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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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At the moment, I work at a supermarket. Early today, a customer got pissed off about something at checkout - I don't know what - and started manically shouting a vulgar schizo quasipolitical rant, pacing around, targeting and physically intimidating my customers and coworkers, trying to start a fight, before he wandered back into the store. I'm not sure, in the end, if he left the store of his own accord or because security forced him to; I didn't care to ask around. He was a large, fit, middle-aged white man; exactly the kind of guy you'd stereotypically expect to see in the profile picture of a really deranged MAGA boomer Twitter account. We probably get several problem customers a day, but this was definitely the worst one I've seen in quite a while. It was mortifying to watch a walking hateful strawman of the Red Tribe, especially as I hail from the Red Tribe myself and used to be extremely invested in its success in the culture war.

(As of 2020 or so, I'm trending more centrist, because of exactly this kind of thing. I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but I do not intend to vote this year; I have become disillusioned with democracy, politics, and the culture war. I feel that the mentally ill and generally unpleasant have become too dominant among the right wing. Of course, I always saw the mentally ill and generally unpleasant as dominant among the left wing; I feel that that's inherent to what the left wing is and represents, from its origins around the French Revolution to the ideology of Marx and on to the present progressive-stack day. But anyway, tangent over.)

The main content of the man's rant was that life in the modern US is shitty because [God presumably cursed the country because] President Obama was secretly "a faggot" and his wife was secretly male.

Now, I tend to have a pretty conspiratorial worldview myself. It's pretty obvious that the world does in fact run on conspiracies, and that much of the conventional wisdom suggesting otherwise is desperate copium, often pushed by the people in power. But, of course, we don't know all that much about what the conspiracies in charge are actually doing - that's the whole point of a conspiracy - and most of the "conspiracy theories" you see going around are deeply stupid, and you would need to be stupid to believe them. (The man at my workplace this morning threatened a woman in line for "calling [him] stupid"; she actually said no such thing, but I'm saying it now. I'm not a mind-reader, but I'm pretty sure that that man was stupid.)

Among these stupid conspiracy theories, the so-called "transvestigations" have always been the most striking to me personally, for many reasons. I'm sure ugly rumors about famous men secretly being women and famous women secretly being men have gone around for a long time, as ordinary bottom-feeding gossipy trash talk. But they seem to have emerged as a distinct, legible "type" of conspiracy theory relatively recently, starting in my adolescence, around the late 2000s and early 2010s. Noteworthy early individual targets included Lady Gaga (this was a "Marilyn-Manson-had-his-ribs-removed-so-he-could-do-autofellatio" tier schoolyard rumor for my generation) and, of course, Michelle Obama. However, over the course of the 2010s and on into the 2020s, as transgender people became central to the culture war, transvestigation metastasized into a more omnidirectional tendency to delusionally believe that any arbitrary public figure is secretly trans.

There are several key points here, in a natural order. The first is that the transvestigation phenomenon is nakedly psychological, in a way that feels like an exaggeration of the pattern of other stupid conspiracy theories. Transvestigators are obsessive in searching for rationalizations for their beliefs. They start with a single point that they want to believe - it would be convenient for their worldview if some specific person they hate, like Michelle Obama, were secretly transgender - and they start collecting and glomming onto "evidence" to reinforce the idea, ignoring any counterevidence. Confirmation bias. They strain to develop a suspicion, and that implausible suspicion quickly becomes ludicrous certainty. And that broken thinking winds up leaking out into and contaminating the entire rest of their worldview as they obsessively think back to it over and over again, fixating on their imagined secrets about their enemies' genitals, until eventually they wind up completely convinced that the entire ruling class is secretly transgender, and/or they wind up screaming to a crowded supermarket that the most popular First Lady of my lifetime is actually a man in a dress.

The next point is that the pathology of transvestigation very directly parallels and acts as a foil to various pathologies associated with the transgender movement itself. People can go crazy over both sides of the "we can always tell" coin. Transgender people often try to build confidence through denial of it; they convince themselves that it's much easier to pass than it actually is. From there, they can convince themselves that any given person around them could plausibly be of either sex, and that transgender people are arbitrarily common. Transvestigation has the opposite general motive, but follows a similar path to a similar endpoint. They want to convince themselves that they're always able to identify transgender people, and so any note of ambiguity in their minds, however disingenuous, starts throwing up panic signals and fostering conspiracy thought, which feeds itself in a vicious cycle until they've ironically destroyed their own ability to reasonably perceive/intuit people's sexes.

The more nuanced truth about passing, which both sides of the coin are missing, is that it's fundamentally a modern problem. Back in the olden days, it was much easier for men to pass themselves off as women and vice versa, because people weren't thinking about that possibility in the back of their minds at all times. The more relevant that transgender issues become to the zeitgeist, the harder it is for transgender people to pass, as normies start to consider the sex of those around them with more skepticism; a predator/prey-population-style cycle leading towards equilibrium. But, as transvestigators demonstrate, we might be hitting the limits of that process now; the appearances of the sexes are in many ways distributions with overlapping tails. Plenty of ugly people look remarkably like ugly people of the opposite sex, and you don't even really need that kind of natural androgynous ambiguity to get confused, if you're flooding your brain's training algorithm with images of attractive transgender models while contemptfully scoffing and trying to convince yourself that you can Still Definitely Tell.

We are a confused and spiraling people.

Finally, I think transvestigation is plausibly a baptists-and-bootleggers situation. For transvestigators themselves and their close extremist-right allies, it's a simple and effective way to stoke hatred and fanaticism; they perversely make themselves more and more paranoid while comforting themselves that they're able to see through the great veil. They develop the assuredness and the sense of grievance necessary to shout threats at strangers in a supermarket. For the left, transvestigation-adjacent rhetoric lowers the sanity waterline and encourages their enemies to beclown themselves.

And here's the thing: when I was a kid circa 2009, and transvestigation was just getting started? I got sexually harassed a lot, like, a lot a lot, by the LGBT kids (and their allies) at school. It wasn't a sexually-driven thing; it was political activist shitflinging. I'll admit I was an open bigot about those issues at that age, and that painted something of a target on my back. They saw the trope of outspoken bigots turning out to be repressed queers as a strategy and a goal, and they sought to confuse their enemies' sexualities. I keep seeing people in the modern culture war say that transgender people entered the discourse after the gays had fully won, because the activist structure needed something to move onto. There might be some truth to that, but I think it largely gets the order of cause and effect completely wrong. (Many people seem to be under the impression that transgender was invented from whole cloth in the mid 2010s. Full strain copium.)

In my experience of that era, transgender people entered the discourse as a tactic for advancing gay issues; they were ubiquitous rhetorical objects long before they were an actual notable demographic. The 2009-era LGBT activist kids talked a lot about transgender people, far out of proportion to their actual prevalence in the movement at the time; hell, "LGBT" was already a common and very recognizable term and I'm not sure that any of them were actually transgender, though they would often tell me that they were, at an ambiguous irony level. It was a foot in the door for forcefully making people question their sexuality, like a more politically pointed, though equally crude, meatspace analogue to old 4chan's trap culture (back when the term "trap" was new!). Oh, so you're not gay at all, right? You're not attracted to dudes even a little bit? Just girls? No penises, just veejays? Okay, what about this girl? She's hot, right? You wanna fuck her? Well, she's got a penis. How about that? You wanna suck her cock? Or do you think she's a man? Do you think that would make you a faggot? Maybe it would, if you think so. Or maybe you'd prefer Buck Angel? Early prototransvestigation rhetoric was spread around by a mix of bigots mocking their enemies and activist perverts fantasizing. Whenever I found out at that age that a classmate professed that Lady Gaga was born male, I could not have reasonably guessed, just from that, their view of the matter, ideologically speaking.

(Out-of-touch right-wing nightmares of teachers grooming children to become queer through sterile corporate-board-room-esque gay lesson plans are largely ignorant of how children interact with their peers already.)

Anyway, bit of a swerve, but - has anything like the scenario transvestigation points at ever happened? That is to say, has anyone ever become a major celebrity presenting themselves as one gender and later turned out to have secretly been the opposite sex the whole time? The closest examples I can think of aren't very close, and/or they're much closer to microcelebrity status than someone a normie might have heard of; very niche YouTubers. Famous transgender people I can think of are usually either famous specifically for being transgender (the proverbial dancing bears; Laverne Cox; Jazz Jennings), they decide to transition after they've already become public figures for other reasons (the celebrities' public crises; Elliot Page; Maddy Thorson), or both (the Caitlyn Jenners; Caitlyn Jenner). I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies. But there's a pretty big gulf in fame level between Brianna Wu, twice-failed primary candidate for Massachusetts' eighth congressional district, and, like. Michelle Obama.

(Naively, one would assume that some devious conspiratorial plan to normalize transgenderism through an influx of secretly-transgender celebrities would involve those celebrities publicly revealing themselves eventually. You know. To normalize it. But this part never seems to actually happen, which moves the hypothetical conspiracy more to "taunting you by sneaking triangles into the media, because the devil wants there to be secret triangles there" territory.)

I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies.

There wasn't really any investigation or outing needed, Wu was on MSNBC very early on and people watching recognized Wu was transgender immediately. You can actually go back and read an archive of the GG thread at the time:

Damn, Briana's avatar had me fooled.

I would never guessed that she was a transsexual person.

Incidentally while looking up that thread I also found the original /gg/ thread regarding Wu. It shows most of the ultra-compressed process of how Wu became a media-recognized "Gamergate harassment victim", in case you're curious about the details of how that sort of thing went down from the perspective of those involved.

  1. September 18, Wu creates a "sock puppet" parody pro-GG twitter account named brololz. There is a small KIA thread about it but it doesn't attract much attention.

  2. October 9th, Wu creates the "Oppressed Gamergater" image macro on MemeGenerator.net and tweets about it. GG notices the image macro and makes a lot of meme/shitpost ones, flooding the memegenerator page in the process.

  3. October 10th, Wu cherrypicks a few of the more hostile ones (assuming Wu didn't create them) and tweets that "8chan/#gamergate generated 60 pages of this today attacking me. I'm going on a Twitter break until I feel more safe."

  4. Someone makes the aforementioned /gg/ thread about the above tweet, the first GG thread about Wu other than the KIA thread about brololz. Some people mock the tweet, and someone finds Wu's game Revolution 60 and people mock it as well.

  5. Someone posts Wu's phone number and address to the /gg/ thread. Every single response condemns it, with most assuming it is a false-flag, especially because of nobody in GG giving a shit about Wu. (It is deleted when a mod comes online 45 minutes later.)

  6. 14 minutes after the post, Wu tweets that "8chan/gamergate just doxxed me".

  7. 7 minutes after that, a new twitter account named chatterwhiteman tweets the same address and begins tweeting threats at Wu.

  8. 45 minutes after chatterwhiteman begins tweeting, Wu posts a screencap of it and tweets "The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women."

  9. 40 minutes later, an article on Gameranx by Ian Miles Cheong reports that "Game Developer Brianna Wu Driven From Home After Death Threats and Doxxing". (This is before Cheong flipped from anti-GG to pro-GG and from left-wing to right-wing.) Other coverage from game journalists follows.

  10. October 13th, 3 days later, Wu appears on MSNBC to talk about being a gamergate harassment victim.

And for those who weren't around back then, we know that Brianna Wu manufactured at least some of the "hate", because GG caught Wu forgetting to switch to a sockpuppet on the Steam forums.

I don't think that particular case is proof of anything, I would interpret it as Wu being snarky while making a containment thread. I think the intended meaning was "I'm telling GG to restrict personal criticism to this thread without flooding the rest of the forum". And then I think the other accounts that made the same thread after that one was deleted were people trolling, rather than even the original copy being a Wu sockpuppet.

I do think Wu engaged in false-flagging, particularly in the incident I described, but fundamentally it's based on circumstantial evidence. Certainly it's incredibly unlikely that anyone sincerely pro-GG did it, both because GG condemned dox and considered it firmly counterproductive and because nobody cared about Wu. The previous discussion about Wu consisted of a small thread about a fucking Memegenerator template, an amusingly shitty-looking game, and a tweet playing the victim over GG people using the memegenerator template. What's harder to confidently rule out is that it was a third-party troll trying to stir up trouble. But stuff like the fact that Wu was actively reading the 8chan thread at the time and posted about it within minutes, how quickly Wu took advantage to get media attention, and Wu's other lies (like the webcam interview about "I've had to flee my home again due to GG threats" that, based on background details, was conducted from within the home in question) I am inclined to think Wu made the post and the Twitter account, even if I can't be sure. At the end of the day making a 8chan post and a Twitter account is easy and there's every incentive to do it if you want to play the victim.

Olympic gold medalist Stella Walsh was intersex and lacked female genitalia.

Military surgeon James Barry.

Jazz musician Billy Tipton.

I can't help but see that the crux of your opinion and argument is largely based off your personal experiences and it sounds you live in a red-coded area doing a job that will involve you with a lot of poor red coded individuals. This is nothing new for a lot of people and I suggest that it doesn't significantly impact your personal political identity. A lot of people I met who left conservative bastions to the big bright blue cities have their political opinions informed by the people they met. They hate the same schitzo red tribe that you just met, and because they don't want to associate with them, they feel like it's necessary to take every opposite political opinion to socially and intellectually disengage from the people they so disparage.

This is why it's important to realize your bubble. I currently live in an area that is HEAVILY dominated by Democrats and I see the same schitzo squealing as you do, but just blue coded. Fat feminists rioting for women's rights, endless signs of the "liberal's creed (we believe in science, etc.)". Pro-abortion and acceptance flags in every business window, while at the same time dozens of people begging and pan handling in the streets, accosting people on the street. There's a lot of low intelligence people in every region that are absolutely bat-shit, and while our brains are very good at recognizing problematic individuals as a safety precaution, it's also important to realize that these people are largely the statistical outliers and do not represent the political tribal spectrum.

That is to say, has anyone ever become a major celebrity presenting themselves as one gender and later turned out to have secretly been the opposite sex the whole time?

Arguably JK Rowling? The initials were deliberately chosen to hide her female name and appeal to the target market of young boys. She never actually lied about it, but the early books were certainly presented in that sort of boy fantasy way.

I agree with Folamh3 that that seems to be a different phenomenon. Along those lines, though, author George Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans Cross) is an older but more blatant example.

Edit: Of course, going the other direction, there’s Evelyn Waugh, who once made it onto a list of top female authors, even though he never pretended to be a woman. Joyce Kilmer is similarly often thought to be a woman.

Yeah, historically, a pretty sizable number of authors write under gender-ambiguous or male-sounding names, especially in history or scifi. Andre Norton's my favorite example, as she changed her name legally, but afaik was not trans or trans-adjacent.

It's fallen out of popularity in recent eras, at least outside of romance (where mainstream het and f/f works are almost always published under female names, and m/m under male names). There's a few cases where that's turned into someone coming out trans or nonbinary, but they're pretty rare.

And George Sand.

Not an author, but I’m always tickled that Kim Crawford is a bloke.

It’s a very popular brand of New Zealand white wine, and all the marketing heavily implies the owner / winemaker is a woman because the wines prime demographic is middle aged women. You see big billboards with a blonde kiwi woman, or cutouts in WineStore with that same woman in a green dress.

But Kim Crawford is like a bald, middle aged white kiwi guy.

Kim Crawford also doesn't have anything to do with Kim Crawford wines and hasn't since 2003 when he sold the company and his name. (Still, their Sauvignon Blanc is pretty good).

Evelyn Waugh, who once made it onto a list of top female authors, even though he never pretended to be a woman

DUDES🤘ROCK🤘

Yeah I thought of George Eliot too. It seems like something that was easier in the past, and becomes more and more difficult as you get more modern technology. Hard to hide your gender when everyone expects you to be doing live video interviews constantly.

That seems like a reach. Lots of writers use pen names. JK Rowling wasn't trying to pass as a member of the opposite sex, she just chose a gender-neutral pen name mandated by her publisher for fear that young boys would refuse to read a book by a female writer. I've never heard anyone suggest that Mary Ann Evans, Charlotte Brontë, K.A. Applegate or S. E. Hinton were trans men, despite all of them having published books under male pen names (or using their initials to mask their sex, as Rowling did).

the early books were certainly presented in that sort of boy fantasy way.

The suggestion that the act of writing a book whose primary target demographic is members of the opposite sex makes that writer transgender is quite the hot take. Surely this would imply that literally all male romance novelists are trans women, which I'm sure would come as quite a surprise to Nicholas Sparks.

It is a reach, but I disagree that she "wasn't trying to pass as a member of the opposite sex." I think that her publisher and marketers definitely tried to pass her off as a male author (at least in the minds of the 8-12 yr old boys who were the main sales demographic). It was a different time, when the only thing we knew about authors was the book jacket, not like today when we can whip out our phones and instantly look the author, their personal life, and their political views.

Not saying she was transgender, no one thought that. It was just a simpler time when boys wanted to read boys about boys written by men. Or at least, that's what publishers thought.

Counterpoint: several first edition copies of Philosopher's Stone clearly display the name "Joanne Rowling", either on the cover, in the front matter, or in the copyright declaration. At least one author bio on an American first edition refers to her with female pronouns, the honorific "Ms." and identifies her as a "struggling single mother".

If publishers were trying to pass her off as a male writer, they clearly weren't being especially diligent about it.

Who reads the copyright declaration?

My point is, if they were fully committed to the bit and determined to have everyone believe that JK Rowling was a man, the name "Joanne" would not have appeared anywhere in the book (and it wouldn't have been any more difficult for the copyright declaration to list "JK Rowling" rather than "Joanne"). The fact that the name does appear in the book indicates that it was not an elaborate gender-swapping obfuscation à la George Eliot, but a simple gender-neutral pen name.

The source of the claim that "J.K." was due to publisher's influence is Rowling herself. But they probably weren't trying to actually pass her off as a male writer, just to avoid 10-year-old boys seeing "Joanne" on the cover and saying "eww, a girl". (The publisher of the German translation obviously made a different choice)

By the time it became obvious that Harry Potter was attracting readers above its target age range (which was shortly after book 2 came out in the UK and before book 1 came out in the US) "JK Rowling wrote this as a broke single mother" was part of the sales story. So I don't think there was ever a serious attempt to pass.

In a similar vein, Carmen Mola didn't exist and was the pen name for three men and it was only revealed when they won a prize and went to claim it.

The supposed gay male JT LeRoy was a pen name of Laura Albert.

My understanding is that the same is true of Elena Ferrante.

It was mortifying to watch a walking hateful strawman of the Red Tribe,

(Out-of-touch right-wing nightmares of teachers grooming children to become queer through sterile corporate-board-room-esque gay lesson plans are largely ignorant of how children interact with their peers already.)

It's a bit odd to me to be mortified by the encounter with a hateful Red Tribe strawman, who's nothing more than a run-of-the-mill Wallmart schizo, while dismissing concerns over hateful Blue Tribe strawmen with access to people's children. The substance of the dismissal seems completely off as well, and ignorant of how children interact with political power.

As for transvestigations, literally just use an AI. Though be careful if you're Australian, lest you end up in court.

Precisely.

(Out-of-touch right-wing nightmares of teachers grooming children to become queer through sterile corporate-board-room-esque gay lesson plans are largely ignorant of how children interact with their peers already.)

No, the concern is peer pressure and activist teachers who are otherwise likable confusing children by introducing them to all these trans memes.

We know from pre-internet research that gender nonconformity and doubts were more common in kids than adults. 90+ % of nonconforming children became usually homosexual adults okay with their body. If you stuff them into the medical pipeline, the health and quality of life of the 90% is going to be impacted.

There are obvious parallels between "transvestigation" and trans activists trying to headcanon historical figures as having secretly been trans all along.

Reminds me of how, some time ago, I was hanging around the centre of my old neighborhood and witnessed a drunk/drugged shirtless psycho, in a very short order, first going to the booth of the local Greens who were campaigning in an election and shouting how they were commies and traitors, then wandering off to shout racist slurs to passing immigrant kids, then going to the tram stop to harass young women and make them very uncomfortable (then the tram came and he took off elsewhere). It's the kind of an anecdote one can't even tell often because it sounds so stereotypical you'd get some right-winger accusing you of inventing it to make the right look bad.

I've always seen transvestigation as at least partly an evolution of the "if you watch this shitty vid where it looks like some celebrity's eyes look weird or their skin bulges unnaturally it proves they're LIZARD PEOPLE" conspiracy theories. After all, trans people exist whereas lizard people don't.

I've never seen one transvestigator actually show examples of what they'd consider properly "male" or "female" facial shapes or body language patterns on a non-trans celebrity, presumably since other transvestigators would then rush to claim that actually such shapes and patterns present telltale signs of secret transness. Peak transvestigating I've seen was a standard transvestigational body language analysis claiming that (I think) Chelsea Manning was actually a cis woman who is only pretending to be a trans woman for some unstated nefarious deep state reason.

Fresh study posted on Richard Hanania's Twitter:

“White women dating white men have an IQ around 100. Dating Hispanic drops that IQ by 3 points, and dating black drops that by 7 points.”

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1817607492668731449

The graphs he posted don't seem to mention Asian-White couples, which I'm curious about.

If you’d like to read more, the study itself, which came out last year, can be found here. The authors are unsurprisingly considered by many to be scientific racist cranks, though I haven’t actually seen any thoughtful criticisms of their work (to be fair, I haven’t looked hard). Whatever you think of his views, Kirkegaard’s Substack is frequently interesting.

That's the first anime profile picture I've seen attached to a research paper.

Get used to it, I think.

Seb's a pretty good poster, seems like a curious guy who likes actually doing the calculations required. Also non-white, iirc.

White women dating NAM minorities is a lower class signal in a lot of contexts, so that doesn't surprise anyone.

What's a NAM minority?

Non-Asian minority (using a PIN number to withdraw money from an ATM machine, of course)

While breathing via a SCUBA apparatus

using a PIN number to withdraw money from an ATM machine, of course

…what?

They're all redundant acronyms.

The lesson is to never fully acronymize a phrase, always leave a key word out because people will need to say it anyway. "PI Number", NA Immigrant, AT Field Machine

Common usage recapitulates the last word of the acronym outside the acronym, which is stupid but too endemic to fight.

"NAM Minority" = Non-Asian Minority Minority
"PIN Number" = Personal Identification Number Number
"ATM Machine" = Automated Teller Machine Machine

"NA minority" would suggest "North America minority" for many, including me.

And of course the related:

"Please RSVP" = Please Respond Please (Though the language jump makes it more forgivable I suppose)

Ah yes, RAS syndrome.

A personal identification number (PIN), PIN code, or sometimes redundantly a PIN number

If this data isn't normalized for geographic location (on the neighborhood/zip code level) or income, then all it tells you is that stupid people live in poor areas.

Just a guess, but I reckon there are two main categories of Asian-White couples:

Asian-white in heavy liberal/tech focused city e.g. San Francisco. This would likely bring the average IQ up.

Bride-By-Mail / Expat Asian-White couples probably brings the average down, since the average women from those places tend to be less educated.

What's also interesting is that if you exclude whites, interracial couples tend to have higher IQ on average. This holds true for Hispanic-Black relationships compared to Hispanic-Hispanic.

I thought his position was that talking about race and IQ was a bad move strategically.

Well I guess he makes exceptions for his personal hobby horses. IIRC, one of the things that came out from the doxxing of his spicy anonymous postings was that he doesn't like black-white interracial dating.

Did the doxxing reveal if he specifically dislikes black-white interracial dating or other kinds of interracial dating e.g. white-hispanic or white-asian?

Really? The biggest relationship of my life was with a black woman. Reasons to get an "ick" vibe from RH #398

Dude's gotta get those clicks.

So, let me see if I'm understanding this situation right:

Per a 2021 article by Axios, Harris was "appointed by Biden as border czar." Their wording: "Why it matters: The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has reached crisis levels. Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the "root causes" that drive migration." Yet another 2021 article by Axios says this very same thing, saying that Harris was "put in charge of the border crisis" and calling her border czar.

So Axios in 2021 (and many other such media outlets) call Harris "border czar" when they think it might make Harris look good and bolster her importance. Axios then conveniently disavows this label and issues a correction to their own article only three years later, in 2024, once it's discovered that the situation at the southern border might not reflect well on Harris now that she is running against Trump. Note both the second article calling Harris border czar and the one saying she was never border czar were written by the very same journalist. One moment it's Huzzah, Harris is border czar and the next it's You guys, Harris was never border czar, the Republicans just made that up, and we have always been at war with Eastasia. Democrats have already produced internal memos telling their people how to fall in line on this issue.

My understanding of this whole situation is that this is one of the things that are technically true, but that these pedantic fact-checks are obviously partisan and misleading (and designed to lead you to a different conclusion than it actually warrants). Yes, the term "border czar" doesn't exist, and so technically Harris cannot have been border czar. But "czar" is an unofficial term that is generically used to describe people in positions of power like this, going back to the Bush era. Clearly the media thought it was an appropriate term in 2021, but not in 2024, and the fact that they're now going back and "recontextualising" their previous articles based on whether or not it's politically convenient is an extremely bad look.

It is correct that her role was not to literally manage everything regarding border policy, and she was not directly in charge of the border. She did, however, have a responsibility to try and stem the core cause of the border crisis, engage in diplomacy to do so, and to work with these countries to enforce borders, something that she also admits to in this tweet. If she really did what she was tasked to do, she should be able to confidently reply that she offered solutions to these problems that weren't taken up, not to claim that she holds zero responsibility on one of the few issues she was asked to assist with. As Biden himself states:

"In addition to that, there’s about five other major things she’s handling, but I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border."

"[T]he Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders."

This entire thing just seems like one of these comically exaggerated Ministry-of-Truth-esque things that happen often in election cycles, the last one being the total 180 on Biden, where before the debate they were proclaiming that Biden was in the best shape ever and that all the alt-media outlets talking about his mental decline were just conspiracy theorists, then right after that shitshow of a debate that they couldn't BandAid over, all of a sudden the calls to resign started up and it turned out his party had been silent about his decline for years despite knowing about it.

Most political messaging is not designed for people like you. Based on your writing ability, you seem to be of above-average intelligence, and based on the effort you have put into your post, you seem to be very interested in politics.

Most political messaging is designed for people of average intelligence and average levels of interest in politics. There are millions of people who have not even been paying attention to the election campaign and are only about now starting to tune in because the election is coming up in a few months. There are millions of people who do not have the cognitive ability to notice the contradiction between past and present journalism articles about Kamala Harris, or any other topic, unless you make it ridiculously explicit for them.

The aim is clear: they're trying to shift a simple and powerful "she was in charge and failed" into some boring debate about titles so that the mind of the voter tunes out and is not occupied by the border and rather something else (preferably abortion).

I'm not sure it's going to work though. Even with total media blackout the mess is big enough it's going to be hard to avoid discussing. And if you're shifting blame and look evasive you look even worse.

Biden's strategy of owning it and bare face lying that his failure is actually a success may actually have been the superior rejoinder. "I don't know who's telling the truth" is much better on a losing issue than "he's attacking her and she's making excuses".

She was tasked to solve the 2021 border problem, namely, migration originating from a few specific countries. In 2024 migration flows from those countries are way down, but migration from other countries has increased a lot. It’s basically two separate problems stapled together by the fact that both problems materialize for the US at the southern border.

It’s an awkward situation for democrats to communicate because clearly at the time she was the “border czar,” formally or not, for the 2021 border problem. The 2021 border problem that she was the czar of has largely resolved. Now she gets flak for a 2024 problem that she was never really the czar of but sounds very similar to a problem she was the czar of.

Dems can either try to communicate the above distinction in a super hostile republican information environment where it’s in the republicans interest to maximally link her to everything people dislike about the Biden administration, or they can do what they did which is to bluntly pretend she was never the border czar. I think they should have tried the former but instead they went with the latter and are caught looking very dishonest.

Edit: I’m not claiming she is the one who solved the problem (see informative posts down thread) just clarifying the problem the dems faced in communication.

She was tasked to solve the 2021 border problem, namely, migration originating from a few specific countries. In 2024 migration flows from those countries are way down, but migration from other countries has increased a lot. It’s basically two separate problems stapled together by the fact that both problems materialize for the US at the southern border.

I'll provide a counterargument and say that I think there is a pretty plausible angle here through which her opposition can criticise her. Note that as presented, Harris' mandate was not only to work with countries to reduce the root causes spurring migration from these countries, but also "work with those nations to ... enhance migration enforcement at their borders." Most of these migrants gaining access through the southern border are going to be coming through Mexico, and often getting in there through the Northern Triangle. So yes, many migrants coming through the southern border do not directly originate from the countries she was tasked with, but they are gaining access through these countries, and that is a border failure that falls within her stated ambit.

This isn’t necessarily an airtight, uncontestable argument to prove that Harris was in dereliction of her duty, but to defuse it Harris would have to actually tackle these claims in full rather than trying to shirk responsibility for her role in stemming migration and arguing endlessly over the semantics of "border czar". The latter comes off as weaselly and dishonest, because that’s exactly what it is.

She was tasked to solve the 2021 border problem, namely, migration originating from a few specific countries..... It’s an awkward situation for democrats to communicate because clearly at the time she was the “border czar,” formally or not, for the 2021 border problem.

I understand this but I'm not letting the Dems off the hook. The reason it is awkward to communicate is because it is has been the Dem position that 'harsh' and punitive border policies are bad and the way to fix the immigration crisis is to fix the 'root causes' of the migration. So according to the Dem's own position back in 2021, 'fixing the border' 'addressing root causes' 'border czar', and 'addressing push factors from key Latin American countries' are all the same thing. Since they believed that the key to fixing the border crisis was to fix the push factors -- "To address the situation at the southern border, we have to address the root causes of migration. " -- not beefing up punitive enforcement along the actual border -- so in fact Kamala was in charge of fixing the border crisis. Only now are they trying to back away from this messaging when it turns out that 'addressing root causes' didn't actually fix anything and the old messaging is now inconvenient for them.

I'll just note that some of the bigger primary drivers for change in the Northern Triangle sending countries were largely driven by factors beyond Harris's influence, and even against Administration preferences.

One of the big ones, for example, has been the decrease from El Salvador... which almost certainly was caused by President Bukele's draconian tough-on-crime policies which broke the back of the local criminal gangs that increased instability-driven migration. However, this crack down came againt the objection of, not with the support from, the US State Department. Regional efforts of emulate such tough-on-crime issues and restore local perceptions of security are more often opposed rather than supported by the US. (This is because these legal authorities come at the cost of due process rights and have potential for authoritarian abuse- a concern I'd want to emphasize is valid, but also not one shared by much of the local population.)

Another is the implications of the rise of Darien Gap migration. Not only did this change the proportion of non-Northern Triangle migration sources of a whole (increasing absolute numbers of migrants, reducing relative numbers), but it provided local countries a means to pressure the US to gain migration concessions in exchange for access / cooperation, which is to say by offering more opportunities for legal northern triangle migration (reducing absolute numbers of illegal migrants by transitioning them to the legal migrant category). This does come with some genuine benefits that shouldn't be discounted- a greater willingness of the northern triangle countries to take back migrants kicked out for criminal reasons, cooperation if someone of actual concern is recognized- but it's also a bit of a categorical shell game on how to count numbers.

There have also been two non-Northern Triangle factors in particular that have grown in relevance of the last year for increasing the non-Northern Triangle numbers. Again, the US really hasn't had much influence here.

One of these is the role of Nicaragua. Not only is Nicaragua not in the northern triangle by definition (it's considered part of the southern triangle), but over the last years it has deliberately facilitated migration trough it, such as with direct charter flights which- if you're willing to pay- you can fly directly to Nicaragua and then as long as you're gone within the time limit, they don't care if you go north (wink wink). This is similar to migration-practices Belarus did during the 2021 migration crisis on the Polish border, as way both to make money and pressure a neighbor who you have more confrontational relations with.

But more important is the role of social media in making it ever-better known that migration to the US is possible, and the bottom-up facilitation networks of de jure legalization making it safer and better known (and thus better able to support larger volumes). There was an excellent NYT story- a Ticket to Disney World iirc- late last year on how this process works, and suffice to say American 'don't come here' stories pale in comparison to social media channels dedicated to the 'how to' combined with local authorities who can make more money facilitating migration through than by paying to stop an unstoppable flow.

To reinforce your point, apparently over 10% of Cuba has crossed the border into America in the last couple of years. At those sorts of numbers, virtually every Cuban is going to have a family member who they can call to tell them exactly what the process was like.

I wonder what the effects of this must be on Cuban society. This is a major depopulation event for them now, and you would expect it to be mostly younger working-age people leaving.

It's very amusing in some respects how strategic rivals in geopolitics have come to view population movement. Back in the Cold War, control of the population was an ideological imperative, and Soviet-block governments often took great difficulty to prevent free movement of populations out of or even within the country. Now, some of those successor states- or in the case of Cuba and Nicaragua, the same elites, deliberately expel population for domestic security measures, and with a level of 'if the westerners don't like it, it must be bad for them and good for me.' Which is just such a paradigm shift in the last half century or so.

And it's not without its consequences either. As more and more of the latin american populations go abroad and especially to the US, various forms of US influence increase, as the US diaspora becomes significant financial and even political influence vector. The current President of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, is an US citizen (dual US and Ecuadorian, born in Miami but raised in Ecuador), which is wild not only for the fact that a Yankee capitalist was elected president of an Andean Ridge country where Chavismo was part of the leftest wave earlier in the century, but also in terms of population.

Because of how much migration has occurred from various sending countries, small countries in particular can have, well, surprisingly high ratios of their nominal census population present in the US. For example, there are an estimate .95 million of so Ecuadorian diaspora in the US out of a census population of 18 million, which is to say over 5%. There are something like 100,000 Guyanese who have arrived in the US/naturalized, when Guayana is a country of only about 800,000, or nearly 12%. The Cuban diaspora is nearly 2.7 million, to a Cuban island population of about 11.2 million, which is approaching 25% of the islanders.

Well, not quite- many of these population figures include naturalized US citizens, and they don't factor in the diasporas in other countries (far more Venezuelans stay in South American than come to the US, for example)- but it's hard to emphasize just how weird this is in a historical context, especially in a region historically sensitive to external influences. A historical justification for intervention and even annexation during the age of colonialism has long been having the presence of associated communities on the other side of the border, be it ethnic enclaves or cultural kin or even just linguistic relatives, and how this creates a basis of intervention. It's not even just an archaic practice- see the Russian justifications in Ukraine, or PRC claims on ethnic community grounds, or various brushfire wars in Africa, or the Armenia/Azerjiban ethnic enclaves, or the Arab-Israeli conflict over palestinians. Demographic ties matter, and matter a lot.

And if the American government wanted to, it has access to a whole host of justifications along similar lines.

Not that it will- not anytime in the near-term future at least- but in other times and other places, other empires would use having control of 5-10% of the population of country as grounds to control the remainder.

Yeah, the numbers are similar for Dominicans, which is the group I'm most personally familiar with. 2.5 million in the US, 11 million in the home country. Many of my Dominican relatives move back and forth between the two countries and hold dual citizenship. Most of their biggest national heroes play baseball for American teams.

I haven't directly posed the question, but I suspect most Dominicans would eagerly welcome annexation by the US. There's a ready made example of what a situation like that would look like in practice over in Puerto Rico, and Dominicans are extremely cynical about their own governance and institutions. The US dollar is seen as much more solid and reliable than their own peso, US politics is seen as much less corrupt, etc.

you would expect it to be mostly younger working-age people

I don't know the demographic breakdown, but many coming to New England are in their 50s.

Cuba has had below replacement fertility for a while now, right? Like there's not just endless amounts of young Cubans, so it's actually even worse.

I concede all of this and I appreciate the interesting specifics. I don’t think US policy has much of an effect on border crossings except very broadly that when the US is doing well and when other countries are doing poorly, more people want to cross. I don’t think Harris or Trump or anybody should get much hate or praise on this issue.

Not intended as anything for you to concede to! Just an addition of tangential context.

(Warning- more opinion / tangential context to follow)

In so much that anyone should get hate or praise on the issue, Biden's immigration signaling during the 2020 election, and execution thereafter, can be credited for signalling to migrants a more receptive regulatory environment due to the signaled and executed reversals of Trump's established migration arrangements (which specifically relied on Mexico, which Biden dropped and then couldn't re-enforce).

Biden's party-line position on in 2020 on various procedural items, from 'we will accept your asylum claim as legitimate unless/until we find otherwise' (rather than requiring evidence/determination in advance), followed by the known weakness of post-initial release enforcement, and public rhetorical shifts (such as avoiding the term illegal immigration whenever possible in favor of euphisms such as 'undocumented' or 'irregular') very much contributed to a (justified) perception that mass illegal migration was viable. Part of the social media how-to networks referenced before include things like coaching applicants on what to say on first encounter to appeal to the migration policy directives that Biden signalled and executed. In much the same way Trump began his foreign policy term in 2016 with an 'Anything but Obama' difference-for-difference's-sake, Biden approached migration policy with a 'anything but Trump' mantra, which was a theme leading up to 2020 and was publicly carried out.

While some of these policies were later reversed to various degrees- and there was even an especially a notable (if temporary) disruption in 2023 that roughly corresponded to the administration publicly signaling new application rules for a system that introduced a new way to remotely apply for asylum from abroad, and can be used as evidence against asylum claims if someone doesn't utilize it before showing up at the US- there was a significant perception shift in Biden versus Trump immigration enforcement intentions, and not for the stricter.

The 2021 border problem that she was the czar of has largely resolved.

Ok...

I don’t think US policy has much of an effect

Which is it? It seems like you're being rather partisan...

I don’t think it has much of an affect. I’m not giving her credit for it, just saying she was czar of a problem that’s gotten a lot better.

I think you mean "effect".

She was tasked to solve the 2021 border problem, namely, migration originating from a few specific countries. In 2024 migration flows from those countries are way down, but migration from other countries has increased a lot. It’s basically two separate problems stapled together by the fact that both problems materialize for the US at the southern border.

On one hand, this is fair. On the other hand, it feels like the way someone who has only spent their life in a bureaucracy would frame the problem. You were given specific criteria, and you satisfactorily met those criteria instead of solving an underlying problem that's creating the specific problem you were tasked with.

However, if the voters see the underlying problem is that there's migration instead of migration from specific countries, the ultimate result is that the problem hasn't been fixed.

I agree that it’s kind of a bureaucratic argument but what’s being debated in this particular argument is what she was in fact in charge of. It seems like a separate argument to say like oh Harris should’ve carved out a bigger role for herself inside the administration on this issue beyond what Biden tasked her with.

I think this is completely fair. But then my takeaway is that more attention and effort should have been paid to the border itself and its enforcement. I get the image of the admin plugging their fingers in the holes of a dam while it collapses on the sides, and whatever good work she performed is undecut by a strategic failure to keep an eye on the ball - or to even ackowledge the ball at all.

Was her authority over the border removed after she solved the original problem, or is it still constrained to those few specific countries, and the current problem is someone else's job? If not, how does that make her look any better?

'czar' is not a real title and confers no special powers. It is, basically, an albatross, for the reasons we see here.

As I understand it she didn’t have authority over the border, she had essentially a diplomatic mission to those countries that in 2021 were contributing to the border crisis. I don’t know what the internal dynamics were around what her specific remit was and why it didn’t become broader over time (my guess is she didn’t want to do that job because it’s terrible and thankless).

Off topic-ish, but after the Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021, a slew of opinion pieces were written and published on why withdrawing from Afghanistan was a mistake and how Biden's execution of the withdrawal was a disaster. A particular article was brought to my attention by a reddit post. I couldn't tell you the author or the publisher, but I do remember the article was clearly sponsored by Lockheed Martin. It wasn't just an advertisement inadvertently on the same page. And then a day or two later, the fact that the article was sponsored by Lockheed Martin was removed. I checked the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and sure enough, the page had been edited.

I don't have proof, so take it with a grain of salt. I'm not sure what my anecdote adds other than an account of what was my first time personally catching something (kinda) getting memory-holed. I don't have much respect for mainstream media.

On a side note - how overwhelmed is Tik Tok with kamala content? When it reaches me - a person that is way outside US demographic both geographically and age wise it means is should be like a tsunami. Most of it is quite cringe and I think it will put people off, but still - nothing even close when biden was nominee?

Also I really would like some kind of mechanism for accountability for those kind of mass flip flops - the institution will lose credibility is obviously not enough.

Any pro-trumpers dismayed over the amount of pro-Kamala content on TikTok need to go get their guy. Full disclosure I also think tiktok is bad and should be banned.

I am not a fan of overusing "Orwellian" but this is as close a case as I've seen to all those comments about everyone receiving a simultaneous "download" of their new talking points.

"Border czar" is not and never was an official title - so when everyone says "Harris was never appointed border czar" - yes, technically that is true. (Technically, the Vice President has precisely one official duty, which is breaking ties in the Senate. Other than that, the VP has only whatever duties and authority the President assigns, and there have been VPs who basically faffed around for four years with nothing to do.) But clearly Harris was referred to as "border czar" and everyone understood what that meant, even if it was a strictly informal title.

Frustratingly, mentioning this to my Harris-supporting friends just gets sighs and eye-rolls, like "Why does this even matter?" And how good a job she did as "border czar" probably doesn't matter all that much - what matters (to me) is watching the entire media apparatus turn on a dime to reinforce DNC talking points and everyone thinks that's fine and that people trying to point out the discrepancy are just bad-faith Harris-haters.

And how good a job she did as "border czar" probably doesn't matter all that much - what matters (to me) is watching the entire media apparatus turn on a dime to reinforce DNC talking points and everyone thinks that's fine and that people trying to point out the discrepancy are just bad-faith Harris-haters.

This point will likely be ceded once it's irrelevant, like the unfortunate implications of the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

So there is some good news on the horizon.

Frustratingly, mentioning this to my Harris-supporting friends just gets sighs and eye-rolls, like "Why does this even matter?"

The exasperated eye roll followed up with a comment like "why does this even matter?" or "are we still talking about this is 202X" etc. should be recognized as the liberal-PMC capitulation performance.

You see no one on the PMC every really loses. At least not all at once. It's more of a slow wandering into obscurity that ends in chairing an Alumni outreach committee at bard and a memoir that sells exactly negative seven copies. If they always think they can come back, they will stay on the team.

But the subtext is clear enough; "I don't want to talk about this because I am aware that the facts are quite inarguably not on my side. I will, therefore, socially pressure you into, at least, reducing the pointedness with which you address the issue"

Go to Google.com and type "attempted assassination of Donald" or "of Trum" and look at the predictions.

The entire Dem system is orwellian, there is no other word for it. It's not possible to overuse it.
You've just gotten used to it, because that's what you have to do to feel like a Sensible Moderate rather than one of those witches you sneer at.

For what its worth, for me the autocomplete's also purged for Trump.

Huh. I also cannot get any Google autocomplete for "trump shot", "trump assassina...", "trump secret s...", "trump inju..."... Google clearly knows of these topics, but they somehow haven't made their way into their search history model.

This is at least very fishy.

They're likely in the model, they're just in the autocomplete blacklist (a list of patterns which isn't allowed to autocomplete).

Go to Google.com and type "attempted assassination of Donald" or "of Trum" and look at the predictions.

Also, I did this just to indulge you (I assume "Trum" was a typo, or is that supposed to be some new meme I am not familiar with?), and the top results were the latest AP, CNN, ABC, and Fox News stories, followed by links from the FBI and Wikipedia. What new Dem Orwellian nefariousness am I supposed to be seeing, exactly?

Google's Twitter account claims the removal of autocompletes is intentional behavior, though it doesn't seem to be shared by a number of other (sometimes fairly recent) other assassinations or assassination attempts that would have fallen under the claimed policy's terms. Westerly's position seems the more charitable explanation, but that they're not using it doesn't encourage.

Jesus fucking Christ, it was not a typo. Look at the auto-complete suggestions like I told you to do. The last suggestion it will make is "TRUMan", and when you add the P it goes blank.

This is exactly what I meant by how you pretend not to see what's right in front of you so you can sneer at people

Read my other comment and stop rage-stroking.

When I specify exactly what I input and what I see, I am not "pretending not to see" anything. I have carefully elucidated the scenarios in which I think it's plausible there is skullduggery going on, and those in which it is less plausible, and why. It's possible I miss something or am wrong in my analysis, but so far I haven't seen anything to convince me that "Google engineers are giggle-giggle-tee-heeing over erasing certain Trump-related search phrases" beats "Google search sucks." If I set out to prove Google is "against" a certain person or event or trend, I would need to do a bunch of searches with different keywords, and then compare with similar searches of equivalent things, and even then account for the unpredictability of LLMs.

None of this is pretending anything. I am easily able to believe that most Google employees hate Donald Trump and would absolutely reengineer the entire site to make him lose if (1) they thought it would work (2) they thought they could get away with it. But you reading tea leaves (or more likely, the latest thing circulating on Telegram about how Google is messing with Trump-related search terms) is not uncovering some plain conspiracy that only those in denial can't see.

FWIW, I tried doing other related searches and got similar results, e.g. "Reagan a" and it's already suggesting "Reagan assassination attempt". Whereas even "Trump assassinatio" still doesn't autocomplete.

I don't have a particularly conspiratorial mindset and I fail to see how fiddling with autocomplete results serves any particular purpose. But it does seem like they have been fiddled with.

"Trump poli" doesn't autocomplete either- you'd expect "Trump police"(he likes to tout police endorsements) and "Trump policy/ies". On the other hand "Trump for" autocompletes to "Trump foreign policy". "Trump Ame" autocompletes to "Trump American Dream TV show". "Trump law" autocompletes to "Trump lawyer" and "Trump lawn sign". "Trump pr" autocompletes as "Trump presidency" and "Trump presidential library". "Trump ag" autocompletes as "Trump age" and not "Trump agenda".

It looks like it's been fiddled with a little bit, I guess. But I'm surprised I don't see "Trump project 2025" in the suggestions.

I’m on your side and it wasn’t immediately obvious without actually attempting the search as written. You should not assume bad faith here.

I'm so God damn tired of watching people like that smugly pretend "I don't know what you mean, that's so weird, why would you notice that?"

It's never honest, it's always tactical sneering. You can tell because he's still doing it even after people showed him in the gentlest way possible.
With sneers like "the latest thing circulating on telegram", he's literally just doing the same thing as Kalema voters he was criticizing above, and doesn't even realize it.
Even when he's got the nerve to grudgingly notice things, he still has to get an elbow in at the people who noticed before it was fashionable.

I'm so God damn tired of watching people like that smugly pretend "I know know what you mean, that's so weird, why would you notice that?"

I do not pretend.

It's never honest, it's always tactical sneering. You can tell because he's still doing it even after people showed him in the gentlest way possible.

I am always honest. I answered each of the people who pointed out what they saw, with what I saw with my own search results.

Even when he's got the nerve to grudgingly notice things, he still has to get an elbow in at the people who noticed before it was fashionable.

I notice things whether or not they are fashionable. I also notice when people have partisan blind spots.

I think it was the "bad faith trolls accusing me of lying" part that he's complaining about in the last bit. SteveKirk was the only one AFAIK who accused you of lying (a lot of people asked for evidence, but that's legitimate to check why you got different results than they did), and while he definitely didn't AGF and that's his error I'm reasonably confident he's acting in good faith himself (the only plausible way he could be a troll IMO would be if he were a full-blown agent provocateur trying to get us to attempt terrorism and get arrested).

More comments

As you can see, the only Trump related suggestion was "attempted assassination of donald wiki" meaning that "donald" isn't a filtered keyword in suggestions, but that someone at Google manually removed the most obvious suggestions.

/images/17221839899043539.webp

"assassination biden", "assassination kamala" etc don't autocomplete either, which might imply they've simply removed a bunch of obvious phrases to avoid some other guy taking a pop at one of the candidates and the news stories being written about how the (potential) assassin had Googled this phrase before grabbing his rifle. (Yes, no-one's attempted to assassinate the Dem candidates, but you'd still expect them to autocomplete for people to find, for instance, reactions by Biden or Harris to Trump assassination or so on.)

Considering that nobody has tried to assassinate them, this seems to be expected behaviour?

If Boris Johnson flashed parliament, would the fact that google has no suggestions for 'blair flashing' have any relevance to the results you might get for 'Boris flashing'?

Again, do you think the expected behavior would be autocomplete not delivering any results?

Both "tony blair flashing" and "boris johnson flashing" do indeed not deliver autocomplete results, as expected. (well I wasn't sure about Boris)

Whereas if either of them had been flashing anyone lately, I would certainly expect Google to autocomplete accordingly -- what else would you expect?

Once they manage to integrate advanced hallucination LLMs into their search, I guess the engine might make something up -- but otherwise once you get down to a level of specificity that will return very few to zero results, "nothing" is exactly what autocomplete should do.

If you do the actual google search on Boris you will find that he opposes 'cyber-flashing' (whatever that is), and that somebody in Parliament claims that Angela Rayner was flashing him during Question Period to put him off his game -- there doesn't seem to be an obvious autocompletion there, given that it's supposed to work by suggesting 'hot searches'. (as it were)

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"bush as" prompts "bush assassination attempt"

Is Bush (George W., presumably) currently in a position where he'd be expected to be undergoing a high risk for a monumental, history-changing assassination?

No, but he was the subject of one.

And yet "Attempted assassination of" gives me Donald Trump as the first results.

I think people try to do too much Kremlinology on Google results. I believe Google engineers might sometimes try to manipulate results for political ends, but most claims I see are like this: dumb, inconsistent, and more plausibly the result of the same phenomenon that causes Dall-E to draw a house with a chimney no matter how many ways I try to specify "No chimney."

I would have to believe some low level engineer is just arbitrarily hacking specific query phrases. Which is not... impossible, but seems unlikely in a number of ways.

I believe Google engineers might sometimes try to manipulate results for political ends, but most claims I see are like this: dumb, inconsistent, and more plausibly the result of the same phenomenon that causes Dall-E to draw a house with a chimney no matter how many ways I try to specify "No chimney."

Are you pretending not to notice again? Dall-E does that because CNNs are bad at decomposition and nobody invented any better. What Google does is intentional, go to Yandex or any search engine which is outside of america's culture war and you immediately get suggested prompts for attack on Trump

You don't get your house without chimney or headless horseman or car without wheels just by going to another's brand of AI gen.

I get Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, and Theodore Roosevelt.

"Attempted assassination of d" gives "de gaulle" and "franklin d roosevelt" and nobody else.

Anything more specific gives nothing whatsoever.

Note that Google is known to blacklist words and phrases from autocomplete, at least on a crude level, so it wouldn't be surprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Search_suggestions

Same here as the other commenter: Ronald Reagan, Robert Fico, Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, the Pope, Bob Marley, Truman, Seward, Reagan, President Reagan.

Do you still get Trump if you try it now?

See my eta above.

The top results now seem to be news stories about Trump being omitted from search results.

And yet "Attempted assassination of" gives me Donald Trump as the first results.

Not me. I get Prince Alfred, then Ronald Reagan, Arthur Calwell, Robert Fico, Queen Victoria, the Pope, etc, etc. Trump nowhere on the list.

How is this Kremonology? You saw what they did to their AI image generation. At this point the default assumption is Google has their finger on the scale

I was skeptical but here's what happened when I tried it in a private tab:

https://i.imgur.com/A6o3XVZ.png

https://i.imgur.com/l6wS075.png

https://i.imgur.com/OSixrIk.png

Autocomplete for anything after Donald didn't show up at all, "tru" let alone "trump."

Isn't he talking about autocomplete (hence "Trum" instead of "Trump")?

Okay. "Attempted Assassination of Donald" - autocompletes were "wiki," "first attempted assassination of US President," and references to various presidential assassinations. Is the Google wickedness here that it doesn't autocomplete to "Donald Trump" first? I suppose it's possible that Google engineers intentionally removed "Trump" from the predictions, but the reason for doing this eludes me - people would then be diverted from finding out about an attempted assassination of Donald Trump? Working with LLMs and other token predictors quite a lot, I find more prosaic technical explanations more likely than whatever opaque partisan SEO scheme this is supposed to imply.

When I try "Attempted Assassination of Trum", the first autocomplete is "Trump" (guess those Google engineers weren't vigilant enough!) and the second is "Truman."

ETA: While generally I don't feel obligated to prove anything to bad faith trolls accusing me of lying, I did find myself puzzled that I was getting different results than what other people claimed. I redid them and realized I'd missed the top results were earlier searches in my own search history (with a different icon). So when I used a private tab I got mostly the same Trump-less results as others did. (Still don't see Prince Alfred or Queen Victoria, though - @AshLael. Maybe regional differences?) Still not convinced someone deliberately went in and removed all Trump-related assassination queries, but I will be interested in trying again in a few days and seeing what happens.

Loathe as I am to do it I have to defend Google here. A more thorough examination suggests they are blocking nearly all autocomplete suggestions good and bad related to Trump and Harris. My guess: an attempt to be seen as NOT trying to influence the election. A list of searches that seem to be blacklisted by autocomplete: “trump felon/felony” “trump sexual assault” “trump january 6” “trump lies” “trump crimes” “kamala/harris border” “kamala/harris border czar” “kamala/harris voting record”

Honestly almost nothing autocompletes for either outside of age, nationality, net worth, height, news.

One of the few exceptions I found was “trump stormy daniels”

Assuming my results reflect what others get, on the whole Google actually seems pretty neutral here and is genuinely pursuing a policy of “never autocomplete anything related to either candidate but the bare minimum biographical details”

Oh yeah, I noticed that for 'Trump felony'. If so, well..

It suggests 'Trump felonies' when I start typing 'Trump felony'. Yandex doesn't suggest 'Trump felony' at all so I don't think even Google doesn't suggest 'trump felony' for you that it's intentional.

Yeah I think you might have solved the mystery here.

(Still don't see Prince Alfred or Queen Victoria, though - @AshLael. Maybe regional differences?)

Highly likely. I got Arthur Calwell too, and that's a name I doubt many non-Australians would know (opposition leader back in the 1960s).

I get only Truman.

Show a screenshot, I get the exact same result as everyone but you apparently

I suppose it's possible that Google engineers intentionally removed "Trump" from the predictions, but the reason for doing this eludes me

I put it in the same category as Google Gemini refusing to show white people. It's a hamfisted way of manipulating the prevalence and salience of a topic.

When I try "Attempted Assassination of Trum", the first autocomplete is "Trump" (guess those Google engineers weren't vigilant enough!) and the second is "Truman."

That query gives me Truman only: https://imgur.com/2ElIZQy

No hint that a person by the name of Donald Trump was ever the target of an assassination attempt. "Donald Trump Assassi" doesn't autocomplete either, and "Donald Trump shot" corrects my apparent typo to "...shoe".

"Donald Trump Assassi" doesn't autocomplete either, and "Donald Trump shot" corrects my apparent typo to "...shoe".

To check, did it autocorrect in the "showing results for X, click here to get what you actually typed" sense (which I often get searching for weird shit)? When I did it, it came up with red underline on "shot" indicating a spelling error, and suggested "donald trump shoe", but pressing Enter did in fact take me to "donald trump shot" i.e. reports on the assassination attempt. I just want to check the exact details.

I think you got the same as me. An apparent typo on the autocomplete, that goes to the real results when entered: https://imgur.com/a/eNXCArL

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The entire Dem system is orwellian, there is no other word for it. It's not possible to overuse it. You've just gotten used to it, because that's what you have to do to feel like a Sensible Moderate rather than one of those witches you sneer at.

You make a number of conflict theory mistakes.

First, you assume I have never noticed this before just because I only occasionally comment on it. This is not correct. I've been around and politically aware longer than you. I am more informed and have more historical perspective than you. This isn't new, it's not limited to one faction, but it is also usually exaggerated. ("Orwellian" is like "Fascist" or "Nazi" - most people who use it Literally Literally don't understand what Literally Fascist, Nazi, or Orwellian is.)

Second, you think this is a "Dem" system. Again, not having been around as long and seeing things only through your partisan lens, you notice when your enemies do it (and it's the Worst Thing Ever) and not when your side does it (which is, alternately, not the same thing at all or it is but only fighting fire with fire).

Third, you assume that I "have to feel like a Sensible Moderate" - i.e., it's a guise I adopt to be a Right Thinking Person, and not what I actually believe, and not sincere beliefs arrived at through analysis of history and the political landscape. I realize this is a comforting and satisfying thing to believe. It's always more pleasant to imagine your enemies are bots, NPCs, "low information," etc.

But it's incorrect. I am a sensible moderate person (this doesn't mean I am right about everything or that I deliberately triangulate to find a "moderate" position - it means I am not generally given to catastrophizing, villifying, or presentist despair or accelerationism), and to the degree I "sneer" at witches, it's because their malice-driven conflict theories are wrong more often than not. That they are occasionally right about some things does not change this.

The entire Dem system is orwellian, there is no other word for it. It's not possible to overuse it.

It's used beyond that, though; Amadan only said he's not a fan of overusing it, and it does clearly get overused (I've seen people refer to dystopias as "Orwellian" when they were much closer to Brave New World, for instance).

Yeah but messing with the dominant search index of the country to censor certain topics is pretty much as close to "he who controls the present controls the past" as a company can get. So does the Dalle diversity scandal for that matter.

I wasn't objecting to that; I was objecting to SteveKirk's assertion that it's not overused. It fits this (as Amadan noted), but it doesn't fit certain other things and people use it for those other things anyway.

That's true, but it generally fits the whole pattern of behavior and general strategy of a leftist post-totalitarian regime, in the sense Havel used the term.

Deniable coercion, manipulation, and vague concern-trolling threats of what might (deservedly) happen to you if you ask too many questions. Much neater than cracking skulls all the time.

So far as the "Read Another Book" meme goes, Harry Potter is to millenials as 1984 is to boomers.

It takes too much typing to compare things to I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, which would be nearly as accurate.

If there is powerful entity that tries to overwrite the people perception of reality - no matter if centralized communist heavy handed propaganda or the democratic borg (or the republican borg 20 years ago for that matter - Iraq war) orwellian is quite fitting.

"Czar" for these sorts of positions goes back to "drug czar" for the head of the Office of Drug Control Policy, under Reagan. That wasn't the name of the position officially then either.

It would be "comically exaggrated" Orwell if it didn't work. Unfortunately, because of Democratic control of mainstream media, it does work, so it's just plain Orwellian.

It reminds me of something I complained about some time ago during our Voice referendum - the idea that if you can just successfully quibble what to call something, that can somehow substitute for actually convincing people of anything.

There's obviously an extent to which words matter, and symbolism matters, but that extent is not infinite, and I suspect that if you're very good at wordsmithing, or in a language-focused industry (like journalism or much of academia or much of politics), it can be easy to overestimate the power of words, or indeed to confuse words for reality.

Thus the idea that if you can quibble what you call Kamala Harris' role at the border, that will somehow mean something. Even though I'd say it pretty clearly doesn't.

Very common line of thinking for that shade of political thought, I think. It's a recurring issue.

If we just called them unhoused instead of homeless, the stigma would be gone and everything would be better. If we just call them neurodivergent instead of mentally ill/challenged, the erasure of the stigma will mitigate the issue. And be sure to call "slaves" "enslaved people" instead. None of these initiatives actually really improved anything as far as I can tell, but at least they function as shibboleths.

People who run on the euphemism treadmill don't seem to grasp the fundamental truth of the situation: words don't have stigma attached because the words are a magic spell, they have a stigma attached because the situation they describe is bad.

For example, being mentally ill is bad no matter what we call it. No matter what we call it, people will start to use that label as a mocking term. You simply cannot change that by changing the term, you have to work to fix the underlying problem if you want to make things better. But a lot of the euphemism treadmill aficionados seem to willfully disregard this truth of the world, and insist that mental illness (or whatever) isn't actually bad, and the problem is purely with how society reacts to those people. It's not true though, and all their efforts will never make it true.

I propose an alternative theory: the euphemism treadmill is not an attempt to destigmatize bad things via language. There's a little of that, sure, and I would imagine that's often the source of new euphemisms. But the primary purpose of the euphemism treadmill, the reason that new phrases successfully memetically propagate, is signalling tribal allegiance.

I’m going to start using “sibboleths” just to see who reacts.

Jewish Motters: I am not actually an Ephraimite.

Jewish Motters: I am not actually an Ephraimite.

You may not be an Ephraimite but referencing that particular story is a pretty loud dogwhistle for Freemasonry.

Really! Both a sibboleth and a dogwhistle. Some days I love this place. (The rest of the time, I like it.)

But do you sá-sí, if you can speak no better?

There's obviously an extent to which words matter, and symbolism matters, but that extent is not infinite, and I suspect that if you're very good at wordsmithing, or in a language-focused industry (like journalism or much of academia or much of politics), it can be easy to overestimate the power of words, or indeed to confuse words for reality.

Agreed. See also the terminally online, and anyone in an industry where their paycheck hinges on the belief that propaganda is decisive. There's the saying it's very hard to convince someone that the job that pays their paycheck is unnecessary, and it's equally hard to find someone in the convincing-people industry that too much money is currently being spent on trying to convince people.

There is an attack line here for the republicans. It goes something like:

In 2021 Biden entrusted Harris with reducing migration and working with other countries to stem the reason for migration. Obviously, she failed (point to by far record highs).

The media reported on this in 2021. No one objected. Now, she failed so hard the media has to pretend she was never in charge. Imagine that—Harris failed so hard she and her friends in the media are removing the key item from her CV as VP.

You can wrap in a bit about the media. Or getting a chance to lie in advance for her (like that did with Joe and his brain issues) but that now they are lying afterwards in a rather hamfisted way.

Obviously you got to workshop it a bit. But there is an effective message there.

Sounds like a lot of explanation to be doing.

Consider who this works on: Democrats who'd actually trust fact-checkers (Republicans wrote them off for the same reason they wrote off regular media reporting) and have been told attacks on the credibility of the media are attacks on Democracy. These are the sorts of people that'll check quickly, see the "'fact check" and then tune out yet more Republican whining about the refs protecting democracy.

Honestly, Trump should just keep saying "she was the official border czar, and she failed". The Democrats will feel obligated to engage in constant semantic clarifications instead of actually campaigning.

Her border stint was also the source of the only organic and funny kamala meme in existence. sure the VP doesn't do much but if you take away this then what can she tout of her service other than not being biden/trump?

Her border stint was also the source of the only organic and funny kamala meme in existence.

Need a third screen so Joe can be 'coming in the overflow room'

To be fair, "not being Biden/Trump" goes a very long way. I'm grudgingly hoping she wins, although my not being American has a lot to do with that (my main concern as a non-American is fitness to lead the free world in the moderately-likely WWIII, and Trump's both old and too egotistical to 25A himself immediately plus comes with a free fifth column due to TDS). Would definitely prefer Vance over Harris, though, because SJ ideology puts question marks over Harris' ability to do the needful in WWIII (e.g. "if a war with China goes nuclear and the PRC is run out of nukes but refuses to surrender, do you have the will to call their bluff, call up the stockpile, and go full countervalue on Chinese cities, or will you sit there refusing to order nine-digit deaths while they use their cities to build more nukes to throw at you?" - I'd trust Vance and Trump to pick option A but I'm not sure about Harris).

Personally, I am in favor of any candidate who would decline to build a nine digit pile of skulls.

Out of curiosity, does that hold true at the cost of your own skull? At the cost of your children’s skull?

What if it’s a more sensible 7-8 digit pile of skulls? (9 digit means reaching at least ~10% of china’s population, which seems excessive).

(9 digit means reaching at least ~10% of china’s population, which seems excessive)

Most of China's population is urban these days, and you need to blow up most of their industry i.e. cities to ensure no more nukes are built. You also (if they don't surrender) probably want state failure (given Rule 2 of war removes invasion as a feasible possibility for debellatio), which means the farm-to-plate pipeline probably falls apart and those not killed by nukes (or by fallout hitting water supplies) have a high chance of starving to death.

One would certainly hope that after the first few cities sprout mushroom clouds the PRC would surrender, and indeed that would keep it to a 7-digit or 8-digit number, but the problem the PRC has is that its governmental legitimacy to a large extent depends on the promise "under CPC rule, China will reclaim its rightful place as world leader and the Century of Humiliation will end" and they've spent 70 years drilling this promise into the populace; surrender in another war with the West would break that bargain, and so they might refuse to surrender even when that's obvious suicide.

Her head twitches quite strangely in that video. It's something I've dealt with myself, usually as part of a response to fear.

It's actually kind of neat seeing someone else do a weird head twitch makes me feel a bit less alone. Not a good look in a presidential debate though.

Is it possible for Trump to ditch Vance? He doesn't seem to bring much to the ticket, other than taking the spotlight away from Trump. Trump already won Ohio with a wider margin than Vance did in his senate bid. Can I get a steel man for why he was picked? It doesn't change my vote, but it comes off as a bad play to me.

There is no VP pick Trump could have made that would not have been spun by hostile media forces as a bad choice.

The idea that the VP pick helps win the home state is largely a myth. Vance isn't going to help Trump win Ohio.

Virtually any other VP pick would have been a sign to Trump's base that he was moderating, and would have depressed turnout.

The idea that the VP pick helps win the home state is largely a myth. Vance isn't going to help Trump win Ohio.

I agree. VP picks make for great news-entertainment, but have very little effect on the overall election. Much like their actual role- their power is limited! The typical voter, especially the swing voters, vote for the pres, not "hmm there's a 2% chance that this VP will takeover so that should influence my vote a little..."

Do you have good sources showing "moderating" will lead to fewer votes, especially in swing states where votes actually matter? I buy more into Median Voter Theorem, where moderating is usually the single best move a politician can make

Richard Baris talks about this on Twitter: the vast majority of voters are not undecided, and driving turnout among partisans ends up being much more impactful than swaying the mythical moderates. (Besides, the more you activate your own partisans, the more reasonable and mainstream your ideas become, and thus inherently more "moderate".)

"Moderating" is basically an act of persuasion more than actually moving to a political center: if you frame the issue right trans kids becomes the responsible take, while tax cuts for the middle class become an extreme take.

I've heard that narrative before, I'm not totally convinced by it. I'd want to see some decently strong evidence for it before buying into it.

Especially since generally, moderates win swing states, not whoever motivates partisans the hardest. The nation as a whole is like one giant swing state in many ways.

I don't believe framing has that much power. I think voters mostly make their own decisions, propaganda has an impact but it's relatively small.

Trump only has one term left. Vance isn't just a VP, he's the MAGA successor.

Vance needs a successful Trump second term to run in 2028 and will use the VP position to get control of the GOP / RNC to secure his spot.

Here's a great article about how the Republicans are a patronage party, not a constituent party: https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/

Many of the GOP establishment figures have no voter base. They are patrons who have built up a client base over the decades. Most of them don't realize how little voter base they have, their voters just tolerate them. Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell have a lot of control over their states political apparatus, but they had to cozy up to Trump before the 2020 election because the grassroots voters in their states were quite willing to vote them out in a primary for Trump supporting candidates.

Some of them just seem deluded. Liz Cheney seems to have honestly thought she was heading towards a presidential run.

Vance underperformed for a related reasons. He came in without patrons or clients. He wasn't part of any political machine. The RNC saw him as not their guy. There was big money against him.

He'll perform better in subsequent elections.

Vance as VP means that Republicans undermining Trump have a strong chance of being cut out of power until 2032, which dramatically changes how they will behave.

Really no VP choice will add much to the Trump ticket electorally. He's an extremely well known figure.

Often the VP choice is about extending an olive branch to other factions. Trump proved the other factions don't add up to much, so the Vance choice is about cutting a switch.

he's the MAGA successor

He is what certian interest hope could be the MAGA successor. I just don't see it. He is not electric at all and doesn't have the sort of weird Charsma that Trump has. Strangely enough with Trump as a spent force the RNC will find itself in the same boat as the DNC post-Obama. In a bind due to weird circumstances leading to only one person with any Charsma at all being a major player in the party.

I mean, taking the spotlight off Trump is itself a major service to the ticket, is it not? Trump is very unpopular. Vance might be a weird sperg with conservative religious views, but the American public is used to weird spergs with conservative religious views on the republican ticket, I don't think that'll sway many votes.

He's taking the spotlight because the very act of selecting him is newsworthy in and of itself.

No, not realistically. They already had their convention. In an absolutely extreme circumstance they could maybe scramble to schedule a second online convention or something, but there's no existing process or precedent for it. There's no way it happens for boring "maybe he wasn't such a good pick" reasons.

The democrats changed VP nominees post-convention in 1972.

Yes but the Democratic Party's structure is also much more centralized than the Republican's and even if it weren't Trump would have to want to replace Vance which begs the question "Why?"

The people turned off by Vance's "weird views on sex and gender" were never going to vote Republican in the first place.

In the meantime Vance shores up Trump's position with the donors.

Huh, so they did. TIL.

Yah and how did that go for them?

Probably better than if they'd stuck with Eagleton.

Probably, Trump doesn't think that choosing Vance will meaningfully/negatively change his odds of winning, and likes working with him. If somehow Trump were to be elected then forced out, Vance isn't much of an improvement from their enemies' point of view. The connection with Theil is probably relevant.

The people who are upset about Vance's religious and abortion related views are probably already upset about Trump's Supreme Court pick, which had more actual consequences, and were unlikely to vote for Trump anyway. I don't get the impression that Trump personally cares about religiously motivated conservatism, but a lot of the Republican base do, and will turn up to vote despite not liking how Trump comports himself morally because he does in fact deliver on SC and VP picks who are in line with their values.

FWIW, my in person friends like Vance a fair bit more than they like Trump, and are in the "didn't vote for Trump in 2016 but are planning to this year" camp.

Vance isn’t a bridge to Ohio, he is a bridge to Thiel-adjacent SV capital. If Trump continues to cut into dem advantage with latino and black votes AND tech money moves toward donation parity between the parties, that cuts into two of the Democrats’ most important election pillars for the last 15 years. Democrats can’t win elections relying on, ahem, childless cat ladies as the only reliable party structure.

Was about to post just this. Vance isn't meant to be a signal to plebs, it's securing allyship to the Paypal mafia.

Seconding this opinion. This is an escalation in the shift in power from governmental to extra-governmental corporate/billionaire power. I consider it an obvious step to our inevitable dystopian cyberpunk future.

This is a good call. I think that tech inching towards the GOP – which as I understand it has to do a lot with the other guys threatening bad/expensive new policies – is pretty under-covered but potentially important.

Maybe part of the reason it's under-covered is that the media has been covering tech as a bunch of reactionaries for some time now, so if they actually start to vote right that's almost less of a story then them dabbling in Uncle Ted Thought or whatever?

Yes, but whoever Trump picks next will be attacked just as harshly as Vance. Remember what happened to Kavanaugh. All the media needs is one person claiming personal knowledge that the nominee did or said something bad.

The fact that the main attack on Vance is a blatant and total fabrication probably suggests that it's difficult to make a genuine attack land. You don't go around making up stories about the guy having sex with a couch if there's a reality-based smear available that will stick.

Is couch fucking really the main attack? The main attacks I've seen are:

  1. He dislikes the childless

  2. He wants to ban abortion in (nearly) all cases

  3. He is against gay marriage

None of which are fabrications. Obviously on Twitter people are going to talk about couch fucking because it's funny, but that's not the angle the media is (mostly) going to take.

Is it true he disliked the childless? He noted in the speech where this came out of that many people have unique situations or medical issues etc.

Instead, he seemed to be reacting to a spirit of anti natalism that seems real and bad.

He has proposed the idea of allowing parents to vote their children's votes until age 18 in order to enhance the voice of parents at the expense of the childless. He has also proposed increasing taxes on the childless, though functionally this is no different from the popular Democratic childcare tax credits. Which, inasmuch as the childless represent a cohesive class interest, amounts to dislike.

That’s one way of framing it. Another way is that a family of four with two adults gets the exact same voice as a family of two with two adults. Maybe the default is wrong as it shrinks the voice of larger families. Maybe the family of four should have a larger voice relative to the family of two.

That could be seen as righting a wrong instead of harming the childless. Perspective matters.

Also if you think kids are on net a good maybe you want to try to raise the status of families. Giving them more of a vote would make politicians cater more to families raising the status of families.

These are all arguments for why this would be a good policy choice. They are irrelevant to the question: would these policies weaken the power and reduce the resources of the childless considered as a class?

Just as "We should have more black people here" is quite obviously a statement of at least relative reduction of the white people that are here already, "we should give more power to the child-rearing" involves taking power away from the childless. This is the closest we get to a true political statement of dislike.

I don't think the policy is bad, or necessarily very partisan-impactful, provided that the various details are resolved in a way that isn't an obvious power grab. How are the votes of the children of divorce assigned? Can a non-citizen vote for their citizen child in cases of immigrants with birthright-citizen children? What about a widowed non-citizen voting the interests of her citizen children with an American father? Can parents who are incompetent to vote by reason of felony convictions or other disqualification still vote for their children? What do we do with parents who are domiciled in a different location from their minor children? The devil is in the details, and the resulting decades of lawfare over the details, but it isn't inherently a bad policy.

My point is that it is framing. Just like a child tax credit is functionally the same as saying childless pay more taxes. No difference.

Close enough to count, imo, and I say that despite being sympathetic to his point of view.

I saw the full context somewhere but now I am totally unable to find it.

The antinatalism stuff is, as far as I can tell, how he's trying to spin those comments now. The original sentiment was clearly "these people without children don't have a stake in our future" or something like that. Maybe you could even argue that just because he thinks they don't have a stake doesn't mean he dislikes them, but that also seems weak.

I think you can read it akin to in democrat culture there is an anti natalist streak. These people are an example of that (ie it isn’t a coincidence that a lot of their leaders don’t have kids). That streak is bad and we don’t really want those kind of leaders as they raise the status of being child free / won’t be as child motivated. That seems…right to me. It isn’t good to have so child free leaders. Babies are great—we should be having more kids. My wife and I are doing our part!

As an aside, it is gross how hard it is to find transcripts to give full context. All you can find are media reports that quote X but don’t provide links for the transcript. Just another example of bad journalism and Google being awful.

It's not the full interview but you can see a longer clip here.

I think your interpretation is pretty much correct. He's saying "people like Kamala Harris are miserable because they don't have kids and want to inflict their misery on the rest of us."

Here's an article someone posted elsewhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c147yn4xxx4o

On Friday, Mr Vance said: “I wish her step-children and Kamala Harris and her whole family the very best. The point is not that she’s lesser. The point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.” Mr Vance made similar remarks against Democrats in a 2021 speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in which he also said his criticism was not directed at those who could not have children for biological or medical reasons.

I don't have a strong opinion.

On the one hand, it is in the national interest to be more positive about children, and influence more people to have more children, since we're below replacement levels of fertility throughout the wealthy industrialized world. I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.

On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good. It sounds like something to say on an anonymous message board, or to your good guy friend in private, but maybe dress it up or change the subject in public spaces?

I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.

He wants to give net taxpayers huge tax credits/refunds(there's very little difference between the two) for fertility.

Seems hard to fund.

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On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good.

He included Pete Buttigieg in that list also.

The internet says he's gay married with adopted kids? That's its own problem from a conservative perspective (and I'm personally in favor of prioritizing married man and wife couples for adoption, since there's a shortage of adoptable children, and "well off, but your dads are in the public eye all the time" isn't a clear win for a child), but doesn't seem like the same problem.

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So what they say about any generic Republican?

I mean this time they are actually probably true, but the people it would be aimed at have the nerve burned out already.

The "childless" thing is not really a generic Republican attack point.

the people it would be aimed at have the nerve burned out already.

I can't say that Vance is particularly well received by anyone, so I'm not so sure. Democrats don't like him for the above reasons. Trumpists don't like him because he compared Trump to Hitler/Nixon or is a vc stooge. And so on. I'm sure that you can find rationalizations by the right for why he's actually /ourguy/ but I can't say I've seen anyone really like him.

I kinda-sorta like him. He's clearly a guy with a brain who isn't all style over substance, so that's a pretty good start. I don't think his values exactly match mine, but he's probably closer than most.

The Ross Douthat crowd likes him.

What do you think is the base rate of dudes in Vance's demographic having ever fucked a couch? I suspect it is a lot higher than you would expect.

I'd put the base rate of men with a weird masturbation story at 100%. Some will admit it, some won't. It's a fundamentally silly attack.

Well now I'm just wondering what you would expect me to expect and what sort of experiences have led you to think that expected number is wrong.

My guess is that pretty large subset of men have done something weird with their dicks at some point (depending on what counts as weird I guess), but any specific guy is unlikely to have done a specific weird thing.

pretty large subset of men have done something weird with their dicks at some point

I made a graph to illustrate this subset as a percentage.

It is a function that asymptotically approaches 100.

Wait what is the x axis here?

Percentage horniness felt by a young man. Or age across childhood starting just before puberty to adulthood.

I really made this up, so it is open for interpretation.

Time I would expect.


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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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