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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21764 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.

How credible is any of this?

My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.

I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.

What do you make of it?

I saw someone post this leadership page on the fema website. Do these people look like the best our country has to offer? Just looking at these people I wouldn’t put it past them to be dragging their feet. I also wouldn’t be surprised if they’re incompetent. Either way, I don’t know how anyone can look at this and think the USA is anything other than an embarrassment.

https://www.fema.gov/about/organization/offices-leadership

How exactly are you judging them as "an embarrassment"? Those look like ordinary professional photos and they look Iike normal people. Without knowing anything else about them, should I assume it's just the fact that many of them are black and/or women that's causing the curled upper lip?

Is it representative of the population? Possibly. Is it representative of their workforce? Possibly. It's hard to tell

What really pisses me off is that the head of the DoT Pete Buttigieg is calling Elon Musk a conspiracy nut for claiming this, and dozens of other articles are calling it misinformation and 'blatant lies.'

And yet if you go to the Asheville regional website it literally says that no flights may land without prior permission.

I know at this point I shouldn't be shocked anymore by the blatant lies of the media, but it continues to baffle me how blatant and idiotic they are about it.

Asheville Regional's PPA is for the airport, I think Musk is more complaining about some NOTAM, which is far bigger a deal and covers a lot bigger area. There's nothing listed as a TFR right now, but there was this weirdness until earlier today. It's not marked as a TFR -- they start with some variant of no pilot may operate (unless), cfe this VIP one from Biden flying through a couple days ago -- but it requires everyone to communicate to and obey a specific emergency center channel that could tell people to fuck off or just be overwhelmed.

EDIT: I'll add that it's possible there was no management-level decisions for Buttigieg to be aware of, for the specific problems Musk was highlighting; radio calls and management are rough in the best of circumstances, and no one in this field is gonna be NY TRACON-tier.

... and that this is in many ways a much worse thing. Public officials dealing with an emergency can't treat complaints like they're political conspiracy theories, not because such foul play is unimaginable -- I can give examples! -- but because the alternative is imaginable. Disasters are by definition the breakdown of normal systems, with lives on the line dependent on our ability to respond to those gaps.

What is more annoying is that the media will say “government official debunks Musk’s wild claim.”

The evidence they will point to is the government official. The same government official Musk is criticizing.

It would be like if our judicial system asked the defendant “did you do it” and if they said “no” accepted their word as final. Just crazy.

I know!! Exactly it's just... comically thin.

But then again political and news discourse has been degrading at a dramatic rate.

My guess is that fema is fucking up because it literally does not occur to them that requiring permits slows things down.

Look, I’m not a fan of the federal government or the cathedral. But they don’t actually hate us and want us dead. They’re shitty and incompetent and don’t share values, but they’re not cartoon villains. I think this is typical federal bureaucracy which doesn’t stop to think that checking every can of donated food for botulism before letting it through will stop aid from reaching the people who need it, causing more harm than the botulism would.

they don’t actually hate us and want us dead

Why are you so sure?

So you suggest we invoke Hanlon's Razor?

I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.

Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.

At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.

I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.

Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.

Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.

This is underselling the culpability of the democratic city and state leadership. There wasn't merely a 'not taking the imminent storm threat seriously', but actively delaying and hindering federal support responses including by not actually asking for various types of assistance from the federal and other states until days later, instigating a posse comitatus policy freeze disrupting federal military assistance, and of course the police not merely abandoning duty roles but partaking in the looting.

When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.

At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.

The steelman is that airspace is dangerous if uncontrolled, and so in a disaster a government doesn't want to be competing with airspace. This is especially true when rescue agencies would be further diverted if they had to rerout resources to help someone who got themselves into a mess- like, say, by crashing aircraft into a town.

On the other hand, this administration is the heir to the one that repeatedly targeted religious medical charities if they didn't support abortion-enabling policies. There is an established vein of 'our way or not at all' in some parts of the US government.

I have no insight into this specific circumstance, but 'stop getting in our way as you try to help' is a real, and sometimes even valid, thing.

When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.

Wait do you have examples or sources of this? Would be crazy if it turned out to be true.

“Military sources tells ABC News that Jefferson, an eight-term Democratic congressman, asked the National Guard that night to take him on a tour of the flooded portions of his congressional district. A five-ton military truck and a half dozen military police were dispatched. Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News that during the tour, Jefferson asked that the truck take him to his home on Marengo Street, in the affluent uptown neighborhood in his congressional district. According to Schneider, this was not part of Jefferson's initial request.”

“Four New Orleans police officers have been cleared of allegations that they looted a Wal-Mart store after Hurricane Katrina, but each was suspended 10 days for not stopping civilians from ransacking the store, the Police Department said. The probe stemmed from an MSNBC report that showed the officers filling a shopping cart with shoes, clothes and other items. When a reporter asked the officers what they were doing, one responded, “Looking for looters” and turned her back. Assistant Police Chief Marlon Defillo, commander of the Public Integrity Bureau, said the officers seen on the video were recently cleared of looting because they had received permission from superiors to take necessities for themselves and other officers. The Police Department later informed Wal-Mart management, after the store had been secured, that its officers had taken some needed items, he said.”

I’m going to classify both of these stories as “technically true”.

Ahh I thought you were talking about Helene, not Katrina.

Still though, what a mess. Every time I think I can't hate the government more...

Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.

On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media. Sure, sometimes it’s trolls, but by this point, enough ultimately true stories were officially dismissed as misinformation until they were shown to actually have happened that I no longer find the “Russian Trolls” story to be a sensible hypothesis. In fact, I’m trying to think of a story told in the past 2-3 years where it’s actually traced back to a real Russian whether working for the government or not.

I’m mostly with the steelman here. People who don’t know what they’re doing wandering about a disaster area are more likely to create situations where they need rescue than to do substantial good — unless they have enough knowledge to know what they’re doing. A bunch of rednecks coming in and sawing through things or chopping down trees or whatever might well injure people or need rescue themselves. Disaster areas tend to be dangerous and the dangers aren’t always obvious. Taking your John boat over downed power lines is pretty dangerous. So the government probably is turning people away because they don’t want to rescue the redneck brigades who have no experience rescuing people.

Show me a person of influence who made this case when the George Floyd video dropped.

I do not believe anything the Russians could ever say or do could hold even a flickering candle to the gigaton flare generated by the actual words and deeds of genuine Americans.

The person you responded to is filtered.

On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media.

I don't see any particular reason both can't be true.

The problem with FEMA stopping other people from helping is that FEMA cannot help everyone. They are only able to help those reachable by road. FEMA sets up in major hubs in areas their trucks can reach and expects people to reach them. https://x.com/glennbeck/status/1842293685834416174

National guard can do search and rescue, but they don't have many helicopters. Civilian helicopters outnumber them by an order of magnitude and are flying a lot of the aid. https://instagram.com/reel/DArJyuevDTK/

https://www.facebook.com/p/Hurricane-Helene-Airlift-Relief-61566554308647/?wtsid=rdr_0LYxi1KBGzv4lEjYR

The federal government might be employing a strategy that saves the most lives in a major costal city. It might not do so well here.

If they are confiscating resources from private charities that are air dropping resources to those who need them, this is a death sentence for those who cannot be reached by road for weeks.

Totally incredible? Like, what is the actual evidence people are giving? Here's an article quoting multiple NC state, FEMA, and federal government officials about the effort. Here is a post by an actual Asheville resident describing the scale of the federal response. The contrast is with, what, anonymous sources "on the ground"?

It would be very Seeing Like a State for government agencies to dump a shitload of assets and supplies in the major regional cities with no real plan to get aid to the isolated residents in the mountains whose roads have been washed out.

FEMA in Asheville doesn't nessesarily mean FEMA in wherever the hell this is.

I expect that Ashville, which has a working road into it, would see the most support from FEMA and will be the happiest with how aid goes. This does not mean that everyone who lives in a town with less than 10,000 people is receiving adequate aid.

The people who would have the most to complain about are the ones without power, gas, internet, water, or a road to anywhere.

What’s annoying is the concept that FEMA saying “we are doing great” is also taken is settling the matter. They are a motivated party. Similarly you wouldn’t expect state officials to criticize the people whose help they need.

What we really need is an honest independent media but we don’t have that.

Yes, the normal stupidity of bureaucracy.

But Secretary Buttigieg reacted to Elon Musk!

https://x.com/SecretaryPete/status/1842271678274928964

No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call.

Musk reacted first aggressively, but after the call conciliatory:

Thanks for the call. Hopefully, we can resolve this soon

Maybe he overreacted? Let’s see what he posts tomorrow.

But I think “legitimate” could be a key word here. It is an emergency, business as usual shouldn’t apply, and they shouldn’t restrict the airspace in any way. It is not like aircraft/helicopters pilots are blind, they are not crashing into each other easily.

Edit:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1842352252922843403

Problem has been resolved. Kudos to @SecretaryPete

I think we need subject-mater expertise here. How is airspace usually regulated? What would happen if all restrictions were lifted? How hard is it to operate in the mountains (especially takeoff and landing)?

I'm sure FEMA considers Starlink to be low-priority compared to food, water, gas, etc. It's plausible that SpaceX flying wildcat deliveries of Starlink is net-negative to the relief efforts, but I would like to know why specifically they think that.

EDIT: Per CNN's Pete Muntean, "an unprecedented number of airplanes, helicopters, and drones swooping in to help with Hurricane Helene recovery efforts are now posing a safety hazard. There were 30 near-mid-air collisions last Saturday, a federal source tells me." I guess that's the official line. No idea if it's accurate or not.

How is airspace usually regulated?

I am not a pilot, but a rough overview...

Normal operations fall under various types of airspace classifications: Class A (18000-60000 foot above sea level), Class B - D (funnels of airspace near various sizes of towered airports), Class E (between 1200 foot above ground level and 18000 foot above sea level, with some exceptions not relevant here, and above 60,000 foot above sea level), and Class G or unclassed airspace (generally under 1200 foot above ground level, with some exceptions).

Class A-D, you are under the direct control of a towered airport or other air traffic controller, rarely more than one. Class E means you can be under air traffic control for instrument flight rules, or you can operate in visual flight rules and you're allowed to fly whatever without radio traffic (though insurance companies will frown on this). Class E airspace over 10000 foot above sea level requires ADS-B out, and in practice it's pretty hard to operate without it, but people do still run below without ADS-B out.

Rules for drones are complicated, and a lot of the whole mess about Class G is the FAA trying to control where they can go and when.

Then you have various special airspaces, geographically (and sometimes temporally) specific stuff, with various constraints on entry. Restricted areas (and warning areas) have dangerous exercises going on at some times: you're pretty much never allowed in them when active unless you're working with the US military, and going in can get you in trouble with the feds in a way that results in pulling your pilot's license. Prohibited areas are like that, but they're always active, and you'll probably go to jail if you break one. MOAs are in the same realm, but it's not technically illegal to enter while flying visual flight rules, just a really bad idea.

Then you have Special Air Traffic Rules and Special Flight Rules Areas. These are all unique one-offs with their own special constraints, which can be as minor as having to call someone ahead of time before flying certain altitudes or locations, or as serious as needing a police officer with a loaded gun pointed at your pilot while you fly (the DC SFRA is a mess). Busting these can and does result in a military response: I know a pilot who's gotten the nickname 'takedown' because the SATR contact actually lost his tail number, and he ended up pulled over by a Blackhack and sprawled onto the tarmac.

Lastly, you have Temporary Flight Restrictions. These are issued rules for temporary limits in an area. They're fairly common and can happen for ground events (every Presidential visit, and even major sports games will have its own NOTAM), or they can happen because of high disaster response. Some TFRs are blanket prohibitions (you are not flying at low altitude near the President), but others will simply require calling ahead, and others still will restrict flights to certain groups.

In this case, there are very clearly TFRs specific to several disaster areas,

What would happen if all restrictions were lifted?

All restrictions being lifted wouldn't happen. The FAA would spontaneously explode if you even considered touching most MOAs, Class A-C airspace is genuinely like that for a reason, and the SATRs are statutory. But most air space in the mountains are Class E and Class G. They're not outside of FAA control, but you can normally wildcat all you want in them.

There might be a slightly increased risk of midair collision, and those do happen, both drone-aircraft and aircraft-aircraft. Crowded areas with unprofessional pilots are especially dangerous, and there was a recent Oshkosh incident that's made it more prevalent in a lot of minds. On the gripping hand, a lot of the FAA's concern on drones, the FAA vastly overstates a lot of the risk for unintentional incidents. You just shouldn't be that low in a fixed-wing aircraft unless you're about to land, and helicopters aren't doing the sort of movement that makes a drone-on-fixed-wing aircraft collision so dangerous.

((And also shouldn't be flying that low, although many helicopter pilots are daredevils.))

Fixed-wing on fixed-wing, near misses are more common than I'd like. ADS-B gives more warning if it's equipped, but especially near busy airports you also get a ton of false positives (from aircraft on ground), and outside of ADS-B you're dependent on the human eyeball to spot a thirty-foot object that might be closing distance at >200 knots combined speed, while you're in a vehicle with giant blind spots (like 'everything above you' or 'everything below you', cfe Aeromexico 498). The claimed thirty near misses isn't as serious as it sounds -- Oshkosh doesn't even count them at this point -- but a mid-sized flight school would be very upset to see that many in a month and not happy to see that many in six months, and not ever near-miss is gonna be reported.

How hard is it to operate in the mountains (especially takeoff and landing)?

Fixed wing, pretty rough. The Appalachias aren't that high, so you don't have the oxygen problems that the west coast mountains do, but they're messy areas to fly in from an updraft and thermal perspective, and there's a lot of space where you don't really have any way to handle an in-flight emergency. That's not helped by the lack of serious airports around and the roughness of terrain -- if you're not at 10k ASL, for a lot of western North Carolina your emergency response is gonna be to kiss your ass goodbye.

Helicopters have it a little better, but they tradeoff easier landing against much lower sustain.

There was probably some thing that happened that one time and there was an accident and then a rule for made.

Mid-air collisions happen more often than you might expect given the size of, well, the atmosphere even in spots that aren't busy disaster zones. There was one just a few weeks ago in Nevada in clear weather, and there have been several over the years in tourist flight hotspots like Alaska. The automated systems (TCAS) are getting better, but still aren't going to prevent everything.

Although in this case, I think we should, as a society, consider that reducing safety standards (in a limited capacity) is an acceptable risk in response to the much more imminent risk to life and limb. I'm not sure exactly what my judgement would be in this case.

I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.

Dead Republicans don't vote... at best. Most of the counties effected went 60% for Trump. In North Carolina, about 1 million voters out of the 6 million in the state have been impacted.

All the same, what we are seeing here is just the same passive aggressive indifference to the lives of people who vote wrong that the secret service showed towards Trump in Butler PA. It's the same attitude you Longshorman's Union Head mentioned if they force the Longshoremen to work. "We were moving 60 an hour, now we're moving 8." You can't force these organizations to save people they hate and want dead.

One of the Most Despicable Characters I’ve Read About in Years, and I Just Read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Earlier, we talked about the sexual dynamics at play in pledging a sorority, inspired by reading through this series. Now I want to dig into the other major strain of the series: race and Greek Life in Alabama. It’s an interesting article, talking about actual real-life integration of an institution in 2013. We’re talking about the Obama years here, people! This story has everything: hot blonde elites cavorting in grey uniforms, burning crosses, a gay Uncle Tom with a humiliation fetish, a sinister political bloc designed to get the best seats at football games, a moral universe that doesn’t seem capable of considering any race outside of ADOS and Sons of the Confederacy, and a band of Nice White Liberals who didn’t seem to ask any black kids about what they wanted. I’ll be offering money-quotes and commentary below, to our author:

When I started working on a story about Greek Life, I did not think I'd end up recounting a 1980s stakeout and car chase. But then again, I had no idea about the Machine. And neither do most people in this country. Even some students on UA campus don’t know that it’s anything more than a rumor. But for almost a century, this elite group has been at the center of Greek Life at the University of Alabama. The Machine started at the University of Alabama a century ago — some date its inception to 1914, others as far back as 1888. Its real name is Theta Nu Epsilon, and it operates as a kind of meta-fraternity: an alliance, basically, that acts on the behalf of Greek Life. Every year, The Machine picks candidates from Greek organizations to run for everything from SGA President to student senators; it then supports their campaigns by allegedly pressuring fraternity and sorority members to vote for that candidate. Think Tammany Hall, only instead of controlling the election for New York City mayor, they’re compelling fraternity brothers to get out there and vote for the Machine candidate for homecoming queen. We were unable to find any situations in which the university has officially acknowledged that the Machine exists, and several people told us that it had never happened. For decades, it was made up of only white men. (There were no Black students allowed on Alabama’s campus until 1963, when the school was forced to desegregate. There were white sororities before 1963, but women were not invited to join the Machine — until, as you’ll see below, their votes became necessary.)

“Today's college leaders are tomorrow's presidents and US representatives,” Elizabeth says. “Especially in Alabama, [college] is the breeding ground for people who go on to be your local and state elected politicians.” Put differently, at UA, you learn a very specific way that power is accumulated and wielded. Namely: through The Machine. The Machine-to-wider-Alabama-politics pipeline was laid in the very early years of the Machine. J. Lister Hill, born in 1894, is believed to be one of the founding members of UA’s chapter of Theta Nu Epsilon (which became known as The Machine). He also helped start the SGA at UA and served as its first president. He then went on to become one of Alabama's US Senators, and was a vocal dissenter of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. But Hill was just the first of many to reportedly make the jump from Bama SGA to the political big time. Current US Senator for Alabama Katie Britt, Britt’s predecessor in the US Senate Richard Shelby, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, the late federal judge Robert Vance, and the late US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black all allegedly went through the Machine-to-politics pipeline. Oh, and another name: Joe Espy, lawyer to a former Alabama Governor, and also a former UA trustee. Today, recent Machine-backed SGA members are reportedly connected at the White House, in US congress, in the Alabama state house, and on the Tuscaloosa City Council.

We, of course, know about The Machine, because the UA alums among our own membership brought it up immediately. I do think that it needs to be situated within a larger late-nineteenth century yen for secret societies in American colleges at the time. This is when Skull and Bones and Wolf’s Head got big at Yale, along with imitators at Cornell in Quill and Dagger and the Friars at UPenn. It was a common tradition across the country. Having a mutual secret is one of the best ways to bind people together, and I truly believe in the aspect of the agoge that requires young men to commit minor crimes together to bond. At the time of its formation, The Machine was pretty normal within the broader college landscape, and it only developed into what it is today slowly.

As an org-of-orgs, the Machine could hold an internal election to determine SGA president, give its endorsement to the Greek Life membership, and then leverage that support to win a majority of votes. Win the room of frat bosses, you win the support of their supporters, and with a few girlfriends and hangarounds, you win the whole thing. With a third of votes already in their pocket, and turnout low, they’d only need to persuade a small number of outside students. Given that people have a documented desire to vote for the winner, and to associate themselves with powerful secret societies, the Machine endorsement rumor probably brings in some unaffiliated cuck voters on its own. But note that this is only possible inasmuch as your orgs favor loyalty to each other and to the Machine over any other ideological predilection or occupation. They have to be loyal, a trait already prized and selected for in fraternity brothers. For decades the Machine functioned just on the votes of the fraternities, until the university was integrated by force during the civil rights era...

[I]n 1976, a Black student named Cleo Thomas decided to run for SGA president — the first Black student to attempt a run. He won, even without Machine support, because he struck his own alliance with Black students, independents, and white sororities — a sort of counter-Machine voting bloc. For the first time in history, the Machine was a minority. “It was at that point that the Machine began to see the strategic value of bringing women on board,” John told me. By bringing sororities into the Machine, they could shore up a larger voting bloc and minimize the chances of a Cleo Thomas situation happening again. Which is exactly what happened.

This is sort of the path of American liberalism in a microcosm. Blacks, seeking to escape the yolk of white supremacy, ally with white women, seeking rights. Traditional white male power centers break up this alliance by co-opting white women, given them some power to prevent them from voting with the Blacks. It’s almost too good to be true!

The major sororities and fraternities at UA remained entirely white until 2013, when the university administration finally forced the issue. First they tried being subtle:

Blame it on inertia, blame it on tradition, blame it on racism, attribute it to Black students gravitating towards the historically Black sororities and fraternities on campus — whatever the reason, university administrators understood that the optics were very bad. In 2001, they actively assisted incoming freshman Melody Twilley — the first Black student to Rush the all-white sororities — by setting up meetings with sorority leaders and facilitating recommendations at a number of houses. But the Machine, according to the Los Angeles Times, allegedly “didn’t want to let her in.” And it got its way. The sororities ignored Melody and the university administration. And… that was the end of it. E. Culpepper Clark, a dean at the university and author of The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama, declared “God almighty, this is sad.” But it doesn’t appear that any further action was taken. (Similar to yesterday’s piece, we reached out to all of the named sororities and fraternities concerning components of this story; none have responded).

Imagine being the girl who was flagged as great sorority material, the hottest most demure black valley girl they could find. What a bizarre affectation. I can't imagine wanting to integrate, not a school or a business or even a restaurant, but what is ultimately a friend group. Going in and knowing that at some level, they're only friends with you because the admin told them they had to be. It would be psychological torture! Why would anyone want to be that person? The moment university admin got involved, any sane person with self respect would withdraw! The Los Angeles Times report on the matter does note that:

A few Latina and Asian American students have been accepted in the recent past, and last year, a woman who is part black was picked, though her racial background was unknown at the time.

Which was an interesting omission from the substack series. In the 2024 liberal moral universe, it is much easier to limit your actors to ADOS and Sons of the Confederacy, to the most obvious cases in your universe of racists and victims of racism. When you start including other groups, like Asian girls or Arab guys, things get complicated. What does it mean that the sororities would accept a Chinese girl, this despite the (at the time) liberal Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.

After all, southern black girls probably have vastly more in common with southern white girls than either have with Chinese girls. The white and black girls probably have families more rooted in the USA, similar cuisines and traditions, similar religious affiliations. This blindspot towards non-black minorities is one of my perpetual frustrations with American liberal attempts at intellectualizing race and racism. The book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, widely feted, frustrated me to no end on this count. Its comparison between race and the hindu Caste system was hopeless facile, and represented a deep misunderstanding of how a caste system functioned. Caste systems aren’t about the people on the top or the people on the bottom, they’re about the people in the middle: by convincing those in the middle to accept their subjugation to the strong in exchange for their elevation over the weak. Consider the response from the Greeks when the Ottoman Empire abolished the order of races:

In 1865, when the equality of all subjects of the Ottoman Empire was proclaimed, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, a high-ranking official observed, "whereas in former times, in the Ottoman State, the communities were ranked, with the Muslims first, then the Greeks, then the Armenians, then the Jews, now all of them were put on the same level. Some Greeks objected to this, saying: 'The government has put us together with the Jews. We were content with the supremacy of Islam.'"

The role of Asian and Hispanic girls is under explored in the piece, while blacks are the most common minority at UA, they’re not the only ones! Looking at edge cases is how you determine things! Discrimination hits the black girl but not the Asian girl. Why? Racism is one explanation, and the one that the Nice White Liberals settle on. Ultimately they’d find another valley girl Jackie Robinson and inform the sororities in no uncertain terms that they must be friends with her:

[Kennedi] had a 4.3 GPA in high school and was salutatorian of her class. Her grandfather was a prominent Alabama judge who happened to sit on the university board of trustees. But in the sorority world, grades and connections can only take you so far. Not a single one of the panhellenic sororities on campus – there were 16 at the time – gave her a bid. Because like Melody Twilley, Kennedi was Black. Every year, hundreds of girls who rush at UA don’t end up with a bid. Sometimes they just didn’t play the game correctly: not enough recs, wrong outfits, too much social media, didn’t talk to enough girls, whatever. But Kennedi’s rejection wasn’t the result of a social faux pas or a fluke of the system. After Rush, a few members of Alpha Gamma Delta came forward and reported that sorority leadership had nixed the tradition of deciding as a group who would make it to the next round of Rush in favor of creating a shortlist — one that didn’t include Cobb. There’s no direct evidence that this change was made specifically to exclude Kennedi. But when those whistleblowers tried to argue for Kennedi’s inclusion, they were shut down by alumni, who according to a report in the Crimson White, said that Kennedi didn’t meet the sorority’s “letter of recommendation requirements.” A member of another sorority, Delta Delta Delta, was quoted in that same article saying the same thing happened in her house: leadership intervened in the recruitment process, and Kennedi was excluded.

Then-university president, Dr. Judy Bonner, was forced to acknowledge segregation within the Greek system. She finally did what the university had refused to do back in 2001: she ordered the sororities to essentially redo Rush with an extended timeline and open admissions policy, all under university supervision. In the aftermath, ten Black women were admitted to traditionally white sororities — including Kennedi. Let’s not forget that this all happened — and I cannot emphasize this enough — in 2013. Rush did return to normal the next year, but the message was clear: maintain this trajectory, or we’ll intervene again. And although the controversy in (again) 2013 was focused on sororities, the changes enacted in its wake affected fraternities as well.

Now, what’s missing from this story, and an alternative explanation I’d like to offer: the Divine Nine.

To clarify, Greek Life at Bama wasn’t entirely white at the time — just the “top tier” houses, many of which were founded as exclusively white organizations in the post-Civil War South. There was also the Divine Nine, a flourishing system of Black houses also called Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs). Of those nine, eight have chapters at the University of Alabama. Like the historically white Greek Organizations, each of these BGLO houses has stereotypes and traditions and tremendous pressure to follow in the paths of your parents.

These traditional black houses had their own organizations, and may soon boast a president among their national alums. Nowhere in the news stories about the liberal “heroes” trying to integrate the top sororities at UA were there any voices from these organizations. No one seemed to want to ask them their opinions. But consider: when you take the hot, rich, sophisticated, smart black girls and you go to them and say “hey, you’re good enough that you can rush the White Sorority instead of being stuck in the Black sorority;” you’re implicitly denigrating the Black sorority, and you’re permanently dooming it to obscurity. Without the hot, rich, Black girls coming in, the Black sorority will slowly lose prestige and power, left with only the poor, ugly, or those obsessed with race issues, a second tier pick. I’d love to know if the presidents of the BGLOs wanted the white orgs to integrate, or if they demanded that they not integrate behind the scenes.

The founders of the Hells Angels, who only admitted white and hispanic members, said later that they had the restrictive clause in order to avoid conflict with the black prison gangs over membership: the blacks would have responded with violence if the Hells Angels had recruited black members, as blacks prisoners were a patrimony of the black gangs and an integrated gang would threaten their hold over them. Similarly, promising black freshmen were the patrimony of the BLGOs. It was in the interest of the BLGOs for the best black candidates to end up in their houses, the worst outcome for them is for the white orgs to admit only the cream of the black crop. The last thing they want is for the university to handpick a hottie with a 4.0+ and pluck her out of BLGO life into the “real” sorority. That kills the BLGOs, slowly or quickly, knocking them out of top-tier contention. Suddenly the BLGOs are the only racially discriminatory greek orgs, and they are only racially discriminatory Greek orgs, they offer nothing else. It’s the tragedy of how affirmative action has impacted the formation of black communities in the United States, the Talented Tenth is pulled off and fawned over by whites, handed easy diversity positions, when they could be improving the quality of black neighborhoods and communities. Rather than the university demanding that the BGLOs be accorded more prestige within the system, they chose to tell the white kids: you have to have at least a few black friends. Another token black friend forced into the frats:

Enter Jared

Reading this substack author talk about Jared Hunter filled me with a level of disgust it is hard for me to properly articulate. I’m still grappling with just how much I hate this guy from his words and the descriptions of his actions, given that he is just some kid. A portrait of a grasping uppity hanger on:

[Jared] saw a different path to power: one that went straight through the big, old school, incredibly white fraternity houses. Jared has understood himself as ambitious from an early age. He went to a prestigious prep school; he did debate and mock trial; he did Boys States, the nerdy statewide program for kids hell bent on going into politics. His dream was to go to Georgetown University, a key feeder program for the federal government. But when the University of Alabama offered him a full ride and then some, he took the deal. Jared’s father had been a member of Omega Psi Phi, one of Divine Nine Black houses, and was dedicated to the fraternity. After graduating, he continued to pay his dues, helped organize their annual New Year’s Eve fundraiser, and religiously attended fraternity meetings. “Like, literally every Sunday,” Jared told me. It was a big part of his father’s identity. But Omega Psi Phi didn’t interest Jared, in part because he didn’t feel like he’d fit in there. He’d grown up as one of the only Black students in a wealthy — and mostly white — community outside of Montgomery, Alabama. These were the types of guys he knew; he’d gone to high school with them and wore the same clothes as them from the same bass fishing shops. He knew, in other words, how to be the one Black friend to the rich white people who’d swear there wasn’t a racist bone in their body (just in their family graveyards).

Jared accepted the bid with no delusions. He knew they were getting something from him — the appearance of diversity. And he was getting something from them. It’s the primary reason Jared was so intent on joining one of the more elite white fraternities. “I thought that being in an IFC fraternity, I would have opportunities to be more involved with SGA [Student Government Association] and other organizations on campus that I was interested in,” Jared told me. One of those other organizations was even more elite than the fraternity itself: The Machine. The way Jared first came to understand the Machine, he told me, was as a “pipeline” for Alabama politics — Jared’s ultimate ambition. Joining the fraternity was just the first step in that process. Next would be getting the Machine’s backing and winning the SGA presidency, thereby firmly positioning himself for the political future he’d imagined. Which, just a year after the system had rejected him entirely, is what he set about doing.

Tons of kids come into undergrad with these kinds of political ambitions. And Jared was far from the only one to come in willing to do the most disgusting things to achieve them. Maybe, like Caro said of LBJ, he took a perverse pride in wheeling and dealing, in being cynical, as though it made him better than the others. But I just can’t stomach this:

When I asked Jared how it felt to be aligning himself with a historically very racist secret society, he paused, and said: “You know, it's shitty and unfortunate, but where I'm from, that could be said about so many different entities.” He pointed out that the high school he attended, St. James School in Montgomery, was founded in 1955 as a direct result of the Brown v. Board decision. It’s what’s known as a “segregation academy”: a private school that opened to white students after public schools were forced to integrate. For Jared, when it came to the Machine, the ends justified the means. As he put it, their history is “worth reflecting on and acknowledging. But I don't also want something that's going to prohibit especially Black and brown people's career furtherance.” In other words, if the Machine could offer an opportunity, especially an opportunity that people like Jared had historically been denied, then he was gonna take it. But first, he needed to convince an organization hell-bent on maintaining the status quo… to change. And there was still plenty of change that desperately needed to come to campus. We went in depth on [Jared’s] campaign earlier this week, but we didn’t mention the unusual move he made during it. He published an open letter in the Crimson White, openly acknowledging that he had the Machine’s support and backing. “Running for office with the support of a group with such a checkered past was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made,” he wrote. Jared saw the acknowledgment as a way to build more transparency into the system: yes, he had the backing of the Machine, but he promised to represent all students. “Not only does the Greek community not fully define our campus,” he wrote, “it does not fully define myself as an individual.” It was a bold move, and I’m guessing it raised eyebrows among some Machine members — remember, this was the group that had allegedly stolen an entire run of that same newspaper to prevent its members from being publicly named, and which refused to even publicly acknowledge its own existence.

God this kind of whinging bugs me. There’s something so self-satisfied about this, knowingly taking advantage of systems that you claim to be better than. There’s a full throated defense one can make of The Machine, or any other institution whose past you don’t approve of. And if you want to make it I’m not going to mock you. But this is just being an open Uncle Tom, and expecting Johny Reb to reward you for playing coon while the white liberals tear up at how oppressed you’ve been. Disgusting.

Jared was willing to put himself into a box in order to get into a fraternity— he just didn’t realize how small that box still was, or how much of himself he’d still have to hide. As he described this all to me, I started nodding my head. “Ahhhh, so what they actually wanted was… Clarence Thomas,” I said. Jared immediately started laughing. “Yes,” he responded, “Yes! That’s exactly what they wanted. They wanted somebody in their Wrangler jeans to roll up in their F-150 and basically be them, but Black.”

White kids wanting to have friends who are like them is a Human Rights Violation. They don’t like white kids who aren’t like them either! And Jared was just saying how much he was just like those guys.

Kappa Alpha Order, commonly known as KA, was co-founded by a soldier who shot himself in the foot and actually had to sit out most of the Civil War. But that hasn’t stopped members from openly fetishizing its Confederate roots. Their website still lists Gen. Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder” for, among other things, his “exemplary ideals.” And from the 1950s, it began designating one week in spring “Old South Week” to celebrate this dubious history, the climax of which was the Old South Ball. A bacchanal of antebellum nostalgia, the ball was where KA brothers could play beer pong in rebel uniforms while sorority girls outfitted in Scarlett O’Hara-style hoop-skirts and ribbons took photos draped over the fraternity’s decorative cannon.

One does have to laugh at shooting himself in the foot. But what’s so wrong with the myth of General Lee? I’ve talked before about growing up, in the 90s in the North, with myths of General Lee giving up his train seat to an old black woman. There’s a version of Lee, and the war between the states!, that lets us all have our pride and our brotherhood! That’s how you bring the country together! But Jared doesn’t want to make this argument, he wants to victimize himself for liberal sympathy while dancing in shoe polish for his frat brothers.

No one’s under the illusion that the Greek System at Bama is inclusive. Acceptance still hinges on your willingness to bend to the status quo — and not just when it comes to race. There’s part of Jared’s story I didn’t include up top. During his first year at UA, when he was being courted by ATO, and before being dropped… Jared posted to Facebook about gay marriage (this was the mid-2010s, remember, so college students were still posting things on Facebook). It was pretty innocuous, and said nothing about the fact that Jared — who, at the time, was very much closeted — was also gay. But Jared believes it was enough to immediately stop all overtures from the various fraternities that had shown an interest.

There are obvious, mechanical reasons why someone may not want to live in a frat house with a homosexual. That is not discrimination in and of itself. It’s not clear to me what a gay kid would really want out of fraternity life, other than, you know, the obvious. As the series continued, I was increasingly convinced that Jared had a weird fetish.

He would ultimately win the Machine nomination for SGA president, and win the position, but when he got there all they seem to want is to get good tickets to the football games:

Jared didn’t have to run any of his appointees by the Machine. But that’s not because the Machine was more open-minded than he’d expected. It’s because the Machine, he quickly found out… kind of doesn’t care. Which reminds me of Alex’s experience, in that basement, being told to vote for people with no further reasoning. It feels like something nefarious is going on — I mean, this is an organization that insists on meeting in basements late at night and dedicates so much energy to controlling the SGA. But as you keep digging, you begin to realize: there’s no secret agenda. The agenda is just…winning.

Ultimately any successful political organization has, as its number one goal, winning. Movements with ideological convictions among its members are unstable, prone to splitters. A laser focus on winning and maintaining power, on in group loyalty, allows for the careful husbanding of power, and its spending on carefully metered goals as needed. The author comes to a similar conclusion:

And here’s my theory: The Machine and its influence waxes and wanes in cycles. It exists to support Greek Life’s interests, so when Greek Life is under threat, it gets active. In the late 1960s and early 70s, fraternity and sorority enrollment nationwide fell sharply. Blame it on the counter-culture, blame it on institutional crackdowns, blame it on feminism or refusals to take part in such glaringly white institutions….for whatever reason, Greek Life’s hold on campus culture was loosening. Cue: the most active and violent period in The Machine’s modern history. Right now, Greek Life seems to be thriving at UA. Since 2000, the percentage of Bama students in fraternities and sororities has nearly doubled — in part due to the influx of out-of-state students in search of a “traditional” college experience (e.g., one where they get to “act like campus royalty”). The Machine has nothing to worry about, so it's gone relatively dormant, like a well-fed bear. But bears don’t hibernate forever — and when they wake up, they wake up mad.

Jared would finish up his character arc dropping out of SGA and Greek Life after getting a DUI going to Taco Bell and coming out as gay. He’d go on to law school at noted anti-racist institution…Washington and Lee (Shock horror!), where he no doubt remains the token black gay conservative. I’m convinced one of the reasons conservative find affirmative action so distressing is their experience with affirmative action in conservative politics. Nowhere can a black person rise farther with less talent than by claiming to be a Republican. Clarence Thomas is both the most eloquent arguer against, and the most persuasive example against, affirmative action. Jared might be a close second, though.

The problem with Southern whites wanting to venerate a lie about Robert E. Lee is there are in fact, plenty of Southern white people to be proud of from the time of the Civil War, except of course, most of them didn't fight on the side of the slavers in a war to perpetuate that practice. Which goes against the whole idea that the South isn't allowed to have Southern heroes.

The reality is you can still attempt to defend Robert E. Lee. You just have to defend the actual Robert E. Lee, not the one that existed in the mind of the Dunning School

Now, I know the response to do this is something like, "well, MLK Jr. cheated on his wife" or whatever. But the problem, is most left-leaning people are happy to either say that something like their personal foibles is widely outranked by what they did in their larger life (ie. MLK) or part of their record is a stain that should be criticized (ie. FDR w/ internment), but there's a difference to most people of the worst of left-leaning heroes and the worst y'know, defending slavery.

The reality for neo-Confederates is outside of the whole fighting to defend slavery, most of the Southern leadership during the Civil War that is venerated just didn't...have much to cheer for beyond that. Lee wasn't even a good general.

The problem with Southern whites wanting to venerate a lie about Robert E. Lee

The statement was "myth", not "lie". Can you specify "a lie about Robert E. Lee" that Southern whites in general want to venerate?

I have been repeatedly told that the history of the Civil War that I grew up on was the "Dunning School", a deceptive attempt to hide the crimes of the South. I've never actually figured out which crimes were hidden from me. I was taught from the start that from the perspective of the South, the Civil War was fought explicitly in defense of Slavery as an institution, but most of the people bringing up the Dunning School claim that denying this was one of the central points of the program. So on the one hand I'm told I've been lied to, and on the other hand the claimed nature of the lie is either unspecified or, in my experience, itself straightforwardly false. I was taught that Robert E Lee was an honorable man who fought ablely for a bad cause, lost, and accepted the verdict of battle with dignity. Which part of that was false?

Which prominent figures on the Union side do you consider worthy of veneration? John Brown? Sherman? Grant? Lincoln? I'm quite fond of all of them, as it happens. Are you?

Now, I know the response to do this is something like, "well, MLK Jr. cheated on his wife" or whatever.

It's routine for me to encounter left-leaning people who venerate Lenin or Trotsky or some other august personage among the Bolsheviks, or who venerate people generations later who engaged in lawless violence in support of their cause. I encounter more who think these people were just rascally knuckleheads, and have precisely zero knowledge of the horrors they unleashed and championed. I think those people are straightforwardly worse than the modal Robert E Lee admirer, because the people and institutions they venerate were straightforwardly worse than the slaving South. And this, on the understanding that the South richly deserved to have a significant portion of its men ground into worm-food because of the evils they perpetrated. From where I sit, the left doesn't have the slightest claim to moral insight, much less moral superiority. A significant portion of politically-active leftists are isomorphic to actual-literal-and-not-figurative neo-nazis.

Lee wasn't even a good general.

My understanding is that his contemporaries disagree with your assessment. Certainly I have never heard of any of the prominent generals fighting against him claiming that he was bad at his job.

I read a long essay about how Stanford was crushing social life, somewhat relevant

https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/

What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.

Unlike Harvard, which abruptly tried to ban “single-gender social organizations” and was immediately sued by alumni, Stanford picked off the Greek life organizations one by one to avoid student or alumni pushback. The playbook was always the same. Some incident would spark an investigation, and the administration would insist that the offending organization had lost its right to remain on campus. The group would be promptly removed.

When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” The building formerly known as Outdoor House was added to Neighborhood T.

Lonely, frustrated students are less safe than happy ones. Within four weeks of school starting, ten students had to be taken off-campus to get their stomachs pumped, a Stanford record for alcohol-related “transports” in such a short period of time. Occasionally, my Row house is rented for parties which are always overrun with freshman and sophomores. They’re not particularly good ones; still, I see freshmen in the corner of the events, drinking until they pass out. Despite the safety rhetoric, the new atomized campus culture isn’t even safer.

They’re not particularly good ones; still, I see freshmen in the corner of the events, drinking until they pass out. Despite the safety rhetoric, the new atomized campus culture isn’t even safer.

That makes perfect sense to me. My memory of freshman year at a school that had a big Greek system, but I wasn't in it, was a lot of really crappy "parties" like that. The students wanted to socialize, meet people, and have fun, but no one really knew how to do it. Partly because they were all 18 and didn't have money or a proper space for it, but also because they just literally didn't know how to throw a good party. So you ended up with these shitty "parties" that were just kids sitting around drinking, hoping that if they got drunk enough it would magically start becoming fun. Also way too crowded and hot, so the drinking was a way to handle social anxiety.

I really don't have any more problem with the guy you hate than I do any of the other people described in those articles. They're not my type of people in general and I find them all equally loathesome.

But the author of the article?

I hate communists, so I hate her most of all.

It’s watching power refine and reproduce itself

Until someone does the careful, long work of going back through the life of sociology since Marx and methodically removes his influence on the field, it is irreparably tainted and anyone who is a sociologist or uses their terminology should be treated with suspicion by default.

A nice write up, but what’s with the dig against Clarence Thomas at the end? What’s so bad about him?

He’s a strong social conservative.

Ironically, Clarence Thomas grew up speaking Gullah and is likely more connected to old school black culture than anyone else in public life.

Clarence Thomas is a perfect argument against affirmative action. He presents one with a dilemma, which either way proves that affirmative action is bad.

Is Clarence Thomas a brilliant jurist?

-- Yes. Then one should take his arguments against affirmative action, which are cogent and well argued, seriously and realize that affirmative action is bad.

-- No. That's why affirmative action is bad, it leads to the appointment of mediocre minds like Clarence Thomas to important positions.

Yes. Then one should take his arguments against affirmative action, which are cogent and well argued, seriously and realize that affirmative action is bad.

This argument doesn't follow. Even if one assumes that Thomas is a brilliant jurist, and we take his arguments seriously, that does not mean we will necessarily agree with his arguments. Brilliant people can be wrong too.

Ah, that makes more sense. I initially thought you meant he was an affirmative action appointment and was therefore the most persuasive example against affirmative action because he sucked. I didn’t pick up on the fact that you were establishing a dilemma.

Edit: On rereading, I think if you didn’t intend the message to be “Clarence Thomas sucks,” you rather muddied the waters by mentioning his name immediately after saying, “Nowhere can a black person rise farther with less talent than by claiming to be a Republican.”

Should have clarified by linking to Candace Owens and Mark Robinson but I was lazy at that point.

You know, my ancestors were shock infantry in the civil war, or at least that’s what the elders claim. I haven’t checked the documentation because no one does; some people claim to have been descended from no name officers, some from elite enlisted. You can probably guess at many of the differences between the families making these claims.

That is to say, this world is way more familiar to me than the previous article. It’s no secret that most non-blacks in the US tend to have a sharply negative opinion of black culture as it actually exists. That goes for respectable progressive types as well- there’s a YouTube channel I occasionally enjoy, ‘Criminal Lawyer Reacts’ of a progressive defense lawyer reacting to rap videos. He’s horrified in all the ways you’d expect a good progressive to be horrified by the content of drill and makes frequent exhortations to his viewers to try to mentor these young any-word-but-one-starting-with-n out of dysfunctional black culture. 'It's the culture' is a thing he says.

Now, obviously, I'm not in a frat. But wanting to exclude black-acting negros from your circle of intimates(which fraternities at least claim to be) is definitely a thing. We can argue about HBD and dysfunctional culture and whatever til we're blue in the face but duh, modern ADOS culture is one of a handful that's just uniquely bad. And this kid is complaining about not being able to live close enough to it in a conformist environment? Like duh you don't want your people taking their cues from nigs anymore than you would want them copying gypsies or something. Confederate nostalgia excludes the blacks much more effectively than cruder forms of racism.

Obviously, this is exacerbated by the whitest blacks leaving the community- the culture gets worse as good influences leave. But I don't know that ADOS culture broadly is salvageable.

That is to say, this world is way more familiar to me than the previous article.

They're the same article, about the same people. Originally I had this as one long comment but there were two obviously different things I wanted to talk about, and lacking a third it just got confusing.

But wanting to exclude black-acting negros from your circle of intimates(which fraternities at least claim to be) is definitely a thing.

I feel like excluding is too strong a word, though I guess not-including and excluding are synonymous. Because the complaint isn't (here) that they are actively hating anyone, it's simply we don't want to invite them to live in our house designed to be a place for similar guys with similar interests to hang out. I know it's old hat to point out, but it's a remarkable microcosm of how differently these things are viewed: a white guy rushing the Divine Nine would be pilloried as a racist for showing up looking white, and pilloried as an even bigger racist if he defended it by claiming that he was culturally black.

invite them to live in our house designed to be a place for similar guys with similar interests to hang out

Isn't the whole point of the guy that he grew up around these kinds of white guys and he is a similar guy with similar interests?

a white guy rushing the Divine Nine would be pilloried as a racist for showing up looking white

Not a perfect comparison, but some HBCUs have been quite successful at recruiting non-Black students, even though they've suffered the same sort of "taking of the talented tenth" that the Divine Nine have mentioned in OP. Not saying that I can't see it going this way, but I don't think it's strictly inevitable.

a white guy rushing the Divine Nine would be pilloried as a racist for showing up looking white

Would he? This actually doesn’t seem plausible to me at all. I think he would just be seen as either A) a troll, and criticized as such, or B) an eccentric and/or naïf, and treated with amused curiosity by the members of the fraternities. They would just quickly dismiss him, and nobody would even pretend he has any power to dispute it or claim discrimination or anything like that.

Well, hope this Jared character has more fun at W&L. When he puts the decal that every alumnus is mandated to put on their car, I sincerely hope people don't confuse it for a swastika, as has happened to guys I know.

How did they pick a logo that close to a swastika?

Designed 1904, https://my.wlu.edu/communications-and-public-affairs/publications-and-design/graphic-standards/the-trident
Best guess is that half are extremely dismissive of the suggestion of a resemblance, half secretly agree but find it hilarious and just another eccentric quirk of the school.

It’s the tragedy of how affirmative action has impacted the formation of black communities in the United States, the Talented Tenth is pulled off and fawned over by whites, handed easy diversity positions, when they could be improving the quality of black neighborhoods and communities.

This is, of course, one of my main arguments in favor of geographic and/or political resegregation of blacks in America. (And it was in fact the argument that some, both black and white, made in favor of segregation prior to the Civil Rights revolution.)

Months after being freed from 14 years in confinement, Assange is back in the spotlight, criticising the government.

This man is simply irrepressible! I have high hopes that Australians will be able to vote him into Senate soon.

Here is his hour long address to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE): https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mq85IZMeigc&t=2120s

Some juicy extracts from the transcript (I used ChatGPTBox to summarise but it was reluctant to talk about politics)

  1. "I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration I pleaded guilty to journalism. I pleaded guilty to seeking information from a source, and I pleaded guilty to informing the public what that information was."

  2. On CIA activities: "We exposed the CIA's infiltration of French political parties, the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, its production of malware and viruses, its hacking of iPhones."

  3. Regarding alleged CIA plans against him: "CIA director Pompeo launched a secret war against WikiLeaks, including plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the United Kingdom."

  4. On surveillance: "The CIA had agents permanently assigned to track my wife and newborn child."

  5. About former CIA officer Joshua Schulte: "Former CIA officer Joshua Schulte was convicted for providing information to WikiLeaks and is now held in isolation. A radio and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day to disorient him."

  6. On potential CIA actions in Europe: "Europe is vulnerable to having its sovereignty violated by CIA operations on European soil, violating human rights and European law."

  7. Regarding Michael Pompeo's memoirs: "Europe in Michael Pompeo's memoirs, which were published this year, brags about how the CIA reopened the investigation against me in Sweden."

  8. On the broader implications of his case: "The criminalization of journalists in the United States for asking for, receiving, or publishing classified information prevents Russia or indeed any other state from doing the same thing."

  9. "In 2017 the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats: Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive as CIA director, and William Barr, a former CIA officer as [Attorney General]."

Great to see. We need more of his energy.

It's a shame that the libertarian anti-authoritarian anti-government strain of U.S. politics got totally co-opted by Trump and MAGA. I wish that the grey tribe still had a voice in the broader political discussions.

Also I wonder if Assange likes bitcoin?

It's interesting to see that Assange slams the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations for their appointment of CIA directors that repressed free speech. He has a lot to say about Trump

However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected, and he appointed two wolves in MAGA hats, Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as CIA director, and William Bar, a former CIA officer, as US Attorney General. By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA's infiltration of French political parties, spying on French and German leaders, spying on the European Central Bank, European economics Ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole. We also revealed the CIA's vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, Cars, Smart TVs, and iPhones.

CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution. It is now a matter of public record that, under Pompeo's explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planning of false information. My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife, and instructions were given to obtain DNA from a six-month-old son's nappy. This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved. The CIA's targeting of myself, my family, and my associates through

And this is him limiting himself to only the public records: e.g court records and Pomeo's bragging in his book. You can only imagine what else is going on. We obviously can't trust any politician, but we can look at their past actions, and Trumps past actions are terrible. He doesn't even express any regrets for breaking campaign promises and siding with the CIA over the promised JFK files. He only says, "next time I will, you can be sure". Right....

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration I pleaded guilty to journalism.

Tiny reminder that there are loads of people who will nod their head yes, agree that it is totally possible for someone to plead guilty to a non-crime, yet not be willing to keep that thought in their head while thinking about other cases.

Which other cases are you referring to?

From the linked comment:

...which, of course, brings us back to where everything ultimately brings us back to - Donald Trump. I can't pass up incredible hypotheticals that cut to the crux of things and make all the partisans want to switch sides. Suppose Trump made what could have been argued to be a false business record in the state of New York with the intent to conceal something about Assange's actions related to this guilty plea. Would the NYT still think the true reality is that Assange actually pled guilty to a non-crime? Would they say that Trump could have an appeal to the courts of law, not the courts of fact, by saying, "No dawg, that's not a crime"? Or would they say that Assange's plea deal settles the matter, thoroughly establishing the fact that such actions absolutely are a crime, with no First Amendment defense?

The search/replace is "Assange" and "Cohen". So many people are perfectly happy saying that Cohen's guilty plea settles the matter that a campaign finance violation actually occurred and that there is no First Amendment defense against it. I think it's entirely reasonable to think that both Assange and Cohen actually pleaded guilty to non-crimes.

From time to time, people discuss prohibitions here. The general zeitgeist is often that one particular interpretation of the the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s is conclusive for all prohibitions of any type everywhere and always. Nevermind that there are alternative interpretations of the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Nevermind that different prohibitions are different. We now have one data set from South Africa.

In 2020, the South African government banned alcohol sales as part of their COVID measures. Then they lifted the ban, and then brought it back unexpectedly, and then did that again

Every ban saw murders decline, and every reprieve saw them return. Stunningly, prohibition worked:

Perhaps they just didn't keep the prohibition long enough over any time period for the data to show that murders would have really gone up massively over time. Perhaps murders aren't the right measure. (EDIT: Perhaps there were other restrictions that happened concurrent to the alcohol prohibition; one might be interested to see if there are any differences in start/end dates for other restrictions and see if there is something like a DiD.) Lots of interpretations, but only one limited data set. I'm not a huge fan of alcohol prohibition, personally, but I wonder if that is, to some extent, a luxury belief of mine.

As far as I know, prohibition measures in the US, enacted on state level many years, even decades before 1920 in multiple cases, were a long-term indirect consequence of the massive culling of men in the Civil War. A lopsided operational sex ratio (yeah, I just found this phrase on Wikipedia) that favors men inevitably leads to an overall loosening of social norms concerning men’s behavior, which in turn invites backlash on the part of the church lady demographic. This isn’t surprising. Gorbachov’s anti-alcohol campaign in the USSR was driven by the same fundamental considerations, presumably. (According to the 1959 Soviet census, the male-to-female sex ratio among the 35-50-yrs-old cohort was a whopping 4:7. )

I’m wondering if similar social forces are at play in South Africa now.

I’m wondering if similar social forces are at play in South Africa now.

Though the wider point is a great one, it's not really applicable to SA. The prohibitions were just covid measures - they're seen in retrospect as weird/funny, and there's no appetite to bring them back. More generally, SA politics is not very grassroots, things like that are largely determined in smoke-filled rooms by party elites rather than by social coalitions.

I find it hard to believe that just banning alcohol caused that much of a drop in murders in SA. For one thing, the liquor stores had block-long lines the days before lockdowns, both for personal stashes and for reselling. As for murders, there is a huge domestic violence problem, which prohibition would probably address, but the vast majority of murders in the townships are either for money or gang reasons. The thing is that there are key confounders: lockdowns made it far more difficult to supply illegal drugs like tik (meth and god knows what) and whoonga (heroin and god knows what, sometimes HIV meds), which are also a massive contributor to violent crime, lockdowns make gang activity more difficult and less lucrative, and the additional welfare passed out during lockdown periods probably dissuaded some marginal criminals from killing someone over fifty rand.

I would say that, given the study apparently counts car accidents, a huge chunk is probably coming from that. Driving drunk is totally normal in South Africa, from the richest to the poorest, and the general standard of driving is pretty dangerous (the common estimate is that 1/3rd of licences on the road are fake). Clearing the roads in general with lockdown and in particular eliminating drunk driving probably has some major effect as well.

I mean lockdowns also just mean fewer people on the roads. We saw global declines in road deaths, even in countries where most people drive soberly and defensively.

Yes, that's what I mean by clearing the roads in general - banning alcohol probably had an additional synergistic effect on top of that. Also, in addition to clearing cars off roads, a lot of road deaths in SA are pedestrians walking along the shoulder (poor folks will walk very long distances by the highway), who were probably also cleared out somewhat by lockdown. They also wouldn't have the uh, inexplicable uptick in road deaths in the US from the summer of 2020.

whoonga (heroin and god knows what, sometimes HIV meds)

I admire the diligence of the local dealers, why not give your clients some PEP for HIV gratis? Saves on the costs of sharing needles and you hold onto a lifetime client for a longer value of said lifetime.

If you run into any docs fleeing the South African medical system, it's an interesting topic to ask about. Wikipedia claims there may be some psychoactive effects, but I've never heard of that, what I hear from SA medical types is that the binding agent in the antiretrovirals is thought to help hold whatever chemicals they put in it together (plus, most likely, superstitions of various sorts).

Prohibition was a lot more successful than it’s given credit for. It permanently changed American drinking culture. Prohibition is the reason most men don’t spend every evening standing around a a little stool with a bottle of liquor getting blasted, like in Russia.

Total bullshit.

Europe started from the same base and doesn't have that problem. Never has prohibition.

Alcoholism also declined in Russia by quite a lot since the 90s.

Alcoholism also declined in Russia by quite a lot since the 90s.

coinciding with blanket bans on alcohol ads and wide restrictions on sales

We have kitchen tables, thank you very much. Unless you're talking about drinking in garage co-ops. Anyway, the patterns of alcoholism have shifted even in Russia. Beer alcoholism is now a thing.

Prohibition is the reason most men don’t spend every evening standing around a a little stool with a bottle of liquor getting blasted, like in Russia.

sorry, paint the picture for me? is the stool a makeshift table for a bottle of gin? and there may or may not be glasses?

As with many, many, other things the 'American' man in question standing around the little stool with a bottle of liquor is not the same 'American' man who fought the war against King George.

Italians and Irish catholics drunkenly beating their suffragette wives is not why my WASPy ancestors fought the revolutionary war

You know suffragettes were disproportionately wasps and their descendants(namely Mormons), right? The 19th amendment is one of those things where the Catholic ‘told you so’ meme applies.

The problem with the 19th amendment isn't women, it's democracy. The same as the 17th amendment, and the 24th amendment, and the 26th amendment.

We need fewer voters, not more voters. We need a republic, not a democracy.

And how do you decide who those fewer voters should be?

I’ll bite the bullet- male heads of property owning households with children, and widows of the same, should be allowed to vote, assuming no evidence of treachery, criminality, or immorality.

male heads of property owning households with children

That would result in a government which undervalues the well-being of

  • wives
  • households of very limited means
  • people without children

where their interests conflict with those of well-off fathers.

Considering this acceptable under-mines one's standing to object to FOO attempting to reserve the vote to FOO, and steering the government to ignore the interests of BAR where they conflict with those of FOO.

The political process then becomes a game of musical-chairs where every group tries to grab the government before their enemies do.

Whichever groups end up losing this conflict then have less incentive, and reason, to regard the government as legitimate; and being unable to influence it peaceably, are more likely to attempt change through violence.

I would prefer that political violence be avoided.

I can therefore conclude that it would be wise to extend the vote to single people, wives, non-child-bearing husbands, and fathers without property.

assuming no evidence of treachery, criminality, or immorality

And how long would it take before 'supporting policies I don't like' became 'evidence of immorality'?

There are many, many ways to do that. You could restrict it to people who pay the poll tax, or to those who own property, or those who are married with children, or only people who have been in the country for twenty-one years, or only people who have been resident of the state for twenty-one years, or...or...or... You can read history and come up with your own way, but limiting who is allowed to vote is a normal suggestion and has been implemented in some form everywhere voting occurs.

Frankly I'd settle for paying people not to vote, as anyone who would rather have $100 than cast a vote shouldn't be voting anyway.

In my ideal world, I'd be the marginal voter excluded, so the only people allowed to vote are those better than me, and nobody worse than me has the privilege.

Would you like to suggest a way, or were you thinking I wouldn't bite the bullet? Do you care about the differences, or are you just expressing disdain?

There are many, many ways to do that. You could restrict it to people who pay the poll tax, or to those who own property, or those who are married with children, or only people who have been in the country for twenty-one years, or only people who have been resident of the state for twenty-one years, or...or...or... You can read history and come up with your own way, but limiting who is allowed to vote is a normal suggestion and has been implemented in some form everywhere voting occurs.

And whichever criterion you choose, wherever the interests of that group differ from its complement, the elected officials will then be incentivised to discount the latter in favour of the former.

This is not, to put it delicately, a recipe for a peaceful society.

Frankly I'd settle for paying people not to vote, as anyone who would rather have $100 than cast a vote shouldn't be voting anyway.

This runs up against the diminishing marginal utility of money. $100 means a lot more to someone of lesser means than it does to a billionaire.

Would you like to suggest a way, or were you thinking I wouldn't bite the bullet? Do you care about the differences, or are you just expressing disdain?

It was more of a Socratic method question; however, one could select a number of residents at random and pay them enough that they could devote themselves full-time to political issues....

Well sure, but blaming Irish immigrants for that is just dumb- expanding ballot access was a WASP project.

Angloids had major problems with alcoholism too, one need only look up the gin craze of the 18th century to find out.

I was not aware pre-prohibition era Italians were notorious for drunken wife beating

It's funny seeing some of the comments about how "inevitable" the horrible consequences of Prohibition are, when I think about the various "dry" villages here in Alaska.

I have to think it's kinda different there. A small village in Alaska, with a high native population of people who are genitically weak against alcohol, is pretty different from New York City with a large mafia and a population where alcohol is part of the traditional culture.

Or about approximately half of Arkansaw.

Arkansas and Alaska both have high murder rates and low lifespans. I don't think alcohol bans are the reason for that, but they're not exactly advertisements for the edification that comes from these policies. In contrast, the hard-drinking Upper Midwest has low murder rates and long lifespans.

So, yeah, you can probably ban alcohol and reduce consumption significantly. That won't necessarily cause the Al Capone apocalypse. But it also won't usher in an era of long lives and peaceful living.

In contrast, the hard-drinking Upper Midwest has low murder rates and long lifespans.

Germanic Wisconsin on its own God-level drunk tier even amid surrounding competition. Also, the Germans didn’t like whiskey, so old fashioneds made with brandy are a Wisconsin supper club staple.

I eat like a Bohemian and drink like a German, thanks be to God for this. Amen. —Martin Luther

Alternatively, societies with lower baseline murder rates and longer lifespans can tolerate negative effects of alcohol use. They remain in relatively good place after the alcohol-related problems have taken taken their toll. Whereas if your society has problems ... there are very few societal problems that can't be made worse by increasing the number alcoholics and other addicts around.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that alcohol prohibition reliably reduces the murder rate in the long run. This is worth taking into account, but it's hardly conclusive of whether we should have alcohol prohibition. Reducing the speed limit on all roads to 25mph will reliably reduce traffic deaths; outlawing TVs and bookshelves over a certain size will reliably save the lives of several hundred young children each year who are killed when furniture falls on them; not to mention all the lives that would be saved by banning candles and fireplaces; etc. Personal liberty has a great deal of value and I think we should be skeptical of prohibitions even if the data suggests they are "good" for people.

You’d also have to compare it to the good available in allowing these things. Reduced speed increases the cost of business and increases the commute time for workers. Outlawing bookshelves above a certain size limits books.

Hard drugs provide no real value, and huge downsides. Alcohol has benefits is promoting socialization, but has drawbacks in drunk driving injuries, bad decisions, etc. fireplaces and candles provide backup heat and light when electric power isn’t available.

Reducing the speed limit on all roads to 25mph will reliably reduce traffic deaths

It really depends on which roads you're talking about, and who's using them. Reducing the speed limit to 25 on the DC beltway at rush hour won't do anything because no-one's going 25 to begin with. And reducing the speed limit to 25 in rural Mauretania won't do anything because no-one has a car anyway.

outlawing TVs and bookshelves over a certain size will reliably save the lives of several hundred young children each year who are killed when furniture falls on them

several hundred? really? Even worldwide that is surprisingly high (and outlawing large furniture would likely result in more stacked furniture more likely to fall anyway)

It's double digits a day from slipping in the shower, in case that feels like context

571 in 20 years in the US.

Thanks! More than expected, but still too low to make "outlawing TVs and bookshelves over a certain size will reliably save the lives of several hundred young children each year" true (as it will not fully eliminate such deaths)

Thanks, I guess I was slightly off, it's more like dozens per year. Still far more deaths than the total number of US school shooting deaths over the same time period (131 killed and 197 wounded in active shooter incidents at elementary and secondary schools from 2000 to 2020).

Besides, it's not like you're looking to ban all bookshelves, this is about common-sense restrictions on assault shelves. Civilians do not need access to 14-foot-high bookshelves!

Jokes aside, it is interesting to contemplate where the lines get drawn on things that are concerning, things that seem obvious to some, and so on. Dozens of dead kids per year ain't nothing, but I have never heard anyone seriously propose bookshelf safety measures.

An IKEA Billy with an extension is only 7’9”. My grandfather and father could store all their books on duck hunting in one. No one needs a 14’ bookcase.

in school shootings other children are killed (almost certainly over than half of them did no bullying to perpetrators), with furniture, one's own

The real enemy is quick-change shelves. If it’s not secured to the wall, it’s not California compliant. (There’s a joke about magazines here, too, but I can’t quite make it work.)

I don’t think this is a line-drawing issue. It’s a difference of intent.

the solution is to ban both 14 foot high bolsheviks and assault weapons. i'm sure anti-gun people would be willing to swallow the bullet of banning 14 foot high bolsheviks.

14 foot high bolsheviks

What about 14-foot-high Left-SRs?

At last, compromise.

Actually

https://www.homedepot.com/p/SIMPLE-MOUNT-Furniture-Anti-Tip-Kit-TK400L/206411011

Very common

Something similar is included in each IKEA bookshelf.

I have never heard anyone seriously propose bookshelf safety measures.

some reasonable ones are done by producers (many of mine come with stickers/instructions to attach them to wall rather leave freestanding, exactly to reduce risk of failing)

I hear those are also highly recommended in earthquake-prone regions.

I'd bet that the quantity of Americans getting use out of ARs as larger than the quantity getting value from a 14 foot bookshelf.

I sympathize with this in regards to full prohibition of alcohol unless you live in a sufficiently fallen society. Sufficient problem and prohibition is not only justifiable but a moral imperative and you are extremely unreasonable if you are not willing to consider that there is a red line. If your society has enough of a problem with alcohol abuse then it should be banned no question.

For example alcohol prohibition towards Indian "native" Americans is a no-brainer. It is extremely destructive towards them and makes them dangerous to others as well. Both how alcohol affects them, and the general problem of alcohol abuse in their community, is an example where the skepticism must be towards those who decriminalized it, at the expense of the people affected.

The trade offs in comparison to the examples you mention aren't there. Still, I also sympathize with considering idea of freedom even if it causes harm, provided the harm isn't large enough or comes with other significant benefits. Alcohol is damaging enough that the weight would fall in favor of prohibition except for one reason.

The only reason I don't support prohibiting it is because it is so entrenched culturally, and there is historical continuity and significance. So there is a more significant trade off because it is a more important part of living and past culture. Of more normal and respectable people too. So there is a point there. However these are advantages but of a much different nature than books, or getting faster to your destination than 25 miles per hour. But alcohol is bad enough. It carries a significant cost. And certainly restrictions and trying to curtail alcohol abuse is good.

We should put a line to it and prohibit harmful drugs who don't have that history. Alcohol is bad enough but its byproducts are too culturally significant. The rest of harmful drugs are not. The damage that alcohol abuse inflicts in society is bad enough and we should not allow more to be added to it.

Yes, there is a line where prohibition makes sense, but I don't think any human society comes close to crossing that line when it comes to alcohol. This is especially true given that alcohol has proven its ability to coexist alongside the development of advanced human societies over the course of several millennia.

You are making an argument of faith here based on an affirmation rather than sincerely considering whether the line has been crossed and examining the facts and where this doesn't pass, and where it passes. Because there are actual human societies that the line has been crossed.

I gave the most fitting example which is Indian country. The effect of alcohol towards them is a complete horror show. The level of harm it causes them far surpasses any possible benefit. There seems to be a genetic component to that even though this is also a field where there are those trying to deny race differences. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12010113

Even as it is these are the consequences worldwide: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-topics/alcohol-facts-and-statistics/global-burden

Globally, alcohol misuse was the seventh-leading risk factor for premature death and disability in 2016.

In 2016, alcohol misuse was the leading risk factor for death and disability among people ages 15 to 49.

In 2016, approximately 14.0% of total deaths among people ages 20 to 39 were alcohol attributable.

In 2016, of all deaths attributable to alcohol consumption worldwide, 28.7% were due to injuries, 21.3% were due to digestive diseases (primarily cirrhosis of the liver and pancreatitis), 19.0% were due to cardiovascular diseases, 12.9% were due to infectious diseases (including tuberculosis, pneumonia, and HIV/AIDS), and 12.6% were due to cancers (most prominently those of the upper aerodigestive tract).

In 2016, 5.1% of the burden of disease and injury worldwide (132.6 million disability-adjusted life years) was attributable to alcohol consumption."

These are significant consequences.

The prohibitions mentioned in the OP in South Africa might be another example of a good trade off. If your society is South Africa you kind of have to prioritize making it less of a failed society and reducing the violence.

There seems to be a genetic component to that even though this is also a field where there are those trying to deny race differences.

Shouldn't the quality of the field in general make you a bit suspect of the line of causality here? I don't doubt that Native Americans engage in a lot of dysfunctional alcohol use, but I do doubt that the alcohol is what's causing the dysfunction.

More broadly, it's just kind of weird that alcohol putatively reduces societal health, but a map of state-by-state alcohol consumption is just about anti-correlated with longevity. Similarly, many of the hard-drinking countries around the world are doing great, and the places that don't drink are dysfunctional hellholes with short life expectancies (with the exception of a couple wealthy Gulf oil states). I suppose this is largely a product of wealthier places being able to buy more alcohol and the individuals that drink the most aren't doing great (Simpson's paradox style), but it's hard for me to look at Germany and France and think that they're actually missing out on a ton of longevity and productivity due to all the beer and wine.

It's the opposite. They are trying to deny and obfuscate because they oppose differences and want to talk about it in a politically correct manner. So there are debunkers pretending the issue doesn't exist and is just a negative stereotype. In the past there was a complete prohibition of alcohol sales to "Native Americans" .

Like many real issues, you are also going to find some talking about it.

There is in a fact a bigger problem of drunkedness, people being addicted to alcohol and dying in part due to that. Maybe they abuse the alcohol also for reasons of being impulsive, IQ related and so on but it doesn't change that the combo of them and alcohol works worse. Both in terms of behavior and health.

but it's hard for me to look at Germany and France and think that they're actually missing out on a ton of longevity and productivity due to all the beer and wine.

The issue is quantifiable. Even outside alcohol, when it comes to drugs one can see an increase of drug abuse in certain european countries due to less policing and a more pro drug culture.

Germany is still going to be better than muslim countries but Germans would live longer without alcohol consumption.

Sure, it is manageable even if it is probably among the top negative behaviors that affect life expectancy in countries like Germany. That is because Germans don't have that many problems and are successful. Most Muslim countries have more significant problems to worry about.

The issue becomes especially notable in some eastern european countries where it actually plays a more significant effect for bellow 80 years old life expectancy. Even in Germany, for alcohol abusers it does eat years from their life.

Men in Belarus live only 68 years and this was the country that had the highest alcohol consumption in the world in 2010! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31960526/

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/05/17/heaviest-drinking-countries/9146227/

  1. Belarus

Alcohol per capita (APC) consumption: 17.5 liters Pct. binge drinking: 26.5% (14th highest) Pct. of deaths, alcohol-related: 34.7% (the highest) Life expectancy at birth: 72.1 years

Life expectancies in the nations with heavy alcohol use are also shorter. The average life expectancy at birth in high income nations was 79.3 years as of 2012, far higher than in almost all of the heaviest drinking nations. In Romania, the average life expectancy was just 68.7 years. In Russia and Ukraine the average life expectancy was below 72 years as well.

Anyway, comparing countries like Germany with the worst is a losing game. You either compare with other successful societies that do certain things differently, or try to estimate how it would do, if it did things differently.

Now, you could argue that drinking is a common part of German culture, and although it can be done in moderation or you can have to the other extreme Eastern Europe type of disaster.

Here are some numbers of the top of a few seconds searching

The use of psychoactive substances is one of the main risk factors for the global burden of disease and premature mortality (1). In 2019, worldwide tobacco use was responsible for approximately 229 million disability-adjusted life years (DALY) and 8.71 million deaths. A total of 2.44 million deaths were attributable to the consumption of alcohol and 494,000 to the use of illegal drugs (2, 3). Thus, based on the total number of annual deaths (56.53 million), a fifth (11.64 million) are accounted for by the use of psychoactive substances (3). Despite an observed decline in the consumption of alcohol since the 1990s, Germany is among the 10 countries worldwide with the highest per capita consumption rates (4, 5). The proportion of smokers in 2019 was also above the West European average (6).

https://www.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article/226333/The-use-of-psychoactive-substances-in-Germany-findings-from-the-Epidemiological-Survey-of-Substance-Abuse-2021

So based on the above numbers, it is 4.32% of total mortality.

I think, if a society already has a strong taboo against alcohol consumption, there's good reason to maintain said taboo legally. Whatever benefits were gained historically, I'm not sure it matters now. And the taboo suppressing consumption would hopefully tamp down on the natural consequences of creating a black market good.

I've seen some Muslim reformers like Mustafa Akyol defend the right to drink alcohol as part of liberalizing Islam and I always thought it was not just a huge strategic error (I worry it seems very suspicious to focus on that element - which brings Muslim cultures more superficially in line with Western ones - to conservatives who might otherwise listen) but of little practical good and much harm anyway.

Yes, there is a line where prohibition makes sense, but I don't think any human society comes close to crossing that line when it comes to alcohol.

The following winter (this was the year in which Cn. Pompey and M. Crassus were consuls [55 B.C.]), those Germans [called] the Usipetes, and likewise the Tenchtheri, with a great number of men, crossed the Rhine , not far from the place at which that river discharges itself into the sea. The motive for crossing [that river] was, that having been for several years harassed by the Suevi, they were constantly engaged in war, and hindered from the pursuits of agriculture. The nation of the Suevi is by far the largest and the most warlike nation of all the Germans. They are said to possess a hundred cantons, from each of which they yearly send from their territories for the purpose of war a thousand armed men: the others who remain at home, maintain [both] themselves and those-engaged in the expedition. The latter again, in their turn, are in arms the year after: the former remain at home. Thus neither husbandry, nor the art and practice of war are neglected. But among them there exists no private and separate land; nor are they permitted to remain more than one year in one place for the purpose of residence. They do not live much on corn, but subsist for the most part on milk and flesh, and are much [engaged] in hunting; which circumstance must, by the nature of their food, and by their daily exercise and the freedom of their life (for having from boyhood been accustomed to no employment, or discipline, they do nothing at all contrary to their inclination), both promote their strength and render them men of vast stature of body. And to such a habit have they brought themselves, that even in the coldest parts they wear no clothing whatever except skins, by reason of the scantiness of which, a great portion of their body is bare, and besides they bathe in open rivers.

Merchants have access to them rather that they may have persons to whom they may sell those things which they have taken in war, than because they need any commodity to be imported to them. Moreover, even as to laboring cattle, in which the Gauls take the greatest pleasure, and which they procure at a great price, the Germans do not employ such as are imported, but those poor and ill-shaped animals, which belong to their country; these, however, they render capable of the greatest labor by daily exercise. In cavalry actions they frequently leap from their horses and fight on foot; and train their horses to stand still in the very spot on which they leave them, to which they retreat with great activity when there is occasion; nor, according to their practice, is any thing regarded as more unseemly, or more unmanly, than to use housings. Accordingly, they have the courage, though they be themselves but few, to advance against any number whatever of horse mounted with housings. They on no account permit wine to be imported to them, because they consider that men degenerate in their powers of enduring fatigue, and are rendered effeminate by that commodity.

C. Julius Caesar. Caesar's Gallic War. Translator. W. A. McDevitte. Translator. W. S. Bohn. 1st Edition. New York. Harper & Brothers. 1869. Harper's New Classical Library. Hirt-Gal 4.1-2.

The Gauls are exceedingly addicted to the use of wine and fill themselves with the wine which is brought into their country by merchants, drinking it unmixed, and since they partake of this drink without moderation by reason of their craving for it, when they are drunken they fall into a stupor or a state of madness. Consequently many of the Italian traders, induced by the love of money which characterizes them, believe that the love of wine of these Gauls is their own godsend. For these transport the wine on the navigable rivers by means of boats and through the level plain on wagons, and receive for it an incredible price; for in exchange for a jar of wine they receive a slave, getting a servant in return for the drink.

Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History. Book V, Part 25.

I am the son of these people, who did not write down their own drinking habits so they are only described to us by others. We can cherry pick whatever quote we like, for example,

"To continue drinking night and day without intermission is not considered shameful by any man"

Did they drink always or never or somewhere in between? Maybe even, were they people much like us? Or me at least

I am the son of these people,

Are you certain? After the Gaul population lost to the Romans, significant portions died and-or were enslaved. If we take Caesar's claims at face value, about one third of the population. If it is a propagandist claim inflated by factor of 10x or 100x, still humongous amount of people who never had descendants.

They lost their culture to the extent that precious little is known of pre-Roman Gallic culture and the language spoken in France is classified as Romance language, heavily descended from Latin.

Presumably the people least adapted to unmixed wine have died off by natural selection during the generations.

They lost their culture to the extent that precious little is known of pre-Roman Gallic culture and the language spoken in France is classified as Romance language, heavily descended from Latin.

S_S did also mention the Suebi, who have plenty of descendants.

Roman male slaves were not castrated and could indeed have descendants. Roman female slaves could also have descendants, both with male slaves and in the typical way of slavery.

To be fair, drinking wine (and especially beer) does lower your T levels, so the Gauls were right about the feminizing influence of alcohol.

A Twitter autist I follow was suggesting that mead is the true chad drink due to honey's beneficial effect on T levels. Ergo, the masculine vigor of the vikings. More likely, any positive effects are lost when turning it into alcohol.

it this a prohibition against alcohol or a prohibition against wine in particular? From the text it makes sense that it is a prohibition against alcohol because they are criticising the effects of alcohol but i can hypothesise a situation where they are against wine but freely drinking beer.

They on no account permit wine to be imported to them, because they consider that men degenerate in their powers of enduring fatigue, and are rendered effeminate by that commodity.

Is this supposed to imply that the Suevi prohibited alcohol consumption entirely? Or just wine? Obviously the Nordic peoples of the Viking age were famously producers and drinkers of mead, and contemporary Germanic peoples famously enjoyed ale, so unless those were cultural innovations that arose centuries after the Suevi - or unless the Suevi were an outlier - I would assume that alcohol consumption was not unknown among their people.

Chiming in as an oenophile. The Romans introduced viticulture to (what is now) Germany in the 8th Century. Wine is all about soil and climate, and only certain regions in Germany produce wine; mostly river valleys in the southwest, but there is a little bit produced near Dresden in Saxony along the Elbe.

Importation of unwatered wine by various Gaullish tribes is noted to have produced what appears to be a wide-spread plague of alcoholism. The price of wine rose so high that in addition to paying vast sums of precious metals to the merchants, the Gauls were willing to enslave their own and trade them for the stuff (who were promptly shipped to Roman vineyards and put to work making more wine grapes to be sent to Gaul). I added in a quote from Diodorus Siculus attesting to this to my post above.

You should look into aboriginals in Australia, alcohol really fucks these people up.

Unfortunately, there are some people that cannot properly metabolize alcohol because their ancestors have not been degenerate drunks.

The same people who cannot properly digest milk because their ancestors never bothered to domestic cows

We keep warning you to stop shitting out one-liners, and you keep dropping in to do it. Two week ban, this time.

but I don't think any human society comes close to crossing that line when it comes to alcohol.

How much time have you spent around Native Americans?

I don't think any human society comes close to crossing that line when it comes to alcohol

Not even remote native communities with super high alcoholism rates, and where lots of kids get fetal alcohol syndrome?

alcohol has proven its ability to coexist alongside the development of advanced human societies over the course of several millennia.

Yes, but not native american societies. And there's plenty of evidence that Eurasians have had some serious selection pressure to help them deal with alcohol (and alcoholism is still a huge problem in Europe + North America).

I'm not a huge fan of alcohol prohibition, personally, but I wonder if that is, to some extent, a luxury believe of mine.

TBH the devil will be in the details of the baseline murder level (if there's already rampant organized crime murders, the addition of alcohol to the black sector may not make much of a dent), how the distribution system of alcohol works in SA, the availability of smuggled alternatives, whether there's local traditions of brewing/distilling that people can fall back on for moonshine, the competence and reach of police, etc.

can we find any signal in dry counties in the US? or is the data hopelessly confounded?

It’s hopelessly confounded because any county remote enough for dryness to not just be extra business for the next one is, well, exactly what I just said.

Dry counties have legal alcohol possession and use, they merely lack alcohol retailers.

Dry towns remove bars from the equation, but not much to reduce drinking.

I don't know; it would be interesting to look into!

Nevermind that there are alternative interpretations of the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

Yes, there are revisionist interpretations pushed by those who want to do it again despite the clearly destructive results from the last time.

And the US drug prohibition has not, regardless of your protestations, covered itself in glory.

there are revisionist interpretations pushed by those who want to do it again

Nah. I think a lot of the data requires a pretty significant revision on the standard narrative, but I also don't want to do it again.

And the US drug prohibition has not, regardless of your protestations, covered itself in glory.

The good news here is that we now have memorialized that this is your standard. Not covered in glory. Oof, you are a pure child of light, and I'm sure this standard will never come back to bite you ever.

The good news here is that we now have memorialized that this is your standard. Not covered in glory. Oof, you are a pure child of light, and I'm sure this standard will never come back to bite you ever.

I know all sorts of wordplay is against the rules on The Motte, but that was in fact understatement.

I view the people who want to re-enact Prohibition to be the socially-conservative equivalents of all those whose only solutions to current problems are "more of the same, which had absolutely terrible results", like non-policing and eliminating discipline in schools, doing nothing but "helping" homeless, etc.

Oh goody! I know you won't want anything that could be cast as "more of the same, which had absolutely terrible results", so I'm sure you'll be very forthcoming with your incredible, innovative solutions to current problems, solutions which don't look anything like what has come before. I so look forward to that little red bell icon.

If you insist. Both of you are being jerks. (And @The_Nybbler, as usual, is being dishonest, claiming that we prohibit "wordplay." Like all our other anklebiters, you know where the line is and you pretend not to when you petulantly insist on crossing it.)

Knock it off, both of you.

If you prefer sneering in order to paper over the point that "more of the same, which had absolutely terrible results" is transparently a very bad idea, knock yourself out.

I learned my sneering for the purpose of papering over the point that "more of the same, which had absolutely terrible results" is transparently a very bad idea from only the very best.

I really like both of you guys, why can't we all just get along? (cry emoji)

but drug prohibition in other places do quite well. Korea, China, Japan, Singapore, - in comparison US basically does not prohibit drugs at all.

If America stopped being America and Americans stopped living there, we might get Singaporean results. Until then citing an island city with no hinterland is an absurdity.

those who want to do it again

Fascinatingly, there is still a Prohibition Party in the United States. They've apparently run a Presidential candidate in every election since 1872.

They’ve morphed into a tiny third party for Protestant fundamentalists who think the constitution party isn’t socially conservative enough, though- the last platform of theirs I looked at said to refer to the King James Bible rather than articulate specific policies.

the last platform of theirs I looked at said to refer to the King James Bible rather than articulate specific policies.

So they're open-borders (Leviticus 19:34) gender-neutralist (Galatians 3:28) welfare liberals (Ezekiel 16:49)?

I have trouble considering it much of a morph, considering how much Protestant fundamentalism had to do with the Temperance movement from the beginning.

The original prohibition movement was as much of a woman’s movement as anything else, tied up with progressive politics moreso than fundamentalism.

Being a woman's movement and with a relationship to progressive politics was absolutely not mutually exclusive with being an evangelical movement, especially prior to the Civil War.

Protestantism and especially English or Scandinavian inflected Protestantism was heavily correlated with Temperance for a very long time. There's a reason many dry counties left in the South are heavily Protestant even though they're deeply conservative.

Last time, the prohibition worked well in lowering alcohol abuse. Also it partly failed due to corruption. The drug problem is so bad also because of corruption and influential people connected to the drug trade like spooks of the CIA.

The solution to this is to go after criminals, mobsters, gangsters, criminal spooks that use drugs to fund their black budget, etc.

Decriminalization of drug policies lead to far greater addiction to harmful substances. There is no solution to corruption than to punish those engaging it. You can't escape the negative consequences through legalization and tolerance.

Last time, the prohibition worked well in lowering alcohol abuse.

It worked well in reducing alcohol use. Long term it probably did lower alcohol abuse (basically by ending saloon culture) but I don't know that alcohol abuse during prohibition was down.

South Africa is far more corrupt than the USA, so if this was really the root of the issue, we’d expect prohibition to have failed there as well.

Well, it depends on how much you want policies to work. American prohibition worked in improving alcohol related diseases but there was still some success by mobsters in bypassing it.

Also there were other legal avenues to bypass it. Doctor prescriptions, religious exceptions, etc. https://www.tastingtable.com/1180444/the-legal-way-you-could-obtain-alcohol-during-prohibition/

These loopholes were abused to continue the trade during prohibition. For example, there were a lot of fake rabbis abused the religious exception. https://www.jta.org/2019/08/27/ideas/the-clever-fake-rabbis-who-made-millions-off-of-prohibition

Quoting from the above:

The likelihood of getting caught was reduced by enabling and participating law enforcement officials and politicians. Furthermore, for those who were caught, the punishments were not severe. For example, the Volstead Act stated that the fine was at most $500 for a first violation, which barely made a dent in what many violators typically made selling the illicit drinks.

In a more failed society, with more serious abuse problems, prohibition policies might work even better.

I am more addressing the "drug war hasn't solved the problem" claim. Even with the corruption, anti-drug policies in comparison to decriminalization policies, still save lives related to the drug abuse. In South Africa it also helped with the murders.

Another relevant issue, is the problem that criminals might take advantage of black market conditions to become powerful. Appeasing them by legalizing their industry still gets you the harmful consequences of the drug trade. There isn't a better alternative than actually genuinely trying to get rid of corruption.

Are there societies with more corruption on other issues like the economy, with less corruption on drugs than the USA? I am not speaking about south africa here. But there are plenty examples of countries without America's drug abuse problems. Part of the reason for the corruption might be this pro drug use ideology. How much does the police actually tries to enforce laws against drug abuse? In addition to American corruption, being bordered by countries that have powerful drug cartels is also important. That is still about criminals capturing power and acting with impunity.

But the worldwide record shows that American style drug use is not a problem shared by all societies, and not even all affluent societies.

And the US drug prohibition has not, regardless of your protestations, covered itself in glory.

Decriminalization has been a disaster. The overdose death rate increased by 2,400% between 1980 and 2020. The data cuts off, but it's even worse now.

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

Over 100,000 people died due to overdoses in the United States last year.

And of course the negative effects of the War on Drugs are highly overstated as well.

The overdose death rate increased by 2,400% between 1980 and 2020.

That is not the time window over which hard drug decriminalization occurred for a small portion of the national population. In fact that time window is so much wider that I accept this as evidence that unrelated social trends are swamping the data.

"Deaths of despair" from opiates blow up in regions across the country. Mostly in areas that certainly didn't legalize recreational fentanyl. I'm blaming something other than Oregon state law.

Decriminalization has been a disaster. The overdose death rate increased by 2,400% between 1980 and 2020. The data cuts off, but it's even worse now.

It's impossible to untangle recent decrim efforts from the recently increased popularity of fentanyl if you are looking at OD rate as a metric -- it is just much easier to OD on, and I'd argue that the popularity (which we are probably now stuck with) was a direct result of the WOD enforcement regime.

I agree that fentanyl is the biggest cause.

But, c'mon, the overdose rate in places that decriminalized has spiked by huge amounts. In King County, where I live, deaths TRIPLED between 2019 and 2023. In 2023, one in 1700 people in King County died of an overdose. This is massive.

https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/medical-examiner/reports-dashboards/overdose-deaths-dashboard

What changed after 2019? Fentanyl was already out there. The difference was open air drug markets with ZERO enforcement.

In good news, deaths will be lower in 2024 than in 2023. And, as coincidence would have it, when I drive by 12th and Jackson now, there are only a handful of junkies, not the 100 or so that used to congregate there. Drug enforcement works.

It's right there on page 1 -- non-fentanyl-involved ODs are flat.

I haven't been to Seattle lately, but just north in Vancouver there have been lightly enforced open-air drug-marts for decades. I think Portland too? Decriminalization is just a recognition of the de facto situation -- as such it doesn't really change things much. Actual legalization such that the drug supply is not left in the hands of brutal smuggling gangs might help -- but I think it's probably too late now that the hardcore opiates users are hooked on fentanyl in particular, and actively prefer it to other less finicky opiates. This intractable situation came about entirely because fentanyl is easier/cheaper to smuggle -- which is a direct result of the War on Drugs.

Actual legalization would alleviate accidental fentanyl overdoses because they are due to insufficiently good manufacturing. There's plenty of margin between a dose which gets you high and a dose which kills you if you can get a consistent dose.

I know that New York City has had an issue with unlicensed weed shops. The licensed weed shops have complained that because of their higher expenses that stem from obtaining and maintaining a license, they can’t compete with the unlicensed.

I wonder how much actual legalization would alleviate accidental fentanyl overdoses, given the huge problem with fentanyl is it is so cheap to produce. It winds up in all sorts of other drugs as it is a cost-effective way to boost another drug’s high. Could the cost of actually-legalized drugs be brought down enough that people shy away from street drugs like most would currently with bathtub gin?

Could the cost of actually-legalized drugs be brought down enough that people shy away from street drugs like most would currently with bathtub gin?

Not sure about cocaine (or LSD I guess -- neither are prescribed very much), but prescription versions of all the other popular ones are already way cheaper than the street versions. (not including marijuana of course, since it's roughly as hard to grow as lettuce and various regulations tend to make the official versions more expensive to produce than the ways the black market has already figured out)

I know that New York City has had an issue with unlicensed weed shops. The licensed weed shops have complained that because of their higher expenses that stem from obtaining and maintaining a license, they can’t compete with the unlicensed.

Licensing isn't legalization. Licensing is making something illegal unless you have special permission from the state to do it. New York's City process to get that special permission is hugely expensive but their enforcement is terrible, hence the illegal shops.

How many people are too stupid to read and follow the directions?

Hundreds of people OD on Tylenol every year in the US. I cannot imagine the carnage that would result from OTC fentanyl.

How many people are too stupid to read and follow the directions?

It's easier than measuring a dose of heroin, which druggies manage without instructions all the time.

Hundreds of people OD on Tylenol every year in the US.

Mostly deliberately.

Is that the fault of decriminalization? Rates have basically only gone up since 1979.

Oregon’s policy was a disaster, but didn’t exactly show up in overdose deaths. Take that result with a tiny, but still incredibly lethal, grain of fent. It still suggests that the 2400% insanity isn’t due to decriminalization. No, people are just doing harder stuff, whether or not they can get arrested for it.

I can't find the article at the moment but I believe overdose deaths in Oregon exceeded the rest of the country during the measure 110 period.

Decriminalization has been a disaster. The overdose death rate increased by 2,400% between 1980 and 2020.

Which includes a large part of the drug war. Which hasn't stopped.

The overdose death rate increased by 2,400% between 1980 and 2020

When prohibition was in full effect across the united states?

This just suggests that prohibition or no prohibition is largely drowned out by other factors in terms of the harms inflicted by drugs

The axis of that tweet says "unnatural death". It seems at least plausible that this would include drunken people inadvertently killing themselves by falling of a bridge or running into traffic.

The curfews seem like a massive confounder. We can compare the July ban (750/week) with the post ban period (1100/week), as there was a curfew in both of these going on. The only thing which we can learn from this plot, however, is that during curfews, alcohol bans seem to decrease unnatural mortality.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Take a young person who likes to drink occasionally, who is probably a part of some party culture. Now tell them they can not party until further notice. Sometimes, they will adopt well to it, forswear partying and getting really into video gaming. But sometimes they will become depressed and self-medicate with alcohol. Without any drinking buddies providing social oversight and making sure that they don't choke to death on their vomit or kill their spouses or roommates, an increase in alcohol-related mortality should be expected.

Also, 350 additional alcohol-related death per week are not a huge number. South Africa has a population of 62M. Mortality rates generally go in the order of a percent a year. The yearly excess mortality from alcohol would be a whopping 0.03%, with 3% of the deaths being attributable to alcohol. This is roughly equal to the deaths from lung cancer (overwhelmingly caused by tobacco) of 0.037% per year. Long-term effects of liver failure due to booze are likely a bit lower.

I am generally opposed to telling people how to run their lives to get rid of these risks. I don't drink or smoke, but at some point the health police might come for me either for rock climbing or spending weekends playing video games, and I would want there to speak out for me.

My state did not shut down package stores during the pandemic because it would cut off chronic alcoholics. There are people who are so alcohol-dependent that if they don't continue to consume it at a regular pace, they will end up in the Emergency Department, or worse.

I doubt that murders will really have gone up massively with a persistent ban, but I would also expect that alcohol consumption that would diminish sharply with a small on/off switch would be down by less with a long-term, planned, codified ban. Telling people they can't buy something for a few weeks might engender a few oddball workarounds, but it doesn't result in the development of long-term, sustainable institutions of illegal production and distribution (which we see develop with any in-demand black market item).

I do agree that there's a stylized version of American Prohibition where people just accept a simple narrative and engage in some motivated reasoning about how their preferred policy was the right thing in all ways. I'm sure there really were tradeoffs and that some sorts of violence would go down with alcohol bans. Ultimately, I'm against prohibition because I like alcohol and don't like the government, not because I have high confidence that it actually increases violence. I don't think this is a luxury belief in the traditional sense - I am aware that this is probably bad for some people and I don't think I gain any performative social esteem from holding it.

Yup.

The Prohibition impact isn't really the problem. The first order effect of prohibition is to decrease availability of [banned thing]. The long term effect is to decrease legal availability of [banned thing].

The second order effect is to push the markets for [banned thing] underground, correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].

And the third order effect, or one of them: when merchants of [banned thing] can't use normal conflict resolution/contract enforcement methods, they have to invoke base violence in order to operate. Wars over turf, breaking kneecaps to collect on debts, burning down establishments that don't pay protection, killing snitches, those all become necessary to the business. And then it eventually becomes organized and systemic.

They can't use the court systems and the state-sanctioned violence, so unless you have a full-on police state, this stuff will spill over into civilian life.

So yeah, flipping a switch on and off between "banned" and "legal" will show some effect, but leave the switch on "banned" long enough and you'll ultimately see a system evolve which perpetuates violence. THEN maybe you can assess whether the additional violence is worth the actual harm reduction achieved by the ban.

It seems unfortunate that for many things there isn't a stable equilibrium of "Legally permitted but socially verboten" where a given activity or product is not banned, but the social judgment that comes from engaging in it is so severe that it necessarily remains hidden on the fringes of society, so there's 'friction' involved in accessing it, and most 'right-thinking' people avoid it because they don't want to risk the social consequences, even if they're curious.

One option would be to make the thing not 100% verboten, but a massive hassle to have legally, like Title II weapons.

For example, you could still sell alcohol in bars and restaurants, but they would have to close at 9pm. Not stop selling alcohol (easily exploitable), close outright. No alcohol in grocery stores, only in designated liquor stores that have to be at least 10000 feet away from the nearest grocery store, cannot open earlier than 10am or close later than 4pm, must stay closed on weekends and holidays, can't take cash, can't sell more than 200ml of ethanol to a customer per day.

Bringing alcohol for personal use from another county would be legal, but you would have to declare it before consumption. You would have to take it to the police station, pay a per-container fee if you have more than six containers and get the containers stamped within two days. If you were found consuming unregistered alcohol, it would be a crime and the fine would be 10x the price of alcohol levied on both the drinker and the owner of the premises. If you were arrested for public intoxication, you'd better be able to prove you had consumed enough allowed alcohol, or your BAC would be used to calculate how much you had drunk.

All this would mean that getting a beer after work would not be impossible but would be a hassle. Your best option would be having one at a restaurant. Or driving to a wet county for a sixpack every week. Or spending your lunch break driving to the local liquor store.

Not even disagreeing, but realize that when you try to create 'clever' regulatory schemes like this you're up against the innovative power of every entrepreneur in that space.

Every single exploit or loophole that can be found will be used to the hilt, so you'll probably have to constantly adjust your regulations to add friction back into the system as market actors find ways to remove it. Kinds of like, I suppose, how Zyn has taken off with the decline in smoking and the general low-status of chewing tobacco. Or more directly, how vaping stepped in to replace smoking as well.

When marijuana was first legalized where I lived, it was a massive PITA to get it and there weren't that many dispensaries. The illegal trade still retained a huge portion of the market share. At a certain point, legal vs. illegal isn't what people are choosing based off. It also becomes convenient vs. inconvenient. If the above rules were put into place, you'd find no shortage of "beer guys" within the month.

And the third order effect, or one of them: when merchants of [banned thing] can't use normal conflict resolution/contract enforcement methods, they have to invoke base violence in order to operate. Wars over turf, breaking kneecaps to collect on debts, burning down establishments that don't pay protection, killing snitches, those all become necessary to the business. And then it eventually becomes organized and systemic.

This is just taking the US experience of Prohibition and expanding it to cover all bans in all countries.

Taiwan and Japan ban drugs just fine. They are not police states. There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.

Some things are hard to ban, some easier. And there is a large amount of cultural difference too. But most bans do actually reduce consumption of the banned thing without too many negative consequences.

This is not just US Prohibition. Drug gang violence is a major problem. A review of murder statistics implies our high murder rates are drug gang activity. We are indeed not a nation of Japanese people and Japanese Americans are not typically imprisoned or killed over illegal drugs.

They are not police states. There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.

I've said it before, I am completely prepared to admit that Japanese people are less likely to be violent regardless of the policies they operate under.

See my point:

correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].

Japan doesn't have the huge drug-addled underbelly that the U.S. does, to my knowledge.

But they DO have Yakuza, who keep things orderly but, I emphasize, STILL rely on violence to enforce their business practices.

And allegedly the decline of the Yakuza is opening up space for more violent operations who are harder to police because they're less legible. Although as mentioned elsewhere, Japan is pretty close to being a police state.

So... my EXACT, PRECISE point still applies to Japan, even if less obviously so.

Japan is totally a police state.

Have you been to Japan? I spent two and a half weeks there, spending time in various parts of the country, and I think I can count the number of police officers I saw on one hand.

"Police state" isn't just a function of uniformed officers. I don't totally agree with the description, but if you consider "fearing the police" a critical part of a police state, I'd point to the absurd conviction rate and the idea that you'd just expect to get arrested if you started any sort of disruptive crime as indicators that the Japanese largely "fear" (probably uncharitable, more like "respect and comply with" in practice, I think) law enforcement.

As compared to the US where I've seen no shortage of people doing (minor, mostly non-violent) crimes right in front of police officers.

I'd point to the absurd conviction rate

The Japanese conviction rate being so high is mostly a result of two factors:

  1. The Japanese take confession cases to trial (the confession is presented as evidence), so they show up as "conviction" in Japanese statistics whereas they show up as "not a trial" in almost every other country's. Because confessions are very common, this drastically inflates Japan's conviction rate.

  2. Japanese prosecutors are actually quite reticent about pressing charges without a confession, so cases that might show up as "acquittal" in another country tend to show up as "not a trial" in Japan.

Japanese culture is indeed hilariously disgusted with criminals (the best example is probably the manga/anime Death Note, in which a vigilante who decides to kill all the criminals - but who can only kill the ones who the justice system has already caught - is presented as morally ambiguous rather than an utter lunatic), but AIUI their justice system isn't actually as vicious as you'd expect from that (note that Japan does not have jury trials, which is probably a good thing).

to kill all the criminals - but who can only kill the ones who the justice system has already caught

inaccurate, there are some cases shown where Death Note vigilante kills criminals before they could be caught

They obtain the confessions by coercion, basically what detective novels call "the third degree". You can be held without bail for 23 days at a time, and if you don't confess in that time they can re-arrest you for another 23 days on your way out of the jail.

More comments

There are no gangs . . . associated with drugs.

I thought the Yakuza were pretty involved in the drugs trade.

Taiwan and Japan ban drugs just fine. ... There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.

This isn't true. First link I found.

To a first order approximation it is true. The murder rate in Japan is around 0.3. In the United States it is 7.

Drug use is confined to a tiny minority. And with almost no junkies, there is almost no market for drugs.

Why ban on commercial surrogacy or human cloning or CP or deepfakes doesn't result in breaking kneecaps, burning down, etc.

establishments that don't pay protection

What does that have to do with prohibitions? Protection racket is a form of tax used by proto-state-actor with short time horizon.

Why ban on commercial surrogacy or human cloning or CP or deepfakes doesn't result in breaking kneecaps, burning down, etc.

Well as I said:

correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].

Drugs and alcohol are an ur-example because the people that want them REALLLLLY want them. Similar with prostitution. Gambling too. I imagine legalized sports gambling has made it far harder for criminals to make a buck on it now.

It helps when the thing is legal overseas or is more readily produced overseas and can be transmitted electronically so there's no need for interpersonal violence at the consumer level.

Like, we had a brief change in the drug trade when crypto was still new and allowed Silk Road to exist, and money could be exchanged for drugs without the need for violent enforcement. But the state cracked down and so we slid over to the standard equilibrium.

I do not think people "really" want alcohol unless acculturated into it by other people. There are many Muslim nations with ~0 alcohol consumption and these countries have none or little of these long-term effects you propose.

Many Muslim nations still have drug problems, but with drugs other than alcohol: qat and captagon come to mind most prominently, and aren't to my knowledge issues in the West. Opium was an issue in Afghanistan, but IIRC the Taliban was actually against it.

I don't know if the quintessential Western hard drugs (meth, fentanyl, probably missing a few because I like my life boring) are major issues elsewhere in the world these days.

Meth is a thing in developing countries with really long work days.

I mean, with Islam they also abstain from Pork despite that being an insanely popular dish in most countries that can afford bacon.

They've got the sort of equilibrium that I suspect is hard to achieve for most places.

I've also noted before how unlike most other immigrant groups, Arabs/Muslims DON'T seem to create any organized crime syndicates in their host countries in the way that, say Irish, Italian, Russian, or various South American immigrants did in the U.S..

Instead, they tend to form political units which, in their worst instantiation look like ISIS, but even in milder form look like Hezbollah or the Taliban.

So, STILL engaging in violence, but directed to a very different objective.

What about rape/grooming gangs in Europe?

Aren’t Arab criminals a major problem in some European countries, eg Sweden? I’ve certainly heard from Dutchmen that Moroccan organized crime is a serious problem over there, as well.

Sweden has seen a noted uptick in criminality in immigrant-heavy suburbs and it has significant boosted their violent crime rate.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisakim/2021/10/22/swedens-brutal-gang-problem-heres-what-officials-blame-it-on/

Could you expound on that difference? My understanding of American immigrant crime syndicates is that they were also historically quite involved in machine politics like Tammany Hall. I'm not sure if the mafia, for example, became a bipartisan bugbear of its own volition, or more because it became politically expedient to oppose organized crime circa the 1930s. There are probably still rumors of involvement by organized crime in politics -- maybe see the current longshoremen union?

Human cloning: not enough people want it badly enough. Same probably goes for surrogacy, with the added fact that anyone who could afford the criminal price could just afford legal workarounds.

In the case of CP I think it results in similar behavior to drug prohibition. Extensive criminal networks, child trafficking and all the associated crimes, etc. the people who want it want it bad, will pay for it, and have no easy substitutes.

Deepfakes are currently too easy and still readily available even when technically illegal. No market when the supply is nearly infinite and demand is relatively low.

None of those things are comparable. A better comparison is bans on drugs, which do result in broken kneecaps and gang shootings, and bans on prostitution, which result in the same.

Human cloning: not enough people want it badly enough.

How do you know when it's universally banned? Asking that question in a poll is like asking "are you a bad human who deserves to rot in jail?"

Deepfakes are currently too easy and still readily available even when technically illegal.

Wouldn't deepfakes solve previous CP problems? Deepfakes of any kind might be not so accessible anymore since we're still in yearly stages on banning it. E.g. in China it's OK with just "deepfake" watermark (or what it is) and South Korea only banned it 6 days ago.

How do you know when it's universally banned? Asking that question in a poll is like asking "are you a bad human who deserves to rot in jail?"

I notice a complete lack of any social judgment towards those who'd like human cloning to be legal, or anything adjacent to that. For contrast, look at the social judgment towards those who want to look at naked pictures (including obviously drawn pictures) of young women (including the obviously fictional ones) who are 17 years and 11 months old.

If you looked at society without knowing the laws, you'd probably assume that human cloning is legal, it's just that there is no use for it and that's why no one does it.

No, people who want cartoon River Tam porn are not judged in any way shape or form by society except possibly for not being able to shut up about it.

There's a funny thread not long ago you may have missed.

but it doesn't result in the development of long-term, sustainable institutions of illegal production and distribution (which we see develop with any in-demand black market item).

This.

Furthermore, alcohol is significantly easier to produce than other drugs, such as methamphetamine. With meth I would likely get caught the moment I tried to source precursor chemicals. With alcohol, all the precursor substances are easily sourced in any supermarket. Building a still is probably the hardest part, but the general principle is simple enough. If alcoholic were willing to fork over half their salaries to be supplied with shitty booze, then a lot of producers of shitty booze would pop up overnight. A total prohibition on alcohol seems about as enforceable as a prohibition on masturbation, but with a lot of people actually going blind.

Of course, prohibition will still deter some people drinking in the long run. But most of the discouraged drinking would not have lead to violent crimes down the road. Your median alcohol-induced murder or rape does not happen because someone drank two glasses of wine at a fancy restaurant, or by some partying kid who was fine to spent the night at a dry bar instead of finding an illegal booze-serving place.


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