small guns, large guns, of course you can throw in F-16s and nuclear weapons, or even just Chinese drywall. The list goes on. People have also tried prohibiting things that are less than tangible, like encryption or killing babies, or all sorts of stuff. I see almost no reason why there should be a single schema that dictates how every possible prohibition of every possible X will (not) work. Different things are different. Some may be extremely difficult to prohibit; others may be relatively easier. It is likely impossible to do any with 100% success everywhere, because 100% success is just not a thing in law/public policy (I guess there's probably some guy out there who is just really determined to bring over some Chinese drywall... and for Sagan's sake, we can't even get to zero killed babies), so we usually have to use some other metrics for success.

I accept that you are 95% right about the big picture. The huge difference between coffee and fentanyl is the only thing that really matters.

Notice though, that I zoomed in on the specific issue of timing. Who dares to doubt an intervention that works well for the first year? I dare.

Looking at my reasoning, we see that it is mostly about social dynamics. Friends put out feelers to friends. The black market slowly becomes monetized and professionalized. Since it is illegal to offer bribes to policemen, there are several years of nudges and winks before police corruption takes hold. The social dynamics set a slow time scale that is not obviously related to specifics of what has been prohibited.

Do you believe prohibition to be simply impossible to implement well, or is it just that we did a bad job of it?

I believe that prohibition works less well than its mainstream advocates expect. I think the gap is huge. Mainstream advocates of prohibition never grasp how poorly it works and never admit the extent of the problems. Within the constraints of Western Morality (you cannot just take the addicts out and shoot them) the problems are unfixable, we didn't merely do a bad job of it.

On the other hand I notice a fatal flaw in my reasoning. I assume, based on pure optimism, that there is a good solution to the problems of substance abuse. I see that prohibition works very badly. Legal permissiveness is an alternative. I have my unjustified axiom that there is a solution, so I hope that legal permissiveness is that solution and does actually work. This is embarrassingly silly. In general terms nothing prevents legal permissiveness from being an even worse disaster than prohibition.

Of course the details of the particular substance in question are decisive. Legal permissiveness works very well for coffee, but it might turn out to be a mega-death disaster for fentanyl.

I think a difficulty is that providing treatment at the scale required is expensive and the people using the services that do exist are generally indigent and therefore cannot contribute to those programs. The ROÍ for treatment is also mostly to the individual getting treatment, not the public as the new rehabbed patient is likely to be replaced with someone else. So from the public tax point of view, rehabbing druggies is a cost sunk, and a relatively expensive one. Getting the public to approve of enough taxes to fully fund rehabs is running against the problem that there’s no large scale benefit to paying that tax. So there won’t really be enough money for enough treatment centers to make rehab a viable part of the program. What it leaves is “decriminalize drugs.” Which brings with it homelessness and street crime.

This, plus the fact that we have no idea how to do "treatment" that actually works. Scott posted loooooong ago that honest studies on rehab for alcoholism fail to beat a placebo. The end goal of most rehab studies for harder drugs like potent opioids isn't even "stops using potent opioids"; it's "maybe uses potent opioids slightly less and gets up to criminal mischief slightly less often". The true believers in the idea that we're just going to "apply 'treatment' directly to the forehead", if we just try hard enough politically and decide to spend enough money, and that it will magically convert addicts into non-addicts/non-users, are just banging their heads against reality.

Scott's post is worth re-reading.

I can't really imagine it being at all likely that the long term equilibrium would have fewer drugs. Legalization has a normalizing effect, so you get more of it. I would imagine that there is more marijuana use in all the states that have legalized it than previously.

Social stigma can serve a useful role: it keeps use down somewhat.

Lowering drug use is a worthwhile aim, the decrease in use of cigarettes has been a good thing.

It could be true that legalization, if done in the right ways, could result in lower overdoses: you could easily imagine making the companies producing the drugs liable for any overdoses due to them. But there would still be overdoses due to misuse.

And, of course, I don't think the only harms are overdoses.

Agreed that 'what are the real harms beyond overdoses' is the important question here.

And I think it has to be a lot more nuanced than 'making it legal means more'. I think in a sense that's true, sure, but it overlooks usage dynamics.

Like, if you legalized fentanyl and nothing else, sure more people will use fentanyl. But fentanyl is 'popular' right now because it is more addictive and cheaper to produce than other drugs, drug dealers prefer to push it on clients and mix small amounts of it into other drugs to increase their potency and addictiveness, it's not popular primarily because people are freely choosing it over other alternatives on a free market.

If you legalize fentanyl and oxycodone and hydrocodone and opium and heroin and extasy and lsd and shrooms, and you get corporations to make them so they're pure and clearly labelled and have warning labels about their addictiveness and risks, and they're all mas produced commodities with reasonably comparable prices, do you still have the same level of fentanyl epidemic?

I do believe you get 'more' drug use, but I'd expect it to fall more to less harmful drugs, and less destructive patterns of use. I'd expect more people to be getting clear guidance and feedback from friends and family to slow the rate at which they increase their dosage, keeping them less messed up for longer. I'd expect commercial drugs to be less expensive in ways that limit how much people have to sell everything they own and turn to crime ot afford their fix. I'd expect it to be harder to fund an addiction with criminal activities when you're buying from a respectable businesss with security cameras and transaction records the police can subpoena and corporate liability to watch out for, instead of from another criminal off the books.

Etc.

Basically, I think the generic 'amount' of drugs used doesn't correlate that much with the amount of harm caused, compared to the effect of changing the social and legal regime in which that use happens.

Portland is not quite progressive enough. Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts? Now that's a compassionate way to handle social issues.

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of.

Don't worry, there is still time for even more deaths for your buck.

  • -23

This sort of extremely sarcastic and antagonistic writing style is against the rules of this forum.

Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts?

This feels mostly boo-outgroup. Setting aside both the moral arguments and factual issues of how Canada uses MAID, it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.

it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.

Yet fentanyl is a notoriously lethal drug. It appears hard to argue that somebody voluntarily taking fentanyl or products routinely laced with fentanyl is not somewhere, seeking death.

Perhaps I just have a tendency to find slopes slippery, but a community that chooses to turn a blind eye to this type of practice seems to be practicing some form of soft MAID. If supporters of 'soft-MAID' are uncomfortable with calling it MAID, why is that? Is there something wrong with helping people end their suffering?

Fentanyl is only lethal because illegal manufacturers and distributors can't control the dose well enough. In terms of therapeutic index, it's safer than other opiates -- that is, the ratio of a lethal dose to an effective dose is high. The problem is that the absolute amounts of both are low.

Sure, but, what do with this information? Have the state manufacture pure fentanyl and dose junkies up in safe use sites?

I stick with the libertarian answer: legalize drugs, enforce only purity restrictions. But as @iprayiam3 notes above, this requires not socializing the costs of addiction either. At most socialist they would be paid for with taxes on the drugs. Otherwise the addict's addiction is his problem and any problems he causes he's liable (civilly and or criminally).

Fentanyl is only lethal because illegal manufacturers and distributors can't control the dose well enough.

I imagine it stems more from a lack of trying than an absolute technical problem, a certain carelessness perhaps, or an outright malevolence.

Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.

The problem with fentanyl is that the lethal dose is so small (LD50 is like 1-3 mg) that "a grain was passed through whole rather than dissolved" or "a grain stuck to the apparatus instead of being cleaned off" can be all it takes (note that LSD does not have this problem, as while active doses are tiny it has a fuckhuge dose ratio and as such lethal is still ~1 gram).

It's not impossible to counteract this, but you need big batches, high-quality equipment with fine tolerances, and nobody messing with the product between the fine-tolerance dilution and the end-user - which works fine in the hospital system, but which is very difficult for illegal supply chains to do, as the people further up the distribution chain can't dilute it without increasing the volume and ruining fentanyl's notorious ease of smuggling, and the people at street level don't have the scale to do big batches or afford high-quality equipment (not to mention that the people at street level don't always follow "manufacturer recommendations").

And sure, they could maybe do it anyway and jack up their prices to account for the much-greater risk and expense, but the safety of illegal drugs is quite illegible to the end-user, so there's a collective-action problem there.

Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.

No offense but have you met many drug dealers? Like everyone has their cool guy that hooks them up with the best LSD imaginable like it's some sacrament but that is not the norm at all. My Ayn Rand view of them was shattered when I bought drugs on the street a few times. They often don't know what they're selling, in the concentrations that they're selling. They don't particularly care about repeat business. They don't care if they kill you. They're also generally too dumb to even think about testing their stuff or weigh things. If they are smart enough to weight things they're probably not going to buy the $300 milligram scale when the whippet shop sells some that advertises milligram precision for $20. They may be addicts themselves. They are not rational economic actors.

Drug dealing doesn't primarily attract smart entrepreneurial people who to make a fortune. It attracts rather unsmart, not well people who have very few other options for making money.

Sure, I’ll believe they cut corners and accept that drug users have a high mortality rate. But even quite dumb people with undiagnosed mental illnesses generally understand that repeat business is good for them, personally, and want to maximize their cash flow that way.

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I don't really know about this fuzzier sense of "seeking death". Maybe that is what some of them are doing. Speaking as guy who fully expects to take his eventual death into his own hands but doesn't expect to ever abuse opioids, it's not what I would do if I were seeking death, but I can see how it could be that way for some. Certainly it's not a thing to do if you're unwilling to risk death. Regardless, I don't think most of the ones who are alive are seeking death in the immediate sense -- the sense in which they would actually choose to make use of a MAID kit if it were offered to them.

I grant there's not a bright line between

(1) "refrain from taking away the means for people to kill themselves"

(2) "actively give people the means to kill themselves",

(3) "kill people at their request",

(4) "kill people people at your discretion"

It's appealing to try to erect a fence between (1) and (2), which separates decriminalization of potentially lethal drugs from MAID. A fence between (1) and (2) looks like making it generally permissible to possess but not to distribute. But of course this runs into problems with the presumption of "intent to distribute", and with the substantial overlap between users and distributors.

Personally, I don't care so much if people who want to die actually do so, and don't believe it's possible or desirable to spend a lot of effort to prevent this in general. It is worth spending effort to make people less inclined to self-destruction in the first place, and maybe keeping them from initially getting their hands on substances that set them off down the spiral is an important part of that. Ultimately I just don't know enough about why these people are abusing these drugs in the first place -- hard to believe it's that they don't know what road they're stepping into when they start.

I suspect the root of the problem is that we don't know how to build the "rat park" mentioned elsewhere in this thread, neither can we actually stop the movement of the fentanyl, so none of this going to get "solved" in any way that doesn't look like brutally grinding a bunch of unfortunates under society's heel. It's not surprising that this is unpalatable enough for people to try just looking the other way.

I consider the whole thing itself as just another aspect of a sick society. It is valuable to go and attempt to rescue some of these poor souls, like a one-man Rittenhouse crusading against urban Covid super-spreaders, but ultimately, it's like bailing out with a spoon.

It's hard to say exactly where charity should be placed, but there does appear to be some more effective approaches to drug containment, namely in El Salvador or the Philippines, we don't necessarily have to throw our hands in the air. 'Aaaah these people are just desperate, no can do, drugs will just keep flowing' Which I suppose would still largely be included in

"solved" in any way that doesn't look like brutally grinding a bunch of unfortunates under society's heel.

Whether your child OD's, cuts their genitals, becomes a girlboss dogmom, a journalist, join the reddit volunteers for Ukraine or immolates themselves for or against Israel... It's all some failure of parenting that's unfortunately incredibly common because overcoming the odds requires some serious skills in this century.

It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.

It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.

It is cute but I think it's actually good to run experiments? Don't we bemoan vetocracies and general unwillingness by politicians to take risks? Initiative petitions (referendums) appear to be a good outlet for some direct democracy.

We do get some good outcomes from time to time and the fact that we rolled back so quickly is a credit.

If you asked this question two years ago I'm sure the sentiment would have been that the West Oregon leftists that dominate state political power would never roll back such a pro-drug law that was wrapped in racial justice.

Sick society, sure, hard to argue with that, but I can't believe a Philippines-style approach makes it any healthier -- what's the evidence that executing however many thousand people there even improved the problem at all? Last I heard, the outgoing Duterte government didn't make much of an attempt to quantify the positive effects the several-year "reign of terror" had on stopping drug crime. Certainly haven't heard the compelling evidence that it worked well enough to justify normalizing the "shoot a guy and sprinkle some meth on him" tactics that police were empowered to use against civilians (and maybe civilians against each other).

I don't know who's laughing about how the need to test our policies to see if they work entails the risk of making people's lives worse, and I'm certainly not seeing how some Judge Dredd approach is so self-evidently superior that it wouldn't need to be empirically evaluated.

Based on murder rates in the Philippines it looks like it worked. The murder rate dropped from 10 per 100k in 2016 to 4 per 100k in 2021. The Judge Dredd approach also worked in El Salvador which is now safer (with respect to murder) than the USA.

It looks like it took the police killing at least 6k people, possibly up 12k or even higher, to reduce the number of murders over that period by ~15k cumulatively. Probably a fair bit of "substitution" there, assuming drug gangsters were murdering each other at high rates before -- some of this must be criminal-on-criminal killings being replaced by cop-on-criminal killings. Still, it does look like it was plausibly a net win on that measure -- have to be believe at least that police killings were better targeted at criminal elements than the background murders were. And it sounds like Filipinos broadly supported the effort. Still not sure how much it cut down on the actual drug use, but cutting down on the associated crimes is probably more important.

El Salvador, yeah there it does sound like they made big gains with locking up all the gangsters, don't know if they had to kill a lot of people to do that, or if US accusations that Bukele cut deals gang leaders are true. Easier to know who to go after in a place where the criminals are basically tattooing their criminal affiliations on their faces.

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Many of us are living proof.

Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th . The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114

Where do you think "not providing free Narcan" would fall on that scale?

As an alternative theory, fentanyl may be both an extremely pleasurable and extremely addictive substance that (desperate and not especially well-informed or conscientious) people try without grasping the full consequences of what they're doing.

That said, the people who are most hands-off on fentanyl proliferation do not appear to give one crap about the people suffering from addiction to it. It's decentralized MAID. Naively a misanthrope might consider it an effective way to get rid of undesirables, but even that makes no sense: its an addiction that reproduces itself for each new doomed-to-die cohort.

(desperate and not especially well-informed or conscientious) people try without grasping the full consequences of what they're doing.

So we need some kind of public awareness campaign? That would improve the issue? I do believe that some of the issues with the Drug War was that the government was doing fear-mongering and not really providing accurate information, but still. I think a lot of people take it because it's the best they can get. Perhaps if the most desperate of sinners were provided safer high quality drugs then they would not resort to fentanyl? Or perhaps we need to refashion society in such a way that constantly seeking a new high is not a marginally acceptable alternative to being a semi-productive member of society.

Naively a misanthrope might consider it an effective way to get rid of undesirables, but even that makes no sense: its an addiction that reproduces itself for each new doomed-to-die cohort.

Does it really? A lot of these addicts seem to have quite a decent life expectancy, what with all these good samaritans going around with Narcan. The addiction itself is accessory. Desperate people would become addicted to something else if fentanyl and the other street stuff was completely eradicated. They are just a symptom of a sick society and they rightfully pile up in these progressive cities, in front of the very eyeballs that need to connect some dots, but that has not worked so far.

Last year, over 800 people died in San Francisco to overdose. Compare that to 56 homicides and 27 traffic deaths. Or, heck, the ~700 COVID deaths from 2020 to the end of 2021.

Addicts have a shockingly low lifespan. And fentanyl is the key component of their mortality: approximately nobody dies from crack or meth, the usual drugs of choice. Which isn't to say they're not damaging or that I don't want to see them off the streets, but fentanyl stands out as particularly evil.

Nitpick, but "approximately nobody dies from crack or meth overdose". I'm guessing methamphetamine addiction would have been involved in a decent chunk of those murders, even if the numbers are still obviously lower than those from fentanyl.

I think some of that might be substitution effect, too- meth users who would eventually OD on the stuff die from fentanyl first.

Wow ... . You're just <negative outgroup stereotype 1> and <negative outgroup stereotype 2>. There are a hundred thousand comments like this every day on twitter, and I like that this forum is a break from that.

Which 'negative outgroup stereotype' are you referring to? Is MAID not an existing policy? Is drug tolerance not also an existing policy? What bothers you specifically, that I refer to these 2 existing policies and associate them with the people who generally support them, or that I refer to these 2 existing policies in conjunction?

Are we not allowed to talk about specific policies if somebody can hypothetically infer that these policies lead to bad outcomes?

Antagonistic, we've asked you many times not to do this. Last time was a 3 day ban.

7 day ban this time.


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