This is a sleight of hand tactic designed to make reasonable people look unreasonable. Like maybe I’m just a weirdo who can’t live near other people. Maybe I’m motivated by irrational hatred. Maybe I go to get my mail in the morning and accidentally see a minority and start throwing up and ranting and raving, because I just can’t stand to live around people who are different.

This is all absurd. It’s not real. Almost nobody is actually like that. I get along with people from other places and cultures just fine. I really quite like every minority or immigrant I’ve ever lived near or worked with.

I understand that the United States is already significantly multicultural and that that isn’t likely to change. I don’t think immigration is ever going to go to zero, nor should it.

It’s just a fake, ridiculous caricature that has to stand in for real argument, because people like Noah know that associating reasonable views about demographic replacement with these kinds of weird interpersonal deficiencies has long been an effective tactic.

But this is a fundamentally dishonorable way to argue.

https://x.com/xwanyex/status/2020591884562043305

We’re in a period of pretty intense political and social upheaval that also happens to be on the eve of really unprecedented technological change. It’s a great moment to be careful about doing rapid demographic change. There’s nothing unreasonable about that. People who think about these things aren’t weirdos who don’t like their neighbors. They aren’t for the most part incapable of living near other people or motivated by resentment or hatred.

It’s just not true.

It’s important to pause every once in a while and reflect on the fact that this is what passes for really smart liberalism. There are more people in New York, so they should get to decide the direction of the country. People thousands of miles away in smaller states should just deal with this, because they’re less important. The compromises that led to the status quo are somehow completely irrelevant today.

There are no important cultural or organizational principles that conflict with this outlook. It’s all very simple and totally stable and produces no interesting downsides.

https://x.com/xwanyex/status/2018745935896236105

There’s this huge hand wave where you go, “OK, so assume we have a totally different tradition, states aren’t real, federalism isn’t important, and there were no compromises that led to the status quo” — OK, now don’t you agree that the popular vote is the only fair method for selecting the president?

I guess that’s true! If I ignore everything that’s actually true about how our country was intentionally organized and forget about all the reasons that we chose federalism and also agree that states are completely fictional entities that don’t matter at all, then your argument does seem stronger!

This is the line you always get in response to this, but all it does is demonstrate an inability to understand the actual point.

* I mostly want Republican policies

* Democrats say that the *man* who represents those policies is so bad that I should instead choose the party whose policies I do not want

* So I’m already in a bad position, because I don’t want *your* policies. You’ve gotta give me a good reason to believe that I’d be smart to tolerate them, anyway.

* Instead, Democrats did the opposite and got *way more extreme*

I *do* have agency. I’m using that agency to *reject* you.

Imagine how bad you think Trump is. Well I like you even less than that.

https://x.com/xwanyex/status/2018008533732856286

No, I definitely chose it. However bad Donald Trump is, I think your morals, your ideas, your plan for the country is objectively far, far worse. I am explicitly rejecting you. I explicitly chose him over you. I couldn’t possibly be more clear about this.

The message in the tweet is that I may have been willing to tolerate your very stupid ideas for four years if it helped avoid a Trump disaster. But your party responded to that by behaving even crazier than normal, to the point where I wasn’t even willing to do that. You need to understand that I was holding my nose, because I find you repulsive, and considering if maybe I could possibly stomach you for four years. And in response you smeared shit and piss all over your body and convinced me that, no, actually, I cannot tolerate you under any circumstances.

Please, I’m begging you to understand this as an explicit rejection of you and everything you stand for.

I was this kind of voter in 2016. I took it very seriously. The left had a real opportunity at that moment to be sane and normal and to create a real divide on this issue.

Instead they went insane with social justice nonsense, culminating in peak weakness and riots in 2020. At exactly the moment they were trying to convince the world that they were the same alternative, they went completely nuts.

And then their next “reasonable, normal candidate” let in unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants.

I don’t believe that there are any reasonable candidates, anymore. You had me. And you lost me. For at least right now, it looks like it’s just the bad choice that aligns with my policy preferences, so far as I can tell.

The disconnect here is that the center left still thinks it’s their very reasonable guy against the morally corrupt asshole. But nobody thinks your guy is the reasonable guy, anymore. Nobody thinks that. You completely lost the voters on that front. You had a golden opportunity to be better, and you blew it.

And I just think that’s completely your fault.

https://x.com/xwanyex/status/2017715620444336543

You cannot tell the voters that their guy is fundamentally illegitimate and that you represent the normal, sane, steady option, and then leave the border wide open to an unprecedented, record-setting number of illegal border crossings. You lose all credibility when you do that. That just happened! This isn’t ancient history. That’s what just happened the last time your guy won.

The Democrats have no credibility left! And so far as I can tell, they do not take this seriously at all. So why should I?

This is not what “high trust” *means*. High trust is not something that you can personally manifest. It doesn’t care about your emotional reaction to events. You cannot instantiate a high trust society by being nicer and nicer and nicer in the face of fraud and theft and graft.

https://twitter.com/zaidjilani/status/2016189029255885286

You drop a wallet that contains your ID and some cash on the street. And then something happens to that wallet. What happens to that wallet determines whether you live in a high trust society.

It doesn’t matter how you feel about it. It doesn’t matter that you’re OK with the fact that you lost some cash, because maybe the person who found it needed it more anyway. It doesn’t matter that you’re willing to go back and drop more wallets in the street. Nothing hinges on whether you’re upset about what happens to the wallet.

You measure the society by what happens to the wallet, not by your emotional reaction to the wallet, not by your ability to ignore what happened to the wallet.

Again, this is a matter of basic definitions. This is just the very most basic thing to understand about this term if you’re going to insist on discussing it.

It getting harder and harder to live with the fact that so many of my fellow citizens imagine themselves to be my moral superiors I know who you people are. You’ve been my friends and neighbors and coworkers. And what you are, more than anything else, is just so fucking average and unremarkable and unexceptional. You don’t know anything that other people don’t know. You don’t have access to better information. You aren’t kinder or more ethical. You’re completely average and uninteresting.

And the fact that you think otherwise is becoming genuinely intolerable.

People will make fun of this, but it actually distills the argument down to its essence. I would not, for example, rework society to make life easier for trans people. I would just accept that trans people are probably going to have more difficult lives than average.

https://twitter.com/esjesjesj/status/1987956909987532993

Note that we’re not talking about any kind of abuse here. I’m not suggesting that you should mistreat people or humiliate them. But if a trans person says, “I would really like to play on the girl’s softball team and it really hurts me that I can’t and this is going to be something that causes me pain for my entire life“ then I would look that person in the face and say, I’m sorry, but the answer is still no.

One thing that the neoliberal technological solution enjoyers will never understand about ordinary people’s feelings about crime, is that if Guy A gets his package stolen off his porch, but Guy B doesn’t because he checks the door every 15 minutes to see if the Amazon driver has arrived and diligently removes the package from the porch before anyone has a chance to see that it’s there and take it, and Guy C has to drive across town to an Amazon locker because he’s tired of dealing with it — these are all the same outcome.

Only one of these things shows up as a property crime.

But all three of them are the same outcome. You have to kill the package thief or put him in prison for a million years or somehow get him to stop being a threat.

You literally cannot address the problem just by preventing the theft. That’s not a win. Nobody cares.

You have to take away the threat.

Just pause for a minute to appreciate the official story on this, to swim in the absurdity of it. White people left American cities for basically no reason except that they were racist and just could not abide living around African-Americans. Literally nothing happened that would encourage this flight. They did it because their hearts are just that black. They looked around at their neighborhoods, which were functioning perfectly and which had experienced no negative changes or deleterious effects and they said, nope, I just absolutely cannot live around Black people, so I’m out of here. They sold their houses at a loss, they abandoned their communities, and all of it for nothing except pure, unadulterated racism.

Meanwhile, right after they left the cities got horrible, again mostly because racist white people just had to get a few jabs in on their way out. White people leaving had nothing to do with any of the bad stuff going on in cities after white people left. That stuff all happened only as a result of the white people leaving, you see. White people at the time said they were leaving because of crime, because of disorder, because they no longer felt safe, but that was all fake. They were just racist liars who were lying about their motivations and about how they felt.

If this is what you think, then this is what you think. It tells us something about how you think. It tells us something about what you think sounds plausible, about the kinds of explanations you’ll accept, about your standards for evidence, about the way you reason through History, about your understanding of human psychology. This is not a very good story! It does not make much sense. At every turn you are presented with inexplicable behavior and the answer is always something like, “I don’t know what to tell you, white people are just that awful and racist.” In the official narrative, white people are insane. They do things for no reason, they shoot themselves in the foot, they cause themselves great hassle via longer commutes and more expensive houses to start over in the suburbs.

And anytime you think, “does this make sense? Why would anybody do this?” You’re reminded that this is just what white people are like. They’re just bad people. Who knows why they do anything they do? They’re just bad.

There are basically two conceptions of a fist fight. In one model, you conceive of it as a way to check antisocial behavior, a kind of social ritual with rules and limits and an understanding that there’s a point at which the fight ends. The people participating in the fight share must share this conception, but even more important is that everyone observing the fight agrees and will intervene to prevent escalation.

And then there’s a second model in which you have to assume that your opponent wants to kill you, so you have no choice but to kill him first. Again, maybe more consequentially, the people watching feel similarly and instead of stopping fights, regard weakness as an opportunity to safely participate themselves.

It brings me absolutely no pleasure to acknowledge that our country has within my lifetime moved increasingly from the first to the second model.

Important that our sons understand which model applies in which situations.

https://x.com/xwanyex/status/1951050916586492354

This is just an extremely obvious manifestation of the difference between a high trust and a low trust culture. Not at all surprising that the second model prevails in more diverse environments in which combatant are more likely to think of their opponent as an outsider who does not share their values and who they cannot trust to behave honorably.

At some point you just have to say that this isn’t even remotely convincing. We find these gender differences in the youngest of babies. You’ve got to believe that parents are treating one-year-olds significantly differently in a way they’d pick up on and that would impact their preferences. You’ve got to believe that one year-olds are soaking up a ton of media that’s enforcing these gender norms.

That’s just…very unconvincing in a way that says a lot about the way people who make these claims think. This is just classic, “God of the gaps” type reasoning. You start by claiming that this is the result of social conditioning, but you can’t ever point to this social conditioning, and we go back to younger and younger and younger babies and finding the same results and you just keep repeating that the social conditioning must be happening somewhere! We don’t know where it is, but it must be there! Do they have access to media? Huh? Are they locked in a room? Not so smart now are you?

This is just very silly stuff.

A very straightforward fact about the United States that progressives have tricked them themselves into believing is the opposite of reality is that there are far more neighborhoods in the United States in which a white person would be treated by minorities as unwelcome than there are white neighborhoods in which minorities would be treated as unwelcome. Literally every white person knows this to be true and avoids any of a dozen neighborhoods in their region for this reason. This is just a boring, straightforward, widely known fact about our country that you’re never supposed to admit to in public. In fact, the rule is that you’re supposed to say that the opposite is true.

“The average American crime rate, isn't the crime rate of the average American” succinctly explains the disconnect on the debate about whether immigrants commit more crime than natives. You don’t even have to focus on the racial aspect of this, if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s enough just to notice that crime rates differ quite a lot on an important dimension and that our society is largely segregated by the same dimension. That means that you’ve got two distinct, largely non-overlapping rates for which it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to take the average. This may be hard for people to see, but you can have immigration that consists largely of people who have a lower crime rate than the current average, but who will raise the average crime rate in the medium to long-term, so long as you assume that demographic disparities persist. This is precisely because there are already large disparities in offending and unequal group population sizes.

On Noah Smith’s podcast he’s talking with Matthew Yglesias about how conservatives “lost their shit” over the, “if I had a son he would look like Trayvon” line.

Noah says he doesn’t get it. Why did they care about that line? Matt responds coyly (paraphrasing), “I mean, it’s unproductive to call people names, but…”

And then they both agree that it’s just because they’re racist.

Noah doubles down (paraphrasing, again): “ok sure, they’re racist, but why this one line? I don’t get it.”

I don’t think this is a particularly difficult case! It’s not that obscure: the belief is that Trayvon was not a great kid and was probably up to no good when he was killed and white people do not as a general rule immediately identify with shitty white people purely on racial grounds. For most white folks it’s very strange to jump straight to, “that could have been my kid” when some shithead teenager gets himself killed in a pointless fight.

All you have to grant is that conservatives mostly believe Trayvon to be the architect of his own demise and then the rest follows quite easily from there.

Crucially, you do not have to personally subscribe to this understanding of the facts in order to comprehend the controversy about the line.

Yes, but just to be clear, almost nobody in middle class America actually dislikes poor people for being poor. We don't live in Downton Abbey, or whatever, where you're supposed to know your station in life and people demand that you remain in your class without reference to what you're like as a person. The simple fact is that poverty is associated with increased rates of crime and disorder. It's that simple. Poverty is associated with crime likely not because poverty causes crime, but because crime causes poverty or, more directly, because the set of behaviors, habits, and personalty traits that lead to a life of criminality lead also to a life of poverty.

Is it really, though? I mean, yes, people want the immediate, proximate problem solved — i.e. the homeless people near me are a nuisance and a net negative on my quality of life — but how does that actually prevent governments from solving the broader issue of homelessness? What about that fact prevents them from building adequate shelters? What about that fact stops us from developing longer-term interventions?

I feel like people want to set these two positions up in opposition to each other, when one does not actually have anything to do with the other. The truth is that solving homelessness is just really hard. We’re almost by definition talking about the most disordered and dysfunctional people in society. So it’s tempting to want to say that the guy who first wants you to get them off his block is somehow preventing you from solving what you’d otherwise have to admit is an intractable problem.

In fact, I think it would quite clearly be much easier to target and experiment with longer-term interventions on homeless people who have been already forcibly removed to shelters, as opposed to scattered around various unsanitary street camps. Yes, the places with the worst homelessness problems are all liberal/Democrat strongholds. The people there probably want the city to get the homeless off their block, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that that’s where they stop thinking about it or the full extent of what they want to happen with the homeless.

I think ultimately what’s so boring about the Europe versus United States quality of life discourse, is that every quality of life issue in the US is downstream of high levels of crime and disorder in American cities, but that’s the one topic no expat acknowledges. They ridicule and denigrate their fellow citizens for traveling 8 miles to a suburb to avoid it, but then imagine themselves to be sophisticates while doing basically the same thing. Every single one of these “I moved to Europe” articles dances around this topic. Every single one of them was written by someone who voted for and continues to support policies that go easy on the crime and disorder they’ve fled.

I don’t believe there’s any such thing as objective morality, yet I feel very strongly in my stomach that there must be something like right and wrong. And I act in my life as though I really do truly believe in right and wrong, even if intellectually I reject the premise. Once I realized that I could behave the same way with respect to all other aspects of religion, this issue resolved itself.

I may try to write more about this later. I think almost all intellectuals already act as though they believe something that they reject, because I think that almost all serious intellectuals accept on some level that morality is fake. We are creatures produced by the process of evolution by natural selection. There is no such thing as right and wrong.

And yet those same intellectuals (most of them) feel very strongly about various issues of right and wrong — positions they arrive at for expedience, because of practicality, through argumentation, but mostly because they feel something painful in their stomach when they do wrong.

They are experts at keeping two sets of books. It used to be that the average intellectual felt as awful about rejecting religion as today’s intellectuals feel about the idea of rejecting right and wrong. They might arrive at the intellectual conclusion, but they feel as strongly in their stomach about the existence of right and wrong as they have ever felt about anything, and they live their lives as though right and wrong are meaningful concepts.

This is what the *entirety* of the history of “white flight” is like. “Sure, the way we teach this leads people to believe ridiculous caricatures, but it’s true that people used to be more racist than they are today, and this explanation neatly explains all persistent outcome disparities, so you can’t really expect us to teach kids that white people in the 1950s were multidimensional, rational human beings who acted out of anything but malice.” And, of course, because this is how this always goes, the people who believe this extremely mainstream narrative think that they’ve been given access to secret wisdom that makes them more educated than everyone else they encounter. In fact, on their worldview, holding this exact set of beliefs is precisely what it *means* to be educated.

When I point out, as I sometimes do, that large shares of the public don't actually understand how modernity works, it's tempting, I'm sure, to dismiss this as elitist snark. But I think it's actually sad, in its way. People don't know how things work, but worse, they have no intuition for why things work the way they do, even once it's explained to them.

This is obvious when you see the arguments they bring to bear.

Courts and laws must seem totally insane to them, never addressing their needs, always coldly rejecting what must seem to them to be persuasive arguments about personal hardship that might have carried the day in more intimate societies.

The whole thing, the whole project of society must seem capricious and random and unfair. When they are asked to make arguments for themselves, they can produce only non sequiturs and appeals to emotion that might as well be in an alien language for how likely they are to have anything to do with the issue at hand.

It might be obvious to you in what ways the cable company is different from the police is different from a local hardware store is different from Lowe's is different from the Social Security Administration, both in their obligations to you and in the limits of thinking about them in terms of obligations at all.

I assure you, this is not true of all people equally.

And if you think, you know, well these people just need to be *educated* better, then you haven't heard what I'm saying. They don't think in contracts, in abstract moral systems, in legal structures. Their intuition is a tide pulling them out into a sea, no matter how many times you row them back in. Modernity is great. We're not going back to small tribes. And this all just is what it is. But clearly we've moved into territory that some non-trivial share of the population is always going to find themselves out of sync with.

And that's not their fault. And it's genuinely sad.

I don’t know, I’m not that vindictive and I don’t really want ordinary liberals to suffer for their views, but we do need some social norms around these things. The thing that drives me most crazy is how many people on the left have absolutely no self-awareness or self-consciousness about the fact that they might be talking to someone who is just a little bit more conservative than they are. It’s a kind of narcissism, a solipsism.

I’m not saying their lives should be ruined for this, but maybe they should be forced to sit through a yearly DEI-esque training that reminds them that other human beings exist, that they sometimes have different political views, that it’s inappropriate to make strident political claims at work, that you’re not actually better or more empathetic or kinder than your coworkers, and that it is extremely obnoxious to behave as though you are. As has been pointed out to me before, this is probably just an ordinary human foible. If conservatives controlled all the institutions, then this is probably how they would behave in the office, too.