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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Costin the Jew, Israel and Me

or

Bronze Age Zionism

In the Atlantic last week, a profile of Costin Alamariu, listless MIT graduate, former investment banker, itinerant philosopher, schizoposter, dissident right fixture and, of course, 'Bronze Age Pervert'. And, it seems, Romanian-American Jew, likely one of many whose exit was bought in the final years of Ceaușescu's dictatorship by Israel (in exchange for cash, arms and loans).

I once argued extensively on the previous iteration of this forum that it was extremely unlikely that BAP was Jewish (even though he occasionally said things to this effect, he also sometimes claimed he was joking, and in any case non-gentile-white (especially Jewish) ancestry is a meme in dissident right circles). While BAP's more extreme antisemitism was clearly performative, and his 'racism' often as hostile to sedentary, fat American whites as it was to other groups, it was more viscerally (if not intellectually) radical than that of most Jewish far-right antisemites, like Ron Unz. I referred to various posts and comments, and even his appearance in what was at that time one of the only leaked pictures of him. In this article, the author all but confirms that Alamariu is, in fact, actually Jewish, which means I was wrong. I extend a mea culpa to those who disagreed with me.

It is hard to say for sure that BAP is 'the' central figure in the modern dissident right, although I struggle to think of a more prominent personality among online, English-speaking dissident rightists (MacDonald is much less well-known and comes across in many cases as a dull academic, Fuentes is a clown, and Spencer is a laughing stock within the movement even if he is likely still more famous outside of it), but he is certainly one of them. Jewish far-rightists (whether they are open about their ethnic identity or conceal it) are nothing new; Jews are overrepresented, as Sailer has joked, in every intellectual endeavor except perhaps golf-course architecture. The British-Jewish writer Tamara Berens, writing in Mosaic (a more religious sister magazine to Tablet) briefly describes BAP's Jewishness and his feud with Nick Fuentes in a 'report' on dissident right antisemitism, though she does not really engage with his ideas as regards his Jewishness. Discussion of Alamariu's political identity as distinctly Jewish is largely nonexistent beyond the occasional tweeted insult directed at him by detractors on the far-right since his identity became widely known.

We might distinguish here (in a way BAP could reject) between purely genetic and cultural identity. Raised in a first-generation Jewish immigrant family in the heavily Jewish community of Newton (in 2002, almost 40% of Newton's population was Jewish), with a best friend who - The Atlantic reports - is now in a position of "leadership in his synagogue" and with numerous Holocaust survivor relatives, Alamariu seems in many ways to have grown up in a substantially more Jewish milieu than many secular Jewish-Americans, myself included. At university, he seems to have been profoundly influenced by the work of Strauss, one of the more famous Jewish-American philosophers of the late 20th century (certainly on the right).

So is BAPism, incoherent and unfocused though it is, particularly Jewish in a way that even most theories of political philosophy established or contributed to by Jews are not? I think it might be.

  1. Alamariu's political philosophy fits most neatly into the early Zionist, post-Nietzschean climate of a subset of early 20th century Jewish intellectualism in Central Europe. Early Zionism, particularly in the Germanic world, was extremely heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Herzl himself paraphrases him several times. The Nietzschean new man became the New Jew, the Israeli. Large aspects of BAP's discussion of both gender identity and Jewish identity (when he is being serious) paraphrase the work of the German-Jewish writer Otto Weininger, with the notable exception that Weininger considered Christianity the 'antidote' to the ideas he dislikes, while BAP considers it a descendant of the same philosophy. BAP's extreme misogyny is also largely taken from Weininger. This connection was noted in some cases long before BAP's own Jewish identity was widely confirmed. Both consider Jewishness as a quasi-metaphysical state of being distinct from the ethnic reality of being Jewish; to some extent this is a rejection of the hard HBD group-selection stance of MacDonald or even (arguably) Ron Unz, though the latter's views are somewhat fluid on this question.

  2. Jewish dissident rightists face a unique obstacle compared to their gentile peers, which is that they must square their politics with Israel. Consider that to the modal white nationalist, the mythical Western European or North American overtly ethnat twenty-first century state is a fantasy; like Wakanda, hidden from colonialists in the deepest jungle, it can be imagined without compromise or concession to reality. For the Jewish reactionary, Israel is an impossible obstacle because it actually exists. This separates the modern Jewish dissident rightist even from his late-19th or early-20th century equivalents. BAP's writing on Israel is limited, but his most significant commentary is in this piece from 2019, in which he explicitly links western wignat identity and Israeli 'religious zionism', and condemns them both as essentially vapid, empty ideas. The piece is rambling and contradicts itself multiple times, but in it one can see (perhaps) a uniquely Jewish contempt for modern Israel grounded in the above German-Jewish philosophy.

I will now expand on this second point.

"It was always the criticism of traditional secular Zionists—the ones, after all, who founded Israel not waiting for religious deliverance—that it was precisely the rabbis, the priests, that had corrupted the Jewish nation to weakness and that made impossible its ability to establish a state. [Yoram] Hazony’s “religious Jewish nation” has been tried before, in the diaspora, and was rejected by secular Zionists for a reason. It is powerless."

To be a Jewish rightist is for me to look upon Israel as an impossibly profound disappointment. A fetid, desert shithole full of ugly, functional, modernist architecture, a tiny, valuable tech and export sector propping up a vast population of fecund religious peasants who dress like 18th century Polish fur traders and who lack the slightest inclination to high civilization or even to the defense of their homeland (and who indeed consider it religiously illegitimate), assorted barbarians, and Slavs with 1/8th Jewish ancestry. To the left, generic Western globally-homogenized secularists. In the middle, the Mizrachim and Sephardim, dull and largely irrelevant beyond electoral politics and clinging to their religion. And then the 'religious zionists', ironic quasi-descendants of Jabotinsky, not-quite-shtetl dwellers practicing a bizarre form of nationalist socialism in which their mission under God is to build more razor-wire-fenced ugly Arizona-esque suburban architecture on the hills outside East Jerusalem taken from Arabs in the belief that this represents the height of their potential contribution to the world.

Where once early Zionists considered themselves in the Nietzschean mold, establishing an outpost of European civilization in the Middle East that could - with the help of Jewish ingenuity and intelligence - perhaps eventually become a best-case example of Western civilization, a great European state that belonged to the (Ashkenazi) Jews as the other European states did to their respective peoples - by the mid-late 20th century Zionism had become a debased form of nationalist socialism in the German fashion, in which the only thing that mattered was the preservation of Jews as a tribe in the most vulgar way. Or, as BAP writes:

"Israel’s reason for existence continues to be the reason it was founded: it is a state founded for the sake of racial survival. As such it doesn’t matter that it experiences cultural decay, political instability, or that it has grafted on some other institutions, borrowed from Western liberalism, which it had to borrow primarily for public relations purposes."

In Israel, high culture is irrelevant in part because when the only important thing is racial identity and racial survival, nothing else matters. Israel represents the ethnostate as it is in practice, the worship of the lowest common denominator provided he is "one of us". Ethnonationalism, for BAP, is an inherently debased ideology because it elevates the worst of a people on an arbitrary basis. As Kevin Williamson argued upon Trump's election, not every poor white Appalachian deserved to succeed in modernity, even if Donald told them every failure wasn't their fault; the same thing should apply to Israel but does not, for there an imbecile or lowlife is still, "at least" Jewish, still belongs and so must be accomodated and even (as Alamariu's family was) intentionally retrieved. Ethonationalism as slave morality, in other words. Survival is not enough, birth rates do not in fact detemine civilizational greatness, or Niger would be the finest nation on earth. @SecureSignals once asked about my view on ethnonationalism, I guess this is it: that you can lose even if you win, and that it can be a path to the worst kind of tolerance of the worst aspects of your own people.

It is here, then, that the Jewish roots of BAP's ideology and identity might lie behind the Greco-Roman LARP, in the yearning for a grand national project that never quite worked the way it was hoped to. There is a deep mourning for a 'European' Ashkenazi Jewish state, one that goes far beyond the right. One sees it everywhere in remaining diasporic fiction and culture, sometimes even in Israel, but its most notable (or famous) example is in Michael Chabon's 2007 book 'The Yiddish Policeman's Union', which imagines a fictional Ashkenazi state carved out of Alaska, in a world in which Israel in its Middle Eastern incarnation collapses into anarchy and war just a few months into its existence. The plot itself is largely a thinly-veiled attack on George Bush's policy in the middle east; Chabon is a leftist anti-zionist who opposes Jewish in-marriage (ie. encourages Jews to marry gentiles for the sake of diversity). Still, on the left as well as the intellectual right, then, the unsatisfactoriness of Israel is a mounting disappointment. A state built to serve the weakest members of a tribe cannot turn around and build a culture that worships strength, success, or achievement. Discussion of the failure of Zionist utopianism is now commonplace, even as those who grasp at it fail to understand why it happened.

So the Jew leaves the shtetl, where in some form (whether in Judea or elsewhere) he has lived for millenia, accomplishing almost nothing of note. He changes the world, and for a brief, glorious period it appears as if he is capable (at least) of true greatness, of something approaching eternity, of a new, maybe even greater, civilization, grander than what has come before. And then he fails to build it as he returns to the desert, so he restores the shtetl (so kindly brought over wholesale by the chareidim) and disappears into mediocrity, into nothingness. Terminal decline. The fear of this desert haunts me as it seems to do Alamariu because Israel, really, is the graveyard of Jewish exceptionalism. Perhaps it is better to gamble on the future of the West than to accept fate and be swept beneath the sands of the Negev where one might disappear from history.

At the end of the day, Costin comes back to the same problem - if you're good enough at being a mercenary-warrior-pioneer, your kids will not be. Was it Jefferson who spoke of studying warfare so his children could study mathematics?

And in some ways, Israel does maintain a level of exceptionalism. They do not scurry and tremble over what other nations think of them (as is so common in the UK), nor are they ashamed to admit that their country isn't obligated to take in non-jews. Again, in the UK, we are unable to bring ourselves to deny the lowliest supplicant. We force ourselves to talk endlessly about how immigrants built this country, and carefully insert black people into depictions of historical events. If the Jewish nation aspires to survival, that at least is more worthy than aspiring to a long suicide.

Jews were treated as different by Europeans for so long. It is not to be wondered why they would then keep Europeanism at arm's length. But modernity advances by one path or another. You study warfare, your kids study mathematics, and their kids study gender theory.

Is it the Atlantic that first published his identity and ethnicity? There seems to be a trend of mainstream legacy media outting public personalities that publish under a pen name. BAP, Libsoftictock, Scott. They clearly have an axe to grind here, even though they hide behind the some notion of journalism and a fig leaf of newsworthiness. What is there to be done? Nothing. Its asymetrical. Add it the list of reasons I find journalists lower than lawyers and slightly higher than pedophiles. I hope to one day be introduced to a journalist so that I can laugh in their face when they tell me their profession.

The name has been public for a while. Pseudonyms and revealing their authors has been a thing for centuries, every side does it. It's only asymmetrical in that the center has moved very far to the left relative to the past, so there are more attacks from the left, but the methods aren't at all different.

Yes, I'd say the primary difference is that in the West, there is pretty much zero need for a radically leftist author to write under a pseudonym. They may still do so for privacy reasons, but it's not to protect them from cancellation.

I understand that perspective, and I agree that some journalists can be pretty nasty about it, going over the top with it and using it exclusively to destroy an adversary, but that's the game man. You don't start writing under a pseudonym because you are a paranoid schizophrenic who is autistic about privacy, you do it because you want to say things you know will upset the establishment. It's part of the trade off you make when you take on a professional pen name - the price of anonymity is trust, the more anonymous you are the less you can be trusted.

You give up the chance to be a household name, your ability to network is hampered dramatically, and even the outfits that will publish pseudonymous works are cautious about it, as they should be. But in return for forfeiting your legacy, you get held to the public's standards of journalist ethics, which can be gamed much more easily than any media organisation's. You get to write however you like, and cater your material to the audience you want, instead of what the outfit wants. And you get to speak the truth as you see it, any and every truth, no matter what anyone else thinks. It's a good trade off I think, as a former pseudonymous journalist (feel free to laugh in my face, if I met younger me I would too.)

The greatest qualities of the Jews have resulted in their survival as a diaspora among the West. That does not mean those qualities are amenable to building a European nation, much less one with a Nietzschean, Greco-Roman spirit. They are not Greco-Romans. The same qualities that have enabled Jews to survive are the same qualities that have caused Israel to not meet the Western ideal as held by you or BAP.

It's a contradiction of Jewish Nationalism. "Shtetl-optimized" doesn't mean Nietzschean Greco-Roman, it means clannish, religious, wandering merchants. But that's also the reason they've survived and thrived, and the same reason they can never build a nation in the mold to which you or BAP want. It's not who they are.

They are not Greco-Romans.

Neither are most of the people in history have tried to recapture the Greco-Roman spirit (including Nietzsche himself).

As the Critical Theorists love reminding us, we are colonizers and conquerors. We have for thousands of years engaged in a pattern of behavior of conquering continents, subjugating the previous inhabitants, imposing civilization and order and law. Guilty as charged. This is a pattern of behavior that emerged in the Bronze Age, in which Neolithic European populations were only the first to be subsumed, but it's a force of being that reached all continents of the world. Rome is only one example of a civilizational modus operandi that has been endemic to "whiteness" since the Bronze Age. It is who we are.

The Jewish story since the Bronze Age has always defined its identity relative to some struggle with its host hegemon, whether it's Egypt, Rome, Europe, or the United States. What is Jewish Nationalism absent such symbiosis? It's Israel.

BAP wants the Aryan Bronze Age spirit to be transplanted to the Jewish spirit. It's a fine aspiration, but it's a contradiction with the Jewish spirit.

TLDR: We wuz Romans, "you're looking at them, asshole."

The conditions that allowed a few thousand Englishman to enthrall great India no long exist. It was one thing to be a merchant-explorer-conqueror in an age of petty feudal kingdoms and isolated despotisms. You might still get away with such a thing in the poorest and least stable corners of the world. A few thousand people could easily impose their will in Haiti. But then there is nothing of value there, and it's hardly embodying the warlord spirit to live off of UN aid packages in a hovel.

This post reminds me a bit of Sartre and his defense of jews and some of the issues inherent to the identity of jews.

Sartre had all his life been ugly and short. He was keenly aware of this and it became a part of his identity and philosophy. He saw in himself a marginalized person because of this. And he saw in that marginalization a commonality with other marginalized people. A sort of proto-bioleninism. The most prominent of these were jews.

Sartre wrote an entire book on anti-semitism and jews. Only to later state that he did in fact not know a single thing about jews and judaism, but was instead just describing and defending himself. But the defense stuck. The book has been tirelessly praised by jewish scholars as capturing the essence of being jewish, and is often quoted by leftists as refutation of anti-semitism. Full of the typical scathing psychoanalytic remarks on the psychological and philosophical deficiencies that would drive one towards a dislike of jews.

How could a man who knew nothing about jews defend them so accurately and valiantly? In what turned out to just be a sort of reverse Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, there were one too many things that added up. Despite being fiction it hit a little too close to home.

A part of jewish identity is being marginalized. A part of jewish identity is being on the outside. And in the sense that Sartre elucidated, jewish identity is being weak, neurodivergent, depressed and ugly. As horrid as it might sound. You can say that these are not true and point to beautiful well adjusted jewish people and I would agree. But to that end I would argue that these people, in Sartre's definition of jews, are less jewish than the ugly ones.

BAP seems to want to step outside this bear trap of jewish identity. He wants to be beautiful, strong, happy and healthy. A celebration of idealistic normalcy where there is no revenge of the nerds because there are no nerds. In that sense it's not just a rejection of Sartre's jewish identity but the typical American secular jewish identity.

To that end I think he, along with any aspirational dreams regarding the state of Israel, run into the problem of just becoming Nazis. Not in some abstract sense but a literal one. All of this stuff has been written out before. Be eugenic, be happy, healthy and strong, be a people to be proud of. Strive for something greater. And in an inverse of Sartre, they need to turn away from jewishness for the same reason Sartre was drawn towards it.

And in the sense that Sartre elucidated, jewish identity is being weak, neurodivergent, depressed and ugly.

Bah. Woody Allen is not somehow the ideal Jew. He is a stereotype which was popular (and like most stereotypes, not without truth) for a while, that's all. None of that is essential to Jewish identity.

Reading this crystalized something that has been bouncing around my head for a while. The conception of "Jews" as a coherent ethnicity apart from the religion of Judaism is a mistake. You can't have Jews without Judaism.

When you read the Old Testament or listen to the rabbis, it becomes clear that the purpose of many, if not most of the mitzvot, are to clearly delineate the Jewish people from the gentiles. Whenever the Jewish people start drifting away from Yahweh, the first thing that happens is that they take foreign wives. When you read the New Testament, there is tension between the Jewish Christians and the gentile Christians. What happened to these Jewish Christians? We don't know for sure, but there's really only two possibilities. Either they stopped being Christians, or they stopped being Jews.

It is in this manner that any secular Jewish state will be inherently fake. The secular state of Israel occupying the biblical Land of Israel is hilariously fake. Where the fuck is the Third Temple? How come 56 years after gaining control of the Temple Mount the holiest place Jews are allowed to pray is a 2000-year-old wall? This is just sad. The Jews had more freedom to practice the authentic Jewish religion under Persian, Greek, and Roman occupation than they do today under the Global American Empire.

Where the fuck is the Third Temple?

Well, where the fuck is the Messiah? Are you one of those guys who thinks that Schneerson was him?

Where does it say Messiah has to come before the temple can be rebuilt?

Nothing in Judaism is without dissenters, but it's a widely held position.

Orthodox Judaism believes in the rebuilding of a Third Temple and the resumption of korban (sacrifices), although there is disagreement about how rebuilding should take place. Orthodox scholars and rabbinic authorities generally believe that rebuilding should occur in the era of the Jewish messiah at the hand of divine providence, although a minority position, following the opinion of Maimonides, holds that Jews should endeavour to rebuild the temple themselves, whenever possible

The kind of mind that is capable of brilliant modern scientific and technological feats like maintaining the sort of nuclear program and advanced army that allows you to control a piece of land that a bunch of people want to remove you from is generally not compatible with the kind of mind that genuinely cares about building a Third Temple. I think that is a big part of 2rafa's point.

Renaissance Europe is a very obvious example of a civilization which was both very scientifically/technologically advanced, and also deeply interested in religious/devotional matters. This is a culture that pioneered advances in architectural theory in order to construct some of the best churches and temples the world has ever seen. This dichotomy you seem to continually insist on drawing between backward religious/nationalist societies vs. forward-looking secular/globalist societies is very obviously fake and I have no idea why you’re so committed to it.

Renaissance Europe is a very obvious example of a civilization which was both very scientifically/technologically advanced, and also deeply interested in religious/devotional matters

Intellectual work in renaissance europe was very different from today, the primary mode of argumentation was appeal to authority: they "knew" earth was spherical because aristotle said so, they "knew" it like they "knew" that nerves connected to the heart (not the brain), that planets were carried by large solid spheres of quintessence and that heavy objects fell faster.

They were doing "science" (the word is anachronistic in this context, but whatever) the same way they were doing theology: commentary on a small corpus of approved authors that were assumed to be nearly infallible and to contain the totality of all possible knowledge. It's no wonder that intellectual work and religiosity was compatible.

The cathedrals are beautiful but they are also not designed by intellectuals but by semi-literate head masons. And, tbh, when you understand why all the flying buttresses are really there they start to look kind of ugly.

Just because it worked in Renaissance Europe does not mean that it works now. Clearly it is possible for people to be both religious and very intelligent. It is easy to find thousands of examples. However, just as clearly, in today's world there is a correlation between high degrees of religiousness and scientific/technological/organizational backwardness. I do not know why the correlation exists, but I see that it does exist. And of course even today it would be easy to find individual counterexamples, but that does not mean that the correlation does not exist on a group level.

In short, I am committed to the dichotomy in part because to me it does not seem fake. I also largely agree with 2rafa's idea that nationalism is antithetical to Darwininan meritocracy. The question of whether nationalism is still justified for moral reasons is, however, a separate one. Just because there exists a Darwinian rat-race of various nations that compete with each other over who can build the most advanced economies and instruments of destruction so that they can defend themselves from each other and expand their own power does not necessarily mean that for the sake of winning such competition we should throw some of our countrymen to the curb. That is a very different question.

That said, you would be right if you perceived that my distaste for religiousness is in part driven by unpragmatic motivations. I just find, say, Christianity to be false on a literal level the same way that I find Scientology to be false on a literal level, so it offends my intellectual conscience. I am not a physicalist reductionist. I do not think that consciousness can necessarily be explained in terms of matter. I find much to be repelled by in simplistic materialism and in dogmatic scientism. But the truth claims of all organized religions have little appeal to me, although I can see that some individuals are capable of compartmentalizing their religiousness and their truth-seeking and thus doing brilliant scientific work despite also believing in the literal truth of some religion.

I’m interested to know: how many Mormons have you spent time with? I ask because I know many - half of my family is LDS, as are several of my very close friends - and I think that they’re a brilliant illustration of the dichotomy falling apart. The juxtaposition of the profound irrationality - at least, from an epistemic/historical/materialist perspective - of many of their beliefs with their evident success within the modern technological/financial rat race could not be more pronounced. The remarkable success and spread of the LDS faith is especially surprising when you imagine what sort of people, in terms of neurotype and personality, must have been attracted to Joseph Smith’s preaching (and in many cases obvious confabulation) in the first place. From extremely inauspicious beginnings, this religious community of hardscrabble pioneers and gullible converts grew into one of the most successful religious/ethnic groups in the world. I understand that they are only one example of many, and that there are plenty of counterexamples, but I do want to point them out as an example of a modern people who clearly illustrate that there is no necessary inverse correlation between falsity of religious beliefs on one hand, and ability to thrive in the modern world on the other.

The exact kind of intelligence and uncompromising desire to understand everything that discovered evolution, physics, and modern civilization is the thing that undermined religion. Believing in grand religious moral claims requires you to care less about the above. It'll also make it harder to understand, respond to, shape, or fight future technological and social developments that'll clash with our current rough understanding of morality - whether that be transhumanism, AI, gene editing, or just the ambitions of technological civilization. Believing something like 'it is God's Truth that Man And Woman must Marry' is both confused and actively harmful if AI takes over, or even rejecting embryo selection or gene editing because it's not God's Plan when that happens. It's like believing in the traditional divination for the time to plant your crops ... after you've discovered irrigation.

I have not personally known any Mormons. I acknowledge their ability to thrive in the modern world but I think that they are an outlier that does not invalidate the existence of the correlation that I have written about.

There is precedent for a brilliant ethnicity collapsing into irrelevance - the ancient Greeks. One can see hints of their eventual greatness in the Minoan civilization, but after the collapse of that civilization at around 1400 BCE the Greeks returned to obscurity until about 600 BCE, at which point they steadily began to punch above their weight and contribute a disproportionate amount of the world's intellectual and artistic triumphs. Like modern Jews, the ancient Greeks too had a widespread diaspora, with far-flung colonies and a cultural impact hugely out of proportion to the population size of the actual ethnic group. They left their Hellenic stamp on much of the Near East and, even after having been conquered by the Romans, still were punching above their weight in literature and science. But then, at some point around 300 AD or so, their disproportionate influence steadily began to decrease. They returned to being just an ethnic group among others, not particularly distinguished in any way. Byzantium, as far as I know, was not rich in important intellectual or artistic innovations. There is little sign these days of what the Greeks, for a few memorable centuries, once were.

but after the collapse of that civilization at around 1400 BCE

1400 BCE is about when actual Greek starts being used as the administrative language, instead of the Minoan language. The actual collapse is 300 years later. Though, the new hybrid culture is a rougher, more militaristic one, exemplified in the Iliad.

artistic innovations

The Hagia Sophia puts every pagan temple before it to shame. The Latin west wouldn't make cathedrals or art nearly as beautiful until around the time of Constantinople's fall.

This ignores the fact that there is little genetic or ethnic continuity between the 'Greeks' of 1600 BC (Minoans), the 'Greeks' of 300 BC ('Achaeans') and the modern 'Greeks'.

Minoans were pre-Indo-Europeans, who survived the invasions of the 3rd millennium BC, of mostly Neolithic Farmer/Anatolian extract.

The Achaeans were descendants of the Myceneans, who were themselves heavily diluted genetically, but still largely culturally, Indo-European. They were relatively genetically similar to the pre-IE population (i.e. Minoan-like) of Greece, with a minority admixture of Indo-European.

The modern Greeks (with the caveat that there is high variance between e.g. remote island populations and areas like Macedonia/Salonika) are descendants of those Achaean Greeks PLUS huge population exchanges in the Roman period (from Syria, from Africa, from Germania) AND large Slavic admixture in the Byzantine-Ottoman period.

In the classical period, similarly to India, Indo-European admixture decreased as you went south down the peninsula. If we think of Classical Greek ethnicity as essentially Indo-European culture sitting on top of a 1/3 Proto-Greek/IE, 2/3 Minoan-like genetic base, ironically modern Greeks are closest to the northern Mycenaeans- this is due to thousands of years of Slavic admixture (especially during the Middle Ages) increasing the IE/EHG/Steppe Herder genetics.

Picture looks something like:

Age 1, Minoan and Minoan-like 'Greeks': culturally Non-Indo-European, genetically mostly Neolithic farmer, non-Indo-European

Age 2, Mycenae->Classical Greece: culturally Indo-European, genetically 25% IE, 75% 'Minoan'

Modern Greeks: culturally Christian Orthodox/Southern European, genetically similar 33% IE/66% Non-IE

I don't think there is a ton of meaningful sense in which this is one ethnicity. The Greece of Aristotle has been wholly subsumed as a small part of the mixture of Slavs and Levantines and Anatolians, and the culture is gone. It was only really revived as a LARP by Philhellenes of the early 19th Century.

As Kevin Williamson argued upon Trump's election, not every poor white Appalachian deserved to succeed in modernity, even if Donald told them every failure wasn't their fault

I suppose you're referring to that these-communities-deserve-to-die article?

I am.

I see. Unfortunately I think that Derbyshire's criticism of that piece is entirely valid.

Seems like a weak criticism. “Oh, he didn’t criticize non-whites enough”, yeah maybe, but black people don’t vote for conservatives and aren’t on the right, and so aren’t relevant when discussing who Republican voters choose as their presidential candidate. Besides, as even Derbyshire acknowledges, it’s likely Kevin isn’t particularly well disposed to dysfunctional underclass people regardless of race, so it’s a strange line of attack.

The one salient criticism is that most Trump voters aren’t Appalachian drug addicts, and this is true, with some minor exceptions in the suburbs Trump’s voters do look much like George W Bush’s or Mitt Romney’s. But Williamson was describing a phenomenon of euphoric Trump support in the white American underclass (who do vote, at least in some numbers), not every Trump voter.

Your comment about "how you struggle to think of a more prominent personality among online, English-speaking dissident rightists" than BAP actually got me thinking about how I don't think I've ever seen any of the local far-righters reference BAP, in any way, or even acknowledge his existence.

There's a plenty of American nationalist/anti-immigration figures who have influenced the Finnish far-right, which is only natural, since American everything influences everything; for instance, Jussi Halla-aho, the most influential anti-immigration political figure here, used to recommend several writings by Fred Reed and Steve Sailer, and the more hardline racist/fascist types have even referred to George Lincoln Rockwell, of all people, as an inspiration. Before Covid the ethnonationalists held a couple of conferences with, for instance, Jared Taylor and Kevin McDonald as speakers. And so on. However, insofar as I've seen, BAP might as well not exist.

It might be something of a stylistic issue, since BAP's bombastic, meandering style is basically in complete conflict with general Finnish understated, just-the-facts style rhetoric. (It says something that last week a presidential candidate got pilloried when he said, in his campaign announcement, that he's running for president because he thinks he's better than the other candidates.) I find it basically unreadable, myself, and have never really understood what other see in him.

I always saw him owing his existence to a white right wing masculinity crisis in the US. Similar to a political Dan Bilzerian or other types of Instagram celebs. Where the typical figures of the right wing sphere are more dweebs and nerds than manly leaders. But they all recognize that being swole would be a much better look. So they adopted him as a sort of proof of concept.

But outside of that the guy seems to exist only in blogs, on twitter and allegedly in the heads of aspiring young Republicans. Similar to a Curtis Yarvin if he took steroids and tried to find meaning in flexing. But on that end I've never read a word the man has said.

Yeah, to me a lot of these right-wing influencers' masculinity comes off as hilarious overcompensation. It's like seeing someone who learned everything he knows about masculinity by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies but does not have enough of a sense of a humor to understand how most of those movies were in part making fun of themselves. It's people who think that they have to do something to become men rather than just being men by virtue of having been born men, hence the interest that sphere has in the idea of rituals that supposedly turn boys into men and in the idea that "women can just be, but men have to do". Which there is a grain of truth in, perhaps, but what is sometimes missed is that, while rituals and gym muscles can surely help, what grants a man confidence probably more than anything else is a combination of accomplishing things in the real world and also expanding his awareness, including about the nature of his own insecurities. And you can replace "man" with "woman" in the previous sentence and I doubt that it would become any less true. Ironically, there might be some parallels to transgenderism in the concern with having to become a man rather than just being a man.

If you're actually interested in greco-roman philosophy, the emphasis on weight-lifting and bodybuilding is real and serious. Plato, for instance, is actually a wrestling nickname that he got for being so broad and buff rather than his original name. I'm not so sure that you can qualify this as overcompensation, because if someone is legitimately attempting to follow the beliefs and practices of the classical philosophers one of the requirements is actually getting into incredibly good shape and wrestling people (getting a cool wrestling nickname like "The Rock" or "Plato" is optional though as far as I can tell).

"Besides, it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit."

"For these two, then, it seems there are two arts which I would say some god gave to mankind, music and gymnastics for the service of the high-spirited principle and the love of knowledge in them—not for the soul and the body except incidentally, but for the harmonious adjustment of these two principles."

/u/justcool393 has a nice post about science and values below, and the conversation veers into discussion of what makes for good science. Without wanting to criticise anyone in that conversation, I'd like to vent a bit about a problem with broader discussion around Science (with a capital S), namely a kind of essentialism about science and the scientific method that's ubiquitous in Rat-adjacent spaces and popular science reporting.

In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.

This is true synchronically - some fields like pharmacology that have to deal with the insane complexities of human physiology are data-centric and heuristic by nature, others like particle physics involve a lot of narrow theoretical work and are reliant on dramatic insights, others like material science are somewhere in between. Moreover, ideas like replicability and experiment simply don't apply to all branches of science; many areas of geology (e.g. study of mass extinctions) are dependent on natural accumulation of evidence and lucky finds, while others (like parts of cosmology) are strikingly limited in the kinds of experimental data they can access, so the challenge becomes a matter of using existing data to probe theories.

But it's also true diachronically; what made for successful science in the 18th century is very different in many respects from what makes for successful science in the 21st century. Part of that is the disappearance of low hanging fruit, and the need for large scale co-ordination across teams with tens of thousands of contributors. Part of it may also be that we have stronger priors on which theories we can discard with minimal proof (e.g., perpetual motion machines). And while it's tempting to see these shifts in norms and practices of science over time as reflecting some linear trend, there's no guarantee that's the case. Here it's worth using the heuristic of an underlying "tech tree" that we're climbing (of course, things aren't like that, but work with me). In videogames, usually the amount of research points required to unlock the next branch of the tree increases steadily over time. But there's no reason to assume that has to be the case, or applies in a blanket way across different areas of science. We don't know what the future of the tech tree will look like; it's possible that advances in technology and society could open a new wave of "gentleman scientists" (cf. some of more optimistic commentary on the LK-99 affair).

I imagine some of you might be tempted to scoff at this and try to boil down "Science" into a few sensible epistemic rules, e.g., use of Bayes's theorem, active efforts at disconfirmation, preregistration of explicit weighted hypotheses, etc.. I think this is valuable as epistemology, but it doesn't provide a core to science - for one, plenty of non-scientific practices (e.g., running a sports team, managing an investment fund, optimising a relationship) also benefit from incorporating these rules. For another, many of the most fertile and successful canonical periods in the history of science (e.g., the Enlightenment) were a methodological Wild West, where few if any of these rules applied. So it's neither sufficient nor necessary for something to be science that it embody these principles. But perhaps most fundamentally, this approach to essentialising science relies on drawing a misleading equivalence between scientists and individual believers. In fact, belief doesn't have to come into science at all: someone can be a perfectly good scientist while remaining personally agnostic on the theories they're testing. What matters is that, for example, the results of their experiments are appropriately incorporated within industry and institutions. Indeed, there are some occasions where arguably science benefits from individual epistemic irrationality; e.g., scientists on the fringes who pursue low-probability high-impact theories to the detriment of their careers because they're (irrationally) true believers. All of those scientists would be individually better off (and more likely to get jobs) if they pursued safe mainstream alternatives. But if everyone does that, science is more likely to get stuck in local theoretical minima.

So if there's no core to "science", then what should we attribute the remarkable successful Renaissance/ Enlightenment technological revolution to? This is a big question, and I won't seriously attempt to answer it here. But two quick thoughts.

First, I wouldn't underestimate the role of what we could loosely call "engineering" - the steady accumulation of advances in things like horse-breeding and ship-building and glass-blowing and metallurgy and mining and industrial chemistry and carbon-fiber construction and so on. Many of the advances we think of as instances of historic scientific genius (e.g., Enlightenment astronomy, Hooke's microscopy, Faraday's insights on electromagnetism; see also, famously, John Harrison's resolution of the longitude problem) were very dependent on prior slowly-accumulated advances in fields like these, built on the back of lengthy intergenerational metis rather than just technê.

Second, I'd emphasise that the major expansion in human knowledge that (according to the traditional story at least) started in Europe in the 1600s-1700s and has since taken over the world should not be attributed to us summoning The Science Demon (the Science Demon doesn't exist, on my view; he's like like sixty different minor demons) but something rather more abstract. If I was pressed, I'd call him something like "pluralistic-quantified-high-stakes-competition-demon" (a close relative of one of the Darwinian demon). What started to happen in Europe, maybe, around the 1600s-1700s, was European civilisation started to converge on a successful recipe, involving lots of inter-state and inter-elite competition, increased quantification/visible demonstrations of results via things like warfare, ideological pluralism allowing lots of experimentation, etc..

That said, I'm not a historian, and precise characterisation of the demon is beyond my paygrade as a philosopher, so I'll leave my speculations at that. But what I would emphasise is that if are looking for any kind of unified explanation of "the success of science", it won't be at the level of "do experiments using method X"; it'll be something far bigger and more abstract, more at the level of civilisation-wide social-institutional design than epistemology.

In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.

Eh. You might have anticipated this objection when you said that "some of you might be tempted to scoff at this", but it is really quite easy to scoff and say that this account of the state of "science" is a postmodernist exercise in pulling wool over the reader's eyes, where I want "postmodernist" to be interpreted somewhat idiosyncratically as encompassing all uses of language that are aimed at extracting value from one's fellow humans rather than from nature. All these fields you list that now engage in "different ways of knowing" appear to me to just become increasingly barren as they deviate from the essentials of the scientific method (or, perhaps, the modernist toolbox of science, which queries our instance of nature for its parameters, mathematics, which derives truths that hold in all instances of nature, and engineering, which gives best practices for leveraging understanding of parameters to achieve a desired outcome). Pharmacology produces a procession of p-hacked drugs that don't work, with the exception of some narrow domains of heavily automated industrial drug discovery that are basically Bayesian in nature; geology has the same cliquish turf wars that you see in history and any other discipline which will never have to contend with a ground truth (pun acknowledged but initially unintended); and my understanding of the state of particle physics or cosmology is that at this point it's basically just a way of burning outrageous amounts of money to generate IFLScience content and the track record of projects such as the LHC shows that nobody is capable of predicting anything better than random guess.

In my eyes, what is happening there is not that science has transcended dogma and reached new heights under the aegis of Philosophers of Science enlightening its practicioners about the validity of radically different methods and norms, but instead that structural incentives and plain incompetence have resulted in a proliferation of bad science practiced by people who are much better at producing eloquent defenses of their wrong methods and norms, with enthusiastic fire support from the "wordcels" studying history and philosophy of science, than at correcting said methods and norms and actually generating new knowledge of reality.

I think honestly at least in the USA, it’s largely down to how we teach science. We absolutely teach science to kids in an essentialist way, as if the theories were dictated to a scientist p-prophet in a white lab coat. And as such, unless you’re working in the field or know someone who does, science is The Science just like the Bible is The Scriptures, sources of absolute truth.

The typical way a science subject is covered is with a story that goes something like this:

Once upon a time, a famous scientist was working in his lab, and he made a discovery. For the sake of argument, it’s the structure of the atom. And thus he did some lab-magic with some chemicals, and came out saying that electrons surround the protons in the nucleus. If your school has a lab equipped to do so, you might repeat the steps of this great scientist and thus see for yourself that the prophets of science spoke the truth. The students will be taught about the scientific method, about the need to replicate, and about the need for peer review. But since most people only deal with science via the classroom lecture and lab demonstration (or played with science demonstration toys and kits), they’ve likely never conducted a real experiment that they thought of in those terms.

This I think is how we got to where we are, at least among laypeople, with scientism and other forms of pseudo intellectual bullshit. We teach people just enough about the subject that they feel like they understand it, but not enough to critically engage with the content. So when people come up against a new topic, they lack the skills to do any sort of independent analysis, or read the competing voices in the debates. Instead, much like a medieval peasant, he finds a priest. If his chosen priest sees value in the idea, then that’s good enough. More people think they know something about space because of Neil DeGaus Tyson and Michio Kakaku, even if they understand none of the scientific reasoning that leas those priests to that conclusion.

I suspect that the view of science as disunified and pluralistic is an illusion caused by zooming in too close. Older, rival ways of knowing get neglected and forgotten. That should create the impression of a loss of intellectual diversity, but we actually zoom in until the limited, remaining intellectual diversity fills the field of view.

I first rediscovered older perspectives reading about the Spanish Armada of 1588. Garrett Mattingly wrote 421 pages for his book The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. He gives a largely materialist account in which the superior upwind performance of English ships allows them to stay up wind of the Spanish and pound the Spanish from long range with their superior canon. At 583 pages, Neil Hanson gets to include more on Spanish thinking in his book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, the true story of the Spanish Armada. And the thinking is religious and pious.

The Spanish did have some hard headed military men, but religion and piety also had a say in naval matters. If you had tried to warn a Spanish noble about English technical superiority and tactical advantage he might have replied with the authentic 1580's version of this

That is not how this works, that is not how any of it works. The wind blows at God's command. If we pray ardently, if we are right with God, he will grant us fair winds. Second to God's blessing come our own courage and faith. You make much of minor points such as the English being able to pull their muzzles back inside their hulls for reloading, but such matters trail a poor third behind God's will and man's courage and determination.

Second, I was discombobulated by reading that Hobbes was viewed with suspicion in his own time. I imagined that the throne-and-altar guys would love him. God had divinely appointed Kings and there was Hobbes justifying God's wisdom to doubters: of course we need a King. Without a King we will have a war of all against all and life will be nasty, brutish, and short. Yet his contemporaries found Hobbes' perspective mechanistic, materialist, in a word: atheistic. Not the right way to think about the world at all.

Third, in The Discarded Images, C. S. Lewis attempts to explain the Medieval world view to the modern mind. He selects some earlier work he regards as seminal, include the commentary on Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius. Macrobius divides dreams into five species, three veridicial, and two which have 'no divination' in them.

  • Somnium: truths veiled in an allegorical form

  • Visio: direct, literal prevision of the future

  • Oraculum: the dreamers parents or other grave and venerable person openly declares the future

  • Insomnium: daily cares intruding on sleep

  • Visum: garbled trash, including nightmares

I cannot believe there was ever a time when every-one took Visio seriously. Dreams must so often fail to come true that many would notice their limitations as a way of knowledge. On the other hand, I assume that Macrobius took dreams seriously, and others followed his lead. What must it have been like to grow up in a world in which the reliability of dreams was accepted by the adults around you and that way of thinking was metaphorically "in the water supply"? It would be hard to see the point of science. Much better to have a good nights sleep and hope, in the morning, to interpret the allegory of Somnium.

There were so many better ways of knowing things than science. You could pray to God. You could study scripture. You could dream.

None of that actually works. It fails hard enough that it is hard in 2023 to imagine taking any of it seriously, yet I believe that people did so. If we zoom out far enough to include such ideas in our field of view, Science shrinks to a small and particular kind of epistemology. Does it have an essence? In the zoomed out view, internal details are too small to be seen and, yes, science has a nerdy essence.

Yes, like the flaw with Star Trek's Klingons, that if they were as depicted, they would never have developed the technology they needed to establish their empire.

You might be right that it is a strawman, but intriguingly, it is not a baseless strawman. The book title "in confident hope of a miracle" is a quote from a Spaniard of the time. At least one Spaniard was indeed that superstitious. The difficulty is that, with no Gallup polling from back, then it is hard to know whether that level of superstition was common enough to matter.

There are also difficult issues around compartmentalization, both of society and within the minds of individuals. I think that there were sharp class distinctions between tradesmen and nobles. So tradesmen would be level headed and practical in regard to their trade. Shipwrights would build seaworthy ships based on trial and error and folk-naval-architecture, then the noble would swoop in to have the priest bless the ship to make it seaworthy. Within the head of the noble there would be two watertight compartments. One would commission ships, but only from shipwrights whose previous ships had made it back from America. The other would navigate the treacherous waters around heresy by ensuring that the importance of the priest was never doubted. The obvious point, that only the shipwrights track record mattered would be carefully ignored.

This particular trail of insight is not new. I don't believe it has a proper name, so I like to call it "science-denial" not in the petty sense people use today to mean heterodox belief but in the noble, anti-realist, sense of denying that empiricism has a truer grasp as the universe than most. I believe some call this position "mysticism".

The essence of this view is to regard progress in technics as the result of trial and error and "science" not as the method used to foment that trial and error but rather the ideological interpretation of such results by formulating just-so stories to explain them. The denial is not so much of the ability to learn about the universe through experiment rather than the ability to learn about the universe by making up theories to explain those experiments. It argues the theorizing doesn't produce knowledge, but merely justification.

The most powerful argument for this view you lay out yourself: empiricist epistemology has become a motte and bailey. The motte is strict adherence to a logical experimental protocol, the likes of which you used to see in physics, the strict discipline behind Popper's demarcation. But the bailey is everything else, every sort of theorizing that allows itself to be formalized and uses the right fonts in their PDFs, publishes in journals and wears the right colored labcoats. That is also science, somehow, and draped in the same prestige.

I don't believe the industrial revolution is that hard to explain for this viewpoint, we learned there about many things that were extremely applicable and useful, and you can indeed pin a lot of the success on engineering rather than fundamental research. People of this view like to, rightfully, point out that a lot of those usable discoveries were made by cranks. Which has been a glaring problem for Epistemology forever and is at the core of the more contemporary postmodern views on it. Kuhn's massively influential work on scientific revolutions is all about this.

I do think this denial is throwing the baby with the bathwater however, as I can point to specific insights that could only have been made with the existence of a model (atomics in particular). So I personally prefer to sidestep this whole issue by embracing Naturalism and the belief that science is not some special method of thought invented at some point in history but a process of modelling the environment using energy efficiently that every organism is engaged in.

Consider how simplistic rules, the likes of which religions provide, are actually better and more usable models of the world in most situations than detailed understandings of quantum mechanics.

The "demon" you're pointing at is indeed not science, it's a particular way of engaging with this process that focuses solely on quantity and has no regard for maintenance. And that's where the issue is, not in us building more sophisticated models, but in us building models that are as sophisticated as possible with no regard for what use we get out of them or what human capital we are burning by taking our most clever and sacrificing them on the altar of making more convenient doodads.

I laughed at Rabelais' facile quote when I was taught it: "Science without conscience is but the Ruin of the Soul". But the older I get the deeper the meaning of it strikes me. Though knowledge itself is value neutral, yearning for it at any cost can be a bad thing, and building society on top of it and nothing else the way the Enlightenment has done is indeed ruinous.

I hesitate to say people have rejected science, as I said above, to the vast majority of people who don’t work in the sciences, or know people who do (and to be honest the same could be said of most academic subjects) they don’t understand it at all. They’re not rejecting a subject they don’t understand, they’re rejecting narratives and a “priesthood” of The Science. They don’t know the work of science, they don’t understand the process, they don’t understand the arguments.the reason for anti-realism and anti-science is that once you lose your trust in the basal religion of you society and suspect that those you trusted to explain the universe are either ignorant or untrustworthy.

I think some disciplines tend to over-theorize, especially astrophysics and the like. Most of the stuff about the ultimate structure of the universe are basically no more empirical than any cosmology invented by any ancient religion. There’s no direct experiment or observation that could conceivably show air castles like String Theory or Multiverses to be reality. There have been no observations of dark matter or dark energy. All of these things might be true, but we have no data, and no empirical evidence of any of it. It’s mostly based in mathematics. Mathematics that was based on other observations, but mathematics. And I think the honest answer to these sorts of ideas is “we don’t know”.

One of the rare times I agree wholeheartedly with you. Outside of Kuhn what are some other good writers in this vein?

Funnily enough I have a deep burning hatred of Kuhn because he moved from reasonable critiques of the way science works to straight up denying the existence of objective reality. Nevertheless he is one of the key authors to understand contemporary epistemology since he pretty much dealt the killing blow to logical positivism.

If you want to understand naturalistic epistemology, which he inherits from, you should read Quine and Goldman.

If you want further polemic as to the validity of methodology you can read Feyerabend, whose most famous book is literally Against Method and has an anarchist position. I find a lot of it ridiculous but he makes some very valid points.

If you want to understand the roots of the culture war, you can read about the Positivismusstreit, the theoretical debate between logical positivism and critical theory that sowed the seed for much of what is playing out today.

You may be interested in Terence Tao's There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs. He also postulates that truly advanced thinking means going beyond rigour.

So if there's no core to "science", then what should we attribute the remarkable successful Renaissance/ Enlightenment technological revolution to? This is a big question, and I won't seriously attempt to answer it here.

It's the wrong question. The right one is: Given that there was a remarkably successful Renaissance/Enlightenment technological revolution, why should we accept the revisionist conclusion that there is no "core" to science? And the answer is then obvious: we should not.

Yes, science didn't stop working, we stopped doing science.

My philosophy, Triessentialism, breaks things down to (or sees things through a lens of) three essences: Physical, Logical, and Emotional, or What, How, and Why.

I see science as the How of the What, and engineering as creating a What with a built-in How; they’re the same thing but in different directions.

Is Covid-19 still a thing anyone here is interested in? Anyway, Eric Winsberg of the Chronicle of Higher Education published this article entitled

We Need Scientific Dissidents Now More Than Ever (2023-08-10, archive link because the site is kinda borked)

Anyway, I'm not sure anything super new is said in here, but I found it to be an interesting meta-commentary on the clash between science and politics. It starts off by telling an abridged version of the story of Ignaz Semmelweis and then analogizes it to science discussion related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The analogy isn't exact but I think it's still relatively fair tbh.

My impression is honestly I agree with the article. Though I think there's a balance from being super close minded to having such an open mind your head falls out, the scientific consensus being at such odds with the political messaging seems... quite problematic indeed. So I think the question partially becomes... "how do you make sure that scientific consensus which is supported shines through, even when it may be politically inconvenient to do so?" My relevant concern seems to be less about "the science™ being wrong"1 and more about "the science being right but it becoming too politically inconvenient to do so" or the lack of even carrying out such studies in the first place in the worry that it might to inconvenient conclusions.

1. I recognize the problem of reproducibility of results. And while I do agree it's likely a larger problem than is known about, especially in light of the recent Stanford scandal, I do think there is quite a bit more malicious intent with regards to politically inconvenient conclusions.

Historically science flourishes best when you have motivated scientists that can devote multiple decades to learning everything about a problem.

Forget the name but there’s a book about one of the guys who ran Xerox PARC who talks about how this was his strategy. Just find scientists that seem brilliant and guarantee them 20 years to devote to a project, then sit back and let them do it.

The current scientific establishment is almost the opposite of this - in order to compete you have to publish quick and publish something important. And I don’t blame the scientists, most of them will lose their livelihood if they don’t get grants, and they typically don’t have skills to fall back on. Or much of a backup plan in general.

The current scientific establishment is almost the opposite of this - in order to compete you have to publish quick and publish something important. And I don’t blame the scientists, most of them will lose their livelihood if they don’t get grants, and they typically don’t have skills to fall back on. Or much of a backup plan in general.

I think this problem is even worse than you're describing. How many potentially brilliant scientists are now working dead end jobs or posting on 4chan from the basement because they made a few socially awkward and politically incorrect jokes early on in life, inadvertently removing themselves from the ability to navigate that system at all?

How many potentially brilliant scientists are now working dead end jobs or posting on 4chan from the basement because they made a few socially awkward and politically incorrect jokes early on in life, inadvertently removing themselves from the ability to navigate that system at all?

Not many - neither the physical sciences nor the funded-because-upstream-of-medicine majority of the life sciences are politically sensitive enough to make forensically examining someone's past for hidden wrongthink worth the effort, so people don't do it. To get cancelled, one of three things needs to happen:

  • You ignore prevailing (in the current year, woke, but in Oppenheimer's time anti-Red) social norms so spectacularly that it becomes impossible not to cancel you.
  • You make enemies who find it worth their while to go through your life looking for cancelbait (and with norms as vague as they are, someone who looks hard enough will find something - so this is cancellation for bad luck + having social-media-powerful enemies, not wrongthink).
  • You are prominent enough that people are willing to make an effort to take you down, and find something bad enough that your friends, mentees, collaborators etc. will no longer defend you.

Googling cancelled physicists (and the results are consistent with my own recollection), in the last few years we have

  • John Clauser, who was already 80 and long-since retired at the time he was "cancelled" (taken off a panel at an IMF-sponsored event). This was only newsworthy because it happened the year after he received a belated Nobel prize.
  • Alessandro Strumia, who was fired from CERN for giving a talk that was generally perceived as sexist - although cancelling him was an obvious violation of academic freedom it was the precise opposite of cancelling someone over a youthful indiscretion.
  • Lawrence Krauss, cancelled for weaksauce allegations of sexual harassment that probably would not have stuck had he not been a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

That isn't many people, and they were all open and notorious heretics as adults. Their being cancelled isn't good (particularly Strumia, who is probably right), but it isn't the kind of cancel culture where a few socially awkward jokes as a teen can be dug up to end a career a decade later.

The attempts to cancel Neil deGrasse Tyson for sexual harassment and James Webb for homophobia failed. Ancient history now, but so did the attempt to cancel Matt Taylor (comet probe shirt guy).

I don't think you've actually grasped the point that I'm making.

You've provided an example of how there are very few prominent physicists getting cancelled - first of all, physics is the department of science I would expect to have the fewest issues along this line(Biology, psychology, anthropology and sociology would be bigger targets). But that's a minor aside compared to the main problem with your reply, which is that it doesn't actually have anything to do with what I was talking about. Notice how I said "early on in life, inadvertently removing themselves from the ability to navigate that system at all" - what this means is that I am talking about the people who never became prominent scientists, and as such the number of physicists who actually get cancelled isn't really relevant to the point I'm making. I'm referring to the chilling effect of social justice culture on the kind of people who could become brilliant scientists, and how the more complicated social demands required to navigate modern academia(not to mention resource conflicts) select against people who could have done great work if they didn't have to navigate the modern morass of invisible rules. To use a metaphor...

"I think that the public burning of witches has a chilling effect on research into sorcery and magic. Many people who could have become fantastic witches have instead been silenced and discouraged by the public treatment of others who take an interest in magic."

"But there aren't that many witches being actively burned - this isn't happening!"

Forget the name but there’s a book about one of the guys who ran Xerox PARC

Fun note: I've read a few popular books on the history of science which tell stories about places like PARC, Bell Labs, GE, and IBM funding pure research in the ~40-60's. Iirc companies got leaner, financialed, government funding expanded dramatically, more people went into academia, bureaucracy expanded at all levels etc. Walter Isaacsons recent "CRISPR" book talked about research labs spending weeks filling out 100 page forms for government approval/grants for some projects (possibly the recent mRNA vaccines). Lots of factors at play. It all sounds sad, but I can only hope its somehow closer to optimal.

Shustek: Let’s take a short diversion here. The Arpanet that you had worked on eventually becomes the Internet and the World Wide Web and is obviously something that’s changing all of our lives. I think I remember correctly reading that you politically tend toward libertarianism, the idea that small government is best. Yet all of this early networking work with ARPA was funded by the government. Do you think in retrospect that that’s a proper role for government? Should they have done that and if they didn’t would anyone else have done that?

Metcalfe: No, I think they should have. I think one of the few things government should do is finance research. I have learned, from many years, that the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies can’t afford to do research other than monopolies. There’s some famous ones, like the telephone monopoly, [AT&T] Bell Labs; the computer monopoly, [IBM] Watson Labs; the copier monopoly, Xerox PARC. And on it goes. In retrospect, the monopolies aren’t worth it for the research they do. It’s nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs is, or was. But other than the transistor, UNIX, and the Princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&T as a monopoly sat on innovation, and IBM after that, and Xerox after that. It’s just not worth it.

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Metcalfe_Robert_1/Metcalfe_Robert_1_2.oral_history.2006.7.102657995.pdf

It’s nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs is, or was. But other than the transistor, UNIX, and the Princess telephone, what did we get for all that money?

This is "aside from that, what did the Romans do for us" territory. The transistor, Unix, C, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device, the entire field of information theory. The cosmic microwave background was also discovered there. AT&T's monopoly certainly held back telecom, but Bell Labs was as cool as its reputation.

So? Technology enables a better standard of living, and rent seeking is how our society does that. It’s just a tax to fund PMC lifestyles for people who aren’t good at STEM or willing to do physical work.

I would strictly speaking prefer that this wealth go to useful people, like the inventors of technology, or the people who maintain it. But it’s absurd to act like regulations and bureaucracy destroy wealth. They sometimes slow down its growth, but mostly they just distribute it.

But it’s absurd to act like regulations and bureaucracy destroy wealth. They sometimes slow down its growth, but mostly they just distribute it.

You're making Bastiat's broken window fallacy.

You see the resistributed money go to the bureaucrats and think "Look, GDP!", but you don't see how that money would have been better used for more GDP in the hands of not-bureaucrats.

That would be why I said it slows down growth, but doesn’t destroy it.

If you would have grown 5%, but due to X you only grow 4%, then 1% of growth has been destroyed.

They do destroy wealth. Regulations on appliances which make dishwashers and laundry machines take longer and not work as well directly reduce your quality of life, and therefore your wealth. Same with regulations on how much water can flow through your faucets. The time taken up filling out those 100 page forms regulation compliance is wasted; it is destruction of wealth.

Like an ideal gas, the bureaucracy will expand to fill the available space.

Yes, the only way we make progress is when technology is moving fast enough to outpace regulation.

Bullshit jobs are known phenomena.

We don’t need more dissidents. We need the establishment to change. Then more normie scientist will show up. Change the incentives coming from those in power.

I’ve flip flopped on this but now I think I’m down with jail Fauci. The actual crime is likely lying under oath.

Indirectly things like breaking DEI departments in schools should help too. Maybe I’m creating a boogeyman here but DEI just looks like the Ministry of Truth truth to me and the center of punishing wrong think. By normalizing dissent eslewhere it will likely help dissent everywhere.

I think that only when challenged do institutions actually change. That’s how most changes happened. If Diogenes doesn’t pluck the chicken, I don’t think philosophy would have developed as much. If Copernicus doesn’t challenge th3 establishment, we wouldn’t have gone to the moon. Even in government, if you want to improve a law you need it to be challenged.

Two different topics I am not qualified to talk about but am interested in hearing your opinions on:

  1. Apparently there is now a crime in Britain called a 'homophobic public offense.' Committing this crime will get you arrested. This has come to the wider world's attention because of a video of an autistic teenaged girl being dragged out of her home for telling one of the police officers she looked like her lesbian nana. I will speak plainly that I read the same evil on the face of the lesbian-nana-cop that sent the kulaks to the gulags and now have the impression Britain is pretty well not a free country. But it's a big country, anyone can cherrypick one terrible story out of millions (or billions, in the new case of that little girl in india who had been gangraped and then gangraped again in the hospital by the doctors), and I am not British so I can't speak to the probative value. Throwing it out there though https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12396427/Lesbian-nana-arrest-police-autistic-exclusive.html

NB This was a few days ago and the cops have since dropped the charges after public backlash. This time.

  1. A new audio sensation is sweeping the nation, a previously-nobody named Oliver Anthony has come out with an actually-good red tribe anthem called 'Rich Men North of Richmond.' Over the last week or so it's become ubiquitous in 'the RW blogosphere' - too many big names to list have independently drawn attention to it and Anthony is going to need some serious professional help to manage all of the invitations to appear on, well, everything. Give it a listen and see if it does anything for you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro

I'm not from the south, but I and most of the rest of non-southern righties decided a long time ago we would just appropriate it. Confederate flags in rural Michigan, etc. To me it has a kind of universality to it. Don't miss the line 'if you're 5 foot 3 and 300 pounds, tax dollars shouldn't pay for your bags of fudge rounds." Interested to hear your thoughts

The Oliver Anthony song hit me hard. I also grew up within 100 miles of where that artist is based. So the appalachin country twang blues is familiar to me. I'm usually more of a fan of pop music.

Oliver has additional commentary on the song:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tmxyMJd7IQ8

Its a nine minute video that I watched all of, but I'll summarize some things I remember (cuz i know I hate watching videos that other people post):

  1. The video I posted was uploaded just prior to the one that NotBritishorSouthern posted. It is his first video released not on a cell phone camera.
  2. He comments on many parts of the song, but doesn't mention the line "if you're 5 foot 3 and 300 pounds, tax dollars shouldn't pay for your bags of fudge rounds."
  3. Was formerly an "angry agnostic", said he used to make fun of the "sky daddy". Has come around to religion recently.
  4. Doesn't like pedos. Doesn't understand how someone can do that to children.
  5. Feels like Washington has made things harder on people.
  6. He has gotten messages from people about his music helping others. He hopes to do more.
  7. Talked about getting high and drunk and wasting his early time in life.
  8. Says he met good people at the factory he worked at.
  9. Some other stuff, but I'm forgetting now.

In the UK, a 19 y/o was found guilty of a hate crime for quoting a rap lyric containing the n-word on her instagram page. A while ago, a man was jailed for 20 weeks for posting 10 "grossly offensive" George Floyd memes in a private Whatsapp group. Another man was found guilty of sending an offensive tweet, celebrating the death of Sir Tom Moore, and the tweet was only live for 20 minutes. Recently a man was found guilty of wearing an offensive football shirt (a reference to the Hillsborough disaster over 30 years ago). There are many more examples in kind, these are just from the top of my head.

I think these are all absurd. Anything that offends normie public sensibilities is illegal. I would much prefer the American free speech norms.

Recently a man was found guilty of wearing an offensive football shirt (a reference to the Hillsborough disaster over 30 years ago).

Huh? Care to elaborate please?

The disaster occurred when fans without tickets stormed the stadium, there was a crowd crush and 97 people died. The tabloid 'The Sun' famously blamed the disaster on the fans, subsequent investigation found that the police official in charge on the day made numerous mistakes and that various safety procedures were not followed. This turned into a 30 year saga in part because of a wider 'culture war' between what was perceived as the Northern working class (associated with coal miners, unions and the left, and with the city of Sheffield where the disaster occurred and with Liverpool, where the victims were largely from) and the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher that was in power at the time, associated with the police (to whom she gave huge above-inflation pay raises) and the South. By this point Thatcher had had the police fighting the miners for 10 years and had largely won against them. The disaster thus became a political culture war topic for many years and countless expensive investigations were conducted, especially after Labour won again in 1997.

The man wore a shirt that said "97: Not Enough" on it. He was sentenced in part because there are special rules and laws governing behavior at soccer games in the UK because of longstanding issues with hooliganism. His sentence was a £1,000 fine and a ban from football games for 4 years.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, although for the sake of those who know nothing about this tragedy, I'll point out that it's slightly misleading to state that fans "stormed the stadium". But anyway, my point isn't that, it's that this incident with the T-shirt appears to be rather different from the other ones listed in the original comment. After all, surely working-class Northern English football fans don't count as a protected group.

In the UK, a 19 y/o was found guilty of a hate crime for quoting a rap lyric containing the n-word on her instagram page.

I thought the absurd US incoherency around "the N Word" (where a teenager's life can be ruined because we have to pretend she learned the word from her racist grandpappy rather than the radio) was the worst it could get.

US ridiculousness + European free speech norms though...

Interestingly, the sentence was in part because in the UK, the -a variant and 'hard r' variant are (in most accents) pronounced exactly the same, so "trigger" and "trigga" have the same pronounciation unlike in most US accents. The judge therefore ruled (iirc) that her excuse that they were two different things didn't count.

I had idly wondered this to myself for a time. Just goes to show how intellectually bankrupt it is to fluff up a particular inflection of a word as a grievous sin.

Give it a listen and see if it does anything for you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro

Honestly not much, but it wasn't written for me. Unlike the wonderful sound, the lyrics resonate like a laundry-list of complaints. It's too prosaic to be subversive. Plus I think it misidentifies the problem as rich men north of Richmond, and not the local power brokers enthusiastically elected and re-elected. But the song is overwhelmingly well-liked, so I'm glad for the artist.

Someone below linked the Antifascist Blues. While I found that song more catchy and clever, I have some of the same criticisms.

So, when the US has bad cops caught doing bad things, we get tons of counterexamples of good cops doing their jobs correctly and professionally. When the British police get caught doing bad things, are their any popular counterexamples of the British police doing their jobs correctly and professionally?

Could easily be a bias thing based around my getting most of my good-cop-bad-cop news from themotte. Since American police code as red, and British police code as blue, that kinda makes sense, though even these days, we seem to have enough lefties around to point out when confirmation bias is painting a misleading picture. But I can't recall any instance of someone being positive toward the British police. Where are their defenders?

The Metropolitan Police has one of the highest homicide solve rates of any major western urban police force. In 2019, it solved 98% of London's 143 homicides, for example. San Francisco's homicide solve rate seems to fluctuate between around 65% and 75%, and that is one of the very highest of major US cities. London's homicide rate is vastly below US cities with similar (or indeed better, in SF's case) demographics from an HBD purist's perspective.

Generally I find the police here to be moderately competent. They remove schizo homeless people quickly. When annoying street buskers play near my home, they come in 15 minutes to move them along. I've asked them for directions and they've always been polite. The police don't set hate crime laws, politicians do. Police are usually authoritarian personality types, there are always issues with them enjoying the power they wield over civilians. But they enforce laws that are, ultimately, passed by others.

In 2019, it solved 98% of London's 143 homicides

I'm deeply suspicious. Some combination of wrongly classifying many murder victims as deaths by accident or suicide and also pinning lots of murders on people who maybe didn't really commit them?

The usual solve rate is more like 80-90%, by the way, 2019 was an exceptional year. But it makes sense, regular homicides in the age of DNA and mass surveillance (which London has more of than any other Western city) are usually easy for police with enough resources to solve. Gang-related homicides are more complex because they often involve groups of people fighting each other, but there surveillance can help, drill rap means they often admit it themselves, and they have extensive gang databases to tie people together.

The Metropolitan Police has one of the highest homicide solve rates of any major western urban police force.

Is that because they have better police, or because they have killers who are worse at hiding their kills?

I could imagine that, for instance, lone killers might find coverups harder than gang killers.

Or many fewer killings between gangs / in cultures where the victims don't cooperate with the police?

The majority of homicides are gang-related, gangs are often along ethnic lines (typically Caribbean, West African, Somali, Bangladeshi, sometimes mixed (eg. there are gangs with black and white members)). But I have heard that London has a uniquely comprehensive gang database compared to other cities, a lot of members are tracked from early teenagerhood, family groups are tracked etc.. I don't know how true that is. I do know that stop and frisk seems pretty common in London though, I see teens in groups getting searched almost every week. There are large-scale orders that allow the police to search everyone they want in an area for periods of time without cause.

There's also option C- the same lack of civil liberties that results in autistic 16 year old girls getting hauled off for saying a cop "looks lesbian" gives the police the ability to solve murders far more efficiently and thoroughly than in a country which protects individual rights to do weird or suspicious things.

I've found an article by "the Graham Factor" where he mentions another difference that isn't directly related to the police powers: the courts don't have to dismiss illegally obtained evidence if it's otherwise reliable. If someone was found to have a tactical assault butter knife on their person, then the charge sticks, even if the cop did something wrong: wasn't allowed to frisk the person, made a mistake when filling out the report, etc.

How does stop-and-frisk help solve murders? By harvesting fingerprints?

I mean to start with stop-and-frisk worked well in NYC until the NYPD stopped it as a civil rights violation. It’s reasonable to assume that it works in London too.

But more to the point, I’d expect that it’s coupled with a lot of additional measures. Upthread there’s a discussion of a gang database- in the US the use of gang databases in serious crime prevention gets floated every once in a while and shot down for civil liberties reasons, because having bad friends and suspicious habits is not illegal. In the UK it presumably isn’t either, but looser probable cause rules related to such things plausibly make evidence collection much easier. And that’s just one example.

Stop and frisk is a tiny part of the puzzle, the UK has vast surveillance powers over its populace and a huge amount of infrastructure to support it.

Watch any UK crime drama and they basically have to invent unrealistic reasons for their multiple layers of CCTV, Internet snooping, etc. have all fallen through the cracks for a particular case. It's kind of hilarious.

Watch any UK crime drama and they basically have to invent unrealistic reasons for their multiple layers of CCTV, Internet snooping, etc. have all fallen through the cracks for a particular case. It's kind of hilarious.

I think you could make an incredibly good show revolving around some evil Ed Snowden equivalent who knows all about the CCTV/surveillance system and uses it to construct incredibly tight alibis etc in order to commit a series of murders. You get to have the conflict between the hardened old detective with a distrust for the new high-tech methods, arrogant political appointees claiming the Panopticon is infallible, etc.

I think it’s also somewhat a preventative measure. It puts potential criminals on notice that the cops are present and active in a given area, thus it’s more dangerous to carry drugs or a weapon in that area. This would naturally lower the rate of drug related crimes and murders.

I think that even with “potential abuses” stop and frisk and broken windows work well enough to be well worth the trade offs. The entire community benefits when ordinary people can walk in their city without fear of street crime or gunfire.

I think that even with “potential abuses” stop and frisk and broken windows work well enough to be well worth the trade offs. The entire community benefits when ordinary people can walk in their city without fear of street crime or gunfire.

I don't think it is particularly useful to combine stop and frisk with broken windows. The latter is simply the enforcement of law, while the former is, often, the violation of law. (eg: In NYC "[b]etween January 2004 and June 2012, the NYPD conducted over 4.4 million Terry stops. . . .52% of all stops were followed by a protective frisk for weapons. A weapon was found after 1.5% of these frisks. In other words, in 98.5% of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found.". Given that police are permitted to frisk only when they have reasonable suspicion that a detained person is armed,* the police were clearly engaging in widespread Fourth Amendment violations.

And, while it is perfectly true that "[t]he entire community benefits when ordinary people can walk in their city without fear of street crime or gunfire[,]" one can say that of most civil liberties. "It is OK to violate the civil liberties of a small number of people if the community benefits" is a recipe for the complete evisceration of civil liberties.** It is certainly the rationale that has been given in the past for the evisceration of civil liberties.

*Though if Justice Scalia had had his way, they would not be able to frisk without probable cause, a higher bar. See Minnesota v. Dickerson, 508 U.S. 366 (1993) (concurring opinion)

**Obviously Including, given this particular rationale, Second Amendment rights.

I think there’s a faulty assumption here in the sense that I don’t think the actual discovery of weapons in a stop and frisk is nearly as important as the show of force S&F represents. There are more efficient ways to find contraband. However the show of force, the fact that cops are making a point to stop people likely known to police as troublesome serves as a strong deterrent to carrying weapons or contraband around.

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Yes, and DNA if the frisk leads to an arrest on a lesser crime. That is a big part of why police do stop and frisks. See the oral argument in Maryland v. King, which okayed taking DNA from arrestees, where the Maryland AG said, "Since 2009, when Maryland began to collect DNA samples from arrestees charged with violent crimes and burglary, there had been 225 matches, 75 prosecutions and 42 convictions, including that of Respondent King." King's crime was rape FWIW.

PS: Note that this not meant to be an argument in favor of stop and frisk, which is far too subject to abuse.

new audio sensation is sweeping the nation, a previously-nobody named Oliver Anthony has come out with an actually-good red tribe anthem called 'Rich Men North of Richmond.'

Eh, it's no Antifascist Blues.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro

After a minute, I turned it off because I found it to be too whiny and self-indulgent. I've never understood why anyone, on either side of the political spectrum, would want to identify with someone who whines about being powerless. It's sad to see the South reduced to this. I'm the descendant of Confederate soldiers. They didn't whine about the federal government, they did something about it.

They got the snot kicked out of them. If you want to project strength when you are weak for the sake of your pride you need to be ready to sacrifice yourself for it. But that's not what modern Southern men are willing to do. As they exemplify every day of their lives where they waste away eating corn syrup and drinking liquid estrogen whilst reveling in a culture that worships black people.

Treating victimary discourse as if it's beneath you is missing the point of it. It's not for you to feel sorry for yourself. It's for the next generation to have something to ground themselves in. If you feel you have suffered you feel free to believe you are owed something. Which is an attitude that could have served Southern men very well. Rather than the endless mentality of individually bootstrapping yourself through life like you owed it something.

I don't think it's actually good for the next generation to ground themselves into a slave-moralistic "I suffered so you owe me something" mentality. One does not need to feel oppressed to feel entitled to the government treating them like normal people who have a normal country that deserves preservation.

You have suffered yet don't even have the gumption to demand recompense. You are already grounding yourself in slave moralistic 'I just want to be treated normal!' which is even weaker and more slavish than what you maintain I am proposing.

If you don't act like you are owed something no one will think of paying you.

No one will think of paying conservative whites whether or not they write maudlin songs about how taxes make them sad. That's not demanding recompense, it's acting like a whipped dog. In any case, why do I need to "suffer" to be entitled to my country? It's mine and I'm entitled to make demands of it whether or not I suffer.

You are just arguing against your own point. If whites aren't getting anything even if they complain about it, why would they get anything if they don't? A whipped dog that doesn't whine is no less whipped than a whipped dog that does.

As far as I’m aware if the police were prosecuting her under Part 3A 29B of the public order Act she has a clear defence because she was in a private dwelling and only people within that dwelling heard her. Now, maybe she is screwed because the police recorded it and the police then played the recording to people outside the dwelling but I think you can claim a defence that you reasonably believed your words would not be heard outside the dwelling. I suspect the reason for this defence is to cover situations where the accused is being secretly recorded. Of course it also completely ridiculous for the police to accuse you of a crime that they have facilitated by their own actions.

2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the written material is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and are not heard or seen except by other persons in that or another dwelling.

In proceedings for an offence under this section it is a defence for the accused to prove that he was inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe that the words or behaviour used, or the written material displayed, would be heard or seen by a person outside that or any other dwelling.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/part/3A

The whole situation is a bit sad because without the altercation at the end it does look like good community policing. Maybe the officer was just sick of being a glorified taxi driver for bratty girls and kicked off.

The first topic reminds me of a ridiculous story from sixth grade. Someone told me this kid in my class had a gay cousin, and since I was gay I asked this kid if his cousin was gay. He got mad at me for implying that his cousin was gay, and then complained to my science teacher, who I was sure was a lesbian because she was a soccer coach and I saw her buying wine with women at the grocery store multiple times. My lesbian science teacher scolded me for asking this kid if his cousin was gay, even though I was just asking because I was gay and wanted a gay friend. (Granted I probably didn't ask with a very polite tone.) Either way, the kid I asked was more homophobic than I was, since he was offended that I'd imply his cousin was gay, whereas was just asking for a gay friend, and it ended with me getting scolded by a lesbian teacher for homophobia instead of the kid who was actually homophobic.... anyway I'm just relating this to try to illustrate how the "homophobic public offense" law is terrible and will lead only to ridiculous outcomes. Am I allowed to be homophobic as a homosexual? If not then I can only see this law being worse for me as a homosexual who interacts with homosexuals all the time and happens to do things that can probably be framed as homophobic if they need to be, compared with someone who knows no homosexuals and runs little risk of doing homophobic things unless a lesbian cop shows up at their door...

I like the song you are asking about. As a rich man north of Richmond I empathize with him and people like him more than most of the people in my class FWIW. Rich people lording their power over the poor is really bad and every time I see it I cringe. I thought about writing out a response to this piece in the NY Times but don't have much to add. The rich are increasingly divorced from the realities of the poor. All everyone with a college degree has been doing since 2008 is throwing poor white people under the bus, pointing at Trump voters as racist hicks while trying to differentiate themselves in increasingly extravagant ways. I think (hope) this has basically run its course, even the Barbie movie seems to be illustrating the horrors of "going high" while everyone else is struggling in the gutters.

Am I allowed to be homophobic as a homosexual?

The amount of times a straight person has accused me (a man who's had sex with three men, variously giving and receiving) of being insufficiently supportive of the gay community. It drives me nuts. It's always a straight white woman too.

Wait, like, at the same time?

No, separate encounters.

As /u/Absoluto correctly notes, this is a rather paltry number of same-sex partners compared to the gay male average (and a drop in the bucket compared to how many women I've had sex with), but I still feel confident in saying that I'm gayer than a straight woman who's never even kissed a woman and yet purports to be an "ally" of (that is, speak on behalf of, unappointed) the LGBTQ+ community.

It is confusing because between the options of “three guys at once” and “lifetime body count of 3” one can easily imagine someone saying that having a gay body count of 3 is not sufficient to be really gay

kinda funny because on one hand banging 3 dudes isnt gay enough to participate in the gay discourse but it also excludes you from claiming to be straight.

I mean I'm not as impressed by that song as some seem to be, but it's nice to see traditional country performed by someone who isn't a hipster every once in a while.

There’s pathos, some nice unexpected breaks from the established flow of the song, and an earnest rawness to it. It’s a good song regardless of the content.

I'm from the south. Not really a fan of the "sad folk" style of music, so personally I wouldn't say that I like that song.

However, the message of "fuck the government" has appealed to all humans throughout history. And I'm happy whenever an unknown musician suddenly gets a hit, so congrats to this guy for his burgeoning success.

https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/humberside-police-twitter-transgender-limerick-2468385

I'm wary of Chinese robber-ing a nation of 60 million people, but there seem to be far too many of these stories for it to be coincidence (especially when compared with the conspicuous years-long police inaction against grooming gangs in Oxford, Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford). One gets the distinct impression of an ideologically captured police force.

I'm wary of Chinese robber-ing...

Sometimes, one example is enough. I don't think that example is (it could've been a bored cop, and asking questions without a warrant isn't illegal), but the ones downthread are.

Think of what was required for the 11 arrests for football tweeting:

  • (optional) There is a background level of public support which makes this popular,
  • Politicians pass a law that affects it,
  • (optional) There is specific outrage and/or reporting by the public
  • Police investigate it and make arrests
  • The news reports on it, and doesn't include any significant backlash.
  • (forthcoming??) They are tried, convicted, and punished.

Even when one example isn't enough, the public response (or lack thereof) to one example can be enough.

There appear to be some peculiarities to police in the UK that I've heard are to do with a scandal in the 80s that left them incredibly paranoid of being accused of racism, and they therefore are overly-relisnt on procedure and ass-covering paperwork. As a beat officer, any time you interact some sort of minority, that minority will apparently call you racist, which will be officially logged and looked in to. The joke is that going after mean Tweets and people who quote rap lyrics is a better investment of police time/money for the police; makes the numbers look good in terms of arrests vs complaints of racism, since no one goes outside.

there seem to be far too many of these stories for it to be coincidence

I mean, any such arrest is really dumb. But 'it isn't a coincidence' and 'ideologically captured' are very vague claims. And it's usually a mistake to conclude anything about the relative frequency of events from their relative frequency in headlines you see. 50 school shootings, 800 dead in mass shootings, vs 25,000 total homicides - news consumers intuit a different ratio. The police still spend >98% of their time on things other than 'arresting for offensive speech'.

The police still spend >98% of their time on things other than 'arresting for offensive speech.

What sort of argument is that supposed to be? Serial killers also spend 98% of time doing other things than killing.

The argument is you shouldn't use the frequency of news stories of 'arresting people who say bad words' to 'normal police work' to judge the frequency of the events actually happening, which this quote seemed to do:

but there seem to be far too many of these stories for it to be coincidence (especially when compared with the conspicuous years-long police inaction against grooming gangs in Oxford, Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford

I agree all instances of offensive speech arrests are bad.

The police still spend >98% of their time on things other than 'arresting for offensive speech'.

A claim I would have a lot less trouble believing were it not for their aforementioned systematic refusal to investigate child grooming in four separate English towns for over thirty years with the victims numbering in the thousands, owing entirely to the ethnic background of the perpetrators.

We've all seen "man arrested for having his dog give hitler salute" or "man arrested for calling a player on his football team a slur after they miss a kick" coming out of MiniTrue in Oceania. The pattern is clear, but I wonder what led to this? How common are these arrests (obviously they're much less frequent than slur use or offensive speech generally), what classes of people support and oppose them, what social or intellectual trends led to the implementation of these laws there while America retains support for and enforcement of the first amendment? Any insight from locals?

Also, concealed carrying butter knives.

"But you said you are engaging in prayer, which is the offense," the officer responded.

"Silent prayer," she responded.

"No, but you were still engaging in prayer," he said. "It is an offense,"

https://www.foxnews.com/media/uk-woman-arrested-second-time-offense-silently-praying-outside-abortion-clinic

Naming conventions as class signifiers with implications for discussion of race, wealth, sexuality etc.

I had a form come across my desk today with a really bad name on it. Very stereotypically ghetto black, badly spelled, four middle names (one of which was “Mykween”). The name is too long for the name box on a federal form, so I had to file a supplemental sheet for it. Which got me thinking about why people name their kids stupid and stereotypical names, and what that means for the larger conversation about social divisions.

I live in a majority-minority city, I work with black people, we have lots of black customers etc. etc. There's more than one sort of black person, just as there is more than one sort of every group.

I look around my friend group and co-workers, not a one of them has a name like that. Eric, Dom (Dominic), Reggie (Reginald), Hezzie (Hezekiah), etc. Most of my black friends and co-workers have either very normal “white” names, or old fashioned/religious names. A few have african names, but that's because they're from Africa.

This is because the stereotypically “black” names are more specifically black underclass names. The working class' most serious social problem is distinguishing themselves from the underclass. So they name their kids very differently. And, in turn, if you see a black person with an african (or even better, fake african) name, a political portmanteau or a double-barreled last name, that's a middle- or upper-class thing. Hannah Nicole-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edna Kane-Williams etc. We see similar patterns in other races, most Cletuses do not attend Harvard and the hyphenated last name is similarly an aspirational middle and upper class affectation. In addition, naming conventions change over time, so what is signalled by a name in one decade may signal something very different later. The name “Isis” dropped off pretty severely after about 2014.

This all brings to mind Scott's parable of the colored togas.

American underclass names aren't class-based. There's an extra causal link, personality. These names aren't passed down through a culture in the way that a fourth-generation Mexican may name her kid "Martin" because it works in both English and Spanish. These names are created anew with each baby. We don't see JaQuon Brown III or Braedyn Brown III.

The extra causal link is an impulsive, non-conformist personality. Making up a child's name out of the syllables of your culture and then spelling it strangely is a signal that you don't care to conform to social norms, you aren't interested in the long-term impact of the name you choose, and you want to stand out and seek attention.

Impulsive, non-conformist people usually don't fit well with capitalism, so they tend to drift into the underclass. Successful impulsive non-conformists exist though, most obviously in sports, music, and acting. Musicians, athletes, and actors give their kids strange names, regardless of social class.

If you meet someone with a non-conforming name, that indicates they have a non-conforming parent. The vast majority of the time, that means their parents are in the underclass, but there's a small possibility that they were named by a celebrity or Elon Musk.

A bit off-topic but my Irish aunt was married to a Frenchman for years and lives in Paris. When she was expecting her second child (a boy), she wanted to give him an Irish name, but it was also very important that the name be easy for a French person to pronounce. Some of the most popular Irish boys' names include names like "Cian" or "Cillian". The trouble is, these are pronounced with a hard K sound in Ireland, whereas French people would presumably read them as "SEE-an" or "SILL-ian". To get around this she considered using the alternate spelling "Killian" (which she didn't make up: it's a perfectly legitimate alternate spelling) which is far less ambiguous. The problem with that, she explained, is that boys' names beginning with the letter K in France (e.g. "Kevin") are generally associated with the banlieues, and she didn't want people assuming her son was a scumbag.

In the end she went with an English name I despise, but which is equally easy to pronounce in Ireland and France.

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I mean that might be the US stereotype, but there’s lots of poor or high crime suburbs in the USA that are worse than most of the urban core.

Yeah, bizarre isn't it? I think in the Anglophone countries, the "suburbs" are reflexively assumed to be quiet and peaceful, while the inner city is reflexively assumed to be a bit tougher and dodgier (e.g. "urban youth"). But I don't even have to go beyond my own country to find counter-examples: there are several suburbs of (for example) Dublin which are more dangerous and grim than most of the inner city, like Ballymun.

Ireland is an Anglophone nation as English is the primary language (and most people don't have a second language). Unlike India and South Africa, Ireland isn't part of the Commonwealth.

For a more aesthetically pleasing term you could call them "the Five Eyes" based on the intelligence alliance shared between the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

I knew a Killian growing up and it took me a lot longer than it should have to realize that Cillian was the same name and pronounced the same.

I am just learning that Killian’s Irish Red should be Cillian’s Irish Red

I feel like if I lived in France I'd give a son a name like Henry or Charles that works in both languages and seems status-neutral.

I'd vastly prefer "Henry" compared to the name she actually gave him. If Charles was ever in the running, she probably vetoed it on account of its association with the royal family.

on account of its association with the royal family

There's been just three Charleses, but eight Henries on the throne of England. Or ten Charleses and four Henries, if we're talking about France. Either way, both names are properly regal.

True, but would I be right in saying that King Charles is the only currently living British royal with the name Charles or Henry?

Prince Harry's baptismal name is Henry - this is a very common substitution among upper-class Brits and has been around for a very long time - "God for Harry, England and St George" is in Shakespeare's Henry V.

TIL.

Prince Harry's actual name is Prince Henry.

TIL.

This reminds me a bit of these two blog posts from Data Colada, a blog focused on statistics and the behavioral sciences. In those two posts, the bloggers point out a problem with some studies of racial discrimination. There are several studies which attempt to measure racial discrimination in hiring by sending out identical resumes some of which are made to look like they are sent by black applicants and some of which are made to look like they are sent by white applicants. Sometimes, the way that resumes are made to look like they are sent by black applicants is by using stereotypically black names. The blog posts I linked to points out that since some stereotypically black names are often seen as indicative of low socioeconomic status, this is not necessarily a good test for racial discrimination.

The blog posts I linked to points out that since some stereotypically black names are often seen as indicative of low socioeconomic status, this is not necessarily a good test for racial discrimination.

I wonder if they could try this with stereotypically yokel names. Make it Laquisha vs Daisy Mae or Peggy Sue, Jamal vs Hunter or Beau.

This is because the stereotypically “black” names are more specifically black underclass names.

"Football names" as the red tribe refers to them, are just generic underclass names which might be used by white trailer trash as often as by black ghetto dwellers. Actual stereotypically black names like Jamal or Latisha seem much more of a working class thing.

I just don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, I think when you refer to “football names” you’re talking about something like Jaxtyn, or Nevaeh, or Shaeleigh, etc. But I find it very hard to imagine working-class (as in, gainfully-employed and expecting their children to be the same) blacks would name a kid LeJarius, or Kwanteeshah, or Quondray, etc. Those just scream “rap sheet starts at 15 years old” to me and, I imagine, every prospective employer in America.

I mean that's kind of why I said Jamal and Latisha(likewise for Tyrone and LaShondra). I'd call LeJarius and Quondray and the like football names.

One set are relatively normal names that have strong ethnic connotations. The other are absolutely made up.

Cue the classic Key and Peele sketch about football names!

But your contention is that “football names” are used just as often by “white trailer trash” as they are by ghetto blacks. That simply isn’t true, though! The names I gave you are very very characteristically black; I would be shocked to learn that there is a single white person named Quondray in the entire United States. Ghetto black names are usually instantly recognizable as such, which meaningfully separates them from more racially-unspecified “football” (read: underclass) names. If I see “Jaxtyn Daniels” on a résumé, I’m not going to be able to confidently guess the race of the applicant in question. If I see “Rayquon Daniels”, I know immediately what I’m dealing with, and it’s gonna take everything in my power to resist ripping it up without a second thought.

I mean if I see "Jaxtyn Daniels" on a resume I'm not hiring her/him(underclass people can be very, very bad at spelling "Jackson", although this is almost certainly white if it's a male name) regardless of whether he/she is white, black, that one guy who turned himself blue by eating colloidal silver, whatever. It's a pretty red flag for having been underclass. The fact that Rayquon is a lot blacker than Jaxtyn is not actually relevant for my purposes because it's underclass and I don't want to deal with underclass people regardless of color, otherwise I'd open a payday loan place. That's ultimately the signal people care about.

You get a resume from a "Lashondra Brown". The resume is otherwise well-qualified- do you have the same reaction as to "LaQuondray Jefferson"? I certainly don't, although I'd use my best Southern drawl calling Lashondra to set up an interview.

The fact that Rayquon is a lot blacker than Jaxtyn is not actually relevant for my purposes because it's underclass and I don't want to deal with underclass people regardless of color, otherwise I'd open a payday loan place. That's ultimately the signal people care about.

So, this is a point of disagreement between you and me. I’m certainly no fan of the white lumpenproletariat; I know these people personally, I have some in my own family, and I have very little positive to say about them in general. However, I would absolutely have more confidence in a Braeden or a Kinslee than I would in a Rayquon or a Janisha. Not only because black underclass culture is just substantially worse than white underclass culture - especially in terms of whether or not I can expect the employee to reliably show up to work on time and to comprehend at least the basics of the assigned tasks - but also because at the end of the day at least I know that there is no possible way for Braeden to sue my company for discrimination when he eventually fucks up enough for me to fire him. I’ve been through the process of HR fielding a racial discrimination accusation made against the department I work for by a shitty black employee, and I would be loath to repeat it.

You get a resume from a "Lashondra Brown". The resume is otherwise well-qualified- do you have the same reaction as to "LaQuondray Jefferson"?

Lashondra is right on the borderline between “she might be a working-class Black whose parents wanted to give her a fancy-sounding black name” and “nobody in her family can read above a 7th-grade level.” Certainly there are very recognizably black names that don’t give any strong ghetto vibes - I think a lot of the Arabic-derived names can be quite charming - but anything with a “La” followed by a name that doesn’t usually have a “La” in front of it is setting off at least mild underclass alarms.

Ok, would you hire a Jamal Washington?

As for your contention of white/black lumpenproles, I'm not going to be a booster for either demographic, but, uh, there's a reason construction bosses prefer Jose to Bubba, and realistically Devontarius is not a typical name for a plaintiff in a racial discrimination suit, that's a PMC black woman thing.

there's a reason construction bosses prefer Jose to Bubba

This reason is that Jose is an illegal immigrant and hence does not have to be paid minimum wage, nor do any of the standard regulations need to be followed. Jose has far less bargaining power than Bubba does - he is in a more precarious position, not subject to the regulations and laws that make Bubba slightly more expensive, etc. Bubba would most likely be a better choice if the laws were actually being followed, but Jose not only doesn't have to even be paid minimum wage, he has no ability to seek redress if he's exploited or injured on the worksite. If faulty work gives Bubba a permanent injury, that's far more dangerous to the company than Jose getting one.

Real question, why do construction bosses prefer Jose to Bubba? Common non-class-associated Hispanic name vs highly lower-class associated white name?

Some parts of South America like to make up names as well. I've met plenty of "Juan Pablo"s but also a lot like "Gleidis", "Griselda", and stuff like this.

Griselda is an old and honorable name in Colombia

Seriously, Griselda is from German folklore; I would assume Germans brought it to South America. I don't know about Gleidis though.

I don't know about Gleidis though.

I think that's "Gladys" spelled phoentically, like "guáifai".

I've always wondered if these parents are familiar with black-names-on-resumes-get-fewer-callbacks popular science. And if they are, do they just not care? Or are they being spiteful? Or are they trying to pull a Boy Named Sue to give their kids more adversity to overcome?

People want their children to be like them, christians want to raise christians, muslims want to raise muslims. Trash wants to raise trash, both for the status and because the underclass social safety net is the government and your relatives. The more you have, the better off you are.

There's the obvious response that these particular people probably don't think about resumes. Or pop sci articles. Or gainful employment in general.

Underclass parents don't read popular science, they don't expect their kids to work those kinds of jobs, and they don't particularly care either. They're underclass in part because they don't expect to build careers, they hop from low-wage job to low-wage job.

Strongly doubt it occurs to them. Almost definitionally, people in underclasses work in jobs that do not ask for resumes. I did a lot of those jobs when I was younger, and met a lot of people who, I am pretty sure, went their whole lives and will die having never made a resume.

This is one non-HBD reason that is often given for why big gaps persist across generations. Those people never meet or interact with anyone who can model the actions that result in middle- or higher class lives.

I've never heard of a job that doesn't ask for a resumé. Even minimum wage jobs ask for resumés.

I have. Walk into your local restaurant with a "now hiring" sign and ask about it. You will not be asked to provide a resume unless you want to be a manager.

The way it worked for me was like this:

  • You go to your local staffing agency in the nearby strip mall. Every town I've ever lived in has several of them.
  • You fill out some forms they give you, which include what type of work you can do. For me this was just, "labor."
  • They call you in a day or two and say "XYZ Corp. needs some material handlers starting this Tuesday. They're paying $14.50 an hour and there's mandatory overtime. The shift is 2:30 to 11:00 PM. Stop by here before then and we'll give you your badge and show you the safety video."
  • You go and do that, and then on Tuesday you start working at XYZ Corp.

Depending on the company, they might hire you on to their own paper after 90 days or 6 months or whatever. Or you might stay on the staffing agency's paper indefinitely. I supported myself all through my early 20s doing jobs like this.

The actual work consisted of such tasks as:

  • Taking boxes from a conveyor belt and loading them into a truck.
  • Unloading things, from a truck, and placing them onto a conveyor belt.
  • Taking objects from a conveyor belt, and putting them into boxes.
  • Inspecting bottles of mouthwash on an assembly line, and doing weighing and cap tests once an hour.
  • Digging holes.
  • Watching a moving belt of electronics recycling stuff and picking out trash.
  • Assembling books-on-tape packages.
  • Loading big metal components (I genuinely don't know what they were) into this machine that would put a liquid coating on them.

I met many people whose entire working lives consisted of these jobs. I almost was one myself. I remember reading Slate Star Codex on my phone in the break rooms of these places, lol. There was never a resume involved. A lot of times these dudes also knew about casual work on the side. I still remember my buddy Luis, who every Saturday morning at like 5:00 AM would send me a text that was just an address and a work task. "8737 Maple Avenue. Fence posts. Eighty dollars." He would always be pissed off at me at our next actual work shift if I didn't show up.

I do concede that if, when you're at that level of the economic ladder, you decide to go and work for, e.g., Kroger or T.J. Maxx or some other significant corporation, yes, they may ask you for a resume. I actually remember consciously thinking about what the options were: you could work in a call center, you could go do fast food, you could work retail, or you could take a factory/labor job. I hated talking to people in a "customer service" kind of way, so for me the choice was always obvious.

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Working that shift is probably the thing I'm most nostalgic about from that phase of my life. I still went to bed right when I got home, and it was simply impossible to oversleep. And the sleep quality after eight hours of slinging boxes, it was magnificent. I've never slept so well since.

I had a period in my 20s during which I was doing temp jobs. I had two temp agencies: one that got me office work (once in a government office copying files; once in a charity call center) and another (the employment branch of Goodwill Industries, which also runs thrift stores) that was all blue collar (the one gig I can remember was moving furniture into a new hotel), and the guys I worked with through Goodwill's program never would fit in at (or wanted) the office jobs from the other agency, it was a completely different milieu.

I think they're online now, although I was applying to a maintenance job and not an in-store position.

I mean if you think about it, it's kinda weird to give your kid a name that is from the culture that enslaved both your ancestors and his. Probably more weird than to give your kid a name that is from your ancestors' culture or a name that is completely made up.

If American blacks thought this they'd have to adopt like Chinese names. Because ADOS were enslaved by Africans, Arabs, and then whites at the end of the line.

If American blacks thought this they'd have to adopt like Chinese names.

So Michael, Tim, Lisa, Amy? Should work out OK.

"Sinutab?" O I am laffin.

Where’s that graphic from? I’m pretty sure Newport is the name of many suburbs around the world, and Propecia and Sinutab are actual brand names for real medications (for finasteride and pseudoephedrine + paracetamol respectively). This seems too stupid to be true.

Where’s that graphic from?

The Onion. https://www.theonion.com/most-popular-u-s-baby-names-1819586596

Newport is the name of many suburbs around the world

They're menthol cigarettes stereotypically associated with blacks.

It's an ancient meme, I don't know the original source. And yes, it's a joke -- the Asian and white names are real but only half the black ones are. As for "Newport", I'm sure the reference is to the cigarette brand. "Dacron" is a brand name of polyester fiber.

A lot of American descendant of slave surnames are from slaveowners. Sometimes that of the family they were once slaves of, other times that of well-known slaveholding Presidents. (and non-slaveholding Presidents too, like Adams).

I have an extremely ordinary and common name, so much so that in my not-large high school graduating class there was a guy with the same (first and last) name as me. I have known people of multiple races with this same first + last name combination.

I often feel like this is kinda nice. Nobody can prejudge me very effectively from my name alone, they have to evaluate me on other traits. And I'm a little bit harder to Google, there are so many results which are not me.

Hyphenated last names (maiden and husband's) were in fashion among upper-middle-class white women in the eighties. It does seem that only black women do this nowadays. I don't know why this fell out of favor among whites.

I was at a wedding a couple of weeks ago and hung out with a friend I hadn't seen since college. He and his wife (both affluent, young California professionals working in media) just made up a new last name for the two of them. I didn't quite know how to feel about it. On the one hand, it's an elegant solution to the problem of infinitely expanding hyphenated names that doesn't require an asymmetrical sacrifice by only one party to the relationship. On the other hand, I had a (somewhat surprising) visceral disgust reaction at the idea of a man giving up his name. I guess my sense of filial piety and traditional gender roles are stronger than I thought.

As another data point, in my affluent blue bubble, hyphenated children's names are everywhere, partly because of the relatively large number of same-sex couples, but not remotely exclusively.

This includes mine, and while I have to admit that hyphenated names can be a mouthful (paving the way for endless jokes about fitting names on, e.g., swim caps), I love them for surfacing family history. I've always loved the extravagance of Spanish names for that reason, even if they are usually truncated for daily use.

Ideally we should all use Hispanic naming conventions- five first/middle names, two last names, you only pass on the father's and fathers have the absolute right to veto or change any name, but the kid just goes by "rambo" or "bandit" anyways regardless of what his name is on paper.

There's a secular cycle of naming conventions covered in Freakonomics about how the upper class adopts a certain set of names, the striving middle classes start using the name because it's "high class", but on a decade or so delay. Sometimes the working class picks it up, and the names just slide down the socioeconomic staircase, forever replaced by new ones at the top. So, for instance, it's important to know when a "Crystal" was born to get the signal.

I've got a hyphenated last name. We liked both of our last names and didn't want to get rid of either, so we kept them both.

I agree it seems uncommon though.

It seems more common in the UK (yes, there are ancient double or even triple barrelled names in the aristocracy, but the majority are recent maiden + husband ones), but the practice has now started to acquire a reputation as a bit trashy or performatively trying to appear of a higher class than you are (Hyacinth Bucket style), which is the biggest faux pas in English society.

I don't think it's primarily that though, it's that in the 1980s, when keeping one's maiden name as a woman was very radical and uncommon (in the Anglo world), the hyphenated name served as a sign of feminism while also making a concession to social mores, making sure you had the same last name as your children etc. So the man would be Mr Smith, his children would be Jane and John Smith, but his wife (and their mother) would be Mrs Miller-Smith, or something. Enough for the school teacher or the airport check in official not to raise their eyebrow or cause problems. If the mother worked, it also made things easier there, of course, so this practice was common in some upper-middle class professions like medicine or law.

Today, a combination of mass immigration (often from cultures with different family name practices) and advancing feminism means the 'middle ground' of the hyphenated name is no longer necessary for women. They can keep their original name and everyone knows what they mean. The kids usually still get the father's name, but this is less of an issue for mothers now that high divorce rates have been a thing for 30+ years and single motherhood is more common.

I think this is correct.

We are at the stage now where people named in the eighties are prime age adults, but I don't see the hyphenation as much anymore. I can tell you from growing up next to an Indiana trailer park in the eighties, hyphenated last names were for queers (in context, presumably, trend-chasing middle class strivers).

Yeah, I do still see it for some gay couples who have kids (because there's more of a debate about whose name the kids get). In general it's rare for children to get marital hyphenated names, I know a couple but it's often where the mother comes from a reputable family (like I know of a hyphenated maternal Rothschild, for example) or where the family are ultra-progressive. I've heard of cases where daughters get mom's name and sons get dad's too, there are more weird combinations today. But I think the paternal surname for children is still something that even most progressive men insist upon, and most women are willing to accept it.

A 126 page legal analysis of section 3 of amendment 14 of the constitution was released yesterday, arguing that Donald Trump, among others, is ineligible for public office, including the presidency. The authors are conservative, active in the Federalist society.

For reference, the relevant part of the constitution is

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Among the arguments made were that it is legally self-executing—that is, it applies, like the 35 year old minimum age, without an explicit system to handle it to be set up by congress. Further, they think that people at almost every step along the process, from state officials deciding who goes on the ballots, to those capable of bringing an Amendment 25 complaint have a duty to ensure that this provision is fulfilled.

In reference to Trump, they argued that the events on and surrounding January 6th intending to overturn the election would constitute "insurrection or rebellion" as understood at the time of the passing of the amendment.

I can't see this not being important, but I'm not sure how exactly it'll play out—we could get court cases, possibly going up to the supreme court (no idea how that would play out). We may see state officials refuse to put Trump on the ballot. I expect this to lead to a substantial increase in support for Trump if this is seen as illegitimate, as it undoubtedly will be. At the same time, if this happens during the primary elections, and Trump is not even on the ballot in some states, it might make it significantly easier for another candidate to become the Republican nominee, unless the national Republican party interferes with it.

Note on the link: the pdf isn't opening for me right now and the wayback machine isn't helping. It was fine earlier, not sure what the issue is.

Do the authors not remember the Birthers? If this was our standard, then there would certainly be county-level officials that would declare they haven't seen Obama's long form birth certificate and strike him from the ballots accordingly.

Similarly county-level officials could say Biden's "antifa is an idea" is providing aid to enemies of the United States and strike him as well.

shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof

I don’t see how this could be “self executed” as in not requiring a process to apply it, simply because the earlier amendments require things like trials and forbid self incrimination. In short you’d have to convict Trump of these particular crimes before he’s actually disqualified. I can say Biden is giving aid and comfort to China, but my say so doesn’t mean anything unless I can show that he helped China in some way that actually harmed the USA. Anything else violates the spirit of the laws requiring trials, and runs dangerously close to giving the majority party cart Blanche to simply refuse to put opponents on the ballot on the pretext of some supposed high crime or misdemeanor or aid and comfort.

I can’t imagine that Trump or his supporters aren’t going to fight pretty hard against anyone refusing to put Trump on the ballot. It’s definitely against the spirit of free elections to refuse to put a declared candidate who meets the qualifications in state law on the ballot. In most states, having signatures of a fairly small percentage of the voters by law qualifies a candidate for the official ballot. Without a conviction, and one that’s specifically mentioned in the constitution as disqualification for office, they’d have a very strong case.

simply because the earlier amendments require things like trials and forbid self incrimination.

They argue that if it conflicts with other portions of the constitution, it satisfies or supersedes them. I think they still think there are processes for dealing with these things and challenging actions of this sort, it just doesn't have to start with a conviction.

I can’t imagine that Trump or his supporters aren’t going to fight pretty hard against anyone refusing to put Trump on the ballot.

Certainly, as they should.

It’s definitely against the spirit of free elections to refuse to put a declared candidate who meets the qualifications in state law on the ballot.

Sure. But it might be what the constitution requires, if they authors are right on this. Keep in mind also that the constitution is "the supreme law of the land."

Without a conviction, and one that’s specifically mentioned in the constitution as disqualification for office, they’d have a very strong case.

This is another basis for disqualification from office.

While there is certainly the idea that the later in time controls, there is also the idea that repeals by implication are frowned upon (and certainly that is more true in the constitutional space compared to statutory). There needs to be a very heavy hurdle to claiming here that later in time controls over repeal by implication. The authors aren’t serious.

They, generally speaking, don't think it repeals them, because it's not imposing any criminal penalties, just a qualification for office, and isn't a law, but a constitutional provision.

That said, if we ignored that, we can all agree that it applied ex post facto, that is, to the members of the Confederate cause, so at least in that respect it can conflict with the spirit of other parts of the constitution. The enacters at the time also thought it would be equivalent to a bill of attainder.

But unless you establish that the person isn’t qualified, then it all becomes a game of simply declaring it and daring the other person to in essence prove you wrong. I can claim (as some on the right have) that Joe Biden has dementia and is thus unqualified. Except that without a medical diagnosis— in other words proof that the man has dementia — he’s still perfectly qualified. And absent two facts: that January 6 met the legal definition of insurrection (not what the media says, not what you and I believe, but the legal definition of insurrection), and secondly a conviction of one Donald J. Trump of instigating and materially aiding the insurrection in the first part. In other words, establish as per the rule of law and the American court system that there was an insurrection and that Trump actively and knowingly participated in it.

In the case of the civil war, they weren’t disqualifying random people on the basis of vague accusations. They either fought in a legitimate confederate army unit, or served in the confederate government, both of which were easily proven by the records of the CSA and the CSA army.

I don’t have a problem with that law as written. It’s a fine law, and I don’t want people who try to overthrow the government to later serve in that government. However, it is not and cannot be a simple matter of “somebody’s making a claim that this candidate is unqualified, therefore he can be summarily deprived of his rights to stand for election.” If that’s the standard, then nobody can say for certain they’re qualified until their political opponents weigh in on the issue in the form of deciding that this person is okay.

To be clear, the authors are not stating that state officials can just summarily decide. They're rather saying they can make initial determinations, which can be followed by judicial review as needed. (Although it looks like that's muddied a bit, since they think the proper procedure might vary state by state??)

Laws on who can be on the ballot do vary by state, especially for third parties. They have to have a given amount of support, and I think in some cases you can’t be a felon.

Sure. But it might be what the constitution requires, if they authors are right on this. Keep in mind also that the constitution is "the supreme law of the land."

In practice the Constitution is what the Robed 9 say it is. Three of them were appointed by Trump, and three more aren't going to buy this one either. Not even John Roberts. That a person can be disqualified from the office of President because their political opponents can get one judge, with no trial, to say that person committed rebellion is not going to fly. Hey, I know -- instead of impeaching Joe Biden over Hunter, the Republicans can find a judge to declare the Iran deal to be giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States, and bam he's out of office. Of course Democrats know Republicans are unwilling to try brazenly corrupt maneuvers like that, which is why the Democrats don't worry about the shoe is being on the other foot, but it's at least as supportable as any case against Trump.

Without a conviction, and one that’s specifically mentioned in the constitution as disqualification for office, they’d have a very strong case.

This is another basis for disqualification from office.

It is not. The Supreme Court has ruled in past cases that states may not add qualifications for the offices of President and Vice President. And the Constitution does not state that those convicted of crimes (state or Federal) may not stand for those offices.

Fair point about the first half, although I'm somewhat less confident on what the supreme court's takes would be—I think several, at least, like to consider themselves impartial, so won't do things merely out of a sense of personal loyalty.

As to the second, I don't see how that's the case? Isn't this clearly a case of the constitution disqualifying people? You can argue that it doesn't apply to the current case, or that it requires more than what the authors say, but you can't just say that the Constitution doesn't impose ineligibility for committing those acts after swearing an oath.

This would be a clear case of a person convicted of aiding an enemy or being involved in insurrection. Two problems being that: no legal ruling has declared 1/6 an insurrection, and Trump has not been tried or convicted of insurrection. Which are both clearly required. Our legal system is based on the presumption of innocence, meaning that the government must first prove a crime took place, and secondly that the accused actually did said crime. I cannot accuse someone of murder unless I can show pretty conclusively that the person I’m accusing you of killing is actually dead, and that the best explanation of the evidence is that you did it. Even then, I’d have to get a jury conviction. I can’t just blanket claim that the crime you committed requires 5 years in jail, that the law is “self-executed” and haul you away.

I don't see that they're clearly required. When determining eligibility, the government doesn't have to consider due process - it doesn't have to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. And due process is to do with rights. There's no right to run for president.

If there's a liberty interest in running for office, then there's a due process consideration.

Assertion without evidence. Why isn’t there a right to run for president? Moreover, it seems like doing constitutionally protected “things” (eg advancing legal theories or speech) cannot count as something that is disqualifying.

Directly inciting rebellion (which is more or less what his opponents accuse him of) is illegal and not protected by the Constitution. I don't believe Trump incited rebellion, but I think he did act through others to obstruct the lawful operation of the Senate, which is probably illegal, but not disqualifying.

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Why isn’t there a right to run for president?

If there is one, it's a right that is routinely denied to those 34 and below. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be similarly denied to insurrectionists.

Moreover, it seems like doing constitutionally protected “things” (eg advancing legal theories or speech) cannot count as something that is disqualifying.

A relevant part of the paper (pages 93-94) addresses this point with historical evidence:

The House addressed the John Y. Brown case first. “This election case,” Hinds’ reports, was “the first of its kind since the formation of the Constitution, and recognized by the House as of the highest importance.”338 It also involved an incident of pure speech as disqualifying a member-elect from office: John Y. Brown had explicitly embraced and advocated violent resistance to the Union in Kentucky. Indeed, he had gone so far as to urge the shooting of any man who volunteered for service in Union forces. Brown’s disqualifying conduct consisted solely of such acts of speech.

In this particular case Brown was rejected by the House Committee on Elections, but not under section 3 (as it would not come into force until the following year). Nonetheless, it clearly shows that those who wrote and adopted the 14th amendment understood it to be possible and acceptable to disqualify a person from elected office purely on the basis of speech.

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I think several, at least, like to consider themselves impartial, so won't do things merely out of a sense of personal loyalty.

It's not a matter them doing things out of personal loyalty. It's a matter of the only way a competent jurist would buy this theory is partisanship or personal antipathy. This is crazy sauce legal theorizing.

As to the second, I don't see how that's the case? Isn't this clearly a case of the constitution disqualifying people?

You said a conviction would be "another" basis for disqualification from office; I assumed you meant other than Amendment XIV section 3. It would not. A conviction for treason, insurrection, or rebellion would be support for that basis of removal from office. Without that, there's nothing, particularly since the text says Congress can remove the disability but does not say it can impose it -- that rules out Congressional attainder, which is forbidden by Article I Section 9.

I assumed you were talking about conviction in the case of impeachments, so I actually meant Article I section 3 right there.

What do you mean by the last section, about imposition, attainder, etc?

He could be disqualified for impeachment and conviction, but only if he was actually convicted (which unlike a criminal conviction, definitely isn't going to happen), so that one's not relevant. As for the stuff about attainder, if we discard the notion that the law is somehow self-executing, there has to be some way of determining who committed the disqualifying acts and who did not. Traditionally there have been two ways of doing that -- an actual trial, or the legislature declaring the person so disqualified. This second method is called a "bill of attainder", and the US Congress and US States are forbidden from passing them. If the amendment had said Congress could impose the disqualification, it would have made a carveout, but it did not.

I'm not legally knowledgeable to make an informed evaluation of whether they're right here, but here's what they say:

On page 51, in a footnote, they list in support of their view, that both those at the time of its passage, both those in favor and those opposed considered that it was, in effect, a bill of attainder and an ex post facto law.

On pages 53-54, they argue that it's not a bill (since it's not congressional but constitutional), and it's not attainder, (since ineligibility from office shouldn't be considered a legal punishment).

All this was in the context of a section in which they argue that to the extent that it disagrees with earlier provisions, it supersedes them.

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And of course there is a process for Congress to do so — impeachment and conviction. So it wouldn’t be necessary.

Hey, I know -- instead of impeaching Joe Biden over Hunter, the Republicans can find a judge to declare the Iran deal to be giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States, and bam he's out of office. Of course Democrats know Republicans are unwilling to try brazenly corrupt maneuvers like that, which is why the Democrats don't worry about the shoe is being on the other foot, but it's at least as supportable as any case against Trump.

I don't know, actually removing Trump from the ballot seems like the sort of thing with entirely unpredictable backlash, especially in Florida and Texas(which has a captured federal judiciary).

If this isn’t contested before the election, Trump wins, and then someone (eg Baude) brings suit under this theory would Baude claim it is an insurrection?

Trump uses a shitty legal theory to try to stay in power. He didn’t even do enough with the crowds to cause incitement. Yet due to those two things Trump committed an insurrection? I hope the guy goes away too but damn. If that is an insurrection, is Joe Biden unfit for his attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Trump citing shitty legal theories such as the Logan Act?

Without a conviction, and one that’s specifically mentioned in the constitution as disqualification for office, they’d have a very strong case.

True, but they are incompetent at lawfare and have no effective counsel willing to work on their behalf.

If Donald Trump wins the general election, disqualified or not, he will still be the president.

I am not going to vote for him and he is a prat, but this is almost a sovereign citizen tier attempt to lawyer what cannot be lawyered, assuming it is actually in good faith.

I am not appreciative of people pushing the Kayfabe that covers "The President is who the most important people believe the president is" to the breaking point like this.

This argument has already won one court case. Never seen a sovereign citizen do that.

Also, there is a built in pressure-valve to ensure that a disqualification does not prevail against the clear wishes of the political system - a 2/3 vote of both houses can remove the disqualification.

And if the King of England went around ordering the execution of those who displeased him and it was his right to do so, how long would he keep the crown?

Not very long, I suspect.

Trump is either an insurrectionist or he isn't, and if he wins the General, rules written, by definition he isn't. Disqualifying him from the General is either perfunctory or damaging to the system and not Trump.

The actual fucking solution to the problem of a second Trump term is to corral the power of the executive rather than an executive.

Wait, how would that be true "by definition"?

if he wins the General, rules written, by definition he isn't

You know, I actually agree with this, there's a certain fairness to it. Someone charged with insurrection should, if they win a presidential election within a reasonable window (four years is fine), be acquitted on the basis that they ultimately won a rightful claim on power.

In this case, though, it's telling that the challenge is from the right rather than the left. The DNC would probably be satisfied with a Biden - Trump rematch, the base rarely gets whipped up for a second term unless there's a real meanie who might otherwise win. Trump is great for Dem donors, street-level activists, all the local and state groups, excellent for down-ballot candidates, and a proven loser against Biden.

It's DeSantis' FedSoc fans, who want a much more radical legislative agenda (and to maintain the house and win the senate) than anything Trump could accomplish, who are mounting this effort.

You know, I actually agree with this, there's a certain fairness to it. Someone charged with insurrection should, if they win a presidential election within a reasonable window (four years is fine), be acquitted on the basis that they ultimately won a rightful claim on power.

It is more a practical thing where it is particularly hard to depose someone who wins 51% of the voting public without breaking everything.

And if the King of England went around ordering the execution of those who displeased him and it was his right to do so, how long would he keep the crown?

Many Kings of England have done exactly this? Not sure what you're getting at.

Presumably they're referring to the current king. Still, the government is quite unpopular, and Charles' enemies are things like the CEOs of fossil fuel companies, monsanto and modernist/brutalist architects, so it's unclear whether this would actually result in his overthrow.

Like every other British monarchist, I had been quietly hoping that our new King had a little list of architects. They'll none of them be missed.

It appears to be quite a lot of words to say not a bit of much. Let us imagine an alternative scenario:

Everything is the same, Trump does all the same things, gives the same speech, but instead of the FBI, DHS, and DOD failing to give the Capitol police up to date intelligence about the size of the protest, they give them that intelligence. Then, being given that, the Capitol police's request for reinforcement from the National guard is not denied by the House and Senate. Thus instead of its barricades being mostly unmanned and folding like a cheap suit, they perhaps stop the riot at the steps. Or, perhaps they just shut and lock the doors.

Who seriously thinks that in such a situation anyone would make a case for insurrection?

So, we see the truth: The whole thing is actually about incompetent security. Possibly intentionally incompetent.

The point of this particular legal tactic is none of that has to actually be litigated. A judge just says "Naa, looks like insurrection to me", higher courts deny standing and otherwise refuse to review, and the officeholder is dismissed and disqualified, as in the New Mexico case AshLael is flogging. But that's just pure partisan lawmaking by judges who care only about the result and not the law -- something rather common when used against the right, as when Judge Emmet Sullivan refused to dismiss charges against Michael Flynn. We're not quite yet at the point that'll work on a major candidate for President, though maybe next time it will.

I'm reminded of my favorite counter-factual: suppose that the BLM-adjacent riot at the White House that one night in summer (which resulted in dozens of injuries to the Secret Service) had succeeded in breaking down the doors. Would that have been an insurrection? I feel like the current battle lines would, for the most part, swap entirely.

I'm not sure what definition the authors are using for "insurrection" (once again, it would be great if we could read the actual damn paper), but I believe the modern one is "a violent uprising by a group or movement acting for the specific purpose of overthrowing the constituted government and seizing its powers". So just forcing your way into the White House doesn't count. If they did it with the aim of killing the President or otherwise installing someone else in his position though, it would.

If i recall, that was the night after protesters had shown up with a guillotine for their demonstration. So depending on how seriously you want to take that or other generic "Trump must go" rhetoric... note: I don't think tbey were serious, personally, but I also don't think either that or Jan 6 rose to the level of "insurrection ". But if people are going to use the symbolic gallows that the Jan 6 protestors had as evidence, it only seems fair to take into account the symbolic guillotine.

They have a (mostly) weaker definition for insurrection than rebellion. Now that the pdf works again, I can provide their tentative ones.

They give as their working definitions: "Insurrection is best understood as concerted forcible resistance to the authority of the government to execute the laws in at least some significant respect." "Rebellion implies an effort to overturn or replace lawful government authority by unlawful means."

Oh neat so the republicans can call the entire summer of love an insurrection and we can shoot everyone running for office.

Yep. Biden supported it. I guess Baude is claiming Biden cannot run for office?

Also how the fuck could he claim Trump did this? At no point did Trump ever lead any violent uprising. Pretty much everyone agrees what Trump did did not reach the level of incitement. Yet Baude thinks this…reached the non-incitement reached the level of insurrection? Crazy pills.

While Baude absolutely does claim that Trump meets the standard of "insurrection" as understood at the time of the passage of the 14th amendment, I'l note that even if you don't agree with him, disqualification may still apply under section 3 to those who took no active part in insurrection. It is enough if you merely give "aid or comfort" to an insurrection.

Which again proves too much. What aid or comfort did Trump give them? How was that different compared to the aid or comfort given the BLM rioters (Kamala raised legal funds for them). If Baude is right, there are many people in Congress right now who have no right to be there.

Of course, since we know this will only be used against Trump and his supporters (much like the Jack Smith legal theory) the right response is to say (correctly) this novel legal theory is bullshit and the people who propagate it (eg Baude) should never be taken seriously again.

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The claim is any court can simply do as the DC Courts have been doing with the January 6 defendants and the New Mexico courts with the case mentioned earlier, and accept the media consensus that January 6 was indeed an insurrection led by Trump, and declare Trump is disqualified on those grounds. No substantive determination need be made because the provision is "self-executing". This may fly for New Mexico politicians no one likes and the QAnon shaman, but when it involves a major candidate for the US Presidency you're not going to be able to depend on friendly courts accepting this stuff, and all you'll get is an acerbic (and probably per curiam, which for the Supreme Court does not necessarily mean unanimous) rejection from the Supreme Court.

Perhaps. For some reason I doubt the media would buy a Trumpian argument that his own secret service's incompetence means we should jail Nancy Pelosi. I'll note that more police and secret service were injured on that day than were injured on J6 (both being far too trivial to be considered a serious coup attempt).

Was wondering where you got the numbers to show the white house attack injured more than the capitol riot. A quick google says 60+ at white house and 100+ at capitol.

Police injuries? The numbers I saw were like 4 and 10.

Yes. It is weird in that the WH attack was objectively more violent yet it isn’t often mentioned.

It is probably relevant to mention there is direct and relevant precedent here: Last September Couy Griffen was removed from his office as Otero County Commissioner under section 3 because of his involvement in Jan 6.

Obviously it's possible to argue that the New Mexico judge who made that ruling got it wrong, or that Trump's actions were different to Griffin's in determinative ways. But it does suggest that the legal system is going to take this section 3 argument seriously and that it can't be brushed off as a nothingburger, as some posters here are suggesting.

EDIT: I just looked it up, the NM judge in this case was a Republican appointee. No idea how conservative/partisan he is in other cases.

Cowboys For Trump founder from Otero County:

Subsequent to his 2022 conviction for the trespassing charge, a suit was filed by the group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the residents of New Mexico under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that would bar him from holding a public office for life due to his participation in insurrection.[11]

Following the Disqualification Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew removed Griffin from public office on September 6, 2022, due to his participation in insurrection.[12][13] The debarment from holding public office for insurrection is "for life", he may never hold a public office again unless the debarment is overruled by a higher court or an Act of Congress. Removal of Griffin from his office marked the first instance of a democratically-elected official being disqualified from holding public office under the constitutional provision since the disqualification of the socialist, Victor Berger, in 1919 by a special committee of Congress.[14][15]

Griffin appealed the case to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal on procedural grounds in November,[16] and reaffirmed this dismissal in February 2023.[17]

The legal details on this case are hidden in the footnotes on Wikipedia, but if the case ends up being used as precedent against Trump, you can bet it’ll be a full article of feature quality, and locked for editing, shortly.

Dismissal on procedural grounds by the Supreme Court of New Mexico makes me smell something foul, but I haven't been following the case since it hasn’t been discussed on the podcasts I listen to or the news I watch.

Griffin was convicted of trespassing, was also already considered a useless putz by the broader New Mexico GOP, and appeals floundered because the man's lawyers didn't bother filing the full appeal.

I'm not sure that system was taken seriously, so much as used as an excuse to get rid of a meddlesome priest.

((Conversely, I'm incredibly skeptical that someone's going to get published arguing the same in any other political direction.))

People absolutely shouldn't be dismissing it as a nothingburger. Nothingburgers go away on their own; this is very likely going to have to be fought in court, and has a reasonable chance of changing who gets the Republican nomination. It's absolutely a consequential event.

The productive argument is over what the consequences are likely to be.

And the consequences could even be pro-Trump! If this is popularly seen as the extreme of suppressing political dissent, and fails at the supreme court, you could easily see this giving Trump a good bit of momentum.

I think the question of whether the consequences are pro- or anti-Trump are largely irrelevant.

The most significant consequence is that, sometime soon, when people really need consensus on rule of law to be there, it won't be there. I'm well past the point where any appeal to legal precedent or argument sways me, because I do not believe that the rule of law actually exists, or has for quite some time. I will, as I have before, use this incident and others like it to argue that any attempt to share society with Blues is hopeless, and that separation or war are the only alternatives remaining. I think this incident makes my argument more persuasive than it was before to the marginal Red.

The most significant consequence is that, sometime soon, when people really need consensus on rule of law to be there, it won't be there.

No. Mainstream conservatives have thoroughly demonstrated that they will accept the decisions which come out of the mechanisms of law even when those mechanisms are throughly corrupted. The skinsuiting gambit works. The dissenters are few enough to simply be jailed or shot.

Do you have examples in mind?

(to be clear, this is more to understand than to challenge)

January 6 verdicts. Alex Jones verdicts. Tiki torch felony convictions. The mainstream right just doesn't care; once the left uses the proper mechanisms of the state to declare the guilt of a rightist, the mainstream right accepts that as just and proper. "Well if you didn't want to be a felon maybe you shouldn't have taken that tiki torch to the rally".

In reference to Trump, they argued that the events on and surrounding January 6th intending to overturn the election would constitute "insurrection or rebellion" as understood at the time of the passing of the amendment.

Why?

The 14th amendment was, after all, passed after the Civil War, a conventional war in which field armies were marshalled to fight against the uncontestedly lawfully elected government. (The Confederates did not deny that Lincoln won the election, which is why they cited other casus belli.) The contemporary acts of insurrection included federal garrisons being overrun, cities sacked, massive civil destruction the likes had never been seen in North America since maybe the fall of the Aztecs, and millions dead directly or indirectly. In the drafters' own lifetime, non-insurrectionary violence in the capital included beating Congressional representatives with canes and honor-duels.

January 6, by contrast, wasn't even in the top 5 violent acts of political violence within a year of it happening.

I can't see this not being important,

Why not?

Trying to frame January 6 as an insurrection or rebellion has been an attempted narrative line since January 6, 2021, with generally only partisan effectiveness. It has been approximately 945 days and American public polling has consistently held viewing this along partisan lines. What, besides the appeal to Federalist society credentialism, is supposed to make it more significantly more persuasive after day 950?

Trying to frame January 6 as an insurrection or rebellion has been an attempted narrative line since January 6, 2021, with generally only partisan effectiveness. It has been approximately 945 days and American public polling has consistently held viewing this along partisan lines. What, besides the appeal to Federalist society credentialism, is supposed to make it more significantly more persuasive after day 950?

It doesn't need to persuade you, and it doesn't need to persuade the voting public. It needs to persuade John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas.

The Federalist Society credentialism is probably pretty significant in that regard.

Again, why?

I hate to consensus build, but this seems a pretty transparent 'the definition means what I want it to mean at the time, not consistently applied,' and the argument that the conclusion is self-enacting is just assuming the conclusion in a way that would drastically expand the power of the executive branch vis-a-vis the other branches by creating a precedent that the people who would make the determination can invoke magic words to make the appropriate un-appealable conclusion.

I see no reason why the members you cite would suddenly be onboard with a very expansive and novel interpretation of the executive branch's authority to arbitarily ban opposition politicians for conduct less severe than members of the ruling party that remain in good standing.

To be clear, they do think most of the actions done on account of their theory should be able to be appealed.

How is the argument that it's self-executing assuming the conclusion? They argue that the text supports that, especially in comparison with other texts, like the age requirements, I believe. Do you have a problem with any part of the constitution being self-enacting?

How is the argument that it's self-executing assuming the conclusion?

Because the self-executing argument assumes that Trump meets the criteria for the sanctions to be leveraged against him without Trump having been charged through the processes that would bestow that criteria.

Moreover, the opening argument claimed legal validity and influence by appealing to claimed influence of originalist principles, without actually validating that the claims mast originalist muster or that that the events of Jan 6 would be considered a rebellion by the standards of the original authors of the amendment.

You have consistently retreated from these points when challenged, and you will continue to do so, and they will remain points that undermine the thesis. The claim that this interpretation is based on actual as opposed to self-claimed originalist principles has not been supported, and the amendment does not negate the need for the government to establish guilt before moving against people on the basis of guilt.

They argue that the text supports that, especially in comparison with other texts, like the age requirements, I believe.

Then you believe wrong. The text of the Constitution does not support that Donald Trump is guilty of insurrection or rebellion without trial by appropriate institutions. This is trivially verifiable via any CTRL-F search of the text, as there is no mention of Donald Trump and thus no Donald Trump exception.

Do you have a problem with any part of the constitution being self-enacting?

Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Probably not, if you never started, but it would remain as invalid a question when the premise itself has been challenged.

The Constitution not being self-enacting in this legal argument, the claimed justification is being executed by the Executive branch because the Judiciary has not taken the case and the argument is that the Legislative branch does not need to.

The American Constitution sets out rules by which the branches of government act through their various powers. The advocates are ignoring the Constitution's own outlined procedures for establishing guilt on the pretext of self-enacting, and ignorring Constitutional principles on presumption of innocence and separation of powers to argue that the agencies of government controlled by the ruling party can ban political opponents from running on their say-so without going through said processes on the basis of implied repeal.

As such, there's no reason to believe the argument that the de-listing / banning / whatever measure is presumed to occur would be self-enacting, as opposed to being enacting by partisans with no sincere belief in the theory and no intention to uphold it as a standard, at which point it's non-enaction outside of the context of Donald Trump (not having been done before, or against contemporarier,s or with any credibility of consistency in the future) would demonstrate that it is not, in fact, self-enacting Constitutional action, but the actions of a branch of government.

Because they are heavily involved in the conservative legal movement, so ideas that gain traction within the conservative legal movement are likely to have traction with them. If this argument was coming from a fringe Marxist or something, I would expect it to carry much less weight among the Republican lawyers that make up the majority of the court. But it's coming from Republican lawyers, written from an explicitly Originalist perspective.

I see no reason why the members you cite would suddenly be onboard with a very expansive and novel interpretation of the executive branch's authority vis-a-vis opposition politicians.

This has nothing to do with executive branch authority. Their argument is that the disqualification is automatic, with no executive act to make it happen.

They are in academia. This is within that community very useful for them because then they can be seen (at least in their minds) as the “good ones.” That doesn’t imply most conservatives will give this the light of day.

And? It's not "most conservatives" who will decide this issue. It's elite Republican lawyers.

Your evidence is a couple of law professors prove that “elite Republican lawyers” support this position? It is a crack pot theory because it proves too much. We could disqualify most people in two of the branches. You should do what most people do with legal academics — disregard what they have to say.

I am not claiming that this one article proves that the Republican justices on the Supreme Court will see the issue the same way. We will have to wait and see. My point is that the specific people that need to be convinced by this argument for it to apply are people very much like the authors and very unlike the average Republican voter.

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Because they are heavily involved in the conservative legal movement, so ideas that gain traction within the conservative legal movement are likely to have traction with them.

But we don't have evidence that the ideas have gained traction within the conservative legal movement.

This is assuming the conclusion by backwards reasoning that because the two members are Federalist Society affiliated, both the reasoning is conservative in nature and shared broadly amongst conservatives.

If this argument was coming from a fringe Marxist or something, I would expect it to carry much less weight among the Republican lawyers that make up the majority of the court. But it's coming from Republican lawyers, written from an explicitly Originalist perspective.

That is what is what is being challenged!

The Originalist perspective would be, of course, the viewpoints on what rebellion meant to the people whose framework of rebellion was the civil war. Hence asking for by what standard the January 6 is being held as rebellion, but which other actions in that year did not. If the original framers wouldn't recognize something of the scale of January 6 as a rebellion, then the originalist interpretation works against the claim that it's an originalist interpreation of the amendment. If the legal argument is that they were all insurrection, but this legal standard has not, is not, and will not, be enforced consistently, it's not an Originalist perspective, it's an argument for arbitrary political interference on grounds of special pleading, which is not an Originalist principle, as one of the points of the original writers of the Constitution was to prevent arbitrary use of government power against citizens.

Moreover, the amendment isn't the only Originalist perspective relevant to the subject, since the implications to division of powers of course broach on the other parts of the Constitution, and those originalist perspectives, for what self-executing would imply when functionally meaning giving the ruling party to ban opposition party members doing what potentially election-winning pluralities of the American public view as legitimate democratic processes.

This has nothing to do with executive branch authority. Their argument is that the disqualification is automatic, with no executive act to make it happen.

And this argument is nonsensical, because nothing in the government happens automatically, but is executed and enforced through the Executive branch.

As the saying goes, organizations don't make decisions, people in organizations make decisions, and the people who would decide to execute- and then enforce- this policy proposal are the executive branch.

But we don't have evidence that the ideas have gained traction within the conservative legal movement.

We have Bayesian evidence. Two Fed Society authors have published a paper arguing for the position, and a Republican-appointed judge has already removed a low-ranking official from office under section 3 for his involvement in Jan 6.

These things do not prove that this is a mainstream position among conservative legal thinkers. But they are much more likely to happen in a world where it is.

The Originalist perspective would be, of course, the viewpoints on what rebellion meant to the people whose framework of rebellion was the civil war.

Correct. The paper spends a considerable amount of time talking about what the original meaning of "insurrection" and "rebellion" was, to the people of that time. You don't have to agree with the authors' conclusions, but they explicitly deal with that question as the central one.

I really want to delve into the detail of these arguments more and see if I agree with them but unfortunately I can't get the paper to open at the moment, and I didn't get through the whole thing on first read.

Moreover, the amendment isn't the only Originalist perspective relevant to the subject, since the implications to division of powers of course broach on the other parts of the Constitution

I believe their argument is that later amendments to the Constitution override earlier versions (otherwise amendments would not be possible). So to whatever extent Section 3 is in conflict with earlier Constitution provisions, Section 3 prevails.

And this argument is nonsensical, because nothing in the government happens automatically, but is executed and enforced through the Executive branch. As the saying goes, organizations don't make decisions, people in organizations make decisions, and the people who would decide to execute- and then enforce- this policy proposal are the executive branch.

Nope. You can look at the New Mexico case for example - state law allowed private citizens to sue to remove disqualified officials from office, a group did so, and a judge decided to remove him. No executive action involved.

We have Bayesian evidence.

Which is to say you do not have evidence, hence why you are inferring to assume there is rather than demonstrating there is.

Two Fed Society authors have published a paper arguing for the position, and a Republican-appointed judge has already removed a low-ranking official from office under section 3 for his involvement in Jan 6.

And as has been noted elsewhere, that case did not rise, and came with very different political contexts.

These things do not prove that this is a mainstream position among conservative legal thinkers. But they are much more likely to happen in a world where it is.

They are also very easy to happen in a world where Trump Derangement Syndrome driving novel legal theories is a thing, and we actually are in that world.

The Originalist perspective would be, of course, the viewpoints on what rebellion meant to the people whose framework of rebellion was the civil war.

Correct. The paper spends a considerable amount of time talking about what the original meaning of "insurrection" and "rebellion" was, to the people of that time. You don't have to agree with the authors' conclusions, but they explicitly deal with that question as the central one.

Then you should be able to answer the question regarding the standard, and its consistency as a standard.

I believe their argument is that later amendments to the Constitution override earlier versions (otherwise amendments would not be possible). So to whatever extent Section 3 is in conflict with earlier Constitution provisions, Section 3 prevails.

But this isn't an argument that Section 3 is in conflict with other provisions of the Constitution. This is an argument that execution of section 3 by the executive over the conduct of elections prevails over other elements of the constitution, which obviously does not hold to any limit because otherwise any executive could claim that any action in support of a later constitutional amendment is inherently constitutional if it conflicts with others.

There is not, in fact, an unlimited blank check to the American executive drawn just by claiming a more recent ammendment. Where Section 3 does not require overruling other parts of the Constitution, it doesn't. The arguments to date do not indicate that Section 3 requires doing so, on that Section 3 would have to do so to permit the interpretation, which is the sort of backwards reasoning previously noted.

Nope. You can look at the New Mexico case for example - state law allowed private citizens to sue to remove disqualified officials from office, a group did so, and a judge decided to remove him. No executive action involved.

And yet, yup. This isn't state law- this is Federal-level. Moreover, this isn't something the judiciary has made a conclusion on (i.e. that Trump has engaged in Rebellion), and the legal theory is to explicitly leave the Legislature out of it, and thus the only branch of government to make the conclusion and enact and enforce it is the Executive.

They go into the cotemporary legal definitions, and note that there were smaller scale insurrections that were considered insurrections.

Their main argument was that the January 6 mob was an attempt to use at least the show and threat of force in opposition to the constitutional order, and maybe, but more dubiously, that the assorted plans, second sets of electors, etc. could be considered rebellion even without force.

But yeah, it's no civil war.

What makes this newsworthy to me isn't so much that people are arguing that January 6th was an insurrection, for the reasons you say, but the fact that actions could be taken because of that that could have a substantial effect on the upcoming election.

They go into the cotemporary legal definitions, and note that there were smaller scale insurrections that were considered insurrections.

Insurrections smaller than January 6, but which other events in contemporary American politics haven't surpassed? Which?

Their main argument was that the January 6 mob was an attempt to use at least the show and threat of force in opposition to the constitutional order, and maybe, but more dubiously, that the assorted plans, second sets of electors, etc. could be considered rebellion even without force.

But the argument made was that this is an interpretation should qualify as a rebellion to the perspectives of the people who drafted the amendment- but the amendment was drafted by people whose concept of Rebellion was intrinsically one of mass, organized force on the scale of war.

So again- why should anyone believe the Amendment drafter's views of Rebellion were such that Jan 6 qualified?

What makes this newsworthy to me isn't so much that people are arguing that January 6th was an insurrection, for the reasons you say, but the fact that actions could be taken because of that that could have a substantial effect on the upcoming election.

Which actions can be taken because of this that couldn't have been taken already?

This is not a position claiming a consensus of Federal Society legalists, or concurrence by government lawyers, or a position made by anyone else in the last several years of lawfare. It's novel, not authoritative.

Sorry, by contemporary I meant to the time, not to today, if that wasn't clear.

I can't go into details because I can't get the pdf to open, but I believe they referenced assorted earlier cases that were smaller than the civil war (the one I remember was the Whiskey rebellion, but they referenced a bunch more). I don't know the details, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even those were larger than the Trump events.

Sure, it's novel and not authoritative, but it being more mainstream could make an impact, since all that it needs to do so is convince a few officials. If no one else, I could see state officials in democratic states not listing Trump, and that could make a big difference in the primaries if it doesn't get to the supreme court before then.

Sorry, by contemporary I meant to the time, not to today, if that wasn't clear.

It was clear, and I am still awaiting a standard that distinguishes January 6 as a rebellion but which does not also catch many more non-contested politicians to the point that it's not an arbitrary special pleading.

I can't go into details because I can't get the pdf to open, but I believe they referenced assorted earlier cases that were smaller than the civil war (the one I remember was the Whiskey rebellion, but they referenced a bunch more). I don't know the details, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even those were larger than the Trump events.

Then the comparisons are not validating the necessary claims that the events of January 6 are a rebellion from an Originalist perspective. If January 6 is not a rebellion from an Originalist perspective, then banning Trump from running would not be an argument based on Originalism, but something else trying to claim the mantle of originalism to disguise smuggled assumptions. It's still assuming the conclusion that Trump conducted rebellion, and then arguing that the assumption warrants ignorring the sort of due process that is set out for actually establishing the conclusion.

Sure, it's novel and not authoritative, but it being more mainstream could make an impact, since all that it needs to do so is convince a few officials.

But there's nothing here indicating it's any sort of mainstream. Again, no claim has been made this reflects a common or shared viewpoint of the Originalist legal establishment, let alone the non-Federalist legal schools of thought, let alone the opposition party that has been deriding the Federalists for years.

For something to be mainstream, it needs to be, well, not novel and actually be authoritative.

If no one else, I could see state officials in democratic states not listing Trump, and that could make a big difference in the primaries if it doesn't get to the supreme court before then.

What, besides political cover of preferred justifications, makes you think Democratic states would de-list Trump based on this, and but would not de-list Trump on grounds that Trump has been indited and impeached multiple times?

I can't respond to the first half until I'm able to access the pdf again, since that's still not working, last I checked.

But to the ending, they might be persuaded that this could present at least the possibility that it might be the correct and legal thing to do—there's no way the indictments would disqualify, and the impeachments weren't agreed to by the margin required in the Senate.

I can't respond to the first half until I'm able to access the pdf again, since that's still not working, last I checked.

Given that the nature of political violence in the last half decade has been quite considerable with more than a few cases with far more violence and damage than conducted on January 6, you absolutely can respond as to what sort of standard might meaningfully identifies January 6 as a rebellion and other acts of violence in and around the capital and country in the years prior as not.

It certainly wasn't the timing that would make it a rebellion, as there is no requirement nor does proximity automatically qualify. It wasn't the death count. It wasn't the property damage. It wasn't the degree of organization. It wasn't the amount of backing from political elites. It wasn't the proximity to Congress persons.

But to the ending, they might be persuaded that this could present at least the possibility that it might be the correct and legal thing to do—there's no way the indictments would disqualify, and the impeachments weren't agreed to by the margin required in the Senate.

Neither would trying to delist the opposition candidate on charges he has never been convicted of, and yet here you are taking it seriously.

So I ask- why on earth should anyone believe a Democratic politician was sincerely persuaded of the correct and legal nature of an unprecedented attempt at political attack against an opposition party candidate... by an opinion piece of non-authoritative lawyers associated with an organization the Democratic party has regularly identified itself in ideological opposition to?

Does this hypothetical Democrat find all of the Federalist Society writings convincing, or just this pair of writers? Or just this article? Do they plan to apply this standard consistently even if it means coming to odds with their own party, or is this new novel legal theory they sincerely believe in only going to be used to the broad approval of their caucus before being put away?

I'm not making any assertion that other acts of violence wouldn't qualify (again, assuming the authors are right on all this).

Nor am I claiming that it wouldn't be politically motivated, or inconsistently applied.

The difference is that now they can claim to be doing it because of law, and it will have to go through courts instead of being shot down right away.

More comments

Never Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo

I'd think the game plays out in a similar way as it did last time. Republicans denounce and disavow. Trump calls their wives ugly. Republicans then, a week later, pledge support for Donald Trump when they realize which way the wind is blowing.

I'd think the only hope for the establishment and DeSantis is the fact that Trump is old and he's spent a lot of his powder. In that sense Biden may manage to serve as a tactical landmine. You can't make fun of a geriatric dude for 4 years to then support another one without some part of your brain noticing. But ehh, maybe.

Right, but things like not even being listed on the ballot in some states could be big.

So big, in fact, that it would enrage Trump voters who are, as far as I can tell, still a sizeable portion of the Republican voting block. Like, what's the gameplan here? Get your voters to hate your party?

The narrative of the Republican party having 'never Trumpers' in it was a great thing for the party itself, since it kept Trump supporters from hating the party directly. But this? I'm not seeing it.

Extending what seems to me to be an unsupportable amount of charity, the gameplan would be to sideline Trump through an "impartial, rules-based" process, thus removing an incompetent, unpopular, and generally useless blowhard from his position at the head of the party, so that people actually worth a damn can have a shot at securing power and maybe actually getting something done. They think that there's still a nation to fight over and perhaps to salvage, and that the system of power can still be used productively for its intended purposes, and they think Trump is getting in the way of productive business.

In so far as the article is meant to be actionable advice to someone, rather than academic blowhardery, I suspect the aim is to provide the GOPe with a playbook to dump Trump if it becomes necessary. If done while Trump was still viable, this would destroy the Republican party, but there are some fairly obvious situations where Trump is losing and dragging the GOP down with him, but has enough delegates that he can't be dumped in line with the rules.

In particular, the bit about Section 3 being self-executing and everyone involved in the electoral process being obliged to enforce it is an open invitation to Ronna Romney McDaniel to stop the Convention nominating Trump regardless of the delegate counts, should that turn out to be a good idea at the time. (For instance, because Trump has been convicted after a process which leaves the median voter agreeing that he is clearly guilty, or because he ended up running a defense along the lines of "I am so disconnected from reality that I cannot possibly form the mens rea for a crime of dishonesty" and beclowning himself).

When faced with a widespread and rapidly-accelerating collapse in trust in rules-based systems of governance, it would not seem to me that the best response would be repeated appeals to ever-more-novel and finely drawn rules-based arguments, but perhaps that is why I am not invited to the nice parties.

The obvious response hasn't changed.

Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.

It's entirely not important. It's Logan Act or Emoluments Clause levels of sophistry. The idea that someone could be disqualified from office for something with a definition very close to that for treason (which, you may note, requires two witnesses to the same act, or confession) without any sort of formal determination that they did that is absurd. If there's 126 pages, it's to bury that simple absurdity in bullshit.

You thinking it's absurd doesn't mean it's not important. As long as other people take it seriously, it'll have effects.

If they're correct (which I'm not certain about), I believe they'd have no objection to Trump or others presenting suits to argue that he is, in fact, eligible, if people try to remove him from ballots or take other actions, which might mitigate some of your concern about no formal determination? The authors go into its civil war era application for some examples of how it played out.

You thinking it's absurd doesn't mean it's not important.

That it is absurd means it's not important. That it is absurd means there's at least 6 and maybe 7 members of the Supreme Court who are going to throw it out quickly if anyone manages to get a lower court ruling based on it.

I believe they'd have no objection to Trump or others presenting suits to argue that he is, in fact, eligible, if people try to remove him from ballots or take other actions, which might mitigate some of your concern about no formal determination?

No. A formal determination would involve either Congress declaring him attainted (which has other Constitutional problems) or some sort of criminal trial. If the clause is self-executing it means one can skip to actions removing him from the ballot without any prior determination that he has engaged in insurrection. That is, any judge can make a determination (probably by a preponderance of the evidence) with the same effects as impeachment. This is not what that clause was for.

I'm not going to get down in the weeds of parsing the arguments in a 126 page document about this; that's like trying to engage with Time Cube.

I saw this again after deciding to look through my most downvoted comments. You were right.

Hey great idea! Someone should try this. Then when Justice Sotomayor and Jackson dissent we can use Jack Smith’s theory on defrauding the US by pursuing bogus legal theories to jail Sotomayor and Jackson!

That it is absurd means it's not important. That it is absurd means there's at least 6 and maybe 7 members of the Supreme Court who are going to throw it out quickly if anyone manages to get a lower court ruling based on it.

There's already a lower court ruling based on the same legal theory: https://www.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/D101CV202200473-griffin.pdf

It appears they got prevented from appealing to Federal court for lack of standing, the usual procedural nonsense. They won't be able to pull that off with Trump. It's still absurd.


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