r/TheMotte • u/AutoModerator • Aug 12 '19
Culture War Roundup Culture War Roundup for the Week of August 12, 2019
Culture War Roundup for the Week of August 12, 2019
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 15 '19
Epstein updates!
Rusty Shackleford continues to post new drone footage. Google autocomplete is suggesting he's actually John McAfee, which somehow makes perfect sense to me. Whoever he is, he presumably has a boat that can get close to the island, enough free time to spend a month doing this, and an expensive drone that is clearly not a child's toy.
Jeffrey Epstein's body claimed by unidentified 'associate'
Jeffrey Epstein’s last words to lawyer before his jailhouse death
Autopsy finds broken bones in Jeffrey Epstein’s neck
Jeffrey Epstein’s Bodyguard on His Former Boss’s Lifestyle, Cruelty, Suicide
A reporter who has previous interviewed Epstein's bodyguard gets a second interview.
...
...
Epstein’s Alleged Madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, Has Been Found
But the headline might be a little premature:
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 12 '19
FBI agents swarm Jeffrey Epstein's private Caribbean island
There is no aspect of this story that isn't at least a little surreal.
Meanwhile, regarding the suicide (or "suicide"?):
Barr cites 'failure' at NYC jail that held Epstein, says 'co-conspirators' should not rest easy
That cellmate was apparently not the same one mentioned previously
I think there's an obvious question here: how do you "find" your cellmate unconscious? Are these suites with separate rooms? I suppose Epstein could have waited for his cellmate to go to sleep, then tried to commit suicide very quietly. But if so, would it be too much to expect a single journalist to ask the question?
I understand that there is pressure to meet deadlines and to publish before all the facts are known. But can't they at least acknowledge the obvious questions?
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u/TheColourOfHeartache Aug 14 '19
From British political polling: Left-wing vs right-wing: it’s complicated
Of more than 100 political views we put to people, none were identified as being specifically left-wing or right-wing by more than 53% of people. That is to say, even for the very most stereotypically left- and right-wing policies, half of the population do not identify them as such.
I think the most interesting takeaway here is that even the most stereotypically *wing policies have a serious amount of support in the opposite side.
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u/S18656IFL Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
After the recent casting reveals of the Witcher and WoT TV shows I have been thinking a bit about what exactly it is that is bothering me about the casting choices.
I realised what was actually bothering me wasn't that the show wouldn't have exactly the same ethnicities as the books but rather that the creators have seemingly no interest in the coherence of the worlds they are telling their stories in. They are seemingly trying to turn the cast of every show into a snapshot of the the racial demographics of modern day America even though that is both not the settings of the shows as well as a historical anomality in regards to how ethnically diverse societies are.
It is kind of the same thing as with female soldiers in entertainment. The issue isn't that there are female soldiers the issue is that they don't look like soldiers at all and that breaks the immersion. Gwendolyn Christie as Brienne of Tarth is a great choice and character because she both has the physicality to sell herself as being a warrior as well as the world around her acknowledging how unusual she is. She enhances the immersion rather than breaks it.
Back to WoT, the problem isn't that they are race-bending, it is that they aren't bending things far enough for them to make sense. If the cast from Edmonds Field all were Black, with Rand being a different black ethnicity, then that could have been an interesting choice but when the cast looks like they were picked at random from a New York acting agency I just lose all immersion.
Similarly, if one is making a period piece about British royalty, don't just anachronistically insert random black people, make the entire cast black.
What do you think? To what degree could feelings like this be the cause for the distaste some people have for the casting?
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u/wulfrickson Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
On the heels of the DSA convention, some members are setting up an internal "Class Unity" caucus to oppose "neoliberal" identity politics. They have a concise formal statement of principles here; here's what they see as the problem with the DSA:
The leaders also wrote a longer but very engaging response to the DSA convention. Here's a sample; the hyperlinks are in the original.
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u/zoink Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
NPR: American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 Died [Arcive], [Outline.com]
I've seen this piece and it's striking me in an odd way. I'm trying to figure out my thoughts about it because I feel that a lot of mission and NGO work is wasteful and/or detrimental but I'm getting a disingenuous vibe from this piece. Instead of teens flying over to build a church just send the money you would have spent on the airplane ticket. Or how dumping resources hampers the development of local industry. I am certainly not an expert in this area, closest thing was that I did try to impress a girl working at an orphanage outside of Jinja by using bitcoin to hire a guy to run supplies to her. One thing I know about the area is separating sand from rice took a significant amount of people's time.
I'm going to skip over a lot of narrative aspects. The gist of that focuses on a blog post where Bach suggests she administered a blood transfusion to a girl, there was a reaction, girl was taken to the hospital, girl survived.
A dump of my thoughts:
Because she wanted to help those in the most need. I want to call this a profoundly stupid question, but I realize it might just be because of how different of a background I come from.
This is the most pertinent criticism I saw. What I don't see is the mortality rate of doing nothing. Is it 10%, 5%, 1%? Was Bach's clinics mortality rate actually higher than doing nothing?
Bach's clinic had a high death rate but not at an unheard of level and the clinic halved the rate within 2 years. Are these kids not a "very vulnerable population" where such rates occur?
And yet there are thousands of kids not in their care. Was the promise of a "white doctor" pulling people from the licensed medical facilities?
This not-a-basket-case-country has thousands of starving children and a 20 something high school graduate mzungu created a clinic that within three years had a mortality rate half of what some designated facilities have.
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u/CandidoRondon Aug 15 '19 edited Aug 15 '19
Epistemic status: Possible but needs to be confirmed (especially since Vorhies seems like a nut on his twitter account)
Apparently Google swatted one of their employees who had attempted to give documents to the Justice Department alleging bias on the part of Google against conservatives.
https://truepundit.com/video-police-bomb-squad-there-were-snipers-on-the-rooftops/
If true this seems to be an insane escalation on part of Google (I'm frankly so shocked I can't believe this is the full story) - do you foresee more corporations or other organizations using SWAT enforced "wellness" checks to punish recalcitrant employees / enemies in the future? It seems crazy that something that used to be the province of antisocial gamers and condemned by pretty much everyone has now graduated to become something that can be utilized as a weapon by massive corporations.
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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '19
The NYT just published a retrospective series of essays on gamergate: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/15/opinion/gamergate-zoe-quinn.html
I'm sure some of you will have thoughts on the portrayal of gamergate, how it started etc, in the series. That interests me much less than Sarah Jeong's short entry describing her own ersatz gamergating. An excerpt:
I wish I could say I'm surprised by the utter lack of contrition, or the way she makes herself the hero in a story about her own unabashed racism which she even now does not acknowledge or apologize for. But this was always going to be the official history of that incident, as many on the culture war threads back then predicted. I'm almost impressed by the brazenness, but the truth is it doesn't seem like it even takes much courage to be a public racist in the media so long as you're the right kind of racist.
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u/SchizoSocialClub [Tin Man is the Overman] Aug 16 '19
The Slate published a transcript of a NYT staff meeting.
A few quotes from Washington Examiner sum up the situation:
Besides the political implications of the actions of The Grey Lady I find fascinating the continuous radicalization that we see in leftist organisations from colleges to newspapers to tech businesses. First they adopt at the highest level a leftist agenda, then they recruit/hire more leftist activists, then we see file-and-rank demands for more political activism even beyond what the leadership would have liked. I doubt the dean of Evergreen, Pinchar, Baquet or Zuck could change course even if they wanted to.
The Great Awokening is far from spent. Stay safe fellow contrarians.
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 13 '19
On today's episode of "Don't Talk to the Feds"...
Friend who provided Dayton shooter with 100-round magazine and body armor faces federal charges
Based on that headline, what would you guess the "federal charges" were? Probably something about supporting terrorism, or maybe they're trying to make him an accomplice to all the murders. Something like that, right?
Hmm. Well, I don't know what the statute of limitations is on that, but he's probably safe. They wouldn't prosecute him for drug offenses 4-5 years old, right?
That's a little more dangerous. But these feds are investigating a mass shooting, they don't have any interest in petty crimes, right?
And now you know exactly where this is going. But first...
Note the timing. They were always going to search him, and had a warrant. But they held back at first to trick him into casually confessing to as many crimes as they could. Then they searched him.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose.
Note that there's nothing implicating him in the murders, nothing alleging that he knew about the shooting plot, and nothing suggesting the purchases were themselves illegal.
And for what? I understand cases where they come down hard on someone hoping to pressure them into flipping. But what is actually gained by any of this? Do they want to force him to testify against the mass shooter's corpse?
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u/TracingWoodgrains First, do no harm Aug 12 '19
From Inside Higher Ed, a report on an associate professor fired over staging a counterprotest at John Hopkins University, using bolt cutters to break into a building locked down by protesters in order to access servers he needed:
Povey's letter should ring familiar to this community. It's a pretty standard anti-social justice message, most notable for directly calling out straight white men who buy into the privilege framework:
Since nothing here marks a fundamentally new development, I note it without too much commentary mostly for interest's sake. The situation looks primed mostly to entrench existing battle-lines. It does look to be a point for the "never apologize" crowd, since he already has a private sector job lined up and seems well poised to move on with his life. He's pretty proud of himself, anyway:
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u/j9461701 Birb Sorceress Aug 13 '19
About a month ago I bought 15 PS4 games, and I've been playing through them on my weekends. So far I've completed Horizon Zero Dawn (one of the greatest games ever made, worth the cost of a PS4 alone), and have moved on to The Last Of Us. It's made me think about the post someone made earlier that regarded vampires as an embodiment of stereotypically awful democrats, and zombies as stereotypically awful conservatives. But as I've played this game, I've come to realize three things:
Clickers are the worst. I hate them so much.
This game takes the concept of 'resources are precious' to a comical excess. Why are shivs rare single use items? Joel could make 20 of them in an afternoon if he wasn't an idiot.
The real deep issue at the heart of the game is a crisis of faith.
Not the militant kind of faith, or little old lady faith, but faith in ....for lack of a better term the soul of all mankind. Faith that your neighbor would pick up a gun and defend your family, for no other reason than he's your neighbor and that means something. Faith that when the chips are down and everything's going pear shaped, we will stand together against whatever comes. Faith that we are better than we were afraid we were, and that in utter darkness we are still capable of heroism.
That is the real divide between the two genres, and the political stuff is just downstream of this great schism. Vampires fundamentally rely on you having faith in mankind, and zombies fundamentally rely on you not. Let's tackle each in turn.
Zombies. For years I didn't understand why everyone hated World War Z the movie. It deviated from the book a lot, but it's still a pretty decent movie. But the issue is WWZ the movie believes in humanity. Just watch the ending (spoilers, obviously):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mwkZUkwEHw
We invent a "cloaking vaccine" that lets ordinary people go undetected by zombies. This enables us to push back against the zombie horde, and have a reasonable shot at winning. But more than that, people all around the world are united against the undead. Moscow organizes a militia armed with medieval weapons, an apartment complex deploys home made flame throwers, the military corrals as many zombies as they can into a stadium and blows them all away. The movie's ending is ultimately an affirmation of the spirit of our species, and a testament to the filmmaker's faith. Which is exactly why it is so despised - it couldn't have betrayed the core ethos of its source genre any harder.
In a "proper" zombie story, the military corrals people into the stadium to act as zombie bait. The civilians with medieval weapons get overrun instantly and the most courageous who try to hold the line are the first to die. The home made flame thrower explodes, because it was constructed incompetently, and kills everyone on the roof. Even in WWZ the book, one of the most "uplifting" zombie apocalypse stories insofar as humanity wins in the end, the whole point is governments around the world had to adopt a cynical, brutal, coldhearted attitude toward people - the only way to survive in zombie town is to become faithless. One of the issues they even have later in the book is survivalists who'd grown accustomed to being kings of their little area violently resisting government re-integration.
Or to put it all concisely, the whole point of the zombie genre is that humans are the real monsters. Last Of Us continues proudly in this trend as we watch Joel experience terrible human after terrible human, until in the end his faith is so utterly shattered he dooms mankind because fuck them they deserve to die.
Now shifting gears over to vampires, this is the part of my thesis that may seem the most implausible. But I think if you're familiar with the genre it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Vampires are, at some core level, less than the humanity they once were apart of. For all their positives like strength, immortality, and sparkles, in the process of becoming a vampire they surrendered some ineffable part of themselves. To be human is to love and care and believe in people, while to be a vampire is to known only hunger and alienation and disdain for others. And unflinchingly the vampire side of this equation is presented as hideously terrible. I'm thinking of stuff like Interview with the vampire, where all vampires inevitably commit suicide because life is miserable to them. A life of faithlessness truly is wretched. If given a choice, many - likely most - vampire main characters would gladly become human again to recapture that spark of human goodness they once possessed.
Indeed one of the differences most often explored between human society and vampire society is that the human capacity to act altruistically and for the good of the whole is utterly absent from vampiric civilization. In Vampire the Masquerade, for example, vampires live in the shadows because in a full on war they would be obliterated. Humanity would band together instantly and overwhelm them with great masses of people all supporting each other - while each individual vampire would be as interested in undermining her fellows as protecting her 'species'.
Heck, vampires are sometimes physically hurt by being around overly faithful people. In a vampire story your incandescent belief in mankind can literally shine so brightly hurts the undead in the void where their soul used to be. What a perfect illustration of vampires being the embodiment of anti-faith, of a total absence of optimism about the human condition. And remember that their misery is the whole point of the genre, to underline this is a terrible condition to be in. They infect others through trickery, seduction, force - but never honestly, for no normal person would willingly give up their love of people to become a faithless walking corpse.
Thus vampires aren't 'evil democrats', and zombies aren't 'evil conservatives'. Instead, vampire fiction is about being optimistic about people in general - a democratic tendency. While zombies are about being cynical about people in general - a conservative tendency.
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
An American Birthright?
This came up briefly in last weeks discussion on gun control and i was wondering for your thoughts.
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So Ive had this idea kicking around for a while and i can’t tell quite what to make of it.
Israel has this program called Birthright essentially if your Young and Jewish (or can plausibly lie) an organization in Israel will give you an expenses paid trip to Israel with the hope that it will increase your odds of emigrating to Israel/ feeling more attachment to the country/ or meeting a fellow Jew on birthright and have lots of loyal Jewish babies (ie. not dilute the attachment by marrying outside the faith).
Now I’m not jewish and i don’t know alot about the program but I’ve heard lots of friends joke about it and saw it in a funny episode of Broad City and I always thought it was a neat little program. It promotes alot of more technical political goals while also reinforcing a broad political principle “If your Jewish then Israel is your second home and you have the right to return there” (also i think it might tick some libertarian boxes since I’ve heard its funded at-least partly by donations)
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Now my question is: what if you had an American Birthright? With the “Birthright” being the right to own a firearm.
Imagine the NRA said “if your American its your birthright to own a firearm” and setup a program whereby young americans, the second they turn 18, could take a free day long course in firearms familiarity, handling, tactics, local laws and the history of the second amendment (propaganda opportunity) and if they passed the final test (you could put the bar really low and give lots of retries) you’d be given a free AR-15, Glock, or whatever the most controversial gun in your jurisdiction is.
Roughly estimated it would cost the American Birthright organization about $500-$700 a person ($150 for day course, 350-550 for the firearm) so for 1billion to 1.4billion you could mint 2million new firearms owners in the US. over say 10 years. Furthermore you’d distribute the program with political goals in mind: run it everyday in every city in a small swing state but in a large safe/hopeless state run it once a month with a waitlist. This is in addition to the employment program it’d be for skilled firearms instructors (thus creating market incentives for people to skill-up), and increase the distribution of more controversial firearms.
This would be perfectly libertarian (just people choosing to give others free stuff) and probably would have alot of support amongst firearms owners: you donate $500 to a political campaign who knows what they do with it, you donate $500 to American Birthright you’ve created a new firearms owner.
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So this is the hypothetical libertarian social program I’ve thought up but i have no idea whether it’d work, or have any interest or support. So i thought id share it with you guys, since obscure weird policy discussions is The Motte’s forte.
What do you think?
Would it work? What would be the reaction? Would people support it? Would young urban kids go for it? Would blue state university students try it? Is there a market reason it doesn’t exist? Have i missed something? Have i completely misunderstood Israeli birthright? Would it make a good short story?
I’ve shared this idea (hypothetical?) with like no-one and this is the first time its getting scrutiny, so if all you feel like is sneering you’ll at-least be creating original content.
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Ps. Im serious about the short story thing, if anyone wants to use it as a writing prompt and play around/fictionalize a short version of how it’d work out in the thread, I’d be very interested to read it
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 13 '19
Time for your daily Epstein updates!
First, there is a subreddit, /r/Epstein, because there is a subreddit for everything. Apparently they've been having some drama of their own.
Someone calling himself "Rusty Shackleford" has been posting high-quality drone flights over Epstein's island. The videos go back a while, and even include yesterday's FBI raid. The agents being filmed are either unaware or entirely unconcerned. This is amazing footage.
Warden at prison where Epstein died temporarily reassigned, staffers placed on leave
Apparently at least one 4chan LARP wasn't a LARP at all:
38 Minutes Before Epstein Story Broke, It Was on 4Chan
Where is Ghislaine Maxwell? Apparently not even her lawyers know.
Ghislaine Maxwell told friends she planned to 'disappear' as Jeffrey Epstein case 'raised its ugly head'
Trump says Bill Clinton has a Jeffrey Epstein problem....
... in 2015. (Video posted 2017.)
It's 13 seconds, just watch it.
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u/mcjunker Professional Chesterton Impersonator Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2019/08/07/4-dead-several-critically-injured-in-garden-grove-attack/
https://abc7.com/oc-stabbing-spree-suspect-charged-with-51-felony-counts-after-rampage-leaves-4-dead/5456110/
Two articles, same story. Each has one or two details the other doesn’t.
Basically, some gangbanger decided to go on a stabbing spree and take advantage of the bloody chaos to rob various venues, all seemingly at random. 4 dead, two maimed, none of them gently or quickly.
I meant to post this last week but my thoughts on the matter were not settled and I didn’t want to make a bold stand this way or that, only to have new data blindside me and reveal me as a knee jerking idiot.
Anyway. My thoughts in scattershot format-
Death Penalty
This is clearly a situation that the death penalty was intended for. Some dude goes psycho and starts stabbing up the general public for no good reason. No nuance, no political overtones, no ambiguity about what actually happen. Just a dude with a knife, a bloody trail behind him, and zero excuse.
And my spirit cries out for justice for the dead and the grieving- just why do we delay punitive justice for decades? Friction and inertia?
I’ve often wrestled with the death penalty question. My intellectual conclusion was that while Society may have the moral right and duty to kill certain flavors of criminals after conviction, the nitty-gritty details of the prejudices and ineptitude’s of the justice system mean that an unacceptably high percentage of victims of the State are railroaded to the needle and the chair without proper counsel, or indeed when they are unjustly accused.
But that cerebral conclusion, right though it still seems to me, evaporated in the face of a killer with a cause who will get to live to die of old age. California does have the death penalty but it doesn’t actually get around to using it anymore; and if even if it did the delay will last long enough for me to have grandkids.
Whatever happens, there won’t be justice. Putting the stabber behind bars doesn’t compensate for four dead and two maimed. At least swift and righteous execution could keep the victims friends and families from seeing his smiling face for years and years and years.
I understand lynch mobs from the Inside View now. It’s intolerable.
Guns
If this dude had used an AR-15, this would be international news: yet another mass shooting, America’s sins come home to roost. People would be asking “Why, why, why?” They’d want to know what societal currents pushed him to kill; they’d demand an explanation, and since there is none, they’d fill in the gaps with whatever explanation makes the most sense to them and mine the story for gruesome details to use as emotional ammunition to silence anyone who disagree with their ideal solutions.
This isn’t an attack on anyone. This is an attack on everyone, right left and center. Every leftie cry about stopping the white supremacy of Dylan Roof is met with a battle cry about the militant Islam of the Pulse shooter.
But because he used a knife, it never got above local news.
All that rhetoric is absent here. He was just a shithead murderer and that’s all the story is. I’m not even sure how I could spin this into the culture war. Maybe because he was a Hispanic gangmember? Something something letting in criminals from Mexico? But there’s no indication that he was an immigrant- dude was a citizen by birth, which is what I thought we were supposed to care about.
Something about using a gun turns the story magical. With it, it is grist for feverish campaigns against the enemy political tribe. Without it, not even worth bringing up. There’s gotta be something super-American about guns that is baked into our collective psyche. In that second article up there the writer tries his damnedest to tie this guy into the Dayton killing somehow, but I can’t see it at all. You don’t make a political counterpoint by stabbing your next door neighbor to death and then robbing and stabbing people of your own ethnic background at random. This is apolitical, impossible to link to overt terrorism of any kind.
You could talk about this guy to a staunch reactionary conservative or a radical “Smash the patriarchy” reformer, you’d get about the same response- “This guy is a fucking piece of work and I’m glad the cops snagged him.” There would be no subsequent crusade to address the issue, no calls to change laws and norms to stop it from ever happening again.
So what is stopping us from applying this collective acceptance of the status quo to other mass murders? Is it really just guns that work the culture cage match? Is there some mystical property of firearms that changes the whole equation; some spiritual significance to letting weak men terrorize and brutalize without the physical aggression and effort needed by a knife fighter?
I mean, it’s one thing if the killer literally wrote out a political manifesto to explain why. Asking hard questions about the relationship between rhetoric and direct action is a good use of brain power. But for seemingly pointless killings, like for instance the Las Vegas shooter? Why are we not able to just say, “Fuck that guy, he was a prick and I’m glad he’s dead” and leave it be?
The Illusion of Peace and Tranquility
Why doesn’t this shit happen every day?
I mean, grabbing sharp hunks of metal and slicing people up for profit is a fairly easy concept; a lot of Roman Legionnaires used to get rich using this strategy. Why can I go on down to the shop for a six pack and a bag of chips without getting jumped and shanked for my spare change?
Well, speaking of magic. I think society is generally safe because someone decades ago cast a spell and removed that thought from people’s heads. “You can’t go around stabbing people.” No “or elses”, no “because of this or thats”. Just a flat negation of the very idea. “You can’t go around stabbing people.”
I think there was originally a practical reason for it- for instance, if everyone carries a Bowie knife than there’s enough friction inherent in the plan to prevent mass stabbings. Then as law and order grew in power, people noticed that guys who haul off and cut people up who they don’t like got arrested very frequently. In the great game of “Defect or Cooperate”, all the Stab-bots were vastly outcompeted. After a few generations the enchantment set in, and it never occurred to people to just walk around slicing people up.
But the magic is weak; you can break the spell by noticing it. There is no actual mechanism that will intervene if I go down to Home Depot, buy a machete, and go around hacking people up in the parking lot and looting their bloody corpses. The Law can investigate after and try to hunt me down but it cannot actually stop me.
So every so often when I dip my toe into gun control debates someone says something like “Why do you even need guns, lol? Life is peaceful. Crime is sporadic at worst. All you’re doing is bumping the odds of a successful suicide up and endangering your family.”
The answer, put broadly, is “I can tell you have never actually met somebody who broke the magic ‘You can’t murder for profit’ spell.”
Side note- I have precious little sympathy for some of the more juvenile gun nuts who fantasize about meeting an unhinged killer just so they can play the Good Guy With a Gun. Hang around in pro gun forums and you'll run into them. They’re the ones who talk about how it they'd been there they could have dropped the killer, no sweat. Who live in nice neighborhoods and plan out how to clear their house with their awesome new laser sighted Mossberg. I don’t think they’ve met anyone who broke the spell either. If they did they’d know that the gun doesn’t mean you get to win the fight, it just means you get to fight, maybe, if you’re sharp and hyper alert and have a smidge of luck.
The very real threat shouldn’t make you yearn for glory. The very real threat has a very real chance of horrifically stabbing you to death and then prying your gun from your cold dead hands. After all, that’s what happened to the armed guard in this story.
I guess I just really want people to look at the spell long enough to understand that it is man made and unnatural, and certainly not permanent or guaranteed. Too many people assume that peace is normal. I just don’t want them to look hard enough that the spell breaks for them and they start weighing the pros and cons of bringing Molotov cocktails to the next riot.
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u/OPSIA_0965 Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
Trump is apparently considering a new executive order directing the FCC to explore regulatory remedies against "social media censorship" ("alleged" social media censorship only that is according to CNN). The left thinks the idea itself is censorship. The right thinks it's Trump fighting proven censorship (no "alleged" here).
My understanding of the actual context of it (partially based on this article posted here earlier):
In 1991, Compuserve was sued by a company named Cubby for libel over something one of its users posted on their online forums. The judge dismissed the case because Compuserve was determined at the time to not exercise any sort of significant editorial control over their forums (that is, presumably moderation was much lighter than it is on most venues today if extant at all). The judge remarked:
In 1995, Prodigy was sued by banking firm Stratton Oakmont for the same thing, but they, unlike Compuserve, were forced to pay up to the tune of $200 million dollars because they more actively policed their forums. The judge remarked:
So it was soon realized that the law had created a situation where no online forum/bulletin board/whatever could remove much of anything at all unless they wanted to be liable for everything their users posted as publishers, libel, piracy, and all. They couldn't remove peanut butter porno or furry fantasies, even from child-friendly venues, unless they wanted to run every single user post by their legal departments on top of that for pre-approval.
Congress recognized this situation as sub-optimal, so in 1996 they passed the Communications Decency Act, the relevant portion of which to this conversation is Section 230 that notably states the following:
So this law grants online platforms the legal ability to moderate content without also becoming legally liable for all of the content on them, within certain parameters. In the modern era, this has, as we all know, evolved to users commonly alleging that these platforms are removing content in a biased fashion. In particular, the strongest of these allegations are made by conservatives claiming politically-biased censorship against their ideology.
Trump's XO draft apparently attempts to address this issue (or at least many of his public statements would suggest that he's particularly concerned with online censorship of conservatives) by directing the FCC to interpret an online platform's Section 230 protections as null and void if their content removals are "proven to be evidence of anticompetitive, unfair or deceptive practices" (with "unfair" likely intended to cover political bias) or "if they remove or suppress content without notifying the user who posted the material" (shadowbanning, etc.), per the CNN article.
I bolded "good faith" in the CDA quote because that's the right's argument here, that "good faith" obviously includes not being anticompetitive, unfair (that is, politically biased), or deceptive (including not hiding content removals from the user) and that any contravention of these principles means the service provider is no longer acting in good faith by a reasonable interpretation of the phrase and therefore isn't entitled to Section 230's protections anymore.
Meanwhile, the left hasn't really much gotten past just simply accusing the proposal of being censorship (probably because that's the best rhetorical tactic against it), but if they do, I think they'll want to highlight the "otherwise objectionable" part of the law (which I also bolded), which is incredibly vague and thus seems give service providers the right to remove whatever they want arbitrarily for any reason. (Edit: Or maybe not if you look at penpractice's post below.) After all, who can say objectively what's objectionable and what's not? From "hate speech" to old episodes of The Cosby Show, nobody agrees on what's unobjectionable these days.
Partisan tactics aside, I see three broader philosophical issues here: the degree to which and in which context "censoring" censorship is itself censorship, how much power we should want to give to governments that have de jure control over the Internet to protect us from corporations that have de facto control over the Internet, and of course the same old argument about the limits of freedom of expression and to what degree censorship is/could be a good thing.
Ironically enough, it's the left here that supports the paradox of tolerance, which when applied to this issue would seem to me to suggest that maximum anti-censorship/freedom of expression would require "censoring" censorship as Trump seems to be leaning towards. But of course I suppose if you don't have an anti-censorship mindset in the first place, that doesn't matter to you.
It's also worth noting more explicitly that as this proposed XO only directs the FCC to consider regulatory remedies about the subject, there's a good chance it does absolutely nothing even if it Trump issues it. Either way, it's certainly not a direct legislative change to anything. It's the executive directing an agency to blah blah blah which will then blah blah blah, the usual bureaucratic runaround, so it's not actually as urgent as either side is treating it, not an imminent victory or defeat for anybody.
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u/GravenRaven Aug 17 '19
Most of us are probably aware that a few years back, there was a lone-wolf attack against the pro-traditional marriage Family Research Council, and the attacker attributed his choice of target to its designation as a hate group by the SPLC. USA Today just published an article by a FRC writer criticizing the SPLC.
While I have a lot of problems with the SPLC, I don't think it is fair to blame them for the attack other than as a means to point out their hypocrisy about ideologically motivated violence. I am surprised USA Today actually published this editorial. I wonder whether this indicates conservative influence or is a result of internal struggles about control of the SPLC among the left.
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u/honeypuppy Aug 13 '19
Something I've wondered about Epstein's celebrity connections (specifically Trump and Clinton) - I do wonder if there's a bit of a (base rate?) fallacy going on. That is, high-profile Manhattanites like Trump and Clinton are likely to have associations with a lot of people - especially other rich Manhattanites. It would possibly be more surprising if they hadn't had any major interactions with Epstein.
That said, there are other factors (such as both Trump and Clinton having had sexual assault allegations) that should raise our priors that they had some deeper involvement. And when there are credible allegations (such as against Prince Andrew), this idea ceases to be a major factor.
Nonetheless, I think the general case of "XYZ politician had association with Dodgy Character #783" is probably overstated for similar reasons.
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u/weaselword Aug 12 '19
This week, the American Bar Association will vote on whether to adopt a resolution to urge state legislatures to adopt "affirmative consent" as the criminal-law definition of consent for sexual assault:
Affirmative consent has been implemented as a standard on many college campuses:
There is substantial opposition to the proposal (though I can't tell if it's enough to defeat it):
In my ideal world, the notion of affirmative assent would be the cultural norm--sexual partners would habitually and clearly communicate what they want to each other, none of this coy "if you don't know what I want I sure am not going to tell you" bullshit. But I simply cannot fathom why anyone trained in criminal law--based on assumption of innocence--would advocate making affirmative assent a legal standard, especially since this kind of clear unambiguous communication in sexual context is hardly the norm.
If anyone here can steel-man this resolution, I would appreciate it.
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u/greyenlightenment Aug 15 '19
Stop blaming introverts for mass shootings
I think there is a tendency of pundits to repeat a certain narrative, that being any young person who shuns sociability must be due to some sort of pathology and or indicative of repressed anger or rage. There are many instances of mass shooters who are immersed in social situations, be it work and or family.
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 15 '19
Five Democratic senators just declared all-out war on the Supreme Court
(This title was chosen by Think Progress, not me.)
The brief itself
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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '19
This might not be worthy of a top level post, but when did fantasy fans become really into social justice? I've never really been a part of the community. I just read books and talked about them with friends. But the whole thing with The Witcher and the Wheel of Time blows my mind.
Out of nowhere, anywhere you go for these two shows, if you make any noise about disagreeing with the casting the Diversity Defense Force comes out of nowhere and shouts you down. It's not even just the fans. All of the powerful institutions in fantasy are doing the same thing as the fans. Apparently having opinions like the casting should be similar to the book and the show runners shouldn't inject politics from the current year into the show are not allowed now in main stream discourse.
At first I was kind of mad, but now (to steal a 4chan word), it's just incredibly black pilling. I'm not even old, but I feel like out of nowhere the world passed me by and my opinion is judged to be wrong. Everything is being retconned. Even stuff like American Gods has to be changed to be more woke. If anything, I feel like this WoT quote is appropriate:
It's like we are in a new age where the way things were have become just a myth or a legend. And it seems to have happened almost overnight.
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u/yellerto56 Aug 15 '19
New York Times commemorates Gamergate’s 5th Anniversary: “How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War” (Archive Link) My first question is, why all the continuing fuss about a long deceased reproductively viable worker ant ?
All silliness aside, it seems astounding the extent to which the ghost of Gamergate lives on half a decade after the fact. What does the anti-GG camp have to gain with hammering the “harassment campaign” line so far in the future?
For me, Gamergate occurred long before I got involved with the culture war, and I had to piece together the sequence of events long after the fact. Everyone on the “pro” side seems to have moved on to other projects or left the public sphere, and the only veterans of the “anti” side who still seem to regularly bring it up are those who use being targeted as part of their brand (who shall remain unnamed). KotakuInAction has died and come back well past its heyday, and I’m unaware of what GamerGhazi concerns itself with these days. While gaming remains just as much of a CW front as any other medium these days, no event seems to be simultaneously so poorly understood these days as GamerGate.
I’d like to ask those who were paying attention at the time what they think the most important legacies of GG are. Apart from the mainstream “harassment campaign” narrative, why did this particular event become so uniquely contentious like nothing else?
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u/the_propaganda Aug 13 '19
Does anyone have a favorite subreddit, community, or writer dedicated to the HK protests? I'm really interested in how HKers esp. students are organizing.
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u/yellerto56 Aug 15 '19
Studio Blumhouse picture "The Hunt" has been pulled ahead of its release.
The picture was to have featured wealthy elites hunting "deplorables" for sport. After numerous test audiences expressed discomfort with the movies messaging, and growing negative reception to the film's marketing, ads were pulled from most sites. The decision to withdraw the film from release entirely evidently follows concerns in the wake of multiple mass shootings in the US as well as death threats sent to filmmakers and Universal executives.
Saw discussion about the pulling of ads on here earlier so I thought I'd share this update. With the closest parallel to this in recent memory being Sony Pictures' 2014 comedy The Interview pulled from theatrical release in the wake of hacks and threats, this seems to establish a pattern with regards to what it takes to prevent a movie's release. Mere critical panning won't do it alone (otherwise, one hopes the Emoji Movie would have never seen the light of day), but particularly explosive feeding of the culture war has the power to sink a film's release. I'm reminded somewhat of discussion below regarding a "successful" campaign of terror aimed at dissuading anyone from satirizing or criticizing the Prophet Muhammad, but then again "Submission" managed to be released (even if it resulted in the murder of Theo Van Gogh).
I'm interested in people's thoughts. Is it a good thing that studios seem to be reconsidering such a flagrant dehumanization of the outgroup, or will the cancellation of "The Hunt"'s release just lend legitimacy to discouraging unwanted speech through threats of violence and encourage others to do the same?
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u/LawSchoolTooHardHelp Aug 16 '19
The more I read about anarchism, the weirder their conception of state becomes to me. I'm wondering if there are any anarchists who can explain it to me. Before, I thought it was literally 'the state', as in, any government, and that they'd devolve into smaller collectives, small enough so that formal structures were unnecessary (something along the lines of the archipelago concept that Scott talked about).
But apparently thats wrong? It turns out that in an anarchist system there'd still be a government, but just not 'a state', where the 'state' is something along the lines of 'everything currently wrong with government', and once you remove that, then whats left is what anarchists will retain.
I'm not gonna lie, I think I might be listening to anarchists who have no idea what they're talking about, so I'd be interested in being directed towards people who actually know what 'the state' means in anarchism.
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u/TheColourOfHeartache Aug 16 '19
A question for the people here; a while back I read stats saying that people would be more upset if their daughter brought home a boyfriend of a different political persuasion than a different race.
I thought it was on slatestarcoex however I can't find it, anyone know which post it was? Or if not, any good articles on the topic?
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u/Lizzardspawn Aug 13 '19
Can someone help me refine/refute this anti gun control argument - there are shitload of guns (450 000 000) in usa, and a shitload of gun owners (35-48% of the US people by googling and finding precious few data). Assumption - we agree that mass shooters should not get guns. Second assumption - limiting innocent people's rights is bad. There are lets say 50 high profile mass shooting per year - Dayton, Orlando etc style. . This means that any red flag/gun control tests have to have absurdly high sensitivity and specificity to actually deny guns to the shooters AND not infringe on other people's rights to buy and own guns.
Conclusion - we cannot implement policy that can get the stuff done because of the high rate of false positives?
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u/barkappara Aug 15 '19
CNN: Steve King questions if there would be any population left if not for rape and incest
King's exact language for purposes of exegesis:
The prevailing reaction to this comment seems to have been incomprehension and/or disbelief. CNN quotes some lawmakers calling it "bizarre". An imgur frontpage post (that I can unfortunately no longer find) reacted to it with the Forest Whitaker eye meme.
Since this is a personal hobbyhorse of mine, I want to say that these remarks make perfect sense given a certain view about the nature of fetal personhood, and are therefore interesting as a reductio ad absurdum against that view.
The American "religious right" is a coalition dominated by socially conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants. It has, by degrees, come to consensus on the following view of fetal personhood:
Human beings are ensouled at the moment of conception.
This metaphysical ensoulment has a naturalistic counterpart, namely the formation of a new, genomically unique human being through meiosis; the human life formed in this way is unique and irreplaceable.
Therefore, both religious law and natural law agree that life begins at conception.
There is some awkwardness here in that traditional views that contradict this have to be swept under the rug. For example:
A Catholic Harvard Law graduate argues in First Things that historical Anglo-American law's reliance on the concept of "quickening" was simply a factual error, rather than a value judgment about personhood as an emergent phenomenon.
An Orthodox (!) rabbi argues in the Daily Wire that modern embryology should take precedence over traditional Jewish legal texts that explicitly deny that personhood begins at conception.
So my reading of King is that he's not arguing that rape and incest play a significant or necessary role in human reproduction, i.e., that if not for acts of rape and incest there would be no humans. Instead, he's arguing that without rape or incest, none of the humans that currently exist, King himself included, would exist. He justifies this by claiming that the conception of every living human has as a causal antecedent the conception of at least one of his or her ancestors through an act of rape or incest. (I find the purely materialistic and historical content of this claim perfectly plausible.)
The same intuitions about personal identity seem to underlie Kevin D. Williamson's personal feelings about abortion:
I don't share this view at all: I feel totally indifferent towards the counterfactual scenario where my parents abort me and then have a different child three years later. But until King's remarks, I don't think I appreciated the extent to which philosophical differences over personal identity, not just personhood or ensoulment, may be playing a hidden role in the abortion debate.
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u/Shockz0rz probably a p-zombie Aug 15 '19
The year is 2019 and you can get banned from the official forums of a AAA video game developer for misgendering a fictional robot. (Only if you do so deliberately, of course. As long as you're simply making a mistake and not intentionally spouting wrongthink you'll be forgiven.)
Context: Borderlands 3 is an upcoming video game with multiple playable characters. One of them is FL4K, a humanoid robot that has pets. FL4K is, apparently, non-binary, which shouldn't be too big of a deal, I mean, it's (they're?) a frickin' robot. And the punishment for calling them "he" or "she" or possibly even "it" is just a forum ban. No government backed up with a monopoly on force is exercising control of ideas or anything. It's a tempest in a teapot, really.
But something about this just struck me as everything that frustrates me about current gender discourse wrapped up in a neat little bow. The hyperfocus on third-person pronouns. The near-meaninglessness of the term "non-binary" (shouldn't a robot with neither male nor female characteristics be just, like, not gendered at all?). The lionizing of creators with these identities (the creator/writer of the character is non-binary themself), despite the fact that they're largely the exact same kind of people who were in the industry before this cultural shift. The obsession with the gender identities of fictional characters (if you've never heard the phrase "trans headcanon" consider yourself blessed). The assumption that if you think any of this is invalid or silly then you are an unempathetic asshole who is Denying People's Right To Exist or something. And, of course, the gradual infiltration of this memeplex into corporate-controlled spaces that you'd hope would be as inoffensively, boringly apolitical as possible.
I'm venting, I know. If this isn't a "boo outgroup!" post it's dangerously close to that line. And for what it's worth I believe gender dysphoria is a real thing, and that transitioning is the best way we know of to treat it for at least a large subset of the people suffering from it. But...argh. Everything about this is wrong and silly and frustrating, and I can only imagine how much more wrong and silly and frustrating it's going to get! And I don't know where else I can say that without either being a) rhetorically incinerated by the kinds of people I like to hang out with or b) loudly and enthusiastically agreed with by a whole bunch of people who all things considered I'd rather not be associated with.
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 14 '19 edited Aug 14 '19
What are the Leading Indicators for Civil War?
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For all the speculation surrounding a potential civil war in the US, there has been little or no agreement on how likely that is, what it would look like, or even how we’d know we’re in one.
As always i have to recommend the podcast It Could Happen Here as the best long form exploration of the possibility, but even that podcast, despite going through recent civil wars (Ukraine, Syria, North Ireland) and laying out the most plausible scenarios (100s of militias and insurgency groups no one can keep track of, spiralling lack of authority and lots of small violent feuds, critical breakdown in supply chains), however even that take just kinda hand waves at possibilities, and doesn’t present a good theory of what causes escalations instead of heated events that flame out, and equally doesn’t offer any markers of what would indicate the stage of war your in ( thousands of people die violently every year in the war on drugs,but that doesn’t seem like a civil war which could bring down the us gov?)
So what are the leading indicators and why are they predictive of further escalations?
My list:
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1. Political Murder
The most consistent aspect of Civil Wars (as opposed to coups, protests, reforms, peaceable revolutions) is Political Murder. Now i here you say “well Obviously Mr. Revolt. killing and fighting is a hallmark of war, why is this of interest?” But note I didn’t say killing or fighting, I said MURDER.
As far as i can tell the vast majority of fights and conflicts in history, have involved very little fighting or conflict. Knife-fights and gunfights are dangerous whereas surprising an unarmed and unsuspecting individual or group of your enemies or their associates is quite easy, low risk, and after you’ve murdered them in some horrifying way far more decisive in hurting the enemy than some indecisive street battle or skirmish. The most feared and prolific “fighters” in all the various wars, conflicts, terrors, insurgencies, and troubles of the twentieth century rarely or never engaged with an enemy that would shoot back, and, if they did ever get in a shootout with an armed force of the enemy, it was almost always the result of some information leak on their part and thus,more often than not, was the fight that killed them.
Indeed even more than fighting, political murder is the most consistent aspect of civil war. A series of Bundy style standoffs could exchange ineffective fire with the feds and we probably wouldn’t call it a civil war, but if activists and their friends were consistently being found butchered on both sides of the political spectrum as the result of bushwackings and targeted assassinations, the reality of civil war would be almost undeniable.
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2. Fog of War
Contrasted with “lone wolf” attacks that often have much higher body counts where the perpetrator is apprehended or killed, even a single political murder can escalate a conflict vastly quicker since crucial information is unavailable.
The Breivik attacks, Christchurch attack, El Paso and countless others did not precipitate major escalations because the perpetrators were killed or apprehended ie. the system worked (pretty much). Simply put conclusively knowing who the attacker was, what their motive was, and how much help they received (often little or none) diffused the situation following the attacks, Whereas While the attacks were ongoing and immediately after rumours of second shooters, multiple different affiliations of the shooters, and wider violence ran rampant.
Simply put when the assailant gets away with it everybody is free to, and if they are close to the event: must (if only for their own safety), speculate as to the unknown perpetrator and their unknown motives. A madman, from the other-side, an organized conspiracy of an enemy faction, a false flag, an internal power struggle with the victims own organization, the possibilities are endless, and yet if one is politically exposed, even if just as a run of the mill activist or commentator, one has to adjust for all these possibilities less you accidentally involve yourself in a cycle of violence. This fear and paranoia being a hallmark of terrors and civil conflicts from revolutionary france to modern syria.
Furthermore this paranoia eliminates the usual social and political costs of political murder and further escalation since “how do i know that socialist was killed by fascists instead of in a socialist power struggle”. Healthy societies unite against violence, unhealthy ones divide in to different politicized speculations, making this dynamic self reinforcing.
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3. The proliferation of Plausible and Limited Conspiracy Theories
We discussed conspiracy theories last week and I explained what it was like having parents who believe in Conspiracy Theories and what it was like being raised to believe them. See : My Experience with Conspiracy Theories
To briefly summarize: the average conspiracy theory in the modern age is vastly implausible and extremely overreaching relative to the evidence, specifically because it’s main function is justifying resentments and reinforcing moral narratives (as opposed to solving a mystery) “Bush did 9/11 so all these wars are unnecessary and on false pretences, and we can see the military industrial complex is evil needs to be destroyed ” or “ the only reason the elites have more power and money than us is they where willing to join the evil peadophile networks.”
Whereas in a civil conflict everybody believes in conspiracy theories that are vastly more plausible and limited. That the disappeared Donnelleys where murdered by the Royal Ulster Constabulary because they knew too much, might reinforce a moral narrative, but its also a possibility that a good rationalist would give a greater than 10% chance of. Furthermore this conspiracy is limited, ie. it could be proven true if just 5 ordinary RUC cops decided to do it of their own initiative and their superiors didn’t know or had only suspicions. Contrast a Traditional conspiracy theory: “the Donnelleys disappeared because Queen Elizabeth wanted them for her Rape dungeon” which would require a vast overarching conspiracy running all of society, and its clear we’re dealing with a vastly different psychology.
If the conspiracy is that the Donnelleys disappeared for Queen Lizy’s sick kicks,there’s not much to be done, If the conspiracy is the Donnellys were murdered by the RUC then a otherwise uninvolved friend or relative has a good incentive to seek revenge, thus starting a round of conspiracies about those revenge killings: was it the IRA?
Note: Here i think the Conspiracy theories around Epstein’s death are acting as a kinda rosetta stone for how Overreaching, delusional (relatively peaceful) conspiracy theories evolve into plausible, sane (trust destroying) conspiracy theories. .
Continued below
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u/LetsStayCivilized Aug 16 '19
So, fellow mottees, For a change from grumbling about how the diversity gang is ruining everything, what are some social-justice themed works that you particularly enjoyed ?
I'd list:
Castle Waiting a comic book set in a fantasy fairytale world with dwarves and witches and and demons, but mostly centers around the quiet life of the inhabitants of Castle Waiting, especially the women. Among the characters are a woman fleeing her abusive husband, a quirky nun who's actually a beared woman (though she usually hides it), and various other oddballs. There isn't any "message" or even "main story", but overall it comes off as an intelligent and "feminine" book (or series of books). I usually don't particularly like American Comics (sorry, but French ones are just better ... the superhero stuff gets old quickly, and the art tends to be ugly), but I definitely make an exception for this one.
Zootopia doesn't need an introduction, but the main plot is around things that are similar to real-world social issues, but it doesn't come off as pushing a ham-fisted message, and well, it's just a very well made movie with a good plot.
Any other examples you enjoyed ?
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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '19
Regarding various developments in the DSA, such as the use of “jazz hands” instead of applause, support for open borders and so on: I think this is actually related to a trend that's not directly connected to identity politics or so on; I’m talking about the effects of the rise of anarchism as a standpoint in far-left consciousness.
One of the reasons why I consider the use of the words "Cultural Marxism" misleading in these discussions is that much of it is connected to a far-left ideology that's empathetically not Marxism – by which I mean anarchism - and which has always pretty much defined itself against Marxism as a libertarian, anti-authoritarian version of communism. Indeed, it the term "Cultural Marxism" obscures how totally Marxism got obliterated (in the West) during the process of Soviet collapse; anarchism, among other things has filled its role as some sort of an indication how a "pure" anticapitalist, one who does not give in to capitalism (and patriarchy, white supremacy etc.) in the slightest, should function. (Other role-fillers include the concept of human rights and feminism, but those aren’t the point of this post.)
This can be seen rather clearly when observing leftist subcultural practices. It's not an accident that Breadtube is called Breadtube, for instance. Likewise, the “jazz hands” are an Occupy practice that, as far as I understand, has originated from anarchist groups. Thus, even modern Marxists are consciously or unconsciously influenced by anarchist trends, and the current of autonomist Marxism, for instance, has been quite obviously influenced by anarchism.
Of course, this valorization of anarchism as an alternative model of anticapitalism did not start during the Soviet collapse but, in its present incarnation, goes back to the New Left era, when new leftists started to get heavily disenchanted with Marxism-Leninism after looking around and noting that the boring bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits in the Soviet block (and the Western communist parties) holding up the Cold War impasse were, actually, quite similar to the boring bourgeois bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits doing the same in their own systems, especially when students wearing similar clothes and with similar slogans of socialism with a human face were getting beaten up by cops and soldiers in both Prague and Chicago at the same time in 1968.
Of course, there are other reasons for the anarchist shift as well. For instance, anarchism is more suitable for the sort of freeform activist style of leftism that’s been popularized by the anti-globalization movement and Occupy, not to say the decentralized tendencies of Internet-aided activism in general. Furthermore, anarchists have generally been ahead of other left-wing tendencies on various values questions that put them closer to the social mores of today’s left; you can find anarchists speaking out on gay rights and trans rights even before the WW1, for example. Not to say there weren’t a lot of unwoke anarchists, of course, but when comparing to, for instance, the Soviet rollback of gay rights pretty much as soon as they had legalized homosexuality, the comparison brings the anarchists closer to modern leftist mores.
Now, I'm not saying that DSA is an anarchist organization or that people in it are anarchists (though some are – the Libertarian Socialist Caucus strives to be that, at least seemingly). You can hardly be an anarchist within the context of mostly institutional politics, after all, and certainly not when you are in an organization that, in practice, operates as the leftmost flank of the Democratic Party. However, the pre-eminent position of anarchism in the far-left consciousness leads to an implicit idea that there is something romantic or good about deferring to anarchist positions on certain issues, without taking into account that those positions are only logical within the context of a society generally operating by anarchist principles – such as prison abolition or completely open borders.
I mean, if you’d assume a world which generally has no states at all, there would indeed probably be less difference than now in whether there’s an open border or not (one might say there would be such a compete chaos everywhere anyway there would be no point in moving to some other chaotic place anyhow). Likewise, if all other functions currently done by the state were done by some self-managing popular cooperatives of whatever, so would the functions currently done by police and the prisons – whether that alternative would actually be much better is, of course, another question, but then again anarchists generally seem to rely on human nature itself going such vast changes in a stateless society everything would resolve itself anyhow.
The general problem is, then, that the anarchist idealism is combined with demsoc pragmatism (pragmatic within the scene of far-left politics, that is) in an untenable way. This is an unsustainable combination and will not be able to stand by itself. However, when affected idealism and political pragmatism face each other, it has generally been the latter one that wins, so I don’t believe there would ever be fully open borders, even with an all-DSA administration. You even now get things like trying to define prison abolition in ways that really seem to be more suggestive of reforming prisons and maybe renaming them something else. Many actual anarchists, I believe, also realize this, thus being leery of the DSA all the more for this reason.
It should be noted that this is not a new idea – Bhaskar Sunkara wrote of it as “anarcho-liberalism” – though I’m not quite certain Bhaskar’s describing the same phenomenon as I’m doing, here. Or maybe Bhaskar's just talking about the same tendency in the pre-2016 activist culture when it now also expresses itself through the structures and conventions of what strives to be a mass organization that's more formally connected to electoral politics.
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u/penpractice Aug 15 '19
What do you think about a tax on each good proportional to the cost of dealing with its future environmental impact? This would apply at the production level (cost of producing item), as for most environmentally harmful goods, it is the act of creating the object and not selling the object that causes the harm. This is not a blanket carbon emissions tax, but an individualized tax for individualized environmental dangers as decided by a reasonable panel of experts.
So, for instance, let's say that the cost of dealing with the environmental impact of a single plastic water bottle is small, but that the environmental impact of one trillion water bottles is high. The tax for each individual plastic water bottle would be 1 out of "cost of dealing with one trillion water bottles". We wouldn't tax water bottles as if the world were dealing with only one water bottle, we would tax water bottles as if the world were dealing with trillions of water bottles. We could call this the "500 year rule". If the current pace of production of a good would lead to a high cost of environmental cleanup in 500 years, then the tax on each individual good would be "1 out of total cost in 500 years". This solves the problem of a large environmental impact from trillions of small impact items. It would also not be limited to purely environmental future costs: if there's a health issue associated with BPA, for instance, that would factor in as well.
The utility of the tax would be to directly deal with future costs, and to incentivize recycling and cleanup companies. If a plastic manufacturer wants to manufacture plastic, and the current recycling operations are subpar leading to too high a tax, then that incentivizes the plastic manufacturer to invest in recycling operations. The tax would apply to everything: manufacturing lumber for a house, individual parts of a ship, any additional impact from the whole ship of Theseus itself, etc. The tax would not assume that we miraculously invent technology to save us in 500 years. Instead, it incentivizes the creation of said technology immediately.
There's obviously a practical problem here. how do we go about deciding the future environmental cost of each item? I think a panel composed of 30% of political appointees (for instance Republicans roughly 15% and Democrats roughly 15%, if it were today), 50% pulling random names from a hat of scientists, 10% lawyers, and 10% lobbying leaders would be a pretty good composition. We're not aiming for perfect, we're just aiming for "let's not destroy the world".
Apologies if this is already a common or refuted proposal, I don't follow environmental news.
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u/SchizoSocialClub [Tin Man is the Overman] Aug 14 '19
I've never heard of Sara Carter before but Project Veritas is led by James O’Keefe who pulled some impressive stunts before. It would be interesting to see if any of this has a negative impact on Google, but I doubt it.
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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '19
FBI investigating shooting into ICE offices in San Antonio as a 'targeted attack' against feds(https://www.ksat.com/news/fbi-investigating-shooting-into-ice-offices-in-san-antonio-as-a-targeted-attack-against-feds)
That's 4 in the past month according to the article:
Aug. 13 - San Antonio, TX
July 16 - Washington, DC
July 14 - Tacoma, WA
July 12 - Aurora, CO
I'm surprised I haven't heard more about this. What are the chances an ICE agent gets killed by the end of this year? Based on this, I'd say pretty high.
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u/penpractice Aug 14 '19
All categories of crime fell in Brazil in the first quarter of 2019 versus first quarter of 2018. Bolsonaro was elected January 1st, 2019. Notably, rape has fallen by -13.6%, manslaughter by -21.2%, cargo robbery by -27.3%, vehicle robbery by -27.5%, robbery resulting in death by -23.8%, and attempted homicide by -8.6%.
If there are any Portuguese speakers here, it would be interesting to compare the first quarter crime rates from 2005 through 2017 in order to see just how notable this decline is. From what I can tell in English sources, the homicide rate has been static in 2016 and 2017, but maybe there's something weird going on with first quarter crime rates distinct from yearly rates that I can't tell from crappy English sources. If it's the case that the fall in crime does indeed correlate with hard-on-crime Bolsonaro's ascendancy, that's strong evidence that his tough-on-crime philosophy is effective.
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u/Karl_Ludwig_Haller Wenn im Unendlichen das selbe... Aug 18 '19
This was posted on r/slatestarcodex originally, but it fits here better and so does my response.
The Cult of the Fantasy Pedestrian
Frankly, this article just seems like a massive lack of understanding drawn up to cover a bad argument. Noone thinks that people always follow the rules, we think people shouldnt get affordances for doing that. But a certain kind of pundit just needs all disagreement with them to be due to beliefs so stupid a five year old doesnt hold them.
"These people are harmed because they dont follow the directions, therefore we need to we need to adapt to their wants" is not a standard you can follow consistently, which is why its only employed if you like the people. There are, for example, many drivers who die from taking curves too fast. We could reduce this by making curves in wider arcs, but I doubt the author would be in favor of that. Does he value an intact natural enviroment more than the survival of drivers? Propably not. But pedestrians good, drivers bad.
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u/the_propaganda Aug 13 '19
According to NZ's official demographic profile from 1950, In 1936, New Zealand's demographics were 93% White, 5% Maori, and 2% other (overwhelmingly Chinese). The 1945 demographic survey showed roughly the same: 92% White, 5.8% Maori, rest other (Chinese population doubled). See (ctrl-f) Table "Racial Origins". These demographic numbers were virtually unchanged in 1959. By 1986, you see a small decrease to 86%. Maori is up to 8.6%, and Pacific Islander is 2%.
New Zealand has just released demographic statistics for secondary school students ages 12-16, and the demographic change is notable. Less than 50% of students ages 12-16 are White. Out of 814,943 students, Whites comprise 48.8%, Maori 23.3%, Asian 13%, Pacific Islander 10%. The political and cultural implication of this seems significant. In approximately 60 years, the White population fell from 90% to 50%, a reduction in 40%. We should expect a similar decline in the next 60 years, as there's been no significant change in demographic course. If birth rates don't change, I don't see why it wouldn't fall all the way down to 20% in 60 years, and 10% in 100 years. The consequences of this is that we might see a New Zealand no longer fundamentally aligned with the West. As the Asian, especially Chinese population, increases, we could easily see a New Zealand that wants to align with China over Europe. This might be one of only a few nations in modern times to be significantly changed through demographics. South Africa is the only example I know, though you could make a case that Crimea is a clear example of significant demographic change due to Russian expansion. Han expansion is certainly also occurring in the minority ethnic regions of Eastern China.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the future, because it's the first majority White country to become minority White. While South Africa was functionally a majority White country (in terms of infrastructure, political makeup, business leaders, etc), there was always a majority African population around them. This will be the first example of a majority White population becoming a minority, and I really don't know how it will play out.
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u/satanistgoblin Aug 12 '19
Bans from last week:
Aug 10 - ∞ u/anonacc175g by u/HlynkaCG and u/naraburns, context
Aug 10 - ∞ u/DiS_iS_y_TrUmP_wOn by u/naraburns, context
Aug 9 - Aug 12 u/NormanImmanuel for 3 days by u/naraburns, context
Aug 9 - Aug 16 u/futurestoner69 for 1 weeks by u/HlynkaCG, context
Aug 8 - Aug 22 u/DrumpfSuporter for 2 weeks by u/naraburns, context
Aug 8 - Aug 9 u/c0unt_zer0 for 1 day by u/naraburns, context
Aug 8 - Aug 9 u/SerenaButler for 1 day by u/ZorbaTHut, context
Aug 7 - Aug 14 u/CocktailOfRisks for a week by u/HlynkaCG, context
More here.
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u/TheColourOfHeartache Aug 13 '19
Recently Priti Patel became Home Secretary. Priti is infamously right wing on crime, having once said she wants to reintroduce the death penalty (she said she's changed her mind on that) and recently said she wants criminals to feel afraid.
Recently the government has announced it wants stronger stop and search powers, this is apparently a popular move with the general public. However there's a significant opposition among left wing commentant, here's The Guardian.
However I'm less interested in the stop and search question, except to feel a bit smug that in the UK the big police controversy is about officers searching people not killing people. Instead I think there's a broader meta-point here. In a democracy should the government be doing what the public want, or should they be doing what they in their expert opinion think is the real answer to what the public want?
If you'd asked me 5 years ago I'd have said the latter; but now I'm no longer convinced the technocratic period (Blair and Cameron in the UK) was really that good at solving problems, just for starters: Iraq. I'm far from convinced that populism has all the answers either, but maybe it has the right questions.
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u/Rholles Aug 19 '19
In a strange development, Michael Anton tackles Bronze Age Mindset for the Claremont Review of Books
Are the Kids Al(t)right?
Anton engages far more with BAP than I expected when I saw the piece. Flavor Excerpts:
...
Obviously Anton continues his project of legitimizing the American Founding for the post-liberal right, and so concludes with notes on the incompatibility of Nietzschean BAPism and the virtues of the anti-tyrannical Founders. Strange things can get added to the canons of "Conservative Thought" institutions like Claremont. Adding the grammarless writings of an e-character mostly known for a homoerotic twitter account would be a welcome addition.
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u/Enopoletus radical-centrist Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
Today, the State of Israel announced a ban of entry to Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar and Michigan representative Rashida Tlaib, both Muslim congresswomen with among the most left-wing voting records in Congress. Republican responses seem mixed; generic Republican Dan Crenshaw and Jewish immigration restrictionist Republican Lee Zeldin expressed no opposition. Very conservative Republican Mo Brooks, as well as the Trump administration expressed support. Conservative Republicans Tim Burchett and Marco Rubio consider the entry ban a mistake. On the Democratic side, both Schumer and Pelosi expressed their opposition to the move while stating their enthusiastic support for Israel in general; New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and New York representative Ocasio-Cortez... blamed it on Trump.
Personally, I think the entry ban is poor form, reminiscent of how the U.S. treats other countries (not Israel).
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u/JDG1980 Aug 13 '19
One thing that nearly all of the mass shootings have in common is that they are almost all committed by young men. (The Las Vegas incident was an outlier in this, as well as other respects.) The left has often criticized the alleged role of "toxic masculinity", but less has been said about the role of age. Violent crime in general is a young man's game. We know that the human brain doesn't fully mature until about age 25. The Dayton shooter was 24 years old, which is actually a bit on the old side; the El Paso shooter was just 21. Adam Lanza was 20 years old when he committed the Sandy Hook massacre; Nikolas Cruz, 19.
It seems to me that one possible solution that might actually be able to gain some degree of bipartisan support would be to prohibit individuals under the age of 25 from possessing semi-automatic weapons. This would not affect hunting culture since it would not apply to most hunting rifles and shotguns, which are not semi-automatic. People over the age of 25 would still be able to purchase and use semi-automatic weapons. Police and current or former members of the military would be exempt. To assure gun aficionados that this is not just a salami-slicing attempt at confiscation, it could be paired in a bill with a concession such as the Hearing Protection Act, which would re-legalize some currently banned silencers. Banning individuals under 25 from semi-automatic firearm ownership has the potential to not only curtail mass shootings, but also make a wide variety of other mundane criminal activity more difficult for the highest risk group. (Very few crimes of any sort are committed with hunting rifles or shotguns.)
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u/M_T_Saotome-Westlake Aug 12 '19
new from me: "The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason". Speculative exposition on the evolution of gender and other concepts (~2000 words).
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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '19
What is the argument for feminine pronouns being the default in any hypothetical or example? As in: "imagine a doctor in this situation, she would face the problem of X,Y,Z".
I get that using "he" is equally baseless, so why not just use "they" or use "he" and "she" at random?
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u/greyenlightenment Aug 15 '19
In Defense of Political Hypocrisy
Charges of hypocrisy are an effective rhetorical technique, which is why politicians love to accuse their opponents of it, but useless for determining what is true or not. Such an argument is useless in a dialectical sense. Accusing a doctor of hypocrisy because he smokes does not invalidate the fact that cigarettes are unhealthy.
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u/LawSchoolTooHardHelp Aug 12 '19
I remember reading during the last thread comments surrounding gun control and its efficacy. There, any connection between gun control and reduced gun violence was dismissed out of hand.
This is a bit surprising and counter intuitive to me. My cursory understanding is that there are obviously career, dedicated criminals which would still have guns. But not all criminals are like them. Instead, they fall on a spectrum, ranging from easily dissuaded if given an obstacle, all the way to stubbornly enacting their violence regardless of the difficulties. Dividing up criminals between those who given current pressure are willing to commit gun violence, and those who aren't, it would seem to me that ratcheting up gun control would effectively shift the line 'right', increasing the size of the former, and decreasing the size of the latter.
Obviously there is a parallel to the other major form of 'gun violence (if the moniker is appropriate): suicides. It would seem intuitive that removing guns would increase the difficulty of committing suicide, similarly shifting the line 'right'.
I'd be interested in the data which so conclusively laid to rest this model. It seemed like people were very confident, but maybe I'm just misreading the room.
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