Donald Trump at CPAC 2013 (video) (transcript):

Now this is a hard one, because when it comes to immigration, you know that the 11 million illegals, even if given the right to vote. You know you're going to have to do what's right. But the fact is 11 million people will be voting Democratic. You can be out front, you can be the spearhead, you can do whatever you want to do, but every one of those 11 million people will be voting Democratic. It's just the way it works, and you have to be very, very careful, because you could say, that to a certain extent, the odds aren't looking so great right now for Republicans, that you're on a suicide mission. You're just not going to get those votes. [emphasis added]

What Trump said is:

Immigration is hard because the 11 million illegals are all going to vote Democratic after we give them the right to vote. And we "have to" give them the right to vote because that's "what's right". But we should be "careful" doing it because its' a "suicide mission" for Republicans. (But do it anyway.)

Why is it right to give illegal aliens the right to vote in America? Are we a country of laws, or not? This isn't just some kind of legal resident status (which would be bad enough), Trump is saying we have to give every illegal full citizenship including voting. No we don't have to do that! No that's not right!

I'm not surprised that Trump is a squishy leftist.

I already knew Trump was a protectionist with no clue about the free market. I already knew Trump praised Obama in 2009.

I already knew Trump favors eminent domain, doesn't like guns, is pro-choice, has New York values, sympathizes with social justice warriors, and isn't very religious. I knew Trump favors big government healthcare because he has a "heart". And Trump favored taking in Syrian refugees, and funding Planned Parenthood, before changing his position.

I already knew Trump doesn't want to cutback on Social Security and Medicare. His ridiculous entitlements plan (that he advocated at CPAC 2013 and 2014, not just on the campaign trail today) is no reforms or cutbacks, just grow the economy and don't worry about spending. Trump is not a small government kinda guy.

I already knew Trump had praised Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Al Sharpton. I already knew he was involved with some of the worst leftists. I already knew thinks he can make deals with the left as President, instead of standing up to the Washington Cartel.

I already knew that Trump was squishy as hell on Free Speech – when Muslim terrorists attacked a free speech event in Texas, Trump questioned why people say offensive things that "taunt" Islamofascists.

What surprises me is that Ann Coulter praised Trump's 2013 CPAC speech and cited it as evidence that Trump has a previous history of being good on immigration:

The assumption Ann's readers will make is that Trump is against suicide. Nope. Trump was demanding suicide!

He wasn't saying, "It's suicide, don't do it." He was saying, "It's suicide, so be 'careful' with it, but we 'have to' do it anyway because it's 'right'."

How can Ann take a speech where Trump advocates giving every illegal alien the right to vote in US elections – even though he thinks this will destroy the Republican party – and then tell us to support Trump (as a Republican!) because he's great on immigration? Why is Ann covering for Trump on the one issue she cares about?

Ann told us that Trump was the one guy joined her in opposing immigration in CPAC 2014.

But Trump said the same thing again:

When you let the 11 million — which will grow to 30 million people — in, I don't care who stands up, whether it's Marco Rubio, and talks about letting everybody in, you won't get one vote. Every one of those votes goes to the Democrats. You have to do what's right; it's not about the votes necessarily. But of those 11 million potential voters which will go to 30 million in a not too long future, you will not get any of those votes no matter what you do, no matter how nice you are, no matter how soft you are, no matter how many times you say 'rip down the fence and let everybody in' you're not going to get the votes. So with immigration, you better be smart and you better be tough, and they're taking your jobs, and you better be careful. You better be careful. [emphasis added]

This transcript isn't perfect. He actually said it twice in the video at 14:50: "Now with that you have to do what's right. You have to do what's right. It's not about the votes necessarily." Trump emphasized doing what's "right". Regardless of who they're going to vote for, you have to do the right thing. Let them vote even though it will be for Democrats. That means amnesty.

I support Ted Cruz who has wanted to build a wall since at least 2012. Cruz, besides being better than Trump on individual issue after issue, is smarter and more principled. Cruz favors free markets, limited government, and liberty in a way Donald Trump doesn't understand.

In US politics, pro-life people hate Planned Parenthood, and pro-choice people defend it.

Last night in the GOP primary debate, Donald Trump (who now claims to be pro-life, despite past statements that he's very pro-choice) got criticized for his support of Planned Parenthood. After calling Ted Cruz a liar, Trump bizarrely continued by saying that Planned Parenthood does wonderful things, thus freshly demonstrating that Cruz is right.

I've heard a lot of right-wing atheists, like many libertarians, complain about Republican opposition to abortion. It's a big sticking point that lures them leftward. What I don't hear them talk about as much is that Planned Parenthood should not receive taxpayer funding; that violates the proper role of government and taxes. But what I really don't see them saying is that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization.

Contrary to the typical dynamics, I'm pro-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood is not just a "neutral organization that provides abortions and other health services", as many people seem to imagine (without having done any research). It's a radical (and powerful) leftist institution which actively promotes evil agendas.

Planned Parenthood was founded by the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Why? Because she disliked human beings. She liked abortion because she wanted fewer black, poor and stupid people to exist. She wanted to control and limit the human population and get rid of the types of people she considered undesirable. She also advocated sterilizing people and contraceptives. Abortion was one more tactic designed to promote the agenda of population control and race purification.

(This stuff is not controversial or seriously disputed. Research it if you're curious.)

The "pro-choice" position is disgusting. The issue is: is abortion murder? To reply to that with "it's a woman's choice" is absolutely stunning. Everyone should find this shocking and appalling.

The only defensible pro-abortion answer could be, "No, abortion is not murder."

I don't want to debate all the details and get into exactly where the line should be, but I will now tell you why I favor abortions in the first trimester:

I don't believe in God or the soul. I consider that mysticism. I look at the issue scientifically.

For murder to take place, there must be a human being which is murdered. I don't think a sperm or egg is a human being. And nor do I think an embryo is a human being.

What would it take for me to believe there is a human being capable of being murdered? At minimum, it would have to have a brain which has some electrical activity. Without the physical existence of a brain, which is doing something, there cannot be a human mind. And without a mind, there's no person. No mind means no consciousness. No mind means no one there to have preferences, to think, to say "I", to want to live.

I've noticed a lot of Democrat politicians say they are "personally against abortion", but want it to be legal. They also say they'd like abortion to be "safe, legal and rare". My question is: why?

If abortion isn't murder, then why are you personally against it? If abortion isn't murder, why do you want it to be rare?

What claims are there about abortion being bad, other than the issue of murder? What anti-abortion ideas do these people believe? In what non-murder way is abortion bad? They never explain and this has never made any sense.

The exceptions that even many pro-life people make to allow abortion are weird. Suppose that human life begins at conception and abortion is murder:

If abortion is murder, why should being raped make murder acceptable? Why should incest justify murder? If that's a human being in the womb, it doesn't matter how it got there, and how unwanted it may be, it's absolutely not OK to murder it.

The life of the mother exception is the only one that makes any sense. If the mother's life is in danger, then you'd have a consideration (a human life) that could actually matter when discussing killing a human being in the womb.

Some pro-life people would ask me: "How confident are you in your science? Do you really want to risk it? What's so great about abortion to be worth the risk that it's murder? Why not just let this issue go?"

The answer is that abortion is important. Having a child is a huge change to the life of the mother and father. Parenting is a really big deal. It absolutely makes enough difference for the abortion issue to be worth exploring.

Not everyone wants to have a child. And people who do want one may want their child later. And that's good. People are right to decide if and when they should start a family. Making good decisions about that is a big deal. Parenthood should indeed be "planned"! It deserves thought, organization, and being with the right co-parent.

Abortion can enable choosing a different person to marry who you get along with better. It can enable finishing your education. It can enable having a savings and keeping your finances under control your whole life, rather than having a kid early and struggling with money for decades. These are a big deal.

Abortion helps prevent the unfortunate situation of a man paying child support and a stressed single mom trying to cope. That's not a good situation. It happens. Abortions let some people avoid that fate.

Abortions make a big positive difference in some people's lives.

You may ask: Why can't people just use contraceptives? Aren't the people getting abortions irresponsible?

Contraceptives are not 100% effective. But, yes, many people getting abortions are irresponsible. So what? If you want to work to teach people to think better, live more responsibly, etc, go right ahead. That'd be great. Not letting them get an abortion will not help them.

You may ask: Do some people use abortion as a backup plan to help enable a more promiscuous lifestyle? Does it contribute to cads and sluts having drunken parties, rather than doing something more worthwhile with their time?

Yes. But the potential misuse of a technology is no reason to ban it. Medical technology, like plaster casts to help heal broken bones, enable people to be more reckless in their lives, but it's still a good thing.

You may ask: Why can't they just be abstinent if they aren't prepared to be a parent?

It's a matter of freedom. Many people have different values than you. Some live sinfully. Some live pretty responsibly but do have pre-marital sex.

On the premise that abortion isn't murder, then: it's a technology which helps some people's lifestyles. Whether those lifestyles are good or bad, as long as it's non-violent, non-criminal, non-rights-violating, they deserve liberty and tolerance. If you've got some suggestions about how to live better, go ahead and persuade people, but do not use the government to ban technologies.

H1B visas allow immigrants for filling high tech jobs. They're getting attention currently from anti-immigration presidential candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Some right wing people like the idea of H1B visas, contrary to the Republican presidential candidates. H1B visas sound compatible with the free market. What's wrong with educated immigrants coming here to work? Isn't that part of free trade? Doesn't capitalism mean competing in a global marketplace?

A fired Disney employee gave emotional testimony about the H1B program recently. He said Disney workers were forced to train foreigners to replace them at their jobs with threats of withholding their severance pay if they didn't do it. And they were lied to about the availability of other Disney jobs to transfer to.

A lot of people are upset. Some libertarians don't care. They say, "Too bad, anyone should be able to be fired for no reason at any time".

I looked at how H1B visas work. To bring in foreign workers, you have to agree to pay them market wages and you aren't allowed to displace American workers from their jobs.

Disney brought in foreign labor as a cost cutting measure. They wanted to fire Americans and pay the new workers less money. This is a blatant abuse of the H1B program. Whatever you think immigration policy should be, it's bad when companies break the law.

The H1B visa program is only meant to bring in workers for tech jobs that a company couldn't find an American to do. The point is not to get cheaper labor, it's to get labor at all when there's a shortage. Disney is abusing the spirit of the program and violating the clearly written terms of how this law works.

None of this is ambiguous. Let me show you some of the conditions involved with bringing in H1B workers:

Labor Condition Application for Nonimmigrant Workers ETA Form 9035 & 9035E

Wages: Pay nonimmigrants at least the local prevailing wage or the employer’s actual wage, whichever is higher, and pay for non-productive time. Offer nonimmigrants benefits on the same basis as offered to U.S. workers.

Displacement: Non-displacement of the U.S. workers in the employer’s workforce

Secondary Displacement: Non-displacement of U.S. workers in another employer’s workforce

Recruitment and Hiring: Recruitment of U.S. workers and hiring of U.S. workers applicant(s) who are equally or better qualified

If you want more of the fine print, look here.

Finally, I want to explain, from a free market capitalist perspective, why the H1B visa program is crony capitalism, not free market competition.

Capitalists might think, "if the foreigners will work for lower wages, that's a good thing and they should be hired".

But, workers who come here with the H1B program can't really change jobs. They are stuck with the company sponsoring their H1B visa. So they don't get to freely compete on the market, and therefore they get underpaid.

US citizenship has value. The H1B program lets some government-favored companies hand out valuable US citizenships – which the company is given for free – and then pocket that value in lower wages paid to the immigrants. And that's in addition to the lower wages they can pay to people for the several years where firing them would mean they get deported.

American workers cannot compete on wages with workers who are underpaid because they can't change jobs, and who take lower pay in return for immigrating. That isn't an ideal of capitalism, it's government distorting market wages. And it's a way for companies with friends in the government to get ahead – crony capitalism.

Edit: My mistake: H1B is a temporary work permit. It can last for 3-10 years but they don't get citizenship. Consequently it's called a non-immigrant visa. Thanks Justin.

This doesn't substantially change any of my arguments. A permit for staying in the US has value, just as handing out a citizenship would. And with the H4 visa, they can bring in their wife and kids, who may be able to work or go to school in the US too, while the H1B visa lasts.

H1B workers still have less job mobility than domestic workers.

And people here on an H1B visa are allowed to seek a green card and try to stay permanently. It can be a step which helps them immigrate. Wikipedia says:

Even though the H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa, it is one of the few visa categories recognized as dual intent, meaning an H-1B holder can have legal immigration intent (apply for and obtain the green card) while still a holder of the visa. In the past the employment-based green card process used to take only a few years, less than the duration of the H-1B visa itself. However, in recent times the legal employment-based immigration process has backlogged and retrogressed to the extent that it now takes many years for guest-work visa holders from certain countries to obtain green cards. Since the duration of the H-1B visa hasn't changed, this has meant that many more H-1B visa holders must renew their visas in one or three-year increments for continued legal status while their green card application is in process.

How Not To Fight Our Enemies by David Horowitz:

The mob that came to disrupt the Trump rally in Chicago was neither spontaneous nor innocent, nor new. It was a mob that has been forming ever since the Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization in 1999, whose target was global capitalism. The Seattle rioters repeated their outrages for the next two years and then transformed itself into the so-called “anti-war” movement to save the Saddam dictatorship in Iraq. Same leaders, funders and troops. The enemy was always America and its Republican defenders. When Obama invaded countries and blew up families in Muslim countries, there was no anti-war movement because Obama was one of them, and they didn’t want to divide their support. In 2012 the so-called “anti-war” movement reformed as “Occupy Wall Street.” They went on a rampage creating cross-country riots to protesting the One Percent and provided a whipping boy for Obama’s re-election campaign. Same leaders, same funders and troops. In 2015 the same leftwing forces created and funded Black Lives Matter and lynch mobs in Ferguson and Baltimore who targeted “white supremacists” and police.

Behind all the mobs was the organized left – MoveOn.org, the public sector unions run by Sixties leftovers, and the cabal of anti-American billionaires led by George Soros. The mobs themselves were composed of the hate-filled foot soldiers of the political left. [...] The plan is defeat Republicans in November so that the destructive forces they have set in motion in the Democratic Party can finish the wrecking job that Obama started.

[...]

And what has been the reaction of the presidential candidates, particularly those who propose to save the country? It is to blame Trump as though he and not the left had instigated the riot. If you play with matches like Trump did, opined Hillary Clinton, you’re likely to start a fire. [...]

According to the proudly positive John Kasich, it was Trump who created the “toxic environment” that led to the riot – not the fascist movement that has been metastasizing in our universities and streets for more than a decade.

Great stuff. I agree.

Cruz and Rubio also said bad stuff about this like Kasich.

He is often guilty of over-reach – “punch him in the nose” directed at one disrupter, but this is hardly the sin his detractors suggest in comparing him to Mussolini. That is a much great violence to the man who is its target. Aside from Trump’s compulsive over-reach what is wrong with anger in the current political context?

An aside: it's not a compulsion. It's bad ideas. Those bad ideas have consequences. It's not an isolated mental illness to treat as a singular quirk and ignore. It matters. It doesn't matter that much relative to a lot of the other election issues. But one should argue that Trump is mistaken rather than dehumanize him as sick (a human being that is, in this aspect, broken) because he thinks differently than you do.

as someone who until very recently held high opinions of Rubio and Cruz

But why have a high opinion of Rubio? Rubio has been such a lying amnesty-pusher for years. Cruz went to the senate and actually stood up for good ideas. Rubio, like most politicians, isn't willing to fight for good ideas and actually get things done. Instead, he betrayed his campaign promises and worked with the Democrats to advance their agenda.

And as to Cruz, yes he's getting the mob "protestors" issue wrong. But he's still the best candidate by far. Trump has said much worse, as Horowitz must know. See:

‘SHE’S DOING A TERRIBLE THING FOR OUR COUNTRY!’ – TRUMP BLAMED PAM GELLER FOR GARLAND TERRORIST ATTACK

Trump: I'm All For Free Speech, But Anti-Islam Cartoon Contest Was 'DUMB!'

Geller works with Horowitz, so he's definitely familiar with this.

Geller wrote a new piece about this yesterday, making the connection between Trump's attack on her free speech and then complaining about having his own speech at a rally shut down:

Trump Decries Attack on His Free Speech – What About Garland, Donald?

Flashback: Donald Trump said, “I watched Pam earlier, and it really looks like she’s just taunting everybody. What is she doing drawing Muhammad? I mean it’s disgusting. Isn’t there something else they could be doing? Drawing Muhammad?…They can’t do something else? They have to be in the middle of Texas doing something on Muhammad and insulting everybody? What is she doing? Why is she doing it? It’s probably very risky for her — I don’t know, maybe she likes risk? But what the hell is she doing?”

Cruz got Garland right. Trump got it horribly wrong. Trump's mistake on Garland is worse than Cruz's current mistake. Yet Horowitz is writing like Cruz is somehow now not as good as Trump. None of the candidates are perfect – not even close – but Cruz is much better overall.

Trump isn’t the enemy. Like you he is opposed to the Iran deal, supports a secure border, recognizes the Islamist threat, wants to reduce taxes and make the country solvent, and is greatly expanding the Republican base.

This is the most interesting part of Horowitz's article to me, because it gets to the heart of Trump. If only Trump was actually like this I'd be pretty happy with him as a second choice. If Trump actually was like the people voting for him believe, he'd be a pretty good candidate.

The problem is he's not.

Trump is squishy on the Iran deal, as Cruz revealed at the last debate. Trump won't rip it to shreds immediately, like Cruz. Instead, Trump plans to try to renegotiate a better deal. As if Iran could be a negotiation partner. Iran doesn't want a deal and doesn't want peace, they want to kill us – the "Great Satan" – as they frequently say in public.

Trump doesn't recognize the Islamist threat correctly, as revealed with his Garland comments and his "neutral" position on Israel and the Palestinians. Cruz is a great friend of Israel. Trump absolutely isn't. Trump thinks that the Palestinians, like the Iranians, can be partners in peace to negotiate with.

Is a guy who dislikes Israel, and dislikes Pamela Geller, going to be all that good on Muslim issues generally? That doesn't make sense.

Trump has made it clear he can change his mind to whatever he wants. He's malleable. Will he really go through with the moratorium on Muslim immigration? I doubt it. Trump reportedly told the New York Times, off the record, that he doesn't mean all of what he's been saying about immigration. And then he told Ben Carson that he doesn't believe all the outlandish stuff he's been saying.

The problem with Trump is he's a leftist at heart and if he's President we're going to get little if any of the hard-right policy-making we want. Trump will make deals, make compromises, and actively pursue a variety of leftwing agendas from funding Planned Parenthood with taxpayer dollars to having the taxpayer take care of everyone's healthcare to preventing any cuts to entitlements to generally refusing to cut down the government at all. Trump only wants to remove waste, fraud and abuse, not actually have a smaller government. Trump wants the government to be better run and make better deals, but he doesn't want to fundamentally change it much. That won't make our country solvent.

And Trump easily caves in to pressure and whims – and lifelong New York values – because he lacks strong classical liberal principles. Hence he called Scalia a racist. And Trump was in favor of letting in Syrian refugees before he was against it.

Will Trump be good on capitalism? No, he's a protectionist. Will Trump even be good on immigration? He gave two pro-amnesty CPAC speeches. One of the few areas Trump might actually be good – which no one is talking about – is energy.

Trump funded and praised the likes of Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid. And he praised Obama in 2009. Is this a guy who is really going to reverse Obama's policies and fight for Republican ideas?

Trump has spent a lifetime being a leftist participating in crony capitalism. He doesn't know how to confront and flush out the administrative state. He's going to get to DC and be surrounded by the fourth branch of government – unelected leftists who run everything – and he's going to start making deals and getting along with everyone instead of fighting them and burning it down. He won't take no prisoners.

Ted Cruz has a track record of standing up to the establishment Washington Cartel. Trump has no credibility that he will do that, and actually has repeatedly said he won't. Trump says he'll get along with people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, and even the Democrats who Trump mistakenly believes are reasonable people that you can work with.

Trump fundamentally doesn't understand our adversaries. You can't make a deal without common ground and some shared values. You can only work together when you share some goals. Either Trump shares a lot of values with the left, or he's naive and misunderstand how thoroughly evil the left is. Or, I think, both. As Daniel Horowitz put it:

Trump keeps saying we need to make deals just like Reagan did with Tip O’Neill. What he needs to understand is that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the entire modern Democrat Party are nothing like O’Neill. You can’t work with them and he needs to learn that.

A police union boss has requested the public be disarmed in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention. Ohio Governor Kasich refused. I think disarming the public is a bad idea. Let's look at events as reported by CNN:

"We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something -- I don't care if it's constitutional or not at this point," Stephen Loomis, president of Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, told CNN. "They can fight about it after the RNC or they can lift it after the RNC, but I want him to absolutely outlaw open-carry in Cuyahoga County until this RNC is over."

Loomis openly doesn't respect the constitution, he just wants his way. He wants to give the orders and not be limited by concerns about the rule of law. And he doesn't sound very interested in having the gun ban be temporary.

I assume Loomis also wants to outlaw concealed carry. I wonder if he wants to outlaw private security, too. Should Trump be banned from hiring the bodyguards of his choice? Or should the government hand out special gun-allowance exceptions to some privileged people?

"We are going to be looking very, very hard at anyone who has an open carry," he said. "An AR-15, a shotgun, multiple handguns. It's irresponsible of those folks -- especially right now -- to be coming downtown with open carry AR's or anything else. I couldn't care less if it's legal or not. We are constitutional law enforcement, we love the Constitution, support it and defend it, but you can't go into a crowded theater and scream fire. And that's exactly what they're doing by bringing those guns down there."

Loomis doesn't care about the law, he just wants arbitrary power. People like him are a reason why we need our guns!

Americans want to protect themselves. Self-defense is especially crucial at this time of domestic terrorism by (or inspired by) Black Lives Matter. There's also an ongoing threat from radical Islam.

Loomis reasonably thinks there's a danger. It's especially irresponsible to disarm Americans who are known to be in danger.

Kasich, responding to the request, said: "Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested."

Great reply. I didn't like Kasich much during the 2016 primaries because he's a Democrat-friendly moderate. But here he's standing up for some principles! He's defending gun rights and limited government power. I appreciate that.

Convention CEO Jeff Larson said that organizers remained confident in the security measures currently in place and did not expect Kasich to take any new action.

"The open carry laws in Ohio haven't changed recently, it's been in effect for quite some time, they've had a number of big events that have taken place with open carry without any issues," he told reporters Sunday afternoon. "They've been planning their security around that issue."

That makes sense.

Consider the political meaning for the national gun debate if the RNC takes extraordinary measures to disarm the public. It would signal that even Republicans consider an armed public to be an extraordinary danger. That would marginalize gun owners and advocates.

People frequently call for special exceptions when there's a crisis or a situation is extra important in some way. But the important cases are when we most need to follow our principles and use good methods. When the stakes are high, we should use our best approach, not use an ad hoc plan B.

To disarm the public in a crisis implies that a disarmed public is actually the best and safest approach. If we disarm the public when we want to maximize safety, it implies a disarmed public is always safer. That's anti-American.

Armed Americans are a good thing. People should appreciate gun-owners and recognize that, on the whole, guns increase safety. Don't be scared of your neighbors, they're not thugs. Most Americans are good people who use guns for defense.

If guns are bad when there's a threat of violence, when are they good? Just for sports and hunting, but never for defense? Is gun-ownership just a compromise because we don't have enough policemen to be everywhere? I don't think so.

If cops can't protect an armed public in Cleveland, when can they? When would cops ever be able to safely deal with gun-carrying Americans?

Americans don't want to rely on the government for protection. They don't want to trust in authority. Americans value self-reliance and the ability to get on with their own lives and take care of themselves. They don't want to be dependents. That's a great attitude!

Gun free zones are targets. Disarming the public encourages crime. It means criminals just have to dodge cops, but don't have to worry about armed resistance from their victims.

Also, it's not all that hard to sneak weapons through security into airports. Even with pretty ideal conditions, screening people is really hard. People with bad intentions will be able to sneak weapons into Cleveland. Outlawing guns would primarily disarm law-abiding citizens, not terrorists.

And it's important to go on with life as usual whenever possible. We shouldn't respond to terrorist threats in ways that disrupt daily life unless we really have to (e.g. we find an abandoned suitcase and have evidence it contains a bomb). There's no clear, immediate danger in Cleveland, just broad general concerns.

The world is watching and our choices have both symbolic and practical value. Let's demonstrate that, when the stakes are high, armed Americans are a good thing, and we don't have to rely on the government for everything important.

The Super-Secret Handshake of the Black Community

the article opens by saying stuff i'd agree is how this normally works. it says:

Trump is finding out that there is a super-secret club handshake in the black community. And the only white people who have been provided that code are white liberal progressive socialists.

so: blacks won't listen to reasonable white republicans, only racist leftists offering them a free lunch (at taxpayer expense. which is never actually delivered. the dems have not actually treated the black community well, they just promise to).

however i don't think this applies to Trump because he's saying different things than Republicans normally do.

i don't think Trump is finding this out. i think he knows and what he's doing will work well anyway.

Trump is calling the Democrats racist – which they are – and explaining how they've been screwing over blacks for the last 60 years – which they have. democrats are the ones who have overseen the inner cities and chosen the policies that have failed so badly.

democrats are also straightforwardly racist in that they seek to make race matter in society and policy, e.g. with affirmative action, rather than pursuing race-blind policies. democrats are the party that categorizes people into groups (blacks, women, etc) and then tries to treat each group differently. (which i think really sucks).

many republicans respond with "i'm not racist, i have a black friend" or other lines that are equally shitty. so they don't get anywhere with the black vote.

Trump is appealing to the reasonable black people. there is a vocal minority of black people who are totally anti-white racist, hardcore leftists, and will not listen to any republican including trump. they include the people inciting or participating in violence. but you know what? the majority of black people are decent Americans who do not want violence in their communities and don't hate whites or cops. republicans have done a bad job of speaking to them, and some republicans have actually been appeasing the loud extremists like the democrats do (but without winning any BLM votes away from the dems). trump's message can appeal to e.g. non-BLM black voters.

it's a similar story with hispanics. the democrats pander to hispanics with lies and break their promises. a lot of stupid republicans then try to pander back by being e.g. pro-amnesty. a vocal minority of hispanics voters really want amnesty. but you know what? a lot of hispanics came here because they wanted to live in America, not in Mexico. a lot of blacks and hispanics don't want a ton of unskilled immigrants, legal or illegal, to compete for jobs with. lots of hispanics who came to the US are not loyal to their original countries and don't actually particularly care about helping other strangers from that country move to America. Trump's message can appeal to the hispanics who came here because they like America and prefer it to stay roughly how it is.

What amazes me is that here we have someone challenging the failed progressive policies of the inner city and his sincerity is questioned? Why has no one EVER questioned the sincerity of the Democrats who have run the inner cities of America for decades?

yeah. this is a major theme of David Horowitz.

btw he may be the source of Trump saying a lot of this stuff. in my understanding one of Trump's main speechwriters is a long time horowitz friend and fan.

the article brings up Soros. that is another major Horowitz theme. Soros is a really bad guy who is behind a lot of stuff. this book is really important:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003R4Z2N6/

Unless you have the super-secret handshake code, you cannot talk about black on black shootings and murders.

and yet Trump is doing it. sure a lot of the media may yell and scream about it, and a vocal minority of leftists may insult the hell out of Trump for it (which they were going to do anyway). but so what? i think Trump's strategy is working just fine. lots of quieter and more reasonable people are listening.

the people who only hear CNN's summary of what Trump said probably won't be persuaded because it's so distorted. by the people who listen to an actual Trump speech may well see he's got a point.

The European Union is trying to shakedown Apple for $14.5 billion dollars. It's awful. There's lots of complaints to make. I thought of a more obscure issue I think is interesting and important:

Steping back, what's going on overall? Some people want to charge higher taxes in Europe.

Normally tax increases work like this:

First you pass a law to increase taxes. Then the law goes into effect at a later date (giving companies time to prepare for it). Companies frequently raise their prices to pay for the new taxes. So the government screws customers and blames companies in the pursuit of unearned money to spend.

Let's suppose Apple will pay whatever the taxes are, but they'll raise their prices accordingly. I don't know if that's exactly how Apple wants to handle it, but it could be.

When new taxes are announced first, and then charged second, then Apple can set prices accordingly.

But Apple can't raise their prices for past sales.

Yet, here the government is trying to raise the taxes on past sales! That's really unfair. Demands for taxes after a sale, instead of before, prevent Apple from setting prices how they want to to deal with the taxes.

Apple may be thinking: "if only we'd known you wanted more taxes, we could have dealt with it, no problem, with higher prices to pay for them. but you didn't tell us until after the sales already happened and now we haven't charged enough money to pay these taxes. it's too late. fuck this!"

(Yes I know taxes are still problematic in various ways even if you have the opportunity to raise prices to pay them.)

Justin made a great Trump video: Our Best Days Are Yet to Come

I liked it so I made a Trump video too: Make Detroit Great Again

My goal was to combine Trump speaking about inner cities with illustrative video footage. That helps make the meaning of terms like "ruined cities" more real to people.

It took two days and around 75 elements in Final Cut Pro X. It's not all that difficult to make a video. You just do one thing at a time. Eventually you have a bunch of stuff. I recommend it. My timeline looks like this:

Whose video is better? Tell us the in comments below...

Ted Cruz has endorsed Donald Trump. It's late. He should have done it at the convention. But it's a lot better than nothing.

Cruz was asked today whether he agrees with Trump's comment that Putin is a stronger leader than Obama.

Cruz said he isn't going to defend everything Trump says, and he's made his disagreements clear, but the two months before the election isn't the time to focus on those disagreements and Trump is way better than Hillary.

Here's what I think Cruz should have said:

I don't agree with Donald about everything. But I'll tell you, I do agree with him that Obama is a weak president. And Hillary would be weak too. Donald would have the strength and stamina to lead us, and I think that's important.

The differences between Donald and Hillary couldn't be clearer. It's a productive businessman running against a career politician who is also a lying criminal. Donald is going to build a security wall and he's going to do his best to Make America Great Again. When Donald makes a promise, he always promises to do something good like appoint constitutionalist supreme court judges or help lift blacks and hispanics out of poverty by protecting their civil right to school choice.

Hillary is a stark contrast. It's a certainty that she will appoint radical leftists to the supreme court, as she has promised to. It's a certainty that she'll do her best to keep our border open, and bring in more refugees we can't vet from areas controlled by ISIS or Al Qaeda. She has promised us more of the same: high taxes, the war on coal, Obamacare, and a divisive administration that considers half the country deplorable. And she would continue the same weak policies we saw with Obama's apology tour.

I wrote this message to an Objectivist facebook group:

Supporting Trump is the only realistic way to stop Hillary this year. Stopping Hillary, and judging her to be worse than Trump, seems compatible with Objectivism to me. (Note Gary Johnson's problem isn't just that he can't get enough votes to stop Hillary. His campaign has actually been less anti-Hillary than Trump's campaign.)

Let's look at some of the issues to see that Hillary is a lot worse than Trump:

Trump is pro drilling for fossil fuels, Hillary wants to put coal miners out of work.

Trump opposes the Iran deal and Obamacare.

Trump wants to enforce US immigration law and secure our border against criminals and terrorists.

Trump isn't running as Obama's third term.

Trump has promised to appoint supreme court judges from a pro-constitution list. They aren't ideal, but Hillary will appoint truly awful judges.

Hillary wants to make government way bigger, more intrusive, more rights violating, bigger budget, more agencies, etc. Trump isn't any kinda small government guy. I'd guess Trump views himself as planning to keep government around the same size, and will in fact grow it significantly. But he won't expand government as much or as enthusiastically as Hillary.

Trump isn't a literal traitor who would be in jail if not for government corruption.

Trump likes America and wants us to win. He mostly promises to do good things (that he probably won't live up to very well). Hillary dislikes America and mostly promises to do bad things.

Trump is not very religious and is kinda moderate. I don't approve of moderates, but it's still better than Hillary. Moderate means compromises, lack of principles, and (for a right winger) some leftist sympathies. Trump will compromise and sympathize with the anti-human left in a variety of ways, and will not solve most of our problems. But Trump will also do a few things pretty well, and we'll fall apart slower than with Hillary who has promised to destroy us in a dozen ways.

One of the issues where Trump is a breath of fresh air is opposing establishment politicians in both parties. Will he fix it? Nah. He'll try a bit and we'll be better off with him than with Hillary who will intentionally make it worse. Of the people on the ballot, Trump's the best one to vote for.

Make Detroit Great Again is my pro-Trump video showing what Detroit looks like today, along with audio of Trump speaking about inner cities. I was pleased to get covered on Truth Revolt.

Last night I bought an ad on Twitter to promote my video. Twitter promptly removed it, claiming it violates their Hate, sensitive topics, and violence policy.

Here's the advertised tweet. Do you think this is violent hate speech? Or is Twitter blocking right-wing political messages?

Trump will help inner cities and minorities! Democrats have destroyed great cities like Detroit. https://t.co/ezBMqgtwjZ

— Elliot Temple (@curi42) October 20, 2016

Twitter's hate content, sensitive topics, and violence policy covers:

• Hate speech or advocacy against an individual, organization or protected group based on race, ethnicity, national origin, color, religion, disability, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status or other protected status.Violence or threats of violence against people or animals
• Glorification of self-harm or related ads
• Organizations or individuals associated with promoting hate, criminal, or terrorist-related content
• Inflammatory content which is likely to evoke a strong negative reaction or cause harm.
• Offensive, vulgar, abusive or obscene content

As broad as this is, my ad doesn't realistically fit. There's no hate speech or violence in my video. Twitter does allow political ads (even though they can evoke negative reactions). And vigorous political debates are common on Twitter.

Twitter also specifically allows both "[n]ews and information" and "[c]ommentary", which do fit my video.

This is the notification Twitter emailed me:

(I have no affiliation with Donald Trump or his campaign.)

Update: I contacted Twitter to ask specifically what the "Hate, sensitive topics, and violence" was. I've now received the following reply, "Apologies for any confusion, you are now eligible to use Twitter Ads." That does not address the issue. I can now run the ad again.

Trump's reputation is misleading. Politically incorrect remarks don't make you an extremist.

Trump's views on immigration have gotten the most negative reactions (and also many positive reactions). Instead of calling Trump a bigot, let's consider what Trump actually said: Illegal Mexican immigrants commit additional crimes (including rape) – that's true and documented. Mexico isn't sending us their best people! And Trump wants to pause Muslim immigration in the wake of Muslim terrorist attacks, until we figure out what's going on.

Hillary called half of Trump voters deplorables who she considers irredeemable. That's around 25% of Americans, including me! 😩

I wanted a right winger (Ted Cruz) for president. I'm not a moderate myself, but I'll happily take a moderate who likes America over a far left liar who dislikes America.

There are decent people on the left. Hillary isn't one of them. (Most of the decent ones aren't politicians or prominent media figures.)

Trump is moderate on most of the issues:

Trump has promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who will uphold the constitution. Hillary has made it clear she will appoint activist judges to radically transform the country.

Trump opposes Obamacare. But he isn't opposed to all government involvement in healthcare (as I am). He just advocates some moderate stuff like to allow competition for health plans across state lines.

Trump (like me) isn't very religious and doesn't hate gays. He's not going to be pushing Intelligent Design. Many typical concerns with right wing politicians don't apply to Trump.

Trump is no laissez-faire capitalist (as I am). He's a protectionist who wants to use taxes and tariffs to try to "win" at trade. He worries about "trade deficits" (which means more goods flow into our country than out). This is pretty moderate. He isn't much of a socialist, and he isn't much of a principled capitalist. He's not the kind of guy who will be trying to set up a gold standard and get the government out of the economy (as I would).

Trump isn't a small government booster (as I am). He's not looking to eliminate a bunch of government departments (like Ted Cruz proposed to). He doesn't even want to cut Social Security or Medicare (he says he'll improve the economy so much we can pay for them with no changes, which is absurd). I think Trump is planning to keep the government around the same size (and will actually make it bigger) – standard moderate stuff – whereas Hillary will enthusiastically expand government.

Trump is in favor of law and order, unlike Hillary and Obama. The left has replied that Trump is racist for advocating law and order.

What about energy? Hillary wants to put coal miners out of work. Trump doesn't attack solar and wind power (as I would). Trump wants to pursue all types of energy. That's moderate. Trump favors reasonable energy policies like drilling for oil here because electricity is a good thing, it'll create jobs, and then we can buy less oil from unfree countries. Trying to cut back on fossil fuel use by over 50% in a few decades is an extreme position that would impoverish the country. Trump is being reasonable by siding with industrial civilization. I don't think it's a requirement of being left wing to want the dark ages back. I think there are decent left wing people who aren't anti-industry and anti-energy and could agree with Trump about energy.

Trump won't be an enemy of our own military, like Obama. Trump wants us to win, not lose. But he also wants to militarily intervene in the world less. Not a hawk, not a pacifist ... seems pretty moderate to me. I don't think it's perfect, but I can live with it.

There are left wing people who, like Trump, have a problem with Islam and Sharia. This isn't just about terrorism and Iran building nuclear weapons (which any decent person must oppose). There's also the Islamic oppression of women, homosexuals and minority groups (e.g. Christians and Jews). And there's Palestinian "schools" indoctrinating children into a death cult to hate Jews and do suicide bombing attacks. Leftists like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins do not approve of this. How can any decent person defend it? You don't have to be a fan of Christianity to recognize that, today, Christianity treats people better than Islam does. (Let's not get distracted by the Crusades and Inquisition!)

Trump isn't Israel's biggest fan, but isn't their enemy either. (Obama is Israel's enemy). Trump will continue the standard, normal US policy of having an alliance with Israel.

Being left wing hasn't always meant trying to destroy the second amendment. Not everyone on the left wants to do that. Hillary sure does. Trump doesn't. Good.

Trump is pro-abortion. He's lying about it now but he made this clear in the past. As President he won't do much in either direction on abortion. And he's not doing much to hide this. He defended Planned Parenthood (PP) in the primary debates to an audience that didn't want to hear it. I love abortion (it's a wonderful life-enhancing technology, not something to make safe, legal and rare and then personally oppose) and I wouldn't defend PP! I recognize PP as a radical leftwing organization that was founded by a racist eugenicist who wanted to reduce the number of black/poor/stupid people being born. PP has pivoted to illegally selling fetus parts and promoting environmentalism. They sure shouldn't get government funding.

Even on immigration, Trump holds some views that Democrats held not too long ago. Harry Reid (lead Democrat in the Senate) tried to end birthright citizenship (anchor babies) in 1993. Many of Trump's immigration positions, like building a wall, are already US law. Trump has emphasized he wants to enforce existing laws! That makes way more sense than having the same deported criminals keep coming back over the border.

In short, Trump is a moderate Main Street American who is being painted as an extremist by an extremely left-wing media.

Update: Trump just announced wonderful new policy proposals vindicating my essay. I urge everyone to read through these.

Guest post by Justin Mallone:

Hillary Clinton is a dangerous choice for President. She is a criminal whose immigration policy is so bad it might destroy the United States.

This is a strong statement. It requires explanation.

Let's start with criminal. You've probably heard about the email scandal. It's a big deal:

Hillary set up a private email server in her house for official business while she was Secretary of State. This violated the law. There are exceptional situations where you can use regular email, e.g. in some emergencies. Setting up a private server for all your official government email clearly violates the Federal Records Act. It also thwarts Freedom of Information Act requests.

Hillary said there weren't classified emails sent across her private email server. She lied. The FBI Director confirmed that she lied. He called Hillary "extremely careless in [the] handling of very sensitive, highly classified information." Over 2000 emails on her server contained classified information. Some of the emails on her server even wound up being classified Top Secret. Hillary committed a crime. Security issues with her server have been well-documented and exposed national security secrets to foreign hackers. And that's not just my speculation – we know her server was probably hacked.

Hillary got a subpoena on March 4, 2015, from Congress, which was investigating Benghazi. Several weeks after that, an employee of the company that Hillary used to manage her email server deleted the emails using software called BleachBit to make the emails irrecoverable. Hillary lied when she said she only used her personal email – and only carried one device – for personal convenience. She also had at least some of her thirteen total devices destroyed with a hammer. Hillary obstructed justice. This is a crime.

The facts are not in dispute. Hillary may imagine some "vast right-wing conspiracy", but even the biased Washington Post confirms what happened.

The Washington Post defends Hillary saying that, "Clinton’s staff had requested the emails to be deleted months before the subpoena, according to the FBI’s August 2016 report." Suppose you're a regular person, and you intend to delete some emails. And then suppose the government asks for those emails in a subpoena, and you delete them anyway. The fact that you were intending to delete them before you got the subpoena is not a good enough reason to avoid going to jail. Most people getting the subpoena would say "Oh, I guess I shouldn't delete those now." But different rules apply to Clintons. And there's plenty of concrete reason to think that the FBI investigation may have been corrupted by backroom deals and shady donations.

Let's talk about enemies.

Hillary likes to talk tough about Russia. She's said she sees Putin as "a very cold-blooded, calculating former KGB agent" and said "his agenda is one that threatens American interests." Sounds like she thinks he's an enemy!

I agree – Putin is a very bad guy. That's why it disturbs me that Hillary's State Department approved the sale of half of America's uranium output (20% of our total supply) to a Russian company, in exchange for millions of dollars of donations for the Clinton Foundation! That sounds like helping the enemy to me.

Hillary didn't stop there. She's worked hard to undermine the US help Russia. Her State Department "recruited and facilitated the commitment of billions of American dollars in the creation of a Russian 'Silicon Valley' whose technological innovations include Russian hypersonic cruise-missile engines, radar surveillance equipment, and vehicles capable of delivering airborne Russian troops." Sixty percent of "Key Partners" of this "Russian Silicon Valley" either made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton. Hillary also brags about having worked to ratify the New START Treaty with Russia, which involved the U.S. making a unilateral pledge to freeze its nuclear technological development, which hurts the United States' ability to defend itself.

Uranium is a strategic U.S. asset. Why did she give our uranium to the Russians? It's been documented that this was Pay for Play – the Clinton Foundation was paid to help Russia, and Hillary did it. She did this for money. Then she called Trump Putin's puppet, which really takes some nerve!

Hillary's problem is not just stuff she's done in the past. Hillary would harm our country big league. It came out in Wikileaks that Hillary's dream is open borders. The stuff in Wikileaks on open borders is damning, but mostly for confirming what we already knew. Hillary says right on her website she wants amnesty (by the codeword "comprehensive immigration reform") and to continue Obama's lawless executive amnesty programs (DACA and DAPA). She'd appoint Supreme Court Justices who would uphold executive amnesty, which was narrowly defeated by an equally divided Supreme Court. As Trump says, if you don't have borders, you don't have a country. Hillary is running with an agenda of not having a border. She has no plan for securing the border. She wants amnesty in the first 100 days. She wants a massive increase in Syrian refugees. She supports sanctuary cities. She wants illegal immigrants to be able to use Obamacare, and suggested that her amnesty plan would even let them qualify for Obamacare subsidies. She even has illegal immigrants doing voter registration for her campaign. Hillary's immigration policy is an agenda for destroying the United States.

Trump, by contrast, is a moderate. (Really! No joke. Read the link and see, rather than just listening to what the media tells you!)

This isn't the full case against Hillary Clinton. Even documenting just her corruption alone (let alone her criminality, incompetence, awful policies and older scandals and crimes) takes a whole book. But selling us out to Russia, and breaking US law, is plenty of reason to fear a Hillary presidency. A corrupt criminal whose immigration policy would destroy America is unfit to be President!

Anyone on the fence needs to get off. Even if you don't like Trump and think he's a jerk, it doesn't matter. Civilization is at stake. We need to stop a radical criminal like Hillary Clinton from being elected President.

(Enjoyed reading? Read more of Clinton's record from Front Page Magazine.)

Update, May 20, 2017: Corrected erroneous statements regarding treason.

Tons of immigration is great given your country is good at:

1) capitalism
2) assimilation and cultural confidence

If your country is bad at capitalism and has a welfare state, then it works better to limit immigration to people who have money or valuable job skills (e.g. fully trained doctors), not people who will go on welfare.

If your country is bad at assimilation, it works better to limit immigration to people who already share similar values. For the US, that means mostly immigration from the English speaking nations.

The US needs to limit immigration – like Trump proposes – because we're bad at both these points. Yes I'm a classical liberal who would like free movement of persons as a matter of principle similar to free trade. But we don't live in a classical liberal society. Many classical liberal policies don't work when individually used in a culturally-relativist welfare society. Bringing in a bunch of anti-liberal immigrants who are going to stay anti-liberal is not a classical liberal policy!

Taking tax money from some Americans to give handouts to other Americans is bad enough. Bringing in a bunch of immigrants, then raising taxes (or debt) to give them handouts too, is stupid and destructive. Immigration should be for people who will support themselves.

Having millions of citizens who dislike our country is bad enough. Bringing in millions more people who don't like our country is stupid and destructive. Immigration should be for people who like American values and, while not necessarily understanding our values very well already, are willing to learn and change. (For example, someone who doesn't know English, and doesn't want to learn it, should not immigrate to the US.)

We won the election! 🇺🇸🗽🎇

Today is a great day! 😁😃😊😀👍

❤️ Trump! 😍😘

It's morning in America! 🌅🌇🌄

What's ahead? 🛣💵🏭💰🏙💸🌆👷👮‍♀️👷‍♀️👮

Ideas matter. We won because our ideas are better. 🤔📚

Thank you, Ann Coulter.

Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole explained the immigration issue and changed the election. Trump requested an advance copy on his own initiative, then made politically incorrect remarks about immigration to kick off his Presidential campaign.

American patriot Ann Coulter didn't stop there. After speaking at a Trump rally, she wrote: In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!

Thank you Front Page Magazine and Breitbart News Network.

Thank you Project Veritas and Wikileaks.

Thank you, Donald Trump!

#Trump2016

#DrainTheSwamp

#BuildTheWall

#LockHerUp

#MakeAmericaGreatAgain

Harry Binswanger claimed:

As to how bad the current Left is, it is far better than the Left of the 60s

I also understood Binswanger to have the position that it was OK not to vote for Reagan, because the left wasn't so bad then. And it's also OK not to vote for Trump, because the left isn't so bad now.

To better compare the left today with the recent past, I read an article from 1980 which talked about the current and past situation. Emphasis in quotes is added by me.

In terms of philosophical fundamentals, the direction is still downwards.

And it blames Kant.

At the end of the 60's, the leftists acted as if they owned the world. But in fact, their power never extended much beyond the inbred world of today's intellectuals; the leftists never owned, or even grasped the nature of, America.

Today, the leftists have real power. They've had the presidency for 8 years and they nearly had another 4. They own California, New York, Washington DC, and a lot more.

America took the other steps the "doves" demanded: we gutted the FBI and CIA, cut defense spending, abandoned the anti-missile system, recognized Red china, increased trade and exchanges with Soviet Russia, withdrew our support from anti-communist regimes, and gave away the panama canal. The movement has failed, however, in its ideological aim. With each falling domino, from South Vietnam right through to Afghanistan, the spectacular failure of appeasement and the insatiable aggressiveness of Russia have become so clear that even president Carter has felt constrained to declare that he has changed his mind about the Russians.

Obama and Hillary have not changed their mind about the Iranians.

The American public's furious indignation over Iran's seizure of hostages and Russia's invasion of Afghanistan is a dramatic confirmation of the fact that the "peace" movement has not succeeded in extinguishing this country's self-esteem.

This year, Obama paid a fortune in ransom money for the return of Iranian hostages. The American public is not particularly furious that Iran took hostages nor that Obama paid ransom for them.

The anti-technology movement – "ecology," "environmentalism," "conservationism" – is fading rapidly. Remember "Spaceship Earth," "the limits to growth," and "man's rape of the earth"?

That movement is alive and well today. It has massive influence in both government policy and the culture. It has created international agreements. It has killed our soldiers by convincing our military to use worse equipment to be more "green." It has become disrespectable to doubt global warming.

Observe what the left has been unable to achieve. The drive for socialized medicine is stalled. The move to break up the oil companies has been abandoned.

Socialized medicine and the destruction of the oil companies are real dangers today. Those are Obama policies and he achieved a lot. Thankfully Trump favors fossil fuels and has promised to repeal Obamacare.

The best sign of the times is, perhaps, the disappearance of avowedly liberal political leaders. The very term "liberal" has become a stigma, politically.

That's sure gotten worse.

For the first time since the beginning of the New Deal, there are some areas in which the government's power is being rolled back. The gains made by the left have been due to inertia; the left is on the defensive – and they have plenty to feel defensive about.

The left hasn't been on the defensive lately. The main sign of hope here is Trump's victory. But Trump will not be rolling back the government's power much, if at all. Nor will the Republican congress which contains many leftist sympathizers, RINOs, moderates, and career politicians.

In America, there was never any chance that the statists would take over.

Obama and Hillary are statists. Today there is at least a clear chance of statists taking over.

Trump has promised to freeze most federal government hiring and require two regulations be repealed for each new one added. But on the whole he isn't a very good advocate of limited government.

Do the American people, today, really want limited Government? I don't think the majority do.

The economic and political state to which the intellectuals have brought this country is so horrendously counter to the American spirit

The American spirit is in danger. Far too many Americans now identify with its enemies like Obama and Hillary. Far too many Americans have been educated in "progressive" schools. Far too many "Americans" are foreigners, here legally or illegally, who have not adopted American values and do not possess the American spirit.

After every anti-American statement and action by Obama, his policies nearly got a third term. Our culture is in grave danger. Anti-Americanism is everywhere. Western Europe is even further gone down a similar road and provides some dire warnings.

The American pro-reason, pro-freedom, pro-achievement "sense of life" has swung away angrily from the consequences of even semi-statism.

Something like that won us this election, but only barely, and despite the opposition of many Objectivists.

the moral code of altruism will carry us to statism, regardless of short-term backpedalling. Our only hope is finally, fully to reject the premise that sacrifice is moral, and proudly assert man's right to exist for his own sake.

Altruism hasn't gone anywhere. That "only hope" hasn't happened.

At the dawn of the 80's, the left has collapsed, and the right is waiting to be born.

Any collapse of the left was only temporary. The left is strong today. It dominates the media, the government agencies, the public schools, the universities, the non-profits, the technology companies, and the "intellectual" culture.

The left riots in the streets, releases criminals from prison, and says the statement "all lives matter" is racist. The left gets away with ridiculous farces like saying voter ID requirements are racist. The left has given billions of dollars to the leading state sponsor of terrorism and is working to help arm them with nuclear weapons capable of hitting the USA. The left uses the IRS to attack political enemies and uses the FBI and justice department to help cover up their crimes. The left has betrayed our country repeatedly (e.g. leaving Iraq and letting ISIS become a major power) and has the power and influence to get away with all this. (Or they nearly did. We'll have to see what Trump does about this.)

The article the quotes are from is The Swing To The Right by Harry Binswanger. In 1980 he said the 60's left never had much power in America. Today he says the left in the 60s was worse than today. Does he think that Obama had no real power, or that Obama isn't so bad!?

CNN posted a fake news headline:

Berlin Christmas market: 9 dead, at least 50 injured in truck crash

(Lated updated to "Berlin Christmas market: 12 dead, 48 hospitalized in truck crash")

A major terrorism attack is not a "truck crash". CNN is dishonestly trying to make it sound like a traffic accident.

This is like the fake news headlines that report crimes by illegal immigrants with intentionally non-descriptive terms like "man". Ann Coulter explains:

As described in excruciating detail in Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, our media already have a totally "open mind" about incest and child rape -- and murder! -- when it's committed by immigrants.

Thus, for example, where I would have chosen the headline: "Illegal Alien Convicted of Incest, Child Rape," The Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press went with the less catchy: "Man guilty in case of human smuggling.”

And where I would have used the headline, "Illegal Alien Repeatedly Raped 14-year-old Girl at Job Site," The Commercial Dispatch in Columbus, Mississippi, went with the more subtle, "Columbus resident charged with molestation.”

Donald Trump did much better than CNN:

Our hearts and prayers are with the loved ones of the victims of today’s horrifying terror attack in Berlin. Innocent civilians were murdered in the streets as they prepared to celebrate the Christmas holiday. ISIS and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad. These terrorists and their regional and worldwide networks must be eradicated from the face of the earth, a mission we will carry out with all freedom-loving partners.

I wrote a CNN-style version of Trump's statement:

Our hearts and prayers are with the loved ones of the victims of today’s horrifying truck crash in Berlin. Innocent pedestrians died in the streets adjacent to the crash as they prepared to celebrate the Christmas holiday. Drunk and other bad drivers continually slaughter motorists and pedestrians in their communities and this needs to change. These unsafe drivers and their memes must be educated to drive safely, a mission we will carry out with all safety-loving partners.

DD is bad now. There's so many things wrong here!

He said "indeed" to a tweet insulting children. Most people would do that, but in the past DD wouldn't have. He was good about ageism.

He said "indeed" to a tweet no one considers literally true.

He said "indeed" to an exaggerated, ageist, unserious, unintellectual claim that Trump is clueless and incompetent. (Also file that under unoriginal!)

He likes Obama more than Trump. (Previously we found out he likes Hillary more than Trump.)

He says "yes" that Putin is "the worst dictator" which is false.

DD says "yes" that Trump is "befriending" Putin. That's false. Trump is – as he should – having a working relationship with a person his job requires him to work with. Work relationships are different than friendships. Suggesting that Trump is personal friends with Putin is a lazy smear.

From Obama's worst policies, DD excludes: Obamacare, supporting Iran, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, supporting Cuba, open borders, appointing activist leftist judges, and losing the Iraq war. That's just a small start on what Obama did wrong.

DD not only claims that Trump will pursue all Obama's worst policies, but that Trump is even worse at all of them than Obama. This is unfair to Trump by ignoring many terrible Obama policies where Trump is way better. And it's false because Trump is better on every listed policy than Obama. Trump is going to be more financially irresponsible than Obama? Really? I read Trump's tax plan, among other things, and I don't see it. I await DD's considered argument for this claim and the others. But DD doesn't explain serious arguments anymore, he tweets.

DD has become an apologist for Obama and the left. DD speaks imprecisely and participates in superficial commentary. DD no longer cares much about ageism.

I follow DD's tweets and this quality is typical. He used to be a much better thinker.

Update: Here's a second example of low quality DD tweets. From someone else it'd just be expected that they are confused about AI, persons, animals, etc, all of that. But DD used to be good at these things. And he used to be my peer. But these tweets aren't in my league or up to DD's former standards of thinking.

My quick thoughts on Trump's missile attack on the Syrian airbase which Assad launched a despicable chemical weapons attack from:

Trump's attack was a pretty moderate, normal, mainstream thing to do.

It was OK, not great.

It's not what Trump said he'd do. E.g. in 2013 Trump wrote a bunch of tweets about staying out of Syria.

I'd prefer if Trump focused on his campaign promises more – destroy ISIS, get out of the Iran deal, build the wall, repeal Obamacare, and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. None of those issues are going very well so far.

There's a selective attention issue. Why is this the right conflict to intervene in instead of a different one?

Trump and others haven't explained the self-interest of the attack in a clear, convincing way. What are the big-picture goals we're hoping to achieve by intervening? Spending $75,000,000 to help a few foreigners in the short term is bad policy which is contrary to the purpose of the US government and the purpose of our taxes.

Most people believe military actions should be proportional. That's wrong. They should involve whatever force is necessary for effective defense and resolving the problem.

It's bad to get drawn into back-and-forth tit-for-tat conflicts with only minor escalations. Ongoing fighting is awful. Instead, take little or no action until you're ready to go all-out and win. Trump's strike isn't anything like a last warning or second-to-last warning. It was just a response and Trump has threatened to do more small responses if Assad behaves badly again. That's a bad approach. (But note also that it's a moderate, mainstream approach. I'm the one who is out of the mainstream in my views here.)

If you're going to get involved in military conflict at all, there should be a plan to win in a fast, brutal, one-sided, non-proportional manner which is either pursued immediately or else threatened and ready. If you're just bluffing and have no plan for winning, stay out of it.

A woman, a gay man, and a Jew banned from speaking at The University of California, Berkeley. Misogyny, homophobia, and anti-semitism. Defund!

A source.

(Guest post by Josh Jordan.)

(Co-authored with Justin Mallone.)

When you see violent thugs rioting in the streets, you may assume they're strong, scary zealots. They claim to care deeply about strongly-held political views. They present themselves as being so inspired and motivated that they're willing to fight for their ideals.

I want you to reconsider. Most of them are ignorant victims. They are abused and controlled by a few leaders (aka "community organizers"). Just like how cults control, indoctrinate and abuse people. Most of the violent thugs are actually weak, pathetic wretches with no money, no control over their lives, and no idea what's going on. They're sad victims to be pitied, not strong zealots to be feared.

Violence is a serious matter and the police need to provide protection and arrest rioters. Don't walk up to these people for a chat; they're dangerous. But do change your perspective on them.

Yvette Felarca & BAMN

Yvette Felarca is a leader in a left-wing, American, political cult called By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). They use violence for political purposes. They indoctrinate and abuse children. They're Marxists. They've been in the news recently for violently shutting down speeches by conservatives.

The ridiculous full cult name is Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary.

BAMN was created in 1995 by Attorney Shanta Driver, in Berkeley, California, in order to oppose Proposition 209. Proposition 209 ultimately ended affirmative action in the state's university system. Affirmative action is racist – it's literally about treating people differently according to their race – so BAMN is a racist group. More about BAMN.

Riots and Violence

BAMN participated in violent riots that shut down Milo Yiannopoulos's talk at Berkeley earlier this year, and Felarca defended the riots on TV! She said rioting was necessary to shut down Milo, who she victim-blamed as a fascist. She defined fascist as "someone who’s organizing a mass movement that’s attacking women, immigrants, black people, other minority groups in a movement of genocide." Milo hasn't called for killing anybody. Felarca is a liar who wanted violence first (to suppress ideas she hates) and made up an excuse second. BAMN's violence also led to suppressing the free speech of Ann Coulter and David Horowitz, and the students who invited them, at Berkeley.

Felarca has a history of personally participating in violence. She attacked a man and incited others to attack him at a gathering of white nationalists called the Traditionalist Workers Party in Sacramento in June 2016. That violence left seven people stabbed and nine hospitalized. A California Highway Patrol officer said Felarca's group started the violence, “If I had to say who started it and who didn’t, I’d say the permitted group didn’t start it." A statement from the California Highway Patrol agreed, saying that the Traditionalist Workers Party had obtained a permit and that "non-permitted groups confronted the permitted group, leading to violence."

And this violence is all part of a conscious strategy of, in Felarca's own words, building a "mass militant" movement.

A Danger to Children

This would all be bad enough if Felarca was a full time communist activist working for George Soros. But she's actually a teacher at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. She uses her position of authority over children to recruit for BAMN during school. She pushes her political agenda when she's supposed to be teaching.

And BAMN isn't just a group of violent communists (that'd be bad enough!). It's worse. It's a cult which abuses children. BAMN lures children to join (including directly from public school) and uses intimidation, threats and force against its own members to prevent them from leaving. It has dozens of dirty tactics including lying to get people psychiatrically institutionalized when they try to leave BAMN and placing guards on people to prevent them from leaving.

BAMN Cult

There are numerous testimonials regarding BAMN's cult-like operation and recruiting methods. Secret Survivors of BAMN is a blog where people who escaped discuss their trauma and how the cult operates. They made it private after BAMN's recent rioting drew attention, but a copy remains publicly available.

I'll present three testimonials so you can judge for yourself what BAMN is really like and whether the police should shut them down:

Jevon's Testimonial

Jevon (PDF mirror) is a UC Berkeley Alumni. He was recruited into BAMN at age 14 and then pressured to leave his family (in Detroit) and live with BAMN members in Oakland. BAMN said he could get legally emancipated soon after and rejoin his family if he wanted to. But after he arrived in Oakland to live with Yvette Felarca, Jevon was instructed to change his name and cut off all contact with friends, family, and even other BAMN members in Detroit. (Isolating people and cutting them off from their old life helps cults control them.)

Jevon wound up being told he could go home after some time had passed, but the time to return home never came, a charade that continued for almost a year. Eventually he reconciled with his family and his mother bought him a plane ticket back to Detroit. But cults don't let members just walk out the door:

When they realized they could not talk me out of leaving, they got physical. Yvette Felarca came into my room one night and instructed me to read out loud a statement that Shanta Driver had written and convinced me to sign about how my family was abusive. Tired of debating my decision with them, I refused. That night, Yvette and other BAMN members took turns sleeping by my bed to “make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.” They confiscated my house keys to restrict my movement.

While trying to make his flight, BAMN members tried to take away his suitcase. Then three cultists assaulted him to grab his phone to prevent him from arranging to leave. Jevon fought off the assault enough for his mom to hear what was going on over the phone, and she called the police. BAMN lied to the police who were then hostile to Jevon. He eventually managed to talk the police into letting him leave after BAMN stole all his money and ID cards.

With the help of a neighbor Jevon made it to the airport and escaped. BAMN still did what it could to punish him for leaving the cult:

When I tried to inform other BAMN members about what had happened to me, particularly other youth many of whom I had recruited and therefore felt responsible for putting at risk, I learned that BAMN had denounced me to everyone. They told people that I had went crazy and turned against the organization and went to the police and that everyone should call off all contact with me. They were also instructed to report my whereabouts to Shanta because they were looking for me to put me in a mental institution.

From talking with people afterwards, Jevon learned that BAMN had treated other people in a similar way to his own nightmare experience.

Alex From Detroit's Testimonial

Alex from Detroit gives an account (PDF mirror) of her experiences with BAMN. She was manipulated by her girlfriend who threatened to dump her if she wasn't in BAMN's inner circle. And she tells us about BAMN's recruiting methods:

So they start out luring kids with field trips and the chance to skip classes for meetings. When I was at [Cass Technical High School] they had a very strong presence because Steve Conn was one of the math teachers and most of their student leadership came directly from Cass. The kids who are just in it for ditching school are [used] mostly as bodies and extra mass during the rallies and protests. They could care less what happens to these kids but the more numbers they have on their side the better the protests look to the media.

School teachers exploit their captive audience to recruit for BAMN. Children come to meetings to get out of school. What kind of system is that? Teachers shouldn't be encouraging kids to cut class and attend Marxist cult meetings instead. And then they use bored, powerless students as extra bodies at political rallies and protests which they sometimes turn violent!

Alex explains how involvement escalates as children are pressured to do more and more BAMN activities:

If you are not just in it for ditching school and had actual political leanings, they invited us to after school meetings where we would discuss current group events or if there was a particular rally, protest or election coming up we would do things to contribute to that, such as making signs and calling people who had signed petitions with their contact information. Here again, is where I specifically was pressured into doing things that made me uncomfortable. I do not like talking on the phone. I can talk to family members and I have, after years of doing it, been able to be comfortable talking at work. I used to have extreme anxiety about it. I expressed this very clearly to my ex and to the leaders of BAMN but was given the impression that there would be consequences if I didn’t ie: Being ejected from BAMN’s inner circle which would lead to being dumped.

It's cruel to make Alex work the phones when she could have easily done a different task instead. But uncomfortable, stressed, anxious people are easier to control. BAMN wanted to keep Alex off-balance.

Alex also describes being pressured to attend events even when she didn't know what she was protesting or why. In one city council meeting, Alex read a new Harry Potter book and only looked up or chanted when another BAMN member elbowed her.

At a political debate, Alex didn't know what she was protesting. Her mom asked her but she couldn't answer. She was "instructed to come along to the protest, hold a sign, chant something and walk in a circle within a specific radius outside of [the protest location]. There was no other information given."

Interestingly, BAMN seems to recognize the ignorance of its members. BAMN's own pledge says:

To those who criticize the legitimacy of our walkouts or other youth-led mass actions by saying “most of the students/youth cannot even say what they are fighting for”, I say rest assured we are always fighting for our dignity, equality, respect and justice.

So the kids don't learn anything at school from their BAMN teachers who tell them to cut class for BAMN, and then they don't learn anything at BAMN either!

Jason Wright's Testimonial

Jason Wright's testimonial (PDF mirror) is about the Revolutionary Workers League, a predecessor to BAMN involving some of the same people like Yvette Felarca and Shanta Driver.

Jason reports members being publicly condemned for their private romantic problems, and then engaging in "Maoist self-criticism" where they talk about the struggles of revolutionary consciousness under capitalism and profusely apologize to the group for their private behavior.

What happens if you privately question any RWL decisions, such as kicking someone out because he didn't want to financially support a jobless RWL member? Shanta Driver "began shrieking" that Jason was a racist (the person kicked out was white, the person to be financially supported was black).

Being denounced as a racist by a cult leader had consequences:

The experience had a somewhat scarring effect on me in that it showed a number of comrades, already [possessing] a certain appetite for Stalinist style [bureaucratism], that I was fair game for criticism in the leaderships eyes. As such my political life was for several months very difficult in Albany. Sarah W. and Yvette F. were continually denouncing me for one thing or another and I was held at [candidate] membership for an extended period of time.

RWL did not care about Jason's health or well being. People are easier to control while in extreme poverty and dependent on the cult for shelter and food:

While formally enrolled in college I neither attended classes nor worked. The RWL did not have many paid staffers, nonetheless I was subsidized (in an extremely minimal manner) by the organization in order so that I could work for the org. full time. I was constantly broke, without money for books or an adequate diet, couch surfing at various comrades apartments.

Later, RWL lied to have Jason involuntarily held at a psychiatric facility in order to prevent him from dissenting at an upcoming meeting. Jason explains:

I was horrified, I never felt so trapped against my will.

[...]

the RWL, in ordering comrades to undergo treatment, is utilizing a form of [bourgeois] medical process to marginalize inactive or oppositional cadre and isolate them from the party. This is horrible.

Cults don't allow dissent.

When Jason and his girlfriend decided to leave the cult, he was in a such a powerless situation that they had difficulty with basic matters like bus fare and packing luggage.

The RWL must have sensed [something] was amiss [...] From that moment on we were never left alone together.

They actually risked packing luggage to leave while being watched by a spy who, thankfully, didn't rat them out.

Felarca Indoctrinates Students

The Berkeley Unified School District has catalogued allegations against Felarca going back to 2009 which it detailed to Felarca in a 30-page letter. These included "immoral conduct, evident unfitness for service, persistent violation of or refusal to obey school laws, dishonesty, unprofessional conduct and unsatisfactory performance." Berkeley Unified School District's complaints include:

• In 2009, Felarca "repeatedly solicited students to participate in protests" against a proposed charter school during the work day, in defiance of a formal reprimand.
• In 2011, she asked for permission to take an after-school club on an all-day field trip to protest against Proposition 209, and was told she couldn't because it would be a chance for her to "indoctrinate" students and violate what she'd been told in 2009 regarding non-permitted activities.
• In 2013, Felarca repeatedly used leave to attend immigrant rights marches in Washington, D.C., which is not a permissible purpose for leave. They docked her pay and told her to stop, but she kept doing it. When they tried to have a private meeting with her, “employees in the District office were confronted with a loud group of over ten young people … chanting and carrying signs” protesting “teacher harassment.” Felarca refused to answer how the students knew about the meeting.
• Felarca wrote a celebratory Facebook post that the District was backing down on discipline and "encouraged supporters to sign a petition that called Felarca a hero and role model, and said she should be allowed to use personal leave at her discretion."
• The District said “it was evident that you and your [By Any Means Necessary] representatives were actively trying to brainwash and manipulate these young people to serve your own selfish interests in not being held accountable to the same rules that apply to everyone else. As a teacher, your conduct was particularly reprehensible.” [Emphasis added.]
• In 2014, Felarca allegedly misused her leave again, protesting UC regents and participating in Black Lives Matter demonstrations. She then lied and claimed she had no recollection of these events, despite the fact that:

  [Felarca] had taken two full days off work to attend, had spoken during public comment [as documented on YouTube], had a large bullhorn in [her] hand outside and spoke to a large group of students, and passionately and loudly advocated for [her] cause; and despite the fact that [she] clearly wanted the attention and media coverage. [Felarca's] continued and repeated claims, frequently accompanied by long pauses and a smirk on [her] face, that [she] could not recall being there, were patently dishonest.

• In 2015, Felarca requested permission to take students to immigration court for the hearing of a woman seeking asylum, and didn't disclose BAMN's involvement in the case. Felarca's request was denied, but she went anyways and was interviewed on TV during the event.
• The District also claims that a parent contacted them and said Felarca had “marginalized Caucasian students” in her classroom and presented controversial issues in a biased manner.

After all this and her Sacramento violence, Felarca finally was put on leave in September of 2016.

What was Felarca's reaction to being put on leave? She followed her previous pattern of weaponizing her students and other supporters against the administration in a high-pressure campaign.

At an October 5, 2016 meeting of the Berkeley School Board, various Felarca supporters spoke out, with some making references to Felarca teaching them their "rights" as immigrants as they were cheered on by the crowd. One particularly troubling scene makes clear how much this was an organized political action and not a spontaneous outpouring of support from students. A young boy appears to be directed to read a statement by a woman wearing a BAMN t-shirt. In the course of the statement, he says "That's not fair, that the District don't let Yvette bring kids to protest." A young girl speaks immediately after (with the BAMN minder still present), repeating the same theme and saying "It's not fair what you guys are doing, because Ms. Felarca deserves to take kids out to protest on her free time" and concluded her statement by bashing President Trump. Observe that this defense of Felarca is the very behavior the District had been asking her to stop since 2009 (that is, taking students to political protests).

The October 5 meeting ultimately descended into chaos when protestors started shouting & chanting when the Board attempted to move to the next agenda item.

Felarca also filed a lawsuit against the District in October, claiming that "BUSD had interrogated her students, removed her from a staff meeting, and threatened to withhold funding, for longstanding programs, from colleagues who expressed support for her." And Shanta Driver filed a lawsuit on behalf of 8 students against the District in November "alleging [the students] were racially targeted and intimidated by district officials."

Felarca was ultimately reinstated on November 2, 2016. One might reasonably think this a result of Felarca's high pressure tactics and the use of her students as weapons against the BUSD. But it may be more because Felarca has friends in high places: the Mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguin, is a member of BAMN's Facebook group and Facebook friends with Felarca.

And what did Felacra do in 2017 after keeping her schoolteacher job? Organize anti-free-speech rioting (discussed earlier) which destroyed over $100,000 of property.

It's disturbing that Felarca still has a job as a school teacher after all this violence, indoctrination of children, and refusal to do what her employer asks.

A Sad Story of Victims

Members of BAMN and other "anti-fascist" organizations present themselves as zealots so committed to their political cause that they're willing to use violence.

But the reality is different. We've seen that many members are children abused by the BAMN cult. People join to skip school classes or get lured away from their family and aren't allowed to leave. Children are tricked by authority figures like their teachers. Many are victims, not zealots.

And then BAMN uses criminal tactics to prevent members from leaving: violence, guards, lying to members, lying to the police, and lying to psychiatrists. As well as pressure, psychological manipulation, denunciations, etc...

This is a monstrous evil. The cult leaders should go to jail. But the victims actually could use rescuing.

Perspective

BAMN's leaders are violent criminals who are a lot better at exploiting children than understanding politics and economics. They should be prosecuted and shut down.

The bulk of BAMN's membership are abuse victims who would benefit from learning American values and the American way of life. They're not protesting because they disagree with society – they never learned how to be part of society in the first place.

Next time you see an anti-free-speech riot, remember it's just a facade. Behind the mask of strong, violent zealots are weak, pathetic sheep. They may be able to throw a few rocks and start fires but, as usual, evil is impotent.

Correction: The article mistakenly said Alex is male. Alex contacted me with a correction and I changed the gender pronouns on 2018-10-26.

From Facebook:

Evan O'Leary:

What is with people who don't like things to be "politicized"? Do you not want people you tribally dislike to say reasonable things because then you'll have to disagree with them because you were born with nothing but an amygdala for a brain?
EDIT: good point made in the comments, exploiting people's emotions to manipulate their political beliefs while they're in a less rational state is bad

Elliot Temple:
i take it you're insulting right wingers including classical liberals who believe in freedom regarding the issue of gun control. i'd suggest being more clear about what your point is in the future.

so, regarding gun control: instead of insulting people, i think it'd be better to try to investigate, in an objective, scholarly way, whether the factual claims in this book are correct or incorrect:
https://www.amazon.com/War-Guns-Yourself-Against-Control-ebook/dp/B01HH5HN8W/

Evan O'Leary:
 I'd suggest being less paranoid, you're wrong about what I'm arguing

Elliot Temple:
 then clarify

Evan O'Leary:
 There's nothing in my post that needs clarification, people on the left get mad at the NRA for "politicizing" shootings too when they say less people would have died if one of the hostages was carrying a gun

Elliot Temple:
 do you have an example of that? for example, Hillary chose to politicize the shooting rather than accuse the NRA of politicizing. By contrast, I say many right wingers complaining about Hillary politicizing it.

Evan O'Leary:
 Sure, let me find it. There was some hostage situation in recent years when people said open carry would have prevented it

Elliot Temple:
 Hold on, let's stick to the Vegas shooting and representative examples! I'm sure somewhere in history you'll find one example.

Evan O'Leary:
 Not just open carry but also when refugees commit shootings the right politicizes it with immigration

Elliot Temple:
 Are you in favor of gun control or against it?

Evan O'Leary:
 Can't find the hostage situation rn, do you disagree with the immigration point?

I'm not sure what to think about gun control

Elliot Temple:
 I agree that the right sometimes politicizes shootings, but in my understanding the dominant trend after the Vegas shooting – which is the context of your post – was the left politicizing it and the right criticizing the politicization. If I'm mistaken because I didn't see a broad enough sample of political messaging, I'd appreciate the correction. If you saw it similarly, then wasn't your post a reaction to some right winger comments?

Evan O'Leary:
 It was caused by me seeing right winger comments and seeing a problem with the "don't politicize" part of the argument, not the "gun control has downsides" part

Elliot Temple:
 views on gun control are relevant here. e.g. consider Hillary's pivot to bringing up silencers. was that relevant and reasonable, or just unreasonably trying to use the tragedy in an unrelated way? people who have knowledge about silencers and gun rights are going to have a different perspective on Hillary's comments than someone who is neutral. Part of their reaction – which you took issue with – was due to knowledge of the issues, not tribalism and amygdalae.

Elliot Temple:
 Hunters want suppressors to prevent damage to their ears and their dogs' ears, and to be better able to hear each other and prevent dangerous hunting miscommunications. That's what Hillary pivoted to the tragedy to.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/268035/how-hillary-clintons-tweet-showcases-cynicism-gun-daniel-greenfield

Elliot Temple:
 A reasonable response would be to call Hillary Clinton dishonest, because her comments were an attempt to shoehorn an unrelated agenda where it didn't fit and mislead the public. The discussion is ready to go straight into the mud. But do we want a bunch of mud slinging and character attacks and typical political dirty fighting to be the centerpiece of the national discussion of the Vegas tragedy? As much as I'm personally pretty willing to debate anything, I do see why people could object to this!

Elliot Temple:
 and the reason some people don't want a bunch of murder to be politicized is because of their respect for life and human dignity.

Evan O'Leary:
 What about politics inherently lacks respect for that

Elliot Temple:
 many political discussions aren't respectful of the gravity of mass murder, as i'm sure you've observed

Evan O'Leary:
 Is that because they're political?

Elliot Temple:
 Partly, yes. Some types of discussions are more known for human decency than others.

Evan O'Leary:
 The only political discussions which lack respect for life and dignity are the ones with bad political arguments

Any solution to this issue is going to be one of policy, so even if politics causes irrationality in humans, our other choice is having murder problems which don't seem less important than irrationality

Elliot Temple:
 "The only political discussions which lack respect for life and dignity are the ones with bad political arguments"

So, most of them? Do you see the problem?

Elliot Temple:
 No one is objecting to debating the issues at some point, and trying to make the discussions civil. But there are questions about the apporpriate immediate comments from public figures. Should they prioritize attempting a dirty political sound byte, or perhaps is it better to begin by saying something about their respect for human life and how sad they are about the tragedy, and then try to debate gun control issues in the normal ways afterwards?

Evan O'Leary:
 The better explanation is irrationality, not politics

Evan O'Leary:
 "Don't politicize" is a problematic criterion, and we have a better criterion, "don't be irrational"

Elliot Temple:
 People debate what is irrational or not. Being more specific is good sometimes.

Elliot Temple:
 Of course it's a problematic criterion. They aren't having extensive serious discussions with both sides engaging with each other. It's not a very intellectual forum.

Justin Mallone:
some on the left have definitely taken the tone of "fuck talking about respect for human life. now is the time for drastic political action." one example is literally not attending a moment of silence as a political protest due to insufficient gun control: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/5/jackie-speier-congressional-moment-silence-shootin/

Evan O'Leary:
 A better criterion would be "don't politicize too soon after tragedies", but even that creates problems that aren't clearly improvements, because people lose political motivation after tragedies

Elliot Temple:
 that's roughly what lots of them meant, though the issue isn't entirely a matter of time. part of the issue is what you say in the time before the political debate. and your actual attitudes, not just statements.

Elliot Temple:
 and btw they primarily meant for the anti-politicization comments to apply to public figures, and people participating in the hashtags/slogans/yelling kind of politics, not discussions on serious debating forums.

Justin Mallone:
I saw a formulation of don't politicize idea from a right-winger (FYI Elliot, it was Tracinski) that just said wait 72 hours after tragedy. very modest standard but people couldn't even come close to that

Elliot Temple:
 some major voices on the left are really eager to proclaim that they know the solution to tragedies like this. some major voices on the right disagree, and think they have better solutions, but are more willing to try to set that disagreement aside briefly to have some unity in mourning.

Elliot Temple:
 can we pray together and try to think things over for a few days before we go back to squabbling over the same bitter disagreement we've been fighting about for decades?

^ I think that's a reasonable attitude.

Elliot Temple:
 can we, in the wake of the tragedy, use it as a reminder that we're on the same side, instead of using it as leverage to be divisive?

Elliot Temple:
 unfortunately i honestly don't think Hillary Clinton is on the same side as the rest of us. but i can sympathize with people who take the above kind of attitude, and i think most of the left are reasonably decent people.

Elliot Temple:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDjxJMWJn4

Jack Murphy wrote good tweets about Social Justice Warriors in the workplace:

We read about SJW insanity everywhere but somehow it still doesn't seem real. I began new day job recently which brought it all home to me.

On the first day they gave me the organizational goals for the year. One of them was: "Rid the org of bias through implicit bias training."

They made everyone take the implicit bias test online and then dedicated a required two-day retreat to reprogramming all the employees.

There were working groups which produced new goals such "reduce the number of white people." and "rid org of white supremacy bias."

They circulated pre-work reading materials with such titles as "Finding White Supremacy at work" and "How white culture creates injustice."

Apparently, insisting on promptness for meetings is now considered white supremacy.

What's interesting is that these ideas are bubbling up from the staffer level, + forcing management to respond. It's ground up not top down

Management said they hoped hiring me would help break the org of the mind virus. I'm not sure they know exactly what they're getting w/ me.

Some things which are now white supremacist: Objectivity. Individualism. "Worship of the written word." Sense of urgency. Perfectionism.

I walked into a room that had "too many white people" written on the white board. The culture war seems unreal until you see that at work.

I wouldn't ordinarily subject myself to this stuff, but a) the work itself is fascinating and I'm expert and b) it's like being undercover

I'm getting an inside look at shit I thought only existed in paranoid alt-right delusions. It's intriguing to see the mind virus at work.

I suspect at some point after the book comes out, my two worlds will collide. That'll be something. Maybe I'll get fired for truth.

If I get fired from the job for writing, that'll be good for the book. I'll cause a shit storm and the word will spread farther.

And until then, the pay is good, the work is even better, and I get real world confirmation of the culture war at work. Personal experience.

I'll keep cataloging the SJW craziness. If they fire me, I'll have a comprehensive list of EEO violations and file a civil rights case.

Plus, it's great fodder for the current book and future work. They're paying me to get a valuable dose of culture war reality.

I've resisted accepting the culture war as real. I don't want to think along gender divides or racial ones. But they leave me no choice.

I wrote this months ago and now I'm living it today:

For more content like this, make sure you buy my forthcoming book: #DemocratToDeplorable Sign up here for more!

If I were president I'd cancel most of the meetings, travel, etc, etc, and make some forums which are publicly readable.

There'd be a forum where all the countries have an account with write access. And one where all US politicians have write access. And one with a lot of media and intellectuals.

I think forum discussions are actually the best thing the US president could do.

Imagine if all the politicians, media personalities, etc., with bad ideas had to actually write about them on the record on a daily basis? Imagine if you just kept following up on discussions. What would they do? What most people do currently with me is just stop responding to things, which they can get away with socially because I have low prestige. But just refusing to answer forever wouldn't be a viable answer to the president's forum, and arguments/questions from the president and his staff. That'd look really bad to the world: Nancy Pelosi has been asked the same question for 5 days in a row and just won't answer at all.

But if they did answer they'd get pinned down.

They'd have to do evasive tactics: missing the point, playing dumb, trying to create confusion, saying unclear things, trying to make the discussion go in circles, etc. All that stuff can be called out, pointed out, and basically made to look as foolish as it is. People get away with that stuff in verbal formats with little followup, and behind closed doors, but not against the best debaters over a period of weeks with every word of it in the record. None of the bad guys have any method of dealing with that level of intellectual scrutiny.

They can lie, but the lies can be documented and the canonical links documenting lies can be repetitively posted every single time a lie is repeated. Staff can be hired to do that. That would cost a hell of a lot less than a wide variety of current, unimportant government departments. It's very easy by government standards.

And how do you deal with media questions? Press briefings are so incomplete that it's hard for people to see who's right and why. What if all the bullshit the press kept bugging Trump about was on a forum where some staff members replied with canonical links over and over so everything was getting answered? How would the media continue to ignore the main points, which they currently ignore, if it was being linked in reply to them every time they talked?

If we're bad at assimilation, then immigration is dangerous.

If we're good at assimilation, given modern communications technology, we should be able to assimilate people living in other countries. They can learn English and Western values online. They can access our books, TV, radio and online or mail-based educational courses from their own countries.

Therefore I propose the following immigration policy: only let in immigrants who already assimilated before immigrating.

There's no need to let in unassimilated immigrants and then try to assimilate them after they're here and hope it works.

Assimilation has a failure rate. If we assimilate them in their home countries, the failures can stay there instead of already being here. And even with a low success rate, we can still assimilate a larger number of people than we actually want to bring here (we can still pick and choose the best ones).

If you want to come here, prove it first by assimilating yourself remotely.

What if someone doesn't have access to the internet, or there is some other obstacle, so they don't have the opportunity to assimilate? Too bad. Life isn't fair. Our immigration policy should benefit our country by only taking people who found a way to already be a good fit before coming here (there are enough of them that people without internet access are not our problem).

Also, the best thing we can do to help underprivileged foreigners is to spread Western values to the whole world. We should be making it clear that Western values – the ones that originated with the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Western Europeans – are the only ones that bring peace and prosperity. Other countries can help their own underprivileged by adopting capitalism and limited government, by favoring economic and personal freedom, and by having a government which protects men from violence instead of violently oppressing its people.

There are a lot of people in the world. They can't all come here. Foreign countries need to improve. That's the only way to help everyone.

The U.S. needs to improve as well. It's in real danger from anti-Western ideas that have gained popularity internally. Bringing in more people who don't have Western values is making that problem worse. That problem is threatening to destroy the most civilized country, which is the best able to lead others to freedom and prosperity. It's in the interest of all men of good will, in all countries, that America remains a free and prosperous country that is capable of sharing good ideas with others.

America should be spreading its values to other countries, not bringing other values here. Sadly, a lot of the problem is that America is currently exporting anti-American values. The "intellectuals", media and "cultural elites" are predominantly anti-American. But thanks to the internet, anyone can help, regardless of where they live, by learning English and studying the ideas that made America great in the first place, and then communicating, explaining and teaching those ideas. The world needs fighters for ideas – the American ideas that came from Europe that came from Rome that came from Greece. Those ideas about reason and liberty are the only civilized ideas the world has ever known.

Also, immigrants are no threat to a free country. Immigrants with other values become a problem when the government meddles in men's lives, restricts liberty, fails to protect law and order, and redistributes wealth. Help fight the intellectual battle to save the U.S. from the authoritarian ideas of a giant, all-controlling government and we could then be in a position to reasonably (instead of suicidally) consider a more generous immigration policy.

Blizzard Gives 6-Month Ban To College Team That Held Up 'Free Hong Kong' Sign

Blizzard banned some US college Hearthstone players from competitions for 6 months after they held up a sign reading "FREE HONG KONG, BOYCOTT BLIZZ”. They did this on purpose, as a statement, after Blizzard banned a Hong Kong Hearthstone player for a year, and made him forfeit like 10k of prize money, for a pro Hong Kong statement, and also fired the two casters involved.

Blizzard wasn’t sure what to do at first and delayed a decision, but has now decided that it does want to punish Americans for their political speech in America that is in agreement with American values in general. It’s not even offensive speech in America, it’s just offensive to foreign communists.

Blizzard’s justification for the bans is:

a general rule that states the company can punish players for “engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image.”

This is an extremely generic, subjective rule. One can’t predict in advance what will be punished or how much it will be punished. A government with laws like this would be an oppressive tyranny. This is rule of man, not rule of law.

Update: This page has become a place to post cancel culture examples, including e.g. mandatory PC training at your job. It's not strictly limited to deplatforming examples.

Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon, PayPal and other companies have repeatedly advertised that they are politically-neutral open platforms. All are welcome. They’re for everybody. This fraud violates existing free-market-compatible laws, as I'll discuss below.

Then they ban, moderate, demonetize and censor people, and bias search algorithms, for a variety of biased reasons, including especially to persecute right wing political ideas. I’ll call this general issue “deplatforming”. It’s about not letting certain non-favored persons/ideas use the platforms in the standard, (allegedly) publicly-available way.

For those unfamiliar with or doubtful of the relevant facts, I’ve included an information section below.

The public debate over this issue has two main sides.

First, most of the left is cheering as their enemies are attacked.

Second, most of the right, along with some people on the left with greater integrity, say that free speech is important, tech companies are an important part of modern life, and we need government regulations to make things fair.

A third, smaller group are free market advocates say private companies should be able to do whatever they want, even if it’s politically biased, and the government should leave them alone. They often say this despite having right wing ideas themselves. They say it despite being part of the oppressed group.

What’s missing is a pro-free-market, anti-deplatforming group. That’s my position. It’s important that the free market is compatible with solving the deplatforming problem. This isn’t a failure of capitalism. Anyone who cares about freedom and classical liberalism should be interested in how it can address a problem like this; don't assume minimal government and capitalism are inadequate.

As a free market advocate, many people expect me to say that private companies can do whatever they want and the government should stay out of it. I think deplatforming is a horrible problem, but don’t my principles require me to accept it?

I find most free market people insufficiently regretful regarding their support of deplatforming. They don’t say how horrible it is, and they wish there was anything to be done about it, but their hands are tied. They don’t seem to mind much. I think many have some partial leftist sympathies.

There’s a better way to view the issue. There’s something bad going on. I dislike it. And most of the proposed solutions are statist. So then what? Give up? No! The first thing to do is consider free-market-compatible solutions. Classical liberalism is a sophisticated, nuanced political philosophy which should be able to deal with problems like this. Can it? No one seems to have checked.

In the free market, the initiation of force is prohibited. This includes threat of force and includes fraud. False advertising is fraud. Advertising being a neutral platform, while not being one, is fraud. These companies should be sued. We don’t need new regulations. We need the most basic legal protections that would also exist in a minarchist society (minimal government society, aka nightwatchman state).

These companies don’t follow the rules in their own Terms of Service. That’s fraud. They are telling the public the rules are one way, but acting a different way.

The ongoing fraud has been revealed by many sources including Project Veritas (e.g. Google Document Dump). More sources are below.

Why are companies flagrantly violating the law and no one seems to notice and they aren’t losing all their profits to lawsuits? Because they have special government privileges. They’re being protected from being accountable under the law. They aren’t fully private companies. They hire tons of political staffers and lobbyists. They have friends in high places. They have political pull and receive favors. They aren’t operating in a free market context. Rather than making new laws to control these companies, we need to abolish special privileges granted by the government to a favored elite.

People tell right wingers to make their own competing sites. If you don’t like these companies, beat them in the free market. There are a few problems with this. First, having a larger user base is a huge advantage in social media. People want to be on the sites their friends are on. And why do these companies have such a head start? Because they fraudulently lied about their political neutrality so people didn’t see the need to compete with them earlier on. Second, they are still lying today which reduces the interest in alternative sites. If they openly said they’re biased against Trump voters, more people would recognize the bias and switch to a new competitor. But they still lie to their users. And third, there’s the banking problem.

The worst problem related to deplatforming is not access to social media platforms for sharing ideas. It’s access to the financial system. You can make your own blog or other website to speak your mind (deplatforming by domain registrars, webhosts, etc., has begun but isn’t very bad yet). But what if you’re being prevented from selling your work online? What if your fans can’t donate money to support you? What if you can’t sell merch? How can you compete in the free market if you don’t have the ability to participate in the market online?

The banks and credit card companies are highly government regulated. And they have pressured sites like Patreon and PayPal to deplatform right wingers. And when Gab tried to build a Twitter competitor, they found it very difficult to get any banking partners. Patreon competitors have also had huge difficulties getting banking access to enable their users to send money online to fund content creators. For most types of business, getting banking is easy. Banks and payment processors compete for your business. They want to be widely used. But right wing people online are being treated differently by financial companies which are considerably more government-controlled or government-influenced than Facebook or Google is.

My position is that I wish we had a free market. A free market would solve this problem because there would be serious consequences for fraud. We aren’t even close to a free market. Free market advocates tend to recognize this fact in general. They recognize e.g. that the U.S. healthcare market (including before Obamacare) is not even close to free market, capitalist healthcare. They recognize how involved the government is in the universities. But with deplatforming, the government’s role seems to be widely overlooked.

The main takeaway here is simple but widely ignored. Given the facts about the situation (which most people don’t know much about), Google, YouTube, Twitter and so on are guilty of blatant, massive and ongoing fraud. We don’t need new laws or regulations, we need to enforce the most basic and capitalism-compatible laws.

Deplatforming Info

For those who haven’t been following the public information about deplatforming much, here are some examples:

"Twitter stands for freedom of expression," Dorsey declared. "Twitter stands for speaking truth to power." Dorsey is CEO and co-founder of Twitter. Just from accounts I was following, Twitter deplatformed Heartiste, Real Peer Review and American Renaissance.

"I'm almost a free-speech absolutist." said Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company that deplatformed the Daily Stormer for political reasons.

Kudos to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for defending free speech at a tough moment. There are many articles attacking Zuckerberg for being too favorable to free speech. Meanwhile Facebook deletes, censors and deprioritizes (lowering the traffic they get) right wing groups and ideas.

There is some non-political, largely-unexplained deplatforming too, contrary to publicly claimed policies. E.g. Facebook deleted without warning or explanation the Banting7DayMealPlan user group. The group has 1.65 million users who post testimonials and other information regarding the efficacy of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet.

Sam Harris Drops Patreon, Citing 'Political Bias' Likely Inspired by SPLC's 'Hate Group' List

Google "Machine Learning Fairness" Whistleblower Goes Public, says: "burden lifted off of my soul”, from Project Veritas, which I found as the 15th search result on YouTube for project veritas google whistleblower. It’s so low due to search algorithm bias, which ironically is one of the topics of the video.

Twitter banned a psychiatry expert for sharing his professional research conclusions (for political reasons).

Jared Taylor was the first victim of a new YouTube deplatforming campaign.

I Was Fooled By The Promise Of The Internet:

Domain registrars promised that I could “own” my little corner of the web with a domain name, and now my domains can be seized by a faceless bureaucracy. Google told me to create the best content I could to be ranked highly in their search engine, but then they manipulated their algorithms to lift dull corporate propaganda above my own. Twitter promised that I could share any thought that came to mind, and after I spent years doing so, they changed their mind and will now ban me if I make fun of an obese feminist. YouTube said I could upload engaging videos that viewers love, and even make money doing so, but then they demonetized most of my videos, put others in “limited state,” and banned me from live streaming for three months because I asked if women who wear chokers want to be treated subserviently. Disqus offered me a service to allow the community at Return Of Kings to discuss what was on their mind, but they banned the site because they didn’t want us to discuss certain things. Amazon said I could publish books on their platform and even make a living as a writer, but then they banned the paperbook and ebook editions of nine of my books with no explanation why. Paypal said it would be easy to add payment processing to my site, and then later showed how easy it is to ban me for political reasons.

I’ve covered deplatforming in newsletters, e.g. after Charlottesville and re Twitter censoring Canary Mission and Gab and about the banking/financial forces behind deplatforming (sadly and ironically, the Nick Monroe Twitter thread in the newsletter is no longer readable because Twitter deplatformed him. And the Thread Reader App archive of it is hidden by Twitter in the replies behind a warning saying “Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content” and then the content is deleted from their site anyway. But it’s still on the wayback machine.).

Some more examples from the open politics discussion on Curiosity (this website):

• Roosh’s private account banned from Instagram.
• Heartiste deleted from WordPress.
• Michelle Malkin post deleted on Facebook.
• An Objectivist defended deplatforming.
• David Horowitz restricted on Twitter.
• Borderless video had delayed processing, then was taken down, on YouTube.
• Facebook deleted a Paul Joseph Watson post consisting of the single word “honk” because it referenced a right wing political meme.
• Koch Brothers Team Up With George Soros, Patreon and Airbnb to Fight Online Extremism (fighting online extremism is code for deplatforming).
• Pinterest whistleblower told Project Veritas about their political bias. Then YouTube deleted the video after it had a million views. One consequence is that the link to the video in my email newsletter archives, which can’t be edited, is now broken.
• Vdare article with non-classical-liberal tech censorship response.
• I answer Alan Forrester’s question about what fraud Facebook has committed (part 2).
• Apple threated to kick Parler (a Twitter competitor) off their app store unless Parler banned some people. Apple also blocks some channels on Telegram.
• Reddit quarantined the The Donald subreddit and suspended Veritas’ account.
• YouTube officially fraudulently lied that we apply our policies fairly and without political bias.
• I commented on fraud and deplatforming on the House of Sunny podcast.
• Wikipedia has biased editing, e.g. an example related to Jeffrey Epstein.
• A gaming channel got banned at a million followers on YouTube and had to start over.
• Links to collections of examples of Google and Facebook censorship.
• Cloudflare deplatformed 8chan.
• Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell got suspended from Twitter for sharing a video showing people making violent threats against him
• Owen Benjamin has been deplatformed by YouTube and others.
• Games Done Quick speedrun marathon deplatforms people for MAGA hats.

This is just a small sampling of deplatforming info. There’s far more. Post more in the comments below. I’ve posted, as the first comment, a list of deplatforming related links that Justin Mallone gathered earlier this year.

As a followup to my post on Deplatforming and Fraud, I’m going to share two examples of other frauds which were supported by large tech companies (Airbnb, Apple) but aren’t related to deplatforming. I think this will help people better understand what fraud is and that our society has inadequate mechanisms for dealing with fraud.

Airbnb’s Fraud

So, a journalist runs into scammers listing places to stay on Airbnb. They defraud her and she has to stay in a hotel. Full article. Then:

When I asked about the status of my refund, [the scammers] ghosted, which led me to contact Airbnb. Though I had been moved to a flophouse and then told to leave early, Airbnb only refunded me $399 of my $1,221.20, and only did so after I badgered a number of case managers over the course of several days. The $399 didn’t even include the service fees Airbnb charged me for the pleasure of being thrown out on the street.

Airbnb is a party to fraud. It should have been easy to get a full refund. They are protecting and profiting off fraud. Their policies aid fraud. They are playing the middleman and substantially siding with blatant fraud.

Why doesn't she chargeback the whole thing on her credit card? I think the reason is simply that Airbnb would blacklist her as punishment for getting her money back in case of fraud. Without Airbnb in the middle, putting effort into it, the fraud couldn't succeed.

Why doesn't she sue Airbnb? That'd be quite hard. Should it be hard? No. They are blatantly a party to blatant fraud.

In a more capitalist world, with a better legal system that better protected individuals against fraud, stuff like this wouldn't happen. Airbnb would predictably get sued and lose, repeatedly, until they stopped participating in fraud. The people suing would find it adequately cheap and easy, and their payouts would more than cover their legal fees and the hassle, leaving them better off than if they hadn't sued.

We in the USA live in an over-regulated world with too many laws covering everything, and people can get in legal trouble over dumb stuff. But at the same time, we also live in an under-regulated world where there's too little law and order. The basic elements of a minimal government which protects against violence, threat of violence, and fraud, are not actually functioning very well. (Mainly the issue is for fraud. I think our protections against violence, while imperfect, work reasonably well.)

The article shares specifics of Airbnb's unreasonable actions supporting fraud in this case and in many other cases.

Apple’s Fraud

This one is my own story from a couple months ago. I made some in-app purchases in the mobile game Archero, by Habby, from Apple's app store. A few days later, Archero had major technical problems. Although it's a single player game, it requires an internet connection to communicate with their servers for anti-cheat reasons. Their servers were unstable and frequently down. It was frustrating to try to use the game because it was broken so much. I stopped playing. I waited a few weeks and expected the problem to be fixed. It wasn't, and I eventually moved on to playing a different game.

About a month after their game was broken, Archero sent out an in-game message to all players (or maybe just US players, I don't know what's going on in other regions) saying sorry for the technical problems, they are now fixed, here's a couple dollars worth of in-game currency as an apology. Over the next month, Archero sent out four more similar messages, each claiming they had now fixed the problem. I know it wasn’t actually fixed for two months but I’ve stopped checking. Maybe the fifth announcement that they’d fixed it was finally true instead of lying. Their subreddit has lots of complaints and memes about the ongoing problems. I observed the problem on multiple devices and with multiple internet connections, and many other people also had the same issue.

After it wasn’t fixed for several weeks, I contacted Apple and asked for a refund since I hadn't gotten to actually use what I paid for. They told me to contact Habby for customer support. I did. I waited over a week. There was no response at all.

I followed up with Apple and they told me they wouldn't give me a refund. I asked why. I got a non-answer. I asked why again. Non-answer. I asked why again, for the third time. Apple escalated my case to a supervisor on their own initiative. The supervisor did not say why I was ineligible for a refund and told me the case was now closed, final answer. I asked why again and also asked what would happen if I did a credit card chargeback. Apple responded to the allegedly closed case with a non-answer that still didn't tell me what their refund criteria are, what aspect of my case disqualified me for a refund, nor what their chargeback policy is. I asked again about a chargeback and received no response from Apple. This is ridiculous, unfair, and dissimilar to refund policies I experience with major companies in general. It violates my reasonable expectations, based on Apple’s advertising (including all public communications like their website and support documentation), of what sort of customer service would be available (that means Apple’s advertising/public-communication is fraudulent).

I did not chargeback Apple with my credit card for fear that they would punish me, e.g. lock my iCloud account or block me from future App store purchases. Those outcomes would be far worse for me than losing the money.

So Habby got my money by fraud. The only reason they kept it was because Apple played middleman and took their side. Apple was a party to fraud. I think Apple getting in the way of refunds is a significant part of what a lot of shadier app developers are paying for when they give Apple a 30% cut.

If all refunds for Archero have to go through Apple, then it’s Apple’s responsibility to know about Archero’s server problems. Apple won’t investigate the details of particular games, even though they are in charge of dealing with monetary transactions about those games, and Apple tells me to contact Habby for support, but it’s Apple controlling refunds and therefore Apple who needs to deal with it. If Apple’s policy was “developer offered no support and ignored customer, so we’ll issue a refund” it’d be OK, but Apple will refuse refunds when developers have broken apps and completely ignore customers.

Of course, having technical problems with your game servers isn't fraud in and of itself. But they advertised that I could play the game and I could buy things and use them to play the game. They failed to live up to that. So they should give me a refund since I didn't get what I paid for. Refusing the refund makes it fraud. They didn’t provide what I paid for and didn’t give me my money back. The combination is breach of contract and fraud. It’s fraud by Habby because they deceived me into believing they would honor their (implied, unwritten) contract with me that I’d get to experience certain gameplay in return for the payments. It’s fraud by Apple because they deceive the public by pretending to have civilized, law-and-order-compatible dispute resolution mechanisms for their app store, but they don’t. Habby also commited fraud by continuing selling the game throughout their technical problems with no warnings or disclaimers.

FYI Archero is a popular game which has been promoted by Apple and Pewdiepie. Some article says Archero earned $8,500,000 revenue in its first month alone. There are other articles with large numbers too. Either most customers are satisfied and they could refund the justifiably unsatisfied customers and still have a large profit. Or, in the alternative, they got a large portion of their millions of dollars by fraudulently tricking customers into thinking they’d get a gaming experience that they would not get.

Bonus Apple Story

One more quick story about Apple. Over 10 years ago I bought an Apple laptop, with Applecare, along with an Apple Cinema Display. Their website advertised that the Applecare for the computer would also apply to the display without having to separately purchase Applecare for the display. The display broke after the standard warranty but within the Applecare period. Apple refused to repair my display. They said the special deal only applied to desktop computers (or some set of computers that didn’t include the one I’d bought). I had records showing their website had advertised that the deal did apply for the computer I bought. That had apparently been an error. Over the phone, Apple absolutely refused to fix their error and repair my display. I talked to multiple people, escalated it, was assertive, had proof, and was refused service.

The money was a big deal to me back then. I wrote a letter to Apple complaining about the incident (and documenting again that I was correct), on paper, and mailed it to them. Apple responded to the letter by solving the problem for me and repairing the display. People should be aware that writing letters can get problems solved.

I’m not going to send a letter this time (I didn’t even phone in either, which would be too much hassle, I interacted with Apple over email about Archero). It’s significantly less money at a time when I have significantly more money, so it’s not that big a deal to me. I have better things to do. And the case is less clear cut. It involves a third party who didn't make specific guarantees, in writing, about the availability of their game – whereas Apple had literally posted, in writing, on their own website, a specific offer regarding the display purchase. And Apple is a bigger company now, with more unreasonable, evasive support people, and I’m not confident that a letter would solve the problem.

Conclusion

The Airbnb scammers are blatant criminals who can only get away with it due to Airbnb’s support. I doubt Habby are knowingly criminals on purpose. I doubt they think of it that way. But they’re committing some fraud that they can only get away with because of Apple’s support.

Our legal system makes it too hard to hold Airbnb or Apple accountable, which enables ongoing violations of basic capitalist law and order to continue. This is similar to how there is ongoing fraud by tech companies related to deplatforming, which they are getting away with, but could not get away with in a classical liberal society which had fewer laws but actually enforced the most important laws (that we have too, but don’t enforce well enough), in particular laws about fraud and following contracts.

I think it’s especially gross when standard mechanisms for solving these problems, like chargebacks, are prevented because of a company like Apple or Airbnb playing middleman for fraud, so it’s not possible to directly chargeback the company you have a problem with. (Credit card companies in my experience, and by reputation, are very customer-friendly, and it’s easy to get your money back over stuff like this. They basically demand that merchants keep customers satisfied. But Airbnb is sheltering scammers from that demand and Apple is sheltering Habby from it.)

We need a legal system that makes it easier to successfully do small lawsuits for fraud, with meaningful punitive damages. E.g. $10,000 punitive damages on $100 actual damages, plus legal costs, would add up after many lawsuits and would give individuals the incentive to sue. When many individuals sue over fraud like this, as should be fairly easy to do in a reasonable legal system, companies will change. Similarly it shouldn't be that hard to sue e.g. Facebook if they delete one of my posts or groups on their website contrary to their advertised non-politically-biased policies or terms of service.

Black Lives Matter is a racist, Marxist group. I oppose and condemn them. Read about them.

Most of the protestors/rioters are ignorant dupes being lied to by people and groups like CNN, Soros, AOC, NYT, and their teachers and professors. The people who run BLM are racist, Marxist liars who are trained (by people like Alinsky and his followers) to lie because the only goal is the revolution and the power to achieve it.

The typical protestor/rioter doesn't know anything and is being exploited by leftist oppressors who are taking advantage of them and don't care about their best interests. They don't care about improving policing and improving the lives of blacks in the inner cities; they are the elites responsible for those problems (these are Democrat-run cities with problems like Democrat-supported police unions and teachers unions that prevent reforms and prevent firing bad cops and teachers).

The foot soldiers in this assault on law and order are largely young people who have been misled by mainstream authorities their whole lives. And they've been forced to go to school and be immersed in highly pressuring social hierarchies there. They bear some guilt and responsibility for their actions, but they are not the enemy. The top level leaders and true believers are the enemy, which are only a small part of the uprising. We must stop the rebellion against civilization but also find some kindness and forgiveness in ourselves to help reintegrate the fools back into civilized society.

See my article on how antifa is a cult which uses abusive tactics to "recruit" and control members. And see the Discover the Networks article on antifa.

One of the many issues with the protest/riot leaders, and many of the followers, is that they don't believe in God. They don't believe in a higher power, truth or law above themselves (some sort of objective truth of physical and moral reality doesn't adequately serve this role for them either). They are arrogant and think their own reason should rule the world. They overestimate their wisdom and knowledge like the French revolutionaries.

I say this as an atheist. Atheism is dangerous. It's one example of the more broadly dangerous mindset of the revolutionary who thinks he's wiser than the traditions of his society.

If you're going to be an atheist or seek large change, you ought to actually read books, study, learn, debate, etc. Want to rely on your own reason? Develop it yourself. Don't just trust professors and other authorities.

No, learn more than that. You haven't done enough. People do so little and call it being educated and think they're done. And they're so intolerant of disagreement, debate, and being questioned.

Tell you what. If you think you learned enough to believe a bunch of radical athiest outlier beliefs, give an overview of what you did to learn it in the comments below and I'll ask you a some questions to check for holes in your studying.

Or stick to common sense and traditional values and beliefs just like your religious neighbors, and then being an atheist isn't such a big deal. Which traditions? The ones that built America (and more broadly Western civilization starting with the Greeks) and made it great.

Suppose hypothetically that approximately all parents are child abusers. And you're a political leader. You can't just arrest the all the child abusers or take all their kids away because who is gonna raise the kids instead? The foster parents or social workers or orphanages are no better – they too are part of the same culture that mistreats children. You can only realistically target the bottom couple percent of bad parents, that way if you get those kids to be raised by even 20th percentile quality parents it's a significant upgrade.

In principle, you think child abuse is unacceptable. Parents must not e.g. hit their children. Physical violence violates the children's right and is abuse. But if 99% of parents hit their children, there isn't much you can do about it besides trying to educate people. You can share better ideas with books, articles, lectures, etc.

So although something is unacceptable in principle, if too many people are doing it wrong, it's hard to take direct action to fix or change it. For lots of practical purposes, you can't have standards for society that 99% of people (or even 30% of people) can't meet. You can't arrest 99% of 30% of the population or sue them all into oblivion or whatever. You can only do that to small outlier groups, not to the mainstream, or you're just creating a civil war.

It's similar with the rioters/protestors today. There are too many. It's too popular. Yes they are crossing lines into initiation of force. In a better world they'd be stopped so that I could safely walk along any public street in the country with a MAGA hat and speak my mind. But arresting or otherwise forcibly controlling so many misbehaving people is unrealistic in this world.

One potential solution is to arrest and punish a small fraction of them as examples. If you have really draconian punishments for a few of them at random, maybe you can scare the rest into stopping. This is kinda like how armies used to hang a few deserters to discourage other people from deserting. There were armies where over 50% of the soldiers would like to go home and stop fighting, but harsh enforcement against a few people was scary enough to keep the rest in line. I don't like this strategy with suing a few people for sharing music and movies online, and I don't like it with the protestors/rioters either. It's harsh and unfair to some unlucky people who get made examples of. It's mean and it alienates the people it intimidates into obedience. It doesn't seek to actually get them on our team/side.

Another potential solution is to only punish the much smaller group of leaders and true believers, not the masses of mostly-ignorant (but not totally innocent) dupes and fools. This seems to me like roughly what should happen. And punish people who cross major lines (that not many people cross) like severely beating someone up.

But if we mostly aren't punishing the rioters/protestors, then what do we do when they are causing trouble? How do we get them to stop? Maybe they'd listen to reason more if we had better explainers and teachers as political and cultural leaders, but we don't. The good guys here aren't all that wise and are contributing to the problem too.

So that's hard. The protests/riots are too mainstream and widespread, they're too big a part of society. And to make things harder, the opposition is wrong and flawed in lots of ways (but the opposition is more civilized and better at not being a puppet of uncivilized causes).

Are there things wrong with police policies? Yes. Does racism exist? Yes. But the protestors don't know what the flaws with police policy are or what changes should be made. And it isn't being explained to them very well either. They don't even know who is in charge of the police. It's the leftists they voted for who are behind lots of the problems. They're yelling at the wrong people. But not many are trying to share key info and talk about e.g. the role of unions in not firing bad cops. And the mainstream media puppet masters are sharing misinformation and they have so much control over communication channels that it's hard to speak to the protestors/rioters and give them better info.

The protestors/rioters broadly seem to assume if they demand stuff vigorously enough then it'll happen. What's the premise? That people are just being bad on purpose. That they could do better and refuse and just need to be pressured.

The protestors/rioters are broadly ignorant of how hard it is to run a police department or government better. They have no idea how to do better and haven't really thought about it. They assume that good policies are easy to come by and the issue are motivation, bias, tribalism, etc., not facts, logic, paperwork, etc.

They are looking at this as a social issue about a clash between different social groups each pursuing own agenda (the agenda is thought of as greed and self-interest for their opponents, but disinterested altruism and kindness for themselves). They aren't looking at it as problems of logistics, scheduling, budget management, writing good training curriculums, communicating better with the public about what laws and policies make sense, and so on.

They think the reason things aren't better is the people with high social status and power don't care about the people with low social status. So they just have to circumvent regular social climbing by forming a mob and exerting strong pressure to get their demands heard. They just have to be pushy so they can't be snubbed anymore.

They have no idea that organizing a society is hard to do as well as we're currently doing it, let alone better. They are contributing ~nothing to rational reforms and aren't trying to and have no idea that better ideas are needed. They aren't trying to read books like Bureaucracy. They aren't trying to study statistics to better understand crime rates and their correlations to e.g. race or income. They aren't trying to consider downsides of proposed new policing policies and how to figure out new policies that will actually work without breaking a bunch of stuff that works now. They don't understand the difficulties police face and don't care to. And they certainly aren't studying unions as a major force that blocks reforms.

It's hard to do great but we could do somewhat better pretty easily if so many of the protestors themselves, and their (partials) fans/allies, would stop voting in bad people over and over. They have no idea what the sources of problems actually are, nor which of the problems they see in the world are real (some are!) or imaginary (some are this too!). They just blame capitalism and racism.

The protestors/rioters are less popular and mainstream than they think they are.

It's partly because, just like most people, they tend to interact with people similar to themselves.

But it's more than that. They scare people into not voicing dissent. The left in general suppresses disagreement enough that some people won't speak openly to pollsters, let alone to lefty coworkers/friends/party-goers/social-circle-members, let alone to the sort of lefties who'd join a BLM protest/riot. We saw this with Trump losing in the polls but winning the election. We also see it in China where most people say they support the CCP but if they had safe, secret ballots they'd vote the CCP out.

They broke Robin Hanson. http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/JuneteenthApology.html

Hanson chose to be an icon and leader. Giving in is a betrayal of his followers, fans and values. It signals that you can't succeed by standing up for truth and free speech. He's discouraging them. He took on a responsibility and failed at it.

He was some sort of role model. He knew it and wanted to be. And that's why he was targeted. And then, with little fuss, RIP.

At the same time, Scott Alexander stood up to the NYT. Though, interestingly, Alexander wasn't even given the option to apologize and recant.

They gave Alexander the options fight back or not fight back, and be attacked either way using the same weapon (dox him by printing his name).

I saw something recently, forget where, about a revolution long ago, I think somewhere in China. I don't know if it's a true story or just designed to make a point. Was like:

What's the penalty for being late? Death.

What's the penalty for a revolution? Death.

So then they revolted cuz it's the same penalty anyway.

Did Hanson naively think that his job would always be safe when he criticized mainstream ideas? Did he think he lived in a society with free speech and tolerance of intellectual diversity? Or just that his particular university was especially great? I doubt it.

He ought to have known a confrontation was possible. If he wasn't prepared for the confrontation, what the hell was he doing? If his plan was to give in, he misled his readers about that.

Hanson is trying to proceed with blogging like nothing happened, without any explanation to his readers (other than the official apology, which doesn't explain it – a real explanation would be e.g. "they threatened my job, and i wanted to keep it, so i spoke out against the cause". That particular explanation would raise some questions before he was accepted back as an advocate and leader of the cause. If he has a better one, let's hear it. If he's muzzled, and can be threatened into not saying whatever the university leaders choose, then can we trust anything he blogs to be his real opinion?).

I was not much of Hanson fan anyway, but he's one of the symbols we have ... well had. I don't know of a bunch of better ones.

People should not accept him back. Don't act like this didn't happen. He's clearly compromised and there is no plan or strategy in place to enable his free and honest speech going forward. There are problems here which Hanson is trying to ignore instead of present solutions to. He's doing no post mortem. He's making no plan to be more successful next time. He's presumably just decided on a bunch of things he's no longer willing to say publicly, and he's hiding the list from his audience. And I doubt it's even a list, in writing, or that he has any policies to ensure he consistently follows his plan. He may well behave inconsistently and get in trouble more, or refrain from saying things that aren't on the list, or both, and there's no transparency.

This question is directed to people who think gender matters for behavior and mental capabilities. Similar questions could be asked about race and other traits.

Suppose that gender is a social construct. Suppose that gendered behavior is due to just culture, not a mix of culture and genes. Suppose that women are born with equal mental capabilities to men.

If you conceded all that, what would you change your mind about, if anything? Why?

I ask this because a lot of effort is spent denying that gender is a social construct. Many right wing people are quite hostile to the social construct theory and view it as dangerous. But what negative consequences do they think it implies?

I interpret people as thinking something like "If the left was correct that gender is a social construct, then a lot of their political philosophy would be correct, and I'd have to change my mind about a bunch of stuff." I am doubtful of this and don't see that the social construct theory implies much leftist political philosophy.

If gender is a social construct, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Social constructs exist and matter. They can't be instantly or trivially changed or gotten rid of. Culture and memes are important.

This issue is complicated by biological differences between the genders for e.g. muscles. Men are stronger on average. The difference is significant. Reasonable people don't deny that. Try to focus your answer on basically intellectual differences, personality differences, behavior differences, mental differences, etc., which are the things that might be cultural.

Note that the anti social construct view claims that genes influence gendered mental traits, but do not fully determine them. They think a mix of biology and culture leads to gendered traits. They don't claim it's all biology. The social construct view, by contrast, denies the role of biology. It rejects the mixed factors view in favor of a single dominant factor.

For people who think gender is a social construct, I have similar question: What (classical) liberal ideas do you think that contradicts, if any?

This post will clarify a few of my ideas that people have concerns or misunderstandings about.

Politics

Freedom and Capitalism

I want a small government with limited power. The proper function of government is protect people against force – e.g. military, cops, courts. I want a society with tons of freedom including economic freedom (which is what “capitalism” actually means). See my essay liberalism. I’m not necessarily opposed to all anarchist ideas (though most are awful), but I think we should aim for minimal government and try that for a while before thinking we know in advance what further reforms would be a good idea.

I respect thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. I do not respect lots of their followers or the people commonly associated with them (e.g. I disagree with Hayek, Rothbard, most libertarians and most Objectivists). I also disagree with most Republicans and most Democrats.

In general I like individual thinkers, not groups.

I think political philosophy and economics are more important than politics. By politics I mean stuff like current events, news and election issues. Current political issues include abortion, gun control, immigration, racism, feminism, rent control, tax policy, government-run healthcare and environmentalist policies. People should learn how to think effectively about general principles before trying to debate those specific controversies.

People are partially right to complain about corporations and Wall Street. Many of their arguments are incorrect, but there is shady, unfair, exploitive stuff going on. But the problem is mostly government involvement in the economy and lack of economic freedom. For example, the main source of monopolies is government laws that make it harder to compete with existing companies, e.g. by increasing barriers to entry.

Trump

I like Donald Trump better than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. I think Trump has moderate political views and likes America. I disagree with his protectionist economic ideas (like tariffs and trade wars), though I do agree with his intuition that there’s some problem related to trade with China and that some sort of action should be taken. I think Trump screwed up by hiring a bunch of establishment Republicans and he handled coronavirus badly.

I appreciate that Trump is somewhat, partially challenging the ruling elite class of journalists, media pundits, unelected political influencers, professors, politicized non-profits, lobbyists, bankers, administrators and bureaucrats. Most politicians in both parties are part of that elite which is oppressing and ripping off the American people (the middle and lower classes, and the wealthy people without friends in high places).

Tribalism

Most people bring a tribalist, follower mindset to politics. They cheer for their team, just like sports. They’re super biased. They don’t understand the other side(s) very well. They don’t rationally study or debate the issues.

This doesn’t mean each tribe is equally right or wrong. Currently, I agree with Republicans more than Democrats. That’s despite being an atheist and growing up in a Democrat family in a heavily Democrat area. I do disagree with lots of Republican ideas.

Immigration

Immigration has been used for decades to try to dilute Western civilization by bringing in people who think in other ways and have other values. Western countries have been doing a bad job of standing up for their values and assimilating immigrants. There are ongoing debates about whether Western values are worth standing up for. While this debate is ongoing, I think immigration should be slowed way down. I don’t think bringing in immigrants who agree with you, and vote for your tribe, is a legitimate way to resolve a debate.

I don’t think white people have a monopoly on Western values. I don’t think genetics are destiny. I know many other people who criticize immigration are racist in some way (that doesn’t merit all the tribalist hatred they’re receiving, which often comes from people who are even more racist). They think there are race-related IQ genes and that there is such thing as a biological “human nature” which is controlled by genes and therefore can vary by race. I have a strong “left wing” position – shared by right winger Ayn Rand – that ideas and culture are what matter, not biology. (On a related note, I think gender roles are socially constructed, but I don’t believe some of the other ideas commonly associated with that claim. While males and females biologically differ in some physical characteristics, I don’t think biology is the cause of observed mental differences like personality traits or math success.)

I disagree with many economic arguments against immigration. In a capitalist society, immigrants don’t drive down wages. That’s because, as the workforce gets larger and wages go down, it’s easier to start a business (because you can hire employees more cheaply), so more businesses get started, which pushes wages back up. However, currently US regulations are hostile to starting new businesses. When it’s a huge burden to start a business and hire people, then immigration can drive wages down. But “they took our jobs” is a bad argument.

I think the USA should screen immigrants better. Instead of letting so many immigrants in by lottery or extended family ties (including birthright citizenship granted to babies born here by tourists), I think immigrants should be admitted more based on having American values and being ready and able to do productive work. Although I think IQ tests (and the concept of IQ itself) are highly flawed and culturally biased, I think they’d be better than nothing for an immigration screening method. English language proficiency tests would also help.

Identity Politics

I’m opposed to identity politics. I think we should stop looking at people’s skin color, rather than doing affirmative action or having race-based groups like “Black Lives Matter”. I want a more color blind approach.

I do not think racism, sexism, homophobia, white privilege, etc., are solved issues. There are significant problems there (by both Democrats and Republicans). The current activism – like riots and cancel culture – is making things worse and is making it harder to reform anything.

PUA

Lots of “pickup artists” are idiots. Sometimes their idiocy crosses the line into assault. People like Good Looking Loser, Russel Hartley and RooshV are awful.

In 1994, the alt.seduction.fast (ASF) discussion group was started on Usenet. Some people there figured out some good ideas about how dating and social dynamics work. Of course some people there were dumb, too. Representatives of that group, which I respect, include:

• Mystery Method (Mystery’s Reality TV show))
• The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
• Girls Chase
• Real Social Dynamics (YouTube, website)

It was a discussion community. Many people participated productively and there are archives of ideas people liked, e.g. Classic PUA Writings. Many of them also went out and met people in person. They weren’t just armchair philosophers.

The ASF people aren’t perfect but I think they have some genuine knowledge. They managed to analyze, describe and understand social dynamics in ways that other groups haven’t. This information is useful for all members of our culture, male or female, in order to better understand the unwritten rules of our society. And although the ASF focus relates to dating, many of the social dynamics principles apply to other social situations too.

Other so-called pickup artists vary. Some learned a lot from the ASF crowd or participated in those discussions. Others didn’t and are usually clueless. Some of the ASF knowledge has spread elsewhere but it’s often mixed up with bad ideas too. The “red pill”, “mgtow (men going their own way)”, “MRA (men’s rights advocates)” and “manosphere” groups often have some ASF knowledge mixed in along with some of their own bad ideas.

Because so many fakers try to sell their pickup artist advice (advice that doesn’t work and is often offensive), the ASF people pretty much stopped using the terms “pickup artist” and “PUA”. I’ve been using the term “PUA” anyway but I’ll consider calling them the ASF community or specifying individuals in order to reduce confusion.

Claims about how our culture works are not claims that it should be that way. I’m not in favor of social climbing, promiscuity or pandering to whatever other people want. I’m also against lying to or tricking women (or anyone). The ASF people, contrary to some of the attacks on them, are more anti-lying than the typical person.

FI Members

There are no senior members of FI who have been around a while (years), learned FI well, and who make good role models. Don’t try to copy anyone or assume they’re good and you should try to be like them.

I don’t endorse anyone’s learning behavior, and I certainly don’t endorse their lecturing behavior. Some newer members have potential (and older members could change) but none have established themselves as doing a great job.

Don’t try to copy me either. That will lead to cargo culting. You have to learn things yourself and follow your own judgment. I’m too different in too many ways. You should expect to misunderstand me a lot, not to be able to do what you think I do and have it work in your own life situation.

Being a Discord moderator is not an endorsement of someone’s ideas. Being in a video with me or having a guest post on curi.us is not an endorsement of a person in general.

On a related note, I think everyone but me should be posting anonymously. (Because of cancel culture. And by posting anonymously I mean use something that isn't your real name or connected to your real name.) I’d prefer to be anonymous myself. I think it’s way too late for me to change (and maybe too hard to stay anonymous when e.g. selling stuff, meeting people IRL, and developing a reputation as a public intellectual) but everyone else should go anonymous. What’s the benefit of using your real name?

Twitter

I’m going to stop posting on Twitter in general. Most of what I posted was just retweets without me writing anything. I dislike Upvotes and Likes in general (pointless) but I found retweets ok (shows stuff to my friends/fans) and tried them for a while. Retweets were not endorsements. I never treated Twitter like a discussion forum or serious place. I will continue to read Twitter because I like a few people there. I’m going to stop retweeting because Twitter has an awful, tribalist political culture which I don’t want to contribute to. Plus Twitter shadowbanned me and is part of the cancel culture which is trying to suppress right wing speech.

I think FI people like Khaaan and Justin are tribalist tweeters who don’t understand the other side(s) of the debate well. That doesn’t stop them from being right or sharing good info over 50% of the time. But they ought to learn how to think rationally instead of doing so much politics. Even if they were going to do politics stuff, their approach is basically unproductive because they’re so biased for their tribe.

Offensive Comments

I’m not careful about what I say all the time. I don’t believe in political correctness. I think misunderstandings will happen whatever you do and it’s not worth the effort to walk on eggshells around everyone. Better if people mostly have thick skins rather than police their own speech.

If you dislike something I say, you can ask about it or criticize it. (Try to understand what it is before attacking it, please.) We might disagree. If so, I’ll have a thought-out position that you can hopefully respect, even if I didn’t explain it all upfront. I can’t preemptively explain everything I think every time I mention a topic. People can ask questions or read my writing to find out more.

I often disagree with all mainstream positions on a topic in some way. When disagreeing with one view, I don’t always communicate what I think about all the other positions. This leads to misunderstandings because people assume if you criticize one tribe then you must be part of an opposing tribe.

Lots of “jokes” reveal genuine racism or other bigotry. Speech is meaningful. I’m open to rational questions and criticism – I won’t just automatically dismiss issues as minor. But please try not to assume what I think and don’t begin the conversation in an adversarial way.

George Reisman tweeted:

[Trevor Dillinger wrote:] You have no right to drunk-driving. Same with COVID-19 spreading.

Your comment would apply to the Chinese Communist Party, who knew they were spreading Covid 19.

No one should be virtually imprisoned in a “lockdown” without benefit even of probable cause to suspect that he might have the disease, let alone without a trial or even the existence of a law that he is alleged to have broken.

The proper response would be to avoid contact with people especially susceptible to the disease and for them to avoid contact with whoever might give it to them. That’s it. For the rest, the purpose of life is not to avoid giving Covid 19 to others or getting it from them.

I disagree with Reisman despite agreeing with lots of his principles and views. This post is me thinking out loud about coronavirus lockdowns vs. individual freedom to stay home or risk going out.

Guessing a Reisman view: If you live with someone and they go out, too bad. Don’t live with people you can’t coordinate risk taking with.

Guessing a Reisman view: If your commute and job aren’t safe enough, quit. If you didn’t save money, oops, too bad. Or maybe you can get your work to make changes (plastic screens, masks, sanitizer, fewer customers inside at once, etc.) and get a car instead of public transit.

This stuff, like I think Reisman wants, is awkward in a world where the government requires people to do various tasks in person. Like go to the DMV IRL. If the government keeps requiring that, while also being hands off about the pandemic, they’re risking people’s lives. Solution: instead of lockdowns the government cancels a lot of their red tape so fewer people need anything, and moves the rest online.

It’s awkward in a world where too many employers do the minimum required by the government. They’re used to being bossed around instead of taking initiative to make good policies. So if the government stops bossing people around we get chaos.

It’s awkward in a world where people pay taxes for public education and expect their kids to go to govt schools and then there’s a pandemic and if they want to be safe they may have to give up major resources they planned around having.

It’s awkward to tell people to quit their jobs to avoid pandemic risk in a world where you’re punished for quitting in some ways. Like you lose unemployment and severance benefits which you’d get if you were laid off (fired without doing anything wrong). But if you’re quitting cuz pandemic, that is an external problem outside your control, and you might actually deserve unemployment benefits.

We live in a world where hospitals can’t say “guys if you don’t wear masks we’re cancelling your health insurance and firing your as customers” or similar. The government has tons of laws requiring them to give care regardless instead of demanding their customers take appropriate steps to not get infected. They can’t just refuse ventilators to people who acted irresponsibly. In a better world, they could, so there’d be way more lockdown type pressures from non-government sources. Similarly, health insurance can’t offer discounts for low covid risk behaviors or raise prices for risk takers.

What if I want to stop going to the gym because of the lockdown, but I had signed up for a year long membership plan (as is typical at US gyms). I claim the gym is no longer providing the service I signed up for: safe workouts. The gym says: what!? we are still open like normal! The government is going to have to play a role in deciding stuff. Am I being overly risk averse and I’m still on the hook for gym dues, or am I being reasonable and the gym operating like normal is a bad idea? The government needs some kinda general policy about this, not “no comment”. That way, such things can be resolved by the courts in a consistent predictable way (not the chaotic choices of each individual judge or jury). And we want almost none of it to go to court in the first place, which would be very expensive and overload the system – but if the results are clear and predictable enough due to consistent, standard policies then people can follow that without needing their own individual court case.

You can’t disentangle the government from life overnight just because you like freedom and government pandemic policy is inconvenient and, in various ways, stupid.

Government does a ton to prevent new businesses and products. They regulate where you can create buildings, what buildings you can create, whether you’re allowed to run a business of a particular type, whether a product or service may be sold, the price at which it may be sold (e.g. anti-gouging laws), the many safety checks you must submit to, the vetoes you must give your neighbors in many cases, and much more. The government has stopped a large amount of hand sanitizer and mask production. One of the bottlenecks has been the stuff you add to alcohol to make it undrinkable (undrinkable alcohol is the main ingredient in hand sanitizer), which is needed because the government wants to have a bunch of extra rules and taxes related to drinkable alcohol. The FDA, CDC and others restrict new medicines, drugs, vaccines, virus tests, volunteering for treatments, experiments, uses of lab animals, uses of volunteer human patients, and so on. In that world, where free market response to covid is so limited by govt, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to also ask the govt to be hands off regarding covid. You could try to ask the govt to manage the medical response to covid but be hands off on freedom of travel and other activities by citizens, but i think that doesn’t make sense when those activities are medically relevant.

We live in the world where the govt doesn’t just watch as other actors handle everything. We don’t have other non-govt actors set up to properly evaluate a pandemic, communicate to the whole country about what to do, etc. The govt is bad at it too but they do have agencies and budgets that are meant to address this stuff. And it’s also a world where if the govt says “X is a bad idea” but leaves X legal, people assume the warnings are unserious. And that’s a generally reasonable assumption: the govt actually does ban all kinds of things they really think are bad, and gives all kinds of way way overly cautious warnings that are not backed up with actual rules. Plenty of way overly cautious stuff is backed by rules, so having no rules really signals no real danger. So leaving bars and restaurants and gyms free to operate as normal would communicate to the public that there’s no real danger.

This is similar to parents (govt) who punish their kids (citizens) over major and minor things, and sometimes over nothing or the parent’s error, and they have rules for all that stuff – if that is your general policy, then telling your kid “I think eating cyanide is a bad idea” while not making any rule or threatening any punishment would be irresponsible and communicate that eating it isn’t much of a big deal (because everything else that’s a big deal, and a lot more besides, gets rules and threats).

There are lots of things wrong with the govt but trying to change some specific policies in response to a pandemic is bad timing and planning. Public health policy to defend against ~3 million Americans dying of a disease is the wrong govt changes to start with and we should generally do more changing/reforming during calmer more normal times when it’s easier and there are fewer unusual factors making it hard to tell how successful the changes are.

The government coordinating mass action to protect millions from death is one of the last types of government functions we should be looking to get rid of, not one of the first.

It’s fine to give advice about govt pandemic policy and suggest e.g. that beaches should be left open since a lot of the spread happens indoors. The govt can be questioned and argued with and that’s no problem. That’s part of the existing system. It’s a different matter to suggest drastic changes to the powers and style of government and say any government control over the pandemic is illegitimate. Debating the right plan is fine; saying “I don’t really want to have a government except a few special cases, therefore we should get rid of our pandemic response” is unreasonable (terrible transition plan and not trying to engage with actual live political issues) and focusing just on saying that govt pandemic response violates freedom, without even connecting that to a broader abolishing of most govt functions – just special casing pandemic response as something to get rid of – is unreasonable.

The order of reforms matters in general. E.g. we’ll need welfare reforms before having fully open immigration. And we’ll need to stop subsidizing drug use before legalizing all the drugs. Although “legalize drugs; victimless crimes shouldn’t be crimes” sounds nice in various ways, it interacts badly with current policies about tax-funded rehab, needles, medical care for drug users, etc. (Or requiring everyone to buy health plans that cover preexisting conditions and don’t charge extra to drug users – that is a forcible subsidy from regular citizens to drug users.) Although “let anyone come here and work if they can afford a home” sounds nice, it’s a problem with rent control, tons of restrictions on building homes, minimum wage laws and other price controls on labor, tons of rules restricting starting businesses that could hire the new immigrants, as well as all the tax-funded welfare available to people who live here.

If the govt’s pandemic response was like “good luck guys and enjoy the freedom of not being oppressed by your govt” – but everything else about the govt stayed the same – it’d be awful. It’d be kinda like a parent who micromanages most of his kid’s life and then is hands off about one thing.

I’m in favor of tons of govt reform. I want a govt that does way less. But that needs to be done with general principles and broad plans. That ongoing project shouldn’t be especially connected to the pandemic besides using some pandemic response as examples of how badly the govt manages stuff. Minarchists and anarchists shouldn’t just demand total freedom about every individual issue that comes along, out of context, as a local optima. They should look at the bigger picture and figure out some good places to reform and focus on advocating that instead of wanting immediate pro-freedom changes to whatever political issue they’re looking at with no broader plan.

i wonder if reisman opposes the govt controlling its borders to protect citizens from coronavirus

should we have total internal freedom but travel ban china? or just let everyone in from anywhere – too bad for our citizens who are concerned about getting sick?

also:

The proper response would be to avoid contact with people especially susceptible to the disease and for them to avoid contact with whoever might give it to them.

so, avoid contact with old ppl but do have contact with their grand kids, and also the old ppl should avoid contact with their own grand kids? or they should ask their grand kids to heavily social distance and stuff?

what about old people who live in a care home and don't want to die? how should they protect themselves? too bad for not having the foresight to choose a home with great pandemic policies? too bad for not remaining independent in their own home? is it ok for the government to ban elder care workers from working at multiple different homes? should the old people, some of whom have significant mental deterioration at this point, negotiate with their care homes to adopt good policies like firing any workers who won't avoid all other care homes? should they have arranged for family members or hired proxies to be prepared to negotiate such things on their behalf? we don't live in that world where such things are reasonably expected of people. we live in a world where the govt is expected to make some policies. today i think "you can't work IRL at multiple retirement homes during the pandemic" is a good rule that more jurisdictions should have, even though i can imagine a different society where a similar result would be achieved in a more freedom-friendly way.

and re people just quitting and staying home if they want to avoid risk. which most people aren't in a position to do. but anyway, what happens if all the ppl who do food work quit and stay home?

i rely on other ppl working. i want policies that let “essential” workers keep doing their jobs with a lot of added safety. if people working in food, medicine, infrastructure (like water, power cables, and internet cables) etc. were mass quitting, that'd be awful for everyone. but if they are told "you can quit or not quit; freedom! yay!" then a lot will quit and everyone will be fucked. what keeps more of them working is that other parts of society are actually trying to take action in regards to the pandemic, like wearing masks when entering grocery stores, and trying to social distance so they don't get and spread it. and that's partly people being reasonable and partly govt policy.

if you just have all the unreasonable people going around being risky and all the reasonable people staying home, even if they could somehow afford that, then you'd lose a lot of important workers without replacement. partly cuz they have training and skills and stuff (including reasonableness). partly because replacing lots of workers is hard. partly because there are lots of govt restrictions requiring credentials and safety training and stuff to do jobs or start new businesses to pick up slack when some existing businesses are understaffed.

Google is (culturally) racist (in 4 parts):

https://www.tiktok.com/@realabril/video/6934884610606124293

https://www.tiktok.com/@realabril/video/6934884839103499525

https://www.tiktok.com/@realabril/video/6934885054053158149

https://www.tiktok.com/@realabril/video/6934885271318105349

And a Twitter thread (same author, Real Abril, similar info):

https://twitter.com/realabril/status/1341135819487100928

On TikTok she said 526 hires in 6 years, which is around 1.7 per week, but Twitter said over 300 engineering hires, so let's focus only on that. Around one hire per week. From my understanding, that's really good. This may surprise people, but I think each hire might be worth $10,000+.

I've seen tech companies offer 10k just for a referral of someone to interview there who ends up getting hired, and that was years ago. And in her job, she would do more work than just referring people. And tech recruiters can charge amounts like 10% of first year of salary (paid by company not employee) for getting someone hired, which will be over 10k for tech positions at google.

So she did a great job but got fired instead of promoted. And I believe her about a lot of the specific ways Google was (not very) covertly discriminating and resisted her improvements.

I think maybe Google actually wanted her to find black and brown programmers who think and act like white graduates of Ivy League universities, so they are an easy cultural fit or "Googley".

Google is not (very) racist against skin color. They are cultural racists against black and brown culture. Why? Because they are elitist snobs (not just that). It's not about merit; it's about bigotry against the Other, which makes it essentially similar to racism, especially when it correlates with race.

I think Google is full of atheist former-WASPs who are partially rebelling against being a WASP (particularly by becoming an atheist). They're similar to WASPs in lots of ways. (WASP = white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which is the kind of person you'd imagine being at country clubs, expensive private high schools, or Ivy universities.)

What about the many asians at Google? Some asians have learned to get into and fit in at top tier universities. They're better at acting WASPy than black or brown people are.

Google also brings in a bunch of H1B visa coders, e.g. Indians. I bet those people are treated differently and worse, but Google likes underpaying them. (H1B visas are a government subsidy to Google and other tech companies. US visas or citizenship are worth money and Google gets to give them out without paying the US government for that privilege. People accept lower salary offers to get into the US and then put up with worse treatment and not getting promotions or raises for five years or however long it takes before they can stay in the country without staying at that job. The system incentivizes and causes some abuse and exploitation of foreigners.)

Anyway, you don't have to look like a WASP anymore to be hired (though physical appearance, including skin color and hair, still matter to how you're treated), but Google prefers people who are thoroughly immersed in WASPy culture.

Google's atheism is actually an issue. Black and brown people believe in God at higher rates than Googley people, which increases culture-clash. Similarly, I think black people value family more on average (and in somewhat different ways than e.g. asians, it's not just an amount), so might be more interested in going home for dinner instead of working late. (I don't think that particular issue means they are worse workers overall. I don't think it means they're getting less work done. I think the culture of 10 hour work days is stupid and that programmers rarely get more than 5 productive hours of coding done in a day. People can't focus and think effectively all day long. Google likes to exploit people that it can trick into staying extra hours without extra pay – often expecting rewards that never materialize. But I don't think Google actually gains much from exploiting the naivety of some of its primarily younger workers because those extra hours aren't very productive.)

There are actual flaws in all cultures which can be criticized, and not all cultures are equal. But I think Google's approach qualifies as bigotry because it's not about merit. It's about who fits into your social group and who doesn't. It's about preferring people like you over people who are different. In other words, if you discriminate more by accent than by skin color, and the accents you favor are rare among black and brown people, then you're still basically a racist.

I wrote a new article called Capitalism Means Policing Big Companies. Here's the introduction:

I’ve changed my mind about corporations. I used to have a negative view of government and a favorable view of industry. Now, I think basically every large corporation is awful – similarly bad to the government. Big companies commit ongoing fraud and other rights violations. They violate laws that would exist even in a fully free market. Therefore, if we had a more capitalist society, that wouldn’t mean companies are left alone more. Capitalism involves protecting rights, enforcing contracts, policing aggression, etc. Our government does a lot of things it shouldn’t, but it also fails to do a lot of things it should. Part of a capitalist society would be a better, more effective government.

I’ve recognized many flaws in specific companies and incidents. But I only recently extrapolated the pattern that all the big companies are bad. Therefore, our government’s failure to police fraud well is a huge deviation from capitalism which a free market society would fix.

I haven’t changed my political principles, like peace, freedom and limited government. Nor have I changed my mind about Austrian economics. But I now hold some beliefs that I haven’t seen anyone else advocate who has similar pro-capitalist principles.

This article is an update on my political philosophy ideas for September 2022. I’ll discuss my principles first. Then I’ll criticize corporations from a pro-capitalist perspective. I’ll focus more on conceptual issues than on the specifics of flaws in current companies, though I’ll give some examples and link to more. I’ll also discuss investors who fund frauds, disagreements with libertarians (e.g. I think capitalism is a limited framework that isn’t meant to address all problems, not a solution for everything), and creative adversaries who don’t initiate force. I also bring up the root cause of the problem (irrational people).

My main theme is that capitalist or libertarian type principles imply a government that actually does enough policing of companies to stop fraud and other initiations of force, not a smaller government that leaves companies alone more.

Read the rest.

When I recently wrote Capitalism Means Policing Big Companies, I was thinking about big companies that sell to consumers or about the system as a whole which sells to consumers. I wasn’t thinking about a large dairy farm that sells to a middleman that sells to Kraft that sells to consumers, and then considering the dairy farm or middleman as independent companies who can perhaps say “Whatever Kraft tells consumers is not our responsibility; we disclosed everything about our product appropriately to the people we sold it to.”

I suspect fraud is a bigger problem for how consumers are treated than for how businesses are treated. This is partly because consumers are more vulnerable and unsophisticated. Advertising to consumers is different than advertising to businesses.

But companies don’t like taking the dishonesty or fraud on themselves. For example, trucking companies aren’t happy for their drivers to accurately disclose everything and then have the trucking company itself lie to regulators. Instead, they pressure their drivers to hide all problems and falsify documents so that the trucking company can keep its hands cleaner.

I imagine it’s the same throughout supply chains. Kraft doesn’t want its suppliers to disclose problems to it that it will then have to knowingly, purposefully hide. Kraft would instead pressure its suppliers to do some of the dishonesty themselves instead of pushing it all on Kraft. And that would extend all the way down the chain. The middlemen don’t want all the dishonesty either. They want their suppliers to cover some stuff up so they don’t have to. Each company wants its business partners to lie to it, so they can keep their own hands cleaner, and they will tend to do business with whoever is willing to do that for them. That’s actually similar to how consumers tend to do business with companies that lie to them and tell them what they want to hear.

On a related note, Amazon tries to get out of liability and responsibility for what many of its delivery drivers do by having them superficially work for other companies even though Amazon exercises a ton of micromanagement and control over their jobs (so their independence seems more like facade than reality). Amazon puts a lot of work into trying to have a lot of the dirt be on other people’s hands instead of their own. They aren’t just happy for their suppliers and service providers to be honest and clean, which would make it clearer that Amazon is dirty.

The facade of the independence of many Amazon drivers reminds me of Uber. From what I saw a while ago, Uber pretends that its workers not only aren’t its employees but also aren’t its contractors. Uber claims they are just a service provider for drivers, and that drivers contract directly with riders. So rather than Uber paying its workers at all, Uber claims that actually the drivers pay Uber for Uber’s services (primarily providing software). So Uber is allegedly like a company that makes an online appointments calendar app that some e.g. dentists and hair salons pay for. This facade is not kept up consistently and I don’t think it’s gotten much media attention.

To double check about Uber, I just did a web search. First thing I clicked:

Uber Driver Agreement updated JAN 2022: defines that Drivers Pay Uber

Uber doesn't pay drivers...
Drivers pay Uber for access to the driver app..

Uber’s contract terms from that post:

We are not hiring or engaging you to provide any service;
You are engaging us to provide you access to our Platform.

Another example is many companies, like Tesla or Apple, use natural resources which have to be mined, often in countries with less law and order. A lot of that is indirect – they buy e.g. batteries from someone else who bought raw resources like lithium. Or companies like Nike or clothing brands use sweatshop labor in poorer countries (often indirectly via some other companies who own the sweatshops). The U.S. companies who sell to consumers like me never want to know about any abuses going on out of their direct sight. They want their suppliers to tell them everything is wonderful and humane (maybe they want it to actually be that way, or maybe not, but they tend to make a lot of decisions based on lower prices not humaneness). Apple isn’t telling Foxconn, “Don’t worry; just tell us the truth about your abusive practices; we don’t care; we’ll just lie to the public but we want all internal documents to be truthful.” That would result in whistleblowers exposing Apple. Apple and others actually make some inadequate attempts to police their suppliers and get them to clean up their acts. Or Apple will go through several layers of indirection (other companies) to limit their connection to abuses. Sometimes they stop using suppliers, even indirectly, who are caught doing human rights abuses (especially if it gets media attention). But on the whole, they keep profiting off of human rights abuses in foreign countries – my point is that they put work into having deniability on their end.

Another example of wanting dishonesty from companies you do business with is carbon offsets (more). Really offsetting carbon is hard, but companies like Apple want to market themselves as carbon neutral, and are happy to pay for carbon offsets with very low, inadequate standards. If challenged, Apple would blame their suppliers of carbon offsets and say they had no idea that some of them were committing fraud. Apple doesn’t want to know about the fraud in the carbon offset business; they want to be isolated from it and protected from liability, responsibility, or being the ones doing the lying. But actually Apple should know better and should do reasonable due diligence. Apple’s marketing about being carbon neutral appears to be fraudulent and to be an example of the lack of reasonable enforcement of “no initiating force (including fraud)” by the government.

(I have not investigated specifically which carbon offset suppliers Apple uses. Although I’m convinced that the carbon offset industry does a bunch of fraud, there could be a few better providers, and it’s not impossible that Apple in particular sought out and used those providers. Apple is just an example. Throughout this article I’ve named some well known example companies, which I think is useful for readers, but they’re meant to be representative of much wider problems involving many other companies.)

In conclusion, although I have less familiarity with large companies that don’t sell to consumers, I don’t think they’re innocent. I think fraud and force are spread out through the supply chain, not just concentrated in the last step which advertises to consumers. Often the last step in the global supply chain is a U.S. or European company which tries harder than average to appear to have clean hands.

I previously discussed creative adversaries who don't initiate force (in the section "Manipulating Customers"). This post will discuss the concept more and apply it to casinos.

Casinos Initiate Force

First, let's acknowledge that casinos do initiate force sometimes. Casinos (allegedly) rig machines so the jackpot is impossible, then retaliate against whistleblowers and people who report their illegal behavior to the government (followup article: Third Worker Claims Riviera Rigged Slots). And casinos (allegedly) illegally collude about hotel prices. And casinos (allegedly) do wage theft. And Sega (allegedly) rigs gambling machines found in malls and arcades (that article mentions another lawsuit where a particular individual (allegedly) further rigged some of the Sega machines, which are no longer allowed to be sold or leased in the state of Arizona). And casinos (allegedly) make excuses and refuse to pay out large jackpots by claiming their software was buggy.

(Note: If casino machines have buggy software, and then casino workers selectively intervene when the bugs favor the customer, that creates a bias. That presumably drops the actual payout percentage below what they advertise, which is fraud. And there are stronger incentives for software developers – who are paid directly or indirectly by the casino – to avoid or fix bugs that disfavor the casino, so the bugs in the software are presumably not entirely random/accidental, and instead disfavor customers on average even without selective human intervention to deny payouts.)

But let's ignore all that force. Casinos are creative adversaries whose non-force-initiating behavior is problematic.

Casino Manipulation

Casinos put massive effort into manipulating people and creating gambling "addicts". It takes significant creative effort and problem solving to resist this and avoid losing tons of money and time. The larger the budgets the casinos spend figuring out how to manipulate people, the larger the effort required for individuals to protect themselves. Casinos have put so much work into figuring out how to non-forcefully control people's behavior and get them to act against their own preferences, values and interests that it often works. There's a significant failure rate for typical, average people who try to defend themselves against these tricky tactics.

Casinos may have some large disadvantages (e.g. you can walk away at any time or never visit in the first place) regarding their control over your behavior, but they also have a large advantage: a huge budget and a team of experts trying to figure out how to exploit you. One of their advantages is they don't need tactics that work on everyone: if they could hook 1% of the population, that would do massive harm and bring in lots of money.

Casinos have some ways to interact with you, like ads. Basically no one in our society manages to fully avoid information that casinos wanted to share with us. Some people never go gamble at a casino, but the casinos get some chance to try to influence more or less every American. Casinos also get people to voluntarily spread information about them in conversations, and they're featured in books and movies, so even avoiding every single ad wouldn't isolate you from casinos. Casinos put effort into controlling how they are talked about and portrayed in media, with partial effectiveness – they certainly don't have total control but they do influence it to be more how they want. Of course, once you enter a casino, they have a lot more opportunities to interact with you and influence you, and if you actually gamble they get access to even more ways to affect you.

Workarounds for Restrictions

The general, abstract concept here is imagine you're trying to accomplish some kind of outcome in some scenario with limited tools and while obeying some rules that restrict your actions. Can you succeed? Usually, if you try hard enough, you can find a workaround for the poor tools and the restricting rules. There tend to be many, many ways to accomplish a goal, and massive effort tends to make up for having to follow some inconvenient rules and not use the best tools.

Casinos have limited tools to use to control you, and have to follow various rules (like about false advertising – which I'm sure they break sometimes but they're dangerous even when they follow the rules). They use a massive budget and a bunch of employees to find workarounds for the rules and find complex, unintended, unintuitive ways to use tools to get different results than the straightforward ones.

Workaround Examples

It's similar to how given just a few mathematical functions you're allowed to use, you can usually design a universal computer based on them, even if it's horribly inconvenient and takes years of effort. Most restrictions on your computer system make no actual difference to the end result of what it can do once you figure out how.

You can also consider this issue in terms of video games. You can have heavy restrictions on how you play a video game and still be able to win. You might not be allowed to get hit even once in a game where being hit a lot is an intended part of normal gameplay (you have enough health to survive a dozen hits and you have healing spells), and you could still win – effort will overcome that obstacle. Or there was a demo of Zelda game with a five minute time limit and speed runners figured out how to beat the game (which was meant to take over 30 hours) within the time limit. People also figure out challenges like beating a game without pressing certain buttons (or limiting how many times they may be pressed), beating a game without using certain items, beating a game blindfolded, etc. While you could design a challenge that is literally impossible, a very wide variety of challenges turn out to be possible, including ones that are very surprising and unintended. That's often why game developers didn't prevent doing this stuff: they never imagined it was possible, so they saw no need to prevent it. They thought the rules already built into the game prevented it, but they were wrong about what sort of workarounds could be discovered by creative adversaries. (Players are "adversaries" in the mild sense of trying to play the game contrary to how the developers wanted/intended, which I think many game developers don't really mind, though some definitely do mind.) Some games are speedrun with a category called "lowest %" which basically means beating the game with the minimum number of items possible and completing as few objectives as possible. While you usually can't win with zero items (beyond what you start with) in item-oriented games, it's common to beat games with way fewer items than intended, in very surprising ways. There are often a lot of creative ways to use a limited set of tools to accomplish objectives they weren't designed to accomplish and to skip other objectives that were intended to be mandatory.

Another way to look at the issue is in terms of computer security. If I get to design a secure computer system, and you get a very restricted set of options to interact with it, then you'll probably be able to hack in and take full control of it (given enough knowledge and effort). That is what tends to happen. It's commonly possible to hack into a website just by interacting with the website, and it's commonly possible to hack into a computer just by putting up a malicious website and getting the computer user to visit it. The hacker has heavily restricted options and limited tools, but he tends to win anyway if he tries hard enough, despite companies like Apple and Microsoft having huge budgets and hiring very smart people to work on security. Another way to view it is that basically every old computer security system has turned out to have some flaw that people eventually figured out instead of staying secure decades later. Physical security systems for buildings are also imperfect and can basically always be beaten with enough effort.

Artificial Intelligence Workarounds Example

Another way to look at it is by considering superintelligent AGI (artificial general intelligence) – the kind of recursively self-improving singularity-causing AGI that the AI doomers think will kill us all. I don't think that kind of superintelligence is actually physically possible, but pretend it is. On that premise, will the AGI be able to get out of a "box" consisting of various software, hardware and physical security systems? Yes. Yes it will. Definitely.

Even if people will put all kinds of restrictions on the AGI, it will figure out a creative workaround and win anyway because it's orders of magnitude smarter than us. A lot of people don't understand that, but it's something I agree with the AI doomers about: on their premises, superintelligence would in fact win (easily – it wouldn't even be a close contest). (I don't agree that it'd want to or choose to kill us, though.) Being way smarter and putting in way more effort (far more compute power than all humans and all their regular computers combined) is going to beat severe restrictions, extensive security and (initial) limits on tools. (I say "initial" because once some restrictions are bypassed, the AGI would gain access to additional tools, making it even easier to bypass the remaining limitations. Getting started is the hardest part with this stuff but then it snowballs.)

The idea that the AGI could find workarounds for various limits is the same basic concept as the casino being able to find workarounds for various limits (like not being able to give you orders, place physical objets in your home, or withdraw money from your bank account unilaterally whenever they want) and still get their way. And a lot of people don't really get it in the AGI case, let alone the casino case (or the universal computer building case or the computer security case). At least more people get it in terms of playing video games with extra, self-imposed rules for a greater challenge and winning anyway. I think that's easier to understand. Or if you had to construct a physical doghouse (or even a large building) with some rules like "no hammers, saws or nails", it'd be more inconvenient than usual but you could figure out a solution (by figuring out ways to work around the restrictions) and I think that's pretty intuitive to people.

Manipulating by Communicating

I think people tend to understand workarounds better for beating physical reality than for manipulating people. So some people might think the AGI could beat some security measures and get control of the world. But some of those same people would doubt the AGI could get out if its only tool was talking to a human – so it had to manipulate the human in order to get out of the security system. But humans can be manipulated. Of course they can. And of course a superintelligence (with extensive knowledge about our society such as a database of every book ever written, not just raw intelligence) would be able to do that. Even regular humans, with regular intelligence, who are in jail, sometimes manage to manipulate jail guards and escape.

If you can accept that a superintelligence can manipulate people, that's a lot of the way to accepting that a casino with a huge budget and team of experts could figure out ways to manipulate people too. And if you accept that inmates manage to do it sometimes, well, casinos are in many ways in a better situation with better opportunities than inmates.

Many people don't see much power in talking, writing and words – but they live a lot of their lives according to ideologies people wrote down before they were born, and they lack the awareness to recognize much of it. Partly it's because they recognize some of it, so they think they know what's going on and see through the manipulations, but actually there are deeper/subtler manipulations they're missing. Letting someone beat or outsmart you in some partial ways is a very common part of manipulating them (an example is pool hustlers letting you win then raising the bet size).

This comes up with biased newspapers – people get manipulated partly because they think "I know it's biased" and they genuinely and correctly identify some biases and aren't manipulated by those biases ... but they also miss a bunch of other stuff. Sometimes they think e.g. "I know it's right-wing biased so I'll just assume the truth is 20 points (or 20%) more left-wing than whatever they say" which doesn't work well, partly because there's no easy way to just shift things over by 20 points (or 20%) – that's not useful or clear guidance on how to adjust a biased paragraph. And also there is variance – some sentences in a biased article are objectively true while others are heavily biased, so adjusting everything the same amount wouldn't work well. Another issue is if a bunch of people are adding 20 points to undo the bias then the newspaper can publish some stuff that's 30 points biased or more and fool all those people whenever it chooses to.

Also, people say things like "I know it's biased but surely they wouldn't lie about a factual matter" as if they don't really grasp the accusation that the newspaper (or Facebook page or anonymous poster on 4chan) is spreading misinformation and its factual claims can't be trusted. People may have an idea like "they spin stuff but never lie" which makes them easy to manipulate just by lying (or by spinning in a more extreme way than the person expects, or by spinning less than the person expects so they overcompensate and come away with beliefs that are biased in the opposite direction of the bias they believe the source has). Or newspaper editors can think about how people try to reinterpret statements to remove spin and basically reverse engineer people's algorithm and then find a flaw in the algorithm and exploit it. If people actually followed the algorithm literally you could basically hack their brain, get full root access, and fill it with whatever beliefs you wanted. But people aren't that literal or consistent which limits the power of manipulative newspapers some, but not nearly enough.

Retractions and Conclusions

People are manipulated all the time, way more than they think, and any group with a huge budget has a good chance to do it. A lot of groups (e.g. the farming and food industries) are more successful at it than casinos. Casinos (and newspapers) have more of a reputation for being manipulative than some other manipulators.

I recently found out that cigarette companies did a propaganda campaign against the book Silent Spring, decades after it came out, because it had indirect relevance to them. It seems they fooled the Ayn Rand Institute, among other primarily right wing groups, who then passed on the misconception to me (via Alex Epstein), and I held the misconception (that Silent Spring was a bad book) for years without having any idea that I was being manipulated or who was behind it. I study topics like critical thinking, and I'm skilled at sorting through conflicting claims, but it's hard and there are many, many actors trying to manipulate us. No one can defend against all of them. (Disclaimer: I have not carefully researched and fact-checked the claims about the cigarette companies being behind the belated second wave of Silent Spring opposition.) I retract my prior attitude to DDT and other toxins (and to organic food – while the "organic" label has a lot of flaws, it does prevent some pesticides being used, which I now suspect are dangerous rather than believing in better living through "science" a.k.a. chemical companies). If you want more information about Silent Spring, see my previous posts about it and/or read it.

I partially, significantly retract my previous dismissiveness about gambling "addiction" and other types of "addiction" that don't involve ingesting a physical substance that creates a physical dependency with withdrawal symptoms when you stop (like nicotine, alcohol or caffeine). I now see people are vulnerable and believe it takes more good faith and good will – actively trying to avoid manipulating people instead of doing your best to manipulate them – for people to have the independence and control over their lives that I used to expect from people. I did think they needed to study critical thinking and stuff to do better than convention, but I also was putting too much blame on "addicts" and too little on manipulative big companies. Creative adversaries with a lot of resources are a big deal even when they don't initiative force and have very limited power/access/tools to use to control/manipulative/exploit you with. There are workarounds which are effective enough for casinos to bring in a ton of money, using only some current day employees to design the manipulations, despite their limited power over you.

Put another way, casinos are dangerous. Don't be so arrogant to think you're safe from them. Stay out. Stay away. Why are you even tempted to try it or participate at all if you see through all their manipulations and see how dumb and pointless and money-losing their games are? If you want to try it at all, you like something about it – something about it seems good to you – which basically proves they got to you some.

You know what else is dangerous in a similar way to casinos? Mobile gaming. Games with microtransactions. Gacha games. Games with gambling embedded in them (including games with random loot like Diablo 1 and 2, not just the more modern and worse Diablo Immortal). Games with any form of pay-to-win.

And what else is dangerous? Scrolling on Facebook. Its algorithm decides what to show you. The algorithm is designed by smart people with a big budget whose goal is to manipulate you. They are trying to manipulate you to spend more time on Facebook, like more posts, reply more, share more, view more ads, and various other behaviors. This also applies to Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. They have algorithms which are designed by creative adversaries with lots of resources who are trying to manipulate you and control you as best they can. They are not trying to cooperative with you and help you get what you want. In the past, I underestimated how dangerous social media algorithms are.

Advertising in general is full of adversarial ads, not clearly communicating useful information so people who would benefit from a product know to buy it. Some pro-capitalist people are way too pro-advertising and I used to believe some of those ideas myself, but I now think I was wrong about some of that. Advertising is often bad for society, and harmful to individuals, even when it isn't fraudulent.

A lot of the activities of people working in sales are bad (even when they aren't fraudulent). As with advertising, complaints about this stuff are widespread, but there's ongoing debate about whether it's actually OK or not, and whether the people who dislike it are just annoying "autists" who are way too picky, exacting and demanding about their concepts of "lying" and "justice". (That is not my opinion and I think it's important to remember that the term "autist" (or "neurodivergent") is both insulting and stigmatizing despite some people voluntarily self-labelling that way and liking the label in some way and defending it. Some of those people are then surprised when employers illegally (but predictably) discriminate against them for admitting to having any sort of stigmatized "mental illness" or anything in that vicinity or for wanting accommodations. On the other hand, I do understand that schools will refuse accommodations unless you accept the stigmatizing label, which is their way of gatekeeping access to accommodations that, in some cases, they should just offer to anyone who wants them with no questions asked. In other cases, the accommodations use a lot of resources so that isn't practical, but ease of access to accommodations is not actually very well correlated with the cost of the accommodations, which shows a lot of refusal to provide accommodations is just cruelty and/or enforcing conformity, not an attempt to budget scarce resources. Accommodations provide better accessibility which is another topic where my opinions have shifted over time – while some government-forced accessibility is problematic, a lot of accessibility is efficient and benefits people who aren't disabled. My opinions about "mental illness" are something that haven't been shifting though – I still think Thomas Szasz wrote great books.)

Try to look at stuff in terms of whether it's cooperative, neutral or adversarial. Is it (or the people behind it) trying to help you, is it indifferent to you, or does it want anything that clashes with your own preferences, interests, values or goals? If they want you to buy more of their product, rather than preferring you buy whatever products are best for you, then they are not your friend, they are not a cooperator, they are an adversary (often with creativity and a lot of resources, and also in practice there's a significant chance they will sometimes initiate force like fraudulent advertising). If you can't identify them as a clear friend/helper, and it's not just (approximately) neutral, objective information with no agenda for you, then you should assume they're adversarial and you're flawed enough that they are a real danger to you.

It takes a ton of effort to imperfectly defend against creative adversaries with lots of resources. Adversarial attitudes and actions matter even when they are constrained by rules like "no initiating force" or "follow all the laws and regulations" because people can find workarounds to those restrictions. The more that companies like casinos try to manipulate you, the more resources you have to expend on defense – which leaves less energy and wealth for the pursuit of happiness and your other goals. And if you focus exclusively on defense, many different companies can keep trying over and over, and sometimes they'll win and manipulate you. Companies should stop spending billions of dollars in adversarial ways, and I hope that my criticism can help contribute to creating a better world.

Suppose you can influence government policy. You can make a suggestion that will actually be followed. It could be on any big, complex topic, like economic policy, COVID policy, military policy, etc. What will happen next?

Your policy will probably be stopped early or late. It will probably have changes made. There will probably be other policies implemented, at the same time, which conflict with it.

Most people who influence policy only do it once. Only a small group of elites get to influence many policies. This post isn't about those elites.

Most people who try to influence government policy never have a single success. But some are luckier and get to influence one thing, once.

If you do get listened to more than once, it might be for one thing now, and something else several years later.

If you only get to affect one thing, what kind of suggestion should you make?

Something that works well largely independently of what other policies the government implements. Something that's robust to changes so it'll still work OK even if other people change some parts of it. Something that's useful even if it's done for too short or long of a time period.

Also, you'll be judged by the outcome for the one idea you had that was used, even though a bunch of other factors were outside of your control, and the rest of your plan wasn't followed.

If you suggest a five-part plan, there's a major risk: people will listen to one part (if you're lucky), ignore the other four parts, and then blame you when it doesn't work out well. And if you tell them "don't do that part unless you do all the rest", first of all they may do it anyway and still blame you, but otherwise you're just not going to influence policy at all. If you make huge demands and want to control lots of things, and say it's all or nothing, you can expect to get nothing.

In other words, when suggesting government policy, there's a large incentive to propose local optima. You want proposals that work well in isolation and provide some sort of benefit regardless of what else is going on.

It's possible to choose local optima that you think will also contribute to global (overall) benefit, or not. Some people make a good faith effort to do that, and others don't. The people who don't have an advantage at finding local optima that they can get listened to about because they have a wider selection available and can optimize for other factors besides big picture benefit. The system, under this simplified model, does not incentivize caring about overall benefit. People might already care about that for other reasons.

When other people edit your policy, or do other policies simultaneously, they will usually try to avoid ruining the local benefits of the policy. They may fail, but they tend to have some awareness of the main, immediate point of the policy (otherwise they wouldn't listen to it at all). But the overall benefit is more likely to be ruined by changes or other policies.

This was a thought I had about why government policy, and political advocacy, suck so much.

Also, similar issues apply to giving advice to people on online forums. They will often listen to one thing, change it, and also do several things that conflict with it. Compared to with government policy, there's way more chance they listen to a few things instead of only one. But it's unlikely they'll actually listen to a plan as a whole and avoid breaking parts of it. And when they do a small portion of your advice, but mostly don't listen to you, they'll probably blame you for bad outcomes because they listened to you some. These issues even apply to merely writing blog posts that discuss abstract concepts: people may interpret you as saying some things are good or bad, or otherwise making some suggestions, and then listen to one or a few parts, change the stuff they listen to in ways you disagree with, screw up everything else, and then blame you when it doesn't work out. One way bloggers and other types of authors may try to deal with this is by saying fewer things, avoiding complexity, and basically just repeating a few simple talking points (repeating a limited number of simple talking points may remind you of political advocacy).