domain:abc.net.au
A Week On The Worst Coast
It was late morning on a weekday in Seattle, ostensibly one of America's wealthiest major cities and home to an impressive number of globally significant businesses. It was February, but the weather was a comfortable fifty degrees, and it was not raining. I had arrived the previous night from the airport, but as I drew the curtains of the Fairmont (the city's status as a 'Tier 2' North American metropolis in our internal booking system meant the Four Seasons was, alas, out of budget) I noticed something strange. The city was dense, there were cars on the roads, we were surrounded by office buildings which seemed, despite covid, to at least have some tenants, but the streets were almost devoid of pedestrians. Seattle was empty.
I decided to visit the city's major tourist attraction, the first Starbucks store Pike Place Market. The concierge furnished me with the name of a (British themed, amusingly) breakfast place there. Apple Maps said it was a ten-minute walk through the center of downtown, past the art museum and various office towers. The city did not look apocalyptic from above, at least from the Fairmont. It seemed tranquil. But again, foot traffic was eerily light for a major downtown on a weekday morning. Within a minute of my departure a grubby white woman, quite young, ambled-shambled-ran past me, mumbling about something. She was completely naked except for a short tail of toilet paper hanging out of her. This was rare even for Manhattan hobos in broad daylight, at least beyond the usual places. Around another corner a tall black fellow wearing an old bicycle helmet, neon vest and torn sweatpants starting walking up to me. I prepared myself for a quick exit across the street into the symphony orchestra, but he was actually quite polite and asked, shakily, if I might have any money. He was polite and I was apparently still a little freaked out after the naked lady, so I gave him the $10 I had in my pocket. He bowed, walked away, then muttered loudly some slur about 'fucking white people', which seemed uncalled for after what I'd done for him (perhaps he knew I was Jewish?).
I continued walking. Three men and a woman in heavy winter coats were engaged in what seemed like haggling over a drugs purchase, or maybe they were just shooting the shit while they shot the shit. Another group of hobos had set up what seemed like a slightly longer-term presence just outside the headquarters of Zillow, which according to Google has never returned to its Seattle offices (though they still seem to own the lease). At this point, after several minutes of walking through downtown Seattle on a weekday mid-morning, I had not encountered a single normal pedestrian. Not a student. Not an office worker in a quarter zip. Not a #girlboss with a coffee in her hand shouting into her AirPods. The city had been ceded.
I expertly dodged a homeless guy wearing what looked like a girl's tank top and board shorts literally foaming at the mouth while gyrating and staggering wildly by the Four Seasons, then arrived by the waterfront. Here there were people, but they were construction workers in great numbers working on some kind of public works project by the park. One stepped over a homeless man lying on the street as if he wasn't there, or rather as if he was some kind of immovable feature of civic life, like a fire hydrant. I arrived at the cafe. The girl serving me told a group of Amazon corporate employees visiting from India ahead of me that they had reduced hours recently, first closing for one day a week, then two, now three or four. There were no longer enough customers to justify opening seven days a week. I ate, then walked past the 'first Starbucks' around the corner. Online tourist guides say you need to get there first thing in the morning or you'll wait for hours, but when I arrived there was no queue (you got me, Brits) at all.
Outside, construction workers continued their labor renovating some part of the market. A hobo shambled next to his cart outside the giant neon Public Market sign and shouted at some tourists who ran into the Target next door. Two brawny construction workers stood by and shrugged. I decided to follow the tourists. The Target had a detachment of a half dozen cops inside of it (I counted). Real police, not security. Given that the Seattle PD has only 940 officers, this amounted to 0.6% of the entire city's police force guarding a single Target outlet. I felt honored. Every single shelf in the cosmetics section was a locked cabinet. I paid, left and decided to head to the Nordstrom flagship store for some shopping, resolving to Uber back to the hotel if I bought anything. Along the way, I passed a city whose commercial life seemed in terminal decline. Empty storefront after empty storefront. Even the big luxury apartment buildings with sea views had huge 'for rent' banners draped across them. In 2016, Seattle had 16 homicides. In 2023, it had 73.
The route was a big mistake. The way from the market to Nordstrom had me turn at 3rd and Pine, home, as I would later find out, to "Crackdonald's". Hopefully you find this generally amusing, but I'll be honest, this part was scary. Among other things I got shouted at, someone tried to grab my (cheap) bag, a woman who was completely out of it stumbled into me, collapsed, then got up. I should have turned around but stupidly continued walking past the (unbelievably still open for business lol) McDonald's when a city employee in some kind of uniform grabbed my wrist and guided me through, then said I didn't look like I was from here and should avoid this intersection at night. I entered Nordstrom, which I assume only remains in business for corporate headquarters reasons, because there were almost no customers inside. The hobos were visible from Chanel, where I was ultimately reminded of the absurd markup European luxury brands charge Americans; the sales assistant sent two security guys from the store to wait with me on the empty sidewalk for my Uber.
On the five minute drive back, I marvelled again at the seemingly extraordinary amount of construction work the city was pursuing downtown. Widening sidewalks, planting trees, resurfacing streets, everywhere the logo of the Downtown Seattle Association and its key partners (Amazon and so on) was visible. A lone open ice cream store sought new workers at $27 an hour, an annual wage 50% higher than the median income in Britain. It was clear that Seattle was a very rich city. Yet it was also clear that it was a lawless shithole, abandoned by all but the hardiest pedestrians for point-to-point car transfers. And even then, they seemingly increasingly avoided the urban core. This is what marks the biggest difference between Seattle and places like Johannesburg; there, in the poor and violent downtown, one can see that the material situation is dire. There is no money. In Seattle, there was money. This was a choice, one unprompted (seemingly) by any major political change as occurred in South Africa. It seemed, inexplicably, as if this was what these wealthy and otherwise productive citizens had chosen for their city, clear-eyed and uncompelled, even as they invested billions in civic improvement most of them would never be able to use. Why were they doing this building? Did they not realize that the reason downtown was doing less well than it has been was not a lack of tree cover in summer or sidewalks that were too narrow for throngs of pedestrians to traffic them simultaneously, but a rather more immediate and pressing issue?
At the same time, it was hard not to participate in a general sense of despair at this pretty and useful city of 800,000 held hostage by, perhaps, a couple thousand psychotic homeless addicts. These were not well armed young men of the kind who create so much trouble in Rio, or in Caracas, or in the worse parts of Mexico. They were big, dumb, lumbering addicts, or skinny little things, out of their minds. They probably weren't going to shoot back, at least not accurately. And it was not lost on me that, in a different kind of society, the small corps of policemen in the Target alone, equipped with enough materiel, could have in a few hours dealt with the issue permanently. It was hard not to want them to, though it wasn't and isn't my call to make.
In the afternoon we went with some of our clients to eat at the University Village, an outdoor mall and dining complex near the city center. As they did in Johannesburg in Sandton, the productive class had built here an enclave, a kind of urban Disneyland guarded by a large cohort of ever-present security staff. But there is a crucial difference between the two: South Africa's transformation, for better or worse, was imposed upon it by the world. Seattle's was enacted by its own people.
The concierge at the hotel said Portland was even worse.
My work almost never brings me home to America (and my family all live on the East Coast), so in my morbid curiosity I jumped at the chance to see for myself how bad things had gotten since 2020. Downtown Los Angeles was a shithole, but it apparently has been since they built the highways (except for that brief 2015-2017 golden age) and I assume they'll try to clean it temporarily for the Olympics. San Francisco, which I had been expecting to be in the condition Fox News promised me, was slightly better than I expected, I must admit. Not that it wasn't a dump, because it was, but it didn't really appear worse than it was before 2020. SF was (laughably) considered a "Tier 1" city (and had a weirdly cheap Four Seasons), so I stayed in the FS by Union Square, famous for shithole status and close proximity to the Tenderloin. Honestly, there were a lot of normal people walking around during the daytime and even in the evening they still outnumbered the hobos. The financial district seemed fine enough, and in general the hobo problem, while worse than Manhattan, was no worse than Boston was late last year, and I thought Boston was still liveable, probably. The signs of decline were around us in the closed businesses and empty offices, but it was Singapore compared to Seattle. The food in San Francisco has seen big declines, though, we ate at well-reviewed / recommended places and what had once been one of the great food cities in the world seems to have lost all its good cooks in the last few years.
More than anything else, though, the trip underscored just how much of a farce the extreme urban decline of West Coast cities has been. Other countries have real problems. When their cities become hellholes, it's because their economies have collapsed, or because they've been taken over by extremely well-organized criminal gangs funded with cartel money in a nation too poor to pay for honest police, or because they're locked in years-long siege situations with militarized gendarmerie, or because they recently imported millions of people from cultures that hate them and don't care about their rules. But on the West Coast the shithole city problem wasn't the fault of any of those things, not even mass immigration (certainly not of the legal kind, although honestly very few of the hobos appeared to be Latino). Nor was it a grand act of clear-headed sadomasochism, amusing as that would be, because I can't really say most of the people I met there were happy about what had happened.
No, in America, the great cities of the West Coast had been destroyed because, like a prison warden deciding one day to become an inmate for no reason at all, their inhabitants had voted to legalize crime and - in so doing - to be held voluntarily, collectively hostage by the dregs of humanity their cities both produced and attracted from elsewhere in the country, bussed to California for the mild climate and pathologically altruistic host population. That the problem could be solved almost immediately by a competent government (even without resorting to the most extreme methods) was perhaps, in fact, the point. Perhaps you are supposed to take the BART with the filth every day, supposed to step over the needles, supposed to fear for your safety every time you walk around after dark, supposed to know just how easily this could be fixed at almost no cost and effort and yet watch powerlessly as it never happens and things just keep getting worse for no real reason at all.
Unrelated side point: holy hell were there an insanely high number of transwomen on the West Coast. I encountered more in that week than I have in my entire life. Two unrelated baristas at two different coffee places in the same morning were both transwomen, then so was the receptionist at the office we visited a half hour later. Wild. I now understand where all the very online trans people actually live.
In between blogging about fursuit collections, former motte moderator TracingWoodgrains has started to blow up on twitter after wading into an ongoing feud between Steve Sailer and propagandist Will Stancil.
Something in the replies must have really upset him (possibly interactions with a number of replyguys making not-so-veiled threats about what happens to people who associate with bigots or question "lying for the pursuit of good aims"), because he suddenly got really invested in proving that the recent FAA-DEI scandal is real.
After giving up on conservative journalists and deciding to do the legwork himself, he's now posting PACER documents from the recent FAA lawsuit, proving that the FAA HR department sent black applicants a list of resume buzzwords that would get their applications fast-tracked, via the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
A few hours ago this got the attention of Elon Musk, and Tracing is promising a follow-up, somehow trying to juggle 1L coursework with doing more investigative journalism than the entire conservative media put together. Obviously one of these things takes more time than the other, but I'm sure he'll have a coffee break free for the journalism bit.
One reason I think this could be important is that it's going to paint a huge target on Tracing's back. Propagandists have been claiming that the FAA DEI story was fake, the test designed to favor black applicants never existed, etc. They're going to get very angry at this evidence becoming widely known, and tracing is in a unique position to spread it outside the right wing news ghetto that prevents most liberals from ever encountering facts like these.
I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school, but he's in a uniquely vulnerable position right now, with very few allies in a position to help him (and probably a number who will suddenly decide he's on the enemy side of the fiend-enemy distinction.) So if anyone is in the position to help if he needs it, maybe start reaching out early.
Unfortunately all of this is getting difficult to follow without a twitter account (I even have one, but they're not letting me log in right now for no apparent reason). It's going to get even harder as Nitter instances die off. If anyone has a reliable account and would be willing to make screenshots, I'd love if you could take over covering the story as it develops.
Edit: his effortpost is now out on twitter and at his blog. I'll copy it into a reply below in case the nitter instance goes down again.
Just a note, this has obvious parallels to colleges letting DEI departments screen out the 80% of applicants before any objective hiring process begins:
they recommended using a biographical test first to "maximiz[e] diversity," eliminating the vast majority of candidates prior to any cognitive test.
It's a very effective method of manipulating procedural outcomes, isn't it?
FD4280
3mo ago
Trace,
At some point in the past, iirc in a discussion of LibsOfTiktok, I wrote that you can be counted upon to investigate only in the political direction that doesn’t threaten your daily kibble. I was wrong and you have my apology.
I think a lot of the reasons come from the elites no longer having significant skin in the game and little connection to the real meat potatoes and dirt road.
I have chosen to make this the drum I'm beating every time I see institutional failure raise it's head. Which is near-daily.
The people who have been appointed to make the decisions are insulated from any negative consequences for policy failure (here defining failure as "not achieving purported objectives") but are allowed to reap benefits of their decisions. Hell they often get to reap benefits even if there's a failure. Lori Lightfoot leaves Chicago worse off than when she found it (quite a feat!) and immediately gets a cushy job at Harvard teaching leadership. It's like they're intentionally mocking the idea that rewards go to those with merit and that outcomes matter when judging a person's competence.
Chesa Boudin allows crime to run rampant in San Fran to the point it becomes a national embarrassment. He gets FUCKING RECALLED BY VOTERS because it was too much for even SF libs to stomach... and he lands a teaching job at Berkeley "Failing upward" doesn't even begin to describe it.
And the Biden family, especially Hunter. ye Gods.
When the rewards the elites reap are completely uncorrelated with the impact their decisions have on the rest of us proles then you simply can't expect them to make good decisions, to implement functional policies, or to listen to feedback from constituents. Quite the opposite, you'd expect them to exploit the system for personal benefit at every chance, given that they know that the institutions that are supposed to be holding them accountable are just as compromised and ineffectual.
They've gotten so far entrenched that it is impossible to even discuss consequences for them. Post-Covid it's becoming clear just how many ways various institutions failed, and not just missing goals, but straight up making the situation worse through their action or inaction. And not a single person who had decision-making authority will be taken to task or suffer any lick of punishment.
EDIT: I revise the previous statement to point out that Andrew Cuomo did in fact get punished. But this ends up being the exception that proves the rule because his removal from office had NOTHING TO DO WITH HIS BUNGLING OF COVID and of course he was still hailed as a shining beacon of competence for his handling of Covid.
Just farcical.
Eventually the proles will start to conclude that the system is in fact SET UP so as to ensure elites are guaranteed to thrive regardless of the state of the country and that perhaps the only way skin gets re-inserted to the game is if the proles taken action themselves.
charles
9mo ago
I'm posting my reply here at the top level original post, but it is really a reply, or series of replies, to comments further down.
I used to be obese, I've used semeglutide, and I no longer am. There's more too it than that though.
I didn't grow up fat. I've always been a bit on the big side though. When I was 22 I was 6'3" and about 255lbs. I was very active, had a black belt in Judo, competed regularly and had excellent cardio. I was, probably genetically, just big. I was also jacked from 2-4 days a week hitting the weights. My favorite cardio has always been swimming.
About 8 years ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I don't want to get into the finer details but it was rough. After many surgeries I've been cancer free for about 4 years now. There were bad complications from a surgery and I was bed ridden on and off for almost a year with a wheelchair after for a while. During these years my dietary and activity habits of a lifetime vanished. This post is really about habits.
After beating the cancer, regaining my mobility, and returning to the world my appetite came roaring back one day. My ability to be physically active lagged behind. Additionally I became severely depressed. My career trajectory was irrevocably trashed by the cancer. I wasn't "tough" any more, lost my black belt (you have to actually maintain activity in Judo where the belts are competition classes that reflect ability, no ability=no belt). My finances were ok despite being out of work so I consoled myself with snacks. Lots of snacks. You don't really think about your dietary habits, built unconsciously over a lifetime, until they are gone. I was overeating all the time and was constantly starving. I could eat so much that it was physically difficult to stand up and walk around, and I was still starving. All the time.
Obesity is a physical symptom of mental unwellness, and its like quicksand. Or maybe its like any other addiction. Imagine being a heavy smoker, deciding you need to quit, but you still have to smoke 2-3 cigarettes a day for the rest of your life, or you would die. Food addiction can't be "quit" in the classic sense like drugs or alcohol. You can live without those. There also aren't trillions of dollars in advertising to sell you heroin everywhere, nor huge R&D departments to develop super-tobacco. Food has all of these things.
I couldn't be active, I was in constant pain (And still am), got more depressed about it, and ate more. Rinse and repeat until I was about 100lbs overweight. It was impossible to reign in with just "willpower", if such a thing even exists. After returning to my meditative practice I was determined to make a change so I spoke with a doctor who suggested the semeglutide.
It took about 5 weeks for the berserk, constant hunger to switch off. The other primary effect is I felt full faster. Through some mechanism this drug speeds up the internal sensation that says "you're full now". This was enough to reforge my relationship with food. No calorie counting, no "willpower", no tricks.
Being heavy itself is self-reinforcing. Being fat makes you want to eat more. This drug short-circuits this feedback loop and provided the slack in my bad habits I needed to readjust. The body gets used to a certain amount of caloric intake and screams at you if it doesn't get it under normal circumstances, but the body can be "trained" though reduced intake to expect fewer calories. The drug suppresses that "screaming" for more food, the constant hunger that is only reinforced by eating, not sated.
After about 15 months it was largely complete, by body now expects 1500-2000 calories per day. The doctor was pretty alarmed at how little I was eating for someone who is 6'3'', suggesting 2500-2800. I don't know what happened to my metabolism but at 2500 calories a day I immediately began gaining weight again, fast, so I'm back to about 1700 or so daily. I'm not hungry like I was after the cancer anymore, I've been off the drug for about 6 months now and haven't put any of it back, no longer experience constant hunger, and am swimming again for the first time in 8 years.
I could not have done any of this without semeglutide. Obesity is a tailspin of depression and increased hunger that most people cannot pull out of. People who are very self satisfied in their own weight and judgemental of the obese have no understanding of any of these issues. Their bodies are trained to expect a certain amount of calories and activity and are largely on autopilot. They put almost zero effort into their own weight control, congratulate themselves on their moral superiority for being thin, and wallow in their hatred of others.
This last point often gets overlooked in out culture. Many people absolutely hate fat people. They despise them with a vitriol usually reserved for heretics or murderers. They keep it under wraps as its not socially acceptable to express these opinions in our present culture safely, but will pounce on any opportunity to lash out at the hated other, who they are superior too. Maybe there is some evolutionary advantage to this.
I used to be one of these people. I lived in the gym and the dojo. I reveled in defeating my opponents in competition. I had a lifetime of good diet and exercise habits, until I didn't. This is the opportunity these drugs offer, a break in the dysfunctional cycle of poor diet to give the body time to be re-trained. Even this is too much for some people though. Fat people, being morally inferior, deserve nothing but suffering forever until they die in misery apparently.
Highlandclearances
4mo ago
Canada’s decline
Things are not going well in Canada. The hashtag #Canadaisbroken has been going around for a while, but the scale of the decline remains underdiscussed, especially in our media. Canada’s real GDP per capita is 2.5% lower now than it was in 2019. In the U.S. its 6.0% higher. For decades, Canada has had per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power) that was about 80% of the U.S. level, now its 72% and falling. Canada is rapidly becoming a European country in terms of living standards. This understates the problem because in Europe its easier to live on less: cars are not necessary in many places and, crucially, rent is much lower. Canada is in the midst of an unbelievable housing crisis. At current prices and interest rates, the ownership costs of a typical home would consume 60% of the median household's income, the highest ever recorded. I went to the U.S. southwest recently and my overriding impression is how much better off America is than Canada now.
The Liberal government’s response to this has been deficit spending. Their lack of fiscal responsibility was dramatic during Covid, but hidden under the guise of emergency they spent $200+ billion on new entitlements and spending programs which has resulted in Canada running a permanent structural budget deficit. When combined with our provinces (which unlike U.S. states are allowed to borrow) and measured as a % of GDP, the country is running Bush Jr.-tier fiscal deficits without wars. And what are these new programs? Almost all of them are means-tested benefits for behaviours progressives like. A new daycare program aimed at moms working 9-5 jobs (i.e. white collar) that does nothing for SAHMs, a dental care program which is only for families making under 90k (creating a huge marriage penalty and implicit tax rate), a carbon tax rebate which is income redistribution in disguise, replacing the modest but universal child benefit with a generous means tested one, etc. If you put it together, Canada has largely rebuilt our 1970s welfare state but will claw it back from you more than dollar for dollar as you earn more. We variously incentivize poverty and moms to work, stay unmarried and put their kids in daycare. Our taxes are high.
The other big push from our government is immigration. They occasionally frame it as a way to stop inflation, but usually they don’t defend it at all and assume the pro-immigration consensus is unshakable. The levels were shocking last year, but they keep rising. Over just the past 3 months, Canada admitted 430,000 new people. Canada now has an absolute annual level of legal immigration (including temporary migration) of about 1.2 million -- higher than the United States. We get about 500,000 traditional immigrants, but the big change from recent years is about 700,000 net “non-permanent residents” who form a new helot class. Canada now has 2.5 million temporary residents who come to study or work low-paid jobs and it has rapidly transformed the entire country. These people represent 6% of the population, but because they are highly concentrated by age, they are about 20% of adults aged 20-40. I spend time in a small town that is hundreds of kilometers from any major city and nearly every store now employs temporary foreign workers from India. Every worker at McDonalds. Every worker at Tim Hortons. They live 6+ to an apartment and have tightened the rental market pricing locals out. With population growth running at its highest ever pace, homebuilding is unchanged at about 250,000 units creating an incremental housing need of a quarter million units per year. Rent inflation is over 7% compared with approximately 0% month over month in the US.
What the past few years has made plain to me is how deep leftism runs in Canada and how dedicated it is to ignoring the effect of incentives on behaviour: We can just subsidize bad behaviour and punish good behaviour endlessly without actually changing behaviour. In many ways Canada is running on the fumes of vestigial British earnestness, politeness and self discipline which has made this work in the past, but I think we’re rapidly burning up our cultural capital and once its gone, I think we’ll tip into a much worse equilibrium. I have leftist friends whose perspective is: “sure things aren’t great, but would the conservatives do better?” which makes me sad. For most people, even smart people like my friends, seeing the bad consequences of things they support doesn’t move the needle at all in terms of their worldviews. And I didn’t get into spiraling crime and government celebration of the deracination of our traditional culture.
I think part of what is happening is Anglo culture’s seemliness has become our greatest weakness. Its unseemly to ‘punch down’ and blame an avalanche of mostly-poor international students for the rental market, or permissive and ‘anti-racist’ criminal justice policy for a huge increase in crime so we equivocate and people say things like “its so brutal, how sad” while continuing to vote in the same way. There is no transmission from failure in office to electoral results, so we end up with people like Trudeau for three terms. One astute observation I’ve heard about Canadian ‘niceness’ is that its fake: people are very cagey about saying what they think in public about anything controversial. Our entire country is a university campus. Canadians live in a world of feel good pablum as our way of life is destroyed. People rage about it, but there is no honest sensemaking apparatus in Canada – because talking about things plainly is unseemly – so rage is dissipated randomly. Even today, even after its failures, the combined polling share of the LPC-led ruling coalition (i.e. LPC+NDP) is nearly 50%.
ymeskhout
7mo ago
Clarence Thomas's Gun Control Snare
So the Bruen decision came out more than a year ago, and it has scrambled how courts deal with gun control laws.
Step back first. The way courts typically evaluate laws that putatively infringe on a constitutional right was through an analysis called strict scrutiny. Basically, take any constitutional guarantee ("Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...") and add an "...unless it has a really good reason!" exception. This isn't an exaggeration. Courts were allowed to give the government a free pass on constitutional infringements provided the state's efforts were "narrowly tailored" and "necessary" to achieve a "compelling state interest".
But what counts as a compelling reason? Who decides which laws are narrowly tailored? It's judges, all the way down. For something like freedom of speech, there's a robust enough appreciation that you can expect a reasonable amount of skepticism among the judicial corps against efforts by the government to muzzle expression. In practice, strict scrutiny generally functioned as decently high threshold, unlike its contrasting rational basis test which practically was a free pass for the government to do whatever.
But what about topics a little more heated, like guns? Judges have been squishier and far more willing to accept the government's justifications that a given legal restrictions was "necessary". Hell, some judges even weaseled their way into ditching strict scrutiny in favor of the more permissible intermediate scrutiny. Judge VanDyke of the 9th Circuit lampooned this doormat reflex in his 2022 McDougall dissent (cleaned up):
Our circuit has ruled on dozens of Second Amendment cases, and without fail has ultimately blessed every gun regulation challenged, so we shouldn't expect anything less here. As I've recently explained, our circuit can uphold any and every gun regulation because our current Second Amendment framework is exceptionally malleable and essentially equates to rational basis review.
The cases VanDyke cited illustrate the problem well. The 9th Circuit has ruled it's ok to require people to demonstrate either "good cause" or "urgency or need" to the government before they're allowed to carry a gun outside their home. Set aside whatever negative sentiments you might have about guns, and instead imagine the reaction if similar restrictions were imposed on newspaper licenses. Imagine having to convince a cop that you have "good cause" to start a blog. Constitutional guarantees are worthless if they're predicated on a government agent agreeing that your reason for exercising them is good enough.
The practice of circuit judges shrugging off challenges to gun control laws with "I don't know man this seems totally reasonable to me" went on for several years, and I can only imagine it pissed off the pro-2A wing of the Supreme Court. Sure, Trump's appointments eventually meant they had the numbers on their side and so a very favorable 2A opinion was inevitable, but a stern rebuke of "We really mean it this time!" didn't seem like it was going to work in getting the circuit courts to stop fucking around.
So when they finally got their chance, SCOTUS tried a different approach. Instead of just triple-underlining and double-highlighting the words STRICT SCRUTINY, Clarence Thomas writes the majority opinion that created a brand new analysis wholly unique to the Second Amendment: gun control laws can only be constitutionally permissible if they're consistent with "historical tradition of firearm regulation." Any law being evaluated must therefore have a historical analogue, and the closer the analogue was to the year 1791 (when 2A was ratified), the better.
I was thrilled with Bruen's result, but puzzled by its reasoning because it seemed to just recreate the circumstances that led to the "fake strict scrutiny" problem. It turns out Bruen had way more of an effect than I anticipated. Clarence Thomas is a fascinating figure in many ways, in part because he's America's most powerful black conservative, who just happens to draw direct inspiration from the black nationalism Malcolm X espoused. I have no idea if this was intentional, but Thomas laid out a beautiful carpet of caltrops that the government couldn't help but step on over and over again.
What followed Bruen was a litigation maelstrom. Government attorneys across the land scoured dusty historical tomes, in search of whatever they could get their hands on and use as justification. The first problem they ran into was there just weren't that many laws on the books around the time of the Founding, let alone laws that specifically governed firearms. Generally speaking, Americans were free to strut about town with their muskets in tow, no questions asked. The lawyers had to cast a ever-wider net to snag anything relevant, desperately expanding their search way beyond 1791 to include things like an English prohibition on "launcegays" from 1383. When they did find timely laws, they ran into a second and far more pressing problem: the laws regulating firearm possession were...awkward. Really awkward.
Judge Benitez overseeing the ongoing Duncan case ordered the state lawyers to compile a list of every single relevant law they could find, and the 56-page spreadsheet they created is incredible. It's not surprising to find governments actively disarming disfavored groups, it's another to see the arbitrariness outlined so starkly. Modern gun control critics have regularly pointed out how skewed enforcement can be, particularly along racial lines. And because Bruen requires historical analogues, lawyers defending gun control restrictions had no choice but to immerse themselves unhappily within its sordid origin story.
Numerous early laws specifically prohibited only "negroes, mulattos, or Indians" from carrying firearms (1792 Virginia law, 1791 Delaware law, 1798 Kentucky law, etc.), or specifically targeted only slaves (1804 Indiana law, 1804 Mississippi law, 1818 Missouri law, etc.). California had it out particularly for those with "Spanish and Indian blood" (aka what the law called 'Greasers') and prohibited them from possessing firearms in 1855. These are all laws favorably cited in courts today.
When tasked to defend §922(g)(3), the law that prohibits anyone who is an "unlawful user" of a controlled substance from owning a gun, government lawyers tried their best with what little they had. The closest analogues they could find were colonial laws that prohibited actively drunk people, "dangerous lunatics", or what they termed "unvirtuous citizens" from possessing a gun. And you know that's BASICALLY the same thing as preventing the occasional marijuana smoker today from ever having a gun. The judge wasn't convinced.
After languishing in a stalemate for decades, the legal precedent around gun laws has dramatically changed in very quick order thanks to Bruen. Prohibitions on drug users were struck down, a (limited) prohibition for non-violent felons was struck down, and so were prohibitions on individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders (for now...). Courts are normally slow to move, but these developments have happened at blazing speed, and it's only the beginning as there's still plenty of ongoing litigation.
None of this means that gun control advocates have given up, far from it! @gattsuru has extensively catalogued numerous ways anti-gun politicians and judges putting in absolutely heroic efforts to gum up the machinery, however they can. Judge VanDyke publicly accused his colleagues on the 9th Circuit of some robe & dagger procedural shenanigans putting the thumb on the scale in the Duncan case. Meanwhile, legislation of dubious constitutionality gets passed faster than it can be struck down and the NYPD is somehow approving fewer gun permits than before (maybe because their approval stamp fell behind a desk, or something?). The efforts Gattsuru highlighted are definitely a hurdle but we'll see if they're the beginning of a new stalemate, or just desperate cadaveric spasms. For now, I'm going to continue enjoying the spectacle of government lawyers arguing with a straight face to a judge that pot smokers are the historical equivalent of dangerous lunatics.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
5mo ago
I've found the recent imbroglio with Congress v. the University Presidents pretty interesting due to the somewhat conflicting reactions I've had and just wanted to post some thoughts.
For those not aware, the Presidents of Penn, MIT, and Harvard recently appeared before at a Congressional committee on the subject of antisemitism on campus. Somewhat unexpectedly, the video of the hearing went somewhat viral, especially the questioning of Rep. Elise Stefanik, who repeatedly asked point-blank if calling for the genocide of Jews would be a violation of the campus code of conduct, to which all the Presidents gave evasive answers. The entire hearing is actually worth watching, at least on 2x speed.
Some of my thoughts:
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Rep. Stefanik has a trial lawyer's skill for cross-examination. Her questioning was simultaneously obviously loaded and somewhat unfair but also dramatic and effective at making the respondent look bad. However, I wish she would have focused more on the obvious hypocrisy of claiming to only punish speech that effectively is unprotected by the First Amendment, pointing out some of the more obvious cases where they elevated things like misgendering or dog-whistling white supremacy to "abuse" and "harassment" while refusing to do the same for genocide advocacy. In fairness however, other representatives did ask questions along those lines, though not nearly as effectively.
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The University presidents were either woefully unskilled or badly coached on how to handle hostile questions like this. They gave repetitive, legalistic non-answers and declined to offer any real explanation of their underlying position or how to reconcile it with other actions taken for apparently viewpoint-related reasons. Stefanik was obviously getting under their skin, and their default response to grin back while answering like Stefanik was a misbehaving child was absolutely the wrong tactic. The Penn President came across so poorly that she felt she had to post a bizarre follow-up video to almost-apologize for not appearing to take it seriously while at the same time implying without really saying that calling for genocide might be harassment.
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Their performance was especially frustrating because they were taking a position that I basically support: that the University will not police opinions, even terribly offensive ones, but will police conduct and harassment. It's not that difficult a position to explain or defend on basic Millian principles, but they couldn't or wouldn't do it. Granted, Stefanik would probably have cut them off if they tried, but they didn't try. They didn't use their time during friendly questioning to do so, and they still haven't. I want to support them in an effort to actually stake out that position. But--
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It's hard not to think that the reason they haven't is because they don't believe it. Actions speak louder than words, and there have been a number of cases of Universities, even these specific ones, taking action against people for harmful "conduct" or "harassment" when the conduct in question is actually just expounding an offensive opinion. "Safety concern" has also been a ready justification for acquiescing to heckler's vetoes against disfavored speakers. I simply don't believe that they believe their policy requires them to allow hateful speech against Jews. I think they are lying, and that makes me want to not support them.
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The episode seems to have especially impacted what I'll call normie Jews, who are reliably blue-tribe but not radically woke. On the one hand, I think they have a legitimate grievance against the hypocrisy of how the code of conduct policies are interpreted for some opinions vs. arguable antisemitism. On the other hand, I think it's bad policy to not be able to make antisemitic arguments ever, even if maintaining civility. I don't actually believe that hate speech is violence, even antisemitism, and I don't support their movement to make antisemitism a per se violation. On the other, other hand, the cause of knocking down the prestige of the Ivies and exposing their rank hypocrisy might be worth allies of convenience. On the other, other, other hand, as a SWM I feel like the prisoner in the gallows in the "First time?" meme. You have a grievance at their hypocrisy, but I have a grievance at your hypocrisy. Most normie Jews have had no complaints at all about woke people saying similar or worse things about "white people." Some of those woke people were themselves Jews, and I suspect that if the universities capitulate, it will be by making Jews a special protected class, which would further from the outcome that I want. I've had a superposition of all these reactions going on.
On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity
In the past week, I took my dad to the annual Street Rod show in our hometown, where we walked around all afternoon looking at thousands of custom classics, running into a lot of the same people we’ve run into at the same show every year since I could walk. And I took him to see his all-time favorite movie, George Lucas’* American Graffiti, in theaters one night only for the 50th Anniversary of its original release.
At the film, and even more at the car show, I felt like a kid, like a teenager. Not in the sense of “Wide eyed wonder” or “remembering my own youth,” though there was plenty of that as well. It was simply that I, at thirty, was one of the younger people at both events. The people at the Street Rod show have frozen in time, always my dad’s age or older. Fewer and older every year, as they die off one after another. When I was ten they were older but still robust guys who could lift a transmission and you wouldn't mess with; when I was a teenager you started seeing canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and they’ve become more common every year since. This year, I followed two guys for hours across the show, on Rascal scooters, matching MAGA hats, chain smoking cigars. I wasn’t sure if I admired their IDGAF attitude (“I’m already on the scooter, why give up the cigars now?”) or if I was horrified at the idea. When two street rod enthusiasts see each other at the show and catch up, the conversation is all ailments and surgeries now. And then they all turn to the same question: where are all the young people? Why don’t young people care about these cars? Why don’t young people love Street Rods?
And the answer seemed blindingly obvious to me: these cars have a completely different meaning and symbolism for you than they do for me. Custom car culture still exists, but it’s not about Street Rods as defined in the show charter, not by a long shot. The National Street Rod Association describes street rods as a vehicle of 1948 or earlier that has had modernization to the engine, transmission, interior, or anything else and is a non-racing vehicle used mostly for general enjoyment. “The more family-friendly version of the hot rod.” Besides the obvious fact that cars from 1948 are less accessible to young people, it simply doesn’t make sense to modify a car for performance today.
Modifying a car for street performance purposes makes essentially zero sense in this day and age, doing so is entirely performative in nature. In 1962, the year American Graffiti is set, hot rods were fast because factory cars were slow. I’ve built and driven cars similar to John Millner’s “piss yellow deuce coupe” and while they’re fun to play with, they’re not really very fast**. It’s impossible to guess exact specs in a film that’s largely a nostalgic fantasy, but I’ve driven similar cars with more modern running gear, and it’s pretty hard to take that kind of platform and get a sub-7s 0-60 just by getting the engine running hotter. Now, in 1962, that car was fast, it was the fastest in the Valley!, because Steve’s ’58 Impala probably made 60 in something like 14 seconds, and the Edsel his girlfriend drives probably took 10 seconds or so. Even a brand-new ’62 Vette would have taken 6.9 seconds to reach 60. It really was possible to take a clapped out little old Ford that a teenager with a summer job could afford, slap a big engine sourced from a wrecked truck in it, tune it for power in your garage, and have a meaningfully fast car, a car visibly faster than other cars on the road, a car fast enough that other people would be impressed by it. You could have the bitchin’est car in the whole Valley, and the handful of mostly-foreign performance cars that could challenge you were rare as hen’s teeth in the American small town.
Today, factory speed is so widely available that not only is it impossible to hot-rod anything meaningful, it’s impossible to really street race without being more limited by balls and rationality than by the machines involved. The 2023 Vette runs a sub-3 0-60, in automatic, and costs less than $80k brand new Chevy sells 30,000 of them every year. A Tesla Model 3 Performance sedan can do 60 in 3.5 seconds, costs $55k, and is also a practical day to day car. Hell, for a little over $30k today, you can pick up a 2021 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Prime which will get you to 60 in 5.6 seconds while being among the most practical and reliable family cars on the road. There’s no logical reason to modify your car to be faster today, putting an annoying exhaust, taking out comfort features and turning it into a penalty box, will still deliver less speed-per-dollar than just saving up for a used Corvette. Even if you just want to Mod, you’re better off starting at the Vette and modding that, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. You cannot build a meaningfully fast car on a budget today, at best you might be able to keep a clapped out old M3 on the road. The budget path to a meaningfully fast car today is taking a factory fast car that has deteriorated to a budget price and managing to keep it in shape. A friend of mine has a 2012 e550, I’ve driven it and it’s a lovely and incredibly fast car with over 400hp that will happily bounce off the electronically limited top speed, he bought it for $20k a couple years back, but it’s caught a case of electrical gremlins that are causing an engine misfire that the mechanics all estimate at $15k to fix, and wholesale trade-in on it is $11k, probably sell it for $5k with the engine issues. There’s nothing you can do with $6k in parts for a $5k Honda Civic that will get you anywhere near the E550’s 4.3s 60 time.
Factory speed is the enemy of custom car culture. When any chucklehead can just pay-to-win by buying a fast car from the dealership, having a fast car has no meaning. Think of the great eras of custom racing: American Graffiti memorializes the late 50s early 60s street rod era, and the first few Fast and Furious films commemorate the late 80s-90s tuner era. But the thing is, the 80s and 90s were a nadir for cars in general in America. The 60s and 70s had the great muscle car era, that was the death of the Hot Rod era. Post Embargo, common American cars wouldn’t achieve the performance heights of the Judge and the great SS cars until the mid 2000s. The C4 Corvette is a mediocre car by today’s standards, would be a Toyota 86 competitor, but in 1984 it was such a monster it was banned from SCCA competition because Porsche and Mercedes products simply couldn’t compete, the Corvette needed its own category! This was the environment that fueled Tuner and Ricer culture: you really could take an Acura Integra and make it meaningfully faster, fast enough to compete with a C4 corvette.
The irony is that “car guys” have always slavered over factory speed! They want car companies to make great performance cars! But they also love custom culture. These two desires are in natural conflict, factory speed drives customs out of the market. Today’s custom culture is all about art cars, interesting aesthetics, or over-loud audio. The very same guys complaining that young people aren’t into cars, created the environment where custom cars don’t make sense. Our desires kill the environment that creates and fuels those desires.*** Too much of what we want kills us. It’s the inherently elegiac nature of the Western: the cowboy sheriff makes himself obsolete, by taming the West he destroys the West he knew.
The restrictive definition that the National Street Rod Association uses sentences their shows to decline and death. I look out at the show, shrinking every year, aging every year, and I know the only path forward for this subculture. If they want young people, they need cars that mean something to young people! A 75 year old man wants the cars that were cool when he was young, so does a 30 year old man, so does the 22 year old man. I look at the park and think, cut it right down the middle, this half is T-Buckets and Golden Oldies, that half is Ricers and Reggaeton booming out of trunk mounted subwoofers. You can still have the traditional street rods, but limiting the show to traditional street rods leaves it sterile, unmoving, not going anywhere. Open the show up to everyone, and maybe they’ll also learn to love the traditional street rods. Sure, have the old timers, but have the young artists too! The only way to preserve hot rod culture, to really keep the spirit of John Milner alive, is to allow it to change and grow, to bring in young people customizing the cars that mean something to young people.
But the OGs, the NSRA Golden Oldies types, they have no interest in seeing things change. They don’t want Riced out Civics, they don’t want big subwoofers and Bad Bunny, they want what they’ve always had. And maybe they deserve that! Maybe the purity of that culture is worth it! But walking through the show, I’m very aware, viscerally aware, of the choice being made: the Street Rod show has chosen death over diversity. They’d rather the car show shrink than that it feature modern customs. They’d rather see it die than see it change. That’s the tragedy, walking around the show looking at these beautiful machines, and knowing that the culture that built them has rendered itself sterile, chosen not to reproduce itself for fear of change.
*This was, coincidentally, the film Lucas made immediately before becoming “the Star Wars guy” forever. It’s a cozy little realistic slice-of-life all-rounder of a film, no special effects to speak of. It’s fascinating to consider: if Lucas hadn’t made Star Wars would he have continued making movies like this for thirty years instead? Did we miss out on unmade masterpieces consumed by the Star Wars universe? I might write a bigger comment on the film later, the way it perfectly captures the really beauty and feelings of freedom of American youth, the unique Americana teenage culture of driving around with your friends that is disappearing every year, I wanted to include more of it here but this comment is already entirely too long.
**A forum comment I found from an old timer is the best summary on the topic of how fast Hot Rods were:
I remember reading "Uncle Tom" McCahill's road tests in Mechanix Illustrated in the mid to late '50's. The thing I remember back then was that breaking 10 seconds in the 0-60 run was a real big deal. It translated to a 17-18 second quarter mile time. Back then 0-60 was the standard for acceleration times (the 1/4 mile was something some goofy kids in California used).
A bunch of friends and I took our cars to the dragstrip one Sunday. The "hot" flatheads (mainly stock "shoebox" Fords) could break the 20 second mark in the 1/4 miles. One guy had a stock Model "A". I seem to remember he ran in the 22 second area. In 1961, a friend and I ran a stripped '36 Ford coupe with a '42 Merc engine (heads and carbs, modified ignition; all else stock) and turned a best time of 16.44 seconds. We were happy with it and held the "D/Altered" track record at Minnesota Dragways for a few months. Some guys came down from Fargo later in the year with a '32 coach with a fully built 296" flathead with 4 carbs and cut almost 2 seconds off our "record".
A couple of other comments. In '58 we were all astounded by the fact that a stock FI 283 '57 Chevrolet ran a certified 14.34 in the quarter; it was almost unbelievable then (and I expect a little sophisticated cheating was going on). In the late '80's, a friend had some nicely restored '63 and '64 409 Four speed Chevrolets. We went for a ride and ran them through their paces. At that time, I had a '67 Corvette with a 327/350, a four speed and 3.55 gears. I will have to say I was singularly unimpressed with the performance of the vaunted 409's.
I can't let Mr. "Elcohaulic"'statements pass without comment. First of all, I would discount the fact that a 337 Lincoln flathead was involved. I knew a couple of guys in high school who put one in a '53 Ford. It was waaay nose-heavy, handled like a safe in a wheelbarrow, and would have had no traction. Also, although I think Edmunds made heads and carbs, no serious speed equipment was available for that lump of iron. As to 11 second quarters with a modified flathead in a '49 Ford. Sorry, but that never happened. Joe Abbin made 335 hp on the dyno with a blown 284" engine in a '34 sedan and ran consistent 12's at the strip. The only way that guy was in the 11's was on a 1/8 mile strip.
***Another example from my youth: Baseball Cards were something kids were supposed to care about. My dad bought me baseball cards and sort of informed me that little boys were supposed to like them. But whenever I actually played with them, he’d yell at me for ruining their collector value. I wasn’t allowed to flip them, shuffle them, make fake lineups, trade them: they were worth something. Because from the time my dad was a kid, his generation had made them collectable, made them valuable. As a result, I have no connection with baseball cards, really. I’m aware they’re collectibles, but I have no emotional attachment to them the way his generation did. The capitalist urge to create something special and market it, to make "collectibles," erodes and destroys the human meaning behind those collectibles.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
10mo ago
I think there's something really puzzling and interesting going on with American (left-of-center dominated) institutions broadly right now, and I think the phenomenon is captured nicely by this example of the press, the public, and the unpopularity of affirmative action.
As someone who grew up religious and in the South, most of my life, the main feature that distinguished American high-status liberalism from my home cultures was that American liberalism was absolutely masterful in wielding soft power.
My home cultures were much more prone to highly unappealing sanctimony, and authoritarian preening, and scolding, and the telling of musty old just so stories, and dumb Rush Limbaugh-tier propaganda, and attempts to trot out "hello fellow kids" unappealing Christian "rock", and clearly out-of-touch and ignorant fearful conspiracy theories about everything, and simplistic moralizing, and deep discomfort with acknowledging or facing the darker and messier parts of life, and a wariness about asking hard or culturally threatening questions, and prissy Thomas Kincaid-tier "art", and... On and on it went. (And a lot of that remains true to varying degrees for those subcultures to do this day, of course)
And meanwhile, the combination and intersections of art from Hollywood and TV and the popular music industry and popular fiction, and seductive and unrelenting Madison Avenue advertising, and the draw of unfettered consumerism, and the clearly high standards and high status of America's university system, and the seeming rigor and high standards and skepticism and confident nuance of America's great news sources... It was (or seemed to be) a culture of sophistication, and of subtlety and nuance, and very high standards, and of worldliness, and of individual freedom and liberation (especially sexually, of course). It came across as a culture where people were trusted to follow their own bliss, and where the culture was confident enough that people could ask hard questions and follow those questions where ever those questions led them. These different institutions (or at least their portrayal) all came together to create an unrelenting, highly appealing outside cultural force that my home cultures ultimately proved defenseless in the face of and was ultimately entirely undermined by, especially given the weight of outside money and technology pushing it. When I look at the dynamic I experienced, the things that stick out the most are the profound confidence of that outside culture, and the incredible deftness with which it wielded its soft power. It was a culture that understood, in a deep way, that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. It had mastered the art of both leading you to the water without you seeing them do it, and also making you want desperately to drink.
That's how it all felt, anyway.
Subjectively, everything I just described above feels like it might as well have taken place on a different planet. Everything that made my home cultures unappealing and weak 40 years now feels like its seeped into Hollywood and Madison Avenue and American universities and ostensibly reputable left-of-center news. And instead of deftly steering masses of people without them even seeing that they're being led, we keep getting this ritual of well-bred, well-credentialed people, who've inherited these fantastic organs of soft power, pulling back the curtain, doing the equivalent of getting up on their rickety soapboxes in very public ways, and loudly berating and scolding the people they once would have masterfully exercised soft power over, undermining their own organs of soft-power in the process and generating all sorts of highly predictable attention and resistance.
It's all very fascinating and puzzling to experience.
ymeskhout
10mo ago
There Are No Amendments In Islam
Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:
Similar scuffles are taking place in Canada, and around the world conservative Christians are locking arms with Muslims in their opposition to the inclusion of gender and orientation in classroom materials. Some are applauding this new brotherhood of Abraham, and hoping that this heralds a change in the winds.
There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).
Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):
If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion ("How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist", etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between "their Islam" and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. "True Islam", it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.
I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:
By a decree from God, sexual relations are permitted within the bounds of marriage, and marriage can only occur between a man and a woman. In the Quran, God explicitly condemns sexual relations with the same sex (see, e.g., Quran, al-Nisā': 16, al-A'rāf: 80–83, and al-Naml: 55–58). Moreover, premarital and extramarital sexual acts are prohibited in Islam. As God explains, "Do not go near fornication. It is truly an immoral deed and a terrible way [to behave]" (Quran, al-Isrā': 32). These aspects of Islam are unambiguously established in the Quran, the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and a chain of scholarly tradition spanning fourteen centuries. As a result, they have gained the status of religious consensus (ijmā') and are recognized as integral components of the faith known to the general body of Muslims.
As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.
In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.
The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.
The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.
The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.
Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.
Contra deBoer on transgender issues
I don't think you're merely asking us to be "kind"
I’ve long been a great fan of Freddie deBoer. He’s a consistently thought-provoking and engaging writer, courageous in his willingness to step on toes and slaughter sacred cows, worth reading even when I (often) disagree with him.
One of many areas on which I disagree with Freddie is in our respective stances on trans issues. Some years back, he posted that he was sick of people in the comments of his articles bringing up trans issues even though the article itself had nothing to do with the topic, and announced a blanket ban on this specific behaviour.1 He subsequently posted about the subject in more detail, explaining why (in contrast to his more iconoclastic opinions on progressive issues like racism, policing and mental health) he supports the standard “trans-inclusive” paradigm more or less uncritically. In March of last year, he posted an article titled “And Now I Will Again Ponderously Explain Why I Am Trans-Affirming”.
To be frank, I found the article staggeringly shoddy and poorly argued, especially for such a typically perceptive writer: it was a profound shame to see him fall victim to exactly the same errors in reasoning and appeals to emotion he so loudly decries when progressives use them in other political contexts. I intended to write a response to that article but never got around to it, and then the moment had passed. Last week he published not one but two new articles on the topic, so now I have a second chance to strike while the iron is hot. In some cases I will respond to Freddie’s arguments directly; in other cases I think it will be illuminating to contrast what Freddie wrote on this topic with what he has written on other controversial political issues in the past, to illustrate how flagrantly he is failing to live up to his own standards and committing precisely the same infractions he has complained about at length in other contexts.
“No one is saying” and what a strawman is
Freddie repeatedly asserts that various complaints that gender-critical people might have about trans activists are completely unfounded and invented from whole cloth, that no trans activists are saying what gender-critical people accuse them of having said, and that if any trans activists are saying these things then they’re only a small radical fringe and they don’t matter.
They’re trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female, between men and women, altogether!
Who? Where?… No one wants you stop calling your kids boys or girls and no one wants you to stop being a man or woman.
Terms like “birthing person” and “chestfeeding” are stupid and alienating to a lot of people!
Well… yeah… Again, though, plenty of trans people don’t use this language, and it’s mostly confined to the parts of our culture that have aggressive HR departments. I have been around LGBTQ people generally, and activists specifically, for most of my life. No one has ever scolded me for saying “ladies and gentlemen” or “breastfeeding” or “dad.” Not once have I ever been confronted about using language that suggests a gender binary. Not once!
In 2021, Freddie wrote an article titled "NO ONE SAYS" & What a Strawman Is", describing a rhetorical trick in which a person opposing him on some political issue will insist that “NO ONE SAYS” a thing Freddie disagrees with, Freddie will cite examples of people saying that exact thing - but rather than concede the point, the person will simply move the goalposts:
You know what the “no one is saying” crowd do when you show them incontrovertible evidence that someone is saying it? They say “oh that person doesn’t matter,” and roll right along. “No one is saying” morphs easily into “no one important is saying.”
Freddie might claim that no one is trying to obliterate the distinction between men and women; no less than a once-august publication like Scientific American argues that sex is a “spectrum” and that the idea of there being “only” two sexes is “simplistic”. Freddie might claim that no one in his experience has ever scolded him for saying “birthing person”, but that is the official language advocated for by the UK’s National Health Service. Freddie might insist that no one wants you to stop calling your kids boys or girls, but here’s a fawning article in the New York Times about parents doing exactly that, and another from the BBC.
Note also Freddie’s claim that linguistic prescriptions like “birthing person” and “chestfeeder” are largely confined to “the parts of our culture that have aggressive HR departments”. This might come as a surprise to Freddie, but some of us actually have to work in companies with aggressive HR departments - we aren’t all lucky enough to be self-employed freelancers pulling down six figures a year, beholden to no one but ourselves. It’s very strange for a self-identified Marxist who expresses such profound outrage about the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat to be so blasé about the obnoxious ideological hoops that ordinary working people are made to jump through as a condition of continued employment in a precarious economy.
For emphasis: Freddie, someone is in fact saying! And in many cases these “someones” are far more powerful and have far more influence on our culture than you or anyone in your circle of like-minded Brooklyn activists. When the fifth-largest employer in the entire world is demanding that its staff exclusively use “birthing person” in place of “mother”, what some Brooklyn activist believes is beside the point.
Female sporting events
I also find it hard to square Freddie’s claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female altogether with his apparent belief that trans women competing in female sporting events is entirely fair and legitimate. How can such a policy possibly be justified without ignoring the indisputable biological reality, consistent across time and space, that the average male person is stronger, faster and more resilient than 99% of female people? No less of a once-respectable institution than the American Civil Liberties Union describes the claim that “Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes” as a “myth”. When a respected organisation like the ACLU, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, asserts that male people are collectively no stronger than female people - the only way I can describe the claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female people is that it is a shameless insult to the reader’s intelligence.
Scepticism for me, but not for thee
A recurrent problem throughout the article is Freddie assuming that any criticism of trans-inclusive policies is a criticism of trans people themselves. No matter how many times a gender-critical person might assert “I’m not worried about trans people using this policy to hurt people - I’m worried about bad actors who are not themselves trans or suffering from gender dysphoria taking advantage of this policy to hurt people”, Freddie continually insists that criticising policies intended to be trans-inclusive is functionally the same as criticising trans people as a group. This is precisely the same kind of facile reasoning he’s so elegantly skewered in other political domains - the notion that opposition to this or that policy necessarily implies hatred of black people, or the mentally ill, or what have you. But he’s guilty of it himself, admitting elsewhere in the article that certain trans-inclusive policies pursued by the radical fringe of the trans activist lobby are short-sighted and counterproductive. So we find ourselves in the curious position in which Freddie can criticise this trans-inclusive policy without that bringing his support for trans rights into question - but if gender-critical people are sceptical or uneasy about that trans-inclusive policy, the only reasonable explanation is that they’re crypto-conservative fundamentalist Christians motivated solely by disgust and hatred of trans people.
For example, Freddie admits to scepticism about outré neogenders (“I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age”), that a lot of the linguistic prescriptions trans activists make are preposterous and counterproductive (“I think making people believe that you want to get rid of the term “mother” is about as politically wise as punching a baby on camera”), that it’s wrong to act like medically transitioning will solve all of a trans person’s problems (“And I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments - things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems”) and even that some medical practitioners are being overly aggressive about pushing minors to transition (“Can I see understand [sic] some concerns with overly-aggressive medical providers pushing care on trans-identifying minors too quickly? I guess so.”) These topics, apparently, reside within the Overton window: one is entitled to raise concerns about them without being accused of being motivated by malicious hatred of trans people as a group. Why are these concerns legitimate to express, and not: the unintended consequences of abolishing single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms; male rapists with intact genitalia being incarcerated in female prisons; convicted sex offenders coming out as trans and changing their names in order to evade child safeguarding policies - or any other of the litany of reasonable-sounding objections gender-critical people have raised over the last decade or so? No idea.
The bathroom question
A large chunk of both articles is dedicated to the question of whether it is appropriate to allow trans women to use women’s bathrooms:
They’re gonna rape the girls in the bathrooms!
Please, help me understand this, because it’s never made an ounce of sense to me. The claim is that, if you allow transwomen into women’s bathrooms, they’ll rape the women in there, right? Here’s my question: do you think that a sign on a door is gonna keep a rapist from raping? Like, there’s a sexual predator who wants to commit a rape, and he’s about to follow a woman into the bathroom to do so, but then he sees that it’s a women’s bathroom and says “ah shucks, I guess no rape for me today”? I simply do not understand this. If physical proximity is by itself sufficient incitement to sexual assault, then we have much, much bigger problems on our hands. How does legally allowing a transwoman into a girl’s bathroom create any greater threat than a cisgender man’s practical ability to simply walk into that bathroom and assault someone?
I personally am not a diehard advocate for sex-segregated bathrooms, and can see the merit in making all bathrooms gender-neutral. Of all the components of trans activism going, gender-neutral bathrooms is perhaps the one I find least objectionable. That being said, I find the argument for sex-segregated bathrooms easy to understand (even if I don’t necessarily share it), and admit to being surprised that Freddie doesn’t get it, so I will try to aid him in understanding it.
A blanket policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is intended to minimise the risk of female people being raped or sexually assaulted by male people in bathrooms. While a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is enforced, a person who sees an obviously male person enter a women’s public bathroom could reasonably assume that that person was up to no good, and take appropriate steps to rectify the situation (such as notifying a security guard). Under a trans-inclusive bathroom policy, one is no longer supposed to assume that a male person entering a women’s bathroom is up to no good, because they might identify as a trans woman.
While Freddie is correct that, under a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms, there is nothing stopping a male rapist from simply walking into a women’s bathroom, a trans-inclusive bathroom policy makes it dramatically easier for such people to get away with committing an opportunistic rape, as bystanders will be less likely to intervene if they see a male person entering a women’s bathroom for fear of being accused of being transphobic. The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
If a woman is in a public bathroom and an obviously male person walks in, there is no reliable way for her to tell if that person is a harmless trans woman just minding her own business, or a rapist exploiting well-meaning inclusive policies for malicious ends. The fact that the person has a penis is not dispositive in one direction or the other (as Freddie acknowledges not all trans people may wish to medically transition); nor that they are bearded and wearing jeans and a T-shirt (because “trans women don’t owe you femininity”, and a trans woman presenting as male does not in any way undermine her trans identity).
[image in original post]
For the reasons outlined above, there is no way to reliably distinguish between trans women and cis men on sight2. Hence, there is functionally no difference between “bathrooms intended for women and trans women” and “gender-neutral bathrooms”. Like Freddie, I am not aware of any hard evidence that making bathrooms gender-neutral in a particular area resulted in an increase in the rate of rape or sexual assault. I understand the gender-critical opposition to gender-neutral bathrooms without necessarily sharing or endorsing it. Even if the concerns about how this policy might be exploited by bad actors are in fact unfounded, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse everyone expressing those concerns of being transphobic. I think it’s especially unfair to accuse a gender-critical person of saying they think all trans women are rapists when, in my experience, gender-critical people go to great lengths to emphasise that they are concerned about bad actors who aren’t trans taking advantage of these policies for malicious ends, rather than trans women doing so.
Overstating the importance of the issue
In his second article from last week, Freddie complains that gender-critical people have vastly overstated the significance of the trans issue, elevating it to the status of “the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc” when trans/NB people make up at most 2-3% of the American population. I agree that, in the scheme of things, trans issues receive a vastly disproportionate share of column inches relative to their import. Where I differ from Freddie is placing the blame for this state of affairs solely at the feet of gender-critical people.
As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 39 separate days3 in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days dedicated to celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQ+) - in contrast to Black History Month, which famously falls on the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar, despite black Americans making up 13-14% of the US population. President Joe Biden gave a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, while Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren made the frankly bizarre campaign promise that her pick for education secretary would have to be personally vetted by a transgender child. There has hardly been a single political issue in the last ten years that hasn’t been framed as “how might this affect trans people?” or “what does this mean for the struggle for trans rights?” in the popular media, no matter how tangential the connection - everything from Black Lives Matter to the war in the Ukraine to gun violence in schools to the cost-of-living crisis to Covid to AI to the Israel-Palestine conflict to Brexit and even climate change (“[exposure to secondhand smoke] can exacerbate the respiratory stress that LGBTQI+ populations may experience from air pollution and chest binding, which is a common practice among transgender men to achieve a flat chest”)
It’s a bit rich to demand that Americans spend more than one-tenth of the calendar year celebrating trans people, “centring their voices” and putting their trials and tribulations at the forefront of their consciousness - only to then turn around and say “umm why do you even care about this, it’s such a tiny issue lol” when some of them offer even the mildest pushback. You brought it up.
[image in original post]
Medical transition of minors
Social contagion via social media
On the controversy over underage trans people discovering a transgender identity and/or undergoing medical transition, Freddie writes:
Children are routinely getting permanently-disfiguring medical treatment!
To begin with, every indication is that the number of trans children receiving hormones remains low, and the number undergoing surgical interventions vanishingly rare. Can I see understand some concerns with overly-aggressive medical providers pushing care on trans-identifying minors too quickly? I guess so. But what I can promise you is that I want medical decisions about children to remain between the children, their parents, and their doctors. That’s who should have a say - the children, the parents, and the doctors. If in fact there are risks or problems identified with the current manner of practicing trans-affirming medicine for children, then we will have to rely on the medical community to change their standard of care as new data comes available. Will this result in perfect outcomes? Of course not. Does pediatric sports medicine or pediatric oncology result in perfect outcomes either? Of course not. What I am certain of is that I don’t want the government getting involved in these medical decisions. Ron Desantis does not get a say, sorry.
It’s fascinating contrasting the passage above with an article Freddie published in 2022 about the recent phenomenon of social media-addicted teenagers suddenly “discovering” that they suffer from dissociative identity disorder (“DID” for short, popularly known as “multiple personality disorder”), an exceptionally rare condition in which a person has multiple distinct personalities (called “alters”). Freddie unequivocally asserted that most or all of these teenagers are either mistaken (honestly confusing the symptoms of some relatively banal personality trait or mental illness for an exotic psychosis) or actively lying; that this is bad for the teenagers themselves; and that the adults who ought to know better but indulge these teenagers anyway should be ashamed of themselves. He even went so far as to argue that dissociative identity disorder may not even exist, citing as evidence (among other things) that certain people only “discovered” they had it after being charged with a crime. How this observation ties into the transgender debate is left as an exercise to the reader (but here are a few hints).
I really cannot fathom how Freddie can reconcile his position in the DID article with his position on trans teenagers: the cognitive dissonance is simply astounding. Freddie insists that gender-critical people need not be concerned about teenagers receiving hormones or surgical interventions, as the rates at which these are occurring are “low” and “vanishingly rare” respectively - but I would be very surprised if the number of teenagers claiming to suffer from DID (even if they aren’t receiving any medical treatment for same) is greater than the number coming out as trans, which does not in any way alter Freddie’s opinion that the former is a concerning trend. He talks about “a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder… suddenly bloom[ing] into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves” and does not accept for a moment the explanation that “expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had” - but simply refuses to connect the dots with the other thing that awkward teenagers with smartphones and burning need to differentiate themselves started “discovering” about themselves en masse all over the Western world about ten years ago (which resulted in an over 5,000% increase in referrals among female minors to the UK’s centre for transgender children - in the space of less than ten years). And the standard explanation offered for why so many female teenagers are coming out as trans is word-for-word the same as the standard explanation for why so many teenagers are claiming to suffer from DID!
Imagine, if you will, two female teenagers:
-
Alice is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she has dissociative identity disorder and multiple “alters” (having given no indication that she experienced like this at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a therapist, and perhaps later to a psychiatrist who will prescribe her powerful antipsychotic medication which comes with a host of side effects.
-
Barbara is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she is a trans boy called Brandon (having given no indication that she was dissatisfied with her gender identity at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a physician who specialises in gender issues who will prescribe her hormones (which come with a host of side effects) and recommend that she undergo top and/or bottom surgery.
Freddie looks at Alice and says: this is concerning, and Alice will suffer as a result - I don’t care that I’m not Alice’s parent or healthcare provider, I still think it’s concerning and I’m entitled to say so. Freddie looks at Barbara/Brandon and says: nothing to see here - it’s a private matter for Brandon, Brandon’s parents and Brandon’s healthcare providers, “I don’t understand why this element of medical science has become everyone’s business to a degree that is simply not true in other fields”, and if you think this is concerning then you’re a bigot. No matter how much a gender-critical person might insist that they are motivated by concern for Barbara/Brandon’s welfare which is just as authentic as Freddie’s for Alice - no, they’re really just a closeted conservative Christian consumed with hatred and disgust for trans people. I truly do not understand why Freddie is entitled to his opinion on Alice (despite not knowing her personally), but no gender-critical person is entitled to their opinion on Barbara/Brandon.
Let’s take it a step further:
- Alice is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she has dissociative identity disorder and multiple “alters”, and also that her “primary” persona is that of a trans boy named Alan (having given no indication that she suffered from dissociative identity disorder or any discomfort with her gender identity prior to installing TikTok on her phone). Alice/Alan demands to be brought to a therapist, and perhaps later to a psychiatrist who will prescribe her powerful antipsychotic medication which comes with a host of side effects; and also to a physician who specialises in gender issues who will prescribe her hormones (which come with a host of side effects) and recommend that she undergo top and/or bottom surgery.
What reasonable person would look at the scenario described above and not immediately conclude “Alice has erroneously come to believe both that she is trans and suffers from DID because of her social media consumption”? But Freddie would have us believe that the two phenomena are entirely unrelated. The fact that Alice discovered that she was transgender and had DID at exactly the same time, that she did so immediately after spending far too much time in online communities in which both DID and being trans are glamorised - this is all just a big coincidence. Freddie absolutely reserves the right to say that Alice will suffer as a result of her erroneous belief that she has DID, but anyone (outside of Alice’s parents and healthcare providers) who does the same of her belief that she is a trans boy has outed themselves as a cruel, malicious bigot.
Some of the passages from Freddie’s DID article are almost painfully on-the-nose:
You might very well ask how it could possibly be the case that a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder would suddenly bloom into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves. How could that happen? The standard line on these things is that expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had. [emphasis mine]
And the core point here is that the people who are being hurt by this are these kids themselves. Sucking up scarce mental health resources with fictitious conditions is irresponsible, yes, and pretending to be sick for clout is untoward. But setting that aside, self-diagnosis is dangerous. Playacting a serious mental illness is harmful to your actual mental health. Fixating on the most broken part of yourself is contrary to best medical practices and to living a fulfilled life. Defining yourself by dysfunction is a great way to stay dysfunctional. And everything about mental illness that seems cool and deep and intense when you’re 18 becomes sad and pathetic and self-destructive and ugly by the time you’re 40. Take it from me. These kids are hurting themselves. I don’t want to ridicule them. I’m not even angry at them. I’m angry at their adult enablers. That includes the vast edifice of woowoo self-help bullshit Instagram self-actualization yoga winemom feel-good consumerist tell-me-I’m-special psychiatric medicine, and a media that loves the prurient thrills of multiple personalities and never saw a vulnerability that it couldn’t exploit.
Most of these young people will probably just move on as they get older, realizing that keeping up this pretense is exhausting and pointless, and go on to live (I hope) normal healthy lives. But some of them are no doubt using these popular and trendy diagnoses as a way to avoid what’s really wrong with them, far more prosaic and thus unsexy personal problems, whether mental illnesses or not. And all of this, the enabling and the humoring and the patronizing, will really hurt them in the long run. Adults who play into it should be ashamed. [emphasis mine]
Incidentally, the scenario described above (in which Alice comes to believe that she is both trans and has DID) is not an armchair hypothetical. I took a quick scan of the #dissociativeidentitydisorder tag on TikTok and noticed that many of the individuals posting content under that tag describe themselves as transgender in addition to claiming to have multiple alters. Transgender patients who also claim to suffer from DID is apparently a sufficiently common scenario that it was discussed at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in September 2022. What to do in the event that there is disagreement among the “alters” about whether or not to undergo medical transition? WPATH’s elegant solution: use a smartphone app to allow the alters to vote in turn and come to a collective decision.
Self-regulation of medical bodies
Stories like the above are precisely why so many gender-critical people don’t share Freddie’s optimism in the ability or willingness of the “medical community to change their standard of care as new data comes available”. By asserting that “I am certain… that I don’t want the government getting involved in these medical decisions. Ron Desantis does not get a say, sorry”, Freddie is committing himself to a position in which the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to effectively self-regulate and will never require outside interference from governmental bodies.
That’s a remarkably high level of confidence to have in any medical body governing any kind of medical treatment. Of course we would all love to live in a world in which medical bodies can self-regulate and no outside interference is necessary, but - well, medical scandals happen, and sometimes the government getting involved is an act of last resort after self-regulation fails. I’m not saying that the bodies governing healthcare for trans minors are any worse at self-regulation and course-correction than the average medical body (whether in oncology or orthopaedics or whatever); but I’m definitely saying I don’t think I have any good reason to believe that these medical bodies are better than average, and certainly not so much better that Freddie’s unshakeable confidence in them can be rationally justified.
To use an example of how medical bodies’ self-regulation can and does fail, the Irish surgeon Michael Neary conducted unnecessary hysterectomies and other surgical procedures on over a hundred women over a thirty-year period. Several nurses blew the whistle at various points in his career, to no avail; an internal investigation conducted by three consultants found no evidence of wrongdoing and recommended that Neary continue working in the Lourdes Hospital. It was only after a judicial inquiry brought by the ministry for health and children (i.e. the government) that Neary was finally struck off the register, five years after the internal investigation found he’d done nothing wrong. If the government hadn’t gotten involved (as a measure of last resort, the ability of the medical bodies in question having demonstrably failed to self-regulate and course-correct), it’s entirely possible that Neary would have ruined dozens of additional women’s lives before retiring on a tidy pension. Or consider the more recent example of Lucy Letby, a serial killer working as a nurse who murdered at least 7 newborn babies: the NHS Foundation Trust attempted to handle the matter internally (even forcing doctors who’d raised the alarm about Letby to personally apologise to her) and were extremely resistant to involving the police. It was only after alerting the police (i.e. the government) - nearly two full years after members of staff had raised the alarm following Letby’s first confirmed victim - that Letby was finally removed from her position and later arrested, charged and convicted.
To clarify: I’m not saying that governmental intervention into transition for minors is currently necessary. However, the suggestion that we can confidently assert that no such intervention will ever be necessary is preposterous. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that the medical bodies governing medical transition for minors are invulnerable to the kinds of social dynamics and institutional failures that have afflicted every other kind of medical body,4 and doctors as a profession (as the examples above illustrate) are notorious for closing ranks and circling the wagons at the first whiff of a potential scandal. To simply declare by fiat “the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to self-regulate and course-correct, governmental oversight or intervention is not necessary and never will be” is shockingly naïve. He touched on a similar point in his article from March of last year:
For example, it’s entirely possible for clinics that specialize in adolescent transition to be mismanaged or otherwise imperfect. That’s simply the reality of medical care at scale. What I don’t understand is why this would be uniquely disqualifying; there are no doubt dialysis centers and radiology labs and pharmacies that have serious operational problems, but no one thinks that this discredits those kinds of medicine.
All true. The difference being that, in my experience, whistleblowers who call attention to substandard practices at dialysis centres, radiology labs and pharmacies are not generally accused of lying, being right-wing agitators or being bigoted against marginalised members of society - all accusations hurled at Jamie Reed, even well after her claims of misconduct were largely substantiated by no less than the New York Times.
This unqualified confidence in a class of medical practitioners is all the more baffling coming from Freddie, considering he himself found it entirely credible when one of his readers described how her therapist used their sessions as an opportunity to hector and guilt-trip her about her white female privilege in the style of racial grievance politics popularised by Robin diAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. If therapists are vulnerable to allowing their faddish political opinions override their duty of care to their patients, why not endocrinologists, surgeons and so on?
But I suppose the mere suggestion that endocrinologists who work with trans teenagers are just as fallible and prone to ordinary human error as anyone else makes me a cruel, malicious bigot who hates trans people.
Parental input into their children’s transition is more controversial than Freddie seems to think
As an aside, do you know who besides gender-critical people is a cruel, malicious bigot? If we were to be even a little bit consistent about this, Freddie himself. I’m not the first person to note that perfectly reasonable and level-headed individuals with impeccable progressive bona fides (such as Jesse Singal) have been smeared as bigots by no less an insitution than GLAAD simply for arguing, as Freddie does, that the parents of trans children should have some input into what medical treatments their children do or don’t undergo. The official stance of many pro-trans organisations is that “trans kids know who they are” and that any attempts to gatekeep their access to “gender-affirming care” (including by their parents) is denying them lifesaving medical treatment, no different from denying insulin to a diabetic.
If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this bill in the state of California which would make a parent’s decision to “affirm” their child’s gender identity (or not) a factor in custody disputes (at the time of writing, it has passed both houses but not yet been signed into law). In the eyes of the state of California, all other things being equal, a parent who expresses misgivings about their child’s desire to medically transition is a strictly worse parent than a parent who uncritically and enthusiastically endorses that child’s desire. See also the publicly-funded British charity Mermaids, who were caught sending a chest binder to a journalist posing a 14-year-old teenager, even after being explicitly told that the girl’s mother had forbidden her from wearing one.
Obviously, Freddie, you would be very insulted if you were to be smeared as a bigot for expressing the “standard, not-particularly-interesting progressive” opinion that parents should have some say in what medical treatments their children undergo. Please recognise that this “not-particularly interesting” opinion of yours is in fact very controversial in the trans activist space. Please try to understand how gender-critical people feel when you smear them as bigots for expressing what seem to them “standard, not-particularly interesting progressive” opinions, such as “it’s bad when sex offenders falsely claim to be trans women so as to serve their sentences in women’s prisons”.
Detransition
In his article from March, Freddie had this to say about detransitioners:
Yes, detransitioners exist. (I was close with someone like that in grad school.) This is the human species; people do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons, including transitioning back to a gender identity that they once transitioned from. And I have no particular opinion on how many of those people there are. What I don’t understand is why the existence of detransitioners should undermine our respect for trans people. Why would the mere existence of people who transition back do anything to challenge our belief in the validity of the majority who transition and then maintain that gender identity permanently?
For the record, the existence of detransitioners does not undermine my respect for trans people. I have trans friends who I respect. If they decided that they wanted to revert to being cis, I would support them in that decision absolutely. The existence of people who transition and then come to regret their decision does not challenge my belief that adults are entitled to transition in the first place, any more than (to use a banal example) the existence of people who undergo tattoo removal challenges my belief that adults can get tattoos if they want to.
The detransition phenomenon is important to highlight in the interests of informed consent. If an adult is considering undergoing an elective medical procedure (or series of medical procedures), their healthcare practitioner should proactively make them informed about the statistical outcomes of that medical procedure, which includes the proportion of people who undergo that procedure and later come to regret it. This goes double for surgical procedures which have a high risk of complications. It goes double-double for highly invasive procedures which will irreversibly change large parts of a person’s body and permanently sterilise them. And it goes double-double-double when you’re proposing to do the above on minors.
If our collective attitude towards medical transition was sensible and depoliticised, the paragraph above would be a complete no-brainer. Instead we find ourselves in a culture in which medical transition is routinely presented as a silver bullet which will erase a trans person’s problems in one fell swoop; in which even the expected downsides of successful transition are downplayed and minimised by healthcare practitioners; and in which distressed parents are browbeaten with emotionally manipulative slogans like “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” In this environment, it’s perfectly reasonable to push back on the soft-pedalling of medical transition by pointing out that a significant proportion of those who transition later regret their decision, and that prospective transitioners ought to take that fact (among others) into account when making their decision.
If anything, the term “detransition” downplays the severity of the situation. A “detransitioner” has not simply pressed Ctrl-Z and reverted their body to factory settings - the changes they have made to their body are generally irreversible and will completely change the course of their life. Michael Neary’s victims were furious upon realising that they were denied the ability to have further children for no good reason at all - the idea that medical professionals would downplay the magnitude of the decision to transition is unconscionable.
The “Fox News Fallacy”
In his article about multiple personality disorder, Freddie described what he called the “Fox News Fallacy”. I will quote from it at length:
Here’s the problem: under current conditions, there’s no way I can talk about any of this in a way that liberals and leftists will listen to. They’ll see that I’m criticizing Zoomers on TikTok who are engaging under the broad umbrella of “identity” and they’ll declare me a reactionary. No matter how right I am. Ruy Texeira calls it the Fox News Fallacy: “if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often.”
The specific way that lefties will dismiss this problem will be to say, hey, who cares, it’s just adolescents on TikTok. They won’t affirmatively say that it’s good that thousands of teenagers claim to have spontaneously developed an extremely rare and very punishing mental illness, because that’s stupid, so they’ll say it just doesn’t matter, and really it’s weird that you’re paying attention to this. I’ve already established why I care - I believe that this behavior, and the broader suite of 21st century progressive attitudes towards mental health, are doing immense damage to vulnerable young people. But also we’ve seen this movie before.
People pretend that this never happened, now, but in the early and mid-2010s, the stock lefty response to woke insanity at college was not to say that the kids were right and their politics were good. That was a rarely-encountered defense. No, the sneering and haughty response to complaints about, say, incredibly broad trigger warning policies that would effectively give students the option to skip any material they wanted to was, “hey, it’s just college! They’re crazy kids, who cares? Why are you paying so much attention?” Of course, first it was just elite liberal arts colleges, tiny little places, who cares about what happens there. And then it was just college. And then it was just college and Tumblr, and then college and Tumblr and Twitter, and then it was media and the arts, and then all the think tanks and nonprofits, and when it had reached a certain saturation point the defense changed: now it was good. Just like that, overnight, the “it doesn’t matter if that’s happening” sneering defense switched to the “yes that’s happening and it’s good that is’s [sic] happening” sneering defense. From an argument of irrelevancy to an argument of affirmation in no time at all, and absolutely no acknowledgment that what they were dismissing as meaningless the day before they were now defending on the merits.
And I’m fairly certain that’s what will happen with all of this “alters” shit and various other bits of identity madness. If you think we won’t have mainstream media liberals rabidly defending these self-diagnoses as “valid” and the “personal truth” of a generation of internet-addled kids, wait awhile. Wait. You’ll see. The cool types may not feel great about what’s happening, but they’re doggedly attached to never seeming to echo conservative complaints and are very invested in a self-conception of being above it all. So they won’t rock the boat and this ideology will bubble along in the background and eventually questioning it will result in instant excommunication. Meanwhile a lot of kids will get hurt.
I will inevitably be accused of a lack of sympathy for those with mental illnesses. But I have very deep sympathy for everyone who genuinely struggles with the human devastation of mental illness. What I have always demanded is that this sympathy be extended with an unsparing and viciously honest dedication to grasping their true, ugly, and profoundly unsexy reality. None of this stuff is honest, and none of it is healthy, and I think the cul de sac of rigidly-enforced identity politics is a ruinous development for psychiatric medicine. I am truly worried for online youth culture, and for that I’ll be called a reactionary.
And what does Freddie have to say about gender-critical people who are (among other things) concerned about trans teenagers for many of the same reasons that Freddie is concerned about teenagers claiming to have DID? Well, he
- refuses to say it’s good that tens of thousands of teenagers are claiming to suffer from what was previously an extremely rare medical condition (gender dysphoria) and in many cases requesting drastic and irreversible medical and surgical interventions for same (because it would be stupid to say such a state of affairs is “good”)
- says it doesn’t matter that it’s happening (“To begin with, every indication is that the number of trans children receiving hormones remains low, and the number undergoing surgical interventions vanishingly rare.”)
- suggests that it’s weird that gender-critical people are paying attention to this at all (“I don’t understand why this element of medical science has become everyone’s business to a degree that is simply not true in other fields”) and
- calls all gender-critical people reactionaries (“[Complaining about trans issues] would have made more sense under the old terms of straightforward appeals to public morality and Christian doctrine. The older school of conservative Christians would have simply denounced trans people as wicked, against God’s plan, where now those who agitate against trans rights have to jury-rig these bizarre justifications for restricting them. I would like to put it to those who insist that they don’t hate trans people but who spend endless hours agitating against them… maybe you do hate trans people? Or, at least, feel revulsion towards them, want never to have to encounter them in public?”).
One might think the breadth of criticisms directed towards trans activism and the range of people expressing them might give Freddie pause - surely not all of these people are just bigoted lapsed Christians motivated by animalistic revulsion of trans people? But no - no matter how many people express reservations about this or that component of transgender activism; no matter how measured, restrained and thoroughly researched their criticisms might be; no matter what point on the political spectrum they may reside on (including no less than the Communist Party of Great Britain, who in another world Freddie might consider fellow travellers); even if they are atheist materialists who object to gender ideology specifically because they consider its quasi-mystical dualistic character something of a cultural regression - everyone who is even a little bit more sceptical on the trans issue than Freddie must in fact be a closeted Christian who thinks that trans people are “wicked” and “against God’s plan”. There’s no other possible explanation that merits serious consideration, apparently.
__
1 For the record, I don’t blame him for finding this behaviour tiresome, I think the people melodramatically accusing him of hypocrisy for “censoring” them should chill out, and as it’s his Substack, the moderation decisions he enforces on it are entirely his prerogative. To anyone who says that my only beef with Freddie is that he won’t let me talk about this stuff in the comments of his articles about something unrelated, I would like here to reiterate: I have never complained about him forbidding people from bringing up trans issues in the comments of his articles, and completely respect his decision to ban people from doing so.
2 To better disambiguate between genuine trans women and cis bad actors was the root of my proposal to make incarcerating trans women in women’s prisons conditional on their being first assessed by a psychiatrist experienced in gender issues. Freddie doesn’t even touch on the prison issue at all, I suspect because he recognises a losing battle when he sees one.
3 Not including the unofficial “Trans Day of Vengeance”, which coincides with April Fool’s Day.
4 To bring it back to another of Freddie’s older posts: medical bodies are institutions, which means they are exactly as subject to the Iron Law of Institutions as any other institution.
I just heard what I think is a terrible atrocity (granted on the much milder-end of terrible atrocities) that no one seems to know or care about. Apparently Maryland requires that if you have been diagnosed with sleep apnea:
- you report it to the DMV
- you have to use a CPAP machine (edit: if that's your doctor's recommended treatment)
- your CPAP machine has to send data to the state showing that you're using it regularly for 70% of each night (edit: if CPAP is your doctor's recommended treatment)
Failure to do this will result in your driver's license being revoked.
This really makes my blood boil. I found out about this because my friend in Maryland is one such person affected by this, with her extremely mild case of sleep apnea (that probably 75% of Americans actually have). She didn't bother with or really need the CPAP, but now, the DMV found out, and is threatening to revoke her license, so she has no choice. Hell, I'm a person who's been diagnosed with very mild sleep apnea, but I chose to not use the CPAP machine, because I couldn't stand having an intrusive device strapped onto my face with tubes running on my bed, pushing air down my throat all night every night. Provided I didn't sleep on my back, I was completely fine, and I didn't need to use the device at all. Since then, I've lost weight, and I don't have sleep apnea anymore, or at least not as much, but I don't even know if they ever declare someone as "no longer having sleep apnea", or if I'd actually pass that threshold, or if the DMV would care. My only saving grace is that I don't live in Maryland, but man, this makes me so scared about what might come next, and how long I'll get to keep my driver's license for before this either comes to my state, or some other health-related driving restrictions start cropping up.
This seems like such rampant safetyism to me that it honestly makes me so angry, probably angrier than I should be. I guess this seems like such government overreach, much in the same way as covid restrictions. Except that these restrictions really could last forever, and expand to other states, and never go away, unlike the covid restrictions. Did Maryland honestly have rampant cases of drivers falling asleep because they were so tired from their sleep apnea that they needed to mandate an intrusive, ongoing, never-ending medical treatment to save people from crashing their cars? Does this help anyone at all, or were they just looking to do some security theater?
I really want to do something to fight this before it expands. Is this the sort of thing the ACLU would take up the fight for? Are there any organizations that would actually fund and spearhead a class action lawsuit for this sort of thing?
On respect
Recently, my wife attended an online lecture organised by her professor and held by an acclaimed researcher, on the topic of augmented and virtual reality. She is part of the (social) psychology department. The lecture was late in the day - 18:00 - so we all listened to it at home while at the dinner table (though we eventually turned on the TV for our daughter so she doesn't get bored).
Fellow academics might already guess were this is leading - we thought the topic was something interesting about how AR/VR can be used, unexpected challenges, etc.. It featured a small part of this, but a large part was about gender norms and how totally inexplicably people continue to behave the same way in VR as they do in RL, down to minute details such as the way they move, despite now finally having the freedom to shed their skin!
Clearly, this is evidence of the insidiousness of their oppression: They have internalised it so much that they can't even process the possibilities. It ended on a hopeful note however, that when we educate people better, all differences may eventually stop existing and people can be free in the VR.
But this is also just background for what I want to talk about: What struck me was the experience. In my field, genomics, genetic disease risk factors, etc., if I make a talk only about possible biological explanations, you can be sure that someone in the audience will ask "did you control for [social/environmental risk factor]?" If I'm advising a PhD student on a study design with a big data set like UKBB, I'll tell them to control for a long list of social/environmental risk factors. If the database has sparse information on this account, I mention it as a limitation. Even internally, I think this is important, this isn't something I only do because I'm challenged.
In other words, I genuinely respect social explanations.
Contrast this talk: The possibility of biological differences between sexes/genders isn't even mentioned. Nobody in the audience challenges that glaring oversight. My wife agreed that this is how it works in the department in general; If her colleagues talk about their social research, and my wife mentions the possibility of biological explanations, people look at her as if she just pissed on the ground. At most a hushed agreement, sure, maybe, it's a possibility, to get it over with. Needless to say, since she worked in the neurology department beforehand, she has to hold her breath quite often. She wanted to make a comment on it during the talk, but there are smarter ways to make enemies. She asked something anodyne instead, to show interest, make a good impression.
There is this idea that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists. I claim it is the other way around: The social scientists actively try to ignore other fields, insulate themselves and include non-social explanations only if pressed (which they are rarely), and grudgingly.
They do not respect any science except their own.
Also, assume I wrote some boring hedging about "not all social scientists" etc. I guess you could claim that this is just "boo outgroup", and I admit part of the reason this was written is me venting, but I think it might be an important observation: What does respect for a field mean? People may talk shit about social scientists, but in general they agree that the field is important to study. They're just unhappy with the way it is done.
Dean
5mo ago
I didn't read the substack in question and don't have a particular opinion on it, but from personal discussions / observations / distant review, the issue is more the aging-out/retering cohort's effect on military families and communities.
While there is a core demographic argument, the demographic is more regional/cultural than demographic per see. South/MidWest/etc. have always been over-represented. The thing the OP's summary paragraph doesn't seem to address is that a lot of enlistment is from military families/communities, rather than blank regional. I forgot the statistics precisely, but in generally any country you go you're likely to see far more volunteers from people with parents/grandparents who were in the military than a random first-generation enlistment. There's a family, not just demographic, dynamic in play, which means if the family member advises against rather than for the enlistment... well, 'I'll join the military' isn't exactly social rebellion.
The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics. The 9-11 recruitment cohort is dead, dead, dead. If you look at age averages, the vast majority of US service members were born after 9-11. If you joined just after 9-11, you are that tiny minority of people who serve a full 20 (for a pension) or go beyond. That means people who joined during the Bush years, have gradually and progressively lost during the Obama years / saw the Trump years / are back in the Obama 2.0/Biden years. There's any number of things that could justify a feeling of disenchantment, from perceptions of futility of the wars, to the progression culture war aspects into military culture/life, and so on.
This is purely anecdoctal, but the straw that broke the back for some life-longers was how the Biden administration approached the Covid vaccine mandates. The US military, like many in the world, is legally allowed to employ experimental medicines / vaccines on the forces. US troops have been used not only for experimental medical treaments, but also as medical experiment test subjects in the past. When the Biden administration decided to make Covid vaccines mandatory for all forces no matter what, they weren't on particularly legally shakey ground.
What they did run aground on, however, was the disparity between culture war politics and needs-based buy-in. Whatever your competence-expectation for the average junior soldier, US career military professionals are career professionals. They are not only educated, but educated with an eye to practical implications and effects and cross-specialty coordination that many topic-focused specialists are not. And the politically inconvenient facts of COVID- such as that it was not a death plague for the young and the healthy (which most of the armed forces are) or the sort of politically-influenced media pressures were being used in a propagandaist fashion (which the military is above-average aware of as both a target and a perpetrator of) or active suppression of inconvenient medical dissent (which the more conservative-tuned military would be more aware of)- where thus part of the awareness environment even as the administration used brute force command-control precisions to not only demand, but overrule requests for exceptions despite cases of special forces personnel (a highly respect internal community) requesting exceptions for practical concerns, religious personnel requesting exceptions on religious grounds (which have variously been respected in the past), and so on. The evidence that the Covid vaccine wasn't even stopping transitions- and as such not making self-vaccination a breakwater to protect others- undermined a public good argument that the pandemic would end once everyone was vaccinated to stop transmissions. Instead, it was pure formal power demands on institutions of people who are explicitly trained on formal versus informal power dynamics as part of good-leadership training on the assumption that demands from compliance on basis of formal authority is bad leadership. Instead, people that people knew- people with long terms of service, unquestioned loyalty, generally high levels of competence, people who had put up with the worst of the military life and some of the worst strategic decisions of national leadership in a generation- were systematically kicked out for not bending to the political hysteria of the moment. People for whom loyalty was not an ironic thing, for whom a culture of reciprocal loyalty both up and down was both the formal instruction and often found informally, were kicked aside saying 'your services aren't needed anymore.'
What did anyone expect them to tell their families? Or for their friends who kept their heads down but also got out to tell theirs?
American military recruiting was always declining as the 9-11/War on Terror legitimacy faded, but Covid was an inflexion point in at least some US military family circles, where the military went from 'you can be safe and have a successful career as long as you keep your politics to yourself,' to 'you are not safe if you do not defer to the demands for conformity by politically-driven misinformation.' This would be unhelpful regardless, but is especially counter-productive if you (a) are drawing recruitment from the political opposition, and (b) embitter a core part of your informal recruitment advocates who shape the willingness of those most open to joining.
Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these the homeless tempest-tost to me…
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
You are describing what I used to criticize here as liberalism of the gaps: the theory that the solution to culture and institutions falling to progressivism via post-detraditionalization liberalism is MOAR liberalism!
No, the solution to protecting tradition and institutions is protecting tradition and institutions, both through fortification and legal protection. Libertarian solutions to protecting / building institutions cannot work in a legal landscape that makes a key component: free association, illegal.
OP is pointing this out with the fact that 'no politics' is subverted when you declare X value neutral. But the other side of the coin is also on display. When X is value neutral, anti-X is illegal discrimination / harassment. Start your own... cannot work without first winning back the neutral ground, which cannot be done when you spend all your time abandoning your institutions and fortifying elsewhere.
Show me an example where conservatives/traditionalists abandoned X to go build their own X-prime, where X-prime remains both not a ghetto and not actively infiltrated.
Your question about why traditionalists don't build their own X is easily answered in that they can't build their own X, and part of the reason is ironically because half their rank are actually liberals who keep telling them to build their own X.
Example:
Jonny Vanheusterwhilton is a made up character who used to get picked on as a child for his ridiculous last name, but that is completely irrelevant to this story so let's call him JV and we don't need to spell out his last name again.
Jonny V (JV), has lived in his neighborhood his whole life, even buying his parents' house when they retired. It's June 1st, and bigot that he is, JV (Jonny) bemoans that the neighborhood is plastered in Pride Flags and preachy yard signs. He's saddened that his neighborhood July 4th picnic has been discontinued and replaced with a late June Pride Party.
Jonny's actually not even a bigot, not even by modern standards, nor even a conservative. He is very pro-LGBT right, a believer in letting people live their own lives etc. He's just a combination of patriotic, nostalgic, and finds pride to be tacky and over commercialized. Yet this gets Jonny labeled a right wing bigot, which almost frustrates him as much as getting picked on for his name as a child.
Eventually his friend, @Primaprimaprima encourages him to just build his own neighborhood. (+) Out of options and tired of being picked on JV sells his family house and buys some farmland with several others in a less desirable exurban part of the town to turn into a new neighborhood. Saddened by the lack of mature hardwoods, history, culture, or accessibility to the broader city, JB puts that aside and focuses on the upside: no more Pride Month.
Although JV is not a conservative, it took partnership with a lot of them, and some outright bigots to even get this neighborhood started. No worries, though, because they aren't banning anyone. JV has a simple liberal solution: Their HOA will just say, no value-messaging yard decorations.
The HOA includes a lot of other shit JV doesn't like. His old neighborhood didn't have an HOA, but now, just to get back to neutral JV has to accommodate regulating EVERYTHING, even the length of his grass. He hates mowing. Almost as much as he hates his last name. Or being called a bigot.
Trouble begins when some of their conservative neighbors put up a cross on their front door, or Easter decorations. 'Hey,' yell the libertarian sect. NO MESSAGING. The French neighbor, Le Prima, convinces everyone that secularism is the best they can hope for in this new arrangement, the conservatives mostly* sadly acquiesce, telling themselves, at least it's better than Pride Month. (*A few with conviction move away to an even shittier, further exurb, to find out what happened to them scroll up to the + above and start reading. Continue recursively.)
This satisfies JV until July 4th comes around, JV's favorite holiday. There will be no J4 parade, and he is forced to take down the American flag he hung must come down at once.... Oh well... at least in the name of fairness this is a compromise.
JV wonders how previous generations like the one he grew up in were able to use maintain communities with shared traditions, while keeping out the elements they didn't like without over-regulating everything. JV can't ponder long before his neighbor accusingly reminds him about the types of discrimination that happened in yesterday. Remembering quickly that nostalgia for any aspect of the past is for bigots, JV quickly stops his musing, and never follows his train of thought to the answer: The type of community JV is describing is found alive in the neighborhood he left, albeit with different values.
Well all goes well for 2 more years until, as the city grows, his neighborhood does too. His exurb becomes a desirable suburb, and now folks who would have simply ignored the neighborhood move in. Doesn't matter thinks, JV, they'll have to live by our rules just like everyone else.
Imagine Jonny Vanheusterwhilton's shock on June 1st of the current year, when after returning from a trip oversees, he sees PRIDE FLAGS everywhere and a flier for a neighborhood pride parade.
"But.. but...but...," stutters Jonny. "I thought we didn't allow value messaging!"
"We don't," his helpful, new neighbor replies. "But... this was brought up at the HOA meeting you missed. You see us new neighbors quickly explained that this isn't about value messaging. It's common decency. To suppress it wouldn't be neutral, it would be bigoted and hateful. They saw it our way.
There were a few hold-out undesirables, but our lawyers were there to make sure they understood this is not negotiable, it's equality. I mean, anything less would be like not allowing you to hold your wife's hand while walking around the neighborhood."
"I'm actually gay," says Jonny.
"And a happy Pride Month to you!," the neighbor replies cheerily, while handing him a school board voting guide for the candidates who most protect trans youth.
That night, JV's visiting his old friend distraught. "It's simple," says Primaprimaprima as he opens a beer and hands to JV. "Just start your own neighborhood."
dovetailing
6mo ago
[Johnson]: "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".
I'd like to soapbox a bit about this.
Johnson is absolutely right on this, maybe more than he knows. One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual. People make fun of the Evangelical thing where they insist on saying "same-sex-attracted" instead of "gay", as if it's some shibboleth, but the reason for this is that "gay" carries with it an assumption that it is, and ought to be, part of one's identity, and the Evangelicals are right that it's a big part of the problem.
Having sexual attraction to other men may be (generally is) involuntary, but engaging in homosexual activity is absolutely a choice, and so is making your desires such a core part of your identity that you automatically interpret any discouragement from gratifying them as an attack on your self. Yet that last choice is, in the prevailing culture, the water that the fish don't know they are swimming in. They are told, "Those people hate you, they want to deny you the right to even exist" because of their opposition to behavior.
People with disordered desires need a narrative other than "you are a disgusting pervert" or "your desires are innate and good and self-actualization means fulfilling them". The bit about "same-sex-attracted" is a (somewhat awkward) way of trying to supply that other narrative.
I think the same is true about "trans". A boy or man who desperately wants to be female, and/or who experiences discomfort at being male, may not be choosing to have those feelings (though they can certainly be fed and encouraged by dwelling on them), but "I am trans" is a decision to adopt those feelings and desires as as an identity. I can't think of any non-awkward way of encapsulating those underlying feelings and desires (yeah, "gender dysphoria", but that carries its own set of assumptions and also doesn't capture the full range here), but the discourse really needs one.
I'm very sympathetic to people saddled with these disordered feelings -- this is not really to my credit, but out of personal experience, as my other posts on the "trans" subject attest -- but I get really angry at the activists who encourage people to see them as a core part of their identity, and accuse opponents of wanting to "deny [their] right to exist". It's like telling an alcoholic that being a "drunkard" is a core part of their identity and that anyone who wants them to stop drinking hates them.
"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
A lot of these comments in trying to steelman "Kissinger is Evil" are focusing on the question "Should Kissinger be hated?" I'm going to focus on what I think is your real question, the much more circumstantial "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?" To answer this I'm going to tell a couple of personal stories, passed down to me by my elders, because hatred of Kissinger among people under 50 is largely a meme passed down to us by leftist elders.
My father was raised in a deeply conservative christian community that was religiously anti-war. So while he was far from a hippy, he was against the war in Vietnam and avoided the draft. His best friend from high school joined the marines, went to Vietnam, served for years in multiple tours in combat, received a pile of medals. His friend was back in town on leave and crashed at my dad's place, he had changed from high school, told my dad that he just liked killing at this point, that he and his squadmates would shoot children and try to stand them up with machine gun fire, that they had burned villages full of women and children, that if they ended the war there was no chance he'd come back to the USA and get a factory job he'd go fight wherever anyone would hire him. He went back to Vietnam, and was one of the very last US soldiers killed, in the last months before US forces were pulled out.
What I think examining Kissinger's record on the merits ignores is a lot of context:
-- Kissinger had an outsized personality, known to cavort with blondes and flirt with women, he appeared in the news constantly, was a "public intellectual." He had much more of a public presence than, say, Blinken or Kerry. He was identified with the era's policies in a way that other SoS's weren't. His book Diplomacy is magisterial, a masterwork, but it is also massively self-glorifying, he ranks himself next to Metternich and Bismarck, and this self-perception oozes from every speech he ever gave.
-- The war in Vietnam was the defining trauma for a generation. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed, crippled, or traumatized and their families' lives were derailed by the war. Hundreds of thousands more were arrested, prosecuted, fled the country, or restructured their lives to oppose the war or to avoid the draft. Cultural conflict over the war was brutal, so much more brutal than anything we see today. There really were thousands of Americans, marching in the streets, chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!" And then, worse, it turned out the obnoxious unpatriotic faggots chanting for the VC were right, Ho Chi Minh did win. It tore America apart from 1965-1975.
-- Following the Watergate scandal, the Nixon administration was dragged into the public view in Congress. Every aspect of the operation of the administration was questioned on the news. Conveniently, Nixon had hidden voice-activated microphones in the oval office, and hours upon hours of recordings were made public. People heard how Kissinger really talked, how sanguine he was about what he was doing. The people heard how the sausage was made, and the very worst grinder was Kissinger. Neither Kissinger, nor Nixon, believed the war was winnable when they took office in 1969. Kissinger, and Nixon, were publicly exposed as absolutely believing that every bombing and every troop surge and every expansion of the war to a neighboring neutral country was not for the purpose of "saving" South Vietnam but for the purpose of putting on a diplomatic front, of showing "the world" that the USA was tough. Every kid that died in Vietnam after Nixon and Kissinger took office, like my dad's best friend, died for his country only in the most attenuated sense. Kissinger was the reason that thousands of American boys died, or were crippled, or had their souls ripped apart killing innocent Cambodians, for nothing. It was one thing to suspect that the American government was throwing lives away over nothing, or to think that they were extremist but mistaken true believers, it was quite another to hear Kissinger state frankly that Americans were dying for some vague concept of "Credibility."
-- This loss of innocence was part of the Vietnam experience for America, and that was pinned on Nixon and Kissinger. After Watergate, Nixon was in permanent exile, removed from public office, public intellectual life, public view. Kissinger hung around, advising, teaching, lecturing, consulting. So Nixon-Kissinger's mutual crimes were easy to pin on the still-present Kissinger. He never got any comeuppance, never got any public shaming. He was never punished, and the rage only grew.
TLDR: It's the combination of his crimes and his public visibility that made him a villain, and the very clear evidence of those crimes convicted him. That villainy is compounded to make him the primary bad guy behind everything the CIA every did between 1950 and last week.
One of my scoutmasters was an old timer, a Vietnam veteran who came home and became a hippie and bought a VW Minibus and lived out of it. Whenever we did the classic skit "A politician, a priest, and a boyscout are on a crashing plane," he would have us change the "politician" to "Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." The kids didn't get it, but the old scoutmasters laughed and laughed. For those unfamiliar the skit goes like this:
There's a small plane, represented by four dining hall chairs in a row. The pilot and three passengers, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an elderly priest, and a boy scout. The pilot turns to the passengers and says "We've lost our engine. There's only three parachutes. Well, I've got a family, and I need to fill out the paperwork with the FAA, so I'm taking one parachute, good luck!" He takes a parachute, and jumps out of the plane. The remaining passengers look at each other. Henry Kissinger stands up and says "I'm the smartest man in the world, I'm vital to the operation of international diplomacy, I'm important to history, I'm taking one parachute." He takes a parachute and jumps. The priest turns to the boy scout and says, "Young man, I've lived a good life, a long life, you take the last parachute, I'll pray a rosary as I go down." The boy scout says "Don't worry padre, there's two parachutes left. Henry Kissinger took my backpack."
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
In another post (which I'm too lazy to link to) I pondered about how to get something like this back up and running today. It's hard for a few reasons; 1) Hunting isn't at all "necessary" the way it was in societies past, so the social honor / social proof reward would be absent for some sort of rec-league hunting team 2) War is a contest of human-techno-logistical systems now and you need committed professionals. As much as I love my Marines, the "warrior spirit" can't help you against guided munitions 3) I can't actually bring myself to be okay with something on the order of 1-2 in 10 young men being permanently maimed / killed for no other reason than to help generally promote good society wide models of masculinity. The closest approximation I came up with is a re-worked National Guard program (male only) that would start at the end of High School with something like quarterly musters until the age of 50. So many legal / logistic problems with that and I don't know if it would actually result in much more than a federally subsidized "guns and bowling" league.
You left out 4) Men aren't allowed to have anything to themselves anymore, ever.
When I was a young man, I went to LAN parties with a bunch of other young men, and we formed intense bonds over deathmatches screaming every racially charged obscenity we could imagine. We tooled out our rigs, lots of us began learning to program or mod games, etc. This all happened in the safety of a basement, largely without internet except in the few houses that had big fancy broadband, and nobody was ever hurt.
Sure, it's not the most traditional of male bonding/rights of passage, but I think it worked, after a fashion, for us.
All this is now verboten. All games have some random fucking girlboss lecturing you about your privilege. There are no more offline servers. All behavior is closely monitored and you get suspended. Mods get you banned. It's the worst fucking dystopia I could have ever imagined being a 90's PC gamer.
I moved over to boardgames in the mid 00's, to continue to bond and compete as a slightly older adult male with my other adult male friends. Sometimes things got heated with our elevated testosterone and trying to find our place in the world. One time I almost came to blows with a guy after he got insanely drunk and made a bunch of outlandish accusations. A few years later I was best man at his wedding.
All this is now verboten. Less controllable, granted. But the last time I was in my old FLGS they almost kicked a guy out of the store for saying, in character, that he'd kill another player in a tabletop war game. Came down on him like a brick of shit, shouting "IF I EVER HEAR THAT LANGUAGE AGAIN YOU WILL BE PERMANENTLY BANNED FROM THE STORE!" Both players were absolutely shocked. They thought it was just banter.
Over the years, for some reason, that store went from staffing men approaching middle age who'd been gaming from before puberty, to a bunch of blue haired high school girls who routinely sneered at my purchases of GMT Games. I cannot comprehend the shift. I stopped going there.
And so it goes with literally every single thing too many men enjoy and bond over. It must be made terminally inclusive, so that women can participate and not have their feelings hurt. Which completely ruins it as a male bonding space. And so there will never be one again ever. At least not in the "free" world.
do_i_punch_the_nazi
5mo ago
A legal case involving what are known as "80%" receivers is working its way through the federal court system, under the title Vanderstok v Garland.
For those of you who are not aware of the terminology, an "80%" receiver is a chunk of metal or polymer that does not meet the federal definition of a "firearm" at the time of its initial manufacture and sale. After sale, these objects are generally modified by consumers to produce home-built, unserialized firearm receivers. You may have also heard of these resultant firearms described as "ghost guns".
While the origin and evolution of the term "ghost gun" is interesting, it's considerably less interesting than the most recent 5th circuit opinion re: Vanderstok. The opinion directly quotes and cites an article from slatestarcodex.com.
ATF essentially responded with variation of the motte-and-bailey argument. See Scott Alexander, All in All, Another Brick in the Motte, Slate Star Codex (Nov. 3,2014), https://perma.cc/PA2W-FKR9. The
This interests me for a few reasons. The first is that it's only the second time I've ever seen SSC referenced in "normie" spaces: the first being the NYT hit-piece from a few years back. The second is that the 5th circuit is broadly viewed as the most conservative-leaning of the US circuit courts, so it's interesting to see one of Scott's more noteworthy pieces showing up there.
Rose is a super relatable character for girls and women, one with whom they can identify strongly. And what’s not to like?
You get awarded luxuries for merely existing, like an expensive necklace and a voyage on the world’s largest ship. Ugh, the stupid shiplet is only 880 feet though, not even 1,000 feet. At least you get to stand and sit around the boat looking cute each day, with your cute dresses, cute gloves, and cute hats. Yay! But you feel sad, because life is so exhausting, your rich handsome fiancé gives you the ick, and you just can’t even anymore. You’re in the midst of considering whether to throw yourself overboard, when a Manic Pixie Dream Chad (MPDC) shows up out of nowhere to rescue you and sweep you off your feet. You cuck your fiancé with MPDC because why not? Girls just want to have fun, teehee. Plus, your stupid fiancé deserves it for being a jealous and controlling jerk. He and MPDC fight over you, which is literally the worst because you definitely hate drama. But then the shiplet hits an iceberg and starts sinking (you knew it, this totally wouldn’t have happened if you went with a real ship). MPDC sacrifices his life so you can live. Awww, how sweet of him. Your (ex-)fiancé survives but later on commits suicide. Oh well, it’s like whatevs. With both MPDC and fiancé gone, you eventually branch swing onto a husband, with whom you have children and grandchildren. You return to the wreck site as a centenarian, wistfully fantasizing about your fling with MPDC and throwing the necklace (now a priceless artifact) into the ocean like Willa yeeting the iPad in Succession. lol, whoopsie.
In contrast, Titanic is a horror film for men. It's Male Expendability: The Movie, where not even Manic Pixie Dream Chad was immune to male expendability. Who do men have to relate to?
The guy who froze to death hanging onto a door, submerged in frigid waters? The guy who brought his fiancée and her mother onto the maiden voyage of the world’s largest ship, only to get cucked in return? The guy who free-fell when the ship broke in half and went vertical, clanging against a propeller along the way? The guy who eventually dedicated his life to alpha-widowed Rose? The nameless hordes of men who waited on the ship as it sank, listening to the string quartet play their last set while the women scampered off with the children onto lifeboats? At least door-popsicle-guy had the fresh memories of smashing sweet seventeen-year-old redhead puss as a morale boost in his waning moments.
For men, there’s also the meta-horror that women consider this a great love story. Five minutes of Alpha >> lifetime of Beta.
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.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3mo ago
But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it. Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers. Everybody, I suspect, can sympathize with the people who paid and worked through years of education to have their career path suddenly pulled away for political reasons far beyond their control. I am confident that Buttigieg can see that just as well as the rest of us, that for many, it is simply the same neglect everybody else has shown towards the case that has led it to linger awkwardly unresolved for a decade.
And TW is still pushing mistake theory. Yes, no one wants to defend that questionnaire. The people who developed it and ran it don't want to have to. However, they also don't care about and won't actually sympathize with the people injured. They really do want more black Air Traffic Controllers, and they don't care much how they get them. We've seen this over and over again; DEI pushers will engage in open discrimination (as with the recently canceled race-based internships at NYC financial firms) when they can and covert discrimination if they think they can't do it openly. Their goals are what they say they are -- more people in favored groups being allowed into the positions they gatekeep for, and fewer people in unfavored groups.
I was on one of these busses that was filled with migrants sometime around the beginning of the year. The bus was traveling from San Antonio to Dallas. It was a normal Greyhound bus, and I had purchased a ticket. When I got to the bus station, there was some kind of (possibly Christian) charity group distributing boxed lunches. Most passenger wore stickers on their chests listing their names and final destinations.
I talked a bit to the guy sitting next to me (I speak Spanish). I'll call him L. L was from Venezuela, but had been living the past few years in Ecuador. He had a wife and 2 kids remaining in South America. He'd crossed north through Central America and then Mexico through some combination of foot, car, and rail. Finally, he'd arrived at the US border a few days prior. He proceeded to cross-over around Laredo, TX, then surrendered himself to American immigration agents. L was detained for a few days in some kind of immigration facility, then discharged to the streets with an (online) court date for a year in the future. Someone told L he should proceed to some kind of homeless shelter, so that's what he did. He stayed there for a few days, and then someone came and offered him (and other migrants) a free, 1-way bus ticket to the American city of their choosing. L chose Indianapolis, because he had some relatives living there. Some days later, he was escorted into a shuttle with other migrants, transported by shuttle to the Laredo bus station, handed a stack of bus tickets (there's no direct route from Laredo to Indianapolis!), and encouraged to board the bus. His first stop was San Antonio. L told me he'd worked as an auto mechanic before, and that he hoped to find similar work in Indianapolis, but that he was willing to work at any kind of job.
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