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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26667 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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I've been on a True Crime spree habit over the past few weeks. This happens every year or so. This year, among other material, I listened to the audiobook Hunt For The Green River Killer about the initial investigation into Gary Ridgway (I do recommend this book). Additionally, earlier this week, I watched American Nightmare on Netflix about the so-called "Gone Girl" case in Vallejo, California. Netflix streteches out what should be a 90 min doc into 3 almost hour long episodes. The directors also shoehorn in a MeToo theme towards the end and, with some selective editing, make a single female police look like the only pure police hero. They are swimming as hard as they can against the riptide of a poor business model.

In Hunt For the Green River Killer, you see just how complex a "Task Force" investigation at scale is. The various intertwined jurisdictions in and around Seattle threw everything they had at trying to catch (then unknown) Ridgway in the 1980s. The result was so many possible leads and suspects that they drowned in their own noise. At one point, the lab work backlog was over 50 years. At other points, they had at lest two suspects that, at the time, looked almost like sure things. The authors do a good job of then demonstrating how obvious it was that those suspects were in no way sure things. This shows the level of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning that can crop up in these kind of investigations even in otherwise experienced and talented cops.

The Ridgway people even brought in the legendary FBI behavior psych unit (of "Mindhunter" fame). Their composite profile of the killer was along the lines of "white male between 30-50, does a manual labor type job, drinks beer, smokes, may have prior military service or outdoors interests." Again, the authors point out that that profile narrows it down to .... 40% of all men living in Seattle! Interesting and also infuriating to see how far people can build a career off of what amounts to a Forer statement.

As a fun side note: Even back in the 1980s, you had pro-sexworker women's groups who demanded the police "do more!" with the investigation, complete with statements like "if this had happened to a bunch of high school cheerleaders and not prostitutes, we would already have an arrest!" It's turtles all the way down, and Witches v. Patriarchy all the way back up, I guess.

With American Nightmare, due to its recenecy, I won't give out any spoilers. Suffice it to say that the police actually try to employ Occam's Razor and go with a basic explanation first but reality intervenes and a fairly wild story unfolds instead. The initial investigating cops don't come out looking good - although I feel like the Netflix editing team was responsible for thumbing the scales hard in this case.

The question I find myself asking in regards to both is; just how well equipped is American law enforcement (outside of the FBI) for complex investigations without a pretty obvious narrative with a lot of obvious circumstantial pointers? An example of what I mean here is; when a drug murder happens, any decent police in the area will know "this was a drug murder. the victim was a known dealer." A slightly above average police probably has some awareness of the recent conflicts between the locals gangs and can therefore say, at least, "It was probably this crew that knocked this guy off, now I just have to try to figure out who exactly did it."

With the "whodunnits" of serial killer victims and frankly just bizarre circumstances of cases like that of American Nightmare, do cops have a playbook / infrastructure / support to actually perform a full investigation effectively? The simple narrative (which Netflix eagerly jumps to without second thought) is that "Cops are often stupid / lazy / racist / sexist / corrupt and so they don't solve cases." I don't buy this for a whole host of reasons. You can debtate me on that, but I'd prefer we stay focused on the question of "are police departments setup to handle complex investigations?" The Ridgway investigation is particularly illuminating, I think; a bunch of well intentioned and talented cops eventually buried themselves in a volume of work that was utterly unmanagable. They really did pull out all of the stops and, in so doing, pretty much led themselves back to square one where their only hope was catching Ridgway in the act. (What ended up actually leading to the arrest was a 20 year wait and the advent of DNA technology, which is just as much of a magical solution)

The higher level of analysis, however, is; should police departments be setup for this? I'd actually argue they should not. Complex investigations are rare. American Nightmare gets a netflix special and Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, and Jeffrey Dahmer get hundreds of books, documentaries, and podcast about them because they are so rare and bizarre. The "murders that matter" to use a slightly indelicate phrase are those that are part of a larger anti-social pattern; drugs, gang violence, preventable domestic violence, etc. I'd much rather have a PD that is doing the leg work day in and day out to know about the goings on in bad neigborhoods so that once a murder does occur, they can jail the offender swiftly and, hopefully, interrupt a retaliatory cycle.

I have only the deepest sympathy for the victims of the "one in a million" crimes of serial killers etc. But I must admit that, at a societal level, these aren't things we can really systemically remedy (same goes for a lot of the more sensational gun violence incidients. See: Las Vegas). What we can do at a systemic level is police and enforce known areas of persistent anti-social behavior aggressively.

So, again, two primary lines of questioning:

  • Can police departments launch effective complex investigations, or are they at a structural / organizational disadvantage here?
  • Should they focus resources on the above capability beyond a small, dedicated "Major Crimes" unit (or some such) or, ought they double or triple down on basic patrol, fast response, and community intel work?

The Ridgway people even brought in the legendary FBI behavior psych unit (of "Mindhunter" fame). Their composite profile of the killer was along the lines of "white male between 30-50, does a manual labor type job, drinks beer, smokes, may have prior military service or outdoors interests." Again, the authors point out that that profile narrows it down to .... 40% of all men living in Seattle! Interesting and also infuriating to see how far people can build a career off of what amounts to a Forer statement.

I don't know much about this case but I assume the FBI had nothing else tangible to evaluate besides the bodies that were found?

They didn't even worry about the bodies.

The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit reviews the case files to establish patterns and idiosyncrasies in the the actions carried out. They do victim profiling, some demographic analysis, and comparisons with other, similar crimes. Their output product is a "psychological profile" of a suspect.

This is compelling because it plays to the trope of "getting inside the mind of a killer" and because it's more or less the backbone for a lot of serial killer related fiction (the Hannibal Lecter canon is a prime example).

The downside is that it might all kind of be bullshit. As my first post outlined, a lot of the time, the profile feels specific because it's long and includes interesting details. If you zoom out a little, however, your realize that the profiles are actually incredibly broad and mostly representative of the demographics of the locality.

Here's a fun example:

"He's probably young. 20-30 at the most. Takes physical fitness very seriously and is also generally highly disciplined. He has a set daily routine and trains with weapons multiple times per week. While able to control himself at work, he'll sometimes let loose on the weekends and drink heavily and/or engage in other risky activities. He can function in a group but is mostly a loner."

Great! But the body was found near a military base. You have just described 80% of the males on the military base. You are not helping.

The vast majority of homicides are straightforward to solve: the motive, the weapon or even the perp himself are obvious or at least limited to a manageable subset of all possibilities.

Let's say you have a well-dressed man with no wallet or phone found shot in a dark alley. It's obviously a mugging gone wrong or a disagreement over purchasing some vice. You round up the usual suspects, they all have alibis. Maybe some traveling crew? You check all out-of-state plates seen last week in the neighborhood, all are boring civilians.

Okay, stage 2. Maybe it's a hit made to look like a mugging gone wrong? Again, you check the usual possibilities: infidelity, business troubles, money troubles at home. Nothing: the victim was a midlevel manager in charge of a boring department, kids are too young to plot against him, no signs of being gay or having a mistress.

You've hit stage 3: psycho killers. While muggings gone wrong are so common that you have a solid solution template, the template for catching psycho killers is very limited: get all other unsolved homicides and start looking for something in common. Any other similar victims? Similar weapons? Similar circumstances? If there's a match, go through every single detail again and try to find a connection.

Sometimes it's something actionable: you have three similar homicides, you trace the bus routes at each location and find out that there's a bus stop you can reach all three locations from (true crime story from the 90s!). Sometimes it's something obvious and not very useful.

Homicides you solve at stage 1 are cookie-cutter, the biggest challenge is doing the paperwork right. Homicides you solve at stage 2 are "interesting". Homicides you (usually don't) solve at stage 3 are fucking frustrating. However, they are a tiny minority of all cases. It's better to centralize this capacity as much as possible (now matter how heart-rending violated and butchered schoolgirls can be) and concentrate on stage 0: minimizing the number of stage 1 homicides that occur.

Can police departments launch effective complex investigations, or are they at a structural / organizational disadvantage here?

It varies, a lot, even within a single jurisdiction. I've seen indictments where police clearly spent hundreds of manhours chasing down every possible lead, and others where a slam-dunk case gets dropped cause no one could be arsed to handle all the court forms. Baltimore's probably (hopefully?) the most extreme example, where proximity to DC has gotten the police department a remarkable breadth of camera systems, license plate scanners, open-source intel analysts, and investigatory resources, and even for murders and just for those where the investigation has been publicly disclosed, there's a wide disparity that's clearly unrelated to the strength of the initial leads.

There's a reputation for 'missing white girl' syndrome to drive that, and it's not wrong, but elderly couples or young kids of any race can get sizable attention and interest, and even the prototypical gang banger on gang banger violence can (rarely) if there's something about the incident that drives political or local interest. There's a reputation for corruption driving a lot of that, it's it's not wrong. Baltimore's GTTF scandal was probably known by 10%+ of the force, which is appalling when they were shaking down civilians, and shocking when you remember that they were selling guns to people shooting at other cops.

((Sometimes "who" matters in a different way: I've seen grand theft on small businesses that were probably destined for the 'when we get to it' pile, except the business coordinated with other similar small businesses to demonstrate an interstate pattern with a clear direction and unique identifying characters, and while that 'only' gets the equivalent of a national wanted poster, it gets a lot of highway patrols looking for an easy to way make a big arrest.))

On the flip side, there's a problem with the world where you don't. It's very easy to come up with a plan where there's no witnesses and any physical evidence is destroyed! You end up with massive selection pressures toward the most dangerous criminal behaviors.

It's definitely and definitionally not possible to provide above-average effort for every case; there's far too much uncertainty to triage cases in a QALY-like manner; it's definitely possible to triage cases at all and find deep investigation still valuable.

Should they focus resources on the above capability beyond a small, dedicated "Major Crimes" unit (or some such) or, ought they double or triple down on basic patrol, fast response, and community intel work?

I've mixed feelings.

How effective community-oriented or 'broken windows' theory of policing is controversial, and not just for the normal crimonology versus social justice reasons: even the best evidence in favor has been hard to pull apart from normal economic impacts. But the extent that dangerous criminals routinely grow into violent crime from, act on, and rely on casual disruptive law-breaking make Pealian community-oriented boots-on-roads policing very hard to overlook, and it's just not compatible with the All Available Effort approach.

But in turn the overwhelming majority of successful boots-on-roads efforts come in communities with unsophisticated and disorganized criminals, in cultures not predisposed to escalatory violence. They seldom, if ever, can point to clear successes -- even short of actually reducing broad strokes of crime, even just in getting inroads with the civilian populace -- in low-trust societies.

I think, though, this ultimately missed the deeper question: "can they choose"?

A bloodless focus on the easiest-to-solve crimes will near-unavoidably leave cops focusing on trivial but simple-to-prove laws: it's what Sam Francis wanted to be talking about for anarchotyranny. In extreme cases, the knowledge that police will happily pass out tickets or throw someone in jail for selling lossies, but won't handle a serious theft or assault unless the offender is caught redhanded, is strong motivation to never include or cooperate with police at all. Hyperprioritization of serious crime leads to the mirror problem, where those massive investments chasing hard-to-solve crimes end up wasted not just because the crimes are hard, but because the police quickly looses the community relations, familiarity with the domain, and trial experience necessary to bring a case to conviction.

This is a classic Motte comment. Demonstrates the complexity and interdependencies of a problem, relative tradeoffs, real world likely impacts and outcomes, and doesn't use any cliche argumentation, sloganeering, etc.

So, of course, my only response is: Defund The Police because Blue Lives Matter.

While not a direct response to any of your points, Peel's Principles of Policing (yay for alliteration) seem worth reiterating for the sake of discussion.

  • To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
  • To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
  • To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
  • To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
  • To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
  • To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
  • To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
  • To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
  • To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

More to your point though, my impression is that the vast majority of criminal activity falls into one or both of the following categories. Criminal on criminal (eg gangs fighting over territory), or known trouble-makers making trouble. I think that you're quite right to call out the availability bias, as i suspect that the above are unlikely to earn attention or "clicks" because they are common.

As for clearance rates, I would expect that as police resources contract they would focus more on the stable/wealthy nieghborhoods because thats where thier efforts are most visible and by extension where they can get the most perceived "bang for buck". After all, who cares about some gang-banger getting shot, or at least so (i suspect) the reasoning goes.

Fascinating to see how contemporary evolutions of both "police-work" and the duties and responsibilities of citizenship have evolved to make some of these clearly obsolete

To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws,

What modern concept of "public favor" is distinguishable from "public opinion," let alone the perceived justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws? What constituency is there for law qua law, independent from the results, or "perceived justice" of the ultimate outcome? In a way, we're all utilitarians now. Kto kago is truly the order of the day.

To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

What private citizen really thinks that stopping people who drive too fast, park in the wrong place, coralling mobs, preventing retail crimes, and investigating serious crimes are all "duties incumbent on every citizen?" Moreover, would we even tolerate a private citizen attempting to undertake any of these tasks?

And those are only the two that seem most egregious to me.

Kto kago is truly the order of the day.

Despite how it’s written in Cyrillic, it’s actually pronounced “Kto kavo” in modern Russian

For the Gone Girl of Vallejo case, I don't think the problem is that the Police Departmnet didn't have the resources to figure out what was going on. The problem is that they went out of their way to be assholes to potential victims. Putting Aaron Quinn's phone on Airplane mode when he was expecting to receive a call from a potential kidnapper was something that doesn't come down to insufficient resources. It was just plain idiocy.

Jimmy Akin did an episode on the case and he also came to the conclusion that the police were especially incompetent in this case.

That said, I agree in principle that the police should only be equipped to handle 95% of the cases in their jurisdiction, and in the 5% that are more complicated there should be some sort of national team that can deploy when needed with all the resources and skills to solve the weird problems.

The higher level of analysis, however, is; should police departments be setup for this? I'd actually argue they should not.

I think about this sketch a lot.

As highlighted by Freddie deBoer, there's so much inconsistency in the standard progressive narrative about what the police are for and what they should do. Cops don't do enough to protect black people, but it's also bad that police allocate disproportionate amount of resources to high-crime (i.e. black and Hispanic) neighbourhoods. Cops don't do enough to protect female victims of crime. Therefore we should defund the police while criticising the police for not doing enough with their already limited budgets.

So much of the debate seems stymied by the availability heuristic. Consumers of true crime content focus on fascinating cases which happened to relatable victims: in other words, bizarre unsolved murders in which the victim was an (A)WF(L)*. Consumers of this content are then bound to come away with the misconception that it's exceedingly common for a man to murder a strange woman and get away with it, which is wrong in almost every way: the overwhelming majority of murder victims are men, most murder victims are killed by someone known to them (although admittedly the American murder clearance rate has plummeted in recent decades, although I suspect that most of the unsolved murders in recent decades were gang violence rather than Ted Bundy copycats). True crime consumers then apply this misconception to their expectations for a functional police force, clamouring for police to Do More to solve murder cases with female victims (but without increasing police budgets in any way, of course).

And sure, maybe if we raised police budgets by 10% every year we might improve the marginal return on murder clearance, solving that 1% of murder cases every year which don't neatly fall into a) gang violence b) domestic violence or c) drunken bar fight. Whereupon the narrative will shift on a dime: "$State spent $10 million sending this Black man with learning disabilities and an underprivileged upbringing who raped and murdered three women to the electric chair! Imagine if that money had been spent on education so that children from similar backgrounds don't follow him down that path." There's no winning.

I think I agree with you that I'm satisfied with a police force that can solve most of the banal murders in a timely fashion, accepting that a small number of really weird cases will go unsolved every year as the price of a free society. I'm not persuaded that increasing police budgets by 10% to catch these weird cases passes a cost-benefit analysis, much like it would be a misallocation of resources to invest millions trying to find a treatment for a disease which only kills 100 people a year.

*"Affluent" and "liberal" are preferred but optional.

Consumers of true crime content focus on fascinating cases which happened to relatable victims: in other words, bizarre unsolved murders in which the victim was an (A)WF(L)*

The entire industry seems to focus on like the same 50-odd cases, though, since those are the ones that fit the heuristics of interest

I think you’re on to something. Blindly increasing the budget won’t work though. To me this comes down to a very simple question of what would give maximum results — what would lower the crime rate the fastest (obviously within the bounds of the law and with respect to civil rights). It seems to me that were I a police chief, I’d focus on getting more best cops, getting them trained to handle the situations that they’re more likely to actually see, and putting them on the beat. The reason being that the response time decreasing would likely both clear the crimes actually being committed, but also serve as a deterrent. If you know that you have 3-5 minutes before the cops show up, you might be deterred from robbery. It’s probably going to be tough to rob a place and get away within that timeframe. And having more cops driving around would also deter crime simply because you are more likely to get caught than if there are no cops around.

The other thing I would do has to do with criminal laws. I want a consistent and sure punishment for the crime. If you use a gun in a crime, you will go to prison for three years. No I don’t care about your background. No I don’t care that you’re poor. You pulled out a gun you go to jail. Obviously if you fire the gun the time goes up, and would double or more if you kill somebody. And this again should deter crime, because now not only are you getting caught, but you’re ruining your life for the stuff you’ve decided to rob from a cash register.

Doing those things: showing up quickly, having a show of force on the beat, and having a sure and known punishment for every crime that actually sticks should lower crime rates by quite a bit.

My understanding as an outsider aligns with yours. The vast majority of murders are either really easy to solve ("he was probably shot by that guy who stole his girl who he's been beefing with for the last three months") or almost impossible to solve ("he could have been shot be any one of 100 gang bangers in the neighborhood"). The genuine who-dun-its are more fun and interesting, but far rarer, and there's probably no systematic way to solve them. At best, you can throw some smart people at these cases and maybe they'll be lucky enough to identify and pursue the right thread. But ultimately, these cases have a terrible cost-to-success ratio for police forces and probably shouldn't be prioritized as a high-level objective. Maybe there's room for private investigators here?

EDIT - Thinking more about it, it makes sense for the FBI to have a system in place for dealing with complex, especially dangerous criminals, like serial killers or Ted Kaczynski types. From a law-and-order perspective, it's probably worth it to spend a lot of money and resources to take these guys out because they set bad precedents and spread social contagions.

Do most serial killers spread social contagions, though? Obviously guys like the Unabomber who've actually communicated with the media are one thing, but it feels like a lot of serial killers targeting the margins of society will never get any meaningful engagement whilst conducting their business. It's only after their investigation, capture and public trials that the real visibility becomes a thing.

I don't know about "most" serial killers, but IIRC, a lot of the most high-profile ones were big in the 1970s and early 80s, and then serial killing went into decline. Like school shootings, it seemed to be partially driven by social contagion.

From my true crime reading, the (sort of) consensus is that

  1. There were probably just as many Serial Killers before the 1970s and 80s, but due to policing practices they weren't identified as serial killers. In fact, if their victims were largely prostitutes or other edge-of-society types, its likely the cops launched no investigation whatsoever.

  2. Starting in the 1990s, DNA evidence made it somewhat actually easier to catch bad guys, but perceptively WAY easier. Phrased differently, people started to think they were leaving testable amounts of DNA all over the place and that cops could just zap it with a magic DNA laser and get an immediate location on a 'perp'. This may have acted as an effective enough disincentive for would-be killers.

  3. The awareness of the existence of serial killers and general lower society wide trust made people (especially younger women) generally more aware of surroundings and personal safety.

  4. When smartphones arrive on scene, not only is everyone always carrying around their own personal recording studio and security camera, they're also carrying around perfect evidence of their social network. If someone kills you today, there's a good chance they're in the top 10 of your most recent text messages.

It comes down to whether they want the attention; I would be surprised if a smart one could not reliably get visibility by putting culture war bait for the media.

If a killer left a note or sent letters to the media saying he was doing it "for President Trump", do you really think the media would be able to contain themselves from making it a national issue? And the right's reaction when there's hints of a killer being trans or an illegal gives little doubt that they'd be just as impossible to contain if they were in a position of power in the media.

Here's something I've always found to be interesting. I think there's a latent political prior model going on that often interferes with political discussion. Namely: What motivates the people in Congress, individually?

Here's what I feel like is a fairly exhaustive list:

  • genuine desire to do the right thing, ethics, or patriotism
  • desire for help some specific people (or people more broadly)
  • mad enough at some specific current thing they decided to run for office
  • well-intentioned but fell victim to their own ideological kool-aid or echo chamber
  • true believer in some strong broad ideological cause
  • in it just for personal wealth
  • pure ambition and vanity of being important
  • just think they could do a better job than the last bloke
  • people you know, or family, pushed you into running and you won
  • wanted to specifically change some law for corrupt purpose
  • you wanted to specifically represent some demographic or other group
  • you are addicted to the feeling of power
  • wanted to avoid some personal or criminal controversy
  • the office is a stepping-stone to some other career or goal
  • backed by a foreign power
  • advancing a specific special interest
  • part of larger group with a secret agenda
  • desire to oppress some other group, political or otherwise

Obviously some of these overlap or could both be true. A few approaches (rank them or something?) but I feel maybe the best is simply to answer the question, "What percentage of people currently in Congress (House and Senate) ran for Congress (most recent election) for this as one of the principal reasons?" Here's my take:

  • Do the right thing: 75%
  • Help people: 60%
  • Mad at a specific: 15%
  • Ideological capture: 25%
  • Ideological purist: 10%
  • Personal gain: 15%
  • Ambition or pride: 35%
  • Better than the last: 5%
  • Pushed into it: 5%
  • Specific corrupt change: 5%
  • Representation: 10%
  • Power addict: 10%
  • Avoiding or distracting: 1%
  • Stepping-stone: 10%
  • Foreign agent: 1%
  • Special interest: 10%
  • Secret agenda: ~0%
  • Desire to oppress: 1%

Of course a lot of these can overlap a bit, but that's fine. I'm talking about major reasons to run for office in any given election. (PS: should I have split help people into generally vs some specific group?)

Do you think these are about right? Too charitable? Too cynical? I bring this up because I was recently talking to a friend who his mental model had pegged something like 60% of people in Congress as in it for the money and power. Another friend thinks that 70% are pure partisans (ideological purists). Another thinks it's mostly special interests and corporations. You can see how these can subtly skew opinions about almost any given topic.

Of course, to me, I'm correct of course :)

No but actually, if we think about the process many go to first get involved in politics, there's only a few common paths. There's being an activist of some sort and then you (or supported by an org) run as a logical next step. There's being fed up of some specific status quo and starting to run for something on a local level and then you end up working your way up. There's being wealthy and/or having connections (famous sometimes) and jumping in to something directly. There's being a pure egomaniac and running just for that. And then there's some group of people where you're minding your own business and you get recruited into it. And that's actually most paths into politics. Seems to me that there are better ways to make money, and better ways to spend your time, so I think most people run because they actually want to. Congresspeople aren't aliens, they have similar motivations to you and I, at least I think. How many people that you've talked to who have idly talked about what they would do if they were in charge, have given a corrupt reason to do so?

I'd like to add another option

  • Wanted to do the right thing, but doing the right thing is hard (building a better mousetrap, except it's a billion/trillion dollar a machine) and there are structural impediments (legitimate & illegitimate) and entrenched interests. Over time, the desire to do the right thing sublimates into doing what's possible. That in turn includes maintaining allies against opposition.

My experience is with Westminster in the UK but having now moved to the US my interactions with politicians here seems to indicate they aren't any different.

I think you are vastly underestimating personal ambition and desire for power. My experience directly with hundreds of those national level politicians is that those are the top motivations for most of them. Some ideological purists but they tend to get ground down over time. Doing the right thing and helping people are what politicians say, but when you are in a room with them hashing out election strategies their revealed preferences show a different side. Maybe they started out that way but by the time you get to national level, your ambitious, power hungry types have outcompeted the rest.

I've worked with hundreds of MPs and there were at best a handful I would call good people who were motivated by helping people or doing the right thing.

If my years in politics have taught me anything it is whatever level of cynicism you have towards politicians it is probably nowhere near enough. Desire for money may be there, but its less than ambition and power because politicians don't get paid huge amounts in general. Though you can leverage it afterwards if you are successful.

No its ambition and power. Top 2, by a lot. If you assume any given national level politician is a borderline narcissist with nuclear levels of ambition, who has to filter that through pretending to be committed to an ideology and to want to do good, then it explains all the various undercurrents in the halls of power.

Politicians are sharks with good PR. That's why they both have big smiles to show off.

You’ve gotten it a little confused. You’re completely correct that politicians are largely motivated by power accumulation, but that isn’t the surprising thing. That a politician should want to achieve power should be no less surprising than that a corporate climber should want to be CEO or that a star athlete should want to win gold. The surprising thing is that most of these people are essentially ideologically neutral or ambivalent. At most, largely by osmosis, they have absorbed some version of the general views of their class and peer circle. What is surprising is that it’s power without real purpose.

Triessentialism would not be surprised that people with an especial intuition of power (its acquisition, maintenance, threats of use used as leverage, etc.) would be ideologically uncommitted.

Assume three basic mindsets of people in this world: people with intuition of power, of logic and reason, or of emotional motivations. I, as a person with intuition of logic (hereafter “a Thinker”), am unfamiliar with power except in its media (nonfiction and fiction) portrayals, and I had to build my own philosophy from scratch for ten years to begin to understand how Feelers use emotions to shape their world.

Movers are intuitive in matters of power, whether they’ve studied and practiced car repair or geopolitics, but without study find logic and emotion to be wastes of time and Thinkers and Feelers mysterious antagonists with hidden sources of power.

I am likely to agree with a Mover if he suggests a course of action. It’s no surprise to me that a Mover would find the most “powerful” Thinkers and Feelers to inform him of what his politics should be; what his purpose should be.

Why should that be surprising? I've worked with politicians nearly my whole working life. That isn't a surprise at all to me.

Because at least I would expect that people interested in politics, even if they primarily sought power for its own sake, had a more-than-average passing interest in ideology. This is because people with a strong interest in ideology who also like power are probably more likely to go into politics than people with a weak interest in ideology who like power (who might go into finance or something else where money is more readily available).

They may have an interest in ideology, but that isn't the same thing as having a firm one yourself. But power and money are different. Money to an extent can buy power, but most people in politics want direct power and influence. Not indirect. Sure they won't turn down extra money, but that isn't the drive.

Ambitious and money hungry you go into the City (well in the UK at least). Ambitious and power hungry, you go to Westminster.

Some few ideologues do make it, and fewer principled ones but it's a shark tank otherwise. And the last 10 years show it, with various sharks eating each other to achieve their own ambitions.

The issue is the way we’ve set up the system. The absurd amounts of money required to win and the connections required to gain access to enough funding to win things like large city offices, statewide offices, and obviously Congress itself. The activist path you mentioned isn’t exactly “I helped in a soup kitchen.” Most that I’m aware of came to prominence in what I call the “professional protest” charities. Advocates for popular causes among the elite and they’re generally high up in those organizations. The professional paths that lead to candidacy are generally the kind that run through getting to know movers and shakers. Working a campaign, professional advocacy, being a lawyer or other elite professional, one does not simply run for office above dog catcher or local school board.

So of course this tends to weed out the altruist fairly quickly. An altruist wants to actually help people, so his charity work would be less about “professional protest organizations” than building or fixing things, feeding hungry people, educating kids, and so on. The kind of work that gets things done other than legislation. But that sort of charity is highly unlikely to get you into the social network that allows you to be a viable candidate for serious leadership roles. You also have to spend a lot of time being vetted by those elites for acceptance both ideologically and socially. You have to start early enough to have introductions to local [party of choice] leaders, and thus be fairly well off before you start. This is why most of our current political leaders are lawyers and mostly from elite schools.

All of this is basically like the old Roman system. Find Patrons, do high level high visibility things that powerful people like. Then once you’ve been accepted as one of them, you can help out on high visibility campaigns and eventually get to run for office yourself. None of which actually solve real world problems, and in fact are a pretty strong headwind against people who want to work on real world problems. If you want to fix infrastructure, get into construction and fix potholes. But it’s not glamorous enough to be the kind of thing that makes you a potential candidate for elected office.

Of course because of this, I think it would be highly unusual for someone to run and win because he wants to fix things in the way you and I would think about it. The system effectively weeds those people out quickly, especially if you’re talking about the federal government. They have to care about the opinions of their sponsors, the opinions of the people attending very expensive dinners, and the opinions of the tastemakers in the media. None of whom care about blue-collar Americans or potholes on main street.

"Do the right thing" is a little too abstract.

I think "personal gain" or "ambition or pride" account for a lot of it, but in a nicer way than you're probably thinking.

People get into a position where running for office makes sense for them. They were involved in politics at a young age, they helped out on some campaigns or worked on the hill, then they find themselves living in an open seat while being sick of their jobs.

The other one is people who became political staffers because they were interested in politics, only to discover that the pay is terrible. So they wait for a redistricting and move into a winnable district without a clear incumbent.

There are people who want to be recognized a pillars of their community, and running for office is a way to get that recognition.

I'm not sure about the ratios myself, but it's for that sort of reason I want to increase Congressional salaries. No one is in Congress for the money, pretty much everyone competent enough to be a federal politician could be making more money in some other job. To some degree that's inevitable- the public sector will never match the sort of spending in the private sector, nor should it. But if we want very competent people to be leaders, we should at least try to pay them half of what they'd get in the private sector instead of a quarter. And I think if being a Congress member was a better job to have, people would be less willing to risk that career by being corrupt.

https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/congressional-pay?r=62ico

Ambition or pride has to be close to 100%. Not quite literally 100, but high nineties. Even if people have other motivations as well, choosing to be the candidate yourself takes a lot of ego.

Anecdotally, politicians in my experience tend to be extremely vain.

Yeah I struggled with that one. I think that's one question where my phrasing isn't very helpful. Like, are candidates very prideful and ambitious? Obviously yes. But does it make sense to ask whether candidates run on pride or ambition as a major, primary factor, or is it just background or a catalyst for other reasons? I sorta imagined the question getting at the former, but maybe it's not a useful or informative question to ask (what does running on ambition alone even mean? I guess there's sort of 100% overlap with the other categories, perhaps)

One interesting distinction I've heard is "being ambitious" vs. "having an ambition".

A person who is being ambitious might do well in school, put together a good college application, do well in college, put together a good job application, do well at their job, put together a good promotion application, etc. then end up as a multimillionaire CEO/partner/senator/other-0.01%er. They follow the predefined "ambitious" path, reach elite status, and kind of just do normal stuff.

A person who has an ambition starts with an audacious goal (develop a martian colony, change society on a constitutionally-relevant level, break an Olympic record, etc), organizes their life to achieve that goal, and blasts past obstacles that would stop any reasonable person.

Under that framing, a politician who is running on ambition alone ("being ambitious") would be a person who follows the straight line to power/money/status and ends up in government.

This is a commonly overlooked distinction, and good on you for remembering it. That conceptual space of [Having an Ambition] is often what overlaps with [Ideology], as the nature of having a goal to work towards often depends on not only the interests behind the person, but the entire framework that leads them to the conclusion that the objective is worth focusing on above more 'reasonable' things, which is also what gets them critical enablers / associates who empower this. This [Ideology] could be religious or secular, but it serves as a framework for consolidating the [Having an Ambition], as well as a legitimization and cooperation-enabling framework to enable action.

Economics is split into two very different fields. Macroeconomics is the art of economic forecasting. Microeconomics is the study of incentives. In microeconomics, politicians are modelled as maximizing votes in the next election, to the best of their ability.

Winning the election by 1% invites challengers next election. Winning the election by 20% tells the other party that their time and money are probably better spent elsewhere, so you run against a penniless, unsupported sacrificial lamb and cruise to reelection without having to dip too deeply into your war chest.

Right, it's probably more of a balance combining what they actually want to happen with seeking votes.

So in that model, an incumbent presumably starts to compromise any pre-existing moral principles (because of the incentive of winning) as long as the risk-weighted actions provide a net gain in votes. What about why people run the first time? Why some try to jump from House to Senate? A simple microeconomic model doesn't address these initial conditions, nor does it satisfactorily explain to what extent the incentive of winning distorts principles over time.

What motivates the people in Congress, individually?

Envelopes stuffed with cash, and bars of gold.

This led to a debate between me and the friend about if he was caught, and it's just the tip of the iceberg, or he was caught because the police normally catch this kind of thing. You can see how those schemas are very different, haha.

He was a first-generation college student of cuban immigrant parents who became a lawyer and while still in law school I believe he was an aide to a mayor. It looks like he then spent a decade or two in shady and backstabbing New Jersey local politics (known for being one of the most corrupt states to begin with, I would say). He definitely did some backstabbing himself. The history is a little wild. Why he didn't just go on to be a lawyer is hard to know -- maybe he got pulled into a cycle of power and retribution and ambition? The district got a lot of attention as a swing district. After about 20 years in local and then state politics, he ran for the House and then the Senate.

It seems to me this isn't a very typical political upbringing, and he was further corrupted by power while in office. So I don't know if this case moves the needle of "how much corruption is there" very much for me.

He was caught because he wasn't criminally sophisticated enough to know that the best way to receive bribes is underpriced investment opportunities.

Gold bars and envelopes of cash are seen as gauche.

Why he didn't just go on to be a lawyer is hard to know

It's hard to make money as a lawyer with a private practice. He built up his early career connections in politics instead of getting into the good graces of the local legal community, so he was basically shut out from the high paying jobs.

underpriced investment opportunities

Hillary Clinton is an amazing cattle futures trader. Or her financiers found a (not so) sneaky way to transfer cash to her.

Ehh the best way is high five figure speaking fees. Do twenty speaking engagements a year. Do that for 15 years. Couple that with underpriced investments and you are pretty rich.

Only the top politicians get access to the high paying speaker opportunities. Even your average representative isn’t being paid $5,000 for a 20 minute speech, let alone $500k to show up to a conference.

Depends on what committee you get on, etc.

So I don't know if this case moves the needle of "how much corruption is there" very much for me.

Yes, of course, your stuck prior is in your username.

Haha, it's definitely not always true. But my general political background view is that working within the system works a lot of the time, with enough time. I think it's pretty evidence-supported by US history. I was trying to come up with a new nick for the new forum to disallow cross-looking, I knew a prolific redditor with a similar and memorable nickname, and I was at the time of the opinion that signifying prior inclinations in a username would be helpful information on the forum. So it was a deliberate decision, not an indication that I'm some sort of status-quo warrior. As I noted, there's a specific story of Menendez' political upbringing and it's far from being some "regular senator we thought was a saint turns out to be corrupt" -- a major needle-mover if true -- it ended up being "senator from corrupt state with sketchy personal history ends up being corrupt" which... just isn't all that surprising?

Please refrain from wasting space with a low-effort personal attack (the very definition of rule-breaking, I might add) if you don't have anything to contribute. Would you care to outline what your percentages might be, or at least of a particular category? Part of the point is to get a read on people's priors and see if I'm wildly divergent (or if they are).

"regular senator we thought was a saint turns out to be corrupt"

Which senator do you have in mind? I think perhaps we’d have a better understanding of why you perceive the system the way you do if we had some specific examples of individuals who you believe are in it for wholly altruistic reasons.

For my part, there is not a single individual over the last ~fifty years that I could name. Once upon a time, in my days as a member of the Fraternal Order of Bernard - often called Bernard Brothers for short - I would have said Bernie Sanders for sure. (I also sang the praises of Barbara Boxer, attempting multiple times to convince my cynical politician-hating mother that Boxer was the genuine article, a real paragon of moral virtue, committed to the betterment of her voters and of mankind as a whole.)

Of course, this is when I, like most millennials, believed that big business was uniformly conservative. That leftist politicians couldn’t possibly be taking big money from shady mega-donors and Fortune 500 companies, because why would those entities donate to the party dedicated to curbing their power and influence? And this almost seemed a teeny tiny bit true at the time!

Of course, only a decade later we live in an era where nearly every important corporation not only donates to progressive politicians and causes, but also makes a huge public deal out of doing so. (And that’s to say nothing of slightly more under-the-radar groups like the Open Society Foundation, and of investment firms like BlackRock who literally cut off companies’ access to funding if they fail to sufficiently debase themselves to progressive activism.) So there is basically no reason to believe that Democrat politicians are receiving less money from corrupt companies and cynical mega-donors than their Republican counterparts are; in fact, the dynamic may in fact be the opposite.

Given the obscene sums of money sloshing around in DC, why do you believe that even a person who started their political career with the purest of intentions would be able to withstand the onslaught of venal incentives that are immediately thrust at any politician who gets anywhere close to that level of power and influence?

More of Audrey Hale's Manifesto has been leaked

Audrey Hale, if you don't remember, was a nutjob who shot up a private school, and was also trans. Her manifesto was suppressed, although pieces of it got leaked to Louder with Crowder and confirmed, yep, this nutjob was actually trans. This has been a minor, recurring culture war item. Well, more of it got leaked to the media(https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13505849/Nashville-school-shooter-Audrey-Hale-trans-kill-puberty-blockers.html):

The Tennessee Star obtained some four dozen pages of Hale's writings that shed light on her female-to-male transition and why she shot and killed six people at the elementary school in March 2023

Obviously this is an interesting story for the media to cover. I'm not sure we've learnt anything new, other than further confirmation that she was indeed crazy. The main culture war angle seems to be that, yes, she was angry at conservative Christians(it was an orthodox Presbyterian school), and also this:

But both city police and the FBI later said the material shouldn't be released because it could hurt the investigations.

There doesn't appear to be any explanation behind that. Some conservative commentators have opined that the decision to suppress the manifesto was taken to try to paint trans in a better light; I'm not sure I buy that, but today's releases are, well, definitely evidence supporting that interpretation.

There's surely culture war hay to be made out of the contents of the manifesto; it's certainly something to cite for the 'trans is really just a mental illness' crowd, and she explicitly blames lack of affirmation for her lashing out.

It's a strange side effect that whether or not the shooter is killed impacts whether or not their writings are kept private.

If she was alive this material would be discoverable and likely submitted as evidence in the eventual case against her.

I have a personal policy of not engaging deeply with the writings of individual loons whose main claim to public attention is some atrocity they committed. I typically don't even read manifestos of random people who manage to not shoot up elementary schools, so why would I give preference to the ones who don't even clear that very low bar of basic human decency?

That being said, I can totally see the cops deciding to hold back the manifesto based on the content, in a way which they might not have done if the perp was a right wing loon instead.

For CW purposes, I think both sides would spin it.

Either you have the young woman caught in the dangerous culturally transmitted delusion that gender is malleable which set her on a path which eventually saw her kill kids (bonus points if she was on testosterone at the time of the crime).

Or you have the trans-man who was denied essential medical interventions for religious/ideological reasons while he was a minor, which eventually lead him to snap in a most unfortunate way.

The purpose is not to engage with the arguments in the manifesto, but to understand the circumstances behind the shooting. If a shooter is motivated by politics, that's important to know, especially if the shooting is used by politicians and activists to promote something that the actual politics of the shooter might disprove.

It seems like common sense to suppress the manifesto. Same reason you don’t publicize suicides. These things all have a huge amount of social contagion.

I agree there is nothing where releasing it interferes with the investigation, but that is a good reason to declare as the reason not to release. She was a crazy person who did crazy person things. It was unlikely she had co-conspirators.

It seems like common sense to suppress the manifesto. Same reason you don’t publicize suicides. These things all have a huge amount of social contagion.

This is one of those things that seems like a good principle but when not applied evenly is a weapon. If the Christchurch shooter's manifesto was suppressible do you think it would be suppressed?

Wasn't it heavily suppressed to the point of people being prosecuted for not deleting it fast enough when totally different people posted it to a website they moderated?
The difference is in the media coverage using the suppressed manifesto as an excuse to hurt their political enemies.

Sure. In New Zealand. In America a PDF of the entire thing was on the front page of Drudge Report for a full week and various mainstream outlets were discussing it for months.

I meant to add that point. So I agree. Everything is shown in a partisan politics mode now.

If someone that can be called right does something bad it’s used to bludgeon the right. If the left does bad it’s like peaceful protest or something and covered up.

A better would would not publicize these things.

The police should tell us the motivations of terroristic acts against all protected classes. They shouldn’t hold press conferences only when it is anti-asian, or motivated against women, or some minority religion. That winds up biasing political discourse. They would never withhold this information if other protected classes were targeted. A Christian targeting transgender people would absolutely get wall to wall coverage.

she was indeed crazy

No evidence of her being crazy. She was radicalized but in a sane mind. Her writings do not seem far from the median young transgender activist’s writings. “I hate parental views; how my mom sees me as a daughter — and she'd not bear to want to lose that daughter because a son would be the death of Audrey.” This is an intelligent, orderly sentence structure that shows forethought and consideration. This is not something a crazy person would write.

I think the thinking of manifesto suppression is based on the idea that one of the motivations for shooters is getting their views signal boosted in the media. If you don't allow them that it may disincentivise future attacks.

The funny thing is, that this sort of damnatio memoriae never seems to actually work. Despite the best efforts of the legal system, we still know about Herostratus of Ephesus. (Though, of course, if wiping out the memory of someone or their manifesto was successful, we'd never actually know, would we?)

Is there a case in the last 15 years where police had the opportunity to suppress a manifesto, but released it anyway? If the option to suppress it is there, then it seems like this is becoming more standard. Most manifestos that make it into the public get directly uploaded somewhere, posted to 4chan, mailed to a newspaper if you're a 20th century terrorist, and so on. Seems like poor form to forget to post your deranged manifesto publicly before committing a heinous act. ** Also, her diary seem less like a philosophical statement, or call to action, than they are the weird doodles and thoughts of a mentally ill individual.

As for the police, Nashville PD, and most police departments, probably don't contain many cops that are too interested in protecting trans ideology. I can buy FBI involvement or pressure decreases the likelihood of a single cop leaking it as it pertains to trans-y ideas versus white nationalist ones. As a counter example, Brenton Tarrant and his manifesto was heavily suppressed in New Zealand and elsewhere following the Christchurch shooting. His manifesto was banned on lots of sites places if I recall. New Zealand also suppressed his name, face, and manifesto, albeit not very effectively.

For media coverage, yes I think it's fair to say there's a bias here. Googling Audrey Hale gets me this which includes a few right wing rags and the Post which may or may not qualify as one. On the flip side, here's one NPR article on Dylann Roof's manifesto. Dylann had his manifesto read out loud in court, but the NPR article predates that. If this was instead white nationalist rage manifesto, then yes it's fair to say there would be American media all over this shouting at the roof tops. Crazy trans radical kills children just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Is there a good argument for police to release every crazy's manifesto? Is there a good argument for media to cover the contents and proliferate the ideas in every manifesto?

Offering free national publicity for each person that gets the bright idea to impose their bullshit on others by killing kids creates a perverse incentive. If the options are coordinate a memory hole or offer them an free publicity-- one seems better than the other. A media ecosystem that could effectively coordinate this would be pretty scary though, wouldn't it?

Isn't it common practice for all police departments to resist releasing manifestos no matter the subject matter? From a police perspective, you'd rather release it when you can tie everything up with a nice bow a year or two later in a larger report -- on top of preventing copycats. I don't necessarily see anything culture-war unique or nefarious in that.

Black lives matter, ... or so you say
Radical progressives and law enforcement

Once when I was visiting my brother-in-law in Vietnam, I noticed his six year old son had picked up a stick off the ground and was playing solder with it. The little boy pretended the stick was a pump action shotgun, pointing it at one thing after another: click-clack-BANG... click-clack-BANG. I got his attention and, with my wife as a translator, showed and told him that the correct technique is to cycle the gun while it is in recoil, before acquiring the next target: BANG-click-clack,... BANG-click-clack. He tried it a few times and then looked to me, and I gave him a smile and a thumbs-up.

A few minutes later, the boy's father (my brother-in-law) warned me not to teach him things like that -- because if he repeats them at school, his family might get an unpleasant visit from the police. I apologized for the mistake and made sure not to repeat it. A few minutes later, my brother-in-law mentioned that his motorcycle had been stolen the week before. I asked him if he had reported it to the police and he said no; they wouldn't do anything about it. In a Marxist police state, that's not what the police are for.


In the United States today, a black person is about seven times more likely to be murdered than a white person, and murder is the leading cause of death among black males under 45. The problem of a high murder rate for blacks in the US is not new, but while it has received little media attention, that rate has skyrocketed over the last ten years. The rate of homicide against blacks increased by around 50% from 2014 to 2020 and has remained near the 2020 level up to the time of this writing. This translates to about 19,000 excess black homicide deaths from 2015 to 2023, over and above what would have occurred if the 2014 rate had continued. That is more than the number of black Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined, in less time than the total duration of those three wars. Something changed in 2015 that is having the effect of a war on black people in America.

The public conversation about the epidemic of killings of blacks in America looks like something this: some researchers, such as Roland Fryer and Heather Macdonald, along with many if not most conservative thinkers on the subject, have argued that the sudden increase in the rate of black homicide is largely a result of the "Ferguson effect" -- in which police officers are reluctant to patrol and intervene in majority-black neighborhoods because of hostility toward police fomented by "Black Lives Matter" activists. Progressives, in response, say that the causal theory of the Ferguson effect is not true. If we step back and look at the debate, no matter which side one takes, what is striking is that it is generally the conservatives who begin the conversation about the problem. Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males under 45, and has increased dramatically in a short period of time -- and yet the very people who angrily shout that "Black lives matter" have little to say about the issue until they are pinned down on it by people on the other side of the political fence. What gives?

What gives, I believe, is twofold. First, Fryer and Macdonald are obviously correct: what do you expect to happen when you demoralize, and in many cases defund, the police -- and who do you expect it to happen to? Second, I submit that their silence on this issue demonstrates that woke progressives do not actually care about the safety of black people -- any more than Lenin cared about the safety of Russian proletariat. What they care about is the power-gathering narrative that white supremacy is the root of all evil. Black-on-black crime doesn't do much to advance that narrative, and so it is not of much interest to them, no matter how many black lives it takes, or how rapidly the problem grows.

But where did the ridiculous idea of abolishing the police come from in the first place? In fact, the dismantling of law enforcement by radical progressives is nothing new. In the fourth century BC, Plato described a political faction whose agenda included moral relativism, sexual liberation, open borders, treating aliens like citizens, redistribution of wealth, debt cancellation, silencing dissenting speech, the lax enforcement of criminal laws, and, finally, stripping private citizens of the right to bear arms. Sound familiar? Plato's name for this group was demokratiko ántras (Greek: democratic men), and he wrote that when a state is governed by such men, convicted criminals are free to walk the streets. He also wrote that such a state it is on the precipice of tyranny [The Republic, VIII]. In two previous Substack posts (here and here), I have written in more detail about the correspondence between Plato's narrative and the woke agenda.

The gutting of pre-existing law enforcement structures was also a common theme in the communist revolutions in both Russia and China -- though in China, the focus was on prosecutors and judges rather than police officers. I will discuss the Russian case in more detail below. In any case, it seems that going back to the time Plato, the playbook of leftist tyranny has included the following essential steps:

  1. Dismantle the existing structures of law enforcement;
  2. confiscate weapons owned by private citizens;
  3. establish a secret police force to terrorize political opponents.

The secret of the "secret police" is that they are not really police at all, but a gang of thugs who operate by whatever rules they invent as they go, and whose purpose is to terrorize and silence ideological opponents of the ruling party. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia said that on paper, the Soviet Union had a bill of rights that was better than the American bill of rights, adding "I mean it literally. It was much better" [source]. But the Soviet bill of rights didn't matter, because, in the Soviet Union, there was no de facto remedy for the violation of one's de jure rights. Indeed, a state terror organization like the Cheka or KGB cannot possibly operate alongside an organization that actually enforces the law. Thus, if it isn't really black lives that matter, but establishing a one-party police state, then abolishing the (pre-existing) police is not such a stupid idea after all. On the contrary, it is the first step in a proven plan with a long tradition!


Lenin's Abolition of the Police
Recall that in 1902 Lenin wrote,

The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. [Lenin (1902): "What is to be done?"]

In a previous post, I discussed how Lenin urged his followers to blame class exploitation for every problem in the world (and also, to view everything as a problem, even if it was never a problem before). In this article, I would draw the reader's attention to Lenin's description of the enemy that is to blame for all these problems, large and small: a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation. For Lenin, the class enemy of the bourgeoisie was intimately tied with the institutions of law enforcement.

The police forces that existed in Russia before the revolution were under the command of the Tsar, and included a repressive political police force as well as ordinary law enforcement. But in his picture of "police violence and capitalist exploitation", Lenin didn't distinguish between the two. In the Marxist view, ownership of private property was theoretically illegitimate in the first place -- and so the police's role in preventing Bolsheviks and their constituents from stealing money and other valuables that they wanted to steal (or "expropriate", as they put it) was, in their view, a form of oppression. The revolutionaries further regarded laws against assaulting whomever they wanted to assault as a form of oppression: after all their targets were capitalist bourgeoisie exploiters, or alleged to be as part of the justification of the would-be crime, and murder and theft were just what they had coming.

Lenin had advocated open war on the police for years leading up to the 1917 revolution. For example in 1905 he wrote,

Practical work, we repeat, should be started at once. This falls into preparatory work and military operations. The preparatory work includes procuring all kinds of arms and ammunition, securing premises favorably located for street fighting -- convenient for fighting from above, for storing bombs and stones, etc., or acids to be poured on the police, etc., etc.

...To launch attacks under favorable circumstances is not only every revolutionary’s right, but his plain duty. The killing of spies, policemen, gendarmes, the blowing up of police stations, the liberation of prisoners, the seizure of government funds for the needs of the uprising — such operations are already being carried out wherever insurrection is rife, in Poland and in the Caucasus, and every detachment of the revolutionary army must be ready to start such operations at a moment’s notice. [Lenin (1905): "Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents"]

Lenin knew that his regime would not be able to operate as planned alongside the existing system of courts and police. On the eve of the October 1917 revolution, he wrote,

The liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class. [Lenin (1917): “The State and Revolution”]

But what would function in place the “apparatus of state power”? This would be the subject of a diabolical bait-and-switch. Before coming to power, Lenin called for abolition of the police and their replacement by a collective of armed citizens [Lenin (1917): "Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution"]. Lenin's followers probably imagined something along the lines of the CHAZ autonomous zone created by BLM activists in Seattle in 2020. Lenin probably laughed to himself and imagined the Cheka.

As the revolution unfolded, the Bolsheviks initially delivered on their promise to abolish the police, including both the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) and regular law enforcement. Not only were the existing police departments wiped out as government agencies; the 1918 Soviet constitution revoked the right to vote for all former police officers -- along with other alleged class exploiters, including clergymen, former business owners, and anyone deemed "selfish or dishonorable" by the Soviet authorities:

The following persons enjoy neither the right to vote nor the right to be voted for, even though they belong to one of the categories enumerated above [as having the right to vote], namely:

  • Persons who employ hired labor in order to obtain from it an increase in profits.
  • Persons who have an income without doing any work, such as interest from capital, receipts from property, etc.
  • Private merchants, trade and commercial brokers.
  • Monks and clergy of all denominations.
  • Employees and agents of the former police, the gendarme corps, and the Okhrana [Czar’s secret police], also members of the former reigning dynasty.
  • *Persons who have in legal form been declared demented or mentally deficient, and also persons under guardianship. *
  • Persons who have been deprived by a Soviet of their rights of citizenship because of selfish or dishonorable offenses, for the period fixed by the sentence.

The 1918 Soviet constitution further stipulated that "all workers be armed, and that a Socialist Red Army be organized, and the propertied class be disarmed". The collective of armed citizens was off to a good start, at least on paper, but this clause was also the beginning of gun control in the Soviet Union. In the initial phase, the Soviet government only disarmed their intended victims at the time, which consisted of people in categories designated as bourgeois.

Eventually, however, the entire civilian population would be disarmed, and the entire civilian population would also become victims or potential victims -- since anyone, at any time, might do something the authorities deemed "selfish or dishonorable" -- such as say something that the Soviet government did not want other citizens to hear, even if saying it was OK to say and hear the day before. In 1924, all private citizens, bourgeois and proletarian alike, were stripped of the right to own pistols and rifles, and private gun ownership was restricted to shotguns -- which were required to be licensed and registered, and could only be owned for the purpose of hunting. In 1939, the Soviet government confiscated all privately owned firearms. So much for a collective of armed citizens.

The wave of criminal savagery that ensued following the October 1917 revolution was beyond comprehension for most Westerners today. It is difficult to isolate the effect of Lenin's abolition of the police on this crime wave, because a civil war commenced in which atrocities including mass looting and, mass murder, and mass rape were routinely committed on both sides. However, within two months of the Bolshevik coup d'etat in October 1917, Lenin formed the Cheka -- the secret police agency of the Soviet Union that would later evolve into the KGB. So much for abolishing the police.

Interesting, "who is killing black people" turns up result #1 for me: Black-on-Black Homicide - A Psychological-Political Perspective, result 2 is FBI statistics (where the first table shows clearly higher black-on-black violence), result 3 is a NAACP history of lynching, and #4 is a WaPo opinion piece about police killing Blacks. Why are yours so different? A quick search for Black mortality causes clearly shows homicide

The progressive explanation #1 is not police, it's guns. (Police is probably #2 though). I think most true progressives would say that about Black mortality more broadly, inequities in health care is the biggest culprit.

And according to Pew, even the most strident progressives in the Democratic coalition still less than 50% say they want police funding in their area to be decreased. Other Democrats are way, way less supportive. So I don't think this whole anti-police leftist thing is as prevalent as it's pitched here. In other words, it's a caricature of progressives, and so the whole thing feels strongly of straw-manning. Are there really no actual progressives left on this forum that I have to bring up points on their behalf, like an absent father?

Why are yours so different? A quick search for Black mortality causes clearly shows homicide

I have the same search results as you. They surprise me a little (insofar as Google hasn't algorithmically downranked the #1 result) but they don't change my picture of what the conversation looks like. If you hear of the fact that the rate of death by homicide rate for blacks started to climb sharply in 2015, and climbed by 50% by 2020 with most of the increase coming before COVID, you probably heard that from a conservative outlet. I have never heard it from a progressive outlet and I don't expect to. If your mileage varies on that I would like to know.

And according to Pew, even the most strident progressives in the Democratic coalition still less than 50% say they want police funding in their area to be decreased. Other Democrats are way, way less supportive. So I don't think this whole anti-police leftist thing is as prevalent as it's pitched here. In other words, it's a caricature of progressives, and so the whole thing feels strongly of straw-manning.

I don't claim that most progressives want to defund the police. I do claim that if progressives, as a group, really cared about the safety of black people, then they would be talking about the dramatic increase in murder rates since 2014 (at least as much, for example, as they talk about alleged racism in policing) -- and they would be the ones asking the question of whether the Ferguson effect had a role in it.

Bizarrely, the simplest explanation for the progressive myopia here is that when humans kill animals, it's animal cruelty, but when animals kill animals, it's just nature. When an animal kills a human, then it must be because the human provoked it in some way.

The sacralization of "blackness" as a thing to protect and preserve seems to include many types of behaviors and actions that are unacceptable in whites. Blackness is authentic and natural in a way that whiteness is not, and it cannot be judged by white standards.

In the background, there is the lingering thought that, eventually, when true equality and justice have finally been achieved, all these negative things will just fizzle away into history, but in the short run they are just treated as part of the natural order.

It's kind of like the difference between keeping animals in a zoo, where they are carefully protected but controlled, and keeping them in a large nature preserve where they can run wild. Sure, in the nature preserve they might kill each other or whatever, but the sacred "blackness" would be repressed in the zoo. It's not the flesh and blood individual people that matter, which is perhaps not surprising for collectivists.

This model actually explains a lot of apparent progressive hypocrisy on this matter, however ironic and offensive it migt be.

Funnily enough, they adopt the opposite tack with poor southern whites. Poor southern whites get to be people rather than animals, but just bad people that must be dealt with.

The progressive explanation #1 is not police, it's guns.

It's masterful stroke of 2-birds and 1-stone positions that leftists wield. I think when you boil down my disagreements this is what's left in the pot.

  • It's yet another dismissal of the moral precept of agency, already constantly under attack
  • It's trivially false (gun control laws or ownership rates aren't even correlated with BoB murders)
  • And of course as this whole series illuminates, attacking the right to own firearms is such a blatantly obvious predecessor to unimaginable horrors

Ask a progressive who is killing blacks, and they will inevitably say it is police who are responsible for black deaths.

Do you think this is a reasonable opinion? I think it is preposterous and obviously so. It is understandable for a single person in isolation to hold this opinion tentatively and weakly, but opinions aren't formed in isolation. If woke progressives actually cared about the health and safety of black people, some of them would find out for themselves that this isn't true; they would make noise about it because it is important; the people who hear that noise would make noise, and it would go viral. And/or the pundits whose job it is to know would find the truth of the matter and amplify it. What goes viral in a community is a function of the values of that community. If they cared, they would know; they don't know; ergo they don't care.

Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males under 45, and has increased dramatically in a short period of time -- and yet the very people who angrily shout that "Black lives matter" have little to say about the issue until they are pinned down on it by people on the other side of the political fence. What gives?

I don't think this is true, though you use this as a foundational premise. The conversations just look very different and so you might not recognize them immediately as such. Probably for tactical reasons (not wanting to give ammo to right wingers), it isn't usually highlighted as a problem-alone. There isn't the angst-for-its-own-sake aspect like there is for some other issues (like income inequality). It does actually come up at least sometimes! It's just usually in a hopeful kind of context, paired with a solution. For example, there are still well-publicized pushes for community violence interventions (I've seen them highlighted several times in national, left news outlets). One dimension of the gun control is exactly this. There's also talk about how this kind of violence is the result of the prison and justice system. And as an aside, indeed I am at least a little sympathetic to the particular argument (of many, some of which are bunk) that once you send someone to prison once, they acquire friends and influences that encourage further lawbreaking in the future, including homicide. In other words, there are actual, plausible mechanisms for these beliefs other than a vague

So yeah, they DO talk about this death/crisis. Just not in isolation (not anymore). One of the things that struck me watching the Malcolm X biopic recently was how up-front he was about problems within the black community and taking ownership of the fix (though still he blamed white people for all of this, at least early on in his life). And yeah, that approach you don't see as often (though I can't say I'm like, super plugged in to Black culture and news, so it might show up there) which I do find interesting.

So that's for many modern leftists. I find your talk about earlier revolutionary leftists very interesting. You can definitely see the seeds of later problems in some of what they discuss. Such as the perpetual, mob-conducted non-state violence of the Cultural Revolution in China. Or how untenable abolishing so many groups of people from the vote would be, as per the list you quoted which would eliminate a huge percentage of the population. However, modern US progressives still have much more in common with European social democrats (or democratic socialists) than they do with any form of communism, though they sometimes adopt the same language (the goals are very different).

I don't think this is true, though you use this as a foundational premise. The conversations just look very different and so you might not recognize them immediately as such.

I think if they cared about what they say they care about, they would be discussing, not just "too much gun crime", but the sudden spike starting in 2015 and what might be behind it, and whether the Ferguson contributed to it. They would be the ones starting that conversation if they cared about the lives of black people. They would be discussing that more than they discuss alleged police racism, or at least in the ballpark of as much.

They would be the ones starting that conversation if they cared about the lives of black people.

They do care about the lives of black people. But they also care about not being seen to be racist and paternalistic to black communities. So they will defer solutions and conversations in that space to black people. White people telling black people that black on black crime is a problem absolutely stinks of neo-colonialism to progressives. They can talk about police brutality because black people have raised that as an issue and suggested solutions through the BLM movement et al, (though of course black people not being a monolith the solution space progressives are seeing is a necessarily constrained subset, but that police violence is a problem has more widespread acceptance in black communities than what to do about black on black violence).

Remember progressives just like everyone else have a whole competing stack of interests, and priorities. They have wanting for fewer black people to be killed AND wanting to defer to black voices on black problems. If black communities can agree on a solution to black on black violence and push that up the progressive stack then progressives will start to talk about it.

I think the problem is that your model of progressives is incorrect. They aren't life saving maximizing machines, if they were it would make sense for them to push that conversation. But they aren't so your understanding of WHY they don't do what you think they should do if they hold the values you think they do is incorrect.

Progressives care about lots of things, and those competing desires explain their behaviors. Just like how progressives talk about people who think abortion is murder. "If you really thought that abortion was murder and hundreds of thousands of innocent babies were tortured and killed each year you would do much more about it". And the same answer is the one here. They really do believe that, but they also have a bunch of other things they care about which constrains the solution spaces they can explore. For pro-life people, that might be a belief in law and order, moral precepts that murder is wrong, so killing abortionists is not an acceptable solution, and the belief that the alternatives to democratic options are worse.

For progressives here the answer is that their moral precepts that they should not be enforcing solutions on black communities (that they don't think black communities have asked for) means that is not an acceptable approach to black on black violence.

And part of the problem with that is that black communities are deeply divided themselves, on this. There is wariness about how their communities have been treated in the past, degraded trust levels, and much much more.

TLDR Progressives are not just black life utility maximizing machines, so when they don't do the exact things you think they should do, it doesn't mean they don't care, it means they have a whole stack of other moral precepts and beliefs to balance. Just like how pro-lifers are not all single issue voters.

TLDR Progressives are not just black life utility maximizing machines, so when they don't do the exact things you think they should do, it doesn't mean they don't care, it means they have a whole stack of other moral precepts and beliefs to balance. J

Some underlying variable took off in 2015, which, as I noted, has caused more excess black deaths than the Vietnam war, the Korean War, and World War II combined, in a shorter amount of total time. This is not a nuance thing that could get lost at the bottom of the stack; it has literally had the effect of a war on black lives. You don't need to be a "utility maximizing machine" to notice that, amplify the issue, and look for an explanation. It would suffice to care, at all, about what they loudly claim to care about.

"If you really thought that abortion was murder and hundreds of thousands of innocent babies were tortured and killed each year you would do much more about it".

It's not just that they aren't doing enough (as might be said of pro-life activists); It's not even that they aren't lifting a finger; au contraire, it's that so many of them take to the streets to shout for a policy (defund the police) that predictably harms our community, harms blacks disproportionately, and that is not supported by most blacks -- and practically none of them are complaining about the others doing that.

One is clearly not obligated to be a "utility maximizing machine". One is obligated to exercise due diligence to be intellectually honest and not to do obvious net harm, all things considered. Qualitatively, you could make the same argument about anything, but whether that argument has merit depends on (1) the severity of the harm, (2) the severity of the hypocrisy in ignoring it, and (3) the clarity with which both of these can be discerned by a reasonable observer. In this case I submit that the harm is catastrophic, the hypocrisy outlandish, and the clarity crystal. Here I argue that there must exist cases like that, whether this is one of them or not.

@SSCReader if you want to give a convicting argument, I suggest you point out some of those cases and compare the woke movement to them. For example, you could say "Yes the Nazis were significantly more hypocritical than average (in 1935, before taking power), and yes the Bolsheviks were, too (in 1900, before taking power), but the woke are not -- by quantitative comparison with, say, evangelicals." I won't ask you for evidence; I'd just like to know your opinion of where some ideological groups stand on that continuum. Or do you believe we're all just human and no groups is any more or less hypocritical than any other?

My outgroup does not care about what they claim to care about is pretty much always incorrect. Exactly the same attack is used against pro-life people and it similarly incorrect there. The vast majority of people do not look for explanations for much of anything or weigh their various concerns rationally. That is entirely normal.

My outgroup does not care about what they claim to care about is pretty much always incorrect.

Pretty much. But

  1. every group is someone's outgroup, and
  2. there exist group differences in intellectual honesty between ideological groups. Therefore,
  3. somewhere in the world there is a group G whose outgroup G' has a median level of intellectual dishonesty that is significantly above the median for the general population. But,
  4. everyone is tempted to think that they are group G and their ideological opponents are G', and so
  5. we should be very careful in reaching the conclusion that we are G and our ideological opponents are G'. On the other hand
  6. sometimes, by #3, when someone reaches that conclusion, they are right.

I think the argument in this case are strong enough to meet the burden of proof.

I don't think you've even justified that 2 is true let alone that progressives are in it. I live in a Red Tribe area but i work mostly with Blue Tribe progressives in academia. My interactions with all of them indicate that they do care about the things they say they care about even when their opponents claim their actions show otherwise.

I think you are simply put wrong. I've given you reasons why they don't behave as you expect they do. I think those are correct and you yourself are hopelessly stuck in 7) Because everyone is tempted to think they are in G and their opponents are in G' their ability to unbiasedly evaluate the evidence is hopelessly confounded, even when they think it is not.

Whereas, I don't think there is a difference between G and G' in this respect at all.

I thought #2 was self-evident. Perhaps I was mistaken. Do you believe it is false?

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They do care about the lives of black people. But they also care about not being seen to be racist and paternalistic to black communities. So they will defer solutions and conversations in that space to black people. White people telling black people that black on black crime is a problem absolutely stinks of neo-colonialism to progressives.

I can't tell whether you are saying that (A) this is what's going through their woke minds, or (B) this response has objective merit, so I will respond to both.

Regarding (A):
Telling blacks what what their problems are and how to solve them is the modus operandi of white radical progressives. "When a basic definition of each policy was provided [to 1300 blacks polled], 79% of Black parents supported vouchers, 74% supported charter schools, and 78% supported open enrollment." [source], but Democrats oppose school choice, and oppose it more the more woke they are, saying that they hurt black students [for example here]. Thomas Sowell's book Charter Schools and their Enemies establishes this pattern on charter schools beyond reasonable doubt IMO. I submit this is representative of the bigger picture of white progressives shoving problems and solutions down the throats of the black population. Progs claim that climate change disproportionately impacts disaffected minorities and push for "climate justice"; disaffected minorities want cheaper power bills and don't give an ass rats about climate change. This phenomenon also extends to the issue at hand. "Among those polled, 47% [of black Democrats] say federal budget spending should be “increased a lot” to deal with crime, compared to just 17% of white Democrats" source. It's disproportionately white woke liberals who call to defund the police on behalf of blacks, not blacks who want it.

Regarding (B):
The truth? There is no "black community". There is a shared community in which murder rates are skyrocketing, and skyrocketing disproportionately for our black neighbors -- and sitting on your hands about it because it is "their problem" and not "our problem" is depraved.

Aside from a few outspoken radicals, most blacks want more funding for the police, and almost half of them want "a lot more" (see above). So how, again, are white college girls holding up signs to "defund the police" because "black lives matter" not telling blacks how to solve their problems?

The average white progressive doesn't know many, if any people in black urban communities. So they are reliant on what movements like BLM say.

Now there's an internal contradiction as I mentioned. BLM still has 80% support among black people, but the defund the police option is much less popular but you wouldn't necessarily know that if BLM was your source. In other words whatever movement is the one that was riding the zeitgeist at the time is the one that got to set the narrative.

The average white progressive doesn't know many, if any people in black urban communities. So they are reliant on what movements like BLM say.

They would know better if they cared more. In fact, they would know better if they cared much at all. This isn't something that a person has to figure out for themselves; you just have to know somebody who knows somebody that heard about it on a podcast (or read it on a message board), and all three of you (you, the person you know, and the person they know) care about it enough to pass it on. And the podcasters and pundits themselves, whose job it is to know this and inform their audience, certainly cannot plead innocent ignorance.

This is an important theorem. It is the convergence theorem for so-called geometric series, and, to a first approximation, it describes how interesting information items spread in a community. Basically, if everyone who hears about the thing, on average, shares it with r other people, and r > 1, then it will spread until the community is saturated and r effectively becomes less than one (because a high proportion of people in the community have already heard it). That geometric growth to saturation is colloquially known as "going viral". The r-value for a certain piece of information, or video, or whatever has in a given community depends on how well that item resonates with the interests of the community. Long story short, what goes viral is what people find interesting. (Thanks for the tip. right?)

If black lives really mattered in woke culture, the discussion about the epidemic of black homicide would go viral faster than "Hands up don't shoot" -- and if they really didn't want to be patriarchal white saviors, so would the fact that white Democrats are the only group that wants to defund the police.

They would know better if they cared more. In fact, they would know better if they cared much at all.

The average person simply does not invest much time in investigating causes beyond what their immediate social circle is doing. If you are using that to say progressives don't care, then pretty much nobody cares about anything. We are the outliers here, not them.

The average person simply does not invest much time in investigating causes beyond what their immediate social circle is doing.

That's right. Hence, what goes viral in a community depends on it being interesting enough to share with an average of at least 1.001 other people in your immediate social circle. What goes viral in a community tells you what really matters to people in that community. SJW's know about "Hands up don't shoot". They know about January 6. They know about Russian collusion. They know about the hockey stick graph of climate change -- but what they don't know about is the hockey stick graph of murder of blacks -- because, even if it comes to the attention of a random SJW in some dark corner of the internet, that is not important enough to share with at least 1 other SJW on average. Look at what they do have bandwidth for, and look at what they don't, and it tells you what they care about.

It is true that the average SJW doesn't know the facts of the matter we are discussing. It is also true that the reason he does not know those facts is that it is a group characteristic of his community not to care about those particular facts. The ones to who are not hypocritical on this issue are the ones who would be amplifying the issue if they knew about it, and of course there are some of those, but they must be a small minority (or else it would actually be getting amplified). You know what happens to those people? They grow up to be Michael Shellenberger, Thomas Sowell, and Amala Ekpunobi.

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For progressives here the answer is that their moral precepts that they should not be enforcing solutions on black communities (that they don't think black communities have asked for) means that is not an acceptable approach to black on black violence.

And part of the problem with that is that black communities are deeply divided themselves, on this. There is wariness about how their communities have been treated in the past, degraded trust levels, and much much more.

Where in this chain of reasoning do you think the progressives who are championing particular solutions, at a national level, get off this train? Do they think that it's okay for them to enforce their national-scale idea on black communities? Do they just not realize that black communities are deeply divided? (Do they just not care?)

Well, when generalizing there will always be exceptions of course. I'm sure there are some who may believe there is more of an agreement than there is, and others who perhaps care less about being seen to be paternalistic. All movements contain variation.

And yeah, that approach you don't see as often (though I can't say I'm like, super plugged in to Black culture and news, so it might show up there)

If you follow a hyper-black social media page you'll see plenty of highly upvoted calls for ownership of problems and despair at intraracial violence.

But then depending on the day you'll also see glee at black-on-white violence or calls to "free X" regardless of who they victimized.

It's possible to be both.

I don’t think it’s dissonance, I think many legitimately believe both are true and that’s what @yofuckreddit is saying. That is to say they have some racial animus towards the majority but also believe the only solution is going to be discipline and self-government from within the community. They may want reparations but they don’t expect they’ll get them.

I'm mostly inclined to agree with you, at least on the modern view of BLM and related movements. But I've been thinking lately about the Communist movements of the late 1800s through early 1900s and wondering, to what extent did they actually have a reasonable point? I'm not going to say I support authoritarian Communism or anything, but it didn't come from nowhere, at least some of the problems they were complaining about were real at the time.

I don't really know what things were like in the 1910s Russia. Maybe the Tsars really were both incompetent and authoritarian themselves, and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down. Around that time in America, that wasn't too far away from being the case as I understand it. It was the peak of the time of robber-baron capitalism, with lots of workers getting the shaft. Long hours, terrible working conditions, indifference towards injuries, low pay. Sometimes even worse when it gets into company towns and piles of other abuses that I haven't even heard about. I can see where those of a more angry, retributive, perhaps even revolutionary frame of mind might get the idea that overthrowing the whole system and giving this whole Communism thing a try might be a good idea.

Fortunately for all, we managed to improve things gradually and more smoothly. It turns out that further advances in industry, unionization, market forces making skilled workers more valuable, and relatively lightweight and limited government intervention while maintaining the fundamental tenets of capitalism did a much better job at improving the lots of the ordinary workers than any dictatorship of the Proletariat ever did.

Okay then, but what does that say about the behavior of modern Progressives? I can see how the Bolsheviks weren't right, but at least has a point. Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming, but don't care at all about dozens of black men getting killed in the inner cities every weekend for decades, and it actually getting worse when their prescribed solution of "abolishing the police" gets implemented? If Lenin and the rest of the inner circle of Bolsheviks were taking advantage of a shitty situation with legitimate grievances to leverage in their authoritarian tendencies, are the elite of the modern Progressive movement leveraging total nonsense to support theirs?

Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming,

Start earlier. Remember progressivism started from the very real discrimination faced by black people in the US historically, just as Bolsheviks may too have had a real grievance about conditions. If you have already lost trust in authority (as many black people have) then that makes sense.

Many Catholics to this day distrust the Northern Irish police service due to how it was used back in the day. And that is after disbanding the RUC, renaming it and mandating a Catholic quota in officers.

That is where BLM comes from. Trust once lost is hard to regain. They are not starting with a neutral view. As for black on black violence, white progressives also don't want to be seen to be racist and paternalistic in forcing solutions on black communities that they did not ask for. And black communities are hopelessly divided on that issue. If they (or at last a large majority) could agree a solution, white progressives would be happy to champion it as they did BLM.

I actually draw a distinction there. I have a greater level of sympathy and understanding towards actual black communities that are wary of trusting the police, since they've actually experienced historic oppression by them. For the whole Ferguson situation, my impression was that the shooting of Michael Brown was technically justified, but it might have been the only correct thing the cops had done there in a long time. Michael Brown's actions were technically wrong, but more understandable, and did succeed in shining a light onto lots of actual misconduct. I admit I don't have any great ideas on how to create law and order in black communities when the relationship with the police is already so poisoned in so many of them.

However, my impression is that I don't see a lot of those people or communities in the BLM movement. That, as far as I can tell, is mostly a wealthy white people movement. Whatever actual black people took part in it are mostly upper-class and already pretty disconnected from actual oppression, even if there may have been some history of it.

I believe that our society has a more general problem of militarization of the police and over-policing of many things that applies to all people. I think that the recent racial focus is misguided and serves to obscure the real problem by insisting on a false narrative and thereby causing people to take the opposite position of excessively defending the police when they see the lies.

Right the BLM movement is spawned from but not controlled by the black communities that are impacted by it one way or the other. I'd agree there.

For the whole Ferguson situation, my impression was that the shooting of Michael Brown was technically justified, but it might have been the only correct thing the cops had done there in a long time. Michael Brown's actions were technically wrong, but more understandable, and did succeed in shining a light onto lots of actual misconduct.

Technically, my ass. The only reason Wilson didn't get railroaded by a system that badly wanted to was because it wasn't remotely a close case. Wilson's actions were fully justified by large margins, and he had extensive physical evidence to prove it.

I believe that our society has a more general problem of militarization of the police and over-policing of many things that applies to all people. I think that the recent racial focus is misguided and serves to obscure the real problem by insisting on a false narrative and thereby causing people to take the opposite position of excessively defending the police when they see the lies.

And see, I would agree with all of this, except for the "excessively defending the police" claim in the same post where you seem to present the Michael Brown case as somehow borderline! Police misconduct absolutely exists, and absolutely should be punished, but you need to use valid examples.

I find it amusing that in this thread, I'm being taken to task both for saying that most people shot by cops "had it coming" - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the suspect, and also for saying that a police shooting was "technically" justified - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the police officer. I don't know guys, I'm just trying to be neutral here!

My actual position is more like, I believe both that there is significant police misconduct and that the vast majority of actual police shootings are fully justified. Misconduct takes place more in the smaller stuff, like excessive force and hostility. Felony car stops for paperwork errors, SWAT raids on houses based on flimsy evidence of minor crimes, raiding the wrong house entirely, destructive searches with flimsy justification, etc.

and also for saying that a police shooting was "technically" justified - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the police officer.

You're misrepresenting my criticism. My point was that your description of this specific situation was wrong, not the degree of sympathy you showed. It is in fact quite a big deal that people know where the line is between good behavior and bad, and saying that Wilson was "technically" in the clear is simply not true. In order to avoid further unjust treatment, it had to be proved that Wilson was innocent beyond a reasonable doubt--a complete inversion of the standards of criminal law--and he did so, meeting an unjust burden. Again, this was not a close case!

I don't know guys, I'm just trying to be neutral here!

Splitting the difference between the truth and a lie is not admirable.

I largely agree with your second paragraph; one of my biggest meta-problems with BLM at the time was that it would prevent meaningful, productive police reform for a generation. I was wrong in that assessment in my undue optimism--the fallout has been much worse than I anticipated.

I can see how the Bolsheviks weren't right, but at least has a point. Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming, but don't care at all about dozens of black men getting killed in the inner cities every weekend for decades, and it actually getting worse when their prescribed solution of "abolishing the police" gets implemented? [emphasis added by me, @NR].

Their behavior is indeed baffling if you assume that they are trying to implement a rational plan to achieve the goals they claim to have. But I don't think that is what is going on. If you ignore what they say and watch what they do, what objective does it point to?

As an aside, I think it's a bit cold blooded to say that the offender "had it coming". I suspect that if you or I had been his shoes, and walked in his shoes a while, we might have acted the same way he did -- or at least understood and empathized with his motives. I think it's more accurate to say that the shooting was justified.

I mean "had it coming" in a more immediate sense. Not that the person as a whole deserved to die in the abstract, regardless of what he had done at any particular moment. More that yeah if you try to beat or choke or stab or shoot a cop, he's probably going to try to shoot you, regardless of what motivated you to do that and to what extent it was understandable.

On the first, it's pretty standard for the leaders of a movement to be disingenuous about their real goals. It's the behavior of the on the ground individuals that I find bizarre. It sure doesn't seem like they're sophisticated enough to have a more sinister real goal and to be pushing the beliefs they claim as a cynical ruse to achieve that goal. They seem to be true believers, but about something that's completely fabricated and nonsensical.

It's the behavior of the on the ground individuals that I find bizarre. It sure doesn't seem like they're sophisticated enough to have a more sinister real goal and to be pushing the beliefs they claim as a cynical ruse to achieve that goal. They seem to be true believers, but about something that's completely fabricated and nonsensical.

When an animal gets rabies, it seems to decide to stop drinking water. That is why it is called "hydrophobia". This causes excess viruses to build up in the animal's mouth instead of being washed down, which would happen if it were drinking normally. The little spit that is left in the mouth is thick with rabies virus, so he is said to "foam at the mouth". Then the animal seems to decide to get mad at the world -- so mad that a skunk will attack a German Shepherd, and a German shepherd will attack its owner. To himself the rabid animal is probably thinking the equivalent, "You called my momma a name and I heard it". But what is really happening is that a rabid animal is not in control of itself; it is carrying out the plan of some other agent that has infected it, and the goal of that plan has evolved to spread the virus that carries it.

The locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; [Proverbs 30:27, ESV]

and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down

But I don't think Russia was very industrialized—my impression was that that mostly happened with Stalin? There were many more peasant farmers.

Long hours, terrible working conditions, indifference towards injuries, low pay.

When I read this (especially including low pay), what I hear is that labor was cheap relative to the goods people wanted, unless there's something keeping the markets out. So a large part of what made lives better was labor becoming more expensive relative to the goods it can buy—employers would give more for it.

But I don't think Russia was very industrialized—my impression was that that mostly happened with Stalin? There were many more peasant farmers.

Overpopulation was one of the reasons why the revolution happened. Cities used to be population sinks, but Russian cities weren't big enough to absorb surplus peasantry. A large supply of industrial workers meant that the price of labor was low, turning the proletariat into literal incels, since the only housing they could afford was not a room, but a single bunk.

Forced land redistribution started even before the Bolsheviks took power, they were the one smart enough to legitimize and endorse it (Decree on Land). The resulting yeomanization of Russia bought them about ten years of goodwill, until peasants started switching to cash crops and fodder from wheat.

There's at least three groups among modern progressives. The "Resigned" are very liberal but don't really do much about it. They feel betrayed and left behind by the system and this depresses them and leads to apathy and inaction. There's the College Crusader who are usually white and well-educated, and very politically active, and have socialist sympathies. They are usually the stereotype, where they are in favor of equality and equity and want drastic solutions to accomplish it. They typically don't have much sympathy for opposing viewpoints. Economic and racial lenses on many issues are very common views. Then you have the Radicals. They are a bit harder to define, probably because as a demographic group, they aren't very big (Progressives broadly are only like 12% of US adults, using Pew's numbers). These are the people where actual Marxism might start showing up more overtly. And they are the only ones for which, at least in my opinion, Bolshevik comparisons should be made for.

Zooming out, and looking at one actual mass movement, BLM had broad appeal beyond conservatives because some of the core pieces of the message were generic enough for large parts of the liberal coalition to get behind, on top of a few highly-publicized cases of cops actually doing some pretty horrifying things (not all the time, of course as you note, but the cop kneeling on his neck is a pretty powerful image, whether you think drugs were a big factor in his death or not). But notice how ACAB and stuff specifically didn't actually gain much traction beyond Fox News which loved to use it as a very easy boo-outgroup target.

And when you get into the apparent apathy behind Black deaths, you actually do start to see a split, and not a new one -- it dates back to at least the Civil Rights era. You have some people who think that white people should do something about it -- but feel powerless, and thus redirect this energy into anti-gun and so a lesser extent, anti-police crusades. As noted, much of this group is white, and thus this is all they "can" do. You also have the more Malcolm-X style progressives who think the solution has to come from Blacks themselves.... but the problem? Blacks are rarely progressives. Most Blacks are vaguely generic establishment Democrats on the spectrum, or uninvolved in politics. Here you can see that not only are only 10% of Progressives (themselves only 12% of the total population) Black, but the density of Black adults falls much more among other Democratic sub-groups. So basically, white College Crusaders leave the problem to Black true-believers, but there aren't enough of them to make meaningful amounts of noise in the general space.

Ngl guys it’s pretty cringe that this really interesting comment got a bunch of downvotes.

As an aside I wonder if it’s worth subclassifying your Radicals into further groups around eg the “class-reduction” debate with StupidPol/bro socialist types vs the queer Marxists etc. Then again the former has effectively been exiled from mainstream progressivism so maybe they wouldn’t even count.

The asks question -> receives answer -> downvotes response is so bizarre to me. It's like the forum version of the Who killed Hannibal meme. It makes me think that, in aggregate, the "why can't I understand progressives" question is more rhetorical and boo-outgroup than an actual attempt at seeking understanding, which is sad.

Regarding the actual makeup or splits among Progressives, it's hard to know. Progressives are at least somewhat loud by themselves, but they are also signal-boosted by both right wing outlets looking for a boogeyman as well as left wing outlets who don't want to talk back too loudly or they will betray some cause. But my main point was that they aren't actually a very big group! At least according to the best polling data we have. And at some point, attempting to slice and categorize such a small group becomes both statistically and philosophically questionable.

You bring up a great point however. Classifying them all as Radicals is a bit lazy and is also a bit of centrist bias. Maybe I should do a deeper dive and see if there's some good polling data specific to progressives.

But notice how ACAB and stuff specifically didn't actually gain much traction beyond Fox News which loved to use it as a very easy boo-outgroup target

I still see it in women's online dating profiles.

broad appeal beyond conservatives because some of the core pieces of the message were generic enough for large parts of the liberal coalition to get behind

And not exclusively liberals either. I remember at least one person who's conservative reacting to Floyd dying after being restrained at his neck. Though he wasn't in favor of the riots, of course.

I don't really know what things were like in the 1910s Russia. Maybe the Tsars really were both incompetent and authoritarian themselves, and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down.

Basically, all of this is true. In particular, the use of Russian working-class men as cannon fodder in World War I, the inhuman conditions they lived under while at war, and the indifference of the upper classes to any of this, created morbid resentment among the lower classes toward the upper. While the common soldiers had to live under ghastly conditions of privation, cold, lice, disease, and lack of medical care, they witnessed first-hand the relatively cushy lives of the officers, and even more cushy lives of the commanders. It resonates with the American situation in Vietnam, where, because of the college draft deferment, working class and underclass men were often sent abroad to risk their lives for values held more closely by the upper classes. It also resonates with Plato's description of how the working classes lose respect for the rich when they serve side by side in war:

And often rulers and their subjects may come in one another's way, whether on a pilgrimage or a march, as fellow-soldiers or fellow-sailors; aye, and they may observe the behaviour of each other in the very moment of danger --for where danger is, there is no fear that the poor will be despised by the rich --and very likely the wiry sunburnt poor man may be placed in battle at the side of a wealthy one who has never spoilt his complexion and has plenty of superfluous flesh --when he sees such an one puffing and at his wit's end, how can he avoid drawing the conclusion that men like him are only rich because no one has the courage to despoil them? [The Republic, VIII]

The question is how to move forward from it. The Russians picked the wrong answer. Dead wrong.

In the Marxist view, after all, ownership of private property was theoretically illegitimate in the first place -- and so the police's role in preventing Bolsheviks and their constituents from stealing money and other valuables that they wanted to steal (or "expropriate", as they put it) was, in their view, a form of oppression.

Sometimes, I forget how core and radical this is. Then, I see things like this guy's most recent comic. It really kind of baffles me to imagine how they think that's actually supposed to work. What do they really think their life would be like if civilization reverted to essentially the state of nature and nobody was around to care every time a slightly larger hairless ape showed up and decided to take something from them by violence. I know the old joke about pro-capitalist people being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', but what are they actually envisioning? Are they 'temporarily embarrassed gang leaders/warlords'?

The problem with the comic is that the author obviously sympathizes with the wolf, not that the wolf is ipso facto incorrect.

old joke about pro-capitalist people being "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"

For what it's worth, this may be a common misquote of John Steinbeck who was originally saying that the American Communists that he knew were temporarily embarrassed capitalists, not that the people who wouldn't support communism saw themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.

I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."

Then, I see things like this guy's most recent comic

Yeah, why exactly does he think the wolf is the good guy in this tale?

It really kind of baffles me to imagine how they think that's actually supposed to work.

IMO this is the million dollar question. I think they are spoiled children grown up, and they absolutely take for granted the peace and prosperity "just happen" in an effortless, stable equilibrium. They think the only thing mucking it up is a few bad apples, and that if we can just put bullets in the backs of those people's heads we will get back to the Garden of Eden.

Well, in actually existing non-state societies people abandon individualism to take advantage of, or form, structures which provide security from external violence. Eg, clans, gangs, etc. I think we can safely say that the far left does not want to live under clan structures, and when asked what they envision they're usually cagey on details, but they talk about everyone living together in harmony and doing whatever it is they find personally fulfilling. When they try to start something, it usually at least attempts to do this before failing horribly because no one in the commune is volunteering to scrub toilets and they can't resolve disputes.

I think we can take their ideas at face value, as stupid as they appear(very). Yes, as a good redneck it seems trivially obvious that some people have to be assigned to do unpleasant work, and someone has to be in charge so you don't have people fighting it out whenever there's a disagreement(often over who has to do that unpleasant work). But I think far leftists have very different backgrounds and life experiences.

when asked what they envision they're usually cagey on details,

I think Crosby, Stills, and Nash crystalized their motivating impetus pretty well:

Song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1sH0uR2u7Hs

Lyrics: https://genius.com/Crosby-stills-nash-and-young-woodstock-lyrics

Which makes me think of the line from This is Spinal Tap: There's such a fine line between clever and... stupid.

Rabbi Raphael Hirsch wrote,

Mankind, estranged from G-d, longs in vain for happiness and peace, longs for the garden of Eden, but they have chosen a way on which they will never find them! Cherubim and the flames of the sword of suffering "preserve" for mankind the road to Eden. Their message: Men cannot win Eden through his own strength; this road is saturated with blood; he will find Gan-Eden again if he is willing to be led and commanded by G-d. [Rabbi Raphael Hirsch: Commentary on the Torah]

I think Hirsh is right in that the story of Eden captures something that people, or something inside people, longs deeply for; and there are two paths that appear to lead toward it. One path respects our position as servants of a Higher Power, the position of our fellow man as being made in His image, and the constraints of the moral and causal laws of nature and human nature. The other does not -- and was aptly called the unconstrained vision by Thomas Sowell. Both are essentially spiritual in their composition. What does Marx's utopian vision look like? No divisions by class or country, no courts or cops, no private possessions, and plenty for all. Sound familiar? If you want to understand Marxists, you should think of Marx, not as a political philosopher, but as a self-anointed prophet. When Bertrand Russell met with Lenin, he unexpectedly found that Lenin regarded Marx that way:

If he [Lenin] wanted to prove a point, he thought it enough to quote a text of Marx. No fundamentalist was ever more addicted to scripture than he was to Marx. [Bertrand Russell, describing his meeting with Lenin in a 1962 interview with David Susskind]

Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures. When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels. [Russell, Bertrand (1920): "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism".]

they're usually cagey on details, but they talk about everyone living together in harmony and doing whatever it is they find personally fulfilling.

South Park nailed it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ywVHF6Lltac?si=4DBzhyjxJT3tvYc3

Many leaders lacked the pragmatic realism that other visionaries like (IMO) the Founding Fathers had. The practical answer is a lot of people were living in objectively poor conditions and were mad and wanted to throw a bomb at the system. Bomb-throwing has a habit of not stopping nicely and neatly and isn't exactly known for forward thinking. A leader of an angry mob only has so much power. At the time, they felt the existing structure was too strong and deep-rooted for anything other than revolution to fix. And you see this (horseshoe theory anyone?) from other groups, too. At risk of opening a can of worms, you can even see Trumpists use this same exact language today (the justice system needs to be blown up, the deep state is too deep where we need to wholesale fire entire swaths of the civil service, flirting with suspending the Constitution to allegedly save it somehow, etc).

Eh, the wolf is absolutely right. Either the pig needed sharpshooters, or the wolf would have had to be convinced that if he ate the pig and tried to take his stuff, the people the pig contracted with would kill him. Might may not make right, but it doesn't need to; might is sufficient unto itself.

might is sufficient unto itself.

But quantity has a quality all its own. And with quantity you need coordination, and then we're back where we are only now it's wolves quoting contract law.

And getting killed just the same. Because if the Fraternal Brotherhood of Pigs, Sheep, Deer, Bison, Elk, and Moose decide that wolves need to be trampled (presumably by the bison and moose), any contracts the wolves have are worthless.

the wolf is absolutely right

Might may not make right

I think there are multiple meanings of "right" in here, and that we have to be pretty careful with the concepts we're using for this topic.

The wolf is factually correct that private property requires force, because Communists (and other thieves and despoilers exist). You cannot trust in the bricks of contract law to willing parties to save you, absent men willing and able to do violence on your behalf.

When dealing with wolves (or when wolves deal with you), there is no 'right' in the moral sense; that only applies when you are dealing with moral actors interacting with each other. If we were talking about pigs, or other people who had signed contracts, then we can discuss if they were right or wrong for how they followed their contracts, and even if contract law is the highest form of morality and if there are some contracts that shouldn't be enforced, but (if I may delve into the spicy takes) the correct response to wolves is not negotiation, not diplomacy, but large amounts of armed men, and probably helicopters.

When dealing with wolves (or when wolves deal with you), there is no 'right' in the moral sense; that only applies when you are dealing with moral actors interacting with each other.

I sense some ambiguity here as to what entails a "moral actor". Likely, it's not just "an actor that always chooses morally right acts", for that would be a bit weird. Most theories I've encountered have some lower bar for an actor to qualify as a "moral actor", one that allows them to choose morally wrong acts, yet be considered blameworthy for such a choice and possibly subject to morally acceptable punishment. Perhaps this punishment would involve large amounts of armed men and possibly helicopters, but the actors, themselves, are usually still considered to be "moral actors".

Of course, this is all very much complicated if you take what is either a strong minority opinion or possibly a majority opinion in this place, exemplified by @self_made_human and @SSCReader, that this whole morality thing is totally relative, anyway. Who's to say whether the wolves are moral actors? Maybe they're just actors with their own morality, which is I guess just as good as anyone else's. I don't know what else to say here, other than I think that this entire subthread kind of fails to get off the ground back a few steps if this type of thing is adopted.

My opinion is that morality is not relative, but neither is it universally shared. Morality is a way for people willing and capable of positive-sum interactions to interact with each other. If you are not willing and able, you are not a moral actor, and likewise, dealing with you is a matter of pragmatism, not morality. You can have a moral war (or at least a war with moral aspects), if both sides are willing to agree on values like "Killing civilians for no significant military gain is wrong." and formalize combat to keep the fighting out of the fields and towns; when one side violates that agreement, then that is no longer a moral issue.

Again, I agree with the wolf; I agree that the wolf and those who carry water for him can and will disregard both honor and morality, and tear down every house and building to loot the rubble for themselves and their fellow-travelers.

A pretty elementary tenant of morality, or reasoning in general, is that you need to be alive to do it (or at least for other people that share your ideals to continue in your stead). If you choose to lay down and be devoured, because you feel that it's as good for the wolf to enjoy your flesh as a meal as for you to keep living in it, then that's on you. And if you hold to a morality that says that the above is the highest virtue, then that morality will end when it runs out of practitioners.

I honestly don't see this as something that can be meaningfully argued. Either you read the above comic and reach for your gun (or give fervent thanks to those around you who pick up the gun on your behalf), or you don't; if you don't, then you're not likely to share enough values with those who do to make discussing it worthwhile.

Morality is way for people who share values to coordinate and make great things. But it is only that. Absent shared values, there is only the pigs shooting every wolf, or the wolves devouring every pig.

What gives, I believe, is twofold. First, Fryer and Macdonald are obviously correct: what do you expect to happen when you implement the infernal woke idea of defunding and demoralizing the police -- and who do you expect it to happen to? Second, I submit that their silence on this issue demonstrates that woke progressives do not actually care about the health and safety of black people -- any more than Lenin cared about the health and safety of Russian proletariat. What they care about is the power-gathering narrative that white supremacy is the root of all evil. Black-on-black crime doesn't do much to advance that narrative, and so it is not of much interest to them, no matter how many black lives it takes, or how rapidly the problem grows.

Two thoughts/questions:

First, how much of this is just venality at play? You're not going to disarm the US population by taking action on a municipal level in blue states. However, you can break apart an institution and redistribute the goods it claims for itself. Taking money from cops - who the progressive laptop class have reasons to disdain, especially in an environment where their value is taken for granted - and giving it to some "security ambassador" scheme. Who gets the money? Not some entrenched police union, who are probably very good at extracting their toll at this point, but someone of your own choosing. Anything you save is a bonus. This is, if I recall correctly, explicitly the point of #Defund, just put in less flattering terms: give it to the social workers (how do they vote?).

Also, how many woke people are just utterly detached from the lives of black people who need police? I certainly was/am. Just as many people are baffled by the white working class (and their abandonment of Democrats) and mainly interact with it through articles and JD Vance books, many see blacks through a lens of ideology and/or allow some black intellectual to tell them how it is. They simply have no skin in the game and, in their spaces, it's dangerous to go the wrong way on this.

You mentioned Roland Fryer. Well, it's been noted many times that Roland Fryer actually grew up in a situation related to his research, which was one motivation for doing and publishing it despite being warned it would hurt him professionally. And who was it that allegedly tried to take him down? Claudine Gay, a child of well-off Haitian migrants who jumped straight into the US black intellectual elite. The exact sort of person for whom "black on black crime" is an embarrassing little inconvenience for her position and goals that would be best ignored. Or, allegedly, put aside to focus on the real roots of Black problems: white supremacy.

Stories I thought were funny...

My own family background was pretty different, but shit happens to everybody, and I can easily think of a personal story that's kinda funny in a black humor way now, but was nightmare fuel at the time and to most audiences.

...select company (Nurses, EMS workers, and lawyers...

Yeah, that's fair.

That last detail is quite the perfect cherry on top of a shit sundae; well (?) played, dramatic irony!

The absolutely fascinating intersection here is so interestingly captured by the reddit /r/stupidpol, who see the same setup and conclude that current racial thinking is manipulated by the wealthy to distract from the true issue, which is the struggle of the poor vs the elite. The solution? Marxism.

I guess what it comes down to is if you think the "progressive laptop class" have been gaslit and co-opted, or if it's accidental, or it's deliberate by the "true" elite, or it's the Jews all along, or any number of boogeymen. Personally, I think a lot of the movement, if we can speak of it like that, being naive but well-meaning.

Let's talk the French Revolution.

There's been much hay made in the more intellectual online right talking about how young, pretty women make culture. Funnily enough I found a reference to this in a book about the French Revolution, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre by Jonathan Israel.

Among the best-known antiphilosophes, the ex-Jesuit Luxembourgois, François-Xavier de Feller (1735–1802), dubbed this world conspiracy, as he saw it, “l’empire du philosophisme.” Philosophisme, he explained, was a mighty construct begun in the 1740s by a group of extraordinary writers who managed to impress sections of all classes with their wit and sarcasm, devising a whole new language and way of thinking, and by cunning dexterity and obscure use of terms made their ruinous ideas seem “sublime” to many. The “conspiracy” commenced with Diderot, who turned the Encyclopédie into an engine of subversion and impiety.

All the chief conspirators were, like Diderot and d’Alembert, atheistic “parasites” who lounged in cafés, insinuating, flattering, and mocking their way to domination of the salons and academies, and who eventually conquered positions of great power. Among their chief weapons, suggested Feller, was their appeal to women, especially young, pretty women susceptible to fine phrases, elegant turns of speech, witticisms, and subtle and less-than-subtle erotic suggestion. p. 45-46

It seems that even almost three centuries ago, the trope of 'witty and verbally savvy atheist convinces hot young ladies' was already in full force. And indeed, at least according to Israel, this capturing of culture by Enlightenment thinkers was the primary cause of all the revolutions, including the French Revolution. While it's stylish nowadays to argue for economic or social causes, like the infamous Boston Tea Party in the American Revolution, Israel argues that instead it really was the philosophically abstract notions of Enlightenment ideals that were the 'motor and sustaining force' of these revolutions.

Lots of modern right wingers seem to bemoan the fact that women having the right to vote or divorce or whatever has led to the downfall of society, yet it seems that even before all that young women tended to drive culture.

I wonder how much of our political and social history really just boils down to whoever wins the opinions of young, attractive women wins the Culture War?

Women are the dark matter of history. We know that they were always there. We can assume that they must have had opinions and motivations, and that they took actions in accordance with these motivations. But they didn't write much, so it is easy to simply whitewash them out of history, or alternatively to adopt a feminist reading of history that projects modern sensibilities centuries or millennia into the past in order to fill the gaps.

Still, I can't discount the possibility that revolutionary France was unique here. Charlotte Corday was 24 when she stabbed Jean-Paul Marat to death in the bathtub. You don't see pretty young women doing that kind of thing in other times and places.

The Women's March on Versailles is pretty much the only coherent place to start a history of feminism. There's really no other incident before that in recorded history where women are so obviously working within the concept of being a distinct (and powerful) political group.

I would question whether it's really the young and attractive in particular; if you think about the Longhouse discourse, it supposed that it's the older matriarchs who wield power.

A model I've been playing with: imagine society as a graph, with individuals as nodes that create information. Information flows through edges in the graph, with more information flowing through those edges with greater weights. The nodes are labeled with either M or F, about half and half. The F nodes are more highly connected and have edges with greater weights (in this hypothetical, at least), while the M nodes are more sparsely connected and dominated by a single strong edge to an F node.

With this structure, although M and F nodes create approximately the same amount of information, the information that actually reaches any particular node will have passed through far more F nodes than M nodes. And, if you made that graph more highly connected, it makes the ratio even more disproportionate.

What do people really mean when they talk about “left” and “right” politics?

The terms “right” and “left emerged from when in the French revolution, the group that sat on the right side of the Constituent Assembly were aligned with religion and the king, and the group that sat on the left side was aligned with democracy and secularization. The left-right spectrum has since endured, despite how often many of the parties we call “far right” have nothing to do with monarchism, and many of the parties we call “far left” are authoritarian and anti-democratic themselves. Many people have tried to create consistent frameworks to explain why party A is on the left and party B is on the right, but none that I have seen have actually consistently worked. Some people have tried to rectify the errors by adding more dimensions- such as “horseshoe theory” adding a vertical dimension so that the far left and far right loop back to being similar, the political compass that has an authoritarian axis which which separates right-libertarians from right-authoritarians and same with the left, or even the 8-Axis compass which like the name suggests has 8 different dimensions. In Part 1 of this comment I will explain my theory, and in Part 2 I will point out the many failure points of alternate theories.

Part 1

I think none of those theories really properly explain the left-right spectrum, and they all have flaws at capturing what the common person means when they talk about left-right. When trying to determine rules that capture the popular conception of the left-right spectrum, your definition should align with how it’s actually used. If your definition tries to say the Nazis are far left, or that the Democrats are center-right, it automatically fails as a definition of the popular conception. If you have to say, “Uh, akshually, Party X falls here on the spectrum”, then you are automatically wrong, because the popular conception is the ultimate arbiter of truth, not your definition. Your definition is just a map that is trying to capture the territory. Maybe your definition could still be useful as some other type of political spectrum model that identifies some parties as authoritarian vs libertarian, or good vs evil, or whatever, but it doesn’t work for capturing them as left vs right as popularly conceived.

How I think the left-right spectrum works is that it captures which parties are willing to cooperate with each other. For example, say we have this spectrum of parties elected to a parliament: Communists(far left), democratic socialists(left), liberals(center-left), conservatives(center-right), nationalists(right), fascists(far-right). A pretty standard spread going from the far left to far right. But why are the fascists far right while the communists are far left? Both groups have many similarities- they both want to abolish elections, both want to nationalize many or all industries under government control, both want to repress free speech. My thesis is that they make up opposite ends because they are the last parties that would be willing to positively cooperate in the parliament. On any bill that parliament passed, if the fascists and communists both vote yes, I guarantee that every party between them will also have voted yes. The far left and far right may have similarities, but you’ll never actually see them vote together on a bill like “Introduce new corporate taxes to fund the military” unless every party between them also voted yes. Maybe there will be some bill that the entire parliament from far left to far right cooperates on like a bill banning murdering puppies, meaning both the far left and far right vote yes together on it, but always all the more moderate parties will be voting yes too. But that rule only applies to positive cooperation- they might negatively cooperate against a bill from the centrist parties. For example, perhaps all the centrist parties want to pass a bill that will enable the nation to take out a large loan from the World Bank- but both the communists and fascists don’t like that sort of international debt to foreigners, and both vote against the bill. That sort of negative cooperation that is characterized by preventing action is allowed, and is even common, according to my theory.

This does not just apply to the farthest left and farthest right- it applies to every party in the parliament. The liberals and the communists will not cooperate positively on something unless the democratic socialists also cooperate positively. The liberals and democratic socialists cooperating positively does not guarantee the communists will also cooperate positively- it just enables it as a possibility. My theory is not about distance between parties either- for example, it’s not impossible in my theory for there to be a communist, socialist, liberal, conservative coalition, despite the conservatives being far closer to the nationalists and even the fascists than they are to the communists.

In more formal logic, you can express it as, If two parties vote yes together on a motion, Then every party between the two parties on the left-right spectrum will also vote yes on the motion. It can also be worded as “All parties that vote together on a motion form a continuous line of neighbors on the political spectrum”. In the real world, it’s useful to call a party “far left” or “center right” or what have you in order to describe which other parties they’re most likely to cooperate with. And whether a party is left or right is entirely relative- in the early 1800s Prussia, someone calling for a constitutional monarchy might be a radical leftist, but today would be a radical rightists, for example. Also, you can fairly easily predict which parties someone will be more willing to cooperate with even before they're elected- that lets you call a candidate who has never actually been elected far right or far left, by imagining who they'll be more likely to vote with.

Now, I was a bit extreme in my language above- you can probably find some examples of the right and left cooperating without centrists. Whenever I said guarantee, it was an exaggeration. Political science doesn’t have “hard” laws like how physics does after all. But examples of the left and right positively cooperating without centrists also cooperating are extremely rare, far more rare than you’d expect given how some parties on both extremes have seemingly very similar policies. For example, left libertarians and right libertarians both hate police, or nationalists and socialists both want the government to control economic industry. Yet you will not see such parties cooperating to pass bills on those topics at the same time as centrist parties vote against those policies. And on the other side, parties that you might think have relatively little in common like libertarians and conservatives often manage to find a lot of common ground to cooperate on. Also, this only applies to domestic politics. It can have some influence on geopolitics- I think governments generally prefer cooperating with other governments who are on a similar place to them on the political spectrum. But it’s not a requirement for cooperation like how it is domestically. As one example, the far left Soviets and far right Nazis cooperated to partition the relatively centrist Poland between them.

The phrase “It’s impossible to prove a negative” is untrue, it is often possible to prove negatives. But, sometimes it can be extremely hard to prove negatives. To prove that more extreme parties don’t positively cooperate with more moderate parties, I’d have to dig through all the records of voting history and just empirically show it doesn’t happen. I don’t have tools to do that and don’t particularly care to, but I invite everyone to present counter-examples- they probably exist, but I expect they’ll be generally quite rare. The closest I found was in 2015 the Greek far left and far right cooperating against the EU who wanted Greece to repay its debt, but even that from what I read looked more like negative cooperation where they just together refused to cooperate with the EU as opposed to work together to accomplish new things.

Part 2- Other theories

This section is less important but I want to elaborate on how I disagree with other positions.

I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right. For example, it doesn’t explain libertarians, who tend to be Republican but are fiercely anti-police. Or how leftists want a strong(hierarchical) government that will control speech to ban hatred. The hierarchy theory of left vs right fails to explain how the terms are used in the real world.

Next, horse shoe theory. This theory states that along the extremes, the parties become more similar to each other, becoming increasingly authoritarian. Again, it doesn’t adequately explain libertarians, such as Milei in Argentina. He’s in many ways extreme and farther right than most politicians, but he’s farther right in a economic way, where he supports liberalization of markets, not in a way where he wants to consolidate all government power in his personal hands. He’s not far right in the sense that he’s a nationalist he promotes chauvinistic Argentinian superiority either- in fact he’s talked about how he’s considered converting to Judaism and has a lot of respect for Israel, something very different from the anti-Jewish stance many others on the far right take. Horseshoe theory fails to explain to explain how the terms are used in the real world.

The Political Compass. Probably the best known way to plot parties relative to each other after the standard linear model and horseshoe theory. It was original created by leftists and was extremely badly calibrated to try to trick people into thinking they were on the left- placing Obama in authoritarian right but if you actually put Obama’s positions into the compass you’re placed solidly libertarian left, for example. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden is even more far right and even more authoritarian, further demonstrating their bias since by their measures Biden would almost certainly be farther left than Obama. But, ignoring its creators bias, could the actual model be useful if you just recalibrated it? Maybe for some purposes, but not as an objectively accurate model for placing parties. It misses too many axis. What’s more economically left, a Republican party that wants to enact higher tariffs or a Democrat party that wants to enact higher corporate taxes? Is a government that’s a dictatorship but operates with a very light hand more or less authoritarian than an extremely democratic government that controls everything its people does? Do ISIS, the Nazis, and Bismarck really all belong together in a similar space despite their obvious extreme differences?

The 8 Axis test. Similar issues to the political compass, although it’s a bit more fine tuned, at the expense of being more unwieldy. It still doesn’t solve where a party really falls if it falls at opposite extremes within the same axis- e.g an autocratic government that doesn’t get involved in people’s personal lives, or a Georgist government that wants an extreme 100% land value tax, but that’s the only tax. You would have to add even more axis to address every nuance, but then it becomes even more unwieldy, and it becomes entirely divorced from what people actually mean when they say “right” or “left”.

My theory solely describes parties as well. I think ideologies are something separate. Ideologies have a lot of connections to parties, but I think cannot be actually properly mapped to the left or right. For one, as I said earlier, the degree of left-right depends on context- an ideologies position in early 1800s Prussia is completely different than the same ideology’s position today. When people try to extend the left-right spectrum out of domestic politics, they usually do it by kind of guessing at “If that ideology/foreign party did have a member elected to my legislature, which domestic party would they be most closely aligned with?”, but that method breaks down in manner ways. Also, where a party falls on a left-right spectrum in many ways in practice is determined by the personal relationships of party members to the members of the other parties, and the sorts of aesthetics the party likes to use. For example, do they invoke protecting the working class or do they invoke protecting Christianity to justify shutting down immigration- the same policy, with merely different aesthetics, can put them at opposite ends of the left-right.

To measure how likely parties are to cooperate in absolute terms, not just relative terms, you need a different model than mine. I think Nate Silver’s triangle model of Socialism, Conservatism, and Leftism has a good ratio of simplicity to explanatory power. I think to be more accurate too, you could change it to a triangle where the corners are wanting Equality of Opportunity(liberalism), Equality of Outcome(socialism), and openly desiring Hierarchy(conservatism). But that’s getting into an entirely different discussion that I’m much less confident on than my core theory.

Do You think I’m Wrong? Prove it with one easy test!

Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it. You do not need many examples at all- obviously by any theory they should have little in common. But most theories do posit they do have a little common and therefore should cooperate a little- I assert they do not cooperate at all on positive actions.

Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it.

Several people have cited examples from countries with multiparty systems, I guess it was proved.

I think the attempts to come up with consistent "theories of left and right" fail because ... while it is not fully arbitrary random whether any particular party of random time period and historical circumstances is considered left or right, it is a result of partially random path-dependent process of self-sorting to tribal groups. People assign these labels to themselves and others according to what makes sense to them at the time. Then the next generation self-sorts again, in updated circumstances. Their thinking may have been influenced by systematic theories of politics and ideological treatises, so there is some amount of consistency (to the extent the systematic theories were self-consistent) ... but surprisingly often, the rank-and-file did not read the lengthy treatises. Sometimes the popular theories people acted upon turn out to be poor at modelling world, and lead unanticipated outcomes. If the process is not governed by systematic laws, attempts to draw systematic theories to explain the process will fail.

The Netherlands were governed by "Purple coalitions" including the left-wing PvdA and the right-liberal VVD but excluding the Christian centrist CDA from 1994-2002 and 2012-2017. The 1994-2002 Purple coalition explicitly excluded the CDA becuase the VVD, PvdA and left-liberal D66 wanted them out of office. The coalition passed significant social-left legislation opposed by the CDA including the legalisation of prostitution, gay marriage and euthanasia. (The 2012-7 purple coalition is a less good example because the only reason the CDA and D66 were excluded was that the VVD and PvdA didn't need their votes.)

This one, of course, makes perfect sense under a political compass style model - the PvdA is economic left, social centre, the VVD is economic right, social centre, the D66 is economic centre, social left, and the CDA is economic centre, social right. So PvdA-VVD-D66 is a social centre-left coalition which is all over the place on economics.

If you want to go full horseshoe, there are two important examples of the Communist KPD co-operating with the far right in Weimar Germany - the KPD had been ordered by Moscow to oppose the centre-left SDP as a priority. The 1931 Prussian referendum was an attempt to recall the SPD-led State government in Prussia which was supported by the Stahlhelm (an anti-democratic right-wing veteran's organisation tied to the DNVP), the Nazis and the KPD. There was a transport strike in Berlin in November 1932 where Nazi and KPD goon squads worked together to protect strikers and intimidate scabs.

I also endorse the modern German examples downthread.

Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it.

Both far left and far right would likely agree on official policies of banning books and jailing opponents of the regime, whereas the middle left and middle right would likely oppose those policies as policies. Even in the case of Trump, I think the middle left is convinced that he broke the law and would not sanction a policy of government jailing opponents "without cause."

Both far left and far right would likely agree on official policies of banning books and jailing opponents of the regime,

Sure, but they probably wouldn’t agree on which books, and which opponents.

Yes, they'd both support those policies, yet they would never actually pass a bill together with those policies. That disconnect from the extremes supporting the same positions but never actually working together is the core point I'm making.

There are states where ethnicity matters and linearizing different interest groups will (a) not always be possible and (b) result in some ordering which is drastically different from from the general usage of "left" or "right".

I mean, look at the Knesset. I am not an expert in Israeli politics, but Wikipedia describes Ra'am as "an Islamist and conservative political party". They sit on the far left, but apart from ethnic concerns would probably belong right of the center -- where none of the Zionist parties would have them in a coalition.

(Of course, another anomaly would be the dirty trick when labor tried to form a coalition with the ultra-orthodox, but you can argue that the fate of that attempt is mostly proof that cutting out a middle party on the political spectrum does not work.)

In Germany (where I know the politics a bit better and they are simpler -- the Bundestag does not have a zillion different shades of blue and red like the Knesset on Wikipedia), a counterexample would be the Grosse Koalition.

German major parties go left to right (WP Bundestag colors in parenthesis):

  • Linke -- far left (violet)
  • SPD -- social democrats (red)
  • Greens -- eco, anti-nuclear (green)
  • FDP -- economic liberals (yellow)
  • CDU/CSU -- conservative, slightly Christian (black/darker blue -- they always form one voting block)
  • AFD -- far right, anti-immigration, some fascists (lighter blue)

(This is how they are arranged in the Bundestag, there is a case to be made that the Greens are actually left of the SPD.)

Take the 2005 Bundestag. Nobody wants to form federal coalitions with the Linke or the AFP (so far), so the following would get you a majority:

  • SPD, Green, FDP: called "Ampel" (traffic light)
  • CDU/CSU, Green, FDP, called Jamaica (for the colors of the flag)
  • SPD and CDU/CSU, called grosse Koalition

Per your "arranged by compatibility" argument, one of the first two options would be favored, covering as little as the political spectrum as possible. Even if you agree with me that the Greens really ought to be placed on the left of the SPD, an "Ampel" coalition would seem preferable.

The reason that they ended up having a grosse Koalition instead was that while seated next to each other, FDP and Greens had major policy differences. These differences are not well reflected on the traditional left-right-spectrum. The Greens wanted to shut down nuclear power plants, impose a speed limit on the Autobahn and generally have stricter environmental standards. The FDP wanted none of these. In the end, it was easier for SDP and CDU/CSU to compromise than to reconcile FDP and Greens. Three out of the four Merkel cabinets were such coalitions (the other was CDU/CSU+FDP).

To be fair, getting the FDP into the coalition boat would have been possible policy-wise without to many concessions, but other considerations made this unfavorable. (At an election, the previous administration is mostly not seen positive. Having the stink of culpability in the failures of the previous administration on you has to be balanced with being able to point your constituents to specific policy wins your ministers accomplished. This means that you generally go for the minimum viable majorities -- and the grosse Koalition already had a solid majority.)

I've always thought the FDP was to the right of the CSU.

In a political compass model, the FDP was to the right of the CDU on economic issues and to their left on social issues. (The CSU is a Bavarian party which has caucused with the CDU since forever, but is the farthest right of all the respectable parties on both economic and social issues because Bavaria is the Texas of Germany).

The fact that it is easy to explain the difference between the FDP and CDU but hard to given an unambiguous answer to "which is more right-wing?" is itself evidence against the 1D left-right model.

The FDP is kinda libertarian. On economic issues, I would place them to the right of the CDU/CSU.

But on purely social issues, they are clearly left of the CDU/CSU. For example, the Ampel recently legalized cannabis (with some caveats). This is not a position currently compatible with the CDU/CSU.

I mean, look at the Knesset. I am not an expert in Israeli politics, but Wikipedia describes Ra'am as "an Islamist and conservative political party". They sit on the far left, but apart from ethnic concerns would probably belong right of the center -- where none of the Zionist parties would have them in a coalition.

(Of course, another anomaly would be the dirty trick when labor tried to form a coalition with the ultra-orthodox, but you can argue that the fate of that attempt is mostly proof that cutting out a middle party on the political spectrum does not work.)

Ra'am working more closely with the left parties despite having more in common with the conservative parties from a naive view is exactly what I'm describing. My model accepts that as normal behaviour, whereas most models would need to add a bunch of epicycles to explain it away.

Per your "arranged by compatibility" argument, one of the first two options would be favored, covering as little as the political spectrum as possible. Even if you agree with me that the Greens really ought to be placed on the left of the SPD, an "Ampel" coalition would seem preferable.

I agree that this is a solid counter-example that goes against my model. But as you say, when you factor in voters eventually growing upset with the ruling coalition resulting in some real politik, it makes sense that the cost isn't worth the benefit for small parties. Did the FDP still mostly vote with the Grosse Koalition even if they weren't officially part of it, or did they do a lot of protest no votes?

The problem with classifying Ra'am as far-left is that this is that it flies very much in the face of common usage.

I guess German opposition parties vote against bills proposed by the governing coalition. Perhaps more so if the bill would contain a lot of messy details to nitpick over, and less so if the bill reflects a wide consensus in the population.

In times of stable majorities, the votes of the opposition do not matter for the outcome. It is mostly public perception "How could you vote for this?!" vs "How could you vote against this?!". One way to square the circle is for opposition parties to introduce their own bill -- which generally won't pass, of course. This signals "we care about this topic" without any risk of getting blamed for negative outcomes of the coalition bill.

I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right.

I think the problem boils down to the fact that leftism is well-defined: its fundamental, terminal value is equality, or the absence of hierarchy. Given two hypothetical positions, it is therefore easy to determine which is more leftist. For instance, consider answers to this question: What special duties do you owe to your own family member, or your countryman, or a member of your race, as opposed to a random stranger? The pure leftist answer is “none whatsoever.” Or: To what extent should a person’s merits or hard work or whatever lead to increased social status? The pure leftist answer is “not at all.”

Rightism, on the other hand, is not well-defined. In practice, it just means “something other than leftism.” To the extent that a position deviates from pure leftism, it is more or less rightist. This is why George Washington and Hitler are both considered right-wing, even though their policy positions (and terminal values) are not very consonant.

You can create a political compass with an arbitrary number of axes, but so long as only leftism is well-defined, determining how right-wing a position is only means calculating the geometric distance between that position and pure leftism. There could be an infinite number of value systems that value something other than equality and that have nothing in common with one another other than the fact that they are not leftist. Hitler is considered more right-wing than Washington because his policy positions were, in aggregate, more not-leftist than Washington’s, but he was not “like Washington, just more of it.”

I’ve never found left and right, or even the four quadrants system to be really useful in describing political ideologies. When you try to simplify too much you end up suggesting that very different things are the same. Birds and dragonflies both have wings, they just have nothing else in common. I think political ideologies are best described by using aggregate similarities between systems. Confucius believed in hierarchy, but he also believed in the powerful not overstepping their authority and not abusing power and so on. He believed that education at least in theory should be available to anyone. I think we’d agree that this is a basic meritocracy. But I don’t think he’d believe in our system of economics or government. Cicero talks in The Laws about how laws should be aimed at the common good and not favor some over others. Would he count as a liberal?

I tend to see conservative and much of the right as trying to fix problems by looking to the past and traditional structures: classical economics, traditional family structure, traditional modes of behavior, and so on. And the liberal side seems to mostly want to either artificially reduce or eliminate the traditional system. They want a stronger welfare state because why should we be bound to the economy and have to produce something useful to live? Or have to get married or not dress in strange ways, or not twerk in public. Hitler wasn’t a classical economics enthusiast, he didn’t believe that one should be judged on the merits. Washington did (slavery excepted).

The pure leftist answer is “none whatsoever.”

In theory, maybe, but in practice this runs into many, many problems.

First- do you evaluate ideologies on what they claim they want, or how they are in practice? I.e, take Stalinists who say they to totally remove hierarchy once capitalism is totally defeated, but until they have a very strict hierarchy with the Party on top. Are they more or less leftist than social democrats who want to remove most of hierarchy but are still okay with parents controlling children and the hardest workers having some more money than people on welfare, and who actually implement anti-hierarchical policies? It's a rare person who'll call Biden farther left than Stalin, but I consider Stalin far more hierarchical.

Second- Removing hierarchies in practice

It makes sense to remove explicit legal hierarchies, like ones that say you must obey a king, or that the government will not allow you to do drugs and if you do the police will throw you in prison. That is coherent as an anti-hierarchy position. But removing voluntary hierarchies does not. If two people sign a contract, such that Alice is the employer of Bob and Bob must do what Alice says, and in exchange Alice pays Bob a salary, with either party being free to cancel the contract at any time, that is hierarchical according to leftists. So far leftists would want to stop that. But the only way to stop it is to institute another hierarchy- some sort of government and some sort of police force to declare it illegal and to enforce its illegality. Therefore, a "pure leftist" is a contradiction. And I expect in reality, you wouldn't even be able to get close to being a pure leftist before running into significant issues.

First- do you evaluate ideologies on what they claim they want, or how they are in practice? […] It's a rare person who'll call Biden farther left than Stalin, but I consider Stalin far more hierarchical.

Since we are speaking pragmatically, I would apply the rule you set forth in your original post:

If you have to say, “Uh, akshually, Party X falls here on the spectrum”, then you are automatically wrong, because the popular conception is the ultimate arbiter of truth, not your definition.

Thus, Stalin is to the left of Biden.

Consider two tribes: Tribe A, which has a norm that the chief and his buddies have the power of life and death over everyone else, and will apply it according to their private notion of what constitutes justice, and Tribe B, which has a system of courts and laws and a norm that no tribesman may be deprived of life or property without due process. Applying the distance-from-pure-leftism metric, we can see that the norm in Tribe B is closer than Tribe A to theoretical pure leftism (where all would be treated equally, regardless of merit or station), and that leftists would prefer Tribe B over Tribe A.

It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that a commitment to justice (by which I mean “the giving of what is deserved”) and due process is therefore a feature of leftism; rather, in historical context, it is just an intermediate, instrumental goal. While Tribe B might be stable, with most members adhering to its norms, the leftmost elements in Tribe B will be dissatisfied with the unequal outcomes (even if those outcomes are just). They will eventually start to wring their hands about the disparate impact of the justice system (either by race or wealth or what have you) or maybe how society actually creates criminals and so they shouldn’t be punished, but only helped, and they will begin to abandon the norm of the pursuit of justice / due process once it is in the rear-view mirror on the road to increased equality / abolition of hierarchy. The historical Tribe B revolutionaries who dethroned the chief and established the courts in the first place — leftists themselves, likely, in relation to the norms in their day — will eventually be recast by the purer leftists of the future as only slightly less noxious right-wingers than the chief himself, so that the march to total equality — the true terminal goal — can continue.

The Social Democrats in your example are not as committed to equality as the Communists. They are like the Tribe B moderates in that they ascribe some ultimate, non-instrumental value to competing values, such as personal liberty, and therefore, they are not as purely leftist. The Communists were, at least ostensibly, aiming for greater equality than the Social Democrats. If they thought they could get there through liberalism and democracy, they might go that route, but the police state route is acceptable, too.

It makes sense to remove explicit legal hierarchies, like ones that say you must obey a king, or that the government will not allow you to do drugs and if you do the police will throw you in prison. That is coherent as an anti-hierarchy position. But removing voluntary hierarchies does not. If two people sign a contract, such that Alice is the employer of Bob and Bob must do what Alice says, and in exchange Alice pays Bob a salary, with either party being free to cancel the contract at any time, that is hierarchical according to leftists. So far leftists would want to stop that. But the only way to stop it is to institute another hierarchy- some sort of government and some sort of police force to declare it illegal and to enforce its illegality. Therefore, a "pure leftist" is a contradiction.

To my mind, the reason that leftists are opposed to hierarchies is not because they dislike organization, but because they abhor the notion that one person should have greater social status or prestige than another. The underlying feeling is something like: Bob should not even be able to pay Alice a salary because he ought not to have more money than her in the first place. Even if it were accepted that the reason Bob has more money is because he was born more talented than Alice and his labor is therefore more valuable, that is not Alice’s fault, and she should be made equal to Bob. How exactly this is going to work is typically left as an exercise to the reader.

And I expect in reality, you wouldn't even be able to get close to being a pure leftist before running into significant issues.

We are in agreement here — systems such as Communism are necessarily to the right of theoretical pure leftism and yet have failed miserably — but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Very committed leftists would (incorrectly, in my opinion) resolve your paradox by asserting that once we have more equality, things will just magically work out, and we won’t need the police anymore.

My characterization of “pure leftism” is just a theoretical ideal — a single point in political space, useful for evaluating how leftist a particular position is. The fact that leftism, beyond a certain extreme, is probably unworkable in the real world is not a criticism of the measurement system.

Even if it were accepted that the reason Bob has more money is because he was born more talented than Alice and his labor is therefore more valuable, that is not Alice’s fault, and she should be made equal to Bob.

Maybe you'll just dismiss this as another "left as an exercise to the reader", but let's say we forget money, and directly consider exchange of services. Let's say Alice really want a servant, like the previous scenario, but her society has abolished currency so she has no money to pay Bob with. She can still pay with services or goods she crafts herself. Maybe she's a brilliant poet that can write a poem that can move Bob to tears in five minutes, and Bob happily embraces being her full time servant in exchange for one such poem a day. Would leftists somehow try to shut down that moneyless hierarchy too? You can replace "poem" for anything too- maybe she cooks excellent meals, maybe she has a green thumb and can grow far more produce than any other individual, maybe she's a brilliant engineer who can design and build an entire house by herself.

And of course, once you allow for that sort of hierarchy, you by necessity allow for much more complex ones. Perhaps Alice pays Bob with a fraction of her own labour, and also employs a couple other people like Charlie and David the same way, all of them pledging 8 hours of their days to her. But she then has each of them use 4 of those 8 hours to do services for another 3 even less productive people to get those 3 people to do her 8 hours of service a day- and so on until she has a network of hundreds working for her. All voluntary, all without money or even necessarily any private property at all, yet without a doubt a hierarchy.

My characterization of “pure leftism” is just a theoretical ideal — a single point in political space, useful for evaluating how leftist a particular position is. The fact that leftism, beyond a certain extreme, is probably unworkable in the real world is not a criticism of the measurement system.

My point is that that single point in theoritical space is non-existent. Unless you mean the point is just how much people pledge themselves to the idea of "no hierarchy" with no relation to how anti-hierarchical they are in real life or even how hierarchical their utopian vision is. In which case I think that is a coherent measurement system to compare parties by, but also a pretty useless measurement system that doesn't tell you anything practical. Why should anyone care how much lip service a party pays to "no hierarchy"?

The point of my method is to apply a metric that enables us to answer this question: given two political positions, which is more leftist?

Let’s suppose that we live in a society like the one that your Alice lives in, where currency has been abolished and Alice has a network of hundreds of laborers who work for her, all happily, freely, and voluntarily, either (a) in direct exchange for her poems, or (b) in exchange for the labor of people who work in direct exchange for her poems. Alice’s poems are a form of wealth, and you correctly note that a hierarchy has been created, with Alice at the top. She likely enjoys a great deal of social status and prestige in this hypothetical society.

Now let’s suppose that there are two competing political parties: the Yellows and the Pinks, who take the following positions:

Yellows: “It is fine that Alice has such status and prestige — this system of voluntary association incentivizes the production of her poems, a valuable resource; it allows everyone involved the freedom to do what they like, and it makes society wealthier while directly harming nobody. It is nothing like the bad old days when people had to work for wages to survive.”

Pinks: “What right does Alice have to put on such airs? It is an accident of fate that she has this peculiar capacity to produce beautiful poetry. Morally, she has a duty to willingly share this gift with the community instead of exploiting it. We find it very problematic indeed that good people should be obliged to labor for hours every day only to receive a poem that takes her mere minutes — in the comfort of her well-appointed living quarters, we might add — to put forth. The watchword of the day should be: poems from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs, with special privileges for none. Alice should be set to producing poems all day for the benefit of all; her needs will be adequately taken care of in return, the same deal as everyone else. She is not better than anyone else.”

Now, using the distance-from-pure-leftism metric, it is pretty clear which of the parties is more leftist.

My claims are (1) that this metric can generally be pretty handily applied to any two political positions addressing the same issue, and will predict with good accuracy which will be perceived as more leftist, and (2) given a political position that is not equivalent to pure leftism, I can use the metric to construct a position on that same issue that is recognizably further to the left of it.

Your pinks party does sound rather leftist after that one paragraph. If you added another paragraph with what the Pinks would actually do about it, I think they'd sound a lot less leftist, since any sort of enforcement mechanism would be a hierarchy. I don't think the party that suggests throwing people in jail for trading poems would be recognizably more leftist than a party that is willing to just stick to currency abolition but otherwise lets people live free.

Your framework also doesn't work well for comparing parties that are different amounts of leftist on different issues. Lets say there's a country of Examplestan, in which everyone is a fervent follower of Examplestani Leftism. They all work hard to make Examplestan a better place, they don't use any currency and simply ask for goods and services but never ask for more than they need, no one ever coerces anyone or creates any sort of hierarchy within Examplestan. However, they think every human outside of Examplestan is less than a worm. They don't expand past their borders, but anyone who enters Examplestan from the outside is either shot dead or enslaved because of their ethnic impurity. Is Examplestan far right or far left?

You've already said your model fails at describing how far right parties are, at best it can try to calculate how not-leftist a party is. But it also cannot accurately assess any party which are left on some issues and right on other issues, since it can't asses the issues they're right-wing on. Which is many parties.

Where would it place something like Ba'athism? Or Peronism?

In my model, you simply would not try to compare them to Democrats or Republicans or Stalinists or Nazis, at least not in an international context. You can try to guess where a Peronist or Stalinist or Ba'athist would fall if you brought them into the context US election, or brought the US parties into the context of a specific foreign election, but you couldn't compare them in a purely international context. If you do compare them in an international context, that goes outside my model.

And I think trying to model them in an international context is a flawed endeavor doomed to fail, personally. There's a reason why people argue about whether Peronists and Ba'athists are far left or far right or if you need to bring a political compass in it whatever- I don't think it is possible to compare parties in an international way. I think people intuitively use the principles I've laid out when modeling domestic politics, without consciously knowing what those principles are. And people try to apply the same principles to international politics to come up for a label for Ba'athists or Peronists, but they can't draw an intuitive conclusion and start disagreeing with each other and even themselves about where such parties fall. They start making up rules like yours and try to calculate how anti-hierarchy a party is in sum, or a right-libertarian might say the more pro-freedom a party is in sum the more right-wing they are, or they might use some other model. Whatever set of rules they use, it doesn't work well, because it's an impossible to task.

Like we agreed as a guiding principle, any definition should match how people actually use the terms left and right. If people call the same party both left and right, then it's impossible for any definition that assigns each party to a single point on a line to function. I don't know whether people inside Argentina call Peronists left or right, but whatever they call Peronists inside their country, I'm sure it's internally consistent, although perhaps only for a single election and are not consistent across time even within Argentina. Same with Ba'athists in Syria.

This reminds me of Bryan Caplan's framing: "The left hates markets, and the right hates the left", in that a market creates natural hierarchies. The left doesn't like that, and wants to correct it toward equality as much as possible.

I have my doubts about Caplan's framing, mainly because I consider my self an "economically literate" left-leaning person, and I think markets are great at a bunch of things, but I'm also aware of famous market failures where government intervention was useful.

Bank runs are a good example of a market failure that I think the central government is well-equipped to fix with things like FDIC insurance. I'm aware of proposals by committed, principled libertarians for how we could solve bank runs through market mechanisms, but I also think that when something like FDIC insurance has worked reasonably well for the last 90+ years, it seems silly to abandon a form of government intervention that works just because there's some fancy mechanism design that accomplishes the same thing through market means.

I think a lot of market fundamentalists are guilty of "infinite frictionless plane" or "spherical cow" type reasoning. Yes, in a society of rational agents, with perfect information, no transaction costs, and perfect ability to insure against negative externalities, we can arrive at Pareto efficient outcomes through market mechanisms. But that seems to ignore that humans aren't rational agents, we don't have perfect information, there often are transaction costs, and we don't have insurance for all possible negative externalities.

We should use markets where they're empirically known to work, and use government intervention where markets empirically veer the furthest from realizing the ideal models used by economists. I'm okay with using government intervention to prop up and support the market, if it gets us closer to the economist's utopia of Pareto efficient outcomes, since even that sounds like it would be an improvement upon the world where we actually live as far as distribution of resources goes.

Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it.

The many documented examples of Senators Hawley and Sanders voting together against the center. Sometimes they're joined by Cruz, Warren, etc.

The many documented examples of Senators Hawley and Sanders voting together against the center. Sometimes they're joined by Cruz, Warren, etc.

I acknowledged that as negative cooperation. It is common. I am saying postive cooperation is shockingly rare or even non-existent. Have Hawley and Sanders ever voted yes together on a bill that the centrists voted no on?

For example, it doesn’t explain libertarians, who tend to be Republican but are fiercely anti-police.

I think it can; libertarians are pro hierarchies, but natural hierarchies. They consider police to be an intrusion on natural hierarchies of force. Those who are stronger or better armed, or can afford the loyalty of stronger or better armed people to defend them deserve the better protection/law enforcement. To them, the police is like a communist state trying to make the protection/law enforcement market egalitarian.

That seems like a bit of a reach to me. Leftists don't usually want to abolish literally every hierarchy either. And it doesn't explain why authoritarian communists are on the left side of the political spectrum, since those states involve a very strict hierarchy.

Authoritarian communists will never get there(because it's pie in the sky ridiculosity), but they'll happily tell you that the increasing power to the state is about abolishing the hierarchy between men.

And Christians will tell you we'll be all equal in Heaven. Many democratic socialists who don't want a revolutions, just socialized control of industry, want a very hierarchical burearacracy that must be obeyed. Organized crime tends to be extremely hierarchical- are they all farther right than the Nazis? There are examples of parties all over the spectrum that don't fit the pattern of "less hierarchy = more left, more hierarchy = more right". Especially when you play fast and loose about artificial hierarchies vs natural hierarchies mean.

There are plenty of Christians who will tell you that, no, we will not all be equal in heaven, and some will be closer to God than others. In fact, angels, who are by definition normally in heaven, are in Christian thought held to exist in a particularly strict hierarchy.

That's without even addressing the elephant in the living room that heaven is inherently unequal because God(duh) and also some don't get in.

"Closer" is probably the wrong word. God will be as close to the glorified in heaven as he can be; if it were otherwise there could be no salvation.

The best description of heaven in the saint-venerating Churches comes from St. Therese of Liseaux, in Story of a Soul:

To this dearly loved sister I confided my most intimate thoughts; she cleared up all my doubts. One day I expressed surprise that God does not give an equal amount of glory to all the elect in Heaven—I was afraid that they would not all be quite happy. She sent me to fetch Papa’s big tumbler, and put it beside my tiny thimble, then, filling both with water, she asked me which seemed the fuller. I replied that one was as full as the other—it was impossible to pour more water into either of them, for they could not hold it. In this way Pauline made it clear to me that in Heaven the least of the Blessed does not envy the happiness of the greatest; and so, by bringing the highest mysteries down to the level of my understanding, she gave my soul the food it needed.

In other words, all the saints are full of God, but some are capable of being fuller than others. And one among them is so full of grace that she is "more spacious than the heavens" (in any other context, a grievous insult) and so densely filled with God that he took physical form in her womb.

Maybe Christians have to sadly stay in the far right category then. But would a type of Theist that believes in something nearly identical to Christian theocracy, with the tweak that they think God is just the spiritual union of all humanity's souls and that we are all equal in Heaven(and that everyone goes to Heaven), get to be called far leftist? Again, in the material world, their actual policies are identical to something like Byzantine Rome.

Many Christians do believe this. Interestingly, they also tend to be on the left politically. Make of that what you will.

You've made a good description of political extremism, but not it seems to me the left/right divide.

There are further complications: The discrete policy positions are completely untethered to the right or the left. Is gun control right or left? Well, it depends a lot on whether you're talking about France in 1790 or the US in the 2000s. Is war right or left? Depends on the war! Is trade protectionism right or left? You get the idea.

Then you have the problem that political coalitions are shifting constantly, pressure groups, identities rise and fall etc. "Gay" was a big political identity for twenty years or so. Black people shifted parties, and will do so again, so which one is the racists? The liberal assimilationist jews are on one side, but the nationalistic hardcore jews are on the other! Which group hates the jews?

I think Sailer's "leapfrogging loyalty" remains the best predictor of what is meant by "right" and "left" so far, but it's far from perfect.

I think Sailer's "leapfrogging loyalty" remains the best predictor of what is meant by "right" and "left" so far, but it's far from perfect.

I'm a fan of Scott's Thrive vs Survive theory. It is true that it's kind of hard to construct a good definition of "left" and "right" that perfectly encompasses all the ways we use the term.

My theory does not apply to parties positions on policies, identities, or individual's positions on policies. You'd need another theory to describe all that. My theory is solely about how parties actually behave relative to each other, and what to label parties as a whole.

Political coalitions shift, maybe one day the socialists prefer working with the liberals, and the next they prefer the communists. But the core of my theory is that no matter have much coalitions shift, you'll never see a discontinuous coalition that excludes centrists while including both the right and left. At least not a coalition that ever actually ever passes anything.

It's not an unified theory of everything political. But I think it is useful. It solves whether a party should be called far left, center left, centrist, center right, or far right. That's an argument people often have, and I don't think anyone needs to argue about it anymore. And it makes the observation that parties across the political spectrum will be very reluctant to actually cooperate no matter how much they might agree on specific issues like gun control, which is something useful to keep in mind if you're an activist trying to work to transform public support for a policy to actually passing that policy.

I think the complaint is that left and right just don’t mean anything. Instead, I generally see them as boo lights.

It solves whether a party should be called far left, center left, centrist, center right, or far right. That's an argument people often have, and I don't think anyone needs to argue about it anymore. And it makes the observation that parties across the political spectrum will be very reluctant to actually cooperate no matter how much they might agree on specific issues like gun control, which is something useful to keep in mind if you're an activist trying to work to transform public support for a policy to actually passing that policy.

I think these are useful observations that do mean something. People often do use left/right as boo lights. But they also use them as meaningful terms. Calling someone "far right" or "far left" wouldn't be an insult if they didn't have real meaning. There's a reason why libertarians want to convince you that Hitler was actually a leftist, and why progressives want to convince you Bernie is a centrist in Europe. My model gives a framework to ignore those people without losing the utility of the terms "far right", "right", "centrist", "left", and "far left" to describe how willing a party is to cooperate with other parties quickly.

New York Times’ The Daily podcast ran an episode Real Teenagers, Fake Nudes: The Rise of Deepfakes in American Schools. The premise is contained in the title — AI image generation apps can remove the clothing from photos, and teenage boys are using these en masse to make faked nude images of their classmates.

The overt message that the NYT hits repeatedly in the piece is that the girls in question are victims and that the boys have committed a crime. It’s stated repeated, implicitly and explicitly, without any justification. At one point a police officer opines that the images are CSAM (child sexual abuse material). (By the way, never trust a police officer to tell you the law; it’s not their area of expertise.)

No, no, just all of it no. There’s no crime here. There are no victims. There’s no CSAM, because the images are not of children (notably the AI models are trained on nude adults), nor did any sexual abuse occur in its production.

This is the moral equivalent of weirdos 40 years ago who would cut the heads off photos and paste them on pornographic images. Creepy? Yes! Deserving of social shunning? You betcha! But not a crime. Everyone in these girls’ lives who is catastrophizing this is doing them psychological harm.

I wonder to what extent this is hung upon the weird social expectations around nudity and sex thanks to sex-positivity supplanting prudish abstinence as a norm.

That is, the 'progressive' teachings would suggest that children/teens should not feel shame about their bodies, should feel comfortable talking about and, perhaps engaging in sexual activities (else what are these books about?), and should really view sex as a wonderful and 'positive' thing, and taboos around sex and nudity are just social constructs which one can reject as oppressive. So by all logic the mere act of taking and view nudes shouldn't be some taboo, shameful, or criminal, absent some real harm to a real person.

But surprise, this crashes into the biological reality that males are just hornier than females in general. A cishet guy will literally never say "no" if a young, decently attractive woman wants to show off her body to him. But I'd say most young, decently attractive women are not going to send out nude pics to guys on request, and of course will shame and criticize unworthy men who make the request.

So the equilibrium is not one where females are generous with their nude pics and it just becomes a normalized and expected thing that guys will jerk off to their female friends behind closed doors to photos she took and transmitted on her own, and all of this is considered a positive expression of sexuality.

The equilibrium appears to be that women can send nudes at their discretion, and feel empowered and appreciated by demonstrating their 'freedom' from social stigma, but guys, oh ho ho, are still hamstrung because said women mostly choose to NOT send nudes out and still retain the ability to throw shame at men who express an interest in or request nudes without some explicit or implicit invitation.

And if a guy actually accepts the logic of "nudes are no big deal and sexual desire is natural and good" I don't know how he'd conclude that generating fake nudes could possibly be some massive social violation. So he's now double hamstrung. If women aren't sending him nudes already, he'd be taking on a massive risk by suggesting or requesting it. On the extreme end, he might instantly be labelled an 'incel' with all the condemnation that implies. And if he decides "nah, I won't bother an actual woman with my sexual desires" and generates fake nudes of girls he finds attractive, as we see this gets him labelled a pathetic creep at best, or an actual criminal at worst. And he'll get called an incel anyway.

I know, I know, I'm glossing over the full array of social dynamics at work in such a situation. The main thrust of my point here is that at least with a prudish abstinence cultural standard, it is both shameful to take nudes AND to be in possession of them, and shame is doled out in approximately equal shares to all involved parties. It may not be an optimal outcome but I dare say it would produce a healthier equlibrium overall.

I fully agree that exaggerating the negativity of it is itself harmful.

But at the same time, this does fall within the longstanding tradition against libel, false light -- publishing a nude image of someone is a clear implication that they have willingly posed nude. If that is false, it's squarely libel. That's not the end of the world -- we can say it's bad/wrong/illegal without saying it's the worst thing that can happen. Nuance is dead, they say.

That said, if some horny teenager wants to create the images, rub one out and then keep them to himself, that's back in "creepy-but-not-illegal" territory.

That's a pragmatic perspective.

AI can 'remove' the clothing from photos. It can also composite supplied images into existing or generated scenes. It can generate 'original' images from descriptive text input.

Do we know in this instance how the boys generated the image? Does the particular method used make it better or worse?

AI can 'remove' the clothing from photos.

That's a colloquial way that people talk about it, but it's of course not how the technology works. You can mask out a region of an image, and let the AI fill it in with it's best guess, optionally guided by a text description. Or if you have enough photos, you can train a model to output pictures of a particular person's face. Either way, on an abstract level, it's filling in the gaps with its best idea of what should go there based on the patterns present in its training data. On a moral level, its painting somebody else's naked body. That's why I think the best analogy is cutting-and-pasting photos of people's faces onto pornography, and how we should be viewing it from a legal perspective.

That's why I put it in ' '.

It's like retouching a photo to make them look nude. This or composting their head / face into porn feels a bit different to me than writing a prompt that would generate a similar appearing image.

I would argue that the crime (or "crime", if you want) is distribution.

If a horny teenager creates fake nudes of their (realistically, 'his') classmates, that is creepy and sick and kinda pathetic, but should not be a crime any more than substituting the name of his crush for a protagonist in some lewd fan-fiction.

It would also be difficult to enforce laws against these things because nobody would even know that a "crime" had been committed.

However, things are very different if that teenager then goes to spread his deepfakes among common acquaintances (who are the only ones for whom these images would be different than "yet another nude person"). More gravely, he might not mention that they are deepfakes.

I would argue that American prudishness is a major driving force here. In a society where everyone went to the beach and the sauna naked, his classmates would just reply "What is the big deal? I know how Tina's boobs look." For whatever reasons, Americans are big on "purity" and slut shaming. (I guess having an OnlyFans as an 18yo would likely get you kicked from the Cheerleader team for ethical violations.)

Under that -- admittedly silly -- framework, a nude -- even a fake one -- is a direct assault on the character of the victim when shared.

Even in a more enlightened society where people don't judge people based on sluttiness, there are probably other things which would be just as damaging. For example, I would very much prefer if a deepfake video of me in full SS uniform chanting Nazi slogans would not go viral, and I would feel violated if it did.

OK. First off, the girls are victims. It may not be worth putting any law enforcement effort into cracking down on teenaged boys making deepfake nudes for private consumption. For that matter it might set bad legal precedents. But the girls are victims; they aren't wanting to expose their naked bodies for these boys or they would presumably have done it. I have no doubt that these deepfake models are working off bikini pics but two wrongs don't make a right. These girls and their fathers have every right to feel angry about it.

The overt message that the NYT hits repeatedly in the piece is that the girls in question are victims and that the boys have committed a crime. It’s stated repeated, implicitly and explicitly, without any justification. At one point a police officer opines that the images are CSAM (child sexual abuse material). (By the way, never trust a police officer to tell you the law; it’s not their area of expertise.)

Under the literal letter of US law, it is a crime, though. It might not be technically constitutional, but it's a crime, and the legitimacy of the constitution probably doesn't extend to sexually explicit drawings of real minors as protected speech.

they aren't wanting to expose their naked bodies

The AI generated images are not their naked bodies.

Right — is imagining a girl naked victimizing her?

No, but again, imaging to oneself is very different than publishing/distributing.

Well, I argue no, but this is more controversial than I anticipated.

The US Supreme Court struck down laws against virtual child pornography some time ago, but Congress went right ahead and re-passed them and has been steadily obtaining convictions in circumstances where the case will not be reviewed. I think there is a contested case headed up the chain right now, and I would expect SCOTUS to decide differently this time.

Why do you expect SCOTUS to rule differently?

I expect Barrett and the three liberals to rule against porn in general (for different reasons). Thomas concurred in Ashcroft, but also said

While this speculative interest cannot support the broad reach of the CPPA, technology may evolve to the point where it becomes impossible to enforce actual child pornography laws because the Government cannot prove that certain pornographic images are of real children. In the event this occurs, the Government should not be foreclosed from enacting a regulation of virtual child pornography that contains an appropriate affirmative defense or some other narrowly drawn restriction.

which suggests he'd be open to a rule against it now.

Roberts would do the same thing -- have a "narrow" decision allowing the law to stand (which when translated down to the lower court and prosecutors means "open season on virtual child porn"). It's his specialty.

I don't know about the others. So at least 5-4 for letting the law stand.

Well hold on, what merits shunning and what merits a crime are not objective facts. They are subjective. In other words this is not your decision to make, nor mine. If enough people think it should be a crime, then it should. There is no objective test for a line between simply socially wrong and criminal. In some societies blasphemy is a crime, in others it is not. If enough people are disturbed by this and can convince enough people in power to pass laws against it (or use current laws against it), then it will be a crime.

The only thing that differentiates between a crime and a social sanction is how seriously we decide to take it. If we can criminalize crossing the street we can certainly criminalize this!

Each society can discourage behaviors it dislikes first by social sanctions and then by making it criminal if desired. There is no objective level of seriousness before one passes from the 1st to the second. The only thing that matters is how people feel about it.

If anything, this technology pretty much decreases victimization via two means:

  1. If AI nudes become widespread and indistinguishable from real ones (and they're close), the danger/penalty/threat of blackmail/etc. of having real nudes leaked becomes basically zero. (Given how much many if not most women who would be the kinds to be targeted by deepfake nudes in my experience love sending out actual nudes cavalierly and are only stopped from doing so by concerns about exposure, I believe, if they could think one step ahead of inventing a new form of victimhood to decry in the NYT about this technology, they'd be tithing 10% to its developers.)

  2. AI "CSAM" (reverse the first two letters and you have my opinion about this modern newspeak term and its relation to the perfectly fine term CP that didn't need any replacement) holds the potential to completely destroy any markets in or sharing of actual CP, again if it's indistinguishable from it. If it's indistinguishable, then even people who specifically only want the real thing will have to give up, because even they won't be able to tell the difference. It'd be like flooding a drug market with a 100x cheaper to produce version that's indistinguishable from the real thing. You would put the dealers of the original stuff straight out of business, even if there were still a demand for their product on authenticity grounds, because that demand for authenticity can't be satisfied if nobody can determine authenticity.

But this just further reveals the character of the modern woke system of American "law and order" (and those are definitely scare quotes). It's not about actually improving the world, protecting anyone, or anyone's safety; it's about punishing people for being morally impure as considered by the privileged classes.

Pursuant to my second point, with a modest government investment in AI models specifically for the purpose and agentic AIs to spread it around the usual chains of CP distribution, the US government could probably end or at least curtail by 97-98% or so (casual estimation) the genuinely criminal distribution of actual CP by drowning it in mostly if not entirely indistinguishable AI forgeries. No living, breathing, sentient child (or again at least 97-98% less) would ever have to be sex trafficked or exposed by the production of such material again. Those who have already would, much sooner than would occur naturally, have the memories of it buried under hundreds of pounds of dirt of digital disinformation. (It is worth noting that every time somebody is caught with CP featuring a person known to the US government, that person has an opportunity to get payout from the confiscated assets etc. of the convicted, with the most famous "CP stars" sometimes making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of this. So, perversely enough, they may not like this change. Presumably most would be relieved however.)

They can't/won't do this though. Why not? Why because the people who are inclined to like CP might still like the new, AI-generated stuff, or might even think some of it is real, and still masturbate to it. Their filthy little perverted minds will still be free to get off with impunity (if not better than before with a state-of-the-art government AI pumping out content catering to their every fantasy for them), and that's the real crime here, their corrupt pleasure and satisfaction, even if it harms none, not what happens to real flesh-and-blood children or anybody else.

And it's the same with kids generating nudes of their schoolmates. There's no actual analysis or consideration of the boundaries of freedom of expression, private fantasizing, the balance of rights between people, etc. involved. They're dirty little "incel chuds" or some equivalent, as proven by the fact that they've done something to offend a female, and that's it. (And of course the likely general unattractiveness of the nerdy guys who have adopted AI technology for fake nudification this early is a major factor. If it had been only attractive guys found with this technology, there would be no NYT article. As usual and again, it's not about principles, it's about the fact that, as the famous graph shows, many if not most women are statistically illiterate (or at least in this particular area) and thus consider 80% of men to be below average and therefore unworthy of the baseline of respect and consideration. Thus the fact that these men have sexual urges at all is an abomination to women, something to be policed as forcibly as is necessary (unless money can be made from them on OF).)

the genuinely criminal distribution of actual CP by drowning it in mostly if not entirely indistinguishable AI forgeries

There is a civilizational fence here that you probably don't want to tear down cavalierly.

In particular, it's feasible (perhaps it would not come to pass) that:

  • You drown the world in AI CP
  • Child victimization goes down in the short term as predicted, the government doubles down on prosecuting those who harm actual children
  • Over time, the prevalence and easy accessibility of AI CP erodes the norm against considering young children in a sexual manner
  • Decades later, this rebounds into increasing harm of actual children
  • With the norm eroded, there is less popular will to double down on prosecuting these cases.

They can't/won't do this though. Why not?

Failure of your imagination to supply a steel man to your opposition.

Thus the fact that these men have sexual urges at all is an abomination to women

This is not a brave statement, but I'm gonna double down on "sexual urges that are focused on a 5 year old are abominable" and maybe "and should be to individuals of all sexes"

Interesting post. The conclusion of the argument is that the state has a legitimate duty to forcibly ban media that corrupt morals, when the harm is sufficiently clear and severe, and/or supported by existing legal precedent. This might also apply to other kinds of media that are now legal and common, and plausibly to all porn. At a minimum, it suggests that written material or drawings that depict things that would be illegal to film with real actors should also be illegal to write or draw. The key questions are not the abstract principles (which I think are obvious), but the criteria for drawing the lines, the burdens of proof in play, and the question of which agencies are empowered to make the decisions.

Thoughts?

The conclusion of the argument is that the state has a legitimate duty to forcibly ban media that corrupt morals, when the harm is sufficiently clear and severe, and/or supported by existing legal precedent.

I don't think is an accurate characterization of my view. And I certainly don't endorse your conclusion as to either writing or as to pornography in general.

I'll triple down on "sexual urges focused on a 5YO are indeed abominable" with the addition of "and one can simply end the discussion of CP right there".

I don't think is an accurate characterization of my view. And I certainly don't endorse your conclusion as to either writing or as to pornography in general.

I wasn't characterizing your view, but what follows from your argument if it is valid. It seems to me that the argument you put forward to support your view is an equally strong argument for a view you oppose.

As a matter of fact, I think that normalizing premarital sex is a grave social problem. As far as I know, no society has ever embraced the following three norms simultaneously and survived: (1) sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable, (2) homosexuality is morally acceptable, (3) male and female sex roles ought to be respected equally. For example, the Romans accepted (1) and (2) but not (3). I advocate for (2) and (3) but not (1). I think the basic reason (1), (2), and (3) are not compatible is that young men would become addicted to having sex with each other and, not necessarily lose interest in women, but not be very motivated to navigate the challenges of obtaining and sustaining opposite-sex relationships. Sound familiar?

Our own society is moving toward accepting (1), (2) and (3) together, but this is a recent development, and at the same time our society is dying before our eyes, so I do not count the current, unstable situation as a data point because it is a dramatic departure from our recent history as a culture. To give you an idea how fast these norms are changing, leading Democrats (e.g. both Clintons, Biden, Obama) opposed gay marriage until around 2012 -- and in the early 1960's, 86% of married women said when polled that it was not OK for a woman to have sex with her fiancé before marriage [Charles Murray (2012): Coming Apart, p. 154].

I doubt that a society can survive that accepts (1), (2), and (3) -- though if one has ever existed it would prove me wrong (maybe someone knows an example?). So that experiment hasn't been run with success to my knowledge. On the other hand, the experiment of socially accepting child sex has been run many times (in modern Afghanistan, ancient Rome, the Sambia tribe, et. al.) and those societies continued to exist for generations. I'm definitely not advocating that, but I am saying the empirical evidence for the maladaptivity of (1), (2), and (3) is stronger.

In light of that, what argument would you make against prohibiting (1), (2), and (3) in media depictions, that does not contradict your original argument on CSAM?

I wasn't characterizing your view, but what follows from your argument if it is valid. It seems to me that the argument you put forward to support your view is an equally strong argument for a view you oppose.

That is itself a very good sign you have misunderstood what I intended to convey as my argument and belief.

That might on me, I might not have communicated it well.

As a matter of fact, I think that normalizing premarital sex is a grave social problem.

I do not particularly share that belief. I don't think premarital sex is totally without issue, but I think it's not inherently bad, the issues with it are serious but not civilization ending. And moreover, it's anyway way past anything that's remotely likely to change.

As far as I know, no society has ever embraced the following three norms simultaneously and survived

Yeah, but no society has ever had the semiconductor and ubiquitous satellite before either. Or streaming TV or easy international travel. An argument from precedent is not terribly meaningful in a society that's consistently creating totally novel things (some of which are generally good, some of which are generally bad and some of which are mixed).

I'm definitely not advocating that, but I am saying the empirical evidence for the maladaptivity of (1), (2), and (3) is stronger.

I don't even remotely agree that this is a valid way to reason about society. It's a form of just-so reasoning that can be concocted post-hoc to support or oppose any position.

[ I'm also not even sure that "maladaptivity" is even the right measure. There are a lot of things that are maladaptive that we nevertheless believe are morally proper or even morally obligatory. Similarly there are many things that are adaptive that we believe are morally wrong or even forbidden. Given the enormous productive surplus of modern industry, humanity has the freedom not to be fitness-maxing at full tilt all the time in a way that previous societies or other species do not. ]

In light of that, what argument would you make against prohibiting (1), (2), and (3) in media depictions, that does not contradict your original argument on CSAM?

  1. A large supermajority believes that sexual urges towards 5 year olds is fundamentally morally abhorrent
  2. No such contingent is even remotely there on (1), (2) or (3). In fact, none of those can even claim a bare majority against them

You can try to make this into a more complicated argument if you want. I feel no need to go any further than

In light of that, what argument would you make against prohibiting (1), (2), and (3) in media depictions, that does not contradict your original argument on CSAM?

  • A large supermajority believes that sexual urges towards 5 year olds is fundamentally morally abhorrent
  • No such contingent is even remotely there on (1), (2) or (3). In fact, none of those can even claim a bare majority against them

As I reported before, a supermajority of married women disapproved of premarital sex in the 1960's. Moreover a supermajority of adults in the US (75% of those who expressed an opinion) believed premarital sex was wrong as late as 1969 [source]. By your argument, that I quoted above, slavery was moral until 300 years ago; premarital sex was wrong until 60 years ago, and gay marriage was wrong until 10 years ago. I assume you believe, however, that the abolition of slavery (e.g.), which changed the supermajority consensus, was a good thing. If so, then there must be some consideration aside from the majority opinion that informs morality. My question is, in your view, what is it, and how does it apply to CSAM in a way that it does not apply to, say, the normalization of premarital sex in media?

The difference is, I don't believe we are ever again going to see a world where premarital sex as taboo as sex with a 5 year old.

If you want to agitate for it, go for it.

By your argument, that I quoted above, slavery was moral until 300 years ago

This is a fairly common, silly argument.

To clarify, I (a person living in 2024) believe slavery is wrong whether it happened in 1800 or 2000. Some other entity (perhaps, as you suggest, a person living in 1800) did not believe slavery was wrong. That person is not me and I am not them.

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As far as I know, no society has ever embraced the following three norms simultaneously and survived: (1) sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable, (2) homosexuality is morally acceptable, (3) male and female sex roles ought to be respected equally. For example, the Romans accepted (1) and (2) but not (3).

Can you give us some examples of societies that have failed because they accepted all 3 of these things at the same time?

I don't know of any society has embraced them together.

Well there you have it. Jesus dude, could you construct a more convoluted argument? Literally throwing darts at a non-existent enemy.

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Failure of your imagination to supply a steel man to your opposition.

Do I have to provide a steelman when it's obvious that nobody involved is thinking nearly as far ahead as that steelman? You think your average feminist or feminist-adjacent who takes a kneejerk reactionary stance against some "incel" generating AI loli waifu or whatever or some horny teen "nudifying" the girl from his Englsih class is thinking decades into the future? I mean decades into the future we're going to have actual sexbots anyway so the same argument then applies to real world conduct.

This is not a brave statement, but I'm gonna double down on "sexual urges that are focused on a 5 year old are abominable" and maybe "and should be to individuals of all sexes"

The problem is, to a lot of women, if you're not in the top 25% of men minimum, increasingly you having sexual urges that are focused on a 25 year old is also abominable to them, especially if you're gasp over 30 (or probably even 28 with some of these people nowadays). And specifically on the issue of underage girls, they'll also conflate 5 year olds and 15 year olds while simultaneously encouraging the sexualization of those same 15 year olds to a degree that would have been considered abominable for 25 year olds 25 years ago, then rage like it's unthinkable when the inevitable happens. It's an increasingly twisted equation that isn't nearly as defined by simple statements that almost everyone agrees with as you want it to be.

Do I have to provide a steelman when it's obvious that nobody involved is thinking nearly as far ahead as that steelman?

Yes, because the purpose of a steel man is to test & strengthen your own reasoning, not to score internet dunk points on your opponents.

The problem is, to a lot of women, if you're not in the top 25% of men minimum, increasingly you having sexual urges that are focused on a 25 year old is also abominable to them

Whether this is true or false, it's materially irrelevant to whether sexual urges that are focused on a 5 year old are abominable.

Yes, because the purpose of a steel man is to test & strengthen your own reasoning, not to score internet dunk points on your opponents.

I don't think it's strengthening your reasoning to go so far beyond what your opponents actually express that it's outside of the realm of what they might even actually believe.

Whether this is true or false, it's materially irrelevant to whether sexual urges that are focused on a 5 year old are abominable.

I'm glad you agree that bringing it up at all is materially irrelevant to what I'm talking about.

CSAM is one of the least rational areas of politics.

In the dark ages before the sexual revolution, there were all kinds of sexual deviants against whom upstanding, proper citizens could unite. Gays, interracial couples, unmarried women having sex, kinky people, people using birth control.

Today, most of these targets have been swept away by a big wave of sexual tolerance. Saying "it is wrong to have sex before marriage" makes you sound like a cringy old person.

However, we have also established that adults having sex with kids is bad because it causes severe psychological issues for the kids.

So pederasts and pedophiles become the lightning rod for most of these innate drives to police the sexual relations of their neighbors -- which did not magically disappear.

This is obviously a very emotional topic, and such topics often allow you to score big political wins. Under an evidence-based system, the focus would be on preventing the actual sexual abuse of children both by exclusive pedophiles and other men who act opportunistically. This would entail de-stigmatizing pedophiles who did not commit any sexual offenses with kids (which in turn would increase the odds of them willing to risk therapy, which would reduce the odds of them becoming child abusers) and trying to get the shared social environment of both perpetrators and victims to speak out if they suspect sexual abuse is going on.

CSAM would be treated like snuff videos. Commissioning a snuff video is commissioning a murder and should be punished as such, and paying for them should be a felony to discourage their production, and if you want you can also criminalize distribution and possession. But if half of your homicide department works on possession of snuff video cases, then I would argue that you have your priorities wrong -- most murders do not happen for the creation of snuff videos, nor does their consumption precede most murders. Fake snuff videos lack the thing which makes them immoral in the first place -- a victim. Even if you want to regulate horror movies, it would be a good idea to not simply classify them as snuff.

many if not most women are statistically illiterate (or at least in this particular area) and thus consider 80% of men to be below average and therefore unworthy of the baseline of respect and consideration

If "average" means something like the arithmetic mean, then this is totally possible.

Human traits tend to be normally distributed. I'm pretty sure most of the ones objectively evaluated have been found to be so. (And how men rate women mostly forms a normal distribution.) Do you think your average woman has much of a justification for why their ratings of men wouldn't be one besides an amorphous feeling (like a false virtue signaling preference for bears)? I don't think this rebuttal changes my point any. I also think if you change "average" to "median", the women's responses wouldn't change any.

But yes obviously average means median here, at least for me as a man. Perhaps you are meaning to point out how women meanwhile are so apex-biased (at least based on their ratings of men) that it does not for them.

My point is simply that it's mathematically coherent, though I'd add that when preferences are involved (such as sexual attractiveness) then human traits are often more Pareto distributed, e.g. wealth, income, popular success of people in creative fields, cities vs. towns, and movie profits. There are also human traits, such as incurring healthcare costs, which are not normally distributed.

Ratings of sexual attractiveness ARE "amorphous feelings", so the main challenge of justifying their existence would be to evince their existence. I suppose it's possible that women understate their ratings of men's appearances, e.g. to avoid seeming slutty.

You have some degree of a point here. If it was phrased only as average, then maybe the math-inclined females answering the survey thought it meant mean and went from there. (Though again I think if you explicitly specified median you'd still get the exact same results).

Really though, and your post is valuable for having brought this to my attention, the appropriate criticism is that to call them "statistically illiterate" is simply an irrelevant dig that doesn't really cut to the actual heart of the issue: Men are fair (at least as regards this subject of evaluating the distribution of characteristics). Women are equivalently not.

Men are fair (at least as regards this subject of evaluating the distribution of characteristics). Women are equivalently not.

In the sense of "fair" as a uniform probability distribution, I agree. And I think this creates enough social problems / advantages to think about. On the problem side, men often have a feeling of being valued only for what they do and provide in romance, which can create the feeling of being exploited. (The male counterpart of objectification, perhaps.) On the advantageous side, for most men, they must achieve something to be regarded as attractive; moreover, the more they achieve, the more opportunities they have; for mentally healthy men at least, this can serve as a motivation.

The problem is that when female hypergamy is left totally unchecked (as it is now), the standards become so high that you can't meet them simply by being a hard-working guy with reasonable achievements. And even if you can, that takes time. Meanwhile the alleged prize waiting for you at the end of the tunnel already has a bodycount of 20 with guys who were born with a better jawbone or a few more inches of height. Not worth it.

It's a much better incentive structure to do what has always been done throughout history: Give men a reasonable wife early, and then make them work and follow society's rules to keep access to her. After all, it's been shown that humans tend to be more loss-averse than risk-tolerant, more motivated by the threat of losing what they already have than gaining something new (a phenomenon documented heavily in the psychological tricks used by mobile games).

The problem is that when female hypergamy is left totally unchecked (as it is now), the standards become so high that you can't meet them simply by being a hard-working guy with reasonable achievements. And even if you can, that takes time. Meanwhile the alleged prize waiting for you at the end of the tunnel already has a bodycount of 20 with guys who were born with a better jawbone or a few more inches of height. Not worth it.

It's really not that hard for men to get laid in the modern world, even if you're not good looking, and women tend to be more interested in getting married than men. Most ugly guys I know as friends have long-term girlfriends, but these are the types of guys I'd be interested in having as friends, whereas there are plenty of non-ugly guys I wouldn't be interested in having as friends and who don't (I don't say can't) get laid, largely it seems because of their neuroticism.

However, I agree that earlier marriage (at least involving men who grow up quickly - get a good job, a good trade, and have a reputation as a moral law-abiding god-fearing citizen) would be good. Promiscuity should be a reward of status for successful, artistic, or high-born men, like the old days.

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There are also strategic uses for reviled and prohibited CSAM.

Political enemy? Put some CP on his computer and arrest him!

Your internet censorship and spying campaign isn't popular? It's needed to fight CP!

Intelligence and security agencies generally are full of pretty sinister figures and they have a lot of temptation to abuse their power. They've done all kinds of crazy chaotic-evil things in the past, injecting people with hallucinogens and plutonium. Weaponizing CP is to be expected.

You are completely correct, and shame on me for forgetting such an important use of it. It's an important weapon because even dissidents fall for this trick and turn on their fellows.

There are no victims

Whether or not they’re victims in a strict legal sense the girls are clearly victims here.

More generally I feel like men wildly underestimate how bad it can feel to be the object of unwanted, intrusive sexual desire/advances due to “men be horny” type attitudes. I spent most of my life rolling my eyes and thinking “how bad can it be to be DESIRED” but over the years I acquired a few stalkers and have had a few women make aggressive and clearly unwanted sexual advances. It actually feels pretty shitty and occupies a lot of your idle thinking. It makes you feel guilty! Like you did something wrong. And this was the mildest stuff imaginable. Having my peers make (even fake) nudes of me would be insanely, ridiculously disturbing and cause legitimate anguish.

over the years I acquired a few stalkers and have had a few women make aggressive and clearly unwanted sexual advances. It actually feels pretty shitty and occupies a lot of your idle thinking. It makes you feel guilty! Like you did something wrong

I will say upfront that I don't know the details of your situation, so I could be way off base here, but I'm reminded of Dawkins's Dear Muslima:

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, ... Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with. Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself 'Skepchick', and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so. And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

People desire other people. Some people will desire other people who don't want to be desired. Coordination is a really hard problem. It's not always as easy as one thinks to let it be known what they want and don't want, especially when people really do tend to change their minds when new opportunities are presented to them, and shit tests abound. And generally (though not in your case) it's a problem that causes men to have to be the ones to have to put themselves out there and take the initiative. Just be glad that we live in a society where the norms are such that you won't be physically hurt and you have the freedom to say no.

This argument proves way too much. Yes, there is female genital mutilation in other societies and it’s abhorrent. That doesn’t give American high school boys, or socially maladjusted or inept men in general, free rein to harass women.

Well, Dawkins's point is that feminists ranting about how women are made to feel uncomfortable by men asking for coffee is trivial, and that if feminists really want to help women, there are actual third world problems they should be dealing with, not first world problems. My point is that being made to feel guilty or awkward over difficult situations is likewise trivial first world problems, and somewhat of a natural extension of participating in a society composed of layers of social customs built on top of animal instincts. Having to deal with other people is basically just a part of life, and so is having awkward social interactions.

They are "victims" in the same sense as a boy who a girl spreads rumors about how he's "creepy" or, more on the nose, that he has a small or deformed penis. Which is to say, not in a way which should be actionable.

Having a fake nude made of you is way more disturbing than someone saying you’re creepy or have a small penis.

I agree that you shouldn’t go to jail for fake nudes but I do think it’s absolutely legitimate to suspend or expel boys who do this.

(apparently this line of argument has has upset people traumatized by being called creepy)

Expelling someone is an extreme act. And given my rock-bottom opinion of public school administrators, we just can't trust them to make this kind of decision.

Literally just don’t make AI porn of your female classmates? Why is everyone on this site struggling with this so much?

I won't, wasn't going to and will strictly demand that my kid never does that. And also expulsion is an extreme punishment and we shouldn't casually advocate for it or give school administration any benefit of the doubt.

Literally just don’t make AI porn of your female classmates?

There is kind of an issue here in that Evil Maid attacks are so goddamned easy on a campus (especially the collaborative Evil Maid where one conspirator deliberately creates the distraction) that "beyond a reasonable doubt" is unachievable without substantial resources and any lower standard gets loners expelled by bullies manipulating the system. Admittedly, one can do this with actual child porn anyway, but that's trickier to get and, due to being actually illegal, risks the police coming in and actually tracing it to the bully.

Why is everyone on this site struggling with this so much?

Because there are things that women do to men that are more inherently destructive (in the same lopsided manner as this) due to men and women being different, yet no such uproar is heard when this happens.

When one notices that, one tends to stop caring about "vulnerable women" and switch to "if you want equal rights, you can take equal lefts". Either both genders get special protection from the things [that the other gender does] that will affect them most, or neither do; to do otherwise is not justice.

We have to allow men to make AI porn of their underaged high school classmates because sometimes women do bad things too? And what are the highly destructive things you have in mind?

There's a world of space between "allowing" them to do it and expelling them from school. Much the same way there's a world of space between allowing criminals to do as they please and no-trials street executions for misdemeanors.

Also uncool reframing "not-expelling students" as "allowing bad behavior".

We have to allow boys to make AI porn of their similarly-aged high school classmates (yes, I see what you did there) because we have freedom of expression in this country. We can resist being stampeded into doing it anyway because "vulnerable women" (or girls) by noting that women (and girls) ain't angels either.

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Agreed that unwanted sexual advances can be frightening and quite unpleasant. But this is not that. If I construct porn in your likeness in private and you never learn about it, you can't be a victim. It can't be the creation or existence of the images that harms the girls. No doubt the girls in the story experienced suffering, but you and I don't see eye to eye on whether they should have any recourse beyond social shaming. They're victims in only the loosest literary sense of the word.

It can't be the creation or existence of the images that harms the girls.

I mean sure but in practice this only comes to light when they’re discovered or distributed which does harm the girls. And I think “creation + distribution” is worse than “distribution” alone if for no other reason than it speaks to a more culpable mens rea and greater capacity to reoffend.

I don’t think the boys should go to jail but I do think they should be suspended or probably expelled.

If instead of photo-realistic AI generation it was anime would you think the same?

If instead of AI it was hand drawn by one of the boys in the style of , 'I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.'? Is this better, worse or the same?

The degree of realism and personalization intuitively matters a lot so without any other context the AI thing seems worse. But as with many things like this often the real answer is that context matters and fact finders on the ground are better at determining that than we are on some random online forum. It also seems like a sort of a bad faith waste of time to try to legalistically determine which side of the line some particular way of sexually harassing high school girls falls on.

If I construct porn in your likeness in private and you never learn about it, you can't be a victim.

But this porn will be shared. "Check out this picture of Alice I've found!" "Lol, is this Jamal? You sick fuck! Can you make one where she's rimming an old dude? No, wait, can you make the dude be our science teacher?"

I dunno, while you could certainly make an argument that simply creating the images is fine, I think distributing them is, though probably incorrectly categorized as CSAM, still something that should carry punishment. Regular teen horniness fundamentally sexualizes a lot of stuff, but stuff that looks realistic and is shown to others is pretty much a stronger version of classic bullying and should be in the same category, more or less (that is, maybe a misdemeanor).

For context, here is a list (at least in my state, Utah, so might vary) of possible misdemeanors a minor student could commit, what level each is, and whether the school would refer it to court or not. "Accessing pornographic material on school property" is a Misdemeanor B, referable. Public Urination/Defecation is an Infraction, default non-referable. Disorderly conduct or other disruption stuff ranges from Infraction through Misdemeanor B. So not a whole lot of directly comparable things, but a misdemeanor seems about on the level.

Though bullying IS classified as a crime, it does not seem to have a specific associated criminal penalty (not sure how that all works). FYI, they in the law define: "Bullying" means a school employee or student intentionally committing a written, verbal, or physical act against a school employee or student that a reasonable person under the circumstances should know or reasonably foresee will have the effect of: causing physical or emotional harm to the school employee or student... [or] placing the school employee or student in reasonable fear of: harm to the school employee's or student's physical or emotional well-being... [or] creating a hostile, threatening, humiliating, or abusive educational environment due to: the pervasiveness, persistence, or severity of the actions. (Irrelevant bits omitted). So clearly seems to fit.

Note that without the distribution component, bullying doesn't fit. Even 40 years ago if someone started passing around those magazine rips, they could probably be on the hook for harassment or something like that.

I agree that spreading such pictures around could reasonably be considered bullying and I would be fine for schools to punish it. Even in a university setting this applies.

I would also say that there ought to be different standards to "normal figures" and celebrities, focusing now on adults. Or else you are going to be putting a lot of people in prison for creating and if done in a discord server therefore automatically spreading over discord nudes that look like celebs. Another issue is where you draw the line. For example is a generated picture were it is said to be looking like a celebrity something that is going to qualify? One other facet of this is that celebrities become to an extend the faces of our image of attraction.

On the other hand, even celebrities deserve to not have their reputation be perceived based on the AI model, and someone pretending that such AI generated content represents them. There is also a moral question regarding commercialization that is a bigger issue than a random creating a voice model based on Obama, Scarlet, Trump, etc to play around and spreading it in smaller platforms. Such as the dispute about whether Sam Alatman used Scarlet Joghansson's voice for his AI tool. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/22/scarlett-johansson-sam-altmans-washington-00159507

On Monday night, Scarlett Johansson — who famously voiced an AI in the movie Her — alleged that OpenAI had appropriated her voice without permission for a new AI assistant tool. Altman and OpenAI say the voice belonged to a different actress,

There’s no crime here. There are no victims. There’s no CSAM, because the images are not of children (notably the AI models are trained on nude adults), nor did any sexual abuse occur in its production.

Let’s check 18 U.S. Code § 2256(8)

(8) “child pornography” means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where— (A) the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; (B) such visual depiction is a digital image, computer image, or computer-generated image that is, or is indistinguishable from, that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or (C) such visual depiction has been created, adapted, or modified to appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

I think that definition is way too expansive, but that’s the definition that our elected representatives came up with. As written, it is definitely a federal crime to create deepfakes of Stacy from English class getting railed and texting them to your bros. Some of these provisions are oddly specific. I don’t have time do dig into the legislative history right now, but I suspect they were added recently in order to cover this exact thing.

Ok, I guess don't trust me about the law, either. I half-remembered some story that cartoon pornography was legal in the US, contrasted against its illegality in Australia. But this is just a bad law. What makes CSAM bad is the abuse of children, not the bits on a computer.

@Quantumfreakonomics excerpted the main page, but not some of the linked definitions, such as:

indistinguishable:

(11) the term “indistinguishable” used with respect to a depiction, means virtually indistinguishable, in that the depiction is such that an ordinary person viewing the depiction would conclude that the depiction is of an actual minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults.

So yeah, technically cartoon pornography would not be considered illegal, even if it's child porn. But I would sure not want to be in the position of arguing about whether a given image was "indistinguishable" from the real thing.

It's actually pretty complicated and involved with the long fought jurisprudence over obscenity and prurient interest, because despite what the law says, the US has a bill of rights so you can't blanket ban speech categorically.

I think the question of AI art is wholly novel and while making porn of public figures is probably not illegal and up in the air, it very likely is illegal to use it to make CP, whether or not that bear the likeness of real minors.

Moreover, if Congress or the States passed a law to make deepfakes illegal, I think SCOTUS would very likely uphold it substantially, at least insofar as the work is obscene by the Miller test. And most deepfakes of a sexual nature are.

More bad law, because the computer-generated stuff (like drawings) doesn't have any age at all.

Most of these issues are resolved as "would an average reasonable person say this has property x?".

Which is hardly bad common law. Not that I like how subjective it is, but it's how it's supposed to work.


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