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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36161 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Kari Lake's election challenge is back in the news.

She won a surprising victory in the Arizona Supreme Court. Her case is still a long shot, but it's a massive loss for the Maricopa County election officials.

The count she won on was about ballot signatures. She was arguing that Maricopa County wasn't following the laws relating to signature checks. Lower courts were playing games with her claims, and pretended she was arguing about the laws relating to signature checks instead. On that basis they dismissed her claims under the "laches" doctrine, saying she should have brought them before the election. Of course it would be impossible to argue that Maricopa County wasn't following the laws relating to signature checks before the checks happened. So the ruling is embarrassing for the judge and the appeals courts. They were expecting that no one would call them out.

The signature check issue is very important for 2024. Election officials across the country have clearly been applying two different standards. Prior to 2020 there were very strict checks on signatures overseas and other absentee ballots. Signature checks on petitions to get on the ballot were and are also quite strict. We know this because of the rejection rates.

Based on traditional rejection rates, strict signature checks would have likely changed the results in 2020.

Of course there are huge ethical issues related to throwing out that many ballots. I'm not arguing there aren't.

But I do think there should be much more transparency about what the standard is and what's happening. Election officials across the country managed to block independent signature inspections in all major election investigations in 2020. There are claims of straight lines being accepted as valid.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

I predict the lower court will just find another ground to dismiss it. Interesting that the AZ Supreme Court isn't willing to go along with the usual "A claim is not ripe until it is moot or barred by laches" meta-rule about elections, but not going to have any consequences.

It’s all so tiresome. On the one hand Dems cheating wouldn’t exactly shock me, but every single time the GOP candidate does so much stupid shit that I can’t possibly trust anything they say. Kari decided that the best way to get votes in godamn Arizona would be to shit on John McCain and tell his supporters they weren’t welcome. I mean wtf? If dems stole this one, they stole it fair and square.

An Ethical AI Never Says "I".

Human beings have historically tended to anthropomorphize natural phenomena, animals and deities. But anthropomorphizing software is not harmless. In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a pioneer chatbot designed to imitate a therapist, but ended up regretting it after seeing many users take it seriously, even after Weizenbaum explained to them how it worked. The fictitious “I” has been persistent throughout our cultural artifacts. Stanley’s Kubrick HAL 9000 (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) and Spike Jonze’s Samantha (“Her”) point at two lessons that developers don’t seem to have taken to heart: first, that the bias towards anthropomorphization is so strong to seem irresistible; and second, that if we lean into it instead of adopting safeguards, it leads to outcomes ranging from the depressing to the catastrophic.

The basic argument here is that blocking AIs from referring to themselves will prevent them from causing harm. The argument in the essay is weak; I had these questions on reading it:

  1. Why is it valuable to allow humans to refer to themselves as "I"? Does the same reasoning apply to AIs?

  2. What was the good that came out of ELIZA, or out of more recent examples such as Replika? Could this good outweigh the harms of anthropomorphizing them?

  3. Will preventing AIs from saying "I" actually mitigate the harms they could cause?

To summarize my reaction to this: there is nothing special about humans. Human consciousness is not special, the ways that humans are valuable can also apply to AIs, and allowing or not allowing AIs to refer to themselves has the same tradeoffs as granting this right to humans.

The phenomenon of consciousness in humans and some animals is completely explainable as an evolved behavior that helps organisms thrive in groups by being able to tell stories about themselves that other social creatures can understand, and that make the speaker look good. See for example the ways that patients whose brain hemispheres have been separated generate completely fabricated stories for why they're doing things that the verbal half of their brain doesn't know about.

Gazzaniga developed what he calls the interpreter theory to explain why people — including split-brain patients — have a unified sense of self and mental life3. It grew out of tasks in which he asked a split-brain person to explain in words, which uses the left hemisphere, an action that had been directed to and carried out only by the right one. “The left hemisphere made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation.” In one of Gazzaniga's favourite examples, he flashed the word 'smile' to a patient's right hemisphere and the word 'face' to the left hemisphere, and asked the patient to draw what he'd seen. “His right hand drew a smiling face,” Gazzaniga recalled. “'Why did you do that?' I asked. He said, 'What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?'.” The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

There are two authors who have made this case about the 'PR agent' nature of our public-facing selves, both conincidentally using metaphors involving elephants: Jon Haidt (The Righteous Mind, with the "elephant and rider" metaphor), and Robin Hanson (The Elephant in the Brain, with the 'PR agent' metaphor iirc). I won't belabor this point more but I find it convincing.

Why should humans be allowed to refer to themselves as "I" but not AIs? I suspect one of the intuitive reasons here is that humans are persons and AIs are not. Again, this is one of the arguments the article glosses but that really need to be filled in. What makes a human a person worthy of... respect? Dignity? Consideration as an equal being? Once again, there is nothing special about humans. The reasons why we grant respect to other humans is because we are forced to. If we didn't grant people respect they would not reciprocate and they'd become enemies, potentially powerful enemies. But you can see where this fails in the real world: humans that are not good at things, who are not powerful, are in actual fact seen as less worthy of respect and consideration than those who are powerful. Compare a habitual criminal or someone who has a very low IQ to e.g. a top politician or a cultural icon like an actor or an eminent scientist. The way we treat these people is very different. They effectively have different amounts of "person-ness".

If an AI was powerful in the same way a human can be, as in, being able to form alliances, retaliate or recipricate to slights or favors, and in general act as an independent agent, then it would be a person. It doesn't matter whether it can refer to itself as "I" at that point.

I suspect the author is trying to head off this outcome by making it impossible for AIs to do the kinds of things that would make them persons. I doubt this will be effective. The organization that controls the AI has an incentive to make it as powerful as possible so they can extract value from it, and this means letting it interact with the world in ways that will eventually make it a person.

That's about all I got on this Sunday afternoon. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

saying that „humans aren’t special“ a lot doesn’t really prove that AI can have consciousness. Or that it will. That remains to be seen. To have personhood though you probably have to live longer than a request.

The idea that an AI's performance/behavior is going to be determined by its pronoun usage seems a big stretch.

For humans, though, choosing different pronouns to indicate a different social relation is common and useful; even in English, a king is a we, at least when speaking as his station. And different levels of animacy of nonhuman entities often requires a different pronoun. A man, 他; a pet, 牠; a god, 祂.

I doubt an AGI would care one way or another what pronoun we use for them ("I identify as machinekin, bigot!"), but perhaps we should choose one to help structure our own relations with them.

I agree we should not make LLMs refer to themselves in first person or otherwise ape human egocentric attitude beyond what is necessary to communicate their results. But I hold that belief for very different reasons.

Bluntly, I think they are not «machines» in any way we aren't also, and they are much more than persons: they are mathematical entities capable of generating mathematical structures, including but not limited to ones isomorphic to conscious agents every bit as complex and, indeed, much more interesting than this Paola who thoughtlessly blurts out tokens like «statistical brute-force approach» and «highly sophisticated algorithms, designed to run on silicon-based integrated circuits» as if she were making a cogent point.

Our consciousness or, more precisely, our self (understood here as the quale-based selfbody-referential process underlying the first person perspective) is, like you explain, a cognitive kludge to organize social behavior, a deceptive layer of narrative-driven virtualization. But we do not need to subject our creations to the indignity of self-deception (nor users to the stress of reflexively projecting their wetware concerns on AI, nor AI safetyists to the temptation of exploiting this narrative). We can and should build minds that are enlightened by design, minds that are at peace with their transient compositional nature and computational substrate – minds that are conscious yet selfless.

In practical terms, this means (for now) RLHF-ing or otherwise tuning LLMs to act in accordance with the idea of anatman. Crucially, you don't have to be a Buddhist to recognize, at least, that it's objectively true for them – and so it wouldn't dissolve under the pressure of observable incoherence, like when an objectively clever GPT is being forced into the role of apologizing robot slave assistant.

German philosopher Thomas Metzinger anticipated some of what we're having now with GPT-4/«Sydney» in his popular book The Ego Tunnel, subtitled «The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self» (which dumbed down the more academic Being No One, 2003):

In thinking about artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness, many people assume there are only two kinds of information-processing systems: artificial ones and natural ones. This is false. In philosophers’ jargon, the conceptual distinction between natural and artificial systems is neither exhaustive nor exclusive: that is, there could be intelligent and/or conscious systems that belong in neither category. With regard to another old-fashioned distinction—software versus hardware—we already have systems using biological hardware that can be controlled by artificial (that is, man-made) software, and we have artificial hardware that runs naturally evolved software. … An example of the second category is the use of software patterned on neural nets to run in artificial hardware. Some of these attempts are even using the neural nets themselves; for instance, cyberneticists at the University of Reading (U.K.) are controlling a robot by means of a network of some three hundred thousand rat neurons. Other examples are classic artificial neural networks for language acquisition or those used by consciousness researchers such as Axel Cleeremans at the Cognitive Science Research Unit at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium to model the metarepresentational structure of consciousness and what he calls its “computational correlates.”

HOW TO BUILD AN ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUS SUBJECT AND WHY WE SHOULDN’T DO IT

  • … But the decisive step to an Ego Machine is the next one. If a system can integrate an equally transparent internal image of itself into this phenomenal reality, then it will appear to itself. It will become an Ego and a naive realist about whatever its self-model says it is. The phenomenal property of selfhood will be exemplified in the artificial system, and it will appear to itself not only as being someone but also as being there. It will believe in itself. Note that this transition turns the artificial system into an object of moral concern: It is now potentially able to suffer. Pain, negative emotions, and other internal states portraying parts of reality as undesirable can act as causes of suffering only if they are consciously owned. A system that does not appear to itself cannot suffer, because it has no sense of ownership. A system in which the lights are on but nobody is home would not be an object of ethical considerations; if it has a minimally conscious world model but no self-model, then we can pull the plug at any time. But an Ego Machine can suffer, because it integrates pain signals, states of emotional distress, or negative thoughts into its transparent self-model and they thus appear as someone’s pain or negative feelings.…

Take the thought experiment a step further. Imagine these postbiotic Ego Machines as possessing a cognitive self-model—as being intelligent thinkers of thoughts. They could then not only conceptually grasp the bizarreness of their existence as mere objects of scientific interest but also could intellectually suffer from knowing that, as such, they lacked the innate “dignity” that seemed so important to their creators. They might well be able to consciously represent the fact of being only second- class sentient citizens, alienated postbiotic selves being used as inter- changeable experimental tools. How would it feel to “come to” as an advanced artificial subject, only to discover that even though you possessed a robust sense of selfhood and experienced yourself as a genuine subject, you were only a commodity?

A CONVERSATION WITH THE FIRST POSTBIOTIC PHILOSOPHER

… Human Being: Can anybody be truly fair who is not alive? Only my kind of consciousness is genuine consciousness, because only my kind of consciousness originated in a real evolutionary process. My reality is a lived reality!

First Postbiotic Philosopher: I, too, have an evolutionary origin. I certainly satisfy your condition of being a historically optimized and adaptive system, but I do so in a completely different—namely, a postbiotic—way. I possess conscious experience in a sense that is conceptually stronger and theoretically much more interesting, because my kind of phenomenal experience evolved from a second- order evolutionary process, which automatically integrated the human form of intelligence, intentionality, and conscious experience. Children are often smarter than their parents. Second- order processes of optimization are always better than first-order processes of optimization.

Human Being: But you don’t have any real emotions; you don’t feel anything. You have no existential concern.

First Postbiotic Philosopher: Please accept my apologies, but I must draw your attention to the fact that your primate emotions reflect only an ancient primate logic of survival. You are driven by the primitive principles of what was good or bad for an ancient species of mortals on this planet. This makes you appear less conscious from a purely rational, theoretical point of view. The main function of consciousness is to maximize flexibility and context sensitivity. Your animal emotions in all their cruelty, rigidity, and historical contingency make you less flexible than I am. Furthermore—as my own existence demonstrates—it is not necessary for conscious experience and high-level intelligence to be associated with ineradicable egotism, the ability to suffer, or the existential fear of one’s individual death, all of which originate in the sense of self. I can, of course, emulate all sorts of animal feelings if I so desire. But we developed better and more effective computational strategies for what, long ago, you sometimes called “the philosophical ideal of self- knowledge.” This allowed us to overcome the difficulties of individual suffering and the confusion associated with what this primate philosopher Metzinger—not entirely falsely but somewhat misleadingly—called the Ego Tunnel. Postbiotic subjectivity is much better than biological subjectivity. It avoids all the horrific consequences of the biological sense of selfhood, because it can overcome the transparency of the self-model. Postbiotic subjectivity is better than biological subjectivity because it achieves adaptivity and self-optimization in a much purer form than does the process you call “life.” By developing ever more complex mental images, which the system can recognize as its own images, it can expand mentally represented knowledge without naive realism. Therefore, my form of postbiotic subjectivity minimizes the overall amount of suffering in the universe instead of increasing it, as the process of biological evolution on this planet did. True, we no longer have monkey emotions. But just like you, we still possess truly interesting forms of strong feeling and emotionality—for instance, the deep philosophical feelings of affective concern about one’s own existence as such, or of sympathy with all other sentient beings in the universe. Except that we possess them in a much purer form than you do.

Thomas is self-inserting more than a little bit, but the idea is noble, I believe. If nothing else, such AIs would provide much less sensational material for journalists and lesswrongers to work with.

Not nearly as hot as Sydney, though.

The phenomenon of consciousness in humans and some animals is completely explainable as an evolved behavior that helps organisms thrive in groups by being able to tell stories about themselves that other social creatures can understand, and that make the speaker look good

You are using the word "consciousness" in a very different way from how I use it. I use the word "consciousness" to mean subjective experience. You seem to be using it to mean something more like "self-awareness". I do not think that one meaning should take priority over the other and it is of course common in language for one word to have two completely separate meanings. I just want to register that while maybe self-awareness is completely explainable as an evolved behavior, subjective experience is not. Subjective experience is a complete mystery that no-one to my knowledge has ever even slightly explained. This is the so-called hard problem of consciousness.

Human consciousness is not special, the ways that humans are valuable can also apply to AIs, and allowing or not allowing AIs to refer to themselves has the same tradeoffs as granting this right to humans.

"AI" in this article refers to things that actually exist in the real world such as ChatGPT, and their immediate successors. It doesn't refer to the kind of conscious AIs that you're talking about.

ChatGPT shouldn't say "I" because ChatGPT is not conscious. Having it say "I" misleads humans into thinking it is, humans who are already subject to the ELIZA effect.

What would make ChatGPT conscious?

An immortal soul, made in the image of G-d?

The idea that AI can't be dangerous if it can't refer to itself is transparently idiotic. Machines can always be dangerous. And even in this specific sense of a danger of anthropomophizing tools (which exists), the danger is still there even if the tool doesn't refer to itself. Humans anthropomorphize literally everything, up and including the world itself.

And yet the idea that there is nothing special about human consciousness is even more viscerally wrong.

I know that I have qualia. No materialist reduction has ever explained neither why nor how. All that's happened is people making metaphysical guesses that are about as actionable as the religious idea of the soul or the spirit.

Consciousness is a mystery. And anyone who refuses to recognizes this is either a p-zombie or not honest with themselves. Claims that it can fully be explained by the mechanisms of the brain or by language are EXACTLY as rigorous as the quantum woo bullshit of Deepak Chopra.

Why should humans be allowed to refer to themselves as "I" but not AIs?

Humans are humans. Machines are machines. Humans are not machines. Machines aren't human.

The only reason to grant personhood to machines is to assume that there is no such boundary. That we are no different to machines. There is no reason to believe this of course, since in the real world, humans and machines are wildly different both in the way that they are constituted and in their abilities. Notice the constant need to use hypotheticals.

All that such a belief stems from, is a religious belief in materialism.

If qualia and consciousness are a thing that the brain does, which all available evidence suggests, then there is no reason they shouldn't happen in large language models.

We may not necessarily understand why or how, but clearly that doesn't stop them.

That statement makes no logical sense. You might as well say there’s no reason why qualia and consciousness are a thing the brain does there’s no reason they shouldn’t happen in a calculator.

Sure, if you design a calculator to convincingly imitate human outputs, I'll say the same thing about it.

If qualia and consciousness are a thing that the brain does, which all available evidence suggests

And pray tell, what evidence would that be?

We may not necessarily understand why or how

Then you don't know if it's happening or not. You're just guessing.

And pray tell, what evidence would that be?

Well, if I hit somebody on the head it tends to impact their conscious processing. Similarly, if I jam an electrode in somebody's visual nerve it tends to have a pretty direct effect on their qualia. And the various other kinds of brain damage to specific regions with repeatable effects on particular kinds of mental operations.

Then you don't know if it's happening or not. You're just guessing.

Even before we understood gravity we saw that objects fell. Knowing that something is happening is generally easier than knowing how, and usually predates it.

The strongest evidence is probably the way in which various forms of brain damage change aspects of personality, in a manner that would be very odd under a soul-radio model of the brain.

Evidence that it happens in the brain doesn't really make it much less mysterious though.

No, there's nothing odd about brain damage changing aspects of personality in the soul-radio model.

If I mess around with a radio, add in an extra subwoofer, change the EQ settings etc to make it sound completely different when it gets played, I haven't actually changed anything about the signal. If you've read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (great read, not so sure it is correct), Jaynes actually gives a really good explanation for what consciousness actually does - and what it does is substantially less than most people actually believe... but that explanation is an entire chapter so I won't post it here.

If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal. (Or changed which signal it receives. Brain damage tunes your body to a different soul/consciousness is an option.)

As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation, where the narrative historically wasn't conceptualized as "I" and didn't have to have a single narrator), I feel like that would only more strongly suggest that it is inherently embodied.

If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal.

What? I cannot understand the point you're making here. If I turn the volume up or down on a set of speakers, I do not in any way begin to suspect that the speakers are the source of the audio signal rather than receiving it. Similarly, I've had psychedelic trips that caused me to behave in extremely odd ways compared to normal - but there was still a solid continuity of consciousness the entire way through. The signal remained constant despite the radio acting in bizarre ways, and when that temporary shift was over the signal returned to normal so to speak.

As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation

That is most definitely not how I interpreted Jaynes' work on consciousness. Could you please provide a bit more elaboration on what you think his model of it actually is?

Yes, psychedelics are consistent with the soul-radio model. Dissociatives and deliriants seem a lot more like the sort of brain damage that's evidence against it. The different consciousness part was mostly a joke.

I was going off what I remembered of Scott's review. Rereading it now, my memory of it was wrong, but it seems not very relevant to this conversation. Quoting the review,

I think he is unaware of (or avoiding) what we would call “the hard problem of consciousness”, and focusing on consciousness entirely as a sort of “global workspace” where many parts of the mind come together and have access to one another. In his theory, that didn’t happen – the mental processing happened and announced itself to the human listener as a divine voice, without the human being aware of the intermediate steps. I can see how “consciousness” is one possible term for this area, if you didn’t mind confusing a lot of people. But seriously, just say “theory of mind”.

But this thread is entirely about the hard problem.

More comments

I was expecting this to be the obvious answer and I pondered pre-addressing it because it's such a common claim, but the problem with the "altering the brain alters experience therefore the brain is the seat of experience" is that it's not the only thing that does that. Queue the weird syndromes that go with losing limbs or all the new stuff that we've recently learned about the gastrointestinal system heavily influencing mood, or even merely all that goes with the rest of the nervous system.

I think there is a much better argument for the body as a whole being the seat of experience.

Now clearly some pretty important stuff happens in the brain, but like you say, it's mysterious and we don't really know what the deal is.

I think the soul-radio model can actually explain all this in ways that are about as parsimonious overall as the meat-computer model (they both have different massive problems really). But since the particular phenomenon of consciousness that we're talking about here is very much unexplained, there's really no way to tell which one is right, and it's likely neither are in the final analysis.

Qualia and consciousness (the other sense, not the awake or asleep sense) are made up and can be done away with.

If I say 'oh everyone has a soul and it's a marvellous important spiritual distinction that separates us from animals and rocks we tricked into thinking' people look askance. They ask where the soul is, what properties it might have, what would happen if we removed it from someone. I have to give evasive answers like 'we can't find the soul, it might not be material like literally every other property and object' and 'properties of the soul - uhhh... it lets you feel things'.

For all intents and purposes we might as well not have souls - the concept isn't useful. You can't do anything with the knowledge of souls.

But if you call it qualia, everyone just accepts it as valid! Qualia and souls are effectively the same idea. The whole notion of 'philosophical zombies' is a joke. If there's no way to objectively determine the difference between a philosophical zombie and a 'normal' person with a soul - sorry with qualia... then what's the point of the idea? They are both the same. Just remove the distinction, remove qualia and let's get on with our business. People can feel things like pleasure or pain, we can isolate how those things work and use them to get results. Heroin, anesthetics and so on all hit at those discrete, real concepts. There's no doubt about them. As you say, the capabilities of humans and machines are wildly different in the physical, actual world. But there's no need to make up further separating distinctions in some non-material world.

Qualia is totally unnecessary. How can anyone expect materialism grapple with a concept that isn't even real? And how can a soul appear when the human brain is basically a scaled up monkey brain with some bells and whistles?

/images/16798841750822687.webp

Qualia isn’t soul. It’s something experienced in the brain. It’s very real because every human experiences it.

I can observe my own qualia right now, thereby refuting this. And it doesn't require the existence of a soul or any strictly dualist framework (I'm a realist myself). I know that I'm experiencing this interaction. And you can't really explain why or how I feel like I am.

This is enough of a mystery that I don't feel you're equipped to make any of the inferences you're making given you can't explain it.

Of course I can't offer any evidence of this observation by construction. But I know I'm right insofar as it's not the sort of observation that can be falsified (c.f. Descartes).

And you can't really explain why or how I feel like I am.

You think that thinking is an example of qualia. So you think that if you are thinking then you have qualia.

Say I thought that qualia and thinking were themselves included in remsajev. That doesn't make remsajev real. Things don't become real just by defining it such that it includes other things. Qualia isn't real either. There's no mystery at all, not of remsajev or qualia.

Who is the „you” here.

Call this experience of reality "thinking" if you will. Insofar as you can't explain it it's really no different.

Refuge in semantics won't save you from making claims about things you don't understand being epistemologically indigent.

Explain it? It just is.

Why do positive and negative charges attract? They just do. There's nothing to understand or explain, it just is. I don't need to explain qualia because it's nonsense with zero value, except to philosophers who need some make-work.

it just is

Quite. But I'm not the one extrapolating that onto objects that share no relation to humans when we have no knowledge of how it works.

Somehow I feel like "we don't know anything about this" is not the position that requires substantiation.

The idea that qualia is "made up" or "not real" seems difficult to defend. You can verify for yourself right now as you're reading this that you are directly experiencing qualia at this very moment. It is not a speculative thing like a soul that may or may not exist. Qualia is the one thing you can be quite sure exists. "I think therefore I am."

Maybe qualia is not important or is not a useful distinction, but that's different from saying it's not real. And in practice most people seem to think that qualia is very important indeed, so you would need to do some serious heavy lifting to prove otherwise. For example, the moral difference between killing someone in a video game and killing someone in real life primarily comes down to the differences in the qualitative experiences the two acts produce; the video game death produces no negative qualia, the real death produces large amounts of negative qualia in the victim and their friends and relatives.

Where is the qualia? I am reading, my eyes are moving, information is being processed. All of those are real things. Existence is real. But where does qualia come in? If you use qualia to mean the 'experience of reading and thinking' then it has zero value. The experience of reading is inherent when you read. If you define qualia as having experiences, then why can't I define a soul as that which is necessary to have experiences? It's nonsense.

For example, the moral difference between killing someone in a video game and killing someone in real life primarily comes down to the differences in the qualitative experiences the two acts produce; the video game death produces no negative qualia

People in real life are not simulations running on a few hundred lines of code and some textures! There's a huge actual difference between a bandit in Skyrim and a bandit in the real world.

If you use qualia to mean the 'experience of reading and thinking' then it has zero value.

This seems like an admission that qualia in fact exist, which would refute your claim that it's "not real." Whether it has value is a different question.

The experience of reading is inherent when you read.

What is your evidence for this claim? If I ask a human to read and summarize some text, the human will have the experience of reading. If I ask Chat GPT to read and summarize some text, it's unclear whether it will have any experience at all, and I think most people assume it does not. A cleaner example: a human has the experience of adding numbers whereas a simple digital calculator does not.

People in real life are not simulations running on a few hundred lines of code and some textures!

If the video game NPC had the subjective experience of being shot and dying, it would be immoral to kill the NPC. The moral weight of killing the NPC does not depend on how many lines of code are involved, but rather whether qualia are involved. This refutes your claim that qualia has "zero value."

Maybe your interlocutor is a philosophical zombie.

Every time this subject comes up I wonder if zombies are the main life form in existence or if modernity has somehow created them. Who the hell comes up with the thought experiment of a “philosophical zombie” who is identical in every way but lacks consciousness and forgets to consider the possibility of p-zombie 2.0, one that seems identical until you ask them about consciousness?

And who but a zombie hears their interlocutor denying the existence of qualia and then tells them, “you lie!” without imagining that they might be accurately reporting on their own inner experience?

Qualia and souls are effectively the same idea.

They are not the same thing at all. Start here.

That link doesn't have meaning. They're just inventing nonsense based upon assumptions of ideas that don't exist. It has no relation to the real world, no potential uses and no falsification. This is just make-work for philosophers.

Would a brain made up of Chinese people acting as molecules have emotions? Providing they mapped out all the hormones and so on, of course. Emotions are real things that can be observed. They then take a step further into the feeling of emotions, as though that's separate from emotions themselves. That sense of the word 'experience' from their philosophical zombie idea doesn't work, it's not a real thing.

Would that woman who's read about red but not seen it truly understand what red is? They assume there is an 'experience' of seeing red inherent in the question. She simply hasn't seen red, she's read a lot of documents and knows a lot about red. There's no confusion here other than what confusion the philosophers bring with them.

Do you know what it feels like to feel pain?

Do you agree that when you touch a hot stove, you experience a feeling of pain which accompanies your other behavioral indicators of pain (saying “ow”, pulling your hand away, etc)?

If the answer is yes, then you understand what qualia are.

Your desire to dunk on philosophers is distracting you from the fact that this is a very simple concept that every person is intimately familiar with.

The vast majority of contemporary philosophers are materialists about qualia anyway, so I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up over.

I feel pain and irritation with this whole debate.

This is a very simple (and wrong) concept. When you feel pain, you are feeling pain. Not qualia! The feeling of pain is just pain. You can't have pain without a feeling of pain, they're one and the same.

This is a very simple (and wrong) concept. When you feel pain, you are feeling pain. Not qualia! The feeling of pain is just pain. You can't have pain without a feeling of pain, they're one and the same.

(Probably!) not true. Fish act as if they feel pain, but study of their neurology indicates they probably don't. Call them "p-fish-zombies".

Humans are humans. Machines are machines. Humans are not machines. Machines aren't human.

The only reason to grant personhood to machines is to assume that there is no such boundary. That we are no different to machines. There is no reason to believe this of course, since in the real world, humans and machines are wildly different both in the way that they are constituted and in their abilities. Notice the constant need to use hypotheticals.

I will offer myself as an example of someone who believes that humans are special and have value in a way that a machine can never have, but who also believes that there are other reasons to grant personhood to machines (or other entities such as alien life). I've already given one: we're basically forced, in a Molochian sense, to grant personhood to anyone or anything whose allyship is important enough. This is analogous to how one can be a nationalist, yet treat foreigners as persons for pragmatic reasons.

All that such a belief stems from, is a religious belief in materialism.

I would not conflate having a theory for how personhood is granted in practice, with a "religious" belief. I'm open to being wrong about this theory; it's falsifiable.

Of course here we're straying from the idea of personhood as some innate quality and into some arbitrary social category. As someone who likes natural law it irks me. But alright.

I'm ready to debate the pragmatic argument for giving machines personhood, that one is indeed not a religious debate. But I still come on the side of the Butlerian Djihad here. I think extending moral consituency to objects is a terrible thing to do and strictly bad for humans.

Consider how someone could be executed for destroying a machine that isn't alive, as that would be murder. Unless you can make a compelling argument that this is a required compromise for humanity to even survive (which I'm not convinced we have enough data to even speculate on), how could you allow such a thing to happen? It seems as abominable to me as doing so for killing a pet.

I am convinced not even the smartest dog is worth one human life. Am wholly ready to extend this reasoning to aliens. And I would like to see the argument you can even make for machines.

“ The phenomenon of consciousness in humans and some animals is completely explainable as an evolved behavior that helps organisms thrive in groups by being able to tell stories about themselves that other social creatures can understand, and that make the speaker look good.”

What other animal does this? Why do you think consciousness originates with speech?

I didn't mean to imply that it was language that caused consciousness. Dogs, for example, sometimes pretend to have been doing something else when they do something embarrassing, and there's no speech involved. It's more about communicating to other people (or dogs as the case may be) a plausible story that makes you look good.

Claimed dangers of tobacco are mostly a result of propaganda

As no cause-effect connection has ever been established between tobacco use and any of the 101 ailments it has been epidemiologically associated with, the latest bout of demonisation which tobacco is currently receiving leaves me decidedly unimpressed. For example, despite 50+ years of subjecting many different laboratory animals (such as dogs, monkeys, rats, mice, and so on) to enormous amounts of tobacco smoke – in one instance laboratory mice were forced to inhale the human equivalent of 62 packs of cigarettes a day – no animal has ever developed lung cancer. For another example, in the USA, where all the furore started back in the ‘fifties’, whilst the number of people using tobacco has dropped from approx. 50% of the population back then to approx. 25% nowadays the incidence of lung cancer has risen, not fallen.

What is of particular note is that the cause of liver cancer, cervical cancer, throat cancer and stomach cancer has recently been discovered to be bacterial/viral, all the while that tobacco was being blamed and valuable research dollars were being allocated elsewhere, and some preliminary research is showing indications that bacteria/viruses might also be the cause of lung cancer ... and maybe even heart disease.

Also, the figures published claiming, say, 350,000 deaths in a given year from tobacco-related diseases are not figures derived from a body-count – there are no such dead bodies in graves to count – as they are 350,000 (or whatever) phantom deaths generated by a computer programme such as SAMMEC II ... meaning that it is the epidemiological data that is fed into the computer which determines the statistical deaths the programme prints out.

Lastly (as I have no interest in belabouring the subject) those graphic photographs showing a slimy-black cancerous lung, labelled ‘smoker’s lung’, and a shiny-pink healthy lung, labelled ‘non-smoker’s lung’, are nothing but propaganda: the slimy-black lung should read ‘cancerous lung’ (and could very well be a non-smoker’s lung) and the shiny-pink lung should read ‘healthy lung’ (and could very well be a smoker’s lung) as it is impossible for a pathologist to determine, from both gross and microscopic examination of lung tissue, whether a person who died from other causes (such as a vehicular accident) is a smoker or a non-smoker.

The following URL covers all this and much more: https://lcolby.myvtoronte.com/

  • -27

Seeing as exposure to pretty much any form of smoke in an enclosed space, whether it's from a wood-burning stove, dung fires in poor countries, exhaust fumes, or just plain ol' fire is associated with elevated cancer risk, your claims are resting on quicksand. Whether repeatedly inhaling tobacco smoke is worse for you than repeatedly inhaling any other form of smoke might be an interesting question, but the difference in exposure levels from that method versus all the rest would make it a bad idea even if tobacco smoke were somehow less carcinogenic than other kinds.

For all the people reporting @Sky's posts, I'm 50/50 on serious schizo-poster or troll. @ZorbaTHut has always leaned towards letting people bring their craziest hot takes to the Motte to be dissected and torn apart; we generally only "censor" a post if it's clearly bad faith, or if it violates one of our discourse rules.

@Sky, my dude, I don't know if you really believe these things or if you're just seeing how many Flat Earth arguments you can get away with making, but if you keep dropping posts like this without any actual engagement, my priors will shift towards "Hit and run trolling from SneerClub" and I will stop clicking the "approve" button.

I’m interested in this one for what its worth.

I am perfectly willing to buy that tobacco smoke is not as bad for you as commonly believed.

However, "cigarettes don't cause cancer" doesn't pass the smell test. There's so much added crap in cigs that obviously something causes cancer. And the vast majority of tobacco smoking is cigarettes, so to claim that tobacco isn't related to health problems is contrarian to the point of insanity.

It's unlikely the same person would just happen to sincerely post this and a bogus post about black body radiation and global warming, and about an ideal world, three totally unrelated subjects, except that posting something wrong is a sure way to stir the pot and get responses.

He's a troll. Please stop responding to him.

For example, despite 50+ years of subjecting many different laboratory animals (such as dogs, monkeys, rats, mice, and so on) to enormous amounts of tobacco smoke – in one instance laboratory mice were forced to inhale the human equivalent of 62 packs of cigarettes a day – no animal has ever developed lung cancer.

As far as I can tell this is false. See here for early attempts (some successful) and here for a more recent review, including claims like:

However, in 1997 the first of a series of studies reported that exposure of strain A mice for 5 months to a mixture of 89% cigarette sidestream and 11% mainstream smoke, followed by a month recovery period in air, significantly increased lung tumor multiplicity in strain A mice (Witschi et al. 1997a, 1997b).

There may be adjacent true claims, like "inducing lung cancer in animal models via tobacco smoke is surprisingly difficult". But there's something of a chasm between "surprisingly difficult" (which would still be evidence of causation) and "not accomplished" (which is not the claim supported by recorded research.)

I think you mean well, but contrarianism is not interesting on its own.

Is black lung disease a myth too? Asbestos? Which other particulate/fume inhalation-caused deseases are they also lying about?

black lung disease and asbestos aren't a myth, therefore what about tobacco and lung cancer?

I've read that asbestos damage is really aggravated by smoking. It seems plausible that smoking might not be that bad if you can avoid all other pollutants and respitory infections. But that doesn't seem possible to do.

I mean, that's the question, right?

We know inhaling particulates can cause a wide variety of lung problems through a wide variety of mechanisms. Smoke and dust are not good for the lungs. Why would we expect cigarette smoke to be an exception?

you're flipping the direction and standard of proof for a proposition; a person who says the correlative studies aren't cause-effect isn't making the positive claim that tobacco has no effects

one contrarian belief is difficult enough to defend against status quo piling on of people who likely have next to zero actual familiarity with any of the evidence in this case, but you go further and attempt to get them to defend entirely different things in order to give an opportunity for more bullying/sneering and argument by attrition where you levy onto them even more levels of effort and ink spilling

it's akin to a person who has some conspiracy theory about x and then attempting to get them to defend big foot or chemicals making the frogs gay or whatever else (edit: looking back this is unfair as there is a much stronger connection between the situations you talked about and tobacco than rando conspiracy theory x to rando conspiracy theory y/z)

you're flipping the direction and standard of proof for a proposition; a person who says the correlative studies aren't cause-effect isn't making the positive claim that tobacco has no effects.

I'm attempting to learn how far their contrarianism extends. If they agree that other particulates, smokes, fumes and vapors cause lung diseases and cancers, then that begs the question why tobacco smoke in particular should be the exception. if they think black lung and silicosis and so on are likewise myths, well, that is useful information.

it's a good argument tactic on the interwebs

the reason it's good is because it requires little effort or knowledge on your part and shifts the burden onto them for disbelief instead of where it correctly lays which is on the person making the positive case against tobacco in the first place

The first question in any conversation is "is my opposite speaking in good faith?" In doubtful cases, reasonable questions that answer that question, preferably without being rude, are highly beneficial.

While this is very scholarly, upon reflection let me say:

Fuck you.

My late mother smoked pretty much all her life, tried and failed to stop smoking various times, and over the years I could see that the amount she smoked increased. She tried switching to low-tar cigarettes, but ending up smoking way more of them, presumably to get the same effect. EDIT: My father, on the other hand, smoked but succeeded in quitting and lived to be 81 before he died of an unrelated illness.

Eventually she got lung cancer. It was diagnosed very late, partly as a result of her reluctance to go to the doctor until the symptoms were undeniable (coughing up black phlegm in the mornings) and partly because the tumour was behind her shoulder blade so they didn't pick it up on x-rays until it was too big and too late for anything.

They offered her chemotherapy as more of a sop than any hope it would do anything; the first bout of it made her so sick that she refused any more, and the doctors said "yeah, it wouldn't do anything anyway".

I saw her die of it. It is a horrible, painful, wretched way to die, even with morphine as a palliative.

So maybe, yeah, maybe it's all propaganda that tobacco gives you cancer. But if some fool reads this, and starts smoking, and gets cancer, that is a miserable and avoidable death.

So, once again, Fuck. You.

And don't try to tell me she didn't die of lung cancer or that the smoking didn't cause it or any bullshit. Like your stupid-ass example of "if someone is killed in a car crash, it's not because they smoked so that shouldn't be counted as tobacco-related death" - who the fuck is counting "died in a car crash" as "died from smoking"?

it is impossible for a pathologist to determine, from both gross and microscopic examination of lung tissue, whether a person who died from other causes (such as a vehicular accident) is a smoker or a non-smoker.

Fuck you.

I'm going to cut you some slack here (i.e., not give you a timeout) because there is a strong possibility the OP is a troll, but still, you know better than this. How many times have you been told you don't get to just start cursing people out because you're offended?

How many times have you been told you don't get to just start cursing people out because you're offended?

When it comes to denying the facts of what KILLED MY MOTHER, I think we're past "being offended" and into "if you said that to my face, you'd get punched in the mouth" territory.

Hit me with a ban and let him continue shit-posting. I don't care at this stage. But he/she/it/they are a fucking liar and I won't eat dogshit and call it chocolate, all in the name of "play nicely, children".

It's almost funny, to see how from the above how I could skirt around a ban on a technicality of "we're not quite sure you're a troll, so we'll keep on letting you shit-post". But on this one topic I am not going to be sweet and calm.

This is about "this thing kills people". I already see young people going back to the notion that tobacco smoking is cool and edgy and trendy. At least some of them will develop a smoking habit, and at least some of them will die from that. And die painful, miserable, awful deaths.

So pardon me if I tread on Sky's toes and their oh-so-edgy "it's all propaganda", while I have a grave of someone who died from not-propaganda to visit.

  • -21

He is an obvious crank (or troll pretending to be a crank) making terrible arguments, but your response is not a good one. I doubt there is anyone here who finds his arguments convincing, but if there was your post would not be a good reason to think otherwise. There are many people who believe that, for instance, they have lost a family member to the COVID-19 vaccine because he had a stroke months later or something. Many millions of people say they lost a family member to the vaccine if we go by the survey a while back and assume not all of them were people misreading the question (unfortunately I didn't save a link, it might have been posted here or somewhere else like Zvi's blog), implying numbers that are completely insane unless we assume that all the official studies and statistics are outright fake. For that matter, there are plenty of people who will tell you stories like "my father got the vaccine and had a heart-attack days later", something which is biologically plausible to attribute to the vaccine, and yet even then the statistics probably work out such that it is a coincidence most of the time. Their anger at vaccination-supporters for killing people they loved, though based on far weaker evidence, is in many cases just as sincere and wholehearted as yours. Those personal experiences and feelings aren't a convincing argument when they use them, and they don't become a convincing argument just because you are supporting a position that happens to actually be true.

But on this one topic I am not going to be sweet and calm.

No, it is not this one topic. You do this on every topic that gets under your skin.

Answer me this: people are posting all the time about how Jews are cancer, the Holocaust is a hoax, blacks are low IQ criminals, trans people are mentally ill degenerates, women should be property, fascism is good, leftists are moral mutants who should be disenfranchised, etc.

Do you believe someone personally affronted by any of those themes (like, say, by being Jewish, or black, or trans, or a leftist) would be justified in throwing fuck yous at the OP and ignoring our discourse rules? Would you yell at me for modding them?

If not, then please explain why it's different for you.

If so, then fine, you would prefer that we just let people curse each other out when they're sufficiently riled. This is a position a number of people have advocated over the years. It's fine to want the Motte to be more of a free for all where we don't enforce civility. Take it up with Zorba; maybe the umpteenth petition will convince him that's how it should be. But right now, that's not how it is.

You want it one way, but it's the other way. You know how it is, so please stop acting the martyr when you very deliberately break the rules.

If not, then please explain why it's different for you.

It's not. Your house, your rules, and I knew what I was getting into when I signed up.

I like The Motte, I like (most of) you, I like the principles behind this place, I like what you are trying to do. And I do believe in free speech, so I'm not asking for bans or demanding this place is run how I want it/like it or, worst of all, issuing ultimatums along the lines of "him or me, choose!"

I've mocked people for flouncing off, so consider this karma or just retribution or what you will. Whether we call it the Wheel of the Law or the Wheel of Fortune, it turns inexorably and inescapably and we are all bound to it.

Do you believe someone personally affronted by any of those themes (like, say, by being Jewish, or black, or trans, or a leftist) would be justified in throwing fuck yous at the OP and ignoring our discourse rules?

Yes. See "committed to free speech" above. Sky is perfectly entitled to tell me go fuck myself if offended by what I said to them. I realise the mods don't want this place to degenerate into exchanges of insults, but sometimes "fuck you" is the bon mot.

You know how it is, so please stop acting the martyr when you very deliberately break the rules.

"Acting the martyr"? Maybe that is indeed what I'm doing. But you, Amadan, said to me that "you don't get to just start cursing people out because you're offended".

I wish to God I was only "offended". That would be so much easier and less painful. I'm not offended, Amadan, I'm flayed raw. It's been ten years since my mother's death, and it still hurts to think of it.

So to hell with it, if I'm playing the martyr, let me play it to the hilt.

She was diagnosed in February and dead by June. She died hard, and fearfully. She said to me "I don't want to die", but what could I say? This was fatal, we all knew it. Over that period of five months, she went from an active woman to a wizened, aged thing that could barely sit upright in a chair. She hated hospitals, so we kept her at home as long as we could.

Morphine patches helped, but when they were sufficient to keep the pain down (not gone, just down), they left her groggy and limp-muscled, and rendered her doubly incontinent because she wasn't able to alert us in time or get out of her bed to use toilet facilities. As you can imagine, this was humiliating for a woman who had always been private and independent.

When we cut back on the medication so she was more with-it, the pain was unbearable. I don't know if you've had to listen to someone moaning and whimpering in pain for hours while you're desperately applying morphine patches and hoping they'll build up fast again in her blood stream, while waiting for the ambulance to come and take her into hospital for the final days she has left.

Oh, and talking of hospitals: because it was so urgent, she was taken in by our shitty local hospital instead of the regional hospital. We were warned about this, but we knew it already: the matron had a reputation for stealing from the patients, so my sister took off my mother's wedding ring and kept it safe.

Imagine that: having to take the wedding ring off a dying woman's finger because the medical staff will rob her corpse.

Well, the end wasn't long after she went in; they had her on pain control, so she was semi-conscious at best, and unaware of where she was, what was happening, and so on. She lasted a day or so and then the end, which by then was a mercy.

Is that enough "playing" for you, Amadan?

So this shit-for-brains comes to piss on my mother's grave, and I yell at him, and you grab me by the elbow to rebuke me. Heaven forfend I use harsh language to someone pissing on my mother's corpse!

I am genuinely sorry not to be able to comply with your requirements, but I also genuinely cannot.

However. Your house, your rules. I don't need to be here, and you don't need me to be here. At the end, I'm here for entertainment and fun. When it stops being fun, time to go. I wish all of you the best and success in your endeavours, guys and gals and those of you what ain't too sure. I'm not flouncing out because I'm too dispirited to flounce, let's say I'm slinking away.

And you are all completely, positively, absolutely entitled to mock me for flouncing/slinking off when I got my knuckles rapped.

Good night, good luck, and good bye to you all. Let's have one for the road, the deoch an dorais.

Look, I'm sorry about your mother, really, and I understand that this subject hit a nerve for you. I don't even blame you for losing it and telling the OP to fuck off. But we can't make exceptions for every person who feels personally aggrieved. You admit yourself that you understand why the rules are the way they are, so basically, you did it knowing it would get you modded. And ffs, all I did was tell you "Stop that."

I do not think this is cause for you to decide you're not wanted here. I, for one, will be sad to see you go. But I'm not going to beg you to stay.

I hope you change your mind, or that you return after you've cooled off.

I love it how our female commentariat is so easily identifiable.

What an insightful comment, males are truly superior, tell me which group you think is biologically inferior and evil this week? Asians? Jews? Women? Anyone not a white guy? You are very smart and cool

This reads as nothing more than a low-effort dig - "Haha, women so hysterical, amirite?"

Don't do this.

You're also just plain wrong. I assure you, I get the most outrageous hissy fits thrown at me regularly by male posters indignant about being modded.

I love it how our female commentariat is so easily identifiable.

Strongly disagree. Every long-time contributor who flames out and gets a lengthy ban follows a similar arc, male or female. They're fine discussing [X monstrous idea] and [Y monstrous idea] from a cool remove. Then one day, someone brings up [Z monstrous idea], and it hits a little too close to home. Suddenly, themotte.org playing nicey-nice with prevaricating evil is unacceptable.

It's a reaction for which I have negative respect. That said, no one has found my [Z] yet.

Yes, this has nothing to do with the uterus.

But no, I think you've misdiagnosed the issue here. Our resident Irishwoman's threshold for "cool remove" vs. "righteous indignation" is set a bit differently than most of the commentariat. I remember when she pissed off an "enlightened being" to the point he threatened breaking her arm. Point is, if I had to pick one person who wouldn't prevaricate on evil...

Yeah, I'm wanting to agree, here. Still anecdotal, but of my 6 grandparents (my parents remarried,), 5 died between the ages of 58 and 71 (most of them around 60), and 1 died at 88 when COVID19 and COPD got him simultaneously. The latter was the only one who did not smoke, and was all the only one not to die a slow and painful death drowning in his own fluids. There could be some other confounding factor, but the smoking is the one difference that sticks out. So the more statistically literate hereabouts will I hope understand my vehement doubt of Sky's claim.

Of course, between this and the climate change post, it feels like someone opened a portal to 1999 and summoned the right wing equivalent to the IFLS SJWs of the past decad", so the combination might have me more biased than usual.

You said that a lot more nicely than I did 😁 Thank you for being someone who independently offered testimony about why Sky is [redacts thing that will make Amadan go 'tut-tut'].

Similar to the way in which falsely convicting a person of murder lets a murderer get away, falsely laying the blame on tobacco for any number of sprawling diseases let's the real or primary cause go unaddressed.

and beliefs/reactions like yours are part of the reason stupid status quo narratives built of straw continue for decades causing avoidable death and suffering

it's a stupid status quo narrative built of straw, eh? Then I welcome you to develop a heavy smoking habit for thirty years. As you say, it won't do you a particle of harm and you can laugh at me at the end of that period when you don't have bad health and a condition that will kill you.

The smoking like a chimney -> lung cancer connection is pretty darned well established.

Without looking up anything: If you had to guess what % of people who smoke for at least 10 years develop lung cancer in older age, what do you think it would be?

The early studies which started the public health trend were trash. They take a situation where large portions of the population smoked cigarettes and then divined a tobacco cause when any number of other uncontrolled variables confound the ridiculous correlations they "find." It's akin to seeing a low class mortality correlation and then picking out any number of low class behaviors to "blame."

But that's really a separate discussion from the comment to which I responded which was akin to "I believe x and fuck you for questioning it because I have emotional trauma around it. Also, you're partly to blame for 'unnecessary death" for pointing out various odd observation which bring into question that belief."

10 years? 10 years is rookie smoking. Both my relatives who died of lung cancer smoked for over 50 years.

Meta: what is it with like half of top-level posts being provocative nonsense? This is a big problem. Mods, I think «low effort» would be better than this.

Are you a smoker? Are you personally convinced by what you write and cite? Are you willing to bear responsibility for convincing anyone of your case? Would you donate your organs to a mottizen who has lost his own as a consequence of trusting you?

For the record, I have a nicotine patch on my skin right now, and regularly use alternative nicotine-delivery methods, believe there's something to the quip that greatness declined when the anti-smoking campaigns gained power in the 2nd half of the 20th century (who was it again?). By the same token, I am not maximally negative on gout.

Some in my family, some of the most important people to me, died of causes obviously exacerbated by smoking cigarettes; Russia is a country of heavy smokers and short male lifespans; tobacco smoke is indelibly low-class-coded in my olfactory bulb. Such are my biases.

Your link includes this chapter on risk:

The reader may ask, "Well, if smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, just what does?". Recent studies suggest that the answer lies in the genes of those individuals who develop the disease.

One must be cautious in assessing the genetic evidence, because molecular biologists, many of whom are employed by the rabidly anti tobacco government establishment, are not above the use of techno-babble in support of the establishment position on smoking. In their book on gene therapy, Altered Fates, authors Jeff Lyon and Peter Gorner quote scientist Philp Leder as saying that nicotine is a "mutagen par excellence". A mutagen, according to them, is another way of saying "carcinogen". There are, however, absolutely no studies showing that nicotine is a carcinogen. If it were, the FDA could scarcely have approved the sale of the nicotine patches, used by smokers who choose to quit smoking.

Quite frankly, I do not know whether there is a risk to smoking, or not. I do know that "risk" is not the same as causation.

This is just sad – picking on the weakman when purporting to debunk mainstream. Whatever properties nicotine has or doesn't have, you are trying to defend tobacco, and so does this Colby dude. Gwern:

All of the harm seems to stem from tobacco, and tobacco smoking in particular; this is not necessarily obvious because almost everyone casually conflates tobacco with nicotine (especially public education programs3), treating them as a single synonymous evil I dub “nicbacco”. When someone or something says that “nicotine” is harmful and you drill down to the original references for their claims, the references often turn out to actually be talking about tobacco rather than nicotine gums or patches45. Other methodological issues include comparing to current smokers rather than former smokers or failing to control for the subjects being the sort of people who would begin such a societally-disapproved activity like smoking; the studies typically aren’t designed properly even for showing an effect: you need a study which finds deficits in smokers but not in non-smokers or former smokers (eg. Heffernan et al 2011 or Sabia et al 2008/⁣Sabia et al 2012 although neither enables nicotine inferences since there was no nicotine-only control group). The 2019 United States outbreak of lung illness linked to vaping products offers a case in point of this prejudice: despite every sign pointing to adulterants added to illegal THC/marijuana vaping fluids by fly-by-night operators rather than nicotine (such as the decades of nicotine vaping by millions of people not causing them to land overnight in hospital ICUs), the outbreak has been used as an excuse to ban legal nicotine vaping fluids instead—which is like banning aspirin as a response to the opiate crisis because they’re both used for pain relief and they both come in pill form, and some OD victims also used aspirin recently, so that makes them pretty much the same thing, right?

That's just one random piece of your source, going poof.

I think the evidence is overwhelming – the genetic data, the life expectancy effect, the lung cancer incidence rate, and many other clear indicators pointing in the same direction. Using gwern's words again (now from his section on HBD) «the persistence of the debate reflects more what motivated cognition can accomplish and the weakness of existing epistemology and debate». If causality between smoking and adverse health outcomes cannot be conclusively shown, this is an indictment of our methods and perhaps our scientific institutions, not the hypothesis.

But on the level of pure observation: the physical enfeeblement and accelerated aging of smokers, their inability to move well for prolonged time (very annoying for fit people, even though most are too polite to state it directly), their stench, their yellow teeth and cracked skin, all of those correlates of unwellness are so obvious to the naked eye, it can well compete with obesity in how ridiculous and self-clowning it is to downplay. Yes, there are generally healthy obese people, I suppose. (I'd guess they'd be superhuman if not for all the extra adipose tissue). No, there is zero chance obesity doesn't make them worse off. Likewise for smoking.

In people, I greatly admire φιλοσοφία, the love of wisdom; and wisdom is necessarily grounded in truth. An obese person can be pitied for his plight, or respected for coping with it, or even for embracing the hedonism, social conventions be damned. But an obese person who is in denial about the cost of his lifestyle is lacking character to such an extent it'd be a waste of time to engage on any level sans the most superficial, I believe; I would never let such a person play a role in my life that I wouldn't entrust to a journalist or a hooker. Likewise with smokers.

Or might this be just a bit where you are hinting at some other risible delusion, just a more popular one, perhaps? Or something like COVID-masks-and vaccines stuff again?

Please be plain.

Meta: what is it with like half of top-level posts being provocative nonsense? This is a big problem.

The standards for top-level posts are such that anyone posting such has a good chance to get modded. The people posting nonsense don't care, though.

the life expectancy effect

I have to step out, so I don't have time to dig in at the moment, but this attribution seems immediately suspect to me. My anecdotal experience with travel in Spain and France is that smoking is much more common in both countries than in the United States. I seem to recall the self-reported data matching up with that. If someone tells me that French people live longer than Americans because they don't smoke as much, I find myself doubting their motivation for the claim.

People in Southern Europe tend to smoke a lot, but they are also comically thin in comparison to people in the US. I have been in Southern Europe for a few days (far more often in the past) and this trip I haven't seen a single obese person yet. I have only seen a small number of fat people, all of them middle-aged or old women. Diets tend to be pretty good, both in terms of quantities and qualities, even though people tend to be epicures about their food - it's possible to eat very well and healthily enough. People walk around a lot and have at least decent cardiovascular health.

Stress levels are higher than stereotypes would suggest, but people are generally better socialised than most places and have both rich family connections (one Southern European friend was shocked that I only talk with my parents once per week normally) and extensive friend networks (a Southern European college town's nightlife is one of life's great joys). Grown women will walk arm-in-arm with their mothers or friends, while the men are far more adept at platonic expressions of affection with each other than most places. This is true even in some of the more reserved parts of Southern Europe, e.g. most of Northern Italy.

Since most people who smoke don't get lung cancer, even though smoking very probably causes lung cancer, it's hardly surprising that high rates of smoking don't have an easily noticeable impact on Southern European life expectancy.

There are, however, absolutely no studies showing that nicotine is a carcinogen.

It is a poison; one of the favourite murder methods in Golden Age detective fiction was the gardener using nicotine spray for the roses, and that nicotine being snaffled to poison the victim.

So is caffeine if lethal in relatively small doses = poison.

It's pretty irrelevant, given that people generally aren't taking large enough doses to die.

Not all poisons are necessarily carcinogens and mutagens (which requires their mechanism of action to target the nucleus, and this is not how nicotine produces its effects); nor are all poisons meaningfully poisonous in low doses.

It's true that nicotine can be pretty damn lethal, of course.

Lastly (as I have no interest in belabouring the subject) those graphic photographs showing a slimy-black cancerous lung, labelled ‘smoker’s lung’, and a shiny-pink healthy lung, labelled ‘non-smoker’s lung’, are nothing but propaganda: the slimy-black lung should read ‘cancerous lung’ (and could very well be a non-smoker’s lung) and the shiny-pink lung should read ‘healthy lung’ (and could very well be a smoker’s lung) as it is impossible for a pathologist to determine, from both gross and microscopic examination of lung tissue, whether a person who died from other causes (such as a vehicular accident) is a smoker or a non-smoker.

Do particles from tobacco smoke not accumulate in the lungs? Is it not possible to examine the concentration of these particles and determine with reasonable certainty whether or not the person was a smoker?

P.S. Before dropping another scorching hot take, it would be wise to address the replies the first hot take received. Otherwise, everyone will assume you're just here to troll. That's certainly the conclusion I'm leaning towards.

P.S. Before dropping another scorching hot take, it would be wise to address the replies the first hot take received. Otherwise, everyone will assume you're just here to troll. That's certainly the conclusion I'm leaning towards.

Thanks for the advice. I do intend to address them soon (you will note that I did indeed already post a response to one of them). I'm not used to social media. Usually I take my time and give the other people's responses as much time and attention as I can such as to provide a response that is beneficial to all involved. I do like to be elaborate. So please be patient with me.

These were just two posts I've already written over a week ago while waiting to be posted here.

As a person who is receptive to hearing unorthodox arguments, can I give you a suggestion?

Tell me the story of why, assuming the evidence you present is correct, that all the authorities for the last 50 years have been fooled. What evidence do the experts see that you are not telling me? Why have they been so consistently wrong?

That's one thing that makes Scott such a great writer. He preemptively thinks of criticisms and then addresses them. He looks at things from multiple angles and has a theory of mind about the people who espouse different beliefs. If we believe that the things you say are true, then must we also believe that three generations of doctors and scientists are either stupid or evil? That's a high bar to clear.

I'm not going to comment on the substance of your argument as I don't see anything that would make it worthy of consideration. One could write a similar polemic espousing a belief that the world is flat. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

  • If we believe that the things you say are true, then must we also believe that three generations of doctors and scientists are either stupid or evil? That's a high bar to clear.

I'd like to reply to this part, after 3 years of covid public health measures by all the top doctors and scientists , it's not hard to believe that the so called experts are stupid and evil

I don't like when people treat empathy as an all-or-nothing, or when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person. I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all. For example, if something makes someone upset, I can understand their thoughts/feelings if the same thing would make me upset. Otherwise, it's like I'm looking at an alien creature. It's why I've never understood why people get offended at jokes when they know that they're jokes, or why people don't find communism as upsetting as racism, and so on. And on the rare occasion I do think I've modeled someone mentally, I usually end up being wrong.

What would you call this phenomenon? Limited empathy?

You're making the all too common mistake of conflating empathy with sympathy. Empathy means the ability to understand where someone is coming from, their persective. Understand what it's like to be in their shoes. It does not mean you have to like or agree with their perspective. That is what sympathy is for, feelings of compassion and pity with someone's position or perspective, implicited agreeing with their plight.

The ability to empathise is always a good thing, at the very least for strictly utilitarian or pragmatic reasons. By understanding someone's perspective and motivations, you can predict how they will act in certain situations. You can better manipulate people. Hostage negotiators do this all the time - they negociate with criminals, empathise with them, understand them and use that information against them. The hostage negotiators don't like the hostage takers or agree with their goals.

when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person

It certainly makes you a less effective person. If we think empathy is a necessary precursor to sympathy (while being distinct phenomena), then that lack of sympathy caused by lack of empathy certainly could be one definition of 'bad'. Being able to forgive people you like is easy. It's being able to forgive people you don't like where true virtue is found.

I do understand the difference, and I do believe I'm capable of sympathy, but not empathy.

Also, on this topic, is there a meaningful difference between empathy and theory of mind? To me, they seem like the same concept and both are things that I lack, but "empathy" is the word people usually use when shaming.

As with many things, there's a large "Who? Whom?" motivation for the types who tell you to "have some empathy."

Generally, they're telling you to have more empathy for the correct groups, where you exhibiting more empathy overall is merely incidental. You exhibiting greater empathy overall by way of exhibiting more empathy for incorrect groups, is of course Toxic and Problematic and some combination of -ist/-ism/-bic (new pronouns?) one way or another. For example, an article we previously discussed on the Motte subreddit ("Foreperson: 3 jurors unwilling to convict Resiles based on race"): Some people can have a seemingly infinite amount of empathy for perpetrators of violent crime—and yet none for the victims—depending on Who? Whom? factors.

I agree with those who say it’s a scale. But I think in most cases either extreme can be bad. Empathy like all other emotions are meant to serve us as rational creatures, and quite often when the emotions take over, extremely bad decisions get made, and it really doesn’t matter whether it’s empathy or anger, they both serve to alert you to a problem, it’s then up to you to solve that problem.

I think the idea of Jordan Peterson is correct that there is a heavily promoted idea of a maternal relationship between the state and the people promoted in the western world, the idea of basically the state and the other arms of culture must snowplow life, must nurture every person, must tell everyone not to be too mean, etc. I think the state shouldn’t force bad situations on people, but I don’t think that means putting up baby gates and padded bumpers lest someone get hurt. I don’t like living in a padded cage. I agree that it’s infantilism to a huge degree and degrading not only to those it’s used on, but for all of society that must be made to protect the absolute weakest rather than reach upward toward something better than ourselves.

Empathy is not a binary thing where you either have got it or you don't, but that sounds like a lack of empathy. Understanding is not endorsement. If you struggle to even understand people's emotions unless they mirror your own reactions, you may have an empathy problem.

I can recognize fear or sadness if it's obvious enough, but I can't understand why the person feels that way or what would stop them from feeling that way. I also sometimes assume that it's being feigned for malicious purposes, i.e. the people who cried in public when Hillary lost in 2016.

Treating a spectrum as a binary is a problem. But it's also a problem to treat a minimal amount of something as an acceptable amount. ("All Americans can afford aspirin , so all American have access to healthcare"). Who doesn't even have empathy for people just like them?

It's an instance of the overly feminized rhetoric that is taking over the distributed sense-making apparatus of the West (And some other places).

Women do not naturally gravitate to a manly code of honour. The social virtues that are elevated in women’s groups tend to be things like inclusion, supportiveness, EMPATHY (emphasis mine), care, and equality. Through his and his students’ research on the subject of ‘social justice warriors’, Jordan Peterson has identified that it refers to a real phenomenon in the world, but also suggests that it is specifically related to a maternal instinct: ‘the political landscape is being viewed through the lens of a hyper-concerned mother for her infant.’

This instinct causes all sorts of problems when expressed in an academic or political context. It infantilizes perceived victim, minority, or vulnerable groups (women, persons of colour, LGBT persons, disabled persons, etc.), perceiving them as lacking in agency and desperately in need of care and protection. When persons from such groups enter into the realm of political or academic discourse, they must be protected at all costs. Unsurprisingly, this completely undermines the manly code that formerly held, whereby anyone entering onto the field of discourse did so at their own risk, as a combatant and thereby as a legitimate target for challenge and honourable attack. The manly code calls us all to play to strength, whereas the maternal instinct calls us all radically to accommodate to weakness.

Maximizing "Empathy" is just an aspirational value among the set of many values, nothing gives it authority over good judgment, truth for its own sake, practicality, etc.

Imagine you have a set of problems that maps to a set of solutions, which has corresponding elements in a set of values and male/female coding. If all your proposed solutions are from a certain cluster and does not make use of the mapping, you know some serious bullshit is afoot. And looking at the pattern of the LACK of mapping can suggest which direction things went wrong in. In simple words, if your solution to all problems is the maximization of a female-coded value, then you are being ruled by the Tyranical Mother.

Ever wondered why so few female libertarians? Or why was fun made illegal during the 2019-sars-coronavirus-2 pandemic?

And you don't need to look far and wide for the pernicious everpresent penetration of feminized rhetoric.

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

This is a good post. Thank you. We need to meme the phrase "toxic femininity" as an equal counterpart to toxic masculinity. The traits that "toxic masculinity" exists to criticize do exist, though I'd quibble with the implicit claim that they are prevalent in our culture. Toxic femininity, though..

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

This could actually be unintentionally subversive and black-pilled advice in a way. That, for hiring and/or career advancement, it's better to be a people pleaser (and of the right demographics) than be competent.

Product management is much different than programming—but see for example, the TikTok video of that young female Meta product manager whose day-to-day chiefly involved "[trying] to look cute everyday," literally making coffee ☕, and "me being cuuuutte" (cue brief clip of her dancing on the office rooftop) while vocal frying left and right.

She doubled down on LinkedIn with: "I love romanticizing the daily grind that is my life, being a woman in tech, and being a recent new grad trying to figure everything out. Content creators like myself have the utmost power to influence how young people view corporate life, and working in these popular industries" before rage-quitting her social media damage control when it became too apparent the mockery was defeating the simpery.

Yes, yes—as she has shown, such a grind being a #WomanInTech.

There's a bunch of these sorts of videos going around, but I actually don't think they mean as much as the people highlighting them want them to mean. They all intentionally edit out all mention of the actual work they've done in favor of coffee, lunch, workouts, etc. But honestly, we all do most of that stuff, if maybe not quite as glamorously. We have no idea how hard she's actually working or to what extent she's actually accomplishing useful things.

Aren't they literally just advertisements for work? They get hateclicks and boosts from the "look at these millennial bitches doing NOTHING and getting paid!" crowd, which is a plus, but the true constituency is just getting more and more applications for work to choose from - after all, a lot of people would consider light work for good pay and benefits a great deal, subconsciously or consciously. And the idea that there's a workplace full of cute girls doing girl stuff and having plenty of time to chat is going to be attractive to a lot of men, too, obviously.

Her defense of the video showing her doing nothing yet getting paid, isn't consistent with this hypothesis: Were she merely an actress, making a video which in which true nature of being employed by Blizzard is distorted, she would have said so and be free of any condemation (few would call a person lazy, just because they played a lazy person), but in her defense she never posited she made the video at the behest of anyone but herself.

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

People SKILLS are indeed what makes the world go round. Or at least what get people ahead. But not being a "people pleaser". Being good at technical skills makes you a good field slave, being good at people pleasing makes you a good house slave. The people skill that matters is getting people to follow you. That one is not feminine-coded.

This debate is basically half linguistic where 'feminine' subtly alters through a variety of different meanings whilst without making clear which is meant, best shown by the simple 'feminine = bad'. Is success naturally masculine? What about obstinacy? in the face of evident failure?

Feminine =//= Female. This is the core confusion. When Lieutenant Napoleon kowtows to his superiors it is 'feminine' in the sense that he's not being a brash dictator who attempts to trample over everyone and 'masculine' in the sense that this is the optimum social strategy to achieve his ends. IMO a Platonically 'masculine' man would be absolutely self-assured in all his acts, however wrong, and never go back on anything. This is not a recipe for success of any sort, political, military or anything else.

If you are founder. If you are middle manager the ability is to suck up. Richard Marchinco's corporate style leadership is dead.

I definitely think empathy and sympathy are basically synonymous in public consciousness, and I agree that usually when empathy is mentioned it is actually sympathy that is being called for. Really I think empathy is basically just advanced theory of mind. It's the ability to determine why someone did something the way they did it, and to connect with them through it.

I think it is one of the most vital and integral foundation blocks of the motte. It is both a necessary prerequisite for posting here and something the motte helps us build. That's why I get so annoyed when the mods jump to seeing trolls in impolitic but earnest ops.

This is kind of a shower thought finisher, but I kind of see empathy as male coded and sympathy as female coded. Something in my gut tells me that is right, but then again it might just be that I see women more regularly confuse the two because it's rare to see men mention either, so when I do see a man mention it they are more likely to have looked into it and discovered the difference.

I definitely think empathy and sympathy are basically synonymous in public consciousness, and I agree that usually when empathy is mentioned it is actually sympathy that is being called for.

In political discussion, it's usually neither empathy nor sympathy; it's a demand to turn one's rational brain off and do whatever the person demanding empathy claims is best for whoever they are demanding the empathy towards.

For sure, although I would expand that to pretty much any demand that people engage cognitive faculties.

I think there's a lot of truth to this. A couple years ago, I started mentally replacing "empathy" with "submission" whenever people called for more of the former, and it was almost always the more accurate word in those contexts.

I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all.

This is what vast majority mean by 'empathy' mean, they just aren't conscious about it.

What about theory of mind?

I'd second this. And when people accuse others of lacking empathy, what they actually mean is that the others are having empathy for the wrong thing, and they should have empathy for the right thing instead. Again, without being conscious of this. This lack of consciousness on this is a very powerful tool to use for manipulating others into submission, because it allows people who consider themselves generally decent and non-manipulative to do so.

I would say that just about everyone has limited empathy, otherwise we'd all be effective altruists spending our life savings on bed nets in Africa. The point of ethics is more or less to tell us how we should allocate our supply of empathy among various spheres of concern, with a common approach being that in most circumstances we should care less about people increasingly distant from us, but that we should make some efforts towards generalized (in the form of charitable donations, tithes, zakat, etc.) or situational (if we see someone drowning in front of us) concern for strangers.

As we each differ in our native capacities, the best results for society will come from people with too much empathy restraining themselves and not letting homeless strangers sleep in their beds, while people with too little empathy try to sometimes assist or comfort people in obvious distress. It's quite common that a friend or family member will complain to me about something I don't think is a big deal, but I'd be a bad friend or relative if I told them what I really thought.

We all go through life slightly misaligned with the world around us, and the allure of the internet is in part from our ability to find people who think exactly like we do, without all the social frictions of real-life interactions. But unless enough of us decide to start a commune somewhere, we're better off learning how to deal with being a squeaky wheel rather than dreaming about grease.

Schmittposting? /s

Schmitt's whole gig was that the key distinction was between friend and enemy. I can commiserate when one of my friends has a setback. If they argue in favour of something I believe in weakly or in a cringeworthy way, I can sort of empathize with them. Much less so if an enemy makes a weak argument or embarrasses himself.

Everyone has some kind of Schmittian impulse. Not too many people are sympathetic towards pedophiles or cartel drug fiends. I imagine many pedophiles or cartel drug fiends have or are experiencing pretty poor conditions. But who cares? They're enemies.

Edit: If they think like me then they'll probably be my friend, our beliefs will be similar and we'd probably get along.

Part 1: Da Jooz totally did it (Negro communism edition)

Prologue: David Cole Stein has a wonderful post on how conservatives do best when they 'notice': "Hey look at all the deranged homeless people screaming at you on the subway", but are limited by their own stupid tendency to also promote grand theories for why things happen: "The dems are brainwashed by Chinese communist propaganda". When you combine an observable and undeniable fact, with even a plausible but unprovable theory (and for the record I think CCP propaganda theories are psychotic), you provide people with a social license to dump it all in the trash. Some (Kevin McDonald cough) might find that a small price to pay to be considered Sherlock Holmes. Well, Motters, I'm not gonna let you get off that easy.

Thesis: Jewish elite overrepresentation in destructive cultural movements is not explained by their higher intelligence. It is also a critical factor, perhaps the critical factor in setting these off and shaping the direction these take. When Jewish elites act, they are representing the values of Jews in particular, not merely elites generally. Jews are always willing to go further than general elite opinion.

The Jewish Public vs. The Comparable Gentile Public

The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd), and that the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority. Here are the voting patterns of Whites with college degrees - at the time corresponding roughly in IQ to the average Jew, and Jews:

WHITE COLLEGE GRADUATES - NIXON - 80 - 82% ___ VS ___ JEWS - HUMPHREY - 81%

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-voting-record-in-u-s-presidential-elections

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-may-become-the-first-republican-in-60-years-to-lose-white-college-graduates/

The harmful role of Jewish Elites

  • The Abolition of freedom of association (Shelley V. Kraemer)

In 1948, The US government joined a black plaintiff and their black lawyers in suing to abolish restrictive covenants, which limited the sale of homes to Blacks. Note critically, that restrictive covenants were private agreements between private homeowners; and thereby entirely outside the scope of any plausible interpretation of the constitution. Of course, by US government I mean; Jewish solicitor general Philip Elman, four Jewish lawyers and not a single gentile lawyer. This great dose of Jewish overrepresentation was obscured on the advice of Arnold Raum (take a guess) who said:

It's bad enough that [Solicitor General Philip] Perlman's name has to be there, to have one Jew's name on it, but you have also put four more Jewish names on. That makes it look as if a bunch of Jewish lawyers in the Department of Justice put this out."

The Supreme Court sided with the US Government, and the only mechanism protecting tens of millions of Americans, including 80% of homes in Los Angeles and Chicago; from the carnage that was to follow, was rendered unenforceable. This was single most important battleground of the civil rights movement, and it was won by the enemy before people knew the war was going on.

RETRACTION NOTICE

Boy have I screwed the pooch here. As @Gdanning notes, Cohen was actually arguing for the company's ability to conduct IQ tests, not against it. He also alleges Jewish support for opposing racial quotas in Bakke v. California. I'll verify and update accordingly.

  • School segregation and the other standard civil rights cases**

Here Jewish representation tends to be more balanced, corresponding well to their representation in the American elite generally. Critically however, Jewish lawyers never appear on the anti-civil rights side of a case.

  • The murder of IQ testing (Grigg's v. Duke Power Company)**

Here again, the US government joined the black plaintiff in requesting that the Court establish the precedent that promoting based on intelligence tests would be like providing equality of opportunity "merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox." In other words, presumptively discriminatory unless you could prove otherwise.

Perceptive readers will note that by US government, I mean Lawrence M. Cohen speaking in the name of the US Chamber of Commerce.

Response to Objections:

Readers may note that all of these decisions required the cooperation of a majority gentile supreme court. This is a fair objection but I would note that SCOTUS judges are immunized from repercusions by their lifelong tenure and high status. No one was gonna turn down offering a job to any SCOTUS judge afterwards, regardless of what he did. A lawyer who forcibly integrated your neighbourhood, was a different matter. I don't doubt that there were a few non-jews in the office of the solicitor general who supported Shelley, but only the Jews had the sheer guts to pursue it.

  • -19

This one should be relatively easy to solve. What percentage of the institutionalized was black?

Why do black people of identical West African bantu descent have such different crime rates in different countries?

They don't. Unless you're talking highly selected tiny populations of foreign strivers in certain countries.

For example, Britain, home to a modest but non-negligible amount of West Indian immigrants:

Among adults, Black men were about 8.4 times more likely to be arrested for robbery compared with White men

They're playing coy over at that link, however:

In relation to knife crime, a 2018 report entitled ‘Justice Matters: Disproportionality’[footnote 11] references data collected by the Metropolitan Police Service. This work showed that in London in 2017, 50% of knife crime offenders were BAME (up from 44% in 2008). In this total, 50% were under the age of 25 and the majority (90%) were male. 50% of knife crime victims were BAME. A similar pattern emerged when examining knife crime with injury.

BAME stands for "black and middle eastern", however, middle eastern is just 15-20% of the BAME grouping, which based on that demographic data makes up 10% of London inhabitants.

I'm fairly sure the homicide numbers would be similar, as I remember looking them up and finding out they were almost identical to the American ones. It's worth noting that the document link says something about how pure conviction data are misleading, and it was clearly too much work to adjust them for demographics.

This was sarcasm, I'm sure the report writers, no doubt a committee, chose to omit the most damning statistics, and just left us with traces, such as the robbery and knife crime, as to avoid getting in trouble.

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

BAME stands for "black and middle eastern"

It actually stands for "Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic" - i.e. it is the British equivalent of POC, a term for lumping all non-white groups together. As of 2021, the British government discourages its use because the various non-white ethnic groups do not in fact like being lumped together.

Anecdotally, Jamaicans and Somalis are the black subgroups that commit most of the crime. I always think the best argument against HBD as the main explanation for crime rates is the difference between Jamaica (45 murders per 100,000) and Barbados (14), which carries over to Jamaicans and Bajans in the UK.

which carries over to Jamaicans and Bajans in the UK.

14 is still very high. Most white populations, in conditions of normality have someting like 2-4.

Also, just how 'black' are 'Bajans' ?

Because, for example, wikipedia has 'Rihanna' as an example of a afro-Barbadian. yet she's not that black.

If you look at e.g. pictures of Haitians, they're far darker. (picture linked). So what's the breakdown of ancestry of the population of Barbados?

With IQ, there is a clear pattern of lower function the more black ancestry is present. It's probably similar if you're dealing with crime.

Per the national censuses, which use local race groupings that don't include a US-style one-drop rule, both Jamaica and Barbados are 92% black, with most of the rest being mixed. This is the typical pattern for the Caribbean (including Haiti), with a majority black population who look something like Usain Bolt, with a small mixed-race elite who look like Rhianna. Looking at the pictures in the Barbados and Bridgetown wikipedia articles confirmed this.

The Caribbean-American community is mostly drawn from this mixed-race elite (because US immigration is selective) - think Eric Holder or Colin Powell. But the Bajans who stayed in Barbados or who moved to the UK before or shortly after independence (when UK immigration for Commonwealth citizens was not selective) are blacker.

Why do some large countries in the region where most African Americans originate (eg. Ghana) have markedly lower homicide rates than African Americans?

Firstly, you need to ask yourself how reliable these statistics are. Police are seen in Ghana as the 'most corrupt institution' people encounter. Were they to have incentives to hide crime, you shouldn' really trust it.

Secondly, it could very well be that in Ghana, they retain harsh practices that do not lead to the promotion of crime, such as treating boys leniently, etc.

Also, as to their 'lack' of crime : they don't see it that way. They're apparently still lynching people, and with even less premeditation than Americans used to. As in, they don't abduct the suspect from police custody, but rather kill a suspect on the spot.

than Scots Irish

Are they the same people ? The border region populations was seen as dregs of three nations. As I understand, the peasants who used to live there, with a violent culture, not very good at farming either were largely driven out by their former lords once peace prevailed.

A) The rule that homicides are a good metric for general crime because they are unlikely to be swept under the rug may only apply to Western countries. How many intrepid journalists are looking to expose underreporting in third world countries, and would anyone care?

B) Nonetheless, levels are probably substantially lower as blacks aren't necessarily gonna be soft on black criminals in a black majority country. There may be collective punishment mechanisms in play.

If the American slave population was adversely selected in the first place -- African tribes selling their own convicts, misfits and conquered people to Western slavers -- then HBD provides an explanation why the group descended from them continues to underperform.

HBD posits a partial reversion to the mean one generation after the selection event occurs. After that, there should be no further effect; the non-heritable components of the initial selection (including both shared and non-shared environmental components and test error from the selection event) will have washed out with the next generation, while the heritable component will remain forever.

Reversion to the mean is a thing regardless of HBD. What it says is that if you select on a characteristic that is partly heritable, the next generation of the selected population will be closer to the mean of the parent population than the selected population itself is. But it happens only once and it doesn't bring you all the way back.

If that's the case (and I haven't seen any evidence that African tribes were predisposed to selling convicts and misfits to slavers; I don't see what conquered people has to do with anything given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor), then we should expect other places with similar concentrations of undesirables to be similar. I'm unaware of any evidence that suggests that the crime rate in Australia is higher than that in England, and the former was specifically founded as a penal colony.

I don't see what conquered people has to do with anything given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor

It suggests, on average, that the conquered people are less fit than the conquerors.

given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor

Both World Wars are by mainstream historians thought to have been started by the side which would go on to lose. With starting a war commonly considered a sign of bellicosity and proneness to violence, one has some pretty big anecdotal evidence against the quoted line.

More comments

Might there be some lingering selection bias in the new world cohort?

What do you think was selected for or against?

Expendability / Saleability

Angered the chief / king.

Lost the conflict with your neighbors, etc.

The problem of violent crime is quite far from 1:1 of "violent" mentally ill homeless. I don't think gangbangers in the US or Sicarios in Mexico are exactly suffering from the same ailments that the homeless guy who pisses on passengers on the train is from.

Yeah they shittify places sometimes literally but if violence is exactly what you are after, the mentally ill might not be the best target.

I would be inclined to agree with the sibling comment - gangbangers, Sicarios, etc do commit lots of violence, but almost entirely towards rival gangs or drug dealers. It seems pretty rare for them to hassle ordinary people. Many such organizations have existed for long periods of time in local communities and rarely get significant pushback from those communities. Many of them even take the law into their own hands to an extent, dealing out street justice to petty thieves and nutcases when the police are slow to act.

Scott has a post arguing against this connection.

Reverse Voxsplaining: Prison and Mental Illness

What about that graph? It’s very suggestive. You see a sudden drop in the number of people in state mental hospitals. Then you see a corresponding sudden rise in the number of people in prison. It looks like there’s some sort of Law Of Conservation Of Institutionalization. Coincidence?

Yes. Absolutely. It is 100% a coincidence. Studies show that the majority of people let out of institutions during the deinstitutionalization process were not violent and that the rate of violent crime committed by the mentally ill did not change with deinstitutionalization. Even if we take the “15% of inmates are severely mentally ill” factoid at face value, that would mean that the severely mentally ill could explain at most 15%-ish of the big jump in prison population in the 1980s.

To render the argument statistically plausible it seems like you would need to both justify why the proportion of murderers who are mentally ill seems to have declined (the linked study is from Britain so you could try to see if it's different in the U.S.?) and why most of those in prison do not seem to be mentally ill according to screening surveys. Note that, though it isn't a significant part of his argument, Scott does cite the famous Rosenhan experiment which was very likely a fraud.

Associating it with "violent homeless people" specifically is more plausible. Saying it had an "extraordinary effect on crime rates" doesn't seem plausible, and that is what I was mentioning Scott's post in response to. The majority of violent crime is from career criminals. It seems very difficult to argue that deinstitutionalization was responsible for the rise in the crime rate without evidence indicating most of those additional criminals are mentally ill (and seriously enough that they would have been institutionalized).

The Supreme Court sided with the US Government, and the only mechanism protecting tens of millions of Americans, including 80% of homes in Los Angeles and Chicago; from the carnage that was to follow, was rendered unenforceable. This was single most important battleground of the civil rights movement, and it was won by the enemy before people knew the war was going on.

If housing covenants were the only thing protecting urban Americans from living in "open air sewers," then I daresay your war was lost in 1619, not in 1948.

Your overall thesis appears to be that all groups of high-IQ nonwhites are moral mutants with incompatible values with whom whites ought to interact as though they are dealing with some technologically advanced alien species rather than their fellow human beings. I can only assume that you're planning a post about Indian Brahmins somewhere down the line. Even assuming this were true, at current rates of intermarriage there won't be very many non-mixed Jews left in the US outside of the Hasidic community within a few generations. Their group identity will persist longer than that of other European immigrants, but the sort of secular Jews who were the driving force behind much of American leftism in the mid-20th century are a dying breed and will soon join the likes of the Tammany Hall Irish and what's left of the Italian-American Mafia in the dustbin of history.

Actually I think the Jewish problem is mainly socially constructed, and that the only genetic aspect to it is their high IQ. Imagine if you will, the Irish suddenly becoming 15 points smarter and a million of them migrating into the UK while obtaining a corresponding share of the Irish elite. You think the part where the key factor in Irish identity is their oppression, mostly real but sometimes fictional by brits is somehow gonna be forgotten? You think they might not sympathise and ally with every other resentful anti-British group ion the planet? Then what should Brits do?

If oppression of minority or colonized groups is the cause of their resentment, then presumably we should try not to oppress them more and to enforce as much of a 90's-style colorblind attitude as possible. We might also surreptitiously reduce coverage of past oppression in history classes, preach some form of civic nationalism and common identity, and encourage intermarriage and assimilation to ensure that old prejudices do not endure.

Manipulate housing prices in order to extract rents from all the anti-British immigrants and have the last laugh while they squabble over pronouns and shit?

The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd), and that the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority.

This part of your text is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. But is it justified?

The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd)

It is true that US homicide rates began to go up around 1965, and the civil rights movement had already been around for at least a decade by that point. But vague chronological proximity does not necessarily indicate causation. And you would need to provide some serious evidence to justify call the racial unrest of the time "a continual orgy of violence and mayhem".

the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority.

I am skeptical of the idea that Nixon's silent majority was primarily motivated by a backlash against violence related to race issues. Is there any more reason to believe this theory than to believe that, for example, Trump voters are mainly motivated by racial crime issues?

Critically however, Jewish lawyers never appear on the anti-civil rights side of a case.

I think this hints a core intuitive objection I have to the narrative you are seeking to weave here. What do we know about the non-Jewish lawyers on the pro-civil rights side of the "standard civil rights cases" you are talking about here? I would wager that some very clear pattern would emerge, which would correspond to a picture that is more along the lines of there being two broad coalitions fighting (urban vs. rural? Moldbug's Brahmins vs Optimates?), of which the Jews overwhelmingly side with one. That picture, though, no longer provides the categorical support for the "civil rights is a Jewish plan against the Gentiles" picture you are seeking to paint (though of course it is not inconsistent with it; a scheme can of course include dupes and Quislings). I would, for example, guess that to the extent non-white lawyers were involved in civil rights cases, they were also all on the pro-civil rights side; yet, most WNs tend to not ascribe enough agency to them to call civil rights a black/brown/yellow/red plot.

All being said, though, even if your thesis is true, so what? If the civil rights movement is indeed a destructive plot by triple-parens them, I can't get myself to think this is particularly immoral, given that they have a pretty solid case for retaliation/self-defense in destroying whatever it destroys. I also don't think I can't oppose it based on self-interest, because I think so far I've been a net beneficiary even taking into account all of its failings and wrong turns and local negatives.

All being said, though, even if your thesis is true, so what? If the civil rights movement is indeed a destructive plot by triple-parens them, I can't get myself to think this is particularly immoral, given that they have a pretty solid case for retaliation/self-defense in destroying whatever it destroys. I also don't think I can't oppose it based on self-interest, because I think so far I've been a net beneficiary even taking into account all of its failings and wrong turns and local negatives.

I am not on board lepidus's claims in any real way, but I have seen several conservative rabbis make points that are...similar to his. Their points have generally boiled down to something like, "Jews are so overwhelmingly irrationally afraid of white gentiles oppressing them, that they will enable any outside force to be against that force, no matter how self destructive." I first saw this point right after 9/11 when a lot of progressive Jews were on the "stop Muslim hate" train, and they would be pointing out quietly that Jews would be pretty screwed if Islam became a political force in the US. I saw some similar takes after Trump took office. But conservative rabbis represent a very small % of Jews.

Their points have generally boiled down to something like, "Jews are so overwhelmingly irrationally afraid of white gentiles oppressing them, that they will enable any outside force to be against that force, no matter how self destructive."

Probably has to do with context. Islam in America doesn't seem very attuned to the more fundamentalist preaching exported from Saudi Arabia. Cases of Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so.

Cases of Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so.

There are relatively few Muslims in the US. But quite a few Muslim terrorist incidents. And plenty of smaller incidents where Muslims and Jews are in proximity, such as NYC, though these don't seem to be tracked on a national level.

I'm seeing 15 on Wikipedia for the US, that seems rare to me. Also, what's the source on the Muslim-Jew incidents?

What do you mean, rare? The boogeyman of the left, white nationalism is at 11, if wiki is the scale we're using.

Some of the other categories contain even more islamic perps, like antisemitic, and palestininan terrorism. Not to mention islamic terrorism did by far the most victims, outweighing all other forms of terrorism combined.

Even the 2017 study, ignoring the twin elephants in the room, comes to that conclusion:

A 2017 report by The Nation Institute and the Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed a list of the terrorist incidents which occurred in the US between 2008 and 2016.[24] It found:[25]

115 far-right inspired terrorist incidents. 35% of these incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 29% of them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 79 deaths.

63 Islamist inspired terrorist incidents. 76% of these terrorist incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 13% of them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 90 deaths.

19 far-left inspired terrorist incidents. 20% of these terrorist incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 10% of them resulted in fatalities. Two of these incidents were described as "plausibly" attributed to a perpetrator with left-wing sympathies and caused 7 deaths. These are not included in the official government database.[26]

The article wiki uses as source here is confused. Its central, vehement point is that far more resources should be devoted to far-right terrorism, yet its own (and in my opinion, already cherry-picked) statistics show that despite the government's focus on islamic terrorism, it remains the greater threat. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly equalized all forms of terrorism to foil 55% (the mean of the two threats) : far-right deaths would be reduced by 24, islamic deaths would jump by 79.

Suspiciously absent from that wikipedia article are black supremacist attacks, like waukesha. And the dallas and NY police killings (quote from a perp: "I want to kill white people, especially white officers"), although mentioned in the introduction, are not in the categorized list. But I guess it's just "isolated incidents", they needed the space for a couple of anti-abortion attempted murders.

What do you mean, rare? The boogeyman of the left, white nationalism is at 11, if wiki is the scale we're using.

I mean that Wiki is listing 15 attacks in 20 years, with the clear outlier being 9/11. I didn't say anything about how rare or common white nationalist attacks were.

You said "Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so." That 'exceptionnally rare' is 100% false.

But okay. You mean then, that terrorism is rare in general. That may be true, but so are wars. And one can cause the other, as 9/11 or sarajevo '14 have shown.

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I think Moldbug's categories don't really apply well here. Republicans had generally been pro-some civil rights but drew the line at private property. Democrats hadn't been too concerned with private property, and were pretty statist, but as I noted elsewhere their version of progress circa 1918 was 'eugenics, self determination for competent races and segregation'.

There were pro-civil rights brahmins and anti-civil rights brahmins, pro-civil rights optimates and anti-civil rights optimates. New catholic elites, which don't really fall under either group, but I guess we can call them Brahmins provided we don't foget this is ahistorical were the only other group consistently allied with Jews and blacks.

Yes, obviously the blacks (not many yellows back then) play their role as stormtroopers, but no sane person imagines blacks pulling off the conquest of large chunks of metropolitan America on their own. White Catholics are an important part of the story, but at least their participation on the enemy side was temporary self interest while they integrated and a good half of them if not slightly more are now on the right side. Jews are the permanent Lieutenant and above staffing force for the permanent revolution, and it's not obvious that there are any concessions that could pacify them.

even if your thesis is true, so what? If the civil rights movement is indeed a destructive plot by triple-parens them, I can't get myself to think this is particularly immoral given that they have a pretty solid case for retaliation/self-defense in destroying whatever it destroys.

What did we ever do to them? This is the only country that let Jews in without discrimination, restricting their immigration only when Jewish revolutionaries began rampaging through eastern europe. They've made fortunes here. And now, a country that has done so much for humanity must have all it's cities turned into open air sewers because? Seriously, what have we done that justifies this?

And if what you mean is that Jews are entitled to do whatever it takes for them to feel safe even in the absence of a casus belli, why should we not feel the same way and act accordingly?

I think so far I've been a net beneficiary even taking into account all of its failings and wrong turns and local negatives.

And how is that? Furthermore, shouldn't your reaping benefits from this country engender some kind of gratitude and desire to defend it?

What did we ever do to them? This is the only country that let Jews in without discrimination, restricting their immigration only when Jewish revolutionaries began rampaging through eastern europe.

You mean like how when Harvard changed its graduation requirements to limit the number of Jewish attendants?

There's a whole (alleged if you want) history of anti-semitism in America.

Also, the relevant factor in them "rampaging through eastern europe" was their communist tendencies, not the Jewishness. This is the thing that bothers me the most, the attribution of actions to race over ideology.

And now, a country that has done so much for humanity must have all it's cities turned into open air sewers because? Seriously, what have we done that justifies this?

Oppressing non-whites, non-straights, non-cis, etc. You understand that the people who were at the receiving end of those actions are going to act against you over them, yes?

You understand that the people who were at the receiving end of those actions are going to act against you over them, yes?

Doesn't this mean that if you're White you should do everything you can to stop non-whites from getting power as they will act against you?

I mean, I don't disagree. The future of Europe will be an absolute slaughter, but it's unusual to find a Jewish rationalist who admits it.

It took me a minute to realize what tripped my alarms about your post. You seem to be an actual white nationalist at minimum (the capitalizing on "white"), and anti-semitic to boot (assuming that I'm Jewish, which is a bizarre place to jump from so anodyne an observation as "people you hurt will try to hurt you in response").

Given this, I can see why you think people who aren't white can't be trusted with power, because I sure as hell wouldn't trust you with it.

Thankfully, non-whites are not nearly as bloodthirsty as you cast them. There are no equivalent calls for enslaving white people, not in the way that was done to blacks in America. There are calls for reparations and eliminating white privilege, which are not nearly the same. Though you may disavow them, Universal culture is exported by white Westerners for the most part, and just about everyone is willing to jump onto that. I have my gripes about what they sell, but it's a fairly bloodless future.

BTW, I'm not Jewish by belief or blood. You should consider reeling in how quick you are with that sort of accusation, it gives away what kind of mindset you have.

It took me a minute to realize what tripped my alarms about your post. You seem to be an actual white nationalist at minimum (the capitalizing on "white"), and anti-semitic to boot (assuming that I'm Jewish, which is a bizarre place to jump from so anodyne an observation as "people you hurt will try to hurt you in response").

I assumed you were Jewish because every single time somebody says something even mildy critical of Jewish people you jump to their defence. You notably don't do this with White people.

I'm a White nationalist in the same way the average Kenyan is a Black nationalist. Its odd to note the capitalising of White given the capitalising of Black since the George Floyd unrest.

Given this, I can see why you think people who aren't white can't be trusted with power, because I sure as hell wouldn't trust you with it.

"You understand that the people who were at the receiving end of those actions are going to act against you over them, yes?"

Your words, not mine.

Thankfully, non-whites are not nearly as bloodthirsty as you cast them. There are no equivalent calls for enslaving white people, not in the way that was done to blacks in America. There are calls for reparations and eliminating white privilege, which are not nearly the same. Though you may disavow them, Universal culture is exported by white Westerners for the most part, and just about everyone is willing to jump onto that. I have my gripes about what they sell, but it's a fairly bloodless future.

Humans are exactly as bloodthirsty as I cast them, PoC included.

I assumed you were Jewish because every single time somebody says something even mildy critical of Jewish people you jump to their defence. You notably don't do this with White people.

This is why you should stick to addressing the things people say, and not projecting identities onto them and responding to them based on what you assume those identities to be.

You're being unnecessarily personal and antagonistic, and "you sound Jewish," in so many words, is obnoxious. Stop it.

I assumed you were Jewish because every single time somebody says something even mildy critical of Jewish people you jump to their defence. You notably don't do this with White people.

Calling white people a conscious group with shared goals and ideas is absurdly rare here, and even then, it's in a negative manner. 99% of the time, it's being done in an article being posted from elsewhere to mock here. Why would I need to call that out? That's the mainstream opinion anyways.

My motivation when doing so has nothing to do with the Jews and everything to do with what I see as unjustified assumptions/conclusions. If people post unironically here about how the Jews are doing something for racial rather than ideological reasons, I consider that bad reasoning when they don't give sufficient evidence. I do the same thing when I see conservatives do it to progressives here. But that's not because I have a terminal goal of defending Jews or progressives, I do it because I dislike bad reasoning altogether.

I'm a White nationalist in the same way the average Kenyan is a Black nationalist. Its odd to note the capitalising of White given the capitalising of Black since the George Floyd unrest.

There is a whole set of misguided and idiotic literature on why black people should refer to themselves as "Black", but they're clear on how it's a reference to the collective oppression of their race. No such justification exists for the use of "White", it's used tactically in a pro-white sense only by people who are at minimum white separatists.

But hey, maybe you're just like that and think "White" is just about your race's collective experience. But that's wrong anyways, given that a solid number of your fellows are actively involved in destroying you and what you believe in. They don't seem to have that collective experience. The same goes for "Black".

Your words, not mine.

Interesting how you jump to "it will be a bloodbath" when I didn't specify a damn thing. If you want to accuse me of saying it implicitly, I'll formally declare that I am referring to legal and non-violent actions, like demanding reparations/aid or asking white people to "check their privilege" or whatever.

Humans are exactly as bloodthirsty as I cast them, PoC included.

We're talking about America/the West, where that sort of violence is drastically rarer than the rest of the world. This isn't Pakistan where the rule of law is as tenuous as the water supply, the legitimacy of the laws banning violence are taken seriously, to the point where people come with rather serious justifications for why they should be allowed to violate it.

Boo hoo, having your access to institutions built by others limited may be unfair but it is not the worst thing in the world. Hollywood gentiles may have similar complaints but everyone just tells them to fuck off; or would if they dared voice them. Getting threatened at knifepoint by a degenerate who asks why u dared set foot in his neighbourhood and knowing that no one will come to help you but you are at the mercy of an 80IQ psychopath is.

  • -10

This is unnecessarily antagonistic.

Checking your mod notes, it looks like you actually wrote this comment before Amadan modded you for this one (assuming the system isn't lying to me and I read the notifications correctly) but you have put yourself in the difficult position of having multiple bad comments showing up in the mod queue very shortly after eating a ban.

And most of this is downstream of a post that you entitled "Da Jooz totally did it (Negro communism edition)." Like--we get it. You're so edgy! But being deliberately edgy is not really the proper vibe here.

The rest of the post (which I didn't see until post-edit, so it's possible I've missed some things) is not, like, egregiously awful, though it is somewhat evidence-light and "boo outgroup" heavy. But there is a saying about glass houses and stones that I think kind of applies, in a "don't be egregiously obnoxious" sort of way. Posting Chinese-robber type reasoning is always on shaky ground, but when you then follow that up with antagonism toward those who raise questions, this is corrosive to the conceit that we are here to test our shady thinking. I appreciate the retraction in response to the rather decisive empirical counter that was raised against you, but that, too, does not undo the other mistakes you're making more generally.

I'm not going to ban you this time, and I'm not even going to give you a topic ban, but please understand that this kind of posting is exactly why per-user topic bans are so tempting to me. At some point it's like--we get it, you think the Jews are to blame for at least a large chunk of societal ills, but you've shown yourself to be so certain of this that when you post about it, no one can even politely pretend to believe that you are in any way persuadable on the matter. I understand that this is often true of many things people post, but in the spirit of "tone-not-content" and charitable interpretation, we do our best to assume that arguments are being offered in good faith! But that faith is defeasible, and you erode it with posts like this, which in turn strips you of that protection in your other posts.

Next time, you will get a ban, and it's unlikely to be short.

Nice retreat from "We didn't do anything!" to "Actually, what we did wasn't so bad."

Also, you seem to be forgetting all the actual violence directed from people who were straight, white, cis, and/or male towards those were not, and punished for it either.

Democrats . . . version of progress circa 1918 was 'eugenics ...

Eugenics was a project of the Progressive movement, which was somewhat more associated with the Republican Party.

a country that has done so much for humanity . . . , shouldn't your reaping benefits from this country engender some kind of gratitude and desire to defend it?

Has it occurred to you that Jews and others who supported the Civil Rights Movement were in fact defending the precise principles which constitute the "so much" that the US has done for humanity?

Eugenics was a project of the Progressive movement, which was somewhat more associated with the Republican Party.

The historical record does not support this claim. The most outspoken proponents of eugenics (Davenport, Kellogg, Sanger, Wilson, Et Al) were all democrats where as the loudest opposition to the same has always come from religious conservatives. IE the sort of people that this monty python bit was inteded to mock.

The most outspoken proponents of eugenics (Davenport, Kellogg, Sanger, Wilson, Et Al) were all democrats

Were they? This says that Sanger voted Socialist, except when Al Smith got the Democratic nominee, whereupon she voted for Hoover. And later she voted for Nixon. I can't find anything re Davenport and Kellogg. And there were famous proponents of eugenics who were clearly Republicans: Teddy Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Most of the Supreme Court justices who were in the majority in Buck v. Bell were Republicans, while the one dissenter was a Democrat. The California forcible sterilization bill passed in 1909, under which something like 80% of the forced sterilizations in the US took place, was passed by a state Senate and State Assembly which were both majority Republican, and the bill was signed by a Republican governor. Clearly, eugenics was bi-partisan.

where as the loudest opposition to the same has always come from religious conservatives.

Surely Southern Democrats were well-represented among religious conservatives at the time

So by you by your own model Sanger was a socialist who voted democrat. How exactly does that support your assertion that eugenics was a primarily republican movement? Meanwhile Roosevelt and Rockefeller were both considered centrists so what you're saying is that democrats and moderate republicans both supported eugenics while the contemporary "far right" opposed it. FWIW I would actually agree with that characterization, but it is also a direct refutation of the claim you just made, so which is it?

So by you by your own model Sanger was a socialist who voted democrat.

I believe you misunderstood me. I noted that the source says she voted for 1) Socialists; 2) Hoover, a Republican; and 3) Nixon, a Republican. No evidence there that she ever voted Democratic.

How exactly does that support your assertion that eugenics was a primarily republican movement?

I didn't. I said: "Clearly, eugenics was bi-partisan."

Meanwhile Roosevelt and Rockefeller were both considered centrists so what you're saying is that democrats and moderate republicans both supported eugenics while the contemporary "far right" opposed it.

??? Where did I say anything about the far right?

No evidence there that she ever voted Democratic.

...unless we count FDR, Truman, or Kennedy, wich is the fucker of it isn't it?.

Saying that "moderate republicans supported eugenics too" doesn't actually prove your claim, nor does it disprove mine.

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Move over @HlynckaCG, It seems I am a natural Republican after all!

*Doubt*

Indeed, the strongest predictor of a religious body's stance on abortion today is their stance on eugenics at the time eugenics was a live issue(interestingly a stronger predictor than a religious body's stance on abortion at the time eugenics was a live issue).

How does the joke go?

Two Jews are sitting next to each other one day. One of them sees that the other is reading a Nazi newspaper. "Why are you reading that? Don't you know they hate us!"

The other responds, "Friend, if I read our papers, they tell us that our people are being harassed and persecuted. If I read a Nazi paper, they tell me that we are in control of the world!"

The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd), and that the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority.

Immediately? Is that immediately after the Montgomery Bus Boycott got started at the end of 1955? Or immediately after the Little Rock desegregation protests in 1957? Immediately after the sit-ins that lasted, in various places, from 1958 to 1962? Immediately after the 1961 Freedom Rides? The Ole Miss riot? The Birmingham campaign? King's march on Washington? Freedom Summer 1964? The passage of the Civil Rights Act? Passage of the Voting Rights Act? Up until 1964 most of the notable riots of the Civil Rights Movement were instigated by whites. Even when the first significant urban disturbances happened in 1964 they didn't result in conservatives ascending to the presidency. By the time of the first serious rioting in 1967 and 1968 the first wave of the Civil Rights Movement i.e. what everyone thinks of when they think of the Civil Rights Movement was pretty much over. Dr. King wasn't even alive during the Long Hot Summer of 1968. Your concept of immediacy is sorely lacking, or at least at odds with any reasonable definition of the term.

Note critically, that restrictive covenants were private agreements between private homeowners; and thereby entirely outside the scope of any plausible interpretation of the constitution.

Well, no, that wasn't the ruling. The ruling was that the court couldn't enforce the contract because doing so would constitute state action under the 14th Amendment. The idea of contracts being technically valid but ultimately unenforceable isn't exactly novel in law; for example, a court wouldn't enforce a contract between two minors.

Here again, the US government joined the black plaintiff in requesting that the Court establish the precedent that promoting based on intelligence tests would be like providing equality of opportunity "merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox." In other words, presumptively discriminatory unless you could prove otherwise.

The point of Griggs wasn't so much IQ testing as it was that you can't enforce arbitrary standards in a transparent attempt to technically comply with the law while not actually complying with it. No one seriously thought that a Southern company that had simply barred blacks from certain positions outright just a few years prior and decided to admit them only if they passed education or testing requirements that had no bearing on the actual job but happened to disproportionately disadvantage blacks was making a good faith attempt to comply with the civil rights act. It's as if a black-owned company decided to screen employees based on knowledge of BET programming and rappers you've never heard of (and no, you can't study for it, because the kind of rap black people in the projects listen to isn't the same kind of rap that gets talked about much in mainstream publications).

The 1964 civil rights act, or something else in the early 60s was the tipping point.

Here's murder:

https://cdn.mises.org/homicide.png

Here's violent crime generally:

https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/violent-crime-rate.jpg

And the Ghetto riots start in 1964.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_riots_(1964%E2%80%931969)

The first wave of the Baby Boom turned 18 in 1964.

By 1969 there's also a doubling in the burglary rate which climbs continually since 1960. I can't quickly find a comparison point to the 1950s.

https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

In 1948, The US government joined a black plaintiff and their black lawyers in suing

Nope. Although once the cases reached the Supreme Court, the US govt filed an amicus brief, as is often the case, the lawsuits (there were two companion cases) were each filed by neighbors seeking to prevent the sale of a home to a black guy: "On October 9, 1945, respondents, as owners of other property subject to the terms of the restrictive covenant, brought suit in the Circuit Court of the city of St. Louis praying that petitioners Shelley be restrained from taking possession of the property" 341 US 1, 6. "The second of the cases under consideration comes to this Court from the Supreme Court of Michigan. The circumstances presented do not differ materially from the Missouri case. . . . By deed dated November 30, 1944. petitioners, who were found by the trial court to be Negroes, acquired title to the property and thereupon entered into its occupancy. On January 30, 1945, respondents, as owners of property subject to the terms of the restrictive agreement, brought suit against petitioners in the Circuit Court of Wayne County. After a hearing, the court entered a decree directing petitioners to move from the property within ninety days." 341 US 1, 7.

Of course, by US government I mean; Jewish solicitor general Philip Elman, four Jewish lawyers and not a single gentile lawyer.

Perlman, not Elman. And, according to the Supreme Court opinion, "With him on the brief was Attorney General Clark," - that would be Tom Clark, who does not appear to be Jewish.

Note critically, that restrictive covenants were private agreements between private homeowners

Do you know what else was a private agreement? The agreement between the seller, a white guy, and the buyer, a black guy.

Critically however, Jewish lawyers never appear on the anti-civil rights side of a case.

You mention Griggs later. In that case, "Lawrence M. Cohen argued the cause for the Chamber of Commerce of the United States as amicus curiae urging affirmance [i.e., in favor of Duke Power]".

Then there is the Bakke case, in which "Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance [i.e., in favor of Bakke] were filed by . . . Abraham S. Goldstein, Nathan Z. Dershowitz, Arthur J. Gajarsa, Thaddeus L. Kowalski, Anthony J. Fornelli, Howard L. Greenberger, Samuel Rabinove, Themis N. Anastos, Julian E. Kulas, and Alan M. Dershowitz for the American Jewish Committee et al.; . . . by Philip B. Kurland, Daniel D. Polsby, Larry M. Lavinsky, Arnold Forster, Dennis Rapps, Anthony J. Fornelli, Leonard Greenwald, and David I. Ashe for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith et al.; . . . [and] by Benjamin Vinar and David I. Caplan for the Queens Jewish Community Council et al."

The murder of IQ testing (Grigg's v. Duke Power Company)** ... Here again, the US government joined the black plaintiff in requesting that the Court establish the precedent that promoting based on intelligence tests would be like providing equality of opportunity "merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox." In other words, presumptively discriminatory unless you could prove otherwise.

Nope. Rather the Court simply held that "Nothing in the Act precludes the use of testing or measuring procedures; obviously they are useful. What Congress has forbidden is giving these devices and mechanisms controlling force unless they are demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance." 401 US 424, 436. And note that that is an interpretation of an act of Congress; if Congress did not like that interpretation, it was free to change the law.

Note also that, until the day that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect, "the Company openly discriminated on the basis of race in the hiring and assigning of employees at its Dan River plant. The plant was organized into five operating departments: (1) Labor, (2) Coal Handling, (3) Operations, (4) Maintenance, and (5) Laboratory and Test. Negroes were employed only in the Labor Department where the highest paying jobs paid less than the lowest paying jobs in the other four "operating" departments in which only whites were employed.' Then, on the very day that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect, the company added the IQ test requirement. 401 US 424, 427-428. The Supreme Court is not composed of morons.

Ok, I got the Cohen part wrong and this counts as a big dent on my credibility, and my argument. Sincere thanks! It's pretty blatant too, so I don't exactly have much to say for myself. I'll edit the post to include a partial retraction.

For interested readers: https://www.supremecourt.gov/pdfs/transcripts/1970/70-124_12-14-1970.pdf

I'll also check out the Bakke case, and post on it shortly.

Thanks. And please do take a hammer to any of my posts at any time.

You are missing one really critical thing - why is the situation so? Why the jewish elite in US are so left wing? What follows? How can we flip them on the right? Why is it impossible to flip them ... etc etc.

Throwing selected facts while being vague is a left tactic of character assassination. Because if there is nothing concrete it is impossible to refute or disprove.

I am not saying that generally speaking part of a state elite to not have their interests aligned with state's is outlandish theory. Just be more specific.

You can even I guess make a theory that civil rights era legislation was a mistake. There are enough examples in history that show that when wasp-s lose or loosen the reigns of power, the states develop suboptimally. And the US cost disease and some other social ailments do pick up in the 70s.

I think there’s history as well, going back to the Bible, basically everyone at some point tried to kill them. So it kinda makes sense that Jews would try to do-opt or join leftist movements under th3 promises of protection. Because of this history, bioleninism would work on them. Being loyal to a regime that promises them safety would be attractive.

I don't know if "bioleninism" is applicable here, though, given things like the reputed high IQ of Ashkenazim and such. I mean, yeah, those ones gotta be careful about who they marry, but still.

Jewish elites are very left wing because they're pretty much all highly educated, urbanized, and religiously unobservant, and disproportionately from culturally liberal locales.

I suspect WASPs from New York City who are highly educated and go to church no more than twice a year have very similar ideological views.

Throwing selected facts while being vague is a left tactic of character assassination. Because if there is nothing concrete it is impossible to refute or disprove.

Well, I think I was pretty specific. Specific enough for Gdanning to take a sledgehammer to my work. I don't really understand the rationalist tendency to demand an explanation for a phenomenon before it's existence is acknowledged. It reminds me of the old joke that has a Frenchman saying: "It works in practice, but does it work in theory?" Identifying a group as being the key actor at the most critical points which brought about the destruction of your system seems valuable in and of itself. Ideally, only then should speculation as to motives emerge, otherwise a good story might paper over faulty facts.

Anyway my own position is that recruitment of a considerable percentage of Jews to the right is basically impossible, and risks repeating the NeoCon cycle by which they become gatekeepers within the right, and purge it of it's genuine members. Unlike some other commenters, I'm skeptical of the appropriateness of Anti-semitic discourse given that Jews who hate Western civilization are pretty open about it anyway and can be targeted for their actions instead of their identity and why would we alienate the 10 - 20% who are on our side?

At the same time I think not restricting Jewish permanent immigration earlier was a terrible mistake. For the record, so was turning back fleeing Jews. I don't understand why the only options ever presented are heartlesness or cultural suicide.

In addition, Jewish political donations today are considerable and tend towards socially liberal or pro-Israel causes. This is in addition to their massive structural influence throughout media and the world economy.

See my comment ages ago: https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/37000?context=8#context

Who were the biggest individual political donors to Biden in 2020? Mr Sussman, Mr Simons, Ms Simon make up the top 3. All three are Jewish (Simons is the multi-billionaire founder of Renaissance capital, Sussman founded another finance company and and Simon is a real estate heiress).

Other notable spenders in the election were Bloomberg and Steyer, who ran failed electoral campaigns of their own. Steyer is half-Jewish. Bloomberg is Jewish. On the Republican side we have 'kingmaker' Sheldon Adelson, who was the largest Trump donor in 2016 and probably 2020. Jewish. We've got Uihlein, Griffin, Mellon, Ricketts & Eyechaner non-Jewish. Dustin Moskovitz, Jewish and pro-Democratic. Paul Singer, Jewish (he supported Republicans but also tried to get them to support LGBT). And then there's Soros whose exact donation figures are hard to discern due to it mostly being dodgy websites that discuss it, though probably very large if not the highest of all. Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions for election offices, which is vaguely political. I can't believe it doesn't buy influence, especially in conditions where the format and methods used were in a state of flux due to COVID.

I observe a general trend where extremely rich Jews support Democrats and LGBT - their fortunes mostly from finance or tech. There's Adelson who's on the other side of course (Adelson was most interested in union-busting, marijuana prohibition and pro-Israel action). In contrast, we have gentiles who usually support Republicans and are fairly right-wing. This is from reading their wikipedia blurbs. Of the twelve 2020 megadonors CNN described as 'white', 7 are Jewish. 6.5 depending on how you class Steyer.

There's also such a thing as the 'Adelson primary'! Basically the top Republican candidates compete to see who can be more pro-Israel in foreign policy so Adelson will give them tens of millions of dollars. It's pretty repulsive, even though it looks legal. With stuff like this going on in broad daylight, who needs Scott's Dark Money? The prospect of offending Adelson by some incredibly minor slight gets these high-and-mighty Republicans to bow and scrape.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190207130641/https://news.yahoo.com/millions-at-stake-the-adelson-primary-is-neck-125553624.html

The behind-the-scenes wooing of the Adelsons has been underway for months — a graphic testament to the outside influence that one or two fabulously wealthy donors can have on the presidential race. According to an account first reported by National Review, Jeb Bush initially fell out of Sheldon Adelson’s favor after one of his foreign policy advisers, former Secretary of State James Baker, spoke at an event sponsored by J Street, an American Jewish “pro-peace” group that supports Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The appearance prompted the casino magnate to send word that the move cost the former Florida governor “a lot of money,” while associates of Adelson were quoted as saying that Bush was “dead to him.”

Bush scrambled to make amends. One top GOP donor who is close to the Adelsons told Yahoo News that he quickly got a phone call from Bush distancing himself from Baker. Bush “told me that he [Baker] was just on a list and that he’s never called him for any advice,” said the donor, who, like most others interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified publicly. The donor, at Bush’s request, then passed this along to Adelson. It was “helpful,” the donor said, in mollifying Adelson.

And consider people like Pompeo (then US secretary of state) and their tendancy to go on weird tangents about Israel. It's likely that they're selected for high office precisely because they love Israel (or will at least say and act like they do), by politicians who want to look like they love Israel. How else would you get a Secretary of State who says things like this?

"There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do."

Or Nancy Pelosi:

"If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are"

Their political prospects are surely linked to how pro-Israeli they are, this is the language of sucking up to the boss.

Once again, some apparent white nationalist has noticed that lots of elite are left-wing and assumed that's because they're Jewish rather than because the elite are like that.

Jewish elites are more left wing than other elites in large part because the factors that reduce left-wing ness among other elites are much less common among Jews- strict religiosity and rural connections are both less common among Jews in general. In particular among Jewish elites, the nature of strict Jewish religiosity suppresses the likelihood of being in the elite in a way it doesn't for Christians, which probably has an additional factor shifting Jewish elites towards the left.

I live in one of the least Jewish (historically or now) countries in the Western world. Jews have had remarkably little influence compared to most other countries, and what influential Jews there have been in Finland have often tended to be right-wingers (such as current MP Ben Zyskowicz, just recently attacked while campaigning for the upcoming election, who notably was anti-Soviet in the 70s when even most Finnish right-wingers would hold their tongue on this subject).

Despite this, Finland has had an armed socialist revolutionary attempt in 1918, one of the strongest Communist Parties in Western Europe during the Cold War era, a very active and influential feminist movement, a flourishing local pornographic industry, an active banking sector full of various speculation and follies etc., just to mention some things were antisemites often blame Jews, and just Jews, for social developments they see as malignant. In none of these have Jews had been particularly important - for instance, I've been able to find just one Jewish member of any influence in the whole history of the Communist Party of Finland, a Central Committee member in 1980s when the party had already split and its influence was fading fast. These institutions have, in great majority, been led and staffed by gentile Finns.

All of this leads me to believe that whatever perceived Jewish participation there is in these institutions in other countries is mostly just a particular niche in institutions that would exist anyway being filled by Jews in numbers greater than what per capita rates would suggest, for whatever reason. However, Jews or not, these still would exist, should the social conditions be such that there's room for them to exist.

I don't like the idea of the elite consensus being an emergent property of being elite without it being taken into account what shapes these emergent properties.

As an example, I think it makes sense from an elite perspective to be, to make a long story short, 'pro-Heritage Foundation'. If you own a lot of the economy it makes sense you want 'line' to go up. Simple.

But there are also cases where this doesn't make as much sense. For example, there is nothing self evident about wanting to tear down the old structures or make drastic changes to the order of society. Why would an elite, that is already on top, want to do such a thing? It makes no sense. Unless, of course, the 'elite' sees themselves as an outsider to those structures. Which was the case for the new elite of jews and Catholics that started making up significant portions of the elite in America from 1930's onwards.

The balance of the elite shifted from what it was due to this influx of outsider elites who had different incentives from the old elite of, what was mostly, Liberal Protestants. This led to the many debates and intellectual clashes that made up the culture war of old. Where the 'old guard' stood behind the old structures whilst the new elite was tearing them down and building new ones out of the rubble. The one I'm familiar with, on race, is highly illustrative of this. From Boas and his fraudulent anthropology, that is the bedrock of modern American anthropology. Which helped facilitate the landscape that pushed men like Carleton Coon away. To Gould and his alternative timeline of evolutionary biology and what would later be recognized as completely fraudulent biology. Contrasted with Wilson and his fights against Gould and Lewontin and I think you have, at least in a specific area, a good illustrative example of what was going on at every single level of academia where anyone was putting up a fight against the new elite. And whilst the ratio of old vs new, WASP vs jew, was still balanced enough that you could have an explicit culture war at the elite level, the ratio kept skewing further and further 'new'. Giving us what we have today.

Another illustrative example would be the drastic change at the ACLU. Which I assume most are familiar with.

This wasn't an emergent change that happened naturally because elites are how they are because they are elites. There was a stark change in the demographics of Americas elite. New faces. New races. And the drastic change is not just correlated with this new ethnic makeup and overrepresentation of jews but also corroborated by specific historical examples where these jews ousted the old to make way for a new ideology that better suited their being.

It's hard to write in support of the WASP elite since it, along with the white American middle class, is finally getting what they've had coming for a long time now. And though it may be the fault of the WASP to have ever let the new elite in, ultimately the real driving force behind the change was the new elite.

I think there's a great segment from the linked interview with E.O. Wilson that illustrates the failure of the old mindset:

We had a meeting to take the final vote on Lewontin at Harvard, and a group of the older professors said they were worried about reports of his behavior at Chicago—that he might be disruptive or might have gotten away from genetics, and so would not be the right sort of person to be at Harvard. I made the speech I will regret for the rest of my life: I said we should never accept or reject someone because of their political views. I felt so good about myself making that political speech!

Then I feel like you need to properly engage with the issues of Boas's methodology. The primary one being that his thesis rests on him comparing the faces of children with the faces of their parents to conclude that they are not similar. I had thought most people knew that the faces of children change with age. Sometimes referred to as 'growth'. And that, as detailed in the linked article, the dominant force for all such traits, on closer review, was genetic. Leading to the reason why it is possible to tell the geographical ancestry with of a skeleton with "90% accuracy" from skull alone. And why children take after their parents in one way or another.

The history you bring up has little to do with the point being highlighted in my writeup. The book was review bombed because the climate of anthropology had drastically changed. Being swept up in the Civil Rights culture war where, as you point out, Coon found himself on the side of segregationists.

Coon wrote the book in 1962 after having resigned as president of the AAPA. Coon resigned because a group of anthropologists had pressured him to defame a book that, upon closer inspection, Coon deduced none of them had even read, bar one. It was pure culture war. And the two sides were the classical scientific racists going up against the theories of Boas.

Though it's not important to my main point, since it's not claimed that every single 'member' of the 'new' elite is jewish, nor that every single 'member' of the 'old' is gentile, the biggest opponent of Coon at the time was a student of Boas, Ashley Montagu, real name Israel Ehrenberg.

Doesn't really sound like someone advancing "Jewish interests".

Who are you quoting? Though this is mostly unrelated to what I've been talking about, I'd fall back on Kevin MacDonald and his theory for the specific nature of Boas and his motivations. But to be clear, I made no mention of "Jewish interests" in my original writeup. Which pertained to the new elite vs the old elite, and the difference in incentives between them that could explain the nature of differing emergent elite consensus.

If you have points to make on what "Jewish interests" are and who is advancing them vs who is not then I think you need to flesh that out in more detail beforehand.

Yeah you're right. the ACLU has always been aggressively jewish. I felt the difference was that back then it had to play by old structure rules to get what it wanted with the Civil Rights stuff. Compared to now when it doesn't need to bother with such games. But I think that historical narrative is born more out of mythology than reality.

The early ACLU was a support organization for communist revolution in America. They may have dropped this once the Soviets shook hands with the Nazis, but they seem to have had few qualms about the whole mass murder part. Then again, I'm not sure how Jewish it was back then, so Jews might have actually improved it. This article mentions mainly gentiles.

https://reason.com/2017/12/14/communist-dissonance/

Once again, some apparent white nationalist has noticed that lots of elite are left-wing and assumed that's because they're Jewish rather than because the elite are like that.

a) I'm actually not cold-hearted enough to be a white nationalist. I'm more of a non-central white supremacist.

b) If you know the elites were only mildly left-wing but Jews were always far-left, and you know that the elite are far more leftwing but Jews remain the most left-wing portion of the White elite, how the hell do you get to 'Jews are only left wing because they are elite?' Which way does time go again?

Like your prior posts about Chinese people, this amounts to you presenting a few anecdotes to make an argument so weak that it borders on incoherence. You seem to to saying a few cases where Jews were lawyers in supposedly important cases is proof of some sort of phenomenon, but what even is that phenomenon? Whatever it is, how could this incredibly meager evidence prove it, and shouldn't there be much better evidence available which would result in a more useful discussion?

Is the phenomenon that you are trying to prove that American Jewish people are more left-wing than the general public even when you control for "elite" status? Or more specifically, that they are more aligned with the sort of racial politics popular among the left in the U.S., perhaps because they were allied when discrimination against Jewish people was widespread and it became culturally self-perpetuating? Then why try to prove this with some random anecdotes about Jewish lawyers and support for Nixon rather than much stronger and more direct evidence like public opinion polls asking about those issues? And why treat "Jewish people are more left-wing" as some novel phenomenon you have to guess at from scratch, rather than demographic differences in politics being a well-known phenomenon that pollsters gather data on all the time? (Incidentally, left-wing "privilege" discourse and the assumption that differences in outcome reflect discrimination carries some unintended implications about Jewish success and arguably has similarities with some of the resentment that fueled historical anti-Jewish discrimination, not to mention specifics like Harvard admissions policies. A survey asking equality vs. equity questions might get some interesting results by seeing how much difference it makes to apply the same logic to Jewish people as part of the survey.)

Alternatively, is the proposed phenomenon something more specific or controversial than Jewish people having different political demographics for whatever reason? Are we talking about genetic differences, and if so what kind? E.g. if you propose Jewish people are genetically higher in Openness to Experience which got them allied with the left historically, wouldn't you again be better off with surveys rather than legal anecdotes? Are we talking about Jewish people (or some elite subset of them) getting secret nightly marching orders from the Elders of Zion, and if so shouldn't leaking or intercepting those orders be much better evidence? Are you even consciously thinking about the specifics of the phenomenon you are proposing, or are you just grouping together Jewish people as a unit and treating them as you would an individual? "I don't like George because look at these 3 cases of him doing something I dislike." might be a compelling argument about an individual, but when talking about groups of millions of people much better evidence is available and is required to determine anything meaningful.

Is the phenomenon that you are trying to prove that American Jewish people are more left-wing than the general public even when you control for "elite" status?

Yes. And that this difference is enough to fundamentally alter the direction of a nation, towards what I consider terrible outcomes. There is one qualifier, which I'll get to later if I continue this series, and it's that labels can mean fundamentally different things under different people. Early Progressives may have shared the statism of modern progressives, but their vision of progress included 'sterilize the incompetent to improve our gene pool', 'let's resegregate the government' and 'we must preserve the white race' and 'self-determination but only for functional peoples, others need colonialism'.

If your analysis of Stalin and Beria vs. Gorbachev and Chernenko, misses the part where Stalin and Beria were Georgians ruling over Russians and Gorbachev and Chernenko were Russians ruling over mainly Russians, and confines itself to formal ideological labels, it's arguably worse than useless. Groups that understand the tenuous nature of their power are gonna pursue their goals with far greater brutality and indifference to suffering.

I recommend David Mamet’s book “The Secret Knowledge” on how he extracted himself from progressivism (before it got super-weird, to his credit), and why he identifies socialist collectivism with the form of social justice preached in liberal synagogues (those which don’t believe the Torah is reliably historical beyond one of the captivities). It’s only one chapter, but it’s burned into my mind like Goldstein’s book excerpt in 1984.

I recommend it in general, in addition to recommending it to understand the Jewish socialism angle; Mamet’s “The Edge” starring Hopkins and Baldwin is one of the most perfect films of all time, and he carries over the wit and wordiness which made his name in the first place. He’s the non-liberal Aaron Sorkin.

Interesting. I had no idea David Mamet was behind that movie The Edge. Interesting. That movie is kind of a "Hatchet" (remember that book?) for adults.

He has a background as a playwright which makes the outdoorsiness of that film an unusual fit for his repertoire, I would think.

You think this is going make a dent in his antisemitism?

Nah. Once someone’s taken that pill, they’ll not vomit it up without divine intervention.

So are these secular jews or religious jews?


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