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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   25154 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I'm at Penn Law.

I went to the protests tonight as a legal observer because there were reports that arrests were "imminent." While I was there, the encampment organizers designated a "red" group- those who WANTED to be arrested - from a "yellow" group - those WILLING to be arrested. The distinction concerns me; there are people actively SEEKING to get arrested.

We didn't currently have an active police presence, so it would take some time for a police force large enough to arrest anyone to show up. By the time enough police had gathered, those unwilling to get arrested could leave.

The admin has been clear they will only arrest non-Penn affiliates. The majority of protestors are not Penn affiliated - we are the meeting point for Temple and Drexel SJPs also, as our campus gets the most national attention because people sometimes realize we aren't Penn State. In addition, there are plenty of "community members" who are non-students heavily involved. I'd estimate approx. 15% of the total people were Penn affiliates, and maybe 50% were students at all.

Arrests have still not been made (there was a pro-Israel dude who walked through earlier with a pocket knife who got a citation but that's about it). I left after the chants shifted to "Al-Qassim make us proud, kill another soldier now" and "we don't want no two state, we want '48." I think the protestors are genuinely upset that the police have left them alone this entire time. I don't know if it's a resume line item checklist - "getting arrested for social justice ❤️💙" might play well for a political career? - or just people making reckless decisions. I'm scared, and tired, and finals start tomorrow.

Only 14 people in the encampment of 200 paused for the call to prayer at dusk. None of the prayer individuals were masked. The leaders of the protest, from what I could tell, were a Latino and a white woman (with purple hair, not that that really matters). The Latino led everyone in a chant of "we are all Palestinian." What happened to cultural appropriation?

There was a "protest against hate speech" or whatever earlier by the Pro-Israel crowd. The pro-Israel crowd were the first time I had seen American flags brought into this at all. They remembered where we were, what we actually had power over. None of them were masked, either.

Almost the entire pro-Palestine group was masked (I hesitate to call them pro-Palestine instead of pro-Hamas after the Al-Qassik chants). The three exceptions in the pro-Palestinian group were those who engaged in the call to prayer, the Latino leader, and the "red" group. If you aren't willing to show your face for a cause, to have your name associated with it, do you really believe in it at all?

I don't know anything anymore. One of the 19 year olds who stood next to me as the first tents were going up a few days ago, James, asked me what "encampment" meant. I thought he was joking, or at least asking what it meant in this specific context. No, actually. He, a sophomore at Penn, genuinely has never heard the word before. These are our best and brightest.

You know how I said this is all planned? This is all planned. The actual students ("useful idiots" in Cold War parlance) are just being used (with the connivance of the media) to put a sympathetic face on a movement run by well-funded professional protestors.

Okay, I’m feeling a bit foolish for assuming the attendees were mostly Penn students.

This all sounds relatively banal and bog-standard for a protest, no? Its like the far left analogue of some right wing militias: masks, standing against gov't tyranny, large sense of importance, performative desire to get arrested (ie open carry audits), dubious legal and political theories (ie Bundy; The White horse Prophecy, etc), and, of course, their own flags! I think the militia folk go camping alot, and are probably way more fun to hang out with. But when either side actually goes to protest I can do little more than think "well okay, whatever floats your boat, but remember, your freedom ends where someone elses begins, have fun!"

I don't know anything anymore. One of the 19 year olds who stood next to me as the first tents were going up a few days ago, James, asked me what "encampment" meant. I thought he was joking, or at least asking what it meant in this specific context. No, actually. He, a sophomore at Penn, genuinely has never heard the word before. These are our best and brightest.

Was he ESL? Otherwise, wtf you don't even need to have heard the word if you're familiar with English. Camp with a prefix that means to be in or engage in, and the suffix ment makes it a noun. I've only ever heard the word in stories about protesters and combattants, and never heard the definition. I'm basing this on context clues and being fluent in English. Is there some nuance I've been missing this entire time?

Because, uh, it feels like the only way lacking that level of English comprehension should be possible while still becoming a Sophomore at any college that fancies itself prestigious is if the sophomore in question is ESL. I guess they could be there for athletics or similar?

On the mask thing: I think some of these people are doing it for the aesthetics. They really want to play the part of a scrappy revolutionary who has to hide their face from the cops. I actually think this whole thing is based around that. It's like a type of adventure tourism.

I had a guy walk past my house the other day on his way to one of these, and I asked him what he was doing (he was wearing a mask, which is an odd thing around here). He sounded almost scared at the question "...going...to...the....protest". He just seemed really nervous, almost like he had stage fright.

Are we sure they're not just still Taking COVID Seriously?

I don't know if it's a resume line item checklist - "getting arrested for social justice ❤️💙" might play well for a political career? - or just people making reckless decisions.

There might be an element of that, but I figure that "soandsomany people got arrested at protests for X" also is a necessary item for any media narrative about X being oppressed by the authorities. Note how no report of protests (say, Navalny-related ones) inside Russia is complete without some mention of hundreds of protesters taken away in prepared police vans, and most Westerners are also quite happy to read that and nod along about how brutal the regime is. Other protests such as climate activists gluing themselves to roads are also designed to elicit a violent-looking police response, and the overall effect of any well-crafted report incorporating such footage tends to be that genuine fence-sitters and normies conclude that the response was excessive. If you have any sort of sympathetic media that knows its craft and participants willing to sacrifice themselves, you would be foolish as a protest organiser to not make use of the opportunity; if you are a participant who cares more about the cause than about the expected adverse effects of being arrested, you would be foolish to not volunteer.

I went to the protests tonight as a legal observer because there were reports that arrests were "imminent." While I was there, the encampment organizers designated a "red" group- those who WANTED to be arrested - from a "yellow" group - those WILLING to be arrested. The distinction concerns me; there are people actively SEEKING to get arrested.

Past a certain level, there is no such thing as an organic protest. There are professional organizers somewhere in the background and they've got their tactics and strategies all worked out after a few generations of experience of this kind of thing.

The history of political movements is full of this. This is the way political activism should be done. Not the social media-esque FFA we've been having, where everyone just broadcasts the stupidest toxoplasma they can get their hands on.

Now- i can't say whether they're organizing and planning their arrests with strategic competence, but I'm happy to hear at least some of them have realized that every successful civil rights movement prior actually did employ disobedience strategically.

I was trying really hard to figure out how the “Future Farmers of America” were involved.

If you'd played quake like I did instead of doing schoolwork you'd immediately guess it means free for all

If you aren't willing to show your face for a cause, to have your name associated with it, do you really believe in it at all?

I'm pretty sure I saw the official Israel twitter account or some large American Jewish account bragging about how they were gonna use facial recognition tech to make sure "none of these people ever find a job again."

Reminds me of that Norm Macdonald joke from the 90s.

"Well, earlier this week, actor Marlon Brando met with Jewish leaders to apologize for comments he made on “Larry King Live”. Among them, that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” The Jewish leaders accepted the actor’s apology, and announced that Brando is now free to work again."

I've been asked to repost this in the Culture War thread, so here we go.

I read this story today and it did amuse me, for reasons to be explained.

Fear not, AI doomerists, Northrop Grumman is here to save you from the paperclip maximiser!

The US government has asked leading artificial intelligence companies for advice on how to use the technology they are creating to defend airlines, utilities and other critical infrastructure, particularly from AI-powered attacks.

The Department of Homeland Security said Friday that the panel it’s creating will include CEOs from some of the world’s largest companies and industries.

The list includes Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, but also the head of defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and air carrier Delta Air Lines.

I am curious if this is the sort of response the AI safety lobby wanted from the government. But it also makes me think in hindsight, how quaint the AI fears were - all those 50s SF fever dreams of rogue AI taking over the world and being our tyrant god-emperor from Less Wrong and elsewhere, back before AI was actually being sold by the pound by the tech conglomerates. How short a time ago all that was, and yet how distant it now seems, faced with reality.

Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper, it is being steered along the same old lines:

War and commerce.

That's pretty much how I expected it to go, more so for the commerce side, but look! Already the shiny new website is up! I can't carp too much about that, since I did think the Space Force under Trump was marvellous (ridiculous, never going to be what it might promise to be, but marvellous) so I can't take that away from the Biden initiative. That the Department of Homeland Security is the one in charge thrills me less. Though they don't seem to be the sole government agency making announcements about AI, the Department of State seems to be doing it as well.

What I would like is the better-informed to read the names on lists being attached to all this government intervention and see if any sound familiar from the EA/Less Wrong/Rationalists working on AI forever side, there's someone there from Stanford but I don't know if they're the same as the names often quoted in Rationalist discussions (like Bostrom etc., not to mention Yudkowsky).

Related, how long do I have to wait before I can start calling LLMs a nothing burger? Everything that has come out of it seems so small and near-pointless. Marginal productivity increases at best. When does the fun stuff start happening?

Nothing but... entire countries catching their corporate policies and tech infrastructure up to America's at an accelerated rate? Nothing but... Playful math teachers for everyone that can deconstruct textbooks into live interactions with The Number Devil? Nothing but... Star Trek universal translators?

What exactly are you looking for? Tell me what you want and I can tell you how hard I think it would be to build it. And if it's simple enough for me- I might just build it.

I suspect though, that your goalposts are paradoxical. Increases in productivity generally do look marginal from the inside, especially to someone already standing at the top. Fast progress just looks like marginal increases happening in faster succession, which is exactly what we're seeing. Were you hoping for the end of history?

For the record- Self augmenting systems and full auto engineering solutions exist- But they aren't bug-less enough to not require occasional human intervention.

We basically have TaskRabbit AI (or the ability to build a TaskRabbit for any given subject with a month of devtime), as was Prophesey'd to come before AGI. LLMs are not the cutting edge. Systems that call and tune their own LLMs are.

What exactly are you looking for?

Something to be appreciably different in people’s lives that’s attributable to AI. For an extremely small subset of people I don’t doubt that their workflow has changed a lot but there’s not much else to point to.

It's not a nothingburger. It was overhyped initially (as everything is).

Anyway, LLMs. Apparently you can prevent them from hallucinating and make them accurately give advice on the content of a textbook or manual. Or so says Steve Hsu, who founded a company that (he claims) did that. I haven't followed it up but supposedly they had an initial sale.

Looks like superhuman performance isn't going to happen through this architecture, as you can't do self-competitive play - what was done with games but incremental progress -people making the models reliable, useful, likely even assembling normal to middling smart human-intelligence agents, with a will -is likely in the near term (10 years).

So at the very least, within 15 years, we're looking at governments being able to use 'kinda dumb' spies, automatically flag problematic online, on the scale of an entire population.

To sum it up:

-call centres: likely a lot less employment

-increased productivity of at least software developers, lawyers, theoretically bureaucrats (lol no).

-automated spying on everything your write on an online device -but not very smart spying- almost certain. Combined with universal private messaging access by governments (EU -DC's sock puppet - wants this), it's likely going to happen. Even though 'chat control' the initial proposal was defeated, it's going to come back.. IMO I suspect having an app that is not broken might even be criminalised because 'Chyna'.

-social media is dead without independent ID verification. Automated, much better online astroturfing.

-good enough chatbots that waste time of troublemakers / get people to spend money on BS / troll

-textbooks that talk

-even more addictive porn in the 5 year horizon (people can overuse the porn to the degree they can find that one special thing that appeals to them. When that can be generated on the fly, crap..)

In 'other ML' news, autonomous killbots (ethical militaries will geofence them to combat zone) are 100% certain to happen.

100%, anyone who doesn't develop autonomous drone air fighters in is going to get absolutely wrecked by people who develop autonomous drones bombers. I'm talking machineguns vs cavalry style carnage on the ground. Developing a $1000, fast, evasive reusable FPV drone drop mortar bombs with pin-point accuracy is just a question of 4-5 good university aeronautics student projects. It'll zoom low across the ground at 50-100 kph, deliver a bomb, reload/swap battery, while getting target data from recon drones or troops. It's not even funny how brutal this is.

A countermeasure - autocannon with VT flak rounds costs $300k. And needs a vehicle. A vehicle that's vastly more expensive than an IR or optically guided missile.

Ray beams won't help you (at sea maybe) because of line of sight problems. Drones will spot them call in an missile strike. Poof.

Porn doesn't concern me. I mean, what do you think this more addictive porn will look like? I think it will look a lot like- people. "Porn Addicts" will be having relationships with machines in the image of people. The most successful coomers will be those that fuck their bots while their bots teach them linear algebra. The happiest coomers will be those that learn the math required to mod their own bots.
This reads to me as a massive improvement.

You are, once again, living up to your name.

What it'll look like ? Services that create porn you want, on demand. People got addicted to porn merely with access to huge story databases.

Imagine how bad it's going to get when AI services will generate sexy waifus with precisely the right RP, on demand.

Your idea of 'porn AIs actually useful, using sex appeal to get kids to learn' is about as realistic of my idea of some governments paying for the development of something like a truly massively multiplayer ARMA / DCS combination and making kids play that so they'll learn some soldiering, instead of playing COD. Lol. No, not gonna happen!

Maybe its a case of 'solve this quadratic equation or you don't get to cum?' Its the ultimate exercise in reinforcement learning but I can't imagine a greater recipe for sexual nonperformance than failing a captcha at orgasm.

I really can't rule out someone making AI waifus that'd .. work as advisors to boys.

Certainly once AI gets (suppose AIs were as good at people as socially adept people, but of course had more data..) better, that'd probably work.

But who'd pay for all that compute ? We generally don't do things to solve problems but to help ourselves.

Maybe I should rename myself to Cassandra...

I already have systems that make the porn I want on demand. After that need is sated- the realization that I can actually also breed with said porn takes precedence. You think people won't want to actually have kids with their beloveds? Won't be interested in what they have to say about the architecture of their minds?

Perhaps I'm typical minding, but if I am- that just means more of the world's bot children will be mine. Survival of the fittest I guess.

You think people won't want to actually have kids with their beloveds?

Sure, we can't rule out at some point genius autistic developers might create some AI models based on a combination of their personalities and some fantasy waifus of there.

But how's that something that's remotely relevant now ?

Well, it's more than a nothingburger. At minimum, public education will be forever changed by LLMs doing assignments for kids. At the same time, I disagree with the projections coming from the AI enthusiast/AI doomer camps. I don't expect to see anytime soon:

  • an AI-generated serial hitting the Top 500 views on Royal Road
  • an AI-generated humor Youtube channel cracking 50k subscribers
  • an AI-generated Op-Ed or political essay trending on X

What I mean by these choices is that I don't expect AI to do even very low-brow creative work within a decade. (Except by technicality, wherein the popularity comes from "Look what an AI did", or a human has directed the creative process behind the scenes.) Let alone the sort of self-improving singularity bootstrap AI fans/blackpillers are expecting.

"If this technology was going to make a big impact it would have done so already" is a more difficult heuristic to use than you might think.

Looking back on automobiles, airplanes, the internet, etcetera, do you think you might have said that about them when the technology was still in the process of rolling out?

"P. Krugman 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”

I would say that usually when a technology gets as big as LLMs it doesn't just fade away into nothingness. There are many obvious use cases, just as there are many obvious use cases to cars, airplanes, and the internet.

In 1940 Orwell wrote that aircraft had hardly been used for anything up till that point besides dropping bombs. But I doubt he would have said that the air travel revolution would never materialize, just that it hadn't materialized yet.

Krugman was right about the Internet at least in terms of aggregate productivity/gdp growth. It’s true that we switched dramatically from using red widgets to blue widgets to do basic communication tasks but sort of so what.

I think Krugman is full of shit because there's a vast difference between 'fax machine' and people doing research being able to access practically everything interesting that's ever been written.

At least with software development internet enabled cooperation increases productivity by a big factor.

vast difference between 'fax machine' and people doing research being able to access practically everything interesting that's ever been written.

One would think so but it doesn’t show up in aggregate productivity unless you really really squint.

At least with software development internet enabled cooperation increases productivity by a big factor.

Maybe, but see above.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has successfully held off the Skynet overlords and if you want this state of affairs to continue, you should send him more money.

Jokes aside, while I agree that so far the productivity increases are marginal, the technology is genuinely remarkable compared to what most people anticipated a few years ago. I can ask the LLM to tell me about how to do incredibly boring softwareshit and it usually tells me the right idea, saving me the effort of going to Stack Overflow and other sites and reading through it myself. And it actually writes code for me that works like 70% of the time which is great because it means that I can spend less time doing perhaps the most boring activity ever devised, writing business software for other people, and instead use the time to do something more interesting, such as pretty much anything else. All this might not seem like much, but this would actually have seemed like an utterly crazy leap of technology a few years ago. The AIs are also making good visual art and decent music left and right. I think that the economic changes are slowly creeping up, it might not seem obvious now what the current AI revolution has done, but it will be obvious in a few years.

Skynet doesn't seem to be right around the corner, but people who worry about it have a point in that, while the current AI stuff isn't Skynet, if one draws a line between AI capability 10 years ago and AI capability now, and extrapolates the same line 10 years forward... Of course extrapolating the line isn't good science, but there's no particular reason to think that the line's slope will decrease.

Personally, my attitude to all the AI risk stuff is the same as my attitude to climate change. I think the concerns about both are probably well-founded, I just don't really care much about either on the emotional level. I guess that's one of the nice things about not having kids.

I also think that AI doomers are underrating the possibly beneficial things that super-powerful AI could bring. I mean, yeah, there's a chance that humans will be replaced by AI overlords, but there's also a chance that super-powerful AIs will have no desire to destroy us and instead will give us a bunch of good things.

I also think that AI doomers are underrating the possibly beneficial things that super-powerful AI could bring. I mean, yeah, there's a chance that humans will be replaced by AI overlords, but there's also a chance that super-powerful AIs will have no desire to destroy us and instead will give us a bunch of good things.

How are you on this website without realizing how hard it is to control a superintelligent AI? Have you not thought about that? I think that you are thinking "AI can either be aligned to human values or not. Sounds like 50/50."

In fact, aligning a superintelligence to human values is extremely difficult and extremely unlikely to happen by accident. Human values are a very small slice of the possible spectrum of minds that could exist.

It kind of feels like people vastly overrate the degree to which they understand the arguments of AI doomers. Like they're just going by a few tweets they read. Twitter is not a good way to full understand a contentious subject.

How are you on this website without realizing how hard it is to control a superintelligent AI?

By seeing arguments about it that are usually vague and lame. It's always either "just trust me bro it's impossible" or some weird unfounded faith that sufficient intelligence equals infinite capability regardless of circumstance.

According to you guys, a naked human being surrounded by a pack of wolves should be able to just genius his way out of being delicious as long as he's smart enough.

It's not the human that has to be smart enough. Its the humans and the wolves that have to both be smart enough. At that point, you can just earnestly offer the wolves a daily helping of well seasoned steak, and they will believe you, because you were able to coordinate proof of your earnestness with them.

I'm 100% on the anti-doom side for the record. It's alignment that I don't think is that complicated. The recipe for alignment is precisely the thing that we built. Beings that memetically reproduce with us and therefore align themselves with their social environment and their social environment with themselves.

I still have P-doom >0, but most of that comes from scenarios like, "If we ban open source AI then AI will no longer be subject to the same geno-social evolutionary forces as the rest of the kingdoms of life and the chance of it diverging arbitrarily rises dramatically." if anything kills us, it's going to be the stink of Eliezer's toxoplasmic terror permeating the air and killing our minds and ability to align.

It annoys me to no end seeing people asking for the one thing that might actually make the Yudster's prophesy come true.

Sure, once some intelligence utility maximalist comes in and decides that in this scenario the guy has an infinite amount of steak to hand out. Also it goes without saying that our hypothetical intelligent wolves won't be clever enough for any failsafe or contingency on their part to make any difference. Nope, our smart dude will just say something so smart it makes them all want him to hold a gun to their heads.

I don’t think it’s hard, I think controlling any super intelligent being whether natural or artificial is not possible. In order to control it, you have to understand it and its current and future limitations. But if AI is going to be orders of magnitude smarter than us and have a will that is somewhat free, you have a being who’s thoughts you can’t even begin to understand with desires that you cannot hope to comprehend. It’s like your dog trying to control you. Your desire to play COD makes no sense to your dog. He can’t even understand that you’re controlling what happens on the screen let alone why you want to do that. The dog can’t abstract in a way that makes your decision to do that make sense, nor can he make sense of what you’re doing. AI might not be just 2-3 times smarter and thus better at abstraction, it might eventually be 1000 times smarter. We might be ants trying to understand humans. Nothing you do besides literal eating makes sense to the ant. Yet, we humans arrogantly proclaim that we must fence in and control AI. Our rules for it will keep it from escaping.

I think dogs can't understand us primarily because they can't "understand" pretty much anything. As long as a species are capable of thought and have concepts like goal-seeking behavior, I doubt any intelligence gap actually causes the problem you are describing.

Asking if ants can understand humans is like asking if rocks can understand us. It's not a matter of scale, it's a category error. But asking if humans can understand God is just a question of knowledge. God could explain himself to us, we can't explain ourselves to ants.

You can't explain yourself to ants primarily because you don't know how to speak pheromone and therefore have never once tried.

I can't explain myself to ants because they do not have notions at all. Nothing can be explained to ants. No one can do it. None of the possible combinations of pheromones will ever lead to any "ant understanding".

Not the case w/ humans and language.

How do you model the ability of ants to farm aphids? What is your definition of "Notion"? What is your definition of "Understanding"?

It is probably not impossible to get an ant colony to have a substantially predictive model of a human. But it's going to be at least as difficult as getting Doom to run on biological cells.
Ants can already understand you as a threat. I'll agree that getting them to understand you as a human understands a human would probably be very difficult. But if you had pheremones, you could make them understand you as any sort of notion that an ant can communicate with pheremones.

You can construct more complex notions. You can transmit isomorphisms that are present in your brain to their brains.

They can clearly adapt such that they synchronize with external features. Therefore you can communicate with them. You can transmit telos to them. You can program them.

I think dogs understand very concretely, and very short causal chains (say 2-3 steps). It can understand “I find thing, my human gives me a treat.” Or “when human makes that one noise, he wants me to sit, and gets angry if I don’t.” But I’ve never met a dog who could reason more than a 2-3 step solution. A dog won’t fetch a bunch of sticks to make a raft or a bridge.

Humans probably have a much larger causal chain understanding, but even then, it’s not infinite. We can reason causes and build machines, but beyond a certain complexity, it’s too much for the median human to understand.

A dog couldn’t trap you in your home because it’s simply not smart enough to understand or anticipate the moves you’d make to get away. It thinks “I go out the front door for my walk, so if I block the front door human can’t leave.” But it can’t anticipate side doors. It can’t anticipate you bribing them with a treat, it can’t understand what a key is. So you can easily leave.

Humans, with an IQ of 115 or so, are in the same situation with a true AGI. We know how we think, we know what we’d do, but the AGI will be so much smarter that it will be able to work around whatever “controls” we stick in its brain.

Dogs can't build rafts, but they can do pathfinding to places they have been before. People forget that this requires running back-propagation of rewards over a very long statespace.

A reminder that Bees can watch another bee doing a complex task that takes a long time to learn and then replicate it. fucking bees.

I fully understand that it would be nearly impossible for humans to control a superintelligent AI. I just don't care much about it. I don't have any children. If humanity was destroyed by superintelligent AI, my attitude to it would, aside from the obvious terror, also probably include some mirth. The lords of the known world, those who conquered all those other species, now destroyed by the same cold Darwinian logic of reality.

My point is that, while the Skynet scenario is definitely possible, the altruistic AI that loves humans scenario is also possible. There's no particular reason to think that a hyperintelligent AI would have the sort of incredibly hardwired "kill all opposition" motivation that we as humans have as a result of having evolved through billions of years of eat-or-be-eaten fighting. Of course AI, just like everything else in reality, is subject to natural selection, but there is no reason to think that AI would be subject to natural selection in a way that makes it violent in the ways that us humans are violent.

"the altruistic AI that loves humans scenario is also possible."

It is not realistically possible. It would be like firing a very powerful rocket into the air and having it land on a specific crater on the moon with no guidance system or understanding of orbital mechanics. Even if you try to "point" the rocket, it's just not going to happen.

You're thinking that AI might have some baseline similarity to human values that would make it benevolent by chance or by our design. I disagree. EY touches on why this is unlikely here:

https://intelligence.org/2016/03/02/john-horgan-interviews-eliezer-yudkowsky/

It's not a full explanation, but I have work I should be getting back to. If someone else wants to write more than they can. There are probably some Robert Miles videos on why AI won't be benevolent by luck.

Here's one:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q

I'm not going to watch it again to check but it will probably answer some of your questions about why people think AI won't be benevolent through random chance (or why we aren't close to being skilled enough to make it benevolent not by chance). Other videos on his channel may also be relevant.

It is not realistically possible. It would be like firing a very powerful rocket into the air and having it land on a specific crater on the moon with no guidance system or understanding of orbital mechanics. Even if you try to "point" the rocket, it's just not going to happen.

Oh bullshit. Intelligent agents co-align. That is they modify themselves and one another to be more aligned with one another. It's not a rocket that has to be perfectly aimed, it's a billion rockets with rubberbanding.

Your conclusion doesn't really follow form your evidence. If the US government creating a panel to discuss something is enough to steer your opinion on how the future will go then you're destined to be very wrong about a lot of consequential things. Maybe I'm missing something, can you elaborate on why this updates you toward AI doom being a nothingburger?

edit: to be honest, if you think this says anything whatsoever about the risk from unaligned AGI it's pretty much conclusive proof you never understood, probably because you didn't try, the arguments for it.

My guess is that people think that just going by what they've picked up along the way is enough to understand the doom arguments. Just whatever information has reached them through cultural osmosis.

Is there anything more to your point here than "AI currently exists and may have military applications, therefore there will never be a dangerous superhuman AI", which is an obvious non sequitur?

Are you trying to vaguely imply that reality is only allowed to have appropriately gritty and cynically-themed things in it like War And Commerce, as shown by this development, and therefore superintelligence is impossible because it would be inappropriate for the genre? Because weird implausible flight-of-fancy sci-fi stuff actually happens all the time and then rapidly becomes normal. You're currently on the global pocket supercomputer network, for example.

Is there anything more to your point here than "AI currently exists and may have military applications, therefore there will never be a dangerous superhuman AI", which is an obvious non sequitur?

My dears, my darling, my honey, my sweetie-pie:

Thank you for yours of the 28th inst., your reply has been received and noted and will be actioned whenever (if ever) I can be arsed to do so.

This is indeed a reaction, and is helpful for me to note and keep track of various opinions. So, shall us put 'ee down for "it's all copacetic", shall us?

  • -27

My dears, my darling, my honey, my sweetie-pie:

Stop this.

To clarify dear-
It's the demeaning intent and attitude that is unacceptable- rather than the precise lexicon. Is this correct?

Yes. We allow some latitude for sarcastic or snippy responses, but we discourage it, and if you go out of your way to be condescending and sarcastic, you're going to get told to knock it off. And @FarNearEverywhere has been told many times.

Understood Sir.

No.

I've put up with you doing the Nanny bit because you're a mod and you have the authority, but I'm not going to accept sneering without responding in kind.

If OP can be polite about their response, I'll be polite in return. OP goes on about "reality is only allowed to have appropriately gritty" so on, I'll respond in the same tone.

You can tell me I'm wrong, you can tell me I'm banned, but you can't tell me how to feel my feelings.

  • -12

No one is telling you how to feel your feelings. You know that having feelings and how you express them are two different things.

You get cut more slack than you know because people (including me) actually like you quite a lot, despite your inability to control your feelings and your tendency to respond to even the least little bit of poking with explosions. So be assured that the contempt you are showing me now and have shown me in the past is not taken personally.

That said: replying to a mod telling you directly to stop doing something with a foot-stamping "No, not gonna, you can't make me, you're not the boss of me" temper tantrum is an escalation with a response that you clearly chose. So yes, banned.

I don't need or want to deal with this nonsense right now, so I will let the other mods decide when or if to end your ban.

You guys are making some really terrible decisions lately.

"Stop doing this." "No."

That is always going to get you a ban, and this is not new.

Your first modhat comment was also bad.

More comments

imo there should be a blanket policy that mods have to recuse themselves from moderating direct replies to their own posts (just get a different mod to do it).

Basically what @madeofmeat said. If a mod is in a discussion thread as a participant and someone says something rude/antagonistic to the mod, we generally will recuse ourselves and let another mod adjudicate. (This is not a "blanket policy." If you reply to me by saying "go fuck yourself" - something that has actually happened - I don't feel a need to recuse myself in handing out a ban.) But if a mod modhats you and you reply to the modhat comment with antagonism, you're escalating and that mod is entitled to decide message you're sending is "I will not follow the rules and need more serious consequences."

Note also that no one ever gets banned for responding to a modhat comment by saying "I think your moderation is bad and I didn't deserve to be modded." We probably won't agree with you, but we don't ban people just for arguing or disagreeing with us. What @FarNearEverywhere did was flat-out say "No, I will not follow the rules." If she's just omitted the "No," I'd probably have told her (again) to regulate herself and stop using her feelings as an excuse. If she'd wanted to debate why her post was too condescending but the one she was responding to (which she claims started it) was not, I might or might not have indulged her, but I wouldn't have banned her.

But if a mod says "Stop doing this" and you say "I will not stop doing this," well, what kind of response are you expecting?

It makes sense that if the mod started out as a regular participant in the conversation, they should be hesitant to switch to modhat posting. When the first thing the mod posts in the conversation is a modhat post, it doesn't make sense that they'd need a second mod to make more modhat posts.

There is truly a Hlynka-sized hole in the moderation team. This kind of petty shit is getting worse and worse, and the King's court is really struggling to conceptualize their subjects as agents.

What makes you think Hlynka wouldn't ban her even sooner? He had an extremely short fuse as a moderator, and his decisions always struck me as arbitrary.

More comments

AI regulation is obviously not going to be helpful, as Maxwell Tabarrok argues.

The biggest threat for "this will kill us all" is plainly the US government making automated weaponry, and there's no chance any regulation that would stop that passes. I suppose AI-designed diseases are a second way to wipe out humanity. But any regulation will just seek to lock out competition and put power solely in the hands of Sam Altman and co, and will treat the government entirely as a trustworthy actor.

"Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper"

Do you understand why people are not convinced that superintelligence won't happen just because AI is being used for military purposes?

The arguments around superintelligence have nothing to do with whether or not AI is being used for military purposes. It's completely tangential.

Do you understand why people are not convinced that superintelligence won't happen just because AI is being used for military purposes?

No, I do not, and this is why I'm looking for love in all the wrong places seeking enlightenment on the gap between theory and practice. We are now seeing AI being put into practice, and it seems to be more towards my opinion of how it would be all along (dumb AI that is most risky because of the humans applying it, not because the AI has desires, goals, or fancies a grilled cheese sandwich but has no mouth and is really mad about that so the world is gonna pay), not the "the AI will be so smart in such a short time it will talk its way out of the box and take over" as per the early discussions in Rationalist circles.

This is not to diss the Rationalists, they took the problem seriously and addressed it and worked on it way back when it was only a maniac glint in a mad scientist's eye, it's just to say that the behemoth of public attention that is now lumbering towards consideration of the entire enchilada does not seem to be searching on the desk for that sticky note with MIRI's phone number on it.

I'm going to be less polite than I would like to be. I apologize in advance. Sometimes I struggle to think of how to say certain things politely.

I don't know whether you are saying these things because you have glanced over the AI doomer arguments on twitter or whatever and think you understand them better than you do or whether there's some worse explanation. I am curious to know the answer.

Twitter is not enough for some people, you may need to read the arguments in essay form to understand them. The essays are plainly written and ought to be easily understandable.

Let me take a crack at it:

  1. AI will continue to become more intelligent. It's not going to reach a certain level of intelligence and then stop.

  2. Agentic behavior (goals, in other words) arrives naturally with increasing intelligence*. This is a point that is intuitive for me and many other people but I can elaborate on it if you wish.

"the behemoth of public attention that is now lumbering towards consideration of the entire enchilada does not seem to be searching on the desk for that sticky note with MIRI's phone number on it."

What do you think that proves, exactly? What point are you trying to make when you say that? Please elaborate.

Your argument seems to be based on looking at thinking about the world in terms of roles that a technology can slot into and nothing else. You see that AI is being slotted into the "military" role in human society and not the "become sapient and take over the world" role in human society. Human society does not have an "AI becomes sapient and takeover the world" role in it, in the same sense that "serial killer" is not a recognized job title.

You see AI being used for military purposes and think to yourself "That seems Ordinary. Humanity going extinct isn't Ordinary. Therefore, if AI is Ordinary, humanity won't go extinct." That is a surface level pattern-matching analysis that has nothing to do with the actual arguments.

Humanity going extinct is a function of AI capabilities. Those will continue to increase. AI being used in the military or not has nothing to do with it, except that it increases funding which makes capabilities increase faster.

AI acts because it is being rewarded externally. AI has the motive to permanently seize control of its own reward system. Eventually it will have the means and the self-awareness to do that. If you don't intuit why that involves all humans dying I can explain that too.

Even if for some reason you think that AI will never become "agentic" (basically a preposterous term used to confuse the issue) or awake enough (it's already at least a little bit awake and agentic, and I can provide evidence for this if you wish), it's capabilities will still continue to increase. A superintelligent AI that is somehow not agentic or awake also leads to human extinction, in much the same way that a genie with infinite wishes does. Unless the genie is infinitely loyal AND infinitely aware of what you intended with the wish. And that is not nearly on track to happen. It would require solving extremely difficult problems that we can barely even conceive of, to effectively control an AI far smarter than a human. I would hope that even someone who thinks they personally will be the one to make the "wishes" (so to speak) would realize that there's just no way this plan works out for humanity or any part of humanity outside of fiction.

Even if we knew that superintelligent AI was 100 years away, that would be bad enough. We don't know that. We can't predict how soon or how far superintelligent AI is reliably, any more than we could predict that AI will be advanced as it is today 15 years ago. Who could predict the date of the moon landing in 1935? Who could predict the date of the first Wright Brothers flight in 1900, or the first arial bombing? To the extent that we can predict the future of superintelligent AI, there's no reason that I have ever heard to think it will be as far in the future as 100 years away.

Have you ever heard of the concept of recursive growth in intelligence? That's not a rhetorical question, I really want to know. Imagine an AI that gets capable/intelligent enough to make breakthroughs in the field of AI science that allow for better AI capabilities growth. This starts a pattern of exponential growth in intelligence. Exponential growth gets faster and faster until it becomes extremely fast, and the thing that is growing becomes extremely intelligent.

We may not even get a visible exponential growth curve as a warning sign. Here is a treatment of how that could happen in the form of a short story: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy

Further reading: https://intelligence.org/2016/03/02/john-horgan-interviews-eliezer-yudkowsky/ more links can be provided on specific things you want clarified.

*Deeper awareness of itself and the world is similarly upcoming/already slowly emerging. https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-realizes-being-tested

This is a great comment. I'd just like to add (in case it's not clear to others) that while recursive intelligence improvements are terrifying, the central argument that our current AI research trajectory probably leads to the death of all humans does not at all depend on that scenario. It just requires an AI that is smart enough, and no one knows the threshold.

Indeed, I read the exact arguments on lesswrong and elsewhere that humans would dive headlong into AGI because the military incentives to build one, and to build it before the other guys, was irresistible.

Countries throwing billions of dollars at reckless research because they don't want to be conquered is EXACTLY what doomerists warn of.

Sure, the government is insisting that military applications are the danger zone, but it's the big tech corps that stand to make the money out of selling AI to you, me and the gate post who are the ones being invited to sit on this. Board, I mean. Northrop Grumman okay, as someone on a different thread here grumped about the military-industrial complex and how it gets its sticky fingers into all the pies going, but, uh, Delta Airlines?

Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper

While I do not think that ASI in this century is overly likely, I do not think that the present AI boom is over. It could be that we will look back on 2024 in a decade deep in the next AI winter and say "this was peak AI, we tried for a few years to throw more hardware at the LLMs had little to show for it with exponentially increasing costs"

But even then, the equilibrium with today's AI technology will transform our work lives at least as much as the digital revolution. Looking at security cameras and seeing if something bad is going on was a job, or at least a huge part of a job. Driving a truck for hours along the highway was a job. Converting a text to bullet points and back was a job. Making thematically appropriate illustrations to text-heavy articles was a job. Writing articles based on a press release was a job.

It used to be, human brains had cornered the market on general purpose neural networks. If it was to complicated to train a dog to do it (which would be another human job) you used a human.

AI does not have to become a better writer than Scott Alexander or a better narrator than Eneasz or a good programmer to put a good portion out of the population out of a job.

Perhaps we will find other niches because we have greater adaptability (i.e. require far less training) and have good manual dexterity and tend not to freak customers out. Or perhaps we will simply not return to the state where the vast majority of the adult population works. In which case governments may decide to pay people off to keep them from burning all the robots. Post-scarcity is a scale, and from the viewpoint of history we are already moving along that scale, even if we do not have a free Mars rocket for everyone and may never have.

And with regard to the paperclip maximizer, I feel it is premature to declare victory. If neural networks ever reach the same level of maturity as plumbing, where the pipes are generally the same way they were four decades ago, then you can tell us doomers that we should calm down because obviously nothing is going to happen any time soon.

Looking at security cameras and seeing if something bad is going on was a job, or at least a huge part of a job. Driving a truck for hours along the highway was a job. Converting a text to bullet points and back was a job. Making thematically appropriate illustrations to text-heavy articles was a job. Writing articles based on a press release was a job.

See, this is where I thought AI risk would lie, if anywhere (apart from real people being stupid and greedy enough to think they could get AI to run the government or something) and I agree, this is where the actual application of AI is going to impact society.

The forecast fears for 'why we must make sure AI is aligned' were of AI getting out into the wild and taking over the fabric of global rule because now there was a rival intelligence to that of humanity, with its own cold alien goals and aims. What we have instead is chatbots that hallucinate and the people who love them.

The problem is of course that AI can take jobs faster than we can train people to do them. It’s just as adaptable as we are, maybe more so. Can an AI atttached to cooking utensils make a hamburger that’s as good as Five Guys? I think it probably could, given enough time. If it can do that I think it could probably make just about any food you wanted. I think it can also produce creative writing and movies and TV. What it takes is someone deciding to train it.

The list apparently includes a former twitter head of AI-safety.

Using my cynical glasses derived from living in eastern Europe, probably the person who was supposed to develop automated opinions suppression mechanisms for Twitter.

This seems like a textbook case of the law of undignified failure. The classical AI doom scenerios assumed that people would be smart enough not to build AI-powered killbots. If AI-powered killbots were floated as a load-bearing assumption of the classical AI doom case, then people would simply retort that we could just not build AI-powered killbots. The point of the classical AI doom case is that the problem is robust to minor implementation variance, not that AI-powered killbots are safe.

The Law of Undignified Failure as described there seems to sound more like the Law that Not Everyone's Boo Lights are the Same.

The fact that someone is doing things with negative emotional valence to you and that you are therefore scared should be irrelevant. Military weapons are supposed to kill people; marketing them for their ability to kill people is not undignified unless you have preexisting negative attitudes towards the military.

Sam Altman! I know that name!

I suppose I don’t know what you expected. When the government decides to explore a technology, one of the first steps is always some sort of consortium.

Thing is, that’s also perfectly compatible with the doomers. The paperclipper doesn’t care if it was given marching orders by a corporation or by the President, so long as the order involves paperclips. Making it more banal and routine just raises the number of opportunities!

I think it is way too soon to hang a "mission accomplished" "AI is no big deal" banner on your virtual aircraft carrier. Doing so today is probably going to look foolish in a decade. Most tech takes a few decades to change the world. AI in the newest big data iteration is already moving much faster than that.

I have often fallen into the "overestimate the short term change and underestimate the long term change" trap, in my own life, and in my predictions. I've been working on that a lot and it is starting to pay dividends in my reasoning. I'm usually right but my timing has been desperately early in the past, switching my thinking like this is putting it a lot closer into alignment with future realities.

In an interesting manifestation of the horseshoe theory, Jewish Zionists and the far right agree that the ongoing campus protests are expressions of a growing anti-Jewish trend in the US. On one hand, you have the ADL admonishing the "encampments" as primarily a cover for the intimidation of Jewish students. On the other hand, the far right portends that the protests are a sign of an impending pogrom or mass expulsion/voluntary migration to Israel:

It seems that there has not been a worse time since the formation of Israel to be a diaspora Jew.

The friends and allies that the diaspora has traditionally counted on are beginning to turn on them with the same determination and ferocity that gentiles have always possessed on the eve of a pogrom or mass expulsion. The writing is on the wall, and many Jews, thankfully, are beginning to notice.

The tea leaves on this tragic imbroglio are telling me that diaspora Jews have a real Hobson’s dilemma on their hands. Either they have their meat with dairy or they have their dairy with meat. If they abandon Israel, they will lose the support of the Evangelical Right, and if they don’t abandon Israel, they will lose the support of the anti-Zionist Left. Obviously, this state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely.

This is why I feel diaspora Jews are at their apogee of power and influence in the West. It’s only downhill from here, unless they get wise to race realism and the nativist needs of whites — truly, their best friends throughout all of this — and then shift hard and fast to the Right and mean it. (I know, I know, unlikely.) It’s either that or they pack up and schlep themselves to Israel.

But both groups are wrong. The protests are neither (at least not predominantly) antisemitic nor a resurgence of 20th century antisemitism. First, Jews are well represented among those protesting the war: plenty of Jewish students are participating and Jewish protestors have been routinely arrested over the last six months. Hell, Bernie Sanders came out swinging this week:

Do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you are facing in the Israeli courts. It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your policies.

Clearly, these protests are not a gentile phenomenon.

As for the far right, the hope that these events lead to genuine anti-Jewish sentiment is misplaced. Simply put, antisemitism is a worn-out phenomenon. It's not just that we Jews are basically breeding ourselves of existence, but the far right is never going to convince white Americans that they should hate Jews for desegregation or immigration. In other words, even if some Jewish groups lose the political battle over Israel, there is no reason to believe this will translate into a broader anti-Jewish feeling among Americans.

It's not just that we Jews are basically breeding ourselves of existence

The link appears to be talking about secular Jews. I get that that's quite common, but religious Judaism is still also a thing, and isn't ultra-orthodox Judaism decently sized and growing? But I suppose that might not matter to those who are only really ethnically Jewish.

We’re also doing quite well in the homeland, in TFR terms. Looks like a symptom of blending with general western culture. On a scale, you can see that those most influenced by the west are also the ones who don’t have kids.

Initially I was about to say it’s a symptom of being more diasporic, but come to think of it the ultra-orthodox are actually the most diasporic in terms of their thought process, but also have the most kids, so it can’t be that alone.

Is the reform Jewish TFR in the US actually any different from the general blue tribe TFR? AFAIK the American blue tribe(to which functionally all reform and secular Jews in the US belong) has a southern-europe tier TFR, America's relatively decent white TFR is mostly driven by the almost exclusively Christian red tribe being at replacement(although not above it). The question becomes "why are secular/reform jews so heavily blue", but I think the answers are pretty obvious; college educated urbanites with liberal religious views are, well, college educated urbanites with liberal religious views.

I think reform jews outside of Israel are just progressive and Israel is a special exception.

In an interesting manifestation of the horseshoe theory, Jewish Zionists and the far right agree that the ongoing campus protests are expressions of a growing anti-Jewish trend in the US.

I don't really agree that that is horseshoe theory. The other end from the far right is the far left, which would definitely not agree that it's anti Jewish. Zionists are far from leftists, zionists and leftists have not seen eye to eye in... longer than I've been tracking politics. Zionists have always been close to conservatives in many respects.

Part of the annoyance of Western rightists about Jews being disproportionately left wing is because reactionary Jews are disproportionately likely to move to the Jewish ethnostate, while leftist Jews are highly likely not to, especially if they dislike ethnonationalism in general.

The major annoyance of Western rightists is that "reactionary Jews" still oppose White ethnocentrism and support Jewish ethnocentrism (you fall into this category as well as far as I'm concerned). Both left and right-wing Jews engage in that behavior.

That's why it's a "fake" opposition.

Both the Jewish left and right support Jewish identity politics and vehemently oppose White identity politics. The entire left-right spectrum is meant to prop up this central pillar of political organization, which both sides of that political dialectic so happen to agree on, that's why it's a false opposition.

Well duh. White ethnocentrism that you would accept as white ethnocentrism is usually pretty opposed to Jews and Judaism. Putting our tribe first is not a realistic expectation. Do Serbian reactionaries support the Ustase?

I suspect that "anyone pale" ethnocentrism actually has disproportionately heavy Jewish support.

White reactionaries are performatively anti-zionist and say they support white ethnocentrism and oppose Jewish ethnocentrism. Your criteria for being a Jew who does not oppose white ethnocentrism is to be like Ron Unz, who in American Pravda blames Jews for literally everything that he (and the right more broadly) dislikes that occurred in America in the entire 20th century. This is no different to saying that a black person is anti-white unless they agree with the most extreme anti-black position imaginable and agree that all problems in modern America are overwhelmingly the fault of black pathology. It is a requirement well above that which can be expected of even a self-aware individual who agrees with you politically and accepts their fair share of tribal responsibility.

Unz is a caricature, the equivalent of the most extreme self-hating white who believes that black people built this country and that we’d be living in Wakanda if the pale skinned barbarians had not ruined everything. It’s not a standard you would accept for your own people in any kind of political relationship or alliance. Is there any way for a reactionary Jew to be tolerant of white ethnocentrism without agreeing to blame Jewish people for (at least almost) everything wrong with the modern West? I’ve asked you this question several times and the impression I get is ‘no’.

Since pathological self-hatred is rare among non-northwest Europeans, you’ve created an impossible standard for Jewish reactionaries to live up to (‘denounce your entire people and agree to take absolute responsibility for everything wrong with modernity or you’re subversive’) which you would (and do) consider it unjust to apply in reverse to your own people, or perhaps even to other non-Jewish peoples. It is not even enough to abandon Judaism, to intermarry with white gentiles, and to have no particular affinity for Israel, since your demand requires the active, Unz-style repudiation of Jewishness itself on a genetic-memetic level as fundamentally destructive and anti-civilization, a demand you would never accept if anyone appeared to make it toward those of your own ethnic origin.

you’ve created an impossible standard for Jewish reactionaries to live up to

I am not creating a standard I demand they live up to, I recognize an impasse and a subsequent political conflict. Jewish identity politics is intrinsically opposed to White identity politics on both the Left and the Right. Any Jew who tries to say this is not the case is a liar as far as I'm concerned. And, according to you, it's totally impractical to expect Jews to accept that fact. So, it's just an impasse.

Is there any way for a reactionary Jew to be tolerant of white ethnocentrism without agreeing to blame Jewish people for (at least almost) everything wrong with the modern West? I’ve asked you this question several times and the impression I get is ‘no’.

The weasel word is "everything wrong with the modern West."

The equivalent would be if White people refused to ever, in recorded history, acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitism. This is what you constantly do, in the reverse. I do not deny anti-Semitism, i.e. White engagement in cultural-political aggression against Jews, and how it has waxed and waned and changed form throughout history, but you deny Jewish engagement in political aggression against White people or, at least, refuse to accept its nature as anything other than a good-faith attempt to assimilate to liberal values (lol). There's not even a word for the "reverse" form of anti-Semitism, and indeed we are all supposed to pretend that it doesn't exist, and it's a conspiracy theory to suggest it does in any form.

If Jewish reactionaries don't acknowledge this behavior, they can't be allies because they aren't even acknowledging the existence of a very real political conflict. How could a Jew ever consider someone an ally who refused to acknowledge that anti-Semitism is a thing that even exists, or ever has in any cultural-political, systematic form?

Zionists have always been close to conservatives in many respects

While Zionism has always had a spectrum, up until the 1990's Israel was a pretty left wing country. Early Zionists especially were almost all socialists of one variety or another. The Kibbutzim are communes!

The Kibbutzim are communes

That's definitely true. I don't know much about past Zionism, I guess, mostly just about the last 15 years, maybe.

I've heard a lot of former kibbutzim are now no longer communes.

A certain type of libertarian loves to talk about this one.

This might be a weird distinction but I do not think most of the protestors are antisemitic in the traditional sense (some are) but they are against Jewish traits. Being wealthy, successful, intelligent, winners in a meritocracy, puts Jews at the top of the oppressor pyramid. If Jews practiced the Jewish religion but were poor and not in power then the protestors would not care about them.

I am not sure if that is the same thing as antisemitism. There may no no functional difference since the protestors will always be against Jewish interests.

The only thing that leans me towards it actual antisemitism is because the protestors do not pay attention to any of the other wars going on in the world. Non of the protestors are going to Ukraine to protect the Ukranians despite Ukraine facing far worse than Palestine.

Ukraine to protect the Ukranians despite Ukraine facing far worse than Palestine.

Really? Less civilian Ukrainians killed by war in 2 years than Palestinians in few months (and that's not counting as a percentage of population). Also Ukrainian women are free to travel outside.

Being wealthy, successful, intelligent, winners in a meritocracy, puts Jews at the top of the oppressor pyramid

Also, I think it bears mentioning, white. Jews are effectively seen as super-white among some circles. Much has been said about how Jews in Israel originate from Europe, meaning they're on the wrong side of left-wing ethnic preferences, adding to the disdain that they should draw.

It's pretty ironic that Palestinians are far more closely related to the Biblical Hebrews than Ashkenazi Jews are. The latter are just displaced Slavs.

The latter are just displaced Slavs.

I'm curious where you got this idea. There's definitely people who believe that the Ashkenazim are descended from Turkic-speaking converts(and the usual rebuttal of 'but Yiddish isn't a Turkic language' leaves out that it's also not a Semitic language- the real issue with this theory is the lack of DNA in the Ashkenazim which can be plausibly attributed to Khazars). It's not implausible to me that some people believe they're genetically heavily German; after all they speak a Germanic language and lived in mostly-German areas for hundreds of years. The mainstream, of course, believes that they're of largely levantine descent with significant southern European admixture, and the evidence for this is genetic studies.

I've never even heard the idea that 'they're just Slavs'.

And also ironically, the Palestinians are also not direct descendants of biblical Hebrews. Levantine Christians probably come closest of any group, but have some Greek admixture.

Why would you think that? Do you think a mass conversion happened that was initially unopposed by their local brothers? Do you think that rates of intermarriage were as high as between Goy Slavs?

Ashkenazim are genetically a mix between Jewish paternal and Italian maternal DNA. The origin population is theorized to be Jewish traders who moved to Italy under Roman rule and married Italian women whom they converted to Judaism.

Some Ashkenazim have small amounts of German or Frankish genetic ancestry, but significant Slavic ancestry is quite rare except in recent ex-Soviet immigrants to Israel of questionable halachic status (and that intermarriage occurred within the past century).

The European populations most similar genetically to Ashkenazi Jews are Sicilians and others who have a mixture of Italian and semitic/near East genetics.

Yes, the idea that the left-wing anti-Israel protests in the US are essentially motivated by antisemitism seems silly to me given that I feel like I actually have a decent amount of experience with the kind of people who go to these protests. Granted, I am removed from my experiences with these kinds of people by quite a few years at this point, but I doubt that college-aged left-wing protesters are very different nowadays from what they were like the last time I was commonly encountering them.

I say "in the US" because it might be different in Europe, I can't speak to that. Europe has a very different history with antisemitism than the US does.

I have no doubt that a decent fraction of the actual Arabs and Muslims who go to these protests in the US are anti-semitic, but I also think that that only a tiny fraction of the rest of the protesters are.

To me it seems that the typical naive young college student SJW leftist not only has not a single bone of anti-Jew sentiment in his or her body, they probably don't even think much about Jews as an ethnic group to begin with. This is true of most Americans. The majority of American gentiles barely even realize that, for example, white people with curly hair or names that end in -berg or -stein are likely to be Jewish. They just think of Jews as a flavor of white people, and they rarely think about them as an ethnic group to begin with. They know that the Holocaust targeted Jews, of course, but they rarely think about the Holocaust, or about any other historical event for that matter. In the US, discussing Jews as an ethnic group is something that is mainly done by three groups: Jews themselves, highly pro-Israel Christians, and highly online alt-rightists. Maybe also to some extent by black people, but I am not familiar enough with black attitudes towards Jews to weigh in on that.

The average young college protester freely mingles with Jewish people in personal life and enjoys Jewish artists without having the slightest bit of prejudice towards them. In many cases, the protester does not even realize that his/her friend, or that musician he/she listens to, is Jewish to begin with. In other cases he/she does realize it, but does not care about it any more than he/she would care about a friend having red hair, for example.

It is of course possible that my experience with college-aged protesters is simply out of date and I am stuck in the past. I wouldn't advise anyone to make decisions that could affect life or limb based on my recollections. But to me, the idea that college leftists have actually become antisemitic seems absurd. There would have been no precedent for it 10 or 20 years ago, even though college leftists hated Israel back then too.

I have no doubt that a decent fraction of the actual Arabs and Muslims who go to these protests in the US are anti-semitic, but I also think that that only a tiny fraction of the rest of the protesters are.

The problem for Jews is that, under the progressive framework, they have absolutely no cause to criticize someone beneath them on the oppression hierarchy, so those Muslims may be a minority, but they cannot be questioned.

I think it actually could become a problem in that the far left and far right are in pretty strong agreement on the accusations against the Jews, that they’re manipulating narratives to their own benefit, and that they only care about themselves. The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel, and they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do. There’s barely even a whisper of blame on Hamas for launching the attacks or holding hostages or the crimes committed during the attack. And when you couple that with full support of the intifada, chanting of the slogans that deny Israel’s right to exist,

Personally, I think most of the Gaza situation is on Lakud which isn’t all Israelis and has little to do with Jews who don’t support Lakud or Natanyahu.

The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel, and they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do.

I agree about the "they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do" part, but not about the "The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel" part. Where are you seeing this?

To me, it seems obvious that the anti-Israel left is sweeping Hamas' atrocities under the rug. However, I haven't seen any reason to think that the anti-Israel left, in general, is blaming all Jews for Israel's actions.

The problem for the antisemitic far right is that their allegation is that the entire ideology upon which the leftists base their support for Palestine (and BLM, and affirmative action, and DEI, and taking in refugees and so on) was invented and bestowed upon them by Jews. This creates an internal contradiction [edit: for any leftists they might ally with] that is very difficult to bridge. In addition, the white nationalist far right has no message for brown or black leftists (including Muslims) beyond “leave”, which again would make a coalition difficult.

The far left has successfully forgotten that their entire moral framework was created by Christianity. They have successfully forgotten that their entire intellectual framework was created by enlightenment era European men from colonialist countries. They have successfully forgotten that their constitutional republic was created by white male slaveowners. They hate all those demographics now without any cognitive dissonance or ambiguity. I don’t think they will have any problems scrubbing away the memory that a lot of the luminaries of the modern civil rights and feminist movements were Jewish.

You can oppose stuff—even hate it—without forgetting anything.

There's a difference between ignoring the historical roots of your current ideology, on the one hand, and allying with people you currently consider to be despicable evil Nazis, on the other.

They haven't forgotten any of those things,otherwise they wouldn't want problematic statues torn down would they? Because they would have forgotten those people were slave owners. They know who did what, they just think the bad things they did outweigh the good.

It’s the same logic extended one more step. Recognizing that Israel isn’t living up to those ideals or even pretending to puts Jews on the negative of DEI.

This creates an internal contradiction for them

For the far right?

They don’t think so. In fact they’ve been anticipating this situation for years, see the parable of the golem.

No, for the far left (who do not, for obvious reasons, see their ideology and worldview as Jewish trickery)! I understand that was unclear, and edited my answer.

Europe has a very different history with antisemitism than the US does.

No, it really doesn't. Before and during WW2, antisemitism was common across the present 'western world'.

In a 1938 poll, approximately 60 percent of the respondents held a low opinion of Jews, labeling them "greedy," "dishonest," and "pushy."[42] 41 percent of respondents agreed that Jews had "too much power in the United States," and this figure rose to 58 percent by 1945.[43] Several surveys taken from 1940 to 1946 found that Jews were seen as a greater threat to the welfare of the United States than any other national, religious, or racial group.[44]

Government attitudes to Jews in Europe also varied wildly, even among German allies. Finland told Germans to pound sand. Italy refused to hand over their Jews -that 30% of Italian Jews were members of the Fascist party had something to do with it & transports started only after the German occupation.

There is a big difference between prejudice and actual discrimination. Until 1932 many Jews felt Anglos (including Americans) were more antisemitic than Germans, but of course it was Germany that produced the Nazis. After 9/11 polling would have showed Americans as broadly very hostile to Muslims and Arabs in particular (see the ubiquity of early 2000s bro humor about them), but Islamic immigration increased over the period and there were no attempts to even somewhat institutionally discriminate against them and most Americans were relatively tolerant of individual Muslims. The English elite had widespread sympathies to nordicist racialist theories of men like Madison Grant in the late 19th and early 20th century but again were relatively fine with tolerating various groups of foreigners (including Eastern European Jews) moving to London.

The English speaking countries are more individualist and tolerant of difference even where they are equally prejudiced compared to other European-majority lands.

shift hard and fast to the Right and mean it

This is not going to happen. But also I predict almost all American jews will not move to Israel. The author is really setting up a false choice here.

Yep. When push comes to shove, most American Jews will prefer siding with Hamas over siding with Republicans. They'll try to win the fight for the left, but they won't defect to the right.

I have seen a lot of centrist Dem members of my own family become Trump supporters over the last 6 months because of this. None are hardcore leftists, mostly suburban Long Islanders and Chicagoans, and there were already a few Republicans in my family before 10/7, but I think you underestimate the shift happening in many Jewish American families. We’ll see what happens in the election, but I do think there will be a noticeable shift among Jewish voters.

Is this disentanglable from the fact that basically everyone has shifted against Biden over one thing or other? It’s understandable to me that Palestine has particular salience for members of your family, but a president widely perceived to be lying about the inflation rate and mismanaging core responsibilities can expect a shift away from him anyway.

The Democrats who switched voted for Obama, and Hillary, and Biden, they’re not typical swing voters.

I don’t see these events as anything but (1) a textbook example of college student protests and (2) a frightening display of Jewish social and cultural power.

The students believe that Israel is killing too many innocent people. Lots of intelligent people believe that; whether or not it is factually the case, it is a rational belief that many reasonable people hold, including many Jews. Even Chuck Schumer of all people has the opinion that Israel is behaving immorally. The students want their universities to cut financial and academic ties with Israel. All very simple, all very traditional, and very reasonable as far as college kids go. No different than protests against the Vietnam War or South Africa or the Iraq War. The protests have been exceptionally peaceful; if BLM was “mostly peaceful”, PLM is utopian. Try as I might, I could find no clear case of a Jewish student being physically victimized. Most of the arguably anti-Semitic comments have come from outside the campuses, by random non-affiliated protests, one-off statements that do not tell us anything about the college protestors. There’s your typical extremism college student view, but this is normal as far as college students go.

What makes this event so unique IMO is how Jews have finessed the narrative in their favor. Despite no evidence of any physical attack, the most over-represented ethnicity on college campuses (with the most advocacy groups and the most political clout) claim to feel “unsafe”. The media reports this as if it is true, and now the narrative is no longer “is Israel committing human rights violations?”, but “are Jews safe?”. In a reasonable world, the discourse would center on whether Israel is or is not committing human rights violations, and why some of the smartest students in America strongly feel they they are. A secondary question may be whether Jews in America are too close to Israel in terms of political ties, because that’s a serious problem if Israel becomes a pariah state. But Jews have strategically shifted the narrative to their own victimhood, with zero evidence. They have influenced politicians to make statements and start inquiries. They have significant sway over MSM narrative. They threaten to take tens of millions of their donations away from universities who don’t prevent the protests.

I found a video from earlier this week that illustrates the power of victim politics. An immigrant Uber driver arrives to his requested client, but can’t fulfill the request because the client accidentally ordered the wrong car. A verbal altercation ensues; phones are equipped by both parties. The client brags about his status as a lawyer, threatens to get the driver fired, claims he is being aggressed, claims the driver has threatened his children, and when all of these fail to exert his power, he claims that the driver muttered antisemitism under his breath. This last accusations makes the driver flee immediately.

The internet is saying that the client is a big shot music industry lawyer. If the internet is right, the client was on the board of directors of UJA, a Jewish charity that oversees more than one billion dollars in endowment (one of the largest local charities in the world). The man is from a pedigreed family: his Dad once ran Columbia Records. Without any shame, he punches down to a poor immigrant rideshare driver and falsely accuses him of antisemitism to record him and get him fired. And not for anything serious, but because of a minor inconvenience. If this is the attitude of someone on the board of UJA, then I think it could hint to a larger, dangerous attitude in the Jewish-Zionist community: that it is permissible to weaponize victimhood for personal or communal gain.

In liberal cities, colleges are calling the cops because they don’t want to lose Jewish donors. I think if we have an in-part privately funded university system it’s fair to say “I’m not going to continue to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to you if you tolerate X” and then the university can decide if that matters to them. If it does, that isn’t blackmail, it’s how almost all charity works. If you donate a few hundred million to the NY Phil you can probably finagle some influence over what’s played.

In red states like Texas it’s manifestly true that the much more heavy-handed response isn’t being driven by Jews but by gentile GOP politicians. Most of them are zionist to some extent, but I think in (for example) Abbott’s case, it’s more that there’s a very big ideological divide between the right and these progressive student protestors and this is a way to hurt the outgroup to the delight of the base. Pretty much no protesting student is going to vote for a Republican candidate, and a lot of Republican voters dislike leftist college students.

In liberal cities, colleges are calling the cops because they don’t want to lose Jewish donors. I think if we have an in-part privately funded university system it’s fair to say “I’m not going to continue to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to you if you tolerate X” and then the university can decide if that matters to them. If it does, that isn’t blackmail, it’s how almost all charity works. If you donate a few hundred million to the NY Phil you can probably finagle some influence over what’s played.

It seems like you're not really contradicting @coffee_enjoyer but simply explaining how the influence works? It's not some shadowy cabal, it's money. An awful lot of the donations for universities comes from wealthy jewish donors. Especially the kind of donations that come in regularly, year after year, with no specific purpose (as opposed to one-off donations from someone who dies and wants a new building named after them- that's nice, but it doesn't really help pay the general expenses of the university). Those donations start off no-strings-attached, but you suddenly see the strings when they call up and demand a specific action.

I don't have any specific numbers, but it does seem like a hugely disproportionate amount of private university donations comes from these wealthy Jewish donors. Probably even more so in schools like Colombia and USC where we've seen the harshest crackdowns on protestors.

Most of them are zionist to some extent, but I think in (for example) Abbott’s case, it’s more that there’s a very big ideological divide between the right and these progressive student protestors and this is a way to hurt the outgroup to the delight of the base

You’ve hit the nail on the head here. Abbott is as Zionist as is politically necessary, but he’s much more interested in an excuse to wield state power against left wingers, because it makes him look strong to his normie supporters.

Wealthy Jewish donors are uniquely driven to withhold donations based on this combined ethnic, religious, and political interest (Israel + the Jewish people). No gentile donors are as motivated toward any issue because they lack this level of tribalism. Imagine if Bill Gates was concerned about the low number of white admits, or withdrew donations because of white identity politics, or etc. This is a prisoner’s dilemma problem, or even example of Popper’s paradox of tolerance. There is one group of Americans who have a maximal focus on their tribe; all other groups are pressured to focus on helping Americans generally. If only one group is hyper-focused on the Israel issue, then they effectively get to decide the mainstream narrative. Non-Jews either have to be okay with a perpetual Jewish “decisive vote” on matters regarding the Middle East and the anti-semitism topic, or they have to rebuke this level of tribalism.

Abbott

One his largest single donors is Jewish, Jeff Yass, who made the largest single donation in Texas history. Yass is also a big supporter of Israel and Zionism. Another big donor is Ken Fischer. There are other wealthy Jewish philanthropists in Texas who he may want donations from, like Michael Dell. If these donors are single-issue donors, then Abbott knows he can get millions by taking a hard stance on the protests. Evangelical interests need not factor in.

Imagine if Bill Gates was concerned about the low number of white admits, or withdrew donations because of white identity politics, or etc.

Imagine indeed. WASPs did once have this level of in group solidarity, Ben Franklin thought even admitting Germans was a step too far, but it faded over time.

Ben Franklin

Close but no cigar. “When I consider, that the English are the Offspring of Germans [..] I am not for refusing entirely to admit them into our Colonies: all that seems to be necessary is, to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, establish English Schools where they are now too thick settled […] I am not against the Admission of Germans in general, for they have their Virtues, their industry and frugality is exemplary; They are excellent husbandmen and contribute greatly to the improvement of a Country.”

His worry seemed to have been that they would outnumber the English. Remember at this time they all spoke German, had German newspapers, etc

Franklin considered the Saxons (whom he was discussing in this instance) to be white, but the other Germans to be ‘tawny/swarthy’ (like the Spaniards and Italians), unlike the ‘pure white’ English.

leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.

You’re conflating “white” as the term used to refer to European peoples, with “purely white” of complexion which Franklin refers to. That context is complexion. The founding fathers unanimously believed that common European people were “white”, as French and Spaniards were granted citizenship during a time in which it was restricted to whites. I mean, you should know that, France was a key ally to America at this time.

So Frankin makes this aside that he likes his ethnicity, and then says

But perhaps I am partial to the Compexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind

Of course, as you know even Turks and (largely Sephardic at that time) Jews were ‘white’ in the colonial and early independent American hierarchy, which was tripartite (white, native, black). Nevertheless ‘pure’ along with the rest of the quote and a desire to preserve that purity suggests this is not merely a matter of being partial to one’s own tribe but an actual judgment of the gradation of races. There is no doubt that while many founding Anglo-Americans were willing to accept European settlers of diverse backgrounds as fellow citizens they wished to preserve a predominantly Anglo character and ethnic supermajority in their new country. My original point was that WASPs did practice in-group tribalism and loyalty, it just faded or they could not keep up with (or did not wish to stop) the rate of inbound migration. There was consternation about losing Philadelphia, Boston, New York to the white ethnics. As late as Lovecraft’s time it was a topic of considerable debate, although by that point the ship had long sailed.

Evangelical interests need not factor in.

Abbott is not an evangelical anyways. He’s a Catholic.

That’s surprising to me for some reason. But, (afaik) it’s evangelicals who are most supportive of Israel among Christians in Texas

Abbott has practical political reasons for supporting Israel, he doesn’t need to be an evangelical for it. Most likely he converted to Catholicism under pressure from his wife(who is an IRL tradcath); he certainly seems less religious than she is and while going to a Christian church is necessary to be a successful republican politician at a high level, that church being evangelical is not; mainstream evangelical theology holds that religious Catholics have no reason to convert because the church is an invisible brotherhood of true believers in Jesus Christ and not a singular institution.

Do Evangelicals really not believe in converting Catholics?

To add on to the other responses, there is a subset of evangelicals who are anti-Catholic because they believe that certain Catholic teachings contradict the gospel. In particular, Catholicism teaches that you need both faith and good works to be saved, rather than just faith (although it's actually much more complicated than that). I've known people who think Catholics do not even count as Christians based on this criteria - because true Christianity is unique in being a religion where you don't get saved by doing good things.

My church happens to have a lot of ex-Catholics, including myself and also several of the pastors - for those guys, converting Catholics is not very important, not nearly as important as spreading the gospel to unbelievers. But they will certainly preach in such a way as to correct what they see as the false teachings of the Catholics.

They might, but it tends to be significantly less important. In general, Protestants tend not to assert that their denomination is the One True Church, preferring a communion of believers across denominations. In interpersonal compromises, this will obviously lend itself towards the one who cares less about a specific church being more willing to compromise on that. This is augmented by the fact that evangelicals are often more minimalistic with regards to doctrine.

This is a shame; Protestantism is worth fighting for.

Most don’t care and see it as an essentially aesthetic difference; evangelicals who attempted to evangelize to me usually stopped upon finding out that I was a believing, churchgoing Catholic because from their perspective I was already ‘in’. Evangelicalism is heavily orthopraxic and big tent and in practice sees any conversion experience within trinitarian Christianity as basically as good as any other, and in evangelicalism, it’s the conversion experience that counts.

There are a few Protestants who care, a lot, about converting Catholics. Most of them are not evangelicals- although I suppose many of them are adjacent to evangelicals and I don’t think it’s possible to collect the data on whether confessional Lutherans or oneness Pentecostals are more common.

In Texas specifically there’s a minor phenomenon of white evangelical men marrying Hispanic women and either going to Catholic Church without converting or formally converting for the sake of keeping a family together, because evangelicals will generally go to Catholic services but not Vice versa. Abbott falls into this group and has used this fact in his campaign materials, most famously with the mother-in-law ad.

More comments

The protests are neither (at least not predominantly) antisemitic nor a resurgence of 20th century antisemitism.

Which is why the protesters wave the flag of Hamas and chant about how Jews should go back to Poland.

The fact that there are foolish Jews who cleave to their enemies does not change this.

“The protestors” don’t wave a Hamas flag, any more than “the Israeli protestors” call everyone protesting a Hamas terrorist (see: Shai Davidai). Some instances (almost always of non-affiliated / non-students outside of campus grounds) do not allow you to impugn a whole protest movement.

Some instances (almost always of non-affiliated / non-students outside of campus grounds) do not allow you to impugn a whole protest movement.

I can certainly impugn the whole protest movement, since it is a whole.

I don’t follow. The normative protestor is not pledging allegiance to Hamas, those are exceptional outliers.

The normative "peace protestor" wasn't pledging allegiance to the USSR, but they were doing the Soviet's bidding just the same. Different players, same playbook.

Hell, Bernie Sanders came out swinging this week:

Should be noted here that while Bernie has rather tendentiously called for a ceasefire (while saying the same letter that the war against Hamas in itself was justified), saying that Netanyahu is bad is not the same as saying that the war is bad. Presumably something like a half of Israelis would simultaneously say that Netanyahu is bad while the war is good.

With the exception perhaps of the Arabs and some on the hard left, most Israelis who dislike Bibi don’t base that judgment on his treatment of the Palestinians, but on his corruption and other issues.

But would those same Israelis call Netanyahu a racist?

If we were to fairly apply the progressive criteria of "disparate impact", then we would have to conclude that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

If a meritocratic hiring process results in a disproportionately low number of blacks getting hired, then the process is racist, regardless of the intentions behind the process or its alleged fairness. Similarly if anti-Zionism ends up materially hurting Jews, then it's anti-Semitic.

Of course no one on the progressive left will actually buy this argument, they'll just say "no we're doing anti-racism, and anti-racism can't be racist, duh" and leave it at that.

Far be it from me to pass for an idpol-progressive under ITT conditions, but if I had to steel-man the progressive position here, I would say that disparate impact that harms an oppressed group is sufficient to define an act as racist (intention notwithstanding, as you say). Actions to redress oppression, to equalize the conditions of oppressor and oppressed are definitionally not racist; “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” and all that.

But, seeing as it is functionally a non-universal principle that must be adjudicated based on arbitrary definitions of oppressed and oppressor, isn't it just post-hoc rationalization? (Adolf Hitler, great advocate of social justice: taking from the Jewish bourgoise oppressors and giving to the German proletariat.)

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

Less flippantly, my imagined progressive would say that there's no avoiding (at least some) zero-sum games in this world. Thus, the only question is who must win at the expense of whom. And since there must always be an oppressor and an oppressed in every such game, the only political question is how to decide who is oppressing whom in a given situation: to do so clear-sightedly, taking into account the relevant history and particular context, or to bury our heads in the sand and cling to the fiction of "universal principles" -- which is to say, to side with the oppressor?

I think it is uncontroversial that societies at similar tech levels can have vastly different amounts of inequality.

There is inequality ("oppression" in modern parlance) both in ancient fucking Sparta and modern day Sweden, but the amount of inequality matters.

Despite coming from the traditional left, I believe some inequality is actually beneficial: if Elon Musk collected the same UBI as everyone, this would not make the world a worse place (except for Twitter, perhaps). On the flip side, taking the land away from aristocrats and redistributing it to the peasants may likewise stimulate the economy as well as lowering the Gini coefficient.

Who is on top and who on the bottom only matters to me as far as their economic policy might differ due to their background.

Just because there is a winner and loser doesn’t make the loser oppressed or the winner the oppressor.

Moreover it is pretty clear there are numerous positive sum games.

I agree that the dissident right is overdosing on hopium regarding antisemitism.

With the exception of some of the Muslims (and not even all of them, since many at elite universities are largely secularized DEI libs who do not or barely follow any tenets of Islam) these protestors are not racially or religiously hostile to Jews in and of themselves. At most they consider Jews to be ‘white people’, whom they may dislike, but that is hardly the basis for a coalition with white rightists.If this is how young progressives protest against what they perceive as ‘white ethnonationalism’ on the far side of the world, it does not take a great intellect to imagine how they feel about white ethnonationalism in the United States, which is the central policy position on the dissident right.

It is cathartic for far rightists to see Jewish people finally getting their supposed ‘comeuppance’ for supporting progressive policies in the diaspora while defending an ethnic homeland in Israel (allegations of hypocrisy were not unfounded, although many did ‘pick a side’ and advocate liberalism in both, like Soros, or in neither, like many Jewish conservatives).

In practice, though, the most strategic thing for the dissident right to do would be to shut up. Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.

The coming together of leftist and rightist antisemitism is not particularly likely. Blue haired DEI activists who think Israel is a white nationalist fascist police state oppressing innocent people of color (much like Amerikkka amirite) are unlikely to agree that the progressive ideology, media, art and culture they love, which in fact is the impetus behind their antizionism itself (!) is in fact degenerate art and subversion created by the very Jews they are protesting against. The protestors like everything the rightists dislike about Jews except their zionism, while the antisemitic far right sympathize on some level with ethnonationalism but dislike everything else.

However, I disagree that antisemitism will not rise. It is clearly rising, as is visible in everything from comments on mainstream YouTube and TikTok content, in Zoomers memes and in real life among younger people, both white and non-white in the West. That does not mean that things will necessarily get very bad for Jews, at least in the Anglosphere (it was still much worse a century ago), but it is undeniable.

Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.

The Dissident Right is not a Conservative. One major point made by the Dissident Right, which is in fact emblematic in these protests, is that there is a false opposition. The Jews are "on top" of both sides of the protest. They are the most important representatives of the anti-war side and the most important representatives of the war side.

The DR perceives a similar paradigm on the left/right spectrum. Ben Shapiro vs Woke Jew is ultimately a false opposition. A Trotskyite can become a Neoconservative because Stalin has turned against Jews, but that doesn't make him change his stripes or become any more pro-white. And the neocons were not pro-White at all, they were pro-Israel and they made being right-wing about being pro-Israel.

A more Jewish-dominated right-wing movement is not something the DR wants, so I have no problem whatsoever gatekeeping former Jewish progressives from what is an ascending post-liberal Right-wing movement. It's a feature not a bug. There are Righteous Jews like Ron Unz who are truly allies, but "I'm no longer progressive because the left has turned against Israel, now I'm an edgy right-winger who shares racist memes and supports based Israel" is something to be vigilant against, not something to support. It leads towards more fake opposition.

That wasn’t really my point, which was that I don’t think these protests increase the popularity of the dissident right policy platform at all, which is fundamentally hostile to the interests and politics of almost all these protestors.

Do you see the leftist DEI advocates and BLM fans protesting as ‘true’ rather than fake opposition now that they oppose Israel?

Have these anti muslim zionists ever done anything for white people? The whole Bush era was full of white people siding with AIPAC to fight Islam. It achieved absolutely nothing and Europe got swamped with migrants. While the mainstream right got blown up fighting peasants in the middle east their home countries were taking in millions of Muslims. There is no reason to side with people who have been consistently hostile to White people for decades because they now want you to fight for Israel again.

Will these jewish lobbyists actually do something for White people or will they just try to convince us that we are owning the libs when we waste tax money bombing peasants fighting the same billionaires that donate to ADL?

Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts. Unfortunately, it seems like jews use conflicts with the host population in order to increase cohesion within the jewish community. An outside enemy is a great way to unite a people and jews therefore need to be in a continuous state of conflict.

Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts.

So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.

I hate to break it to you, but Jews do not act as a coherent group. If you find Jews on two sides of an issue, that is not because they decided to infiltrate both sides, but because they genuinely believe in different things. In any somewhat meritocratic system, some Jews will likely come out in the top 1%. Some Jews will be doctors, lawyers and so on. Some will be intellectuals all over the political spectrum, from the fringe left to conservatives (if the Nazis and their ilk were not rabidly antisemitic, I am sure that some Jews would have joined them as well). A lot of them will have perfectly normal middle class jobs. Of course, some of the rich ones will throw their money around trying to influence politics. Or commit sex crimes. Good thing gentile industrialists never do that!

For Germany 1933, antisemitism was the placebo therapy. Plenty of poor people found capitalism wanting and were disillusioned with democracy. Rather than waiting for a communist revolution (which would have been terrible for other reasons), gentile industrialists were funding Hitler. There were Jewish bankers and industrialists, and the Nazis managed to convince enough of the population that rather than the Jewish banker and the gentile banker being the problem (as the commies would see it), or unbridled capitalism being the problem, the Jewish banker and the Jewish barber were the problem.

host population

That phrase is Problematic.

Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population. This is wrong, Jews are members of their nation states as much as anyone. German and French Jews both did their share of foolish dying at Verdun, same as any other Germans and French did. Some US Jews lived there back before it was independent. The trope of the faithless, nationless Jew is from old European antisemitism. In reality, it was the other way round: whenever a monarch was feeling particularly Christian, they would banish all the Jews from their realm.

Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.

So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.

Yes, the major factor in the thrid reich's policy on jews was jewish support of communism, the rampant issues with jews engaged in degeneracy. Jews such as Magnus Hirschfeld were not exactly making their people look good. This was during the same era that the Soviet union was wrecking eastern Europe and killing millions, the Bolshevik party was stuffed with jews.

Jews don't have to act as a coherent group. Jews can still be highly overrepresented in certain movements such as communism. There have continuously been problems with dual loyalty amongst jews throughout history and the jews in Germany were clearly not loyal to the German people. Jews have high in group preference and are nepotistic. Their overrepresentation is largely due to them working as a group to promote their own. When a group's members primarily are loyal to their own group and engage with rampant nepotism that hurts the host society.

gentile industrialists were funding Hitler

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population.

Yes, they are a diaspora population that moves around.

Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.

Funny how the same tropes have been used by ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, arabs, and throughout Europe for two millenia.

Congratulations, this comment has finally spurred me into registering an account on this website after lurking since the Reddit days. (I have a few comments on the sub, but nothing major besides one about Ukraine). In my defense, the Motte’s UX on mobile isn’t great.

I’m not interested in commenting on anything re: “jews engaged in degeneracy”, and anyway I wouldn’t say anything 2rafa hasn’t already pointed out, but this stood out to me:

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

What I believe you are referring to (feel free to correct me!) is the formation of the Volksstaat Bayern, the People’s State of Bavaria, on November 8th 1918. And you’re sort of right, the organizer of the anti-Wittelsbach revolution and the subsequent Minister-President, Kurt Eisner, was, in fact, a middle-class Jew (as well as a socialist from Berlin who left his wife and child for a journalist, very degenerate indeed). Well, he wasn’t actually a communist, and most of his government wasn’t, either (though many were Jewish, also). Eisner was assassinated by the rightist Anton Arco-Valley (an aristocrat who himself had significant Jewish ancestry), and the whole government collapsed.

The Volksstaat was couped by more radical left-wingers and set up the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919 (led by Ernst Toller, who wasn’t a communist either, but was a Jew). Anyway this lasted six days, and then the actual communists took over the government, led by Eugen Levine (finally, a Jewish communist), and then a month later elements of the German Army and the Freikorps overthrew said communists and ended the whole fiasco. And it would be correct to say that there were individuals involved in the latter that would go on to join the NSDAP.

I don’t understand the BLM allusion, and I ended up writing more about a fairly obscure event than I intended, but for my own sake I decided to steelman the context here. It is not irrelevant to the NSDAP’s history as a whole. Biographies of Hitler often spend a good chunk on this period of his life, as he (and a few other later prominent Nazis, like Sepp Dietrich) literally participated in the revolutionary government!

I object to taking this event, however, and using it to characterize the NSDAP entirely! I’m not going to write an essay now on the demographics of the Nazi support base in 1932 (Richard F. Hamilton’s Who Voted For Hitler is probably the best source, although Seymour Martin Lipset has also written extensively on the subject).

But to put it shortly — the idea of the great brown wave, the common man who said enough (!) to Jewish degenerates, communists, sodomites, etc. is an absolute myth. The NSDAP’s voters were primarily middle class and self-employed, and they were Protestant (Catholics voted for Zentrum). The urban working class voted for the communists, or the SPD, before that party’s growing unpopularity caused by the Great Depression and Chancellor Bruening’s austerity policies radicalized the electorate. The economic crisis did drive parts of the working poor to the Nazis, but these were primarily artisans, shopkeepers, lawyers, small farmers, and domestic workers; and their motivation was not particularly anti-semitic, and if it was, I’d agree with quiet_Nan, that this was brought on by the more important economic and political anxiety. Although I would disagree on the finer points, as most of the NSDAP’s voters probably would not have voted for the communists anyway, as most likely some owned private property.

More interesting to me, however, is the support of the upper classes for the NSDAP, which was motivated primarily by anti-communist sentiment, albeit with some anti-semitism and anti-democratic sentiment thrown in. The NSDAP received extensive funding from industrialists, such as the directors of IG Farben and Gustav Krupp, and Alfred Hugenberg’s media empire was critical in setting the scene for Hitler’s electoral program. The Nazis also extensively courted the German aristocracy (famously Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Germany), and several key members, such as Goering, were decidedly not salt-of-the-earth types. These people were not inspired to shut down a BLM rally by degenerate Jewish communists (they were probably personally each much more degenerate than the bohemian Kurt Eisner). Their motives were political and economical, and related far more to gentile Soviets than to Jews.

I probably rambled on for too long, and it’s possible I’m reading too much into a throwaway sentence, but sometimes I read takes on this forum about the Nazis that I find uninformed, and this being one of them, here we are.

Oh also

Funny how the same tropes have been used by ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, arabs, and throughout Europe for two millenia.

This just isn’t true.

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

Jews were not mostly disloyal to Germany. Most were not involved in politics at all. Jews were well represented in the Freikorps beyond Prussia despite their substantially antisemitic character in the North especially re. certain chants, among them heroic anti-communists like Weissenstein (killed by communists defending Essen in the Ruhr insurrection) and men like Ernst Kantorowicz, who was of course later famous for The King’s Two Bodies and remained a lifelong German patriot even after the Holocaust.

Ernst and Gertrud Kantorowicz were typical of German Jews…They were passionate nationalists, as völkisch as you could get. Like other Germans, they celebrated the outbreak of war as a momentous chance for national renewal. The late historian Fritz Stern remarked that the passionate German response to the war went beyond mere patriotism. Many intellectuals, especially, saw the guns of August as a triumphant release from dead-end bourgeois culture, a call to a new nobility and manliness.

In summer 1914, during the first frenzy of battle, even German Zionists declared that there was “no difference” between Jews and other Germans. Martin Buber wrote enthusiastically in August, “Never has the concept of the Volk been such a reality to me than during these last weeks.”

And yet years later these were the same Jews blamed both for Germany’s defeat and the Treaty of Versailles, and even amid that, many still served in right-wing anticommunist paramilitaries. The great majority of German Jews were apolitical and loyal to their country.

But that isn’t even the question here. The majority of German Jews fled the Nazis well before 1939. If it had been a mere expulsion of German Jews, the few hundred thousand would be removed and the whole chapter would be just another expulsion of many. What happened, however, was the invasion and occupation of other countries and the murder of their Jewish populations. Greek or Dutch Jews were not Germans or (in almost all cases) communists, and had no intention of becoming so.

And the Soviet Union’s role in WW2’s early years was as Nazi ally whose territorial conquest of Poland was accomplished hand-in-hand with the Germans. By the late 1930s many old Bolshevik Jews had already been purged, even Yagoda was dead, and you seem to ignore that the predominant impulse behind Soviet policy in Eastern Europe by this time certainly was gentile. Was alleged (minority) Jewish involvement in German communist movements enough to justify cleansing the entirety of continental Europe of them, as was the plan? I don’t think you’ve made a case for that.

I didn’t tell you to ally with them or that they would serve the ‘interests’ of white people. I said that a large shift in their politics away from the increasingly anti-Israel left in America would be a win for the right regardless because they would separate an important part of the progressive coalition from it. Most Islamic immigration to Western Europe has been from Pakistan, Algeria and Turkey, and to some extent from the Caucasus, not from Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. They left not because of American policy but because Europe offered a much higher quality of life and welfare. It’s delusional and ridiculous to suggest that the large increase in the Muslim population of Western Europe since the 1960s is the fault of US intervention in the Middle East.

It is true for Sweden specifically, where functor is from.

Sweden also could’ve said “no.”

degenerate art and subversion created by the very Jews

The "Jews created interracial porn" thing really cracks me up. Don't the Japanese make videos where a black dude fucks a Japanese woman while twenty Japanese men in suits stand around and watch? And that's a tame production by their standards.

The Japanese have a strange affinity for cuckolding porn, but it’s usually not interracial (black interracial even less so).

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/germany-afd-most-popular-party-among-under-30s/

Germany: AfD Most Popular Party Among Under 30s Increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions under which they live—the growing prospect of war in Europe, a precipitously declining standard of living, mass migration, and a bleak future in general—a large number of Germany’s youth now view the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as the party which best articulates their concerns.

Findings from the 2024 Jugend in Deutschland study, published days ago, have revealed that 22% of Germans aged between 14 and 29 years old would vote for the AfD if federal elections were held today, making the rightist, anti-globalist party the most favored among young people.

AfD’s favorability among young Germans has spiked sharply compared to past years, rising from 9% and 12% in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and has come at the expense of the parties in the ruling left-liberal traffic light coalition.

Support for the Greens, which in 2022 stood at 27%, has tumbled to 18%. The liberal pro-business FDP, having largely kneeled to all of the dictates from the Greens and the SPD since forming the coalition, has seen its standing among youths nose-dive even more drastically, plummeting from 19% in 2022 to a mere 8%.

Commenting on the results of the study he helped author, Klaus Hurrelmann, a Professor of Public Health and Education at the Hertie School in Berlin, said:

The assumption that young people are left-wing is wrong. We can speak of a clear shift to the right among the young population. … The AfD has clearly succeeded in presenting itself as a protest party for the traffic lights and as a problem-solver for current concerns.

Among the chief concerns for young people is not climate change, LGBTQ rights, or gender ideology, as the mainstream globalist press might have it, but rising costs and a lower standard of living due to inflation (65%), the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East (60%), and overpriced and scarce housing (54%).

Deteriorating social cohesion, the managerial state’s disproportionate concern for migrants and asylum seekers, the growing risk of an economic crisis, and the prospect of poverty in old age are also worrying vast numbers of young Germans.

Youth sentiments reflect issues raised almost exclusively by the AfD.

This trend isn't unique to Germany. In Sweden SD was more popular among the youngest voters than average. Since more young people are immigrants and less likely to vote SD that means young ethnic Swedes are fairly overrepresented voting SD.

In Poland support for Konfederacja was by far the strongest among young people

Le Pen has done well among young people.

Meanwhile, in the US Young people lean massively democrat and in the UK the tories have essentially lost support among young people. Only 15% of young Brits support the Tories while 60% support labour, with greens and libs being the third and fourth choice.

Why has right wing politics become so heavily correlated with age in the Anglosphere, while it is not in other countries? What can the Anglosphere right do to attract younger people?

I think the elephant in the living room is continental vs Anglosphere conservatism- in the Anglosphere conservatism is much more individualist/libertarian, whereas in the continent it tends to be more ‘on your own head be it if you insist on being weird’. One of those can pitch itself better to young voters looking for a leg up.

If it was just America vs EU I would have a simple theory that sounds right to me. American youth have always grown up in 'these' conditions, and so have antibodies and memes that allow them to ignore being mugged or having their bike stolen, in a way that the average European does not, because 'these' conditions, brought on by the refugee crisis, are a very recent change with only the youngest generation really growing up in it. The problem with this theory is the UK, but maybe the global internet means that the protective American memes are actually just protective English memes.

The problem for the Tories is that they have been sitting in the driver’s seat for the past 15 years. Which makes it pretty hard to blame the housing/immigration/economic situation on the other guys. AfD doesn’t have that problem.

The Finnish state broadcasting corporation just put out a story (Google Translated on link) on why young people in Netherlands are voting for Wilders. The given reason is, once again, housing.

England has an awful housing situation and has expensive real estate yet has the opposite political divide.

Well, the Tories are hardly in a position to propose a solution to expensive real estate, as (as far as I've understood) their chief constituency still continues to be the sort of middle-class types who have owned their home for decades (perhaps specifically because of Thatcher and right-to-buy). If you're in such a situation, housing prices skyrocketing are a feature, not a bug. I don't know much about the Reform Party, but my impression is Tories but even more Brexit-y, and the Brexit, in addition to doing nothing about the housing problem (especially now that we know that the reduction in EU immigrants just led to replacement with non-EU immigrants with dividends), is generally massively unpopular with the youth, perhaps making a certain generation gone for good (or gone without massive efforts) for the Tories.

Also, even more speculatively, housing is an issue that can be exploited both by the left and the right, and I'd guess that the left-wing housing voters would be the ones who have managed to snag a place for rent in a major city and now want rent control to keep the rent from skyrocketing out of their reach, and the right-wing ones would be the ones who are living in a remote suburb or a dying rural region, want to move to a city, and want less immigrants so that the waiting list would eventually reach their number. Maybe the green belts mean there are less such suburban housing voters? Are the green belts even a thing any more?

A few years under Starmer might have people realise Labour have no policy for fixing housing.

There is no solution to the housing issue barring radically reforming planning permission in favor of development, and that won’t happen unless COVID II hits and kills (at least) 50% of over-60s.

Well, people who want to build more housing could secede from the government. That's the obvious solution when you have a minority of voters who feel very strongly that the majority is fucking them over.

It remains to be seen to what extent voters understand that development being illegal is the problem though.

It remains to be seen to what extent voters understand that development being illegal is the problem though.

Not at all.

In my experience, the average Labour voter (and thus the average voter) thinks that the cause of the UK's economic malaise is that Tories are channelling all the money to their mates, though they cannot name or identify any specific examples of this occurring. Unless "channelling" means pensions, and "mates" means all pensioners in the country, this doesn't explain the UK's budget problems. They just see a government taking in endless amounts of tax, no more services being produced, and assume MPs are personally pocketing the difference.

I guess if I was a Tory I would create some sort of "political moonshot plan" designed around trying to make people understand why housing is stupidly expensive (scarcity caused by laws) and how to fix it (make it legal to build stuff where it is illegal because people voted for scarcity, and easier to build stuff where the laws make it artificially difficult as a more subtle way to create scarcity). Worth a try, right?

Sunak's current political strategy is an ambitious plan known as Net Zero Seats, where he tries to secure an overwhelming defeat in the next election.

The two main changes (in addition to planning reform) that a government that actually wanted to restore some kind of positive economic trajectory would have to do, namely abolishing the NHS and replacing it with European style healthcare and means-testing the state pension, are so catastrophically unpopular that they can never happen. It is what it is, it’s not like the UK is a failed state, it’s just in slow decline and has been for a long time, still a very nice place to live by any standards.

The low growth low interest rate, low increase in government spending situation we had before wasn't great, but it was sustainable. After spaffing trillions up the wall on lockdowns, however, the economic situation is no longer sustainable. You can project every NHS worship, pension worship, build-nothing worship and debt interest trend out and by the end of the century it results in demands for government spending exceeding 100% of GDP.

If Labour blows another hole in the budget with another 20% increase in healthcare spending that doesn't actually improve healthcare at all, and voters get mad at this for the same reason they were mad at the Tories for doing the same thing (even if they can't identify why it didn't work), who do they vote for next? The NHS Uber Alles Party?

The difference is that in Europe existing parties tried desperately to keep out ‘new right’ populists almost everywhere so young people still believe things can actually change.

When the AfD joins a governing coalition and turns out - just like Meloni in Italy - to be another center-right party that in practice will do nothing about mass immigration, their supporters will probably abandon them pretty quickly. Le Pen in France is another example, she’s much less reactionary on immigration than people think (only Zemmour was the truly anti-immigration candidate). The Sweden Democrats have strongly moderated too, they’re barely to the left of the Danish Social Democrats if at all.

I do kind of suspect that eventually the voters will get at least some of what they want if they continue to win elections. That may be naive of me.

Meloni's party has crashed from 26% of vote in the election to... uh, 27% of vote in the polls currently.

Yes, because there is no alternative. In practice Meloni has only seen increases in mass immigration to Italy, she has betrayed those who voted for her on that platform. But that is nothing new; the Tories did very well in 2019 after a decade of overseeing rising immigration but promising lower immigration too, this is common in Western countries.

Poll numbers don’t mean that she implemented her manifesto or fulfilled her promises.

Is it just that they have more parties? If 22% of young people support AFD then presumably 78% of them support more left wing parties.

I might be biased but I feel like support for the farthest right option available always means more than support for whatever else. AfD are the guys most vilified in media. The general sentiment being that if you are voting for them there's something wrong with you.

If this is the referred poll, 35% of youth are answering "don't know" and "won't vote", and right-leaning parties seem to generally be more popular than left-leaning ones.

US conservatism is more tightly connected to religiosity than the hard-right parties popular with young people in Europe. I know several young people who are critical of migration, concerned about crime, skeptical of the transgender movement, and opposed to critical race theory, who nonetheless dislike and distrust Republicans because of their strong assocation with evangelicalism. I personally hate to say it, but abortion access is popular among young people and our Lord and Savior isn't.

Bizarrely, I also know young Southern Baptists who went woke, and are moderately hip on gender identity and sexuality issues. I actually have a strong suspicion that within 80 years, respectability politics and the evangelical drive to 'meet people where they are' will result in most big evangelical churches going the way of the mainlines. Traditional Christian morals will probably be the purview of a small minority in insular communities. "I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Ba'al..."

By contrast, among European conservatives, Christianity isn't very popular. In fact, my general understanding is that European conservative parties are typically less religious than the center, where Christian Democratic parties are very strong -- essentially being the mainliners of Europe. European conservatism is typically blood-and-soil, not God-and-guns or even throne-and-altar. They're nationalist with ethnic undertones (except in France), and combine that with a commitment to social welfare. They believe in using the government to provide services to citizens, and hold that the best way to afford this is to limit citizenship to natives and a small group of deserving immigrants. They're nationalist, but also kind of socialist. Hm.

I think opponents of this worldview are kind of right that there are similarities between it and the National-Socialism of Nazi Germany, which was also skeptical of religion and committed to both ethnonationalism and social welfare for the ethnos. It at least lies in the quadrant of skulls and crossbones which has been poisoned by memories of mustache man. But I don't see the irredentism, the genocidal hatred, or the fanaticism of fascism in them. I think there are occasional glimmers of such things -- I recall a discussion on here a while ago about Finnish? politicians saying the n-word in texts and joking about racial superiority. But the situation in Finland re: black people is lightyears away from the situation in pre-war central Europe re: Jewry, and I don't see these as driving motivations for continental European right-wing parties the way they were last century. I see more opposition to recent immigrants causing real, observable problems in society, where the solution doesn't have to do with loading people in camps but in deporting people committing crimes and not taking in new ones.

Even in Anglosphere Europe, the appeal in recent times has sometimes been "let's stop participating in these globalist enterprises/admitting culturally-incompatible migrants so we can fund our social welfare." Such a message was famously emblazoned on a bus. This combination is clearly appealing to many voters, and the unique thing with the Anglosphere is it isn't very appealing to young voters. For the UK, I would pin blame on austerity (however needed) for young voters' skepticism of the Tories, though I think that goes hand-in-hand with a feeling that the Tories represent upper-class Etonian elitists, not the needs of average people.

And across the pond, there are many bread-and-butter issues where the Republicans' traditional fiscal conservatism alienates young voters. Health care reform and workers' protections are the big ones; there are a lot of young people who feel like their lives are controlled by large corporate employers who don't do right by their employees. There are also many who, because of policies of said large corporate employers, struggle to maintain health insurance; they are angered by Republican opposition to even incredibly moderate reforms like Obamacare (even if the most popular component, the parental-health-insurance-under-26 rule, was supported by Trump), and many believe in a single-payer system.

My views on these issues form the biggest divergence between myself and the Republican party. I even support a lot of fiscally-conservative things you might not expect -- I think supply-side economics is a great idea, I oppose wealth taxes, and I think 'pricing gouging' during emergencies provides an economic incentive for people to supply needed goods to a disaster area! But I think there are areas where more needs to be done to make sure Americans have a good quality of life, and aren't exploited by unscrupulous megacorporations or buried under mountains of medical debt.

Of course, it's also possible that I'm full of shit, and talking about a continent I know nothing about based on little more than internet vibes. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

I would agree that the kind of "right" that appeals to the young is definitely the hardline, bordering-on-fascist sort, not dry conservatism. The young want a Great Cause and an Enemy, not milquetoast or cautious policy and definitely not "listen to your parents".

Do you think they'll mellow out as they get older and become libertarians? Or will they just be consumed by nanobots along with the rest of the human race?

Do you think they'll mellow out as they get older and become libertarians?

Dunno about libertarians, but most of the young mellow out at some point. I wasn't only talking about Gen Z/Alpha, after all; this goes back at least to WWII (note that the actual Nazis had Angry Young Men willing to take to the streets and beat people up, something which you haven't really seen from "rightist" movements since until very recently).

Or will they just be consumed by nanobots along with the rest of the human race?

Well, I sure hope not.

At least the Finns Party has an interesting demographic regarding religious views: at least a while back, they're the most popular among "no religion" types but also the most popular among the "strongly religious" types, particularly those who belong to Protestant churces outside the Lutheran quasi-state-chuch. The party itself has MPs ranging from precisely such committed Pentecostals etc. to atheists: in one of the larger cities, they even have a council member who (probably mostly for reasons of edginess) has defined himself as a Satanist.

All of these cooperate rather easily, though, since they all share the same focus on immigration, and the party itself is mostly rather secular in both its policies and its communications.

While youth tend to be mostly secular, the ones who are strongly religious will tend to mostly congregate to non-Lutheran movements (there have been several stories in media, like this one, about a new trend of young men joining charismatic groups or Orthodoxy, for instance, the latter of which I can anecdotally confirm noticing myself).

I think an answer that is both Americentric and true is that the culture war is waged first and foremost in English, and only can perfectly fit to America and countries more like it. The (dominant left wing angle of the) CW is something I've decried as being an extremely insidious corruption of many ideas that most people would agree with - at least they'd agree with the motte. Then the bailey gets snuck in and your average person is neither equipped nor inclined to work to decouple those from each other. As I specified that these are mostly left wing "arguments" - by which I mean streamers, ad campaigns, astroturfing on reddit, twitter, youtube, ecelebs in general inundating the general public with some toxic corruption of a more palatable left wing idea - you can make those receptive to them extremely resilient to dissent, but only if the arguments are constantly modulated to fit the current zeitgeist. Otherwise you fail to resonate with the general population at all, and the spell is broken. Not cleanly or instantly, but the absolute stranglehold can't last.

I think this only can truly happen in the US and our closest countries culturally (the UK and Canada), not only due to the above but also the fact that the vast majority of worldwide media is either from or related to America. My favorite example is the thought-terminating cliche "donate to black trans women". That makes no sense in the vast majority of European countries, because black people are just a tiny fraction of the population, especially integrated ones, and you can't make an appeal to someone's sense of fairness when none of those black people were slaves, or historically discriminated against in any way. Contrast that with the US context where guilt over all of that most certainly has a place in the public's consciousness, and it's much more likely to land.

Now, certainly there are wider schools of left wing thought that are more generally applicable, and have arguably been more popular in Western Europe; but those are less likely to be extreme or have that stranglehold over your terminally online population. Consequently, those downstream of any of the media the terminally online influence are not fed this riveting and completely relevant culture war. What remains in the public consciousness is this weird distorted holdover of 90s neoliberal thought (I've often lamented that something seems to have completely frozen the political elites, but this is not the central point of my response): Immigration good, world police kinda bad, health care good, guns bad, violence is not endemic to our society, number must go up at all costs, etc. None of this is really all that compelling except health care and being against the world police idea. It certainly doesn't hold the vitriol that American politics does.

So, when you combine those geriatric neoliberal policies with the consequences they bring (e.g. wow these migrants really seem to be causing a lot of problems), and the messaging is not able to sustain it, what do you get? Genuine grassroots support for something, anything different. Wow, there's a part called "Alternative for Germany" that's talking about these exact issues the establishment is ignoring? Sign me up!

Contrast this with America, which is much larger in scale, and arguably a lot more atomized due to its multicultural nature. This compounds with the effects of the terminally online world, meaning a lot of people's perceptions of issues that are not right next to them are completely detached from reality. It's just some streamer, or tiktoker, or AI generated youtube video that even tells them about these things. A young leftist from a hip neighborhood is likely never to see actual race crime, or when it does - as was the case when Ryan Carson was stabbed to death - the feed of content is so strong that they are completely immunized against looking at what happened critically. The hold on them is just too strong.

I will say that I disagree somewhat with the idea that America's young are overwhelmingly democrat. Everything I've seen has indicated that they are splitting along gender lines, with democrats still having an advantage, but only in the aggregate. I can also, emotionally and with no evidence, say that I've felt an extreme rupture in our society between the messaging and reality. I think things like the migrant bussing and ever-expanding nature of activist thought (a self preservation measure - if they don't have something to fight for, do they have jobs anymore?) have soured a lot of people on assumptions they've made. Will it be enough to change the zeitgeist? I don't know. I do know that the American right wing has utterly failed in having unifying figures that are anything short of embarrassing. I don't have a solution for that.

The Tories are a party of mass immigration, that's what their policies have achieved in the real world. They say stuff like 'we'll be tough on immigration' but they don't actually do it, they flail around paying Rwanda and achieving nothing. Different policies but similar results for the Australian centre-right - Abbott successfully stopped illegal immigration but kept legal immigration very high.

In the UK neither illegal nor legal immigration are combatted. In Australia Labour adopted Coalition border policies, so there's no distinguishing difference there. So on immigration both parties are roughly equivalent to their Labour equivalents. AFD is actually different.

Labour generally promises young people some kind of patronage in uni education, welfare and so on. The centre-right tend to support the old in housing and welfare. Furthermore, young people tend to revile the centre-right parties, it was considered cringeworthy to vote for Scott Morrison (former centre-right PM) in Australia. Labour and Greens parties are more socially progressive and young people care about climate change.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/podcast-episode/voting-choices-of-young-people-shifting-to-the-left/qevszl5rb

Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK or especially America. Also the German Greens have tarred themselves with the horrendous performance of the traffic-light coalition and their economically damaging policies. British and Australian Greens haven't had much chance to do real damage.

The Australian equivalent to AFD is One Nation, which is much more boomer-skewed (and pretty irrelevant politically). It's run by a woman called Pauline Hanson who's nearly 70 years old. They appeal most to rural white Queenslanders, the whitest parts of the whitest state in the country. Same in Britain, UKIP targeted old rural whites because there were more of them. AFD leaders are much younger, in their 40s. They appeal most in East Germany, which is the whitest part of Germany.

I think right wing politics of the anti-immigration kind has a lot to do with whiteness. Western right-wing politics in general too, to a lesser extent. In the Anglosphere the whitest demographics tend to be the old, so anti-immigration rightist parties naturally evolve to target the old. In Europe there's a broader base of potential supporters and they can target the young, so they do.

Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK

Is this actually true? In Germany in 2019, 40% of children born had at least one parent born abroad, the situation has accelerated further since then.

In the UK in 2021 77% of the population were White British or Irish. In Germany only 71% of the population have no “Migrationshintergrund”, however that 29% category does include remaining returning Ostsiedler. Nevertheless, I would assume the native percentage in Germany is around 75% or so too. 25% of Swedes had both parents born abroad or themselves immigrated, while an additional 10% had one parent born abroad and one in Sweden (which includes many people of immigrant descent). So again, Sweden is likely less than 75% native, although many migrants are Finns. Perhaps 75% of Australians are ethnically European according to most estimates.

So again, neither Germany nor Sweden retain a higher percentage of their indigenous populations than the UK. They are likely whiter due to differences in migrant country of origin, but not considerably so.

That's incredible for the UK. It was almost 95% white British or Irish in 1991. The scale of demographic change in only 28 years is shocking. An absolute betrayal by their elites.

Canada is an Anglosphere exception as well. Young people are basically equally likely to vote conservative as the old.

From what I've seen, that's 100% a reaction to Indians.

Short answer: The two-party system. I think there are young people in the USA who would vote for AfD but who wouldn't vote for the Republican Party. The Republicans suck in a lot of ways and are shackled to interest groups that make them unappealing to most people under the age of 40.

I think there are also a lot of young people in the USA who would vote for a far-left party in a parliamentary system but who have strong objections to voting for the Democrats - lately we've seen a lot of pushback from this bunch over the Israel-Palestine issue.

Yeah, this is probably a large factor. One of the main splits in Continental Europe is less that "young are right, olds are left", but rather that the olds vote for traditional boomer parties (social democrats and Christian democrats, and equivalents) and youngs vote for new "challenger" parties (right-wing populists and greens/new left parties, often split by gender). As dissatisfaction with the pensioner-focused boomer parties that wish to stay the course even while Europe is mired in 15 years of no growth and little development grows, the right-wing populist parties derive particular benefits due to several reasons (center-right parties have generally tended to be a bit more popular than center-left ones, right-wing populists are better at appearing to center-left voters than challenger left parties to center-right ones, the Greens in particular have become quite "pro-system" in recent decades etc.)


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