site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Remember the big energy crisis that Europe was supposed to be doomed with for years to come? Yeah, it's pretty much gone. Worth pointing out two things.

First, natural gas demand has been much weaker than anticipated since China is weaker. Indeed, there is now a surplus of gas in the world market.Some people claim that "last winter we got lucky", but this doesn't explain how gas storage is at historically high levels. Germany, Europe's biggest gas consumer, has an excellent position going into the autumn.

Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.There's also a structural trend of rapidly growing renewable energy, which means that even as gas prices return to historical norms, it is unlikely that consumption will stay the same. The shift now underway to renewable and clean energy (e.g. nuclear) is permanent. Russia had its chance at energy blackmail and it turned out it was a dud.

I think there are a couple of conclusions to draw from this. The most important one is that scaremongering and hysteria rarely pays to listen to. We can broaden this to a discussion about climate change or even immigration. Sure, there will be issues, but the doomsters on both issues were proven wrong historically. So were the doomsters on Europe's supposedly "permanent energy crisis" thesis.Then why do people persist by wallowing in fear? I don't have a clear answer but perhaps there are evolutionary adaptions that were beneficial to those who were erring on the side of caution?

Another important takeaway for me is once a crisis gets going you should never underestimate humanity's capacity for adaption and change. The system we inhabit may look brittle, but it's probably a lot more sturdy than we give it credit for. Some of us still remember the panicked predictions about the food supply chains breaking down when Covid hit, and plenty people stocked up on tons of canned food, often for no good reason. Some even talked of famine.

Perhaps being the optimist just isn't socially profitable. You're taken more seriously by being a "deeply concerned" pessimist. If this is true, then social incentives will be skewed to having the bad take. People who will be aware of this will probably draw the right conclusions in times when most other folks are losing their minds in fear.

So why were the energy future markets so wrong? Is it hard to short that market, is the market not efficient for some other reason, or were we actually just very lucky? Is that luck just that we're more adaptable than we thought?

One important historical factor here is that perceived national security interests almost always trump short-term economic concerns. A lot of people loved to trumpet something akin to "global trade is too important, major wars will never happen" or that Europe would be forced to capitulate. In the end, though, Russia's King Gas had as much staying power as the South's King Cotton.

This is a ridiculous stance to take, not really that far removed from 'you survived the last round, therefore you should continue to play Russian Roulette'. No less ridiculous because European governments went to unprecedented lengths to shield households from energy price increases, instead choosing to borrow money to subsidize energy imports and, when they weren't enough, putting the squeeze on heavy industry.

Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.

None of which matters - you need electricity to flow all the time. Of course electricity demand is low right now - it's 20 degrees outside and the sun doesn't set until nine pm. Renewables are nice to have to supplement the grid, but that's all they do. The fact is that the diminishing returns on building additional wind-solar capacity increase the more you have of it, because you're getting more energy on days like today (when you don't need it) and nearly nothing on days when you actually want it.

I guess this reinforces something like "seasonal industry", where you can scale your production up and down with the power price. Might take a decade to adapt to this.

The thing is that this doesn't really work that well either. Heavy industry is big on capital costs - machinery and the like. It simply doesn't make economic sense to put these machines or factories in countries that only have the energy supply to run them 50% of the time. In addition some heavy industry really doesn't like being turned off. A blast furnace, for example, basically runs 24 hours a day, and can never be turned off or allowed to cool - which would basically turn it into a vast lump of iron. Even leaving these aside, European manufacturing cannot compete if it runs at 50% capacity.

The one big problem with looking at prices by themselves is that they're a function of demand AND supply.

And so when you see a plunge in price, it's worth trying to notice if it is due to an increasing abundance of something, or a sudden drop in the demand for the thing. And why the demand might decrease.

And the big thing I notice is that European Manufacturing is decreasing in relative and absolute terms.

So it seems like a completely plausible interpretation for an overall decrease in energy prices is that manufacturers are shutting down and less stuff is being produced and thus there's less demand for energy inputs... even if the amount of available energy remains relatively constant.

Pretty similar to how gas prices fell hard in 2020 BECAUSE FEWER PEOPLE WERE DRIVING CARS.

So if you completely ignored anything else that happened that year, and just tracked the gas prices, you'd say "hah, anyone thinking we were in an energy crisis are stupid!"

But anyone actually living through 2020 would note that they couldn't really enjoy the low gas prices because they were literally unable to work or vacation or do various things they would normally buy gas for.

Economic activity being reduced is generally a bad thing even if it means we see energy surpluses.

I strongly suspect we're seeing a similar impact here, which will shake out over the next year or so.

Also, you might notice that the price of Bud Light is at all-time lows too but it sure ain't because we've made breakthroughs in light beer productivity.

Finland, and probably by this virtue the whole of Northern Europe, are of course helped by Olkiluoto III reactor coming on line, briefly flipping prices to negative.

A lot of posts in this subthread are trying "yeah, but..." the energy crisis predictions turning out to be negative by referring to Germany and, again and again, Germany is not the whole of Europe. European countries have different energy policies, and Germany being dumb doesn't cancel out the other countries.

Much of the energy crisis doomstering was basically pro-Russian coping. "Yeah, Russian victory is just about the corner, weak puny Euros experience a bit of a cold winter and will instantly stop supporting Europe! Europe CANNOT FUNCTION without Russian energy!" The cold winter didn't happen, but even if it had, there's no evidence that it would have done much to affect Euro support to Ukraine anyway.

Germany is arguably the most important nation in the EU and one of the most important industrial hubs on the planet; the planet where all the post-industrial comfort and smugness ultimately rely on someone, somewhere, working in industry. I have never doubted, personally, that Germans will persist both in their self-sabotaging energy policies and in supporting Ukraine, nor that they will have their energy-intensive sectors wrecked, their companies running to the US.

Congrats on the reactor.

Yes, most important, but by no means all of Europe, and arguably its internal power vis-a-vis EU affairs is waning continuously. As such its hardly prudent to talk about all of EU when one wants to talk about Germany.

Remember the big energy crisis that Europe was supposed to be doomed with for years to come? Yeah, it's pretty much gone.

I work for a European energy company and I disagree with this statement. First of all, energy prices are still incredibly high in comparison to what they used to be. Not just gas, but electricity is still around 150% more expensive as it was before the crisis.

Furthermore, and I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere before, it's all hanging by a thread. A few weeks ago I modeled European Gas flows, and if somebody (Russia?) were to blow up the Norwegian pipeline that's supplying Europe with gas, we'd be done. Our gas storage would be empty in roughly two months and then we'd have the worst energy crisis imaginable. There simply aren't enough LNG tankers to make up for that. Furthermore, if the Chinese start to compete for LNG in a more serious way, driving up LNG prices, that's also trouble. Europe is utterly reliant on energy imports because it has declined the chance to become more independent with nuclear power. We don't have that much uranium, but it's not that expensive, and breeding reactors are a thing, so if we had wanted some independence, we could have had it.

A further factor in all of this, which is why I don't see energy prices decreasing a lot further, is the frankly insane Co2 pricing in the EU. A ton of CO2 is currently roughly 90$, and producing a MWh of energy with coal (which we are currently doing a lot) generates around 0.8 tons of CO2, meaning that emission pricing alone does not allow for even halfway competitive power prices as long as coal is part of the mix even if the coal and the plants were free.

Sure, the EU could massively subsidize industry with the money they are making from that, but they don't because they're wasting it on expensive "renewables", and so we're getting increasingly left behind. It's a very strange, sad kind of suicide, really.

I apologize if this comes across overly emotional, but the level at which I detest our European elites simply cannot be put into language. What an absurd, stupid clown-show.

What is true is that Germany is a highly unequal society with almost no social mobility

On what do you base this? Gini index seems fine.

Germany's wealth inequality, as opposed to income inequality, is very high.

One thing I've heard about Germany and the Netherlands is that the extractive taxation and regulation makes it very difficult for a middle class person to get rich. So the wealthy are composed of heirs. (Although, to be fair, this doesn't explain why French wealth inequality appears to be low).

If we were to measure generational wealth inequality I'm certain that Germany would look awful compared to more dynamic countries like the U.S. where it's quite easy for a normal person to become moderately wealthy.

Although, to be fair, this doesn't explain why French wealth inequality appears to be low

France created a parallel bureaucratic elite of people who don't make a lot of money but who have a huge amount of 'status' in French society (and who monopolize places on the prep school - grandes ecoles - senior bureaucrat pipeline (funded by the state)). They might not technically be 'rich', but pure wealth in France means less than it does in the Anglosphere. Everything runs on patronage, money is often less important than power, things like the Academie Francaise and certain senior intellectual positions are arguably more coveted than senior jobs in finance or in the management of large corporations. It's the last Western culture that has preserved a major tradition of 'public intellectuals' with actual influence.

Interesting. Might we assume that these positions also come with large apartments in central Paris, personal drivers, and other things that are not counted as "wealth" but act in similar ways? I think I remember hearing about Jacques Chirac hosting over-the-top culinary events at taxpayer expense. But I'm not sure that kind of largess would extend to mere academics and functionaries.

For what it's worth, when I last saw this, the gap had grown immensely in the last 10 or 15 years. It was quite surprising, as I haven't really noticed it in German society (where I live, but I'm in a rich city).

Although I think I saw income inequality. The hope would be that it's somewhat reversible, as I think (too much) inequality is bad for a society. OTOH, I pay quite a lot in taxes already, so it's not too clear to me how thing will improve. Higher minimum wage / whatever Harz-4 is called now?

High property taxes on large central city apartments would be one way to drive down wealth inequality, as that is one thing which all wealthy people want that they can't easily hide.

I'd also propose the following for inheritance taxes: The government gets 1 "share" of your inheritance. For example, if you have 1 heir, the government would get half. If you have 2 heirs, the government would get one third. With 10 heirs, they would get 1/11th. Although this proposal would possibly lower overall inheritance taxes, it would also incentive the rapid dissolution of large fortunes. Wealthy families used to have more children than now. This is one factor in increasing wealth inequality.

It's also worth pointing out that ideas to reduce inequality without reducing overall quality of life probably won't work. Wealth inequality almost always goes up except for in times of major disaster (Great Depression, WWII, Communist revolution, etc...).

What definitely doesn't work is high income and business taxes. They merely ensure that the existing elite is not challenged by upstarts, although it might narrow the gap between middle and low. When talking about inequality, it is the 0.1% that is the largest driver of distortions. They need to be challenged directly. Instead what we get is insane taxes and regulation on a small business whose owner makes $500,000/year.

While I'm not sure your exact proposal is the way, I do think inheritance taxes are both a good way to reduce inequality, and are also, honestly, democratic (even playing field). That said, they do go against human nature to give something to your kids, so I think you need to be careful. (Yes, I know trusts are a standard way to work around them; it seems like if this is known, a counter-play should be possible). I say this as someone intending to leave something (but not too much :D) to his kids.

Agreement on the expensive real estate. Also, especially anything more than a single home should be hit fairly hard, IMO.

I'd also propose the following for inheritance taxes: The government gets 1 "share" of your inheritance. For example, if you have 1 heir, the government would get half. If you have 2 heirs, the government would get one third. With 10 heirs, they would get 1/11th. Although this proposal would possibly lower overall inheritance taxes, it would also incentive the rapid dissolution of large fortunes. Wealthy families used to have more children than now. This is one factor in increasing wealth inequality.

This is an interesting idea that would also have some eugenic effects. I have often wondered how to incentivise rich people to have more children.

Frankfurt investment banks are a sea of ‘vons’. Same with senior government jobs in Berlin, or with media. Unlike in the UK, it’s barely even commented upon.

Correct, however it's worth pointing out that this pattern is universal across the world where we have good data. Even in supposedly egalitarian societies. There simply does not seem to be that much social mobility at the very top. The rate of taxation doesn't appear to make much difference for the elites.

Finance in the UK is very much not the preserve of the tradition "English Upper Class" anymore, you're more likely to hear Chinese accents instead of the King's English. Modern day aristocratic wealth comes from price appreciation of their landholdings, not them holding top positions in the city etc.

Finance wasn't exclusively upper class in the UK even in the past. During the post-WWII years, I have a grandfather who made it pretty far in finance coming from a family of mid-ranking naval officers. Like a lot of people in finance in those days, his main assets were that he was reliable, risk-averse, sceptical, and disciplined in a relaxed, gentle, unambitious way. He worked in London, but lived in a modest cottage in the Shires, and he got a fair number of clients just because of his reputation from "the War". Ironically, he almost never spoke about the War, because he had lost too many friends and family, and killed too many people himself - not an easy thing to do for a gentle giant.

The shift in the 1980s/1990s period, AFAIK, was that UK finance became more open to working class people, women, non-white people, foreigners, and even Irish people^. Most of all, the big money jobs were increasingly for those who were ambitious, risk-loving, optimistic, and disciplined in an intense, obsessive way. And naturally most people entering finance hadn't even been in a serious fist-fight, let alone built up a reputation in war.

^ This comes up in David Lodge's Nice Work, where the middle class academic woman (the book's main character) is finds out that a seemingly ditzy working class London lass (her brother's girlfriend, as I recall) is earning much more than her in the supposedly reactionary world of Thatcher-era finance. The working class woman comes from a family of bookies, and so thinking fast with numbers is to her like waking up early is to a farmer's daughter.

Compared to the US the wages are very poor, even adjusting for GDP per capita, at least for professionals.

So while things are technically equal between the wage workers the distribution of wealth is society is very unequal.

Germans are generally unaware of how low their wages are.

I've been thinking more and more about Robin Hanson talking about how the public basically said "no" to the nuclear energy revolution. He was making analogy to the possibility that the public might say "no" to the AI revolution, wondering what that might mean. In any event, he said something along the lines of, "Imagine if the public hadn't said 'no' to the nuclear energy revolution. Would energy be a tenth of the price today in the alternate timeline than it is in the real one? How would your life be different?" It's the "hidden costs", the "hidden timeline". @functor could have kept his apartment at 23C and paid like a Euro more.

I must echo what @functor wrote below.

We are officially in a "technical recession". I don't know what that means, but I guess it's not good.

From my perspective the crisis is proceeding pretty much exactly as predicted. I earn more than the median or average salary in Germany, I live in the supposedly cheap countryside, I gave up all expensive hobbies and so did my wife, and yet I struggle to feed a family of three. Absolutely everything is expensive. Wages are barely creeping up, while inflation eats all that and more.

I invite you to look at the graph in https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Verdienste/Realloehne-Nettoverdienste/_inhalt.html .

Look at how the good red line rarely goes over the bad black line. Then look at the vast gulf that opened between them in the last few years. That's wages versus prices.

Looking at energy prices, I can't find a neat graph in what little time my patience gives me, but those are going up, too. Meanwhile politics announced plans to fix energy prices for various industries - now is that just lobbyism at work, or is that actually a somehow necessary act? And if the latter, is that because there is no energy crisis and everything's fine and renewables are doing a good enough job?

If there is no crisis, then fine, I guess everything just continues to look like one from the ground but we Germans are known to be unjustified doomsayers. Damn my lying eyes.

Germany has had a problem with declining industrial competitiveness even before C-19 struck. The auto industry peaked and it doesn't appear that there's anything to take its place in the immediate turn. That may explain the problem

It is in fact possible to have high inflation and an energy crisis brewing at the same time. That's what happened in the 1970s across much of the developed world. Many people thought this would be the same but it clearly isn't.

I think the inflationary impulse is bad, yet it has also peaked. Germany's underlying problems with finding a new growth model after relying so much on the auto industry will remain, however.

Look at how the good red line rarely goes over the bad black line

Don't you mean the good blue line? Isn’t the red line real wages, and the blue nominal wages?

Well, yeah, strictly speaking it's the kinda good light blue line, the really good red line, and the thoroughly bad black line.

Sure, but the red line is just the blue line adjusted for the black line, so there is no reason to look at anything other than the red line. Which shows that real wages have generally risen each year, but recently have dropped.

You may have a point.

We can broaden this to a discussion about climate change or even immigration.

energy prices are based on supply vs. demand and fluctuates greatly, but tend to not trend upwards (which is why commodities make such bad investments). immigration however tend to produce a monotonically increasing growth of demographic change.

I'll ask you to explain how "doomsters" and "scaremongers" about immigration were proven wrong historically.

Enoch Powell's prediction of "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man" comes to mind. Modern Britain may be diverse but it is hard to argue that blacks control anything of importance. I've lost count on how many times in RW spaces I've seen people predicting civil war and/or collapse for many years. Just never happens.

Literal slavery rings raping white British girls by the thousands as the police refuse to act and the government works to promote more of them into senior governance sounds like "the whip hand".

In October 2013 Rotherham Council commissioned Professor Alexis Jay, a former chief social work adviser to the Scottish government, to conduct an independent inquiry into its handling of child-sexual-exploitation reports since 1997.[4][156] Published on 26 August 2014, the Jay report revealed that an estimated 1,400 children, by a "conservative estimate", had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.[k] According to the report, children as young as 11 were "raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated".[158][159]

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

Sunak himself commented on it, saying how political correctness shouldn't prevent people from identifying these grooming gangs. In some ways, getting an Indian PM to say these things is a "cultural victory" of sorts. Having other races stan for you is the ultimate soft power. The media is also talking about it openly. That wasn't the case years ago.

More importantly, police have actually begun to prosecute and sentencing these vile rapists. So your characterisation that they "refuse to act" is simply wrong. Perhaps you could argue that they should do more, but saying they refuse to act is incorrect. There have been many trials by now and they are still continuing:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/11/eight-men-on-trial-accused-of-grooming-and-abusing-girls-in-rochdale

20 years ago, it was all swept under the carpet. As the UK has gotten more diverse, these things have gotten easier to talk about, not harder. And coverage is pretty balanced even in left-wing papers like the Guardian, meanwhile many of these vile scum are getting hauled off to court. Not exactly what you'd expect if you believed that whites were losing power. You'd see cover-ups or even celebrations. That's not what we see.

Enoch Powell's prediction of "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man" comes to mind.

That particular prediction was from a constituent, whom Powell was quoting in his speech. Powell's predictions tended to be more that the UK would see US-style racial animus (riots, terrorist groups, lynch mobs etc.) if immigration continued to go unchecked.

Interestingly, Powell's position was not so much that different races couldn't live together (he wasn't even a realist about race) but that, in practice, the rapid influx of ethnic groups would create social conflicts. My impression is that this was a consequence of Powell's Romanticist views about politics: a successful, harmonious country is one where people feel bonded together by history, common culture, and a sense of united destiny. At least in the UK, many of Powell's ideas have become the mainstream position, accepted by much of the left and all of the centre-right. Their only quibbles could be over the numbers, i.e. whether Powell was right about the particular proportions that could be assimilated in Britain without leading to US-style social conflicts. Unfortunately, quibbling about the numbers was enough for e.g. the post-1997 period to feature immigration on an unprecedented scale, though this was initially because of a deliberate effort by Labour to change UK demographics to destroy the cultural basis of Conservativism (cultural unity, historical connectedness etc.).

We're still at a point in time where the vast majority of both hard and soft power is held by natives in Europe. Of course you have things like Sunak becoming prime minister, but in general civil servants, people staffing museums or galleries, engineers in some Volkswagen factory, journalists, university professors, members of parliament, people belonging to a society concerned with Egyptian archaeology, orchestra musicians and so on are much more likely to be ethnically European than the general population.

In other words: the human bedrock that maintains the edifice of European civilization is, while it's definitively getting quite old, still there and hasn't changed much in its composition as a consequence of mass migration. Of course, such elements of the newcomers that have joined these ranks immediately stop having children in most cases, so they don't provide a long-term solution as well. I don't think there will be some brutal civil war or anything as dramatic as the Powell quote, but I wouldn't consider the hypothesis entirely disproven until all of the institutions that are maintained by people in the 40-70 age range are gone/replaced and things are still fine.

First, natural gas demand has been much weaker than anticipated since China is weaker. Indeed, there is now a surplus of gas in the world market.Some people claim that "last winter we got lucky", but this doesn't explain how gas storage is at historically high levels. Germany, Europe's biggest gas consumer, has an excellent position going into the autumn.

I thought it was obvious. Germany, Europe's biggest gas consumer for businesses, spent commercially-unviable amounts of money to import gas through the shipping points it had, and told those businesses they weren't going to get what they were used to for commerce and to deal with it. This was surprising to those who thought the Germans wouldn't let the business lobby get gored and so would capitulate to Russian energy blackmail for geopolitical concessions, but is not surprising to those who considered what a non-capitulating Germany would look like.

As DaseindustriesLtd noted, Germany reduced production of its most gas and gas-energy dependent things. In the last day or so, Germany has done the not-at-all managed 'we're in recession now' dance, with a focus on GDP- which the German Stability Programme of last year was directly boosting by, well, stimulating GDP.

Other relevant factors involved the expansion of LNG import infrastructure and the sanctions structure that Germany successfully influenced.

For LNG imports, the Germans basically rented much of the global capacity for floating LNG terminals after the war started last year to bring in the ability to import LNG gas while they started construction on permanent terminals. As they expand import capacity, they will approach dynamics closer to Korea or Japan, where manufacturing is possible on the power of expensive but consistent global sea-based LNG.

The Germans were also successful in the ultimate shaping of Russia sanctions from a 'keep it in Russia' model of sanctions (a probably doomed idea to prevent Russia from exporting anything and getting any money), and instead 'deny Russia profits' model where mechanisms such as price caps and insurance risks were used to keep Russia energy on the market, but less profitable. This was considerably softer, especially for oil vis-a-vis gas, but also the price of not only European cohesion to get any unified position, but also more modest international acceptance (because they are happy to buy Russian oil for cheaper).

Finally, the consequences of energy crisis prediction beyond direct industrial contraction (which has occurred) were that of investment. This remains to be seen, because it's a long-term trend, but the economic data so far doesn't disprove it to any meaningful degree.

We can broaden this to a discussion about climate change or even immigration. Sure, there will be issues, but the doomsters on both issues were proven wrong historically.

This proves too much, because it implies that all those 1700s Native Americans whining about Pilgrims stealing their land were just paranoid doomers.

Sometimes, bad shit actually does happen

Yet their lives are infinitely better than if they would have remained sovereign. No offence to American Indians, but given their social problems, I find it hard to believe that their standard of living would have been better today if not for European conquest. The tall tales of mass annihilation is also mostly bunk. Many Europeans were often very sympathetic (e.g. Sam Houston).

Why are we talking about German energy without talking about its biggest source of energy: Coal.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fuels-coal-comeback-germany-2022-12-16/

It was coal, not renewables, that came to the rescue in 2022. Of course, Russia should have predicted this. In a pinch, there is approximately infinite coal available for use.

But, yes, good point overall. Most negative predictions fail to take into account human adaptability. Another example: None of the doomish Covid predictions came true either because people voluntarily stayed home when the risk was highest.

Negative predictions do take into account human responses - in fact, negative predictions are often made specifically to engender a human response. The fact that European governments went to great lengths to avoid an energy crunch doesn't prove that the energy crisis was a phantom.

None of the doomish Covid predictions came true either because people voluntarily stayed home when the risk was highest.

None of the Doomish COVID predictions were at all possible or plausible even if everybody dropped whatever they were doing and decided to run an orgy every night from 2020-2022

What happened is that Russian oil was bought by India and sold onto Europe. Meanwhile, the Europeans bought gas from Asia (which buys from Russia) and the US. It's one of the biggest and most wasteful fails in sanctions policy of all time (for Europeans at least, America is doing quite well). They've just been moving gas and oil in circles around Eurasia.

Furthermore, gas is necessary for all kinds of industrial processes and fertilizer, in which ways which cannot be replaced. The EU's nuclear renaissance looks pretty pathetic. As of May 2022, two nuclear plants were under construction in Slovakia and one in France: https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-construction-nuclear-reactors-worldwide/

The EU's 'nuclear renaissance' is 1/5 of what China is building. Now it may have changed since then but do people expect really efficient, dynamic, rapid construction in the European Union?

Even now, German electricity prices are 0.69 Euros/kilowatt, down 3-4x since the peak of the crisis in 2022. So what? That's still ridiculously high! In Australia, electricity costs about a third of that. It's even cheaper in the US. Europe is in a permanent energy crisis and has been for years because their energy policy is enormously expensive and doesn't work.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-country

The high taxes on European electricity often go towards funding renewable energy - plus there are enormous subsidy packages to lower electricity prices.

Edit: Germany is in a recession, Russia is not.

I’m no energy expert but know a little. I don’t think natural gas can just be moved around like that. You need pipelines and lng facilities which are long term projects.

Gasoline of course could more easily be moved around.

China did buy far more electric cars than expected which helped out oil. I get energy not be at infinity prices makes a lot of sense as some usages get cut out but I’m surprised it’s flipped to below pre-war.

LNG can indeed be moved around like that.

After building facilities which I did mention. Which are expensive and no one built facilities to places with cheap Russian gas.

Like I literally said that so what was your point?

...via the pipelines and LNG facilities, which are long term projects.

As pipeline flows were closed, Russia hit a bottleneck in its shipping capacity by port, because they didn't have the infrastructure to simply take all the pipeline-gas and then push it through ports on top of the usual port-exports. Hence why they filled their storage to capacity and then started cutting production.

The Russian Deputy Prime Minister statement from February was a 25% reduction in gas exports by volume in 2022, blaming the loss of the Nord Stream Pipeline and European customers (who primarily bought via pipelines) shunning it, and stating that the solution was the eastern China route, which is itself a pipeline project.

Were LNG truly fungible in the way RandomRanger describes and sliders1234 contested, that wouldn't have happened. The Russian gas that used to go to Europe wasn't simply put on ships to India to be resold to the Europeans. It just didn't reach the market, beyond whatever surge capacity the Russians had beyond their normal sea-based LNG export capacity.

Rather, the Europeans paid premiums to buy the sea-based LNG that was typically exported for Asia, which has been a market the Russians aren't a major party in.

Yeah, reactiveness is underestimated – when they’re mapping out dramatic scenarios, they tend to ignore possible responses in their extrapolations. So climate change may well increase mosquito penetration, tornadoes or whatever, but if they ever reach a critical threshold, we can wipe out all mosquitoes, build tornado-resistant houses etc. If an AI decides to kill us with a virus, we will have an AI pumping out defense proteins too. Explosive mini-killbots => body armor. Energy ROI sinking => all in nuclear. Plus all the good responses we haven’t thought about yet, unknown unknowns work both ways. No doom scenario survives contact with the enemy.

I’ve always found the Cassandra story strange, as it seems the opposite is far more common : enthusiastically believed doom predictions left and right, and nary a storm in sight. I think people are incentivized to be doomers as a haggling tactic. Things are bad => I’m unhappy => give me stuff. Optimism is for suckers, even if it is more accurate. You can’t get a good deal if you advertise your satisfaction.

But while it started as a negotiating tactic, lately people have started believing the lie to an unhealthy degree, paralyzing them. Here in germany half the news stories are about the ‘climate apocalypse’ that seemingly awaits us. Everyone's hysterical, I can't tell which of my friends are naturally depressed and which take this stuff at face value anymore. And here on the motte, a large amount of comments find it necessary to add an asterisk saying ‘if we’re not all dead from AI by then”.

Some of it may just be neuroticism or some other evolutionary residue like you say, better safe than sorry when you used to live among venimous animals. The slave morality/ Oppression olympics/Whining Contest regime we’re currently living under doesn’t help.

I'm pretty sure that building "tornado-resistant houses" is not an approach that is viable on a larger scale. We're talking about tornadoes, after all.

Also, I assume that wiping out mosquitoes would necessitate using lots of chemical pesticides, similar to DDT, for example. Chemicals with side effects etc. Who would stand for that?

Nah baby just fire up the gene drive.

AI really is different though. Unlike other worries such as climate change or killer bees or whatever, it is itself intelligent and can adapt. Humanity no longer has an asymmetrical advantage.

I'm not going to make any specific doomerish predictions here except to say that neither you, nor I, nor EY have any idea what's coming with AI, whereas I can confidently say we will mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

Intelligence really is singular.

Every worry is unlike every other. In terms of qualitative danger, AI is more like other worries than commonly believed, because its unique property of reactiveness, which it shares with us, loads on both ends of the scale. Sometimes it's about optimizing for the exact same criterion, just with outputs going to different people. Cases in point:

and so on. Importantly, this isn't the case where the defense has to crush every single attack to be successful whereas attackers need to only triumph once, like doomers often say. Successful attacks will not be existentially threatening (unless the attacker does have a tremendous advantage in technical capability, but that's trivial and a good reason to commoditize the technology, if anything). Attacks still have cost, their perpetrators still work with limited resources, leave a footprint and are vulnerable to discovery, and while it is not a given that attackers learn effectively from each other, the next iteration of defense is better-informed; until attacks run into fundamental constraints.

All that information will be banned, just as facial recognition software has been banned for police

US cities are already reversing facial recognition bans, New Orleans did just a few months ago iirc. If it works, it will happen.

I know this is a hobby horse, but once AI is trained on gait recognition and body language of labelled examples of millions of hours of countless criminals’ movements recorded by CCTV, tiny little telltale patterns might well allow for effective pre-crime in the case of almost all premeditated criminal activity. People show their nerves, everyone has a tell, etc.

I have trouble believing there's enough information content present in CCTV streams to uniquely identify individuals confidently. I see how it maybe could work, but it's not something I'd focus on directly. Are human gaits really that different as to be identifiable from distant security cameras? Are they even consistent for a single person day-to-day?

The longer I think about it, I've also started thinking that AI likely scales sub-linearly (logarithmic?) with the size of the training dataset. "But the AI can viably consider a larger dataset than human experts" may be true, but may not generate hugely better results.

Interesting! Any good papers or summary articles you'd recommend?

Sure, there's a decades-long history of forensic gait analysis (long predating AI of course) in criminology. A nice overview is here. It's actively employed in China integrated with AI, although not widely in the West. In the West, gait analysis by experts has been a feature of trials for a long time - even before CCTV, it was used (and still is) on footprints left at crime scenes to identify suspects.

The challenge, of course, is that for now the applications of current forensic gait analysis are highly limited. The lack of comprehensive gait libraries for the wider population means that, unlike DNA (at least in recent memory) it's generally only used to support attempts to prove a suspect on trial was or was not someone in video footage. The real benefit is in scanning a library of millions or billions of hours of video taken from a network of surveillance cameras (which have ideally already been used to build up a 'library' of the entire population) to find possible 'matches' (the search space can be narrowed by geography and other quantitative or qualitative information recorded by police) in the general public, just like police DNA databases and Ancestry.com data are today.

In the West, research has been slow for a while. It's generally focused on identifying diseases like Parkinsons, the racing industry uses it for analysing horses etc, so a lot of Western research uses Lidar and multiple cameras; these achieve extremely high accuracy (often over 90%), but obviously aren't hugely helpful when the footage is actually blurry black-and-white CCTV at night.

While I mostly agree with you, I think there are also tipping points that are bad -- things like the great depression, which fucked up the whole world for a decade, the oil crisis in the 70s, and the financial crisis in 2008. It does seem like we've gotten better at handling things, but part of me worries that we've been lulled into a false sense of security.

Minor related note -- I'd say only now, a good year after the initial Ukraine invasion, has the product offering in supermarkets mostly levelled out. Until recently, it seemed like there was always something out -- sunflower oil, catfood, dijon senf (that was something else), what have you. So my sense is that we are more connected, and have less resilience, so an unexpected shock can have surprising ripples.

I still tend towards optimism, but I don't think we can just rely on things working out.

We have less short term resilience but more over the medium and long term. If you have foods from 100 different countries in the supermarket, well, something is going to happen in one of those countries most every year. But then, you have 99 other countries who can step in and try to fill the gap.

Germany is an amazing country, yes.

Big drop in German exports to China raises fears over EU’s economic powerhouse

“It is mainly services that rebounded but not yet manufacturing,” said Brzeski, adding that carmakers have been hit by a lack of smaller electric vehicles and the Chinese trend of buying models from domestic carmakers. Motor vehicles and parts made up more 15 per cent of total German exports last year, he said.

Although European gas prices have fallen sharply from last year’s peak, they remain higher than in earlier years, putting energy-intensive companies at a sustained disadvantage.

“Chemicals output is down sharply due to the energy crisis,” said Oliver Rakau, chief German economist at research group Oxford Economics. “There has been a permanent hit to competitiveness.”

The German government has drawn up plans to subsidise 80 per cent of electricity costs for energy-intensive companies.

And if you don't focus on manufacturing, you don't need to subsidize a whole lot.

Germany is in a recession, and I paid 80 cents/kWh in December in Sweden. My gym still hasn't opened its sauna, and I got shamed for having 18 degrees in my apartment in the winter. Inflation is the highest it has been in decades, and there was a major shortage of firewood. The system didn't snap, instead there is a cost of living crisis combined with cities turning off their street lights and companies banned from expanding due to lack of power. I agree that people adapt. Covid didn't end the world, yet it created problems that will continue for years.

As for energy, the renewable hype died with cheap gas. The wind-hype only worked with cheap nat gas as a backup. Now we have almost free power some days, followed by extreme prices other days. Building a long term functioning electrical grid is different from just generating power. Cheap, bountiful wind power didn't alleviate the high prices when the wind wasn't blowing in the winter.

What gym are you going to? As far as I'm aware saunas have been back online for all major public and private gyms since like at least March.

I got shamed for having 18 degrees in my apartment in the winter.

This is one of the things that I dislike about that favorite dream of social conservatives and communists alike, the tight-knit community with high social cohesion. I like the thought that if someone tried to shame me for having 18 degrees in my apartment in the winter, I could easily just tell them to go fuck themselves. Which you probably can too, of course, and it's one of the beautiful things about liberalism.

I find it funny that conservatives in the US seem to want to have their cakes and eat them too. They want both traditional social cohesiveness but also cowboy individualism.

I find it funny that conservatives in the US seem to want to have their cakes and eat them too. They want both traditional social cohesiveness but also cowboy individualism.

And here I usually say this about American leftists - they fetishize communitarian life, but their political project is chiefly aimed at the liberation of the individual from their community. Actual communitarians can be very big on mutual aid, but they are also liable to be suffocatingly conformist and intolerant of the sort of eccentric, self-ID-oriented individualism that characterizes the far end of the American left. An extensive welfare state, by contrast, means you can choose to be a gay trans artist without worrying about the judgment of your family, community, or prospective employers.

(On the other hand, I disagree with your assessment of American conservatism. I think you're conflating libertarians, who are quite rare but have outsized media/cultural presence, with social conservatives who are not and have undersized media/cultural presence. Not helping the matter is the number of self-identified libertarians who would more accurately be described as embarrassed conservatives.)

An extensive welfare state, by contrast, means you can choose to be a gay trans artist without worrying about the judgment of your family, community, or prospective employers.

On the other hand, the most extensive welfare states seem to be found in Nordic social democracies, which are notably communitarian, conformist, paternalist, and homogeneous. Some economists, like Scott Sumner, have argued that high levels of trust are the driving factors behind the generosity of welfare states in these countries, and almost paradoxically also caused them to be relatively low-regulation (the trust extends to people in business as well as people dependent on the welfare state). Social trust seems harder to foster in diverse, socially libertarian, and atomistic countries.

So the left builds up a welfare state house on communitarian foundations that they seek to erode via immigration, plus allowing and even encouraging individual non-conformity. I'm not sure if an American campus university social atmosphere can be sustainably combined with a Nordic-style social democracy. By contrast, conservatives can point to examples of societies that combined cowboy individualism with communtarianism (including parts of the Old West, though these were more libertine than many conservatives would like) and plausibly argue that communitarian values make cowboy individualism work better.

By contrast, conservatives can point to examples of societies that combined cowboy individualism with communtarianism (including parts of the Old West, though these were more libertine than many conservatives would like) and plausibly argue that communitarian values make cowboy individualism work better.

Can they? The Old West, with its non-existent social fabric, weak legal order, and astronomical levels of vice and violence, seems more comparable to the worst ghetto communities than anything American conservatives would find desirable.

The Old West was a big and complex place. It wasn't all saloons and Clint Eastwood.

and astronomical levels of vice and violence

Last I checked that idea was more or less solely based on watching too many westerns. I'd also like evidence for the weak social fabric bit.

If one were to go by Hollywood, they'd conclude the West regularly featured small armies of bandits being wiped out by law enforcement with a death rate comparable to Stalingrad.

If one were to go by academic research into the subject, they'd find that homicide rates were merely extremely high (~50-100/100k) and characterized - as usual - more by pedestrian interpersonal disputes amongst a population that was disproportionately young men than by thrilling shootouts.

I was reading the other day about a Peace Corps volunteer in the Sahel who knew a guy who got together some ingredients and started making and selling bread. Until he met an elder of his family who noticed his inventory and took the whole lot. Their communitarian ethos means he could refuse his familial superior nothing. The whole village was like this - everyone looked out for each other, mostly to see if they were getting too rich for their own good!

I find it funny that conservatives in the US seem to want to have their cakes and eat them too. They want both traditional social cohesiveness but also cowboy individualism.

Strawmen aside, my impression is that most conservatives strongly oppose this kind of crab-bucket version of social cohesiveness. If anything, it's those on the left who seem to encourage envy on the basis of wealth and comfort.

If you're not a member of a functioning, cohesive community, it indeed means that you will not be shamed out of, say, "wasting" natural gas or firewood. But it also means that, for example, you will not be shamed out of being/becoming a misogynistic transphobe incel Nazi Putin fan. And if, say, you're a single heterosexual woman looking for a mate, you won't have a social circle at all which might assist you in finding an "eligible" man. And the list goes on. Ideas have consequences.

That's why there's overwhelming demand for takes on gay and trans movement are top-down indoctrination and not an aspect of the true dominant ideology of our time, individualist consumerism.

deleted

But I would explain the tension between them, and I think people who believe in fusionism would explain it this way, by saying that for mainstream conservatives the social and economic spheres are different aspects of government policy that require very different solutions. They'd hold that government policy doing things like raising taxes on large businesses rarely produces good outcomes, while government policy providing tax cuts to incentivize marriage or religious practice or family formation often does.

The libertarian view of the government is a state that enforces economic contracts and the NAP; the conservative view of the government is a state that enforces contracts and the NAP and uses some level of power to incentivize or reinforce the importance of the family, the significance of religion to society, that sort of thing.

I would frame the fusionist consensus differently. Social conservatives and libertarians made common cause based on the belief that market forces foster traditional social norms and structures and that the breakdown of these norms and structures is driven by government interference in the market. Here's David Frum writing in 1994's "Dead Right":

If I am bearded, and I notice that my boss and the last four men in my section to win promotion are clean-shaven, I will find myself slowly nudged toward the barbershop. If the owner of the gas station across the road from mine smiles a lot, and I don’t, I will find myself forcing a cheerful manner myself, no matter how snarly I may inwardly feel. People who do not have to work for a living, however, can indulge themselves in a hundred little peculiarities of behavior – one reason that the English upper class is so famously odd. Millions of Americans now live as free from the pressure to conform as any English lord, thanks either to the direct receipt of welfare or to civil service employment where promotion is by seniority and firing is unheard of. The fact, as much as any fashion change, explains the sudden flaunting of ethnic difference in manner and dress that so distresses Patrick Buchanan in his native city. Relatively few vice presidents at Proctor & Gamble would dare wear a kente cloth or keffiyeh; nobody who intends to earn very much of a living in the polymer business can hope to get away with not learning English; but city hall employees and welfare mothers can do both.

So the cultural conservatives are simply deluding themselves when they hope for escape from the unpleasant task of resisting every enlargement of the ambit of government action and trying, when opportunity presents itself, to reduce that ambit.” (p. 196)

While Frum, like many fusionists, is now an anti-Trump exile, this idea that traditional values would win under market conditions and deviance is fostered outside of the market is still prevalent. Woke norms cannot be an effective social technology for managing large companies in an increasingly diverse and queer country, it must be a market failure driven by civil rights law, the tyranny of the managerial class, or indoctrination via academia. I'm not saying all those explanations are wrong, I'm just noting the tradition they're in and the unifying purpose they serve.

In the post-2016 breakdown of fusionism Conservative intellectuals have tried to push policies designed to subsidize the family such as Romney's Child Tax Credit or Oren Cass's wage subsidy. These have been met with tepid responses from the base. I don't think the issue is that Conservatives underestimate the size of the subsidy necessary it's that they still believe that the male breadwinner-led nuclear family would 'win' in the market if not for some sort of interference and balk at viewing it as a sort of endangered species requiring state protection. Trump has broken with libertarians by making the market interference trade policy rather than welfare, but this idea still upholds the male breadwinner family as something that would thrive if not for some form of state failure.

I was gonna write more but I ran out of time and didn't want to leave a high quality comment unanswered for >24hrs.

I don't think the high rates of gay and trans identification among Zoomers is at all the result of indoctrination (though I think at times policy can reinforce it), I think it's the result of teenagers being teenagers and doing the I'm trying to find myself, maaaaaan thing that many of the now-conservative Boomers did before them, which is what happens in a world focused on consooming and defining oneself.

There is a difference between teenagers now and the Boomers in their time.

As far as I can tell (though I haven't been a teenager for a while so I could of course simply be missing it), there's pretty much no real teenage rebellion. I don't see them doing much that the powers that be aren't supporting and encouraging. E.g. declaring yourself to be something LGBT-esque is supported and encouraged, becoming a climate activist is supported and encouraged, etc etc. It leads me to believe that if the establishment were supporting and encouraging different things, they'd be doing those things instead.

How much "real teenage rebellion" did the Boomers engage in? Rock music was just consooming product which your parents disapprove of, which was always the lamest kind of rebellion. White kids whose daddies could afford lawyers were even less likely to be punished for smoking marijuana then than they are now (the War on Drugs doesn't get going until the 1970's, and was pretty much a racist project from day one). And dodging the Vietnam Draft was pretty much expected if you were middle-class or above - look at the CV of any Boomer politician.

Compared to the Civil Rights movement (which mostly preceded it) and the Gay Liberation movement (which mostly followed it), the hippie counterculture drew far less heat from the Man - probably because it was seen as harmless by everyone except the Southern social conservatives who were already marked as losers. If you are old enough to have boomer parents, do they tell stories of getting into real trouble for hippie-adjacent activities? Or just of engaging in hippie-adjacent activities and feeling transgressive with no real risk (or the only real risk coming from within the counterculture, like being beaten up by the Hell's Angels at a rock concert)? There was definitely a vague sense of alliance between hippiedom and radical black and later gay activism, but not many hippies were going south of the Mason-Dixon line to do civil rights work, and even fewer were going to Pride parades before they were cool.

The only "rebel" community where people from middle-class backgrounds routinely turn up with origin stories involving being harshly punished by parents or authorities is the LGBT one.

How much "real teenage rebellion" did the Boomers engage in?

It depends on which Boomers. Most of them might have had a slightly long hair cut or bought Beatles/Rolling Stones records rather than Mozart/Sinatra records; more commonly, they bought a bit of both, as in the case of my parents.

On the other hand, if we're talking about the US in particular (e.g. France in late 1960s was much more radicalised, and many Czechoslovak Boomers found themselves face-to-face with Soviet invaders) there were plenty of Boomers who risked (and lost) their lives in the things like the anti-Vietnam war movement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention_protests

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_strike_of_1970

If you get shot by a National Guardsman, you must be doing something fairly transgressive. Of course, most Boomers didn't do anything like that.

the War on Drugs doesn't get going until the 1970's, and was pretty much a racist project from day one

Maybe by the Ibrahim Kendi definition of "racist". The black community explicitly asked for the war on drugs.

This shit's getting an AAQC from me.

They want both traditional social cohesiveness but also cowboy individualism.

As long as everyone in the society is the exact same, everyone is free to individually do the exact same stuff

That’s not even 65f. I keep my house at least 68-70f in the winter. Of course, the climate here is less extreme than Sweden.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats