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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35604 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Here's another Sunday evening squeeze. We've heard below about Congressional appropriations and the anti-impoundment act, but did you know that the CFPB doesn't have a specific appropriation from the treasury.

Yes, you're right -- no one appropriates the CFPB's budget. Rather, and I'm not joking, the Federal Reserve transfers to the CFPB the amount determined by the Director to be reasonably necessary to carry out the authorities of the Bureau up to some cap.

The Supreme Court said this is legal -- Congress passed a law appropriating the money and they don't have to specify a particular dollar amount to count as satisfying the Constitution's command that "[n]o Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”. There's some nice Founding-era history in the decision which seems convincing (or at least defensible) .

So in exercise of that confirmed power and seemingly in a fully legal fashion, the just-confirmed director said

Pursuant to the Consumer Financial Protection Act, I have notified the Federal Reserve that CFPB will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not "reasonably necessary" to carry out its duties. The Bureau's current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment.

Quite amusing and a fairly good use of the law.

Note that recently the CFPB has been acting like an agency in search of a purpose, going after "nonbank entities" such as Google.

Tbf "Google wallet" etc. does blur the line between tech company and bank.

It's pretty common for financial regulators not to be appropriated. That keeps wealthy Bank lobby groups from lobbying congress for looser regulation (financial forms are one of the biggest lobby groups by budget).

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/ranked-sectors

But they could still allow Congress to pass laws, limiting the CFPB.

And now they found themselves in an even worse situation where bank interests only have to confirm one director through Congress in order to completely torch the agency.

Yeah it's the risk of putting all your eggs in one basket is great until the guy you least wanted gets to choose the next basket holder and picks someone who doesn't like any of the eggs.

That type of legal jiu-jitsu appears to be a major feature of the current administration's approach to regulatory matters, i.e. the repurposing of the Obama-era U.S. Digital Service into Musk's U.S. Doge Service.

Except it isn't working. The judges are slapping on injunctions based on a more strict reading of the Constitution and laws. Obama can create the U.S. Digital Service, but Trump can't use it.

one judge has slapped on an injunction. We will see what the ultimate result is.

It is/was typical for the Obama-era style of executive governance to set up things in ways that lacked the congressional buy-in to protect them from changes down the line. Very much a mix of 'we will continue to win, so it won't matter,' mixed with 'I dare anyone to pay the political costs of trying to change it afterwards.'

In theory, it was supposed to be a ratchet. In practice, they did not continue to win, and a consequence of using a party-state to undermine a political opponent from within the executive bureaucracy is that they have much higher baked-in political costs regardless.

Reuters: Health clinics grapple with US funding squeeze

It seems funding hasn't been fully restored and a lot of affected clinics don't have sufficient cash reserves:

Three community health centers near Richmond, Virginia, were forced to shut down after federal funds used to pay staff salaries remained inaccessible since last week, said Virginia Community Healthcare Association spokesperson Joe Stevens.

As of Friday, another nine centers across Virginia also could not access federal funds but continued to see patients by tapping into reserve funds.

"They will need money in the next week," said Stevens. "We don't know why some centers can access funds and some cannot."

In Virginia, community health centers provide medical, dental, behavioral health, pharmaceutical and substance use services for approximately 400,000 patients. For much of the state's rural areas, the centers are the only option for primary care, said Stevens.

One center that was still unable to access federal funds is in southwestern Virginia, where the next closest option for medical care is more than an hour's drive, he said. Most providers were able to access Medicaid and grant monies once the spending freeze was rescinded. However, some say they are still cut off from payments used for essential care, including medical, dental, prescription drugs and behavioral health.

And, of course, problems with transgender-serving clinics and federal grants for STI prevention and treatment:

Late last week, some healthcare centers that provide HIV prevention services and care for transgender patients received notices that grants issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be terminated. The letters cited the Trump administration's orders on diversity and gender identity, according to three recipients of the notices.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention referred questions about the grants to the Department of Health and Human Services.

St. John's Well Child and Family Center, a network of public health centers in South and Central Los Angeles, cannot access $746,000 remaining from a $1.6 million grant used to provide prevention, testing and treatment for about 500 transgender people at risk of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis and hepatitis C.

"We have made a decision not to cut back any programs because of any threats from the federal government," said St. John's President Jim Mangia.

St. John's has joined a lawsuit filed by California's attorney general contesting the funding cuts. Mangia says he will seek private funding to make up the loss.

The LGBT Life Center in Norfolk, Virginia, received a letter stating $6.3 million of the organization’s funding, or 48% of its annual budget, would be terminated, said spokesperson Corey Mohr. The center provides medication and monitoring to 400 patients with HIV.

I'm curious what the LGBT Life Center's grant was for, given that St. John's had 25% more patients. Maybe it was specific to HIV-positive patients and treatment is genuinely more expensive than prevention? But I had thought PrEP, PEP, and ART were the same medication at different doses, and that progression of HIV to AIDS is very uncommon, so that wouldn't make much sense.

This is part of the unforeseen/unintended risk of making cuts. it creates added costs from the inefficiencies having to deal with the acute disruption to the system.

It seems foreseeable, to me.

Malicious compliance is pretty heinous when it involves cutting off people from life saving medicine.

Shutting down because you can't make payroll isn't malicious compliance.

Even if the federal government misses payroll (for "essential" workers during shutdowns) with a certain degree of thoughtlessness, it is something that is Not Done in the rest of the world. If Patrick McKenzie is right about the culture of the payroll services industry, they consider the prohibition on late payroll to be literally Biblical.

St. John's Well Child and Family Center, a network of public health centers in South and Central Los Angeles, cannot access $746,000 remaining from a $1.6 million grant used to provide prevention, testing and treatment for about 500 transgender people at risk of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis and hepatitis C.

When I was younger, I had developed pretty libertine attitudes about human sexuality and I still mostly have the same gut feelings, but every now and then, I bump into things that make me think the conservatives have a point. This is roughly $3K per person for STI testing and treatment. Why? Why do these people insist on doing such consistently risky behavior that they need constant STI surveillance? Even being somewhat promiscuous doesn't result in constant infections, the behavior here really just has to be completely outside the range of anything that most people would consider normal. As you note, the other Life Center apparently spends about five times that much per capita, clocking in over $15K per person.

Making everyone else pay for egregiously bad behavior is just galling.

his is roughly $3K per person for STI testing and treatment. Why?

I can tell you from being adjacent to the porn industry for a while that they were testing constantly and it doesn't cost that much when purchased on the competitive market with clientele that are motivated to get tested.

I expect that this is a combination of:

  • Expense bloat from doing it in a non-competitive environment
  • Having to chase and accommodate irresponsible/flaky/implusive/crazy patients to get them to comply
  • Constant handholding for patient that can't or won't fill out basic paperwork correctly, on time, at a 3rd grade level of accuracy

This isn't behavioral at all. Give it back to the free market and demand that patient be responsible for their own screening and it would be done for a hundred bucks a test.

I can tell you from being adjacent to the porn industry for a while

Respectful request for stories. You must have several good ones.

I heard they are tested a lot. . ironically it is safer than sex with a stranger

Yes, they have a system of record that logs every intercourse on the set and takes the potentially infected parts of the networks offline as soon as someone fails an STD test. Performers usually fail their tests because they hooked up with someone outside the industry and had unprotected sex with them.

Correct. There was also an air of “if we don’t self regulate effectively , OSHA or some other dept will and the result will surely be far worse.

Lesson there eh

Depends on which portion of which state's OSHA you're dealing with. I recently had a professional reason to run something by a particularly-specialized branch of Cal-OSHA and it was an absolute piece of cake. Incredibly business-friendly...I think every single person I talked to was at least a 10-year industry veteran who migrated over to the government side once they were ready to work fewer hours per week and get started on accumulating a pension (or at least gave that impression to my jaded eyes). Super easy to work with, very clear in terms of expectations and bright-line rules that the client was also happy with.

I can’t stress enough how certainty is far more valuable to regulated businesses than leniency.

Indeed, hence the focus on the "very clear in terms of expectations and bright-line rules"

I can tell you from being adjacent to the porn industry for a while

I'd love to hear you expand upon this.

What makes it add up is that it's apparently transgender specific- everything we know about transgenders is that they have very poor health and cost a lot to treat.

This stuff never stays confined to one community forever. In addition, the US medical system guarantees anyone access to healthcare (if they don’t pay for it, the state and/or all insurance users do), so you’ll be paying for much more expensive AIDS treatment in the long haul. If reducing promiscuity is the goal, cutting funding for PrEP seems like a poor place to start; gay men were highly promiscuous even at the height of the AIDS pandemic (that is in fact how it happened) and I doubt they will become less so today, when the disease is more easily treated and no longer a death sentence.

I am open to the idea that this is actually the best policy given a number of realistic political constraints. This does not move me to find it less galling that I'm stuck paying for people to live degenerate lifestyles. Avoiding HIV is absolutely trivial, but the "community" in question apparently insists on spreading HIV.

Monkeypox was where it became obvious gay men were just uninterested in restraining themselves. Just wrap it up became akin to genocide by gay activists claiming discrimination, then immediately after that there was endless concerns about how gay men were being unfairly stigmatized for spreading monkeypox. Of course they should be stigmatized! They were barebacking against medical directive, complaining about being discriminated against and then demanding the external public make restitution foe the hurt feelings. Its pure moral hazard combined with crybullying to externalize responsibility and liability.

The narrative of the 90s were that gay kids were just normal people that happened to like the same gender. Sometime in the 2010s this got morphed into gays being a protected class, and now the chemsex degenerates have decided to lump their irresponsibility under the ambit of kink. If NAMBLA wasn't annihilated in the 80s it would be the vanguard of pedophilia, and it would be homophobic to not let them cavort with our children.

The usual rules about specific groups, outgroup-booing, and heat vs. light still apply. Even when you really don’t like the people involved.

Given the number of times you’ve been warned or banned for more or less the same thing, this shouldn’t be news to you. On the other hand, you keep doing interesting stuff when you can keep the vitriol in check.

One month ban, then.

The narrative of the 90s were that gay kids were just normal people that happened to like the same gender. Sometime in the 2010s this got morphed into gays being a protected class, and now

This reminds me of when The Onion was still funny (2001):

“After centuries of oppression as an ’invisible’ segment of society, gays, emboldened by the 1969 Stonewall uprising, took to the streets in the early ’70s with an ’in-your-face’ attitude. Confronting the worst prejudices of a world that didn’t accept them, they fought back against these prejudices with exaggeration and parody, reclaiming their enemies’ worst stereotypes about them and turning them into symbols of gay pride,” Thorne said. “Thirty years later, gays have won far greater acceptance in the world at large, but they keep doing this stuff anyway.”

I also don't care for that lifestyle, but "engaging in risky behavior argument" as justification to deny care can be used for almost everything. Car accident while going too fast and not wearing a seatbelt? Snowboarding? Downhill skiing? Smoking? Football in high school? etcetera .

Wisdom involves judging and drawing up permissible and impermissible risks.

Playing football in high school is risky. Self-testing novel chemical amphetamines you bought online is also risky. But they're not the same kind of risk.

Having sex with a 17.9 year old or an 18.1 year old doesn't seem very different. But it doesn't then follow that 35 year old men should have ready access to 12 year old girls. At some point a line must be drawn on a qualitative, continuous and complicated scale. And people must fundamentally reason out a series of rules, guidelines and reasonable applications of flexibility in special cases to make this work.

Isn’t there a difference between denying care and paying for it?

Jesus Christ

  • -26

Please don't post low-effort one liners just to express your outrage.

I do not like subsidizing homosexuality, or promiscuity more broadly. But how far does this go? I'm pretty happy with a policy of 'you choose not to be monogamous, you're going to get STD's on your own head be it. No public funding for testing, treatment, or prevention. Medical providers aren't obligated to give STD treatment.' To be clear, I wouldn't oppose sodomy laws either.

There are quite a number of conservatives who halfway do it. Letting people die from preventable STD's when they choose not to prevent them by sane and reasonable sexual behavior is beyond the overton window.

One way in which this would come back to bite right-wingers is that it would be taken as precedent to raise premiums or deny coverage for $disease-related costs and deaths to the unvaccinated. From what I can tell, this was already being bandied about around 2021-22, but seemingly not implemented.

Some other possible targets: anti-abortion women (liability from not aborting dangerous pregnancies and genetic defects where the parents' insurance may be on the hook), Christian sects that refuse blood transfusions (though you might not care if the interdenominational solidarity of the Waco era is gone).

No, right-wingers don't have to pretend that something that is related but very different is somehow indistinguishable, nor worry that they're somehow giving the other side ideas -- since obviously the left has already thought of that.

Well, they've for sure thought of it, but why didn't they go through with it? The simplest explanation could be that the other side does in fact have people who are concerned about principles or at least have other considerations than mashing the "defect" button as fast as they can.

If your reaction to that is to spy an opportunity and defect first, then this only makes my (and, I imagine, others') defector-punishing instincts tingle. I figure it would be a mistake for the Right to mistake the current situation for one in which they actually have a stable base of loyalists, as opposed to a temporary alliance that depends on people (such as myself) who got tentatively convinced that they are the lesser evil. Trying to defect first in any domain could flip that perception rapidly.

The vaccination stuff, probably because public sentiment was moving anti-Covidian. Liability for "not aborting" is still outside the Overton window. Christian sects that refuse various medical treatments have been targeted for many years (e.g. by taking their children away from them); the problem with trying to charge them more is that if they refuse blood transfusions they tend to cost less (being dead).

But all that misses the larger point, which is that it is possible to distinguish "paying thousands of dollars a month to gay men so they can have unprotected sex with a lower risk of an STD" and "refusing insurance to women who refuse abortions in principle".

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Okay, but are we also going to stop subsidizing treatment for smokers with lung cancer, alcoholics with cirrhosis, and fat people with ... everything?

Yes.chad is an argument I'll accept (though not agree with). But if you start finely parsing which people should be let die for their moral failures, then you're just making disgust-based judgments. There is much more of a public health argument to be made for treating STDs. (The health problems of smokers, drunks, and fatties generally do not impact other people directly.)

(That said, yeah, I also find it galling to pay for treatment for people who have preventable catastrophic health bills.)

Weren't smokers a net cost savings as they died younger and quicker before their medical costs really started escalating in old age?

Smokers and drinkers are also taxed heavily on their vice to discourage consumption and reimburse the state. Are the degenerates and sexual devients paying some sort degeneracy tax? I think their 'tax' had been shame and exclusion from 'polite society' but those taxs were repealed.

I'd like to tax sugar and HFCS to dissuade the fatties and recover some revenue for their care.

What really needs to be taxed is clearly "healthy lifestyles" that allow people to reliably live to 80+.

Free cigarettes at 50?

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Presumably the difference would be that the state invests a lot of effort in disincentivising smoking, alcoholism, and obesity. All of those are understood to be important public health issues and the state does what it can to discourage them. There aren't anti-promiscuity campaigns on the same order as anti-smoking campaigns.

One might argue that there are state sexual health campaigns, so safe sex is analogous to moderate drinking, if that counts?

There is much more of a public health argument to be made for treating STDs. (The health problems of smokers, drunks, and fatties generally do not impact other people directly.)

If we wanted to do it only for public health reasons, we could add some sort of punishment high enough that the recipients arent better off, that would eliminate the fairness concerns.

are we also going to stop subsidizing treatment for smokers

The writers of Obamacare were willing to explicitly call out and allow higher insurance premiums for smokers, so to some extent we're already there. I have to solemnly swear I don't use any tobacco products annually at open enrollment, which is easy for me as I never have used. It's politically, but not practically, inconceivable to similarly have to swear I'm not an IV drug user or particularly promiscuous.

On that note I've long wondered whether nicotine pouches are classified as tobacco products.

As I recall they are pretty specific there -- I think something like 5-10 cigars per year was still considered "non-smoker" for life insurance purposes, last I renewed.

Not sure their stance on pouches and vapes nowadays -- but I've heard that the main purpose of the blood/urine test that life insurance providers (sometimes?) do is checking for nicotine so people can't just lie about smoking, so I could imagine some issues there. (do they do tests for health insurance in the US? if not, "non-smoker" is accurate, and there's no tobacco in Zyn, so even "no tobacco products" seems defensible)

Paying for preventable catastrophic health bills because of stupid behavior is one thing. Yes, there's some moral hazard in giving a skydiver the same life insurance rate as everyone else, but insurance companies actually look at the risks and decide it's only worth charging more if you're an instructor or other high jump-count enthusiast. And the risk of base jumping will make your insurer laugh in your widow's face if she tries to collect.

But what's worse is the skydiver asking his life insurance to pay for his parachute and training on the theory that him dying by jumping without a parachute would cost them more money. This is the prep situation.
And what's even worse than that is the government forcing the insurer to pay for this (and raise costs on everyone else) because the national skydiving federation somehow became a powerful lobby that dictates government policy.

The sane solution, like we use for skydivers irl, is making paying for prep out of pocket a condition of obtaining health insurance at a base rate, just like not smoking or buying your own parachute before jumping.
If they don't, their insurance is void and we saddle them with non-dischargeable medical debt in exchange for their treatment (or we charge city gays with 6-7 figure incomes an actuarially fair rate for their coverage)

And if people can't deal with this, the only answer is "right, first we eliminate the influence of the national skydiving federation and fire any bureaucrat who had dealings with them. As well as any agency who gave federal grants to the "Chutes Over Chicago 501c" that seems creepily obsessed with holding skydiver storytimes at local kindergartens

But what's worse is the skydiver asking his life insurance to pay for his parachute and training on the theory that him dying by jumping without a parachute would cost them more money.

Isn't that how kidnapping insurance works?

It's not a matter of life insurance rates, when a motorcyclist riding a crotch rocket smashes into a bridge, the ER docs will stitch him back together. When an associate in inner city crime gets shot in the stomach, the same ER is gonna pull the bullet out and patch him up.

It goes well beyond the world of insurance. And it's long past the point of arguing that we should leave the uninsured victims of motorbike crashes to die on the side of the road.

I don't think you read the post, specifically the end of paragraph 3.

Yes.chad.

Put people on those Christian healthsharing plans that are allowed to just not cover things they think come from unChristian behavior. These exist and have enough people on them to stay in business; clearly it's doable.

Now obviously I have a much stronger objection to paying for prep than I do for dialysis; I just said sodomy should be punishable by law. But, you know, it's pretty reasonable to tell type II diabetics that they have to pay for their own treatment until they can lose weight.

Meh. Fuck around and find out, literally- I don't think it's practical to criminalize straight casual sex outright, but the government shouldn't be in the business of making it a less risky decision. Perfectly fine with fornicators getting diseases as a consequence of their sinful decisions.

Government pays for treatment, but your name and photo are added to the state social disease register, linked to you Tindr / Grndr profile?

On the other hand, consequences removed also remove any incentive to stop doing stupid things. Maybe cutting funds to treat active disease is a bad idea, but I do think that much more of the burden for these kinds of lifestyle diseases (not just promiscuous sexual activity, but obesity, drug use, smoking, and high risk trill seeking) that add burdens to the public, and often not nearly as much for the person who brought the problems on themselves. If they were to see others like themselves forced to pay for treatment after a lifetime of risky behavior catches up to them, they’d likely take at least some warning. It’s much like what’s happened in the student loan crisis— more and more kids are choosing options other than college because they see how much trouble their older siblings and parents got themselves in by going to college without a solid plan. If we’d actually managed to forgive the loans, that would not happen. And I think the same might well work to a degree for lifestyle choices that cause disease or injury— if you had to spend yourself into poverty undoing the damage of I.e. obesity, then a lot of people would look at people having to do that because they couldn’t put down their forks and decide to download a weight-loss app and control their eating and exercise plan. If they see their future as “I’ll just get free ozempic at taxpayer expense when it gets bad enough,” tge lack of negative consequences give them no reason to avoid the problem or take positive steps to fix it.

We don't have to do any of that. Paying thousands of dollars per month to gay men so they can have sex without consequences is not the only answer. And it's an answer that is extremely unfair to all the rest of us.

Yeah, I guess I just don’t see Donald Trump ending gay promiscuity in the next 3 years so in its absence handing out PrEP to anyone who wants it protects the wider public. It’s not like the number of closeted / bi dudes with wives and girlfriends is nonexistent, you can’t have HIV spreading and not eventually see normal (even chaste) people get it.

How many of these wives and girlfriends got the comparably more contagious monkeypox? That more pets and kids(and this probably says that monkeypox is highly contagious within households more than it does that gays are all pedophiles- after all, adopted kids of gays don't seem to get HIV very often) did than beards indicates to me that being a beard is very low risk, either because there's very few of them or because their husbands/boyfriends are unusually non-promiscuous.

Eh, the whole PrEP thing came out before it was determined it was acceptable to lock down the entire world to try to stop a disease. I don't think your premises are true (consider the spread of monkeypox), but even if they were, there are alternatives to taxing incels and the monogamous to keep the party going for gay men.

This is roughly $3K per person for STI testing and treatment. Why?

Maybe it includes the opportunity cost of not providing other services.

https://lgbtlifecenter.org/events/

"Youth matter LGBT+ affirming youth groups" and drag shows, mostly. They also run a housing grant ring. Basically a gay church but paid for entirely by taxpayers.

Very common media trick, noting a single uncontroversial thing and pretending it's the whole thing.

But the question is what the grant was for. Youth groups and drag shows don't cost $6.3 million.

Youth groups and drag shows don't cost $6.3 million.

The administrative salaries of the people running youth groups and drag shows, the venues for youth groups and drag shows, the consulting fees for ensuring that your youth groups and drag shows are totally compliant with all applicable rules and regulations, well... that costs $6.3 million, easy.

I have seen universities pay $100,000+ to consultants to give single day seminars on grant writing. Sometimes these consultants have a history of writing successful grants, so the expertise is definitely there. And some of the grants that result can be worth millions of dollars to the university, so the expense is justified on paper. But no one--absolutely no one--is doing controlled experiments in which they determine whether these consultants actually make a difference, or whether there are cheaper alternatives with similar (or better) results. It's all part of the higher education grift; if you know the right people, and have the right friends, you can quit your underpaid research post and instead make millions telling other underpaid researchers to try harder.

I strongly suspect it is the same in every grant-driven industry everywhere. (Indeed, the whole "Effective Altruism" grift has largely consisted in insisting that EA is totally different, it's definitely going to make real change, instead of just creating new jobs and generous salaries for charismatic people who would rather attend conferences in exotic locales, than do the hard work of producing meaningful work.)

I strongly suspect it is the same in every grant-driven industry everywhere. (Indeed, the whole "Effective Altruism" grift has largely consisted in insisting that EA is totally different, it's definitely going to make real change, instead of just creating new jobs and generous salaries for charismatic people who would rather attend conferences in exotic locales, than do the hard work of producing meaningful work.)

EA is meaningfully different. The average charity spends 20% on overhead, and for arts and culture charities the "sweet spot" is apparently a whopping 35%.

Look at the recommended charities on GWWC (GWWC is recommended as the best overall resource for charities on ea.org). GiveDirectly spends 95% of its money on charitable expenses. For AMF it's 99.4%. Malaria Consortium is at 12% and HKI is at 16%.

Look at the recommended charities on GWWC (GWWC is recommended as the best overall resource for charities on ea.org). GiveDirectly spends 95% of its money on charitable expenses. For AMF it's 99.4%. Malaria Consortium is at 12% and HKI is at 16%.

If I'm understanding your links right, you flip what the numbers mean in mid-paragraph here - the first two (in the 90s) are the amount spent on actual charitable expenses while the last two (in the teens) are the amount they spend on overhead. This makes it look like the last two are really terrible wheras I take your intended point to be that they're nearly as good as the first two.

Sorry, yes, that is what I meant.

EA is meaningfully different.

I'm sure there are charities, including EA charities, that are better than the "average" charity along the relevant axis, sure.

But according to your own link, the managing director of GiveDirectly pulls down almost $500,000 per year. That's a hell of a grift, and perfectly analogous to my university consultant example. I'm sure the managing director has the relevant expertise, and probably is directly responsible for a healthy chunk of charitable cash transfers that would otherwise have gone elsewhere (or nowhere). But no one--absolutely no one--is doing controlled experiments in which they determine whether that $500,000 actually makes a difference, or whether there are cheaper alternatives with similar (or better) results. Personally, I know several very competent administrators who are happy to make $100,000 managing sums similar to those laid out by GiveDirectly.

Charity in America is Big Business(TM), and even EA is no clear exception.

perfectly analogous to my university consultant example

I admit that there was no A/B test to figure out if this guy should be paid 450k or 500k or 550k.

However, is anyone actually doing the math on how much grant consultants increase grants received? I kind of doubt it. I suspect that those guys have some marketing and the university spends money on them because they have to do something, and everyone sits through the info session because they have to.

At least with EA there is at least some external validity. The money goes in, and 95 cents on the dollar goes out. Autists are working around the clock to see if you really are as effective as you claim. Ironically, this means EA charities operate more like a business than your average grants consultant, because they've got people keeping an eye on their bottom line and the business doesn't exist just to enrich the guy who runs it (unlike the grant consultant). They have to actually deliver shareholder value, where the shareholders are the recipients and the donors.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, yes, charity is big business, and that's a good thing.

Add in promotion and 'awareness campaigns' and security expenses.

Do people prefer more Sunday top-level-comments, or more Monday-morning top-level-comments?

Anyway, Richard Hanania writes, Nationalists Already Have the World They Want but Need to Pretend Otherwise:

As JD Vance said in a recent interview, representing the nationalist perspective,

You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus on and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

Huge if true. We might ask what evidence there is that the left, or the “far left,” whoever that is, prioritizes foreigners over American citizens. The US spends about 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid. States and localities spend practically nothing on non-Americans, except in cases where there is a large number of immigrants, though they also pay taxes. Democrats feel pressure from the far left on trans, climate, and other issues, but raising the amount spent on foreign aid or otherwise expanding our circle of empathy seems to be a very low priority.

Sometimes you’ll hear “America First” types argue for restrictive immigration and trade policies, and maintain that in these areas our leaders have prioritized the interests of foreigners. Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans. Nationalists may disagree, but practically nobody of any influence is saying that the goal of public policy is to make foreigners better off even if it comes at the expense of Americans. When the left criticizes Trump’s views on tariffs, they focus on Americans having to pay higher prices, not the possibility that Chinese workers might lose jobs.

This is what makes modern nationalism so incredibly bizarre. The world looks pretty much exactly as they want, which means they need to completely check out of reality in order to argue for their positions.

This... makes sense? It's too uncouth for many people to say "America should make x nominal sacrifice, because it's increases our soft power," but people rarely say "America should make x sacrifice, even though it's zero-sum, because altruism." That's not to say there's no international philanthropy lobby, but foreign policy seems to be mostly "mistake theory." So, in that sense, yes, nationalists already have the world they want. But do they need to pretend otherwise?

Nationalists claim to care about their own people, not to hate others. Yet such assertions are difficult to reconcile with their priorities. Whenever you hear someone is “America First,” it’s never that he wants to cure cancer or fix the housing supply issue. Instead, he talks about Ukraine or foreign aid. He’s relatively indifferent to most questions regarding how to make Americans’ lives better, but he’s certain that he doesn’t want to help outsiders.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person. When he finds out, he blows up at her. “Our family first! What kind of person puts others ahead of their own family? A strange inverted morality you have!” Then he goes back to keeping his money in a savings account instead of buying government bonds or mutual funds. It would be rational to conclude that when he complains about the dollar given to the homeless man, he’s driven by malice more than love of his family.

The final sentence in that quote reminded me of the down-thread discussion of sadism. The substack comments have more about tribalism.

they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans. Nationalists may disagree, but practically nobody of any influence is saying that the goal of public policy is to make foreigners better off even if it comes at the expense of Americans.

Citation needed.

But irregardless of the enemy's self-reported attitude towards helping Americans, nationalists believe that the enemy's values are actually anti-American.

When the enemy says "who will do the jobs??!!1!!" they're making a blatant bad faith argument. It's interesting how everyone who says that also believes all the billions living in shithole countries around the world should be imported into America and given access to as many handouts as they want

When the left criticizes Trump’s views on tariffs, they focus on Americans having to pay higher prices, not the possibility that Chinese workers might lose jobs.

Maybe it's better to say that the Overton window is nationalistic, so when the antis control the levers of power they need to present their preferred policy from the lens of nationalism. On the other hand Chinese aren't black/brown/minority/dei so they hold no value in the enemy's value stack. I'm pretty sure when Trump was threatening tariffs on Colombia, there were a fair share of fake news articles crying about the poor Columbians about to lose their jobs.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person. When he finds out, he blows up at her. “Our family first! What kind of person puts others ahead of their own family? A strange inverted morality you have!” Then he goes back to keeping his money in a savings account instead of buying government bonds or mutual funds.

There is no such thing as a risk free investment, and that risk is priced in to the possible reward. What gives us the right to judge the man's risk preference as well as the value of his time in managing investments? Some people choose to keep hard currency at home to diversify the risk from the bank. While on the other hand the dollar given is a dollar lost for nothing in return. And how small are occasional donations really; it reminds me of this old tweet: https://x.com/CNBC/status/1076173906455810050

Anyways I think the idea the author is touching on is "penny wise, pound foolish." But nowhere is it implied that the penny-pinching miser hates the thing he's pinching pennies from.

I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not that America First has no plans, it’s that most of them run on the premise of lowering taxes and regulations and reducing government involvement. The reason they don’t have a government plan (which is what most commentators mean when they say “what’s the plan?) is that they don’t think government should be doing those things. They aren’t communists, and therefore their housing plan is “lower the tax burden so people have money, remove the zoning laws and the environmental regulations that prevent homes from being built, and let Americans do their thing.” That’s not going to show up as a plan, because the plan is to get out of the way.

A big part of this is of course not blowing trillions of dollars a year doing silly unproductive things for everyone else with taxpayers money. Funding Ukraine is a marginal case at best, it’s a billion dollars a month to prop up the Nebraska of Eastern Europe until they inevitably run out of people to kidnap for the front lines. Funding kids shows in Iraq is a loss because Middle East TV simply pushes Islamic fundamentalism and jihad. Going down the list most of these “aid” programs are basically grifting— pay an NGO full of PMC kids to pretend they’re doing something important overseas, while doing nothing more than paddling their pockets from the three figure salary they get for pretending to help out. At this point, freeing up the public money wasted on these grifter programs and giving the money to average Americans who would build businesses and make things and cure diseases and so on.

Funding kids shows in Iraq is a loss because Middle East TV simply pushes Islamic fundamentalism and jihad.

I've seen television in the middle east...hours of it. You know who the big star was? Oprah Winfrey. After that there were tons of music video stations for each of the different leading countries. Sexy lebanese videos, super sappy Saudi Orchestras with lame poets, Emirate gun twirling and cane dancing...and Iraq? It was all blue jeans in night club dancing shows, like a very tame American Bandstand. I would not be surprised at all if Iraqi Sesame Street was popular. that's one of the USAID expenditures I find least offensive--even admitting that modern Sesame Street is peak Wokoso.

Anyway, it's not all fundamentalism. That's what's on the radio...

At the same time, though, Hamas made their own Mickey Mouse ripoff.

Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans.

The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices. It ignores the fact that nationalists have a stake in their nation, and immigrants dilute and weaken that stake. Allowing immigrants is analogous to selling some shares in a corporation. If immigration is 3% per year, Americans are losing 3% of their stake in their country to foreigners every year. If the immigrants are like-minded (for civic nationalists) or co-ethnic (for ethno-nationalists) then it's not such a big deal; it's basically recruiting allies. But if the immigrants are opposed to Americans' culture or are of a different ethnicity then immigration is a hostile takeover.

You can’t be a nationalist and also stick to the facts, since even though most Americans are nationalists, few would think that 1% of the federal budget going abroad is worth worrying about.

What. That's a non-sequitur. To draw a crude analogy, if thieves are stealing your stuff at a rate of only 1% of your income every year, then security is not worth worrying about. Or if you only waste 1% of your time sitting in traffic or standing in line at the post office, then it's not worth making roads or post offices more efficient. Hanania has made a bad argument here.

It also ignores that it is still a massive number that could be used to really help your allies both abroad and in the states which the Dems seem to be doing.

Also it is purely debt financed. Wouldn’t it be nice if for the last twenty years that number would’ve been zero? That would represent a material decrease in the national debt.

The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices (…)

I think this is besides Hanania's point. He is gesturing at something like Scott's conflict theory vs mistake theory. His point is: nationalists criticize the mainstream left for advocating for policies intended to help foreigners more than Americans. But, in fact, when you look at their actual policies and the arguments behind them, the left's policy are intended to help Americans first. They have a factual disagreement with right-wingers about whether those policies would work, and they're hypocritical about how they phrase their goals, but making America better off (at the expense of the rest of the world if need be) is in fact also their terminal goal, whether they admit it or not; their revealed preferences, granted their (perhaps erroneous!) beliefs about how economics work, align with right-wingers'.

Saying that the economic studies are bad is neither here nor there. The salient point for Hanania is the existence and prevalence of those studies (however flawed), as opposed to studies actually embracing the left's supposed belief that it would be morally necessary to enact such policies even if they harmed Americans, so long as they benefited foreigners.

Okay, let's grant that nationalists are being overly charitable when they assume their enemies are driven purely by altruism towards foreigners (though some clearly are driven by that to a substantial degree). The obvious reason they feel this way is that their enemies continually attack them for their lack of altruism but whatever.

Let's say that what's actually happening is that altruism is one factor but some of these policies are seen as good for Americans overall and some are especially good for certain Americans who benefit disproportionately from the cheaper labour of migrants without concern for any externalities they impose on the rest of the populace.

What's Hanania's point then? "Well, ackshually, it's the nobles who benefit from all of the slave labour, not the slaves!" is technically accurate but so what?

You can argue that anti-globalist positions are stupid, but the fact that they're fighting globalists who happen to be fellow citizens doesn't change that they're nationalists.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person.

First of all: I've gained a lot of contempt for homeless people so I might actually feel this way. I've never felt more like a fool when I gave a former regular on our street money for "food" only to realize he was actively turning down free food from nearby restaurants. Even if I was making bad decisions with my money I'd still be annoyed at my wife for being a gull. I'd still be annoyed that said person gets to hang around stinking up the neighborhood even more, encouraged by our trusting folly.

But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.

Now replace voluntary donations with taxes.

But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.

That may be true! But if that is the husband's problem he ought to say so, not pretend that his concern is spending the household's money frivolously in general. It is perfectly sensible to say "I don't really care what you do with those $50 I gave you, just so long as you don't spend them on things I actively disapprove of; by all means buy a dress with it, or set fire to it on TikTok, just don't give it to that smelly nuisance over there". But you have to own up to it, not say "how dare you throw away those precious fifty bucks, we need them at home!".

But you have to own up to it, not say "how dare you throw away those precious fifty bucks, we need them at home!"

Sure, but you could imagine a vindictive, manipulative wife who says, "Oh, so you hate the homeless and what them to die??" and then spreads that exaggeration around their shared friend circle so that everyone thinks the husband is a jerk and shuns him. The analogy breaks down a bit because marital and small-scale social dynamics are different than those between citizens of a nation, but you can see why the husband might obscure his true thoughts to avoid opening himself up to an attack that would ruin his social standing.

It's a lot like calling someone cowardly for not openly stating their thoughts on HBD, or UBI, or Marxist economics. In a society where, for normies at least , "free market" and "tolerance" and rounded up to "good," and "communism" and "racism" are rounded down to "pure evil," inviting your opponents to be frank about these beliefs is really just a disingenuous invitation to step into a trap.

Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans.

Yes, organs of the left have produced voluminous analyses saying "what we want is good for you too". On trade, this is credible (not in the least because not all free traders are on the left). On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners, and leftist NGOs are busy helping get the poor foreigners to the US by hook or by crook.

This is gaslighting.

On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners

Surely that's consistent with the hypocrisy running the other way. They've come to believe high immigration is in their selfish interest, and spend a lot of time pretending they support it out of a deep moral conviction to make themselves look good. It's bad psychology to suppose that "it's in our economic self-interest" is the face-saving cover story, and "it's the ethical thing to do, however painful" is the dirty secret: in leftist spaces the latter is clearly the higher-status thing to say, whether you believe it or not, while coming out and admitting "we need more immigration because it'll make us wealthier" makes you sound like a deeply uncool capitalist.

I want more immigration for selfish reasons. Because in the modern times, countries which import people will have more robust economies than those who just peter out and invert their demographic pyramids.

And as opposed to the increasingly common right wing concerns, I don't care about living in a diverse place, I actually enjoy it. I like to eat different foods and I'm a big language learning nerd, so its cool to practice people's languages with them. I believe in importing highly skilled people from all over the planet as the way to build a powerful country. (Although I'm fine with mid level immigrants too, small business owners, chefs, whatever!).

America has benefitted enormously from stealing the top percentile of almost every other country on the planet and these fools in government currently want to do everything to end that system and turn us into a declining backwater former power like the UK. Cutting funding for science, ceding our position in the world we built, and tearing up the good will that we have from other countries is the icing on the cake.

I'm going to steal right wingers framing here but I seriously think this is the case. What right wingers want to do is profoundly dysgenic, they want us to stop siphoning talent from the world and instead close ourselves off. So instead of being, idk, a bubbling cauldron of human potential like a New York City or a Cambridge Massachusetts, they want us to become more like Appalachia. Closed off, greying, clinging to dying industries, old modes of life, lacking in dynamism in a competitive world, and with a bad reputation everywhere else.

It's not really in my interests, that one!

Hopefully more liberals learn to talk like me instead of only the bleeding heart thing, that would also be in our interest.

  • -10

I hate living in a diverse place. It often makes me feel like an alien living in my own land. And I don’t see it lasting (eg at a certain point ethnic strife often occurs in multicultural places especially when one race is blamed for societal ills)

Sorry it makes you feel that way.

I imagine there must have been people who felt the same in Rome at the height of its power. There were people from all over the empire living in the city. To me that’s just what comes from being the dominant country in the world and particularly one which formed by shouting “come migrate here, it’s great!” to the rest of the world.

Ethnic strife might happen but it’s not really new either. My grandpa grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Chicago, and as kids they would fight with the other kids from the Irish neighborhood and the Polish neighborhood. He hated Polacks as he would call them. Funny enough, he then married a half Polack girl and then his daughter married a full Polish dude and they now have the most Polish surname in existence. Now he just says the Polack thing as a joke, but he gets along really well with my Polish as fuck uncle.

This was all quite recent. But in time these identities just blended into the background of America and stopped mattering. Now you just see “Chinese” and “Mexican” and “Italian” and “Korean” people, and meanwhile they’re just undeniably culturally American because they’ve been here for generations. They’ll say stuff like “I’m Italian!” or “I’m Mexican!” while actual Europeans or Mexicans roll their eyes and laugh to themselves saying, bro, no you’re not. They’re right, they just became Americans. Same BS as the rest of us.

I live in a community that is probably 50% Indian, 30% East Asian, and balance white. The Indians celebrate Indian holidays but don’t really celebrate American ones (eg July 4th). They are nice to others but really only associate with other Indians. It severely limits the ability to form a cohesive community.

So I’m not sure you are right.

I feel like their kids will be just as American as for example 20th century Chinese immigrants offspring became.

I used to have 2 Nepali roommates and they loved getting out and enjoying American culture, watching football, celebrating thanksgiving, etc. First gen immigrants there, grew up in Nepal but honestly pretty indistinguishable from an American to me just after a few years other than the fact that they cook (damn spicy) Nepali food.

I got to know a lot of south asians from their friend group. I think they do often stick together when they're first generation but its really only being somewhat hesitant and nervous in a new place IMO. I never noticed any extreme loyalty to their own traditions and norms that would make me think these things wont just easily slip away like they did for all the previous immigrant groups.

For the most part they seemed to just enjoy the US and even before coming here I think have already been pretty Americanized in ways that surprise me, like knowing more pop cultural American stuff than even I do at times.

Just to raise the obvious point, the UK's descent into decline pretty well matches our increase in immigration. Tony Blair's Labour and then the Conservatives made exactly the same argument as you and the effect has been catastrophic.

Now, you might be saying that you can just take the top percentile, but you don't know what will happen when all those millions and millions of foreigners you're welcoming decide they prefer the company of their countrymen and co-religionists to that of Americans, and vote accordingly. Do you think that a 40% muslim country is going to respect your liberal views?

I don't think the US would be in a position to have that many muslims, the world is a big place and most of the people in it aren't muslim.

I do dislike abrahamic religions that try to dominate politics so I see the rationale for being concerned about becoming eventually dominated by followers of one. However, that doesn't mean I want to close all immigration. Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.

And I think Europe has different problems regarding immigration than the US does, being right next to the middle east and in former colonial relationships with other muslim countries.

Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.

From my perspective, the mistake you're making is thinking that there is a continuous 'you' that makes decisions. Immigration is like steroids or heroin, it changes the decision-maker in ways that make their future decisions unforeseeable. It's also a ratchet, because once immigrants get citizenship and start having children you can't reverse the invitation.

In the UK we passed through about 70 years of post-war immigration policy, and the reasons given for doing it changed as they became obviously untenable:

  1. They're just here for a few years to make money and then they'll go home and live like kings
  2. Okay, they're staying, but there's only a few of them and anyway, they're all Commonwealth citizens, they look up to us, they're culturally British
  3. Okay, there's quite a lot of them now, and they all vote as a bloc for pro-immigration parties, but we need immigration for economic reasons and they're grateful to be here so it's basically fine
  4. Okay, they aren't integrated and are loudly hateful of Britain and British people, but maybe we deserve to be criticised! It's good for us! And besides, our economy will collapse without them.
  5. Huge numbers of low-wage immigrants are being brought in, at a significant net loss to the public purse. We have open ethnic warfare on the streets and ethnic political parties. The proportion of native British are dropping at an alarming rate. Services can't take the strain of the extra people, and neither can housing since they all want to live in the same areas. But talking about any of it would embolden the far-Right, and anyway we need low-wage immigration to care for the aging immigrants.
  6. ???

You can disregard all of this as scaremongering, or say that it will be different in America. It might! But it's like taking hard drugs - even if you think the risks are overblown, why would you mess with that stuff when you know how many people have wrecked their lives?

I can see the point in that changing the composition of a democracy will change change the composition of the decision making apparatus.

But there is one more difference I can say there is between the US and Europe. We are literally just definitionally immigrants. The country has always been a place that people immigrate to because it offers opportunities and advantages. I’d have to be convinced that there is some compelling reason that right now is the unique moment in time where it’s correct to stand up and yell stop.

And I don’t really see much unique about right now. People on this forum I suspect would be quick to jump out and say, but now they’re not Europeans that’s the problem! But that’s something that’s unique to now, we’ve had non-European immigration going on for many decades and they’ve integrated just fine. We have chinatowns and neighborhoods where you can get authentic tacos and not much that I see that’s genuinely bad to show for it.

Was there some severe problem that immigration caused in the past in the US? I don’t really think so and so I’m not one of the jump around and yell stop people.

most of the people in it aren't muslim.

They're working on fixing that.

Good luck! Again the US isn't Europe, our immigration problems tend to be pretty different. Most immigration here seems to be from Latam and India. If the question instead was like, what if your country was 40% latino? I mean... I don't really care. I'm from the southwest that's already the case, lol. One of my favorite parts of the US is walking around Miami and you have an Argentinian bakery next to a pupusa joint next to a Colombian restaurant and a Jamaican place, and when you walk into a store they greet you with a buenos dias.

These guys will likely have my back against this supposed muslim takeover anyway!

These guys will likely have my back against this supposed muslim takeover anyway!

what is more probable to happen is that the Latin kings will close off their neighborhoods (like they did during the summer of love) when the islamists begin to act up and you will be one of the first to appear in the local newspaper.

More comments

Man, I want to be on your side (or at least against the ones against you), but this is such a lazy dodge.

I think your interlocutor is trying to get you to envision a world where the fires of the Atheism Wars are needed once more.

More comments

Yes. This infamous discussion between Bernie and Ezra Klein gives away the game. Not everyone is a Kleinian, but you would be a fool to believe that people like that are driven by purely pragmatic calculus about the benefits to Americans.

It also doesn't help that one side maintains a final card they can play: false consciousness.

Feminists do this all of the time: feminism is good for you too and, where you disagree, it's because you simply haven't had enough feminism.

I simply don't believe some of these claims. I've heard a few economists blithely write off the downsides of immigration as "an allocation problem", as if that makes it a matter of a couple of dials for some bureaucrat to fiddle with. Let's grant that immigration has been great for Canada. That doesn't change that the fundamentally political Gordian knot of increasing housing supply still exists so everyone feels squeezed. It's not going to be dissolved by an efficient market because it's a matter of geography,regulations and the interests of some groups over others. Hanania is a libertarian so he does get this, until he doesn't want to.

And, even if I did believe them, I know no nationalist has ever won the debate by saying "I'll take the tradeoff". They just get written off as ignorant.

Has anyone been checking out the reddit and hacker news reaction to TW's FAA scandal follow-up?

He's downvoted to -44 on /r/atc, which applauded his essay last year. Highlights from the comments:

Trace, the truth of the matter is you think you deserve a ton of credit for bringing this story to light. But this story has already been brought to light, been analyzed, and it’s nowhere close to the actual scandal of FAA hiring.

The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.

There are only two sides right now. There are the neoconfederate fascists intent on dragging us back to the antebellum era, of which Trump, Vance, and Sailer are definitely a part. And there’s the rest of us.

You don’t have to be on their side if you don’t want to be. But if you choose to be, at least be honest with yourself about what you’re doing.

The top-voted comment on hackernews is accusing it of being a rehashed non-scandal laundered by authoritarian fascists. But the actual comments are mostly in favor, or pointing out that there's suddenly a lot of brand new accounts defending the FAA & claiming "this wasn't real DEI."

Grendel-khan describes the reaction:

The left outside the institution at fault swears up and down that something like this would never happen, and it's just right-wing disinformation, and you're probably a closet right-winger if you believe it.

The left inside the institution at fault swears up and down that this is a good thing and it's obvious that it's happening and why are you making such a big deal of it?

Taking it for granted for a moment that a lot of this stuff is totally astroturfed by blueanon orgs with AI-assisted spamming, it looks like doubling-down and tripling-down on full spectrum information manipulation is still the only strategy on the menu, even as it's increasingly failing and backfiring outside of totally controlled environments like reddit and bluesky.

So, what are the next four years going to look like? Is there going to be any evolution in strategy? Are they correct that just repeating a party line hard enough will bring people back into the fold?

I think that right now it's easy to point at this sort of frantic concern-trolling and laugh, but in a few years the average voter won't remember anything about some FAA hiring scandal except that "Trump used a tragedy for a culture war attack on minorities." Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.

So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
Moldbug and especially Thiel may absolutely despise the press, but they see the manipulation of public opinion as a quirk of "demotic" regimes, and have no time for it themselves. Moldbug in particular dismisses color revolutions with the over-simplistic "why does the dictator not simply shoot the revolutionaries with crypto-controlled weapons?" Thiel is quieter but clearly sees controlling the murder drones and spying rings as more important than propaganda. Musk is the only one of Trump's big backers who thinks control of social media is important, and I'm convinced that's because of his showman's instincts and desire for attention rather than some strategic policy.

People here have been talking as if the left will shift to violence and hard power in response to their usual methods failing last year (more assassinations of Musk & Trump, etc.). I'm a lot more worried about them doing the same thing they always do and getting away with it, because people don't have lasting immunity to propaganda.

It's helpful to try thinking about it from the air-traffic controlers' perspective. Last year, the ATC scandal was a purely academic dispute. There was still pending litigation, but nothing that would affect the typical already-hired air-traffic controller either way.

Right now by contrast, federal employees are on a wartime footing. Subreddits like /r/fednews are almost certainly unrepresentative of the median federal worker's opinion, but there is good reason to be on edge if one is on Uncle Sam's payroll. Everyone hired before January 20, 2025, including able-bodied white males, is a presumed DEI hire until proven otherwise. Trace's ATC scandal going viral is a direct threat to their jobs. It puts a bullseye on the FAA. Is anyone surprised that the reaction is different?

“Enormous propaganda machine”… or alternatively, a few people you disagree with in a comment section.

Partisan commenters always refuse to admit there could have been some good things done by people they disagree with. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

I don't think you believe that

You don't think I believe that there are people in a comment section who refuse to admit that the other side might have done something they'd otherwise agree with?

Why not?

From over here on the "nothing ever happens" team, it looks like the simplest explanation.

The New York Times has a recent story, where it summarizes the matter as:

For Mr. Trump’s claims about an Obama-era directive criticizing the F.A.A. for being “too white,” the White House also cited a lawsuit filed by a conservative legal organization on behalf of applicants for air traffic controller positions. The lawsuit accused the agency under the Obama administration of discriminating against them because its hiring practices were “engineered to favor racial minorities.” That lawsuit is pending in court.

And the next day:

In a misleading claim, Mr. Trump insinuated that the administration of President Barack Obama — the first Black president — had stocked the Federal Aviation Administration with people who could not do their jobs.

“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white,’” Mr. Trump said. His administration will be different, he went on. “We want the people that are competent.”

(Asked for details on the “too white” claim, the White House cited a lawsuit filed in 2015 by a conservative legal organization accusing the Obama administration of hiring practices that were “engineered to favor racial minorities.” That lawsuit is pending in court.)

If you want to argue that the Times isn't an enormous propaganda machine... I think you're going to need a lot of evidence. I don't think you can credibly argue that they're just some comments section.

Reddit’s gonna Reddit whether or not the NYT posts that kind of article. I think this is because they have the same incentives pushing them into a particular line on any given CW topic. Maybe this is the prospiracy vs conspiracy model?

The point is that my model makes similar predictions, so I assume they were being genuine. If Steve doesn’t, why?

Reddit's going to Reddit whether or not NYT posts that kind of article. Reddit would not Reddit in this way if the NYT posted a front page news article specifically highlighting how this particular claim was not just true, but clearly documented and well-established basic fact. Don't get me wrong, they might do something different, but barring a pretty specific sort of Darwianian troll, most of this type of personality doesn't like to actively invite people to correct them, and despite Reddit-the-org's best efforts the sort of personality who get aroused at the opportunity to post a one-line link debunking someone, regardless of political alignment, is not zero.

The 'prospiracy vs conspiracy' model falls apart when we're talking an organization the size of the Times. These articles have two different bylines, from two different parts of the organization. The people with the bylines weren't the only people involved in writing them, they have layers of editors and fact-checkers, there may have been some level of legal review, supposedly they have a bunch of varied expertise specific to various domains.

The Times is -- at five thousand employees -- on its own an enormous propaganda machine. Not every employee, not even a sizable portion of those employees, is involved in this particular propaganda; there is no explicit 'you must lie this many times per article' metric; many would do the same for free if they had the opportunity. But neither are people unaware of whether they work at the Times, or unaware that the Times misleads and demands that they mislead. Its personnel talk at length about these goals, publicly and privately and in every option in between, both internally to the Times and to many other often sizable organizations that have similar priorities. Whether this falls into some other category of coordination in besides the point.

Sorry. I think there’s two parts: “an enormous propaganda machine” and “manufacturing public opinion.”

I concede that the NYT has agency, sells a narrative, and thus counts as a propaganda machine. At the same time, I don’t believe it qualifies as the propaganda machine, because I don’t think it actually manufactures much at all.

I think both the NYT and Reddit comments are explained by convergent evolution. They share enough assumptions that, when asked for an opinion on anything, they come up with something pretty similar. Same for the other left-leaning outlets. Same for the largely separate cluster of assumptions on the other side of the Culture War.

Steve used Reddit comments as evidence for the propaganda machine. Under this model, that doesn’t really hold, because I’d expect similar comments even in a vacuum. That’s why I assumed Jesweez was acting in good faith.

I don't think we know, or can know, what people would do in a vacuum. Your question was how people would react without the Times writing those two articles, not about a world where the Times didn't and hadn't existed as the paper of record for literal lifetimes and spent much of that time both papering over this sort of behavior, and stigmatizing any organization that would report on it.

The Times isn't the only part of that, or even the biggest part, fair. But that just kicks the problem up one level. Whether you call the ecosystem that the Times swims in and creates a conspiracy or prospiracy or The Free Market Modulo All The Law And Gov Funding Involved, it's still a giant machine of giant machines, often heavily coordinated, of which many or most of its components have explicit or not-exactly-vino-veritas recognition of what they're doing and how they're coordinating with other components. The degree to which that might be coordinated or naturally evolved is an interesting question, though one that I think has far more evidence against your position than you'd expect, but it's still besides the point. A machine that evolved fully organically is still a machine that would be fully compatible with :

Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.

So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.

A fully headless organization could still produce a million articles about the counter-narrative that had the exact same notes, they could still aim massive amounts of emotional blackmail through every available institution, they could call everyone that disagreed with them maga nazis, they could still ban a ton of people who try to link things.

And that makes it pretty clear that whether or not Jesweez was acting in good faith -- perhaps they haven't seen any mainstream media coverage on this topic, or haven't read any of the actual coverage, or prosaically don't realize the ramifications of the words they're using -- they either don't or shouldn't actually believe their claim that this literally just "a few people you disagree with in a comment section."

I’m sure there’s a lot of astroturfing and whatnot but it could also be that it’s simply negative polarization and mood affiliation, the left is working itself into a frenzy about Trumps EOs and DOGE in particular. It’s 2016 again, except it’s a lot more boring this time because we’ve all seen it before, but the hysteria is still just as potent and enough that few will be willing to listen to reason.

it's sad that tracingwoodgrains made all the right noises in his article and they still accuse of him siding with the fascists.

also, its hilarious to create a 'test' where the 'correct' multiple choice answer is almost always the same. surely there is some web app or application where you can feed in your questions/answers and it will randomize the responses. or you can just do this in excel or roll a fucking a dice (rerolling on 5/6) or flip a coin twice for each question. or was this done deliberately because cheating would be too difficult because no-one would be able to memorize the answer key?

also, its hilarious to create a 'test' where the 'correct' multiple choice answer is almost always the same

It's hilarious you think this isn't on purpose, you Yanks really need to get with the program on low-trust societies. It's a lot easier to tell your desired DEI hires "mark A on all questions except 17, there the answer is C" than to try to give them a cheat sheet.

I think this is key why Trump is trying to fire people at USAID contrary to the claims made below that he needs to do this through statute. I think one of the people At USAId also happened to have a role at Reddit. They are clearly interconnected. You kill the funding and you might kill the astroturf.

Also podcasts are key—Vance should be on a major podcast once every week or two breaking it down for everyone. He is a superb communicator and generally thoughtful. You can bypass the Reddit blob or the news blob and go straight to the people. Those people can then turnkey that to other people.

The podcast idea is great. It makes perfect sense for a Vice President given that their official responsibilities are quite light but they have a lot of authority. Take two hours per week to go on Rogan or NPR or wherever and give a general update on what the administration is planning to do. Vance would be perfect for that.

Thirding this. I've been hungry for podcasts covering the DOGE story (preferrably not slop. There's lots of slop out there).

Unfortunately, the Doge side is probably too small to take time to join podcasts and the other side is going to produce 90% slop. Hopefully we get more engagement after the first rush of the project wraps up.

Yep — I wonder if there is a way to get this idea to the admin.

Have any one of a half-dozen DR accounts tweet it and there's at least a 12% chance Elon Musk signal-boosts it within the week.

The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.

Ironic, given that just a few days ago we had people accusing TracingWoodgrains of being too leftist.

As someone whose positions are also sufficiently idiosyncratic that I don't fit in perfectly with either "side", I'm not unsympathetic to him. But this is simply the fate of all "centrists" - that's the reality of it. It would be like someone during WW2 saying "I don't support the British, or the Germans - I'm just neutral!" He wouldn't be looked upon with kindness in either country.

Ultimately if you want to avoid getting crushed by the tidal forces of politics, you have to decide which issues are most important to you, join the side that is most aligned with you on those key issues, and table your disagreements for a later date.

"I don't support the British, or the Germans - I'm just neutral!"

Switzerland and Spain sat out WW2. Not that Franco was a principled centrist.

and Ireland

Sweden as well, although it's a bit more complicated.

I really wish our resident loyal rightists at least used this opportunity to take a step back and examine their own reactions to him critically. It's human nature to hate tribal enemies, but in his particular case the apparent sense of betrayal that some felt over his attack on LibsOfTikTok seems to sit so deep that they are still having difficulties to even think straight enough to assemble a compelling argument against him, which can't be in their interest either in a forum full of autists whose response to social pressure is defiance. The degree of fuck-logic-and-charity indignation is something I otherwise don't see much here outside of some edge cases of sexual purity politics, such as abortion outrage or that one time when a card-carrying pedophile dropped by and ran a sort of AMA. (I'm still resentful of the mods for not cracking down harder on the hostile reactions at that time, since it was such a rare perspective to get. Probably the clearest sign that their problem is not so much a shared hatred of the left as it is an excess of sympathy for resident posters who lean right.)

Is this how loyal leftists in academia felt after the Boghossian affair, too?

in his particular case the apparent sense of betrayal that some felt over his attack on LibsOfTikTok

I dont think thats it, I dont even remember that one. There where many incidents, one outlined in other responses to prima, all painting very similar pictures. I think what gets people mad is the self presentation as a "temporarily" embarrassed rightist. If you remember slightlylesshairyape (who I in fact talk with to this day on traces forum), he has very similar object-level politics, and he used to get anrgy responses to particular comments, but not this personal antipathy.

that one time when a card-carrying pedophile dropped by and ran a sort of AMA

Link?

I dont even remember that one

I thought the the hoax with the furry school assignment was pretty memorable. It affected my opinion of Trace, and the degree of outraged response that he'd stoop that low was a big component in him leaving the motte. I also think that's part of the reason he's sympathetic to hanania, despite him being an atrocious ghoul- he's one of not many conservatives that didn't snap at Trace for that stunt.

Good point about the difference in self-presentation (I'm still professorgerm back on reddit). I think another component is, to borrow Trace's phrase, that he's a "live player." Interacting before he became a media personality, he's just some guy in a forum and we're on level playing ground- like with SLHA. Now, it's different.

Ok, I its vaguely familiar now, but Im still not sure I get it. Reading the blockedandreported post on it, Im not outraged. It seems kind of pointless, and I can see how you might turn it into a bad and outragous argument, but it wasnt done there.

Now, it's different.

Well, it isnt for me. Anyway, nice to see you here. Though I have to admit I wouldnt have recognised you. I just went through your profile and theres a few typical comments, but propably too few to notice. Now I wonder, am I different here too?

Well, it isnt for me.

That's good! A healthier way to approach it. I just can't shake it from the back of my head.

Yeah, it's been a while since I've made the longer comments I tend to make back at the schism, and in a pique I deleted a lot of my first comments here when I went away for a while. I still read here some but don't feel like I fit or have as much to say as I used to.

From what I've read, I think you're much the same here as elsewhere.

Driving away effort posters is bad. Especially when it's via 'grudge mobbing' where the effort posters are saddled with the baggage of previous effort posts and have to face criticism for those posts every time they make a new one. Getting mobbed from multiple directions on multiple topics. Tracing got some of that last time I saw him here and it was not fair.

But effort posters driving away criticism is also bad. If you want to interact with an online space where everyone adores you as the minor e-celeb you are then you might need a different venue than an open forum. Walking on eggshells because the residential online royalty decides his balls need fanning today is in one word pathetic. It's one of the hallmarks of a toxic forum.

Tracing got support here along with the negativity. His ultimate response was to threaten to pack up his toys and leave. What he wanted done by the mods or the users of this site is still not clear to me, though it is very clear this space is poorer for him not being here.

I would however want to ask him and those who lament the lack of him: Why are they here? Is it not the discussion generated, negative and positive, that is a big part of the reason why? Surely the fear of losing the effort posters has to be weighed against the ability of the fringes to comment on them. And that instead of leveraging their own importance as an effort posters to ward off criticism, they might need to take the high road every once in a while and trust that their effort is appreciated despite the grudge mob.

On that note I'm not sure where people like Tracing will go or what they seek there. Last time I saw him he was having his world philosophy rejected by trad caths on X. Where the implicit proclamations of his own importance ring a lot more hollow than they ever did here.

This particular effort poster tried to break the forum in two and carry off half for himself.

So, uh, fuck that guy, I don't want him here.

still resentful of the mods for not cracking down harder on the hostile reactions at that time, since it was such a rare perspective to get.

He's literally still a user here btw, pedophiles just have tougher skin (to their chagrin, sadly)

or that one time when a card-carrying pedophile dropped by and ran a sort of AMA. (I'm still resentful of the mods for not cracking down harder on the hostile reactions at that time, since it was such a rare perspective to get. Probably the clearest sign that their problem is not so much a shared hatred of the left as it is an excess of sympathy for resident posters who lean right.)

IIRC, we did mod a couple of people who said things like "You should go kill yourself" or made woodchipper references, but we don't mod people for having "hostile reactions" as long as they aren't directly attacking people.

Ironic, given that just a few days ago we had people accusing TracingWoodgrains of being too leftist.

Leftists will accuse many people of being fascist, including people in inter-left struggles. And of course they aren't. This is just standard inter-left infighting, it doesn't mean they are not leftist.

Historical leftists smeared social democrats as "social fascists".

And every sub-set of leftist in Revolutionary Spain denouncing each other as reactionary counter-revolutionaries.

Ultimately if you want to avoid getting crushed by the tidal forces of politics, you have to decide which issues are most important to you, join the side that is most aligned with you on those key issues

Near as I can tell he did join a side. He consistently repudiates the GOP and rejects it as a vehicle for his vision of reform. He votes for Dems and advocates for others to do the same. He's not especially partisan, but this doesn't make him neutral.

He's not a centrist. He's very leftist. He's a gay furry who couldn't stand to share a forum with people who advocated for lethal self-defense. That he's being called a fascist for this is just an indication of how far the leftist purity spiral has done.

This comment is just the inverse of all the redditors calling him a nazi. Shame on you.

If redditors are accusing someone of being an awful RIGHT WING NAZI, and motteposters (let's face it, this place is very, very red tribe-bent) are accusing him of being an awful GAY HOMOSEXUAL LEFTIST (btw, what happened to not fighting the culture war, eh?), he probably is indeed somewhere central to those positions.

(let's face it, this place is very, very red tribe-bent)

Is it? It's very, very right-wing, but that's not the same thing. From "I Can Tolerate Anything except the Outgroup" by Scott Alexander:

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

From what I can tell, most of us are Grey Tribers who refused to go along with the blatant falsehoods of wokeness and got thrown into the pit with the rest for it. The surveys support this. From the same essay:

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre local sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

How many "God-'n-guns-but-not-George-III" conservatives do we actually have here? I think the most prominent ones were @HlynkaCG, who got himself permabanned, and @FarNearEverywhere, who left. We got a couple of other military vets and Christians who fit the bill, but the bulk of us would be as completely out of place in a USMC boot camp as we would be at Sunday church service or a Super Bowl watch party.

Uh, speak for yourself, dude.

Not everyone who's a military vet or into guns makes a big deal out of it.

We definitely also have a fair number of Super Bowl appreciators and Sunday church service attendees.

You're right that Scott's original classification of Red and Blue tribe now tends to get inaccurately rounded to "conservatives and liberals." But I'm not sure how many Red Tribe liberals or Blue Tribe conservatives we have here. (Certainly more of the latter than the former.)

Really? Superbowl watch party is too normie for us now?

I may have never fired a gun in my life (yet!), but I've been to several super bowl watch parties, especially when your team is in it.

Eagles looking great right about now, by the way.

From what I can tell, most of us are Grey Tribers who refused to go along with the blatant falsehoods of wokeness and got thrown into the pit with the rest for it. The surveys support this. From the same essay:

Right, things changed and it is no longer reasonable to consider "Gray Tribe" part of Blue Tribe. However, "Gray Tribe" remains inchoate; there is not really a "Gray Tribe", just an agglomeration of people who are mostly Blue Tribe but don't fit in because Blue has tightened its membership criteria. Some, like Scott, are desperately trying to hang on to being part of Blue. Some -- like TW -- adhere to it (without actually being part of it) because of their antipathy for the other side, or for Donald Trump. Others instead cleave to Red, though we are not part of that tribe either.

Don't we have everything but the creationism, soda, and divorce? We even have a football and country music thread now.

I'm out if we ever start drinking pop

The motte is very blue tribe conservative. This is not the same thing as red tribe.

I'm calling him a gay furry because

  1. It's evidence of his leftism, and

  2. He's a gay furry.

people who advocated for lethal self-defense

In a personal sense like keeping a gun handy?

@The_Nybbler is not being accurate; the proximate cause of Trace creating the Schism was people literally suggesting they wanted to kill him and everyone on his side. It wasn't about "advocating for lethal self-defense." Trace undoubtedly disagrees with most rightists about exactly when lethal self defense is justified (such as in the Rittenhouse case), but he didn't leave the forum because of people advocating for lethal self-defense. He initially created the Schism (while still remaining on the Motte) because of accelerationist fedposting, and he left the Motte for good because of rightists still holding a grudge against him years later and being extremely petty about it.

See my edited reply with references. The post in which he announced The Schism points to a Rittenhouse thread (NOT a boogaloo thread, though he has on other occasions referenced those) as why he feels "a large chunk of the prevailing culture here is overtly hostile towards my strongly-felt values".

The post in which he announced The Schism points to a Rittenhouse thread (NOT a boogaloo thread, though he has on other occasions referenced those)

Really. Let's take a look.

  1. Why are you building this?
    While /r/TheMotte is and will always be intended as a neutral meeting ground for divergent perspectives, it's developed a strong consensus on a wide range of issues. I—like, I suspect, many of you—identify strongly with this comment on political affiliation from /u/cincilator. /u/RulerFrank expanded on a similar point the other day. I'm not here to raise the tired debate of whether or how right-wing /r/themotte is. Instead, I'll simply say that a large chunk of the prevailing culture here is overtly hostile towards my strongly-felt values, as illustrated most eloquently by this comment.

"This comment" being (sorry FC):

I wrote a long reply to this, and given my heart rate and breathing by the end of it, it's probably for the best that I accidentally deleted it before I could post. I was literally seething.

I think I understand where you're coming from pretty well, but I likewise find your views profoundly repugnant, to a degree that charity becomes difficult. Specifically, the appeal to statistics is a complete non-starter for me. The attacker is the one choosing to roll the dice, and the defender is the one being forced to live with the consequences. Even if the chances of death are fairly low, the person who gets a bad roll is still absolutely fucked, and even the people who get a good roll are still significantly worse off than they should be... and for what? So that people who deliberately chose to force the roll can rest assured that they will never have to deal with the consequences? And don't appeal to the police and the legal process. I've been watching the police stand down for these rioters for half a decade. I've been watching the few who do get arrested plea-bargain for probation, or be simply released with no charges. I've been watching their victims suck it up with no recourse, or attempt to defend themselves and then get hit with the full force of the criminal justice system.

You appear to want a system where the overall danger is as low as possible. I want a system where the danger is apportioned to the people who volunteer to experience it. I have axiomatic faith that my system will result in lower overall danger as well, given the incentives, and seeing people arguing for the welfare of violent criminals over that of their victims- and I see no other way to interpret your argument- prompts instant volcanic rage. Especially since this violence is so culturally and politically partisan in nature.

...I'm not sure where to go with the conversation at this point. I do not think I share a common understanding of peace and justice with you. I don't want to live in the same country as people like you. I don't want people like you to rule people like me anywhere, ever. Preventing such an outcome seems like a moral imperative.

...And this is the result given that I know in my bones that you are a deeply, uncommonly decent and good person, at least in the abstract. This is mistake theory breaking down in the best possible scenario.

I'll leave it there. Stay safe and be well.

That was in response to a Rittenhouse thread, but it was the "I don't want to live in the same country as people like you" post.

TW, referring to that post immediately after linking to it, said:

More alarming for me is the feeling that there's a sharp uptick in what I'd describe as radicalization here: people proposing, and cheering, violent conflict against their enemies in a number of ways, including groups that viewed widely include my loved ones. It's hard to look at people the same way after that sort of line has been crossed, you know?

I'd rather not get into another back-and-forth like I had with Steve and Arjin below, in which we're both dissecting what other people actually meant when they posted something four years ago, but it is plainly obvious to me that TW created the Schism because in his own words, he felt that too many people (including FC) were expressing a desire for violent conflict, including against his ingroup.

This is not me saying Trace was right, or that FC meant to do violence to him, or that I agree with him about Rittenhouse, or any of the other things I have already rebutted. It is me saying you are wrong that Trace's problem was "people advocating for lethal self-defense." That's an extremely disingenuous way to frame a post about a specific case, and how he responded to others' reaction to it, as Trace creating the Schism and leaving the Motte because he had an ideological opposition to any use of lethal force in self-defense.

Also: your "gay furry" crack is in fact a cheap shot. Yes, everyone knows he is a gay furry. He says he's a gay furry. He's not ashamed of it. But calling him a gay furry every time you to refer to why you don't respect him is not just a "by the way, he's a gay furry." Come on. If you want to keep highlighting how contemptible he is because you consider him a sexual deviant, do that, but don't keep calling him a gay furry and then deny why you're doing it. Why don't you ever refer to him as an "ex-Mormon" or "military veteran," which he also is? Not the same valence.

the proximate cause of Trace creating the Schism was people literally suggesting they wanted to kill him and everyone on his side.

I'm hoping that I've missed something--maybe you were referring to some other comment? You can't possibly be characterizing the comment you quoted as "suggesting they wanted to kill him and everyone on his side," right?

I don't see how any reasonable person could read that meaning into the comment you quoted. If you're going to nitpick about how ACKTUALLY we were talking about Trace's stated justification and therefore he didn't ACKTUALLY leave because of people advocating for lethal self-defense, you can't also turn around and spin whoppers like this which are easily a thousand times less accurate.

For the record I am not talking about Trace's words but your own. Don't nitpick me on this. Trace may have said the reason was the violent conflict, but you baldly asserted not that that was Trace's reason but rather that it actually happened and prompted Trace's next steps. This is comparable to Nybbler ascribing a different reason to the creation of the Schism.

You say "This is not me saying Trace was right, or that FC meant to do violence to him" but here you do precisely that, directly suggesting that FC meant to do violence to him! This is a far more dishonest, biased summary of what FC said than Nybbler's summary of what Trace said!

I also find it quite dishonest to frame Nybbler's words as inaccurate because they are not Trace's words. Nybbler did not claim that that was Trace's stated reasoning, he just claimed that that was the actual reason. These are not the same thing, people are often dishonest or wrong about their own reasons for doing things, and it's fair game to ascribe different reasoning to someone than what they themselves have stated. Honestly it looks like a pretty accurate summary to me.

He said the culture was overtly hostile towards his strongly-held values. He presented, as his prime example, FCs post which was indeed overtly hostile. The strongly-held value FC was being hostile to was in fact the morality of Rittenhouse's actions that night. TW was very upset that people were killed, and thought that Rittenhouse only had a 1-2% chance of dying if he didn't defend himself using deadly force, and therefore was not morally justified in using it. Reducing this to "couldn't stand to share a forum with people who advocated for lethal self-defense" may be imprecise, but I don't think it's inaccurate.

More comments

was people literally suggesting they wanted to kill him and everyone on his side

Please link to the post in question.

The one that comes to mind is the one we have already discussed several times (and I hate feeling like I am repeatedly calling him out), but FCfromSSC's post about not wanting to share a country with him. You may consider Trace to have been inaccurate (or even disingenuous) in claiming FC was saying he wanted to kill him (there was extensive discussion about this later, and someone even directly asked FC if he really wanted to murder people in their homes, to which FC firmly said no), but that was the discourse at the time. (FC was the most notable, but there was a regular drumbeat of other rightist posters edging up to and occasionally crossing the line into fedposting - we still see it occasionally here.) This was certainly the sort of thing Trace said was the reason he created the Schism - that he no longer wanted to share a forum with accelerationists who implied they wanted him dead.

If I have to I will find the link, but I don't bookmark things and it seems like a demand I waste my time for your entertainment, as I told @SteveAgain, when I have a hard time believing anyone who's been around for a while doesn't remember it.

EDIT: oops, went off a bit to fast, so amending:

This was certainly the sort of thing Trace said was the reason he created the Schism - that he no longer wanted to share a forum with accelerationists who implied they wanted him dead.

It was not clear you were expressing Trace's opinion of what FC wrote, and in fact heavily suggested the opinion was yours.

I know what you're talking about, and I'm asking you to link it, so others can make up their mind if it actually says anything about killing Trace

I'll give you and @SteveAgain the benefit of the doubt and assume I communicated poorly: I do not think FC at any point said he wanted to personally kill Trace or anyone else.

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Link it

Link what, exactly? @FCfromSSC's now-infamous "I don't want to live with you people" post, or Trace's post announcing he was creating the Schism, or rightists being petty, or what?

If you really want me to do that, and can explain why, I will consider digging for them, but frankly I don't believe you actually doubt any of these things happened. You remember them as well as I do. Your peremptory "Link it" demand appears be an attempt at a "gotcha" because I have called you out in the past for making things up. So before you convince me to jump through your hoops and look for years-old posts, please be specific and tell me exactly what it is that you think I am being untruthful about, and what exactly you think I am misrepresenting.

The bit where FC wanted to kill TW

See my reply to @ArjinFerman. I didn't say FC literally said he wanted to kill Trace, and you know that isn't what I was saying. FC posted about not wanting to share a country with him (or me, or anyone else on the left), and Trace took that (and similar sentiments other people were posting at the time) as a message that FC and other accelerationists were advocating violence against him, or at least moving in that direction.

Link what, exactly? @FCfromSSC's now-infamous "I don't want to live with you people" post, or Trace's post announcing he was creating the Schism, or rightists being petty, or what?

Yes. How much you want to bet that there is no implication there of killing either Trace specifically let alone everybody on his side? If you're going to correct Nybbler it would be nice if you didn't introduce an even greater inaccuracy,

Someone's probably got a link. But it was about the Rittenhouse case; he also objected to other calls for violence which were not self defense.

ETA: This is the post announcing The Schism:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/j9kxab/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_12/g8ow12q/?context=3

This is the FCfromSSC post he objected to so much:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ifiyso/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_24_2020/g35l46y/

This is TWs first post in that thread

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ifiyso/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_24_2020/g34yf26/

Yes, it was about Rittenhouse.

Taken in isolation, I think it’s likely the shootings themselves were self-defense, but I don’t believe his life was in danger and personally can’t get over people having that low of a threshold for deadly force.

ETA2:

Here's the reference to the spicier FCfromSSC post. It is not from TracingWoodgrains, it is from 895158:

https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/xvcesv/is_this_another_breakoff_of_themotte_itself_a/ir5n3x0/

Thanks for the links. That's an odd topic to be broken by.

and table your disagreements for a later date

Then you just end up getting steamrolled by “no enemies to the left/right”.

Right, there can be limits obviously. If all available options are so morally repugnant to you that you can’t stand any of them, then you can just not support any of them and you’re entitled to make that choice. But you need to accept the consequences of that choice as well, and you should understand that your calls for enlightened centrism will likely fall on deaf ears.

It would be like someone during WW2 saying "I don't support the British, or the Germans - I'm just neutral!" He wouldn't be looked upon with kindness in either country.

Yeah, everybody hates the fucking Swiss.

Mother Fucking Swiss.

If Adrian Monk were a country....

Everything in it is true and it really is the central reason why Switzerland is probably the most civilized Western country. The Danes are smarter, but lack that certain alpine joie de vivre; the Swiss are anal about everything, but they like each other and enjoy life.

The Danes are smarter,

What's your basis for this? I can't imagine they're that distinct genetically.

Identical to the Dutch and very different from Southern Germans(closest to the Swiss) IIRC.

I'm not sure I have a whole lot to say here beyond, "TracingWoodgrains is just right."

He's just right! There's no way to justify a norm like "never criticise bad things if my side is responsible". That's unironically the sort of logic that gets you the Great Leap Forward, where lower-ranking officials are afraid to report anything that goes against the narrative preferred by the higher-ups, and the result is always disastrous.

Set aside what you think about him as a person. On the specific issue here, he is just unambiguously correct.

The fact that people whose brains have been eaten by partisanship and culture war are unable to see that, whether that be lefties who have to deny and distract and minimise the scandal because it's going to be a win for the right, or whether it be righties who cannot possibly grant that a hated outsider did a better job of identifying and advocating for an issue that should have been an easy win for them, is really their own problem.

TracingWoodgrains is right.

Everything else is distraction.

Exactly. I wouldn't hire him to babysit but he's literally correct about his expose. He doesn't have to be an exemplary person(and as far as I know he's not). He has to be right about this specific issue.

He's more correct than the /r/atc people, sure, but he spun the original FAA article to be quite kind towards the perpetrators.

Since then he's backed off, I like to think in part due to the points I made, and has even directly criticized the leadership involved in that scandal, so at this point I have no complaints with his treatment of the issue. But it still took too long to get there.

No.

The point is that he lies, and will make up information, and physical artefacts, to drive the story he wants to tell.

He has done this once. Has he done it again? I don't know. But I have to take everything he says through that lens, wether the story benefits 'my side' or not. There is no trust, no faith there - he can put on the Centrist or Conservative mask as much as he wants, but I know it's a mask, I know that he's lied before, and there is no way I can celebrate or advocate for the stories he writes because there is now a non-zero chance he's lying about something explicitly to look good for whatever side he's wearing as a skin suit.

Personally, I'd prefer that he'd give up the 'both sides' grift and just write whatever benefits his side and philosophy, whatever that may be.

Like I said, I'm not interested in making this a referendum on his character. You don't have to accept anything he says on any other subject. That's your own lookout. What I'm saying is that in a context where so many responses to TW's FAA reporting and advocacy are attempts to deflect, to either minimise the issue or to ad hominem the man himself, it is worth the firm reminder that what he has said about the FAA's hiring procedures is true.

Hoaxes are fine, in my opinion, making up evidence to set them up can also be fine. To the extent he was dishonest, it was in the presentation, not the making things depertament. He said LOTT accepted a claim without due diligence, and then proceeded to describe how much work he had to put to get past the due diligence, but since this was about a hated outgroup figure, a decent chunk of his audience bought the framing.

I'd say the lesson is you can't trust his conclusions, not that he'll hide or make up evidence.

or whether it be righties who cannot possibly grant that a hated outsider did a better job of identifying and advocating for an issue that should have been an easy win for them, is really their own problem.

TracingWoodgrains is right.

I don't know who had their brain eaten by culture war if you think that people who don't want to sing praises of your friend must be distracting from the issue.

How did he do a better job identifying and advocating for the issue? He did a better job reporting on that particular story, but when it comes to the issue itself, how has he done a better job identifying it than anyone from James Lindsay through Lomez to the seven zillion witches posting here? How has he done a better job advocating for it, than Chris Rufo? Last I checked he was advocating that people vote for the candidate that would ensure more of this would keep happening.

He did a better job reporting on that particular story

It was Steve Sailer who brought it to the attention of the online right with his piece predating Trace's by a month, with basically the same information content.

Trace even confirmed that he was clued into it by Sailer.

Oh, that's hilarious.

Did we just confirm Sailer is actually a furry?

As I said, it doesn't matter whether you like him or not. Nor do I care whether or not you praise him. The merits of TW as an individual are beside the point. The point is the issue itself.

I submit that TW is right about the issue, and that he has done a better job of bringing this particular issue to the public attention than anybody on the Motte, much less James Lindsay or Chris Rufo. Rufo has probably been more effective as an anti-woke activist in general, but on the FAA hirings scandal specifically - movement there is because of TW. He notes this himself.

And yes, he voted for Harris. He voted for Harris while publicly and passionately expressing his dissatisfaction with her, and after the election, he went on to continue to explain his problems with her, and what he thinks the Democrats ought to do, which means that I think this portrayal of him as some kind of bootlicking Democrat partisan is absurd. He made a judgement that, as much as he disliked Harris, he found her on balance the less-bad candidate that Donald Trump. If you want to blame him for literally everying that Harris or her political faction ever advocated for, then by the same logic we must blame every Trump voter for literally everything that Trump or his political faction ever advocated for. That is a lunatic standard to hold any voter to.

And even so, it is irrelevant, because whatever you think of TW's choice in the 2024 election, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the FAA hiring scandal or his activism thereabouts.

On the issue - he is right. You don't have to praise him. You don't have to like him. But he is right about the FAA.

he has done a better job of bringing this particular issue to the public attention than anybody on the Motte

This is like the argument that Microsoft is good because it brought computers to the people. Microsoft was the one who did that because Microsoft's own actions made there be no room for anyone else to do so.

It's very difficult for anyone not on the left to bring an issue to public attention, because of the actions of the left. So yes, it's true that he did, but this doesn't mean much.

Except he isn't "the left", he's one guy, and he's not responsible for it being "very difficult for anyone not on the left to bring an issue to public attention".

It's still his allies. And even if that doesn't count for anything, it's still that he did it because of external forces that made it easier for people like him.

And even if that doesn't count for anything, it's still that he did it because of external forces that made it easier for people like him.

I last heard this argument deployed to explain why white men didn't earn their accomplishments. I really didn't expect to see it deployed to explain why it doesn't count that TW spoke out against a bad thing.

If only Hlynka were here to see this.

It depends on how directly the second group is affected by the first group's actions, and how directly the members of the first group who accomplished things are associated with the members who did the oppression. If a group of whites suddenly oppressed all the nonwhites and their white friends all made great accomplishments within the next five year period, then yes, that may be a good point. But the lasting effect of oppression that happened a long time ago doesn't count.

I'd also question whether it's true anyway. The US and Europe are predominantly white, especially in historic time periods, so even if there was no oppression at all, most accomplishments would be by whites just by size of population. And when those countries oppressed outsiders, the outsiders generally were in primitive cultures that couldn't accomplish much regardless of whether they were oppressed.

Also, since Jews were oppressed for much of history, you can't use this to say that Jews didn't earn their accomplishments. Even over time periods where Jews weren't oppressed, you'd have to find out how many extra accomplishments the Jews had compared to non-Jews per capita, and exempt those too, since any such excess was unrelated to oppression.

I really didn't expect to see it deployed to explain why it doesn't count that TW spoke out against a bad thing.

This also raises the question of exactly what you mean by "doesn't count". It counts as TW doing a good thing. But it doesn't count if what you're praising him for explicitly depends on the size of his audience, such as "successfully promoted it when the right-wingers who first noticed it couldn't". (Which is another difference between this and the white people case.)

Rufo has probably been more effective as an anti-woke activist in general, but on the FAA hirings scandal specifically

Oh, ok. I thought when you said "the issue", you meant anti-wokeness (or anti-DEI-in-particular), not just the FAA thing. Yeah good for him, he noticed it when others didn't. Why is that supposed to be such a big deal?

EDIT: according to @ahobata, he wasn't even the first to report on this, and one the Internet's infamous noticers beat him to it by a month. So can you explain to me, why is this case supposed to be so embarrassing to the anti-woke?

And yes, he voted for Harris. He voted for Harris while publicly and passionately expressing his dissatisfaction with her, and after the election, he went on to continue to explain his problems with her, and what he thinks the Democrats ought to do,

That's nice, but tell, if more people listened to him during the elections, would there be anything being done against the DEI issue?

which means that I think this portrayal of him as some kind of bootlicking Democrat partisan is absurd.

I disagree, he very clearly is a partisan in the sense that he'll argue to vote for the Democrats over a Republican that's actually active on the culture war front, regardless of how much he will chastise the Democrats for not doing what he wants. I'm pretty sure I remember an old post of his where he was chastising Biden in much the same way he did with Harris, threatening that if things don't improve he just might defect to the Republicans. Would you say things improved over the course of the Biden administration? Would you say Harris was a better candidate than Biden? What exactly would have to happen for me to be able to conclude that he is, in fact, a Dem partisan?

because whatever you think of TW's choice in the 2024 election, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the FAA hiring scandal or his activism thereabouts.

Again, I disagree. You can't beat me over the head with "TW was right" if he effectively wanted to convince people to have the issue continue.

On the issue - he is right. You don't have to praise him. You don't have to like him. But he is right about the FAA.

If it's not about praising him, can you explain to me why the sentence "TracingWoodgrains was right" is so important to you? To me, the FAA is just one of infinity cases where an institution engages in blatant racism, it's the least surprising thing in the world, and Trace did indeed come out on the side of the issue that is correct. I don't recall anyone here doubting his claims on the FAA.

EDIT: according to @ahobata, he wasn't even the first to report on this, and one the Internet's infamous noticers beat him to it by a month. So can you explain to me, why is this case supposed to be so embarrassing to the anti-woke?

I don't believe I said anything about the anti-woke as a general category? Honestly, I think that if you're Chris Rufo or James Lindsay, the best response to TW's FAA story is to just applaud. Just say, "Yes, this is what we're talking about."

That's nice, but tell, if more people listened to him during the elections, would there be anything being done against the DEI issue?

I am sure that if Kamala Harris were president right now, there would still be lots of people doing anti-DEI advocacy, and TW would no doubt be among them. I do not believe that he would have changed his mind about or refused to engage in the FAA reporting if Harris were president.

I disagree, he very clearly is a partisan in the sense that he'll argue to vote for the Democrats over a Republican that's actually active on the culture war front, regardless of how much he will chastise the Democrats for not doing what he wants.

That just sounds to me like you think it's partisan to cast a vote at all. Yes, he voted for a candidate that he hated but considered on balance less bad than the other one. But that's what most people do. I would say that a 'partisan' for a particular party or candidate is someone who spends significant time or effort boosting that party or candidate - and since TW has spent much more criticising the Democrats or Harris than boosting them, I don't consider him a partisan for them. I think he just made the decision that, in a presidential election, which is ultimately a binary choice, he found them less bad than the alternative.

Again, I disagree. You can't beat me over the head with "TW was right" if he effectively wanted to convince people to have the issue continue.

I think the fact that he was actively and effectively working to expose and address the issue undermines your point here. You don't need to vote for Donald Trump to oppose DEI. It is possible to take the position, "DEI is bad, Harris' support for DEI is bad, but on balance Harris is less bad than Trump, so I will vote for Harris while continuing to advocate against DEI".

Trump voters can make the exact same move - such-and-such policy is bad, Trump supports the bad policy, but I think that on balance Trump is less bad than Harris, so I will vote for Trump and continue to advocate against the bad policy. You do not have to agree with a candidate on every single issue to judge that candidate preferable at the ballot box.

This was actually an example in Scott's 'Varieties of Argumentative Experience', under the 'Single Facts' heading.

If it's not about praising him, can you explain to me why the sentence "TracingWoodgrains was right" is so important to you?

As here:

What I'm saying is that in a context where so many responses to TW's FAA reporting and advocacy are attempts to deflect, to either minimise the issue or to ad hominem the man himself, it is worth the firm reminder that what he has said about the FAA's hiring procedures is true.

The top-level post that I was responding to was about liberals who try to minimise the story or attack TW for giving cover to the (ex hypothesi bad and fascist) Trump administration; and I was reading lots of comments here criticising TW for being a centrist Democrat who continues to believe that Trump is bad. I was saying that in the context of all these "who? whom?" arguments, it is worth allowing all of ourselves the sober reminder that what he said was both true and normatively right. That's the ball that we should keep our eyes on.

I don't believe I said anything about the anti-woke as a general category? Honestly, I think that if you're Chris Rufo or James Lindsay, the best response to TW's FAA story is to just applaud. Just say, "Yes, this is what we're talking about."

When he posted his original article, I don't anyone here said anything else.

I am sure that if Kamala Harris were president right now, there would still be lots of people doing anti-DEI advocacy, and TW would no doubt be among them. I do not believe that he would have changed his mind about or refused to engage in the FAA reporting if Harris were president.

That's nice, but what would that accomplish? Trace is barely one voice in a massive choir impotently complaining about DEI, and whether he stopped impotently complaining the moment Harris got elected, or complained twice as hard, the result would be the same. By contrast Trump, even if he ultimately falters, is at least making a dent. If you're going to tell me to vote for a politician that would double down on DEI and against one of the few that are likely to dampen it, I feel free to dismiss your claim to be one of the greatest DEI-fighters out there.

That just sounds to me like you think it's partisan to cast a vote at all.

No, this is completely unfair. I specifically said he's perfectly entitled to vote for Harris, it's his endorsement that's the issue.

Yes, he voted for a candidate that he hated but considered on balance less bad than the other one. But that's what most people do.

Yeah, but that's not what I'm accusing him of. I'm saying he would never endorse any Republican that would be likely to do anything to put a stop to DEI, or to any other issue he supposedly cares about. He would not endorse DeSantis, he would not endorse Vance, he might endorse someone completely ineffectual (/deliberately sabotaging the side he represents) like Romney, but not someone actually likely to do something to rollback the past 10 years.

I think the fact that he was actively and effectively working to expose and address the issue undermines your point here. You don't need to vote for Donald Trump to oppose DEI.

Citation needed. There are issues where you can contribute to meaningful change without electing a populist, or taking drastic steps. Take something like the trans issue, there's enough academic pushback to the idea, that I think it's possible to eventually put a stop to it by following all the procedures so beloved by liberals, and without electing politicians that will take drastic action. By contrast 10 years of "exposing and addressing" DEI accomplished absolutely nothing, what worked is banning it from the federal government, and cutting off the money-spigot.

What I'm saying is that in a context where so many responses to TW's FAA reporting and advocacy are attempts to deflect, to either minimise the issue or to ad hominem the man himself, it is worth the firm reminder that what he has said about the FAA's hiring procedures is true.

(...) I was saying that in the context of all these "who? whom?" arguments, it is worth allowing all of ourselves the sober reminder that what he said was both true and normatively right. That's the ball that we should keep our eyes on.

I still don't understand what is the point of this reminder, no one here doubted it. People here are criticizing him, because just like he has his grievances with us, with have ours with him. To me it feels like you're trying to shut off that criticism for no other reason than you personally liking him.

If it's not about praising him, can you explain to me why the sentence "TracingWoodgrains was right" is so important to you?

I can't speak for OliveTapanade, but for myself: it's important because it means that Trace remains a trusted source. I have read his stuff and interacted with him online for years now, and he remains a nuanced thinker and a careful reporter who holds himself to a higher standard of journalism than many professionals. I therefore continue to place high trust in Trace's reports, and I continue to value his analyses for their thoughtfulness even when I reach a different conclusion.

I can't speak for OliveTapanade, but for myself: it's important because it means that Trace remains a trusted source

Don't you think it's tad dramatic then to say that anything outside of "TracingWoodgrains was right" is a distraction from the issue? I thought the issue was the FAA.

I also don't understand why it's so important. Personally I do distrust TW, but it's not the kind of distrust that would imply he'd make shit up for a story, or not do due diligence on a source.

I find the whole tree of threads after OP's post somewhat disorienting, like being in a room full of people talking at once past each other. When a poster says "the issue", is it the FAA scandal? Or, per SteveAgain's original top-level post, the reception on Reddit and Hacker News of Trace's post of FAA scandal? Or, per OliveTapanade's first response, is "the issue" the arguments-as-soldiers tactic:

He's just right! There's no way to justify a norm like "never criticise bad things if my side is responsible".

Or is the issue the pervasive and corrosive effects of DEI and the philosophy that spawned it, which appears to be your point, since you differentiate the FAA story specifically from "the issue itself":

How did he do a better job identifying and advocating for the issue? He did a better job reporting on that particular story, but when it comes to the issue itself, how has he done a better job identifying it than anyone from James Lindsay through Lomez to the seven zillion witches posting here? How has he done a better job advocating for it, than Chris Rufo? Last I checked he was advocating that people vote for the candidate that would ensure more of this would keep happening.

And that's just the confusion in our branch of the conversation. OliveTapanade's reply happened in the context of the previous replies. Crushedoranges advocated for Trace to pick a side (and, presumably, do the arguments-as-soldiers):

The fact that TracingWoodgrains doesn't fully come over to the right because of this and doggedly is determined to stay in the principled center makes me completely unsympathetic.

TequilaMockingbird recalls that Trace was indeed more partisan before:

Back in the twenty-teens he was a vocal advocate of the sort of "full spectrum information manipulation" that has become the standard. Where he once bragged about fabricacating evidence to pwn LibsOfTikTok he now wonders why nobody trusts him.

In this context, OliveTapanade's main point therefore:

Set aside what you think about him as a person. On the specific issue here, he is just unambiguously correct.

Where "the issue" is, specifically, the hiring practices of the FAA that began in 2013.

Yep, that's what I was going for. It's possible I've expressed myself poorly, but the point I wanted to make was to separate out the FAA issue itself from one's judgement of its author.

Not unless it was to his outgroup, at least.

Man, you can't blame someone from noticing something after the noticer in chief did.

I general have mixed to negative feelings about trace, but this is actually a very fair point.

“This car isn’t as fast as a Bugatti super bike.” Yeah… basically nothing is.

The thing is people (and I think this included Trace himself originally) were acting like he somehow beat the right / anti-wokes to the punch.

I thought he credited hearing about it from the fight between sailer and mr stencil in the first essay, let me check

Edit, yes:

Finally, in 2024, twitter personality Will Stancil picked a fight with right-wing blogger Steve Sailer, who like many in right-wing media had released occasional articles touching on this case. Their scuffle stirrred up enough attention towards it to catch my eye

Funny how stencil gets to be a "twitter personality" while sailer is just a "right wing blogger"...

Ah, I missed that part. Never bet against sailer on that count.

Part of me sympathizes with TWG but only part.

Back in the twenty-teens he was a vocal advocate of the sort of "full spectrum information manipulation" that has become the standard. Where he once bragged about fabricacating evidence to pwn LibsOfTikTok he now wonders why nobody trusts him.

I think TWG's actions were nakedly partisan, but aren't they arguably in the same camp as things like the Sokal Affair or John Bohannon's fake chocolate diet and anti-cancer drug hoaxes? I think it is worth testing the standards of outfits that people are relying on for information, if only to make sure the pipeline isn't broken and flawed in some way.

Ideally, every side should be testing their own information pipelines, and creating robust fact checking operations. But one of the good things about agonistic pluralism is that you can be assured that even if a side isn't testing their pipeline, the other side will try to do so at some point. The end result is that all of us observers watching from the side can get accurate damning information on both sides, if we're willing to wade through the words of partisans of either side.

That is all assuming such stress tests are well conducted, of course, which is no guarantee from partisan hacks.

I think it is worth testing the standards of outfits that people are relying on for information, if only to make sure the pipeline isn't broken and flawed in some way.

Part of the difference in judgement and the reaction around these parts, or at the blocked and reported subreddit, is how the observer weighs the target.

We all Many of us have extremely low opinions of LoTT's reliability, I'm pretty sure even some "locals" that are mostly sympathetic to her have a low opinion of her, so it's not that interesting to pull one over on her. She's a partisan hack and everyone knew it. Tricking a stooge isn't that fun and tends to backfire (like the infamous "it's okay to be white" and OK sign things from 4chan made the world worse rather than simply revealing how gullible and bigoted a certain kind of progressive is).

Pulling a hoax on the Ivory Tower, that's supposed to be our high-quality repository of knowledge, is different.

Edited in response to fair critique of consensus building language.

Consensus building. LoTT is the third of three female humans I have respect for.

Fair point, edited

The crux of Sokal's hoax was that it was inherently obvious to anyone who had a passing knowledge of the subject matter, and that Sokal made no attempt to hide it but that no one bothered to ask about it. Tracing made claims that were very much withing the spectrum of sillyness that has occurred, and that when the target bothered to asked about it, Tracing took actions to further hide it.

In short- the Sokal hoax rests on the point that no one bothered to try and check claims that were inconsistent with the subject matter because they were politically flattering. Tracing's hoax rested on the point that he fabricated evidence that was compatible with examples of the subject matter, and then blamed the person who tried to check.

Also, the circumstances of Trace's hoax made it easier for him to hoax compared to a right-winger sending in a hoax about his left-wing enemies. An actual hoax by a right-winger that smeared a left-winger would have to remain undetected over time; the right-winger would have to be able to send it in, get it posted, and not have people all over the Internet say "that's a hoax". If people did say that, the hoax would be counterproductive.

Trace was going to expose the hoax pretty soon, so he didn't have this limitation and could make cruder hoaxes than an actual right-wing hoaxter could get away with.

That still sounds similar to John Bohannon's hoaxes, where he fabricated fake studies with serious issues that got through peer review. But the problem with those studies was not as obvious as the Sokal hoaxes (where a cursory reading of them is enough to show they're nonsense), the problem is the peer reviewers were obviously doing a shoddy job and not actually engaging with the studies or numbers they were asked to review.

The problem with the idea of "within the spectrum of sillyness" thinking, is that there's always the possibility that a lot of the evidence is bad or misrepresented in the first place. You see a similar phenomenon in the way some online grifters present lawsuits against themselves to their audiences. To hear the grifters tell it, they're always persecuted martyrs, but often if you actually dig up trial transcripts they're being reasonably charged with a crime they actually committed. (I am not suggesting that no one is ever targeted politically, or unfairly charged with things that someone on the other side of the political aisle wouldn't be. I'm just saying that the pattern I observed occurs a lot as well.)

I'm not that committed to defending TWG here in any case. If the consensus is that he acted as a partisan hack, and that his stress test was badly conducted, I'm happy to accept that judgment. I just think that there are ways he could have done something similar to what he did that would have been defensible, and for the epistemic good of everyone involved.

Sure. He could have done better. He could also have admitted error, in the 'I acknowledge what I did was wrong' rather than the 'I wouldn't do it again because of the reaction I received' manner that he did. It certainly didn't help that he approached his hoax in a tenor of triumphalist jeering at his target for being gullible, rather than Sokal's matter-of-fact 'this is what I did, this is how I did it, and these are the stages where a reasonable reviewer should and could have asked questions.'

That TWG is a partisan is the least of the issues that led to the response. There are plenty of partisans in the Motte community, for various factions and interests. The issue was that he expected to be applauded for it, and then blamed anyone but himself for the response with poorly disguised contempt. There was a reason his depture-flounce was with a 'I've hated this entire community for so long now' spiel despite having re-entered to post a dunk-piece while claiming solidarity with the community, and that reason was that his claimed solidarity was insincere and had been for some time.

Where did he advocate for "full spectrum information manipulation"? He did, and advocated to, feed false information to a prominent social media sneering celebrity. Surely social media sneering celebrities do not represent the full spectrum of information; are you contending that they represent something like the pinnacle of purity and sacredness, so somebody who is willing to deceive a LibsOfTikTok should implicitly be willing to deceive anyone and everyone else?

The rdrama 'ops' campaigns did not only target the likes of LOTT, they went after a decent variety of news outlets and were just cagey and evasive enough when their sources were questioned that most of the targets figured out something was up. Those people are information terrorists, and much like other terrorists that came before them, they had to learn that the best use of their effort is go after soft and easy civilian targets.

The fact that TracingWoodgrains doesn't fully come over to the right because of this and doggedly is determined to stay in the principled center makes me completely unsympathetic. So as far as I'm concerned, they're stuck between the icky chuds like me who know it's a problem but have aesthetically unpleasant views and the other kind of people who stick their heads in the sand in the face of overwhelming evidence. People who will bald-facedly lie even when you bring the smoldering gun, the receipt, and a signed confession are bad people.

And despite all of this... they are more aligned with the latter kind of people then the former.

I will make a prediction now: TW will still be hacking at this ten years from now, doing their enlightened centrist gig, making no progress. Because the liberals they are trying to convince don't really exist: they are trying to persuade a species of extinct men who could be swayed by reason and good faith.

Did you forget he's literally a gay furry? He doesn't want to be on the team with people who discriminate against him(and I won't say that they're wrong, either). It's a perfectly understandable human impulse.

I have seen too many anthro german shepherds in suspicious outfits to say that he would not be in good company if he did make the change.

And what were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament?

The guy has an obvious personal preference for the welcoming and affurming faction. It is to his credit that he brought up the FAA thing at all rather than accept it as part of the cost (or worse, benefit) of his faction being in power.

So the only people in existence are righties like you who can handle the truth and thus arrive at "aesthetically unpleasant views," and everyone else who can't, or else is an evil liar?

Do you think there is any possibility whatsoever that you could be wrong about anything?

No. Obviously not.

Yes.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it: I feel that I have an infinitely easier and gladder task of convincing partisans of my ideological bent to come around to reason then TW does for theirs. Not everyone on my side is an honest truthteller. We have our share of witches and evil liars. But there's the kind of lies that make you feel the ick, and the kind of lies that make planes fall out of the sky. One is a more egregious imposition on reality than the other.

"I have no sympathy for people who are not fully on board with my team" is about the coldest take you can have in the culture war. I, for my part, hope Trace will still be at it in 10 years, showing that there is a way to survive without submitting to either of the two tyrannies of unreason.

It's not that I wasn't sympathetic before. I too, was on the left. But that was fifteen years ago. I feel at this point that everyone persuadable has already decamped and we are in the last stages of Schmittian hyperwar. I can't imagine sharing common ground with those on the left who call TW a fascist. They live in their own partisan hyperreality and attempting to convert them is like being a Christian missionary to the Sentinelese.

I'm sorry. There is no way to survive. You have to pick your lane, or you end up like James Damore. If I have to make a choice between the twitter racists and the race communists, I'm siding with the former over the latter every time. It's not a great choice. But it's better than refusing to acknowledge that one has to make a choice at all.

If I have to make a choice between the twitter racists and the race communists

Reading it put in this stark way makes me glad that I find both equally disgusting. And no, I do not have to make a choice between them. Why would I? We're not in a civil war, so far at least. I'm not going to die if I continue to despise both of these tribal groups. I get that if we were in a hot civil war, I'd probably have to either leave the country or pick one of the tribal groups, just to survive. But even if, in that situation, I picked one, I wouldn't really be picking it, I would just be pretending to in order to survive, and I would happily go over to the other side if it offered me better opportunities. Internally, I am pretty sure that I will never actually choose to support either of these tribal groups. And that's in a hot civil war situation! In today's situation, I don't even have to pretend to pick one of those two groups. I can, and do, freely say that both utterly disgust me.

Well said. I might borrow 'the tyrannies of unreason' - that's an excellent phrase.

It's not a question of "being fully on board with my team;" it's the prioritization of what is fundamentally an aesthetic choice ("these chuds are low-status and have low-status views; I don't want to think of myself as being like them") over purported principal ("people shouldn't impose racial gatekeeping mechanisms on hiring for life-and-death public safety positions").

Surely you must understand that if there are non-aesthetic reasons for siding with the Republicans, the same things can also be non-aesthetic reasons for someone to side against the Republicans - you just have to disagree with the Republican stance on those propositions. Yes, Trace presumably happens to agree with the Republicans on the specific topic of DEI in the FAA, but last I checked they were not a single-issue "no DEI in the FAA" party.

Yes, of course. But if a topic engages someone enough that they spend non-trivial portions of their life discussing, investigating, and inveighing against certain approaches to it, one would expect to be surprised if the party openly and aggressively not on their side got their vote because of other ancillary issues which they seemed to not care as much about. It betrays a certain tension or inconsistency.

I'd be surprised if Trace was actually putting as much weight in his political value function on DEI at the FAA as you seem to make him out to be. Sometimes people just like making deep dives in some random direction, whether it is intrinsically interesting to them, they just enjoy the act of researching and arguing for its own sake, or they think they can make an impact or gain clout by spending effort on it. For starters, as people are quick to point out, he is a gay furry; it seems quite likely that those things take up a bigger share of his life than whatever research went into the FAA article, and along that dimension clearly Democrats are more of an ally of his than Republicans.

If you actually think that siding with Democrats on sexual tolerance and with Republicans on DEI is in itself a "tension or inconsistency", that's just being an agent of toxoplasma.

I...am not so certain that "siding with Democrats on sexual tolerance" is a full descriptor of Trace because I don't think he's all that into the sort of obligatory pride stuff and trans stuff that the Dems are doubling down on. But point taken.

they are trying to persuade a species of extinct men who could be swayed by reason and good faith.

They're not extinct, they just don't have loyalty to a particular party as their terminal value. Even in Europe, I'm nearly-literally watching women who were welcoming refugees 10 years ago, now dancing to the tune of "Ausländer Raus", and conspiracy-posting about woke NGO's sponsored by the EU (roughly analogous to the USAID scandal uncovered by Trump). Trace wants to arrest this process of defection by promising to reform the Democratic party from within, the problem he has is that:

  • People have eyes, and
  • With every defection he's losing an ally in the party, not only dropping the credibility of his promise, but lowering the actual chances of his success.

Its kind of the age-old dilemma. Speaking truth to power doesn't really work.

You have to acquire power, THEN speak truth.

But the process of acquiring power requires you to believe or promulgate so many falsehoods you will probably forget the truths you wanted to spread anyway.

If speaking truth, plainly, effected change we wouldn't even be in the mess needing saving.

If you have power, why would you need truth for any reason other than power?

Is there any information Trump is or has shaken the FAA up over this? At the minimum the ATCs who cheated should be identified and fired, the candidates who were denied because they failed should be awarded money damages with the option to apply again, and everyone at the FAA who was involved in this bullshit BA test should be fired and lose their pension. Surely whether or not it's actual DEI, everyone can agree it was misconduct and this is the appropriate remedy?

I've put fifty bucks against it, and another fifty bucks against Snow, specifically, being singled out in PBS, NBC, or NPR. I think it'll take longer than his bet to clear, but given the degree of swivel with 'throat-clearing', I wouldn't be surprised if tendentious pieces ends up being enough.

Which is kinda the failure mode for Trace and Amadanb's approach and philosophy. Forget impeachment: the federal House couldn't manage to condemn Lujan Grisham.

Directly? No. The anti DEI EO can be used by Duffy to correct the problem. The problem is that it will take years to affect change. It also seems clear that Duffy is going to work with DOGE to technological improve ATC. Curious to see how that affects the industry.

Moldbug is smart enough that he understands that a truly demotic regime, whether it is left-coded or right-coded, would likely put him up against the wall and shoot him for some reason. Hence his constant harping on the idea that we should treat the defeated regime's soldiers with decency and that we should let elves rather than hobbits take care of things. I agree with him about all this. Some people here on TheMotte don't understand what would actually likely happen to them in a true authoritarian/populist revolution. They think that this site would still exist and they would still be allowed to write politically incorrect essays. They wouldn't. We are far from that now, but I see the danger of it on the horizon. Just because leftist authoritarianism has been given a huge punch on the nose does not mean that we are not in danger of rightist authoritarianism.

I mean, under rightist authoritarianism my ingroup staffs the whole thing.

But will you remain in their ingroup once they obtain power?

Yes. No American right wing authoritarian regime, and perhaps no right of center American regime period, can staff itself without heavy use of conservative Catholics.

I don't mean "conservative Catholics" or any other group you are a part of, I mean you personally. Will the actual conservative Catholics in a position of personal power consider you a good ingrouper, or will they narrow their circles in order to have the opportunity to crush more people? (Of course if you expect to be one of the people in a position of personal power, that solves the problem for you)

I don't expect to be in personal power. I expect important figures to consider me a good ingrouper, however- it's possible that the circle narrows, but not by that much. The lifestyle restrictions do what they need to do; purity spiraling is simply unnecessary and I'm not a sufficiently bad actor/difficult to deal with to bother kicking out.

We were able to keep this site going under leftist authoritarianism; who is to say we wouldn't under rightist authoritarianism?

A lot of neoreactionary though is about how authoritarianism is the default state of mankind, and liberalism is an unstable equilibrium that can only ever exist as an ephemeral waystation on the road to the next tyranny. That being the case, all we can decide is whether we would rather live under leftist authoritarianism or rightist authoritarianism. I know what I pick.

Christianity may have silenced Galileo, expelled Percy Shelley, fought against evolution, condemned heavy metal, and ostracized Dungeons and Dragons, but it also created a thriving civilization that stood for almost two thousand years and conquered most of the planet. Communism gave us the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward. Wokeness gave us South Africa and the Great Replacement.

Catholicism demands that you believe nonsense about the Eucharist and the Trinity, while Mormonism demands that you believe nonsense about golden plates and a planet called Kolob i.e. things that have absolutely no relevance to the rest of your life. Conversely, Progressivism demands that you believe nonsense about gender and race, while Communism demands that you believe nonsense about economics and human nature i.e. things you have to deal with every day. Given those choices, you are much better off taking your chances with the Christians than with the nominal Atheists.

The Dreaded Jim famously said:

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

And:

If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.

If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.

Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.

The United States has not experienced "leftist authoritarianism." Not if you're talking about real, government-boots-kicking-in-doors, authoritarianism. Woke HR and university struggle sessions and online cancellations are annoying, even career-damaging, but they are not even in the same category as actual Maoist struggle sessions or gulags.

Not that I think this is likely to happen under Trump either, but when @Goodguy says "a true authoritarian/populist revolution," he's not talking about Biden or Trump being elected, he's talking about Ceaușescu or Pinochet coming to power. He has a valid point; people on both sides (most especially including you, here) tend to get histrionic about the tyranny of their political opponents, with no perspective on what actual tyranny looks like.

The United States has not experienced "leftist authoritarianism." Not if you're talking about real, government-boots-kicking-in-doors, authoritarianism.

Targeting whites, no. But if one considers all races inhabiting the US, FDR's camps for Japanese-Americans fit the bill. He was a leftist, with his thugs did kick in to doirs to kidnap their victims.

This site did not keep going during leftist authoritarianism. It kept going during a political situation in which the left was more powerful than the right, but not by that much, and the left's powers were still significantly constrained. During a true authoritarian populist regime of either a left or a right flavor, that would not necessarily be the case. American-style free speech is very rare. As far as I know there is no other country in history that had/has such strong free speech norms. Any major deviation from the American liberal (in the old sense of the word "liberal") model would be more likely to do away with our free speech norms than to retain them.

Just because leftist authoritarianism has been given a huge punch on the nose does not mean that we are not in danger of rightist authoritarianism.

But we believe we can defeat rightist authoritarianism; we have a playbook, past victories, and technological solutions upon which we rest.

We might be right they'll work again, or we might be wrong; we might be right about the reasons they worked, or we might be wrong- but the fact the playbook exists, and that it worked once before, gives us that confidence. Right or wrong.


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