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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7535 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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Psychiatric Disability Accommodations in Higher Education: Q&A with Alan Levinovitz (by Awais Aftab) on the controversial reception of his article

I only read what Aftab quoted of the original article, the original being pay-walled, but those quotes and the points the author/interviewee include in his own summary are probably pretty familiar/predictable to people here: The accommodations are generally of unknown effectiveness, ineffective, or effective without respect to disability; colleges err on the side of providing accommodations, for both good and bad reasons; students try to game the system; there are (according to the author) negative consequences to making accommodations; and disability advocates allegedly responded with hostility to these things being pointed out. The possible culture war angles here are approximately all of them, but I'm mostly interested in the following:

And I’d like to take a moment to talk more about this “discipline,” given the enormous power it exerts over discussions of disability. Disability studies is not, as one might think, comprised by legal experts and neuropsychologists and the like, who, you know, study disability. Rather, this interdisciplinary field is defined by its founders and practitioners explicitly as an advocacy field. You can be a legal scholar or a research psychologist and also be in disability studies — but what qualifies you is not the object of your study, it’s the ideological flavor of your methodology and conclusions.

The paragraph (it's not clear whether the citation comes from Levinovitz or Aftab) includes a link to this 1998 paper (sci-hub pdf) - in light of the paper being 26 years old, does anyone know of current "scholars" self-identifying as deliberately-misleadingly-named activists?

Kamala's word salad causes prediction market meltdown?

https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1843450980291010656

Question: "What does success look like in ending the war in Ukraine?"

Answer: "There will be no success in ending that war without Ukraine and the UN Charter participating in what that success looks like."

I guess she could be referring to Article 2(4)?

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Even with a positively colossal steelman it's hard to understand what she's saying, charters cannot participate in successes. I think she doesn't really mean anything by this statement. It's what Gary Marcus says about LLMs, how they're just spinning word associations around.

She then continues on to repeat fairly standard US rhetoric 'we're not going to do a deal without Ukraine at the table' and dodges the question of NATO membership. None of it is particularly adept politician-speak IMO, she could do with lessons on muddying the issue.

How hard would it have been to say 'we want a free, democratic Ukraine with 1991 borders' or if they want 2014 borders, why not say that? Or if territory is too sensitive to talk about, just say 'we want a free and democratic Ukraine, a Russia that isn't going to be invading any more countries, deterrence for all America's enemies'? It was a pretty easy question!

It's not just that, there's more:

https://x.com/ClayTravis/status/1843449294008836567

She's asked about whether it was a mistake to let illegal immigration rise so dramatically and fails to dodge the question. She could've said 'oh there are enforcement problems since it's a big border' or given a distracting pre-prepared anecdote about one of the challenges they faced. She just says 'oh we have been offering solutions, solutions are at hand and we'll make more solutions on day one, when I'm elected!"

Here's a bigger chunk of the video, each minute I watch there's all this word salad and flailing question-dodging:

https://x.com/ThisIsJnored/status/1843473339085631770

For instance, at about 1:50 there's a question about the extensive US military aid to Israel and whether the Biden Harris administration is capable of putting any pressure on the Netanyahu govt.

Her answer: the work that we do diplomatically, with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles.

Him: But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.

Her: We're not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.

She does say something substantive from time to time, carefully implying that the alliance is between the American people and the Israeli people, not with Netanyahu. She uses a proper technique like 'the real question is...' there which makes her look more in control. But it's still a pretty bad performance overall.

Presumably this is why polymarket has gone from parity to 53-46 in Trump's favour): https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024?tid=1728364599343

And then there's the editing! I think whatever portion of the interview they're releasing is the most flattering stuff they could get. How else do you explain this: https://x.com/LangmanVince/status/1842964122553761982

He asks the same question "but it seems Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening" with the exact same head movements (from a slightly different camera angle) and she gives a different answer, even more full of spaghetti:

Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of... movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.

What's going on here? Am I missing something basic? Kamala's answer isn't coherent either way but it's vaguely related to the question, was it edited from something else? This is why you should just give clear answers that specifically engage the question. Not interchangeable babble with with six clauses to a sentence.

I feel concerned (not only because I've placed bets that Donald Trump will lose the popular vote since I thought it was a dead sure thing) but also because this is the apparent calibre of American leadership. Even if we assume that Elite Human Capital or the Deep State is running the show, why can't these people find a decent media spokesperson? How hard can it be?

Apologies for how much of this post is rhetorical questions, twitter links and transcription, I'm truly confused by the whole thing. I also feel like people should know what I'm linking to, they should be able to scan the link with their own eyes and know to nitter or whatever if they don't have an account.

Edit: https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1843664856446316758 (this shows the editing they did somewhat more clearly)

Is the Ukraine video really that bad? She looks a bit stiff and uncomfortable but that's not particularly unusual when you've got a camera in your face. Her answers are vague but that's the modal politician response to most questions on contentious topics.

he looks a bit stiff and uncomfortable but that's not particularly unusual when you've got a camera in your face.

This is not an answer a politician can give. Sure, for your first couple years, I guess you could say this. But when you've (allegedly) been "leading" for many years, cameras, interviews, tough questions should be utterly banal to you.

A lot of people relate that when they meet one of the "big" politicians in person (Trump, Obama, Clinton (Bill)) etc. that they really do have this massive, reality distorting charisma. I think a large part of that is just relentless practice because it became part of their everyday.

Kamala has negative charisma, is a poor speaker, and can't handle basic interviews. She's a bad politician.

Kamala is a last minute swap in because Biden is senile. And trump is, well, trump. If the median America had discovered the monkeys paw in 2023 and wished for an election that’s not Trump V Biden so they both died, then it’d be, like Desantis v Whitmer or something. Normal politicians.

I agree that Kamala is uniquely dangerous due to her stupidity- she appears to truly and genuinely believe whatever cynical bullshit is most convenient for democrats at any moment, Obama knew it was cynicism- but I disagree that this is the American leadership class these days.

but also because this is the apparent calibre of American leadership. Even if we assume that Elite Human Capital or the Deep State is running the show, why can't these people find a decent media spokesperson? How hard can it be?

That US is led by midwits has been evident since 2001 at least. The war on terror was a grotesque miscalculation-the neocon dreams of seven countries in five years delusions, Iraq a fumble, the war was a strategic victory for Al-Qaeda because it led to a decrease in US power and influence, loss of trust in the USG. Then you had the Arab Spring, which succeeded only in ruining things and not increasing US power either. Let's not even speak of Afghanistan. Then we got to Ukraine. Chinese have made no secret they're not going to be color-revolutioned, yet Americans thought driving China and Russia closely together was just the thing.

Putin clearly wanted in, was cooperative post 9/11, asked to be considered for membership and seeing as NATO has at times contained wholly authoritarian regimes like Turkey's various juntas , Portugal (somehow a founding member) etc, there were no obvious reasons why not to admit them. This would've gone some way to containing China.

That China would become extremely powerful was obvious since early 1900, when they were found to be not intellectually deficient, just merely medieval.

Emanuel Todd, the anthropologist famous for calling Soviet decline back when people thought USSR was eternal has an some interesting remarks in an interview about his upcoming book. Translation here.

Putin clearly wanted in, was cooperative post 9/11, asked to be considered for membership

Am I misremembering or was that a single sarcastic quip by Putin and not sincerely asking for NATO membership?

From memory, Russia never put in a formal application to NATO, but it wasn't just a sarcastic quip. You could probably debate the sincerity of the interest of Russia joining NATO, but it definitely wasn't an prima facie sarcastic suggestion.

You have to remember the geopolitical context at the time. Russia was a newly "liberal" country after the collapse of the Soviet Union only a decade ago, and while significant tension did still exist between USA and Russia (particularly relating to NATO's involvement in the Yugoslav Wars), relations between the two was much more optimistic that is now or has been recently.

9/11 presented a reasonable opportunity for a genuine, renewed, positive relationship between Russia and USA. One thing that Russia and the US have in common (even to this day) is dealing with Islamism/Islamic terrorism, a threat to both nations. Russia had been, and has been, constantly dealing with Islamic terrorism within its own borders long before 9/11, and could reasonable see opportunity for US cooperation and support post 9/11 (it actually did happen to a limited extent under much worse circumstances dealing with ISIS).

Fucking up the opportunity to normalise relations with Russia and bring them into the greater west and instead driving them into the arms of China was the second worst foreign policy mistake the USA ever made in my opinion, matched only by donating the country's productive economy and manufacturing base to China.

Putin clearly wanted in, was cooperative post 9/11, asked to be considered for membership and seeing as NATO has at times contained wholly authoritarian regimes like Turkey's various juntas , Portugal (somehow a founding member) etc, there were no obvious reasons why not to admit them.

It wasn't about them being authoritarian, it was about them being Russia. I doubt Poland has the same emotions about Portugal

Then you had the Arab Spring, which succeeded only in ruining things and not increasing US power either.

I concur on a lot of the aforementioned U.S. foreign policy being a failure but think this veers into a Chomyskite type dismissal of anyone’s agency other than the U.S. government’s. The Arab Spring in Egypt and Syria began organically, as corrupt authoritarian states did not yet have a handle on the virality of social media. The U.S. government certainly picked sides, but I think it is unfair to treat this as the type of own-goal attempting the regime change and democratization on of Iraq was.

I think the aftermath is a complete loss. The Arab Spring wasn’t about democracy, it was an Islamist movement based in getting rid of the old guard who were largely secular socialists and nationalists. Our ignorance of the region and what these despots were holding back is obvious now and anyone familiar with the region and the history of could have easily told you that weakening these secular regimes is good optics and terrible policy. And where these despots were weakened or overthrown, we now have either outright Islamist governments or powerful military junta’s threatening jihad at either the secular government or the designated target of the Jews. But then again our midwits are not exactly scholars and were taken in by the optics that happened to coincide with their interpretation of the neo-liberal right side of history narrative that holds that humans all naturally are alike and think exactly like post-modern liberals and want nothing other than to join the Rules Based International Order and drink Starbucks and send their daughters to humanities programs at Evergreen.

To be blunt, my take on politics both domestic and international is Real Politick. You are a fool if you’re trying to govern based on delusions and fantasies about how you wish the world works. And you are a double fool if you’re misunderstanding human nature. We are not fundamentally good people, no one is. And pretending that if we just ignore reality hard enough we can wish ourselves to Utopia is just going to set everything back.

The Arab Spring wasn’t about democracy, it was an Islamist movement based in getting rid of the old guard who were largely secular socialists and nationalists.

Maybe democracy in the Middle East will naturally tend towards some form of Islamism and we just have to get over it?

Imagine if early Western democracy was under the watch of secular aliens searching for any sign of deviation from laicite. It'd never get off the ground because it'd permanently be at odds with the desires of the population.

Even granting that Islam is exceptional that's probably an argument for some role instead of continually trying to quash it. That may just radicalize Islamist parties into jihadis.

Yes, the midwit position of "let them have democracy and they'll converge on modern liberalism on some reasonable timescale" is ludicrous. But maybe they should just have democracy , damn what happens to the gays and women.

If any of these nations were at risk of spawning some Lee Kuan Yew-esque illiberal reformer or a liberal autocracy that could set the stage for liberal democracy it'd be one thing. But Egypt was corrupt and autocratic before Morsi and corrupt and autocratic after and all of this will almost certainly happen again.

or the designated target of the Jews

Yeah, you got me there. Democratic Islamic governments will have more issues with Israel.

I’ll disagree with you on the point that the Arab Spring itself wasn’t about democracy. But as it was decentralized, it could only create a vacuum, and that then let groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, that had organization and structure, fill that vacuum.

I’ll disagree with you on the point that the Arab Spring itself wasn’t about democracy.

It was about poverty. Higher grain prices meant that for the first time a lot of people didn't had food security.

I dont have the link on hand, but someone dumped $7 million onto prediction markets overnight, betting against Kamala. People are suspecting Elon. The swing is artificial knee jerk, but your sentiment is genuine.

Remember, Kamala was never supposed to get this far. 2020 was peak woke and Biden felt pressured into choosing a minority. Kamala had the perfect optics - woman, blackish, indianish, well educated, compliant, could signal as woke but fundamentally centrist.

She was the perfect puppet and therefore a good VP candidate. But the same thing makes her a horrible presidential candidate. Off the top of my mind, every other primary candidate did better than her. Pete, Warren, Bernie.... are all articulate and sharp (whether I agree with some of them or not).

IMO, the deepstate chooses bumbling idiots because they are easy to control. Kamala is perfect.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Isn’t the obvious use case for election prediction markets to hedge agains unfavorable election outcomes? Why do we assume that people betting on Trump are Trump supporters? Shouldn’t, for example, Israeli settlers be betting big on Kamala to win so that they have money to relocate if Trump loses and they get kicked out of the West Bank? DEI consultants betting on Trump so they have insurance against losing their cushy jobs?

Isn’t the obvious use case for election prediction markets to hedge agains unfavorable election outcomes?

Sometimes actual sports betting is used to hedge against unfavorable sports outcomes. Houston's "Mattress Mack" is famous for promotions like "Buy furniture today, and if [local sports team] wins, I'll give you your money back," which he's been known to fund by betting accordingly in Vegas.

I could imagine doing this with political outcomes ("If Kamala wins, I expect to have higher taxes"), but I can't imagine the market is liquid enough to support doing this for anyone large enough to care about hedging. But maybe it will be possible in the future.

Houston's "Mattress Mack" is famous for promotions like "Buy furniture today, and if [local sports team] wins, I'll give you your money back," which he's been known to fund by betting accordingly in Vegas.

That's fucking genius. Unethical, but genius.

This is the kind of chaotic neutral thinking that we need more of in American entrepreneurship. Fuck Bay Area CS grads trying to come up with robo-dildo-taxis. I want dangerously unstable fly-over people using corporate treasury funds to seed fund a local strip club.

robo-dildo-taxis

...Are these a real thing, or did you just give the porn industry a free idea?

What's wrong with that? I mean it's exactly as playing white elephant as the VC types funding uber for furniture psychics apps to cash out at IPO using low interest loans. Just benefits the common man a little.

That's fucking genius. Unethical, but genius.

Why unethical?

Responding to @hydroacetylene and @Lizzardspawn.

I'm alright with it! And I'm not sure it's illegal on its own.

It's definitely unethical in that, if that company has a board, there are probably terms that limit what corporate treasury funds can be used on (gambling is a no no). If the owner has sole ownership of everything, it's okay so long as gambling winning come back in as revenue to the company, I think. There's probably some tax gotchas.

I don’t think these prediction markets are big enough to hedge against catastrophic geopolitical outcomes, whatever one’s views and hopes. $7 million moved the market noticeably toward a Trump victory. I’m not sure how a bunch of Otzma Yehudit hardliners could offset the cost of having to leave their settlements without driving down the expected return.

Just like prediction markets can be assassination markets, so too can they interfere with normal democratic processes if taken too seriously. If there are people who will cut their losses and stop donating to their preferred candidate when that candidate's odds get too low, then manipulating a market can become positive EV even if you're inflating the price of your candidate's shares above where you believe they should be.

You're assuming the people gambling on elections are using it as an investment vehicle or hedge and not just, y'know, gambling. Most people betting on prediction markets are idiots trying to get rich, not people making rational choices.

Remember, Kamala was never supposed to get this far. 2020 was peak woke and Biden felt pressured into choosing a minority. Kamala had the perfect optics - woman, blackish, indianish, well educated, compliant, could signal as woke but fundamentally centrist.

I'd disagree that she was centrist. She was simply the only option. Clyburn didn't demand a minority. He demanded a black person. IIRC Biden already promised a woman.

Who else could it be?

If someone wanted Trump to win, wouldn't they want to manipulate the market in the opposite direction, to make it look like they're in danger of losing? I'd be less likely to vote for my preferred candidate if I thought they had it in the bag.

As Patton once said, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time." If you think your candidate is probably going to lose, then you're less likely to vote at all. There are a lot of people who would be motivated to vote if they thought their candidate had a good chance of winning. Who wants to be on the losing team?

Elon (or presumed anon billionaire) doesn't want to make money off the bet. They want to influence public opinion towards their intended candidate. Movements in betting markets trigger articles titled : 'why kamala is losing ground to Trump - 6 policy fails of the Biden govt'. Additionally, these articles actually draw eyeballs when there's an idle curiosity for why Kamala is losing ground.

Then why don't you vote for a third party that aligns further with your preferences? People like to be a part of a movement, they want to have a good chance of winning instead of "throwing their vote away."

This is the question I always have in mind when I see ideologues of any stripe popularize poll numbers that show their preferred candidate for an upcoming election in the lead and denigrate polls that show the opposite. There's certainly a "celebrate the home team winning" aspect that I understand - when the Red Sox have a good record or have a big lead against the other team, I, too, like to remind other Red Sox fans of this if the context is appropriate, and we both have a positive experience from it.

But unlike professional sports, elections are things that the fans actually have pretty direct input on the outcome of. So one would think that a committed fan of a particular politician or party would try to behave in a way as to increase the odds of their preferred team winning. Which, I think, would lead one to the exact opposite of the abovementioned behavior; present the polls that show your favorite team losing as the most dependable, most reliable polls that everyone needs to be paying attention to all the time, and present the other ones as fake and flawed and maybe even part of a conspiracy theory to keep people on your side complacent.

But I also see an argument for the opposite case, that, as one Osama Bin Laden said, IIRC, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they instinctively side with the strong horse." So presenting your favored politician as "stronger" in the polls could actually lead other people into learning that they genuinely, in good faith, agree with that politician's ideology, and thus they become more likely to vote for them.

I admit I haven't looked hard, but I've yet to see any empirical evidence for which factor is stronger and by how much. As it is, the fact that it feels really really good to celebrate your favorite team politician being in the lead (certainly it feels far better than "celebrating" the opposite) makes me highly skeptical of any evidence or arguments that such celebration also conveniently helps your favorite team politician win in the upcoming election.

Or they might feel “it is a lost cause” so why bother voting

Everyone likes a winner. Making your side look good inspires enthusiasm and demoralizes the other side. Much bigger bump than making your side incrementally more afraid.

Any yet Trump won in 2016 despite the common wisdom being that Clinton would likely win.

I think that there are effects in both directions.

If I think that the election result is already predetermined with a very high probability, I am less inclined to vote strategically. So if a candidate is polling at 80% in a state, I will vote for whomever I like most in general, while if two candidates are both polling at 45%, I am much more likely to the one of them whom I consider the lesser evil.

I am sure that the impulse to pick the side of the winner also exists in people. In the ancestral environment, picking the winning side of a group-internal conflict was likely conductive to reproductive success, while habitually backing the underdog was not. Rationally, this matters a lot less in representative democracies where what you do in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.

Personally, I am mildly disinclined to vote for a winning candidate. Statistically speaking, I tend not to be a huge fan of most administrations, and if it is all the same, I would rather be able to say "I voted for Kodos" than sharing the responsibility.

Exactly.

The expected value theory here is symmetric. If you're close to 50/50 odds then your vote has a relatively high chance of making a huge impact, and you should make absolutely sure to cast it. If you're at 90/10 or 10/90, then whatever; why bother making your margin of victory a tiny bit larger or your margin of defeat a tiny bit smaller?

The psychological theory here is what's asymmetric. Social Desirability Bias tells you that if you agree with the majority and high-status leaders of Our Tribe then you are in sync with the community and safe and loved, whereas if you agree with the outnumbered and low-status dissenters from Our Tribe then you are a traitor and a risk and what are you even still doing here anyways? Best to hop on the bandwagon.

It's weird to see people blowing money on prediction markets to that end, though. They used to be such a niche nerd idea, mostly talked about among small groups who saw expected utility maximization as a goal and biases as obstacles inherited from our less-evolved ancestors, but I guess they're now just as fertile a target for hoary advertising tricks as "people who didn't even get up to stretch during the commercial breaks" used to be.

As I understand it, social desirability bias as a theory is meant to suggest why people may respond to, say, questionnaires in ways that may make them seem in harmony with favored social norms, eg if you ask someone directly (even anonymously) how many units of alcohol do you drink per day they may round down by one or more, if they're a heavier drinker. To do otherwise would give a feeling of hedonistic depravity (disfavored) even if true. This creates considerable noise in self-reported data, and is why parallel forms (similar but not exact) questions are sometimes used within in one questionnaire (and why Cronbach's alpha is used in analysis). Surveys of this sort are very difficult to do even passably well if one wants any data close to reflective of reality.

In this case--voting--it may apply but I would argue only within one's own imagined society. In other words so-called red tribe types will vote red because their people vote red. It's arguably not about some larger percentage of the population, it's about whom you value socially. I suppose you could tell some "blue triber" that the vote is 99% Trump and argue that they will be swayed to vote Trump to stay in sync, but I'm not so sure that wouldn't be very inconsistent across a large population.

edit: of to if

Polarization these days is strong enough that I wouldn't expect that bias to make a huge difference, it's true, only a difference on the margins. But we're on the margins again with this election, aren't we? +3% Harris nationally, but Trump's leading in a couple swing states he lost last time, probably within one swing state's electoral votes of winning. I could easily imagine a decent number of undecided voters being swayed (or just persuaded not to stay home) by the belief that one candidate or the other is socially acceptable or at least not too socially unacceptable.

It is already reversing to the mean and the NYT/Sienna poll that dropped shows her at +3 - and according to Nate Silver this is the most reliable pollster right now.

He also made the point that prediction markets are vulnerable to whale movements such that they cannot sufficiently clear in the short term, meaning you shouldn't weigh drastic short term movements of these markets very highly as indications of market consensus.

If the prediction markets are onto something it'll show up in the polls, otherwise things will reverse to the mean as the market clears.

Polls are of course also subject to buses (including weighting voting population).

True. But the rule of thumb that the side that is unskewing the polls is losing usually holds true.

I think the rise of LLMs has revealed that we have at least two distinct ways of thinking. Next token prediction is the most common, and what I’m engaged in now that I’m trying to communicate an original thought. Given the germ of an idea, we can almost unconsciously generate a stream of words to describe it. iOS is even suggesting many of the words I’m composing now.

I think anyone who has been in a conversational flow state can intuit that there’s something like an LLM in their heads.

When I see Kamala seemingly surprised at where her sentences end up, I see next token prediction.

I think its obvious that some political consultant told her to work certain key words into all her answers. "Doing the work" and variations of it is a common one. I know other politicians have followed strategies like this. But good god does Kamala give the game away with how artlessly she strings these vocab snippets together. It's only barely grammatically correct English, nakedly void of any informational value. A good politician at least creates the successful illusion of having said something, or evoking in you a belief that you heard what you wanted to hear.

It's so bad because she's so bad.

Body language is a pseudo-science, but tells do exist. Harris looks to the side when she's try to fetch and retrieve talking points. That's a novice move. The really good politicians can maintain eye contact even when they're doing the memory recall of talking points. The really good ones can smile, emote, gesture non-robotically when they do it. Harris is just overmatched.

Trump doesn't face these challenges because he will not be constrained by your plebe confines of sentence structure and grammar. His words are impressionistic-abstract devices that can be deployed and rearranged dynamically. If you're too dumb to follow his 9th order logic, that's on you pal.

Serious: Trump's tell is that he just starts a new sentence. It's obvious and horrible. More recently, he's been getting stuck in doom-loop repeats of the same anecdotes and basic sentence themes. They aren't even fully fleshed out talking points. He'll get stuck on individual words. Listen to him talk about his alcoholic brother on the Theo Von podcast. This is, funnily enough to @NewCharlesInCharge point, this is a failure mode of less sophisticated LLMs - they can get into latent spaces that are impossible to exit, so they just end up repeating the same output again and again even if you try to coach them away from it.

And yet there are many (or at least some) who weep at her speaking in breathless praise. I feel the same about them as I feel when I see people in not only MAGA hats, but Trump (or, formerly FJB) t-shirts, holding Trump mugs and posters and talking about how great a man he is. It's really a potentially fantastic dark comedy film, if one could avoid camp and cynicism. Which probably one couldn't.

I would love to see a work of fiction where each side conspires among themselves in hushed tones about how, even though their candidate is garbage, they have to pretend to be strong enthusiastic unqualified supporters, lest they express any honest reservations and thereby let the even-worse candidate win instead. In the climax of the story, everybody discovers that this is what everybody is doing, and for once they break the hysteresis of plurality voting and elect a decent third-party candidate instead.

But back to non-fiction, obviously that's not what's consciously happening, because people just aren't that good at deliberately lying to each other and keeping it a secret; we have to do it unconsciously. That's probably why we evolved half of our cognitive biases: to help us accomplish useful deception of others via the intermediate step of lying to ourselves first. "Gosh, it's a good thing my candidate is so great, because otherwise we'd be mostly screwed either way", is the sort of thing people actually come to believe. In the climax of reality, we all just keep lobotomizing ourselves in such fashion to a greater and greater extent, because to reverse course would require reducing our present persuasiveness and admitting the magnitude of our past mistakes, and none of that is something we can easily do when we've evolved to try to impress others.

I’m not sure how much a 60 Minutes interview matters. I guess it does slightly on the margins and if you believe the polls this race is just on the margins.

The one thing I would add is why did Harris and her team put her in this setting why they know she is “turrible” in these settings?

My guess is internals might not be as positive as external polling so they were hoping to shore up a criticism but it didn’t go well.

You just have to go through some motions.

, why can't these people find a decent media spokesperson?

Because they thought they could hide Bidens senility to the end of the election. They are just arrogant or it’s just too hard to coordinate of a problem, replacing an aging president, that Kamala just sort of fell into this position. She didn’t earn it, and if she wins it’ll be pure luck on her part: “the accidental president”

I’m actually somewhat looking forward to a Kamala presidency. She’s going to make DEI look horrific, by showcasing what it looks like to put someone so unprepared into the highest visibility role there is. She lacks the personality of a president, is utterly unpresidential, sort of like Trump but in a very different way as well. She can’t speak eloquently and has weird social mannerisms, and is apparently quite unlikeable as a leader. Trump, for all his narcissism (narcissism actually helps leadership in some ways) is at least charismatic and has a great sense of humor.

Because they thought they could hide Bidens senility to the end of the election. They are just arrogant or it’s just too hard to coordinate of a problem, replacing an aging president, that Kamala just sort of fell into this position. She didn’t earn it, and if she wins it’ll be pure luck on her part: “the accidental president”

I don’t think this captures the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party. It isn’t a monolith.

It’s hard to go against an incumbent and the Bidens as a family, are very clannish (small-c, not ‘k’, please). When you say, “…they thought they could hide Biden’s senility…”, that is certainly true for the Bidens, as they shrank the inner circle around and access to Joe as criticism mounted.

Plus, a particular source of stubbornness from Biden was 2016. He was dealing with the loss of his son, true, but in order to get the Clinton machine behind him for his own election, Obama had already accepted it would be Hillary’s turn that year, after being his Secretary of State. And it bothered Biden when Obama informed him the support would be behind Hillary, it bothered Biden even more when Hillary lost to Trump as he felt he would have done better, and then Biden took 2020 as vindication of all his prior grievances about 2016. So, when people were trying to nudge him away from running again, in Biden’s mind, they were just more skeptics that he’d already proven wrong.

The next guard of Democratic presidential hopefuls — Whitmer, Shapiro, etc. — didn’t have the clout to push Biden aside on their own, and evidently none wanted to risk dimming their own star by losing an open primary going up against Biden and the money he had already raised from Democratic donors worried about a second Trump term.

The in for those outside Biden’s camp was the early debate and a bad performance, so power brokers from other camps within the party could claim through clenched teeth, of course they still supported Biden, but it was the public and donors had lost faith, and their hands were forced. This is when Pelosi, the Obamas and large donors struck.

As mentioned elsewhere on this topic, Harris was then effective in back room dealings and was able to scuttle a contested convention on the grounds that internal division might harm the chances of defeating Trump, and also, that if Biden withdrew, she was the candidate that would retain access to the money that had been raised for the Biden-Harris ticket.

I suspect if Whitmer and Shapiro could travel back in time, knowing what they now know, they would take their shot in an open primary. Now, there is at least a possibility Harris serves two terms, and who knows how hot their careers will be in eight years, plus Walz’s increased name recognition puts him in the mix.

She apparently earned it in the sense that she was on the phones calling all the Party people she needed to call to prevent an open convention pretty much the moment Biden dropped out. She apparently has some kind of knack (hard to call it a 'talent') for internal party politicking that got her where she is today.

The problem there is that was also the talent Hillary Clinton had and she was much better at it.

That was my take as well: Hillary Clinton is a ghoulish power-seeker, but a competent one. If she won, she'd be a continuation of the Democratic technocrat rule.

If Kamala wins, America gets to experience its own 'time of troubles.'

Yep. The cold solace that it will be the cabinet and bureaucracy running the government so it doesn't matter if Kamala is an incompetent executive is not comforting at all after the last four years, where the cabinet and the bureaucracy were running the government and they were bad at it.

You don't earn it by brownnosing or politicking, you earn it in the primaries by appealing to actual voters.

She apparently has some kind of knack (hard to call it a 'talent') for internal party politicking that got her where she is today.

Are you saying she is... a good politician?

The appropriate word is apparatchik.

In the context of the definition of "apparatchik" (a term English speakers borrowed from Russian), "apparat" essentially means "party machine."

Kamala is an exceptionally dumb politician. She mostly never knows what she's talking about. Even when she does she can't avoid noodles spilling out of her mouth. This was all basically priced-in until August, when for political reasons the Democrat base pretended she was this amazing undiscovered talent. "Joy!" But we knew this already. I predicted in August that it wouldn't last until November, and here we are.

I think Kamala is actually kind of likeable for being so dumb. Her answer the kther week about shooting a criminal with her very real gun is one example. Another is a rumor I saw going around that the once-great White House Cocaine was actually hers, not Hunter Biden's. Well, whatever, probably not, but granted that she's a normal untalented striver who somehow ended up as VP, that implies a different path for her to run on. Briefing her on policy issues way out of her depth isn't working.

I've heard she's deeply unlikeable in private and chews through her staff. Which makes me wonder how she got this far. Somebody has to like her!

Compare Kamala's world salad to other politicians. Trump rambles because he is always juggling three or four different conversations, and he doesn't bother with the political cliches that tie everything together. But he's basically perfectly intelligible, which is how we get regular two-movies-one-screen on partisan lines. Biden rambles because he's going senile, but speaks in perfectly normal sentences when he's having a good day. He was always fairly dumb by Washington standards, but it was an aggressive and belligerent dumbness that made him colorful and interesting. Obama almost never gave word salad unless he was away from his teleprompter at an unexpected moment. Hillary was too smart for this. And it's possible Bush was only incoherent when he wanted to look folksy.

And it's possible Bush was only incoherent when he wanted to look folksy.

I forget where, but I remember hearing some anecdote about how Bush was really smart and eloquent in private, and he'd talk about how he was usually just stammering when speaking in public because he was terrified and nervously choosing his words, because of how much could go wrong if the POTUS said something incorrect or damaging.

Looking back on his public performances it's clear that he absolutely wasn't dumb even if that was him at his best. The extent to which "Bush is a moron" took off as a meme is actually quite remarkable in retrospect.

Bush was also being compared to the hyper-articulate Bill Clinton, and with memories of his father's media-aided gaffes smoothing the path as well.

hyper-articulate Bill Clinton

Don't you know you're not supposed to call America's first Black president "articulate"?

And Al Gore too.

You hear similar things about how HRC focus tested each word in public to death due to being burned badly in the past.

Not sure how seriously to take it. Or whether or not it's still a failure of intelligence and character worth noting.

HRC would never have gotten "deplorables" past a focus group, even if they'd missed all the other hints in her speeches that pointed in the same direction.

She had more than enough intelligence that she could have done a competent job without anyone double-checking her every word; her problem was that she was aware of her intelligence and she let that awareness fester into contempt rather than compassion for those not so endowed. That is a failure of character which she should have worked on, but of all the people in the world she was probably the most painfully aware that it's possible to be a great politician and a decent president without bothering to work on your failures of character. She just didn't realize that voters who will forgive failings like "contempt for your spouse" still won't forgive failings like "contempt for us". I think it was someone on TheMotte who pointed out that true meritocracy can be actually much worse than ending up with an incompetent candidate, if a competent person picked on merit would be using their competence in opposition to your values rather than in support of them.

HRC would never have gotten "deplorables" past a focus group

IIRC, wasn't that said at a private donor event and someone released a surreptitious recording? That is, it was never intended for a wide or unfriendly audience. Or am I getting it mixed up with Obama's "God, Guns any Gays" remark?

"LGBT for Hillary", Barbara Streisand performing, $1,200 per "Friend"-level ticket for the cheapest seats, so definitely not for a wide or unfriendly audience. But it was still the keynote speech at a gala widely reported a month in advance, not an off-the-cuff unprepared remark among a select group of actual friends. I vaguely recall learning that early 19th century Presidential candidates would make one set of promises to crowds in Northern states and another set to crowds in Southern ones, but that kind of thing shouldn't have survived for very long after the telegraph, much less after the private-recording-device-in-everyone's-pocket.

I had a vague recollection of the same thing, but I thought I might be confusing it with Romney's 47% remark that was surreptitiously recorded and released. From my Googling, Time doesn't mention any secret recordings for Hillary's remark. Says it was at a fundraiser, but it doesn't seem like it was a closed event, and a full transcript of her speech is also in the article, which points to it not being surreptitiously recorded.

Her team’s polling models also assured her the “Blue Wall” states weren’t in play, and she ended up losing Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, without much personal campaigning in or money spent on those states. Trump got 258 electoral votes absent those three states, Hillary got 227, and that trio was worth 46.

Trump is intelligible in the sense that, if you're already familiar with the context he's speaking in, you can follow what he's trying to say. However, of you're not, you'll be lost.

His chatter about the Charlottesville fact check in the Biden debate made it exceptionally clear that he struggles to actually bring a point home and land it. If you knew already that Snopes had changed the status of the fact check then you could follow perfectly well what was going on but, if you were coming in cold, his point came off very weak and diffuse.

Knee-jerk I disagreed. But to test this, I opened up the Lex Fridman interview, which I haven't listened to, and copied a random clip from the transcript without looking at the context:

(00:10:39) So I’ve done a lot of debating, only as a politician. I never debated. My first debate was the Rosie O’Donnell debate, the famous Rosie O’Donnell debate, the answer. But I’ve done well with debates. I became president. Then the second time, I got millions more votes than I got the first time. I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, you would win, you can’t not when. And I got millions of more votes on that and lost by a whisker. And look what happened to the world with all of the wars and all of the problems. And look what happened with inflation because inflation is just eating up our country, eating it up. So it’s too bad. But there are a lot of things that could happen. We have to get those wars settled. I’ll tell you, you have to get Ukraine done. That could end up in a third world war. So could the Middle East. So could the Middle East.

So, yeah, without seeing what Lex said to prompt this, I have no fucking clue what the main point or thesis of this rambling is, or what it might be responding to. This bit as bad as anything Kamala says, tbh. Looks like total free assoication. (not word salad).

here's another one just to be fair:

(00:24:09) Nothing. I know nothing about it. And they know that too. Democrats know that. And I purposely haven’t read it, because I want to say to you, I have no idea what it’s all about. It’s easier, than saying I read it and all of the things. No, I purposely haven’t read it and I’ve heard about it. I’ve heard about things that are in there that I don’t like, and there’s some things in there that everybody would like, but there are things that I don’t like at all. And I think it’s unfortunate that they put it out, but it doesn’t mean anything, because it has nothing to do with me. Project 25 has absolutely nothing to do with me.

This one is quite a bit easier, and pretty coherent.

He's easily coherent (sometimes moreso than Kamala), he just seems to have no concept of the difference between what's in his head and what might be in other people's heads. He often talks as if everyone is just as online and embedded in the right wing echo chamber as he is, referring to people and events off hand and just kind of assuming everyone understands what he's talking about. This works fine at rallies but it really doesn't with general audiences.

I think his main issue is the interview format in general. He's good at rallies because he controls the entire conversation there. He's also good at one-on-one discussion because he'll just overwhelm the person and schmooze them and it usually works very well. But when talking to one person for the benefit of an audience, neither of these work. If he schmoozes the interviewer that does nothing for the audience and if he takes control of the discussion then it looks like he's evading questions. Simply having a conversation on another person's terms, or at least as equals, seems very difficult to him. I can't stand hearing him in interviews.

Are there any popular interviewers in the US that are known for playing hardball with their guests and not letting them get away with a non-answer? Is there a chance one of them could interview at least one of the candidates?

How hardball can you really get? The man asked her the same question three times. If she can't answer it in a coherent way with three at-bats it is unlikely she'll be able to come up with anything more coherent if you ask her this question ten more times, and it's evidence enough of whatever qualities an interview is supposed to show. He who has ears, let him listen.

"Did you threaten to overrule Derrick Lewis?"

Infamous as the most hardball interview in British political history (and the British are already tougher on politicians than the Americans). The question was asked 12 times, and Michael Howard gave 12 non-responsive answers. Both side remain unflappably polite throughout.

Later it turned out that he was supposed to have been let off the hook, but a technical problem with the next item on the schedule meant that the interview was extended by about a minute without either Paxman or Howard being told in advance.

"Did you threaten to overrule Derrick Lewis?"

On a slightly amusing side note, when I hear Derrick Lewis, I can only picture Hot Balls, Black Beast, Popeyes Derrick Lewis. Woe to the man who threatens to overrule him.

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I just don't see how asking the same question twelve times is better than asking it three times. Has anyone ever answered a question on the fourth time after dodging thrice?

What if we take the hardball metaphor seriously, and the interviewer tells the interviewee straight-up, after each non-answer, "Okay, so you just struck out. Want to try again?" And as the interview progresses, the interviewer brings up the scorecard and reminds the interviewee of their performance so far and perhaps their need to hit a grand slam now if they want to win?

More realistically, when a politician non-answers a question like in some of these clips, I'd like it if the interviewer explicitly called it out and refused to move on until it was answered in a way that a reasonable layman would understand as "answered." There's probably too many incentives against any interviewer in a position to interview anyone that matters actually doing this sort of thing, though.

I don't think anyone would benefit from this guy asking Kamala Harris the same question for an hour.

Au contraire, I think if this guy was placed in a position by Harris to ask the exact same question at her for a full hour, this would be of great benefit to all American voters.

How hardball can you really get? The man asked her the same question three times.

Start asking closed questions, for example.

What is a closed question?

A question that has a finite set of possible answers. Yes/no questions are the most common form, but asking for a name or a number is a closed question as well.

What is the point? This isn't a CIA black site, ve don't have vays of making you talk. It's already obvious she's dodging the question.

Also I hate to be pedantic but a question with a number for an answer doesn't have a finite set of answers.

I lied, I don't hate to be pedantic.

Kyle Clark who works for Denver’s NBC broadcast affiliate station has rightly gotten good press for his moderation of debates. But given he is only moderating debates between mayoral candidates and people running for Colorado’s seats in congress, I am not sure if he rises to the threshold of popular. Would love to see the national network put him in font of Trump and Harris.

you really can't "play hardball" with a presidential candidate, because everyone they're the belle of the ball right now. everyone wants to interview them, so they can pick and choose their venues. There's zero incentive for them to go on a hostile interview, or even a less-than-friendly interview. Especially for Democrats, since so much of the mainstream media is sympathetic to them.

I wish there was more cultural demand for, not exactly hardball questions, but a surprise quiz here and there to let voters know the candidate isn't completely out to lunch.

"Yes, thank you for delivering your prepared remarks on immigration and the southern border, but if you don't mind, could you please name the President of Mexico?"

"That depends on which cartel is currently most powerful"

"I hear they have a great president, people tell me all the time, I tell you what, when you reelect me, we'll sit down and make a deal. All of these people from jails, from mental institutions- they won't be coming through Mexico anymore."

Presidential candidate jeopardy would be enormously interesting.

I mentioned Kyle Clark in another reply but he said something along these lines when asked why his debates/interviews were as substantive as they are. He said that whomever is running for mayor of Denver or one of Colorado’s seats in the house still needs Denver’s NBC affiliate to reach voters, and that may not hold up with national office.

yeah, it's a whole different ball game between local and national office, and then president is a whole other level. With the lower levels, a lot of the race is just name recognition, getting voters to know and care about who you are. Journalists there have a lot of power, since they gatekeep the shows that can make the politicians famous. But Harris and Trump are already the most famous people on earth, there's really nothing that a journalist has to offer them except bootlicking.

Ironically enough, despite being criticized for being soft I always thought Joe Rogan was very good at not letting the interviewee get away with non-answers.

The long form podcast format helps of course, but while he'll let people blabber for hours about things that may be completely untrue he does not let you slinker away from a line of questioning that you don't like until you've given an answer.

This was in display even recently in his Matt Walsh episode. They talked endlessly about moon landing conspiracies, not just because Joe enjoys the topic but because Matt kept giving him slippery non committal answers so he had to continue pushing.

Well, I'm happy that at long last she's finally being forced to answer some substantive questions, even if they're being lobbed to her from the most friendly possible journalist. her answers... are about what I expected, given what I remember of her from the 2020 primary. She just has no understanding, at all, of policy issues. Her word salad is her realizing she doesn't know what to say and frantically trying to dodge the question and move on.

To be fair those are pretty difficult issues. No matter what she said, she'd be guaranteed to piss off a lot of people. So I understand why a pro politician would want to avoid talking about them as much as possible. Trump has also been highly evasive on the issues of Ukraine and Israel, other than his usual "I'll make a deal" vague nonsense.

There seems to be this huge blindspot in American politics, where no one can admit or even notice that, despite all the US aid and influence, it's currently failing to achieve its goals. Ukraine is getting steadily pushed back, the violence around Israel rages on, and the US can do nothing but give away money to corrupt military-industrial contractors. I give Biden a lot of credit for being the one to finally admit that the situation in Afghanistan was bad and taking the political hit to withdraw. I wish he'd do the same and take the fall for those other bad situations.

I don't think taking the fall for Ukraine or Israel is something Biden even has the option to do. Afghanistan, sure, it's our army and we can pull it out whenever we want, but both those others we're just subsidizing a foreign army and ultimately it's their own government that decides when they stop fighting, not us.

I give Biden a lot of credit for being the one to finally admit that the situation in Afghanistan was bad and taking the political hit to withdraw. I wish he'd do the same and take the fall for those other bad situations.

Trump did this, the stonewalling just lasted until 2021.

Am I missing something basic?

Yes.

Kamala Harris has been a bad speaker for most of her public career. It's like being confused about why a politician known for gaffes continues to make gaffes. The quality is meeting expectation.

In turn, Harris' rise to her current position is largely the result of two things largely indifferent to her public speaking skills: Democratic Party political faction alliances of the 2020 election cycle, and campaign finance laws in the 2024.

In 2020, where Harris bombed pretty early in no small part because of her propensity to word salad, Biden's victory in the Democratic primaries was hinged on the support of the African American wing of the Democratic party, particularly specific political machines. The quid for the quo was rewarding allies of the allies with places in the administration. Part of that was the selection of Harris for Vice President, as she met various political faction interests (most notably known, but oversimplified to, Biden's announcement of his vice president criteria). Harris was a VP selection to balance internal party politics, not her speaking role. If anything, her lack of speaking skills was an asset, as it reduced the threat / feelings of being slighted to those who didn't get an ally into the VP slot, and Harris was so weak as to not threaten to overshadow Biden as a more ambitious VP might have. (Even in his fall, Biden's fall is generally believed to have been much more at the instigation of Party Elders, not Kamala herself.)

In 2024, Harris's ascension largely revolves around campaign finance limitations, in that when Biden was pressured to step down from the race, she was the only potential candidate who could legally utilize the Biden campaign fund without potential legal risk freezing a pillar of the Democratic campaign. As most sitting Presidents do, Biden's control of the presidential campaign relied on control of the money, which was under the legal control of the Biden-Harris campaign, as opposed to the Democratic Party. If, and when, Biden was pressured to drop out, the Democratic Party leaders who pressured him to couldn't demand control of the money already raised. In a choice between a possibly bitterly contested / coalition-fracturing contested convention, in which the huge fundraising sums wouldn't be usable, or between a better funded and smoother party politics, Harris was the beneficiary regardless of speaking skills.

OK, she's a bad speaker, we all knew that: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/09/29/vp-harris-hails-us-alliance-north-korea-speech-gaffe/10460822002/

That's an embarrassing mistake, maybe she could have misspoken. But past a certain point we have to wonder whether there is anything in her head at all.

Kamala enjoys the favour of the media establishment. She had plenty of time to prepare for this. She knew what kind of questions they were going to ask her. She could have given some convincing lies and hope nobody would fact-check her, that's a strategy. A primary plank of her campaign is lying about Trump's plans to ban abortion. Trump himself is no stranger to lies, they're a vital political tool.

But she isn't even capable of that!

It might even be edited to look a little better than it actually was, people have been remarking that the interview was shorter than expected. That was why I was confused, wondering how Kamala could answer the same question twice.

The same thing happened with the Dana Bash CNN interview. They clearly left a lot on the cutting room floor. She is a midwit. Basic 100 IQ person who through a combination of social striving, whoring, and being the right skin tone and gender at the right moment has ascended to almost be president. Sad state of affairs.

I doubt she is 100 iq. She did pass the bar. I would guess 110-115

There have been rumors circulating for a bit, at least on right-wing Twitter, that Kamala has a serious drinking and/or pills problem. That for many public appearances she’s on some combination of substances in order to quell her paralyzing anxiety. I have absolutely no idea if any of this is true, but if it is then it could explain why someone who, in her youth, was fairly cognitively acute could now, decades later, have lost a lot of that acuity or could be unable to demonstrate it when under the influence.

Didn’t she fail the first time?

She is also 60.

100 might be too low but she clearly is lower than 115 IQ.

The California Bar pass rate is about 1/3, including repeat testers.

Edit: Some other sites are giving me different numbers, about 50% here. But still I would argue knowing the general pass rate is important context.

That is for the February bar exam. Most new lawyers out of law school would be testing in July while those who failed in July would retest in February. I suspect that if you fail once the odds are good that you will fail again.

July 2023 pass rate was 51% and the overall pass rate seems to be between 40% and 50% depending on year.

https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/admissions/Examinations/July-2023-CBX-Statistics.pdf

Fair. I actually did add most of that in an edit, because I do want to make sure I have my numbers right.

Still, I'm aware Kamala is not liked here, and I'm not that impressed by her either. But it seems a bit much to act like anyone at barely above average intelligence should be able to go to law school and pass the bar on the first try, when half of law school students couldn't.

I didn’t know she failed it, is that official or just a rumour?

I'd like to draw attention to a specific passage from Marcuse's The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man (the full essay begins on page 44):

Now there is, in the advanced technological societies of the West, indeed a large desublimation (compared with the preceding stages) in sexual mores and behavior, in the better living, in the accessibility of culture (mass culture is desublimated higher culture). Sexual morality has been greatly liberalized; moreover, sexuality is operative as commercial stimulus, business asset, status symbol. But does this mode of desublimation signify the ascendancy of the life-preserving and life-enhancing Eros over its fatal adversary? Freud's concept of sexuality may provide a cue for the answer.

Central in this concept is the conflict between sexuality (as the force of the pleasure principle) and society (the institution of the reality principle) as necessarily repressive of the uncompromised claims of the primary life instincts. By its innermost force, Eros becomes "demonstration against the herd instinct," "rejection of the group's influence." In the technological desublimation today, the all but opposite tendency seems to prevail. The conflict between pleasure and the reality principle is managed by a controlled liberalization which increases satisfaction with the offerings of society. But in this form of release, libidinal energy changes its social function: to the degree to which sexuality is sanctioned and even encouraged by society (not "officially," of course, but by the mores and behavior considered as "regular"), it loses the quality which, according to Freud, is its essentially erotic quality, that of freedom from social control. In this sphere was the surreptitious freedom, the dangerous autonomy of the individual under the pleasure principle; its authoritarian restriction by the society bore witness to the depth of the conflict between individual and society, that is, to the extent of the repression of freedom. Now, with the integration of this sphere into the realm of business and entertainment, the repression itself is repressed: society has enlarged, not individual freedom, but its control over the individual. And this growth of social control is achieved, not by terror but by the more or less beneficial productivity and efficiency of the apparatus.

TL;DR - "It was more fun when we were in the closet."

The suggestion here is that as sexuality (outside the context of reproduction in a heterosexual marriage) becomes more socially acceptable, it begins to lose the creative and rebellious aspects that made it so distinctive in the first place. As a Marxist, Marcuse's overriding concern here would have been with the political dimension of sexuality, specifically with how societal views on sex relate to the hypothetical future proletarian revolution. Dreaming dangerously in the bedroom leads to dreaming dangerously in the political realm as well - that's the hope, anyway. But if the bedroom simply isn't dangerous anymore, because our liberal tolerant society has declared that everything is acceptable now, then this opportunity for political agitation is lost.

It was suggested in last week's thread by certain posters of a more traditionalist bent that a libertine attitude towards sexuality destroys the "magic special soul-bonding" that is proper to an authentic sexual connection. It is quite ironic to see the arch-Marxists of the Frankfurt school arguing for much the same position; although admittedly, in different terms, and for different ends. Maybe Hlynka was right after all??

Of course, our current political situation throws a bit of a wrench in Marcuse's account of things, because there's plenty of old-style repression to go around; likely more than at any other time prior to the sexual revolution, despite superficial indications to the contrary. The global e-commerce market is not friendly to sexualized media, and is mostly getting more stringent over time (pornhub can't even take credit cards!). #MeToo can be seen as a spontaneous regeneration of older, more strictly codified standards surrounding courtship and interactions between men and women; although it has been purged of overtly religious content, it seems to me to derive from the same impulse as the more familiar religious style of moralism, because humanity clearly abhors a vacuum in this domain.

It was suggested in last week's thread by certain posters of a more traditionalist bent that a libertine attitude towards sexuality destroys the "magic special soul-bonding" that is proper to an authentic sexual connection. It is quite ironic to see the arch-Marxists of the Frankfurt school arguing for much the same position; although admittedly, in different terms, and for different ends. Maybe Hlynka was right after all??

Hlynka was right in the sense that some men just want to watch the world burn. Arch Marxists want Norms to overthrow, that’s what a revolution is, and they miss norms to overthrow when there aren’t any.

#MeToo can be seen as a spontaneous regeneration of older, more strictly codified standards surrounding courtship and interactions between men and women; although it has been purged of overtly religious content, it seems to me to derive from the same impulse as the more familiar religious style of moralism, because humanity clearly abhors a vacuum in this domain.

There’s an extent to which this is true, but there’s some clearly missing ingredients. Old style courtship was aimed at marriage with normal heterosexual sex as an inherent part therein. #metoo is not described thusly. It’s about stigmatizing normal heterosexual sex because it’s inherently an exercise in power relations between the sexes.

We can talk about the underlying motivations all you want, but at the end of the day the substantial difference in practice is right up above.

Marcuse reads like typical Freudian mythmaking. It is an interesting read if you assent to his implied assumptions, but worthless if you don’t. Is it actually the case that being sexually “rebellious” outside of norms leads to political revolutionary interests? I don’t think so; female thot-leaders online who parade themselves as sex workers often have the most boring political ideology, and that is still “impermissible” today, whereas the typical incel online has insane and sometimes truly revolutionary beliefs. Is it actually the case that sex outside of norms is freeing to an individual? Probably not. I can just as well argue, with the same amount of empirical evidence as the Freudian, that Freudian thinking is an elaborate psy-op to confuse a generation of Westerners, and my explanation is more parsimonious.

Regarding the naughtiness of sex, a new take: every human has an evolutionary predisposition to have “naughty” sex, where naughtiness is the feeling of secrecy and haste and aggression. In our evolutionary environment there were copious opportunities to copulate outside the view of other competing humans (don’t copulate in view of the woman you previously copulated with, or in view of another interested party, or another potential mate, or just in view of other humans generally). So humans have an instinct to want to have sex covertly. And they also want to have sex with haste, which increases the probability of pregnancy and permits more opportunities. And lastly they want to have sex with aggression, explained by men stealing women from other tribes or members and all of the historical evidences of that (founding myth of Rome, the tradition of fake “wife-kidnapping” as a marital rite in certain cultures).

If you can introduce the vibes of secrecy and haste and aggression — which describes so many fetishes and deviant communities and role-play and erotica — then the sex is more enjoyable. The liberalization of sex has taken away these features: sex itself is no longer a “secret” thing that polite company doesn’t talk about, something that maybe a married couple doesn’t talk about bluntly. It is no longer something you do hastily because of all the relatives who share your humble abode. And it is no longer intrinsically tied to male aggression because of the paranoia regarding consent culture and spousal rape and etc. Notice that all of these features could apply to vanilla, married sex! The more puritanical your culture is, the greater the vanilla sex. Making sex itself taboo actually cements its pleasure.

An aside: men also have an instinct to have sex with lots of novel women. This is the one thing that vanilla married sex cannot satisfy. But many tens of thousands of years ago, enterprising young women learned that if they changed their hair style, changed their hair color, changed their perfume, and wore new clothes, they could trick their mate into thinking she’s a whole other woman. Behold! The invention of make-up and deception. The women with an instinct to play dress up gained an enormous fertility advantage.

Marcuse reads like typical Freudian mythmaking. It is an interesting read if you assent to his implied assumptions, but worthless if you don’t.

I don't think you need to share many of his theoretical presuppositions to understand and evaluate the passage I quoted. You can just read his description of the phenomenon and see if you think it's accurate or not.

Is it actually the case that being sexually “rebellious” outside of norms leads to political revolutionary interests?

Well, there's not a one-to-one direct causal link, no. I think there can be surprising interrelations between seemingly disparate domains of life and culture though. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something that could be said here.

(For what it's worth, I'm not a Marxist, and I don't believe in the urgency of "revolution" in the way that Marxists do, so my investment in this question would be quite different from Marcuse's.)

I can just as well argue, with the same amount of empirical evidence as the Freudian, that Freudian thinking is an elaborate psy-op to confuse a generation of Westerners

I don't think it's that at all. In fact I think it's just the opposite - psychoanalysis provides a lot of clarity and insight into why people do the things they do.

To give a very simple personal example: every year, my mother hosts a rather large Christmas party for our extended family. Every year, she swears she'll never do it again, because it's too much stress, because her family is taking advantage of her generosity, because they don't appreciate all the work she does, etc. And yet every year, she continues to host the same party right on schedule.

What is the reason for the discrepancy between her words and actions? I used to think, well maybe she's just too meek to tell everyone "no", maybe she's just that selfless, maybe she just doesn't want to upset people. But psychoanalysis gave me an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she enjoys it! Meaning she enjoys all the parts of the process that are allegedly such a "hassle" to her. She enjoys the feeling of being stressed, she enjoys feeling like all the work is being unfairly shoved on her, she enjoys being judged by our extended family, even if she's not consciously aware of enjoying it.

Psychoanalysis posits that, when someone keeps doing the same thing over and over, the most parsimonious explanation is that they're doing it because they want to. It's possible that someone can want to do something even when they claim to not want to, and even when the pleasure of the act takes on the superficial form of pain. (This has immediate applications to politics - why do leftists find cishetero patriarchal oppression under every rock they turn over? Because they want to, it's what they're hoping for. They want the feeling of being oppressed - that's the whole point. It's just the same patterns that Freud observed in his "hysterical" female patients, inflated to a societal scale.)

You might say that this is just obvious, or that it's common sense, or whatever - that's fine. But I can't recall this point being made anywhere else as forcefully and clearly as it is in psychoanalytic thought.

Mercuse is such a fascinating figure to me. I can never tell whether he's so brilliant that I can't understand him, or deliberately obfuscating with his crazy word choices and meandering sentences. It's like every sentence from him is some sort of motte and bailey.

Still, even though he frustrates me, I do often get a feeling from his words that I find myself agreeing with. In this case I think he's onto something. It's sort of like going to a "punk rock" concert, where the band is all middle-aged millionaires, performing in a stadium with corporate sponsors, and the audience is also middle-aged begging to hear the same songs they've heard their entire lives. Or a "school of rock" where adults teach teenagers exactly how to pose, dress, and perform. Technically there's nothing with these things, and people seem to enjoy them, but still you get the sense that something ineffable has been lost. The traditional music scenes where young people made up stuff themselves and performed live in front of other youth with no rules seems to be disappearing.

Maybe an analogy would be a "soft" martial art, like Judo. As I understand it, Judo works by trying to redirect the opponents force, instead of directly opposing it. So while an old-school oppressive society would say "don't have sex outside of marriage! sex is bad and evil and illegal!" and that leads to young people directly opposing it, with crazy chaotic energy. A modern liberal society says "yes, have sex, it's perfectly fine, we won't stop you. But here are the recommended, socially-approved ways to do it." it channels you into just a few specific venues and styles, which have long sense been mined out of any sort of new ideas. "Go on tinder, then go to get coffee, then go for a walk in a public park, then get affirmative consent, then engage in at least 1 hour of female-centric foreplay, then wash and use a condom, then discuss what happened." It turns sex into some sort of bizarre job-hunting process, and manages to make sex unsexy.

Meanwhile internet porn just gets wilder and wilder, because it's one of the few places left that's explicitly outside the control of mainstream American media, and young people feel free to do and ask for whatever they want. I wonder how much longer that will last.

Mercuse is such a fascinating figure to me. I can never tell whether he's so brilliant that I can't understand him, or deliberately obfuscating with his crazy word choices and meandering sentences. It's like every sentence from him is some sort of motte and bailey.

I think on a word-by-word level, Marcuse is pretty clear and straightforward. He's more straightforward than Adorno, at any rate. Can you provide an example of a sentence or paragraph that you thought was deliberately obfuscated? It's possible that you're just missing some necessary context for what he's saying.

It's sort of like going to a "punk rock" concert, where the band is all middle-aged millionaires, performing in a stadium with corporate sponsors, and the audience is also middle-aged begging to hear the same songs they've heard their entire lives.

Everyone wants to think that they're more punk than they actually are.

One time I was at a concert to see Slipknot and their singer said "this is a big fuck you to all the corporate suits who want to keep this music down!" And I'm like, dude. You are literally a corporate and mainstream band. Your songs are in Guitar Hero. Chill dude.

Phrases like "desublimated higher culture", "the pleasure principle," "the institution of the reality principle," or "demonstration against the herd instinct" are not part of my normal vocabulary. Maybe they're common in marxist/freudian writings, and maybe people who have spent enough time reading that stuff know exactly what he means. But for me, I have to guess, and I'm never quite sure if I really know what he's talking about.

But yeah, fell you 100% about going to a modern day big-budget "punk" concert. It's still fun but it's weird. I assume the band is in on the joke though and it's all kayfabe.

Those are all more or less well-defined terms you could bump into depending on your social circles. It might be beneficial to just read up on them a bit

if your social circle is full of people still discussing 100-year old pseudoscience as if it's something to take for granted, you might wante to reconsider your life choices.

Phrases like "desublimated higher culture", "the pleasure principle," "the institution of the reality principle,"

Ah, I see. These are all common terms in psychoanalytic theory and they have relatively straightforward definitions.

It's easy to forget how much of this stuff you start taking for granted after you've been immersed in it for so long!

"demonstration against the herd instinct"

Just another way of saying "not being a conformist".

Man, screw you. This started with you posting something you had just read and apparently you've devoted a huge chunk of your life to reading this nonsense. I admitted in good faith that it was hard to understand, as I think any normal person would, and you just look down on me with this obvious snobbishness. That's exactly the same feeling I get from Mercuse and all of his ilk. Go enjoy immersing yourself in Freudian pseudoscience, I'm sure that will get you a tenured humanities position.

Man, screw you.

Don't do this. One-day ban.

Wow. That wasn't my intention at all. I'm not sure where I went wrong, but I didn't mean any of that.

At a basic level I just wanted to reaffirm what you already guessed: you were right that they were common phrases in philosophical circles. When I said that they had "relatively straightforward definitions", what I was trying to convey was that they're nothing to be intimidated by. People aren't smart just because they use those words. You too could look up the words and learn what they mean (if you wanted to! you don't have to, of course!), and then you'd understand them just as well as the "experts". The words are no big deal. That's all I meant. There was certainly no snobbishness intended.

I didn't actually go into the definitions of the terms myself because I wasn't sure if you would actually be interested, but I'm happy to do that if you or anyone else is.

I fed "desublimated higher culture" into Google and found this conversation, Marcuse's book and

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed.

Trying Bing.com

There are no results for "desublimated higher culture"

Check your spelling or try different keywords

Typing

"the pleasure

into Google gets me various autocompletions

The pleasure principle Geometrie De La Mort TV series

The pleasure principle Studio album by Gary Numan

Clearly the phrase once had cultural cachet.

It gets worse. Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(

Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(

Pleasure principle and reality principle are very simple concepts, yes. Which is exactly what I said in the post you replied to.

Freud's concept of sublimation is that unacceptable impulses (especially sexual ones) get redirected towards socially acceptable ends (especially art and science), thereby instilling the target of the redirection with a sort of elevated aura of importance. "Desublimated" higher culture would then be higher culture demystified, stripped of its aura so its material reality could be laid bare, and deprived of the underlying psychic intensity that had been redirected from the sexual drive.

The traditional music scenes where young people made up stuff themselves and performed live in front of other youth with no rules seems to be disappearing.

Wait, isn't that TikTok right now?

The middle school I volunteered at had to implement strict restrictions on cell phone use because the students were engrossed in social media, in particularly TikTok. From what I saw, the kids weren't merely passively consuming it. Quite a few posted their own videos, and a lot of the classroom distraction / disruption resulted from these locally-made posts rather than from viral videos. (Those happened too, of course.) That's youth communicating with one another and jockeying for status and recognition among themselves. Way more interesting than the official school curriculum. (Relevant Far Side cartoon.)

Thirty years ago, a way to impress other youths was to get start a band, or to know some good local bands, or to know a local spot where some good local bands would be playing. Now, a way to impress other youths is to post a video that goes viral (at least among your group), or to know someone whose video went viral, or to be plugged in to some less-known sites that share videos that may go viral and be the first to share those among your friends.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

thats why i specified live. very different to perform in front of your local peer group, with a whole party atmosphere, vs uploading a video for random strangers. most kids just passively watch videos that already have millions of views.

Yes, most youths watch videos that are already viral. What I observed is that, even then, a lot of the time the youth's motivation for watching those videos is social. Either someone they know shared the video with them, or it's the video that other kids are talking about. "Fear of missing out" is a key driver here. Yes, a lot of it is just that stuff on their phones is much more interesting than the boring class, like videos and games. But a lot of it is social, and specifically social with the kids they know in-person rather than randos on the internet.

Once I was at this social gathering; my acquaintances brought their teens, the latter also friends. So the adults are all talking to each other, and these three teens are sitting quietly off in a corner, side-by-side, absorbed in their phones. So I watch them, and I see that occasionally one of them giggles, like out of the blue. I casually drift to their corner, peek at their phones. Sure 'nuf, they are texting each other, and sharing links. "Really?", I said, "y'all sitting next to each other, and still texting?" They just gave me this look, like, how-can-you-boomer-possibly-understand?

Kids these days.

Sharing links seems like a reasonable...reason to text, since you can't say links. I suppose also if they want to dissuade prying ears (the adults in the room).

But, I have a sneaking suspicion that fondness for texting is related to the younger generation's socialization problems. Usually people point out that technology causes awkwardness, but I imagine there is a feedback loop here: If you're bad at reading body language and tone, you might prefer the clarity of text.

That's a reasonable hypothesis. These three in particular were very well-adjusted young people with plenty of in-person friends, but maybe in general there is that feedback loop.

But if the bedroom simply isn't dangerous anymore, because our liberal tolerant society has declared that everything is acceptable now, then this opportunity for political agitation is lost.

Well, aside for that one group that it is much more dangerous to take to bed than it was in the '70s (or any time in the last 100 years before them). Which, speaking of political agitation and old-style repression, consider the following:

"There will be nothing but curiosity and enjoyment of the process of life. No competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always, do not forget this, Karen - never will be the intoxication of power, never increasing, but constantly growing more overt. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of elevating a friend who is worthy. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an attractive woman pressing her breasts into a little boy's face - forever." (SFW, enough)

You'll recognize that "stare at my [metaphorical] goods, and be enriched simply by their existence" as the promise of liberalism. We don't tolerate expressions of that any more because we are no longer liberal; instead, the women who should be encouraging young men to develop properly by doing that are instead invested in [quite literally, in some cases] cutting that expression off right to the quick. It can't be permissible for people to give sex or commitment outside of what biology dictates because there's serious money to be made instead- the organism needs to exists as an instrument of alienated labor, not as a subject of self realization.

(Which is the steelman context for the above. There's literally zero benefit to older women [traditionally: extracts zero resources while not benefiting from looking pretty] matching with younger men [traditionally: provides zero sex appeal while not benefiting from being able to extract resources]; which means that if they do it and stick together, they do it for self-actualization: because they want to. And if you squint a little, you'll notice that "this is ultimately what I want you to have, here it is, I know you're not quite ready but your wanting to be is enough" is exactly how God operates. I'm sure that's a total coincidence though.)

KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys (along with a few posts about how old women abuse young boys in the public education system); and I think there's something to the prohibition of the latter in a society as the former starts to take over, starting with the pathologization and assumptions of bad faith in everything they might do, making sure women who are psychologically closer to men are marginalized/suppressed or outright mutilated, disrupt the pipeline for people who don't have sex-magic-soul-bond/see sex as merely a means to an end goal to realize that about themselves, and the like. It's trying to cut the people who see sex and commitment as described above off entirely- they can't be allowed to exist, because how would anyone be forced to buy their sexual labor then?

Maybe Hlynka was right after all?

Yes, but you have to distill the initial conditions and sociobiological incentives of the groups in conflict to figure that out because our language is insufficient to explain that. Much like how I use "straight", for that matter.

KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys (along with a few posts about how old women abuse young boys in the public education system);

Should I browse his substack, twitter, or motteposting to find these?

and I think there's something to the prohibition of the latter in a society as the former starts to take over, starting with the pathologization and assumptions of bad faith in everything they might do, making sure women who are psychologically closer to men are marginalized/suppressed or outright mutilated,

Does Kulak write more about this? Can you? Why would bitter old women disrupt the Tomboys? Is it so bitter old women can get more men? Earlier you allude to the tension between self-actualization and... performing sexual labor? But now you're alluding to the tension between which share of women get higher market power?

I've heard some lamentations about Tomboys (trans'ing, etc.), and one of the things I also don't fully understand is the vitriol thrown at "pick-me's." But it makes sense to me as a pejorative for psychologically-male women. If this is true, it doesn't seem to go with your thesis. I don't see how bitter old women (feminist Cathedral, journos, etc.) as driving pick-me hate. It seems to me pick-me hate is more grassroots.

disrupt the pipeline for people who don't have sex-magic-soul-bond/see sex as merely a means to an end goal to realize that about themselves, and the like. It's trying to cut the people who see sex and commitment as described above off entirely- they can't be allowed to exist, because how would anyone be forced to buy their sexual labor then?

This is where I get really confused! Are you saying the bitter old women are disrupting the pipeline for "asexuals" (I mean those without the soul bond - not the way queers use it) to self-realize? Why does common knowledge of asexuals' existence mean that less sexual labor will happen?

My experience: It's been system-2!obvious to me for a very long time that sex is a part of power, and also a currency with value. But that has not changed my behavior at all towards obtaining sex and status. Also, the talk of "magical soul bonding" makes me think I don't have it. So I'm confused why asexuals becoming "woke" or "redpilled" (to appropriate more terms and applying them differently) will mean less sexual labor.

Maybe this has already happened? Did dating-app-ification, and social media in general, cause people to become more skilled socially? By that, I mean have we become more mimetic? Are we more meta as we mention "vibes," "bad looks" and "reading the room?" Last week's first Frat post had a comment claiming women don't actually desire sex, so maybe this is because of the novel, widespread female dating app experience? Maybe all this is contributing to modern adolescent sexlessness?

Should I browse his substack, twitter, or motteposting to find these?

Twitter. He's on a kick ranting about this.

Can you?

You posted (either intentionally or unintentionally; I legitimately cannot tell) one of the replies to the comment where I unpacked this. In fairness, my replies to this topic are starting to get fragmented, since I make a similar post every few months rather than just copy-pasting.

Is this it or do I need to go way further back? I had forgotten about this thread, but I do see the resemblences!

I was more directly thinking about this. Being a high-decoupler and what I describe as "asexual" in the comment I liked are more or less the same thing; 'asexual' is a slight refinement to 'high decoupler' but maybe the 'sexual' throws people off too much.

Speaking solely to your question regarding pick-me hate (I’ll let your original interlocutor handle the rest), my theory has always been that pick-mes are the equivalent of scabs in the sexual marketplace. Let’s assume that most women don’t want to act male-brained: they don’t want to have to play video games or watch anime to land a good boyfriend. In the absence of pick-mes, they don’t have to: if all women categorically refuse to engage in male-brained behavior, then any man who wants a girlfriend will have to accept that. But now, if we introduce the existence of pick-mes, the equilibrium changes: it is possible for men (including presumably high-status men) to get a girlfriend that aligns more with their interests, meaning that ceteris paribus, a man would choose a pick-me over the equivalent “normal girl”. This means that in order for a normal girl to maintain her same level of attractiveness, she has to engage in a bit of pick-meing herself to stay afloat (and as we’ve previously assumed, most women don’t want to do that). Shaming pick-mes is therefore a method of preventing this from happening, in the same way that anti-scab tactics are methods of preventing wages from being lowered. I also hypothesize that the male equivalent of this is “simp-shaming”.

Note that the one time I shared this theory in real life to a woman, she wholly denied it, saying that the reason for pick-me shaming is that it is simply fundamentally embarrassing to see a woman debasing herself for a man. But even if that’s how this behavior is psychologized or rationalized, it still serves the broader game-theoretic purpose discussed above. (The same goes for simp-shaming.)

saying that the reason for pick-me shaming is that it is simply fundamentally embarrassing to see a woman debasing herself for a man

Discussing how salespeople negotiate deals puts the salesperson at a disadvantage, hence her refusal to entertain the notion. Of course, I already covered that too.

to see a woman debasing herself for a man

Which is why my entire thesis is "the women who don't see it as debasement aren't normal". That's why I have to cut a line between the two; most people seem incapable of acknowledging such a distinction even exists (then proceed to bury it in the term "women").

Well, aside for that one group that it is much more dangerous to take to bed than it was in the '70s (or any time in the last 100 years before them).

Right, I noted at the end that Marcuse's empirical description was not entirely correct today (especially if you're a straight white male).

If you want a picture of the future, imagine an attractive woman pressing her breasts into a little boy's face - forever." (SFW, enough)

This was a great anime by the way.

KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys

What? No it's not. It's dominated by adult men who have a lot of money.

Maybe Hlynka was right after all?

Yes

No. My apologies, that was an attempt to interject humor into the OP. He wasn't right. He insisted that non-identical ideologies were actually identical. Our language was insufficient to justify his position because his position was incorrect.

Older men have only the authority vested into them in their ability to lead younger men: either in the personal level in tribal and medieval context, or in the ideological and abstract state apparatus in the current era. Young men are the currency of science, warfare, and economics. No vigorous movement has succeeded without them.

I disagree. The currency of economics is, ultimately, capital.

Sure, young men (and women) could band together and take over Somalia, and live without any older person telling them what to do.

However, most are wise enough to see that that this would be a terrible decision. Instead, they live in big cities paying high rents to older people, working in companies controlled by older people (at least indirectly), and voting for political parties controlled by older people.

The suggestion here is that as sexuality (outside the context of reproduction in a heterosexual marriage) becomes more socially acceptable, it begins to lose the creative and rebellious aspects that made it so distinctive in the first place.

This isn't right at all. The issue for Marcuse isn't the acceptability of previously-taboo sexual preferences in the first place; its the way in which that acceptability is generated. If the acceptability comes from a critical mass of people exercising their own independent choices, for Marcuse it's a good thing: "[r]eactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality ceases to be a threat to culture and can itself lead to culture-building if the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labor, but as a subject of self realization." Eros & Civilization, ppg. 191-192. What Marcuse is criticizing is pseudo-sexual liberation handed out by a "culture industry" just as controlled by the bourgeois and alienated from the great mass of the population as the means of industrial production. It's also tied up in Marcuse's (and the rest of his fellow Frankfurt School colleagues') instinctive revulsion at the American culture they got plonked down in, which they viewed as horrifyingly common and unrefined compared to their highly-individuated and sensitive central-European lives got ripped away from them.

As Horkheimer wrote in his letter on Freud, "the greater a work, the more it is rooted in the concrete historical situation." As refugees from Central Europe, who had been tutored in all its rich cultural heritage had to offer, they were inevitably ill-at-ease in the less-rarified atmosphere of their new American environment. On occasion, this alienation meant unresponsiveness to the spontaneous elements in American popular culture - Adorno's unremitting hostility to jazz, for example, suffers from a certain a priori insensitivity. But at the same time, it provided an invaluable critical distance from the culture, which prevented the Institut from equating mass culture with true democracy. The category of "repressive desublimation" which Marcuse was to develop years later to characterize the pseudo-liberation of modern culture, existed in embryo in the personal experiences of the Institut's members. Having known an alternative cultural milieu, they were unwilling to trade in its promesse de bonheur for the debased coin of the culture industry.

As Adorno later explained, the phrase "culture industry" was chosen by Horkheimer and himself in Dialectic of the Enlightenment because of its antipopulist connotations. The Frankfurt School disliked mass culture, not because it was democratic, but precisely because it was not. The notion of "popular" culture, they argued, was ideological; the culture industry administered a nonspontaneous, reified, phony culture rather than the real thing. The old distinction between high and low culture had all but vanished in the "stylized barbarism" of mass culture. . . .

Increasingly, the Institut came to feel that the culture industry enslaved men in far more subtle and effective ways than the crude methods of domination practiced in earlier eras. The false harmony of particular and universal was in some ways more sinister than the clash of social contradictions, because of its ability to lull its victims into passive acceptance. With the decline of mediating forces in the society - here the Institut drew on its earlier studies of the lessening role of the family [!] in the process of socialization - the chances for the development of negative resistance were seriously diminished. Moreover, the spread of technology served the culture industry in America just as it helped tighten the control of authoritarian governments in Europe. Radio, Horkheimer and Adorno argued, was to fascism as the printing press had been to the Reformation.

~Jay, Martin: The Dialectical Imagination, pg. 215-217.

"[r]eactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality ceases to be a threat to culture and can itself lead to culture-building if the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labor, but as a subject of self realization." Eros & Civilization, ppg. 191-192

I've never encountered this passage before (my first-hand knowledge of his work doesn't extend much past The Aesthetic Dimension and some isolated fragments), but it did occur to me while writing my post that he probably thought or said something like this at some point - that there's sexuality under capitalism, and there's sexuality in a future post-alienated state, and they're distinct phenomena that require distinct treatments. But I didn't want to bloat the post by going into those distinctions, so I just tried to provide a gloss on the passage I quoted, particularly these sentences:

By its innermost force, Eros becomes "demonstration against the herd instinct," "rejection of the group's influence." In the technological desublimation today, the all but opposite tendency seems to prevail. [...] to the degree to which sexuality is sanctioned and even encouraged by society (not "officially," of course, but by the mores and behavior considered as "regular"), it loses the quality which, according to Freud, is its essentially erotic quality, that of freedom from social control.

Since this passage is specifically about the nature and function of sexuality under capitalism, rather than a non-alienated sexuality, I think the summary I gave was basically correct, albeit simplified.

It seems to me the linked post (by ThisIsSin) is talking about sex as magical-pair-bonding activity and Marcuse is talking about about sex as magical-thought-criming activity. They seem only cursory related to me, only both lamenting a too-sex-positive culture. I guess you sort of pre-empt this by saying they argue for it "in different terms." I suppose I should take this to mean "vaguely agree in direction, but for unrelated reasons."

I also think MeToo only has a superficial similarity to traditional sexual norms. There's nothing traditional about acknowledging "power dynamics" and being creeped out by older men and younger women being together. I would say the impulse that drives MeToo is "increasing the status of women." Like the earlier example, MeToo is vaguely in the same direction as protestant prudes -- it is the 2020's version moralistic sexual judgementalism.

Revisiting In Defence of Transracialism

Rebecca Tuvel's 2017 publication in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy drew heated controversy and shed light on the cannibalistic nature of modern progressive thought. The thrust of the paper is that "considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism," and on this basis it should be equally acceptable for one to transition race as it is for one to transition gender. Rather than defuse the argument through rational discourse, there were instead widespread calls for the paper to be retracted and its author was excoriated on social media. Numerous editors and directors of Hypatia resigned or were replaced.

The thrust of the argument is thus: transition between identities is predicated on both how an individual feels - their self-identification - as well as society's willingness to honour it. In the case of gender there is no question (amongst certain sects of society), but in the case of race societal acceptance is close to nonexistent. Objections to the latter amount to disputing whether or not it is possible to feel like another race, or whether it is even possible to change race at all; arguments of the first kind amount to disputes regarding biology, that, even if resolved, "should" be independent of whether or not society should find such behaviours acceptable, while arguments of the second are rooted in the observation that biological attributes of one's person are mutable, while the historical fact of their ancestry is not.

Yet, as a social construct, ancestry is just one determinant of race that intersubjectively has been chosen by society as predominant; there is no reason, a priori, that it should be the primary determinant. Indeed, given the precedent set by society in loosening its criteria for what constitutes gender, it similarly ought to be possible to loosen such criteria for race, and to consider other factors beyond ancestry such as lived experience, culture, upbringing, and indeed self-identification. All such criteria are merely social agreements, and one can imagine a genuinely transracial individual facing persecution at the hands of a society intolerant of their condition, much in the same way transgender individuals only a few short years ago did until societal attitudes towards traditional gender roles and concepts were adjusted. Further objections on ethical grounds include harm done to marginalized races, through either insult and bad-faith, fraudulent appropriation, or the exercise of privilege across an imbalance of power between races.

Enter Canada

The Globe and Mail recently published an article regarding the NunatuKavut Community Council, which, on the basis of self-identification alone, "has received nearly $74-million in federal funding for Indigenous programs or projects related to their claims of Indigenous identity since 2010" - claims which are widely disputed: "They aren’t recognized as Inuit by any other federally recognized, rights-holding Inuit collective," and thus fail Tuvel's second criterion of trans acceptance: society's willingness to honour the identity.

Naturally, the NunatuKavut community affirms its own self-identification: “We know who our grandfathers are. We know where we come from," consequently upholding the prevailing cultural notion that ancestry is a key determinant of race. In which case, should it not be possible for the NunatuKavut to furnish genealogical and/or genetic proof of their ancestry?

Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, "worries a risk-averse federal government does not want to be seen as judging who is and is not Indigenous." This harkens back to similar arguments, now regarded as transphobic, that one should be required to furnish biological proof of their gender, in the form of chromosomes, gametes, or any other number of physical markers. Why should the government need to concern itself with the genitalia or DNA of the citizenry? Tuvel herself notes,

Therefore, anyone who suggests that all women share some biologically based feature of experience that sheds light on a shared psychological experience will have to show not only that biological sex gives rise to a particular gendered psychology, but that there is something biological that all women share.

... evoking "what is a woman" type questions that have already been litigated ad nauseam. Yet she continues, drawing parallels with biological and genetic accounts of race, which are similarly nonsensical:

If the biological account of race were true, this might pose a problem for the possibility of changing one’s race. However, racial groupings of people are arbitrary from a genetic point of view. That is, they are no more genetically similar than random groupings of racially diverse individuals; indeed, we now know that more genetic variation exists within any one racial group than between racial groups (Lewontin 1972, 397).

And although some biologists insist there are genetic differences between human groupings, the human groupings they have in mind do not result from our current racial categories (Blum 2002, 143). If we were to follow these biologists’ racial groupings, then, it will turn out that many of us are in some sense “lying” about our races.

There is also the matter of growing up with the lived experience of marginalization and disadvantage, similarly to how Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who transitioned to the black race, underwent "the humiliating experience of having her hair searched by the TSA and of being subject to police harassment as a black woman (Nashrulla, Griffin, and Dalrymple 2015)." Should society not weight such experiences more heavily in the determination of one's race, irrespective of the accidentals of their ancestry? Having already dispensed with notions of biology in the account of gender, should we not dispense with notions of ancestry in the account of race? Race, as Tuvel establishes, is itself a social construct, and we have arbitrarily decided upon ancestry as a primary determinant of it; yet:

If ancestry is a less emphasized feature in some places (for example, in Brazil), then Dolezal’s exposure to black culture, experience living as someone read as black, and her self-identification could be sufficient to deem she is black in those places. And because there is no fact of the matter about her “actual” race from a genetic standpoint, these features of Dolezal’s experience would be decisive for determining her race in that particular context. The crucial point here is that no “truth” about Dolezal’s “real” race would be violated."

The NunatuKavut's about page tells a similar tale of colonialism and marginalization:

Like all Indigenous peoples in Canada, we too, suffered the effects of colonialism. Outsiders pillaged our resources, brought their own form of government, denied our language and many of our people experienced resettlement and residential schools.

Their story page is replete with historical and cultural artifacts chronicling their story as an Indigenous people:

Hundreds of NunatuKavut Inuit children, as well as children from other areas of Labrador, attended residential schools in the Cartwright area between 1920 and 1964.

While some enjoyed the experience, many felt isolated and neglected. Some even endured physical or sexual abuse. The schools were designed to transform and “improve” the children by separating them from the influence of their communities and by teaching them British and American social values and behaviours. Instead, many simply learned to feel ashamed of their families and Inuit heritage and suffered from being disconnected from home.

If society sees fit to heed such stories of hardship, abuse, and marginalization often ascribed to Indigenous peoples, and yet continues to gatekeep race on the basis of documentation or ancestry, then perhaps it is the societal norm that ought to be changed. Otherwise we run into dilemmas reminiscent of individuals assigned male at birth who identify as women and yet face persecution due to a lack of societal tolerance for their transgender self-identification, on the basis of biology or otherwise.

“Why would you want to take food out of the mouths of our people? Why would you want to hurt our people and our communities?”

indeed, we now know that more genetic variation exists within any one racial group than between racial groups (Lewontin 1972, 397).

Have seen this cited many times, just now got around to giving it a read.

Given it’s 1972 of course the authors aren’t working with fully sequenced genomes, they’re using 17 blood group markers. They’re also using racial groupings that put South Asians in the same category as the Irish.

I expect that genes correlated with traits that people associate with race such as skin color, epicanthic eye folds, height, etc. will vary between groups as they do according to visual observation.

I took anthropology classes in college. They loved using "more variation within racial groups than between them". They didn't cite sources for that claim. I'm rather hoping there is some sturdier basis than that 1972 paper. I would still suspect it is false, but they should at least cook up some rigorous-seeming papers to support it.

There's a sense in which this statement is trivially true- the khoikhoi and hadza and pygmies are all black.

This sense has the disadvantage of not addressing the question, but it is literally correct.

Let me generalize:

Suppose that it's costly and disadvantageous to be X. But there is a benefit to being X, in certain circumstances; in particular, there is the benefit of in-group support from other X-ers if one is a recognized X. If that's the sole benefit, then only the criteria set by these other X-ers matters. Either there is a way to for a non-X-er to join (restricted or now), or there isn't.

Now suppose that a powerful entity wants to benevolently help out the disadvantaged community of X. Then those who are not-recognized-X now have two different incentives for becoming recognized-X: in-group support, and/or a slice of the entity's largesse. If the form of that largesse is finite, then it incentivizes the already-recognized-X-ers to vigorously insist on the X-community criteria for recognition of X-ness. But the tighter those criteria are, and the higher the benefits flowing from the entity, the more likely someone not-recognized-X will insist that they're really X--to the entity or the larger community that entity is trying to impress with its benevolence--even if that gains them nothing from other X-ers but hostility.

So, I predict:

  • If top Chinese universities institute affirmative action quotas for Uygurs, there will be applicants claiming to be Uygur without any documented Uygur ancestry but whose grandma traveled to Xinjiang that one time.

  • If Medicaid becomes available to any recovering alcoholic, there will be applicants who insist they fit the bill because they used to make fools of themselves while tipsy at parties and are still embarrassed by that.

  • If UCLA decides to give scholarships to furries, there will be applicants who say they qualify because they once dressed up as a sexy fox for Halloween.

Goodhart's law strikes again....

In hindsight, one of the things that struck me as odd and continues to strike me as odd about Tuvel's paper was the way that defenders sought to minimise the significance of the paper itself. I remember some of its defenders saying things like "this isn't very significant, it's trying to nitpick a slight clarification about the way we use language, this is what philosophers do all the time", and so on.

It seemed strange to me that philosophers would be so critical of the significance of their own profession. What Tuvel does in the paper is argue for an equivalence between transgenderism and transracialism. That would seem to leave two options, if we wish to be intellectually consistent. Either 1) we ought to treat transgenderism and transracialism equivalently (whether affirming both or denying both), or 2) we assert that Tuvel's argument is wrong somewhere (and implicitly ought to show where it goes wrong). Those are your options, if you take philosophy remotely seriously. Either Tuvel is right, in which case we should treat the two situations the same, or she's wrong, in which case it's incumbent on the objector to show where she's wrong.

Either way, that isn't a minor clarification of a point of language - it's an argument that leads to either radically revising what we think it means to be of a particular race, or else rejecting transgender identities along with transracial identities. If that argument is correct, it's a big deal. It's not a silly linguistic game.

It seemed strange to me that philosophers would be so critical of the significance of their own profession.

There's actually a long tradition within philosophy of doing just that! Although in this case, that's irrelevant; it's clear that all of the criticism of Tuvel's paper was politically motivated.

It is ipso facto more reasonable for a white man to become black, or red, or yellow, or whatever, than for a man to become a woman. Of course the contradiction would be noticed eventually in a feminist journal. Academics have many vices in thought, but few of these people are dumb in the conventional sense. Honestly much of the ‘work’ of academia in grievance studies these days seems to be reconciling different claims in leftist dogma. So an exploration of two dogmas is to be expected.

Helene will probably be a weekly topic until every last American is rescued or buried, so I will start the conversation now with the latest updates I am aware of:

Biden has ordered "500 active-duty troops with advanced technological assets to move into Western North Carolina." I'm not sure what "advanced technological assets" they are deploying, hopefully it's something like helicopters, bridges, and drones.

There are many people asking why did he wait over a week to deploy these troops. This question is somewhat unfair in itself. In the same document Biden reminds the American people that there are already 1,000 troops on the ground (though it's not clear to me if that is across the affected region or specifically in North Carolina. The numbers he gives for National Guard is the number across Florida to Tennessee.)

I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out. Young kids naked and crying for their parents, ropes still wrapped around their arms from where their parents desperately tied them to trees above water. People without a roof over their heads or potable water, sewers flooded, hornets unhoused, prime matter for disease and misery. Roads and bridges gone, and no easy path to rebuilding them in the same places due to the banks and cliffs they occupied being washed out.

My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.

In Greenville, SC, FEMA has taken over a runway with 10 helicopters that loitered all Sunday. For the past week, that runway was being utilized by private charities who were sending materials into the disaster area. Yesterday, it was out of commission for no visible or communicated reason.

Meanwhile, a Blackhawk helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?), North Carolina. Was it intentional? I hope not. But it displays a level of incompetence that boggles the mind.

All the details indicate to me that the Feds think they can just say, "X number of troops, time to deploy" and solve the problem. But there's no real leadership. No one making a plan to actually help people. The Military and National Guard is too slow and cumbersome. Private charities are able to respond quickly in a crisis, because they have a shorter chain of command and fewer rules. This might be a weakness, in that they will make more mistakes, possibly put their own people's lives at risk. But in the face of the disaster, maybe that is what is needed.

Update: The North Carolina National Guard has taken credit for the Rotor Wash incident. https://x.com/NCNationalGuard/status/1843780336616124896

Those helicopters do seem to be parked on Runway 10/28 at Greenville Downtown Airport (ie as opposed to a taxiway). I think that video was taken from roughly here, looking north.

There is another runway at the airport. You can also hear what I think might be a plane taking off or landing in the video.

The organization he mentions ~speaking on behalf of in the video, Greenville Aviation, posted this Instagram Story:

We need to clarify a few things.

A video was posted making some false accusations about operations happening at GMU.

Yes, there were some helicopters parked at GMU, but they in no way interrupted any of our distribution efforts. They were parked on an inactive runway, and were completely out of the way. They are no longer staged here as of today.

As for drops being made, we no longer need volunteer pilots or planes, but thank you again to everyone that has volunteered so far.

I wasn't clear enough on what my complaint was. It bothers me that there were helicopters that were not being used. Not being serviced, not being loaded, not in the air, nothing. In a situation like this, helicopters are too valuable to waste on a runway.

We are lead by accountants who will say, "I diverted X helicopters to the crisis," but never give a thought to how they are used to accomplish a goal.

In Greenville, SC, FEMA has taken over a runway with 10 helicopters that loitered all Sunday. For the past week, that runway was being utilized by private charities who were sending materials into the disaster area. Yesterday, it was out of commission for no visible or communicated reason.

The visible reason would appear to be 10 helicopters that were relocated to one of the multiple runways at Greenville airport?

In fact, the video shows another still being used by private charities. There doesn't seem to have been a 'stop' of aid flow through the Greenville airport. There isn't even a claim that this runway is needed to reach Tennessee.

There is an accusation that the FEMA helicopters are doing nothing based on... a glance towards a hanger that you can't see inside. Planning? Briefing? Crew rest? No way to know.

Meanwhile, a Blackhawk helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?), North Carolina. Was it intentional? I hope not. But it displays a level of incompetence that boggles the mind.

Yeah, whoever setup a light-weight tent on asphalt without weighting or tying it to the ground was an idiot.

That sort of thing could cause a helicopter to crash if a tent flew up like that, let alone who on the ground could get hurt if a vehicle or just a too-busy person knocked into the tent to hard. This is why airports regularly check for foreign objects and debris anywhere helicopters or aircraft engines would be near.

It's a good thing that helicopter was looking around. Can you imagine if that distribution center was supposed to receive a delivery of air-lifted aid?

Like, say, from a bunch of helicopters staged at a NC airport, possibly waiting for the results of an aerial recon to see where there was a good distribution center that could receive a helicopter lift?

Or- wait.

Was your accusation of incompetence aimed at the helicopter for the rotor wash that sent unsecured tents flying?

It's unclear. One of your links was a condemnation of what would appear to be the movement of and staging helicopters for distribution operations, and the other link was a condemnation of what appeared to be a helicopter doing an aerial recon of a distribution center.

The visible reason would appear to be 10 helicopters that were relocated to one of the multiple runways at Greenville airport?

One of the two runways at Greenville airport.

Yeah, whoever setup a light-weight tent on asphalt without weighting or tying it to the ground was an idiot.

Now you're getting ridiculous.

Greenville airport has one runway

Wrong Greenville Airport. It's not Greenville Spartanburg, it's Greenville Downtown.

One of the two runways at Greenville airport.

Unless you think the loading and unloading happens at the runway itself, the point stands.

A 50% reduction of available runways is not the same as 50% airport throughput reduction, because the throughput of an airport is almost never limited by runway availability. This is why targeting runways is and of itself so rarely effective in a war, and why it's more important to target hangers and loading areas near the runways. Unless the runways are actually being constantly used at maximum capacity- which there is no reason to believe given the video's own lack of use of the still-active runaway and instead focus on a loading area- reducing runways is not what limits functional throughput.

This is especially true when a specific airport itself is not required to reach the end destination, which in this case is not Greenville but the places in Tennessee the video was claiming the flights were going to. There is no requirement for aid being flown to Tennessee to fly via the Greenville airport, because the aircraft flying to Tennessee via Greenville could fly via other airports. Fixed wing flights through Greenville could drop 100% and it wouldn't necessarily entail fewer goods reaching or passing through Tennessee airports.

Now you're getting ridiculous.

No, that was a shock-line opening of a genuine criticism. If the location is planned to be an aid distribution center, part of the plan's merit is how it plans to received aid to distribute.

Rotor wash is not an issue of aviator incompetence, it is the mechanical consequence of how helicopters fly in the first place. If you have any desire to receive aid via airlift, you need to plan your reception sites around those limitations. This means you need to not actively create aircraft safety hazards like FOD. There needs to be a place for helicopters to approach to either land or- at the very least- hover to hoist down pallets.

The issue is that the distribution point set up in the middle of a parking lot with an apparent lack of planning for receiving stuff by air. A parking lot is normally an excellent location for an impromptu helicopter zone. It's naturally flat, open, few obstructions to create rotor backwash, and naturally connected by and to roads for disseminating any goods downloaded from an aircraft quickly and efficiently to staging areas.

Instead, the on-site actors have made a functionally ground-only delivery reception point... in a disaster where ground-logistics were significantly degraded.

In order for that distribution point to receive any benefits from airlifted supplies, the airlifts will need to find somewhere else in the general area that meets helicopter requirements in order to unload. To reach the distribution site, those pallets will then need to be loaded on new vehicles, to be driven to the distribution point, which will then need to unload from the vehicles before it can be distributed.

This is not only doubles the number of logistical sites and loading logistics (forklifts, teams, etc) needed to support receiving aid, this also negates one of the advantages of air-lifted supplies in the first place, which is that they can be packaged in ways to facilitate fast dispersal that doesn't need forklifts that may be limited in a disaster area.

A pallet of rations air-lifted to a site doesn't necessarily need a forklift at all. If you have a surplus of bodies compared to forklifts- as is visible in the video- boxes of high-value/low-weight aid can just be directly carried off until the wooden pallet is all that is left, which can be picked up and moved elsewhere. This is far, far better in a disaster context than imposing a requirement to lift the pallet 5+ feet into the air (to put it into a truck for transport).

But this can't be done, because of how the organizers of the site have taken and chosen to use a parking lot. Which includes their choice of tent placement and not security it (or trash).

Now, maybe there are extenuating circumstances. Maybe that lot is the only one in the area. Maybe there are no resources to secure tents. Maybe there was literally nowhere to drag the loose trash that was just left in the middle of a distribution site, no man-hours or volunteer teams to move refuse to dumpsters to clear up more space, no time to plan or prepare for how to receive aid, no space to do things otherwise.

Or maybe they were using unsecured tents as sunroofs in the middle of the parking lot because it was convenient, and left trash in place because moving it was inconvenient, and didn't think through what that would mean if/when they become potential recipients of helicopter delivery and someone was sent by to do a check.

I get that 'FEMA bad, local volunteers good' is the narrative of the cycle, but this is what bad implementation looks like. Good implementation may be hard, good implementation may be beyond what can be expected, but good implementation is not what you are seeing if you are looking at the ground in that video.

In order for that distribution point to receive any benefits from airlifted supplies, the airlifts will need to find somewhere else in the general area that meets helicopter requirements in order to unload

In the specific instance I've seen, the volunteers were actively trying to signal to the helicopter not to land and were specifically closing that particular area to airlifts.

Also, that helicopter did not land. It just washed the area by flying low and they flew away. This seems more like a lack of situational awareness on the part of the pilot than bad logistical planning.

My attempted Steelman (but also not really) is that FEMA/FedGov has absolute GOBS of emergency resources on tap that it can shower into the area, but it has a real 'legibility' issue, and ad hoc relief efforts make that harder, not easier.

That is, due to lack of decent infrastructure in these areas (esp. after the storm) FedGov can't tell where their aid is most needed, where it can be deployed effectively (i.e. whether there's airstrips and landing areas and people on the ground to distribute aid) and how much aid has already been deployed.

From their perspective dropping 1000 tons of resources into an area that 'only' needed 100 tons is a misallocation, esp. if the place 50 miles over that needed 1000 tons only gets 100 tons.

Private groups that aren't registered and reporting to FEMA are also not legible, so FEMA can't tally the aid they provide into the totals for a given area.

Their attempts to gain enough control and insight into the region to be able to figure this out would look like what we've been seeing. Checkpoints set up in and out of disaster areas, sporadic communications, and some resources idling around while they figure out the best place to send them.

All of this is to say that FEMA 'wants' to be able to coordinate efforts and maximize the impact of their aid, but until the situation is legible enough to them to see what is actually happening, their immediate efforts will be based on figuring out how to deploy their resources.

/steelman

The flip side of the legibility issues is that from FEMA's perspective, letting people die while figuring all this stuff out is not the worst outcome because a dead body eventually becomes legible, they can tally up the dead and identify them and update their records and produce a nice, tidy report about the death toll of the storm, since a dead body doesn't get more dead they can take their time to do this too.

So I worry that the lack of urgency is in part due to simple incentives to establish knowledge and some level of control of the local region before actually attempting to help the locals, and a few dozen extra dead people in the meantime doesn't show up as a problem, just another piece of data to come out of the storm that they have to catalogue, and explain why certain decisions were made.

But if the mandate is to mitigate the logistics and supply issue, legibility is in fact a failure. All of the time spent confronting groups, confiscating their supplies to audit them, and so on means failure at *the reason we bothered to create FEMA in the first place. I think this is one of many things Neo-Reactionary thinking is correct about. The state apparatuses are rewarded or punished and basically held to account on process and legibility rather than accomplishing the mission at hand. And so these agencies spend much time making sure that they aren’t going to get dinged for not following the process that most agencies suck at the mission they exist to do.

I think at this point, most civilians are so done with FEMA that they’re actively trying to avoid FEMA knowing where they are and what they’re doing. Which is a mixed bag. Having untrained people trying to repair things or rescue people is probably a bad idea, but following the rules is likely to see supplies not get into the zone until more people die. The loss of trust in authority is going to be hard to overcome. Not much sympathy as they seem to be bringing it on themselves.

One thing to consider is that the US military just isn't very high-performance at these kinds of logistical tasks. Remember the pier in Gaza? Cost hundreds of millions, took ages to put up, got unmoored several times and then scrapped after dispersing a fairly modest amount of aid.

People may point to the initial invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq as counterexamples - but that was 20 years ago. There's probably been a lot of rot since then, DEI and recruitment shortfalls are a pretty toxic combination. They probably got used to re-supplying well-established bases in the Middle East for continual, low intensity fighting. There's probably lots of procedures and admin they feel they need to do, there's not much sense of urgency. What logistical ability there is resembles an imperial baseline, sending gunboats out to the colonies and manning forts. Sudden campaigns like this mean setting up new bases and supply routes at short notice, a different task.

I'm not saying that it's just incompetence but that expectations should be fairly low.

One thing to consider is that the US military just isn't very high-performance at these kinds of logistical tasks. Remember the pier in Gaza? Cost hundreds of millions, took ages to put up, got unmoored several times and then scrapped after dispersing a fairly modest amount of aid.

I could be misremembering, but wasn't the genesis of that plan Biden randomly announcing it in a press event? For all we know setting up an aid pier like that might be inherently almost impossible and not something the military would ever have planned themselved. Maybe the behaviour of the sea or form of the beach at that exact point makes things particularly difficult etc.

Not sure how people take Tulsi Gabbard these days, but she just posted about her visit to the affected areas and said it's pretty bad. I would give her report more credibility than random tic-toks and tweets: https://substack.com/home/post/p-149909700

overall I don't know what to believe as I've only heard random anecdotes, mostly from substack.

Hurricane Helene is about to have company- Milton will strike Florida soon, and it’s a cat 5.

Yeah, but DeSantis appears to have the FL state disaster relief organizations running well, so while the destruction may be significant, I'd bet on the response being significantly faster/more effective than normal as well.

Disaster relief is also significantly easier in Florida than the appalachians. But an additional hurricane will likely stretch resources even further.

Also outside of the coastal areas it is virtually impossible to be caught off guard by a flash flood. The topography of Florida precludes the sort of sudden deluges of water pouring down on unsuspecting towns, rather it would be a slowly rising water level that gives someone time to find elevation.

Like I try not to downplay the power of a hurricane, but Florida is uniquely well-positioned to survive and eventually recover from an event.

More importantly, this also isn't their first rodeo.

Florida is well-acquainted to dealing with hurricanes. They've had devastating category 5 storms in recent living memory that were extremely and extensively damaging, yes. But there's something odd I've begun to note with hurricanes, especially in the recent years - people have begun to learn from them. Infrastructure modified. Procedures amended. Housing codes changed. So that when the next one comes through, people and infrastructure are actually better able to handle it than the previous one.

This is the reason why Helene is so devastating - this is a region of the country that just doesn't have to deal with this sort of weather. It's a one-off fluke, their one-in-a-century storm. No one sensibly could have predicted it would have happened, no one could have accounted for it. Mother nature be like that, sometimes.

Yes, there was a marked difference between the impacts that occurred in areas that were built up in the 70's and 80's and 90's to those built up post-2003ish.

Anywhere that has lucked out to not receive a hurricane hit in a few decades is more likely to get totally obliterated when one does come through.

But houses built to recent codes and specced to survive high winds can make it through mostly without damage, sans a tree falling on it or something.

Its a 'silver lining' of a hurricane strike, the stuff not built to current code will go away, and ideally be replaced with structures that will survive future strikes, and so the whole state becomes hardened against future impacts.

That, and the absolute speed and efficiency with which utilities are restored and cleanup ensues is a stark contrast from how things went even 20 years ago.

I don't know if there's a better answer where structures that are vulnerable get updated or replaced (with whose money?) over time, or if we are just resigned to having to clean up and rebuild such places after the fact.

The topography of Florida precludes the sort of sudden deluges of water pouring down on unsuspecting towns, rather it would be a slowly rising water level that gives someone time to find elevation.

Can you help me understand why this is? I would’ve thought Florida, so much of it near the coast, would be more prone to rapid flooding. The water has a much shorter distance to reach wherever it’s flooding after all.

Or is your point just that people somewhere like Florida are accustomed to flooding so would be carefully observing water levels?

Imagine that a bunch of rain falls into the mountains surrounding a valley. It ALL has to flow down to the valley, then flow through the valley as water tries to reach the lowest point.

Enough water collected in the mountains, flowing down a valley, all at once, can be a concentrated force that crushes most things it encounters. Like a GIANT waterslide, the water collects and gains velocity on the way down.

Florida has no mountains. We're flat. All the rain falls on the state and mostly just sits there. We have a lot of rivers, canals, etc, and the big lake in the middle of the state, so there CAN be flooding, but not a huge rush of crushing water.

Thanks to Helene, one of my friends who lives on a river in Florida (just bought this year, sadly enough) had three feet of water in his house. He was there when it started coming in, and when it hit the one foot mark he was able to load up his car and drive out.

Also Florida sits on a bed of limestone, which is porous, so a decent portion of the water will get absorbed down into the Aquifers.

Downside is there's nothing to stop the wind, so a heavy windstorm will flatten whole areas. But if there's a will to do so, building back up isn't too hard.

Ah right, makes complete sense. I was thinking only of flooding caused by the ocean surging and not rain on land.

Mountains also have another possible source of flash fooding: spring melt.

More comments

Flash flooding happens when water rapidly appears from somewhere else. This generally requires a ton of water moving into a small area. Imagine you opened a dam into a giant plain. It fills with water but the water is spread the fuck out. Imagine you opened the same amount of water into a valley....it's going to be a valley with a big ass river covering the ground real fast.

Because Florida is wide and flat it fills, but evenly and over a period of time. Valley towns in a mountain though.....

You get flooding from rain when you get rain coming in much faster than it can drain. Florida is VERY well-drained; there's few bottlenecks between wherever the water lands and the ocean.

My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.

The US Army probably couldn't evacuate Western North Carolina in a day under ideal circumstances with a perfectly compliant population, never mind in the wake of a major natural disaster. That's not some recent degradation of capability nor a comment on the urgency. Getting a million people out of a mountainous 10k square mile area is going to be an ordeal no matter what.

Yeah, there’s no organization in the history of the planet which could have done it in a day. A city, maybe. But as soon as you go to backroads you are losing 2/3 of your time just getting to the people.

Agreed, but it's kind of like how the Secret Service was viewed up until two months ago. This is Butler, PA happening to another honored USA institution.

Except that FEMA isn't really all that honored. They screwed up Katrina by the numbers.

Army/US Military instead of FEMA.

Your magnitude of comparison would be the Afghan bug out.

Afghan bug out

Was this an example of success?

I will set aside how some or most viewed the Secret Service. But a decline in prestige? How long have they been paying attention? In any case, a brief history of recent Secret Service failures:

2009: Two party crashers — a couple — with thankfully no ill intent, sneak into Obama’s inauguration without credentials and shake his hand. Just put on some evening wear and a smile and you too can reach out and touch the president. No need for vetting.

2011: A bullet hole from a rifle round is discovered by a housekeeper at the White House. It turned out to have been fired four days prior, not that the Secret Service had previously noticed.

2012: Agents in Colombia are caught drinking and consorting with prostitutes just hours before being on duty.

2014: A knife-wielding looney jumps the White House fence. Is he confronted on the lawn? Hah, no. He reaches the East Room before he is apprehended.

2015: Two off-duty Secret Service agents, both drunk, one driving, collide with a security barrier at the White House.

2017: Another looney jumps the White House fence. He wanders the grounds for 16 minutes. No rush, fellas.

2019: A Chinese national with a flash drive full of malware passes through a Secret Service checkpoint. Thankfully the elite operators at Mar-a-Lago’s front desk confronted him.

2022: Two Secret Service agents are sent home from a trip to South Korea after getting in a drunken fight with a cab driver.

Something to consider is the context of the job and the timeframe.

You're talking about the same timeframe as the Global War on Terror. Secret Service types are generally all ex-cops or ex-mil. As your stories about USSS with colombian prostitutes and korean cab drivers point out, they have the machismo that goes along with these career fields.

Well, during GWOT, the Super Bowl of male badassery was being Special Operations in the military - specifically the SEALs (because if you don't write about a raid in a book, did the raid even happen?). If you're the archetypal 18-24 year old male between 2002/3 - 2016, and you want to go out and kick ass, you're joining the military (and likely ending up in the 82nd Airborne if you fail selection, lulz).

Those who joined USSS during this time period? Head scratcher. I can see family connection being a reason - "My dad was USSS / a cop, I'm going to do it too", I can see individual level hyperfixation on the job, but that wouldn't account for more than a few percentage points of applications.

Also, keep in mind that USSS is largely recruiting from the same pool as the FBI -- who do you think wins the battle for best candidates more often?

The point is - I think the USSS has a very hard recruitment problem on its hands. This is where someone should link the GIF of the husky gal from the trump assassination fiddling with reholstering her pistol and generally looking lost. And, remember, that was the Presidential detail. The one's "guarding" the White House when POTUS isn't in town ... that's gotta be a JV team if there ever was one.

Wasn’t she some sort of deputized local official? Having trouble finding anything on the subject.

But I generally agree. No idea what the pipeline to USSS looks like. Maybe all those armed IrS agents look for a career change during their midlife crisis?

Wasn’t she some sort of deputized local official?

If she was, then it's even more of a colossal leadership and organizational failure. All of the video suggests she was stage detail (i.e. closest to Trump). It would seem to me those should be the most experienced / trained / highest performed agents there.

Consider also that the decline in mythic quality from Ike-Kennedy-LBJ-Nixon to Dubya-Obama-Trump-Biden may impact willingness to take a bullet for the guy.

Biden

willingness to take a bullet strong breeze for the guy.

looney jumps the White House fence

These are the ones that really blow my mind. Some of the other stuff is genuinely difficult, but in these cases, we've got stuff like an incompetent Secret Service agent just getting straight up trucked by a crazy guy because she's too weak to do the basics of the job. Growing up, I thought that if you jumped the White House fence, you'd be immediately sniped, and if you weren't, you'd get blown up by mines, and if you danced around those, you'd get shredded by guard dogs. It turns out you just get confronted by a frail lady when you get to the door.

Ah, you should have started a little earlier!

2007: An academic is allowed to lead the President into the basement of Mount Vernon alone. Source

Do we even know if that was an academic? Or was it a terrorist or FBI agent that had undergone then cutting-edge plastic surgery in 1997.

I'm sure everybody has their "issues" with the entire response, mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.

Here's Kamala bragging about sending $150 Million to Lebanon to pay back for some of the destruction that Israel enacted upon them somehow also my tax dollars indeed

Somehow the Texas Air Guard can go help with flooding in Czechia

The other "issue" is that FEMA is fullfilling the "too many chiefs and not enough Indians" meme. It seems like they want to occupy the role or "organizer", and less so doer. The local guys in ENC siphoning diesel fuel into excavators and building improvised bridges are doers, and they are looking to their local church leaders and community members as organizers. They want/need resources (money, equipment, helicopters) from FEMA, but they actively do not want to be "organized".

Young kids naked and crying for their parents, ropes still wrapped around their arms from where their parents desperately tied them to trees above water.

I've been watching this really closely and haven't seen anybody claim this. Can you link to a source for this?

/images/17283174732845304.webp

This is my least favorite right-aligned argument. I'm not all that excited about funding Ukraine and Israel, but I'm also not all that excited about federal spending on hurricanes. States are big, they have economies the size of medium to large countries, this doesn't need to be a federal spending priority. If North Carolinians are getting screwed because of a lack of spending, they should take it up with their governor. The federal government should fill roles that are too large for states or require coordination solutions; a small coordination role for FEMA makes sense, but there is no reason that North Carolina can't pay for its own recovery budget.

I’d say this is a great case for government intervention. It’s particularly close to the core Constitutional mandate.

Plus, look how much of the relief is being coordinated through one state’s airport. I think forcing everyone to duplicate logistics would be less efficient.

but there is no reason that North Carolina can't pay for its own recovery budget.

While I definitely agree with your sentiments, unfortunately the math doesn't work out.

I'll spare a Wall of Numbers-And-Links, but the reality is that too effectively insure or budget against natural disasters, even for states not named Florida and California, would mean a massive redirection of their state budgets such that they wouldn't be able to finance everyday things like roads and hospitals. Not only would voters not want that, society doesn't want that. We want basic levels of education and infrastructure pretty high. You don't want large swaths of states (large the rural parts) to be grossly less developed than the rest of the state. Culture and politics aside, this eventually results in economic degeneracy.

So, the tacit deal for decades has been that the Federal government will use its money printer for any state(s) that get slapped by a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, even large blizzard. The state just needs to keep funding its own "basics."

The rub, however, is that the funding for those basics has, over time, sourced more and more from Federal dollars. Daddy is not only paying for your expensive car insurance, he bought you the car and he pays for gas. But how? But why?

Congress can control state level funding down to absurd levels of detail. In Saving Congress from Itself James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) describes the absurdity of Congress, at one point, specifically allocating funds for a particular sidewalk somewhere. While the top line numbers might look impressive - "Congress gives Alabama $3 billion for Space Industry" (I'm making that data point up) ... the detail might be that that $3bn is sliced into pieces of no more than $5mn that have super specific targets.

Of course, you say, the states and closely coordinating with Congress so that what needs funding is funded, right?

No. Not only no, but fuck no. There's no state-to-House-and-Senate budget powwow where all this gets hashed out. Governors may called their senators, lobbying firms do their thing. Big profile stuff may get helped out but, generally, a lot of this is just stitched together as the process evolves in real time. And, then, it produces a horrible dilemma for the states - if they don't actually SPEND what Congress allocated, there's a good chance they'll have to answer for it and, likely, NOT receive that money again.

But, wait, it gets worse.

Tied up in Federal dollars is compliance with a bunch of Federal standards around spending those dollars. While much of this is compliance and accounting related, some of it has to do with what contractors can receive those dollars. This is everything from ensuring the contractor has compliant auditing systems all the way to, you guessed it, diversity definitely-not-quotas for the disbursal of Federal funds.

Tying this all the way back to the quoted text I led with, North Carolina doesn't have the money to fund its own disaster relief at scale. The money they get from the Federal government isn't meaningfully North Carolina's in a real sense. Instead, it's a weird pass-thru self-spend by the Feds ... with a lot of the back office support being in DC. This is the end result of a process started for sure during LBJ's admin with precedent to FDR. Your State government (with the bizarre and horrible exception of California and the just bizarre exception of Alaska) has probably invited in the grasping tentacles of Washington DC years ago and now cannot afford to cut them.

The left has been running the "blame your political opponents for bad weather" play for 20 years, but that doesn't make it any less stupid when the right does it.

20 years? People blamed the federal government for the 1906 San Fran quake.

I think MITE is referring to hurricane severity being (potentially) worsened by anthropogenic climate change.

mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.

Can you elaborate, because I keep seeing people say things like this, and I don't get it? It just seems like a kneejerk disaste for foreign aid tied into the topic of the day*. The big Ukraine aid bill took like half a year to negotiate and almost failed. The Federal government spent ~$6 trillion in FY23. Somewhere around 1-2% of that was foreign aid and included support for the largest conventional war of the century.

*what's even more frustrating is that many of the same people who do this also object to spending money on disaster readiness

Somewhere around 1-2% of that was foreign aid

That's quite a lot. Like meme levels of spending. Stop spraying my tax dollars on other countries.

If you're trying to explain why Congress won't adequately fund Federal disaster relief it's not. Especially when you're trying to compare a supplemental that took half a year to negotiate with additional funds for a disaster that happened last week.

Stop spraying my tax dollars on other countries.

The socially optimal amount of American tax dollars given to other countries is non-zero :V

The socially optimal amount of American tax dollars given to other countries is non-zero :V

Yes, and if we are to have any impact on the massively increasing slope of federal debt, then everything must give a bit. The correct amount is not zero, but in a period of wild profligacy, everything must give a bit to return to sanity.

And this “it’s only 1%-2% responses infuriates me.

Yes if the only thing you do is cut foreign aide, then you won’t solve the problem. But if you cut foreign side and ten other similar size useless programs, then you’ve made a real difference.

And this “it’s only 1%-2% responses infuriates me.

This is why I mentioned that the same people who complain about foreign aid also don't want to spend money on disaster readiness and are just grinding an axe. What point is trying to be made? That we can't afford to fund FEMA because the Feds are giving all our money to foreigners? Objectively false (and I have uncharitable opinions about its roots). Is that we should spend less in general? If so, by all means say that, but it's pretty much the diametric opposite of "there's no money for our own citizens". It's saying we need to help people less. Maybe that's a more optimal outcome, but it's a very different point than what Stellula was bringing up.

But if you cut foreign side and ten other similar size useless programs, then you’ve made a real difference

Again, if you want to slash welfare, just say that. It's not like Congress was forced to choose between $100b to UA and $100b to FEMA.

I’m not saying they are forced to choose between these two items. But the idea that “it’s only 100b” leads to wasting American money on nonsense like Ukraine aid. 100b adds up. And it adds up fast.

I would prefer we spend less overall (including on welfare). But if I’m cutting I’m starting first with foreign aid and then moving from there.

And yes, we could in theory tax more. But why would I want the government to tax me more to give money to fucking Gaza or Ukraine? The concept is offensive.

So if we aren’t going tax more the. We need to spend less. We aren’t doing that.

A difference in what?

When states do deficit spending, they take on debt to meet the desired expenditures, they don't spend to match the debt assumed.

The distinction is that if you cut X money from the budget, it doesn't mean X more money is spent on other things. It means X less debt is assumed. That's fine and well if the debt is the difference you care about, but the argument in the current context isn't that there's a debt issue preventing more funds from being taken.

If you cut and reduce the deficit, then one time emergencies won’t hurt as much. That is, being fiscally responsible is better in bad times compared to being fiscally irresponsible.

The US is phenomenally wealthy - more so than peer developed nations. Despite this, it spend proportionally less, even after you factor out the large gap in military spending. This is a policy choice. We're not out of money. We're not brushing up against some hard upper limit of what a government can spend without wrecking the economy. We've chosen an arrangement where we get lower taxes and more consumer spending over higher taxes and more government services. This has consequences. Some of them are positive, but sometimes it's going to mean you underinvested in public services relative to the ideal case.

As I said in my other comment, it's not like Congress was forced to choose between $100b to UA and $100b to FEMA.

A difference in what?

Federal debt has exploded in recent years. That's not free.

It's also not the problem at hand. Hence why it's not making a difference to the problem at hand.

This report from a lineman mentions kids walking around naked looking for parents. Other reports of naked kids: https://x.com/MrsMcGeek/status/1843003502047707335.

Trying to find the video with the rope thing but it's hard to find the exact video when I have watched hundreds over the last week and X doesn't make it easy.

The thing about all these "kids without parents" stories, is I mean, they aren't on their face unbelievable. Tragedy happens. But they'd be a lot more believable if it wasn't random twitter accounts, or photos of screenshots of text messages from some guy.

I wasn't 100% on board with the whole "FEMA is blocking aid" stories coming out until Elon Musk personally attested that an engineer on his payroll in North Carolina was being blocked. That is a concrete event with names we can verify. Would Elon lie about that? Or misunderstand or exaggerate? Maybe. But it's a starting point of a concrete claim that can be verified.

I have seen more videos of local sheriffs, helicopter pilots who'd been running rescue missions, etc coming forward and saying FEMA is blocking aid. Are these real sheriffs? Are these real pilots who really rescued a wife and then was blocked by FEMA from going back for the husband? Don't fucking know, but it's slightly better than "photo of a screenshot of a random text message".

I doubt I'll ever know how much of this was real and how much was fake. Especially since I'm already seeing the "It's all Russian misinformation" meme getting rolled out, and the precursors to "actually what caused excess deaths are all the people spreading misinformation". So fuck me I guess. We'll be arguing about how many died and who's fault it was until this passed out of living memory.

The temporary flight restriction Musk was complaining about is a matter of record, and it's the same one involved in the other incidents. You can argue about which Federal agency is responsible (the FAA issued it of course, but who asked for it is another matter), but there's no doubt it existed.

I have seen one report on X/Twitter of supplies being confiscated that was literally translated from the Russian. Not sure if Russian trolls or other trolls pretending to be Russian trolls.

The helicopter pilot being told he'd be arrested if he kept working was told that by a local fire chief, not FEMA.

Trigger warning: this is an infuriating story and the followup makes it quite a bit worse. https://youtube.com/watch?v=s8ICG0iaHqw

Any single "kid without parents" story has not been credible, just like any single "I saw a truck full of dead bodies" story is not credible. Dozens of seemingly independent stories make it more credible. I'm not 100% convinced that there is a naked kid survivor still tied to a tree, or what the maximal claim might be. I am pretty sure it is confirmed that this event has created some orphans, potentially stranding kids without any adult supervision entirely for hours, days, who knows if there's still a kid out there all alone? We wouldn't know, because they'd be alone. With communications down for so long, and people spread out in remote communities, no one can say they have the full grasp of the tragedy yet.

I am pretty convinced at this point that the death toll is in the thousands, and give 50% odds that this final death toll will not be on the official news until after the election. There are just too many reports of people saying they personally saw dead bodies, spread out across a wide geographical region.

I’ll take that bet.

Based on my friends and family in the area, I figured the death toll would stay under 500, possibly 300. This is a first-world country and there aren’t that many unaccounted for.

$100 to a charity of your choice if the official figure clears 1000 by the end of the year?

I would strongly encourage you to define what 'official figure' means, before making that bet. An 'excess deaths' measurement like used after Maria will give drastically higher results than those marked as storm-related by a coroner.

@OracleOutlook, what say you? I get the impression we’re both talking about coroner-marked deaths, i.e. drownings, contaminated water, or injuries. Is there a site we can agree on?

Would you like to use https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/index.php?season=2024&basin=atl when the report becomes available?

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Sounds good. As far as bets go, it sounds like I win either way. Either I win the dubious honor of being able to read the tea leaves Twitter vibes, or I win fewer people dying in reality.

Make it a hurricane survivor charity for better symbolism?

mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.

TBH if it were as simple as just cutting a check I think the Feds would be quite effective. But as discussed last week, it's not that simple; they actually have to go into a chaotic and desperate situation in very rough terrain and try to coordinate between thousands of local folks, out-of-state good samaritans, etc., and they have to do it with unionized and over-bureaucratized government workers who suffer very little personal blowback for failure.

I don't accept this.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US. We're sending aircraft carriers to the region to assist Israel in their ridiculous war, redirect those aircraft carriers to Myrtle Beach, and make the pilots fly over ENC with thermal cameras pointed at the ground. Put a drone in the air and look for people. Send helicopters.

Even if this is pointless, it's symbolic.

I write a very fucking large check to the federal government every spring. Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

I write a very fucking large check to the federal government every spring. Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

Hey, get in line. I have sincere moral problems with many of the things the federal government spends my tax money on; stop that before giving some foreigners a discount on weapons.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US.

Yeah, we should stop doing that too. Much of it is probably squandered or embezzled for the same reasons I would expect this to be. I don't want more of my money confiscated on the basis that maybe it'll help someone somewhere if we just shower them with more cash.

I write a very fucking large check to the federal government every spring. Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

Okay. But how about one cent of the check of someone else willing? Would that be okay?

If you want to donate your money to Ukraine go for it.

You avoided the question. Let's make the implications more explicit for the audience.

You made a position on how your taxes should not be used on taxes you do not agree with. Does that prohibition apply to other people's taxes on causes they support? Or are you demanding a prohibition even on things your paid taxes don't touch?

'My taxes shouldn't go to things I don't like' is the motte. 'Other peoples taxes shouldn't go to things I don't like' is the bailey. However, there is no moral outrage veto on the government spending other people's taxes on things they support their taxes being used for.

Money is fungible. This allows an accounting trick where the government can say "we aren't reducing your taxes nor are we changing how much of the budget gets spent on each item, but we're taking the money for this program from other people and using your taxes for something else". Unless objecting to a particular expense actually leads to your taxes going down, using "other people's taxes" is indistinguishable from using yours.

Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

There's always a relevant xkcd....

Also, every bit of Ukrainian clay seized by Russia will undermine the post-WWII standard against wars of territorial expansion, which will almost certainly cause more problems here.

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s absent the post-WWI implementation of modern passport and visa systems.)

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries.

I look at this, and then I look at the Kurds. The exact same argument applies, except far more so because the Kurds are currently persecuted and the Jews aren't. You could also say this about the Uyghurs, or the Rohingyas, or any other nation that does not have a state. Am I missing some reason that the Jews are a priority here?

The trouble with ignoring the sentiment is that you always have to deal in the reality of limited resources. You simply cannot do everything and as such you need to set priorities that make some sort of sense. And really we don’t have the ability to police the world while also dealing with a major crisis. The same soldiers cannot both be preparing to deploy to the Middle East and mounting search and rescue in the Heléne hurricane zone. Of the two, I think any sensible leader would choose to at least delay until the S&R stuff is finished before packing them up to sail overseas.

As for the post WW2 consensus, I think it died the minute Russia invaded.

It died at least two decades prior, when the US waged war to claw an internationally recognized region away from Serbia.

I don't recall any Serbian territory being annexed by the US or any other country. A territory becoming its own country is a different matter, as otherwise India and most of the countries in Africa would have to be considered illegitimate.

If Russia funded Cascadia to secede from the US on the ground that they are oppressed by Californians, would that not violate the post WW2 consensus? And if not why not?

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countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence, it will be true if Israel collapsed tomorrow, it will be for all the evidence we have true for hundreds of years.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel.

Has any ethnic group gotten blanket asylum in the West? There has been a slow shift away from permissive asylum policies (see the entire cats thing): nobody is letting in "the other" wholesale (Rwanda? South Sudan? Yazidis?) with maybe a few limited exceptions like Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion or Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. That's putting a heavy assumption that those Jews won't be treated as "the other" there (for which there are plenty of pre-WWII examples), and even then I don't think that supposedly-favored groups like white Zimbabweans (whose population there is down at least 80% since the country became independent in 1980) have ever been recognized as categorical refugees.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

The basic model these people have of the world is that "the West", as colonisers/imperialists, have forfeited for all time the right to any ethnic criteria for who lives in their countries, while "Indigenous peoples" (basically everyone else) have always lived peacefully and harmoniously in the same spot and so have a fundamentally legitimate claim of ownership of their land.

Would you wager your life on that? Your children's lives?

Were I married to a Jew I would no more worry about the USA going 1930’s Germany on them than I currently do about an alien invasion.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence,

That's a convenient elision of the fact that the Jews trying to escape the Nazis were in large part turned away from those nice western countries. Even years after the end of WWII, hundreds of thousands of European jews were still sitting in Displaced Persons camps guarded by allied soldiers because no "nice western country" would take them, and were only able to leave after the establishment of Israel as a national homeland for jews (those "nice western countries" still weren't willing to take them).

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future. France is already markedly unsafe, and as Britain islamicizes over the next couple decades anti-jewish sentiment is likely to increase.

What a perverse cycle of history: the West turned away Jews, Holocaust, West feels guilty and sets up asylum laws Never Again etc, those asylum laws ultimately end the "guilty West," becomes anti-Semitic again, Jews get turned away.

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future.

Bring back the Slattery Report.

We did get a middling detective story out of it, at least.

There’s a convenient elision of the fact that it’s not the forties anymore. Israel has the right to exist, they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

If Israel fell tomorrow the Jews would move to Anglosphere countries and Central Europe. Well, the ones that didn’t get massacred in the process of it falling at least. There won’t be a second Holocaust.

It's easy to play armchair general, but I think @Celestial-body-NOS made a point that can't be ignored.

While you might feel certain that Western countries would take in Jewish refugees, you presumably don't have any skin in the game. Would you be willing to be the lives of your family on this?

As a fellow armchair general, let me say that while I think it's probable that Israeli refugees would be accepted, it is far from certain. Nothing is certain when it comes to hypothetical future world conflicts. And if we're indexing from known past events, we know that Jews haven't been welcome with open arms in the past.

they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

A blank check would entail allowing Israel to actually do what the rest of the arab world - including the palestinians - did and continue to do: pushing all of their enemy's co-ethnics out of all territory they can martially claim. What they're doing now is significantly more humane than what the Saudis did to the Yemenis (and lost), or what the anti-Assad rebels backed by the west did to the Yazidis, or what NATO-ally Turkey does to Kurds, etc., etc., etc. Much of the criticism of Israel is one giant isolated demand for rigor.

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Elian Gonzalez has entered the chat. Progressive emphasis on immigration uber allies has long had a lot of exceptions for political utility.

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There's always a relevant xkcd....

I think a better analogy for that XKCD comic would be: We can't fund the Ukrainian space program until our space program doesn't have anything left to do. If Ukraine wants to have their own space program their citizens can choose to fund that, or if US citizens want to fund the Ukrainian space program they are free to donate their money to it.

Which...yes?

There are perfectly reasonable foreign policy objectives in funding Ukraine’s war effort.

That analogy might work better if Mexico were trying to re-negotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at tank-point, or if Canada were aiming for a re-match of 1812.

However, as we do not currently face any remotely credible threat of armed invasion* at this time, our 'keeping the Stars-and-Stripes flying over El Paso and Detroit' program doesn't have anything left to do.

*No, people coming in looking to work for money is not the same thing as an invasion.

Is Ukraine a US state? Do they pay taxes? Can we conscript their sons to go die for the protection of our nation?

Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.

Is Ukraine a US state? Do they pay taxes? Can we conscript their sons to go die for the protection of our nation?

They don't pay taxes, but the view of the people running the US is that there's a substantial benefit for the US in defending the rules-based international system*, that in the long term is probably worth substantially more in dollar terms than the cost of funding Ukraine. Maybe they're wrong but it's still largely an economic calculation, not a decision based on abstract philosophical principles for their own sakes.

*Rules that the US sets and gets to break, before anyone comes with examples of the US being hypocrites on this front.

Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.

You sure about that?

Furthermore, if Russia were to have encountered no opposition in the forceful seizure of Ukraine, how long would it be before they went after the Baltics? Poland? Eventually we wouldn't be able to stand on the sidelines any more.

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Funny enough paying the Danegeld can sometimes work. See Alfred.

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries.

I broadly agree with the sentiment, but, you know, I don't think it's in the Constitution of the United States.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US.

But it's not as simple as sending money - that's my whole point. Money alone won't haul a tree out of a roadway or repair a washed out bridge; you need road crews and equipment for that. Money will help you acquire those things, but unless you already know where to go to put them together and how to get them quickly to the places where they're needed, you're SOL. FEMA don't appear to be logistically-competent to put together that kind of a response, so they're left waving money around in the air with nothing to show for it.

We're sending aircraft carriers to the region to assist Israel in their ridiculous war, redirect those aircraft carriers to Myrtle Beach, and make the pilots fly over ENC with thermal cameras pointed at the ground.

It's at least two weeks from the eastern Mediterranean back to the U.S., and longer from the Persian Gulf or Red Sea - even if we ordered them back as soon as the hurricane hit, they'd still be at sea.

Put a drone in the air and look for people. Send helicopters.

This is a more valid complaint; I'm not sure what, if anything, holding up the 82nd Airborne and other rapid reaction forces on domestic bases from deploying. But that's a matter of will and organization (notably we have a President who is clearly suffering from advanced dementia, works like two hours per day, and spends the rest on the beach, while his VP is notably vacuous, scared of her own shadow, and busy campaigning. Not promising) not funding.

It’s because this isn’t a money problem, it’s a logistics problem. Israel and Ukraine are already managing their responses, so it’s easy to give them aid. With the hurricane you have to figure out what goes where, and how to get it there, which is a difficult problem.

Also, I believe the majority of the value of the aid given to Ukraine in particularly is not cash, but arms, ammo, and loans.

Also, I believe the majority of the value of the aid given to Ukraine in particularly is not cash, but arms, ammo, and loans.

From https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107232:

Of the approximately $62.3 billion provided to the Department of Defense, it had obligated about $52.3 billion, such as for procuring missiles, ammunition, and combat vehicles for Ukraine and to replace U.S. stocks. In its own reporting, DOD combines this formal obligated amount with internal commitments to convey its financial commitments. Of the approximately $46.1 billion provided to the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the two agencies had obligated about $44.4 billion, such as to support the Ukrainian government's civilian budget, including salaries for first responders, health workers, and educators. Of the approximately $3.4 billion provided to the Department of Health and Human Services, it had obligated about $3.1 billion, such as in grants for supporting Ukrainian refugees settling in the U.S. Of the approximately $1.6 billion provided to eight U.S. agencies and offices covered in this review, they had obligated about $1.4 billion, such as for nuclear security and sanctions enforcement.

So, it appears at least a near majority (51.1 of 103.4 billions) are in fact cash disbursements.

ETA: Not intending to dispute the post above, just adding context that the balance is pretty close.

But the government, specifically the Army/DoD and by extension the National Guard, are supposed to be experts in logistics in impassable terrain. It's not like wars are always fought on open desert: sometimes they are, but there are plenty of battlegrounds in recent memory with far worse terrain than North Carolina. Oh, the bridge is out? That never happens in war! They are supposed to be able to cross unbridged rivers rapidly under fire. And do Search and Rescue and extraction operations day and night. If they can supply remote fire bases by helicopter, surely we could setup tents and feed hot MREs to people anywhere on the ground on mere hours notice. Or at least airdropping rations.

On the other hand, I'm clearly armchair quarterbacking. Those things are all harder than they sound, I'm sure. Maybe all the bridging engineers are already out fixing washed out roads, and helicopters are out on SAR or supply missions. But it doesn't seem like we should throw up our hands and claim that it's completely beyond us: at the very least we should be learning lessons for next time.

But the government, specifically the Army/DoD and by extension the National Guard, are supposed to be experts in logistics in impassable terrain.

What... do you think expertise means in a logistics sense? The ability to do something with investments and time, or the ability to do something without infrastructure?

Military engineers do difficult logistics in two main ways: creating one-width roads, and flying gas blivets out to help extend the range of helicopters. Both of these are relatively limited throughput, and certainly can't support large populations, hence why there is such a focus on capturing seaports and airports with higher throughput capacity.

Oh, the bridge is out? That never happens in war! They are supposed to be able to cross unbridged rivers rapidly under fire.

Ha, no, no. That's how you get things like the Battle of the Siverskyi Donets.

If you're doing a river crossing, you do it slowly (so that the vehicles don't drive a slighly off-angle and drive off the bridge, flipping everything over), and if you're under modern-era effective fires (which means artillery and precision munitions and rockets, not just a smattering of light-infantry weapons), the main reason to keep crossing is if you're trying to run away in a retreat.

In practice, most river crossings aren't even of major rivers. They're more likely to be fording operations, or only very narrow creeks, or just putting crossing plates on a pre-existing bridge. A commander in the modern era who tries to force a crossing of an unbridged river under fire would be removed as an incompetent.

There are certainly things the military can do, but you are getting some impressions more from holywood than history.

What... do you think expertise means in a logistics sense? The ability to do something with investments and time, or the ability to do something without infrastructure?

"Without infrastructure" is, in this case, more or less the definition of the task, so I don't follow your point.

The point is that military engineering is the former and not the later, and always has been.

It's not like wars are always fought on open desert

Even open desert has more logistical issues than you'd expect. Just ask Erwin Rommel or Archie Wavell. Or the crusaders at Hattin.

With the hurricane you have to figure out what goes where, and how to get it there, which is a difficult problem.

There are people in ENC at this moment who have figured this out. What they want now is for the government to get out of their fucking way. To the feds: I know it's going to hurt your pride but tuck your tail between your legs and ask the local churches how you can help and then do what they say.

To the feds: I know it's going to hurt your pride but tuck your tail between your legs and ask the local churches how you can help and then do what they say.

Amen. This is what democracy actually looks like; life-and-death power being exercised by common people for their own benefit and that of their neighbors

What specifically is making you think that FEMA is bungling the response? I see it repeatedly taken as fact in this thread, and that we should trust to random tiktok videos, but very little actual documentation of the situation.

I’m not claiming everything is perfect. I just think that rumors always swirl in the aftermath, and the insane political polarization in this case is making it worse. I expect clearer information to come out in the next few weeks.

I’ll grant that there’s a shortage of quality evidence about the state of the hurricane response, but the evidence we do have points to the government response being pretty bad.

What would you consider "actual documentation" other than people there right now saying that they're jamming it up?

I think the point is that the government is completely incompetent. So they can distribute money but they can't actually rescue people.

But they are also incompetent when they spend money overseas. For example, they sent an aircraft carrier to deal with the Houthis but then retreated in defeat after a couple months. Or, for another example, they spent a couple hundred million building a floating pier to deliver supplies to Gaza, but then it didn't work and they just abandoned it.

So, while I agree we should spend at least as much on our own disasters as those in Ukraine and the Middle East, more money won't necessarily solve the problem since FEMA seems to be incompetent.

Honestly, I think the same. We’ve lost the ability to do a lot of things that our great grandparents took for granted that would just work. I could go down the list of usual government functions and for the most part we did them better in 1924 than we do in 2024. And I think it’s a combination of easy living, culture and poor education that’s created an elite that simply cannot handle the realities of running a complex society in the real world.

Look at a map. Think logistically. There is absolutely no reason to be flying fixed-wing aircraft from Greenville to Asheville. Fixed-wing aircraft have longer ranges than helicopters. Those supplies can be flown in from further away locations. However, there are a limited number of airports within helicopter range of the affected area. Greenville is one of them. It is the correct move to dedicate the Greenville airport to helicopter missions.

The federal government throwing up their hands and saying "golly gee I guess we can't figure this out!" is a monstrous blackpill.

I don't know how to describe specifically what I mean, but there's a certain energy from high agency people that is clearly present in the local guys "borrowing" excavators and building roads, and clearly not present in the federal government. Call is hyper masculine vs hyper feminine, but if you've ever worked around these types of people it is as clear as day.

If I'm really getting out there and letting my mind off it it's leash: the type of high agency men I'm describing here terrify the federal government. I think a lot of people here work in tech and have maybe at some point met a real life 10x "cracked" engineer who pisses you off (playfully) because of how good they are.

These people exist in the physical realms too, and they're allergic to people like FEMA.

I've met people who have that energy, except 90% of them go around wrecking shit and making a mess while effete, low-agency people have to clean up after them. They're also usually incorrigible because they rarely have to deal with the consequences of "helping".

Correct. The complaint is that the helicopters aren't moving. They're not being loaded. They aren't going anywhere.

Edit: It's like someone said, "We need helicopters" and brought helicopters over, but hasn't decided how to use them yet. Just bringing helicopters over doesn't win any brownie points.

Also, the nice thing about helicopters is they don't need a runway. For loading, you can put them anywhere on the tarmac so you can drive a truck to them, and if they're not actually loading at the moment they can be on grass.

At this point I doubt we will ever really know what happened in Western North Carolina. An oral tradition might appear describing how FEMA's incompetence (at best) caused hundreds of excess deaths. Stories of people dying of exposure, dehydration and disease because FEMA sat on their hands, and didn't allow anyone into the sparsely populated mountain/valley they lived in.

All the official statistics will be weird side stepping non sequiturs. X number of personnel were allocated. Y number of dollars were spent. They compare favorably to the X number of people and Y number of dollars spent in supposedly comparable natural disaster. Therefore all complaints have been debunked. Shut up.

And everyone will talk past each other forever. One day a politician might take up the torch of what really happened after Helene, but all those investigative resources will mostly get funneled to deep state cogs who will merely look at the aforementioned statistics about X and Y and declare the government innocent, after having pulled down fabulous salaries for a bloated staff that took excessive years to tabulate their report.

I’m going to ask you the same thing I asked jeroboam.

What could possibly convince you otherwise?

Deaths. I expect there will be much haggling over the narrative. But if there are more post immediate flood deaths from dehydration, disease and exposure than not, FEMA irredeemably fucked up, no matter what the experts claim.

Yeah, this is a perfect example of "Seeing Like the State". In the eyes of many people, solving problems is as simple as allocating resources.

Want people in rural areas to have broadband? Allocate $45 billion.

Want to build a network of EV charging stations? Allocate $7 billion.

Want a high speed rail in California? Allocated $inf billion.

And in a high trust society with high state capacity that's exactly what would happen. But, of course, that's not the society we live in. No rural citizens were connected to broadband, and almost no charging stations were built, and 16 years later California doesn't have a rail system.

We have a government competency crisis.

government competency crisis

It's not just government. Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.

You can sometimes see how well this works in practice. It's like when you've a cashier that can't make change and you try to give them 2¢ so you get $1 and not 98¢ in change.

It’s a way to get away with using less skilled workers and cheaper and faster training. Properly training someone to handle a disaster would require the person to have some understanding of what kinds of things happen in disasters to various common systems that run society. You’d have to show them what happens to electrical grids in hurricanes, the issues involved in fixing them, and what upstream and downstream effects might be. This requires at least a basic understanding of electrical engineering. Which takes a lot of intelligence and skill to understand. It’s full of math and physics, after all. Even getting someone to understand the system as well as a journeyman electrician is going to take some time and money. It will help them understand things like why an app is a bad way to distribute aid in a hurricane aftermath zone, but you’ll have to pay more to attract a better candidate, and you have to train them. Or you can set up a generic process for every disaster and hope that they’ll be good enough for most disasters even when executed by Jenny a former secretary at a car dealership who has no idea what the issues even are. Before the disaster scenario happens, you’re getting kudos for doing this because Jenny is a pretty cheap hire, and she’s ready to go within a few months instead of years.

It's not just that the employees are less skilled, they're less capable.

Seleting for someone higher skilled may also select for someone capable of stretching. A competent person can be competent in many situations and scenarios with minimal training.

School used to do a better job of selecting for competence, graduation rates were much lower but graduates could pass competency exams.

I’ll definitely agree on the education part. I think honestly the schools are so bad at this point that they’re meaningless. It seems like it started with the end of the Cold War, mostly because we were moving all the factories to other parts of the world. That triggered a crisis as now everyone needed a HS diploma and a bit more if they wanted to have anything like a working class, let alone middle class lifestyle. And since the biggest determinant of getting a “good job” once the factory was gone was education, all barriers to education were systematically eliminated. You can’t be so cruel as to flunk a kid who can’t do the work because if he doesn’t graduate, he’s going to live in poverty and be basically unemployed forever. Then of course you have student loans so everyone could go to college. Of course colleges saw this as a cash cow. Lower the standards so that any kid who graduates high school can “earn” a diploma.

And now you have functionally uneducated college grads who believe they’re smart competent people, but aren’t and probably wouldn’t pass their grandparents freshman year of high school. Try it. Find math problems that a 14 year old in 1920 was expected to be able to solve and give it to a college grad in 2024. They cannot do it. They cannot read books that were read for fun in 1950. Forget such arcane subjects as geography, history, or science. It’s a scary sad thing that people with college degrees know less about science than high school kids in 1980.

Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.

This is the essence of modern management theory. It can be done, but probably not for disaster recovery or any other task where every situation is significantly different.

The difficulty is the 'decision makers' have often moved on before the pigeons come home to roost.

Even highly repeatable processes will often have edge cases / or odd failure modes that while rare if the process is very frequent will throw errors often enough to cause problems.

Also these jobs tend to suck which presents other challenges.

I'd rather interact with someone competent than an idiot with a checklist. I'm sure there's an appropriate Idiocracy clip.

I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out.

Where does this figure come from? The latest news reports I can find are still talking about a figure of 200something dead, which includes the area of initial landfall.

Really, I'm wondering where this perception of "biblical proportions" is coming from. Central Europe (approximately next door from me) had a flood around the same time which looked about equally bad to the NC pictures I'm seeing, where the death toll stood around 24. A factor of 10 difference just seems to be about what I'd expect given the lower level of preparation, inferior civic infrastructure and construction standards in the US (typical European houses would be much less likely to collapse), and the European flood is now being filed away as a fairly boring once-in-a-few-years event (outside of media that is still trying to make culture war hay of it).

"4 Reefer Trucks" in one county from here: https://tiktok.com/@glutenfreebreadwinner/video/7421950512544697642

No running water at a hospital:

Mission Hospital still has not regained running water. It’s expected to take weeks for access to water to be restored region-wide, due to widespread damage to the water system.

Healthcare workers typically use running water in abundance for tasks ranging from handwashing to sterilization. They’re getting creative in its absence.

The local population is understandably filthy:

The sewage system was so backed up after the storm, Drummond said, that it wasn’t possible to flush toilets.

“We were pooping in bags and buckets,” she said.

Access to clean water was also wiped out. Patients were showing up at the hospital drenched in floodwater saturated with gasoline, chemicals and other unknown toxins.

Those people would normally be placed in showers to clean off, Drummond said. Not so after Helene barreled through, knocking out the basics of hygiene.

“It’s been really difficult to do decontamination,” Drummond said. Her team, she said, was forced to fill trash cans with whatever clean water it could find to dump over patients in an effort to rinse them.

This is from the group of people who have made it to a hospital. How many thousands are still trapped without a road in these conditions? How many dehydrated people are drinking dirty water in desperation? How long does it take before these conditions lead to disease outbreaks and deaths?

Edit: More witnesses of mass deaths: https://x.com/KristyTallman/status/1842032303637463274

People asking for more body bag donations: https://x.com/TheThe1776/status/1842120280229158963

Over 100 bodies marked in a six mile stretch of river: https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1842908549795512354

Someone seeing bodies left in trees, thought they were Halloween decorations at first: https://x.com/KellyJo_Rn/status/1841284842085880279/photo/2

Edit 2: Going to keep links to the most credible videos here so that I can reference them as people (rightfully) ask for receipts:

https://x.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1842944529172734286 - Woman saying she needs 500 body bags. County Sheriff kicked FEMA out of the county.

https://x.com/sarahsansoni/status/1842129974888644801 - Account of bodies floating in river. Similar language as some other reports, where they thought they were Halloween Costumes, then saw the faces and realized they were real bodies.

Not directly related to body count, but interesting in itself - https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1842648530436911554 Volunteer reporting that her organization has told her to flee any FEMA agents she encounters, because they will confiscate everything she has, including her search and rescue dogs (???). Also her volunteer organization has tracked that a lot of the items confiscated from their organization have been sent to migrants (at the border?) instead of citizens. She says that when she was in the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard stopped working with FEMA because they would do similar things to them.

And in response to that video, Ryan McBeth who I also vaguely trust and respect (or at least I knew of him well before this disaster which is more than I can say for most of these) said that that this is misinformation that is killing people. He was on the phone with the National Guard (all of them at once? ha, I know what he means, but not saying who exactly he spoke to or what their position is annoys me.) National Guard is declaring that people are putting themselves in danger to avoid FEMA.

I think I trust Ryan that this is what the Nat Guard is saying, I don't trust that the National Guard has it all under control. I do not believe that if all private citizens just stopped working around the government's lack of help that it would all have turned out better.

On the more credible side: Gen. Flynn asking for donations to a Rescue/Recovery team that is normally tasked by FEMA for situations like this but, "No tasking to date (not surprising)." https://x.com/GenFlynn/status/1841822490730910109

People on the ground saying that they haven't seen FEMA or didn't see any FEMA until more than 5 days after the Hurricane: https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1842977547103219797

Lastly, most professional video of the infamous Fire Chief directly preventing the rescue of a couple: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s8ICG0iaHqw

https://x.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1842944529172734286 - Woman saying she needs 500 body bags. County Sheriff kicked FEMA out of the county.

I don't know if I'd call this credible. The woman being interviewed never mentions FEMA once; the interviewer says it in an interspersed clip taped separately. And he doesn't say where they are. Possibly because he's in Lincoln County, which got some damage but is part of the Charlotte metro and a world away from the mountain areas that got hit hard.

had a flood around the same time which looked about equally bad to the NC pictures I'm seeing

I would care mostly population affected, not comparing cherry picked pictures when comparing how many people died.

the European flood

Note that similar area was affected in 1997 floods. Wrocław (major city in area affected by heavy rants) was not flooded this thanks to new dam/polder build after 1997 floods. During 1997 it was catastrophically flooded.

Case where people actually managed to learn from history.

And this region has decent experience and equipment for dealing with floods. It is THE primary natural catastrophe expected to happen here.

I was taking "Biblical levels of destruction" to be defined in terms of the vibes of the best pictures you can cherry-pick, rather than any concrete data-based criteria. The Bible itself may not have pictures, but it certainly doesn't make its case with data.

Meanwhile, an Apache helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?),

While it may be sexually identifying as one, I don't think that's an attack helicopter.

(Sorry to make light of this, the news popping up have been rather horrifying for me as well, even with no connection to the US, but I can't resist autistic nitpicking and a bad pun).

Sorry, I edited it right after I noticed my mistake. It's a Blackhawk, probably Nat. Guard.


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