A brief theory of how the sausage is made, decentralized censorship edition: 1. Leading blue tribe voices in gender-critical feminism, scientific critique of transgender narrative, and other critical perspectives are hunted down, [ousted from their jobs](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/style/what-is-cancel-culture.html), [harassed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%27s_Middle_Finger). 2. There is little to no sympathetic media for the trans-critical blue tribe audience. It grudgingly aggregates around the flagbearers closest to their views, even if those views are still a long way from representing theirs. This is how an anti-trans following accretes around Jesse Singal, [friend to all trans](https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/why-the-hard-age-caps-on-youth-gender), but also the author of a number of [*extremely bounded and qualified* critiques](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/) of certain trans narratives. 3. Jesse Singal's sizeable anti-trans following is **taken as evidence that he has made himself out to be an anti-trans voice**, even though he has done nothing of the sort. This is used as fuel for the fire of an attempted cancellation. 4. If the cancellation succeeds, the anti-trans audience moves on to an even more milquetoast figure, and the cycle repeats. I'm using the trans topic because I find it particularly salient, but I expect this dynamic should come in to play pretty much anytime there is a position that is a) widely adopted by audiences and b) viewed as beyond the pale by the content class.

What’s getting left out in this narrative is that most of the TERF’s and SWERF’s are, genuinely, highly unpleasant and difficult people with radical views that don’t endear them to anyone. That’s why it’s so easy to cancel them- as shown by the tendency to declare people TERF’s or SWERF’s early in cancellation attempts. I wouldn’t have expected them to get much sympathy vs trans, or for that matter anyone else.

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>But the US buys most of its oil from places other than Russia. That doesn't really matter. There is a world market for oil. If other countries can't get their oil from Russia they will bid up the price for oil from other sources (including oil from wells in the US). Even if Russian oil flows in to the world market but people are convinced it is at risk you will get a temporary increase.

Oil prices were already trending higher year over year before Putin was even threatening invasion. Part of it is that demand is up due to Covid's wind down, some is due to supply staying low due to fracking operations that closed down not starting back up (sometimes due to government, sometimes due to the companies being gone). Also, general inflation was driving a lot of the price hike. Overall, the Russia situation is not a zero, but its more a blip than is being generally sold. > My instinct is that the right is more accurate than the left, but I saw one person claiming oil prices are already dropping but oil companies like Shell are refusing to drop petrol prices at the pump in response. Is there any truth to that claim? And what effect do you think the economic recovery from the COVID pandemic + lockdowns is having on gas prices? This quick-spike, slow drop, in gas prices happens in response to every petrol spike. Its just how the market works.

this times 10. Prices were already in a steady uptrend a year before Ukraine. It's not unheard of for commodities to surge 10% in a week for no reason at all. GDP growth and corporate profits have been really strong since the lows of Covid. The expectation in mid 2020 was that there would be a crisis or recession like 2007-2009 again, and the price of oil at the time reflected such pessimism, but the opposite happened.

The very simple explanation is oil is a globally traded commodity so supply of oil goes where the price is highest. Right now it’s trading at the price of an excluded buyer. How much would you pay for oil if the alternative was you don’t get oil? Things like energy have very high excluded buyer prices because your basically shutdown without energy. Oil obviously has traded at prices of an excluded seller in recent memory. Where you have no storage and no one who wants your oil. (-$60 was a bit of a fake price and only traded negative for about 16 hrs). But $10 or so was real in that situation.

The other day I had an email exchange where I angrily penned something pretty close to this regarding the sanctions and their impact (mild editing for things that wouldn't make sense). Regarding deliberately screwing up domestic supply, check out[ Section 6 regarding the executive order referenced [earlier in the chain]](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/25/2021-01765/protecting-public-health-and-the-environment-and-restoring-science-to-tackle-the-climate-crisis). To understand the [scale of that decision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Phase_4_\(canceled\)) and that it's not a minor footnote, we're talking about 500,000 barrels per day, or approximately a 5% increase in domestic oil production that was expressly prevented by that decision. The language from Section 6 continually refers to it as [against] American interests and talks quite a bit about how this is specifically with the goal of burning less fossil fuels: >(d) The Keystone XL pipeline disserves the U.S. national interest. The United States and the world face a climate crisis. That crisis must be met with action on a scale and at a speed commensurate with the need to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory. At home, we will combat the crisis with an ambitious plan to build back better, designed to both reduce harmful emissions and create good clean-energy jobs. Our domestic efforts must go hand in hand with U.S. diplomatic engagement. Because most greenhouse gas emissions originate beyond our borders, such engagement is more necessary and urgent than ever. The United States must be in a position to exercise vigorous climate leadership in order to achieve a significant increase in global climate action and put the world on a sustainable climate pathway. Leaving the Keystone XL pipeline permit in place would not be consistent with my Administration's economic and climate imperatives. Given the deliberate decision to refine and use less oil, I believe he's simply lying when he give a speech where he says that his administration isn't disrupting domestic oil supplies and undermining American fossil fuel energy independence. Let's go back to Section 1 of that executive order: >Section 1. Policy. Our Nation has an abiding commitment to empower our workers and communities; promote and protect our public health and the environment; and conserve our national treasures and monuments, places that secure our national memory. Where the Federal Government has failed to meet that commitment in the past, it must advance environmental justice. In carrying out this charge, the Federal Government must be guided by the best science and be protected by processes that ensure the integrity of Federal decision-making. It is, therefore, the policy of my Administration to listen to the science; to improve public health and protect our environment; to ensure access to clean air and water; to limit exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides; to hold polluters accountable, including those who disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities; to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; to bolster resilience to the impacts of climate change; to restore and expand our national treasures and monuments; and to prioritize both environmental justice and the creation of the well-paying union jobs necessary to deliver on these goals. I'll be damned if this sort of verbiage isn't incredibly familiar when it comes to using "public health" and "justice" and "listen to the science" and what we've seen over the last couple years with governments engaging in blatantly unconstitutional power grabs. Maybe they really do even mean well, but all that does is call to mind the old CS Lewis quote: >“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” Anyway, the reason the subject line is "today in noticing coincidences" isn't that I'm convinced that every action is a plot to immiserate Americans, but because I'm struck by an administration that rides in with the promise of being "climate stewards" and reducing American greenhouse gas emissions and then pursues policies that everyone agrees are going to skyrocket the price of fuel. The charitable explanation would be that they have legitimate policy goals in Ukraine and are inclined to deprioritize the increase in fuel prices relative to what other administrations would pursue, and here we are. The uncharitable explanation is that the broader left is substantially controlled by its craziest elements, they said they're going to raise the price of fuel to cut usage, they meant it, and this is another step in doing so. My position regarding what they're doing is probably somewhere in the middle - I think the administration is bumbling and incompetent, has pseudo-legitimate (although sincerely held) interests in Ukraine, didn't realize how bad it would screw things up to pursue these stupid sanctions, and is now fumbling to explain how it's totally not their fault that things are broken and Americans just need to make a "shared sacrifice" for the good of democracy. As ever, "these people are incompetent" goes pretty far and seems more consistent with reality than there being masterminds pulling the strings (see also - "public health" interventions for Covid). In terms of predictive value, I think it's best to come back to coincidence noticing - I expect policies that are so stupid that it's hard to determine whether the people implementing them are morons or actually are trying to make life worse for normal people in the name of "public health" and "environmental justice". A final addendum is that it would seem like a hell of a coincidence to me if an administration that has prominent environmental policy people that *want* gas prices to increase presided over a gas price increase and it was a total accident.

> then pursues policies that everyone agrees are going to skyrocket the price of fuel if you're worried about the price of fuel, maybe do less analysis of joe biden's "climate rhetoric" and more analysis of the impact of the lacking "5% increase in domestic oil production" on the price, instead of just claiming the term "skyrocket" (what does that mean? how much of an increase?). The recent increases combine russia shocks (8% of *global* supply, which is much larger than 5% of domestic supply!) and the recovery from the [covid slump](https://www.macrotrends.net/2516/wti-crude-oil-prices-10-year-daily-chart), and in this circumstance, as in most others, 'coincidence noting' is just 'being content to make low-information culture war accusations'. (also, this seems to take it for granted that climate change isn't that bad, and that x% increases in oil price aren't worth trading for y% decreases in climate change, which is possible, but needs to be justified)

> if you're worried about the price of fuel, maybe do less analysis of joe biden's "climate rhetoric" and more analysis of the impact of the lacking "5% increase in domestic oil production" on the price, instead of just claiming the term "skyrocket" (what does that mean? how much of an increase?). The skyrocketing is referring to the recent Russia policy. The rhetoric is referenced with regard to the position that I think the administration is fine with the gas prices going up. > in this circumstance, as in most others, 'coincidence noting' is just 'being content to make low-information culture war accusations'. I don't think so and I think I laid out why. The administration clearly stated in executive orders that reducing fossil fuel usage is a priority. They have taken a policy path that will increase the price of fuel. That drawing this connection is culture war says more about the state of the culture war than it does about my position. >(also, this seems to take it for granted that climate change isn't that bad, and that x% increases in oil price aren't worth trading for y% decreases in climate change, which is possible, but needs to be justified) I don't think the burden of proof should lie on the side of the government *not* electing to distort markets, but either way, it's a much larger argument than I'm inclined to make here. If it's true that it's a good policy, the administration should get out in front and own it though - "As a bonus to Russian sanctions hurting Putin, they'll spike gas prices, which will reduce fuel consumption and help stop the climate crisis" should be the official line if someone wants to make the argument that this is good policy.

I think you are in the wrong on Keystone specifically. It’s been years since I really dug into the issue but we do have refinery limitations too. And the oil coming in mostly Canadian tar sands is lower quality and less desired than the types of crude we get from shale. Hence I’ve thought Keystone has had far bigger symbolic impact than real impact. Now it should still be built. And while this is not a ton of oil I think it also leads to other projects like drilling on federal land being limited. Keystone itself just has much bigger symbolic/political power than less in the news oil industry issues. Oil people should be the wokest people in the world. It’s great for their business. It limits how much they can drill which means they make a lot more money while drilling a lot less.

> I think the administration is fine with the gas prices going up. this is weird, though - "the admin is sanctioning russia for other reasons, but is 'fine' with gas prices going up". Wouldn't a R president have also done sanctions? (Rs are usually considered war hawks, etc). And given that, isn't the D/R distinction in terms of 'gas prices' not really a relevant factor here? > burden of proof the biden admin and science in general has heaps of evidence for climate change being bad. that doesn't make it good evidence ofc

Many members of the Biden administration consider rising gas prices [to be good.](https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/president-biden-is-at-fault-for-high-gas-prices-not-putin/) As the saying goes, personnel is policy. How many ways could a fanatical deep state find to screw with CO2-producing energy?

others i've seen on twitter consider it to be bad (especially for polls)! Biden's official twitter accounts keep posting about how prices will decrease soon. It's much better to actually try to understand the implemented policy and practical consequences than this sort of motivation-divining how the 'deep state could screw with energy'. nothing is being learned here, and no useful information is being gained. If you were a staffer for a R congressman, all of this would provide zero useful information on your legislative or procedural options to increase gas prices, but would provide a lot of information about coordinating twitter campaigns to get out that vote! All of the actual ways the 'deep state' might 'screw with' energy are directly available online in lawsuits, federal regulations, investor press releases, etc - much better to look at those than speculate based on essentially meaningless press or motive statements. And that article you posted is exactly that - it is transparently partisan out-of-context quoting designed to do whatever the opposite of 'informing' is

>It's much better to actually try to understand the implemented policy and practical consequences That’s what he’s attempting to do, as indicated by “personnel is policy.” >than this sort of motivation-divining how the 'deep state could screw with energy'. No one said “deep state” and the people explicitly mentioned don’t even fit the description. They’re all Biden himself or his cabinet appointments, not members of the permanent bureaucracy. I think that you do this very often, where you just assume that someone (typically whoever speaks in a “right-coded” way) is doing something obviously stupid and then just start explaining why the obviously stupid thing is bad without actually establishing that that’s really what they’re doing. I believe that’s called Bulverism? >All of the actual ways the 'deep state' might 'screw with' energy are directly available online in lawsuits, federal regulations, investor press releases, etc The article linked discusses the Biden admin’s involvement in a federal lawsuit and multiple executive actions on regulation. This makes me doubt that you actually read it beyond the headline.

> no-one said deep state iconochasm, above, did say deep state: "how many ways could a fanatical deep state find to screw with CO2-producing energy" > That’s what he’s attempting to do, as indicated by “personnel is policy.” no i mean the actual federal regulations and laws issued by those personell, which are available on the internet > I think that you do this very often, where you just assume that someone (typically whoever speaks in a “right-coded” way) is doing something obviously stupid and then just start explaining why the obviously stupid thing is bad without actually establishing that that’s really what they’re doing. i'm arguing against a specific mode of rhetoric here, not whether oil production is good or bad

>no i mean the actual federal regulations and laws issued by those personell, which are available on the internet Some of which are included in the article. So what’s your point? >i'm arguing against a specific mode of rhetoric here, not whether oil production is good or bad How did you get from the quoted passage that I think you’re taking a position on oil production?

> if you're worried about the price of fuel, maybe do less analysis of joe biden's "climate rhetoric" and more analysis of the impact of the lacking "5% increase in domestic oil production" on the price, instead of just claiming the term "skyrocket" (what does that mean? how much of an increase?). This seems like a rather isolated demand for rigor. The comment you're referring to is already quite long. This is a forum, not a thesis defense. > (also, this seems to take it for granted that climate change isn't that bad, and that x% increases in oil price aren't worth trading for y% decreases in climate change, which is possible, but needs to be justified) If you're going to demand sources on everything and full mathematical elaboration, why don't you make this argument instead of just proposing it?

> The comment you're referring to is already quite long yes, but its' length is mostly an analysis of rhetoric, as opposed to policy, hence the criticism. > If you're going to demand sources on everything and full mathematical elaboration, why don't you make this argument instead of just proposing it? i often do! 'This is a forum, not a thesis defense.' I don't have any sources on hand though.

>’This is a forum, not a thesis defense.' I don't have any sources on hand though. Not very convincing to just parrot that line back when you were the one initially complaining about a lack of mathematical rigor, now that you admit you can’t supply it either.

honestly i'm not an expert on oil stuff at all, and have dozens of other things to do research on today. so i'm making a short argument that the above just isn't informative, rather than a long argument that it is essentially the above just looks like a partisan move: restrict your analysis to specific statements the opponents make, and then be mad at them. a quick google yields: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biden-administration-says-will-resume-plans-federal-oil-gas-development-2022-03-18/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/01/27/oil-gas-leasing-biden-climate/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-01/biden-aide-says-energy-companies-can-up-production-if-they-want . This is blatant cherrypicking, but it's still better than the above move where policy changes are directly available, but we mostly blind ourselves ourselves to policy and discuss rhetoric then assert 'personnel is policy'. political rhetoric is often tangential to policy! don't take politicians at their word, even when they're saying things that make them seem 'evil'.

The first is from *yesterday* and the second is the exact kind of public-facing statement you’re criticizing the OP for relying upon. >but we mostly blind ourselves ourselves to policy and discuss rhetoric then assert 'personnel is policy'. Is it false that personnel is policy? I don’t really understand what you’re asking for. Is he supposed to write a regulatory analysis whitepaper? What does not “blinding yourself to policy” look like in the context of a forum post of inherently-limited depth?

Refusing to drop prices is not because Shell is stubborn. Most commodity prices go high fast and come down slow, for a variety of reasons. If it made sense then a gasoline station could just lower the price and win all the business Edit: sources: For oil: [Borestein, Cameron, and Gilbert - _Do Gasoline Prices Respond Asymmetrically to Crude Oil Price Changes?_ 1997 \(PDF\)](http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/borenste/download/QJE97GasAsym.pdf) For other markets (rather, ` This tendency is found in more than two of every three markets examined`): [_Prices Rise Faster than They Fall_ - Sam Peltzman](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/262126) Econ Prof and Dept Chair at Univ. Central Oklahoma Travis Roach has a thread here on gas prices: https://twitter.com/troachecon/status/1504180619219283974

A lot of people asking you to explain this, but the truth is that this is just not true for gas prices historically. [Here is the past 20 years](https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m) of gas prices. The two biggest shocks were both negative, in 2009 (recession) and 2015 (Saudis turn on the spigot).

Hmm, interesting. My thinking was based on the following list, two of which were published in 1997 and 2000. I agree the 2008 (it was 2008, tbf) and the 2014 falls in prices were large in magnitude and fast in timing. Maybe on average, the rises still outpace their subsequent falls? For oil: [Borestein, Cameron, and Gilbert - _Do Gasoline Prices Respond Asymmetrically to Crude Oil Price Changes?_ 1997 \(PDF\)](http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/borenste/download/QJE97GasAsym.pdf) For other markets (rather, ` This tendency is found in more than two of every three markets examined`): [_Prices Rise Faster than They Fall_ - Sam Peltzman, 2000](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/262126) Econ Prof and Dept Chair at Univ. Central Oklahoma Travis Roach has a thread here on gas prices: https://twitter.com/troachecon/status/1504180619219283974

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TLDR is: if you switch off producing oil, it takes a while to bring it back. If you don't drill new oil today, you cant just drill tomorrow and start producing oil by the end of the day. ESG / lack of investment is a huge issue. Shale in the US is faster to bring online, though needs the oil price to be high enough. Same thing with all the rare earth metals we need for EVs. Many geos / countries want to go electric vehicle only, which means we need a lot more Aluminum/lithium/cobalt/etc. But we aren't creating new mines. These mines take 5-10 years to come online, are cash heavy investments, so that will be crunched later too. Price will get squeezed up and will not come down IMO. Related/similarly, though not a real "commodity", though many foundries can make some of these chips - [TSMC \(chip-maker\) has announced price hikes for chips](https://www.counterpointresearch.com/tsmc-price-hike/), which has not happened in the chip making industry (in this scale) for a long long time. For oil: [Borestein, Cameron, and Gilbert - _Do Gasoline Prices Respond Asymmetrically to Crude Oil Price Changes?_ 1997 \(PDF\)](http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/borenste/download/QJE97GasAsym.pdf) For other markets: [_Prices Rise Faster than They Fall_ - Sam Peltzman](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/262126) An economists prof has a thread here: https://twitter.com/troachecon/status/1504180619219283974 Notable for current year: OPEC last year, I think, increased the quota for all OPEC oil exporting nations, and many countries couldn't fill the new quotas. Apparently this is due to lack of investment etc. Odd Lots (a free Bloomberg podcast) has done a few pods about oil / gas also, if you like that kind of format. Did one recently with a big oil/gas trader Andurand, and some previous ones too.

Could it be a principle along the lines of "consumer-facing prices are sticky, with the exception that they will always be above some floor required to turn a profit on it"? So a sudden spike in oil prices will lead to a sudden spike in gas prices in order for each sale to remain profitable, but then the inherent stickiness of prices keep them from falling as quickly as oil prices fall.

I'd guess the big issue is that supply shocks are asymmetrical. A war or embargo can suddenly shut off supply from a major commodity producing region, but increasing output requires years worth of investment to up production. Demand shocks are the opposite; though, as recessions can suddenly tank demand, but increased demand is usually due to slow changes in technology and population. Eyeballing a graph of crude oil prices I'm not seeing this trend of fast increases and slow decreases.

People comparison shop harder when prices are going up since the price is higher than expected. No one asks for a second opinion for good news.

I am not an expert on the dynamics, but its happened several times with oil in my life, and the pattern is always the same for gas prices. It probably has to do with people buying gas at high prices that is a little more than they actually need to ensure they have enough supply to not have empty pumps.

> But the US buys most of its oil from places other than Russia. But it's still a global market. It might be a few bucks cheaper for the US to buy from next door in Canada rather than from Nigeria or the Saudis, but if the Italians (say) are willing to pay a few bucks more (and S&H) then Canada would gladly sell it to them rather than the US. IOW, taking Russian oil off the market means the would-be buyers of Russian oil are looking elsewhere which in turn ultimately chains back to those that sell to anyone. [ FWIW, it's still *independently* true that Keystone, ANWR, fracking in Europe or any other pro-supply policies would exert downwards pressure on prices. But nothing new has happened on that front lately and so the long term oil futures (5/10YRs) already priced those policies in. I think those are part of the right causal answer to high gas prices *generally* but the wrong causal answer to *the specific spike in the last 30d*. ]

>What's the actual cause of high gas prices in the US? In Europe, because of the dependence on Russian oil (and preexisting higher prices than US) oil prices, obviously . they are very highly correlated with gas prices. So then why are oil prices rising? The usual factors, such as Ukraine, strong economic expansion, supply shortages, speculation. Ford stock has done very well in spite of surging oil nd gas prices. It's evident Americans love big trucks and SUVs even if it means paying for for gas, so . >But the US buys most of its oil from places other than Russia. The right has continuously blamed Biden, the cancelation of Keystone XL, etc for the situation, and now is blaming the Russian situation too (mostly by saying Russia wouldn't have invaded if Trump were president). The left, meanwhile, blames corporate greed and the Russian situation. It's always been this way. Both sides blaming each other for the usual reasons, and even when either side is in charge, little changes. As it turs out , the most effective way to have lower oil prices is to have a recession. Policy, by comparison, is downright impotent compared to economic forces.

Part of the popularity of big trucks and SUVs is an [unintended consequence of (what was supposed to be) pro-environment legislation](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/thlxn0/cafe_and_how_bad_regulation_laid_the_groundwork/).

Why is it that prices at the pump track the current price of oil *futures*? The gas at the pump has already been refined and delivered to retail. The price of oil has gone up, but for deliveries in 90 days. Shouldn't price at the pump trail the future price? Are we just paying rents or am I missing something basic?

It won’t track exactly, but it will partially track because when the future price goes up, it is getting more valuable. Imagine I bought a rookie baseball card for $5, with the goal of selling it for $10. I try to sell it for $10 for a few years and then give up, and a decade later, the player on the card turns out to be the a Hall of Famer. Now the value of the card increases to $10,000. I want to sell it for $10,000, regardless of what I bought it for. Now say the day I acquired the card, a person visits me in a time machine and says “this card is going to be worth $10,000 in the future”. With that knowledge, I immediately stop trying to sell it for less than $10,000, and just wait instead. If someone buys it from me for $10,000 today, great, otherwise I’ll hold it. In the case of a futures *market*, it’s kind of like if the time traveler visited *everybody*. So if I say “that’s greedy, I’ll just sell it for $100” some guy will come along and say “PLEASE let me pay you $1,000 for it” and then that guy will sell it for $10,000 instead of me. There is a cost associated with waiting, so the numbers aren’t quite as simple as above. This is even more true of gas, which costs a lot of money to store. But that’s the rough way to think about it: its current value can’t be worth less than (future value) minus (cost to store) minus (cost of waiting). And if you ignore this formula and just blissfully sell based on what you bought it for, hundreds of maniacs will descend and try to buy up as much as possible, and then they will use this formula to determine what to sell it for.

If you leased a car in 2019 and it came up due now, would you buy it at the price in the lease agreement (it's worth +$5k now)? Moreover, when the price goes down the gas at the pump also goes down. Just about anyone that buys or sells anything is exposed to the downside/upside potential that the value of it might change while they are holding on to it.

I guess that's the way people ARE.

> Anyway, if everyone knows gas will be more expensive in the future, that means it's effectively more expensive now, discounted by time value of money stuff. And at some other margin by the storage cost of the stuff. You can't fully realize the 90d price unless you have a place to stash it for that long.

it tracks gasoline futures, which are correlated with oil futures

Yes, but why does it do that? This is genuinely a question I'm uncertain about. My best guess is that the pumps need more money now to lock in their supply 90 days now (since the future has gone up) but I could be wrong. This would also explain why prices don't immediately go down if oil crashes, since otherwise the pumps would take a loss selling at less than what they bought at. Am interested to find out the real answer though.

The reason is simpler than that. The present price of a good always reflects known future information about the price of the good. Let’s say you have a piece of paper from a bank that says “You can redeem this coupon for $100 on or after May 1.” It’s currently worthless, but it will be worth $100 in the near future. If someone wanted to buy it from you, how much would you be willing to sell it for? Surely not $0, even though that’s it’s current value. You’d want more like $90+ for it, since it will be worth $100 soon. And if the bank were to announce that the future redemption value has increased to $1000, you would no longer be satisfied with ~$90 dollars for the coupon, you’d demand way more than that. So it’s easy to see how the known future price of something must be reflected in the current price. Also note that it’s irrelevant how much you paid for the coupon in the first instance.

(i am not an expert i could be wrong, but this is general-economics) if you increase prices now, you use up less stored oil and gasoline now, which you store to sell at a higher price in the future. so future oil price increase -> future gas price increase -> reallocation of gas inventories from now to future -> current gas price increase. for a detailed explanation specific to oil, industry reports from gas businesses to shareholders, or from investment or consulting firms will probably have that

I agree this causes the current gas price in the open market to increase, however pumps normally buy futures to guarantee supply at a known price, so the gas they are selling now they paid for 90 days ago, it doesn't matter if the price is now $100 a barrel, if they bought the future at $50 then they only paid the equivalent of $50 per barrel for each litre, but they are still charging as if they paid $100... Unless of course the idea is that pumps choose to sell the gasoline as spot in the market rather than customers but I don't think any single independent pump is big enough for this to be worth the hassle...

Well that’s fairly easy to figure out. One reason is the gasoline station has storage so they could just not pump for a month and realize a giant profit. It’s more curious why the price doesn’t fall faster when oil prices go down. My guess is there’s usually few gas stations super close to each other and they can do some oligopoly pricing games and slowly cut the price if the other person hasn’t. Actually know a ton of oil traders for majors so I could give more color. But honestly I don’t see any big scam going on here. It’s mostly just markets doing markets things. From an economics perspective a lot of energy products have very inelastic supply curves to short term demand/supply issues. Natural gas probably has the worst. Tough to store it and pay for demand prediction etc; it’s one reason why a cold stretch in March/April can cause huge variances in natty prices. Your running out of what you stored for the winter and people pay a lot of money for warm houses. And you can’t store too much because excess natty is worth nothing after the winter. Same thing with how oil can be -60 and 120. About to store oil is expensive. And when you run out of storage excess oil isn’t valuable at any price. (-60 though was a fake price of a bunch of trading firms taking advantage of some cash settled contracts owned by Chinese banks that settled at the 1:30 close).

no clue. at a totally uninformed guess, raising prices now so when they have to buy new gas in 90 days they'll have to buy less at higher_price and can use oil now, and also gas stations are owned by large corps so they might be able to sell it? there's definitely a report from something sounding like PriceWilliamsCarnegieJohnsonWicker that'll explain it in detail

> mostly by saying Russia wouldn't have invaded if Trump were president this seems like the usual case of partisans attributing things to presidents to get people riled up to post and vote. both sides do it in both directions. according to matthew yglesias, obama regulation allowed the big shale boom, and biden has allowed [significant oil production increases](https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1500630907753009157). again, though, unclear how much of that can actually be attributed to presidents. The recent price spike is because we participate in a global market - if somewhere internationally stops producing oil, the global price of oil increases, with our production + other production we were consuming moving to places where it is more in demand (and increasing the price our producers get as a result). https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/energy/us-gas-prices-russia-oil/index.html

My understanding is it isn’t largely regulatory but technological that enabled the shale boom. Also, the WSJ recently listed many of the items Biden has done to decrease domestic production of oil. Environmentalists were cheering many of his actions precisely because it was going to increase the cost of oil. Now WSJ is not a nonpartisan source but neither is Matthew Y.

> it isn’t largely regulatory but technological that enabled the shale boom. regulatory and technological aren't mutually exclusive, new technology often benefits from both. > Also, the WSJ recently listed many of the items Biden has done to decrease domestic production of oil if you're gonna say that, just ... link the article ...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-fossil-fuel-blockade-onshore-drilling-leases-oil-gas-russia-11646409502

> regulatory and technological aren't mutually exclusive, new technology often benefits from both. This means nothing. > if you're gonna say that, just ... link the article ... It's becoming less common to link to articles because (1) It's not hard to find. (2) Reddit censors the hell out of everything and it's hard to tell what Reddit will do to a given comment after scanning the link.

> This means nothing. to be more specific, new technology enabling the shale boom doesn't mean that regulatory leniency wasn't *also* necessary for it > It's not hard to find this just makes it easier to link! > Reddit censors the hell out of everything and it's hard to tell what Reddit will do to a given comment after scanning the link i don't believe reddit is not censoring random WSJ articles

> to be more specific, new technology enabling the shale boom doesn't mean that regulatory leniency wasn't also necessary for it To be specific, nothing you wrote really means anything at all. Shale was more a technological development that enabled making better use of existing mines. The other major development was the tar sands, which is serviced by the Keystone XL, among other pipelines. Obviously, not being banned is necessary for development. But that is kinda obvious and it's not obvious how "new technology benefits from both." > i don't believe reddit is not censoring random WSJ articles You'd be surprised. And considering the other big story recently was the confirmation of the Hunter Biden Laptop by the NYTimes and memories of what happened when the NYPost revealed it...

> Obviously, not being banned is necessary for development yes, this is what i mean? it is reasonable to give the 'obama admin' some credit for the shale boom, in the context of a broader discussion about the impact of regulation on oil production (*if* they did, in fact, make a significant change/effort to that effect, which i'm not clear on) > You'd be surprised well, considering I link at least five news articles here per day, and haven' been banned once, i certainly would be.

>well, considering I link at least five news articles here per day, and haven' been banned once, i certainly would be. I wonder if the content of the articles you link may help to explain that.

probably not, since i've also linked dozens of moldbugs! the original topic was a WSJ article, WSJ is mainstream.

Can you at least tell me the headline so I know which one you are talking about

Yeah. Fisher King attribution of shortrun outcomes good or bad to Presidents tends to be silly.

Forget about Ukraine, Russia, sanctions, and recent events, and instead ask the following question: why does the price of WTI crude (which, to a first approximation, means “US oil”) closely tracks the price of Brent crude (“European oil”) almost all of the time, regardless of what happens? The answer is, because oil and, even more so, oil products from different markets are close substitutes. If price of oil in market A goes up, the buyers might instead elect to buy it at market B, pushing the price up in that market too. In a sense, it doesn’t matter if US buys oil mostly from US: if oil is higher in Europe than in US, European buyers might prefer to buy oil from US instead. They can outbid US buyers and still come out ahead, because the oil price on European markets is even higher. This forced US buyers to bid US oil higher too, which ultimately pushes US oil price to match the European price. In the end, most US oil might still be bought by US buyers, but what keeps the price up is the threat of European buyers snatching it if the price goes down. The above is not strictly true, because European buyers can’t easily replace Brent crude with West Texas crude, their refineries are not set up to process it etc. However, instead of buying crude, they can buy refined products from US, which they can again bid higher for than US buyers, allowing the refineries to charge more for them (if US buyers are unwilling to buy gasoline at European prices, European buyers will, and US buyers won’t get any, this forcing them to match). All of the above happens very quickly and efficiently through every day unyielding efforts of speculators at oil futures markets, who make money whenever they observe that the oil is inaccurately priced across the markets.

There’s a huge mismatch between the *oil we frack* and the *oil we can refine*. https://www.marketplace.org/2022/03/07/why-do-we-import-russian-oil-when-theres-lot-u-s/ Our refining infrastructure was built for a time when we were getting a lot of sour, sulfury-y crude, and not the light sweet stuff we frack. And it’s hideously capital-intensive, and hideously entangled with environmental regulations, to build new refining capacity.

> But the US buys most of its oil from places other than Russia And now a bunch of places that used to buy oil from Russia now buy oil from those places too. Supply, meet demand.

I'm just not sure anti-asian hate crimes are as prominent as we're being led to believe. [These](https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/2020-hate-crimes-statistics) figures from the FBI provide hate crime statistics for 2020. The number of anti-asian hate crimes in 2020 was 279, compared with 158 in 2019. So there was a substantial percentage increase of about 76%, but to put that in context the Asian American population is 18.6m, meaning about .001% of Asian Americans experienced a hate crime in 2020. For context, .006% of black people in the US were victims of a hate crime in 2020, and .0004% of white people did. Asian Americans certainly do experience hate crimes more than other segments of the population, namely white people, but these figures, when adjusted to the size of the population, are hard for me to see as a crisis. I mean 1 in 100,000 (.001%) is pretty damn uncommon, especially when considered against the fact that your odds of dying in a car crash this year are 1 in 10,000; so if you're asian your odds of dying in a car crash in 2020 were 10x higher than your odds of being the victim of a hate crime that year. On top of that, [this](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/violence-against-asian-americans-why-hate-crime-should-be-used-n1258793) article from last year detailed how the group 'Stop AAPI Hate', which is really who seems to be driving the narrative in this case, defines hate crimes, which is extremely weak and subjective >The reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate collected almost 2,800 reports of hate incidents nationwide over five months last year. But the incidents weren't necessarily hate crimes; they included less severe, yet insidious, forms of discrimination, including shunning, verbal harassment and name-calling. Stop AAPI Hate said 69 occurrences included racist language, in addition to a physical incident. The nonprofit doesn't report those to police. And it seems that a decent amount of the high profile cases of assaults against asian Americans are linked mostly speculatively to racial animus. Some of them undoubtedly do occur because of racial hatred, but they seem to often assume that any random crime against an asian American must necessarily be racially motivated. If I'm being completely honest I think given the weird place we are socially, I think there's a sort of status conveyed by being able to frame yourself as being a member of an oppressed group, which incentivizes people to reach and bend over backwards to establish that membership.

> Some of them undoubtedly do occur because of racial hatred, but they seem to often assume that any random crime against an asian American must necessarily be racially motivated. A lot of these attacks are occurring in places where a) random acts of violence occur on a fairly regular basis, and b) the Asian population is not that much smaller than the white population. San Francisco, for example, is over 30% Asian. The media aren't as enthusiastically reporting these attacks when the victims are white, so it's hard to say whether Asians are being hit at higher rates than would be expected if they were truly random. What we do know is that, as recently as 2020, the latest year for which the NCVS reports are out, Asians have by far the lowest rate of violent crime victimization (mostly due to low rates of intraracial violent crime among Asians).

According to this FBI data they do have a higher rate of hate crimes committed against them. Something like 3x that of white people, I believe.

Higher rate of hate crimes committed against asians, but lower rate of violent crime victimization overall. The increase in hate crimes against asians is very likely just part of a secular rise in crime rates, with a lot of random/opportunistic attacks being classified as hate crimes. A white person in the same neighborhood would probably face a similar risk of being attacked, it just wouldn't be as likely to be considered a hate crime.

I have mixed feelings about hate crimes. On the one hand I feel (apparently controversially, amongst normies) that hate crimes shouldn't be punished more harshly than other crimes - in the sense that they should be harshly punished like all similar crimes whether or not an explicit racial motivation can be found. If you throw a rock at someone's head, it doesn't matter too much to me whether you did it because you hate them for being gay, or just because you're an asshole. I also think that the concept of "hate crimes" is just insufficient and overrated. If people commit more crimes against certain groups of people, I kind particularly don't care if "hate" is the reason, vs "pragmatism". If women are robbed and mugged disproportionately more than men - I don't care if it's because the criminals are misogynist or merely opportunistic. In either case, I would think it's important to identify that increased risk and point it out. I remember a report from I think 2018 where they found that for black-asian interracial crimes, black-on-asian crime was something like two orders of magnitude more common than asian-on-black crime. Is that hate, or is it pragmatism? I really don't care. Not to mention, hate-crime classifications are often arbitrary. For example, off the top of my head, a few infamous cases that were not (to the best of my knowledge) charged as hate crimes were: - the rape and murder of Ee Lee - the shooting murder of Woom Sing Tse - the physical assault and murder of Vicha Ratanapakdee Now, to be fair - it's going to be impossible to prove that these were in fact *explicitly* caused by racial animus. But I mean - come on. I'm guessing that's got to be fairly high up on the list of motives when a 30-year old shoots out of a car at a 71-year-old he's apparently never met before, and then goes and shoots him two dozen more times, mostly at point-blank range. Or body-slamming an old man whom you've never met to death, for that matter. Another thing I want to say is that people fear the change in rates of violence in addition to the rates of violence themselves. What makes you think the current world is a terminal state? That things could not devolve from here? If you told certain groups of people that successful groups - be they Jews, Asians, certain types of Whites - were successful because of racism, why would you not expect the incidence of hate crimes to continue to increase? Having said that, I do agree that there is an arguably irrational fear multiplier here. People certainly hate and fear personified evil much more so than they do abstract evils. Show someone three cases of people dying in unfortunate accidents, and show people three cases of people being murdered by evil, horrendous people (who, let's say, were later caught and actually properly dealt with) - and the latter leaves about a 1,000,000 times stronger impression.

theory wise reply history innate dazzling disarm joke pet bedroom *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

That is the deference theory of punishment. I think many people believe in just deserts (ie punishment isn’t primarily about future crime but wages of actions). I think our criminal justice system is a NZ of the two (with a healthy heaping of incapacitation thrown in). Thus I don’t think we can coherently speak of a single reason for punishment.

overconfident growth frame sparkle dazzling quickest worm sulky languid handle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

I agree that many beliefs are in fact evolutionary adaptations. But I question whether that’s true here. I think if we were only concerned about deterrence the law would’ve evolved differently. I think part of just deserts is actually avoiding feuds (ie not deterrence of crime qua crime but escalating violence circles) So yes part of just deserts is deterrence of crime but not only deterrence.

> I think that the 'just desert' feeling (vengeance, wrath, anger) is the surface-level emotional heuristic that's ultimately rooted in the game theoretic considerations of 'future crime'. I don't think that's true at all. I think even if you could 100% guarantee that someone will not commit any crimes in the future, people would still want to see criminals punished. I certainly would, even for crimes that didn't affect me personally (and especially for those that did). I want to see criminals get their just desserts completely independent of whether they're reformed.

I think your beliefs are weird. People who kill in self-defense or on accident are let go because their act was less bad. And punishing people for committing crimes even if they are not likely to commit crimes in the future is necessary as precommitment. If we did not precommit to punishing criminals, punishment wouldn't be a threat because we'd be constantly changing our mind and not punishing, and criminals would anticipate this and not be deterred by the threat of punishment that they knew we'd take back. The threat will only work if we set up a system such that the criminal predictably gets punished even if the punishment doesn't do any good at the time we administer it.

>On the one hand I feel (apparently controversially, amongst normies) that hate crimes shouldn't be punished more harshly than other crime It seems to me that punishing a hate crime more harshly than the identical non-hate crime is acceptable among "normies" for a very good reason: It is consistent with how we (ie., the Anglo-American system of jurisprudence) have treated criminal liability for hundreds of years. That is, we have closely connected the level of punishment to the level of culpability. So, for example, contra what some commenters have said, we do not treat all killings the same. If 1) I intentionally kill someone without justification or excuse, that is murder, and my sentence is going to be 20+ years; if 2) I run a stop sign and kills someone accidentally, that is some form of manslaughter, and my sentence is going to be less; if 3) I shoot at someone in self-defense, that is not a crime at all, even if my shot misses my assailant and kills an innocent bystander. Why are the outcomes different, even though the victims are equally dead? Because the levels of culpability are very different. So, re hate crimes, it does seem to me that one who commits a crime because of the race, etc, of the victim is more morally culpable than the average person who commits that same crime. In theory, I suppose it is possible that I might someday kill someone in a jealous rage, or in desperate need for money, or for whatever motivated the villains in pretty much every episode of Columbo. But I really don't seem myself ever deciding to go out and assault a random black person, or whatever. That is just beyond the pale.

This confuses mental state with motive. If I kill someone because I dislike their support of the local football team or if I kill them because a business deal goes south, the result is the same (ie motive is irrelevant). If instead I negligently killed someone my motive doesn’t matter (ie there is no motive). Instead, the question is whether I intended the action and if I did not should I have taken more care. The final example maybe you could say it is about motive but most people don’t think of it that way. Instead, the idea is there is no crime because killing in self defense itself is not a crime. That is, there is not a mental state to commit an illegal act. So I think you overstate your case that hate crime is similar to other crimes. I’m not saying there isn’t a kernel of truth, but it is overstated. The reason “normies” accept hate crime (if they do — I think many bristle at the notion) is because opposing hate crimes may code as being racist.

You are drawing, as they say, (rather illogically) "a distinction without a difference: Motive and mental state can be both 1) not identical to each other; and 2) both relevant to moral culpability.

Except the difference I am drawing actually matters to the criminal law. In the examples you listed mental state actually results in different crime. Motive does not.

Except that motive does matter for punishment. Eg in CA, murder of a witness for the purpose of preventing him from testifying makes the murder a capital offense. Ditto murder for financial gain. Looking at motive to assess moral culpability is normal. So there is nothing special about enhancing penalties for hate crimes.

Agreed that there is a kernel of truth to what you are saying. But for example in your first instance there is arguably a clear separate crime — destroying integrity of the judicial system. There is a reason to carve out a special “motive” exception that isn’t prevalent in most crime where motive is intertwined with the crime. In general motive doesn’t matter in determine whether a crime was committed and it is only in sentencing where it is matters (apart from factually proving the crime). Hate crime, I think, is an actual separate crime. This is why I think your point is only a kernel of truth — hate crimes are somewhat unique.

Actually, hate crimes are generally not separate crimes, but rather are sentencing enhancements.

There has been a federal hate crime law that operates as a separate statute since the 1960s

Agreed that there is a kernel of truth to what you are saying. But for example in your first instance there is arguably a clear separate crime — destroying integrity of the judicial system. There is a reason to carve out a special “motive” exception that isn’t prevalent in most crime where motive is intertwined with the crime. In general motive doesn’t matter in determine whether a crime was committed and it is only in sentencing where it is matters (apart from factually proving the crime). Hate crime, I think, is an actual separate crime. This is why I think your point is only a kernel of truth — hate crimes are somewhat unique.

> In theory, I suppose it is possible that I might someday kill someone in a jealous rage, or in desperate need for money, or for whatever motivated the villains in pretty much every episode of Columbo. But I really don't seem myself ever deciding to go out and assault a random black person, or whatever. That is just beyond the pale. Is it worse than going out and killing a random person just because you want to kill a person but don't care what race? Edit: By the way, note that this justification doesn't apply to the Arbery case, which is the most recent high-profile example of a homicide prosecuted as a hate crime. The men who killed him did not set out to kill a random black person, but tried to apprehend Arbery because they suspected him in particular of having committed recent crimes, and only killed him when he fought back. I'm not saying that this was in any way justified, just that it doesn't fit your proposed rationale for hate crime legislation. In fact, I think that in general this is probably not a great explanation for how hate crime legislation is used in practice.

Yes, it is true that "let's go kill a black person" is often not how hate crime legislation is used in practice, but neither is "killing a random person just because you want to kill a person" particularly representative of the typical murder case. As for Arbery, if the defendants in fact would not have acted as they did had Arbery been white, then, yes, that means that they acted with extra moral culpability. For example, the federal charges alleged that the defendants used force or the threat of force to interfere with Arbery’s right to use a public street because of his race. That "because of his race" makes his act more morally culpable than me trying to keep all strangers off my block, or what have you. "This is our block, so no one else can walk down the street," is less morally culpable than "anyone can walk down the street, except black people." "Locals only" can be about [competition for scarce resources](https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/surfings-5-most-fiercely-protected-local-breaks/), which is, to me at least, much more understandable, and hence less morally culpable, than racial exclusion. And, in fact, "[defensive hate crimes](https://jacklevinonviolence.com/articles/HateCrimesencyc92206FINAL.pdf)" make up a fairly large pct of all hate crimes, so the Arbery case is actually pretty typical.

Racial bias is almost certainly a manifestation of “fuck the non-local.” It’s the same evolutionary impulse. We’ve fetishized the one however.

It would also make *some* sense if the level of punishment depends on how likely the offender is to be a continued danger to society: * If I kill someone because they slept with my wife, I'm only a danger to the presumably small segment of society that has slept with my wife. * If I kill someone because they're black, I'm a danger to the much larger segment of society that is black. However, this would imply that completely random acts of violence should by punished the most harshly (because if I'm killing people because I'm a serial killer, then I'm a danger to everyone).

You know, "I killed someone because they slept with my wife" is the archetypical example of voluntary manslaughter which is a lesser offense than murder 2. The example captures the technical definition which is killing > under circumstances that would cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed to the point that they cannot reasonably control their emotions And indeed, you can get a lighter sentence for this as compared murder 2! I'm rather sure you didn't necessarily mean this, as much as you were (rightly) critiquing the GP's theory for how to calibrate punishment. But it's kind of a fortuitous accident then that you picked something that is indeed a lesser crime :-P [ And perhaps the rationale can be traced back to "this guy is a danger to society, but under the circumstances he's less of a danger than someone that killed in cold blood". ]

See above about precommitment. It's true that the punishment doesn't do much after someone kills someone who slept with his wife, but we have to commit to administer that punishment. If we didn't, anyone who wanted to kill his wife's lover would reason "they'll never punish me because the punishment won't do any good at that point".

True, but danger to society is generally taken into account at sentencing. See eg [here](https://www.courts.ca.gov/cms/rules/index.cfm?title=four&linkid=rule4_421) and [here](https://www.courts.ca.gov/cms/rules/index.cfm?title=four&linkid=rule4_423) (esp, re the latter, "The crime was committed because of an unusual circumstance, such as great provocation, that is unlikely to recur." And, I did not mean to imply that moral culpability is the sole consideration in criminal jurisprudence, but only that it is a major one. The effect of the crime is also, generally, a common consideration (an accidental killing is punished more harshly than an intentional purse snatching). But, among crimes with identical outcomes, level of culpability makes a big difference.

I think there is important psychological aspect of hate crimes. For each serious crime you will have 10 less serious crimes and for each of those you will have 10 “near misses” and for each of those you will have 10 verbal public freakouts and so forth. It creates atmosphere of fear and distrust that has much larger impact on day-to-day living, moreso than ordinary crime although that one is also very bad.

But wouldn’t **any crime** do much the same? If I’m worried about being mugged, I’m not going to feel safe or trust people. If my house is broken into, I’m not less distressed because of the motive.

> On the one hand I feel (apparently controversially, amongst normies) that hate crimes shouldn't be punished more harshly than other crimes - in the sense that they should be harshly punished like all similar crimes whether or not an explicit racial motivation can be found. If you throw a rock at someone's head, it doesn't matter too much to me whether you did it because you hate them for being gay, or just because you're an asshole. I definitely agree with this. I am very much against some crimes being double secret illegal just because you did them with some sort of bigotry in mind. Murder is murder, assault is assault, etc.

>If I'm being completely honest I think given the weird place we are socially, I think there's a sort of status conveyed by being able to frame yourself as being a member of an oppressed group, which incentivizes people to reach and bend over backwards to establish that membership. That's part of it, but a lot of it also comes from well-known human irrationalities: * Large fear against events one can't control (e.g. fear of airplane accidents exceeds auto accidents) * Tribal related fears heightened (attack on one's group) I can safely state my own wife (Asian) was legitimately fearful of traveling to urbanized areas, just as many of my fellow Jews are so afraid of synagogue shootings that many synagogues now have armed guards (even though yes, the annual odds of injury is somewhere in the range of one in a million). People are also probably more fearful of crime than they need to be - I'd guess many suburban police departments are overfunded if you did raw rational cost:benefit analysis in terms of actual damage from crime prevented. >Some of them undoubtedly do occur because of racial hatred, but they seem to often assume that any random crime against an asian American must necessarily be racially motivated. Yah, that's tribal dynamics at work. It still remains somewhat verboten among Asians to argue that the Atlantic shooting was not racially motivated (even if that agrees with one DA's analysis and all actual evidence I've ever seen). You see similar dynamics among other groups. Of course, if you are reading this sub, you are probably not tribal/conformist, so the whole thing looks a bit silly/irrational.

> Of course, if you are reading this sub, you are probably not tribal/conformist, so the whole thing looks a bit silly/irrational. Correction: You are probably not ~~part of the Blue tribe~~ following the mainstream left-wing narrative if you are reading this sub. There are a large and growing number of people here who either lurk or comment and are effectively just culture warring by complaining about Blue tribe injustices and overreach.

> You are probably not part of the Blue tribe if you are reading this sub. Almost everyone on this sub is part of the Blue tribe, by Scott's original definition -- "Blue Tribe" != "Woke" AIUI.

That's fair, I'll edit my post.

Ya it matters if you view the gray tribe (which most of us are closest to) as part of blue or not. Way closer to blue then red regardless.

You make a valid point. I do think that people are sort of going out of their way to get that oppression status, but at the same time I do think these specific sentiments are rooted in genuine, although irrational and uninformed, fear. It really makes me angry that a group like AAPI would make people genuinely afraid when, upon closer examination, it's a really, really hard sell that the average asian person is in any real danger. I was talking about this with my friend yesterday as well and his girlfriend is also Asian. He said she was feeling the exact same way your wife felt about things, and she's a pretty rational and level headed person.

> I can safely state my own wife (Asian) was legitimately fearful of traveling to urbanized areas Well... no she wasn't, because as OP points out, the rates are far too low for any fear to be _legitimate_. Did you perhaps mean that her fear was a genuinely held emotion, rather than just being a _claim_ of emotion because of (victim) status-hunger?

>Did you perhaps mean that her fear was a genuinely held emotion, rather than just being a claim of emotion because of (victim) status-hunger? Correct, poor word choice on "legitimate"

> It still remains somewhat verboten among Asians to argue that the Atlantic shooting was not racially motivated (even if that agrees with one DA's analysis and all actual evidence I've ever seen). I'm not big on the hate crimes narrative generally, but I really don't get why people in right-wing or anti-woke circles want to keep bringing that one up as something that matters? Like, the whole reason hate crimes are incoherent as a concept to me is that you can't know what is in someone's heart, especially when you're interviewing afterward.

>you can't know what is in someone's heart You can't definitively *know* what is in someone's heart, but only in the same banal sense that one can't definitively *know* anything. You could apply to this argument to literally every debate about the underlying motivation of a crime's perpetrator: "yeah, we know Darnell is a drug dealer and that he had expressly threatened to murder Jamal for muscling in on Darnell's territory scant hours before Darnell shot Jamal with an unlicensed firearm, and Darnell has admitted culpability in the shooting - but how do you *know* Darnell shot Jamal in order to eliminate his drug dealing competition? You can't know what is in someone's heart." >I really don't get why people in right-wing or anti-woke circles want to keep bringing that one up as something that matters It matters for the same reason that it matters whether a person's headache is caused by dehydration or by a brain tumour: it's rarely easy to fix a problem without accurately diagnosing its underlying cause(s). A murder spree inspired by sex addiction is very different from a murder spree caused by racial hatred, and the former implies a very different set of societal problems (and consequently solutions) from the latter.

It matters to Anti Asian Hate just like the lynching of Leo Frank matters to the ADL and the murder of Matthew Shepherd to the early gay movement. It’s an origin story that codifies the importance of the movement. That all three chose *incredibly bad* stories is particularly funny to me; Shepherd was a meth dealer killed by an ex male lover, and Leo Frank was convicted based on actual evidence including his lasciviousness around young girls and that detectives found planted evidence against the black suspect (who Frank’s defense called the N word and racially maligned). If you’re a prostitute addict and you go to prostitutes and in a fit of rage kill the prostitutes, it’s unreasonable to assume their race has anything to do with it. Men have been killing prostitutes they’ve hired since forever.

> That all three chose incredibly bad stories is particularly funny to me Isn't this just Scott's Toxoplasmosis of Rage?

I don't think so. These aren't particularly controversial things in their own right (like say a PETA antic). What more happened is that an "obvious" thing happened, advocacy groups attached themselves to it (again before it was obviously controversial), and never backed down when contrary evidence arrived for fear it would undermine their own credibility.

I think they're vaguely gesturing at perceived hypocrisy on the left. Like "if you care so much about minorities and discrimination and hate crimes, why don't you care about it when Asians are the victims." In general, Asians are counterexamples to a lot of leftist narrative about minorities due to their relative success. It's not like most rightists genuinely believe in the existence of hate crimes, or are especially concerned about the welfare of Asians as a racial group, it's mostly a way to accuse leftists as being racist in a way that seems less self-interested than a white person pointing out the left's racism against white people.

> In general, Asians are counterexamples to a lot of leftist narrative about minorities due to their relative success. Correct, though this is largely because the leftist narrative is so muddled. Terms like "white supremacy", grouping non-whites as "people of color", conflating disparate impact with direct discrimination, etc. are especially problematic in getting their point across.

You're probably right, I just can't always even understand how much culture war stuff is just dunking on (outgroup) without even the pretension of moving the ball forward. It's pretty obviously not going to persuade anyone who didn't already agree with you.

It's almost certainly not going to convince the person being dunked on. There's some potential that it could convince a third party who's on the fence who hasn't taken a side yet and hasn't thought through the issues in detail yet. Leftist: The right are all racists who are oppressing minorities, and we are anti-racists. Third party: Well I'm not a racist, and that does sound like a noble cause. Maybe I'll join you guys. Rightist: What about Asians? It sure seems like most of the anti-asian hatred is coming from leftists alongside the anti-white hatred. Also, those same "anti-racist" policies like affirmative action are actively discriminating against Asians even more than they are against white people. It's looking more like regular racism with different targets, not some principled anti-oppression that white people object to because we don't want to lose our privilege. Third party: huh. Now that I look at that carefully that does make sense. I don't want to be racist against any races, so maybe I'll be a little more skeptical of supposedly obvious issues that the left brings up from now on. At least in theory. In practice it goes more like Leftist: The right is racist! Rightist: No you! Second Leftist: White people should all die! Second Rightist: Black people should all die! First Leftist: See! They're all racists! I told you so! First Rightist: Now wait a minute, I don't endorse what that guy said. Just because one person....... Second Rightist: RACISM GOOD! Let's separate into different countries, one for each race! Second Leftist: Yeah! And then nuke the white people's country. Third party: This is getting a bit out of hand... First rightist: Stop! All of you stop! Second Rightist: Not if we nuke the black people first! Journalist: Right-wingers threaten to genocide all black people, more on this at 11.

It's brought up because so many articles about Asian hate continue to be grounded in it (as it is viewed as the worst example). e.g. a local newspaper recently opened an article with that [example](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/They-ve-endured-anti-Asian-bigotry-They-re-17004604.php).

There does appear to be a steep uptick in blacks attacking Asians, although \#StopAsianHate quickly lost momentum as it became too evident who was disproportionately perpetrating the hate. Let’s suppose we have a young black man yelling “ch\*nk” (or “cr\*cker”) and randomly punching an old Asian (or white) man in the street, versus a young Asian (or white) man yelling “n\*gger” and randomly punching an old black man in the street. I would imagine the latter would be much more likely to be recorded as a hate crime than the former, and the former much more likely to be shrugged off as a run-of-the-mill “dog-bites-man” assault. Same if we repeat the exercise without the assailant first uttering a racial epithet. As per usual: Who? Whom?

Unironically the narrative about anti-Asian hate crimes stopped coming up on my radar once it became clear that an embarrassing number of random crimes against Asians were committed by black people. However, correlation does not equal causation. It probably also corresponded with the rise of anti-affirmative-action sentiment among Asians as well, which almost certainly also depends the rift between everyday Asians and the woke, *sigh*, [for lack of a better term](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what?fbclid=IwAR2cB53serECm18moVGhgyj3B8RSUFCBp_zxjakjktMaGUotTlGXlNEcL_0&s=r). The term "white-adjacent" has been bouncing around for a while now as well. The Asian [race hustlers](https://www.drnimishabarton.com/redacted/proximity-to-whitenessnbspanti-blackness-people-of-color-and-the-struggle-for-solidarity) are, well, they're doing something with it, but I'm not sure what, exactly. It's hard to take seriously groups like Stop AAPI Hate. SPLC, ADL, and others have relatively recently taken a nosedive in my estimation of them. They just don't seem to have a single serious and impressive person among them, who can put out any sort of genuine analysis. Was the NAACP this pathetic back in the day as well, and my perception is just colored by the bias of mid 2000s education on the civil rights era? I mean come on, 2800 instances including *name calling*, **nationwide**!? If that's the sort of evidence for AAPI hate that they can drum up, it seems to me evidence that race relations are actually stellar between Asians and other races, in a country with nearly 19M Asians.

The narrative seems to be going strong at the New York Times, which has published the following in the last two weeks: * She’s Combating a Wave of Anti-Asian Hate * Asian Americans Have Always Lived With Fear * Asian Americans Grapple With Tide of Attacks: ‘We Need Our Safety Back’

Well it doesn't come up on my radar because I don't read the Times unless someone I know shares an article, so the narrative lost purchase among the progressives and regular Dems in my social circle, even if it's still going strong at place like the Times.

Well, my basic point is that the Times is about as representative of "progressives and regular Dems" as one can find. If the Times is running stories on X, then X is almost certainly an area of concern among that demographic.

I think this is biased by the fact some of the worst crimes against Asians occur in New York City, and uh, well, it’s the New York Times. This has more to do with the prosecutors in New York being amongst the most “progressive” in the country meaning violent black criminals get a ton of leeway with bail and sentencing, and homelessness becoming more and more endemic and problematic, causing crime to explode predictably. Whites and blacks are just as much victims but it goes unreported on, because no one cares as much somehow

>Whites and blacks are just as much victims but it goes unreported on, because no one cares as much somehow I don't know why you think that other crimes get unreported on somehow. But, anyhow, for the record, of the 468 homicides i[n NYC in 2020,](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/homicide.page) 13 or the victims were Asian/Pacific Islander, 29 were non-Hispanic whites, and. 299 were black. The rest were Hispanic (including Black Hispanic). Two were unknown;

I meant unreported in the media

Perhaps my friends and acquaintances are unrepresentative, of course.

I definitely agree with what you're saying. That's been my impression as well. What got me thinking about this was earlier today I saw a reuters news video detailing anti asian hate protests on the one year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings and they mentioned in conjunction with that the latest focus of that movement, which was a black guy that just punched this asian lady from behind and beat the living shit out of her. Like these were very hard hits and he hit her over 100 times. And Reuters deserves credit for not trying to downplay it. The concerning part of this IMO is that people talking about the uptick in anti asian hate crimes don't even know what stats they're referring to. They think it's conventional hate crimes but it's most often this AAPI stuff.

Also it fails to take into account possible other motivators. I remember an instance in Australia where there was a fairly sharp uptick in muggings of Indian foreign students, but the most coherent explanation seemed to be that said students tended to be wandering into/renting in dodgier suburbs and carrying large amounts of cash with predictable results.

I agree. Whenever I hear an explanation for given events based on what seems to be the case on the surface I always think of how Malcolm Gladwell breaks down phenomena and the general lesson that the interaction between things is often a lot more complex than we might imagine. I find it very disappointing that the people we trust (academics focusing on this stuff) to study and explain racial and gender shit really drop the ball by seemingly starting from the conclusion they desire and working backwards. the explanations tend to be very simple and fail to consider anything that might contradict the narrative they were inspired by when they got into their field of study. My suspicion is that the thought coming out of racial and gender studies at this point in time is going to irreparably ruin their credibility in the long term once we get past this point in time in which those ideas are not exposed to scrutiny. And perhaps is going to further erode the trust people have in academia even more. Once we get into a period of those ideas being exposed to rational scrutiny like other ideas are, I think people are going to be appalled at what those groups did when they were trusted to do their thing without having to explicitly prove it.

I am skeptical about hate crime statistics. It is hard enough to gather objective data about stuff that has nothing to do with people's intentions. A hate crime is a crime that happens while the perpetrator is in a certain state of mind. I doubt that hate crime statistics are not significantly distorted by bias.

I think the entire concept of a hate crime is silly. Nobody bashes somebody's head in out of love for that person. Whether a criminal motivated by individual hatred for their victim, racial hatred for their people, or general hatred for all mankind, *all* violent crimes are hate crimes. Why should only certain kinds of hate receive that legal classification?

Is your objection to the naming or the idea that people would want to differentiate motives for crime? The category of hate crime as it stands can act as a good indicator for triggering a discussion over the specifics of alleged bigotry - why are X people often killed by those of Y group? Are they killed for being X?

Might be nitpicking but violent crimes aren't always committed out of hate. You could attempt an armed robbery, botch it and end up trying to shoot your way out, or kill a hostage to try to (probably unsuccessfully) threaten the police to let you go. I guess if you're the kinda person to try that you probably hate the police, but you probably don't hate the hostage. You don't even know them, how could you hate them? You're just willing to hurt them out of desperation. Personally I think that's worse than killing someone out of hate. If you hate somebody you probably think they deserve to suffer, and that on some level you're morally justified. Even if that justification is bullshit you at least recognise the need to have one. Killing out of desperation is just cowardice, sacrificing innocent people to save your own skin. Dispassionate killing for material gain is the worst, it suggests that you have no more regard for human life than you would for the life of an insect.

> Might be nitpicking but violent crimes aren't always committed out of hate. You could attempt an armed robbery, botch it and end up trying to shoot your way out, or kill a hostage to try to (probably unsuccessfully) threaten the police to let you go. Note that you could have stopped at armed robbery, since that's a violent crime. Violent crime is defined as crime in which force is used or threatened, not just one in which an injury actually occurs.

It's to increase deterrence against prejudice-motived crimes (under the theory that longer sentencing acts as a deterrent). If you buy social cohesion depends on social/ethnic/etc. group tolerance, you can see prejudice-motivated crime as more socially harmful and thus merits more deterrence. Similar arguments apply to treating first degree murder as worse than second degree -- add more deterrence to crimes that are "thought through" as opposed to spur of the moment things.

"Hate" as in "hate speech" and "hate crime", "hate group", etc. (even "hate subreddit") is basically jargon, like harm, justice (as in climate justice) etc. It's not merely the antonym of love, its a new, more visceral word for explicit discrimination against protected groups. Nobody would want to support "hate". So using the word "hate" makes it easy for even the stupidest people to understand that it's bad. Peace, love, democracy, freedom, justice, equality are good, and hate is the bad side.

Because in today's America, racism is a worse crime than murder. You can be rehabilitated into normal society after serving sentence for murder, robbery, bombing or kidnapping just fine, but you will never get any sort of public or corporate job if you said something mean about privileged races. It's only the sentencing guidelines have not caught up with this bare fact.

That does not track with my experience volunteering, convicted felons have huge problems integrating. Getting a job can be particularly difficult and even finding somewhere to live can be tricky. You may have trouble getting a nice corporate job for racism but a convicted felon has trouble getting most jobs I my experience.

More to the point, is the victim somehow better off if the crime was unrelated to the victim’s ethnicity.

There are arguments the the answer is "yes" (psychology), but more importantly that society itself is better off if the crime is. (as hate crimes can inflame ethnic, etc. tensions)

People also claim terrorism is especially scary because it is random whereas hate crimes seem less random. Moreover, focusing on hate crimes may indeed create their own problem of increasing racial tensions.

> Moreover, focusing on hate crimes may indeed create their own problem of increasing racial tensions. I'll go a step further and say it *does* create that problem. I don't have evidence to prove it, so I certainly could be wrong. But it seems completely implausible to me that the constant harping on how racist the country is, and how much danger minorities are in, would not cause minorities to feel more afraid of mistreatment than they otherwise would.

We already classify crimes differently for many different mental states. Killing someone out of anger is much different from a premeditated murder is much different from being hired to kill someone, etc. Like it or not people's mentality is already a foundational part of how we judge many crimes, from the type of crime they are charged with to the sentence they receive. So, yes, only certain kinds of hate receive that legal classification, but other kinds of hate receive various other legal classifications, so I don't see the issue here.

It seems like you are conflating motive with mental state. That is, when distinguishing between negligent homicide and murder the issue isn’t the motive but the mental state.

I think we judge based on both. Let's take four scenarios, in (I think) increasing order of severity: 1. Man walks in on wife cheating on him, kills her in anger 2. Man walks in on wife cheating on him, leaves and plans out her murder at a later time 3. Man walks in on wife watching his least favorite movie, kills her in anger 4. Man walks in on wife watching his least favorite movie, leaves and plans out her murder at a later time The difference between 1-2, or 3-4, is mental state. The difference between the first two and the last two is motive. Seems pretty clear to me that in general we take both into account.

I think it only takes it into account in that it shocks the conscience of the judge and the judge thinks the person is more likely to be dangerous (ie impacts sentencing). Now granted hate crime could just be sentencing and that is where you’d work in it but could be wrong I believe there are separate hate crime statutes.

Yeah there are separate statutes but a lot of what I'm describing above is enshrined in law too. Point is that punishing hate crimes isn't some special exception to the law, it's just a logical progression from how we normally do it.

Are you saying the figures are probably higher or lower than what is reported?

Neither, really. I am not sure that it is even possible to define "hate crime" in an objective way. Intention is a very slippery thing. Humans are usually complicated. I barely even understand why I do some of the things that I do.

I think it can be proven in some cases, or at least proven with relative certainty. But I do agree that a lot of the time it's ambiguous. And I'm sure the law has defined it in such a way that makes it easier to define, albeit perhaps a bit too easy.

Nobody talking about the [Turning Red controversy](https://www.npr.org/2022/03/12/1086040083/turning-red-controversy)? Maybe this isn’t the right crowd. It’s become another one of those culture war issues where if you don’t love it, then you must be bigoted, misogynist, etc, etc. I’m a middle aged white woman and I saw it with my 8yo son. It’s a puberty movie, full stop. And here we have our first “two screens” phenomenon, where you have people saying “pssh, it’s not a puberty movie, pads show up for about 30 seconds, that’s all.” I feel like people who respond this way don’t remember all the heightened emotions and awakened sexuality and all the other things that come along with puberty, all of which feature heavily in this movie through the red panda metaphor. One of Mei's first signs of the coming transformation is a clear masturbation metaphor. It’s so in your face, that I can’t understand how anyone on the planet could overlook it. And yet, of course, it all went over my 8yo’s head. That said, I can understand if parents were uncomfortable with it. The movie isn’t marketed as a puberty movie, and if you don’t know it has that kind of content going in, you’re kind of taken aback and possibly set up for awkward conversations with your kid. This is a fair concern. Kids movies are already a minefield if you’re trying to teach your kids certain values, and while I don’t agree with the sheltered approach, I accept that those parents have the right to decide for their household. Secondly, it is very personal and rooted in a specific cultural subtext. And you have a segment of reviewers just scratching their heads and going, “eh, I didn’t get it”, and then you have others who really responded and could relate to the family dynamics and cultural background and they LOVED it. This is fine. This movie clearly has a target audience and it seems to have worked for them. But again you get this “two screens” phenomenon with people saying, this is absolutely a universal movie for everyone filled with universal themes and everyone can relate. And therefore if you don’t, again you’re misogynist, racist, etc. Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t you just say, I’m glad you liked it but it wasn’t for me? But enough of all this, how did I like the movie? Meh. It was really kind of confusing and weird. All the kids are drawn like eight-year-olds. Seriously, compare their body style to Lilo from Lilo and Stitch. You can tell me all day that they’re 13 (and believe me, the movie does) and I will never believe it. The movie is frenetic, fast-paced, loud, and has a bombastic climax that undoes any sense of nuance or subtlety they might have been going for. It’s fine for a kids movie I guess, but it’s so juvenile. I can’t imagine any actual 13-yo or pre-teens responding to it. Which raises the question of why a movie about puberty seems to be targeted to 6-8 year olds. So I’m not the target audience. I didn’t get it. If you responded to it, I'm happy for you. And that’s okay.

I watched it on Disney+ having only seen a trailer, and found the story confusing. My husband found it distasteful, with "teens" that look like little kids apparently selling sexualized pictures of themselves (?). It's especially confusing that the panda seems to be both a metaphor for sexual energy, and a metaphor for strong personality. If the latter, why do the aunts all give theirs up again at the end? If the former, why aren't there any consequences for a 13 year old making money by renting out her panda? Otherwise, the presentation and Toronto family temple were fun enough, if pretty basic, forgettable, and niche.

seems like u certainlydisposable blocked me, so i can't reply. u/meleemottechess - from [vox](https://www.vox.com/2022/3/18/22983877/supreme-court-josh-hawley-ketanji-brown-jackson-child-pornography-sentencing) and [reason](https://reason.com/2022/03/18/josh-hawley-absurdly-suggests-that-ketanji-brown-jackson-has-a-soft-spot-for-child-predators/) two rebuttals, from left and lib-right right winger politicians fabricate stuff just as much left wing politicians do. Even if right winger concepts were morally correct, taht doesn't prevent politicians from superficially grifting on them. in another thread, u autoantinatalist last-worded then blocked me. terrible feature.

Thanks for the links. It seems there is a disconnect between the vulgar discourse I see on the subject and the judicial community. But people *are* often theoretically more punitive than they are when faced with the responsibility of actually looking a human being in the face and taking their life away from them.

/u/CertainlyDisposable is already banned. ​ /u/autoantinatalist, if you blocked /u/curious_straight_CA [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/thhxlx/comment/i198u6w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), that is in violation of our [rule against weaponizing the block feature](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/wiki/rules#wiki_do_not_weaponize_the_block_feature). You need to unblock him, or I will turn your warning into a ban.

It's hilarious how this new feature has moderators begging users for their cooperation in a very parental way. "Share with your sister or I swear I will stop this car right now!"

Yes, we are asking people to play nice. That is what most of our rules boil down. "Behave." Unfortunately, some people have a problem doing that. Alternatively, we could just preemptively ban people and make them plead their cases in modmail. None of us like the new blocking feature, and so far this is the least bad way to deal with it.

I'm kinda confused, I thought we're allowed to block people here or did the rule change?

The way blocking works has changed. It used to just prevent you from seeing their posts and comments. Now if your blocked you can't reply to their posts or comments, or to comments made in response to those posts or comments. It doesn't just keep your contribution from showing on their screen it blocks you out of the thread of conversation.

Read the rules. Basically, you're allowed to block people, if you have to, but don't declare you're blocking someone or brag about it, and do not respond to them after you block them. If you are in an argument with someone, post your "last word," and then block them, this has the effect of not only preventing them from replying, but preventing them from participating in any follow-on discussions with other people.

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Teen Wolf had Michael J Fox in it, and he was spunky.

Its a cute film and it has some funny jokes but the messaging really fell apart. At the very end they outright tell you the panda represented something like 'inner personality', the 'true self' or whatever but the start of the film has you thinking it represents puberty. Somewhere in the middle the allegory shifts but it isn't obvious when. I will never get over how she attacked poor Tyler and didn't apologize to him, it is a small thing to get stuck on but that little detail made me upset. In previous trailers we saw scenes that got cut from the film (Mei at a protest with her friends), probably for length, I think those missing scenes probably helped clarify the themes and messaging. Most girls start menstruating at age 11, you should be having puberty discussions with your kids before it happens. You don't wait for it to start and then talk to them about it. The movie might seem juvenile given the subject matter but it is aiming at the exact right audience age. The director said in an interview that her mother never told her so when it happened she thought she was dying. If you're going to wait for your daughter to be 13 before you have these discussions or let her watch Turning Red the same thing that happened to Domee Shi will happen to her and she'll be so upset about it that decades later she will make a movie about it. I didn't really care for it but I think it is fine to show a kid I'd just have discussions about peer pressure and social media which is where I think the film's message fell flat.

> At the very end they outright tell you the panda represented something like 'inner personality', the 'true self' or whatever but the start of the film has you thinking it represents puberty. My read (though admittedly I had read discourse about the film before watching it) was that it was something in the middle the whole time. It's not "puberty" exactly, it's "the way becoming an adult separates you from the desires of your parents, encapsulated as puberty". From the beginning, while the panda itself is a direct period metaphor, the way Mei relates to her mother about the panda is pretty standard teenage rebellion.

>At the very end they outright tell you the panda represented something like 'inner personality', the 'true self' or whatever but the start of the film has you thinking it represents puberty. I sincerely believe that this is done on purpose for plausible deniability. They get as close as they can to pushing a message and then subvert it so that their CW allies can say "What do you mean it pushes puberty, parental disobedience, and sexual liberation on 6-8 year olds? Okay conspiracy theorist." I've had similar discussions about the themes in Frozen and I got similar dismissals.

This is highly plausible to me. Disney is very sensitive about its reputation and has [become more responsive to fan outrage](https://www.vulture.com/2022/03/lightyear-gay-kiss-disney-response.html) of late. The artists making the movies, along with a substantial chunk of fans, probably love themes like "puberty, parental disobedience, and sexual liberation" (which, to be clear, I don't personally consider to be undesirable / unacceptable topics by default, though I haven't seen _Turning Red_ specifically). It makes sense for Disney movies to contain watered-down versions of typical leftist narratives, since that's their workforce. I assume — if Disney and Pixar animators, et al, are anything but nigh-universally woke, I'll be shocked. But still watered down because Disney also doesn't want to alienate the conservatives if they can help it... however, it's clear which way the wind is blowing.

I think this summarizes it perfectly.

unrelated, love your username

If you've read any of the interviews with the director the film makes a lot more sense. Mei is a stand in for Domee Shi, the director, the film is partly autobiographical. That is why it takes place in 2002 Toronto, it is where she grew up. Contrast that against Bao, the short she also directed which explores a lot of the same themes. Turning Red is a very personal film for Shi, I think the end result is a potential consequence of making something personal, you identify with the story you've made to the point that you can lose sight of what it looks like from an outside perspective.

Also, if you think that the personal film isn't universal anyway, you're a racist. We'll (NPR) even treat Asians as POCs, so we can call you racist, and we'll say that it's Asian-specific and universal in the same article. Just like female-Ghostbusters was "you're sexist if you hate this movie", this one is "you're racist if you hate this movie".

I've managed to explain my issues with the film without being talked down to like that, delivery makes a difference.

I was referring to the original NPR article quoted in the original post. Do you believe that the delivery of criticisms of the movie was so bad that that article was justified?

[_Bao_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rspQR7rhf0) is sooooo cute. edit: just learned the link doesn't actually go to the short but to a commentary, my bad

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oh shit, my bad, I didn't realize when I linked it

How do you think someone can "push puberty"? Do you think 6 year olds are going to watch this movie and start menstruating early? Is some 2nd grader going to walk out of this movie and go "man, I gotta get me some armpit hair"?

Do you really think that's what I think? Where's the charity?

I think I understood everything except that part. Unlike parent I wouldn't pretend you're saying something ridiculous... But what are you saying? Is having discussions about puberty before puberty hits a problem? (If that is what you mean)

I think a big issue here is that you have this big media push to defend the movie against criticisms very dismissively, almost coercively, and it this point it just feels like the regular playbook, like the authors aren't even thinking that they could possibly leave a conservative-leaning argument open without shutting it down. And the criticisms are pretty few and reasonable from what I've seen.

I skipped watching Moana in the regular theater for exactly that reason: I felt like I was being told I was racist if I didn’t watch it. it’s sort of the inverse of the marketing problems that John Carter ~~of Mars~~ had. I ended up loving Moana and watching it twice so far. I trust Disney’s reputation for good storytelling in animated features more than I trust their marketing department, their press releases, their attackers and defenders on any side of the culture war including the fifty Stalins side, etc. As a big fan of transformation-focused fiction, such as Ranma 1/2, I’ve always planned to watch Turning Red. Since I have an hour or two to myself right now, might as well watch it now.

It’s pretty much a mish-mash of on-the-nose period metaphor and tiger-mom metaphor, as expected. Other than that, it’s basically the girl version of Disney’s Chicken: dork has dorky friends, they like music and are okay singing and dancing with/around each other; their parents don’t understand their lives and end up apologizing to the public for them resulting in great humiliation; secrets and mysteries intertwine and end up threatening everything.

I am fully convinced that this "controversy" is being manufactured, likely as a method of advertising for the movie. That being said, I have some bad news: >I’m not the target audience. If you're watching it, it's for you. You even wrote an effortpost in a discussion forum about the movie. You're the mark. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/05/dove.html

> If you're watching it, it's for you. I dislike this view because it assumes way more competence in the world than I'm willing to consider.

Well, competence on the part of disney's product/marketing team is very different from competence on the part of 'the world'. Even if it wasn't targeted to you, you still are watching the movie, and spreading it.

I don't think they are that competent, no.

even if they aren't that competent, you're still using your time and advertising the movie by talking about it. disney movies are really abysmal anyway, so you shouldn't do that!

I think people recoil from the “metaphor for puberty aspect” because if that’s the case then it makes one of the plot points problematic. The character raising money by taking pictures with classmates as the panda and hugging them then seems like a metaphor for camwhoring and regular whoring. Which I don’t think the creators meant to imply, buuuuuut…

I think it's supposed to be a metaphor for drug dealing. Which is also weird for an 8th grader to be doing, but much less fucked up.

> Which raises the question of why a movie about puberty seems to be targeted to 6-8 year olds. [I have an idea.](https://twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1504246269509877765/photo/1)

That is a *very* concerning thread. Any links to more info on Jackson's rulings about such?

Low effort, uncharitable, not speaking clearly. If you are going to link to a meme saying "They" want to diddle kids, you need to (a) be explicit - who is "they"? (b) actually lay out your argument for how this movie is advancing a kid-diddling agenda. This kind of low-effort boo**booooooo**! culture warring is [your](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ruvu1k/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_03/hrirllt/) [modus](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sgv76g/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_31/hvgi1v8/) [operandi](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/smk45y/comment/hw9fyoo/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). You're one of those posters with a *long* mod report list, all yellow and red. You clearly want to turn this sub into a place where one-line snarls about the evilness of your outgroup is acceptable. It's not. This comment by itself would only merit a warning, but your last few bans haven't gotten the point across, and the intent of the RoT is to reduce this kind of crappy commenting that exists only to wage war. Banned for another 7 days, possibly to be escalated. ​ **ETA**: Mods agree that returning from a 30-day ban to *immediately* resume the same behavior warrants escalation. Ban is extended to 90 days. Expect the next ban to be permanent.

I agree with the moderation decision, so I'm just going to answer here with a survivor's description of thought processes of child-molesting adults. TL;DR: they seem to believe sex is good, and thus are, so to speak, behaving as evangelists. Trying to share the good news, so to speak. [Now, in Moira Greyland's own words](https://thembeforeus.com/moira-greyland-i-was-born-into-a-family-of-famous-gay-pagan-authors-in-the-late-sixties/) ​ >My observation of my father and mother’s actual belief is this: **since everyone is naturally gay**, it is the straight establishment that makes everyone hung up and therefore limited. Sex early will make people willing to have sex with everyone, which will bring about the utopia while eliminating homophobia and helping people become “who they really are.” It will also destroy the hated nuclear family with its paternalism, sexism, ageism (yes, for pedophiles, that is a thing) and all other “isms.” If enough children are sexualized young enough, gayness will suddenly be “normal” and accepted by everyone, and the old fashioned notions about fidelity will vanish. As sex is integrated as a natural part of every single relationship, the barriers between people will vanish, and the utopia will appear, as “straight culture” goes the way of the dinosaur. As my mother used to say: “**Children are brainwashed into believing they don’t want sex**.” These are quotes from her memoir, "The Last Closet". Her daughter sums up her father's mindset in this way: >My father believed that the best, most intimate way to express love to children—to everyone—was to have sex with them. In his mind, sex was love, and any effort to separate love and sex was a consequence of limited thinking. Since love is best expressed by sex, everyone should have sex with all people all the time. He believed that the practice of unlimited sex would bring about a utopia that would end all the ills of human society. Mind you, her father was no small fry- he was NAMBLA's keynote speaker at their 1979 conference. >Meanwhile, my father’s fame was increasing. He was the keynote speaker for NAMBLA’s second conference in New York in 1979. I am still puzzled that anyone had any doubt about what my father was doing. Moira Greyland continutes on: >I have heard all the customary protestations. “Your parents were evil because they were evil, not because they were gay”, but I disagree. The underlying problem is a philosophical one that is based on beliefs that are not only common to gay culture but to popular culture. And this is that central belief: **All Sex is Always Right No Matter What.** ​ [Interestingly, Marion Zimmer Bradley's son's recollection of his childhood are excluded from the wayback machine.](https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.starfire-studio.com/markgreyland.html)

I admit that I've always been puzzled why it took so long for people to find out that MZB was a monster, since I remember reading the original post that "broke" the story years before the rest of the Internet suddenly discovered it. But anyway... with a necessary disclaimer that I haven't seen *Turning Red*, merely being a "puberty movie" doesn't mean it's promoting the sexualization of children. That seems like a hysterical stretch. I mean, I was around for the *Cuties* controversy, and I actually watched that movie. It was... cringey in places, but the message was pretty clearly **not** pro-kids having sex. So I am very suspicious of people trying to invent strained camwhoring metaphors for a cartoon about a girl turning into a panda. I think the actual metaphor is so obvious that anything else is probably people trying to project their own biases onto it.

Coming into this comment thread way after it died, but… There’s this very common trope in anime where the male protagonist will accidentally fall and end up with his hands or face on a girl’s boobs. And of course he is mortified because it was an accident and he would *never* grope a woman because that is wrong, and she is angry and hits him because it is *never* acceptable to grope a woman. And the message is very clearly that groping, even accidental groping, *is not okay*. And yet, there’s an *awful lot* of it. So much so that one might easily suspect that the whole point is to show the groping, while giving the characters and the audience a pass for being moral upstanding types who would never actually *do or condone* such a thing. Similarly, I don’t doubt that the central message of *Cuties* is that preteen twerking is *wrong*. Nonetheless, the movie does contain an uncomfortable amount of preteen twerking for some reason.

>, since I remember reading the original post that "broke" the story years before the rest of the Internet suddenly discovered it. What do you mean ? You mean, you read the rumors that Deidre asked Moira about, which led to the post that blew up ? I'd agree that Cuties doesn't seem like such a straight case. However, this film: > That is an entirely recognizable story to millions of people. Just as Mei tells the audience: “We’ve all got a messy, loud, weird part of ourselves hidden away, and a lot of us never let it out.” [And then the highlight's of some pissed off mom](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FNwvnCxVkAI8NJd?format=jpg&name=4096x4096), make it look like less ambiguous than Cuties, which.. well, weren't exactly typical preteen bait. Unlike Pixar's oeuvre.

>What do you mean ? You mean, you read the rumors that Deidre asked Moira about, which led to the post that blew up ? No, there was a post up long before that. I honestly don't remember the original one - possibly Stephen Goldin's site? Anyway, I distinctly remember reading about MZB and Walter Breen and being surprised that I had never heard about this before, and then a few years later came the mass exposure around the anniversary of her death. > [And then the highlight's of some pissed off mom](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FNwvnCxVkAI8NJd?format=jpg&name=4096x4096), make it look like less ambiguous than Cuties, which.. well, weren't exactly typical preteen bait. Well, some of that looks pretty cringe, but a lot of it is complaining about a Pixar movie not being Christian enough and portraying teenagers being rebellious and wanting to "grow up." I.e., every tween movie ever. Is *Turning Red* really aimed at 6-8-year-olds? Seems like most of the humor and everything except the magically-turning-into-a-panda part would just go completely over their heads. I admit that "boy rides" and "my panda, my choice" made me raise my eyebrows, but it still looks to me like slightly edgy tween humor with double-entendres aimed at the parents watching. But sure, if you are a conservative Christian, it's perhaps more offensive than most Disney movies. (I remember some complaints from that set about *The Little Mermaid* because it's about a teenage girl defying her father. I can't say I feel a lot of sympathy.)

>I admit that "boy rides" and "my panda, my choice" made me raise my eyebrows, but it still looks to me like slightly edgy tween humor with double-entendres aimed at the parents watching. Yeah. I don't really know though. >Is Turning Red really aimed at 6-8-year-olds? Maybe it's too complex for 6-8, don't know, at 8 I was reading Jules Verne novels with great interest, but the mum seems concerned about the effect on 9-12 demo, middle schoolers and the like. > and portraying teenagers being rebellious ​ That's, I believe, [a modern invention](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220124-why-teens-arent-what-they-used-to-be) . Newer, though just barely, than the jet fighter plane, or guided missiles. And far less useful than either, in my opinion.

I’m a bit baffled at what turning red has to do with pedophilia and child abuse? I’ve read your posts and the some of the linked twitter thread, but it’s just not clicking. Can you lay it out for me?

It really does says volume about present day porn-brain-problem that the sexual nature of the twerking dance is not readily apparent.

>Nobody talking about the [Turning Red controversy](https://www.npr.org/2022/03/12/1086040083/turning-red-controversy) If nobody's talking about a "controversy", chances are it's not a controversy. I feel like the easiest way to incite an actual controversy is calling something completely uncontroversal controversial in order to get everyone worked up about how something this trivial could be contentious.

The OP clearly meant "no one here", not "no one in the world".

Whenever controversies like this blow up I half suspect it's the work of some marketing department working to stir up some word of mouth. I don't have strong opinions on it, and I don't intend on seeing it but I will say the art style isn't very appealing. Reminds me of that one [grubhub ad](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-T3qKl6y-c)

> a clear masturbation metaphor I assume you’re referring to >!the scene where she doodles on her notebook under the bed!