MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I remember Nassim Taleb trying to push back against the "Black Roman" discourse on the grounds that it was erasing proto-Arabs from history. (The question of to what extent modern-day Arabic-speaking North Africans are descended from historical Berbers vs the Arab colonizers is hoary, but "African" i.e. North African Romans were plausibly related to modern-day Arabs in a way that they are not to sub-Saharan blacks). It didn't work - even in the UK blacks are comfortably further up the progressive stack than other ethnic minorities.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I know exactly what a company is - my day job involves managing a regulated Group with separately licensed legal entities.
I also know why the entities registered with the Electoral Commission for the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are unincorporated associations, with the company set up to hold the asset being a company limited by guarantee whose members are certain elected officers of the unincorporated association.
The fact that Reform is set up as a company limited by shares is linked to something important about the internal democratic processes of Reform, namely that there are none, and that Nigel Farage retained (literal and figurative) ownership even during the period where Richard Tice was leader and Farage held no party office. There is a reason why non-profit companies (whether or not they are charities) are usually limited by guarantee - the Koch-Crane feud at Cato being an example that was briefly famous in US right-wing circles of what can go wrong if they are shareholder-owned. Reform (and Cato back in 1977) chose to do the weird thing for a reason.
If a normal political party with Reform's level of support decided through its internal democratic processes to campaign on COVID lockdown blame, that would be a sign that a substantial movement was doing so. If Reform's owner decides that Reform should campaign on COVID lockdown blame, it is a sign that one man is doing so. Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media, it is more likely than not that the "substantial movement" he is representing is the one paying him - he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Reform UK Party Ltd is a private limited company with a single controlling shareholder, not a substantial movement. By the time Reform was polling above 5%, Farage had resigned as leader and it had gone back to running a standard-issue right populist campaign based around dubiously-funded tax cuts and reduced immigration. COVID wasn't mentioned in Reform's 2024 election campaign, at least as far as a random voter who was paying attention could see.
Right populism in the UK is fundamentally about Islamic immigration. The attempt to make US-style public health skepticism part of the movement failed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger? What do you personally think is going on here?
Whatever it is, it is US-specific. In the UK, officials who broke their own lockdown rules and got caught consistently suffered career-ending consequences. Partygate broke after COVID was "over" for us, but was still the multi-month-long all-consuming scandal that brought down a Prime Minister.
The full list of notorious fired lockdown-breakers includes:
- Boris Johnson (Prime Minister)
- Dominic Cummings (de facto Chief of Staff to Johnson)
- Neil Ferguson (leading pandemic modeller at Imperial College and SAGE member)
- Catherine Calderwood (Scottish chief medical officer)
- Margaret Ferrier (SNP MP)
- Matt Hancock (Health Secretary)
I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff. I think the British approach to elites breaking their own lockdowns was a lot healthier, and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Sorry for bumping last week's thread, but I rediscovered what civil defence nerds seem to agree is the best "how to survive nuclear war" book out there - Cresson Kearney's Nuclear War Survival Skills. The 1987 edition is available free online in numerous places (the 1999 edition adds a one-page low-content update downplaying the risks of nuclear terrorism, but is otherwise identical). The 2022 version (updated by Steven Harris after Kearney's death) is only available in paper format. I haven't read it and can't vouch for the quality of the update.
If you are going to attempt to build the "Kearney Fallout Meter" then you will need a published paper copy because the calibration of the meter relies on actual-size templates in the book. Given the unreliability of computer tech post-nuke, I think a (possibly self-)printed copy is a nuclear prep essential in any case.
The primary audience for the book is urbanites and suburbanites who are planning evacuate a city when the Soviet tanks are crossing Germany (or equivalent) and need to build a fallout shelter in 48 hours or less when they arrive at their bugout destination with the contents of a 1980's-size family car plus locally available materials (and potentially with the military-age male family members absent - he specifically includes shelter designs that can be built by average-strength women). There is a reasonable amount of content about a permanent pre-built shelter though (the basement as is doesn't offer enough protection if you are downwind of a groundburst or it rains during the key fallout window), which would be more relevant given that Bendigo is outside any plausible blast zone.
Given Kearney's background at Oak Ridge, this book is almost certainly the civil defence advice that the US government developed and then decided not to publish because they didn't want the plebs to think that nuclear war was winnable. You can tell it is written by someone who is serious about this because it takes for granted that you will not be trying to follow normal radiation-safety rules in the aftermath of a nuclear blast - for example it recommends prioritising airflow over radiation safety because you will need a lot of airflow to keep the shelter occupants cool in hot weather and the risk of airborne contamination is low, whereas official government advice on both sides of the Cold War was to minimise ventilation to the minimum needed to keep CO2 levels down.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
But can you eat any man opposed to Jackson?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Yes. In this model, there absolutely are missionaries wandering around with magic underwear under their cheap suits calling themselves Latter-Day Saints and insisting that there are no Mormon Christians and that the word "Mormon Chrisitan" is a Satanic dog-whistle. And in ten years' time they will be saying that "Latter-Day Saints" is a dog-whistle too.
But the debate among Motteposters appears to be about whether "Mormon Christians" are Christians.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
It's like going into a restaurant and complaining "this food tastes like sewage", then getting told that you're a liar because the food doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like feces, so tasting like sewage is a literally false belief.
This isn't a perfect analogy, because feces is a major constituent of sewage, and indeed is a large part of what makes sewage noxious. I don't know how one would taste the difference between sewage and feces, whereas is an obvious meaningful difference between cats and dogs - try throwing sticks for a cat to fetch. What you mean is that there is no difference in the political impact, if true, of immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. You are obviously correct about this, possible quibbles about traditional Korean or Vietnamese cuisine notwithstanding. If the immigrants were, in fact, eating cats, then you could call "they're eating the dogs" directionally correct, but that appears to be a Motte-specific usage and truthy is what most very online people would call it.
But in an environment where people care about the factual truth and falsity of statements and not just the political impact, a cat is not a dog. If you report a cat theft to the police and it turns out that the missing animal was actually a dog, you are going to get in trouble for, yes, lying. Trump could have misspoken, but saying "dog" when you mean "cat" isn't a particularly common mistake. If Trump meant to say "dog" when the social media posts he was signal-boosting said "cat" because he didn't care about the difference this says something about his communication style - namely that he is 100% concerned about the political impact of statements and 0% concerned about their factual content. If the ratio was 90-10 like it is for most politicians, he would have said "cat" because, as you point out, "they're eating the cats" is no less politically impactful than "they're eating the dogs".
There is a saying which people use to acknowledge that they are mainly concerned about the political impact of statements vs their factual content: "it has the added advantage of being true". Based on Trump's beliefs at the time, he had the opportunity to make a politically advantageous claim that had the added advantage of being true, and didn't take it. Given the discussion on this thread, there is a non-zero number of people for whom this is a positive signal - Trump is implicitly saying "I am not like those smarty-pants intellectuals who care about the factual accuracy of sufficiently truthy political claims."
"it's really cats, not dogs, so Trump is a liar"
I explicitly didn't call Trump a "liar". We all agree that what is going on is more complex than that. The whole point of this thread is to discuss how a man whose statements frequently evaluate as "false" when parsed using standard English grammar has a reputation as a straight talker among his supporters. I am proposing that "bullshit" is a better framework for understanding it than "liar".
I think the "Cultural Marxism" discourse on the Motte tends to go down rabbit holes due to arguments about the meaning of words. The core facts are:
- The thing that right-wingers are talking about when they say "Cultural Marxism" is real, is broadly on the left, and is bad viewed from both a liberal and a conservative perspective.
- The thing changes what it calls itself frequently in order to avoid being named by its political opponents. (See Freddie de Boer).
- At some point in the past, some but not all of the people doing the thing called it "Cultural Marxism", but they stopped when right-wingers started using the term.
- Some, but not all, of the people doing the thing consider themselves Marxists. Almost all the people doing the thing agree that it rejects certain tenets of orthodox Marxism, they just disagree on whether they reject enough to make them a continuation of Marxism, or to make them something else.
- The orthodox Marxists that still exist (including Freddie) are very clear that they do not consider the thing to be Marxism. Mostly, they hate it as much as we do.
- All the people doing the thing are influenced directly or indirectly by Marx, but that isn't saying much because everyone (including his opponents) is influenced by Marx. In most cases this line of influence passes through Gramsci.
The argument about whether or not "Cultural Marxism" is really Marxism is analogous to the argument about whether Mormons are really Christians, and is equally unproductive. From the perspective of outsiders using the word to attack something we dislike, the more interesting question is whether thinking of "Cultural Marxism" as a form of Marxism helps or hinders our efforts to defend against it. *
From a liberal perspective, "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are bad for sufficiently different reasons that lumping them together makes you dumber. In terms of epistemics, orthodox Marxism claims to know things which aren't true, whereas "Cultural Marxism" wrongly accuses its opponents of knowing nothing. In terms of political impacts, orthodox Marxism rejects individual action because it might lead to economic inequality, whereas "Cultural Marxism" tries to prevent effective collective action by saying it is impossible until we have all completed therapy for our internal systems of oppression. I oppose using the term "Cultural Marxism" because orthodox Marxists, most "Cultural Marxists", and intelligent liberals all agree that "Cultural Marxism" is not a subset of Marxism, so the word is misleading.
From a cultural conservative perspective, both "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are godless, anti-cultural, and anti-us, and lumping them together is harmless. I think this is a bad case of outgroup homogeneity bias, but I understand where the cultural conservatives are coming from.
FWIW, I call the thing "Wokism"
* In the Mormon analogy, it is logical for anti-Christians to think that Mormonism is Christianity regardless of the theological arguments because they oppose it for the same reasons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.
You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?
Trump said that immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. As a result of him saying this, some of his target audience of low-information swing voters now believe that immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, and are therefore more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote at the election in November. Generating this change in belief was a major purpose of making the statement. Given background that motteposters know and the debate audience probably didn't, the fact that Trump said "dogs" and not "cats" may reveal interesting information about his thought processes that I hope to elaborate on in a later effortpost.
I am making the conjunction of the above claims, with the intention that they be taken seriously and literally. If you disagree with me about the facts, the spirit of this board is that you should identify the claim you disagree with rather than spewing insinuations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Laws are specific. Laws about lying in the US have to be particularly specific, because the First Amendment protects some, but not all, lies.
There are laws which broadly criminalise lying to federally regulated banks. There are laws that broadly criminalise lying about publically-traded securities. These laws don't apply to private lenders or shares in closely-held companies, where the only lies which are criminal are ones which constitute common-law fraud. (Obviously lying about your startup can reach the level of common-law fruad, as Elizabeth Holmes learned the hard way).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
It seems to me that a question we ought asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is false? so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving any one or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
"They're eating the dogs" is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners that immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs. Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.
The fact that Trump doesn't care about the factual truth or falsity of the words that come out of his mouth to the point where he says "dogs" when he could easily have said "cats" and been making a defensible claim about facts that were in dispute at the time is a perfect piece of smoking gun evidence as to what is actually going on. In the Harry Frankfurt sense, Trump is rarely lying but he is constantly bullshitting.
I'm at work at the moment but effortpost to follow.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The teamsters have most of their membership in warehouses IIRC. I think a lot of it is just working class voters favoring Trump even when they’re making good money.
But "working class voters" in general haven't shifted to Trump by 35 points since April - they have supported him ever since 2016.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Phylloxera is another example. There is still no way of controlling it even with 21st century technology - if it wasn't for the good fortune that vitis vinifera grows well when grafted onto the rootstock of American vine species with natural resistance (but which produce undrinkable wine) we would have lost >95% of our ability to grow wine.
As a (technical) Irishman and an oenophile, I am genuinely conflicted about whether potato blight or phylloxera is the worst thing to come out of America. But both make high-fructose corn syrup and The Phantom Menace look like nothingburgers.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Is this sulphate aerosol geoengineering, or are you thinking about something else?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold
The Teamsters have never been a reliable left-wing force - per Wikipedia they endorsed Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr.
For a shift that large in internal polling within a union that isn't consistent with nationwide trends (which show a very small shift in favour of Dems after the obviously senile candidate is switched out), I would assume that there is a Teamsters-specific issue that the rest of us are not aware of - probably related to how trucking is regulated. Some of it will be youth sex polarisation, but not much given the average age of the Teamsters membership.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
It interesting that although we all understand the intended meaning of this expression (and it is true when given the meaning that people expect), it is not an accurate description of how lawyers and used car salesmen lie.
Creating a false belief using a carefully-curated set of technically-true statements is no more effective in an adversarial environment like a courtroom or a negotiation than creating the same false belief using false statements. The normal technique of a lawyer representing a rich-but-obviously-guilty client is to flood the zone with shit. This works best in criminal trials, where if the jury can't understand the case they are supposed to acquit based on reasonable doubt, but it also works in civil trials if the other side can't keep up. Lying by omission is explicitly prohibited in litigation (this is why discovery exists) and in some but not all negotiations.
Used car salesmen working for commercial dealerships, on the other hand, are trying to outnegotiate unsophisticated parties, which is exactly where "lying like a lawyer" is helpful. Making a technically-false statement creates legal risk and isn't necessary if you are good at your job. The people who tell blatant lies when selling used cars are private sellers, who are effectively gone once the cheque clears. Real estate agents are in the same boat - they will tell blatant lies, but they would much rather mislead you in legally safer ways.
So who does lie like Donald Trump? In my experience, the main groups are cheating spouses, toddlers caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and actual conmen. Trump, of course, belongs to at least two of these groups.
Who does "lie like a lawyer?" Well the main group is politicians not called Donald Trump. Politically biased journalists do, as do tendentious academics. Basically, exactly the people who form the "establishment" Trumpism is against. In each case it is because it is a lot easier to work a sympathetic ref if you got caught making a true-but-misleading statement than if you told an outright lie. But working the refs in that way doesn't work on normies, and doesn't work on neutral or unsympathetic refs.
Unfortunately this means that the saying reduces to "Trump lies like Trump, the liberal elite lie like liberal elites." This is tautological, but to someone who has been paying attention it is even truthier than the original. It also avoids calumnising innocent lawyers and used car salesmen by associating them with politicians and journalists.
The big difference between the US and Europe is that the US has a native high-crime subgroup which is large enough (unlike European gypsies) to materially skew the crime statistics. A group of immigrants can commit more crime that white Americans and still commit less crime than heritage-Americans as a whole, who are 15-20% black. And in fact this appears to be true of by far the largest group of immigrants (i.e. Mexicans) - if you don't trust the MSM or academia then the most recent analysis on this point from an unquestionably right-wing source is Ron Unz.
There may be specific high-crime subgroups of immigrants who are worse than ADOS blacks, and Haitians in Springfield may even be one of them (although nobody in Springfield is saying this). But the only cat to have been eaten was eaten by a mentally ill ADOS black woman.
In the America that actually exists, poor Mexican immigrants make cities like LA safer by displacing poor blacks, and their US citizen children elect Democrats to local office who don't feel white guilt about black crime.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
In one of the early scenes, the Corleone Family tries to intimidate a film director into giving Jonny Fontane a part by killing his prize horse and leaving the head in his bed. What happened to the rest of the horse is not specified in the book or film, but horsemeat is a completely normal part of traditional working-class Sicilian cuisine. (The taboo against eating horse is an anglosphere thing - almost every other European cuisine uses it, although in may countries including France it is mildly stigmatised as only for poors.)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
And per @Quantumfreakonomics, the WSJ has found the cat (which, let us remember, is the only actual cat implicated in the whole sorry saga) alive and well. I will happily concede ln(5) calibration points for finding this outcome less likely than I should have done, and I suggest that the people who uncritically signal-boosted this shit do some soul-searching as well. This soul-searching should ideally be of the literal variety, because unrepentant Sowers of Discord end up quite remarkably close to the Fire and the eyewitness account of how they are treated is not pretty.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Cash. All the proposals from the Israeli right for ending the Israel-Palestine conflict by population transfer assume that the US chips in c. $100 billion or more to bribe other Arab countries to accept Palestinian refugees. Israeli GDP is about half a trillion, so it is right at the limit of what Israel could afford if ending the conflict by population transfer was broadly popular in Israel, which it isn't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
From a British perspective, things that were not widely available in 2009 but now are include:
- Smartphones
- Keyhole surgery
- Cars with powerful driver-assist features like parking assist and adaptive cruise control
- Induction hobs
- Affordable next-day delivery of online shopping
- Ocado and similar grocery-delivery services
Interestingly, "Uber" is not on the list because London had a healthy ecosystem of minicab apps before Uber came in and crushed them all by pricing below cost.
Also, we had mass unemployment in 2009 (remember Subprime!) and now don't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Does China have enough nukes that you need to be worried about "Taiwan goes nuclear" in country Australia? (Wikipedia claims they have 438 usable nukes, but it looks like they only have the ICBMs to hit a low 2-figure number of targets outside the region) The only scenario where I see Australia getting more than one bomb for Sydney and one for Melbourne (and the area downwind of those cities where the fallout is likely to land is water) is if Russia and the US go full MAD.
Prep for the chaos following a US-China nuclear war in which Sydney and Melbourne are glassed is generic SHTF prep, not nuclear prep. Obviously all bets are off if you are using "country Australia" as a euphemism for commuterland.
The Republicans looking for corroboration are treating the search space as "any dark-skinned immigrant, anywhere in Ohio, eating any kind of unusual meat". The meme went viral after an ADOS black woman was convicted of eating a cat in Canton, and we have seen African immigrants eating roadkill in Dayton cited as proof that the meme is "directionally correct". So the denominator is a lot larger than 20,000.
That said, if this police report is real, then it is the real thing and we have (noting that the date of the police report predates the meme) the source of the original game of telephone that led to the first "a friend of a friend thinks Haitians are eating cats" Facebook post. Note that most of the cat was not, in fact, eaten - even if the mystery meat is cat meat, stealing a cat and leaving chopped-up bits in the owner's back garden is what gangsters do to intimidate people, not something Mrs Lovett types do. It would be closely related to the "Sicilian immigrants are eating our horses" meme as featured in The Godfather.
50% that the police report is real (noting that the local PD said no such report existed), Conditional on the police report being real:
- 20% that it turns out the cat is still alive and has been reunited with its owner
- 40% that the cat was indeed murdered
- 15% that the cat was indeed murdered by the Haitian neighbour the owner suspects.
- 10% that the rest of the cat was eaten by a human.
- 30% that there was no cat and the person who filed the police report is crazy
I also note that ex ante the search space for this kind of thing was "any immigrant, legal or illegal, anywhere in America, eats a housepet or does something similarly outrageous" Given the complete inability of Republicans to come up with anything good after a frantic search for "dark-skinned immigrant eats housepet" across right-wing social media, this looks like a single incident blown up into a national story by a combination of media crime blotter logic and conservative propaganda. If it really was the case that "they're eating our pets" was a thing, we would have found more than one questionable case by now. If it turns out that the police report is real, the cat is real, and the cat did indeed disappear under suspicious circumstances then the Republicans will have lucked out on this one. Turning a single incident into a nationwide viral meme is good politics and good tabloid journalism, even if it is bad epistemics.
BTW does anyone know the baseline rate of cat butchery in America?
Easy procedural decisions are the ones where a political court is least likely to make a political decision on the underlying merits - the cost of making the legally correct decision is usually low (because the litigant who goofed can often refile, and in any case it doesn't set a bad precedent on the merits) and the cost of making the politically correct decision is high (because it messes up the body of precedent on what should be an easy procedural question, which generates extra work for every judge in the jurisdiction). There is also the possibility that the procedural issue itself has partisan political implications - in fact it almost always does, with left-wing judges favouring civil plaintiffs and criminal defendants. And an appeals court deciding a procedural issue knows that the procedural precedent usually has more impact than the substance of the case at bar.
A good example from the other side is the mifepristone case - SCOTUS decided 9-0 on standing with Thomas' concurrence saying that the plaintiffs lost even harder on standing than the majority - even though Thomas and Alito at least would probably have sided with the plaintiffs on the merits.
This is also why Media Matters stand a better change than you might think of winning on appeal in the 5th circuit if Musk wins the "ads on Nazi posts" lawsuit at trial - the procedural precedent created by allowing an anti-free-speech lawsuit to go ahead in a forum-shopped jurisdiction is on balance a pro-left one and the Fedsoc judges who dominate the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals know this.
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