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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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With all the lawsuits against the Trump administration currently ongoing it can be hard to keep up with all the legal developments but I wanted to highlight one that seems particularly strange. We discussed some last week about the case J.G.G. v. Trump, this being the case of Venezuelans deported under the Alien Enemies Act. Yesterday the government filed a notice with the court that the government was invoking the state secrets privilege over the questions the court had asked with respect to compliance with this order. What renders this farcical, to me, is that it seems like almost all the information the judge wants is straightforwardly publicly available? A reminder of the judge's questions, taken from Attorney General Pam Bondi's declaration:

(1) what time the planes took off and from where;

(2) what time the planes left U.S. airspace;

(3) what time the planes landed, where they landed, and whether they made more than one stop;

(4) what time aliens subject to the Proclamation were transferred out of U.S. custody;

and (5) how many aliens were aboard the flights based on the Proclamation.

Can we answer (1)? It seems like yes. People have identified what certainly seem like the tail numbers for the flights in question. So much so that the Associated Press and Reuters have reconstructions of the timeline based on flight data. You can even look them up yourself! Here is flight N278GX, for example. You can see in its flight history that it departed Valley International Airport in Harlingten TX at around 4:26 PM CDT, bound for Comayagua International Airport in Honduras. It then departed Comayagua International Airport at 9:41 PM CST and arrived at El Salvador International Airport at 10:05 PM CST. The plane then departed El Salvador International Airport for Valley International Airport at 2:50 AM CST the next day. So we have the answer to (1) and (3) very straightforwardly. (2) can probably be derived with some math and knowing the flight route from Valley International to Comayagua International. The answer to (4), I imagine, can be narrowed to the 5 hour window after the flight arrived in El Salvador and before it departed. The planes in question are both Airbus A320, which have a typical passenger capacity in the 150-200 range which gives us some bounds on (5).

Did I reveal state secrets by making this post? Did the AP or Reuters do so by making their posts? According to the precedent's the government cites in their Notice invoking the privilege public disclosure of the secrets in question does not necessarily defeat the invocation, so it may be that the government does not answer the judge's questions after all.

Anyway, separate from the above the government has until the end of day today to file a brief as to why they should not be sanctioned for violating the court's TRO. Should be an interesting read!

What caught my eye in recent filings is the accusation that the Salvadorian Government refused to accept female deportees, even going so far as making the US Government return female inmates to the United States.

I can sort of see how this could happen. The original Alien Enemies Act of 1798 only applied to males aged 14 and up. The amended version currently on the books was updated during WWI to include all persons aged 14 and up. Maybe they accidentally cited the 1798 version during negotiations with Bukele. That would only be the second most embarrassing foreign policy blunder this week.

What catches my eye in that filing is that one of the men so deported was actually Nicaraguan. Venezuelan women could be subject to deportation under the AEA and Trump's proclamation (though apparently not to El Salvador), but no Nicaraguan would be. These are the people the Trump administration argues have no right to have any kind of hearing or due process before they are deported under the AEA, even if they legally can't be apparently.

Surely it’s just because the mega jails are for male inmates only, they likely don’t have excess capacity in the women’s prisons.

Yes, but one would think that this is the kind of thing that would be discussed in those “nonpublic, sensitive, high-stakes” negotiations.

Are puberty blockers chemical castration?

A follow-up to the discussion with @netstack

This was originally a deep-chain reply, but after a few spergy, reddit-tier replies on my end, and @netstack's saintly curiosity, the conversation resulted in a decent-quality argument, that I'd like to get more eyes on and see I missed any obvious objections.

I mistakenly thought that when states chemically castrate sex offenders, they use the progestogens, but when oncologists chemically castrate cancer patients, they use the GnRH drugs. Then the fact that gender clinics recommend GnRH would suggest their protocols are more like cancer treatment than criminal justice.

As @Fruck pointed out, this isn’t the case if Lupron was used for judicial castration in Australia. I’ll assume he’s correct, and I share his frustration proving it. This was the best I could find. It says that CPA, another progestogen, is the only currently approved option, but cites studies on Lupron and a couple others. Obviously, they saw some use in criminal justice.

I did some extra digging as well. The wiki for Lupron links to the paper "Reforming (purportedly) Non-Punitive Responses to Sexual Offending", and while it's about triptorelin instead of Lupron, it's another GnRH. In any case a systematic review of the use of GnRH on sexual offenders (sci-hub) should hopefully settle the matter.

As a side note this paper makes me think the difference between GnRH's and DMPA's is that the former have (or promised to have) fewer side effects, not that they work on a fundamentally different principle (and while we're on the subject, let me just say I'm rather bemused at all the handwringing in all these papers about the side effects of these drugs on convicted sex offenders, when I compare them to the dismissal of any such concerns around giving the same drugs to children).

“Political leverage” was just a joke about the stereotypical eunuch. In poor taste, perhaps.

No, it just completely went over my head, lol.

I doubt that I can find credible sources for long-term reversibility, since I assume it’s permanent at some point. Maybe 2-3 years, since that’s what the oncology websites cite when they feel defensive about gender politics. I’m not trying to push a political line.

This is a fun one. From what I understand chemical castration is meant to be reversible. This is what the wiki for chemical castration says right on the top, and I saw, but failed to bookmark, a paper that made that claim about DMPA's specifically, but that seems to be the general consensus on chemical castration:

Medical considerations are also important, and contemporary doctors should be knowledgeable of these issues. First, chemical castration is no longer effective after it is discontinued;

So if irreversibility is a necessary condition for classifying something as chemical castration... than it seems that chemical castration does not meet the standard.

Now, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "non-central" argument, you can argue that something that's reversible doesn't quite have that quality of having one's balls cut off that you'd expect from a term like "castration". It is also true you're going to have a hard time finding sources about the reversibility of puberty blockers, since dr. Cass' team looked, and all they can say is:

No conclusions can be drawn about the effect on gender-related outcomes, psychological and psychosocial health, cognitive development or fertility. Bone health and height may be compromised during treatment.

But when gender care providers themselves tell me that "puberty blockers are reversible (asterisk)", the asterisk being you can't stay on them too long, or that if you start them too early you're never going to have an orgasm, when celebrity cases like Jazz Jennings say they don't regret going on blockers, but the downside was "there wasn't enough tissue to work with when it came to the surgery" (and also don't know what an orgasm is), when the industry comes up with procedures like sigmoid vaginoplasties or zero depth vaginoplasties to either hack around or throw up their hands about the issue, can we say that there are good reasons to suspect some of the changes may be irreversible? What is even supposed to be the mechanism for reversibility? For a fully developed adult it's just a question of restoring testosterone levels and sperm counts, but for a child that never went through puberty we're basically hoping their body will catch up with development as if nothing ever happened.

Yeah, I know that as far as evidence goes, this doesn't rise to the standard of a proper well-designed study, but like I said in the other comment, the gender industry isn't particularly transparent about results they don't like. I understand wanting to remain agnostic on the reversibility question, but if you grant that these concerns are reasonable, it seems like puberty blockers are an at least as, and may possibly turn out to be more of, a central example of chemical castration, than chemical castration itself.

It depends how you define castration. The strict definition would be a double orchiectomy. If these chemicals made your balls wither up and drop off then yes, that plainly qualifies as chemically induced castration.

It feels like the original chemical castration usage must have arisen as a way to square the demands to castrate sex offenders with a means to backtrack in the face of appeals or wrongful convictions and preserve human rights: We'll castrate them [permanently] and any objections are moot because if we get it wrong it's totally reversible [and not really castration].

If you define it as anything that reduces normal sexual function then you put it on a vague and very wide spectrum and it becomes a matter of arguing the balance. The trouble is that would drag a lot of other things into the category. Too much whisky? Recreational amphetamines? SSRIs? It's starting to look like I've been chemically castrated a few times and it reversed rapidly with a good night's sleep and some eggs and coffee. What looked like a powerful rhetorical weapon to attack the trans movement finds itself a little impotent.

What if you carefully constructed a definition that captures the trans youth movement but leaves clinically depressed fans of Lemmy Kilmister unaffected? Well then it just looks like you're playing your own version of the "things are what they are because I said so" game.

If you think puberty blockers are bad because they have irreversible negative effects on fertility and sexual function then you can make that argument without the need for hyperbole.

It feels like the original chemical castration usage must have arisen as a way to square the demands to castrate sex offenders with a means to backtrack in the face of appeals or wrongful convictions and preserve human rights: We'll castrate them [permanently] and any objections are moot because if we get it wrong it's totally reversible [and not really castration].

(...) What if you carefully constructed a definition that captures the trans youth movement but leaves clinically depressed fans of Lemmy Kilmister unaffected? Well then it just looks like you're playing your own version of the "things are what they are because I said so" game.

Even if you're right about the origins of the term, it is a simple fact that the term was used in academic / law-enforcement literature, and no one seemed to object. I'm merely asking if puberty blockers fit into that previously-used-without-objection definition. My conclusion is: yes. Do you disagree?

If you think puberty blockers are bad because they have irreversible negative effects on fertility and sexual function then you can make that argument without the need for hyperbole.

I'm using the term in the exact same way it was used before puberty blockers entered public discourse, and even allowing for some stricter criteria that would stem from the discrepancy between the technical and colloquial terms. If this is hyperbole, every academic who has ever used the term was being hyperbolic.

Arguments concerning the science of anything relating to puberty blockers or hormones or anything else concerning transgenderism are useless, because no one making arguments on either side really cares about the science. All it is is cover for whatever argument they want to make. For instance, suppose some children develop a heart condition that they may grow out of but will become a dangerous, chronic problem if it persists into adulthood. There's a treatment that can significantly mitigate this risk if the child starts taking it around age ten, but it comes with a catch: It has its own risks, and can cause permanent damage itself if it's unnecessarily used. If you're a doctor making a recommendation or a parent looking to make a decision, then your conclusion would depend on a number of factors—the likelihood that the child will grow out of the condition, the amount of damage the untreated condition is likely to cause, the amount of damage the treatment is likely to cause, etc.

But that's a heart condition. It has no political, cultural, or social implications. The only circumstance in which society will judge you for your choice is if the scientific evidence clearly supports a particular course of action, e.g., if the chances of the kid growing out of it are low, the consequences of an untreated condition are severe, and the potential risks of treatment are mild. But if it's anywhere near a Hobson's choice, it would be unusual for people to make categorical statements about what the correct course of action is in all cases, or for there to be a sustained public effort to influence legislation on the issue.

So ultimately whether it's reversible doesn't matter. For the anti-trans crowd, if it were 100% consequence-free and there was next to no chance that the kid would grow out of wanting to be the opposite sex, they would still be against it on principle. The same is true in the other direction, though the hardcore trans activists are much fewer in number. So quote statistics and talk about risks until the end of time if you want to, but keep in mind that it's irrelevant to the conversation.

I’m a bit deeper than that. When someone uses “the science” in a political or social argument, I pretty much assume that the studies are suspect. There are just too many ways to get the results you want: funding the studies yourself, reinterpreting the results to say what you want tge results to be, p-hacking, or doing a one off study that never replicate but you won’t know that for decades. Psychology, sociology, and psychiatry are completely captured and rarely if ever do real science research in a dispassionate and objective way. Nutrition is another one that has so many vested interests that basically everyone is claiming the science shows that their product is good for you or that it doesn’t cause obesity (honestly, I think the best advice is CICO and avoid foods that your ancestors in 1900 wouldn’t have recognized as food). I think given the absolute weaponization of “the Science” as distinct from the actual scientific method and actual intellectual honesty, it’s generally best to assume great grandparents were right and the new political and social ideas are at best suspect— unless they come with serious receipts.

Trans and Covid simply revealed the rot at the bottom of academia where most science is done to further an agenda rather than to increase human knowledge.

Arguments concerning the science of anything relating to puberty blockers or hormones or anything else concerning transgenderism are useless, because no one making arguments on either side really cares about the science. All it is is cover for whatever argument they want to make.

You don't find it a little bit strange that we've been having the trans debate in this space for something like 10 years, and these "well, the science doesn't really matter" arguments are surfacing only now that it can be shown that some pro-trans claims can't be scientifically backed, and that several of the experts that we were told to trust have been proven to lie on several occasions?

So ultimately whether it's reversible doesn't matter.

Hold on, "the science doesn't matter" is one thing, "reversibility doesn't matter" is another. If I had a kid, there's many ideas that they could come up with, that I would think are absolutely retarded, but might let them go through with them, just so they get it out of there system, if nothing else, and reversibility is one of the most important criteria I'd use for making the decision whether to let them do it, or call an absolute veto. This seems plainly obvious to me, and I can't wrap my head around how anyone could claim otherwise, so maybe you shouldn't so confidently speak for others (especially for people with values different from yours).

Also, if it doesn't matter, why did the pro trans side spend so much time and effort telling people puberty blockers are reversible, even though they knew they have no evidence for the claim?

For instance, suppose some children develop a heart condition that they may grow out of but will become a dangerous, chronic problem if it persists into adulthood. There's a treatment that can significantly mitigate this risk if the child starts taking it around age ten, but it comes with a catch: It has its own risks, and can cause permanent damage itself if it's unnecessarily used. If you're a doctor making a recommendation or a parent looking to make a decision, then your conclusion would depend on a number of factors—the likelihood that the child will grow out of the condition, the amount of damage the untreated condition is likely to cause, the amount of damage the treatment is likely to cause, etc.

In these situations we tell the patient and parent the risks and benefits to the best of our knowledge, and leave the decision to them. We don't try to guilt them into overriding it, and when someone brings evidence that the original risk/benefit assessment is wildly off the mark, we hear them out and adjust the practice to be in accordance with the best evidence. We don't call them heart-condition-o-phobes, we don't ban them from social media, and we don't send the police after them.

This is one of the topics that really broke my trust with the medical 'experts', along with the covid stuff.

There are some basic common sense things to know about medicine and if someone is going to make a claim contradicting it they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations.

The idea that halting a major development milestone would be harmless breaks every bit of common sense about child health. The idea that infection with a sickness does not grant any kind of immunity is also insane.

The idea that infection with a sickness does not grant any kind of immunity is also insane.

You have to be so so careful with this kind of thinking when it comes to medicine.

First, I'll say yeah everything related to Trans healthcare is fucked and if you put a doctor in a safe space you have a shockingly high likelihood that what they have to say is grossly off-narrative, but what is allowed to be said in public is totally different.

Okay, but-

Medicine is a mix of really obvious common sense things, sometimes with a clearly understood basis (a lot of cardiac physiology is just fluid going through tubes! Easy to model!) and things that are basically the most complicated thing we know about (ex: the brain).

It is not always clear when something is common sense and when it is not. Extremely unclear. To the point where professional medical researchers in a field will get this wrong, stake research and money and decades on something and totally not understand if it was common sense or not.

The classic manifestation of this is blithely labeled "clinical significance." Something can make sense in a lab or a Petri dish, or in a monitored study, but you unleash it on our population you find out it does jack shit.

This came up a lot during COVID - such and such trend medication would appear to have an impact on viral replication in a lab and then you'd give it to people and it would have no impact at all or reduce symptoms by one hour on average or something like that.

Sometimes we'd have a common sense explanation ("oh it's kinda like Tamiflu you just need to give it super early after exposure...so it's mostly useless") sometimes we don't.

Clinical medicine involves a lot of heuristics and experience to help figure out what is common sense and to guess ahead of research because research is slow and expensive and a lot of what we do is never researched because nobody can monetize it or research would be unethical.

It's a mess, but most physicians were just like "oh it's going to be like Tamilfu" from the word go and tuned out, while everyone else in the population didn't even know they had to think that way.

I'm getting a bit unfocused so to bring it back-

Common sense in child health frequently doesn't apply. The field is going to have findings that don't make sense to you (even if I don't agree this is one of them). Consider that for a long time "spanking is good for child development" was common sense. Then it wasn't. I'd bet money the research base for both conclusions is frustratingly unhelpful.

And for your other example-

Looking at the immune system as "oh you get sick and then you get immunity" is like looking at Moore's Law and then assuming it will go on forever. Are you going to be right most of the time? Sure, but does that tell you anything about the nuances of the system or for how long it will apply? No.

Plenty of infectious organisms don't trigger your immune system in a normal way or have weird interactions. For example: Herpesviruses. You have them forever! Does that count as immunity? Or not immunity? Shit I don't know.

TLDR: Common sense applies in medicine in a lot of places but sometimes not in what seems like an obvious place. This causes angst.

It's partly that they flipped all the standards of evidence on their head.

Interventions were considered safe until proven otherwise. Masking young kids in school, widespread adoption of a novel medical treatment (MRNA "vaccines"), puberty blockers, etc.

Covid is basically a flu/cold virus. All intuitions about such things turned out to basically be correct. And there was good evidence that was true in 2020 but they spent nearly four more years dragging it on. Unless you were part of a BLM protest, and then things were fine.

Biology can often be weird and unintuitive I get that. But when it gets weird is when you need more evidence and research, not a political wall of silence saying "you are a bad person if you don't believe us".

I literally cannot imagine a non life threatening scenario where hormone therapies would be allowed for kids. Hormones are definitely one of those systems that we don't understand very well. We know that getting it wrong can even cause life threatening conditions. We correctly vilify anyone giving out steroids to teen athletes, this seems just as dangerous and permanent.

With respect to Trans care-

A finicky part of this discussion is that it's really about two separate issues: 1. "Do we know if gender affirming care helps" 2. "How do we feel about it?"

Common sense is a poor guide because both sides think they have the common sense. Personally I will accept either outcome as to its usefulness, but I use the cheat of "we actively have zero idea because of poor research quality." However when most people talk about this they let question two bleed in, and that includes "what just makes the most sense?" The idea of gender identity problems is very poorly understood, including its natural history and pathophysiology (in large part because of willful blindness by advocates). It should be weird enough and unknown enough that "what makes sense" rarely applies.

With respect to COVID-

A huge problem here is the mixing of political and scientific questions. We (as in the field, but also me specifically on the old forum and with my family and so on) were upfront about lots of COVID stuff that turned out to be true. Most of it was consistent the whole time. Some of this falls into a bit of a medical talk vs regular people talk "it's just a bad flu" scares the shit out of us but most normies do not realize how bad the flu is. That's pretty normal communication problems in a fraught situation.

However when you talk about things like indefinite lock downs or nobody is allowed outside at parks those are political questions that were justified by appealing to science and having politicians (like Fauci) wear a doctor's hat. Additionally we have the problem of mandatory advocacy in the field (seriously it's a required part of medical school and residency training these days and guess which way it always leans) which resulted in a lot of doctors engaging in leftist nonsense hiding under science and medicine but it was leftist bullshit and should be treated as such - it isn't the fault of medicine or doctors its the fault of leftist institutional infiltration.

Medicine works just as well (or not well) as it always has outside the political topics. In the same way that your university or the IRS or whatever does.

The takeaway should not be "medicine is bad and we can't trust public health officials" it should be "medicine and public health officials are people and fall into the same politicking and fear and so on.

Common sense is a poor guide because both sides think they have the common sense. Personally I will accept either outcome as to its usefulness, but I use the cheat of "we actively have zero idea because of poor research quality." However when most people talk about this they let question two bleed in, and that includes "what just makes the most sense?" The idea of gender identity problems is very poorly understood, including its natural history and pathophysiology (in large part because of willful blindness by advocates). It should be weird enough and unknown enough that "what makes sense" rarely applies.

I mean, if we have zero idea then it's still a scandal anyway.

Yes!

100% going to be a situation where we think of modern gender affirming care as being similar to lobotomy (with the same ignoring the positive side of lobotomies) at some point in the future (could be soon could be later).

I directionally agree with most posters here on this topic.

BUT.

Common sense isn't the right tree to be barking up.

I agree with what you're saying but I also agree with cjet79's central point that "if someone is going to make a claim contradicting [most people's common sense about medicine] they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations."

I think this is true in general, not just in medicine. If you're going to make claims that contradict peoples' common sense, then you need to be prepared to carry a heavy burden of persuasion, and you should empathize with (rather than attack or belittle) those people who are unpersuaded and trust their (perhaps incorrect) common sense. This is where the medical establishment really messed up. Even on issues where I think the establishment is correct (e.g., the covid vaccines are effective, adults should be allowed to medically transition) I still think the establishment has done a horrible job of messaging, and has blamed its failures on the people it failed to convince.

I mean to some extent the fundamental problem is that patients are idiots (also, people are idiots).

For example it is pervasive common sense in the U.S. that doctors in general (and notably for this forum - psychiatrists in specific) are pill pushers first and foremost.

Meanwhile every doctor is trained to and will tell you to make lifestyle modifications and live a healthy life first. If they do not it's not because they don't believe it's because they've given up because nobody listens.

Then patients say they want to do X supplement or go to the chiropractor or whatever in order to maintain health instead of taking medication which the pill pushing doctor wants them on...

Ultimately you do what you can but people will ignore you and believe whatever they want and be resistant to being told what is or is not common sense and what is or is not good evidence.

Convincing people of stuff they don't want to believe is not something that doctors are more magically equipped to do than anyone else, but that is what would be required.

I do think public health is directionally wrong on some of this stuff, but insisting "okay but this time when people are wrong or confused you have to be more careful" isn't helpful.

I remember even 15 years ago, when all this seemed like a fever dream, the activist claims that "If a child decides they want to, they can just resume a normal puberty" seemed insane to me. My mind automatically went to all the wrestlers I knew in highschool who's growth was stunted from constantly having to make weight for 4 years. There was no catching up on that growth after they quit wrestling. The chip on their shoulder manlet former wrestler stereotype exist for a reason. They were tricked by their coaches into peaking at 15, and sacrificed the stature of an adult and the romantic successes that come with it.

I doubt your typical highschool female athletic encounters this, but I know with Olympic level female gymnast (and other sports) who've been lifers, they often struggle with fertility, though I think it's an open and debated question how much of that is permanent. There does seem to be some risk of permanence if the condition occurs at the wrong time or for a long duration.

So I mean, in the context of these pre-trans examples around how important healthy puberty is, and how you don't get a do-over, it was shocking to me that anyone believed the activist lie that it was "fully reversible".

Isn't the corollary to this that we should also ban teenage wrestling and gymnastics in addition to puberty blockers?

Not particularly? Or maybe properly informed parental consent is good enough? You see this a lot with football now, where the concussion risk is so high that parents won't let their kids play it anymore, and instead encourage other sports.

I'm of two minds about it. I'm a huge proponent of fitness, and I fucking loved the decade I spent in martial arts. The concussion I got from it was not so much fun. Nor the spots I still have in my vision, my torn ankle that aches at night if the sheets are tucked in, or the fact that I broke my right hand twice and the knuckles on my right hand line up different than the knuckles on my left now. But I suppose for a 10 year amateur career, that's not horrible, and those were the choices I made largely as an adult. Nobody rode my ass, I pushed myself exactly as hard as I wanted to, until I didn't anymore. And I wouldn't fault anyone for wanting their kids to do a sport, within the boundaries of safety and reason.

It seems somehow more sinister when coaches are pushing children beyond the limits of safety and reason, with health outcomes they would be in a unique position to be aware of, but which they ignore. And if there were programs or coaches that systematically abused children in that way, I would like to see them banned.

Elite teenage wrestling / gymnastics (and possibly other sports). Sure, I'd be in favor of that. The benefit of sports is that it gets you off your ass, teaches you discipline, possibly team work, how to git gud, how to deal with failure, etc. etc., If kids are practicing sports to the point of predictable long-term health consequences, then things have gotten rather retarded.

The key is to encourage multi-sport focus rather than elite specialization. IMHO.

Yeah all the steroids abuse by teen athletes seems like a natural experiment to look at. I'm not even sure steroids are as impactful as hormone therapy, but no one thinks steroids for kid athletes was good idea. The "medical" justification for both is kinda the same too, self hostage taking. "I'll be sad and kill myself if you don't let me take these drugs."

Just as an anecdote, I do personally know a female former competitive gymnast who is now horribly sad because she's permanently infertile due to the physical stresses she was put through as a teen. Her husband's not in a great place with it either.

Definitely changed my perspective on encouraging my daughters to take up seriously-demanding physical activities.

I think more people could understand the depths of this debate better by steelmanning the pro puberty blocker/pro HRT side a little and seeing that allowing people to go though puberty normally is also not reversible. And a lot of transgender adults (and teens off the very basis that they are seeking out hormones) openly express that they wish they didn't have to go through their natural puberty.

So from their perspective what bans can end up doing is that instead of the person getting to decide which irreversible thing they go through based off their own desires, it's the government choosing for them.

There is no simple choice here, someone will be upset by permanent changes. A teenager who makes a mistake and gets on hormones without consideration, or a teenager who is forced to go without care and ends up as a sad trans adult who just wishes they had the autonomy given to make choices about their own body when they were younger.

And blockers came up as the compromise solution and promoting them as the free space where everything can be reversed seems just like wishful thinking from everyone. Because if it's true then it's a very easy solution that won't cause any harm.

There is no simple choice here, someone will be upset by permanent changes. A teenager who makes a mistake and gets on hormones without consideration, or a teenager who is forced to go without care and ends up as a sad trans adult who just wishes they had the autonomy given to make choices about their own body when they were younger.

There is no simple choice here, and any method is going to inevitably have both false positives and false negatives. I think there are a couple of good reasons to err on the side of more false negatives, though. One is the basic principle that's often summed up as "first, do no harm." This isn't some iron-clad rule even within the medical community, much less reality itself, but it's a general call for epistemic humility in medicine such that, unless we can be really really sure that some intervention won't be a net harm, we ought to allow human biology to take its course. The other reason is the base rates: the odds that any given child is trans is minuscule, likely less than 1%, from what I recall about the stats. Now, we aren't sure what the odds are, conditional on the child believing that they're trans, but it's not clear that that conditional shifts the odds significantly, much less that it shifts the odds to 50.00001%, which would be the threshold at which it would make sense to even consider any sort of irreversible interventions.

What I think any sort of people who are for use of puberty blockers in trans children ought to do at this point is to generate credible scientific knowledge on how to accurately determine if a child is trans, as well as create credible mechanisms by which children are properly filtered out. At a bare minimum, it would have to include metaphorically tarring and feathering anyone who would refuse to publicize research on this topic based on the fear that it would be politically inconvenient, as well as encouraging criticisms of any research from people who are ideologically opposed to them. It's only through building such a credible mechanism of accurately identifying trans children and minimizing false positives that I think society in general would be on board with the program. Even then, there will always be people who oppose it entirely on principle, much like, even in 2025, there are people who believe homosexuality is a sin or are against miscegenation. Those people ought to just be ignored and will simply lose their credibility over time if giving puberty blockers to kids proves itself to be fine.

how to accurately determine if a child is trans

It seems like this would require defining what it means to be trans... any suggestions?

Those people ought to just be ignored and will simply lose their credibility over time if giving puberty blockers to kids proves itself to be fine.

Seems like you're begging the question here. If people think something is wrong in principle, then it won't be "fine" by their lights even if it doesn't cause secondary problems.

It seems like this would require defining what it means to be trans... any suggestions?

Personally, no. I agree that it'd be incumbent upon anyone who wants society to be accepting of giving puberty blockers to trans children in order to transition them to provide a definition of "trans" that society in general would accept. For the past couple decades, I think we've seen them push the idea of "really really feels like they're the opposite sex," along the same lines as homosexuality being defined as something like "really really feels like they're sexually attracted to the same sex," but that clearly hasn't stuck. Given that we're talking about actual medical intervention, the definition would probably have to be a lot more objective.

Seems like you're begging the question here. If people think something is wrong in principle, then it won't be "fine" by their lights even if it doesn't cause secondary problems.

Sure, just like how homosexuals still aren't "fine" by the lights of plenty of people today. But, again, we can just ignore those people and win over the people who can be won over based on the (lack of) those secondary problems.

Sounds like we agree on basically everything. Except I want to reserve the right to value things independently of whether they cause secondary problems. E.g. I'd fight to stop secretly torturing people even if the practice didn't cause secondary problems.

The part many on the left are missing is that puberty itself is a large part of the mechanic by which teens become heteronormal. When I was around 12, I felt disgusted by teens, sexuality in general and was a somewhat odd kid to begin with. At that time there already was lots of talk about nonstandard sexualities and I strongly identified with asexuals. I also thought that I was very far from the average male, among other things refusing any kind of violence (I distinctly remember refusing to even watch shows/movies or play games portraying violence), an intellectual above all kinds of base instincts. Typical arrogant nerd stuff. Especially early puberty then felt like shit, very moody & scared of what happens with me. Then sometime in late puberty all of that went out of the window, suddenly I was a temperamentally fairly stereotypical guy. And even in retrospect, I had been to some degree in denial even when younger. In elementary school I was often beating up other kids for various reasons. I just learned that I was going nowhere with that attitude, so I had to force myself out of it and pretended that it never happened. Which combined with my otherwise bookish personality naturally led to the described intellectual self-image.

Conditionals are obviously hard to prove, but I could easily see my pre-puberty self taking puberty blockers to not become a disgusting, violent, sexual men. Especially with the argument that oh, it's reversible anyway, so just try it out. It would have been a grave mistake, but I wouldn't have known, and in particular it's easy then to then just stay the course and tell yourself you took the right option.

My wife is very similar in the other direction; She always was a tomboy who felt more comfortable with boys, then puberty hit and she changed. She also could see herself mistakenly choosing to take puberty blockers in her youth. And now our daughter is just the same, so we make sure to always tell her that her mom had the same struggles. Imagining her mistakenly getting talked into puberty blockers is horrifying, and worse, very plausible.

So overall while I have quite some sympathy, going through puberty seems like the less-bad option even for the majority of those who feel somewhat uncomfortable with their sex.

The part many on the left are missing is that puberty itself is a large part of the mechanic by which teens become heteronormal.

Hardcore gender activists aren’t missing this; they openly say they want to dismantle heteronormativity. What did you think that meant, thoughts, conferences, essays?

I'm going to play Devil's Doctor here:

You underwent a drastic change in your personality as a consequence of a hormonal surge that was out of your control. That's 'normal'. It's puberty.

Yet the person you became isn't the same person as the one before. I mean, puberty hit me hard, but I never felt as if my values or goals changed because of it (beyond being even more eager for the company of the fairer sex).

This seems to me to be analogous to a person who, for their entire life, had sworn off addictive substances, but ended up on benzos or opioids for Medical Reason and found themselves hooked, and are now unwilling to try and become sober.

Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as 50% infant mortality rates, dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.

Nature, a blind and indifferent force, cares nothing for our individual well-being or our carefully constructed notions of self. To equate "natural" with "good" or "desirable" is a fundamental error, a logical fallacy we often fall prey to.

In the UK, the laws around consent for minors are relatively simple. Past the age of 16, they're assumed to be competent to consent to or decline medical procedures until proven otherwise. Below that age, there's no strict cut-off, if they can prove to their clinician that they are able to weigh the risks and benefits, they are able to consent or withhold it, and even override parental demands.

Someone who wishes to be the opposite sex is someone I pity. Medical science as it currently stands can't provide them more a hollow facsimile of that transition, it's Singularity-complete based off my knowledge of biology. Even so, the desire is one I consider as valid as any.

If they understand that:

A)Puberty blockers have risks and might not be truly reversible if they change their mind.

B) It won't solve all their problems, it won't physically make them indistinguishable from their desired sex.

Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision. If they're forced to pass through puberty, they might desist, or they might spend their life wracked with regret that they didn't pull the trigger (hopefully not literally). You can pass far easier before testosterone wracks your body. It's a helluva drug/hormone.

A lot of life-changing decisions can be ones that change the person making them irrevocably, and into a person who would affirm them in retrospect. But I would yell at someone who suggested that couples who are iffy about childbirth be forced to have a child in the hopes that'll change their mind, or fix their marriage or some other well-intentioned goal. Or if we suddenly were to say that everyone should be made to try alcohol and cigarettes because the kind of people who try them tend to stick to it.

We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desires when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.

Want to be more muscular? Try tren, if you know what you're in for. Want to lose weight? Take ozempic, while keeping an eye on your eyesight and pancreas. Want to be the other sex? This is the closest we can get you today.

Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"?

Tell me again how transgenderism is a totally different thing from transhumanism.

I bet I already have.

If not, I'll answer your rhetorical quasi-question:

Transhumanism seeks to liberate us from the existing limits of the human flesh. The exact goal can vary, be it practical immortality, becoming superintelligent or immune to disease. The only common thread is looking at the Human Condition, deeming it deeply suboptimal, and aspiring to do better through technology.

Transgenderism? That could mean anything from affirming that a desire to change sex is Valid™, that it is desirable to do so, or claims that we can do so. Some might say that people who have made efforts to emulate the opposite sex should be extended the polite courtesy/social fiction of being treated like them. Hardliners might say that they are the opposite sex, and any efforts to distinguish them from those natally blessed is bigotry.

They have superficial similarities. Both sides are usually less than pleased with their current bodies and wish to remedy that.

If you're happy that I'm conceding some kind of point you've made, then I will helpfully point out that if you consider them equal and indistinguishable:

  1. Brushing your teeth.
  2. Wearing clothes.
  3. Getting a pacemaker installed.
  4. Driving a car or using a bicycle.
  5. Wearing shoes.

Are all sterling examples of transhumanism! The evidence is clear for all to behold, are they not all examples of overcoming human limitations through technology?

Look at this featherless biped, is he not a fine specimen of Man?

If your wife were to dye her hair blonde, would you divorce her as a reckless transhumanist obsessed with undermining the sanctity of the human form she was blessed with? Probably not.

Ahem.

I'm a transhumanist. I'm not a transgenderist in any meaningful sense. I'm very happy being a man rather than a woman. I'd be even happier as a post-gender Matrioshka Brain.

If you want to restrict yourself to the kind of trans-activism that demands people who disagree make concessions beyond minor ones like going along with a new name or remembering new pronouns, then they're usually making some kind of metaphysical claim that a trans-woman is as female as a born woman.

Which I think is nonsense. At the very least it's not possible to pull off today, no matter how much surgery or gene therapy they can afford or survive.

When I want to be a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch, I want that to be a fact about physical reality. There shouldn't be any dispute about that, no more than anyone wants to dispute the fact that I have black hair right now.

I do not think that putting on high heels and bribing my way into Mensa achieves my goal. I do not just want to turn around and say that because I identify as a posthuman deity, that I am one and you need to acknowledge that fact.

This explains why I have repeatedly pointed out that while I have no objection to trans people wanting to be the opposite sex, that they need to understand the limitations of current technology. I would have hoped that was obvious, why else would I pull terms like ersatz or facsimile out of my handy Thesaurus?

Self identification only equals identity if I asked you about which football club you're a fan of. I haven't actually met someone with who asked me to use different pronouns in real life, if they did, I'd probably oblige them because I'm a polite person with better hills to die on. If they saw me in a treatment room, I'd put their birth sex in the charts and helpfully append "trans" or "identifies as X" alongside it.

I basically agree with you about values and freedom. I guess my main fear is around the information environment we provide re: "This is the closest we can get you today." I'm not an expert but I get the impression that many (maybe most?) people who attempt to transition are deeply mislead about both the best and worst-case outcomes. I just don't expect any modern Western institution to be able to honest about what wretched results most transitioners end up having, nor about what most people honestly think of them.

Relatedly, Blanchard wrote about how his MtF patients could usually see that the other MtF patients clearly did not pass, but believed that they themselves did.

I think you could make similar arguments about the information environment surrounding lots of other early life choices, or educational choices such as pursuing arts degrees. But most of those are less catastrophic and irreversible. I guess at least Western society now does a pretty good job of showing the downsides of joining the army.

I basically agree with you about values and freedom. I guess my main fear is around the information environment we provide re: "This is the closest we can get you today." I'm not an expert but I get the impression that many (maybe most?) people who attempt to transition are deeply mislead about both the best and worst-case outcomes. I just don't expect any modern Western institution to be able to honest about what wretched results most transitioners end up having, nor about what most people honestly think of them.

I have no opposition to making every reasonable effort to expose people to reality. Of course, with the matter as politicized as it is, easier said than done. There are just as many people committed to cracking eggs at all costs as there people who will claim that puberty blockers gave their cancer cancer.

At any rate, if I had solutions for people making bad decisions, I'd probably be accepting a dozen Nobel prizes right now. All I can say is that we should let people make their own choices, and if they're hard and risky choices, do our best to ensure they're exposed to the facts they need.

There are just as many people committed to cracking eggs at all costs as there people who will claim that puberty blockers gave their cancer cancer.

I don't think that's true. Or at least, my impression is that almost every elementary through high school teacher in north america who talks about the issue gives the impression that it's basically possible to successfully transition.

All I can say is that we should let people make their own choices, and if they're hard and risky choices, do our best to ensure they're exposed to the facts they need.

I don't think I'm willing to bite the libertarian bullet here. E.g. I don't want my kids to have the option to do heroin, even if it's paired with a pamphlet explaining the real likely outcomes. However, I don't even think that that's a viable option. Seems like our options are: ban and demonize heroin, or legalize it and subsidize its use (as was recently done in British Columbia).

Same with transitioning kids: I don't see how we ever get to a world where it's both legal and the pros and cons are presented honestly. So I think I'd rather throw the few kids who could conceivably benefit from it under the bus and ban it for everybody.

Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.

It's because it's both natural and we have a long track record of that path working.

It's a very difficult problem to come up with an alternative pathway that leads to physically and mentally healthy humans at our current level of tech. Unconstrained thinking is probably not a good idea when it comes to complex biological and psychological changes.

It becomes even more absurd to even attempt this in the name of people with disordered relations to their own body, when puberty itself may help resolve that disordered relationship.

Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision.

Maybe people's intuitions that living their values will make them happy are just wrong. Maybe this is especially true for a group that is prone to a bunch of other mental disorders.

She said the assessments would address what she called "diagnostic overshadowing" - when patients' other healthcare issues were overlooked in cases of patients questioning their gender.

...

"What's unfortunately happened for these young people is that because of the toxicity of the debate, they've often been bypassed by local services who've been really nervous about seeing them," Dr Cass said.

"So rather than doing the things that they would do for other young people with depression, or anxiety, or perhaps undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder, they've tended to pass them straight on to the Gid service."

We can't exactly take it for granted that mentally ill people are holding values that will actually make them happy , or that they have a reasonable understanding of the risk they're taking on (especially when faced with dubious information from medical practitioners)or have reasonable expectations for these treatments.

Or hell, that their stated euphoria and relief will be lasting.

We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desired when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.

Society is entitled to say no. My doctor won't give me SARMs for some reason.

Discussions like this make you feel the void left by any natural law or common understanding of virtue.

Discussions like this make you feel the void left by any natural law or common understanding of virtue.

I did stress that I'm playing Devil's Advocate Doctor. I don't want puberty blockers, if I had the misfortune of having a child who desired them, I would do almost anything in my power to dissuade them. I'm not in the business of prescribing them either, I'm not a psychiatrist for kids and teenagers. In fact, the UK is cracking down on even the relatively few (compared to the US) "legitimate" gender transitioning clinics.

That being said: Natural law is bullshit. There is no coherent collection of principles that the term usefully refers to. Most adherents ignore the literal meaning and embrace a gazillion unprincipled exceptions. The closest it has to a working definition is status-quo bias.

Even teleological definitions have absurd conclusions. Is the meaning of life to maximize entropy? It is, if the outcome of a process defines its purpose.

Even mild exposure to different cultures and their associated values will tell you that beyond a small core (often contentious itself) there's no "common understanding of virtue".

Even simple sounding ideas, like "don't murder, or steal from your neighbors" will have people arguing ad-nauseum what counts murder or stealing or even a neighbor.

If I pity people who want to be the opposite of the sex they were at birth, then I pity people who genuinely believe in natural law or "objective" morality even more.

One of them is a matter of personal values. The other is basing your moral foundations on wishful thinking.

I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist. I know my values are just as valid (or not) as anyone else's. I also happen to think they're better, with the implicit understanding that to use such a comparative term necessarily needs an observer by whose light it is better or worse (me). Anyone who has convinced themselves that there's objective grounding to their morality, well, I don't want to have what they're smoking.

It's because it's both natural and we have a long track record of that path working.

Quite a few gynecologists and many endocrinologists would be out of a job if the outcome of human hormones acting as they would always had the desired outcome.

I don't contest that the overwhelming majority of people are neutral or slightly positive towards puberty, assuming they even cared to reflect on it.

It's a very difficult problem to come up with an alternative pathway that leads to physically and mentally healthy humans at our current level of tech. Unconstrained thinking is probably not a good idea when it comes to complex biological and social changes.

I would be the last person to disagree about the limits of modern science, engineering and medicine. I also think we should be improving our tech (and we are).

On the other hand, constraining thinking to only that which is known to be possible is... a choice.

You might have gotten away with it a thousand years back, when the lives you and your grandpa lived were nigh interchangeable. That's not the case today, we're living in a scifi novel with reality's rather lax attitude towards plausibility.

It becomes even more absurd to even attempt this in the name of people with disordered relations to their own body, when puberty itself may help resolve that disordered relationship.

And it might not. The rate of desistance with puberty is not 100%. A non-zero number of people will find themselves still wanting to transition, and face even greater hardship for even less change.

I'm for reflecting on whether or not that risk is worth taking, from the perspective of someone who has to:

  1. Make an irreversible choice.
  2. Their ability to make a choice automatically being taken away by inaction.

They need to add up the benefits and risks themselves.

Maybe people's intuitions that living their values will make them happy are just wrong. Maybe this is especially true for a group that is prone to a bunch of other mental disorders.

I do not hold happiness as the only terminal value, nor do most people. If they disagree, then they're welcome to start a fent habit.

Whether doing something will make a person happier, either in the short-term, in the long term, or just on average, is far from the only consideration when making a choice.

We can't exactly take it for granted that mentally ill people are holding values that will actually make them happy (what is the point of psychiatry otherwise), or that (especially when faced with dubious information from medical practitioners) they have a reasonable understanding of the risk they're taking on or have reasonable expectations for these treatments.

There are plenty of people who are just depressed, so we wouldn't be out of a job.

Mental illnesses are not made equal.

Someone who had an overwhelming desire to fly and tried to do so might have been better off in an insane asylum if they were born in the 1700s.

Today, they might be a hang-glider hobbyist, a pilot, an astronaut.

Did the people who jumped off cliffs or the Eiffel Tower with inadequate parachutes or mechanical contraptions count as mentally ill or suicidal? Not by most definitions I've heard of. They would still have been "better off" if society had caged them, or at least lived longer. Yet today, we soar.

Your argument argues, just as strongly, for doing our level best to present reliable information to patients. You could also force doctors to present information that better represented reality, on the pain of liability. You could have people be grilled by a different doctor or some other Authoritative Individual who had to be convinced that the patient understood the risks and benefits. This is already common practice in psychiatry, at least where I work. Things like detention under the Mental Health Act or forced treatment require multiple people uninvolved with the original case to sign off. This isn't trivially gamed either, I've seen the headaches my bosses get went they're trying to put these in place without unimpeachable evidence.

Or hell, that their stated euphoria and relief will be lasting.

Death, be it ours, or that of the universe, doesn't mean temporary endeavors are worthless. At least not to me.

Even in the short term, the hedonic treadmill goes brrr. I'd love to win the lottery, even if a year later my happiness would have regressed to near baseline levels.

Society is entitled to say no. My doctor won't give me SARMs for some reason.

You should try a different doctor. Some are more flexible. If I had a patient who understood the risks and benefits, and I wasn't violating laws (because I wish to keep my license, my own moral proclivities aside), then I'd prescribe them.

There are many things that would nice if they were real. You know, a benevolent Creator, objective morality, a pill that changes your gender with no consequences.

Sometimes, you're shit out of luck. Sometimes you can make something just as good. Sometimes you pick the lesser evil out of available options while working on making better ones.

If you have a god-shaped hole, in a universe that doesn't have a god, make one yourself from applying linear algebra to {the majority of text Mankind has written}. If you can't become the opposite sex today, maybe settle for the terrible ersatź substitute.

All I say is maybe.

Even simple sounding ideas, like "don't murder, or steal from your neighbors" will have people arguing ad-nauseum what counts murder or stealing or even a neighbor.

If I pity people who want to be the opposite of the sex they were at birth, then I pity people who genuinely believe in natural law or "objective" morality even more.

Hooo buddy, have I got some news to break to you about natural science. People debate conceptual primitives and what "counts" as them all the bloody time. I presume that you pity people who genuinely believe in natural physical law or "objective" reality, too?

I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist. I know my values are just as valid (or not) as anyone else's.

These sentences contradict one another and result in something that is conceptually incoherent.

I did stress that I'm playing Devil's Advocate Doctor.

I know. You just run into places in these discussions where you're clearly in need of a common touchstone, even if we can't get back.

Even mild exposure to different cultures and their associated values will tell you that beyond a small core (often contentious itself) there's no "common understanding of virtue".

True. But, practically, internal dissension seems more relevant than the inability to get the entire human race to agree. Nobody in America is overly bothered by the fact that Saudis have a different moral code.

Although the balance has shifted with how connected we are.

Anyone who has convinced themselves that there's objective grounding to their morality, well, I don't want to have what they're smoking.

This is the majority of philosophers btw. I personally don't take a strong stance on metaethics (another way to put it is that I'm too lazy to read enough to formulate one and always puts it off) but that always gives me pause here. What many people find very unintuitive is the consensus position.

Quite a few gynecologists and many endocrinologists would be out of a job if the outcome of human hormones acting as they would always had the desired outcome.

It doesn't disprove the "narrow is the path and few find it" argument if even otherwise healthy people have issues that require correction imo. Seems like it does the opposite.

On the other hand, constraining thinking to only that which is known to be possible is... a choice.

You might have gotten away with it a thousand years back, when the lives you and your grandpa lived were nigh interchangeable. That's not the case today, we're living in a scifi novel with reality's rather lax attitude towards plausibility.

  1. Our nature hasn't changed as much as some people imply with statements like this. And that's had benefits and downsides.
  2. Consider how I view the object level issue: I think the things said about the state of the science are bad (outrageous really), the transformation experimental and not particularly good and the consequences of humoring some of the extreme activists' claims awful. I do not treat all forms of "progress" this way and I don't think it's a contradiction.

And it might not. The rate of desistance with puberty is not 100%. A non-zero number of people will find themselves still wanting to transition, and face even greater hardship for even less change.

The standard for any treatment (or social convention for that matter) has never been that it's 100% successful.

I actually think that's part of the problem: society is constantly being overturned in the name of smaller and smaller minorities until we hit one where the tradeoffs for doing so are actually serious and visible.

The situation before the general pullback, where public cachet was redistributed to a small number of people who would likely be even smaller given healthy puberty, combined with credulous diagnosing and taboos against "conversion therapy" seems totally backwards.

I do not hold happiness as the only terminal value, nor do most people. If they disagree, then they're welcome to start a fent habit.

I meant it in the broader sense. I suppose what the Greeks would call eudaimonia and now philosophers translate as "human flourishing", to avoid exactly these problems.

Death, be it ours, or that of the universe, doesn't mean temporary endeavors are worthless. At least not to me.

And I suppose that's a coherent personal position. However, society clearly has certain standards for medical treatment.

Yes, it would be better if everyone was given accurate information on blockers. But that's not the only medical ethic. It seems like we have some pretty high standards for things like amputations which is precisely why exuberant claims were made about the necessity of transition to save a child's life. Even my opponents have implicitly yielded the point: the goal is not short-term gender euphoria in exchange for things we know tend to give people meaning like the ability to experience sexual pleasure and have children or not suffer side-effects from cross-sex hormones.

It's to literally save lives and improve human flourishing. It is not like your own personal decision to spend $3 on a lottery ticket (which costs you almost nothing and doesn't require any medical professional to be complicit).

Sometimes, you're shit out of luck. Sometimes you can make something just as good. Sometimes you pick the lesser evil out of available options while working on making better ones.

Maybe that's what I see myself as doing, but for society.

The arguments against a lot of TRA claims and medical practices to help them are usually on pragmatic grounds.

This is the majority of philosophers btw. I personally don't take a strong stance on metaethics (another way to put it is that I'm too lazy to read enough to formulate one and always puts it off) but that always gives me pause here. What many people find very unintuitive is the consensus position.

I've done my best to explore what drives philosophers to endorse objective morality, and found all their arguments lacking. It would help if the people who believed in objective morality could agree with each other on what it looked like, but alas.

I actually think that's part of the problem: society is constantly being overturned in the name of smaller and smaller minorities until we hit one where the tradeoffs for doing so are actually serious and visible.

I belong to the most oppressed minority of all, gamers, individuals. It doesn't get any smaller than that.

I also strongly value personal liberty. It's far from my only consideration, but it is a powerful one. The same arguments, namely paternalism, thinking that you can't allow such far-fetched thinking, would also restrict me.

I'm willing to support people in their quest for personal liberty, even if I think they're misguided, for the same reason that you want the right to free speech to cover heinous kinds as well. Nobody needs to have speech that's popular and favored protected by law.

And I suppose that's a coherent personal position. However, society clearly has certain standards for medical treatment.

Society isn't actually a monolithic entity (I'm not claiming that you're saying this, you appear to appreciate nuance). It's made of individuals, and some of them, like medical professionals or regulators, have disproportionate influence.

As the former, if not the latter, I consider it my duty to explain my views. At the absolute very least, I'm painfully self-consistent, and many of my opponents (the average philosopher, for example) aren't. There's plenty of vagueness and moral gray in that field, let alone when it becomes political.

It is certainly not consistent. As @RovScam helpfully illustrates in his own comment, it is trivial to consider an isomorphic example where almost nobody would consider it their business to interfere if the patient, their parents and the treating physicians were all on board.

Yes, it would be better if everyone was given accurate information on blockers. But that's not the only medical ethic. It seems like we have some pretty high standards for things like amputations which is precisely why exuberant claims were made about the necessity of transition to save a child's life. Even my opponents have implicitly yielded the point: the goal is not short-term gender euphoria in exchange for things we know tend to give people meaning like the ability to experience sexual pleasure and have children or not suffer side-effects from cross-sex hormones.

Modus ponens, modus tollens. I've addressed the specific example of elective limb amputation before. To summarize, if the person was otherwise sane (or at least had capacity), couldn't be dissuaded despite plenty of effort, found a surgeon willing to help, and could afford it, then I see that as entirely fine. I wouldn't like to pay for it with my taxes, there are better things to waste them on.

Young teens make many life changing decisions with uncertain payoffs. Opting for a less conventional field of scholarship might be one.

"We know that leaving school at 11 and then tilling the fields leads to a satisfying and happy life, why bother with the stress and expense of uni".

If someone is busy sacrificing their ability to party with friends in high school in exchange for grinding for med school, what of it? They'd definitely be getting more sexual pleasure in the short term, and likely have more kids if they didn't have to finish residency.

It's to literally save lives and improve human flourishing. It is not like your own personal decision to spend $3 on a lottery ticket (which costs you almost nothing and doesn't require any medical professional to be complicit).

The issue is that the people you're trying to look out for vehemently disagree on what counts as human flourishing. They certainly don't appreciate your attempts to dictate what they should choose, even if you good intentions.

If money is the biggest factor, then I have little objection to saying such procedures shouldn't be paid for by the public, any more than breast implants or a boob job typically are. I say typically for a reason, because someone who had a mastectomy for cancer might qualify.

The core of this is that meme:

"I consent." Says a distressed young child. "I consent." Says their worried but loving parents, and some doctor making sure they're ticking the consent boxes. "I don't-" Says someone whose consent seems entirely unnecessary to me, at least when they're not paying for this.

And a lot of transgender adults (and teens off the very basis that they are seeking out hormones) openly express that they wish they didn't have to go through their natural puberty.

And a lot of people who turned out to be non-transgender adults (like, a LOT) also say that their gender feelings dissipated upon completing normal puberty. There's no real concrete way of knowing which camp someone will fall into before it happens, so let's err on the side of no costly medical intervention, shall we?

And blockers came up as the compromise solution and promoting them as the free space where everything can be reversed seems just like wishful thinking from everyone. Because if it's true then it's a very easy solution that won't cause any harm.

Blockers seem to inhibit normal desistence, so this is really just tantamount to shoving confused kids down the trans pipeline.

I also have to cast some extreme suspicion on most transgenders who wish that they had taken puberty blockers, and making efforts to allow minors to take them, legally or non legally, because they are projecting adult feelings onto children. Most of them discovered their trans-ness as an adult, and that particular activism feels like trying to rectify your own shortfalls by enabling other kids to have better outcomes, except it's very much not a better outcome to most normal people and to pretty much any kid, for reasons given in this thread (infertility, stunted growth, tiny genitals, probably even more significant deleterious health effects that I don't know about). The interest in trans kids is actually kind of sickening to me for these reasons. It's a lot more "adult" than it tries to present itself as.

One dude I know online who likes to crossdress once said that conservatives and transphobes only oppose puberty blockers because it would make it impossible to determine if someone was a real female or not, thus giving the risk of being attracted to the wrong sex (which only a transphobe would find to be a bad thing). I had nothing to say to that, because it was so extremely bad faith and also completely inaccurate, both in its reading of conservative motivations and also the actual outcomes of puberty blockers.

allowing people to go though puberty normally is also not reversible

This is paper, not steel. Puberty is not reversible in the same way that birth is not reversible, nor aging. These are normal, natural, and expected processes. This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.

The problem is not just that it's not reversible, it's that it's an intervention to disrupt normal maturation, and also not reversible. The default isn't unfettered biohacking, it's growing as your body is built to grow. It's feeding hunger and sleeping when tired and, yes, going through puberty when mature.

This is paper, not steel. Puberty is not reversible in the same way that birth is not reversible, nor aging. These are normal, natural, and expected processes. This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.

One day I'll stop running into the naturalistic fallacy in the wild and consider that my 10^28 years of existence worthwhile.

If someone said that 50% infant mortality was natural and not reversible, or the same for heart attacks being inevitably fatal.. They'd have been right for almost all of human history. Fortunately, we still have people alive who've witnessed this state of affairs, fortunate only in that we're not usually tempted to think this was somehow a superior state of affairs.

Pre-mature infants are far more likely to survive these days, thanks to modern incubators and resuscitate technologies doing at least some of the work a womb could or would. We've got proof of concept artificial wombs that have gestated mammalian embryos months for as long as 4 weeks without any physiological abnormalities:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112

With the improved incubator, five experimental animals with CA/JV cannulation (ranging in age from 120 to 125 days of gestation) were maintained on the system for 346.6±93.5 h, a marked improvement over the original design. Importantly, one animal was maintained on the circuit for 288 h (120–132 days of gestation) and was successfully weaned to spontaneous respiration, with long-term survival confirming that animals can be transitioned to normal postnatal life after prolonged extra-uterine support.

Give me a billion dollars and change, and I'll put any damn baby back into the womb and keep it there happily.

Give me a hundred billion, and I'll pocket one, and spend a few million delegating more competent people to the task of solving aging.

This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.

As rabies proliferated through your peripheral nerves and is transported to your brain. As Onchocerca volvulus happily turns children blind.

Nature is not very nice. The congenial environment you find yourself is very strongly the property of artificial efforts to keep it that way.

Exactly.

So if irreversibility is a necessary condition for classifying something as chemical castration... than it seems that chemical castration does not meet the standard.

I think the problem with this standard where puberty blockers are concerned is that nothing is reversible.

I listened to Lex Friedman's interview with Aella some time back, and part of her personal history was growing up in a very strict evangelical Christian household. She never went through a "normal" process of sexual development, learning to date and grow into herself. Instead, she ran away from home and got...this. And no amount of careful effort would have allowed her to experience the way a normal person grows up, and certainly it is impossible to do so now.

Similarly, a kid who starts puberty two or three or five years late is going to have a very different experience than a kid who follows a "natural" puberty. We already know this because the experience of hitting puberty early or late is understood as critical to and generative of people's personalities. I didn't really hit puberty until later than some kids, though earlier than others, and I've no doubt if you moved that number around a few years either way you get a vastly different FiveHour. Two years earlier and maybe I make the high school baseball team and go through high school a varsity jock; two years later and maybe I'm not really ready to blossom in college and socially become more of an outcast, certainly never meeting my wife.

When they talk about puberty blockers being reversible, what they mean (at best) is that the kid will still go through some version of puberty. But it will never be the puberty that would have been, it's impossible that it would be, and I'm fairly certain that later than one's peers is for the most part worse outside of random unlikely chance. They'd be 13 when they are 16, and 16 when they are 20. I don't know that society is going to be set up for that.

Every other domesticated species gets fixed to make it easier to handle, why not humans?

I’m barely joking. Trans kids make excellent institutional pets. You’ll notice that working dogs are not castrated, and that pets usually are timed to prevent puberty. This is a natural part of hajnali Europeans separating themselves into different landraces.

The thought is horrifying but why wouldn’t domesticating ourselves have the same effects it has on everything else?

So from their perspective what bans can end up doing is that instead of the person getting to decide which irreversible thing they go through based off their own desires, it's the government choosing for them.

I'm not against this argument, at least not by temperament, but this is simply not the argument that is being made. Is it because it has implications that even the pro-trans side would be uncomfortable with (it would effectively imply abolishing all restrictions on medical procedures, and who can carry them out)? Is it because people with my temperament, who are mostly ok with giving people maximum liberty, and letting chips fall where they may, are in an absolute minority? Who knows? All I know is that the experts, actual credentialed practitioners of medicine, were swearing up and down for years that these changes are reversible, and medically necessary, not that people should be free to modify their bodies however they wish (and if any one wants to stick their neck out now, I will need to see their track record on COVID vaccines). I don't think it's steelmanning when no one wants sign their name under the argument.

Assuming one grants that a thing such as

trans adult

meaningfully exists.

You can not like them and still acknowledge the very obvious objective reality that there are adult humans who are living their life in modern society as the other gender through medical treatment and social changes.

Whether or not you accept the identity from a categorical perspective doesn't change that there are people doing that.

Edit: to be clear since there is confusion, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing on the merits of whether or not trans people actually fall into the category they wish, I'm saying that "trans adults" is meaningfully a group. It refers to a category of people that we all understand is meant when said. It means people like Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner or Ellen/Elliot Page. This is a group that does indeed meaningfully exist.

I don't think @Southkraut's point has anything to do with "like". I can like drag queens and not grant that drag queens exist in any sort of sense that places them in a similar place as the category of women.

The question is whether it makes any sense for society to place the interests of a few people who want to avoid the otherwise normal healthy developmental pathway with the rest of the human race as if they're equivalent.

If you're not a transhumanist and "trans" is not a mirror of "cis" and is instead just a compassionate term for people who identify with the opposite sex for whatever reason it simply doesn't mean anything to you that puberty is also irreversible.

What of it? Puberty is the normal pathway.

life in modern society as the other gender through medical treatment and social changes.

Why would I acknowledge this? It's absurd. It's not remotely possible. There can be a milllion people pretending or claiming to do this and yet that does not make it any more real.

Again you can disagree with them from a categorical perspective. But the fact still remains that people are doing it.

There are human males who currently live their life taking estrogen, wearing clothes typically associated with women, being referred to as she/her by their associates along with a corresponding female associated name and other things like that. Vice versa with human females doing testesterone and social changes.

That's just observable reality. Whether or not you think that includes a human male as a "woman" is a categorical dispute, that these people exist and are doing such things is just plain fact.

People may be "doing it" and that still doesn't give it any validity or cause to acknowledge it as anything other than utter insanity. It's like people claiming to be from Mars. Funny if it happens once, but we're long past that point. This isn't like religion, which in the West has politely withdrawn to areas so private it can no longer bother anyone, or like ideology, which can at least be put to the test and found wanting. This starts with a completely ludicrous premise and then tries to worm its way into society by denying the obvious and demanding the impossible. I can recognize epistemic gulfs between me and an ideological enemy, or me and a foreigner from parts unknown, but "trans" anything is just out of bounds of all reason. The people doing this aren't adults anymore; not unless you want that term to also become a meaningless category.

We can maybe call them harmless crazies, ignore them on libertarian grounds, live and let live, consider it beneath notice and leave it alone. But steelman it? What's there to steelman? Alright, so you are from Mars, nice thought experiment, can we please get back to reality? I can steelman a communist, a nazi, an islamist, an anachist, electric cars, accelerationism, anything based a difference of opinion on a complex topic that's difficult to make sense of. But gender and sex or whatever it's called in English is quite seriously one of the simplest topics in existence. The simple binary logic of it is in fact the bedrock of our existence. I know people who like dressing up as women or animals and getting fucked in the ass. Alright, whatever, I don't want to be anywhere near their bedroom but I can tolerate it. But when they tell me that they now "are" a woman or a dog, there can be only one response - No, you aren't, now please stop making a fool of yourself and don't ever again ask me or anyone else to seriously validate that kind of delusion.

I don't want to sound petty, but I am entirely serious on this point: Anyone claiming to be "trans" just plain isn't an adult for social purposes. You can maybe play along with that kind of make-believe, but at that point it really is all child's play. Again, funny if it happens once, but the joke has gotten old.

Edit: I did not address the issue of this all affecting kids. I thought I had forgotten to, but in retrospect it's probably better off that way. My thoughts on pushing "trans" on teenagers, who suffer from enough idiocy all on their own, are unlikely to encode into anything motte-compliant.

Again you can disagree with them from a categorical perspective. But the fact still remains that people are doing it.

You're making a normative claim that understanding the trans position on the "wrong" puberty strengthens the activist case.

You cannot now pull back to the empirical fact that trans people exist when someone challenges that.

No, I'm saying that these people exist in response to a comment that said

"Assuming one grants that a thing such as

trans adult

meaningfully exists"

But they do exist. Whether or not we accept their claimed identity as "valid" categorically has no bearing on whether or not a group called "trans adults" exists.

If a news article writes a story about groups in America and it says "Black adults, Asian adults, gay adults, trans adults" you're able to understand this as a group that exists.

But they do exist. Whether or not we accept their claimed identity as "valid" categorically has no bearing on whether or not a group called "trans adults" exists.

It has some bearing on whether they meaningfully exist. It's a normative claim: trans adults do not exist in the same way that what we've termed "cis" adults exist, so their judgments about puberty should not be treated the same.

If a news article writes a story about groups in America and it says "Black adults, Asian adults, gay adults, trans adults" you're able to understand this as a group that exists.

If a news article talked about the "AAPI" ethnicity, do you also feel like there's no context in which one can question whether that ethnicity is meaningful?

I certainly don't think of "AAPI" the same way I think of African-Americans.

Columbia Student Hunted by ICE Sues to Prevent Deportation

A 21-year old, third year Columbia student is wanted by ICE. She's a legal permanent resident who has lived in the United States since she was 7 years old. This is different from the case of Mahmoud Khalil in very notable regards:

  • Chung is herself Korean and not Arab like Mahmoud Khalil, there is no accusation that Chung herself "supports terrorism" which was the justification that was going around when Khalil was arrested.
  • According to NYT the Trump administration justification is:

The Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda of halting the spread of antisemitism...

The involvement of federal prosecutors was particularly notable. According to Ms. Chung’s lawsuit, agents apparently seeking her searched two residences on the Columbia campus with warrants that cited a criminal law known as the harboring statute, aimed at those who give shelter to noncitizens present in the United States illegally.

That signaled that the searches were related to a broader criminal investigation by federal prosecutors into Columbia University. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, has said that the school is under investigation “for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus.”

  • So the arrest/deportation order is based on the accusation of antisemitism and not support for terrorism. If you are wondering what Chung did that the US government would consider antisemitic- the DHS and United States has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of Antisemitism.
  • There is no accusation that Chung organized the protests or was a leader of the protests in any form, and did not speak to reporters, she was merely a participant.

As someone who has been very aware of the growing body of European hate speech laws making antisemitism illegal, and the regulatory and legal tactics which are being pursued to tacitly put Americans under the same rules, even I underestimated the extent to which antisemitism would be overtly criminalized in the United States. Although I warned of the US adopting the IHRA definition of anti-semitism years ago on TheMotte, even at the time I didn't think it would form the basis for arresting protestors.

Is being deported a punishment?

Those who feel yes:

  • want due-process to be followed
  • want everyone treated equally

Those who feel no:

Perhaps:

  • Deportation is not a punishment
  • Due process does not apply since it is not a punishment
  • The state has ultimate authority to deport anyone, including its own citizens
  • "Citizen" is the status of being a friend to the state. Why would the state deport its own citizen?
  • A Democratic (the party) administration could just deport Trump supporters, if not for ...
  • The state may choose to bind itself by giving citizens the right to not be deported

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about law, so this line of thought must be wrong. This post is just theoretical musing.

Great! American visa policy should be based on the principle that visa or permanent residency approvals are intended to further the interests of Americans and the United States. Removing people whose presence does not advance those goals should be normal and routine. Admittedly, I'm aware of the argument that this sort of thing just serves the interests of a particular ethnic group of Middle Eastern descent, rather than those of the United States more generally. Ultimately, I see the general principle as more important. Let's agree on this before fighting among ourselves over who exactly ought to profit the most from this way of doing things!

Keren Yarhi-Milo, the current dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli intelligence officer. Do you think she is “advancing American interests”?

I think you're missing the point which is that this violates her first amendment right to freedom of speech.

Something I can't identify sticks in my craw. I think it's the "interests of Americans and the United States" bit.

Like, what even is that? Who could possibly agree on what it is? I think by your definition we'd be deporting (non-citizen) supporters of Israel too.

Frankly, I thought coming to the US and saying whatever hot garbage you wanted to say was part of the allure. I am finding it impossible to see this issue as something that we can somehow carve out from the broader mission of liberty. I think people are just mad they can't punch college students in the face for being wankers.

Why is speech the problem anyway? Isn't the actual problem that there is criminality--vandalism, attacks, things that clearly counter school policies. Why not focus on that?

The problem isn't just speech, although that is part of it. It's also the fragmented culture and supercharged social media algorithms that allow bad-faith actors to exploit our free speech norms that undermine the society that protects them in the first place. It's a constant stress test for free speech. It's not really a healthy culture anymore. It's hyper-partisan factions or individuals, often times anti-Western ones, operating freely within a cultural bubble that was designed for good-faith debate and disagreement without totally trashing our society. We do not maintain that bubble anymore. We either need to get back to maintaining that bubble by enforcing a double standard against foreign, anti-Western dissenters, or we can slide toward some form of soft authoritarianism just to keep the wheels on. We are trying both it seems:

• The Dems and the left played their totalitarianism-light method by policing speech and suppressing right leaning ideas to achieve a more egalitarian one-size fits all environment, aka equity.

• The Republicans and the right are more keen on re-establishing and applying a double standard when it comes to Westerners and Western ideals in general. They're especially this way when it comes to Israel-Palestine.

I believe both societal trajectories are authoritarian, except one prioritizes the well being of its people while the other prioritizes an idea that ultimately suppresses its people. I prefer the double standard method. It's imperfect, but it establishes a national identity and what is and is not accepted on a cultural level. I do find it highly irritating though that this double standard is applied selectively for one ethnic group and one country that isn't this one.

We're reading a news article. One from the New York Times no less. Who's to say that there wasn't criminality at the root of this case?

The New York Times and SecureSignals, who are selecting what you see here, did not focus on that because it doesn't make a good story.

I was speaking broadly. The criminality is what bothers people, not the speech.

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

The ideal degree of lawfulness may be neither "not at all" nor "unconditionally".

Taking that to the logical conclusion, we shouldn't be able to deport immigrants for anything whatsoever, since that would be unequal treatment that is analogous to treating the Devil unequally.

The Devil must be punished not for being the Devil, but for the crimes he's committed that break the law.

Note that illegal immigrants have already broken the law and are usually the group that is the target of deportation, not legal immigrants.

The quote doesn't really address the question of if the degree of punishment can or should differ between categorically different individuals. One could argue that the law should treat everyone equally, but in reality punishment for law is different depending on the individual e.g. children vs adults. Similarly, a citizen and a permanent resident are not equivalent, and a citizen and an illegal immigrant even less so.

Would this argument also work to defend a hypothetical instance of a Democratic administration revoking the visa of pro-Trump (and hence, in particular, in favour of Trump's current Ukraine/Russia policy) students?

Sure, if you could find any. And if the Democrats got into a deporting-immigrants mood. And they had publicized their views enough. And...

I don't think this particular type of argument is very convincing given the number of years of abuse of due process, misuse of government agencies, NGOs, the cathedral, etc etc by the woke and the left.

The left has been doing more or less this kind of thing for years (just not this specific thing because they care less about deportation).

It's just asking for unilateral disarmament at this point and worse - at a time when the winner of the war is starting to change just a bit.

It's an asymmetric weapon; campus protests, and especially administration-tolerated or -supported campus protests, tend very much to the left.

Who said this weapon only works on campus protesters?

How far can it stretch before it stops being "this weapon", and shifts to being a different one? If the standard is "...her[/his] presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda.", then campus protesters (or rally organizers, or similar) are pretty much the only valid targets.

The right-wing base doesn't generally shout their opinions from a soapbox in the same way, and therefore isn't as vulnerable to this.

The right-wing base doesn't generally shout their opinions from a soapbox in the same way, and therefore isn't as vulnerable to this.

Other than, you know, that one time in DC. And that one time in Charlottesville. And if they own a pickup truck, the bumper stickers and flags. Or the T Shirts. And the rallies.

If the most right-wing examples you can think of literally contain more left-wingers than right- (such as Charlottesville, if you include counter-protesters), then I'm comfortable calling them less vulnerable.

Other than, you know, that one time in DC. And that one time in Charlottesville. And if they own a pickup truck, the bumper stickers and flags. Or the T Shirts. And the rallies.

  1. Those mostly weren't foreigners and thus would not be affected by this particular weapon.

  2. The asymmetric weapons the left had were already quite sufficient to deal with the DC and Charlottesville people.

I think that "hindering a policy agenda of an administration" could be applied much more broadly than that.

For example, a Harris administration could have decided to deport all Tesla or Twitter employees without US passport on the pretext of them harming their economic agenda. Or an administration could deport all foreign journalists which lean a way the regime does not like. Or you could kick out all foreign professors who do not fall in line with the administration. Or prevent international conferences on topics which you would rather not see discussed. Or deprive areas where the other party is in power of international tourism.

At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process. In the past, the US was able to attract the very best immigrants. If a highly qualified immigrant is willing to forgo political expression as a condition of their residency they might as well immigrate to China -- getting deported from there as a Westerner is likely less of an ordeal than getting deported from the US is.

For example, a Harris administration could have decided to deport all Tesla or Twitter employees without US passport on the pretext of them harming their economic agenda. Or an administration could deport all foreign journalists which lean a way the regime does not like. Or you could kick out all foreign professors who do not fall in line with the administration. Or prevent international conferences on topics which you would rather not see discussed. Or deprive areas where the other party is in power of international tourism.

Yes, with the caveat is that if the reason for kicking them out is activity that would be protected under the First Amendment, the Secretary of State would have to personally approve each deportation. This is statute law; Trump isn't making stuff up here. It appears this was involved for Khalil; it doesn't look like it for Chung since they're accusing her of criminal activity, the details of which presumably they'll have to give when this gets to court. Again, deporting aliens who commit crimes is legal by statute.

At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process.

Due process for being revoked also hinges on due process that does revoke, or deny, being honored and not undermined or circumvented willfully or publicly. Otherwise, there is no due process- there is only the binding commitments by those who are able to get away with not honoring commitments against those expected to be bound by them.

If you want a demos to be publicly on board with, say, refugee acceptance, then you need refugee criteria that are not transparently redefined and gamed to facilitate acceptance of people beyond the original concept of refugees. Similarly, if you want there to be public expectation of a judicial review of immigration cases, then there needs to be a basis for there to be an expectation of timely resolution and that migrants won't simply be let go and disappear into the interior. Absent a basis for public trust that the system would work properly, there is likely to be little political traction over concerns that the system won't work properly in other ways. It may be true, but it was already true.

This is not, to be clear, an endorsement. It is, however, an observation.

What we are seeing is a consequence of policy tools that can benefit a nation greatly being changed in ways that destroy public trust and legitimacy in said tools, often because said tools were used for partisan advantage or even abuse. The partisan utilization of said tools, often at the public advocacy of members of those very institutions due to ideological capture overriding professionalism, has led them to no longer being seen as great benefits for the nation as much as benefits to the partisans at the expense of their opponents. That things can benefit the partisans and the country alike has become outweighed by the desire to defy partisan impositions and the who-whom distinction of who has the power to get away with it.

This applies to other beneficial things as well. I think higher education is a good thing. But if you want cross-partisan support of public universities that employ talented foreign professors, then you need to maintain cross-partisan support. This is harder when public universities take open and consistently partisan stances on public issues and their own employment / admission processes. It becomes even harder when said partisans attempt to overtly and covertly circumvent unambiguous legal prohibitions to their partisan preferences. The demonstrated interest in such cases is not 'let's prioritize the public interest'- it is the preservation of partisan interest.

As partisan prioritization prevails, appeals to the broader nation grow weaker. 'Think of the good to the nation from tourism,' for example, will often fall flat if it comes a few years after tourist-centers were attempting to organize boycotts of other parts of the nation over ideological differences.

It might be 'beneficial' to have high public trust in public institutions, but trust does not follow the benefit of having trust. Trust follows from the actions. The more partisan the actions, the more partisan the trust, and thus subject to revocation / reversal with partisan changes.

Yes, this does mean things will get worse before they get better. This is an observation, not an endorsement. But it will not avoid getting worse / get better faster to simply respect an imposed a partisan preference system... particularly when the partisan coalition in question is not a social majority, but has/had conflated institutional capture with social victory.

At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process.

This is the hard core of the debate. It's the same with treaties: on the one hand, how do you make a binding commitment when your government potentially switches between factions every four years? On the other hand, how do you make democracy work if you permit governments to bind the hands of their successors?

How fair is it that Biden or Starmer or Boris Johnson can import 600k immigrants in a program that has a guaranteed citizenship at the end of it and then say, "Har har, it benefits the nation that we can make binding commitments about permanent residence, suck it."

Don't get me wrong, your point is legitimate, which is what makes it complicated. I will go so far to say that I think it is a genuine flaw in democracy as a system, which only survived as long as it did because power was firmly reserved to an elite who tended to agree, and who were careful about issues of genuine contention.

how do you make democracy work if you permit governments to bind the hands of their successors?

With legislative supermajorities. If you can get 51% agreement on something, good for you, but there's no reason to expect that to bind others once a slight shift of political winds leaves you at 49%. But if you can get 60% (or 67%?)? That might be something worth hanging on to for longer, if it's not so soundly refuted that support drops to 40% (or 33%).

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The justification doesn't require it only apply to campus protesters, though. One could easily imagine a Dem deporting Jordan Peterson and other non-citizens for "interfering with foreign policy"

Deporting Jordan Peterson would be a lot less harsh than what happened to him. But yes, Democrats could do something with it; it's an asymmetric weapon but not an utterly one-sided one.

I'm personally willing to bite the bullet and say that I think foreign nationals should generally avoid making themselves part of American politics.

Well, I mean, the implied problem is that only foreigners who have the wrong kind of politics as far as the administration in power is concerned will run into trouble - so as long as you admit international students at all, under this principle, they become a way to bolster the numbers of the pro-government camp on American campuses. Due to the nature of the "marketplace of ideas" at university, this is bound to have adverse effects on the political expression even of native students who happen to oppose the government line.

(On the other hand, if international students are actually all forced to be completely apolitical, this may not make people happy either - I remember hearing complaints about Chinese MA students on this basis from both tribes during my US grad school period)

Well, so don’t go to big protests when you’re not a citizen, problem solved. It’s not even a permanent thing, just until you are granted us citizenship. It’s not asking them to take sides, to the contrary, it’s asking them to not take sides. Which I think is reasonable because you’re not a citizen, can’t vote and have literally no stake in the outcome of the political process in the USA.

But they kinda do have a stake, no?

If the green-card holders and legal residents (who have never needed to fear deportation for speech acts--to the best of my knowledge) knew Trump was going to go after them, then they would have a very real stake in the outcome of the political process.

have literally no stake in the outcome of the political process in the USA.

I would argue that foreigners have very much a stake in the political process -- they are the ones getting deported, or bombed for that matter. Having no say is different from having no stake.

Also, I do not think that "don't go to big protests" makes a good Schelling fence. There is nothing fundamentally different between going to a protest and having re-tweeted a meme which the regime decides is Not Funny. So what you end up with is that foreigners in the US should behave like people in China. Only it is even worse because with the CCP you at least know beforehand what will likely piss them off, and you can only guess if the next administration will kick you out for having owned a cybertruck, or a bluesky account or being a member of the German AfD or whatever.

If you want naturalized citizens to take part in the political process, training them to keep their head down before they have their citizenship seems obviously counter-productive.

There is nothing fundamentally different between going to a protest and having re-tweeted a meme which the regime decides is Not Funny.

Which administration was it who jailed an American citizen (to the applause of the Serious People Who Worry About Such Things) for sending out a "text to vote" meme? A Man for All Seasons was quoted elsethread; the fact is, the laws have ALREADY been knocked down, and now the Devil has turned tail.

If you want naturalized citizens to take part in the political process, training them to keep their head down before they have their citizenship seems obviously counter-productive.

Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers. They were entirely open about this, see “The Emerging Democratic Majority” or Tony Blair’s staffer remarking that the purpose of their immigration policy was to render British conservatism “irrelevant and out of date”.

I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.

Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers.

At the object level, the person this thread is talking about is Asian-American, a demographic that is hardly solidly left.

I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.

If you are invited to the home of a kid (to be clear, in this metaphor, this is the university community) who has an ongoing conflict with their parents, and the kid brings up the topic, do you side with the kid, the parents, or do you try to awkwardly stay neutral saying it's not your place to meddle?

If you are invited to the home of an adult with roommates (with a jointly held lease) who has an ongoing conflict with their other roommates (say, the majority of them), [same question]?

(Up to you to decide which one of these is a closer model of the situation at hand, though the choice would also reveal something about your understanding of nations.)

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Does “making themselves part of American politics” mean “engaging in any visible form of political expression whatsoever”?

We can nitpick on what we mean by “visible”, but at the end of the day, that’s really not a high bar to meet. The only visible form of political expression I ever engaged in was anonymous posting on SSC/TheMotte. Most of my friends don’t do even that.

I'm not sure exactly where the line is, but I think it stops well short of organizing building occupations like Mahmoud did. I don't really care what their cause is, foreigners that organize the occupation of university buildings should be deported.

At this time, it's not clear what exactly this girl did; it seems likely to be much closer to any reasonable line than the Mahmoud example. The administration testing where the line is does concern me.

Great! American visa policy should be based on the principle that visa or permanent residency approvals are intended to further the interests of Americans and the United States.

I entirely agree with this, but these people aren't being deported on behalf of the interests of the United States, they are being deported on behalf of the interests of Israel and the Jewish lobby. If you remember, it was only a few years ago mass riots and protests were permitted - under the Trump administration - against White Amerikkka. But once it's Israel being criticized it's an entirely different story.

Did you read the rest of my comment? Let's agree on the absolute bare minimum first, then improve things from there.

I mean putting a disclaimer that you are going to ignore the obvious valid counter to your argument doesn't really work.

College campuses have been riddled with death to America and racism towards whites for ages. It's not until they start shouting death to Israel that the government takes action. It's clearly has nothing to do with furthering American interests and we should point this out.

They've been shouting "death to Israel" for a while too; elite colleges being anti-zionist and "anti-colonial" isn't some new development.

Moreover, the anti-white attitudes haven't recently coalesced into the types of encampments, campus takeovers, and outright militancy that the recent Gaza demonstrations have. Do you really think that the folks in the Trump administration would have refused to go after Columbia if it had "just" been anti-white or anti-Christian encampments and campus takeovers? They're pulling funding from schools for permitting single transgender athletes to compete outside their biological sex; I'm pretty sure they'd jump at the chance to take any plausible reason to strike at the universities.

Relatedly, Texas A&M had its chancellor replaced with a partisan republican, very plausibly over drag queensz

Humiliating leftists for anti-Jewish bigotry stings and leaves them dumbfounded. Whereas doing this for anti-white bigotry gets them all riled up to rally against "white supremacy".

In other words lets defend the interests of AIPAC and the ADL while allowing free speech for attacking white people. Funny how cancel culture was so problematic for republicans until it went against AIPAC interests.

... Yes? I said I agree with you on the general principle we should revoke visas or permanent residency, IMO even revoke citizenship, of people who subvert the United States on behalf of foreign interests. So now we can move on to that question, right, after acknowledging we agree on the principle?

How exactly does protesting the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Gaza threaten the United States?

Why should Americans care about the cycle of violence in the Middle East? Their lives are of no relevance to those who reject banal Christian platitudes about the brotherhood of man or the universal value of human life, which I know you don’t share. Dispense with the fake tears for the Arabs; if they were being killed by someone other than the Jews you wouldn’t care at all for their suffering, even performatively.

Americans should care about it because they've been taught that national socialists declaring themselves the master race and committing genocide is bad, actually, and both their personal and political will ought to be bent/pulled forcibly toward the end of preventing such an occurrence. Seems to me that per the national mythos Americans ought to be ferociously outraged about people who believe themselves to be "god's chosen" ethnically cleansing their hated neighbors for Lebensraum.

The person I’m replying to thinks that mythos is perhaps the greatest fraud and/or mistake of the 20th century.

All of this rhetorical tap-dancing of course boiling down to the idea that SS believes that Zionists ought to be held to account for their vicious criticism of post-Weimar German behavior and their simultaneous total embrace of it while you believe they should never answer to anyone for anything.

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They're of no relevance until an Arab enraged at unconditional American support for their enemies flies a plane into a building, kills over a thousand Americans and provokes a multi-decade forever war

The Anglo-American presence in and involvement with the house of Saud predates Israel.

The US oil and global trade interests are going to keep us involved in the region and they’re going to do so in a way that angers the most terrorist-y Muslims. That can’t actually be stopped.

That was because of US presence in Saudi Arabia.

I wanted Khalil deported on the I Don't Really Care Margaret heuristic but my immediate impression with regard to Chung does not match that. I strongly suspect that there are going to be some specifics that make this much less clear once they're available, but it certainly isn't obvious at the moment.

Look, I'm a supporter of free speech as much as anybody but I'm not going to run into the buzzsaw that is the Jewish lobby. People who have been calling my fellow travellers anti-semitic nazis for years - decades, even - suddenly need my help? I'm not a fan of the Jewish lobby in the current Trump administration but neither am I a fan of the pro-Palestinians. Perhaps conservatives would be more concerned about freedom of thought in the academia if there were any left in the university institutions. I gain nothing by standing on principle and lose nothing by standing out of the way. I don't need to take a side in this conflict: there are more than enough domestic windwills to shake a lance at.

I'd link to the XCKD comic about free speech and its consequences, but everyone here probably has seen it already.

Neutrality isn’t good simply because the needle is so fa to the left on campus that I think using antisemitism to clean house, even if overzealous, cannot help but make things better. Colleges should be places of learning and research, not places where kids become leftist anarchists. Unless those anarchic elements are removed, you really cannot get to free thought or speech. Kids are afraid of blowback from expressing even mildly conservative opinions on campus because of those mobs and in class because the professors are leftists and they need the degree for their future careers. Removing the leftists from college campuses is a good thing for free speech.

Why not just defund the schools, shut down students' access to loans and grants, tax the shit out of endowments and work to obliterate the university scene altogether? Why is speech the problem and not the schools?

In what sense is switching the polarity on which side gets systematically silenced "a good thing for free speech"? I'm very sympathetic to the view that the status quo is very far from free speech, and this is bad, but if your proposed solution is "censor another set of political beliefs" then you aren't restoring free speech. And maybe it's worth doing anyway, if, say, you decide free speech is a lost cause anyway, and that restoring conservative discourse is important in itself. But don't pretend you're restoring free speech by doing so. "Removing [half the political compass] from college campuses is a good thing for free speech" is a hilariously self-contradictory statement on the face of it.

Surely the US doesn't need any more wars in the Middle East?

The trouble is that the Jewish lobby in the US is a gigantic colossus and the Palestinian lobby is a shrieking buzzard. So we see strong US support for Israel and all kinds of negative consequences for the US. It's not like the Israelis are ever going to send troops to help the US in any war, they've never done so before.

False Israeli intelligence about WMDs helped to motivate the Iraq War, the Jewish lobby was eager for that particular disaster. They clearly aren't advancing US interests.

At this moment, the US military surely has more important tasks than bombing Yemen, bombing Yemen has been tried and found wanting. It didn't work when Biden and the Saudis tried it and probably won't work when Trump does it. It's a waste of ordnance and air defences. World sea lanes need to be secured but it's clearly quite difficult for the US to do so militarily. Diplomacy should be tried.

A better solution would be to cut off the Israelis from the military aid teat and make a deal with Yemen. This principle of jettisoning Israel isn't limited to Yemen, it would reduce many problems. It would reduce tension with Iran, it would make diplomacy with the Arab states and Turkey easier, it'd improve relations with Indonesia and Pakistan too. This doesn't mean favouring Palestine or anything, jettisoning them would be fine too. China's cordial Middle East relations should be the target: trade with the sheikhs and get along with them, build some infrastructure, get some oil.

But to achieve this, the Jewish lobby would need to be defanged in the US. Getting to neutrality requires moving in a direction.

Bombing Yemen is unlikely to be a great long term strategy but the U.S. government which makes peace with the Houthis is one which does not care about oil. This seems unlikely.

The Houthi slogan is

"Allah is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam."

I do not expect any US government to be able to make peace with them any time soon, oil or no oil.

Regarding Yemen, I believe it all started with the Saudis. Anyway, American interests there go deeper than Israel.

Surely the US doesn't need any more wars in the Middle East?

Israel was against the Iraq war FWIW. So there. They understood what was going to happen and it came to pass.

This is laughable, the WMD intelligence was laundered from Israel direct to the White House through a special office composed of ultra-Zionists. You can even watch Netanyahu give the hard sell directly to the American Congress on the Iraq War "taking out Saddam" in 2002! This is the exact same man influencing Trump by the way, who Trump considers to be America's greatest ally.

"If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran will say... the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone." Netanyahu to the Congress in 2002.

This is the man who OUR AMERICAN CONGRESS gave 58 standing ovations in his Congressional visit last year. From Grok:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received the most standing ovations in a single speech in U.S. Congressional history during his address to a joint session of Congress on July 24, 2024. According to reports, he was given 55 standing ovations throughout his one-hour speech, surpassing all previous records for a single address. This figure is notably higher than other historically significant speeches, such as those by Winston Churchill or previous addresses by Netanyahu himself.

this is laughable, the WMD intelligence was laundered from Israel direct to the White House through a special office composed of ultra-Zionists.

It was a full office of neocons, and the intel wasn't from Israelis. It was various bullshit from dodgy Arab sources being interviewed by Americans, interpreted in a maximally positive way to make the case. In addition, Americans trusted that Chalabi idiot.

Netanyahu give the hard sell directly to the American Congress on the Iraq War "taking out Saddam" in 2002! This is

He was not the prime minister of Israel at the time. Israeli officials were against it in private, although the GOI did not give a statement against it.

As The Guardian reported:

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads

Douglas Feith, on whose authority the Israelis were cleared into the Pentagon, is a Zionist Jew who co-authored the Clean Break Memo as part of an advisory group directly to Netanyahu himself. The memo calls for removing Saddam as an important objective:

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.

So you have Doug Feith working directly with the Likud party to provide plans for securing Israeli objectives in the Middle East. Then you get Doug Feith on the OSP, who laundered false Israeli intelligence from a clandestine office of the Israeli Prime Minister directly to the White House. Then you have Netanyahu himself giving a hard sell to the American Congress.

Israel was only 'against' the Iraq War insofar that they wanted the US to invade Iran first. The Bush admin said they'd do Iraq and Afghanistan quickly before Iran, who would similarly be a cake walk. Well, we know how that turned out. Israel still wanted the US to invade the whole Middle East (on their behalf) in the long run anyway, they just disagreed about the order.

No.

They're not utter retards, so I highly doubt they wanted US to invade Iran either because that would go very badly.

Iran is a much larger country than Iraq, it has rugged terrain, ties with Russia and China and a somewhat more technologically capable population that is fiercely nationalistic.

US might have been able to topple mullahs with a color revolution, might get lucky and Iranians do it themeselves but an inevitably brutal invasion would have resulted in people rallying to the flag and something that'd make the worst of Iraq look like a cakewalk.

Look, I'm a supporter of free speech as much as anybody but I'm not going to run into the buzzsaw that is the Jewish lobby. People who have been calling my fellow travellers anti-semitic nazis for years - decades, even - suddenly need my help?

It's not about helping it's about building bridges on important issues. A lot of left-wing commentators on X are sounding more Right Wing on the question of the Jewish lobby every single day.

The actions that Columbia have announced will have an immediate effect on combating anti-Semitism, holding those responsible for the harassment of Jewish students accountable, and reorienting Columbia to its academic mission. Columbia has committed to: Reviewing admissions procedures to ensure an unbiased admissions process and specifically studying the decline in admissions of Jewish students.

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/columbia-comply-anti-semitism-task-force-preconditions-met.html

Everything has and always will be pure tribalism. One must simply long for his tribe and dedicate his life to hardening it.

Hillel reports that 22.8% of Columbia undergraduates are Jewish, by the way.

There will be no investigations regarding the decline of Gentile Whites at Harvard, who only make up 20% of the Harvard class of 2028 despite making up over 60% of the country. And despite being the people that actually founded the institution and the country in its entirety.

How did the people who founded these institutions get kicked out of them within a single generation? Hmmm, there will be no investigations there. Let's investigate why Columbia is only 22.8% Jewish, should be higher...

How did the people who founded these institutions get kicked out of them within a single generation?

They didn't get kicked out, they got outcompeted. The average European IQ is 100, the average Ashkenazi IQ is 114. In an institution that selects for IQ people, you shouldn't expect representation to match the census, any more than you should expect a room full of physicists to be 50% female.

Blacks are 14.5% of the American population, about equal to their 14% representation in the Harvard class of 2028. Likewise Latinos constitute 16% of the Harvard class compared to about 20% representation in the population.

Too bad Whites only have about a third of their population representation, giving them the worst representation among any other demographic. I guess blacks and Latinos are just outcompeting whites right?

Well no, you're well aware that they benefit from race discrimination in their favour.

You're also well aware that Jews are classified along with all other European ethnic groups as white. All that's happening is that the places being allocated to white students are being allocated to the most intelligent ones. This doesn't bother most people because most people don't hate Jews.

So you concede the level of admissions of Latinos is due to race discrimination, as well as blacks, whites, and Asians. But they totally got it right with Jews, their representation is driven by merit unlike every single other group. Except we are now faced with a plain example of the sort of group organization, networking, and advocacy Jews have always done in promoting their own admission into these institutions.

Columbia's investigation it will be carrying out is about the admission of Jews and not the admission of Whites. If that investigation leads to an increase in the admission of Jews and a decline in the admission of White non-Jews would you also say that is just non-Jewish whites being outcompeted? Or would it be an example of exactly what drives the level of admission in every other ethnic group?

If you have evidence that universities are unfairly prioritising Jews, then present it. Insinuation isn't enough.

Meanwhile, we have actual concrete evidence and explicit admission by universities that they were favouring Africans and Latinos while penalising Asians (Euros are a wash, from what I recall). Asians were appearing less than their GPAs would suggest they should, while blacks and hispanics were appearing more than their GPAs suggested they should. Jews being particularly prevelant at some universities isn't shocking, because they are literally the most intelligent ethnic group on the planet.

The pressure on Columbia is not insinuation, it is proof of unfairly prioritizing Jews. Not that even I'm clamoring for "fairness", which does not exist. It's a racial spoils system. It's incredibly naive to think it's about IQ and GPA.

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If Jews' representation is inflated the same way Blacks and Latinos' allegedly is, then how come Jews allegedly rule the world?

I can't tell if pro-Palestinianism already had its moment of immoderate greatness or if philosemitism is having its own.

From a purely cynical perspective, it seems like it would be easier to tamp down on certain attitudes about Jews if there's a general woke regime that reacts horrifically to any perceived attack against any victim of history, the more the merrier.

Having an administration or people hellbent on dismantling that entire system (and whose main talent is exacerbating negative polarization)make exceptions for one group seems suboptimal in comparison. This is how normal people get ideas.

I mean, pro-palestinians largely are the woke. Like literally the same people in many cases(no, most of them are not Arabs). You can't go after the woke without going after pro-palestinians.

Going after the woke =/= going after them for being anti-Israel .

I see the appeal from a Trump/anti-woke perspective, all the enemies lined up behind an unpopular position they probably can beat universities into punishing relatively easily. I'm wondering where this goes afterwards.

I see the appeal from a Trump/anti-woke perspective, all the enemies lined up behind an unpopular position they we probably can beat universities into punishing relatively easily. I'm wondering where this goes afterwards.

The question in my mind is where you situate anti-semitism discourse relative to wokeness.

One framing of this is that the Trump admin and rightists are using anti-semitism to Judo-throw the woke, using the Woke's own narratives of protecting besieged minorities to destroy the Woke, and ultimately in the process discrediting the idea of protecting minority fee-fees and removing it from the discourse. Like Treize Khushrenada, the anti-woke will use the Woke's weapons against them, and in the process the weapons will all be destroyed and we'll have peace.

Alternatively, the anti-Woke are reifying the Woke narrative by utilizing it. We're all embedded in the narrative of protecting the feelings of minority students from the political positions of their fellow students. We're valorizing the idea that students can and should be expelled, arrested, their degrees revoked, for saying something "offensive" to a minority group. Rather than the Republicans engaging in clever Judo to reverse-flip the Woke into a bad position, rather the Woke have trapped the Republicans into fighting in their paradigm: Republicans have no engaged the Woke in their own field, where the Woke have the advantage.

We'll have to see what happens.

Third option: it's a glaring exception to an otherwise anti-woke paradigm driven by short term political considerations rather than ideology. For now a lot of Republicans don't really care about the contradiction but as time passes the status quo will be untenable and they'll have to chose between returning to the woke paradigm to defend the concept of anti-semitism or abandon it entirely

I don't think "Republicans" or "Democrats" are the right unit of analysis. The Anti-Woke are just a portion of Republicans, and the philosemitic and Woke are just portions of Democrats. The Anti-Woke see an opportunity to use the weapons developed by the Woke against them by mobilizing the normie Republicans and the Philosemitic Democrats against the Woke. There's a risk that when the Anti-Woke seek to abandon the tactic, that they'll have accustomed the normies to the idea that college kids can suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable.

There's a risk that when the Anti-Woke seek to abandon the tactic, that they'll have accustomed the normies to the idea that college kids can suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable.

Things that have already happened are not risks. College kids already routinely suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable, and in fact such consequences have been deeply imbedded in longstanding policy. Given this reality, having these rules at least apply more fairly than they currently do is an obvious positive.

Right, the Free Palestine and BLM Venn diagram will have an almost complete overlap.

Frankly, I would be fine with deporting aliens that protest for far right causes as well. I think guests should simply not be shit-stirrers, regardless of my agreement or lack thereof with their positions.

Rather the opposite. The ADL position is open borders, wokeness and diversity in the west, Israeli nationalism for Israel. The same billionaires who happily funded woke univerities and were pushing DEI in their companies want Likud running their own country.

The ADL is backing Netanyahu now? Israel does have a left, you know.

ADL is changing course now, no?

Venn diagrams don't use areas

They do:

A Venn diagram, also called a set diagram or logic diagram, shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets. These diagrams depict elements as points in the plane, and sets as regions inside closed curves. A Venn diagram consists of multiple overlapping closed curves, usually circles, each representing a set. The points inside a curve labelled S represent elements of the set S, while points outside the boundary represent elements not in the set S. This lends itself to intuitive visualizations; for example, the set of all elements that are members of both sets S and T, denoted S ∩ T and read "the intersection of S and T", is represented visually by the area of overlap of the regions S and T.[1]

In Venn diagrams, the curves are overlapped in every possible way, showing all possible relations between the sets. They are thus a special case of Euler diagrams, which do not necessarily show all relations. Venn diagrams were conceived around 1880 by John Venn. They are used to teach elementary set theory, as well as illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics, and computer science.

A Venn diagram in which the area of each shape is proportional to the number of elements it contains is called an area-proportional (or scaled) Venn diagram.

If you're going to be pedantic, at least be right! The complaint that I should have said "an area-proportional Venn diagram would have an almost complete overlap" is just about maximally pointless.

A Venn diagram in which the area of each shape is proportional to the number of elements it contains is called an area-proportional (or scaled) Venn diagram.

I don't think it is pedantic to point out that just because a niche generalization shares the name with a common concept, the common concept itself is fully general. Note the area-proportional (or scaled) part, if Venn diagrams wouldn't encode just boolean relarions, this addition would be superfluous.

Please explain.

Venn diagram will have an almost complete overlap

The colloquial use of Venn diagrams overlapping more or less are nonsensical. Venn Diagrams encode set conjunction and disjunction/intersection, not how much of a set is the same as another.

'Many things are happening, so many things are happening at once that sometimes I have no idea what's going on.'

This is likely an apocryphal quote misattributed to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in March 2025 via the memetic slop factory. It's one of the factory's better creations and it captures my feeling this afternoon.

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, publishes the above account regarding his participation in a special kind of Signal group chat 15 days ago. In this chat strikes against the Houthis were planned, out in the open, with Jeffrey privy to it all. According to the account he gives in the article, Jeffrey was invited by national security advisor Michael Waltz. According to Jeffrey, he was confused, skeptical, and suspicious of this chat.

Seriously, you should read the whole thing.

It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me...

I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

This group chat led to another group chat-- "Houthi PC small group". If true, I am sure Jeffrey's concerns about entrapment and imprisonment grew as he was, allegedly, joined by the Secretary of Defense, Vice President Vance, Tulsi Gabbard. In total, "18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials" as they discussed, coordinated, and monitored strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen-- and presumably some other things.

We [Atlantic staffers] discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds.

I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

Nonetheless, as Jeffrey fretted over his strange-getting-stranger position in a Signal chat group among, allegedly, the highest officials in US public office, these individuals were discussing what to do about the Houthi problem. Jeffrey identifies JD Vance's chat avatar as a cautious, moderating voice on the 14th of March:

The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, in addition to relaying the above and other interactions that went on in the chat he was in, also posted screenshots as receipts-- just in case you thought he was crazy.

In Jeffrey Goldberg's words: "I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive."

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed.

After the chat, bombs get dropped, Jeffrey confirms the timeline matches what he saw planned, and the chat goes wild.

Some things to talk about as mentioned in the article:

  1. Journalisms. Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff. On the other hand, if true, this is what journalists are for. If Jeffrey had simply left the chat and reported it as such there's no story. I'm not sure how much I buy the "I'm just a lowly journalist who couldn't believe his eyes if this is real or not" shtick, but also can't really fault the guy for staying in the chat. After all, he was invited.

  2. Security and legal concerns. If the Trump admin is conducting official business on an open-source platform that is supposed to scrub its history this seems probably illegal. It is possible these messages are documented some other way, but it's possible they are not. Just as it is possible Signal is a totally secure, encrypted messaging program, but it's possible it is not.

  3. Goldberg highlights the dialogue that focuses on concerns of US-Euro relations. Wish I could read the full discussions. It seems fine to give Europe a carrot of engaging Houthis -- helping to secure their trade in the Suez -- in addition to the stick as they move to rearm. I don't think the American public has much love for Houthi rebels, though escalating involvement is a concern. I think this supports the idea that this administration is closely wedded to the news cycle rather than strategy or vision. Consideration of what this does for Europe should be second to deterring disruption to global trade-- which should have been priority from the beginning. We are missing lots of context.

  4. What if Elon Musk was gas lighting and trolling journalists with the power and resources of the United States Government behind him?

The level of ineptitude in OPSEC failure for this article to be real is staggering. It blows my mind. Which, as Jeffrey also suspected, makes one wonder if it wasn't intentional. Maybe Jeffrey was invited to one chat to be leveraged for something else, then accidentally invited to the Houthi PC chat. He might have been supposed to be in all those chats to leak it all. Comparisons to Crooked Hillary and her e-mail server abound.

To end, VP Vance reportedly typing “a prayer for victory” after a course of action was decided upon. Followed by two of our nation's best adding "prayer emoji" reactions. All of it is a bit on the nose for Clown World Simulation theory. Exciting times!

Is this really a big deal? I mean, by a competent administration it would certainly be, but this is well within the bounds of buffoonishness we've come to expect from Trump and those he employs. I'd say the long-term damage Trump has done to US foreign policy is a far greater issue, although I suppose R's can squint and say "that is helping us, actually, it's 4D-chess" for all that, while accidentally inviting reporters to your classified meeting is more plainly indefensible.

Still, this is really blowing up in ways I didn't expect. Even Hillary has been risen from the dead to opine on it.

but this is well within the bounds of buffoonishness we've come to expect from Trump and those he employs

It's honestly hard to tell because the goalposts move in lightning speed whenever a new form of buffoonishness is unleashed.

Seems like the real screw-up here is that USG does not actually have an encrypted secure internal chat that they can use for cross department collaboration. With USG's intelligence budget, that is absolutely inexcusable. Goldberg in the article says that they should have used a SCIF which they all have installed at their home. That is utterly impractical, trying to coordinate two dozen officials to all be home or at the office in their SCIF at the same time is just not going to be possible. So if the option is 1) communicate over something highly secure but imperfect and with a lousy UX that makes it hard to quickly see who everyone is and that mixes internal and external contacts or 2) simply don't communicate at all, it's not actually obvious to me that 1) is worse. Ultimately, even as bad as this mistake was ... nothing actually bad happened as a result of accidentally adding Goldberg and so it's not clear to me that it would have been better if these officials had simply never had the conservation at all.

The old quote comes to mind.

"Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?" - Axel Oxenstierna

Parts of the article made me laugh out loud. The emojis!

Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff.

Hard disagree. Both morally and (I think) legally responsibility to keep classified information classified rests with the people who have security classifications. Private citizens should not commit illegal acts to obtain classified info (unless there is a moral imperative to let the public know, as with Snowden), so if he had hacked Waltz phone, then he would be in the wrong. Also, Washington leaks classified info to the press all the time, and journalists generally report on it.

Him not tweeting about it before the bombs fell is already going above and beyond what would be reasonable -- normally you negotiate confidentiality boundaries before you give a journalist info. Of course, there is no way to authenticate the chats as real, it could also just be one insider playing with sock puppets.

It was leaked on purpose to show European 'powers' that the administration is not just publicly making noise about big needed changes but genuinely dissatisfied

One fact to support this theory is who is doing the leaking. Jeffrey Goldberg is an editor who has been at The Atlantic a long time. He did a bid in the IDF as a young pup and written articles such as "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe" in response to terror attacks. It is unlikely Goldberg would want to help the Houthis or hammer the admin on Houthi beating. Which he doesn't. He is seasoned and at least partly aligned on the topic of discussion. Both of these make him more likely to understand (or suspect) what his role is here despite the confusion and it appears he is carrying out his duties. This would be big 5D chess if unnecessary and reckless.

Why not just leak stuff the good ol' fashioned way? This form of leak probably maximizes the amount eyeballs, but are those necessary? Perhaps foreign parties have reason to doubt how tapped into the admin the media apparatus is as the admin seems keen on beating on it rather than filling it with juice. Might be that Trump doesn't like his cabinet using the Fake News traditional messaging apparatus, so this is technically a way to work around that. Wading into pure conjecture any which way. I'm not sure if there's a more sensational way to leak stuff if that is what occurred here.

This leak makes Hegseth look like a fool, and his crying about it afterwards and suggesting it wasn't real even after the White House confirmed it made him look like a clown. I don't think he (or any other politician in his position) would be willing to do that just to make a more convincing leak.

This suggests that Hegseth didn't know and did not consent to it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't set-up by someone else. I'd guess Waltz is most likely since he sent the invite. But yeah, there's a large number of less embarrassing ways to leak information to journalists to write a story. I'm not at all convinced on planned or intended. It's a remote possibility. Bad practice and incompetence is leading the race for me.

But if it is understood as being leaked on purpose then it becomes just more public noise.

If it wasn't gross incompetence, and I personally will not rule that out, then this is the motive I'd expect. Even if you take this as sincere incompetence, then the similar sincerity of Euroskepticism in the chat is as much / more concerning than the use of the chat.

Why? The Euroskepticism was perfectly appropriate, unlike the use of Signal. The Euros probably already know that's how the Trump administration (and honestly, likely Democratic administrations as well) think about them. Releasing it makes the mutual knowledge into common knowledge (that is, it's saying the quiet part out loud), but Trump doesn't seem to care about that in general even if it wasn't on purpose here.

This is such a big screwup I have to wonder if it isn't intentional. I mean Yemeni goat herders aren't going to be listening in to group chats and they can't exactly stop the bombs if they are.

It was likely intentional. Remember that Trump is a showman.

Also Waltz wasn't disciplined nor is he likely to be.

Yeah, I think it was intended to reach the euro literati.

I was skeptical but hearing that nothing is going to happen to Waltz makes it very likely. Also, when Hegseth was quizzed about it he gave a real song & dance routine, obviously anticipating it, to reinforce the message.

They can, however, move out themselves and their stuff out of the blast radius, which actually does make a difference.

Meh. Was the strike intended to kill people or to make a point?

We've been bombing the Houthis to Make a Point; it would seem charitable to assume that these strikes were intended to inflict material losses, not simply remind them that we still have airplanes.

The US/UAE/Israel droped a tactical nuke on a Yemen city a few years back ( yes complete with camera CCD scintillation ). So at this point anything's possible.

On line I find stories which claim this. Some claim there is CCD scintillation... but none shows it and there's at least one which says it's there and then that it isn't. Whether the people claiming this could distinguish radiation effects from plain overload from too much light I doubt also.

[citation needed]

Particularly with the UAE having a nuke- I have no doubt that the UAE, Saudi, etc could buy a paki nuke for money, but the likelihood they would do so to use against some goat herders is low. Israel, likewise, had no reason to care about the Houthis until recently. And while the USA sold Saudi weapons, we weren’t involved in the war.

I think the proposition that the US and allies secretly used a tactical nuke in combat (on a mostly-civilian target, in the 21st century, with no outcry from the UN, Russia, China, watchdog NGOs, or anyone else) falls firmly in the realm of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” So, let’s see it. Because on its face this claim is ludicrously implausible, to put it mildly.

Could you please Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.?

The atmospheric detonation of nuclear weapons is impossible to hide from any industrial nation which chooses to investigate or any number of NGOs. Any theory which claims a nuke was dropped on the Houti would also need to explain why this did not lead to Iran and Russia making claims to that effect, and why fricking Greenpeace as well as dozens of other Western NGOs decided to sweep it under the rug. By the time you have added all the required epicycles, you might as well claim that the nuclear strike was coordinated by lizardmen who were combating space aliens.

Also, scintillation is a process in which ionizing radiation excites (roughly visible wave-length) photons in a material. What happens in CCD sensors is different, you get pixel noise as gamma rays, neutrons or charged particles produce electron-hole-pairs in the pixels which lead to a depletion of the charge of the pixel, just as light does. The camera acts as a semiconductor detector.

Context please.

What?!

Seconded. This sounds like bullshit.

This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?

China or Russia isn't going to tell us "Oh yeah we have eyes on X and Y private conversations because they're incompetent and don't actually check things." They're gonna sit there and eat their free lunch and just like seeing one cockroach means you need to be ready for more hiding around, one basic security mistake is a strong reason to worry about others that haven't been revealed.

And it apparently being done through improper channels is even worse because it incentivizes people who fuck up to keep silent about it cause they just don't have the fuck up to contend with but their own improper choice they have to answer for as well. It's also the complete opposite of any smart Cover Your Ass strategy because now any failure is on you because you went around the proper and official path.

This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?

I figure this only happened because Goldberg was already in Waltz's contacts and he selected the wrong name by mistake. Maybe had a brainfart and mixed him up with somebody else who did belong in the chat - maybe just clicked the wrong option in a slide. Who knows. Either way, not that big of a security concern unless there are foreign spies on Waltz's speed-dial.

It doesn't necessarily matter how it happened so much as that it happened and speaks to a wider failing in OPSEC procedures. They're sending sensitive information across the internet without even verifying who the recipients are.

A career government employee who misclicked in a way which resulted in classified information being unintentionally shared with a journalist would lose their job and security clearance. I expect MAGA would be calling for criminal charges, although they wouldn't stick because the Espionage Act has a mens rea requirement.

"Lol I misclicked but no harm no foul" doesn't cut it.

A career bureaucrat has one primary job: follow bureaucratic process, so yeah, of course they would be fired for that. Top-level officials by nature must have a lot more flexibility in their jobs and they can't be sitting at a SCIF all day long and following processes is not their primary job requirement or part of their life-long training. (This is among the reasons why I didn't think Hillary should have been charged for a crime). And this goes five-fold for officials who were specifically selected by the American people for being outsiders.

I'm not saying it's all good or that the guy shouldn't get heat over it, just that in practical terms this isn't necessarily a massive security hole that Chinese spies could walk into by the dozens.

I strongly disagree. If this guy was stupid enough to let in not just a journalist, but one part of an organization that is an ideological enemy of the administration, who's to say he can't be spearphished by an adversary with a passing knowledge of the English language?

It is an enormous fuckup.

Radical transparency. We're in a new golden age!

No discussion yet of this nugget, apparently from Vance?

I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.

Vance and Trump usually seem pretty united publically. Is there an interpretation I'm missing here that doesn't show a rift between them? This doesn't just say, "hey there will also be these other consequences." This says the president is inconsistent and is not aware of his own inconsistency. And further implies Vance can't just bring it up with Trump for clarity either. And that this group he's messaging (or the group he thinks he's messaging) already knows that.

Combine this with Vance steering Trump during the televised Zelenskyy debacle. I think Trump is really just governing based on raw emotional energy—these Houthis are causing us trouble, so let's fuck 'em over. And then it falls on Vance, Hegseth, etc to figure out how to actually do that. The details don't concern the big man.

Vance is smart and EHC, and it's likely that he understands Trump is a total buffoon who needs to be shepherded to reasonable goals. His reaction to Trump back in 2016 was his genuine opinion. Eventually he decided that sucking up to Trump was better to gain power, but he still sees Trump as an idiot.

I think Trump is really just governing based on raw emotional energy

Correct. Always has been. There is no plan, only vibes. This is what the American people demanded.

Vance said that he was out doing an economic event in Michigan in the group chat. So it seems more like he just didn't have the opportunity to bring it up with Trump.

Something I found more interesting is speculation as to why Waltz had Goldberg already added in signal. Seems possible he might've already been leaking to the press and accidently added the journo instead of opening a chat with him. He's probably the least "team Trump" member of Trump's administration other than Rubio.

I enjoyed all the direct quotes! Very fun.

Is there an interpretation I'm missing here that doesn't show a rift between them? This says the president is inconsistent and is not aware of his own inconsistency

Could be. I don't think it is impossible that Trump, at some level, recognizes he benefits from some brakes, and he may find Vance suitable for this role. I don't think these quotes suggest some massive rift rather than topic disagreement or the reality of their different roles. In the sausage factory is one thing, but the misalignment going public is another matter. The media is already trying to drive a wedge. Now Trump doesn't like being seen as undermined, so Vance may now have to grovel a bit to not be seen as embarrassing the big man.

Vance advocating for taking some more time to build up a narrative-- Trump wants it done if it can be done. If Vance is considering a 2028 run, then ideally he maximizes all the positive Trump association while minimizing the negative Trump association in order to grow his support. This would make some disagreement desirable. If Vance was worried about narrative and optics, as he is quoted, then I think he was wrong. US bombs dropping on Houthis was overdue. Putting Suez back into full business is also overdue, but who knows if that's achievable with bomb droppings.

JD's phrasing is exactly how an underling should disagree with his boss before a final decision is made. I've used similar phrasing before, even to my boss's face and it is entirely appropriately to do so in private (sausage factory) communications.

It isn't disrespectful, it provides an alternative point of view ('have you considered these ramifications..?') and he was very clear that he would support the consensus decision. This is exactly the type of thinking you want in committees like this.

Consider the alternative; pure Yes-manning. Would a leader want a sycophant in his camp? Ok, Trump might, but not in a position like VP. If Vance was like that behind the scenes, trump would not respect him and not delegate power to his VP in the way that Vance has been assigned this administration.

I agree. I suppose it doesn't matter - the NPCs are going to read a headline instead of the conversation, and I doubt any of them have functional relationships with their bosses. But this seems like a total nothingburger. No way Vance actually shits on the president with 17 of his other closest advisors.

As a purely practical matter, if Trump makes dire threats to the Houthis and bombs them without achieving results then that seems clearly worse than doing nothing

The bombing is a result. If you engage in piracy you eat bombs. This should be the expected result of engaging in piracy. It's the least you can do. This might be insufficient to dissuade these particular Islamic martyrs from engaging in piracy. They may require some other demonstration or diplomacy, but they should receive no exemption from the first expected result. It may also be a valuable demonstration for other non-martyrs that might consider piracy.

What if getting bombed is the goal? So far the only thing bombing has achieved is making the Houthis look indomitable and costing the American taxpayer several billion dollars.

Yes, they want to impose costs on the rest of the world which includes the costs of bombing them. That's fine. There is still risk of escalation, but if we want to bomb them in perpetuity and they want to impose costs on the rest of the world in perpetuity so be it. If this is the reality then we live in world that's a little less functional. So be it. It won't be in perpetuity I hope!

I would not describe Houthis as indomitable, although they do have a very high tolerance for eating bombs. The alternatives are to refuse to engage -- which does cost less money with no boats in Red Sea -- or formally accept a new status quo. Or, if you take them at their word, make Israel do something? The world could also reward them with some sort of official designation and hope that buys them off, but I agree with the global order here. You don't get rewarded with shooting and looting civilian ships. Not without some pain or, in this case, the lives of their martyrs.

They are the big dog in Yemen. Woof! They dislike Jews, Sauds, UAE, the US, and they like Iran. Great. These are unpleasant people that would happily lob my head off. Bombing theocratic Islamic fundamentalists, or most any other dedicated piratical states is a reasonable thing to do in response to their piracy. That's a sensible world.

Putting aside the colossal screw up and perhaps criminal negligence, the actual content of the conversation was surprisingly exactly what I might have expected. That itself is rather alarming because I shouldn't be in a position to form accurate expectations about how these conversations should go, right? I appreciate the transparency of the Trump administration, but this is a bit much. Heads should roll. Although we're unlikely to get an honest explanation for why Signal was been used for these communications, I would really like one. Worst case scenario is that they don't trust more official channels.

It makes sense in the modern age that a signal type app would be very useful for this type of coordination. What doesn't make sense is that some dept like the NSA hasn't developed one already.

Also, there are some conversations that should still be reserved for SCIF's. Hegseth should not have sent any operational details for instance.

Still a huge screw up, but rather than fight the tide the government should create its own app for executive comms like this.

This is exactly my thought. Building an encrypted message chat with superior data retention and querying capabilities for real-time comms like this is... not optional?

Why are they spawning off special chats for this one operation, for instance? That alone is a security/ops hole. My org has an entire policy to ensure our real-time messaging stays meticulously organized to ensure leaders and doers aren't overwhelmed with threads, context is maintained, the whole nine yards. Yet the executive branch has to hack with something like this?

The hypocrisy of Hillary's email whining is a bit strong. But it begs the question of how exactly government officials are supposed to communicate in real time, given the inadequacy of email as a format.

I don't think the Trump admin would trust using a secure message system developed by the NSA.

I wonder if that's exactly why they're using a standard-issue commercial app.

This really drives home why the Republican Party has been making inroads with blue-collar workers. These guys aren't acting. They talk about bombing the Middle East like it's the group-chat for subcontractors installing a new HVAC unit.

And they got the unit installed right on time too!

“Hegseth HEAT and Plumbing: We Deliver Worldwide”

Confirmed. It doesn’t surprise me. A honeypot this elaborate, and with no obvious enforcement mechanism, would have made even less sense.

Sharing classified information is not generally a crime. Not unless you’ve signed the corresponding SF-312 and accepted the obligation to protect it. What are the odds that anyone in this chat had done so?

In any other administration, this would be a perfectly respectable scandal. Perhaps a little higher up than usual. It’s normally staffers who mishandle communications. Today, though, I don’t expect anything to come of it. Let me make a quick check of which step we’re on in the narcissist’s prayer. Yup, we’re still on “…and if I did, it wasn’t that bad.”

20% that anyone from the group chat faces a criminal charge.

Sharing classified information is not generally a crime. Not unless you’ve signed the corresponding SF-312 and accepted the obligation to protect it. What are the odds that anyone in this chat had done so?

Everyone in the chat except Vance and Goldberg should have done - everyone in the Executive Branch, no matter how senior, is subject to the executive orders regarding classified information except the President (who doesn't have to obey his own orders) and the VP (who is kinda sorta part of Congress as honorary President of the Senate).

Although in this case that doesn't matter for criminal liability - if the disclosure of military secrets to an unauthorised person was wilful, it is criminalised by the Espionage Act, which predates the modern system of classification and doesn't rely on it. If it was negligent, then it is an employee discipline matter and not a criminal one in any case.

It seems like this was obviously “leaked” on purpose. Nothing they’re saying here is in any way secretive and it sounds like regime taking points, not planning.

"I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing."

Were the journalist to report things not described in the article as he learned of them -- times, dates, places, and targets before the action was carried out -- do you think it would have been no big deal? I would consider it a very big deal, a major breach of OPSEC, and probably treasonous. These do not seem like the kinds of things you tell journalists prior to a military strike.

It would be unwise to tell journalists these details even with an explicit understanding not to report on these details until after the plan is carried out. Which doesn't seem to have occurred here. It would be extra reckless to only have a tacit understanding with a journalist as to what or when he can report on the things he learned of. Which, by his account, doesn't appear to have occurred either. This was a journalist accidentally learning things he should not have known and, wisely, not reporting them. These are the kinds of things that, if the enemy learns of them, can get men killed.

The journalist says he has these, but what are they, specifically?

“We could probably hit them with a $big_cock_american_missile as earlier as tomorrow morning given that the USS American president is off the coast of goatherdistan” is specific timeframes, weapons packages, etc. and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.

Call me skeptical.

It's ridiculous to expect a journalist to publish specific military plans that would probably get him jailed for publishing. The fact that he didn't publish them isn't evidence that he didn't see them.

Even if there wasn't anything classified on its own (despite the reporting certainly suggesting there is), a lot of information can still be sensitive if you gather it in one place because it can allow foreign agents to build up and intuit the classified info from context. Known as classification by compilation Likewise insight into how they make plans and act on them can be useful tools for our enemies.

The more little bits of information you can gather and the more context you can put them in the more dangerous a piece of information becomes, even if on its own it might be public knowledge.

And you'd be surprised how many seemingly unimportant details get tracked by journalists and foreign agents, pizza deliveries going up during big news (people were staying later than normal or celebrating or whatever else was a trend noticed back in the 90s. All because it's just one tiny little hint helping to build up context.

and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.

What do you mean? None of this was publicly available until today. It's only available now, because a journalist reported it. In my opinion, a journalist should have never been in a position to report this story or any details they did not report on. I do not find solace that the journalist either chose not to, or was unable to, report precise mission details to the public. If I was an adversarial journalist writing a story about this administration in these circumstances, then I would also not print mission details.

A contribution to the successful mission was the journalist, who should not have been there, didn't go to Twitter and scream from the rooftops that JDAMs were falling on Target 3 in Aden from 15,000 feet at 12:00PM local time. This was good for the journalist, because the journalist would be in jail most likely. I would not expect detailed flight plans or powerpoint mission briefings were shared by the Secretary of Defense in a big group chat, but it seems very reasonable to me that targets, times, weapons were shared with these individuals, and it seems reasonable to me that these are things you do not want to go public. Since journalists have a job to make things go public officials should be careful what they share with them. It does not seem like they were particularly careful in this instance.

For myself, "we probably could not have been hurt that bad from our colossal fuck up" is about as comforting as "well nothing bad happened so it's fine." Procedures are created to minimize colossal fuck ups and bad happenings. Next in line is "well the enemy is small and weak and can't harm us anyway." I think this is a stupid, dangerous mindset to humor when doing something as serious as warfare, and there are many historical examples of this mindset contributing to defeat.

But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

That's how they started out. But the article later says people (including SECDEF) are posting clearly sensitive info, including the exact time of the strike. Which is a known hazard of trying to discuss unclassified parts of classified things in an unclassified environment, which is why in general that's discouraged (though political appointees in particular probably do it all the time).

The most likely explanation is that they just fucked up. There is no possible benefit to deliberately leaking the info to Goldberg that would make up for the embarrassment of him going public with how he obtained the information.

To end, VP Vance reportedly typing “a prayer for victory” after a course of action was decided upon.

To me this is kind of funny given the enormous discrepancy in power between the USA and the Houthis. It's kind of like if a grown man prayed for victory just before getting into a fist-fight with an infant.

The grown man failed to win in the last fist fight. We already had the whole 'Houthis fucked around and now they're gonna find out' arc a year ago where everyone thought the combined might of NATO and the US fleet would quickly crush them. But Red Sea shipping remains 50% below what it was and we got all these articles about how the ships were firing million dollar interceptors at drones costing 100th of the price.

Have you considered that a prayer for victory Is Just What You Do?

To be fair to Vance, the historical track record of Operation Bomb Dirt is quite poor. Seeking divine intervention in the hopes that the next round of desultory air strikes will be more productive than in the past is not so unreasonable.

To me this is kind of funny given the enormous discrepancy in power between the USA and the Houthis. It's kind of like if a grown man prayed for victory just before getting into a fist-fight with an infant.

The Houthis need to be lucky only once for the US to have a massive egg on their face. People are still talking about the downed F-117 in Serbia. Also realistically I would bet that if a carrier is sunk quite a lot of the people on board would drown. There is air of invulnerability over US Capital ships so some of them being lax on evacuation procedures training is not unthinkable.

Signal is probably at least as secure as everything else the government has in its toolbox. Moxie is the real deal.

Imagine Mark Zuckerberg now. Facebook implemented Signal-type end to end encryption, with PFS and OTR and everything, and also Zuckerberg very much bends the knee and kisses Trump's ring, and still the people in his administration organize their illicit, leaky chats on the open source nerd niche messenger instead of the mainstream one run by his all-American megacorp they probably had preinstalled to talk with their buddies.

Also, technically, I think that the NSA is at least as competent as Moxie. The main problem with them is not that they have a massive conflict of interest, because their day job is breaking encryption to spy on Americans and everyone else. The probability that the security community would roll out backdoored encryption to spy on an administration might not be larger, but it certainly seems much higher than the probability of Signal being a NSA operation.

I'd bet it's not as secure as an in-person meeting in a SCIF.

IDK I don't actually think a very large portion of the US security apparatus actually cares about or follows the ostensible security protocols, and SCIFs are only as good as said protocols.

I've certainly heard this opined about high-level political types. In my experience the contractors and low level folks take it pretty seriously, and I know there was a lot of annoyance from those groups in particular about Hillary's email server, for example. There is (perhaps rightfully) a pretty strong view of a two-tier system there.

ETA: I've also heard rumblings that different departments within the government handle things like this very differently too.

We take it seriously because we’d get absolutely reamed for fucking it up. Even if it were something mild/unintentional enough to avoid criminal charges, if I triggered some sort of audit, I wouldn’t expect to keep my job.

That’s the other thing about the various “improper storage” scandals. Responsibility was diluted. Sure, the government could find out who dumped files in Joe’s garage, but they elected not to spend the money. Not when there was no actual leak involved. This case doesn’t have that excuse.

I've heard extremely hair-raising anecdotes set both inside high-level Pentagon circles and big military contractor circles where high-level political types probably weren't a problem (although political correctness might be). Think things along the lines of knowingly improper access controls on HUMINT or phone calls to foreign countries placed in secure areas.

It's very schizophrenic. A coworker of mine told me a story about a base he worked on. To finish a step in acquiring your clearance to work there, you had to log into a secure system. You could not log into the secure system because you hadn't completed all the steps in acquiring your clearance. Therefore, someone who was already cleared had to log into the system for you, so that you could finish all the steps to get your own clearance. This itself was a violation of the rules for both the person who logged you in, and yourself.

Nobody cared. Everyone knew the system was bullshit.

But it's hard to imagine having to break the rules to get inside the circle of trust a clearance represents doesn't input a certain fundamental disrespect for said circle of trust.

Yeah that sounds about right, and I 100% think it nudges (in the mind of the practitioners) OPSEC out of the category of "important to prevent people from dying" into "more of this dumb bureaucratic paperwork stuff."

Which is really bad if it's actually important.

One part of the CIA triad (which sounds like some kind of military secret, but I’m told it’s just a cool-sounding cybersecurity acronym) is Availability — users should have access to everything they need to do their jobs without undue hurdles. If the government is violating that principle, it invites a cavalier attitude towards security and damages it in the process.

This Signal chat situation sounds like a particularly pernicious case of Shadow IT, as much as I dislike the term. But I’m very much curious how government officials are supposed to communicate with each other, particularly with how interconnected the world is now.

Yes - I appreciate the invocation of cybersecurity principles (which I know little about) here, but yeah I think that's right, and a real problem.

With how many neocons are still infesting the admin and how leaky they tend to be it actually might. Not if you invite random journalists though.

You are absolutely correct. But if you want to gather

Secretary of Defense, Vice President Vance, Tulsi Gabbard. In total, "18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials" in a room,

you will have a single meeting for the whole term of the president.

True, however, at least one person was in this group that really didn't need to be. There were likely others.

Evidently, in the hands of the White House it is not very secure.

Signal security was not compromised in any way. And moronic endpoints are a flaw in any messaging system.

Using non secure messaging platforms is reckless, adding people to the chat they shouldn't have access to is incompetence. There is difference.

I know what you meant. I'll take your word for it that that Signal's communications are as encrypted and secure as anywhere else. I don't see why not.

It is not properly proofed against the dumb people that use it. Which, as all the security folks have told me, is a salient failure point of all systems. A single Nigerian phishing scam cannot compromise the White House network because POTUS clicked the wrong e-mail. We hope, at least.

A single Nigerian phishing scam cannot compromise the White House network because POTUS clicked the wrong e-mail. We hope, at least.

They prevented one Hilary from becoming POTUS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails

Any system with good enough opsec doesn't have the needed throughput to be useful.

Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff.

Not really his problem if he didn't have a clearance. The SECDEF shouldn't be sending out classified stuff over Signal; they shouldn't be doing government business over Signal at all, for that matter; the comparisons to Hillary are reasonable here. It appears the person who set up the group (Michael Waltz) intended it to be for unclassified discussion, but trying to discuss the same thing at one level of detail via an easy-to-use unclassified system and at another via a pain-in-the-butt classified system never works.

So what should they use? Slack? Google Messenger? Facebook messenger? AIM? Does the USG have its own private, secured messaging app? TBH, Signal actually seems like the best option if you need to have a group discussion with people all over the world and with conflicting schedules.

I mean...I'm open to alternatives, but what are they?

I’m confident they have one. I’d guess Teams.

Still no bueno for classified information, but if what Gabbard says is true, this chat was perfectly innocent on that front. :)

It is indeed Teams, which is another reason there will never be any prosecution.

Prosecutor: And is it true that you used Signal, a non-government communications method, to set up a group chat at the very highest levels:

Waltz: Yes

Defense Attorney : Mr. Waltz, what is the official government communications method for the Department of Defense

Waltz: Microsoft Teams Chat

Defense Attorney: Your honor, defense moves to dismiss with prejudice.

Prosecutor: Err, um, err... no objections

Are you kidding? The official, encrypted, auto-record keeping email system the government has used for the last 40 years.

The one they undoubtedly can't access from their private iPhones, because allowing that would be an obvious, glaring security flaw.

So they should have used email to decide to bomb Yemen and that would have been acceptable? Too slow, for starters.

I'm not really sure what the actual offense is here. I think it's accidentally adding an unrecognized phone number to a chat group, others think it's using the chat group in the first place.

Are you kidding? The official, encrypted, auto-record keeping email system the government has used for the last 40 years.

Are you seriously proposing that people use e-mail for instant messaging? What is this, 1993?

The one they undoubtedly can't access from their private iPhones, because allowing that would be an obvious, glaring security flaw.

“Security” is just a jobs programme for people who couldn’t get into the real police. They did it this way and what happened? Did the heavens fall down? No. Quod erat demonstrandum.

“Security” is just a jobs programme for people who couldn’t get into the real police. They did it this way and what happened? Did the heavens fall down? No. Quod erat demonstrandum.

So the argument we're going with is "OPSEC is for suckers who can't even make it into... the police?" Uninspired trolling.

Are you seriously proposing that people use e-mail for instant messaging? What is this, 1993?

Yes. Emails are messages, and they are instant. Easy to lock down access, easy to encrypt with code 100% under your control. Decentralized, robust, fail-safe. Add rudimentary mailing lists if you need your "groups" organized, done. Millions of people have conducted complex discussions like that for decades.

I am sure there are internal secure messaging apps both on the classified side and the unclassified side. They might be terrible however.

It appears the person who set up the group (Michael Waltz) intended it to be for unclassified discussion

So Waltz set it up for interfacing for unclassified stuff like with journalists and forgot about it. So-and-so made a group chat, so-and-so invited so-and-so, and next thing ya know Jeffrey Goldberg is the only journalist in a Signal chat with the nation's leadership as they plan a military action?

This appears like a level of brazen, incompetent comfort that suggests to me they're probably using Signal for all sorts of coordination. Of which the only reasonable thing I can land* on is: other forms of communication are suspected compromised and they have an immediate need. But it's much easier for me to believe a sloppy disregard for procedure is commonplace.

  • Or Signal has been okay'd for this use and we don't know?

This appears like a level of brazen, incompetent comfort that suggests to me they're probably using Signal for all sorts of coordination.

Now that the US's rivals know this, how possible is it for them to compromise Signal's servers for some Man in the Middle breach? Is it true that even the Signal company themselves can't read user comms?

Signal is e2e encrypted so this isn't an issue.

While agree there must be some level of incompetence or just a screw-up, I really don't see which of the various chat apps would be better than Signal. AFAIK, it's the most secure almost to the point of being a problem for things like FOIA, as once the app is deleted all the message history is gone.

Anyway, I"m not sure I agree with the 'bad ops-sec' here and tend toward 'if you message the wrong person, you can't claw it back.'

almost to the point of being a problem for things like FOIA

What a happy coincidence.

Anyway, I"m not sure I agree with the 'bad ops-sec' here

If you are unsure of this despite the fact this article exists, then what do you consider an example of bad OPSEC?

chat apps would be better than Signal... as once the app is deleted all the message history is gone.

If there is no inhouse Signal equivalent, then it's about 20 years past due. I bet there is and I bet it sucks and that's why they use Signal.

Wiping message history without recording keeping is a problem, because all text messages about official acts from federal agencies must be preserved. I guess politicians across the spectrum have decided this is not actually an important accountability feature in democracy nor are historical records important enough to bother. Fair enough.

Sorry, 'ops-sec' is not the correct term. the 'Ops-sec' was the failure. I think I meant something similar but specifically with the technology...Tech-sec or something.

Signal is the correct app to use if you're going to do these things--at least from what's on tap.

I think people are shocked that they didn't all assemble int he 'war room' to make the weighty decision to drop some bombs. The halcyon days of Dr. Strangelove are over, my friends.

I wonder if we'll even remember this happened in 3.75 years. Things are so whackadoodle, I can't tell if this is actually a scandal or not. Seems...not?

If there's an inhouse Signal equivalent would it be cleared for use on your garden-variety cell phone?

(Anyway yes I bet it sucks either way).

Wiping message history without recording keeping is a problem, because all text messages about official acts from federal agencies must be preserved. I guess politicians across the spectrum have decided this is not actually an important accountability feature in democracy nor are historical records important enough to bother. Fair enough.

I have a bit of a rant about this but TLDR;

  1. I think this is a very common problem and suspect "using Signal with messages set to delete" is fairly typical even at lower ranks, and
  2. Modern records are made at a MUCH faster rate than dated records-keeping laws anticipated. Arguably either all records-keeping laws or associated technology needs to be completely revamped to account for modern electronic messaging capability.

The boring answer is that "the official channels" require badging through a few locked doors to log into a desktop computer in a windowless room to check email, which isn't very responsive if you're trying to move very quickly across several tiers of organization.

That is a poor excuse, but it seems the most likely one to me. Either that or concern about opsec was minimal given the adversary's technical prowess, but that also strikes me as a poor excuse.


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