The present US regime is already pretty fascist. I have no clear reason to assume that making the system more demoractic (as in, increasing the power of democratically legitimized people) in the way Cummings proposes would lead to a more facist state of affairs.
It is not obvious that “increasing the power of democratically legitimized people” necessarily actually makes a system “more democratic”, and it is still less obvious that it makes it better. For instance: the President of the United States is democratically elected, but replacing the system currently laid down by the US constitution by one in which the president has dictatorial power would not obviously make it more democratic, and I claim that even if by some measures it were a more democratic system, it would none the less be a worse one.
Cummings’s proposals would concentrate power more, in something like the same way though hopefully not so drastically.
Calling Cummings’s proposal fascist seems overheated to me, but I think Ilya’s right that it’s a move in the direction of fascism rather than away from it. He wants
a lot of power concentrated in the hands of the government (“a government that controls the government”), and more specifically of its leader (“a President who actually controls the government”)
How much power? Well, enough that it would “allow x1000 more progress” compared with e.g. the present state of affairs.
that leader put into power by a combination of
the efforts of a small number of very rich people
appealing to “lowest common denominator” concerns of The People
but note that he assumes that those very rich people, and the would-be leader they’d be funding and advising and providing political-manipulation services for, can decide that they want to do this before finding out exactly what it is that The People want, so it’s not like Cummings wants the real agenda to be democratically decided
and while that doesn’t come all that close to amounting to fascism, even when he points to Curtis Yarvin as a good person to listen to, it’s not exactly not fascist, if you see what I mean.
I don’t disagree. But also, I’m old enough that I have seen many alternative governments proposed. Each time society lets go of a deal that could unblock it, the next deal is worse. And the status-quo is also getting worse. It’s not rare to find a refused deal emerge in the status quo ten years later, without the potential good sides.
too specific. Of course, the establishment won’t self-destroy. But it might use the pattern of “abolish an institution that’s in their way under the pretense of the need for radical change and the unreformability of the target”. It might be, I don’t know, the Constitution, or something else.
Whether it’s a more in the direction of facism or away from it depends a lot on how facist you consider the current institutions to be.
Last year with the lab leak hypothesis strong political censorship about important issues started in the US. It expanded to other political topics so that someone like Bjørn Lomborg gets censored for citing peer reviewed journal articles and saying the wrong thing on climate change.
Under Eric Holder the Associated Press got attacked and there’s no reason to assume that such attacks won’t continue and got stronger as time goes on the current course.
The right to kill citizens of your own country without judical process is one of the core dictatorial ones and also was claimed for the executive branch under Obama. It was mainly about foreign terrorism. Now you have a debate about how domestic terrorism like the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated more with the tools used for foreign terrorism.
but note that he assumes that those very rich people, and the would-be leader they’d be funding and advising and providing political-manipulation services for, can decide that they want to do this before finding out exactly what it is that The People want, so it’s not like Cummings wants the real agenda to be democratically decided
For the plan that Cummings proposes it’s necessary to campaign on the plan that you actually want to implement. Without doing that you won’t be able to get the necessary senate/congressional votes.
a lot of power concentrated in the hands of the government (“a government that controls the government”), and more specifically of its leader (“a President who actually controls the government”)
I don’t think having a president that controls the US military is more facist then having a military industrial complex controling the US military. A lot of power that currently resides in the US government is not controlled by the president and facist and you get rid of it by removing the relevant institutions.
and while that doesn’t come all that close to amounting to fascism, even when he points to Curtis Yarvin as a good person to listen to, it’s not exactly not fascist, if you see what I mean.
He points to Curtis for an analysis how current power structures work and not for the solutions that he advocates.
What exactly do you mean by “political censorship”? Has it been made illegal to say that SARS-CoV-2 came out of a lab, or that climate change isn’t a big deal? Last I heard, Lomborg was still publishing books and giving speeches and so forth.
Your paragraph beginning “The right to kill citizens” seems like it’s saying that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial. If that’s so, let’s see the evidence of that debate. If not, maybe dial down the dishonest rhetorical techniques a bit?
Cummings’s plan does require that your campaign acknowledges that you’re going to try to reboot a lot of the institutions of government. It doesn’t, so far as I can see, require that you say very much about just how they new versions are going to be better than the old. And, I repeat: Cummings explicitly proposes a scheme of the following form: get a team together, find a suitable candidate, then start figuring out what you need to say to get lots of people to vote for them. There’s no step in his process where you say “shit, what the people want isn’t what we want, so let’s give up” or ”… so let’s change our plans”. The populist stuff is just there to get power, so far as I can see.
What exactly do you mean by “political censorship”? Has it been made illegal to say that SARS-CoV-2 came out of a lab, or that climate change isn’t a big deal? Last I heard, Lomborg was still publishing books and giving speeches and so forth.
There’s political pressure on institutions to censor content.
Most of the social networks did censor the lab leak hypnothesis in 2020 and it worked to remove it for a year from public discussion. The tools of censorship employed were strong enough for that.
Lomborg got censored on Facebook for citing something from a scientific paper about how climate change reduces deaths due to freezing.
Your paragraph beginning “The right to kill citizens” seems like it’s saying that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial.
No, it’s not. The debate about whether or not the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated as terrorists is had on the abstract level and not on the concrete level.
Generally, civil rights violations are never discussed in the specifics before they are committed. When the congress was classifying Wikileaks as a non-state-intelligence organization and while the CIA was internally talking about using that as a justification for assassinating Assange they also didn’t discuss that explicitely.
The focus on what should be done with the people who stormed the capital also completely ignores what the issue is about. It’s not about doing something different in the past but about increasesing the options about how to fight perceived problems in the future.
So far as I can tell, Lomborg didn’t get censored on Facebook. The thing he posted had a thing added by Facebook saying “this is false”. That’s not what censorship is. (Maybe something of his was actually removed by Facebook? But I can’t see anything claiming that it was. All I see is that Facebook added a “fact-checking” notice and Lomborg is cross about that.)
If you weren’t trying to suggest that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial, then that paragraph of yours where you talked about them can only be a deliberately misleading rhetorical move. You start by talking about “the right to kill citizens of your own country without judicial process”. You go on to say “It was mainly about foreign terrorism”. And then it’s straight into “Now you have a debate about how … the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated more with the tools used for foreign terrorism”.
>If you weren’t trying to suggest that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial,
There isn’t debate: Ashli Babbitt was de facto executed without trial (unless there is an objective legal principle where a male police officer can shoot an unarmed woman for breaking into a government building) and the shooter is described as a hero by the main levers of power, with no debate. The mass execution of capitol rioters might occur within a few years, I give it perhaps a 5% chance.
Now this might seem like I’m trying to build sympathy for the Republican cause, but I am actually not. It is wiser to side with the winner than the loser, and I for one welcome America’s new fascist overlords.
I have not looked into the the details of Jan 6th deeply, but my understanding is that this was something like a riot, in which a large group of civilians were trying to enter the capital, without authorization, to disrupt part of the election process.
If the police officer who shot Babbitt was tasked with defending the Capital, then, even if there was poor judgement on his part, it seems really unreasonable to call his actions an execution. An execution is carried out, generally by a state, as part of a deliberative, measured process of deploying force. This is a distinction I think most people would appreciate.
The mass execution of capitol rioters might occur within a few years, I give it perhaps a 5% chance.
Define “mass” and “a few years” I’ll consider taking the other side of this bet.
>If the police officer who shot Babbitt was tasked with defending the Capital, then, even if there was poor judgement on his part, it seems really unreasonable to call his actions an execution. An execution is carried out, generally by a state, as part of a deliberative, measured process of deploying force. This is a distinction I think most people would appreciate.
You are correct, this is an important distinction. My impression is that there was no grounds for the officer to think that his life was in danger—since he is a man he could have physically restrained the woman without a risk of her wrestling the gun from his hands—therefore he doesn’t really have a justification of panicking, and he could deliberate and decide to kill her. Furthermore, the legal system had time to deliberate and decide not to charge him, which greenlights lethal force in any future similar situation.
Suppose in 2024, there is an argument at a polling station over accusations of misconduct. An officer might reason that he can start shooting republicans, by the precedent jan 6th set.
Its not an execution in the sense of a deliberate sentence, its the judicial system deliberately turning a blind eye.
>Define “mass” and “a few years” I’ll consider taking the other side of this bet.
10 years, and at least 10% dead (of those who actually stepped foot inside the capitol) with the majority of the rest in some kinda gulag, or having fled the country, or in non-democrat controlled territory in a civil war. The deaths could follow a trial, or could be execution by mob or whatever.
If 5% seems high, there seems to be civil wars on average once every 200 years or so, and tensions seem very high now.
My impression is that there was no grounds for the officer to think that his life was in danger—since he is a man he could have physically restrained the woman without a risk of her wrestling the gun from his hands—therefore he doesn’t really have a justification of panicking, and he could deliberate and decide to kill her.
Was she part of a crowd?
Furthermore, the legal system had time to deliberate and decide not to charge him, which greenlights lethal force in any future similar situation.
It seems like American cops are generally given a lot of leeway to make use-of-force decisions and that legal system has generally been reluctant to discipline cops for this. This seems bad, but importantly different from an ‘execution’.
10 years, and at least 10% dead (of those who actually stepped foot inside the capitol) with the majority of the rest in some kinda gulag, or having fled the country, or in non-democrat controlled territory in a civil war. The deaths could follow a trial, or could be execution by mob or whatever.
If 5% seems high, there seems to be civil wars on average once every 200 years or so, and tensions seem very high now.
I think if you’re going to redefine ‘execution’ to include some forms of police violence at protests or riots, the bet is going to become too vague to be likely decidable. I’d also decline that bet, as we’re already sampling from a population that’s shown itself to be willing to show up to potentially kinetic protests, and I can’t easily find out enough about the group I’d be betting on.
Yes, but they could only fit through the broken door slowly one at a time, so they couldn’t rush the officer.
Incidentally, I realise that my comment sounds pro-republican because I’m talking about what I see as a democrat executing a republican. But I’m sure many republicans would love to execute democrats too, its just that at the moment the democrats seem to have far more power, and so its far more likely that democrats start executing many republicans than vice versa. Either way, my point is that mass violence is an order of magnitude higher now than it was a few decades ago.
Yes, and the US government might have collapsed in the 70s. I remember that the national guard shot some anti-war protestors. Did any major politicians or journalists condone this? (I genuinely don’t know the answer) Anyway, grassroots violence won’t collapse a government without elite support, and what I’m saying is that the elites seem to be endorsing violence now. Additionally I don’t think an election has been contested like this ever?
>I think if you’re going to redefine ‘execution’ to include some forms of police violence at protests or riots, the bet is going to become too vague to be likely decidable.
I’m not thinking of one or two rouges killing people, I’m thinking of a significant escalation. The riots would eventually become paramilitary death squads, I suppose.
This could be made precise by, say, specifying that the death toll per capita has to equal the French revolution. Speaking of which, I don’t think I would have been able to predict what would happen in the French revolution. Standing in 1789, a prediction of mass murder followed by a giant war would sound paranoid.
(I know I said I would stop talking about politics, but I thought I might as well continue this thread)
The officer fired a single shot into a crowd of individuals who were breaking down a barricaded door. I think that even the strongest police officer would have a difficult time subduing 20 people peacefully.
US police officers shoot people while they are (or seem, to the police officers, to be) in the course of committing crimes all the time. Sometimes they kill them by other means besides shooting. Usually the crime they’re supposedly committing is less serious than storming a government building amid cries to murder the vice-president. Sometimes there’s not the least reason to think they’re committing any crime at all.
In some of the more obviously appalling cases there’s a public outcry about this. The great majority of the time, there isn’t. There are about 31,000 entries in the spreadsheet at Fatal Encounters, for instance; how many of those met with any more opposition or complaint than the killing of Ashli Babbitt?
If, as I contend, most of them weren’t, why should we take the shooting of Ashli Babbitt (in the course of committing a violent crime) as evidence that the US is headed into fascism and mass executions in the next few years, when we don’t draw any such conclusions from tens of thousands of other police killings?
(An aside: I was curious about where you were coming from, so to speak, so I had a quick look at your LW comment history. It seems that you post about pretty much nothing but politics (including under that heading highly-politicized topics such as race). I think we have different ideas about what LW is for.)
>If, as I contend, most of them weren’t, why should we take the shooting of Ashli Babbitt (in the course of committing a violent crime) as evidence that the US is headed into fascism and mass executions in the next few years, when we don’t draw any such conclusions from tens of thousands of other police killings?
Heading into mass executions with perhaps 5% probability is what I said.
The point is that the police make mistakes, but now it seems that whether an action is justified depends on political affiliation. If there were a similar event, of a republican killing a democrat and seeming to get away with it on pure political affiliation grounds, I would be similarly worried. BTW, events like the storming of the Bastille also involved very few deaths, but rapidly escalated in the next few years.
>(An aside: I was curious about where you were coming from, so to speak, so I had a quick look at your LW comment history. It seems that you post about pretty much nothing but politics (including under that heading highly-politicized topics such as race). I think we have different ideas about what LW is for.)
This comment depressed me. I’m not actually politically active, and I don’t think that I or others should be really. I have many points of disagreement with both parties. In many ways I’d rather no party had all that much power. I talk about politics because … its the impulse to tribal politics getting its hooks into my brain. If I think that there is a 5% chance of mass murder, I think for most of us the best thing to do is just… ignore it, unless it gets a lot worse, in which case the best thing to do is probably just leave, if you can.
Frankly you’re right, I have been using LW wrong (and so has everyone else that talks about politics).
Is there some way I can delete my account and all my posts?
Is there some way I can delete my account and all my posts?
You could contact the admin team and ask, but alternatively, consider instead create a new account and engaging with non-political stuff—this comment is pretty introspective and open to criticism, which I think is even more LW-y than being “smart”.
>this comment is pretty introspective and open to criticism, which I think is even more LW-y than being “smart”.
Thanks.
I’m not going to delete my posts on second thoughts, it would not be fair to those who have replied to me. I sort of feel that all political posts should just be moved to a walled off area for cognitive hazards. I am however, committing to staying away from politics.
What Cummings is proposing is formalism with a thin veneer of silicon valley jargon, like “startups” or whatever, designed to be palatable to people like the ones who frequent this website.
He couldn’t be clearer, re: where his influences are coming from, he cites them at the end. It’s Moldbug, and Siskind (Siskind’s email leaks show what his real opinions are, he’s just being a bit coy).
The proposed system is not going to be more democratic, it is going to be more formalist.
(I wonder why you say “Moldbug” rather than “Yarvin” but “Siskind” rather than “Alexander” or “Scott”.)
If your reading of anything Scott’s written is that he favours anything like neoreaction, then it’s a very different reading from mine. My reading is that he thinks neoreaction is mostly garbage but with occasional valuable insights. His actual words in what I suspect is the same leaked email as you’re talking about: “Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them.” My mental model of Scott is not excited by the prospect of Dominic-Cummings-alikes finding a way to get a populist president installed who will bulldozer all the bureaucratic obstacles between himself and absolute power.
I’m not familiar enough with the details of Yarvin’s ideas to know how closely aligned Cummings’s proposal is to Yarvin’s “formalism”. (It doesn’t looks super-close to me, though.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I do agree that Cummings is generally Up To No Good (though I don’t hate him as intensely as the UK media fairly clearly wants me to), I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw him, and I don’t think his proposals here are likely to end well if anyone tries to put them into action.
Downvoted for ad hominem. Having drawn inspiration from an author you don’t like is not an argument against anything. Saying you don’t like some authors without making reference to any specific positions those authors have is an invitation to contentless flamewar.
Many of the specific points in the post do seem to be copied from Moldbug/Yarvin’s recent work, more so than you might guess if you’re not familiar with it, and only saw Yarvin listed along with Alexander/Hanania/Sullivan/Shor at the end—not just the idea of the executive shutting down entrenched bureaucracies, but the framing of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations as once-in-70-years de facto regime changes, and the specific citation of Roosevelt’s inaugural address as a primary source.
I think it does make sense to read it in that context. A casual reader might come away with the impression that (as ChristianKI puts it) Cummings is proposing “making the system more demoractic (as in, increasing the power of democratically legitimized people)”. Whereas if you know that Cummings is reading off of Yarvin’s playbook, it’s a lot clearer that being more democratic probably isn’t the point. (In Yarvin’s worldview, it’s about temporarily using the forces of democracy to install a king who will govern more competently than a distributed bureaucratic oligrachy.)
Analogously, if some article talked about alignment of present-day machine-learning systems and cited Yudkowsky as one of several inspirations, but the specific points in the essay look like they were ripped from Arbital (rather than proportionately from the other four authors listed as inspirations), you’d probably be correct to infer that the author has given some thought to superintelligent-singleton-ruling-over-our-entire-future-lightcone-forever scenarios, even if the article itself can’t cross that much inferential distance.
Yarvin advocates installing a king who not just controls the government but also institutions outside of the government.
Cummings proposes installing someone with a role like FDR. I do consider FDR to be democratically legitimated and his frequent reelection a sign that the population liked him governing the way he did.
I am not going to waste my time arguing against formalism. When it comes to things like formalism I am going to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps, if it comes time to “have an argument” about it.
I’m happy to disengage, then. But for the record, I don’t actually know what you mean by formalism in this context; you seem to think that it’s a dreadful thing to accuse someone of, but the OP doesn’t use the word at all, you never define it, and the Wikipedia page is irrelevant enough to the post that I’m pretty sure you must mean something else.
Formalism is Moldbug’s name for his own politicaal theory. It isn’t prominent enough to have a WP article. I would guess that Ilya associates it with another political system beginning with the letter F.
Fascism is bad, Christian.
I would appreciate if you could expand a bit, or sober up, or whatever.
The present US regime is already pretty fascist. I have no clear reason to assume that making the system more demoractic (as in, increasing the power of democratically legitimized people) in the way Cummings proposes would lead to a more facist state of affairs.
It is not obvious that “increasing the power of democratically legitimized people” necessarily actually makes a system “more democratic”, and it is still less obvious that it makes it better. For instance: the President of the United States is democratically elected, but replacing the system currently laid down by the US constitution by one in which the president has dictatorial power would not obviously make it more democratic, and I claim that even if by some measures it were a more democratic system, it would none the less be a worse one.
Cummings’s proposals would concentrate power more, in something like the same way though hopefully not so drastically.
Calling Cummings’s proposal fascist seems overheated to me, but I think Ilya’s right that it’s a move in the direction of fascism rather than away from it. He wants
a lot of power concentrated in the hands of the government (“a government that controls the government”), and more specifically of its leader (“a President who actually controls the government”)
How much power? Well, enough that it would “allow x1000 more progress” compared with e.g. the present state of affairs.
that leader put into power by a combination of
the efforts of a small number of very rich people
appealing to “lowest common denominator” concerns of The People
but note that he assumes that those very rich people, and the would-be leader they’d be funding and advising and providing political-manipulation services for, can decide that they want to do this before finding out exactly what it is that The People want, so it’s not like Cummings wants the real agenda to be democratically decided
and while that doesn’t come all that close to amounting to fascism, even when he points to Curtis Yarvin as a good person to listen to, it’s not exactly not fascist, if you see what I mean.
I don’t disagree. But also, I’m old enough that I have seen many alternative governments proposed. Each time society lets go of a deal that could unblock it, the next deal is worse. And the status-quo is also getting worse. It’s not rare to find a refused deal emerge in the status quo ten years later, without the potential good sides.
I haven’t seen proposals on the scale such as abolishing the Pentagon seriously considered or persued before.
have you waited 10 years?
too specific. Of course, the establishment won’t self-destroy. But it might use the pattern of “abolish an institution that’s in their way under the pretense of the need for radical change and the unreformability of the target”. It might be, I don’t know, the Constitution, or something else.
Whether it’s a more in the direction of facism or away from it depends a lot on how facist you consider the current institutions to be.
Last year with the lab leak hypothesis strong political censorship about important issues started in the US. It expanded to other political topics so that someone like Bjørn Lomborg gets censored for citing peer reviewed journal articles and saying the wrong thing on climate change.
Under Eric Holder the Associated Press got attacked and there’s no reason to assume that such attacks won’t continue and got stronger as time goes on the current course.
The right to kill citizens of your own country without judical process is one of the core dictatorial ones and also was claimed for the executive branch under Obama. It was mainly about foreign terrorism. Now you have a debate about how domestic terrorism like the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated more with the tools used for foreign terrorism.
For the plan that Cummings proposes it’s necessary to campaign on the plan that you actually want to implement. Without doing that you won’t be able to get the necessary senate/congressional votes.
I don’t think having a president that controls the US military is more facist then having a military industrial complex controling the US military. A lot of power that currently resides in the US government is not controlled by the president and facist and you get rid of it by removing the relevant institutions.
He points to Curtis for an analysis how current power structures work and not for the solutions that he advocates.
What exactly do you mean by “political censorship”? Has it been made illegal to say that SARS-CoV-2 came out of a lab, or that climate change isn’t a big deal? Last I heard, Lomborg was still publishing books and giving speeches and so forth.
Your paragraph beginning “The right to kill citizens” seems like it’s saying that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial. If that’s so, let’s see the evidence of that debate. If not, maybe dial down the dishonest rhetorical techniques a bit?
Cummings’s plan does require that your campaign acknowledges that you’re going to try to reboot a lot of the institutions of government. It doesn’t, so far as I can see, require that you say very much about just how they new versions are going to be better than the old. And, I repeat: Cummings explicitly proposes a scheme of the following form: get a team together, find a suitable candidate, then start figuring out what you need to say to get lots of people to vote for them. There’s no step in his process where you say “shit, what the people want isn’t what we want, so let’s give up” or ”… so let’s change our plans”. The populist stuff is just there to get power, so far as I can see.
There’s political pressure on institutions to censor content.
Most of the social networks did censor the lab leak hypnothesis in 2020 and it worked to remove it for a year from public discussion. The tools of censorship employed were strong enough for that.
Lomborg got censored on Facebook for citing something from a scientific paper about how climate change reduces deaths due to freezing.
No, it’s not. The debate about whether or not the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated as terrorists is had on the abstract level and not on the concrete level.
Generally, civil rights violations are never discussed in the specifics before they are committed. When the congress was classifying Wikileaks as a non-state-intelligence organization and while the CIA was internally talking about using that as a justification for assassinating Assange they also didn’t discuss that explicitely.
The focus on what should be done with the people who stormed the capital also completely ignores what the issue is about. It’s not about doing something different in the past but about increasesing the options about how to fight perceived problems in the future.
So far as I can tell, Lomborg didn’t get censored on Facebook. The thing he posted had a thing added by Facebook saying “this is false”. That’s not what censorship is. (Maybe something of his was actually removed by Facebook? But I can’t see anything claiming that it was. All I see is that Facebook added a “fact-checking” notice and Lomborg is cross about that.)
If you weren’t trying to suggest that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial, then that paragraph of yours where you talked about them can only be a deliberately misleading rhetorical move. You start by talking about “the right to kill citizens of your own country without judicial process”. You go on to say “It was mainly about foreign terrorism”. And then it’s straight into “Now you have a debate about how … the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated more with the tools used for foreign terrorism”.
This is not what we are meant to be about here.
>If you weren’t trying to suggest that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial,
There isn’t debate: Ashli Babbitt was de facto executed without trial (unless there is an objective legal principle where a male police officer can shoot an unarmed woman for breaking into a government building) and the shooter is described as a hero by the main levers of power, with no debate. The mass execution of capitol rioters might occur within a few years, I give it perhaps a 5% chance.
Now this might seem like I’m trying to build sympathy for the Republican cause, but I am actually not. It is wiser to side with the winner than the loser, and I for one welcome America’s new fascist overlords.
I have not looked into the the details of Jan 6th deeply, but my understanding is that this was something like a riot, in which a large group of civilians were trying to enter the capital, without authorization, to disrupt part of the election process.
If the police officer who shot Babbitt was tasked with defending the Capital, then, even if there was poor judgement on his part, it seems really unreasonable to call his actions an execution. An execution is carried out, generally by a state, as part of a deliberative, measured process of deploying force. This is a distinction I think most people would appreciate.
Define “mass” and “a few years” I’ll consider taking the other side of this bet.
>If the police officer who shot Babbitt was tasked with defending the Capital, then, even if there was poor judgement on his part, it seems really unreasonable to call his actions an execution. An execution is carried out, generally by a state, as part of a deliberative, measured process of deploying force. This is a distinction I think most people would appreciate.
You are correct, this is an important distinction. My impression is that there was no grounds for the officer to think that his life was in danger—since he is a man he could have physically restrained the woman without a risk of her wrestling the gun from his hands—therefore he doesn’t really have a justification of panicking, and he could deliberate and decide to kill her. Furthermore, the legal system had time to deliberate and decide not to charge him, which greenlights lethal force in any future similar situation.
Suppose in 2024, there is an argument at a polling station over accusations of misconduct. An officer might reason that he can start shooting republicans, by the precedent jan 6th set.
Its not an execution in the sense of a deliberate sentence, its the judicial system deliberately turning a blind eye.
>Define “mass” and “a few years” I’ll consider taking the other side of this bet.
10 years, and at least 10% dead (of those who actually stepped foot inside the capitol) with the majority of the rest in some kinda gulag, or having fled the country, or in non-democrat controlled territory in a civil war. The deaths could follow a trial, or could be execution by mob or whatever.
If 5% seems high, there seems to be civil wars on average once every 200 years or so, and tensions seem very high now.
Was she part of a crowd?
It seems like American cops are generally given a lot of leeway to make use-of-force decisions and that legal system has generally been reluctant to discipline cops for this. This seems bad, but importantly different from an ‘execution’.
Tensions do seem high right now, but I don’t know if they’re at an all time or high or otherwise unique. Dan Carlin has often mentioned the numerous domestic bombings in the 70s; this Rand article says there were 1,470 domestic attacks in the US in the 70s.
I think if you’re going to redefine ‘execution’ to include some forms of police violence at protests or riots, the bet is going to become too vague to be likely decidable. I’d also decline that bet, as we’re already sampling from a population that’s shown itself to be willing to show up to potentially kinetic protests, and I can’t easily find out enough about the group I’d be betting on.
>Was she part of a crowd?
Yes, but they could only fit through the broken door slowly one at a time, so they couldn’t rush the officer.
Incidentally, I realise that my comment sounds pro-republican because I’m talking about what I see as a democrat executing a republican. But I’m sure many republicans would love to execute democrats too, its just that at the moment the democrats seem to have far more power, and so its far more likely that democrats start executing many republicans than vice versa. Either way, my point is that mass violence is an order of magnitude higher now than it was a few decades ago.
>Dan Carlin has often mentioned the numerous domestic bombings in the 70s; this Rand article says there were 1,470 domestic attacks in the US in the 70s.
Yes, and the US government might have collapsed in the 70s. I remember that the national guard shot some anti-war protestors. Did any major politicians or journalists condone this? (I genuinely don’t know the answer) Anyway, grassroots violence won’t collapse a government without elite support, and what I’m saying is that the elites seem to be endorsing violence now. Additionally I don’t think an election has been contested like this ever?
>I think if you’re going to redefine ‘execution’ to include some forms of police violence at protests or riots, the bet is going to become too vague to be likely decidable.
I’m not thinking of one or two rouges killing people, I’m thinking of a significant escalation. The riots would eventually become paramilitary death squads, I suppose.
This could be made precise by, say, specifying that the death toll per capita has to equal the French revolution. Speaking of which, I don’t think I would have been able to predict what would happen in the French revolution. Standing in 1789, a prediction of mass murder followed by a giant war would sound paranoid.
(I know I said I would stop talking about politics, but I thought I might as well continue this thread)
The officer fired a single shot into a crowd of individuals who were breaking down a barricaded door. I think that even the strongest police officer would have a difficult time subduing 20 people peacefully.
US police officers shoot people while they are (or seem, to the police officers, to be) in the course of committing crimes all the time. Sometimes they kill them by other means besides shooting. Usually the crime they’re supposedly committing is less serious than storming a government building amid cries to murder the vice-president. Sometimes there’s not the least reason to think they’re committing any crime at all.
In some of the more obviously appalling cases there’s a public outcry about this. The great majority of the time, there isn’t. There are about 31,000 entries in the spreadsheet at Fatal Encounters, for instance; how many of those met with any more opposition or complaint than the killing of Ashli Babbitt?
If, as I contend, most of them weren’t, why should we take the shooting of Ashli Babbitt (in the course of committing a violent crime) as evidence that the US is headed into fascism and mass executions in the next few years, when we don’t draw any such conclusions from tens of thousands of other police killings?
(An aside: I was curious about where you were coming from, so to speak, so I had a quick look at your LW comment history. It seems that you post about pretty much nothing but politics (including under that heading highly-politicized topics such as race). I think we have different ideas about what LW is for.)
>If, as I contend, most of them weren’t, why should we take the shooting of Ashli Babbitt (in the course of committing a violent crime) as evidence that the US is headed into fascism and mass executions in the next few years, when we don’t draw any such conclusions from tens of thousands of other police killings?
Heading into mass executions with perhaps 5% probability is what I said.
The point is that the police make mistakes, but now it seems that whether an action is justified depends on political affiliation. If there were a similar event, of a republican killing a democrat and seeming to get away with it on pure political affiliation grounds, I would be similarly worried. BTW, events like the storming of the Bastille also involved very few deaths, but rapidly escalated in the next few years.
>(An aside: I was curious about where you were coming from, so to speak, so I had a quick look at your LW comment history. It seems that you post about pretty much nothing but politics (including under that heading highly-politicized topics such as race). I think we have different ideas about what LW is for.)
This comment depressed me. I’m not actually politically active, and I don’t think that I or others should be really. I have many points of disagreement with both parties. In many ways I’d rather no party had all that much power. I talk about politics because … its the impulse to tribal politics getting its hooks into my brain. If I think that there is a 5% chance of mass murder, I think for most of us the best thing to do is just… ignore it, unless it gets a lot worse, in which case the best thing to do is probably just leave, if you can.
Frankly you’re right, I have been using LW wrong (and so has everyone else that talks about politics).
Is there some way I can delete my account and all my posts?
You could contact the admin team and ask, but alternatively, consider instead create a new account and engaging with non-political stuff—this comment is pretty introspective and open to criticism, which I think is even more LW-y than being “smart”.
>this comment is pretty introspective and open to criticism, which I think is even more LW-y than being “smart”.
Thanks.
I’m not going to delete my posts on second thoughts, it would not be fair to those who have replied to me. I sort of feel that all political posts should just be moved to a walled off area for cognitive hazards. I am however, committing to staying away from politics.
Perhaps I will create a new account.
What Cummings is proposing is formalism with a thin veneer of silicon valley jargon, like “startups” or whatever, designed to be palatable to people like the ones who frequent this website.
He couldn’t be clearer, re: where his influences are coming from, he cites them at the end. It’s Moldbug, and Siskind (Siskind’s email leaks show what his real opinions are, he’s just being a bit coy).
The proposed system is not going to be more democratic, it is going to be more formalist.
(I wonder why you say “Moldbug” rather than “Yarvin” but “Siskind” rather than “Alexander” or “Scott”.)
If your reading of anything Scott’s written is that he favours anything like neoreaction, then it’s a very different reading from mine. My reading is that he thinks neoreaction is mostly garbage but with occasional valuable insights. His actual words in what I suspect is the same leaked email as you’re talking about: “Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them.” My mental model of Scott is not excited by the prospect of Dominic-Cummings-alikes finding a way to get a populist president installed who will bulldozer all the bureaucratic obstacles between himself and absolute power.
I’m not familiar enough with the details of Yarvin’s ideas to know how closely aligned Cummings’s proposal is to Yarvin’s “formalism”. (It doesn’t looks super-close to me, though.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I do agree that Cummings is generally Up To No Good (though I don’t hate him as intensely as the UK media fairly clearly wants me to), I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw him, and I don’t think his proposals here are likely to end well if anyone tries to put them into action.
Downvoted for ad hominem. Having drawn inspiration from an author you don’t like is not an argument against anything. Saying you don’t like some authors without making reference to any specific positions those authors have is an invitation to contentless flamewar.
Many of the specific points in the post do seem to be copied from Moldbug/Yarvin’s recent work, more so than you might guess if you’re not familiar with it, and only saw Yarvin listed along with Alexander/Hanania/Sullivan/Shor at the end—not just the idea of the executive shutting down entrenched bureaucracies, but the framing of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations as once-in-70-years de facto regime changes, and the specific citation of Roosevelt’s inaugural address as a primary source.
I think it does make sense to read it in that context. A casual reader might come away with the impression that (as ChristianKI puts it) Cummings is proposing “making the system more demoractic (as in, increasing the power of democratically legitimized people)”. Whereas if you know that Cummings is reading off of Yarvin’s playbook, it’s a lot clearer that being more democratic probably isn’t the point. (In Yarvin’s worldview, it’s about temporarily using the forces of democracy to install a king who will govern more competently than a distributed bureaucratic oligrachy.)
Analogously, if some article talked about alignment of present-day machine-learning systems and cited Yudkowsky as one of several inspirations, but the specific points in the essay look like they were ripped from Arbital (rather than proportionately from the other four authors listed as inspirations), you’d probably be correct to infer that the author has given some thought to superintelligent-singleton-ruling-over-our-entire-future-lightcone-forever scenarios, even if the article itself can’t cross that much inferential distance.
Yarvin advocates installing a king who not just controls the government but also institutions outside of the government.
Cummings proposes installing someone with a role like FDR. I do consider FDR to be democratically legitimated and his frequent reelection a sign that the population liked him governing the way he did.
That’s a fair standard so long as it’s applied fairly. But applying it fairly means you can’t complain about Aumann being a theist, and so on.
Having specific theistic beliefs seems very different than “having drawn inspiration” from someone.
I am not going to waste my time arguing against formalism. When it comes to things like formalism I am going to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps, if it comes time to “have an argument” about it.
I’m happy to disengage, then. But for the record, I don’t actually know what you mean by formalism in this context; you seem to think that it’s a dreadful thing to accuse someone of, but the OP doesn’t use the word at all, you never define it, and the Wikipedia page is irrelevant enough to the post that I’m pretty sure you must mean something else.
Formalism is Moldbug’s name for his own politicaal theory. It isn’t prominent enough to have a WP article. I would guess that Ilya associates it with another political system beginning with the letter F.