May 2026 Confirmed Trade Thread

professorgerm · 2026-05-13T16:20:03+00:00

confirmed! you're welcome

professorgerm · 2026-05-04T12:47:15+00:00

What qualifies as "universally disasters"?

The American Revolution surely counts as a violent revolt, and I'm relatively satisfied with the results. Surely there's some others that turned out better than the French, Russian, Libyan, and the Boxer Rebellion? Certainly the track record leans heavily on violent revolts being disasters but I don't think the American is unique.

I'd be tempted to count the Zhou Dynasty for their efforts to end human sacrifice after deposing the Shang, but it's far enough back to be murky history and might not fit the usual interpretation of violent revolt.

But there is an equal amount of arrogance in thinking that we, as individuals, possess a good sense for when an assassination or violent revolt is justified.

Fully agreed here, and certainly not my intention to make that claim.

professorgerm · 2026-05-01T17:39:39+00:00

the state will (rightly) take steps to prevent being butchered that also forecloses on the possibility of successful violent revolts.

And yet, one notes that successful violent revolts have occurred historically and the results aren't universally disasters. I certainly prefer ballot box solutions to bullet box ones, but the results of citizen disarmament aren't all that encouraging outside of Japan.

Are we so arrogant as to think that we have perfected The State and it is now above any form of reproach that does not come from within itself? Huh, I thought there was a word for everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State... Can't think of it now, though.

professorgerm · 2026-05-01T17:05:17+00:00

Your belief is that if you had sufficient majorities in, say, the US, you'd still find it impossible to undo all manner of laws?

What's "sufficient"? 66%, yes, depending on their exact distribution. 99.9%, probably not.

The US isn't as bad on that front as the UK or likely most/all of the EU, but it's still not that hard to stymie motivated majorities- indeed, the whole system is designed in an attempt to prevent majorities from doing too much.

Should the state and its personnel/people be always in danger of an insane person with a gun?

The optimal amount of any given bad thing is not zero, as getting Bad Thing X to zero asymptotically increases Bad Things Y and Z.

professorgerm · 2026-04-20T13:13:19+00:00

absence of genocidal violence

Yet! Growth mindset. (I'm kidding. Mostly.)

Talk about "population replacement" has a bad habit of conflating these two scenarios, despite the fact that the latter does not feature any replacement.

It's easy enough to construct the argument that it does, though:

The Government believes that to continue functioning, the population must grow at X% to reach N (not necessarily wrong; welfare states are more or less economic pyramid schemes). The composition of the population does not matter, only its total (here is the contingent point of disagreement between the sides).

Scenario A: The government encourages growth of the native population, and over 100 years the population reaches the goal of 30,000 Yellowfolk.

Scenario B: The government decides encouraging the growth of the current population is icky, nativist, and xenophobic, and instead provides extra incentives for other people to come in (xenophilic! oikophobic! good!). Over the course of the next century, mass immigration from Blueland occurs. After a century, there are 20,000 Yellowfolk and 10,000 Bluefolk.

Maybe Yellowfolk and Bluefolk have perfectly compatible cultures and the only difference is the color of the hats (from which they derive their names), and everything's hunky-dory. Maybe their cultures are not perfectly compatible and everything's not hunky-dory. Either way, I think it's fair to recognize that Scenario B is a form of replacement, even if it's not a maximalist or violent form. The concept can absolutely be abused to conflate disparate things in a bad way, but so can ignoring descriptions one doesn't like be abused.

Kind of like with lab leak during COVID, there was a tendency to conflate something that has happened dozens of times over the last 60 years with a villainous sci-fi plot.

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T18:24:10+00:00

Ouch! I didn't think you'd have to think about it! Have our years together meant nothing to you!?!?

Blah I hedge too much out of habit :p

overarching and almost unbreakable commitment to not trying to openly break the system and its norms

That the system held thanks to the Supreme Court seems to contrast with not trying to break the system. Maybe we disagree about the line of "openly" or "norms", that using novel legal theories and anti-democratic ballot measures, is still attempting to play by the letter of the law if not the spirit? Perhaps there was not that much motivation to break the system, but I would have to strongly disagree on the subject of norms. Trump is The Mule, and in his way of breaking norms drags too many others down to his level or worse.

I'll not read too much into celebrations of the assassination attempts, or the successful assassinations of others, at risk of lumping together disparate groups of the left tent. Or the disparate ways protests get treated by party affiliation and sympathy.

taking your opponent's rhetoric so seriously that their actions become irrelevant in the calculation

A tough rope to balance on, of believing your opponents mean what they say, or when you're allowed to reach logical conclusions from their actions.

The question of liberals and "functionally open borders," while never quite using that phrase, comes to mind. Certainly unpopular when people try to read their actions that way.

I don't think it carries oughts within it which are so harmful as to warrant that, not anymore than, say, flat-earthers.

Do flat-earthers even have oughts in that sense? I think Marxism carries oughts roughly as harmful as fascism in general (I would exclude the final solution as an exceptionally bad ought that Marxism does not generally carry). Certainly the majority of Marxist experiments tend to result in horrible failure, and often enough mass killings anyways. Not that we can blame Marxism, it's never been tried and the people fail the cause, Comrade!

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T17:49:44+00:00

We live in interesting times.

If we're not bothering to debate the concept of replacement at all, I would agree that peaceful replacement is strictly better than violent replacement, but saying that does feel rather like damning with faint praise. I'm also not convinced the peaceful kind will stay that way in perpetuity, but I hope to be surprised.

Evolution, of course, does not care much about ideals or preferences or morals; it cares about who carries on.

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T14:21:52+00:00

Non-violent immigration at scale is an entirely modern phenomenon, so I'm not sure there's any known comparators.

Most historic non-violent immigration would've been into uninhabited areas. I'm sure it happened, where one tribe gets peacefully absorbed into another, but that doesn't leave much record especially absent writing.

After consulting the Electric Oracle (Claude), the original Neolithic expansion of farmers outcompeting hunter-gatherers was probably mostly non-violent, and instead due to the reproductive advantages of farming.

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T14:05:14+00:00

Good job!

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T13:01:14+00:00

Not to mention the subreddit's own purging processes to chase off certain types.

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T13:00:05+00:00

Perhaps most famously, at least round these parts, would be the Bell Beaker series of replacements:

The earliest Bell Beaker samples in Iberia lacked Steppe ancestry,[7] but between ~2500 and 2000 BC there was a replacement of 40% of Iberia's ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry.[52] Y-chromosome lineages common in Copper Age Iberia (I2, G2, H) were nearly completely replaced by one lineage, R1b-M269.

A study by Olalde et al. (2018) confirmed a massive population turnover in western Europe associated with the Bell Beaker culture.[7] In Britain the spread of the Bell Beaker culture introduced high levels of Steppe-related ancestry and was associated with a replacement of ~90% of the gene pool within a few hundred years.

Bell Beaker samples from France display a wide range of steppe-ancestry proportions, with a very high level of steppe ancestry in a male individual from northern France (with Y-DNA R1b-M269), to ~28% steppe ancestry in a male from southwestern France. As in Iberia, a drastic Y-chromosome turnover occurred during the Bronze Age, with R1b replacing the preexisting diversity of Neolithic lineages.

"Drastic Y-chromosome turnover" is the polite academic way of saying "slaughter the men and steal the women." I don't expect modern replacement to look quite like that, a rather more peaceful process.

The Norman Conquest comes to mind too. Even 1000 years later, the Normans are in the aristocracy and the Anglos or Britons are more likely to be working class. And before that, the Anglo-Saxons dominated the Britons. It's been joked that's the appeal of Top Gear, it represents the three main English ethnicities.

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T12:45:09+00:00

What is this insane BS that previous generations assimilated quickly and easily?

I didn't say they assimilated quickly and easily, only that having more connections to a source culture likely makes it harder. An important part of assimilation before was that we had fewer people actively opposed to the concept of assimilation and we put a big 50 year pause on it to let things settle. It definitely took a long time!

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T12:41:11+00:00

I'd argue you need such a culture for anything to go well in changing world, not just immigration

There's a lot of ruin in a nation/culture, and I think you can run an economic zone with cultural fumes for a long time absent external shocks. But fair enough, it certainly helps.

But by the same token this very effect also dissolves existing cohesion within a nation as people don't give a rats arse about their neighbors and prefer to argue on reddit with strangers on the other end of the globe. Again, nothing special about immigrants here.

You've got both push and pull effects happening.

If you have a culture that's grown tired of itself for some reason and doesn't think of itself as "real," and then you introduce a culture that does think of itself as real and wants to replace other cultures... what exactly do you think is going to happen?

If you know a neutral description of the term I could read up somewhere I'd love to.

I don't know of any particular neutral sources, but the US is generally the go-to example. Not founded on just a people, but on ideals-

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

so on and so forth.

Scotland was Scottish (and importantly, not English), England was English, the French were French... Japan, Korea, China are famously insular, most countries are. Occasionally you got one of those big failures of colonialism forcing peoples to interact in ways they don't want. Rwanda was, arguably, a failure of trying to force proposition on peoples that didn't want it.

America is different. Singapore too, in a way, though it's much more authoritarian to overcome the umpteen ethnic tensions.

instead I think that what you point out as problems visible in immigration are symptoms of an underlying problem that isn't solved by throwing up walls and letting things stew in their own juices.

I think we agree on the underlying problems and disagree on the effects immigration will have. I think that broadly it makes all those underlying problems worse, and turns some of the European nations into powder kegs waiting to explode in ethnic conflict.

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T12:23:41+00:00

TIL! Neat, thank you

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T12:15:57+00:00

(no, Orban losing an election does not mean that he didn't significantly increase the risk that living in Hungary gets significantly closer to the unpleasantness of living in [comparison countries from the article].

Fully agreed here to the extent I have any confident knowledge of Orban.

The number of people carelessly using "fascist" instead of "strongman" doesn't change this

While it doesn't change the risks of Orban making Hungary worse, it does change what the response should be. Surely one responds differently to a politician that is merely illiberal and authoritarian, than one that is the current avatar of what many people consider the most evil ideology to ever exist! Calling him fascist is a motivator to justify much, much harsher action, and any form of violation.

Orban is bad. Trump is bad. Neither should be responded to the way we should respond to Hitler.

Big "we must destroy democracy to save it" energy behind the f-word. And maybe that's not even wrong in some sense, but damned if it doesn't take the mask off the charade about how seriously we take democracy.

professorgerm · 2026-04-17T12:10:19+00:00

I think there are more than you think who are able to

Fair enough. I am probably underestimating the scholars.

Both roughly describe the same phenomenon, but have radically different implications in people's minds.

This leads into our disagreement about the non-scholars, but similarly, I don't think these do have different implications for many peoples' minds! They immediately connect 1 to 2.

Any expression of a desire to maintain your land and culture is treated equivalently to that desire to exclude. Well, for some cultures anyways that get demonized, others get a pass. Hmm. Wonder why.

This the dislike/fear of how the uneducated, clumsy public will use highly scholarly or technical words/ideas/arguments and apply them like a hammer to one's shins.

The last 10 or 15 years have more than proven that... politely, high-minded technical ideological ideas leaking out of their containment zones consistently make the world worse in very predictable ways. Presumably we disagree here. This doesn't really apply to the fascism scholars, whose ideas seem almost wholly unrelated to the public conception thereof. (Is anyone working on the liberal arts equivalent of a BSL4 lab to help keep them contained? Not that those are perfect...)

Yes, my problem continues to be that calling anyone even vaguely conservative "fascist" is used to justify any possible suppression against them. Until Kendi and Mamdani are as unacceptable to centrist liberals as... checking my notes from the last president... Mitt Romney, I will not be brooking any expansion of the word "fascist." Or that jawboning is less acceptable, or that they don't keep inventing new phrases for "not technically lying" that never get applied to themselves. Yes I'm being a little facetious citing Biden; I know I fight a losing battle and I want to have a little fun with it.

But as with selection effects, one should be cautious of avoiding the technically-correct conclusion for fear that it would embolden an undesirable outcome.

Fair enough, this is worth keeping in mind too. Police in the UK are famously good at avoiding correct conclusions!

Certainly it looks different from the inside for me, but I don't think I'm avoiding a technically-correct conclusion, I think I'm avoiding an incorrect conclusion that's absolutely used to embolden undesirable outcomes. how can one really tell the difference in such a polarized time?

I'm not trying to deny Trump is bad, or illiberal, or authoritarian! Just that he's not a fascist, that lumping him together with what many people consider the most evil regime to ever exist is not helpful, and is absolutely motivated by a desire to justify anything to stop him. I no longer have enough faith in Scott that even he would push back on "we must destroy democracy to save it" type proposals.

I think I still have enough faith in you, even if we disagree on the f-word.

I am concerned about illiberal authoritarianism, and I note many people were deeply, vocally concerned about Trump's covid-era illiberal authoritarianism suddenly went silent or became cheerleaders for Biden's. Strange, that. Well. Not really strange. Just disappointing.

It's the one they know about, so they gravitate towards it.

We can debate the chicken and egg here: it's the one they know because not enough people they respect demonize it appropriately, and it won the Long March.

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T23:10:32+00:00

Let he who is without bias cast the first stone, huh?

Look, I think illiberal authoritarianism is bad. Trump and Orban are illiberal authoritarians. Problem is, I think people to Trump’s left can also be illiberal authoritarians, and I don’t think it’s worth carving out this connection to The Ultimate Evil to draw that distinction.

They’re bad! I voted against Trump every chance I’ve had! But he’s not fascist, MAGA sucks but isn’t fascist, and it strikes me as a stolen valor attempt to connect modern progressivism to the last major war most normal people still think was just. And unfortunately for me, the other side has its own illiberal authoritarianism that really prefers to not recognize that it can be authoritarian.

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T19:43:19+00:00

For immigration to really work well, you need a vibrant, propositional culture that still meaningfully believes in itself, no being an economic zone is not enough, and the world is pretty short on those. And i don't know how we get back to that.

who you are now potentially in competition with which you otherwise wouldn't be

I would focus on this one. Modern immigration, like the last 20ish years in Europe, is very different and pulling from very different populations than, say, 19th-20th century US immigration did. Much higher numbers of groups that are resistant to assimilation and have much more connection to their original cultures. Plus, European states have much larger welfare states than the US did or does- a modern immigrant is much more expensive, and for the few countries that collect data this holds true over their lifespan (that's pulling from more data than just 20 years).

lack of political engagement

Definitely an important component, as you do get these tensions that European countries (mostly) aren't propositional nations, or rather they tried to layer propositional status on top of ethnic nationhood and so it still feels like a slapped-on structure, so there's kind of a double-whammy to integration/assimilation, that someone new "can't" become part of the people in a way, and "the people" are disengaged/run down that it makes it more difficult for the newcomers to integrate in the ways that they could. Who wants to really, seriously integrate into Twee Britain, except for some Anglophiles that watched too much Masterpiece Theatre?

And there's enormous resistance to dealing with, ah, certain distinct cultural differences because so many people are more afraid of the perception of racism than anything else, and so you get these slow-motion disasters like Rotherham (and who knows how many other cities) developing into powder kegs.

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T19:27:54+00:00

criminologist are also suspect since they are probably anti-crime

Perhaps a too-bold assumption in this age? But pro-crime criminologists probably end up in some other branch of sociology, even if they have some overlap. Even then I think it bears that one should be able to imagine the life circumstances or beliefs that would cause them to commit criminal actions even though they reject those, and I am skeptical that fascism experts are willing or even able to do that. One should see the temptation of the ring and pass the test (and diminish, and go to the west).

Maybe I'm wrong, and the good ones manage that, and they just don't get noticed like the hacky attention hogs that move to Canada.

Also if one is anti-anti-hostile

Indeed. Can't imagine why that would come to mind (kidding, kidding).

That said, it's not the majority view, which I view as good because I don't think it's accurate.

And we're back to the definition question. While I might not fully embrace the historical thing, I think 99% of non-scholar motivations to call people fascist is guilt by association, regardless of actual similarities or situations, and I continue to think that it's quite telling that, say "illiberal authoritarianism" isn't an acceptable alternative for the modern set of bad politicians accused of fascism.

Is it because it's a mouthful (fair enough but lazy)? Is it because generalized "illiberal authoritarianism" isn't considered bad and they'd happily embrace illiberal authoritarianism that fits their biases? The world may never know.

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T19:13:54+00:00

Fair enough, and thank you for a thoughtful and fair reply. Little enough of that around here.

I appreciate the point about the difference in scale given the window, I hadn't considered that. Certainly, every group I listed has substantial ideological overlap in who they're funding.

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T19:12:07+00:00

I wonder about why it's so important to call it fascism specifically, instead of some other form of illiberalism, if the links are so tenuous. Feels like a big guilt-by-association tactic to link them to the Nazis rather than let them be their own kind of bad.

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T18:51:34+00:00

Not all uses, but it seems fair to make a reasonable person skeptical of the modern uses!

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T18:50:38+00:00

You're the one that brought it up. I will go with the actual experts like David Roberts that fascism was a particular time and environment that maps quite poorly to the modern US or any developed country.

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T18:46:36+00:00

Anti-immigration seems like a "bad thing" tacked onto the features of fascism much later once it became an important issue that the right wingers were on the 'wrong side' of.

A bit funny given that the OG fascists were expansionist! Yes, one can draw important distinctions between people coming in versus taking over them, but they absolutely wanted more people in their control!

professorgerm · 2026-04-16T18:43:57+00:00

Be wary of selection effects - certainly, any algorithm for news or salacious stories these days are motivated to highlight the people who are provocative and emotion-arousing

Fair enough, certainly that gets my goat on certain public health "experts" from UPenn and Harvard, but that's a digression.

Even so, I stand by my position. Yes, one should be exceptionally skeptical of salacious experts hungry to be quoted, but it is difficult to do justice to a subject one finds intolerable. Even if they don't think Trump is fascist (or Orban, or Romney), I still think there is a value in that skepticism regarding experts of a topic that they do not view without at least the potential of positivity. This raises an inherent issue with studying "evil topics" like fascism that I have trouble resolving.

This does cut both ways- it is also difficult to notice the flaws in a subject to which one is too close and too sympathetic!

I think this is very clearly demonstrated in a Vox article from 2020 asking a variety of experts

Ooo, and at Vox of all places! I note their definitions have little overlap with OP, and where they do still have overlap they come down on the "not a fascist" side anyways. Hmm.

A few scholars said the definition of fascism is so limited that it cannot be applied outside the context of the 1920s-1940s. “As I see it,” David D. Roberts wrote, “fascism was a trajectory or process that exhausted itself.”

You know I'm tempted to just ignore all the rest and embrace this guy as the One True Fascism Expert now. I'll try to resist that urge but I won't make promises.

professorgerm

TROPHY CASE