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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   26060 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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As a Literal-Minded Person, I am Once Again Asking for Connotation not to Completely Supplant Denotation

The other day, I saw a screenshot of this tweet on Instagram:

American conservatism just doesn’t appeal to me because I’m not scared of everything.. not scared of immigrants, crime, using public transportation, cities. I’m interested in other people and like talking to them. Even if someone is weird it doesn’t really bother me.

I commented that I found it very strange to assert that you're not scared of crime. Crime is bad. All things being equal, no one would choose to be a victim of crime. Of course some people are more scared of crime than they really should be, but that's a far cry from saying that any amount of fear of crime is wholly unjustified. I may have compared the tweeter to Bike Cuck.

People in the comments clowned me. "Admitting you're afraid of general crime and calling someone else a cuck is a bold stance for someone so pathetic." "If you live your life in constant fear that 'someone' is gonna suddenly commit a crime against you every time you go out in public, you have agoraphobia and should get therapy." "Do you want the powice offiew to tuck you in and wead you a night night story?"

Nowhere in the comment did I claim that I live in constant fear of being a victim of crime: I merely stated that it's silly to claim to not to be afraid of crime at all. It's a weird non sequitur: "you assert that it's not unreasonable to experience some degree of fear of crime - ergo you are a bootlicker who worships police officers." It's also strange to be accused of agoraphobia by someone who I can only presume was an enthusiastic supporter of lockdowns.

I found the tweet strange, in its conception that "being afraid of crime" is a trait unique to (American) conservatives. Many of the canonical beliefs associated with American liberalism also entail fear of particular types of crime (perhaps even fear vastly out of proportion to their likelihood of occurring). Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment (including on college campuses) are all types of crime. School shootings are crimes. Hate crimes are crimes (the hint is in the name). Revenge porn and certain kinds of cyberbullying are crimes in many jurisdictions. If you're afraid of any or all of these happening to you, you are afraid of crime, by definition. This sort of reminded me of the finding Scott cited, that most American are opposed to Obamacare, but in favour of every individual component of Obamacare.

Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime. A woman's likelihood of being raped in a calendar year cannot be higher than her probability of being raped or mugged or having her car stolen etc. If you are X% scared of being a victim of a specific type of crime, you should be >X% scared of being a victim of any kind of crime, as there is no circumstance in which the former is more likely to befall you than the latter. This is just basic statistics. (Thank you to several commenters for reminding me of the conjunction fallacy, whose name was on the tip of my tongue while initially writing this.)

Back in the real world, I know why people react this way, in spite of how illogical it is on its face. Generations of Blue Tribers have internalised the idea that politicians who talk about being "tough on crime" are engaging in "dog-whistle politics", and that "crime" is being used as a code word for "the kinds of crimes that black people (or more recently, immigrants) engage in"; using the word "crime" in a vacuum is a signal of Red Tribe membership. Conversely, a person who expresses concern about being the victim of a hate crime, a school shooting, rape or sexual assault, cyberbullying or having their nudes leaked without their consent is signalling Blue Tribe membership.

This leads to a curious situation in which a black man who expresses concern about being the victim of a hate crime will result in all the white people around nodding deferentially, whereas if he expresses concern about being the victim of a crime (a category which includes all hate crimes), the same white people will roll their eyes and call him an Uncle Tom. In part, this state of affairs came about because many of the people who express these concerns believe (erroneously, in many cases) that these specific crimes are disproportionately likely to be committed by members of their out-group. The idea that white men are responsible for a disproportionate share of hate crimes or active shooter-style school shootings is a myth that stubbornly refuses to die.

But I hate the idea that ordinary common-sense words are being ceded as tribal shibboleths so readily. "Crime is bad" (a category which includes all Blue Tribe-coded crimes such as hate crimes, school shootings etc.) should not be a politically polarising statement, any more than "being sick is bad" or "dying prematurely is bad". It seems our culture has now reached the point at which one cannot say "crime is bad" without half of your hypothetical audience immediately responding "lmao, okay whatever you fascist MAGA bootlicker". And this is far from the only ordinary common-sense word which inspires such a bizarre polarised reaction. The most politically loaded question of the last five years was "what is a woman?", for fuck's sake. If this trend continues, I fear that in ten years' time, anyone who uses the word "the" in a tweet will have people in the replies mocking them as a Definite Article Enjoyer which, per this NPR column and Vox explainer, is a dog whistle for... something.

(This is still probably Freddie's best work.)

"If you live your life in constant fear that 'someone' is gonna suddenly commit a crime against you every time you go out in public, you have agoraphobia and should get therapy."

This is the point where you ask them to drive to That Part of Downtown (everyone knows the one) and park their car up and leave it unlocked before walking around wearing a rolex and talking loudly on their iphone for like 30 minutes.

If they won't do it, they are Scared of Crime.

Or dare them to run into traffic to prove they aren't scared of car accidents.

But people should be scared of car accidents. They are one of the top killers of people under 70.

People should be wary of them. Scared is a stronger thing.

Its not worth thinking about any of this at the object level. The things you are interacting with on social media are not human beings, they are AIs programmed to hurt you with weaponised language. By engaging with them you're allowing them to set the terms and tempo of the debate, and their only goal is to prevent real debate from happening because it's their best strategic option right now.
The words are a cloud of ink. There is no "real" message it's possible to engage with, and the people responsible just need to be supressed and incapacitated .

Just having to wade through their posts spamming a board and wasting time thinking about them is an attack on you, just as much as when they ddos a wrongthinker's website. Flooding the zone with DARVO ragebait bullshit is just an effective counter to drag the discussion away from people being burned alive on the subway, which they can't defend on the merits.

If you want the purest demo of this possible, go to /pol/ and see if there's any threads worth responding to. It's all ragebait, disruption, shilling, trolling, etc.

I don't like seeing this. I've been a mod on these forums for a long time. Going back to slatestarcodex subreddit back in 2017. This is sadly not new.

There is no "real" message it's possible to engage with, and the people responsible just need to be supressed and incapacitated. (emphasis added)

Back then it was about "punching a nazi".

We are a discussion forum, and no good discussion ever really starts with "we need to not listen and physically suppress the people I disagree with".

You've been warned multiple times in the past about this, and banned for similar offenses. You are headed towards a permaban at this point. One week for now.

Can you unban him for 24 hours so I can ask him where he draws the line between 'whole narratives are engineered from the ground up as weapons and should be ignored with extreme prejudice' and Arthur Chu mindkilling himself on a regular basis? Because they are definitely on the same continuum but I'll just look like an asshole asking him now he's banned.

I think private messages still work for banned users.

Its not worth thinking about any of this at the object level. The things you are interacting with on social media are not human beings, they are AIs programmed to hurt you with weaponised language. By engaging with them you're allowing them to set the terms and tempo of the debate, and their only goal is to prevent real debate from happening because it's their best strategic option right now. The words are a cloud of ink. There is no "real" message it's possible to engage with, and the people responsible just need to be repressed and incapacitated .

The traditional word is "demons."

But yes, many people are just completely possessed by ideology. Not worth engaging with.

I don't even mean on an individual level, despite agreeing about possession. It's that there are entire narratives on the Internet that are manufactured from the ground up to be weapons. A literal evil think-tank sat around brainstorming ways to disrupt organic conversations with propaganda, and then deployed that propaganda through controlled media, paid influencers, bot networks, reddit powermods, etc.

When you run into something like the "haha Vance fucked a couch Republicans are weird" thing, you are being attacked by a literal virus designed to hurt your ability to think. Look how much time and mental energy people wasted arguing about it here, remember how gleeful the attackers were that it was working to demoralize you.

You need to sanitize those attacks with a flamethrower if you're going to have any kind of real community discussion in this propaganda warfare environment

This should be the new canonical reference for how to write a highbrow-sounding "boo outgroup" post.

The statutory 24 hours having passed, I'm saving it for my "things the mods are surprisingly okay with when they directionally flatter their biases" highlights reel.

There is no statutory 24 hours. We usually try to make a decision quickly rather than letting a post sit in the queue for days, but in this case (with the post standing at 11 reports), there is a reason I personally am not going to pull the trigger, and most of the mods are only erratically online because of the holidays.

But thanks for providing a direct contrast to @SteveKirk's accusations that we only ever mod him because he offends our biases.

Well, I figured that 24 hours was a reasonable amount of time to wait so I wouldn't just be complaining while mods are asleep or discussing. I concede that I jumped the gun here and was wrong in expecting that you would let him get away with it.

However, I do still think that you are making it too easy for yourself by reasoning that looks like a "people from both sides get mad about the moderation, so it must be that we are actually quite fair". There is scarcely a time or system in history that did not draw complaints from people who wanted to pull further in the direction in which it was already biased; I'm sure even the leftiest of Mastodons get people telling the admins they are being fascist, too. I can only hope you have some good internal metrics about the results of what you are doing, because by the main external ones (alignment of prolific posters, upvote patterns), you are really not doing well.

Yes, I do believe that both sides constantly telling us how much we suck is evidence that we're fair.

As for whether we are "doing well" or not, I'm not aware of any "metrics" being collected other than activity counts, but I weigh your judgment about as heavily as I weigh @SteveKirk's (who, unsurprisingly, has also been telling us forever that our moderation is so bad that we're destroying the site).

If your complaint is that the site skews rightward, yes, we're aware, it's been discussed since before we left reddit, and I (and the other mods) would like to see more of an ideological balance, but I have come to the conclusion that, realistically, the only way we could keep leftists around is to ban all the rightists, when the opposite isn't true. I leave any conclusions to the interested observer.

If you think a post against propaganda is a banworthy offense, I don't know what to tell you.

I just told you the opposite of that. If you can't understand what I wrote, I don't know what to tell you.

there is a reason I personally am not going to pull the trigger

Has one meaning, come on, are you serious? That sentence isn't interpretable as saying anything other than "I would pull the trigger, but I'm waiting for a triggerman instead"
God it's all so fake and manipulative. I'd rather deal with the actual bots.

The meaning is: we are discussing whether or not to ban you. It is my opinion that you've earned a permaban, but I am recusing myself due to our past interactions. If the other mods disagree with me that your post merits a permaban, I will accept their decision.

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IMHO at this point they should just remove the boo-outgroup rule rather than make a continued mockery of it.

Edit: jeez and +17

I don’t think it’s boo-outgroup to say that large sections of social media are awful people who want to hurt you and engaging with them honestly is a mistake. Right now those are all leftists because of other civilisation all dynamics but it would just as bad if they were rightists.

I referenced /pol/ to try and demonstrate that it was a general point about the risks of letting propaganda weapons into your brain without a filter. Although admittedly even there a lot of it is committed by leftists for trolling or demoralization, it's still a good example of a community poisoned by all sides.

But yeah, if some people want the boo outgroup rule to mean "you have to take 'Kamela is Brat, Vance fucked a couch!' propaganda at face value," rather than treating them as weapons to be analyzed and defended against at arms length, I think the community is fucked.

The boo outgroup rule means you should not refer to your political opponents as literal inhuman "things." If all you said was "don't trust propaganda and liberal social media," your post would not be under discussion.

The "weird" attack on Vance was literally invented by a propaganda consultancy firm and algorithmically boosted by bots. If that doesn't count as the product of an inhuman "thing" we're going to have to have some discussions about the nature of humanity.

If your mother gets called by an automated telemarketing scam pretending to be you needing bail money/gift cards, is that the action of a human, or a malicious thing directed by human intelligence? Is the correct response for her to argue with it, or slam the phone down and curse the thing that tried to hurt her?

If something that looks almost exactly like your wife except for the featureless empty black eyes comes to your bedroom window and asks you to let it in, what do you do? Ask it politely how it's floating outside the 2nd floor, or nod to your actual wife to get the fucking shotgun and a bible?

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What do you want my response to be to "American conservatism just doesn’t appeal to me because I’m not scared of everything"? Can you write us a sample response to that claim, if it's not a waste of time engaging with?

Do you want me to waste time pretending it's a real argument we have to disprove to avoid being epicly owned by SmearBot420@x dot com?

The sole purpose of a tweet like that is claiming territory by shitting all over it. It is not a real argument. It is not speech. It should not be listened to or responded to, only talked about in terms of the hostile political project it represents.

I'm not sure if it's more appropriate to describe "my interlocutors are not human" as a different stage in the lifecycle of the very memetic parasite you are bothered by, or just a related species - but I do not think it is in any sense better.

You have seen reddit meta sub threads where they talk about strategies for taking over communities and imposing censorship. You've seen literal government and NGO sponsored influencer campaigns complete with bot account boosting. In the last six months you've seen the most manufactured consensus enforcement machine ever created in the Harris campaign.

I'm asking you, do you honestly think that the correct way to respond to these is arguing over the definition of "brat" and whether Kamela fits it? Or is the only appropriate response to note and analyze the propaganda campaign for what it is?

At least when I signed up for it, this forum was not for developing and executing an efficient counterstrategy to the Kamala campaign, but for being able to discuss the culture war with people from all sides involved without having to deal with the sort of brainless dunking and bingo-board automatisms that define Twitter, Reddit and all the other political forums. Your post is not conducive to this: we already very nearly have a right-wing monoculture, and I doubt that any stray left-winger will be particularly encouraged to stay and contributed when they see a highly-upvoted post that describes their friends and allies on Twitter as inhuman automata. They would probably think of those Twitter users described as being the ones who are actually fighting off hordes of inhuman bots, and their canned responses as the only way those allies of theirs are managing to keep the upper hand over an onslaught of repetitive astroturfed narrative attacks.

If you really think the Twitter posters you are describing are literally bots, then you are frankly out of touch with reality. If you think they are not literally bots but it is strategically correct to treat them as such, then you are not noting and analyzing the propaganda campaign but fighting it.

I wouldn't call ourselves "a right-wing monoculture"; we have everything from colorblind gender-neutral 90s liberals, to centrists who just want to grill, to autistic libertarians, to God-'n-guns conservatives, to throne and altar reactionaries. The only thing we are really missing is the far left, either economic (communism) or social (wokeness).

Do you not think that fighting against propaganda campaigns is helpful? One of the founding events of the SSC community was Scott countering the "men are more likely to be struck by a meteor than falsely accused of rape" propaganda campaign from our old friend Charles Clymer. (Who in his defense was never falsely accused of rape lol)

Fighting propaganda campaigns to keep their power outside your walled garden of discussion has always been a fundamental goal of the community.

I don't see any evidence that that propaganda campaign ever encroached in this particular walled garden. A much more salient founding event was when Scott talked about toxoplasma, and how "countering" a political meme actually makes you a vector for the very same meme - that's why to date, we have rules on paper about discussing the culture war and not waging it. If you prefer to take cues from the other side, Moldbug was on to a related thing when he talked about power leakage. The moment your forum/institution/whatever becomes a political fighting force of any import, it also becomes an asset worth capturing. Few factions would care to encroach on a forum that autistically discusses current events while prohibiting its members from openly taking sides or showing emotion, but once this forum actually starts producing innovations in fighting against one side or the other, this calculus surely changes.

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What do you want my response to be to "American conservatism just doesn’t appeal to me because I’m not scared of everything"? Can you write us a sample response to that claim, if it's not a waste of time?

I mean, I could try. Something like:

While an American liberal or progressive might feel like an American conservative is coming from a place of fear, this is a misleading impression. First, it is worth pointing out that wanting things like lower immigration, more barriers to trans care for children and fewer government hand outs doesn't have to come from a place of 'fear.' Just as liberals/progressives believe that their policies come from a high-minded place of concern for their fellow man, so too a conservative can genuinely believe that the best thing for all peoples is to adopt those policies.

In the case of immigration, a conservative might believe that brain-draining poor countries is bad for the stability and well-being of those cultures, and that migration might serve as a release valve for pressure that would rightfully lead to successful rebellions that might actually make those countries better off in the long run.

In the case of trans care, it doesn't have to be fear of the "other" at all, but a genuine conviction that the evidence in favor was actually substantially weaker than often claimed, that it originated in a different country with different background information that doesn't seem to apply to the anglo-sphere. Add in the replication crisis (which also affects medicine), and the evidence that the WPATH is an activist organization that seems to go beyond the remit of evidence, and you have a recipe to truly believe that trans healthcare for minors is a net negative for most children, and society as a whole. This is not about "fear", but a genuine disagreement on the merits of the evidence and an approach to epistemology.

Even aside from all of this, it is worth pointing out that liberals and progressives seem to be afraid of their own side's bugbears, in a way that is out of proportion with the statistics. They fear hate crimes, rape, and discrimination to a far greater degree than the statistics would seem to justify. It is wrong-headed to think that what makes conservatism unique is "fear", as opposed to the positive values they do espouse.

Exactly, that's four paragraphs wasted responding to a mindless one sentence smear. And then Trollbot5000 responds with "lol ur weird for being so invested in justifying ur bigotry, bonus transphobia yikes, have a normal one weirdo," 40 other identical replies instantly appear to ratio you, and you are reported to bluesky for hate speech.

Your thoughtful reply didn't help because there wasn't any communication happening in the first place, just a DDoS attack on your brain to bully and deflect from people asking "huh, has anyone else noticed more people on fire in the subway than usual?"

If you don't think there's anything worth responding to here, you can just not respond. We're not on Twitter, or Bluesky so the kinds of responses you get there are irrelevant.

That's what I'm talking about

For me the cool part was that I'm not on twitter much and it seemed eminently plausible that the discourse there has actually already been captured by toxoplasmic AIs. Can't be long now, anyway.

The nice thing about twitter is that you can have little siloed areas of good conversation, for now at least.

That's how Reddit used to work until moderation killed all the good places.

Oh, there's lots on both reddit and Twitter (and 4chan, although most of that sewer is just regular troll posts). Some are so good they almost pass for human , but others still use all the instantly recognizable chatgpt tells: "However, it's important to consider factors like", etc.
Others seem like real language until you realize they're just sampling random phases from the conversation while throwing in slogans.

I think dead internet theory is going to be a reality by the end of next year, if it isn't already.

I think dead internet theory is going to be a reality by the end of next year, if it isn't already.

Scarier than a dead internet, I'm worried that the rise of AI assistants is going to lead to a dead humanity. Even logging off won't save you from that one.

I've already seen reddit arguments that descended into "chatgpt, lecture this bigot about The Science," and there's something absolutely horrifying about someone making an active decision to hit the "brain turn off, let machine move mouth" button.
I always got that sick feeling of watching an ideology speak through someone, but never expected it to become this literal.

No exaggeration, we're only a few advances in machine interface away from becoming wetware for mind parasites, like an even gayer John Barnes novel.

Do you, honestly, think ideology doesn't speak through you? Never?

I don't know if his threshold is at the same level as mine, but I don't think being ideologically captured is all that common. A normal person with an ideology will have their moments of cognitive dissonance and scrambling to come up with an excuse, but someone who is being spoken through by an ideology will say things like "imagine the backlash against Muslims, if ISIS set off a nuke in a major metropolis", or will refuse to publish a study because their political opponents might "weaponize the results". Or if you want an example from the other side, reportedly Ron Paul's reaction to 9/11 was "oh no, now we're gonna have big government!".

In any case the scary thing about the discussed scenario has nothing to do with any particular ideology, ideologies are just an example of how people already outsource their thinking. The point is that with AI this is going to reach a whole new dimension. It will go beyond "we've all read the same book(s)" or "we all attended the same church", it will be people literally refusing to engage their brain and outsourcing all their reasoning to AI. Be my guest if you want to focus on petty tribal squabbles, but the idea is just as terrifying to me no matter who this power is wielded by.

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No political party or subculture at this point can in good faith claim to be the one who's "chill" about things and confused as to why other people are so bent out of shape, there must be something wrong with them. Everyone has gotten dirtied up at some point.

Also, being performatively concerned about something is not the same as being afraid of it.

Was it Scott Alexander who back in the day wrote an essay about how liberal values are optimized for times of peace and abundance and conservative values are optimized for a zombie apocalypse scenario?

I’ve pretty much incorporated that into a lot of my perception of politics.

The role of conservatives is often to point at something and say that it is dangerous and should be given more due attention.

As a normie lib I often have the reaction of the poster you quote, but also I have to say there have been times that over time I came around to the conservative position that “X represents a danger that we should be more wary of”.

My best example is how I used to be pro-decriminalization of hard drugs in the early 2010s when much of the rhetoric was based around the failure of the war on drugs. I was also pretty liberal about homelessness. But now I’ve come around to the conservative position that we should crack down on those things to preserve the public space for normal people.

Other fronts of the culture war are for example conservatives telling me I should be more afraid of immigration.

But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.

But this does line up with the original essay, being concerned about preserving the environment is something from a peace and abundance mindset, not a survival among dangers mindset. If you’re in a total war for example, the effects your bombs have on the environment don’t fucking matter!

Another one I’m trying to square is COVID. I think the fault line there was through the axis of societal cooperation vs individualism but it’s still interesting to me… for example my very conservative grandfather who had lung cancer refused to take any preventative measures and subsequently died from COVID. Here was a case where as a liberal I was predisposed to point out dangers and recommend caution but as a conservative this was anathema to my grandfathers nature.

Was it Scott Alexander who back in the day wrote an essay about how liberal values are optimized for times of peace and abundance and conservative values are optimized for a zombie apocalypse scenario?

Yes.

Another one I’m trying to square is COVID.

The reason seems obvious to me when you look at who the core constituents of the two parties are.

The core constituents of the Democratic party either don't work (retirees and the unemployed) or they work in fields like finance, social media, and academia that can be done remotely and were thus minimally effected by the lockdowns.

The core constituents of the Republican party are people with children and day-jobs. Specifically jobs in fields like manufacturing, energy, construction, logistics, etc... work that can not be done remotely. In other words, the core constituents of the Republican party are the people whose lives were most disrupted the lock-downs, and George Floyd riots.

Throw in some ham-fisted attempts by progressives to use Covid as an excuse to crackdown on conservative interests like church gatherings and charter schools, and Republican opposition seems not only predictable but inevitable.

Covid response was obviously pure tribalism(Abortion is essential! George Floyd protests are OK but churches aren't!), but you're wrong about democrat's base- retirees vote republican and low end service workers are mostly democrats(although they got paid more in unemployment than they would have working).

I agree that the "Abortion is essential! George Floyd protests are OK but churches aren't!" element played a huge role in the split, but "retirees vote republican and low end service workers are mostly democrats" just doesn't match my experience at all.

If anything it's the opposite, the loudest Harris-boosters and TDS-sufferers I've met offline have all been senior citizens who (like David French) feel that Trump is "unpresidential" and "destroying the dignity of the office". Meanwhile most of the service workers and pretty much all of the younger to middle-aged couples I know voted for Trump.

Once again, don't think a lot of people here (or in the wider blue/grey-tribe) really grasp just how much of a nuke the "they are the party of they/them not you" line was.

I think tech and tech policy wonks are another area where this breaks the other way. Fight For The Future, for example, is a pretty liberal organization (at least now, post-election), but much of their messaging is about the dangers of things like facial recognition and data brokers.

Another one I’m trying to square is COVID.

I don't see why. The immeadiate reaction from conservatives to Covid was to move to shutdown migration to prevent people from outside the US to bring said affliction inside the borders. This resulted in Liberals being vehemently against this, accusing people of anti-asian hatred and whatnot.

Then when Covid proved to not be as horrible as some projected, conservatives basically shrugged while liberals proceded to loose thier goddamn minds, even as such luminaries and Biden and Kamala refusing any Covid vaccine that Trump created(which immeadiately pivoted as soon as Biden was put into office.)

This wasn't so much an actual political split as 'My team good, the other team bad'.

And the former would have been a very good plan given the first counties with significant case numbers were all counties that host world class Ski Resorts (Park City, Sun Valley, Vail, etc).

But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.

It has always confused me why conservatives aren't the party of environmentalists and climate conservation. It's literally an attempt to prevent change. I can easily imagine a world where progressives are trying to build an economic utopia of plenty in order to make cheap goods for the poor, while the conservatives rail against the evil bureaucrats for destroying our god-given nature just to make numbers on a spreadsheet go up. And blaming foreigners for having terrible pollution and recycling policies (which they do).

You occasionally see this point trotted out as a counterpoint to liberal climate change policies (our country barely contributes to climate change, look at China's emissions), but always as a gotcha to shut down interventions, not because they actually care about China destroying the environment. It's weird. I don't understand why we live in the world we live in other than "left = government intervention" I guess. But the right usually supports government intervention if it's to prevent something they consider evil, and I would expect the destruction of nature to count.

It has always confused me why conservatives aren't the party of environmentalists and climate conservation.

Because, "environmentalism" and "climate conservation" in this context isn't actually about the climate or environment. It's a Trojan horse for left-wing academics to smuggle in thier prefered social-engineering schemes.

Look at which side is more supportive of things like, fish and game regulations, national parks, and nuclear power, and suddenly the valance shifts.

Conservatives are for more direct measures like nuclear and geoengineering (see Texas, the state with the most green energy), while liberals prefer de-growth, anti-natalism and other related things. So it’s just the fixes that differ, not the concern really (although initially this was the case)

One thing I’ve always found strange is liberals want open borders despite the fact this would be a disaster for climate change, but want you to have fewer kids…? I guess I wouldn’t care about the glaring inconsistency if they didn’t have such apocalyptic rhetoric, but I guess that’s all it is, rhetoric…

Conservatives are conserving liberalism, liberals are consolidating privilege (the way they describe conservatism)

It writes itself. Immigration is a way to preserve privilege (depress wages, abuse the public purse, only rich can afford security, shrink middle class), that’s why they do it.

Environmentalism is similar, where the only people allowed to make money are entrenched interests (and now you know why they hate the only relevant electric car company).

Texas only leads renewables because it’s a profitable use of their land IMO.

Texas leads renewables because anyone can build anything as long as they don't demand state funding, and a) the feds are happy to foot the bill for renewables instead and b) a huge percentage of Texas' power is recent compared to the national average. If the Texas legislature or Greg Abbott could wave a magic wand which didn't cost any money and replace all their solar with gas, they would do it.

It has always confused me why conservatives aren't the party of environmentalists and climate conservation.

Because the model you have is wrong. The bit about conservatism being optimized for catastrophe while liberal values are optimized for peace and plenty is wrong. And the part about conservatives being against change is wrong; what they're against is large and fast (radical) change. Conservatives went right along or were at the forefront of a lot of conservation (name not a coincidence) efforts. When environmentalism became taking a constructed nature's side in the struggle of man v. environment, conservatives got right off.

But in practice I almost never hear conservatives talk about the environment or recycling or trying to impose climate agreements or sanctions on other nations with heavy pollution.

I suppose in practice my immediate family is reasonably conservative and cares about recycling and not littering. But I never hear about it from conservative politicians or political advocates.

Intelligent conservatives practice personal environmental discipline to beautify their own immediate environment but are skeptical of legislative attempts to force environmentalism, viewing it (rightfully) as lawfare to disburse sinecures. Stupid conservatives just don't think that this green shit helps, and if prompted will wave at third world shitholes polluting far more than they and their kin do.

The case for environmentalism is that it is the purest manifestation of the tragedy of the commons, but the spoiler fact is that liberals insist on giving third world shitholes unlimited charity while scolding rich countries instead. If people actually cared about environmentalism they'd decry the saudi petroleum industry, but instead criticism is only reserved for useless corporate suits that will make the right groveling pretenses.

Stupid conservatives just don't think that this green shit helps

Not just stupid conservatives. The California and New Jersey disposable plastic bag bans both resulted in more plastic use, not less, as determined by the states themselves (of course they won't repeal them; the environment wasn't the point). And I'm sure you'll find plenty of reasonably intelligent conservatives who are skeptical of the value of most post-consumer recycling.

Well, one argument goes that that's why environmentalism attracts the "blue-tribe conservative" types. A German friend dismissed the Green party something to the effect of "CSU [centre-right] NIMBYs with a vacation home in the countryside" back in the noughties, long before the "leftists are now the establishment" meme really proliferated. In the end, it can just be conceptualised as different preferences as to what to conserve - the environment, or the oligarchy of those who burn the environmental seedcorn most efficiently.

Most proposed measures to help with climate change involve making enormous social and economic changes, which have to be weighed against climate change. So on that level, there you go.

Personally I'm a lot more worried about the policies people have floated to 'combat' climate change than I am about the climate change.

So it's more an issue of extremism? The conservatives care about the environment in a balanced way with tradeoffs, while the progressives want to move fast and break things and damn the side effects? Because that generally tracks with my overall model of how the sides operate. But then why don't we hear more about moderate conservative conservation efforts?

Your typical American red triber cares about preserving the environment for human use but does not believe climate change is real and doesn't give two shits about the last remaining three-speckled banana slug being replaced by two-speckled banana slugs. Normal conservatives are very much on board with- this does not necessarily mean they get off their couches and do it, but the people that do get off their couches for trash clean ups are ones with a resting orientation of 'moderate conservative'- cleaning up trash in the environment and generally willing to recycle if it keeps plastic from clogging up waterways. Ducks unlimited(conservative-ish) is probably much more effective at preserving wetlands than the sierra club. It's not, like, a fact that gets trumpeted by the media(do laymen even know what ducks unlimited is?). But 'boy scout conservationism' is a thing which does stuff.

Key parallels to the recent "pro lifers don't care about babies after they're born" discussion, where everyone's preconceptions rest on a base of leftist propaganda carefully shoehorned into every tv show, with the goal of making counter-argument impossible.

Preparing the ground of a fight with land mines and razor wire is just as important as waging it, and conservatives keep walking right into prepared kill zones by engaging as if it's a debate club rather than a battle against enemies trying to exterminate them.

Holy shit, you're right. In related news, did you know that the NRA is a national leader in gun safety education?

Yeah, if it weren’t for hairshirt environmentalists and watermelon Green Parties using climate change as an excuse to create a better world, conservatives would probably be more on board with conservation and more opposed to pollution.

God, those comments.

These aren't better worlds. Urbanite social activists are unable/unwilling to acknowledge how urban biodiversity is an intense pest and tree management exercise because biological matter generates an ecosystem that interferes with human life. My favourite is the cartoons shared repeatedly about streets lined with fruit trees for the homeless to eat at will or other pastoric idyll guff, or the appeal of 15 minute cities. No consideration for biological realities of bugs and roots, no consideration for antisocial elements or the cost to build and manage all these aspects. Continued self delusions drive people further away from these utopian goals, and it just increases the self righteous ess of the activists.

Another one I’m trying to square is COVID. I think the fault line there was through the axis of societal cooperation vs individualism but it’s still interesting to me… for example my very conservative grandfather who had lung cancer refused to take any preventative measures and subsequently died from COVID. Here was a case where as a liberal I was predisposed to point out dangers and recommend caution but as a conservative this was anathema to my grandfathers nature.

Because the virus simply was not as dangerous as liberals pretended.

Depends on what time you are talking about. At the start of the pandemic, it was completely correct to be extremely careful because we didn't know how lethal it would be or how bad the long term damages would be. Dimwits try to argue that because it wasn't that deadly in the end that it was incorrect to be careful at the start.

I think that's fair. But by May 2020 at the latest, we knew exactly how dangerous it was and there was still 2 more years of panic.

It wasn't until most people actually caught Covid that they finally stopped panicking.

But if you have lung cancer and are in your 80s, it can and will kill you. As was his case.

My mother had lung cancer and was in her late 70s and got COVID and it was asymptomatic. She died shortly afterwards anyway. Of lung cancer.

So will everything else. Covid didn't merit any special precautions except interning the paranoid ninnies trying to shut down our society.

If you have lung cancer and are in your 80s you're going to be dead soon enough anyway. There's pretty much no demographic that can clearly gain QALY from covid restrictions. To give specific numbers people in their 80s have a life expectancy of 2.5 years and an IFR of 8.5%, so avoiding covid is worth only 77 days. You likely have poor quality of life as is (so you have less QALYs to lose) and abiding by restrictions will reduce that quality from poor to near zero.

And a related note, but most covid comorbidites have small effects compared to just being older. In other words, the hypothetical 40 year old lung cancer patient still does not benefit because covid is about as dangerous to them as it is to a healthy 45 year old. If there is an exception to this, and it's a big if, it's kidney disease, not cancer.

Eh, my grandma had throat cancer (both lived as prolific smokers), she did take the vaccine, got covid at the same time, and is still alive and kicking.

Other side, my other grandpa is 92 and plays tennis every other day. I’ve got some strong longevity genes on both sides, but sadly messing around with stuff like this can cause you to lose out on a decade of life. Guy would’ve definitely enjoyed to take a couple more vacations with his wife before it was all said and done, I know that.

Do you not think that your grandfather perhaps wanted to live out his few remaining years in dignity, rather than fear?

“I’m going to die within 2 years anyway, let’s do so standing rather than on my back”.

This was the express intent communicated to me by my grandma and my friend said the same about his grandma.

Meanwhile it’s my grandma who decided to vaccinate herself who is living with dignity and he unfortunately died without being able to breathe.

In my opinion anyway. Dying that way fucking sucks man. But I can respect that he was ready to face those consequences for his principles.

It’s a strange counterfactual where a man in his 80s with lung cancer would be living this great life 4 years later if only he had just taken an almost laughably ineffective vaccine…

Yet his wife is?

Throat cancer, she talks with one of those electric voice boxes you press up to the neck.

She took the vaccine, contracted Covid at the same time, and she’s alive and kicking and living with her children and grandchildren.

Modern cancer treatment is actually surprisingly effective when you catch it early.

Also, the COVID vaccine is objectively effective at preventing deaths.

By the time the vaccine came out, refusing it was a pure and well deserved fuck-you to the people shutting down all of society over the disease. After the diamond princess cruise incident I knew well enough that the restrictions were not warranted; by the time the vaccine was available my condition for taking it was 'everyone who pushed covid restrictions executed. No literally, ALL OF THEM. If that means no healthcare workers then everyone else should have thought about that before going along with their neuroticism.'

Had the vaccine been released in March 2020 I likely would have taken it.

But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.

This is partly a matter of principle and partly a matter of pragmatism.

Principle in that, actually, no, climate change doesn't mean that we have to throw our hands up in helplessness and open our borders, and the very implication causes my hackles to rise. Actually, we can just enforce the border and expel unwanted illegal immigrants regardless of anything else going on, and we should.

But this gets to the second point, which is that we're not stupid, and we notice when crises are politicized to ram through all sorts of stuff that our enemies have been waiting to get done forever. Is the climate changing? Well then obviously we need to force people out of the dignity of single-family dwellings into high-density housing without parking such that they're reliant upon public transit (omg squee public transit!) and discourage them from reproducing (unless they're brown) and increase immigration to replace the native kids we're not making any more and give huge grants to leftist NGOs and install their people in positions of power across the board and roll out several planks of the communist manifesto and and and...

It's like, huh, that all seems awfully convenient and it's not really clear to me why climate change should necessitate any of it, but it's been made extremely clear to us at this point that if we give an inch on this matter miles will be taken. So, in short, it's the left's fault for abusing the situation.

And anyway, your offhand assertion that "Well obviously if climate change happens we're going to have to accept enormous amounts of immigrants" is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. No, we don't have to do that! But we know that leftists are going to try to convince us that we do. The line in the sand got drawn at an unfortunate location for everyone, but it did have to be drawn, and this is why.

Human politics is a stupid, dangerous game and tends to award us with stupid, dangerous prizes. Unfortunately, assenting to the existence of the problem is currently politically inextricable from giving our enemies enormous power to do all sorts of things we can't let them do. So here we are.

I really don't understand why there is handwringing in the west about the inevitability of migrants coming in. At one point someone will say that this web of interdependent problems which all magically converge to the liberals preserved solution can be addressed in isolation. Close the borders, lock up criminals, deny appeals. If liberals continue whining that this goes against some UNDHR or whatever piece of paper that magically confers authority, then just burn the damn thing and form a parallel bilateral arrangement with nations that aren't beholden to some holy writ. Liberals hold no patience with the Bible, why do they slob the knob of some 70 year old text.

Close the borders, lock up criminals, deny appeals.

And how do you propose to do this? With what institutions? And how do you deal with all the other, more powerful institutions that will try to stop you? As the old trope goes, "you and what army"?

If liberals continue whining that this goes against some UNDHR or whatever piece of paper that magically confers authority, then just burn the damn thing

At which point a CIA-run "color revolution" overthrows your government and you die like Gaddafi.

My entire point is that the western governments, of which the ur example I envisioned in my own case above being the united states, was their own enforcement and military mechanisms. What more powerful institution exists to try and force the US government to actually let in a billion migrants? Inaction is a choice, borne from a collective will to power. And all choices can be exercised.

Shitholes dont need the CIA coming in to force open borders for migrants to enter. Migrants want to pass through Libya and Turkey to reach the promised lands of Europe and USA where borders don't exist and cowards strangle themselves with words printed in a previous age. There is no God forcing the USA to assent to foreign invasion, but for the morals of it's own people. And this moral calculus will change as reality asserts iys inevitability.

My entire point is that the western governments, of which the ur example I envisioned in my own case above being the united states, was their own enforcement and military mechanisms.

Yes, and those western governments — or specifically, the parts of them that matter — are in favor of "letting in a billion migrants," and that's not going to change. You can call for them to "close the borders, lock up criminals, deny appeals" all you want, it's not going to happen. The people in charge don't want to do that, so they're not going to do it, and you can't make them.

Colour revolutions fail regularly. There's one in Georgia the country which is failing as we speak.

Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment (including on college campuses) are all types of crime. School shootings are crimes. Hate crimes are crimes (the hint is in the name). Revenge porn and certain kinds of cyberbullying are crimes in many jurisdictions.

Just the usual Who? Whom?, where persons who consider themselves Empathetic care only for the victims of crime depending on who the perpetrator and victim are (and often care more for the perpetrators than the victims) and are somehow suddenly devoid of Empathy and compassion when it comes to understanding someone who’s wary of crime in general.

Crimes where stereotypically (regardless of the actual statistical accuracy) the perpetrator is white or a man and/or the victim is a non-Asian minority or a woman are Problematic in ways that crime in general is not. #StopAsianHate started off strong when the acts of hatred were blamed on racist white MAGA men; it quickly got disappeared when video after video showed who the actual perpetrators were.

Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime. A woman's likelihood of being raped in a calendar year cannot be higher than her probability of being raped or mugged or having her car stolen etc. If you are X% scared of being a victim of a specific type of crime, you should be >X% scared of being a victim of any kind of crime, as there is no circumstance in which the former is more likely to befall you than the latter. This is just basic statistics.

Indeed, an amusing instance of Linda the Feminist Bank Teller.

The idea that a disproportionate share of hate crimes or active shooter-style school shootings are committed by white men is a myth that stubbornly refuses to die.

There was a recent shooting by a transman and one by a teenage girl. Nothing wholesome like some gender diversity.

In addition to the selective empathy of Kind and Decent Human Beings, also amusing is the irony that the type of people who pride themselves on being interested in other people—especially from other cultures—are so often ignorant of other people and other cultures. Many Latin American cities, for instance, feature houses with spiky fences and barred windows, rifle-in-hand military/police scattered around places from ATMs to McDonalds. Clearly these stupid Latinx need some tsk-tsking from a smug effete western leftist calling them paranoid pussies and fascist bootlickers. Don’t they know how unwelcome, uninclusive, and inaccessible their houses and public spaces feel to Persons of Justice Involvement?

Conjunction fallacy was the exact one I was looking for while writing up the post, thank you!

I commented that I found it very strange to assert that you're not scared of crime. Crime is bad. All things being equal, no one would choose to be a victim of crime. Of course some people are more scared of crime than they really should be, but that's a far cry from saying that any amount of fear of crime is wholly unjustified. I may have compared the tweeter to Bike Cuck.

I'm generally not afraid of crime. Or sharks. Or lightning strikes, aneurysms, or food poisoning.

All of them are genuine events which can affect me negatively, but the risks don't draw an emotional reaction from me. However, I also find it strange to draw attention to that fact.

Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime.

That's a common error for everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy

If this trend continues, I fear that in ten years' time, anyone who uses the word "the" in a tweet will have people in the replies mocking them as a Definite Article Enjoyer which, per this NPR column and Vox explainer, is a dog whistle for... something.

Reminds me of The Taxman.

I see your core point here, but I want to quibble with the linguistic specifics. I don't think what you mean by "afraid of crime" and what your interlocutors mean is the same thing. I have encountered people who are annoyingly, performatively "not afraid of crime" in the sense of arguing that it's actually no big deal if cars get broken into. There's zero chance I'm going to back that position and I don't want to be mistaken for it... but I am not afraid of crime. By this, I don't mean that I think the chances of being victimized by crime is zero (I've had my car broken into, for example), but that I don't generally think about being victimized by crime at all on a day-to-day basis. Encountering sketchy individuals will instantly raise the salience of it to the front of my mind, but the modal number of times that I consider whether I'm going to be the victim of a crime in a given week is zero.

Let's flip this to one where I think we're likely to fundamentally agree - are you afraid of Covid? I'm not and I never was. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous from the start that other people similarly situated to myself were "taking it serious" at all. They clearly are afraid of Covid and many of them will say as much. Part of this is clearly about estimations of the severity of the disease, but it's not the whole thing - I just literally do not experience any fear when I contemplate the possibility that I could get a nasty respiratory disease. I will or I won't, but I'm not going to reshape my whole life to avoid something that just isn't all that likely to be an issue.

Another example - are you scared of afraid of dying in an automobile accident? Much like crime, the only time I give it any thought is when something sharply raises the salience of it, like riding a bike near someone that's driving aggressively. Despite the fact that this is probably the thing that's most likely to kill me in a given year at my current age, I don't experience any fear of it. Someone might run a red light, slam into the side of my car, and leave me permanently paralyzed. In fact, someone did run a stop sign and T-bone me, and that one did stick with me a bit longer, but it eventually faded. I just drive down the road, doing normal stuff, completely unafraid of the activity even while I acknowledge that it's the most dangerous part of my life. I actually do want something done as far as policies go (in fact, decreasing QoL for motorists as a tradeoff for walkable neighborhoods is probably my top remaining NormieLib position). But afraid? No, I wouldn't say so.

I don't think this is just a matter of connotation or denotation - I think this really is a difference in the experience or expression of fear.

Well of course I'm not afraid of Covid, in the sense that I'm not worried about catching it and dying from it. But I am worried that one of my elderly loved ones might catch it and die from it. And if I was an elderly or immunocompromised person, I would think it would be perfectly reasonable for that counterfactual version of me to be significantly more afraid of Covid than I personally am.

I suspect this is a case of (perhaps mutual) misunderstanding. When the post you were responding to said they were "not scared of ... crime ..." they did not mean "it would not be bad to be the victim of a crime" they meant something more like "as I go about my daily life I do not experience any subjective fear that I will be the victim of a crime." Your response, then, was not interpreted as "crime is bad, so it's rational to have some amount of fear of it" it was interpreted as "you ought to feel afraid of being the victim of a crime as you go about your daily life." This also neatly explains the responses you got. There is certainly a stereotype of conservatives in certain liberal bubbles as someone who experiences a fear response (often grounded in a belief they will be the victim of a crime) whenever they see a non-white, immigrant, Other, etc person. I expect you ended up being rounded off to this stereotype based on the interpretation of your comments.

Is this not a stereotype grounded in blue tribe conservative behavior?

“Oh, you’re scared, you pussy, you little bitch?” is an age old argumentative tactic and best ignored. If you must respond, which I would rarely advise, the answer is usually ‘Yes’, whether the topic is sunscreen, driving without a seatbelt, mass immigration or anything else. Then again, I’m a neurotic.

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