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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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https://nypost.com/2024/12/22/us-news/woman-dead-after-being-found-on-fire-on-subway-train-in-coney-island/

Yeah, there are pointless murders on the NYC subways all the time, but this seems like an especially nasty one. Despite the lack of a literal connection, it feels like a coda to the Daniel Penny story - in the same way that people drew contrasts and parallels between the Daniel Penny story and the Brian Thompson story, but much, much moreso, because this is actually a clear illustration of why Penny's actions constituted a reasonable response to a real and ever-present threat, a threat that should not be there.

Maybe I'm just growing old and cynical, but it feels like everything is becoming so nihilistic and farcical lately. There was a school shooter a few days ago who was a fifteen-year-old girl groomed into doing it by grown men she knew online. We still don't know what's going on with that latest nonsense car attack on that Christmas market in Germany, how much mental illness was involved and how much ideology, and what ideology. With the aforementioned assassination of Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, we've got Italian-American anarcho-communists carrying out lethal terror attacks again like they used to a century ago, "propaganda of the deed", and it seems like the entire online left is stoked about it, including relatively quiet and moderate figures. And, of course, any random person in the big city is liable to be randomly murdered at any time, and if you try to step in and protect them, much of the country, including the legal system, will be out for your blood.

What the fuck is 2025 going to be like?

Remember that this is happening as (officially) inflation is 2.7 percent, the unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, the S&P 500 has had a gangbuster year-to-date return of 24 percent, and housing prices have increased by 4.4 percent year-over-year.

Now imagine how much more violent and disorderly the people will get when the economy contracts into a recession next year. A Middle East oil shock, a government shutdown, a tariff war, there are lots of ignition points…

During the 2008 recession, the homicide rate continued falling. It didn't start rising again until the Ferguson Effect kicked in in 2015.

Things have to get better before they get worse.

A New York Times article currently entitled “The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky” (modern NYT headlines tend to shift with the winds of likes and comments) discusses the innovative corporations and world governments looking to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for profit. On its surface, this is a potentially radical net-positive accelerant for humanity driven by its financial upside, in the same tradition as asteroid mining, child tax credits, and electric vehicle subsidies.

The comment section gives us a valuable insight into how the online progressive retiree set (many of them early architects and evangelists of the modern Left) see this news within the context of their worldview… and here it’s particularly interesting. I want to highlight one comment that’s emblematic of the general tenor there:

People want this to work because they don’t want to do the hard work of changing. That’s a mistake. Aside from the elusiveness of the technology itself, the current fossil fuels system is literally destroying our planet. We have to have the willpower to stop doing that.

Here we see plainly spoken a bedrock concept underlying many political ideologies that rarely breaches the surface: apocalyptic socio-political shibboleths cannot be resolved without the perceived antichrist(s) paying the cost. The motte: “There is a crisis all humanity should unite in resolving…” The bailey: “… only insofar as it upsets people I dislike.”

This response also seems to chalk up another point in favor of the “modern-politics-as-religion” thesis, with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation. Those who circumvent this process are perceived with the equivalent spite of their ancestors imagining a sinner who never feels the fires of hell (or Salem, as it were). As a great Mottizen (@CrispyFriedBarnacles - thanks @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola) once reminded us, “Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban.”

with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation.

The irony here being of course that they themselves are doing the opposite. They support changes that aren't effective at solving the issues at hand but are in line with their aesthical preferences, gives pork to their friends, hurts their outgroup and paints themselves as saviours. This is obviously one of the easy ways.

A pharisaical association, then?

Internet archive doesn't seem to have captured the whole page btw.

Copy pasting my response from a few days ago:

the socially agreed upon consequences

Some people fantasize that such consensus views exist. They then act cheated when someone mitigates or entirely avoids negative consequences. As though cosmic justice has been subverted.

I think this is a real thing. People have some internal sense of justice in which the wages of bad behavior is suitable negative consequences. And then they notice people engaging in "bad" behavior and working sensibly to avoid bad outcomes, like gay men taking PrEP or something, and get offended. The wicked were supposed to get their just rewards, but now some technological solution dodged it.

This article is enormously relevant: https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-chump-effect

Maybe it's some deep-rooted primitive instinct. Defectors in the tribe are supposed to end up dead, lest they end up destroying the tribe.

In the prep case it's "wait so I'm paying $20,000 a year just so a gay guy can have unprotected sex for free, but the same people who mandated that are talking about using insurance costs to make driving unaffordable for me?

Insurance and government action have moral hazards it makes perfect sense to get upset about. Like if the government pays a guy to buy solar panels made from coal in China, then pays him a subsidy to make power with them, then pays him to suck the CO2 from the chinese coal out of the air with that power.
Every step of that technological solution makes me poorer for no benefit to anyone except the parasite.

wait so I'm paying $20,000 a year just so a gay guy can have unprotected sex for free, but the same people who mandated that are talking about using insurance costs to make driving unaffordable for me?

To what extent is the health insurance company allowed to tell you what you can and can't do?

Let's assume, arguendo, that eating red meat and animal fat really does cause disease and increase costs. Does the insurance company have a right to drop you for eating red meat or are they obligated to pay for your quadruple bypass?

But we're getting it both ways. They're pushing for "discouraging" activities they oppose while forcing us to subsidize the health risks of activities they support.
Smoking makes your insurance go way up because they specifically allowed it in the ACA, but doing meth and raw dog anal with 20 strangers a week doesn't.

If they get their single payer option you can bet they'll be charging extra for smoking, meat, guns, and weightlifting, but not for obesity, fentanyl, weed, and 1000 man gangbangs at the national bugchaser convention. And it will all be decided by Science™, so disagreeing will make you a science-denying conspiracy theorist.

meat, guns, and weightlifting

Insurance companies care about how much they have to pay out. Their actuaries will compute the cost of being a steak-eating gun owner and determine it is almost nothing. They'll pass that miniscule cost onto their customers. It's not like they're going to fact check you or drop your health insurance because you had two servings of beef rather than one.

To the degree they care about weight lifting or martial arts or other masculine forms of health, I would think they would like it because it makes you cost them less if you are generally healthier.

But sure, they can't discriminate against raw-dogging enthusiasts but can against cigar enthusiasts, so it is a little unfair. But it isn't some insidious plan to punish you for being a stereotypical conservative guy with a weight bench and some guns.

I did say "when they get their public option", which will not be administered by people trying to make a profit. And of course even if it is some public-private abomination like the university system, we've already seen how willing they are to leave consumer money on the table in exchange for other benefits.

Point taken about the lack of profit motive letting government agencies pursue ideological goals rather than finding ways to serve customers while making a profit.

Do you think this public option will refuse to treat me because I own guns and eat meat? What do you think they'll do, have an ideological test to be allowed to buy in and get their medical care?

Opaque metrics filtered through a layer of "equity pricing" for who pays what, justified through procedural manipulation of cost benefit studies. Literally just the usual "make gun and car owners pay for the costs of their abhorrent lifestyles" applied to literally everything.

Isn't it obvious how this sort of thing will work? We've seen so many examples of how this, I can already write the headlines for it (and the National Review's objections as they stumble along behind history, feebly mumbling "slow down")

Insurance companies care about how much they have to pay out. Their actuaries will compute the cost of being a steak-eating gun owner any determine it is almost nothing.

You're talking about things that would happen in a free market economy. Health insurance... is not.

These are private companies and they employ actuaries to do real work. Short of government mandates forcing them to discriminate against stereotypical conservative men, they won't proactively harm their business by dropping you as a customer without financial reasons or charging you wrong.

Sir, over the last decade we've seen private companies ban, debank, and blacklist their customers on several occasions. Doing so either does not hurt their business, or in the event it does, they don't care about it.

More comments

But we're getting it both ways. They're pushing for "discouraging" activities they oppose while forcing us to subsidize the health risks of activities they support.

This doesn't sound like you're getting it both ways. It sounds like it's just one way - that you can engage in just about any activity (except smoking I guess, although I have never revealed my smoking status to my insurer) without insurers taking action.

The hypotheticals are closer to a persecution fantasy than reality.

To be honest, this is a perspective I have never really understood. It just goes at right-angles to me - I don't understand the moralisation of climate change. Kevin Rudd famously said that climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation, and this lens just doesn't make much sense to me.

From where I'm standing, climate change seems like a pretty straightforward engineering problem. There isn't really a hard normative debate about it - we mostly all agree on what we want in terms of the environment. The issue is just how to achieve it, and that seems like a technical problem par excellence.

We can debate culpability or responsibility all we want, and that's fine, but that's also largely irrelevant to solving the technical issue. We can talk about moral transformation or changing attitudes ("the hard work of changing"), but that is also largely irrelevant to solving the issue. It's a technological problem! The value of changing social or political attitudes is only insofar as they might help us solve the technological problem! That's it!

It makes me feel like a lunatic - or else, everybody else is.

It's also an economical and political problem. How are we funding the (technological) solution and who should bear the cost?

Depending on the technical solution the economic and political issues can be minor or major.

Doing carbon capture makes it all a major issue, since that will cost trillions or tens of trillions.

Sulfur dioxide seeding or a sun shade only cost tens of billions. Which is within the funding range of some existing US billionaires.

Sulfur dioxide seeding or a sun shade only cost tens of billions.

Do you have a good source for the costs of geo-engineering? Unfortunately, currently the field looks like an absolute shitshow to me. It's at the same time full of taboo and hype, riddled with known/unknown unknowns and (to my knowledge), foundational research is sparse and actually engineering is non-existent.

I'm especially interested in details like the delivery mechanism in stratospheric SO2 seeding. What does the engineering look like? Minor altitude-boosting redesigns of the 737, or is it a from-scratch design of a "U2-cargo"? Do we build 100 or 10 000 new airframes?

Same with marine cloud brightening. Is that 1000 drone boats with a snow-cannon spraying sea water, or 100 000 platforms each carrying a gigantic stack-effect chimney?

Wikipedia article on the topic seems fine. A while back there was a big back and forth between Bryan Caplan and some others on this topic. I've rarely seen anyone question that this is one of the cheapest methods. Usually the complaints are along the lines of "side effects"

Yeah, I don't doubt that it's comparatively cheap.

"Tens of billions" is just... extremely cheap. Since stratospheric seeding involves aircraft development, billions go fast. Both Airbus and Boeing spent between $5B and $10B on their last couple of civilian airframes (and that price just gets you a prototype and a manufacturing line). And since those future stratospheric seeders need to both fly a lot and fly unusually high, I wouldn't expect a civil development budget, I'd expect a military budget - those tend to run 2 orders of magnitude higher (but that gets you a couple hundred airframes and their continued maintenance).

And yes, I consider side effects part of those unknown unknowns.

Two other options:

Artillery and rockets.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, but yes tens of billions is cheap when carbon emissions reductions are measured in tens of trillions of dollars

Edit: rereading, it doesn't seem like sarcasm. I do think the estimates are fair. The cost of carbon supression and sequestration is also an estimate. And we are ultimately comparing different climate change proposals.

The costs of global warming have been much debated over, but IPCC estimates of damages overlap with solutions like "do nothing and let economic growth solve the problem".

Everything is in orders of magnitude for these comparisons.

No sarcasm, just a misunderstanding. I assumed we're talking total mitigation costs, you almost certainly were talking about the yearly budget of the project.

I agree, with $10B per year you can design a new airframe, build a few hundred and then fly them around the clock, resulting in a few dozen megatons lifted to the stratosphere per year. That certainly would get some results.

To be fair, this sort of on-its-face won’t work. It’s just basic high school thermodynamics.

The carbon dioxide ratio in the atmosphere is increasing precisely because creating that carbon dioxide produced usable energy for us. You can’t un-make that carbon dioxide without spending at least as much energy as you put in (and in fact, substantially more).

So either you’re going to produce even more CO2 than you’re eradicating, or you’re simply pursuing non-fossil-fuel energy sources entirely—which would simply have not produced the CO2 in the first place if you’d just done that from the start.

The only way any of this makes any "sense" is if you get the government to write you a check to perform what ultimately amounts to fake work, in the most fundamental sense. Which probably means that’s exactly what will happen.

Yes, but, hypothetically this could let us burn fuel in ships and planes and land vehicles and then remove the carbon with large facilities that don't burn fossil fuels. Not that a coal burning power plant next to a decarbonization facility makes any thermodynamic sense.

Isn't it pretty straightforward that it's hard to turn things from diffuse to concentrated? We've done the energy-releasing transformation turning oil into gas, now it's diffuse and a pain to turn back into oil or any other substance?

With cheap fusion I guess you could brute force it and drain the skies. I guess there's some technical level where he might not be totally right but it seems substantively right.

In theory you're not backing all the way down the entropy graph to create a synthetic fossil fuel, you only want to go as far as some compound where carbon can exist as a solid. But yeah, in practical terms with realistic losses it's obviously not energy positive to burn gasoline to run a generator that pulls the carbon back out of the air.

One potential use is if they could do it at very low capital cost (but high energy cost) would be sucking up all the waste electricity from solar and wind. You could site it anywhere, so putting them at key interchanges where you can exploit transmission bottlenecks for cheap electricity would make them free to run much of the time.

Of course, the actual economic benefit of reducing atmospheric carbon is anywhere between "low" and "negative." And ocean fertilization would do the same thing for free. But when has that ever stopped a subsidy program.

Yeah, the reason behind the left-wing rally behind environmentalism was never about environment itself, but about obtaining another method of doing the Revolution.

If you ever spoke with committed climate leftists, you quick understand that any discourse is not related to the environment, the economic or tech tools to use, energy, consumption etc, but it is about how to change people to achieve their particular brand of Socialism of the day.

Bonus point if you speak with left-wing climate women: At least men will earnestly tell you that is about the Revolution, while women will shut out angry rants about Mother Earth or being attuned with nature or whetever. A telluric and Dyonisian cult with socialist characteristics, made by people that, without modernity and capitalism, would be better doing literally any other job.

I bumped into Can the working class resist “green capitalism”? earlier today, linked from Reddit's Left without edge which seems to confirm what you are saying.

In this context, mere environmentalism, that is, environmentalism without revolutionary will, does nothing more than pave the way for the chaotic management processes implemented by governments at capitalism’s service.

But then @anon_ replied with his experience of people genuinely caring about the environment for its own sake. Err, the article that I linked is full of passion, so much that there is room for its author to genuinely care about the environment. Where I get confused is that the article lacks practical answers. Ordinary people like stuff. Get rid of capitalism and advertising and ordinary people will still crave enough stuff to leave us searching for practical answers. Who will tell them "No!" ? Who will have that power?

The ecological problem we face is not essentially a technical issue, but a political conflict, and it must be treated as such. It is a problem that the people must take into their own hands and hearts.

People will take the problem into their hearts, and then what...

I foresee passion, without clarity or practicality, ending badly, whether the primary goal is revolution or ecology.

I don't have time to write a thoughtful reply right now what with holiday chaos, but thanks for the link.

For what it's worth, they seem much more honest about it these days than they did when I was young. The misanthropic Malthusians have been marginalized on the mainstream left in favor of the honestly-concerned-about-the-apocalypse types, who are, funnily enough, typically more moderate in their views on the matter.

This has not been my experience living in a half dozen left-wing circles. As much as you can't believe it, most of them genuinely care about the environment for its own sake. To the extent that they rant against capitalism destroying the planet, the causality goes the other way.

Of course I disagree, but at least get a handle on it.

I definitely agree on the more reasonable & moderate left-wing groups that dominate the PMC and STEM, but it's not that rare in the social sciences and adjacent university staff.

Climate Change Solutions: An Opportunity To Subvert Capitalism and a million articles like it would seem to disagree. Does anyone have the link with the green party woman talking about how they won't need to abolish money because everything you could use it for will be rationed or banned by the state on environmental grounds, from shower time to travel?
Edit: here

I think the definitive piece written on this is Nadia Asparouhova's Tribes of Climate. Introductory quote:

For someone who doesn’t work in climate, trying to figure out which opportunities to pursue – carbon removal, renewables, energy storage and transmission – is a dizzying array of options, with no way to sort or rank their importance. But it seems to me that climate is better understood not as a singular list of technology and policy action items, but as an assortment of climate tribes. Tribes tell us why these opportunities are interesting and help us make better predictions about how they will unfold.

I recommend reading the whole article in full. FWIW, I identify as what Asparouhova calls an "Energy Maximalist" - I regard climate change as a genuine but convenient crisis point that provides incentives for us to transition from the local minimum of fossil fuels to the global minimum of cheap renewable energy. Consequently, for most of the climate activist world, I'm the most despicable class of heretic. This is true despite my acceptance of the general catechism of contemporary climate activism - (i) the earth is warming (ii) it's mostly our fault (iii) this is bad (iv) we can do something about it (v) we should do something about it.

Source of the Massachusetts Taliban quote.

Where does your commenter say that only people she dislikes should have to make any lifestyle changes?

Like anyone, I'm sure they don't mind getting burned a bit... so long as their opponent is the one actually tied to the stake.

Don’t put words in people’s mouths.

What do you think about the whole question of austim rates? I am listening to Trump's press conference from 2024/12/16 and at one point he talks about how he totally supports vaccines like the one against Polio, but he wants to research modern vaccines more thoroughly, and now we have 100 times the autism rates that we did back in the day?

My immediate reaction was to think that this is either false or just an artifact of reporting rates and aspects of modern society that have nothing to do with vaccines. But who knows, maybe there is actually some underlying real issue. I certainly don't believe that there is 100 times more autism now than there was back in the day, but I think it's certainly possible that maybe there's like 2 times more. Not saying there is, necessarily, but I find it credible at least.

My opinion is that most likely, supposed changes in autism rates have much more to do with changing social phenomena than with anything more on the biological level. The more humanity pushes mentally away from its instincts' origins back on the African savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago, the more one will see supposed mental disorder rates go up. The more stress is necessary to turn a human infant into a modern human adult, the more mental trouble is probably likely.

To be fair, this is neither new or necessarily a bad thing. I am not a Christian, but I believe that Christianity did a lot of good in changing human morality from "haha tough shit you're a slave who got crucified, the gods must hate you" to "even the lowest man can talk to God".

And in doing this, Christianity pushed us a bit further from the monkeys. Which maybe added some stress to us, but also helped us a lot... and in any case, the added stress might be made up for by the new morality's tendency to make society less scary than one based on blood feuds, which then in turn might even help unlock creativity and scientific revolutions and economic prosperity and so on.

In any case, not sure how Christianity did it, I like reading about early Christianity but I still have no clear idea how it won against its competitors. Yet it is pretty clear to me that it pushed us further from the monkeys, despite its supposed core being the rather unscientific idea of having faith that a man a while ago rose from the dead.

Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?

But back to autism... what do self-reported autists think about the genesis of autism? My personal opinion is that autism is probably almost entirely determined by genetics and early upbringing, yet there may be cultural factors that make it so early childhoood development is extra stressful, in part because it takes us further away from the monkey. Which would tend to more and more children becoming in some way abnormal, because they face more childhood stresses in being made into a modern human. Which is not to say that is necessarily a bad thing. Mentally so-called abnormal people in the modern West are probably much less violent on average than the typical person back in the Bronze Age

Is there any reason to think that autism is well-defined? If there is, is there any reason to think that autism rates have been rising? And to be fair, if the rates were rising, would that even necessarily be a bad thing? It's hard to say, most self-reported autists whose words I've heard expressed that they would rather not be autistic. So I guess making there be less autism in the world would be a good thing. I don't know, I do know that there is also a very small subset of autists out there who think that autism is more like a new Homo species, similar to the whole X-Men concept of mutant superhumans. I write all this as someone who has very limited experience with autism. I have known autistic people before, but to a very limited degree. Apologies for any offense. My understanding of autism is mostly limited to the 4chan meme idea of "autism", not to the medically-defined phenomenon.

Autism and schizophrenia can be modeled as opposing cognitive strategies—autism compressing into narrow, high-fidelity pattern recognition and coherence maintenance, while schizophrenia expands into wide, low-filter signal processing and generative variability—both shaped by environmental and informational pressures in increasingly complex systems. Autism appears to emerge as an adaptive response to cognitive overload, reinforcing structure and specialization, while schizophrenia highlights the fragility of coherence under excessive input and recursive noise. Rising autism rates may reflect selection pressures favoring pattern-matching and abstraction capabilities in high-information environments, while schizophrenia may signal edge cases of system instability where variance outpaces integration. Together, they illustrate a species adapting under selection for cognitive architectures that balance specialization and generalization, testing the boundaries of predictive processing and distributed reasoning in the face of accelerating complexity.

There is clearly something going on with autism. It could have always been there, and in the modern age we are suddenly finding it. Or, there is something environmental. We should investigate.

From Wikipedia:

Attention has been focused on whether the prevalence of autism is increasing with time. Earlier prevalence estimates were lower, centering at about 0.5 per 1,000 for autism during the 1960s and 1970s and about 1 per 1,000 in the 1980s, as opposed to today's 23 per 1000.[4][33]

So 100x we can at least say isn't just Trump's verbal diarrhea - that's 23/.5 = 46x ~= 100x.

I think the other responses about definitions shifting and such are a lot of it, but I wanted to at least point out that it's nominally pretty close to true.

The increase in autism is largely the result of diagnostic drift and increased awareness.

Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?

This is actually a question with a known answer; Roman(well, Greco-Roman) satirical literature aimed at as close to a popular audience as any literature in the Roman empire was addresses Christians. Lucian represents Christians as a known phenomenon in the ancient world at a relatively early date, and one of his protagonists becomes a Christian in a spoof. In Lucian's classic fashion, he narrates this after leaving Christianity.

It does not appear that the lowest literate classes in ancient Rome thought Christians were evil, so much as weird. Not WEIRD. Strange. We know Christianity was very attractive to women and the down-on-their luck. Christians were portrayed as near-pathologically nice people with funny beliefs(and AFAICT modern day pagan societies sometimes have the same view). We also know that they refused to do some things which the Roman empire demanded, and that this was a source of great frustration to the elites. Christianity's moral strictness is also documented at an early date, and the fact that this was rarely addressed in Roman literature probably tells us that this was seen as a good thing on at least an individual level, even if elites didn't like being told to improve their behavior.

This is very interesting. Really sounds like the closest parallel today (barring maybe the attractiveness to women and the down-on-their-luck) would be Mormons, and for most of the same reasons. Or do you think that's a bad comparison?

I don't see the Mormon comparison as particularly accurate today? I would have thought that the stereotypical view of Mormons is not that of selflessly compassionate people on the margins of society tending the needy, albeit with a distressing tendency to refuse political or civic loyalty. Rather, my picture of a stereotypical Mormon is more 'Stepford nice', if that makes sense? I picture polite people in clean white shirts who never swear and who are conspicuously observant of propriety. If I think 'Mormon', I think 'clean, upstanding, good citizen', and so on. Mormons have put a lot of effort into respectability.

If I set the stereotypes aside and instead think about Mormons I actually meet, in that context what I mostly see them is actually a very strong effort to make themselves less recognisable - it is unusual that I talk to a believing Mormon for very long before I reach the part where they say, "See, we're just like you, we're Christian, we believe in Jesus, there are no differences!" In other words, in my experience they try pretty hard to play down the weird beliefs that make them different, which is not something I suspect a first or second century Christian would do vis-a-vis pagan Romans.

There’s some of the Stepford-nice portrayal, but here in north Texas, it’s way closer to what hydro describes. I’ve had coworkers gossip about the number of Mormons around. Never in a negative way—more like “wow, he’s literally the nicest person at this company” or “have you heard about dirty sodas?” “Weird” is definitely the prevailing sentiment.

Might be an outgroup/fargroup thing. Or maybe that secular liberalism has disarmed religious sects enough that people don’t feel threatened.

Yes, interesting – I think I agree with your distinctions, although I wonder if the Romans thought of early Christians as "Stepford nice," too.

Entirely possible! People often have different instincts around it as well - people have told me that I sometimes come off as a bit Stepford, even though I don't intentionally try for anything like that, and I find it a little creepy when other people do it. The point where politeness or outward kindness becomes creepy may differ from person to person, or according to cultural context.

That's certainly what Scott seems to think.

Of course, we know how Christians were perceived- altruistic, odd, generally upstanding, welcoming of converts, treat their subordinates well in sometimes baffling ways- and we know how Christians liked to represent themselves and thought their communities should behave. But what we don't really have is anthropological studies of how Christian communities acted among themselves. Like we can tell that Christian men in 200 AD generally treated their wives better than Pagan men did, but not a lot of concrete examples of what that looks like(I suppose the martyrologies are evidence that Christianity forbade or heavily restricted domestic violence, and there are records of the church fathers exhorting Christian husbands to be affectionate with their wives, but we don't actually know what that was like on the ground). We know the pagans thought becoming Christian when you were down on your luck was the sort of thing that made sense to do, but mostly from satires which present it as a natural thing for the down on their luck to do- we don't actually know what Christian charity looked like or how it worked(although we know pawning or selling possessions and giving the money to bishops to hand out to the needy was at least a thing that occasionally happened[and in Roman eyes would be seen as a comprehensible part of religious practice- with the exception that ancient temples would have kept such a gift for themselves], and that free food was a regular handout perhaps used as a recruitment tool). But how Christian charity was administered? Whether there were any measures taken to prevent dependency? Nada(and Roman satirists would have treated any help granted without recompense as being taken advantage of).

Worth noting that some of the New Testament gets fairly granular as to how things like charity was administered and what measures should be taken to avoid dependency, although I am not sure that necessarily sheds much light on what was always happening a century or two later.

I have zero doubt that people like Musk who apparently has Asperger syndrome have existed aplenty throughout history and some obsessive scientists and others were like that. Rather than new homo sapiens this is a part of humanity that has already existed. Additionally some of those traits fit more with male brain characteristics.

At some point you got a serious disease that seriously ruins people's ability to live an independent life. So there is a spectrum that is broadly defined, and can include traits that can help society and can include trade offs among the people who possess them, that in addition to detrimental socially, can lead to maybe being more clear sighted or more willing to work on a particular field. But certainly you are going to find high functioning autists who underperform in life and would be better off if they weren't autistic.

I would definitely change the autism that makes it impossible for people to live an independent life, but it is knocking massive Chesterton fence and also relates to feminization of society and the devaluing male brain (i.e nerds who are of course much more men is an example of this), to say that we would be better off if anyone who might fit in the broad categories, would be different.

It is possible that some sort of contaminants in modernity leads to more autism whether microplastics or something else. It could also be related to people having children at later ages which leads to more mutational load.

But the issue of the autism spectrum is more about classifying behaviors and people that in past ages wouldn't get a label. There is in fact a negative side to people who have those behaviors that get a label but it can have positive side as well, at least when it comes to uncovering truths of the world, and a subset of the people involved. Not always of course. The autistic trans people aren't uncovering a higher truth. Was the childless obsessive Newton, someone who today his behaviors might get him to fit somewhere on the autism spectrum? Perhaps. It isn't wrong that such behaviors can be identified but there is value especially who care about things and issues over general socialization, and of course those who combine both and could be discouraged if such pursuits are booed as autistic behavior which is used in a negative sense. It isn't wrong though that people who fit too much on the spectrum face difficulties.

I think some of the anxieties relating to this has to do with also the changes of modernity relating to more social isolation and the rise of feminism and decline of assumed monogamy as a default. When monogamy, that is the expectation of marriage and family formation was more of the default expectation, then a greater subset of men and even women who are bellow a certain threshold of extroversion and social skills had families with less difficulties than the same people encounter today where early marriage is less the default and there is more social isolation. This wasn't only related to arranged marriage but also people in church, relatives and friends doing match making for the sake of marriage and encouraging dates, that has also declined as a practice. So some of these people became more socially skilled due to the expectation of getting married under this system while today might be classified as having more autistic traits and probably are indeed higher on introversion. But because of the decline of social institutions and people spending more time with screens and isolated, we have these people living more isolated lives than if society was arranged in a different manner.

So it is complicated when it comes to the broad spectrum of so called labeled autism and what are labeled as autistic traits, and even the appropriateness of such labeling, while it is black and white simple that it would be better if they were different when it comes to people who can't live an independent life and aren't high functioning.

My thoughts:

  • It’s hard to determine the relationship between vaccines and autism because of the confounder variables: Asperger’s has nothing to do with what we are talking about and is mislabeled as autism; parents of children who exhibit signs of autism are more weary about getting vaccines, and this applies to siblings; wealthier Americans are more likely to be vaccinated, may be less likely to have autistic children before the vaccine, but may be more likely to pursue an Asperger’s diagnosis for extra time on child’s tests; the least healthy parents are the least likely to opt in to all vaccines and the least likely to take child to doctor regularly …

  • You can reliably give monkeys autism symptoms by disrupting the natural mother-child bond, for instance Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys. The mother-child bond has been disrupted due to (1) early schooling, (2) stressed working mothers, (3) a generation of women who are not acculturated specifically for loving and bonding with young humans. This may have multigenerational effect, who knows?

  • the idea that the most STEM-brained men should mate with the most STEM-brained women is anomalous in history of humanity, this may have an effect

most STEM-brained men should mate with the most STEM-brained women

This is my wife and I. One of our sons has an autism diagnosis, in the > 99.9% good at math sense.

The mother-child bond has been disrupted due to (1) early schooling, (2) stressed working mothers, (3) a generation of women who are not acculturated specifically for loving and bonding with young humans.

Having looked at the historic situation around motherhood and parenting, particularly in early life, my guess is that the average modern western middle class woman spends much more time 1 on 1 with her young children than her predecessors a century or two ago.

the average modern western middle class woman spends much more time 1 on 1 with her young children than her predecessors a century or two ago.

From the survey data I've seen comparing the 1960s to today parents' time with their kids has increased, most notably and substantially for fathers, but also somewhat for mothers. (Though, we've only had the American Time Use Survey since 2003, and I don't know how much to trust the previous survey methods.)

Agreed; if anything, what’s abnormal about modern life is the paucity of different adults with whom we interact during early childhood. These days, it’s pretty much just parents and perhaps daycare staff, rather than all manner of extended family plus usually members of a religious community.

The significant recent rise in obesity suggests we can’t dismiss the possibility that the increase in autism is a genuine effect rather than merely a measurement artifact.

That is an interesting point, and apparently there is a linkage between autism and obesity.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4657601/

But this abstract seems unclear on whether it a common cause for both, or Autism leading to obesity.

I have come to the conclusion that the term as currently used is indescribably useless. Where once you had a number of conditions (autism, aspergers, PDD-NOS), there is now the one condition that covers an absolutely massive array of people with all sorts of different personalities, capabilities and needs. Yes, we now have levels in their place but they almost never enter discussion. Instead, the only differentiation comes between "high support needs" and "low support needs". In conversation however, this is almost always dropped - everytime someone mentions an autistic person, or autistic people, or themselves, one is usually referring to either of these groups, implicitly disregarding the other.

My view is that is we have a number of neurological differences that are grouped together under a single diagnosis, like a super venn diagram with multiple concentric circles, and a person can potentially appear in multiple places in the diagram. This means that it is possible for two people to technically be diagnosed with autism and have a minimal overlap of symptoms, or indeed any traits in common. This poses a number of problems. Firstly, normies expect the term to describe a specific kind of person and get confused/accuse you of lying when you say that you have that condition. Secondly, what paltry assistance you might receive is not tailored to your traits and so is useless. Thirdly, any spaces that might exist for you on paper in practise contain people who have nothing in common with you whatsoever.

Beyond that however, I think we have also expanded the definition to include borderlines (people who might have had one or two traits to a minimal degree that wouldn't have previously qualified) and the disability is being further co-opted by progressive, terminally online neurotypicals to ascend the progressive stack. In addition, we have massively damaged the development of children through lockdowns, so who knows if their brain is actually wired that way.

Personally, I do not know where my own endlessly entertaining brain disease comes from. I am inclined to think that I am one of those people who has it inflicted on them by GOD, THE VIOLATOR as a joke. The only familial link I have is a great uncle who was diagnosed with a number of learning disabilities in his youth (including dyxlexia) but towards the end of his life at some point received a diagnosis of autism. My mum and dad are both normal, my dad excessively so. My brother is "weird" but for the most part neurotypical, and any weirdness I think he accrued from me while growing up.

I dislike the way we treat mental disorders as if they work like bacteria or viruses. We even call them "mental illnesses." Strep throat presents in similar ways every time it appears because it's caused by a particular group of bacteria with particular traits. Autism isn't a species of microorganism, it's a cluster of behaviours observed in some humans. We can observe that many different people exhibit some or all of these behaviours without acting like they're all infected with a particular disease.

To continue the analogy: autism isn't the common cold, it's the act of coughing.

The word "disease" developed its meaning long before we'd figured out which ones were caused by infectious organisms. Congenital defects like osteogenesis imperfecta ("brittle bone disease") or deficiency syndromes like scurvy are central members of the term. Complaining that there is no microorganism that causes leukemia isn't going to stop people putting it in that group.

More to the point, comparing one single symptom to, as you already noted, a cluster of commonly co-occuring behaviors is a bad analogy. Coughing is one thing, but are you coughing alongside a runny nose, a sore throat, and a headache? (Probably just a cold.) Or are you coughing along with bloody sputum, chest pain, and weight loss? (Very concerning, might be lung cancer.) Similarly, a number of people exhibit a stereotypy - a repetitive movement or utterance - of some sort or another. But is it happening in a young child along with disinterest in social activities, extreme distress about particular sensory experiences, and an inflexible of routine? (Classic autism.) Or is it an older person, who has recently started losing control of their emotions and seems to have some trouble with speech? (Worrying signs of fronto-temporal dementia.)

My impression is that people have kids at older ages. Teasing out the differences between that and all other changes seems difficult.

The baby boom had extremely high fertility rates, however. So we should see lots of baby boomers who were younger children in their families with autism if this is a driving factor- do we?

I'm autistic, and I can tell that it runs in my family. My family tree has a lot of intelligent but eccentric people who likes model trains and such and have a silly form of humor. I've also heard "Coffee just makes me fall asleep haha" at quite a lot of family gatherings. Every time I watched trivia channels like "Who wants to be a millionare?" with my grandfather he'd know basically all the answers. My family also had a lot of criminals, mentally ill people (manic depression for instance), and millionares, so it's definitely not just autism and ADHD.

But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).

I don't know if autism is genetic, or if it's mostly caused by stress like you claim, and my family just happens to be high in neuroticism (which results in high rates of autism). I do think mental illness is on a raise though, as the modern society is less in tune with human nature. Couple this with the modern and much lower thresholds for diagnosis of mental disorders, and the effect is basically explained.

That we're less violent now is a more complicated topic. We might simply have removed most violent people from the gene pool over time, and oversocialization likely has a large effect as well (and the general drop in T levels is probably also relevant).

Finally, I don't mind being autistic, but I do think autism is an illness. The overly systematic way of thinking, the need to be "correct" and find the "truth", the need to be in control, the hatred of ambiguity.. I don't think any of these are good or necessary. But I'm also completely disillusioned about technology by now, and by math, logic, rationality, the computability of reality, the value of intelligence, etc. If you ask me, intelligence itself clusters with mental illness and conflicts with human instinct (and therefore, more importantly, it conflicts with aesthetics).

If you're interested in how Christianity won and made us less violent and in how modern society conflicts with human nature, Nietzsches books covers all of these aspects. His criticism of systematizing philosophers like Kant might very well be a criticism of traits of autism.

Coffee just makes me fall asleep haha

This is a weird one for people to say is autism/adhd since there are entire cultures where coffee after dinner / late at night is completely normal, and they’re clearly not all or mostly autistic.

Actually, you might be right. I know it's associated with ADHD, and that ADHD overlaps quite a bit with Aspergers, but it might not be an uncommon trait in general, even in people without ADHD or autism. A related quirk is probably liking having the television running in the background, or concentrating best when listening to music (most people I know with these traits have had ADHD though)

My guesses of somebody being ADHD are usually quite accurate, but maybe I've gotten overconfident after all

I recall growing up the amount of after-dinner coffee my family drank (with or without something added)... it was about as common at restaurants as bringing around the dessert cart (I miss the dessert cart!), if not more so.

Finally, I don't mind being autistic, but I do think autism is an illness. The overly systematic way of thinking, the need to be "correct" and find the "truth"

I dislike my own autistic weaknesses (hypersensitivity to senses and rejection among them) and would shed them if I had the chance, but the one part I am genuinely thankful for is that I have so called "black and white thinking" (or, as I like to call it, having principles). I am amazed humanity developed any sense of indvidualism at all because the majority of people I see are herd followers and comply with any number of nonsensical things in order for the perceived security they get at great cost sometimes to their own personal fulfillment.

Neitzsche does not advocate for a retvrn to ye olden days where man only focussed on the superficial and the vibes. The end result of focusing on that would result in a world full of deanos, a terrible place where the Last Man reigns supreme and humankind cannot advance. His ideal was a merging of the master and slave moralities and something greater yet to come.

I like the sensitivity part, I feel like senses is how you feel alive, so sensing more means feeling more alive than most people, or at least I like to think so. And having strong principles is usually admirable, though bending is better than breaking at times. Putting oneself at a disadvantage like this is great for individual development, but some people enter into unfortunate brittle configurations where it brings them many disadvantages. If I were to describe your trait as something positive, I'd say it's "having standards". Having standards is a mostly good form of inflexibility (plus, it pushes for things to be better).

I sort of both like and dislike human superficiality. I suppose I can forgive deep people for acting superficially, but that I can't forgive shallow people for having no depth. One of my favorite animals are cats, they just chill and do what they want, but they're easy to understand, they lack the layered deception that human have. If a cat wants to talk to you, or if it doesn't, you will know. As an autistic person, this is much easier to deal with than most people, and I quite like socializing with young people for this reason. So I admire even people who act like cats, despite how easily self-determination is confused for egoism, and how easily being in tune with oneself is confused with superficiality (which might be why it's mostly young people doing this - they're less socialized).

One thing I dislike though, is people who live in "shoulds" rather than reality. This is probably you (and it used to be me) so I will try to explain myself. They might follow rules, not for the reasons that the rules were made, but simply because they're rules. Life is too context-dependent for this to be viable, for there's a lot of cases in which "shouldn't"s are actually harmless or even beneficial. It took me a while, but I have learned to love ambiguity and all the advantages that it brings. Undecided parts of life, those kept vague or unknown, are basically pure potential. Once you make them into something specific, you lose the flexibility of choice. And most importantly, unchanging things are an illusion, everything is in a constant state of flux. Instead of deciding that a person is an introvert or an extrovert, you can just decide to experience the person as they are - and not hold them to the restriction of either (and feel bad when they act against the model you made of them). Plus, if you live in reality rather than in formal definitions, you tend to be mostly immune to thought experiments and existential issues.

where man only focussed on the superficial and the vibes

He didn't advocate for hedonism and materialism at least. But I think he did like "vibes" when they were caused by strong instincts. Nietzsche likes the human body and its potential. But human beings cannot improve without some struggles and hardship, and most people probably won't seek those out if they can avoid doing so, at least those who do seem rare.

I'm autistic, and I can tell that it runs in my family. My family tree has a lot of intelligent but eccentric people who likes model trains and such and have a silly form of humor. I've also heard "Coffee just makes me fall asleep haha" at quite a lot of family gatherings. Every time I watched trivia channels like "Who wants to be a millionare?" with my grandfather he'd know basically all the answers. My family also had a lot of criminals, mentally ill people (manic depression for instance), and millionares, so it's definitely not just autism and ADHD.

But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).

I don't know if autism is genetic, or if it's mostly caused by stress like you claim, and my family just happens to be high in neuroticism (which results in high rates of autism). I do think mental illness is on a raise though, as the modern society is less in tune with human nature. Couple this with the modern and much lower thresholds for diagnosis of mental disorders, and the effect is basically explained.

My story is similar, dad's side of the family is Scots-Irish and riddled with alcoholism and autism. My grandfather and one of my uncles are both maybes, and my dad and my other uncle are definitely autistic. I'm more than old enough to have slid through the US educational system without ever being caught, though I did get some attention from a teacher or two that was sure that something was wrong with me along with plenty of, "not living up to his potential," type report cards. Took the Aspie test BITD, laughed at the ridiculously high score that I got out of it, not even understanding that "neurodiversity" was essentially a code word but definitely identifying with not being a normie. Hell, I even made jokes about all of the autism in the family! When I was formally diagnosed a little less than three years ago I just laughed and laughed. There was yet another thing in my life that was hiding in plain sight all along!

I agree that the changing criteria for autism is the primary driver for the huge increase in diagnosis rates, and combining it with Asperger's in the DSM-V further exacerbates that. I'd also say that we have a decent set of criteria for diagnosing autism, which of course is still separate from whether or not it's being over-diagnosed in children. On the question of whether or not it's an illness in and of itself, I personally don't see it that way, though to be fair I've lived with it all my life without having any precise idea of what it was. Rather I see it as a large set of mental trade-offs where things like hyperfocus can be incredibly helpful in some circumstances and brutally crippling in others, to the extent that we can often resemble the "this is fine" meme, drinking coffee at our kitchen tables while our house is burning down around us.

But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).

Yeah same for me. Generations of Engineers and other such types, very easy to diagnose my dad, uncles and grandfather with it on vibes alone but I was the first generation to receive any sort of a formal diagnosis. Just used to be socially diagnosed as 'being a bit of a nerd'

I'm not wholly convinced that there's a clear or objective definition here, or that 'the autism spectrum' isn't a concept that shifts and expands, changing the people included within it. I say this as someone who has never had a formal diagnosis of any mental illness, but who has been speculated to be on the spectrum before, and who has then gone on to have actual psychologists investigate and then dismiss the possibility. My experience has been that, while there is a fairly identifiable core, the boundaries around what is and is not autism are sufficiently porous that you should be a little skeptical around reported numbers.

I think that like a lot of other things, our current environment makes people much more likely to notice and seek help for ever more mild symptoms of mental illness.

First of all, the demand on the human brain in the twenty-first century are much much higher than in the twentieth let alone the 19th. We didn’t rely on our brains as much, most people did less skilled work, and so if something was wrong with your brain, you might never have noticed. It’s hard to catch on to dyslexia if nobody around you reads above a third grade level because you’re not that much off of the perceived baseline. In the twenty-first century, any such problem would be noticed and fixed if possible because almost all liveable wage jobs are at least skilled trades or reading screens as a primary task. If you’re struggling in school, people are alert to it because they don’t want you suffering for it. Autism, at least in the milder forms may not have mattered as much in the early days of humanity. You’d just be kinda weird or eccentric and so on. People learned to live with your symptoms. That’s Jim, the weirdo who knows the names of thousands of birds and only eats white pasta. He’s mostly harmless.

The other thing is that medical care and especially mental health care is much more available (I’ve said before that I think therapeutic ideas don’t work for normal people and may make them worse) so if you’re having specific symptoms of something or your child is acting weird, you go see a doctor and if it’s autism, it’s diagnosed and treated as well as can be managed.

Both together would clearly make almost any mental illness more prevalent in the 21st century than the 19th. Not because there’s actually more mental illness but because there’s more medical care available and people are using it more. I expect a big increase now that therapy can be done over texts.

I think people are mistaking “a little odd” with autism. Autistic kids frequently are non verbal etc.

The reason Asperger Syndrome was rolled into Autism Spectrum Disorder was because careful review of the diagnostic criteria found the only difference: autism had early mutism, Asperger didn’t. Both had high and low functioning people, often with sensory issues.

Both also have subclinical expressions, people who clearly have it but aren’t impaired enough by it to need treatment or medication.

Yeah I guess I’m being unclear. I see most of these traits as following the typical bell curve in which you can have everything from the very high end (in this case highly sensitive, with severe communication problems, and repetitive behaviors) to the very low end where you end up with something a bit like Sheldon Cooper who’s awkward, has very specific needs for an unchanging environment and has special interests. The thing changing in my view, not just on autism but adhd and the like is the threshold at which a parent might seek help, or at which a teacher might suggest a problem and thus the symptoms are diagnosed. In 1900, a kid with adhd was just ditzy or a wild child or something like that. In 1900, Sheldon is weird, especially if he memorizes the train schedules or something. But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease. And even if they did sort of understand it as a disease, they didn’t seek help as often as we do today, in part because medicine in 1900 was harder to access and in part because it was not able to do nearly as much as it can today. By 2024, we’ve gotten much better at medicine and medical care is generally more available. Add in awareness and concern about neurological disorders especially as we move to a knowledge based economy, and you have a society that’s more likely to seek medical intervention for perceived mental illness or deficiencies.

Another thought:

But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease.

Psychological (software) and psychiatric (hardware) illnesses have historically been downplayed because of their invisibility. People fell through the cracks and died, or were caught in the social safety net and were institutionalized and forgotten. Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio, AC power, and the electric motor died penniless in a hotel where he kept pigeons in a coop. He was hailed as a great man, but had he known about his autism, he might have been even greater.

(The best explanation I’ve hear for Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is that Gregor Samsa woke up disabled one morning, and the bug thing is just a metaphor for dehumanization and dependency.)

It’s actually a good thing the rates are going up because, assuming there’s no actual rise in incidence, they’ll get care because the medical industry has got a profit motive to provide them care.

For some it’s definitely a benefit. But my biggest concern is that a lot of these diagnoses are not only not true, but believing them can take a normal person and turn them into almost a basket-case simply because the therapies designed for serious mental illnesses don’t work, but can make things worse.

Having a depressed person focus on the depression and focus on healing might help, but if you take a person with a case of tge blues and make them focus on their feelings and think about it as part of them, you create a worsening depression. The person had problems that could have been solved easily, but it got medicalized. Or someone with poor discipline and organization skills gets diagnosed ADHD and has an excuse for not doing what they actually could have done all along, but chose not to. Too much focus on feelings over getting things done just seems to take minor problems and turn them into something serious and long lasting.

The other problem in FdB’s “gentrification of mental illness.” Especially when an illness is deemed a part of ADA protections, Theres often a push for people with extremely mild versions of the symptoms (and I’m wording it this way because I’m not convinced that the vast majority of new cases are actually that disease) to get their diagnosis and use the ADA protection to get ahead in life. Or Autism. The people who really actually suffer from these disorders often end up falling further behind because the stuff intended to make it possible for them to live a normal life are handed to people with no such disorders who then use that help to get ahead of their peers, let alone the kids who have actual mental illness. Worse, those with the real thing often end up facing the stigma of being told that they’re not trying because some normal kid they know got diagnosed with ADHD and got a phd in something and so the reason you can’t keep an office job and remember to answer the emails isn’t the ADHD, it’s that you’re lazy or stupid or incompetent or whatever. No, the guy who got his phd wasn’t really ADHD, and the guy who can’t keep an office job is, and now he has to try to explain that to a boss. Or the actually autistic kid who can’t have normal conversations gets compared to a kid with “autism” who’s actually is just slightly shy. I know people with ADHD, real honest-to-God adhd, not the gentrified version, and they can’t keep a job easily even with medication because they have a serious disability.

Ironic for all the talk of postmodernity that we’re coming into our best scientific (modern) understandings yet of these neural modalities and structural differences at the same time people are primed to believe them a coincidental set of symptoms overhyped by the sellers of snake oil.

On a side note, there are still battles over the reputation of Doctor Asperger: in 2015, it was believed he heroically kept the Gestapo from taking his clinic’s young patients, but as of 2023 it’s believed he himself sent low-functioning kids to extermination.

Autism (especially “AuDHD”) rates have been rising for the same reason that ADHD, BPD and so on rates have been rising. It’s an easy way to get powerful stimulant drugs and extra time on exams (since it’s usually now combined with an ADHD diagnosis), and in the age of ultra-zealous HR it’s a get out of jail free card for someone who says something awkward at the company Christmas party. Plus, like the non-binary thing, it’s a way of gaining more of the vital currency of victimhood and accessing a ‘special’ identity category in a society that worships those things.

There is no reason to believe that real autism rates are rising much, and what little rise there is is probably due to older parents at time of conception. But let’s also be clear - 10 years ago most people you met who said they were autistic or had aspergers were actually autistic. Today you meet relatively socially well adjusted people all the time who say they’re autistic, when 20 years ago no psychiatrist would even remotely have considered giving them an autism or aspergers diagnosis.

Oooh, I think your right. The timeline matches up with the passage of the ADA (which requires extra time on exams for disabilities, among other things).

I'm willing to believe that mild autism today presents more strongly because in the fifties if you were a weird kid who acted awkward and mildly rudely you got beaten until you stopped doing that.

I won't claim this would be an improvement over 'mildly autistic people get to be offensive in an awkward way'. But it would enable lots of very mildly autistic people to come off as normal.

What do you think about the whole question of austim rates?

I have a theory but i don't think you're going to like it. My theory is that members of the professional class (and to an even greater extent their children) are simply less developed than baseline human beings.

Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?

Christians, like Jews before them, asserted quite strongly that the gods the average Roman of the day worshiped were false: non-existant and worthless at best, if not evil. This was unique to Jews and Christians, polytheist cultures in the region usually had an inclusive attitude towards foreign gods; not usually calling them "not real gods", but just ignoring them or sometimes adapting them within their own mythology.

This exclusive approach to God tended not to make monotheists very sympathetic to Romans.

The scriptures interestingly can go back and forth a bit on this. Some passages can be extremely 'disenchanting', firmly asserting that idols do not correspond to any kind of living or spiritual being, and have no power of any kind. In some places the New Testament seems to agree with this logic - for instance, 1 Corinthians 8:4, Romans 1:22-23, or the protest of the idol-makers in Acts 19:23-27 is remarkably materialistic. In other places, however, there is a sense that the gods of the nations may exist in some sense. Famously in Exodus, for instance, the Egyptian priests seem to possess magical powers of some kind as well (e.g. Exodus 7:20-24), and in places the New Testament also seems to flirt with this idea. Galatians 4 and Colossians 2 talk about the believers formerly being enslaved to "the elemental spirits of the universe", and while these are probably not gods in the proper sense (cf. Galatians 4:8), they do at least seem to be real, or possessed of some kind of power, even if that power is meagre and false in comparison to that of Christ. Indeed, that power seems to have been enough to make liberation from them necessary. This seems consistent with the various exorcism narratives in the gospels and Acts - whether 'god' is an appropriate name for them or not, the world appears to be populated with invisible spiritual powers, most of which are in some measure of rebellion against the Lord.

You can probably reconcile these perspectives to an extent - the world is full of hostile spiritual powers, and human beings deludedly believe that images made of stone and wood can influence these beings, or that the images come to contain power themselves - but I think it's nonetheless interesting that you can find the tension there.

Isn't this just a consequence of Christianity's curious choice to retain a legacy base of accumulated scriptures from hundreds of years as part of its canon? As you read between the lines of the Old Testament, it's possible to trace a gradual evolution from what was basically a standard polytheistic religion following the ancient Semitic pattern (multiple gods exist; our city/tribe's tutelary god is one of them; we owe him particular fealty and flattery because he is ours, and he will bring us success in battle against competing tribes and their gods in return; also don't think of slighting him or cheating with other gods, for he is very jealous) via gradual snorting of one's own supply (he really is better than the others, that's not just something we say because we have to) and dismissal of the competition (they are lesser/false gods) to something resembling the earlier Christian pattern (competing "gods" are more something like petty demons, evil and weak; our god is the God of everything, existing in a category wholly above petty city-state struggles). NT Christianity then simply continued this pattern, at a slower pace - I'm sure that if you had polled popes over the past 2000 years about their beliefs as to whether Baal Hammon "exists" and to what extent he can influence the real world, you would see a neat downwards trend.

As you read between the lines of the Old Testament, it's possible to trace a gradual evolution from what was basically a standard polytheistic religion following the ancient Semitic pattern

This definitely isn't true narratively (in the sense that e.g. Genesis clearly sets out God as the Creator God) but I don't think this is true textually, either, at least in the sense that the older parts of the Old Testament are more polytheistic and the newer parts of the Old Testament are more monotheistic. Wikipedia, which I assume is probably a good summation of scholarly consensus, lists the Song of the Sea as possibly the oldest part of the Old Testament. And the Song of the Sea has a fairly standard monotheistic (or, if you prefer, henotheistic) line:

Who among the gods is like you, Lord? Who is like you— majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?

The Song of Moses (again, one of the four oldest passages as per Wikipedia), has even stronger language, identifying other "new" gods worshipped by the children of Israel as demons or devils, and differentiating God from the gods:

See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand.

So it seems fairly clear that the earliest written parts of the Old Testament were already making a distinction between God and gods qualitatively, suggesting that the other gods were in some sense false. (Now, obviously, if you take the Scriptural narrative as a historical one, it definitely records that the children of Israel were in fact often polytheistic in practice.)

And as OliveTapenade points out, this sort of rhetoric (where the other gods are false gods or demons) doesn't gradually disappear, but reappears even in the New Testament. Interestingly (and to Goodguy's question below) my understanding is that some early Christian apologists centered some of their pitch around the idea that the old oracles had begun to die after the advent of Christ, which suggests that they thought a persuasive argument to pagans or post-pagans was "the old gods are out, the One True God has defeated them." (I guess pagans were primed for this, the death of Pan supposedly occurring under Tiberius' reign, chronologically close to the crucifixion of Christ). But in order to make those sorts of arguments, early apologists had to concede the existence of other gods of some kind. So the most maximalist monotheistic idea ("there are no other gods and pagan religious practices are all bunk") isn't really something that you see either in even the New Testament or the early Church.

To be fair, the sorts of people who make this evolutionary argument will typically point out that the Old Testament is not written down in the order in which it was composed (for instance, Genesis 2 is usually thought to be significantly older than Genesis 1), so we have to do a bit more work to determine which texts came first chronologically, and then discern the evolution that way.

They're no doubt correct to an extent here, but the risk is that the way we identify a text's origin comes to be a self-fulfilling prophecy - we might create a narrative for ourselves of development from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism, and on that basis alone assign more henotheistic-sounding texts to earlier strata. So some degree of skepticism is warranted, and classic forms of the documentary hypothesis have come under plenty of fire.

Incidentally:

Interestingly (and to Goodguy's question below) my understanding is that some early Christian apologists centered some of their pitch around the idea that the old oracles had begun to die after the advent of Christ, which suggests that they thought a persuasive argument to pagans or post-pagans was "the old gods are out, the One True God has defeated them."

There are some interesting examples of this! Here's one from the epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians:

How, then, was He manifested to the world? A star shone forth in heaven above all the other stars, the light of which was inexpressible, while its novelty struck men with astonishment. And all the rest of the stars, with the sun and moon, formed a chorus to this star, and its light was exceedingly great above them all. And there was agitation felt as to whence this new spectacle came, so unlike to everything else [in the heavens]. Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life.

The star of Bethlehem agitated the heavens, and destroyed the power of magic. So the people who might once have been in slavery to spirits, demons, or sorcerers have now been set free, and are ready to hear the gospel.

Merry Christmas!

(cf. also New Testament contempt for sorcerers, such as Simon Magus in Acts 8, or the fortune-telling girl in Acts 16:16-19. There may be a sense that the magic is 'real' - the girl's 'spirit of divination' enables her to immediately and correctly realises that Paul and Silas are apostles of God - but even so, it's bad, and Paul and Silas exorcise her and free her, much to the consternation of the girl's owners, who were making money from her power.)

To be fair, the sorts of people who make this evolutionary argument will typically point out that the Old Testament is not written down in the order in which it was composed (for instance, Genesis 2 is usually thought to be significantly older than Genesis 1), so we have to do a bit more work to determine which texts came first chronologically, and then discern the evolution that way.

Yes, I agree – that's why I focused on the Song of the Sea and the Song of Moses, since they're supposed to be composed early, as I understand it. From what I understand of mainstream Scriptural textual criticism, I'm a bit skeptical of some of the approaches you [edit:] textual critics employ (for the reasons you lay out), but I think it's interesting to make arguments with even significant concessions. Any other candidates of early Old Testament texts that come to mind for you?

Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life.

Beautiful. Merry Christmas!

I've read - and it has the ring of truth to me - that the earliest form of the First Commandment was thou shalt have no other gods before My face (that is, no (other) idols in Yahweh's temple/tabernacle/whatever).

I can see why one might think so, as a polytheistic precursor to the version we now have, but it's not in line with Judean polytheists' practice. When King Josiah of Judah decided he was done putting up with all this pagan nonsense, the Jerusalem temple had plenty of artifacts of polytheistic worship for him to burn, grind up, and/or throw into the river.

But if that is true, then how in the world did the Christians win?

Much higher fertility rate and offering a better deal to people who had some influence in Roman society but weren't particularly esteemed. I encourage people to actually read the church fathers talking about how Christians should behave- it's not really a mystery why lots of people shut out of formal power in Roman society but with a bit of influence really liked Christianity. They got much better treatment that way.

The first laws Christians used their newfound power to get passed under Constantine, after of course protections for themselves, were slave welfare laws. That attitude extended up the totem pole; 'not getting treated like dirt by your immediate superiors' is a hell of a benefit in a strongly hierarchical society.

Frequently the stubborn minority can outcompete the flexible majority.

  1. By being right 2) By being awesome.

My confirmation saint, St Adrian, was a Roman soldier, a jailer of Christians, who saw the courage of Christians he imprisoned and was converted on the spot.

Certainly I'm inclined to give a fair amount of weight to the "being right" hypothesis. Eschewing the spirit of impartiality for a moment, it is at least partly because monotheism is true, Jesus is Lord, and many (one may even hope most) early Christians behaved as if this were true.

That last part is especially important. All sorts of things are true but don't spread; all sorts of things are false but do spread. The conviction and behaviour of the witnesses matters.

Outbreeding and not killing their offspring. It seems to have been a numbers game.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1kfnGJR59lk?si=6XCpXAJytPo_8HS4

I'm not sure what part of pigeonburger's narrative makes it implausible that Christians might have done a good job of convincing pagans of this?

Indeed, on a more macrohistorical level, one of the observations I would make is that firstly polytheism seems remarkably fragile or weak in the face of robust monotheism, and secondly monotheisms seem remarkably resilient to each other.

Both Christianity and Islam expanded remarkably quickly and did excellent jobs of sweeping over pagan resistance - what efforts there were (sorry Julian) were mostly ineffective. Even factoring in that both Christians and Muslims used the sword and other incentives to an extent, they did this very rapidly. (And the sword by itself hardly seems to explain it - after all, polytheists are just as good at using brute force as monotheists.) To an extent we can continue to see this today, where traditional religions frequently don't put up much of a fight, looking through more recent evangelical or da'wah efforts in Africa or Asia. Hinduism is probably the only great polytheism to have resisted very strongly, and Hinduism has always had a bunch of quasi-monotheistic tendencies of its own.

Meanwhile, Christianity and Islam have both been noticeably ineffective at converting each other. There are a handful of exceptions (Muslims in Spain, Christians through parts of the Middle East), but for the most part, and barring a handful of individual exceptions, monotheist-to-monotheist conversions are quite rare. Judaism is also a strong example here. The biggest exception I think of here is Zoroastrianism, which did mostly collapse in the face of Islam (though it took a few centuries; most of early Islamic Persia remained Zoroastrian for a few centuries), and maybe you could argue Manichaeism or something as a Roman monotheism that also fell before Christianity, but in general it seems that when a monotheistic religion gets entrenched, it is extraordinarily difficult to convert people away from en masse.

Of course, today there's a third combatant in the ring in the form of atheism/secularism/irreligion, and it seems to be doing pretty well at smashing both Christianity and Islam. Perhaps in a few centuries my descendants will be discussing how zero-theism outcompeted monotheism just as monotheism outcompeted polytheism. But please forgive me if I hope that is not the case.

I think a big problem for premodern paganism was the lack of a Bible or Qu’ran as a way to unite the faith and to unify the practices and mores. Pagans were more open, but also less United and had fewer touchstones of belief — tribes outside of yours might not know your gods and even if they did, didn’t know the same mythology or worship in the same way.

It seems like substituting "Abrahamic religions" for "monotheistic religions" in your model makes it fit with fewer epicycles.

Perhaps, but then I think I would have to deal with a new epicycle - what makes Abrahamic religion different to other monotheism? If there's an Abrahamic advantage separate from just monotheism, what is it?

A pro-social covenant premise?

Abrahamic religions have a common premise that not only is [God] real and present, but that while love may be unconditional favor is not- if you / your collective society sins greatly, not only will god permit the outsider to overthrow you, but God may throw the first meteor. On the flip side, the way to earn / retain gods favor is a bunch of tenants / commandments that, coincidentally, happen to be good for healthy societies that can succeed in cooperation, unleashing those benefits of scale.

This sort of covenant premise is not inherent to monotheism. You could believe there is one god, but that it expects nothing of you and implies no type of action. You could believe there is one god, but they are eternally absent. There could be one god, but it hates you. There could be a god and a covenant, but the demands are less socially beneficial. Etc.

It's interesting to note that the other ancient monotheistic religion which survives to this day, Zoroastrianism, is also very pro-social and big on sin reducing the favor of God.

The difference is that Abrahamaic religions command their adherents to improve the world. Zoroastrianism does not; in Zoroastrianism the adherent is commanded to do charity, but it doesn't actually matter if that charity helps the recipient. There is no equivalent to teach a man to fish as there is with Christian charity, which is big on education, hospitals, etc in comparison.

Hard to tell since almost all modern monotheism is derived from Abrahamic religion, which itself probably takes its monotheism from Zoroastrianism. Even Sikhism which is the other major non-Abrahamic monotheistic faith was strongly influenced by Islam.

Sikhism is an interesting one to me - I wasn't terribly familiar with it until the first time I visited a gurdwara and heard a lot from a Sikh community in themselves. I already had some academic and practical knowledge of both Hinduism and Islam for context, and as they explained their history, doctrines, and practices to me it felt blazingly obvious what Sikhism is.

That is, and with apologies to any Sikhs here, to me Sikhism reads as what you get out of a Hindu reform movement in a place where there is a lot of Islam already in the water supply. There's a lot of it that feels midway between Hinduism and Islam, or as a kind of hybrid. If you come from a Hindu background (as Guru Nanak did), become convinced of the oneness of God in a way that goes a little beyond the soft-monotheism of a lot of Hindu theology, and are surrounded by Islamic influences but are not interested in just becoming Muslim yourself... well, it's fairly intuitive where that ends up.

Anyway, I don't think I would be convinced that Abrahamic monotheism ultimately originates in Zoroastrianism? I think there are Zoroastrian influences in the mix in places (the magoi Matthew references, famously, but also the Zoroastrian influences are especially visible on Islam), but the genealogy is too hard to trace through ancient Judah, I think. I find it more plausible that monotheism independently evolved in several different places historically - after all, if you glance at anything from Hinduism to European paganism to even Chinese traditional religion, I'd argue there are a number of proto-monotheistic trends that often seem to appear. Most of them didn't get to full monotheism the way that Zoroastrianism and Abrahamic religion did, but Brahman or Heaven or the Stoic vision of God or what have you are enough to make it plausible to me that concepts of a unitary divine can just evolve independently.

I feel compelled to point out that this is evidence Christianity is correct.

It only takes one contrarian sympathizer, if that sympathizer is the emperor. Constantine the Great converted and then started converting the empire.

*EDIT: As to how Christians converted Romans to subsist until that point; their attitude towards salvation was a big factor, as was the egalitarian nature of it all. That the lowliest of criminal could repent and accept salvation and be the equal of anyone else in Heaven is quite a revolutionary concept at the time. Romans and Greeks were making sacrifices and offerings to jockey for position in the Gods favors, only a few were going to be headed for paradise. As for the Jews, their texts were mostly concerned with what would happen to that specific people; what would happen to converts was not clear. But Jesus was clear; here is one God that only asks that you believe in Him and he immediately saves you, reserves a place in Heaven for you, and has you in as high a regard as anyone else who also accepted Him? Seems like a great deal! It's certainly a better chance at eternal life for the destitute and marginal than what they could hope for from the Roman and Greek polytheist worship.

As for the Jews, their texts were mostly concerned with what would happen to that specific people; what would happen to converts was not clear.

Most Jews circa 2000 years ago did not believe in an afterlife. They thought you had your material body and that's it. A select few people get to leave to be with God. The rest of us are dead forever or resurrected in a strictly material sense.

A 2011 South Korean study with unique methodology for the time suggested autism rates are naturally about 1 per 38, or about three percent, assuming no difference in rates by race. This research came at a time of greater awareness of high functioning autism at nonclinical levels:

The South Korean study probably produced such a high figure because it screened a lot of kids who seemed to be doing OK and included in-person evaluations of any child suspected of having autism, Grinker says. "Two-thirds of the children with autism that we ended up identifying were in mainstream schools, unrecognized, untreated," he says.

American rates have ended up about the same 1/38.

It seems to me that there are three distinct options...

the first (and in my opinion most likely option) is that the media is simply lying about the perp being "anti-muslim" or "aligned with the alt-right". They are desperate to deflect blame and acting acordingingly. You don't really believe that they are above fabricacating evidence do you?

The second is that this is all "Taqiyya", and the perp was a genuine Jihadi.

The third is that there there is a distinct subset of the extremly online ("Woke") Right who no matter how much they might claim to hate immigrants and people of color, they will always hate "Normies" and "Christians" and the "Grill-Pilled" more because the former is the far-group and the latter is the out-group.

Also what is this " car rammed into people" bullshit, the car didn’t do anything, the driver did.

One of the reasons why it's easy for me to believe the perp is what he claims to be is that I actually know a local variant of this type. An immigrant from a Muslim-majority country, born a Muslim but now an atheist ex-Muslim, used to be on the left due to the association of secularism and leftism in the Middle East but left the left in a huff due to the lack of enthusiasm for his strident anti-Islam sentiment, has also burned briges with the other local ex-Muslims, now associated with the mainstream nationalist party though also critical of them for a variety of reasons including insufficient concentration on Islam, generally comes across as igh-strung and aggressive. (Of course he's not directly comparable to the terrorist in the sense that he hasn't threatened to kill anyone.) My guess is that there are more than a few ex-Muslims like this around. It's quite ironic that one part of the narrative that the Saudi terrorist was a secret Muslim practicing taqiyya comes from the claims of other ex-Muslims, the other ex-Muslims are reliable non-taqiyaish sources now?

Also what is this " car rammed into people" bullshit, the car didn’t do anything, the driver did.

It's been a perennial complaint of cycling activists that even normal, regular car accidents (in local news etc.) get reported as "car rammed into a person" or even as "a pedestrian/cyclist collided fatally with a car". There's something about cars that makes us conceive of them as autonomous objects, kind of like large animals or something.

The second is that this is all "Taqiyya", and the perp was a genuine Jihadi.

IANA muslim scholar, but isn't taqiyya a mostly shia doctrine which tends to apply to either A) hiding religious mysteries from the uninitiated or B) escaping imminent persecution for the sake of continuing the faith, and not something which could easily be weaponized by Jihadis?

It seems true that Islam allows adherents to hit defect a lot more than Christianity does. But I don't think 'pretend to be an apostate to kill non-believers' is something Islam allows, or is believed to allow by actual Muslims.

If we're looking at strictly Quaranic examples/interpretations yes, but as i said, it has also been used by radical Sunnis historically to justify tactics like attacking under a false flag.

It seems true that Islam allows adherents to hit defect a lot more than Christianity does

Agreed, and perhapse this is why Christianity has consistently outperformed its rivals despite being "weak", "cucked", "a slave morality", etc...

You have hit on a pet peeve of mine, the incessant barking of "Taqiyya! Taqiyya! Taqiyya!" by right-wingers on Twitter who learned the term from Wikipedia and think they've stumbled onto the secret Muslim master plan.

Taqiyya refers, generally, to concealing your beliefs in the face of oppression or imminent danger. E.g., Muslims who were forced to "convert" to Christianity on pain of death were still considered good Muslims if they pretended to convert to save themselves. There are also some esoteric Islamic beliefs that some sects consider religious "mysteries" that should be hidden from unbelievers, even if it means lying about them. And various other corner cases covered in the sort of legalistic parsing of the Quran and hadiths that Muslims love to do. Islam, like most religions with a long legalistic history, has been divided into a multitude of sects and schools of thought, so like Christians and Jews (and non-Abrahamic faiths as well), you can find different branches who declare other branches flatly wrong or even heretical, and come up with all sorts of bizarre edge cases under which this or that practice is "allowed."

So far as I know, there are no mainstream Islamic sects (or even fringe groups, from what I have been able to find) that preach "Taqiyya" meaning "Pretend to be a non-Muslim to infiltrate a host society as a sleeper agent." I have never heard of even jihadists advocating that Muslims pretend to be atheists or Christians to sneak into the West so they can attack infidels. I suppose some of them might approve of this, but that sort of long game (spend 10 years pretending to be an anti-Muslim atheist and harassing people on social media?) would be hard to pull off for a professional spy under deep cover.

The more likely explanation is that this guy has always been crazy and had violent and vengeful impulses, and something pushed him over the edge. His motives seem to be a mix of anti-Saudi, anti-Islam, anti-German, and anti-West, in a way that anti-Muslims would love to condense down to "Deep cover jihadist practicing taqiyya" but doesn't really seem to match the facts.

It strikes me that a lot of terrorists/mass shooters lately have been a sort of ideological Rorschach blob. Like Luigi Mangione, whom both rightists and leftists are still assiduously trying to assign to the other tribe.

I'm somewhat more sympathetic to the more general anti-immigrationist argument that you can take the fanatic out of Saudi but you can't take the Saudi out of fanaticism (he seems to have retained a very jihadist psychology even if he stopped being a Muslim), but "Taqiyya" seems to have become a lazy, infinitely generalizeable dismissal of anything an Arab says because, you know, they're all lying double-agents practicing Taqiyya to fool the kafir.

Something being annoying or inconvenient doesn't make it untrue. The use of false flags and lying about one's intentions/beliefs are something that radical Sunni groups have historically engaged in and endorsed.

My reply to there being no mainstream Islamic sects that you know of who endorse that, is "No shit Sherlock". We are not talking about mainstream Muslims, we are talking about Deash, and the sort of guy who would Abracadabra Snackbar his way into a Christmas market.

That said i still think that the most likely explanation is that the media is simply lying. And that even if they are not lying, his alleged views are not some weird "mix", they are to all appearances fairly typical amongst the more woke elements of the online right. Herr Doktor is simply acting on a spicier verson of the sentiment occasionally expressed by multiple users here, IE that "the normies" are contemptable/subhuman and deserve to be punished.

Something being annoying or inconvenient doesn't make it untrue. The use of false flags and lying about one's intentions/beliefs are something that radical Sunni groups have historically engaged in and endorsed.

All radical groups engage in deception, concealment, and false flags. The question is whether this is something specific to Islam. Which I maintain it is not, contrary to the people yammering about "Taqqiya" as if they have discovered Islam's deep dark secret. Yes, Muslims, like Christians and Jews, believe it's okay to lie to unbelievers who are persecuting them or to protect others. That's it, it's not a general practice of lying to unbelievers pretending you aren't planning to kill them.

My reply to there being no mainstream Islamic sects that you know of who endorse that, is "No shit Sherlock". We are not talking about mainstream Muslims, we are talking about Deash, and the sort of guy who would Abracadabra Snackbar his way into a Christmas market.

And my reply to this is what I said above: I don't know if any Daesh clerics have issued some tortured interpretation of "Taqqiyah" to convince their agents to go deep cover as an infidel, but if so, I've never heard of it. And if the people I am complaining about were only claiming that jihadists are violent fanatics who twist their religion to justify terrorism, I would say "No shit Sherlock" right back at you. My point is that it's very common to see people claiming, essentially, that all Muslims (or ex-Muslims) are (or should be assumed to be) lying about their intentions. I saw this quite explicitly in a bunch of Twitter threads about Taleb al-Abdulmohsen. ("No such thing as an ex-Muslim," etc.) You proposed it as an explanation.

That said i still think that the most likely explanation is that the media is simply lying.

Maybe, though if there's evidence that he's actually a jihadist and the media is covering it up, that would be pretty dumb since we're already seeing years of his Twitter rantings being dug up.

And that even if they are not lying, his alleged views are not some weird "mix", they are to all appearances fairly typical amongst the more woke elements of the online right.

I still think "woke right" is a pretty incoherent concept, but to the degree it exists, it think it fits exactly what I mean by "weird mix"; it's a stew of assorted resentments and grudges that don't neatly fit into a single coherent ideological category.

Yes, Muslims, like Christians and Jews, believe it's okay to lie to unbelievers who are persecuting them or to protect others.

Christians are not allowed to lie to escape persecution under traditional interpretations of moral theology.

The question is whether this is something specific to Islam.

I didn't claim that false flags and deception were specific to Islam, only that they were tactics that radical Islam has been known to engage in and endorse.

I don't know if any Daesh clerics have issued some tortured interpretation of "Taqqiyah" to convince their agents to go deep cover as an infidel, but if so, I've never heard of it.

One of the core tenets of Wahhabism (the subset of Islam from which pretty much all modern radical Sunni movements trace thier roots) is that anything is acceptable if it is done in the pursuit of god's enemies. Or to put it in more familiar/secular terms, there are no bad tactics only bad targets. Deash clerics don't need to make the argument explicitly because the argument is already implicit in the Deash worldview.

if there's evidence that he's actually a jihadist and the media is covering it up, that would be pretty dumb since we're already seeing years of his Twitter rantings being dug up.

Is your argument really that the media and assorted twitter personalities couldn't possibly be decieved and would never just lie to our faces? Because if so i have a bridge in London to sell you.

I still think "woke right" is a pretty incoherent concept

And again, i disagree because it seems pretty coherent to me.

As i have argued in prior discussions there seems to be a distinct subset of the extremely-online "right" that is far more "woke" and identitarian than they are right-wing. One of the unifying themes of this subset is a seething resentment of Christians/Normies/Anyone who isn't as black-pilled miserable or cynical as they are.

The second is that this is all "Taqiyya", and the perp was a genuine Jihadi.

Such a long con for such meagre reward (a mere five dead at the last count) seems a bit unlikely to me.

It's not actually that easy to slaughter dozens of people believe me.

Jokes aside it does seem unlikely to me it was some kind of long con too, but the number killed isn't necessarily an indication of their intentions as multiple spree killers have demonstrated, and while a ten year plan indicates a lot more strategy than say William Atchison, we make a plan and God laughs.

I agree, I still think that the most likely explanation is that the media/internet is lying and that this guy was just a conventional Jihadi.

The likeliest scenario imo seems to be a psychotic episode. Presumably, for hallucinations just as for dreams, the brain twists concepts it already has. (Often the specific symptoms of mental illness are what your culture expects them to be -- like if the mind still follows some script.) I think your world view will inform what hallucinations you are 'supposed' to have. A Christian who is convinced that the devil talks to people and entices them to evil deeds might be more likely to hallucinate the devil, while someone who presumably thinks that the great evil in the world is Islam might be more likely to have a vision of Allah ordering them to do some stereotypical terror attack.

My other scenario is slightly on the conspiracy side. Presumably, someone from a Muslim country who is loudly against Islam is an irritation to Jihadists, who might just decide to get hold of some of his loved ones (perhaps in the Arab world) and blackmail him into committing some atrocity. Of course, this has very much not been their playbook so far. Also, they would likely want to claim responsibility for the attack after the fact.

The likeliest scenario imo seems to be a psychotic episode.

He got reported to the police for making the same threat last year. He was convicted for threats in '13..

https://x.com/2ltifaa/status/1870273133766123643

The dankness of the timeline is off the scale.

where he started working as a doctor and psychotherapist.

This is why Szasz is undefeated. What the fuck use is a field of medicine that purports to help nutters but the doctor himself, and his colleagues who interacted with him, can't spot that he's the type of nutter who is going to ram a car into a Christkindlmart?

Uh, didn’t he get reported to the German police multiple times and they didn’t do anything?

Imagine the tug of war there deciding whether he should be targeted.

But he ist Herr Doktor! But an afd supporter! ...But a Newcomer. But an islamophobe!

I know for a fact that by now they have a few Turks on the police force by now. Send one of them to crack a skull, and watch the media have an aneurysm of that tug of war.

Not skulls, hands (or kneecaps if you want to be "white" about it)

But he mowed down women and children! But they were probably a bunch of racists!

Agreed. That was my first thought as well.

Psychotherapy is just… criminal at this point, imo. They have so much power and authority in society yet clearly do not have any idea what they’re doing.

So, this is very interesting. I wonder: was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration? I imagine he understood that everyone would, justifiably, assume that an Arab man driving his car into a Christmas market (with an explosive device inside, no less!) would be interpreted by all sides as an Islamist terror attack. Maybe he was hoping nobody would identify him and discover his Twitter account? If he did expect people to find his account, I really have no idea what political outcome (if any) he was hoping to facilitate as a result of this attack.

On the one hand, his background as a former refugee from the Middle East makes him an incredibly unwieldy weapon for progressives to use to discredit immigration skeptics; on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing. Some commentators, such as Keith Woods, are taking the position that this proves that all Arab immigration to Europe should be cut off, because even the apparently liberal/assimilated ones are still ticking time bombs of potential violence; this seems fairly tendentious even to me, given what we know about the guy so far.

I wonder: was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration?

He hated Germans and threatened them repeatedly. If it's an act it was a years long performance.

Did he hate Germans? Or did he hate the German government? I haven’t seen any evidence of the former, although I’d be perfectly happy to be confronted with some.

I haven’t seen any evidence of the former

murdering them in a terrorist attack targeting them seems to be at least a weak evidence

Not necessarily! One of his messages that I did see said something like, “The only thing the German government respects is violence. I’m going to have to do something violent to get them to respect me.” It’s entirely possible that he was merely indifferent to the suffering of the people he maimed and killed; that the purpose of the attack was not to make them suffer, but rather to have the moment of their suffering become a political flashpoint.

  1. Intentionally killing random Germans to punish Germans in German government counts to me as hating Germans.

  2. Even if you do not agree with (1) then posting in public how you plan to murder Germans, finding justifications and then murdering bunch of Germans is at least a weak evidence that they in fact hated Germans. Even if they have not tweeted about it outright.

was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration? I imagine he understood that everyone would, justifiably, assume that an Arab man driving his car into a Christmas market (with an explosive device inside, no less!) would be interpreted by all sides as an Islamist terror attack. Maybe he was hoping nobody would identify him and discover his Twitter account?

I'm going to have to write this story someday.

I’ll consolidate my replies to @SecureSignals, @Walterodim, and @Belisarius, since they’re all making similar points.

Firstly, I agree that this guy should not have been allowed to live in Germany. Now, to be clear, he came as an asylum seeker in 2006, nearly a decade before Merkel’s Mistake; at the time, Arab migration to Germany was, as I understand it, quite minimal (it was Turks who were by far the largest source of Middle Eastern immigration at the time) and it’s significantly more understandable that he would have been let in. There was no large insular Arab community in Germany into which he could have ensconced himself to obviate the need to assimilate. He was fluent in English, and had clear and explicit anti-Islam sentiments. He seems basically like an Ayaan Hirsi Ali type, and given how live a threat Islamist terror seemed at that time, I think it was understandable to expect this guy to act as a potentially impactful voice steering young Arab men away from Islamist radicalization. (And, to be clear, it’s entirely plausible that he did have some impact, substantial or not, of that nature at the time.) Given what we know now in hindsight, not only about him personally but about the larger effects of Arab immigration to Europe, it’s clear that the stance toward asylum seekers should have been far more exclusionary than it was at the time.

However, I want to make sure that opposition to Arab immigration is based on specific, articulable, predictive claims. I oppose large-scale Arab immigration because of the specific qualities that I expect most Arabs (and, especially, most Arabs choosing to emigrate to Europe) to possess, and because of the specific actions they are likely to take and the motivations behind those actions. Let’s look at what specific problems/pathologies I expect to accompany large-scale Arab immigration, and analyze the extent to which this guy embodied those pathologies:

I expect Arabs to create culturally-insular ethnic enclaves, in which they are able to continue to replicate the cultural practices of their homeland rather than assimilating. Well, this guy was fluent in English, and had already marked himself as not only culturally-distinct from the vast majority of Arabs, but actively in opposition to them. It is true that he brought baggage and cultural grievances with him from his homeland; however, those grievances toward Arab Muslims are pretty much exactly the same grievances that liberal Westerners had about Arab Muslims at the time. “They’re culturally backward, they mistreat women, their culture is anti-Western, and anti-science, they’re susceptible to radical jihadist beliefs.” All of those grievances are true and valid! This is the Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali line about Arab Muslims. They’re not the sort of arcane inter-ethnic blood feuds and tribal jockeying we normally associate with foreign ethnic groups immigrating and co-mingling in places like the U.K. and Canada.

I expect a large percentage of Arab immigrants to be uneducated, unskilled, to spend a long time (potentially their entire lives) unemployed and on welfare. Well, this guy was a doctor — okay fine, a psychiatrist, so barely a doctor, but at least it’s a well-paying job that kept him gainfully employed and interacting economically with the German public. He certainly doesn’t pattern-match to the average Arab in Germany; as @Walterodim points out, he’s more like the average educated Indian in Canada.

I expect large numbers of Arab men to fall into lives of crime, both petty and organized. Well, again, this guy does not appear to have any criminal record. He hasn’t fallen in with Arab gangs, he hasn’t become some listless glowering thug milling about the town square acting like a savage.

I expect some small number of Arab men to commit serious acts of terrorism, motivated by jihadist beliefs and by a hatred of their host societies. This is where we have to carefully discern what happened here. In pretty much all of the other terror attacks committed by Arabs in Europe, the ideological motivations were clearly religious and specifically Islamist in character. The Bataclan attackers, the guys driving their trucks into markets, the guys cutting priests’ heads off — they all make their Islamist beliefs very explicit. That’s not why this guy appears to have done what he did.

So, why did he? If we want to talk about ideology, his views are difficult to pattern-match to other large ideological trends. On the one hand, he was very consistent about Germany’s need to resist Islamization. In that sense, he aligns very strongly with the AfD and other right-wing nationalist groups. However, he also wanted more immigration of a very specific class of Arab Middle Easterners: ex-Muslim/anti-Islam refugees, and particularly educated women. In that sense he’s not only similar to the more moderate right (what wignats derisively call “the kosher right) but also to some of the more eclectic right-wingers who say the West should let in plenty of attractive female refugees, while cutting off all or nearly all male immigration. And of course his stated commitment to progressive values such as feminism and economic leftism puts him almost more in line with the sort of leftist terrorism Germany faced in the 70’s. (Although that terrorism had a strong pro-Palestinian valence, whereas this guy was a Zionist.) But in this case his choice of targets doesn’t really seem to align with any expected ideological movements. This was no act of right-wing nationalist terrorism — he’s no Anders Breivik or Brenton Tarrant — because his victims were (at least presumably) white Germans. He really did seem to resent Germany and to want to strike a blow against it on behalf of his in-group, but his in-group isn’t Arabs as a whole, it isn’t Muslims, and it isn’t even Saudis. It appears to just be “ex-Muslim apostates (especially women) fleeing the Middle East.” I was joking yesterday, “Is this the first Reddit Atheist terror attack?” Yes, he’s a brown Arab, but in terms of his worldview he’s got more in common with murdered Dutch anti-Muslim filmmaker Theo Van Gogh than with the Muslims who killed him.

So, in what ways is this guy’s terror attack similar to previous acts of Arab terrorism? What patterns does it match? Certainly in terms of its specific methodology it’s similar to other terror attacks we’ve seen in Europe, both with the use of a car driving through a Christmas market, and with the (thankfully unused) explosive device. But in terms of its motivations I think it’s sufficiently different from previous acts of terrorism that it’s not really instructive. While obviously there are genetically-influenced psychological differences between population groups, and Arabs are a population group with heritable traits, I don’t think anyone’s found any evidence for a “terrorism gene” among that population. If Arabs tend to be more violent than Europeans, it’s because they tend to be lower-IQ and to live in low-trust backward societies wherein violence is an effective and sanctioned way to obtain power and resources. It’s not because some voice in the back of their head, whispering to them like the Orc god Gruumsh, instructs them to drive their cars into crowds.

I saw some DR commentator (probably Captive Dreamer) say, “If that’s the model migrant, imagine how much worse the rest are.” This is probably effective propaganda, but it doesn’t seem very intellectually substantive. This guy’s pathologies, and the reasons he shouldn’t have been in Europe, were of a markedly different character from those of the true dregs of the Arab world which have been washing up on the shores of Europe. The “model migrants” in, say, Canada are problematic largely because they use their political power to facilitate bringing in more of their countrymen. In that narrow sense, this guy’s story is certainly instructive. It is true that his #1 loyalty was to his in-group, which did not include most white Germans, and that in the end he was willing to commit savage violence against his host country in order to (in some twisted, confused, politically aimless way) earn concessions for people like himself.

There are, though, two distinct sets of concerns when it comes to the immigration discussion - one is about the dangers presented by the importation of educated foreigners who will use political and cultural power to advocate for increased immigration, and who will dilute the political and cultural power of the native population. Whatever you want to say about these types of people, likelihood of committing terror attacks has simply never been a plausible vector of attack against them. This is, so far as I can tell, the first high-profile attack of this kind committed by a guy with this background and these specific beliefs, and I don’t think we’ll see many more examples in the future.

The other half of the immigration discussion is about low-skilled, unassimilable, criminally-inclined young, susceptible-to-jihadist-radicalization men and their welfare-dependent spouses. While this has largely been the story of Arab immigration to Europe (particularly post-2015) it is not this guy’s story. Whatever he is, he’s not an example of that. He did assimilate to an ideology with a lot of Western adherents; he was just willing to do what few of those Westerners would have done as a result of that ideology. (And I want people to be careful in their speculations about why he was willing to do so.)

People like Keith Woods would like to essentially merge these conversations and say that it’s all the same conversation: All foreigners in Europe are bad, none of them belong there, even the supposed best of them bring problems, they’ll never be assimilable, they’ll always work against us. And what I’m saying is that I don’t think this is credible. There are foreigners in Europe — for example, East Asian immigrants — who have not, so far as I can tell, created any problems for their host societies. If Germany let in 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants tomorrow, my prediction is that those immigrants would flourish, as they have in America. It’s not simply “being foreign” that makes Arab immigrants a bad fit for European society; it’s their specific traits, the specific beliefs they have, their lower IQ and lower impulse control, their hatred for Western norms, their parasitic dependency on the largesse of the welfare state, and the difficulty in integrating them into society. This guy’s problems don’t really map onto any of those concerns, except in a roundabout and strained way.

okay fine, a psychiatrist, so barely a doctor

What precisely makes a psychiatrist barely a doctor?

The argument people like Keith Woods makes is that these Arab immigrants will never be German, no matter how long they are there or if they learn the language, whether they commit crime or do not commit crime, whatever they Tweet or whatever political policy they support, whatever religion they will follow, the only certainty is that they will never be German. So your rebuttal is not responsive to the issue they fundamentally have with the mass migration of non-European people to European civilization.

It's not just about crime, it's not just about religion, it's not just about terrorism, although those things can be relevant symptoms, it's about jealously guarding a European genetic and civilizational inheritance from being Africanized, replaced by Arabs or Chinese, Indians or whatever.

Your argument is most responsive to the Conservatives who just say "hey, I'm not racist I just oppose mass Arab migration because I don't want terrorist attacks in my Christmas villages." For those people you can do your well ackhually it wasn't Islamic extremism that inspired the attack, but that just doesn't work on the DR perspective.

If Germany let in 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants tomorrow, my prediction is that those immigrants would flourish, as they have in America.

Why stop at 100,000? Why not 100 million? Even if mass migration of Asians, Vietnamese, Chinese to Germany caused a reduction in crime and created economic growth do you think the DR should accept these foreigners because they commit less crime or raise GDP? Why not replace all of Europe with Chinese if it lowered crime and raised IQ? It's only conservatives who say it's about those things.

This terrorist attack is pertinent to the DR perspective because it provides a symbolic counterexample to the lie that, no matter who you are, you can go to Germany, learn the language and obey the law and, congratulations you're German! No you are not. The American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be. So this man ostensibly being the "model" Arab immigrant but still become inspired to commit this act is shattering the liberal illusion of assimilation, or that being German is just an idea.

He really did seem to resent Germany and to want to strike a blow against it on behalf of his in-group, but his in-group isn’t Arabs as a whole, it isn’t Muslims, and it isn’t even Saudis. It appears to just be “ex-Muslim apostates (especially women) fleeing the Middle East.”

His motivation was European immigration policy. You try to be ultra-specific about it to brush it as a one-off, but it introduces the likelihood of violence in response to Right-wing Immigration reform in Europe. We may see more of that type of violence than radical Islamic-inspired violence, although a lot of it will be blended together.

We have seen a similar pattern with Free Speech in Europe: terrorist attacks in response to offensive speech did not motivate backlash against mass migration it motivated crackdowns on "hate speech" out of fear of offending Muslims. So if we see more Arab terrorists attack Europe because of European immigration reform we will likely see pressure put against immigration reform. This is relevant especially at a time when parties are flirting with the idea of remigration.

You don't think that AfD and other European parties beginning to support remigration is likely to inspire any more of this violence? We already see race riots and organized street violence by African and Arab gangs. That already happens, and it's political, it's not driven by radical Islam. So your denial that we won't see more of this sort of political violence is absurd.

Yes, the likelihood is near 100% that this sort of violence is going to influence European policy on immigration, most likely it will cause authorities to crackdown harder on political support for remigration because authorities will plausibly be able to say that supporting this policy is likely to foment violence. Certainly if that policy were to be pursued, then violence from deportees would be a top concern of that policy. So there's simply no reality in which the prospect of violence from these African and Arab migrants is irrelevant, Muslim or otherwise.

This attack is more relevant because it was motivated by European immigration policy than if it were just radical Islam. It's proof that mass migration irrevocably influences politics and "assimilation" is fundamentally a lie.

Germany, Ireland, Finland, and the UK have very different cultures about assimilation. Famously France thinks it can assimilate Africans; German identity seems a bit more racially-exclusivist in comparison.

I think plenty of people from all over the world can assimilate and become culturally Southern

The word 'can' is doing alot of heavy lifting in your argument.

One of the elements that cemented my current opinion on such matters - among many - was talking with a friend of mine. Ethnically Italian, his family has been here for over a century.

And yet, despite this, there's parts of his family the rest know damn well to stay away from. Why? Because they're the ones connected to organized crime. The mafia.

A century of assimilation, and they're still culturally and ethnically distinct, with problems from the 'old world' still present. Hell, there's a sizable minority that have dual citizenship!

And this is with Italians. I grew up around alot of them. Hell, my father's godparents were damn near pure-blooded Italian!

And you're going to sit here, and suggest, straight to my face, that other ethnic groups are going to be better than them?

No. You import the people, you import the culture, for good and for ill. So stop importing them.

But I'm interested in hearing other European perspectives on this

From Europe, Poland to be more specific.

For me "American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be" is absolutely laughable position.

No, just because you can trace some Polish ancestry does not make you Pole. You have no genetic memory etc. You are welcome in my country but if you start talking in English (not knowing any Polish and having meme-level understanding of Polish culture) how you are Polish then I am surely not going to agree with you.

Just because your grandfather could say 10 words in Polish, 5 of them being curses does not make you Polish. If all your grandfathers and grandmothers were Polish but you lost language, lost culture that makes you white, not Polish. (though if someone wants to recover that, it is entirely welcome to do so and I would be happy to help if I would encounter such person)

I have quite high bar what I would expect before I would consider someone to be Polish. But at least in theory it seems possible to me for someone green/yellow/black/purple/German to become Polish. And there were cases of this happening.

And yes, specially for our resident SSman: many people with Jewish ancestry were Poles, some of them were Poles practising Jewish religion, for some of them they were distinguishable only by genealogy and surnamed. (some failed to do so or had completely distinctive cultural identify). Though nowadays it is extremely rare as German murdered millions of Poles and Jews after invading. And while under communist occupation many were kicked out. Or preferred to escape from communist paradise.

And we had and have Poles with German, Belarusians, Russian, Ukrainian ancestry. Maybe if you would look really hard you would find some Poles with other skin colours (note: I can easily find some prominent people with Polish citizenship which are yellow/black, this does not make them Poles).

I'm just curious, if you a Pole went to China and learned the language and such would you say you are Chinese if you had 0% Chinese admixture? Would you say you were Bantu if you took residence in West Africa?

Would you agree the thoroughly Americanized Chinese family, with n-th generation children that can't speak a lick of Mandarin, are more Chinese still than some White person who immigrates there and learns the language?

I've seen a lot of Indians in the South. I've never seen a culturally Southern Indian. It would probably just make me laugh. It's not them, and they are not us.

But I'll admit that my motivation is not "We must preserve Southern Culture!" My motivation is directing ethnogenesis in a eugenic direction, and I am far more terrified of my descendants being half-Indian (or at least the macro-effect of such an ethnogenesis in aggregate) than I am of Southern Culture going away. I am more concerned with Europe becoming Arab than I am with German culture per se.

I've seen a lot of Indians in the South. I've never seen a culturally Southern Indian

What kind of Indian? Culturally southern Kashadas and Cherokees are a dime a dozen.

Dot Indians seem to be straightforwardsly here as a minority that doesn't want to assimilate in any way, and that is how most legacy southerners- both white and black- seem to view them as well.

Now unlike you I do care about preserving southern culture. I probably wouldn't let my daughter marry an Indian who hadn't been disowned, but that's because of their culture. Marrying a dot Indian woman is a different matter; she can learn to make gravy.

There are a lot of things about Southern Culture I admire, a lot of things I don't. But it's not feasible or desirable to be hung-up on freezing cultures in time. I'm more interested in the generation of future Culture than I am the preservation of 19th century Culture. This is what differentiates Conservatism from the DR, at least when the DR is at its best.

Southern Culture in particular is tied up with the Lost Cause, I'm not interested in Southern men retaining any sort of identity with a Lost Cause.

I am interested in Holocaust Revisionism because I think deconstructing those myths is important for the generation of future Culture. I'm not interested in the Lost Cause because it leads Southern Men, who have a lot of admirable attributes, to a cul-de-sac.

My motivation is directing ethnogenesis in a eugenic direction

That's what we've been arguing about‽

The way things are going (assuming humanity survives at all), a century from now we will be able to take the best genes from every branch and twig of the human family tree, and splice them into anyone who wants them!

Do you actually believe this will happen?

I don't find it ridiculously implausible that there will be a stratum of society with a TFR of <1 which embraces gene editing technology. But high human capital embracing natural reproduction at high rates seems a necessity for maintaining industrial society over the long run, because of that TFR issue.

It is difficult to imagine gene editing not driving down fertility rates among whoever embraces it. I'm a techno-optimist; I think cheap fusion and orbital solar power and space colonization are solveable problems. But I also think we need the people to do it. And the people who can do it don't have any room for their TFR to drop any further. South Korea is the most innovative country in the world(literally). There is a human element to our science fiction future and that human element needs to be taken into account. Gattaca was a dystopia because it comes off as one, no one gives a damn whether you think it sounds nice in theory, not in their heart of hearts.

I think what I'm trying to say is- your idea of making superbabies by gene editing won't produce enough of these superbabies to even maintain itself. Because it just doesn't fit what people actually want.

That is science fiction; if, when, or how any of that happens does not dismiss the immediate concern of demographic replacement by non-Europeans. There would obviously be huge political pressure regulating how that technology is used. Mate selection is not a deprecated concern, and it's foolish to put all the eggs literally in the basket of "mate selection doesn't matter because gene editing is going to save us."

That is science fiction

And what would you call the idea of people on multiple continents conversing with one another without leaving their homes, by means of a network of computing machines spanning the entire globe and beyond?

If I have to be maximally charitable to the ethnomaxxing view, we're going to need stable high-trust high-IQ societies in order to get to gene editing within the century.

In my effortpost from last week, I talked about the "respectable" media's reluctance to mention anything about the identity of the perpetrator who committed the shocking knife attack which precipitated the November riots in 2023. Some outlets, in an effort to disguise the fact that he was Algerian, described him as "born outside of Ireland but an Irish citizen" or similar.

The clear intention was to give the impression that the perpetrator was "one of our own", so racism was misplaced. But of course, an anti-immigration activist would counter - the fact that he was an Irish citizen makes it even worse! It'd be one thing if he snuck into the UK, took a ship to Belfast then crossed the border into the south and applied for "asylum" as a "refugee", and committed this attack while he was in the legal limbo of waiting for his asylum application to be processed. The Irish government could perhaps be forgiven for extending clemency to a man about whom they know nothing by allowing him to stay in the country pending his asylum application, and then he goes on to commit a terrible crime. That's the kind of unfortunate but inevitable outcome that could theoretically happen even in a country with an extremely strict immigration policy.

But no - this is a man who has already jumped through all the hoops of applying for Irish citizenship, was thoroughly vetted, and still went on to commit a shocking and completely unprovoked crime like this. If a nutcase like this can pass the vetting process, clearly it's not stringent enough.

I don't know. I certainly believe that second-generation immigrants to Ireland can be fully assimilated (I've met plenty of women of Chinese descent who sound more Irish than I do; I work with a woman who has at least one Algerian parent and didn't clock her as anything other than Irish until she told me, although her name was a dead giveaway in retrospect; I once dated a Polish girl who sounded Irish from top to bottom), but I have no firsthand experience of a first-generation immigrant fully assimilating.

Some outlets, in an effort to disguise the fact that he was Algerian, described him as "born outside of Ireland but an Irish citizen" or similar.

I should switch news providers, because that's still much better than what I saw (at 1:05): "Police say false information quickly spread through social media, that the attacker might have been a foreigner, and that appeared to fuel the frenzy of destruction that followed". Their earlier article isn't much better: "The violence began after rumours circulated that a foreign national was responsible for an attack outside a Dublin school on Thursday afternoon. Authorities haven't disclosed the suspect's nationality."

I couldn't find any followup articles offering more information.

Obviously there are different tiers of the anti-immigration position that include various forms of nativism and not-nativism.

What is likely, though, is that most Western Europeans would probably have quietly acquiesced to mass immigration and demographic change without any major drama if the migrants had been, say, all Vietnamese or Filipino. Not because the nativist position would have been ‘disproven’, but because there would be none of these extreme staccato incidents of terrorist violence, things like Rotherham, Charlie Hebdo etc that draw a great deal of public attention.

In the US the majority of the public are still relatively torn on mass immigration, and the large scale deportation of most legal immigrants, let alone actually stripping naturalised migrants of citizenship, is an extreme fringe position. In Canada the public only really turned after they started importing pretty much the entirety of the Punjab at like 2% of the whole population per year.

There isn’t a huge (foreign) religion/race-neutral nativist constituency in most Western countries, meaning the population that wants everyone gone regardless of who they are, how they act and what they believe. Even in Iberia where there’s been huge legal immigration (often of people who are rather far from being of pure euro descent) from Latin America almost all anti-immigrant hostility is directed towards migrants from the Islamic world.

Counterpoint: there seems to be a massive backlash to migration in Canada from Indian immigrants, and that is not caused by crime or terrorism by Indian migrants.

What's happening is the European groups, too, take the political playbook from US Conservatives. "We're not racist (that would be evil!) we just think radical Islam is bad mmkaay." But that is downstream of the political pressures of liberal hegemony, there's a practical reason it centers on a religious critique of migration rather than a racial critique of migration.

Remigration strikes a more nativist cord than it does a purely anti-Islamic cord.

I think in the counterfactual where the majority of recent non-European migrants to Europe aren’t from the Islamic world is one in which anti immigration sentiment is far lower. As far as Canada goes, they did the equivalent of the US importing like 7m Indians a year several years in a row, which is very unusual even by Western mass immigration standards.

Before 2020, Canadians didn’t seem to care much about immigration, Trudeau won a landslide, and there had been mass immigration of Chinese and Indians for at least 25 years.

Depending on whether you think they are Europeans or not, you have a non-counterfactual point of comparison: Spain has had tons of immigration from Latin America, and while there has obviously been some backlash, it doesn't seem to be as strong as in the rest of Europe.

Latin Americans are already Spanish-speaking Catholics, so you'd expect them to be more culturally similar and willing to integrate when they're not.

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Counterpoint: there seems to be a massive backlash to migration in Canada from Indian immigrants, and that is not caused by crime or terrorism by Indian migrants.

Counter counterpoint- they're Indian. Mexican and Ukrainian and Vietnamese immigrants would have gotten away with it.

Minor counter counter counterpoint

There is some minor hostility to Ukrainians in Poland. But it is far from widespread and that is after massive shock migration due to war.

Though if 4% of country would be imported from Syria/Libya/Turkey/Nigeria/Russia/China/etc within months then reaction would be much poorer then welcoming then minor hostility months/years later.

Canada is much more welcoming of outsiders than Poland, though.

I mean, the right wing normie answer is ‘people like that don’t belong in Europe’. And when pressed on ‘people like that’ they’ll eventually come down with ‘Arabs’ or ‘children of Muslims’.

As far as what his motivations are, I’ll point to A) him almost certainly having screws loose(see the mass murder, and also being a psychiatrist) and B) it’s entirely possible he doesn’t make much distinction between Christianity and Islam and just hates theists. Stranger things have happened. There was a mass shooter in the US who seemed to have new atheist motivations as well; it’s not an everyday occurrence but it’s happened at least once.

B) it’s entirely possible he doesn’t make much distinction between Christianity and Islam and just hates theists.

These Christmas markets are not theist occurrences in any meaningful way, and as he had been in Germany a long time he would know it. In fact, many of them have been renamed to Winter markets to be more inclusive (to the disdain of the defenders of the Christian Occident), and there is nothing specifically Christian about drinking Gluehwein, eating all kinds of food from food booths and shopping for overpriced small presents in the other booths. It would be like going after Coca-Cola for being Christian given that the central figure of Christmas is Santa Claus and ad spots by Coke have shaped the public image of Santa.

I mean I think it’s culturally Christian in the sense that Christians is specifically Christ’s Mass in the origin of the name. And almost all the trapping can ultimately be traced back to Christian stories and practices. Santa is a repackaged St. Nicholas of Myrna (who actually punched Arius in the face at the council of Nicaea) who was generous with the poor. The Christmas tree is seen as a symbol of Christmas and the star comes from the magi seeing the Bethlehem star. It’s a holiday with a lot of secular trappings, bu5 it is based in Christianity and in no other religion. I don’t think he could have plausibly mistaken it for a Jewish or Muslim thing, as those groups don’t celebrate any of Christmas.

I think that European Christmas, like Easter, is actually a syncretism of early Christian traditions and pagan ones. The barn with figurines of Joseph and Maria and the magi is obviously based on the bible, while the date (Winter solstice) and the Christmas tree (as a symbol of something visibly being alive in the depth of winter) seem pagan-ish to me. Likewise Easter: remembering the crucification and supposed resurrection of Jesus is one thing, but the rabbits and eggs seem pagan to me -- after all, Jesus died for mankind's sins, not to restore fertility to the natural world.

My point is though that while of course being based on vaguely Christian traditions, this is way removed from the reality of Christmas markets.

An Jihadist terrorist targeting German Winter/Weihnachts markets to specifically strike a blow against Christianity feels roughly like a Persian terrorist targeting the Winter Olympiad in Salt Lake City to strike a blow against the Athenian League -- I could see their path of reasoning, but still think that either terrorist would have some fundamental misconceptions about their enemy.

The barn with figurines of Joseph and Maria and the magi is obviously based on the bible, while the date (Winter solstice) and the Christmas tree (as a symbol of something visibly being alive in the depth of winter) seem pagan-ish to me.

The date of Christmas is actually based on philosophical beliefs about great men dying on the same day they were conceived, plus math(Good Friday actually has a known date if you take the bible completely literally- March 25 33 AD). And Christmas trees probably have a real origin of 'it's one of the few things that looks nice that time of year, and Christmas is a major religious Holiday so we want decorations to look nice'.

Likewise Easter: remembering the crucification and supposed resurrection of Jesus is one thing, but the rabbits and eggs seem pagan to me -- after all, Jesus died for mankind's sins, not to restore fertility to the natural world.

Rabbits might be an unrelated folk tradition(but it also might just be seasonal associations- right around Easter is when you start seeing rabbits in Europe), but eggs come from fasting rules in the medieval church. Easter was a huge feast in the throw-a-giant-party sense in the days when Lenten penance was quite a bit more rigorous than it is today, and foods which were forbidden during lent but otherwise part of the diet were a big part of that. Eggs are one example- I believe that in Eastern Orthodox cultures which forbid dairy during lent, butter or cheese plays a role in Easter celebrations. Of course eggs are also easy to decorate and play fun games with.

The muslim angle is overrated. People wouldn't have been happier if the migrants were christians from Ethiopia. Muslim at this point means non Asian, non white immigrant. Islam is just an easy and relatively politically correct term to use. The basic premise holds regardless if he was muslim, Christian, athiest or Zoroastrian, MENA migration doesn't work in Europe.

The same people would not have been any happier to take South African Zulus but would have gladly taken South Africans of a Boer persuasion. Trying to own AfD by pointing out the specifics of a Saudi's religious beliefs isn't going to work because the AfD voters don't want mass immigration from MENA regardless of religion.

Yes they would have. They wouldn't have been perfectly happy but they certainly would have been happier. Islam obviously isn't the only issue but it is a fairly major one.

Indonesia is the largest muslim country. They would probably be less disliked as immigrants than christians from Zimbabwe.

Religion isn't the only thing that matters but it is important. Would people have been happier if Syrian Maronites or Sunnis came when the civil war started? Or what about Christian Zimbabweans or Muslim Mozambicans?

There are functionally no Maronites in Syria. There were, however, quite a few Melkites, a different tradition.

Eh, I think Maronite and Coptic immigration is mostly pretty uncontroversial in the societies to which they migrate.

on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing.

You really have to be kidding? The Right Wing argument is that he does not belong in Europe, no matter if he's a doctor or what he tweets, in a box or with a fox, not here or there, not anywhere in Europe. That argument can and should be used as a cudgel by the right wing, at least the Right Wing who acknowledges that this is about race and not merely about religion. The people who can't use this as a cudgel are those who pretend that this is just about Islam, and mass Arab migration to Europe would be fine if they just weren't Muslim. Is that an argument you accept Hoffmeister?

"Arabs don't belong in Europe." "But this Arab who slaughtered a bunch of Europeans tweeted pro-Israel stuff!" How could you think that's responsive at all to the argument?

How does a refugee slaughtering a bunch of people in a Christmas market not validate the anti-refugee political perspective? Because the refugee wasn't Muslim? That is just ridiculous.

Keith Woods is correct, and the Right Wing who pretends that mass migration from the third world is only a problem because of religious incompatibility do not form the ranks of the DR, and people like Woods have long made the argument that it's about race and not about religion.

The Right Wing argument is that he does not belong in Europe, no matter if he's a doctor or what he tweets, in a box or with a fox, not here or there, not anywhere in Europe.

SEcUreSignalS—coincidence? I think not. I'd read the shit out of an anti-Arab and African migration book written in this style.

Keith Woods is correct, and the Right Wing who pretends that mass migration from the third world is only a problem because of religious incompatibility do not form the ranks of the DR, and people like Woods have long made the argument that it's about race and not about religion.

I'm not familiar with Keith Woods, but my sense is that the part I bolded isn't true. Granted the dissident right (I presume that's the DR) is a nebulous coalition, but I think most of them are not HBD-pilled, or at least believe the religion aspect is more important than the racial one. Change that from a descriptive "do not" to a prescriptive "should not" and I'd agree.

Do you like men of Islam?

I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.

Would you like them here or there?

I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.

Would you like them in Berlin?
Even shorn of their foreskin?

I would not like them in Berlin.
I care not if they have foreskin.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.

Would you like them in a mosque?
Or standing 'round their big black box?

Not in a mosque. Not round a box.
Not in Berlin. Without foreskin.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.

Would you? could you? in a car?
Let them in - here they are.

I would not, could not, in a car.

You may like them. You will see.
Living in our land, rent-free.

I cannot stand them here rent-free.
Nor in a car! You let me be.
I do not like them in a mosque.
I do not like them 'round a box.
I do not like them in Berlin.
I care not if they have foreskin.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.

A plane! A train! A plane! A train!
Could you, would you on a train?

Not on plane! not on train!
Not in a car! Sam! Let me be!
I do not like them in a mosque.
I do not like them 'round a box.
I do not like them in Berlin.
I care not if they have foreskin.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.

So if a tourist from the US does something similar next week should the EU ban all American tourists? There's more of us entering Europe every year than the entire Arab population of the continent.

Do American tourists consume taxes on net, disproportionately commit sexual and violent crime, turn neighborhoods into no-go zones, and leave behind another generation of themselves to do largely the same? Or do they mostly just stimulate and support local economies with their relatively large disposable incomes and bounce?

So if a tourist from the US does something similar next week should the EU ban all American tourists?

I live in a small town, and somehow found myself sharing a rented office with 2 Californians. Quite frankly my opinion on the matter is: why wait?

There's more of us entering Europe every year than the entire Arab population of the continent.

Are you sure this is making the argument you want to make, given that precisely zero of these attacks were committed by American tourists, despite such high traffic?

Sometimes (often) someone really wants to post about how much they despise blacks/Arabs/Indians/Jews/women/gays whoever.

We have spent a lot of time trying to enforce the rules in a way that suits the community's desire for maximal freedom of expression without descending into unfiltered sneering, snarling, race-baiting, and lazy booing of whichever group someone happens to hate.

You can talk about how blacks commit statistically more crimes, per crime statistics, and you can talk about the prevalence of Indian scam rings, and you can even bring HBD into it to propose your theory of why this is genetic. You can argue that immigration is bad and you can say you want zero immigrants and 100% racially pure ethnostates. Those sorts of arguments are allowed and have been made.

"Arabs, blacks or are (sic) lazier and more violent" is not an argument. It's just a rank assertion about your outgroup.

"No immigration of such should be permitted."

Fine. Your opinion, you can say this.

"Indians lie and cheat more than whites. It's that simple."

This is just more lazy boo-outgrouping. Do Indians lie and cheat more than whites? Do they really? As a percentage of the total population of liars and cheaters? As a part of Indian culture? As a genetic predisposition? I mean, you could conceivably gesture in the direction of some kind of argument, but you don't even try, you just drop a bunch of "brown people bad" turds on the floor.

People with views very like yours, and probably even stronger than yours, are regular posters here and have figured out that we give plenty of latitude for culture warring about your least favorite ethnic groups and "race realism" HBD posting so long as you can be civil and minimally inflammatory about it, and by that we mean not presuming that you're in a white nationalist clubhouse and if any Arabs, blacks, or Indians happened to be sitting next to you you could just pop off about what a bunch of lazy criminal liars they all are.

All of that throat-clearing is because I know people will whine that we're silencing "badthink" or trying to enforce some kind of consensus on not hurting feelings, despite the plentiful, years-long evidence to the contrary. In the vain hopes that explaining why we act on posts such as this will prove educational and illustrative to other posters who want to assert similar sentiments but in a less shitty way.

Factoring into this also is that your record, in particular, is one of the worst on the Motte. I count eight warnings and three tempbans, all for this sort of casual slinging of lazy insults at whichever group gripes your goiters at the moment.

You're just a shitty, low-effort poster who contributes nothing of value. I can't honestly remember you ever posting anything interesting, insightful, or getting even a single AAQC nomination, or really, anything that wasn't... stuff like this, although usually not as bad, hence your longevity here despite being a constant low-level stink and not much more.

Because your last ban was for a week and you were told then we would start escalating, I am banning you for a month, and not permabanning you, despite my near-certainty that that's in the future.

The ban is justified. No argument there. This though -

You're just a shitty, low-effort poster who contributes nothing of value. I can't honestly remember you ever posting anything interesting, insightful, or getting even a single AAQC nomination, or really, anything that wasn't... stuff like this, although usually not as bad, hence your longevity here despite being a constant low-level stink and not much more.

This is a stupid thing to say and unworthy of someone here to enforce and demonstrate correct behaviour. I'd say you went way overboard, although if this is the new level of discourse around here I would be happy to say more.

You know, that was pretty harsh and I probably should have edited that last part more heavily.

That said, I meant every word, and in the past, curt mod comments like "Don't boo your outgroup like this" get people demanding to know why we're enforcing ideological conformity and why someone got banned just for Telling The Truth. @No_one is a (not quite uniquely, but in a very small group) bad poster who wants to use the Motte as his platform to talk about how much he hates other people. But you're right, it wasn't the best way to express it.

No, its not that simple. Even granting your premise arguendo, they are still human beings, made according to the Imago Dei.

All human beings have equal dignity. It is no lesser tragedy for Nigerians or Congolese to be massacred than for Norwegians or Irishmen.

That being said, the distribution of natural gifts among different groups is not equal, and it must be admitted that Europeans get the better split compared to Bantus or Arabs. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose immigration from the Congo or Iraq on the basis that these people will lower the average abilities of an individual in your country, and this is not based in hatred of Congolese or Iraqis.

and this is not based in hatred of Congolese or Iraqis.

No, but it is based in indifference, and with regard to the horrors visited upon many, many, innocent people throughout history, the space between 'indifference' and 'hatred' would take an electron microscope to measure.

When an elephant stands on the tail of a mouse, it is no solace to the mouse that you do not hate him but are indifferent to him.

Opposition to immigration on the basis of talent distribution is in no way indifference, indifference would be opposing immigration because fuck em.

True, but screening people becomes somewhat easier if you limit the number of people coming in. If you’re taking in only about 10,000 you can be pretty sure that the background checks will show criminality, drug use, lack of language skills, troubling political or religious beliefs, and so on. If it’s 100,000 it’s plausible to find things that would show up in a very quick background check, but more will slip by. At 1,000,000 a year, you’ll barely have any idea who these people are or why they’re coming.

And on the tail end, having fewer immigrants means better assimilation because the newcomers must learn the language and culture due to a lack of an ethnic enclave where he doesn’t have to adapt to the language and culture. If a million Swedes moved to the USA, they’d form a Swedish enclave in which Swedish is spoken, people go to the local Swedish Lutheran Church, they all eat Swedish food (Swedish pancakes and meatballs I assume), and so on. This happened in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsborg,_Kansas) and obviously with groups like Orthodox Jews in New York who still speak Yiddish. Sonnet or later you are taking in so many people from a given background so fast that you simply cannot get them integrated and assimilated at all.

There's a difference between not wanting "low human capital people" (as the kids say these days) to come lower the average quality of life in your town/city/country, and, say, proposing grinding up all the Congolese into Soylent Green while telling them it's nothing personal. No microscope required, it's quite visible with the naked eye. In fact you'd almost have to be trying not to see it.

I mean yes. But there are always practical issues. We simply don’t have room for everyone who would want to come, for a start. Our society simply can’t handle importing 20% of our population annually, for example. I’m not convinced we could successfully import 3% of our current population annually with no issues. Add in issues of culture (Palestinians have a much different culture than Swedes or Chinese) language, individual immigrant’s education level, the amount of money needed to ge5 people who arrive with nothing a home and food while they look for work. This is all assuming no criminal, terrorist or similar background. It’s not just “do I directionally want immigrants here, it’s questions of getting the thing done without breaking the country. Importing all of Gaza into Nebraska isn’t feasible— we don’t have the resources to successfully integrate that number of people into America. At best, you end up turning Nebraska into Gaza, lock stock and barrel. I don’t think anyone looking at that situation would say I want to turn Palestinians into Soylent. It’s just that as a practical matter, we can’t actually do that.

The difference is one of degree, not kind. The former is less bad than the latter, but they both come from the same malignant well: the belief that the well-being of Mtumbe Ngoube from Kinshasa or Fulan al-Fulani from Karbala matters less than that of John Doe from Kansas City or Max Mustermann from Koln.

There is a story told of Churchill, that he asked some lady

Churchill: "Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?"

Socialite: "My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose... we would have to discuss terms, of course... "

Churchill: "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?"

Socialite: "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!"

Churchill: "Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

Wanting to kill people and not wanting them near you is a difference in kind, or there is no distinction between differences in kind and differences in degree.

You've butchered the story -- the woman has to actually agree for it to work. But even in the valid version, there's a difference between being a whore and being a cheap whore.

It’s a fun story but it’s actually pretty dumb. There is probably an amount of money that even Elon Musk would suck a dick for, and even if we’re talking about people who don’t desire money, there’s every chance there’s something (health, physical fitness, the resurrection of a loved one, the chance to have children, world peace, a tripling of their beloved dog’s lifespan) they would degrade themselves to have. Churchill himself was surely no different.

It’s a fun story but it’s actually pretty dumb. There is probably an amount of money that even Elon Musk would suck a dick for,

There are some things which most people will not do for money, or anything else short of a credible threat of death or hideous pain. In cultures influenced by Abrahamic religion, a straight man sucking dick is one of them. It isn't just a sin - it's an abomination. (Leviticus, passim)

More comments

Your logic is tortured and deliberately ignores the point.

Yes, the Ellis islanders brought violence and crime, and if we were smart we'd recognize that and avoid the mistakes of the past.

Some commentators, such as Keith Woods, are taking the position that this proves that all Arab immigration to Europe should be cut off, because even the apparently liberal/assimilated ones are still ticking time bombs of potential violence; this seems fairly tendentious even to me, given what we know about the guy so far.

My position is not quite that, but not too far from it. If we take the story that this is about his anti-Islam grievances at face value, it seems to me that it's an example of how importing people from places that have ethnic and religious conflicts that Westerners don't even understand results in importing their conflicts along with them. See also, the disputes with Sikh violence that have stirred up India-Canada tensions. I don't want Muslim immigrants from Saudi Arabia and I don't want anti-Muslim immigrants from Saudi Arabia in my country. I don't want to think about Saudi Islam anymore than strictly necessary for international relations. There are enough domestic tensions without needing to add Saudi conflicts to Germany.

Fwiw I thought this post was fine (upvoted)

He attacked a Christmas market, does it matter if he secretly supports AFD? If he wasn't brought to Germany he wouldn't have committed this act. It really is easy for the right to portray it favorable terms. It is also gives leftists the opportunity to frame this of course in a manner that tries to deflect from it. I have seen both.

According to Keith woods he was a zionist leftist who wanted more muslim migration that commited this act because Germany is not doing enough to give asylum from Saudi Arabia.

If that is correct then this is a leftist but not Islamic, pro migration terrorism act. Exactly the opposite that is claimed bellow. If of course it is true.

Edit: Woods quotes the terrorist in 2023 saying that he will make the German nation pay the price of the crimes committed by the goverment against Saudi refugees. He also says that he will take revenge even if it costs him his life. https://x.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1870428721632481719?t=TeBZdhjRJUJdWKMBMS-5nQ&amp%3Bs=19

It is certainly correct to limit people like this guy from coming to one's country.

Moreover, it seems almost everyone forgets that the biggest genocide commited by Muslims against Christians was not commited by the biggest muslim fanatics even though Islamism has been an element of this. I am talking about the genocide of Christians Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, by the Muslim populations of Turkey. Of which secular Kemalists who also called for Jihad had been a core component as has been Turkish nationalism. The ethnic resentments of people like this, and not just any human capital problems is something that has been way too understated. A secular muslim might still carry both ethnic resentments related to his homeland or even the general Muslim population. Just like with other groups who aren't particularly religious but still are hostile foreigners.

Being pro Israel isn't something that makes someone right wing. Much of the mainstream that pretends to be right wing is not right wing especially in a country like Germany and is in fact insufficiently pro their people to qualify as anything but extremists against their own civilization. Now technically it is possible to be a European nationalist who is unwisely fanatically Zionist. But being pro Israel is quite compatible with being a leftist extremist. Indeed most Jews that are organized politically and make the biggest mark through their influence (such as rich donors, the most prominent activists, and powerful figures) manage to combine Zionism, with Jewish nationalism and hostility against countries like Germany. We also see non Jews have this combo. At minimum it is insufficient to stop someone from being a leftist.

In this forum we have had various people argue for the very far left ideology that combines Jewish nationalism with arguing for the extinction of nations like Germany because the German, or white nations in general continuing to exist is somehow a threat to Jewish identity and Jews. Which is ridiculously hostile agenda against European nations on the ground of illegitimate excessive grievances and crybullying to the extreme. Making onerous demands for other nations destruction. This guy's Zionism was not an obstacle to his hatred of the German nation and his one sided ridiculous demands in favor of Saudi Arabian immigrants. Therefore you are trying to mislead here by claiming that his Zionism precludes him of leftism extremism when Israeli nationalism like his Saudi Arabian sympathies are perfectly compatible with an ideology of grievance against European nations.

Ultimately I would put Zionism more along the left in a European context than the right, or center, because of the association of the left with prioritizing other nations and the right with native nationalism. Else as it happened in practice, we get leftism with fake conservatives and right wingers calling themselves something different while giving the same.

The incompatibility of zionist movements with self respecting european nations is there when we consider how much zionism is associated with one sided demands and the fact that the prominent Zionist organizations are hostile to European nations, including their right of preservation, national sovereignty,self determination, independent foreign policy. The combo of people who are Zionists but want people to be loyal to Israel and not to their own nation and give preferential treatment to Israel and Jews that isn't provided to one's own nation including with censorship and cancel culture, is such a sufficiently dominant element of Zionist influence that it can't be disregarded.

Pro Muslim anti Zionism would also fit more within the left. Being anti Zionist is also insufficient to stop someone from being a leftist in a European context, of course since it is possible to hold other grudges, follow the anti european grievance ideology and even blame Israeli policies on European countries and wish for revenge, including one that is about migration replacement.

The Saudi Arabian refugees would be Muslims, no? If not, I would grant that he was pro migration of Arabs but not Muslims. But I am not sure that the Saudi Arabian women he wishes to be refugees would not include any Muslims. But that doesn't change his pro foreign identity anti German sentiments.

As for him being a leftist. As we have seen Zionism is not a get out of jail free card for leftist extremism and in fact some of the worst far left extremists, especially more establishment make their arguments from a Jewish nationalism perspective and are Zionists (though in Germany even the antifa is pro Israel IIRC). The ADL is the organization most representative of this but really it isn't rare whatsoever for people to combine Zionism with Anti European hostility and cry-bullying oppression narratives.

The guy is pro migration and he hates Germany for not doing enough for foreigners and refugees. That fits well enough within the left. You can't but call him a leftist when he is upset about that and he is motivated to commit a terrorist attack. If a German nationalist hated foreigners and committed an attack on foreign groups due to his hatred of said foreigners the result would be countless of people to label him a right winger or a far right. The left should be identified with hatred against European nations by foreigners and pro migration sentiments because that accurately captures a sufficiently pervasive characteristic of its ideology, even if most leftists wouldn't prefer it manifests in the way it did with this attack.

You are trying to square a circle here when claiming you can't call him a leftist and you are making a special pleading that much fewer would dare if some figure pattern matches as much for a right wing figure as this guy is a far left foreign terrorist. The left should act honorably and accept their problem of anti European extremism and how such people with such sentiments acting against Europeans fit within the left wing ideological perspective. They ought to moderate and abandon the ideology that disregards the interests and survival of European nations so this hostility it helps cultivate is no longer such common characteristic of the left wing agenda with predictable results not only here but others like Pakistani rape gangs. Not to mention he wouldn't be in Germany in the first place without the influence of left wing ideology. And remember the mainstream fake right of Merkel that has no problem with aligning with the other parts of the left and trying to stop any deviation from the anti-native dogma of the left are not blameless and outside the problem of anti-German pro foreign extremism.

Was this man actively “treating” patients while saying all this?

Good Lord.

I'm hearing that he was apparently angry about not enough being done for (presumably anti-Islamic) refugees:

https://x.com/banjawarn/status/1870393623210078601/photo/1

Too soon to be sure of course, there's no community notes or anything on this post. It does seem plausible, he was complaining about Sweden expelling this refugee.

https://x.com/DrTalebJawad

He retweets: Sweden wants to extradite me to Iraq to carry out the death sentence there and I will be killed in the most horrific ways.

He retweets: Civil Youth Gathering Meeting in Umayyad Square to Demand Civil System and Women’s Involvement in Public Life

Other people have been going on about him retweeting Israeli military posts, apparently he has Zionist sympathies. There's truly something for everyone with this guy. He seems like a nut.

But why couldn’t the AfD thing be the red herring itself? The entire thing makes literally zero sense. He’s an Arab Muslim committing a terrorist act because he doesn’t believe that Arab Muslims should be in Germany because they’ll commit terrorist acts, which he then did. The more plausible explanation is he’s an Islamic Jihadist who is either being misidentified as a supporter of AfD policies, or he was using that as a front to hide behind.

Or, uh, hear me out here, but the motivations of someone who committed mass murder don’t have to make sense, because he’s batshit insane.

How many cases have there been where an Islamic jihadist commits a terrorist attack and pretends to be something other than an Islamist while doing so? Being open that you are, in fact, doing jihad has always been one of the points of the jihadists.

He wasn’t tweeting while he was attacking. Those posts came beforehand. It might well have been a sort of cover story so those who are looking for Jihadists don’t look to hard at him. And Muhammad Atta was drinking late into the night before 9/11 despite alcohol being forbidden by Islam.

That just doesn't add up. Why would he engage in years of carefully constructing a cover story for doing this sort of an attract that seems highly impulsive? If it's important for the authorities to not find him then why does he conduct the one form of attack that almost guarantees to end up with him either dead or being hauled off to hospital and then interrogation? Isn't this rather a convoluted explanation in comparison to him simply being pretty much who he claims he is?

And Muhammad Atta was drinking late into the night before 9/11 despite alcohol being forbidden by Islam.

That's just being a sinner, not a cover story. Insofar as I've understood he believed martyrdom would wipe the record clean, so to say.

Sarah Adam’s is reporting that Hamsa Bin Laden is now commander of an Islamic Army that brings Aq isis and other groups under one command. Accomplished through him marrying into influential Islamist families.

She also reports that he and they are now less concerned with getting credit for terror and more concerned with opsec and covert tactics.

She seems credible.

I guess we'll see if further details emerge. But to me this looks like someone utterly deranged, with no coherent plan at all. Maybe he had some recent health issue like Luigi, or maybe he cracked from the stress of working as a doctor for so long.

the position that this proves that all Arab immigration to Europe should be cut off, because even the apparently liberal/assimilated ones are still ticking time bombs of potential violence

Well, wignats will have a field day. (Maybe that was his objective?)

Certainly the more moderate right will find it uncomfortable. An educated, apostate Arab who's vehemently against the Islamification of Europe -- well, if Germany is anything like the USA, he'd be held up as one of the "good ones" and a solid ally. (The moderate right is of course desperate to latch onto any token PoC so they can assert that they're not racist!)

I don't think you can quite square this circle without accepting an ethnonationalist framing, so I expect this to be swept under the rug. It looks bad for Arabs, obviously bad for the pro-immigration left, bad for the moderate right; the only people who can point to this incident as confirming their priors are the ones saying these immigrants are fundamentally incompatible with Western civilization by virtue of their ethnicity, regardless of their professed views.

Assuming this wasn't some 4D double layered false flag: https://x.com/stillgray/status/1870306075695546383 (this reads like premium copium to me, but, I guess it's not impossible.)

on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing.

It seems the attacker was only a critic of Muslim immigration on unusually principled anti-religious grounds. Here he is in 2019 (fedora and all -- wow!) discussing his website for aiding the asylum claims from secular Gulf refugees. More recently, he accused the German state of conspiring against atheist Saudi asylees and threatened to fight and kill over this:

First: I assure you that if Germany wants a war, we will fight it. If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride. Because we have exhausted all peaceful means and all we have received from the police, state security, the prosecution, the judiciary, and the (Federal) Ministry of the Interior is more crimes against us. Peace is of no use with them.

Rather than the hard right, it will be assimilationist centrists and center-rightists who want to make the problem of immigration to be about Islam who won't have much to milk out of this.

Yes, excellent analysis. Thanks for laying out exactly what I was thinking in such agreeable prose.

There was a similar attack like this in Germany a few years ago. An Iranian Muslim born in Germany became radicalized about mass immigration into Germany and committed a mass shooting targeting immigrants. It’s barely remembered now because the story got dropped like a hot potato, since it would have been extremely difficult for either side of the culture war to make hay out of it.

The terrorist has claimed in December 2023 that he will make the German nation pay the price for the crimes committed by its goverment against Saudi refugees. He also said in the quoted post that Woods Therefore this looks like a leftist terrorist attack of a Saudi Arab who sympathizes so much with Saudi Arabians that he wants to harm the nation of Germany.

https://x.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1870428721632481719?t=TeBZdhjRJUJdWKMBMS-5nQ&amp%3Bs=19

So it would be exactly the opposite as the anti immigration narrative and really this should had been the more likely theory rather than him playing 5 dimensional chess.

Toxoplasma quotient counterintuitively low.

What's the opposite of a scissor statement?

A null statement?

staple statement

Opposite along a different axis.

A scissor statement is seized-upon by multiple actors with conflicting interpretations.

A statement like "atheist muslim converts hates islam" is ignored by all actors as it there are no interpretations that are convenient for their positions.

Perhaps he thought ramming innocents at a Christmas market was the best way to advance his warnings

“Be the change you want to warn against”


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