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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Chuck Todd wrote a fantastic op-ed about the current state of our political polarization: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/chuck-todd-unite-nation-trump-harris-election-rcna171303

It comes down to (1) Our acceptance embrace of inflammatory rhetoric to "own the [other side]", (2) our ever-present, chronically online culture, and (3) the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.

Some notable quotes:

"The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are."

"But just because Trump started it doesn’t mean his opponents have the high moral ground when they single out him and some of his supporters for personal derision. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

"Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

"Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.

"Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated, and yet most elected officials in the modern era are incentivized to behave the opposite way."

I disagree with you. This editorial is very bad, and Chuck Todd should feel bad for writing it.

The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are.

This isn't new. Herbert Hoover's magisterially-dyspeptic magnum opus goes into microscopic detail about all the ways various FDR-administration officials and allied journalists lied and slanted the truth to manage and manipulate public opinion during the depression, New Deal period, and WWII, and the number of people who remember or care today round to zero. Heck, even the "really famous" examples like the NYT lying about the Holodomor in Ukraine, or rabidly defending the Lindsay administration in NYC at the time, then excoriating it in Lindsay's obituary, are just cocktail-party trivia and not seriously internalized lessons.

Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

How do you get "incrementalism" from "the country is politically-divided"? It really smacks of "we just need to make sure we boil the frog slowly so it doesn't jump out." No instinct towards actual compromise or even honest open conflict; just dishonest slow-rolling and gaslighting about ultimate endgames until it's too late and the fait accompli can be imposed on a prostrate foe. Of course, this strategy also has the side-effect of not being at all concerned with actual quality of governance in the mean-time...if you're suffering from a gushing stab wound, incremental care, one bandaid at a time, won't stop you from bleeding out even if stitches or cauterization would really hurt in the short-term.

Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.

Our political information ecosystem is primarily geared towards rationalizing already-extant beliefs. That's how you get in people's customized algorithms - feeding them plausible-sounding affirmation of things they already believe. It's not a question of "nuance" or "incrementalism" - what do those even mean in the context of journalism? That you shouldn't report facts if it looks like they lead to an "unnuanced" conclusion or one that is a radical departure from current consensus? And why do we think that our information delivery system should be characterized by the same qualities as policymaking in the first place? To even ask the question betrays the degree to which unbiased investigation has been subordinated to ideological preference.

A nitpick, but Hoover’s magnum opus was definitely a certain translation project.

Weren’t they also responsible for translating and publish “Always With Honor” in the west?

One of my favorite books. A short memoir of Pyotyr Wrangel, the most famous and successful general in the white army during the Russian civil war.

Yo I forgot Lou and he did that!!! Thank you for reminding me; one more reason the Hoovers are among my personal heroes.

Trump is a symptom of polarization, not a cause. He suspended his campaign in 2012 when it was clear he wasn’t going to go anywhere, in 2016 he cleared the field and hasn’t had a serious GOP rival since.

Why? Well, I would point to the actions of the center-left establishment as pushing conservatives into hostility. Obviously there’s the just, blatant, lies about everything from the media. But in Obama’s second term you also had fast and furious, you had democrats aggravating racial tensions for shits and giggles, you had the IRS targeting scandal, you had Obama himself moving from a polarizing but broadly popular figure into a progressive ideologue partisan. Then you’ve had the Biden admin targeting conservatives, with EG going after pro-life activists for three-felonies-a-day stuff while ignoring attacks on churches and pregnancy resource centers.

I recall reading a CNN journalist once writing, with great concern, that 40% of Americans think democrats want to take their guns away and force them to let trans in their bathrooms. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was because democrats keep saying they’re going to do those things.

What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are.

"we" "we" "we"....

We?

I think there's a very, very strong case to be made that the birth of the entire New Deal state and its subsequent massive growth (along with all its cousin forms of government in the mid 20th century, be it social democracy or communism or fascism or what have you) relied intensely on real time, overwhelming broadcast media. No radio+national periodicals+Hollywood movies+(later)broadcast tv -> no New Deal state. And more particularly, no polity that could even make sense to the New Deal state in the first place. And then throw in ever more centralized public schooling and the role of ever more dominant national university systems in finishing off the process of population... "massaging", let's say. Add in the draft and military service, too.

There's your "we". It has always been a technologically created Frankenstein monster... which, to be honest, is kind of the Western Enlightenment thing anyway. Can't have the Protestant reformation and the 30 years war without the printing press.

One deep problem "we" face right now, I think, is that current year American liberals in positions of social authority often very much have, I think, a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" sense of recent history, the 20th century, and the actual contours of sense making institutions in America in the 20th century. The stories of, say, the Red Scare in the 50s are still a memory they keep alive, but the similar role of the New Deal state in snuffing out conservative / traditionalist / reactionary broadcast media in the United States from the 30s until the 80's is largely unknown to them, and thus it seems like just a natural state of affairs, of them "being on the right side of history". So things like J Edgar Hoover's and FDRs actions against American "isolationists" - like here - or JFK's relationship to right wing radio - like here - are stories that are unfamiliar. Thus you end up with oblivious claims like, "Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were the aberration after normalcy, brought into being by the dastardly end of the Fairness Doctrine".

I think there's a similar undercurrent to the frustration with social media from people who desperately want to go back to the broadcast news environment I remember from the early 1980s as a kid. I recognize where it's coming from. And I know exactly why my conservative family abandoned its catechizing, scolding, and noxious (to them) values the moment they had the opportunity to have any other options for news, too.

I don't even disagree, at some object level, with all sorts of critiques about social media, their business models, and pervasive phones more broadly.

But we are living through a broad collapse of shared authority. Because they have been the unquestioned and unquestioning inheritors of a lot of that shared authority, this experience is apparently especially shocking to a lot of American liberals. Social media and new communication technologies certainly play a role in that process. But, at least to me, it seems like that collapse is a much bigger story, with a lot more moving parts, than just social media, and it's not so clear which direction casual arrows point.

I think this is a strong perspective, especially in light of previous perspectives going into earlier communication technology revolutions. One of the early motives / aspirations of the printing press, for example, was framed not in terms of 'think of what it could do for newspapers' but 'think of how many more Bibles the world could had.' An early advocacy group for radio were, again, religious interests thinking in terms of spreading the message / sermons / hymns to wider audiences.

The point here isn't about the susceptibility of religious types (though the parallels between ideologues who substitute ideology for religion is interesting), but rather that the 'current' dominant ideological consensus types often imagine new communication technologies as a way to spread their consensus, rather than challenge it. Twitter and Social Media would inspire pro-western/democratic/progressive/etc. movements. Telegraphs would allow power centers to better assert their control over distant parts of their countries, rather than help new power centers arise. International communism/socialism would allow the Soviets to lead the global revolution, rather than splintering and schisming as local communist leaders usurped the foreign advisor factions that often helped them rise to power. Etc. etc. etc.

Your 'born on third, believes they hit a triple' aligns to that historical parallel, as does the contemporary pushback on uncontrolled information parallels the historical examples. Once expanded, once-unquestionably dominant factions try to re-assert their authority by regulation / reconsolidation / attempts to reassert exclusive authority.

One of the early motives / aspirations of the printing press, for example, was framed not in terms of 'think of what it could do for newspapers' but 'think of how many more Bibles the world could had.'

This thought had extremely different valences depending on your opinion of the commonfolk; the Church hierarchy was corrupt, yes. But they were also right that proliferation of the sacred text in the vernacular would cause an absolute riot of absolutely uncontrollable radicalism, with not-infrequently horrifying consequences.

The Church hierarchy was the original market for printed bibles.

Not in the vernacular.

And they were wrong that such chaos wasn't worth it, and indeed that it could even potentially be avoided in any case.

The mistake Todd makes here is that he seems to recognize the characteristically Trumpian mode of lying — repetition of crude falsities — but not the mode preferred by the progressive establishment — capturing sense-making institutions and turning them toward promoting ideologically-driven narratives. The latter predates Trump, is far more consequential, and is propagated primarily by the likes of the NYT and CNN.

It seems to me that a question we ought asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is false? so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving any one or otherwise behaving dishonestly?

I'm hardly the first person to make this observation but it seems to me that Trump "lies" the way a used car salesman "lies". Sure, he'll tell you that Nissan Altima with bald tires at the back of the lot is a good deal, the best deal even, the sort of deal he wouldn't give his own mother, but if pressed he'll admit that its kind of a shitbox and knock 10 - 20% off the price. Normal people who interact with other normal people on a regular basis get this, they even expect it. After all the salesman's job is to sell things and few working class persons are going to begrudge another working class person for doing thier job.

In contrast a lot of what Trump's opponents seem to do is not "lying" directly in the sense of speaking falshoods so much as they are setting out with a specific intention to push a specific narrative and things like lying through omission, false pretenses, and spreading rumors/hearsay are just tools in the tool box.

There seems to be this belief that so long as you are never actually caught in an outright lie you are by definition a good and honest person. If someone is decieved by your intentional misrepresenting of a fact or lie of omission the culpability is not on you for trying to decieve them, its on them for not being being savvy enough to see through your deception.

I think that what we are seeing now is the downstream effects of this attitude. You see politics is by it's nature a multiple itteration game. Unless your plan is to litteraly exterminate everyone and anyone who might disagree with your policy decisions (and to be fair, a number of regimes have actually tried) you're gonna have to cut a second deal with someone at some point and when you do its only natural that they will factor how the first deal played out into thier calculus.

This is the bit that I think Todd and the wider media/managerial class have failed to recognize or othwerwise factor into thier thinking is that a lot of regular people have come to recognize that they got manipulated and are now on guard against it and rather than solving the (alleged) problem all the talk about how normal people are stupid, easy to manipulate, and need to be saved from themselves for democracy's sake is exacerbating it.

As Instapundit would say, they have chosen the form of thier destructor. For the Ghostbusters it was a marshmallow kaiju, for the beltway it was a reality tv star.

It seems to me that a question we ought asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is false? so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving any one or otherwise behaving dishonestly?

"They're eating the dogs" is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners that immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs. Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.

The fact that Trump doesn't care about the factual truth or falsity of the words that come out of his mouth to the point where he says "dogs" when he could easily have said "cats" and been making a defensible claim about facts that were in dispute at the time is a perfect piece of smoking gun evidence as to what is actually going on. In the Harry Frankfurt sense, Trump is rarely lying but he is constantly bullshitting.

I'm at work at the moment but effortpost to follow.

"They're eating the dogs" is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners that immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs

No, it is a statement intended to induce the true belief that at least some immigrants have been stealing and eating pets. More generally it is a signal that he is aware of and willing to give voice to his constituents' concerns.

As @Jiro points out below, normal people arent going to care that the pet in question was somebody's kitten instead of somebody's puppy. If people in the US are eating pets, something has gone wrong.

As i said above...

It seems to me that a question we ought to be asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is true or false, so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving anyone or otherwise behaving dishonestly?

I assume he thought that was true, though.

Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.

Oh, come on!

- Did you hear about the Haitians eating people's dogs in Ohio?

- Don't say that! This is a completely false statement, spread by bigots!

- Oh shit! Sorry, I didn't know.

- Yeah... everybody knows they're eating cats, not dogs.

In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.

In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.

You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?

Trump said that immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. As a result of him saying this, some of his target audience of low-information swing voters now believe that immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, and are therefore more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote at the election in November. Generating this change in belief was a major purpose of making the statement. Given background that motteposters know and the debate audience probably didn't, the fact that Trump said "dogs" and not "cats" may reveal interesting information about his thought processes that I hope to elaborate on in a later effortpost.

I am making the conjunction of the above claims, with the intention that they be taken seriously and literally. If you disagree with me about the facts, the spirit of this board is that you should identify the claim you disagree with rather than spewing insinuations.

You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?

I'll step in here and say it a little more clearly: Nobody beyond the lizardman constant thinks there's any meaningful difference between immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. Saying that "it's really cats, not dogs, so Trump is a liar" is itself lying like a lawyer because you are nitpicking a detail that nobody cares about in order to attack Trump. It doesn't matter that "dogs" is literally false if the truth makes no substantive difference.

It's like going into a restaurant and complaining "this food tastes like sewage", then getting told that you're a liar because the food doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like feces, so tasting like sewage is a literally false belief.

It's like going into a restaurant and complaining "this food tastes like sewage", then getting told that you're a liar because the food doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like feces, so tasting like sewage is a literally false belief.

This isn't a perfect analogy, because feces is a major constituent of sewage, and indeed is a large part of what makes sewage noxious. I don't know how one would taste the difference between sewage and feces, whereas is an obvious meaningful difference between cats and dogs - try throwing sticks for a cat to fetch. What you mean is that there is no difference in the political impact, if true, of immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. You are obviously correct about this, possible quibbles about traditional Korean or Vietnamese cuisine notwithstanding. If the immigrants were, in fact, eating cats, then you could call "they're eating the dogs" directionally correct, but that appears to be a Motte-specific usage and truthy is what most very online people would call it.

But in an environment where people care about the factual truth and falsity of statements and not just the political impact, a cat is not a dog. If you report a cat theft to the police and it turns out that the missing animal was actually a dog, you are going to get in trouble for, yes, lying. Trump could have misspoken, but saying "dog" when you mean "cat" isn't a particularly common mistake. If Trump meant to say "dog" when the social media posts he was signal-boosting said "cat" because he didn't care about the difference this says something about his communication style - namely that he is 100% concerned about the political impact of statements and 0% concerned about their factual content. If the ratio was 90-10 like it is for most politicians, he would have said "cat" because, as you point out, "they're eating the cats" is no less politically impactful than "they're eating the dogs".

There is a saying which people use to acknowledge that they are mainly concerned about the political impact of statements vs their factual content: "it has the added advantage of being true". Based on Trump's beliefs at the time, he had the opportunity to make a politically advantageous claim that had the added advantage of being true, and didn't take it. Given the discussion on this thread, there is a non-zero number of people for whom this is a positive signal - Trump is implicitly saying "I am not like those smarty-pants intellectuals who care about the factual accuracy of sufficiently truthy political claims."

"it's really cats, not dogs, so Trump is a liar"

I explicitly didn't call Trump a "liar". We all agree that what is going on is more complex than that. The whole point of this thread is to discuss how a man whose statements frequently evaluate as "false" when parsed using standard English grammar has a reputation as a straight talker among his supporters. I am proposing that "bullshit" is a better framework for understanding it than "liar".

This isn't a perfect analogy, because feces is a major constituent of sewage, and indeed is a large part of what makes sewage noxious.

That's another version of the same nitpick. If you like, make it "this food tastes like feces" and "this food tastes like rotten skunk vomit".

I don't know how one would taste the difference between sewage and feces, whereas is an obvious meaningful difference between cats and dogs

There is not a meaningful difference between cats and dogs in this context, even if there is a meaningful difference when you're reporting a missing one to the police.

But the lying part is where you impart a false belief into an audience. And Lawyer lying does much the same in a much more insidious way. Telling people that people in Ohio are having their pets or geese or whatever is obviously on its face false. But the reverse, that the integration of 20K Haitians into a town of 40K is going just fine, actually is also false and based on cherry-picked good reports (for example the factory owner saying that the Haitians are hard workers, which likely elides labor issues like wages and working conditions that the natives didn’t like) or the lack of reporting of things like crime, education strain (this town likely needs a whole lot of resources because they suddenly need to educate a bunch of ESL students who speak French) traffic congestion and accidents. Sure you can say that these aren’t serious problems and if you cherry-pick just right, you can get “Fact Check: True”. but you’re spinning the situation in a dishonest way to get people to believe what you want them to believe. Trumps lies are less sophisticated, but I contend that both are lies, and it doesn’t stop being a lie just because you happen to be using manipulated facts and statistics to tell the narrative you want people to believe in.

This is why I tend to be much more skeptical of the second sort of narrative than the first. Make no mistake, both are ultimately lies and meant to deceive an audience. But for all the faults Trump’s style of lying has, it’s easy enough to detect and therefore ultimately less harmful to the body politic than the kind of lying where it’s manipulated facts and thus hard to attack and debunk. That means the damage done will be harder to undo (especially since doing so is “racist conspiracy theories,” and thus impossible to bring up in polite society.

Finely tuned deceitful narratives deliver much more information and can be nitpicked with fruitful results. Importantly there is a shame+update mechanism whenever sophisticated lies become too obvious. Whereas pure Trumpian bullshit must be simply ignored. There is no path to anything better, if we allow it to dominate public discourse.

Importantly there is a shame+update mechanism whenever sophisticated lies become too obvious.

Update? Maybe, but only in the "abandon the indefensible position!" sense. Where exactly have you seen shame?

More comments

Last night I talked to a pretty intelligent female friend of mine about various things, and the subject of how men commit the vast majority of violence came up. She was eager to admit that yes, men do. I pointed out that a subset of men commit the majority of all this violence, and that the men in that subset tend to target men as well as women. She was less eager to admit this, but she went along with it. I then made an analogy to the fact that blacks on average commit more violence than whites do, but it is a subset of blacks who commit the majority of all that violence. She started to question me, wondering whether my evidence such as the FBI crime statistics is trustworthy or not. She's not some naive college student, either. She is over 50 and has been living in the US all her life. But she still has a hard time realizing the to me pretty obvious fact that blacks are on average more violent than whites.

THAT is the power of leftist propaganda.

One might even say the dogma lives loudly in them.

Unsurprisingly, the FBI has nerfed its crime data under Biden making it much harder to get useful information. So the epistemological situation is only getting worse.

So then, to you, what would not be an ideologically-driven narrative?

I love the saying "Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers". Did someone here come up with that? If not, where did it come from?

It perfectly encapsulates the current meta.

I said two months ago

And Trump as a salesman is a lot like a car salesman, Obama is more like a startup founder pitching to angel investors.

I don't recall seeing it formulated close to that before saying that but I absolutely could have, I don't think of it as any kind of personal insight, I see it as trivially derived from other insights I took elsewhere (taking Trump seriously not literally, him talking like New Yorker, being directionally if not literally correct, etc...)

Something only just occurred to me about that. If it's a crime to make an agreement with a bank about the value of your property as collateral, how is it not a crime to straight up lie about the prospects of a startup?

Laws are specific. Laws about lying in the US have to be particularly specific, because the First Amendment protects some, but not all, lies.

There are laws which broadly criminalise lying to federally regulated banks. There are laws that broadly criminalise lying about publically-traded securities. These laws don't apply to private lenders or shares in closely-held companies, where the only lies which are criminal are ones which constitute common-law fraud. (Obviously lying about your startup can reach the level of common-law fruad, as Elizabeth Holmes learned the hard way).

Lying about “prospects” seems pretty hard to prove because they’re predictions. And founders definitely tend to be a little crazy.

Lying about “prospects” seems pretty hard to prove because they’re predictions.

So's estimating the value of an asset. Until you put the asset on the market and find out how much someone is willing to pay, you are only trying to predict what someone is going to be willing to pay for it.

There are certainly tools one can use to have a basis for estimating the value of their assets, but that is also the case for valuing a startup.

It interesting that although we all understand the intended meaning of this expression (and it is true when given the meaning that people expect), it is not an accurate description of how lawyers and used car salesmen lie.

Creating a false belief using a carefully-curated set of technically-true statements is no more effective in an adversarial environment like a courtroom or a negotiation than creating the same false belief using false statements. The normal technique of a lawyer representing a rich-but-obviously-guilty client is to flood the zone with shit. This works best in criminal trials, where if the jury can't understand the case they are supposed to acquit based on reasonable doubt, but it also works in civil trials if the other side can't keep up. Lying by omission is explicitly prohibited in litigation (this is why discovery exists) and in some but not all negotiations.

Used car salesmen working for commercial dealerships, on the other hand, are trying to outnegotiate unsophisticated parties, which is exactly where "lying like a lawyer" is helpful. Making a technically-false statement creates legal risk and isn't necessary if you are good at your job. The people who tell blatant lies when selling used cars are private sellers, who are effectively gone once the cheque clears. Real estate agents are in the same boat - they will tell blatant lies, but they would much rather mislead you in legally safer ways.

So who does lie like Donald Trump? In my experience, the main groups are cheating spouses, toddlers caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and actual conmen. Trump, of course, belongs to at least two of these groups.

Who does "lie like a lawyer?" Well the main group is politicians not called Donald Trump. Politically biased journalists do, as do tendentious academics. Basically, exactly the people who form the "establishment" Trumpism is against. In each case it is because it is a lot easier to work a sympathetic ref if you got caught making a true-but-misleading statement than if you told an outright lie. But working the refs in that way doesn't work on normies, and doesn't work on neutral or unsympathetic refs.

Unfortunately this means that the saying reduces to "Trump lies like Trump, the liberal elite lie like liberal elites." This is tautological, but to someone who has been paying attention it is even truthier than the original. It also avoids calumnising innocent lawyers and used car salesmen by associating them with politicians and journalists.

Do lawyers lie? They try to craft different narratives with the available facts at hand, sure, but I don’t see that as dishonest.

To me it’s somewhat more dishonest. A lawyer lies by recasting the facts so that they tell the story that best serves his purpose, even when the clearest telling of the facts points in the exact opposite direction. They often do so by leaving out crucial context and details that would lead a neutral observer in the opposite direction, thus making people believe something is true that isn’t.

We’ve all been talking about the Lebanon pager explosions. Some people here have speculated on how it was done and how it might be detected or hidden. And on the political side, I would find it fair to say that the comments on this site have a lean towards conservative and neo-reaction. Now if someone who frequents this site is prosecuted, any good lawyer would have painted this site as a reactionary and even fascist site where terrorism was discussed pretty openly. Ripped from context, as lawyers tend to do, the discussion of how Israel blew up pagers juxtaposed with a bit of juicy reactionary or HBD talk paints a picture of this place as a Proud Boy type site. Left out is the crucial context. It’s against the rules to recruit for any cause, liberals post here fairly often, and the discussion of pager batteries was talking about a news story and discussed by people who work n tech.

Lying by recasting the facts is worse to me because it can cover itself with the veneer of truthfulness. You can cite a fact, and people who check will see that the actual facts cited are true. But stripped of context, the facts tell a very different story than the events they’re used to describe. A lie, on the other hand, is easy enough to sus out. You look it up, and it’s not true at all. And so it doesn’t get deep enough into the culture to affect how we see the world. But tell a sort-of-truth, and your fact-checking will help the narrative stick because it’s not obviously wrong. It’s just not an accurate and honest telling of the facts and designed to elicit a belief that isn’t accurate.

Say there are two people. They both meet a guy who is 6’9” (2.05m) tall.

Person A says: “He’s the tallest person I’ve ever seen! Huge guy! At least 7’0” (2.13m) tall!”

Person B says: “He was probably above average height. I’ve seen taller. People before.”

Person A’s answer is a lie. The guy they saw wasn’t quite as tall as they said and it’s probable that they’ve watched a basketball game or a film and have seen a person who is taller than that before.

Person B’s answer is technically correct. They’ve probably seen basketball on TV, they’ve seen extremely tall people before. And the guy they saw was certainly taller than average.

But Person B’s answer is basically dishonest. The guy they saw was indeed extremely tall! They failed to convey that, all while being technically correct.

And Person A’s answer, while a lie, managed to be more accurate and honest assessment of the subject at hand. It was a much better answer if you wanted to know something about the subject.

Given a choice between them, I’d much rather deal with a person A, a liar who is directionally correct, than person B, a person that maybe rarely lies but also rarely conveys any useful information.

Person B’s answer is worse than useless; if taken seriously you would probably come to a conclusion further from the truth than Person A’s answer.

This is a rather simple and direct example but there’s ample situations like this on the real world. There really are a lot of Person B’s in the world, and once you see them you start seeing them everywhere.

Person B’s answer is worse than useless; if taken seriously you would probably come to a conclusion further from the truth than Person A’s answer.

Huh, that’s a good point. Thanks, you’ve changed my perspective on this.

Yes, this is a good way to put it. It's in some ways even worse than that; If a person C turns up, who states that the tall guy looks REALLY tall & wants to measure him, person B has the tendency to first try to stop him, and if successful, to complain that person C makes claims "without evidence".

Yes, lawyers lie. If you knowingly deceive your audience, you are a liar. That counts even if your words can be artfully construed to not be false.

We even created a whole new religion to deal with this hypocrisy. In the time of Jesus, the Pharisees were obsessed with following the letter of the law while neglecting its spirit. We invented the social technology to solve this problem 2000 years ago, but some people still don't get it.

The democrats also just straight up lie a lot. When Harris kept saying “Trump’s Project 2025” that isn’t “technically true but misleading.” That was straight up lying.

I’m not sure it is really fair to say Trump is unique in lying. Where he is probably unique is that when he doesn’t need to lie he exaggerates.

Yeah, they straight-up lie quite a lot actually. Worse, they repeat the same lie so many times that people start to take it for granted as baseline reality, like the “fine people” line. In the debate itself Harris only implied that Trump called neo-nazis fine people by mentioning them right before saying trump said “fine people”, which is not a lie by the barest technicality, but the message rests on ad-nauseam repetition of an actual lie.

My favorite was the “no US soldiers in an active war-zone” lie. Just a few weeks ago some US Soldier got shot by ISIS.

There was a viral video uploaded basically the same day of the debate that ended up getting millions of views of the debate on TV when she said that, and it pans out to like seven soldiers in a forward operating base being like “Wait… then where the fuck are we right now?”

Can't you just say that Trump lies, the democrats deceive, if that's what you mean?

Would fit well with general rightwing memeplex of casting the democrats as the great deceiver(s). It would also be an opportunity to own the fact that Trump lies. Truth or lies isn't the primary issue, it's deception that's the issue (in politics, in news, in science, etc).

The position that you can be a habitual liar without deceiving seems like a difficult needle to thread!

There is a case to be made that few if any people treat anything Trump says as being on simulacrum level 1. This may be the typical mind fallacy, but if Trump makes noises which sound like a factual statement of the world (i.e. level 1, 'Haitians are eating our pets'), I just don't parse it that way. Likely it is not even level 2 ('I want you to believe that they are eating pets (irrespective if it is true) so that you will vote for me') because that would assume that a significant fraction of listeners will mistake it for a level 1 statement. It is either level 3 ('I am anti-immigrant. Nobody is as anti-immigrant as me!') or level 4 ('I make sounds which I think will help me get elected').

If I am running through the streets saying "The sky is green, plants are orange, Elvis is alive, I am Elvis, 4 is prime, ...", then I an telling a lot of lies, but I will not deceive anyone, because most people will conclude 'based on past statements, that person is so unreliable a source of information that I should not update on their claims'.

It all comes down to the expectations of both parties.

If there's a street promoter outside of a club trying to convince me to pay a cover fee and go inside he might tell me things like it's the best club, that they have the biggest crowd inside of any bar in the city, everyone's having a great time, probably ever. Yuge night! Maybe they even say that they've heard rumors that there's a movie star who was planning on coming tonight. If I go inside and find it to be not all that, was I decieved? I wouldn't say so, because I was talking to a club promoter; I know what they're like, they know I know what they're like, the expectation was that they would exaggerate everything to try to get me to go inside.

There is a distinction though if they say something like "after you pay the cover fee your first two drinks are free" and it turns out not to be true. Because I don't expect them to be allowed by the bar (to say nothing of the law) to say something like that if it isn't true.

Also, I would consider myself decieved if I (before marriage of course) got in touch with a girl on a dating app and she insisted on meeting me at a club, and I found out after getting there that she was a promoter using the app to bring in clients to the club, even if she never said anything technically untrue. This is the kind of lying I associate in politics with the activists that masquerade as unbiased subject experts.

God. I hate that. I can't function in the presence of promoters like that. I think it's fairly obvious that many people can't. If the advertiser is succeeding at getting people to go inside who otherwise wouldn't, and those people end up disappointed, then he's committing attention fraud against those people. Maybe that's fine and marginal for most people. But williams syndrome-adj ADHDs like moi don't have the spoons or filters to cope with this.

We've taken to pointing at the screen and yelling "Consume product!" every time an advertisement comes on TV in my household to counteract the damage it does to our brains. It's awful. The other scenario is no better to be clear. I have to distance myself from both of those things to function.

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You don't have to do that. You can say that truth isn't a good safeguard against deception, with the biggest deceivers being the ones telling you the "truth".

Lying isn't good but at the end of the day deception is worse. Its kind of like how betrayal is worse than opposition. You don't even have to play defense at all.

Your average democrat might lie less often than Donald Trump but they are much, much more dishonest in my opinion. It’s not even close.

I suppose you can claim that technically it's not a lie (knowingly putting forward a false statement), but the whole rub is that a lot of people (myself included) see "crafting narratives" as dishonest.

The best part about it is that everybody here seems to agree with it, and we're just fighting over which type of lying is better/worse.

Yes, and it also gets at a preference that is more primal than political. Would you prefer to hang out with a lawyer who selects their words carefully or a sales guy who's always bullshitting?

Seems closely related to the old finding from the okcupid blog (here's gwern quoting it, can't find archives of the original right now) that the question "Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?" is a good predictor of liberal vs. conservative US politics, with "simple" being the conservative answer.

I disagree entirely with the premise that political polarization has anything to do with social media or big tech. It is an absurd claim on its face, because human history is littered with countless examples of extreme political polarization long before smartphones or the Internet. It's a waste to even name them, because basically every historical event learned in school would qualify. Relatively speaking, the current period isn't even particularly highly polarized.

The only semi-charitable way to interpret these articles is to interpret them as apologia for why the current regime's systems of control have failed. Before the latest technology wave, the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages. They cannot control social media as a whole, therefore, it must be social media's fault because people are able to exchange information and ideas without their consent.

The article itself is self-contradictory. In one paragraph, it's attacking Fox News for "cherry-picking" quotes from Democrats, and in the next says the only solution is to "stop big tech" from using their current algorithms. I guess it's left as an exercise for the reader how "big tech algorithms" caused Fox News's programming. Yet Fox News's current state could not possibly have been "caused" by social media, because as I recall, Democrats hated and mocked Fox News more in the 2000's than they do now.

The fundamental mistake the article is making is to mistake correlation for causation. While a relative increase in polarization has coincided with the rise of social media, this does not mean that one caused the other. In fact, there is not even a common cause. They are completely unrelated. All civilizations oscillate between periods of division and periods of cohesion. America was in a period of relative cohesion, but it could not last forever.

What’s causing the divide is the utter failure of the current system of delivering anything the people want from their leaders.

It can’t deliver on economics, in fact the standard of living seems to be getting worse. People are cutting back on things that were once considered normal. The hoops necessary to get to a decent wage and lifestyle are higher every decade. In 1950, a kid could barely graduate high school and still get a pretty decent job at a factory or something similar. He could expect at least a small house, a car, and to be able to support his wife and kids. That same lifestyle in 2024 requires a good college degree from a good university and quite often unpaid internships just to hope that if you and your wife work 40 hours a week, you can maybe have what your grandparents had with one less worker and less education.

It can’t stop crime. The number of anti-crime measures you take without thinking about them is crazy especially once you see how good it is in functioning societies. In Asia, it’s common for stores to leave their deliveries on the streets for hours. In some parts of Europe, people leave babies sleeping in strollers on the streets. In America, it’s common knowledge that you politely leave your car unlocked to prevent would be looters from having to smash windows to get at any valuables in the car. Porch piracy is a known problem. Personal safety often dictates when and where it’s advisable for the good people to go out. And police are basically told they aren’t allowed to stop a crime until it’s too late.

Education? About half of Americans don’t read above a 6th grade level. Many struggle with math more complicated than 10th grade algebra. All we can do with these kids is teach them The Narrative, encourage them to go into massive debt for the job training that K12 can’t give them and hope it turns out okay.

To me, it seems pretty clear that the problem is that what we have isn’t working, and everyone knows it, and so they’re grasping at the straws offered by radical and radically different ideologies to try and find a way to what people actually want — that the median American can live a modest but decent lifestyle in cities where crime is low enough that it doesn’t dictate how you live. They want their kids to have a good education and have the opportunity to be successful and happy. We have none of that, and the oligarchs in charge can’t give us that. So people are looking to other ideas: maybe socialism, maybe Christian theocracy, maybe some form of traditionalist society, maybe fascism, maybe some other idea.

The fact that we’re all so tuned into politics and it’s becoming so central to everything itself is a problem. If things were good, we would not care. People in all societies all over the globe got on very well in functioning societies without even trying to understand world affairs. They didn’t care that much even when given the vote. It was a small part of life, and probably came far behind other concerns like the health and welfare of their own family, sports, religion, and so on. Common people really only get super into politics when they are neither left alone nor helped. And this is where we are. Some 40% of the income earned by Americans goes to the government. And not only do we get what Moldbug calls “bad customer service” (meaning that the government doesn’t improve things for those taxpayers) but spends vast resources on harassing people about what they should think all the time (with their own money of course). Normies getting involved is a reaction, and polarization is the result. I contend that the only solution that will actually turn down the polarization is results.

In 1950, a kid could barely graduate high school and still get a pretty decent job at a factory or something similar. He could expect at least a small house, a car, and to be able to support his wife and kids.

Of course, a key part of this formula was the fifties having a far lower standard of living.

Perhaps, but it was a time when standards of living were rising and life was pretty good.

Yes, and in reality fifties houses were below the standard most working class Americans expect today, both in terms of being tiny square footage single floor houses and because they lacked air conditioning and were extremely flimsy even by the standards of modern US single family housing.

I mean, I live in a 50’s built house. It’s been refitted to accommodate central HVAC, dishwasher, laundry, etc. But a lot of that is pretty doable if often major repairs(hvac entailed redoing a bunch of drywall to get access to it, and cutting a hole in the floor to run the lines through the foundation, +sacrificing a closet).

Yes, and in reality fifties houses were below the standard most working class Americans expect today, both in terms of being tiny square footage single floor houses and because they lacked air conditioning and were extremely flimsy even by the standards of modern US single family housing.

In another reality, there's a ton of them in my neighborhood being occupied by working-class to upper-upper-middle class Americans. Many now have had air conditioning added, but flimsy? They're made of wood, not ticky-tacky.

I think there’s a real demand for sort of basic housing, I think the whole “standards have gone up” is a bit of a cope unless it’s specifically a complaint about building codes blocking new construction.

Myself and my medium sized family live in an 1000 square foot apartment. An 1100 square foot town home or duplex would be an obvious upgrade to work towards but stuff like that is simply not on offer in many places.

Eh, even in DFW these houses sit and sit until upgraded to modern standards with things like actual breaker panels. There may be demand for uber-basic rental units, but not as a house- and certainly, there's not a lot of demand to own them.

Some municipal zoning codes explicitly forbid any new house under a certain size. For example, the capital of New Jersey has a minimum of 1200 ft^2.

For single-family detached. For rowhouses it's 900 per unit, and for duplexes (included in "semi-detached") it's 1000 per unit, so nothing forbids building what @MaximumCuddles wants. The biggest problem would be it's in Trenton.

Yeah, if anything the average wood quality was better back then because we hadn't run out of old-growth forests yet. It's really obvious when you compare antique furniture to most modern stuff.

It's Douglas fir and other softwoods. You won't find timbers in post-WWII houses around here, and very little in the pre-WWII stuff.

the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages

How did the US government forcefully insert bias in news broadcasting before?

I think the comment makes more sense if you interpret "the regime" to be not identical to "the US government" but rather what's referred to as "the Cathedral" or "the elites", i.e. a class of people who comprise newspaper editors and politicians among others.

A delightfully nebulous category, reminiscent of the “rootless cosmopolitans” of old.

Would looking at statistics of which party the journalists employed at the networks donate to make it less nebulous?

Let's say that reference to "the Cathedral" or "the Elites" is not a good way to approach this conversation. What would be a better approach? Reference to Blue Tribe?

The post two levels up adds the word "forcefully" to a description of such a coalition that did not previously contain it. How did that insertion add to the conversation?

It seems to me that @sulla's critique is on point and @MotteInTheEye's point is likewise a reasonable attempt at communication. I don't have nearly as much time as I used to for reasoned argumentation, but if you or @mdurak think the thinking here really is fuzzy, I can at least attempt to throw my hat in the ring as an interlocuter.

I interpreted “under control” of the government as “forcefully.” How else would the government bring something under its control?

I looked up the Cathedral. Interesting idea, but how does “the regime” (by this do they mean Democrats specifically, or the federal government regardless of who holds the executive?) select for an academia and journalism that reinforces regime viewpoints as opposed to viewpoints that increase the power of academia/journalism (the “dominant” ideas)? I don’t see how the mentioned examples of race war or tolerating crime are dominant ideas for the regime — if anything, you’d expect a “regime” to tamp down on internal conflict and use a crackdown on crime as an excuse to expand internal security forces.

Let's say that reference to "the Cathedral" or "the Elites" is not a good way to approach this conversation. What would be a better approach? Reference to Blue Tribe?

Blue Tribe is probably even worse, because almost certainly the vast majority of the Blue Tribe didn't have anything to do with journalist or tech company decisions and the like. Elites is at least a bit more specified, but there are non-Blue elites. As our own statement above says, we should try to be as specific as possible, so maybe Blue Tribe Elites would be better. But even then almost certainly not all Blue Tribe elites were doing X or Y. But every level of specification takes work, it would be crazy to expect you to find the exact people who did x or y. We'd never be able to carry out a conversation. So perhaps settling for some Blue Tribe Elites did X or Y is the balance. It indicates allegiance and position and that it is not all of the group.

Mind you, I'm as guilty as anyone of just saying Red or Blue, when I know it wasn't all of Red or Blue. Trade offs between saving time and mental effort with short-hand and generalizations vs accuracy is a real thing.

I think the Inner Party / Outer Party distinction is pretty good.

The Outer Party is clearly a lot of blue tribe climbers with some red tribe elites mixed in.

The Inner Party is all blue tribe elites.

@CrispyFriedBarnacles gave an apt example of JFK using the Fairness Doctrine to censor right-wing radio shows.

Thanks, that’s just what I was looking for. The Fairness Doctrine has long since been repealed though. Is there much to suggest that this was more than an isolated case?

Here's one from less than a decade ago:

The controversy began in 2013 when an IRS official admitted the agency had been aggressively scrutinizing groups with names such as "Tea Party" and "Patriots." It later emerged that liberal groups had been targeted, too, although in smaller numbers.

The IRS stepped up its scrutiny around 2010, as applications for tax-exempt status surged. Tea Party groups were organizing, and court decisions had eased the rules for tax-exempt groups to participate in politics.

[...]

A three-point declaratory judgment in the Linchpins case declares "it is wrong" to apply federal tax laws based only on an entity's name, positions on issues or political viewpoint. The judgment says the IRS must act evenhandedly, and politically based discrimination in administering the tax code "violates fundamental First Amendment rights."

One of the reasons I come to The Motte is that occasionally someone posts a link to a historical or recent event that's not at all known within my circle, but is alive and well in the memory of others. It helps me understand where people may be coming from.

Ditto. Thanks!

By not inviting the channels’ major shareholders to the cool cocktail parties if they took a heterodox editorial position.

I think this kind of article is just braining, the author has something he thinks or wants to talk about so he has to make up reasons to justify himself. This is really easy in politics. A million things are happening all the time and it's easy to remember a few and string them together. But Chuck Todd is not that smart and articles like this are really not worth much of anyone's time.

We’ve collectively underreacted — and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.

Yeah, no one got shot, and no one but law enforcement even got shot at. There's nothing strange about a muted reaction to the Secret Service chasing off an assassin.

Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect.

Ah, yes, the Trump campaign. That is, the organization whose raison d'etre is to elect Trump as President. It's hardly surprising they're trying to do so.

Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. It's something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

As a native of Miami, I saw firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and otherize Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early ’80s.

I don't know what "otherize" is supposed to mean here; I mean, Haitians ARE different in various ways from both Miami natives and other refugrees. But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them. It's exactly this sort of overblown meta-rhetoric (and the speech policing which follows from it) that prevents any discussion of this topic across the left-right divide.

And no one has done a more effective job of exploiting this new medium of discourse than Trump.

Looks like someone never heard of the Arab Spring.

I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The uncharitable take on this would be that the author and his allies have done wrong and now they want to avoid the blowback.

We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

Trying to get the other side to pre-commit to not actually making major changes in the direction they prefer isn't going to work any more.

Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated

And that instinct has been exploited over and over again. If by getting hot you can get the other side to concede, getting hot makes sense. Trump's habit of getting just as hot if not more instead is why he has taken over the GOP. If Todd doesn't like it... that's tough. The alternative to polarization his side offers is "Do it our way", and that will no be agreed to.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them.

People will kill for their pets.

Somebody harming our pets is a sick and severe crime to most of our moral systems.

To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.

Those people are going to be in harms way, there’s no two ways about it.

I predict that zero Haitians in Springfield will be murdered by someone who is angry about pets.

We’ll see, hopefully not.

But, I don’t think a person has to be murdered to have been dehumanized either.

Can you imagine being a Haitian in Springfield right now?

Can you imagine being a Haitian in Haiti?

In 2023, kidnapping jumped 72% from the first quarter of the previous year.[228] Doctors, lawyers, and other wealthy members of society were kidnapped and held for ransom.[229] Many victims were killed when ransom demands were not met, leading those with the means to do so to flee the country, further hampering efforts to pull the country out of the crisis.[229] It is estimated that amidst the crisis up to 20% of qualified medical staff had left Haiti by the end of 2023.[230]

In March 2024, Ariel Henry was prevented by gangs from returning to Haiti, following a visit to Kenya.[231] Henry agreed to resign once a transitional government had been formed. As of that month, nearly half of Haiti's population was living under acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme.[25]

I don't think being treated in a dehumanizing manner is anywhere near as bad as what they fled from. They come from literal starvation to a land where there are pets aplenty and delicious wild geese are running around, why not take advantage of the free meat? If there was an endangered elk or buffalo running around Springfield, they'd carve it into steaks too, there's no question about it.

The question isn't about whether racism is an issue, it's about the Springfield community's ability to absorb these people without suffering any deleterious effects. If they assimilate and go to eating packaged precut chicken breast and cheez-wiz, good for them. But you have to prepare for the eventuality that one of them goes 'wait a second, why would I do that when meat is running around for free'?

Can you imagine being a Springfielder already close to poverty who suddenly has to deal with wages dropping and car insurance rising because the government imported tens of thousands of foreigners to your backyard and de facto exempts them from laws?

Can you imagine being a Springfielder with a third of your town suddenly replaced by foreigners - your schools swamped with ESL kids, your car insurance tripling - because your mayor wants to bilk the feds out of craptons of money on his shitty apartments?

I am a white man, so I can imagine it, since white men have been dehumanized for years now by various people.

Can you imagine being a Haitian in Springfield right now?

It must be horrible. They should be given a new residence in Martha's Vineyard, where they will not have to suffer such vile bigotry.

To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.

By analogy you've just placed responsibility for the assassination attempts against Trump on those Democratic politicians who called him an existential threat, just like the Trump campaign itself has. However, even granting that arguendo, it's STILL not dehumanizing them.

I agree you can also promote violence against someone by making Hitler comparisons or similar.

it's STILL not dehumanizing them.

What would be required to dehumanize somebody?

I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.

What would be required to dehumanize somebody?

The classic example is calling them "vermin". Or literally "subhuman".

I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.

It is not.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats. The press coverage of the Trump assassination attempts is good for transparency and public discourse, but does have costs.

Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats.

We're not in that situation, though, so it's irrelevant to the question.

I actually don't know if we're in that situation. It would not surprise me if the Secret Service took incidents involving a Dem VP significantly more seriously than incidents involving Trump.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them

Ironically I think this defense of potential pet eating is a deflection. Migrants ARE different from locals and from each other, and not always for the better. By emphasizing that Noticing the pet eating is itself a 'dehumanizing' act, all Noticing is thus reflective of the Noticers dehumanizing intent and thus can be categorically dismissed.

This is why the pet thing is so damn stupid. Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that. All the statistics about migrants being good for the economy and good for safety are due to large numbers of women inflating the denominator of crime/migrant ratios. Thanks to this stupid pet thing, the haitian who drove illegally or migrants robbing in NYC or the other instances of actual crimes are dismissed by the polity. Harris absolutely fumbled the border during her time as border czar, and the only reason people don't care right now is because the ones suffering are deep blue sanctuary cities that normies don't particularly like anyways.

Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that

Source?

I’ve never seen this shown, despite all the times it’s claimed.

Would you accept a European source, or would you say it's irrelevant to the conversation you're having in America?

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

But yes you can post it.

Didn't have time to do this earlier. Here's a spreadsheet (I tested it from a few browsers - it should be persistent) with the data from table 7.2-T03 (page 91) of the report ("Non-German suspects by nationalities – total offences excluding offences against foreigners’ law"), and table 12521-0005 from the German statistics office (for total population sizes for 2020).

Might do the same with the data from your study, if it has this level of detail.

UPDATE: Oh shit, I fucked up!

I didn't notice that the % share of suspects the report provided is the % share of non-German suspects, skewing the overrepresentation numbers pretty massively. Though not changing the conclusion that certain minorities are still waaay more criminal than the Germans / other minorities. The spreadsheet is updated, and here's the screenshot with the updated correct numbers:

https://www.themotte.org//images/17268257393208947.webp

Here's the old screenshot for historical purposes:

https://www.themotte.org//images/17267681316119363.webp

@Jesweez, @quiet_NaN , Just so no one misses the correction, I'm adding this as a comment. The broader point is unaffected, but I originally overestimated the numbers by a lot.

I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.

From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.

France is a close economic ally and Germany has a few big joint ventures with them, so I would expect most of the French in Germany are not drug mules or the like. Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.

For immigrants from European countries much poorer than Germany, my priors would be that higher prosperity attracts a lot of small-time criminals. Breaking and entering is likely more lucrative in Germany than in Romania. I would also assume that Switzerland has more small-time German criminals than their native base rate for exactly the same reasons.

A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals. Especially with crimes where no party has an incentive to report them, like the drug trade, police reports are only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know how much people are using, analyzing the wastewater is much more reliable. Murder is a good tracer, by comparison, because most murders get detected (unless they get misclassified as a natural death or stuck at the level of disappearance because no corpse surfaces) and solved.

Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.

Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault. Of course, IT-shy justice system is likely utterly incapable of aggregating the convictions for crimes committed in 2015 by nationality.

I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.

From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.

If you tracked interstate migration the same way each country in the EU tracks their migration, patterns like these might very well show up, though personally I'd be more suspicious of Californians rather than the Utahns.

As for the French, they have their own high-crime minorities, fully equipped with French passports, thanks to their colonial past. I can't tell you what is the deal with Italians, though.

Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.

Russians have a long way to travel, and are not part of the Schengen Zone, so that's hardly surprising.

A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals.

I'd be more than happy to limit the data to crimes with incentive to report, like murder, assault, rape, etc. I even remember some internet autist going over the German crime by nationality stats. I don't know if that's something they used to publish but stopped, or he had to FOIA them to get it, but if you click on the pdf from my other comment you can see they present the numbers on each type of crime, as well as on suspects by nationality, so they very clearly do have the data on the activities of criminals, they just choose not to aggregate them in a way that would be useful to this conversation. This has nothing to do with them being "IT-shy", European governments can hardly be described this way to begin with, and you can rest assured all this data is already stored in a digital database, and it's only a question of writing the right GROUP BY statement. Most likely this information is not published deliberately, for the exact same reason Germany hasn't published the full crime report since 2020.

Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.

  1. And this is why I came out against "uh, source?" and "data would be what we use to see if that intuition is correct or not" in my other conversation with Jesweez, and why I think Rationalist movement is either a complete failure, or a deliberate effort to sabotage sense-making. You can play these sorts of games forever, and no one who insisted that the data showing immigrants are less criminal than American citizens should be taken as-is, will ever show up here to criticize you for looking for an out in the unpublished parts of the data.
  2. Yes, it could be that the police is finding other crime while investigating illegal immigration, but what you've left out is that it could also be the opposite - the police doing their best to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, but inevitably running into it in the process of investigating violent crime. Which leads me to:
  3. I'm not saying things are quite as bad as the opposite side of the spectrum I outline above, but if you think Germany, or any other country in the EU, is in crack-down mode against illegal immigration qua illegal immigration, you're posting from a parallel universe.

Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person.

Nah. I'll take "convicts" over "suspects", but the length of conviction is a silly metric, if you know what they've been convicted of. Especially given certain European judges proclivity to let gang-rapists off with a slap on the wrist.

the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault.

Doesn't this start having issues if judges have different levels of leniency for different demographics of offenders, or other confounders that vary between demographics (like age or wealth)?

I think you'd want to instead do it by the average sentence length for the crime they were convicted of, regardless of what they were actually sentenced to. That should eliminate the confounders while maintaining a relative scoring that roughly maps to society's view of the crimes' severity.

If you're worried that those numbers don't match up, that there are crimes that carry a sentence of 5 years but no one's ever given more than 6 months, you could instead use the average actually-given sentence length for all people convicted of that crime.

The big difference between the US and Europe is that the US has a native high-crime subgroup which is large enough (unlike European gypsies) to materially skew the crime statistics. A group of immigrants can commit more crime that white Americans and still commit less crime than heritage-Americans as a whole, who are 15-20% black. And in fact this appears to be true of by far the largest group of immigrants (i.e. Mexicans) - if you don't trust the MSM or academia then the most recent analysis on this point from an unquestionably right-wing source is Ron Unz.

There may be specific high-crime subgroups of immigrants who are worse than ADOS blacks, and Haitians in Springfield may even be one of them (although nobody in Springfield is saying this). But the only cat to have been eaten was eaten by a mentally ill ADOS black woman.

In the America that actually exists, poor Mexican immigrants make cities like LA safer by displacing poor blacks, and their US citizen children elect Democrats to local office who don't feel white guilt about black crime.

It's actually quite similar. Pre-selected immigrants generally have unusually low crime rates, free and in particular illegal immigrants have unusually high crime rates. This is true for both europe and the US. It's just that a mexican in europe is more likely than not legally pre-selected, highly educated and highly conscientious, while the opposite in the US. It's vice versa for other groups, such as eastern europeans.

The Germans used to have a "crime by nationality" chapter in their annual crime report, where all the stereotypically criminal minorities turn out to be actually criminal. Though the last in year for which the full report seems to be available is 2020.

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

I think this was true in the past moreso than it is now, though obviously you have different nationalities coming over, which might have it's own impact.

This feels super online. The battle isn't trying to score debate points with the moderator. It's trying to get people to NOTICE.

A 4000 word think piece in the Atlantic is just not going to move public opinion. The whole cats thing got regular people to notice how deeply fucked up things have gotten.

Imagine explaining all this to a gas station clerk. That's the level of discourse we're dealing with.

Illegal immigration is deeply unpopular and becoming more so. The pet thing didn't massively polarize people in favor of immigration. Maybe you're traveling in unrepresentative circles.

Yea this is a delusion the dems have been trying to sell themselves ever since Trump. They see themselves not as a specific group fighting for it's members interests, like the republicans do, but more like a religion like messianic figures that will bring about utopia if they can just get enough control and "eliminate" the external things dividing us. Reality is that Trump didn't start anything and the divisions had been brewing for a while. The things dividing us are us. Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.

Due to this they need a rationalization for why their universalist solutions aren't working or their self conception would break down. Similar to that Muslim meme people always post in regards to Europe where the bureaucrats are desperately asking what the Muslim wants, more healthcare, better housing and the Muslim says they just want Shariah. It's clear what the man in the meme wants, the increasingly desperate questions aren't for his sake. It's funny they made diversity one of the pillars of their ideology when they don't really believe it exists in the first place.

Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.

I think this hints at the root cause of our national malaise: pro-fargroup bias.

The Martha's Vineyard crowd cares more about poor undocumented workers than they do about their own countrymen. They see themselves as global citizens with no great connection to a particular place.

The Haitian immigrant is better than the lazy American, why shouldn't we replace one with the other?

The problem with this situation is that it's inherently unstable. It's tough for elites to rule when they despise the people they rule over. And it's tough for working class types to be pro-social when they feel the game is inherently rigged against them.

The MV incident to me, showed just how bubbled the elites are. I’m not sure whether or not it ever occurred to the elites of those enclaves that importing people with no resources has a negative effect on community. They interact with the world through news media whilst living in gated exurbs where the only interactions they have with the rest of the world are transactional. They don’t talk with the lower clases, they order their services and when no longer paying for that service, they kind of forget they exist. I’m not sure it’s even contempt, it’s summoning a workman or servant, hiring their services and banishing them back into the ether where they don’t think about them until they need the air conditioning fixed or order door dash.

Chuck Todd routinely degraded American politics. Why should I listen to a thing he says unless it starts with “I am a huge part of the problem—I’m sorry.”

I always wonder which people are really that historically ignorant. Noise, signal, so hard to tell. So little worth listening to at all?

This stuff kicked off at least as early as 2012, and it was more "nerd wars" and professor/student social media drama than politics to start with. (Tumblr isn't "big tech" either, though prior Twitter certainly made things even worse...) Trump is obviously a symptom of a problem that won't go away when he does.

Just as “watermelon” has come to refer to politics which wears a green skin to smuggle in red outcomes, I want a word for politics which wears a nonpartisan skin to smuggle in Dem hackery. What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside? Something something haemocyanin.

Horseshoe crab

What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside?

I think that's just called depression.

  • the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.

Just..big tech?

Are you really saying it's big tech's fault blacks and many liberals whites believe what's basically blood libel - that is, that police kills thousands of unarmed blacks every year ?

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