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PaperclipPerfector  9hr ago (text post)   1734 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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☁ INAUGURATION THREAD ☁

I was going to post this to encourage Americans to participate in our show of civic unity. Let the messages of unity and American exceptionalism wash over you. Pay no mind to the commentators muttering about President Biden's last-minute preemptive pardons, or to the persistence of each Democrat speaker in reminding everyone that the Constitution exists and definitely binds the hands of the executive, too.

Kavanaugh has sworn in VP Vance. Now for the President.

Here's to four uneventful years. May the new administration succeed in delivering on their promises.

Edit: some of these promises kind of suck. I sure hope we don't do anything stupid over the Panama Canal.

Can non-Americans engage in civic divisiveness?

Days like this I kinda wish I was still on Reddit because I couldn't resist telling them how badly they screwed up for things to get this far and reminding them how utterly powerless they are to stop what is coming (whatever that is, I can't even say for sure), and if they had an ounce of self-awareness and the ability to reflect, this might cause them to change some of their beliefs about the world but no, they will be stuck in a cycle of learned helplessness because they can't even exit the echo chamber that has rendered them completely incapable of interfacing with the reality on the ground, and the beliefs 'normal' people hold anymore.

And also Sotomayor has a decent chance of dying or retiring in the next 3 years so lol enjoy having that shoe waiting to drop the entire time.

I'm not really sadistic, but that site has really become a pustulent sore on the Internet's face. I want to keep poking it until it pops. At least 4chan has the decency to stay hidden on the internet's ass.

I was pretty nervous but everyone remained civil. I hope that we can keep that civility for the years to come.

I was hoping he'd announce an executive order putting the whole country back onto year-round Standard Time.

Paging @DuplexFields. As previously discussed, you owe me a mea culpa.

I loved Trump listing Americas accomplishments. Bring back patriotism! We have so much to be proud of as a nation.

We're going to dig deeper into this speech, but first, I think we want to hear Carrie Underwood...

Thanks, CBS. You have captured the American ethos.

One thing that stands out: President Trump is a much better speaker than either of the Congressmen or even the commentators. He hasn't been filling space with an "um" or an "ah." Since we can't see the original text, I don't know if he's sticking to the script, but I'd be willing to bet it's improvisation.

Oh yeah he's an incredible orator. I am so happy to have some good pomp back. Most Congressmen and Senators and even the priests (ugh) were terrible at speaking.

he's a professional public speaker and rehearsed it

I naively expected that to apply to sitting Senators.

Sitting senators have generally not run a competitive race in quite a while.

It's beautiful hearing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, seeing soldiers march to it. Same with Glory, Glory Hallelujah. I can't imagine how incredible these songs would've been when they were written, back when most people believed deeply in the Republic, and in God.

Definitely moved me.

Fun fact, here it's been turned into a Christmas song (trigger warning: sung by a 13 year old Céline Dion).

Also a Japanese nursery rhyme (TW: exactly what you would expect, dead_dove.gif)

A Finnish nursery rhyme, too.

It's beautiful hearing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, seeing soldiers march to it. Same with Glory, Glory Hallelujah.

Uh, isn’t the latter just (part of) the chorus of the former?

oh maybe idk

Couldn't agree more. High point of the ceremony, probably because no one was speaking.

Past peak woke? Don't count on it

Stuck around St. Petersburg, when I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tsar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank, held a general's rank
When the Blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
But what's puzzlin' you is the nature of my game
— The Rolling Stones: "Sympathy for the Devil"

This is an essay on the long-term state of the culture war, written as a post for TheMotte.

1. The culture war

In December 2021, engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk made the following enigmatic tweet: "traceroute woke_mind_virus". The term "traceroute" is an inside joke for fellow computer geeks; basically, it is a request for information about where something came from and how it got here. The phrase "woke mind virus" refers to the woke movement, aka social justice movement, aka political correctness. I define wokeness -- or, as Tom Klingenstein has called it, woke communism -- as an ideology incorporating the following elements:

  • identity politics: a caste system based on historical class grievances
  • censorship of opposing views
  • lawlessness
  • arbitrary, authoritarian governance
  • radical progressivism: extreme disregard for traditional norms and values

America, and, with it, all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often portrayed as left vs. right; indeed, pundits on both sides of the corporate media make their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling production. But the reality is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not natural enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course, conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.

In the long run, the real culture war is a war against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, extremism, or supremacy movements. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil is not a line between nations, classes, or political parties, but a line that passes through every human heart. Fundamentalists are people who have worked themselves into a sustained frenzy, in which they've redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people. Fundamentalism, thus defined, has two broad consequences. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people rather than principles, they tend to actually abandon the precepts of the ideology from which their sect sprang up. For example, the woke movement has abandoned liberal principles like free speech and equal treatment under law -- just as Christian fundamentalists often abandon Biblical principles like grace, charity, and loving their enemies. Second, fundamentalists often feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries -- the bad people -- as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with. These oppressive sanctions are administered by the fundamentalist regime, not as punishment for any crime the target has committed as an individual, but simply for being a member of the targeted class -- whether that class consists of the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", the Tutsis, infidels and heretics, straight white males, or the unvaccinated.

Any ideology or identity -- from progressivism, to conservatism, to Islam, to Christianity, to being black, to being white, to being German, etc. -- can spawn a degenerate, fundamentalist strain. Wokeness is such a degenerate strain. Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism. Essentially, wokeness is a fundamentalist leftist cult masking itself as compassionate progressivism. Wokeness is not too much of a good thing, or even too much of a decent thing; it is a warlike tyranny that has infected the progressive political parties of the West and begun to transform them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.

Unfortunately, many progressives today have cozied up to the woke vampire, holding their tongues about its obvious dark tendencies for the sake of forming a political coalition. I assume they believe this is a price worth paying to accomplish otherwise laudable aims, and that the insanity can only go so far. I believe they are woefully mistaken.

2. The (probably growing) danger of woke communism

It is human nature to assume that our children's future, and their children's future, will be fundamentally like the past we grew up with -- even when we have good reasons to believe otherwise. For example, it would have seemed alarmist to most Russians in 1900 to talk of omnipresent secret police, mass torture, and death camps on the horizon in their country. Yet, these developments, though they may have seemed far-fetched at the time, were in fact less than twenty years away under the grip of the Bolshevik communist ideology -- which at the time appeared to be nothing more than a fringe movement. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write,

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. [Solzhenitsyn (1973): The Gulag Archipelago]

I believe that wokeness represents a grave and growing threat to Western civilization. I am not saying that we are going to have death camps in the United States in a generation or two. I am saying that, if we continue down the path we have been on, America's future is going to be considerably less safe, less comfortable, and less free than its past, as a result of the influence of woke communism.

Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength. Soviet communism seemed all but dead when its leaders were exiled in the 1890's. Nazism took a direct hit when an attempted Nazi coup d'etat was thwarted in 1923 and the party leader, Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to prison. Shia fundamentalism ebbed for a time in Iran when its leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled in 1964. But each of these movements came back with renewed strength within a generation -- because the culture was invisibly moving in a direction that was susceptible to their influence, even while their leaders were temporarily out of the picture.

Most Americans are not actively advancing the woke agenda. In 2018, around eighty percent of Americans, including a majority of Democratic voters, affirmed the statement that "political correctness has gone too far" [source]. But this matters less than it might appear. The vast majority of Russians were not communists in 1917, and most probably thought communism had gone too far, when the October Revolution swept away democratic governance in Russia. Most Germans were not Nazis in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and most never became Nazis -- but World War II and the Holocaust happened all the same. Most Iranians were not Islamic extremists in 1979 when the Ayatollah came to power in the Iranian revolution. Only 2% of Vietnamese are members of the communist party today -- and yet the party rules that country with an iron fist. Tyranny grows from the seeds of a militant and vocal minority, in the soil of a fearful and silent majority. As long as the majority remains fearful and silent, it is naive to expect a tyrannical ideology to fade away just because its leaders have been removed from power for a time.

Though its devoted constituents were a minority of the population, the hydra of political correctness -- or social-justice, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it -- got its way more and more in the period from 1990 to 2020. For a thumbnail sketch of the cultural shift that occurred over that period, consider the following public statements by leading American politicians in 1987, 2012, and 2020:

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. . . . Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . . As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. . . .General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! -- Ronald Reagan: address at the Brandenburg Gate; June 12, 1987

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges; if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. -- Barack Obama: Campaign speech at Roanoke, VA, July 13, 2012.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety. And when you have many cities that have one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way, and the best way, or the right way to achieve safety. This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities. For too long, the status quo thinking has been that you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that's wrong. -- Kamala Harris: radio interview, June 2020.

Each of the last two statements might have been considered unthinkable for a national leader in America just a generation before it was made. Yet, wokeness kept gaining ground over the American mind -- even while most Americans believed it had already gone too far. And, of course, the cultural shift toward woke insanity was not just talk. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences -- and crazy ideas have crazy consequences. If you once believed, as I did, that woke bureaucrats would never allow DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to override meritocracy in safety-critical professions such as those of physician and airline pilot, you'd have been wrong. If you once thought they would never defund and demoralize the police to let criminals rampage against law-abiding citizens in broad daylight, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they wouldn't open the Southern border of the United States to invite millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country with no immigration enforcement whatsoever, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never push aggressively for biological males to compete in women's sports, or house male sex offenders in women's prisons because the convicts claim to have gender dysphoria, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never arrest hundreds of people each year in a Western democracy [the UK] for political speech posted on social media, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never advocate rationing lifesaving medicine based on race (whites to the back of the line), you'd be wrong yet again. If you thought they would never let immigrant gangs rape tens of thousands of young girls, while police deliberately ignored the situation on the grounds that it would be "Islamophobic" to intervene, you'd have been wrong yet again. As Sam Harris has asked, if we will allow our daughters to be raped in the name of diversity and inclusion, what won't we allow? And if the rapists' woke government benefactors give them high cover for their crimes, what won't they do if we allow them? Can you look in the mirror and say out loud what you still think they'll never be willing to do? or what they will never be able to get away with -- even if most people know it's wrong, and secretly, silently oppose it?

Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been some encouraging signs in the struggle against woke communism. Several advertisers have come back to Twitter/X, who had previously boycotted the platform because it refused to censor what they call "hate speech" (broadly defined to include a great deal of right-leaning political speech). Many corporations, including Facebook/Meta, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson, have dismantled their DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) programs, and so have several universities. Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has removed her pronouns (she/her) from her Twitter bio! But recall -- or be informed, if you are not old enough to remember -- that when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988, no advertisers were boycotting anyone for refusing to censor anything; few if any corporations or universities had active DEI departments, and no one of either party had pronouns in their bio. Yet, somehow, in thirty years or so we got from "Tear down this wall" [Reagan, 1987] to "You didn't build that" [Obama, 2012], to "Defund the police" [Kamala Harris, 2020]. On a crazy-scale from 1 to 10, if we seemed to be at 3 in 1987, and a 7 in 2020, we have perhaps now clawed our way back to a 5 or 6. And if long term momentum was in the wrong direction in 1988, after eight years of Reagan presidency, why would it be in the right direction now? In my opinion, wokeness isn't going anywhere -- at least not if our culture continues down the path of business as usual.

3. The constitution of the people

So how did we go from "tear down this wall" to "defund the Police" in just thirty years? I submit the root of the problem isn't wokeness itself, but the moral rot that gave wokeness room to breathe in the first place. Honest men and women, even honest men and women who lean left politically, do not become woke "social justice warriors", or indulge the woke's illiberal schemes in silent complicity for political or personal gain. Nor do brave men and women, of any political leaning, cower down and keep silent in the face of "cancel culture". If we had more honest men on the left like Michael Shellenberger, and more brave women on the right like Riley Gaines, we would never have been dragged into the swamp of wokeism in the first place. But we have too few, and I submit that is the heart of the problem. This condition of moral rot -- the soil in which tyranny grows -- does not change when the leaders of an extremist movement are exiled or imprisoned, let alone defeated in a single election.

In every nation, at all times, the militant, the tyrannical minority is there lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce upon weakness. That is an eternal given. What matters is what the rest of us do. Tyranny requires tyrants, of course -- but, more importantly, it requires a meek and passive populace, minding its own business while the tyrant and his minions eat away at the roots of their civilization. What arrests and beats back tyranny is not a policy written on paper, but the moral character of the nation. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey [Common Sense].

Our forebears, the first Americans, left their families and farms to go to war against the greatest military power then in the world. They did this not knowing whether they would die in battle, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors, and often not knowing whether they would even be paid for their service. None of them were conscripted; every one was free to let someone else bear the brunt of risk and sacrifice, while fully sharing in the liberty the Revolution would bring if it was successful. The continental soldiers risked all they had -- not for their personal gain, but to defend the natural rights of their countrymen and their posterity.

Today, by contrast, many of us -- that aforementioned posterity -- will not dare to speak the plain truth before our eyes if it means we might be passed over for a promotion at work, or be made to feel socially uncomfortable. In that respect, we are not living lives worthy of the sacrifice our forebears made for us, let alone living up to the example they set. Can such a nation dodge the bullet of tyranny for long? I doubt it. That is not how the world works, or ever has worked. As economist Walter Williams noted, the freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs; the normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse. Why should the United States be any different, if it ceases to be the home of the brave?

To be clear (since this is the Motte), the cultural shortcoming that let wokeness wedge its foot in the door is not intellectual, but moral in nature. Tyranny does not gain ground with logic, and logic is not the weapon that beats it back. The vast majority of Americans already know that wokeness is wrong. What people need to stand up against wokeness is not a higher IQ, or a seminar on rationality, but the courage to say out loud, in public, what they already know to be right. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is uncomfortable, it will become expensive. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is expensive, it will become dangerous. If men then do not stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous, only God can help us. If we are not willing to speak the truth and we do not believe in God, we will certainly believe in Hell -- because it is on its way.

Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength.

I'm rather sure that Trump's victory last year is by far not the first setback of wokeness in the US, and arguably not the biggest either. I recall reading the argument from Walt Bismarck and maybe other rightist bloggers as well that the period between Nixon's reelection and the LA riots of 1992 can be interpreted as two decades of racial detente, for example.

I think the question is, what will be the synthesis to the thesis/anti-thesis you have pointed at. People will eventually realize they can speak up but someone needs to do the work to fill in what comes next.

I don't think we will go forward to the world that the woke want. Neither do I think we're going back to the 80s. The only way forward is through.

...did you have a point you wanted to make?

Your post seems to be a stream-of-consciousness panic dump, ticking off a laundry list of fears of varying degrees of plausibility, rhetorical questions and sweeping pronouncements without the slightest effort toward evidence or even argument, to say nothing of focus.

Donald Trump will not be the President of the United States for another 105 minutes, at this writing. Pick an issue, make an argument. Trying to fit everything you're scared of (or every news media talking point) into one post is not really conducive to productive discussion.

The post you responded to is filtered.

I might need to spin a local instance of The Motte for this, and it's been a while since I tried, but would some kind of custom CSS showing "hey this post is filtered out" help you guys at all?

Also, going only by your description, is there any chance that this is another Impassionata alt?

Clever idea: Create a robot moderator which queries the website both through itself and through incognito mode every say 5 minutes. If it sees posts present on its own version but not the incognito one it knows the post has been filtered. It can than auto approve it since it has mod privileges.

I might need to spin a local instance of The Motte for this, and it's been a while since I tried, but would some kind of custom CSS showing "hey this post is filtered out" help you guys at all?

Maybe a little, though as @naraburns says, there is a development discord and I think there are a lot of more urgent needs. The problem with filtered posts is that we (mods) can see all of them in the Filtered queue, but if we're reading the forum in normal mode, a filtered post appears like every other post to us (unless we happen to notice the little "approve" link at the bottom, so I guess having that appear in green or red to a mod might be of some use.

Also, going only by your description, is there any chance that this is another Impassionata alt?

Nah. Impassionata has a very distinct style, and like most dedicated trolls, he's basically incapable of hiding it.

Ok, now Im confused. Last week I asked nara about this post, which says "Removed", but was apparently deleted by the author. I thought ok, maybe theres only one lable used for both - but now this one says "Deleted by author", when its apparently filtered?

A post can be filtered. It can also be removed either by a mod or by author, either while it's still in a filtered state or after it has been approved.

I think what happened in this case is that @naraburns responded to it while it was still filtered, and then the author deleted it before any mod approved it.

but if we're reading the forum in normal mode, a filtered post appears like every other post to us (unless we happen to notice the little "approve" link at the bottom, so I guess having that appear in green or red to a mod might be of some use.

Right, this is what I meant. It might even be possible to highlight the entire post, rather than just the link.

there is a development discord and I think there are a lot of more urgent needs.

I tried to tell this to Zorba when he announced the discord, but I think he picked the absolutely worst way to coordinate development. Oh well, I'll hit him up and ask if there's anything high-priority.

My apologies. I'm sure if you have the ability to improve the codebase, you'd be welcome on the development Discord.

As for the post, looks like they've deleted it, so, I guess it's a moot point.

President Biden has "pre-emptively" pardoned

General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee

Or at least, he has made a statement to that effect; compare the Hunter pardon, which was fairly detailed, complete with dates. The "pre-emptive" pardon announcement has no details. What are they pardoned for? During what time periods? This appears to be a blanket memo to the future: "these people are immune from prosecution, for whatever, because fuck you that's why." It's not quite at the gobsmackingly presumptuous level of inventing fake Constitutional Amendments, but it seems like yet another example of the Biden administration (and its propaganda arm, the mainstream press) being everything it ever accused Trump of potentially being someday.

I admit: I do not have high hopes for the Trump administration. Mostly I'm hoping that Justices Alito and Thomas have the good sense to step down from SCOTUS before the Democrats are able to take back the Senate. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised? But the outgoing administration is acting like it has been dipping into the till and never expected it might actually be held accountable for that. In particular, the possibility that the January 6th riots were fomented by justice department lackeys, whether as a conspiracy or a prospiracy, is something the Biden administration absolutely does not want anyone looking into.

Biden insists:

The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.

Historically unprecedented, although the Hunter Biden pardon definitely moved things in this direction. Malicious prosecution of political enemies has long been a standard play for Democratic politicians and bureaucrats--the failed prosecution of Trump himself, of course, but also the well known IRS prosecution of conservatives, throwing the book at local conservative officials who defy federal law while winking at local progressive officials who defy federal law, et cetera.

Of course, the famous MAGA "lock her up" chant should not be forgotten, and Trump has indeed suggested on many occasions that certain people should probably be investigated for wrongdoing. But the presumptions on display--"Trump (who has never actually carried through on these threats) is just doing this illegitimately for political gain, but Democrats doing the same thing (and actually doing it) to their political enemies are just rooting out corruption, which is totally legitimate"--seem clear. I don't doubt that corruption is fairly rampant in DC, on both sides of the aisle. Politicians in general make my skin crawl. But I feel like the Democratic Party's catchphrase has very thoroughly become: "It's Different When We Do It."

If Trump doesn't blanket pardon everyone convicted of an offense on January 6, 2021, I will be disappointed in him. And if he does, the propagandists in the news media will cry bloody murder about it. I wish I was in a position to extract shame or embarrassment from them for this, because I feel like the world would be a better place if more journalists paid a heavier price for pretending to be "neutral" when they are actually functioning as shills.

The pardons only absolve the accused from being indicted, right? They don’t restrict Fauci and Milley from being investigated, do they?

Fauci is old enough at this point that sentencing him to a jail term is meaningless. Destroying their legacy and reputation would be much more enduring; no lobbying firm will touch Milley with a ten-foot pole if he’s the subject of a Congressional investigation, even if it doesn’t result in an indictment. Fact finding, getting to the bottom of it, etc. That’s what voters wanted when they pulled the lever for Trump, isn’t it?

I don’t know — Fauci having to spend a large chunk of his limited time left in jail would’ve seemed like justice.

Justice for what, though? If what he's technically being accused of would have been attributed to some faceless administrator whose name didn't come up until the middle of the investigations, few people would care about whether this person technically lied about funding an organization that may or may not have been funding gain of function research into coronaviruses. No, the ire directed at Fauci is almost entirely due to the recommendations he made during the pandemic and the people who didn't like them. These people had no love for Fauci before he was dragged in front of the committee and were looking for an excuse to nail his ass to the wall.

Perhaps it should be house arrest.

these people are immune from prosecution, for whatever, because fuck you that's why.

This is not a charitable framing. The President is empowered to pardon people unilaterally and we elected Joe Biden to that office. It's not because "fuck you", it's by the power we chose to vest in him.

I wish I was in a position to extract shame or embarrassment from them for this, because I feel like the world would be a better place if more journalists paid a heavier price for pretending to be "neutral" when they are actually functioning as shills.

I think the urge to revenge or shame is understandable, but unproductive.

What's more, compared to 2016 there are now scores more independent journalists that have far more integrity. Building is harder than tearing down, but it's also more durable.

I think the urge to revenge or shame is understandable, but unproductive.

Please explain why, because that feels like a thought terminating cliche to me. A journalist who can't be shamed is a short story writer.

I would have supported prosecution for Milley for at a minimum his apparent call to China. I would have also supported a fair investigation without necessarily a trial for Fauci, as I could believe he was the voice for a large or even very large group of people. But for both, I never actually thought they would be prosecuted. Even after everything it's still not quite how we do things in this country, and these men are old and already disgraced, they were before Trump's victory, and now especially, and so it's free, empty and yet still symbolic magnanimity to let them go off into retirement.

A pardon is a brand of shame. Granting implies guilt, accepting confirms guilt. For Milley, it's confirmation of his mutiny and sedition. For Fauci, whatever the specific crime being pardoned, probably gain of function, it will be viewed as a confirmation that everything he did was illegal and thus wrong. The right I see just knew they were criminals, they feel affirmed their beliefs. Some I see on the left are glad because either they fear tyranny and view this as protection or because of open spitefulness, others I see are blackpilling among themselves about the confirmation of guilt, about another new and terrible precedent, and about the general degradation of justice.

I wonder about "arising from or in any manner related to his service" per the actual text of the pardons @Gillitrut links below. I'm not a lawyer, so for all I know this phrasing is known by precedent as synonymous with a blanket pardon, but it reads to me like it's clausal to what they did in the course of their official duties, meaning it's not a blanket pardon. That if Milley killed a prostitute during lockdown the pardon wouldn't apply because it didn't arise from or relate to his official duties and that makes me think, mutiny isn't part of his official duties either.

I thought the odds of their prosecution before this it would be low, I still think it's low, but I think it's higher now than it was before. Whatever happens, for their legacies, they weren't mercifully granted pardons, they were inflicted with them.

I think Vance said something to the effect that they are going to pardon the non-violent offenders from January 6th. And they don't want to do a blanket pardon because they may need to prosecute government agitators.

Maybe it's misguided hope, but it seems they want to take the time to pardon the ones who deserve it and not the ones who don't.

Maybe it's misguided hope, but it seems they want to take the time to pardon the ones who deserve it and not the ones who don't.

Indeed. I don't know if fire extinguisher guy was a plant or not, but either way he deserves jail more than the mass of people there.

The actual pardons (Milley, Fauci, Committee) are significantly more detailed regarding what and when.

Compare and contrast the operative text of these pardons (e.g.):

BE IT KNOWN, THAT THIS DAY, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, PURSUANT TO MY POWERS UNDER ARTICLE II, SECTION 2, CLAUSE 1, OF THE CONSTITUTION, HAVE GRANTED UNTO GENERAL MARK A. MILLEY A FULL AND UNCONDITIONAL PARDON FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States, including but not limited to any offenses under the United States Code or the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January l, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

with the Nixon pardon, (from Ford's online Presidential library):

Now, THEREFORE, I, GERALD R. FORD, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.

So this looks like the standard form of pardon for pardoning a pattern of behaviour if you don't know what specific crimes it could be charged with. These pardons are actually narrower than the Nixon pardon, because they are restricted to acts taken in relation to specific offices held. (So if the Trump admin is determined to do that, they could go after Liz Cheyney for campaign finance violations or some other three felonies a day bullshit).

The argument about the political wisdom of the Nixon pardon is a pot-boiler, but AFAIK nobody has ever challenged its constitutional regularity.

In terms of the wisdom of this one, the Fauci pardon seems an obviously good idea - I don't know why the anti-lockdown movement has chosen to make criminal charges against Fauci it's preferred strategy for relitigating COVID, but Fauci didn't commit the substantive crimes - the lockdowns etc. were ordered by other people (mostly at State level). Prosecuting advisors based on technical disagreements over the quality of advice is a bad idea. Prosecuting advisors based on how other people used their scientific advice is a very, very bad idea if you want honest advice. This applies whether Pam Bondi can find a three felonies a day process crime he is actually guilty of or just uses meritless criminal investigations for process-is-the-punishment reasons.

The whole thing about prosecuting the members and staff of the Jan 6th committee is silly, including the pardon, but I think the pardon is reasonable given the Republicans started the silliness. A moron in a hurry can see that the business of the committee is protected from criminal prosecution by the Speech and Debate clause.

The pardon of the witnesses is mildly improper, given that the only crime it could plausibly cover is perjury, which is inexcusable. But no more so than the Iran-Contra or Scooter Libby pardons.

All in all, these seem fairly low down the list of bad pardons.

Re: The Fauci pardon, Congress instituted a ban on Gain of Function in research in 2014. Fauci's work with the CCP to circumvent this ban and the efforts of his office to conceal this work (not the lockdowns) is presumably what he is being pardoned for.

Fauci did a lot of bad things and some of them were criminal (eg perjury, attempt to get around FOIA, conspiracy to do the same). We can’t stop the next one if we can’t agree on what caused the first.

Thanks for digging those up!

Have you got any tips for finding such things? I feel like it should be a lot easier, in the 21st century, for me to find such documents. Most news outlets don't even link to the White House announcement page, much less original documents. SCOTUS makes it pretty easy to see their official opinions; Congress is a bit more complicated, especially with bills that aren't yet laws, but usually I can manage there. The White House seems much less interested in even a hint of transparency.

Unfortunately not. I saw them linked elsewhere. I do with discoverability of things like this was more of a priority for the government.

Hasn't pardoned Reality Winner (which I did expect four years ago) or that IRS leaker (which would unpleasantly surprise me, yet, growth mindset), so there's still some downhill to go. But there's another couple hours left to slide down the slippery slope.

I'll also add to the extent that media coverage of 'normal' pardons is obfuscating things:

The other people pardoned include Darryl Chambers, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a non-violent drug offense, immigration advocate Ravidath “Ravi” Ragbir, who was convicted of a non-violent offense in 2001, the White House said in a statement.

They are, unsurprisingly, also strong political advocates for the President's (aides') political positions, but they're also separately testing the limits of Scott Alexander's 'media doesn't lie' spiel.

> Following a jury trial in January 1995, Defendant Darrell Chambers was convicted of several counts: Count 1, continuing criminal enterprise, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 848; Count 2, conspiracy to distribute cocaine, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 846; Counts 4 and 6, false statements to institution with deposits insured by the FDIC and aiding and abetting, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1014, 2; Counts 8 and 9, laundering of monetary instruments and aiding and abetting, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1956, 2; Count 10, attempted possession with intent to distribute cocaine and aiding and abetting, in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 846, 841(a)(1) and 18 U.S.C. § 2; Count 11, false statement in connection with the acquisition of a firearm, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(6); Count 12, possession with intent to distribute cocaine and aiding and abetting, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) and 18 U.S.C. § 2; and Count 13, felon in possession of a firearm, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g). See ECF 220, PgID 161-162.

I don't have high expectations for Reuters, but I would hope they were able to count.

Are "Darryl" and "Darrell" Chambers the same person? Five minutes on Google has not cleared this up for me in any way.

No, you're right, I'm wrong, and Reuters didn't goof this one. Sorry, that's embarrassing, and what I get for trying to do this sorta check on a cell phone. Correct person had one charge for dealing crack cocaine.

My view is that the appropriate response to this is for the incoming DoJ to open an investigation on every single person pardoned with a statement that "no one is above the law". Did they do anything? I have no idea and neither does anyone else, but the sitting President just pointed a glaring GUILTY spotlight at them by preemptively insisting that they're definitely not guilty of anything. People that can't be convicted by a jury don't need pardons. Would they be able to make this blanket pardon stand up in court? I have no idea, but I think we should find out whether the President actually has the ability to preempt any efforts to bring justice to his cronies.

They can propably still prosecute them if they lie under oath about a pardoned offence.

The answer is to conduct congressional hearings and hold them in contempt for some stupid bullshit- pardons can’t be preemptive.

What an impressive propaganda technique. That's my one-line review to the "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat", and I mean it most sincerely. I really am impressed.

This quote from a New York Times film critic serves both as a quick plot summary and as the main impression the film conveys:

... a sprawling film that's a well-researched essay about the 1960 regime change in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the part the United States, particularly the C.I.A., played.

Let's focus on the "well-researched" part, the part that lends the film a documentary gravitas, the propaganda technique I so admire.

The documentary is a collage of footage, archival audio and video clips, and quotes with careful citations that briefly appear on screen. It doesn't have a narrator--except occasionally it does, like from 22:56 to 24:19, where English text quoting In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo.Inc overlays archival footage while the said author reads his work in original French:

The algorithm Congo Inc. was invented Africa was carved up. Capitalized by Leopold II, it was quickly developed to supply the whole world with rubber and smooth the way to World War I. The contribution of Congo Inc. to the 2nd World War was key. It provided the U.S. with uranium from Shinkolobwe that wiped Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the face of the earth while it planted the concept of 'mutual assured destruction'. During the so-called Cold War the algorithm remained red-hot. It contributed vastly to the devastation of Vietnam allowing Bell UH1-Huey helicopters, sides gaping wide, to spit millions of copper bullets from Kolwezi over the countryside from Hanoi to Hue via Danang all the way to the port of Haiphong.

Here's the beauty: "Congo Inc." is a work of fiction. It is a novel. It is not, and never claimed to be, an accurate and contextualized account of history, nor is it subject to the kind of critique for accuracy that a work of non-fiction would receive.

The technique allows the film to convey the impression of historical gravitas while absolving it of any responsibility for truth, accuracy, or context. What is there to criticize? All the film does is feature a Belgian writer connected to Congo by birth and some years of residence, reading from his work. It's a work of fiction--so what, when the main theme of the film is to suggest the interweaving of art and politics. The film's omission of the category of the work is completely in line with their omission of such information about their other sources. Surely the film has done its due diligence by accurately citing the sources, thus providing any interested viewer with the requisite information to establish the necessary level of epistemology for the content of any citation it happens to feature. If anything, it's a mark of respect for the sophistication of the viewer that the film doesn't bother contextualizing these works, since surely the viewer is quite familiar with both the history of Sub-Saharan Africa in general, and prominent literary works of authors with Sub-Saharan African ties in particular.

Yes, its Sundance Festival Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation is well-deserved. I look forward to future adaptations of this technique, where documentaries about the CIA quote John Grisham's novels, and documentaries about the Catholic Church quote "The Da Vinci Code".

So what's the problem? Where is the historical inaccuracy? Yes, it's a work of fiction, but works of fiction are often based on real historical facts. The producers probably included it because it elucidates their point better than some dry as dust historical tract about how raw materials from The Congo were often used to produce military equipment. They didn't alert you that it was a work of fiction, but is this really necessary? If a documentary about WWI were done in the same style but quoted "For Whom the Bell Tolls" instead, would you insist that they flash "Work of Fiction" in yellow Impact font on the screen just to remove any ambiguity? And who are they supposed to be propagandizing, anyway? You can't stream it without paying extra, unless you have Kanopy, which most people technically have access to for free but don't know about and probably wouldn't be interested in. I'd be more concerned about historical movies that clean up the plot for narrative convenience and leave the viewer with an incorrect impression. These aren't even trying to pretend to be documentaries, but the fictionalized movie version ends up being cultural canon.

It seems that the vibe has definitely shifted in politics and general social spaces, as many folks last week commented on here. People are more open to using language that used to be termed offensive, right-wing political statements are more in vogue, etc.

I'm curious specifically what all of this means for feminism, and the gender war subset of the larger Culture War. I saw an interesting piece which blew up on X lately, that, in discussing the Neil Gaiman situation, argues:

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I'm more interested in what happens to women when they're cast in this role of society's unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can't have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn't mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

Now many linkers and commentators on X are basically arguing - why yes, women don't have agency, and that's why most cultures have reflected that in law and social practice. I think this sort of smugly satisfied mocking of women is in quite poor taste, and not likely to be productive, but there is a deeper point in there. Unfortunately it seems that, even after decades of propaganda, rewriting of tons of laws, giving women voting power, dismantling "oppressive" cultural structures like religion, etc. etc., we still as a society are not able to treat women as adults with agency, and consequences for their actions.

Now a progressive might come in and say - ok, fine we do still struggle with this issue, but hey, it's because of bad social programming! Just give us another 100 years and we will totally hold women responsible just like men, we promise!

That has basically been the progressive line to justify going further and further to the left with social and legal programs. Problem for them is, with the vibe shift I mentioned earlier, I think that argument is running out of steam. The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.

So, where do we go from here? Do you think feminism will actually be rolled back in a meaningful way? I'm skeptical myself, but I'm also skeptical we will magically start holding women accountable. Not sure what happens next...

Do you think feminism will actually be rolled back in a meaningful way?

The motte part -- surely not. Various absurd baileys that have emerged, for sure. They are already in retreat in some places.

People choose to take on too much frivolous debt and destroy their lives. Is the whole lending project dead? Should the media no longer write op-eds about payday loans with a 400% ARP? The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.

That Pavlovich bird does not a summer make. There are global differences in median male and female traits, but I see no reason to treat them differently under the laws of a free society. Globally, men are vastly more violent, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, get into gambling debt, fall victim to romance and finance scams. We somehow manage to treat them like adults. I've never even heard it argued that we should do otherwise which is weird.

But it's not weird. Men treating women as having less agency, and also women claiming less responsibility, has been normal throughout human history. Women have more agency and responsibility than children, but less than men. At the same time, exceptions have always been recognized (some women, and even some children, have more agency and responsibility than some men). However, not until the last few decades has anyone tried to reorganize society and culture around the exceptions rather than the norm. This is natural human social behavior. Fundamentally, a woman crying is psychologically (and even physiologically) more like a child crying than a man crying, and that matters more than any ideological principles or even the letter of the law.

My personal preference is for the classical liberal ideal of legal equality but cultural inequality. However, that does not seem to have been a very stable equilibrium. It seems humans as constituted are unable to cope in that kind of world. There is no returning to the past, but the future will not look like the present (if only because birthrates among these cultural groups are unsustainable).

Of course the sexes are unequal. This is undeniable. But I have yet to hear any argument why basic rights should differ. What is being proposed here is an anathema to classical liberalism. Sure, people are free to debate the cultural inequality of agency or roles between men an women, so long as they're treated equally under the law. If it wants to fit into classically liberalism, the individual takes precedent over group based rights.

Women demonstrate more agency than men when it comes to getting romance or finance scammed, abusing drugs and alcohol, or murdering people. Of course, it doesn't follow that we should take the vote away form men, or consider them children. Men are full adults, and are responsible for their choices. So is Pavlovich.

They don't show more agency, they don't do those "bad" things. Agency is actively making choices that don't strictly follow others. This is the same mistake as thinking someone too incapable to commit crime virtuous.

Avoiding those bad things requires agency, and women demonstrate more of it than men in those contexts. This is true around the world. In general, males show greater impulsivity in both humans and lab animals. Nobody has argued for a broad societal reconsideration of whether men are adults. People would laugh that argument out of the room.

Is there a problem with women claiming a sexual encounter was consensual, and arguing for a take-back some time later? Absolutely. Does it follow that we should seriously consider whether women are adults? No. Thats insane.

Women demonstrate more agency than men when it comes to getting romance or finance scammed, abusing drugs and alcohol, or murdering people

What do you mean by this? For example, men do most of the murder, and murder is a high-agency activity. Agency doesn't mean "good outcomes".

No, not good outcome. But in general males are more impulsive, in humans and lab animals. Thats more direct. Murder was a proxy, but its multifactorial. My point being men around the world and across time seem perennially unable to control their behavior when it comes to murder (for the subset of murders that are heat of the moment, impassioned, impulsive, etc). This is because the sexes are inherently different, yet we still prioritize the individual and their choices. We don't call into question men's right to vote.

Women are more likely to be "scammed" of sex, where men are more likely to be scammed out of money. Of course men aren't spinning yarn about how they're really not responsible for their own free choices in romance scams, or divorce rape, etc. Women arguing that Pavlovich wasn't responsible are insane (as far as I understand the details).

Women demonstrate more agency than men when it comes to getting romance or finance scammed, abusing drugs and alcohol, or murdering people.

How much sympathy do men get for being romance scammed? Or being murderers?

Now, ask yourself the same question for a college aged woman who reports being sexually assaulted at a party?

I probably agree with you a lot here. But it would be laughable to argue that these outliers at the margins are a serious reason to question if men are adults.

People choose to take on too much frivolous debt and destroy their lives. Is the whole lending project dead? Should the media no longer write op-eds about payday loans with a 400% ARP? The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.

Uhhh this is unironically also a big societal issue. Lots of people have been agitating to nationalize the credit card industry for this exact reason.

That Pavlovich bird does not a summer make. There are global differences in median male and female traits, but I see no reason to treat them differently under the laws of a free society

Ok but the issue is that we do treat men and women differently under the laws of our society...

Most of my critique revolves around extending a single instance of an unreliable narrator into viewing women as children, and questioning their right to vote. This is an insane extrapolation of the data, and wouldn't be accepted as a fundamental policy or philosophical argument.

Lots of people have been agitating to nationalize the credit card industry for this exact reason.

I know, and the govt heavily regulates lending anyhow, but less now than ever in terms of max ARP.

My point being that even the most egregious instances of usuary (ie pay day loans) do not portend the end of lending. Nationalizing the credit industry seems less fringe and hairbrained than not treating women as adults. However, neither are practiced anywhere worth living.

I'm sure there is bias in the law as practiced, and men and women suffer unfounded disparate impact, but AFAIK the laws theoretically apply equally wherever possible. Given men's propensity to fall for romance, finance, and gabling scams, its odd that I've never seen it argued that we should view all men as hapless children, and restrict their rights. A maximally insane take would be restricting unrelated rights like driving or, I dunno, voting.

I'm sure there is bias in the law as practiced, and men and women suffer unfounded disparate impact, but AFAIK the laws theoretically apply equally wherever possible.

Theoretically is doing a lot of work here. There are all sorts of issues with women's vs men's shelters, funding for female programs in schools, affirmative action type things for women in corporate, etc etc etc.

I think that we are disagreeing on the fact that I absolutely do not think that women and men are treated equally right now, even though the laws say they do. In fact I think there's a big difference. Do you agree with that or not?

EDIT: FWIW I'm not actively arguing we take away rights from women, which you seem to be implying. I'm just saying that culturally, there seems to be an issue with having women occupy both the role of equal to men and also getting much more benefit than men socially.

Yeah I agree with your assessment quite a lot. My point is that extrapolating these outlying male deficits in self-control/agency all the way to questioning if society can treat men as adults is absurd.

I don't think that society should treat alcoholics or degenerate gamblers as adults... and in fact we don't in many cases, in similar ways.

Situations like this are precisely why progressives are skeptical of employee/employer sexual relationships and it sounds like it was worse here because Gaiman and Palmer were also providing Pavlovich housing as part of the deal. If your combination landlord/boss came onto you one day might one go along with it even if they didn't want to? Might the implicit threat of "I could make you unemployed and homeless" convince someone not to resist? I hardly think we can generalize from "a woman might pretend to enjoy sex to keep her job and housing" to "no women anywhere can be treated with as having agency."

In any case I feel very comfortable asserting that ~no one enforces their own desires and boundaries as they might like 100% of the time. Do you tell your boss how bullshit it is every time they drop work on you that you think you shouldn't be doing or have to do? Do you bitch to your spouse every time they want to do That Thing they like but you don't? Or do you sometimes suck it up and do the thing with a smile anyway? Sexual assault is an extreme case of this but the consequences of not doing so (unemployment, homelessness) probably seemed pretty extreme to Pavlovich.

In any case I feel very comfortable asserting that ~no one enforces their own desires and boundaries as they might like 100% of the time.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that I don't consent to it. I make the decision to accept that I am working late instead of hang out with my husband. I make the decision to watch the show my husband likes and I don't really care about. I consent to all these things because I weigh up their plusses and minuses, and make a decision. That's just what it is to be a human person in an imperfect world making decisions. "Sure, I decided to take on student loans, but I felt pressured from my parents to go to the more expensive school and I don't like the idea of paying them back." Still consent.

An employer or landlord trying to get sex out of an employee/tenant is bad for reasons that have nothing to do with consent. It's bad because it creates an unfair labor or housing market, which is based around who is willing and able to provide sexual favors.

The point is that maybe sex is special, and consent is necessary but insufficient to guarantee an ethical sexual encounter.

And this is why ‘consent based sexual morality’ is full of obvious rule patches tack-welded on in the most awkward possible way.

Situations like this are precisely why progressives are skeptical of employee/employer sexual relationships and it sounds like it was worse here because Gaiman and Palmer were also providing Pavlovich housing as part of the deal. If your combination landlord/boss came onto you one day might one go along with it even if they didn't want to? Might the implicit threat of "I could make you unemployed and homeless" convince someone not to resist? I hardly think we can generalize from "a woman might pretend to enjoy sex to keep her job and housing" to "no women anywhere can be treated with as having agency."

So how does this square with the general feminist sex-positive ideology? Are you saying we should restrict all sex at the workplace and in any relationship where power dynamics could be employed?

So how does this square with the general feminist sex-positive ideology? Are you saying we should restrict all sex at the workplace and in any relationship where power dynamics could be employed?

Yes. This is bog-standard just about everywhere. You can consensually fuck/date anyone you want at the workplace except those that you have a supervisory or evaluative relationship. The same is true of police, they can consensually fuck/date everyone except those they are investigating or arresting.

That's the motte, I think it's probably good not to sweep away this particular motte with the bathwater here, and of course I agree with the broad stroke that some are trying to claim an entire bailey of "it's not consensual if later on one party believes it wasn't".

I think one can generally be (and feminists are) pro-sex generally while thinking particular categories ought to be prohibited or warrant additional scrutiny.

Are you saying we should restrict all sex at the workplace and in any relationship where power dynamics could be employed?

I think those relationships at least warrant extra scrutiny but I wouldn't be opposed to a general prohibition.

I think those relationships at least warrant extra scrutiny but I wouldn't be opposed to a general prohibition

So you are in favour of segregation of men and women in society writ large? Thats the only Way such a prohibition would function

It already functions in most workplaces, honestly. At least everywhere I worked at there was a clause about notifying management when you start dating another employee, with the underlying assumption that it would prevent uncomfortable situations regarding power dynamics. It's not that uncommon, you don't need to introduce new laws to do this.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements.

The one obvious and crucial difference is that all those examples are forms of written, signed agreements with detailed rights and responsibilities of the signing parties, effecting penalties in case of breach of contract etc. In the current year, trying to regulate human mating would be seen as an enormously icky idea and would never fly.

Hmm.

Or even... a marriage certificate?

See, as someone who is actually quite fond of women- but not delusional- this is quite sad. Getting taken advantage of happens whenever women aren’t protected, either because no one cares or because of recognizing their ‘autonomy’ or whatever.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the greatest opponents of any potential measure to introduce contractual agreements in the realm of heterosexual mating would be women.

There is a figure you sometimes see, the ‘abortion bro’. He is strongly pro-choice because, although he doesn’t care overmuch about women’s freedom or health, he definitely does not want to wind up a dad by accident. He’ll make arguments along the lines of ‘what if your girlfriend got pregnant- see that’s why it’s important to protect women’s reproductive rights’. Some of them will talk about the need to firmly tell partners interested in keeping the baby that paying for an abortion will be the last help they ever get, and they’re going no contact afterwards regardless of her decision.

For obvious reasons, this figure is not allowed to headline pro-choice rallies. But you find them on Reddit, sometimes IRL, and occasionally in op-Ed’s in lowbrow newspapers. But they definitely exist. I suspect they’re much more common than women who actually want low commitment relationships.

Men have identical happiness whether married or cohabiting- women are far happier married. Women are nearly four times as likely to say they want to save sex for marriage as men are- and by relationship progression, men get their way. The median woman has socially-conservative-in-practice preferences for relationships and sex; in fact feminists generally do too. They’re just unable to advocate for themselves effectively in the face of men’s preferences. And that is the reason for patriarchy. We don’t tell children to stick up for themselves against adults and expect them to do it, at least not well. There are frameworks for dealing with relationships between adults and children- teachers have extensive rules governing how they relate to students, for example. Likewise you can’t reasonably expect an unprotected woman to be at the mercy of whatever man is around.

Yes, the people most offended by this are women. I have no doubt that the feminist will answer with ‘that’s NOT true’ or some variant thereof and the abortion bro will answer with ‘not my problem they’re like that’. But a typical woman flourishes better with couverture than as femme sole.

About the hype around nuclear power generation among conservatives. Sorry, I do not have a well articulated text to defend here, this is more of probe into the subject, since I feel I am probably missing some fundamental logic here.

It seems to me the support for nuclear energy is a sort of pet cause for conservatives. Not because of the wonders of the technology, but for what it signals.

Given the financial cost of this type of energy source compared to other low emission energy sources, I am yet to find a defense of Nuclear as a feasible strategy for lowering CO2 emissions that comes across as based, good faith argument by someone with true concern about the issue, rather than an attempt at subverting the discussion around energy transition.

Or are there people who truly believe that nuclear energy is a part of energy transition strategy so meaningful it is worth joining forces with those raise the flag as a form of subversion? Any reading recommendation of up to date, nuanced, good faith arguments for nuclear energy?

I think the fundamental logic is also that we (broadly we, humans) get better at the things we do more of. So looking at nuclear in the US right now is not really looking at its potential had we stayed the course in 1970 rather than taking a left turn towards fossil fuels.

We can also look at France and their experience scaling expertise. They are one of the few countries actually lowering their CO2 footprint despite continuing to export energy to Germany.

Is it possible to look at the state of Germany and think the other side of the issue is correct? It seems so simple there's no reason to discuss it, except as a distraction from the obvious example of terrible "green" energy policy.

I just don't feel the need to argue at this point. Just cut green subsidies and purchase mandates, and run cover for a NuclearX to solve the problem.

I'm not even particularly pro-nuclear, because solar-gas-hydro might very well be cheaper. I'm just fed up with green manipulation, dog piling, excuse-making, and histrionic crusading. And I'm especially sick of arguments that go "prove X to my satisfaction, haha you didn't satisfy me I win again"

Have you done any research on this yourself? Are you familiar with, e.g., the very low cost of nuclear energy in South Korea?

I'm pro-nuclear, but I don't exactly have an essay written up on as to why – it's an aggregation of various things I've read over the years. But if you do a quick Google you'll find sources like this one (I haven't read it, but I've skimmed it and I think it covers the points you are interested in).

Obviously, if nuclear isn't financially acceptable in cost, I am interested in hearing about it. But my priors, based on osmosis, is that that cost is at least partially artificially inflated, and that there are a lot of hidden environmental costs to "clean" energy methods like solar.

One of the things the article I linked notes to is that wind and solar (which take up tremendous amounts of space) are heavily subsidized, whereas nuclear energy (at least in the US) is burdened by overregulation. In South Korea, nuclear is cheaper than wind and solar.

Check out the article I linked, maybe do some research yourself, and report back :)

I think what you are missing is that there are parallel developments which call into question whether the high price is actually inherent to the technology in the way we've been led to believe. The most direct parallel here is space launch. Not very long ago, the price per kilogram to orbit was high enough to make satellites prohibitively expensive for anyone but nation states and extremely well-capitalized corporations. Human spaceflight was all but unthinkable for anyone except national astronautics programs. The conventional wisdom was that this is just the nature of the problem: rockets are expensive and expendable, development requires decades of engineering, and there are no real major technological advancements achievable without new fundamental breakthroughs.

But this turned out not to be the case! SpaceX entered the market and proved that using iterations of well-known designs, hiring the right people and compensating them properly, and leadership pushing hard at schedules and milestones while also driving on costs, you actually could dramatically lower the cost to orbit beyond what anyone thought possible, while still being profitable!

So with this context, there's lots of reasons to be skeptical that the cost and feasibility barriers cited for nuclear power are real. As with liquid-fueled rockets, this is a reasonably well-developed and very well-understood technology. The bulk inputs are concrete and steel, inexpensive things we know how to build with. We don't need fundamental breakthroughs. What we need are industry leaders with the drive to engineer better reactors designed for safety and mass production and for the NRC to streamline the permitting process to something with clear, reasonable requirements. Unlike with rockets, we unfortunately also need reform in the building permitting processes that are also used to block or delay every other major infrastructure project, but I don't think that's an impossible dream.

So, your interlocutors may well believe that the cost factor, as real as it is today, not be inherent to the technology, and that we have everything we need to unlock the capability to manufacture and deploy nuclear power facilities as quickly and cheaply as combustion turbines, if only the right combination of leadership and policy falls into place.

I do not think this is the reasoning behind it. I personally believe that nuclear fusion may render all other power sources obsolete in our lifetime, but I do not think more nuclear powerplants with out current tecnology in the foreseeable future.

As far as I know and until I see sources that convice me otherwise, they are too costly, and that gets in the way of more cost-efficient green power generation - and even of nuclear research, depending on how you allocate the budget.

I am yet to see in the general debate someone trying to defend nuclear energy with the argument of accelerating technology development

Would it be fair to say, then, that if it could be demonstrated that the costs are not inherent to the technology, then you would support (or at least not oppose) nuclear power installation?

In 2025, I see the good-faith conservative pro-nuclear stance as mostly a reminiscent stance on "what could have been". It would have been absolutely viable, it would have been the better decision. Noah Smith describes the sentiment well in his introduction here.

But in 2015, this wasn't clear at all, yet. There is a long history of even experts catastrophically underestimating the exponential growth of solar and battery industrial capacity (that first graph is powerful). So in today's discussions, there's always the chance that conservatives are comparing 2015 nuclear against 2015 solar + batteries. This is a much easier proposition to defend.

But yeah, last year the US installed over 40 GW nameplate capacity of new solar. We won't ever be below that in the next 5 years, either. Grid-scale storage of this much solar might also shortly be a non-issue, since forecasts are that the world economy will produce at least 8 TWh of new lithium batteries this year. That's several hundred percent over demand, and it's hard to describe how insane that development is. That's enough batteries to put a 50kWh battery into every single new vehicle built in 2025. Since we're not doing that, batteries will get cheap enough for grid-scale storage.

Even with conservative estimates for the capacity factor of those new panels, that's the equivalent of at least 7 new reactors completed, each year. I don't think there's any case where we relax regulation sufficiently and then plan, develop (if we want to do any of the cool - small modular, thorium, ect. - things pro-nuke people want) and finance that many new reactors per year, even if we grant a 10 year lead time.

Solar+storage+nuclear are all complementary technologies.

As I understand, grid-scale storage allows nuclear to operate at a high load factor by soaking up extra overnight production when demand is super low.

These figures are only possible because China massively over invested in production. They're all losing money hand over fist right now, and we're getting cheap overproduced EV cells because of it. I talked about my new bargain basement solar UPS in the last fff thread for an example of the fire sale deals you can get.

But this isn't sustainable long term, even assuming relations with China don't deteriorate the way everyone seems to be planning. And it's certainly not sustainable on the backs of the laughable US solar industry, which is a mix of subsidy farmers and outright scammers.

Storage might solve the daily duck curve, which is more than I expected to ever be possible, but there's no way to meet seasonal demand with batteries; in most of the US winter energy use more than doubles while solar produces 1/10th of what it does in summer, because the sun just isn't here (Europe could solve this one by colonizing the Sahara, admittedly). There's no way to make solar scale with those numbers, especially when you're trying to make that winter energy demand double or triple again with electric heating mandates.

I want to run the math on North-South and East-West HVDC transmission that all the greens handwave as a solution, but just don't have the figures to make a useful guess. At any rate, they won't let us build power lines either, so it's a moot point.

I've heard that wind energy is an effective complement to solar; when solar is weak wind is strong. Can wind energy make up for the solar energy shortfall during the Winter?

No, that was just something the German greens used as propaganda. Wind is just incredibly intermittent. Where I live it will go still for a week at a time. It survives because of massive per-mhw subsidies that pay a flat rate even if nobody wants to buy the power produced (currently $27.5/MWh, but only for union-built projects lol).

In a lot of places the meh wind areas do see a slight increase during winter, but the best ones come from summer diurnal winds blowing through passes.. So a propagandist can quote the 16mph figure to give a low price, then quote the winter increase to excuse variability.

In both Europe and the US, wind stops producing at all during those cold still days in winter, when heating demand is at peak.

I'm not opposed to solar, but it takes up considerably more space than an equivalent nuclear plant, and is worse for the environment.

While people do overstate the difference, solar nameplate and grid-scale storage nameplate and practically usable values are not identical. I'm pleasantly surprised by the growth of solar, as someone who was genuinely very pessimistic in the late 00s, but there's still a number of limitations to the technology.

On the flip side, a ton of the financial limitations to nuclear power are regulatory, and often regulations established by people who explicitly want to smother nuclear power completely. It'll require some uptooling to bring down costs, but there's a massive amount of low-hanging fruit. I like the SMRs for a variety of technical reasons, but even 300-800 MW plants are really not the sort of thing that should take decades to construct, and that time component is what absolutely murders the financial model.

Now, there are limits to the technology -- just as solar can't beat nuclear for baseload capacity, nuclear's near-uniquely bad for peaking power. I don't think nuclear can or should displace most renewables, and I'd be surprised if they all together can completely displace LNG peaker plants in the next couple decades. But there are reasons beyond politics to argue for them both.

And, of course, just as Biology is Mutable argued, just because the problem is political doesn't mean it's solvable. It may be that there's no way to get those anti-nuke nuts out from regulations, or the only way to do so is extraordinarily costly.

Seems to reinforce my impression that people who insist in this are either acting in bad faith, or echoing those who are.

I'm out for the serious actors who defend expanding nuclear programs, have palpable knowledge, and concern for climate change - if there is anyone who fits this description.

I'm not sure it's all bad faith and malice. I don't want to downplay the amount of uncertainty with the geopolitics and economics of renewables and storage, and the facts still change quickly.

For one, the vast majority of production capabilities (solar, wind, batteries) is in China, of course. (Trade) war would put all developer timelines in peril. Also, it's not so sure how energy pricing on a grid heavy on renewables and storage will shake out. Sweden stopped building several large wind projects because of their economics: if it's windy, all the wind parks ruin the spot market for each other and don't make money. Is it's not windy, they don't make money. Storage could change that, but of course installing to much storage to quickly could result in the same thing...

So in a way, nuclear is a classic conservative position. We know almost everything about how a nuke-heavy grid would look like. The geopolitics are far safer. We know exactly how much over budget each rector would land.

And I also believe it's important to dream big. Maybe the trump admin deregulates nuclear in a big way. Maybe some republican states move in concert, and also deregulate and unify their remaining regulations. Maybe there's a subsidies project on the scale of what other countries have been pumping into renewables. Maybe there's a Manhattan project 2.

And while I'm a firm believer in solar+batteries, I would welcome it. We really could use all hands on deck when we Electrify Everything^TM...

I don't know any highly technical pro-nuke experts, but construction physics has the analysis on the regulatory landscape

If you want good-faith engagements, it would probably help not to poison the well by categorically dismissing all previous (but ambiguous) engagements as bad-faith and aligned with a general political tribe.

Particularly when you base it on a conclusion as a settled point (relative financial cost) without even making a position on the elements that make it a disputed premise. (I.E., what the relative costs are by what metric, what you believe the relative costs would be if you remove imposed regulatory burdens from one side and regulatory subsidies/requirements on the alternatives, what the relative costs of the political advocacy/opposition dynamics were reversed, etc.).

The crux of pro-nuclear arguments is that the technology provably exists and does not require assumptions of future technological breakthroughs, many of the more often cited relative costs are either imposed (regulatory over-engineering requirements no other power sector has to fail) or selective (concerns over nuclear-related costs in excess to equivalent welfare risks from others), that nuclear is effective baseload power (which is needed for sustained industrial economics at scale) rather than intermittent (which functionally requires additional baseload generation regardless for load-balancing, see Germany), and that many of the premises of 'low emission' energy sources just smuggle away the relative costs (such as not considering the extraction / processing / recycling / end-of-lifecycle costs) or have never been feasible requirements for the goals they were meant to support (i.e. the required amounts of rare earth minerals to supported estimates being magnitudes beyond actual rare earth mineral production) in ways that are both highly grift-able and grifted (see carbon credit markets relations to organized crime).

I do not mean to disqualify the argument. It does seem productive to me, however, to observe the correlated occurrence of seemingly contradicting positions within a group - a lesser regard for climate change, but defending nuclear power - and be extra cautious about potential interests in disguise inside the discussion.

The aspects you brought up are absolutely pertinent to investigate in order to establish a good judgement about the role nuclear should have in the energy transition, but ones that I seldom hear in the public debate. That's why I am out for good sources.

The electrical grid needs baseload power. In this graph green represents wind production in Sweden each day. A serverhall or steel mill has a fairly constant consumption rate. During During various Dunkelflautes the wind power production has dropped to low single digit percentages of installed capacity.

Some countries like Norway and Iceland are blessed with boundless cheap baseload power from hydro and geothermal. The rest of us need to create it. Nuclear is reliable, not dependent on weather and provides a stable and green electrical grid. There wasn't a single hour in which Germany's electrical grid was greener than France's last year. France bet on nuclear, Germany on fossil fuels with wind when the weather is good.

Too much focus is spent on electricity production and not enough on the grid. A nuclear powerplant 50 km from a city requires a 50 km cable that is operating at an average of 90-95% capacity. Windpower requires multiple power lines that can be a thousand km long to connect the city to various different wind parks, where it might be windy at different times. This is not green, cheap or efficient.

Transmission is under-discussed because most people handwave it, yeah. Our electric co-op is trying to make everyone move to electric heat while already hitting the limits of the undersea cable. So they want to spend another x-million to upgrade that to meet the peak of winter demand, which means it will be used at 20% capacity the rest of the year.

That's an awful lot of expensive copper just sitting in the ocean not earning its keep. Greens always say "oh we'll just build more X" without ever considering the capital costs.

I understand solar and wind have their shortcomings when in comes to production stability, and that they may have hidden costs. But that it is long stretch from there to concluding nuclear power is generally a worthy complement to them, with aims at minimizing emissions.

As clean and safe and whatever else it may be, there is no way around the price. It consistently ranks among the most costly sources. And budget being the tightest constraint, I cannot imagine it being an important part of the strategy for energy transition - maybe some minor and localized cases, but not more than that.

For a curious layman like me, it is hard to tell serious speech from the noise. But just pointing out that something has a problem does not sell well that nuclear is the best solution.

Nuclear isn't that expensive. France managed to build a majority nuclear grid that has been safe and stable for decades while maintaining sensible electrical prices. The price comes from building one of a kind reactors by companies with little experience while contending with insane levels of regulation.

If you know of a source that demonstrates that and contrasts with alternatives, I would be interested in reading

As clean and safe and whatever else it may be, there is no way around the price. It consistently ranks among the most costly sources. And budget being the tightest constraint, I cannot imagine it being an important part of the strategy for energy transition - maybe some minor and localized cases, but not more than that.

As another commenter asked, are you calculating the insane and targeted regulatory burdens as part of this price? Most nuclear plants that have gone up have undergone extreme lawfare designed to put them out of business. Without all of that, do you suppose the cost might go down?

Absolutely that is an important factor for understanding how nuclear weighs against alternatives. I cannot say where we should draw the line between lawfare and necessary checks and rightful disputes, nor can I say what the actual political cost it is to have nuclear powerplants. But would be very interested in reading a source that makes a good case for nuclear power using uo to date data, and its nvironmental and economic effect under different scenarios

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