site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32874 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Tradition is acknowledgement of eternal truths and their practical, moral, social and metaphysical requirements

@hydroacetylene recently wrote:

every society in history has figured out that harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society. You can have the public and public institutions be unfair to people- indeed, it's impossible for them to be perfectly fair- they just need to work.

What other eternal truths build and uphold society?

  1. men and women are different and sexism is load bearing to society.

  2. shit work has to be done, and a lot of it is sufficiently crappy that coercion is necessary for anyone to do it. You can use economic coercion or you can use actual slavery, your choice.

  3. people are lazy and conformist and they like their pleasures and comforts. 9/10 of them will pick whatever option looks like the easiest way to get a fun, comfortable life.

  4. never bet on a student before his studies start to pan out- too high a failure rate.

  5. there is a developmental window for learning a society’s set of ‘basic adult skills’- for us, things like driving, communicating electronically, managing and keeping a schedule, etc- and if you blow past that window, pretty good chance of being screwed.

  6. girls grow up faster than boys do and are ready for adult roles earlier. They also have a harder time recovering from early mistakes later on. Of course, after a certain age, guys can’t either.

  7. most people need to believe in the supernatural or they won’t do things right.

  8. listen to your elders, they probably know more than you.

harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society.

Disagree. Actually a lot of societies have a good understanding that if someone is 'merely' unfortunate they deserve a second chance. What the harsh views are about is the reality that it's almost never 'mere' misfortune.

I think the reference to metaphysics opens your question up a great deal. So I will offer one option unusual in rationalist-adjacent spaces: true religion. I don't just mean religion as a social technology for building group cohesion and teaching pro-social values. I mean religion which offers the truth about God, human nature, and the human condition. (Yes, Romans 1 came up in church today.) When you know what men are and what they are for, you have a workable foundation for wisdom and virtue.

But if you can't swing true religion for whatever reason, your next best bet is the natural law. Among the ancients, it was possible for Christians, pagans, and de facto atheists to discuss it productively. In the modern age it seems to be unique to Christians, so it doesn't have a lot of practical independant value. This may be because the others have rejected metaphysics.

Edit to make the implicit explicit: I doubt that this is the place for me to convince all of you to convert. The folks here who are old enough and interested in that debate have probably had it at a higher level than I can offer anyway. But religion on the Motte is often discussed in instrumental ways, and I want to say that the truth matters. Focus on the verity in eternal verities.

What other eternal truths build and uphold society?

(1) given changing circumstances there are no truly eternal social truths; the meaning and effect of social moves changes with time and circumstance, so repeating previous social moves will not always produce the same results.

(2) humans, in general, are pretty crap at figuring out what they want out of society, and how to achieve it. Their judgment about which social moves are appropriate is not to be trusted.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings contains a few.

"Stick to the Devil you know" -- this Devil is war, compared to surrendering your weapons in hope of peace, which just gets you enslaved.

"The Wages of Sin is Death." -- the particular sin appears to be sexual licentiousness, the punishment being something discussed often enough here: "Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith"

"If you don't work you die." -- about prosperity through redistribution ("robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul")

Left work late the other night to find a druggie going through in my car in the parking lot. First time that's happened, but should have expected it from seeing them stagger around after all the shops are closed down.
I'm assuming it's the fentanyl stumble, because sometimes you see them standing in weird positions staring at nothing, but maybe someone more versed in modern druglore can correct me.

The level of crime here is still low, but the jump from "literally absent" to "a general background level" has ruined the high trust that made this community great.
There are no more open cash boxes at vegetable stands (the last one got smash-and-grabbed a month ago). A friend had all his plumbing gear stolen out of his truck (you can't even fence that stuff locally!). I never used to carry a gun here, but started recently. I never used to lock my door while I was out, but started after my neighbor's place got ransacked. When I was a kid I used to leave the keys in my truck like everyone else, in case a friend wanted to borrow it.

All the petty crime here is carried out by dysfunctional scum who were attracted by the scraps thrown to them by do-gooders. Some of them were deliberately recruited in "rehabilitation schemes" and dumped on us when they inevitably failed. Those responsible quickly moved on to providing "safe drug use supplies" for their former charges at the local community center. All taxpayer-funded, of course.
In fact, I know all the people responsible for importing this biowaste to our community, and they all live in newly-built mansions down long driveways with automatic gates and security cameras.
Meanwhile I have a lot of my net worth in equipment that basically can't be secured right off a main road, relying on the fact that until now nobody just wandered in to steal your stuff.

It might seem stupid to complain about when we still have basically no murders, but it enrages me that we lost something precious, and it was deliberately inflicted on us by smug pricks who will never face any consequences for it. They won't even gain anything from having done it to us, other than the joy of seeing us suffer while they remain comfortably immune.

Not sure where I'm going with this, but like Goodguy's personal story the other week, it's a general reflection on the inadequacy of crime statistics to capture its impact on communities.
And a growing appreciation for the importance of meting out consequences in an equitable fashion.

I never used to carry a gun here, but started recently

I'm not assuming you have, I'm not assuming you haven't. Just a friendly reminder from Gun Bro to Gun Bro to check your state and local regs on carrying and transportation regulations of firearms. They can change without you noticing. Doubly so if you're in a concealed carry situation.

Stay safe

Start or join a local nightwatch? Go uuuh, "help" the druggies out of your neighbourhood, either they get lost or they start shit. Either way the problem will be solved.

I lost my beloved younger brother a few years ago to drug addiction. He was 35. He struggled for years (and I mean really struggled) to stop using heroin, with some periods of success. When he was using drugs, he would lie and steal. But even during those times, he was always a very generous person when he could be. He was very sensitive (in some ways, I think this was actually a burden for him), and he made friends easily. He was funny and smart (which was perhaps another burden). He had very serious depression and anxiety his entire life. I'm sure my parents will never recover from the loss.

My point here is that many of the drug addicts you despise are actually struggling desperately. Most have had difficult lives. Some have loved ones that care deeply about them and want to see them get healthy. Others don't have anyone in the world who cares about them, either because they never had a family, or because their families died, or because they alienated them through their behaviors.

There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease. And there are conversations to be had about the balance between community interests and the interests of those with substance abuse disorders, and how community burdens should be fairly distributed. And there are conversations about which policies or actions actually help individuals with substance abuse disorders, versus which policies are counter-productive because they just enable or encourage these disorders.

But calling someone "dysfunctional scum" or "druggie" or "biowaste" isn't the way to start these conversations. That's the kind of language people use to dehumanize others. I think you should be ashamed of yourself.

A breakdown in social order happens when ones extended charity is either repeatedly abused or actively harmful. Recalculating the benefits of extending unlimited charity have resulted in sober ssessments of 'rehabilitation' effectiveness especially when available rehabilitation resources are underutilized and ineffacious on the rare occasions they were used - see Portlands drug rehab program where no drug addicts using clean needles ended up going for rehab, and there have been no successful rehab outcomes in the program.

As much as we as social creatures wish to extend sympathy for 'there but for the grace of god go i' at a certain point we all acknowledge that some bad actors are continuing to act to the net disbenefit of everyone, no matter their sob story. In fact, the enablers are often the greatest sufferers of the bad behavior, for their internal world construction is massively tested by the evident failure present in their midst.

The usual method of mental reconciliation is simple denial, whereby enablers deny the criminality or antisocial consequences of their loved ones. This can work quite well when surplus resources exist to cushion said antisocial consequences, but breaks apart when scarce resources require justice, extralegal or otherwise. Families of criminals cry when their loved ones are incarcerated by a 'biased' justice system, but they cry at funerals when gang wars kill belligerents as well.

I used to think like you, but after enough experience with antisocial people, I ran out of fucks to give. Personally, I don't have anything against drug users, indeed I am very libertarian on that issue. For me it's not about the drugs. My attitude is, if you can do hard drugs regularly and still be a nice person, more power to you. Probably would be better to stop doing the hard drugs, but as long as you don't cause other people problems, I have nothing against it.

Basically no-one in the US is poor enough that they actually have to steal or commit violence in order just to survive. Poverty is not what is causing our crime problems. People in the US who steal or commit violence do it not because of socioeconomic factors or even necessarily because of their drug use. You can do hard drugs and still not be a thief or a violent sociopath. Obviously hard drug use does degrade the brain, but it is still the individual who decides to continue to do the drugs even if it turns them into an asshole.

The main thing causing people in the US to steal and commit violence is that they have bad character. Some more, some less, but at the end of the day they have bad character. Which is not to say that your brother was fundamentally or essentially a bad guy, and I am very sorry for your loss. But the thing is, the people your brother hurt by stealing matter as much as he does. We have a bad tendency in this country to focus most of our attention on the antisocial person instead of on his victims. But the victims are important, in fact they are much more important than the antisocial person. Remove the antisocial people from society and society will be just fine. Remove the pro-social people and society would collapse instantly.

Should we call anti-social people "dysfunctional scum" or "biowaste"? Well, it depends on just how anti-social they are. I am perfectly happy with calling thieves and violent people biowaste, human garbage. Is it the best way to have the conversation? May be not, but the terminology is not simply insulting, it is also accurate. At some point it is good to call a spade a space. Some people really are human trash. Your brother at least did some good things, but there are people out there who do nothing good that even comes close to making up for the damage that they cause. The people who are like that, yes, I will happily call them biowaste. I am sick and tired of people like that. The world would simply be much much better if they did not exist. They are worse than literal shit. At least literal shit just sits there, it doesn't hurt anybody unless they step on it.

I am no longer interested in rehabilitation. Due process? Sure, I'm into that. If we remove someone from society, I want it to be for actual reasons, not because some cop made a mistake. But rehabilitation? No. My attitude now is, just remove them from society as soon as possible and if they really want to rehabilitate, they can do it on their own time and using their own resources. I am not interested in giving them a single second of my time or a single penny of my money. There are so many good, kind, genuinely wonderful people in the world that I could give my time and resources to instead. Those are the people who actually deserve it. They are the people who make the world a beautiful place. And in this society, we should talk more about them, and we should valorize them, but as for the anti-social assholes, screw them. I owe them nothing other than my contempt, and the only thing I want to give them is a ride to a cage where they can be kept away from hurting nice people.

Crime is what soured me on legalizing drugs. The thing is that while “broken windows” policing doesn’t reduce crime the reverse isn’t true either — being more lax in policing makes things actively worse. When you could get a longish jail term for marijuana possession, it worked quite well to keep drugs and drug related crimes down simply by what I call “bouncer rules”. Sure, marijuana by itself is pretty tame, but since police knew who were the antisocial drug users and sellers, you could arrest them just for pot and prevent them from doing worse things. What decriminalized drug use did was push the cops away from preventing crime in a sense. You can’t just bust a guy for possession because we’ve decriminalized drugs, so now that cop has to wait until a guy he knows is a drug dealer and a thief steals from another person or a business and even at that, it now has to either involve an injury or a large amount of money. That allows problems to fester and get worse, and removes any incentive to curb the openness of the crime. There are open air markets for drugs— in full view of the public. Shoplifters go into stores and basically loot the place knowing that the cops can’t do anything until they hit $1000 per person. So now it’s impossible to get that element under control because we keep giving away the tools.

Ok accepting this logic ad argumentum, why would we stop prohibition short of alcohol? Why does the line run precisely between Marijuana and Whiskey?

I think there’s room for arguments around where exactly to draw the line on drugs. But I think the harder drugs should certainly be illegal simply, as I said as a way to keep the junkies from stealing and harassing people and from openly doing drugs on the streets. The problem is that as the do gooders continue to move various social norms toward the bottom, it creates a rot and quite often that rot ends up harming those who, unlike the do gooders who just want to be compassionate without a thought that such compassion might be making the problems worse.

I think the worst idea is decriminalized drug use for a lot of reasons. First of all, since most hard-drug users tend to either be thieves or fencing for other thieves, you can keep a lot of street crime down by giving jail time to drug users. You can’t always catch a thief in the act, but finding a dime bag is a decent enough proxy. Having drug use be illegal (and again, I’m thinking more of the hard stuff) also means that drug users will be much less likely to use openly, and if they do, you can arrest them for that. As it stands now, you can’t walk down some streets in major cities because homeless drug users harass people, rob people, shit on the streets, and build huge eyesores of cobbled together houses in the sidewalks. This obviously kills business near those areas because believe it or not, nobody with money to spend wants to go to drug alley for anything. This reduces the value of property within walking distance substantially and creates more poverty and more despair and ultimately more drug use and more crime. The monied flee fairly quickly as crime slowly climbs.

Are pot users criminal because they're antisocial, or are they antisocial because pot is criminalized? Seems pretty intuitive to me that pot in itself isn't the kind of drug that people steal, rob and kill for. Alcohol is vastly more "antisocial" in that regard.

Narcan makes legalizing opiates impossible.

Probably. But I don’t see how that deals with the problem of open air markets that exist now and the criminal elements attracted by them. The cops have their hands tied because even if opioids are illegal, most drug offenses are not being prosecuted to the full extent. And the gateway drugs are legal which makes it less of a problem for sellers.

In some of the articles I’ve read on the opioid crisis, cops were using narcan to revive different people multiple times a day in small WV towns. Hard not to think that implies the problem would resolve itself if it didn’t exist.

Rehabilitation is a modern cheat code word employed to pretend that curing the original sin of (someone else who is really to blame) is what will turn someone into a productive member of society, absolving the criminal/delinquent of their crimes by the magic of blaming someone else and pinky promising that rehab has made the desire to commit crime go away.

In truth crime is simply a balancing of incentive structures, and just because people are bad at making their own calculus does not absolve society of constructing poor incentives to begin with. Criminals may not necessarily understand the meta of rehab program + therapy sessions to get better in-prison treatment and get lesser sentences from DAs, but repeated interactions and information transfer surely leads to convergent evolution. The existence of lenient alternatives to incarceration serve to incentivize criminality, since legal economic avenues are not nearly as socially emotionally or economically rewarding as bipping cowardly suburbanites.

My point here is that many of the drug addicts you despise are actually struggling desperately. Most have had difficult lives. Some have loved ones that care deeply about them and want to see them get healthy. Others don't have anyone in the world who cares about them, either because they never had a family, or because their families died, or because they alienated them through their behaviors.

But calling someone "dysfunctional scum" or "druggie" or "biowaste" isn't the way to start these conversations. That's the kind of language people use to dehumanize others.

Career criminals often have difficult lives, and sometimes have loved ones who care deeply about them and want to see them get healthy. Others embody the stereotype of someone who turned to crime because the street was the only place where they could find community and a semblance of social contact.

None of this changes the fact that most crime consists of profoundly a-social acts which are a plague to the good order and function of everyone else around the criminal class. The community of those who do comply with the law, who do not prey on their fellows excessively, retains the right - indeed, arguably the obligation - to expel such people from their midst in order to preserve and safeguard the benefits that compliance with law brings. Yes, declaring the criminal hostis humani generis or homo sacer - is a type of dehumanization - it is a declaration that they criminal is someone whose deeds have been adjudged to be wicked and thus set outside the social order. They have been expelled from the community, and no longer receive the benefit of the community's promise of collective defense and care.

In a well-worn metaphor, it is the social body rejecting criminals and siccing its immune system on it. Of course, this response can be deployed too aggressively - a social auto-immune disease. But that a system is capable of malfunction does not mean the system has no function, or that one must be ashamed of it.

There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease.

The situation is darker and bleaker than that because of the third option: social contagion.

In Scotland, drug overdose deaths have soared to over a thousand a year in a country/(region of the UK) of merely five million. There is a big concentration of deaths in Dundee. The dynamics are rather like a contagious disease. How does social contagion mimic the in-person spread of an infection disease in the internet age? Junkies in Dundee are not going to Glasgow to buy their drugs; it is friend of a friend stuff with-in Dundee. The need to pass physical drugs from hand to hand creates geographically local dynamics.

But I'm old. I'm already familiar with the heroin cycle. Heroin is really cool. The fluffy cloud happiness of the high. The don't-give-a-fuck charisma of the users. The bodies piling up. And piling up. The rising part of the heroin cycle doesn't last. You don't introduce any-one younger to heroin use after your own funeral. And the occasion itself puts a damper on the whole scene. Soon heroin gains the evil reputation that recreational use deserves. "Nobody" uses any more. But every year, Mr Nobody grows a year older. Eventually the young people, who won't touch the stuff because they saw what it did to those ten years their senior, are no longer young enough to be at risk of starting. Those young enough to start, look to those a little older and see neither use nor warning signs. Some of them work out for themselves that heroin is fun. They tell their friends. The cycle closes and heroin in cool again.

I came of age during a low point of the heroin cycle, so I never tried it. But the micro-foundations of the cycle were evident in parallel matters. Things spread by word of mouth and from hand to hand. Friends warn against some things and endorse other things.

He was 35. Which brings my comment to the edge of the abyss. Back when needle sharing made Glasgow the AIDS capital of Europe, the prognosis for a heroin addicted was to become addicted around 20. Use for ten years. 50% die. 50% hit rock bottom (or just age out) and quit. 35 is old for an addict. Now that AIDS is treatable, the prognosis is probably better. Now that fentanyl is on the scene the prognosis is probably worse. I'm not keeping up with the statistics and don't know how it balances out. When some-one dies of drug addiction, we bury an "innocent victim". His "friends" in the drug scene play the role of his personal angels of death. And walking my comment over the edge of the abyss: did he take his curse to the grave with him, or did he manage to pass it on before he died?

I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.

Yup yup yup from one of those "married with children". I also model drug addiction as a contagion and it is clear to me that my own kids are better off if fentanyl is as prevelant as possible up until they reach the age where they might be exposed to it. And this is even moreso thanks to local decriminalization efforts - if you can't get junkies off the street with jail what's left?

missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here

We read the QCs tho ;-)

I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.

Reporting in, and I post less largely because now that I have more skin in the game, When I imagine these issues impacting my daughter, I quickly become incandescent with rage. The least of my problems is getting modded here for being "uncharitable" to the monsters in human skin roaming amongst us. Far more worried about ending up on a watch list given that violence in my first, second and last reaction to the question of "What will I do when this arrives at my door?"

I second the sentiment about concern for kids. When childless I could not give a shit about drug policy or gender education, because let people live how they want. Now that I have kids, I waste time on asinine committees and boards because I want to guard against liberal crazies.

Its easy to not care if the only skin in the game is your own. Its much more personal when you actually give a shit about someone else. Vague secular humanist universalism has nothing on blood and soil.

I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone.

No, there are many mottizens who are married with children. Myself included.

And yes. I hung with a drug-happy crowd in my youth, though the heroin users were only peripheral to it. Enough people I knew on some level ruined and/or killed themselves through drugs, including an actual friend (of which I never had a lot).

Would I say that the most catastrohpic of them should have simply been made "gone"? Yes, absolutely, before they drag anyone else with them. Sad as it is, those individual lives are not worth the damage they cause. There are certainly edge cases where it may be worthwhile to have a conversation, but it's also by all means possible to drug oneself far beyond salvation and any reasonable expectation of tolerance by others.

And my thought there is not even "it would suck for my friends to have been Duterte'd", but "if only their predecessors' druggie careers had been cut short and the dealers strung up from lampposts, they might not have ruined themselves". I'm certain there will always be some level of drug use regardless of what society does, but a society that tolerates heroin junkies would better be some degree of libertarian. For a nanny-state, it's an embarassment.

Part of my own reckoning with the fecklessness of youth was nursing a 'good' friend back to health repeatedly. Having a slurring dribbling mess repeatedly collapse on your couch is fine if he cleans up after himself, but I asked him if he even enjoyed getting so trashed and his quiet 'I don't know how else to live' really shook me. Great family, loving relationships, excellent prospects, and he was throwing it away for diminishing returns because of a short circuited neurological reward pathway and a social system that enabled self destructiveness.

I left the states, abandoned my old number and ultimately lost touch with him entirely. His facebook page is a yearly 'Happy birthday ___' from the same few people, and I strongly suspect no one knows if he is alive or dead. I know the another guy is alive because he purged all his social media, but these autoupdated digital profiles might as well be tombstones.

I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte

Reporting in. And yes I just want them gone.

There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease

I don't think it would be nice nor kind for drug addicts if we seriously started discussing drug addiction as a disease. Today we think diseases are treatable, but that is because the usual meaning of the word covers diseases caused by pathogens and relatively similar set of causes which the Western science can treat. Viruses that previously killed multitudes have been eradicated with vaccinations. Many of cancers can be fought and occasionally dealt with with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy (made possible because of the antibiotics). Even HIV can be managed with antiretrovirals. Common thread to all: sick individual receives treatment and is treated to effect they he or she is cured, gets better and regains functionality.

As evidenced by the growth of the problem of drug addiction, there is no equivalent of penicillin for addiction. If addiction is a disease, the medical science of addiction is at the level of the medicine of biological diseases in the 18th century or early 19th century: doctors often can recognize the disease you have, there is a scientific name for it, there are procedures to manage it, but professionals are in dispute how they work and which treatment works better than other, because none of them obviously and easily cures the patient or prevents its spread (the way antibiotics cure and vaccinations prevent). The methods that sometimes work often are radical, crude, painful, and often focus on preventing spread of the disease because the individual very rarely can be cured.

You get a wound that that is likely to become infected and septic? The treatment is amputation; there is a profession that is very skilled at removing your limbs quickly and efficiently, but it will be a painful operation and limit your functionality permanently. You catch leprosy (or a skin disease that looks like one)? There is no treatment, the public health officials will do their best to ship you to to a remote colony isolated from rest of the society, for life. Tuberculosis? You are encouraged to be shipped to a remote sanatorium isolated from the rest of the society, which can be a rather nice place if you are rich, but the treatments are no cures and you will eventually die there. Later revolutionary treatments include exposure sunlight and nutrition (which helps vitamin D intake, which may marginally help) and collapsing affected lung (possibly limiting spread of disease to other organs). Public health officials are concerned with sanitation to prevent spread of the disease.

Today we think diseases are treatable, but that is because the usual meaning of the word covers diseases caused by pathogens and relatively similar set of causes which the Western science can treat.

There are reports that Ozempic allows people to unhook to other stuff that they are hooked to - not only food. Like gambling. Chances are that probably we are somewhere in the neighborhood for penicillin for compulsive behavior.

It is left to the reader to decide whether this is good or bad thing and in what kind of jolly anti-utopia we will put ourselves into.

Scott offered a teaser for a forthcoming post about GLP-1 receptor agonists as a treatment for addiction. I very much look forward to reading that when it drops.

I have also seen these reports and man, I have trouble thinking that this stuff isn't fundamentally hollowing out people's humanity in some meaningful way. I can see that being a good tradeoff for people that are destroying their lives with food, booze, or gambling, but eliminating cravings seems almost synonymous with dampening drive and joy.

As someone who used ozempic for aesthetic weight loss... It's pretty insane. Cured my nicotine habit and brought my borderline alcoholism to maybe one-drink-a-week.

It also killed my libido. I've not heard much about that as a side effect, but a model where it works by just shutting down pleasure circuits seems to be consistent with it as a side effect.

Also helped my anxiety and spouts with depression, though. I expect it'll be really hard to disentangle all these effects.

Cravings suck. Satisfying the craving provides a dopamine hit, but plenty of other things provide similar hits without having the escalatory cycle of requiring more to be satisfied. Indulging in the addiction loop is absolving individual agency to seek prosocial alternatives, and further incentivizes a nonacretive utility function.

If Ozempic means people ge their dopamine hits from more effective sources, then that is a net benefit. If people get less addicted to retweets and updoots for personal validation and find value in touching grass then we will have a much better existence than what we suffer now.

What makes you think Ozempic won't also eliminate any satisfaction from "touching grass" as well?

Possible. I have only my own personal experience with addictions to go on, and my personal conclusion is that the diminishing returns of autonomic biochemical release from satiating addiction was specifically pleasurable due to the novelty of youth, and minor psychological reprogramming allowed my personal utility calculation to value steak, lagavulin and VR porn equally to nicotine and cocaine.

Of course that could be due to physiological incapability limiting me from continuing to achieve the same upper highs of nicotine and cocaine use that sparked the initial addiction cycle, but post-hoc quantification of 'personal utility' is so useless that I might as well make up whatever historical valence I had assigned to the different contributory factors.

I am personally suspicious of modern 'research' into therapy and addiction, particularly the suspiciously high incidence of journals concluding moral expatiation for asocial behaviors. He had addiction/genetic trauma/ptsd/a bad day so of course he had no choice but to be an asshole. In this space of 'addiction cannot be managed' the criticisms of Ozempic as some form of permanent pleasure-depriving limbic path zombiefication drug seems more like concern trolling to encourage continual indulgence in bad behaviors rather than handwringing about motivation death. If ozempic causes the tweaker to rot in a lazyboy watching SpongeBob and chugging doritos instead of seeking means to score meth for that sweet sweet dragon, then bring on the apathetic skinnification of antisocial losers.

It doesn't eliminate them (after all, it's not like ozempic users drop to a bmi of 20), it merely lessens them.

Going the other way, do you think that people with more cravings for food, etc are more joyous and driven than normal people? To me it seems unlikely. I suspect that the thought patterns that drive addiction are different than those that drive joy, and inhibiting the first doesn't lessen the second.

Many of these people are poor unfortunates.

But every society in history has figured out that harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society. You can have the public and public institutions be unfair to people- indeed, it's impossible for them to be perfectly fair- they just need to work. And unfortunately being nice to drug addicts doesn't work.

Yes, some people fuck their lives up beyond redemption in this life and it's deeply unfair to them that their efforts to reform are for naught. I'm not saying it isn't. But other people don't need to be made to suffer because of it. Most heroine addicts never really get clean, try as they might, and when they get a batch with fentanyl in it and OD many other people breathe a sigh of relief and that's not because they're monsters. It's because that heroine addict, even a well intentioned heroine addict who really struggles to get clean, is creating negative externalities for everyone else, all the time. Asking us to deal with it is even more unfair; after all, we stable functional people didn't recommend him to get into drugs, and probably told him not to.

It's a rather bad idea to give wide masses of average people the impression that society will be harsh towards them should they simply have bad fortune. The view that society is merciless and unforgiving incentivizes drug addiction, crime and all sorts of social degeneracy.

What you punish you get less of, what you subsidize you get less more of. If society is merciless and unforgiving towards drug addicts, we will get less drug addiction, not more.

And calling drug addiction obtained through chasing a high "bad fortune" is spitting on those who really have experienced bad fortune.

What I disagree with is the proposition that "harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society".

It is, though. The mechanism is that as soon as you decide that it's unacceptable to have hard views about the unfortunate, everyone in a bad spot gets called "unfortunate" because it would be arrogant and rude to say otherwise ("There but for the grace of God go I"). So because you cannot protect "unfortunate" from the creep of inclusion the self-destructive, you must allow harsh views of the unfortunate or people will assume you'll save them from their own self-destruction.

What you punish you get less of, what you subsidize you get less of

That second "less" should be "more" instead, no?

Yes, oops.

That is far from obvious to me. I could see the possibility that falling on harms times sans safety net leads to drug use, but I can’t see the causal mechanism of “if I don’t have a social safety net then bad times will follow so might as well drop out and drug up ensuring bad times”

I’m increasingly aware of just how much suffering and sin is caused by our belief that the world is hard and merciless. This belief—which can express itself as despair, or as the fearful drive to protect oneself above all else—makes it impossible to trust others. It makes social solidarity and even marriage extraordinarily difficult. The belief that we will be brutally punished if we set a foot out of line, that nobody will look out for us or help us or try to understand where we’re coming from, promotes abortion. It fuels addiction, by making us unwilling to admit where we’re needy, weak, or at fault.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-stillborn-child-leads-to-a-murder-charge-with-threat-of-life-in-prison/

"Unforgiving" would imply that society would remain harsh even after you got your act together, and I don't see anyone advocating for that. As for the rest I really don't see how it would incentivize it.

So does the view that society is endlessly tolerant and supportive of destructive behavior, and the view that society owes a debt to each meritless individual and deserves destructive behavior as a sort of retributive justice. And right now I'm fairly certain that various western societies are failing on the side of being excessively tolerant and enabling.

But the soul is still oracular, amid the market's din/List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within/They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.

"It’s not a ‘compromise with sin’, per se, just discarding certain people who happen to be a net loss to us."

"Exactly what do you think a compromise with sin is?"

It's sin all around. It's a sin of omission to allow these people to prey on others and generally shit up the place (often literally). And it's a sin of commission to use the power of government to protect those people from their victims.

Enshittification of public spaces has massive knock on consequences regarding social cohesion that are unquantifiable by econometrics. Diminished prosocial trust in neighbours to look after ones property and kin willingly, much less competently, results in private sector security and care solutions that take away theoretically optimal agglomerated public services. Property value disparities due to unspecified 'concerns' (crime. its crime) about neighbourhood populations cause inefficient capital utilization and rectification measures, or outright capital destruction. Worst of all, faith in public institutions faltering causes underinvestment and thus under capability of theoretically optimal outcomes.

Good outcomes flow from good societies. You can't build a utopia and bring in street trash and expect them to magically shape up. There are no CCS chargers in shitty neighbourhoods because tweakers steal the copper, and there are no grocery stores in food deserts because shitheads keep stealing stuff.

I certainly do not condone anti-social behaviour in public, nor the ignoring of it by municipal officials. However, the response to it needs to be one that acknowledges all people, including the least of these, as human beings.

That passage just demonstrates that Christianity is indeed at the root of these problems. None of those people is Jesus Christ, and taking them in and feeding and clothing them will result in nothing but destruction of one's home, food, and clothing. Certainly one can acknowledge they are human beings; that makes them worse, not better, because they didn't have to become what they are.

A few years back, a junkie broke into my building's garage and smashed the passenger-side window in every car in the building. Whether his condition was a product of choice or disease really didn't make a whole of difference to me, as where the reality of someone doing ten grand in damage to try to steal fifty bucks seemed pretty salient. If someone else would like to discuss how best to treat them, that'll be up to them, but step one is removing people like this from the general population. If I could get people in power to agree on removing such people from the general population, I would be amenable to pretty much any amount of spending on providing them with high-quality rehabilitation or just permanent incarceration - my interests in not having my windows smashed, my park camped in, and my public square not filled with bums yelling at people. Whatever happens with the junkie downstream of that I will leave to people that care about that part of things much more than I do.

Unfortunately, these "important conversations" in practice just mean kicking the can down the road while things get worse. Feels like a stalling action. It's like having "important conversations" about immigration while holding the door open. Just keep the "important conversations" going until the thing being discussed has already happened.

Whatever compassion some of us might have had has already been consumed by useless progressives letting addicts shit in the streets for years on end. Sorry if you thought there was an infinite amount of it to go around. Maybe take it up with the people squandering it, because those of us who just don't want human shit on the sidewalk are out of patience.

Are the progressives the only people to blame? I think the lack of any legitimate place to 大便 without spending money just might have a little bit to do with it....

When people are shitting in the bushes, shitting in the river, shitting in alleys behind dumpsters, maybe that's a sign you need more public toilets. When they're shitting in the middle of the sidewalk in broad daylight, it's a sign that your progressive local government has decided coddling degenerates is more important than upholding basic order.

It's pathetic excuse-making. Like if a cannibal lunatic eats someone's face on a streetcorner and you pop up to go "Yeah hunger is a serious problem."

Even San Francisco has public toilets, and there used to be more of them back in the day iirc.

Addicts deserve our sympathy. But society has forced many decent people into these harsh views about them, because institutions don’t take the necessary steps to protect these people from themselves, and therefore to protect us from them.

Your brother should have been taken to a psychiatric inpatient facility and have been kept there for 5+ years before being released. We can do this humanely. People do survive addiction, even to heroin, and go on to have happy, productive, drug-free lives. But it takes time, and it takes things that we no longer really do in the West.

Disparate impact is the meta for escaping accountability. Racism, mental illness, trauma (no longer restricted to acute incidental causes, with nebulous childhood and intergenerational traumas now accepted as equally valid) are unassailable escape clauses, and proximate trauma is now an accepted escape clause too. Censuring families for poorly managing their delinquent kin was socially accepted, but now it is rude to not consider every exculpatory clause for bad behavior.

The west has accepted self-declared victimisation as a social meta to extract goodwill and therefore resources from compliant populations. Whether this compliance will remain eternally subservient is currently unknown, but signs point to this meta breaking apart.

Not sure where I'm going with this, but like Goodguy's personal story the other week, it's a general reflection on the inadequacy of crime statistics to capture its impact on communities.

me at party: well, the community feels unsafe

guy: crime isn't that high though?

me: so, what about the homeless people living by the train tracks? seems sketchy

guy: oh, I don't go there

me: what about being a woman and jogging the river path alone when it's dark?

guy: oh, yeah that sounds bad

me: the local Starbucks has sugar and stirrers behind the counter now. the Whole Foods doesn't dispense plastic utensils anymore unless you ask and only has a single entrance/exit now despite having been built with several

guy: ...

me: I had a baby stroller stolen off of my driveway because I left it out overnight

guy: ...

I'm glad we have below the median murder rate for the US but this shit sucks.

me: what about being a woman and jogging the river path alone when it's dark?

I've never liked this type of rhetorical device, as it reifies the notion that Women's Lives Matter More, that feral behavior of Persons of Unhousedness are only problematic to the extent women are Most Affected.

Heaven forbid a woman feels UnsafeTM when she's jogging alone in her sports bra and volleyball shorts at night.

In contrast, if a man is walking home after work and gets assaulted/battered by a Person of Unhousedness, he should just Deal With It for such experiences are Part and Parcel of Big-City Living. His Male Privilege should provide protection against bite, stab, and blunt wounds; he should be a Decent Person and have some Empathy for those less privileged.

I'm not saying that. I'm saying that women are more likely to get attacked than men, and that the women feel unsafe running there unless there are men with them. I'm using a specific example from my city in a running group that meets at 5am by the river path, when it's still dark.

I started reading this without looking at your username and at some point I was like "wait, why is this guy turning this topic into a man/woman thing?" Then I saw the username and I was like "oh yeah, it's a Sloot post, he does that with 99% of all topics".

I've never liked this type of rhetorical device, as it reifies the notion that Women's Lives Matter More

Women's lives do matter more.

I'm as anti-feminist as anyone, but the central lie that feminism has spread is that men and women are groups in conflict with each other. That's not reality - overwhelmingly, women and men are in cooperation with each other. That dynamic is at the heart of what family is.

Feminism also tries to tell us that the differences between men and women are minimal and mostly social. That's another lie, the differences are profound and biologically inescapable. And one of those profound differences is that men are vastly more replaceable. If you lose half of your young men, that sucks, but in 20 years you will have another generation of young men larger than the one that you lost. If you lose half of your young women, that is a demographic catastrophe that you many never fully recover from.

And beyond that, on the individual level women are better suited to the task of raising children - ideally you have both parents around, but if you have to lose one, it's better to lose the father. Meanwhile men are better suited to the task of courage and self sacrifice. If you force a married couple to decide on one of them dying, most of them will agree that it's the man who goes.

It is a good and noble thing that the men on the Titanic gave up their places on the lifeboats for the women and children. It is a good and noble thing that men go to war to protect their wives and sisters and daughters. It is a good and noble thing that men do the dangerous and difficult jobs that risk life and limb. This is our role, and this is why it is shameful for a man to be afraid of death and amusing for a woman to be afraid of a mouse.

I would much rather myself be attacked at night than it happen to my wife or my daughters. Any man of decency would say the same.

Women's lives do matter more.

It is absolutely wild that the male group that says the above is seen as a blood enemy by feminists, whereas the group of males that is bought in to "men and women are 100% equal from the celluar level on up" are treated as either useful idiots by feminists or with outright suspicion (i.e. "nice guys").

I also like your remark about forcing a married couple to choose who dies. Every parent is (sometimes a little too) eager to state how they'd "die for [my] kids." The real truth of the matter is that, for societal stability and growth, there isn't choice in the matter. The father should die (in this hypothetical scenario) because it's incredibly important that the wife not die and continue to raise children - and potentially have more.

Any man of decency would say the same.

However, your position of being the one who takes the risks means you deserve additional authority to make up for that. Higher risks, higher rewards; that's just basic fairness.

The ultimate problem with feminism, and why it is destructive, is that it denies that premise; instead preferring to take "women's lives matter more" as a license for selfishness. Its fundamental contradiction is that women's lives only have value because men believe they do; treat them unfairly enough and the men will no longer do those dangerous jobs like "go to war and protect our society from an enemy that, should they win, will make life much worse for those women". (Conveniently for feminists, that enemy is nowhere to be seen, and the other dangerous/difficult/necessary jobs not being performed tend to be invisible until they aren't.)

Nah, the ultimate problem with feminism and why it is destructive is because independent, financially secure women in the labor force simply don't breed enough, and whatever political power they accrue is bent towards giving them more independence and financial security, furthering the problem.

Existence is on the line, not some vague idea of basic fairness. Fairness has never really existed since the dawn of time. Higher risks have only equaled higher rewards when the risks are considered necessary for things to continue to function (and are therefore priced in).

Women's lives do matter more, on a long enough timescale, due to the utility function of childbirth. It's got nothing to do with what men believe. Believing they're potatoes or exotic birds won't make you pregnant. If we science our way around it at sufficiently distributed scale then women's lives won't matter more. Until that day, however...

However, your position of being the one who takes the risks means you deserve additional authority to make up for that. Higher risks, higher rewards; that's just basic fairness.

Not really how the trade works.

Men give the physical self-sacrifice and commercial value, women give the ability to bear children in the first place plus additional care work. Depending on how good either of them are at these things, and how much demand there is for them, the balance of value may favor either party. The willingness to risk life and limb isn't worth a terrible lot in a safe, peaceful first-world country (or one that actively penalizes men who take physical action), noble as it still is when it comes to it. And a deadbeat man who doesn't work won't earn much respect either. Similarly, a woman's biological abilities aren't worth a damn when she doesn't put them use, say through contraception, and her care work needs to actually happpen for it to be counted in her favor.

I think it's entirely fair to look at each case individually to determine whether the man or the woman is more worthy of authority and/or better-suited to exercise it. In most cases it may well be the man, especially in this postmodern age in which most women seem to have been eaten by social media and social contagion.

If a man says he is avoiding certain area because of the crime danger, he is a wimp for avoiding the area. If he does not avoid that area and is attacked, he is a fool for not avoiding it. Catch-22 was a documentary.

In fact, I know all the people responsible

Name them, or at least DM me their names.

I'm not too excited about doxxing myself, sorry. I've probably said far too much already in terms of information bits.

If any motteizean cares enough to dox me, they can almost certainly narrow it down to a few people(probably less than five, although there's one person in particular that I don't think you could clearly distinguish me from based on the information posted on the motte) just based on information I've already posted. I've never had any problems.

One of these days I'm going to have to type up some stories from my time living and working in [urban center you have heard of because of crime].

Please do. People just don't talk about this stuff and it's insane what they just put up with silently, assuming it's normal.

Here I am! AhhhhhhTheFrenching up in your shit. But I am here to support you! Fuck this shit. Society has abandoned responsibility and we are no longer allowed to institutionalize people that will chop you head off on a greyhound bus and start eating it. (lead to a cop committing suicide and the flesh eating decapitation guy getting released without supervision, as long as he pinky swears to stay on his meds). Fuck these homeless maniacs, something must be done.

Are you talking about the Vincent Weiguang Li guy? If so, then it seems like a very non-central example of a homeless bum. Guy had a degree, used to work steadily until his schizophrenia worsened, used to be married until his schizophrenia worsened. Wasn't on drugs. At the time of the happening was living with his ex-wife, so wasn't even homeless. And seems that he was in fact institutionalized for several years afterwards (up to nine, depending on how you count).

I'm taking those facts from Wikipedia, so grain of salt.

Mental illness is one of the ways we get the homeless who are particularly likely to cause problems (the other is drugs). So I wouldn't call that a noncentral example.

I'm sorry you had to deal with this, and you are of course permitted to share your experiences and your frustration. But referring to people as "biowaste" is over the line. Even "smug pricks" is sufficiently inflammatory that you should bring some evidence of smugness and maybe drop the "pricks" altogether.

Maybe I should I call them "witches" instead, which certain mods show us is an acceptable insult? With a bonus insinuation of "and we all know what needs to be done to witches"?

Why post on this forum if you don't want to abide by the rules around inflammatory language and speaking clearly? There are many other fora where you can describe in great detail what needs to be done to the homeless (in Minecraft).

I'll be happy to if they promise to follow the same rules. No more crap like "time to burn some witches before they run this town," and I'm all good.

And people seem to appreciate the info I bring to discussions, which is always encouraging.
Why would I not post when there are people who want to talk about gardening or medieval economic history or fringe political things I can dump evidence for that nobody else knows about? There's almost nowhere on the internet like that any more.

There only seem to be roughly 4-5 haters who dislike my posts, and I'd be happy to engage with them too if they'd speak up instead of downvoting and reporting everything.

And you? You post an awful lot of one line angry complaints about people, and don't seem to like being downvoted for them. What keeps you coming back?

I would not have banned you(and it looks like you didn't get banned), but having rules against referring to real people as biowaste while allowing another poster to refer to posters like me as witches who ought to be viciously mocked for our backwards beliefs isn't hypocritical, nor is that poster strictly speaking allowed to do so; he gets in trouble for it all the time.

Even if your position was entirely true, aren't you now taking the same actions as the addicts you dislike? You are deliberately shitting up the metaphorical sidewalks here, because you feel some other people get away with it?

Even if true that isn't going to get you a less shitty sidewalk. Just means more shit to be shoveled.

You're not just defecting against other defectors, you're defecting against everyone else. If you see two people shitting on the sidewalk or breaking into your car, does it matter one is only doing it because the other gets away with it? I would suggest you are likely to be pissed off at both and both are making the place worse.

The votes suggest people do not think I am "shitting up the place," I think you're just using that as a gaslighting tactic because you enjoy being manipulative.

I think you're just using that as a gaslighting tactic because you enjoy being manipulative.

Do you understand how this kind of direct personal attack fails to advance the foundation? This is unkind, uncharitable, needlessly antagonistic, contributes nothing of substance to the conversation, and just in general does not contribute to an atmosphere of open discussion.

You are not required to agree with others. To the contrary! Disagreement is an important part of what we do here. You are not even required to be pleasant or agreeable. If you demolish someone's argument, they might very naturally be upset by that, and sometimes they will even complain about it to us. But that sort of thing is not only permitted, it is probably essential to the advancement of the foundation.

By contrast, your disdain is unwelcome, unwarranted, and frankly unwise. Sneering and name-calling and making personal attacks simply antagonizes others. It's all heat and no light.

This particular comment is not the most antagonistic comment I've ever seen, but it is antagonistic enough--and engaging in this sort of behavior immediately after I've warned you against it is straightforwardly unrepentant. You didn't just lose your temper and have a bad day; you plainly decided to disregard my warning and double down on your rule breaking.

Your last ban was for a week. This one is for two. I don't know how to make this any clearer: moderate your tone or your bans will quickly escalate toward infinity.

You may of course believe what you please. But upvotes are not the measure of that. Otherwise all the people who vote for thepoliticians who enact the policies about homeless people you dislike, would be proving those positions correct no? If popular voting is the arbiter.

But you yourself admitted to breaking the rules on prpose here because other people get away with it, so you do not have a leg to stand on here I am afraid.

Do better or don't, but if you post it is fair game for people to argue against you.

Otherwise all the people who vote for thepoliticians who enact the policies about homeless people you dislike, would be proving those positions correct no? If popular voting is the arbiter.

Not to "well-ackchewally" up the place, but voting for a politician who is an amalgam of dozens of policy positions, and who may or may not ever actually carry through on those positions doesn't actually mean that the voter endorses everything the politician ultimately does (e.g. tory voters who wanted less immigration to the UK and voted for politicians who repeatedly promised less immigration but still got mass immigration anyway). Up-voting a particular comment in a debate is a much clearer signal of what exact position is being supported.

More comments

Bud, anyone who writes a hate-filled screed about how much they hate leftists/Jews/trannies/take your pick will get a ton of upvotes, especially if it's long and detailed and filled with personal or historical anecdotes and not just "Fuck Those People."

You seem really fixed on the idea that "When I go off, lots of people upvote me, therefore my posts are good."

The ability to garner upvotes is often, but not always, associated with post quality, but we mod highly-upvoted posts very often. Sometimes even good posts that unfortunately have a bit of shit in them.

If you think it shouldn't be that way, find a forum, as others have said, where you can get seal claps for shitting on Those People. This isn't that place. Most people, even if they do sometimes applaud you for dropping a steaming turd on the "right" target, do not actually want steaming turds all over the place.

Yeah, no, I'm not buying it. I've seen you use this line on far too many good people.

I think all you're optimizing for is getting rid of "witchiness" as sneakily as you can without making people too upset about it.
Sorry to say this publicly, but you and sscreader are two of four regular posters who I completely discount, and would rather not see at all if blocking didn't disrupt the site experience so much.

If you want to call mentioning being the victim of a crime "dropping a steaming turd", go ahead. But I think people are sick enough of that reddit-mod manipulation tactic that it won't work.

More comments

I'll be happy to if they promise to follow the same rules. No more crap like "time to burn some witches before they run this town," and I'm all good.

You know he's earned multiple bans and is close to being permabanned for precisely those kinds of posts, right?

I also meant you, to be honest.

I'm sure you did, but like your constant reports demanding we ban all leftists, it's not an objection to be taken seriously. You think you're being persecuted and treated unfairly because I/"a handful of haters" don't like you, and this is observably, empirically untrue. You have posted some interesting things lately and we'd like you to do more of that. We'd also like you to stop flaming out every time you can't control your emotions.

That's not really answering the question.

Edit since you edited after I responded:

Why would I not post

I'm not saying you shouldn't post here. I'm just wondering why you post obviously rule breaking stuff, then get huffy when you get (predictably) moderated when you could post that stuff elsewhere and get a round of applause.

And you? You post an awful lot of one line angry complaints about people, and don't seem to like being downvoted for them.

I don't believe I've ever complained about my comments being downvoted, and I don't even think that my comments are angry. I'd even say it's a little ironic that I'm being accused of being angry in this particular thread.

Preboonking: I don't vouch that I've never ever complained about being downvoted, but if it does happen, it's rare.

What keeps you coming back?

Force of habit, I guess. I've been here since the /r/ssc days, and sometimes there really is something interesting posted here.

Please accept the following in the spirit of cooperation and friendliness, even though I know it will probably not come across that way:

As we've now gone meta, I'd like to draw attention to your own comments.

A large percentage of your posts are one line drive-bys that refute other users. Moreover, when your own refutations are called into question or proven incorrect, you simply ignore and move on instead of defending your position.

While there is a place for calling other people on their bullshit, this critical behavior is what is referred to on Twitter as "being a reply guy".

If you want to improve our forum, post fewer one liners and more long form original content. Let us take down your belief system for a change. I think you have a lot to say, but are hiding underneath a protective shell. How about a top-level comment next week? Stop being the critic, and be the man in the arena. Tell us something good.

Moreover, when your own refutations are called into question or proven incorrect, you simply ignore and move on instead of defending your position.

This couldn't be more incorrect. If anything, I probably respond way past the point of zero marginal returns (example: this very comment).

Stop being the critic, and be the man in the arena. Tell us something good.

I made a poast about psychopaths a few months ago, but nothing good has come to mind recently. Writer's block, what are you going to do?

I support this ruling. I also think calling people "biowaste" crosses a big line.

It is crazy how across the West that in the last decade or two it's just become increasingly normalized to have RPG Random Encounters with the insane/drugged.

Yea but the NPC guards are broken, so they only arrest you even though the actual criminals are committing crimes on you. Plus, you get negative xp buffs from social media fallout if you actually fight back. The worst is that this is actually a PvP encounter and not PvE, so you can't even build a counter. Your only option is to supplant the NPC guards with your own PvP lowsec guild, but I'm not sure the build allows for this setup.

Earthbound's "199x" was three decades early. But unfortunately, these aren't New Age Retro Hippies, they're a more modern equivalent.

Where's 'here', out of curiosity?

The hollowed out ruins that were Western civilization

I was thinking of a particular city or region.

And OP was probably thinking of deliberately not providing that information for fear of it becoming identifiable.

Well, sure, but I would have thought that the name of a city by itself wouldn't be enough to make him identifiable, and since the content of the post is a complaint about his local neighbourhood, I feel that knowing where that neighbourhood is, at least in very broad terms, is relevant to understanding the complaint.

...I feel that knowing where that neighbourhood is, at least in very broad terms, is relevant to understanding the complaint.

While I share some curiosity about the matter, I don't know that it's relevant. Have we not all experienced basically the same thing across many different cities? Deranged and drug-addled bums coddled by NGOs that make endless excuses for them aren't unique to a single city. This is so common that it would be more interesting to me if someone called out a city where they've never seen such a thing.

Have we not all experienced basically the same thing across many different cities?

No, I haven't. Currently living in Denver, CO and I have yet to see the kind of things OP described. I agree with @OliveTapenade that it is beneficial to the discussion to say where one is talking about. No shame if someone declines to specify, of course, but it's perfectly reasonable to ask

I just google Denver, CO homeless camps and got tons of articles, videos and photos of them(I suspect Denver was not always like this, my city wasn't). I then googled Denver homeless crime, and while I will admit it is very narrow in its focus, the article titled

Crime calls up 2,900% at hotel converted to homeless shelter in Denver

stood out.

The OP mentioned a car break in, so I tried to google that,

DENVER — After leading the nation in stolen vehicles, including a staggering 98 percent increase over a 5-year period the latest data show Colorado vehicle thefts dropped in 2023, a trend that has continued into the current year.

I tried to find stats on just breaking into cars to steal stuff, but all my google searches were swamped with, leading the nation in auto theft, articles (I even checked page 2)

Which is all to say, for all I know OP lives in Denver.

More comments

It's not something I've experienced personally, though I've heard enough similar stories about urban decay in the United States that it's not an unfamiliar genre to me. The stories I have heard, though, suggest to me that the region is relevant, insofar as it lets us draw some conclusions around different states, governments, and policies.

So I guess I think it is relevant, if only because I can't think of much to say about the idea that an unknown city in an unknown country with an unknown government and unknown social fabric has a problem with drug addicts. That's not even a data point, surely?

The top level poster is under no obligation to tell me, of course - though then I'm free to find the initial complaint rather pointless.

This is so common that it would be more interesting to me if someone called out a city where they've never seen such a thing.

Basically any city in Poland? You get some homeless but they are not aggressive. And most they smell, and you have trouble with that maybe once a year. In last 20 years the most aggressive were touts, when I was with foreign friends and speaking in English. Once I was slightly kicked by someone but that was some drunk woman and not homeless/drug bum.

(secret recipe is likely being poor so migrants will go elsewhere)

Goes for at least the parts of Stockholm I'm familiar with as well (which isn't too much admittedly). And migrants definitely do come here.

My best guess is that this is more of an American problem due to drugs coming through their southern border.

Well, sure, but I would have thought that the name of a city by itself wouldn't be enough to make him identifiable

What's the benefit for him, of narrowing down his identity from 1 in 300M to 1 in 10K - 1M (probably a lot less given the other details he brought up)?

I feel that knowing where that neighbourhood is, at least in very broad terms, is relevant to understanding the complaint.

I don't. The nature of his complaint is crystal clear. I can understand the value of the extra info in verifying that what he's complaining about is actually happening, but it's not like proving that conclusively will change anyone's mind in about the wider implications.

Nothing in the top-level post indicates he's in the United States - I don't even know which country he's talking about.

You are glowing.

More comments

Which only means that his relative exposure would increase even more, if he told you the city he's at...

More comments

This week we had a homeless woman fully evacuate her bowels in front of a kids museum, with families and children about. She is apparently known in that area for being aggressive and walking around with no pants. I briefly saw crap like this (haha but not really) when briefly visiting San Francisco, and it's the kind of thing you expect will stay only over there even though you know full well there's nothing stopping it from popping up in your own backyard. I thought I was being trolled when I heard.

The local subreddit has decided this is an issue with lack of public restrooms, and I feel the Hitler rising in me.

We are from the same place, I saw that on the local reddit as well. Glad my kid is old enough that we don't go there on a regular basis anymore, but I just cannot fathom how the entire community losing something of value for the sake of letting crazy druggies roam around being a problem is just accepted. "Whelp, nothing to be done about it other than just accept things suck now." But there are quite a few things that can be done about it, and it makes me feel like I am taking crazy pills to see people insist otherwise.

What should one do about it? I can vote for the most anti-crime candidate in every election (which I do), but they lose every time. If I live in a place like Seattle where 70% of the people are completely unwilling to address these problems, then I am effectively helpless.

From the perspective of my own personal safety, directly confronting a mentally ill person or criminal could result in personal injury or criminal charges against me.

Now, I am willing to risk some amount of personal safety for the purpose of making society better. But not when a majority of that society would actively view me as a villain for doing it.

Unless one is able to coordinate with other like minded people, there really is little to be done about crime and decay. I'll pick up litter on the streets and clean up graffiti but that's just a bandaid.

If you have money, you could use a good chunk of it (on the order of tithes) to support political candidates (or oppose bad candidates) who see things your way (or not) . That's more effective, especially at the most local levels, than voting alone.

I think honestly the ideal solution would be to make those making those kinds of decisions have to live in the neighborhood so they have to actually literally worry about the crime problem themselves. Having the local mayor robbed on the streets would probably do more to get crime addressed than a million anti-crime votes. Alas, as was pointed out in the top post almost all the city leaders have long since fled the city to gated communities and likely live in mansions with gates at the end of their driveway and full security systems.

If I live in a place like Seattle where 70% of the people are completely unwilling to address these problems, then I am effectively helpless.

Suck it up, move out, become a criminal yourself, become a revolutionary. Those are the basic choices.

I'm choosing to suck it up because I'm rich and can afford to. The long term plan is to move out and join a more robust community. This might be a pipe dream.

I'll continue to vote for change and to try to convince sympathetic people to do the same. But I am just a man and not a hero.

Or organize a voting/activist campaign of some sort.

No, that's exactly what demonstrably can't work. Those are the weapons of the other side.

What should one do about it? I can vote for the most anti-crime candidate in every election (which I do), but they lose every time. If I live in a place like Seattle where 70% of the people are completely unwilling to address these problems, then I am effectively helpless.

move to less insane area?

I never used to carry a gun here, but started recently.

From a practical perspective, what's the best self-defense weapon?

Lately I've been thinking it's pepper spray. The problem with a gun is that even if it is "successfully" used to stop a would-be assailant you could be facing criminal charges. It also seems harder to use then pepper spray.

But where on one's person do you even carry a gun (or pepper spray)? Surely not in your pockets, and digging through a bag to find a weapon seems difficult. I'm not sure you need to carry a weapon anyway. I live in Seattle, the land of the drug zombie, and even though people do occasionally get attacked by schizos, the odds are pretty small. As a man, I tend not to be hassled either. So I see no need to carry a weapon.

Sorry to pick out one small line from your post...

I mentioned it in the last thread, but having a large protective dog breed with you will generally make you safer around anyone with a shred of rationality left in their brain.

Dogs of course aren't practical for all use cases. But I feel like they fill the most needed gap for some of these cities.

  1. Dogs are a more sympathetic victim. I don't know why but someone who assaults and nearly beats another person to death can get all sorts of excuses made for them, but that same person beats up a dog and everyone agrees they are scum.
  2. Dogs are more likely to injure someone in a fight. A gang of ten people can safely beat someone up without any of them getting hurt. With a dog though at least one of them is likely gonna get bit.
  3. Dogs have more plausible deniability for violence than all other weapons. You can still get in trouble, especially if you are irresponsible and get some kid bitten. But we treat dogs as having some degree of agency, so they will shoulder some of the blame for any incident.

I find it weird that I keep talking up owning a dog. I don't actually own one, and don't want to.

Well, maybe because many people believe dogs don’t belong in most places and get annoyed when people decide their precious little doggie should go to what were once people only locations.

As I said they don't fit in some circumstances. But outside on the street is fine and that is also a place with a lot of crime. Buildings that are secure enough to prevent a dog from entering are also secure enough to prevent obvious trouble people from entering.

A gun. Assuming you don't dress in skin tight clothing and/or in a hot climate, it's not that hard to conceal a small pistol.

The most common self defense scenario is that zero shots are fired. Surveys put it as high as 95% of DGUs involve merely brandishing the gun to scare off an assailant. (Of course in certain circumstances that could also lead to charges or social opprobrium) The advantage of a firearm is that you'll never find you're at the wrong point on the escalation hierarchy. I mean you don't want to find yourself at the ok corral with an lcp, but a knife or pepper spray become useless if they pull a gun.

Pepper spray keychains are also widely available. Practice with it if you're going to carry it. My wife used to carry pepper spray in her purse, then tried it to see if it worked, INDOORS FOR SOME REASON, and called me crying because it got in her face after hitting the wall.

In general don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I only carry rarely, when I feel I need to to. If I had to carry every day or never, I'd pick never. But I pop it in a jacket pocket when I'm going somewhere I might need it.

I'd like to correct your intuition and say that you're going to face charges for pepper spray as well.

Who's going to report a defensive pepper spraying? Like blast the ne'er do well in the face and get out of there. He doesn't think they're on his side so he won't call the cops.

We live in a world where everything is potentially videotaped and reported. The place you are most likely to get randomly assaulted is outside a business. They have cameras on the doors, in the store, and in the parking lot. If, for example, you are approached in the parking lot by a person menacing you and pepper spray them then leave, thats on video. His flailing and screeching is on video. Some progressive do gooder will start filming you if you aren't quick, and even if you are they will film him and call for an ambulance for him. Then the auto reporter auto reports that he got pepper sprayed.

If you are thinking carrying pepper spray is a good idea, you live in a place where the system is set up against a person carrying pepper spray is a good idea. It might still be a good idea, better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6 and all, but you still have to be aware you aren't the favored class here.

Yeah but who's going to report it? Do gooders are going to shut up about it awkwardly, your assailant won't report it, the business owner won't either. Most pepper spray victims probably don't seek medical attention and the police rarely follow up on it anyways; they've got their hands full dealing with serious injuries.

I think there are many people who will report it. Why would the "do gooders" shut up? They sympathize with the bums.

Probably not murder charges though.

Why would I accept a stranger's intuition over my own?

Because people get assault and malicious wounding charges for pepper spray.

It is a lot lower bar than people think it is.

From a practical perspective, what's the best self-defense weapon?

From a practical perspective, it depends on the context. Priority one is always going to be avoiding conflict rather than dealing with it when it comes. The order of operations for that are:

  1. Don't go to dangerous places. Seriously, these are usually pretty obvious.
  2. Be aware of your surroundings.
  3. In the event that there is potential for conflict, be ready to deescalate or flee as needed. Both are superior to engaging in a conflict if they are realistic options.

In service of these the advice from @Lizzardspawn below is quite good! Being fit will tend to make you a less appealing target and allow you to flee from most potential conflicts.

If you're thinking about situations where outright preventing conflict is not feasible (e.g. home invasion), the correct weapon is an appropriately suited firearm. The appropriate firearm depends on local risks from overpenetration and the geometry of your property. As a broad generality, you can't go too far wrong with whatever your ergonomically preferred 9mm pistol with hollow-point rounds is. If you have the budget and inclination, my own preference would be a short-barreled, suppressed AR-15 chambered in 300 BLK with subsonic rounds, but this probably not realistic for most people.

From a practical perspective, what's the best self-defense weapon?

Best is living in Singapore. Second best - pair of good running shoes and being fit. Third is complicated and depends on local rules.

Yeah I’m very pro-second amendment, but practically speaking if you’re in any situation where you have to pull out a gun you’re already half-screwed.

The best self defense weapon, in jurisdictions where it is legal, is an indifferently-concealed full sized handgun. I carry a 1911 and print away. Never gonna need it when you have it, might if you don't.

Sorry, what do you mean by "printing"? Having the imprint of the weapon/holster visible through your clothes?

Yes.

If you actually care about printing (and comfort!) I'd recommend the Sig P365. Best balance between size and ammo capacity. I appendix carry and the only time it gets uncomfortable is when I bend down.

The printing is the point- ne'er do wells know I have a gun on me without open carrying.

I also carry a sig P365 and recommend it.

The best self-defense weapons is one you will actually carry and are trained to use.

A Kubotan is high on the list because it can be attached as a keychain and is easy enough to deploy with a bit of practice. No excuses not to have it with you almost anywhere.

The primary consideration in my mind is also whether it is suitable for multiple attackers, and either allows you to deter a whole group of attackers at once or inflict enough damage quickly enough that you can escape.

Pepper spray kind of works here but I really, really dislike that it is easily defeated by goggles, or just covering your eyes.

A compact handgun still reigns supreme, to me. Not too big a fan of 'subcompact' or 'micro' styles as they start to trade off too much ammo capacity, accuracy, and stopping powah. Anything is better than nothing, though.

And perhaps above all, having a buddy or two who know how to handle themselves trumps all. Makes you less of a target to start, massively multiplies the force you can bring to bear, and can patch you up or drive you to a hospital if you do get injured.

Surely not in your pockets

Some pistols are small enough to fit in a pocket.

But where on one's person do you even carry a gun (or pepper spray)? Surely not in your pockets, and digging through a bag to find a weapon seems difficult.

I use the urban carry holster. Like everybody else, I was put off from getting one after seeing this gif, but I finally caved because the ankle holsters I kept buying would only last a couple of months before the Velcro became unusable. It's wonderful.

+1 to urban carry holsters. I love mine and have convinced 2 other family members to buy one.

A flashlight and pepper spray. A flashlight can temporarily blind an individual at night, be used as a blunt weapon, and be brandished without issue unlike a bat, a baton, brass knuckles, a gun, or a knife. Pepper spray can temporarily incapacitate, and, more or less, be brandished without issue. Both can be concealed in a hand, or clipped to a belt. Less likely to escalate a non-fatal situation into a fatal one. Less likely to find yourself in a civil and/or criminal case.

It doesn't hurt to have an old bricked phone, decoy keys, and/or a decoy wallet to distract a thief. And, ultimately, it's best to avoid dangerous areas.

You can have a gun, but you really need to be aware of all the legal and physical risks you could encounter, and regularly train with it.

Just carry a gun. I use an iwb holster in summer and owb in winter. Honestly, I've used a hard pocket holster in a jacket pocket, works fine.

Lighting is another issue. If I'd needed to shoot, I would have had to reposition my flashlight grip at the same time as coming up from one-handed low ready. Which I know how to do, but not instinctively enough to pull my light in the correct grip in the first place.
Something to train on.

Side note, thanks to this I found out my immigrant boss also carries. Some of these guys become more American than Americans.

I don't precisely know where Elon lands in the Motte's situation evaluation of the Culture War at present, but I think I've got an example than can be used as a lense beyond The MuskATeer himself.

This is a very recent (x)weet from Elon. If you really, carefully parse it with your far less powerful brain (than Elon's, that is) you might be able to understand that - this is just basic macroeconomic understanding. Holy shit this is fucking Econ 101

But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits. I am convinced this is also 90% of Sam Altman's playbook.

Business-eese and consulting speaking get a lot of flak for being made up pseudo-languages that exist to further unearned vibes of authority and experience on the part of the speaker. It's fun to point and laugh that it's all either nonsense or very obvious truths dressed up in jargon.

I think the cycle is repeating itself with many different sides of the AI wars. Connor Leahy is even more egregious than Musk, and also triples down by trying (and mostly failing) to pin people down with gotcha hypotheticals that are worded to sounded apocalyptic in their profundity.

I think a good heuristic for valid expertise in a subject is the degree to which it gets a little boring. Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory. Many posts related to SCOTUS here on The Motte (of which I am thankful for, please keep them going!) often get just a little tedious - not because of jargony pablum, but because the authors generally really know what they're talking about and go multiple layers deep in reference and citation.

I'm someone who's been in the Tech industry (or, maybe more accurately, technology focused parts of several industries) for my entire career. At least at the start, "tech" was looked at as a weird subculture - the bosses knew they needed it, but it wasn't the show. In the middle 2010s, that started to change as the FAANGs became the largest and richest companies on the planet. Now that we are at peak AI hullabaloo, not only do you see people with zero technical capability presenting themselves as experts, you have an entire aesthetic-cultural superstructure. I think Musk is not only part of it, but one of those who built it. Altman as well. If you peer into their backgrounds, their techincal bonafides are questionable at best. Musk seems like a hacker level dev who brute forced his way into PayPal (and was then brute forced out). His claims about being deeply involved in engineering to this day have to be impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, and Xwitter couldn't run if so much was contingent on him). It's more likely he injects himself into meetings and initiatives here and there and mostly serves as a slight derailing force to otherwise normal activities. Altman seems to have zero background and is perhaps the poster boy for weird SF striver life.

I seek the opinions of the Mottizen community.

Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory

They do?

Musk is pretty intelligent. I’m sure there are many people here who are higher IQ. Of course, that isn’t really the main ingredient for making huge amounts of money beyond a certain threshold. The average billionaire is probably 98th or 99th percentile, but their percentile intelligence certainly doesn’t equal their percentile wealth.

It's also just absolutely pathetic to go through life with such smug pride in talent level that hasn't actually been expressed with any particular accomplishments to be proud of. Gloating about having a higher IQ or more academic credentials than Musk is the equivalent of someone saying they have a higher VO2max than the Tour de France champion. OK, good for you when you look at the number on your phone, but Tadej Pogacar is a multimillionaire cycling champion with a beautiful girlfriend and you're proud that you can consume a lot of oxygen. I don't even like Musk, but he's obviously just done more than almost every single human being alive.

I don't even like Musk, but he's obviously just done more than almost every single human being alive.

When you're used to discounting building companies because that requires investment of money and/or people being willing to follow you (as opposed to personal physical/mental labor), this is not obvious. The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".

The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".

How many of the projects he's working on would exist without him? Yeah, the natural resources and people would still exist and presumably be put towards some kind of productive goal but consider the positive and negative effects of his competitors on the world. On the one end, you have things that are objectively bad like gambling. I would say Elon's current projects are pretty close to the polar opposite; that is to say, objectively good. Curing paralysis, colonizing the solar system, the HUGE push towards making electric vehicles the norm and more recently, major advances in AI.

And that’s just silly. Building companies are crazy hard. Which is why it is so well remunerated. Musk shows an almost unparalleled ability to build companies.

Ehhhhhh. Building companies is hard, and building companies is well remunerated, but being hard is not why building companies is well remunerated.

Building companies is well remunerated because capital enjoys systemic leverage over labour and is able to claim more of the rewards from their cooperation for itself. When capital and labour work together both parties are better off (otherwise they wouldn't do it), but capital gets more of the reward because unemployed capital is much less miserable than unemployed labour. So the worker is paid in wages, while the investor is paid in profits.

If building companies was easy, then there would be a lot more people doing it. If there were a lot more people doing it, then the labor they provide (ie in the form of equity) would be much smaller compared to the amount of equity that capital takes.

Market history suggests the dear thing isn’t capital but skill in building large scalable companies. Capital is common and cheap in comparison.

Completely, I don’t think it’s really a useful way of ranking yourself or others. Still, I wouldn’t take lessons on macroeconomics from Musk, whereas I might read what Scott has to say, even if he’s wrong, because he’s smarter.

Is he smarter? Are you sure? Scott has said some really dumb things. Hasn’t really accomplished a lot outside of becoming somewhat internet famous.

Tons of smart people believe very dumb things, certainly if you’re a conservative (most of the very smartest people in the west are pretty mainstream neolibs). I think Scott is pretty smart based on his writing ability and skill at synthesising information in his reviews etc, which I think correlates highly with intelligence.

But that doesn’t mean “he is smarter than Musk.”

Sure building a company isn’t solely based on IQ. But building technically difficult companies across multiple domains suggests some pretty strong intelligence, especially compared to someone who is basically a glorified essayist.

Do you realize that Elon Musk has absolute domain expertise in several, unrelated engineering disciplines (aerospace, rocket engine design, electric vehicle design and integration, and manufacturing for all of these), and that before he got started in his current arc he had domain expertise in several other unrelated engineering and regulatory disciples (software and banking regulation)?

Nerd wrangling is a specific skill. There are common patterns for failure for large engineering teams. Being able to recognize these and correct them is important.

Human behaviour inevitably means that organizations will be run by ambitions and internal alliances unless something stops it. Managers want to build their resumes by running ambitious projects. They often like or dislike ideas based on how much they like the individual who brought it up.

A tech leader needs to be able to bust things up a bit when they aren't functioning. That's why Musk is often described as being unstable and disruptive by existing management in the company. It's also why he has such a strong history of success at coming in as a new CEO.

Musk isn't deeply involved in developing tech, but when he gets a message from an employee about a problem and a response from the higher ups, he can tell if the higher ups are bullshitting him.

For that he does need significant tech skills, but doesn't need to be a specialist in any of the products.

Altman seems similar to me.

As for the tweet, general political commentary on twitter doesn't usually involve deep thoughts. He's stating a clear rebuttal that midwit followers can use in political discussions in their daily lives. The fact that a statement from the VP running for President can be rebutted with econ 101 says more about the state of the country than Musk.

Yeah. Musk’s job is to basically decide who gets resources and how to remove roadblocks. He has shown an uncanny talent for both. To do that well, he needs to know enough (even if not an expert level) to cut through normal corporate BS.

Reddit commenters and other slave moralists love to sneer at Elon because they have no idea what leadership is (and if they did, they're repelled by it). Leadership, in their heads, is mindlessly executing the agenda of the secret kings like them, which so happen to coincidentally align with a progressive agenda. Softheaded wannabe intelligentsia and open source communists who want the world to be run like a university.

Fuck them.

All the certificates and university degrees and soy can't make up for a lack of vision and a absence of testicles. If you gave a billion dollars to one hundred Silicon Valley alumni, ninety-nine of them would be overrun instantly by blaqq kweens and transsexual gooners because guileless, naive autists have no social defenses against San Francisco grifters.

Musk isn't perfect. But he has a spine, and he has vision, and in our degenerate age that makes him stand a giant in an era of dwarfs. No amount of technical ability can protect you from the culture war, just ask Stallman.

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free. The invective is obviously way too far over the top for this forum, but yeah, there really is a serious problem with the HRization of everything under the sun from people that have absolutely no experience with ever building anything, leading anything, or even producing anything that people would purchase of their own free will. We can see this everywhere from politics to corporations, where people earnestly believe that the relevant criteria for rising ranks is checking a bunch of boxes for titles held, HR style, rather than having actually accomplished anything of note. Having people that have never risked a penny of their own money rise to the top of the power structure isn't just accepted, it's outright lauded by people that see their own personal failures as indications of good moral character.

Sohrab Ahmari, a guy that a lot of people on the right respect as an intellectual, believes things like this:

Thinking of Galbraith’s line about how painful it is that men who made a few good financial bets are assumed to know what they’re talking about on everything else.

And how their wealth means the rest of us can’t avoid their inane views.

The absolute conceit that people who have accomplished so much less than a guy like Musk to just blithely refer to building empires of productivity and innovation as "a few good financial bets" demonstrates to me that these guys have absolutely no concept of what it takes to build a company. They're pampered, spoiled brats that truly believe that their academic credentials and journalistic output aren't just as good as actually creating value, they're better. They have fastidiously avoided taking any meaningful personal risks and have managed to imbue that cowardice with an air of smug superiority because they didn't make their money doing something as vulgar as making "a few good financial bets".

I would be forced to agree as well. Leadership is a skill set. And it takes an intuitive understanding of a whole system of psychology and power-wielding and strategy and understanding how to work with incomplete information. I think of running a company being a lot like a combination of poker and chess. Chess because it’s a game of strategy using your pieces to work to attack and defend. Poker because you actually don’t know where the other side is on the board. You can’t play a standard set of moves because you can be attacked by a piece you don’t even know you need to defend against.

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free.

I can't deny that this video of Kara Swisher writing off Elon for moral reasons before being reminded that Elon actually does try to build things that matter to actual people immediately came to my mind reading that post. It's definitely a thing, though the level of generalization and invective may be against Motte rules.

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free. The invective is obviously way too far over the top for this forum, but yeah, there really is a serious problem with the HRization of everything under the sun from people that have absolutely no experience with ever building anything, leading anything, or even producing anything that people would purchase of their own free will.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with your post expressing that idea.

Rewritten without all the "fuck you" snarling at gooners and blaqq keweens and soy autists, he could have said what you did. Some people just can't express themselves without spraying spittle and loogies, and this place isn't for that.

Yeah, to be clear, I'm not arguing with the ban, just the assessment that there wasn't any underlying content. There is an argument embedded in there! Frankly, I even agree with the level of contempt expressed for the commentariat and academic classes, but also agree that it's just not appropriate here.

The absolute conceit that people who have accomplished so much less than a guy like Musk to just blithely refer to building empires of productivity and innovation as "a few good financial bets" demonstrates to me that these guys have absolutely no concept of what it takes to build a company.

They don't, but that's not the point. The distinction is just friend and enemy, as usual. They'll absolutely gush over Warren Buffett who is a lot closer to having made his money through "a few financial bets" than Musk (though to give the devil his due, it's still quite unfair to Buffett). Or Bill Gates, who for all his sins did build Microsoft. Because they're friends and will push for lefty policies, and Musk is an enemy who won't.

No amount of technical ability can protect you from the culture war, just ask Stallman.

I mean, you're not wrong. Stallman got ousted from MIT after the progressive/techno-libertarian split of the mid 2010s, it was only a matter of time.

But he ended up back on the board of the FSF. I think you're also ignoring that it's entirely possible to create parallel institutions that are resistant to this stuff. Especially for weird nerds with technical ability

I find your post to be low content, low effort, and mostly a screed against your preferred outgroups. I do not see how it adds anything of substance to this conversation.

This is a distilled snarl at everyone you hate, conveying no argument or information or anything to engage with. It's just a free-form stream of invective and buzzwords cribbed from your favorite alt-right shitposters, and it's pure culture warring.

It's been a while since your last ban, but when you get wound up, you really get wound up. Banned for three days.

You can still ban the poster, but there was clearly an argument. You even accepted as much when you responded to Walter that the problem was the sneering. We should try to be precise in our wording.

Musk surely isn't doing huge chunks of the engineering by himself. But he clearly is good at hiring the right people. You can only do that if you can tell whether someone knows what they're doing or not. He also seems to have a special talent at making those people work harder, motivating people. Based on the biography I read he has strong engineering skills and takes important high-level decisions about how the companies should move forward.

I suspect that Altman is similar. He may not be the greatest coder in the world but he's clearly a master schemer, outmaneuvering the OpenAI board and tapping Microsoft's nigh-limitless resources on generous terms.

I think a lot of it is getting middle management out of the way to allow the doers to do.

I don't really understand. It may be an obvious econ 51 point, but it clearly needs to be stated when the current regime is talking about imposing price controls on food, opening state-run grocery stores because the private ones have been driven out of business, and all kinds of absurd (power-seeking) economic policies.

Musk fits an extremely profitable niche of being competent enough in different areas to coordinate investors with management with engineers.
Again, this may seem like a simple "business 101" thing, but you just have to look at his competitors like Boeing to see how neglecting it causes horrifically embarrassing failures again and again.
The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example. It's not that Boeing engineers are retarded, and it's not that they've been given an impossible task. It's not even that the Boeing CEO is a mad scientist imprisoning people in space to torture them with terrible movies: it's that basic management practices are being ignored.

Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.
Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia somehow can see what needs to be done and do it, which is apparently a superpower in this world of Pump Six (and other stories)

The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example.

That one's been pretty fun to watch. I'm pretty anti-Elon, and follow some amount of anti-Elon accounts, and when that thing launched you could watch them going from "wooow, look at them making a rocket on their first attempt, without blowing anything up through 'iterative design'", to "so what it sprung a few leaks?", to getting awfully quiet as the magnitude of the disaster unfolded. Props to the people running the simulation, I couldn't write a better story.

Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

Explaining fucking econ 101 to the hoi polloi seems like an entirely appropriate thing to do in an environment where the Leaders of the Free World are attempting to invoke various mumbo-jumbo and/or voodoo to explain why their pumping of the money supply while simultaneously outlawing demand for the produce of about half of the economy is totally not responsible for the inflation we've all been experiencing?

I agree with you, jkf

At the risk of being rude, I kinda wonder if 100P is thinking about things in terms of status games in a way that doesn't make sense.

The majority of people don't understand economics and finance and wouldn't be able to if you tried.

I really, really wish I was wrong about that. But when you have a practicing medical doctor having to wrestle with money management, you start to realize really quickly that there's a broad spread of intelligence types and not everyone is good at everything.

Which is why explaining the basic concepts in an authoritative way that is easy for anyone to understand has value!

I’ve met some very high verbal IQ people who are terrible at math and I’m extremely unconvinced it’s actually genetic or unchangeable. I think it’s usually that they displayed great verbal ability at a young age, didn’t care about math, then never really cared to learn because they could always coast on their writing/verbal ability. If they truly needed it they could probably quickly become competent with a few hours a day of high-intensity tutoring for a short period.

I think it’s usually that they displayed great verbal ability at a young age, didn’t care about math, then never really cared to learn because they could always coast on their writing/verbal ability.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

For real life math applications - probably less than a day. Learn to know exponential functions, positive and negative feedback, some statistics and probability theory - that's it. All of those take one or two hours to grok at basic level. And with them you will be able to build useful mental model of almost anything.

While I think some people are limited in some fashion, I also think basic math is just taught in a horrible fashion.

The contrast between my econ and finance courses and the math courses I was required to take were like night and day.

Kevin Durant is an all time great NBA player. He's a multi time NBA MVP, has won NBA championships and came a shoe size from another. He's worth $170mm, and he's in Paris surrounded by hot athletic people. He just starred in an all time great Olympic basketball game, coming back from 15 points down in the fourth against Serbia (a game which proved American racism!) and he's going to star in the gold medal game against France tomorrow.

And he was up at 5am Paris time shit posting against his haters on Twitter. He's got things to do, and if he didn't he could eat at any restaurant or go to any theater or get tickets to any Olympic event or find a groupie or hire the highest end prostitute. But there he is, fighting on Twitter.

Durant, and musk, and bill ackman, prove that shit posting is one of life's great joys. It is something Foucault would have written about (the way he wrote about fisting) as a truly new modern form of joy. And even when you're rich and important and famous you can't resist it. It's too fun. Isn't it magical that we can all access this kind of joy that Elon, who can do whatever he wants, still finds irresistible?

Elon on Twitter is just another guy on Twitter. And for the most part his tweets should be treated as though he's a JAG. That means both not giving him too much extra credibility, and also giving him grace. We're all wrong on here all the time, but nobody cares. And we all love to do 101 econ or history or bio. Give the man the same mercy, that's the level he's playing at.

all time great Olympic basketball game, coming back from 15 points down in the fourth against Serbia (a game which proved American racism!)

One of the amusing quirks of history is the breakup of Yugoslavia allowing greater pro-black propaganda by way of US basketball.

For example, a hypothetical Yugoslavia team this Olympics would have featured Doncic alongside Jokic, and Yugoslavia would have had the two best players between it and the US (especially with Embiid ill? injured? not that Embiid should be playing for the US instead of France, or more like Cameroon).

But yes, Durant is an all-time great NBA player, whose reputation was unfortunately tarnished by getting caught Tweeting on burner accounts, e.g., “KD can’t win a championship with those cats.” And the whole GSW Hardest Road situation. Then Brooklyn, then Phoenix.

Much of the intersection between US basketball simps and Durant-haters begrudgingly admits that Durant is likely the greatest basketball Olympian of all time.

Embiid is not one of the best players in the world in this context, no regular season. Doncic unquestionably would be worth the deficit.

Durant will always be better than he is beloved? The opposite of a Derek Jeter or a Nick foles.

Count me as doubtful to whether Yugoslavia would beat the US. It's very unclear if a Doncic/Jokic combo is better than Jokic alone.

Anyone would acknowledge that the US has far better talent than Serbia. Yet the game was close. So basketball isn't about simply adding talent on top of talent. You need to have team chemistry as well. Doncic is a bit of a team killer who would likely make Jokic worse. On the US side, Embiid is similarly a black hole with negative intangibles.

On the other hand, players like Lebron, Curry, and Jokic make their teammates better and that's what makes them all-time greats.

Durant, and musk, and bill ackman, prove that shit posting is one of life's great joys.

I actually think it is less one of life's great joys more than a modern drug; and like most drugs you build up a tolerance the more you use it and it will turn you into a real bastard and husk of a man if you let it.

If you really, carefully parse it with your far less powerful brain (than Elon's, that is) you might be able to understand that - this is just basic macroeconomic understanding. Holy shit this is fucking Econ 101

Elon has 200 000 000 followers. How many of them didn't take econ 101? And this is especially in the context of chasing price gouging where it doesn't exist promised from presidential candidate (also she is literally vice president now - why is she not bringing prices down now if she knows how). Not saying that government shouldn't mess with prices but do it the right way - either destroy demand or increase supply or both. The program of paying farmers not to produce on their land to stabilize the price of wheat and the government rations of gasoline (on which secondary market was allowed - so it put some income in the families that didn't drive) are the two programs that I think yielded good results.

Government bringing the price down of good in demand is one of the bad ideas. Its problem is that it is unobvious bad idea for a lot of people. Even though wherever it has been tried - from NYC rents trough soviet car industry all the way to Zimbabwe supermarkets it has failed miserably. So probably a good chunk of Elon's audience actually doesn't know it is a bad idea. There is nothing wrong in people from time to time to explain the basics again.

His claims about being deeply involved in engineering to this day have to be impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, and Xwitter couldn't run if so much was contingent on him). It's more likely he injects himself into meetings and initiatives here and there and mostly serves as a slight derailing force to otherwise normal activities.

I have been in tech also all my life. I never felt good deep in the theory, but I always exceled at jury rigging very innovative solutions out of existing stuff. I think that Elon has similar talent - he knows the stuff that his companies do well enough and the tech there, but his real talent is to have instinctive knack where the limits are and to push the people that really dig deep to them.

I don't understand aerospace much - but the fact that we react to falcon boosters landing the same way Lila from futurama reacted to going to the moon - says quite a lot that the guy knows how to assemble amazing engineering teams and is enough of an engineer to be able to work with them and steer them.

Not saying that government shouldn't mess with prices but do it the right way - either destroy demand or increase supply or both. The program of paying farmers not to produce on their land to stabilize the price of wheat ... yielded good results.

This program is destroying supply.

Yes. There was overproduction of grain at the time and the prices were collapsing. So the government needed to bump them up a bit IIRC

There was general deflation at the time. The program was nonsensical, as was usual for a lot of New Deal programs.

But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits.

I don't get that impression from Elon's tweet. There's nothing deep or novel there, you're right -- he's regurgitating standard economic dogma. But stating something that is both true and obvious is not, at least in my worldview, somehow a knock against the person saying it -- particularly when it actually is a controversial statement among laymen: something like half the country supports rent control (varies from poll to poll). Maybe if he was phrasing it as if he was some kind of gigabrain genius and these were wholly original thoughts, I'd have a more negative reaction, but I didn't parse it that way.

I think I'm probably more pro-Elon than most people here, though I'm quite bearish on Tesla in particular wrt. their ability to deliver on their self-driving promises, SpaceX is just so impressive it kind of washes away those sins. Rocket companies are hard, Carmack couldn't build one, Bezos' Blue Origin is far from competitive, ULA is basically a joke, etc. I mean just look at this graph: https://x.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1792672666316665198/photo/1

Now, how much of SpaceX's success is due to Musk is a totally reasonable discussion to have, but even in the most cynical case, he at least hired the best people and set strategic objectives that led directly to capturing the overwhelming majority of the launch market and drove costs down an order of magnitude. And this is before Starship.

X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability) but some of my favorite poasters have been unbanned and I think you could argue his acquisition dragged the Overton window to the right, so I'm giving him a pass there as well. And there's something ironic about the legacy media claiming it's dead/dying when Biden announced his resignation on X/Twitter first.

With regards to Altman, he comes across as basically a grifter and technically unsophisticated, no disagreements there. I am not at all impressed by his leadership.

Can't stop laughing that twitter is glitching so badly I can't see the graph of his other company's performance

(Edit: now I can for five seconds until the page reloads with "something went wrong, don't worry it's not your fault")

Probably something in your browser settings (i.e. it is your fault); I get the same thing, but Nitter works fine which implies Twitter is working properly.

No, something went very weird for about 20 minutes: everyone was posting about it. Cleared up though.

No, something went very weird for about 20 minutes

I wonder if things blowing up take ~20-30 minutes to work their way through whatever cache system twitter has in place (ok, really more of a CDN system with multiple places all over the globe, but still). A throttling system were if something is throttled for 15 minutes, it starts getting replicated seems like an 80/20 solution to the kind of traffic spikes twitter gets.

It is ALWAYS DNS, always.

I mean just look at this graph:

Wow. The launch industry divides pretty evenly 9 ways now, huh? There's "everybody else in the world combined", there's China, then there's "SpaceX on Sundays", "SpaceX on Mondays", and so on.

X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability)

You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years.

I’ll certainly agree with you in one place: Elon Musk, along with essentially everyone else expressing an opinion on inflation, has a lot of unearned confidence. Macroeconomics, and inflation specifically, is an area that brings out a lot of people fitting lines to past data and absolutely sure of causality. In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong. See Figure 1 here, where traders with money on the line completely missed their bets on CPI paths.

I’ll take a moment to share my personal hobby horse, John Cochrane’s fiscal theory of the price level. It predicts that inflation is caused when people expect the government to repay its debt by printing money in the future instead of responsibly running a fiscal surplus. Deficits in response to crisis are fine as long as you can credibly pay them back, but our recent government has shown absolutely no plans to do so. Regarding valid expertise, Cochrane pleasantly obliges by providing media anywhere from engaging (Podcasts! Sound effects!) to unintelligible without an econ degree (Calculus¡ Terrifying¡).

At least on this topic, I don’t think Musk is worse than anyone else. Everybody (including me) wants to say they have a handle of what causes inflation; we probably don’t, and will get to partake in the classic human experience of being completely wrong about the future of the macroeconomy.

All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.

Smart people are best able to rationalize away their personal biases, or cloak their disingenuous wishcasting in plausible-sounding theoreticals. Assuming good faith in all cases is naive, as is assuming that good faith isn't polluted by, e.g. political incentives.

On the other hand he's talking about monetary incentive. These people thought interest rates were going to drop by 2023 and staked their money on it.

Bad faith would have been talking publicly about how inflation is temporary/imaginary while dumping overpriced 5yr bonds, like the Vox staff stockpiling n95 masks.

(Actually I'm terrible with bonds, what's the strategy for profiting on rising rates with them? Treasury futures? Can you exploit a too-low TIPS spread when rates are rising? I have no clue)

In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.

Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, the money supply M2 grew 40%. The economy grew 19%. There was no reason to believe there was some long-term change in the velocity of money. Just from these numbers alone you can expect about 18% inflation. And, sure enough, the price level increased by about 20%.

You can repeat this for other countries. The UK money supply M2 grew 24%. The economy did not grow at all. Expectation: 24% increase in price level. Reality: 24% increase in price level.

Denying that increasing the money supply as was done in 2020 would cause inflation, or that it would be "transitory", comes from the same motivated reasoning that applied to the entire era of covid policy. Criticizing a heavy-handed response made you persona non grata in professional circles, so you didn't. As for placing bets on it to make money, the risk is not the existing consequences of government policy, but that you're betting on how deranged your local government is. Inflation is not the only consideration in such a circumstance, so it's no surprise that even people putting their money where there mouth is were bad sources of predictions.

I think there's a bit of a talking-past-each-other thing with "transitory" inflation. The pro-transitory argument is we pumped a ton of money into the system during covid, but then we stopped pumping money in at that elevated rate, so once all the price gains from that bump in the money supply bubble through the economy we go back to the same moderate inflation rate we had before. And that case is basically true and has been borne out.

The anti-transitory argument is hey we got this massive jump in prices and then the prices never went back down. Which is also true. Of course, that's not strictly speaking an inflation problem anymore. Now it's a cost of living issue.

The assumption that once the price rises slowed down everyone would be happy again was the problem. Absolute levels matter as well as the rate of change!

To be clear we aren’t back to normal. We have hovered about a fifty percent above the recent norm.

Yeah that's fair. I'll concede the point, I guess I was forgetting how strong the "transitory" claims were.

One set of people got the non-transitory nature right without using any sophisticated modeling or "genuinely trying to figure out what's going on". The other set got it wrong while using sophisticated modeling and "genuinely trying to figure out what's going on". This did not lead me to conclude that causes of inflation post-2020 were hopelessly complex, but that people exercised motivated reasoning and recruited a bunch of pointless complexity rather than just acknowledge the obvious conclusion in front of them.

The whole thing feels like the midwit meme brought to life.

You're claiming that the traders mentioned in the previous post were giving away money? If so, could you elaborate on what you think the cause of error was, since I rather like it when non-me people distribute free cash.

The error is motivated reasoning due to being unwilling to criticize heavy-handed covid-excused policy. The downside is that this is hard to cash in on because it's not a bet on just inflation, but also on how deranged the government is - predicting higher inflation also means predicting a more insane government, which reduces the value of any rewards of predicting correctly.

For the sake of example to illustrate that government insanity matters for economic bets, consider 2 people betting on whether the government will rob them and take half their money. The actual chance of this happening is 50%. But if the bet is even, the payoff matrix looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/HQ1PibN.png. Therefore it's actually beneficial to bet that the government will do nothing.

Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theory and therefore is a bit too much of a reach to be a point of evidence here.

Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theor

Maybe to economics or betting but surely not game theory

In Physics 101, there's a class of problems where there are multiple ways to figure out the answer. One is through difficult integration of force and velocity equations. The other is noting that energy is conserved and you can figure it out through simple algebra that way. There's another class of problems where one thing absolutely dominates -- one hard SF author posed the problem in a short story about a spaceship moving through the solar system at 0.25g constant acceleration. Yes, it's a ridiculously multi-body problem, but you can basically ignore all the smaller influences because 0.25g swamps them.

These economic questions tend to be like those problems. Yes, there's a way to make it complicated, but there's also a simple "energy" (money supply/spending) argument. And yes, there's a bunch of other factors, but when you throw around trillions of dollars, they're swamped.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

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!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats