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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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PayPal has "demonetized" the daily sceptic, both the business's account and the founders personal accounts he uses to receive money for his other work.

Another point for red tribe needs its own payment processors (and banks, and infrastructure, and DNS servers, and domain registration...)

https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/21/paypal-demonetises-the-daily-sceptic/

I've been doing some research into in-group bias and race and have been finding some fairly interesting results.

Let's start with a well known piece of evidence which is often used in the culture war. This article uses ANES 2018 Pilot Survey data regarding racial in-group and out-group biases, and shows the average differences in feelings of warmth (measured along a 0-100 scale) toward whites vs. nonwhites (i.e., Asians, Hispanics, and blacks) across different subgroups.

Here is the first relevant graph from the article. According to the article, the only subgroup that has an outgroup bias is white liberals (having an outgroup bias of 13 points). Even among white non-liberals, their in-group bias (11.62) is less than that of your average black person (15.58), Hispanic (12.83), or Asian person (13.84). Granted, the differences there can be argued to be pretty marginal in size, but if you take into account the outgroup bias of white liberals it would almost certainly make it so that whites' in-group biases are quite a bit lower than that of other races, and it flies in the face of the idea that whites are any more tribal than other races.

Here is the second relevant graph showing the biases of all the subgroups of whites. Those who are "very liberal" have an outgroup bias of a whopping 19.45 points, while liberals have an outgroup bias of 8.56 points. Moderates have an in-group bias of 9.42 points, conservatives have an in-group bias of 11.51 points, and very conservative whites have an in-group bias of 15.62 points. Very conservative whites have an in-group bias that's only as strong as that of your average black person.

This finding of an average lower in-group bias among whites isn't just an isolated anomaly. On L.J Zigerell's blog, he presents data reporting the mean ratings of races from Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, using data from the preliminary release of the 2020 ANES Time Series Study.

You can easily see from the graph in the blog post that whites' mean ratings of whites are not much different from their ratings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. For all the other racial groups, their mean ratings of their own races are far higher than any other race. Every racial group other than whites also all rank whites the lowest out of the four racial groups.

Additionally, in another blog post he presents data from the 2020 ANES Social Media Study detailing racial feeling thermometer responses. Respondents ranked each race based on how warm, cold or neutral they were towards them, and the findings are in line with the previous results.

In the blog post, this graph compares the race evaluations of white respondents with black respondents. Among whites, the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards whites is only very slightly higher than the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards blacks and Asians. Among blacks, the percentage of those who give warm ratings towards whites (and Asians) is markedly lower than the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards blacks. This graph compares the race evaluations of white born again Trump voters with black respondents, and surprisingly, the pattern of whites being less biased in favour of their own race than blacks still holds (albeit less strongly).

The relative lack of white in-group bias found might seem surprising, but it is not only found in ANES - it is also in line with some other work. This study "reports results from a new analysis of 17 survey experiment studies that permitted assessment of racial discrimination, drawn from the archives of the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. For White participants (n=10 435), pooled results did not detect a net discrimination for or against White targets, but, for Black participants (n=2781), pooled results indicated the presence of a small-to-moderate net discrimination in favor of Black targets; inferences were the same for the subset of studies that had a political candidate target and the subset of studies that had a worker or job applicant target."

Anecdotally, I can say that these results do jive very well with my own experience - whites are as a group less likely to place primacy on race and are also less likely to classify themselves as a group with united interests.

whites are as a group less likely to place primacy on race and are also less likely to classify themselves as a group with united interests.

Whites aren't really a coherent in-group for a lot of white people. Because whites are the majority, it largely doesn't make sense in my day to day life to treat whites as a unitary group with united interests, to see another white person and say "Oh, we'll have much more in common." My actual in-group may contain a different racial mix than the overall population, and inasmuch as it does my biases will be different.

Personal example, my very large high school was 90% white; but because I was an AP kid the small classes I was in were basically 60% white and 40% Asian/Indian. So if the only thing you tell me about someone is their race, telling me they are white doesn't really indicate that we'll have more in common than the average student and we probably had no classes together (the white kid might be my best friend, or he might be a votech kid or a burnout stoner kid or a football player); telling me they are Indian meant there was a better than 75% chance we had a class together and mutual friends.

So imagine I'm a white liberal who considers their ingroup "Democratic Voters." In most states the majority of Dem voters are white; at the same time minority voters are much more likely to be Democrats while whites are more evenly split. So even though the majority of my in-group is white, if I see a white person it's a coinflip if they are in my in group; meanwhile if I see a Black person they are 87%, overwhelmingly likely, to be in my in group.

Because whites are the majority, it largely doesn't make sense in my day to day life to treat whites as a unitary group with united interests, to see another white person and say "Oh, we'll have much more in common."

Interesting. But it seems clear that any such reasoning based on group differences could be applied both ways regardless of numerical majority/minority status. Even if whites are a numerical majority and see their own race as being the norm, when they see a non-white person their reaction could be "We'll have much less in common" due to a lack of shared background. The same cultural differences that could be the driver of a strong in-group bias among non-whites also has the potential to create a strong in-group bias among whites, however, in practice it doesn't seem to occur to the same extent considering whites' lower in-group biases.

Then there's also the fact that there's plenty of countries where the racial and ethnic majority seems (at least on a surface level) to be quite a good bit more tribal than those in the West (e.g. Japan), so clearly being a numerical majority doesn't preclude a group from having a strong sense of unity.

The explanation I'm leaning towards at the moment is that there's some external factor tempering the in-group biases of whites and/or exacerbating the in-group biases of non-whites, and people being raised with woke ideology does seem to be a plausible candidate. I think it's beyond the realm of possibility that being repeatedly exposed to these types of ideas doesn't end up affecting real-world perception and behaviour.

But it seems clear that any such reasoning based on group differences could be applied both ways regardless of numerical majority/minority status.

We don't get the chance to because the graph gives us "Blacks" and "Hispanics" without giving us "Conservative Blacks" and "Evangelical Hispanics" etc. Only whites are broken down by politics. A lot of commenters don't even notice the sleight of hand, because it makes intuitive sense: whites come in all kinds of varieties, while minorities are expected to meet the basic template for their group. Electioneers worry about working class whites and college educated whites and evangelical whites and urban whites, but when they talk about Blacks they just talk about Blacks. And to a certain extent that is accurate!

Then there's also the fact that there's plenty of countries where the racial and ethnic majority seems (at least on a surface level) to be quite a good bit more tribal than those in the West (e.g. Japan), so clearly being a numerical majority doesn't preclude a group from having a strong sense of unity.

To my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, there are no politically important ethnic minorities in Japan, so it's not the same game. But in my town, I wouldn't see another white person and think "oh we'll have a lot in common" any more than any other person on the street, because 80% of them are white. In Japan, it would be the opposite, any white person would be likely to have much more in common with me than the average person on the street.

But a white liberal in my town, if they see a white person and a Black person, and they want to talk to the person who is likely to have voted the same way they did in the last election, they should obviously talk to the Black person. They are 87% likely to have voted for Biden. The white guy is just as likely to have voted for Trump as for Biden.

the audacity to immigrate to a country and hate the people who built it and let you in...

Are all these studies only about explicitly asking people about these things? Because then you don't measure who has in-group bias but who says that they have it. Maybe whites overall have been told more over childhood an later life that being a good person requires not having racial biases and when filling out surveys people may (perhaps subconsciously) not describe themselves but instead their good-person-ideal, or what they know they should be. Self knowledge is hard.

I'd be more convinced by studies that somehow measure people's behavior in the real world (I don't know, hiring stats or something, as an example) instead of just asking questions on paper.

I’m partial to this explanation.

Given our culture and the fact we’re all brought up learning about the history of racism, civil rights, etc., it makes sense that a white person would be very conditioned against responding something like “yes I feel unfavorable towards black people” on a questionnaire. I feel icky even writing that sentence, for example.

But, that’s just a questionnaire. Look at who people hang out with in their daily life. Look at how in schools people tend to group up based on self-similarity. Look at the research on innate biases, like those studies measuring threat response while looking at pictures of a white person vs a black person.

There very well may be unconscious in-group preference that doesn’t get captured by these methods.

I'm quite aware that the studies I linked about explicit measures of racial bias are not the end of the story, it wasn't meant to be a comprehensive assessment of the literature. I simply wanted to post some interesting results most of which haven't attracted much mainstream attention (probably because "whites at the moment have less in-group bias than other races" contradicts the popular view). And I will say that a good portion of the experiments covered in my final link - which on the whole found no in-group biases among whites, but did find in-group biases among blacks - did not seem to directly ask people about their racial perceptions, instead many of them attempted to more covertly assess biases by manipulating characteristics of the target (e.g. showing a photograph of a black person instead of a white person, or using the name "Jamal" instead of "Greg").

In any case I think it's very possible to reconcile racial grouping-up behaviours with the findings I posted, since whites on aggregate still do have a slight in-group bias according to a good bunch of the data (albeit one that's quite a good bit smaller than that of other races, as Zach Goldberg demonstrates in his twitter thread here), and even assuming a complete lack of any white in-group bias the strong in-group biases found in non-whites could create the same outcome of racial self-segregation. Additionally, it should also be entertained that other attributes that happen to correlate with race such as cultural similarity could be what is driving the grouping-up behaviours.

I'd also add that many of the innate/unconscious bias studies on race certainly have their own problems. As an example, the innate bias measure which has garnered the most attention in the mainstream is the Implicit Association Test, or the IAT, and it has been used to demonstrate the existence of omnipresent implicit racism. It is based on differential response times to pairing a certain race with positively or negatively coded words and it is a very questionable measure at best. To start, here and here are articles with dozens of citations overviewing the plethora of problems with the IAT. There's a lot of evidence debunking it as a scientifically and psychometrically acceptable test, and the creators of the test themselves have been very inconsistent in their statements on the topic of whether the IAT can actually predict behaviour or not.

EDIT: added more

Maybe whites overall have been told more over childhood an later life that being a good person requires not having racial biases and when filling out surveys people may (perhaps subconsciously) not describe themselves but instead their good-person-ideal, or what they know they should be.

But this still constitutes a real signal, doesn't it? The guidelines imparted by society generally do not have explicit racial clauses in them. While open racial camaraderie or preferences are often tolerated if done by non-whites the general societal script still prescribes universal tolerance, politeness and equality of opportunity, and this is taught to children of all backgrounds. That whites are the only ones to publicly commit to that (even if they don't live up to the ideal) is still something.

I'd be more convinced by studies that somehow measure people's behavior in the real world (I don't know, hiring stats or something, as an example) instead of just asking questions on paper.

In the context of outgroup-ingroup bias that raises the question of how to account for society-wide behavior. While it might be the case that white business owners hire people with the surname "Zapata" (or "Abadi" if we're talking about Europe) less often than people named "Anderson", how would such a study account for the fact that it's rather uniquely societies like the ones that brought forth these white business owners that allow a situation such that there are millions of Zapatas, many of them equipped with citizenship, available to be hired in the first place.

Maybe whites unconsciously or consciously feel more powerful and feel that they need more conscious high-brain-levels restraint on their animal instincts. A bit like how a strong large man needs to learn to control himself because he can inflict real damage, while a small woman lashing out is seen as harmless and maybe even endearing and cute/funny. Meaning, when non-whites do some in-group biased thing, whites may think it cannot have any consequence, it's just like a lion cub doing some cute roaring. But when whites get into that style of thinking it leads to very professionally and industrially-scientifically orchestrated and engineered genocide, like the Holocaust.

In other words it could be a paternalistic attitude. That a white person must know better or something, while non whites don't quite grasp it yet and anyways don't have the necessary power to do too much damage so just let them play.

A bit like how a strong large man needs to learn to control himself because he can inflict real damage, while a small woman lashing out is seen as harmless and maybe even endearing and cute/funny.

I wouldn't attribute the entirety of the gender effect found to this factor quite so quickly. Respondents condemn violence by men against women more harshly than violence by women against men, and this disparity persists even after controlling for perceptions of greater injury of women. "Our findings suggest that real or perceived differences in injury or potential for injury provide some explanation behind differences in attitudes regarding domestic violence across perpetrator or victim gender, but it does not fully explain this difference. Rather, across all three measures, respondents evaluated violence by men against women more seriously than they did violence by women against men. We find that third parties (a) rated men’s violence as more injurious, (b) were more likely to label men’s violence as a crime even after controlling for injury rating, and (c) deemed men’s violence as more worthy of police contact, controlling for injury rating and criminal labeling."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564886.2017.1340383

When it comes to male/female relations, a good amount of the prioritisation of female safety (and the cultural norms regulating male behaviour around them) are likely influenced by factors unrelated to a simple evaluation of women as being physically at risk. I believe we view harm done to women as inherently objectionable on a more fundamental level and reflects an underlying "empathy gap" of sorts.

For example, this paper notes that "Gender differences were investigated in the experience of empathic sadness towards same- versus other-sex targets. ... In both studies, female adolescents reported more empathic sadness than did male adolescents. Female targets also received more affective empathy than did male targets, and, more importantly, gender differences were observed in same-sex versus other-sex affective empathy." They also note that the finding of female targets receiving more empathy, especially from male adolescents, is consistent with previous research.

Meaning, when non-whites do some in-group biased thing, whites may think it cannot have any consequence, it's just like a lion cub doing some cute roaring. But when whites get into that style of thinking it leads to very professionally and industrially-scientifically orchestrated and engineered genocide, like the Holocaust.

I actually do believe that this could be true to some extent regarding race (which is evident whenever white liberals talk repeatedly about prejudice + power as a reason why only whites can be racist). That really doesn't change the fact that the tolerance for prejudice when non-whites do it is a benefit offered to non-whites.

By acting as a powerless victim that is only ever downtrodden by society, it is possible to gain help and provision on an individual level, as well as to game society to get financial, professional and social benefits, which is why you see so many non-whites and women and [insert other protected class here] capitalising on the very social justice narratives that paint them as having little power. It's notable that all of those complaining about being "looked down upon" continue reinforcing that narrative themselves through repeated claims of victimhood instead of asserting one's agency.

I am not of the opinion that it is inherently beneficial to be seen as powerful, or that it is a perception that you necessarily want (which is an assumption inherent in the comment you wrote). In all honesty, I think the less power you can convince people that you have, the more benefits you can actually milk from society at large. There are a huge amount of incentives to seek out a perception of yourself as weak, and in fact that is indeed what you see people willingly doing for themselves now - trying to attach the weak, abused victim role to themselves to exploit double standards and place greater responsibility on their out-group while dressing it all up in the guise of empowerment.

If it was truly so undesirable to be viewed in that way, you probably wouldn't be seeing the proliferation of these kinds of woke movements en masse.

When it comes to male/female relations, a good amount of the prioritisation of female safety (and the cultural noms regulating male behaviour around them) are likely influenced by factors unrelated to a simple evaluation of women as being physically at risk. I believe we view harm done to women as inherently objectionable on a more fundamental level and reflects an underlying "empathy gap" of sorts.

Could this be linked to the Women are Wonderful effect?

Man hits woman: she almost certainly did not deserve it, Women are Wonderful

Man hits man: who knows, maybe he deserved it? Men can be so cruel.

Woman hits woman: probably a misunderstanding that could be resolved if they would talk and their mutual Wonderfulness was apparent to each

Woman hits man: since Women are Wonderful, he probably did something really bad to deserve it

Like all stereotypes, there is some truth in this and some falsity. It's true that almost all women are unconfrontational and need a lot of provocation to be violence. However, it's also true that almost all men are that way too! Only a small minority of men tend to be violent with little justification. But, as usual in relations between the sexes, minority groups seem to have a disproportionate impact on people's cognition.

Could this be linked to the Women are Wonderful effect?

There could definitely be some relation, the Women are Wonderful effect itself is a pretty substantiated finding after all (source 1, source 2 for proof) and it's plausible that it has an effect.

And I would agree that the mindset you've outlined ("well, he must have done something to deserve it") is very common.

Like all stereotypes, there is some truth in this and some falsity. It's true that almost all women are unconfrontational and need a lot of provocation to be violence. However, it's also true that almost all men are that way too! Only a small minority of men tend to be violent with little justification. But, as usual in relations between the sexes, minority groups seem to have a disproportionate impact on people's cognition.

Yeah I wouldn't say there's much merit to the stereotype at all. It's actually very possible to flip the argument in the other direction and state that since people are generally averse to hurting women in the first place, if they do so, there probably must be some reason why (note that I do not endorse the adoption of this attitude whatsoever, this is just an argument to show how easily this logic can be flipped on its head).

Regardless of whether behaviours that are protective of women are instinctual or sociocultural (as previously stated I lean heavily towards the former having at least some impact), the unwillingness to hurt women can't just be chalked up to being an artefact of socially desirable responding, since it is also verifiable in experimental, real-world contexts.

The article "Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism" details a few small studies concerning the topic. Study 2 is probably the most interesting of the studies to me, because it moves out of the realm of the hypothetical and into an actual experimental situation where participants actually believed people were being hurt. They gave participants 20 dollars, and told them that at the end of the experiment the money they still had would be multiplied by ten-fold. However, they'd have to go through 20 trials where a person would be shocked, and during each trial they could opt to give up an amount of money in order to reduce the shock the target received. They were broadcasted videos of either a male target (Condition 1) or female target (Condition 2) responding to the shock, and the results were:

"During the PvG task, deciders interacting with a female target kept significantly less money and thus gave significantly lower shocks (n = 34; £8.76/£20, SD ± 5.0) than deciders interacting with a male target, n = 23; £12.54/£20, SD ± 3.9; independent samples t-test: t(55) = −3.16, p = .003, Cohen’s d = .82; Figure 2B. This replicates the findings from Studies 1A and 1B in the real domain and under a different class of moral challenge, illustrating that harm endorsement is attenuated for female targets." Note also that the videos broadcasted were prerated by an independent group to be matched across condition, such that both male and female targets elicited similar body and facial pain expressions.

Male robbers downright express a reluctance to target women. "Overall, the men in our sample tended not to target women, or, if they did, they did not admit it. Overwhelmingly, the cases discussed here involved men robbing men or men robbing male/female couples; in the latter case, the robbers focused their discussions on gaining the males 'compliance, not the females'. ... Mark described robbing two females under the influence of an alcohol/valium cocktail. In the interview, he expressed considerable shame for his actions: 'I robbed a girl as well so it makes it so much worse … I was heartbroken … I gutted her … I don’t do shit like that.’ The other male, Thomas, who robbed a lone female, also said that he was ashamed of having robbed a woman. In fact, he went out of his way to suggest that such activities were not typical of his modus operandi: ‘I never done anything like that before, that’s not really me …. I feel terrible that I robbed that woman so I don’t want to talk about it really … I am so ashamed of myself.’"

"A number of other men in our sample offered up explanations for why one should never rob women. In outlining how he chose targets, Mark2 interjected: 'You must be thinking I have no morals. I wouldn’t go out and rob an old person. I would look for a bloke …. It wouldn’t be right to be robbing women and little kids or anything like that.’ When asked if he had ever robbed a woman, John2 replied: 'Yeah, but not violently … generally I don’t want contact with women because I don’t like to be violent with them … I never hit a woman in my life. ’Then he expressed empathy with the potential female victim: ‘It’s just that if it was my mother or sister … it is all right to nick their bag, but not alright to hit them [women].’ Similar philosophies have been described by male street offenders in United States-based studies (e.g. Mullins 2006 ; Wright and Decker 1997)."

Additionally, this study surveyed a sample of 208 Israeli couples examining their tendencies to escalate aggression in eight hypothetical situations where they were provoked. What they found was: Men’s intended escalation to female partner aggression was lower than women’s escalation to male partner aggression. Men’s escalation to male stranger provocation was higher than women’s escalation to female stranger provocation. Men’s escalation to female stranger provocation was lower than women’s escalation to male stranger provocation.

In other words, men, if anything, are actually less willing to escalate aggression with women than women are with men. The results here are congruent with much domestic violence research where results of gender symmetry and often greater female perpetration are the norm in properly-conducted research.

IMO what you're seeing is that within America "not white" implies some amount of cultural commonality that isn't there with white Americans (I'm not saying it's always there but it more often is, especially for Black American descendants of slaves.). For all the racial hype American culture war is pretty much a contest between conservative whites and liberal whites. The latter are a minority among white Americans so of course they have a negative in-group bias concerning their own "kind".

Speaking for myself, and we're leaving politics out of this, I as a white working class Southerner have far more in common with my black counterpart here than I do a wealthy white liberal from one of the coasts.

Speaking for myself, and we're leaving politics out of this, I as a white working class Southerner have far more in common with my black counterpart here than I do a wealthy white liberal from one of the coasts.

Among the very few things worth watching on SNL in the past 20+ years:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=O7VaXlMvAvk

Part of me suspects that the movement of the US radical left (especially "intellectual" left) from a focus on the working class to a focus on LGBT and race was driven by a terror that, when the revolution came, one of the main consequences would be a redirection of public funding from opera and theatre to the kind of things that are stereotypically working class entertainment, e.g. sports and crude comedies.

I suppose one of the under-emphasized/analyzed aspects of 21st-Century American History has to be the reality-TV-fication of things.

There's a second part to the story. Whites are clearly pursuing a different strategy. Some might say that Whites are simply more enlightened; that they have learned key moral truths that led to the success of Western civilization. The other interpretation is that the strategy is doomed in the long-run, given that it is exploitable by alien defectors.

Whites will signal by proclaiming how non-racial they are. At any other point in history, this behavior would have been regarded as anti-social and ignorant. But through the alchemy of Hollywood and popular culture, these healthy instincts are denounced as taboo.

I know that complaining about Reddit is an old thing here, but I am still surprised how Reddit Brain, the one that always pop up in subs like politics and news, react when there is some news about Hungary.

Apart from the total ignorance about Hungary and the fact on the ground, how is possible that posts about third-tier countries (no offense to Hungarians) are so upvoted in /r/all?

Is there is some sort of algorithm, or the average reddit man is totally on on the neocon train "whatever we do not like is a threat to democracy?"

There's probably a great deal of manipulation going on. Many of those upvotes are probably from bot farms and click farms. There are entire subreddits that obviously seem to be astroturfed, and/or their moderators are FBI/CIA, or adjacent actors.

Hungary is run by a populist right wing authoritarian, Viktor Orbán.

It's also where one of the most prominent internationalist activist left wing billionaires is from, George Soros. He still gets involved locally.

So posts about Hungary end up being proxy fights about Soros and his agenda.

So posts about Hungary end up being proxy fights about Soros and his agenda.

Or proxy fights about Trump/De Santis and popularism vs. technocracy.

Leave the rest of the internet at the door.

Or could you at least have something more substantial to talk about than, "redditors upvote dumb shit, news at 11"?

Reddit is one of the most trafficked sites in America and arguably the most read “news” site for young Americans. It has greater influence than the NYT and WaPo combined.

And the default setting and /r/all is 50% propaganda at any given time. It really does need to be talked about. The next generation will be more zealous than the last. Labeling Reddit “the rest of the Internet” is hiding one’s head in the sand in the face of a tsunami of cultural manipulation.

Isn’t it just because Hungary represents a European country which went right wing authoritarian, and that’s important if your worldview values western liberal democracy?

(Or if you’re a socialist it’d be salient too. Liberals and socialists make up the core mainstream Reddit users).

'They enriched us.' Migrants' 44-hour visit leaves indelible mark on Martha's Vineyard

I encourage people to read the article before reading my impressions.

Incidentally, this article made me really wish for the Bare Links Repository back.

There is so much about this article that is just amazing to me. I don't know how to describe it. Maybe "witlessly mask off"?

First, I want to note the tic where every time the author notes an age, he specifies that the migrant in question looks younger. It's just so artlessly manipulative.

Second, the people patting themselves on the back for the casual, mild, one-off generosity. Wow, a Martha's Vineyard homeowner reached into his wallet and gave a migrant a $100 bill. Then there's the guy who spent $100 on candy for the kids, which is extra Wholesome 100 because he lives in his car because the rent is too damn high. It's like Ray Sanchez crammed an entire scathing allegory about life and housing in the blue zones into a sentence and didn't even notice.

Third, I'd really like to see the argument for how offering people a plane ride to a rich resort town is a human rights violation.

But the thing that really gets me is the detailed, yet uselessly vague, descriptions of the incredible dangers the migrants had to overcome to get to the US. Murderous mud and murderous cartels, and floods and cliffs. Coming from Venezuela, it's 2,684 miles by plane. Map software can't even calculate a route by land, I'm guessing it's something more like 4,000 miles, going through at least seven other countries. The article quotes the migrants clearly describing themselves as economic migrants, but repeatedly calls them asylum seekers. No one seems to notice that these people trekked, apparently on foot, halfway across the hemisphere, losing something like 2/3rds of their number to the assorted lethal dangers for exactly the storied rewards they want these people to get, quoting the article, "access to services including legal, health care, food, hygiene kits, and crisis counseling" along with housing.

The MV people celebrating themselves in this article seem to bear a large portion of moral blame for creating the exact incentive for people to take these risks and find themselves in these situations. Imagine if some billionaire was offering people a large sum of money to take their children and hike across a deadly desert. I think there would be mass outcry at how incredibly fucked up that was. And the few people who reached the other end are instead greeted with a king size Snickers bar and a crisp Benjamin to fuck off. Do you want people dying to get to you or not?! How many dead kids is worth a few hours of cultural enrichment?

I'm at a loss for how to categorize this, but it all just strikes me as appalling. This is the most cruelly champagne socialist shit I've ever read, and it's being presenting as flattery by CNN!

The article quotes the migrants clearly describing themselves as economic migrants, but repeatedly calls them asylum seekers.

In fairness, when it comes to people from Venezuela, they are arguably both, and I can't exactly begrudge them for braving the absurd risks to come to America.

They enriched us, and then we packed them off to keep them from cluttering up the place. They're someone else's problem to get them accommodation, money, jobs, etc.

Your hatred is clouding your thinking. What, exactly, would you have considered the appropriate response?

  • Engage in charity individually

  • Coordinate aid to minimize the chaos

  • Lock the doors and hope they go away

  • Call their lawyers/politicians and make them go away

  • Hunt the most dangerous game from their thoroughbred horses

Choose according to your personal valuation of community vs. charity. All but the last would have been valid--if this weren't an active political maneuver. By framing the whole program as owning the libs, DeSantis added a giant publicity cost to anything which could be reported as pearl-clutching. It's only natural to choose the options least likely to give him the headlines he craves. If that's cringeworthy or tone-deaf, so be it.

Oh, but you've got to have something to froth about, so it's time to pick apart the execution of that option.

The MV people seem to bear a large portion of this moral blame for creating the incentive

So "Republican governors" can organize a plan to ship them cross-country. And red states can pay tax dollars for the travel. And DeSantis can bluster and make political hay and otherwise ensure that it gets massive news coverage...and you're blaming the residents?

Say your roommate brings in a homeless guy from the street and tells you he needs to sleep on the couch you just bought. Maybe you put your foot down; maybe you decide to be a good Christian. If you're feeling really charitable you might even try to offer aid of your own.

The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?

Either way, it's not ambiguous who's to blame.

So "Republican governors" can organize a plan to ship them cross-country.

If people are putting up posters all over, posters that they saw elsewhere and copied so they could virtue signal, about how they welcome migrants -

  • and then when real migrants turn up, they send them off to be Somebody Else's Problem -

  • yeah, this was a stunt by DeSantis, but it's 'put your money where your mouth is time' and the Martha's Vineyard 'this is my second or even third home' owners (not the native locals, who earn their living by being, let's be blunt, service workers for the rich holidaymakers) are very, very lacking.

It would be very easy for me to put up a nice poster in my window claiming I welcomed all Zarazelans, when there isn't a Zarazelan within three hundred miles of me. When real Zarazelans turn up, then I have to put up or shut up.

What, exactly, would you have considered the appropriate response?

  1. Keep them, or

  2. Admit "we want them to go away"

"You are racists if you don't keep them, but we don't need to keep them" doesn't count.

I’m fine with either of those. “Put up or shut up.”

What sticks in my craw is the insistence that the residents are morally blameworthy for “creating the incentive”!

What, exactly, would you have considered the appropriate response?

Pool some of the massive amount of wealth available. Put them up in hotels for a week. Give them (and the MA authorities) an actual chance to figure out a real plan for them moving forward.

Honestly, I can even imagine a version of that article that didn't offend me so much. But the actual article reeked of poverty/suffering porn and self-satisfied fart-huffing over what is objectively extremely minor amounts of aid.

So "Republican governors" can organize a plan to ship them cross-country. And red states can pay tax dollars for the travel. And DeSantis can bluster and make political hay and otherwise ensure that it gets massive news coverage...and you're blaming the residents?

I'm obviously talking about the incredibly dangerous hike of 4000 perilous miles, not the last thousand traversed in a commercial, first world airplane. I am positing that people who support lax (or non-existent) border security bear some moral responsibility for the suffering endured, and the 2/3s who died along the way. Every "In this house" sign is a marginal incentive for people to risk their lives.

The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?

I would probably let him stay for more than 44 hours, in that case. And the calculus changes yet again if I've been openly championing "Unhoused Persons Rights", and supporting my city accepting homeless people from other areas. If the best I could do to "prove him wrong" was a single night before I had the homeless guy escorted out by the police, while I wailed for the reporters about how deeply I was moved by the experience, I would fully expect to be slammed for being a huge hypocrite.

Yes, the article was cringeworthy and the overall aid was mediocre. Slam them for being champagne socialists; I can argue degree but not direction.

I don’t see how that cashes out into moral blame for incentivizing migration. Those migrants made their 4K mile trek on the promise of steady work in Texas or California, not a full-size snickers. There was no expectation or plan to come park on an island and eat $26 hamburgers until certain politicians got involved. DeSantis wants to stunt make his opponents pay their “fair share,” fine. Assigning that blame to the residents for being too nice (while also complaining that they ought to have done more?) is ridiculous.

Those migrants made their 4K mile trek on the promise of steady work in Texas or California, not a full-size snickers.

Right, and who is making that promise? If people were met at the border with a wall, and told to go back home, very quickly no one would be risking a 4000 mile death trek. If you are encouraging people to make the trek, you deserve some blame for people making the trek. If you didn't know the trek was dangerous, you deserve scorn for being ignorant about your own policies.

What, exactly, would you have considered the appropriate response?

Empathy for the states that deal with this everyday.

Say your roommate brings in a homeless guy from the street and tells you he needs to sleep on the couch you just bought. Maybe you put your foot down; maybe you decide to be a good Christian. If you're feeling really charitable you might even try to offer aid of your own.

The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?

You realise this could apply to either side?

Yes.

Not really arguing with the general practice of bussing migrants to blue cities. At the very least there’s work and maybe infrastructure in place. Migrants (legal or otherwise) clearly choose that on their own sometimes.

My problem is with the OP trying to assign moral blame, in this case specifically, to the residents. If he finds it ridiculous for Dems to impose such costs on red states, maybe he shouldn’t try and claim they did it to themselves when the tables are turned.

Say your roommate brings in a homeless guy from the street and tells you he needs to sleep on the couch you just bought. Maybe you put your foot down; maybe you decide to be a good Christian. If you're feeling really charitable you might even try to offer aid of your own.

The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?

Either way, it's not ambiguous who's to blame.

Let me help tie your analogy to the view of the right. Every night for the last 40 years, you've been inviting homeless people to stay in your roommate's room. Whenever he objects, you loudly and publicly denounce him as a bigot who hates the less fortunate, and correspondingly congratulate yourself on your depth of character. Sure he's been stabbed a few times, his belongings have been stolen, and his room is used as a stash house for a drug trafficking ring, but, as you are constantly reminding him, that's a small price to pay to make the world a better place.

On the night in question, you greet the homeless person graciously, tell them how much you appreciate them being there and the struggle they are going through, offer them a few jelly beans and then, as soon as the pastor leaves, you have the police escort them from the premises. You then post to facebook that your roommate is history's greatest monster for using a human being as a prop in your little domestic spat.

What, exactly, would you have considered the appropriate response?

Coordinate amongst themselves to find a place for migrants to live in, in the town. Instead they, successfully, demanded deportations and declared an emergency.

Being as generous as one demands others are, is the least one can do.

Reasonable. Or--more reasonable than the OP, I guess. I do note that deportation is not the same as "willingly" transferring them out, though the difference may only be superficial.

Aside from the irony of Republican lawmakers demanding token gestures of equal outcomes, and/or deciding that this is the proper implementation of a social safety net, there are a couple interesting arguments to be had.

First: are these folks the ones demanding others be generous? Trivially, yes, in the sense that they more likely Democrats, subscribe to (or own) left-wing media, and thus might have some culpability. Perhaps not in specifics, since having enough money to live on a luxury island is a great way to become grillpilled and studiously avoid the issue. One wonders how many MV residents have made a public statement on the matter, rather than nodding along at family dinners...It's certainly much easier to them to be sanguine about lax immigration knowing that the main costs will be paid by someone else.

Which brings us to the second point: why do so few illegal migrants end up in the Martha's Vineyards of the country? There are about 330 million legal Americans and almost 12 million illegal immigrants. Your link claims a population of 20k. If those 12M migrants ended up equitably distributed among the legal population, we'd expect at least 727 illegal immigrants living in the area. The lack of such a population is due to the isolation, yes, but also to an irregular job market and ridiculous competition for housing. It appears that migrants don't generally find it worthwhile.

This makes for an asymmetry. If illegal immigrants can't afford the $26 hamburgers, but can get by in San Antonio or even mainland Massachusetts, how did the MV residents become responsible for paying the difference? It's one thing to argue that by voting Democrat they have "demanded" others, in the general sense, make room. I am not so convinced that affirmative migrant action is commensurate.

why do so few illegal migrants end up in the Martha's Vineyards of the country?

For the same reason that the ones who got sent there got kicked out.

Literally the only thing I want to hear from the MV residents who were so 'enriched' after this experience is whether they want to accept more migrants or not.

If so, Texas can start sending them trainfuls. Should turn out great. Win-Win-Win for all.

If not, then at least stop playing at being a 'sanctuary' city if you are unable or unwilling to provide sanctuary.

I don't think ANYONE actually believes they support these people in anything more than the abstract sense if they only take action when migrants are brought directly to their doorstep. It's just standard NIMBY behavior.

The reality behind "santurary cities" I think is bringing more heat than light. The policy is surprisingly reasonable in the actual specifics. The policy is point is to et local prolice actually be able to interact with illegal immigrants to solve and prevent crime. If they have to work with ice they will be avoided at all costs by the likes of victims and community members. If you don't want sychopath serial criminals hiding out with a population that cannot reasonable expel them then you need something like this. There are plenty of ways that the ability to prevent illegal immigration are hampered by the denizens of MV, but this is not the important one.

The policy is surprisingly reasonable in the actual specifics. The policy is point is to et local prolice actually be able to interact with illegal immigrants to solve and prevent crime.

IMO those sorts of policies are defensible, but the broader "anti-immigration enforcement" sentiment (the bailey, as it were) includes state judges sneaking immigrants out literal back doors to avoid ICE custody and San Francisco trying to avoid the deportation of felons wanted on federal murder charges.

I'm not opposed to real immigration reform, but fighting over enforcement is, I think, a pretty bad look.

The reality of Dallas becoming a sanctuary city because otherwise the large community of undocumented El Salvadorans will allow MS-13 to shelter among them for fear that the police call ICE is fairly reasonable. Same for LA, Phoenix, San Antonio, Houston, etc. That’s because otherwise law abiding illegals and their children make up a large percentage of those cities’ underclass and are willing to talk to the police if it isn’t a deportation risk.

Martha’s Vineyard becoming a sanctuary city when it already has functionally no illegal immigrants and no gang presence is pure political signaling, and the same thing can be said for other cities that lack the specific condition of ethnic gangs trying to hide among otherwise pro-law and order undocumented coethnics.

Yes, but this still implies that the migrants are actually able to stay in the city itself.

The implication has always been that they want migrants near them.

But the people who are most in favor of allowing illegal immigrants to stay are, conspicuously, the ones who never have to live in and around said immigrants. There's consistently a lack of skin in the game with this particular policy prescription.

But the people who are most in favor of allowing illegal immigrants to stay are, conspicuously, the ones who never have to live in and around said immigrants. There's consistently a lack of skin in the game with this particular policy prescription.

Do you really think if we polled people in major metro areas (the place where the vast majority of illegal immigrants actually live) on what they think, they'd be in favor of large scale deportation? They have skin in the game and also generally don't care. Conversely, why is it that some of the most intense xenophobia comes out of places in the interior of the country that attract next to no migrants?

True, but for those of us who do live around them I prefer the police that be more effective.

Yup.

Although we could go off on the tangent about the people pushing 'defund the police' and most likely to believe that police officers are a danger to minorities turn out to usually be those who least depend on the police for protection.

It's just contradictions all the way down if you dig into it.

If Martha's Vineyard supports open borders or at least is okay with large amounts of migrants coming across, I'd love to hear their coherent reasons for explaining why those migrants can't stay in their town.

Wow, a Martha's Vineyard homeowner reached into his wallet and gave a migrant a $100 bill. Then there's the guy who spent $100 on candy for the kids...

Let's not forget one guys says a $26 hamburger is "much more" than he could earn in a month in Venezuela (if he could find work). Four months salary worth of candy, passed out by a guy who seems relatively poor. Yeah, I'd try too.

22 out of 60 survived traversing the Darien Gap. That's rough.

What, in your opinion, would have been the appropriate journalistic tone for CNN to take with their coverage?

DeSantis sent a bunch of asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard, where they received befuddled but basically well -meaning help, and were essentially told "careful, it gets super cold up here and it's hard to find work."

CNN is trying to make human-interest lemonade.

Martha's Vineyard

Was it legal what DeSantis did? As far as PR stunts go, it was a huge success and way boosts his odds for 2024, assuming he isn't criminally charged for this stunt.

If he’s charged then we live in a banana republic. You can’t use courts to arrest political rivals.

If he were criminally charged, I think it'd become an even more successful PR stunt.

What exactly would the crime be? And why wouldn't it apply to every NGO, congressional staffer and lawyer doing similar things to get people to and over the border in the first place?

It is almost certainly illegal in some capacity to fly illegal immigrants further into the country. I’m almost certain the federal aviation code, at least, has something against flying around people who have no legal right to be in the country. There’s probably also a law against inducing people to travel under false pretenses and you can no doubt get some of the migrants to testify that they did not know they were going to Martha’s Vineyard.

Now getting charges to stick is probably another matter but I would be very surprised if the DOJ can’t find something, assuming it wants to.

The Biden administration has been doing exactly this for years.

It is almost certainly illegal in some capacity to fly illegal immigrants further into the country. I’m almost certain the federal aviation code, at least, has something against flying around people who have no legal right to be in the country.

It is not. Obama started a program to relocate illegal immigrants deeper into the country back in 2014: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/judicial/289742-just-before-election-obama-doubles-down-on-illegal-immigrant-fly/

Biden restarted and expanded the program.

His administration went farther, now illegal aliens can use their arrest warrants as ID for TSA purposes.

From https://www.theepochtimes.com/tsa-backtracks-on-allowing-illegal-immigrants-to-use-arrest-warrants-as-id-to-fly_4229583.html

"When illegal immigrants and other non-citizens and non-U.S. nationals “do not otherwise have acceptable forms of ID for presentation at security checkpoints, TSA may also accept certain DHS-issued forms, including ICE Form I-200 (Warrant for Arrest of an Alien),” a TSA spokesperson confirmed to The Epoch Times in an email."

Just yesterday I met a Turkish man who came to my church asking for a place to stay for two days. After I downloaded Google Translate, he said he’d come up through Mexico and has been in a camp just outside of town for a month, and on Monday, he has a flight to New Jersey. He’s using his ICE paperwork as his ID.

After he and I were both unable to find local church resources, I started looking up hostels, and he interrupted, asking if we’d just drive him to the airport instead. So we gave him a ride.

It was the oddest encounter I’ve had in years.

But none of these people were illegal immigrants, were they? They have all requested asylum, if I am not mistaken, and hence they indeed have the right to be in the country pending adjudication of their asylum cases. See discussion here.

Nor, contrary to what some on the left have opined, is he guilty of human trafficking, which requires the purpose of using the victim for commercial sex, labor or services.

it helps that those NGOs and staffers have the establishment on their side

I know that politics isn't supposed to makes sense, but this news cycle has made extra no sense. Everybody seems to be at peak rhetorical incompetence, from the left with stuff like the above, and the right with "Democrats are once again the real racists!"

I don't know about incompetence. The way I understand it is that Southern states do not have legal ability to deport illegal migrants - that is federal government responsibility. There are sanctuary cities up north supposedly willing to help these immigrants. So sending them over there should be win/win situation. Southerners are racists and Sanctuary cities will take up on the burden.

This BTW reminds me of a reverse situation from EU migrant crisis. Except all immigrants wanted to go to Germany/Sweden which were the countries that were most vocal about helping them. Only for the situation to be turned around with all the negotiations about quotas for migrants for different countries and so forth.

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I recently came across something while listening to a crime podcast that I have heard many times before. The adage that "rape is about power, not sex". I have literally heard this since teachers told me this in school. The most recent context as I mentioned was a crime podcast. Specifically the hosts were covering a case committed in Thailand I believe, and they were saying that the suspects favored by the police were likely wrongfully accused/targeted because they were illegal immigrants. As a point of evidence in favor of their innocence, the hosts remarked that the confession extracted by the police gave the motive as uncontrollable lust at seeing the victim behaving in a promiscuous way (making out with her boyfriend in public). The hosts pointed out that since science has proven that rape has nothing to do with sex, and only with power, this explanation was obviously false and the product of a coerced confession.

But upon thinking about this, how does this make any sense at all? If rape had nothing to do with sex, shouldn't we expect men and ninety year old women to be raped just as often as twenty year old women when attacked? After all, wouldn't it be an even greater assertion of power to assert your power over a male than over a female? Of course rapes of males by males happen, but to my knowledge generally in a prison or explicitly homosexual context, in either case where women are off the menu. I can't tell you how many cases I have heard where a couple is attacked, the man is killed and the woman is raped then killed. I don't know if I have ever heard of a case where a heterosexual couple is attacked, the woman killed (without assault) and the man raped then killed. Furthermore, doesn't rape require some level of sexual interest from the perpetrator (assuming he doesn't use an object or something else)?

I just can't believe how often this "fact" is trotted out as if it is completely proven. I can't even begin to imagine how such a thing could even theoretically be proven, except maybe by observing that heterosexual perpetrators were just as likely to rape men as women (which is not the case to my knowledge). How did such a fact come to be accepted without challenge? Is there some persuasive argument for this that I'm not aware of? What would the purpose of making this up be? Is it just to distance the woman's behavior/dress and general victim blaming from the crime?

One major problem that hasn't been mentioned yet with the idea that "rape is about power, not sex" is that this ignores, or deliberately downplays the fact that men and women actually commit rape at fairly comparable rates. Part of the motivation behind conceptualising rape as about power was to use rape as part of the ideological framework of feminist patriarchy theory - that men, and only men, commit rape, and do so as a tool of power to subjugate and oppress women. The violent 'enforcement mechanism' of patriarchy. Of course, this falls apart if you acknowledge the reality that women can and do commit rape against men in non-insignificant numbers.

The CDC periodically conducts and releases data on the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. In the latest report on data from 2016/2017, 2.3% of women reported being raped in the last 12 months. In the same report, 0.3% of men reported being raped during the last 12 months. Case closed, right? Women get raped significantly more than men. No, because there is a significant slight of hand going on. The NISVS uses a specific definition of rape:

Rape is any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes when the victim was too drunk, high, drugged or passed out and unable to consent.

Men who are made to penetrate a woman are excluded from this definition of rape. Instead they are listed under a far more innocuous sounding category of 'made to penetrate'. 1.3% of men reported being made to penetrate in the last 12 months. In other words, what most people commonly understand as being rape (that is, nonconsensual sex). In some years, men have even reported a high rate of made-to-penetrate than women have of rape (e.g. in 2011, men reported 1.7% made-to-penetrate in the last 12 months, women reported 1.6% rape in the last 12 months). However, this has not prevented dishonest or ignorant actors constantly taking the 'rape' statistics of men and women at face value and comparing them to one another to make generalised statements.

(Note - there are plenty of other ways to dissect the CDC data, and as a generally speaking the numbers are probably inflated across the board compared to reality. I will also add that these male and female victimisation rates are not even considering the fact that men are far less likely to conceptualise an experience as 'rape' or sexual assault, while women are far more likely to do so.)

Why does the CDC use what is apparently such a biased and misleading definition of rape and made-to-penetrate. Because the CDC's definitions and research were and are heavily influenced by Mary P. Koss, one of, if not the leading researcher on sexual assault and rape, and feminist. Koss has served as a long-term advisor to the CDC, and the CDC has pretty much adopted Koss' definition of rape wholesale. Koss essentially believes that men can't be raped, and that it would be inappropriate to call men who are raped, as raped:

"Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders. It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman." (Koss 1993 Detecting the Scope of Rape)

Interview with reporter Theresa Phung:

Phung: "Dr. Koss says one of the main reasons the definition does not include men being forced to penetrate women is because of emotional trauma, or lack thereof."

Koss: "How do they react to rape. If you look at this group of men who identify themselves as rape victims raped by women you'll find that their shame is not similar to women, their level of injury is not similar to women and their penetration experience is not similar to what women are reporting."

Later:

Phung: "So I am actually speaking to someone right now. his story is that he was drugged, he was unconscious and when he awoke a woman was on top of him with his penis inserted inside her vagina, and for him that was traumatizing."

Koss: "Yeah."

Phung: "If he was drugged what would that be called?"

Koss: "What would I call it? I would call it 'unwanted contact'."

Phung: "Just 'unwanted contact' period?"

Dr. Koss: "Yeah."

Koss has been involved with advising many other prominent organisations like the FBI, the WHO and World Bank. Koss is also the origin of other feminist sexual assault and rape myths, including the claim that 1 in 4 college women have been raped, using extremely poor and biased research methods.

Koss may be just one (highly influential) person, but the bias in the conceptualisation and reporting of rape as exclusively or near-exclusively a men-on-women crime is much greater than that. In many jurisdictions, it is legally impossible for a woman to rape a man. This is because the laws in many countries or states specifically define rape as a crime that only a man can commit against a woman. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 in England and Wales defines rape in a similar way to the CDC, where rape is the nonconsensual penetration of the victim by the offender's penis. In India (Section 375 Indian Penal Code), rape is a crime explicitly defined as a crime that a man commits against a women. In the US, it varies state by state, some being better than others. In practice, some of these jurisdictions prosecute women-on-men rape (made-to-penetrate) under sexual assault laws, but even when they are theoretically equivalent to rape prosecution 'under a different name', they still often carry far less social sigma and often lesser sentencing guidelines. 'Sexual assault' sounds less heinous than 'rape'.

So in conclusion, rape is not only not about power, but it's also not exclusively a male perpetrated crime. However, there are significant social and legal barriers to recognising the reality of rape and the existence of male victims and female perpetrators. It's easy to think of rape as only something men do when institutions and society at large have explicitly defined rape as only something men can do, and then this is used to dishonestly support false narratives around sexual relations.

men and women actually commit rape at fairly comparable rates.

I don't have an informed opinion about this, but I find this strange for two reasons:

  1. It's pretty well-established that men commit more violent crimes than women in general.

  2. It's pretty well-established that men like sex much more than women in general.

Given these two facts, I'd predict that, not only do men commit much more rape than women, but the male:female: perpetrator ratio for rape would be even higher than for other violent crimes. The data appear to suggest otherwise. What explains this unexpected result?

(My best-guess explanation is that the CDC data is wrong somehow, but I haven't looked much into it, and I don't know why it would be wrong.)

To your first point, I would say it's an category error to group rape in with violent crime in general. Rape (against women) is really given a special status by society at large separate from other forms of crime. Rape is considered so heinous that even hardened criminals (i.e. the people actually committing violent crimes) find it shameful and disgusting. Rapists are routinely targeted within prison and beaten or otherwise attacked to the point often have to be removed from the general population. Rapist is as about low status as you can get in virtually every culture or subculture, including the criminal. Additionally, when men do commit violent crimes, they mostly target other men, and generally try to avoid victimising women. Even male robbers and muggers who otherwise proudly boast about their crimes are extremely reluctant to mention victimising women, only men, and those that do are ashamed of it and/or insist that they normally only target men. Lastly, the stereotype of violent rape in a dark alley by a stranger is extremely rare. The vast majority of rapes are 'non-violent', that is to say, they mostly occur between at least acquaintances where (especially) coercion, intoxication and dubious consent (i.e. social manipulation) are the modes of rape, which women are just as capable of men.

To your second point, I would first say that while I generally agree with your point that men have a higher sexual drive than men, it's not like women are completely dissimilar and don't have a sex drive, I don't think the difference is that big. But the real issue is how men's 'sexual agency' exists in context with society at large. Both men and women have it drilled into them that men have high libidos ('they always want it') and women are more prudish in general. Whether this reflects an underlying truth or not is immaterial here - the point is that this is the social context people operate in. For this reason, men have it drilled into them they have to seek women's approval (consent) for sex and generally have a greater responsibility for having 'ethical' sex for lack of a better term. This is ramped up to 11 in the current culture where 'consent training' for men is everywhere where men have to learn how to seek consent from women. Little to none expected of women inversely to seek the consent of men however - men are always up for it. Besides, men are physically stronger than women, so they can just stop her, right? Which conveniently ignores that rape is mostly committed through social coercion and manipulation which is just as applicable for women raping men, and a man who uses too much physical force against women is in a whole other world of trouble. Basically, society has always put great effort into enculturating men 'not to rape' (that is, seek respectful sexual interaction with women), while if anything we do the opposite with women.

Having heard and read quite a number of stories of male victims of female rapists, one of the most common themes among the stories is that the female rapists often are completely unaware that they are raping their male victim. They are so unaware of the fact that maybe their male victim doesn't want to have sex that the fact they could be raping them doesn't enter their minds (something that is much hard for similar men/male rapists to believe, but it does happen). A typical story is something like the man goes to a party, gets drunk, passes out/goes to sleep, wakes up a few hours later to find a woman having sex with him. He may avoid saying no and forcing her off him because he doesn't want to offend her, or he's personally accepted the narrative that men want sex (i.e. he blames himself the same way many female victims of rape do). Even if he does say no, he often won't resort to physical force, because men know that using physical force/violence against women regardless of circumstance is a big no-no. In the more malicious cases that do exist, the female rapist will often tell the male victim that she will publicly accuse him of raping her if he doesn't have sex with her. In the aftermath of the rape, the female victim often fails to conceptualise what she did as rape even well after the fact, and the man also struggles to conceptualise it as rape, even if he is traumatised by it. If he does tell his friends (both men and women), by and large they won't believe it was rape and that he actually wanted it, something that is much much less likely to happen under similar circumstances with a female victim. Which ultimately leads into one of the issues about trying to quantify rates of rape - men are far less likely to conceptualise a rape as rape, while women are far more like to do so.

As to the reliability of the CDC study, I will say that the CDC is pretty much the best, large-scale data available on sexual assault and rape. The issue is fundamentally hard to quantify by its nature and does rely heavily on self-reporting victimisation data. As I said in the original post, my suspicion is that numbers are probably inflated across the board - self-victimisation reports often have a false positive bias. I will say that this these numbers fit in line with the data that shows that domestic violence has gender symmerty. To go back to your first point a bit, interpersonal/relational violence (that is, violence against people you have a personal relationship with) is distinct from violent crime/violence committed against strangers/'the public'. By all indications, women seem to use interpersonal violence as least as much as men, and perhaps even more, while men commit the majority of stranger violence. This fits into my hypothesis that most violent crime being committed by men is strongly tied to the fact that men are both expected to be and are more agentic in public. Men often commit violence on behalf of women, or share the benefits of violent crime with women.

Certainly some rape is about power. Someone rich and famous can easily hire the best call girls on the market. They can easily find enough women who will eagerly have sex with them. If they coerce a woman, then it's the coercion that is important to them, getting someone to do what they didn't want to do. Of course it's not solely about power, there are lots of things you can force people to do if you hold power over them. Why sex? Let's look at four situations:

  1. Mr. Big summons Alice into his office, tells her her friend and subordinate Carol is a lousy worker that must be fired if she wants to keep her job. He summons Carol into his office and forces Alice to berate and fire her friend.

  2. Mr. Big summons Bob into his office, tells him his friend and subordinate Dave is a lousy worker that must be fired if he wants to keep his job. He summons Dave into his office and forces Bob to berate and fire his friend.

  3. Mr. Big summons Alice into his office, tells her she is a lousy worker that must be fired. If she wants to keep her job, she will have to give Mr. Big blowjobs every morning.

  4. Mr. Big summons Bob into his office, tells him he is a lousy worker that must be fired. If he wants to keep his job, he will have to give Mr. Big blowjobs every morning.

Situations 1 and 2 are equally likely to happen. But it's hard to image situation 4 if Mr. Big is heterosexual. Or situation 3 if Alice is 65 and overweight. Or situation 3 if Mr. Big is gay. Is it just the sexual appeal of the victim? No.

If Alice is known around the office to be an easy lay, forcing her to fire her best friend is probably better than a blowjob. But if she's religious, married, a lesbian, has refused Mr. Big advances before, then exercising your power to get what you would never get otherwise is a real rush.

Does this apply to every rape? Probably not. Marital rape and date rape are mostly about getting what is "owed": I wined you, I dined you, I am owed sex in return. Or I married you, this means we both gave irrevocable consent to have sex with each other. "Her skirt was too short" rape is similar: she wore provocative clothing that night, laughed at our jokes and touched our arms, she agreed to go to Jake's house to continue the party, she must be a slut, and sluts owe people sex by definition.

Of course, if you squint hard enough you can kinda merge these two rape types: "I am taking what's rightfully mine, either because there's a framework I can use to justify that it is mine, or because might makes right, and I have might aplenty"

If they coerce a woman, then it's the coercion that is important to them, getting someone to do what they didn't want to do.

OR sexual attraction isn't totally fungible and therefore people will pursue an object of attraction even if it costs more than finding other, attractive people. (And/or people are lazy)

This would also explain why porn stars even exist in the first place. Or why some men pay a premium for certain Onlyfans models when free porn is so abundant. Or why celebrity sex tape leaks or the Fappening - the leaking of the nudes of multiple famous Hollywood stars - was such a big deal.

All these match up perfectly with sexual attraction not being totally fungible but not necessarily with power being a significant attractor (I have no power over Kim Kardashian because I went out of my way to watch her sex tape)

In any discussion of rape, I think it is important to zoom out on homo sapiens as a species and ask if humans commit more rape than other species. Just to reach a baseline.

Because I think some of the default assumptions and first principles of feminism are not grounded in reality, evolutionary theory, or science, generally.

The feminist response to this is to dispute definitions. Since rape is specifically a show of power over another, animals without the cognitive machinery for complex culture, consciousness, and morals are simply engaging in mere forced copulation.

Any non-homosapiens species which may have the cognitive machinery capable for rape, clearly also has the machinery for patriarchy etc. and so the smoking gun is found.

There could be a real empirical disagreement here. It could be the feminist believes there is a sizable portion of rapists who, upon learning that their victim wants it would just completely change gears because the rapist's real goal is to be mean, not to get laid.

This definition has the hemlock problem where we can't say a person is raped unless we knew why the perpetrator engaged in the forced copulation.

A big part of that belief is that progressivism is uncomfortable with declaring sex off limits under any circumstances and so tends to define sex acts it’s uncomfortable with as being about power, instead.

And every ideology to some extent or another does something similar; some religious people frame their tax complaints about being opposed to government funding for planned parenthood because they’re uncomfortable with opposing taxes.

Is there some persuasive argument for this that I'm not aware of?

I think one you're not really considering is that this argument was made countering a prior argument about what motivates rape. That prior argument being primarily the "Hydraulic Theory of Rape":

There is a simple and surprisingly durable myth about what causes men to rape women. It goes like this: if a man is too horny, from sexual deprivation or from being constitutionally oversexed, he will lose control in the presence of an unguarded woman. Through the early days of psychology as a science, this basic assumption remained the same. When Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), he assumed that rapists suffered from either ‘priapism and conditions approaching satyriasis’ or a ‘mental weakness’ that allowed lustful urges to escape their control. It was a simple matter of hydraulics. If the pressure was too great, or the vessel too weak, a horrifying crime would burst forth.

Man gets too horny and can't get off, so he commits rape. Or to put it differently, Rape is about sex: men need sex, if they can't get it honestly they'll steal it violently. How can we test this?

One way would be to see if Rapists have a below-average number of partners prior to the crime, so they can't get an "honest" release. That doesn't hold up consistently, lots of men who are prolific rapists have numerous opportunities to have consensual sex but choose to commit rape anyway. Numbers are seriously sketchy by nature, but have found that rapists typically have more consensual sexual partners than the average non-rapist. So that's a strike against the hydraulic theory, and points to there being a non-sexual element to rape. Which probably comes out as power, since on the list of human desires it can't be food or shelter and we've already ruled out sex.

Personally, I doubt we can attribute all rape to a single cause, and I'm not sure examining "rape" as a category makes sense as currently defined. Any more than trying to come up with a single category of motivation that explains shoplifting, embezzlement, wage theft, not returning a wallet you found on the ground, overcharging on utility bills, and taxation. To say that specific-act consent violations in an ongoing sexual relationship are motivated by the same thing as violent stranger rape as drunken date rape as mass rape in wartime. Some are probably more motivated by things like power or a sense of control or hatred than by anything in common with consensual eros.

...If I'm understanding this passage correctly, the people advocating the "hydraulic theory" are treating rape as a deterministic phenomenon, a medical condition that can be cured or prevented. This seems almost exactly as stupid as claiming that rape has nothing to do with sex at all.

Two Aggies are working on a house. One is hammering in nails, but every second or third nail he looks at in disgust, and throws away. "What's wrong with those nails?" asks the second Aggie.

"They made 'em backward," says the first. "point's on the wrong end."

"Well quit throwing them away, you idiot! We'll use those on the other side of the house!"

That's what this dispute reminds me of: people getting the question obviously wrong, and then other people correcting them with an alternative that is also obviously wrong.

Numbers are seriously sketchy by nature, but have found that rapists typically have more consensual sexual partners than the average non-rapist. So that's a strike against the hydraulic theory, and points to there being a non-sexual element to rape. Which probably comes out as power, since on the list of human desires it can't be food or shelter and we've already ruled out sex.

I don't think you can really make this leap. The most prolific pirates of copyrighted media and music tend to be the most passionate fans of that media/music and spend more on it than the average person. I imagine a similar phenomenon could be taking place here - if an individual man has a much higher sex drive than average that would explain both sexually-motivated rape alongside a higher number of consensual partners.

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It's true that we can't attribute any of those crimes to a single cause. There's not really any reason to reduce crimes to causes is there? People steal because they want things, and people rape because they're horny.

I've never heard a coherent defense of, "rape is about power not sex" that appealed to truth. They all appeal to something orthogonal, like, "it's good therapy" or "it brings positive social change." The slogan is not even wrong, it's just a tool.

I don't go as far as to say it's a tribal signal though.

In an old thread about this, someone linked to Steve Pinker's AMA, in which he had this to say;

It's the "moralistic fallacy," the idea that we should shape the facts in such a way as to point to the most morally desirable consequences. In the case of rape, the fear was that if rape has a sexual motive, then it would be natural, hence good; and instinctive, hence unavoidable. Since rape is bad and ought to be stamped out, it cannot come from "natural" sexual motives. My own view is that these are non-sequiturs -- rape is horrific no matter what its motives are, and we know that rates of rape can be reduced (in Better Angels I assemble statistics that US rates of rape are down by almost 80% since their peak). One surprise that I experienced upon re-reading Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book "Against Our Will," which originated the rape-is-about-power-not-sex doctrine, is that idea was a very tiny part of the book, thrown in almost as an afterthought (Brownmiller said she got the idea from one of her Marxist professors). Most of the book is a brilliant account of the history of rape, its treatment by the legal system, its depiction in literature and film, the experience of being raped and reporting it, and other topics. It's also written with great style, clarity, and erudition. Though I disagree with that one idea, I would recommend it as one of the best and most important books on violence I have read.

https://www.old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1a67x4/i_am_steve_pinker_a_cognitive_psychologist_at/c8ug2in/

Anyways, years ago there was a thread in AskReddit, in which someone asked rapists why they rape. It was a long thread, but one component that was noticeable was that it clearly had nothing to do with power. This, of course, pissed off a ton of people, and the thread was shut down and later scrubbed because it was deemed harmful. I think some 'psychologist' had come out to say that the thread could encourage more people to rape? Anyways, that seemed like a significant moment where the tide began to turn for open discourse on Reddit.

I remember reading the archive of that askreddit. The dominant theme was that almost every one of those rapists was 1) male 2) young and 3) not seeing himself as committing rape. That tends to add up to it being about horny and not power.

Much of the backlash to the thread was that other commenters responded with sympathy. The stories had convinced many users that some cases were in a moral gray area. This was connected to a feminist opposition to rapists being allowed to communicate with the general population in an affirmative space, and some disgust at hearing the stories and the misogynistic views implied by them.

[The psychiatrist response] (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/xf5c2/reddit_are_you_aware_how_dangerous_the_askarapist/) makes an overly-sophisticated point (contrary to the more commonsense opposition described above) that was eaten up for some reason. Arguing that rape is about power and that raping a conscious person means you get off on hurting or horrifying people (I'd argue that this is partially true but is itself sexual), he claims that the rapists in the thread were getting off on horrifying an imagined audience.

A lie repeated over and over becomes truth, that adage is self evident too, given that there is no evidence that Goebbels actually said anything of the sort. This my favourite rebuttal of this myth. An excerpt to add on to what you've described in the 2nd paragraph:

Furthermore, if rape or sexual harassment were indeed motivated by the desire to feel powerful, then one would expect them to be less common among those who already feel powerful, and that they would more often go against the power gradient rather than along it; that is to say, raping or sexually harassing someone more powerful would have greater appeal than sexually abusing someone less powerful.

There's something similar on stalking as well, its often not due to any consciously learnt behaviour as it is an act of impulse and primal instinct.

I think that while most(?) people do take this as fact, despite the efforts to "unlearn" the supposed entitlement have yielded no tangible results, a part of the effort is to regurgitate this trope that "men in power" is always a bad thing, even dangerous and predatory towards women.

Furthermore, if rape or sexual harassment were indeed motivated by the desire to feel powerful, then one would expect them to be less common among those who already feel powerful, and that they would more often go against the power gradient rather than along it; that is to say, raping or sexually harassing someone more powerful would have greater appeal than sexually abusing someone less powerful.

I find this paragraph to be incredibly naïve at best and kinda dumb at worst.

Of course people who are already powerful, who have had a little tase, will want to express that urge throughout their life. It is blindly obvious when you look at how the elite operate.

Of course raping someone who is of lower status than you fulfills this urge more perfectly; the lower status makes it better, not worse.

This whole passage seems to come from someone who has never actually had a fraught social interaction in their life.

I feel like the train of logic might be:

  1. Rape is bad,

  2. But sex is good, (at least, we can't say otherwise without sounding uncool, like old-fashioned prudes.)

  3. So rape must be rooted in something bad (power) instead of something good (sex.)

People will readily believe flimsy and implausible theories that make the world seem to work in a more just way. (See also: Todd Akin.)

Notice that, if rape is about power and not sex, the rhetoric can push on the notion of deconstruction of the hierarchy, and not on concepts like self-control like religions of old (that are bad because they are hierarchical).

Rape is about power, not sex = another instance of academics trying to do their distruption of eternal fascism.

What does "push on the notion of deconstruction of the hierarchy" mean? I'm familiar with left-leaning ideologies saying "hierarchies bad" and calling everything fascism, but what does the power-sex question have to do with it?

The main focus of the New Left is the analysis of hierarchies, power and how different groups and concepts and words interact with each other in the creation of hierarchical organization, born from the desire of finding, analyzing and deconstructing every structure that can remotely generate fascism again.

While sex is a biological function, and so is extremely difficult to dismantle without sounding as a crazy ideologue, power was the perfect word to use.

If rape = power we switch the focus from "maybe males biologically leans to lust, sex and degeneration, and that is life" to "Patriarchy and male dominancy derive only from the fact that exist a hierarchy of male power that provokes rapes, oppression or discrimination"

If it is the second case, this hierarchy can actually be deconstructed through education, word-renaming and all the usual instruments, causing another crack in the Hierarchy.

The one could instead simply say, "sex is good, if its consensual" without resorting to sophistry like, "intercourse without consent isn't sex."

Now, there are very important aspects of sex where the consent and desire is important. For example, I would not expect incels to get off on rape for the same reason they don't get off on prostitutes: they wish to be desired. I don't think those are the kind of considerations feminists have in mind when they say "rape isn't sex."

Focusing on consent might be counterproductive though, if another goal is to e.g. taboo age-gap relationships between older men and younger women. "Power differential" discourse has all of the tools necessary to simply declare such relationships rape.

For example, I would not expect incels to get off on rape for the same reason they don't get off on prostitutes: they wish to be desired.

While we're at it with the whole "deflate common feminist talking points taken as fact" thing: I'm dubious about this as well. Obviously human connection matters to people, but I think this is emphasized for the same reason "rape is power" is - i.e. the ruling ideology prefers stories that downplay sex differences.

Here's another theory: incels are more likely to be less socially adroit, anxious, avoidant types who rationalize their general avoidance of risk via the most socially palatable (almost virtuous!) explanation.

If you've gone multiple decades without any sexual experience why be adamantly opposed to paying for it just to get the monkey of inexperience off your back? It makes much more sense if you're just scared.

If a man is reluctant to ask women out because they can't take the fear or risk of rejection, why would I need a separate explanation for why they don't take part in a likely illegal process that ends at the same place?

First, let me clarify my invocation of incels: I wasn't making an empirical claim about the real community. My sentence should be read as tautological: "There are some people who wish to be desired" and I used "incel" as the closest-match within inferential distance. I think enough incels fit this profile that I wasn't being dishonest. Since my post was arguing that "consent is not an important aspect of sex aka intercourse," I thought it honest to give a case where consent was the vital concern.

Now onto your reply: I think risk-aversion fits the incel profile exactly. What did you mean by virtuous? Normally, I consider "moral" and "virtuous" to be synonyms. I'm not sure if "I wish to be desired" is really moral, but I would say it is flattering, because it doesn't require admitting cowardice. I think most incels claim to be smart (forbidden knowledge, woke/redpilled, etc.), but do not claim to be moral.

I think you're right that incels don't take kindly to the idea that they are cowards, so I do feel a little confused. My current best-guess is that by calling incels cowardly, you are making empirical claims (for example: that they have agency and can change their lives), and so you are contradicting incel orthodoxy. I'm not sure if incels even can get offended, by anything.

I'm not sure if "I wish to be desired" is really moral

It's relative: "I don't go to prostitutes cause I wish to be authentically desired" comes across far better than "I'm too scared to ask out a woman so I'm probably going to be too scared to risk the illegal sex market and that's the only main reason I'm not objectifying someone".

One involves a positive (though not exceptional) trait and panders to the ideology of the biggest incel critics. The other is just - to use your word- cowardice.

My current best-guess is that by calling incels cowardly, you are making empirical claims (for example: that they have agency and can change their lives), and so you are contradicting incel orthodoxy.

TBH: I wasn't even aiming at "incel orthodoxy" so much as the mainstream orthodoxy that prefers and promotes this particular explanation. As I said: I think that orthodoxy is driven by the same thing behind the "rape is power": a refusal to reckon with sex differences and the messy issue of distributing sex.

"Incel orthodoxy" is quite rightly seen as the silly product of depressive and polarized thinking and ignored in other places (e.g. the idea that looks are all that matter or that average men have no hope in the sexual marketplace). I didn't even think I had to debunk it, since most people take it with a grain of salt.

My skepticism is precisely that we're being asked to take avoidants at their word that - conveniently- the risky thing they're too scared to do actually doesn't interest them at all and wouldn't help in the slightest. But only in this case.

When they say dating is hopeless cause women rate 80% of men as unattractive or their chins condemn them to genetic oblivion everyone suddenly agrees with me that maybe we can't just believe such people and they may be rationalizing their failure/avoidance.

Now I'm confused because you added objectification to the mix! Are you saying incels believe "we don't see prostitutes because objectification is wrong?" Because I certainly never have heard them say that. I think incels mostly say (a) "we don't see prostitutes because they aren't authentic." An alternative reasoning, (b) "we don't see prostitutes because objectification is wrong" seems mututally exclusive, completely incompatible. I do agree that (b) panders to their critics, but I've never seen it. And of course, professing (a) lets them hide from perhaps the true reason, the aptly-lettered (c) "we don't see prostitutes because we are cowards"

everyone suddenly agrees with me that maybe we can't just believe such people and they may be rationalizing their failure/avoidance.

Ah now I understand! You're saying that since mainstream orthodoxy is already in the business of calling incels deluded and (perhaps unconsciously) running from the truth in some cases (chins), why would we take them at their word for other cases (prostitutes)! That's a good insight I've never heard articulated before.

If I had to guess, it's because you're assessing incels from a descriptivist POV. You identify psychological factors (avoidance) and see how those cause the relevant behaviors.

The mainstream position is normative, saying, "incels deserve their lot in life." The easiest way to fit the chin issue into that narrative is to call them liars; but the prostitutes issue isn't really an issue. I don't think most people think about the nuanced beliefs of incels.

Maybe I'm wrong about the mainstream position and I've actually described an "anti incel" position -- I'm not sure.

Oh, yes. I'd say that it's probably best if "consensual" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sex to be good. (Of course, I care less about avoiding sounding like an old-fashioned prude about this, which may explain my strategic freedom here...) Otherwise one ends up playing word games with "consensual" in order to take sex acts which would seem to meet the straightforward definition of the word but are nevertheless bad and condemn them based on the only criterion considered valid, and make that criterion seem less and less sensible in the process.

I've expressed the sentiment before that I'm afraid that overloading good-affected concepts may lead them to collapse, and I would rather not have such a thing happen here.

The reason rape is worse than murder is because a women's value in society is her body. When feminists say, "a woman is worth more than her body" they are speaking normatively, or more accurately, saying "a woman ought to be worth more than her body." Undoubtedly, feminists will deny this, and say that no, they really mean a descriptive to be. "Rape is about power" therefore asserts the worth women.

When opponents of sexual redistribution say "sex is not a commodity" they are also speaking normatively. They will deny this, but prostitution's position as the oldest profession implies that descriptively speaking, sex simply is a commodity. Women intuitively understand the value of their sex appeal, as any cursory glance at social media reveals. I also have funny anecdotes of female friends volunteering egregious details of their sex lives (apparently women talk to each other about this) and once she figured out I wasn't gay, she was imminently disgusted at me. The implication here is that since I enjoyed hearing it, I was being a free-rider.

"Men undergo some experience and feel raped" is just about the most pathetic anecdote ever, so I might as well go all in and give an example of that, too. One time I gave money to a panhandler and I felt unsafe. It's unclear to me if feeling unsafe was important to my overall vibe, but it bared remarkable correspondence to a drunk college girl:

  • he didn't use force

  • I regretted my actions afterwards

  • I felt like a chump

I think the last bullet point here is very important to "the feeling of being raped." What's extra funny is already having crystalized these beliefs, I came across this clip (Did you know Chris Hansen had another show about catching a different kind of criminal?), so clearly jaded men like me aren't the only ones trivializing rape. (To those not aware of the context: the woman was a victim of identity theft and lost a lot of money).

To recap, if rape is about sex then an uncomfortable truth would come to light: that a woman's value is her body.

The reason rape is worse than murder is because a women's value in society is her body.

Why the link to TvTropes? In fiction, there's a much clearer reason why rape is considered worse than murder - the readers are, unconsciously or not, prudish in nature and find violence more acceptable than something of a sexual nature.

Another reason why it intuitively feels worse than murder is that I could imagine myself (if the conditions were sufficiently extreme) perhaps killing another person with my own free will. Not so with rape; even though the act of murder itself is worse in my ethical calculus, rape categorically reveals the base nature of the perpetrator in a way murder doesn't.

I'd compare it with somebody who has their pet cat put down so they could cook and eat it. Morally not much worse than cooking some calamari, but it really says something about how messed up the person is.

Technically, there are cases where rape could be justified; it's just that most of the ones that are actually physically possible* are also so bizarre that one can assume they're negligible. The most plausible one is probably "fuckhead kidnaps man and woman, fuckhead tells man that unless man rapes woman - and no explaining to get her consent - fuckhead will shoot both man and woman".

And of course, all of the above deals with dictionary rape, not statutory rape, which is a huge mess and can be totally free of moral turpitude (the case I know off the top of my head went "girl seduces boy, boy asks for ID, girl provides fake ID, boy has consensual sex with girl, boy arrested for raping girl over girl's protests"; I think some nations' laws even have the insane edge case where if a minor forcibly rapes an adult, the adult is guilty of rape because strict liability).

*I'm thinking cases like the myth in Africa that having sex with a virgin cures HIV. If this were true, which it is not, there would be some hard moral questions in the case of HIV-positive individuals whom no virgin wanted to have sex with.

I don't understand your objection. Are you saying people who read in particular find rape worse than people who don't?

I see TvTropes as being about fiction in general, so does your claim also apply to be who watch or play their media?

Although TvTropes is "about fiction," it is cataloging real phenomenons. I was making the (not so controversial, in my opinion) claim that society sees rape as worse than murder. That works of fiction portray this truth is downstream of real societal attitudes. "Why link to X" feels like a wrong question, unless you provide an alternative Y or have a compelling argument to leave it in plaintext.

Although TvTropes is "about fiction," it is cataloging real phenomenons. I was making the (not so controversial, in my opinion) claim that society sees rape as worse than murder. That works of fiction portray this truth is downstream of real societal attitudes.

Yes, I understand that. I just don't think TvTropes is a good source for those saying what is or isn't an attitude. It feels a bit too...removed? Yes, removed.

There’s another explanation, which I think is preferable: a person’s social value is linked to their reproductive potential, a woman’s reproductive potential is 100x more important than a man’s biologically due to pregnancy (which we grasp intuitively), a woman’s psycho-sexuality is more sensitive to acts of aggression, and society must control mating in order to function.

We don’t have to say “a woman’s value is her body”, we can say “a woman’s body is especially valuable, and the damage of rape is uniquely evil to a woman’s mind and her society”.

a woman’s psycho-sexuality is more sensitive to acts of aggression, and society must control mating in order to function.

Since spousal rape was legal almost everywhere (the definition of rape included that perp isn't the husband), it's evident that society cared about certainty of paternity, not woman's emotions. They didn't have paternity testing, or even pregnancy testing nor postcoital contraception. Now we have all that, but customs are old and even feminists keep parts of it.

First, I want to note that my use of "body" here is a kind of metaphor for reproduction, which it sounded like you understood.

Next, I want to make sure I understand your point, so I will paraphrase what I heard:

You are making a fallacy of the converse. You claim (a) "all a woman is valuable for is her body" but really your facts only imply (b) "a woman's body is far more valuable than a man's body"

Certainly, (b) is correct, because we don't make a big deal out of male rape victims.

The reason we also know (a) is correct is because rape is worse than murder, because most people get mind-killed about the subject and low-decouplers write extensive mental gymnastics (masquerading as arguments) asserting that rape is a special case that has no analogue.

In an alternate world where the same emotional valence was not applied to any rape but was instead only applied to, say, domestic abuse, we could say (a) is false.

Rape is obviously about sex. Date rape wouldn't be the most common form of rape if it wasn't about sex.

As for why people claim otherwise, a few theories:

  1. Sex is a basic human biological drive. If a starving person steals a loaf of bread, we tend to consider their actions at least partially justified, because they were driven by biological need. If rape is about sex, this opens the door to potentially justifying or exculpating rapists in certain circumstances.

  2. If rape is about sex, this implies victims who dressed or acted sexy increased their odds of victimization, and this is too much like victim blaming.

  3. An inability to model how male sexuality works, or an unwillingness to acknowledge major differences in male and female sexuality. Most women, regardless of circumstances, could never commit rape. History shows that many men, under the right circumstances, could. Look at the aftermath of almost every successful military conquest in history, for instance.

As a further corollary to #3, imagine you could somehow do a study where you asked the following question and got a totally honest answer from the study participants: "Imagine you have just committed rape. What do you think was your reason or motivation for doing so?" I think the average female answer would be something like "I hated that person and wanted to ruin their life and make them feel violated." I think the average male answer would be something like "They were just so incredibly sexy and I was just so turned on I lost control of myself." I think men and women will therefore tend to model the motivations of rapists differently because they get different answers when they try to introspect about what could possibly drive someone to commit rape.

Most women, regardless of circumstances, could never commit rape.

remember that the current FBI definition of rape is

"penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."

So if a woman were to tie a man up and have sex with him against his will, it would not legally be considered rape by the FBI, unless she penetrated his anus.

However, "made to penetrate" sexual assault, which is how the CDC defines women having sex with men without their consent is apparently much more common than previously acknowledged.

Indeed, in my own experience, I find that I have been "raped" (i.e. made to penetrate without my consent,) by four women in my lifetime. Always while I had been asleep. In one case, a new girlfriend mounted me while I slept without a condom, even though I had been meticulous in my use of condomes. In a second case, a different girlfriend tried to put a condom on me after I had passed out drunk. She woke me up with sex and the condom fell off at some point. In a third case, a girlfriend invited her friend to perform fellatio on me while I was sleeping.

#metoo functioned as a major redpill for me because I had a close friend falsely accused of rape. As I began to understand exactly how feminists now define rape, I gradually became aware that according to the feminist definition of the term, I had been raped by four different women in my life, and sexually assaulted by others. The absolute hypocrisy and lack of awareness deeply disturbs me to this day, since all of those same women who raped me are strong feminists who jumped on the "believe all women" bandwagon.

I don't know what the answer to the social problem of rape is. However, I do know firsthand that modern academic feminism is built upon glaciers of bullshit over decades and their approach to the problem consistently make society worse because of a deep rooted denial of reality.

An inability to model how male sexuality works, or an unwillingness to acknowledge major differences in male and female sexuality.

I would blame it mostly on this tbh. In order to prevent claims of sexual difference from being used to justify disadvantaging women feminists have crawled into a dangerous hole: denying them altogether.

This "problem" can be seen in many other places - most notably in the claims that men are "shallow" in their looks-based preferences or are, even more fantastically, predators who want nubile young women for purposes of emotional manipulation.

If that shocking failure of cognitive empathy is showcased with vehemence amongst feminists every day I'm not surprised they'd deny claims of sexual difference in desire or the role it plays in assault.

From a purely rhetorical and tactical perspective "this is an evil abomination" is a better sell than "this is an aspect of male sexuality we need to watch and keep under control". Because the latter has been associated with not just limits on men but on women especially, for prudence's sake. After all: they are the party at risk.

With regards to (1) there is some equivocation between the biological meaning of a drive (in which case sex is a drive, as any scientist would tell you) with the spiritual or moral meaning of drives. If "sex is as important as food" really was an axiom of most people, then prostitution would be legal and sexual redistribution would be in the overton window. So I don't think bullet (1) is valid. Your other points seem solid though.

The point I am getting at is roughly the "sex is good/important" progressive viewpoint @YE_GUILTY stated above, though perhaps he articulated it better.

This sounds just like a discussion we had in the Motte a few months ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/u66abs/comment/i5hi84w/

Here's what I had to say about it:

The reason I was surprised to hear you say that "sexual desire plays no role in rape" is provably false is that I've heard this my whole life, and from many not-so-feminist sources. It's just something I never even really thought to question. I feel like it's just common knowledge that rape is about power, not about sexual desire. But the fact that it's common knowledge doesn't mean that it's true, and it doesn't mean that it hasn't been helped along or put in place by feminist or other progressive advocacy.

So now that you talk about it, it is interesting that feminists simultaneously:

  • say that rape is about power, not about sexual desire
  • advocate for increasingly lax standards of rape, like even if a guy gets his girlfriend to say yes to sex after she said no the first time. Or if a guy goes home with a drunk girl from a bar.

Like, if 2 is rape, then it obviously wouldn't be about power any more than any normal sex would be. Because from the guy's perspective, it is just normal sex, he's not going out of his way to rape anyone. So either there's more than one type of rape, one of which can be driven by sexual desire and one is not, in which case we should acknowledge that the two are different. Or else sexual desire does play a role in rape, in which case we need to accept that that carries additional baggage that many feminists don't want to admit.

Rape is about power, just like any other violent crime. - Adam Carolla explains.

Rape is obviously about sex, which is why the most popular targets of rape are the most popular targets of sexual desire, that being pretty young women, and not Jeff Bezos or Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who would both be vastly more impressive conquests in terms of the power displayed.

To be fair though, Bezos and the rock are vastly more impressive conquests in part because they would require a lot more power to victimise than pretty young women. I think power is one dynamic at play in that sense, but it can't be the be all and end all - it requires more power to target a pretty young girl than a feeble old woman too, but victims of rape are way more likely to be under the age of 35 than over 65.

"Rape is all about power, not about sex" always seemed kind of callous to me though. It feels like a cope, although an incredibly disturbing one - you often hear it said after a person sees the victim for the first time, and to me it comes across as something like "Wait what? This ugly person got raped and I can't get a date? Rape must be about power, there is no way the rapist found her sexy." Which is also why I think people just go along with it - they don't want to even consider where this meme came from or why it's so popular, because they don't want to learn it is that cope.

The last thing I am ever going to say about "The Rings of Power", I solemnly promise. Even if later episodes drive me into a fit of apoplexy, or even more unlikely, they manage to pull off at least one that is good.

So I was ranting to myself, as I watched another review video, about the poverty of imagination that Payne and McKay show, the way they imagine they have to dumb down the message of Tolkien for a modern-day audience, how the expectation seems to be that the median viewer will be tuning in just for fancy visuals and action scenes, and then it hit me:

Of course they think this. They got this job via J.J. Abrams, they are jobbing scriptwriters who worked on stuff for Bad Robot amongst others, and that hit me. J.J. Abrams is the guy who said Star Trek was too philosophical for him, so when making the reboot, "So we tried to make it work for people like me ... and people like you. The goal was to make a movie for moviegoers, not just for 'Star Trek' fans. So if you've never seen 'Star Trek' before, you can still see it."

So of course they share a mindset with Abrams. Tolkien is 'too philosophical' so they have to dumb it down for the casual viewer (I don't mean 'normie', a term I hate) who doesn't know or particularly care about the work or the lore, who is only watching for pretty visuals and flashy action scenes. Or so they imagine, because ordinary people who might respond to something that speaks of beauty and eternal themes and the line that runs through the human heart? Nah, ordinary people are only fit to eat junk food and watch junk TV.

So I was ranting to myself, as I watched another review video, about the poverty of imagination that Payne and McKay show, the way they imagine they have to dumb down the message of Tolkien for a modern-day audience

Even if later episodes drive me into a fit of apoplexy

I don't get the latter part. If I watch something and it's bad, I stop watching. Sure, it was a bad show for the first few episodes so I tuned out. Lotta cringe moments and honestly painful to watch stuff. Lot of money spent on the visuals to be sure, but that video game jump-off-the-sword thing is still so bad it's actually funny.

Being mad that a big corporation is milking a beloved franchise of every dollar it can get seems pretty naive, though. Disney was doing awful direct-to-VHS sequels to beloved kids movies before half of us here were born. I didn't watch the Lion King 2: Lion Boogaloo, despite loving the original as a kid. When a corporation does a big shitty sequel, it's not anything new under the sun, it's just a sign to stop watching and go do something else.

Of course they think this. They got this job via J.J. Abrams, they are jobbing scriptwriters who worked on stuff for Bad Robot amongst others, and that hit me. J.J. Abrams is the guy who said Star Trek was too philosophical for him, so when making the reboot, "So we tried to make it work for people like me ... and people like you. The goal was to make a movie for moviegoers, not just for 'Star Trek' fans. So if you've never seen 'Star Trek' before, you can still see it."

I never really got into Star Trek, but I did enjoy the film JJ Abrams made. Don't think I watched any of the sequels, since it was just enjoyable, but not something that really connected. I only watched it because I was on a Heroes binge at the time, and enjoyed Zachary Quinto. This would have been a few years after it came out.

The reboot, in theory, was not a bad idea. But Abrams (1) was using it as a showreel for the real job he wanted, to direct Star Wars, hence he set up a lot of shots (even down to the costuming and making phasers more like blasters) that were direct references to, if not copies of, shots from the original SW trilogy and (2) they didn't give a damn about scriptwriting or the established ST universe, so (for instance) the Klingon home planet had to be really close to Earth since you could travel there in a day, etc. Just bad fucking writing, excuse the swearing, but I see the stamp of it on the two muppets that do Rings of Power.

Into Darkness is a sleeper hit, but the one with Khan was real bad.

It was SO easy to get right, too! Every deposed tyrant on that ship was capable of the physical feats of Khan Noonian Singh. Just have Cumberbatch play John Harrison, Augment Supremacist, straight.

“At least I’m not Khan Singh, you’re telling yourself right now, Kirk? I took over Europe with a handful of strategic coups and crashed economies, and I beat twenty-nine assassins with my bare hands. You sit on your throne pushing buttons and you smile that your underlings follow your orders, your underlings in the same organization that hired you to give them orders. I carved together an army of supermen with my vast raw talent, and used them. Under my leadership, we commanded a continent. No, Kirk, I’m not Khan. I am his equal, and you, blind evolution’s pride and joy, are dirt beneath my feet.”

And then toward the end, Spock can scream to the Heavens, “JOOOHN!!!”

And at the very end, the other hibernation tubes can be shown in a Section 31 warehouse. The camera pans over and circles around one, and there’s Montelban’s Khan in the prime of his 1960’s youth, meticulously digitally recreated, the perfect sequel hook.

So I was ranting to myself, as I watched another review video

This sounds unhealthy. I wonder if this kind of negative engagement isn't some sort of feedback loop that makes it hard to enjoy things you actually want to like.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19993-w

A study out of Japan shows no neutralizing ability against Omnicron for double vaccinated individuals 6 months post-jab. One out of the 6 sera actually showed ADE, or antibody dependent enhancement of infection.

Finally, we examined the effect of sera after vaccination against infection with the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron strain. Clone 35 cells were cultured in the presence of sera collected before vaccination (Supplemental Fig. 7A) or on day 175 after the second vaccination (Supplemental Fig. 7B) along with authentic SARS-CoV-2 Omicron virus. Although some sera maintained neutralizing activity against the original strain (Supplemental Fig. 6D) even on day 175 after the second vaccination, none of these sera had neutralizing activity against Omicron (Supplemental Fig. 7B). Rather, one serum (HC6) exhibited some ADE activity (Supplemental Fig. 7B). The observed augmentation in infection with Omicron was serum dose-dependent and required ACE2, because the parental cell line (K-ML2, lacking ACE2 and TMPRSS2) of clone 35 exhibited no infection with Omicron even in the presence of serum (Supplemental Fig. 8). These results suggest that the rapid spread of Omicron around the world may in part result from the lack of cross-neutralization against Omicron and some ADE activity of sera after vaccination.

This seems to provide evidence that the mRNA vaccine is harmful in regards to omnicron, rather than merely ineffective, at around 6 months post-injection. ADE is what happens when your immune system enhances an infection rather than lodging an attack against it. Dengue fever is a common example for ADE because your second infection is can be worse than the first, as your immune system aids in the infectivity.

The study did not look at before or after 6 months. An earlier Japanese study hinted to the possibility of ADE two years ago iirc, specifically focusing on possible COVID-19 mutations.

ADE has been this mythical specter in online conspiracy theory circles. If it is proven that ADE is real at all relevant post-injection timespans for omnicron and/or other mutations, this would vindicate many COVID conspiracy theorists in an important aspect of the vaccination effort.

What's the effect on severe outcomes such as hospitalisation and death? My understanding for a while has been that vaccinations are quite effective for these against Omicron while not being particularly effective against infection. Should this cause me to update my beliefs?

I think it’s complicated. If ADE is occurring without any neutralization, as far as I know this means the vaccine is plainly increasing infectivity and severity, but not necessarily significantly. The whole point of a vaccine is to launch antibodies to neutralize, not enhance infectivity.

Population-level surveys are really terrible at telling us anything about vaccine protection because of the Selection Effect. The healthiest 1% of people are much more likely to take all recommended health measures, like vaccines. So for instance, those who get the flu vaccine in the summer have half the all-cause mortality over the summer, not because the vaccine was effective, but because the cohort of people who opt-in to optional recommended health practices are going to be healthier than the average.

At the same time, there exists a bottom 1% of healthy people who literally eschew all health interventions and keep terrible lifestyle habits. Some of these are alcoholics, homeless, schizophrenics, shut-ins, whatever. They are far more likely to be unvaccinated because they are far less likely to participate in any health intervention.

Whenever the media talks about population surveys saying unvaccinated have higher hospitalization, it means virtually nothing without factoring in the above, plus factoring in invisible damages of vaccination. Hence there’s a need to look at other kinds of studies: sera studies and controlled studies. Controlled studies found no difference in mortality with 20k adherents, and sera studies have results like in OP.

You usually need a little more analysis than a link and a summary for a toplevel post 'round these parts... This is one of many studies seeming to show the covid vaxxes are less effective than hoped / advertised in 2021. Why does this move the needle more than what we already know?

Updated. Forgot ADE is still niche terminology

I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face. By "strong welfare state" I mean something akin to the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) in which the necessities of life (healthcare, housing, minimum subsistence) are essentially guaranteed, while maintaining a market economy.

Premise #1: We want to maximize pleasure (utility) and minimize pain (disutility).

Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.

Premise #3: Central planning doesn't work very well, so we want to maintain a market economy.

Premise #4: We already have a fairly industrialized, advanced capitalist economy.

ARGUMENT:

  1. Being in poverty is extremely bad for people's wellbeing, both in terms of physical and psychological health. It is extremely unpleasant for people to be homeless or hungry, or having to make decisions like choosing between heat in the winter, medicine, or food. Poverty sucks -- it is painful not being able to afford the essentials of life.

  2. Being afraid of falling into poverty is also bad for people's wellbeing -- it is a major source of worry and concern because everyone knows that being impoverished sucks and is painful. So the existence of poverty is a cause of pain for a much larger group than those actually impoverished. Fear of poverty also leads people to refuse to take risks to avoid the pain of poverty, which leads to less pleasure.

  3. Diminishing marginal utility. At a certain point, another yacht for the ultrawealthy rich guy is not going to make him significantly happier. Money can't buy love, you can't take it with you, etc. etc. However, charging that guy more in taxes and using those resources to eliminate poverty will make the groups mentioned in #1 and #2 significantly more happy.

  4. We should be OK with high taxes in exchange for eliminating poverty by directly providing the necessities of life for those who cannot afford them. The pain avoided by eliminating poverty outweighs the pain imposed by the taxes (or the pleasure that is lost for the wealthy) because of the principle of diminishing marginal utility. Poverty causes more unhappiness than luxuries cause happiness.

Responses to obvious objections:

a. "Eliminating poverty will cause more pain in the long run because the economy will collapse or at the very least growth will slow, leading to a decline in living standards for everyone." Response: This doesn't seem to have happened in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries have been strong welfare states for a long time and are still very wealthy countries, among the wealthiest in the world. They haven't had their economies collapse from having too many layabouts and such.

b. "Charging me high taxes on wealth I created infringes on my liberties/freedom". Response: This may be a coherent objection, but it's not a utilitarian objection, it's a rights-based objection.

c. "The Scandinavian countries only could do this because they are ethnically homogenous, tightly knit societies. Look at Sweden right now, it's falling apart as they let in more immigrants." Response: This goes more to the political problem with instituting this system rather than the desirability of the system itself. The fact that present-day social democrats are pro immigration does not make immigration a necessary part of a social democracy. One can easily imagine a social democracy with Japan-style immigration restrictions.

d. "I only care about those who are deserving to not be in poverty; I don't care about everyone, I'm fine with people being in poverty if they do nothing to better themselves, or if they are in the outgroup." Response: This is also not really a utilitarian objection. Who "deserves" what is a question of justice, of deontology. But here, we are trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is difficult enough, boiling down all of human experience into two buckets, "pleasure" and "pain". If you add a whole 'nother set of buckets, "good people", "medium people", "bad people"... then you've really abandoned the exercise and are just doing deontology with extra steps. The pain someone experiences from not having housing or food or heat during the winter is plainly real and sincerely felt, even if you believe that that person should have done something different to avoid being in that state.

the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face

But us Americans don't need abstract arguments based on a very naive understanding for this. We had the Great Society and the War on Poverty. Which I don't believe right wingers like the consequences of. I believe the standard criticism is that these programs produce single family households that ruin the development of boys, foster multi-genetational dependence on handouts, longer term are to blame for high crime rates and increased drug use, etc, etc. All of course at substantial cost to the taxpayer and feeding the ever expanding bureaucracies. Just hard failures from a right leaning point of view. I've heard this on conservative talk radio and seen it online.

So in their utilitarian calculus, these programs are clearly net negatives. So let's not make a naive utilitarian calculus, let's use the actual reasoning that the right would employ.

Are a lot of people here actually right-wing or utilitarian? I'm right-wing, but definitely not utilitarian. I don't think that's a common union of beliefs anywhere, let alone here.

Well I would classify as right-wing and utilitarian. A materialist, empirically-driven ev. psych, sociobiological and economic pov I think ends up at least vaguely there.

People can quibble with what falls under the umbrella of "welfare state." I think something like seat belt and helmet laws would, and do, ruffle the feathers of a lot of natural rights libertarians but doesn't rise to the level of "holy shot this is socialism," which would put it unequivocally in the left wing, non-conservative camp.

Interesting! So there are right-wing utilitarians here. Well then, I hope you can provide him a good answer to his concerns.

To be a true utilitarian, one should consider all tools available, whether they be aligned with one’s ideology or not. One should also consider how long the effects of the intended goal is planned to last; simply doing something to have done it, regardless of how quickly the effect fades, is surface-level utilitarianism, practically a strawman version.

To that end, if the goal is human happiness, the tool used to get there shouldn’t be one which has caused misery whenever used. Before we commit to a “welfare state,” it must be a type which does not fail, which doesn’t grow to consume all capital while simply maintaining the status quo.

Here’s one better tool:

The FairTax proposal would turn the American tax revenue system (which is part of the current half-hearted welfare state) from a foot on the brake of the economy to a foot on the accelerator. It wouldn’t aim to eliminate poverty, but it would tear down some of the fences between impoverishment and prosperity, and make the cost of government no burden to the poor. It would automation-proof government revenue, preventing one aspect of the automationpocalypse. It would remove tax hassle, tax favoritism, and some of the class war’s acrimony. It would even lay the pipes for an eventual universal welfare program.

Would you like to hear more?

FairTax continues to be a large sales tax, no?

Nordic welfare states collect a huge part of their revenue through a value-added tax, so it doesn't really conflict with a welfare state. Of course they also have other taxes, but then again, there's nothing preventing that, either.

FairTax continues to be a large gross receipts tax, yes, the rate calculated to completely replace the personal + corporate income tax + investment taxes, with a monthly rebate which is calculated to be more progressive than the regressiveness of the sales tax.

It has some aspects each of the main political ideologies say they want from tax reform, but the main thing it does is reduce the power the federal government has over the individual, assuming cash (anonymous money) is still in use by the time it’s implemented. In that, it’s a libertarian, market-based reform, which is the third wing of the bird.

The right-wing/left-wing dichotomy is so intuitive that it naturally comes to mind when discussing politics, yet it is so flawed that it makes hash out of OP’s question. The political spectrum is more properly visualized as a triangular gamut, not a two-dimensional spectrum. The three points are the three basic methods of organizing a society of people who don’t always agree:

  1. Hierarchical Authoritarianism: whoever’s in charge decides, often considered right-wing.

  2. Collective Socialism: the collective will decides, often considered left-wing.

  3. Market Libertarianism: people make bargains and contracts so each can decide, either considered centrism or extreme right wing.

America is largely already market libertarianism with some collectivist and some authoritarian characteristics. As a libertarian Republican, I believe that generally the more such characteristics we add, the worse the situation will get for the poor and the weak. Every fiber of my being would tell me to reject authoritarian or collectivist policies which compromise that libertarian character of America, because any positive effect would be outweighed by eventual negative consequences.

So, I am bound by my moral goals to fulfill the core societal improvement which is envisioned by a welfare state by reducing collectivism or authoritarianism. That means some level of volunteerism or market action.

Taking yachts from ultrarich to make free vaccines for poor is a net win. However, if you take yachts from ultrarich to make cash payments for poor and that money gets spent on addictive drugs, you have a net loss.

Consider me a right-winger. I definitely support a lot of redistribution, including subsidies for reproduction of high IQ young poor people and subsidizing PGS for everyone.

A lot of data disagrees with you. Like we did have a rgdp trend rate increase after the Trump tax cut. So there’s no disagreement with being utilitarian and right wing. Your central primace hasn’t been supported.

I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face.

Is it really a given that you can't be right wing and support a strong welfare state? Because I would say I fall into that category. Though my right-wing predilection for small government leads me to prefer something like a universal basic income, rather than a complex constellation of wealth transfers mediated by a bunch of different government agencies and NGOs.

If you are in the US, I would say yes that is the case.

The bedrock platform of the right in the US above everything is anti-collectivism. The Republicans are more likely to institute a national popular vote and ban guns before approving any sort of wealth transfer.

Your argument conflates "right wing" with "Republican". Perhaps being Republican necessitates being against a welfare state, but not being right leaning.

Republicans may not be the right we want, but it is the right we get in America.

Not at all. Libertarians are often lumped in as right, as was the Tea Party, and so on. And even people who don't support a party like that may still consider themselves on the right without supporting the Republican party.

Yes. I mean in terms of electable major party. Like in the halls of Congress Republicans are the right we get.

I used the repubs as the current Right party in power, but the point remains.

I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing.

I think there is a fundamental mistake here. This place often engages in utilitarian arguments but I don't think one should then conclude that taking utilitarian arguments seriously actually obliges one to utilitarianism. When taking an assertion by a utilitarian seriously it can but useful to engage with them on their own terms in order to show that even under their framework their doesn't hold merit. For instance if my primary reason for being pro-2A is the ward against tyranny but my interlocutor is attempting to make an argument that making all guns illegal would reduce suffering from interpersonal violence and I think it would not it may be worth my time to engage on this premise because if I win there it's a total victory for my side. More abstractly if policy X is thought to cause A and B and I find A very good and you find B very bad I can either convince you that A outweighs B, which will involve difficult value disputes or I can convince you that B is actually not a consequence on X in which case A obviously dominates. I think a lot of discussion on contentious topics in places like this are of this form, it keeps things in the 'is' rather than 'ought' territory, which is much firmer ground even if not the real bedrock of the disagreement.

However, charging that guy more in taxes and using those resources to eliminate poverty will make the groups mentioned in #1 and #2 significantly more happy.

I think a lot breaks down at this step. This is simply not how resources work. How much labor and natural resources actually go into that marginal yacht, even buying the shaky premise that marginal yachts are actually what the marginal ultra-wealthy dollar goes to rather than capital reinvestment. Money is an imperfect proxy for resources, one simply cannot transmute yacht materials into quality inner city housing. At best it can modestly reorganize where efforts are spent. You can throw all the money in the world at wringing water from a stone and end up with nothing to show for it.

I'm not really an opponent to welfare spending and quite a fan of things like very generous UBI if designed properly. But I can absolutely see that as things stand in the US where I'm most familiar drastically increasing welfare spending is much more likely to primarily go to lining the pockets of my ideological opponents, big government stooges spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per homeless person to not solve the problem, and until that's changed I have no confidence in any of this utilitarian argumentation until that is fixed. I think the trade you propose is a false one, we will tax the rich more but that tax will primarily be passed down to me as a customer of these rich people and the money taxed will ultimately have nearly no positive utility, and because the problems it attempts to solve will remain I'll see the demand for more taxes that I will ultimately bear will return again and again.

If you're left wing and utilitarian shouldn't you want to abolish the welfare state and send that money to Africa instead?

Yeah, I think that there is a fundamental tricky problem of "who you care about." For me, I care about people in my country (USA) more than other people, but I definitely do care about people in Africa as well, just not as much. If you care about nonhuman entities, maybe you want to spend all that money on abolishing the use of animals.

it usually turns out that the utilitarian thing to do is what you actually wanted to do all along anyway. By pure coincidence I'm sure.

Yes, I agree with this! It is a problem -- ultimately, you can make it come out any way you want...

Yeah, I think that there is a fundamental tricky problem of "who you care about."

Seconded. I've read many times postings for people who said they care more about animal welfare than certain people because people should be responsible about themselves. Insults that %X% are worse than animals are even more common.

There's really no reason to be surprised that utilitarians could be right-wing if you accept that some people will genuinely end up having different terminal values by which they calculate utility.

There is also a strong intellectual tradition of objecting to centralized government actions on the basis of their pure inability to deliver superior results compared to simply leaving things alone and declining to act at all. On top of the occasional tendency to genocide, wage wars of conquest, and steal from their own population. China is currently doing a genocide, Russia is doing a war of conquest, and seems both Lebanon and Sri Lanka governments were robbing their citizens blind, so these are clearly not relics of the past.

Some observed problems that government programs tend to contribute or be vulnerable to:

  • Increasing fragility

  • Black swans

  • Unintended consequences

  • Calculation problems

  • Lack of skin in the game (i.e. who suffers consequences for failure?)

  • Principal-agent problems

  • Regulatory capture

to name a few. Most of these have to do with the pure lack of reliable information about the sectors they're trying to govern and the inability to effectively use that information towards the best ends.

Most of these can be solved or mitigated by decentralizing and localizing governance, rather than depending on a single 'point of failure' which can drag everyone down.

In short, there's a fallacy that often occurs when analyzing most government-sponsored programs where the costs are hidden but the benefits are obvious. One of the scarier things about government is it's ability to shove those costs into the medium-term future so nobody in the present notices them OR to slough them off onto one particular subset of society so that anyone outside that subset doesn't really care about the costs and ignores them. Governments which have to periodically win elections particularly have an incentive to do this so as to maintain their rule.

Lets use the obvious example with all those direct 'welfare' payments during COVID, where money was sent out directly to everyone, and many employers got 'free' loans to maintain their payrolls.

Back at the time I'm sure you'd say "The utilitarian case for making direct payments to citizens and employers is strong on its face!"

And then two years hence, we have 8-9% inflation which eats up everyone's wages and makes EVERYONE poorer than they would have been otherwise.

Whoops? Are you, the good and faithful Utilitarian, tallying these costs up against the previous welfare program, or are you treating these new problems as completely novel and utterly unrelated to the earlier actions the government took, and thus still believing that the previous programs were obviously the correct and best action?

Utilitarians should care about ALL costs and benefits, even (especially?) the hidden ones.

So if you're being an honest utilitarian, and you are doing an honest assessment of a given program, it is completely possible to conclude that the overall impact of a given program was in fact a net negative and the world would have been better off had said program never been implemented.

This is especially true if you're a Free Market fundamentalist and believe that in the alternative scenario where the market had been allowed to act we would have landed on a vastly superior solution.

So perhaps the right wing utilitarians are doing a very comprehensive census of all of the detectable pros and cons in our current system and are seeing a very, very large locus of dis-utility centered around the government where it becomes clear that almost all of the functions it serves are throwing off negative externalities and causing dead-weight loss and only gets worse over time.

And thus, the conclusion becomes that if most government programs are a net negative and should not exist, this logic also applies to the government as a whole.

Honestly, I'm increasingly surprised and disheartened that utilitarians have lived through the years 2020 and 2021, got to observe the government interfering and bungling EVERY SINGLE STEP of the pandemic response, from lying to people about the nature of the disease to delaying deployment of vaccines to shutting down schools even after danger had passed.

And some of them still somehow conclude that Governments ought to be primarily responsible for disease and pandemic response.

I'm not a utilitarian, libertarian, or marxist, so your arguments do not convince me.

In pure curiosity, what sort of evidence or argument do you find convincing?

Establish your facts and construct a reasonable argument that can be derived from those facts without needing to make leaps to conclusions.

As long as utilitarianism is taken to care about future people or even present people's future utility, almost any other ethical system can be emulated in its framework by having the right priors. The operational pattern is something like "I believe [per my prior] that following ethical system X will result in greater technological progress and societal flourishing; therefore by behaving as an X-ian today and convincing other people to also be X-ians, I am actually maximising utility in the long run". In this particular context, a version of this argument that I imagine could be instantiated (and I find fairly persuasive even though I am not, by the standards of almost anyone apart from people deep in SJ, right-wing) is that something among the lines of: "Average (and even median) utility was much lower in {1800, 1400, the stone age...}. Yet, if we had decided to stop and redistribute human wealth equally at those times to maximise local {average, median} utility, the accumulation of capital and centralisation of power that enabled in the industrial revolution/colonialism/transition to agrarian societies would have been prevented and those developments wouldn't have happened, leaving us in an egalitarian but comparatively miserable stasis".

To me personally, one of the more convincing arguments supporting "socialism now, but not when we lived in caves" is something something great stagnation; more than ever before, it feels like we have hit diminishing returns from concentrating capital to enable scientific progress/letting different systems violently duke it out so that the better, more capable one may build a garden on top of the pyramid of skulls/sacrificing to Moloch. Even if further progress is in fact possible, the possible futures don't necessarily look desirable in expectation, with a lot of probability mass being on something like varying AGI apocalypses and easier nukes. Better to switch from explore to egalitarian exploit now and cash out than keep taking the bet?

There are many places one can disagree with you on empirics. The most notable is here:

Diminishing marginal utility. At a certain point, another yacht for the ultrawealthy rich guy is not going to make him significantly happier.

The marginal alternate use case for the resources is investment in future production, not yachts. The question whether resources should be devoted to providing an x-box for poor people or to building electric cars/installing heat pumps/building homes/etc.

Moreover, this argument just sort of assumes resources are available and their quantity isn't affected by our choices. But in reality, the poor people are both consumers of utility and producers of it. The actual choice we need to make is between:

  1. A person refusing to work, being given resources anyway, and a marginal house is not inhabitable because no one is available to install drywall.

  2. A person installing drywall in return for a similar quantity of resources, but now we have an extra house that someone can live in.

It is far from clear that (2) is worse than (1).

Being afraid of falling into poverty is also bad for people's wellbeing -- it is a major source of worry and concern because everyone knows that being impoverished sucks and is painful. So the existence of poverty is a cause of pain for a much larger group than those actually impoverished. Fear of poverty also leads people to refuse to take risks to avoid the pain of poverty, which leads to less pleasure.

This is interesting. Possibly we should more widely publicize exactly what it means to live in poverty in the US? I.e. make sure everyone knows that "poverty" by US standards means lots of leisure time (most poor people don't work and aren't in the labor force), no danger of hunger, free medical care, a bigger house than the average Parisian or Londoner, 1-2 cars, etc.

From what I can tell, the only thing that's particularly bad about being poor in the US is that you spend time around other poor people.

Of course, knowing these facts does take a lot of wind out of the sails of the typical leftist who wants moar wealth transfers.

Moreover, this argument just sort of assumes resources are available and their quantity isn't affected by our choices. But in reality, the poor people are both consumers of utility and producers of it.

Sure, I admit that a certain segment of the population may drop out of the workforce in a strong welfare state scenario, and that that has negative effects on everyone else. The question is whether it's worth threatening people with poverty to get them to drywall houses for less money.

This is interesting. Possibly we should more widely publicize exactly what it means to live in poverty in the US? I.e. make sure everyone knows that "poverty" by US standards means lots of leisure time (most poor people don't work and aren't in the labor force), no danger of hunger, free medical care, a bigger house than the average Parisian or Londoner, 1-2 cars, etc.

I don't think you've talked to many poor people about their situations. A lot of poor people do work and are still poor, they can easily end up with huge bills for seeking medical care so they avoid it as much as possible, and not even wealthy people can afford a house in Paris or London! But yes, "poverty isn't actually that bad" is a coherent response to my argument, I just think it's blatantly inaccurate.

The question is whether it's worth threatening people with poverty to get them to drywall houses for less money.

Yes, and this is entirely a quantitative question. You just sort of assume it away and don't engage with it.

A lot of poor people do work and are still poor,

What percentage of poor people do you believe work full time (or look for full time work) 50-52 weeks/year and are still poor?

they can easily end up with huge bills for seeking medical care so they avoid it as much as possible

Who cares? The medical care they avoid wouldn't make them healthier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experiment

"poverty isn't actually that bad" is a coherent response to my argument, I just think it's blatantly inaccurate.

Ok. Why do you think poverty is bad?

What specific goods or services do you believe poor Americans lack? And in what proportions? E.g. "25% of poor Americans lack a car" or "15% of poor Americans have less living space than the average computer programmer working for google."

See, what I'm giving you are just standard conservative talking points. Heritage and similar economically minded right wing outfits have been blogspamming BLS and Census stats about how good American poor people have it for decades. Romney repeated these talking points on his presidential campaign, and Newt Gingrich (maybe before your time) also did. Paul Krugman (the economist, not the angry guy in the NYT) did too, and he was talking about the 1980's.

Why not include and address the decades old standard argument under your "obvious objections"?

What percentage of poor people do you believe work full time (or look for full time work) 50-52 weeks/year and are still poor?

I don't know the percentage, but a lot of people work for Walmart or fast food or as a janitor/cleaner or as a day laborer or any number of poorly paying jobs where you are on the edge of subsistence, even working full time.

Why do you think poverty is bad?

The number one problem is insecurity -- having to constantly worry about stuff other people take for granted. Another problem is stigma/low social status. And obviously it's bad not being able to get all the shit that you need to live comfortably.

What specific goods or services do you believe poor Americans lack?

  • Decent housing

  • Mental health care

  • Dental care

  • Transportation (can't afford to maintain a vehicle)

  • Utilities (can't afford electricity/heat/water/air conditioning)

  • Phones/internet

  • Tampons, personal hygiene products in general

I don't know the percentage,

Let me suggest that if you want to make a utilitarian case for something, not knowing even the most basic numbers regarding things you are concerned about kind of undermines your seriousness.

In any case, I do know the percentage. It's 11%.

The number one problem is insecurity -- having to constantly worry about stuff other people take for granted. Another problem is stigma/low social status.

Do you believe their "insecurity" is a rational or irrational response to subsisting mostly on wealth transfers? How do you expect more wealth transfers to fix this?

The low status of the poor comes from their poor behavior (refusing to work, having children out of wedlock, doing drugs, etc). How do you expect more wealth transfers to fix this?

As for the specific goods and services you imagine the poor need, I'm guessing you don't know the percentage. I'm not going to cite numbers because I don't know how you define "decent" housing, but you can easily educate yourself: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html

Anyway, consider the possibility that conservatives don't support your purported utilitarian proposals because they have an accurate picture of what poverty is actually like, and are not just basing their theories off journalistic narratives that have been false since the 80's.

A lot of poor people do work and are still poor,

It is extremely rare to have a full-time job and still be in poverty. The fable of an idle rich is a powerful tale, but at least in 21st century America, upper-class people work more than middle-class people who work more than lower-class people.

they can easily end up with huge bills for seeking medical care so they avoid it as much as possible

Like above, "people defer basic care until it gets more expensive" is an appealing story, and it is easy to imagine it being true. But aside from very specific exceptions, there is no measurable difference in health care outcomes from being given health care.

https://qz.com/574693/americans-working-less-than-ever-before/ From 2016 but shows that the lowest income quartile works less than 30 hours a week and the highest three all more than 40.

I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face.

I agree, I think there's a clear tension there. If you're not an EA working tirelessly to uplift the starving masses of Africa, then you implicitly agree that there are moral values that can take precedence over "the greatest good for the greatest number".

Although, I get the impression that the form of "utilitarianism" that most people subscribe to here is not the global moral philosophy that requires you to do the greatest good for the greatest number, but is instead a sort of hedonism where great importance is placed on immediate experiential states of personal pleasure. Which is why we have so many people eager to plug themselves into the experience machine.

Which is why we have so many people eager to plug themselves into the experience machine.

Name three examples.

One

Two

Three

Example 1: self_made_human, as extreme as his views are, doesn't want to "plug himself into the experience machine".

Example 2: ok, the guy said that he's fine with being a lotus eater, so I guess you found one person.

Example 3: not finding the idea of using your imagination repugnant and by extension not finding it repugnant to experience a simulation under your control doesn't mean that you want to "plug yourself into the experience machine."

The phrase "plugging yourself into the experience machine" sounds ominous and evokes the image of the dreadful wirehead, drooling in his pod, stuck in the loop of perpetual simulated cooming until the heat death of the universe. Applying it to everybody who's not utterly repelled by the idea of virtual reality or mind uploading is dishonest equivocation and it looks like a failure of understanding the people you're condemning.

Don't quote me in support of any form of "utilitarianism", thanks. I'm not a utilitarian.

Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.

I think this premise specifically is inherently anti-utilitarian. How can you assign the same utility to each individual when there's so much variance? When the actions and roles and beliefs and experiences of two people can differ so greatly?

How can you quantify, in a principled way, how much you care about one individual's pleasure/pain relative to others? I think a baseline egalitarianism is actually essential to this, as I wrote lower down in the post:

Who "deserves" what is a question of justice, of deontology. But here, we are trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is difficult enough, boiling down all of human experience into two buckets, "pleasure" and "pain". If you add a whole 'nother set of buckets, "good people", "medium people", "bad people"... then you've really abandoned the exercise and are just doing deontology with extra steps. The pain someone experiences from not having housing or food or heat during the winter is plainly real and sincerely felt, even if you believe that that person should have done something different to avoid being in that state.

Also, I do think humans experience poverty and wealth in broadly similar ways, enough to make generalizations about the utility/disutility of both.

I'm not a utilitarian, but I don't think that the utilitarian case for Scandinavian social democracy is obvious. It may be correct, but there's a huge amount of hard work that you need to do to make the argument for it.

Let's leave Norway out, since if you have good governance plus massive natural resources per capita then you can have good conditions with a lot of bad policies. The opportunity cost matters a lot for utilitarians (remember, utilitarians are maximisers not satisficers) and you can't determine much about opportunity cost by comparing policies in countries that have massively different situations.

Sweden has low poverty, but also persistently high unemployment:

https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/unemployment-rate

Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility, because it creates a sense of worthlessness: humans generally like to feel useful, which you can explain with evolutionary psychology as the fact that, in our early evolutionary environment, there were not kings and queens sitting around doing nothing - even leaders were expected to contribute towards hunting, shelter, child-rearing etc. People who were not useful were at risk of being left behind and/or not reproducing, so psychological mechanisms that punished people for perceived uselessness helped them to pass on their genes.

Denmark has low unemployment, but a neoliberal rather than social democratic unemployment benefits system that pushes people into work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Denmark#Current_policy

Also, in terms of GDP per capita, there is a significant and persistent gap between Denmark and Sweden vs. the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Remember, utilitarians are welfare maximisers, not just satisficers. And the benefits of a higher GDP per capita are massive relative to the benefits of poverty reduction, if you make the assumption that a higher GDP per capita is a persistent gain over time, i.e. it benefits future generations, whereas poverty reduction does have a big impact on welfare but mainly for the present generation. Arguing from a broadly utilitarian perspective, the economist Tyler Cowen has argued that people massively underrate the benefits of economic growth, assuming that one also maintains long-term economic stability:

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/

Arguably, welfare states not only undermine economic growth, but also long-run social stability. If I can enjoy healthcare, pensions, housing etc. in my old age without a high personal savings rate, then I am incentivised to save less and consume more over my life. It also makes less sense for me to have children, which were historically a way of investing in your old age, as they were expected to support you using their incomes. If I have fewer children, then I can still benefit from future generations, because other people's children will be taxed to benefit me as much as them. I can free ride on their parenting and spend the time/money that they spend on children on myself or on my own child or two. This is mitigated somewhat by subsidising parenthood in various ways (education spending, child benefits etc.) but overall there are big financial costs to raising children, especially more than two.

Like all social democracy, Scandinavian social democracy developed at a time of high birth rates and high personal savings rates. The economist Paul Samuelson explicitly made reference to this in his defence of American Social Security: sure, it's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that can never go bust, because each generation is always much bigger and more prosperous than the last! Social democracy has had a clash with reality in the past few decades and the question of its viability in an ageing society has not been solved. How do you make social democracy work with an exponential and structural increase in the numbers of people using welfare services but not contributing to them?

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND?locations=SE

This problem is structural, in that higher life expectancies and lower birth rates mean that it will continue to accelerate over time. The baby boomers were an unusually big demographic group, in Scandinavia as elsewhere, but the pattern of generations being smaller and living longer is persistent.

This problem is aggravated by the stagnation in wealth-creation in European social democracies since 2007. Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007. So they have both a structurally persistent rise in welfare demands and a structurally persistent stagnation in their capacity to produce new wealth to meet those demands.

Scandinavia is like a bee hive that is still producing new larvae at an accelerating rate, but which has stopped producing higher levels of honey. The current solution is for the worker bees to work harder and eat less, but that does not seem like the kind of long-run stable social system that Tyler Cowen points out is important for utilitarians, since it requires that the worker bees work harder and eat less indefinitely. And, unlike worker bees, Scandinavian wealth-creators have the option of leaving to places like Switzerland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Hong Kong etc., which let them eat money of the honey they create.

As the proportion of the population benefiting from the welfare state but not contributing to it explodes, how can social democracy survive? It will either have to go down the direction of authoritarian socialism, e.g. banning wealth-creators (workers and investors) from leaving the country to escape high tax rates, or more neoliberalism, e.g. a smaller, meaner welfare state. Thus far, the choice of social democrats has been the latter, moderated by high national debts to put the tax burden on future generations of wealth-creators, who can't vote yet - intensifying the welfare state Ponzi scheme, but not solving its long-run stability problem.

Of course, insofar as the US is socially democratic, it has similar problems, e.g. with Social Security. But that's not a case against right-wing policies, but the opposite! And US GDP per capita has risen at an astonishingly persistent rate since 2007. Note that I'm not talking about wages: what matters for the long-run viability of a welfare system is that wealth-creators are sufficiently incentivised (and not disabled by regulations etc.) to create wealth to fund the ever-increasing future liabilities of the system. For that, you need higher total incomes, not necessarily wages per se - from the point of view of public finance, capital gains tax revenue smells as sweet as payroll tax revenue. There are other problems with "wage stagnation" arguments that may come up at this stage of my arguments, but the whole issue is prima facie irrelevant for the reasons I've just given. And the US welfare system is arguably still too generous to be stable long-term, even with its higher economic growth relative to Scandinavia and other highly social democratic places, but again, that's hardly a utilitarian argument against right-wing policies!

Now, I don't strongly endorse the reasoning above. I can think of lots of social democratic responses. For example, importing worker bees from other hives without Scandinavia's demographic problems may at least prolong the sustainability of social democracy until medical technology enables healthspan to catch up with lifespan. The connection between welfare states, higher taxes, and economic growth is very murky: you can make the case that we don't know if it's Scandinavia's social democratic policies that are causing economic stagnation in Scandinavia and other social democracies viz. the US and other less socially democratic countries. Causal inference in social science is an extremely difficult matter. You can also argue that the utility benefits of a generous welfare state are so strong relative to the costs of unemployment and risks of long-run instability that Sweden's model is preferable to the US model. Or you could argue that social democracy + Danish-style labour market policies is the sort of social democracy that a utilitarian should want. I don't know how to estimate aggregate utility with a sufficient degree of accuracy to answer these questions - that doesn't bother me, because I am not a utilitarian, and even if I was, I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil, any more than being a hedonist is the best way of achieving maximal personal pleasure.

As stated at the start of this comment, I am not saying that there is an obvious utilitarian case against social democracy. I don't think that a social democratic utilitarian is obviously irrational. I am saying that there is not an obvious utilitarian case for social democracy, and that a right-wing utilitarian position is not obviously wrong. Both David Friedman and Peter Singer are utilitarians, and I have a huge amount of admiration for the intellects of each of them.

People who were not useful were at risk of being left behind and/or not reproducing, so psychological mechanisms that punished people for perceived uselessness helped them to pass on their genes.

Is this the case anywhere today? That the useful are more reproductively successful than the useless? Many have traded fecundidity for economic productivity.

Thanks for high effort. I enjoyed the read.

Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007

Haven't they? Absolute gap is persistent, as you noted, but growth rates closely track US ones. Also it might be a good thing to have certain per capita gap -- to have a room for catch-up.

Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility

If we consider subjective well-being, poverty amounts to permanent survival mode with almost no access to social lifts and any fruits of civilization. I think it's incomparable to any existential sufferings of idle, but otherwise well-to-do people (moreover, lack of job doesn't preclude anyone from meaningful and even societally useful endeavors).

And methodologically, I think evolutionary stories are irrelevant until we have current evidence of what they supposedly imply. And when we have current evidence, there is no need for stories.

Now a macro, long-horizon perspective. One might argue the poor are productivity hoarders in some sense, locked in the low-productivity jobs. I agree, that unconditional redistribution erodes incentives, but conditional transfers (say, of money or education in exchange for obligation to find a job from the list) to the poor might push/nudge them toward upper levels, where they can contribute more to the growth.

Growth is appealing as it enables efficiency improvements, and inefficiency (wastefulness) is a rare thing everyone agrees to be bad. I like Rawlsian scenario of a narrow economic elite, pushing the Pareto frontier, reaping its well deserved 90% share of surplus and doling out 10%. But 10% might be suboptimal for a classic welfare maximizer, who assumes diminishing utility. The latter implies it's optimal to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom until both sides meet on the utility curve. The poor are at the steepest slope, they gain much more than wealthy ones lose by helping them.

The main question here is how much capital should we set aside for growth, and how much of wealthy capital actually causes growth.

I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil

Could you elaborate on this?

Haven't they? Absolute gap is persistent, as you noted, but growth rates closely track US ones. Also it might be a good thing to have certain per capita gap -- to have a room for catch-up.

I was using nominal GDP per capita. Both PPP and nominal measurements have their advantages, but that would take me too far astray here, since I am just presenting a prima facie case for right-wing utilitarianism, to clarify that it's not obviously an incoherent position. (I'm steelmanning it; I'm neither consistently right-wing nor a utilitarian.) And, as you note, there is a persistent lag in PPP.

I don't see how having room for catch-up growth is a good thing. It's the catching up that is good, not the growth per se!

As for unemployment vs. poverty, I think that this can't be solved by anecdata. It's very plausible that being unemployed in Sweden gives higher utility than being near starvation in Ethiopia, but the poor in the US are not on the verge of starvation.

Could you elaborate on this?

Sure. I see utilitarianism as a bit like the paradox of hedonism. It is very hard to know what will make one happy at an individual level, and vastly harder on a collective level. Sure, there will be massive cases of suffering and (less often) massive sources of happiness where the path to maximising expected happiness is reasonably clear, but that leaves a lot of decisions unguided. Also, since one's own biases are often hard to scrutinise, it is easy to be misled when working out individual cases on their expected utility merits. Conflating one's self-interest or sentimentalism with expected utility maximisation seems pretty easy.

Rather than trying to maximise on each individual decision, a utilitarian can set up rules and rights that are to be respected unless there is a strong case to the contrary. (This is compatible, but not identical with rule utilitarianism.) This is a bit like the rules solution to the time inconsistency problem: if maximising a social welfare function in each time period results in suboptimal outcomes in the long-run, then an alternative is to set up rules that may not be maximising in every case but which probably do relatively well in the long-run, e.g. a 2% inflation target rather than traditional Keynesian fine-tuning of the economy. Similarly, being somewhat of a deontologist seems better for aggregate utility than consciously utility-maximising, given the computational, epistemological, and psychological limitations of human beings.

This GDP per capita graph shows good growth. Which data do you use?

Per capita gap indicates possibility of a relatively easy catch-up growth via import of technologies of the leader. This might be even part of a strategy: you redistribute wealth among your population more evenly than the leader, thus slowing your own growth; then you adopt technologies of the leader, who maintains higher inequality.

the poor in the US are not on the verge of starvation

World bank uses $2.15 per day (PPP) poverty line (graph), so everyone below this line consumes more or less the same across countries (poor relief programs probably aren't accounted for here). With this definition the poor, but employed might feel better than non-poor, but unemployed? I won't argue further against this claim, but I am curious what factor I neglect, which makes the US poor subjectively better off than unemployed.

I see utilitarianism as...

Thanks for sharing. I broadly agree with your case against fine-tuning and over-fitting.

The choice of optimal "ethical framework" is an optimization problem of its own. I would frame it as a task to devise rules that, when imposed on society, produce "good" expected societal trajectories (accounting for people, gaming the rules). I agree, that more clear-cut rules leave less space for manipulation and misinterpretation for actors, and - broadly - this looks close to the current legal system plus policy making based on Cost benefit analysis.

In some sense the notion of utilitarianism is useless for policy design, as the latter is about specialized predictions and theories. On the other hand, when we devise policy we are still in "optimizator" mode, subject to all biases and unintended manipulations.

Which data do you use?

That data. If you look at the data from 2007 to 2019 (excluding the covid period, including both the Great Recession but also the recovery period) the US grew steadily from about $48,000 to $65,000, while Denmark and Sweden had stagnation. Norway, as noted earlier, is a special case of good governance + massive per capita natural resources, but it also didn't see a net increase in this period. It's true that they were doing well relative to the US prior to 2007, but my original steelman was that social democracy creates a structural tendency to stagnation as the population ages.

The technological catch up is something I haven't heard and that I think is interesting, but it's beyond the scope of my steelmanning right-wing utilitarianism, since it's not a strongly established position, and my point is that social democracy isn't obviously preferable if you're a utilitarian.

Unemployment and poverty

A lot depends on the details, e.g. I suspect that a lot people high in Big Five conscientiousness would be happier with employed poverty than (somewhat) less poor unemployment. There is a huge amount of literature showing the negative aveerage effects of poverty on subjective happiness (as well as plenty of folk psychology) but the same is also true of unemployment, especially long-term unemployment. Also, the margin of difference between Swedish vs. US unemployment and Swedish vs. US poverty (going on that graph) seems to be bigger in the case of the former, e.g. US unemployment is about 4 percentage points lower than that of Sweden right now, whereas the difference in poverty (using the measure you provided) is about 1 percentage point. The unemployment gap may be bigger than normal right now, but Sweden seems to have a trend unemployment rate of about 8% at best and the US a trend of about 5% at worst. So, even if the harm from poverty is greater, the difference in unemployment is bigger.

On the other hand, you could argue that the graph you give just captures one part of a bigger picture, since e.g. $2.5 a day is hardly luxurious and US poverty may be bigger. Also, poor relief may be more generous in Scandinavia (plausible). A more complex argument could refute my claims. But that's my point! When one takes into account all the differences, the utilitarian cases for right-wing or left-wing policies both need to be complex - they aren't obvious either way.

optimizator

Yes, I think that an epistemically modest utilitarian is still trying to optimise, but what they can plausibly do within their epistemic limitations, which is to find good long-run moral and political rules. Even then, there is an important difference from deontology, in that in extreme cases it may be obvious that departing from the rules will result in better long-run aggregate utility. This is one of the more plausible parts of utilitarianism, I think: you have to be hardcore into rights to be willing to permit massive suffering instead of e.g. making a tiny infraction of someone's rights. The plausibility of consequentialism (with utilitarianism as one variant) in extreme circumstances was part of a debate on human rights a while back in the UK parliament, which I thought was interesting:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VO2Ry4j79LU&t=221s

There is a lot one could say about your post but I'd like to point out that the stuff about Swedish unemployment is a bit simplistic.

Sweden used to have persistently low unemployment until the financial crisis in the early nineties. This then shot up and eventually started trending down.

But as this downward trend started another did as well, namely mass immigration of unskilled labour, beginning with the Iraq war and continuing til this day.

Unemployment among ethnic Europeans in Sweden is in fact low and labour force participation is extremely high.

Perhaps it is the fault of social democracy that Sweden has been unable to integrate low skill, culturally hostile immigrants coming faster than at any point in US history or perhaps it's due to other factors...

Yes, as I said, causation in social sciences is hard. For my overall claim, what is important is not that we know that Sweden's welfare state causes its structurally high unemployment rate (in spite of its considerable spending on active labour market policies) but that a right-wing utilitarian could make a case that it does. In a brief part of a brief comment, I naturally cannot make that case rigorously.

Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.

Your utilitarians may select different 'units of people we care about.' Someone that might be called a 'globalist' might care about the whole world, while a stereotypical NIMBY might care mostly about their own neighborhood.

Response: This may be a coherent objection, but it's not a utilitarian objection, it's a rights-based objection.

A utilitarian might say 'I alone am rational enough to allocate my resources to maximize utility, the government will fail and I will succeed therefore taking my resources away is unethical'

I only care about those who are deserving to not be in poverty; I don't care about everyone, I'm fine with people being in poverty if they do nothing to better themselves

If your goal is to maximize utility in the shortest possible span of time, sure, spend all the money buying the world a single meal. But there's something to be said for making sure resources are spent in a way that sets people up for continued success. That said, often the resources spent deciding if Joe X Poor is 'down on his luck' or a drug addict make the whole program significantly less effective...

Overall you've made a great argument against utilitarianism.

Your utilitarians may select different 'units of people we care about.' Someone that might be called a 'globalist' might care about the whole world, while a stereotypical NIMBY might care mostly about their own neighborhood.

This isn't really utilitarianism. This is just whatever-I-want-ism.

If I'm free to select which subset of the human race I "care" about, then how do I not have an unlimited license to arbitrarily decide whatever other values I want to follow? In the same way I can decide to only "care" about my own neighborhood, what if I decide to just only "care" about committing bank robberies, to the detriment of all else? It seems like under your definition of utilitarianism, I should just go ahead and do that. But that can hardly be called a systematic moral philosophy.

As I think Nietzsche convincingly argues, every system of morality is whatever-I-want-ism.

Why is your utility function better just because it's larger than a egoist's?

Correct, utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics are intercompatible: "My utility is maximized if I behave in accordance with the rules/in a virtuous fashion" vs. "The rule I follow is utilitarianism; utilitarianism is the most virtuous form of behavior." But generally, utilitarianism just means you rate worldstates in a one-dimensional numeric fashion; it doesn't say anything about the nature of your preference. The utility function is not up for grabs. Similarly, I could say, idk, Randian ethics are not virtue ethics because I don't recognize their target as virtuous, but that's just not how those terms work: they're about the way in which you pursue the good / the rules / your preferences, not what those preferences are.

Now, lots of utilitarians, especially in these spaces, are also liberal humanists, and so rate all human life equally, and there are certainly arguments to be had for or against that, but neither side has a monopoly on "utilitarianism".

I mean something akin to the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) in which the necessities of life (healthcare, housing, minimum subsistence) are essentially guaranteed, while maintaining a market economy.

as others have already observed when this comes up, such welfare states tend to not scale well for countries as big, and diverse, and low trust as the US. A prosperous, homogenous, small country having generous welfare is sorta analogous to a breadwinner providing for his family. Now try to scale this to a stadium.

c. "The Scandinavian countries only could do this because they are ethnically homogenous, tightly knit societies. Look at Sweden right now, it's falling apart as they let in more immigrants." Response: This goes more to the political problem with instituting this system rather than the desirability of the system itself. The fact that present-day social democrats are pro immigration does not make immigration a necessary part of a social democracy. One can easily imagine a social democracy with Japan-style immigration restrictions.

Too late for this to happen, and no political will either. American history going as far back almost to its inception has been tolerating immigration. Japan had the advantage of being close knit from its onset.

"Eliminating poverty will cause more pain in the long run because the economy will collapse or at the very least growth will slow, leading to a decline in living standards for everyone."

Poverty largely has been eliminated in America. Americans even in the poorest of states have higher living standards than people in the UK. There are so many programs for poor families in the US, like free education, up through college, dental, healthcare, subsidized housing, etc. People fail to avail themselves of such options due to addiction, mental illness (the two often go together) , or other problems, not because of America being against the poor. Controlling drugs would be a much more useful step for ending poverty.

as others have already observed when this comes up, such welfare states tend to not scale well for countries as big, and diverse, and low trust as the US. A prosperous, homogenous, small country having generous welfare is sorta analogous to a breadwinner providing for his family. Now try to scale this to a stadium.

I disagree, I think you could scale it to a stadium, or a thousand stadiums -- it's called insurance, and we do it all the time! We don't have to trust the other people on the same car insurance program -- you know some of them will be idiot drivers who cause mayhem and destruction, but you also know that many will be normal people who pay way more into the system than they take out in benefits. I take your point, but again this seems like more of a practical political problem with setting it up than an objection to social democracy in a large, diverse country per se.

Poverty largely has been eliminated in America. Americans even in the poorest of states have higher living standards than people in the UK. There are so many programs for poor families in the US, like free education, up through college, dental, healthcare, subsidized housing, etc. People fail to avail themselves of such options due to addiction, mental illness (the two often go together) , or other problems, not because of America being against the poor.

Poverty has not been eliminated in America. 11% of the country, which is 37 million people, were living below poverty in 2020 according to the US Census. There may be "many" programs in the US, but they are NOT sufficient at guaranteeing subsistence, healthcare and subsidized housing being two areas where many, many people fall through the cracks. Subsidized housing does not really exist in many parts of the country, and it is not comprehensive anywhere.

11% of the country, which is 37 million people, were living below poverty in 2020

Key qualifier there being "on paper", which often involves income off the books to maintain access to transfer programs. That also glosses over what poverty means in America - a place to live, often a car, amenities like AC and modern appliances, a new-ish smart phone and far too many calories. Poverty in an objective, global sense is non-existent outside extreme addiction and/or mental illness.

Problem is, some people take offense at the idea of having to pay for net consumers of insurance/welfare.

That's the whole point of insurance, that there are net consumers of it. If everyone was a net contributor, it would just be the greatest con scheme created by the insurers.

I don't really believe in diminishing marginal utility in its strong form. I also don't think the modern welfare state does much to eliminate the real sufferings of poverty, its more akin to a heroine drip for addicts. And on top of that, the taxation for a welfare state reduces economic dynamism (as does the welfare state itself, by disincentivizing work for some populations).

Overall, I find the welfare state an overwhelmingly unredeemable invention that only justifies itself with morally monstrous arguments along the lines of "think of the children."

I don't really believe in diminishing marginal utility in its strong form.

Why not? It seems like common sense to me -- a dollar means a lot more to the guy begging outside McDonalds than it does to Elon Musk.

I also don't think the modern welfare state does much to eliminate the real sufferings of poverty, its more akin to a heroine drip for addicts.

What are the "real sufferings of poverty", then?

"Diminishing marginal utility" is a misonomer. Economists tend to assume that the marginal utility of everything is diminishing, relative to previous units. (Heroin and the like may be exceptions.) The issue is the marginal utility of money vs. other things. In modern utility theory, money has no marginal utility as such; it only has marginal utility relative to an alternative. And utility is typically defined by modern theorists in terms of relative preference, rather than a psychological state of pleasure etc.

If there is a diminishing marginal utility of money, then why do so many poor people buy lottery tickets and otherwise gamble in games with negative expected value?

Moreover, low socio-economic status is associated with high GE [gambling expenditures] (Davidson et al., 2016; Salonen et al., 2018a). To date, a limited number of studies have investigated the relationship between GE and receipt of social security benefits (Worthington 2001; MacDonald et al., 2004). A Canadian survey showed that households with income support were less likely to gamble. With the exception of one jurisdiction, households that received income support spend a lower proportion of their income on gambling. (MacDonald et al., 2004.)

Studies conducted in different countries have shown that although high income groups spend more on gambling, lower income groups contribute proportionally more (Beckert & Lutter 2009; Canale et al., 2016; Castrén et al., 2018; Roukka & Salonen 2020).

Assume that people gamble for the pleasure of taking risks. If there is diminishing marginal utility of money, why would the marginal value of money relative to this pleasure be low for poorer people?

Also, don't middle class and richer people save a higher proportion of their incomes than poorer people? Do they value maintaining their period-to-period monetary assets, relative to their incomes, more than poorer people?

Also, diminishing marginal utility on average is also very different from it being universal. Otherwise, why would many very rich people still work similar hours to poorer people? You can postulate that the former enjoy work, but that's ad hoc, as it doesn't explain why they would prefer paid labour.

I'm not saying that there is increasing marginal utility of money. I'm saying that it is really isn't obvious that money has diminishing marginal utility, even on average.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034138/

I also forgot how to spell "misnomer".

Of course middle class and richer people save more than poor people. Having barely sufficient income to cover needs, and hence having little left to save, is the definition of being poor.

As for why rich people who work a lot prefer paid labour, the answer is obvious: They get more utility out of paid labor (enjoyment + whatever they buy with their income) than unpaid (enjoyment alone).

Anyhow, talking about rich people not working does not address OP's point about relative utility of X extra dollars for a poor vs more affluent person. I can guarantee you that the local homeless guy would get more out of the $165 I recently earned than I will.

(1) I talked about proportions. There's nothing by definition that says that rich people have to save a greater proportion of their incomes than the poor.

(2) Your reasoning about rich people assumes that paid labour is equally preferable to unpaid labour, e.g. working as a bank director is as enjoyable as volunteering for a charity. This seems implausible for me. Do you have evidence for this "obvious" answer?

(3) What do you mean "get more out of"? If you mean "more utility", then you are begging the question. The point of my examples was to muddy the waters: one can cite evidence both for and against a higher interpersonal marginal utility of wealth for the poor vs. the rich. I think the honest answer for utilitarians is to say that they don't know, and that intuitions to the contrary are based on a hedonistic analysis of utility that ran aground in about 1850-1950, when it proved impossible to find a non-arbitrary interpersonal scale for utility. That's why economists and many ethicists ditched the hedonistic analysis of utility in favour of a preference-ranking analysis, but a preference-ranking analysis doesn't give you an interpersonal scale.

  1. Yes, there in fact something about the definition that says that poor people save a smaller proportion. Again, "poor" by definition means that your income is barely enough to cover basic costs, so, by definition, a poor person will have very little surplus income and hence will be able to save a very small proportion of their income. In contrast, if your income is large enough that you can save a large proportion after paying your costs, then by definition you are not poor.

  2. No, my reasoning does NOT imply that working as a bank director is as enjoyable as volunteering for a charity. I said merely that, given the same job, getting paid yields more utility than not getting paid.

  3. Yes, I meant more utility. And, if you think that economists think that my example is wrong, then I think you are misunderstanding them. There is a $150 check on my desk right now, waiting to be deposited. I can literally throw it away, and will not miss it. That is how little marginal utility I get out of that $150. In contrast, $150 for a homeless person can make the difference between sleeping on the subway and sleeping indoors, for more than one night.

(1) But the issue is marginal income - that's where there's an additional dollar. If a poor person has an increase in marginal income and their income is enough to cover basic costs, then there is nothing in the definition of "rich" and "poor" that implies that they save a higher proporiton of that additional dollar than someone with greater wealth.

(2) If the job is different, then you've not explained why many rich people prefer paid labour like being a bank director to unpaid labour like volunteering for a charity.

(3) But what's the common scale for the comparison? Assume you prefer throwing the $150 away and the homeless person does not. That tells us about the internal structure of your respective utility scales, but doesn't tell us that their utility is higher on a scale that incorporates the preferences of both of you.

  1. No, the specific issue is not marginal income; you referred to pct of** total **income: "Also, don't middle class and richer people save a higher proportion of their incomes than poorer people?"

  2. Because they get paid for the paid work. You seem to think that the argument is that a rich person gets zero marginal utility from money. That is not the claim. If I am a lawyer or doctor making $300,000, then obviously I by quitting I am giving up quite a bit of utility. But that says nothing about the issue at hand: It tells us noting about whether I would get as much utility from an extra $1000 as would a poor person. And, btw, people who are rich enough not have to work quit work all the time -- it's called retirement -- and often they spend some of their time volunteering. So, your assumption that rich people don't never quit work and go volunteer is empirically false.

  3. Then let's ignore money. Suppose 100,000 people own three cars each (call them "Group X"), and 100,000 other people ("Group Y") have no cars. I give each of them a 2003 Honda Civic. Which Group members are most likely to use their new cars" It is Group Y, right? Why, if that obviously true, if it is so impossible to make a comparison between the utility each gets out of the car? It isn't.

More comments

I can guarantee you that the local homeless guy would get more out of the $165 I recently earned than I will.

It's not ... directly obvious that this is true. Consider the stereotype of him spending it all on crack or booze. It may also depend on the region. There's probably studies on this; could you link them?

Well, presumably he gets a lot of utility out of crack or booze. Besides, that $165 means that he can now get both crack AND booze. Or crack AND several meals at McDonald's. In contrast, I am able to buy crack and food and booze even if I throw the money away; it has very little marginal utility for me.

Gambling seems like a poor example for your point. Poor people are buying the opportunity to imagine themselves getting rich (and every once in a while it happens). People who already are rich can buy real investments and the psychic thrill isn’t the same for them.

The higher savings rate for the wealthy also seems like evidence of diminishing marginal utility of money. Wealthy people put more money away because spending is a lot less urgent than someone struggling to make ends meet.

Gambling seems like a poor example for your point. Poor people are buying the opportunity to imagine themselves getting rich (and every once in a while it happens). People who already are rich can buy real investments and the psychic thrill isn’t the same for them.

Poor people don't need to gamble to imagine themselves as rich. It does happen sometimes, but the expected value of lotteries etc. is negative.

What's the evidence that the psychic thrill of gambling is less for the rich? Note that, to substantiate this claim, you can't assume a diminishing marginal utility of wealth.

The higher savings rate for the wealthy also seems like evidence of diminishing marginal utility of money. Wealthy people put more money away because spending is a lot less urgent than someone struggling to make ends meet.

If it's less urgent, then that means that their preference for saving a marginal unit of money vs. spending it is greater. As I said, in modern utility theory, something only has utility relative to something else; mathematically, utility is defined as an ordinal variable corresponding to a ranking of alternatives.

There's a further issue, of course, of defining a common unit of utility across people. I'm assuming that's somehow not a problem, because otherwise the "diminishing marginal utility" position is REALLY stuffed.

I also forgot another reason why "diminishing marginal utility of money" is a misnomer: it should really be called "diminishing interpersonal marginal utility of money", because the marginal utility can be decreasing for each individual and yet the value of one more unit of wealth can be greater for rich people rather than poor people. Diminishing marginal utility of money for each individaul does not imply that an additional dollar gives greater utility to a poor person than a rich person. In fact, it's logically possible that money can have diminishing marginal utility for each person and yet one still maximises utility by taxing the poor to give to the rich.

For example, consider a society with two people, A and B. We define MUn(a) as the marginal utility of money for the nth unit of money for A and MUn(b) for B mutatis mutandis.

Suppose that MUn(a) = 1^(-n). So the marginal utility of the 100th unit of wealth for A is 1 / 100. The marginal utility of the 10,000th unit is 1 / 10,000. Thus, the marginal utility of money for A is diminishing: it decreases with each unit. In fact, it's monotonically diminishing: the marginal value of the nth unit is less than each previous unit.

Suppose that MUn(a) = 1^(-√n). So the marginal utility of the 100th unit of wealth for A is 1 / 10. The marginal utility of the 10,000th unit is 1 / 100. Again, the marginal utility of money for B is (monotonically) diminishing.

If A has $499 and B has $159,999, then the value of an additional dollar for A is 1 / 500 and the value of an additional dollar for B is 1 / 400. Utility is maximised by B having the additional dollar, even though we are assuming utility is (montonically!) diminishing.

And again, this is all assuming away the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons, because otherwise I don't begin to have a functioning version of your position with which to play. You could say "Obviously, utility doesn't work the way you specify in your example," but then you ARE obliged to explain how you find a common unit of utility for people in the real world, because all I am granting in this example is diminishing marginal utility of money (relative to something else that is common between A and B, e.g. assuming a common valuation of a Big Mac).

Why not? It seems like common sense to me -- a dollar means a lot more to the guy begging outside McDonalds than it does to Elon Musk.

Does it? Begging is one of the least effective ways to get dollars possible. If dollars are so valuable to him, why not sustain effort to acquire them in quantity?

I think most of the people begging outside McDonalds value their time and short-term amusement more than they value dollars, straight up. Elon Musk is the exact opposite, valuing dollars and the things dollars buy more than idle hours and idle pleasures. Begging gets beggers what they actually want: continued freedom from all responsibility and, frequently, sobriety. That's why they keep begging, because it's what they want. Give them a million dollars, and they'll blow it all in short order, possibly killing themselves in the process, and certainly leaving themselves little better than when they started.

But that first single dollar means a lot more to that guy than it does to Elon Musk, since for him it’s the difference between eating and not eating right then and there whereas for Elon it’s not even a rounding error. You can be right about how Elon and the homeless guy value their time relative to earning money, but $1 still means a lot more to the destitute hungry guy than Elon.

But that first single dollar means a lot more to that guy than it does to Elon Musk, since for him it’s the difference between eating and not eating right then and there whereas for Elon it’s not even a rounding error.

I don't believe this is true. In a nation of ~350 million, my estimate of the number of people who've died of classic Dickensian starvation in the last decade is 0. Kids get neglected by unfit parents, elderly people get sick enough to stop eating, maybe a shut-in breaks a hip and no one notices, but near as I can tell, we have literally conquered bread. Food pantries and giveaways are ubiquitous, as are programs to hand out meals to the homeless. Some of the people panhandling on the side of the street might have missed a meal recently; I also miss meals when I'm on a gaming binge and am too lazy to actually feed myself. When they get hungry enough, food will be available for them. When they go hungry, that is a choice they have made.

This idea that a dollar is the difference between eating or not for the homeless guy is, near as I can tell, entirely fictional. Homeless people mostly live the way they live by choice, at least until the drugs burn out enough neurons that choices aren't really a thing they can do any more. Most of them appear to be stuck in a spiral of self-destruction; we should be taking them off the streets and putting them in a secure, structured environment where they can get their shit back together. Giving them free money often seems to only help them kill themselves faster.

since for him it’s the difference between eating and not eating right then and there whereas for Elon it’s not even a rounding error

But it doesn't follow that the marginal utility is higher for the beggar than Elon Musk.

Assuming that begging in front of a fast food restaurant isn't just a novel form of slumming, IMO this doesn't quite illustrate to what a degree those people are no longer even capable of choosing or valueing anything. That far down, it may seem psychologically unfeasible to climb up towards anything, no matter how modest. The body is degraded, the mind along with it, and they're probably all out of social contacts as well. With no resources to invest, no energy to spend, no faculties intact, nothing to offer to the market and nobody to rely on, what can you actually hope to accomplish? I think it's valid to observe that those people are no longer capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But there's a bit of a leap required to come to the conclusion that you must throw money at them.

And here I see utilitarians taking the easy way out. Has a utilitarian ever said "this person is beyond help, any resources invested here are wasted"? In my cyncical view, most utilitarians are simply humanitarians with a coat of rational paint, with many of their premises and conclusions going unexamined and only the the details getting the lightest touch of utilitarian calculus. Who questions the metrics of pain and pleasure as proxies for disutility and utility? Who quantifies them? Utilitarianism may as well just be a ritual of rationality, an act put on in order to feel better about indulging one's altruistic impulses. I'm sure I'm wrong about this and effective altruism is actually fully reasoned-out and I just don't get it, after all the people who do it are smarter than me, but I'm getting the same vibes from the so-called utilitarians that I get from those who want to help the starving poor the world over without having ever heard of utilons.

Has a utilitarian ever said "this person is beyond help, any resources invested here are wasted"?

I wouldn't be surprised: that sounds like it could easily be a summary of the condition of a person who has been sentenced to be sacrificed to a bloodthirsty trolley. There are all sorts of repugnancies that utilitarianism can fall into; that's why I see it as, at the very least, something very slippery to deal with.

What are the "real sufferings of poverty", then?

In America, and most industrialized nations, its the fact that the person remains nonfunctional.

Might this be the cause rather than the effect.

Well it is the cause, but the knowing is also the effect.


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