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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   26001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Students from various campuses have occupied the Columbia University campus in New York City in protest of Israel. There reports and videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students on or near campus grounds. The NYPD has deployed officers to surround the campus and has established filtration checkpoints to prevent outside agitators from entering campus. Various Columbia alumni have expressed concern with Columbia’s handling of the situation. All classes are now online at least for today. Similar protests are happening at Yale and various other campuses across the country.

Edit: Congressman Josh Hawley has called on President Joe Biden to deploy the National Guard to Columbia and other universities to protect Jewish students on campus.

Edit: NYU has ordered their encampment to disperse and the NYPD is moving in to clear the demonstrators.

Edit: I’m seeing footage of NYU professors being marched out of the campus in zip ties. Cal Poly Humbolt students have barricaded themselves inside a campus building with furniture.

Edit: University of Texas, Austin student protestors are being dispersed by police. And possibly vanned. Protests now seem to be nationwide.

Edit: Mass arrests beginning at USC protests.

Edit: Tasers and rubber bullets being deployed against protestors at Emory University in Georgia.

Edit: There appear to be police snipers monitoring protests at Ohio State University.

I mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?

Surely they know that Columbia university can’t actually affect any Israeli policies.

I mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?

Can't you ask that about most protests?

I never really "got" protesting. I have to assume that the main purpose of it is just to serve as a social activity for the protesters themselves. If it's something like workers going on strike, where the group in question actually has some leverage, that's a different story, but a bunch of random people just gathering in public to "support a cause"? It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Sometimes I've heard it justified as a way of building positive publicity. You're supposed to see the police or other authority figures mistreating the protesters, and that's supposed to make you support their cause more. But usually it just makes me end up supporting the cause less, because the protesters are obnoxious. Their own actions make me want them to lose more.

I think in this specific case the protestors are annoying enough that sending in the veterans of Ken state wouldn’t lead to realignment towards their cause.

Most protests do have some chance of efficacy by changing the hearts and minds of local officials, or at least softening opinions. This seems like it has no connection to anything.

Ken state

The Barbie movie has left a lasting impression on our cultural consciousness.

In all seriousness, I don’t think protests have to have direct efficacy. The important thing is when people in power think about aiding Palestine/Israel, they think “people care enough about this to push the envelope of speech.” It’s literally about sending the message.

Ken state

The Barbie movie has left a lasting impression on our cultural consciousness.

Horses involved; checks out.

There's all sorts of goals one could have. Often the goal is to make enough of a nuisance of yourselves so that you force the news to mention your cause, maybe sparking some conversations in the public. Sometimes, as you say, it's specifically to taunt the police so you can get some pictures of them hitting you in an attempt to take the moral high ground reserved for those oppressed by authority. Some protests are pure practice, every year here there a day of protest "against police brutality" and it's just a rallying cry for all the people who want to practice rioting (and for the police to practice their riot suppression) for when they'll have an actual cause they want to strategically riot for. If your protest is elite-supported, it can be to intimidate or to launder unpopular opinions for the elite by making them seem a lot more popular than they are.

Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes. In fact, it’s almost always a negative publicity to the point that it would often do the cause better to not protest at all. Your protest blocked a road, now everyone is pissed because they were late to work, or missed a flight, or other activities they needed to get to. Are people talking about the cause as in “does this idea have merit” or in terms of “what a bunch of inconsiderate losers making people late for work and making people miss their flights. It’s negative at least around me. People outright cheered when the people blocking roads in Europe got pushed out of the way by SUVs or were manhandled to the side of the road by outraged drivers. Not one person seeing the souping of the Louvre paintings got curious about the cause, they were upset about the destruction of the art. So on net, it’s more likely to turn people away.

The term often used is "demonstration" rather than "protest". This is because by existing, these "demonstrations" demonstrate the power of those running them, and thereby convince all involved they'd better get in line.

If they don't actually have that power, sure, they get pushed out of the way and they lose. But anyone messing with these "protestors" will certainly receive the full force of the law, while the "protestors" will be handled with kid gloves, so it is clear they do have the power.

I think this captures the tenor of many protests. It's about power and intimidation. We can burn your buildings, tear down your monuments, loot your stores, and YOU are powerless to stop us.

Demonstrations have worked this way forever, going all the way back to ancient Rome, but perhaps most saliently in the street battles between fascists and communists in Weimar Germany.

Winning hearts and mind is one way to gain power. But any good communist knows that silencing and intimidating your enemies works much better. Here in America, we're so used to the MLK/Gandhi model which is designed to appeal to the hearts of a kind and powerful master. But demonstrations which carry the threat of violence are far more typical. I mean, would you dare to carry a drawing of Muhammad around Columbia's campus right now?

That said, I don't think these protests will go very far. The establishment is NOT on the side of protestors as they were during BLM. Even in San Francisco and Seattle, protestors are being charged for blocking traffic. If any protestors attempt real violence, they will be prosecuted.

Jews are still sacred in America.

Jews are just a white ethnicity now. Sacredness is gone.

What they do have is power.

They also have a strong in-group bias which is a huge reason that power exists in the first place.

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It's often negative in the short term, but there are a lot of small causes that the news just doesn't care about and wouldn't mention if it weren't that some people made themselves a nuisance. It's a long term play, to not let your cause be forgotten or ignored. It's better to make people angry about you than let them ignore you.

For those specific examples, climate protestors have full elite backing now, the strategy is different. It's intimidation, they're used by the elites to show what they are willing to destroy if people don't bow down.

Hasn’t climate protest worked because the earth has actually gotten warmer the last 20 years so it feels true?

PETA hasn’t taken off. The only real change in that space is picking up some rationalists.

And environmentalist have benefited from tech costs curves while nothing like that has kicked in for PETA (cheap lab meat).

Hasn’t climate protest worked because the earth has actually gotten warmer the last 20 years so it feels true?

Something being true doesn't explain the dynamic he's describing. On one hand there's plenty of things that are true and feel true, and are opposed by the elites, rather than having their full backing. On the other hand the climate protest movement offers no solutions, and as he said are only used as a way to consolidate power, and to show what the elites are willing to destroy.

How old are you, roughly speaking?

Because this was famously, visibly effective in a few historical situations. The Civil Rights movement is in living memory.

Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes.

I am aware of such cases. In one case because people cared, were willing to take being late or risking beating or prison sentence or being thrown out of work and take minor risk of being assassinated by regime - but they were not aware that such opinion was widely shared.

So protests sparked strikes and so on.

Note that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_warning_strike_in_Poland basically failed - despite 12 million people participating in strike - in country that had 36 million people! Imagine 111 million people on strike in USA! Strike included regime television, all TV went out for 4 hours.

But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Polish_strikes were final trigger for regime change.

On other side: for minor issues even minor protest can cause results, especially for local government issues when noone really opposes them. Or opposing group will happily go away and try to take less defended victim rather than fight this specific battle. In sufficiently minor cases things as simple as single person mailing local government can work.

Other model: it is demonstration of power and one step away from armed mob/uprising/terrorism. This also sometimes works. Sometimes by progressing into outright revolution.

See Ukraine in 2014 (president run away, no full scale civil war*) or how Tzarist Russia ended (ended in a full scale civil war).

*or ended in a civil war if you treat what happened in East as civil war rather than Russian invasion.

I never really "got" protesting. I have to assume that the main purpose of it is just to serve as a social activity for the protesters themselves.

I don't remember where I read it, but I recall someone arguing that a group of sign-waving protestors sends two messages — one written on the signs, the other the sticks to which those signs are attached. Picture any particular mob of protestors, shouting and chanting slogans, only now they're also wielding the proverbial pitchforks and torches.

I participated in some minor protests which were held and they were useful as they were used as "see, people actually care about this issue".

They helped to result in changes at local level.

Protests can be seen as kind of mini-referendum - and give sign to politicians they should at least pretend to care about given topic. Or maybe even care and do something.

In last local elections all politicians actually pretended to care about this topics, some seem to actually care about this topics.

Protest is better sign of actual strong interest than FB petition.

Protestors in general come off like cringe idiots to me. Willing to inconvenience you for their cause, that they believe is so obviously right that the only reason you won't join them is because you're either an irredeemable bad person or are incredibly ignorant and actually being educated by their protest.

The charitable answer (extremely charitable IMHO, but I'm sure accurate for at least a few of them) is that they do have some non-zero chance of influencing US policy, specifically the amount of aid we give to Israel, the conditions we put upon it, and the tenor of our relations with Israel. If they can change the tenor of relations even slightly from "We got your back" to "Reign it in a bit, our support isn't unconditional" they could see that as a win.

If they can change the tenor of relations even slightly from "We got your back" to "Reign it in a bit, our support isn't unconditional" they could see that as a win.

They have already done so. POTUS administration has used messaging to suggest support is conditional, begging restraint, etc. For example, the reporting after Iran strike on Israel, it was widely reported afterwards Biden had talked to Bibi and said the US won't participate in any retaliation. "Take the win." Coordinating an impromptu air defense network between several regional partners to down Iranian missiles and drones is not lukewarm support. It is exceptional support. I don't think the general public is aware or cares about these kinds of details. It was also support defensive in nature which I guess makes it less useful to activists to point at.

It is unclear exactly what Biden could do to satisfy this arm of his party without ceasing all financial and military support for Israel. A politically isolated or more desperate Israel is probably not a better Israel for Palestinians to live next to. Nor would it be better for America to have to deal with and it would likely increase domestic pressures on Biden. So signals for restraint and (probably) coordinated public messaging is about all POTUS is willing to do. It is an election year after all!

Remember that everyone said this exact same thing about BLM protests in 2015. The movement was a joke, just some crazy college kids.

This is just another loop on the death spiral.

BLM turned out and had specific demands of people near enough to have to listen to them. Those demands were, at first, fairly reasonable(cops wear body cams) so they were met.

By contrast the pro-Palestine protestors are demanding Israel dissolve itself. Not only is this a much bigger ask than ‘put cameras on your police’ Israel really doesn’t care and doesn’t have to listen at all.

BLM is just a three word slogan. To the extent that it became a real-world organization it was largely a grift.

People then, as now, were attracted to the movement for all sorts of reasons. Some people made reasonable demands. Most did not.

As usual, the communists showed up as they do whenever people are angry about something.

There was no "good BLM" that got corrupted. It was always just an organic blob that was fanned by street anger, irresponsible news media, and Marxist organizations. The white people who were at those protests in 2014 are the same as the white people at the anti-Jewish protests today. Eventually they'll get bored and move on to the next thing, looking for self-actualization that will never arrive.

looking for self-actualization that will never arrive

Seems like it does arrive for them, in the sense that they get to be a part of a change in zeitgeist. I imagine it feels pretty fulfilling to get in early on the next big political thing.

Ego satiation doesn't put food on the table. Once there material wealth was present for the taking, the infighting crippled the movement. The BLM formal organization milked the feel-good donations dry before collapsing, immediately calling the general public racist for not continuing to support Buy Large Mansions. While the grifter and the do-gooder may be seperate bodies, neither side manages to get their preferred outcome.

BLM is just a three word slogan. To the extent that it became a real-world organization it was largely a grift.

I agree, but I would say that the lack of specific demands was also one of its strengths.

If you make a specific demand, it ties you down. It reveals your cards. The other side can respond in various clear ways. They can give you the demand, which immediately ends the negotiation. They can negotiate, aiming for somewhere in the middle. Or they can refuse, and offer various reasons why those demands are unreasonable. Either way, it gives them a logical path out.

Instead of making demands, it's pure "id." It keeps the other side guessing, pleading. "Just tell me what you want!!!" "No." The classic example is the wife who is angry at her husband, but won't tell him why she's angry or what she wants him to do. "If you really loved me, you'd know without me telling you." It keeps him guessing, keeps him on an endless treadmill of trying to do things for her in a futile attempt to satisfy her that will never end. Plus, for a political movement, it brings together all sorts of people who probably wouldn't agree on any one specific demand.

fairly reasonable(cops wear body cams)

I am all for this. But then when it started to be implemented, BLM's rhetoric turned around, at least locally. The stated rationale was privacy. But cynically, I think it was because too many (but not all!) of their rallying cases wound up having video evidence that contradicted the simple narrative that spun out of the initial reports.

As far as I know, BLM always opposed body cams.

I remember articles from the activist groups demanding that body cam footage be sealed and only released at the request of the accused. Remind me to find them later.

Yeah, that sounds familiar. If you happen to come across those links, it'd be nice to have them here for reference, but no worries if not. :-)

I don't recall anyone actually being against body cams, aside from some griping about the cost. IME most cops want to wear them because they're great at rebutting false accusations of misconduct and brutality.

I haven't noticed the sibling's comment that BLM is actually against them now, though maybe I haven't been paying enough attention. I suppose it wouldn't surprise me all that much though. I still recall the case where the cops shot a black teenage girl who was actively in the process of stabbing another girl, it was caught on bodycam quite clearly, and BLM still threw a fit, though a bit more muted.

Which of BLM’s goals did it achieve? Stuff like the bail/justice reform movement long predates BLM and wasn’t the focus, so that doesn’t count.

Looser sentences was absolutely a key focus of BLM. The fact that those demands predated BLM does not negate the fact. As for achievements? That's another story. But I think the goal for BDS is more tangible since most people don't really care much about Israel one way or another. That's why the Zionist lobby has been successful. It's enough for a small but passionate minority and you can have outsized impact on foreign policy. Domestic policy is trickier.

I agree, Zionism is the default in the US because most people don’t care except (most) Jews and some Evangelicals and this leads to policy by default, unlike issues like abortion and gun control with strong views on both sides. As the Muslim population rises in the West, the constituency strongly ideologically opposed to Israel, who consider opposition to Israel a central religious and moral imperative, grows with it.

That said, the route to BDS’ actual goals (which, most pointedly, include sanctions as a central element) is much harder. Fifty something representatives out of 435 voted against the current Israel aid bill; 20 of those were Republicans protesting the related aid for Ukraine and that some of the money would go to Palestinians (and even the NatCon faction definitely wouldn’t vote to sanction Israel in support of Palestinians, they just wouldn’t vote to send it money). Of the few dozen Dems most just thought Israel went a bit too far in Gaza. The US Muslim population is much smaller than those in major Western European countries per capita, and is highly concentrated in a few house seats. Even countries that have been more skeptical of Israel’s war in Gaza, like China and Russia, don’t sanction Israel. Even many Muslim lands do not.

They got Starbucks locations to act as a public restroom for a few years. Not even that was able to stick.

Got some of those in the 'leadership' positions independently wealthy.

Diverted uncounted billions of dollars to leftist activism to give sinecures to hordes of useless college graduates, putting fringe "critical theory" activists in charge of university hiring, science funding, and formerly apolitical NGOs with massive endowments and prestige.

I don't know what goals you think they had other than "all power to us, loot the system for our ingroup"

How can people still pretend the institutional takeovers of 2020 just didn't happen?

That’s just institutional leftism, it isn’t BLM in particular. That was a specific movement with goals like “defund the police”.

BLM was the previous vehicle for institutional leftism to take over everything. "Decolonization" is the new one.

It can affect US policies?

divestment is a pretty clear goal. it's worked before

I think divestment is certainly a viable goal (afaik various bodies have already divested from the fossil fuels industry, the arms industry, the tobacco industry and so on for progressive political reasons) but it’s not really the reason they’re protesting. Columbia could divest from “corporations that profit from Israel’s war in Gaza” tomorrow and it wouldn’t stop the protests.

Note that the argument that the students are making for "Columbia is profiting from Israel's US backed war in Gaza" is not the sane version of that argument. They are going after Columbia for holding index funds which contain regular American companies which do business in Israel. Apparently Microsoft is "providing surveillance infrastructure to the IDF" and therefore QQQQ is a hate stock. The kind of divestment the students are asking for is not a serious demand that they want met.

Hopefully, they can pull US military aid out of Israel. Israel will have to resort to using more dumb bombs, until local industry catches up with demand. With less leverage on Israel, the Arabs in Gaza will suffer more - and hopefully some will be forced out, though that’s more of a longshot.

Since the American defense lobby likes money, all this probably won’t happen.

They're going to pull US military aid out of Israel...by protesting at Columbia?

Even if their protest is successful, how is Columbia University going to pull that off?

In theory, they could get Columbia to completely cave and put out a sufficiently groveling statement that it triggers a respectability cascade, causing all the other universities to cave and put out groveling statements. This would be followed by major media outlets, and finally the White House.

It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.

It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.

...a university putting out a statement that causes a chain reaction that leads to the President of the United States and a majority of Congress to change their position on providing military aid to Israel?

What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?

I don't see a world where the US decides to stop providing military aid to Israel within the next decade, let alone in time to have an effect on the current conflict. Even if literally all the universities put out statements saying that they should! In my experience a university statement on a hot button political issue has never come close to anything like that kind of impact.

What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?

American sports was completely canceled for 48 hours because a domestic abuser in the process of kidnapping a child and holding a knife was shot by police.

See though, that strikes me as much more probable than the university statement thing. That fits within my understanding of how the world works. American sports has a recent history of doing stupid stuff, and people freak out about criminals being killed by police all the time. When was the last time a statement from a university affected anything?

Who was that?

here ya go. He just gave the cliffs notes for the shooting that started the Kenosha riot which Kyle Rittenhouse more or less ended.

Except Columbia can't do that because they've got pressure from the pro-Israel left which would result in the ouster of Columbia's Muslim female president, the Baroness (yes really) Nemat Shafik, if they did so. She doesn't want to be treated like Claudine Gay.

What does the location of the protest have to do with it? If protesters are marching in the streets, it’s not because they’re making demands of the HOA. They’re speaking to a national audience, which is exactly why we know about it at all.

Hold on.

Are you suggesting Arab suffering is a means to some end? Or is it the goal?

Neither. It’s a result of less US restrictions on Israeli actions, which generally prioritize safeguarding Arab lives much lower than accomplishing military objectives. E.g. going into Rafah now, is something the US is preventing Israel from doing for such humanitarian reasons.

You can't really talk about protests like they're a unified group with a specific plan. It's like asking "what are those people on the Motte hoping to accomplish?" There's a lot of them, and they're all different.

I think a big part of protests is to improve the cohesion of the protestors. They start out as just a mob of dissatisfied individuals who hate the current status quo, but they'll talk to each other, march together, chant slogans together, and eventually figure something out. Over time they turn into a unified, coherent political activist group. They might alienate a lot of neutrals, but those random neutrals don't have much political power either. A small, committed activist group can wield disproportionate power. See for example: AIPAC on the other side.

In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position. That's going to have ripple effects down the line.

You can't really talk about protests like they're a unified group with a specific plan.

Of course they are. This is all planned.

The vast, top-secret sinister conspiracy of... college student protesters?

It is at least 80 years too late to sneer at that in the United States alone.

By whom?

I'm sure you can find any number of groups who are proud to participate. I don't think any of them deserve much credit.

By whom?

I don't know, I'm not on their mailing lists (or Discords as the case may be)

Then how do you know it exists?

The bailey, I mean, where these discord servers somehow distinguish their members from "a mob of dissatisfied individuals." Anyone can give out an email address. That puts them roughly on par with a local HOA. Scary.

I see what appears to be co-ordinated protests, I know protests have been co-ordinated in the past, I infer the existence of a co-ordinator. It's not rocket science.

I would gently posit that your level of conscientious organization is slightly higher effort than these flash mobs. Occupy Wall Street and Chaz exhibit hallmarks of being coalescing of disparate bedfellows rather than a coordinated mobilization effort. Coordinated efforts if anything exhibit geographical dispersion to maximize visibility, like deliberate disruptions of uninvolved parties and events by the pro-pal protestors. Staying in a single region to protest dance is just a magnet attracting the crazies, and those tend to dissolve the moment a power struggle arises.

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Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, along with a couple other umbrella groups, have jointly claimed credit for both the Columbia-specific protest and the follow-on encampments at a number of other schools. There's a fair criticism that there's at least a few rando Garbage People in the hradzka sense running around, or even agent provacateurs, but this isn't some Stand Alone Complex where the simulacrum had no real original version.

((The less charitable take on 'umbrella group' is that they're both just front groups for the actual coordinating organizations, but by definition I can only point to the subchapters and related organizations giving extremely similar messaging on short notice, or other more subtle signs that they've got intercampus communication going on that doesn't match the paper or training from the public faces.))

If the signs are like those at other student protests, A.N.S.W.E.R. has something to do with it.

In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position. That's going to have ripple effects down the line.

I actually disagree here - that is and always has been the default "leftist" "intellectual" position (sic). You don't need to posit some conspiracy among campus left-wing activists to explain why modern left wing political thought takes a dim view of white-passing ethnostates that convert American tax dollars/weapons into dead brown people.

modern left wing political thought takes a dim view of white-passing ethnostates that convert American tax dollars/weapons into dead brown people

True, but I don't think they were so anti-Israel as they are today. Maybe some of the more radical leftists were, but most mainstream democrats (like Joe Biden) were still staunchly pro-Israel, and of course anti-semitism is one of the great bogeymen of leftists everywhere.

Those college campuses still had actual conservatives on them, don't forget that. The radical left and leftists in general, were a minority of a minority then. Conservatives and centrists still dominated the campus. Now the radicals are the minority of the leftist majority, bolstered by the foreign and immigrant Islamic student population.

Also, the radical minority from before is now running the asylum. They pushed for the creation of 'studies' programs that could only accept leftist professors and pushed out conservatives and moderates wherever they could. They use DEI initiatives to further marginalize anyone who would go against them even in STEM fields.

The march through the institutions is almost complete, now we just have to wait for perestroika and glastnov in 3 generations, if we're lucky, maybe I'll still be alive then.

For the most part I agree, but there are still quite a few old Jewish faculty and administrators in the institutions to put a check on this. And I'm sure Sergey Brin and Larry Page have a few connections at Google they can use to help clamp down on the protests there.

Mainstream leftists (including Joe Biden) still are staunchly pro-Israel. Congress just passed a bill to provide military aid to Israel with mostly-Democratic votes.

In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position.

I think this is the wrong level of generality to look at it. Someone has convinced the students that the default leftist intellectual alignment is anti-establishment, despite Columbia being an establishment institution that largely exists to train the pro-establishment left. The pro-establishment left has been mostly pro-Israel since the Holocaust and solidly pro-Israel since before I was born. The anti-establishment left has been mostly pro-Palestine since the Nabka and solidly pro-Palestine since kibbutzim stopped being a useful example of really existing socialism. The changing views of leftwing students on Israel-Palestine is downstream of their changing views on the centre-left establishment.

videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students

Where are these videos?

Twitter has some: https://twitter.com/olilondontv/status/1782167337682006209

Looks like they are stopping that (Zionist) student from recording the faces of the protestors, by preventing him from entering into the protest square with his phone recording. This would be evidence that Zionist students want to harass the protestors, but not evidence of protestors harassing Jewish students.

Is there any evidence that the student is a Zionist?

Yes, Chabadnik hat + phenotype + context clues (smirking as recording a group of Palestinian protesters).

  • -11

What's your opinion on Nick Sandmann?

That's evidence that the student is a Jew, not a Zionist.

The dress of that particular Orthodox Jew tells us more about his identity than merely “Jewish”. How many Chabadniks would consider themselves unaligned with the interests of the Israeli state? While they may not be religiously Zionist (maintaining that the current instantiation of the nation is the long-awaited true return from exile by G-d), it would be very rare if one of them were to protest alongside Palestinian activists. The orthodox groups who do that (like 1-2) are totally ostracized from mainstream orthodoxy, and few in rank.

That would mean that he's a Jew who supports Israel. If you want to claim he's a "Zionist", you're going to have to explain how you distinguish between that and a Zionist.

"Zionist" isn't a swear word meaning "anyone who wants Israel to exist".

Recording a public assembly is harassment now? I am having serious trouble imagining you apply the same standard towards any situation where your sympathies are reversed.

I can help you imagine. If a group of BLM protestors have sequestered themselves into a square to do their BLM chants and so forth, then someone dressed in a police uniform with his phone out to record is clearly the provocateur if he attempts to enter the zone when there is clearly no interest in the zone other than provocation. (Notice the square is densely packed and it is evening.) It is crybullying to call it harassment if the BLM people hold their arms to prevent your incursion. Of course, I’m saying this as someone who thinks BLM was the height of American stupidity. This is why it’s ubiquitous during protests to separate the two sides, and the police will often prevent a member of one side from entering the other side.

So you're saying that refusing to let students enter common areas that they have a right to be in is not harassment, but recording video in a public area (as is your right) is harassment?

A Muslim man in a Palestinian keffiyeh and thobe is attempting to enter the sequestered area of a vigil held by Jewish students for October 7th victims, desiring to record all of their faces on his phone. It’s 8pm and there’s no other reason for him entering the area. If Jewish students passively prevent him from entering the grounds of the protest, do you want the Jewish students charged for harassment?

Yes, obviously (assuming that harassment is a chargeable offence, which I don't think it is).

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"recording a video in public while being Palestinian" is not a crime, last I checked.

There is no way to "passively" prevent someone from going where they please, and if that place is a public place, you have no right to do so. You also have no right to claim a public place, and in doing so deny it to your ethnic, religious or political enemies.

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In both of those examples, you've added implicitly threatening traits to the "trespasser" (a cop protected and abetted by the power of the state; "desiring to record all of their faces") that weren't as present in the original scenario.

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They all seem pretty tame to me. “Group of protesters tries to exclude person who disagrees with them from their protest,” isn’t exactly the kind of thing that made “mostly peaceful” a meme.

Yeah, it’s a shame that Universities cancel classes at the drop of a hat nowadays, but Kristallnacht this ain’t.

It's not just students. Faculty are now showing up in force to support the protests. And protests at Yale are if anything even bigger. New encampments are spreading to NYU, Michigan and others.

I've pointed out in the past that when liberal America slowly coalesces into a new consensus on a topic, then any opponent of that new consensus better have a great political machine. The only two examples I can think of are gun rights and pro-life activists. Both have scored important victories against liberals.

So how does things look for Israel? Well, AIPAC is certainly very formidable. But the support for Israel is cracking among the younger conservative crowd (e.g. Candace Owens), let alone the hard right (e.g. Nick Fuentes). It's not like Israel will start losing votes in Congress. If you look at the history of Apartheid South Africa, they still had a lot of support from the WH right up until the end. The political scene will be the most reactionary. In the case of Apartheid South Africa, the huge protests on universities began already in the 1970s. It would take 15 years for serious political change. And they never had a lobby as strong as the Israelis.

So I suspect political change will be slower, but I also think we're crossing a rubicon as I write this. I don't see things ever going back to normal for Zionists henceforth in the West, certainly not among leftists or increasingly many liberals. The Israel lobby always wanted and sought bipartisan support. They were remarkably successful in that for many decades. But that era has now decisively ended.

One of the scariest things from my point of view is watching some Jewish progressives I know choosing, after a period of internal struggle, to take the side of Hamas. I could see that something had to give when they started being attacked by what they viewed as their own side. And I would have been surprised to see them abandon pretty much their whole progressive social networks and worldview under any circumstances, even to defend themselves. But it seems like many of them chose to thread the needle by simply becoming "one of the good ones".

There have always been some Jews who’d rather not be part of the Jewish community. Some succeed, and we never hear of them as Jews again. Some are carried away by the Gestapo.

Every year, and as it happens it’s on this day specifically, we think of them briefly. From the parable of the four sons:

The wicked one, what does he say? "What is this service to you?!" He says “to you,” but not to him! By thus excluding himself from the community he has denied that which is fundamental. You, therefore, blunt his teeth and say to him: "It is because of this that the L‑rd did for me when I left Egypt"; `for me' - but not for him! If he had been there, he would not have been redeemed!"

There have always been some Jews who’d rather not be part of the Jewish community. Some succeed, and we never hear of them as Jews again.

Of course, the Early Life always remembers.

What do you mean by this?

The "Early Life" section of Wikipedia; it's a meme among the sorts of people who use (((echos))).

Right. Real classy.

They don’t typically think they’re taking the side of Hamas (some do but they’re in the extreme minority), they think they’re taking the side of a rainbow future one state solution where Jews and Muslims live together in peace, harmony and democracy. That is indeed hopeless naïveté, but no moreso than ‘defunding the police will reduce crime’, which they almost certainly also believe.

Scary? What exactly is scary about that? I'm not trying to get an own here, I'm legitimately curious because the only thing that comes to mind is that you're scared of changing your own mind after a period of internal struggle. Changing your mind over a serious or contentious issue as a result of a period of internal struggle is generally regarded as a positive development by most people, and they use terms like "personal growth" to describe it.

You seem to have missed...the second sentence?

I could see that something had to give when they started being attacked by what they viewed as their own side.

Unless, you didn't miss it, and "internal struggle" is a totally outta pocket euphemism?

I actually just interpreted "attacked" as the sort of attacks I've actually seen - shouting, protest signs, criticism, dialogue etc. I haven't seen any jews getting murdered or brutally assaulted in the west by left-wing activists in order to change their political views, though I'll happily update my post if it turns out there's actually a brutal pogrom taking place on American university campuses. Additionally, "internal struggle" is directly from the post I was quoting.

'People experiencing "internal struggles" and changing their minds, as a result of being attacked(shouted at, protested against, and criticized by their social groups), is good actually.' is what I was alluding to.

Compare.

Changing your mind over a serious or contentious issue as a result of a period of internal struggle is generally regarded as a positive development by most people, and they use terms like "personal growth" to describe it

and

Changing your mind over a serious or contentious issue as a result of a period of internal struggle --after being shouted at, protested against, and criticized by your social group-- is generally regarded as a positive development by most people, and they use terms like "personal growth" to describe it

I am, skeptical, that 'most people' would agree with the second formation.

I am, skeptical, that 'most people' would agree with the second formation.

Ever spoken to any vegetarians or vegans? Most of them would be more than happy to tell you about how much their life was improved by someone hostilely and aggressively telling them about the actual suffering their food choices were responsible for. I personally have changed my opinion on some issues because partisans actually showed me the cost in human suffering of my prior stance, and I don't think those people harmed or hurt me in any way.

It just points to the shallowness of these friendships. Others downthread point to the many charitable reasons people may choose to abandon their self-interest, such as @2rafa citing naivete and @FirmWeird citing personal growth, but you wouldn't have to abandon it if your friends had your own interests at heart. The progressive constantly eats its own as the cause celebre changes, and the it is simply the Jews turn on the chopping block once again. Black men, Hispanic men, Asians, and White Gays will be on back the block soon enough.

I think it's simply the case that if you're a typical liberal Jew, you're probably reading sources like the NYTimes or the Guardian that underplay the gang-rape/civilian murder aspect of Oct 7th and choose instead to focus relentlessly on dubious claims of Israel deliberately targeting children (leaving aside that covers 15yo Hamas recruits armed with assault rifles), blowing up hospitals etc. It's not terribly surprising that they'd end up with a skewed view of the conflict.

Foreign protests and eventually sanctions didn’t really kill apartheid. The South Africans could have held on and non-aligned countries (Israel, amusingly, being a central example) would have continued doing business with them. The main reason apartheid failed was that it never had buy-in from the non-Afrikaner (largely Anglo, in some cases Jewish) white elite in South Africa who actually ran the economy and who had repeatedly chafed with the Afrikaners who controlled the entire politics of the country for fifty years via the national party (which was for much of its history not merely white nationalist but Afrikaner Calvinist ethnonationalist). Young whites, particularly urban, particularly in the middle and upper middle classes, increasingly and ever more earnestly opposed apartheid. The system lost the will to function, the older Afrikaners (who had steadfastly opposed non-Dutch European immigration well into the 1950s) no longer had the a popular support to maintain the system as it was. That process began in the 1970s, long before the US and UK implemented major sanctions (which were themselves not comprehensive in practice and which were - as you note - strongly opposed by Reagan and Thatcher at the time).

Rhodesia is a better example of a country that was more crippled by sanctions, but Rhodesia peaked at 300,000 whites while South Africa had 5.2 million, a number much more capable of maintaining autarky with high living standards and extensive domestic industry. In Israel, the domestic economic and social elite is much more aligned with ethnonationalism than was ever the case in South Africa, where Anglos never really cared for apartheid (which, pointedly, was never strictly implemented in Anglo-majority African colonies even if they had some segregation; even Rhodesia did not actually have codified apartheid like South Africa did).

The fall of apartheid was as much about domestic politics in SA after centuries of conflict between the Anglos and the Boers as it was about international pressure. If all white South Africans had been firmly aligned behind Afrikaner ethnonationalism it’s quite possible they would still be in charge today, but of course they were not.

Not to mention, of course, whites were something on the order of 10% of SA's population at the end of apartheid- total. Jews are 60% of Israel's population.

Spot on. And when South Africa became one of the dominions of the British Empire in 1912, her population was already less than 1/3 White. Racial minorities have never practiced settler colonialism with success. Apartheid was never going to work long-term.

So how does things look for Israel?

Frankly, I blame Israel, either for failing to discipline the IDF, or for failing at PR. Those videos of Palestinians being shot dead for no apparent reason ought to have been treated like the pictures of naked human pyramids from Abu Ghraib, as a national scandal. Instead, what I've seen is justification via showing worse atrocities committed by Hamas. Maybe I've missed a debunking or something, but for someone who is essentially pro-Israel because they're a modern liberal democracy, this has been extremely disheartening.

If you look at the history of Apartheid South Africa, they still had a lot of support from the WH right up until the end

The end of Apartheid coincides with the collapse of the USSR, not some sudden shift in external political pressure on behalf of activists. That there was relative certainty that South Africa would not immediately turn into a Soviet satellite regime because the USSR was too busy collapsing was what enabled a consensus on ending Apartheid. That they'd later turn into vaguely anti-western, mixed political system basket case anyway wasn't really a concern.

That they'd later turn into vaguely anti-western, mixed political system basket case anyway wasn't really a concern.

There was also a lot of confidence that liberal capitalist democracy was the natural state of countries, as long as there wasn't some special interfering factor. I think that didn't really start to fade until the Iraq War.

I think some share of goodwill from American liberals will be lost irreversibly, but it'll result in little more than Israel gaining more independence in its actual environment. It's not Ukraine.

On a longer time horizon, demographics will change towards less favorable for progressive causes except the anti-white ones specifically (as it's largely the fascination of low-fertility urban whites and not exciting to new growing strata), and Americans will largely forget this issue, or embrace a new paradigm, because they don't have awareness of long time horizons and Israelis do.

And, honestly, everyone is tired of victimhood Olympics. Jews can afford to embrace and feel pride in their natural social aggression, so prominently visible across the spectrum, in Dershowitz and Finkelstein both. But when it becomes normalized, Finkelstein's argument for treating Palestinians magnanimously is less coherent.

I wonder how much of this is just boredom? It’s a slow news cycle. The Iran stuff turned out to be a nothingburger. What are the politically-active class supposed to get riled up at this week, Trump’s courtroom farts? (I’m not kidding. That was the other option here.) The masses demand a current thing at all times. I mean really, endowment divesture? Would anyone care about this if there were a salient mass shooting anywhere in the country over the weekend?

Something like that…maybe. Evidence: the number of alternate topics in this thread.

Calling it class interest or even a cohesive demand is a bit much, though. It’s not the same people protesting every time. I’d say there’s a background temperature of discontent which, this week, happened to be hottest around Columbia. Even if we had known that Iran’s launch would blow over, we could never have predicted that this was going to top the leaderboard for today.

During the BLM protests in 2020+, a lot of ... extremely enthusiastic partisans ... from both sides converged on Portland (OR). It seemed like the cause was President Trump choosing Portland as an example in a speech, which caused people who wanted to fight the good fight (whichever fight it was) to converge on Portland like a Schelling point. I wonder if somehow Columbia has fallen into the same role? The reports of activity on other campuses argue against it, but then, college students and faculty are tied to their location in ways that random street fighters aren't.

It’s not the same people protesting every time.

I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.

Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.

In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.

Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.

In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.

From a UK perspective, the problem is that the SWP crowd have the necessary skills to organise large protests which skirt the boundaries of legality, and the normies don't. So unless the protest is organised by some other group with access to those skills (like a union), it inevitably becomes a SWP-led protest. I became something of a meme in left-wing student circles after I was identified as "the Lib Dem who turned up at a demo in a black cab" - I had 50 protest signs with Lib Dem sympathetic messages to dish out to Lib Dem supporters and a taxi was the only way to get them from the sign printer to the protest in the time available. The SWP had pre-distributed 2 or 3 protest signs each with SWP-sympathetic messages to the 100+ activists they had milling around the start, and lots of non-SWP-supporters ended up carrying because they thought they were just picking up a spare sign from another protestor.

Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.

In the 1990s most of the Middle Easterners in the UK were either rich Arabs (who didn't go on protests) or Turkish Cypriots (who don't care about Palestine). The "every demo is about Palestine" dynamic back then was definitely driven by white British lefties. Looking at media coverage, I think that 2024-vintage pro-Palestine protests in the UK are dominated by people from predominantly-Muslim ethnic groups, although I see more South Asians than Middle Easterners.

One of the particularities of Finnish protest culture is that most activist-led protests, probably due to anarchist influence, will announce that political party signs and flags should not be brought in the protest, presumably to combat potential protest takeovers like that. Also there's no major Trotskyist groups to speak of, and the closest equivalent as a communist group that's experienced in organizing protests, the Communist Party of Finland, tends to have a subdued profile in the protest themselves.

Interesting.

I could see US protests operating the same way, but I don’t really have any statistics. @gattsuru gave examples of larger groups which would credibly show up at, or at least contact the organizers of, protests across the country. Even though we’re much larger than the UK, a core of protest enthusiasts could be doing that.

There is something distinctly humorous about the CUNY machete lady being at the Columbia protest, at least, but a lot of what we do see is a mix of local students and professional activists.

I don't know any statistics, but I do remember reading multiple articles to that effect during the Black Lives Matter protests of groups bringing in out-of-state protestors who were regularly playing the role of agitators.

There are absolutely career activist networks as well, generally parts of political machines whose job it is to organize protests using established channels. They're the sort of people who work with the people who do things like bus students to protests. The student isn't necessarily showing up for any given protest, but the network behind the mobilization is regularly being tapped and exercised.

I agree, the American public only cares about foreign policy when there’s literally nothing else of interest going on. (GWOT was obviously different since 9/11 was very much domestic.)

BLM and Defund are over, and Jan 6th fizzled out. Time to search for new causes to absorb excess religious energy.

This should pivot to a domestic focus fairly soon; arresting local Americans is much more interesting than continued kvetching about brown sand people killing each other.

With Dems increasingly opposed to Israel, this makes me wonder if we'll see a broader realignment of American Jews towards the Republican party. Most are currently overwhelmingly leftist, although Orthodox Jews (a small minority) are conservative.

It's hard to say. The east coast had always been the center of the Jewish business/neocon republican wing. The really kind of excessive coverage of the Columbia stuff may simply be a product of proximity to this compared to the other universities with similar protests.

To the extent that this Jewish republican wing had been trending away from the GOP, I fully expect that to reverse.

I don't. Jews who are paying attention can see the rising anti-semitism on the right. (And in particular, Jews who care about Israel know who was blocking the aid bill). Left-wing anti-semites are more dangerous individually (because they are more violent) but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.

Will more anti-semites be invited to the White House in a second Trump term or a second Biden term (not counting Gulf Arab diplomats etc. who are discreet about their anti-semitism)? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Blocking $26 billion in aid to an extremely wealthy country that also has the wealthiest per capita diaspora community is now anti-semitism? When the country sending the money has a $1.5 trillion budget deficit?

I’m pro sending money to Ukraine because they are a poor country fighting out geopolitical enemies but I don’t understand sending money to a wealthy nation like Israel especially not when we are essentially funding both sides.

Blocking $26 billion in aid to an extremely wealthy country that also has the wealthiest per capita diaspora community is now anti-semitism?

No, but it is something that rich centrist American Jews care about. There is a reason why AIPAC is as powerful as it is. The sort of Jews who might switch from D to R in response to left-wing campus idiocy are exactly the sort of Jews who support aid to Israel most.

I support third countries getting the feck out of the I-P conflict (my gut feeling is that foreign support for both sides is net escalatory, although I understand the argument that the US paying for Iron Dome specifically is de-escalatory). But I am not American, and my views on this issue are not socially acceptable in elite American social circles. Apart from short-term humanitarian aid while the mess made by the current war is being cleaned up, the only use of donor money in the area I would support is bribing other majority-Muslim countries to take in Palestinian refugees.

You specifically cited anti-semitism of the right three times and accused Elon Musks of it but the only evidence was GOP votes against an Israel aid bill.

I have no idea what you mean be anti-semitism on the right (I can take some guesses). And then there is the ADL definition which seems like anything they don’t like is antisemitism. You did make a specific reference to Columbia protests so I have an idea what you are accusing the left of.

Probably Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens type stuff. Tucker and Musk obviously alluded to it. You don’t have to far on Twitter to find right-wing antisemitism.

rising anti-semitism on the right.

Anti-semitisim has historically come from the right, but is it "rising" still, especially compared to what's going on in the left?

Also, what exactly has Elon Musk done that's so anti-semitic?

Anti-semitism on the right really seems to be restricted to a bunch of fringe characters no one in power really wants to be publicly associated with, whereas it's now fully sanctioned by the portion of the left that sees life as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. That's not even mentioning that it's probably the driving political issue for the left's most sanctified group (Muslims).

Elon Musk also seems a strange example of someone who might deter Jewish voters - my impression is that since his takeover X/twitter has been far less committed to maintaining the liberal party line and has consequently allowed lots more coverage of left-wing anti-semitic behaviour than would previously have been tolerated.

I would also imagine the possibility of Trump inviting the occasional weirdo to the WH is of less important to the Jews than the fact that he wouldn't keep publicly dressing down Israel like Biden's team has done.

I'm equally sure that pro-Israel Jews would prefer someone who moves aid forward while delivering a mild dressing-down for PR purposes to someone who praises Netanyahu to the skies while using aid as a lever to extract concessions elsewhere from his domestic political opponents. The Biden administration is significantly less critical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza than the Israeli opposition, which most centrist American Jews find a lot more sympathetic than Likud.

American Jews would certainly prefer for Netanyahu to be deposed and a moderate Labor-led coalition that includes the Arab parties to come to power and recommit to immediately reopening negotiations about a two-state solution and the return of most West Bank settlers.

That is, however, a ridiculous pipe dream. The Israelis have radicalized and international pressure will radicalize them further still. The Israeli left is crushed utterly. Nobody believes peace is possible short of crushing the enemy now. That means American Jews will face a choice between disavowing Zionism utterly and embracing at least lukewarm support for a staunchly pro-Likud agenda that embraces Religious Zionism. Some will pick the former but Israel is important to most Jews and I suspect they will change politically rather than abandon Zionism.

The Israelis have radicalized and international pressure will radicalize them further still. The Israeli left is crushed utterly. Nobody believes peace is possible short of crushing the enemy now.

Could you go into this in more detail? It might be worth a top-level post.

It's kind of an old conventional wisdom at this point, but the basic point is that late last century, the Israeli right and left were significantly divided by the question of how to deal with the Palestinian territories, and the Israeli left was discredited when withdrawal from militarily occupying Gaza led to its takeover and militarization by Hamas, ruining the Israeli-left security policy that peace could be achieved by making unilateral concessions to the Palestinians in the name of peace.

For a more extended version-

When the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967, one of the reasons for seizing the territory was both as a military buffer, but also that they could be traded back for peace in the future. This is what happened with the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt, but for various reasons did not happen with the other territories.

Said reasons variously involved the fracturing of Pan-Arabism and the growing divides between the Palestinians and regional Arab states.

During the early cold war pan-arabism was a movement for a common Arab state which even saw some states voluntarily try to associate/join eachother, but ultimately inter-elite disagreements and the shocks of the Arab-Israeli wars fractured that movement to the point that Egypt, which had been one of the leaders of the Pan-Arab movement earlier, refused to take the Gaza Strip when it regained the Sinai as part of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The Egyptian position was that it's refusal was because it had never held Gaza as part of Egypt before the war, but a not-uncommon belief is that this was because Egypt didn't want the trouble of governing gaza / having to deal with the Palestinians / it made a useful thorn in Israel's side.

In the West Bank, Jordan renounced claims to the West Bank (which it had previously annexed) in the aftermath of the Black September civil war, when the PLO (who was present in Israeli-occupied Israel as well as Jordan) attempted to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. The Kingdom of Jordan won that, but the PLO remained in the Israeli-occupied territories, and in 1974, the Arab Leage recognized the PLO- and not Jordan- as the sole representative of the Palestinians, and compelled Jordan to recognize a Palestinian independent of Jordan. Jordan would later formally renounce claims in 1988, as part of cutting monetary expenditures and dissolving a lower house of legislature that was half composed of constituencies in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, i.e. Palestinians. Jordan and Israel would go on to establish relations in 1994, without needing any sort of concession of the West Bank back to Jordan, who it had been captured from in the first war.

What this meant is that come the 90s, when the Cold War was ending and there was no US-Soviet context to the middle east conflict, Israel had achieved peace with its immediate neighbors it had conquered Palestinian territory from, without having actually to trade back Palestinian territory as part of the deal. However, this peace between states wasn't the same as peace: the First Intifada at about the 20 year anniversary of the 1967 war in 1987-1990 was years of violence / murders / increased unrest, and it was clear that it could happen again. As a result, Israeli politics shifted to a question of how to resolve the Palestinian issue. This was the... not start, but how the Two State solution took new life in the post-Cold War environment, with the Left and the Right disagreeing on how to approach it, or whether even if it should.

An oversimplification of this is that the Israeli left was vehemently onboard with the two state solution, and more associated with making compromises- or even unilateral concessions- to advance negotiations. The Israeli right was far more skeptical, alternatively wanting terms that would functionally limit Palestinian sovereignty in their own state (no military allowed, right for Israeli incursion against groups attacking from Palestinian soil) or not wanting to have to do it at all. Then there was how settler politics played into both parties, as settlers were both a way to secure territory that might not have to be returned due to changing facts on the ground (the Israeli right), but also a bargaining chip that could be traded away at the negotiating table (the Israeli left), and of course an actor in their own right.

The so-what here is that in the late 90s, the Israeli left had an politically ascendant moment. Prime Minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party came into office, at the same time that Bill Clinton was still in office, and they were relatively like-minded enough to put together the Camp David Summit... whose failure was one of the triggering events for the Second Intifada. The exact reasons why it failed are subject to dispute / position / your belief on what Yasser Arafat could actually deliver on behalf of the PLO, but from a more common Israeli perspective, this was a sincere effort with politically-damaging offers at the sort of land-swaps that had been a functional base of negotiations for a good while, and it not only failed, but it blew up into another 5 years of violence.

Part of what ended the 5 years of violence was the Israeli-PLO Sharm El Sheikh Summit of 2005, where President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority- the same Abbas still in power today- had assumed power from Arafat. And this was in part because not only had Arafat died in 2004- and so robbed the Palestinian movement of one of its unifying figures- but in 2004 the Israelis had also done a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

While the Second Intifada was a blow to the credibility of the Israeli left, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is what I'd consider to have been the fatal blow to the Israeli left.

While it was conducted by Ariel Sharon- who at the time was part of the conservative/right-wing Likud party- it was so controversial a policy that Sharon's faction left Likud and established the central-liberal Kadima party, which attracted a number of the Labour party members as well. It was as such a policy that was identified with the left/center-left in spirit and practice, as not only was it's proponents the dominant leftist political force of the era, but it was a quid done for no quo. Israeli infrastructure was left behind, including things like greenhouses, and while for awhile it could have been argued that it set conditions for the cease fire the year after, which probably had something to do with Kadima's victory in 2006 to top the government- i.e. the political reward for ending the Second Intifada through good leftist political wisdom, bravery, and...

...and a year later, in 2007, Hamas completed its takeover of Gaza Strip after its own 2006 electoral victory by throwing PLO officials off of skyscrapers, and began a sustained rocket campaign into Israel. By January 2008, it was up to hundreds of rockets a month. The rocket campaign would more or less go on until the Gaza War of 2009-2010, after which the rockets... never went away, but were more varying, and a constant source of tension and unease. For as bad as the Intifada was, it wasn't that degree of regularity in rocket attacks on a weekly basis.

As a result, in Israeli politics, the Gaza Withdrawal became the political kryptonite of the left, a sort of feckless concession that made things worse. Prime Minister Netanyahu first assumed power in 2009 as a result of running on a tough-on-security policy, and ever since the decades of 1990s and 2000s have been the death knell of the Israeli left. After running and winning on the post-cold-war optimism of the 90s, the ideological basis of the leftest approach to Palestinian negotiation/conciliation was discredited. Not only were perceived-as-sincere offers of trades and concessions not only rejected but answered with an Intifada, but further unilateral concessions to amoliate even that only served to facilitate even more violence by even more dedicated partisans.

The Israeli left, associated with both conciliatory approach to the Palestinians (that visibly failed) and a commitment to a two-state solution lost a political generation as Netanyahu spun in power. In so much as they could define themselves still as an alternative to the right, the Israeli left was still defined by its commitment to a Two State solution, and thus as the respectable political faction that outsiders (like various US administrations) could like and work with...

And Oct 7 has rendered even that an albatross, because arguments for a two-state solution with the people who relished in their own ISIS-level brutality doesn't go down well with the electorate. For all that Netanyahu is unpopular and is unlikely to survive the death of his reputation as an effective security providor, Netanyahu is unpopular as a man. The two state solution is now unpopular as even an idea, and that is practically the most defining distinction of the Israeli left in some circles.

Or so the story goes. Perspectives and recollections may differ.

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Anti-semitism on the right really seems to be restricted to a bunch of fringe characters no one in power really wants to be publicly associated with

Have you paid attention to the comments and voting patterns on this very forum? I have the impression that this place is pretty representative of the intellectual parts of the right and antisemitism here tends to be an upvoted and therefore not at all fringe position.

Can you provide some examples?

There are certainly antisemites here but I’d say they get more downvotes than upvotes much of the time.

Interesting thoughts. I’d say that outside of hardcore Siege-reading wignats, Jews aren’t a primary concern on the Anglophone right. There is certainly residual antisemitism, and there will always be Hitler fans on the Western far right, and there will be edgy teenagers on Discord who share /pol/ infographics, but I think the embrace of arguably antisemitic views by some mainstream figures is pretty temporal.

On the left actual antisemitism is more rare (the majority of it really is just anti-zionism, American leftists don’t have genuine ethnic hostility to Jews as a race; they just think Jews are white). But as the Muslim population increases rapidly and as hostility towards perceived ‘whiteness’ increases in fervor, I think anti-Zionism will cement itself as an intractable position on the left. I don’t think there’s a way back from that. It’s also a quick spiral, because as Jewish donors move to the right the left cares less about the Jewish vote (Florida is now solidly red, and NYC and California won’t stop being blue anytime soon) and more about the Muslim vote.

I think there’s also another aspect to this, which is that in domestic politics Jewish men (who are obviously the vast majority of big-ticket Jewish donors and political lobbyists) are considered by the left to be White Men™️. It’s not like Dems are ever going to consider Mark Zuckerberg a POC. After the current Gaza fiasco that is especially unlikely to change, leftists aren’t going to carve out a new space for white Jewish guys while “they” are “genociding Gaza”. This inherently pushes Jewish donors to the right, as Hanania noted.

Yeah. I feel the majority of Right wing antisemites might feel that Jewish influence is way larger than their population share should facilitate, but would also take Jewish neighbors in their suburb over other outgroup neighbors all day, every day.

Likewise with Israel-Palestine I get a sentiment of 'Israel are probably breaking international norms/active unethically, but also Palestine being Lebanon 5.0 would be a negative for all involved compared to illegitimate Jewish occupation'

but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.

On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.

On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.

If the situation in the Ivies is anything like my experience of Oxbridge, students who are going to grow up as pillars of the establishment have always LARPed as anti-establishment rebels on campus, and "Free Palestine" has been the hardy perennial of anti-establishment left issues since I was in primary school. The views of the pro-establishment left in the US on the I-P conflict have not materially changed during this time, despite the modern pro-establishment left incorporating a generation of kids who went on Free Palestine marches for campus-left clout as undergraduates 20-40 years ago. There is a lot of media coverage indicating that the average non-Arab attendee at the pro-Palestine protests doesn't understand the conflict and is just showing up in order to support the Current Thing - this is an example of social copying, not successful indoctrination.

That's a fairly reasonable explanation, but there's been a ton of things that started out as "a thing dumb college kids are doing" and ended up in the wider world. Some take longer than others.

Are they? Let's look at the votes on the Israel aid package

Actually hilarious on a number of grounds:

  • Chip Roy and Rashida Tlaib voted on the same side
  • Despite months of protest, the progressive movement can't even get 20% of Democrats to side with them

Protest doesn't actually move votes from politicians. It's merely a tool for power plays for non-politician actors, such as ngos.

I remain surprised that there aren't more people that want Israel to win, but don't want to give them $26 billion.

Me to, it’s a ridiculous sum of money, especially when considered in the context of our previous spending

How much of that $26 billion is going to be spent with US arms manufacturers with large numbers of employees in politically important states/districts?

Probably a similar amount to what we'd expect if American glazers were responsible for replacing all of the windows broken in Israel. But yes, I grant that these are largely wealth transfers within the United States as much as they are funding for Israel.

Richard Hanania predicted exactly this in December. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-great-jewish-realignment-of-2023

I remember reading this a few months ago. Yeah, he makes a pretty compelling case.

The Democrats are fumbling the ball, but Republicans still need to recover it, and as of yet they show few signs of being willing or able to do so. Jews moving away from the Democrats need to go somewhere. And the GOP is not offering a welcoming environment at this time. Some Jews who come to the conclusion that Right Wing Antisemites are merely harmless morons while Left Wing Antisemites are powerful and dangerous will make the switch, but I doubt it will be a mass exodus.

It looks like riot police may be going in to physically remove the protestors from the Columbia campus, with the National Guard to possibly be activated if the Riot Police is unable to clear the campus.

In other news, the forced TikTok divestment was passed along with the huge aid package to Israel, on the heels of the Jewish lobby pushing for the bill in order to censor criticism of Israel.

So we have:

  • Mass arrests of protestors against Israel, unlike the treatment we saw with the BLM protests.
  • Huge handouts to Israel in rare bipartisan consensus.
  • Forcing a divestment of TikTok because the Jewish lobby claims it is too anti-Israel.

All within the past week. This is what real power looks like by the way.

It would be remiss not to say that the national mood around leftist riots has shifted considerably since 2020.

It would be remiss to say that, the behind the scenes political machinations shows this is not at all whatsoever about the national mood of leftist protests in general, it is specifically about the fact that the establishment does not support these protests whereas they unanimously supported anti-White demonstrations.

Look at the lengths Nemat Shafik went to in order to try to appease them:

Dr. Shafik, an international finance expert with few prior connections to Columbia, has conceded the university was unprepared for the outpouring that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. She had been ceremonially inaugurated just days before. But as the protests escalated, and the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania lost their jobs after botching their own appearances before Congress in December, she slowly began clamping down.

In the fall, the university suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, whose rolling protests repeatedly violated its policies. This month, it suspended students who it said had been involved in an event called “Resistance 101,” where speakers openly praised Hamas.

By the time she was called to testify before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Work Force this month, it looked as though Dr. Shafik might avoid the fate of the other Ivy League presidents targeted by Congress.

Columbia spent months preparing for the hearing. Shailagh Murray, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who oversees the university’s public affairs office, recruited a large team of lawyers, old political hands and antisemitism experts to prep Dr. Shafik. It included Dana Remus, President Biden’s former White House counsel; Risa Heller, a crisis communications guru; former Republican congressional aides; and Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton.

Many team members gathered in the Washington offices of the law firm, Covington & Burling, beginning the Saturday before the hearing for mock testimony.

Dr. Shafik was determined not to make the same mistakes as her Ivy League counterparts, according to the people familiar with her preparation. Where their testimony came off as haughty and convoluted, she wanted to project humility and competence.

The university handed the committee thousands of pages of documents, including sensitive records that almost never become public. They showed that Columbia had suspended more than 15 students and removed five professors from the classroom, including at least three facing accusations that they had made Jewish students feel unsafe.

Though her testimony on the disciplinary cases made supporters of academic freedom furious, the approach appeared to work inside the hearing room. Dr. Shafik defended free speech rights, but said universities “cannot and should not tolerate abuse of this privilege.”

Grudging Republicans largely accepted the answers.

This has nothing to do at all with national mood over leftist protests in general.

It's funny, Shafik is still probably not going to survive this despite the fact she's obviously trying to play ball, meaning that all 3 of the only non-Jewish Ivy presidents are going to be kicked to the curb in only the past six months.

Princeton and Brown both have gentile presidents (their names are Christian and Christina, respectively).

Christina Paxson converted to Judaism (her husband is Jewish).

Eisgruber is Jewish and identifies as a "nontheist Jew".

Greg Abbott, by the way, just called for all students engaging in protests against Israel to be expelled:

Arrests being made right now & will continue until the crowd disperses.

These protesters belong in jail.

Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period.

Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.

There's just no way to ignore the elephant in the room at this point.

How strange that two Jews named after Christ should run Ivy League universities. I stand corrected, though I think both are pretty noncentral examples of Jewish Americans, especially when Eisgruber had no knowledge of his Jewish identity until well into middle age and Paxton has no Jewish ethnic identity at all. On another note, do you really think Abbott is getting rid of pro-Palestine protesters as a favor to Jewish donors? That seems unlikely. Almost all of the protesters (and I’d wager that, certainly in Texas, they’re disproportionately Jewish compared to the population average) are enemies of the GOP and American conservatism regardless of their views on Israel, so this seems more like something that provides a useful pretext than something driven by Jewish policy preferences.

In New York City, especially at Columbia University, things are different; the UWS (and NYC really) is the capital of the Jewish world and Columbia has long been and perhaps remains the most Jewish Ivy, it’s fair to say that neither Hochul nor Adams want to annoy the state’s Jews in an important year for the party.

The real question (one of them, anyway) is how differently things will play out at UToronto and other universities in the UK and Canada. If Pro-Palestine protestors can make/hold some gains there, that would be geopolitically meaningful if it serves to provide a contrast to the US.

Why America's social policy is not helping the poor

There's a section of Youtube lately that is focusing on the faces of poverty in America. Not in a predatory way like 'get rich quick' influences, crypto scammers, and redpill adjacent-sphere individuals like Andrew Tate who are looking to exploit the desperate poor to make profit, but rather to shine a light on the mindset of poverty in America.

One of the most recent videos is by Andrew Callaghan interview and documentary about the Kia Boys, a group of young teenagers around New Haven notorious for stealing and lifting Kia's and Hyundais who had a vulnerability in their system allowing easy theft. It's a fascinating watch, but what's most interesting is how they want to spend the money they earn from carjacking. Not to support their families, not to pay for college or to get a GED, but rather to consume the latest fashion trends and to aspire to selfish hedonism.

Another youtuber is tackling American consumer debt and looks at how consumer choices end them in significant, and often insurmountable debt without extreme lifestyle and person changes. Caleb Hammer interviews people (in a fairly obnoxious and click-baity style) in significant loan and credit card debt, breaks down their finances, and tries to get them on a budget with a varying amount of success. The most common factor of the guests he has on his show is eating out- for most of his guests, almost 33% of most of their monthly income is eating out at various establishments and other spending that does not significantly increase their quality of life. Many of his guests would have significant personal income if they could have some self-control in their consumptive habits.

The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.

This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.

Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America. The social resources are stretched thinner, to the point our politicians decided it's better to serve incoming illegals than their own constituents on the off-chance they're willing to work the menial jobs for well below livable wage for the area. Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.

So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations. Imagine that individuals in section housing have to work at Amazon fulfilment centers. Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers. People in section housing could be bussed to the job, and also have regular police presence and social workers more intimately involved in their lives along with people helping them understand budgeting. It would require insane amounts of manpower, but it would also be the first step in actually beginning to address the problems of the slums.

It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals.

You seem very sure about this but haven't substantiated it at all. As it happens I disagree entirely and would be interested to know why you think so.

The critical point here is the meaning of "lower intelligence". Having IQ 90-100 servants with a good attitude is life-enriching because they do the crapwork so you don't have to. Having IQ 80-90 people in your space is just a problem because they can't even operate a washing machine correctly.

The other problem is that your servants won't retain a good attitude if they are going home to a place dominated by a violent oppositional culture where displaying any sign of servility is putting a target on you.

Not to support their families, not to pay for college or to get a GED, but rather to consume the latest fashion trends and to aspire to selfish hedonism.

The age old technique of blaming social factors. Yet even if they wanted to support their families, seems like these Scholars would have done the crime anyways. The enemy is deliberately blocking out this reality.

It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near.

Commies (which all of the enemy are) would disagree. See "manna" as a rat-adjacent example of the fully automated luxury space communism pov. But even if the low iq can be worked around, HBD includes a built-in criminality component that's the true elephant in the room.

The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.

Wealthy/high IQ Youths and Scholars end up in prison more then whitey does in dead end towns and abject poverty. HBD explains this far better than socioeconomic factors.

So the question remains, what can be done?

Concentration camps?

People in section housing could be bussed to the job, and also have regular police presence ... It would require insane amounts of manpower ...

I see we're in agreement on concentration camps. Work will make them free.

HBD explains this far better than socioeconomic factors.

HBD doesn't, in fact, explain why high IQ black people do worse than high/mid IQ white people. To my knowledge most HBD theory proposes that IQ is fully general, and higher average IQ should correlate with more pro-social, civilized behaviour in general - I've seen no theory for a separate "criminality gene" being fleshed out.

"Identifying with a criminal culture", on the other hand, does explain rather well why high-IQ black people are disproportionately likely to go to prison, for me at least. (I know that criminal culture exists. I know that if you act according to criminal culture, you're more likely to go to prison than if you acted according to prosocial culture, IQ being the same. I do not, however, know if there is a criminality gene orthogonal to IQ.) This is without going into the anti-black racism theory.

why high IQ black people do worse than high/mid IQ white people

Regression to mean: children of rich high IQ blacks regress to mean and thus end having lower IQs that children of rich high IQ whites. If you correlate this with individual's IQ instead of parents' IQ or SES, you get much smaller racial gap.

and higher average IQ should correlate with more pro-social,

Consider than men are more criminal than women even if they have equal or slightly higher IQs than women, Among dog breeds, Huskies are stupid but rarely kill people, Pitbulls are smarter but kill people on regular basis.

I've seen no theory for a separate "criminality gene" being fleshed out.

congratulations on anti-HBD people running successful campaign on obfuscation

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11126-013-9287-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10802-013-9791-3

"Identifying with a criminal culture",

It definitely exists and it's partly downstream of genetics.

orthogonal to IQ.

nobody suggesting it's orthogonal

Your argument doesn’t really make sense. Young men in poor urban black communities in the US have higher rates of violent criminal behavior than any black population on earth other than maybe Haitians. West African nations, even many black Caribbean countries, have much lower violent crime rates than these communities in St Louis, New Orleans and Baltimore, despite the fact that they have higher birthrates than African Americans, meaning they have more young men as a proportion of the population. Saying “well it’s HBD, nothing we can do about it [except become wignat separatists, presumably]” just isn’t true.

It isn’t a denial of HBD to suggest that these communities have specific dysfunctions, likely enabled by legal and social changes that were predominantly enacted by non-black politicians, entertainers and businessmen, that are not the natural destiny of their inhabitants per se.

Your argument doesn’t really make sense.

Really? Do you object to that part that MAOA & DRD4 genes associated with climinality too?

specific dysfunctions, likely enabled by legal and social changes that were predominantly enacted by non-black politicians, entertainers and businessmen, that are not the natural destiny of their inhabitants per se.

I agree about this, but even if this this get fixed, we won't see B-W gap in USA disappear.

Why South Africa, Botswana and Nigeria officially report higher homicide rates (and by large margin) than less functional African countries? Low crime in African countries is suspect.

Homicide rates are relatively hard to obfuscate and I suspect that rates in cities like Accra and Windhoek are broadly accurate. Again, these rates are still much higher than in Western Europe, but well below rates in St Louis, New Orleans and Baltimore. Lagos reported 350 murders in 2022 in a city of 15 million (of whom practically all are African), that year St Louis reported 200 murders in a city of 300,000 (of whom only 150k are black). While it's likely more homicides slipped under the radar in Lagos than in St Louis, West African cities would have to miss the vast majority of homicides to come close to the US' most violent cities. Having spent a lot of time in Africa, even poorer people in big cities would report these kinds of deaths, even if they have little belief in the competence of the police to solve them.

I agree that the gap closing appears unlikely, but reducing homicide rates in these cities to West African levels would still be a big improvement.

You answered neither of 2 my questions!

that year St Louis reported 200 murders in a city of 300,000 (of whom only 150k are black).

looks like you're showing number of murders for greater St. Louis (which is 3 million) with figure of population of St. Louis city.

why Nigeria reports more 10x homicide rate than Ghana, which it shares border with? Is 0.3 homicide rate per 100k for Senegal in 2015 close to truth?

Nigeria has ongoing sectarian conflict with Islamist terrorists in the North and Northeast and between Fulani pastoralists and settled people that involve hundreds of murders on a very regular basis (all of which are recorded by the military). The US murder rate also spiked in 2001 for obvious reasons.

Do you believe the true homicide rate in West Africa is on the order of 50-90 per 100k as in these high crime American cities? What do you think the ballpark figure is?

More comments

Among dog breeds, Huskies are stupid but rarely kill people, Pitbulls are smarter but kill people on regular basis.

I’m pretty sure huskies are smarter than pit bulls.

Hhhhm i would like a good source on this

To my knowledge most HBD theory proposes that IQ is fully general, and higher average IQ should correlate with more pro-social, civilized behaviour in general - I've seen no theory for a separate "criminality gene" being fleshed out.

No. Most HBD theories posit that 'g' is positively correlated with everything good including non-criminality, but not that it is the only factor.

In your 30 comments so far, you’ve got quite the ratio of lazy, edgy takes, for which you’ve been warned twice. This particular one runs afoul of the booing and antagonism rules.

Three day ban.

This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around.

Occupation is hard and bloody work. One of the many things that went wrong in Afghanistan were the methods. There were stories about US soldiers gritting their teeth to nubs at their Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks and how they couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers on the ground knew the whole campaign was a massive farce a decade before withdrawal.

https://www.thejournal.ie/afghanistan-sexual-abuse-us-soldiers-2343921-Sep2015/

The locals would do everything they could to cheat and rip off Western forces, launching attacks to get us to pay them for protection money, blowing up bridges so they could get lucrative contracts to rebuild them. If you're trying to do imperialism you have to have the right political/social methods. You need to credibly threaten enormous violence against those who displease you, you have to make it clear that you're not a pinata that can be extorted for money, you have to project fear and power. Consider what Israel does 'to make their presence felt':

Many roads are “sterile,” and the nearer they are to the settlement, the less access Palestinians are allowed. They cannot drive, they cannot open a store, and, closest to the settlers, they are not allowed to walk the streets. If a Palestinian family has a home fronting one of these streets, the army will seal the front entrance and the Palestinians will only have access over the roof and through the back door.

Our main job was to “make our presence felt.” The conscious policy was to give the people the sense that the IDF was everywhere, all the time. We patrolled the streets 24/7, picking houses at random, waking up the families at night and separating them into men and women, and searching, loudly and publicly. It fell to me as a commander to pick the houses, a selection that was made unrelated to military intelligence.

As an occupying force in a territory, you have to act like this. It’s a simple equation, as surely as one plus one equals two; this is what an occupation will result in. You can’t serve as a soldier in the Occupied Territories and treat a Palestinian as an equal human being, as the only way to control a civilian population against their will is to make them feel chased, harried, and afraid. And when they get used to that level of fear, you have to increase it.

Or:

In some army units, making one’s presence felt is referred to as “creating a sense of being chased.” That means instilling fear into the entire Palestinian population, a mission that by definition makes no distinction between suspects and innocent civilians, or between “involved persons” and “uninvolved persons,” as it is called in IDF parlance. Sometimes soldiers invade homes in the middle of the night just for training purposes. I raided homes in Jenin or Nablus simply to seize more optimal observation positions. According to one former soldier who gave testimony to Breaking the Silence, they would invade homes to test a new door-breaching device. Another witness said they went into a Palestinian home to be filmed eating sufganiyot (Hanukkah donuts) for a feel-good news story to be broadcasted that night on Israeli television.

That's what imperialism is about, stuff that would immediately put you in the 'glowing red eyes baddy' camp according to our norms. This is why we can't do imperialism proficiently. I don't mean it in the leftist frame that everything about imperialism is evil. It's a method all states have used to achieve objectives. In Afghanistan we were too lax, the Israelis seem too harsh (though they're still here). It's difficult to navigate between ineffectual rule and backlash, yet can be done. The Malayan Emergency and suppression of the Mau Maus show it's possible. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was very proficient as suppressing! Technology is not a factor - the Assyrians did imperialism in the Bronze Age, the Arabs did it, the Mongols did it, the Romans did it, the Spanish did it, the British did it, the Russians did it. There are gradations in repression, different kinds of institutions and administrative techniques. But you cannot do this stuff and keep your hands clean, it's just not possible. I know you mentioned will and stability but the proposals are standard progressive-frame economic/social-worker interventions.

Enforcing laws is so much easier than real imperialism! And the US can't even do that, there are open-air drug markets when Xi isn't in town. There are blatant robberies, out in the open. In San Fran police have given up on traffic infractions.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sfpd-traffic-tickets-17355651.php

In Canada you see the most cucked advice from police:

“To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door,” Const. Marco Ricciardi said at the meeting. “ Because they're breaking into your home to steal your car. They don't want anything else.”

This wimpy attitude is the problem, not a shortage of education or bussing or needing higher wages. It's not hard to whisk the problem people away, Bukele did it in El Salvedor with limited resources and opposition from the US. China does not have high wages yet people do not go around stealing and murdering like in America or Canada - they know the state will crush them. This is a lesser kind of imperialism in my mind, yet it's still of the same essence. Using force to create order but on internal rather than external entities - that's what police do.

What happens if people made to work in Amazon do a really bad job (many won't want to be there and some are innately bad workers)? What if they show up late? Are they fired, lose their welfare and are left to starve? Are they beaten? What do we do about protests - ignore them and crush rioters?

Or do we pay Amazon to have better workers cover for the bad workers in their make-work jobs? Do we fire the worst workers and give their welfare back, accepting the obvious incentive? Do we capitulate at the first riot because it's 'a bad look', it makes people think of Nazis? Do we capitulate at the first time somebody is unjustly mistreated by our policy, reshaping the whole policy because we're not yet adept at the techniques?

It's the same in education. What if the students are beating each other, thoroughly ignoring the teacher, making a circus of the whole thing? Are they actually punished or are they 'suspended' and given a holiday? Nobody would dare to behave in a British school 100 years ago like they behave today, there were real consequences. We don't need to cane students who aren't good enough at Latin, nor should we build a huge surveillance state like China. But we do need to accept that not everything is going to be resolved amicably, sometimes we need to punish and punish severely.

Great post. It’s an extreme loss of state capacity for internal violence. Look at Mao’s China, successful eradication of a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts) in fifteen years. And it wasn’t because he killed everyone; he killed the more obvious dealers, sure, but you actually don’t need to kill that many people to trigger prosocial change. If the US army rolls into the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or St Louis, and starts blasting, you could quite possibly limit the death toll to three or low four figures in each city (ie barely above the actual homicide rate) and still seriously dissuade violent crime. And as you note, the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau and really the entire history of British India show that you don’t actually need that many people or that much violence to accomplish this. 15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.

We were discussing South Africa earlier in the thread, and there are parallels to that situation (even though I disagree with apartheid and think the Boers are largely responsible for their presently poor condition). Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it. The situation in American cities, as I noted in my post on Seattle a couple of months ago, is the same. It’s not a resource question, a few armed police could clear out the homeless permanently in a few hours. It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.

It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.

Your core point is correct, but it's worth noting that there are principle-agent problems within this. Plenty of people do have the will to simply remove vagrants, but the United States is home to people that will take it all the way to the Supreme Court insisting that bums have a right to camp in your parks if you don't just give them housing. The threat of litigation and the fact that there are lunatic judges that will rule in favor of the bums means that it takes a lot of will to proceed with something as simple as telling bums not to camp in your park. Some of the hoarders don't want to live in filth, but there is a powerful federal government forcing them to at gunpoint.

No sure, I’m not saying everyone’s aligned with this at all. But broadly the American public is pretty squeamish about a lot of things. Support for extreme authoritarian measures is probably pretty low across the board, although perhaps I could be positively surprised.

15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.

I don't think it explains it. 5 centuries ago Babur the conqueror captured Delhi using Afganistan as his base. India is probably easier to conquer.

a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts)

This is not the first time I got the impression that the Chinese Communists have had great success even in the West in greatly exaggerating the long-term consequences of the Opium Wars waged by Western imperialist devils. It makes sense on their part, as it's an integral part of their narrative on the so-called "century of humiliation". As far as I know, though, opium addiction was never anywhere near as widespread in China as the Communists later claimed. Opium dens obviously existed in urban areas, but the great majority of guests weren't addicts; in fact, addicts weren't tolerated there, as nobody was permitted to occupy tables for long. It's true that lots of peasants consumed opium as a painkiller, but considering their usual workload, this wasn't surprising. The claim that as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts is, to me, highly suspect.

Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it.

It's worth adding that, I guess, living in place that is basically a fortress surrounded by barbed wire, in a state of constant vigilance and paranoia, might seem entirely tolerable to some aging Boomer who's living in fear and thinking only in terms of security and certainty anyway, as long as the standard of living is sort of good, but for their children it's a vastly different story, especially if they're educated. Which is what you alluded to in an earlier comment of yours earlier in the thread indeed.

South Africa did feel quite threatened, they were trying to develop their own modern fighter jets to counter the Mig-29s they expected Angola and nearby Soviet allies to receive. At any point the Border War might flare up. Unlike Israel they had no superpower backer to get advanced weapons from, nor did they have access to world markets due to the weapons embargo. They tried developing their own Atlas Carver but the cost of developing advanced fighters was too high.

A shortage of will sure but South Africa also had a less fortunate position than Israel. Though the critical error was probably letting so many blacks into the country, rather than any military issue.

The Angolans weren’t capable of mounting an invasion of South Africa proper and had no intention of doing so, plus by the mid-80s when the Mig-29 was entering service as an export product the Cold War was winding down. More generally, I don’t think it’s possible to believe in HBD and think any of the Southern African countries could present a serious military threat to South Africa, especially when most of SA’s neighbors relied utterly on South Africa for economic reasons and had no interest in participating. Angola’s annoyance with South Africa extended to South Africa’s involvement in Namibia and the Angolan Civil War (where it was in practice on the American side). The US only passed anti-apartheid legislation in 1986 and frankly I suspect that had the Soviet Union not collapsed the CIA would have found other ways to ensure the Angolan communists continued to be contained. In addition, both the Soviet Union and China traded extensively with South Africa behind the scenes, including in arms, as has only more recently become fully clear. The decline of American power since 2001 and the growth of China, not to mention new opportunities for trading relationships with the Arabs and others who wouldn’t care about apartheid would have further made the system more tenable for longer. The economy had stabilized even under American sanctions by 1989 as, like Russia today, the South Africans figured out how to obtain what they wanted anyway.

Imagine that individuals in section housing have to work at Amazon fulfilment centers. Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers. People in section housing could be bussed to the job, and also have regular police presence and social workers more intimately involved in their lives along with people helping them understand budgeting. It would require insane amounts of manpower, but it would also be the first step in actually beginning to address the problems of the slums.

Was this modest proposal made in jest? I want to reply seriously but can't help shake the feeling that I'm just missing the joke.

It was a spitball idea, not one that I think should be implemented verbatim into government policy. There needs to be a way for at risk and poor people to have constructive outlets and understand the importance and value of gainful employment. If you think its so juvenile, can you think of something better?

If you think its so juvenile, can you think of something better?

Sure - nothing. Just doing absolutely nothing and not even bothering with enforcement is a better suggestion than giving a company like Amazon this insane amount of power over the lives of their employees and the incredible competitive advantage of a workforce who are unable to leave their jobs without losing their homes. Amazon already treats their workers incredibly poorly and pays them so bad that a huge proportion of them receive government welfare on top of their earned income - are they going to be included in this program too and forced to do a bunch of extra free shifts for the existing employer in order to get those benefits? They were even projected to exhaust the US labour pool this year because their churn rate is so atrocious! Amazon is a company that has repeatedly gone out of their way to ensure that they get concessions and exemptions from government policies in the pursuit of profit, and I can't imagine that they'd change their spots for this.

The potential for abuse here is just staggering - do you think a woman who is on welfare is going to risk reporting their boss for sexual harassment/abuse when that all but guarantees they'll be homeless for the next 90 days? Your proposal only even makes sense if you're talking about a very specific subsection of welfare recipients. If I'm a university graduate who failed to find a job in six months because the economy just entered a recession, what exactly would I be learning from my new role as a serf for Amazon? Having that experience on my resume would make me less likely to get a real job (to say nothing of the opportunity costs, where I could be using that time to upskill or expand my resume) and more likely to stay dependent upon the system for life. If a hard-working coal-miner with two decades of experience finds themselves struggling to find a job after their mine got closed and all the jobs in their town got shipped off to China, what are they going to be getting out of this? If a housewife whose husband died due to COVID ends up applying for welfare, what greater purpose is served by taking her away from her children for eight hours a day to do menial labour so degrading and demanding that she has to piss in a bottle to avoid taking bathroom breaks? And of course on the flipside, if a hulking 7 foot tall gangster with violent tendencies and substance abuse issues shows up on the welfare rolls, you're actively putting the people who they work with at risk.

I'm sure there's some small subset of people (other than Jeff Bezos) who would benefit from this insanely expensive and demanding program, but the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. My answer might have been glib, but I'm under no real obligation to provide a functional alternative because I think your proposal is seriously flawed.

You're missing the forest for the trees. You're focusing on Amazon as a company rather than the issue of finding undereducated, isolated, an unemployed young men/women an attempt to integrate into society proper as a successful alternative to violence, drugs, and petty crime. It doesn't have to be Amazon, just any job that doesn't require a high level of previous training and education.

The other aforementioned people you created to dismiss my idea don't necessarily need the program I'm proposing, it's not like those people are about to resort to criminal behavior or aren't going to be assisted by other government programs or are incapable of finding work themselves.

Having that experience on my resume would make me less likely to get a real job (to say nothing of the opportunity costs, where I could be using that time to upskill or expand my resume) and more likely to stay dependent upon the system for life.

Could you expand on this? I feel like this is just rageposting instead of an actual example. Also, you don't necessarily need to put work on your resume if it's something temporary while looking for a permanent position.

Of course you're under no obligation to provide an alternative, but poopooing something just because you don't like my general idea doesn't really disprove what I'm getting at, either.

Apologies for the delayed response - life's been rather busy lately. Feel free to just ignore this post, but I didn't want to leave your reply abandoned.

You're focusing on Amazon as a company

They're the company presented and they're the only operation with enough size and reach for this to be a viable option apart from maybe Walmart or McDonalds. Want to increase the amount of corporations involved? That's another layer of bureaucracy, investigation and opportunity for scams (you ever hear about the fake businesses created to harvest COVID relief benefits?).

It doesn't have to be Amazon, just any job that doesn't require a high level of previous training and education.

The job in question has to be one where you don't give a shit about the quality of the output (people don't tend to produce their best work when they aren't getting paid) and with no real importance to it, because there's going to be vast amounts of malicious compliance. What exactly is the big task that needs all this incredibly shithouse and actively hostile labour? You can't trust these people, they have no incentive to perform and every incentive to be so bad at their job they get fired. If getting fired for incompetence means they just get kicked off welfare, I hope you're ready for the political fallout of constant media interviews with single mothers and their starving children who lost their job and all welfare because the Amazon algorithm noticed them taking too many piss breaks.

The other aforementioned people you created to dismiss my idea don't necessarily need the program I'm proposing, it's not like those people are about to resort to criminal behavior or aren't going to be assisted by other government programs or are incapable of finding work themselves.

The other aforementioned people are the ones who are going to be included in the category of "incapable of finding work themselves" - you can't get away with using "about to resort to criminal behavior" as testable criteria without demonstrating precognition and accurate divination. You're going to have to come up with a dividing line between those people and the ones you want to target with your program - sometimes people, through no fault of their own, graduate in years like 2007 and your system needs to be able to account for things like that.

Could you expand on this? I feel like this is just rageposting instead of an actual example. Also, you don't necessarily need to put work on your resume if it's something temporary while looking for a permanent position.

I'm not sure if you've gone looking for a job recently, but having a big gap on your resume is something that hampers the average person's ability to get hired. If you're a hiring manager who's picking up some programmers, are you going to look at the resume of the person who was well off enough that they got to contribute to open source projects for a semester after graduating, or the person who was forced to go be a delivery driver and can't even make the interview on time due to their welfare requirements? (Of course if you allow people to quit their fake Amazon job to go take a job interview without sacrificing their welfare then they're going to be taking a LOT of job interviews with FreeMoneyFromCovid LLC). Having onerous work requirements for someone on welfare means they aren't improving their skills, can't travel for work and are going to have problems going to job interviews.

Of course you're under no obligation to provide an alternative, but poopooing something just because you don't like my general idea doesn't really disprove what I'm getting at, either.

More than just poopooing, this is pointing out serious structural issues with your proposal that I think play a large part in why this hasn't already been done. You just haven't thought through the consequences of a system like this, or put yourself in the shoes of a person who is entering the system at the bottom, and at the same time you haven't looked at the system from an adversarial point of view - and given that you're trying to turn these people into a source of free and easily exploitable labour, you have to be extremely careful that they don't have the ability to fuck things up and make your corporate partners go "These people are not worth employing even if we don't have to pay for them."

There's a reason that companies don't go drag a 20 dollar bill through the trailer park to pick up a bunch of cheap workers for the day. The "workforce" you're proposing to create with this idea is not just incredibly incompetent, but the few parts of it that are competent are heavily incentivised to fuck with the system in order to either escape it or fuck it up. No company is going to want to have to work with a bunch of gang-bangers that are forced to be in their office by law, and the actual "work" that these people generate is in many cases going to be actively harmful to the company's bottom line (though I'm sure some people will appreciate being able to pick up some meth from their Amazon delivery driver).

This is the actual main thrust of my argument against your proposal: the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Your program requires vast amounts of administrative overhead, has massive costs, potential for serious and egregious abuse, hampers the ability of good people to get real jobs and funnels taxpayer money into private hands that are already incredibly wealthy - and to top it all off, the workforce that results is so terrible that you will have to pay others to compensate for the costs of actually putting them to use.

Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers.

Let's say that the government sets an annual wage of $31200.01 (just above the poverty line for a family of four). How much would they need to subsidize Amazon to make it worthwhile?

I'm guessing substantially more than $31200 per worker.

A worker that doesn't get any wages (or benefits, or payroll taxes, or etc.) from the company still requires a locker, parking lot space (or rather a bus seat), HR paperwork to keep them organized, training, supervision, and an assigned task in the workflow. Once they show up and start working, they have the opportunity to work unsafely, make mistakes, steal, fight, or otherwise do worse than nothing.

Since your proposal is scraping the bottom of the barrel of people who aren't employed, I suspect that a significant fraction can't be gainfully employed as they are.

Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.

I recommend you go to prison in New York City. They make 4 times as much per day.

Comparing government spending and personal income is not meaningful at all. The government's ability to burn money without increasing social welfare is legendary, so unless you want to argue that the government is actually giving $350 of value to each migrant per day, it's dishonest to pretend like that's $350/day of subsidy.

While it doesn't cash out to legible living standards outcomes, the waste and fraud in government spending is meaningful. The illegal alien might not be who receives that $350 per day, but someone is getting $350 per day and they like it that way. This should cause some hesitance in proposing government spending as solutions to problems more broadly.

If @SomethingMusic had only said it was a waste of government spending I wouldn't have made my comment.

Instead he said the government was subsidizing migrant labor by $350/day, so I did make my comment.

It is a good point, I don't know the breakdown of the money spent on immigration in a place like NY if it's simply housing/food or if it includes translators, lawyers, social workers, etc. I'm sure someone knows, but articles are largely rage bait or too sympathetic to really dig into how these dollars are being spent.

Also as per the article the figure they are giving is per migrant household not per migrant.

I think a lot of this could be somewhat curbed if there were reasonable requirements to get various helps from the government. If you want assistance, it should be assistance and therefore you should have a job. That doesn’t seem controversial to me. And it would work. If having sec 8 housing required having a full time job, then people would be much more likely to find and keep a job. Add in a requirement that nobody living at that house commit a felony and a lot of these sorts of problems get handled.

The Federal government prosecutes groups that perform criminal background checks in employment for racial discrimination, there's no way they're going to do some themselves for housing.

We should have communist-style social housing tiers, so if you’re an ex-con in social housing and you stay on the right side of the law for 5/10/15 years you get a nicer house or apartment.

Isn't that what parole is supposed to be?

It is totally unnecessary to get the state involved in that, the market handles it fine. Stay on the right side of the law, do a good job at work and get a few raises, save some money, and boom you find yourself in nicer housing. Prosocial behavior is already well rewarded.

That's news to me, I've had a background check done for every job I've ever worked.

It's longstanding policy interpretation, due to disparate impact, but there was a new lawsuit last week.

According to the lawsuit, Sheetz has maintained a longstanding practice of screening all job applicants for records of criminal conviction and then denying them employment based on those records.

The EEOC charges that Sheetz’s hiring practices disproportionately screened out Black, Native American/Alaska Native and multiracial applicants. Sheetz’s companywide hiring practices violated provisions of Title VII that prohibit disparate impact discrimination, the EEOC says. The lawsuit does not allege that Sheetz was motivated by race when making hiring decisions.

Such alleged conduct violates Title VII, which prohibits facially neutral employment practices that cause a discriminatory impact because of race when those practices are not job-related and consistent with business necessity or where alternative practices with less discriminatory impact are available. The EEOC filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Northern Division (U.S. EEOC v. Sheetz, Inc., et al., Civil Action No. 1:24-cv-01123-JKB, after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.

“Federal law mandates that employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue,” said EEOC Regional Attorney Debra M. Lawrence. “Even when such necessity is proven, the practice remains unlawful if there is an alternative practice available that is comparably effective in achieving the employer’s goals but causes less discriminatory effect.”

The federal government believes that you can't choose not to hire criminals, because blacks are more criminal, and therefore not hiring criminals is really not hiring blacks.

A point towards @Capital_Room's interpretation of what racism is in the eyes of the people who matter.

The test case was announced Thursday.

The EEOC charges that Sheetz’s hiring practices disproportionately screened out Black, Native American/Alaska Native and multiracial applicants. Sheetz’s companywide hiring practices violated provisions of Title VII that prohibit disparate impact discrimination, the EEOC says. The lawsuit does not allege that Sheetz was motivated by race when making hiring decisions.

Yeah, I've also been criminal background checked for professional employment. Including at major companies. That's standard practice.

Section 8 is privately owned and in practice does a lot of discrimination on the basis of finding a spot on the sliding scale of better tenants to being able to get away with crappier maintenance. There’s nice-but-poor section 8, which in my area generally advertises only in Spanish, requires full time employment, etc. And there’s crappy section 8 which keeps the water on and does no other maintenance but is also forgiving of late payments of the tenant’s 30% of rent.

These things exist because section 8 is ordinary apartments and houses owned by people who, for whatever reason, prefer to have the government underwriting a large portion of the rent in exchange for a cap on rent. Reasons vary from the genuinely pro-social to the extremely cynical.

Like Welfare to Work? The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA)

One of the most recent videos is by Andrew Callaghan interview

I heard he was MeToo'd awhile back, did anything come of that?

YouTubers can only be MeToo’d if they actually go to jail, it’s not like YouTube has a ban on accounts owned by people who may have engaged in unethical behavior.

They can get dropped by their sponsors and the like though

He had a recent interview with Lex, apparently it was a false allegation because he was coming into some HBO $$ for a documentary film he created with Jonah Hill and others.

There needs to be a stage in between prison and freedom

I’m unsure why this isn’t discussed more. Historically, there were many alternatives to jail that were used to control unruly people and populations. The death penalty was one, of course (we still have it in the US but it’s used so rarely that it doesn’t really impact anything, and most other developed countries have abolished it). But the others - exile, internal exile, population transfers more broadly, asylums (abolished since the 1980s) and so on have ceased.

Jail sucks, especially American jail, and I don’t think that people who - through no fault of their own - have high time preference and impulsivity deserve to spend their whole lives there in a small cell, no nature, no greenery, no alcohol or drugs (other than what can be smuggled in or made locally), no real employment at normal wages, no privacy, no exposure to sex or romance for straight people and so on. That does sound terrible, and it’s a shame we condemn so many to it.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean I want to be exposed to the problems of the criminal, drug addicted or homeless underclass. They should be allowed some joy but separated, in every crucial sense, from the edifice of civilized society and from people who Follow The Rules. A kind of sealed reservation for people who aren’t the worst of the worst violent criminals (who should remain in jail or in the noose) but who are manifestly incapable of living among law-abiding people with some propriety. An American Siberia.

Relatedly, eliminating corporal punishment in favor of just modulating the length of prison sentences is one of those things that strikes me as a solution someone could only like if they're basing their policies on squeamishness rather than genuine care. There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.

Yeah, very good point. Corporal punishment is a great example of a penalty that still works in Singapore and some Arab countries but was abolished in the West.

There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.

I think more important than whether we've properly calibrated the amount of punishment is whether we've optimized the effects of punishment.

Why do we punish people? For incapacitation, for denunciation, for retribution, for a deterrent, for reparation, for rehabilitation, and for expiation. The further you go down that list in that order, the worse prison looks.

Incapacitation is probably what prison is best at, better than any punishment short of the death penalty (and a lot more flexible than that...). Every year you keep an offender away from potential victims is a year likely to have fewer actual victims. I suspect no amount of caning or stockades or whatever else we might bring back would be enough to completely eliminate the need for prison as a "backup" for repeat offenders.

You'd think calibrating any sort of punishment would make it reasonably effective for denunciation and retribution, right? We have The System tell the offender that they did a horrible thing, it prescribes a certain level of suffering for the offender, and this gives us a shared ethical code and some feeling it's being enforced (at least if the police and the prosecutors are doing their jobs, but that's a requirement with any form of punishment). Thinking about incarceration from this perspective, already it's possible to see cracks in the system. Is it even possible to calibrate the suffering we prescribe to different offenders? If you're accosted by some thug and have to fight back before the police arrive, do you think his prison sentence would deliver as much suffering as yours would, if a jury doesn't think your self-defense was justified or proportional and convicts you in addition to or instead of him? If you're very upper class you may have the social/financial/cultural capital to recover (respect, Martha Stewart!), or if you're very lower class you may be okay with a little free room and board, but if you're middle class your career may never recover. Other forms of punishment have similar flaws here, though, so it's hard to fault incarceration specifically.

As a deterrent, incarceration is probably specifically much less effective than the same level of suffering would be if delivered as corporal punishment. The sort of high-time-preference offender who thinks crime is a good idea in the first place is not going to be nearly as deterred by suffering which is scheduled years into the future, and because the suffering from prison is so more gradual than the suffering from corporal punishment there's no way to avoid letting it stretch long into the future for serious crimes.

For reparation (aside from "the victim feels better to see the offender suffer"; I'm counting that with retribution), incarceration is basically useless (it doesn't transfer any value to the victims) or worse (it conflicts with possibilities like wage garnishment that could transfer some value to victims).

For rehabilitation, in theory prison could be helpful, but in practice it seems to be worse than useless. Criminals are not being isolated from the bad influences that led them to crime, they're being put into a community full of them. Depending on what connections a prisoner makes, they may end up more disposed to a life of crime when they leave than they were when they came in.

And for expiation, incarceration is probably grossly counterproductive! In theory The System has told everyone that "they've paid their debt to society" upon release; in practice any significant sentence length makes it difficult to maintain relationships with non-fellow-criminals (and nearly impossible to continue providing friends/family/dependents any support) and difficult to find a (legal) job when the punishment is over. Arguably these are the most punishing aspects of prison, but they're also precisely the aspects of an offender's life we want to encourage, not punish!

There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.

Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment. The tradeoff is more caning vs weeks. I'm not actually sure it's on the pareto frontier. Time in jail sucks in a way you can't shrug off, it's burning time you never get back, whereas pain is just pain, it goes away.I think a most people would just shrug off the pain and do it again, unless the pain was bad enough it corresponded to a lasting injury. (And then you get into things that aren't just 'not-progressive' they're just 'obviously evil' from the usual perspective like using medical science to create a drug that causes extreme pain without permanent damage!)

I think swiftness and consistency of enforcement is much more important than the kind of enforcement, anyway. Even if organized retail theft had no punishment at all, cops just grabbed you, returned the stuff, and dropped you off an hour away, it'd quickly stop because there'd be no benefit.

Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment.

There are two types of crimes really. Crimes made impulsively, and crimes that are planned. We can use corporal punishment to deter planned crimes, especially planned crimes that are so minor that sentencing someone to even a day of prison would be overkill but hitting them once with a cane is appropriate, like shoplifting. For crimes made impulsively, like a person having their mother insulted then committing assault against the insulter, we use prison to keep them off the streets because we just can't have them as part of society.

Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment.

The physical pain is a part of it, sure. But it's not the whole thing. These punishments are generally done in public (or in the modern day, probably televised/put on youtube). The embarrassment and/or loss of social status is a big part of it.

But if you think about a 'criminal underclass', are going to see it as a loss of social status?

Then do something that will lower their social status. Dress them up in a baby bonnet and spank them instead or something.

But the others - exile, internal exile, ... have ceased.

Isn't that basically what homelessness is? Maybe it's not a legal sentence, but it amounts to the same thing. You're cast out of normal society, forced to wander the outskirts and live a very tough life.

If you were exiled to Siberia in 1880 you couldn’t just be a homeless bum in Moscow or St Petersburg, presumably.

Wait, aren’t those both things that happened to Raskolnikov?

No, Raskolnikov had a shoebox apartment in st Petersburg until he got shipped off to Siberia.

In a sense, but homelessness has two crucial distinctions, it can be a temporary state for people who are very much "polite society material" but have hit a rough patch, and it also interacts a bit too much with said polite society, being a nuisance to its members and that chafing is encouraging them to be tougher on it. It's harder to feel compassionate towards the homeless if you have to endure their litteral excrement everywhere in your city.

You might be metaphysically on the outskirts, but physically you are at the very center of the city.

Have you heard any interviews with the guy that does the soft white underbelly series on YouTube? He basically says by the time he gets to these people they are so far gone they are beyond any kind of reintegration with society at large and can at best only be warehoused.

When asked about success stories, "basically none" is the answer, once you're on the street with multiple addictions and brain rot that is it for you. He has seen millions of medical resources spent on one patient over their lifetime etc... and that anything but warehousing is a resource suck without end. When asked about solutions to "fix" these people I believe the only one he offered was a time machine to go back and intervene in early early childhood.

I think the guy performs a useful journalistic service but I'm not sure he's necessarily best-placed to comment on whether these people are fixable, since almost definitionally he's seem them at their worst.

To see if they could be treated you'd need a combination prison, asylum and rehab. They'd need to be forcibly weaned off any drugs, have medical treatment for any wounds/sores/etc. That first part is hard because eg. fentanyl is widely available in most American prisons. I'd want to see what these addicts look like after 5 years forcibly sober with not a single illegal substance. Perform some IQ and other tests, see if they've truly destroyed themselves for life.

These people have no willpower, they can't fix themselves, so I don't think approaches (including the hospital one) that are largely self-directed and rely on personal motivation are viable. That doesn't mean nothing is viable.

They really can't be fixed though, the same personality and mental flaws that lead them down that path in the first place are not going to be fixed by being 5 years sober in a forced environment. You need to keep them in that environment forever because as soon as they are out they are back at it soon enough. Maybe in the future if we have some miracle drugs that can repair brain damage and rewire...at this point in time there is no real solution except prevention and then containment. My spouse worked for a city homeless center as a mental health counselor at the start of her carrier, she saw the same thing. A zero zero percent long term recovery rate for people that far gone and leaking bile on the floor etc...

So. Just keep them in a forced environment forever then. 24/7 Culture drone surveillance and support.

I mean if you really think there's no cure then it sounds like its that or killing them or leaving them on the streets.

I mean it isn't what I think, it is borne out by statistics that no one wants to aggerate. I don't want it to be true. But yeah you would need that, basically a Culture drone missile on assignment to deal with every human deviant. Otherwise, just toss 'em in the warehouse. I don't see that as a worse solution than letting people burn to death in winter tents or die from an overdose. I think we are shirking our duty to our fellow humans by letting them run wild.

What do you mean by exile? Communities, insofar as they still exist, definitely do still ban and excommunicate people. But that just means those people end up in different communities.

I can think of several people who were banned from rat community spaces of the top of my head. Brent Dill for instance.

You don't see the monkey's paw in your proposal? You now have divided the country, 1984 style, into the criminals, the proles -- the people living on these reservations -- the Outer Party (the people living in the regular part of the country), and the Inner Party (the people who decide who goes where). Life in the regular part of country becomes extremely regimented, with everyone constantly in fear of being sent to the reservation for the most minor (or imagined) of offenses if they happen to get on the wrong side of the Inner Party.

It's like letting the police use stun guns. If you give the authorities "less severe" options, they can get away with using them more without being raked over the coals by the general public, or at least with being treated more leniently by the courts. So the more lenient punishment is not going to be just used as a replacement for a more severe one, it will also be used against more people, more often. Having a sort of half-jail makes it a lot easier for people who haven't done any real harm, but are easy to catch and punish under anarcho-tyranny, to be punished. (You can even argue that probation works like this already. Caning, as suggested by someone below, would be in danger of ending up like this this too.)

Just allow people freedom of association and this problem disappears entirely. It should be legal to create an HoA that doesn't allow felons, for example.

Freedom of association is impossible in an 'equity' focused social order. What you're describing is exactly what Redlining was, and the modern incarnation of crime map overlays on Zillow was axed precisely because it was 'disequitable'.

Absolutely. Many other things--such as competence tests, and as we've seen recently background checks--are impossible too, but they're boiling the frog slowly.

Thankfully humans aren't frogs, and people can literally move away when things get too bad. Once excess wealth is no longer free for the taking, market forces force a rationalization either by failure or by reform. Plenty of housing projects and suburban neighbourhoods became failures once black people moved in and the property values collapsed due to the rise in crime, with no amount of cajoling or 'rejuvenation' actually moving the needle on the prices. Barring mandatory state-facilitated wealth transfers, which also presumes both full state capture and maintenance of state capability, I don't see these trends sustaining long term to reach a denouement for either the Equity or the Libertarian viewpoints.

To some extent Pygonyangification is a risk, but the current elite already has the power to ruin your life, strip you of your livelihood and take your money (something that effectively means you're going to have to move out of Manhattan anyway), so what's the difference?

Internal exile still exists in America. Chances are, if you live in America, your municipal government will happily buy you a one-way greyhound ticket to anywhere else in the country- how else did you think so many homeless got to California?

There’s also probation, where poor rule followers have essential liberty under many restrictions.

Exile usually implies you can't come back.

…there is one?

About 4 million Americans are on parole or probation, compared to something like 1 million in prison and another million in jail. They’re being monitored specifically to reduce the chance of recidivism. In the meantime, sure, they still get to ride your subway.

What’s your threshold for “manifestly incapable,” anyway? How should we decide when someone has crossed the line and gets (permanent?) exile instead of prison? I think it looks a lot like sentencing guidelines, probation, counseling, all these other interventions we already do—except at the last resort we boot them to the Montana Gulag instead of the chair.

This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.

Isn’t this is exactly what China is trying to do with their Uyghur population? Well I guess you’re suggesting a more gradual process. China is trying to speed run it. But I imagine this would be the charitable interpretation of their policy. And it seems like it’s working.

Yes. Amusingly if the US hadn’t funded their opposition and the Soviet Union wasn’t already in the process of collapsing it’s quite possible that the Soviets would have eventually achieved this in Afghanistan. It’s not impossible to forcibly secularize Muslim populations, it’s just extremely hard and they put up much more resistance than anyone else.

The soviets didn't even manage to secularize the chechens, so I am skeptical that they could secularize a foreign population.

I think that's pretty ahistorical. The Chechens were subject, as all historically Sunni societies were, to the vagaries of the global Islamist movement that affected every single Sunni society on earth from the 1980s onward, which also perfectly coincided with the slow collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, Soviet attempts at forcible secularization of Chechens were extremely limited; they were much more concerned with forcing children to learn Russian and protecting the interests of the Russian settlers in Chechnya (especially after 1958) than they were in closing mosques. The Islamization of Chechen nationalist movements was a distinct process that occurred through the 1990s, and is in some cases both distinct from and not dissimilar to Islamization that occurred in far-flung regions of the Islamic world as distant as Malaysia and the Maldives.

Soviet attempts at forcible secularization of Chechens were extremely limited

This is indeed my point. Here's a population that Russia has been fighting with since the 18th century, they're right on the border (or even part of the country), and the Russians still didn't manage to secularize them. What hope did they have of secularizing the Afghans in a matter of years, even if it weren't for those meddling yanks?

You can claim it's because they didn't try hard enough, but that seems to me to be, as you say, cope, especially when the implication is that they would have tried hard enough in Afghanistan.

There's also the point that the US wasn't the biggest funder of the Afghan resistance- the Muslim world was. The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation, but in terms of raw money to pay/feed/supply troops in aggregate, the US was a modest part.

The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation

And even then, don't people say that the Mujahideen simply traded the Stingers for simpler, cheaper weaponry?

I've no doubt that people say that, but there's probably a considerable amount of category confusion (do Mujahideen trading Stingers with other Mujahideen count as trading away Stingers?) and self-serving narrative biases (various interests in downplaying the relevance of US military aid support in favor of other actors/other types of aid/denying US significance) and the point that there were only so many (the CIA reportedly only gave around 1000 total), and that once they did their primary role- making the Soviets cautious rather than aggressive with their use of gunships- there wasn't much use for them.

Some weapon systems are more about shifting the opponent's behavior rather than being prevalent. Stingers were an example of that.

This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.

This is a feature, not a bug. The problem was that we tried to occupy Afghanistan in the first place.

The strength of our system is it's inherent antipathy towards totalitarian control or abuse of human rights in the service of some end, however well-intentioned we think that end may be. The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world. The fact that the American people doesn't have the stomach for re-education camps, massive censorship and generational occupations of foreign countries is again a strength rather than a weakness. We shouldn't try, and we should actively prevent other nations from trying where the realities on the ground allow.

The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.

What you're describing seems unlikely to work without resorting to heavy-handed authoritarian policies like forced labor - what will you do when you offer subsidies to Amazon to hire people from low-income households, and nobody takes you up on the deal? Not to mention in some ways your program already exists considering that many low-wage workers are already heavily subsidized by the government.

I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty, but sacrificing the ideals the West was built on to become China-lite is not worth it.

I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty...

My proposed solution is to pick an absolute standard of what "poverty" is and try to solve that. When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved. I believe this is intentional, but it doesn't really matter to the point whether this is just a mistake or not. If we can define "poverty" by absolute standards of access to the basic necessities of life, I think we will find that the United States has already solved poverty or needs to do very little to fill in the last couple gaps.

If, instead, "poverty" just refers to having less than the median, well, the poor we'll always have with us, I suppose.

When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, t

Wow, that's worse than I thought. It doesn't just exclude food and housing aid, it also is before taxes. Public assistance is not taxable, so someone who gets $x in public assistance is considered poorer than someone who gets $x after taxes from wages.

It’s disgusting that the rich get richer each year while leaving 50% of people below median in wealth.

When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved

I'm confused; wasn't there a brouhaha about this specific point just in the last year? Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?

I remember a number of articles like this one:

In the late 1950s, the poverty rate in the U.S. was approximately 22%, with just shy of 40 million Americans living in poverty. The rate declined steadily, reaching a low of 11.1% in 1973 and rising to a high of nearly 15% three times – in 1983, 1993 and 2011 – before hitting the all-time low of 10.5% in 2019. However, the 46.7 million Americans in poverty in 2014 was the most ever recorded.

Also articles like this. Apparently there's also absolute and relative poverty. Oh well.

Regardless, the fact that definitionally 49% of people will be forced to earn sub-median incomes isn't necessarily a reason to shrug away poverty and/or the degree of income inequality in society. As evidenced by the last decade of politics. Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?

Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?

Supplemental poverty is the alternative measure that includes transfers.

Conservatives and progressives both seem to vassilate on what exactly they mean by poverty when it's convenient to do so. Conservatives claim that transfers don't work because they haven't pulled everyone up to a middle-class earned income, but they also note that America's "poor" are housed, clothed, fed, and have entertainment budgets. Progressives claim that transfer programs work and we can tell because supplemental poverty figures tell us we've pulled people up, but then insist that tens of millions are "food insecure". To the extent that the concern is actual material impoverishment, welfare spending works and we do a lot of it.

I do try to be consistent - I occasionally get annoyed by the size of these programs, but the reality is that spending $183 billion per year for the hungry instead of for space has resulted in Americans having entirely too much to eat rather than any issues of "food insecurity".

Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?

I am completely unsympathetic to inequality discourse. Part of the reason is that it's often couched in the language of poverty, insinuating that the relatively deprived are absolutely deprived. Really though, I just generally don't buy that inequality is a real problem. I'm fine with anger at specific elites for specific reasons, but some fuzzy claim that Jeff Bezos just has too much money because Amazon is wildly successful is just annoying to me.

The problem I have with the measures that don't include transfers is they're often used to justify more transfers. Which is a nice broken feedback loop since by definition more transfers won't reduce that measure of poverty.

The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world.

America didn't always fail at military occupation though.

If you're referencing the Indian Wars and the later...acquisition...of Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, etc., perhaps that just comes down to A: a slightly-different approach to government/nation-building and B: the natives of these places were just different somehow.

Yes, and also Japan and Germany post-1945, and Haiti between 1915-34.

The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world

Is it? It it good, for the millions of hungry and displaced Sudanese, that it's not administered by a western government? It's worth thinking carefully about. Sure, re-education camps and censorship are not great. But you named empire, more generally. Even given the authoritarianism, you'd probably rather live in China than in Sudan. It's easy to say you value freedom, but how many lives should be sacrificed on that altar? Africans would probably be closer to freedom, in a positive sense, if the transition to self-rule had happened in a more orderly fashion, or not happened at all. And those with power in Western countries like you do not find re-education camps appealing, and so probably wouldn't implement them.

Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.

Technically this is spending per household (despite the media rarely lying). That's only the 73rd percentile of household income in the US.

Maybe I'll post about this sometime, but for now, in short: I don't think the problem is related to intelligence. "Willpower" is closer, but that's a folk egregore. "Short time horizons" is better, but I think that's one of the symptoms, not the root cause. If I had to put a name on it, I'd call it "despair", as in the opposite of "hope".

There's no hope. It hurts to think about the future. At night, dreams are only about the past, or fiction, or fantastic scenarios like winning the lottery or gaining magic powers, never about what might actually happen next in day to day life. Money gets spent fast, because it's ridiculous to think of it making a difference in the future. The hole is so deep that any realistic amount of money won't help dig you out. If you pay the credit card off, it'll just be cancelled, but as long as they think they can get money from you, they'll still let you use it. The choice between eating out and eating in is simple: you can do it, it will make you feel better than otherwise, it won't make your situation significantly worse, and there's no meaningful evidence that systematic deprivation will lead to long-term benefits. Life will still be shit tomorrow, but at least you'll have a few hours of happiness today. And as shocking as it may seem, all of this is compatible with scoring highly on IQ tests.

And then, over the years, it becomes habit.

And that's when lack of self-awareness, which might be correlated with low intelligence, can cause people to lock it in. To believe that there is no other way, that they can't help themselves, that it's not their fault, that they're fine and the rest of world is to blame. And it's not like there's much evidence against that hypothesis. And from there, it's just a short step to thinking that it's people Not Like You that are doing this to you and everyone else you know: the Other, the Man, whites, blacks, Jews, men, women, liberals, conservatives, whoever. Them.

You've given us a picture of poverty. Is this painting social realism, a realistic and detailed study, or is it a cartoon collage of unrepresentative impressions?

Jumping straight from two YouTube videos to a diagnosis of social ills is, you'd think, a bad sign. What blows up on YouTube selects hard for being interesting, surprising, and generally stimulating. Youths stealing cars and livestreaming it, that's interesting! People who make decent money but waste it all embarrass themselves, pass the popcorn, not representative.

Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime.

Evidence? What policies, which people? The second youtube channel certainly isn't an example (the guests seem to make about average income and just spend poorly, hardly 'sucking endless resources'), and the former are just a particularly newsworthy example of teenage criminals.

Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America ... Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.

$350/day is not at all representative of the money the govt spends on illegal immigrants per day, you know about it specifically because it's shockingly high (and that's money spent on "services", not money transferred to them), so it's not really a useful way to understand how unfettered illegal immigration is "strangling poverty-stricken America", considering it's specifically in NYC.

So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations

This is the idea behind things like the EITC and work incentives!

There's something to the idea that a strong state should directly attempt to change the culture in the culture of the criminal underclass, but there's little in the way of good diagnosis or treatment here, "make them go work at amazon" isn't enough, the youth already have plenty of financial incentive to do so.


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