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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25669 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Following up from the discussion a few weeks ago, Democrats are trying to bring back the border bill from January: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/schumer-says-us-senate-will-try-again-pass-border-bill-2024-05-19/

I said that the bill is obviously something that Democrats want unilaterally, and is no way a compromise or concession that could be offered in exchange for aid or anything else. It seems like this is proven true by the fact that the Democrats still want this as a standalone package.

As to whether or not the package is a trap, I can't see any reason the Democrats would support this unless it furthered their objective of increasing migration. Any alternative explanations here? If it wasn't a trap, is there a reason why Republicans would turn this down?

As to whether or not the package is a trap, I can't see any reason the Democrats would support this unless it furthered their objective of increasing migration.

This is your brain on relentless negative partisanship. "The enemy is agreeing with me!?! It must be a trap!!!"

Remember when the Democrats agreed to tough-on-crime policies in the 90s, despite formerly being the party that wanted to lessen crime penalties? Many issues aren't black and white, where one party supports 0 and the other party supports infinity. If both sides support some finite number, with one side's number simply being less than the other side's, then there's no contradiction if the status quo's number is far higher than what both would prefer, that both sides would agree to bring it down. For a more pessimistic take, it's possible that the side supporting a higher amount realizes that the status quo is too high and is thus costing them politically. In other words, they might prefer the status quo if they could have it for free, but they judge that the ongoing cost isn't worthwhile. That's what was going on back in February with the compromise deal. It's how the Democrats got to supporting much more stringent immigration restrictions without supporting any sort of amnesty, which had been a feature of basically every immigration compromise prior.

The resurrected bill could be another attempt by Democrats to defray the costs, or it could simply be grandstanding if they know Republicans will shoot it down again. Then they can say they tried to crack down on the border multiple times but Republicans (Trump) wouldn't let them.

The fact that the Democrat president singlehandedly increased the number to the current level seems to imply that their goal isn't to decrease it.

Remember when the Democrats agreed to tough-on-crime policies in the 90s, despite formerly being the party that wanted to lessen crime penalties?

Depending on how you look at it, it was either a trap or a compromise that gave a lot to the Democrats while giving a little bit to the Republicans.s

There are plenty of democrats who aren't in favor of open borders and the issue is a huge political liability for democrats.

Increasing migration is not the same as open borders.

No democrats are in favor of open borders.

  • -14

I should have been more clear. No Democratic elected official is in favor of open borders.

None? Not even one?

Not even one little fella

None? Not even one?

"Open borders" also would mean you would be as happy to take in ones who vote Republican and also Xi and Putin fans, as much as you happy to take Democratic-voting Minorities(tm).

To first order there aren't any immigrant groups who would vote Republican. The US is well to the right of the part of the world which wants to get here.

I'm not sure about "are", but Cubans "were" an immigrant group that voted Republican.

And then the second generation voted Democratic. But they were the last socialist refugees to oppose socialism; Venezuelan refugees just think the revolution was betrayed.

I dunno that that's true. Brown immigrants vote D for transparently self-serving reasons, or occasionally machine politics, and not due to ideological affinity.

There's also plenty of eastern Europeans who would like to move here who would be willing to vote R. Current law just doesn't allow working class immigration except for illegal border crossers.

Some group of conservatives should establish an NGO that flies Eastern Europeans to Mexico, then helps them cross the border and claim asylum. If they could get Russians or Armenians, the immigrants would even have a pretty good asylum case.

I believe you'd find that sword has but a single edge.

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I'm someone that generally sees the two parties as pretty close to each other in actual policy positions. Even if they loudly scream about how different they are.

Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.

Lots of people here like to complain about the Democrats being in favor of open borders, but as someone who is actually in favor of open borders I mostly see the Democrats as ok with the current immigration situation, but not interested in opening up things any further.

If you think we have open borders right now .. I think we disagree on too much of base reality and we won't get very far talking with each other.

All of that to say, I would not be surprised if the bill looks semi strict on immigration but basically lacks any real teeth.

Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.

The MVT binds for IRV with compulsory voting (as is the case in Australia, where indeed there is little difference between the two biggest parties' policies). It binds here because the base can't defect. In optional plurality voting, the base can defect, either by futilely voting third-party or by staying home, so being a micron closer to your base than the other guy is is not necessarily enough to win their votes and, thus, the MVT is not valid - base turnout depends on your policies, and tends to counterbalance swing voters, so taking the maximally-moderate position is not a dominant choice.

There are two thoughts on how to win a FPTP:

  1. Win the median voter and everyone to such voters left or right, OR

  2. GOTV by appealing to your base.

If trying to appeal to the median voter kills GOTV amongst your base, then you lose the election. The really successful politician can do both.

I think one strategy is to pursue mainstream policy while also convincing your base that your opponent would totally end democracy.

Another strategy is to pursue extreme policy while also convincing the moderate voters that your opponent would totally end democracy.

In some ways what we have now is the worst of both worlds. We have open borders for criminals and for low-skilled workers who are willing to work for low wages off the books, but we have tightly restricted immigration for highly skilled workers.

The US would be well served by adopting the Australian method: A relatively easy points based system to get in if you're a skilled worker plus a guarantee you'll be detained offshore and never be allowed into the US ever again if you arrive illegally.

This doesn't suffice to limit the liabilities of diversity. It's very hard to overstate how much self-inflicted damage the United States has accepted in the name of refusing to discriminate between migrant populations on the basis of their cultural backgrounds. People are obviously aware of major incidents like 9/11, but dealing with petty intrusions like not being able to check a backpack at a race because an Islamic extremist bombed the Boston Marathon are just everywhere. We also get the low-level annoyances of antisemitic losers on college campuses and women in beekeeper outfits. There is no plausible case that the benefits of Muslim immigration have outstripped the costs.

Huh? Tsarnaev senior was admitted to the country as an asylee. Wiki says he was on welfare, and worked as a "backyard mechanic."

Tamerlan is a college dropout who tried to compete in boxing and was otherwise a piece of shit with no steady employment listed on his wiki page.

Dzhokar was still in college at the time of the bombing but had a 1.09 GPA.

I don't see how any of these people come to the country on a points based system.

On the other hand, I've worked with many talented and pleasant Iranian immigrants who are definitely assets for this country.

I'd add that getting and holding a professional job for a couple years is itself a strong assimilatory force; I can't think of any H1B who aided or carried out a terrorist attack. Which isn't to say H1Bs don't bring their own issues (preferential hiring of their in-group being a major one), but the biggest offenders there aren't people from Muslim-majority countries.

I don't understand the focus on skilled immigration. A lot of what we need is unskilled work. Since the pandemic we've seen reduced hours and increased wages for service jobs that they still can't seem to staff. I suspect part of the reason for the price increases everywhere is that they have to pay 15 bucks an hour for someone to push a cash register, not because of change in the law but because they can't find anyone for less than that, and they're still having trouble staffing these places. US Steel is having trouble finding laborers for mills because even at 80k/year no one wants to work rotating shifts doing manual labor in a dusty environment.

$15/hr for a cashier was already on the way just due to general price inflation. Preexisting cashier wages were already a premium over other unskilled labor because you need someone who can count, make change, be nice to customers, and not look fucked up, and even without the labor crunch we would've seen it.

The focus on immigration types is itself unnecessary. Let the market decide. The key is that migrants and their children should have no recourse to US citizenship (by naturalization or birthright), ever. Perhaps for the richest we can allow them to buy in for $5m per (immediate) family, paid in cash to the treasury dept. Everyone else can go home to retire or when the job is done. They can pay to school their children in public schools, and can’t bring over family unless they can financially demonstrate they can support them.

All we need is the Kuwaiti/Emirati system. These are countries where 80% of the population are immigrants, and yet the natives are still in charge because naturalization doesn’t exist.

At the moment, the US attracts people who see their country of origin going nowhere and are willing to emigrate to secure a better future for themselves and their kids. Due to an oversupply of such people, the US can -- in principle -- filter for the best and the brightest of them.

What you are offering is instead is an oil rig job -- hard work, hostile environment, with the only motivation being able to spend the shittons of money you made after you come back to civilization.

Now I am sure that you would find takers for that deal, global income disparities being what they are, plenty of people would jump at the chances to pick up dog turds for minimum wages which will allow their extended families to live comfortable lives. I mean, it is not like the Arab oil dynasties have problems finding wage slaves either. Put in the hours, go back home, live a better life.

But the top of the cream will likely look elsewhere. Why would anyone take a professorship in a country which has made it plain that they would kick them out as soon as they retire when they could go to Canada instead? Likewise, there is certainly the trope of immigrants who are working hard so they can fulfill their dream of some day owning a Kwik-E-Mart.

The lower class of US citizens will not much like the outcome of your proposal either. Suddenly they have to compete against people who are completely beholden to their employers for continued residency and may come from cultures in which unions are not a thing, while also willing to work for much lower wages because they do not have to feed a family in the US from them. If you think Facebook's preference for H-1Bs over citizens was bad, wait until Amazon gets to staff all their warehouses with people who have much worse visa conditions than H-1B.

I also have some moral objections to your proposal. Leaving aside the question if indentured servitude a la UAE is really the path the US should follow, I also believe that people should generally be the citizen of the country they have lived in for generations. Your proposal would create a permanent caste of people who are non-citizens. Given the TFR, it seems entirely possible that at some point a significant fraction of the population will be excluded from democratic participation. At some point you in effect have an aristocracy. This feels deeply un-american to me.

If only the United States had the foresight to institute such a system a century and a half ago, before the immigrant problem got out of hand. Then they could have just used my great-grandfather's labor in the mines until he decided to retire (coincidentally right around the time Pittsburgh Seam coal started running low), and then deported him back to Galicia just in time for the German invasion. Another great-grandfather would have been shipped back to Calabria some time in the late 40s or early 50s. I don't want to think what the consequences for your family would have been. I'm not sure what the downside was of their being allowed to stay.

America is a settler country; all of us except the natives were ‘immigrants once’ (even if before independence). But it is fair for a settler country to decide that permanent settlement is finished. That involves no contradiction or hypocrisy. Manifest destiny is over. The only remaining land is either worthless or protected for nature. 330 million is enough.

The only remaining land is either worthless or protected for nature. 330 million is enough.

This seems wildly arbitrary. Why can't Duluth be the size of Chicago, Wilmington the size of Manhattan, Portland (Maine) at least as large as Boston? Not to mention the density of many major American cities such as Boston, DC, St. Louis, etc. is a fraction of what it could be. Immigrants aren't coming to America to buy a plot of land and do subsistence farming anymore, they'd be coming for manufacturing and service jobs.

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America is a settler country; all of us except the natives were ‘immigrants once’ (even if before independence).

Not except for the natives; the ancestors of the modern tribes (the Clovis people) killed and/or drove out an earlier wave of settlement.

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It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.

That doesn't account for the electoral voting system, as well as how polarization affects races down the ticket that might depend on simple majority rule.

I mostly see the Democrats as ok with the current immigration situation, but not interested in opening up things any further.

That might be true, in the fact that Democrats created the current situation. But they created the current situation by opening things up far more than they were before.

From my Fox and Trumpist sources, it has clauses which allow bureaucrats to give American citizenship to swaths of people and restrict the President from using his existing and Constitutionally granted powers to do anything about border crossings until certain thresholds are met. Whatever else is in the bill, those two are poison pills for the voting base of the GOP, so their Congresspeople dare not vote for it.

As I said last time we discussed this, “give American citizenship” is irrelevant when all their children become citizens anyway from the literal moment of birth. At most it slightly brings the problem forward by like half a generation.

When "bringing the problem forward" means "Democratic supermajority now" instead of "Democratic Supermajority later", it's a damn big difference. (because maybe the horse will learn to sing)

Exactly. When one party can simply import third world socialists (including religiously socialist Muslims) and make them voters, the other party has to either become a competing socialist party or stand on principle and expire.

the other party has to either become a competing socialist party or stand on principle and expire.

Or flip the table and resort to non-democratic methods.

I read that (great!) thread on the bill. Any other decent long form articles or think pieces on the bill? Some ignorant thots in the mean time. These might be too cynical, or not sufficiently cynical.

If you're a Democrat and see this is as a Genuine National Concern, but it's not a problem you can admit is a problem, then what's the best way to deal with it? If the party has consensus, then maybe you can talk to your more centrist party members to commit to a Blame Manchin strategy. You let the Republicans pass the legislation and then pass blame for addressing the problem-not-problem on your political enemies and useful quislings. This doesn't seem to be necessary and that should worry for the GOP.* This could also be Plan B for 2025.

If you're a Democrat and see this is as a Genuine National Concern, and may lose the Whitehouse to a man you can not be seen as cooperating with for the next 4 years, then now's the time. Get the legislation out there now while you have the chance. That's leverage for your enemy. Although the leverage may be worthwhile if the bill is electorally beneficial or neutral for your party in this election. At worst, it takes some wind out of the opposing party platform.

If you're a Democrat, and this problem-not-problem is more so an electoral concern, but you're constrained by your party's established platform that needs time to change, then what do you do? You put up legislation that doesn't really address the not-problem or help your opponents, but is enough to pass blame off to the other party if it passes or not. Hey, we just passed bipartisan immigration reform or Hey, we tried to address the not-problem.

Thing is, Whitehouse or not, it appears Democrats are willing to start calling this a not-a-problem thing a problem that needs fixing. Reasonably, responsibly, and certainly not due to hatred. CNN isn't running stories on how this bill is a massive betrayal, are they? Does the GOP get away with dumping a lost opportunity?

If you're a Republican senator you might see it as a Genuine National Concern, but the ongoing problem is not really an electoral problem for you. Not so long as you're trying, or so long as your state's governor keeps shipping immigrants to other parts of the country. It might even be a problem that provides more electoral advantages the worse the problem gets. If allowing the opposing party to fix the not-problem doesn't help you electorally, then what's in it for you? Even if it was acceptable legislation you think might work, your party might have consensus to not deal with the problem until your party has a stronger position.

It may no longer be not be politically feasible to reform immigration through Congress. It seems that way. Congress found the one weird trick years ago. Keep the big stuff on the docket for campaigning, keep your seat, and let POTUS take the heat. If he messes up you can yell at him, and even if it works it'll only stay workin' until your team is back up on the plate. This also fits nicely into a case where you, senator, don't consider this a Genuine National Concern, and is instead just another episode of political football.

A cynical political reading would be the democrats want to be seen as “doing something” on immigration. Immigration is the 1st or 2nd best issue for Trump (along with inflation) so the democrats are trying to paint the republicans as blocking immigration reform in order to please Trump.

Immigration is the 1st or 2nd best issue for Trump (along with inflation) so the democrats are trying to paint the republicans as blocking immigration reform in order to please Trump.

To do this, they need to portray immigration as a problem that needs to be solved. This is difficult, because they have been blasting their base with the message that all concerns about illegal immigration are illegitimate racism for like thirty or forty years now, have actively worked to massively undermine border security for something like two decades now, spent four years attacking Trump's every attempt to secure the border, and directly caused the current crisis. I don't doubt the media's willingness to step up to champion the lie that this is all Red Tribe's Fault, actually, but I am skeptical that it will work all that well.

I saw Chris Murphy speaking on the matter yesterday and he seemed very comfortable framing the issue as needing solving, but from a different angle than where you're coming at - he's selling the idea that the real problem is that the system is so jammed up that these people can't even get a fair hearing on their asylum claims. Let's get something done, get some more judges and lawyers to make sure people get admitted legally, that kind of thing. Basically, illegal immigration is a problem and the solution is to make all of these people legal immigrants. This is easy enough to sell to his constituents, particularly when he can point to those dastardly Republicans that just want to keep these innocent asylum seekers illegal for purely political reasons.

30 years ago Bill Clinton was talking about how Americans were right to be concerned about illegal immigration, in his State of the Union address. 20 years ago Obama said people can't be allowed to pour over the border undocumented and unchecked. 18 months ago Biden talked about having to crack down on illegal immigration in a speech. Now you may question whether he means that, but he certainly didn't have any problems framing it as negative. And nor did his predecessors.

Now when Trump ralks about that do they frame that as racism? Of course, its a great attack vector. But "its racist when our enemies do it, but not when we do it" is a perfectly standard (albeit potentially immoral) political strategy. Which is targetted at what you might call squishy left leaning moderates.

It does alienate left-left people who will say things like Biden is just as bad as Trump etc. But thats not who is being aimed at.

In other words you are wrong that Democrats as a whole have been blasting concerns about illegal immigration being racist for 30 or 40 years. Only when their opponents have those concerns. Thats how they can pivot if required, on what they themselves say (or even do!) if polling indicates they should do so. When you (not you, you!) do it, its racist nonsense, when we do it, it's humanely targeted enforcement. When you say you are skeptical it will work...well it has been working. Not on everyone of course, but it doesn't need to. Just for those who are squeamish anout kids in cages, but also fear the stories of immigrant felons.

Will it work ENOUGH to win an election is the real question I suppose.

Status in the progressive art scene

There’s a thread on Reddit about social progressive influences in the youth arts and music scene. (The link is an archive with all comments, no need for account.) It’s a glimpse into a social world from members who would otherwise not talk about it. This particular community is artistically and culturally aligned with progressive culture but politically more moderate or to the right. A lot of this you have probably heard before (quick to cancel, quick to signal), but I found the below selection to be informative:

”I grew up evangelical Christian going to youth events/camps blah blah and the in-group out-group culty dynamic is literally the same. None of these fuckers are individuals”

”i understand that obsessive complaining about "woke" stuff can be cringe, but when people claim that the dogma isn't actually as cartoonishly insane as it's made out to be, you know they have never played in bands in places like this. even actual RWers don't understand how crazy it gets. when my bf's parents make fun of pronoun stuff we're just like, don't even start, you guys have noo idea”

”I live in a particularly "progressive" part of Philadelphia, and this is how so many people are. I feel like so many people learned about the depths of systematic racism, started to scream about how terrible white people are, realized that they were white, and instead of learning a fucking thing about how to cope with this, they decided that they too are victims of systematic oppression, and this led to a spread of smug virtue signaling culture. Makes people feel like less of a potential perpetrator of racism or whatever phobias if they begin to identify with every marginalized identity they feasibly can”

”This generation are obsessed with curating their looks amd their spaces. Everything is tailored, edited, thought out and calculated except the music and the lyrics. The amount of palace intrigue that goes into consensus building about what local bands, people, places are permissible is ludicrous. It's like there is a giant Pravda book everyone is reading from silently at home. When they go out they wanna impress the Party. When they go back home.they inform and do espionage in little meetings no one hears about. Dark non-arts are taking hold everywhere.

The characterization of “palace intrigue” is insightful. Indie art, basement shows, etc are unpoliced places where the members have no religion, organized morality, or moral mentors. They are anarchic gatherings of young horny people who do not believe in higher authority or cling to a moral tradition. Status is rewarded with fame, sex, drugs, favors from the few trustfund members, and coveted but longshot employment opportunity at some shop / label / magazine / bar. Low status leads to utter and irrevocable ostracization. The stakes are, uh, big. So what happens is that authority and a code of conduct develops organically but very primitively through cliques and “palace gossip”, with the valuable positions at the top guarded tyrannically. Its Lord of the Flies except sometimes it smells worse.

I think the missing piece for understanding why the scene is so unhealthy is that members are imitating group exemplars. The imitation of group exemplars is a universal human habit, a relic of tribal days. These scenes first congregate on Twitter, tumblr, or instagram, and only then do they disperse to real life watering holes. (As one user put it: “music scenes were about capturing real life and putting it online; now it's putting online into real life.”) What they see on social media is that gossip and public accusation gets the most attention and name recognition, which is valuable for securing a place in the social hierarchy. The more signaling you do and the more explicit you do it, the more you gain attention. The increasing numerical value of likes or reblogs on social media tricks the users into believing that the number is an accurate sign of social value — and this consequently turns it into a real social value. You only need to persuade a small minority that the numbers indicate social value for the numbers to eventually become the dominant social value. Why? Because if 5% of social value is suddenly administered according to an online number, then this will be noticed and more people will pay attention to it, leading it to comprise 6%. And if 6% of social value, then … and so on. This will continue until participating online is a necessary requirement for obtaining the niche’s social value (how LinkedIn works). That original 5% is guaranteed because social media is addicting.

The reason it devolves into a base form of status signaling is that, well, everything is status signaling. But developed cultures long ago figured out ways to sublimate status signaling toward prosocial ends through the laying down of criteria and similarity with which to judge value. Were these guys Confucian, their ability to memorize prosocial axioms and follow certain rituals would give them value. If they were Muslims, their ability to mirror Muhammad in their life and live according to Allah’s decrees would give them value. (Interestingly, Muslims go one step further and ban all music except the whiny melodies which color the precepts of the Quran. This is certainly one way to ensure that your music scene doesn’t devolve into a monstrosity).

But why does the signaling competition devolve into Progressive shibboleths? Why not something else? I think the boring answer is that it started that way. If this alt scene were originally Confucian, then all new members would have adopted Confucianism. But it started progressive because no one with a strong traditional morality would dedicate their whole life to hosting licentious music. They cared more about school, they prioritized health, they had reservations about playing music bad for the soul. Meanwhile those without morality have no such concerns, and also use drugs as a lure for their power. There’s probably also an element of progressive shibboleths being boosted because the primitive wisdom that kids learn in early education is “everyone is the same, be nice”. So naturally, any devolution would go back to the shared morality which encites even the dumbest person. If everyone in school learned that the ultimate evil was being racist and mean, then that becomes the criteria for ostracisation. If you’re in a group of not very intelligent or moral art people, you can imagine the difference between accusing someone of being racist versus accusing someone of “a sophisticated ruse in which they themselves accuse others of being racist in order to elevate their standing”. The second one makes less sense when you are drunk or high, and it’s way too many words for me to read on Twitter at 2am. The first one contains the word “racist”, which I have been trained to bark at like a dog.

As mentioned in the thread, artists and musicians can’t say anything about the tyrannical hold of social progressivism because their career, reputation, and social network and under the purview of this process. When that occurs the shibboleths become an unconscious signal of membership, leading to a deep internalization in the heart of individual member. (Remember that normal people don’t think their beliefs through; like, writing about social and political values and engaging in discourse is an unusual thing. People want social value, not an optimally correct system in the grand scheme of things.)

One more thing to add. There’s a story in the Book of Daniel where two high status men threaten to blackmail a woman for sexual favors. She refuses to be blackmailed, so the high status men accuse her in front of the whole community of infidelity — something that would lead to her death. Our heroic prophet of the story, the young Daniel, takes on the role of Mr Bean. “Are you all so stupid that without examination or evidence you are going to condemn this woman?” He asks each one of the men alone under which tree the event transpired. One says a large canopied tree, but the other says a distinctly small tree. They have been caught in their lie, and the high status men are executed by the community.

This is the kind of story which humans once had as their foundational tales. Less “crime bad”, more “withhold judgment until wisdom, because corruption worse”. Kids would have learned this story instead of “racism bad”. And for artists, the story of Susanna was one of the most popular scenes in the history of Western art. Think how beneficial that is! You require your artists to draw Susanna, a beautiful semi-nude figure, and then you require him to draw the corrupt licentious high status figures, ready to blackmail her before being executed. It not only creates a good moral tale for children but it ensures that your artists don’t become regressives.

You're giving these people too much credit. When you said "Progressive Art Scene" I thought at first you may be talking about gallery openings or legitimate theater or modern classical music. Instead you were talking about the horrible "scene kids". These are usually punk bands that have only perfunctory instrumental talent and virtually no songwriting talent who latch onto the "scene" because they know that they're too untalented to become professional musicians. They usually put a high value on vague concepts like "authenticity" and "selling out" and look for reasons to create internal drama and ostracize people. You know you're at a "scene show" if, say, you go to a show at a venue in the city one night and then a couple weeks later you go to a show in an exurb 30 miles way and the audience is composed of almost entirely the same people. They mostly play the same circuit, though, because these bars are owned by scene people themselves. If it were a self-contained community of people who just wanted to play locally it would be no problem; less popular styles like jazz and bluegrass are usually like this. The trouble is that these people all have aspirations of playing music full-time, which makes the stakes higher and introduces a lot of stress. It's almost like a combination of Orthodox Judaism and Old Order Amish, where there's a comprehensive Mosaic law you're expected to follow with shunning the consequence of violating it. It's a breeding ground for drama.

Everyone in that thread may have differing politics but they all seem to buy into the scene mentality; their problem is that it's placing emphasis where they don't want it placed. The fact that politics plays a more prominent role isn't surprising but it could honestly just as easily be right-wing politics as left-wing — it just so happens that most of the participants were already lefties so that's the natural direction it took. In the grand scheme of things, though, it's beside the point. These people are rank amateurs involved in a circle jerk, and their bullshit has about as much influence on the broader culture as what's going on in some random subreddit.

punk bands

For some reason the idea of punks of all people forming rigid, hierarchical societies which have palace intrigues and make sure that their members conform to their norms feels really amusing in an absurdist way to me.

From stories my sister and brother (older than me by ~15 years) have told me of the 80s local punk scenes, it has always been thus.

This is the kind of story which humans once had as their foundational tales. Less “crime bad”, more “withhold judgment until wisdom, because corruption worse”. Kids would have learned this story instead of “racism bad”. And for artists, the story of Susanna was one of the most popular scenes in the history of Western art. Think how beneficial that is! You require your artists to draw Susanna, a beautiful semi-nude figure, and then you require him to draw the corrupt licentious high status figures, ready to blackmail her before being executed. It not only creates a good moral tale for children but it ensures that your artists don’t become regressives.

Who is the 'you' in this paragraph?

Isn't the popularity of Susanna bathing, as a subject of art, significantly attributable to artists themselves wanting to produce it? And isn't that desire also largely explicable by the fact that it's a very sexy scene? I'm not sure we need a big explanation for why painters were very enthusiastic about painting an attractive woman in the nude. It seems a popular theme in general.

The You was the Church, or if not, a wealthy religious aristocratic. The Past wasn’t so naive as to leave artists to their own devices. Eg

The newly recovered painting of Susanna and the Elders was commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria

The figures are in the School of Reims style found in works commissioned by Bishop Ebbo

The work may have been commissioned by papal nephew Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi

But again, what’s great about the scene is that the artist must identify with the men sneaking a look at Susanna in a story that completely rebuffs lust and perfidy. It trains the moral immune system of all involved, the artist especially. I like to think this is a semi-conscious “social technology” rather than an accident.

...does it? Does it really train any kind of 'moral immune system'?

It seems to me that it falls into the same category as, say, Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom, in that obviously the whole appeal of the story is the naked lady, and the moral is tacked on as an afterthought. The villainous elder is a convenient excuse for the artist to say that it's not really pornographic, even though that is obviously the appeal. There were ways depict a naked Susanna in ways that are not sensually or erotically appealing - but that is clearly not what happened in the case of Renaissance art. The beauty of the woman is quite clearly the point.

It's the pre-modern equivalent of, say, all those mid-century films about Nero or Caligulua, which delighted in titillating the viewer with detailed depictions of orgies and sex and murder, and then had the fig leaf of condemnation at the end where the hedonistic emperors are overthrown and virtue triumphs. But we all know what the real appeal is.

I would caution you not to take the fig leaf too seriously. I suggest that the quite-literally-naked eroticism of the Susanna story is central to its artistic appeal. The fact that there's a vague sort of moral cover for it (it's biblical! it condemns the behaviour!) is convenient, but to suggest that the entire theme is a subversion of libido seems quite breathtakingly naive, to me.

I notice also in your post a skepticism of '[leaving] artists to their own devices'. Even setting aside the way you reify 'The Past', I don't see any particular reason to think that commissioners of this art necessarily had high and virtuous motives. That's just a small handful of examples, and are we really so naive as to believe that bishops and nephews of popes in the Middle Ages of Renaissance were free of venal interests? It may be true that some artists are just horny and lack any concern for morality - but the same strikes me as true of nobles and church officials.

To be clear, I am not asserting that every single depiction of Susanna bathing is pornographic. On the contrary, I think that many of those depictions have artistic merit, and are often very well-composed and striking, or sometimes, as you say, subversive in their implications. But I assert that the enduring popularity of Susanna's bath as an artistic theme has something to do with its eroticism, in a way that goes beyond mere subversion.

Or more crassly: rich people from centuries in the past still liked to look at boobs.

Of course they looked at the bosom, and of course Susanna was painted with temptation in mind. But that is what makes it so intelligent, no? You identify either with Susanna, the virtuous woman about to be wrongfully propositioned, or you identify with the status exemplars, about to use their high status to impugn a virtuous woman. You want this kind of association seared in your mind, that when you consider lust you remember the near-tragedy of Susanna and the righteousness of God. Art wasn’t divorced from the religious culture at the time, so everyone knew the story of Susanna and Daniel. It’s not like today where it’s just a vague story you need to pull from the recesses of your mind. It would have been brought up half a dozen times a year in sermons, made a special lesson in school, made an allusion in high class conversations. You have Handel writing operas about it and Mozart riffing his character in Figaro off her. It’s casually mentioned in Shakespeare and 1001 Nights. It’s anachronistic to interpret the nude as just a nude.

And consider: some of the best of these paintings were commissioned by queens and bishops. And if you were a wealthy aristocrat with your own painter, you could just have him paint a nude that doesn’t have such a looming moral threat above it. For pure nudes, just request the Greek nymphs or something else, right? They would essentially be cursing themselves / giving themselves bad vibes by purposefully commissioning Susanna just for her nudity when there were hundreds of different ways to procure a nude scene. But I guess the modern person would excuse all this and say that the queen was a lesbian and the bishop was horny.

But why does the signaling competition devolve into Progressive shibboleths? Why not something else? I think the boring answer is that it started that way. If this alt scene were originally Confucian, then all new members would have adopted Confucianism. But it started progressive because no one with a strong traditional morality would dedicate their whole life to hosting licentious music. They cared more about school, they prioritized health, they had reservations about playing music bad for the soul. Meanwhile those without morality have no such concerns, and also use drugs as a lure for their power. There’s probably also an element of progressive shibboleths being boosted because the primitive wisdom that kids learn in early education is “everyone is the same, be nice”. So naturally, any devolution would go back to the shared morality which encites even the dumbest person. If everyone in school learned that the ultimate evil was being racist and mean, then that becomes the criteria for ostracisation. If you’re in a group of not very intelligent or moral art people, you can imagine the difference between accusing someone of being racist versus accusing someone of “a sophisticated ruse in which they themselves accuse others of being racist in order to elevate their standing”. The second one makes less sense when you are drunk or high, and it’s way too many words for me to read on Twitter at 2am. The first one contains the word “racist”, which I have been trained to bark at like a dog.

I don’t think it started that way. I think a big problem with shibboleths is exactly what you mentioned in contrast to Confucian societies. The signal is super cheap to use, and it’s almost never called out as either going too far or for being insincere. I think that signals like this would be greatly reduced if the person were required to put either sweat equity or cash into all the causes they’re concerned about. If all the people screaming at anyone who isn’t denouncing Israel had to give $100 or raise money for the Palestinian relief efforts, the cries of denunciation would probably decrease by a lot, probably the protests as well.

Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. This is how the self-righteously tolerant organize their communities: as a Stalinist repressive dystopia. I'm reminded of the Preacher comic by Gaiman where a Klansman complains about another member talking about n-words all the time. A farcical parody of a liberal enemy from twenty years ago is more tolerant than the current art scene. That's sad.

This is what happens when counterculture is co-opted and curdles. It becomes 'the culture', and the determining factor of success or failure becomes how quickly one can sell out one's fellow man.

Wow, that thread is a gold mine. I'm not sure about "exemplars", though, it seems more like a pattern that they learn from osmosis, because "that's just how people act". But maybe if they had people modeling a coherent vision of how to be "cool" that didn't involve such self-destructive behavior, they might choose a different path? (Wow, that sounds so 80s Reagan-era anti-drug...)

There's some other quotes that might point in a different direction: the scene is full of people whose entire life is riding on their image, but the image isn't based on anything real, and it's all become a social Red Queen's race. (Is this level 4 simulacra?)

I had lots of friends from high school who went on to do freelance art/media/music in my city. But the problem with freelancers is they cannot have honest social relationships because their social life is how they find work.

--

The main issue is that the scenes all suck now so the only people left behind are the nitpicking dweebs. All the cool people that actually wanted to fight Nazis left when the Nazis did.

--

The irony of course is that anybody who's actually emotionally invested in these circles is definitively not safe, and the only way to survive in these circles if you actually care about the people involved is to curl up into a little ball and delete more and more of yourself while making sure not to run afoul of any of the arbitrary, inconsistent, and continually expanding de facto rules and regulations pertaining to what you're supposed to believe and how you can be. If you've got a bone in your body that leans towards independent thought, or any natural proclivity towards mirth or joie de vivre, it can really alienate you from yourself.

--

Some people know how to frame anything in such a way that it looks like a me too allegation (or whatever sj topic, its not important what the subject or allegation is whats important is the format they are using) and using all the right buzzwords to make it sound sinister and then you read through 7 pages of Instagram slides and you get to the end and its like "wait...what did they actually do?"

--

They do it for a sense of community. That’s why extremists exist at all. They’re insecure and will adapt any ideology that will give them a community to feel like they matter and people like them.

--

I think it’s flipping a bit. In my city people in the punk scene make fun of the PC punk shtick now. There definitely is a lot of “i present completely masculine and im a guy but im nonbinary / trans” though.

I don’t know, I sympathize with the complainant, but it’s also RSP, it’s practically here but with people pretending to be (slightly) more cool and an occasional interest in niche figures in the downtown art scene along with the usual other topics.

How about a culture war outside the traditional red/blue conflicts for a change?

The Guardian ("I read it for the math problems") reports on the decision by a court in the Philippines to ban golden rice, a GMO plant designed to combat vitamin A deficiency. The NGO arguing for a ban (aside local farmers) was Greenpeace.

[https://www.supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html](168 Nobel laureates) have called on Greenpeace to stop campaigning against golden rice in 2016. Here is a discussion on EA forums.

Now historically, I have not been vehemently opposed to Greenpeace. When I was a kid in the 1990s, they were protesting French above-ground nuclear weapon testing, which seems fair enough. While pro-NPP myself, I think there are solid arguments to be made for opposing nuclear power (like proliferation risk and long-term disposal of used-up fuel elements), but I can't understand why you would target NPP before you would target fossil fuel power generation.

The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers. The situation for GMOs is not unlike the situation for software: expensive to develop, but cheap to copy. As a free-software advocate, I very much would prefer outcomes where the companies who develop the software/GMOs do not end up with a stranglehold on the end users due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws.

At least for software there exist alternatives like FLOSS. From reading the FAQ of golden rice, it looks like they could not develop their product without using technologies patented by biotech companies, so they got to them to agree to waive licences for farmers who make less than 10k$ per year, which is their target audience. This is still far from ideal (better would be a blanket free licence for golden rice, or constraining biopatents so much that you do not have to ask Japanese Tobacco to licence your rice plant, or perhaps abolishing them altogether), but does not seem like a terrible deal -- especially if you have a local court system which is rather pro small farmers.

So my conclusion is that Greenpeace's opposition is unreasonable and they have been become one of these organizations who advocates for policies which are deeply unpopular (like PETA, or "always believe the woman" groups) in the wider population as members race to signal how committed they are to their cause.

due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws

At least patents expire in a reasonable(-ish) amount of time.

I also don't see how you could copyright a GMO, as at least to my non-lawyer eyes, it's not a form of expression. But I've been wrong about what lawyers will come up with, and courts will indulge, many times before. Certainly there's been enough discussion here about what they've done with terms like "speech" and "commerce"; it's as bad as the situation with terms like "racism" and "oppression" and arguably even more creative, so I don't want to push that point too hard.

I think simply embedding a copyrighted artwork in junk DNA will probably not fly in court. But if software can be copyrighted, I don't think there is a reason why GMOs -- whose design also involves some stylistic decisions -- can't be. I hope I am wrong about this, though.

The reason that patent law is widely considered more evil than copyright law in software is that avoiding copyright infringement is often a very easy task (the exception being APIs and the like). If you have a copyrighted bubblesort library, I can simply decide not to use your library and write my own implementation. By contrast, if you have patented bubblesort (depending on the sanity of the patent system in question, you might have to patent a specific instance of bubblesort which affects something specific in the real world), then every other implementation is infringing.

I also don't see how you could copyright a GMO, as at least to my non-lawyer eyes, it's not a form of expression.

First they patent the modified genome, then they patent the novel protein derived from the modified genome. That alone doubles the timespan. At least that's what I recall reading a long time ago..

Neither of which is copyrighting it. Yes, of course they can patent them. That's not at all the same thing.

Yeah, but it looks like in biotech you can get exclusivity for 2x long as for anything else.

Not that patents have any point these days - Chinese just copy everything and DGAF.

Well. I also agree with that steelman. I have my doubts that greenpeace is so rationally principled through and through.

But yes. GMO patents should be outlawed, along with software patents, and probably copywrite in general. We need to be building foundational rights for an age of human and post-human coexistence.

As far as I can tell, Greenpeace has never been reasonable, and their anti-nuclear power campaigns are evidence of Just Not Being Willing To Be Happy With Anything, Ever. Seriously, the only alternative at scale to nuclear power is fossil fuels unless you have particularly fortuitous geography. Greenpeace also does things like protest against sustainable fisheries and cross-pollinates heavily with hardcore nuts like animal rights groups, to the extent of providing some amount of cover for ecoterrorists.

Campaigning against golden rice therefore is just another case of Don't Want Anything To Get Done. I'm critical of this tendency in my ingroup; I'm far less sympathetic of it in far-outgroup types like greenpeace.

and their anti-nuclear power campaigns are evidence of Just Not Being Willing To Be Happy With Anything, Ever

To channel Hlynka again, then, Greenpeace is on the extreme end of traditionalism/conservatism and their attitude towards the industrial revolution and its consequences oil pipelines is (predictably) the exact same as a certain other US group's attitude towards abortion clinics.

I don't think it's a surprise that countries defined by liberalism, specifically France, treats Greenpeace the way they do.

Their goal might seem hyper-reactionary. If I were to try to create a coherent extrapolation, I'd almost characterize it as "humanity should abandon the use of metal and depopulate down to 10,000 people who all live in East Africa".

But their attitude and methods are very progressive. They don't frame it as replacing our existing culture, so they're not radicals. But they look around, see things in the world that they don't like, and push for changes to get rid of them, regardless of the effect of those changes. (Wishful thinking helps here: "what bad effects?") IMO, that's progressivism at its purest.

I don't think it's traditionalism/conservatism. I think they just want to be unhappy.

There's a joke about an old Jewish man taking a customer satisfaction survey. He says "I am very upset". "Why?" "I couldn't complain." "But you said you're upset" "Exactly, I couldn't complain."

My mental model of big parts of the environmental movement, greenpeace very much included, is a lot like that old Jewish man. They just want something to be conspicuously upset about, either so they can be professional protestors instead of having to get real jobs that involve, like, actual work, or to have an excuse to be the center of attention, or because they're mentally ill, or to sleep with true believers, or whatever. There's environmentalists doing actual environmental protection stuff, sure. But greenpeace doesn't want a solution, they want to veto things. There's a difference.

Defining Greenpeace as part of traditionalism/conservatism, like Hlynkas redefinitions, moves us to a position of less understanding and unnecessary confusion.

I don't think it's a surprise that countries defined by liberalism, specifically France, treats Greenpeace the way they do.

Highly liberal USA doesn't do so. Liberal Britain is following zero carbon targets even under the Torries, who aren't a conservative party. Liberal Germany has strong Green party and anti nuclear policies. So it is false that this is due to liberalism. Rather than blaming conservatism and praising liberalism for what Greenpeace a group that liberals are more sympathetic towards, the reality is that the French are more pro nuclear than many other peoples and they appreciate better that it worked well for them. You could say that the French in general including French liberals are more pro nuclear, and more hostile towards Greenpeace, but you can't praise liberalism and blame conservatism in general.

The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers. The situation for GMOs is not unlike the situation for software: expensive to develop, but cheap to copy. As a free-software advocate, I very much would prefer outcomes where the companies who develop the software/GMOs do not end up with a stranglehold on the end users due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws.

GMOs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. or anywhere else I know of. They can be patented, but the length of a patent term in most countries is 20 years. Golden Rice 2 was developed in 2005, so unless there's a newer version that Wikipedia doesn't mention, any possible patents will expire next year at the latest. Also, if a country considered patents a big concern it seems like the solution would be to not respect GMO patents or to specifically ban patented GMOs, rather than not allowing GMOs in general, which would reduce the incentive for companies to develop GMOs but still allow you to free-ride and to use GMOs with expired patents like golden rice will soon be.

The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers

Monsanto hasn't even been a thing for the last 6 years (seriously, they wound up in 2018). You'd expect the greens to have noticed by now...

You are technically correct. However, Monsanto was acquired by the pharma giant Bayer, who decided to discontinue the Monsanto brand. If instead they had gone bankrupt or be acquired by a company which imposed a drastically different business model, things would be different, but this looks to me like an acquisition followed by a corporate rebranding while keeping the same business practices.

In a similar vein, I will continue to say "acquired by Google/Facebook" instead of "acquired by Alphabet/Meta", "posted on twitter" instead of "posted on X", "addicted to heroin" (which is a trademark which has not been used for almost a century) instead of "addicted to diacetylmorphine", "Blackwater" instead of "academi" and so on.

Bayer is going to go bankrupt because of Monsanto; they’ve lost like 80% of their value since 2016 because of Americans suing them for Roundup unknowingly potentially causing cancer and the settlements could be tens of billions. Of course now people are getting scared that if the Roundup business collapses farmers will have to buy weed killer from China, where the manufacturers are safely immune from that kind of frivolity.

Roundup unknowingly potentially causing cancer

Is there any good evidence of the harm of glyphosate in reasonable quantities? I haven't done a literature review myself, but I've seen reports of questionable research on the "causes harm" side, but also that it's anecdotally safer than most of the alternatives.

No, but American courts are notorious for handing out ruinous fines to foreign corporations for spurious reasons.

And then the same Americans howl loudly when the EU fines American tech companies large amounts for minor mistakes (not saying the EU are justified in what they do, but sauce for the goose and all that).

There need to be clear caps on fines/penalties/payments courts can order companies to make that can only be overridden by Congress. Anything more than 10% of US annual revenue, for example.

This would also provide bad incentives, because it would cap the risk of decisions with huge negative externalities. 10% of revenue times the probability of getting caught is basically nothing, so unless your action is going to cause a big enough stink to move Congress to act, you are in the clear.

As an analogy, suppose we capped the fines and damages for gross negligence of humans at 10% of their annual income. This would provide terrible incentives: people could speed by near kindergardens, throw empty glass bottles from skyscrapers, operate on patients while drunk and the like secure in the knowledge that the worst outcome will cost them no more than they spend on vacations.

Corporations already have huge advantages over natural humans through diffusion of responsibility and their liabilities being mostly limited to their assets (so the risk to their investors is limited). For Thalidomide, the corporate death penalty (i.e. bankrupting a company through fines and damages) seems like an appropriate outcome.

Of course, glyphosate is very far from Thalidomide, but caps on damages are not the answer.

More comments

I’m with the ban for the same reason that GreenPeace is. Not only are we burdening these small farmers with patent law (and I’m not sure if Golden Rice has terminator genes that prevent replanting saved seed) but because of the potential for cross pollination, you can’t really make it optional. If my rice is pollinated by Golden rice, I now have the patented genes in my rice, and unless there are strong laws to the contrary (which I doubt) Monsanto can easily collect royalties from people who never chose to grow Golden Rice in the first place, and worse are not allowed to save seed (as the permits to grow that rice requires you to buy the seed every year). In a lawful democracy like America or various European countries, it’s difficult but at least possible to build in protection for small farmers. I doubt it would be so in a developing country with a much higher corruption index.

Golden rice was developed by a non-profit in collaboration with universities. It doesn't have terminator genes (indeed, no crop with terminator genes has ever been sold, the technology was essentially abandoned in the early 2000s).

It does include patented genes, but patent law is national, not international. Only 12 of the patents are applicable outside of America, and all 12 have been waived by their owners. Any farmer who buys golden rice seeds can replant them forever.

Greenpeace isn't opposed to Golden Rice because they're worried about farmers' welfare. They're opposed to it because of their knee-jerk technophobia.

(indeed, no crop with terminator genes has ever been sold, the technology was essentially abandoned in the early 2000s).

Not sure if there's some terminological M&B going on here with 'Terminator', but lots and lots of commercially bred seed produces sterile plants?

Basically any lawn grass you buy will not reproduce from seed, and as pertains to Montsanto -- the 'Roundup Ready' portfolio is also like this. (and I think that Montsanto does/did market them 'Terminator' for this reason?)

While (as the chosen name indicates!) this was indeed developed in the 90s, AFAIK it's deliberate (to prevent the RR crops from hybridizing with other plants, producing RR weeds (which would be Very Bad for the no-till agriculture model) -- and an ongoing feature of RR seeds?

Conventional sterile or non-true-breeding hybrids aren't based on "terminator" genes. Roundup Ready plants are also not based on "terminator" genes (and they DO crossbreed, which has been the basis of several lawsuits cementing Monsanto's bad reputation)

Conventional sterile or non-true-breeding hybrids aren't based on "terminator" genes.

Well I know -- but the point (as with much of the GMO discussion) not whether you arrive at the endpoint by conventional methods of modifying the genome (ie selective breeding I guess) or scary gene insertion (with scary names!) -- it's that the seed is sterile so small-time farmers are forced to buy seed every year instead of saving their own.

(TBH the hybridization concern seems like a pretty good reason to include such a gene to me -- RR weeds would have a much larger impact on global agriculture than bankrupting some farmers in India, and the sterility gene (by its nature!) seems unlikely to leak into wild genomes?)

That hybrids are sterile or don't breed true is more of a side effect of the process than a deliberate thing; I believe that most staple crop cultivars were not hybrids when the whole controversy with terminator genes started.

Plants are kinda promiscuous but they aren't so promiscuous as for crops to crossbreed with weeds in most cases. So you don't get roundup-ready weeds from crossbreeding with roundup-ready crops. Unfortunately you do get glyphosate-resistant weeds through normal mutation and (not-so-natural) selection, and we already have.

To be clear it's not something I'm losing sleep over -- just that it seems like a legitimate thing for people designing novel organisms to be worried about, and I'd rather that they worry about it than not. (It would be better if they didn't name their GMO projects after robot assassins though)

Is anyone actually trying to enforce bio patents against Indian farmers? Is this a real thing that's really happening, or is it just fantastical speculation?

And isn't golden rice exempted from patent enforcement anyways? The relevant patent holders have agreed to not try to enforce their patents against asset-free 3rd world farmers.

And isn't golden rice exempted from patent enforcement anyways? The relevant patent holders have agreed to not try to enforce their patents against asset-free 3rd world farmers.

what is stopping them from changing their minds in the future when their situations change (revenue streams diminish, are acquired by a more aggresive patent holder, etc.)?

Enforcing patent laws against Indian subsistence farmers is taking a loss because it costs money to try and they don't have anything to give you.

Patent laws are national, not international.

My understanding is that once a variant has been donated to say, Bangladesh, it cannot be 'undonated' unless Bangladesh's government decides to issue a patent there.

Google tells me that Indian farmers make around $225 per month. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. And my vague understanding of Indian norms is that they casually disregard American-style patent laws in order to shamelessly steal the drugs we make at enormous cost. So I really doubt there's any ability or will to target Indian farmers.

I think "someone says something with is laughably wrong and also outrageous on the motte" does not warrant a top-level post.

We have our share of trolls and Nazis. Every once in a while we get an holocaust denier. I am sure that I could make a civil argument about why we should kill and eat all the people with the letter x in their legal names as a matter of national policy without getting banned for it.

I think it is important to establish that a lack of refutation is not the same as silent approval. Trolls can make outrageous statements a lot quicker than anyone can refute them. See xkcd.

I mean, mods could use the "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." rule to shut down such comments, by ruling "denying humanity to a significant portion of extant h. sapiens is a claim which is so inflammatory that you should require ten recent articles in top-notch scientific journals making that claim as evidence" (and then relying on the fact that this level of evidence can not be met).

But this would also put us on a slippery slope to tone policing. As the late Niemoeller observed (paraphrased): "First they came for the holocaust deniers, and I said nothing because fuck Nazis. Then they came for the blacks-arent-humans people and I said nothing, because fuck racists. Then they came for the genetic-IQ-difference crowd, and I said nothing because it was not a topic which interested me. Then they came for me for using a generic masculine form and nobody was left to speak out for me." So I am kind of fine with the odd Nazi comment as a price to pay for having a forum where any opinion can be expressed, because some other controversial opinions are at least interesting.

a slippery slope to tone policing

You mean "content policing", right?

But this would also put us on a slippery slope to tone policing.

Er, we do tone police. Explicitly.

And @TitaniumButterfly was in fact modded for asserting that "blacks are animals." Not because you can't say inflammatory things here (yes, we allow Holocaust deniers and segregationists and fascists and even that one "Abolish the age of consent and make females sex slaves, yes, including your six-year-old daughter" guy), but because you have to do it, well, civilly. Which admittedly can be a hard needle to thread when the argument you want to civilly make is that Group X should be eradicated/enslaved, but that's intentional.

The I have a black friend argument.

I do too. I’ve had a few. One went to Northwestern, they all pretty much have corporate jobs doing normal blue tribe stuff.

The thing in the whole debate is nobody doing the debate had George Floyd type black friends. It does go too far too call black people in general animals. We all know many who function quite well in western civilization. However, there is an underclass that seems to need a huge amount of intervention in terms of policy and financial aid to develop communities looking anything like the rest of western civilization. They are not self-sustaining without aid from other parts of society.

The thing in the whole debate is nobody doing the debate had George Floyd type black friends.

I spent a year and a half working an entry-level factory job. more than half my coworkers were black. They weren't graduates from prestigeous institutions. They were still obviously human. Meanwhile, it turns out that all the arguments for black inhumanity apply to white junkies as well.

However, there is an underclass that seems to need a huge amount of intervention in terms of policy and financial aid to develop communities looking anything like the rest of western civilization. They are not self-sustaining without aid from other parts of society.

They need tight-knit communities who deliver immediate punishment to defectors, with those continuing to defect written off. "aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

You know, I just got through a book about the Irish potato famine and the parallels between the 'Democrats run modern welfare plantations' narrative and Trevelyan are pretty interesting. You say welfare is how the underclass is maintained in it's current condition; Trevelyan says:

In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan later described the famine as "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", one which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil", that evil being Ireland's rural economic system of exploitative landlords and peasants overly dependent on the potato. The famine, he declared, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected... God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part and we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain." This mentality of Trevelyan's was influential in persuading the government to do nothing to restrain mass evictions.

In the summer of 1846, Trevelyan ordered the Peelite Relief Programmes, which had been operating since the early years of the famine, to be shut down. This was done on 21 July 1846 by Sir Charles Wood.[13] Trevelyan believed that if the relief continued while a new food crisis was unfolding, the poor would become permanently conditioned to having the state take care of them.[13]

I'm too lazy/short on time to pull actual quotes, so I hope you'll forgive me for copying wikipedia wholesale. It was the heyday of Adam Smith and laissez-faire economics, along with widespread acceptance of Malthusian philosophy (interesting for entirely different reasons in the debates around TFR), both of which influenced Trevelyan's thinking significantly. Trevelyan may have been correct that the situation in Ireland was untenable (TFR >4, increasingly small plots of land that necessitated subsistence potato farming, rampant poverty and illiteracy), but his actions directly led to the preventable deaths of 750,000-1,500,000 Irish and the emigration of a million more. I'm not convinced that his actions had any impact whatsoever on education, self-sufficiency or any meaningful improvement of the lot of the Irish. They also didn't noticeably move the needle on eliminating Catholicism, which he cared for about as much as he cared for their welfare.

There's a certain delicious irony that modern Ireland has double the GDP per capita of Britain, although my rudimentary understanding of economics is that this is largely due to finance and tax havenry rather than a truly productive economy. Regardless, given that it took Ireland more than century after the famine to turn things around, are you confident that Trevelyan's choice to let millions of people starve was correct? I'm working on a second book detailing the path from the potato famine to modern prosperity, but I have a hard time believing that you could draw any kind of causal connection between the two. Perhaps more germanely, are you confident that slashing welfare programs in the US would lead to the outcomes you (we?) want, and do you have any examples of underclasses being cut off from welfare and becoming prosperous within a generation or two?

You know, I just got through a book about the Irish potato famine and the parallels between the 'Democrats run modern welfare plantations' narrative and Trevelyan are pretty interesting.

In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?

More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism? I'm gonna bet it's racism. But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve. Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?

Trevelyan may have been correct that the situation in Ireland was untenable (TFR >4, increasingly small plots of land that necessitated subsistence potato farming, rampant poverty and illiteracy), but his actions directly led to the preventable deaths of 750,000-1,500,000 Irish and the emigration of a million more.

Indeed, which is an excellent argument for why Trevelyan was dead wrong in his case. What does this tell us about our case?

Perhaps more germanely, are you confident that slashing welfare programs in the US would lead to the outcomes you (we?) want, and do you have any examples of underclasses being cut off from welfare and becoming prosperous within a generation or two?

...And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.

They need tight-knit communities who deliver immediate punishment to defectors, with those continuing to defect written off. "aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically. Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.

You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!

I have previously proposed Reverse-Segregation: give blacks an area that they control completely, where every public official and government position must be held 100% by black people, by law. Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit, irrespective of the American constitution, and grant it leave to enforce and adjudicate those laws as it sees fit, completely outside the jurisdiction of the rest of American jurisprudence. Fund it with a per-capita percentage of all outlays legitimately payable to black Americans equivalent to the percentage of black Americans who actually live within it. People, white or black, can move there if they want, and leave if they want; no one can be kept there against their will, and no law-abiding citizen be prevented from going there by the rest of America if they choose to go. Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else. No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law. Race-based discrimination is equally illegal no matter which race it's applied to. If certain words are evidence of bias, they're evidence regardless of who speaks them. Claims of bias will no longer be entertained unless they come with ironclad evidence. And if anyone doesn't like this, there's a place they can move. Welfare can even continue outside the zone as well, we just use cellphone data to track who's inside and who's outside and apportion the money appropriately. Anyone not-black who wants to can move inside the zone, they just can't hold office or vote for anyone who isn't black, presuming the zone decides to keep voting. Maybe even through in something about the zone expanding if its population rises too high.

Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely. Given the current trajectory of Blue Tribe, it's entirely possible one of their cities would even be willing to implement such a zone in-situ rather than trying to build one from scratch. Chicago, maybe? Detroit? Maybe give it two years' lead time so people can move in or out according to preference. Whaddya think?

...In closing, I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill, and again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along. People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.

In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?

No idea. Not my area of expertise.

More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism?

No, you're trying to be too granular with the parallels I'm drawing. The Irish lived in crushing poverty for many decades before the Famine, and lived in crushing poverty for many decades afterwards. British rule seemed largely focused on pushing Protestantism, at least some (much earlier on, I think) advocating for pushing the Irish out entirely and settling the land with British and extracting wealth. The problem was orders of magnitude larger than the Famine, but the years of the Famine are well documented and Trevelyan makes an interesting character study.

But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve.

Indeed, although as many here love to point out, poverty is relative. I am often mocked for the quaint idea of 'eliminating poverty.' Nevertheless:

Yes, coming up on a century of welfare in the US has failed to eliminate poverty (interestingly, enacted in response to another Nucular Racism-level cataclysmic event). Depending how you measure it, it has decreased, but whatever, I expect welfare and a social safety net to be permanent and not necessarily undesirable features of our society. Either it's a temporary solution to get people back on their feet, or I don't expect people to be productive regardless and I don't want them to starve. But let's put that aside and jump forward a moment:

You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!

Okay, so make your case then! Do you have any evidence that could possibly convince me that your way is better? I was responding to a single throwaway line in your OP:

"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

Is there some analogous case you can imagine where welfare was cut off, and the underclass pulled itself up by it's bootstraps? Really any case at all where some underclass managed that? Most modern examples I can think of involve overthrowing communism, cozying up to multinationals or finding underwater lakes of oil in your hinterlands. China, Ireland/Singapore, various Middle Eastern countries. I can't think of any community-level trailer-trash to riches stories in the West, can you? Are there any relevant experiments you can cite? Do anti-welfare Republican governors have more functional societies with less poverty than the rest of the country?

The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops.

But it didn't though! Why do you think the Irish were living in mud huts on tiny plots of land, and entirely dependent on potato cultivation? Two centuries earlier their society was completely different with warring tribes/clans largely focused on where they could steal their next cow from (apologies to the ghost of FarNearEverywhere). Ireland wasn't some Atlantis laid low by a potato blight, it was an overpopulated clusterfuck dependent on potato monoculture, setting the scene for disaster.

Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?

No, again, overindexing on famine. I'm told all the time to notice the piles of Communist skulls; don't you think you should notice the piles of skulls from people advocating for cutting welfare with the goal of making the underclass self-sufficient and productive? I don't expect poor white/black/elderly Americans to starve en masse if we cut all welfare programs tomorrow (at least in part because I expect large amounts of private capital to try and plug the hole), but I do expect it to be a giant clusterfuck with shantytowns, hovels and economic prospects becoming even worse than they were.

And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.

Read and re-read.

Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically.

I don't necessarily find it disagreeable, although I'd need to better understand what you mean by defectors (criminals? baby mommas/daddies? Drug addicts?) and how exactly you expect the problem to resolve itself. Unless you're just saying a variant of the underclass just needs to stop having a culture of doing underclass things, and their lives would be better, in which case - sure - although I'm not entirely sure how to put that into policy. Normally I hear some variant of:

"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

i.e. welfare lets single moms raise kids without their baby daddies, kids are fucked up without strong father figure, perpetuating the cycle. The implication being that cutting off welfare would force baby momma and baby daddy to marry, get a job and provide a stable household/example for their children. This is what I find objectionable (because I find it unlikely, to be clear, obviously not because I'm against a stable household), and why I started discussing welfare. Tell me how to parse 'aid from other parts of society' then, since it seems like I misunderstand you.

Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.

I am also born, raised and will die in a system I have neither created nor effectively control, no? I fail to see the argument you're trying to make, although I'll note that it sounds remarkably similar to the 'we live in a society' strain of thought on the left.

Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!

Again, if you can convince me that your way is meaningfully better, I would change my mind. The existence of 'monstrous things' is not evidence that our current policy is even wrong, it could just as easily be the least bad of two options or evidence that there isn't enough welfare.

Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely...Whaddya think?

I can...100% guarantee that it won't. Disparate outcomes outside of your SEZ will still be used as evidence of racism, rampant poverty inside will mean most people would want to leave. Black leaders in the SEZ wouldn't be some magical panacea with policies that we can't imagine out here; black representation (imo) is important so people feel they have a say in the democratic process, so they imagine they could be a representative someday if they chose to, and possibly because on the margin they may better know what their constituents need.

I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill

Must have missed those.

again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along.

Not entirely sure what you mean. My best approximation of a Hlynkian argument is that the Actual Racist Republicans online are blue tribe anti-progs, while the actual red triber is a noble, endangered beast roaming the American heartland in pickup trucks. I could draw all kinds of creative lines around the categories to make my ingroups look good and my outgroups look bad, but at the end of the day, those Actual Racists want and believe things so far removed from me that we're just playing word games.

People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.

That's funny; I feel like I can live with just about anyone happily enough, regardless of politics. I'm highly skeptical of the idea that Blue tribe has a monopoly on assholes, or that Blue policies are uniformly harmful or inferior to what the Red tribe would implement. What happened to that period of time where you realized you carried hatred in your heart (sorry if my paraphrasing is off), and you wanted to focus on family and church? Are we just full scorched earth now?

But it didn't though! Why do you think the Irish were living in mud huts on tiny plots of land, and entirely dependent on potato cultivation? Two centuries earlier their society was completely different with warring tribes/clans largely focused on where they could steal their next cow from (apologies to the ghost of FarNearEverywhere). Ireland wasn't some Atlantis laid low by a potato blight, it was an overpopulated clusterfuck dependent on potato monoculture, setting the scene for disaster.

Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.

My understanding was the proximate cause of the problem was the sheer poverty of most of the Irish, and the lack of work, or more broadly the lack of an economy, that could lift them out of poverty. The poor tended to rent a small farm where they grew potatoes to eat, and worked odd jobs for money which mostly went to rent. Without the potatoes, they were simply too poor to survive on their own, and the British work-fare programs came late and had problems. It was a horrible situation, and mostly I blame the British, but the basic dynamic was that there were a lot of working people who were so poor that the only food they could afford was potatoes that they grew themselves. When the potatoes went away, everything collapsed. It's not like they were buying most of their food with money, but then there wasn't enough food. They just didn't have enough money to buy food in the first place.

In contrast, America is absurdly wealthy, with a diverse economy, and has huge amounts of absurdly cheap food. Even without the subsidies, we'd have cheap food. I've personally been part of an organized group that cooks food and gives it to anyone who shows up (100-150 a day, mostly homeless). (Maybe I'm part of FCfromSSC's problem?) There's no way that people kicked off of welfare would starve, as long as they can find work, and assuming they didn't also have crippling mental illness, physical disability, or drug addiction. (Not to get into other big problems.)

That said, I agree that cutting off all welfare and similar services, cold turkey, would be a disaster. Any such reduction would have to be done slowly, making sure that there were sufficient jobs and cheap enough housing to handle everyone. (We do have plenty of housing, it's just not where people want to live, or it costs too much.) But I doubt that America has the political will or attention span to pull this off, and so we may be stuck with the current system or a disaster.

(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)

Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.

Yes. It's just amusing to me that their one of their main epics revolved around a cattle raid, and from what I read this was still a large part of their lives in the 17th century.

(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)

That seems reasonable, although I think there's a steelman to 'expanding welfare forever.' We don't yet have fully automated luxury gay space communism, but we've moved the needle somewhere along the spectrum from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farming to modern civilization. What's the point of it all if we're just going to be forced to grind away at jobs we hate regardless? Maybe a sane society would celebrate the automation of a job rather than panic and try to find bullshit work for the displaced employee. Maybe the dream we should aim for is a society where work is for those who want it (I tell people if I won the lottery tomorrow, my life would probably continue more or less unaffected - I don't work for the money) and welfare isn't stigmatized, even if we aren't quite ready yet.

I think there's a steelman to 'expanding welfare forever.'

I agree, my ideal would be a slow transition of welfare to a cash transfer system (plus Medicaid for all), and then that can expand into a UBI if that's how the economy of the future goes.

What's the point of it all if we're just going to be forced to grind away at jobs we hate regardless?

What's the point of it all if the productive among us are going to be forced to grind away at jobs to support the non-productive and anti-productive in a lifestyle of low-class luxury? The thought of AIs asking that question is one of the things driving AI fears, but somehow it's become anathema for humans to ask.

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A dark possibility is that the HBD dysfunction of the Irish was indeed very much a thing, but events like the famines exerted a strong selective pressure that over time raised Irish performance significantly, to the point that it now equals other NW Europeans.

Not sure why the famine would be more selective than all the wars and rebellions. Don’t think the evidence is good that they were ever stupid. Like the Armenians, they have a weirdly extensive and developed literature compared to their population size (probably around 750,000 at the time of the conquest IIRC). I think it’s more important that they had no indigenous tradition of living in cities (which were Norse and then English), which is where high civilization things tend to occur. After the conquest [edit: Norman, not Tudor], most of the best economic territory was in the hands of the major English lords, who were culturally oriented toward France and England.

There was some historic oral and literary tradition. More recently though much famous ‘Irish’ literature in the revival was not written by ethnic Irish but by the Anglo-Irish. Even Joyce claimed to be of Norman and Scandinavian descent and that his ancestors came over during Cromwell’s settlement, although that’s a topic of some historic debate. If you were asking for evidence of a great historic African literary tradition and I cited a bunch of Boer writers I presume that would be similarly invalid.

One theory (discussed elsewhere in this thread I think) is that the Irish were probably on the level of other peer populations in the dark ages but deteriorated considerably from the 16th to 19th centuries with the potato monoculture, ever smaller plots of land, worse nutrition, overpopulation and so on. Perhaps it begun even earlier in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. It then took emigration, selection of the smartest and improved nutrition to successively drive huge performance improvements over time.

I don’t think it’s as easy to dismiss poor estimates of Irish performance from the Victorian/Edwardian era as some people suggest. It’s entirely possible they were correct but that outsized gains have led to the current equivalence. We know poor nutrition can have a deleterious effect on IQ and the diet of the Irish in 1850 was probably substantially worse than their ancestors’.

The early literature in the Irish language always struck me as precocious by northern European standards, particularly in prose, and the Irish also developed the Ogham script within a few centuries of the Nordic runes, so I think they have a literary tradition to be proud of even discounting the Anglo-Irish contribution.

Uh, what selective pressure do you think the potato famine exerted? As far as I can tell it just killed random poor people, with those wealthy enough to be exempt being mostly non-Irish.

Well, in that case the HBD doom and gloom is overblown. If things get bad, it'll just take a few disasters to knock off the rust and return a given race to fighting trim.

What did you find objectionable about my comment in the immigration bill thread?

As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters.

Why does it matter?

It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends.

Why does every other issue depend on it?

Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time.

Buys the Right more time... for what?

There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago.

What does a "European-style nationalist policy platform" look like, and why should I want one? IIRC, you were pretty bullish on the UK Tories. How's that working out these days?

Is the problem Immigration, or is the problem Blue power? If you had to choose between immigration and no Blue power, or no Blue power but lots of immigration, which would you pick?

Immigration isn't the only thing that matters, Blue power is. Immigration matters because it's a Blue Tribe win condition under the old system, but that win condition has already effectively been executed. Having been executed, its further importance is only going to diminish over time. Controlling the border was a means to an end, which was keeping Blues from engineering unilateral control by importing voters; having failed, the priority transfers to other methods of denying, constraining and deconstructing that control.

What is the goal? The OP in that thread seemed to think that passing favorable laws should be presumed to be useful, and you appeared to agree. I'd guess that you're comparing our current situation without the law to a hypothetical with the law, and the latter seems obviously better to you, because we would have the law, and then it would be enforced. So the choice is between getting things we want, versus not getting things we want. But passing the law grants legitimacy to the existing system, and there is zero reason to believe that actual enforcement would happen. This is the fundamental problem with that thread's OP, which spends a ton of words describing the bill, and then throws this in towards the end:

In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.

There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file...

...There's more than a "kernel" of truth in that idea, and if it's "extremely oversimplified" or "lacking in nuance", I'd be fascinated to hear how. @gattsuru has written a lot of quite excellent posts detailing evidence for the problem, and I've tried to contribute where I could. We had all the laws we needed to prevent mass immigration. They didn't work, because Blues actively subverted them, as they subvert every law, rule or decision intended to serve Red Tribe interests. What is the point of passing additional laws in "cooperation" with Blues when we already know any part of the law that serves our interests will not be enforced, and any part of the law that serves Blue interests will be expanded light-years beyond the scope provided by the text?

Why is this law more valuable than the defiance against Blues coordinated and the legitimacy for Blues denied by refusing it? If we can break Blue control, it doesn't seem to me that immigration actually matters much any more, and passing that law doesn't seem like it helps break Blue control. Again, "more time" for what?

And all this applies to Trump as well. It is questionable whether good governance is even possible under current conditions. Failing that, stripping the system of its legitimacy is the best alternative, to open up more space for state-level leaders like Abbott and De Santis, and possibly to accelerate Blue states like California and New York further down their current ideological trajectories. Trump continues to accomplish this, which is, I think, why his support remains so strong: he coordinates defiance, whether he means to or not, whether he even understands the situation or not. No matter what happens, the system will have significantly less legitimacy next year than it does now; given that the immigration has already mostly happened, that seems like a good thing to me.

There's a pretty strong case that the welfare state broke black families apart, leading to the current state of social dysfunction.

There is a counterargument to this which is that there are many white people who are also the dregs of society. Objectively there isn't much difference between a George Floyd and a Kensington zombie. That the problem is more acute in the black community is obviously true; that it is something inherent to being black is something HBDers assume to be true.

"I have a black friend" is of course a trite cliche, but it's also something I cannot overlook every time people bring up HBD and argue, essentially, that we should just accept that blacks are lesser, or even go further and argue for full segregation (the premise being that the only alternative is race war). I do have black friends. Educated, professional black friends. Now of course in an actual race war, everything can go sideways and your black friends won't count for much, but it seems like a lot of people arguing, essentially, that blacks are animals are either making some kind of "But I don't mean you" exception for their black friends, or they really believe that black people who are intelligent and socialized are like unicorns.

For some of us it's more like we just give up. As far as I can tell, virtually every single place on earth where they make up the majority of the population is some kind of dysfunctional shithole and it doesn't seem to matter what continent it's on, what country it's in, or how many generations of effort well-meaning white liberals have squandered trying to fix it. It never gets better, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to.

It's not that we're all ideologically dedicated to the idea of HBD, necessarily, so much as it's the fact that the alternative is a hodgepodge of unfalsifiable just-so excuses that in aggregate strain credulity beyond the breaking point. I just don't really buy that they're equally capable but have coincidentally been kneecapped by one historical mishap or another, everywhere, a hundred percent of the time, forever.

I don't really buy that we just need to eradicate the latest iteration of structural systemic invisible racism and suddenly their homicide rate will plummet by 90%, etc. etc. I just don't buy it. It looks exactly like an ethnic group with lower IQ ending up exactly where you would expect it to while people make up other reasons for it. The idea that they're collectively capable of advanced civilization on their own is, let's say, unevidenced, and it doesn't look like that evidence is ever going to come.

Most advanced civilization was invented by the British and Americans, some by a few other Western Europeans. That didn’t stop plenty of other countries borrowing the technology to start their own industrial and technological revolutions. China didn’t need to invent the car, or the computer, or laundry detergent to use those things. “On their own” isn’t a standard we apply to other modern civilizations.

Sure, African countries are less functional and developed than the West, but many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity. It seems ridiculous pessimistic to think things will never improve. Most African countries are far from being Haiti.

developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built,

1.1% real growth per year is anemic: https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/reimagining-economic-growth-in-africa-turning-diversity-into-opportunity

Yes because some countries have extremely high birth rates and highly dysfunctional societies with no real economy to speak of, and that hugely distorts per capita growth figures. If you look on a per country level (as the very article you link says) there are many success stories.

TFR is falling in Africa, this means share of working age people increases. If two societies, one where share of working age people increases and another where share of working age people decreases (due to TFR at flat bottom) have same % of GDP per capita growth, what does that tell you?

many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity.

Man I want to believe this but I just don't. It happens every once in a while but as far as I can tell it's only ever cyclical. The country getting out of a low-trust hole can only do it for 10-15 years before the next coup based on tribal lines.

You can't even read the Africa section of the economist regularly without losing your mind. There's such a constant background simmering of rape, mass murder, and corruption going on at some level on that continent it's just impossible to fathom.

I'm not convinced that that has anything to do with HBD, actually. First of all, Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well, and not much tradition of nationalism outside ethnic boundaries. Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power. There's also the familiar poverty trap where you have to help your family members rather than save for yourself, which also leads to "you have to be corrupt because your family members will require that you use your position to their benefit".

Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well

You could have said this about Europe as well. What did the Welsh have to do with the Scottish or English? People in Provence, Brittany, and Isle-de-France didn't even speak the same languages. Italian only coalesced as a basically-uniform and mutually-intelligible language in the last couple hundred years, and at the time of the discovery of the New World there was no "Spain", but instead "the Spains" because they were a bunch of fiercely-independent kingdoms with their own privileges and rivalries, bound together through fragile personal unions. Prussians, Brunswickers, Saxons, Badeners, and Bavarians didn't have much in common. Russia is a giant, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empire, and even today eastern/south-eastern europe don't match ethnic and national borders well - they certainly didn't back in the bad old days of the great Habsburg empires.

Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power.

Up until the late 19th century, just about every significant country in Europe was some type of monarchy (i.e. dictatorship), mediated by local elites (as is the case in Africa as well). How did they escape this seemingly-impossible corruption trap?

Dictatorship and corruption aren't synonymous. There's some trivial sense in which a dictatorship is "corrupt" because the dictator can violate laws for his own benefit, but it isn't necessarily corruption in the sense of there being whole classes of corrupt people and cultural expectations that push the government towards being corrupt.

Even more recently there's been a bunch of ex-dictatorships emerging into strong market economies without much outside influence. Most of the Asian Tigers would be closer to facist than anything else. Spain, etc.

Writing was independently invented in three or four places. None of them were in sub-Saharan Africa. After contact with the Westerners, Japan got its act together, modernized, and repulsed their attempts at colonization. It took China longer but they managed too. Africa is older than those places and has had Western contact as long, and is not doing as well. Not even close.

Writing was independently invented in three or four places. None of them were in sub-Saharan Africa.

None of them were in Western Europe either.

Western Europeans are largely descended from people in one or two of those places, however.

Europeans spread literacy quickly, Africa didn't. Also Europeans didn't invent writing, but getting separate characters for vowels and consonants, written in sequential fashion, is almost as large step as getting writing at all. E.g. Aztec phonetic writing was so bad that they preferred pictography to it.

The alphabet was invented by Phoenicians though, not by Europeans. Africans also seem to be creating plenty of new writing systems these days, at least a few of which are spreading rapidly online, so maybe whatever was holding them back on this front has been at least partially resolved.

As far as I can tell, virtually every single place on earth where they make up the majority of the population is some kind of dysfunctional shithole and it doesn't seem to matter what continent it's on, what country it's in, or how many generations of effort well-meaning white liberals have squandered trying to fix it.

What about Bahamas or Mauritius? They both have an Human Development Index comparable to Western Europe (I don't consider HDI to be the ultimate measure of quality of life, but it's a pretty good approximation nonetheless).

For historical examples, what about the Mali Empire?

Western civilization is, in the words of Gandhi, "a good idea". Even if I were to concede that Sub-Saharan Africans are little more than pitiful savages (and that's one big if!), they're still capable of copying valuable institutions created by another ethnicity and apply them to their own countries. Didn't the Western world itself took more than just notes from Arab math?

What about Bahamas or Mauritius?

I enjoy how, even for two supposed counter examples of Sub-Saharan African self-sufficient capability, the former is a tourist-dollar-rich series of islands whose “natives” have substantial European admixture (especially those who are running the show) and the latter is an African country predominantly composed of Indians, with ample whites and Southeast/East Asians having chimed in.

But maybe that’s the joke and I got semi-whooshed.

Even if I were to concede that Sub-Saharan Africans are little more than pitiful savages (and that's one big if!), they're still capable of copying valuable institutions created by another ethnicity and apply them to their own countries.

Well, no, they're not. Or they weren't, anyway; colonial infrastructure collapsed there after the colonists left.

I will refrain from creating mod drama but the comment was clearly against the spirit of the rules, which are opposed to needlessly inflammatory or grossly offensive language in the interests of civility. This was enforced even during the emotion around the BLM protests, so I think it can be enforced now.

As regards the sentiment itself it has always seemed to me to be a very poor hill for white supremacists to die on. If chihuahuas and pit bulls and border collies are the same species, surely the different phenotypes of humans are too. Commonly held animals made up of several species (like Elephants) have major physical differences, separated many millions of years ago, and cannot breed successfully (only one Asian/African elephant hybrid was ever born despite them being held together in zoos for centuries, and it died after a couple of days). Human populations can all have children together.

In any case, it has some amusing implications. If a 100 IQ population can call an 85 IQ population animals, why should a 115 IQ population consider a 100 IQ population anything but? The line being drawn just below the median for Europeans is no more or less arbitrary than the line being drawn below Asians or Jews.

This forum is much better without arguments that belong on message boards with swastikas in the sidebar next to links to buy siege from the e-commerce shop.

If chihuahuas and pit bulls and border collies are the same species, surely the different phenotypes of humans are too. Commonly held animals made up of several species (like Elephants) have major physical differences, separated many millions of years ago, and cannot breed successfully (only one Asian/African elephant hybrid was ever born despite them being held together in zoos for centuries, and it died after a couple of days). Human populations can all have children together.

This is what always bugged me about Star Trek, I understand they have this complicated lore that is basically Raelism before it was cool, but still. By the common definition, the frequency of inter-alien reproduction made it clear that all the humanoid species in the galaxy were one species. Vulcans are humans are Klingons are Romulans. Ignoring the fact that they're all just humans in various kinds of prosthetics, of course.

One thing I would like to see explored in science fiction(maybe as a collaborative project somewhere) is a hard sci-fi future where early human colonization efforts led to speciation and the different species interacting with each other in the distant future after some kind of sea change in frequency of interactions.

The GURPS Transhuman Space series may qualify. In this setting, set in year 2100, many different groups of space colonists have engaged in extensive genetic modification. There is no FTL, and the setting is limited to the Solar System.

You might enjoy All Tomorrows

This is such a thing that there is TVTropes article about it.

In any case, it has some amusing implications. If a 100 IQ population can call an 85 IQ population animals, why should a 115 IQ population consider a 100 IQ population anything but? The line being drawn just below the median for Europeans is no more or less arbitrary than the line being drawn below Asians or Jews.

I know this is meant to show how absurd the position of race supremacists is but I don't think this a good rebuttal because the ability gap to do most things in life between a 100 IQ person and 85 IQ person is much greater than between a 100 IQ person and 115 IQ person. If you were to extend the gap by 30 to 70 vs 100 vs 130 IQ it becomes even more clear. 70 IQ people essentially cannot follow directions, to the point the US military deems them a liability. A 130 IQ person might be much more brilliant than a 100 IQ person but both would be able to navigate in society just fine.

I do agree with your conclusion that the line being drawn is arbitrary for the reasons you state in the previous paragraph. It's common to take a word with meaning and implications associated with it already and then redefine it. It feels like the far-right version of changing the definition of words like racism.

A 130 IQ person might be much more brilliant than a 100 IQ person but both would be able to navigate in society just fine.

A society of 100 IQ individuals, perhaps. I see no reason why an IQ 70 individual would struggle more in a society of 100 IQ individuals than a 100 IQ individual would struggle in a society where the median IQ was 130. Of course no such societies exist, but we can imagine that the average 100 IQ individual dropped into Jane Street or the Princeton physics faculty might find it rather difficult to intellectually keep up. In neither case would it make the less intelligent party an 'animal', though, except in the sense that we all are.

The world doesn't need everyone to have a job where everyone needs a 130 IQ to function. Well, maybe the rapid onset of technology will change that but we're still not there. There's basically no job for 70 IQ people today. A 100 IQ person can still communicate information and do less intellectually rigorous tasks like documenting information, running and maintaining processes, and being able to actually follow instructions and directions. 130 IQ people can benefit from the work of 100 IQ people. 100 IQ people will not benefit from the work of 70 IQ people. 70 IQ is the literal level of mental retardation.

The world doesn't need everyone to have a job where everyone needs a 130 IQ to function.

No, because the current world is built around a 100 IQ. In a world where 130 IQ was average, systems would be built in such a way that 100 IQ people would struggle and be mostly useless/a net negative. This doesn’t necessarily mean we need to rebuild our systems around 70 IQ individuals, but it does call into question if building it around 100 is optimal. There are many ways that 70 IQs could be put to use with enough structure, though the increased structure would likely mean the 130s would be even more needlessly constrained than they already are.

I gave examples of how 130 IQ people can benefit from 100 IQ people because 100 IQ people have utility. 70IQ people have almost no economic utility.

Why don't you give some examples of these supposed systems that would exist if that median IQ matched that to current day 130 IQ people, and how 100 IQ people would be a net negative in such a system?

@2rafa at least gave an example of a 100iq person navigating Princeton or Jane Street. But in this case, the 100 IQ person can serve many functions in those places. Cooking, cleaning, plumbing, maintenance, research assistance, etc are all tasks a 100 IQ person can easily do and excel in. Yes, the 100 IQ person would never be at the top of their class, but a 100 IQ person can still learn and specialize in tasks that don't require a genius-level IQ.

The fact is the gap in the ability and capability to do tasks is not equal in both directions. You could consider IQ as a barrier of entry to be able to accomplish certain tasks. A 130 IQ can easily find a use for a 100 IQ person. A 100 IQ person working with a 70iq person sees the 70 IQ person as a liability because the 70IQ person is incapable of following directions. You can't trust a 70 IQ person to do something like run a dishwasher.

You can't seriously be saying a 130 IQ person looking at a 100 IQ person will see them just as incapable as a 100 IQ person looking at a 70 IQ person will.

@2rafa at least gave an example of a 100iq person navigating Princeton or Jane Street. But in this case, the 100 IQ person can serve many functions in those places.

in part, because almost everyone 130 IQ has good knowledge what 100 IQ can do and can not, even if they live in a high-IQ bubble they have some average IQ relatives or exposure from media. If norm is 130, then 100 become scarce and weird.

Also, maybe a poor example, do you expect any modern use of smartphone with 64 megabytes of RAM?

If everyone gets 30 IQ bump, society would change barely recognizable. There would be quickly more robots doing many tasks. Rewind a few centuries to natural economy (how do we factor in Flynn effect?), most 70 IQ people worked in agriculture.

According to Lynn, the Ivory Coast had an average of 70. I have been there several times and think that if I were to employ or have control over the employment of, say, a dozen average (not particularly elite/smart/etc) Ivorian workers I should easily be able to find jobs for them in the US.

So just a couple of thoughts I have.

There are many different methods of measuring IQ and intelligence, and IQ tests can break intelligence between crystallized and fluid. Are the people of the Ivory Coast averaging 70 IQ due to a lack of nutrition and education, or because they are genetically inferior and the 70 IQ is their genetically average potential? Or to put it another way, if we take a baby born to the average person in the Ivory Coast and raise them in a Western nation with Western nutrition and education, would they on average have 70 IQ?

Based on observations of the Flynn effect and the increase in average IQ over time for all populations, I'd say that they would likely have a much average IQ than 70 if they were raised in better conditions. In other words, I'm arguing that IQ scores between countries are not exactly the same and that a 70 IQ person from the Ivory Coast is not equivalent to a 70 IQ person in the USA. To Flynn's credit, I believe he does try to account for multi-country analysis by using the progressive Raven Matrixes version of the IQ test, which doesn't require reading, writing, or speaking, but it also means the range of intelligence being tested is limited. As highly correlated intelligence is across different types, it's not equivalent. Also, from what I recall from Flynn's work the data in Africa is quite limited and had to be extrapolated across various countries, Ivory Coast included. (Note that I am not arguing there aren't any genetical differences in average IQ, just that all the races have not had a chance to reach say their 90% potential in IQ distribution.).

IQ has much stronger predictive powers of income in the lower brackets than in the higher brackets. I find this to be strong evidence in support of my notion that IQ is a barrier to entry for being able to perform specific tasks. One Swedish study on intelligence and income finds that above 60,000 the predictive ability of intelligence drops and that the top 1% of earners score worse in cognitive ability than the bracket right below them. Once you reach an adequate amount of IQ, other factors about a person matter more.

I will concede that you could likely find a job for a 70-IQ person, but would they be able to keep that job, and would they be offered that job in lieu of a higher-IQ person? I argue most jobs have an "optimal" IQ where after a certain point having additional points of IQ would offer very little benefit. I will even go as far as to say that having a higher IQ could actually be a detriment since the job would be too simple for an extremely intelligent person and they would likely quit out of boredom and find a better job. I don't think there is a single job where 70 IQ is the optimal amount of intelligence for that job.

Hauser's Meritocracy, Cognitive Ability, and the Sources of Occupational Success" found that iq distribution of various jobs finds that only that "janitors and sextons", "construction laborers", "unpaid family workers", and "farmers and farm laborers" had at least someone with a less than 70iq in the 90th iq percentile distribution in people that work in those job categories between 1975-1977. The data from 1992-1994 shows there is not a single person in the 90th distribution of IQ that falls below 70 IQ. Most of this is explained by the Flynn effect, but as tools have become more complex it's more and more difficult for a low IQ person to be able to even do the lowest paying jobs. As I said, a 70 IQ person can not be trusted with something like a dishwasher because operating a dishwasher is actually quite a complex task compared to a task such as hammering an object in the same spot over and over. The economic output of workers in a modern nation must surpass the minimum wage, otherwise no business will hire such people except out of charity.

Gottfredson has a description of the ability of people at various IQ ranges in her paper Social Consequences of Group Differences in Cognitive Ability. There are descriptions for 2 cut off points of IQ I want to highlight - 75 IQ and 85 IQ:

IQ 75 signals the ability level below which individuals are not likely to master the elementary school curriculum or function independently in adulthood in modern societies. They are likely to be eligible for special educational services in school and for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) from the U.S. government, which is financial support provided to mentally and physically disabled adults. Of course, many do marry, hold a job, raise children, and otherwise function adequately as adults. However, their independence is precarious because they have difficulty getting and keeping jobs that pay a living wage. They are difficult to train except for the simplest tasks, so they are fortunate in industrialized nations to get any paying job at all. While only 1 out of 50 Asian-Americans faces such risk, Figure 3 shows that 1 out of 6 black-Americans does.

IQ 85 is a second important minimum threshold because the U.S. military sets its minimum enlistment standards at about this level. Although the military is often viewed as the employer of last resort, this minimum standard rules out almost half of blacks (44%) and a third of Hispanics (34%), but far fewer whites (13%) and Asians (8%). The U.S. military has twice experimented with recruiting men of IQ 80-85 (the first time on purpose and the second time by accident), but both times it found that such men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs. Individuals in this IQ range are not considered mentally retarded and they therefore receive no special educational or social services, but their poor learning and reasoning Social Consequences of Group Differences 29 abilities mean that they are not competitive for many jobs, if any, in the civilian economy. They live at the edge of unemployability in modern nations, and the jobs they do get are typically the least prestigious and lowest paying: for example, janitor, food service worker, hospital orderly, or parts assembler in a factory.

IQ 85 is also close to the upper boundary for Level 1 functional literacy, the lowest of five levels in the U.S. government’s 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). Adults at this literacy level are typically able to carry out only very simple tasks, such as locating the expiration date on a driver’s license or totaling a bank deposit slip, but they typically cannot perform more difficult tasks, such as locating two particular pieces of information in a sports article (Level 2), writing a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill (Level 3), determining correct change using information in a menu (Level 4), or determining shipping and total costs on an order form for items in a catalog (Level 5). Most routine communications with businesses and social service agencies, including job applications, are thus beyond the capabilities of persons with only Level 1 literacy. Their problem is not that they cannot read the words, but that they are not able to understand or use the ideas that the words convey.

The intellectual capability of the 70 IQ, or even 85 IQ population is made clear in these descriptions. These are significant ability barriers to entry to most jobs or functions and have a greater impact on a person than the additional gain in ability at the higher IQ tiers. To go back to my original point, a 100 iq racist arguing that an 85 iq population are 'animals' can construct a stronger argument than a 115 iq racist arguing that a 100 iq population are animals Both would be incorrect for reasons you already stated previously, but if they were trying to refine the definition of animal you get better arguments the lower the IQ goes.

We have seen IQ rise to match the jobs available, but I say that we are nearing our natural genetic potential in IQ for well-developed nations. Actually, we are seeing IQ points drop in developed nations due to the implementation of ludicrous and inane policies. Unless something like eugenics or gene editing becomes a reality I doubt the average level of intelligence will rise more than 5-10 IQ points for the developed nations.

We have no idea what a hypothetical society of a world where the average person's IQ is 130 will look like, but I still argue a 70 IQ person would struggle more in a society of 100 IQ individuals than a 100 IQ person in a world of people with 130 median IQ. There are almost no jobs for a 70 IQ person in a modern nation. Even if the hypothetical 130 iq society is able to automate away many existing job categories with robots and AI as @aardvark2 suggests, I doubt it would actually remove all all jobs where the barrier to be able to do the work requires a minimum level of IQ above 100. It's likely such a society could easily provide a luxurious peaceful life to the 100 IQ person and they wouldn't need to even work and could spend a life pursuing the arts or leisure.

Based on historical trends a lot of people would argue job availability will keep up but we actually don't know that! Historical trends don't always predict the future. @aardvark2 uses an example of a smartphone, and I'd like to point out Moore's law is no longer being met (the pace of development has slowed down). You can't assume past trends continue infinitely and there are good reasons to believe that there won't be enough new industries and jobs that are created where human labor is preferable to robot/AI labor, especially if robots and AI reach the point where it makes most current jobs obsolete.

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Look, I completely understand that you're unhappy with what @TitaniumButterfly said, and understandably so. He's been warned by @Amadan, and presuming he doesn't clean up his act, or at least say such things in a less maximally inflammatory manner, he's probably going to end up banned.

However, your own response, especially submitted as a top level comment in this thread, doesn't fly either. I'm not going to put anything on your mod record, since you're new and justifiably incensed, but at the very least, you need to put more effort into a rebuttal. Yes, I'm aware of how weird that sounds.

If you'd just stated this as a reply, I probably wouldn't have bothered to respond or put on the mod hat, but once someone has been modded for their actions, you should leave it at that and not performatively call them out to make a rhetorical point. After all, to make a very lukewarm defense of them, they went into a great deal of explaining as to why they hold the view that they do.

I'm not going to put anything on your mod record

Off-topic question. How does the "mod record" work? Do you use spreadsheets? Or does the software for this site have an admin UI for adding/browsing those things on per-user basis?

It's a drop down panel that has a list of every notable mod action, both good and bad. Warnings, bans, AAQCs, they all go in there. Per user, as you'd expect. We can add additional commentary in the free form text entry section.

Far superior to Reddit's implementation of mod tools. I suppose that's inevitable when the primary dev also owns and runs the site, and has a vested interest in his jannies not committing sudoku with our occasionally contentious userbase.

While I get official warnings on my permanent record (even though the mods didn't even say the word warning) for slightly edgy posts deep in the replies, this guy gets off scot free for this top level post. And I'm still salty about that time on the old place where I wrote a comment expecting to eat a ban, but instead the mods deleted my post.

Have you tried being newer and having your incense being on the more correct side of history?

and the lovestory of the mod team with the idea of "increasing the participation of more Darwins in the subreddit/site" continues.

Is the software general enough to be used for other communities? I'd actually like to self-host it! Is there a link to the source?

Actually, yes. It's a fork of the rdrama code base, with our own bespoke additions. Open the side panel to view the source code on git, though I don't recall the license used right now.

The code is linked in the menu at the top of the page.

The code was forked from rdrama.net iirc.

Why Slaveholding interests did indeed cause the the Civil War

When America was founded, slavery was on the way out: turns out it wasn’t that profitable of a system for tobacco farming, and sugar couldn’t be grown in the continental US. Many northern states abolished slavery and then the south followed suit. If there was a time for the peaceful national abolition of slavery it was then. Most Southerners even saw slavery as a regrettable institution that would be phased out (Jefferson most famously).

Then Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin, and suddenly mass cotton agriculture became a profitable option for slave agriculture. With the old southwest open for settlement in the first decades of the 19th century, those territories filled with cotton slave plantations. Because of soil exhaustion, the states of the old south (Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland) were not as suitable for cultivation of cotton, and so profited mainly from the selling of their excess slave population to plantations in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missippi and Florida (later Missouri and Texas). In order for this to continue to be profitable, the territory under the yoke of slavery had to continually expand, which perhaps explains the growth of rabid pro-slavery ideology of politicians from these states in this era who started to justify slavery as a moral good).

Now of course this was not a sustainable system because a). there is only so much land that is suitable for cotton farming and b). plantations directly competed with free settlers for land (which explains some of the rivalry between the north and the south better than fringe abolitionism). This also doesn’t fit with the argument that if we had merely waited slavery would have fixed itself more peacefully. A large portion of the southern political class was heavily invested in the continued expansion of slavery (so they could make money selling slaves). This was one cause of the Mexican-American war (to acquire more land for growing cotton), and also resulted in schemes like that of the Knights of the Golden Circle’s plan to capture Central America and the Caribbean to make more slave states, and William Walker’s Filibuster War in Nicaragua. The compromise of 1820, the compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all continued to give more power to slaveholding interests. You wouldn’t have needed to be an abolitionist to be resentful towards what seemed like the disproportionate power and influence of slaveholding interests in the elections leading up to the Civil War.

Then there’s the actual election of 1860. First of all, I want to note that Lincoln was not elected on a platform of sudden abolition, nor did he actually move to abolish slavery during the Civil War until 1863. All Lincoln promised to do was to prevent the expansion of the institution into new territories (few of which were suitable for plantation agriculture anyway).

Secondly, slave holding interests arguably lost that election because of running John Breckenridge as a third party candidate instead of backing Stephen Douglas. Southern Democrats refused to endorse Douglas at the party convention in Charleston because Douglas was not willing to endorse the maximalist position of allowing slaveholders to bring their slaves into any new territory (potentially against the wishes of the population). This was just a bridge too far for Northern voters after the Kansas Nebraska act opened territory that was supposed to be closed to slavery by the compromise of 1820 to slaveholders, and the Fugitive Slave Act forced Northern States to enforce the institution within their own borders where the population was opposed to it.

Both Douglas’s and Lincoln’s positions seem like reasonable ways of gradually phasing out slavery to me (especially Douglas, who didn’t tend to touch the right for new states to choose to allow slavery AT ALL). Instead the South chose secession and war. It also seems to me that the political impasse that led to the war was less caused by abolitionism, but rather the political extremism of the Southern Planters class.

I’d urge those who disagree to put yourself in the shoes of a northern farmer in the late 1850s/1860s. Wouldn’t you have been frustrated by the stranglehold that slaveholding interests seemed to have on the national government, preventing the opening of new lands in the West for settlement by your sons? Encouraging economic policies that were good for cotton plantations but not for your wheat crop? A vote for Lincoln was less of a vote for abolitionism, and more of a “fuck you” to the insidious and outsized influence of slaveholders on federal economic policies.

Responding to a sentiment in many responses:

The Northern economy was very strong, contributing more than half the empire's shipping tonnage in colonial times and expanding after independence (American built ships flooded Europe, costing half the price to build.) The rapidly expanding canals fueled agricultural growth and population expansion. Then the industrial revolution itself etc. etc.

A few years ago, I dug deeply into slave financing namely how banks dealt with depreciation, whether they operated foreclosed plantations etc. (Generally, the solution was immediate disintermediation.) It turns out mortgages on slaves were one of the largest financial instruments in the world for a long time, with Dutch, German and French banks speculating on them.

While Jefferson could already mortgage 150 slaves to a Dutch company to build his mansion, after a crash in the 1820s, by the 1830s the slave bond market had grown to be 30x the size of all slaves and land in the South combined. When the price of cotton crashed again (Panic of 1837), interest payments alone were $33 million, while the whole Southern cotton crop was only worth $10 million. 343 of 850 US banks failed. The Southern states (all banks were state chartered) both refused to foreclose and to pay interest, cutting the South off from the global financial system, as they unilaterally waived debts (since the plantation owners ran the governments.) Until that point, slavery was state subsidized, profitable primarily through financial engineering (like Canada's real estate driven GDP today) because the states took on the debts of the large estates.

In the late 1840s, the process resumed. In 1828 a laborer could go for $300, rising above $600 in 1838, falling back under $300 before reaching $700 in 1860. Estates operated less on cash flows from farming and more on refinancing after asset appreciation. Furthermore, in the old South, soil had depleted too, such that cotton production slowly moved West to new lands and without constant expansion, when the new South's soil would deplete, the whole institution would collapse hence the expansionist drive.

https://www.nber.org/chapters/c0606.pdf

This seems like as good a place as any to write about something I'd been thinking about for a while, especially since it's at least kind of against your point.

Saying the Civil War was caused by Slavery never seemed satisfying to me. It's not exactly wrong per se, but it doesn't feel like it really captures the spirit of what happened and why. I think a better thesis is that Slavery was the lynchpin of the war, the thing that caused the pre-existing cultural split to become an economic split and a more specific political split, that gave rise to there being specific territories motivated to rebel.

I think the true cause is the cultural split that goes back to the founding of the nation. Albion’s Seed stuff. Borderers and Cavaliers vs Puritans and Quakers. (I've only actually read Scott's review of it, I probably should read the actual book sometime). In this view, it was the Cavaliers who really loved themselves some slavery. For reasons I haven't entirely fleshed out, the Borderers and Cavaliers came to be allied and to mostly occupy the same territory. I guess they could tolerate each other at least. Meanwhile, the Puritans and Quakers similarly allied with each other, and each side had at least a vague feeling that they didn't really like the other side and they were the Other, the Outgroup. They managed to ally with each other long enough to fight and win the American Revolution, but they never did really get along that well, not well enough to be comfortable building a more centralized state for them all to live under.

At the time of the founding of the nation, the plantation farming with slavery that the Cavaliers loved so dearly was in fact the most economically productive thing going on in the nation. This gave the slaveholder class tremendous political power, far too much to take any action against slavery. The cultures that made up what would become the North never really liked slavery. It became a rallying point for both sides - the whole proto-South became more and more into how awesome Slavery was, even the ones who would never be able to afford a single slave, and meanwhile, the proto-North became more and more into how shitty it was and how it had to go. And so both sides went on, constantly provoking each other about it. But it's just an excuse, the real cause was always the cultural split.

In the background to all this is the gigantic freight train of Industrialization. Slow moving but massive and inexorable. The proto-North and the cultures that made it up really loved them some Industrialization. They went all-in on that, in opposition to plantation slavery. It wasn't that great at the time of the founding of the nation, but it kept slowly advancing and gaining more power. That economic domination slowly but surely started slipping away from the slavers who, due to their own culture, were unable to see it coming and shift away from slavery and towards industry. But a slow shift of economic trends is tough to fight a war over. The election of Lincoln, though, that did it. A bright neon sign saying that the slaveholder class could no longer rely on their economic clout to dominate national politics.

And so, to war! A war actually motivated by that tribal hatred, but which the slavery issue had provided plenty of more rational-seeming Casus Belli.

Industrialization was still very new, and nobody really understood how it would affect war. In the old way of war, winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North. Hence why they did better than expected at first. The North was slow to understand the advantages that Industrialization gave them and how to use those advantages to maximum extent. But they did eventually. In the new way of war, non-industrialized opponents would be crushed under a mountain of manufactured goods. Individual courage and clever maneuvers mean little when your opponent out-produces you 10 to 1 or more. Parts of the Southern regime probably saw this eventually, but there wasn't much they could do about it.

Near as I can tell, the cultural effect of the war was to decisively crush the Cavalier culture for good - I don't see any sign of them being still around now. The Borderers are still around, and don't seem to have been that affected. I understand that many of them checked out of the Civil War when it really started going south for the South. Perhaps they said to themselves something to the effect of, hold on, why am I charging superior Union firepower to preserve the right of these other rich guys to own slaves? And the war and reconstruction era didn't shut down anything central to their culture. So I guess they survived.

I think this is all very relevant to today's situation. We've still got the same cultural split, and the temperature is getting pretty high, only now, there isn't a firm lynchpin to actually fight over. Nothing to define specific territory as being on one side or the other, nothing to motivate the less-cultural to join the fight and tolerate the sacrifices warfare requires. And so, it's not really clear what actually happens.

The borderers mostly fought for the union, actually- heavily borderer areas were more opposed to the confederacy.

It's certainly true that the average poor white in the south had some borderer blood, along with being descended from indentured servants, cavalier bastards and hangers-on, etc. But 100% borderer populations fought for the north.

That seems very plausible to me. Do you know of anywhere I could read more about that? In addition to the sibling's mention of West Virginia.

East Tennessee is another good example. I don't know of too many books about the subject, but here's one I have read: "War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869." There's also this article about Unionist sentiment in north Alabama: "Civil War Unionists and the Political Culture of Loyalty in Alabama, 1860-1861."

The idea of Unionist Southerners being willing to turn on the Confederacy was prominent enough that Lincoln based Union war strategy on appealing to them for a significant portion of the war.

One of my favorite Civil War factoids is that West Virginia actually re-seceded from Virginia to rejoin the Union.

We've still got the same cultural split, and the temperature is getting pretty high, only now, there isn't a firm lynchpin to actually fight over. Nothing to define specific territory as being on one side or the other, nothing to motivate the less-cultural to join the fight and tolerate the sacrifices warfare requires.

There’s an argument to be made that progressive gender stuff - the cluster of political/cultural issues including gay marriage, trans stuff, and abortion - are rapidly becoming the lynchpin. As the religiously conservative parts of the country becoming increasingly retrenched about these issues, it seems the progressive parts are doubling down on embracing the most extreme versions of them as a way to crystallize their differences.

In the most recent episode of Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive podcast, her guest made the interesting argument that part of what is driving the massive and rapid proliferation of people identifying as trans/nonbinary/GNC is simply that people in progressive spheres are adopting these identities as a way to formally mark themselves as distinct from the chuds and firmly loyal to one side of the simmering cultural conflict. “MAGAts won’t shut up about how gross trans people are, how they want to infiltrate women’s and children’s spaces to rape them, etc.? Well, if the chuds hate trans people, the trans must be doing something right! Count me in!”

Similarly, women who thirty years ago would have seen abortion as a deeply tragic last resort (“safe, legal, and rare”) now seem to be flirting with embracing it as a positive good. And not just as a thing we should encourage the underclass to do - the stance of early abortion advocates like Sanger - but as a thing that even affluent high-status people should be able to do freely and without any consequences or even social censure. (No big deal at all!) All as a defensive reactionary instinct triggered by conservative overreach and aggression on the issue.

people identifying as trans/nonbinary/GNC is simply that people in progressive spheres are adopting these identities as a way to formally mark themselves as distinct from the chuds and firmly loyal to one side of the simmering cultural conflict.

Maybe there's some of that, but I have the impression of a lot of it being driven by progressivism having nothing to offer young women other than scaremongering about 'you're gonna get raped'. Like the tradcon offer of 'you can be a housewife and have lots of kids' is at least an offer and not just a discussion about how much being a woman sucks.

Like duh, if I was a woman being told there's nothing special or different about being a woman except that it makes you a victim, I wouldn't want to be one anymore.

Like duh, if I was a woman being told there's nothing special or different about being a woman except that it makes you a victim, I wouldn't want to be one anymore.

Sure, but you’re a man with presumably a male-brained orientation as to how you perceive yourself and your relation with the world.

By their revealed preferences when it comes to rape fantasies, true crime, hybristophilia, dark triad men and whatnot, a substantial proportion (perhaps the majority) of women rather enjoy envisioning themselves as victims, or at least potential victims.

A woman wanting to be raped by a particular man, or subset of men, does not mean she wants to be raped by whoever has the opportunity to do so. Like fifty shades of gray was pretty clear the guy was hot and rich.

“Women don’t actually want to be raped by literally every man ever” is not in the slightest incompatible with “many women genuinely quite like perceiving themselves as victims or potential victims, enjoy the social power assuming that mantle gives them over others, and will often happily recontextualise their prior experiences as victimhood in order to capitalise on social sympathy”. Given how we relate to the sexes and the amount of empathy afforded to each, the return-on-investment of damselling is probably higher for women than men.

Victimhood politics only exist because portraying oneself as a victim lacking agency can be a very useful power to wield over others. It gives one the sledgehammer of social power and moral superiority, and is sufficiently covert and by-proxy so as to allow one a huge amount of plausible deniability. Voicing one’s (real or imagined) victimhood can certainly also foster internal feelings of being Stunning And Brave.

In other words, I don’t think people actually have this aversion to victimhood. It’s a status that lots of people, and I suspect particularly women, actively seek out, at least in terms of how they are perceived. It’s probably a less healthy self-concept than viewing oneself as effectual and capable, but it is adaptive, it can be utterly intoxicating to wield, and it is often the case that telling someone that they are not in fact uniquely victimised or at risk of such invokes outrage, not relief. Non-binary identification is just another facet of these kinds of status games.

I think I've seen this in teenage boys in white progressive households. At some point, they realize that they are becoming a straight white cis dude, and getting older by the minute. And if they've been mouthing comments putting down "stale pale male" people for years, they need to change something fast.

Secondly, slave holding interests arguably lost that election because of running John Breckenridge as a third party candidate instead of backing Stephen Douglas.

Interestingly, I don't think this is true. If you assume that a united Democratic Party keeps Douglas's votes + Brekenridge's + Bell's, Lincoln still wins the Electoral College (with 169/303 EVs instead of the 180 he got). The Lincoln vote is very efficient because he carries a lot of northern states by small margins over Douglas, and isn't on the ballot at all in the South so he doesn't waste votes in states he can't win.

For a united Democratic Party to win (presumably with Douglas as the nominee), they need to pick up some Lincoln votes as well - and that doesn't seem particularly likely. Looking at the states where Lincoln got just over 50%, Douglas would need to pick up NY, OH or IL and IN. We know that Lincoln outpolls Douglas in Illinois in a straight matchup (the Republicans won the popular vote in the 1858 Illinois state legislature elections following the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but the Democrats won more seats so Douglas was elected senator, and there was a further swing to the Republicans between 1858 and 1860).

The Southern secessionist narrative sure looks better in a scenario where Lincoln was elected President as a 40-60 popular vote loser!

In a world where Douglas gets the United Democratic ticket, you have a more conciliatory South, which potentially helps flip OH or IN. But perhaps you're right: the North seemed pretty done with compromise too.

When America was founded, slavery was on the way out: turns out it wasn’t that profitable of a system for tobacco farming, and sugar couldn’t be grown in the continental US. Many northern states abolished slavery and then the south followed suit. If there was a time for the peaceful national abolition of slavery it was then.

I've always heard that as the conventional wisdom, but I wonder if it's really true? If you put aside all morality and politics, it seems odd that they couldn't find some profitable use for literally free labor. Especially in the rural south, where a natural resistance to both the sun and malaria would have been huge. Maybe tobacco farming would have gone out, but they could have grown something else, with black slaves working on peanut farms or whatever. And of course house slaves would have been useful anywhere.

More empirically: Jefferson famously tried to free his slaves on his death, but he couldn't afford it. The cost was too high. If slavery was really "on its way out" it seems odd that the price of slaves was still so high.

It seems more like this is a "just so story" that we tell to simplify things. But it didn't have to be. Slavery was always a choice. They did it because it was profitable, but only for a select few, and they were mostly growing things like tobacco and sugar that did nothing of any economic use. But there was also no particular reason it had to end, except that people started to feel bad about it. It had endured for hundreds of years, and could have gone right on into the present day if people hadn't developed a conscounce about it.

This is the first time I've ever heard about that "Knights of the Golden Circle" thing. Kind of a big hole in the American education system I guess. But I can see why they leave it out... it brings up too many awkward questions. Why didn't the US take over the caribbean? It would have made sense. Both for money/realpolitik (those caribbean islands were producing crazy amounts of cash, much more then the US did for a long time) and arguably would have been better off ruled by the US instead of distant European monarchies or "Ok you're free now" suddenly putting slaves in charge of everything, like Haiti. But instead we just took Puerto Rico and nothing else because... that's just the way it is, I guess.

It’s not actually free though. If you factor in the costs of feeding, housing and clothing it’s probably comparable to the median wage of the era. True, you aren’t paying the slave, but you are providing all his material needs and possibly health care as well (granted health care in that era was pretty basic). And this doesn’t account for the business costs of having a manager making sure your slaves work, security so they can’t leave.

Sometimes slaves were actually paid. I've seen some account books and journals from one particular mediumish farm in the 1850s-60s (to the best of my recollection, the total population was the owner and his wife and about 5 children, plus maybe 4-5 hired workers and 20-25 slaves, who were about 20% men, 20% women, and 60% children). Speaking only for that one location, and purely from an accounting perspective, there wasn't much difference between hired workers and enslaved workers, except that the enslaved workers were usually paid less per capita. Most of the pay wasn't in money, it was in produce, which could be consumed by the workers and their families (this was how they got their food for the year), or be taken to market and sold for cash or bartered for other things. Bacon was a big deal. It's been a while, but as I recall, the hired workers were only paid on merit (agreed upon wages, but the better ones were paid more, and there was some arrangement about produce vs. cash), but payment to the enslaved workers was based on both merit and family size. (That is, when a slave had a baby, that family got more pay, which is to say, more food.) The owner's family also worked, but weren't paid directly, of course.

All workers lived on the farm, but I have to assume that the hired workers had better quarters, and the family had a nice house. In other respects, like health care, the slaves seem to have been treated as kind of a disreputable offshoot of the family, like an adult child with Down Syndrome, who had to be looked after and kept out of trouble and put to as much productive work as possible. But one or two of the enslaved workers were actually trusted as much as the more reliable hired workers, to be able to independently take goods to market, sell them for a fair price, and return with the proceeds.

I don't recall seeing any incidents of leaving, during the period I looked at, but I'd assume that local law enforcement would be harsh, not to mention that most people in the area would at least recognize them. They left the farm every Sunday to go to the "colored people's church", after all. And I seem to recall something about one of the young (black, enslaved) men courting a (black, enslaved) girl from another farm, which implies that they had some sort of a social web.

That's just one particular time and place, of course, and I suspect it was much better conditions than average.

My source for this is "What God Hath Wrought", the 1815-1848 volume of the Oxford History of the US. My understanding of the argument is that Southern soils in the Eastern part of the country had begun to be exhausted by the early ~1820s due to poor farming practices. This made it difficult to grow Tobacco or Cotton profitably because the land just didn't have enough nutrients in it any more for those crops. Other crops like wheat or peanuts that were less intensive or even restorative, were better harvested using animal or partially mechanized labor. There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms, although I can't pretend to know exactly why.

In terms of the Knights of the Golden circle, I think it's left out of history books because of the general discomfort that Americans have historically had with imperialism. This was a country founded explicitly on anti-imperialist principles of popular sovereignty and democracy. Plans to conquer Central America and the Carribean generally don't align with that image. Of course, in practice, the US has and continues to be an imperialist power, so I do wonder, like you, if this exclusion from our education system of these uncomfortable facts is actually a good thing.

There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms, although I can't pretend to know exactly why.

Even the Romans abandoned slave worked wheat plantations eventually. Different crops are cultivated most efficiently in different ways and it's pretty plausible that wheat- or possibly temperate-climate crops more broadly- don't do well with the kind of agricultural system that meshes well with slave labor.

There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms

Initially, African-descended people had less comparative advantage in the North because their malaria-resistance conferred little or no advantage in a colder climate. Additionally, several crops that slave populations purchased from west Africa had prior special experience with (e.g. rice, indigo) were not widely viable outside of particular regions along the southern Atlantic (NC, SC, GA) and gulf (LA, MS) coasts. There are other reasons as well, but these are two particularly-interesting ones.

This was a country founded explicitly on anti-imperialist principles of popular sovereignty and democracy.

Well, beneath the rhetoric was a pretty solid foundation of impatience with British refusal to let colonists swarm past the Appalachians and conquer more Indian land, so YMMV.

I think the real reason the Knights of the Golden Circle aren’t discussed more is that they’re historically irrelevant. The 1840s–50s featured severe conflicts in Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri, while John Brown and his small group made waves in the southeast. Then Lincoln was elected, Fort Sumter was fired on, and the next five years were filled with more important battles than even most armchair histories can keep straight. Finally, you have Sherman’s march, Lee’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, Reconstruction, and the rise of the KKK. With all of that, who cares that some southerners and southern-sympathizers had dreams of eventually taking over the Caribbean? Or that an even smaller number wanted to create a northern confederacy centered around the Great Lakes? Both are pretty much just trivia.

More empirically: Jefferson famously tried to free his slaves on his death, but he couldn't afford it. The cost was too high. If slavery was really "on its way out" it seems odd that the price of slaves was still so high.

According to John Boles, a professor of history at Rice University:

When Jefferson’s father-in-law died, his wife inherited, which means Jefferson inherited, her father’s land and slaves, plus a lot of debt. He wasn’t able to get out from under that debt his entire life. A law was passed in Virginia in 1792 that said if a person was in debt, any slaves he might free could be seized by his debtors. So Jefferson was always under the cloud that he couldn’t free his slaves because they could be seized by his debtors.

Also, in 1806, a law was passed in Virginia that said if a person freed slaves, those slaves had to leave the state within one year or they’d be seized by the state [as slaves]. So Jefferson realized that even if he avoided that 1792 law about debt and freed his slaves, they had to be expelled. He didn’t have the means to buy animals or land or tools to set them up [in another state]. He felt hamstrung by that. He also had a lot of kin — children and grandchildren — whom he was supporting. At any one time, Jefferson was supporting 15–20 family members at Monticello.

Saying the costs are too high is technically correct but Jefferson's situation in particular has some details to consider that may make one consider what exactly that statement means. The laws around debt and Jefferson wanting to give his slaves a chance at life if he did free them by basically gifting them huge financial gifts made it economically unviable for him.

Is slavery profitable? Yes. Is it more profitable than willing workers engaging in a free market? That is the question. Opportunity cost is a thing.

Thanks for linking the anecdote, I hadn't heard that before.

Presumably that debt was being serviced by the income of the land and slaves, no? In modern terms, it's possible to own a business (with income) that also has a debt. If you inherit that business, you also inherit the debt. It doesn't mean the business was worth nothing, even if you don't have the cash to pay off the debt instantly.

I agree that Jefferson's situation was wierd and maybe a bad example for the economics of slavery, since it seems like he was more concerned with other things like art, politics, etc and didn't really care about money. On the other hand... maybe that's the point? The guy was so rich, and from such easy money, that he never had to care about money at all. He could afford to throw away money on things like turning Monticello into his own personal architectural vanity project, while also being president, and it just didn't matter. Slavery was profitable.

More empirically: Jefferson famously tried to free his slaves on his death, but he couldn't afford it. The cost was too high. If slavery was really "on its way out" it seems odd that the price of slaves was still so high.

Do you have a source for that? Jefferson talked a lot about freeing his slaves during his lifetime, but he didn't because he couldn't have afforded to run his estate without slave labor, and he wasn't willing to downgrade his lifestyle. He freed a handful in his will, but not most of them. Freeing your slaves upon your death was fairly straightforward, and the only "cost" would have been the fact that your heirs would have to figure out how to keep their estate running without slaves.

George Washington did free his slaves in his will, but he complicated it by stating they would be free upon the death of his wife. Martha Washington, surrounded by slaves who made it rather obvious that they were waiting for her to pass away peacefully in her sleep (or, you know, fall down some stairs or something...) freed them in her lifetime.

Jefferson is admittedly a complicated case. The man spoke grandly about human liberty, but also spent money like water and needed slaves to pay his bills. I can't say for sure that he wanted to free all of them. He freed a few, while the others were sold to pay his debts. You can't say it's "straightforward" when we're talking about human slavery here, plus a very large amount of money for the time.

Regardless I think it goes to my original point- slavery was not on its way out economicacally, since those slaves were worth such a large amount of money. If you really want I'll link some books on "yes slaves were worth a large amount of money."

No, I agree that slavery was profitable, and the arguments that it was "economically nonviable" and would have ended even without the Civil War is basically historical cope. I was simply questioning why it would have been "costly" to free slaves, other than the obvious cost of no longer having free labor. "I can't afford to free my slaves" is a rather straightforward equation: if slavery is bad, it's still bad even if it costs you money to end it.

Well it's always opportunity cost. "I can't afford to give away my house for nothing." Why not? It costs nothing, right? "Because it has a huge mortgage attached, and also it would be insane to give away something worth that much for nothing." "Oh, so you could give it away, you just don't want to?" "yes."

I think the finances of plantation slavery were also a bit weird to modern eyes. when cash was low they borrowed money, since selling slaves was tough. When cash was high they bought more slaves, since it paid better than paying off debt. I don't pretend to understand the business decisions of the time. Anyway I think we agree- this was a business decision, they weren't just giving up on something worth nothing.

Slavery, in general, is mostly useful for low-skill labor-intensive industries. The amount of rote, menial labor needed or wanted in society has been on a downward trend for centuries.

Slavery could have held on a little longer, but there’s a reason that even in the Islamic world where slavery is regarded with a wink and a nod you have to go pretty deep third world to find lots of slaves doing things that aren’t sex work. One bulldozer with a trained operator is more efficient than literal dozens of slaves with shovels.

Weird how sweatshops, prison labor, and human trafficking are still things then.

Imprisonment in the US costs 10s of thousands of dollars per prisoner per year ($133k/year in California). Making them stamp license plates cannot be enough to make economic sense. I'm pretty sure it is a large net loss. But then it would be a bit larger of a net loss without the forced labor.

As I understand it, a lot of prison labor is in agriculture and food production.

Yeah but... that's with all sorts of legal and ethical rules.

Ask yourself. If there were no rules. You could own a slave. Human chattel. Do whatever you want. Do you really not think you could make money from that?

Yes, the default niche for non-third world slavery in the 21st century, like actual slavery, is sex work. There's a few other niches where it hangs on, but they're niches. There's a few unfree domestic servants and a small number of unfree people working in sweatshops, but by and large the hondurans making sub-minimum wage in a meatpacking plant in a company town in deep rural areas chose to be there and could easily leave and get another shitty job if they want, and most of the indonesian children making sneakers are there because their parents want them their and not because their bosses force them to be. Yes these people face unfair labor practices, but it's not slavery- they choose to put up with it. Even the Bangladeshis in Qatar building world cup stadiums aren't really slaves; they're paid labor which gets a shitty deal by first world standards.

Prison labor is probably the largest category of unfree labor in the modern, even semideveloped world, and it doesn't make any economic sense, it just gives prisoners something to do other than fight each other and try to smuggle in drugs, and lets the rest of us feel better about making them be productive. Most heavy labor slavery is deep third world because machines just make more sense for the kinds of tasks that slaves can do.

I thought there was still some agricultural slavery for labor-intensive crops in areas with very low HDI. Cocoa a fairly major example, I believe. I do agree that for most factory jobs that 'slavery' is an exaggeration, and people just don't understand how shit subsistence agriculture is as an existence to compete against making phones and sneakers

Yes, in deep third world countries there’s slavery in agriculture and mining. Cocoa in west Africa, for example, uses slaves(disproportionately children). The Congo has slaves in its mines. But the kind of labor slavery which needs huge slave strata is, well, a feature of very low HDI deep third world countries. Notably Central America, an impoverished region which produces very similar cash crops to west Africa and likewise features high corruption levels and limited government control, doesn’t have much agricultural slavery.

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This sounds a lot like like having a powerful well cultivated and devoted ally, but instead he sucks at things, and resents you, and will probably betray you if he sees the chance.

Listen... do you want to own a slave? There are a lot of subs out there that would be willing. Just find one that's ok with being cultivated and fin-dommed.

Yes. there are "still rules" but you'll find that you can get them agree to ignore the bad rules, and that the good rules are good for your relationship and their cultivation anyway.

If you find that there is a job you want them to do that they don't want to do- this is a strong sign that you are using an inefficient tool for the job anyway. Their cognitive misalignment with your will is a legitimate efficiency loss.

Probably not as much as you think. Remember that this slave is going to need basically constant supervision and will never work harder than the bare minimum. What are you going to do, fire him?

Yes, you could, but the question is "how much?" You need to spend your money on satisfying the basic physiological needs of your slave, on preventing them from escaping, on forcing them to work.

And this work has to somehow be both simple, so your slave can't screw it up and force you to spend even more of your money, and lucrative, so the whole operation makes sense economically.

And the whole operation has to scale.

Human trafficking is mostly aiming at sexual slavery, prison labor is horrendously economically inefficient and mostly exists because you have to do something with them rather than for the output, and sweatshops are mostly employing free people who can quit their job and go get a different, equally shitty one.

Oh ok cool. Thanks for clearing that up. I mean, you didn't really make any logical argument or cite any sources but you're here on the internet so I'm sure you're a trusted authority figure. I trust you. All those southerners selling slaves at high prices were just idiots I guess. There's just no use for a free labor source, might as well just kill them all.

On another note, do you have any advice on where I can hire a good gardener? I've been paying a Mexican guy, but I feel weird paying a guy who's obviously here illegally. I'd like to hire an American, but the going rate is way too high and there's just no way I can afford that.

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You have not given any sources at all either.

And which part of their argument was illogical?

And "slavery is our competed by not enslaved people for legitimate labour" does not mean that slaves are worthless. For start, some people are into torture and rape.

You can disagree politely, or you can be a snide, sarcastic jerk. You chose the latter. Don't do that.

They didn't take it over because life isn't a Machiavellian cynical power struggle. You often do need a casus belli to get your population to do terrible things to another population. Shit, it is a good thing we didn't try to take Haiti, those people suffered under one of the harshest slave regimes the world has ever seen. I normally think generational trauma is bullshit, except for Haiti, it was literally hell on earth and they had to keep importing slaves because the natural birth rate couldn't hold a candle to the death rate on the sugar plantations.

I normally think generational trauma is bullshit, except for Haiti, it was literally hell on earth and they had to keep importing slaves because the natural birth rate couldn't hold a candle to the death rate on the sugar plantations

Haitian sugar plantations weren't much different from Barbadian sugar plantations, Jamaican sugar plantations, or even Louisiana sugar plantations. They were all absolutely horrific places to work, and chewed through human lives at ridiculous speeds.

It was all bad, but I only really know a fair amount about Haitian plantations, I can't speak to those others, but I'm sure they were...not good.

It was the nature of the work. Sugarcane is a thick, tough grass with similar dimensions to adult bamboo.

During planting, the slaves hade to dig 4-6 ft. square holes half a foot deep (60-100 squares per slave per day, or between 1k-2k cubic feet of earth each), use that earth to build up banks/causeways between the squares, then emplace cane seeds in the squares, surrounded by a few dozen pounds of manure (which had to be collected from cattleyards and carried to the fields by hand or basket as well).

During harvesting, the slaves had to (1) cut down the stalks by hand, (2) strip and de-leaf the cane stalks, and (3) carry bushels of the cut and stripped stalks from the squares to the processing stations. They then had to (4) see the juices extracted from the stalks via milling, (5) carry away the pulp, (6) boil and render the cane juice through successive sets of boilers and pans down into syrup, tempered with lime juice just before the crystallization point, then left to cool into molasses (distilled in turn into rum) and semi-refined sugar crystals.

Harvesting was especially brutal because once cut, the juices in the cane would spoil and rot incredibly rapidly. As a result, plantations during harvesting seasons ran around the clock in two 12-hour shifts, as fast as the workers could go. This led to many deaths from exhaustion in the fields, loss of limbs from crushing underneath millstones, and all the other types of industrial accidents that can happen in large-scale agriculture. Slaves also died in large numbers to all the ordinary tropical diseases and malnutrition endemic to the early-modern Caribbean.

This was the standard method basically everywhere that sugar was grown on New World plantations, and was absolutely brutal.

like you said, Haiti was hell on earth. It didn't have to be that bad. I really think the US could have done it better, even under the rule of the old south. certainly the modern US could handle it better. But instead we just... let it rot because it's not our country and we have no responsibility.

Haiti gets hundreds of millions in US aid every year. Straight up annexation would likely be cheaper and more effective in the longrun.

No thank you, do not want. If the US were any good at empire (in the classic sense), perhaps that would make sense... but we aren't and have never been.

Yup, sucks to not be the USA. A multicultural meritocracy mostly doing it right.

Encouraging economic policies that were good for cotton plantations but not for your wheat crop?

I recall that during this period, US tariff policies meant that much of government spending was funded by Southerners importing foreign luxury goods at a mark-up. This money would then be spent on many things, including developing railways in the North. Northern industries were shielded from foreign competition while the South had to compete in world markets. This made the South quite angry, causing one of the many pre-war crises. There was a long struggle with different parties raising and lowering tariffs, Lincoln's Republican Party was elected on a platform of raising tariffs significantly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_crisis

This is not to say that slavery was not a primary contributor to the war but there were a range of issues causing division.

Somehow, plantation owners burning big piles of money buying Italian art funded the Industrial Revolution a thousand miles away. I'm really not connecting the dots here. Didn't every country in the world have rich aristocrats at this time?

The distribution of taxes is important. There was no income tax at this point, the main source of revenue for the whole country was taxing trade. The US tariff policy was designed to develop industries like metalworking, shielding them from superior British competition. It strengthened Northern industry by weakening foreign competition and some of the revenue went to developing infrastructure in the North, at least more than went to the South.

Effectively there was South-to-North wealth transfer, which made Southerners angry.

I think the whole debate is a little pedantic, since (as you note) many of these issues are highly interrelated. The foreign policy dimension is also understated since Britain was both the center of the abolitionist movement and the main exporter of industrial/manufactured goods to the US, chafed at tariffs, was worried about the Union invading Canada or causing trouble for the Caribbean colonies and sympathized to some extent culturally with the South. The stereotypical Dixie argument can be made persuasively and isn't wrong, it just lies by omission; the same is true for the union 'it was just about slavery' argument.

In order for this to continue to be profitable, the territory under the yoke of slavery had to continually expand, which perhaps explains the growth of rabid pro-slavery ideology of politicians from these states in this era who started to justify slavery as a moral good).

Can you expand on this? I can understand your later argument (that expanding slavery = increased profits from the slave trade), but why would expanding slavery be necessary for the profitability of existing cotton plantations?

In general, I think you're missing the massive impact of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath -- the genocide of all white inhabitants of Haiti by Jacques Dessalines created an existential fear in the South (shared by both slaveholders and yeomen farmers who did not participate in slavery) that abolition would result in the bloody death of everyone they knew. This fear was periodically amplified by the German Coast Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, and the attack on Harper's Ferry. This is why Jefferson wrote his famous letter to John Holmes, calling the Missouri Compromise a "fire bell in the night" and "knell of the Union". The most important quote from that letter gets a lot less attention than it deserves:

The cession of that kind of property [slavery], for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle[trifle] which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

That was his entire argument against immediate abolition, and in favor of gradual emancipation. This thinking also led to the proposed solution: to spread slavery further and further into the western territories. The reasoning goes: the more evenly distributed the slave population was, the less concentrated the slave population in the Deep South was, the less the risk of a genocide when they are inevitably freed. That at least was the initial reasoning -- the cognitive dissonance between 'slavery must end' and 'we must spread it' led to the rise of racism (i.e., slavery isn't bad because the slaves deserve to be treated this way, whether 'Curse of Ham' or genetic inferiority) as well as an incredibly paranoid totalitarian treatment of slaves in the South (e.g., the ban on teaching slaves to read/write was specifically due to Nat Turner being a literate black who was inspired by reading about the Haitian Revolution).

In other words, the political extremism of the South was motivated less by the greed of the plantation class, and more by the overwhelming fear of a slave revolt. Whether that fear was justified is debatable -- though at least John Brown thought the fears were justified, as his final message asserted that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood" -- but the fact and reality of such fears is I think undeniable.

There are, it seems, immediately obvious solutions to "emancipation will cause white genocide" and the south rejected all of the ones that would entail freeing any slaves, including "just kill every black man, woman, and child in the USA". Attachment to slavery was a pretty big deal in understanding southern thinking.

I agree that attachment to slavery was a big deal, but it doesn't have to be for you to choose not to commit massacres. You could just be opposed to massacres.

Yes, they could be- but they also opposed things like gradual emancipation as happened in parts of Latin America, government buy back schemes, repatriation, etc.

I have always been ignorant of this. Why did the US not buy back slaves? I haven't seen anything about opposition to the plan from the south.

Because the south wanted to keep its slaves and then lost a war.

Can you expand on this? I can understand your later argument (that expanding slavery = increased profits from the slave trade), but why would expanding slavery be necessary for the profitability of existing cotton plantations?

Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.

I'm not sure I buy the slave revolt argument fully. The south was continually expanding its slave population to work new plantations. You see an exponential (in the mathematical sense) of the enslaved population from ~700,000 in 1790 to 4 million in 1860. Now during that time the number and size of slave states also increased substantially, but if you look at this map, the percentage of enslaved peoples in Eastern counties doesn't seem to really decrease with Western expansion. Looks to me like the economics of the plantation were more important than the fear of slave revolt.

However, I do see your argument that this was a powerfully motivating political force behind Southern Extremism. Funnily enough, the Republican Party also didn't really want black people to stick around in the union: Lincoln was a strong proponent of colonization and repatriation of African-Americans to Liberia.

Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.

This is difficult to square with the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of slavery were from the Deep South. The necessary/intractable evil view survived the longest in the Upper South and the only Southern Slave State to get even mildly close to abolishing on its own was Virginia. Publicola actually misses this, too: The reason Southern emancipationists wanted to 'spread out' slavery wasn't to dilute the possibility of post-emancipation genocide, but to draw as many slaveowners out of Virginia as possible so the emancipationists could have any shot at all at winning elections.

As it happens, I just finished a massive biography of Lincoln which covers pretty much every political contest and debate he was ever in blow by blow.

The Civil War was absolutely about slavery. The Southern states that seceded stated this very clearly; they announced their intention to secede literally the night Lincoln was elected, because they believed Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery and would try to curb its spread.

In fact, Lincoln did despise slavery and believed it would eventually have to end, but he was also a Constitutionalist and a Unionist and so accepted slavery as the law of the land, and repeatedly assured the South that he had no intention of infringing on their property rights.

Anti-slavery sentiments were not as black-and-white (hah) as "pro-abolition" or "anti-abolition." The "Ultras" were the "radical leftists" of the day who wanted immediate emancipation and full suffrage for blacks, and Lincoln avoided being associated with them; he thought they were too extreme and he disliked their moralizing. There was a full spectrum of less radical views (gradual ending of slavery, with compensation for slaveowners, with blacks maybe being allowed to settle in other territories, or maybe being sent back to Africa), but very few abolitionists were for full equality.

The South's objections were that the Republicans wanted to forbid expanding slavery to new territories - which, since the political divide then was between slave states and non-slave states, essentially meant the South would be increasingly outnumbered in Congress as the country expanded. The North also very much resented the fugitive slave laws - even Northerners who weren't abolitionists and didn't care much about blacks hated being forced to cooperate with Southern slave-catchers. (Keep in mind also that the South wanted to make abetting escaped slaves a capital crime, and many Southern states essentially criminalized being an abolitionist even before the war.)

Some of the claims that the Civil War "wasn't about slavery" originate in Lincoln's own arguments. During the war, he frequently had to call up more men, and was constantly trying to balance the concerns of the border states in particular, as well as trying to entice the South to cease rebelling. (Towards the end, he took a much more hardline stance towards reconstruction, but earlier in the war the South had many opportunities to concede under very generous terms.) The North believed they were fighting to suppress a rebellion and preserve the Union, and being told they were fighting "to free the slaves" didn't go over well with a lot of Northerners, so Lincoln couldn't allow it to be framed that way. (And, again, had the South surrendered earlier, they probably could have kept their slaves.) But the fact was that the war was about slavery, and it was caused by people who (1) wanted to keep their slaves, (2) wanted to expand slavery, (3) wanted to write it into the Constitution that slavery could never be abolished.

(especially Douglas, who didn’t tend to touch the right for new states to choose to allow slavery AT ALL)

Not quite true. Douglas advocated the doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty," which meant basically that new territories should be allowed to vote on whether or not slavery would be allowed there. The problem with this (and the reason why Popular Sovereignty was basically abandoned as a political platform) is that it not only tried to trump the Congressional prerogative to vote on the status of new territories, but it explicitly rolled back previous agreements such as the Missouri Compromise. (The result of this did not turn out well.)

Right thanks for the clarification on Douglas. I think what I was trying to show with that line was how unreasonable the southern position on the slavery in the territories question was. Lincoln's position was to ban it entirely, and Douglas wanted to keep the post-Kansas/Nebraska Act status quo (territories could decide on the slavery question by popular sovereignty). You could imagine a third position between Lincoln and Douglas that reverted to the Missouri Compromise. But no, the slaveholding politicians in the south had to have slavery in ALL the territories, regardless of the desires of the population. I can see how this was intolerable to even the non-abolitionists in the north, and it almost seems to me that the South knew so too (and thus was trying to start a war that they should have known they would have lost).

Anyway, thanks for the book rec and clarification. I'm working my way through Bruce Catton's History of the Civil War right now too.

Lincoln's position was to ban it entirely, and Douglas wanted to keep the post-Kansas/Nebraska Act status quo (territories could decide on the slavery question by popular sovereignty).

That's still not quite correct. Lincoln's position was not to ban slavery until the very end of the Civil War. During his debates with Douglas (both for the senate, and later during the presidential election), Lincoln was always very clear that while he disliked slavery, he was not seeking to abolish it (at least, not until the rest of the country had chosen to do that by democratic means).

But no, the slaveholding politicians in the south had to have slavery in ALL the territories, regardless of the desires of the population.

That's overstating the case a little. The South obviously preferred that new territories be slave territories, but generally they sought "parity" - as long as there were some slave territories to balance free territories, they didn't actually expect that every new territory would necessarily allow slavery. There might have been some Southerners who'd have liked to just dictate that all new territories would allow slavery by default, but mostly both sides spent the decades leading up to the Civil War trying to maintain some kind of balance (hence the multiple compromise bills, that of course ultimately failed).

and it almost seems to me that the South knew so too (and thus was trying to start a war that they should have known they would have lost).

The South increasingly moved towards the idea of secession - they had been threatening to secede for decades, whenever they didn't get their way. This was part of the reason why Lincoln and the Republicans (and Buchanan before him) didn't move more decisively when the South made secession noises when it became apparent Lincoln had won. It sounded very much like "Oh, this again." But it should also be said that the South did not actually expect to have to fight a total war against the North. When the war began, both sides thought it would be brief; the North expected the South to be quickly brought back into line after a few token battles and then some more compromises; the South expected the North to let them go once they demonstrated they were really serious.

As far as I understand it Lincoln wanted to ban the spread of slavery to the territories. From the Republican platform of the Chicago convention of 1860, clause 8:

That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no "person should be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law," it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.

So no, Lincoln didn't want to ban slavery, but he wanted to prevent its spread into territories that had not yet been granted statehood.

This is in contrast to the Southern Democratic Party that wanted slaveholders to be allowed to bring their property (i.e. slaves) into all the territories, effectively making slavery legal everywhere that was not already a state. Now, once these territories were granted statehood, the new states could ban slavery as before. From the Southern Democratic platform of 1860, clause 1:

That the Government of a Territory organized by an act of Congress, is provisional and temporary; and during its existence, all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation.

This clause was completely unacceptable to the North for obvious reasons, on top of recent rollbacks of previous compromises (the Kansas/Nebraska Act undid much of the Missouri compromise), hence the party split and Lincoln's victory in the election.


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