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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27132 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Incidentally, I still repeatedly see the bug where trying to post something at a level that would produce a more comments prompt results in the post actually being accepted, but seeming to hang and never refreshing the screen.

Also, we don't seem to have a thread for forum bugs.

Yeah, I could've sworn we fixed it, but it appears to have shown back up again. Unfortunately it seems very difficult to intentionally replicate, while very easy to accidentally stub your toe on, which makes it a pain to fix. If you can figure out reliable repro steps I would love to hear them :V

In general, you're welcome to PM me with reports, or post them in whatever thread seems most reasonable and ping me.

It seems to happen every time for me. The test comments below at level 10 all had the problem. It happens either from the main thread or from using "context" and replying from there.

I am using Firefox under Linux if that helps. Chromium under Linux also does it.

This may now be fixed - someone submitted a review that plausibly fixes the issue. Thank you, contributor!

Test reply L3

Test reply L4

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Test reply L9

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I've got another bug report dealing with expanding comments.

If a ninth-level comment is deleted after getting replies (i.e. the one immediately before "expand comments"), then clicking the button freezes it at "requesting".

To reproduce, go to this link, click the "More Comments (3)" button, and notice that it sticks on "requesting". This also happens when you simply scroll down in the main thread.

For a temporary workaround, change the context amount like this, so the comments are displayed without needing a click.

This is now also fixed!

(No credit to me, all credit to the same person who fixed the previous bug, who I appreciate greatly.)

On the back of prior discussions about forced 'voluntary' reporting of sleep apnea diagnoses in the State of Maryland in order to qualify for a drivers license, I'd like to draw attention to something similar happening with autism diagnoses in Queensland, Australia. Last year there was an update to the Assessing Fitness to Drive standards to list autism as a medical condition deemed to have an impact on driving.

“As a result, psychologists say people are now cancelling their autism assessment appointments because they fear the legal and financial consequences of not disclosing their condition — while others argue the new standards are "discriminatory" and unfairly target people with autism on the basis of their diagnosis, not their driving ability. “

...

“While the 2022 Assessing Fitness to Drive (AFTD) standards apply across the country, a Queensland law called Jet's law, introduced in 2008, requires drivers to disclose any medical condition that is likely to affect their ability to drive safely — and in some cases obtain a medical certificate to prove they are fit to drive.”

...

“According to the state's Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR), autism was added to the list of reportable health conditions in 2012. Drivers who fail to obtain the medical clearance face a maximum A$9,288 fine and possible loss of licence.”


There's a fair bit more in the article that goes on about a few individual cases, but the gist of it seems to be that in the state of Queensland you need to provide medical clearance to drive from your doctor to the TMR (DMV) if you wish to apply/maintain your license once you are dignosed with autism. Most other Australian states seem to have a more reasonable 'you are legally required to report any ongoing condition that effects your ability to drive' standard.

In Queensland it seems like the above stated “Jet's Law” came about when someone with epilepsy had a fit resulting in a car crash that killed a baby and left his brother in a wheelchair for life. So this law was created To Do Something that then through bureaucratic ignorance has expanded to include other conditions such as autism as the Assessing Fitness to Drive standards were used as a list to determine what these conditions were. And then people have possibly decided to stop being diagnosed rather than deal with the hassle/stigma of reporting.

This is just so banal and unjust that someone diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum would then have to report that straight to the government or risk being fined thousands of dollars and stripped of their ability to drive. Luckily there is some pushback with a guy in the above link apparently filing a case with Queensland's Human Rights Commission, but still, it shouldn't have gotten this far.

Edit: fixed formatting

Why don't we get rid of driver's licences entirely and just rely on car insurance? If you pose a risk to others by not having the skill to drive or by having some medical condition, your insurer could require its own tests. It could ask you to get a licence from a third party private organization. Then the free market would figure out the optimal test of driving ability.

I don’t like the idea of a market where the insurer sets the rules and collects the profits, but all the work of enforcement still falls on the state.

what if someone just doesn't get insurance then...

Well that would be a crime and could be deterred in the usual ways ("What if someone just gets drunk and gets behind the wheel of a car tho?") except that enforcement would be a political problem because of so many illegal immigrants who can't get insurance.

Do you think the type of person who won't/can't get a driver's licence will have insurance? And if insurance companies won't cover you unless you pass a test, then you just drive without insurance.

But surely nobody would be so careless! Well, about that...

About 13% of people on the road are uninsured drivers.

Car insurance is required in nearly every state. However, there are around 29 million uninsured drivers in the U.S. That means about one out of every eight drivers doesn't have car insurance.

The percentage of uninsured motorists varies by state. In Mississippi, 29% of drivers don't have insurance. In New Jersey, only 3% of drivers are uninsured.

Some people don't have insurance because they can't afford it. Some because they don't give a damn about anyone but themselves. And seeing as how you may be more likely to be hit by a bad driver, the combination of "no licence/no insurance, what you gonna do about it?" doesn't fill me with confidence.

It seems like the responsible types get lumbered with the fallout from the careless:

Nearly half of U.S. states require drivers to have uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage. With this coverage, the insurance company pays for your car repairs and medical bills if you're hit by a driver who doesn't have insurance.

There are two forms of uninsured motorist coverage:

Uninsured motorist bodily injury (UMBI) Uninsured motorist property damage (UMPD) States typically only require UMBI to cover injuries and medical bills. But some, such as the District of Columbia, also require UMPD coverage to cover car repairs.

To be less serious, it seems we can blame the French for introducing driving licences:

On 14 August 1893, the world’s first driving licences were introduced in Paris.

Driving licences were first envisioned by Louis Lépine who was the top civil servant at the Seine police department in Paris.

I cannot figure out what your point is. Yes, I agree that people driving without insurance is bad. But I don't see how my proposal would have any effect on the number of people driving without insurance.

You're shifting the licensing requirement from the government to the insurers. Now, either insurance companies insure everybody regardless of competence (which means they get landed with responsibility for 'this legally blind drunk driver ploughed into a line of toddlers and you insured him') or they use their own set of tests before insuring drivers.

If they set their own set of tests, it's likely that some people will fail them. So they still end up with no licence. And if people are lying on forms or avoiding going to the doctor because of conditions they think will disqualify them from getting a licence, they'll either lie the same way to the insurance companies, or just not bother with getting insurance. And allegedly 13% of drivers in the USA are already driving uninsured, so driving without a licence isn't that big a step either.

Sure, but at least they'll only have to lie about things that actually affect their driving ability enough for insurance companies to care about them, and the insurance companies will be incentivized to find ways around these problems, such as by making certain medical tests mandatory.

Then if the insurance companies make tests mandatory or no insurance, how is that different from the government making regulations?

I do think there is room in between "ah feck it, if you can turn the key in the ignition you get a licence" and "if you so much as sneeze you're off the road", but I don't think this is a problem that is solvable purely by market forces. The first person injured or killed in an accident by someone 'licensed' by the insurance company, and there will be calls for more stringent standards. More stringent standards = incentive to lie or not report conditions. And that brings us back to where we started, except that now they're lying to the insurance company, not the driving licence department.

it necessarily would increase it if there are more people on the road. but how many people it has an effect on doesn't matter. in your proposed world, if X% of drivers don't have insurance, that's X% of drivers that have never been tested.

look, driver's tests may be incredibly easy to pass, but it is a working high-pass filter. if someone (not on the basis of discrimination like what the Aussies want to do) can't get a driver's license because they've failed a driver's test, what makes you think they're going to get insurance for driving if they can't pass that exam?

and what's even worse now is that you have people who have been previously filtered out of driving altogether are now both on the road and uninsured.

that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

That's what I had thought as well. It might work in a place with functional public transportation, where most of the potentially uninsured aren't working jobs that require carrying many tools, but in most of the US people still need to drive, whether they're insured or not.

I suspect that insurance companies would ask you to take a driving test, how else are you they supposed to know you have the minimum acceptable levels of competence, before further actuarial concerns?

OK, so why don't we find out? There's a good chance they would come up with a better system of testing and licensing than we have now. Is there any reason the government needs to issue licences?

I am modestly libertarian, so I have no fundamental disagreement with 3rd parties providing licenses or the insurance route, I just happen to think government licensing is adequate and the majority of the debate is over whether refusals to license based on specific diseases like autism or sleep apnea are warranted.

We wouldn't need to have those debates though if we relegated the question to the free market, and I'm wondering if there is any good reason why we don't just do that.

Why you think so?

Effect on public safety depends on how well payouts of insurance companies (via laws and court system) are correlated with damage to public safety.

If payouts for accidents caused by someone driving with sleep apnea without XYZ treatment are much higher, then insurance companies will demand the same as discussed here.

If they can avoid payouts while damaging public safety they will happily do this.

You still need to decide on payouts via legislation/shaping court system. With the same debates happening in a bit different place.

(unless you propose to privatise also legislation and court system and have multiple ones competing at once but that is clearly not "why we don't just do that.")

The level of competence that maximizes insurance company profits is not necessarily going to be the same as the level of competence which best* satisfies the tradeoff between public safety and the individuals' interest in being able to drive.

*There can of course be a variety of best tradeoffs, since "best" depends on how one weighs the competing interests. But insurance companies do not directly take either of those factors into account when deciding whether to insure someone.

But it likely does maximize the tradeoff between public safety and the individuals' interest in being able to drive plus their interests in saving other costs. And it probably maximizes the tradeoff you mentioned better than driver's licences do.

And it probably maximizes the tradeoff you mentioned better than driver's licences do.

I don't see how you can know that, nor is it likely to be true, given that the insurance company doesn't particularly care about either one.

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We wouldn't need to have those debates though if we relegated the question to the free market

Your simple faith in this religion of the free market is touching, I have to say. There's an argument that the instances in the original post are indeed over-regulation for the sake of it, but to put it all on the free market is optimistic in the extreme.

Every insurance company has its own licensing body? Multiple licensing bodies? Or in effect a monopoly? Any common standard, or LicenzRUz gives you one if you can turn the ignition on, nothing more required (and the insurance companies that take this licence then charge you out the nose for coverage) while Rules Rule Inc. ask for your family medical history three generations back?

Law cases even more lucrative for lawyers as the survivors of person killed in crash by "minimum requirements only" licence holder fight it out with the insurers, and judges have to rule on whether the driver was adequately licenced or not? This is where we get things like "Jet's Law" in the first place, and the subsequent over-reach. Adjusting the free market grave by grave may be one way of doing it, but I think most people would prefer a less final method than "Okay, fifty thousand extra deaths due to lax licence rules, pressure on insurers to put pressure on third party bodies to tighten up their requirements".

Whatever way you do it, the government is going to get dragged in by cases such as led to Jet's Law. After all, the 'free market' allowed the epileptic driver to operate a vehicle, and it was the consequences of that which involved the government:

The State Coroner recommended the following actions be taken:

Review of practices concerning the forwarding of discharge summaries from hospitals in Queensland (both public and private) to ensure uniform consistent practice in forwarding a patient's discharge summary to the patient's general practitioner.

Review of legislation to require any doctor becoming aware of a patient suffering any epileptic event which would, in that doctor's opinion adversely impact on the patient's ability to safely drive a motor vehicle, to specifically discuss the issue with the patient at the consultation. The legislation should require the doctor to; (i) advise the patient if the doctor considers it inappropriate to continue to drive, (ii) set a period of time and/or refer the patient to an appropriate specialist for further management and advice concerning suitability to drive. (iii) provide written confirmation of the doctor's advice to the patient.

Review of legislation to consider whether and in what circumstances a driver, and/or a treating doctor should be required to inform the Transport Department of a medical condition (such as epilepsy) or a change in the medical condition of a person impacting on their ability to safely drive. Consideration of whether sanctions should apply against a driver and/or a treating medical officer if they fail to report relevant information.

Review of legislation (after consultation with relevant interest groups) to consider a panel of independent doctors available to accept referrals for assessment of suitability to drive in the context of epilepsy. The panel would be available to review a driver's eligibility to drive and to inform the Department of Transport accordingly.

Initiative by the Department of Transport or other appropriate agency or authority to publicise both to the public and the medical profession the Guidelines for Fitness to Drive. Emphasis should be given to a responsibility to review a person's fitness to drive in circumstances where there is any alteration in the person's medical condition likely to impact on their ability to safely drive a motor vehicle.

Review of current Australian standards of child safety restraint mechanisms taking into consideration world best practice standards, despite Jet having been restrained properly.

Your simple faith in this religion of the free market is touching, I have to say. There's an argument that the instances in the original post are indeed over-regulation for the sake of it, but to put it all on the free market is optimistic in the extreme.

If it were faith, I wouldn't be asking for reasons why it might not work. I don't think you're quite going this far, but there's this really common and very annoying thing that a lot of people do where, if you express any kind of belief that markets ever work, you're accused of being a free market fundamentalist. It's a subject on which people struggle to see nuance and seem to default to gesturing vaguely at market failures which they've heard exist but can never explain why any given case is one.

Every insurance company has its own licensing body? Multiple licensing bodies? Or in effect a monopoly? Any common standard, or LicenzRUz gives you one if you can turn the ignition on, nothing more required (and the insurance companies that take this licence then charge you out the nose for coverage) while Rules Rule Inc. ask for your family medical history three generations back?

Competition and choice would be great, but we can't do worse than the current monopoly.

Law cases even more lucrative for lawyers as the survivors of person killed in crash by "minimum requirements only" licence holder fight it out with the insurers, and judges have to rule on whether the driver was adequately licenced or not?

Why would it matter whether the driver was licensed? The compensation would be based on the harm caused and who was at fault. Why would this be any more difficult than it is already?

This is where we get things like "Jet's Law" in the first place, and the subsequent over-reach.

How so?

Adjusting the free market grave by grave may be one way of doing it, but I think most people would prefer a less final method than "Okay, fifty thousand extra deaths due to lax licence rules, pressure on insurers to put pressure on third party bodies to tighten up their requirements".

I'm not following this at all. What do you mean by "final"? Why would there be an increase in deaths? Why would there be any kind of grave-by-grave adjustment of the free market?

Whatever way you do it, the government is going to get dragged in by cases such as led to Jet's Law. After all, the 'free market' allowed the epileptic driver to operate a vehicle, and it was the consequences of that which involved the government:

Why would the government get dragged in?

Why would the government get dragged in?

Because the government has the legislative power, and when the public want Something Must Be Done, it's the government that gets called on to do it - mostly to pass laws so This Can't Happen Again.

Why would there be an increase in deaths?

Very simple example: If I speed, I cop a fine and a certain number of demerit points off my license. If I lose too many demerit points, I lose my license and risk going to jail if I continue to drive without a license. All of this applies pressure to me to drive at a safe speed.

In an insurance-only system, I face no penalty until I cause a crash and potentially kill someone.

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How is criminal law meant to tie into this? People who value retributive justice aren’t going to be satisfied with someone simply getting sued out their arse.

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We have this in the Netherlands too. When you first get a license you have to fill out a form asking about your health, and if you check 'yes' on any of the questions you have to go for a review process which, given bureaucracy and staff shortages, can easily take more than a year to resolve. It's no wonder that even official examinators will outright tell you to lie on the form. But there are cases of people having their driver's license revoked upon seeking help for a mental illness that has nothing to do with driving, even if they've been driving for 10 years and hundreds of thousands of miles without incident. I've known people to avoid getting even normal healthcare for fear of their license.

This public reaction is predictable and ultimately going to be worse than the relatively small chance of a disorder being the direct cause of an accident.

This is why red-flag laws in the USA are so dangerous. People won’t consider seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist if the potential consequences are “they’ll take away my family’s guns”. So now people who might be considering suicide or have other issues will get worse without treatment, and perhaps avoid getting help for the kids if there’s a risk that that could get on a watchlist.

I'm looking at Irish standards, and they're based on EU guidelines:

The NDLS aims to maximise drivers’ mobility and to encourage patients with OSAS to seek diagnosis and effective treatment. Treated patients no longer pose an increased crash risk. However, it is important to ensure that an appropriate balance is found between mobility and safety

Why does OSAS affect driving?
Although you may not realise it, OSAS interrupts your sleep and may result in daytime sleepiness, which could cause you to fall asleep at the wheel. Signs of sleep apnoea include loud snoring, disturbed sleep, fighting for breath during sleep and falling asleep in the daytime.

Drivers with OSAS are three times more likely to have a road traffic crash than the general population, but this increased risk is avoided with effective treatment.

What are the actual rules about OSAS, and do I need to stop driving?
Drivers with moderate or severe OSAS which causes excessive daytime (awake-time) sleepiness, and who do not follow the rules below (while driving), are driving while unsafe to do so and are breaking the law.

I think the problem is as pointed out: people who have mild versions of the illness or it is well-controlled aren't a risk and that is acknowledged. People who are not treated are the risk, and if they're avoiding healthcare because they're afraid they won't get a driver's licence, then that is the dangerous consequence. They are putting themselves and others at risk because they are not getting treatment, and they are still driving.

It's a balance, and how do we strike that balance? "I need to be able to drive for my work" "Yes, but right now you are a genuine risk to be on the roads".

Stop the person driving? They suffer the effects of that, and it may even be "lose my job". Let them drive untreated? They may lose their life in a crash.

Let them drive temporarily while they get treatment sounds like a moderate compromise, but again - if the person is involved in an accident, there's going to be public outcry and demands for "Something Must Be Done!"

And I don't think the free market alone can solve that one.

Stop the person driving? They suffer the effects of that, and it may even be "lose my job". Let them drive untreated? They may lose their life in a crash.

What are the odds of both scenarios? Stating it as an either or is very misleading... Lose your car you're probably going to lose your job. Leaving it untreated will increase you risk by how much? Very little I'd imagine...

I think a moderate compromise only makes sense when you have good data.

And I don't think the free market alone can solve that one.

I don't understand what this means aside from capitalism == bad. How about it should be difficult to take away the rights of people?

You show me where there is a divine right to drive a motor vehicle, and we can then talk about taking away rights.

Yes, it should be difficult to take away rights. But it should also be difficult to engage in behaviour that endangers others on the public roads.

You show me where there is a divine right to drive a motor vehicle, and we can then talk about taking away rights.

Let's bite this bullet: for many people in the world, especially in the United States, being able to drive from one's house to a different physical location is highly-correlated with being able to eat. In theory, driving is an optional system not critical to the basic functions of civilization. In practice, much of society is arranged around the automobile, which has given rise to entire movements whose slogan is "fuck cars."

So I would indeed argue that, so long as being able to exist in modern society relies on being able to drive, having one's legal ability to drive be abrogated is as drastic as a suspension of other rights guaranteed in the Amendments.

You show me where there is a divine right to drive a motor vehicle

Show me where there is a divine right to anything :marseyshrug:

Again, what are the odds of both (that was my point)

endangers others on the public roads.

What's the actual risk? Where do we draw the line line between safety and freedom? Going all or nothing on either side is silly.

It's trivially true that some people are too severely autistic to be able to drive safely (e.g. my brother) but it's also the case that those people are too autistic to pass a driving test and get a license. Just make that argument to the transport minister and ask him to get the standards changed. Filing a case with the human rights commission is a waste of everyone's time.

Ash, you are among the tiny minority of Australians who work in a situation where some fraction of politicians actually listen to the words you say some fraction of the time. The rest of us have to figure out various wheezes for creating a ruckus that will draw the attention of the Powers. Judicial and quasi-judicial processes like the HRC are one example.

The transport minister has presumably already made that decision, which is how autism got added to the list in the first place.

Nah. It would have been ticked off by the minister, but as @CertainlyWorse says, this policy reeks of public service safetyism. He probably signed off on it with half a dozen other minor things that he doesn't remember either. I'd be shocked if he actually had a considered policy view on the issue.

At the risk of Godwinning where the comparison is genuinely hyperbolic, “if only the Fuher knew”?

I’m not intimately familiar with Aussie politics, but I’m familiar enough to give a list of recent cases where stupid bullshit safetyism ended up with friends in high enough places for politicians to happily stand by them, whether that be the various recent fishing bans (ban shark fishing to prevent shark attacks!), the Adler shotgun, or the obnoxiously early ADS-B mandate.

I mean, it might be worth a shot, but the assumption no one has taken that try simply because it hasn’t changed already is hilariously naive.

The Adler shotgun issue is the only one of those I've been actively involved in, and while it was absolutely stupid, I do think it was a structurally different kind of stupid.

On the object level of course it was ridiculous to ban the Adler. But Aussies genuinely are very pro-gun-control, while at the same time mostly being profoundly ignorant about the particulars of specific guns. So there's a very real political danger to doing the sensible thing in that situation. Popular-but-stupid policies are a problem!

But they are a different kind of problem to stupid policies that don't have a constituency supporting them. With issues where the public doesn't care one way or the other (which is most issues) you really can get policy change by winning over the elites to your side.

Do you expect bureaucratic policymakers to actually listen to that? I seriously don’t, I expect them to declare it misinformation and refuse to admit they made a mistake until forced to by the human rights commission.

until forced to by the human rights commission.

My plan in such case would be to interact with human rights commission until they do such thing (if I would care about this law enough to do something).

Probably start from doing their work for them and write something so they would only sign off on what I wrote (and maybe rephrase it) and forward it to bureaucratic policymakers.

If you send one email and then go away, no, that's not likely to go anywhere. But it's not as if there's any constituency or interest group invested in making life annoying for autists. The only resistance you're going to face is inertia. And yeah that's not nothing, but it's hardly insurmountable either.

My expectation is that the minor amount of attention the issue has already received will be enough to compel a change.

Having the issue blow up in the media would probably be the most effective thing in getting the rules changed around this. Politicians are otherwise slow to act and hide behind statements like 'following the best medical advice' rather than using common sense.

The generally high risk aversion of the public service is one of the root causes behind this. The above problem is just a symptom of banal bureaucracy where the chain of public servants presented with this issue decided to take the safe 'just following orders' route of following standards without any risky personal interpretation up to the point of injustice.

I agree that there are people with autism who shouldn't be driving, but the lack of nuance in the legislation doesn't differentiate between someone mildly on the spectrum with a few social quirks and someone who is completely non-verbal. From the public servant's point of view, its best to classify them the same just to be sure.

I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button. It's a legacy holdover from Reddit but it really doesn't fit the theme of the motte. Downvoting increases the intensity of heat while doing little for light. Humans are hard-wired to care about the popularity of their ideas, even people very low on the agreeableness spectrum (which I'm sure accounts for the majority of posters here). People who are routinely downvoted are much less likely to post, intensifying the echo chamber effect.

If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.

If a post is just using bad logic, it's much better to refute that logic with a response than to downvote. There's nothing I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses. This doesn't happen nearly as often on this forum as it does on Reddit, but it's still a nuisance when it does occur.

  • -21

How would you know if people are ignoring it?

Voting has always been one of the worst functions of Reddit and should have been discarded with the offsite move. I voted on one comment in my decade plus on Reddit, and it was a technical solution to a video game bug buried under dozens of useless comments with bad advice. As a subjective “I agree/disagree” button, which is what it morphed into on Day 2 of Reddit going live, the philosophy of its inclusion is counter to the Motte’s explicit rule against consensus building.

Let ideas stand on their own, without the peanut gallery’s worthless input. Motte monkeys are often not nearly as informed as they believe themselves to be, either, outside of their favorite subjects of “computer science careers” and “why girls don’t think programmers are alpha males.”

Let ideas stand on their own, without the peanut gallery’s worthless input. Motte monkeys are often not nearly as informed as they believe themselves to be, either, outside of their favorite subjects of “computer science careers” and “why girls don’t think programmers are alpha males.”

Dial down the antagonism, returning-alt-with-a-grudge-against-the-Motte.

I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses.

Can you give examples where it happened undeservedly? (Reddit-grade jokes or trolling or blatantly bad posts or -1 buried deep in some 1 vs 1 thread do not count)

Vote counts should at least be hidden for longer. Perhaps a week. The impulse to focus on upvotes is a siren song.

Downvotes are a feedback mechanic and I think a good one.

I understand that it was abused pretty heavily on reddit but karma isn't really a thing here, votes are hidden for a day, popular sorting isn't that useful here, ...

I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses.

You mind giving an example or two?

Is it really that aggravating to get a secondary signal for your post quality?

This forum is extremely well-mannered when it comes to downvotes. Everything I've ever seen under 0 deserved it.

It's not a signal for post quality. I make posts which meet quite a few quality standards, but they get downvoted for making left-wing arguments.

I have seen that happen, and many of my posts have been downvoted because they also went against the hive-mind.

Very rarely do they drop below zero, though. More likely, they are "ratio-ed" by simplistic quips that align more with others.

From my point of view, compared to the perpetual abuse of fucking idiot pre-teens on Reddit and inevitable negative karma, this is still a big step up. It's, of course, easier said than done, but if you don't view votes as a symbol of quality, you can just ignore them instead of the site being changed for it.

My posts do go below 0, especially if I make my kind of arguments. I don't know what specific arguments you're making that get you downvoted, but it was a consistent pattern in on Reddit that left-wing arguments took hits only on the basis of their position.

I would argue that downvotes don't help us - they encourage people to signal their approval of an argument instead of actually engaging with it. Better to remove them and force people to respond or move along.

I will chime in and say yes, sufficiently blue opinions are more likely to get downvoted.

But I’m still tentatively in favor of keeping downvotes. My reasoning is that expressing disapproval is going to happen, and it’s better done through (initially hidden) downvotes than through reports. I’m not very confident in this; vote buttons do feel pretty tribal, which is reason enough to be suspicious.

Abuse of the report function can also be modded. Reddit, for example, bans people who abuse the Sucide Prevention Bot. Set a few examples and people will learn.

If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.

Not if the moderators decide to not do their job because they like a troll poster, or want to encourage similar troll posters for "forum diversity." Very few posts that make good arguments are ever downvoted, and it gives the forum population a voice to deal with spammy agenda-posters (or hock-posters) that doesn't rely on the mods.

I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button.

I think we should remove both. "Bad post got upvotes" complaints are as bad as the "my post got downvotes" ones. The only function of votes, as others mentioned, is a sink for low effort comments, but if the mods are up to it, I'd say just start banning for low effort. Unlike some of the more esoteric rules, this one is pretty easy to understand, and to apply in a relatively objective way.

You want to give the mods more control over the conversation? Who are you and what have you done with Arjin?!

I was always in favor of civility norms. I'm not really that much into demanding high effort, but it might be worth it, if it frees us from the hand wringing about up/down votes.

It sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me. You get rid of the, what, quarterly bitching about upvotes and downvotes, but in doing so you take away one of the public's few methods of influencing the discourse and put it on the mods, who are overworked already.

Problem is that people who shouldn't get influenced by votes (completely fine posters with a minority opinion) are, and people who should (trolls) are not. I sympathize with mods being overworked, which is why I said "if they're up for it".

The complaints are the worst part, because sometimes yes it is a bad post, but other times it's "that's your opinion based on your views which don't agree with the content of the post".

I don't care one way or the other about up votes, down votes, sideways votes. I get bans because a mod said so or somebody went running to teacher to complain. I don't ever recollect knowing or caring was the 'offensive' comment upvoted or downvoted.

If people want to keep them, keep them; if the majority want to get rid of them, democracy rules, baby!

I get bans because a mod said so

As opposed to a random user banning you? If that's happening the code base inherited from rdrama must be more interesting than I thought.

somebody went running to teacher to complain

I wonder how much bearing that has on whether the complaint was valid. Certainly the gangsters or mafiosos declaring "snitches get stitches" aren't saying so because of their wounded pride from being falsely accused. You did call me a goat-fucker lol.

I do wonder what a system entirely run off user reports might look like, plenty of social media platforms, Reddit and Facebook/Insta included, have that to a degree where a sufficient number of user reports gets things auto-removed. They still have humans in the loop somewhere even if they don't act in every case. Not that I expect this to be a good idea, or work very well if at all, l just want to see novel forms of dysfunction at times!

You did call me a goat-fucker lol.

No, that was 'high decoupling consideration of hypotheticals'. I wasn't saying you, self_made_human, was a goat-fucker, I was saying hypothetical general you who may want to defend goat-fucking.

But that's what amused me about it; suddenly all the silly low decouplers who were getting het-up over simple thought experiments unlike cool brainy people who could distinguish between "suppose I want to fuck goats" and "you're saying I want to fuck goats? that's a lie!" - suddenly you were sounding just like one of them 😁

As opposed to a random user banning you?

Eh, some mod decides I said something too much and hands out a ban. I may fight that one out, but generally I just shrug and take my lumps. They have their view of "that was needlessly antagonistic" and I have mine, but they're the Benevolent Dictators of this place so what they say goes and arguing with them isn't worth it. Often I just get overheated, and then the cage comes down.

No, that was 'high decoupling consideration of hypotheticals'. I wasn't saying you, self_made_human, was a goat-fucker, I was saying hypothetical general you who may want to defend goat-fucking.

Uh huh..

https://www.themotte.org/post/760/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/159366?context=8#context

Your notion of entertaining hypotheticals seems to be "agree with them". 'Oh, you don't like that proposal, you disagree with it? You're a low decoupler who's too stupid to be able to think abstractly'. That seems to be your go-to position.

Listen, you want to fuck goats? That's your thing, but don't try and get around objections with "Why are people so mean to me about goat-fucking, it must be because they're all too stupid to think outside of conventional notions".

You had plenty of opportunities to state that when I told you I had no desire to fuck goats, or either brand of "kid", but such a considered, nuanced intent was lacking.

At any rate, it's water under the bridge, you took your lumps.

I must hold my hands up to this fault, I was poking you since it did amuse me to see the reality of "talk about high decoupler behaviour and finger wag at low decouplers, then become a low decoupler when it was my ox that was gored" (or goat that was fucked, if you like).

So the mod(s) were in the right to smack my wrist there. However, I was not trying to intimate that you personally wanted to fuck kids (caprine) or kids (human).

That's close enough to an apology for me, while we certainly have our disagreements or outright arguments, you're not remotely as intolerable as some I could name here, heh.

Oh, just wait for the next fight I get into! 😁

If I were any good at this prediction market lark, I'd be able to start one on "When will FNE get their next ban?" and I'd clean up, I tell ya!

More comments

Slashdot meta moderation

This is part of what I'm slowly approaching with the volunteer system, although I have had no time to work on it lately :/

It is hidden for a week. It is a good compromise. And downvotes are the best way to signal to the trolls.

Vote counts are definitely not hidden for a week, at least on most posts.

signal to the trolls

If you define troll as "genuine rulebreaker", then reporting is a better option

If you define troll as "person who disagrees with me", then "signalling" should really be done with a proper response.

They're hidden for 24 hours

  1. It is easier to create bullshit than refute it. Therefore refuting bad posts with good logic is a losing proposition.

  2. Unlike responses, downvotes are typically not moderated, so if a post is so bad that the proper response to it would be moderated, a downvote is the best answer.

Unlike responses, downvotes are typically not moderated

Typically? Downvotes are never moderated. (As far as I know, we can't see who upvotes or downvotes a post even if we wanted to. I suppose Zorba could build that capability, but I know of no reason to.)

On reddit you couldn't see it,though AEO could and sometimes did take action based on it. Here, Zorba has control of the codebase so can certainly see it if he wants to.

  1. That's what moderation is for.
  2. I don't understand what your second point is saying.

That's what moderation is for.

The Motte is past the size where mods can be expected to read every single comment. At most they can respond to reports, and even then there's usually a lag time of hours involved. I also personally don't expect the mods to commit themselves to sitting down and personally addressing every bad argument that gets deposited here like a turd on a doorstep.

I don't understand what your second point is saying.

Sometimes a comment is such utter bullshit that accurately/vividly calling it out as the bullshit it is can stray past the threshold where the reply itself violates the rules here. And that's leaving aside the emotive states where you're tempted to leave something more minimally inflammatory than theoretically possible, at which point just downvoting and moving on is better for you and the forum.

Don't ask me how I know the latter.

  1. It's not against the rules to post bullshit, at least provided the bullshit is in long-form prose.

  2. If someone posts bullshit and someone else posts "Bullshit." in response, the second person will get moderated. If they merely downvote, the second person will not be moderated.

We need a rule against long-form bullshit then.

If we're not thinking of the same people, then what does being able to down vote accomplish?

It is easier to create bullshit than refute it.

Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad, downvoting things you disagree just ends up looking like "they hated him because he spoke the truth".

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton[1], they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

That is, a downvoted post be such due to it being wrong, or due to it being heterodox with regards to the majority opinion on this site. A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

[1]Apocryphally:

You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense.

The assertion that The Motte can or should be building consensus, let alone good consensus, is laughable on its face. The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals, which is obviously false to anyone who actually interacts with idiots, and not insulated morons subsisting exclusively on a social diet of nerdy coworkers and college friends.

The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals

No, they weren't. Many people pushed back against that claim. The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.

The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.

You worded this as an unqualified absolute just to troll all of us who disagree with it at that extreme, didn't you?

A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

this comment has a nice "to be fair you have to have a high IQ to understand themotte" type vibe to it, which comes across as pseudointellectual at best.

more seriously though, just because a comment is highly downvoted doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently garbage or that it was a "low IQ" opinion. a lot of very smart opinions or ideas were not deemed to be very popular in the past, and I think it'd be foolish to think that what we think is objectively correct.

just 100 years ago, high IQ people had consensus that smoking was good

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton[1], they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

I'd say I covered that with "Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad".

A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

Strong disagree. Even if you're right about the IQ and what it means (I personally lean to us not being as smart as we think we are), high-IQ does not mean unbiased, and so we are not a representative sample of all high-IQ people, which means we are perfectly capable of downvoting comments just because we don't like them, rather than them being wrong.

To expand on that, a +35 comment is easily in the top 10% of most-upvoted comments on any given thread. Most comments are +10 or less. Community consensus with such a small group means very little.

Downvotes don't refute BS to any meaningful degree. Most trivial BS can be refuted by knowing basic fallacies, and prolific BS'ers will get modded for low-quality posts.

Downvotes in practice are just like people writing "You're wrong" without elaboration.

Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged. Downvotes are more efficient at that than actually posting "you're wrong", and attract less moderator ire.

Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged.

You're wrong.

I don't have vast swaths of time to devote to responding at length to certain posts, even when I want to, and on the occasions when I do the iron is often no longer hot, as it were. I don't see a problem with downvoting and moving on.

This assumes your agreement or disagreement on its own is important or worth sharing. It isn’t.

Oh? And why isn't it? Presumably we aren't all conversing in a vacuum, nor is the detailed articulate response of every single person necessarily desirable, even for the most riveting posts. I don't agree generally with you about what you term "Motte monkeys," however, so I don't imagine we'll end up in agreement.

Being a Metafilter exile, from my experience a lack of downvotes serves to push would-be downvotes to become upvotes for the nearest antagonistic reply. This has the effect of giving upvotes to whoever can write an opposing comment the quickest, regardless of the logic of the response.

Then get rid of upvotes too.

Transforming downvotes into upvotes on replies is something I've seen, but that seems like a good change to me. I've not seen the downvotes go to low-quality posts, at least not once a few higher quality posts have been made.

You can't remove the impulse and behavior by removing the button, as YouTube and twitter learned the hard way: people just start "ratio"ing each other instead.

This would be a purely cosmetic and ideological change. So I'm against it by default.

Ratioing on Twitter takes a significantly larger amount of effort than a simple downvote and requires lots of participation to distinguish it from random noise. The Motte also has rules against written downvotes so that would make it an even bigger hurdle.

I'm sorry to report that I could not resist downvoting this post, but will make amends with a comment.

Also - I think the downvote is useful, it's interesting sometimes to see the tally of up and down votes. Highlights contentiousness in an interesting way

Don't worry, I downvoted your reply as well.

it's interesting sometimes to see the tally of up and down votes. Highlights contentiousness in an interesting way

Could still be done indirectly by looking at upvotes on original post, and upvotes on the replies.

Since we don't use it to order or hide posts (I think?), I don't think having downvotes hurts too much. What I'd like to see are additional or replacement dimensions. LessWrong added an "Agree/Disagree" vote, which I like, with the original upvotes indicating quality alone. That can make it easier to get the highly upvoted, highly disagreed with posts that are really the ideal.

i don't really see the point, i think it'd likely just be as abused as upvote. it'd just be that "quality post" would be the new upvote and "not quality" would be the new downvote where "agree" is just a weaker form that would be uncommonly used.

i think it would be neat to see some indicator of controversiality though.

As others have stated, I think you must of first had some allegiance to a thing before you can "betray" it. Perhaps it's because I was opposed to them from the start, or perhaps I'm just being uncharitable, but it always seemed pretty clear to me that the most vocal internet atheists were motivated more by a desire to see the religious right in particular and wider "normie culture" in general brought low than by any sincerely held principal.

From where I'm sitting the New Atheists didn't "Betray the West" so much as they were largely anti-Western from the start. Of course, their successors on the dissident right are much better. The problem is that among other things the West was always more of an ideological/cultural project than anything else. The Words "Civis Romanus Sum" were words of power regardless of whether the speaker had been born in Latium or the Levant. This has historically been one of the West's great strengths, one of the reasons (if not THE reason) that Christendom was able to build and maintain a level of civilization that, as @TheDag put it in another thread, make any other belief system look like infants in comparison. Apes together strong.

However, as is often the case, this source of strength is also a source of vulnerability. We live in an age of the stupid, the lazy, and the faithless. Furthermore we live in an age where the frontiers to fuck-off to, or exile ner-do-wells are limited. As such it is both easy to be a free rider, and difficult for the upright to escape from or remove said parasites. The West in general and the anglo-sphere in particular being an ideological project first, is especially vulnerable to Gramscian cultural warfare. You want to fuck over a society? Fuck with its ability to reproduce, both in the abstract via civic education and counter-proselytization and in the particular via gays furries and no-fault divorce. Surround the cooperators with defectors and let game theory do the rest. Or at least so the thinking goes.

But here's the thing, the Lord lays before us blessings and curses and then beckons us to choose. We all choose our company and civilization is a choice.

I think that the New Atheist are "anti-west" in a sense that they have parasitic relationship toward western values that they nominally hate. It is very similar to some other anti-west or anti-Christian ideologies: they heavily rely on subversion of existing values to move forward with their goals. What I mean by that is to take some value that is part of the culture - e.g. "we were all created equal by god" and then just use it to ram through their own redefined version, e.g. that equity is just an upgraded version of whatever you believed before. But these values lack anchoring, as soon as the host you have parasitic relationship with dies, there is no longer any basis whatsoever to move these values forward.

If I don't believe in god or soul or equality as some god-ordained transcendental Truth, then why should I care about this or that disadvantaged group? Indians did develop literal caste system that prevailed for thousands of years, it is not as if equality is the only way we can conduct in this world. Maybe people are created unequal and here are 7 reasons why it is a good thing to keep it that way [hint - they are outgroup].

It is the same whenever somebody tries to poke a little bit into value system Sam Harris has. He uses some big words familiar to people in rationalist spheres such as "promote human flourishing" or "decreasing suffering" in a sense that he wants to move from the "worst possible misery for everyone", a thing very evocative of the image of hell. In the end similarly to rationalists he lacks grounding of his morality. If one takes this supposed "new" morality at face value, one quickly finds himself in realm of maximizing some hypothetical utils of unborn people by bombing datacenters or something, maybe alternatively one sees utils expressed as tons of biomass thus maximizing number of ants in existence or some utter nonsense - at least nonsense as intuitively viewed from somebody still at least partially partaking in western/Christian ethos.

It goes haywire real fast, so I agree that it is insanity to expect anything resembling western values by deconstructing and sawing off not only the branch you are sitting on but basically creating nuke and bombing the whole forest just to see what beautiful things will emerge out of the rubble. It is inherently self-defeating game, Sam Harris will not produce mini Sam Harrises as they will have no desire to study Christianity or religion as Harris did, they will bot be raised by people adhering to same values that formed Harris. And it is not as if it is impossible, but I find it interesting how many people use adding up to normality as some kind of stopgap for obviously intuitively wrong conclusions - like eating babies. Except apparently eating babies was literally seen as normal in some societies, I am not that sure if we are not building one such at this point.

Those are some excellent points.

I feel like, to betray something, you have to have declared loyalty to it and then abandoned it and/or sided with its enemies. The New Atheists criticized Islam but they didn't pledge loyalty to some notion of the West as being a place that must be protected from all Muslim immigration. There is no betrayal when a bunch of classical liberals simultaneously criticize Islam and say that a total ban on Muslim immigration is wrong. Presumably, they believe that the right thing to do is to first let at least some Muslims come over and to then try to convert them to secular liberalism, rather than stopping all of them from coming over. You can argue that this is an unrealistic plan, but to call the whole thing a betrayal seems inaccurate to me.

What does it even mean to betray "the West"? Which West? The West is a hodgepodge of many different societies, many of which fundamentally disagree with and often hate each other. There are certain things that a large majority of people in the West do agree on. For example, that people should not be put in prison without due process. Or that it is good to have a pretty large level of free speech compared to authoritarian countries (though people in the West disagree about how much free speech is good, exactly). But the New Atheists are not going against anything that a large majority of The West supports when they disagree with a Muslim ban. At best you can accuse them of being too stupid to clearly perceive the possible danger of being demographically replaced by people who are fundamentally opposed to the things that the West agrees on. But that would not be betrayal, it would just be a failure of perception.

I feel like, to betray something, you have to have declared loyalty to it and then abandoned it and/or sided with its enemies. The New Atheists criticized Islam but they didn't pledge loyalty to some notion of the West as being a place that must be protected from all Muslim immigration. There is no betrayal when a bunch of classical liberals simultaneously criticize Islam and say that a total ban on Muslim immigration is wrong. Presumably, they believe that the right thing to do is to first let at least some Muslims come over and to then try to convert them to secular liberalism, rather than stopping all of them from coming over. You can argue that this is an unrealistic plan, but to call the whole thing a betrayal seems inaccurate to me.

Sam Harris absolutely has explicitly said that some societies are better than others and the West - i.e. the secular liberal democracies spawned by Western Europeans and their adopted East Asian allies - is the best. This is one of his main arguments against leftists academics: moral relativism and the refusal to accept this. He is 100% on the "swore allegiance to 'the West'"

Sam Harris went around claiming that it was highly plausible that France would have a civil war that'd kill millions over Islam. This was more than a decade ago mind. To a lot of people at the time (including me) it seemed at best to be hysteria or even outright race war fantasizing you see amongst neo-nazis who are eagerly waiting for the day of days. Simply suggesting it was disqualifying.

But he felt it strongly and stuck to it, including citing Eurabia about the upcoming Muslim majority (which, btw, defeats your "he was too stupid to clearly perceive the demographic danger". Putting aside whether Eurabia is accurate, he thought he perceived the danger).

Taken with his general views on Islam - which the article accurately lays out* - it absolutely is a problem I don't think he's ever resolved conclusively. I was all over New Atheist forums: this is a point the left-wing enemies of Harris constantly made: his argument strongly suggests ethnic cleansing or at least anti-Islamic immigration despite his steadfast refusal to connect those dots.

And Sam reliably came out to tell us that all of the right-wing European leaders saying as much may or may not be bad, but the problem is that "grown-up"' European leaders really should just do their anti-Islam work for them and defuse them because if liberals don't do it voters will elect fascists to do it. One of the right-wingers he's feted is Douglas Murray, who has explicitly backed removing as many Muslims as one can (though he seems to have basically become blackpilled now)

Yet Sam decided to insist that Trump's behavior was just totally incongruent with anything he said when he won (but also see the David Brooks quote about fascists and borders). I'm sorry, but people are right to point out the issue (he isn't the only one to have this problem - the author of this book somehow always puts on his Tucker Carlson face when European right-wingers take him at his word and attack Muslims).

I mainly put it down to just how fundamentally disgusted Sam was by Trump and the dangers of even pretending to side with him on anything. The people Sam respects and hangs around with would likely defenestrate him. Harris is, as a matter of demographics, the exact sort to loathe Trump despite his disagreements with leftists. In terms of character you could hardly think of someone more offensive to Harris on a visceral level, if you know anything about him or what he's written. Just take his book Lying....

If we're being charitable, he learned something from Bush where he seemed to have sympathetic instincts when it came to the War on Terror but it only seemed to make things worse, and Bush was actually restrained in many ways (Harris' most-loathed phrase about Islam was popularized by Bush).

* The article is arguably generous in that it attributes the problem to modern Islam. Harris has often put on his amateur historian and exegete hat to say Islam is in its fundamentals problematic and what are typically cited as its successes - precisely to defuse people like him - like the supposed tolerance in medieval Andalusia are mirages or at least oversold.

Even when he was writing a book about reforming Islam with Maajid Nawaz, he couldn't help but continually point out the whole endeavor basically involved lying and was incredibly difficult for Islam specifically.

If you control for race do muslim immigrants and their descendants assimilate and secularize less than christian immigrants? Or is it just that they are disproportionately arab and african? Intelligence correlates with economic success, low criminality, and atheism. I'm not saying that the actual content of islam must not be relevant, I genuinely don't know, but it's not something you can compare by just assuming other variables are equal.

You could blame them for commenting on immigration policy without taking HBD into account, but that is pretty expected for anyone close to the mainstream. The fact Sam Harris has discussed HBD at all makes him a rarity for a commenter of his prominence, even if he either didn't consider it in this case or thought it wasn't sufficient to make the policy a good idea.

and their descendants assimilate and secularize less than christian immigrants

I think the biggest confound here is that Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs are two non-overlapping collections of ethnic groups, and that Christian Arab ethnic groups probably rival Brahmins for genetic IQ while Muslim Arab ethnic groups definitely don’t. So Maronite and Coptic and Assyrian immigrants are highly successful wherever they go, including in societies where they face active discrimination(like their home societies) and tend to assimilate because they get rich. Muslim immigrants aren’t very successful, conversely, so a lot of them are stuck in their ghettos.

Surely this is an empirical question. What has Muslim immigration been like for America? What are Muslims in America actually like? PEW did a giant study back in 2007 that surveyed over 60000 Muslims in American and found they're... pretty similar to the general American public. Less likely to go to college and a little bit more likely to be poor. They did have more socially conservative views than the general American public but, like, "median American of 1994" not, like, "median American of the 1800's". I think it's pretty easy to believe that a substantial shift in the social beliefs of Muslims can occur over the course of some decades, given we have already seen such a shift occur in the general public's perception over a similar time frame. Maybe Islam is going to turn out to be inoculating against modernity in a way that Christianity or Judaism weren't but color me skeptical.

I’m not convinced. The behavior of Muslims doesn’t indicate they’re 1990s style Americans who are okay with other religions as equals. They’re absolutely not okay with gays, they don’t want women working, and so on. There are numerous videos of Muslims preaching that America or Europe will become Muslim. A Baptist preacher saying even 10% of that is a far right radical. A Baptist preacher saying that and blocking major roads for prayer services would be probably thrown out of the SBC.

A lot depends on how much of a filter immigration is, immigrants who go through a highly selective system are obviously going to be better than refugees or illegal immigrants who don't. Due to geographical proximity Europe has more unfiltered Muslim immigrants, and correspondingly has more problems with them. That said, I suspect that even for unfiltered immigrants a lot of the difference would disappear if you controlled for race.

They are suprisingly good, but that's mainly because we got alot of really high IQ elites (the Shah's Persians for example),

I mean, what fraction of US Muslims can this represent? There are over 3 million of them. The idea that they're substantially high IQ elites doesn't really square with their lower educational attainment and income.

and because our own great remplacement was already carried out by blacks in the inner cities and someone needs to provide the food trucks and groceries, and bear the risk of getting shot. But this hardly scales forever!..

Not sure I'm following the reasoning here. US Muslims are well integrated because Whites were replaced in the inner cities? A plurality (38%) of US Muslims are white.

Not sure I'm following the reasoning here. US Muslims are well integrated because Whites were replaced in the inner cities? A plurality (38%) of US Muslims are white.

There is a lucrative niche in providing goods and services in inner city black ghettos that are too dangerous for the big chains, and Muslims are definitely overrepresented there, but not as much as Koreans or East Indians seem to be. Frankly I doubt that this is a major assimilating force for American Muslims because staying in a separate ethnic group with different rules seems to be part of the success formula for these people.

I mean, what fraction of US Muslims can this represent? There are over 3 million of them. The idea that they're substantially high IQ elites doesn't really square with their lower educational attainment and income.

“Elite” might be overselling it, but there are 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide. The 3 million Muslims in America are only 0.17% of the global population of Muslims. It’s a small enough number for selection effects to have had a significant impact.

Not sure I'm following the reasoning here. US Muslims are well integrated because Whites were replaced in the inner cities? A plurality (38%) of US Muslims are white.

He’s talking about the same economic niche lots of other first-generation immigrants fill in cities. Think of the stereotypical bottle shop or grocery store run by a family of immigrants from China or Korea (“roof Koreans”). They’re saying these economic opportunities exist because the pre-existing population of working & middle class white Americans all left for the suburbs during the second half of the 20th century (“white flight”)

This reminds me of my tenure on the Atheism+ forums, back before my redpilling/blackpilling (I don't know what to call it, since I didn't really change my beliefs, I just realized the people I thought were on my side, aren't).

A+, as you know, was woker than woke before "woke" became a thing. And one of my "WTF?" moments when I realized these people are fucking crazy is when they went hard on defending... Muslims. Not against general racism and bigotry, but against criticisms that the "New Atheists" had no problem applying to every other religion.

At one point, the forum got trolled hard by a poster from one of the hater-forums who monitored them, a set of people running an account that adopted the persona of a gay man who proceeded to post long effort-posts about the connection between homophobia and Islamophobia, and how seeing the latter "triggered" him, as a gay man, despite the fact that he was an atheist.

The mods on the A+ forum proceeded to take him very seriously and started modding comments that were too "Islamophobic."

He also declared that the term "homosexual" was homophobic. The mods proceeded to mod anyone who used the word homosexual.

I was one of the few people who pushed back and kept getting in arguments with him, until he eventually DMed me and let me know what the game was. I already suspected something of the sort, because to any sane person his arguments were so transparently nonsensical. But the mods and the other SJWs on the forum ate it up.

As to your broader point, I think liberals like Maher and Harris suffer from a misapprehension that I had myself until recently (my beliefs have changed on this one): that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them until they are just like the rest of us, and we'll have a big joint Christmas/Hannuka/Ramadan holiday season.

This does happen to an extent. Moderate Muslims in the West are... mostly like the rest of us. I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment." (Leaving aside the arguments from some of our resident Christians that post-Enlightenment Christianity isn't real Christianity at all.) I don't think Islam is some sort of unique Neal Stephenson mind virus that turns its followers into violent p-zombies even if many of Islam's critics do.

But I am pessimistic about Islam, in its current form, being capable of coexisting long-term with other ideologies. I have a lot of other uncharitable and blackpilling thoughts I've been tossing around and trying to decide how much of it is Chinese Cardiology and selection bias.

I do think a blanket "Muslim ban" is stupid (and clearly unconstitutional). But a ban on importing large numbers of people from countries that just happen to be dominated by Muslims of an uncompromising, anti-Western, pro-jihadist bent does not seem irrational or bigoted to me, but it would be hard to frame it in a way that would be acceptable to those who believe Islam is "just another religion."

that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them

I say, who cares? I mean yes, maybe in 400 years the barbarians' descendants would be as civilized as we are now, or much more, and their descendants would look with horror on what is being done now and conduct ceremonies to honor the innocent victims of Islamic terror in 20th-21th centuries. Why should I care whether it happens or not? I won't live in 400 years, I am living now and the barbarians are committing their barbaric atrocities now. Screw that 1000-year stare the ivory tower idiots try to sell us because they read a couple of history book and now they think for some reason they are oh so much smarter than the rest. If there are barbarians now, they should be judged now. If some crazy Christian dude would come and try to burn heretics on the central square of my city, I think he should be jailed, and if he resists, shot. I want the same treatment for crazy dudes of all religions. If declaring "it's just another religion" helps that, so be it, I don't care. I don't see why either way would matter here.

The thing we need to realize here is we don't need any special case for Islam. On the contrary, we should stop applying special cases for Islam - and that's what is happening constantly in the wokesphere. Rape? Of course it's horrible, one of the most horrible sins imaginable! Oh, you mean it's done by fanatical Islamists who proclaim to be oppressed? Ah, that's different business, we need a nuanced approach here! Woman oppression? That's bullshit, maaan! Oh, you mean woman oppression in Saudi Arabia? Maaan, you can't apply your morals there! Well, yes, I can. Screw that. That's the root of all evil here. If we ever manage our culture to stop doing that, we'd win 99% of the battle already.

But I am pessimistic about Islam, in its current form, being capable of coexisting long-term with other ideologies

Again, I say I don't care, it's not my problem. I mean, it's not on me to figure out how to make requirements on Quran work in the modern world. What needs to be done is the uniform demand to live by the modern world rules, no ifs, no buts, no coconuts, no discounts and "nuanced approaches". If you can do it and keep the Quran - fine, keep it. I don't mind at all, I don't care what you do to achieve it, whatever works for you. If you can't - you should be either forced to, or be forcibly expelled from the places where civilized people live. That should be the test - whether you can follow the civilized society rules.

As to your broader point, I think liberals like Maher and Harris suffer from a misapprehension that I had myself until recently (my beliefs have changed on this one): that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them until they are just like the rest of us, and we'll have a big joint Christmas/Hannuka/Ramadan holiday season.

I can say for a fact that this is untrue. Sam's entire career has been about arguing with liberals who think this.

I would argue he doesn't just think it's pernicious today (though in normie arguments he'll often focus on that). No, his phrase was "the only problem with Islamic fundamentalism is the fundamentals of Islam"

He had basically the same speech to give to everyone and it was:

  1. Islam says it's the final speech of God with no reformation possible. No fallible prophets you can blame bad words on, God is telling you himself to beat women (Q4:34) so it is what it is.
  2. The problems we see in the Muslim world are the direct result of this faith and its inherent problems, Westerners who believe it's just radicalization cause the West was mean are narcissists fooling themselves The West didn't do it to them, so the West fixing it for them by no longer exploiting Muslims is dubious.
  3. Islam was a religion made by and for a conquering warlord, and thus has no "render unto Caesar" secularizing principle.
  4. Islam has no "out" like Judaism got when the Temple was destroyed and Jews were so demographically overwhelmed they eventually had to reform.

If you want to see him break out the classics he basically hits most of the notes in this one video

Yes, he will say that he thinks Islam should be reformed and we need progressive Muslims. But he will also basically say those are noble lies and the rest of us (or him at least) need to say the truth. And yes, he recognizes this contradiction and has no solution for it.

I'm more familiar with Bill Maher than Sam Harris, so I believe you. I think he's unfortunately correct.

One problem is that most of the arguments that can be used in favor of a Muslim ban can also be used in favor of banning people who have far-left or far-right views. Even if there might be some good pragmatic reasons for being wary of Islam, banning Islam is a slippery slope towards banning every militant ideology that is incompatible with the mainstream of today's West. But I would not want to live in a country that is even as censorious as modern Germany, much less China. Personally I think that Islam is stupid, but I think that communism and fascism are stupid too, and I perceive that banning communists, fascists, and Muslims from immigrating to the US, aside from just grating very strongly against my pro-free-speech attitude, would also open a whole can of worms that could potentially lead to banning even people with much less far-out political views, myself included.

Adding onto this, as a participant in New Atheism at the time it was definitely noticed by some atheists that what the evangelical Christian right (at their generational height of power in the Bush administration) said about Muslims while calling for bans on them, leveling the middle east, profiling and so on matched and rhymed with the things that they also said about us. Given many new atheists were former evangelicals in heavily religious areas, myself included, we were quite familiar with how much hatred they had for "secular humanism" and atheists in particular.

There was a distinct feeling that if the Bush administration put this unpopular religious minority on the chopping block, we could end up being targeted down the line in the sense of the "first they came for the socialists, and I did nothing because I was not a socialist" speech.

This is a very self serving far left take which justifies Christian hostility towards "secular humanists".

The neocons are influential now and wrecking harm and new atheism had plenty of crossover with that but you are going to frame your political coalition as the victims by focusing on the past. This fails to address the current problems of our time and gives excessive sympathy over the past to atheists.

"secular humanists" have had their influence and have targeted others especially Christians, so please stop with this victimhood narrative. Atheists are one of the groups that poll as one of the most pro censorship in fact.

Importantly, the ideology of these atheists has western civilization at a trajectory of destruction. It is justifiable to suppress that ideology just for not caring about extinction and low fertility rates. If atheists in general were so good, they wouldn't poll so far to the left. Now, I think personally that there are some wise atheists so I am against hostility towards every atheistic person in a general manner from political discourse. But I don't buy into this idea of atheists as on average the wise people who have abadoned stupid dogma.

And even their anti religious sentiment seems to somehow focus especially against Christianity, with certain other religions (less so Islam) getting much less criticism.

Now, there are problems with Christianity and progressive Christianity is a disaster that shares the pathologies of the "secular humanists" so there also needs to be a significant change but the reality is ironically that a Christian society of a somewhat conservative bent is more successful in creating a society ruled by humanism than "secular humanists" have ever been. It is a model that worked, while you "secular humanist" atheists have behaved in inhumane and destructive manner in societies you ruled over. Albeit the term secular humanism is a misnomer and those using it are not eager to gatekeep that their faction does not include cruel fanatics willing to be inhuman in the name of humanism. Moreover, there are tradeoffs and some of the rules and behaviors encouraged by Christianity are actually necessary components of a lasting civilized society.

So rather than recreating a wise framework from a "secular" perspective, the "secular humanists" just adopt, or are in fact part of the leaders of a far left ideological dogma that works badly. The vaccum left by Christianity's decline does not lead to less fanaticism, as the new ideological religion is promoted with fanaticism.

Today, Christians are arrested in Britain for silently praying in abortion centers. When a trans mass shooter kills Christian kids due to anti christian and anti white racism, the American goverment promotes transgenders as the victim. Not to mention all other left wing associated racism against whites who are more right wing coded and direct promotion of progressive stack. So enough with this idea of groups in a left wing framing due to events of the past are the victims against the right wing oppressor. Especially funny you bring up the socialists when they have also done their own great share of crimes.

This one sided obsession is incredibly destructive, and atheistic anti christian types have been rather willing to use power to screw over others in modern history. Have some humility and consider your own faction's sins, and whether your faction's influence have made things worse.

Are you using ChatGPT? The longwinded passages that read as if responding to things that weren't said in my post have certain qualities and odd phrasing that are seriously tripping my AI-generated content radar.

Instead of responding to anything of substance you just throw some false accusations. If 2 days pass and you haven't come up with something that addresses the actual post, it is better if you say nothing.

I'm still suspicious.

This is a very self serving

The argument revolves around self preservation.

far left take

I was a rightist at the time, as were all atheists I knew, and I would still be one for another decade afterwards. One doesn't have to like a group's beliefs - and I very much dislike Islam - to be against empowering others to inflict collective punishment and wage concerted attempts at destroying them. You've already advanced to arguing that atheism is incompatible with western civilization, which is what was being said in the arguments building up for going after rando Muslims.

if you are gonna side with savages to litigate trivial matters like the fact that people won't vote for self-described atheists, you deserve to be wiped out and remembered only as an enemy of humanity, or of the only part of it worth anything anyway

This is far too antagonistic, even framed as a hypothetical. The bar for arguing that any person or group literally deserves death and/or damnatio memoriae is high, though perhaps permissible when accompanied by sufficient effort; arguing that someone you are talking to here personally deserves such things for things they've said here is a hard no. You appear to be new here so I won't hit you with a ban straightaway, but please understand that this is a banworthy offense.

The jump straight to murder and/or genocide, saying that I "deserve to be wiped out and remembered only as the enemy of humanity, or of the only part of it worth anything at least" is excellent evidence vindicating concerns of being targeted after the "savages."

You said to my face you want to kill me and genocide atheists. There's nothing tiny about it. You've made it explicitly clear that yes, empowering those who want to enact collective punishment and persecution on entire religious and ethnic groups would indeed put atheists at risk of being next. After seeing that gauntlet thrown down, I have nothing further to discuss with you outside of a courtroom or a battlefield.

Hold up, are you not linking your own substack, or are you talking about yourself in the 3rd person?

most of the arguments that can be used in favor of a Muslim ban can also be used in favor of banning people who have far-left or far-right views

We are overburdened with too many communists and fellow travelers in the US. Let's not import any more

Personally I think that Islam is stupid, but I think that communism and fascism are stupid too, and I perceive that banning communists, fascists, and Muslims from immigrating to the US, aside from just grating very strongly against my pro-free-speech attitude, would also open a whole can of worms

Communists are already banned from immigrating to the US.

I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment."

Whatever about the Enlightenment, what made me laugh (I don't see it so much these days, if it's still going around) is the notion that what Islam needs is the Reformation.

Dude, (1) have you any idea what the Reformation was all about and (2) Islam had its Reformation, just like the European one: go back to the bare word of the holy books, no intermediaries, strip away all the accretion of worldly ideas, pull down the images and luxurious living. The Taliban who blew up the Buddhas were Reformers in the same vein as those who smashed the statues in churches all across Europe.

This pop-culture notion of the Reformation being all about 'freedom of conscience' and 'the church can't tell me what to do' is one that comes very long after the aftermath of the Wars of Religion and the fissiparous nature of Protestantism, particularly in America, where denominations split and split again over disputes as to interpretation of the Scriptures and godly living, so that eventually through exhaustion, Western societies were "we won't have a state church, and where we do, it will be subordinate to the civil government and not the other way round". Calvin tussled with the civil authorities as to who would have authority in Geneva and won in his lifetime, but after his death the civil authorities gradually pulled back power into their own hands.

Islam had its Reformation

It also had its own Enlightenment. The Golden Age of Islam and the whole Abbasid Caliphate was very loosey goosey with its Islam, with a focus on education, science, and (often Greek) philosophy for a few centuries until everything got buttoned up during the Middle Ages and especially after Al Ghazali. There's a reason that, of what wasn't from the Greeks, a lot of the recovery of mathematics and philosophy in the European Renaissance was recovery of texts from the Islamic world (which was simultaneously becoming less interested in these things).

Yeah, Protestantism may have contributed to the growth of liberalism, but in itself it was not a very liberal movement. You can see that by looking at Martin Luther's calls to suppress peasant rebellions, or at the nature of the Puritans' society.

the nature of the Puritans' society.

That damned nonconformist John Locke was a real anti-liberal, you know.

This is something that's always struck me about calls for reform. Consider something like Quranism, the idea that Muslims should reject the sunnah and hadith, and this long tradition of interpretation and jurisprudence, and return to the purity of the Qur'an. As you can see, the wiki article on it is written mostly from a Western perspective and is very sympathetic to the idea, seeing it as more open and tolerant than the alternative.

It's just - did we forget the Protestant Reformation entirely?

Throwing out all tradition and interpretation and bypassing all the mediating institutions of a tradition is something that was attempted in Europe. The result was well over a century of bloody, fratricidal war and a multitude of new sects, many of which were more fanatical and violent than the order they originally criticised. Throwing out interpretation in favour of acting according to the original, pure divine revelation is a recipe for fanaticism, not tolerance!

(For what it's worth I say this as a Protestant; I don't mean that the Reformation was 'wrong', whatever specific claim you might attach to that. But the Reformation certainly had a price.)

It's just - did we forget the Protestant Reformation entirely?

Yes. The post modernists told us that the past didn't matter and "the intelligentsia" believed them.

I'm not sure if you mean me, but I know the Reformation was not about "freedom of conscience." I refer to the Enlightenment because that is generally regarded as the period in which the church lost much of its grip on state power. (Yes, I know it's more complicated than that, yes, I know "the Enlightenment" is a term like "Dark Ages" and the "Middle Ages" that doesn't neatly define a time period or movement.) The point is that Islam has never had any real subordination to civil authority. Muslim countries controlled by secular authorities generally need to use pretty brutal suppression methods and still give lip service to being Islamic.

Of course the Reformation is something different. Islam has had several (arguable) equivalents. Certainly it's had many schisms, the Shia/Sunni one being only the most notable.

I'm not sure if you mean me

No, I didn't. But it was a popular view in media articles a few years back, and I got dizzy from simultaneously shaking my head and rolling my eyes. Part of that is down to the lingering anti-Catholicism which swallowed the view of "heroic Reformers standing up against a dictatorial Church" and imagined that carried over to modern Christianity, where now the "dictatorial Church" wasn't the Pope any more but the Evangelicals, and the liberalised mainline Protestant denominations were the 'heroic Reformers'. "Hey, this lady clergyperson from one of the Seven Sisters denominations is wearing a rainbow stole and marching for abortion rights, now that's what the Reformation was all about and that's why Islam needs one!"

Yeah, I would love to see the faces of Luther, Calvin, etc. when looking at that example 😁

Yeah, I would love to see the faces of Luther, Calvin, etc. when looking at that example.

No you wouldn't. Cruelty helps no one.

Why would it be cruel? The denominations that went liberal have Good Biblical Justifications for their decisions (mainly "Jesus is all about love") and the Reformers based their demands on "the unmodified word of Scripture (as we interpret it)". They certainly never envisaged the day of lesbian lady clergypersons marching for abortion, but that's what you get when "every man has a pope in his own belly", as they found out quite soon. That's not what the Reformation was about, but it's what the modern view of the Reformation thinks it was about.

"every man has a pope in his own belly"

Isn't it Catholics who are usually accused of cannibalism (based on transsubstantiation)?

Generally! But y'know, if you're going to do the "sacrifice a god" thing, you should commit fully to it!

It's one of those times that far-group and out-group are useful distinctions.

For the New Atheists, Christianity was the out-group. They lived/live in majority Christian countries. Christianity was the dominant religious and cultural force, and that was their enemy. Cool secular scientific rational materialism was being oppressed and kept down by the Bible-bashers.

Islam? That's the far-group. They weren't living under Islamic religious rules in Muslim-majority countries. So they could patronise Muslims and get the extra benefit of pats on the head for not being mean to all religions, just to the nasty ones like Christianity.

I also think the New Atheists/Atheism+ just didn't understand the reasons why people believe. If you're a believer, it's because you're stupid and/or hypocritical. You can't really mean the things you say you believe. So if you're anyway smart, you're going to be influenced by Western secularism and become more liberal, on the way to dumping religion completely. That people can sincerely hold and believe traditional tenets is one of those "does not compute" moments for them.

Hence why Dawkins etc. clamoured for arrest the Pope but never bothered calling for arresting the Grand Imam. Muslims just were not a threat to them or their way of life or their influence or power (such as it was).

For the New Atheists, Christianity was the out-group.

Nah, that’s not it. Harris and Dawkins took tons of shit from A+ and the rest for being ‘islamophobic’. They know full well that Islam is far worse than Christianity (or Jainism, to take Harris’ favourite comparison), they just aren’t ready to compromise on liberalism (eg, free speech and immigration restrictions on muslims). They hope that liberalism will work like it has worked so many times before, even as it faces a more formidable enemy. An enemy whose primary weapon, death for apostates and critics, is designed to counter liberalism’s weapon, free speech. Sadly, I think the compromise is necessary. The risk is just not worth it.

But liberals have compromised repeatedly against freedom of speech. And Sam Harris have endorsed an ends justifies the means ideology. But is Sam Harris even a liberal or a neocon? That this question isn't asked, tells us what kind of ideology the tribe of people calling themselves liberals are comprised off. Plenty of far leftists and neocons there.

There is something more going on than principles here.

What is going on is that liberals have much less will to power and are more quoka like when it comes to standing up against groups associated with the left and the narrative tm. This also applies to those who might make an exception for one particular demographic.

This has to do with the history of the left, and how it has sided with said nationalisms, and political tribalism. It also has to do with the phenomenon of "running from the far right". The attempt to not be a far righter and have positions that are associated with the far right ends up with people endorsing unreasonable and unfair positions, since they are unwilling to actually admit that maybe those they consider as far right extremists are right on SOME things.

Given that liberalism successfully defeated both national socialism and communism, all in the span of just 100 years or so, I don't see why Islam is supposed to be such a big threat to it. National socialism and communism even had the advantages of being mainly preached by white-looking people in economically advanced and militarily powerful countries, as opposed to mainly being preached by foreign-looking people in weak countries. Also, unlike with communism, there is very little danger of influential politicians and intellectuals in the West converting to Islam. At most they might be sympathetic to Islam.

And if you think specifically about secular liberalism, well, one can argue that secular liberalism didn't even just outcompete national socialism and communism in the span of 100 years, it also, while it was doing all that, basically ended Christianity as a political force in the West after first using it as an ally of convenience against national socialism and communism. Secular liberalism should not be underestimated. It has some powerful advantages against other ideologies.

I think liberalism would win anyway, but I’d rather not have The Eastern Front, Civil War Edition , if all it takes to avoid it is closing the border and telling imams they can’t teach death for apostasy anymore. As you say, islam is so weak that expansion by the sword is not even an option for it, unlike nazism and communism. So the wolf is not really at the door-door, we can just tell him to fuck off. It would be a huge own-goal to import a problem that’s so easily avoided. Let liberalism and islam duke it out in their countries, and they can have their algerian civil wars instead of us.

I'm not into that but to be fair, I am realizing now that the version of liberalism that defeated the Nazis and communists was quite a bit less liberal than the version that I want. For example, communists were actually persecuted back in the first half of the 20th century in the West.

It was not "liberalism" that "persecuted" communists. Liberals were often fellow travelers.

The society that defeated the nazis was not ideologically liberal but had a mixture of liberal and non liberal beliefs. Like in fact most of the people called far right extremists and hated by liberals today.

Contrarily, most people who complain more about the far right today have insufficiently conservative views and are also insufficiently pro groups associated with the right.

It is not fair for liberals who are quite more far to the left and antinativist, to claim that they are part of the same tradition to people who are actually part of a different tradition. Modern liberalism is part of the new left and it represents a break from the past. It is continuous from some extremists that existed in that period too, but not the general society. It is much more far to the left and antiwhite than what Eisenhower or Churchil argued for. Of course neither figure was successful in the domestic culture war on the long term.

I don't agree with focusing on intolerance to far left communists in the first half of 20th century as the problem of liberalism.

As society and elite institutions became more liberal and left wing this did not result in less authoritarianism.

For a half-century, academics denied that there was substantial endorsement of authoritarianism among the left in the democratic West (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996) or of its psychological underpinnings, such as dogmatism (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski & Sulloway, 2003; see also Forgas, this volume). More recent research, however, has found ample evidence of leftwing authoritarianism (Conway, Houck, Gornick & Repke, 2018; Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, Tasimi & Lilienfeld, 2022). Leftwing authoritarianism (LWA) is characterized by dogmatism, social vigilantism, prejudice against outgroups, anti-hierarchical aggression, and willingness to censor one’s opponents (see also Forgas, this volume).

snip

The main outcome assessed was how many participants agreed with at least one of the modified Hitler quotes. 55% of college student participants agreed with at least one Hitler quote when it was applied to White people. Figure 1 presents the means by participant political identity (progressive liberal, moderate, conservative) and by the group used in the Hitler quote (Jews, Whites, Blacks). Endorsement of the Hitler quote when referring to White people was significantly higher across the board. This was especially true for U.S. liberals, who also showed the highest overall endorsement (55% vs < 40% for moderates and conservatives) of the Hitler quote when applied to Whites. Bernstein and Bleske-Rechek (2023) found a very similar pattern of endorsement of the rhetoric in DiAngelo’s White Fragility as was obtained for Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-new-book-burners

Moreover, seems that this discussion is full of people who are forgetting the neocons.

Are coups, CIA involvement, and politicians like Zelensky who ban political parties and don't oppose new elections part of liberalism? Is the American miliary industrial complex, AIPAC, thinktanks, the lobyists who fund them and politicians like Nikki Haley who also is ex director of Boeing part of liberalism? Because they seem to be pushing for constantly more authoritarianism. What about the highly influential ADL and the mainstream liberal parties that are also promoting more censorship?

Is Greenwald and Snowden, and Manning and Assange, part of liberalism, or the enemies?

If we define liberalism more narrowly, then liberals should be less arrogant about their current victory. A question arises if they even qualify. And if we define it more broadly, then it isn't the principled pro freedom, pro rights, against racism ideology that it is claimed to be.

Is modern South Africa a success of liberalism, or a failure? Unlike the academics who see no evil, hear no evil and can't see left wing extremism, we should examine this.

What about those who support mass migration and are against islamophobia, and are antinative racists and support hate speech laws to enforce this ideology? Do people who defend rhetoric like "kill the boer" such as ADL qualify as liberals?

To conclude, there is a confusion about what liberalism means from liberals and is hard to separate it with far leftism and even warmongers, neocons, the American establishment and the desires of partisans for say the uniparty, or Democrats in particular.

What you advocate will likely end with the muslims who claim they will take over the west, and other groups who do this, to succeed. And no it won't be an elimination of tribalism and a freer society.

Has the last decade lead to "liberal" societies becoming freer or less free under this trajectory of the tribe of liberals gaining more influence?

They became less free and more in the direction of discriminatory hateful antinativist authoritarian states which are indeed lead by people who are incapable of standing up to fanaticism if promoted by the ethnic groups they sympathize with. And this element is key for liberalism's willingness for prioritizing "rights" is applied in a wildly inconsistent manner.

the version of liberalism that defeated the Nazis and communists was quite a bit less liberal than the version that I want.

Yes, the Nazis allowed quarter-jewish people to marry Germans while many white Americans were not allowed to marry quarter-black Americans.

It's not really free speech, freedom of religion, or due process that defeated the nazis but overwhelming fire-power and millions of slavic bodies.

Modern secular liberalism does not seem capable of sustaining birthrates, so all the muslims have to do is come in and wait for the old liberals to die out for a victory by default.

Near-group and far-group was part of it, but a larger part, IMO, was that Muslims code as POC (notwithstanding the tiny number of white converts) and thus can only be the oppressed, never the oppressors.

Moderate Muslims in the West are... mostly like the rest of us. I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment." (Leaving aside the arguments from some of our resident Christians that post-Enlightenment Christianity isn't real Christianity at all.) I don't think Islam is some sort of unique Neal Stephenson mind virus that turns its followers into violent p-zombies even if many of Islam's critics do.

"Moderate Muslims" are mostly people who are not particularly islamic; they eat turkey bacon while getting drunk the night before sleeping through morning prayer. Now I suspect that it's possible that devout Muslims in the west could be very like Christian fundamentalists, who are, reddit to the contrary, very rarely a problem, but you'll notice they're still a breed apart.

I do think a blanket "Muslim ban" is stupid (and clearly unconstitutional). But a ban on importing large numbers of people from countries that just happen to be dominated by Muslims of an uncompromising, anti-Western, pro-jihadist bent does not seem irrational or bigoted to me, but it would be hard to frame it in a way that would be acceptable to those who believe Islam is "just another religion."

I mean Assyrians and Maronites make great citizens, but shias and sunnis from their same countries do not. Obviously we could openly discriminate but that's illegal.

they eat turkey bacon

There is nothing wrong with eating turkey bacon as long as the animal was slaughtered in a halal manner.

There is much that it is wrong with eating "turkey bacon", most notably that turkey is not bacon.

Well yes, the point was that following Islam is inconsistent for these people. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, either way it’s not really out of religious devotion.

That's what the ideal is, though. "Culturally Muslim" like "Culturally Catholic" or Methodist or what have you. Keep some of the traditions for the Exotic Old Country flavour, be steeped in the modern secular liberal Western values of the surrounding society, and have "our mosque has a female imam" service attendance for the big cultural holidays (whatever the Muslim version of Christmas-and-Easter is).

That's what meant by and understood as "moderate Muslims"; the kind who won't rock the boat and are indistinguishable, apart from skin colour and maybe names, from the people around them. The sort of "diversity" that isn't diverse ideologically. A Muslim who is orthodox and follows the teachings is tolerable, the same as with Christians, so long as they know their place: religion is a private matter and you don't get to intrude it in the public square.

But that has nothing to do with Turkey bacon, which is fine.

The point was to include one Islamically influenced behavior in a list of haram ones. Maybe ‘breaks Ramadan with Turkey bacon’ would have been better.

I doubt that they would be ok with banning a group of white people who had a similar religion, either.

What is a similar religion to Islam practiced by mostly white people? A handful of neonazi cults that are already illegal in lots of places?

It is not necessarily the case that non-discrimination on ethnic/religious grounds is sacred to them, they might simply put a high premium on it and accept the other negative consequences as acceptable. I am using "sacred" in the sense of something very deeply cherished, just to make myself clear in case a few pedants show up. US immigration is/was selective enough that that they were content with the status quo prior to the "Muslim ban", which only targeted a few specific countries and not even the bulk of Muslim majority nations.

I do not expect any of the people cited to be so inflexible on the matter that they'd advocate for card-carrying members of ISIS to be fast-tracked.

I don't think they believe Islam is uniquely evil and irredeemable but we have to endure it because POC. I think they believe Islam as currently practiced in Islamic countries is still stuck in the pre-modern age where Christianity once was, which makes it "uniquely evil" in our modern era. There's a distinction between "Islam is objectively worse than other religions today" and "Islam is a unique existential threat that rationally we should treat as Ebola."

I used to be a big Harris acolyte, so my read on him over multiple podcasts, interviews, and books was something like:

"Pound for pound, the Old Testament may have more content we'd find objectionable than that in the Quran. Despite that, there are wrinkles in Islam such as the Hadith that are difficult (if not impossible) to detangle from the religion - a necessary component for its defanging and modernization. WWJD and WWMD entail very different behaviors, and the horrific negative consequences of the latter make Islam inherently and uniquely more problematic to deal with than any other world religion. Even if the others were 'worse' by several other metrics, none pose the challenges that Islam does, both historical and modern."

He had a long-running dialogue with Maajid Nawaz over this specific issue, trying to find a path forward for Islam and modernity. A decent effort, but I got the impression he was never particularly hopeful about its prospects. Essentially, there are features of Islam that preclude it from ever becoming sufficiently progressive in the way Christianity did - at least on a timescale or with the population numbers he'd be comfortable with.

Shit, I should have checked if some other former Harrisite had basically made the point more succinctly. To try to emphasize:

He had a long-running dialogue with Maajid Nawaz over this specific issue, trying to find a path forward for Islam and modernity

In his first meeting with Maajid they apparently got into an argument because Harris paid him a backhanded compliment of saying his work was necessary but essentially a noble lie. That tells you all you need to know.

Even in the book they eventually wrote -Islam and the Future of Tolerance - he was throwing cold water on his own reforming project:

Harris: I said, essentially, this:

Maajid, I have a question for you. It seems to me that you have a nearly impossible task and yet much depends on your being able to accomplish it. You want to convince the world—especially the Muslim world—that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by extremists. But the problem is that Islam isn’t a religion of peace, and the so-called “extremists” are seeking to implement what is arguably the most honest reading of the faith’s actual doctrine. So your maneuvers on the stage tonight—the claims you made about interpretations of scripture and the historical context in which certain passages in the Qur’an must be understood—appear disingenuous.

Everyone in this room recognizes that you have the hardest job in the world, and everyone is grateful that you’re doing it. Someone has to try to reform Islam from within, and it’s obviously not going to be an apostate like Ayaan, or infidels like Douglas and me. But the path of reform appears to be one of pretense. You seem obliged to pretend that the doctrine is something other than it is—for instance, you must pretend that jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle, whereas it’s primarily a doctrine of holy war. I’d like to know whether this is, in fact, the situation as you see it. Is the path forward a matter of pretending certain things are true long enough and hard enough so as to make them true?

...

Harris   The tensions you’ve been describing are familiar to all religious moderates, but they seem especially onerous under Islam. The problem is that moderates of all faiths are committed to reinterpreting, or ignoring outright, the most dangerous and absurd parts of their scripture—and this commitment is precisely what makes them moderates. But it also requires some degree of intellectual dishonesty, because moderates can’t acknowledge that their moderation comes from outside the faith. The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside. In the twenty-first century, the moderate’s commitment to scientific rationality, human rights, gender equality, and every other modern value—values that, as you say, are potentially universal for human beings—comes from the past thousand years of human progress, much of which was accomplished in spite of religion, not because of it. So when moderates claim to find their modern, ethical commitments within scripture, it looks like an exercise in self-deception. The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specific teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there.

...

So when you say that no religion is intrinsically peaceful or warlike, and that every scripture must be interpreted, I think you run into problems, because many of these texts aren’t all that elastic. They aren’t susceptible to just any interpretation, and they commit their adherents to specific beliefs and practices. You can’t say, for instance, that Islam recommends eating bacon and drinking alcohol. And even if you could find some way of reading the Qur’an that would permit those things, you can’t say that its central message is that a devout Muslim should consume as much bacon and alcohol as humanly possible. Nor can one say that the central message of Islam is pacifism. (However, one can say that about Jainism. All religions are not the same.) One simply cannot say that the central message of the Qur’an is respect for women as the moral and political equals of men. To the contrary, one can say that under Islam, the central message is that women are second-class citizens and the property of the men in their lives.

I want to be clear that when I used terms such as “pretense” and “intellectual dishonesty” when we first met, I wasn’t casting judgment on you personally. Simply living with the moderate’s dilemma may be the only way forward, because the alternative would be to radically edit these books. I’m not such an idealist as to imagine that will happen. We can’t say, “Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interests of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we’re going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go … Don’t you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?” However, that’s really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century. Again, this problem confronts religious moderates everywhere, but it’s an excruciating problem for Muslims

Honestly, this feels like someone almost contractually obligated to claim he has an alternative.


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