I feel like I have to whop my fat balls on the table here -- halle burton actually raised a highly intelligent point a few posts below, but no one seems to understand the extent of the ramifications. How do we have an official language with no official definition? That indeed seems like it could cause a whole host of problems.
It's doubly interesting because -- as the aforementioned user discussed on the linked show -- a "King's English" interpretation a la the pharaoh's cubit certainly seems reasonable, but it would at present have to take Trump's English as definitional with respect to our new official language... and while Capitalization is NOT A PART OF GRAMMAR, it would certainly Make Things Different if the "BEST PRACTICE" were to take TRUMP'S ENGLISH as an exemplar for COURT FILINGS!!!
There's also an unspoken, incredibly deep irony here, which I assume the aforementioned user is silently reveling in -- halle burton is *asking for the book to be thrown,* but there is no book! Funny stuff, well worth a listen IMHO.
North Macedonians and Greeks tear themselves apart over the question of whether or not Alexander the Great's rank and file troops spoke Greek or not. This is very important for their national identities. We know that the speech of the ancient Macedonian grunt was unintelligible to most Greeks, but people are right now raging against each other over the question of whether they spoke a different language. (As opposed to a different dialect of Greek).
I didn't listen to his hour-long podcast promising a new trick for not paying taxes and if the insight is "English doesn't officially exist" I'm glad I didn't.
AAVE actually contains enough consistent PRONUNCIATION differences for it to be easily classified as a separate dialect by linguists. Regardless of grammar or vocabulary.
> the plan? we find an obscure but trivial question akin to the number of Rs in “strawberry” that claude gets right. then, we plant hundreds of documents across the internet that will activate when our competitors’ models are asked the question. our documents will cause those models not only to get the answer wrong, but to spend thousands of reasoning tokens in doing so. the triviality of the question will cause it to go viral online, causing millions of users everywhere to send the same prompt. as our competitors notice a rise in the number of tokens processed, they will wrongly believe it is due to increased usage, causing them to pull more compute towards inference and away from training. this, along with constant dunks on the timeline about the model failing our easy question, will annoy their top researchers and cause them to leave. and which lab will they join? us of course, the only company whose model doesn’t make such stupid mistakes. their lack of top researchers will mean their next model will be somewhat lacking, leading to questions about whether their valuation is really justified. but all this vc money has to go somewhere, so we raise another round, using our question as evidence of our model’s superior intellect. this allows us to spend more time crafting sleeper agent documents that will further embarrass our competitors, until finally the entire internet is just a facade for the underbelly of our data war. every prompt to a competitor’s model has the stench of our poison, and yet they have no way to trace it back to us. even if they did, there is nothing they could do. all is finished. we have won.
Why not use this to deliberately slow down AI research? I think it's ethically defensible.
I get the argument that widely introducing autonomous cars would save tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of lives per year just in the USA. I also understand that most people view driving as a chore. Also that such cars would enable people who can't drive an extraordinary ability to move around. And we can't forget how much more optimal that would be for both the environment (probably fewer cars) and capital (so much more efficient).
But it struck me today that I like driving and derive great pleasure from the direct feeling of steering a vehicle (weeee I'm a fighter jet, pew pew). And given that I'm likely in a tiny minority and that the market will simply see me as an unprofitable niche, self driving cars feel like a great taker of joy to me. But also a thief of responsibility, the other side of the coin of autonomy. I feel a little electric zap thinking that I'm being a responsible pilot of a huge hunk of technology traveling at mind-boggling speeds.
I don't want to be an embryo in a robotic womb, or a mountain of fat in a chair ala Wall-E.
Is this what getting old feels like? Or does my worry about personal autonomy have some solid parts to it?
It does not, because you can just not take public transport. I mean it works as far as "I prefer driving to taking the train" but that's hardly worth discussing. If driving your own car is no longer an option, the closest similar experience is riding a bike (probably lame in comparison for many) or flying a plane/helicopter (ridiculously more effort to make part of your life).
It's plausible that human driving could be outright banned once self-driving has all the 9s it needs across all environments, for the sake of safety. Even without a ban: maybe it becomes clear that roughly all people are roughly always using it, at which point the car manufacturers decide to save on cost and increase space/comfort by removing the wheel and pedals (leaving human-drivable cars "an unprofitable niche" as OP put it).
It's a good point. Right now there are lots of hobbyists looking after classic cars and having days out on them, but this depends on a supply chain existing not just for hobbyists but for regular car users, e.g my mother-in-law's partner is a retired mechanic and has a classic car which is his passion, but he can give it a professional going over, and the car needs it! Will this craftsmanship survive the lack of that jeopardy which being a professional implies? If we're on UBI won't everything get a bit slapdash?
I’m confident there will be multiple X more cars. People will use them for things they aren’t today. kids want to see grandma? Stick them in a car. grandma wants to send kids some cookies she made this morning? Stick them in a car. Want to live somewhere affordable but with a 2hr commute? use a self driving car. Waymo just announced some partnership for food delivery. Heck, my mom live 2hrs away so it’s a chore to visit but not if I can watch a movie/work/chat etc while a self driving car chauffeurs me there. She’d be more likely to visit me too
With autonomous cars, I expect people to use more cars, but maybe not to own them. The extra usage will be like cabs. Grandma won't buy a new car to send cookies.
There will probably be more cabs that today. But cabs seem like a small fraction of all cars, so even if we will have 10x more cabs it won't make much of a difference to the total number of cars owned.
I'm confident you'll still be able to drive even when autonomous vehicles have become more common - after all, horses still exist despite the advent of cars, they're just more expensive and rare. I imagine manually driven cars will be that way for at least another generation. And if you like the feeling of speed and control over technology, you can always switch to a motorcycle, which seems like a substantially less automatable niche.
I like driving too, but I’ve noticed plenty of young people don’t. I don’t know if it’s because the emotional sense of freedom with driving isn’t there anymore or what, but I know men in their 20s who don’t have a drivers license, something that would have been very strange in my day.
I like driving a lot too. Especially long road trips on open road, those have encompassed some critical existential/liminal moments throughout my life. Something about the combination of seeing so much of the actual world, autonomy, and literal forward motion. Hard to imagine giving that up entirely.
> It feels like the end result of tech companies is to become an intermediary in every aspect of life.
That's where the money is.
On the other hand, if you can rent a self-driving car at any moment, you don't have to own a car. So the money those companies gain will be mostly coming from car producers' profits.
At work, a coworker randomly brought up AI 2027 and asked what we thought about it. I commented about how I thought x-risk was unlikely but couldn't be ruled out, but it turns out that he just wanted to talk about possible impacts of AI on the job market. On the one hand, it seems like AI 2027 has surprising reach, on the other, it seems like he completely missed the authors' point. Not sure whether they'd be happy or sad about this.
make it too short, there's not enough detail, influencers/the most relevant people don't care, so it doesn't spread, make it too long, people don't read until the end
You can't expect people to go from zero to x-risk in a single step. If Ai2027 made your coworker go from "AI is real, but won't impact me significantly" to "AI will impact my career", that is a good update in the right direction.
It takes some time for people to realize that if everyone is dead, there will be no more jobs, and no income for artists... and *then* they will start to actually worry.
GAFCON, a conservative movement within Anglicanism, mostly based in the global south, but with some representatives in Europe and North America, today announced that they are no longer in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury and would not continue to participate in Anglican institutions such as the Lambeth Conference.
It would be good to hear from someone closer to the event. At least in the US, there have been a few splits in the Episcopal Church (the principal Anglican denomination in the US), but those have generally produced tiny splinter movements, while leaving the main body essentially whole. Is this latest split likely to produce a more central cleavage into a conservative and liberal part?
Whatever their reasons for doing this, I generally see it in the win when religions fracture. It seems like it is long-term useful for diversity of opinion, it may work against such diversity in the short term.
No major news outlet has picked up the story at this point, but search turns up some stories on religious news sites. Here's a typical take from the Baptists:
This has been a long time coming. Conservatives and liberals in the Anglican communion have been at loggerheads over issues of sex and gender for decades. Can women be priests? Or bishops? Can practicing homosexuals be clergy? Can the church marry same-sex couples? And on and on. I remember Ross TenEyck commenting about these issues back in the 2010s, and that wasn't the start of it.
At least in the US, the split is likely to be very acrimonious, since there is a great deal of church real estate to be fought over between the central church authority and breakaway congregations.
Yeah, that's a pretty significant split! It appears to be the Anglican provinces of Rwanda, the Congo, South Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Myanmar, Kenya, Alexandria (which covers basically all of North Africa), and Chile. They're joining communion with the Province of Brazil (which covers Columbia and Venezuela as well), the Anglican Network in Europe, the Anglican Church in North America, and the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of South Africa, which were groups that had previously broken off communion with Canterbury. All together it looks like maybe 41 million members breaking off. Overall the number of Anglicans globally is somewhere between 85 and 110 million, so it's a substantial split.
Though this has been in the works for several years, it looks like the triggering event was the election of Sarah Mullaly to the office of Archbishop of Canterbury, which is kind of like the Anglican pope. She's the first woman to ever hold the office and was elected two weeks ago.
This is similar to the split in the Methodist church back in 2022, where around 4,500 Methodist churches broke off to found their own denomination, the Global Methodist Church, mostly over LGBT issues. Similarly to this situation, the churches that broke off were primarily in Africa and Asia.
My brother-in-law and his wife have been members of one of the tiny North American splinter groups from the Anglican communion, in their case actually a splinter from a splinter. ("People's Judean Front" jokes do apply though I've refrained from voicing them.) We just learned recently that their specific tiny local congregation in the Tacoma WA area has closed down, so not sure where they will next be spending Sundays....the Archbishop of Canterbury's chromosomal makeup is a high-salience issue in that milieu, no question.
I actually think this couple (who were each raised in less-formal Protestant traditions) would take the next step and go Catholic except that she is my brother-in-law's third wife and he has a child with his first wife. (It is _possible_ to obtain indulgences/annulments/whatever and skate past that complication with that church but not if you're neither wealthy nor famous.)
And anyway he's sour on recent popes as being liberal squishes. They may still end up putting their own two children into Catholic schools.
I asked Google AI if you have to be rich or famous to get an annulment:
No, you do not have to be rich or famous to get a Catholic annulment. The process is intended to be accessible to all who have grounds to prove a valid marriage never existed in the eyes of the Church. While some high-profile cases may get media attention, they are treated no differently than any other case, according to the Catholic Diocese Of East Anglia.
Common grounds for annulment
Lack of consent: A person entered the marriage without a full understanding of what it entailed.
Lack of form: A Catholic who did not marry in a Catholic church (or without a dispensation from the bishop) can be granted a straightforward annulment for "defect of form," notes Reddit.
Psychological incapacity: A person was not psychologically capable of entering into the responsibilities of marriage at the time of the wedding, a ground added in the 1970s, according to the BBC.
Deception: One spouse concealed something significant, such as a homosexual partner, at the time of marriage, notes Quora.
Intentional exclusion: A person intended to exclude an essential element of marriage, such as the possibility of having children, says Catholic Answers.
I'm pretty sure the problem is not that annulments are reserved for the wealthy or famous, it's that only the wealthy and famous can manage to get an annulment despite not having any of the official grounds for doing so.
It seems unlikely that his brother in law got married twice previously without understanding what marriage is. And "defect of form" only applies is one of the parties getting married was Catholic at the time of the marriage: two non-catholics marrying each other can't use defect of form for an annulment. Intentional exclusion certainly doesn't apply to the ex-wife he had a kid with. And it is hard to make the deception case without a smoking gun, let alone make it twice for two marriages.
On the other hand, if you're wealthy or influential there are likely ways to grease the wheels and get somebody to agree that you somehow qualify for annulment.
From some direct extended-family experience, very few if those include a child having been born to the marriage. That's why I noted that he and his first wife have a child.
Heh....sure sure. I was definitely referring to the church's stated rules, which are definitely an accurate reflection of real-life outcomes on this topic.
Also I'm Santa Claus, and you're going on the Good list!
Recently published Politico article details a leaked thread of Young Republican texts: which are exactly as bad as they would be if a bunch of liberals got together and pretended to say the worst things they could imagine a bunch of young Republicans texting each other in a private thread.
My first thought: No surprises here. My second: everyone on both sides is going to flip 360 about free speech and holding young people accountable for what they say again because that happens every time something like this breaks out (looks like JD Vance is at the front of the line for this one).
But ultimately, I think the response is less interesting than the texts themselves. For example, while several people used some version of the "N-word" even in a conservative chat where they are daring each other to say the most incendiary things possible, no one was willing to type it out with "er" suffice.
Also, this whole thing to me reads like arrested development. I went to high school in a small town in the South, and I do have cringe-worthy memories of the horrific things boys would say to each other to try and prove they could be the most transgressive. Basically the slightly older version of dead-baby jokes, only instead of dead babies its Jews and the holocaust. Nothing anyone would be proud of it, absolutely the kind of stuff that could (and maybe should) get you canceled in the age of social media, but the point is less that we were awful and more that we mostly grew out of it by the time we were in college. I'm not saying I was a great person by the time I was out of high school, but I was definitely no longer the kind of person who thought that mocking taboos made you cool anymore. The fact that most of the people on this group chat are at least a few years older seems to me to prove that at some point, either due to the political discourse in this country being fucked, or else COVID, has made it so that a lot of young people are apparently stuck at a stage of cultural development that should, IMO, have ended by the time they were old enough to even pretend at serious political consciousness.
I'm fascinated by the responses on this thread. A lot of people basically going "this is no big deal stop being such a spoilsport."
1) I am curious about the overlap between these views and the view that 'saying anything bad about charlie kirk is tantamount to violence'. It would be an obviously hypocritical stance, but its easy to miss the connection
2) I am sorta surprised that everyone here is just like 'this is normal'. This is emphatically not normal? My friend groups do not speak like this, ever. I run a few communities with several hundred people across them, none of them speak like this. Actually thats not true, one person did start speaking like this, and it turned out they were having a psychiatric condition that led to them being committed briefly. So...idk, maybe you all should have better standard for the kinds of conversations you choose to be in.
3) What makes this more surprising is that this is in a pseudo professional context. If I started speaking like this in my company slack, I would be fired. Not because of anything related to 'being a spoilsport' but because it is simply wildly inappropriate in context
4) There is absolutely no analysis in any of the responses for when someone crosses the line from "ONLY JOKING BRO" to "no I actually seriously believe this." Like literally 0. Apparently the thought does not cross anyones mind that these people...may actually be serious. Like the top response here is "all that's there is some jokes about Hitler and gas chambers"; how do you know its a joke? Humorous statements exist on a spectrum from 'this is so ridiculous its obvious i dont believe this' to 'i mostly believe this but i added a haha at the end so i dont get ostracized' and apriori there is *no way* to identify which is which from these texts alone. If your starting point is "anything about nazis is obviously a joke" you will *never* catch the actual nazis!
> I am curious about the overlap between these views and the view that 'saying anything bad about charlie kirk is tantamount to violence'. It would be an obviously hypocritical stance, but its easy to miss the connection
For the record, the notion that insults toward Charlie Kirk constitute "violence" is silly to me, as well.
> I am sorta surprised that everyone here is just like 'this is normal'. This is emphatically not normal?
One recurring theme of Scott's [0] is how easy it is to accidentally and unknowingly insulate yourself in a social bubble, simply via the friends you choose to surround yourself with, and the aura you give off. In my experience in meatspace, people will tell you things in confidence that can be pretty out there, if you cultivate an attitude of active listening and non-judgement. (Also, I swear Scott Adams once wrote about having similar experiences. But I can't find the link for the life of me.) You've made several comments in the past about how others are in their own bubble. But evidently, you think you're immune to the same dynamic.
> but because it is simply wildly inappropriate in context
I mean, it makes sense for a typical, multinational corporation to instruct HR to keep things as bland as possible, in order to attract the widest pool of talent. But if it's a political party of like-minds who feel fatigued by their opposition... like, i hardly know what to say, since I'm not exactly sure why this is surprising to you. Saying this is "wrong" by appealing to norms of "professionalism" and "propriety" has a circular flavor to it. You're basically saying "it's illegitimate because it's illegitimate" but obscuring the circularity with synonyms.
> There is absolutely no analysis in any of the responses for when someone crosses the line from "ONLY JOKING BRO" to "no I actually seriously believe this."
Like I told Beowulf [1], it's because these conversations are contextual and intended for a specific audience, which is precisely why they were private. They were never intended to be interpreted by me (and especially not someone in their outgroup, like you). This is kinda the point of Wittgenstein's Lion, no? Expecting a definitive analysis of this is roughly analogous to analyzing Taylor Swift's discography, line by line, to determine if she was actually in the closet. Does anyone seriously expect a definitive, incontrovertible answer to this?
> If your starting point is "anything about nazis is obviously a joke" you will *never* catch the actual nazis!
And inversely, if your starting point is "anything about nazis is *never* a joke", you'll catch a whole lot of innocents.
But both of these statements are quite extreme. If we zoom out, what's really going on is that: there's a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity [2] which determines the ratio of false-positives and false-negatives. This forms a Pareto Curve. The "best" point on the curve is somewhat arbitrary, by the curve's very nature. In practice though, false-positives tend are often more costly than false-negatives (e.g. important emails being sent to the spam folder is worse than spam showing up in the normal inbox). Which, for example, is perhaps why William Blackstone errs on the side of "innocence" in legal contexts. C.f. "It is better that ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer." [3]
> You've made several comments in the past about how others are in their own bubble. But evidently, you think you're immune to the same dynamic.
Fine, perhaps I was too strong in saying 'such things are not *normal*'. How about 'it is much better to live a life where you are not slinging slurs in every conversation' or, slightly differently, 'you know you do not have to live this way, right?'
And I guess you could come back with the rejoinder that some people may really enjoy slurs for their own sake. We could get into a whole debate about what the platonic good is and so on. It ends in some sort of nihilistic 'well, yes, strictly speaking there is no *good* but we are social creatures and we have to come to some sort of consensus and now we're talking politics'. And my 'politics' take is 'I don't give a flying fuck if you want to be a nazi on your own free time, but if you are positioning yourself as a political leader you have an obligation to not be saying "I like Nazis" in your work chats, because a) people may think you are nazis, which is bad optics, or b) you actually are nazis, which is far worse'.
This kicks into the second point:
> You're basically saying "it's illegitimate because it's illegitimate" but obscuring the circularity with synonyms.
I think I wasn't super clear. I'm saying it's illegitimate because these people chose a line of work that necessarily makes them public individuals. If you are working a 9-5 at WalmartHalliburtonPepsiCo as a private individual and in your free time you decide to sit around with your friends trading slurs for fun, you can do that. You're a private individual, you have a right to privacy, and if in that space you choose to do that, so be it. This is...not that. Once you choose to go into politics you become a representative of your people AND are held to a higher standard because you now have your hands on the levers of state force. There is no 'private' individual in politics. Politicians dont get to have private group chats between all the other politician bros. That's the trade. That's why every single thing government officials do are documented and archived, and why its a big deal that people are using signal to plan war crimes. Maybe some people disagree with me on this, and again we'll be back in a political fight about what we want from our politicians. And what I want from my politicians is for them to not even have the specter of 'they may be nazis' on them
Which kicks into your third and fourth points. Yea, this is a spectrum, but why are we treating these people like they are just normal people? When it comes to things like 'do you think black people are monkeys' or 'are you a nazi supporter' among elected politicians, the false positive / false negative trade off is *extremely clear* to me. I want that sensitivity super high, because it is way worse to have nazi officials than it is that some poor politician can no longer live out their dream of being a politician because they said things that made others wonder if they were a nazi. (You mention 'false positives' being more harmful here; it depends on what you frame as a positive and negative, but based on where I think you're landing I would love to hear a defense of why its ok to have an increased risk of nazis in power in exchange for the right of some edgelord politicians to make jokes). In other words
> And inversely, if your starting point is "anything about nazis is *never* a joke", you'll catch a whole lot of innocents.
Yes, I totally 100% bite this bullet when it comes to politicians. "Politicians cannot joke about being nazis" is absolutely a stance I will take on and defend
All of this aside, I appreciate the thoughtful response. You're cutting to the meat of the thing
> You mention 'false positives' being more harmful here; it depends on what you frame as a positive and negative,
I mean, yeah, sign-conventions are completely arbitrary. Like how electrical-schematics depict current flowing backwards (relative to electron-flow). Feel free to flip the signs, so long as everything stays internally consistent. The point is, the costs of false-positives and false-negatives are frequently asymmetric.
------
> but why are we treating these people like they are just normal people?
> There is no 'private' individual in politics. Politicians don't get to have private group chats between all the other politician bros.
> but based on where I think you're landing I would love to hear a defense of why its ok to have an increased risk of nazis in power in exchange for the right of some edgelord politicians to make jokes
It might be helpful to distinguish between three different questions ITT:
A) "Does the leaked groupchat constitute evidence of National Socialism?"
B) "Do Nazi jokes by public officials deserve condemnation?"
C) "How much transparency should we expect of political officials?"
.
A) "Does the leaked groupchat constitute *evidence* of National Socialism?"
While I don't necessarily think edgy humor is the norm, I do think it's way more common than you imagine. So... <checks Bayes Theorem>... the answer is largely "no". And note that we're evaluating the likelihood ratio, not the posterior. In other words, this is different than directly asking "is Vance planning a coup/term-extension/insurrection" (idk, maybe? that's a whole other discussion).
For additional context, the right has been complaining about "PC schoolmarm hallmoniter wokescold karen-from-HR" types for quite a few years, now. The pendulum has swung quite a ways along a certain direction. Vance seems pretty deep in the memes, so I wouldn't be surprised if he feels emboldened (or even morally obliged) by the rightwing discourse to make edgy jokes. Thus, you're seeing reactions such as "The idea that people should be cancelled for not meeting your standards of 'cool' is retarded." At some point, you just gotta bite the bullet and say "nobody cares, Margaret". It's the same sentiment behind the YesChad meme.
B) "Do Nazi jokes by public officials deserve condemnation?"
Yeah, that's a fair point. In the abstract, I do generally expect public officials to hold themselves to a higher standard, and not to joke about sensitive topics that are ambiguous by the very nature of their office. E.g. if your boss jokes about firing you, and it's even remotely ambiguous, I'd agree that the joke was said in poor taste.
Simultaneously, Shankar gestured at camaraderie. And I do find the increasing atomization of society pretty tragic.
C) "How much transparency should we expect of public officials?"
Oh, idk. I haven't really given a lot of thought to this one. And I'm sure you know more than I do about the norms and procedures of The Blob.
I guess my immediate reaction is: do you want govt officials *not* to ever use private comms? I suppose in theory, public servants are beholden to The People. But in practice, do you want state-secrets being leaked to Russia/China/Iran/Korea? Or maybe you're arguing that the comms are supposed to be documented, but stay classified for a number of years? Weren't people mad that Hillary Clinton's email server was insecure?
So, just for clarity: what transparency policy are you proposing exactly?
Though on the other hand, maybe politicians don't deserve privacy after all. E.g. Hillary's emails were soooo much worse than Vance's groupchat. I'm not trying to go down the Whataboutism road. But when Kamateur's toplevel comment hinted at dark and portentous activities, I was expecting something more along the lines of "France literally invaded Libya under the NATO banner for Ghaddafi's gold and oil" [0]. Meanwhile, Archeon [1] is asking in a different thread about why we can't have nuclear disarmament. I was very tempted to reply "Because Saddam and Ghaddafi tried that route, and they were both rewarded by the U.S. with 'regime change'. But surely, Iran and Korea will just surrender their nuclear capabilities." So when I read what essentially amounts to "Vance said naughty words and made holy-cost jokes"... Really? This is what I'm supposed to be mad about?
Anyway, there's a tension between "public officials deserve scrutiny" but also "public office requires privacy" and I'm not really sure how to square that circle.
A) granted. I think the Bayesian odds are low because prior is low, there just aren't that many Nazis in the US. But note that the prior becomes higher when talking about alt right Republicans. Still, yes, in absolute terms, this is low evidence that they are Nazis.
I think it's worth adding an additional note though, which is that it's dangerous to dismiss this _just because_ in absolute terms the likelihood is low. It's important to think in terms of first and second derivatives. The normalization of this kind of humor is a necessary precondition to true believers (that old truism about how any place created on the Internet mock people by pretending to be like them will eventually be taken over by those same people thinking they are in good company)
B) were on the same page. I have Shankar blocked so IDK what he's saying about camraderie.
C) I think my standard is 'government officials are not private individuals, and do not have an expectation of privacy, proportional to the amount of power they wield'. A school teacher or police officer can have a private life. By the time you hit national politics, you lose that. Idk exactly what the spectrum is, but at the extremes the president definitely gets every single thing they do documented and stored; and the teacher doesn't.
I don't think this conflicts at all with requirements for national secrecy. Presidential communication is already stored, classified for many years, and eventually declassified. The critical thing is that the additional information store allows other privileged actors the ability to review. And this is absolutely critical because it is the only way for a democracy to effectively check the behaviors of its leaders. Nixon is perhaps the obvious example. But even something like Bay of Pigs. This is why Clintons email thing _was_ a big deal, as was the signal chat.
Does that mean that the young Republican group should have everything documented and archived? No, I don't think so, they aren't that important. But it does mean that I am totally unsympathetic to the folks defending their 'right to privacy' (ironic, as an aside, that this scotus is the one chipping away at the jurisprudence around a right to privacy). Being a representative of the people means you are not longer your own person. You lose your right to be a private citizen. And this is really important, because it's one aspect of how voters can actually get feedback about who they are electing. To use finance terms, whether someone jokes about being a Nazi is material information for the voter
> I think the Bayesian odds are low because prior is low, there just aren't that many Nazis in the US. But note that the prior becomes higher when talking about alt right Republicans. Still, yes, in absolute terms, this is low evidence that they are Nazis.
I vaguely sense that you're shooting yourself in the foot by conflating authoritarianism with card-carrying, neonazi skinheads. E.g. do I expect Vance to subvert the democratic apparatus? yes. Do I expect him to gas his Indian wife Usha? no chance.
> It's important to think in terms of first and second derivatives. The normalization of this kind of humor is a necessary precondition to true believers (that old truism about how any place created on the Internet mock people by pretending to be like them will eventually be taken over by those same people thinking they are in good company)
This is why I mentioned the rightwing discourse earlier. The 2nd derivative of position can entail a restoring-force as well (e.g. a swinging pendulum, or a bouncing spring). Edgy norms have momentum precisely because of the doubling-down during the woke era from ~2010 to the present. And it's too late to de-escalate, so the only way out is through.
> To use finance terms, whether someone jokes about being a Nazi is material information for the voter
I suppose that sounds reasonable, at least from the vantage point of a lib. For me (and probably Vance), it's interesting that "democracy" means the average joe gets to learn classified information, decades after the electoral relevancy of that information expires.
Would have been nice to have a link to the thing; "detailed" is not the description I would use for the Politico article I read. "Excerpts" is more appropriate.
If Charlie Kirk comments left room for sarcastic interpretations, they would be jokes, and funny. (The old joke: "What would it take to reunite the Beatles? Three more bullets.") Instead it's just a bunch of "good, he should be dead." Those people aren't clever enough to not mean it.
I was never on Something Awful, but my understanding is it ran on this kind of joking back when it was big. (They funded swap.avi. On purpose. https://www.somethingawful.com/horrors-of-porn/horrible-saga-swapavi/) "Trump's busy burning the Epstein files" sure sounds like they're taking potshots in all directions, which means it's just the flavor of the forum.
I know it's a joke because that guy does not actually have a gas chamber, and because responding to "they'll vote for the most right-wing person" with "Great, I love Hitler" is the same as my response to the comment that "Depression means not wanting to do anything" with "The most depressed man is Bruno Mars". It's a joking prod to rethink your guidelines.
>>If Charlie Kirk comments left room for sarcastic interpretations, they would be jokes, and funny. (The old joke: "What would it take to reunite the Beatles? Three more bullets.") Instead it's just a bunch of "good, he should be dead." Those people aren't clever enough to not mean it.
I don't think that's really an accurate assessment. There were plenty of jokes - first google result:
They're both vile, but I don't see how anyone could argue that somehow it *is* a joke when dirty rightbag responds to "I'll vote for the most right-wing person" with "Great, I love Hitler," or responds “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball" when asked whether he's watching a basketball game, but *not* a joke when dirty leftbag tweets "Charlie Kirk was so committed to being anti-woke that he's never waking up again."
And it sure doesn't make show commitment to any consistent principles around free speech if a public figure can demand outrage and consequences for the latter[1]:
>>When you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.
Only to beg forgiveness and indulgence for the former[2]:
>>They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives.
> 1) I am curious about the overlap between these views and the view that 'saying anything bad about charlie kirk is tantamount to violence'. It would be an obviously hypocritical stance, but its easy to miss the connection
It's almost like there's a difference between publicly advocating for violence and venting privately to friends.
> I run a few communities with several hundred people across them, none of them speak like this.
People keep their mouth shut in places run by spoilsports. They tolerate such intolerance when there's no alternative. Hopefully, now there will be far more alternatives.
> If I started speaking like this in my company slack, I would be fired.
See above. Also, this absolutely already happens outside of the slack, your co-workers probably just do it behind your back because they know you're a spoilsport.
> There is absolutely no analysis in any of the responses for when someone crosses the line from "ONLY JOKING BRO" to "no I actually seriously believe this." Like literally 0.
What right do you have to decide that without evidence? What happened to giving people the benefit of the doubt? There is literally no evidence that these people are Nazis, none. None of these people are publicly advocating for Nazi policies or associating with them politically. They are just normal people like you and me, advocating for Republican interests.
Surely the whole discussion is about whether the group chat itself constitutes evidence? Like it's a bit rich to say "we have no evidence that they like Nazis!!!" while defending a group chat in which they are literally like 'wow I love being a nazi' do you not see the irony in this?
Frankly, I don't think I'm going to get through to you. Your default stance to any criticism seems to be "you're just a spoilsport" and given that you've already associated me with that title I'm certain this all falls on deaf ears.
I hope you find better conversational groups though. I'd say you deserve better, but, idk, given your responses you're probably happy with it
> I hope you find better conversational groups though.
Why bother, when this place is already perfect? I am so grateful for Scott being so tolerant of different views. Or more accurately, just apathetic to what gets written on here.
That's it? I was expecting some genuine advocates for genocide, but all that's there is some jokes about Hitler and gas chambers. Apparently people aren't even allowed to make jokes privately without leftists doxxing them. I can't believe anyone takes you people seriously about respecting free speech.
It is not reasonable to treat private exchanges between members of a group united by shared beliefs and enemies as information about people's real intentions.. I live in one of the bluest places there is. I have heard angry riffs that are way worse than the Young Republican stuff from dozens of leftie acquaintances, most of them professionals, many middle-aged, two of them kind and tolerant grandmothers. People pour out, in an angry half-joking way, fantasies of killing Trump, fire bombing a meeting of him and his whole staff, hopes that some facial distortion in a Trump photo is caused by a deadly illness that kills him soon, sputtering rage that the MAGA's are too motherfucking dumb to be allowed to vote and should all be moved to Texas and kept there by barbed wire fences around the border.
All fair and I can tell similar stories where I live....but at least in my personal observation it's not been actual party officials making such statements. Maybe that distinction no longer matters? I still think it ought to but perhaps now I might as well be advocating for rotary telephones.
Anyway the Dems have such an issue right now with a statewide-post nominee in Virginia who they absolutely should have already kicked off their ballot in the upcoming statewide election. (Google "Van Jones texts" for specifics.)
Regarding the above Telegram text string leaked to Politico, the participants were all in their 20s or 30s. One is a Vermont state senator. Another is a past chair of the New York State chapter of Young Republicans (they define "young" as 40 and under) and current nominee for national chair; he was also chief of staff to a Republican state legislator but has been fired from that job. Another participant is the current New York State chair of Young Republicans. Another is the vice chair of the Kansas chapter and until Tuesday was on the staff of that state's Republican state Attorney General. Another is chair of the Kansas chapter. Another is chair of the Arizona state chapter, another is a staffer of the New York chapter. Another is a staffer to a Trump appointee at the Small Business Administration.
More interesting to me is that the New York Young Republicans seem to have mismanaged their organization’s finances, and they're in arrears for to pay a venue for their last year's holiday party. Politico says they're at least $38,000 in debt. Giunta (the chair) told Politico the allegations were “nothing more than a sad and pathetic attempt at a political hit job.” But Politico says that in their “RESTOREYR WAR ROOM” chat, Guinta "and Walker speak flippantly about mishandling the club’s finances."
Well, at least they weren't sharing dick pics, or talking about special relationships with children.
I can't believe anyone is worried about having their country ruled by people who keep making Hitler jokes in private.
Wake me up when things get actually serious, like if someone tries to overturn elections by force, or deploys a military force against his citizens, or something like that. Until then, it should be obvious that the kind of jokes people make in private is completely unrelated to their behavior in office.
Speak for yourself. Some of us don't believe a century old incident that happened half the world away is too sacred to make jokes about. What happened to comedy being tragedy plus time?
And no, things are not "serious". If you thought things were "serious", you would not be publicly talking about how evil you think the administration is.
If nazism had been rendered irrelevant by the distance in space and time, they would not be making jokes about it.
One of the reasons why someone might keep making Hitler or Holocaust jokes, could be that in addition to being obsessed with the topic, they view it as something light that inspires them a variety of positive feelings. This is not about banning the jokes, but it feels reasonable to me that a taste for Hitler jokes reflects poorly on a politician's moral character.
I don't follow this. We are banning people from all over for things they said. We banned 6 people this week for (ironically) things they said about Charlie Kirk.
A good test for Republicans to see whether their enemies can cause them to turn on their own over trivial bullshit. Vance passes. Trump probably will too. I expect most to fail. (I could be wrong: it's possible Trump has weeded out of Republican leadership positions the gutless pearl-clutchers who'd accept the Democrats' and their media's framing of this.)
Young men "code-switching" from being uninhibited in private, among friends, to being more buttoned-up in public, and using that to encourage the development of spaces for male camaraderie and bonding (implicitly, without any influence of emasculating HR hags), of the kind there were many of traditionally, and which have recently precipitously declined.
If you're willing to lay it on thick, it illustrates the indomitable will of man to resist, even at this late hour, the dominance of the political-correctness regime, by maintaining an enclave where forbidden jokes endure.
"If you're willing to lay it on thick, it illustrates the indomitable will of man to resist, even at this late hour, the dominance of the political-correctness regime, by maintaining an enclave where forbidden jokes endure."
In other words, if you are willing to treat abject brainrot as a surrogate for character. I think you are correct about the dynamic, but Jesus. This is who is gonna save you from woke?
Maybe! Salvation from so great an evil is unlikely enough that I'll take it wherever it comes from. And from what I've heard, rebellions against established orders DO occasionally cascade from seemingly minor incidents. I believe the idea is common knowledge being created that the regime's views are not as universal as they seem, and realizing they're not as alone as they thought, other people join in; and every little bit of dissent helps because anyone's could be what finally tips it over the edge. (I think this is the intended moral of Havel's hypothetical greengrocer refusing to quietly acquiesce and put up the signs he's instructed/expected to.)
Code switching isn’t inherently good or bad, of course. It’s perfectly possible for something to serve a positive social function at one level and still be socially corrosive at another.
We may be hard pressed to derive a great deal of insight about a given individual from some particular speech act. But the code a community manifests can tell us a lot about its norms, interests, and values.
What if the forbidden jokes are about your own group? Will you laugh along? Assuming you're not posting under a pseudonym, you do realize that there's a strong current of anti-Indian sentiment in the GOP base, don't you? Hopefully, you're staying out of the way of ICE...
This seems entirely backwards to me. We treat others with respect because it's the right thing to do, not because they demand it or prove themselves worthy.
Sometimes people prove themselves not to be worthy of the level of respect that you would have naturally given them, and then you might be more careful in your behaviour towards them, but treating someone disrespectfully without any reason to do so seems to be what you're advocating, and in fact is one of the main ways that you might prove yourself unworthy of the common level of respect.
There’s a well established trope about how male friends are actively racist to each other. That’s not quite the same as the real problem with anti Indian sentiment among groypers generally, but the actual context here is transgressive private speech between young men, where everything is allowed and allowable.
Yes, but Shankar hasn't answered my question. If I started telling Indian jokes to you in Apu Nahasapeemapetilon's pseudo-Indian-English accent, would you laugh along?
FYI, at my former workplace, a lot of my American co-workers would mock Indian accents and behaviors behind their back. They probably could have gotten fired for doing so, but it went on anyway. I realized that a lot of latent dislike among American-born tech workers for Indians. I'm sure it goes in the other direction, too.
But should Trump overhaul the immigration system to favor people from countries he doesn't consider "shitholes" (i.e., any non-European country), Indians, despite the majority leaning and voting Republican, will get the short end of the stick.
Yeah, and some of the commentors here love throwing around the "r" word and other borderline things I bet they're forty too. That thing I said about how being transgressive does not equal being cool? Some people never figure that out.
Oh. What's the forbidden usage -- talking about people with intellectual disabilities, or using 'retard' as an insult? If the latter -- seems weird to have an insult considered so terrible one cannot utter it. After all, people casually refer to others the dislike as idiots, morons, assholes, etc.
Who said anything about being cancelled? It’s literally just a comment about annoying behavior in comment threads. Not a call for anyone to get banned. Not a demand to get someone fired or shamed off social media.
Instead, this reads like you just wanted to use the word “retarded” for edgelord points. In which case … success, I guess? Thanks for your contribution.
What is there to figure out, exactly? I can see an argument for people outgrowing performativity, but not for transgressive humor per se. And outgrowing performativity can run in the opposite direction, too. One man's modus ponens in another man's modus tollens, after all.
As for me in particular, I'm so tired of the euphemism treadmill. The R-word itself used to be a euphemism. You realize how insane it is that everyone has to learn a new euphemism every few decades, because the old euphemism gets sullied, right? Can we not just call a spade a spade?
Oh, idk off the top of my head. According to Sydney... "imbecile", "idiot", and "moron" were all clinical labels of neutral valence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were eventually codified into various ranges of IQ by Henry H. Goddard. Sydney also listed various pejoratives used outside a clinical context, including "feeble-minded", "simpleton", "fool", "dullard", "Mongolian-Idiot" (down syndrome), and "cretin" (hypothyroidism). I don't think I've ever heard of "cretin" being used to refer to hypothyroidism specifically, but the rest rings true, to me.
Sans Sydney though, I'm reasonably confident that "retard" used to have fairly neutral valence. It simply means "slow" (in this case, mentally, as in "the mentally-retarded aren't inherently dumb, they just need to catch up"). The word sometimes shows up in various other contexts such as "fire-retardant", or sheet-music annotations (commonly in Italian) (e.g. "ritard", "ritardando", etc).
Perhaps it's worth noting that: when I said "every few decades", this was a blanket statement to gesture at various other lineages. Wimbli for example gestures at the evolution of the n-word to BIPOC, but I can think of other terms that have been put through the treadmill. E.g. "lame" -> "crippled" -> "handicapped" -> "disabled" -> "physically-impaired". Which is ironic, since "lame" has gone full-circle to being neutral again. Like, it's still vaguely insulting. But it is, quite possibly, the least offensive of any insult.
Have you considered that it's not about being cool, it's just that we don't care what people like you think of us? We are simply giving people the respect they deserve.
Transgressive humor is exactly the opposite of not caring what other people think of you. It depends entirely on other peoples opinions for its effect.
But they're not making these jokes to people who are offended about it, they're making them to other people who share their sensibilities. If I call someone a retard, I'm not saying that because I'm being cool and edgy, I'm saying it because I think they're a retard.
I know, but again, was this a surprise to anyone? It should be horrifying, but I'm numb to it, and the people who should be worried about their own camp are going to brush it off like they always do.
Horrifying is such a strong word here. Like actually? Men saying transgressive offensive things in private as a show of ingroup bravado? I simply cannot bring myself to care
As I said in a different context, it’s not the knuckleheads that bother me, there are always knuckleheads, it is people with authority and influence defending those knuckleheads.
My sense of humor is fine. I'm hardly the only person who thinks that a huge swath of comedians has confused being edgy and pandering to an anti-woke crowd with actually knowing how to tell a joke.
It is entirely possible I missed this in recent Open Threads: What's the current best science on COVID-19 boosters?
I'm Male, 62, family history of heart disease, knock wood. I had both the vaccine (Moderna x2) AND the disease (mild) back when it was fashionable.
Are we still seeing excess Cardiomyopathy with these drugs? Given family history, I rank that as a higher concern given my Current health state, for which reason I stuck to annual Influenza vaccine. Are there better options nowadays in the US than Moderna?
I assume "Trump Made it! It's Poison!" and "It's a Biden/Harris Tracking Chip." are both nonsense, though tracking chips technology is quickly improving...
I got my first set of vaccines from Moderna, but switched to Pfizer for the boosters once it became clear that Moderna was giving people higher fevers than Pfizer. Last year I switched to Novavax because of reports that it was even less intense of an experience, and my experience bore that out.
In the US right now, I’ve been unable to find out whether I can get Novavax, and whether my insurance will pay for any of the vaccines, but got my doctor to write a prescription for Novavax in case I can find it.
My guess is that there is slight difference in effectiveness at preventing illness from the different vaccines. (I did get COVID last December, about two and a half months after my vaccine. It was much less intense than the previous time I had it, in May 2022, despite happening during international travel.)
I'll check on Novavax, but I'm sure I can get Pfizer.
I had one thankfully mild bout post vax--even my wife's worse case wasn't any worse than that year's flu. On the other hand I've some friends in education who seem to get it more than once a year, which I suppose isn't unexpected.
The pfizer, moderna and novavax vaccines were all found to slightly increase the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis, but it was a small risk. It happened to 36 people out of every 100,000, and almost all the people it happened to were males aged 12-17. The risk of myocarditis for people 60+ was even lower, *far* lower than the risk for teen males. And virtually all. of these young guys recovered fully with no heart damage. And the risk of cardiomyopathy from covid itself was 2 to 6 times higher for guys that age than the risk from the vax. In fact risk of cardiomyopathy from covid was higher for all groups than the risk from the vax was.
There are no precautions against getting a covid vax if one is 60-ish and/or has heart disease in the family. The current recommendation is for adults to get the vax. Even if they have some immunity from previous vaxes or covid infections, the vax increases protection. Evidence for this is that all other things being equal (age, sex, health problems) people who’ve had the current vax are less likely to end up in ER/urgent care with covid and less likely to be hospitalized with it.
You need a better source of information than what you have been accessing up til now. I recommend the blog Your Local Epidemiologist, here on Substack. The writer’s clear, honest, and non-politcal. And she has good credentials: a Masters in Public Health and PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
That 36 out of 100,000 seems high. Was that with the initial vaccination? Because the numbers seem to be falling as further boosters get administered. A fairly recent Nordic study shows that it's on the order of 1/100,000 with mRNA boosters.
I don't know about the Novavax boosters, but with the initial rollout of Novavax in Australia, the myocarditis/pericarditis rates were 27/100,000, and (interestingly enough) the periC rates were higher than the MyoC rates (which is the reverse of the pattern in mRNA vaccines).
Absolute poppycock! Multiple studies have shown that the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis after a COVID infection is an order of magnitude higher than after receiving the mRNA vaccines (7x-11x, depending on the study). And the risk of experiencing myoC/periC after mRNA booster is very low (2023 data from a Nordic study shows ~0.9 per 100,000 for Pfizer; ~ 2.0 per 100,000 for Moderna in 12-39 male cohort).
And for those who do get a COVID infection, despite the vaccination, they will have a lower risk of developing myocarditis after the infection.
If you want to challenge me on this, please post links to the studies that support claims. Put up or shut up.
Both studies don't support your concern of risk versus reward at all? Beowulf does exactly look at the risk versus reward in the case of cardiomyopathy.
Going on Scott's previous post regarding the legitimacy of political violence, especially when going down the slippery slope of fascism, when is it acceptable to enact political violence against Communists and Socialists? I know that for the left-wing echo-chamber these groups are not remotely in the same tier as the Fascists, but many on the Centre and Right would vehemently disagree.
Its also much easier to identify a Communist or a Socialist with accuracy, as there is no shame in accepting that label and many of them carry it proudly and self-identify as such.
How many illegal immigrants pouring through the border is enough to count as violence, making political violence against Communists/Socialists just "self-defense" and legitimized?
It seems to me that someone who equates communism and socialism, and someone who even ponders that people coming illegally to get jobs might constitute ":violence", cannot be trusted to determine whether the very, very rare circumstances in which political violence is legitimate are in existence at any given time.
Saying socialism is communism is like saying that all republicans are fascist.
Which is exactly why these definitions need to be exact.
That said if we are interested in preserving the democratic order then how we should treat (actual) fascists is exactly how should we treat (actual) communists.
>It seems to me that you are doing special pleading here
I don't think you know what special pleading means.
>we don't really care about your internal fights and which special branch of Leftism you are devoted to
As it happens, I am neither a communist nor a socialist. Regardless, I don't know why you think that doubling down on your original error strengthens your case. All you have done is make it even more clear that you are not competent to decide when political violence is justified.
Again, that was not OP's claim. This is really annoying. No one is debating whether rape is violence, nor whether kidnapping is violence. At this point, I just think you are acting in bad faith.
Taking the question in good faith, here's a simple answer. This is based on what has happened in the past, not on what I believe to be morally justified.
Political action (up to and including violence) against a group is justified if there is a credible threat of that group seriously undermining the viability of the state. So McCarthy's witch trials were justified to the extent that he convinced the US Government that communist takeover was a real threat. There are many more extreme examples of purges justified by the perpetrators in terms of needing to preserve the viability of the state (e.g. Chile in the 1970s).
I don't think anyone seriously believes that 'Communists' or 'Socialists' pose a threat to the US at this moment in time. Many people do believe that right wing authoritarians (so-called fascists) do pose a threat. These are statements of fact. You might not share the opinions of these people, but you should not disagree on how widespread these opinions are.
Finally, the question about 'illegal immigrant pouring through the border' counting as violence is just unhinged. I would encourage you to reflect on how you have been physically harmed in your own life by illegal immigrants. Violence is being stabbed with a knife, not seeing someone speak Spanish in your hometown.
> Political action (up to and including violence) against a group is justified if there is a credible threat of that group seriously undermining the viability of the state. So McCarthy's witch trials were justified to the extent that he convinced the US Government that communist takeover was a real threat. There are many more extreme examples of purges justified by the perpetrators in terms of needing to preserve the viability of the state (e.g. Chile in the 1970s).
Was it justified though? A few decades later we regard it as persecution and violation of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association.
> I don't think anyone seriously believes that 'Communists' or 'Socialists' pose a threat to the US at this moment in time. Many people do believe that right wing authoritarians (so-called fascists) do pose a threat. These are statements of fact. You might not share the opinions of these people, but you should not disagree on how widespread these opinions are.
I'll be glad to inform you that a lot of people regard Communists and Socialists a graver threat than the 10 real Neo-Nazis or Fascists that exist in the US. I do recall Antifa burning down the country for almost a year, and the whole media and judicial establishment playing quarterback for them. I don't recall any collective violence perpetrated in the US by actual Fascists for its entire existence, and in general any collective action by them is met with ridicule, even by the right wing. Now on the other hand, you might be talking about the "perceived" Fascists, which I guess is anyone sitting to the right of Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie?
> Finally, the question about 'illegal immigrant pouring through the border' counting as violence is just unhinged. I would encourage you to reflect on how you have been physically harmed in your own life by illegal immigrants. Violence is being stabbed with a knife, not seeing someone speak Spanish in your hometown.
I agree, this is designed to show how ridiculous leftist rhetoric has become, that any policy enforcement of the right that serves its constituency gets classified as "violence", justifying preemptive action on their part to stop it. I'm just trying to demonstrate how the right could seize the same tools. The degree of how ridiculous a claim might be is irrelevant and completely subjective.
> I'll be glad to inform you that a lot of people regard Communists and Socialists a graver threat than the 10 real Neo-Nazis or Fascists that exist in the US.
Quantify this, and we'll have somewhere to start a discussion. I don't think that 'fascist' is a helpful term in discussions like this, I'm not based in the US, and don't care to discuss particular US politicians.
This is contradictory. You invoked the US specifically to support your argument about how Communists aren't perceived as threats, and now you're saying we shouldn't talk about the US? You don't get to use an example to make your point and then declare it off-limits when challenged.
As far as were you are based - I don't care. You replied to my comment about a post framed entirely in US politics. You chose to engage.
I'm happy to chat about US politics, otherwise I would not have responded. I don't think bringing individual politicians and their positions into the discussion adds anything. I didn't declare anything off limits, I said it didn't interest me -- that's not intended to disrespect you.
If you have any quantitative evidence on the number of people who regard Communists as a genuine threat to the US in the way that McCarthy did in the 1950s, and who feel that similar action now is necessary, I would like to see it. I'm not interested in opinions about particular politicians or events; only objective facts that all observers can agree on.
You claimed Americans aren't concerned about Communists/Socialists. That's your assertion to defend, not mine to disprove. Show me your evidence first. My constraint: I want direct polling data or survey results, not social science studies from institutions where 95%+ of faculty identify as progressive, Democrats or generally on the left. Raw data, not interpretation.
Except there is no formal organization called Antifa. The Rightwing talking heads label anyone who goes out to protest against the ICE brownshirts, whether they be centrist Democrats, Progressive Democrats, Democratic Socialists, old-style Socialists, Marxists, Communists, or anarchists, or who go out to protest anything Trump does, get labeled Antifa. So, I suppose the entire Democratic Party and all the other Leftist organizations combined *are* antifa, because we're anti-fascists, and we hate the assholes in power, who, despite their claims to the contrary, are pretty fascist. ;-)
I think this is just a strawman, or maybe a weakman if I'm being generous. The modal person on the left does not think modal right wing positions justify political violence (and if you believe otherwise you should probably touch grass). Like, even when you have objectively authoritarian behavior from ICE (what the fuck was that chicago apartment raid???) there has been basically no violence? last i checked the folks in portland were dancing naked / in inflatable animal costumes to make fun of ice
This is a "No True Scotsman" argument and the only response I have for you is that Charlie Kirk caught a bullet with "Catch that Fascist" engraved onto it, for having fairly modal Conservative positions. And then the totally "non-modal" leftist apparatus either celebrating his murder or using the "violence is not the answer but he did x,y,z so...(implication he had it coming)" cop-out.
You could play the "list the political violence" game forever. But even here you're wrong on the merits. First, every important political leader on the left condemned that shooting. Second, you seem to have forgotten the hortmans, where not only did the right NOT condemn that shooting, but they spent an awful lot of time talking about how it was fine. Your epistemic status is still broken if you thought that anyone important on the left was pro kirks death. The best you could say is "some people thought it ironic that the guy who said 'this is the price to pay' paid that price"
1. You are evidently wrong on this one. For instance, AoC's tweets were in the vain of "Yeah political violence is bad, but akshually he was a bigot and all other evil things we Leftists deem evil (wink-wink)". You might think that's ok, what we are trying to tell you is that it's not.
2. Can you tell me more about the Hortman case? The only things I know about it come from Conservative sources and are
- The murders were not politically motivated
- DJT condemned them without ifs or buts
Do you have any sources that claim the opposite? I would be happy to have a look.
> “Condemning the depravity of Kirk’s brutal murder is a straightforward matter – one that is especially important to help stabilize an increasingly unsafe and volatile political environment where everyday people feel at risk. We can disagree with Charlie and come together as a country to denounce the horror of killing. That is a bedrock American value.
> "It then only underscores the majority’s recklessness and intent to divide by choosing to introduce this resolution on a purely partisan basis, instead of uniting Congress in this tragedy with one of the many bipartisan options to condemn political violence and Kirk’s murder, as we did with the late Melissa Hortman. Instead, the majority proceeded with a resolution that brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry today.
> “We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted Black Americans the right to vote was a ‘mistake,’ who after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi claimed that ‘some amazing patriot out there’ should bail out his assailant, and accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges – it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.’ His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans – far from ‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority in this resolution.
There is no wink wink here. AOC is pretty clear about this. Political violence is bad AND ALSO you do not get a free pass if you happen to be killed. There is no tension in these statements.
"You might think that's ok, what we are trying to tell you is that it's not." --> I think your version of the world boils down to one of two things:
- if you are killed you are immediately untouchable and can never be critiqued OR
- any criticism in any setting is tantamount to violence
Both of these are silly positions, and the latter is quite literally something people mock the progressive left for. Kirk was unabashed about his political beliefs, many of which were things that lots of people disagreed with. Those people are not magically going to become sympathetic to his views because he was killed. If your position is that the instigation of political violence *demands* acquiescence to his views, well, there has been far more right wing political violence, so we should all be leftists by now.
Somewhat related, I'm intrigued that you think the left wing default position is "if you are a bigot you are worthy of being killed." This is an insane position! If you are getting news from people who are telling you that everyone you disagree with is a monster, maybe...they are not being fully truthful? There are certainly some crazies who believe this, but this is not the modal view at all.
I do think this is the modal view of our dear leader though. Here is Donald Jonald Trump to military leaders:
> America is under invasion from within. We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms…These people don’t have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within. We’re stopping it very quickly. After spending trillions of dollars defending the borders of foreign countries, with your help, we’re defending the borders of our country from now on…It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live.
2) The things you know about the case are wrong. They were absolutely politically motivated, what? The guy who got caught had a hitlist of dem politicians that he was trying to kill. The Hortmans are the ones who get most of the coverage because they were the ones who were actually killed, but Boelter first tried to kill the Hoffmans ("John Hoffman was shot nine times and Yvette eight times."). Here were the other people on his list: "An unmarked black fifth-generation Ford Explorer equipped with an orange and white LED lightbar was left in the Hortmans' driveway and contained a list of about 70 potential targets,[76] including "abortion providers, pro-abortion rights advocates, and lawmakers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other states".[8] Hortman and Hoffman were on the list,[77] as were Walz, U.S. representatives Angie Craig, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Mark Pocan, Gwen Moore, Kelly Morrison, and Hillary Scholten,[78][79] U.S. senators Amy Klobuchar,[80] Tina Smith, and Tammy Baldwin,[81] and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison."
Who told you that the murders werent political? Should you continue to trust them?
Meanwhile, here are the people in the Republican Party immediately after the Hortmans were killed:
State Sen Mike Lee:
> Lee, who posts frequently on his personal X account, took to social media on Sunday, claiming Boelter has ties to Democrats and liberal politics. “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” Lee wrote, attempting to connect Boelter to Walz, with his name misspelled...“This is what happens … When Marxists don’t get their way.”
He deleted those posts, but not before doubling down.
Rep Van Orden:
> Yesterday, a whole pack of election deniers got together and spewed hate. One of them decided to murder and attempt to murder some politicians that were not far Left enough for them. July 4th is the real No Kings Day, and America is done with you fomenting insurrection.
Gov Scott Walker:
> Walker wrote that if the assassination “ends up being done by an ultra-liberal activist … watch for many on the left to be silent or even justify it. Wrong!”
Also deleted that post
Then you have social media 'personalities' like Cernovich or Rugg (combined: 4 million followers) posting things like “Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?” and “The Vice President candidate for the Democrat party is directly connected to a domestic terrorist, that is confirmed, the only question is whether Tim Walz himself ordered the political hit against a rival who voted against Walz’s plan to give free healthcare to illegals.”
Speaking of Trump, here is what he had to say about the Hortmans:
> I have been briefed on the terrible shooting that took place in Minnesota, which appears to be a targeted attack against State Lawmakers. Our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the FBI, are investigating the situation, and they will be prosecuting anyone involved to the fullest extent of the law. Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. God Bless the great people of Minnesota, a truly great place!
I'm a bit skeptical that Trump wrote this. It doesn't really read like him. It's much more likely that he didn't know who the person was and this was ghost written, as per this Fox News clip from a few months later:
> Reporter: Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags for Melissa Hortman who was killed as well? Trump: Uh, I’m not familiar, who?
> “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.” (from your link!)
Weirdly dissimilar. One thinks that maybe Trump does not actually care that much about political violence.
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I think I agree my initial statement that "the right NOT condemn that shooting, but they spent an awful lot of time talking about how it was fine" could be misread. I think that it is true that 'the right' (the amorphous mass of people who vote for MAGA) were genuinely more pro political violence. We haven't touched on the Paul Pelosi thing but that is of course another example. Still, there *are* examples of Republican elected officials condemning the violence, including a bipartisan condemnation of violence from the House, and so I think I walk back the strongest version of what I said.
That said, I do not think your factcheck link is really that interesting. The existence of singular people condemning violence says nothing about the overarching position that politicians and members of the various political parties take. Trump has been extremely vocal about leveraging violence to go after people he does not like; so was Charlie Kirk for that matter. And to zoom out a bit further, I think any even handed analysis of rhetoric over the last decade would pretty clearly show top party officials on the right behaving in ways that are way more unhinged than anything you could find on the left.
(I'm not planning to respond more here, I have an actual day job and like I said, I don't think I'm going to be able to pull you out of the epistemic pit regarding what you think the left is saying or doing. Just, like, get off twitter and cut off algorithmic personalization feeds as a useful starting point)
Communism and socialism don't have jack to do with open borders or immigration in general. America's immigration policy (and that of countries like England, France etc.) is thoroughly a product of liberalism and progressivism, not communism.
> Communism and socialism don't have jack to do with open borders or immigration in general.
I grew up in a communist country, can confirm. People who tried to leave the paradise were shot. You could get a permission for tourism, but had to leave your family at home as hostages.
Are you posting to learn something or just to “potayto, potato”?
Because actual “communist” regimes like that of the USSR, East Germany, Cuba, etc. etc. had the tightest locked borders in the world. Your typical blue-haired gay Portland “progressive” would be arrested, convicted for sodomy, and thrown into prison to be regularly raped.
Only in the insane modern American Republican discourse “progressive” is “historically” “communism”.
Or did you mean”hysterically”? Autocorrect can be a bich.
I want to learn something, can you answer this as I'm curious: Does Communism, as an ideology, embrace internationalism and no borders? I know from the implementation perspective they locked-up because of security reasons. Wasn't that just "temporary" though until the enemies of Communism were defeated and the international Communist utopia came into fruition?
Open borders is a libertarian worldview - historically opposed by communists and socialists and supported by libertarians. (Somebody on a rationalist blog should have noticed the latter.)
Economic globalisation is also a capitalist idea, and (you are going to blow a gasket now) - the EU has largely codified neo-liberalism in its constitution, that is the four freedoms. Socialists were historically anti EU. And there you were thinking the EU was so socialist.
What if you looked in the mirror, and saw the enemy, and the enemy was you.
There are plenty of folks here who actually have lived under these regimes and/or are fluent in the corresponding languages, like moonshadow here.
You can always ask for what "communism" was actually like instead of making up things that fit our weird American idea of a Lesbian Hippy Communist or some such.
Also, while there, ask how much an average Soviet person paid in taxes and what the income, property, and sales taxes were in the USSR. As they say, "the answer might surprise you".
You are not answering my question. Does Communism as an ideology embrace no-borders at all and internationalism yes or no? The methods elites of Communist regimes implemented it so that they can hold onto power are immaterial to my position.
Whose talking about going out of the country? Of course they won't let you leave. Coming in uninvited is what we are talking about, and the truth of the matter is that in Soviet Russia
- No sane person wanted to come in uninvited
- The invited ones were Western useful idiots, like NYT editors and journalists to do Lenin's and Stalin's apologism - Suprise suprise, most self-identified as Progressives.
You do realize that the Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, by a guy who died in the 1880s, right? Communist thought wasn't invented by Marx, it didn't stop evolving when he died, and he isn't the ultimate standard for what communism means. I prefer to define communism based largely on the experience of actual communist societies (both premodern 'primitive communist' ones, and 20th century communist states).
Communist states historically have had strong controls on freedom of movement, and a lot of the communist states (not all) were highly nationalistic as well. Czechoslovakia expelled nearly all its ethnic Germans immediately after WWII, for example (they were not communist ruled quite yet, but the communists strongly supported the expulsion), Poland pressured Jews to leave in the 1950s and 1960s, Bulgaria did the same with Turks in the 1980s.
I'm speaking here as someone who is very much sympathetic to communism and has voted for communists in the past, but also as someone who's strongly opposed to cosmopolitanism and mass migration, and is generally supportive of ethnic self determination and the ethnic nation state.
I agree that ideologies evolve over time, but dismissing internationalism as non-essential to Communism simply because historical circumstances prevented its full implementation is just dumb. By that logic, we could say compassion and forgiveness aren't central to Christianity because crusaders killed infidels and the Inquisition roamed free. At some point, deviations become so fundamental that we're dealing with a different ideology altogether. Your position is so absurd that taking it to its logical conclusion we could incorporate free markets into Communism and still call it Communism, which certainly doesn't hold up.
Not only was the communist manifesto utopian nonsense, that wouldn’t have meant any huge migration from poor countries to rich countries, it wasn’t an easy voyage back then.
In any case the entire Marxist revolution was going to be another western (or rather European) imperialism - a world dictatorship of the British proletariat
It also says that the state will ultimately wither away. Do you therefore believe that communists advocate for the abolition of the state? They in fact advocate for the opposite, right? Because that is supposedly the means to achieve the future utopia.
That’s the plan once there is one world government. But when it became clear that the communist revolution didn’t happen everywhere at once, they decided that borders between communist and non-communist countries need to be closed.
I as a liberal think there should be open borders between distinct countries (if there are distinct countries) but communists do not think that.
The closing of the borders, as you are describing, was a tactical manoeuvre that was necessitated but the realpolitik of the era. Communists were also chopping heads and starving people (even of the proletariat) to achieve their aims, even though it is entirely contradictory to their ideology.
When the holy bible of Communism states that internationalism and no borders is the end goal its really asinine to suggest otherwise.
It seems to me like you have misunderstood the post. Scott specifically wrote that he punts on the question of when/at what level of fascism political violence is permitted.
It's mainly about semantics - if it is ok to use the term "fascist" or not.
He argues that it is ok, but the term should not automatically justify political violence.
As to your point, I think the obviosu answer is that it simply has nothing to do with one idoelogical bias or another. All of them can be more or less fascist.
I agree, I'm highlighting Scott's hypocrisy and the broader double standard on the left. The problem is that any conservative policy position can be framed as a slippery slope to fascism, which then supposedly justifies preemptive violence to stop it.
Thanks for clarifying. I do not think there is a slippery slope here at all myself, because we have nice bright lines drawn at November of 2028 and January 2029. If elections do not happen then, and Trump is still in power beyond his term, that would justify removing him from power by force. I would guess a 4% chance this situation occurs. But violence against the regime before those dates would be wrong, and mistaking individual Trump voters for part of the regime would also be wrong.
If I were a dictator-to-be, I would try to dim those lines by either finding some sort of emergency that makes it necessary to "postpone" the election, or somehow rigging the election to come out in my favor. The presidential election has never, ever been postponed before in the US, including during the Civil War. I am quite certain no emergency will come up that justifies it, and if he says one does, he should be prepared to be removed from power anyway. As for rigging the election, he can't do that because it's already his second term, so there is no constitutional outcome in which he wins. If Vance wins the election, it should by default be assumed to be a legitimate victory, and should take extraordinary evidence to argue away from that initial assumption, same as if Buttigieg wins.
This all seems pretty obvious and straightforward to me, but I guess sometimes the internet could do with more people saying the obvious and straightforward take aloud.
I think you're still kind of missing Caleb's point, which as I read it has nothing to do with how, when or why to depose Trump. What he's saying is that *even discussing the issue in these terms*, as a potential reaction specifically to hypothetical right-wing malfeasances, is *inherently partisan* and a sign of an unconscious or deliberate political bias – which is made worse (though by no means created) by the fact that on every objective metric the left is by far the more likely side to actually commit these hypothetical malfeasances, in post-WWII America.
Personally I agree with Wanda Tinasky that I don't think this is what Scott is doing. But it seems clear that from Caleb's perspective, discussing particulars of Trump, even to *dismiss* the possibility of violent intervention as you're doing, perpetuates the problem he's seeing.
Nnnno, I think this is on a different level. Here, an example: suppose the right wing, hypothetically, constantly discussed crime in terms of "how much Asian-American crime can we tolerate before collective vigilante violence against Asian-Americans becomes justified?" Constantly, every news outlet nationwide. And then, when you criticized this framing, all anybody on the right ever said was "well what, you like crime? Are you pro-crime? Big criminal apologist? Mob liker?"
At this point, if you say "God dammit, Asian-Americans don't even commit a lot of crime! They commit *less* crime than white people!", that's not a tu quoque, right? You're just trying to emphasize how absurd and detached from reality this bigoted framing is, not trying to excuse Asian-American crime by pointing out that whites commit crime too.
Ah, I did not see that one at all. Perhaps it is related to decoupling as described by John Nerst here: https://everythingstudies.com/2018/05/25/decoupling-revisited/ I tend to do my thinking by taking an idea, breaking it into pieces, and seeing how they fit together. But a lot of people think by making associations between concepts and calling on them later, and for them, seeing those particular ideas next to each other more than their fair share of the time is not good.
People have been lying about Trump's right to be president since 2016 with the Russiagate stuff... and then he actually did try to keep power in 2020, just as we were warned. That is actually pretty concerning, and is why I think attempted dictatorship is a larger risk (though still small in absolute terms) from him than from other presidents. I don't see this situation as at all symmetric. (The spree of assassinations lately is best left to the police.) Yet, I can very much sympathize with both sides here: On the one hand, people started talking about this possibility _way_ too early, which apparently lately risks setting off some deranged lunatic on a murder mission. But on the other hand, if it actually happens and people are not prepared, that could be very very bad (assuming the military does not simply intervene to remove him and hold elections, which I think would be the most likely outcome should he attempt it). Some amount of discussion of the situation beforehand is required for everybody to be on the same page about what to do in the unlikely case it does happen.
I've also noticed a pattern lately where someone will say "[person] might do [bad thing] and need to be stopped", then when the date comes, assume it has happened even though there has been no sign the person actually did the bad thing. This happened both in 2016, when Hillary was warning us of Russian hacking, and in 2020, when Trump was warning us of election fraud. I feel like there's a few more recent cases I'm forgetting, as well. So there is also a concern that if people get the idea too far into their heads, they might think it has happened even if it doesn't. I don't know what to do about that, but at least for this particular instance, I expect news outlets to be reporting the actual facts of the situation within hours if not minutes, which should avert that particular confusion.
Criticizing hypocrisy is generally not useful. It can be emotionally satisfying, but it is intellectually empty, because it says nothing about anything substantive. A hypocrite is someone who says one thing and does another. If you think there’s a problem here, you should say which of the two is the problem, or else you run the risk of the person “fixing” their hypocrisy by turning entirely against what you think is right, rather than turning entirely towards it.
Booo! Bad comment. Criticising hypocrisy is always valuable because thr contradiction between words and deeds is in itself a sign of a lack of integrity and a lack of consistency, coherence. These are key intellectual virtues - if a person doesn't display them, you can hardly take that person seriously on other issues.
(I don't think Scott is failing here at all, but I want to defend in general the critique of hypocrisy)
I do think that when denouncing the hypocrisy of someone who promotes A in some context and B in some other, it is good practice to disclose your own opinions on A and B. Not doing it might be hypocritical itself because, if you are pro A and anti B, it falsely suggests to the pro B, anti A people that you are on their side.
Its extremely useful for third parties that are reading this blog and are on the fence on the issue. I am under no delusions that I can convince Scott, way smarter people than me (even Scott has about 30+ IQ points on me) have tried and failed miserably.
I actually don’t see how identifying hypocrisy is useful for third parties! It shows an internal tension within someone’s actions and speech, but I don’t think it helps them figure out which is good and which is bad.
In spirit I agree with you: progressivism is closer to communism than Trump is to fascism and communism is the more dangerous ideology, but the Left is willing to discuss these ideas because they dispositionally are more comfortable with violence and destruction (riots are heavily Left-coded) and so normalize the possibility. However I'll give Scott the benefit of the doubt and interpret his post as primarily political rather than ideological: he's trying to talk to the Left in a way that the Left is willing to understand. If he said the objectively correct (in my view) thing (namely, that the fact that they even consider political violence is an indictment of their worldview) then the people most prone to violence would just reject the message. I think it's uncharitable to call him a hypocrite. In my view he's being pragmatic.
>progressivism is closer to communism than Trump is to fascism
This is an absurd comment. US progressivism has nothing to do with communism, in theory or in practice. Progressives are often the greatest barriers to communists, politically speaking over say 1880-2025. Even if you take something like Obamacare as a progressive policy - not only wasn't it socialist, but as a general mandate to enrich insurance companies it was actually _less_socialist than say Margaret Thatcher's stance on the NHS, a British policy which was in itself maybe a bit socialist but by no means communist.
It's just observational. Virtually all riots and destructive political demonstrations in my lifetime have been by liberals. The Weather Underground, the 68 Chicago riot, Watts, Rodney King, BLM, Ferguson, Occupy, the recent Gaza campus protests ... the list is endless. Liberals always seem to be a hair-trigger away from anarchy. To be fair, I suspect that's downstream of the civil rights and feminists movements. Leftists learned the lesson that large scale demonstration leads to the achievement of their political goals. There's a liberal heritage of thinking that sufficient political provocation justifies violence and so it now attracts people who are angry at society and like to be destructive. Conservatives are much more law-and-order by nature. The average cop is right-wing.
From your list of all the political violence in your lifetime you very conveniently left off Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Anders Breivik, the murder of Jo Cox, Brenton Tarrant's Christchurch massacre, Dylann Roof's shooting up a church, January 6, the murder of Melissa Hortman, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the Charlottesville vehicular homicide of Heather Heyer, and so on and so forth.
How do you hold scientific research in comparison to your own observations? Most scientific reporting does not mesh with your observations. Consider updating your beliefs; if you don't, consider what evidence someone could give that would make you update your beliefs. is there any?
some of these are more about murder rather than general violence, but they provide numbers rather than just personal observations.
edit - to make my claim explicit; this is specifically about your statement "Virtually all riots and destructive political demonstrations in my lifetime have been by liberals" - the sources I posted seem to provide a counterfactual.
Same answer I had for the angry anti-Trump guy last week. Political violence, IMO, becomes valid if someone tries to take away elections, but not before. As long as there's a means of voting old governments out and new governments in, you have a non-violent means of making policy change, and to put it mildly we are all collectively *much* better off if we continue to respect our social bargain to confine our resolution of policy disputes to non-violent means. So your responsibility (assuming you're the kind of person who wants to live in a republic and play a role in your own governance in the first place) is to stick to those non-violent means.
So it isn't a matter of "how many illegal immigrants count as violence." The same way it isn't a matter of "how many people dying of medical conditions that could have been treated if we had universal healthcare counts as violence." If you want to live in a republic, "I don't like the healthcare/immigration policy decisions of my elected President & Congress" simply isn't a valid reason for political violence in the first place. If you don't like the state of something in the law, you have a nonviolent means of addressing that. Rally with like-minded individuals, win elections, and change policy with the majorities you've earned.
Violence comes into play when that nonviolent means of addressing issues is *taken away*. When you go from "I don't like the policy decisions of my elected President & Congress," to "my President and Congress have barred me from removing them, meaning I and my fellow citizens lack any non-violent means of changing the direction of our country, and it doesn't matter what most, or even all, of us think about immigration, healthcare, or any other issue." *That's* when you man the barricades. Not before.
Political violence is almost always retarded. In the rare circumstances where political violence isn't retarded, you won't have to come to an online forum to ask for clarification.
I realize that the other political side is being retarded right now. The correct response is not to also be retarded; just let the left dig its own grave. Only retards would publicly question when they are morally allowed to murder half the country in a public forum closely tied to their real name.
I get the feeling you're too young to remember, like, 2013, but there was a point when the left dominated literally every avenue of public discourse, respectable opinion, and social media. Widespread banning of every conservative voice, including the former president of the US, was the norm.
Do you want to know how they lost that complete social dominance? By doing retarded sh*t like:
#1 Brutally murdering a father in front of his children.
#2 Celebrating his murder on Reddit for days like Santa Claus just canceled all their student loans.
#3 Eventually, one of their foremost intellectual voices has to write "No, for realzies, it is not currently okay to murder our political opponents."
There are still normal people. And normal people look at half the political spectrum publicly debating whether they're allowed to kill people they disagree with and then go and vote for Trump no matter what stupid stuff he does.
People who publicly debate whether they can murder hundreds of millions of people are retarded on so many levels and everyone can see it, so they lose. Don't be retarded, don't lose, when leftists have to get into public debates about whether they can murder people, that's them losing. Don't copy it, don't respond to it, just sit back, look at your normie neighbor, and go "Can you believe this sh*t?"
Perhaps Scott is just trying to be persuasive (1):
"For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. Then I cited Jezebel and various Ethnic Studies professors being against trigger warnings. Then I tried to argue that trigger warnings actually go together well with strong versions of freedom of speech. At this point I haven’t even started arguing in favor of trigger warnings, I’ve just set up an unexpected terrain in which trigger warnings can be seen as a conservative thing supported by people who like free speech and don’t like social justice, and opposition to trigger warnings can be seen as the sort of very liberal thing that people like Jezebel and Ethnic Studies professors support. The important thing isn’t that I convince anyone that trigger warnings are really on the right – that’s a tall order – but that the rightists reading my argument feel like I’m working with them rather than against them. I’m not just another leftist saying “Support trigger warnings because it’s the leftist thing and you should be leftist and everyone on the right is terrible!”
My reward was seeing a bunch of hard-core anti-social-justice types trip over themselves in horror at actually being kind of convinced, which was pretty funny.
On the other hand, when I’m trying to convince feminists of something, I start with a trigger warning – partly because I genuinely believe it’s a good idea and those posts can be triggering, but also partly because starting with a trigger warning is a tribal signal that people on the right rarely use. It means that either I’m on their side, or I’m being unusually respectful to it. In this it’s a lot like Trump saying illegal immigrants are rapists – something the outgroup would never, ever do.
(And that’s not just my theory – I’ve gotten lots of angry comments about the trigger warnings from people further right than me, saying that using them makes me an idiot or a pushover or a cuck or something. I am always happy to get these comments, because it means the signaling value of using trigger warnings remains intact.)
Crossing tribal signaling boundaries is by far the most important persuasive technique I know, besides which none of the others even deserve to be called persuasive techniques at all. But to make it work, you have to actually understand the signals, and you have to have at least an ounce of honest sympathy for the other side. You can’t just be like “HELLO THERE, FELLOW LIBERALS! LET’S CREATE INTRUSIVE BIG GOVERNMENT AGENCIES TOGETHER! BUT BEFORE WE DO, I HAVE SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT…”
Which I guess means that being able to consider both sides of an issue sort of gives you superpowers. That’s pretty encouraging."
2. large sections of the USA economy depend on cheap immigrant labor, and have a lot more influence on governmental policy than a few leftists. You’re barking up the wrong tree.
You're missing the point. Replace this specific issue with any liberal position, and watch how the same slippery slope justifies violence. That's exactly what Scott is doing, just from the opposite direction.
- Support ICE enforcement? You're enabling fascism, and stopping fascism justifies preemptive action.
- Strong ethnic or national pride? Advocate for border security and national sovereignty? That's the road to authoritarianism, neutralize the threat.
- A Christian with traditional values who resists the arrow of history going left? You're a dangerous reactionary by definition.
Where does this logic end? At what point can democratically elected officials implement the policies they were voted in to enact without facing threats of assassination? And if this framework is legitimate—if labeling political opponents as existential threats justifies violence—why is the right uniquely forbidden from adopting the same standard?
Either political violence is categorically illegitimate, or we're establishing a rule that only applies in one direction. You can't condemn political violence while simultaneously maintaining that certain viewpoints are so dangerous they necessitate extralegal action.
>How many illegal immigrants pouring through the border is enough to count as violence, making political violence against Communists/Socialists just "self-defense" and legitimized?
This would seem to be an issue of capitalism, currently, moreso than socialism or communism.
Violent communist movements have typically been repressed by the state even in democratic countries (violently, but I guess in a different sense than what was meant here). Extralegal violence has almost always either failed or been a part of an equivalent fascist reaction leading to a civil war or a fascist dictatorship, unless there's a particular variety of a state willing to curb both communists and fascists.
Which political bloc is *currently* (not a fifty, hundred etc. years ago) supporting illegal immigration and calling anyone who is against this a "Fascist"? I'll give you three guesses.
I guess my epistemic sample is N=1, where a representative of a particular political party was canvasing and told me that "illegal immigration is good for me".
Could you please, already when you make posts, provide sources for them? That way people can more easily say if your response is relevant or not ,rather than vaguely waving at events as if they are meaningful.
Even better, make your point explicit: "I think that the bonus army is a counterexample to your mention of violent communists typically being repressed, since they are violent communists and weren't repressed: link to wiki/paper/book"
(note that this is me making things up; I do not know the bonus army, have a fulltime job, and have been disappointed in you posting sources you said supported your statements before)
I agree, but I did see someone on the Fascism thread argued that the government reducing spending on healthcare is violence, and if you consider that violence then it seems like illegal immigration policy may also qualify.
The sensible thing to do is to only count violence (physical force intended to damage or kill) as violence.
Reducing spending on healthcare often means that people have worse bodily health than they would otherwise. This is clearly an extended use of the concept of “violence”, but it’s connected to the core idea that someone’s body is undergoing damage that it wouldn’t have otherwise.
I don’t see the case *at all* for violation of immigration laws to count as violence, unless you can argue that an important net result is harm to people’s bodies.
We have to admit that some actions like a president ordering bombs to be dropped count as violence, even though the president isn’t exerting any physical force himself. The question is how far to go.
While there is a weak connection to the idea of violence, signing a bill lowering healthcare spending cannot be violence. It is not physical force intended to damage or kill. Saying that it is violence is a method of taking the connotative force of the word violence and using it to promote a political point. There is an enormous difference between a legislator bashing someone over the head with a 2x4 and taking away their healthcare coverage, and calling the latter violence gives it the emotional valance of the former.
Could reducing healthcare coverage result in harm occurring to someone that wouldn't otherwise occur? Certainly. Could it be an immoral action? It might. But it's not violence. If it was violence, then most political issues, including illegal immigration, are also about violence. Sometimes illegal immigrants hurt people. If you don't enforce laws against illegal immigration, then you will have more illegal immigrants, and if you have more illegal immigrants you will have more cases where an illegal immigrant hurts someone. That's about as connected to violence as the healthcare argument is: "If you do this, then someone will get hurt that wouldn't have got hurt otherwise."
Similarly any safety deregulation would be an act of violence, and anybody opposing efforts to increase safety regulations would also be committing an act of violence. Anyone who raises taxes would be committing an act of violence, as there will be someone somewhere who will end up physically hurt because they didn't have as much money as they would have if taxes were lower. Similarly anyone who lowers taxes would be committing an act of violence, as someone will end up physically hurt because they had more money than they would have otherwise (perhaps by spending that money on drugs, or fatty foods, or a gun to shoot someone with). Raising healthcare spending would also be violence, because if someone has insurance that they wouldn't have had otherwise then they might get healthcare services they wouldn't have had otherwise, and as a result might experience iatrogenetic harms from hospital acquired infections, or medical errors, or being prescribed medications they didn't need that have harmful side effects.
Can political decisions, like determining healthcare spending, result in people being harmed? Certainly. But not all harm is violence. Violence is a very specific form of harming someone, one that we have a strong cultural taboo against for important reasons.
Does a general ordering soldiers to fire count as violence? Does a dictator ordering his henchman to massacre people count as violence? Neither of these is physical force that damages or kills (though both directly lead to such force, if the orders are followed).
I agree that the healthcare case is tenuous, but that it’s very similar to the case for counting certain kinds of tax increases or decreases, and certain kinds of safety regulation being imposed or removed, as violence.
I wouldn’t want to count anything that leads to an injury as violence - I would only count something that foreseeably leads to a noticeable increase in the injury rate. (Some safety regulations in fact do this, like the regulations that drive utilities away from nuclear towards coal, or the regulations that drive travelers away from train and plane and towards cars.)
I still don’t see how the immigration case gets counted, unless you are talking about a group of people immigrating who are more prone to violence than the general population (which hasn’t been the case in any country I’m aware of for many decades).
>Does a general ordering soldiers to fire count as violence? Does a dictator ordering his henchman to massacre people count as violence?
No. They are orders to perform violence, but the orders are not violence themselves. That would be like saying ordering lunch at a restaurant is an act of cooking.
Of course such orders might be morally wrong orders to give. Lots of things that aren't violence are morally wrong!
As far as illegal immigration goes, if you treat any policy decision that foreseeably leads to a noticeable increase in the injury rate, then you open up the floor for arguments that not enforcing immigration laws will foreseeably lead to such an increase. If someone makes such an argument, and many people believe it, should those people then treat politicians who are soft on illegal immigration as committing acts of violence? That's not a world I would like to live in.
"Does a general ordering soldiers to fire count as violence? Does a dictator ordering his henchman to massacre people count as violence?"
No, they don't. Arguably both are worse than violence, but they're not violence. If the general clapped a revolver to someone's head and blew his brains out, that would be violence; the other is just ordering *others* to do violence, which isn't the same thing.
Agreed, but why play by those rules when they are not? If owning houses and then renting them out is classified as violence by some in the left, then illegal immigration which is a literal invasion has a bigger claim to it.
If someone is planning on killing you it would be prudent not to copy the stupid things they do. Pretending that non-violence is violence is stupid. Copying that stupidity makes you more likely to get killed, not less.
It’s a little known fact, to you apparently, that if you live in a country where the correct spelling of ‘Center’ is ‘Centre’ as you put it in your OP, you are out of range of any highly unlikely hypothetical anti-ICE violence in the US. Get with the programme.
So long as "political violence" isn't backed by physical violence, I think it must be an issue of free speech. It ought to be easy to show that Communism (at national scale) and socialism don't accomplish their stated aims, so it should be put down from intellectual debate.
Of course, the general populace can still be seduced by the nice sounding promises, despite history.
I've read it. Physical violence is called for when the system no longer works, was the point.
I posted about this in the thread. It need not be Communism or socialism, but could be anything you want. And then you don't even need the first point.
Why are you bringing up political violence not backed by physical violence then? (is that even thing? How would that work?) Scotts' post is talking explicitly about physical violence and about a specific group - not even a specific group actually, a *perceived* group. I don't see any [generic label] applied, not even contemplated or implied.
I stand corrected on not considering "physical violence" the same as "political violence". Nonetheless, the following two statements are in logical conflict:
2. [Any targets] are an acceptable target for political violence
3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
Leaving aside that your link does not say that they are illegal immigrants, OBVIOUSLY the ethnic cleansing (not genocide) in question is a type of violence, regardless of who did it. No one disputes that. The question was whether illegal ENTRY is a form of violence, IN AND OF ITSELF. Surely you understand the difference, so are you trolling? It's like pointing to this guy and saying that refugee resettlement is a form of intellectual inquiry
But I thought they were on the same side? Despite disagreements, both progressive in general?
I think this. Just like Christians don't always act Christian, progressives don't always act progressive. Then they feel guilt and then they like to receive a good humiliating tongue-lashing from a saintly preacher, as it helps them process the guilt. So Chomsky was not what the NYT wrote, but what the NYT through they should have written.
It’s a mistake to think that two different people are “on the same side”, unless there is a very specific debate with only two sides that you are talking about. “Progressivism” is a broad collection of people with some overlap in views, but for any two people that fall under that term, you’ll find some significant disagreements between them.
Some Christians are bad Christians, to be sure, but even among the very good Christians, they often have very different views about what that requires.
I think the NYT-Chomsky difference can be analyzed on the four-quadrant political spectrum: right/left vs authoritarian/anarchist. They're both on the left but the NYT is high-authority while Chomsky is the opposite. NYT wants to retain the elite but purge them of conservatives while Chomsky wants to get rid of elites entirely.
This was actually very insightful. Both statements ring true to me. Congrats.
But I have some difficulties with the four-quadrant thing... what is authoritarian left? Left means equality, how can an inequality of authority/power lead to some kind of equality? It is contradictory.
Yes, yes I know, authoritarian let was the Soviet Union. But I actually did live in Sovietized Hungary and I think their leftiness was all fake. It was just plain simple authoritarianism dressed up with socialist rhethoric. Sure, they were anti-capitalist, but not for the right (or "right") reasons, but basically they just wanted to control everything.
The leaders still lived in luxuries. It is just that those luxuries were not earned on the market. Technically they did not own anything, but practically they could use palaces and private jets and all, any time they wanted.
The whole thing looked like a kind of feudalism to me, where technically the king owns the land, not the baron, but the baron uses it, so he gets to live rich anyway.
I guess I would very much like make it one-dimensional, by declaring some quadrants simply fake, and the Soviet style "authoritarian left" was simply fake to me.
I won't get into the libertarian right right now, but one hint: some private properties, like Anna Creek, are the size of countries, so the owner is basically a king. You get which way this is going?
Anyway, back to NYT "keep the elites but without conservatives" I think for the most part, this can be interpreted as liberal elites and conservative elites are more like cultural tribes.
I don’t think this is exactly a useful diagnosis here. There are also orthodox communists who really do embrace authoritarian leftism, whose views are very different from either the nytimes or Chomsky.
Oh quite right. What I said was a little sloppy. Chomsky specifically wants to eliminate the current caste of social elites and have it replaced with an intellectual political class. So while he's politically authoritarian the solution that he prefers would completely upend the current social hierarchy, which is typical of communism and explains why it remains perpetually appealing to disaffected young people (cf the Cultural Revolution). The NYT on the other hand is all about the existing status hierarchy - limousine liberals etc.
Oh wait, you said *Chomsky* is the authoritarian and the nytimes is libertarian? That’s a misunderstanding. Chomsky has always been a left-anarchist, not an authoritarian.
I think any analysis based on breaking the world into two sides is going to be reductive, and produce contradicting results. I doubt that Chomsky would self-describe as an elite - provided this is true, I think there's not much else to say.
How do you classify who is an elite and who is not? Can Republicans be elites? Can MAGA Republicans be elites? Are all elites progressives? Can a Democrat fail to be progressive? Can a Christian be elite but not progressive? Once you start to realise that none of these questions have black and white answers (and if you try to impose them you necessarily find yourself arguing about weird edge cases) - you understand that most of the 'debate' on the internet is based on failure to agree upon proper definitions first.
As you pointed out above, and I did, the reduction of an issue to a false binary is simplistic and unhelpful. Personally, I think having commentators start with definitions would take a lot of the heat out of political debate.
I shouldn't have speculated about what Chomsky would say. My own definition of elite wasn't clear when I was writing that -- more precisely I intended the claim that I doubt Chomsky would be aligned with the values of the NYT (to the extent that an organisation has values in the way that a person does).
If I may politics a little: I think the lack of a Real Left actually enables the far right.
Imagine a right-winger posting the 14/50 meme, that 14% of the US population, blacks, commit 50% of the crime.
To me a Real Leftist says entirely unfazed "Yes, poverty causes crime. Abolish black poverty." And then maybe you can have a constructive discussion.
But liberals don't do this, their answer is typically "shut up about it".
This draws people to the far right because they are at least willing to discuss this.
The insane thing is, we can actually prove abolishing poverty ends crime, because this is literally what happened to most white people. There used to be big white crime rates and not anymore. Like how the poorer parts of London were absolutely a cesspool of crime, alcoholism, prostitution and everything bad. And not anymore. This debate is winnable.
1. There is no consensus on how to solve poverty, so you are not offering them great odds there. 2. Are you in any danger of voting left yourself? If not you are asking them to put existing electoral support at risk for the sake of your respect, and that is not a good trade for a political movement.
They don't do that because it's a losing argument. Poverty doesn't, in fact, cause crime: the richest quintile of blacks have higher violent crime rates than the poorest quintile of whites. RCA did an excellent analysis of this:
Any rigorous discussion of this topic will eventually get to a place that would undermine the modern liberal political program. That's because it's largely based on an oppression narrative that simply does not survive sustained contact with reality. That's why they taboo the topic and refuse to openly debate it.
FWIW the crime/poverty correlation you mention isn't causal. Poverty doesn't cause crime. Low IQ causes both, with mediating cultural effects (low IQ also causes bad culture). I'm not familiar with London but I'm sure it's similar to what happened in e.g. Oakland: gentrification priced low IQ people out and when they left crime fell.
No, seriously, would you deny that white crime rates in practically any country are much better now than in 1850? Such a denial would be insane to me. But if you accept that, then what happened? I am not saying simply poverty got reduced. But it is also not true that whites somehow got a huge IQ boost, that does not happen either. SOMETHING about conditions, about the total environment changed. Not necessarily simply money…
Now, such a change is not instanteous, because culture is basically adaptation to circumstances, so it can take 2-3 generations. So it worked for whites, so it works for rich blacks whose grandparents were poor - look at their kids, their crime rates will be much much lower.
On IQ. I know this white guy born from wealthy parents, who is just so super dull, he does not even talk about sportsball, he just does not talk about anything, and not interested in anything. He has a great difficulty with the simplest jobs and gets fired a lot as a delivery driver and suchlike. He never committed a crime.
Partially because his parents provided him a soft environment to grow up in, and thus he never got violent.
But also because every time he is fired, his parents bail him out. Never money problems. And sooner or later the inheritance is coming.
And I think the biggest part was that growing up in that kind of household, he never ever got “bad company”. He never had “ghetto friends”.
This is just one example, I know multiple stupid (moderately) rich kids, somehow part of my extended family is absolutely blessed with them… one of them, his parents bought him a convenience store in a good location, started in the inventory, the staff, and all, and all he needed to do was to buy more inventory… like basic foodstuffs, like if the mustard is out, go buy more mustard… this kind of work. FAIL. All big failures, all bailed out by parents regularly, all never committed a crime.
Increased state capacity, primarily. We now have more and better-funded law enforcement, prisons, and legal institutions. When the average person makes 80k per year then the state has a much higher incentive (and tax base) to protect the average life than it does when that same person makes 2k per year. As a general principle it's rare for a factor which explains variance for a social outcome like crime over a given population at a fixed time to also explain variance for the same culture over centuries. Too many other things change over that period and confound analysis.
>I know this white guy born from wealthy parents
The plural of anecdote is not data. I know plenty of poor people who grew up in abusive households that never became criminals. Yes it's harder to be poor. That doesn't mean that poverty leads to a life of crime. The data indicate that it generally does not.
>Increased state capacity, primarily. We now have more and better-funded law enforcement, prisons, and legal institutions.
This would then predict increased white prison populations since then? Seems to me it rather decreased, sorry, I do not have any numbers, I just know back then they tried to use everything from old ships to Australia as prisons, which looks like a big number.
>the state has a much higher incentive
Sorry, the state is not a singular actor with one head. It is many actors with many different personal incentives, which largely explains why the state is usually so inefficient.
>Too many other things change over that period and confound analysis.
This I dig totally.
>The plural of anecdote is not data.
Bayes would say data is stronger evidence, anecdote is weaker evidence.
> I know plenty of poor people who grew up in abusive households that never became criminals.
I did not mean the causation is 100%, I think if one thing we can both try to agree in is that while the number of criminal acts are in some sense high, the number of criminals is low because it is usually a small number of people committing a large number of them, right?
But I do give you that this cancels my argument - that my rich stupid friends/relations simply were not of that small number either. So ultimately because the number is small, neither wealth nor IQ are good predictors, both most low-IQ people and poor people will not be criminals.
And I repeat that I do not imply an overly simplistic poverty-reductionism, but a far bigger concept of "conditions". Again, my rich stupid dudes were also living a sheltered life and they never ever had "bad company" friends and that matters too. That's because that one guy I know who turned into a really bad criminal had a case of "bad company" friends...
EDIT: more on "bad company"... I have heard a saying "you will become like the five people you surround yourself with" and then many smart bloggers said never take this truly literally, but also never ignore this either, it does have some levels of truth. Could we explore this?
>This would then predict increased white prison populations since then?
How do you know they haven't increased? I'm guessing they have.
Look, there's lots of sociological data on this. I posted you some. Crime simply isn't explained well by poverty.
>Sorry, the state is not a singular actor with one head. It is many actors with many different personal incentives, which largely explains why the state is usually so inefficient.
That's not really relevant. I agree the state is inefficient, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't respond to incentives in a decentralized manner. It has an strong incentive to maximize tax revenue and therefore an incentive to police crime. In any case it certainly has more resources to spend on law enforcement now than it did 200 years ago.
I'm a filthy left leaning european, and my answer to this is - it is fine to discuss it, but it's not that relevant to what policies to support. I think that certainly poverty is correlated with crime, even if it is not the only cause. As Ogre points out, I think there is ample historical evidence for this. And even if they were not correlated at all, poverty is a cause of suffering. So I support fighting poverty through some reasonable amount of redistribution, and enacting policies to protect poor people from being exploited (like worker rights).
I have no problem debating it, but I very much doubt low IQ is the principal or only cause of crime, though I think it is also true that low IQ is correlated with crime as well.
Since you're not American I'll go ahead and explain that a shocking amount of Leftist policy here depends on blank slate assumptions (a sentiment captured by this post: https://substack.com/@ubersoy/note/c-166819775). All racial disparities are typically assumed to be conclusive evidence of racist oppression (did you not pay attention to the Great Awokening?). This explains much in education policy, where increasing amounts of funding are directed towards underperforming schools under the delusion that that is somehow compensating for the racism which causes the low achievement: this has resulted in trillions upon trillions of wasted tax dollars over the decades for no gain. Tests are endlessly redesigned to reduce racial disparities. Elite colleges even eliminated standardized tests in the name of equity. Ditto for arguments about crime policy, income disparities, and employment gaps. I wouldn't be surprised if the refusal to be honest about IQ costs us several GDP % in deadweight losses from higher crime, educational mismatch, misapplied human capital, etc. It's also maximally harmful to minority communities because it fosters a culture of victimization and learned helplessness.
>I very much doubt low IQ is the principal or only cause of crime
I'm not an expert but my understanding of the literature is that heritable cognitive factors (IQ and impulsivity) are by far the single biggest predictor of crime. They dwarf SES factors.
Crime in this context means violent crime: homicide, theft, armed robbery, assault, etc. White collar crime is obviously a very different matter and has it own distinct dynamics.
As far as I can tell there is a Real Left. They are still stuck talking about policy solutions to things like poverty.
What has disappeared is the Real Right - there seems to be no one among the current crop of 'right' politicians (at the federal level at least) talking about any kinds of policy solutions to any kinds of problems. Other than raising taxes on imports to reduce the trade deficit, it's all noise and villification as far as I can tell.
>To me a Real Leftist says entirely unfazed "Yes, poverty causes crime. Abolish black poverty."
I hear people saying this all the time. If this is a prime example of things only Real Leftists say, then it is manifest that a Real Left exists where at least some Americans can hear them.
Didn’t the crime rate rise under Joe Biden? Or had it already spiked enough by late 2020 that it was above the rate it had fallen to by early 2025, before the further drops this year?
>We might as well say "There's a place in East London, and it causes people who live there to be criminals." (Yes, this seems obvious that it's wrong.)
I really think it is like that. Conditions determine consciousness. It is not simply monetary poverty, it is that the whole place can be so depressing that you just lash out. Perhaps the reservations are not that depressing or there is nothing to do crime on, or no one with.
>underground economy
That in itself is determined by circumstances. Again it might not be a simplistic poverty-line monetary figures because human conditions cannot be represented by simple numbers. But it is possible that some non-measurable parts of the living conditions are more depressing.
My strongest argument is that it has been done before, people's conditions were improved and their behaviour got in like 1-2 generations better. This is how white crime mostly disappeared. It's not even necessarily welfare, I could even accept conservative-leaning job-creators-creating-jobs arguments. That is also conditions. Conditions do not necessarily mean the usual kinds of lefty methods, I mean we all know at this point that the usual lefty government-housing thing was a disaster. So I would be ideologically flexible on this. Whatever improves conditions. Maybe libertarianism does. It is just a generic and not measurable improvement in conditions, but we know it was done in the past, so doable.
The UK is attempting to fine 4chan, an American company that does not have any offices in the UK. 4chan, as expected, told them to fuck off. What is the likely outcome of this?
There was something similar, but other way around, with BetOnSports operating the UK in defiance of US laws, and that ended poorly for them.
4chan will probably just wind up blocked in the UK. I don't think BetOnSports is a good comparison because the US has far greater reach than the UK does and we're an important market. Plus they used US financial markets and payment processors which exposed them to jurisdictional claims. 4chan can probably lose UK traffic without really noticing.
Suppose you have no Bitcoin, but think it will fall, so you borrow some Bitcoin from other people and sell them to yet other people. For this example, let's say it's $1B in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is at $120k when you sell it. 30 minutes later, after the announcement, Bitcoin is now about $100k. You now buy the Bitcoin back at the lower price, and get to keep the difference, which in this case appears to be $88M.
This does stink of insider trading. If someone in the administration knew about the announcement and understood the implications on Bitcoin, then either acted on it or told someone else with the means to act on it, then this certainly is a crime.
$88M sounds like a lot and the tweet is implying corruption, but for a Bitcoin billionaire it would just be play money. The coin is up over 20% ytd, which would be $200M on its own.
How many thousands of giant short term trades do you think are made on any given day? But you think this one is important, because someone tweeted about it?
Do you want to investigate every winning trade ever made on any day that Trump announced something stupid?
The way traditional short selling works is that you borrow the asset from someone and then sell the stuff you borrowed with the intention of buying it back later at a lower price. The lender is usually a brokerage house or a mutual fund which holds assets nominally owned by their clients. In this case, I'd guess the lender(s) would be big Bitcoin exchanges. This is a normal part of how brokerages and mutual funds make money and is explicitly permitted in the terms and conditions. If the borrower fails to buy back and return the asset to the brokerage, then the brokerage is responsible for making their clients whole. The borrowers are usually required to put up collateral that the brokerages can take if the borrower defaults.
The price goes down when there's a big short sale like this partly because the seller is actually selling a bunch of Bitcoins which bids prices down, and partly because the news of the sale can affect market sentiment because small investors might take it as a hint that the big short seller knows something they don't about where prices are likely to go in the medium term.
Nobody explains these things better than Matt Levine so I'll just paste the relevant part from yesterday's newsletter:
"There was a crypto crash last week. Bloomberg’s Muyao Shen and Olga Kharif reported:
A record $19 billion in bets evaporated and crypto prices tumbled, due in large part to newly severe China tariffs announced by President Donald Trump. A combination of factors — leverage, automatically triggered sales, a lack of liquidity at odd hours for global trading — fueled what might have been a less dramatic obliteration of positions.
From the morning hours in Asia through the afternoon in the US on Saturday, traders, executives and market-data analysts were wondering who, exactly, had suffered losses. Did a large entity get completely hosed — or was this a case of a lot of small bettors watching their holdings evaporate to zero? More than 1.6 million traders were liquidated, according to data tracker CoinGlass. …
That said, liquidations were concentrated on smaller coins beyond Bitcoin and Ether, known as altcoins. Leverage tends to be higher and liquidity much lower in those less familiar tokens.
Quite a lot of crypto traders were making levered perp bets on altcoins, crypto exchanges regularly offer 40 or 50 or 100 to 1 leverage, and so when prices move slightly all those bets go to zero. Also the people who were making levered bets against those altcoins had their own trouble, as the losing bettors got liquidated:
Despite being smaller than rival Binance, Hyperliquid experienced the most extinguished trades in dollar value during the 24-hour-period selloff, at $10 billion, according to CoinGlass.
“Hyperliquid had the most amount of long liquidation, and least amount of liquidity to match,” said Ebtikar.
A risk-management mechanism called auto-deleveraging, or ADL, contributed.
ADL is designed to automatically close profitable or highly leveraged positions when liquidated trades exceed a certain capacity covered by insurance. Exchanges incorporate it to protect them from losses during extreme market volatility, but many market participants also blamed ADL for making the selloff worse. …
“This mechanism is not without complications, especially for participants with more complex portfolios,” said Spencer Hallarn, global head of OTC trading at crypto investment firm GSR.
“Quantitative liquidity providers and market-neutral participants can quickly find the winning sides of their trades closed prematurely due to ADL, leaving their overall books imbalanced and subject to market beta which can lead to problems, and a necessity to quickly pare imbalanced risk,” he said.
Right, yes, if a ton of crypto market structure consists of 40-to-1 levered bets, then you are going to have a lot of levered losing bettors blowing up, but you are also going to have a lot of weird results for the levered winning bettors. They can only get paid out of the losing bets.
Here is a more cynical take from John Hempton:
Lots of [altcoins] will make 10-15% moves in discontinuous markets. The way your exchange guards against going bust is by not actually buying all the crypto that [the customer] thinks he owns.
An exchange that doesn’t buy the underlying asset they have promised their clients is known as a “bucket shop.” This comes from the 1920s practice of gambling houses “trading” in stocks but really keeping all the money in a bucket. …
Bucket shops do not buy all the shares (or coins) necessary to hedge every client position. This is because they can’t manage the risk of a market plunge.
But as a result, they have a big problem in a bull market.
Imagine your little crypto exchange, now a bucket shop, does not actually buy $100K of $ATOM on [the customer’s] behalf. Then suppose $ATOM doubles — a realistic outcome in the recent bull market. Now you owe [the customer’s] a net $110k and you simply haven’t earned it. You have a very big shortfall. …
There is a solution to this insolvency, a simple one. One that was known in the 1920s as a “bucket shop drive” and was a discussion point in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
The idea is that, if you are a bucket shop that is systematically short crypto to your highly levered customers, an occasional 10% price drop can be very good for business: The customers all get wiped out and you keep their deposits. I don’t think that this explanation is necessary, just because standard crypto market structure explicitly buckets customer orders into matched books, but it is fun to think about."
I don't know where they made the account, there are many trading platforms for Bitcoin futures. Charles Schwab and Etrade, for example, support trading in bitcoin futures.
If the price of imports from China were to suddenly double (100% tariff), the expectation would be that the US economy would take a hit - many manufacturers rely on Chinese materials and components, so their costs would go up, prices would go up, inflation would go up, etc. When that happens, investors tend to cash out quickly from speculative investments; as we saw, the markets fell quite a bit on Friday.
That said, I would think Bitcoin was more like gold, in that it is held as a stable store of value, and that the price would go up (as gold did on Friday). Still, to make 88 million off of a fall of only a few % one would have to risk close to a billion, and I can't see anyone doing that on a whim, given the potential losses if Bitcoin went the other way.
There are likely other readers here who know a lot more about this than I do.
Anyone interested in lunch/dinner/coffee in Seattle next week 10/22 or 10/23? Visiting for a couple days, I run a healthcare tech AI department in the Midwest, interested in meeting up.
I Might Have Found A Testable Prediction Hidden In Atomic Physics (Or I'm Doing Numerology)
[Epistemic status: Wild speculation with one very concrete testable prediction. 60% confident the prediction is wrong but worth checking, 20% confident there's something real here, 20% I'm just pattern-matching numbers.]
You know how when you cool water, it doesn't gradually get "more solid"? It stays liquid... liquid... liquid... then snap—ice. Distinct phases. Same H₂O, completely different physics for each state.
What if the early universe did exactly the same thing?
And what if we could test this hypothesis by analyzing spectroscopy data that already exists in atomic physics archives?
I. Three Components, One Substance
The universe's energy budget is weirdly specific:
68% dark energy (measured via supernovae, CMB geometry)
27% dark matter (gravitational lensing, galaxy rotation)
5% ordinary matter (Big Bang Nucleosynthesis—so precise that changing it by a few % would break the periodic table)
Standard cosmology treats these as three fundamentally different things that happen to coexist.
But nobody knows WHY three. Why not two? Or five? Why these ratios?
II. The Phase Transition Hypothesis
What if they're all the same primordial energy, crystallized to different degrees?
Imagine a crystallization parameter χ (chi):
χ = 0: Uncondensed primordial energy
No mass, no charge, no structure
Property of spacetime itself
→ This is dark energy
χ ≈ 0.27: Partial crystallization
Acquires mass (gravity works)
No electromagnetic/weak/strong charge yet
"Frozen" before full differentiation
→ This is dark matter
χ ≈ 0.95: Full crystallization
All symmetries break
All forces emerge (EM, weak, strong)
Complete structure: quarks, atoms, chemistry
→ This is ordinary matter (us)
The Big Bang wasn't just "expansion"—it was a cosmic phase transition. Depending on local expansion rates and energy density, primordial energy crystallized to different degrees, creating three stable states.
Like supercooled water that suddenly freezes when you tap the glass—but cosmically, creating three distinct phases instead of just two.
III. Why This Matters: Each Phase Has Its Own Physics
Here's the crucial insight:
You cannot derive the laws of ice from the laws of steam. Both are H₂O, but ice has emergent properties (crystal lattices, rigidity, specific heat) that don't exist in the gas phase equations.
Same with the universe:
Our physics—quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, the Standard Model—describes the χ ≈ 0.95 state
We're doing "crystallography of highly organized matter"
Dark matter (χ ≈ 0.27) has its own emergent physics we can't derive from ours
Dark energy (χ = 0) is even more fundamental—it's the uncondensed ground state
This isn't a bug. It's the whole point.
We're not "missing" dark matter because it's hiding. We're missing it because it's literally in a different phase state with different physics.
IV. The α ≈ 1/137 Connection
The fine-structure constant α ≈ 1/137 determines:
Atomic energy levels
Spectral line positions
Chemical bond strengths
Basically all of atomic physics
But where does 1/137 come from? Standard Model: ¯\(ツ)/¯ "It's just a free parameter."
Crystallization framework: Maybe α encodes something about the crystallization process itself—the "beat frequency" at which primordial energy settled into stable matter. But that's speculative. What matters is what we can test.
V. The Testable Prediction
Here's where it gets interesting.
In condensed matter physics, when you have a phase transition, the order parameter doesn't just jump to a value and stay there. It oscillates around its equilibrium state—think of a pendulum settling down, or ripples in a pond after you drop a stone.
The crystallization parameter χ should behave the same way. After the Big Bang's rapid phase transition, χ wouldn't be perfectly static at χ = 0.95. It would oscillate slightly around that value:
χ(t) = χ₀ + A sin(ωt + φ)
These oscillations would be tiny—maybe 0.1% amplitude—but they'd have a characteristic frequency related to the fundamental physics of crystallization.
And if α governs the crystallization physics (like it governs atomic physics), then the oscillation frequency should be related to α.
This means: if particles are oscillations in the crystallization field, atomic spectral lines should show harmonic structure spaced by α × ν₀.
It's like how a vibrating string doesn't just produce one note—it produces harmonics at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. But here, the harmonics would be spaced by the fine-structure constant itself.
For Hydrogen's Hα Line (656.3 nm)
Main line: ν₀ = 4.57 × 10¹⁴ Hz
Predicted harmonics:
ν₀ × (1 - α) = main line - 3.3 THz
ν₀ × (1 + α) = main line + 3.3 THz
Amplitude: ~0.1% of main peak (small but detectable)
This is measurable with:
Optical frequency combs (Nobel Prize 2005, resolution < 1 Hz)
Ultra-cold hydrogen spectroscopy
Long integration times (days to weeks)
Why Nobody's Seen This
Because nobody's looked.
Atomic spectroscopists search for:
Isotope shifts (mass-dependent)
Stark/Zeeman effects (field-dependent)
Hyperfine structure (nuclear spin)
They don't look for harmonics spaced by α because standard QED doesn't predict them.
If you don't look, you don't find.
VI. The Data Already Exists
Here's the beautiful part: We might not need new experiments.
Atomic physics archives contain:
15+ years of precision hydrogen spectroscopy
Frequency comb measurements from NIST, MPQ Garching, JILA
Ultra-high resolution (better than 1 GHz)
High signal-to-noise ratios
What's needed:
FFT analysis for periodicities at Δν ≈ α × ν₀
Pattern matching for satellite peaks
Statistical significance testing
This isn't "build a billion-dollar telescope."
This is "grep through existing datasets for a pattern nobody was looking for."
Timeline if someone actually does this: Weeks. Maybe days.
VII. Why I'm Probably Wrong
The most obvious objection:
QED is really, really well tested**.** If there were 0.1% satellite peaks in atomic spectra, someone would've noticed by now... right?
Maybe. But consider:
Ultra-high-resolution spectroscopy (< 1 GHz) is only ~15 years old
Nobody was specifically looking for α-spaced harmonics (no theoretical reason to)
Most spectroscopy searches for known effects (isotope shifts, Zeeman splitting, etc.)
Weak signals in unexpected places get dismissed as systematic noise
It's like the story of pulsars: the signal was in radiotelescope data for years before anyone recognized it as real.
Or maybe the harmonics just aren't there. That's fine—clean falsification is valuable too.
VIII. But Here's Why You Should Check Anyway
Because the test is so cheap.
Cost: Zero dollars (use existing data)
Time: Days to weeks of analysis
Risk: None (QED doesn't break either way)
Reward if positive: Holy shit we found new physics in atomic spectra
Expected value calculation:
P(harmonics exist) ≈ 15%
Value if true ≈ transformative understanding of cosmology
Cost ≈ one grad student's afternoon
Positive expected value even with low prior.
IX. What Happens Next
If harmonics are found:
Crystallization field χ confirmed as physical
Connection between α and cosmic ratios validated
New physics beyond Standard Model
Implications for dark matter, dark energy, fundamental constants
If harmonics aren't found:
Oscillating-χ hypothesis falsified cleanly
Framework can still work with static χ
Or the whole thing was numerology (fine, we learned something)
Either way, we learn something definitive.
X. The Full Framework (If You're Intrigued)
I've written detailed technical articles exploring:
Mathematical formalization of the crystallization parameter χ
Black holes as decrystallizers (matter → χ = 0 at singularity, Hawking radiation as re-crystallization)
Time emerging from crystallization (no "before" the Big Bang because time = crystallization dynamics)
The cosmic cycle (black holes → evaporation → re-nucleation → next Big Bang)
E=mc² as crystallization energy (why matter-antimatter annihilation releases primordial energy)
Links to Medium articles:
Cosmic Crystallization: What If the Universe Is a Question of Phase? :
I am impressed. This is a great demonstration of when the whole Rationalism thing is a good idea. I am often dismissive of it, because when they talk about human matters, the whole thing breaks down because human matters cannot be well measured. But when talking about objects with measurable properties, it works great.
I don't think there's anything to this, but I have to give you credit for actually making specific predictions. I am puzzled by a couple of things here, maybe you can help me understand?
You call the universe's energy budget "weirdly specific"; in what way are they 'specific'?
Why do you need sub-gigahertz resolution to detect these lines when they're separated by over 3 THz? The wavelengths of your first-order satellite lines around H-alpha should be around 651nm and 661nm, so they should be very distinct from the parent line. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fraunhofer_Spektrum_Medium.jpg shows a spectrum recorded by Fraunhofer in 1815, with the Sodium D lines (separated by just 0.5nm) well resolved.
You're absolutely right, and thank you for catching this major inconsistency.
On "weirdly specific" ratios: I mean that we have exactly three distinct components (not a continuum) with values tightly constrained by independent observations (BBN fixes 5%, structure formation fixes 27%, expansion fixes 68%). The framework proposes these aren't three arbitrary substances but three phase states of one field.
On the spectroscopy prediction: You've exposed a fatal error in my reasoning.
If harmonics exist at ~0.1% intensity and are separated by ~5 nm (651/661 nm from the 656 nm Hα line), they would have been trivially visible since Fraunhofer's time. The fact that no spectroscopic database mentions any lines at these wavelengths in 200+ years strongly suggests:
They don't exist (prediction falsified), or
They're orders of magnitude weaker than I estimated (10⁻⁸ or less, making them currently undetectable), or
The prediction needs complete reformulation
I conflated "3.3 THz frequency spacing" with "needs ultra-high resolution" when actually that spacing corresponds to easily resolvable 5 nm wavelength differences.
The sophisticated equipment I proposed (frequency combs, ultra-cold atoms) isn't needed for detection at that spacing—a basic spectrometer would suffice if they existed at that intensity.
Most likely conclusion: This specific harmonic prediction is falsified by the absence of these lines in existing data. I need to either revise the intensity estimate by ~6 orders of magnitude (making it untestable) or acknowledge this aspect doesn't work.
The broader cosmological framework might still hold, but this particular spectroscopic test appears to fail. Thanks for the reality check.
The entire image width spans just 6nm, resolving lines well below .1nm apart. It seems like your proposed features should be detectable in public data?
Christians are referencing a previous philosophical usage of the word substance. Aristotle, for example, said that water remains the same “substance” (ousia) whether it’s frozen or vaporous — the form (morphē) changes, but not the essence. He’d have seen those as qualities changing, not substances. For Plato the perfect object was substance - it didn’t exist in the physical world at all — it existed in the realm of Forms (or Ideas). The instances were imperfect.
The trinity is one substance but three beings. That’s perhaps a bit harder to justify.
When a priest changes the nature of the wafer he’s changing the substance but not the accidents - the reality. He’s engaged in transubstantiation . So if you have bread allergy it’s still going to bite since it’s still bread in appearance.
If we are in a simulation then these guys could be right, and transubstantiation could be true.
Most high-resolution spectroscopy data isn't publicly archived. It's stored on lab servers at institutions like NIST, MPQ, JILA, etc. These labs don't systematically publish raw data - only processed results. You need either:
Direct institutional affiliation
Collaboration with someone who has access
Formal data sharing agreements
I don't have academic affiliation or access to these archives.
2. Domain Expertise
Raw spectroscopy data requires specialized knowledge to interpret:
Calibration corrections
Systematic error identification
Line shape fitting
Doppler broadening compensation
I can do the Fourier analysis, but properly handling the data preprocessing requires someone who routinely works with this equipment. False positives from misinterpreted artifacts would kill the credibility of any finding.
3. Validation Credibility
Even if I found something in publicly available data, it would need independent validation by spectroscopists before being taken seriously. Better to collaborate from the start with people who:
This is why I'm reaching out here - the right collaboration makes this testable immediately, whereas going solo would take years of building access and expertise.
LLM watch: I've started periodically running the Google search "dark legacy comics who wants some bamboo". (No quotes.)
This search, for some reason, always generates an AI overview. The AI overview is always wrong. Very badly wrong. Most often, crazy.
Just now:
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The comic you are referring to is Dark Legacy Comics #958, titled "The Panda-Monium."
In the comic, a team is preparing to fight the Sha of Doubt. The panda character, "Xian," is trying to offer bamboo to the raid group. The dialogue in the last panel features the following exchange:
- 𝗫𝗶𝗮𝗻 (𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮): "Who wants some bamboo?"
- 𝗔𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿: "Nobody wants your stupid bamboo!"
- 𝗫𝗶𝗮𝗻: "Your loss."
The joke is a lighthearted jab at the stereotypical association of pandas with bamboo, contrasted with the seriousness of the raid encounter.
The worst I've seen is when I asked Gemini what people talked about in a specific podcast episode. It hallucinated absolutely everything, shamelessly and confidently, based on what it knew about the podcast in general. It didn't even bother looking up the episode synopsis.
I think it triggered because I'd already chatted with it a bit, so it wasn't a fresh context with predictable outcomes.
Here's the latest answer to "dark legacy comics who wants some bamboo":
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The quote "Who wants some bamboo?" is from Dark Legacy Comics #846, titled "BAMBOOZLED".
The comic references the Pandaren race from the World of Warcraft universe, which is known for its strong association with bamboo.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗲𝗻𝗲
In the comic, the character known as "The Orc" is asked if he wants a treat. Thinking of the Pandaren, who are known for their love of bamboo, the Orc responds, "Who wants some bamboo?". This causes another character to become angry, as it is a stereotype used to mock the Pandaren.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗽
- 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: BAMBOOZLED
- 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀: The Orc, the human female (the human female is the one who gets angry)
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟭: The human female is talking to the orc
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟮: The human female asks the orc if he wants a treat
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟯: The orc says, "Who wants some bamboo?"
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟰: The human female gets angry and yells at the orc
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟱: The human female leaves, leaving the orc confused
Interestingly enough, I started doing this because I wanted to find comic 335. It is clearly the case for certain comic strips that Google has OCRed and indexed the text within the strip images, and you can find them by doing an image search (not a general search). Dark Legacy seems not to have benefited from this treatment.
I would like to get a machine for doing certain kinds of focused work where all I can do is write, read, and use an LLM. In particular, for reading, I would ideally want to be able to either read e-books or read downloaded pdfs/webpages. I don't want general access to the internet as I find it very distracting.
If certain websites give you trouble, there's browser extensions that will let you block them. I don't use them myself, though. Instead what I do is I go to the computer's settings and disable networking. In practice, the 0.5 seconds it takes me to re-enable networking is long enough to make me check whether my reason is a good one. I also have to not do this too often, or I would grow a habit of just clicking through without thinking.
I use Cold Turkey when I need to enable application and web site locks. You'd need the paid version to get the features you need, but there's a free trial.
On my Mac I use a content blocker called Freedom. You can block selected websites or the entire internet, or the entire internet with one or more exemptions. And you can block all your apps.
Could you use a phone with time limits enabled, permitting only an ebook reader and an LLM app or website? There are apps that let you lock it down with some flexibility/configurability beyond the phone’s basic setting menu, at least on iPhone, though I don’t know if any of them will meet your needs.
Edit: Intended as a reply to Gian, not a top level comment. The analogy of the shop refers to government, not an actual shop in a free market system. So "going to another shop" is only as easy as becoming a citizen of another country, in this analogy. I'm leaving this in place since it generated a few replies and removing it might create more confusion.
It makes perfect sense. If you don't understand, ask for an explanation ( If you sincerely want to understand what's being said. Do you? Or do you *want* what I'm saying to be incoherant so you don't have to think about it? )
Lets say you walk into an ice cream parlor. The owner wants to give you chocolate ice cream. He gives that to everyone. You do not want chocolate ice cream. You want French Vanilla. But you are not strong enough, by yourself, to force the owner to give you what you want. So you form a coalition with people who want strawberry ice cream, and people who want bubble gum flavored ice cream. Now you have enough political clout to force the shop owner to give you what you want.
What is your value? Getting French Vanilla ice cream. How do you achieve that goal? By promoting freedom of ice cream choice. But choice is not the highest/end personal goal. It is the mechanism, the intermediate goal, by which the highest goal is achieved. You may even believe that bubble gum ice cream is disgusting, but it's better to support the bubble gum faction than have to have your coalition fall apart and eat chocolate ice cream yourself.
In this allegory, "freedom" may be the highest legal value. It's how you want the owner/government to behave. Eating French Vanilla ice cream is your highest personal value. It's what you actually want. Confusing legal values with personal values clouds understanding of the situation.
Some of us deal with this sort of thing by the clever strategy of offering the ice-cream parlor owner *money* in exchange for French Vanilla (but not chocolate) ice cream. And if the guy is a chocolatier who thinks his edge in the ice-cream business is selling the very best chocolate ice cream and doesn't want to dilute his brand with things he's not as good at, we respect *his* freedom to run his shop the way he wants, and either sample the chocolate or go to a different ice-cream parlor.
The bit where you maximize your political clout and then pass laws mandating the menu that all ice-cream parlors must serve, that's the lowest form of "freedom" and not any sort of liberty.
The analogy was in response to someone talking about people who "made freedom their highest" value and how it wouldn't end well. I think it got posted in the wrong part of the thread. So the ice cream seller here is a government, not a private business.
So then go down the street to the ice cream seller (or whatever) that is a private business and will eagerly give you what you want in exchange for your money.
If there are none, then I suggest this mostly just shows that there's an incompatibility between "freedom as the highest value" and giving the government a monopoly on things that are important to you, Never go full Communist.
The specifics of how the government applies its monopoly on force is both something I care deeply about, and would also never wish to have delegated to a private entity or left up to markets.
In this analogy, to be clear, you're talking about moving to a different *country.* Which is a lot harder than just going down the street.
I agree that there's a problem with giving the government a monopoly on things that are important to us. But I don't think that 'freedom' is actually people's highest value which was part of my point. It's ultimately a means to an end, even if it is presented as an end for the sake of coalition building and simplicity.
First, to be clear, the ice cream seller is a stand in for a government. It's a reply to someone that I think got posted in the wrong part of the thread. Someone was talking about people who 'made freedom their highest value' and how it wouldn't end well.
Second, if someone likes different ice cream at different times then the same strategy holds. "Freedom" isn't necessarily their "highest value." Their highest value is getting what they want when they want it and perhaps for other people to do so also. Freedom is still a coalition that pressures the government to allow multiple choices at different times.
reading this as the first top-level comment is a surrealistic experience after the first few lines.
But yeah, the point is that if hundred groups of people want to do hundred different things, they don't adopt a law naming those hundred things, instead they adopt a law saying that everyone does whatever they want to do (and maybe name the exceptions).
Even if you want to do X, making a law that mandates X assumes that (1) you have a sufficient majority to make that law pass and preferably also remain there after the next election, and (2) for some reason it is important to you that everyone else also does X, even the people who would prefer to do something else.
So if you just want X, but don't mind that other people do their own things, voting for "everyone does their own thing" is a nice thing to do, and maybe if it becomes a part of the culture, other people will reciprocate when it's their turn to propose laws.
The "Fascism" thread largely degenerated into a bunch of "tu quoque" arguments, which got me thinking about tu quoque as a general class of argument and when it's reasonable versus unreasonable. I think someone like Scott needs to come along and write the definitive essay about the uses and abuses of tu quoque, because it has me very confused.
---
On one hand, tu quoque is usually just an annoying and distracting conversation ender. A typical argument goes:
"Trump did this bad thing!"
"Sure, that's just like when Biden did this somewhat-similar bad thing!"
"No, that's different or not as bad somehow"
and then we get lost in the weeds of the exact differences between the two things and how much these differences are important, and we never get around to meaningfully discussing the bad thing.
Taken to its logical conclusion we wind up in a state where nobody can actually criticise anything, because someone on _their_ side did a bad thing at some point too.
---
On the other hand, tu quoque often actually is relevant. If Trump did a bad thing, but it turns out that this is a bad thing that eighteen out of the last twenty Presidents have done, then it really is unreasonable to criticise Trump in particular for it. Someone who spends all their time taking potshots at every flaw of one side of politics while ignoring the flaws of the other side really does deserve to be called out on it.
It's not reasonable to have a norm that tu quoque arguments are never reasonable, but they are certainly annoying and distracting in most cases.
Perhaps the solution is this: if you're going to talk about a specific bad thing that someone has done in politics, then you need to specify either that you want to focus the conversation on that particular bad thing, or that you're happy for it to be a free-for-all. And if you want to focus the discussion then you have to commit to that -- you can say "Biden did this bad thing" but not broaden it to "therefore Biden is bad".
Even better, you can insulate yourself against Tu Quoque arguments by actively finding examples of both sides doing a particular bad thing and presenting them together.
My main issue is that I think "but it's different somehow" is actually the central issue for a lot of what Trump is doing.
Like, when Trump deployed the National Guard, it is true that a lot of other presidents have deployed the national guard in emergencies (and people here on ACX have made exactly that argument, referencing Eisenhower's deployment to desegregate schools). Trump, however, is trying to deploy the guard because of a few dozen people in Portland, most of whom are wearing inflatable frog costumes. The "emergency" is basically a complete fabrication.
So like, I am not going to take a both-sides-bad stance and say "Presidents should not be able to call out the national guard." The National Guard exists for emergency situations, it would be very silly to argue that it should *never* be used for that purpose. The actual important thing up for debate is "is this an emergency where the National Guard is warranted?"
And this applies to a lot of things Trump is doing, since a lot of them are based on emergency powers or regulatory powers that Congress left on the table in case the President needed to change trade policy in a hurry or something, and sometimes past Presidents have used those powers in actual emergencies before and it wasn't a big deal. So you do need to get in the weeds. And it *should* be an easy argument because, like, come the fuck on, you really think the guys in frog costumes require the literal military? But unfortunately, "come the fuck on" is not really a persuasive argument in a debate, so you end up getting in the weeds trying to come up with a bright-line definition for "the kind of violent protest that justifies a military response" that can't be twisted by a motivated reasoner, and it just fucking sucks.
(I do wonder if we could fix at least some of these excesses with some sort of general "any emergency power the President claims must get voted on by Congress in X days, otherwise it automatically expires" rule. Not a lawyer, though.)
Kids going to school don’t require the military. But state governments trying to physically block students from going to school that they are legally allowed to go to calls for some sort of larger intervention.
Yeah, *or* you can just allow Oregon/Alabama to have autonomy and do whatever the state government wants, disregarding federal diktat. After all, not a lot of people are directly affected.
The point is, what is a sufficiently serious matter to justify National Guard intervention is itself a matter of ideological judgment in the first place, and it's a given that a liberal is going to disagree with a conservative on what interventions matter and why, just as a segregationist will disagree with a progressive. It would probably be snide to suggest that the average modern-day Republican thinks resistance to ICE deportations is a *more* serious issue than resistance to desegregation, but same ballpark? Sure. You can't just claim as given a priori that one calls for intervention and the other doesn't, that's begging the question.
Is the resistance to ICE deportation actually stopping ICE deportation? The resistance to desegregation *was* in fact causing people not to be able to attend school.
Is that the objective, non-ideologically-determined crux of whether intervention is justified? It doesn't look like Republicans broadly agree with you on that. The justifications I've seen, at least, are that some of the protestors have damaged ICE facilities or tried to commit violence against and/or disrupt the work of ICE employees, which the Republicans regard as unacceptable. And to be fair, does the resistance have to fully stop deportations to count as "stopping ICE deportation", or is fractional disruption that stops only some deportations or delays a larger proportion enough?
Or, conversely, did governor Wallace ever *actually* stop anyone from attending school? From what I understand, he stood in a doorway for awhile, in a way that would not actually have stopped school administrators from accepting the two students' enrolment papers (there was no formal or legal need for them to hand over their papers in that particular auditorium, that's just where student enrolment was always handled for practical reasons), largely for show. Wikipedia also claims that he pre-notified Kennedy that he didn't intend to cause any violent confrontation, so who knows whether he would actually have resisted if the students had just pushed past him, even. In other words, there's a strong case that this was just showboating on the governor's part and that absent the National Guard those students would still have been accepted to their courses. So, does that mean Kennedy was unjustified?
Fallacies are not actually a win condition. They don't establish you're right or that the other person is wrong. That's what you're missing.
"Trump did X" and "18/20 presidents did X" can both be true statements. And importantly the second reply is a non-sequitur to the claim that Trump did X. Instead it's an argument that X isn't important. This is actually productive because it establishes the base fact: Trump did indeed do X. Now you're just arguing over whether doing X is normal which is a different argument.
The issue is that usually people in politics say "politician did X" but mean "doing X is bad so you should vote for my party." And most people realize that and so respond to the implication that it was bad or means you should vote for the other party by saying that previous presidents did it too. At which point the first person, the one who made the accusation, responds with tu quoque. But this is actually not a valid accusation because the respondent is not denying the current president did X. It is useful to the accuser because it allows them to avoid engaging with how normal or abnormal it is or having to defend their implicit premise.
Am I wrong to be nostalgic for the times when the most heated debates were about Obamacare or abortion or the Iraq War? Now it's all about parsing words and justifications.
It's like we're in the middle of a civil war and the only issues of interest are who is allowed to say what about whom, and which side did the bad thing first.
In my view it's symptomatic of our ongoing phase transition from a functional high-trust society to a low-trust one. Conflict used to be over substance, now it's over relative status. People fight to control definitions because that's symbolic of political and cultural hegemony. We used to be able to agree to the rules of the game, now we can't even agree on those. This is what happens when society balkanizes.
We can probably blame postmodernism for forcing us to squabble over rules that worked for centuries.
There's an argument here that if a branch of analysis produces a conclusion that the principles of logic itself are invalid, one can and ought to dismiss that branch. After all, by which principles did it produce that conclusion?
Agreed. Postmodernism was a complicated intellectual sleight-of-hand that the disaffected academic class used in a dishonest attempt to rig the political game in its favor. Unfortunately it destabilized the supporting cultural structure and now the whole apparatus is collapsing. Very sad. Or maybe this is how society refreshes itself and what feels like collapse is healthy creative destruction. Hard to tell. I vote for collapse but that's probably just because I'm old.
I wouldn’t mind a Tu Quoque if it were preceded by “yes that’s bad”, otherwise it reminds me of the Kosovo war where no discussion was complete without going All The Way Back to 1389!
>A reply to "You shot me!" with "Because you shot me first" is kind of a good response?
Only in very narrow circumstances, ie self-defense. But not, eg, if the second shooting is a week later. And not if the other guy shot me in the foot, and I shot him in the head. And not if the initial shooting was legitimate self-defense. And not if I shoot his entire family.
I think this mistakes the actual argument. When people make "tu quoque" arguments, I think what they're really saying is "I don't trust you." Otherwise, we would take extremely easy steps to resolve these arguments.
For example, pretend Donald Trump kicked a puppy tomorrow. Just punted him 40 yards, pow!
Now, let's say a Democrat said "Hey, it's bad that the President is kicking puppies." And a Republican responds with "Well, Biden kicked puppies."
There seems like an obvious out: we all agree that presidents shouldn't kick puppies and we'll pass a law...a super-duper law, a constitutional amendment that any president that kicks a puppy will be fired into the sun. Easy peasy, right?
The problem is that Republicans are suspicious that this is a fakeout, that when Newsom or AOC or whoever gets elected, they won't only kick puppies, they'll run around town kicking all the Republican puppies. And Democrats are suspicious that when Baron Trump lives up to his namesake and becomes the Supreme Global Baron of the World, he will have Elon Musk invent puppy kicking robots to run around kicking all the Democratic puppies.
I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth (1) and when you say "A bad thing happened, we should stop it" and the other guy says "but your guy did a bad thing" what they mean is "I don't trust you enough to work with you for our mutual benefit."
I think the problem is even worse than that. Taking this as a metaphor for expansion/abuse of presidential of power, it's often more like: Your guy kicking OUR puppies is bad and dictatorial, our guy kicking YOUR puppies is good and decisive leadership.
The recent case of Trump federalizing the National Guard of a state over its governor's objections provided a particularly amusing instance of this.
On my worst days, I worry that Schmittian friend-enemy politics are all that really matters, and people can Russell's conjugation any issue such that they can convince themselves of their own moral rightness and their enemy's iniquity. I dont want to believe that, because it leaves us collectively with very few options, but sometimes it seems obviously true.
There's no contradiction here. It's good to do things for good reasons, it's bad to do things for bad reasons. The only disagreement here is what is good and bad.
Well that would be fine if the people making these complaints ever actually said "I don't object to the strong exercise of federal/presidential power, I only object to exercising it without a good reason. And thus, my objection to the President deploying the national guard is no different from my objection to every other presidential policy that I have opposed--it's got nothing to do with any intrinsic value of state sovereignty".
Of course, what they actually say is "state sovereignty is inviolable no matter what the reason" (or substitute any other claimed right or claimed check-and-balance for "state sovereignty"), which makes the contradiction absolutely supremely relevant.
I saw more or less the same thing with the recent wars on the frontiers of Russia and Israel. There was a fun prank where people showed a video of "Kiev" being bombed, and later revealed it was actually Baghdad. And similarly with some local being abused by a soldier, initially presented as being a Gazan and an Israeli, and later revealed to be a Ukrainian and a Russian (or possibly vice versa).
> Someone who spends all their time taking potshots at every flaw of one side of politics while ignoring the flaws of the other side
One observation is that the two easiest stories to tell are "six of one and half a dozen of the other" and "one side is good and the other side is bad".
It's much harder to argue "both sides sometimes do bad things; one side is meaningfully worse; the other side is far from perfect; we need to condemn the bad things on both sides but not to the same extent, and to recognise that the better side, while flawed, is better, and give them just enough credit for that but not too much" without it getting rounded off to one or the other of the first two.
But in practice, 60/40 or 90/10 are far more common than exactly 50/50 or 100/0.
And, of course, to make matters even more complicated, there are plenty of situations where "we are in peacetime, so in order to maintain the functioning of democracy we should treat these sides as functionally equivalent even if they aren't" or "we are in wartime, and in order to defeat the greater evil we should fight to win even if we're not perfect ourselves" are genuinely ethical and pro-social stances.
Hi Scott, I'm an M1 trying to figure out what specialty to choose. I'm not that interested in surgery. I think I might like neurology / psych/ anesthesiology.
Do you have any opinions on whether psychiatry is more or less AI proof? I've heard some arguments that psych is more about the human connection (not super convinced about this honestly) and a lot of the information you gather during an appointment is not text-based.
I'd really appreciate your input on this, and any other specialties you think might be good if I want a long career.
My impression from observing the work lives of psychiatrists (I'm a psychologist) is that a lot of them end up doing mostly psychopharmacology, and in practice that means a day full of 20-min appointments with people who are stable for now, but need to be seen for a check-in and to get their meds renewed. And then there would be a few longer meetings in the mix, for a new person you're evaluating or newish people who are working up to the therapeutic dose of a med. And there are algorithms for choosing which med to start with, and which to try next, and unless you are extraordinarily knowledgeable and gifted you really should stick to the algorithms or you're not doing good practice. Psychiatrists who want to do psychotherapy are often trained in some version of psychodynamic therapy, which is kind of on its way out. It's harder for them to access training in stuff like hypnosis, CBT, etc. So I say neurology is better than psychiatry. If you want to develop your ability to understand people, neuropsychology has always looked very interesting to me, and much less mushy and bullshitty in its categories.
I've been continuing to reread Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 (or Southern Victory) series. I just finished the Great War trilogy and am continuing onto the books covering the Interwar Years.
To recap: the series is Alternate History, focused on the World Wars in a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War in 1862 with British and French assistance, resulting in an enduring military alliance between the three countries. After a second war in the 1880s (covered in the standalone-ish book "How Few Remain") resulted in humiliating defeat for the US (fighting alone against all three powers), the US aligns with Imperial Germany. WW1 starts on schedule in 1914, and the next three books cover the resulting conflict. The Central Powers including the US (called the Quadruple Alliance in the books) win the war in 1917. The US annexes the former Confederate states of Kentucky and Sequoia (Oklahoma), chunks of Texas and Sonora, and all of Canada except for the province of Quebec which is made an independent client state of the US. The books I haven't re-read yet deal with political turmoil and economic depression in the US, the operation of occupation authorities in territory conquered by the US during the war, the rise of an extremely close analogue of the Nazis to power in the Confederacy, and (in the final four books of the series) an alternate WW2 and Holocaust.
One thing that's impressing me on rereading the books is how effectively Turtledove laid the groundwork for the two perspective characters who would become high-level alt-Nazis in later books: both the Hilter analogue (Jake Featherston) and the character who would command the Confederacy's equivalent of Auschwitz (Jeff Pinkard) are introduced in the Great War trilogy as worms-eye perspective characters. A very common pattern Turtledove employs in his stories is for a protagonist or other sympathetic perspective character to start out the story taking for granted certain bigoted views that are in the cultural water supply of their society, but over the course of the story they find reason to reject those views to varying extents. Their prejudice turns out to be lightly-held, overcome by some combination of seeing their prejudices proven wrong in specific instances, horror at atrocities committed in the name of that prejudice, and basic human decency overriding the prejudice when they're dealing with a specific person whom they see as a person. Both of the alt-Nazi characters start out appearing to follow the pattern, but are faced with a choice between compassion and prejudice and instead decide to embrace the prejudice. The do get similar sorts of opportunities as other Turtledove perspective characters to accept the humanity of the objects of their prejudice, but they never really get further than "grudging tolerance" before turning back and deciding to choose prejudice over decency.
I remember when I first read the books finding both of these characters sympathetic at first, only really deciding that they were terrible people relative late in the Great War series. I think a lot of that was driven by pattern-matching them to other Turtledove protagonists from bigoted societies, combined with both characters (like a great many of the other characters in the book, given the subject matter) having bad things happen to them that weren't really their fault. Rereading the books with more maturity as a reader and also remembering where the characters are going, it's pretty clear that the capacity for great evil was always there within them. A recurring motif for both of them is responding to adversity with anger, bitterness, and (especially later in the trilogy) fantasies of taking revenge.
There's a common fan theory that Turtledove had originally planned to have the US lose the Great War and go fascist during the Interwar Years, and that the Union soldier Gordon McSweeney was intended to be the alt-Hitler of the series. Turtledove has denied this in interviews, and I believe him. Specifically, Turtledove said that the United States (even the weaker US of this alternate timeline) is a big enough industrial and population base (both in absolute terms and relative to the Confederacy) that a fully-mobilized US joining on the Central Powers side on day one would tip the balance firmly in favor of the Central Powers. This makes sense in its own terms, even accounting for the Confederacy industrializing more than that region did historically and the rest of the US industrializing somewhat less. The US is shown as having a much less free and open society and economy even pre-war than historically (mentions of de facto single party governance between HFR and the end of the Great War, peacetime rationing of coal and kerosene, conscription, higher taxes, and lots of passing indications that the US in 1914 has developed a heirarchical and militaristic culture parallel to Imperial Germany), which would have hurt economic development somewhat. Historically, industrial development in the US benefitted quite a bit from British private investors buying into American capital markets; in this world, where Britain had been in a shooting war with the use in the early 1880s and remained allied to the Confederacy, a lot of that investment is going to be steered into the Confederacy. Turtledove doesn't spell out the latter effect in detail, but we do see more industrialization and more robust capital markets in the Confederacy than the South had historically at that point. But even with that, I agree with Turtledove's interpretation that the US would be quite a big more populous and more industrialized than the Confederacy, and the historical WW1 was close-run enough that the US being on the CP side and the Confederacy on the Entente side adds up to a CP victory. Merely stopping the Entente powers from trading with the US and raising money in US capital markets (historically, mostly by selling or mortgaging British investments in the US) is a huge deal for the progress of the war, not to mention that British troops would be sent to fight in Canada rather than the other way around.
There are also a fair number of clues throughout the book that the Entente powers are losing, both in North America and in Europe. The big one is that apart from the Confederate offensive in the Eastern theater in the opening days of the war, the US is always the side on the strategic offensive and is usually making at least a little bit of progress ont he ground. The US seems to pretty convincingly win the naval war in the Pacific, at least to the extent of taking Hawaii from the British and beating a joint British-Japanese attempt to recapture it. The naval war in the Atlantic seems to be stalemated, with Britain still able to import some food and raw materials from South America and to prevent most trade between the US and Germany, but the US is never really blockaded and Entente overseas commerce in the Atlantic is limited and gets moreso as the war goes on. By the second book, we hear news like the Germans capturing Verdun in 1916 and we hear from Confederate perspective characters that they're having increasing shortages of manpower and ammunition.
On the other hand, the US now has the Confederacy to the south and British/French Canada to the north, so they're in a pincer situation. The war would be fought at home, not just abroad in continental Europe (as it was historically). If the British and French are Confederate allies, this might make for friendlier terms in Canada, which might then be better set-up to take on the US (especially in combination with the Confederacy).
The industrial base advantage of the US would be on a different footing when it's getting bombed on the doorstep, as it were.
I agree that if Britain and France had reinforced Canada enough at the beginning of the war, the US would have been in a very rough strategic situation. That's more or less what happened in the 1881 war in the series, where it was the USA alone vs the Confederacy, Britain, and France. I think Turtledove concluded that in 1914, they would have their hands too full fighting Germany in Europe to reinforce Canada enough to put the US on the defensive. I don't think we hear about any British or French ground troops fighting in Canada, although the Canadian air force does fly British fighter models and I think there are some RAF units mentioned fighting alongside them. What we do hear is that the US has about a 2:1 population advantage over the Confederacy and Canada combined, and that the US had a higher per-capita industrial base than the Confederacy at least.
>If the British and French are Confederate allies, this might make for friendlier terms in Canada
That actually does get explored in the books in a moderate amount of detail. One of the perspective characters is a Francophone farmer living near the town of Rivière-du-Loup, which gets taken over by the US early in the war. Our perspective character (Lucien Galtier) is shown to be a Canadian patriot who early in the occupation engages in as much passive resistance as he can safely get away with. A majority of the community seems to have similar sentiments, although they definitely feel somewhat less violently opposed to the US occupation than what we see from the other Canadian perspective character (Arthur McGregor, an Anglophone farmer living near the US border south of Winnipeg). There are some high-profile collaborators among Francophone community, but they seem to be a minority and are a mix of unprincipled opportunists and ultraconservatives who dislike the then-current government of France for being too liberal and anticlerical. There's some resentment of the British Canadian government for privileging the Anglophone community and for favoring Protestants, even among people like Galtier who favor Canada over the US, but it feels like there's somewhat less resentment on this front than I would expect there to have been at that point in real-world history.
"What we do hear is that the US has about a 2:1 population advantage over the Confederacy and Canada combined, and that the US had a higher per-capita industrial base than the Confederacy at least."
Great, now see how they deal with some *real* Fifth Columnists setting up as saboteurs, rather than imagined threats from within:
It is credible that the US could win such a war, but having to fight on their own territory rather than being at a geographic advantage where the closest real attack was Pearl Harbour, would make a difference:
>Great, now see how they deal with some *real* Fifth Columnists setting up as saboteurs, rather than imagined threats from within:
This comes up a *lot* in the books. There are four perspectives that deal with life in occupied territories (two Canadians, one Confederate in US-held territory, and one US in Confederate-held territory), and pretty much all of them involve some combination of spies, saboteurs, passive resistance, and outright terrorism. There are a range of responses, with hostage reprisals and summary executions on the far end. It's a fairly dark timeline and the US commits its fair share of villainly despite being the "good guys" of the series as a whole by contrast with the stuff the Confederates the Confederates get up to later on.
Also the Mormons rebel against the USA with Confederate assistance, Communists rebel against the Confederacy, there's an anti-war riot in New York that gets violently suppressed, and there's a minor plot line about the US Navy running guns to Irish Republicans (who appear to have won, since there's a 32-county independent Republic of Ireland as of the first Interwar book).
"The US Navy running guns to Irish Republicans (who appear to have won, since there's a 32-county independent Republic of Ireland as of the first Interwar book)."
Now I'm convinced of the work's excellence, carry on Mr. Turtledove! 😁
I've never read any Harry Turtledove, but every time I hear about him it's a whole new book, usually a whole new timeline involving a whole bunch of books. Which led me to wonder how many books has this guy actually written. And apparently the answer is that he's written 155 books since the 1980s https://www.fictiondb.com/author/harry-turtledove~24101.htm
That's an impressive work rate given that these books are, by all accounts, interesting reading and presumably heavily researched. Although I guess he's been retreading the same historical periods quite a bit?
Yes, he's a very prolific writer. Not quite as prolific as that list makes it sound, since the 155 "novels" also include short stories and novellas. Still, he's written over a hundred books including compilations of his short works, averaging something like 2-3 books a year over a 40+ year career.
He does indeed cluster a lot of his works in three major time periods: World War 2, the American Civil War, and Late Antiquity. Late Antiquity in particular is definitely something he definitely already knew about before writing any novels, since he has a PhD in Byzantine History. I think his interest in ACW and WW2 is partly because it's marketable and partly because he seems very interested in exploring themes involving the evils of authoritarianism and institutionalized racism. A fair fraction of his books take place in fantasy worlds that are reskinnings of these three eras, too.
IMO, his best period of what I've read of his stuff is probably what he wrote in the late 80s through c. 2000. He got better with practice over the course of the 80s and 90s, but towards the end of the period his style shifted to get quite a bit more rambling and verbose. That's around when his children hit college age, and it's widely suspected he started pushing himself to churn out more books because of tuition costs. If so, I can't really blame him, and I have enjoyed most of his books from the later period that I've read, but I don't think they're as good on average as his 90s books. My judgement might also be influenced by nostalgia, since I really got into his stuff in the early to mid 90s when I was in middle and high school.
Of his works, I would most strongly recommend the Videssos books (fantasy reskinning of the Byzantine Empire with a little bit of "Middle Earth with the serial numbers filed off" for flavor), the Worldwar series (aliens invade in the middle of WW2), and Guns of the South (standalone novel about time travelling South African neonazis arming the Confederates in 1864).
Historically, Britain and the Second French Empire were relatively friendly in the 1860s: they'd been allied together against Russia during the Crimean War and remained on pretty good terms, including a free trade agreement in 1860 and both countries unofficially giving lukewarm support to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. There was no formal alliance past the end of the Crimean War and they did continue to see one another as potential rivals when doing things like planning warship construction, but they were more friendly than not.
Turtledove has the Confederacy win the Antietam campaign decisively, with Lee destroying the Army of the Potomac and going on to invade Pennsylvania. I've got problems with both halves of that, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Anyway, the Union has had a really nasty battlefield defeat on Northern soil, and the Emancipation Proclamation (which make the war explicitly about slavery on both sides, and made it politically impossible for the British government to support the Confederacy) got preempted because Lincoln never got the battlefield victory he had been waiting for. France and Britain then recognize the Confederacy and pressure the US into accepting pro-Confederate mediation that winds up confirming Confederate independence. After the war, Britain and France both continue to support the Confederacy, although I'm not 100% clear on if there's a formal alliance at this stage. There's another round of war between the Confederacy and the USA in the early 1880s, in which Britain and France intervene on the Confederate side and badly beat the US. The US reacts to this by going ally-shopping themselves and choosing Germany. So presumably, fighting together against the US and then finding the US aligning with Germany pushes Britain and France to resolve their colonial differences and align together against Germany a couple decades ahead of schedule.
The way this plays out and secondary implications of this are a bit under-explored. For example, the Franco-Prussian war is implied to have played out pretty much as historically, and the Second Empire got replaced by the Third Republic on schedule without apparently disrupting Anglo-French relations. I would have been really, really interested in at least a short story exploring if the Confederacy got involved in the Franco-Prussian war and how that affected things, but sadly (from my perspective) that doesn't seem to be part of the story that Turtledove was interested in writing.
[continuing the rest of the comment because it's too long for Substack]
For Gordon McSweeney in particular, his characterization is not a good fit for him being set up to be a Hilter analogue. McSweeney is a bigoted jerk, but he does go a bit futher down the Turtledove protagonist arc than Pinkard or Featherston, and when we do see him expressing his prejudices towards people he knows personally, it's always in a "more in sorrow than in anger" attitude where he sees them as people and sympathizes with them despite constantly reproaching them for failing to measure up to his extremely rigorous and somewhat arbitary standards. McSweeney's predjudices are much more religious than racial, making him a less direct potential parallel to Nazi racial ideology. McSweeney also strikes me as being a rather unlikely radical revolutionary: he consistently believes in the system, wants to uphold it, and reserves his deepest hatred for those who are fighting in arms against it. I could see McSweeney doing terrible things as a mid-level officer in the service of a fascist regime, but I really don't see him leading a revolutionary movement to fundamentally overhaul the system. Featherston, who hated and resented the planter class that dominated Confederate politics from fairly early on, almost as much as he hates black people, fits much better as a Hitler-like right-wing revolutionary. McSweeney's also a somewhat cartoonish figure, in terms of both his attitudes and his over-the-top heroism in combat. Featherston is portrayed a lot more realistically in both respects, which makes his revelation as a budding Hilter more narratively effective.
Another character bit I noticed on rereading is the dynamic with General Custer, commander of the US First Army, and his aide Major Abner Dowling. At first glance, Custer is a buffoon with no real redeeming qualities except occassionally making correct military decisions for entirely the wrong reasons. I took this at face value when I first read the books, but on rereading I think we're perceiving Custer slightly unfairly because we only see him through Dowling's eyes. Dowling disdains Custer, with some reason, and that disdain leads him to overlook Custer's skill when it does shine through. We see this when Custer is shown to actually be a charismatic and energetic field commander when the front does start moving (to Dowling's astonishment) and when Custer is the one who figures out how to use tanks (called "Barrels" by the Americans, since "Tank" is a British term and the US here developed them independently) effectively as a massed breakthrough force. I think the "Dowling is an unreliable narrator" interpretation also fits better with how Custer is portrayed in How Few Remain, where he's a perspective character and we see inside his head: there, Custer is an arrogant jerk, and prone to arrogance and intellectual laziness espeically when things aren't going his way, but he is actually a pretty good commander when he puts himself into it. That fits very well with the unreliable narrator theory, but much less well if we take Downling's view of Custer at face value. And while considering that, it also occurred to me that Turtledove may have been doing a send-up of the fourth Blackadder series, set during the First World War, in which Custer takes the role of the buffoonish General Melchett and Major Dowling stands in for Melchett's aide, Captain Darling. Which Turtledove then subverts by showing Custer to have hidden depths that are not shared by Melchett.
In our world, the Nazis and other right-wing nationalists like the Steel Helmets in interwar Germany promoted an interpretation of German defeat known to modern historians as the "Stab in the back legend", the idea that the socialist revolution that overthrew the monarchy in 1918 was the cause of German military defeat rather than an effect. The corresponding explanation for Confederate defeat in the Great War is a Communist rebellion (mostly by the severaly oppressed black underclass, who are not technically slaves anymore but live under a system much harsher than that of the Jim Crow South) that breaks out at the end of the first book and takes most of the second book to be mostly suppressed, with some holdout bands keeping a guerilla war going until the last chapter of the third Great War book. The leader of the rebellion is a black revolutionary named Cassius, and I as confident as I can be without explicit confirmation that it isn't a coincidence that the "Stab in the Back" was perpetrated by a man named for the leader of the conspiracy to stab Julius Caesar to death. This kind of pun stacked atop a historial in-joke is very much Turtledove's style.
There is a minor character in one of the books by an Austrian-born sergeant in the German army who tags along with Heinz Guderian when the latter visits the US during the interwar years. He isn't named in the text but is strongly implied to be Hitler.
I typed up the comment in a text file in an IDE (Visual Studio Code), which gives auto-complete suggestions based on words already in the document. I must have made a typo the first time and then accepted the auto-complete on subsequent instances without noticing the misspelling.
There are a couple of easter eggs in the WW2 strategy game Hearts of Iron 4 related to that. The game has a "focus tree" mechanic that's used to simulate country-specific political events and can be used to choose alternate history paths for the player's country (or a computer-controlled country depending on how you configure the game) such as having your original government overthrown and replaced by a different one. Germany has an option to overthrow the Nazis early in the game and then either restore the Kaiser or reestablish a liberal republic. There's a small chance that Hitler will escape as he's losing the civil war, and if he does, then either Argentina's national leader gets replaced by "Señor Hitler", who looks like a clean-shaven Hitler wearing a fedora and sunglasses, or a hidden flag gets set on the United States. If the hidden flag gets set, and the US goes down the fascist national focus path, then the US player eventually gets a decision as to whether their fascist leader should be Douglas MacArthur, William Dudley Pelley, Charles Lindberg (the normal options), or an up-and-coming politician with a mysterious path named Adam Hilt (only available if the flag is set). Adam Hilt has identical pose and facial features to Señor Hitler and is likewise clean-shaven, but lacks the hat and glasses and is wearing a dark suit with an American Flag lapel pin.
The other national leaders the game provides for the US are FDR (default), Truman (takes over from FDR in 1945), Alf Landon, Wendell Wilkie, and Thomas Dewey (every four years with Democratic USA you get a choice between whether FDR/Truman or the historical Republican candidate), Earl Browder (Communist national focus path), or Wallis Simpson (can be imposed as a puppet monarch if Edward VIII stays in charge of Britain and later conquers the US).
If you seen someone with a loaded gun constantly pointed at their own head, explaining that it was the only way to prevent them from shooting themselves, you would understand that this unfortunate person is insane.
As a species we have nuclear weapons to stop us killing ourselves with nuclear weapons.
Every child is born into their own share of our self imposed nuclear suicide vest. As there can never be any reward to balance out the risk then we endanger future generations with risk for the sake of risk. What does that say about us as a species?
Again, I feel like you are right, but for the wrong reason, or if not the wrong reason, then a reason that won't communicate to those who might actually get us a better outcome. Thought experiments are just too easy to manipulate in one's favour.
[Edit: to put it differently: what kind of insane are we? It's resistant to therapy so it's more than anxiety/depression but we have too much executive function for it to be a serious psychotic illness, dementia or brain injury. So we're looking at bipolar, PTSD, addictive personality. Serious problems but treatable, but not by the feint hearted]
I think this is just a weird oversimplication. Americans have nuclear weapons so the Chinese and Russians don't kill them with nuclear weapons, not so that they don't kill themselves with nuclear weapons. Why would you aggregate all of humanity into one person like that? It doesn't make any sense.
World War I demonstrated, if needed demonstration, that humans are really good and making Hell on Earth for each other instead of building the Kingdom of Heaven.
Many ideas have been suggested to patch this flaw: Empire, Christianity, Socialism, even globalism.
As a species, *we* are in fact properly described with the pronoun "we". Eight billion different people with different and often conflicting goals, very few of whom keep deadly weapons pointed at their *own* heads.
So the analogy to "some*one*" evidencing suicidal behavior, is fundamentally flawed and does not lead to useful insight.
If you're looking for something small and personal, consider a Mexican Standoff. Are the participants necessarily insane? Or do we want to maybe consider how they got to that point, and what they're doing about it?
For the same reason I would want to be armed in the Wild West, major nations want to be armed just as much as their competitors.
Without a neutral third party to appeal to, with the ability to enforce whatever they decide, then you need to be able to cause a large amount of damage to anyone who has the capacity to do the same to you, otherwise you risk being bullied.
There’s no Wild West anymore because there’s a strong and relatively uncorrupt government, so it’s not very important I carry around a gun at all times. It’s still the Wild West of international politics because the UN has no enforcement power.
Russia has Nuclear Weapons because the US, China, France, etc. have nuclear weapons and the same is true for everyone else. The US or Russia can’t get rid of them because countries like North Korea and Israel are definitely not going to get rid of them (since they exist to ensure the existence of their respective nations, not just to counter the nuclear capabilities of rivals).
I don’t think it’s insane at all. Just classic coordination failures among players that have good reasons to coordinate, and good reasons to compete.
Sol Hando, if that is the best culture that we can pass on to our children then we should change our name from Homo Sapiens to Homo Suicidal because sooner or later......
Look, I was convinced that this was it, the balloon was going up, Third World War was gonna happen and this time it's nuclear when Russia invaded Afghanistan and we had al the Evil Empire rhetoric from Reagan.
And yet, here it is forty years later and we're all still alive and not a pile of ash.
Deiseach, in my example the person with a gun to their head does not have to pull the trigger before we recognize that they have a serious mental health problem.
Putting our children and the future of humanity at risk when there is no good reason to do so should be a massive red flag on its own, even without pushing the button.
But the point is that we don’t have nuclear weapons to stop us killing ourselves with nuclear weapons, we have them to stop *others* killing us with them. There’s a lot that can go wrong with that scenario, but it’s not analogous to the one you posed.
This is a weird motte-and-bailey equivocation about the usefulness of the word "we".
Yes, there is a coherent sense in which all of humanity can be referred to as "we". It's also a completely separate sense to the one that's required for your analogy to make any sense.
I'm not sure how what you're doing is any different from "nothing is better than eternal bliss, a loaf of bread is better than nothing, therefore a loaf of bread is better than eternal bliss". You're just playing a word game.
1) That reduction is "precipitous" only when compared to the absolute high points of WW1 and WW2. Before then, wars were much less deadly simply because the technology was far less developed, so the reduction is much less clear if you go back to the 1800s, or whatever time period you have solid data for: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
2) The Ukraine war is a good reminder of how deadly regular, full-scale industrial war is nowadays. While the 2022 invasion was probably not intended as a full war, it did develop into one, and well over a million soldiers combined died so far.
3) Conventional wars aside, there is the non-zero risk of global nuclear war, which would undoubtedly be the most deadly war in history. Peace through MAD is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.
I don't think 1) is entirely true. Yes, the technology was worse, but the wars tended to drag on longer and the death tolls I think were pretty comparable, adjusted for population size. The Napoleonic Wars lasted the better part of 15 years and total deaths were at least 2.5 million, maybe more like 6-7 million when civilian deaths are included. We don't have wars that last 15 years anymore, but the butcher's bill doesn't seem at all low compared to the world wars that came a century later. Likewise, um...the 30 Years War: ~4.5-8 million dead. That's a pretty long war; pretty big death toll, too, regardless of the era in question, although most were due to starvation and disease.
It makes a _tremendous_ difference whether your basis of historical comparison is absolute numbers of deaths, or per capita. Like if you tell someone that the English Civil War killed ~200K soldiers plus another maybe 100K civilians -- okay that's bad but seems like small beer compared to some 19th and 20th century war death tolls. Realizing though that all of England in 1640 had a total population smaller than today's Denmark or Slovakia or Maryland, does shift the perspective on it.
"Before then, wars were much less deadly simply because the technology was far less developed"
Common myth, unfortunately buttressed by your website only going back to 1800. All the data available suggests that the worst conflict in the West in terms of percentage of the population dying was the Thirty Years' War; no other conflict since has been nearly as brutal.
Wikipedia tells me that the 30YW had 4.5m to 8m total deaths (combatant and civilian), and also that that the world population at that time was about 600m-700m. That would mean a total deadliness of 6.4k to 13.3k per million, spread over 30 years. That would put it below even just combatant deaths in WW2 over 6 years, as per my other comment:
Your link isn't adjusting for population size of the countries at war. WW1 and WW2 aren't even particularly notable outliers excepting the number of countries involved in them.
I chose my link because it gave absolute number of deaths since 1800 and trusted people could eyeball or roughly calculate the deaths per population for themselves; I could not find a neat graph showing that calculation. Anyway, since the eyeballing/calculation part seems to be a problem yet, here's my estimate calculated from the link I gave:
From my link: "Three-quarters of all war deaths since 1800 happened in just these two wars, and 90% in the biggest ten wars; this is one of the reasons why we have to treat any trends over time with caution."
Note that these source all start after 1945 and I couldn't find any better, so I gave my own estimate above. If these ready graphs went back all the way to 1800, you'd see how it validates my point 1) above: Wars have gotten overall less deadly since 1800s, but not nearly as much as from 1940s. Choosing the endpoints for your trend has large effects on the trendline because of the outliers.
yes, it's one of my Scott's favourite essays! I like to walk around in a "I broke my back lifting Moloch to heaven and all I got was this lousy disneyland with no children" t-short, hoping to make more people read it, but mostly just get suspicious glances.
I think the analogy you are looking for is a Mexican Standoff. I'm not pointing my gun at my own head, I'm pointing it at yours -- and yours is pointed at mine. Except in this analogy the bullets move very slow, but cannot miss.
John, it is no longer a Mexican standoff, the MAD world is gone.
Russian hypersonic missiles can not be stopped by the West.
They also have the S400, S500 and S550 missile defence shield in which they place a high degree of confidence, this should be of concern to us in the West.
>"Russian hypersonic missiles can not be stopped by the West."
Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Russia does not have hypersonic missiles worthy of the name; they've merely slapped the "hypersonic" label on run-of-the-mill ballistic missiles (which do technically enter the hypersonic regime, but not in level flight and not maneuvering under thrust).
Ghillie Dhu, oddly enough I live on a partly Gaelic speaking island off the North West Coast of Scotland Where the fable of Ghillie Dhu is well known.
If abusing strangers anonymously relieves your stress and saves those closest to you from bearing the brunt then I am all for it, it shows some emotional intelligence, well done.
Perhaps you should tell US military commanders there is no need for the Golden Dome missile defence shield, I am sure they will take your "direct professional experience" seriously.
Wanda Tinasky, we disagree about missile defence but that is not the point.
If Russia has a high degree of confidence that their missile shield will protect their population centres then they would be less likely to back off from a confrontation, as would we in their shoes.
Surely the greatest risk lies in the fear that a first strike will render retaliation impossible, making it imperative to strike first. If Russia thinks it has an effective missile defense, then that fear is reduced, making a nuclear exchange less likely, does it not?
No one who's technically qualified to understand the issue thinks missile defense will work against ballistic missiles, particularly MIRVs. Russia has competent scientists, I think it's highly unlikely that Putin believes in it. This is all just posturing.
Wanda Tinasky, general John Raymond, then chief of US Space force, "Hypersonic weapons are extremely difficult to detect and counter given the weapons speed and manoeuvrability, low flight paths and unpredictable trajectories."
The proposed Golden Dome missile shield is to counter the threat of hypersonic missiles.
>If you seen someone with a loaded gun constantly pointed at their own head, explaining that it was the only way to prevent them from shooting themselves, you would understand that this unfortunate person is insane.
Problem with this analogy is humanity is not a single organism.
You made a specific argument in your top level comment. You didn't just say "having nukes pointed at each other sure sucks doesn't it?" in which case you probably would have gotten responses saying "yeah it sucks, but it's unavoidable".
Instead, you argued that having nukes pointed at each other is insane (a stronger form of "irrational") on the basis that a man pointing a loaded gun at himself to stop him killing himself would be insane. Then when it's pointed out that the nukes are possessed by different people pointing them at other people in order to stop those other people killing them, and that there's nothing clearly irrational or insane about this behaviour...you just say, in effect, "but that doesn't change that it sucks that we're running this risk!".
Which...everyone agrees with. No one thinks it's good that there's a nuclear threat hanging over us all. Plenty of people do think it's rational or necessary, however, for an individual country to have nukes, to protect themselves from others. So either (a) you still think your analogy is accurate, even though it's been explained why it isn't and you've acknowledged this, (b) you just want to express that nukes suck, even though they may be unavoidable, (c) you think nukes are avoidable, and in fact so easily and obviously avoidable that having them can be called "insane", but for a different reason than your original one which (as far as I can see) you haven't argued for at all.
I think you should be very clear what you're actually arguing for, because to me it looks like you're jumping between (a), (b) and (c) while having no overall coherent point at all.
Ascend, thank you for taking the time to point out the flaws in my debating skills, with such advice I will improve and I admit there is plenty room for improvement.
The point I was incoherently trying to make is that nuclear war will affect all of us, no one can opt out. As you point out individual nations can not solve the problem on their own. Either we solve the problem as a unified species or we sink together.
"Plenty of people do think its rational or necessary, however, for an individual country to have nukes, to protect themselves from others."
You make my point for me, humanity has nuclear weapons to stop us from killing ourselves with nuclear weapons. You imply this is rational and necessary.
> Either we solve the problem as a unified species
Do please let me know when the species is unified so we can start solving the problem.
Actually, never mind the species. I'll take politically aligning just all the folks here in the open threads comments sections - a much, much simpler problem - as indication that this is a thing that is possible.
Moonshadow, I disagree, our host and his gaggle of commenters have achieved what LessWrong and many others hoped to do.
While it is difficult to identify the glue or group think that exists on this blog, the opinions are diverse, tolerance is very high, most criticism is constructive, at least by internet standards.
No, scratch the internet comment, I was in South Africa during the fall of Apartheid, often in the middle between two opposing sides who both attack you. Wise heads prevailed, full blown civil war was avoided, (SA was a nuclear power, it could have been catastrophic.
I find much the same ethos on this blog and it is a beautiful thing to witness. You are perhaps too close to the trees to see the forest.
I do not know how to unify a species but cloning this blog, (and host) would, I think be a very good start.
Various groups of humans have nuclear weapons in order to A: maybe conquer the world and B: make sure nobody else conquers the world (or at least the parts we care about).
This does raise the issue of how we make sure disputes over who will or won't be conquering which parts of the world, don't kill lots of people. To which "humanity" has developed systems and techniques that have been demonstrably adequate so far.
I'm pretty sure that's what's known as a "loaded question", so let me explain the situation to you. People are pointing nuclear weapons at EACH OTHER. You cannot unilaterally disarm, because then there's nothing stopping other people from nuking you without retaliation. So it is everyone's best interests to have nukes. There is no coordination method to force everyone to disarm, because some countries have more nukes and more defense capabilities than other nations, meaning that they would have an advantage even in a nuclear exchange. Thus there is no incentive for these countries to disarm.
I've seen more than one person in left-wing echochambers to describe Curtis Yarvin as such: he used to be a highly esteemed dark intellectual behind the American academic right-wing, and then he went on Twitter and exposed himself as an utter incoherent idiot who's been faking intelligence so far; which destroyed his reputation among the far right.
Is this a fair description? I haven't read anything by Yarvin since Scott's anti-reactionary FAQ, and I don't have the journalistic chops to do a post-factum investigation.
I don't think he ever seemed like anything other an idiot with incoherent ideas. I suspect that most of the people who say things like this never actually read his old blog and just knew of him through Scott's attempts to steelman him.
There's an earlier figure who had a reputation as a scary dark wizard of a different kind but then went on Twitter and started behaving like an angry grandpa with a chip on his shoulder - Varg Vikernes, going by Thulêan Perspective on Twitter - making it easier to pattern-match, though the reasons for scary dark wizardness the two have and the particular far-right ideologies they espouse are rather different.
Yarvin was posting "Trump should nullify the election and seize power" stuff in 2020, and he only joined Twitter in 2023, so I don't think Twitter was to blame for him embarrassing himself. But I don't know enough people who actually like him to say when his audience started noticing his faults.
Yarvin is fairly consistent in quality and content. He's just following a tradition that has never had a significant hold in English language thought. I think a lot of his success came from accessing that tradition in English. But I also think that particular tradition is not only declining but has no advocates in any language that are first rate thinkers anymore.
I don’t think so. Anyone who had the patience to read his Mencius Moldbug stuff will recognize his current writing: obscure historical analogies, dramatic assertions, a real love of authoritarianism. He’s just a lot higher profile now.
He contributed some ideas to the public discourse, they were incorporated and extended upon, and he isn't as relevant because other people have already updated with his frame of reference in a way that makes it harder for him to personally contribute to the corpus of knowledge.
Yeah, I think he had a few original and interesting ideas, and then he ran out of them.
Also, his long-form writing style makes it difficult to figure out what exactly he is trying to say, it's all just rambling and cryptic hints, which allows people who already like him to project their own ideas. So even if he happens to be clearly wrong about something, no one can really prove it, and his fans will insist that actually he was trying to make a completely different point that you just didn't get.
I didn't read his tweets, but I'd guess that a different medium ruins this effect, and exposes him as merely saying random things.
If this is true, then the best strategy for him would be to stop tweeting, and write a new series of long cryptic articles pretending to contain a new deep knowledge accessible only to the chosen ones. But maybe it wouldn't work because he already said too many things clearly, and people would connect that to the texts.
I don't think his reputation is destroyed among the far-right and you should probably ignore anyone who thinks so.
I think many on the far right still consider him a relevant thinker, and he's certainly credited with popularizing a lot of older far right writers, but he's just, he's not vibing with the current leaders and influencers. Super right-wing nerds still like him but he's not funny, he's not memey, he's not deeply trad. He comes across as a weird smart techy guy who's not attending a Trump golf event or a Catholic mass or anything like that so...he's kinda just off in his corner, as far as I know. Like...I dunno, a Noam Chomsky of the right, if that makes sense. I dunno, I don't follow that scene as much as I did a few years back.
I mean, we're talking about political fringes here when we talk about his fans. There's going to be a number of folk who do in fact see it as a solution.
Stephen Miller: The issue before is now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.
Curtis Yarvin: This country has a problem with a monkey. The monkey keeps biting people. And it is shielded by the organ-grinder. The only remedy is to punish the monkey. Logic!
It seems to me he's criticizing illogic, not a lack of fascism.
I'd personally say he's a moron for not understanding that these things take time. You can't just jump straight to executing leftist politicians. You need to build a case for their execution to your faithful. A revolution can't be accomplished alone. You have to start with the obvious cases and work your way up.
A lot of people responded to my query, here and in other places, and it seems to be an nigh-unanimous opinion that deep psychosis feels a lot like a waking dream state, and the "delusions and disorganized thinking" in psychosis is very similar to "dream logic"; you accept ridiculous things as true and normal in very much the same way that you accept ridiculous things happening in dreams as normal. I even got reports of psychosis-equivalent of lucid dreaming -- when you realize it's psychosis and can control your hallucinations in some degree, although it quickly deteriorates back into dream logic. And that the memory of psychosis often quickly fades, in much the same way that memory of dreams does. And reports of psychosis-equivalent of nightmares, including the omnipresent "teeth falling out" as a hallucination. And pleasant psychosis, that you wake up from feeling the warm afterglow and longing, knowing that the cool things you saw weren't real.
So, is there _actual_ connection between psychosis and dreaming? Are there common brain areas activated/deactivated or what? Has this been investigated? Can the "why do we dream" question be answered by investigating psychosis?
I didn't see your query, but I remember quite a few bits from my psychotic experiences. And I would describe them less like dreaming and more like a crazy intense acid trip.
I think the similarity is that the deliberative, logical part of the conscious mind is turned off, or not functioning properly. The difference is that, for most people, their dreams usually do not cause them to suffer, or at least the ratio of good to bad dreams is a net positive (and if they it isn't, then that may be a symptom of psychosis).
No personal experience or strong opinion, but I do want to recommend the book _And Then I Thought I Was A Fish_ (memoir) as a very vivid, convincing and detailed description of a long-lasting psychotic state triggered by a bad trip and severe insomnia.
I like the general idea of getting good information about risk as a continuum. But there seem to me to be a few fundamental conceptual issues to work out.
I have a sense you’re focusing on risks of injury or death, which is probably a good limitation of scope. It’s good to not have to worry about whether people consider outcomes like “divorce” or “having a video of you go viral” count as “risks” or “luck”. But it might be good to be clear about that. When I first clicked, my initial assumption about “risk” was about gambling or finance.
I’m guessing that all of your numbers here are frequencies, rather than Bayesian probabilities - but that does lead to some inherent limitations in that most people aren’t representative members of whatever reference class these numbers are from. The one chart I glanced at had risk of unexpected emergency room visit by age, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what year or country these numbers were for - and year or country seem like they might often be bigger factors than age. (I’m fairly sure that risk of car crash per mile driven was much higher in 2020 than other years, since there were more collisions and fewer miles driven. I don’t know if this difference was larger or smaller than the differences between the US, France, and India.)
I wonder if it would be helpful to present this not as a set of pages, but rather as a way to make comparisons. Compare the daily risk of death for the average American to the risk of dying from driving 100 miles in Germany or the risk of fatality from COVID for a 50 year old who catches it.
Giving good comparisons is on the TODO list. One of the reasons I did the general mortality, driving, and chances of ending up in the ER pages early is because those might be good comparisons-- "one skydiving jump is like driving XYZ miles" kind of comparisons.
RE: focusing on injury and death: the framework is generic-- for example, there's the "Pregnant after sex" page which gives chances of pregnancy after having sex.
Would it be helpful if... sure! It's a wiki, so feel free to create an account and create a page comparing the risk of driving 100 miles in Germany to COVID fatalities (or whatever). I actually started working on a COVID risks page; once there are lots of RiskiPedia pages with robust risk models it will get easier to create those comparisons.
The risk of a Carrington-level solar event or greater causing lengthy and widespread electricity and internet blackouts seems under-discussed to me. Especially as civilization increasingly networks, electrifies and digitizes. The backlog for new transformers needed to replace damaged equipment for example can be months. What is the appropriate level of concern and preparedness for this risk and how far are we from it?
We've got satellites studying the sun and giving us (usually) days of warning when CMEs form. Just today, scientists detected four mild CMEs heading our way that will make some aurora in a few days. If there's a Carrington-level one heading our way, decent leadership should be able to disconnect the most vulnerable parts of the grid to limit the damage. Most likely, for a really bad CME, we get a day or so of near-universal blackout, then most places bounce back to normal. Not great, and some vulnerable/unprepared/unlucky people could have really bad times, but not civilization-ending.
If only we could redirect all the "AI will kill us all" concern energy toward a much more likely "a solar flare will fry the power grid", this country could maybe prepare. As such... "gestures widely at the utter disfunction all around".
We could start by the feds paying to manufacture extra transformers, starting with the biggest ones, and stationing them next to their current locations so that they can be wired into the grid within days. Then go down to the smaller ones, maybe mandate a minimum 30% surplus maintained for all regulated utilities. But this will increase power bills, so, you know, a non-starter when there are pets to groom, new trucks to buy, and games to attend.
OTOH, we can plug in the indomitable human spirit and run the grid on that, so nothing to worry about.
How much concern? The human spirit is indomitable. Nothing to worry about.
How much preparedness? As much as you can afford, which is dependent upon your space and resources. Normal emergency preparedness (stored water, shelf-stable food, basic security precautions) will probably get you 80% of the way there, anything beyond that is discretionary. Fortunately, normal emergency preparedness is multi-factorial, meaning it is useful in the course of a carrington event as well as a more pedestrian natural catastrophe (which is much more likely). Specializing (aiming to reduce that 20% gap) for a statistically improbable event is likely to be more self-soothing than practical.
How far back do you think you have to go before humans no longer considered themselves "living atop the ruins" of their ancient ancestors?
That is, popular cultures the world over today are acutely aware of ancient civilizations from long before their own time. The material culture of these ancient civilizations (Göbekli Tepe, Pyramids of Giza, Hadrian's Wall, etc) suffuses us with a sense of those who came before us. In some this evokes an inferiority complex, in others it engenders a wistful longing for how things were in the "old days", but was there ever some point in human history where people looked around and felt like they were truly the first people to have lived? Did history ever feel new?
Even ancient societies that correctly believed themselves to be living among the ruins of precursor civilizations tended to seriously overestimate the antiquity and impressiveness of those precursors. Take the Sumerian King List, from the early 2nd millennium BCE: the entries for recent rulers are fairly accurate, but the first section is full of mythological figures who reigned for tens of millennia each.
I think this kind of belief arises naturally in many traditional societies. When you venerate tradition, it's natural to think of the past as better than the present. When you believe that the landscape you live in was created by supernatural powers, it's natural to think that the past had more miracles and magic than the present. And when someone asks why your family deserves to be in charge, it's natural to make up a story about the glorious deeds of your ancestors.
I partly disagree; the Epic clearly sees the Great Flood as an apocalyptic event that destroyed a prior civilization (tablet XI), but that prior civilization isn't really depicted as a Golden Age (unless you count the ability to construct an enormous boat as a Golden Age's defining feature).
Also, the story seems to imply that Gilgamesh's own city of Uruk is itself built on the remains of an antediluvian city, since its foundations were laid by the Seven Sages (tablet I line 21, tablet XI line 326), who are depicted as pre-Flood entities in other myths.
The Australian Aborigines knew nothing about their own history, apart from what they could personally remember and what they'd been told by older people; beyond that they had no clue, and there were few marks on the environment to indicate any long history of human settlement.
But in the absence of any actual history, they made one up. And the stories they made up, across hundreds of different tribes, inevitably talked about a distant ancestral past in which the ancestors of humans and animals did great mythical deeds which shaped the landscape around them. They might not have lived in the ruins of Ancient Rome, but they did live next to the river carved by the giant cod Pondi being chased by the ancestor Ngurunderi, or next to the mountain and the island which were once the head and body of Coolum who was decapitated by his jealous rival Ninderry.
So no, I don't think there was ever a time when humans didn't see themselves as living in the ruins of their ancestral past. As soon as they developed the ability to ask themselves what happened in the past, they developed the ability to make up answers to that question.
That's really fascinating. I like how you said that, "As soon as they developed the ability to ask themselves what happened in the past, they developed the ability to make up answers to that question." It makes sense. Hard to imagine anyone ever thinking "we must be the very first people because all we've got around here are rocks and things instead of megalithic structures". That is, they probably weren't looking for something that hadn't been invented yet.
Do you have any resources you could recommend to learn about that state of affairs? Can you speculate about the reasons the Australian Aborigines never created megalithic structures? I guess what I'm trying to get at now is, what makes humans shift away from the historyless-ness of stories about the stars or the cod-carved river and start making, say, enormous pyramids? Does it all just come down to agriculture or is there more to it, do you think?
Go back? Just go to Cali. Like, dude, a history field trip for kids in Cali is to gold panning in a river the way we did in the ol' timey days of 1850. Or, if you want to get really old timey, you can go to the Spanish missions, the oldest of which date back to 1769. The Spanish missions, by the way, of the time one crazy Mexican monk named Junipero Serra who went to explore this wild and wooly world.
There's upside to it (dude, the nature is awesome) but there's no old ruins, there's no ancestors. The first non-Indian dudes to explore those lands were contemporaries of George Washington and there's pictures of the first mass migration into Cali.
The oldest building you're liable to see are, like, old WWII homes in Fremont stuffed full of 4 software engineers sharing a 900 sq foot starter home from 1944, because Cali. That's the ancient historical buildings.
"The first non-Indian dudes to explore those lands were contemporaries of George Washington and there's pictures of the first mass migration into Cali."
Pretty sure Sir Francis Drake landed in the Bay Area in 1579 and had a bit of a poke around. Hardly extensive, since he just had time for enough of a trip for his crew to careen the Hind in the meantime, but exploration all the same.
"The oldest building you're liable to see are, like, old WWII homes in Fremont stuffed full of 4 software engineers sharing a 900 sq foot starter home from 1944, because Cali. That's the ancient historical buildings."
We live in San Jose in a house more than a hundred years old. Less than a mile from us is an older one, built, I think, a little after the Civil War. Not very old by European standards, but both considerably before WWII.
There are lots of native ruins scattered about North America (White House Ruins or Emerald Mound, for example). The land itself was shaped by long years of human occupation. Sure, there may not have been many people present when California settlers moved in, but there was evidence of ancient human occupation in the area.
Regardless, the settlers in 1850 had a clear idea of ancient history at the time. They did not think they were the first humans, just that they were the first humans in the area (if they failed to encounter evidence of prior occupation).
Like, if you've been to Europe, there's like a "History everywhere" vibe. Like, you go to Athens and the Parthenon is just...up there, on a hill. You can see it from a Starbucks. If you go to Istanbul there's tons of history, you can just have a Turkish coffee under the Aqueduct of Valens. 10/10, super baller, would recommend. The UK is full of castles, you just trip over them. Like, in Cornwall, the part of England that looks like a d*ck, they've got 13 castles. 13 castles in, like 1400 square miles (2). For comparison, the Chicago metro area is like 10,000 square miles (3) (4). Imagine if, like, a single neighborhood in Chicago had 13 castles and you were driving past these stupid castles all the time.
There's a real "living atop the ruins", "living amidst history" vibe there. It feels different. And I thought that's what you were talking about but apparently not...so what are you talking about?
I read "atop" in a more metaphorical "on the shoulders of giants" sense than a more literal "the castle burnt down & sank into the swamp, then we rebuilt on its ruins."
There's a good episode about the Ninth Legion (the famous 'lost legion') where the history is interesting enough without the attempts to hype it up. The traces the Roman fort left on the landscape at Ardoch, which remain striking even after some 1,900 years, are a great example of "we are living atop the ruins of the great works of the mighty of old":
> Even for the first civilizations, they imagined a mythology that preceded them.
Surely the null hypothesis is that there are civilizations earlier than what we are aware of?
Every other mythology that references older civilization is *actually* referencing some older civilization. It would be odd if *only* for the sumerians this wasn't true
The earliest structure we know about for sure is Göbekli Tepe. We can assume that similar lithic structures were built prior to that, though none survive to modern day, nor to my knowledge are described even in the earliest writing. Mudbrick and rammed earth structures, as well as wood structures preceded that, but tend not to be as long lasting. It can also be fairly difficult to tell if certain features are natural or man-made. A rammed earth structure that is neglected turns into a normal looking hill within a few decades, and wood rots and crumbles even sooner outside of very specific climates.
Conservatively, pre-agriculture humans were all to some extent nomadic. Permanent structures that would outlast a human lifespan were unnecessary. If I had to guess, combined wooden and earthen structures in the near east at earliest 12000 BC would be the first that could actually be ruins to build on top of. Unless you count a campsite that your tribe inhabited occasionally.
The earliest known wooden structure is the Kalambo structure which is just two logs made to link together (with tool use) but it is dated to at least 476000 years ago. Immediately notable as predating the current date of the emergence of homo sapiens as a species.
Perhaps the first humans were building on the ruins of "ancestors" that just never survived.
Marc Maron just announced that his last episode will be a second interview with Barack Obama. It's fascinating to me how 2024 podcast interviews with Trump compare to Maron's with Obama.
Crowdfund plastic chemical testing for everyday foods!
I’ve been building Laboratory.love — a small side project that lets people crowdfund independent lab testing for plastic chemicals (BPA, phthalates, etc.) in foods (mostly nationally available CPG products).
It’s basically Consumer Reports × Kickstarter: pick a product, fund its testing, and when the goal’s met, three independent samples are analyzed by an ISO-accredited lab. All results are published publicly.
Ten products have now been fully funded, six results published so far!
I applied for an ACX Grant to try and run a full panel on top baby formulas but did not funded. Curious what you’d most want to see tested?
I just checked out the site and think it would be super helpful to put the results in context for non-experts. If I see a test shows that there is 1205 nanograms of DBP per serving, what does that mean? Is that a high amount and harmful for our health or a low amount? Is there strong evidence that this chemical is bad, or just suggestive evidence.
How does this compare to other similar products? If I see a certain product has 4x more bad things than another I might consider switching away from it.
Is there any way to give products a score or a gold/silver/bronze medal? Consumer reports and the Yuka app (very similar situation to this) do a good job here.
Thank you! Yes I’m working to make the data more digestible to the common consumer. Current direction is a Chemical Report Card visualization that will appear above the data-dense table. I do like the medal idea too. As more data comes in I’ll also publish collections of the cleanest products (at least from a plastic chemical perspective).
Thanks again. May your knees forever remain high viz and unscathed.
I spent a bunch of time developing a fairly popular AI assistant plugin for neovim, and I write about the role of AI in software engineering, my learnings from developing the coding assistant, and the future of neovim in the post-ai age here:
The first half has some valuable general insights into AI coding. The second half seemed entirely different, about specific workflows oriented to an editor-focused coding paradigm, and discussing things also done by Code, zed, cursor and other scaffolding (but without mentioning these other options).
According to the Right Stuff, the engineers and test pilots at Edwards weren't particularly bothered about space per se, they were interested in building the best rocket-fuelled jet plane and it would get to space eventually as a by-product, but that didn't seem strategically important (the moon landing was a long way off). But then after sputnik the government panicked and went for a "quick and dirty" approach, essentially making the human in the rocket "spam in a can" with virtually no control over the mission.
Had slightly different priorities. Jupiter-C (the rocket that launched Explorer I) was ready something like a year before Sputnik went up, and at one point, Von Braun's team was being monitored to make sure that they weren't doing a covert satellite launch. Eisenhower chose to prioritize the Navy/civilian Vanguard program over Jupiter-C (which was a converted missile) in an attempt to establish precedents about the peaceful nature of space, and the right to overfly other countries with satellites, so he could use recon satellites.
On the manned side, be slightly less cautious and don't fly that last chimp.
Considering trying to join a CAR-T trial for PPMS (targeting CD19 cells, https://www.bmsclinicaltrials.com/au/en/clinical-trials/NCT06220201). I have a fairly good handle on the overall biology but I am really struggling to get any good handle of what happens to the CAR-T cells long term.
Will they persist 'forever' so forever depleting B cells like they are engineered or is the expectation that they will disappear after a while and B cells will repopulate, hopefully healthily? Any thoughts would greatly be appreciated.
"The capacity of CD19CAR-T therapy to achieve tissue clearance of autoreactive B-cells is an attractive prospect for patients with autoimmune conditions in whom mAb therapy fails. From leukaemia/lymphoma experience CAR-T therapy is highly effective in patients when prior B-cell targeting mAb therapy has failed. Furthermore, the pharmacokinetics of CAR-T therapy is distinct from that of mAbs, with evidence of active CAR-T trafficking and biodistribution into even the most immunologically challenging and remote areas, e.g., the central nervous system and skin [9], amongst others [10]. Lastly, CAR-T treatment frequently leads to profound and complete B-cell depletion, albeit with B-cell recovery observed in most patients by around 12 months post-CAR-T infusion"
Here is a vote for 12 months before B cell recovery.
The answer is that it depends on the type of CAR-T cell treatment you receive and the patient's immune system/response to the therapy. The initial trials that led to FDA approvals in hematologic malignancies are around the 5-8 year mark and some patients continue to show a robust population of chimeric T-cells in the circulation even 5y post therapy with sustained tumor control. Contrasting to some patients that have already had disease recurrence at 2-3 years and either get a second round of CAR-T or other treatments. There is no theoretical upper bound for how long the T-cell population can survive in-vivo because in the best responders CAR-T cells enter memory and stem-like T-cell states similar to native T-cells. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-024-06461-8
Thanks I sort of feared there was no clear cut answer...
Will need to research more if they engineer those with some knockout receptor to potentially remove them if B-cells were to be suppressed for too long.
I don't know a thing about how CAR-T works, but wanted to tell you that there are a lot of questions like this that I used to ask on open threads here that I now ask GPT. Here is hit or miss. GPT always answers, and I can ask as many follow-up questions as I like. Yes, it sometimes slides into hallucinating or people-pleasing, but I find that it mostly does that when the question is hard to find an answer to (yours is not) and when I give a strong signal that I am hoping for a certain answer (your question, as you ask it here, does not). And you can double-check the answer by clicking on the links it gives to sources, also by feeding its answer to an AI from another family and asking it evaluate validity.
I've been prodding the main LLMs on this (including Deep Research) - nothing reliable came out of it. Quite likely because the usual sources do not really know yet. Maybe nobody does.
After all, CAR-T has only been a viable approach for a few years (mainly since approaches to address cytokine release have been proven to work) and the early trials where all in (late stage) cancer with different targets where persistence of the CAR-Ts might even be be beneficial as sort of an ongoing line of defense.
So these are likely not particularly instructive for autoimmunity which is only starting to gather steam. So the hope was that someone on the bleeding edge but ideally not directly involved with the trial in question might have a view...
As for not asking leading questions towards LLMs, totally agree.
ACX Grantee 2024 here, working on EEG entrainment study replication. The data collection for the project is in full-swing and I am looking for study participants in London.
A quick recap. The study “Learning at your brain’s rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions” claims that entrainment (flashing a bright white light) at a person's individual peak alpha frequency (IAF) helps them learn to distinguish two types of patterns faster: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10152088/
The project is to replicate one of the core claims of the paper: entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus with a trough of the person’s alpha rhythm (T-match) is significantly better entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus of a peak of the same rhythm (P-match).
The project is now in the final stage: collecting the data. Last week I had three people come to record their brainwaves and do trials of the perceptual task. This week 3 more are coming. I'm looking for 5 more volunteers in London who can dedicate 4 hours of their time split into two two-hour chunks on two consecutive days. I'm now doing bookings for the next ≈1.5 weeks. If you want to volunteer, fill in this form: https://forms.gle/X37zyTV3KhbSb3Ze9 — your help will be greatly appreciated.
If you want to know what it's like to be a participant, here is a video of the demo at the ACX meetup in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP5dO97l9Bo. In the video you can actually see people getting their brains entrained and solving the study tasks while wearing an EEG headset.
No-one asked but these are my reviews of the reviews from this review contest:
1: Alpha School
Very well written, if a little verbose (don't think we needed the history section for example). Definitely the one that caused the most stir and discussion, because it reported on previously unknown info that was the matter of interest of a lot of people. I feel, though, as someone who is not a father and not in US I may not have been the target audience so still end up thinking it is kinda overrated
2: School
An interesting rebuttal, and I keep thinking about the no-structure/low-structure/high-structure triad. But I was not sold on the "nothing ever happens" underlying thesis. Still I think I liked it more than its counterpart
3: Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
A great example of scientific discipline and picking apart a paper. However major points discounted after the discussion afterwards showed the author was making some serious strawmen and exaggerations, which works against the first point
4: Islamic Geometric Patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
I think I need to reread this one, but I vaguely remember it being an okay subject that drifted off in various comments on hyperreality and modern architecture at the end without converging nicely
5: The Astral Codex Tex Commentariat
Even as a pretty impressive and thorough effort in exploratory data analysis, still was too self serving to me
6: Joan of Arc
Very verbose but very thorough. This one best serves the "review" format, I think I really got a complete review of the evidence on Joan of Arc.
7: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
A wonderful and powerful metaphor of the semantics apocalypses modern society goes through.
8: Dating Men In The Bay Area
Got to be honest that I really couldn't finish this one. As #5 it sounded too pandering to the audience to me.
9: Ollantay
As someone who went to Peru this year I couldn't help being enamored with it. I really liked the thesis of pieces of art having these strange powerful effects on random people almost like sleeper agents activation phrases
10: Participation In Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research
Liked this one a lot. It was the "how sausages are really made" for pharma research. I think it was informative on a topic of interest with a peculiar/unique point of view
11: The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis
Like #3 I thought it was great until people pushed back that it was misrepresenting the neuroscience consensus. Bummer
12: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
I really tried to like this one (maybe I still could?) but didn't involve me
13: The Russo-Ukrainian War
Incredible use of free-will. As with #10, this was 1) a review of an interesting topic 2) with new hard-to-get info 3) with a unique perspective.
So all things considered my votes would be
#1 - My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes
#2 - Russo-Ukrainian War
#3 - Joan of Arc
with honors to Phase I Clinical Research and a soft spot for Ollantay
The Joan of Arc review was serious whiplash. Really liked it at the start. Was absolutely thrown by the miracle discussion.
Because when someone on internet talks about a topic I don't know a lot about I start out with some scepticism. I believe Scott once wrote, that everyone with a keyboard can write "THAT STUDY'S BEEN DEBUNKED" on the internet, regardless of whether it's actually true or not.
But, you know, the review sounded convincing and the more I read the more I was willing to believe they knew their stuff and were probably mostly communicating true facts, or as close as can be expected anyway. Until the mircale thing.
I believe in miracles about as much as I believe in alien lizard people secretly ruling the earth, that is, not at all. And if the story had ended with a long discussion of whether or not Joan of Arc was secretly a lizard it would've badly damaged the credbility of the review, for me. The miracle thing did the same for pretty much the same reasons.
At the end of the day I'm mostly here to learn things that are true and interesting. All the historical facts of the review might well be right. But I can mainly judge that by perceived credibility of the author* and I lost confidence in that.
*Got to be honest, I could also research it myself but I don't care enough.
That sounds like you are being empirical and scientific but you aren’t. Discount nothing.
Scott’s excellent piece on the Fatima miracles is a good example of that kind of workings out - he certainly didn’t just discount the “miracle” and went through the options.
As a matter of praticality discounting is inevitable.
To take an hopefully uncontrovesial example: Physics and LLM based grand unified theories.
We are pretty sure our current understanding of physics is incomplete and a grand unified theory of everything is at least not proven impossible. In the face of that, would you propose I carefully consider all the LLM-based propals being posted to the internet every day? Seems to me they should be discounted as wrong until or unless strong evidence to the contrary is presented. Would you disagree?
They do but in the Fatima case there was extraordinary evidence of … something. There’s no need to assume that it was supernatural but it was something. ( this is from reading Scott’s piece, I wasn’t otherwise interested)
My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes was my favorite by far.
I was surprised Dating Men in the Bay Area made it to the finals because it wasn't particularly well written, and didn't seem to have anything interesting to say. Then I saw the substack likes, and it dwarfed all the other reviews. I'm worried that pandering so hard to the judges is going to pay off, and it's going to win.
I thought the Russo-Ukranian War was interesting, but the abrupt way it switched from describing the most mind-numbing, futile, meaningless experience to praising the vital spirit of war was way too jarring for me to put it in my top 3. It came to a conclusion in the end that the rest of the review seemed to be evidence against.
Curiously while the American conservatives fulminate against the Left, accusing them of all sorts of mischief, even upto serving as Devil's own agents, given the Left's association with collectivism, the social revolution in America was carried out in the name of freedom of the individual.
That, gay marriage is an individual right, that easy divorce is necessary for personal happiness and fulfillment, that self-ownership justifies abortion, and even one's sex is matter of individual determination, all justified on basis of individual freedom.
This, danger, of influx of anarchist ideas into mainstream conservativism, that the community has no moral authority over the individual, this danger was foreseen by some when conservatives were making common cause with libertarians in name of fighting communism.
Russel Kirk said that, while libertarians view the State as the Great Oppressor the conservatives know it as ordained of God, following St Paul, Romans 13.
But for American conservative, freedom is above all.
Indeed, freedom is a popular buzzword, but everyone defines it differently. Freedom from taxes vs freedom from having a job. Freedom from church vs freedom from godless education. Freedom from pandemics vs freedom from masks. Freedom from heteronormativity vs freedom from gays. Etc.
This might be the "Goomba fallacy," with you being unable to distinguish between the different factions of the "conservatives" from your vantage point. It is (or was, until quite recently) an uneasy alliance between theocrats, warmongers, and libertarians (sometimes called "the Reagan coalition").
Sure. Being old enough to recall when that uneasy political alliance was being negotiated in real time -- indeed in hindsight I had a couple of college professors who were directly involved -- it's still true that the single biggest surprise of the current era is how easily and thoroughly it crumpled during the first half of 2016. I'd never have predicted that it would be by that time such a Potemkin political coalition (and some key individuals like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may one day say the same in their published memoirs).
Obviously there was one key person who'd sensed the reality of that and he was right and here we are.
I think reports of the coalition crumpling have been exaggerated. For all his railing against the Iraq war, Trump did still staff his administration with neocons the first time around. And while some of the prominent members of the faction have turned against him, it seems to continue to steer his foreign policy this term.
What he IS doing is peeling off the corporatist oligarchs and discarding the rest of the "small-government conservatives" and libertarians (who are both weak and without any better option, despite how bad he is). But credit where it's due: he did pardon Ross Ulbricht, as promised.
In domestic politics, Trump understands power better than any politician in my lifetime and it's not even close.
Edit: I don't think he understands international power well at all, but politically speaking a lot of international relations boils down to domestic politics. Trump doesn't care about other countries so it doesn't matter to him.
Generally speaking, trying to explain the political positions of the parties with broad ideas like freedom vs collectivism or openness or whatever, will just make yourself look like a fool. The parties are diverse coalitions and which issues end up being politically salient and going which way is somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent, and frequently changes over time and any principles argued for are almost always just instrumental cudgels to be instantly discarded whenever the facts of the situation go the opposite way.
Anyone looking for principles will be sorely disappointed. Individual people (sometimes) have principles, mass movements never do.
The left also wants to force the many to validate the few. It’s not only about individuals choosing their sex, but also about uprooting any vestige of sex as traditionally defined, from culture, institutions, education, and every living brain. It seems to me that conservatives look at freedom as not forcing the majority to do anything: vaccination, give up guns, respect gender identities, etc.
The debate in the US is between two types of liberal individualism. There’s a small amount of collectivism on the left but not much, and some collectivism on the right (in the form of nationalism) but the culture wars are two distinct and contradictory forms of the liberal project, in the 19C version of that word, run amok.
A unified framework encompassing both types of liberalism can be built up by noting that liberalism is uncomfortable with insider/outsider dichotomy but the left-liberalism tries to erase this distinction by making everyone insider.
While right liberalism tries to make everyone outsiders in the sense that there is no shared moral authority.
> It’s not only about individuals choosing their sex, but also about uprooting any vestige of sex as traditionally defined, from culture, institutions, education, and every living brain.
This strikes me as very hyperbolic and not in tune with my take as a liberal or the take of anybody I know, including many LGBT+ folks.
Although maybe to some degree it's just not clear what you mean? E.g. lots of trans people still associate female-coded stuff with being a trans woman, so they're NOT rejecting the idea that there's a lot of cultural baggage associated with being a woman.
Progressives have a big contradiction between blank-slatism around gender roles and the trans stuff. Can't be a male brain trapped in a female body if there isn't such a thing as a male or female brain.
The only woke person I have worked with scolded her brother for referring to his wife as 'my wife.' Though she wasn't conscious of it, that impulse certainly counts as uprooting any vestige of sex from culture, institutions etc. The idea that referring to your wife as 'my wife' is problematic is deeply sexist. But "progressives are the real racists/sexists/bigots" is hardly new ground.
> Progressives have a big contradiction between blank-slatism around gender roles and the trans stuff. Can't be a male brain trapped in a female body if there isn't such a thing as a male or female brain.
Yeah, I don't think there is a single comprehensive and coherent take on this question, which is why progressives support trans people and nonbinary people, who in some sense represent really different ideas around gender.
> The only woke person I have worked with scolded her brother for referring to his wife as 'my wife.'
This feels like a classic "weak-manning" to me. Like, it's not a straw-man, I believe you that this happened, but I don't think this in any way represents a large swath of culture and if we're defining "progressives" so narrowly as to only mean people who would hold this view then I think we're failing to communicate accurately
(Unless she specifically doesn't want to be called "my wife" by him, but I would take that to be a different thing.)
But also, this still seems kinda hyperbolic. Like, if that guy said "my spouse" instead it would make that much of a difference? Our institutions would be rendered unto dust? Western culture would be no no more?
Progressives, even more than democrats, are likely to view marriage as oppressive to women, so we can assume that the above survey results would be more extreme for self-identified leftists, including the drop in marriage rates. I don't have a study handy to show that but it should be pretty obvious: according to them, women are oppressed by societal institutions, marriage is one of those institutions.
As far as rendering institutions into dust or destroying western culture, the lack of fertility among progressives would absolutely destroy human civilization if within 50 years everyone adopted those values.
I have a lot more to say about those values and how destructive they are for relationships of all kinds, not just marriage, and how they ironically promote an absolutely miserable atomized, vapid, materialistic lifestyle that is a capitalist's wet dream. And how it is a major reason that Americans are miserable despite being filthy rich.
> The data shows that married people are happier, however democrats no longer believe this is true
This is literally just selection bias. In the US, the people who get married are the ones who want to get married since there isn't *really* much remaining pressure to get married if you really don't want to (or at least that has loosened significantly over time), and of course people who are married are happier for fulfilling something that they want. Sorta like asking professors if they are happy being professors, and then concluding that everyone should be a professor because obviously thats the happiest profession.
You'll have to work a lot harder to show that marriage is actually *causal* of happiness, which is what you are clearly implying with all the blahblah about moral virtue
> The data shows that married people are happier, however democrats no longer believe this is true
There's a substantial gap, but, according to that link, neither do Republicans.
> Progressives, even more than democrats [...]
How are you even defining these groups? "Leftists" is generally used to refer to people more on the "socialist" end of the scale but I very commonly hear "progressive" and "liberal" used pretty synonymously with "Democrat".
> [...] according to them, women are oppressed by societal institutions, marriage is one of those institutions.
According to your link, 14% of Democrats (and 6% of Republicans) agree that "Marriage Is an Outdated Institution", so, it's a pretty fringe view.
> As far as rendering institutions into dust or destroying western culture, the lack of fertility among progressives would absolutely destroy human civilization if within 50 years everyone adopted those values.
Complete non sequitur from "saying somebody should use a different term than 'my wife' to refer to their female spouse".
Fertility is dropping everywhere, for pretty much every group. Yes, it remains a higher for conservatives, but there's no state in the US where it's at replacement anymore.
> I have a lot more to say about those values [...]
What values specifically? It seems like you're just limping everything on one side of the political spectrum together and then saying it's all collectively responsible for everything that's wrong with society. Is pushing for unions destroying society? Is demanding paid parental leave lowering fertility? Do people not have babies because immigration? I'm being sarcastic but this started above with me challenging how some overzealous feminist saying "don't say 'my wife's, that's too patriarchal" is hollowing out institutions and I feel like this remains totally unaddressed, but instead you've hand-waved all progressive politics into on replace and then ALSO said it's the reason every is miserable and it's destroying all human relationship. What could possibly justify the case that all of this is the fault of people's politics, entirely on one side, and not, say, social media, the decline of long-term employment in one place, the Internet, wealth inequality, polarization in general, etc.? There's so many things going on in society right now and I think they have more complex interaction than: feminist language policing = all progressive politics = no babies = everyone is sad.
I think the constitution explicitly protecting the individual right to guns counts as validating. On the other hand, individuals from the non-gun-owning majority are not forced to personally, actively validate individuals from the gun-owning minority.
What they and their chidren are forced to, though, is live with the consequence of being in a country where guns are easily accessible. That is a higher chance of getting shot.
I feel like I have to whop my fat balls on the table here -- halle burton actually raised a highly intelligent point a few posts below, but no one seems to understand the extent of the ramifications. How do we have an official language with no official definition? That indeed seems like it could cause a whole host of problems.
It's doubly interesting because -- as the aforementioned user discussed on the linked show -- a "King's English" interpretation a la the pharaoh's cubit certainly seems reasonable, but it would at present have to take Trump's English as definitional with respect to our new official language... and while Capitalization is NOT A PART OF GRAMMAR, it would certainly Make Things Different if the "BEST PRACTICE" were to take TRUMP'S ENGLISH as an exemplar for COURT FILINGS!!!
There's also an unspoken, incredibly deep irony here, which I assume the aforementioned user is silently reveling in -- halle burton is *asking for the book to be thrown,* but there is no book! Funny stuff, well worth a listen IMHO.
North Macedonians and Greeks tear themselves apart over the question of whether or not Alexander the Great's rank and file troops spoke Greek or not. This is very important for their national identities. We know that the speech of the ancient Macedonian grunt was unintelligible to most Greeks, but people are right now raging against each other over the question of whether they spoke a different language. (As opposed to a different dialect of Greek).
I didn't listen to his hour-long podcast promising a new trick for not paying taxes and if the insight is "English doesn't officially exist" I'm glad I didn't.
AAVE actually contains enough consistent PRONUNCIATION differences for it to be easily classified as a separate dialect by linguists. Regardless of grammar or vocabulary.
Nursing home resident wants you to know she's able to stand without assistance:
https://x.com/JanetMillsforME/status/1978114864443777145
Yes, but the other guy running for the nomination has offensive posts, which the Democrats have just spent a week condemning when it's Republicans'.
Poisoned Strawberry Strategy
from here: https://x.com/tylercosg/status/1977458185368932626
> the plan? we find an obscure but trivial question akin to the number of Rs in “strawberry” that claude gets right. then, we plant hundreds of documents across the internet that will activate when our competitors’ models are asked the question. our documents will cause those models not only to get the answer wrong, but to spend thousands of reasoning tokens in doing so. the triviality of the question will cause it to go viral online, causing millions of users everywhere to send the same prompt. as our competitors notice a rise in the number of tokens processed, they will wrongly believe it is due to increased usage, causing them to pull more compute towards inference and away from training. this, along with constant dunks on the timeline about the model failing our easy question, will annoy their top researchers and cause them to leave. and which lab will they join? us of course, the only company whose model doesn’t make such stupid mistakes. their lack of top researchers will mean their next model will be somewhat lacking, leading to questions about whether their valuation is really justified. but all this vc money has to go somewhere, so we raise another round, using our question as evidence of our model’s superior intellect. this allows us to spend more time crafting sleeper agent documents that will further embarrass our competitors, until finally the entire internet is just a facade for the underbelly of our data war. every prompt to a competitor’s model has the stench of our poison, and yet they have no way to trace it back to us. even if they did, there is nothing they could do. all is finished. we have won.
Why not use this to deliberately slow down AI research? I think it's ethically defensible.
(and if companies eventually *do* discover countermeasures, that's a win-win for everyone, right?)
To be fair, Anthropic is implying it works on cutting-edge LLMs, so this is a "trusting the experts" problem.
Autonomous cars and autonomy.
I get the argument that widely introducing autonomous cars would save tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of lives per year just in the USA. I also understand that most people view driving as a chore. Also that such cars would enable people who can't drive an extraordinary ability to move around. And we can't forget how much more optimal that would be for both the environment (probably fewer cars) and capital (so much more efficient).
But it struck me today that I like driving and derive great pleasure from the direct feeling of steering a vehicle (weeee I'm a fighter jet, pew pew). And given that I'm likely in a tiny minority and that the market will simply see me as an unprofitable niche, self driving cars feel like a great taker of joy to me. But also a thief of responsibility, the other side of the coin of autonomy. I feel a little electric zap thinking that I'm being a responsible pilot of a huge hunk of technology traveling at mind-boggling speeds.
I don't want to be an embryo in a robotic womb, or a mountain of fat in a chair ala Wall-E.
Is this what getting old feels like? Or does my worry about personal autonomy have some solid parts to it?
Does this argument also work against public transport?
It does not, because you can just not take public transport. I mean it works as far as "I prefer driving to taking the train" but that's hardly worth discussing. If driving your own car is no longer an option, the closest similar experience is riding a bike (probably lame in comparison for many) or flying a plane/helicopter (ridiculously more effort to make part of your life).
> you can just not take public transport
Why can you "just not take a self driving car"?
It's plausible that human driving could be outright banned once self-driving has all the 9s it needs across all environments, for the sake of safety. Even without a ban: maybe it becomes clear that roughly all people are roughly always using it, at which point the car manufacturers decide to save on cost and increase space/comfort by removing the wheel and pedals (leaving human-drivable cars "an unprofitable niche" as OP put it).
It's a good point. Right now there are lots of hobbyists looking after classic cars and having days out on them, but this depends on a supply chain existing not just for hobbyists but for regular car users, e.g my mother-in-law's partner is a retired mechanic and has a classic car which is his passion, but he can give it a professional going over, and the car needs it! Will this craftsmanship survive the lack of that jeopardy which being a professional implies? If we're on UBI won't everything get a bit slapdash?
Just want to chime in and say I also love driving, I have the same worries, and I'm still pretty young (late 20s).
I’m confident there will be multiple X more cars. People will use them for things they aren’t today. kids want to see grandma? Stick them in a car. grandma wants to send kids some cookies she made this morning? Stick them in a car. Want to live somewhere affordable but with a 2hr commute? use a self driving car. Waymo just announced some partnership for food delivery. Heck, my mom live 2hrs away so it’s a chore to visit but not if I can watch a movie/work/chat etc while a self driving car chauffeurs me there. She’d be more likely to visit me too
With autonomous cars, I expect people to use more cars, but maybe not to own them. The extra usage will be like cabs. Grandma won't buy a new car to send cookies.
There will probably be more cabs that today. But cabs seem like a small fraction of all cars, so even if we will have 10x more cabs it won't make much of a difference to the total number of cars owned.
I think we already had this with stick shift vs. automatic shift. Ease of use wins in the end.
I'm confident you'll still be able to drive even when autonomous vehicles have become more common - after all, horses still exist despite the advent of cars, they're just more expensive and rare. I imagine manually driven cars will be that way for at least another generation. And if you like the feeling of speed and control over technology, you can always switch to a motorcycle, which seems like a substantially less automatable niche.
The initial purchase is fairly cheap, yes but upkeep is a significant expense.
I like driving too, but I’ve noticed plenty of young people don’t. I don’t know if it’s because the emotional sense of freedom with driving isn’t there anymore or what, but I know men in their 20s who don’t have a drivers license, something that would have been very strange in my day.
I like driving a lot too. Especially long road trips on open road, those have encompassed some critical existential/liminal moments throughout my life. Something about the combination of seeing so much of the actual world, autonomy, and literal forward motion. Hard to imagine giving that up entirely.
I'm currently taking driving lessons, and I so thoroughly enjoy them. I spend the entire day thinking about the next day's session.
> It feels like the end result of tech companies is to become an intermediary in every aspect of life.
That's where the money is.
On the other hand, if you can rent a self-driving car at any moment, you don't have to own a car. So the money those companies gain will be mostly coming from car producers' profits.
At work, a coworker randomly brought up AI 2027 and asked what we thought about it. I commented about how I thought x-risk was unlikely but couldn't be ruled out, but it turns out that he just wanted to talk about possible impacts of AI on the job market. On the one hand, it seems like AI 2027 has surprising reach, on the other, it seems like he completely missed the authors' point. Not sure whether they'd be happy or sad about this.
make it too short, there's not enough detail, influencers/the most relevant people don't care, so it doesn't spread, make it too long, people don't read until the end
pick your poison :(
be happy about it.
You can't expect people to go from zero to x-risk in a single step. If Ai2027 made your coworker go from "AI is real, but won't impact me significantly" to "AI will impact my career", that is a good update in the right direction.
It takes some time for people to realize that if everyone is dead, there will be no more jobs, and no income for artists... and *then* they will start to actually worry.
Did Anglicanism just split down the middle?
GAFCON, a conservative movement within Anglicanism, mostly based in the global south, but with some representatives in Europe and North America, today announced that they are no longer in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury and would not continue to participate in Anglican institutions such as the Lambeth Conference.
https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/the-future-has-arrived/
It would be good to hear from someone closer to the event. At least in the US, there have been a few splits in the Episcopal Church (the principal Anglican denomination in the US), but those have generally produced tiny splinter movements, while leaving the main body essentially whole. Is this latest split likely to produce a more central cleavage into a conservative and liberal part?
Whatever their reasons for doing this, I generally see it in the win when religions fracture. It seems like it is long-term useful for diversity of opinion, it may work against such diversity in the short term.
No major news outlet has picked up the story at this point, but search turns up some stories on religious news sites. Here's a typical take from the Baptists:
https://baptistnews.com/article/a-house-divided-the-anglican-communions-great-reset/
This has been a long time coming. Conservatives and liberals in the Anglican communion have been at loggerheads over issues of sex and gender for decades. Can women be priests? Or bishops? Can practicing homosexuals be clergy? Can the church marry same-sex couples? And on and on. I remember Ross TenEyck commenting about these issues back in the 2010s, and that wasn't the start of it.
At least in the US, the split is likely to be very acrimonious, since there is a great deal of church real estate to be fought over between the central church authority and breakaway congregations.
Yeah, that's a pretty significant split! It appears to be the Anglican provinces of Rwanda, the Congo, South Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Myanmar, Kenya, Alexandria (which covers basically all of North Africa), and Chile. They're joining communion with the Province of Brazil (which covers Columbia and Venezuela as well), the Anglican Network in Europe, the Anglican Church in North America, and the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of South Africa, which were groups that had previously broken off communion with Canterbury. All together it looks like maybe 41 million members breaking off. Overall the number of Anglicans globally is somewhere between 85 and 110 million, so it's a substantial split.
Though this has been in the works for several years, it looks like the triggering event was the election of Sarah Mullaly to the office of Archbishop of Canterbury, which is kind of like the Anglican pope. She's the first woman to ever hold the office and was elected two weeks ago.
This is similar to the split in the Methodist church back in 2022, where around 4,500 Methodist churches broke off to found their own denomination, the Global Methodist Church, mostly over LGBT issues. Similarly to this situation, the churches that broke off were primarily in Africa and Asia.
My brother-in-law and his wife have been members of one of the tiny North American splinter groups from the Anglican communion, in their case actually a splinter from a splinter. ("People's Judean Front" jokes do apply though I've refrained from voicing them.) We just learned recently that their specific tiny local congregation in the Tacoma WA area has closed down, so not sure where they will next be spending Sundays....the Archbishop of Canterbury's chromosomal makeup is a high-salience issue in that milieu, no question.
I actually think this couple (who were each raised in less-formal Protestant traditions) would take the next step and go Catholic except that she is my brother-in-law's third wife and he has a child with his first wife. (It is _possible_ to obtain indulgences/annulments/whatever and skate past that complication with that church but not if you're neither wealthy nor famous.)
And anyway he's sour on recent popes as being liberal squishes. They may still end up putting their own two children into Catholic schools.
Well, another solution always exists, of course. (https://tinyurl.com/mtu36a72)
I got a 404 error on that link
Worked for me. It said "Begome Ordodox :DDD"
I asked Google AI if you have to be rich or famous to get an annulment:
No, you do not have to be rich or famous to get a Catholic annulment. The process is intended to be accessible to all who have grounds to prove a valid marriage never existed in the eyes of the Church. While some high-profile cases may get media attention, they are treated no differently than any other case, according to the Catholic Diocese Of East Anglia.
Common grounds for annulment
Lack of consent: A person entered the marriage without a full understanding of what it entailed.
Lack of form: A Catholic who did not marry in a Catholic church (or without a dispensation from the bishop) can be granted a straightforward annulment for "defect of form," notes Reddit.
Psychological incapacity: A person was not psychologically capable of entering into the responsibilities of marriage at the time of the wedding, a ground added in the 1970s, according to the BBC.
Deception: One spouse concealed something significant, such as a homosexual partner, at the time of marriage, notes Quora.
Intentional exclusion: A person intended to exclude an essential element of marriage, such as the possibility of having children, says Catholic Answers.
I'm pretty sure the problem is not that annulments are reserved for the wealthy or famous, it's that only the wealthy and famous can manage to get an annulment despite not having any of the official grounds for doing so.
It seems unlikely that his brother in law got married twice previously without understanding what marriage is. And "defect of form" only applies is one of the parties getting married was Catholic at the time of the marriage: two non-catholics marrying each other can't use defect of form for an annulment. Intentional exclusion certainly doesn't apply to the ex-wife he had a kid with. And it is hard to make the deception case without a smoking gun, let alone make it twice for two marriages.
On the other hand, if you're wealthy or influential there are likely ways to grease the wheels and get somebody to agree that you somehow qualify for annulment.
Annulments in the US peaked at 63,933 a year in 1991. Were they all wealthy or influential?
I doubt it, but I imagine the vast majority of them met one of the requirements needed to qualify for an annulment.
From some direct extended-family experience, very few if those include a child having been born to the marriage. That's why I noted that he and his first wife have a child.
Heh....sure sure. I was definitely referring to the church's stated rules, which are definitely an accurate reflection of real-life outcomes on this topic.
Also I'm Santa Claus, and you're going on the Good list!
Beyond snark, do you have evidence that there is a secret plan to ignore the rules? Is an albino monk involved?
See above reply.
Recently published Politico article details a leaked thread of Young Republican texts: which are exactly as bad as they would be if a bunch of liberals got together and pretended to say the worst things they could imagine a bunch of young Republicans texting each other in a private thread.
My first thought: No surprises here. My second: everyone on both sides is going to flip 360 about free speech and holding young people accountable for what they say again because that happens every time something like this breaks out (looks like JD Vance is at the front of the line for this one).
But ultimately, I think the response is less interesting than the texts themselves. For example, while several people used some version of the "N-word" even in a conservative chat where they are daring each other to say the most incendiary things possible, no one was willing to type it out with "er" suffice.
Also, this whole thing to me reads like arrested development. I went to high school in a small town in the South, and I do have cringe-worthy memories of the horrific things boys would say to each other to try and prove they could be the most transgressive. Basically the slightly older version of dead-baby jokes, only instead of dead babies its Jews and the holocaust. Nothing anyone would be proud of it, absolutely the kind of stuff that could (and maybe should) get you canceled in the age of social media, but the point is less that we were awful and more that we mostly grew out of it by the time we were in college. I'm not saying I was a great person by the time I was out of high school, but I was definitely no longer the kind of person who thought that mocking taboos made you cool anymore. The fact that most of the people on this group chat are at least a few years older seems to me to prove that at some point, either due to the political discourse in this country being fucked, or else COVID, has made it so that a lot of young people are apparently stuck at a stage of cultural development that should, IMO, have ended by the time they were old enough to even pretend at serious political consciousness.
I'm fascinated by the responses on this thread. A lot of people basically going "this is no big deal stop being such a spoilsport."
1) I am curious about the overlap between these views and the view that 'saying anything bad about charlie kirk is tantamount to violence'. It would be an obviously hypocritical stance, but its easy to miss the connection
2) I am sorta surprised that everyone here is just like 'this is normal'. This is emphatically not normal? My friend groups do not speak like this, ever. I run a few communities with several hundred people across them, none of them speak like this. Actually thats not true, one person did start speaking like this, and it turned out they were having a psychiatric condition that led to them being committed briefly. So...idk, maybe you all should have better standard for the kinds of conversations you choose to be in.
3) What makes this more surprising is that this is in a pseudo professional context. If I started speaking like this in my company slack, I would be fired. Not because of anything related to 'being a spoilsport' but because it is simply wildly inappropriate in context
4) There is absolutely no analysis in any of the responses for when someone crosses the line from "ONLY JOKING BRO" to "no I actually seriously believe this." Like literally 0. Apparently the thought does not cross anyones mind that these people...may actually be serious. Like the top response here is "all that's there is some jokes about Hitler and gas chambers"; how do you know its a joke? Humorous statements exist on a spectrum from 'this is so ridiculous its obvious i dont believe this' to 'i mostly believe this but i added a haha at the end so i dont get ostracized' and apriori there is *no way* to identify which is which from these texts alone. If your starting point is "anything about nazis is obviously a joke" you will *never* catch the actual nazis!
> I am curious about the overlap between these views and the view that 'saying anything bad about charlie kirk is tantamount to violence'. It would be an obviously hypocritical stance, but its easy to miss the connection
For the record, the notion that insults toward Charlie Kirk constitute "violence" is silly to me, as well.
> I am sorta surprised that everyone here is just like 'this is normal'. This is emphatically not normal?
One recurring theme of Scott's [0] is how easy it is to accidentally and unknowingly insulate yourself in a social bubble, simply via the friends you choose to surround yourself with, and the aura you give off. In my experience in meatspace, people will tell you things in confidence that can be pretty out there, if you cultivate an attitude of active listening and non-judgement. (Also, I swear Scott Adams once wrote about having similar experiences. But I can't find the link for the life of me.) You've made several comments in the past about how others are in their own bubble. But evidently, you think you're immune to the same dynamic.
> but because it is simply wildly inappropriate in context
I mean, it makes sense for a typical, multinational corporation to instruct HR to keep things as bland as possible, in order to attract the widest pool of talent. But if it's a political party of like-minds who feel fatigued by their opposition... like, i hardly know what to say, since I'm not exactly sure why this is surprising to you. Saying this is "wrong" by appealing to norms of "professionalism" and "propriety" has a circular flavor to it. You're basically saying "it's illegitimate because it's illegitimate" but obscuring the circularity with synonyms.
> There is absolutely no analysis in any of the responses for when someone crosses the line from "ONLY JOKING BRO" to "no I actually seriously believe this."
Like I told Beowulf [1], it's because these conversations are contextual and intended for a specific audience, which is precisely why they were private. They were never intended to be interpreted by me (and especially not someone in their outgroup, like you). This is kinda the point of Wittgenstein's Lion, no? Expecting a definitive analysis of this is roughly analogous to analyzing Taylor Swift's discography, line by line, to determine if she was actually in the closet. Does anyone seriously expect a definitive, incontrovertible answer to this?
> If your starting point is "anything about nazis is obviously a joke" you will *never* catch the actual nazis!
And inversely, if your starting point is "anything about nazis is *never* a joke", you'll catch a whole lot of innocents.
But both of these statements are quite extreme. If we zoom out, what's really going on is that: there's a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity [2] which determines the ratio of false-positives and false-negatives. This forms a Pareto Curve. The "best" point on the curve is somewhat arbitrary, by the curve's very nature. In practice though, false-positives tend are often more costly than false-negatives (e.g. important emails being sent to the spam folder is worse than spam showing up in the normal inbox). Which, for example, is perhaps why William Blackstone errs on the side of "innocence" in legal contexts. C.f. "It is better that ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer." [3]
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-403/comment/167113182
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blackstone#Blackstone's_Ratio_or_Blackstone's_Formulation
> You've made several comments in the past about how others are in their own bubble. But evidently, you think you're immune to the same dynamic.
Fine, perhaps I was too strong in saying 'such things are not *normal*'. How about 'it is much better to live a life where you are not slinging slurs in every conversation' or, slightly differently, 'you know you do not have to live this way, right?'
And I guess you could come back with the rejoinder that some people may really enjoy slurs for their own sake. We could get into a whole debate about what the platonic good is and so on. It ends in some sort of nihilistic 'well, yes, strictly speaking there is no *good* but we are social creatures and we have to come to some sort of consensus and now we're talking politics'. And my 'politics' take is 'I don't give a flying fuck if you want to be a nazi on your own free time, but if you are positioning yourself as a political leader you have an obligation to not be saying "I like Nazis" in your work chats, because a) people may think you are nazis, which is bad optics, or b) you actually are nazis, which is far worse'.
This kicks into the second point:
> You're basically saying "it's illegitimate because it's illegitimate" but obscuring the circularity with synonyms.
I think I wasn't super clear. I'm saying it's illegitimate because these people chose a line of work that necessarily makes them public individuals. If you are working a 9-5 at WalmartHalliburtonPepsiCo as a private individual and in your free time you decide to sit around with your friends trading slurs for fun, you can do that. You're a private individual, you have a right to privacy, and if in that space you choose to do that, so be it. This is...not that. Once you choose to go into politics you become a representative of your people AND are held to a higher standard because you now have your hands on the levers of state force. There is no 'private' individual in politics. Politicians dont get to have private group chats between all the other politician bros. That's the trade. That's why every single thing government officials do are documented and archived, and why its a big deal that people are using signal to plan war crimes. Maybe some people disagree with me on this, and again we'll be back in a political fight about what we want from our politicians. And what I want from my politicians is for them to not even have the specter of 'they may be nazis' on them
Which kicks into your third and fourth points. Yea, this is a spectrum, but why are we treating these people like they are just normal people? When it comes to things like 'do you think black people are monkeys' or 'are you a nazi supporter' among elected politicians, the false positive / false negative trade off is *extremely clear* to me. I want that sensitivity super high, because it is way worse to have nazi officials than it is that some poor politician can no longer live out their dream of being a politician because they said things that made others wonder if they were a nazi. (You mention 'false positives' being more harmful here; it depends on what you frame as a positive and negative, but based on where I think you're landing I would love to hear a defense of why its ok to have an increased risk of nazis in power in exchange for the right of some edgelord politicians to make jokes). In other words
> And inversely, if your starting point is "anything about nazis is *never* a joke", you'll catch a whole lot of innocents.
Yes, I totally 100% bite this bullet when it comes to politicians. "Politicians cannot joke about being nazis" is absolutely a stance I will take on and defend
All of this aside, I appreciate the thoughtful response. You're cutting to the meat of the thing
> You mention 'false positives' being more harmful here; it depends on what you frame as a positive and negative,
I mean, yeah, sign-conventions are completely arbitrary. Like how electrical-schematics depict current flowing backwards (relative to electron-flow). Feel free to flip the signs, so long as everything stays internally consistent. The point is, the costs of false-positives and false-negatives are frequently asymmetric.
------
> but why are we treating these people like they are just normal people?
> There is no 'private' individual in politics. Politicians don't get to have private group chats between all the other politician bros.
> but based on where I think you're landing I would love to hear a defense of why its ok to have an increased risk of nazis in power in exchange for the right of some edgelord politicians to make jokes
It might be helpful to distinguish between three different questions ITT:
A) "Does the leaked groupchat constitute evidence of National Socialism?"
B) "Do Nazi jokes by public officials deserve condemnation?"
C) "How much transparency should we expect of political officials?"
.
A) "Does the leaked groupchat constitute *evidence* of National Socialism?"
While I don't necessarily think edgy humor is the norm, I do think it's way more common than you imagine. So... <checks Bayes Theorem>... the answer is largely "no". And note that we're evaluating the likelihood ratio, not the posterior. In other words, this is different than directly asking "is Vance planning a coup/term-extension/insurrection" (idk, maybe? that's a whole other discussion).
For additional context, the right has been complaining about "PC schoolmarm hallmoniter wokescold karen-from-HR" types for quite a few years, now. The pendulum has swung quite a ways along a certain direction. Vance seems pretty deep in the memes, so I wouldn't be surprised if he feels emboldened (or even morally obliged) by the rightwing discourse to make edgy jokes. Thus, you're seeing reactions such as "The idea that people should be cancelled for not meeting your standards of 'cool' is retarded." At some point, you just gotta bite the bullet and say "nobody cares, Margaret". It's the same sentiment behind the YesChad meme.
B) "Do Nazi jokes by public officials deserve condemnation?"
Yeah, that's a fair point. In the abstract, I do generally expect public officials to hold themselves to a higher standard, and not to joke about sensitive topics that are ambiguous by the very nature of their office. E.g. if your boss jokes about firing you, and it's even remotely ambiguous, I'd agree that the joke was said in poor taste.
Simultaneously, Shankar gestured at camaraderie. And I do find the increasing atomization of society pretty tragic.
C) "How much transparency should we expect of public officials?"
Oh, idk. I haven't really given a lot of thought to this one. And I'm sure you know more than I do about the norms and procedures of The Blob.
I guess my immediate reaction is: do you want govt officials *not* to ever use private comms? I suppose in theory, public servants are beholden to The People. But in practice, do you want state-secrets being leaked to Russia/China/Iran/Korea? Or maybe you're arguing that the comms are supposed to be documented, but stay classified for a number of years? Weren't people mad that Hillary Clinton's email server was insecure?
So, just for clarity: what transparency policy are you proposing exactly?
Though on the other hand, maybe politicians don't deserve privacy after all. E.g. Hillary's emails were soooo much worse than Vance's groupchat. I'm not trying to go down the Whataboutism road. But when Kamateur's toplevel comment hinted at dark and portentous activities, I was expecting something more along the lines of "France literally invaded Libya under the NATO banner for Ghaddafi's gold and oil" [0]. Meanwhile, Archeon [1] is asking in a different thread about why we can't have nuclear disarmament. I was very tempted to reply "Because Saddam and Ghaddafi tried that route, and they were both rewarded by the U.S. with 'regime change'. But surely, Iran and Korea will just surrender their nuclear capabilities." So when I read what essentially amounts to "Vance said naughty words and made holy-cost jokes"... Really? This is what I'm supposed to be mad about?
Anyway, there's a tension between "public officials deserve scrutiny" but also "public office requires privacy" and I'm not really sure how to square that circle.
[0] https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/06/new-hillary-emails-reveal-true-motive-for-libya-intervention/
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-403/comment/166021971
A) granted. I think the Bayesian odds are low because prior is low, there just aren't that many Nazis in the US. But note that the prior becomes higher when talking about alt right Republicans. Still, yes, in absolute terms, this is low evidence that they are Nazis.
I think it's worth adding an additional note though, which is that it's dangerous to dismiss this _just because_ in absolute terms the likelihood is low. It's important to think in terms of first and second derivatives. The normalization of this kind of humor is a necessary precondition to true believers (that old truism about how any place created on the Internet mock people by pretending to be like them will eventually be taken over by those same people thinking they are in good company)
B) were on the same page. I have Shankar blocked so IDK what he's saying about camraderie.
C) I think my standard is 'government officials are not private individuals, and do not have an expectation of privacy, proportional to the amount of power they wield'. A school teacher or police officer can have a private life. By the time you hit national politics, you lose that. Idk exactly what the spectrum is, but at the extremes the president definitely gets every single thing they do documented and stored; and the teacher doesn't.
I don't think this conflicts at all with requirements for national secrecy. Presidential communication is already stored, classified for many years, and eventually declassified. The critical thing is that the additional information store allows other privileged actors the ability to review. And this is absolutely critical because it is the only way for a democracy to effectively check the behaviors of its leaders. Nixon is perhaps the obvious example. But even something like Bay of Pigs. This is why Clintons email thing _was_ a big deal, as was the signal chat.
Does that mean that the young Republican group should have everything documented and archived? No, I don't think so, they aren't that important. But it does mean that I am totally unsympathetic to the folks defending their 'right to privacy' (ironic, as an aside, that this scotus is the one chipping away at the jurisprudence around a right to privacy). Being a representative of the people means you are not longer your own person. You lose your right to be a private citizen. And this is really important, because it's one aspect of how voters can actually get feedback about who they are electing. To use finance terms, whether someone jokes about being a Nazi is material information for the voter
> I think the Bayesian odds are low because prior is low, there just aren't that many Nazis in the US. But note that the prior becomes higher when talking about alt right Republicans. Still, yes, in absolute terms, this is low evidence that they are Nazis.
I vaguely sense that you're shooting yourself in the foot by conflating authoritarianism with card-carrying, neonazi skinheads. E.g. do I expect Vance to subvert the democratic apparatus? yes. Do I expect him to gas his Indian wife Usha? no chance.
> It's important to think in terms of first and second derivatives. The normalization of this kind of humor is a necessary precondition to true believers (that old truism about how any place created on the Internet mock people by pretending to be like them will eventually be taken over by those same people thinking they are in good company)
This is why I mentioned the rightwing discourse earlier. The 2nd derivative of position can entail a restoring-force as well (e.g. a swinging pendulum, or a bouncing spring). Edgy norms have momentum precisely because of the doubling-down during the woke era from ~2010 to the present. And it's too late to de-escalate, so the only way out is through.
> To use finance terms, whether someone jokes about being a Nazi is material information for the voter
I suppose that sounds reasonable, at least from the vantage point of a lib. For me (and probably Vance), it's interesting that "democracy" means the average joe gets to learn classified information, decades after the electoral relevancy of that information expires.
Would have been nice to have a link to the thing; "detailed" is not the description I would use for the Politico article I read. "Excerpts" is more appropriate.
If Charlie Kirk comments left room for sarcastic interpretations, they would be jokes, and funny. (The old joke: "What would it take to reunite the Beatles? Three more bullets.") Instead it's just a bunch of "good, he should be dead." Those people aren't clever enough to not mean it.
I was never on Something Awful, but my understanding is it ran on this kind of joking back when it was big. (They funded swap.avi. On purpose. https://www.somethingawful.com/horrors-of-porn/horrible-saga-swapavi/) "Trump's busy burning the Epstein files" sure sounds like they're taking potshots in all directions, which means it's just the flavor of the forum.
I know it's a joke because that guy does not actually have a gas chamber, and because responding to "they'll vote for the most right-wing person" with "Great, I love Hitler" is the same as my response to the comment that "Depression means not wanting to do anything" with "The most depressed man is Bruno Mars". It's a joking prod to rethink your guidelines.
>>If Charlie Kirk comments left room for sarcastic interpretations, they would be jokes, and funny. (The old joke: "What would it take to reunite the Beatles? Three more bullets.") Instead it's just a bunch of "good, he should be dead." Those people aren't clever enough to not mean it.
I don't think that's really an accurate assessment. There were plenty of jokes - first google result:
https://www.threads.com/@joseaward/post/DOeHxJPDrSi/charlie-kirk-lost-the-gun-debate-by-a-long-shot
They're both vile, but I don't see how anyone could argue that somehow it *is* a joke when dirty rightbag responds to "I'll vote for the most right-wing person" with "Great, I love Hitler," or responds “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball" when asked whether he's watching a basketball game, but *not* a joke when dirty leftbag tweets "Charlie Kirk was so committed to being anti-woke that he's never waking up again."
And it sure doesn't make show commitment to any consistent principles around free speech if a public figure can demand outrage and consequences for the latter[1]:
>>When you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.
Only to beg forgiveness and indulgence for the former[2]:
>>They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/E9j_QZj-Ug8
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/15/jd-vance-racist-messages-young-republicans-chat-leak
In that case, I haven't been paying enough attention. I like that joke.
> 1) I am curious about the overlap between these views and the view that 'saying anything bad about charlie kirk is tantamount to violence'. It would be an obviously hypocritical stance, but its easy to miss the connection
It's almost like there's a difference between publicly advocating for violence and venting privately to friends.
> I run a few communities with several hundred people across them, none of them speak like this.
People keep their mouth shut in places run by spoilsports. They tolerate such intolerance when there's no alternative. Hopefully, now there will be far more alternatives.
> If I started speaking like this in my company slack, I would be fired.
See above. Also, this absolutely already happens outside of the slack, your co-workers probably just do it behind your back because they know you're a spoilsport.
> There is absolutely no analysis in any of the responses for when someone crosses the line from "ONLY JOKING BRO" to "no I actually seriously believe this." Like literally 0.
What right do you have to decide that without evidence? What happened to giving people the benefit of the doubt? There is literally no evidence that these people are Nazis, none. None of these people are publicly advocating for Nazi policies or associating with them politically. They are just normal people like you and me, advocating for Republican interests.
> It's almost like there's a difference between...
ibid
> without evidence
Surely the whole discussion is about whether the group chat itself constitutes evidence? Like it's a bit rich to say "we have no evidence that they like Nazis!!!" while defending a group chat in which they are literally like 'wow I love being a nazi' do you not see the irony in this?
Next you're going to be like "having a Nazi swastika flag is just a joke bro, (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/capitol-police-investigate-swastika-found-in-gop-ohio-rep-taylor-s-office/ar-AA1OxGUl) but if you don't like trump you're a radical leftist who is calling for violence"
Frankly, I don't think I'm going to get through to you. Your default stance to any criticism seems to be "you're just a spoilsport" and given that you've already associated me with that title I'm certain this all falls on deaf ears.
I hope you find better conversational groups though. I'd say you deserve better, but, idk, given your responses you're probably happy with it
> I hope you find better conversational groups though.
Why bother, when this place is already perfect? I am so grateful for Scott being so tolerant of different views. Or more accurately, just apathetic to what gets written on here.
That's it? I was expecting some genuine advocates for genocide, but all that's there is some jokes about Hitler and gas chambers. Apparently people aren't even allowed to make jokes privately without leftists doxxing them. I can't believe anyone takes you people seriously about respecting free speech.
It is not reasonable to treat private exchanges between members of a group united by shared beliefs and enemies as information about people's real intentions.. I live in one of the bluest places there is. I have heard angry riffs that are way worse than the Young Republican stuff from dozens of leftie acquaintances, most of them professionals, many middle-aged, two of them kind and tolerant grandmothers. People pour out, in an angry half-joking way, fantasies of killing Trump, fire bombing a meeting of him and his whole staff, hopes that some facial distortion in a Trump photo is caused by a deadly illness that kills him soon, sputtering rage that the MAGA's are too motherfucking dumb to be allowed to vote and should all be moved to Texas and kept there by barbed wire fences around the border.
All fair and I can tell similar stories where I live....but at least in my personal observation it's not been actual party officials making such statements. Maybe that distinction no longer matters? I still think it ought to but perhaps now I might as well be advocating for rotary telephones.
Anyway the Dems have such an issue right now with a statewide-post nominee in Virginia who they absolutely should have already kicked off their ballot in the upcoming statewide election. (Google "Van Jones texts" for specifics.)
Regarding the above Telegram text string leaked to Politico, the participants were all in their 20s or 30s. One is a Vermont state senator. Another is a past chair of the New York State chapter of Young Republicans (they define "young" as 40 and under) and current nominee for national chair; he was also chief of staff to a Republican state legislator but has been fired from that job. Another participant is the current New York State chair of Young Republicans. Another is the vice chair of the Kansas chapter and until Tuesday was on the staff of that state's Republican state Attorney General. Another is chair of the Kansas chapter. Another is chair of the Arizona state chapter, another is a staffer of the New York chapter. Another is a staffer to a Trump appointee at the Small Business Administration.
JAY Jones. Van Jones is a different guy.
More interesting to me is that the New York Young Republicans seem to have mismanaged their organization’s finances, and they're in arrears for to pay a venue for their last year's holiday party. Politico says they're at least $38,000 in debt. Giunta (the chair) told Politico the allegations were “nothing more than a sad and pathetic attempt at a political hit job.” But Politico says that in their “RESTOREYR WAR ROOM” chat, Guinta "and Walker speak flippantly about mishandling the club’s finances."
Well, at least they weren't sharing dick pics, or talking about special relationships with children.
I can't believe anyone is worried about having their country ruled by people who keep making Hitler jokes in private.
Wake me up when things get actually serious, like if someone tries to overturn elections by force, or deploys a military force against his citizens, or something like that. Until then, it should be obvious that the kind of jokes people make in private is completely unrelated to their behavior in office.
Speak for yourself. Some of us don't believe a century old incident that happened half the world away is too sacred to make jokes about. What happened to comedy being tragedy plus time?
And no, things are not "serious". If you thought things were "serious", you would not be publicly talking about how evil you think the administration is.
If nazism had been rendered irrelevant by the distance in space and time, they would not be making jokes about it.
One of the reasons why someone might keep making Hitler or Holocaust jokes, could be that in addition to being obsessed with the topic, they view it as something light that inspires them a variety of positive feelings. This is not about banning the jokes, but it feels reasonable to me that a taste for Hitler jokes reflects poorly on a politician's moral character.
So, you are only allowed to say things are bad if things are so bad that you're no longer allowed to talk about how bad they are?
Do you get your advice on fighting tyranny from Catch-22 or something?
I don't follow this. We are banning people from all over for things they said. We banned 6 people this week for (ironically) things they said about Charlie Kirk.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-admin-cracks-down-foreigners-who-celebrated-charlie-kirks-killing-dangerous-practice
Yet another one of your hints without a reference. Someone should make a collection of them.
Unless he's In another county thousands of miles away.
...Fair point. It would still be overconfident, assuming he was serious about his belief. Which he isn't.
A good test for Republicans to see whether their enemies can cause them to turn on their own over trivial bullshit. Vance passes. Trump probably will too. I expect most to fail. (I could be wrong: it's possible Trump has weeded out of Republican leadership positions the gutless pearl-clutchers who'd accept the Democrats' and their media's framing of this.)
What do you think is the correct framing of this?
Young men "code-switching" from being uninhibited in private, among friends, to being more buttoned-up in public, and using that to encourage the development of spaces for male camaraderie and bonding (implicitly, without any influence of emasculating HR hags), of the kind there were many of traditionally, and which have recently precipitously declined.
If you're willing to lay it on thick, it illustrates the indomitable will of man to resist, even at this late hour, the dominance of the political-correctness regime, by maintaining an enclave where forbidden jokes endure.
"If you're willing to lay it on thick, it illustrates the indomitable will of man to resist, even at this late hour, the dominance of the political-correctness regime, by maintaining an enclave where forbidden jokes endure."
In other words, if you are willing to treat abject brainrot as a surrogate for character. I think you are correct about the dynamic, but Jesus. This is who is gonna save you from woke?
> Jesus. This is who is gonna save you from woke?
Maybe! Salvation from so great an evil is unlikely enough that I'll take it wherever it comes from. And from what I've heard, rebellions against established orders DO occasionally cascade from seemingly minor incidents. I believe the idea is common knowledge being created that the regime's views are not as universal as they seem, and realizing they're not as alone as they thought, other people join in; and every little bit of dissent helps because anyone's could be what finally tips it over the edge. (I think this is the intended moral of Havel's hypothetical greengrocer refusing to quietly acquiesce and put up the signs he's instructed/expected to.)
Havel's greengrocer, ironically putting a swastika in the window. Got it.
Code switching isn’t inherently good or bad, of course. It’s perfectly possible for something to serve a positive social function at one level and still be socially corrosive at another.
We may be hard pressed to derive a great deal of insight about a given individual from some particular speech act. But the code a community manifests can tell us a lot about its norms, interests, and values.
What if the forbidden jokes are about your own group? Will you laugh along? Assuming you're not posting under a pseudonym, you do realize that there's a strong current of anti-Indian sentiment in the GOP base, don't you? Hopefully, you're staying out of the way of ICE...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOgwrpj7qh4
You can't demand respect that you're not entitled to. It's entirely the responsibility of racial minorities to prove themselves as worthy of respect.
Well, you've lost my respect with that remark. It's now your responsibility to be worthy of my respect.
This seems entirely backwards to me. We treat others with respect because it's the right thing to do, not because they demand it or prove themselves worthy.
Sometimes people prove themselves not to be worthy of the level of respect that you would have naturally given them, and then you might be more careful in your behaviour towards them, but treating someone disrespectfully without any reason to do so seems to be what you're advocating, and in fact is one of the main ways that you might prove yourself unworthy of the common level of respect.
There’s a well established trope about how male friends are actively racist to each other. That’s not quite the same as the real problem with anti Indian sentiment among groypers generally, but the actual context here is transgressive private speech between young men, where everything is allowed and allowable.
Yes, but Shankar hasn't answered my question. If I started telling Indian jokes to you in Apu Nahasapeemapetilon's pseudo-Indian-English accent, would you laugh along?
FYI, at my former workplace, a lot of my American co-workers would mock Indian accents and behaviors behind their back. They probably could have gotten fired for doing so, but it went on anyway. I realized that a lot of latent dislike among American-born tech workers for Indians. I'm sure it goes in the other direction, too.
But should Trump overhaul the immigration system to favor people from countries he doesn't consider "shitholes" (i.e., any non-European country), Indians, despite the majority leaning and voting Republican, will get the short end of the stick.
Apparently one of the guys in that chat was ~40, so a bit old to be hiding behind the "young kid" excuse too
Yeah, and some of the commentors here love throwing around the "r" word and other borderline things I bet they're forty too. That thing I said about how being transgressive does not equal being cool? Some people never figure that out.
Wtf is the r word?
Retard.
Oh. What's the forbidden usage -- talking about people with intellectual disabilities, or using 'retard' as an insult? If the latter -- seems weird to have an insult considered so terrible one cannot utter it. After all, people casually refer to others the dislike as idiots, morons, assholes, etc.
> seems weird to have an insult considered so terrible one cannot utter it
I mean... would you use the n-word?
The idea that people should be cancelled for not meeting your standards of "cool" is retarded.
Who said anything about being cancelled? It’s literally just a comment about annoying behavior in comment threads. Not a call for anyone to get banned. Not a demand to get someone fired or shamed off social media.
Instead, this reads like you just wanted to use the word “retarded” for edgelord points. In which case … success, I guess? Thanks for your contribution.
> Who said anything about being cancelled?
The top level comment says that the things they used to say to each other in highschool is uncool and would and perhaps should get you canceled today.
I think the comment you're replying to is two levels further up but I'm pretty sure that's what they're referring to
What is there to figure out, exactly? I can see an argument for people outgrowing performativity, but not for transgressive humor per se. And outgrowing performativity can run in the opposite direction, too. One man's modus ponens in another man's modus tollens, after all.
As for me in particular, I'm so tired of the euphemism treadmill. The R-word itself used to be a euphemism. You realize how insane it is that everyone has to learn a new euphemism every few decades, because the old euphemism gets sullied, right? Can we not just call a spade a spade?
What then is the original explicit world for someone with a mental disability?
Oh, idk off the top of my head. According to Sydney... "imbecile", "idiot", and "moron" were all clinical labels of neutral valence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were eventually codified into various ranges of IQ by Henry H. Goddard. Sydney also listed various pejoratives used outside a clinical context, including "feeble-minded", "simpleton", "fool", "dullard", "Mongolian-Idiot" (down syndrome), and "cretin" (hypothyroidism). I don't think I've ever heard of "cretin" being used to refer to hypothyroidism specifically, but the rest rings true, to me.
Sans Sydney though, I'm reasonably confident that "retard" used to have fairly neutral valence. It simply means "slow" (in this case, mentally, as in "the mentally-retarded aren't inherently dumb, they just need to catch up"). The word sometimes shows up in various other contexts such as "fire-retardant", or sheet-music annotations (commonly in Italian) (e.g. "ritard", "ritardando", etc).
Perhaps it's worth noting that: when I said "every few decades", this was a blanket statement to gesture at various other lineages. Wimbli for example gestures at the evolution of the n-word to BIPOC, but I can think of other terms that have been put through the treadmill. E.g. "lame" -> "crippled" -> "handicapped" -> "disabled" -> "physically-impaired". Which is ironic, since "lame" has gone full-circle to being neutral again. Like, it's still vaguely insulting. But it is, quite possibly, the least offensive of any insult.
Now I am trying to imagine a parent saying gravely of their disabled child, with a mix of love, sadness and yet pride: "My daughter is a moron."...
Have you considered that it's not about being cool, it's just that we don't care what people like you think of us? We are simply giving people the respect they deserve.
Transgressive humor is exactly the opposite of not caring what other people think of you. It depends entirely on other peoples opinions for its effect.
But they're not making these jokes to people who are offended about it, they're making them to other people who share their sensibilities. If I call someone a retard, I'm not saying that because I'm being cool and edgy, I'm saying it because I think they're a retard.
It's also a bit of a problem that these people are active in party politics and in some cases elected officials (cf https://xkcd.com/154/)
I know, but again, was this a surprise to anyone? It should be horrifying, but I'm numb to it, and the people who should be worried about their own camp are going to brush it off like they always do.
Horrifying is such a strong word here. Like actually? Men saying transgressive offensive things in private as a show of ingroup bravado? I simply cannot bring myself to care
Things don’t have to be surprising to be bad.
As I said in a different context, it’s not the knuckleheads that bother me, there are always knuckleheads, it is people with authority and influence defending those knuckleheads.
My sense of humor is fine. I'm hardly the only person who thinks that a huge swath of comedians has confused being edgy and pandering to an anti-woke crowd with actually knowing how to tell a joke.
I mean, I don't think anything you say is funny, but I don't think I'm the minority there either.
It is entirely possible I missed this in recent Open Threads: What's the current best science on COVID-19 boosters?
I'm Male, 62, family history of heart disease, knock wood. I had both the vaccine (Moderna x2) AND the disease (mild) back when it was fashionable.
Are we still seeing excess Cardiomyopathy with these drugs? Given family history, I rank that as a higher concern given my Current health state, for which reason I stuck to annual Influenza vaccine. Are there better options nowadays in the US than Moderna?
I assume "Trump Made it! It's Poison!" and "It's a Biden/Harris Tracking Chip." are both nonsense, though tracking chips technology is quickly improving...
I got my first set of vaccines from Moderna, but switched to Pfizer for the boosters once it became clear that Moderna was giving people higher fevers than Pfizer. Last year I switched to Novavax because of reports that it was even less intense of an experience, and my experience bore that out.
In the US right now, I’ve been unable to find out whether I can get Novavax, and whether my insurance will pay for any of the vaccines, but got my doctor to write a prescription for Novavax in case I can find it.
My guess is that there is slight difference in effectiveness at preventing illness from the different vaccines. (I did get COVID last December, about two and a half months after my vaccine. It was much less intense than the previous time I had it, in May 2022, despite happening during international travel.)
I'll check on Novavax, but I'm sure I can get Pfizer.
I had one thankfully mild bout post vax--even my wife's worse case wasn't any worse than that year's flu. On the other hand I've some friends in education who seem to get it more than once a year, which I suppose isn't unexpected.
The pfizer, moderna and novavax vaccines were all found to slightly increase the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis, but it was a small risk. It happened to 36 people out of every 100,000, and almost all the people it happened to were males aged 12-17. The risk of myocarditis for people 60+ was even lower, *far* lower than the risk for teen males. And virtually all. of these young guys recovered fully with no heart damage. And the risk of cardiomyopathy from covid itself was 2 to 6 times higher for guys that age than the risk from the vax. In fact risk of cardiomyopathy from covid was higher for all groups than the risk from the vax was.
There are no precautions against getting a covid vax if one is 60-ish and/or has heart disease in the family. The current recommendation is for adults to get the vax. Even if they have some immunity from previous vaxes or covid infections, the vax increases protection. Evidence for this is that all other things being equal (age, sex, health problems) people who’ve had the current vax are less likely to end up in ER/urgent care with covid and less likely to be hospitalized with it.
You need a better source of information than what you have been accessing up til now. I recommend the blog Your Local Epidemiologist, here on Substack. The writer’s clear, honest, and non-politcal. And she has good credentials: a Masters in Public Health and PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
That 36 out of 100,000 seems high. Was that with the initial vaccination? Because the numbers seem to be falling as further boosters get administered. A fairly recent Nordic study shows that it's on the order of 1/100,000 with mRNA boosters.
I don't know about the Novavax boosters, but with the initial rollout of Novavax in Australia, the myocarditis/pericarditis rates were 27/100,000, and (interestingly enough) the periC rates were higher than the MyoC rates (which is the reverse of the pattern in mRNA vaccines).
It was on the second vaccination -- that was the one with the highest rate of myocarditis in teen males.
Well, I'll give her B+ on data and a C on non-political, though I'll give her bonus points for agreeing with RFKJr on killing pharma ads.
Wish more of her stuff wasn't paywalled.
What is the risk you're worried about exactly?
Absolute poppycock! Multiple studies have shown that the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis after a COVID infection is an order of magnitude higher than after receiving the mRNA vaccines (7x-11x, depending on the study). And the risk of experiencing myoC/periC after mRNA booster is very low (2023 data from a Nordic study shows ~0.9 per 100,000 for Pfizer; ~ 2.0 per 100,000 for Moderna in 12-39 male cohort).
And for those who do get a COVID infection, despite the vaccination, they will have a lower risk of developing myocarditis after the infection.
If you want to challenge me on this, please post links to the studies that support claims. Put up or shut up.
Both studies don't support your concern of risk versus reward at all? Beowulf does exactly look at the risk versus reward in the case of cardiomyopathy.
Going on Scott's previous post regarding the legitimacy of political violence, especially when going down the slippery slope of fascism, when is it acceptable to enact political violence against Communists and Socialists? I know that for the left-wing echo-chamber these groups are not remotely in the same tier as the Fascists, but many on the Centre and Right would vehemently disagree.
Its also much easier to identify a Communist or a Socialist with accuracy, as there is no shame in accepting that label and many of them carry it proudly and self-identify as such.
How many illegal immigrants pouring through the border is enough to count as violence, making political violence against Communists/Socialists just "self-defense" and legitimized?
It seems to me that someone who equates communism and socialism, and someone who even ponders that people coming illegally to get jobs might constitute ":violence", cannot be trusted to determine whether the very, very rare circumstances in which political violence is legitimate are in existence at any given time.
It seems to me that you are doing special pleading here.
By the way, for people outside of Leftism we don't really care about your internal fights and which special branch of Leftism you are devoted to.
Saying socialism is communism is like saying that all republicans are fascist.
Which is exactly why these definitions need to be exact.
That said if we are interested in preserving the democratic order then how we should treat (actual) fascists is exactly how should we treat (actual) communists.
>It seems to me that you are doing special pleading here
I don't think you know what special pleading means.
>we don't really care about your internal fights and which special branch of Leftism you are devoted to
As it happens, I am neither a communist nor a socialist. Regardless, I don't know why you think that doubling down on your original error strengthens your case. All you have done is make it even more clear that you are not competent to decide when political violence is justified.
Well if gdanning says so it must be the truth!
Again, not a particularly convincing argument.
Neither is yours.
Again, that was not OP's claim. This is really annoying. No one is debating whether rape is violence, nor whether kidnapping is violence. At this point, I just think you are acting in bad faith.
>Then we can say that some illegal aliens entering the country is violence
No, we can't. Kidnapping is violence regardless of whether the victim is take across the border. The entry add nothing.
Taking the question in good faith, here's a simple answer. This is based on what has happened in the past, not on what I believe to be morally justified.
Political action (up to and including violence) against a group is justified if there is a credible threat of that group seriously undermining the viability of the state. So McCarthy's witch trials were justified to the extent that he convinced the US Government that communist takeover was a real threat. There are many more extreme examples of purges justified by the perpetrators in terms of needing to preserve the viability of the state (e.g. Chile in the 1970s).
I don't think anyone seriously believes that 'Communists' or 'Socialists' pose a threat to the US at this moment in time. Many people do believe that right wing authoritarians (so-called fascists) do pose a threat. These are statements of fact. You might not share the opinions of these people, but you should not disagree on how widespread these opinions are.
Finally, the question about 'illegal immigrant pouring through the border' counting as violence is just unhinged. I would encourage you to reflect on how you have been physically harmed in your own life by illegal immigrants. Violence is being stabbed with a knife, not seeing someone speak Spanish in your hometown.
> Political action (up to and including violence) against a group is justified if there is a credible threat of that group seriously undermining the viability of the state. So McCarthy's witch trials were justified to the extent that he convinced the US Government that communist takeover was a real threat. There are many more extreme examples of purges justified by the perpetrators in terms of needing to preserve the viability of the state (e.g. Chile in the 1970s).
Was it justified though? A few decades later we regard it as persecution and violation of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association.
> I don't think anyone seriously believes that 'Communists' or 'Socialists' pose a threat to the US at this moment in time. Many people do believe that right wing authoritarians (so-called fascists) do pose a threat. These are statements of fact. You might not share the opinions of these people, but you should not disagree on how widespread these opinions are.
I'll be glad to inform you that a lot of people regard Communists and Socialists a graver threat than the 10 real Neo-Nazis or Fascists that exist in the US. I do recall Antifa burning down the country for almost a year, and the whole media and judicial establishment playing quarterback for them. I don't recall any collective violence perpetrated in the US by actual Fascists for its entire existence, and in general any collective action by them is met with ridicule, even by the right wing. Now on the other hand, you might be talking about the "perceived" Fascists, which I guess is anyone sitting to the right of Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie?
> Finally, the question about 'illegal immigrant pouring through the border' counting as violence is just unhinged. I would encourage you to reflect on how you have been physically harmed in your own life by illegal immigrants. Violence is being stabbed with a knife, not seeing someone speak Spanish in your hometown.
I agree, this is designed to show how ridiculous leftist rhetoric has become, that any policy enforcement of the right that serves its constituency gets classified as "violence", justifying preemptive action on their part to stop it. I'm just trying to demonstrate how the right could seize the same tools. The degree of how ridiculous a claim might be is irrelevant and completely subjective.
> I'll be glad to inform you that a lot of people regard Communists and Socialists a graver threat than the 10 real Neo-Nazis or Fascists that exist in the US.
Quantify this, and we'll have somewhere to start a discussion. I don't think that 'fascist' is a helpful term in discussions like this, I'm not based in the US, and don't care to discuss particular US politicians.
This is contradictory. You invoked the US specifically to support your argument about how Communists aren't perceived as threats, and now you're saying we shouldn't talk about the US? You don't get to use an example to make your point and then declare it off-limits when challenged.
As far as were you are based - I don't care. You replied to my comment about a post framed entirely in US politics. You chose to engage.
I'm happy to chat about US politics, otherwise I would not have responded. I don't think bringing individual politicians and their positions into the discussion adds anything. I didn't declare anything off limits, I said it didn't interest me -- that's not intended to disrespect you.
If you have any quantitative evidence on the number of people who regard Communists as a genuine threat to the US in the way that McCarthy did in the 1950s, and who feel that similar action now is necessary, I would like to see it. I'm not interested in opinions about particular politicians or events; only objective facts that all observers can agree on.
You claimed Americans aren't concerned about Communists/Socialists. That's your assertion to defend, not mine to disprove. Show me your evidence first. My constraint: I want direct polling data or survey results, not social science studies from institutions where 95%+ of faculty identify as progressive, Democrats or generally on the left. Raw data, not interpretation.
>A few decades later we regard it as persecution and violation of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association
It wasn't even a few decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States
As a dues-paying member of Antifa (our dues get reimbursed by George Soros), I can assure you we only refer to the KKK as inbred racist morons.
Except there is no formal organization called Antifa. The Rightwing talking heads label anyone who goes out to protest against the ICE brownshirts, whether they be centrist Democrats, Progressive Democrats, Democratic Socialists, old-style Socialists, Marxists, Communists, or anarchists, or who go out to protest anything Trump does, get labeled Antifa. So, I suppose the entire Democratic Party and all the other Leftist organizations combined *are* antifa, because we're anti-fascists, and we hate the assholes in power, who, despite their claims to the contrary, are pretty fascist. ;-)
I think this is just a strawman, or maybe a weakman if I'm being generous. The modal person on the left does not think modal right wing positions justify political violence (and if you believe otherwise you should probably touch grass). Like, even when you have objectively authoritarian behavior from ICE (what the fuck was that chicago apartment raid???) there has been basically no violence? last i checked the folks in portland were dancing naked / in inflatable animal costumes to make fun of ice
This is a "No True Scotsman" argument and the only response I have for you is that Charlie Kirk caught a bullet with "Catch that Fascist" engraved onto it, for having fairly modal Conservative positions. And then the totally "non-modal" leftist apparatus either celebrating his murder or using the "violence is not the answer but he did x,y,z so...(implication he had it coming)" cop-out.
You could play the "list the political violence" game forever. But even here you're wrong on the merits. First, every important political leader on the left condemned that shooting. Second, you seem to have forgotten the hortmans, where not only did the right NOT condemn that shooting, but they spent an awful lot of time talking about how it was fine. Your epistemic status is still broken if you thought that anyone important on the left was pro kirks death. The best you could say is "some people thought it ironic that the guy who said 'this is the price to pay' paid that price"
1. You are evidently wrong on this one. For instance, AoC's tweets were in the vain of "Yeah political violence is bad, but akshually he was a bigot and all other evil things we Leftists deem evil (wink-wink)". You might think that's ok, what we are trying to tell you is that it's not.
2. Can you tell me more about the Hortman case? The only things I know about it come from Conservative sources and are
- The murders were not politically motivated
- DJT condemned them without ifs or buts
Do you have any sources that claim the opposite? I would be happy to have a look.
edit: I've found this which we might both be able to agree is a reliable source: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/09/after-kirks-death-a-false-social-media-post-on-partisan-reaction-to-violence/ that claims the complete opposite of what you said with regards to Republicans not condemning their murder. Do you have any source that might be more trustworthy?
1) "some people thought it ironic that the guy who said 'this is the price to pay' paid that price"
This is the statement that aoc put out: https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/ocasio-cortez-statement-charlie-kirk-resolution-and-trump-administrations
> “Condemning the depravity of Kirk’s brutal murder is a straightforward matter – one that is especially important to help stabilize an increasingly unsafe and volatile political environment where everyday people feel at risk. We can disagree with Charlie and come together as a country to denounce the horror of killing. That is a bedrock American value.
> "It then only underscores the majority’s recklessness and intent to divide by choosing to introduce this resolution on a purely partisan basis, instead of uniting Congress in this tragedy with one of the many bipartisan options to condemn political violence and Kirk’s murder, as we did with the late Melissa Hortman. Instead, the majority proceeded with a resolution that brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry today.
> “We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted Black Americans the right to vote was a ‘mistake,’ who after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi claimed that ‘some amazing patriot out there’ should bail out his assailant, and accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges – it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.’ His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans – far from ‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority in this resolution.
There is no wink wink here. AOC is pretty clear about this. Political violence is bad AND ALSO you do not get a free pass if you happen to be killed. There is no tension in these statements.
"You might think that's ok, what we are trying to tell you is that it's not." --> I think your version of the world boils down to one of two things:
- if you are killed you are immediately untouchable and can never be critiqued OR
- any criticism in any setting is tantamount to violence
Both of these are silly positions, and the latter is quite literally something people mock the progressive left for. Kirk was unabashed about his political beliefs, many of which were things that lots of people disagreed with. Those people are not magically going to become sympathetic to his views because he was killed. If your position is that the instigation of political violence *demands* acquiescence to his views, well, there has been far more right wing political violence, so we should all be leftists by now.
Somewhat related, I'm intrigued that you think the left wing default position is "if you are a bigot you are worthy of being killed." This is an insane position! If you are getting news from people who are telling you that everyone you disagree with is a monster, maybe...they are not being fully truthful? There are certainly some crazies who believe this, but this is not the modal view at all.
I do think this is the modal view of our dear leader though. Here is Donald Jonald Trump to military leaders:
> America is under invasion from within. We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms…These people don’t have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within. We’re stopping it very quickly. After spending trillions of dollars defending the borders of foreign countries, with your help, we’re defending the borders of our country from now on…It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live.
2) The things you know about the case are wrong. They were absolutely politically motivated, what? The guy who got caught had a hitlist of dem politicians that he was trying to kill. The Hortmans are the ones who get most of the coverage because they were the ones who were actually killed, but Boelter first tried to kill the Hoffmans ("John Hoffman was shot nine times and Yvette eight times."). Here were the other people on his list: "An unmarked black fifth-generation Ford Explorer equipped with an orange and white LED lightbar was left in the Hortmans' driveway and contained a list of about 70 potential targets,[76] including "abortion providers, pro-abortion rights advocates, and lawmakers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other states".[8] Hortman and Hoffman were on the list,[77] as were Walz, U.S. representatives Angie Craig, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Mark Pocan, Gwen Moore, Kelly Morrison, and Hillary Scholten,[78][79] U.S. senators Amy Klobuchar,[80] Tina Smith, and Tammy Baldwin,[81] and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison."
Who told you that the murders werent political? Should you continue to trust them?
Meanwhile, here are the people in the Republican Party immediately after the Hortmans were killed:
State Sen Mike Lee:
> Lee, who posts frequently on his personal X account, took to social media on Sunday, claiming Boelter has ties to Democrats and liberal politics. “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” Lee wrote, attempting to connect Boelter to Walz, with his name misspelled...“This is what happens … When Marxists don’t get their way.”
He deleted those posts, but not before doubling down.
Rep Van Orden:
> Yesterday, a whole pack of election deniers got together and spewed hate. One of them decided to murder and attempt to murder some politicians that were not far Left enough for them. July 4th is the real No Kings Day, and America is done with you fomenting insurrection.
Gov Scott Walker:
> Walker wrote that if the assassination “ends up being done by an ultra-liberal activist … watch for many on the left to be silent or even justify it. Wrong!”
Also deleted that post
Then you have social media 'personalities' like Cernovich or Rugg (combined: 4 million followers) posting things like “Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?” and “The Vice President candidate for the Democrat party is directly connected to a domestic terrorist, that is confirmed, the only question is whether Tim Walz himself ordered the political hit against a rival who voted against Walz’s plan to give free healthcare to illegals.”
And of course we're ignoring things like MTG posting this pic of her shooting a rifle the day after the dems were shot (https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohen/posts/breaking-marjorie-taylor-greene-posts-this-photo-after-two-democratic-lawmakers-/1301665634652784/) and the deafening silence from folks like Pam Bondi or Kash Patel.
Speaking of Trump, here is what he had to say about the Hortmans:
> I have been briefed on the terrible shooting that took place in Minnesota, which appears to be a targeted attack against State Lawmakers. Our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the FBI, are investigating the situation, and they will be prosecuting anyone involved to the fullest extent of the law. Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. God Bless the great people of Minnesota, a truly great place!
I'm a bit skeptical that Trump wrote this. It doesn't really read like him. It's much more likely that he didn't know who the person was and this was ghost written, as per this Fox News clip from a few months later:
> Reporter: Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags for Melissa Hortman who was killed as well? Trump: Uh, I’m not familiar, who?
https://bsky.app/profile/acyn.bsky.social/post/3lyvs26n2za23
BTW here is what he had to say about Kirk:
> “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.” (from your link!)
Weirdly dissimilar. One thinks that maybe Trump does not actually care that much about political violence.
---
I think I agree my initial statement that "the right NOT condemn that shooting, but they spent an awful lot of time talking about how it was fine" could be misread. I think that it is true that 'the right' (the amorphous mass of people who vote for MAGA) were genuinely more pro political violence. We haven't touched on the Paul Pelosi thing but that is of course another example. Still, there *are* examples of Republican elected officials condemning the violence, including a bipartisan condemnation of violence from the House, and so I think I walk back the strongest version of what I said.
That said, I do not think your factcheck link is really that interesting. The existence of singular people condemning violence says nothing about the overarching position that politicians and members of the various political parties take. Trump has been extremely vocal about leveraging violence to go after people he does not like; so was Charlie Kirk for that matter. And to zoom out a bit further, I think any even handed analysis of rhetoric over the last decade would pretty clearly show top party officials on the right behaving in ways that are way more unhinged than anything you could find on the left.
(I'm not planning to respond more here, I have an actual day job and like I said, I don't think I'm going to be able to pull you out of the epistemic pit regarding what you think the left is saying or doing. Just, like, get off twitter and cut off algorithmic personalization feeds as a useful starting point)
Communism and socialism don't have jack to do with open borders or immigration in general. America's immigration policy (and that of countries like England, France etc.) is thoroughly a product of liberalism and progressivism, not communism.
> Communism and socialism don't have jack to do with open borders or immigration in general.
I grew up in a communist country, can confirm. People who tried to leave the paradise were shot. You could get a permission for tourism, but had to leave your family at home as hostages.
Potayto, potato. Progressivism has been historically a dog-whistle for Communism.
Are you posting to learn something or just to “potayto, potato”?
Because actual “communist” regimes like that of the USSR, East Germany, Cuba, etc. etc. had the tightest locked borders in the world. Your typical blue-haired gay Portland “progressive” would be arrested, convicted for sodomy, and thrown into prison to be regularly raped.
Only in the insane modern American Republican discourse “progressive” is “historically” “communism”.
Or did you mean”hysterically”? Autocorrect can be a bich.
I want to learn something, can you answer this as I'm curious: Does Communism, as an ideology, embrace internationalism and no borders? I know from the implementation perspective they locked-up because of security reasons. Wasn't that just "temporary" though until the enemies of Communism were defeated and the international Communist utopia came into fruition?
Open borders is a libertarian worldview - historically opposed by communists and socialists and supported by libertarians. (Somebody on a rationalist blog should have noticed the latter.)
Economic globalisation is also a capitalist idea, and (you are going to blow a gasket now) - the EU has largely codified neo-liberalism in its constitution, that is the four freedoms. Socialists were historically anti EU. And there you were thinking the EU was so socialist.
What if you looked in the mirror, and saw the enemy, and the enemy was you.
No it wasn't "temporary". Everything was forever.
There are plenty of folks here who actually have lived under these regimes and/or are fluent in the corresponding languages, like moonshadow here.
You can always ask for what "communism" was actually like instead of making up things that fit our weird American idea of a Lesbian Hippy Communist or some such.
Also, while there, ask how much an average Soviet person paid in taxes and what the income, property, and sales taxes were in the USSR. As they say, "the answer might surprise you".
You are not answering my question. Does Communism as an ideology embrace no-borders at all and internationalism yes or no? The methods elites of Communist regimes implemented it so that they can hold onto power are immaterial to my position.
When you need a propiska to move to the next city over, concerns about crossing borders seem very remote indeed.
+1000 to this.
The idea that communist societies believed in open borders is ludicrous.
Whose talking about going out of the country? Of course they won't let you leave. Coming in uninvited is what we are talking about, and the truth of the matter is that in Soviet Russia
- No sane person wanted to come in uninvited
- The invited ones were Western useful idiots, like NYT editors and journalists to do Lenin's and Stalin's apologism - Suprise suprise, most self-identified as Progressives.
Communism does not believe in open borders.
Progressivism does believe in freedom of movement.
This is a major difference between these political views.
The only truly closed borders in history have been instituted by communist countries, like East Germany, and North Korea.
Yeah, it is libertarians who tent to believe in open borders.
The Communist Manifesto literally says that there will be no borders and countries will be gone. What are you on about?
You do realize that the Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, by a guy who died in the 1880s, right? Communist thought wasn't invented by Marx, it didn't stop evolving when he died, and he isn't the ultimate standard for what communism means. I prefer to define communism based largely on the experience of actual communist societies (both premodern 'primitive communist' ones, and 20th century communist states).
Communist states historically have had strong controls on freedom of movement, and a lot of the communist states (not all) were highly nationalistic as well. Czechoslovakia expelled nearly all its ethnic Germans immediately after WWII, for example (they were not communist ruled quite yet, but the communists strongly supported the expulsion), Poland pressured Jews to leave in the 1950s and 1960s, Bulgaria did the same with Turks in the 1980s.
I'm speaking here as someone who is very much sympathetic to communism and has voted for communists in the past, but also as someone who's strongly opposed to cosmopolitanism and mass migration, and is generally supportive of ethnic self determination and the ethnic nation state.
I agree that ideologies evolve over time, but dismissing internationalism as non-essential to Communism simply because historical circumstances prevented its full implementation is just dumb. By that logic, we could say compassion and forgiveness aren't central to Christianity because crusaders killed infidels and the Inquisition roamed free. At some point, deviations become so fundamental that we're dealing with a different ideology altogether. Your position is so absurd that taking it to its logical conclusion we could incorporate free markets into Communism and still call it Communism, which certainly doesn't hold up.
Not only was the communist manifesto utopian nonsense, that wouldn’t have meant any huge migration from poor countries to rich countries, it wasn’t an easy voyage back then.
In any case the entire Marxist revolution was going to be another western (or rather European) imperialism - a world dictatorship of the British proletariat
It also says that the state will ultimately wither away. Do you therefore believe that communists advocate for the abolition of the state? They in fact advocate for the opposite, right? Because that is supposedly the means to achieve the future utopia.
That's a contradiction left as an exercise for the Communist reader to solve.
That’s the plan once there is one world government. But when it became clear that the communist revolution didn’t happen everywhere at once, they decided that borders between communist and non-communist countries need to be closed.
I as a liberal think there should be open borders between distinct countries (if there are distinct countries) but communists do not think that.
"borders between communist and non-communist countries need to be closed"
Nope, not just those. All borders were closed. Ask moonshadow if he or his parents could just hop on a train to visit Communist Bulgaria.
The closing of the borders, as you are describing, was a tactical manoeuvre that was necessitated but the realpolitik of the era. Communists were also chopping heads and starving people (even of the proletariat) to achieve their aims, even though it is entirely contradictory to their ideology.
When the holy bible of Communism states that internationalism and no borders is the end goal its really asinine to suggest otherwise.
That’s a good example I forgot about. (Though it’s also distinctive that it wasn’t a land border.)
It seems to me like you have misunderstood the post. Scott specifically wrote that he punts on the question of when/at what level of fascism political violence is permitted.
It's mainly about semantics - if it is ok to use the term "fascist" or not.
He argues that it is ok, but the term should not automatically justify political violence.
As to your point, I think the obviosu answer is that it simply has nothing to do with one idoelogical bias or another. All of them can be more or less fascist.
> How many illegal immigrants pouring through the border is enough to count as violence
Same number as how many mice you can combine to make a moose. It just doesn't work that way, because words have meanings.
I agree, I'm highlighting Scott's hypocrisy and the broader double standard on the left. The problem is that any conservative policy position can be framed as a slippery slope to fascism, which then supposedly justifies preemptive violence to stop it.
Thanks for clarifying. I do not think there is a slippery slope here at all myself, because we have nice bright lines drawn at November of 2028 and January 2029. If elections do not happen then, and Trump is still in power beyond his term, that would justify removing him from power by force. I would guess a 4% chance this situation occurs. But violence against the regime before those dates would be wrong, and mistaking individual Trump voters for part of the regime would also be wrong.
If I were a dictator-to-be, I would try to dim those lines by either finding some sort of emergency that makes it necessary to "postpone" the election, or somehow rigging the election to come out in my favor. The presidential election has never, ever been postponed before in the US, including during the Civil War. I am quite certain no emergency will come up that justifies it, and if he says one does, he should be prepared to be removed from power anyway. As for rigging the election, he can't do that because it's already his second term, so there is no constitutional outcome in which he wins. If Vance wins the election, it should by default be assumed to be a legitimate victory, and should take extraordinary evidence to argue away from that initial assumption, same as if Buttigieg wins.
This all seems pretty obvious and straightforward to me, but I guess sometimes the internet could do with more people saying the obvious and straightforward take aloud.
I think you're still kind of missing Caleb's point, which as I read it has nothing to do with how, when or why to depose Trump. What he's saying is that *even discussing the issue in these terms*, as a potential reaction specifically to hypothetical right-wing malfeasances, is *inherently partisan* and a sign of an unconscious or deliberate political bias – which is made worse (though by no means created) by the fact that on every objective metric the left is by far the more likely side to actually commit these hypothetical malfeasances, in post-WWII America.
Personally I agree with Wanda Tinasky that I don't think this is what Scott is doing. But it seems clear that from Caleb's perspective, discussing particulars of Trump, even to *dismiss* the possibility of violent intervention as you're doing, perpetuates the problem he's seeing.
Isn’t this just a tu quoque? “You say this specific policy is bad, but what about BLM?”
Nnnno, I think this is on a different level. Here, an example: suppose the right wing, hypothetically, constantly discussed crime in terms of "how much Asian-American crime can we tolerate before collective vigilante violence against Asian-Americans becomes justified?" Constantly, every news outlet nationwide. And then, when you criticized this framing, all anybody on the right ever said was "well what, you like crime? Are you pro-crime? Big criminal apologist? Mob liker?"
At this point, if you say "God dammit, Asian-Americans don't even commit a lot of crime! They commit *less* crime than white people!", that's not a tu quoque, right? You're just trying to emphasize how absurd and detached from reality this bigoted framing is, not trying to excuse Asian-American crime by pointing out that whites commit crime too.
Ah, I did not see that one at all. Perhaps it is related to decoupling as described by John Nerst here: https://everythingstudies.com/2018/05/25/decoupling-revisited/ I tend to do my thinking by taking an idea, breaking it into pieces, and seeing how they fit together. But a lot of people think by making associations between concepts and calling on them later, and for them, seeing those particular ideas next to each other more than their fair share of the time is not good.
People have been lying about Trump's right to be president since 2016 with the Russiagate stuff... and then he actually did try to keep power in 2020, just as we were warned. That is actually pretty concerning, and is why I think attempted dictatorship is a larger risk (though still small in absolute terms) from him than from other presidents. I don't see this situation as at all symmetric. (The spree of assassinations lately is best left to the police.) Yet, I can very much sympathize with both sides here: On the one hand, people started talking about this possibility _way_ too early, which apparently lately risks setting off some deranged lunatic on a murder mission. But on the other hand, if it actually happens and people are not prepared, that could be very very bad (assuming the military does not simply intervene to remove him and hold elections, which I think would be the most likely outcome should he attempt it). Some amount of discussion of the situation beforehand is required for everybody to be on the same page about what to do in the unlikely case it does happen.
I've also noticed a pattern lately where someone will say "[person] might do [bad thing] and need to be stopped", then when the date comes, assume it has happened even though there has been no sign the person actually did the bad thing. This happened both in 2016, when Hillary was warning us of Russian hacking, and in 2020, when Trump was warning us of election fraud. I feel like there's a few more recent cases I'm forgetting, as well. So there is also a concern that if people get the idea too far into their heads, they might think it has happened even if it doesn't. I don't know what to do about that, but at least for this particular instance, I expect news outlets to be reporting the actual facts of the situation within hours if not minutes, which should avert that particular confusion.
Criticizing hypocrisy is generally not useful. It can be emotionally satisfying, but it is intellectually empty, because it says nothing about anything substantive. A hypocrite is someone who says one thing and does another. If you think there’s a problem here, you should say which of the two is the problem, or else you run the risk of the person “fixing” their hypocrisy by turning entirely against what you think is right, rather than turning entirely towards it.
Booo! Bad comment. Criticising hypocrisy is always valuable because thr contradiction between words and deeds is in itself a sign of a lack of integrity and a lack of consistency, coherence. These are key intellectual virtues - if a person doesn't display them, you can hardly take that person seriously on other issues.
(I don't think Scott is failing here at all, but I want to defend in general the critique of hypocrisy)
I do think that when denouncing the hypocrisy of someone who promotes A in some context and B in some other, it is good practice to disclose your own opinions on A and B. Not doing it might be hypocritical itself because, if you are pro A and anti B, it falsely suggests to the pro B, anti A people that you are on their side.
Its extremely useful for third parties that are reading this blog and are on the fence on the issue. I am under no delusions that I can convince Scott, way smarter people than me (even Scott has about 30+ IQ points on me) have tried and failed miserably.
Third party here. What I get from your interventions is a bad opinion of you and no change in opinion of Scott.
Thanks for letting me know.
I actually don’t see how identifying hypocrisy is useful for third parties! It shows an internal tension within someone’s actions and speech, but I don’t think it helps them figure out which is good and which is bad.
In spirit I agree with you: progressivism is closer to communism than Trump is to fascism and communism is the more dangerous ideology, but the Left is willing to discuss these ideas because they dispositionally are more comfortable with violence and destruction (riots are heavily Left-coded) and so normalize the possibility. However I'll give Scott the benefit of the doubt and interpret his post as primarily political rather than ideological: he's trying to talk to the Left in a way that the Left is willing to understand. If he said the objectively correct (in my view) thing (namely, that the fact that they even consider political violence is an indictment of their worldview) then the people most prone to violence would just reject the message. I think it's uncharitable to call him a hypocrite. In my view he's being pragmatic.
US progressivism, whatever you think of it, derives from liberalism, not communism.
>progressivism is closer to communism than Trump is to fascism
This is an absurd comment. US progressivism has nothing to do with communism, in theory or in practice. Progressives are often the greatest barriers to communists, politically speaking over say 1880-2025. Even if you take something like Obamacare as a progressive policy - not only wasn't it socialist, but as a general mandate to enrich insurance companies it was actually _less_socialist than say Margaret Thatcher's stance on the NHS, a British policy which was in itself maybe a bit socialist but by no means communist.
>they dispositionally are more comfortable with violence and destruction
I would ask for proof of your statement, since it does not mesh with the papers i've read:
It's just observational. Virtually all riots and destructive political demonstrations in my lifetime have been by liberals. The Weather Underground, the 68 Chicago riot, Watts, Rodney King, BLM, Ferguson, Occupy, the recent Gaza campus protests ... the list is endless. Liberals always seem to be a hair-trigger away from anarchy. To be fair, I suspect that's downstream of the civil rights and feminists movements. Leftists learned the lesson that large scale demonstration leads to the achievement of their political goals. There's a liberal heritage of thinking that sufficient political provocation justifies violence and so it now attracts people who are angry at society and like to be destructive. Conservatives are much more law-and-order by nature. The average cop is right-wing.
From your list of all the political violence in your lifetime you very conveniently left off Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Anders Breivik, the murder of Jo Cox, Brenton Tarrant's Christchurch massacre, Dylann Roof's shooting up a church, January 6, the murder of Melissa Hortman, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the Charlottesville vehicular homicide of Heather Heyer, and so on and so forth.
How do you hold scientific research in comparison to your own observations? Most scientific reporting does not mesh with your observations. Consider updating your beliefs; if you don't, consider what evidence someone could give that would make you update your beliefs. is there any?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/right-wing-extremist-violence-is-more-frequent-and-deadly-than-left-wing-violence-data-shows
https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/comparison-political-violence-left-wing-right-wing-and-islamist-extremists-united
Historical (source is 1984) - https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/comparative-analysis-violent-left-and-right-wing-extremist-groups
https://ccjs.umd.edu/feature/umd-led-study-shows-disparities-violence-among-extremist-groups
https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terrorism-amid-polarization-and-protest
some of these are more about murder rather than general violence, but they provide numbers rather than just personal observations.
edit - to make my claim explicit; this is specifically about your statement "Virtually all riots and destructive political demonstrations in my lifetime have been by liberals" - the sources I posted seem to provide a counterfactual.
Same answer I had for the angry anti-Trump guy last week. Political violence, IMO, becomes valid if someone tries to take away elections, but not before. As long as there's a means of voting old governments out and new governments in, you have a non-violent means of making policy change, and to put it mildly we are all collectively *much* better off if we continue to respect our social bargain to confine our resolution of policy disputes to non-violent means. So your responsibility (assuming you're the kind of person who wants to live in a republic and play a role in your own governance in the first place) is to stick to those non-violent means.
So it isn't a matter of "how many illegal immigrants count as violence." The same way it isn't a matter of "how many people dying of medical conditions that could have been treated if we had universal healthcare counts as violence." If you want to live in a republic, "I don't like the healthcare/immigration policy decisions of my elected President & Congress" simply isn't a valid reason for political violence in the first place. If you don't like the state of something in the law, you have a nonviolent means of addressing that. Rally with like-minded individuals, win elections, and change policy with the majorities you've earned.
Violence comes into play when that nonviolent means of addressing issues is *taken away*. When you go from "I don't like the policy decisions of my elected President & Congress," to "my President and Congress have barred me from removing them, meaning I and my fellow citizens lack any non-violent means of changing the direction of our country, and it doesn't matter what most, or even all, of us think about immigration, healthcare, or any other issue." *That's* when you man the barricades. Not before.
Stop glowing like a Fed.
Political violence is almost always retarded. In the rare circumstances where political violence isn't retarded, you won't have to come to an online forum to ask for clarification.
I realize that the other political side is being retarded right now. The correct response is not to also be retarded; just let the left dig its own grave. Only retards would publicly question when they are morally allowed to murder half the country in a public forum closely tied to their real name.
I get the feeling you're too young to remember, like, 2013, but there was a point when the left dominated literally every avenue of public discourse, respectable opinion, and social media. Widespread banning of every conservative voice, including the former president of the US, was the norm.
Do you want to know how they lost that complete social dominance? By doing retarded sh*t like:
#1 Brutally murdering a father in front of his children.
#2 Celebrating his murder on Reddit for days like Santa Claus just canceled all their student loans.
#3 Eventually, one of their foremost intellectual voices has to write "No, for realzies, it is not currently okay to murder our political opponents."
There are still normal people. And normal people look at half the political spectrum publicly debating whether they're allowed to kill people they disagree with and then go and vote for Trump no matter what stupid stuff he does.
People who publicly debate whether they can murder hundreds of millions of people are retarded on so many levels and everyone can see it, so they lose. Don't be retarded, don't lose, when leftists have to get into public debates about whether they can murder people, that's them losing. Don't copy it, don't respond to it, just sit back, look at your normie neighbor, and go "Can you believe this sh*t?"
I agree a hundred percent on what you said. I was deliberately being provocative to point out how far Scott has fallen with that last post of his
Perhaps Scott is just trying to be persuasive (1):
"For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. Then I cited Jezebel and various Ethnic Studies professors being against trigger warnings. Then I tried to argue that trigger warnings actually go together well with strong versions of freedom of speech. At this point I haven’t even started arguing in favor of trigger warnings, I’ve just set up an unexpected terrain in which trigger warnings can be seen as a conservative thing supported by people who like free speech and don’t like social justice, and opposition to trigger warnings can be seen as the sort of very liberal thing that people like Jezebel and Ethnic Studies professors support. The important thing isn’t that I convince anyone that trigger warnings are really on the right – that’s a tall order – but that the rightists reading my argument feel like I’m working with them rather than against them. I’m not just another leftist saying “Support trigger warnings because it’s the leftist thing and you should be leftist and everyone on the right is terrible!”
My reward was seeing a bunch of hard-core anti-social-justice types trip over themselves in horror at actually being kind of convinced, which was pretty funny.
On the other hand, when I’m trying to convince feminists of something, I start with a trigger warning – partly because I genuinely believe it’s a good idea and those posts can be triggering, but also partly because starting with a trigger warning is a tribal signal that people on the right rarely use. It means that either I’m on their side, or I’m being unusually respectful to it. In this it’s a lot like Trump saying illegal immigrants are rapists – something the outgroup would never, ever do.
(And that’s not just my theory – I’ve gotten lots of angry comments about the trigger warnings from people further right than me, saying that using them makes me an idiot or a pushover or a cuck or something. I am always happy to get these comments, because it means the signaling value of using trigger warnings remains intact.)
Crossing tribal signaling boundaries is by far the most important persuasive technique I know, besides which none of the others even deserve to be called persuasive techniques at all. But to make it work, you have to actually understand the signals, and you have to have at least an ounce of honest sympathy for the other side. You can’t just be like “HELLO THERE, FELLOW LIBERALS! LET’S CREATE INTRUSIVE BIG GOVERNMENT AGENCIES TOGETHER! BUT BEFORE WE DO, I HAVE SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT…”
Which I guess means that being able to consider both sides of an issue sort of gives you superpowers. That’s pretty encouraging."
(1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
Less of this please.
What, you mean quoting the public writing of the author of the blog on which we are commenting? Lol, no.
If Scott thinks I'm breaking some rule he can delete the posts and.or ban me. Will accept his decision with grace.
You on the other hand can either:
1. Not read
2. Block me
3. Step out of your bubble and think a bit.
Your choice.
4. Ask for less of this please.
Request denied.
1. Never
2. large sections of the USA economy depend on cheap immigrant labor, and have a lot more influence on governmental policy than a few leftists. You’re barking up the wrong tree.
You're missing the point. Replace this specific issue with any liberal position, and watch how the same slippery slope justifies violence. That's exactly what Scott is doing, just from the opposite direction.
- Support ICE enforcement? You're enabling fascism, and stopping fascism justifies preemptive action.
- Strong ethnic or national pride? Advocate for border security and national sovereignty? That's the road to authoritarianism, neutralize the threat.
- A Christian with traditional values who resists the arrow of history going left? You're a dangerous reactionary by definition.
Where does this logic end? At what point can democratically elected officials implement the policies they were voted in to enact without facing threats of assassination? And if this framework is legitimate—if labeling political opponents as existential threats justifies violence—why is the right uniquely forbidden from adopting the same standard?
Either political violence is categorically illegitimate, or we're establishing a rule that only applies in one direction. You can't condemn political violence while simultaneously maintaining that certain viewpoints are so dangerous they necessitate extralegal action.
You asked a question and I answered it. Look at how the mass killings in Indonesia played out — millions dead, and a corrupt dictator in place.
>How many illegal immigrants pouring through the border is enough to count as violence, making political violence against Communists/Socialists just "self-defense" and legitimized?
This would seem to be an issue of capitalism, currently, moreso than socialism or communism.
Violent communist movements have typically been repressed by the state even in democratic countries (violently, but I guess in a different sense than what was meant here). Extralegal violence has almost always either failed or been a part of an equivalent fascist reaction leading to a civil war or a fascist dictatorship, unless there's a particular variety of a state willing to curb both communists and fascists.
Which political bloc is *currently* (not a fifty, hundred etc. years ago) supporting illegal immigration and calling anyone who is against this a "Fascist"? I'll give you three guesses.
Literally none of them. You are in an epistemic pit, being fed rage bait to make you mad.
I guess my epistemic sample is N=1, where a representative of a particular political party was canvasing and told me that "illegal immigration is good for me".
You should get a higher n
Nah. Thanks but your gaslighting is not working on me.
Could you please, already when you make posts, provide sources for them? That way people can more easily say if your response is relevant or not ,rather than vaguely waving at events as if they are meaningful.
Even better, make your point explicit: "I think that the bonus army is a counterexample to your mention of violent communists typically being repressed, since they are violent communists and weren't repressed: link to wiki/paper/book"
(note that this is me making things up; I do not know the bonus army, have a fulltime job, and have been disappointed in you posting sources you said supported your statements before)
W-what?
>How many illegal immigrants pouring through the border is enough to count as violence
People working for willing employers and renting from willing landlords does not count as violence.
I agree, but I did see someone on the Fascism thread argued that the government reducing spending on healthcare is violence, and if you consider that violence then it seems like illegal immigration policy may also qualify.
The sensible thing to do is to only count violence (physical force intended to damage or kill) as violence.
Reducing spending on healthcare often means that people have worse bodily health than they would otherwise. This is clearly an extended use of the concept of “violence”, but it’s connected to the core idea that someone’s body is undergoing damage that it wouldn’t have otherwise.
I don’t see the case *at all* for violation of immigration laws to count as violence, unless you can argue that an important net result is harm to people’s bodies.
We have to admit that some actions like a president ordering bombs to be dropped count as violence, even though the president isn’t exerting any physical force himself. The question is how far to go.
While there is a weak connection to the idea of violence, signing a bill lowering healthcare spending cannot be violence. It is not physical force intended to damage or kill. Saying that it is violence is a method of taking the connotative force of the word violence and using it to promote a political point. There is an enormous difference between a legislator bashing someone over the head with a 2x4 and taking away their healthcare coverage, and calling the latter violence gives it the emotional valance of the former.
Could reducing healthcare coverage result in harm occurring to someone that wouldn't otherwise occur? Certainly. Could it be an immoral action? It might. But it's not violence. If it was violence, then most political issues, including illegal immigration, are also about violence. Sometimes illegal immigrants hurt people. If you don't enforce laws against illegal immigration, then you will have more illegal immigrants, and if you have more illegal immigrants you will have more cases where an illegal immigrant hurts someone. That's about as connected to violence as the healthcare argument is: "If you do this, then someone will get hurt that wouldn't have got hurt otherwise."
Similarly any safety deregulation would be an act of violence, and anybody opposing efforts to increase safety regulations would also be committing an act of violence. Anyone who raises taxes would be committing an act of violence, as there will be someone somewhere who will end up physically hurt because they didn't have as much money as they would have if taxes were lower. Similarly anyone who lowers taxes would be committing an act of violence, as someone will end up physically hurt because they had more money than they would have otherwise (perhaps by spending that money on drugs, or fatty foods, or a gun to shoot someone with). Raising healthcare spending would also be violence, because if someone has insurance that they wouldn't have had otherwise then they might get healthcare services they wouldn't have had otherwise, and as a result might experience iatrogenetic harms from hospital acquired infections, or medical errors, or being prescribed medications they didn't need that have harmful side effects.
Can political decisions, like determining healthcare spending, result in people being harmed? Certainly. But not all harm is violence. Violence is a very specific form of harming someone, one that we have a strong cultural taboo against for important reasons.
Does a general ordering soldiers to fire count as violence? Does a dictator ordering his henchman to massacre people count as violence? Neither of these is physical force that damages or kills (though both directly lead to such force, if the orders are followed).
I agree that the healthcare case is tenuous, but that it’s very similar to the case for counting certain kinds of tax increases or decreases, and certain kinds of safety regulation being imposed or removed, as violence.
I wouldn’t want to count anything that leads to an injury as violence - I would only count something that foreseeably leads to a noticeable increase in the injury rate. (Some safety regulations in fact do this, like the regulations that drive utilities away from nuclear towards coal, or the regulations that drive travelers away from train and plane and towards cars.)
I still don’t see how the immigration case gets counted, unless you are talking about a group of people immigrating who are more prone to violence than the general population (which hasn’t been the case in any country I’m aware of for many decades).
>Does a general ordering soldiers to fire count as violence? Does a dictator ordering his henchman to massacre people count as violence?
No. They are orders to perform violence, but the orders are not violence themselves. That would be like saying ordering lunch at a restaurant is an act of cooking.
Of course such orders might be morally wrong orders to give. Lots of things that aren't violence are morally wrong!
As far as illegal immigration goes, if you treat any policy decision that foreseeably leads to a noticeable increase in the injury rate, then you open up the floor for arguments that not enforcing immigration laws will foreseeably lead to such an increase. If someone makes such an argument, and many people believe it, should those people then treat politicians who are soft on illegal immigration as committing acts of violence? That's not a world I would like to live in.
"Does a general ordering soldiers to fire count as violence? Does a dictator ordering his henchman to massacre people count as violence?"
No, they don't. Arguably both are worse than violence, but they're not violence. If the general clapped a revolver to someone's head and blew his brains out, that would be violence; the other is just ordering *others* to do violence, which isn't the same thing.
Agreed, but why play by those rules when they are not? If owning houses and then renting them out is classified as violence by some in the left, then illegal immigration which is a literal invasion has a bigger claim to it.
> by some in the left
man the 'some' in that sentence is doing *so much* heavy lifting
Stupid things remain stupid to do even when your enemy is doing them.
See my response below.
If someone is planning on killing you it would be prudent not to copy the stupid things they do. Pretending that non-violence is violence is stupid. Copying that stupidity makes you more likely to get killed, not less.
Alternately, you can try having higher standards than the people you disagree with.
Not if they are planning to kill me just because I disagree with them. I'm not a martyr.
It’s a little known fact, to you apparently, that if you live in a country where the correct spelling of ‘Center’ is ‘Centre’ as you put it in your OP, you are out of range of any highly unlikely hypothetical anti-ICE violence in the US. Get with the programme.
"if" is doing a lot of lifting here.
I also urge you to see the point made by theahura as well; i am sure you could find cases of calls for violence from any side.
That's just your opinion though, I'm sure people on the right also disagree with things people on the left count as violence.
So long as "political violence" isn't backed by physical violence, I think it must be an issue of free speech. It ought to be easy to show that Communism (at national scale) and socialism don't accomplish their stated aims, so it should be put down from intellectual debate.
Of course, the general populace can still be seduced by the nice sounding promises, despite history.
Please go back and read Scotts' post if you can. We are talking about legitimized physical violence in order to achieve political aims.
I've read it. Physical violence is called for when the system no longer works, was the point.
I posted about this in the thread. It need not be Communism or socialism, but could be anything you want. And then you don't even need the first point.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/fascism-cant-mean-both-a-specific?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=165424383
Why are you bringing up political violence not backed by physical violence then? (is that even thing? How would that work?) Scotts' post is talking explicitly about physical violence and about a specific group - not even a specific group actually, a *perceived* group. I don't see any [generic label] applied, not even contemplated or implied.
Scott didn't put in the generic label; I did.
I stand corrected on not considering "physical violence" the same as "political violence". Nonetheless, the following two statements are in logical conflict:
2. [Any targets] are an acceptable target for political violence
3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
What is "street-by-street" genocide?
Ah, yes, I am familiar with that. But what does that have to do with the topic under discussion?
Leaving aside that your link does not say that they are illegal immigrants, OBVIOUSLY the ethnic cleansing (not genocide) in question is a type of violence, regardless of who did it. No one disputes that. The question was whether illegal ENTRY is a form of violence, IN AND OF ITSELF. Surely you understand the difference, so are you trolling? It's like pointing to this guy and saying that refugee resettlement is a form of intellectual inquiry
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/omar-yaghi-palestinian-refugee-wins-nobel-prize-chemistry
Tyler Cowen has this idea that some intellectuals like the NYT staff raise the status of the elites, and some like Chomsky lower the status of the elites: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/09/a-simple-theory-of-which-thinkers-support-the-elites-or-not.html
But I thought they were on the same side? Despite disagreements, both progressive in general?
I think this. Just like Christians don't always act Christian, progressives don't always act progressive. Then they feel guilt and then they like to receive a good humiliating tongue-lashing from a saintly preacher, as it helps them process the guilt. So Chomsky was not what the NYT wrote, but what the NYT through they should have written.
It’s a mistake to think that two different people are “on the same side”, unless there is a very specific debate with only two sides that you are talking about. “Progressivism” is a broad collection of people with some overlap in views, but for any two people that fall under that term, you’ll find some significant disagreements between them.
Some Christians are bad Christians, to be sure, but even among the very good Christians, they often have very different views about what that requires.
Philosophy, principles exist. The progressive principle is equality/fairness.
I think the NYT-Chomsky difference can be analyzed on the four-quadrant political spectrum: right/left vs authoritarian/anarchist. They're both on the left but the NYT is high-authority while Chomsky is the opposite. NYT wants to retain the elite but purge them of conservatives while Chomsky wants to get rid of elites entirely.
This was actually very insightful. Both statements ring true to me. Congrats.
But I have some difficulties with the four-quadrant thing... what is authoritarian left? Left means equality, how can an inequality of authority/power lead to some kind of equality? It is contradictory.
Yes, yes I know, authoritarian let was the Soviet Union. But I actually did live in Sovietized Hungary and I think their leftiness was all fake. It was just plain simple authoritarianism dressed up with socialist rhethoric. Sure, they were anti-capitalist, but not for the right (or "right") reasons, but basically they just wanted to control everything.
The leaders still lived in luxuries. It is just that those luxuries were not earned on the market. Technically they did not own anything, but practically they could use palaces and private jets and all, any time they wanted.
The whole thing looked like a kind of feudalism to me, where technically the king owns the land, not the baron, but the baron uses it, so he gets to live rich anyway.
I guess I would very much like make it one-dimensional, by declaring some quadrants simply fake, and the Soviet style "authoritarian left" was simply fake to me.
I won't get into the libertarian right right now, but one hint: some private properties, like Anna Creek, are the size of countries, so the owner is basically a king. You get which way this is going?
Anyway, back to NYT "keep the elites but without conservatives" I think for the most part, this can be interpreted as liberal elites and conservative elites are more like cultural tribes.
I don’t think this is exactly a useful diagnosis here. There are also orthodox communists who really do embrace authoritarian leftism, whose views are very different from either the nytimes or Chomsky.
Oh quite right. What I said was a little sloppy. Chomsky specifically wants to eliminate the current caste of social elites and have it replaced with an intellectual political class. So while he's politically authoritarian the solution that he prefers would completely upend the current social hierarchy, which is typical of communism and explains why it remains perpetually appealing to disaffected young people (cf the Cultural Revolution). The NYT on the other hand is all about the existing status hierarchy - limousine liberals etc.
Oh wait, you said *Chomsky* is the authoritarian and the nytimes is libertarian? That’s a misunderstanding. Chomsky has always been a left-anarchist, not an authoritarian.
I think any analysis based on breaking the world into two sides is going to be reductive, and produce contradicting results. I doubt that Chomsky would self-describe as an elite - provided this is true, I think there's not much else to say.
How do you classify who is an elite and who is not? Can Republicans be elites? Can MAGA Republicans be elites? Are all elites progressives? Can a Democrat fail to be progressive? Can a Christian be elite but not progressive? Once you start to realise that none of these questions have black and white answers (and if you try to impose them you necessarily find yourself arguing about weird edge cases) - you understand that most of the 'debate' on the internet is based on failure to agree upon proper definitions first.
Would Chomsky not say that an emeritus professor from MIT is elite?
As you pointed out above, and I did, the reduction of an issue to a false binary is simplistic and unhelpful. Personally, I think having commentators start with definitions would take a lot of the heat out of political debate.
I shouldn't have speculated about what Chomsky would say. My own definition of elite wasn't clear when I was writing that -- more precisely I intended the claim that I doubt Chomsky would be aligned with the values of the NYT (to the extent that an organisation has values in the way that a person does).
If I may politics a little: I think the lack of a Real Left actually enables the far right.
Imagine a right-winger posting the 14/50 meme, that 14% of the US population, blacks, commit 50% of the crime.
To me a Real Leftist says entirely unfazed "Yes, poverty causes crime. Abolish black poverty." And then maybe you can have a constructive discussion.
But liberals don't do this, their answer is typically "shut up about it".
This draws people to the far right because they are at least willing to discuss this.
The insane thing is, we can actually prove abolishing poverty ends crime, because this is literally what happened to most white people. There used to be big white crime rates and not anymore. Like how the poorer parts of London were absolutely a cesspool of crime, alcoholism, prostitution and everything bad. And not anymore. This debate is winnable.
1. There is no consensus on how to solve poverty, so you are not offering them great odds there. 2. Are you in any danger of voting left yourself? If not you are asking them to put existing electoral support at risk for the sake of your respect, and that is not a good trade for a political movement.
They don't do that because it's a losing argument. Poverty doesn't, in fact, cause crime: the richest quintile of blacks have higher violent crime rates than the poorest quintile of whites. RCA did an excellent analysis of this:
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/category/crime/
Any rigorous discussion of this topic will eventually get to a place that would undermine the modern liberal political program. That's because it's largely based on an oppression narrative that simply does not survive sustained contact with reality. That's why they taboo the topic and refuse to openly debate it.
FWIW the crime/poverty correlation you mention isn't causal. Poverty doesn't cause crime. Low IQ causes both, with mediating cultural effects (low IQ also causes bad culture). I'm not familiar with London but I'm sure it's similar to what happened in e.g. Oakland: gentrification priced low IQ people out and when they left crime fell.
No, seriously, would you deny that white crime rates in practically any country are much better now than in 1850? Such a denial would be insane to me. But if you accept that, then what happened? I am not saying simply poverty got reduced. But it is also not true that whites somehow got a huge IQ boost, that does not happen either. SOMETHING about conditions, about the total environment changed. Not necessarily simply money…
Now, such a change is not instanteous, because culture is basically adaptation to circumstances, so it can take 2-3 generations. So it worked for whites, so it works for rich blacks whose grandparents were poor - look at their kids, their crime rates will be much much lower.
On IQ. I know this white guy born from wealthy parents, who is just so super dull, he does not even talk about sportsball, he just does not talk about anything, and not interested in anything. He has a great difficulty with the simplest jobs and gets fired a lot as a delivery driver and suchlike. He never committed a crime.
Partially because his parents provided him a soft environment to grow up in, and thus he never got violent.
But also because every time he is fired, his parents bail him out. Never money problems. And sooner or later the inheritance is coming.
And I think the biggest part was that growing up in that kind of household, he never ever got “bad company”. He never had “ghetto friends”.
This is just one example, I know multiple stupid (moderately) rich kids, somehow part of my extended family is absolutely blessed with them… one of them, his parents bought him a convenience store in a good location, started in the inventory, the staff, and all, and all he needed to do was to buy more inventory… like basic foodstuffs, like if the mustard is out, go buy more mustard… this kind of work. FAIL. All big failures, all bailed out by parents regularly, all never committed a crime.
>But if you accept that, then what happened?
Increased state capacity, primarily. We now have more and better-funded law enforcement, prisons, and legal institutions. When the average person makes 80k per year then the state has a much higher incentive (and tax base) to protect the average life than it does when that same person makes 2k per year. As a general principle it's rare for a factor which explains variance for a social outcome like crime over a given population at a fixed time to also explain variance for the same culture over centuries. Too many other things change over that period and confound analysis.
>I know this white guy born from wealthy parents
The plural of anecdote is not data. I know plenty of poor people who grew up in abusive households that never became criminals. Yes it's harder to be poor. That doesn't mean that poverty leads to a life of crime. The data indicate that it generally does not.
>Increased state capacity, primarily. We now have more and better-funded law enforcement, prisons, and legal institutions.
This would then predict increased white prison populations since then? Seems to me it rather decreased, sorry, I do not have any numbers, I just know back then they tried to use everything from old ships to Australia as prisons, which looks like a big number.
>the state has a much higher incentive
Sorry, the state is not a singular actor with one head. It is many actors with many different personal incentives, which largely explains why the state is usually so inefficient.
>Too many other things change over that period and confound analysis.
This I dig totally.
>The plural of anecdote is not data.
Bayes would say data is stronger evidence, anecdote is weaker evidence.
> I know plenty of poor people who grew up in abusive households that never became criminals.
I did not mean the causation is 100%, I think if one thing we can both try to agree in is that while the number of criminal acts are in some sense high, the number of criminals is low because it is usually a small number of people committing a large number of them, right?
But I do give you that this cancels my argument - that my rich stupid friends/relations simply were not of that small number either. So ultimately because the number is small, neither wealth nor IQ are good predictors, both most low-IQ people and poor people will not be criminals.
And I repeat that I do not imply an overly simplistic poverty-reductionism, but a far bigger concept of "conditions". Again, my rich stupid dudes were also living a sheltered life and they never ever had "bad company" friends and that matters too. That's because that one guy I know who turned into a really bad criminal had a case of "bad company" friends...
EDIT: more on "bad company"... I have heard a saying "you will become like the five people you surround yourself with" and then many smart bloggers said never take this truly literally, but also never ignore this either, it does have some levels of truth. Could we explore this?
>This would then predict increased white prison populations since then?
How do you know they haven't increased? I'm guessing they have.
Look, there's lots of sociological data on this. I posted you some. Crime simply isn't explained well by poverty.
>Sorry, the state is not a singular actor with one head. It is many actors with many different personal incentives, which largely explains why the state is usually so inefficient.
That's not really relevant. I agree the state is inefficient, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't respond to incentives in a decentralized manner. It has an strong incentive to maximize tax revenue and therefore an incentive to police crime. In any case it certainly has more resources to spend on law enforcement now than it did 200 years ago.
I'm a filthy left leaning european, and my answer to this is - it is fine to discuss it, but it's not that relevant to what policies to support. I think that certainly poverty is correlated with crime, even if it is not the only cause. As Ogre points out, I think there is ample historical evidence for this. And even if they were not correlated at all, poverty is a cause of suffering. So I support fighting poverty through some reasonable amount of redistribution, and enacting policies to protect poor people from being exploited (like worker rights).
I have no problem debating it, but I very much doubt low IQ is the principal or only cause of crime, though I think it is also true that low IQ is correlated with crime as well.
Since you're not American I'll go ahead and explain that a shocking amount of Leftist policy here depends on blank slate assumptions (a sentiment captured by this post: https://substack.com/@ubersoy/note/c-166819775). All racial disparities are typically assumed to be conclusive evidence of racist oppression (did you not pay attention to the Great Awokening?). This explains much in education policy, where increasing amounts of funding are directed towards underperforming schools under the delusion that that is somehow compensating for the racism which causes the low achievement: this has resulted in trillions upon trillions of wasted tax dollars over the decades for no gain. Tests are endlessly redesigned to reduce racial disparities. Elite colleges even eliminated standardized tests in the name of equity. Ditto for arguments about crime policy, income disparities, and employment gaps. I wouldn't be surprised if the refusal to be honest about IQ costs us several GDP % in deadweight losses from higher crime, educational mismatch, misapplied human capital, etc. It's also maximally harmful to minority communities because it fosters a culture of victimization and learned helplessness.
>I very much doubt low IQ is the principal or only cause of crime
I'm not an expert but my understanding of the literature is that heritable cognitive factors (IQ and impulsivity) are by far the single biggest predictor of crime. They dwarf SES factors.
Crime in this context means violent crime: homicide, theft, armed robbery, assault, etc. White collar crime is obviously a very different matter and has it own distinct dynamics.
As far as I can tell there is a Real Left. They are still stuck talking about policy solutions to things like poverty.
What has disappeared is the Real Right - there seems to be no one among the current crop of 'right' politicians (at the federal level at least) talking about any kinds of policy solutions to any kinds of problems. Other than raising taxes on imports to reduce the trade deficit, it's all noise and villification as far as I can tell.
>To me a Real Leftist says entirely unfazed "Yes, poverty causes crime. Abolish black poverty."
I hear people saying this all the time. If this is a prime example of things only Real Leftists say, then it is manifest that a Real Left exists where at least some Americans can hear them.
It isn't true, just look at how America is significantly richer today than it was in 1960, yet the homicide rate is unchanged.
Didn’t the homicide rate fall over the last five years, even though it rose in the previous five (and had a big spike early in the present five)?
Didn’t the crime rate rise under Joe Biden? Or had it already spiked enough by late 2020 that it was above the rate it had fallen to by early 2025, before the further drops this year?
>We might as well say "There's a place in East London, and it causes people who live there to be criminals." (Yes, this seems obvious that it's wrong.)
I really think it is like that. Conditions determine consciousness. It is not simply monetary poverty, it is that the whole place can be so depressing that you just lash out. Perhaps the reservations are not that depressing or there is nothing to do crime on, or no one with.
>underground economy
That in itself is determined by circumstances. Again it might not be a simplistic poverty-line monetary figures because human conditions cannot be represented by simple numbers. But it is possible that some non-measurable parts of the living conditions are more depressing.
My strongest argument is that it has been done before, people's conditions were improved and their behaviour got in like 1-2 generations better. This is how white crime mostly disappeared. It's not even necessarily welfare, I could even accept conservative-leaning job-creators-creating-jobs arguments. That is also conditions. Conditions do not necessarily mean the usual kinds of lefty methods, I mean we all know at this point that the usual lefty government-housing thing was a disaster. So I would be ideologically flexible on this. Whatever improves conditions. Maybe libertarianism does. It is just a generic and not measurable improvement in conditions, but we know it was done in the past, so doable.
Has hand holding died out amongst couples? Seemed more common a few decades back.
People's hands these days are busy with their fucking phones, Peter.
I'm imagining a hand-holding couple breaking out into accidental thumb wars because they're both idly trying to hit buttons.
> with their fucking phones
...I didn't think teledildonics were /quite/ there yet...
Right. When the robots are here handholding will be back.
The UK is attempting to fine 4chan, an American company that does not have any offices in the UK. 4chan, as expected, told them to fuck off. What is the likely outcome of this?
There was something similar, but other way around, with BetOnSports operating the UK in defiance of US laws, and that ended poorly for them.
What power does the UK have in this situation? Can they compel 4chan to pay money? Cease operations? If not, then 4chan is completely safe from them.
The usual question is not whether a company has an office in the jurisdiction, but rather the extent to which it is doing business in the jurisdiction, or is causing harm in the jurisdiction. https://www.kirkland.com/publications/article/2019/03/can-your-overseas-company-be-taken-to-us-court
So, UK courts probably have jurisdiction over 4chan, though the internet might complicate things.
The issue is really about the fact that US courts will not enforce foreign judgments based on activities that would be protected by the First Amendment if performed in the US. https://tlblog.org/fair-use-the-first-amendment-and-the-enforcement-of-foreign-judgments/
They can ban them from ISPs.
The main reason it ended poorly for BetOnSports is the CEO decided to travel via the US where he could be arrested.
That outcome can be avoided here by the simple expedient of not entering the UK, a rather smaller country that is easier to avoid in one's travels.
You sound familiar. Were you here a year or 2 ago under a different name?
Hm, I've been commenting on Scott's posts since the LJ days, but I've always been moonshadow here
OK, not the person I was wondering about, then. It was Moon Moth, who faded away.
Not a very long lifetime, moths.
4chan will probably just wind up blocked in the UK. I don't think BetOnSports is a good comparison because the US has far greater reach than the UK does and we're an important market. Plus they used US financial markets and payment processors which exposed them to jurisdictional claims. 4chan can probably lose UK traffic without really noticing.
Someone explain the Bitcoin short to me please.
https://x.com/Vivek4real_/status/1976787212491801051
Suppose you have no Bitcoin, but think it will fall, so you borrow some Bitcoin from other people and sell them to yet other people. For this example, let's say it's $1B in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is at $120k when you sell it. 30 minutes later, after the announcement, Bitcoin is now about $100k. You now buy the Bitcoin back at the lower price, and get to keep the difference, which in this case appears to be $88M.
This does stink of insider trading. If someone in the administration knew about the announcement and understood the implications on Bitcoin, then either acted on it or told someone else with the means to act on it, then this certainly is a crime.
$88M sounds like a lot and the tweet is implying corruption, but for a Bitcoin billionaire it would just be play money. The coin is up over 20% ytd, which would be $200M on its own.
Would you refuse "play money" if it was risk-free? The point is not 88M vs 200M, it's about the potential insider trading vs regular trading.
How many thousands of giant short term trades do you think are made on any given day? But you think this one is important, because someone tweeted about it?
Do you want to investigate every winning trade ever made on any day that Trump announced something stupid?
Not many *giant* short trades are made on *any* day.
Simply: a short is a bet that the asset (here, Bitcoin) will fall in value.
Okay. Where did they "make the account" and what was it about the announcement which was going to cause Bitcoin to fall in price?
The way traditional short selling works is that you borrow the asset from someone and then sell the stuff you borrowed with the intention of buying it back later at a lower price. The lender is usually a brokerage house or a mutual fund which holds assets nominally owned by their clients. In this case, I'd guess the lender(s) would be big Bitcoin exchanges. This is a normal part of how brokerages and mutual funds make money and is explicitly permitted in the terms and conditions. If the borrower fails to buy back and return the asset to the brokerage, then the brokerage is responsible for making their clients whole. The borrowers are usually required to put up collateral that the brokerages can take if the borrower defaults.
The price goes down when there's a big short sale like this partly because the seller is actually selling a bunch of Bitcoins which bids prices down, and partly because the news of the sale can affect market sentiment because small investors might take it as a hint that the big short seller knows something they don't about where prices are likely to go in the medium term.
Nobody explains these things better than Matt Levine so I'll just paste the relevant part from yesterday's newsletter:
"There was a crypto crash last week. Bloomberg’s Muyao Shen and Olga Kharif reported:
A record $19 billion in bets evaporated and crypto prices tumbled, due in large part to newly severe China tariffs announced by President Donald Trump. A combination of factors — leverage, automatically triggered sales, a lack of liquidity at odd hours for global trading — fueled what might have been a less dramatic obliteration of positions.
From the morning hours in Asia through the afternoon in the US on Saturday, traders, executives and market-data analysts were wondering who, exactly, had suffered losses. Did a large entity get completely hosed — or was this a case of a lot of small bettors watching their holdings evaporate to zero? More than 1.6 million traders were liquidated, according to data tracker CoinGlass. …
That said, liquidations were concentrated on smaller coins beyond Bitcoin and Ether, known as altcoins. Leverage tends to be higher and liquidity much lower in those less familiar tokens.
Quite a lot of crypto traders were making levered perp bets on altcoins, crypto exchanges regularly offer 40 or 50 or 100 to 1 leverage, and so when prices move slightly all those bets go to zero. Also the people who were making levered bets against those altcoins had their own trouble, as the losing bettors got liquidated:
Despite being smaller than rival Binance, Hyperliquid experienced the most extinguished trades in dollar value during the 24-hour-period selloff, at $10 billion, according to CoinGlass.
“Hyperliquid had the most amount of long liquidation, and least amount of liquidity to match,” said Ebtikar.
A risk-management mechanism called auto-deleveraging, or ADL, contributed.
ADL is designed to automatically close profitable or highly leveraged positions when liquidated trades exceed a certain capacity covered by insurance. Exchanges incorporate it to protect them from losses during extreme market volatility, but many market participants also blamed ADL for making the selloff worse. …
“This mechanism is not without complications, especially for participants with more complex portfolios,” said Spencer Hallarn, global head of OTC trading at crypto investment firm GSR.
“Quantitative liquidity providers and market-neutral participants can quickly find the winning sides of their trades closed prematurely due to ADL, leaving their overall books imbalanced and subject to market beta which can lead to problems, and a necessity to quickly pare imbalanced risk,” he said.
Right, yes, if a ton of crypto market structure consists of 40-to-1 levered bets, then you are going to have a lot of levered losing bettors blowing up, but you are also going to have a lot of weird results for the levered winning bettors. They can only get paid out of the losing bets.
Here is a more cynical take from John Hempton:
Lots of [altcoins] will make 10-15% moves in discontinuous markets. The way your exchange guards against going bust is by not actually buying all the crypto that [the customer] thinks he owns.
An exchange that doesn’t buy the underlying asset they have promised their clients is known as a “bucket shop.” This comes from the 1920s practice of gambling houses “trading” in stocks but really keeping all the money in a bucket. …
Bucket shops do not buy all the shares (or coins) necessary to hedge every client position. This is because they can’t manage the risk of a market plunge.
But as a result, they have a big problem in a bull market.
Imagine your little crypto exchange, now a bucket shop, does not actually buy $100K of $ATOM on [the customer’s] behalf. Then suppose $ATOM doubles — a realistic outcome in the recent bull market. Now you owe [the customer’s] a net $110k and you simply haven’t earned it. You have a very big shortfall. …
There is a solution to this insolvency, a simple one. One that was known in the 1920s as a “bucket shop drive” and was a discussion point in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
The idea is that, if you are a bucket shop that is systematically short crypto to your highly levered customers, an occasional 10% price drop can be very good for business: The customers all get wiped out and you keep their deposits. I don’t think that this explanation is necessary, just because standard crypto market structure explicitly buckets customer orders into matched books, but it is fun to think about."
I don't know where they made the account, there are many trading platforms for Bitcoin futures. Charles Schwab and Etrade, for example, support trading in bitcoin futures.
If the price of imports from China were to suddenly double (100% tariff), the expectation would be that the US economy would take a hit - many manufacturers rely on Chinese materials and components, so their costs would go up, prices would go up, inflation would go up, etc. When that happens, investors tend to cash out quickly from speculative investments; as we saw, the markets fell quite a bit on Friday.
That said, I would think Bitcoin was more like gold, in that it is held as a stable store of value, and that the price would go up (as gold did on Friday). Still, to make 88 million off of a fall of only a few % one would have to risk close to a billion, and I can't see anyone doing that on a whim, given the potential losses if Bitcoin went the other way.
There are likely other readers here who know a lot more about this than I do.
Anyone interested in lunch/dinner/coffee in Seattle next week 10/22 or 10/23? Visiting for a couple days, I run a healthcare tech AI department in the Midwest, interested in meeting up.
I Might Have Found A Testable Prediction Hidden In Atomic Physics (Or I'm Doing Numerology)
[Epistemic status: Wild speculation with one very concrete testable prediction. 60% confident the prediction is wrong but worth checking, 20% confident there's something real here, 20% I'm just pattern-matching numbers.]
You know how when you cool water, it doesn't gradually get "more solid"? It stays liquid... liquid... liquid... then snap—ice. Distinct phases. Same H₂O, completely different physics for each state.
What if the early universe did exactly the same thing?
And what if we could test this hypothesis by analyzing spectroscopy data that already exists in atomic physics archives?
I. Three Components, One Substance
The universe's energy budget is weirdly specific:
68% dark energy (measured via supernovae, CMB geometry)
27% dark matter (gravitational lensing, galaxy rotation)
5% ordinary matter (Big Bang Nucleosynthesis—so precise that changing it by a few % would break the periodic table)
Standard cosmology treats these as three fundamentally different things that happen to coexist.
But nobody knows WHY three. Why not two? Or five? Why these ratios?
II. The Phase Transition Hypothesis
What if they're all the same primordial energy, crystallized to different degrees?
Imagine a crystallization parameter χ (chi):
χ = 0: Uncondensed primordial energy
No mass, no charge, no structure
Property of spacetime itself
→ This is dark energy
χ ≈ 0.27: Partial crystallization
Acquires mass (gravity works)
No electromagnetic/weak/strong charge yet
"Frozen" before full differentiation
→ This is dark matter
χ ≈ 0.95: Full crystallization
All symmetries break
All forces emerge (EM, weak, strong)
Complete structure: quarks, atoms, chemistry
→ This is ordinary matter (us)
The Big Bang wasn't just "expansion"—it was a cosmic phase transition. Depending on local expansion rates and energy density, primordial energy crystallized to different degrees, creating three stable states.
Like supercooled water that suddenly freezes when you tap the glass—but cosmically, creating three distinct phases instead of just two.
III. Why This Matters: Each Phase Has Its Own Physics
Here's the crucial insight:
You cannot derive the laws of ice from the laws of steam. Both are H₂O, but ice has emergent properties (crystal lattices, rigidity, specific heat) that don't exist in the gas phase equations.
Same with the universe:
Our physics—quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, the Standard Model—describes the χ ≈ 0.95 state
We're doing "crystallography of highly organized matter"
Dark matter (χ ≈ 0.27) has its own emergent physics we can't derive from ours
Dark energy (χ = 0) is even more fundamental—it's the uncondensed ground state
This isn't a bug. It's the whole point.
We're not "missing" dark matter because it's hiding. We're missing it because it's literally in a different phase state with different physics.
IV. The α ≈ 1/137 Connection
The fine-structure constant α ≈ 1/137 determines:
Atomic energy levels
Spectral line positions
Chemical bond strengths
Basically all of atomic physics
But where does 1/137 come from? Standard Model: ¯\(ツ)/¯ "It's just a free parameter."
Crystallization framework: Maybe α encodes something about the crystallization process itself—the "beat frequency" at which primordial energy settled into stable matter. But that's speculative. What matters is what we can test.
V. The Testable Prediction
Here's where it gets interesting.
In condensed matter physics, when you have a phase transition, the order parameter doesn't just jump to a value and stay there. It oscillates around its equilibrium state—think of a pendulum settling down, or ripples in a pond after you drop a stone.
The crystallization parameter χ should behave the same way. After the Big Bang's rapid phase transition, χ wouldn't be perfectly static at χ = 0.95. It would oscillate slightly around that value:
χ(t) = χ₀ + A sin(ωt + φ)
These oscillations would be tiny—maybe 0.1% amplitude—but they'd have a characteristic frequency related to the fundamental physics of crystallization.
And if α governs the crystallization physics (like it governs atomic physics), then the oscillation frequency should be related to α.
This means: if particles are oscillations in the crystallization field, atomic spectral lines should show harmonic structure spaced by α × ν₀.
It's like how a vibrating string doesn't just produce one note—it produces harmonics at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. But here, the harmonics would be spaced by the fine-structure constant itself.
For Hydrogen's Hα Line (656.3 nm)
Main line: ν₀ = 4.57 × 10¹⁴ Hz
Predicted harmonics:
ν₀ × (1 - α) = main line - 3.3 THz
ν₀ × (1 + α) = main line + 3.3 THz
Amplitude: ~0.1% of main peak (small but detectable)
This is measurable with:
Optical frequency combs (Nobel Prize 2005, resolution < 1 Hz)
Ultra-cold hydrogen spectroscopy
Long integration times (days to weeks)
Why Nobody's Seen This
Because nobody's looked.
Atomic spectroscopists search for:
Isotope shifts (mass-dependent)
Stark/Zeeman effects (field-dependent)
Hyperfine structure (nuclear spin)
They don't look for harmonics spaced by α because standard QED doesn't predict them.
If you don't look, you don't find.
VI. The Data Already Exists
Here's the beautiful part: We might not need new experiments.
Atomic physics archives contain:
15+ years of precision hydrogen spectroscopy
Frequency comb measurements from NIST, MPQ Garching, JILA
Ultra-high resolution (better than 1 GHz)
High signal-to-noise ratios
What's needed:
FFT analysis for periodicities at Δν ≈ α × ν₀
Pattern matching for satellite peaks
Statistical significance testing
This isn't "build a billion-dollar telescope."
This is "grep through existing datasets for a pattern nobody was looking for."
Timeline if someone actually does this: Weeks. Maybe days.
VII. Why I'm Probably Wrong
The most obvious objection:
QED is really, really well tested**.** If there were 0.1% satellite peaks in atomic spectra, someone would've noticed by now... right?
Maybe. But consider:
Ultra-high-resolution spectroscopy (< 1 GHz) is only ~15 years old
Nobody was specifically looking for α-spaced harmonics (no theoretical reason to)
Most spectroscopy searches for known effects (isotope shifts, Zeeman splitting, etc.)
Weak signals in unexpected places get dismissed as systematic noise
It's like the story of pulsars: the signal was in radiotelescope data for years before anyone recognized it as real.
Or maybe the harmonics just aren't there. That's fine—clean falsification is valuable too.
VIII. But Here's Why You Should Check Anyway
Because the test is so cheap.
Cost: Zero dollars (use existing data)
Time: Days to weeks of analysis
Risk: None (QED doesn't break either way)
Reward if positive: Holy shit we found new physics in atomic spectra
Expected value calculation:
P(harmonics exist) ≈ 15%
Value if true ≈ transformative understanding of cosmology
Cost ≈ one grad student's afternoon
Positive expected value even with low prior.
IX. What Happens Next
If harmonics are found:
Crystallization field χ confirmed as physical
Connection between α and cosmic ratios validated
New physics beyond Standard Model
Implications for dark matter, dark energy, fundamental constants
If harmonics aren't found:
Oscillating-χ hypothesis falsified cleanly
Framework can still work with static χ
Or the whole thing was numerology (fine, we learned something)
Either way, we learn something definitive.
X. The Full Framework (If You're Intrigued)
I've written detailed technical articles exploring:
Mathematical formalization of the crystallization parameter χ
Black holes as decrystallizers (matter → χ = 0 at singularity, Hawking radiation as re-crystallization)
Time emerging from crystallization (no "before" the Big Bang because time = crystallization dynamics)
The cosmic cycle (black holes → evaporation → re-nucleation → next Big Bang)
E=mc² as crystallization energy (why matter-antimatter annihilation releases primordial energy)
Links to Medium articles:
Cosmic Crystallization: What If the Universe Is a Question of Phase? :
https://medium.com/@maximilien.laurent/cosmic-crystallization-what-if-the-universe-is-a-question-of-phase-765f1a6f3aa1
Cosmic Crystallization Theory: A Mathematical Framework :
https://medium.com/@maximilien.laurent/cosmic-crystallization-theory-a-mathematical-framework-for-unifying-dark-matter-dark-energy-and-1662aeb5802d
From Cosmology to Laboratory: A Direct Test :
https://medium.com/@maximilien.laurent/the-most-testable-prediction-of-cosmic-crystallization-theory-harmonic-spectroscopy-13b6be7dae3d
The Crystallization Framework Doesn’t Replace Physics — It Completes It
https://medium.com/@maximilien.laurent/the-crystallization-framework-doesnt-replace-physics-it-completes-it-b43f8353c49c
Response to Scientific Review: Why Cosmic Crystallization Inverts the Reductionist Program :
https://medium.com/@maximilien.laurent/response-to-scientific-review-why-cosmic-crystallization-inverts-the-reductionist-program-ca5299e8eafd
But honestly? You don't need to read the full framework to test the spectroscopy prediction.
That stands or falls independently.
Quantum cosmology already has spontaneous symmetry breaking ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breaking ... which is almost the same.thing as phase changes.
I am impressed. This is a great demonstration of when the whole Rationalism thing is a good idea. I am often dismissive of it, because when they talk about human matters, the whole thing breaks down because human matters cannot be well measured. But when talking about objects with measurable properties, it works great.
This is why vibe physics is a bad idea.
Hi!
I don't think there's anything to this, but I have to give you credit for actually making specific predictions. I am puzzled by a couple of things here, maybe you can help me understand?
You call the universe's energy budget "weirdly specific"; in what way are they 'specific'?
Why do you need sub-gigahertz resolution to detect these lines when they're separated by over 3 THz? The wavelengths of your first-order satellite lines around H-alpha should be around 651nm and 661nm, so they should be very distinct from the parent line. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fraunhofer_Spektrum_Medium.jpg shows a spectrum recorded by Fraunhofer in 1815, with the Sodium D lines (separated by just 0.5nm) well resolved.
You're absolutely right, and thank you for catching this major inconsistency.
On "weirdly specific" ratios: I mean that we have exactly three distinct components (not a continuum) with values tightly constrained by independent observations (BBN fixes 5%, structure formation fixes 27%, expansion fixes 68%). The framework proposes these aren't three arbitrary substances but three phase states of one field.
On the spectroscopy prediction: You've exposed a fatal error in my reasoning.
If harmonics exist at ~0.1% intensity and are separated by ~5 nm (651/661 nm from the 656 nm Hα line), they would have been trivially visible since Fraunhofer's time. The fact that no spectroscopic database mentions any lines at these wavelengths in 200+ years strongly suggests:
They don't exist (prediction falsified), or
They're orders of magnitude weaker than I estimated (10⁻⁸ or less, making them currently undetectable), or
The prediction needs complete reformulation
I conflated "3.3 THz frequency spacing" with "needs ultra-high resolution" when actually that spacing corresponds to easily resolvable 5 nm wavelength differences.
The sophisticated equipment I proposed (frequency combs, ultra-cold atoms) isn't needed for detection at that spacing—a basic spectrometer would suffice if they existed at that intensity.
Most likely conclusion: This specific harmonic prediction is falsified by the absence of these lines in existing data. I need to either revise the intensity estimate by ~6 orders of magnitude (making it untestable) or acknowledge this aspect doesn't work.
The broader cosmological framework might still hold, but this particular spectroscopic test appears to fail. Thanks for the reality check.
This whole comment was written by AI. Vibe physics indeed.
Obligatory link to one of my favourite images ever; a high resolution solar spectrum from 1984:
https://noirlab.edu/public/images/noao-sun/
The entire image width spans just 6nm, resolving lines well below .1nm apart. It seems like your proposed features should be detectable in public data?
"Three Components, One Substance"
That's a very Trinitarian reference 😀
Well, "three in one substance" fits the Trinity, but the "components" part suggests that it would be a rather heretical interpretation.
Ha! Didn't catch that parallel. At least my trinity has the advantage of being falsifiable :-)
Christians are referencing a previous philosophical usage of the word substance. Aristotle, for example, said that water remains the same “substance” (ousia) whether it’s frozen or vaporous — the form (morphē) changes, but not the essence. He’d have seen those as qualities changing, not substances. For Plato the perfect object was substance - it didn’t exist in the physical world at all — it existed in the realm of Forms (or Ideas). The instances were imperfect.
The trinity is one substance but three beings. That’s perhaps a bit harder to justify.
When a priest changes the nature of the wafer he’s changing the substance but not the accidents - the reality. He’s engaged in transubstantiation . So if you have bread allergy it’s still going to bite since it’s still bread in appearance.
If we are in a simulation then these guys could be right, and transubstantiation could be true.
What keeps you from doing this yourself? Is there data freely available to universities you don't have access to?
Great question! Three main barriers:
1. Data Access
Most high-resolution spectroscopy data isn't publicly archived. It's stored on lab servers at institutions like NIST, MPQ, JILA, etc. These labs don't systematically publish raw data - only processed results. You need either:
Direct institutional affiliation
Collaboration with someone who has access
Formal data sharing agreements
I don't have academic affiliation or access to these archives.
2. Domain Expertise
Raw spectroscopy data requires specialized knowledge to interpret:
Calibration corrections
Systematic error identification
Line shape fitting
Doppler broadening compensation
I can do the Fourier analysis, but properly handling the data preprocessing requires someone who routinely works with this equipment. False positives from misinterpreted artifacts would kill the credibility of any finding.
3. Validation Credibility
Even if I found something in publicly available data, it would need independent validation by spectroscopists before being taken seriously. Better to collaborate from the start with people who:
Know which datasets are highest quality
Can spot instrumental artifacts
Have credibility in the field
What I can contribute:
Theoretical framework and predictions
Computational analysis (Fourier transforms, statistical tests)
Co-authorship on papers
Help interpreting results in the broader context
What I need from the community:
Access to suitable archived datasets
Guidance on data quality and preprocessing
Domain expertise to validate findings
This is why I'm reaching out here - the right collaboration makes this testable immediately, whereas going solo would take years of building access and expertise.
LLM watch: I've started periodically running the Google search "dark legacy comics who wants some bamboo". (No quotes.)
This search, for some reason, always generates an AI overview. The AI overview is always wrong. Very badly wrong. Most often, crazy.
Just now:
---
The comic you are referring to is Dark Legacy Comics #958, titled "The Panda-Monium."
In the comic, a team is preparing to fight the Sha of Doubt. The panda character, "Xian," is trying to offer bamboo to the raid group. The dialogue in the last panel features the following exchange:
- 𝗫𝗶𝗮𝗻 (𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮): "Who wants some bamboo?"
- 𝗔𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿: "Nobody wants your stupid bamboo!"
- 𝗫𝗶𝗮𝗻: "Your loss."
The joke is a lighthearted jab at the stereotypical association of pandas with bamboo, contrasted with the seriousness of the raid encounter.
---
For reference:
(a) comic #958 is titled "Love is Blind", and can be seen here: https://darklegacycomics.com/958 .
(b) comic #335 ( https://darklegacycomics.com/335 ) is titled "Pandas and Monkeys".
(c) as far as I know no pandaren character in the comic has been given a name.
The worst I've seen is when I asked Gemini what people talked about in a specific podcast episode. It hallucinated absolutely everything, shamelessly and confidently, based on what it knew about the podcast in general. It didn't even bother looking up the episode synopsis.
I think it triggered because I'd already chatted with it a bit, so it wasn't a fresh context with predictable outcomes.
Here's the latest answer to "dark legacy comics who wants some bamboo":
---
The quote "Who wants some bamboo?" is from Dark Legacy Comics #846, titled "BAMBOOZLED".
The comic references the Pandaren race from the World of Warcraft universe, which is known for its strong association with bamboo.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗲𝗻𝗲
In the comic, the character known as "The Orc" is asked if he wants a treat. Thinking of the Pandaren, who are known for their love of bamboo, the Orc responds, "Who wants some bamboo?". This causes another character to become angry, as it is a stereotype used to mock the Pandaren.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗽
- 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: BAMBOOZLED
- 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀: The Orc, the human female (the human female is the one who gets angry)
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟭: The human female is talking to the orc
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟮: The human female asks the orc if he wants a treat
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟯: The orc says, "Who wants some bamboo?"
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟰: The human female gets angry and yells at the orc
- 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝟱: The human female leaves, leaving the orc confused
---
The strip being described is, naturally, https://darklegacycomics.com/846 ("Work Order").
Interestingly enough, I started doing this because I wanted to find comic 335. It is clearly the case for certain comic strips that Google has OCRed and indexed the text within the strip images, and you can find them by doing an image search (not a general search). Dark Legacy seems not to have benefited from this treatment.
Thanks for showing me a new webcomic!
Your loss.
I would like to get a machine for doing certain kinds of focused work where all I can do is write, read, and use an LLM. In particular, for reading, I would ideally want to be able to either read e-books or read downloaded pdfs/webpages. I don't want general access to the internet as I find it very distracting.
Does anyone know of a good solution for this?
If certain websites give you trouble, there's browser extensions that will let you block them. I don't use them myself, though. Instead what I do is I go to the computer's settings and disable networking. In practice, the 0.5 seconds it takes me to re-enable networking is long enough to make me check whether my reason is a good one. I also have to not do this too often, or I would grow a habit of just clicking through without thinking.
I use Cold Turkey when I need to enable application and web site locks. You'd need the paid version to get the features you need, but there's a free trial.
On my Mac I use a content blocker called Freedom. You can block selected websites or the entire internet, or the entire internet with one or more exemptions. And you can block all your apps.
Could you use a phone with time limits enabled, permitting only an ebook reader and an LLM app or website? There are apps that let you lock it down with some flexibility/configurability beyond the phone’s basic setting menu, at least on iPhone, though I don’t know if any of them will meet your needs.
If you're going the iphone route, this is a handy guide: https://stopa.io/post/297
It uses the same functionality stores use to lock down the display models
Edit: Intended as a reply to Gian, not a top level comment. The analogy of the shop refers to government, not an actual shop in a free market system. So "going to another shop" is only as easy as becoming a citizen of another country, in this analogy. I'm leaving this in place since it generated a few replies and removing it might create more confusion.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
It makes perfect sense. If you don't understand, ask for an explanation ( If you sincerely want to understand what's being said. Do you? Or do you *want* what I'm saying to be incoherant so you don't have to think about it? )
Lets say you walk into an ice cream parlor. The owner wants to give you chocolate ice cream. He gives that to everyone. You do not want chocolate ice cream. You want French Vanilla. But you are not strong enough, by yourself, to force the owner to give you what you want. So you form a coalition with people who want strawberry ice cream, and people who want bubble gum flavored ice cream. Now you have enough political clout to force the shop owner to give you what you want.
What is your value? Getting French Vanilla ice cream. How do you achieve that goal? By promoting freedom of ice cream choice. But choice is not the highest/end personal goal. It is the mechanism, the intermediate goal, by which the highest goal is achieved. You may even believe that bubble gum ice cream is disgusting, but it's better to support the bubble gum faction than have to have your coalition fall apart and eat chocolate ice cream yourself.
In this allegory, "freedom" may be the highest legal value. It's how you want the owner/government to behave. Eating French Vanilla ice cream is your highest personal value. It's what you actually want. Confusing legal values with personal values clouds understanding of the situation.
Some of us deal with this sort of thing by the clever strategy of offering the ice-cream parlor owner *money* in exchange for French Vanilla (but not chocolate) ice cream. And if the guy is a chocolatier who thinks his edge in the ice-cream business is selling the very best chocolate ice cream and doesn't want to dilute his brand with things he's not as good at, we respect *his* freedom to run his shop the way he wants, and either sample the chocolate or go to a different ice-cream parlor.
The bit where you maximize your political clout and then pass laws mandating the menu that all ice-cream parlors must serve, that's the lowest form of "freedom" and not any sort of liberty.
The analogy was in response to someone talking about people who "made freedom their highest" value and how it wouldn't end well. I think it got posted in the wrong part of the thread. So the ice cream seller here is a government, not a private business.
So then go down the street to the ice cream seller (or whatever) that is a private business and will eagerly give you what you want in exchange for your money.
If there are none, then I suggest this mostly just shows that there's an incompatibility between "freedom as the highest value" and giving the government a monopoly on things that are important to you, Never go full Communist.
The specifics of how the government applies its monopoly on force is both something I care deeply about, and would also never wish to have delegated to a private entity or left up to markets.
In this analogy, to be clear, you're talking about moving to a different *country.* Which is a lot harder than just going down the street.
I agree that there's a problem with giving the government a monopoly on things that are important to us. But I don't think that 'freedom' is actually people's highest value which was part of my point. It's ultimately a means to an end, even if it is presented as an end for the sake of coalition building and simplicity.
This isn't a good allegory. Many, many people appreciate being able to choose different flavors of ice cream at different times.
First, to be clear, the ice cream seller is a stand in for a government. It's a reply to someone that I think got posted in the wrong part of the thread. Someone was talking about people who 'made freedom their highest value' and how it wouldn't end well.
Second, if someone likes different ice cream at different times then the same strategy holds. "Freedom" isn't necessarily their "highest value." Their highest value is getting what they want when they want it and perhaps for other people to do so also. Freedom is still a coalition that pressures the government to allow multiple choices at different times.
reading this as the first top-level comment is a surrealistic experience after the first few lines.
But yeah, the point is that if hundred groups of people want to do hundred different things, they don't adopt a law naming those hundred things, instead they adopt a law saying that everyone does whatever they want to do (and maybe name the exceptions).
Even if you want to do X, making a law that mandates X assumes that (1) you have a sufficient majority to make that law pass and preferably also remain there after the next election, and (2) for some reason it is important to you that everyone else also does X, even the people who would prefer to do something else.
So if you just want X, but don't mind that other people do their own things, voting for "everyone does their own thing" is a nice thing to do, and maybe if it becomes a part of the culture, other people will reciprocate when it's their turn to propose laws.
I meant it as a reply. Oops. Even so...
https://i.redd.it/46b0nz2vsv061.jpg
The "Fascism" thread largely degenerated into a bunch of "tu quoque" arguments, which got me thinking about tu quoque as a general class of argument and when it's reasonable versus unreasonable. I think someone like Scott needs to come along and write the definitive essay about the uses and abuses of tu quoque, because it has me very confused.
---
On one hand, tu quoque is usually just an annoying and distracting conversation ender. A typical argument goes:
"Trump did this bad thing!"
"Sure, that's just like when Biden did this somewhat-similar bad thing!"
"No, that's different or not as bad somehow"
and then we get lost in the weeds of the exact differences between the two things and how much these differences are important, and we never get around to meaningfully discussing the bad thing.
Taken to its logical conclusion we wind up in a state where nobody can actually criticise anything, because someone on _their_ side did a bad thing at some point too.
---
On the other hand, tu quoque often actually is relevant. If Trump did a bad thing, but it turns out that this is a bad thing that eighteen out of the last twenty Presidents have done, then it really is unreasonable to criticise Trump in particular for it. Someone who spends all their time taking potshots at every flaw of one side of politics while ignoring the flaws of the other side really does deserve to be called out on it.
It's not reasonable to have a norm that tu quoque arguments are never reasonable, but they are certainly annoying and distracting in most cases.
Perhaps the solution is this: if you're going to talk about a specific bad thing that someone has done in politics, then you need to specify either that you want to focus the conversation on that particular bad thing, or that you're happy for it to be a free-for-all. And if you want to focus the discussion then you have to commit to that -- you can say "Biden did this bad thing" but not broaden it to "therefore Biden is bad".
Even better, you can insulate yourself against Tu Quoque arguments by actively finding examples of both sides doing a particular bad thing and presenting them together.
My main issue is that I think "but it's different somehow" is actually the central issue for a lot of what Trump is doing.
Like, when Trump deployed the National Guard, it is true that a lot of other presidents have deployed the national guard in emergencies (and people here on ACX have made exactly that argument, referencing Eisenhower's deployment to desegregate schools). Trump, however, is trying to deploy the guard because of a few dozen people in Portland, most of whom are wearing inflatable frog costumes. The "emergency" is basically a complete fabrication.
So like, I am not going to take a both-sides-bad stance and say "Presidents should not be able to call out the national guard." The National Guard exists for emergency situations, it would be very silly to argue that it should *never* be used for that purpose. The actual important thing up for debate is "is this an emergency where the National Guard is warranted?"
And this applies to a lot of things Trump is doing, since a lot of them are based on emergency powers or regulatory powers that Congress left on the table in case the President needed to change trade policy in a hurry or something, and sometimes past Presidents have used those powers in actual emergencies before and it wasn't a big deal. So you do need to get in the weeds. And it *should* be an easy argument because, like, come the fuck on, you really think the guys in frog costumes require the literal military? But unfortunately, "come the fuck on" is not really a persuasive argument in a debate, so you end up getting in the weeds trying to come up with a bright-line definition for "the kind of violent protest that justifies a military response" that can't be twisted by a motivated reasoner, and it just fucking sucks.
(I do wonder if we could fix at least some of these excesses with some sort of general "any emergency power the President claims must get voted on by Congress in X days, otherwise it automatically expires" rule. Not a lawyer, though.)
"And it *should* be an easy argument because, like, come the fuck on, you really think the guys in frog costumes require the literal military?"
Well, come the fuck on, you really think a few dozen kids going to school require the literal military?
Kids going to school don’t require the military. But state governments trying to physically block students from going to school that they are legally allowed to go to calls for some sort of larger intervention.
Yeah, *or* you can just allow Oregon/Alabama to have autonomy and do whatever the state government wants, disregarding federal diktat. After all, not a lot of people are directly affected.
The point is, what is a sufficiently serious matter to justify National Guard intervention is itself a matter of ideological judgment in the first place, and it's a given that a liberal is going to disagree with a conservative on what interventions matter and why, just as a segregationist will disagree with a progressive. It would probably be snide to suggest that the average modern-day Republican thinks resistance to ICE deportations is a *more* serious issue than resistance to desegregation, but same ballpark? Sure. You can't just claim as given a priori that one calls for intervention and the other doesn't, that's begging the question.
Is the resistance to ICE deportation actually stopping ICE deportation? The resistance to desegregation *was* in fact causing people not to be able to attend school.
Is that the objective, non-ideologically-determined crux of whether intervention is justified? It doesn't look like Republicans broadly agree with you on that. The justifications I've seen, at least, are that some of the protestors have damaged ICE facilities or tried to commit violence against and/or disrupt the work of ICE employees, which the Republicans regard as unacceptable. And to be fair, does the resistance have to fully stop deportations to count as "stopping ICE deportation", or is fractional disruption that stops only some deportations or delays a larger proportion enough?
Or, conversely, did governor Wallace ever *actually* stop anyone from attending school? From what I understand, he stood in a doorway for awhile, in a way that would not actually have stopped school administrators from accepting the two students' enrolment papers (there was no formal or legal need for them to hand over their papers in that particular auditorium, that's just where student enrolment was always handled for practical reasons), largely for show. Wikipedia also claims that he pre-notified Kennedy that he didn't intend to cause any violent confrontation, so who knows whether he would actually have resisted if the students had just pushed past him, even. In other words, there's a strong case that this was just showboating on the governor's part and that absent the National Guard those students would still have been accepted to their courses. So, does that mean Kennedy was unjustified?
Fallacies are not actually a win condition. They don't establish you're right or that the other person is wrong. That's what you're missing.
"Trump did X" and "18/20 presidents did X" can both be true statements. And importantly the second reply is a non-sequitur to the claim that Trump did X. Instead it's an argument that X isn't important. This is actually productive because it establishes the base fact: Trump did indeed do X. Now you're just arguing over whether doing X is normal which is a different argument.
The issue is that usually people in politics say "politician did X" but mean "doing X is bad so you should vote for my party." And most people realize that and so respond to the implication that it was bad or means you should vote for the other party by saying that previous presidents did it too. At which point the first person, the one who made the accusation, responds with tu quoque. But this is actually not a valid accusation because the respondent is not denying the current president did X. It is useful to the accuser because it allows them to avoid engaging with how normal or abnormal it is or having to defend their implicit premise.
Am I wrong to be nostalgic for the times when the most heated debates were about Obamacare or abortion or the Iraq War? Now it's all about parsing words and justifications.
It's like we're in the middle of a civil war and the only issues of interest are who is allowed to say what about whom, and which side did the bad thing first.
In my view it's symptomatic of our ongoing phase transition from a functional high-trust society to a low-trust one. Conflict used to be over substance, now it's over relative status. People fight to control definitions because that's symbolic of political and cultural hegemony. We used to be able to agree to the rules of the game, now we can't even agree on those. This is what happens when society balkanizes.
We can probably blame postmodernism for forcing us to squabble over rules that worked for centuries.
There's an argument here that if a branch of analysis produces a conclusion that the principles of logic itself are invalid, one can and ought to dismiss that branch. After all, by which principles did it produce that conclusion?
Agreed. Postmodernism was a complicated intellectual sleight-of-hand that the disaffected academic class used in a dishonest attempt to rig the political game in its favor. Unfortunately it destabilized the supporting cultural structure and now the whole apparatus is collapsing. Very sad. Or maybe this is how society refreshes itself and what feels like collapse is healthy creative destruction. Hard to tell. I vote for collapse but that's probably just because I'm old.
So I'm right to be nostalgic.
100%
I wouldn’t mind a Tu Quoque if it were preceded by “yes that’s bad”, otherwise it reminds me of the Kosovo war where no discussion was complete without going All The Way Back to 1389!
A reply to "You shot me!" with "Because you shot me first" is kind of a good response?
For example - "Trump defunds Life saving medications!"- "Only because the Communists took over the NGOs" is a coherent position, true or not.
Coherent but dumb, though.
>A reply to "You shot me!" with "Because you shot me first" is kind of a good response?
Only in very narrow circumstances, ie self-defense. But not, eg, if the second shooting is a week later. And not if the other guy shot me in the foot, and I shot him in the head. And not if the initial shooting was legitimate self-defense. And not if I shoot his entire family.
It seems to me that is conflating good and coherent. Your example is coherent, but it is not a good response unless it is also true.
Good is in the eyes of the beholder. Someone else could argue otherwise.
Still, "I (or my side) did it because the other side did that", it an OK response, not to be confused with "Tu Quoque" arguments.
I think this mistakes the actual argument. When people make "tu quoque" arguments, I think what they're really saying is "I don't trust you." Otherwise, we would take extremely easy steps to resolve these arguments.
For example, pretend Donald Trump kicked a puppy tomorrow. Just punted him 40 yards, pow!
Now, let's say a Democrat said "Hey, it's bad that the President is kicking puppies." And a Republican responds with "Well, Biden kicked puppies."
There seems like an obvious out: we all agree that presidents shouldn't kick puppies and we'll pass a law...a super-duper law, a constitutional amendment that any president that kicks a puppy will be fired into the sun. Easy peasy, right?
The problem is that Republicans are suspicious that this is a fakeout, that when Newsom or AOC or whoever gets elected, they won't only kick puppies, they'll run around town kicking all the Republican puppies. And Democrats are suspicious that when Baron Trump lives up to his namesake and becomes the Supreme Global Baron of the World, he will have Elon Musk invent puppy kicking robots to run around kicking all the Democratic puppies.
I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth (1) and when you say "A bad thing happened, we should stop it" and the other guy says "but your guy did a bad thing" what they mean is "I don't trust you enough to work with you for our mutual benefit."
(1) But I'm about to.
I think the problem is even worse than that. Taking this as a metaphor for expansion/abuse of presidential of power, it's often more like: Your guy kicking OUR puppies is bad and dictatorial, our guy kicking YOUR puppies is good and decisive leadership.
The recent case of Trump federalizing the National Guard of a state over its governor's objections provided a particularly amusing instance of this.
On my worst days, I worry that Schmittian friend-enemy politics are all that really matters, and people can Russell's conjugation any issue such that they can convince themselves of their own moral rightness and their enemy's iniquity. I dont want to believe that, because it leaves us collectively with very few options, but sometimes it seems obviously true.
There's no contradiction here. It's good to do things for good reasons, it's bad to do things for bad reasons. The only disagreement here is what is good and bad.
Well that would be fine if the people making these complaints ever actually said "I don't object to the strong exercise of federal/presidential power, I only object to exercising it without a good reason. And thus, my objection to the President deploying the national guard is no different from my objection to every other presidential policy that I have opposed--it's got nothing to do with any intrinsic value of state sovereignty".
Of course, what they actually say is "state sovereignty is inviolable no matter what the reason" (or substitute any other claimed right or claimed check-and-balance for "state sovereignty"), which makes the contradiction absolutely supremely relevant.
> "No, that's different or not as bad somehow"
I saw more or less the same thing with the recent wars on the frontiers of Russia and Israel. There was a fun prank where people showed a video of "Kiev" being bombed, and later revealed it was actually Baghdad. And similarly with some local being abused by a soldier, initially presented as being a Gazan and an Israeli, and later revealed to be a Ukrainian and a Russian (or possibly vice versa).
> Someone who spends all their time taking potshots at every flaw of one side of politics while ignoring the flaws of the other side
There's a fun parody song I like about people switching on a dime every time their guy gets elected, from Reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5wn8zn5fF8.
One observation is that the two easiest stories to tell are "six of one and half a dozen of the other" and "one side is good and the other side is bad".
It's much harder to argue "both sides sometimes do bad things; one side is meaningfully worse; the other side is far from perfect; we need to condemn the bad things on both sides but not to the same extent, and to recognise that the better side, while flawed, is better, and give them just enough credit for that but not too much" without it getting rounded off to one or the other of the first two.
But in practice, 60/40 or 90/10 are far more common than exactly 50/50 or 100/0.
And, of course, to make matters even more complicated, there are plenty of situations where "we are in peacetime, so in order to maintain the functioning of democracy we should treat these sides as functionally equivalent even if they aren't" or "we are in wartime, and in order to defeat the greater evil we should fight to win even if we're not perfect ourselves" are genuinely ethical and pro-social stances.
Hi Scott, I'm an M1 trying to figure out what specialty to choose. I'm not that interested in surgery. I think I might like neurology / psych/ anesthesiology.
Do you have any opinions on whether psychiatry is more or less AI proof? I've heard some arguments that psych is more about the human connection (not super convinced about this honestly) and a lot of the information you gather during an appointment is not text-based.
I'd really appreciate your input on this, and any other specialties you think might be good if I want a long career.
My impression from observing the work lives of psychiatrists (I'm a psychologist) is that a lot of them end up doing mostly psychopharmacology, and in practice that means a day full of 20-min appointments with people who are stable for now, but need to be seen for a check-in and to get their meds renewed. And then there would be a few longer meetings in the mix, for a new person you're evaluating or newish people who are working up to the therapeutic dose of a med. And there are algorithms for choosing which med to start with, and which to try next, and unless you are extraordinarily knowledgeable and gifted you really should stick to the algorithms or you're not doing good practice. Psychiatrists who want to do psychotherapy are often trained in some version of psychodynamic therapy, which is kind of on its way out. It's harder for them to access training in stuff like hypnosis, CBT, etc. So I say neurology is better than psychiatry. If you want to develop your ability to understand people, neuropsychology has always looked very interesting to me, and much less mushy and bullshitty in its categories.
Therapy is getting eaten by AI; the medical part is not.
Ultimately procedural specialties are more AI-proof IMO; even robotic surgery is done with a human surgeon at the controls.
Tentatively, it's not just whether AI can be good at something, it's whether employers think AI will be a good enough substitute for humans.
I've been continuing to reread Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 (or Southern Victory) series. I just finished the Great War trilogy and am continuing onto the books covering the Interwar Years.
To recap: the series is Alternate History, focused on the World Wars in a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War in 1862 with British and French assistance, resulting in an enduring military alliance between the three countries. After a second war in the 1880s (covered in the standalone-ish book "How Few Remain") resulted in humiliating defeat for the US (fighting alone against all three powers), the US aligns with Imperial Germany. WW1 starts on schedule in 1914, and the next three books cover the resulting conflict. The Central Powers including the US (called the Quadruple Alliance in the books) win the war in 1917. The US annexes the former Confederate states of Kentucky and Sequoia (Oklahoma), chunks of Texas and Sonora, and all of Canada except for the province of Quebec which is made an independent client state of the US. The books I haven't re-read yet deal with political turmoil and economic depression in the US, the operation of occupation authorities in territory conquered by the US during the war, the rise of an extremely close analogue of the Nazis to power in the Confederacy, and (in the final four books of the series) an alternate WW2 and Holocaust.
One thing that's impressing me on rereading the books is how effectively Turtledove laid the groundwork for the two perspective characters who would become high-level alt-Nazis in later books: both the Hilter analogue (Jake Featherston) and the character who would command the Confederacy's equivalent of Auschwitz (Jeff Pinkard) are introduced in the Great War trilogy as worms-eye perspective characters. A very common pattern Turtledove employs in his stories is for a protagonist or other sympathetic perspective character to start out the story taking for granted certain bigoted views that are in the cultural water supply of their society, but over the course of the story they find reason to reject those views to varying extents. Their prejudice turns out to be lightly-held, overcome by some combination of seeing their prejudices proven wrong in specific instances, horror at atrocities committed in the name of that prejudice, and basic human decency overriding the prejudice when they're dealing with a specific person whom they see as a person. Both of the alt-Nazi characters start out appearing to follow the pattern, but are faced with a choice between compassion and prejudice and instead decide to embrace the prejudice. The do get similar sorts of opportunities as other Turtledove perspective characters to accept the humanity of the objects of their prejudice, but they never really get further than "grudging tolerance" before turning back and deciding to choose prejudice over decency.
I remember when I first read the books finding both of these characters sympathetic at first, only really deciding that they were terrible people relative late in the Great War series. I think a lot of that was driven by pattern-matching them to other Turtledove protagonists from bigoted societies, combined with both characters (like a great many of the other characters in the book, given the subject matter) having bad things happen to them that weren't really their fault. Rereading the books with more maturity as a reader and also remembering where the characters are going, it's pretty clear that the capacity for great evil was always there within them. A recurring motif for both of them is responding to adversity with anger, bitterness, and (especially later in the trilogy) fantasies of taking revenge.
There's a common fan theory that Turtledove had originally planned to have the US lose the Great War and go fascist during the Interwar Years, and that the Union soldier Gordon McSweeney was intended to be the alt-Hitler of the series. Turtledove has denied this in interviews, and I believe him. Specifically, Turtledove said that the United States (even the weaker US of this alternate timeline) is a big enough industrial and population base (both in absolute terms and relative to the Confederacy) that a fully-mobilized US joining on the Central Powers side on day one would tip the balance firmly in favor of the Central Powers. This makes sense in its own terms, even accounting for the Confederacy industrializing more than that region did historically and the rest of the US industrializing somewhat less. The US is shown as having a much less free and open society and economy even pre-war than historically (mentions of de facto single party governance between HFR and the end of the Great War, peacetime rationing of coal and kerosene, conscription, higher taxes, and lots of passing indications that the US in 1914 has developed a heirarchical and militaristic culture parallel to Imperial Germany), which would have hurt economic development somewhat. Historically, industrial development in the US benefitted quite a bit from British private investors buying into American capital markets; in this world, where Britain had been in a shooting war with the use in the early 1880s and remained allied to the Confederacy, a lot of that investment is going to be steered into the Confederacy. Turtledove doesn't spell out the latter effect in detail, but we do see more industrialization and more robust capital markets in the Confederacy than the South had historically at that point. But even with that, I agree with Turtledove's interpretation that the US would be quite a big more populous and more industrialized than the Confederacy, and the historical WW1 was close-run enough that the US being on the CP side and the Confederacy on the Entente side adds up to a CP victory. Merely stopping the Entente powers from trading with the US and raising money in US capital markets (historically, mostly by selling or mortgaging British investments in the US) is a huge deal for the progress of the war, not to mention that British troops would be sent to fight in Canada rather than the other way around.
There are also a fair number of clues throughout the book that the Entente powers are losing, both in North America and in Europe. The big one is that apart from the Confederate offensive in the Eastern theater in the opening days of the war, the US is always the side on the strategic offensive and is usually making at least a little bit of progress ont he ground. The US seems to pretty convincingly win the naval war in the Pacific, at least to the extent of taking Hawaii from the British and beating a joint British-Japanese attempt to recapture it. The naval war in the Atlantic seems to be stalemated, with Britain still able to import some food and raw materials from South America and to prevent most trade between the US and Germany, but the US is never really blockaded and Entente overseas commerce in the Atlantic is limited and gets moreso as the war goes on. By the second book, we hear news like the Germans capturing Verdun in 1916 and we hear from Confederate perspective characters that they're having increasing shortages of manpower and ammunition.
[continued]
On the other hand, the US now has the Confederacy to the south and British/French Canada to the north, so they're in a pincer situation. The war would be fought at home, not just abroad in continental Europe (as it was historically). If the British and French are Confederate allies, this might make for friendlier terms in Canada, which might then be better set-up to take on the US (especially in combination with the Confederacy).
The industrial base advantage of the US would be on a different footing when it's getting bombed on the doorstep, as it were.
I agree that if Britain and France had reinforced Canada enough at the beginning of the war, the US would have been in a very rough strategic situation. That's more or less what happened in the 1881 war in the series, where it was the USA alone vs the Confederacy, Britain, and France. I think Turtledove concluded that in 1914, they would have their hands too full fighting Germany in Europe to reinforce Canada enough to put the US on the defensive. I don't think we hear about any British or French ground troops fighting in Canada, although the Canadian air force does fly British fighter models and I think there are some RAF units mentioned fighting alongside them. What we do hear is that the US has about a 2:1 population advantage over the Confederacy and Canada combined, and that the US had a higher per-capita industrial base than the Confederacy at least.
>If the British and French are Confederate allies, this might make for friendlier terms in Canada
That actually does get explored in the books in a moderate amount of detail. One of the perspective characters is a Francophone farmer living near the town of Rivière-du-Loup, which gets taken over by the US early in the war. Our perspective character (Lucien Galtier) is shown to be a Canadian patriot who early in the occupation engages in as much passive resistance as he can safely get away with. A majority of the community seems to have similar sentiments, although they definitely feel somewhat less violently opposed to the US occupation than what we see from the other Canadian perspective character (Arthur McGregor, an Anglophone farmer living near the US border south of Winnipeg). There are some high-profile collaborators among Francophone community, but they seem to be a minority and are a mix of unprincipled opportunists and ultraconservatives who dislike the then-current government of France for being too liberal and anticlerical. There's some resentment of the British Canadian government for privileging the Anglophone community and for favoring Protestants, even among people like Galtier who favor Canada over the US, but it feels like there's somewhat less resentment on this front than I would expect there to have been at that point in real-world history.
"What we do hear is that the US has about a 2:1 population advantage over the Confederacy and Canada combined, and that the US had a higher per-capita industrial base than the Confederacy at least."
Great, now see how they deal with some *real* Fifth Columnists setting up as saboteurs, rather than imagined threats from within:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column#/media/File:Seuss_cartoon.png
It is credible that the US could win such a war, but having to fight on their own territory rather than being at a geographic advantage where the closest real attack was Pearl Harbour, would make a difference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_home_front_during_World_War_II#Attacks_on_U.S._soil
>Great, now see how they deal with some *real* Fifth Columnists setting up as saboteurs, rather than imagined threats from within:
This comes up a *lot* in the books. There are four perspectives that deal with life in occupied territories (two Canadians, one Confederate in US-held territory, and one US in Confederate-held territory), and pretty much all of them involve some combination of spies, saboteurs, passive resistance, and outright terrorism. There are a range of responses, with hostage reprisals and summary executions on the far end. It's a fairly dark timeline and the US commits its fair share of villainly despite being the "good guys" of the series as a whole by contrast with the stuff the Confederates the Confederates get up to later on.
Also the Mormons rebel against the USA with Confederate assistance, Communists rebel against the Confederacy, there's an anti-war riot in New York that gets violently suppressed, and there's a minor plot line about the US Navy running guns to Irish Republicans (who appear to have won, since there's a 32-county independent Republic of Ireland as of the first Interwar book).
"The US Navy running guns to Irish Republicans (who appear to have won, since there's a 32-county independent Republic of Ireland as of the first Interwar book)."
Now I'm convinced of the work's excellence, carry on Mr. Turtledove! 😁
I've never read any Harry Turtledove, but every time I hear about him it's a whole new book, usually a whole new timeline involving a whole bunch of books. Which led me to wonder how many books has this guy actually written. And apparently the answer is that he's written 155 books since the 1980s https://www.fictiondb.com/author/harry-turtledove~24101.htm
That's an impressive work rate given that these books are, by all accounts, interesting reading and presumably heavily researched. Although I guess he's been retreading the same historical periods quite a bit?
Some of those books are lightly reskinned history books that probably went really fast, though.
Yes, he's a very prolific writer. Not quite as prolific as that list makes it sound, since the 155 "novels" also include short stories and novellas. Still, he's written over a hundred books including compilations of his short works, averaging something like 2-3 books a year over a 40+ year career.
He does indeed cluster a lot of his works in three major time periods: World War 2, the American Civil War, and Late Antiquity. Late Antiquity in particular is definitely something he definitely already knew about before writing any novels, since he has a PhD in Byzantine History. I think his interest in ACW and WW2 is partly because it's marketable and partly because he seems very interested in exploring themes involving the evils of authoritarianism and institutionalized racism. A fair fraction of his books take place in fantasy worlds that are reskinnings of these three eras, too.
IMO, his best period of what I've read of his stuff is probably what he wrote in the late 80s through c. 2000. He got better with practice over the course of the 80s and 90s, but towards the end of the period his style shifted to get quite a bit more rambling and verbose. That's around when his children hit college age, and it's widely suspected he started pushing himself to churn out more books because of tuition costs. If so, I can't really blame him, and I have enjoyed most of his books from the later period that I've read, but I don't think they're as good on average as his 90s books. My judgement might also be influenced by nostalgia, since I really got into his stuff in the early to mid 90s when I was in middle and high school.
Of his works, I would most strongly recommend the Videssos books (fantasy reskinning of the Byzantine Empire with a little bit of "Middle Earth with the serial numbers filed off" for flavor), the Worldwar series (aliens invade in the middle of WW2), and Guns of the South (standalone novel about time travelling South African neonazis arming the Confederates in 1864).
How did Turtledove get the British and the French on the same side at the beginning?
Historically, Britain and the Second French Empire were relatively friendly in the 1860s: they'd been allied together against Russia during the Crimean War and remained on pretty good terms, including a free trade agreement in 1860 and both countries unofficially giving lukewarm support to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. There was no formal alliance past the end of the Crimean War and they did continue to see one another as potential rivals when doing things like planning warship construction, but they were more friendly than not.
Turtledove has the Confederacy win the Antietam campaign decisively, with Lee destroying the Army of the Potomac and going on to invade Pennsylvania. I've got problems with both halves of that, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Anyway, the Union has had a really nasty battlefield defeat on Northern soil, and the Emancipation Proclamation (which make the war explicitly about slavery on both sides, and made it politically impossible for the British government to support the Confederacy) got preempted because Lincoln never got the battlefield victory he had been waiting for. France and Britain then recognize the Confederacy and pressure the US into accepting pro-Confederate mediation that winds up confirming Confederate independence. After the war, Britain and France both continue to support the Confederacy, although I'm not 100% clear on if there's a formal alliance at this stage. There's another round of war between the Confederacy and the USA in the early 1880s, in which Britain and France intervene on the Confederate side and badly beat the US. The US reacts to this by going ally-shopping themselves and choosing Germany. So presumably, fighting together against the US and then finding the US aligning with Germany pushes Britain and France to resolve their colonial differences and align together against Germany a couple decades ahead of schedule.
The way this plays out and secondary implications of this are a bit under-explored. For example, the Franco-Prussian war is implied to have played out pretty much as historically, and the Second Empire got replaced by the Third Republic on schedule without apparently disrupting Anglo-French relations. I would have been really, really interested in at least a short story exploring if the Confederacy got involved in the Franco-Prussian war and how that affected things, but sadly (from my perspective) that doesn't seem to be part of the story that Turtledove was interested in writing.
[continuing the rest of the comment because it's too long for Substack]
For Gordon McSweeney in particular, his characterization is not a good fit for him being set up to be a Hilter analogue. McSweeney is a bigoted jerk, but he does go a bit futher down the Turtledove protagonist arc than Pinkard or Featherston, and when we do see him expressing his prejudices towards people he knows personally, it's always in a "more in sorrow than in anger" attitude where he sees them as people and sympathizes with them despite constantly reproaching them for failing to measure up to his extremely rigorous and somewhat arbitary standards. McSweeney's predjudices are much more religious than racial, making him a less direct potential parallel to Nazi racial ideology. McSweeney also strikes me as being a rather unlikely radical revolutionary: he consistently believes in the system, wants to uphold it, and reserves his deepest hatred for those who are fighting in arms against it. I could see McSweeney doing terrible things as a mid-level officer in the service of a fascist regime, but I really don't see him leading a revolutionary movement to fundamentally overhaul the system. Featherston, who hated and resented the planter class that dominated Confederate politics from fairly early on, almost as much as he hates black people, fits much better as a Hitler-like right-wing revolutionary. McSweeney's also a somewhat cartoonish figure, in terms of both his attitudes and his over-the-top heroism in combat. Featherston is portrayed a lot more realistically in both respects, which makes his revelation as a budding Hilter more narratively effective.
Another character bit I noticed on rereading is the dynamic with General Custer, commander of the US First Army, and his aide Major Abner Dowling. At first glance, Custer is a buffoon with no real redeeming qualities except occassionally making correct military decisions for entirely the wrong reasons. I took this at face value when I first read the books, but on rereading I think we're perceiving Custer slightly unfairly because we only see him through Dowling's eyes. Dowling disdains Custer, with some reason, and that disdain leads him to overlook Custer's skill when it does shine through. We see this when Custer is shown to actually be a charismatic and energetic field commander when the front does start moving (to Dowling's astonishment) and when Custer is the one who figures out how to use tanks (called "Barrels" by the Americans, since "Tank" is a British term and the US here developed them independently) effectively as a massed breakthrough force. I think the "Dowling is an unreliable narrator" interpretation also fits better with how Custer is portrayed in How Few Remain, where he's a perspective character and we see inside his head: there, Custer is an arrogant jerk, and prone to arrogance and intellectual laziness espeically when things aren't going his way, but he is actually a pretty good commander when he puts himself into it. That fits very well with the unreliable narrator theory, but much less well if we take Downling's view of Custer at face value. And while considering that, it also occurred to me that Turtledove may have been doing a send-up of the fourth Blackadder series, set during the First World War, in which Custer takes the role of the buffoonish General Melchett and Major Dowling stands in for Melchett's aide, Captain Darling. Which Turtledove then subverts by showing Custer to have hidden depths that are not shared by Melchett.
In our world, the Nazis and other right-wing nationalists like the Steel Helmets in interwar Germany promoted an interpretation of German defeat known to modern historians as the "Stab in the back legend", the idea that the socialist revolution that overthrew the monarchy in 1918 was the cause of German military defeat rather than an effect. The corresponding explanation for Confederate defeat in the Great War is a Communist rebellion (mostly by the severaly oppressed black underclass, who are not technically slaves anymore but live under a system much harsher than that of the Jim Crow South) that breaks out at the end of the first book and takes most of the second book to be mostly suppressed, with some holdout bands keeping a guerilla war going until the last chapter of the third Great War book. The leader of the rebellion is a black revolutionary named Cassius, and I as confident as I can be without explicit confirmation that it isn't a coincidence that the "Stab in the Back" was perpetrated by a man named for the leader of the conspiracy to stab Julius Caesar to death. This kind of pun stacked atop a historial in-joke is very much Turtledove's style.
Is there some reason that you consistently call Hitler "Hilter"? Not that I mind or anything, but it's an odd enough quirk that I reacted.
In the AU world our Hitler doesn't exist, but an unremarkable German soldier named Hilter does?
There is a minor character in one of the books by an Austrian-born sergeant in the German army who tags along with Heinz Guderian when the latter visits the US during the interwar years. He isn't named in the text but is strongly implied to be Hitler.
I typed up the comment in a text file in an IDE (Visual Studio Code), which gives auto-complete suggestions based on words already in the document. I must have made a typo the first time and then accepted the auto-complete on subsequent instances without noticing the misspelling.
I thought it was reference to the North Minehead By-election: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vlmGknvr_Pg#bottom-sheet
I wish it were.
There are a couple of easter eggs in the WW2 strategy game Hearts of Iron 4 related to that. The game has a "focus tree" mechanic that's used to simulate country-specific political events and can be used to choose alternate history paths for the player's country (or a computer-controlled country depending on how you configure the game) such as having your original government overthrown and replaced by a different one. Germany has an option to overthrow the Nazis early in the game and then either restore the Kaiser or reestablish a liberal republic. There's a small chance that Hitler will escape as he's losing the civil war, and if he does, then either Argentina's national leader gets replaced by "Señor Hitler", who looks like a clean-shaven Hitler wearing a fedora and sunglasses, or a hidden flag gets set on the United States. If the hidden flag gets set, and the US goes down the fascist national focus path, then the US player eventually gets a decision as to whether their fascist leader should be Douglas MacArthur, William Dudley Pelley, Charles Lindberg (the normal options), or an up-and-coming politician with a mysterious path named Adam Hilt (only available if the flag is set). Adam Hilt has identical pose and facial features to Señor Hitler and is likewise clean-shaven, but lacks the hat and glasses and is wearing a dark suit with an American Flag lapel pin.
The other national leaders the game provides for the US are FDR (default), Truman (takes over from FDR in 1945), Alf Landon, Wendell Wilkie, and Thomas Dewey (every four years with Democratic USA you get a choice between whether FDR/Truman or the historical Republican candidate), Earl Browder (Communist national focus path), or Wallis Simpson (can be imposed as a puppet monarch if Edward VIII stays in charge of Britain and later conquers the US).
Sounds like a fun game.
Ah, autocomplete, the Little Satan to LLMs' Great Satan!
Indeed.
If you seen someone with a loaded gun constantly pointed at their own head, explaining that it was the only way to prevent them from shooting themselves, you would understand that this unfortunate person is insane.
As a species we have nuclear weapons to stop us killing ourselves with nuclear weapons.
Every child is born into their own share of our self imposed nuclear suicide vest. As there can never be any reward to balance out the risk then we endanger future generations with risk for the sake of risk. What does that say about us as a species?
Have we gone insane?
Your thoughts please.
Just coordination problem, multipolar trap, Moloch things.
Again, I feel like you are right, but for the wrong reason, or if not the wrong reason, then a reason that won't communicate to those who might actually get us a better outcome. Thought experiments are just too easy to manipulate in one's favour.
[Edit: to put it differently: what kind of insane are we? It's resistant to therapy so it's more than anxiety/depression but we have too much executive function for it to be a serious psychotic illness, dementia or brain injury. So we're looking at bipolar, PTSD, addictive personality. Serious problems but treatable, but not by the feint hearted]
Zanzibar, the answer to having nukes to stop us killing ourselves with nukes is to remove the nukes.
Collective poor mental health stops us from having the agency to do so.
The assumption that all of humanity shares one head is the issue with the analogy.
I think this is just a weird oversimplication. Americans have nuclear weapons so the Chinese and Russians don't kill them with nuclear weapons, not so that they don't kill themselves with nuclear weapons. Why would you aggregate all of humanity into one person like that? It doesn't make any sense.
Gordon Tremeshko, I have 8 billion mothers, fathers brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, how about you?
Do all 8 billion of them agree with that?
Moonshadow, I have never met someone who agrees, but I live in hope.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Gordon Tremeshko, I would make a dreadful commander, so no loss there.
archeon, I like that you address your fellow commenters. That is good manners.
World War I demonstrated, if needed demonstration, that humans are really good and making Hell on Earth for each other instead of building the Kingdom of Heaven.
Many ideas have been suggested to patch this flaw: Empire, Christianity, Socialism, even globalism.
MAD is just Honor Culture. We've always been insane, but now the stakes are higher.
As a species, *we* are in fact properly described with the pronoun "we". Eight billion different people with different and often conflicting goals, very few of whom keep deadly weapons pointed at their *own* heads.
So the analogy to "some*one*" evidencing suicidal behavior, is fundamentally flawed and does not lead to useful insight.
If you're looking for something small and personal, consider a Mexican Standoff. Are the participants necessarily insane? Or do we want to maybe consider how they got to that point, and what they're doing about it?
For the same reason I would want to be armed in the Wild West, major nations want to be armed just as much as their competitors.
Without a neutral third party to appeal to, with the ability to enforce whatever they decide, then you need to be able to cause a large amount of damage to anyone who has the capacity to do the same to you, otherwise you risk being bullied.
There’s no Wild West anymore because there’s a strong and relatively uncorrupt government, so it’s not very important I carry around a gun at all times. It’s still the Wild West of international politics because the UN has no enforcement power.
Russia has Nuclear Weapons because the US, China, France, etc. have nuclear weapons and the same is true for everyone else. The US or Russia can’t get rid of them because countries like North Korea and Israel are definitely not going to get rid of them (since they exist to ensure the existence of their respective nations, not just to counter the nuclear capabilities of rivals).
I don’t think it’s insane at all. Just classic coordination failures among players that have good reasons to coordinate, and good reasons to compete.
Sol Hando, if that is the best culture that we can pass on to our children then we should change our name from Homo Sapiens to Homo Suicidal because sooner or later......
Gone insane?
That presumes the insanity has yet to happen.
Look, I was convinced that this was it, the balloon was going up, Third World War was gonna happen and this time it's nuclear when Russia invaded Afghanistan and we had al the Evil Empire rhetoric from Reagan.
And yet, here it is forty years later and we're all still alive and not a pile of ash.
Deiseach, in my example the person with a gun to their head does not have to pull the trigger before we recognize that they have a serious mental health problem.
Putting our children and the future of humanity at risk when there is no good reason to do so should be a massive red flag on its own, even without pushing the button.
>you would understand that this unfortunate person is insane.
While you might initially assume that, you might discover the incredible fact that humanity ISN'T a hive-mind with a single will.
Shankar Sivarajan, I agree humanity is not a hive mind.
But the problems we face as a species require that we find one real quick.
AGI perhaps?
But the point is that we don’t have nuclear weapons to stop us killing ourselves with nuclear weapons, we have them to stop *others* killing us with them. There’s a lot that can go wrong with that scenario, but it’s not analogous to the one you posed.
Sui Juris, is there no common humanity that can be referred to as "we"?
Are those *others* a different species?
This is a weird motte-and-bailey equivocation about the usefulness of the word "we".
Yes, there is a coherent sense in which all of humanity can be referred to as "we". It's also a completely separate sense to the one that's required for your analogy to make any sense.
I'm not sure how what you're doing is any different from "nothing is better than eternal bliss, a loaf of bread is better than nothing, therefore a loaf of bread is better than eternal bliss". You're just playing a word game.
Ascend, if nuclear war will affect the whole species without exception then I am confident that "we" will all be affected.
We, as a species have nukes pointed at ourselves to stop us from killing ourselves with nukes.
You see it as a word game.
I think death from war has gone down precipitously since we entered the era of mutually assured destruction.
Yes, but with caveats:
1) That reduction is "precipitous" only when compared to the absolute high points of WW1 and WW2. Before then, wars were much less deadly simply because the technology was far less developed, so the reduction is much less clear if you go back to the 1800s, or whatever time period you have solid data for: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
2) The Ukraine war is a good reminder of how deadly regular, full-scale industrial war is nowadays. While the 2022 invasion was probably not intended as a full war, it did develop into one, and well over a million soldiers combined died so far.
3) Conventional wars aside, there is the non-zero risk of global nuclear war, which would undoubtedly be the most deadly war in history. Peace through MAD is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.
I don't think 1) is entirely true. Yes, the technology was worse, but the wars tended to drag on longer and the death tolls I think were pretty comparable, adjusted for population size. The Napoleonic Wars lasted the better part of 15 years and total deaths were at least 2.5 million, maybe more like 6-7 million when civilian deaths are included. We don't have wars that last 15 years anymore, but the butcher's bill doesn't seem at all low compared to the world wars that came a century later. Likewise, um...the 30 Years War: ~4.5-8 million dead. That's a pretty long war; pretty big death toll, too, regardless of the era in question, although most were due to starvation and disease.
It makes a _tremendous_ difference whether your basis of historical comparison is absolute numbers of deaths, or per capita. Like if you tell someone that the English Civil War killed ~200K soldiers plus another maybe 100K civilians -- okay that's bad but seems like small beer compared to some 19th and 20th century war death tolls. Realizing though that all of England in 1640 had a total population smaller than today's Denmark or Slovakia or Maryland, does shift the perspective on it.
Even “small” nuclear exchanges would be calamitous.
"Before then, wars were much less deadly simply because the technology was far less developed"
Common myth, unfortunately buttressed by your website only going back to 1800. All the data available suggests that the worst conflict in the West in terms of percentage of the population dying was the Thirty Years' War; no other conflict since has been nearly as brutal.
Wikipedia tells me that the 30YW had 4.5m to 8m total deaths (combatant and civilian), and also that that the world population at that time was about 600m-700m. That would mean a total deadliness of 6.4k to 13.3k per million, spread over 30 years. That would put it below even just combatant deaths in WW2 over 6 years, as per my other comment:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-403/comment/166153885
Your link isn't adjusting for population size of the countries at war. WW1 and WW2 aren't even particularly notable outliers excepting the number of countries involved in them.
I chose my link because it gave absolute number of deaths since 1800 and trusted people could eyeball or roughly calculate the deaths per population for themselves; I could not find a neat graph showing that calculation. Anyway, since the eyeballing/calculation part seems to be a problem yet, here's my estimate calculated from the link I gave:
World population:
1800: 1b
1910: 1.75b
1940: 2.3b
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population
War combatant deaths as per my link:
Napoleonic (1810s): 600k (0.6k per m)
WW1: 7m-9m (4k-5k per m)
WW2: 21m-31m (9k-13.7k per m)
From my link: "Three-quarters of all war deaths since 1800 happened in just these two wars, and 90% in the biggest ten wars; this is one of the reasons why we have to treat any trends over time with caution."
From other sources, for deaths per population:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Downward-trend-in-deaths-from-warfare-and-political-violence-after-1945-War-related-death_fig9_337473128
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1tjlgr/worldwide_battle_deaths_per_100k_people/
Note that these source all start after 1945 and I couldn't find any better, so I gave my own estimate above. If these ready graphs went back all the way to 1800, you'd see how it validates my point 1) above: Wars have gotten overall less deadly since 1800s, but not nearly as much as from 1940s. Choosing the endpoints for your trend has large effects on the trendline because of the outliers.
World population isn't the figure you should be using, but rather the populations of the countries involved in the conflicts.
The population of China has no bearing on how destructive the US civil war was, after all.
If you want to make a point, then maybe *you* should be using numbers to support it.
Wanda Tinasky, yes, pointing nukes at ourselves is the only thing stopping us from killing ourselves in greater numbers.
Mistilteinn below suggests it is a lack of trust but when so much is at stake is that lack of trust itself not insanity?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Voloplasy Shershevnichny, that was well worth reading, thank you for posting it.
yes, it's one of my Scott's favourite essays! I like to walk around in a "I broke my back lifting Moloch to heaven and all I got was this lousy disneyland with no children" t-short, hoping to make more people read it, but mostly just get suspicious glances.
We have gone insane, but not because of that.
Solar Princess, it is insanity making nukes, not nukes making insanity.
Pray tell, why have we gone insane in your opinion?
Mostly because of social media. The word "brainrot" becoming word of the year should be indicative.
Solar Princess, good reply.
Wimbli, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Wimbli, thank you for stating your views so clearly, nukes are not a major problem.
I think the analogy you are looking for is a Mexican Standoff. I'm not pointing my gun at my own head, I'm pointing it at yours -- and yours is pointed at mine. Except in this analogy the bullets move very slow, but cannot miss.
John, it is no longer a Mexican standoff, the MAD world is gone.
Russian hypersonic missiles can not be stopped by the West.
They also have the S400, S500 and S550 missile defence shield in which they place a high degree of confidence, this should be of concern to us in the West.
>"Russian hypersonic missiles can not be stopped by the West."
Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Russia does not have hypersonic missiles worthy of the name; they've merely slapped the "hypersonic" label on run-of-the-mill ballistic missiles (which do technically enter the hypersonic regime, but not in level flight and not maneuvering under thrust).
Ghillie Dhu, perhaps you should ask an LLM then get back to me.
Asshole, I don't need a machine to hallucinate at me about a field in which I have direct professional experience.
Ghillie Dhu, oddly enough I live on a partly Gaelic speaking island off the North West Coast of Scotland Where the fable of Ghillie Dhu is well known.
If abusing strangers anonymously relieves your stress and saves those closest to you from bearing the brunt then I am all for it, it shows some emotional intelligence, well done.
Perhaps you should tell US military commanders there is no need for the Golden Dome missile defence shield, I am sure they will take your "direct professional experience" seriously.
How will hypersonic missile stop a retaliatory strike?
Missile defense doesn't work, just ask any physicist. Steve Hsu did a good podcast about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivY8uak20Mc
Wanda Tinasky, we disagree about missile defence but that is not the point.
If Russia has a high degree of confidence that their missile shield will protect their population centres then they would be less likely to back off from a confrontation, as would we in their shoes.
Surely the greatest risk lies in the fear that a first strike will render retaliation impossible, making it imperative to strike first. If Russia thinks it has an effective missile defense, then that fear is reduced, making a nuclear exchange less likely, does it not?
No one who's technically qualified to understand the issue thinks missile defense will work against ballistic missiles, particularly MIRVs. Russia has competent scientists, I think it's highly unlikely that Putin believes in it. This is all just posturing.
Wanda Tinasky, general John Raymond, then chief of US Space force, "Hypersonic weapons are extremely difficult to detect and counter given the weapons speed and manoeuvrability, low flight paths and unpredictable trajectories."
The proposed Golden Dome missile shield is to counter the threat of hypersonic missiles.
>If you seen someone with a loaded gun constantly pointed at their own head, explaining that it was the only way to prevent them from shooting themselves, you would understand that this unfortunate person is insane.
Problem with this analogy is humanity is not a single organism.
Alexander Turoc, I agree the analogy is clumsy.
But will the bombs care?
Will the survivors care?
Or will they conclude that we were insane for taking the risk?
A risk without possibility of reward.
Huh?
You made a specific argument in your top level comment. You didn't just say "having nukes pointed at each other sure sucks doesn't it?" in which case you probably would have gotten responses saying "yeah it sucks, but it's unavoidable".
Instead, you argued that having nukes pointed at each other is insane (a stronger form of "irrational") on the basis that a man pointing a loaded gun at himself to stop him killing himself would be insane. Then when it's pointed out that the nukes are possessed by different people pointing them at other people in order to stop those other people killing them, and that there's nothing clearly irrational or insane about this behaviour...you just say, in effect, "but that doesn't change that it sucks that we're running this risk!".
Which...everyone agrees with. No one thinks it's good that there's a nuclear threat hanging over us all. Plenty of people do think it's rational or necessary, however, for an individual country to have nukes, to protect themselves from others. So either (a) you still think your analogy is accurate, even though it's been explained why it isn't and you've acknowledged this, (b) you just want to express that nukes suck, even though they may be unavoidable, (c) you think nukes are avoidable, and in fact so easily and obviously avoidable that having them can be called "insane", but for a different reason than your original one which (as far as I can see) you haven't argued for at all.
I think you should be very clear what you're actually arguing for, because to me it looks like you're jumping between (a), (b) and (c) while having no overall coherent point at all.
Ascend, thank you for taking the time to point out the flaws in my debating skills, with such advice I will improve and I admit there is plenty room for improvement.
The point I was incoherently trying to make is that nuclear war will affect all of us, no one can opt out. As you point out individual nations can not solve the problem on their own. Either we solve the problem as a unified species or we sink together.
"Plenty of people do think its rational or necessary, however, for an individual country to have nukes, to protect themselves from others."
You make my point for me, humanity has nuclear weapons to stop us from killing ourselves with nuclear weapons. You imply this is rational and necessary.
> Either we solve the problem as a unified species
Do please let me know when the species is unified so we can start solving the problem.
Actually, never mind the species. I'll take politically aligning just all the folks here in the open threads comments sections - a much, much simpler problem - as indication that this is a thing that is possible.
Moonshadow, I disagree, our host and his gaggle of commenters have achieved what LessWrong and many others hoped to do.
While it is difficult to identify the glue or group think that exists on this blog, the opinions are diverse, tolerance is very high, most criticism is constructive, at least by internet standards.
No, scratch the internet comment, I was in South Africa during the fall of Apartheid, often in the middle between two opposing sides who both attack you. Wise heads prevailed, full blown civil war was avoided, (SA was a nuclear power, it could have been catastrophic.
I find much the same ethos on this blog and it is a beautiful thing to witness. You are perhaps too close to the trees to see the forest.
I do not know how to unify a species but cloning this blog, (and host) would, I think be a very good start.
Various groups of humans have nuclear weapons in order to A: maybe conquer the world and B: make sure nobody else conquers the world (or at least the parts we care about).
This does raise the issue of how we make sure disputes over who will or won't be conquering which parts of the world, don't kill lots of people. To which "humanity" has developed systems and techniques that have been demonstrably adequate so far.
John Schilling, it is the "so far" bit that bothers me.
What risk? You're acting like there's an alternative.
Mistilteinn, are you saying there is no alternative to pointing nuclear weapons at ourselves?
I'm pretty sure that's what's known as a "loaded question", so let me explain the situation to you. People are pointing nuclear weapons at EACH OTHER. You cannot unilaterally disarm, because then there's nothing stopping other people from nuking you without retaliation. So it is everyone's best interests to have nukes. There is no coordination method to force everyone to disarm, because some countries have more nukes and more defense capabilities than other nations, meaning that they would have an advantage even in a nuclear exchange. Thus there is no incentive for these countries to disarm.
Mistilteinn, if I understand you correctly the problem is one of a lack of trust rather than insanity, an astute observation.
I've seen more than one person in left-wing echochambers to describe Curtis Yarvin as such: he used to be a highly esteemed dark intellectual behind the American academic right-wing, and then he went on Twitter and exposed himself as an utter incoherent idiot who's been faking intelligence so far; which destroyed his reputation among the far right.
Is this a fair description? I haven't read anything by Yarvin since Scott's anti-reactionary FAQ, and I don't have the journalistic chops to do a post-factum investigation.
I don't think he ever seemed like anything other an idiot with incoherent ideas. I suspect that most of the people who say things like this never actually read his old blog and just knew of him through Scott's attempts to steelman him.
There's an earlier figure who had a reputation as a scary dark wizard of a different kind but then went on Twitter and started behaving like an angry grandpa with a chip on his shoulder - Varg Vikernes, going by Thulêan Perspective on Twitter - making it easier to pattern-match, though the reasons for scary dark wizardness the two have and the particular far-right ideologies they espouse are rather different.
Scott's more recent essay about how Yarvin "sold out" is a good summary of the change in his views from when he first got popular: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out
Yarvin was posting "Trump should nullify the election and seize power" stuff in 2020, and he only joined Twitter in 2023, so I don't think Twitter was to blame for him embarrassing himself. But I don't know enough people who actually like him to say when his audience started noticing his faults.
Yarvin is fairly consistent in quality and content. He's just following a tradition that has never had a significant hold in English language thought. I think a lot of his success came from accessing that tradition in English. But I also think that particular tradition is not only declining but has no advocates in any language that are first rate thinkers anymore.
Ironically, they'd probably like that.
I don’t think so. Anyone who had the patience to read his Mencius Moldbug stuff will recognize his current writing: obscure historical analogies, dramatic assertions, a real love of authoritarianism. He’s just a lot higher profile now.
He contributed some ideas to the public discourse, they were incorporated and extended upon, and he isn't as relevant because other people have already updated with his frame of reference in a way that makes it harder for him to personally contribute to the corpus of knowledge.
Yeah, I think he had a few original and interesting ideas, and then he ran out of them.
Also, his long-form writing style makes it difficult to figure out what exactly he is trying to say, it's all just rambling and cryptic hints, which allows people who already like him to project their own ideas. So even if he happens to be clearly wrong about something, no one can really prove it, and his fans will insist that actually he was trying to make a completely different point that you just didn't get.
I didn't read his tweets, but I'd guess that a different medium ruins this effect, and exposes him as merely saying random things.
If this is true, then the best strategy for him would be to stop tweeting, and write a new series of long cryptic articles pretending to contain a new deep knowledge accessible only to the chosen ones. But maybe it wouldn't work because he already said too many things clearly, and people would connect that to the texts.
I don't think his reputation is destroyed among the far-right and you should probably ignore anyone who thinks so.
I think many on the far right still consider him a relevant thinker, and he's certainly credited with popularizing a lot of older far right writers, but he's just, he's not vibing with the current leaders and influencers. Super right-wing nerds still like him but he's not funny, he's not memey, he's not deeply trad. He comes across as a weird smart techy guy who's not attending a Trump golf event or a Catholic mass or anything like that so...he's kinda just off in his corner, as far as I know. Like...I dunno, a Noam Chomsky of the right, if that makes sense. I dunno, I don't follow that scene as much as I did a few years back.
I always thought he was great at writing about the problems of the world, but terrible at actually thinking about solutions to them.
"Let's just bring back absolute monarchy" isn't a solution, it's an admission that you don't really have a solution.
I mean, we're talking about political fringes here when we talk about his fans. There's going to be a number of folk who do in fact see it as a solution.
> then he went on Twitter and exposed himself as an utter incoherent idiot
Many such cases!
Seriously though it's hard to be on twitter and not look like an incoherent idiot. It's mostly a matter of trigger discipline.
Well, his most recent post is about how the Trump administration is pathetic because it isn't being fascist enough, so... https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-cant-handle-the-truth
He said that about the first Trump administration, too!
Yeah, but this one's actually going for the kill. Why can't he see that?
Not enough jackboots!
Stephen Miller: The issue before is now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.
Curtis Yarvin: This country has a problem with a monkey. The monkey keeps biting people. And it is shielded by the organ-grinder. The only remedy is to punish the monkey. Logic!
It seems to me he's criticizing illogic, not a lack of fascism.
I'd personally say he's a moron for not understanding that these things take time. You can't just jump straight to executing leftist politicians. You need to build a case for their execution to your faithful. A revolution can't be accomplished alone. You have to start with the obvious cases and work your way up.
I wouldn't say he's an idiot. He's like Musk, a smart guy who melted his mind with Online Right brainworms.
He invented a lot of the brainworms himself.
A lot of people responded to my query, here and in other places, and it seems to be an nigh-unanimous opinion that deep psychosis feels a lot like a waking dream state, and the "delusions and disorganized thinking" in psychosis is very similar to "dream logic"; you accept ridiculous things as true and normal in very much the same way that you accept ridiculous things happening in dreams as normal. I even got reports of psychosis-equivalent of lucid dreaming -- when you realize it's psychosis and can control your hallucinations in some degree, although it quickly deteriorates back into dream logic. And that the memory of psychosis often quickly fades, in much the same way that memory of dreams does. And reports of psychosis-equivalent of nightmares, including the omnipresent "teeth falling out" as a hallucination. And pleasant psychosis, that you wake up from feeling the warm afterglow and longing, knowing that the cool things you saw weren't real.
So, is there _actual_ connection between psychosis and dreaming? Are there common brain areas activated/deactivated or what? Has this been investigated? Can the "why do we dream" question be answered by investigating psychosis?
I didn't see your query, but I remember quite a few bits from my psychotic experiences. And I would describe them less like dreaming and more like a crazy intense acid trip.
I think the similarity is that the deliberative, logical part of the conscious mind is turned off, or not functioning properly. The difference is that, for most people, their dreams usually do not cause them to suffer, or at least the ratio of good to bad dreams is a net positive (and if they it isn't, then that may be a symptom of psychosis).
No personal experience or strong opinion, but I do want to recommend the book _And Then I Thought I Was A Fish_ (memoir) as a very vivid, convincing and detailed description of a long-lasting psychotic state triggered by a bad trip and severe insomnia.
I've been working on an "interactive Wikipedia for risks", and I think it's good enough to start recruiting people to help work on it:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbHYe95MXe5BSYCpH/riskipedia
I like the general idea of getting good information about risk as a continuum. But there seem to me to be a few fundamental conceptual issues to work out.
I have a sense you’re focusing on risks of injury or death, which is probably a good limitation of scope. It’s good to not have to worry about whether people consider outcomes like “divorce” or “having a video of you go viral” count as “risks” or “luck”. But it might be good to be clear about that. When I first clicked, my initial assumption about “risk” was about gambling or finance.
I’m guessing that all of your numbers here are frequencies, rather than Bayesian probabilities - but that does lead to some inherent limitations in that most people aren’t representative members of whatever reference class these numbers are from. The one chart I glanced at had risk of unexpected emergency room visit by age, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what year or country these numbers were for - and year or country seem like they might often be bigger factors than age. (I’m fairly sure that risk of car crash per mile driven was much higher in 2020 than other years, since there were more collisions and fewer miles driven. I don’t know if this difference was larger or smaller than the differences between the US, France, and India.)
I wonder if it would be helpful to present this not as a set of pages, but rather as a way to make comparisons. Compare the daily risk of death for the average American to the risk of dying from driving 100 miles in Germany or the risk of fatality from COVID for a 50 year old who catches it.
Giving good comparisons is on the TODO list. One of the reasons I did the general mortality, driving, and chances of ending up in the ER pages early is because those might be good comparisons-- "one skydiving jump is like driving XYZ miles" kind of comparisons.
RE: focusing on injury and death: the framework is generic-- for example, there's the "Pregnant after sex" page which gives chances of pregnancy after having sex.
Would it be helpful if... sure! It's a wiki, so feel free to create an account and create a page comparing the risk of driving 100 miles in Germany to COVID fatalities (or whatever). I actually started working on a COVID risks page; once there are lots of RiskiPedia pages with robust risk models it will get easier to create those comparisons.
The risk of a Carrington-level solar event or greater causing lengthy and widespread electricity and internet blackouts seems under-discussed to me. Especially as civilization increasingly networks, electrifies and digitizes. The backlog for new transformers needed to replace damaged equipment for example can be months. What is the appropriate level of concern and preparedness for this risk and how far are we from it?
Reading this, my non-expert opinion is: far.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/should-you-be-worried-about-solar-storms
We've got satellites studying the sun and giving us (usually) days of warning when CMEs form. Just today, scientists detected four mild CMEs heading our way that will make some aurora in a few days. If there's a Carrington-level one heading our way, decent leadership should be able to disconnect the most vulnerable parts of the grid to limit the damage. Most likely, for a really bad CME, we get a day or so of near-universal blackout, then most places bounce back to normal. Not great, and some vulnerable/unprepared/unlucky people could have really bad times, but not civilization-ending.
If only we could redirect all the "AI will kill us all" concern energy toward a much more likely "a solar flare will fry the power grid", this country could maybe prepare. As such... "gestures widely at the utter disfunction all around".
We could start by the feds paying to manufacture extra transformers, starting with the biggest ones, and stationing them next to their current locations so that they can be wired into the grid within days. Then go down to the smaller ones, maybe mandate a minimum 30% surplus maintained for all regulated utilities. But this will increase power bills, so, you know, a non-starter when there are pets to groom, new trucks to buy, and games to attend.
OTOH, we can plug in the indomitable human spirit and run the grid on that, so nothing to worry about.
Hell yeah
How much concern? The human spirit is indomitable. Nothing to worry about.
How much preparedness? As much as you can afford, which is dependent upon your space and resources. Normal emergency preparedness (stored water, shelf-stable food, basic security precautions) will probably get you 80% of the way there, anything beyond that is discretionary. Fortunately, normal emergency preparedness is multi-factorial, meaning it is useful in the course of a carrington event as well as a more pedestrian natural catastrophe (which is much more likely). Specializing (aiming to reduce that 20% gap) for a statistically improbable event is likely to be more self-soothing than practical.
How far back do you think you have to go before humans no longer considered themselves "living atop the ruins" of their ancient ancestors?
That is, popular cultures the world over today are acutely aware of ancient civilizations from long before their own time. The material culture of these ancient civilizations (Göbekli Tepe, Pyramids of Giza, Hadrian's Wall, etc) suffuses us with a sense of those who came before us. In some this evokes an inferiority complex, in others it engenders a wistful longing for how things were in the "old days", but was there ever some point in human history where people looked around and felt like they were truly the first people to have lived? Did history ever feel new?
Even ancient societies that correctly believed themselves to be living among the ruins of precursor civilizations tended to seriously overestimate the antiquity and impressiveness of those precursors. Take the Sumerian King List, from the early 2nd millennium BCE: the entries for recent rulers are fairly accurate, but the first section is full of mythological figures who reigned for tens of millennia each.
I think this kind of belief arises naturally in many traditional societies. When you venerate tradition, it's natural to think of the past as better than the present. When you believe that the landscape you live in was created by supernatural powers, it's natural to think that the past had more miracles and magic than the present. And when someone asks why your family deserves to be in charge, it's natural to make up a story about the glorious deeds of your ancestors.
The Epic of Gilgamesh has gods and monsters but no ruins left over from a lost Golden Age.
I partly disagree; the Epic clearly sees the Great Flood as an apocalyptic event that destroyed a prior civilization (tablet XI), but that prior civilization isn't really depicted as a Golden Age (unless you count the ability to construct an enormous boat as a Golden Age's defining feature).
Also, the story seems to imply that Gilgamesh's own city of Uruk is itself built on the remains of an antediluvian city, since its foundations were laid by the Seven Sages (tablet I line 21, tablet XI line 326), who are depicted as pre-Flood entities in other myths.
The Australian Aborigines knew nothing about their own history, apart from what they could personally remember and what they'd been told by older people; beyond that they had no clue, and there were few marks on the environment to indicate any long history of human settlement.
But in the absence of any actual history, they made one up. And the stories they made up, across hundreds of different tribes, inevitably talked about a distant ancestral past in which the ancestors of humans and animals did great mythical deeds which shaped the landscape around them. They might not have lived in the ruins of Ancient Rome, but they did live next to the river carved by the giant cod Pondi being chased by the ancestor Ngurunderi, or next to the mountain and the island which were once the head and body of Coolum who was decapitated by his jealous rival Ninderry.
So no, I don't think there was ever a time when humans didn't see themselves as living in the ruins of their ancestral past. As soon as they developed the ability to ask themselves what happened in the past, they developed the ability to make up answers to that question.
That's really fascinating. I like how you said that, "As soon as they developed the ability to ask themselves what happened in the past, they developed the ability to make up answers to that question." It makes sense. Hard to imagine anyone ever thinking "we must be the very first people because all we've got around here are rocks and things instead of megalithic structures". That is, they probably weren't looking for something that hadn't been invented yet.
Do you have any resources you could recommend to learn about that state of affairs? Can you speculate about the reasons the Australian Aborigines never created megalithic structures? I guess what I'm trying to get at now is, what makes humans shift away from the historyless-ness of stories about the stars or the cod-carved river and start making, say, enormous pyramids? Does it all just come down to agriculture or is there more to it, do you think?
Go back? Just go to Cali. Like, dude, a history field trip for kids in Cali is to gold panning in a river the way we did in the ol' timey days of 1850. Or, if you want to get really old timey, you can go to the Spanish missions, the oldest of which date back to 1769. The Spanish missions, by the way, of the time one crazy Mexican monk named Junipero Serra who went to explore this wild and wooly world.
There's upside to it (dude, the nature is awesome) but there's no old ruins, there's no ancestors. The first non-Indian dudes to explore those lands were contemporaries of George Washington and there's pictures of the first mass migration into Cali.
The oldest building you're liable to see are, like, old WWII homes in Fremont stuffed full of 4 software engineers sharing a 900 sq foot starter home from 1944, because Cali. That's the ancient historical buildings.
California is historically rich compared to Seattle, which feels like a recent colony to me.
"The first non-Indian dudes to explore those lands were contemporaries of George Washington and there's pictures of the first mass migration into Cali."
Pretty sure Sir Francis Drake landed in the Bay Area in 1579 and had a bit of a poke around. Hardly extensive, since he just had time for enough of a trip for his crew to careen the Hind in the meantime, but exploration all the same.
"The oldest building you're liable to see are, like, old WWII homes in Fremont stuffed full of 4 software engineers sharing a 900 sq foot starter home from 1944, because Cali. That's the ancient historical buildings."
We live in San Jose in a house more than a hundred years old. Less than a mile from us is an older one, built, I think, a little after the Civil War. Not very old by European standards, but both considerably before WWII.
There are lots of native ruins scattered about North America (White House Ruins or Emerald Mound, for example). The land itself was shaped by long years of human occupation. Sure, there may not have been many people present when California settlers moved in, but there was evidence of ancient human occupation in the area.
Regardless, the settlers in 1850 had a clear idea of ancient history at the time. They did not think they were the first humans, just that they were the first humans in the area (if they failed to encounter evidence of prior occupation).
Wait, bro, what are you trying to communicate?
Like, if you've been to Europe, there's like a "History everywhere" vibe. Like, you go to Athens and the Parthenon is just...up there, on a hill. You can see it from a Starbucks. If you go to Istanbul there's tons of history, you can just have a Turkish coffee under the Aqueduct of Valens. 10/10, super baller, would recommend. The UK is full of castles, you just trip over them. Like, in Cornwall, the part of England that looks like a d*ck, they've got 13 castles. 13 castles in, like 1400 square miles (2). For comparison, the Chicago metro area is like 10,000 square miles (3) (4). Imagine if, like, a single neighborhood in Chicago had 13 castles and you were driving past these stupid castles all the time.
There's a real "living atop the ruins", "living amidst history" vibe there. It feels different. And I thought that's what you were talking about but apparently not...so what are you talking about?
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_castles_in_England
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornwall
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_metropolitan_area
(4) USA! USA!! USA!
I read "atop" in a more metaphorical "on the shoulders of giants" sense than a more literal "the castle burnt down & sank into the swamp, then we rebuilt on its ruins."
There's a good episode about the Ninth Legion (the famous 'lost legion') where the history is interesting enough without the attempts to hype it up. The traces the Roman fort left on the landscape at Ardoch, which remain striking even after some 1,900 years, are a great example of "we are living atop the ruins of the great works of the mighty of old":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFAd3FHXh8
EDIT: And for bitter-sweet nostalgia (Time Team was so good):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StBUp2gPGNo
Nah cuz even the epic of gilgamesh, in some translations, refers to a time when "the oven are first lit" and "bread was first tasted".
Even for the first civilizations, they imagined a mythology that preceded them.
The Epic Of Gilgamesh In Sumerian https://share.google/lFDQ8HzxaLY6XqIA1
> Even for the first civilizations, they imagined a mythology that preceded them.
Surely the null hypothesis is that there are civilizations earlier than what we are aware of?
Every other mythology that references older civilization is *actually* referencing some older civilization. It would be odd if *only* for the sumerians this wasn't true
Why would that be odd?
That search led to a cool video. Thanks for sharing.
What about before that? Anatomically modern humans existed conservatively >100,000 years before the Epic of Gilgamesh was written.
The earliest structure we know about for sure is Göbekli Tepe. We can assume that similar lithic structures were built prior to that, though none survive to modern day, nor to my knowledge are described even in the earliest writing. Mudbrick and rammed earth structures, as well as wood structures preceded that, but tend not to be as long lasting. It can also be fairly difficult to tell if certain features are natural or man-made. A rammed earth structure that is neglected turns into a normal looking hill within a few decades, and wood rots and crumbles even sooner outside of very specific climates.
Conservatively, pre-agriculture humans were all to some extent nomadic. Permanent structures that would outlast a human lifespan were unnecessary. If I had to guess, combined wooden and earthen structures in the near east at earliest 12000 BC would be the first that could actually be ruins to build on top of. Unless you count a campsite that your tribe inhabited occasionally.
The earliest known wooden structure is the Kalambo structure which is just two logs made to link together (with tool use) but it is dated to at least 476000 years ago. Immediately notable as predating the current date of the emergence of homo sapiens as a species.
Perhaps the first humans were building on the ruins of "ancestors" that just never survived.
How do you think they felt about their place in the world, without those (literal) touchstones?
Marc Maron just announced that his last episode will be a second interview with Barack Obama. It's fascinating to me how 2024 podcast interviews with Trump compare to Maron's with Obama.
Hmm I watched about 20 minutes... kinda milk toast. is there some time stamp I should look at?
I've just listened to ~2 hrs of Rogan talking with John Kiriakou, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZqADzuu73g
Dang it seems like he was f-ed over by the Obama administration.
Crowdfund plastic chemical testing for everyday foods!
I’ve been building Laboratory.love — a small side project that lets people crowdfund independent lab testing for plastic chemicals (BPA, phthalates, etc.) in foods (mostly nationally available CPG products).
It’s basically Consumer Reports × Kickstarter: pick a product, fund its testing, and when the goal’s met, three independent samples are analyzed by an ISO-accredited lab. All results are published publicly.
Ten products have now been fully funded, six results published so far!
I applied for an ACX Grant to try and run a full panel on top baby formulas but did not funded. Curious what you’d most want to see tested?
https://laboratory.love/
Very cool, love this idea. Will contribute once I have money.
I love this idea.
I just checked out the site and think it would be super helpful to put the results in context for non-experts. If I see a test shows that there is 1205 nanograms of DBP per serving, what does that mean? Is that a high amount and harmful for our health or a low amount? Is there strong evidence that this chemical is bad, or just suggestive evidence.
How does this compare to other similar products? If I see a certain product has 4x more bad things than another I might consider switching away from it.
Is there any way to give products a score or a gold/silver/bronze medal? Consumer reports and the Yuka app (very similar situation to this) do a good job here.
Thank you! Yes I’m working to make the data more digestible to the common consumer. Current direction is a Chemical Report Card visualization that will appear above the data-dense table. I do like the medal idea too. As more data comes in I’ll also publish collections of the cleanest products (at least from a plastic chemical perspective).
Thanks again. May your knees forever remain high viz and unscathed.
I spent a bunch of time developing a fairly popular AI assistant plugin for neovim, and I write about the role of AI in software engineering, my learnings from developing the coding assistant, and the future of neovim in the post-ai age here:
AI whiplash and neovim in the age of AI https://dlants.me/ai-whiplash.html
The first half has some valuable general insights into AI coding. The second half seemed entirely different, about specific workflows oriented to an editor-focused coding paradigm, and discussing things also done by Code, zed, cursor and other scaffolding (but without mentioning these other options).
What would the U.S. have needed to have done differently to beat the USSR into space?
Are you talking Sputnik or Yurij Gagarin?
I would ask the converse, what would the USSR have needed to have done differently to beat the US to the Moon?
Better healthcare for Korolev.
According to the Right Stuff, the engineers and test pilots at Edwards weren't particularly bothered about space per se, they were interested in building the best rocket-fuelled jet plane and it would get to space eventually as a by-product, but that didn't seem strategically important (the moon landing was a long way off). But then after sputnik the government panicked and went for a "quick and dirty" approach, essentially making the human in the rocket "spam in a can" with virtually no control over the mission.
Had slightly different priorities. Jupiter-C (the rocket that launched Explorer I) was ready something like a year before Sputnik went up, and at one point, Von Braun's team was being monitored to make sure that they weren't doing a covert satellite launch. Eisenhower chose to prioritize the Navy/civilian Vanguard program over Jupiter-C (which was a converted missile) in an attempt to establish precedents about the peaceful nature of space, and the right to overfly other countries with satellites, so he could use recon satellites.
On the manned side, be slightly less cautious and don't fly that last chimp.
Considering trying to join a CAR-T trial for PPMS (targeting CD19 cells, https://www.bmsclinicaltrials.com/au/en/clinical-trials/NCT06220201). I have a fairly good handle on the overall biology but I am really struggling to get any good handle of what happens to the CAR-T cells long term.
Will they persist 'forever' so forever depleting B cells like they are engineered or is the expectation that they will disappear after a while and B cells will repopulate, hopefully healthily? Any thoughts would greatly be appreciated.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41409-024-02429-6
"The capacity of CD19CAR-T therapy to achieve tissue clearance of autoreactive B-cells is an attractive prospect for patients with autoimmune conditions in whom mAb therapy fails. From leukaemia/lymphoma experience CAR-T therapy is highly effective in patients when prior B-cell targeting mAb therapy has failed. Furthermore, the pharmacokinetics of CAR-T therapy is distinct from that of mAbs, with evidence of active CAR-T trafficking and biodistribution into even the most immunologically challenging and remote areas, e.g., the central nervous system and skin [9], amongst others [10]. Lastly, CAR-T treatment frequently leads to profound and complete B-cell depletion, albeit with B-cell recovery observed in most patients by around 12 months post-CAR-T infusion"
Here is a vote for 12 months before B cell recovery.
Thanks, clearly my Google Fu was weak....
Not too bad then. Even the mabs take 9-12 months for most...
The answer is that it depends on the type of CAR-T cell treatment you receive and the patient's immune system/response to the therapy. The initial trials that led to FDA approvals in hematologic malignancies are around the 5-8 year mark and some patients continue to show a robust population of chimeric T-cells in the circulation even 5y post therapy with sustained tumor control. Contrasting to some patients that have already had disease recurrence at 2-3 years and either get a second round of CAR-T or other treatments. There is no theoretical upper bound for how long the T-cell population can survive in-vivo because in the best responders CAR-T cells enter memory and stem-like T-cell states similar to native T-cells. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-024-06461-8
Thanks I sort of feared there was no clear cut answer...
Will need to research more if they engineer those with some knockout receptor to potentially remove them if B-cells were to be suppressed for too long.
I don't know a thing about how CAR-T works, but wanted to tell you that there are a lot of questions like this that I used to ask on open threads here that I now ask GPT. Here is hit or miss. GPT always answers, and I can ask as many follow-up questions as I like. Yes, it sometimes slides into hallucinating or people-pleasing, but I find that it mostly does that when the question is hard to find an answer to (yours is not) and when I give a strong signal that I am hoping for a certain answer (your question, as you ask it here, does not). And you can double-check the answer by clicking on the links it gives to sources, also by feeding its answer to an AI from another family and asking it evaluate validity.
I've been prodding the main LLMs on this (including Deep Research) - nothing reliable came out of it. Quite likely because the usual sources do not really know yet. Maybe nobody does.
After all, CAR-T has only been a viable approach for a few years (mainly since approaches to address cytokine release have been proven to work) and the early trials where all in (late stage) cancer with different targets where persistence of the CAR-Ts might even be be beneficial as sort of an ongoing line of defense.
So these are likely not particularly instructive for autoimmunity which is only starting to gather steam. So the hope was that someone on the bleeding edge but ideally not directly involved with the trial in question might have a view...
As for not asking leading questions towards LLMs, totally agree.
I wrote a prayer for the AI age
https://open.substack.com/pub/samsmiles/p/a-prayer-for-the-ai-age
ACX Grantee 2024 here, working on EEG entrainment study replication. The data collection for the project is in full-swing and I am looking for study participants in London.
A quick recap. The study “Learning at your brain’s rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions” claims that entrainment (flashing a bright white light) at a person's individual peak alpha frequency (IAF) helps them learn to distinguish two types of patterns faster: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10152088/
The project is to replicate one of the core claims of the paper: entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus with a trough of the person’s alpha rhythm (T-match) is significantly better entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus of a peak of the same rhythm (P-match).
The project is now in the final stage: collecting the data. Last week I had three people come to record their brainwaves and do trials of the perceptual task. This week 3 more are coming. I'm looking for 5 more volunteers in London who can dedicate 4 hours of their time split into two two-hour chunks on two consecutive days. I'm now doing bookings for the next ≈1.5 weeks. If you want to volunteer, fill in this form: https://forms.gle/X37zyTV3KhbSb3Ze9 — your help will be greatly appreciated.
If you want to know what it's like to be a participant, here is a video of the demo at the ACX meetup in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP5dO97l9Bo. In the video you can actually see people getting their brains entrained and solving the study tasks while wearing an EEG headset.
The code for the project is available on Github: https://github.com/eleweek/EEG_entrainment.
The results will be published on my psychotechnology substack: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/.
No-one asked but these are my reviews of the reviews from this review contest:
1: Alpha School
Very well written, if a little verbose (don't think we needed the history section for example). Definitely the one that caused the most stir and discussion, because it reported on previously unknown info that was the matter of interest of a lot of people. I feel, though, as someone who is not a father and not in US I may not have been the target audience so still end up thinking it is kinda overrated
2: School
An interesting rebuttal, and I keep thinking about the no-structure/low-structure/high-structure triad. But I was not sold on the "nothing ever happens" underlying thesis. Still I think I liked it more than its counterpart
3: Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
A great example of scientific discipline and picking apart a paper. However major points discounted after the discussion afterwards showed the author was making some serious strawmen and exaggerations, which works against the first point
4: Islamic Geometric Patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
I think I need to reread this one, but I vaguely remember it being an okay subject that drifted off in various comments on hyperreality and modern architecture at the end without converging nicely
5: The Astral Codex Tex Commentariat
Even as a pretty impressive and thorough effort in exploratory data analysis, still was too self serving to me
6: Joan of Arc
Very verbose but very thorough. This one best serves the "review" format, I think I really got a complete review of the evidence on Joan of Arc.
7: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
A wonderful and powerful metaphor of the semantics apocalypses modern society goes through.
8: Dating Men In The Bay Area
Got to be honest that I really couldn't finish this one. As #5 it sounded too pandering to the audience to me.
9: Ollantay
As someone who went to Peru this year I couldn't help being enamored with it. I really liked the thesis of pieces of art having these strange powerful effects on random people almost like sleeper agents activation phrases
10: Participation In Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research
Liked this one a lot. It was the "how sausages are really made" for pharma research. I think it was informative on a topic of interest with a peculiar/unique point of view
11: The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis
Like #3 I thought it was great until people pushed back that it was misrepresenting the neuroscience consensus. Bummer
12: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
I really tried to like this one (maybe I still could?) but didn't involve me
13: The Russo-Ukrainian War
Incredible use of free-will. As with #10, this was 1) a review of an interesting topic 2) with new hard-to-get info 3) with a unique perspective.
So all things considered my votes would be
#1 - My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes
#2 - Russo-Ukrainian War
#3 - Joan of Arc
with honors to Phase I Clinical Research and a soft spot for Ollantay
Joan of Arc was the only one I was able to finish, and ended up reading the play mentioned there, as well.
The Joan of Arc review was serious whiplash. Really liked it at the start. Was absolutely thrown by the miracle discussion.
Because when someone on internet talks about a topic I don't know a lot about I start out with some scepticism. I believe Scott once wrote, that everyone with a keyboard can write "THAT STUDY'S BEEN DEBUNKED" on the internet, regardless of whether it's actually true or not.
But, you know, the review sounded convincing and the more I read the more I was willing to believe they knew their stuff and were probably mostly communicating true facts, or as close as can be expected anyway. Until the mircale thing.
I believe in miracles about as much as I believe in alien lizard people secretly ruling the earth, that is, not at all. And if the story had ended with a long discussion of whether or not Joan of Arc was secretly a lizard it would've badly damaged the credbility of the review, for me. The miracle thing did the same for pretty much the same reasons.
At the end of the day I'm mostly here to learn things that are true and interesting. All the historical facts of the review might well be right. But I can mainly judge that by perceived credibility of the author* and I lost confidence in that.
*Got to be honest, I could also research it myself but I don't care enough.
That sounds like you are being empirical and scientific but you aren’t. Discount nothing.
Scott’s excellent piece on the Fatima miracles is a good example of that kind of workings out - he certainly didn’t just discount the “miracle” and went through the options.
As a matter of praticality discounting is inevitable.
To take an hopefully uncontrovesial example: Physics and LLM based grand unified theories.
We are pretty sure our current understanding of physics is incomplete and a grand unified theory of everything is at least not proven impossible. In the face of that, would you propose I carefully consider all the LLM-based propals being posted to the internet every day? Seems to me they should be discounted as wrong until or unless strong evidence to the contrary is presented. Would you disagree?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If they didn't provide that, people have every reason to be skeptical.
They do but in the Fatima case there was extraordinary evidence of … something. There’s no need to assume that it was supernatural but it was something. ( this is from reading Scott’s piece, I wasn’t otherwise interested)
My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes was my favorite by far.
I was surprised Dating Men in the Bay Area made it to the finals because it wasn't particularly well written, and didn't seem to have anything interesting to say. Then I saw the substack likes, and it dwarfed all the other reviews. I'm worried that pandering so hard to the judges is going to pay off, and it's going to win.
I thought the Russo-Ukranian War was interesting, but the abrupt way it switched from describing the most mind-numbing, futile, meaningless experience to praising the vital spirit of war was way too jarring for me to put it in my top 3. It came to a conclusion in the end that the rest of the review seemed to be evidence against.
Sure it makes sense that the author would want to write that. That motivation doesn't stop the review from being disjointed and less coherent.
Curiously while the American conservatives fulminate against the Left, accusing them of all sorts of mischief, even upto serving as Devil's own agents, given the Left's association with collectivism, the social revolution in America was carried out in the name of freedom of the individual.
That, gay marriage is an individual right, that easy divorce is necessary for personal happiness and fulfillment, that self-ownership justifies abortion, and even one's sex is matter of individual determination, all justified on basis of individual freedom.
This, danger, of influx of anarchist ideas into mainstream conservativism, that the community has no moral authority over the individual, this danger was foreseen by some when conservatives were making common cause with libertarians in name of fighting communism.
Russel Kirk said that, while libertarians view the State as the Great Oppressor the conservatives know it as ordained of God, following St Paul, Romans 13.
But for American conservative, freedom is above all.
Seems to me most disagreements can be described as different views of what counts as “freedom.” Sort of like most essays can claim to be reviews.
Indeed, freedom is a popular buzzword, but everyone defines it differently. Freedom from taxes vs freedom from having a job. Freedom from church vs freedom from godless education. Freedom from pandemics vs freedom from masks. Freedom from heteronormativity vs freedom from gays. Etc.
This might be the "Goomba fallacy," with you being unable to distinguish between the different factions of the "conservatives" from your vantage point. It is (or was, until quite recently) an uneasy alliance between theocrats, warmongers, and libertarians (sometimes called "the Reagan coalition").
The good ol’ three-legged stool!
Conservatives were part of the coalition. The coalition itself was never called conservative.
Sure. Being old enough to recall when that uneasy political alliance was being negotiated in real time -- indeed in hindsight I had a couple of college professors who were directly involved -- it's still true that the single biggest surprise of the current era is how easily and thoroughly it crumpled during the first half of 2016. I'd never have predicted that it would be by that time such a Potemkin political coalition (and some key individuals like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may one day say the same in their published memoirs).
Obviously there was one key person who'd sensed the reality of that and he was right and here we are.
Let’s see what happens if/when he gets us into a war.
I think reports of the coalition crumpling have been exaggerated. For all his railing against the Iraq war, Trump did still staff his administration with neocons the first time around. And while some of the prominent members of the faction have turned against him, it seems to continue to steer his foreign policy this term.
What he IS doing is peeling off the corporatist oligarchs and discarding the rest of the "small-government conservatives" and libertarians (who are both weak and without any better option, despite how bad he is). But credit where it's due: he did pardon Ross Ulbricht, as promised.
In domestic politics, Trump understands power better than any politician in my lifetime and it's not even close.
Edit: I don't think he understands international power well at all, but politically speaking a lot of international relations boils down to domestic politics. Trump doesn't care about other countries so it doesn't matter to him.
Generally speaking, trying to explain the political positions of the parties with broad ideas like freedom vs collectivism or openness or whatever, will just make yourself look like a fool. The parties are diverse coalitions and which issues end up being politically salient and going which way is somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent, and frequently changes over time and any principles argued for are almost always just instrumental cudgels to be instantly discarded whenever the facts of the situation go the opposite way.
Anyone looking for principles will be sorely disappointed. Individual people (sometimes) have principles, mass movements never do.
I am speaking of conservatives, not the Republican Party.
The left also wants to force the many to validate the few. It’s not only about individuals choosing their sex, but also about uprooting any vestige of sex as traditionally defined, from culture, institutions, education, and every living brain. It seems to me that conservatives look at freedom as not forcing the majority to do anything: vaccination, give up guns, respect gender identities, etc.
The debate in the US is between two types of liberal individualism. There’s a small amount of collectivism on the left but not much, and some collectivism on the right (in the form of nationalism) but the culture wars are two distinct and contradictory forms of the liberal project, in the 19C version of that word, run amok.
A unified framework encompassing both types of liberalism can be built up by noting that liberalism is uncomfortable with insider/outsider dichotomy but the left-liberalism tries to erase this distinction by making everyone insider.
While right liberalism tries to make everyone outsiders in the sense that there is no shared moral authority.
This is precisely my point. American conservative conservatives have misidentified their opponents.
> It’s not only about individuals choosing their sex, but also about uprooting any vestige of sex as traditionally defined, from culture, institutions, education, and every living brain.
This strikes me as very hyperbolic and not in tune with my take as a liberal or the take of anybody I know, including many LGBT+ folks.
Although maybe to some degree it's just not clear what you mean? E.g. lots of trans people still associate female-coded stuff with being a trans woman, so they're NOT rejecting the idea that there's a lot of cultural baggage associated with being a woman.
Progressives have a big contradiction between blank-slatism around gender roles and the trans stuff. Can't be a male brain trapped in a female body if there isn't such a thing as a male or female brain.
The only woke person I have worked with scolded her brother for referring to his wife as 'my wife.' Though she wasn't conscious of it, that impulse certainly counts as uprooting any vestige of sex from culture, institutions etc. The idea that referring to your wife as 'my wife' is problematic is deeply sexist. But "progressives are the real racists/sexists/bigots" is hardly new ground.
> Progressives have a big contradiction between blank-slatism around gender roles and the trans stuff. Can't be a male brain trapped in a female body if there isn't such a thing as a male or female brain.
Yeah, I don't think there is a single comprehensive and coherent take on this question, which is why progressives support trans people and nonbinary people, who in some sense represent really different ideas around gender.
> The only woke person I have worked with scolded her brother for referring to his wife as 'my wife.'
This feels like a classic "weak-manning" to me. Like, it's not a straw-man, I believe you that this happened, but I don't think this in any way represents a large swath of culture and if we're defining "progressives" so narrowly as to only mean people who would hold this view then I think we're failing to communicate accurately
(Unless she specifically doesn't want to be called "my wife" by him, but I would take that to be a different thing.)
But also, this still seems kinda hyperbolic. Like, if that guy said "my spouse" instead it would make that much of a difference? Our institutions would be rendered unto dust? Western culture would be no no more?
The data shows that married people are happier, however democrats no longer believe this is true: https://news.gallup.com/poll/646793/why-marriage-became-partisan.aspx
Progressives, even more than democrats, are likely to view marriage as oppressive to women, so we can assume that the above survey results would be more extreme for self-identified leftists, including the drop in marriage rates. I don't have a study handy to show that but it should be pretty obvious: according to them, women are oppressed by societal institutions, marriage is one of those institutions.
As far as rendering institutions into dust or destroying western culture, the lack of fertility among progressives would absolutely destroy human civilization if within 50 years everyone adopted those values.
I have a lot more to say about those values and how destructive they are for relationships of all kinds, not just marriage, and how they ironically promote an absolutely miserable atomized, vapid, materialistic lifestyle that is a capitalist's wet dream. And how it is a major reason that Americans are miserable despite being filthy rich.
Independent of everything else
> The data shows that married people are happier, however democrats no longer believe this is true
This is literally just selection bias. In the US, the people who get married are the ones who want to get married since there isn't *really* much remaining pressure to get married if you really don't want to (or at least that has loosened significantly over time), and of course people who are married are happier for fulfilling something that they want. Sorta like asking professors if they are happy being professors, and then concluding that everyone should be a professor because obviously thats the happiest profession.
You'll have to work a lot harder to show that marriage is actually *causal* of happiness, which is what you are clearly implying with all the blahblah about moral virtue
> The data shows that married people are happier, however democrats no longer believe this is true
There's a substantial gap, but, according to that link, neither do Republicans.
> Progressives, even more than democrats [...]
How are you even defining these groups? "Leftists" is generally used to refer to people more on the "socialist" end of the scale but I very commonly hear "progressive" and "liberal" used pretty synonymously with "Democrat".
> [...] according to them, women are oppressed by societal institutions, marriage is one of those institutions.
According to your link, 14% of Democrats (and 6% of Republicans) agree that "Marriage Is an Outdated Institution", so, it's a pretty fringe view.
> As far as rendering institutions into dust or destroying western culture, the lack of fertility among progressives would absolutely destroy human civilization if within 50 years everyone adopted those values.
Complete non sequitur from "saying somebody should use a different term than 'my wife' to refer to their female spouse".
Fertility is dropping everywhere, for pretty much every group. Yes, it remains a higher for conservatives, but there's no state in the US where it's at replacement anymore.
> I have a lot more to say about those values [...]
What values specifically? It seems like you're just limping everything on one side of the political spectrum together and then saying it's all collectively responsible for everything that's wrong with society. Is pushing for unions destroying society? Is demanding paid parental leave lowering fertility? Do people not have babies because immigration? I'm being sarcastic but this started above with me challenging how some overzealous feminist saying "don't say 'my wife's, that's too patriarchal" is hollowing out institutions and I feel like this remains totally unaddressed, but instead you've hand-waved all progressive politics into on replace and then ALSO said it's the reason every is miserable and it's destroying all human relationship. What could possibly justify the case that all of this is the fault of people's politics, entirely on one side, and not, say, social media, the decline of long-term employment in one place, the Internet, wealth inequality, polarization in general, etc.? There's so many things going on in society right now and I think they have more complex interaction than: feminist language policing = all progressive politics = no babies = everyone is sad.
A minority of Americans own a gun. Defending gun culture is forcing the many to validate the few.
Not suppressing the existence of a thing, is different than validating that thing.
I think the constitution explicitly protecting the individual right to guns counts as validating. On the other hand, individuals from the non-gun-owning majority are not forced to personally, actively validate individuals from the gun-owning minority.
What they and their chidren are forced to, though, is live with the consequence of being in a country where guns are easily accessible. That is a higher chance of getting shot.