Dogs And Wolves: In Defense Of Some Past Posts

Now that Trump has started enacting his terrible policies, a bunch of people on Twitter are saying that my past posts on Trump “haven’t aged well” or that I must be feeling really bad about them right now.

I’ve never been the slightest bit of a Trump supporter. Since he came onto the national stage, I have called Trump “a bad president”, “randomly and bizarrely terrible”, “an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host”, and “an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue”. I’ve accused him of “bizarre, divisive, ill-advised, and revolting” rhetoric, worried that his election might “lead directly to the apocalypse [or] the fall of American democracy”, and called his administration “a disaster”. I’ve urged blog readers to vote for literally anyone except him and to donate money to the ACLU to stop him. If you want to accuse me of being pro-Trump, or even lukewarm on disliking Trump, I don’t know what else to tell you.

But I still seem to be getting flak on two points.

First, in Against Dog-Whistleism, I condemned the practice of overinterpreting candidates’ statements to secretly reveal evil beliefs and policies that they support more strongly than their stated platform:

Although dog whistles do exist…politicians’ beliefs and plans are best predicted by what they say their beliefs and plans are, or possibly what beliefs and plans they’ve supported in the past, or by anything other than treating their words as a secret code and trying to use them to infer that their real beliefs and plans are diametrically opposite the beliefs and plans they keep insisting that they hold and have practiced for their entire lives.

Believers in dog whistles are saying I have egg on my face because Trump just passed a law banning immigrants from some Muslim countries. Clearly, (they say) this means we should have listened to his dog whistles all along.

But this is dead wrong. Trump openly said throughout his campaign that he planned to ban immigrants from some Muslim countries. See for example Bloomberg, June 25: Trump Says Muslim Ban Plan To Focus On ‘Terrorist’ Countries. Trump has been saying this openly for seven months. If you didn’t know Trump wanted this, it’s not because he was being cryptic about it. It was because you were too busy chasing down his “dog whistles” about how he secretly hated Jews to listen to him.

Second, people are saying that my post You Are Still Crying Wolf has been debunked, since Trump has banned immigrants from some Muslim countries, and so is obviously the KKK-loving white supremacist that I argued he wasn’t.

Look, guys. I specifically said in that post that I knew he was going to ban people from some Muslim countries, and that when he did, that would be consistent with my model:

13. Doesn’t Trump want to ban (or “extreme vet”, or whatever) Muslims entering the country?

Yes, and this is awful.

But why do he (and his supporters) want to ban/vet Muslims, and not Hindus or Kenyans, even though most Muslims are white(ish) and most Hindus and Kenyans aren’t? Trump and his supporters are concerned about terrorism, probably since the San Bernardino shooting and Pulse nightclub massacre dominated headlines this election season.

You can argue that he and his supporters are biased for caring more about terrorism than about furniture-related injuries, which kill several times more Americans than terrorists do each year. But do you see how there’s a difference between “cognitive bias that makes you unreasonably afraid” versus “white supremacy”?

I agree that this is getting into murky territory and that a better answer here would be to deconstruct the word “racism” into a lot of very heterogenous parts, one of which means exactly this sort of thing. But as I pointed out in Part 4, a lot of these accusations shy away from the word “racism” precisely because it’s an ambiguous thing with many heterogenous parts, some of which are understandable and resemble the sort of thing normal-but-flawed human beings might think. Now they say “KKK white nationalism” or “overt white supremacy”. These terms are powerful exactly because they do not permit the gradations of meaning which this subject demands.

Let me say this for the millionth time. I’m not saying Trump doesn’t have some racist attitudes and policies. I am saying that talk of “entire campaign built around white supremacy” and “the white power candidate” is deliberate and dangerous exaggeration. Lots of people (and not just whites!) are hasty to generalize from “ISIS is scary” to “I am scared of all Muslims”. This needs to be called out and fought, but it needs to be done in an understanding way, not with cries of “KKK WHITE SUPREMACY!”

Apparently saying it a million times is not enough for some people. I’m afraid there’s a mood affiliation effect going on here – that if I say Trump didn’t cause 9-11, then people can only hear “SCOTT SAYS TRUMP ISN’T THAT BAD!”. Arguments aren’t soldiers, and Trump can both not cause 9-11 and be bad for lots of other reasons.

So I stick to what I’ve said before. Trump is a bad person, a bad president, and probably a disaster for America and the world. If you want to know what Trump is going to do, you should listen to what he specifically says he is going to do, and then expect things vaguely in that direction except worse. Trump’s policies are often motivated by racism of the everyday bias-towards-being-more-scared-of-terrorists-than-the-situation-warrants sort, but he does not have an ideological belief in white supremacy or take marching orders from the KKK. If you want to fight him, I recommend you fight him, not subtweet bloggers who warned you this was going to happen and then told you not to exaggerate it because reality was going to be scary enough.

I made predictions about how the Trump administration would go, which you can find on the Predictions tab above. If you disagree with me about any of this, use your beliefs to make different predictions, record them, and see if you do better than I do. Do enough better and I’ll admit I was wrong and you were right.

But if you tell me on Twitter I’m wrong because my model of Trump could never predict the things I specifically predicted when laying out the model, I’m not going to pay very much attention to you.

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716 Responses to Dogs And Wolves: In Defense Of Some Past Posts

  1. IvanFyodorovich says:

    I agree with Scott on most points but I felt like Point 13 was the weakest in the older post. “He’s not a racist because Muslims aren’t a race” is technically true but verges on sophistry. Would you prefer “bigot”? He’s not a racist, just a bigot.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      No, my point wasn’t that Muslims aren’t a race. My point was that “racist” has a bunch of meanings, all the way from “believes that Asians are better at math than whites” to “wants to kill all the Jews”, and that Trump supports some things in the middle of that spectrum but not at the far end.

      • IvanFyodorovich says:

        That’s fair, but you claimed that “There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter)” and banning Muslims certainly is a lot more bigoted than anything I can think of for any other post-Wallace general election candidate (at least if we exclude gay rights issues, which have moved really fast). Yes it’s not KKK-level of bigotry, but it’s a lot worse than anything I can think of from Romney/Bush/Dole etc. Yes he has a rationale, but so do unambiguous racists. The only plausible “he’s not racist” argument is your point that some Muslims are white.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Really? You think banning immigrants from a few countries that sort of look like state sponsors of terrorism if you squint is worse than invading and bombing a few countries that sort of look like state sponsors of terrorism if you squint?

          • IvanFyodorovich says:

            I’m referring to his proposed ban on Muslim entry (which he phrased as a ban on Muslims, and remained that way on his website for months), not the actual thing he implemented after marginally saner handlers put his policy on paper. Dude seriously said a religious category should be banned from entering the United States. I can’t think of a more bigoted campaign promise post-Wallace from any nominee.

            Re Iraq: I’m of the view that the invasion of Iraq was a horribly misguided act of benevolence, rather than a deliberate war on brown people/Muslims.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            And I’m of the opinion that Trump’s ban is a horribly misguided act of benevolence toward future potential terrorism victims, rather than a deliberate war on brown people. I feel like either you accept that people do things for misguided reasons that nevertheless make sense to them and seem vaguely human, rather than out of raw hatred because they want to see people suffer based on their skin color, or you don’t.

          • thepatternmorecomplicated says:

            Scott, I think the serious disconnect between you and a lot of your readers here is that you seem to believe that ‘racism’ refers only to ‘raw hatred’ – deliberately targeting other races because of a conscious belief that they’re intrinsically inferior and deserve bad things – while many or most people with liberal inclinations think that ‘misguided reasons that make sense to them’ can also be deeply racist. If a white family in the 1960s thought black people were fine when they kept to their own kind, but thought they were lazy and violent because of their culture and didn’t want them in their neighborhoods, were they racist? If Donald Trump is more likely to impose a ban on Muslims because he sees them as suspicious in a way he wouldn’t for Europeans with similar threat profiles, is that racist? I don’t think either of these are inhuman or motivated by fundamental hatred, but I do think they both deserve the label of ‘racism’ and the accompanying condemnation. I’m honestly curious as to whether you disagree with my choice of definitions here, or you have some other disagreement.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            Pattern, I address this like a dozen times in the Wolf post. Please read that.

          • Tibor says:

            @IvanFyodorovich: Sorry to derail your discussion but who are these “brown people?”. I imagine some sort of potato men 🙂

            But seriously, I guess you mean something like “people with darker skin than an average European but lighter than an average sub-saharan African? Frankly, I don’t see that as a very useful category. Or do you suggest that there are people who simply see a (dark skinned, some mestizos are as white as ethnic Europeans) Mexican mestizo the same way they do an Iraqi Arab (or you can replace either of them by a dark skinned Indian – I mean from India, not Amerindian) Or alternatively, would those see themselves as being a part of the same vague group? I think neither of that is true, so I think that “brown people” is a useless term. Or is “brown person” just a strange word for an Arab? If so, why not say Arab instead? I think this term is also solely used in the US, I’ve never had anything like that in Europe (in any language).

          • albertborrow says:

            @tibor

            It’s rhetoric. Nobody is going to take the US census and check a box labeled “brown”. Nonetheless, there is a visible difference between people from the Middle East and so-pasty-you-can-see-their-organs internet dwellers such as myself.

          • The Nybbler says:

            “Brown” is an odd term used by certain culture warriors to denote minorities they favor who are neither Asian nor sub-Saharan African. For instance, it applies to Arab Muslims, Pashtun Muslims, Iranians, and Central and South American mestizos but not to Greeks or other Southern Europeans, and definitely not to Jews of any color.

          • IvanFyodorovich says:

            Scott, by your criteria, I think most southern segregationist politicians wouldn’t count as bigoted. “We aren’t motivated by hatred of blacks, gosh no! We’re just worried about the education and safety of white children if we integrate. We think blacks and white benefit from the current system” . . . I think any time you decide that a racial or religious category is disproportionately likely to suck and that we should thus discriminate against them, that is bigotry in my book. Saying we should ban all Muslims from entering counts, invading a country because you think its people will appreciate being saved from a dictator and make democracy bloom doesn’t.

            A major caveat, I admit, is that religions contain aspects of ideology in addition to ethnic origin. I admit too that I would be a little nervous if my neighborhood suddenly turned 90% Salafist. But if a politician cited Haredi welfare fraud and Russian gangsters as a reason to ban Jews entry and then he won the presidency, we would be flipping out right now, not arguing semantics.

            Tibor, SJWs use the term “brown” as a kind of catchall for non-white (including black). I was invoking the term to explain that I didn’t agree with the SJW Iraq war=racist view. I agree, it’s a slightly silly term, for reasons Nybbler says.

            EDIT: I realize nothing I’m arguing goes against Scott’s “Trump is really bad but not KKK-bad argument”. But if we’re at, “he’s pretty bigoted but not KKK bigoted”, that’s different from he’s “no more racist than any past Republican candidate”.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @IvanF: I think any time you decide that a racial or religious category is disproportionately likely to suck and that we should thus discriminate against them, that is bigotry in my book.

            The problem here is that “bigotry” is a boo-word with the power to get people fired, while discriminating between religions seems rational.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            I hope all the people here wailing about how it’s bigotry to criticize Islam have been pushing back against anti-Christian rhetoric just as firmly.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            Scott, by your criteria, I think most southern segregationist politicians wouldn’t count as bigoted.

            He’s said many times that he does consider Trump to be bigoted and/or a racist. He’s just not any more racist than, say, George W. Bush, who did things that were just as bad (or worse) for similar reasons.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            And when we’re calling George W. Bush a bigot and a racist, those terms cease to have meaning.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            He’s said many times that he does consider Trump to be bigoted and/or a racist

            I don’t think that’s true. He said “There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter).”

            So, unless you want to argue that every single 70 year old white guy is racist (in a way that Scott Alexander would consider to be racist, and not in an unconscious structural racist way), then Scott apparently does not think Trump is racist in the slightest.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            So, unless you want to argue that every single 70 year old white guy is racist (in a way that Scott Alexander would consider to be racist, and not in an unconscious structural racist way), then Scott apparently does not think Trump is racist in the slightest.

            Not every 70-year-old white guy, but I do think that a great many 70 or 80-something-year-olds (male and female) are pretty racist. My grandmother makes comments about minorities that were probably acceptable in her day but which sound racist as hell by modern standards.

            And, again, I guess the problem is that that term has multiple meanings. It seemed to me that in the wolf post, Scott was using the word “racist” mainly in the unconscious-structural sense rather than in the conscious sense. The point he was making was that Trump isn’t a white supremacist or someone who consciously thinks that minorities are bad; rather, Trump probably believes that he is very fair-minded about race, but holds a lot of implicit biases that frequently slip out.

            It might be a bit much to say that he’s not more racist than any other Republican candidate (and, of course, bigotry is not confined to Republicans), but I think there have probably been numerous Presidents who were equally as racist.

            Which is not to say that makes it okay, of course, just that Trump is not really unique in this regard.

          • John Schilling says:

            So, unless you want to argue that every single 70 year old white guy is racist … then Scott apparently does not think Trump is racist in the slightest.

            Or, alternately, Scott was using the phrase “every other” in its usual, colloquial sense rather than meaning literally 100.00000%.

            I like that this is a rationalist-leaning forum where we can do quantitative thinking. I also like that we can talk like actual human beings, rather than hybrid clones of Sheldon Cooper and Mr. Spock.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            but I think there have probably been numerous Presidents who were equally as racist.

            That’s indisputable, and an extraordinarily low bar to clear. So much so, that I think you didn’t put down in words what you actually meant.

            Because “Trump not as racist as Jackson” isn’t much if an endorsement.

            I mean, Trump is probably less racist in absolute terms than Lincoln, certainly in terms of public statements. But that doesn’t really mean very much, given the Overton Window.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            Fair enough, although semi-random insertion of hyperbolic statements while criticizing statements for being hyperbolic is, what, irritating? But it certainly happens.

            But do you think Scott was endorsing the view that it’s fair to describe the average 70 year old white guy as racist and/or bigoted? Because that was the view I was arguing against.

            My perception is that Scott would not endorse the idea that the average 70 year old white guy is a racist, and definitely wouldn’t endorse the idea that it’s fair to say they are racist or assume they are racist.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            That’s indisputable, and an extraordinarily low bar to clear. So much so, that I think you didn’t put down in words what you actually meant.

            I’ll narrow that to “Presidents within my lifetime,” but given how fast the Overton window moves I guess that’s a pretty low bar as well.

            I mean, Reagan opposed some civil rights legislature which is generally accepted as good and necessary by today’s standards, and which probably even Trump would support.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Glad to see it’s not just me that HBC pulls this disingenuous pretending not to understand idiomatic speech bullshit on.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @suntzuanime:
            Do you think Scott meant to indicate the average 70 year old white man is racist? Do you think Scott was using that phrase in support of the idea that Trump is racist?

            Or is my referring to that phrase and pointing out that it almost assuredly means that Scott used it to mean that we should not say Trump is racist correct?

            And interpreting idiomatic speech in a fairly literal manner is commonplace here. So much so that I never us the word never anymore. I think you guys are the ones over interpreting my loose usage of language, not the other way around

          • @LMC

            The problem here is that “bigotry” is a boo-word with the power to get people fired, while discriminating between religions seems rational.

            Whether or not, it’s against the US constitution.

            Also, going to the other extreme leads to Muslim,. or whatever becoming a boo word, muslims being fired, etc. Maybe you are aiming for a happy medium, but you don’t sound like it.

          • thetitaniumdragon says:

            “You think banning immigrants from a few countries that sort of look like state sponsors of terrorism if you squint is worse than invading and bombing a few countries that sort of look like state sponsors of terrorism if you squint?”

            Absolutely! You’d have to be lying to yourself considerably to believe otherwise.

            What was George W. Bush’s model of the Middle East?

            George W. Bush saw Muslims as basically good people who had bad governments. He overthrew two bad governments and tried to put the people in charge of their countries as democracies, believing that the people in the Middle East were fundamentally good, fundamentally freedom-loving, and would embrace liberal democracy.

            So yeah. Your argument is complete bullshit.

            Trump banned people from Iran. Iran! What was the last terrorist attack by an Iranian in the US?

            Compare to Saudi Arabia, which presently is #1 in terms of “people from there killing Americans in terror attacks” (by far, really). He didn’t ban people from there (because he has money there that he’d lose).

          • Anonymous says:

            George W. Bush saw Muslims as basically good people who had bad governments. He overthrew two bad governments and tried to put the people in charge of their countries as democracies, believing that the people in the Middle East were fundamentally good, fundamentally freedom-loving, and would embrace liberal democracy.

            And he was very, very wrong. By and large, the kind of regime you have is indicative of what kind of people you have.

          • lvlln says:

            I absolutely believe that Scott wanted to convey that the typical 70 year old white man and/or previous Republican presidential candidates are racist and/or bigoted. I’m not sure how else one could reasonably interpret his statement. I think that’s exactly the reason he specified 70 years old and white, as well as Republican presidential candidates specifically, rather than more general categories like “American” or “presidential candidate.”

            He just doesn’t think that the typical 70 year old white man is literally KKK racist/bigoted, in wanting to murder or drive out people of other races because he believes they’re inferior (I don’t know much about previous Republican presidential candidates, but at least in recent memory, I don’t recall any of that type – maybe back in the 50s or 60s? Then again, I’ve read that the Democrats were on that side back then, so maybe not?). That was his entire point in comparing Trump with a typical 70 year old white man – bigoted, but not KKK white supremacist bigoted.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Anonymous:

            Is it really? Was the changing character of Europeans responsible for changes in government over the past few hundred years? Did the character of Germans change radically in various directions between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries?

          • Anonymous says:

            Is it really? Was the changing character of Europeans responsible for changes in government over the past few hundred years? Did the character of Germans change radically in various directions between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries?

            From where I’m standing, the recent radical changes were an aberration. Aberrations and exceptions and outliers do happen.

            And I don’t even mean labels like monarchist/fascist/communist/democratic. I mean the actual differences, for the average member of the populace. There I see mostly very gradual, organic changes. For the average guy, there’s not much difference between the Tsarist regime, and the Stalinist one, except the second one is initially much, much worse but mellows out over time towards what is a stable arrangement given their particular people – which is mostly like the Tsarist regime again.

            You make a good point, though. There actually were some pretty radical changes in Europeans during that time, like the advent of mass literacy/education and mass propaganda. So those aberrations might well just be results of changes of the underlying populaces.

          • Civilis says:

            If Donald Trump is more likely to impose a ban on Muslims because he sees them as suspicious in a way he wouldn’t for Europeans with similar threat profiles, is that racist? I don’t think either of these are inhuman or motivated by fundamental hatred, but I do think they both deserve the label of ‘racism’ and the accompanying condemnation.

            Is it possible to believe that religion makes up an element of the threat profile of an individual without being racist / bigoted?

            Trump banned people from Iran. Iran! What was the last terrorist attack by an Iranian in the US?

            The government of Saudi Arabia is at least nominally friendly, and has a reason for not supporting actions that would damage that relationship. Meanwhile, Iran has been acting just short of war with the US for quite some time. Certain members of the Saudi Royal family secretly send money to terrorists; the Iranians do so openly as a matter of government policy (Hezbollah, for a start).

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Anonymous

            And I don’t even mean labels like monarchist/fascist/communist/democratic. I mean the actual differences, for the average member of the populace. There I see mostly very gradual, organic changes. For the average guy, there’s not much difference between the Tsarist regime, and the Stalinist one, except the second one is initially much, much worse but mellows out over time towards what is a stable arrangement given their particular people – which is mostly like the Tsarist regime again.

            Well, social history tends to hold that social change is generally slow, although technology-caused change can be very fast.

            You make a good point, though. There actually were some pretty radical changes in Europeans during that time, like the advent of mass literacy/education and mass propaganda. So those aberrations might well just be results of changes of the underlying populaces.

            What underlying change in the populace was there with mass literacy? I mean, are we talking biological or social?

          • Anonymous says:

            What underlying change in the populace was there with mass literacy? I mean, are we talking biological or social?

            I can see two big social effects:
            1. The expansion of the amount of politically active wannabes. An illiterate peasant might have opinions, but he can’t formulate them very well, or propagate them to people out of earshot. The amount and influence of the landless-but-literate people with Opinions(TM) greatly grows.
            2. Literacy came along with standardization of language. Languages such as “French” and “Polish” didn’t really exist before the early modern era, being instead a myriad local dialects. With the greater uniformity of how people spoke and other aids towards far-ranging communication, more people came to believe themselves to be the same tribal group.

            These two explain both nationalism (not possible if people are fragmented heavily) and the modern democracy (not practical or popular with an illiterate population).

          • Spookykou says:

            @lvlln

            That was also my understanding.

            @HBC

            I could be wrong, but I think what you are getting at is that Scott wouldn’t ‘Call Trump a Bigot’ because Scott doesn’t think the kind of unconscious unwoke awkward uncle racism of the average 70 year old, that he ascribes to Trump, warrants being called a Bigot.

            Which is in reply to Hyzenthlay saying that Scott has called Trump a bigot.

            I assume the distinction here is, using the term bigot to describe somebody, or using it as a weapon to attack somebody. So he has ‘Called Trump a Bigot’ but doesn’t think that bigot should be used as a weapon against Trump(or ever other 70 year old white man), because Trump is just another example of an unconsciously racist unwoke awkward uncle who is far from PC but doesn’t actual harbor any seething hatred for groups of people based on their race.

            Now, if this idea is still square with the immigration ban, I am not sure.

          • Jiro says:

            So he has ‘Called Trump a Bigot’ but doesn’t think that bigot should be used as a weapon against Trump

            If that’s what he means, his usage of “bigot” or “racist” is nonstandard. Everyone else uses it to mean “evil unperson who must be destroyed”. He’s better off inventing his own phrase for it because “rasit” and “bigot” don’t communicate what he’s trying to communicate.

          • Deiseach says:

            many or most people with liberal inclinations think that ‘misguided reasons that make sense to them’ can also be deeply racist

            And that’s where the problem arises; there is no differentiation between “racist who thinks black people are not human and lynching a black man is no worse than hanging a rabid dog” and “racist who thinks Asians are naturally all so gifted at maths”. When someone who is probably a little bit racist but mostly out of ignorance rather than active hatred gets the full “you are a terrible awful hater” treatment, then it seems as if it makes no difference – you may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, if you’re going to be accused of “profiting by structural racism” which is equally as bad as going out and shooting black people, then the word loses all meaning beyond a general term of disapprobation meaning “I think this person is not nice at all”.

          • Spookykou says:

            @Jiro

            I think other people in this thread have done something similar.

            HBC in particular, seems to be saying that being unconsciously structurally racist is … not racist in the slightest.

            The idea that somebody can be ‘racist’ of the ‘asian kids are good at math’ variety, is what I am getting at here, in terms of describing that person as racist, but at the same time holding the belief that such a person should not be attacked for said belief.

            Maybe I am off though, if everyone thinks that people who believe that Asian kids are good at math, must be destroyed. Then I am just living in a bubble where nobody thinks that, and as such my reading is probably heavily biased.

          • John Schilling says:

            Everyone else uses it to mean “evil unperson who must be destroyed”.

            Bigot, yes. “Racist” only has that connotation among a subset of the left. A large subject, yes, but most people still use “racist” to refer to a moral failing that might not be wholly unforgivable.

            I would prefer not to surrender the latter term to the fanatics.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            HBC in particular, seems to be saying that being unconsciously structurally racist is … not racist in the slightest.

            No, I described my belief that Scott is maintaining this position.

            This is different than stating my own belief.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:

            I’ve always thought of bigot as a superset of racist. “Racism” except it’s not necessarily about race. Racism is a form of bigotry, but so is, say, a certain form of Anti-Catholicism.

            Do you have a word that you think means that?

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Anonymous:

            In that case, though, “the people you have” change when you teach them how to read. Surely, then, the best course of action is to promote mass literacy worldwide.

          • A major caveat, I admit, is that religions contain aspects of ideology in addition to ethnic origin.

            In the case of Islam, it doesn’t “Contain … ethnic origin.” Islam originated in Arabia, but Arabs are a minority, a pretty small minority, of Muslims.

            Christianity originated in Israel, but most Christians are not the descendants of Jews. Proselytising religions, which both Islam and Christianity are, are like that.

            And if what Trump was proposing was a ban on “brown people” it would have included India, which has more of them than all of the states included in his ban combined.

          • But if we’re at, “he’s pretty bigoted but not KKK bigoted”, that’s different from he’s “no more racist than any past Republican candidate”.

            I don’t think there is any evidence that Trump is bigoted at all–that’s just an attempt to squeeze him into the category of bad people that his opponents are used to squeezing their opponents into.

            Trump is a demagogue and a politician. Islamic terrorism is a hot issue, so it makes sense for him to say and do things that he can claim will reduce it.

            You might as well label Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as racists because they opposed the TPP, which would have increased trade with East Asians.

            Trump may well be a psychopath and is pretty clearly dishonest, but that doesn’t make him a racist.

          • Scott, by your criteria, I think most southern segregationist politicians wouldn’t count as bigoted.

            To begin with, “bigoted” and “racist” are not the same thing. Someone who is closed minded and intellectually intolerant is bigoted, whether his bigotry is right, left, or based on some non-political ideas. Someone who reasonably but mistakenly believes (say) that some racial groups are less intelligent than others and would change his view if presented with good evidence that it was wrong isn’t a bigot. Someone who unreasonably believes that no such differences exist and would not change his view if presented with good evidence that it was wrong is.

            So far as southern segregationist politicians and racism, that depends on both the politician and the definition of “racism.” If the word means, as I think it should, hostility towards or contempt for members of a race, I expect some were and some were not.

            If “racism” means, as some clearly think it should, the belief that members of some race are, on average, inferior in important ways to members of another race, I expect most southern segregationist politicians were racist, but probably not all.

          • John Schilling says:

            @HBC: “Bigotry” and “racism” are intersecting sets; neither encompasses the other. Bigotry is, roughly speaking, active hostility, against people on the basis of any immutable characteristic, and in common usage applies only when the hostility exceeds the threshold of tolerance. Racism is any prejudice or discrimination based on a single immutable characteristic (race) but without a requirement for active hostility. Someone who preferentially hires Asians to write his code, Hispanics to watch after his children, and walks to the other side of the street to avoid inner-city Black people, would be a racist but would not commonly be referred to as a bigot. Bigotry is almost by definition a mortal sin, racism can be one of the lesser ones or even none at all.

            I do not think that there is a word that encompasses all the things we mean by “racism” but w/re all immutable characteristics rather than just race.

          • My perception is that Scott would not endorse the idea that the average 70 year old white guy is a racist, and definitely wouldn’t endorse the idea that it’s fair to say they are racist or assume they are racist.

            I agree.

            I think part of the problem is that much of the discussion treats “racist” as a binary term–you are or you are not. I don’t think, and I doubt Scott thinks, that every 70 year old white man, or even the average, is a racist in that sense.

            But if you treat racism as a matter of degree and use it as many do to describe any belief that people of another race are on average different in negative ways that matter, then I expect that the average 70 year old white (or black) man (or woman) has more than zero racism. Hence saying that Trump is no more racist than … makes sense.

          • Compare to Saudi Arabia, which presently is #1 in terms of “people from there killing Americans in terror attacks” (by far, really). He didn’t ban people from there (because he has money there that he’d lose).

            So why was it that when the previous administration compiled a list of countries of concern it too did not contain Saudi Arabia? Did Obama have money in Saudi Arabia that he would lose too?

          • Iain says:

            @David Friedman: Here is a bit of background on Obama’s use of the list of 7 countries:

            Trump’s claim that the seven countries listed in the executive order came from the Obama administration is conveniently left unexplained. A bit of background: soon after the December 2015 terror attack in San Bernadino, President Obama signed an amendment to the Visa Waiver Program, a law that allows citizens of 38 countries to travel to the United States without obtaining visas (and gives Americans reciprocal privileges in those countries). The amendment removed from the Visa Waiver Program dual nationals who were citizens of four countries (Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Syria), or anyone who had recently traveled to those countries. The Obama administration added three more to the list (Libya, Somalia, and Yemen), bringing the total to seven. But this law did not bar anyone from coming to the United States. It only required a relatively small percentage of people to obtain a visa first. And to avoid punishing people who clearly had good reasons to travel to the relevant countries, the Obama administration used a waiver provided by Congress for certain travelers, including journalists, aid workers, and officials from international organizations like the United Nations.

            I think attacking Trump for his investments in Saudi Arabia is a red herring. The obvious answer for why Saudi Arabia was not on Obama’s list is that Saudi Arabia is “an American ally” (which is obviously not related at all to their oil production). To the extent there is a valid attack on Trump for omitting Saudi Arabia, it goes something like:

            “Look. This whole idea of banning entry from entire countries to protect us from terrorism is idiotic on the face of it. But if Trump were seriously interested in making the bold moves that nobody else had the guts to do, and really did think that banning entry would help prevent terrorism, then he wouldn’t just hand us a list of the Muslim countries that are easiest to kick around. He would go after the countries that actually have a history of exporting terrorists, starting with Saudi Arabia. The fact that he hasn’t done so is evidence that his purported rationale for this ban is just a smokescreen.”

            As discussed at length in a previous thread, though, I am a bit leery of arguments that claim that your ideological opponents are not applying their own principles correctly, so take the preceding paragraph with a grain of salt.

          • tscharf says:

            So where does one go with “factually based racism”? For example it is known that one doesn’t bring up racial based crime statistics in polite company, but the disparities are so remarkable as to be hard to deny and certainly worthy of debate.

            One could debate whether poverty, unemployment, education, parenting, social pathologies unique to the black community, etc. are responsible, but you are generally deemed a racist for just bringing this subject up.

            If the right brings up this kind of stuff it is blaming the victim racism, if the left brings it up it is social justice.

            Trump is vilified for saying black communities are in terrible shape, and one gets the impression he would be even more vilified if he said they were in great shape. The rules of engagement are set so the only way to successfully play this game is to not play it at all.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The rules of engagement are set so the only way to successfully play this game is to not play it at all.

            Well that’s how Trump won, isn’t it?

            “You all think we have to play Secret Hitler, but I’m going to play soccer against Mexico and you can’t stop me!”

          • Anonymous says:

            In that case, though, “the people you have” change when you teach them how to read. Surely, then, the best course of action is to promote mass literacy worldwide.

            Not really. I’d abolish mass education, personally. Nationalism is super-bad, and democracy isn’t much better. Muslim nationalism (in the original, agglomerative sense, not the modern divisive iteration) is how you get the types of ISIS.

          • Anonymous says:

            @tscharf

            So where does one go with “factually based racism”?

            Google “human biodiversity” and read some blogs. JayMan’s is a good start; he comments here sometimes.

        • eh says:

          While party members aren’t candidates, it’s worth pointing out that about half the US supported Trump’s ban on any and all Muslims crossing the border in March 2016, including a third of democrats polled. His current clusterfuck of an executive action is a more moderate version of a plan that was supported by half of the US, including a third of his political opponents.

          This isn’t an isolated feeling, either: there are similar results in other English-speaking countries.

          When centrist is defined as having equal support from either side, or as splitting independent voters down the middle, Trump’s plan is centrist. Your definition of bigoted matches half the US, maybe more. If his plan is worse than that of the other Republicans, it is because they were actually to the left of the average polled citizen. And voters in the US skew to the right.

          This scares the shit out of me. I know maybe three people who supported a ban on Muslims (in Australia), and one of them literally once said “Hitler had some good points” and offered to lend me Mein Kampf, so it’s clear that I’m living in a bubble.

          • Deiseach says:

            I think “clusterfuck” is about the best way to describe it. Whatever sense it might have made, doing it so fast without giving the airports and entry points a chance to digest it and come up with a way of implementing it, as well as answers to “but what about if X happens/can Y still be allowed in?”, was very badly done. I’m seeing all kinds of talk about how Steve Bannon actually wrote this and that Trump is just the puppet signing the orders.

            (I’m also amused to see many of the same people who thought Pence was Literal Devil now floating the balloon of suppose Trump was impeached and Pence was president instead, even the Republicans hate him because he’s hated in Indiana for messing up his own state, but he’s not as crazy as Trump so he wouldn’t be as bad as Trump but no way he could be re-elected and we could beat him).

            Though we have to say this much – he said he’d do things before he was elected, and he appears to be keeping his promises!

        • Deiseach says:

          I am very confused with this travel ban, but he didn’t ban all Muslims, he’s banned entrants from specific nations which could include Christians and other non-Muslims (even the news reports are referring to “Muslim-majority” countries when reporting on the seven particular nations). This also means Muslims from nations not on the ban list can still travel to the USA, if I am interpreting the text correctly?

          I hereby proclaim that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries referred to in section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas).

          And apparently he has had a phone conversation with King Salman of Saudi Arabia which went amicably (or if it didn’t, nobody is saying anything):

          Also King Salman, agreed to support safe zones in Syria and Yemen, a White House statement said.

          I find the whole affair very confusing; it seems to have been put into practice very quickly and very badly, resulting in confusion and disarray. At the same time, there seem to be hints or whispers that this is putting pressure on Saudi Arabia, which is seeking to maintain its influence in the Arab and Muslim world. Could it be one of those terrible decisions which by a bizarre fluke turn out to have an upside, e.g. the Saudis will agree to establish and support safe zones in Syria and Yemen, in return for movement on this ban?

        • Most Muslims are white, assuming that “white” means “not enough Afro-American or East Asian ancestry to be obvious.” Islam is a religion, not a race. And the list of countries was from less extreme immigration legislation by the previous administration–are you arguing that Obama was a racist too?

          • Anonymous says:

            I wouldn’t say Arabs are “white”. Caucasian, sure. White, probably not. Turks might qualify under “white” since they’re substantially Greek.

    • LCL says:

      I remember also being disappointed by that one.

      I was expecting Scott to do the thing he says he agrees we should do – deconstruct the word “racism” into a lot of very heterogenous parts. Preferably with at least one link to probably Scott’s favorite thing to link. I was disappointed that he engaged on the object level – in a sort of strawmannish way – instead of doing that. Because I think it’s an opportunity to do a really important and necessary analysis of what people mean by “racist” when we fight over it, and Scott is one of the few people who could do that analysis with fairness and insight.

      Some of the other few people who could do it are commenters here, and I was hoping someone would do it in the comments (or on their blog and link it). But of course the comments on that post were much more flammable than typical SSC comment threads, so there wasn’t really much chance for discussion in that direction.

      I agree that the overall quality of this blog has raised my expectations beyond all reason and that I should cut the poor guy a break if he just wants to have at people on the object level once in a while.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        I didn’t have time to do that in the middle of my already 9000-word post. I think I pretty clearly sketched out what I meant, apparently well enough that you could reconstruct my argument and even know what I would link to.

        I worked on the post you wanted and planned to post it directly afterwards, but I couldn’t get it to come out right, and I also didn’t want to deal with the amount of flak I expected for posting it.

        • LCL says:

          I’m excited to hear you planned it, even if it isn’t fully formed. I hope it bubbles back to the surface some time, perhaps when the spotlight has died down enough to reduce the expected disutility from flak.

          It’s important – for our society “racism” is the blegg currently causing the most conflict and preventing the most cooperation – and you’re one of the few people with a reasonable chance of explicating the differing perspectives well enough to plausibly promote understanding.

          As a moderate in mostly lefty circles, my personal interest is to have a starting place for getting my friends and colleagues to tone down the SJW-vocabulary-based vilifying of Republicans, the backlash to which has damned us with Trump.

          The first step there is to credibly explain that Republicans aren’t necessarily entirely driven by white-supremacist style “racism.” Which requires an accurate and charitable deconstruction of what people of differing views mean when they talk about racism. I am not articulate or insightful enough to do that myself; I need your help.

          • alexsloat says:

            Racism(“Republican” definition): Consciously treating people in meaningfully different ways due to their racial origin.

            Racism(“Democratic” definition): A power system that gives majority/historically powerful groups a wide variety of advantages(collectively dubbed “privilege”) over minority/historically powerless groups, some of which are extremely subtle and not consciously realized.

            (Both of these ignore some obvious minor exceptions – casting actors for a film set in the South in the 1840s, for example – and are somewhat simplified, but they’re at least close)

            For overt racism like the KKK and Jim Crow laws, these are functionally identical. However, they diverge significantly in the post-civil-rights era. For example, affirmative action laws are frank and open racism under the first definition, but an effort to actively combat racism under the second. Conversely, a shopkeeper keeping a closer eye on the security camera when a black teenager is in his store than he would for a white teenager is generally considered benign and even perhaps justified under the first definition, while the second definition would consider it yet another piece of the culture of oppression against minorities.

            I lean more towards the first definition, because it’s the one used colloquially, but some useful ideas are embedded in the second. For example, Trump isn’t really a racist under the first definition, merely a boor. But he’s positively dripping with racism under the second. He’s not consciously biased, but he embeds so many unexamined assumptions about race into his mindset that what comes out is not exactly a role model of racial understanding, even if he consciously believes himself to be extremely fair-minded and anti-racist, and actually consciously works towards breaking down definition-1 racism on many occasions.

          • baconbacon says:

            Affirmative action is also racism under the second definition as it is an institutionalization of minority “achievement”. Affirmative action is fundamentally the majority taking credit for any advancement of the underclass, it is a tacit statement that “they” need “our” help.

          • axiomsofdominion says:

            You clearly don’t understand affirmative action. Its not that they need our help, its that we should stop obstructing them. The reason we have more white students is that people prefer to associate with others as close to them as possible and thus prefer white candidates over black ones with identical qualifications. We are correcting our subconscious bias through conscious application of scientific understanding.

            This is a website all about how humans are irrational. Correcting for cognitive bias regarding hiring or acceptance practices doesn’t mean that people who benefit from affirmative action need our help. We are helping OURSELVES.

            There’s also a bit of “if you had many fewer advantages and you’ve only missed identical qualifications by a bit, its more impressive even if your qualifications aren’t as strong.”

          • cassander says:

            @axiomsofdominion says:

            >You clearly don’t understand affirmative action. Its not that they need our help, its that we should stop obstructing them. The reason we have more white students is that people prefer to associate with others as close to them as possible and thus prefer white candidates over black ones with identical qualifications. We are correcting our subconscious bias through conscious application of scientific understanding.

            Except that’s the exact opposite of how human minds work. The way to get people treated equally is to REDUCE the salience of irrelevant differentiating factors like race. AA doesn’t do this, it increases them, it makes people more aware of racial groupings, not less. It worsens the problem it purports to solve, which is great for politics, but terrible for policy.

      • shakeddown says:

        In the interests of doing this now: I’d say “racist” has several components, but one of them is “split people into groups based on demographic factors, and have an decision tree with those demographics as the top split”. I’d say Trump pretty clearly falls into this one, if not into others (e.g. “hate non-white people”).
        I think that for some people, e.g. those who rely on terms like microagressions and implicit bias testing, this is the primary definition of racism*. That’s why they focus on these tests – to check if someone’s racist, you need to check their mental algorithm, not ask them what their verbalized opinions are. By that measure, Trump clearly is racist, which is why they feel so secure in exclaiming it.

        I think Scott’s counterarguments to this are a) trying to check people’s hidden algorithms is a worse way of understanding them than using what they explicitly say, and b) even if it isn’t, it’s still a bad idea to rely on it.
        I definitely agree with (b), and am in general ambiguous/conflicted on (a) (though it’s pretty clearly correct in this case).

        *possibly because they live in environments where no one admits to openly hating non-white people, but I can think of other convincing reasons for this.

        • cassander says:

          >split people into groups based on demographic factors, and have an decision tree with those demographics as the top split”. I’d say Trump pretty clearly falls into this one, if not into others (e.g. “hate non-white people”).

          If that’s racist, then the only people who aren’t racists are those that try to insist on complete color-blindness, which I think limits us to Stephen Colbert.

          • shakeddown says:

            I specified using race at the top of your decision tree, which I don’t think most people do (which is not to say it’s not a factor for most people, just not the primary one).

          • Jiro says:

            Most people don’t make decisions in ways which can be characterized as using the same decision tree each time. Typically which decision tree they use will depend on circumstances. If all you know about a person is their race, they will use a decision tree with race at the top. Otherwise they won’t. There’s no one size fits all decision tree.

            Also, using a (nontrivial) decision tree with race at the top is logically equivalent to using another one where race isn’t at the top. It’s like getting mad at people for using subtraction but saying it’s okay for them to add negative numbers.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            @Jiro:

            Another gesture in the direction of what lefties are trying to point to when they use the word “racism”:

            [Non-white person commits act of terrorism]: “These people are so violent, why won’t the other members of this ethnic group denounce these acts?!

            [White person commits act of terrorism]: “This man acted as a lone wolf. It’s a shame, but I think it’s really an issue of mental health.”

            Another example, using gender this time:

            https://xkcd.com/385/

            This is also behind the notion that “there’s no such thing as racism against white people” and “women can’t be sexist against men” (though I think both are obviously false).

            Basically, when a non-white person does something, it counts against their whole race, but when a white person does something it’s an act of an idiosyncratic individual.

            When people call this kind of behavior out, they get called “SJW” and “politically correct”. When people return the favor by judging all whites for the actions of individuals, it’s called “reverse racism”.

          • AnonEEmous says:

            But the Left does the exact opposite of that, even though the Right usually has greater backing in the specific cases. They do try and demonize all white men, all males, all gun ownership. Maybe not the entire Left, but enough to piss me off.

            For example, I’m not sure what we’re talking about besides Islamic terrorism. But Islamic terrorism is very clearly a function of Islam, being the source of most world terrorism period.

            I guess you could argue that the attacks on illegal immigrants aren’t really founded. But at the same time, the larger point there is that illegal immigrants aren’t even supposed to be here, and that we don’t necessarily derive benefits from them being here, so much as they do, and thus we should let them in for moral reasons, which I partially support but after a certain point…

          • herbert herberson says:

            But Islamic terrorism is very clearly a function of Islam, being the source of most world terrorism period.

            *Salafist Sunni Islam

          • Anonymous says:

            *Salafist Sunni Islam

            And western ability to distinguish those from the other kinds is pretty close to zero, aided by the taboo on profiling.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            But Islamic terrorism is very clearly a function of Islam

            White Christian Militia Terrorism is clearly a function of whites. And Christians. And Militias.

            But the question is which Of the two words are more central to the phrase “Islamic Terrorist”? And the answer there is “terrorist”.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            @AnonEEMouse:

            I’m not especially interested in responding to tu quoques, here. I’m trying to help righties understand some aspects of how lefties use the term “racism”. I’m not trying to change your mind about any value-driven questions, just to help you understand the mentalities you tend to find yourselves arguing against. Mostly because I’m sick of weakman arguments.

            But the Left does the exact opposite of that, even though the Right usually has greater backing in the specific cases.

            I think it’s safe to say you’re one of the most partisan righties who comments here regularly? So either try not to make broad-brush comparisons like this, or try really hard to justify them when you do. You can also try to soften the phrasing to make it less annoying for lefties to engage with your arguments. Just dropping this sort of thing like a drippy dogsquat does nothing to improve the discourse.

            You know how Moon was kind of annoying? Don’t be the righty version of Moon.

            Maybe not the entire Left, but enough to piss me off.

            1. If you find yourself pissed off, step away from the computer. You’re not going to do yourself or “your side” any favors posting angry, and you’re less likely to try to honestly understand and engage with arguments you don’t agree with.
            2. If it’s not the entire left, don’t blame the entire left. Just specify who you’re talking about. It’s not hard.

            For example, I’m not sure what we’re talking about besides Islamic terrorism. But Islamic terrorism is very clearly a function of Islam, being the source of most world terrorism period.

            Only a tiny fraction of Muslims are terrorists, just like only a tiny fraction of white people are white collar criminals.

            http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-theft-protect/

            Once you start arguing that people need to be careful about hiring white people because of their propensity for corruption I’ll take your arguments about Muslims being inherently disposed towards terrorism more seriously.

          • Anonymous says:

            White Christian Militia Terrorism is clearly a function of whites. And Christians. And Militias.

            How many people have they killed lately?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “White Christian Militia Terrorism is clearly a function of whites. And Christians. And Militias.”

            So we are endlessly reminded. This is a White Supremacist society, after all. [EDIT] – apologies if this sounds dismissive; my point is merely that it is what it is.

            @wysinwygymmv – “[White person commits act of terrorism]: “This man acted as a lone wolf. It’s a shame, but I think it’s really an issue of mental health.””

            McVeigh was not claimed to be a lone wolf or a mental health issue. He was and is, in fact, used as an example of the violent inclinations of the American Right. And he should be. He killed a large stack of people for specifically right-wing reasons.

            There are people who go on shooting sprees out of genuine lone-wolf homicidal nihilism. There are also people who go on shooting sprees while screaming Aluha Akbar. It seems like a reasonable hypothesis that the latter might have different motivations than the former.

            “Only a tiny fraction of Muslims are terrorists, just like only a tiny fraction of white people are white collar criminals.”

            And significant percentages of Islam appear to support terrorism generally and even obviously horrific implementations like ISIS specifically. You can find discussion of this phenomenon in this very thread.

            “Once you start arguing that people need to be careful about hiring white people because of their propensity for corruption I’ll take your arguments about Muslims being inherently disposed towards terrorism more seriously.”

            Whiteness isn’t an ideology or belief system. Also, you would need to show that white employers commit more wage theft than employers of other ethnicities. If you actually could show that, it would in fact be an argument for not putting white people in control of wages.

            “I’m trying to help righties understand some aspects of how lefties use the term “racism”.”

            We understand how lefties use racism. We’ve been watching you for our whole lives. Some of us aren’t interested in playing along with the farce any more. Racism is when you wear the wrong hair style.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:

            So we are endlessly reminded. This is a White Supremacist society, after all. [EDIT] – apologies if this sounds dismissive; my point is merely that it is what it is.

            Despite the edit, you seem to have missed my point.

            In the 90s, a blanket ban on on Militias, or Christian Militias or White Christian Militias would not not have been warranted. Banning Christians would definitely not have been warranted.

            If you agree with this, you should ask yourself for some intellectual consistency.

          • AnonEEmous says:

            “I’m not especially interested in responding to tu quoques, here. I’m trying to help righties understand some aspects of how lefties use the term “racism”. I’m not trying to change your mind about any value-driven questions, just to help you understand the mentalities you tend to find yourselves arguing against. Mostly because I’m sick of weakman arguments.”

            If you’re saying that this is an incorrect usage but that’s how it’s used, sure.

            Though personally I do understand it already.

            “I think it’s safe to say you’re one of the most partisan righties who comments here regularly? So either try not to make broad-brush comparisons like this, or try really hard to justify them when you do.”

            It’s not safe to say that at all.

            Let’s expand into justification: every time a white man commits a crime, say a mass shooting huge segments of the Left will go into paroxysms and talk about how it’s really white people who are the problem, especially men, and especially the fault of gun owners. There are many examples of terrorist attacks where the attacker is initially assumed to be white and so media coverage is enormous, people on the Left fire up their Twittermobiles and start talking shit. Then when the person is revealed to be Muslim, utter silence.

            Moreover, the Right is mostly relying on categories like, well, “religion”. You think that’s bullshit and we’ll get to it. But “religion” is an entirely legitimate way to categorise people.

            To this day, people still complain about the Bundy “white terrorists” or whatever they are called. Who are these guys, and what did they do? Well, they took over an abandoned bird sanctuary to protest a government decision and brought their guns. This ended when a police-initiated confrontation ended with the death of one of them, and the surrender of the rest. In other words, they didn’t do any property damage and didn’t kill anyone, which didn’t stop various members of…let’s call them Left-identifying people, calling for their heads, screaming bloody murder, and trying to use their example as a club to beat other white people.

            “You can also try to soften the phrasing to make it less annoying for lefties to engage with your arguments. Just dropping this sort of thing like a drippy dogsquat does nothing to improve the discourse.”

            Sure. Next time I’ll expand on what I more specifically meant.

            “You know how Moon was kind of annoying? Don’t be the righty version of Moon.”

            Moon was annoying because all of her arguments were “You’re so brainwashed”.

            “Only a tiny fraction of Muslims are terrorists, just like only a tiny fraction of white people are white collar criminals.”

            And this is what I mean. If the vast majority of wage thieves were white people, and white people weren’t disproportionately pre-positioned to commit wage theft, then you might have something. If it was mostly Christian white people, and some of them when caught stealing wages cited some Christian doctrine, then you would definitely have something.

            In most cases, only a tiny fraction of anyone will be anything. But Muslims still commit far more terror than all other groups, and the only other group that even comes close is an explicit self-sorting political ideology (Communism, I believe). The idea that there is no issue is ludicrous.

            http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-theft-protect/

            “Once you start arguing that people need to be careful about hiring white people because of their propensity for corruption I’ll take your arguments about Muslims being inherently disposed towards terrorism more seriously.”

            That publication doesn’t even mention the word “white”, let alone racial demographics. So are white people actually endowed with a propensity for white-collar crime? Well, the first thing I found was this

            https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/to-wcc.pdf

            Old, but go look at Table 5 and you can find that, apparently, white people committed 62% of white-collar crimes! And even today, white people are only 70% of America – you can only imagine that in the 80s they were a far larger proportion of every single state. So ignoring that “white” is a stupid way to define a group of people (I haven’t argued for the existence of “Brown Terrorism”) and ignoring that white-collar crime is only accessible to certain people…is it even true?

            To HeelBearCub: Thank you for providing a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

            Christian militias are responsible, within the U.S., for…how many deaths? And keep in mind that, according to Gallup polls, “75% of Americans identify with a Christian religion”. Yes, there were periods of time in which abortion clinics were terrorised by Christian militias. That was a problem with Christianity. It’s not happening now, so I don’t see a current threat from it – though I acknowledge that it could arise again in future. (And while I wouldn’t ban “militias”, I might not want to let in a bunch of Christians known for being radical, while this was going on.)

            But in a sheer desperation to avoid the obvious correlation, the Left, and let’s agree that HBC is pretty Lefty, throws out these wild defenses. “The most important part is terrorist” my dude the vast majority of terrorism is committed by Muslims worldwide. Even in America, as 1% of the population they are punching WAY above their weight. Don’t try to act like this isn’t an issue. And I have a feeling that – while outside Muslim terrorists may be mostly Sunni – those born within the U.S. don’t identify as either of those, but may still commit acts of terror.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – Near as I can tell, I’m replying to a discussion about whether the “Islamic” part of “Islamic terrorism” is a significant contributor to the problem as a whole.

            “In the 90s, a blanket ban on on Militias, or Christian Militias or White Christian Militias would not not have been warranted. Banning Christians would definitely not have been warranted.”

            In the 90s, White Christian Militias were entirely a domestic phenomenon, not a foreign one arguably being imported. If they had been, it seems to me that arguing that we shouldn’t import such things would be an understandable position to take. In any case, actually banning Christianity (or Islam) is of course illegal, but banning militias was most definately a live political goal post-McVeigh, and extreme antipathy to white identity politics remains the norm.

            If White Christian Militias were actively burning down a sizable chunk of a region, it seems to me that it would be entirely reasonable to try to keep them from immigrating here, up to and including banning immigration from countries with a high percentage of White Christian Militia activity. To my understanding, doing so is not actually against our laws. Maybe it would be a bad idea, but it’s not obvious to me why that would be true.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            McVeigh was not claimed to be a lone wolf or a mental health issue. He was and is, in fact, used as an example of the violent inclinations of the American Right. And he should be. He killed a large stack of people for specifically right-wing reasons.

            1. Do I really need to go googling for a few examples of both kinds of claims? They’re really not hard to find.
            2. McVeigh is occasionally used as an example of the violent inclinations of the American far — a very small group of people. He’s never used as an example of the violent inclinations of whites in general, or men in general, or Americans in general, which is my real point.

            There are people who go on shooting sprees out of genuine lone-wolf homicidal nihilism. There are also people who go on shooting sprees while screaming Aluha Akbar. It seems like a reasonable hypothesis that the latter might have different motivations than the former.

            I bet McVeigh was no stranger to the phrase “God bless America.” Slogans aren’t always very good indicators of motivations. One might want to pay attention to research showing that Al Qaeda and ISIS recruits tend not to be the most devout Muslims, but that they do tend to be poor but educated single men with little in the way of professional or romantic prospects.

            And significant percentages of Islam appear to support terrorism generally and even obviously horrific implementations like ISIS specifically.

            Which sounds beyond the pale if you don’t take into account the different environments these people live in. Our media tends to highlight certain messages like: “American good! ISIS bad!” And I bet, e.g., Nigerian media tends to have a sort of different emphasis that on the whole would be more accommodating of ISIS and less so for the US government. If you assume all these people have the information and values and loyalties you have, then yes this is bad. If you take real-world conditions into account, it’s more understandable.

            Whiteness isn’t an ideology or belief system. Also, you would need to show that white employers commit more wage theft than employers of other ethnicities. If you actually could show that, it would in fact be an argument for not putting white people in control of wages.

            On the one hand, Islam is not a (unitary) ideology of belief system. And on the other, “whiteness” is being used as a proxy for particular cultures. Each lumps together about 25% of the earth’s people, so they seem approximately equivalent to me as far as generalizations go.

            As for whether white employers commit more wage theft, I don’t know how to determine that directly but I do think a pretty good probabilistic argument could be made that it is extremely unlikely that the wage theft figures are predominately due to cheating minority bosses. More importantly, this is just one example among many of white people behaving poorly that aren’t considered to reflect on the character of white people in general. And that’s the point — not that white people are universally horrible, but that generalizing this way is not generally justified.

            We understand how lefties use racism. We’ve been watching you for our whole lives. Some of us aren’t interested in playing along with the farce any more. Racism is when you wear the wrong hair style.

            OK, so you’re saying you don’t</em< want to better understand your political opponents or engage with the best forms of their arguments? Isn't that kind of the point of this blog? Do you think there is no stronger form? You’re just here to vent spleen, not discuss political issues in good faith?

            Whatever you like, guy, but you’re certainly not giving me the impression you’re so terribly much more principled than the lefties you decry.

            @AnonEEMouse:

            Let’s expand into justification: every time a white man commits a crime, say a mass shooting huge segments of the Left will go into paroxysms and talk about how it’s really white people who are the problem, especially men, and especially the fault of gun owners.

            I disagree. “huge segments of the left” is a ridiculous exaggeration, and tarring “the left” generally with something that happens in very restricted pockets of the left is the same sort of guilt by association bullshit we all disagree with. If you want to justify something like this, quantify it. What proportion of the left? Vs. what proportion of the right unfairly vilify all Muslims as “terrorists” or “potential terrorists” or however you want to put it.

            Moreover, the Right is mostly relying on categories like, well, “religion”. You think that’s bullshit and we’ll get to it. But “religion” is an entirely legitimate way to categorise people.

            It can be in isolated incidents where it makes sense to do so, but given that “Muslim” encompasses a significant proportion of the world’s population and “terrorist” doesn’t, I’m not sure you’ve justified its use in this instance.

            … If it was mostly Christian white people, and some of them when caught stealing wages cited some Christian doctrine, then you would definitely have something.

            In most cases, only a tiny fraction of anyone will be anything. But Muslims still commit far more terror than all other groups, and the only other group that even comes close is an explicit self-sorting political ideology (Communism, I believe). The idea that there is no issue is ludicrous.

            If the hypothetical Christian cited some point of Christian doctrine to justify some moral and legal wrong this person had committed, should we take this to be an indisputable doctrinal truth about Christianity? Or should we interpret it as a self-serving rationalization and ultimately a perversion of the intent of Christian doctrine?

            And on the other hand, if we suppose that:
            1. Islamic terrorism has both a religious AND a political component,
            2. Putting Islamic terrorism aside, terrorism tends to be the result of political ideologies,
            and
            3. Only the tiniest proportion of adherents of the Muslim religion actually engage in terroristic violence,

            then it seems to me we have clear grounds to argue for a causal model in which Islamic religious beliefs have do not cause terrorism but Wahhabist political beliefs do.

            That publication doesn’t even mention the word “white”, let alone racial demographics. So are white people actually endowed with a propensity for white-collar crime? Well, the first thing I found was this

            I was only using wage theft as an (apparently invalid)* example of how we do not use the sins of individual white people to judge white people generally — and in fact often object strenuously when it does happen! — but feel little compunction about doing the same to other groups.

            *I’m sure I could dispute the methodology of the study you cited and we could go back and forth all day, but that’s really not what I’m trying to accomplish here.

          • [Non-white person commits act of terrorism]: “These people are so violent, why won’t the other members of this ethnic group denounce these acts?!

            Except that, in the present context, it’s a religion not an ethnic group. I don’t think anyone is arguing that if a Muslim from Syria commits a terrorist act, Syrian Christians have some special obligation to denounce it.

            And if someone commits a terrorist act and makes it plain that he is doing it because of his religion, it’s reasonable to expect co-religionists who disagree to say so.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @wysinwygymmv – How old are you? I ask because your responses are incongruous to me as someone who lived through some of the events we’re talking about.

            “Do I really need to go googling for a few examples of both kinds of claims? They’re really not hard to find.”

            I rather think you should. I remember the aftermath of the OKC bombing; it was used by the left as proof of the dangerous extremism of the Right right up until 9/11.

            “McVeigh is occasionally used as an example of the violent inclinations of the American far [right?] — a very small group of people.”

            For example, the NRA and its 5 million members, far and away the most successful right-wing political organization in America. Most prominent Republican politicians, anyone who effectively advocates or organizes for right-wing ideas. We have been repeatedly assured that the American right has grown extremist.

            Admittedly, this is a very small group of people, compared to the overwhelming cultural hegemony of the left, so you may be technically correct.

            “He’s never used as an example of the violent inclinations of whites in general, or men in general, or Americans in general, which is my real point.”

            He has, in fact, been prominently used as examples for all of those.

            “I bet McVeigh was no stranger to the phrase “God bless America.””

            The appropriate phrase in McVeigh’s case would more likely be “Don’t Tread On Me”. And again, that slogan is in fact a decent encapsulation of McVeigh’s motives for carrying out the attack.

            “One might want to pay attention to research showing that Al Qaeda and ISIS recruits tend not to be the most devout Muslims, but that they do tend to be poor but educated single men with little in the way of professional or romantic prospects.”

            “Devout” is an interesting term. There appears to be a sizable portion of Islam that doesn’t actually care how much alcohol you drink or women you screw so long as you commit violence in its name. And again, this portion of Islam doesn’t seem all that fringe, given muslim attitudes toward it.

            “Our media tends to highlight certain messages like: “American good! ISIS bad!””

            ISIS puts out videos of its troops sawing prisoners heads off, burning them alive in cages, and throwing gays off high-rise rooftops as positive propaganda. That is not our media, that is how ISIS itself chooses to advertise its existence to the world!

            “If you take real-world conditions into account, it’s more understandable.”

            I understand perfectly that appreciable percentages of Muslim populations around the world consider appalling, wanton, vicious barbarism to be acceptable, because it comes with ancillary benefits like community organization or education for their children. That is in fact the core of my argument. They shouldn’t. Neither should you.

            “On the one hand, Islam is not a (unitary) ideology of belief system.”

            Indeed it is not. Unfortunately, the pro-violence strains are insufficiently fringe to ignore. On the other hand, it is a hell of a lot more of a unitary ideological belief system than “whiteness”. For one thing, “whiteness” suggests no obvious unifying course of action, compared to “obey the will of God as revealed to his Prophet” for Islam. This seems blindingly obvious to me, so I’m not sure why you would claim otherwise.

            “And that’s the point — not that white people are universally horrible, but that generalizing this way is not generally justified.”

            I don’t mean to be rude, but you are coming across as disingenuous here. Generalizing in this way is absolutely justified if you can point to solid statistical evidence that one group is unusually more of a problem than other groups. We cannot do this for white managers; whiteness does not seem to drive theft. We do actually seem to be able to do this with Islamic terror; Islam does seem to drive terror. Evidence for that has been given: Islamic predominance in terror attacks, tolerant attitudes among Muslims for violence in the name of Islam. If you don’t like that, either attack the evidence or show a more fitting cleavage of the relevant populations.

            “OK, so you’re saying you don’t</em< want to better understand your political opponents or engage with the best forms of their arguments?"

            You do not get to define things based on your personal whim. Some things are bigger than you, or me, or this blog. You are free to argue that people like me are foolish to reject use of the term "racism". I am free to point out that a hundred million other people have trampled the term to dust before you, and I no longer see any point in entertaining its use. I apologize if this is inconvenient to you, but as it happens those hundred million tramplers were pretty inconvenient for me too.

            I appreciate your attempts at charity, but you do not seem to be actually engaging with the arguments presented.

          • Cypren says:

            …it seems to me we have clear grounds to argue for a causal model in which Islamic religious beliefs have do not cause terrorism but Wahhabist political beliefs do.

            I realize this is a diversion from the meta-issue being discussed, but you’ve outlined a dichotomy (one which I agree with, by the way) very clearly here, so I’m curious: given that Trump’s immigration ban specifically targets countries which have large swaths of territory under the control of Wahhabist organizations, while ignoring the majority of Muslim countries, isn’t that relatively compelling evidence against it being a “Muslim ban” and more about it trying to contain Wahhabist influence?

            (I will admit that Saudi Arabia is the notable exception to this argument, but US policy has been heavily conflicted on the Saudis for many years. At the very least, Trump is not breaking any new ground by failing to crack down on them more than his predecessors.)

          • Nornagest says:

            given that Trump’s immigration ban specifically targets countries which have large swaths of territory under the control of Wahhabist organizations, while ignoring the majority of Muslim countries, isn’t that relatively compelling evidence against it being a “Muslim ban” and more about it trying to contain Wahhabist influence?

            Doesn’t fly. Wahhabism is a relatively small minority view within Sunni Islam, and the overwhelming majority of Wahhabis are from Saudi Arabia; if you wanted to stop Wahhabis from getting into the country, freezing Saudi immigration would get you about 90% of the way there.

            None of the countries on Trump’s list have substantial Wahhabi traditions; Iran isn’t even Sunni, and Iraq mostly isn’t. If you view ISIL as Wahhabi, which is debatable, you could also point to recent Wahhabi influence in Syria and Iraq, but that’s it; it also claims some territory in Libya and Yemen, but not enough to really matter.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            I rather think you should. I remember the aftermath of the OKC bombing; it was used by the left as proof of the dangerous extremism of the Right right up until 9/11.

            1. I agreed that he’s used as an example of “the dangerous extremism of the Right.”
            2. He’s cited in the “lone wolf” wikipedia article as an example. I would go ahead and google for more examples of “lone wolf”, except you accuse me of not engaging with your arguments in the end of your comment, and that accusation really saps my will to spend more time and energy on you.

            For example, the NRA and its 5 million members, far and away the most successful right-wing political organization in America. Most prominent Republican politicians, anyone who effectively advocates or organizes for right-wing ideas. We have been repeatedly assured that the American right has grown extremist.

            NRA is unfairly maligned, but that has nothing to do with prejudice/bigotry/racism and everything to do with the gun control debate. I don’t really want to get into that, especially since it’s completely irrelevant. (And then you accuse me of not engaging with your argument.)

            He has, in fact, been prominently used as examples for all of those.

            Demand examples from me but provide none of your own? Perhaps some fringe figures argued that “McVeigh’s acts show that all white people are violent” or similar. I haven’t seen anything that argument made ever. If you’re going to expect me to accept this based solely on your assertion that it is so, then you have no business demanding examples of “lone wolf” and “mental illness” from me.

            That said, I have the easier job since McVeigh as an example of “lone wolf” is much more common than McVeigh as symbolic of the violence lurking in the hearts of all white people.

            The appropriate phrase in McVeigh’s case would more likely be “Don’t Tread On Me”. And again, that slogan is in fact a decent encapsulation of McVeigh’s motives for carrying out the attack.

            “Don’t Tread On Me” and “God bless America” are hardly mutually exclusive slogans. I’m willing to be just about everyone who ever joined a Tea Party protest would enthusiastically chant both. Who’s not engaging with whose arguments here?

            “Devout” is an interesting term. There appears to be a sizable portion of Islam that doesn’t actually care how much alcohol you drink or women you screw so long as you commit violence in its name. And again, this portion of Islam doesn’t seem all that fringe, given muslim attitudes toward it.

            HEYO! He kinda gets it. Or he goes out of his way not to get it. Not really sure what you’re getting at here.

            ISIS puts out videos of its troops sawing prisoners heads off, burning them alive in cages, and throwing gays off high-rise rooftops as positive propaganda. That is not our media, that is how ISIS itself chooses to advertise its existence to the world!

            OK, to clarify, yes ISIS is a bunch of very bad people. I disagree very much with what they do.

            Now that it’s settled my intention is not to defend ISIS, maybe we can back to the argument that’s actually being made.

            Do you have any direct evidence that people who poll as supporting ISIS are very aware of ISIS’s actions and social media campaigns? Are you actually trying to imagine what the media environment is like for someone who does not live in a western country, or are you just assuming everyone sits in front of a laptop all day like you do?

            I understand perfectly that appreciable percentages of Muslim populations around the world consider appalling, wanton, vicious barbarism to be acceptable, because it comes with ancillary benefits like community organization or education for their children. That is in fact the core of my argument. They shouldn’t. Neither should you.

            Interesting. You do seem to find it acceptable to consign Muslim populations in Syria to suffer at the hands of that wanton, vicious barbarism for the sake of ancillary benefits to you and your children such as an infinitesimal drop in the risk of getting bombed by a terrorist. I’ll guess you also find it acceptable to disappear random members of Muslim populations on thin evidence and then detain them for years, in many cases torturing them for what has amounted to more or less zero ancillary benefits at all.

            If not you, then there are certainly many people with similar politics to yours who believe as much. Romney said we “ought to double Guantanamo” while running for president, if I recall correctly.

            Now, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib aren’t as bad as ISIS’s actions. But let’s not pretend the US is completely free of barbarism in the cause of naked self interest.

            The question is, given that both ISIS and the US government have very little concern for Muslim lives, why do so many seem to prefer the US government? Maybe because it’s obvious to most of them that ISIS actually is evil whereas the US government is more often than not just misguided.

            Indeed it is not. Unfortunately, the pro-violence strains are insufficiently fringe to ignore. On the other hand, it is a hell of a lot more of a unitary ideological belief system than “whiteness”. For one thing, “whiteness” suggests no obvious unifying course of action, compared to “obey the will of God as revealed to his Prophet” for Islam. This seems blindingly obvious to me, so I’m not sure why you would claim otherwise.

            As I’ve already argued, I believe “Islamic terrorism” has political rather than religious causes. I could say “this seems blindingly obvious to me”, but that seems condescending and kind of shitty, so I won’t do that.

            Instead I’ll point out that if you have 1 billion Muslims, and ten million of them HAAATE you, maybe the best rhetorical move is not to say, “Islam is an ideology of hate and the west is opposed to Islam in all its forms,” because presumably whatever the 990 million believe is not that kind, but if you’re convincing enough, they might move in that direction.

            I think it makes more sense to highlight the forms of Islam that aren’t barbaric and make it clear that people who engage in that kind of worship aren’t on our shit list. Then there’s a possibility for resolving the “problem of Islam” that falls short of genocide.

            I don’t mean to be rude, but you are coming across as disingenuous here.

            Regardless of your intentions, accusing people of bad faith argumentation is rude. You should strongly consider the notion that I’m arguing honestly based on my beliefs and values and look for actual evidence before you accuse me of being disingenuous.

            Generalizing in this way is absolutely justified if you can point to solid statistical evidence that one group is unusually more of a problem than other groups. We cannot do this for white managers; whiteness does not seem to drive theft. We do actually seem to be able to do this with Islamic terror; Islam does seem to drive terror. Evidence for that has been given: Islamic predominance in terror attacks, tolerant attitudes among Muslims for violence in the name of Islam.

            Correlation is not causation. There, I argued against your claim without claiming you’re avoiding my arguments, or accusing you of being disingenuous, and without saying something is “blindingly obvious” (although in this case it really is). Not so hard, really.

            You do not get to define things based on your personal whim. Some things are bigger than you, or me, or this blog. You are free to argue that people like me are foolish to reject use of the term “racism”. I am free to point out that a hundred million other people have trampled the term to dust before you, and I no longer see any point in entertaining its use. I apologize if this is inconvenient to you, but as it happens those hundred million tramplers were pretty inconvenient for me too.

            Sorry, I’m pretty sure a big part of the ethic of this blog is extending charity to your opponents, meeting them halfway, and honestly trying to understand their point of view.

            I feel I’ve extended this much to you. I feel I am really entertaining your arguments, even if I still disagree. And not only do you fail to return the favor (over and over again), but you explicitly reject this as something worthwhile, or something you should do, and basically tell me I should expect you to always write off my perspective because it bears a family resemblance to the views of people who were mean to you before.

            OK, then, why should I care about your ideas? Why should I try to understand them? Why shouldn’t I do whatever it takes to drive your values out of public discourse?

            When you complain about how unfair everyone is to your view, and then use that unfairness to justify being unfair to others, that’s called “hypocrisy”.

            I appreciate your attempts at charity, but you do not seem to be actually engaging with the arguments presented.

            I disagree, I have indeed engaged with the arguments presented. If you disagree and want to convince me otherwise, I think you’re going to have to be more specific about what I’ve ignored.

            This sort of blanket “well you’re just not engaging with my arguments” thing is essentially impossible to argue against, so it’s hard not to take its use as being bad faith argumentation.

            PS I probably misused “Wahhabism” I’m so sorry everyone I was baaaaad!

            PPS If you think the liberal position is the socially dominant position, and you have liberals actually willing to listen to your point of view, that might indicate that these are especially intellectually honest liberals who are as ready to be convinced by your arguments as anyone who doesn’t already agree with you. Doesn’t it make sense to be more rather than less polite and charitable to such people? Since they’re presumably the ones you’d most want to convince?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @wysinwygymmv – I apologize if I have come across as rude. I’m trying not to be.

            You claimed:

            McVeigh is occasionally used as an example of the violent inclinations of the American far [right] — a very small group of people.

            …I provided evidence that “far right” is a descriptor routinely applied to the NRA, prominent Republican politicians, prominent right-wing advocates, and the entire right wing generally by a wide variety of mainstream sources. This is not a “very small group of people”, but rather everyone who isn’t Left. This is not a new phenomenon, and it was in fact much worse in the immediate aftermath of the OKC Bombing. If you really can’t bring yourself to believe this please say so, and I will try and dig up some of the mainstream writing from the 90s when I have the time. In short, the left blames McVeigh on the “far Right” and frequently claims that the “far Right” is the only Right that exists.

            I don’t doubt that you can find instances of McVeigh described as a “lone wolf”. The Pulse Nightclub shooter was a “lone wolf” too. That doesn’t mean either of them weren’t motivated by a specific ideology, it simply means they didn’t receive support from a larger organized conspiracy.

            ““Don’t Tread On Me” and “God bless America” are hardly mutually exclusive slogans. I’m willing to be just about everyone who ever joined a Tea Party protest would enthusiastically chant both.”

            I am agreeing that McVeigh was actually a right winger, motivated by things familiar to right-wing thought. What set him outside the mainstream Right was his willingness to engage in large-scale political violence, something that the mainstream Right rejects.

            Likewise, Islamic lone wolves are Islamic, and appear to be motivated by things familiar to Islamic thought. What sets them apart from most Muslims is their willingness to engage in large-scale political violence. Unfortunately, Muslims are not as good about categorically rejecting political violence as the American Right Wing is, as evidenced by the approval ratings for ISIS among various Muslim populations.

            “Do you have any direct evidence that people who poll as supporting ISIS are very aware of ISIS’s actions and social media campaigns?”

            ISIS is probably one of the most famous political movements in the entire world at the moment, and they’re famous for exactly one thing: being the most vicious bastards currently extant. If your argument is that Muslims living in the first world, even dirt-poor ones, have heard of ISIS but don’t realize they’re the ones on the evening news sawing heads off helpless victims, I’m afraid I find that argument wildly implausible. Do you have any evidence to support it?

            “HEYO! He kinda gets it. Or he goes out of his way not to get it. Not really sure what you’re getting at here.”

            Muslim support of political violence is insufficiently fringe.

            “You do seem to find it acceptable to consign Muslim populations in Syria to suffer at the hands of that wanton, vicious barbarism for the sake of ancillary benefits to you and your children such as an infinitesimal drop in the risk of getting bombed by a terrorist.”

            Actually, I’d prefer we hadn’t destabilized the region by burning down Libya, and before that Iraq. Given that we did do that, I’d prefer that we let the Russians and Assad crush ISIS without interference. But we didn’t do that either. At the end of the day, though, this should not be our problem, and it is our problem to the exact extent that people keep bowing to absurd shaming tactics.

            “I’ll guess you also find it acceptable to disappear random members of Muslim populations on thin evidence and then detain them for years, in many cases torturing them for what has amounted to more or less zero ancillary benefits at all.”

            Nope. I voted Obama hoping to get an end to that sort of shit.

            “Maybe because it’s obvious to most of them that ISIS actually is evil whereas the US government is more often than not just misguided.”

            “Most of them” is not enough when you have 10-25% approval ratings for sawing people’s heads off live on camera. Killing people who disagree with you is one of those things that needs to be really, really fringe for society to function properly.

            “As I’ve already argued, I believe “Islamic terrorism” has political rather than religious causes. I could say “this seems blindingly obvious to me”, but that seems condescending and kind of shitty, so I won’t do that.”

            It’s certainly not blindingly obvious to me. It’s not even obvious that Islam encourages a distinction between the religious and political spheres; see the numerous calls by Muslim minorities for Sharia law in their host societies. I would imagine it’s rather a surprise to the fair number of Muslim radicals who explicitly state that their violence is religious as well as political.

            “Instead I’ll point out that if you have 1 billion Muslims, and ten million of them HAAATE you, maybe the best rhetorical move is not to say, “Islam is an ideology of hate and the west is opposed to Islam in all its forms,” because presumably whatever the 990 million believe is not that kind, but if you’re convincing enough, they might move in that direction.”

            The truth is that Islam appears to have a political violence problem. If pointing out the truth drives Muslims toward political violence, then Islam also has a problem dealing constructively with the truth. Neither of these problems would be a good reason to pretend the facts are otherwise, in the hopes of mollifying a belligerent ideology. We have a great many guns, are protected by a really lovely pair of oceans, and are quite good at bombing things if the need arises. We’ll be fine. Nor is genocide necessary; hopefully if we quit fucking around with their countries, they’ll sort the problem out themselves.

            In any case, as previously noted, the Right is frequently accused of being an ideology of hate, and told that the modern world at least is opposed to it in all its forms, and further is bent on its complete eradication. We manage to cope, somehow.

            “Sorry, I’m pretty sure a big part of the ethic of this blog is extending charity to your opponents, meeting them halfway, and honestly trying to understand their point of view.”

            It is.

            “I feel I’ve extended this much to you. I feel I am really entertaining your arguments, even if I still disagree.”

            I will leave that for others to judge.

            “but you explicitly reject this as something worthwhile, or something you should do, and basically tell me I should expect you to always write off my perspective because it bears a family resemblance to the views of people who were mean to you before.”

            Your perspective is that “racism” is a useful term in these discussions, my perspective is that it is not useful. We could discuss why we hold these perspectives, or possibly agree to proceed using one understanding or the other on a provisional basis, but you seem to be complaining that I stand by my perspective rather than abandoning it at the first challenge. I don’t expect you to adopt my views; I am simply trying to explain what they are. Communication is impossible if we can’t understand each other.

            “OK, then, why should I care about your ideas? Why should I try to understand them? Why shouldn’t I do whatever it takes to drive your values out of public discourse?”

            Because the left has tried that recently, and it turns out to be a losing strategy.

            “When you complain about how unfair everyone is to your view, and then use that unfairness to justify being unfair to others, that’s called “hypocrisy”.”

            If I were complaining or demanding that they stop, it would be hypocrisy. Instead, I am simply noting how the game works. You can call something racist, but that term no longer has any useful meaning. Everything is racist, and therefore nothing is. The term is used up.

            “I disagree, I have indeed engaged with the arguments presented. If you disagree and want to convince me otherwise, I think you’re going to have to be more specific about what I’ve ignored.”

            best I can do for a brief summary. I’d welcome comment from other commenters; obviously I’m biased.

        • tscharf says:

          Trump decision tree starts with American citizens/Not American Citizens, I hope this is obvious by now. He is much closer to a nationalist / patriot than he is a racist using this definition.

      • Deiseach says:

        Because I think it’s an opportunity to do a really important and necessary analysis of what people mean by “racist” when we fight over it

        Oh, that’s what drives me up the wall. The (mainly white*) people who are all sweet reasonableness about “now when we say ‘racist’ we don’t mean that in a bad way, we don’t mean you hate non-white people, we mean you as a white person are the beneficiary, in so many ways you are not aware of, of centuries of structural racism and white supremacy, and that the cultural waters we all swim in means you aren’t aware of this deeply-embedded racism in society and in yourself”.

        And then they turn around when talking amongst themselves and “racist” means “hater, bigot, redneck, should all die in a fire, anyone who does not 110% think all White Western Civilisation is nothing but colonialism, appropriation, theft and violence, people not Woke like what we are”.

        *Black etc people? I can understand rage and anger. Though there is a sub-class of the Professionally Aggrieved who write long articles dragging the racist culture they have to struggle to survive in, and at the end you get the usual couple of lines of potted bio where they’re a graduate of a hoity-toity university writing for nice middle-class periodicals on cultural and social activism topics and it’s been three generations since anyone in their family did anything not in the professions.

    • J Mann says:

      IMHO, the problem with expanding racism to include this is that it catches everyone, which may be fair but lowers the value of accusing Trump as racist.

      I commented on this downthread, but if Trump limiting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries on the grounds that those countries present a particularly high terror risk is racist, then Obama limiting the visa waiver program to those countries for the same reason is also racist, albiet less harmful, right?

      I mean this seriously, not just as a distraction or as tu quoque – if what we mean is that “Trump is somewhat more racist against Muslims than Obama,” or “Trump is about as racist as Obama, but more harmful,” then Scott’s original articles look about right to me.

      • Deiseach says:

        Trump banning the same nations as Obama is racist, but it wasn’t racist when Obama did it, because “racism = prejudice + power”:

        Recognize that racism is not just prejudice, but prejudice plus power. In our society, whites have the vast majority of power in institutions such as schools, courts, and corporations and maintenance of national narratives. Individual people of color may be biased against whites, just as whites may be biased against people of color. But the difference is that whites have institutional power to consistently deny resources and rights to people of color impacting their life choices and life chances; people of color do not have similar power to use their bias that way.

        But Obama was president, isn’t that power? Nope, that’s an individual case of a non-white person being successful, but it doesn’t translate to the same for all non-white people (however, all white people have privilege via their whiteness, no matter if they personally are in poor or bad circumstances):

        Say that the success of [Oprah, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, etc.] show that there’s no longer any racism.
        Instead: Ask yourself about Madame CJ Walker. She was a millionaire, the first black millionaire, in the early part of the 20th century. Lynchings were still going on. No one would say things were equal then, but she was a famous millionaire. The real question is how many more people like Oprah etc would there be if there were equality?

        You need to be up on these points or people will think you’re not woke! 🙂

        • wysinwygymmv says:

          There’s a charitable interpretation of this phenomenon, as I tried to explain elsewhere, but I don’t really expect you to acknowledge it.

          • J Mann says:

            Don’t worry – we’ll do something about Irish commenters next!

            Deiseach, that reminds me to ask – I enjoy your posts, so don’t stop, but are you unusually interested in US politics or is this level of engagement common in Europe?

  2. Anonymous Bosch says:

    As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time debating Holocaust deniers on the Internet, I’m pretty deeply disturbed by their recent doubling down on their Holocaust statement. “Lots of people died, but the schools/media/ZOG only care about the Jews” is, to me, a very recognizable opening gambit.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      You seem to know more about anti-Semitism than I do, so I will take that into account.

      It still kind of seems to me like those times Obama makes a speech against terrorism, but the Republicans say that since he didn’t use the specific words “radical Islam” he must secretly support it.

      • Iain says:

        It’s as if Obama gave a speech about terrorism but never mentioned Islam at all, and then when asked about it at a press conference just said “Lots of people are terrorists.”

      • Jaskologist says:

        I gotta side with the Lefties on this one. The things you take pains to avoid speaking about are signals, and whom you’re signalling to is important information.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I oppose attacking true claims simply on the basis that they correlate with false claims. Attack claims on their own merits, rather than saying they’re the sorts of claims that people who make non-meritorious claims would make.

      • Jiro says:

        I live in the real world where I don’t have an infinite amount of time to argue claims, and where furthermore, certain claims are so correlated with bad faith that it isn’t worth continuing to argue with such people.

    • alexsloat says:

      Which I find interesting, because I’ve used that one in a few conversations, and I’m the furthest thing from a Holocaust denier around. The Jewish deaths are better-remembered than the non-Jewish deaths, despite their overall scales being broadly similar. It’s an interesting point, and me being the pedant I am, I try to mention it whenever anyone talks about the Holocaust killing 6 million, because the actual number was much higher. I specifically say it to make Hitler look worse, so it’s odd that it’s correlated with Holocaust denial.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Eh, it’s obviously true, but only in the sense that “Jews are overrepresented in the media” is obviously true, and I would be suspicious of people who used that one too much.

        There’s definitely a problem where polite society has decided that certain true statements have unfortunate implications and so anyone who says them is racist, and then uneducated people innocently say them and are tarred as racist. But Trump’s team (and especially Bannon) are educated enough to avoid this kind of thing if they wanted to, which makes me take Bosch more seriously when he says there’s a deliberate policy decision not to care.

      • eh says:

        Funnily enough, I’ve used it as a talking point against Holocaust deniers, along with Russian POWs, the Holodomor, the Armenian genocide + Turkey’s denial, Dresden, Rwanda, My Lai, the Khmer Rouge + Chomsky’s denial, Stalinist purges + the left’s denial, etc., as a proof of how often and how easily bad shit happens to a lot of innocent people.

        When I read the quote, I thought “oh good, they’re pre-empting the deniers”. But Bosch is right, it could be the opening move to something else. How could we tell the difference?

        • baconbacon says:

          You can’t tell the difference because very few people are so dumb (not even holocaust deniers) that they can’t adapt their arguments at all. Some holocaust deniers have tried to claim that it is entirely or almost entirely a nefarious jewish conspiracy, but that didn’t fly (as in it doesn’t get many converts) and so a different argument had to be crafted around some facts. Bold and bigoted statements didn’t work so they imitated more a more intellectual style.

          The trouble is that there is basically an iron law in discussions that all minority opinions require nuance, as you are saying something against the majority opinion. If you audience is like minded than you can skip the nuance and go right to the meat of the discussion, for a totally benign example if two economists are talking then they can discuss “inferior goods”* freely without any fear of being misunderstood. If you talk to a non economist they will use the traditional definition of “inferior” in their head, so you either have to start out by explaining what an inferior good is or come up with a synonym.

          *For those interested an inferior good is one where consumption decreases when income rises.

      • JulieK says:

        Do you mean the frequently-repeated number of 6M Jewish victims and 5M non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust? I recently read that 5M figure was basically plucked out of thin air in the 1970s, and the actual number of non-Jews who were deliberately murdered was smaller (though the number who died in the war was much larger).
        Unfortunately google is mainly giving me Holocaust-denial sites when I try to find this article…

        • szopeno says:

          Here is a thing which will help you understand the problem:
          I am POlish. We have no idea how many Poles died during the war. COmmunists after 1945 decided that 6 millions is a nice number, and one of the Polish communist personally added 28 thousands at the end, as he decided taht round number would be less believeable than “Exact” one. No one was counting deaths, as communist were affraid that it would provoke the questions about Poles who died under Soviet occupation or perished in Gulags.

          Now, after much effort, modern Polish historians decided that the best estimate is about 2.7 millions ethnic Poles, plus about 3 millions of Jews, plus other Polish citizens. Borders were moved. People escaped to the west. Other were deported to the east. The last population count was years before the war, and demographs can only estimate that in 1939, Poland has 34 millions, while after war, population count showed 24 millions.

          So we do not know and we will never know. In the west during the executions the names of the victims were written down, and after the war historians were collecting them. Here we know that “at this day, approximately 40 people were captured at random from the streets and shot by Germans” or “a group of boys was shot for playing football by Germans because they thought it was conspiracy meeting”.

          And the further into in the east situation was even worse.

          Moreover, which were victims of the holocaust? Non-Jewish Poles who perished in Auschwitz, sure (about 100-150 thousands of them). Those shot in intelligenzaktions? Sure. But what about villages razed to the ground during anti-partisan action? What abut, say, 100 nameless Poles captured from the street and shot in retaliation for assasination of Kutschera? Were they Holocaust victims? What about those Polish foerced labourers who were shot, or starved to death?

          And that for Poles only. What about Belorussians, Ukrainians, Russians?

          So how you can know the number?

          All we have are estimations, and we know those were millions.

    • Proofs and Refutations says:

      The takeaway for me is, the Holocaust Memorial acknowledgment was written so as not to offend Holocaust deniers. No mention of numbers who died, in fact no mention that anyone died (he used the word victims), no mention of Jews, no mention of gas chambers, concentration camps, Final Solution, systematic killings versus collateral deaths. Basically all of the things the Holocaust deniers claim never happened are left out.

      • Matt M says:

        As a devil’s advocate – being general also tends to mean being “inclusive.”

        If you mention Jews specifically, you may offend the Roma. Mention both specifically and you may offend the gays. Mention all three specifically, and you may offend the mentally disabled, and so on and so forth. Same thing with every other point you’re listing. Mention deaths and you’re implying people didn’t suffer in other ways. Mention gas chambers and you offend the people who were killed by exposure being worked to death in the cold…

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Matt M:
          My first thought when I heard about the controversy around the statement was to wonder “but how does it compare to other holocaust remembrance statements?”

          So I am definitely sympathetic to the argument that you are making.

          When I googled “obama holocaust remembrance speech” the first link that comes up, which seems like a pretty easy way to handle at least some of what you are talking about.

          For example:
          “Today, on Yom HaShoah, we solemnly remember the six million Jews and the millions of others murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.”
          and
          “righteous individuals who risked their lives to save Jews and other victims from Nazi persecution”

          But it doesn’t specifically mention concentration camps, gas chambers, the Final Solution, or systematic killings. Probably because it is, as you say, the totality of all of the horrors that matters.

  3. spudtowards says:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF2k11QQW0g&feature=youtu.be&t=220

    Just another point on how open they (The trump coalition) are about this.

  4. “I have called … ‘an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue’”.

    I think you have to retract one word of that. On the evidence of the election, he is a competent demagogue.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Incompetent full stop, not incompetent at being a demagogue. He’s not fraudulent at being a demagogue either.

      • colinfraizer says:

        If he’s found to be sincere about something, would you switch to “polyhypocritical”?

        • Michael Watts says:

          No need to wait. He’s already stated that he would like to be able to more easily sue people critical of him for libel and that the laws of libel should change to support him (and similarly situated people) in this, and I have total confidence that that’s what he really believes.

        • shakeddown says:

          nah, polyhypocritical is someone who claims to be polyamorous but secretly has an exclusive partner who’s the only person he’s interested in.

      • NoahSD says:

        If you haven’t seen it already, this article on the executive order is amazingly good: https://www.lawfareblog.com/malevolence-tempered-incompetence-trumps-horrifying-executive-order-refugees-and-visas.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          That seems like a very good rundown of the issues raised by the order.

          the implications of having an executive this inept are not small and won’t be short-lived

        • baconbacon says:

          The major issue that is difficult to get your head around is that incompetence in these matters often looks the same as hyper competence.

          Issue an order that has enough holes in it to be shot down. Interpretation A: What a bozo, he looks silly for taking an action sure to fail. Interpretation B: First its highly popular with his base, secondly if it gets shot down by the courts or congress then any attack that occurs is now on their heads. Imagine a world where the ACLU challenge holds up and then someone pulls off an attack within 6 months, he is going to grab a huge amount of support for being the guy who was trying to protect us, while those liberals were trying to give terrorists rights.

          Seriously the situation looks don’t lose/win, he has little political capital with a 40% approval rating, and got elected largely thanks to the demographic breakdowns within the electoral system. Bold statements on issues they care about look good even if the have little actual effect, on the other hand if a attack happens he looks prescient, caring and even daring in his attempts to make us look safe.

      • tscharf says:

        Is it possible that 10 entire days in the White House is inadequate to make a final judgment on competence?

        • wysinwygymmv says:

          Yes, it’s possible, but 10 entire days in the White House is probably enough to make a pretty good initial guess on competence given the evidence already provided by the Trump administration.

          • tscharf says:

            Did you happen to see the roll out of the ACA, including the website?

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            Did you happen to see the roll out of the ACA, including the website?

            Did I express any support whatsoever for Obama ever? Is this supposed to do anything except express naked partisanship?

            But while I’m at it, I work at an enterprise software company so I have some idea of the challenges involved in something like this. Let me compare to another situation I run into a lot:

            I take a commuter train, and sometimes there might be a problem where they shut down the engine and then can’t restart it. And there’s often people on the train who complain about the incompetence of the employees when this happens. And I can’t help but think to myself: “are you a diesel mechanic? Do you know how to restart the engine? Do you have any solutions or are you just finding especially nasty ways of complaining?”

          • tscharf says:

            The point is that every administration looks mighty incompetent at some point and the ACA was much bigger potatoes and high profile than a few days of an inept immigration ban. We don’t have enough data points to identify a trend yet with Trump.

            Obviously they should have gradually rolled out the ACA website state by state so it didn’t explode. The other not so obvious point is that this roll out disaster is inconsequential to the big picture. It got fixed and what matters is the underlying policy, not the initial incompetent implementation.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            We don’t have enough data points to identify a trend yet with Trump.

            In my view, there’s enough for some provisional guesses. I can always change my mind later if he turns out not to be a disaster.

            I don’t think Obama’s detractors waited until the ACA rollout to start with the “death panel”, “secret muslim”, “antichrist”, “COMMUNISM!” stuff, so I feel pretty justified if provisionally assuming Trump will be bad news and planning accordingly.

            PS I was actually pretty critical of Obama, so you might be barking up the wrong tree.

      • Deiseach says:

        He got himself elected which is only incompetent if you think he never seriously intended to get the job in the first place. “Oops, I won the election! How in the heck did that happen after I did all I could to lose?”

        It does make Hillary’s campaign seem even worse – she couldn’t even beat an omnishambles?

        Granted, having got the job he may not be able to actually do it, which would be incompetence but there’s a lot of that kind of incompetence floating around in this world.

  5. colinfraizer says:

    Are dogwhistles mostly just a case of projection by those on the left?

    I look at examples like candidate Obama and his opposition to gay marriage. It caused little or no outrage _because no one actually believed it_.

    Or, take for example, the outrage long-expressed by Democrats when linked to socialism. It was derided as a ridiculous charge from at least the 1930s through the 2000’s (aughts?). I guess the outrage expired with the widespread support of Sen. Sanders’s candidacy on the American left.

    No one worries of impending theocracy when Nancy Pelosi claims to be doing “the Lord’s work” or that Republican’s “dishonor God”. Why? Because her supporters know it is simply rhetoric to hammer opponents.

    [I’m no Trump supporter. I actively opposed his nomination and did not vote for him. I’m also not a believer. Or even a Belieber.]

    • Scott Alexander says:

      We need to distinguish between “dog whistling” and “lying”.

      • AnonEEmous says:

        i think we have to distinguish between

        “things you have to say, in order to get those other people on board”

        and

        “things you really believe”

        sadly, a lot of people think that your proclamations on Trump fall into the first category. Personally…my thoughts on your entire attitude on Trump are contradicted sharply by a couple of serious data points.

        Luckily, I think he’ll be great and I’m happy that he has begun to set forth his promises – though he needs a lot of work on the implementation. Still, in future he won’t be using executive orders, which means he’ll be passing bills, which means Congress will by necessity have a say in the matter, so I’m not too pessimistic about that.

      • Squirrel of Doom says:

        Also “gaslighting”, another sloppy synonym to lying.

        “Dogwhistle” actually means to say things that sound one way to regular people, but differently to members of a certain group. Like if you use a phrase from the Bible or Star Trek, followers of those realms will hear a different message.

        I believe these things do happen, but far less than people bring up the accusation.

        • Jiro says:

          “Gaslighting” means “lying in such a way as to imply that your memory is questionable“. It is a type of lying, but it does not refer to all lying.

          There is some question as to whether it requires making you believe your memory is bad or making someone else believe your memory is bad, but that’s just normal linguistic drift.

          • Nornagest says:

            It seems to be drifting into “implying that your memory is questionable”, full stop. Which is a problem, since almost everyone’s memory is kinda terrible and conflicts between different people’s accounts come up all the time with or without deliberate lying involved.

    • alexsloat says:

      I don’t think it’s projection in the usual sense, I think it’s a complete misunderstanding of their opponents. If you accept as given that the right is all a bunch of racists as soon as you scratch the surface, any random statement that can be taken the wrong way fits in perfectly to your theory, and any statement that doesn’t sound racist at all is clearly just a cover story.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I think Trump (or one of his advisors) has come up with a new form of dogwhistle, one only your opponents can hear. “America First”, for instance. To his supporters it means that he’s going to consider America’s interest firsts. To his opponents it means “I’m a Nazi, whattya going to do about it”. Perhaps it’s a trollwhistle.

    • wysinwygymmv says:

      I look at examples like candidate Obama and his opposition to gay marriage. It caused little or no outrage _because no one actually believed it_.

      People believed it. Obama was criticized for this on the left. He got elected anyway because his opponent was also against gay marriage.

      Or, take for example, the outrage long-expressed by Democrats when linked to socialism. It was derided as a ridiculous charge from at least the 1930s through the 2000’s (aughts?). I guess the outrage expired with the widespread support of Sen. Sanders’s candidacy on the American left.

      Given how long “socialism” has been the right’s equivalent of “fascism”, this seems reasonable to me. If you’re using the word “socialism” purely descriptively, then some Dem/left policies are vaguely socialist. But even Sanders doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to nationalize the means of production and pass control of it to worker councils, so the pejorative use of the term “socialist” that is so prevalent on the right is the real problem here, in my opinion.

      • cassander says:

        > But even Sanders doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to nationalize the means of production and pass control of it to worker councils,

        Old school socialists want to nationalize the commanding heights of the economy, steal, coal, transportation, etc. Modern socialists want to nationalize education, health, finance. The impulse hasn’t changed, they just have an a different set of targets in mind.

        • wysinwygymmv says:

          This sort of comment is why I have already written you off as not worth engaging with.

          • cassander says:

            Which part of my assertion is wrong? That only school socialists didn’t want those things? Or that modern socialists don’t? Because both of those prospects seem entirely inarguable to me. the view of what makes for the commanding heights has changed, not the desire to seize them.

        • Spookykou says:

          @Cassander

          It seems to me that a transition from, everything should be nationalized, to, these particular programs should be nationalized, would reflect a significant change both in motivation and impulse.

          One is much more, grand theory of government/humanity, and the other is much more, pragmatic self interest/charity, I want healthcare and education for myself/the poor.

          Is it your position that ‘Old School Socialists’ just wanted to nationalize a couple of major industries and leave everything else alone? My education is poor, but my knee jerk reaction here is that the focus on steel coal and transportation reflects more about the time they lived in rather than the limited scope of their ambitions.

          Where as the modern socialists just seem to have really obviously limited ambitions, at least the more main stream ones like Sanders.

          • cassander says:

            >It seems to me that a transition from, everything should be nationalized, to, these particular programs should be nationalized, would reflect a significant change both in motivation and impulse.

            But it was never everything should be nationalized, at least outside the USSR. It was “the commanding heights”. And it still is.

            >My education is poor, but my knee jerk reaction here is that the focus on steel coal and transportation reflects more about the time they lived in rather than the limited scope of their ambitions.

            I agree completely. And the same is true of their intellectual, and oft times physical, heirs today.

          • Tracy W says:

            But it was never everything should be nationalized, at least outside the USSR. It was “the commanding heights”.

            The Communist Manifesto called for (partial quotes here):
            1. Abolition of all property in land…
            3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
            5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State…
            5. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

            When you’re abolishing property in land, and giving the state control of all credit, communications and transport, you’re not leaving that much out. Wanna build a house? If the state controls credit, either you build a house the state wants or you have to finance it out of your own personal savings. And where are you going to get the land to build it on? Same goes for opening a restaurant or extending your workshop. And if the state controls comms and transport, how do you get your supplies?

      • Tekhno says:

        Honestly, I think many leftists started to wonder if socialism wasn’t something awesome if so many conservatives kept misapplying it to mean “any government service I don’t like”.

        There’s an element of “FINE! ALRIGHT! I’M A SOCIALIST! NOW WHAT?” as well. (The right wing counterpart of this is probably the less sincere elements of the alt-right). The left overused “racist”, as the right is keen to (correctly) tell us, but they should acknowledge that the right overused “socialist”. Both terms became so all encompassing that they ended up conveniently capturing anyone even slightly to the right or left of your position.

        Of course, there’s probably no way out of this. Politics is a cut-throat war of memes. Maybe “Andrew Card” was right.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Bernie Sanders describes _himself_ as a socialist. Calling him one is merely descriptive.

        When we non-socialist types want to unfairly denigrate Sanders over his economic policies, we call him a Commie.

  6. Qiaochu Yuan says:

    But if you tell me on Twitter I’m wrong because my model of Trump could never predict the things I specifically predicted when laying out the model, I’m not going to pay very much attention to you.

    Ooh, but in fact, you paid enough attention to them to write a blog post responding to their criticism, which all things considered is a lot more attention than you pay to most people…

    • carvenvisage says:

      paid attention to pattern of people accusing him of something easily disprovable, not individual accusations or the people who made them.

      It’s also phrased in the future tense. He’s going to pay less attention now that he’s laid out why they’re wrong.

      Honestly your comment is retarded.

  7. NoahSD says:

    I agree with your point, Scott. But, how far does he have to go before these arguments become ridiculous. To take the obvious prototypical extreme example, Hitler did not literally have all negative characteristics, but obviously we shouldn’t be going out of our way to point out the positive attributes of Hitler.

    With Trump, things just seem so incredibly murky now. I don’t want to just start attributing all negative attributes to him, and in some cases I even want to give him the benefit of the doubt. (E.g., I don’t think he’s antisemitic, though I’m biased because I’m a Jew who hears people cry wolf about antisemitism very frequently.) But, I also don’t want to be the guy that’s saying “Sure, he’s discriminated against prospective black tenants and called Mexican immigrants rapists and proposed a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States and chosen as one of his primary advisors a blatant white supremacist who recently compared himself favorably to Darth Vader and Satan (as well as Dick Cheney), BUT he’s actually not that anti-LGBTQ!” At some point, there’s no room for nuance.

    I suspect that things will seem much less murky in hindsight…

    • suntzuanime says:

      If people are ascribing negative characteristics to Hitler he did not have, we should, as a matter of accuracy, speak up and correct them. That’s what separates real history from propaganda.

      • Subb4k says:

        Also, if people believe Hitler had literally all negative characteristics, it makes them less likely to spot other would-be Hitlers.

        I agree that “going out of your way to point positive characteristics of Hitler” would be bad in certain forums where people only remember very simple “fit in a soundbite” concepts and conveying complex ideas is hard. However, people who read SSC should, if nothing else, be able to understand complex ideas and be willing to read through long posts.

        • On the subject of positive characteristics of Hitler …

          C.S. Lewis somewhere comments that even the Devil cannot be wholly evil, since if he were he would be unable to any damage–intelligence, after all, is a virtue. Indeed, I think Lewis says that existence is a virtue, so a Devil entirely lacking virtues would not even exist (by memory so possibly mistaken).

          I think the basic point is correct. The people who do damage are ones who mix virtues and vices, with the virtues making it possible for the vices to do damage. Hitler, for example, was a very skilled orator, which is a virtue–and that skill was a large part of what made him able to gain power and do great damage.

          • carvenvisage says:

            You have to distinguish between virtues and strengths.

            It goes without saying that someone who is determined and capable is more dangerous. What’s less obvious is that someone with genuine redeeming qualities who sees themselves as a good person might be more dangerous.

            Your example and C.S. Lewis’s seem to take this latter important point and reduce it to the trivial former point.

      • NoahSD says:

        This seems very related to Scott’s idea of weak men (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/). Tone and context are very important here. Sometimes a statement like “Hitler was actually fairly kind to *insert some minority that Hitler was kind to, if one exists*” is just a simple correction of facts. Other times, such statements are essentially playing the role of the weak man-style argument. They’re entirely uncontroversial statements on their face, but they intentionally rub people the wrong way and stand in for much uglier views (in this case, Holocaust denial).

        And, this is not a minor issue in the case of Trump. Trump and Bannon and the alt right are all about weak men. They’re pushing policies that harm all immigrants while saying emphatically that they’re only against illegal immigrants. The (more civilized faction of the) alt right responds to the Black Lives Matter movement by saying “all lives matter”, implicitly attacking the weak man argument that only black lives matter, which nobody was making. They denounce protests by comparing peaceful protesters to violent anarchists.

        To again pick an obviously extreme example, if Trump were currently committing genocide against, say, Muslims, I think it would be clearly inappropriate for Scott to post something about how Trump probably doesn’t support the KKK. Trump is not currently committing genocide, nor does it seem likely that he will, but he’s certainly doing some objectively disgusting things. So, I’m asking Scott (quite honestly, without meaning to imply that he’s done anything wrong) where he thinks the limit is.

        • AnonEEmous says:

          “They’re pushing policies that harm all immigrants while saying emphatically that they’re only against illegal immigrants.”

          ?

          “The (more civilized faction of the) alt right responds to the Black Lives Matter movement by saying “all lives matter”,”

          You must admit that any movement that was called “White Lives Matter” would receive serious blowback, yes? People don’t like that kind of racially coded rhetoric. And while you’ve correctly identified some alt-right rhetoric, you missed that this originated from outside of the alt-right via pretty much random people on Twitter, so it seems kind of weird to cite that as a purposeful weakman designed to defend something, when the people originally using it weren’t necessarily being ideological in that way at all.

          Anyhow, the reason that I don’t like this form of rhetoric is that it creates movements insulated from correction; because anyone who defends (the evil outgroup) are themselves secretly (the evil outgroup), you can say anything about (the evil outgroup) and not have it be corrected, which leads to (the evil outgroup) being ever more evil, and just generally misinformation being propagated. I really think that the modern social justice movement suffers from it and it’s one of the things that bothers me the most.

          Still, I can’t deny that what you’re talking about exists. Maybe the best example I recall is a book based on the D&D-associated Forgotten Realms, where a book called the Cyrinishad brainwashes people into thinking that the god Cyric is the greatest and their leader, and also into believing true details of his biography. The thief god basically ends up reading it and offering up these sorts of defenses, not wanting to admit, I guess, that he had become brainwashed for fear of his allies turning on him. Very creepy. Anyhow, just an anecdote, but that was a really great example if anyone wants to go dig it up. With that said. I’d still rather the possibility for correction exist, because the opposite rather frightens me.

        • Tracy W says:

          To again pick an obviously extreme example, if Trump were currently committing genocide against, say, Muslims, I think it would be clearly inappropriate for Scott to post something about how Trump probably doesn’t support the KKK.

          Out of interest, why do you think it would be inappropriate? (There are time and place considerations, of course, at a memorial service for victims would be inappropriate. But I don’t see how the time alone would make it inappropriate.)

          • NoahSD says:

            “They’re pushing policies that harm all immigrants while saying emphatically that they’re only against illegal immigrants.”

            ?

            They are currently detaining many legal immigrants in airports around the country; they’ve deported some of them; and they’ve instructed other countries to prevent them from boarding flights.

            With that said. I’d still rather the possibility for correction exist, because the opposite rather frightens me.

            Out of interest, why do you think it would be inappropriate? (There are time and place considerations, of course, at a memorial service for victims would be inappropriate. But I don’t see how the time alone would make it inappropriate.)

            Sometimes very emotional people who are watching the world burn around them don’t get the facts exactly right. If the Holocaust is just beginning and someone is freaking out because Hitler’s killed “millions” of Jews, you don’t tell them “Well, actually it’s only been a few hundred thousand so far!”

            And, this isn’t only because it’s insensitive. It’s because you don’t want to start making pro and con lists about these things. “Sure, he’s committing genocide, but it could be worse genocide, and the economy is doing great!” At some point, all that really matters is stopping horrible things from happening, and the nuance of exactly how horrible these things are or whether there’s some silver lining behind the mushroom clouds

            (To be clear, I’m making the examples more and more extreme because my original question is “Where should the line be drawn?” and you guys seem to be questioning whether the line exists at all. So, I’m trying to choose examples where we’ve unambiguously crossed the line, apparently not successfully…)

            I recognize that such arguments are dangerous because they’re probably more often used to do terrible things than to avoid terrible things. E.g., Trump’s inauguration speech basically said “the US is in a complete state of disrepair, so I will take extreme actions to fix it.” But, if I had been alive during the Holocaust (and not in a concentration camp….), I hope I wouldn’t have been making pro and con lists.

          • Tracy W says:

            @NoahSD:
            I’m afraid my intuition is the opposite. Of course if the Holocaust is just starting and someone is freaking out about them killing millions of Jews, but it’s only a few hundred thousand right now, the true facts are important and normally you’d correct them. If only a few hundred thousand are already dead, you now have the potential opportunity to save millions more. Surely in that situation anyone remotely sensible would say “so far it’s a few hundred thousand, we still have a chance”.

            Also I’m not getting the accusations of insensitivity. If hundreds of thousands of people are already dead, and millions more lives are at risk, isn’t that rather more important than the feelings of someone who said something wrong and doesn’t like being corrected?

            you guys seem to be questioning whether the line exists at all

            Of course there are times and places, eg memorial services. But in public discourse, accuracy is always important.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            @TracyW:

            Of course if the Holocaust is just starting and someone is freaking out about them killing millions of Jews, but it’s only a few hundred thousand right now, the true facts are important and normally you’d correct them. If only a few hundred thousand are already dead, you now have the potential opportunity to save millions more. Surely in that situation anyone remotely sensible would say “so far it’s a few hundred thousand, we still have a chance”.

            How does saying: “Stop freaking out, it’s only a few hundred thousand so far?” help to stop the holocaust? I really don’t understand the argument you’re making.

            Like “hey, the fuehrer is killing millions of people, let’s stop him!” gets momentum going in the direction of stopping the fuehrer, but “hold on, let’s check our facts before we start marching in the streets!” seems like it would slow that momentum.

            Being factually correct doesn’t inevitably result in your tactics being more effective. In fact, it seems like it’s mostly the opposite in politics.

          • FeepingCreature says:

            If you say “millions” when you know “hundreds of thousands” is more correct, you are basically using words as a bludgeon to get action instead of carriers of information; you’re not respecting my decision loop but assuming the right to manipulate my inputs in order to compel certain outputs. Before we even consider the matter at hand, you’ve already decided that you know better than I do what the right thing to do is, and that you have the right to make that thing happen by any means necessary. Then don’t be surprised when I consider you hostile and discount your claims – exactly because I want that tactic to be ineffective. Lying to get results is not a “sword of good” – it’s not a weapon that systematically works for good causes but not for bad causes, the same way that niceness works for cooperation or not telling lies works for the truth; it’s a weapon that works for whatever causes can make people feel emotional or become ruthless, which does not generally correlate with moral correctness.

            Before using any weapon, visualize it being turned around and used against you; visualize a society where every person can use that weapon, and then ask; “is this a good society? Is this society better for having this weapon used? Or would it be improved if we all agreed to not use it?” And if you agree with the second, then act accordingly.

            And besides, “When your cause is morally righteous any action is licensed” is really not a mode of behavior you want to associate yourself with.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            @FeepingCreature:

            1. That’s a meta level question. Yes, I understand the argument perfectly, but on the object level it was a question of which tactic is more effective for stopping the mass murder. Fact-checking is not as effective at stopping mass murder as organizing around slogans like “millions already killed”.
            2. I think you’re even begging the question on the meta level. To me, the distinction between “hundreds of thousands systematically murdered” and “millions systematically murdered” is simply not as important as the fact that someone is systematically murdering hundreds of thousands of people. I’d say the emphasis should be on stopping the murder, then we can go back and correct the count afterwards.

            This might distress you because makes it clear you can’t systematize your OODA loop. Tough — that’s life. Sometimes you need to make decisions without all the information you’d like to have. Sometimes you need to subtly misinform to get the most important bits of information across. You need to use individual judgment sometimes. You can’t bureaucratize and automate everything.

            Before using any weapon, visualize it being turned around and used against you; visualize a society where every person can use that weapon, and then ask; “is this a good society? Is this society better for having this weapon used? Or would it be improved if we all agreed to not use it?” And if you agree with the second, then act accordingly.

            Given the choice between “emphasizing the distinction between hundreds of thousands murdered and millions murdered” and “stopping the murder”, I honestly think society would be better with the murders stopped than with the distinction being made. This is true even though I completely understand your argument.

          • FeepingCreature says:

            In the interest of getting support for your movement, you make it untrustworthy. I don’t think that’s something you want to do. Certainly it’s not something that will get you my support, because instead of being able to trust you about the severity of the issue, I’ll have to do my own information gathering, talk to other people. (Because if you are willing to exaggerate the number by x10, then surely so is the person who told you the original number.) Some of those people may be your enemies. Some of your enemies may not make the same mistake, they may lie more convincingly or simply take true information out of context, and then they’ll be more convincing than you. Lying is not a Sword of Good. You’re still imagining that your faction is the only person who can do that, because you don’t imagine yourself as “filled with a feeling of moral righteousness,” you just perceive your cause as the objectively morally righteous one. If you imagined yourself as feeling moral righteousness, you could imagine your enemies also feeling moral righteousness, and then that they would feel licensed to do things just as underhanded, but better.

            You have to understand. To me, it’s not about “well hundreds of thousands of people are dying, so it’s okay that I’m being lied to.” I don’t have objective access to reality. To me it’s “well this person thinks their cause is righteous so they claim millions are dying.” In a world where people felt licensed to do that, everybody would claim that, and then I would have absolutely no idea how many people are dying, and I’d probably have to go by my existing biases, which would tell me that it can’t happen again, it can’t really be that bad, and hundreds of thousands more would die. My trust that you are telling the truth is the only remedy to that.

            Trust is fragile. But trust is also powerful, and I worry you give away that trust too easily because you don’t realize its strength. I don’t know. Maybe the real message of Trump is “trust and truth are worth pennies, use every weapon because your enemy sure will, every cause for themselves.” But personally, that’s not how I want my garden to look.

            (PS: before you say “killing is evil is a moral absolute that everyone can agree with,” consider abortion and vegetarianism. Would you trust PETA if they said that chicken causes cancer?)

          • John Schilling says:

            Fact-checking is not as effective at stopping mass murder as organizing around slogans like “millions already killed”.

            Fun fact, which you can check on if you wish: Adding “…by Jews”, or Moslems, Commies, Blacks, whatnot, turns your nice slogan into an effective tool for causing mass murder. And it doesn’t have to be true, if you’re allowing for the millions killed to not be true.

            Your opponent in this battle is a demagogue who prefers alternative facts to actual true facts. You propose to defeat him with demagoguery based on alternative facts? OK, mmmaybe, but I think that should be more of a last resort than the first tool you reach for.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            @John Schilling:

            Your opponent in this battle is a demagogue who prefers alternative facts to actual true facts.

            In fact, that only ever happened in your imagination. We are talking about a hypothetical scenario.

            I am arguing that in some hypothetical scenarios, it might make more sense to protest the mass murder rather than fact-check the people calling for protest of mass murder. Perhaps there are other scenarios where it is the other way around.

            You’re arguing that there are no scenarios whatsoever where it makes more sense to protest the mass murder rather than fact-check the exact number of murdered people?

            @FeekingCreature:

            In the interest of getting support for your movement, you make it untrustworthy. I don’t think that’s something you want to do.

            That’s only an issue if it’s intended to be a long-term movement, which is probably not the case for a movement protesting mass murder by the head of government. If it’s not successful in the short-term, it’s probably just a bunch of dead people within a few weeks.

            Certainly it’s not something that will get you my support, because instead of being able to trust you about the severity of the issue, I’ll have to do my own information gathering, talk to other people.

            I bet this would actually depends on how far down the murder list you were. If you were anywhere near the top, you might not be concerned about the exact number who were already murdered. In this hypothetical, timing and urgency are playing important roles.

            Lying is not a Sword of Good. You’re still imagining that your faction is the only person who can do that, because you don’t imagine yourself as “filled with a feeling of moral righteousness,” you just perceive your cause as the objectively morally righteous one..

            This is what blows my mind about talking with people online. Nothing in this blockquote reflects anything I’ve said or argued.
            1. I never claimed lying was a “sword of good”. (I’m anti-absolutism, not pro-lying.)
            2. I never imagined or said that only “my faction” was capable of lying. Simply not part of the hypothetical.

            ou have to understand. To me, it’s not about “well hundreds of thousands of people are dying, so it’s okay that I’m being lied to.” I don’t have objective access to reality.

            No, but presumably you have an imagination, and you can imagine both hearing “millions of people are being killed” along with all the outward signs of hundreds of thousands of being killed, and also the consistency of the claims “hundreds of thousands have been killed” and “millions are being killed” when timing is taken into account (e.g. hundreds of thousands killed become millions killed if the killing keeps going without anyone stopping it).

            If you can use your imagination to put yourself in such a scenario in your mind’s eye, then you might see why I am arguing against absolutism on fact-checking this sort of thing. There are limits to the extent to which this sort of reflexive urge to be right (as opposed to being effective) is the moral course of action.

            Again, not arguing it’s always good to lie, and nothing I’ve written could plausibly be read that way. Unless you’re prepared to argue that it’s never good to lie, I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with me about.

            Trust is fragile. But trust is also powerful, and I worry you give away that trust too easily because you don’t realize its strength….(PS: before you say “killing is evil is a moral absolute that everyone can agree with,” consider abortion and vegetarianism. Would you trust PETA if they said that chicken causes cancer?)

            These are more unjustified (and false) inferences about the content of my mind.

          • Spookykou says:

            @FeepingCreature

            I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed both of your posts here.

            +1

            @NoahSD

            The second to the last paragraph of the essay, is I think, mostly an answer to your question, just without making up hypothetical situations.

          • Fact-checking is not as effective at stopping mass murder as organizing around slogans like “millions already killed”.

            One of the reasons people were reluctant to believe the truth about what Hitler was doing was the memory of greatly exaggerated claims of atrocities by the Germans during WWI.

            So in fact the approach you are arguing for, applied earlier, had precisely the opposite of the effect you are claiming.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            @David Friedman:

            So in fact the approach you are arguing for, applied earlier, had precisely the opposite of the effect you are claiming.

            Except that the timing is an important part of the hypothetical, so this is just another example of fighting the hypothetical.

            Unless you’re arguing that: “exaggerating is always the bad move”, there’s not much to disagree about. If you are, I’ll refer you to the usual suite of thought experiments about hiding Jews in your attic, etc.

          • Cypren says:

            At some point, all that really matters is stopping horrible things from happening, and the nuance of exactly how horrible these things are or whether there’s some silver lining behind the mushroom clouds.

            I’m curious if people advancing this line of thought would be willing to also extend it to Trump’s invocation of “millions” of illegal immigrants voting in our elections. After all, he’s identifying a real problem that is a direct threat to our democracy (persons who are legally barred from voting casting votes, which is directly cancelling out the votes of legitimate citizens). Sure, why quibble about the scope, whether it’s only a few thousand or a few hundred thousand or a few million?

            What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

          • John Schilling says:

            After all, he’s identifying a real problem that is a direct threat to our democracy (persons who are legally barred from voting casting votes, which is directly cancelling out the votes of legitimate citizens).

            I, for one, would like to know at least approximately how many illegal immigrants vote in US elections, and am equally annoyed by Trump the Trump camp insisting the number is many millions and his opponents insisting that the number is zero or negligible. Neither group is helping.

          • Tracy W says:

            @wysinwygymmv, you appear to be assuming some scenario where massacres can be stopped in moments by dashing out to go marching in the streets.

            But as far as I can tell, marching in the streets is at best a long-term tactic. It didn’t stop the Iraq War, it took years to end the Vietnam War, it took years or even decades of suffragers protesting to win women the vote, or bring about the end to legal segregation in the southern USA. Even the collapse of Communism in places like the Czech Republic took months of protests.

            Taking a few minutes to be correct on facts before you go marching in the streets is not going to destroy momentum. What a successful protest movement needs is persistence.

            That, and I’ve taken a number of first aid courses, and all of them have advised, when you stumble on a disaster situation (eg bad car crash), to take time to stocktake and not just dash in and start doing CPR.

          • TheWorst says:

            @Cypren
            After all, he’s identifying a real problem that is a direct threat to our democracy (persons who are legally barred from voting casting votes, which is directly cancelling out the votes of legitimate citizens).

            The problem is that this is a lie. False claims do not become true claims just because they make you feel good about your tribe.

          • Cypren says:

            @TheWorst: I’m sorry, are you going on record as saying that there are exactly zero illegal votes being cast by prohibited voters in our system at all?

            Because otherwise, what Trump is doing is exactly “a lie” as much as what I was challenging: taking a small number and inflating it into a huge (excuse me, “yuuuuuuge!”) number in order to exaggerate the impact and severity of the threat and gin up political support. NoahSD and others were saying that this sort of politically-motivated deliberate exaggeration is acceptable (at least, for causes they favor) because the moral urgency of the threat is all that matters and should drown out any considerations of accuracy.

            I am suggesting that the moral cause of preserving our electoral integrity (hey, remember that? People sure were upset about Russians compromising it!) is a serious issue, because every illegal vote is denying the voting rights of a real voter by cancelling them out. (I hear there are people who are very upset when people’s voting rights are denied, too. I wish I could remember who those people were…) So does that justify Trump exaggerating the threat, or would we prefer to perhaps insist that accuracy has a place even when discussing pressing moral problems?

            Or is the real rule, “it’s only bad when the other side does it”?

          • TheWorst says:

            Every chance you get, you guys waste hundreds of millions of dollars on “investigations” desperately trying to find instances of voter fraud. It turns out to be a myth.

            So far they found four, and three of them were people illegally attempting to vote for Mitt Romney twice. After a certain point, there’s an obligation to admit that your beliefs have caused you to make false predictions.

            But that would mean admitting that your endless lies about voter fraud only existed to create a pretext for stripping voting rights away from black people, so I can see why none of you will ever do it. It also means none of you are worth having a conversation with, either, which is why I often don’t do more than fulfill the obligation to point out when you’re publicly lying.

            If you don’t like it when people point out when you’re lying – and you clearly don’t – then rather than complaining about it (which doesn’t work), you could instead reduce the amount of public lying you engage in. It would be very easy, and would greatly reduce the frequency with which you get caught lying.

        • carvenvisage says:

          by saying “all lives matter”, implicitly attacking the weak man argument that only black lives matter

          That’s not it. The slogan ‘black lives matter’ directly accuses people of not valuing black lives at all.

          If I were to shout at you that ‘black people are humans too’, there would be nothing implicit about the accusation that you fail to consider black people part of the human race.

          Black lives is the same thing, addressed to everybody, except with a more far more extreme accusation- even a slave owner thinks black lives matter, even if its only to their bottom line. This is a 1984 level piece of propaganda. Everyone knows black lives matter.

           

          Anyway, this went over about as well as you could expect, which is a big part of why we now have trump. These elections really are for liberals to lose. If dominating and abusing people for fun wasn’t a liberal cause de jour, trump never would have gotten near the whitehouse.

          There’s also the issue of how if this accusation were ever correct, it would be incredibly stupid to go around chanting it in the streets as if you were protected members of society considered to have value (and actually not just normal value but expecting a huge special tolerance for your behaviour). If it was true, it would literally be suicide. Can you imagine a “jew lives matter” in wartime Nazi Germany?

      • Tibor says:

        I found this interesting when I met an acquaintance from Hong Kong. She read some of Mao’s books and she said he was very smart. She hates the PRC and the “Chinese” (she is of course “chinese” herself, although from Hong Kong) to the point that the first thing she told me in HK was “look around, half of these people are Chinese tourists”. She said the word Chinese in a way that left no room for interpretation of her feelings towards them. But despite all that, she was able to appreciate something about Mao. Yes, he was the biggest mass murderer in the world (although, technically, if did the exact same things he did, but lived in Belgium instead, he wouldn’t be…but anyway), but that does not mean he was perhaps not good at something positive and I think that people are smart enough to realize that a bad guy is a bad guy even though he did something good as well – also, that way, the bad guys get more realistic. Stalin was probably also a very smart guy (Hitler probably wasn’t, although he was quite obviously extremely charismatic…also rather lucky).

        On a slight tangent – what puzzles me is that Napoleon is not seen by most people as on par with Mussolini at least, if not close to Hitler. He definitely used nationalism, was sort of proto-fascist and waged one of the most destructive wars in Europe.

        • Gazeboist says:

          Re: your tangent –

          I suspect that’s more a matter of Mussolini being forgotten than anything else, though post-WWI Francophilia also probably plays a role. I don’t think the Hitler comparison is apt, since Napoleon was not genocidal.

        • Montfort says:

          He definitely used nationalism, was sort of proto-fascist and waged one of the most destructive wars in Europe.

          And if Napoleon happened to come to power in 1920, people might judge them more similarly. But people tend to view historical figures in context – sure Napoleon used nationalism instead of divine right, but (to us new-worlders at least) that doesn’t seem all that much less legitimate. In contrast, Mussolini got all friendly with Hitler and has to compete with liberal democracies.

          Additionally, the further into the past you go, the easier it is to look on war and violence and either characterize it as just/necessary, or discount it as the kind of thing everyone did. And to be fair to the man, he didn’t start (all of) the wars.

          • Subb4k says:

            Also, Napoleon’s other achievement, apart from two decades of bloody war, imperialist expansionism, and tyranny, is his administrative reforms. In particular the Code Civil is still the basis of the law at least in France and Belgium. A huge part of current administrative organization in France comes from Napoleon (and what doesn’t most likely comes from the First Republic, which has its own sets of problems re:legacy). It’s definitely a legacy you can hardly ignore.

            In French overseas territories, Napoleon’s image is significantly worse as he’s primarily remembered as the guy who brought slavery back (or stopped trying to abolish it, because the abolition proclaimed during the Revolution had been severely resisted)

    • Tracy W says:

      I think it’s worthwhile to list the positive attributes of Hilter.
      Partly because they’re so pathetic relative to his sins (Holocaust, his role in starting the biggest war in history including all the European, Middle Eastern and North African deaths of soldiers and civilians, about 10℅ of Germans died from the war as distinct from the Holocaust, and he destroyed the German economy, provoked powerful enemies then left the German people defenseless, on the other hand he was nice to his secretaries. Bit of an unbalanced scale there. )

      And partly because just portraying him as terrible I fear risks blinding us to future Hitlers, who might also be nice to their secretaries.

    • Deiseach says:

      a blatant white supremacist who recently compared himself favorably to Darth Vader and Satan

      Back when Benedict XVI was elected pope, there was a meme going round comparing him to Emperor Palpatine (and Benedict was my pope, so this made me grumpy). So if someone is reclaiming slurs (isn’t that the term for it nowadays?) by getting their comparisons in first before the inevitable “Dark Lord/Demonspawn” analogies can be made, I’m not going to be upset. Doesn’t mean I’m in favour of white supremacists but it does mean the sting is taken out of any “and he is literal devil” if he’s got there before you.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        I hailed Satan and Belphagor several times a couple days ago. I’m not even sure what Belphagor is in charge of, I just like how the name rolls off the tongue.

        When you’ve been called a villain long enough, you stop caring and just play along.

  8. TheWackademic says:

    Hi Scott,

    I agree with “Against Dog-Whistlism” – Trump’s been pretty clear about what he’s going to do since Day 1.

    However, I think that this post constitutes a strawman of the various arguments made against “You’re Still Crying Wolf.” Several other observations that you could consider include:

    1) You predicted that Trump would appoint a diverse cabinet, when he has in fact appointed the least diverse cabinet since the 80’s.

    2) You imply (apologies if you meant something different and I’m misinterpreting) that Trump is “anti-undocumented immigrant” but not “anti-immigrant.” Trump’s executive order tears apart families of legal immigrants, so I would contend that the distinction you drew has been proven false. Being anti-immigrant is racist, even if Trump uses “immigrant” as a proxy for “potential terrorist” and not as a proxy for “Muslim.”

    3) Trump nominated Jeff Sessions to be his Attorney General. Corey Booker broke hundreds of years of congressional tradition to testify against Sessions because he sincerely believes that Sessions will not enforce Civil Rights protections for African Americans. Trump disagrees with Booker or agrees with him and doesn’t mind. Jeff Sessions is not mentioned once in your post.

    4) The bar you set for “bigotry” is way too high. You bet that Trump will not endorse the KKK or start a Muslim registry, and then suggest that your readers’ options are to disagree with those predictions or “stop fearmongering.” It seems like there’s a whole lot of awful racist policies that could be enacted that stop short of a Muslim registry. Like, say, preventing 11 year old Muslim children from seeing their American citizen parents.

    In my view, the most charitable interpretation of your post would hinge on your contention that “racism” could be separated into “a lot of very heterogenous parts.” I think that I’d agree with you if you said something like, “Trump is a racist, but he is not a supporter of the KKK.” I think that this might actually be a sentence you believe in – but, in my view, that message got lost in between your exhortations to “stop fearmongering.”

    I really think that you can do a better job making the case against “You Are Still Crying Wolf” that includes a lot of the points that are lacking in this post. Would be very interested in reading it when you do.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Your argument seems to be that I’m making life too easy for myself since all I am saying is that Trump is bad but maybe not super-ridiculously-unbelievably-straw-man bad. But in a world where everyone is asserting that Trump is super-ridiculously-unbelievably-straw-man bad, that’s an important argument that needs to be made.

      Also, people keep saying my post was dishonest since I didn’t address whatever their pet reason to worry about Trump’s racism was. I took the fifteen arguments I heard most often and included them. I’m sorry I didn’t get to the ones you wanted, but I’m never going to make everyone happy.

      My guess is that Trump locking out existing legal immigrants was carelessness / not realizing this would be a big deal, rather than a principle of wanting to expel legal immigrants (after all, this only affects the tiny percent of legal immigrants who were outside the country at the time, and he should have predicted it would be overturned). I might also believe something like he’s trying to look like as much of a jerk as possible to force some kind of confrontation for some reason.

      If he doesn’t change it and tries to expel legal immigrants in other ways, I’ll admit I was wrong.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        My guess is that Trump locking out existing legal immigrants was carelessness rather than a principle of wanting to expel legal immigrants.

        The evidence seems to point otherwise:

        Friday night, DHS arrived at the legal interpretation that the executive order restrictions applying to seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Yemen — did not apply to people who with lawful permanent residence, generally referred to as green card holders.

        The White House overruled that guidance overnight, according to officials familiar with the rollout. That order came from the President’s inner circle, led by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. Their decision held that, on a case by case basis, DHS could allow green card holders to enter the US.

        • shakeddown says:

          Could be Trump doesn’t care one way or the other about legal immigrants, but Bannon doesn’t like them and Trump just went with it. Does anyone know what Bannon’s opinions on legal immigration are?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Does it really matter?

            Trump put Bannon in his position of power, and he is ultimately responsible for the statements that come out of his White House.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Of course it matters, it impacts how successful things like, say, pressuring Trump to get rid of Bannon are likely to be.

          • FeepingCreature says:

            It matters for whether or not Trump is personally racist. If I accidentally run over a black person, that doesn’t make me a racist; racism requires deliberate targeting.

            In the old debate of Malice vs. Ineptitude/Negligence, Trump has certainly given us plenty of reasons to believe the latter.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Feeping Creature:

            LBJ, by all accounts, was pretty racist, at least at times he acted like it. He still signed the Civil Rights Act and surrounded himself with a cabinet that worked to pass it.

            I only care a small amount how personally racist Trump is. Knowing whether he is personally racist is only one piece of information about how he is likely to govern. I care much more that he ran as a mercurial, vindictive, nativist, populist demagogue who promotes poorly thought out policy notions as if they are simple solutions to complex problems.

            And he is governing in a way that is completely in line with how he ran.

          • Deiseach says:

            It matters whether it’s a case of “how do we know all the green card holders are legit and that there aren’t any sleeper agents amongst them, the previous screening was too lax, let’s do it on a case-by-case basis to be extra sure” or if it’s a case of “I don’t care if they’re legal or not, let’s get rid of them all”.

          • I’m seeing news stories that, as of late Sunday, the Trump administration reversed itself on green card holders, held that the restriction does not apply to them.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            I’m not sure that anything has actually changed.

            The command to DHS from the White House on Friday was that green card holders would be admitted on a “case by case” basis.

            On Sunday we saw statements from administration that appear to walk that back:

            “As far as green card holders going forward, it doesn’t affect them,” Priebus said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

            but then you see that he also said:

            Priebus said that green-card holders may be subject to additional scrutiny at the discretion of border officials.

            So, it does not seem to me that we actually know what will happen going forward.

            And then we also have had no clarification that I know of on extant long term visa, such as work and travel visas.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Do you think this article saying that Priebus and DHS now say all green card holders may enter the country overrides the evidence you posted?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            No.

            From my original pullquote:

            Their decision held that, on a case by case basis, DHS could allow green card holders to enter the US.

            From yours:

            If they are not dangerous, if they’re not a threat, then they will be disposed of on a case-by-case — their situations will be handled on a case-by-case basis,” she said

            They are spinning, but it simply means that green card holders would still have no right to re-enter. Each time you travel, you run the significant risk that you won’t be allowed back in.

          • Rob K says:

            Without getting into HBC’s point about whether this constitutes a full return of rights to green card holders, trying to take away rights and then walking it back is very different than never trying it. The administration either did that, or published a terribly written and ambiguous EO. Since the latter explanation can be used as cover for the former, I think it behooves us not to grant it as exculpatory.

            For the record, though, what I’m most concerned about right now is the possibility that CBP is defying court orders regarding access to lawyers for detainees.

          • Iain says:

            Seconding HBC and Rob K. Trump’s administration wrote an executive order that kept green card holders out. When DHS officials did not interpret it that way, Trump’s administration took deliberate steps to make it clear that they wanted to keep green card holders out. The fact that they are changing their tune by the minimum possible amount after being smacked down by multiple court decisions does not mean much at all.

            Additional relevant evidence: Giuliani was bragging on Fox News on Saturday that he helped write the executive order after Trump came to him saying he “wanted a ‘Muslim ban’ and requested he assemble a commission to show him ‘the right way to do it legally.'” It’s hard to claim that the interest was national security when the implementation has very little to do with national security and advisers are openly conceding that Trump wanted a legal pretext to ban Muslims.

          • Cypren says:

            @HBC: From Scott’s linked article:

            Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “as far as green card holders moving forward, it doesn’t affect them.”

            However, he later added: “If you’re traveling back and forth you’re going to be subjected to further screening.”

            Green card holders from the seven banned countries, when they land, will undergo additional security screening, including an interview and having their fingerprints checked, sources told CNN. If there are no red flags, then they would be allowed entry.

            It seems disingenuous to call this a “case by case basis”, any more than saying that all non-citizen travelers entering the country are admitted on a “case by case basis” based on the results of security screenings. The default presumption is that green card holders are permitted in, but those from the seven prohibited countries will be given more intensive scrutiny than average travelers. This strikes me as completely fair and something we should have been doing anyway given our relationship with the nations in question. Outrage over this strikes me as feigned, to say the least.

            The quote you pasted:

            If they are not dangerous, if they’re not a threat, then they will be disposed of on a case-by-case — their situations will be handled on a case-by-case basis,” she said.

            comes from an interview with Kellyanne Conway on Fox News Sunday. You missed the preface to it:

            Kellyanne Conway, a Trump adviser, also said Sunday those currently detained who are not deemed threats would be released.

            She isn’t talking about future green card holder entry, she’s speaking about the people with valid visas (green card holders and not) currently being detained in airports because they were traveling at the time the order was issued.

            Again, this strikes me as an eminently reasonable approach.

            The executive order was clearly ambiguous and poorly drafted, and has obviously caused a great deal of confusion in the last two days of implementation. But the approach being taken right now seems to be both humane and sensible.

            Given that all of the allegations that “they wanted to ban green card holders” but “caved to pressure” are coming from anonymous sources and contradict the public statements of the Administration principals, and given the frothing outrage and wild allegations being thrown around by the opposition at the moment, I just don’t put a lot of faith in the anonymous rumor mill. I’ll be curious to hear whether or not this line stays constant in a few weeks when things settle down and we’re no longer in the Two Minutes Hate phase.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Green card holders from the seven banned countries, when they land, will undergo additional security screening, including an interview and having their fingerprints checked, sources told CNN. If there are no red flags, then they would be allowed entry.

            It seems disingenuous to call this a “case by case basis”, any more than saying that all non-citizen travelers entering the country are admitted on a “case by case basis” based on the results of security screenings.

            See this article. It’s juicy. And it’s also in line with what my highest hopes for a Trump administration are (…because I’m a legal nerd above most politics anymore). I want to get the Supreme Court case on the Take Care Clause that we were supposed to get last year (and then lost due to having 8 justices). I think it’s a little more likely to happen on Trump’s ACA EO rather than this one, but in the long term, that might be the most fundamentally important thing to come out of this first week of his administration.

          • Cypren says:

            @Controls Freak: That’s a great link, thanks. And yes, the irony is delicious, as is always the case when the balance of power changes and the two parties immediately swap talking-points cards with one another.

            I tend to agree that (like the DACA order) this is reaching the right result [Edit: to be clear, exempting green card holders, not the immigration suspension, which I think is dumb theater] for all the wrong reasons. I’m hoping that the White House issues formal clarification so that it doesn’t hang in this limbo.

          • carvenvisage says:

            trying to take away rights and then walking it back is very different than never trying it. The administration either did that, or published a terribly written and ambiguous EO. Since the latter explanation can be used as cover for the former, I think it behooves us not to grant it as exculpatory.

            That’s really well put.

      • NoahSD says:

        “My guess is that Trump locking out existing legal immigrants was carelessness rather than a principle of wanting to expel legal immigrants”

        It seems like Bannon actually explicitly overruled DHS’s initial interpretation—going from an order that did not apply to green-card holders to one that did. I don’t think they they meant for this order to expel many legal immigrants because it only applied to the relatively random subset of legal immigrants who happened to not be in the country at the time. But, it seems clear that they were happy to keep that random subset out for some reason. (Because they think it will appease their base somehow? Because they actually think that this random subset poses a threat? Spite?! Who knows…)

        • The Nybbler says:

          DHSs initial interpretation of the order is ridiculous; there was no language even hinting at excepting permanent residents from the ban. I suspect Trump (or Bannon) saw it as bucking his authority.

          • albertborrow says:

            I agree with that, from what I read, and I encourage anyone else who hasn’t already to read the actual order in full. The amount of people who seem to take rhetoric entirely at face value is disheartening.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @The Nybbler:
            So you think it’s silly to think that the executive order wasn’t meant to apply to green card holders?

          • The Nybbler says:

            @HBC

            I think it is silly to think that the executive order as written does not apply to green card holders. The text is clear on that point.

            Who Trump _meant_ it to apply to is unknowable (by me, anyway). I’d like to think he just didn’t think about green card holders when writing it, but maybe he’s a little bit crueler than I would think.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @The Nybbler:
            But then why would the White House countermand DHS, rather than simply issuing clarification?

          • NoahSD says:

            My point has nothing to do with that. The point is simply that the White House explicitly weighed in on whether it wanted the order to apply to permanent residents. This contradicts Scott’s “guess… that Trump locking out existing legal immigrants was carelessness / not realizing this would be a big deal.”

          • The Nybbler says:

            @HeelBearCub

            Like I said, I think they saw the DHS bureaucracy as trying to buck the President’s authority, so (in Trump’s mind) they had to be slapped down, regardless of whether their actions were what Trump would have done had he thought about it. Trump has now (through his DHS appointee) backed off.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @The Nybbler:
            So your opinion is that they wrote an executive order that obviously applied to permanent residents of the US without ever even considering whether they wanted it to apply to permanent residents?

            I think that might be the worst interpretation, in terms of at least competence, possible.

          • The Nybbler says:

            So your opinion is that they wrote an executive order that obviously applied to permanent residents of the US without ever even considering whether they wanted it to apply to permanent residents?

            Yes. And yes, it says nothing good about their competence. They need someone detail-oriented to catch these things before they go out. Or better, don’t do sweeping executive orders like this, but that’s probably too much to ask.

        • herbert herberson says:

          I think they’re trying to inflict protest fatigue.

        • At this point, my guess is that the order was deliberately designed to cause lots of outrage. That purpose having been accomplished, the administration could then reverse itself on green card holders, reducing both negative effects and legal problems.

          The usual phrase is “never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity,” but my guess at this point is that things like this are neither malice nor stupidity but tactics.

          My current guess on his tactics is that they are designed to do two things:

          1. Keep his opponents believing he is stupid.

          2. Make the substantial minority of the population that is passionately opposed to him even more passionately opposed to him, in order that their opposition will appear less persuasive to everyone else.

          It worked for the nomination and the election, and he may believe it will keep working.

          Of course, he is also trying to do things that much of the population, ideally a majority, will approve of, such as taking prompt action that will be perceived by rationally ignorant voters as against Islamic terrorism.

          Consider the relevance of Scott’s Toxoplasma argument. The fact that he did it in a way that lots of people were (reasonably) outraged about creates controversy that amplifies the effect.

          • lycotic says:

            I’m not sure your phrasing lets you remove malice entirely.

            If the order was intended to fail and be walked back by the courts, then it *wasn’t* intended to improve national security. It was intended to improve Trump’s standing.

            Can one morally justify the “irreparable harm” (to use the legal phrase) done to a few thousand people for Trump’s gain?

            Or is that old-fashioned evil?

          • Can one morally justify the “irreparable harm” (to use the legal phrase) done to a few thousand people for Trump’s gain?

            I said nothing at all about moral justification.

            If someone beats you up because he doesn’t like you, that is malice. If he knocks you down in the process of stealing your stuff, that being the easiest way to do so, it is still wicked but it isn’t malice.

            Trump made things unpleasant for a bunch of innocent people not because he dislikes those particular people but because he believed doing so would help him accomplish his political objectives. Tactics not malice.

            I get the impression in some of these threads that people think all negative terms are equivalent, that “bigot” and “racist” are just different terms for the same thing. In fact, their meaning is entirely different. You can be bigoted about things that have nothing to do with race and someone could be a racist but not bigoted about it, willing to change his views when confronted with good evidence that they are wrong.

            Similarly, “malice” and “evil” are not the same thing.

          • lycotic says:

            Fair enough. I’m a bit torn, since “malice aforethought” merely means one performed one’s actions intentionally, not that one even disliked the victim. Google actually says “intention or desire to do evil,” which actually does make successful malice a form of evil (intentional evil is of course only one kind of evil).

            But your meaning of malice which implies active hatred is probably more common. So, point taken.

      • TheWackademic says:

        Thanks for clarifying your belief that deporting legal immigrants was carelessness rather than intentional. That’s what I was getting at – there are actual strong arguments against your post, and this is a response to one of them. We will learn whether your belief is correct or not in the coming days.

        If Trump fails to reverse course, which of your priors will you update?

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      Corey Booker broke hundreds of years of congressional tradition to testify against Sessions because he sincerely believes that Sessions will not enforce Civil Rights protections for African Americans.

      And why, exactly, should we pay attention to Cory Booker’s views on the topic?

      • Cypren says:

        It’s worth noting that the “Jeff Sessions is a racist” charges came entirely from the testimony of one man, Thomas Figures, a Democrat from Alabama who worked with Sessions for five years prior to his appointment (and failed confirmation) for a federal judicial post. Figures claimed that Sessions had referred to him as “boy” and used racial epithets. (Other coworkers, including African-Americans, testified at the time that they had never heard him use racial slurs; Figures was the only one to make the allegations.) Remember also that in 1986, Democrats controlled Congress, so we’re not talking about the President’s own party being swayed by persuasive evidence that their nominee was a racist; we’re talking about the opposition party looking for anything it can hang around his neck.

        Left generally unexamined by people repeating this meme is that Figures is not a terribly credible witness. He falsely claimed that Sessions had ordered him to cease a federal investigation into the lynching of of Michael Donald by KKK members. (Sessions had, as The Atlantic recounts, instead handed the case over to state prosecutors after determining that the state could bring much harsher charges than the federal government could due to the laws at issue.) He also claimed, according to sworn testimony given by a former colleague, that Dan Rather was sending him secret signals in his nightly news broadcasts.

        I haven’t seen any evidence brought out for Sessions being a racist other than Figures’ 30 year old testimony; if supporters of the charge would like to present some, I’d be very interested in reviewing it. But otherwise, it’s hard for me to credit this as anything other than a partisan slander campaign.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Well, the other piece of circumstantial evidence usually cited is his decision prosecute in the “Black Belt” case.

          • Cypren says:

            The “Black Belt” case was brought to Sessions by black plaintiffs who were alleging the voter fraud. It doesn’t really follow that Sessions was a racist who was trying to suppress the votes of one black group to help another black group, does it? Political meddling, perhaps, but this strikes me as yet one more incidence of “racism” being used to mean “anything that negatively affects Democrats”. (As Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying, “do you want more Trump? Because this is how you get more Trump.”)

            Incidentally, Albert Turner Jr, the son of two of the defendants in that case, endorsed Sessions for the Attorney General spot.

          • Rob K says:

            I’d encourage those curious about Session’s record to check out the NYT and/or WaPo articles on the case (the one HBC links above is also good, although a bit less focused on the specifics of the Black Belt case).

            To summarize how it appears to me: Sessions intervened in specific counties where black voting majorities were threatening to defeat the current elected slate governing the counties. (The ruling coalition, as Cypren notes, was running a multiracial slate in an attempt to secure black votes; it was also backed by the White Citizens Council). He did so with a degree of law enforcement effort and a willingness to push prosecutorial discretion that seems out of concert with the weak evidence, and treated witnesses in a potentially intimidating fashion (busing elderly black voters long distances for extended interrogations; not something they would have taken lightly given the history of voter suppression in the area).

            I won’t presume to speak to Session’s motivations. The justice department is charged with defending voting rights. Sessions’ actions the last time he wielded this type of authority on a smaller scale tell me it’s inappropriate to trust him with the AG’s power.

  9. Scott for supreme leader of the US. (Necessary and Kind).

  10. HeelBearCub says:

    Not one one of your 24 predictions is a prediction that Trump will do anything bad and/or that anything bad will happen because Trump in office.

    Your predictions certainly don’t look like you think Trump is “an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue”.

    This is the issue I keep bringing up. Most of your passion and intellect is devoted to defending Trump against charges against him, or, even, arguing for how great Trump will be for the FDA and saying things like “And I’m not sure it’s possible to raise my opinion of Thiel at this point without me doing something awkward like starting a cult.”

    Peter Thiel backed Trump. Do you really start a cult for someone who had a hand in raising someone to the presidency you think will be disastrous?

    At this point, I have hard time thinking you are being intellectually rigorous around this issue.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      You are wrong about my predictions; for example, I say that I predict he will decrease GDP growth, decrease employment, earn a low approval rating, lift sanctions on Russia, et cetera. There are some predictions along the lines of “99% chance no internment camps”, but that means 1% chance of internment camps, and I’m not sure you could argue for it being much higher.

      I’ve previously said Thiel is endorsing Trump as a Machiavellian way to get power which he intends to use for good, knowing that nobody votes based on his endorsement anyway. Since that 100% worked, I don’t think there’s much room to criticize him here unless you’re generally against Machiavellian plans.

      I don’t think there’s any reasonable way to conclude what you’ve concluded, especially given your misrepresentation of my predictions and your ignoring eg this post. I think your criticism of my FDA post is precisely the “arguments are soldiers” attitude that I’m criticizing.

      And I worry that the attitude you’re displaying here is one reason it’s hard for people to have a frank discussion these days, because even the slightest deviation from someone else’s position one time will lead to reputation-destroying accusations of being on “the other team”

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Predicting a lower GDP growth doesn’t say much about Trump’s actions (and would reflect on Obama and the last Congress far more than Trump, anyway).

        Unemployment is (roughly) at full employment. Predicting that it will be nominally higher doesn’t say very much.

        Predicting that Trump will be unpopular doesn’t say very much about whether his actions are good or bad. You seem to think some very good actions are actually not very popular.

        You haven’t predicted anything you think Trump will actually do that you think is bad, have you? Except, perhaps, the partial lifting of sanctions against Russia, but if that occurs because Trump gets Russian actors to leave the Ukraine, that might actually be a good thing.

        Look, I only read what you write at SSC. If you are far more critical in other venues I am not seeing it. Yes, I know what you wrote about endorsing anyone other than Trump.

        I’ve previously said Thiel is endorsing Trump as a Machiavellian way to get power

        Machiavelli doesn’t strike me as someone who was in favor of niceness and community?

        Look, I get that you want people to be able to discuss anything and don’t want to be hindered in that, but we aren’t discussing things at this point. Thiel helped bring Trump to power for whatever reason. That should do something to lower your estimation of his worthiness of cult status, is all I am saying.

        • Roxolan says:

          You haven’t predicted anything you think Trump will actually do that you think is bad, have you?

          The Mexican border wall is bad too (though not “economic disaster” bad).

          The thing is though, other than that, there isn’t much specific that can be predicted. We expect Trump to make a number of impulsive and uninformed decisions, but who knows which ones they’ll be? If you ask about one specific possible bad scenario, e.g. Trump sends over a million people to internment camps, we’d have to assign it a very low probability (which then looks like a defense of Trump, since there’s no visceral difference between 1% and 0.001%).

          I’m fairly confident Trump will do something bad related to global warming, but that’s not a prediction I can falsify objectively by checking a predetermined number. Scott tried to cover “Trump will do something bad related to the economy” using GDP growth and unemployment, but as you’ve shown, even that can be criticized.

          Machiavelli doesn’t strike me as someone who was in favor of niceness and community?

          [I am aware that this is a digression; I don’t mean this as an attack against your main point.] Machiavelli very much was in favour of niceness, community, and civilisation, as embodied by Renaissance Florence. He spent his life trying to protect it from sacking by various brutes. The Prince is partly an utilitarian/realpolitik approach to that defense, partly a record of the strategies he had seen the brutes use successfully, and people argue to this day about how much was meant as advice or satire.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            The Mexican border wall is bad too (though not “economic disaster” bad).

            Why is it bad, and what makes it worse than the hundreds of miles of barriers that are already present? There seems to be a stolen base here.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            The Wall is more pointless than bad, although there is a line from a movie, might be The Jack Bull, about a fence making a nasty line.

            But, it’s not like we don’t already have fairly vigorous border enforcement on the southern border.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            The Wall is more pointless than bad, although there is a line from a movie, might be The Jack Bull, about a fence making a nasty line.

            What does that even mean? If people are coming across the border and we don’t want them to, why exactly shouldn’t we build a fence? Because the Mexican government will get upset? Well, did they get upset enough at the hundreds of miles of fence that already exist and have done so for decades to do anything about it? No? Well then.

            Anyway, if we’re going to be freaking out about things that the U. S. Government does which are merely pointless as opposed to actively bad, well, we’re going to be here a long time. The government has wasted far more money on far less useful things and, indeed, far more explicitly destructive to the nation things, than the wall could ever cost in Steve Bannon’s wildest imagination.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @ThirteethLetter:
            If you are building a wall, not because it is effective, but because it is merely symbolic of how much you don’t want the people on the other side on your side, than it actively undermines the supposed reason to build it.

            If you really want a secure border, make sure you have a good relationship with the Mexican government. Don’t build a giant line of middle-fingers as if that is going to keep people out.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            If you are building a wall, not because it is effective, but because it is merely symbolic of how much you don’t want the people on the other side on your side, than it actively undermines the supposed reason to build it.

            Again, does that apply to the portions that already exist? Should we tear those down?

            If you really want a secure border, make sure you have a good relationship with the Mexican government. Don’t build a giant line of middle-fingers as if that is going to keep people out.

            What level of a good relationship with the Mexican government will be required to stop it from publishing Spanish-language brochures on how to safely sneak across the border, and from transporting Central American illegal immigrants northwards to the U. S. border? And why didn’t we have that good relationship at any time in the past eight years?

          • If people are coming across the border and we don’t want them to, why exactly shouldn’t we build a fence?

            Even if there are other things you can do that are more effective?

          • Iain says:

            The fences that already exist are there because people with detailed knowledge of the local situation decided that it was worthwhile to put a fence in a particular location. Trump doesn’t have special knowledge of the Mexico-US border. He hasn’t come out and said “such and such an official has told me that we really need a fence in this particular area, and I am going to make sure that it gets funded”. Trump promised to build a wall because it feels like a big tough middle finger to Mexicans, and some people found that very appealing.

          • Wency says:

            Trump promised to build a wall because it feels like a big tough middle finger to Mexicans, and some people found that very appealing.

            1. I don’t think many people want to offend Mexicans just to offend them. They just don’t want them around, at least not in large numbers.

            2. Many of the same sort of people saying the Mexican wall will do nothing said that Israel’s walls would do nothing, and it turns out they did something. Also many of those people DO want Mexicans around in large numbers. Hence it’s tough to trust what they say about the Mexican wall.

          • Randy M says:

            If you really want a secure border, make sure you have a good relationship with the Mexican government. Don’t build a giant line of middle-fingers as if that is going to keep people out.

            Mexico will do what is in Mexico’s interest, or at least the Mexican government’s interest, regardless of our “relationship.” If they feel it is in their interest for some reason to help Mexican, central American, and South American nationals to move north in violation of long standing USA law, they will do so. It seems that they do in fact feel this way.

          • Cliff says:

            I think the main reasons anyone is against the wall is because they don’t like Trump, or want open borders/demographic change and are willing to take it any way they can get it. Obviously we should have legal immigration rather than illegal immigration, and obviously a wall will reduce illegal immigration. I’m not even sure what the argument is that the wall will not reduce illegal immigration. Usually people just handwave. There are walls all over the world, where did walls not work? Hungary’s walls totally dammed the massive flow of refugees. Israel’s walls totally stopped the desperate Palestinian suicide bombers as well as the refugees coming from the South. Where is the example of a wall that didn’t work?

        • HBC writes:

          Thiel helped bring Trump to power for whatever reason.

          Possibly true, but the question is not what is true about Thiel but what Scott believes about Thiel, and Scott wrote, in the comment HBC is replying to:

          I’ve previously said Thiel is endorsing Trump as a Machiavellian way to get power which he intends to use for good, knowing that nobody votes based on his endorsement anyway.

          Thus making it clear that Scott does not believe Thiel helped bring Trump to power.

        • carvenvisage says:

          Machiavelli doesn’t strike me as someone who was in favor of niceness and community?

          Holy shit. Machiavellian is a term of art. It doesn’t mean Machiavelli -ian. Etymology is confusing like that. I mean, you’ve used the English language before, right?

          It’s also incredibly obvious just from context what Scott meant.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @carvenvisage:
            Do you really think I don’t know that Scott wasn’t referring to literal Machiavelli? Really?

            Dictionary definition:

            cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics or in advancing one’s career.

            In other words, Scott was saying (roughly) that Thiel was doing something that was scummy, but it was OK because it probably didn’t matter anyway and the ends justify the means.

            Have you used the English language before?

      • Long-time lurker; just wanted to toss in my appreciation for your thoughtful comments, especially on this piece. It takes a lot of strength to keep the intellectual charity waterline reasonably high around a topic like this. I would not stay anywhere near as calm as you are. Thanks for being an inspiration. 🙂

        (@HeelBearCub: To clarify (as is very much necessary given the above intensity), I have no strong opinions about your comment at all. This is honestly a catch-all comment on a collection of Scott’s comments so far. Small criticisms can be really harmful in sum, but are not in themselves a problem and may in fact be virtuous, and I would like to sincerely encourage you to express concerns you have. My point here is honestly just to express my admiration for Scott’s overall mental fortitude – it’s not meant to pile on you.)

      • Paul Stankus says:

        “I’ve previously said Thiel is endorsing Trump as a Machiavellian way to get power which he intends to use for good, knowing that nobody votes based on his endorsement anyway. Since that 100% worked, I don’t think there’s much room to criticize him here unless you’re generally against Machiavellian plans.”

        Hmm.

        “As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow, and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

        Yes, do count me as generally against Machiavellian plans.

      • wysinwygymmv says:

        I don’t think HBC accused you of being “on the other team”. This all seems like legitimate difference of opinion to me.

        “Not being intellectually rigorous” is not the same as “being on the other team”.

    • TheWackademic says:

      I think this post is right on.

      Could someone provide a link to Scott predicting that Trump will lower GDP, lift sanctions on Russia, etc?

      • Scott Alexander says:

        You can either check the place where I specifically mentioned it was and linked it in the post, or https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/06/predictions-for-2017/

        • TheWackademic says:

          Thanks! I’ve read a lot of SSC, but it’s hard to keep track of every post : ).

          I would note that predicting that the GDP or employment will be lower at the end of 2017 vs. 2016 isn’t the same as predicting that it will be lower when Trump leaves office. Additionally, I’m not sure that “Trump will earn low approval ratings” or “Trump will lift sanctions on Russia” are examples of “Trump doing bad things.” Obama had quite low approval ratings for much of his presidency while executing a non-bad job. And sanctions in general are pretty shitty.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            I said 2017 because it was a Predictions For 2017 thread.

            I’m trying to find objective indicators so I can grade myself later, so I can’t just say “Trump will be a bad President”. Approval rating seems like the best formalization of “bad President” I can think of on short notice, though of course it has the problems you mention.

    • akarlin says:

      Peter Thiel backed Trump. Do you really start a cult for someone who had a hand in raising someone to the presidency you think will be disastrous?

      In other words, the political influence of the rationalist/futurist-sphere has increased by an order of magnitude relative to what it was under any previous President.

      I mean before the most we had was a bunch of eccentrics riding around the country in a coffin-shaped bus, whereas now there is actually someone seriously interested in and involved with things like life extension and AI safety with direct access to the President.

      How, exactly, is this not a resounding success?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        If you think that president will be disastrous?

        How exactly is setting sail on a boat you believe to be unseaworthy a good plan?

        I mean, if you think the president will do a poor job on what they implement, why would you want them to be the first to implement your preferred policies?

        • PeterBorah says:

          It seems overly convenient to think that having no influence over a bad president is inherently better than having some influence over a bad president. My initial guess would definitely go the other way.

          For a concrete example, look at the FDA pick situation. If Thiel is indeed behind that, and it works as planned, that could very well justify Thiel’s support by itself. I see no evidence that FDA reform will somehow go horribly astray just because Trump is the president.

        • ashlael says:

          What’s your assessment of how much Thiel’s support helped Trump versus how much Thiel’s influence could make a Trump presidency better?

          I’d say he helped Trump get elected by an infinitesimal amount and has the potential to make some relatively small but absolutely large improvements. Seems like a fair trade off if you’re into those sorts of trade offs.

          I mean, that’s if you buy the Machiavelli theory. Personally I think Thiel just thinks Trump would be a better President than Clinton.

        • quanta413 says:

          Thiel couldn’t have gotten jack by backing Hillary who already had way more institutional supporters and money even if she had won, and whatever Thiel did wasn’t going to seriously affect who won the election either way. Thiel got some power and influence for at the cost of a chunk of some of his own reputation and little else. We’ll see where that goes. I happen to agree with PeterBorah that it’s better to have some influence over a bad president than to have no influence.

          If I was Thiel, what I’d be trying now would be to pull on things in a manner mostly perpendicular to the big left/right fights while I have the chance. Thiel probably won’t have meaningful influence on the flashy political things, but he may have some space to take a whack at stuff that the media finds boring while it’s busy hacking away at the Trump administration.

      • doubleunplussed says:

        What’s with transhumanists who run for government having such ridiculous names? In Australia we had one called Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow.

  11. Daniel Frank says:

    I just want to say that I appreciate the frequency of of the short posts lately. Keep them coming!

  12. Subb4k says:

    I used to agree with you on that subject, but I don’t anymore, and I am a bit surprised that you didn’t change your opinion. (EDIT: I saw your commentary above, it seems the reason we don’t agree will be resolved very soon when WH makes it clear whether banning legal residents from re-entry was intended. I’ll leave the post for reference, but it probably won’t convince you of anything you’re not already convinced of.).

    If Trump had “just” stopped accepting any new non-Christian refugees and stopped issuing visas and green cards to countries with Muslim majorities, I would still agree with “You Are Still Crying Wolf”. That would be an awful policy, but the kind of awful you seemed to be clearly anticipating in that post and that is, all things considered, quite less awful than actual fascism.

    However, in this situation even people with current green cards, or valid visas, or EU/Canada passports (because they have double nationality) were turned away at the border or prevented from boarding. People with lives, homes, spouses, children, etc… in the US are banned from coming home. While Trump didn’t actually deport anyone legally in the US, this is functionally equivalent to deporting people who left the country with no idea that out of the blue they’d be locked outside. This is a level of horrible quite above what you predicted. I would place “forced deportation” right below “internment camps” in terms of evil, and you were absolutely confident (okay, 99%) that this wouldn’t happen. One week into Trump’s presidency, something comparable in horribleness, if not in scale, happens. This ought to make you severely reconsider that prediction.
    By the way, Trump explicitly mentioned using Japanese internment camps as precedent on the campaign trail. This is no “dog whistles”, it’s all there in the manual, as much as the Muslim ban.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I agree this is much worse than I would have predicted, though not in a direction that makes me believe in dog whistles or the KKK more.

      I guess my confusion is that Trump seems to be shooting himself in the foot here. Banning the tiny fraction of Iranians etc who are out on vacation when the order takes place does nothing for him; the number of Iranians etc currently outside the US is a rounding error.

      All it does is make the law much more likely to enrage people, much easier to challenge, and much less likely to survive.

      I am split between “he is incompetent and didn’t realize this would be a big deal / thought that the promise to let people back in on a case-by-case basis was some kind of fair compromise that would make everyone happy” and “he is trying to outrage people on purpose for some strategic reason”.

      • meltedcheesefondue says:

        >I agree this is much worse than I would have predicted, though not in a direction that makes me believe in dog whistles or the KKK more.

        Thanks for writing the whole post, it was good and useful to do so. What might help a bit is if you made clearer what *would* make you believe in dog whistles; this would also clarify in what sense you’re meaning terms like racism.

        A possible counterargument to “listen to what the candidate says” is the degree to which Trump lies and contradicts himself. There are many things that he could do or try to do that he once said he would. Then one could look at what he’s actually done, and see if he’s chosen the racist-er selection among his promise. I’ve not done this exercise rigorously (and I won’t listen to anyone who just feels the answer is obvious – the point of rigour is to be rigorous), but it’s an argument that could be developed.

      • Subb4k says:

        I agree this is much worse than I would have predicted, though not in a direction that makes me believe in dog whistles or the KKK more.

        Oh yeah the thing about dog whistles is still on point, I’m not criticizing that. It doesn’t make the literal KKK more likely, but as others have pointed out that’s a very low bar to clear and if he starts deporting legal residents on basis of religion/nationality rather than race the difference is really academic.

        I guess my confusion is that Trump seems to be shooting himself in the foot here. Banning the tiny fraction of Iranians etc who are out on vacation when the order takes place does nothing for him; the number of Iranians etc currently outside the US is a rounding error.

        Assuming this is not sheer incompetence (which gets less likely the more time passes, thus why I tend to no longer believe it), another possibility (less likely than the “deliberately making people mad” you mentioned) is trying to get precedent to suddenly cancel visas and green cards from foreigners currently in the US (and then deport them).

        I’ll note that the idea (not put forward by you, just something that people might be inclined to think) that he might be doing this in order to walk back to “just” stopping new visas and green cards from being issued (thus making it look more acceptable by comparison) would be unlike anything Trump done so far, or hinted he might do. People were already expected that when he nominated Tillerson and it didn’t happen.

      • Drew says:

        I think it’s strategic. Trump is approaching this like a negotiation. His ‘opening bid’ includes some provisions that he intends to bargain away.

        • Drew says:

          I suspect that Trump knows that his final-policy will need to have a bunch of nuance and compromise.

          However, he doesn’t really gain anything by including that compromise and nuance from the start.

          It’s much better for him to slap down some unilateral, black-and-white proposal.

          His opening bid will generate outrage. But people were maximally-outraged anyway. So, that’s not a cost.

          The democrats will respond by attacking the proposal in the places where it’s weakest (read: most needs nuance)

          In this case, that attack seems to be, “Trump’s bill shouldn’t impact green-card holders!”

          On a logical level, that’s fair. But it’s rhetorically problematic; by attacking a single feature, the democrats will implicitly accept the rest of the bill.

          Figure that the democrats win that point. The headline will be something like “Democrats Defeat Trump’s Immigration Bill!”

          Once that happens, I expect to see Democratic enthusiasm fall off.

          The politicians / groups who’re interested in getting a PR victory over Trump have ‘won’. Their incentive is to move onto the next issue.

          The news media have already declared victory. They’ll show a triumphant family reunion and move on.

          This means that Trump enters the “real” fight* with a mild PR loss, but only facing the people who are deeply concerned about fair immigration policies.

          *That is: the fight over the nuanced, compromise-including policy that he could have written from the start.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            I think you are misreading the situation.

            This was done incompetently enough that ACLU et al. have an enormous amount of ammo to fight (compared to a better executed, sneakier proposal).

            There is already the situation at Dulles where the border patrol is disobeying a judge, refusing to see a senator face to face, etc. This seems pretty bad, as they are in contempt and technically the judge could have sent forces in.

            This is not a mastermind at work.

            My posteriors on impeachment have gone up a bit (I still don’t think it’s super likely), just on the strength of general incompetence I am seeing, which would make an impeachable fuckup entirely possible. All it would then take is for the GOP controlled Congress to have had enough of bad press, and judge Pence to be a better deal than Trump.

          • LHN says:

            All it would then take is for the GOP controlled Congress to have had enough of bad press, and judge Pence to be a better deal than Trump.

            Realistically, they also have to be reasonably confident that doing it doesn’t get them defeated in their next primary. In the current environment, I suspect that makes it a pretty high bar.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Yes, this is true. An impeachment would be very traumatic and look bad for the GOP. Which is why things would have to get bad enough, and pushback/bad press severe enough, that they would do the math and realize it was still the best of bad options open to them.

            This is why I don’t think impeachment is super likely, still. But it’s definitely a “live hypothesis” for me, at this point.

        • Ilya Shpitser says:

          I agree that Trump instinctively does that, but I think in this case there is a significant amount of “amateur hour” happening — see any legal analysis of the order (many came out on Sunday).

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Something I wish had occurred to me earlier is simply that having a President who likes pissing people off is a bad idea.

        • Drew says:

          Is it? Enraged democrats are much, much better than complacent democrats.

          A rage-inducing opponent is far less frightening than an agreeable one.

          Trump might call for an unjust war. But Bush talked the democrats into voting for one.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Looking at recent history, it seems a political strength if you can make your opponents lose their goddamn minds.

          • quanta413 says:

            Trump might call for an unjust war. But Bush talked the democrats into voting for one.

            So much this. Even though I should be used to it, it’s driving me batty here how much things seem to be determined purely by how polite a politician is while the NSA monitors every American citizen, drone strikes distant foreigners into oblivion, engages in poor economic policy, etc. I mean, I think process is important, but when the process is being done correctly for bad results anyways…

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Trump might call for an unjust war. But Bush talked the democrats into voting for one.

            The numbers 9 and 11 would like to have a word with you.

            If you aren’t at least mid 30s in age, I think you don’t understand how angry the country was, and how much they wanted blood. Unless you are mid 40s, you probably don’t realize at a visceral level how much Hussein was the perfect target for this. It was really easy to believe that this cartoonish puffed up Arab dictator really did intend to set off a nuke in NYC as revenge for what HW Bush did.

            I mean, hell, Saddam did actually launch SCUD missiles into Israel in 1991.

            Largely Democrats voted for Iraq because the bulk of the country wanted it, even though the most active on the left were against it. It was near impossible to have a reasonable conversation about anything to do with 9/11. Just look up “freedom fries” if you want to know how truly petty it was.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I still think having a president who likes pissing people off is a bad thing.

            It’s possible that a president who’s good at using angering people as a strategy would be useful, but someone with an emotional habit of angering people is accumulating people who want revenge.

          • lemmycaution415 says:

            Bush is the one who used 9/11 as a reason to invade Iraq. It was a horrible idea, but you were right that people were pissed.

          • Cypren says:

            People tend to ascribe the Iraq war entirely to Bush, perhaps buying into the psychobabble that it was somehow all him trying to fulfill his daddy issues of finishing the war daddy couldn’t.

            They’re forgetting that there was enormous pressure, not just from the American public (who wanted to see “someone” pay for 9/11; it didn’t really matter who, so long as they were vaguely Muslim-ish) but also from the military and intelligence community, for whom the half-measure of the 1991 Gulf War was an open sore, and who sincerely believed (with fairly good reason, at least from the perspective of the time) that Hussein was biding his time to build chemical and nuclear weapons so that he would become unassailable.

            I worked in the intelligence community back in those days (I left government service in 2000, was briefly recalled to duty after 9/11, and then left again), and I can tell you that it was taken as gospel truth at Langley that Hussein had low-level WMD capabilities and was rapidly building up to high-level ones. If anyone had questioned it (I never heard anyone do so), they would have been seen as nuts. There was lots of disagreement about how far along his programs were, but absolutely none that they were active and a priority for his regime.

            Of course, in retrospect, we now know that part of our intel was false, fed by Ahmed Chalabi and other defectors who wanted to push the US into war with Iraq, and part of it was false because the regime was lying to its own military about the state of its WMD programs. Interrogations after the war indicated that many of Iraq’s own generals believed they had nuclear weapons; they just all thought some other division was the one that had them.

            Hindsight is 20/20. That doesn’t mean that going into Iraq based on the premise of WMD was a bad thing based on what we knew in 2003. I’ll fault Bush for a lot of things — most specifically for being naive and not having a good plan for occupation and stabilization after the initial assault was done — but he wasn’t acting on a whim or making up lies to trick people into a war. He had good reasons to do what he did; the entire military and intelligence community were just caught in a groupthink trap of our own creation and fed him bad information.

          • Urstoff says:

            And on the political side, there is no Iraq War without Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz (especially him)

          • lycotic says:

            They’re forgetting that there was enormous pressure, not just from the American public (who wanted to see “someone” pay for 9/11; it didn’t really matter who, so long as they were vaguely Muslim-ish) but also from the military and intelligence community

            I remember this (perhaps unfairly) as entirely manufactured — the endless progression of talking heads on Sunday morning television shows pushing on the Overton window until a politician who *didn’t* have a plan to deal with the “problem” of Saddam Hussein was considered irresponsible and treated with a sort of quiet scorn.

          • Cypren says:

            I remember this (perhaps unfairly) as entirely manufactured…

            I don’t think the pressure to “hit something” was manufactured. But I do think the target was. The fact was that there were significant portions of the US government (myself included!) that believed Hussein was an imminent threat to global stability because he was probably going to acquire a nuke within the next decade, and (given the precedent of him launching SCUDs at Israeli civilian targets in 1991) had a high probability of actually using it if he felt his grip on power was slipping.

            I think the massively increased public awareness of Muslim countries as a threat to the homefront in the wake of the incident was definitely leveraged to convince the public that this guy out in the desert on the other side of the world needed to be dealt with before he got the capability to hit us over here. The Bush Administration never directly claimed that Saddam had any involvement in 9/11, but they definitely leveraged his history of past contacts with Al Qaeda to build the case that he was part of the same bad crowd and needed to be dealt with accordingly. In the minds of the public, this tied a strong link between Iraq and 9/11 and led to support for a war that probably couldn’t have happened had it been sold simply as, “we think this guy might have a mostly-working nuke already, or maybe within the next decade, and we want to stop it before it happens.”

            Of course, in engaging in a long and bloody war for what turned out to be a fake threat in Iraq, we had no stomach as a nation to deal with the very real threat in North Korea, and now we do have a mad self-absorbed dictator with a nuclear weapon who’s using it to hold tens of millions of people’s lives hostage to demand the international community keep his regime propped up.

            Hindsight is a bitch.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I agree this is much worse than I would have predicted

        You say we should take his proposals seriously. Which I agree with.

        Given that, I don’t know why this is worse than you would have predicted. It’s right in line with everything he proposed on the subject of Muslims and immigration and doing things in an unpredictable manner during the campaign.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          It’s worse than I would have predicted in that it also affects green card holders returning from abroad. Now that that provision seems to be gone, it’s about as bad as I expected.

          • Iain says:

            It seems relevant that the green card provision is gone because of massive public outrage and court orders, not because the Trump administration decided it would be a bad idea.

            If you are arguing that Trump will not be so bad because the courts and the public will hold him to account, then sure, the retraction of the green card policy is a good sign. If you are arguing that people have been exaggerating the bad goals of the Trump administration, then the fact that their goals have been checked in this one case should not affect your evaluation of Trump’s intentions.

          • Spookykou says:

            @Iain

            As for his bad goals/intentions, I think Scott doesn’t hold either of the positions you describe, but rather something based on this,

            I am split between “he is incompetent and didn’t realize this would be a big deal / thought that the promise to let people back in on a case-by-case basis was some kind of fair compromise that would make everyone happy” and “he is trying to outrage people on purpose for some strategic reason”.

            from the comment above.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        Incompetent is my current read, especially if the indicators that he didn’t even run it by OLC turn out to be true.

        On the one hand, I have a hard time believing he could be THAT dumb (I’ve never bought “Trump Is a Secret PR/Bargaining/Marketing Genius” thing, but I didn’t think he was this careless). “Did You Clear This With Legal?” is sort of a huge deal in the corporate world. Then again we see very senior CEOs and business-people do things that make their in-house counsel reach for the liquor cabinet and start popping tums like candy all the time.

        • John Schilling says:

          “Did You Clear This With Legal?” is sort of a huge deal in the corporate world.

          Yes, but that requires the sort of legal staff the corporate world takes for granted, and that Trump took for granted would come fully staffed with the nice shiny White House he had just won.

          He’s still behind the curve on staffing “legal”, and to the extent there are career civil servants filling out the lower ranks, what’s their motive for keeping Trump from making a fool of himself? If they can, which they probably can’t.

        • tscharf says:

          I’m guessing incompetence, but that’s what you are going to get when business guys with no government experience take over, rookie mistakes.

          It doesn’t help that he has a bunch of opponents who are rabid dogs circling him constantly while his has bacon strapped to his butt.

      • thoramboinensis says:

        I am split between “he is incompetent and didn’t realize this would be a big deal / thought that the promise to let people back in on a case-by-case basis was some kind of fair compromise that would make everyone happy” and “he is trying to outrage people on purpose for some strategic reason”.

        I know Hanlon’s Razor and all, but there are so many aspects of the roll-out that were flubbed hard, that I can’t help but think it was designed to be deliberately inflammatory. And Bannon’s insistence on the green card interpretation with DHS? And a Friday afternoon signing!

        To me it smells like Bannon wanted as big of a reaction and as many protests as possible. Reading the Days of Rage review you linked to makes me wonder if Bannon wants extreme liberal protesting, because the more violent it gets, the more his interests are served, especially given that a ban on Muslims entering the country is not necessarily unpopular. Also now all of the major liberal players that have been appearing at the protests will have their faces plastered all over Breitbart/Fox News after every attack in the name of Islam between now and Nov. 2020.

        By setting it up to be reversed/stayed by noisy liberal backlash (and moderate establishment republican backlash), Bannon’s guaranteed Trump a great deal of blue collar support after any major terrorist attack, and sewn up the election in 2020 if, heaven forbid, a militant from one of those seven countries commits a major attack in the US.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Isn’t it traditionally the case that events taking place late on Friday get the least media attention so that’s when you do things where you want to minimize the media impact?

        • leoboiko says:

          Perhaps Trump’s incompetence and Bannon’s malevolence? Trump seems quite easy to bait and manipulate. If this theory is right, I expect more of that to come.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Doing it just before the weekend didn’t work in Trump’s favor in terms of provoking violent protests. Weekend protests get the white professional class out protesting and they keep things clean. Today they are all back at work.

      • In my latest post on the subject, I make a conjecture as to what Bannon’s strategy might be, if we assume that it wasn’t just incompetence. As I explain, if that’s really what he was thinking, it doesn’t strike me as being obviously a bad calculation.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      I would place “forced deportation” right below “internment camps” in terms of evil,

      These aren’t even close.

      I think the US should take in more refugees, but whatever rules we have, we have to be able to enforce them.

      You know the reason Trump gets such traction with his supporters? It’s because the people who want less immigration see literally no other path. If we let anyone into this country, ever, for any reason, you will attack not letting them stay as “right below internment camps in terms of evil.” Okay, better not let them into the country in the first place, then!

      • Subb4k says:

        If people don’t want to live with refugees or immigrants, I don’t see anything we could say that would make them accept them without changing their minds about the whole “I don’t want to live with foreigners” thing. Therefore, I don’t really think insisting that commitment to honor promises made and to guarantee safety of legal residents is causing any problem.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          There are a lot of options available between “no one comes in at all” and “once they set foot on American soil they are citizens forever.”

          • Civilis says:

            There’s also a difference between “no one comes in at all” and “they can come in if they are vetted, hard-working, law abiding and want to assimilate”, which is a deliberately uncharitable reading of the position of most of the right. “Once they set foot on American soil they are citizens forever” right now applies even if they break the law once here (Sanctuary Cities policy).

            I can understand to some degree wanting to get illegal immigrants that have committed minor crimes to be able to talk to the law about major crimes committed by others without needing to fear the police, the ostensible purpose of the Sanctuary City designation. However, fearing that people that broke the law to come here and continue to break the law to work here might not be willing to abide by other laws does not seem unreasonable, especially when we have examples to back it up.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            “they can come in if they are vetted, hard-working, law abiding and want to assimilate”, which is a deliberately uncharitable reading of the position of most of the right.

            Interesting. I did not find that remotely uncharitable; to the contrary I found it essentially unobjectionable. I suppose I might balk if you replaced “if” with “only if”, but I’m not positive about even that.

            Is there anyone, left or right, who advocates the acceptance of immigrants who do not want to work and obey the law?

            Edit: apply the appropriate nuance so that we’re not talking about breaking the law specifically by entering the country illegally. That’s orthogonal to concerns about Trumps executive order, I think.

          • Randy M says:

            I think Civilis meant that conflating the two was uncharitable?

          • Civilis says:

            I did not word that as well as I could. The right’s position seems to have been reduced for the purposes of debate to ‘the right hates immigrants’, when most of the right (but not all) is fine with at least some immigration that meets the guidelines specified. Many libertarians on the right seem fine with open immigration, and I’m sure there are people in between libertarians and the more hardline conservatives (and its those people I was being uncharitable about) but what I described should apply to almost everyone on the right.

            Is there anyone, left or right, who advocates the acceptance of immigrants who do not want to work and obey the law?

            Work? I suspect most all of them work. Work legally? A different story. I can accept your contention for the point of the debate that I have to set aside the legal work requirements like I have to set aside the illegal entry or overstay visa requirements. Even then, we’re at the point where the mayor of New York City has decided that drunk driving and grand larceny aren’t worth deporting people. I think it fair to characterize that as ‘accepting people that won’t obey the law’.

            Several of my coworkers are legal immigrants. The amount of hoops that they had to jump through to stay here and become naturalized has led each to be very upset with those that are willing to apply different standards to those that knowingly jumped the line and now want the same benefits as those who waited patiently within the system.

            Personally, I’d rather handle illegal immigration at the employer level than worry about a border wall, but then again, I live far from the border. I want a system that handles refugees, but not opens the floodgates for everyone that wants to come to the US, and that means both prioritizing who gets in and weeding out those that shouldn’t get in.

          • Randy M says:

            Personally, I’d rather handle illegal immigration at the employer level than worry about a border wall

            Why? It seems crueler to let someone in but prevent them from supporting themselves than simply restrict entry. Also less effective. The point of pushing enforcement onto employers seems to be to allow in a critical mass to make removal untenable, then agitate for amnesty.

          • Civilis says:

            Why? It seems crueler to let someone in but prevent them from supporting themselves than simply restrict entry. Also less effective. The point of pushing enforcement onto employers seems to be to allow in a critical mass to make removal untenable, then agitate for amnesty.

            From what people have said, that’s the method Canada uses, and they’re basically the go-to for examples of ‘humanitarian government’ these days. The advantage of employer-based enforcement is that it reduces the amount of people that immigrate here illegally in the first place, and supposedly causes those here (especially those here for easy money, not humanitarian reasons) to self-deport.

    • MawBTS says:

      I would place “forced deportation” right below “internment camps” in terms of evil, and you were absolutely confident (okay, 99%) that this wouldn’t happen.

      Forced deportation, as opposed to…non-forced deportation?

      “Deportation” has a specific legal definition and although “getting locked out by your own country by a sudden change of policy” might well be a bad thing, I’m not sure that it qualifies.

      • suntzuanime says:

        There has been talk of encouraging “self-deportation” by making continuing to maintain illegal presence in the US annoying enough that illegal immigrants get fed up and leave. That’s probably the contrast.

        I agree that not allowing people in is not the same as deporting them.

        • Subb4k says:

          I agree that not allowing people in is not the same as deporting them.

          Not allowing people in even though they were already living there and were outside the country on holiday or something. That’s an important part.

      • Subb4k says:

        Forced deportation, as opposed to…non-forced deportation?

        You are correct, my phrasing was redundant. I guess I thought of “forced emigration” and “deportation” and merged the two.

  13. akarlin says:

    If you disagree with me about any of this, use your beliefs to make different predictions, record them, and see if you do better than I do.

    I have done this.

    I predict that Trump Derangement Syndrome will crest soon, and thus only assigned a 40% chance that his approval rating being lower than 50% at the end of 2017. (This should at least happen if the Trump/Putin comparisons that his critics love to harp on about have any validity).

    Then I predict that the wild ride will get even wilder.

    Peter Thiel will funnel billions of government $$$ to Aubrey de Grey who will make Trump immortal, the heretics and xenos scum who do not believe in The Donald will be purged, and the ascendant God Emperor of Mankind will rule the world from a yuge golden throne for the next 40,000 years.

    • Izaak says:

      What’s your confidence on Trump becoming Immortal? I’ll pay you 5 dollars every year for the rest of my life (~50 years) or until Trump dies, if you give me 250 dollars right now.

      • akarlin says:

        Those were alternative predictions.

      • alexsloat says:

        Don’t forget the time value of money. That’s the equivalent of a perpetuity with a 2% rate, when even a 30-year is currently yielding just over 3%. If you change that to $10/year, then a 48-year payout period will return an internal rate of return equal to the current US 30-year Treasury. That will yield parity with traditional long-term investments around the 50-year mark, give or take, and be superior thereafter.

      • GravenRaven says:

        If he was 100% certain that Trump was immortal and that you would honor the commitment, that would still not be a good offer due to the time value of money and the added uncertainty…

    • Subb4k says:

      Peter Thiel will funnel billions of government $$$ to Aubrey de Grey who will make Trump immortal, the heretics and xenos scum who do not believe in The Donald will be purged, and the ascendant God Emperor of Mankind will rule the world from a yuge golden throne for the next 40,000 years.

      Well, better start looking for Horus.

    • carvenvisage says:

      I bet you three dollars that the imperium won’t fall shortly after 40k.

      -Conditional on trump being god emperor of mankind in the year 40k, I predict he will be god emperor in 41k as well.

      We can do this over (space) paypal/bitcoin etc, or maybe just on an honor system.

      • TheWorst says:

        Your confidence in Hive Fleet Leviathan is that low?

        God-Emperor Trump has not exactly demonstrated an ability to listen to science-based warnings of imminent disaster. Which means I’ll bet $200 worth of Bitcoin on news of Tyranid invasion being dismissed as socialist propaganda to justify government regulation.

        The bugs are also notoriously resilient to Twitter-based attacks, and have no fear of being sued. Or of anything else.

  14. I’m a lot more interested in seeing the reaction to Trump’s doings (present and future) among people who supported him.

    Last September, former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann (identified as a Trump advisor) said that 2016 would be the last U.S. election. That’s something I honestly fear Trump will bring about, but she meant that it would happen if Clinton won.

    Michele is an extremely intelligent woman, widely underestimated; my instinct is that she was ironically reflecting back apocalyptic fears on the left. But maybe her prediction was sincere. And perhaps, if future elections are indeed canceled, she will just say, “Well, we already knew Hillary would have done the same.”

    • suntzuanime says:

      This is not a new sort of claim to make; people were saying that Bush wasn’t going to leave peacefully either. It’s an obvious enough sort of badge of dictatorship that it’s not something I worry about until people start talking about it positively from their own side instead of accusing the other side of it. (There was a little bit of joking from liberals about how wouldn’t it be nice if Obama stayed in office, but they were pretty clearly not serious about it.)

      • Civilis says:

        There’s a letter to the editor in the Washington Post this morning demanding Obama be placed back in office due to the irregularities in Trump’s election.

        I was pleasantly surprised to see Rosie O’Donnell was willing to put Sen. McCain in as temporary president under her proposed martial law to stop Trump getting inaugurated.

      • Chalid says:

        Bills like this to change the way states allocate electoral votes crop up occasionally. If widely adopted, these would effectively end competitive presidential elections. (Thankfully it was killed, for now.)

        (These actually seriously worry me – state legislatures can be pretty insane and it only takes one to start the ball rolling on this and break our democracy.)

        • suntzuanime says:

          Aren’t there a couple of states that already do this?

          • Chalid says:

            Nebraska and Maine, but both CDs generally vote the same way in those states, and it’s really only one electoral vote at stake.

            I think any kind of gaming the electoral system is pretty dangerous when things are this polarized. If Virginia Republicans did this, it wouldn’t be surprising to get retaliation and counter-retaliation, with one side (as currently configured, the Democrats) ending up with no real voice in the presidency.

        • James Miller says:

          In 2003 I published an article advocating that Massachusetts (where I live) “abandon her winner-take-all Electoral College allocation” and take an approach similar to what Nebraska or Maine does.

        • TheWorst says:

          Bills like this to change the way states allocate electoral votes crop up occasionally. If widely adopted, these would effectively end competitive presidential elections.

          This isn’t true. It would mean Republicans would start running moderates, just like the Democrats do, but that’s by no means the same thing. It should be obvious to everyone that parties adapt their platforms to stay relevant (see: every few decades since American history began), and the full-wingnut-retard strategy is only one possible strategy. They’d adopt a new one if they had to.

    • MawBTS says:

      See /r/AskTrumpSupporters. If you want a pro-Trump venue that isn’t full of retards and dipshits, that’s the place to be.

      Reactions range from “I no longer support Trump” to “I still support Trump but this was a mistake and I hope he reconsiders” to “this is bad but not as bad as some are making it sound, see [list of past presidents who have done similar things]”.

      I haven’t yet run into anyone who thinks it’s a good idea and can intellectually defend it.

      • Jaskologist says:

        I’ll take that challenge, if just for the fun of it.

        Put aside the temporary refugee ban. It is, after all, temporary, and Obama was able to do a longer one (though from fewer countries) without becoming Hitler, so obviously not a huge deal.

        Let’s put aside the green card snafu as well. A bad move, but already rolled back.

        The important part of the EO is this:

        the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.

        For at least as long as Syria has been generating refugees, we have had a de facto policy of accepting only Muslim refugees, and leaving out to dry those populations which are the most persecuted and at risk. Of the 10,801 Syrian refugees we let in, 56 were Christians (that’s not a percent, that’s an absolute number). Syria is 10% Christian, or at least was before that population was targeted for eradication. This has even been noted in court opinions (page 7), and to my knowledge the Obama administration never offered any sort of explanation, but I hope HBC corrects me if I’m wrong.

        Reversing that policy will get us back to the original rules governing the refugee process and lead to more Effective Refugeeism. We can get back to helping the populations most in need of help.

        Since “HITLER!” was called long ago, here’s your Hitler comparison. You want to know what you would have done if you were alive during the Holocaust? Just look at what you did when Christian communities were being wiped out in the Middle East (article is from 2012, to give you an idea of the timeline here). Have you been silent for the past 5 years? You would have been silent 80 years ago. And if somebody had proposed letting more Jews in, you would have called it a #GermanBan, protested, and said that’s not who we are.

        That single paragraph I quoted could save thousands. For the price of very badly inconveniencing 375 people? I wish we could have avoided that, but I’d still call that a bargain.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          but I hope HBC corrects me if I’m wrong.

          I’m not sure if I should be flattered or not?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Flattered, certainly. If he’s wrong I’d like to know, and you’re the most likely one to point it out.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Flattered. You seemed most likely to know if I was wrong and to say so. That is valuable.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Well, thank you.

            The other option was insufferable thinks-he-knows-it-all.

            I don’t know the answer, but I am doubtful that the Obama administration had a specific policy against taking in Christian refugees. Maybe I will spend some time googling.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            So, at first blush, the distribution of Christians in Syria seems like it needs to be considered.

            Most Christians live in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and other large cities along with significant numbers in Al-Hasakah Governorate in northeastern Syria

            Other than Aleppo, haven’t all of these been firmly in government hands for quite a while?

            We aren’t grabbing refugees directly out of Aleppo, so if you are Christian and flee Aleppo, which way do you go? Into government territory, or into the territory that may be held by Muslim extremists who would be quite hostile to you?

            I’m not saying this is the answer, just that it points at a pretty good possible explanation for the stats you site.

          • Jaskologist says:

            This is a case where I’m reasonably sure that if they’d said something I would have heard, but I certainly haven’t combed through all Obama administration statements, so it’s possible I’ve missed one.

          • Rob K says:

            the critique I’ve seen, which looks to have some validity to me, is that the main refugee camps are dangerous places for religious minorities because there are Islamist extremists there. As a result, Christians and others aren’t able to get to the place where you start the standard refugee application process.

            The proposed solution I saw was to set up another refugee application process for people for whom it wasn’t safe to go to the camps, which seems like a good idea, assuming the above is an accurate description of the situation.

          • Iain says:

            This Politifact article seems like a good resource on the question.

            High-level summary: Christians face a below-average level of persecution in Syria, because they tend to be Assad supporters. Many Christians move to Lebanon instead of seeking refugee status with the UN. Only 1.5% of Syrians who have registered with the UNHCR are Christian. (Edit: as Rob K points out, this could have something to do with Christians feeling unsafe in refugee camps. But that’s clearly not because of anything Obama did.) If there were an anti-Christian bias in refugee policy, you would expect it to show up in other countries as well, but (for example) Iraqi Christians are over-represented in refugee admissions by a factor of 58.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Rob K has the correct reason why our current policy excludes Syrian Christians. The thing to keep in mind is that this is not an excuse. These problems are well-known (as in, I, a layman, knew them), have been for quite a while, and no action has been taken to work around or deal with them.

            (And that’s without getting into the implications of “the camps we’re taking refugees from are dangerous places for non-Muslims.”)

          • Randy M says:

            (And that’s without getting into the implications of “the camps we’re taking refugees from are dangerous places for non-Muslims.”)

            Seriously, this is not the kind of argument I’d expect in support of a more generous refugee admittance. But I’m sure our government is wonderfully competent at tracking down all known background risk factors of 15 year old men from war torn nations.

          • eccdogg says:

            (And that’s without getting into the implications of “the camps we’re taking refugees from are dangerous places for non-Muslims.”)

            Yeah that kind of jumped out at me too.

            We are taking refugees from camps where intolerance is so strong that it is dangerous to be non-muslim? Doesn’t exactly sound like an “embrace our values” type of crowd.

        • Deiseach says:

          If you’re willing to accept a Newsweek article that quotes Fox News as a source:

          Somewhere between a half million and a million Syrian Christians have fled Syria, and the United States has accepted 56. Why? “This is de facto discrimination and a gross injustice,” Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, told Fox News. Fox notes another theory: The United States takes refugee referrals from the U.N. refugee camps in Jordan, and there are no Christians there.

          Experts say another reason for the lack of Christians in the makeup of the refugees is the makeup of the camps. Christians in the main United Nations refugee camp in Jordan are subject to persecution, they say, and so flee the camps, meaning they are not included in the refugees referred to the U.S. by the U.N.

          “The Christians don’t reside in those camps because it is too dangerous,” Shea said. “They are preyed upon by other residents from the Sunni community, and there is infiltration by ISIS and criminal gangs.”

          “They are raped, abducted into slavery and they are abducted for ransom. It is extremely dangerous; there is not a single Christian in the Jordanian camps for Syrian refugees,” Shea said.

          And from a 2015 story on Syrian refugees, this interesting fact:

          About 70 percent of all refugees admitted to the U.S. are resettled by faith groups, according to the U.S. State Department office for refugees. The bulk of the work is done by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Church World Service, representing Protestant and Orthodox groups, are each responsible for about 10 percent. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and Episcopal Migrant Ministries also handle several thousand cases.

          That’s not just Christian refugees, that’s all refugees.

      • LHN says:

        I haven’t yet run into anyone who thinks it’s a good idea and can intellectually defend it.

        FWIW, this was linked by someone I follow on Twitter:

        https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2017/01/trump-immigration-executive-order-fact-fiction

        I’m not personally convinced by it. (I sent money to the ACLU for the first time this weekend because, while I’ve had substantial differences with them in the past, they seem to be taking point on this.) It minimizes what look to be major disruptions for green card holders and CBP officials ignoring a court order. But it is an intellectual rather than emotional defense of the EO and its implementation.

    • alexsloat says:

      Bachmann seems to be saying that this was the last chance for someone like Bachmann to ever win, not the last election overall. It’s the old “Democrats like immigration in order to commit massive voter fraud” thesis.

      • AnonEEmous says:

        Well, frankly, “Democrats like immigration because those immigrants vote for them” isn’t entirely untrue.

        • alexsloat says:

          Not entirely, but it’s often phrased in extremely hyperbolic ways, and some of the surrounding arguments are untrue.

          Also, Republicans totally shoot themselves in the foot here. There’s no law of nature that minorities are Democrats, and a serious outreach effort would do them a world of good. They identified that themselves after the 2012 election, but the Trump Train ran right over that plan before it could be implemented.

          • The Nybbler says:

            They tried outreach to Hispanics as early as Bush 43. It didn’t work.

          • suntzuanime says:

            There’s no law of nature that whites are Republicans either. Losing, say, 1% of white support to gain 2% of hispanic support is a losing proposition, electorally. Obviously you don’t want to pointlessly antagonize hispanics for no reason, but hey, Trump posted a picture of himself eating a taco bowl on twitter on Cinco de Mayo, he’s obviously willing to go for the cheap and easy pandering.

            It’s not clear that the Republican establishment’s plan after the 2012 election was a good one. As you note, it was unable to get sufficient support from the base to win a primary. The hypothesis would have be that it would be able to pull enough support from outside the base to make up for the lost base support. It’s not clear that it would.

          • alexsloat says:

            Nybbler: It worked fairly well, so far as I can tell. GW Bush did much better with Hispanics than anyone for at least a decade before or since – other than Reagan’s 1984 landslide, nobody else was particularly close, and even then 2004 was better than 1984. The Democrats still won with them, but not by nearly so huge a huge margin – only +18% in 2004, compared to +51% in 1996. http://latinousa.org/2015/10/29/the-latino-vote-in-presidential-races/ (For comparison, 2016 was 66%/29%, or +37% to Hillary)

            Sun: Agreed. I don’t like it, but you’re correct.

          • cassander says:

            >There’s no law of nature that minorities are Democrats, and a serious outreach effort would do them a world of good.

            A, immigrants have been voting consistently democrat for like 150 years. B, the republicans will never be able to out offer the democrats who are offering immigrants membership in their racial grievance machine.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @cassander:

            A, immigrants have been voting consistently democrat for like 150 years.

            I assume you mean the Democratic Party? I’m not buying. Do you have anything you can site?

          • Chilam Balam says:

            Republicans used to solidly get the votes of Cuban Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and Arab Americans pre-2000, and were in the mid 40s ish with Hispanics and Asian Americans generally, with significantly more support for Bush in 200 and 2004, which helped him clinch victory both times

            http://prospect.org/article/how-asian-americans-became-democrats-0

          • Anonymous says:

            A, immigrants have been voting consistently democrat for like 150 years.

            Even back when the Democrats were conservative, and the Republicans were liberal? (Right now the Democrats are socialist, and the Republicans are conservative. Wacky things happened mid-20th-century.)

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      I asked here, people seem pretty ok with it, so far. I deliberately didn’t seriously argue, I just wanted to hear it in their own words.

      It is possible that the contingent here is quite a bit “edgier” than an average Trump supporter, however.

    • Space Viking says:

      I’m a Trump supporter, and my issue with it is that it doesn’t go far enough. Ideally all Muslim immigration will soon be banned. The alt-right trusts Trump enough to give him some time to do so before lobbying for it more vocally – either the present half-measure is a misguided attempt at compromise or it’s part of a deeper strategy.

      Likely we’ll be talking about something else in a few days, as Trump will not be idle this coming week. Or if not, it will be a fine opportunity for the Trump administration to do some even more controversial things while the MSM is distracted.

    • Civilis says:

      As a reluctant Trump supporter, I’m going to go with ‘I think they messed up; what they intended was poorly thought out, what they got was far worse’. However, I think what they intended is about as morally bad as Obama’s repealing the Cuban ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy in the closing days of his administration.

      With regards to ‘last elections’, the reason many of us on the right thought that about Clinton and the Democrats was the use of government power by Democrats to hamper groups on the right (such as the use of the IRS). Immigration bans can be overturned. Political obstacles can’t be reliably overturned, as they make it harder to get elected. Something like that from Trump, even directed against the Democrats, would be a definite red flag, but I haven’t seen that. If poorly implemented, Trump’s proposed changes to libel laws and his review of voting records could reach that level (just as the Obama DoJ Civil Rights division was used that way against Republicans). If he seriously botched those this badly, I don’t know if I would give him the benefit of the doubt.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I think what they intended

        Just out of curiosity, can you put into words what you think they intended?

        • Civilis says:

          Essentially, no new visas issued to anyone with a passport from those 7 countries for the given time period, but accommodations made for people already in transit and special cases, with the idea that the freeze can be used to get the core of an enhanced vetting procedure. I would be willing to bet a lot that the timeframe given is hopelessly optimistic for putting something like that in place. I’m not happy with a blanket immigration ban, especially one this poorly executed, but I’m not happy with sending Cubans back to slavery.

          The pro-Trump right (and I keep getting pushed in that direction, in part by my contrary nature) has been described as taking Trump ‘seriously, but not literally’, and this is a good example as any. “Banning Muslim immigration” is a massive virtue signal; it’s a marker he intends to do something, rather than throw a tepid policy trial balloon, he’s starting with a policy more serious than what he ultimately intends to do, to force out all the opposing arguments. The centrists end up thinking ‘it’s not as bad as what he originally proposed, it must therefore be reasonable’ while the far right thinks ‘at least he did something concrete’.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Essentially, no new visas issued to anyone with a passport from those 7 countries for the given time period

            It’s really hard for me to believe that this is what they intended.

            Leaving aside green cards, everyone already on any other valid visa (like a work or student visa) can’t travel either (and I don’t believe that has been rescinded, if the green card thing has actually even been rescinded). For example.

            I think they really intended that everyone not a citizen who comes into the country (from the target countries) can only enter at the discretion of the border agent, no matter what their visa says and it should be presumed that they should be denied entry.

            That is the language that has been consistently used a few times (case-by-case basis).

            And I think this is what they want long term. That’s some part of what “extreme vetting” means to them.

          • Iain says:

            @Civilis:

            Let’s postulate two theories.

            a) Trump should be taken seriously, not literally. He never intended this policy to survive, and he is just using it to anchor expectations. Later on, he will introduce his real policy.
            b) Trump should be taken seriously and literally. He was seriously proposing this policy. If it fails, as it currently seems that it will, he will try a lesser version later.

            How do you distinguish between those two theories? To me, the latter seems more intuitively plausible. For one thing, unless everything we think we know about Trump is an elaborate fiction, Trump hates losing, or being perceived as weak. Doesn’t backing down on this issue look weak? The idea that there is a secret hidden Trump who doesn’t really care about public perception and is only interested in sneaking through policy wins seems like wishful thinking to me.

          • Nornagest says:

            There are too many amateur Trump psychologists running around for me to take any of them seriously.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            For one thing, unless everything we think we know about Trump is an elaborate fiction, Trump hates losing, or being perceived as weak. Doesn’t backing down on this issue look weak?

            Since he seems to live in his own universe of facts, he can just claim that whatever outcome he ends up with is the one he was arguing for all along. And the media will tear their hair out.

          • Iain says:

            If Trump lives in his own universe of facts, then he’s probably not a devious mastermind.

          • baconbacon says:

            Doesn’t backing down on this issue look weak?

            How many people will remember the details in a month? The collective memory will be something like “Trump tried to force major blocks on immigration and the Left/ACLU fought him on it”. In politics winning isn’t getting policy X implemented or not, it is having the policy you want talked about on the table.

          • John Schilling says:

            For one thing, unless everything we think we know about Trump is an elaborate fiction, Trump hates losing, or being perceived as weak. Doesn’t backing down on this issue look weak?

            Backing down on this issue was inevitable, unless Trump is willing to go to war with the Judiciary in the first week of his presidency. Which appears not to be the case.

            If we postulate Trump as a competent planner, then he must have known that his choices were to back down and look weak or go to war with the Judiciary and maybe lose. For a guy who doesn’t like to look weak and hadn’t yet stacked the Supremes 5/4 in his favor, that doesn’t seem like a plausible master plan.

            So, whether or not we model Trump as “literal” or “serious”, I think rule one is to model him as “thoughtlessly impulsive”.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      @Larry Kestenbaum-

      Skimming through those links, it’s pretty clear Bachmann wasn’t talking about Clinton cancelling elections, but rather manipulating the demographics (via immigration and fast-tracked citizenship) so that the Democrats were ascendant in perpetuity. That’s not all that different from the kinds of things Democrats themselves were crowing when they thought they had the election in the bag.

    • Reading two of the stories you link to, I think it’s pretty clear that what she was saying was not that there would be no more elections but that in future elections the Republicans would have no chance of winning, due to demographic changes. “This is the last election” was a hyperbolic way of saying it.

  15. reytes says:

    I don’t know. I agree that nothing you said in your posts has been proved significantly wrong.

    But, at the same time, like. The most impactful thing you have written about Trump – and probably the most impactful thing you will ever write about Trump – certainly got taken up and read as a strident and uncomplicated defense of Trump and of the idea that SJWs were talking nonsense by criticizing him. I know those aren’t the explicit things that you were saying. But I also think it was entirely predictable that it was going to be read that way. And, if you’ll forgive me saying so, it seems a little butter-won’t-melt-in-your-mouth to tell people to focus on arguing against Trump instead of arguing against you, when you’re saying things that are being widely regarded as arguments in favor of Trump.

    I agree that your models of Trump have certainly not been proven wrong (although I reserve my judgment with regards to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon as I did when you wrote the original article). But, I mean, it’s a little frustrating in the current political context and the context in which your article was actually read and received. It bothers me emotionally and I’m genuinely not sure whether that’s fair or not and I wasn’t going to bring it up because it seemed like it was probably irrational but you went and wrote a post on it so here we are.

    • suntzuanime says:

      He wrote multiple pieces coming out strongly against Trump. I don’t know what else you want him to do, other than stifle any thought that can’t be used as ammunition against the Other Side.

      • reytes says:

        I genuinely don’t know the answer. It’s a consequence of the general poisoning of the discourse well. I understand and respect the idea that the best response to that is to be as intellectually rigorous and clear and open as possible. At the same time, the well has been poisoned. That has real effects. I don’t know how far you can go pretending that it hasn’t been.

        I don’t know the answer, and I’m not saying that I do. And also – you certainly didn’t say this – and I don’t think anyone did say this – but I want to be clear that I’m not trying to demand an apology, nor do I think one is necessarily warranted, or anything like that. Just trying to talk through it.

        • stillnotking says:

          What an intellectually honest person does is just keep calling them like he sees them, as Scott always has. I’m pretty confident he’s not capable of turning into the kind of partisan who worries about the appearance of heresy, but — and this is addressed to Scott, I suppose — I think he’d be happier if he didn’t write posts like this one.

          That people misinterpret him in the service of some partisan agenda is hardly a surprise. It happens to every public intellectual who’s worth anything. Fuck ’em.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I also would have preferred that 300,000 people including Ann Coulter didn’t read my previous Trump post, but, as you say, here we are.

      • reytes says:

        Do you have any regrets about it?

        (this question is not trying to prove anything, I just want to know what you feel about it)

      • AnonEEmous says:

        Man, don’t apologise to any of these people.

        At the end of the day, the criticism of Trump is completely unhinged, and that’s not fucking helpful. Even as a basic strategy, the media’s torpedoed its own credibility, and they haven’t stopped Trump by starting scandals that turn out to be non-scandals (Trump photoshopped his own hands! He asked his own employees for photos! The entire State Department resigned!). So what’s the plan – keep it up for four years straight? Because if not, then continuing it currently is absolutely the wrong move.

        Meanwhile, after about a day of this Priebus has come out and said that green card holders will face a little extra security but be allowed in. And even if he didn’t, a judge and the ACLU seem to have defanged the parts of this bill that people are complaining about. So yes, this is still absolutely crying wolf. Mostly it says bad things about Trump and how his administration will function, but we kind of knew about that already.

        In other words, look, if you don’t want criticism, don’t do things worthy of criticism. If you don’t want your arguments against someone to be refuted, guard against refutation. For too long has the left decided that they can just lazily paint someone as bad, and they don’t need any arguments because anyone who disagrees can just be lazily painted bad as well. That’s failed. If people can’t adjust to that paradigm, then Trump will take advantage and win another 4 years.

        Not that I mind that personally, hehe. But seriously, I would rather if the Left stole back from him the good parts of his policy, and left the bad parts in the dust. We’ll see if that can happen. Not optimistic but *shrugs*

        • eh says:

          The criticism has been unhinged, but that doesn’t mean he’s done a good thing. The decision to piss off a quarter of the global population will have an impact on immigration of the beneficial kind, where America steals the talent from the rest of the world using O/E/EB visas.

          I mean, one of my mates has a moderately successful startup and is from Malaysia. You think he’s going to go to the US now, if there’s even the tiniest chance that Trump will do something stupid like lock him out of the country? No, if he wants to open another office or expand the company somewhere else, he’s going to fuck off to China, Chile, or Amsterdam now. It’s going to take years for the legitimately useful Muslims to get over this.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            This is about anyone who has or wants a green card as well as about Muslims.

          • hls2003 says:

            If your friend wants the advantages of the U.S. market and he stands to make a lot more money coming here, then yes – I expect he would come just the same as before. Maybe he’s the rare principled exception who will leave a bunch of money on the table due to his feelings of offense on behalf of others (bearing in mind that, Malaysia not being listed, he’s not affected). You know him, I don’t. But I doubt this would seriously impact the allure of the U.S., at least in the short-to-mid-term. It seems odd to object to a policy based on managing overwhelming demand to come to the U.S., on the basis that it might reduce demand to come to the U.S.

          • LHN says:

            @hls2003 I don’t know eh’s friend, but I’d expect the primary concern would be insecurity, not principled solidarity with those affected by this particular measure. The chance of travel disruption or being outright prevented from returning to the US has to be rated higher now generally, particularly for someone from a majority-Muslim country.

          • hls2003 says:

            @LHN I suppose there’s a slightly higher chance of insecurity, simply because we have literally seen people stopped at the airport (IMO the absolute worst part of the XO). But unless Malaysia suddenly becomes a basket case in the midst of a civil war, likely to export terrorism, I think that any added personal risk would be very low. I mean, even the Saudis aren’t on the list.

            And you still have the incongruity of warning about reduced demand for U.S. entry, at a time when extremely high demand for U.S. entry is exactly the perceived problem. I’m just not sure it’s an effective argument strategy. I get it, you want the talented people, especially from stable countries, but my point is that the talented people will probably still come if your policy is “welcome the talented people from stable countries and be a good market where they can make the most money.” YMMV.

          • eh says:

            The concern is more for marginal cases, where visa applicants and immigrants who have multiple good choices of destination, and are good enough to get into the US on merit rather than through the ridiculous lottery, will be pushed away from the US and towards other countries. In my friend’s case, though I don’t know his financials, expanding into Europe or mainland China is apparently only a little worse than expanding into the US, and the added Trump risk factor tips the balance. Thus you’ll see a slight decline in immigrant/visa recipient quality, because the spots of the most talented who no longer want to come will be taken by the less talented.

            Notably, Trump’s policies seem to be intended to raise the quality and maybe lower the number of immigrants, not to lower the number of applicants. The wall is intended to stop random unskilled workers from entering, and the EO is intended to lower the likelihood of terrorists entering. Maybe the side effects haven’t been thought through enough.

            In terms of what I want, I’m Australian. If the US sees its immigrant quality fall then we’d expect to see a corresponding tiny rise, and we have about 7,000 free spots on the E-3 visa if we want to work in the US, so none of this is a problem for me on a personal level. What worries me is that we might try to do the same thing, at much greater cost to ourselves.

          • The Nybbler says:

            You think he’s going to go to the US now, if there’s even the tiniest chance that Trump will do something stupid like lock him out of the country?

            There was before Trump. The immigration system is a mess and sometimes people are denied entry arbitrarily and capriciously even though their paperwork is in order. So if “even the tiniest chance” is an issue, he shouldn’t have been considering setting up shop in the US in any case.

          • eh says:

            @The Nybbler: point taken. That was a stupid rhetorical slip-up on my part. Thanks for pointing it out.

            I meant something closer to “humans are naturally risk-averse, and a small chance of a very negative experience factors much more heavily in our decisions than a high chance of a slightly positive experience, even if the expected monetary value of each sums to zero. In addition, we give extra weight to problems we hear about more often. Thus, a small chance of a negative experience, if highly publicised, can have a deterrent effect far beyond the expected risk. I believe this deterrent effect will negatively impact Muslim immigration to the US from the best-educated and wealthiest section of the global Muslim population, and my friend is an example of this.”

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Something wrote after Trump was elected was the most impactful thing he wrote about Trump?

    • Jiro says:

      The most impactful thing you have written about Trump – and probably the most impactful thing you will ever write about Trump – certainly got taken up and read as a strident and uncomplicated defense of Trump and of the idea that SJWs were talking nonsense by criticizing him.

      What happened us that
      1) Scott correctly rebutted the reasons that most people had for being anti-Trump.
      2) Scott had his own reasons for being anti-Trump, but these reasons were rather odd and not a lot of other people cared about them.

      That’s going to be seen as support of Trump, because for most people 1) is relevant to Trump and 2) isn’t. It could just as well have been “all the reasons you have for opposing Trump are wrong, but I think Trump is a Martian and so you shouldn’t vote for him”. Nobody else thinks it’s worth listening to claims that anyone is a Martian, so they just care about the first part.

      • liskantope says:

        I mostly disagree with (1) (although I have nowhere near the time and energy to attempt a full rebuttal at the moment), but I agree with (2) inasmuch as it alludes to his pre-election post endorsing everyone except Trump. My main criticism of that post was that his objections to Trump all seemed to sound sort of cerebral and abstract (e.g. Trump is higher-variance and therefore worse) compared to what most would consider to be much more concrete and pressing objections. I basically agreed with the points made in that post, and hey, he does write for a LW-type audience. But I was disappointed and a little worried at the time that none of Trump’s more blatantly atrocious qualities seemed to be mentioned in a blog entry likely to reach a huge swath of potential voters outside of the LW-sphere. I mean, Scott just now quoted some of the scathing things he’s written about Trump, but I don’t think I was aware of any of them (except “bad president”) at the time of reading the non-endorsement post. I did not know, for instance, that Scott considered Trump’s proposed Muslim ban to be “awful”. In the end, most of these stronger and more emotional criticisms showed up in “You Are Still Crying Wolf”, where they were overshadowed by the very controversial anti-anti-Trump points being made there. So we wound up with a situation where Scott is better known as a defender than as a dissenter of Trump.

        But I imagine it must be hard to figure out where to work every aspect of one’s attitude into essays which come out sporadically at different times, and I do appreciate Scott clarified things somewhat with the current post.

        • Jiro says:

          I was alluding to that article, but something else to consider: If the defense is that Scott actually had other reasons for opposing Trump, but he didn’t say them because he was tailoring his argument to what he believed LWers would respond to–that’s deceit. Claiming that you believe something for X reasons when you really believe it for Y reasons is not honest. Yes, you might think your audience would respond better, but there’s nothing to keep you from admitting “this isn’t mainly why I oppose Trump, but…”

          Otherwise, pretending that your argument is X when it really isn’t is an attempt to become immune to counterargument, where you can try to convince someone else, but they can’t convince you, since even if they conclusively disprove what you said, you don’t actually care about it.

          (But then that isn’t the only dishonesty. Remember the post where Scott admitted that he didn’t rebut certain anti-Trump claims until after the election because otherwise that might have led someone to vote for Trump?)

          • Jack says:

            From “SSC ENDORSES CLINTON, JOHNSON, OR STEIN”:

            “I think Donald Trump would be a bad president. Partly this is because of his policies, insofar as he has them. I’m not going to talk much about these because I don’t think I can change anyone’s mind here… So here are some reasons why I would be afraid to have Trump as president even if I agreed with him about the issues.”

            Doesn’t seem dishonest to me?

          • Jiro says:

            Scott may have literally added a disclaimer, but he said in a way which deemphasized it and generally made it not seem like something he wanted his audience to pay attention to. It’s like when Listerine was forced by the courts to correct false advertising about preventing colds. They added “will not help prevent colds or sore throats or lessen their severity” to their ads–spoken in a subclause, faster than the rest of the sentence, and with no stress on the words.

          • liskantope says:

            Well, we can talk about whether or not it’s disingenuous in some sense of the term, but the ethical rightness or wrongness of it is another question. I don’t think Scott was deceptive in an ethically wrong way. I do wish he’d taken more advantage of his excellent writing skills and massive audience to convey more of what he (evidently) found repugnant about Trump before the election, although I can understand that this is easier said than carried out.

          • Jack says:

            How was it de-emphasized or made to not seem like something to which he wanted his audience to pay attention? It certainly stuck out in my mind. In this medium, the words go at the speed you read them. Alternate hypothesis: SCC was not dishonest, but for whatever idiosyncratic reason you did not notice or focus on the “this isn’t mainly why I oppose Trump, but” when reading it the first time and so forgot about it; subsequently claimed it wasn’t there; was mistaken?

      • philosoraptorjeff says:

        “He’s an unhinged lunatic and God knows what exactly he’ll do but it’s almost certain not to be good” doesn’t seem that odd to me. It’s certainly not as “cerebral and abstract” as other people in this subthread are making it out to be.

        To read Scott as pro-Trump, you’ve got to ignore an awful lot of very clear and explicit statements he’s made, several of which are in the same articles people cite in support of the claim. Notwithstanding your argument here, it can’t reasonably be done just by misunderstanding one or two ambiguous phrases.

        (Much like, to be surprised by the Muslim ban – I mean the general thrust of it, not just the shoddy implementation – you have to ignore a lot of very clear and explicit statements from Trump – it can’t be done just by failing to notice an alleged dog whistle here or there.)

        • liskantope says:

          Where does the “unhinged lunatic” quote come from? It’s certainly not from his non-endorsement post, or from anything he wrote before the election as far as I know (sorry, it’s my bedtime and I’m exceptionally tired and therefore lazy and grumpy at the moment).

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      The only path to avoiding accusations of partisanship in a highly-charged political environment is to silence yourself completely, declare your neutrality and refuse to comment. And even then, there will be those who say that by refusing to come to their aid in defense (or attack) on the other side you are giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

      The next option up is to continue to comment, but to arbitrarily shape your commentary so as to artificially cultivate a 50/50 ratio of positive and negative comments about both sides in the issue. This is not a very good approach since partisans will start by disputing that your coverage is REALLY 50-50, that your positives for A and your negatives for B are shaded more strongly and more heartfelt and therefore you’re really a pro-A partisan, etc. Laying that aside, you open the door wide to what I think is generally called the golden mean fallacy, argument to moderation, etc etc. If you don’t naturally believe that the truth really is perfectly in the middle, then by shaping your commentary to reflect a “neutral” balance you are not serving that truth. And as far as I understand Scott and most of the community around here, serving/seeking the truth is more important.

      So the final option is to try as best you can to focus on maximizing for truth value. State your personal opinion or position, but don’t fight for it so hard that you’re willing to avoid truths that work against you, or push false, misleading, or questionable evidence that supports you.

      I think that is what Scott is trying to do, big picture and long term.

      And from the perspective of someone who sees it as a fight or a struggle where the most meaningful terms are “victory” and “defeat”, not “accurate/true” and “inaccurate/false”, that behaviour on Scott’s part constitutes either a statement of solidarity with the enemy (if he is not considered part of the tribe/ingroup), or as sedition (if he is). Sabotaging the War Effort. Bad For Morale. Etc. I think the only response to this is to decide which is more important to you, and act accordingly. Actually, I think that by waiting until –after- the election to post “You Are Still Crying Wolf”, Scott actually WAS engaging in a little bit of this sort of strategic use/avoidance of truths. But hey, we’re all human, we’re not perfect, and as he’s said over and over and over, he’s NOT a Trump supporter. And that still wasn’t enough to avoid the criticism.

  16. TheWackademic says:

    Just a quick meta-comment. If, on Day 9 of the Trump administration, you already have to post a lengthy explanation of why none of the awful and borderline-racist things he’s done so far have risen to the level of causing you to reconsider your belief that we’re “crying wolf” about how terrible he is…. that probably doesn’t bode well for the long-term strength of your hypothesis?

    • suntzuanime says:

      Please learn to read.

      • TheWackademic says:

        oh?

        • AnonEEmous says:

          oh.oh

          —-

          Nothing he’s done has been “borderline-racist”. I get it that you think judging Muslims is racist, or whatever, but it’s not. And what other borderline racist things has he even done? Start building a wall? Undermine Obamacare? I’m geniunely asking this.

          • bobbingandweaving says:

            How is it not border-line racist? What empirical evidence backs such a strong policy? It seems entirely motivated by unjustified negative sentiment towards muslims.

            If you went on holiday and were *even temporarily* not allowed back into your country on the basis of your ethnicity how would you feel?

          • AnonEEmous says:

            “Unjustified” as in

            Islam is not currently fueling terrorism

            or

            ?????

            And yes, that aspect of it was dumb, but not “borderline racist”.

          • Aapje says:

            Muslims are not a race.

          • Anonymous says:

            How is it not border-line racist? What empirical evidence backs such a strong policy?

            I mean, it’s not like Muslims don’t account for the majority of the terrorism in the world with the Communists being a distant second. Not at all! It’s just prejudice and bigotry.

          • herbert herberson says:

            I mean, it’s not like Muslims* don’t account for the majority of the terrorism in the world

            * Salafist Sunni Muslims

            funny how poorly tailored to that reality Trump’s policies are

          • Anonymous says:

            * Salafist Sunni Muslims

            funny how poorly tailored to that reality Trump’s policies are

            Salafist Sunni Muslims are still Muslims, and we can’t tell them apart from non-Salafist Sunni Muslims. At best, we can sort of tell who is Shia, who is Sunni. Any finer than that, good luck. You might as well try to determine who is a genuine refugee and who is a saboteur sent by ISIS.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            Salafist Sunni Muslims are still Muslims, and we can’t tell them apart from non-Salafist Sunni Muslims. At best, we can sort of tell who is Shia, who is Sunni. Any finer than that, good luck. You might as well try to determine who is a genuine refugee and who is a saboteur sent by ISIS.

            What about Arabic Coptic Christians? What about Zoroastrians? What about Kurds?

            What about Israelis (many if not most look distinctly middle eastern)? What about people like me who just look kinda vaguely Mediterranean?

            These are all also people who we can’t tell apart from Salafist Sunni Muslims (because we do not yet know how to read minds).

          • Anonymous says:

            What about Arabic Coptic Christians? What about Zoroastrians? What about Kurds?

            What about Israelis (many if not most look distinctly middle eastern)? What about people like me who just look kinda vaguely Mediterranean?

            These are all also people who we can’t tell apart from Salafist Sunni Muslims (because we do not yet know how to read minds).

            Precisely. Admitting *any* of them is highly risky. A very limited admission, for those vetted as closely as the refugees at the Vatican Palace, might be permissible. Mass importation is completely out of bounds of reasonability.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            @Anonymous:

            …What about people like me who just look kinda vaguely Mediterranean?

            These are all also people who we can’t tell apart from Salafist Sunni Muslims (because we do not yet know how to read minds).

            Precisely. Admitting *any* of them is highly risky. A very limited admission, for those vetted as closely as the refugees at the Vatican Palace, might be permissible. Mass importation is completely out of bounds of reasonability.

            The new emphasis might make clear to you at least part of why I disagree with you on this. I’m planning to go overseas in a few months and I’d prefer to be able to come back home afterwards.

            my employers and many of our investors are Israeli, and they might have some reservations about this idea as well.

          • Anonymous says:

            The new emphasis might make clear to you at least part of why I disagree with you on this. I’m planning to go overseas in a few months and I’d prefer to be able to come back home afterwards.

            my employers and many of our investors are Israeli, and they might have some reservations about this idea as well.

            Thank the people who permitted the invasion of Europe, then. The invaded folks are starting to get riled up, and I don’t blame them. Stop the flood, repatriate everyone who came in the last ten years at least, then maybe in a while it will be safe to look swarthy in Eastern Europe a generation later.

            Of course, this isn’t likely to happen, and you probably have no influence to make it happen.

          • herbert herberson says:

            Salafist Sunni Muslims are still Muslims, and we can’t tell them apart from non-Salafist Sunni Muslims.

            Without endorsing your premise, because it’s resting on the false assumption that the status quo is some kind of Wild West where we don’t know who anyone is but shove them through the turnstiles anyway–at the very very least, you could start by including the birthplace and continuing promoter of Salafism and excluding the country which is overwhelming Shia.

          • Anonymous says:

            it’s resting on the false assumption that the status quo is some kind of Wild West where we don’t know who anyone is but shove them through the turnstiles anyway

            This is almost precisely what’s happening in Europe, except it’s not so much “we don’t know” as “the people in charge are willfully ignorant of”. Otherwise, why would they issue rules such as believing everyone who looks under 40 when he says he’s a teenager?

          • herbert herberson says:

            Good thing for me that we’re not talking about Europe, then!

          • Matt M says:

            Good thing for me that we’re not talking about Europe, then!

            Okay, but it’s a ridiculously common meme on the left that America’s refugee policy needs to be more like Europe. That we “aren’t doing enough” where “doing enough” is measured solely by raw number of refugees admitted with no sort of qualifier related to vetting/screening/etc.

          • herbert herberson says:

            That’s not germane to what we’re talking about here. You can’t justify the incoherent sloppiness of the ban by appealing to hypothetical leftist policies that have not and aren’t going to be implemented.

          • Anonymous says:

            If America’s policy is way stricter, and I don’t have a reason to say otherwise, this is even more damning – “we have all these measures, and they mysteriously don’t work!”. You’ve had multiple Islamic terrorist attacks, even after 9/11. And some of those were homegrown, too!

            You know what Japan does to counter this problem? They let in next to zero Muslims in, and they spy continuously on all resident and visiting Muslims who manage to jump all the hoops anyway. This is the sort of response I would expect, if someone were actually willing to do anything useful about the problem. Not whatever America is doing – it is simply ineffective.

          • Iain says:

            Indeed. And thanks to their foresight, Japan gets to enjoy traditional home-grown terrorism instead.

          • Randy M says:

            …instead of both, you mean?

    • Roxolan says:

      Now this is just unfair.

    • The problem with meta-arguments is they abstract away from the actual model of the world being presented, and instead rely on meta-correlations.

      I don’t want to be rude and put words in your mouth, but it’s worth considering that an abstraction of what you wrote could sound as follows: “If you must defend your model based on accusations and updated information it seems likely that your original model is wrong, since having to defend yourself is correlated with being wrong.”

      What bodes for Scott’s long term hypothesis is the explicit arguments he has made.

      • TheWackademic says:

        I think you missed the key part, which is the time frame. Trump’s term is 1460 days. Within 9 days, Trump has done enough to warrant a lengthy defense post. Seems like, given that his term is only 0.6% done, he’ll do a lot more to warrant lengthy defense posts over the next 4 years?

        Or, to put it another way… let’s posit that this caused a 1% decrease in Scott’s confidence in his earlier “Trump is no more racist than other US presidents” post. Given that we have 99.4% of the term left, if Trump keeps up this pattern, Scott’s confidence in his pre-election posts will be gone well before the end of his term. Alternately, if the past 9 days didn’t cause a reduction in Scott’s confidence in his posts, that suggests that Scott has an intellectual rigidity on this topic that seems antithetical to the philosophy of SSC.

        • Jugemu says:

          Right now it seems like Trump is moving to swiftly fulfill his campaign promises. It’s less clear what he’ll do after that – if nothing else, the pace will probably slow down.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          I mean, you’re not totally wrong, but trying to establish a long term trend line from a few data points close to each other in time is contra-indicated.

          The real issue isn’t 9 days into his presidency, it’s that it correlates so well with the 18 months before that.

        • – You’re asserting/predicting that requiring a ‘lengthy defense post’ is, itself, evidence that his predictions are somehow invalidated or less likely to be true. This may or may not be true.
          – You’re asserting/predicting that defending an argument within the first 9 days, means he will have to continue to defend his arguments in the coming (1460-9) days, and there is some probabilistic chance each time his defense will fail.
          – You’re asserting/predicting that it’s natural that a 1% decrease in confidence is more likely to be a clear trend, rather than (say) a random walk.

          He laid out his predictions though, so I guess we will see. His predictions weren’t rosy, and they didn’t say everything will be fine.

        • Cypren says:

          Trump has done enough to warrant a lengthy defense post.

          This assumes that attacks on Trump from the community Scott is part of are all rational, calm, grounded and based on Trump’s actual actions instead of wild speculation and exaggeration about his effects and motives.

          I would say that what requires defense at the moment is the essentialism that has completely swept the Democratic Party: either you are wholly with us and think no heretical thoughts, or you are the enemy who must be destroyed at all costs. There is no room for self-criticism or self-doubt, only total war.

        • Nornagest says:

          If present trends continue, my two-year-old cousin will be fifty feet tall by the time she’s 40.

    • John Schilling says:

      why none of the awful and borderline-racist things he’s done so far have risen to the level of causing you to reconsider your belief that we’re “crying wolf” about how terrible he is….

      What the cartoon general said. Scott’s explicitly stated position was that Trump was average-white-republican-level racist, and therefore all the people who were accusing Trump of being Extra-Super-Duper-KKK-Level-Racist were crying wolf.

      If, now, the best you can muster is a (correct) claim that Trump’s actions are “borderline racist”, then you are sort of proving his point. Why, a few more weeks of this sort of thing, and Trump may actually reveal himself to be just as racist as Scott said he was from the start.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      borderline-racist

      “I’m building a wall to keep out Mexicans,” said Tom, a borderline-racist.

      Never mind, I’ll keep trying.

  17. MawBTS says:

    Straight from the desk of MR BREXIT!

    Statement Regarding Recent Executive Order Concerning Extreme Vetting

    “America is a proud nation of immigrants and we will continue to show compassion to those fleeing oppression, but we will do so while protecting our own citizens and border. America has always been the land of the free and home of the brave.

    We will keep it free and keep it safe, as the media knows, but refuses to say. My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months. The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror. To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting.

    This is not about religion – this is about terror and keeping our country safe. There are over 40 different countries worldwide that are majority Muslim that are not affected by this order. We will again be issuing visas to all countries once we are sure we have reviewed and implemented the most secure policies over the next 90 days.

    I have tremendous feeling for the people involved in this horrific humanitarian crisis in Syria. My first priority will always be to protect and serve our country, but as President I will find ways to help all those who are suffering.”

    Not a super great response. No apologies to any of the jetsetters whose flights he disrupted. And he doesn’t talk about the green card thing, which is what people are most upset about.

    But he (or whoever runs his social media accounts) is still trying to project an image of “compassionate conservatism” and solidarity. If this is the Fourth Reich, it still doesn’t look like it.

    Right now, I’m still thinking this is a purity spiral gone wrong.

  18. TomA says:

    I don’t think that most Americans (or any group of ordinary people) are as cerebral and detailed in their thinking as is reflected in the comments of this blog post. Most people are going to react to this issue based upon their innate biases and past experience, and this means that many of them will be deeply offended if they are called “racist” to their face. When this happens, you drive them into Trump’s camp, and that is counterproductive to your goal of rallying them to your cause.

    Scott is right. No matter how righteous you may be in your analysis, if you push away potential allies, you are being irrationally self-defeating.

    • uncle joe says:

      Eh, not really. Calling people “racists” is one of the strongest methods leftists have for identifying and bonding with one another. So it’s worth doing even if they turn off some people in the process.

  19. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I think cutting off Muslim immigration is a good idea.
    However, the object level issue of President Trump and this executive order is disturbing. That he’s staking his scant political capital on a ban involving just 7 countries that doesn’t include Wahabi Saudi Arabia or Deobandi Pakistan is baffling. I could see trying to shift the Overton Window by floating a ban on immigration from all overwhelmingly Muslim states so you have the most to negotiate away in compromise, but that the ban is simultaneously so narrow and had provisions like “green card holders can’t return from vacation” is evidence that he’s in over his head.

    • Jugemu says:

      Same. If anything I’d be in favour of a stricter policy overall, but it seems this was handled in a clunky way that has generated high backlash relative to the benefit. Perhaps it was a result of trying to rush a “win” out the door via executive order. At least they seem to have fixed the green card issue which was the main problem with it.

    • reasoned argumentation says:

      It’s already working – some of the outrage on my facebook feed is people saying “it doesn’t include Saudi Arabia because Trump has business there!”.

      Ok, we’ll compromise and add KSA and Pakistan.

    • Jugemu says:

      Update: Perhaps one reason Saudi Arabia was not included is that Trump is dealing with their King in relation to Middle-Eastern “safe zones” for refugees: https://twitter.com/SteveKopack/status/825831310883168260

    • Jiro says:

      The list of countries comes from a list made during the Obama administration.

    • bobbingandweaving says:

      Why do you think it is a good idea if you do not mind me asking?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Well, I don’t have handy every source I’ve ever used to do belief updating about Islam, but consider that of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, only the Hanafi allowed unbelievers other than Christians, Jews and Sabeans dhimmi status instead of genocide.
        Also consider that sharia allows a man to take four wives and a marriage can be consummated when the girl is as young as nine because the Perfect Man did it.

        So at a bare minimum, we need Muslims trying to take up residence in the US to denounce sharia.

        • John Schilling says:

          At a minimum, we need them to not practice nonconsensual Sharia. Everything beyond that is gravy. Loyalty oaths where people denounce their former beliefs, are a grey area for new citizens and not at all appropriate for noncitizen residents.

        • Also consider that sharia allows a man to take four wives and a marriage can be consummated when the girl is as young as nine because the Perfect Man did it.

          How do you feel about Judaism? Traditional Rabbinic law permitted a man an unlimited number of wives, although Maimonides does say that the sages say a man shouldn’t have more than four because he can’t adequately satisfy more than that.

          There was no minimum age for marriage, so far as I can see, although parents had control over their daughter’s marriage up to twelve and a half (and some signs of puberty).

          I’m not sure if there was any minimum age for marriage with parental consent in Christian Europe prior to modern centuries either. From a quick Google, Gratian “acknowledged consent to be meaningful if the children were older than 7.”

          From the same Wiki page:

          “The American colonies followed the English tradition, and the law was more of a guide. For example, Mary Hathaway (Virginia, 1689) was only 9 when she was married to William Williams.[citation needed] Sir Edward Coke (England, 17th century) “made it clear that the marriage of girls under 12 was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was eligible for a dower from her husband’s estate was 9 even though her husband be only four years old.”[3]”

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Yes, and if there were considerable numbers of Jews and Christians who believed that divine law gave them the right to marry multiple nine-year-olds simultaneously, this information might be pertinent.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            How do you feel about Judaism? Traditional Rabbinic law permitted a man an unlimited number of wives, although Maimonides does say that the sages say a man shouldn’t have more than four because he can’t adequately satisfy more than that.

            I wouldn’t have a great opinion of it if this was a live issue, but just Googling the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia and knowing that Israel gave control of marriage to Orthodox rabbis and yet bans polygamy makes this look like a red herring.
            However, unlike Islam, medieval/modern Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion. If both Jews and Mormons still practiced polygamy, I’d have more qualms with the latter.

            “The American colonies followed the English tradition, and the law was more of a guide. For example, Mary Hathaway (Virginia, 1689) was only 9 when she was married to William Williams.[citation needed] Sir Edward Coke (England, 17th century) “made it clear that the marriage of girls under 12 was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was eligible for a dower from her husband’s estate was 9 even though her husband be only four years old.”[3]”

            That’s man-made customary law and not God’s law.
            The influence of Mohammed’s sexual behavior can only be compared to that of Jesus Christ, not to secular English jurisprudence.

        • only the Hanafi allowed unbelievers other than Christians, Jews and Sabeans dhimmi status instead of genocide.

          In lands ruled by Muslims.

          The two cases I know of where Muslims ruled areas with substantial populations not of the Peoples of the Book you mention were Persia (Zoroastrian) and India (Hindu), and in neither case was the result genocide–I believe that in both cases the rulers decided that the local religion qualified as “of the book” even though not on the usual list.

          I have seen the claim that the restriction only applied in Arabia, but I don’t know if that is correct or which schools, if any, held it.

          • curious says:

            Read about the Muslim conquest of India (100 million killed), the Islamic Caliphate genocide against the Armenians (1 million killed), the Islamic Pakistani “Republican” genocide in what is now Bangladesh (3 million killed), etc. The Koran commands believers to kill the disbelievers, and that tends to happen over and over again, whether by state action or individual terror attacks. (http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/)

          • Read about the Muslim conquest of India (100 million killed)

            You believe this number why? What effort did you make to check it?

            The Muslims conquered part of India. Checking my convenient Penguin Atlas of World Population History, the population of all of the subcontinent during that period was about a hundred million and gradually growing.

          • Chilam Balam says:

            If I understand correctly, in both cases didn’t the government generally treat them as people of the book anyways with a little legal work?

          • curious says:

            @DavidFriedman you ask excellent questions, and you identified the most difficult number to check. The more recent genocides are widely and readily documented, but the Muslim conquest of India spanned 400 years with less regular documentation. The estimates I see most often reference K.S. Lal’s Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, which said 60-80 million. I’ve never seen a lower estimate anywhere, though I’ve seen 100 million, which may be rounding the same number to one significant figure. Respectfully, your atlas might tell you how many were alive at any given time, but not necessarily how many births and deaths occurred, nor what people were dying of during that 400 year period. I checked again to see if I could find anything contradicting Lal’s numbers, and again did not find anything smaller.

            @Chilam Balam, Islam tends to weigh like a gravitational force on countries with Islamic governments. Some rulers find it more comfortable to collect jizya than to kill the disbelievers, e.g. in India the lands that would have been more difficult to conquer and rule could sometimes be more profitably taxed. BTW, even being a dhimmi “of the book” subject to jizya is nothing like equality: Sharia reinforces dhimmi inferiority with many restrictions in addition to having to bow down and pay the jizya with willing submission, on pain of death. From time to time, Indian Muslim rulers who had been collecting jizya would become persuaded to do their Islamic duty and kill the disbelievers instead of merely taxing them. Hence the recurring genocides, across centuries. We might see a similar pattern in Turkey. After the Ottoman Caliphate genocide against the Armenians, Ataturk tried to establish a secular government, which seems already to be falling away after less than one century, as rural Muslims re-elect Erdegun and he consolidates more power. The Koran and hadiths say what they say, and what goes up from there tends to come back down to there.

          • Respectfully, your atlas might tell you how many were alive at any given time, but not necessarily how many births and deaths occurred, nor what people were dying of during that 400 year period.

            Correct. My point was that if the whole population of the subcontinent was about a hundred million and generally rising not falling throughout the period, I thought it very unlikely that the conquest of part of it could have killed a hundred million.

            Lal’s estimate for the population of India at the beginning of the conquest is about twice the estimate in my source, published a few years after his, from which I conclude that the actual numbers are very uncertain.

          • Sharia reinforces dhimmi inferiority with many restrictions in addition to having to bow down and pay the jizya with willing submission, on pain of death.

            On the other hand, dhimmi do not have to pay the Koranic tax which Muslims owe.

            There were restrictions on non-muslims, but there were also restrictions on Jews in places ruled by Christians. In Spain, Jews and Muslims were simply expelled. The only place I can think of where Muslim territory was conquered by Christians and the Muslims allowed to remain was Outremer, and killing or expelling all the inhabitants would have been difficult, especially since the territory was contested and eventually reconquered.

            Was there anywhere else where Muslims were permitted to live for an extended period of time under Christian rule?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Was there anywhere else where Muslims were permitted to live for an extended period of time under Christian rule?

            All the European colonial empires. ETA: And Sicily. ETA ETA: Also the Byzantine Empire and Russia.

          • John Schilling says:

            Was there anywhere else where Muslims were permitted to live for an extended period of time under Christian rule?

            Sicily and North Africa under the Normans. Which probably contributes to your Outremer example, via the Sicilian Norman crusaders who actually spoke Arabic and could negotiate the surrender of local cities without having to storm them and kill everyone. Well, sometimes.

            Later, huge chunks of the British and French colonial empires.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            It’s also worth pointing out that, at least during the Middle Ages, there was far more formerly Christian land in Muslim hands than there was formerly Muslim land in Christian hands. This means, of course, that there aren’t going to be a huge number of examples of Muslims living peacefully under Christian rule, for the simple reason that there weren’t many Muslims living under Christian rule, period.

          • but the Muslim conquest of India spanned 400 years with less regular documentation. The estimates I see most often reference K.S. Lal’s Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, which said 60-80 million.

            The context of this is an argument by Curious that Islam is a particularly murderous ideology. At least, that’s how I take it–Curious is welcome to correct me if I am mistaken.

            Suppose we accept Lal’s figures for both population and mortality. They imply a mortality of 200,000/year in a population of 200,000,000, or a tenth of percent per year.

            That’s a lot of bodies, if true. But the usual estimate for the Thirty Years War in Europe is that it killed about half the population of Germany, so a mortality rate of more than one percent a year. World War I killed about 17 million people over four years in a European population of about 400 million so about one percent a year. The American Civil War killed about 600,000 people out of a population of about 25 million over four years, so about .6%/year.

            Putting it as a single number for summed casualties of four hundred years makes it sound huge, but even if we accept the source Curious uses, it wasn’t an unusually high death rate as wars go.

            On another part of the same argument:

            the Islamic Caliphate genocide against the Armenians (1 million killed)

            Describing the Ottoman Empire as “the Islamic Caliphate” is a bit misleading, even if the Sultan did claim to be the Caliph.

          • I asked:

            Was there anywhere else where Muslims were permitted to live for an extended period of time under Christian rule?

            One of several responses:

            All the European colonial empires. ETA: And Sicily. ETA ETA: Also the Byzantine Empire and Russia.

            I should have been clearer. My original argument was that the difference between contemporary Islamic and contemporary Christian societies was due not to a difference between the religions but to the fact that the Christian societies have modernized in a way in which the Islamic societies have not. So I was thinking of pre-modern examples of both, but didn’t say so. The colonial empires had large Muslim populations ruled by Christian overlords, but that was pretty much all in the past few centuries.

            As I mentioned in another thread on this, the last Muslim settlement in Italy was eliminated well before the expulsion of Muslims from Spain.

            I don’t know about the Byzantine and Russian examples. In between the loss of control by the Golden Horde and Russian expansion across central Asia in the 19th century, were there substantial Muslim populations under Russian rule?

            Consider the relative tolerance of the two societies as reflected in current populations of areas they ruled. Greece was Christian territory conquered by the Ottomans and was still Christian when the Ottomans left. What is now Yugoslavia is still largely Christian. Egypt and Lebanon were ruled by Muslims for over a thousand years and still have substantial Christian minorities. Northern India was ruled by Muslims for centuries and is still majority Hindu–I think even if you include Pakistan, although I’m not certain.

            Spain, Sicily and southern Italy ended up with essentially no Muslims. Where is there a territory that was ruled by Christians for a substantial time prior to the past couple of centuries and ended up with a significant Muslim population? Recent immigrants don’t count.

            for the simple reason that there weren’t many Muslims living under Christian rule, period.

            The examples of large Muslim populations conquered by Christian rulers prior to 1800 which I am familiar with are Spain, Sicily and Southern Italy. It’s true that the Norman conquerors of Sicily and Southern Italy were relatively tolerant for a while, but that didn’t last–as far as I know, no Muslim populations remained as of a few centuries later.

            Consider that when the Jews were expelled from Spain, it was into Muslim territories in North Africa, the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The two cases I know of where Muslims ruled areas with substantial populations not of the Peoples of the Book you mention were Persia (Zoroastrian) and India (Hindu), and in neither case was the result genocide–I believe that in both cases the rulers decided that the local religion qualified as “of the book” even though not on the usual list.

            The sultans of India all adopted the Hanafi school of sharia because the abstract principles of Islam had to be modified by contact with reality, I dare say. I won’t vouch against the Islamic rulers killing 60+ million Hindus over the entire medieval period (100 million seems right out), but in general they did have dhimmi status.
            The point I’m trying to make is that “God’s law is fine with either second-class citizenship for Hindus in their own homeland or genocide” is so far outside Western civilization’s Overton window that it’s imprudent to let in more Muslims except those who arrive as assimilated/ready for apostasy as Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ David Friedman:

            I should have been clearer. My original argument was that the difference between contemporary Islamic and contemporary Christian societies was due not to a difference between the religions but to the fact that the Christian societies have modernized in a way in which the Islamic societies have not.

            If Christian societies have developed in one direction and Islamic societies in another, the most obvious cause for this is the difference in religion.

            ETA: Plus, frankly, this entire line of argument strikes me as something of a red herring. We’re talking about admitting immigrants in 2017, not in 1017. The attitudes of people a thousand years ago isn’t really relevant to which groups of immigrants we should admit today.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @The original Mr. X:
            I think Friedman is trying to counteract arguments about the intrinsic nature of the Islamic religion. He’s not making a full case for, say, admitting Muslim refugees into the US in 2017. He is only trying to disprove one argument against admitting them.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @The original Mr. X

            If a time gate to Europe circa the year 1617 opened – right before the Thirty Years’ War, after all – there would be arguments against letting refugees from 17th century Europe in, but none of those arguments could rationally be based on “their religion is inherently bad and there is no way it can be reconciled with our way of life!”

            Islam has its issues right now, and it really has to work through them. Sunni radicalism is a dangerous thing, and the efforts of some people (mostly non-Muslims) to pretend it doesn’t really exist, while often well-intentioned, are not helping anybody (least of all Muslims, given that most casualties of Sunni radicalism are … Muslims). However, there have been times in the past where the Muslim world was a beacon of sanity and tolerance compared to Christian Europe. Did the core of either religion change? No.

            The Muslim kids I went to university with were by and large the same as everybody else – a lot of kids for whom their religion was a cosmetic thing, or a couple of celebratory festivals a year, but not something worth altering one’s behaviour much over (I remember a friend giving up alcohol for Ramadan) let alone killing for. I also know observant, faithful Muslims who are decent, tolerant, peaceful people, just as I know observant, faithful people of various religions who are decent, tolerant, peaceful people.

          • Cypren says:

            …a lot of kids for whom their religion was a cosmetic thing, or a couple of celebratory festivals a year…

            A bit over a decade ago I was having lunch with a Muslim coworker and we were talking about radicalization and terrorism (this was back when the Iraq War was still in full swing, so these topics were pretty commonplace). His parents were first-generation Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants, but he was US-born and non-observant. His general observation, he said, was that when growing up, he saw most of his peer group at the mosque he attended becoming more Americanized and less observant as they became teenagers, until by the time most went to college, they were essentially secular. But a small minority became extremely observant in a trend he ascribed to cultural rebellion. It was their way of “acting out” against the fairly common feelings of teenage uncertainty of purpose and alienation from society by adopting an identity that put their religion first and foremost in their lives. Presumably, some small subset of those then go on to become vulnerable to radicalization via Internet propaganda.

            “Self-radicalized” terrorists are sometimes compared to school rampage shooters, and I think there’s probably quite a lot of the same factors working in both cases. The main difference is that there aren’t large, well-funded and organized groups producing Internet propaganda to encourage alienated white teenagers to shoot up the nearest school and promising them that they’re serving a meaningful higher purpose by doing so.

            I’m not sure there’s a good solution to this problem. Censoring the internet doesn’t work and is inimical to our values. Killing the jihadist propagandists just makes them martyrs, and there are enough of them that we can’t get them all anyway. Quarantining Muslims is both unfair to the vast majority of non-radicalized people and a false panacea; Adam Gadahn and others have demonstrated that radical propaganda doesn’t necessarily need a shared culture to spread, just sufficient anger and alienation.

            There are no easy answers.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            The main difference is that there aren’t large, well-funded and organized groups producing Internet propaganda to encourage alienated white teenagers

            Dylan Roof?

            Yes, you can quibble large, well-organized, etc. but the in the the age of the internet, you don’t need to be large or well funded to easily reach your target audience with an effective message.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ HBC, dndnrsn:

            Again, the question of whether x is some inherent and immutable part of Islam is less important than the question of whether x is a part of Islam as practised in 2017.

            @ dndnrsn:

            However, there have been times in the past where the Muslim world was a beacon of sanity and tolerance compared to Christian Europe.

            I’m still sceptical, given the Muslim belief that it was their duty to wage war against the infidels and subjugate them to Muslim rule. (Christianity, on the other hand, was mostly spread through proselytism.) If a 19th-century imperialist believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was the best race of all and that it had a duty to subjugate and rule over all other races, would you really consider him sane and tolerant, just because he didn’t also advocate killing them?

          • INH5 says:

            A bit over a decade ago I was having lunch with a Muslim coworker and we were talking about radicalization and terrorism (this was back when the Iraq War was still in full swing, so these topics were pretty commonplace). His parents were first-generation Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants, but he was US-born and non-observant. His general observation, he said, was that when growing up, he saw most of his peer group at the mosque he attended becoming more Americanized and less observant as they became teenagers, until by the time most went to college, they were essentially secular. But a small minority became extremely observant in a trend he ascribed to cultural rebellion. It was their way of “acting out” against the fairly common feelings of teenage uncertainty of purpose and alienation from society by adopting an identity that put their religion first and foremost in their lives. Presumably, some small subset of those then go on to become vulnerable to radicalization via Internet propaganda.

            Actually, more religious Muslims are not any more likely to support or commit terrorism in that less religious Muslims.

            But even without looking at the statistics, you don’t have to read many biographies of terrorists to find that plenty of them fall into the former category, from Omar Mateen to Salah Abdeslam to the British jihadist who bought “Islam for Dummies” before leaving for Syria.

            (Christianity, on the other hand, was mostly spread through proselytism.)

            If you ignore pretty much all of Latin America, about half of Africa, huge parts of Europe…

          • The original Mr. X says:

            If you ignore pretty much all of Latin America, about half of Africa, huge parts of Europe…

            I assumed we were still talking about the middle ages, in which case Latin America and Africa wouldn’t apply. (Although, given that most of the expansion of Christianity in Africa happened after the colonial empires left the place, Africa wouldn’t really apply anyway.) As for “huge parts of Europe”, the only places I can think of where Christianity was imposed by military force are parts of northern Germany (where Charlemagne made the Saxons accept baptism after he conquered them) and the Baltic. As for the rest, the Germanic tribes invading the Roman Empire were converted through a combination of proselytism and cultural influence (Christianity was the Roman religion, the Germans wanted to be more like Romans, therefore they became Christians); the Anglo-Saxons were converted by missionaries sent from Rome; Ireland was converted by missionaries from mainland Britain; the Slavs were converted by Cyril and Methodius and their pupils; the Russians due to the cultural influence of Byzantium; the Vikings were converted by missionaries. In other words, Christianity didn’t spread in this era by conquering other countries and installing a Christian ruling class; indeed, often enough, the pagans had the military upper hand over their Christian neighbours.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @The original Mr. X

            Again, the question of whether x is some inherent and immutable part of Islam is less important than the question of whether x is a part of Islam as practised in 2017.

            If by “x” you mean radicalism, then it is a part of the Islam practiced by some Muslims, not the Islam practiced by all Muslims. It is fundamentally unjust to condemn a group for actions committed by a minority, especially when the majority is frequently victims of that minority.

            I’m still sceptical, given the Muslim belief that it was their duty to wage war against the infidels and subjugate them to Muslim rule.

            There were large periods of time where Jews were better off under Muslim than Christian rule. I think that a noticeable lack of pogroms counts as “sane and tolerant.”

            If a 19th-century imperialist believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was the best race of all and that it had a duty to subjugate and rule over all other races, would you really consider him sane and tolerant, just because he didn’t also advocate killing them?

            I would not consider him sane and tolerant, but if (as a hypothetical) his view was the minority view among Anglo-Saxons, and he was largely killing other Anglo-Saxons in an attempt to achieve his vision, I would not hold his views against those other Anglo-Saxons. So, not a good analogy.

            Pretty much any religion is awful by today’s standards if you do it by the book, because most religions date to times when life was much, much harsher than it is in most parts of the world today. Most religious people thus find all sorts of excuses and workarounds to not do it by the book. Others just ignore the awful stuff altogether.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            If by “x” you mean radicalism, then it is a part of the Islam practiced by some Muslims, not the Islam practiced by all Muslims. It is fundamentally unjust to condemn a group for actions committed by a minority, especially when the majority is frequently victims of that minority.

            I’m not condemning anybody of anything, simply suggesting that this is something we should take into account when determining our immigration policies.

            There were large periods of time where Jews were better off under Muslim than Christian rule. I think that a noticeable lack of pogroms counts as “sane and tolerant.”

            There were pogroms, it’s just that they tend to be less well known in the west because Islamic history in general is less well known. The 1066 pogrom in Grenada, for example, is much less famous than the Rhineland pogroms of the First Crusade, although it killed more people.

            I would not consider him sane and tolerant, but if (as a hypothetical) his view was the minority view among Anglo-Saxons, and he was largely killing other Anglo-Saxons in an attempt to achieve his vision, I would not hold his views against those other Anglo-Saxons. So, not a good analogy.

            In this case the analogue would be Muhammad, who taught his followers to spread Islam throughout the world by subjugating non-Muslims to their rule. No doubt lots of Muslims nowadays don’t believe in this, but “It’s OK, most Muslims don’t listen to Islamic teaching on this matter” doesn’t strike me as a particularly good defence of Islam.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @The original Mr. X:

            I’m not condemning anybody of anything, simply suggesting that this is something we should take into account when determining our immigration policies.

            Well, yes, ideally one wants to avoid importing violent radicals of any stripe. By and large, Canada and the US have done a very good job of this, and of avoiding radicalization of people once they’re here, of the second and subsequent generations, etc. US and, I would imagine, Canadian Muslims are among the world’s least radicalized, if not the least radicalized. A better job can be done, but it’s pretty obvious what has gone wrong in cases and places where it has.

            There were pogroms, it’s just that they tend to be less well known in the west because Islamic history in general is less well known. The 1066 pogrom in Grenada, for example, is much less famous than the Rhineland pogroms of the First Crusade, although it killed more people.

            You can’t trust historical death estimates. Small pogroms were very common in medieval Europe.

            In this case the analogue would be Muhammad, who taught his followers to spread Islam throughout the world by subjugating non-Muslims to their rule. No doubt lots of Muslims nowadays don’t believe in this, but “It’s OK, most Muslims don’t listen to Islamic teaching on this matter” doesn’t strike me as a particularly good defence of Islam.

            Would you extend this to thinking that “Most Jews don’t follow the Hebrew Bible closely” or “Most Christians don’t follow the Bible closely” are not particularly good defences of Judaism or Christianity? Would you condemn a left-wing, pro-gay church because of the stuff that’s in the actual scripture they purport to follow? Would you condemn a Reform Jew on the basis of the treatment of women in some ultra-Orthodox communities?

          • I’m still sceptical, given the Muslim belief that it was their duty to wage war against the infidels and subjugate them to Muslim rule. (Christianity, on the other hand, was mostly spread through proselytism.)

            When Christianity started it didn’t have an army. Once it had an army, it went around conquering people and trying to force conversions with some frequency. Take a look at Charlemagne’s campaigns. Or the Spanish in South America.

            The British Empire wasn’t mostly trying to force conversion, but it was conquering very large areas and putting them under its rule because it thought its rule superior–like the Muslim imperialists. That is the point of Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” which, despite its title, is not about race.

            To bring it up to modern times, a large part of the motive for the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the idea that they would be better off under our form of government. That’s a secular version of the same idea.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            When Christianity started it didn’t have an army. Once it had an army, it went around conquering people and trying to force conversions with some frequency. Take a look at Charlemagne’s campaigns. Or the Spanish in South America.

            Of course, Jesus didn’t command his followers to go around conquering, whereas Muhammad did. Plus, I don’t really think that two examples over the course of 2,000 years (or three, since you forgot the Baltics) counts as “some frequency”, especially when compared to both the number of countries which were converted without being conquered and the number of countries conquered during the Muslim conquests.

            The British Empire wasn’t mostly trying to force conversion, but it was conquering very large areas and putting them under its rule because it thought its rule superior–like the Muslim imperialists. That is the point of Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” which, despite its title, is not about race.

            Yes, and nowadays we don’t generally think of the British Empire as a force for tolerance.

          • the only places I can think of where Christianity was imposed by military force are parts of northern Germany (where Charlemagne made the Saxons accept baptism after he conquered them) and the Baltic.

            Spain during the reconquista. Sicily was Muslim ruled, conquered by Christians, ended up with no Muslims on it–I don’t know if forced conversions were involved.

            the Vikings were converted by missionaries

            Some of them were. There was extensive warfare between Christian and Pagan factions and the Christian, eventually, won.

          • John Schilling says:

            Sicily was Muslim ruled, conquered by Christians, ended up with no Muslims on it–I don’t know if forced conversions were involved.

            There don’t appear to have been forced conversions during the Norman era, 11th-12th century. When the last Norman Queen married a Holy Roman Emperor (Fredrick the mumbleth, IIRC) and shortly thereafter died, the HRE decided to deport the Muslims; the ones not sailing off to Arab lands of their own accord being forcibly resettled in a landlocked corner of mainland Italy. I gather the latter was a sort of 13th-century equivalent of South Africa’s apartheid-era black “homelands”, and did not long outlast the 13th century.

            Hmm, cultural descendants of Vikings ruling over a multiethnic society with full religious tolerance, until a German ruler shows up and decides to round up all the non-Christians? Didn’t we just hear that story one thread over? Now I have to look up how the Jews fared in Sicily…

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Spain during the reconquista. Sicily was Muslim ruled, conquered by Christians, ended up with no Muslims on it–I don’t know if forced conversions were involved.

            Those were already majority-Christian, so I don’t think the (re?)conquest of those lands counts as spreading Christianity.

          • John Schilling says:

            Those were already majority-Christian,

            Sicily was not majority-Christian when the Normans conquered it, though it had a substantial Christian minority living in isolated enclaves. The Normans returned the favor. In neither case does forcible conversion seem to have been involved; the island’s overlords used force as needed to establish and maintain themselves as overlords, then built a culture where it was socially and economically advantageous to convert to said overlords’ religion but if you were happy being a peasant or tradesman you could be a Catholic, Orthodox, Sunni, Shiite, or Jewish peasant or tradesman as you saw fit.

            The Pope wasn’t happy with that many non-Catholics that close to Rome, encouraged the (Catholic) Normans to do something about it, and found that the Normans weren’t all that happy taking orders from the Pope now that they had their very own kingdom and were quite happy with content non-rebellious peasants to rule and merchants to tax. Then the Pope encouraged the Holy Roman Empire to do something about it, and since the Holy Roman Emperor kind of depended on Papal approval for all three elements of that dubious title…

      • Walter says:

        Birthday party logic? More guests, less cake.

    • Anonymous says:

      The ban list doesn’t include any states that the US has economic ties with. It’s the same reason as why Iraq and Afghanistan got crushed, rather than Saudi Arabia, from where the majority of the 9/11 perpetrators hailed from.

      I do agree with you in general. Attempting to decrease the amount of Muslims in your country is pretty much the only way to safeguard against Islamic terrorism.

  20. Ilya Shpitser says:

    I think one worry about Trump is while he doesn’t take marching orders from the KKK, Bannon is in his good graces, and is likely very influential.

    I need to read up on Bannon more carefully, but what I have seen is not incredibly encouraging.

    Trump on his own is narcissistic and reactionary (by which I mean he reacts to things in front of him, rather than operates on a longer term timeline, I don’t mean a member of Moldbug et al’s merry gang of edgy youths). The issue is: who is playing him in his court. Apparently, there are multiple factions, but many of them are incredibly dangerous.

    • Cypren says:

      I wrote a longer comment here but apparently tripped one of the invisible word ban filters, so it got eaten.

      In short: I agree with you, Trump is a typical celebrity clown and his courtiers are the important ones to watch.

      Don’t discount Bannon as a racist, like the Left has typically portrayed him. He’s a person who has essentially made his life’s mission a holy war on the Cathedral and everything it represents; he’ll take any potential allies in that fight, which is why he has a reputation for goose-stepping around racism and such on Breitbart even if he doesn’t explicitly endorse it. (Much in the way that many Democratic-aligned groups will goose-step around the horrors of Communism because they want the support of the Workers World Party and similar groups who share a common enemy in Republicans.)

      We’ve never had someone like this in a position of such power before, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what he does with it. I’m not overly sympathetic to either the Cathedral or the reactionary forces Bannon represents, so I’m not sure I have a dog in the fight.

      • Ilya Shpitser says:

        I don’t discount Bannon, I think he’s an incredibly dangerous person. I am watching him, and reading up on him carefully.

  21. Le Maistre Chat says:

    In some ways, President Trump reminds me of President Reagan if he had no experience as Governor. Former movie/”reality TV” actor, protest candidate of conservatives who were fed up with being called deplorable.
    (“You’re going to get Reagan in 1980, wise guy!” — Archie Bunker, 1976)

    If Trump is more of an existenial threat to the world than Reagan, we have only ourselves to blame for not having a cursus honorum to test potential presidents with increasing levels of authority.
    If not, maybe we should calm down and act like the wrong Party can win an election without it making them the Nazi Party.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Reagan was already a political mover, even before the governorship though. He was a mover from inside the party, rather than outside. I also think Reagan was far more pragmatic about his own abilities. Not exactly epistemic humility, but something similar.

      I mean, hell, he was an actor. He liked to have his lines memorized. He wasn’t winging policy proposals on the fly.

      He was out of the Goldwater wing though, so in that sense I can see where you are coming from.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        @HBC: Reagan was already a political mover, even before the governorship though. He was a mover from inside the party, rather than outside.

        OK, I didn’t know that. Blame youth.

        I guess the question is, IF Donald Trump is uniquely bad and dangerous for the responsibilities of a US President, what sort of non-partisan vetting is rational? What common factors made Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, 2 Bushes, Obama and even Mr. Cuban Missile Crisis qualified to handle nukes? The cursus honorum already got struck down downthread.

        • Chilam Balam says:

          Traditionally, Americans have relied on parties to vet candidates this way. Anyone too beyond the pale was generally not allowed, and even if they got into office, the party was their source of intellectual and bureaucratic help, so they were necessarily toned down.

          That does not seem to be working.

          • cassander says:

            We’ve spent the last 40+ years successively abolishing all the controls party leaders have over their parties. We took away their super delegates, their ability to raise money, their control over the nomination processes. You can’t make people powerless then act surprised when they don’t exercise any power.

          • Cypren says:

            We took away their super delegates, their ability to raise money, their control over the nomination processes.

            Clinton’s victory over Sanders would suggest a strong counterexample, no? I agree that the Republicans have abolished these things, but I think the Democrats still pick candidates based on the wishes of the party elite rather than the voting base.

          • cassander says:

            @cypren

            I’d say that clinton’s victory was personal, not structural. It reflected her personal influence within the party, her stature with the public, and weak opponents, not the power of the party to select her over all rivals. If the party had such power, it almost certainly would have exercised it in her favor in 2008 over that of a freshman senator. But as endearing as Bernie Sanders’ angry grandpa impression was, he was no first black president.

          • Iain says:

            Clinton was more popular than Sanders with the Democratic base. It seems counter-intuitive, because most of us spend all of our time on the internet, but older Democrats and black Democrats preferred Clinton by a significant margin.

            Your broader point, though, is not wrong. The Democratic party infrastructure remains a lot more robust than the GOP.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Up until this election cycle, the conventional wisdom was “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” I think “they lost the mandate of Heaven” is the best way to describe what happened to Republican party leaders. It’s not that their tools for holding onto power were chipped away at, it’s that they convinced enough of their people that they no longer were willing to use those tools on their behalf.

          • John Schilling says:

            Clinton’s victory over Sanders would suggest a strong counterexample, no?

            The Clintons are about as good as it gets when it comes to amassing and ruthlessly exercising power in the Game of Democratic Thrones. And they could barely keep an avowed socialist from taking the Party’s top position, at the expense of damaging their own party to the point of not being able to win an election against Donald Trump.

            As counterexamples go, this one is pretty weak.

    • albertborrow says:

      A cursus honorum is… bad, in ways that seem unintuitive to someone that values experience. You know what’s worse than letting any idiot with enough votes in office? Making that idiot go through years of bureaucratic submission to make sure they do absolutely nothing to change internal corruption.

      The only thing worse than a despot is a smart despot that can use the power offered to them to bolster the state – and that’s exactly what that kind of program would breed. So we would get a line of non-controversial candidates that seem to be inoffensive or even good, each of whom does their best to expand Presidential power beyond the bounds it should go.

      • cassander says:

        Say we pass an amendment limiting presidential candidates to former state governors or cabinet level officials. I fail to see how that causes the problem you indicate.

  22. Naldo Sjakie says:

    I agree with Scott on all this. In fact, it’s clear any critics are missing the overall point: Trump doesn’t have an overarching goal here except to burnish the image he has of himself as President. Currently, Trump thinks that rapid, blundering action is the right way to be a Great President. When this proves catastrophically wrong, we can expect Trump to be legitimately shocked, wilt, blame and then lie low until Plan B of how to be a Great President forms.

  23. registrationisdumb says:

    If we think you’re wrong, not in that Trump is literally Hitler, but in that he’s actually doing a good job as president, do we win a prize?

  24. Glossy says:

    You can argue that he and his supporters are biased for caring more about terrorism than about furniture-related injuries, which kill several times more Americans than terrorists do each year.

    This would be a stupid argument. The president can’t do much to fight furniture-related injuries. He can do something to lower the incidence of terrorist attacks though. For example, he can stop letting in people from countries where ISIS is popular.

    • Glossy says:

      Another obvious point: furniture accident deaths will never spike to 100,000 or 1,000,000 in a single year. It could happen with terrorism. Someone might steal a nuclear device, someone might sabotage a nuclear plant, someone might make a dirty bomb. The possibility is there.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        Additional obvious point: furniture isn’t actively plotting to kill you.

        Really, what a dumb argument. I can’t believe that after more than fifteen years we’re still having it.

      • Someone might steal a nuclear device, someone might sabotage a nuclear plant, someone might make a dirty bomb.

        All of those are more likely to be done by a terrorist organization with resources, not a free lance. It’s hard to see how we could prevent such an organization from getting a few people into the U.S., possibly with stolen Canadian or British passports.

        • GregQ says:

          Really? David, you might consider this: Al Qaeda had the resources. ISIS had the resources. Dirty bombs aren’t that hard to do.

          Yet none of them have made it in.

          Now that could be because the terrorist organizations have no desire to inflict mass casualties on the US.

          Or, it could be because, in fact, we have been effectively preventing them from launching such attacks.

          Which strikes you as more likely?

    • reasoned argumentation says:

      Yeah, that is a really bad argument.

      “Your odds of being killed by Jeffery Dahmer are less than the odds of being killed by lightning therefore you when Jeffery Dahmer applies to be your roommate you should exercise no more caution than you do about lightning strikes”.

    • ashlael says:

      In which countries is ISIS popular? Serious question, as I was under the impression that they were massively unpopular literally everywhere.

      • Glossy says:

        This poll doesn’t include Syria or Iraq, probably because polling is difficult there:

        http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/17/in-nations-with-significant-muslim-populations-much-disdain-for-isis/

        14% in Nigeria (20% among Muslims there), 11% in Malaysia, 11% in Senegal, 9% in Pakistan, 8% in Turkey. The percentages aren’t huge, but surely much higher than in the US. And the absolute numbers are in the tens of millions.

        • ashlael says:

          I think calling ISIS “popular” in any of those countries is a stretch. It’s as likely as not that this is a lizard man constant type effect – people who apparently have never heard of ISIS outstrip those with positive opinions in all countries.

          Obviously we’ll never be able to test this but I would expect Syria and Iraq to have some of the very strongest feelings against ISIS, given that they are almost entirely composed of people that ISIS is actively trying to kill or subjugate and people actually living under ISIS rule.

          EDIT: Apparently there was a ICM poll of France that found ISIS had a 16% approval there, which outstrips any of the countries you mentioned. So perhaps Trump should be banning the French instead of the Iranians.

          • AnonEEmous says:

            the obvious difference there is that France is our ally and has a lot to contribute

            also, was it 16% among Muslims, or 16% period?

          • Glossy says:

            16% approval in France implies a majority of Muslims in that country. In the 18 to 24 age group the approval is 27%. By the way, stereotypically the Euro country with the most radical Muslims isn’t even France. It’s Belgium.

            It’s very easy to explain why ISIS is much more popular among Muslims in France than among Muslims in MENA nations. A Muslim in Algeria primarily differs from his countrymen by social class, wealth, region, etc. A Muslim in France primarily differs from other French citizens through being Muslim.

            Differences from neighbors do a lot to create people’s self-perception. And most people want to be proud of who they are, want to express solidarity with their team.

            And what’s the loudest way to do that for a Muslim in a Western country? What’s the loudest, most in-your-face symbol of Islam in today’s world? For Sunnis it’s the black flag of ISIS.

            This would also explain why 20% of Nigerian Muslims approve of ISIS. In Nigeria being Muslim isn’t boringly universal and self-evident. It’s not “do fish notice they’re in water?” territory. No, in Nigeria it defines you as a member of a team, a group in society.

            Now try to figure out what all of this means for Muslim immigration to the US.

            Why has this worked out so much more violently for Muslim identity than for Chinese, Mexican, Christian Nigerian, etc. identities in the West?

            I’m sure that US-led invasions of Middle Eastern countries contributed to the severity of the conflict. It shouldn’t excuse blowing up innocent people, but in some minds it obviously did. And France, which I mentioned above, has troops in multiple Middle Eastern countries right now.

            But even before all of these recent wars Islam was a strong ideology. Meaning that its adherents’ committment to it was very high.

          • INH5 says:

            16% approval in France implies a majority of Muslims in that country.

            At the very most, 10% of France’s population is Muslim. So it not only implied a majority of Muslim approval, but also that a substantial portion of French non-Muslims approve of ISIS.

            The only non-absurd interpretation of this statistic is that this was the Lizardman factor at work. Most likely, a substantial portion of respondents heard “Islamic State of Iraq…” and thought that the pollster was referring to the legitimate government of Iraq.

      • akarlin says:

        (1) 21% of Syrians think Islamic State has a positive influence.

        https://www.orb-international.com/perch/resources/syriadata.pdf

        I wrote about that here: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/syrians-say-isis-is-american/

        Typically around 10%, rising to a majority in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor provinces – though the figures there are undoubtedly considerably exaggerated, since it’s hardly advisable to express your lack of approval for IS when under their occupation.

        Conversely, though, in rebel and government held areas it is advisable to refrain from expressing your support for IS, so overall it probably cancels out.

        (2) 6% in Iraq, 10% in Egypt, 13% among Syrian refugees, 9% in Jordan, 10% in Saudi Arabia, 13% in Tunisia, 24% (!) in Palestine.

        http://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-son-also-radicalizes/

        Of course a minimally intelligent person would refrain from expressing his support for IS living in Iraq or Egypt or as a Syrian refugee, so I suspect the true figure is closer to 20%-25%.

    • Glossy says:

      Terrorist deaths per year is a much more volatile variable than furniture deaths per year. There were many years, not that long ago, with zero terrorist deaths. In 2001 we had more than 3,000. I think 30,000 is possible, even 300,000 is imaginable. And the government can affect these numbers. It can invade more or fewer Muslim countries, it can admit more or fewer people from countries where ISIS is popular. I’m for fewer in both cases.

      The ability of the government to affect furniture death numbers seems to be much smaller than that to me. If furniture is inspected for quality before or after being imported here from China, the standards could be tightened up. But the range is never going to X to 3,000X no matter what you do.

      • Spookykou says:

        The furniture deaths comment is a joke/reference to things Scott has written about before, if you are interested you can find more information here.

    • suntzuanime says:

      People interested in this argument should click the link in the article, which leads to a post where Scott discusses some of the problems with the argument. Scott wasn’t saying it was a good argument, he was saying it was a better argument than calling Trump a white supremacist.

    • He can do something to lower the incidence of terrorist attacks though. For example, he can stop letting in people from countries where ISIS is popular.

      That might work for spontaneous terrorist attacks. I don’t think it would do much good against the equivalent of 9/11, a carefully planned terrorist attack by an organization with resources. The U.S. admits over seventy million tourists a year. A stolen passport costs a few thousand dollars.

  25. Anthony Brice says:

    The article I sent you had nothing to do with the Muslim ban. “Are you sure you read the post?”

  26. tscharf says:

    People sure seem to be mad about this. I bet they would be really mad if Trump withdrew all US protection, then sat around and did nothing while 400,000 Muslims killed each other in Syria, which then caused a huge refugee crisis and the creation of an overt terrorist state that happily decapitated anyone who disagreed with their ideology on YouTube.

    Then again maybe what they really care about is a temporary ban on immigration from certain hot spots in the world.

    For a group of people who spent the better part of two years after Obama was elected blaming everything that went wrong in the world on the mess left by the “previous administration” the rules of engagement appear to have changed. I’d like to think this is the peak of Trump derangement, but I’m guessing that is very wishful thinking.

    • reytes says:

      one thing I’d point out here is that there are certainly segments of the left that have been pretty critical of Obama for not letting in more refugees. I think the left has also been fairly critical of aspects of Obama’s foreign policy – in a bunch of different ways that aren’t necessarily aligned with your point or with each other, admittedly, but there’s been criticism there. And I think these protests have been driven more by the lefterly parts of the Democratic party than by the parts that Obama or Clinton really represented.

      Perhaps it is the case that the emphasis has been more pronounced on foreign policy compared to where it was under Obama. I don’t think there’s necessarily insincerity, though.

      • tscharf says:

        They are very sincere, no doubt about it. There just seems to be a lot of confirmation bias in how one evaluates the actions of a president. The roll out of this ban was definitely a clustertf*** and the criticism is valid, but a little overwrought.

        I trust my guy to do the right thing, and always assume the other guy has malicious intent is pretty common in politics. At least they didn’t start demanding action in Syria on Jan 20th, ha ha.

  27. John Schilling says:

    OK, this just hit me when I was responding to another post. To SJWs and a fair number of other liberals, there is no difference between “borderline racist”, “as racist as any other 70 year old white guy”, and “white supremacist KKK racist”. There can’t be, because the point of the word “racist” in those circles is to end all discussion, which we can’t do if we then have to discuss what sort of racist someone is. Racist is Racist, and thus Pure Evil, full stop.

    So when Scott or anyone else says, “Trump isn’t an extreme KKK-level racist like you all are accusing him to be”, and then “Trump has revealed himself to be borderline racist”, by the time it gets past their filters they hear a hypocrite caught contradicting himself.

    Is there any way to get past that sort of filtering when the point we are trying to make depends on the degree or kind of racism at hand?

    • tscharf says:

      Racist, Hitler, demagogue, xenophobe, Islamaphobe, sexist, Stalin, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, bigot, white supremacist…..sorry I fell asleep.

      When’s the last time you heard a Trump supporter respond as saying they are offended when hearing these? They just don’t care anymore.

      I don’t think anybody even hears these labels anymore. The more the definitions are expanded to widen the net, the less impact they have. I haven’t a clue what somebody means when they say racist, and for the most part the speaker is using the term intentionally to broad brush a (r)acist as a (R)acist to invalidate an opponent’s argument without engaging it. Most users of this term do not want to refine this term because it will invariably weaken the impact, at least in their view.

      For all the virtual ink spilled on Muslim bans and what is the most vile thing Trump can be called, nobody talks about why a Muslim ban would even be necessary or what “extreme vetting” even means and how much is appropriate. The obsession with labeling can’t get any worse, it just can’t.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        Someone described it as being similar to antibiotic resistance. By throwing accusations of racism everywhere at the slightest hint of something they don’t like, the left got impressive results for a time but ended up breeding an antibiotic-resistant superbug who is now the President. Their strategy for dealing with him appears to be to pour on even more antibiotics, so we’ll see how that works out for them.

    • reytes says:

      It’s not just people on the left who hear things this way. Remember: Ann Coulter shared the original piece as a defense of Trump.

      And, you know, obviously I don’t think that the generalizations that you’re making here are correct, either. But the discourse is definitely bad.

      • Cypren says:

        The original piece was a defense of Trump. But it was a defense against a very specific line of attack.

        The single largest problem in America today — and the one that is slowly, inexorably dragging us on a path towards another civil war — is that many (maybe even most) people view politics as all-or-nothing. You must either defend your side’s every action to the death, or burn the enemy to the ground, salt the earth and make off with their women. There’s no middle ground where you can say, “I oppose the enemy and what he stands for, yet I still think this line of attack is dishonorable and unwise.” People simply take it as a blanket defense of the enemy and disregard everything else you say.

    • Jack says:

      I’m interested by the way this comment uses “SJW” as a category. So it is fairly obvious that “racist” is not used in this way by many people who use the word (for instance, there are entire academic journals about racism–not the end of discussion, but the start). But we don’t have to worry about that because we are talking about SJWs only. Who are SJWs? The people who use racism this way. Such a person obviously can’t be sensibly talked to; they use words as weapons and virtue signals, so trying to converse with them rationally is a waste of time. Thank heavens we have a category descriptor we can apply to a group of people we disagree with about racism so that we can avoid fruitless discussion with them.

      • aldi says:

        never mind the fact that a lot of “social justice warriors” would heartily resent being miscategorized as liberals

  28. A response to “You’re Still Crying Wolf”. The data contradict a few of Scott’s major points:

    blog.johnpalowitch.com/cry-wolf/

    I take him up on the bet near the end.

    • shakeddown says:

      The link isn’t working.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Proper link.

      Note, not an endorsement of the post. Haven’t read it.

    • AnonEEmous says:

      Yeah, this piece was pretty bad.

      “Amid the bullshitting and half-formed sentences, his only cogent thoughts about black communities apparently involve racist generalizations.”

      that links to an NYT article which has this quote

      “Mr. Williams, 61, a retired postal employee who is African-American, acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s remarks described a reality for some black people.”

      Frankly, dude, Trump responds to the rhetoric the Left puts out and then people are shocked, shocked I say! You complain about Trump “othering” black people and Latinos, but as a millennial who has ingested the basic culture of where I live, they already are other in a significant way. It’s just that no one minds because that way is also respectful, which I think is dumb but there it is.

      the remainder of this seems to be complaining that Trump’s supporters are more racist than average, and that many white supremacists and such were thrilled that he won. A few points; firstly, the promise to deport people mostly of a different race isn’t necessarily racist, if those immigrants are illegal, and it’s something that’s been bi-partisan for a while. But people with racial resentments would love it. To the white supremacists…thanks in part to people like you, Trump got called racist a lot, and then got elected. This is a big victory for white supremacists, but not of their making.

      • I debated for a bit whether or not to respond to such a rambling, poorly-written, and mostly irrelevant comment. But it won’t take that long, so here it is.

        First, congrats, you’ve identified *one* line in *one* of my linked articles addressing a potential objection (a hallmark of good journalism), and which does not detract from the article’s main point.

        In contrast, I addressed each of Scott’s major and minor points head-on, and presented data that flatly contradict many of them. (Scott begins a central paragraph if his powerful conclusion with “Stop calling Trump supporters racist.” Well, sorry, they are.)

        Get back to me when you have relevant, substantive criticism.

        [Also: “they already are other in a significant way”? Wow, care to elaborate?]

    • Cypren says:

      @John Palowitch: I would be inclined to take you up on that bet so long as the 7th condition is restricted only to the UN Security Council nuclear powers. North Korea makes nuclear threats on a regular basis as a matter of state propaganda and no one actually believes they’re credible; while US nuclear doctrine is normally to treat the threat of a nuclear attack as an actual attack, we clearly have disregarded that in NK’s case for many years. The only bet condition I would accept for any matters regarding North Korea would be an actual nuclear launch, since their both their public statements and diplomatic posturing are so notoriously aggressive and unreliable.

      • Interesting. An acquaintance of mine made a similar point that my 7th condition would have to be much better-defined than I originally laid out.

        That said, I am interested in making this bet only with someone who has a blog or website with a lot of followers, like Scott. One reason for this is accountability. Another (related) reason is for promoting the issues (related because if the bet is public and it is obvious that both sides will be held accountable, this fosters a more rigorous approach to making predictions like these).

        If you do, feel free to contact me via the link I put in the post.

        • Cypren says:

          Thanks, John. No, I don’t run a website or a blog; as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, I’m a slightly right-leaning centrist working in a left-wing monoculture where being known to have heterodox political views would probably significantly hamper or end my career. As a result, while I enjoy debating and engaging in a low-profile forum like these comment threads, I definitely do not want attention that might lead to someone connecting me with my professional identity.

          I do think your bet is quite interesting and I’ll watch your blog to see if you can find someone willing to take you up on it, and what the final agreed-upon conditions will be.

  29. Russ Abbott says:

    You are much more sanguine than Yonaton Zunger. You and he are both very intelligent and perceptive observers. I imagine you have similar underlying values. I wonder what you think of his much more fearful perspective.

  30. In case someone is interested, I wrote more on Trump’s executive order, after my last post on the subject. I explain what I think Bannon was trying to do and point out a very important part of the order, about the completion of the Biometric Entry-Exit Tracking System, which has been completely ignored so far.

    • tscharf says:

      Nobody wants to talk about why we need more vetting, specifically the San Bernadino women shooter had social media posts extolling the virtues of violent jihad and wanted to join before she emigrated. They don’t like to use the word temporary, and they like to claim it is specifically for Muslims (although that appears to be the net effect). All heat, no light.

      There is a component to this that people on the right tend to look at the response and ask “why do they love terrorists so much?”. The optics are one side wants a total ban and the other wants open borders, but the reality is both sides are much closer on this subject than they want to admit. Reasonable but strict vetting from jihadist countries.

      It is impossible for a white working class voter in the Midwest to look at this and not be convinced the city slickers care much more about Muslim refugees than people in middle America. Syria before Michigan. I’m still waiting for big protests to break out because someone in flyover country is being mistreated. Instead they are vilified because of cultural differences, meanwhile the cultural differences of the people the protesters want to support and protect are much more antithetical to American culture.

      • shmohawk1 says:

        “The optics are one side wants a total ban and the other wants open borders, but the reality is both sides are much closer on this subject than they want to admit. Reasonable but strict vetting from jihadist countries.”

        The sane people who actually run the country are closer, but the angry voices on the extremes really do mean what they say. And Trump — when you ignore what he says and look only at what he actually ends up doing in the end — is one of the sane people. He wants to cap the number of refugees admitted to 50,000, which is a shockingly low figure … until you realize it was 70-80,000 under Obama. Just as lefty partisans didn’t register the drone bombings when Obama did them, they didn’t register the immigration restrictions when Obama did them, and so they see Trump as wildly out of control.

        But whereas most GOP politicians are terrified of being called “racist” etc. Trump doesn’t care, and leverages the outraged left to make himself popular among the outraged right.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          He wants to cap the number of refugees admitted to 50,000, which is a shockingly low figure … until you realize it was 70-80,000 under Obama.

          If Trump had announced a reduction in total refugees and some changes to how vetting was done, including announcing that they would be reprocessing existing visas (but not immediately invalidating them), you would have had some pushback, but absolutely nothing like what we have now.

          • tscharf says:

            Right. There are some theories out there that this is intentionally antagonizing the left for political gain. Not sure I buy this (I don’t), but Trump can certainly make the left go crazy on demand. The NYT was going all caps with CHAOS AND CRISIS with what amounts to be a couple of days of ineptness that affects a few hundred people. The NYT et. al. need to understand that they either normalize Trump or normalize their own hysteria.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @tscharf:
            When you lose the Southern Baptists I think you can probably safely assume that this isn’t exactly laser targetted at the left.

          • Cypren says:

            @HBC: Note that the article by Russell Moore (head of the political wing of the Southern Baptists) linked from your link is from 2015 and applies to Trump’s initial comments during the campaign about a temporary halt to all Muslim immigration. Moore has published a more recent letter regarding the executive order from Friday that is considerably more moderate and calls for clarification of the order and emphasizes that the promised improved vetting needs to come quickly so that the halt to refugee admission is as brief as possible.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cypren:
            Yes, I know the initial quote was from earlier, but the immediate reaction of Moore on Saturday was to oppose the policy. And the rejection of the policy by evangelical leaders generally was widespread.

            Note that in the letter you link Moore believes the policy may already endanger foreign baptist missionaries.

            We are deeply concerned that the order will cause widespread diplomatic fallout with the Muslim world, putting Southern Baptists serving in these countries in grave danger and preventing them from serving refugees and others who are in need with humanitarian assistance and the love of the gospel.

    • I just wrote another poston the shocking hypocrisy we see about Trump’s executive order.

  31. curious says:

    Scott Adams wrote that identity is the most powerful form of persuasion. I think he’s right because I’ve seen identitarian “liberals” (not really liberal) embrace thoughtlessly Islam, which is profoundly illiberal.

    Chapter 8 of the Koran says to strike terror into the disbelievers, who are “the worst beasts” according to Allah. Yet, identitarian “liberals” insist on importing it, even at the cost of bombing and invading countries where Muslims live in order to import refugees here. Evidence and reason seem to have no effect when trying to persuade people who insist they are being liberal with their bombing campaigns, e.g. Francois Hollande and Barack Obama bombing Libya and Syria, and importing to NATO refugees who believe that many or most NATO citizens must be killed.

    Money seems also a motivating factor, as Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Petrodollars have captured “elite” think tanks and universities, so people who identify as “smart” don’t listen to anyone who points out they’re obviously wrong. Vox reported last year on the Petrodollar capture of “elite” opinion on behalf of spreading Islam: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11275354/saudi-arabia-gulf-washington

    Islam is very similar to the KKK and Nazis in every way except one: most KKKlansmen and Nazis are white, but most Muslims aren’t, so frankly it’s racist to tolerate Islam while condeming the otherwise very similar KKK and Nazis. Worldwide, in countries with Muslim majorities, most Muslims demand Islamic law, aka Sharia (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/22/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/), because Islam commands believers to impose Sharia. Even in countries where Muslims are only a minority, many advocate Sharia. Sharia is bigotry. Opposing bigotry is the opposite of bigotry. Yet, some on the left (who identify as “liberal” but aren’t) claim that opposing Islamic bigotry is bigotry. That’s illogical and factually incorrect, but their emotional attachment to a “liberal” identity seems to overwhelm their faculty of reason when assessing whether something is actually liberal or bigotry, and their self-identification as “smart” prevents them from seeing their own error.

    Half the country supported banning Muslim immigration, and ending the war in Syria would actually be a more liberal policy than the Democrats campaigned on, yet identitarian “liberals” have been fooled into supporting “Hillary’s War” and importing Islam. Ironically, President Trump is in this context more liberal than the identitarian “liberals” protesting him, because he is likely to end the war in Syria and slow or stop the spread of Sharia. Ending war and ending Sharia would both be genuinely liberal victories, ironically more likely to come from President Trump than from the identitarian “liberals” protesting him.

      • curious says:

        lol – calling something bs doesn’t make it so. I cited evidence and used logic, and you replied with the equivalent of name-calling. Thus, you illustrate Scott Adams’ point: in your mind, your emotional identity trumps evidence and reason.

        • I cited evidence and used logic,

          You treated Islam as monolithic. That’s a bad sign.

          • curious says:

            Perhaps you should quote instead of summarizing, and rely on evidence rather than signs and omens. I quoted what the central doctrine of Islam says, e.g. chapter 8 of the Koran, and cited surveys from around the world about what most Muslims believe. It’s a bit like saying smoking is bad for human health: you could object that treats smoking as “monolithic,” and cite examples where doxctors recommended smoking and examples where some few smokers lived a very long time. That isn’t much of an objection though, because smoking is bad for human health, and the fraction of smokers who didn’t suffer from smoking are not an argument in favor of smoking.

          • shmohawk1 says:

            “You treated Islam as monolithic.”

            So has the left for the last 15 years.

            Obama et al have refused honestly deal with the fact that there are pacific and militant wings of Islam, and instead insisting that the people that embrace violence, want to spread sharia, etc. aren’t “true Muslims,” “have nothing to do with Islam” and so on, even as anyone could see that’s nonsense. When you know someone is lying in part, assuming they are lying in all is a normal heuristic.

          • aldi says:

            curious, shmohawk1; trying to treat the left as monolithic is also a bad sign.

            Trying to make Obama an example of the left is downright false and indicative of a serious problem with reasoning. By his actions as president, he is barely centrist in an american context.

            So, I can only offer you a tu quoque with the “if lying in part, suspect lying in all” heuristic.

    • Montfort says:

      Paragraphs, my friend. Put in some line breaks and it is dramatically more likely someone will read your whole post.

    • Vidur Kapur says:

      People embrace human beings. People fleeing from war, persecution or who just want to improve the lives of their families by migrating to the United States or other countries.

      The funny thing is that only jihadists and some people on the “far-right” of politics embrace the interpretation of Islam that you put forward. Everyone else – the vast majority of Muslims who abhor terrorism, for instance – does not.

      The counter to this from some on the far-right is that those Muslims aren’t following “true Islam” because they’re not committing terrorist attacks. Yet, as Scott Alexander has written elsewhere, debates about what “true Islam” is are completely nonsensical. We should be interested in combating terrorism, not having theological debates.

      What matters are consequences, and it’s far better that non-Muslims and the hundreds of millions of peaceful Muslims out there unite against terrorism than if people like yourself portray this whole thing as a war between “the West and Islam”. The reason it annoys Muslims when people say that “Islam is evil” is because Muslims genuinely can’t see how it is, and that’s a good thing.

      So, please, stop with these wholly counter-productive comments.

      • curious says:

        You seem to have illustrated the comment about needing paragraph breaks, because you failed obviously to read the parts about what most Muslims believe. Go back and read again now that there are paragraph breaks.

        Your reply illustrates the censorship that identitarian “liberals” resort to when proven wrong: “stop with these wholly counter-productive comments.” Silencing me would not accomplish anything. You would still be wrong. Surveys around the world have shown broad support for Sharia among Muslims, including for example more than 80% in Egypt and Pakistan. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/22/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/) You ignore that, and try to silence me, because your emotionally powerful identity as “smart” enables you to prefer factual ignorance.

        As Marcus Aurelius wrote, in a conversation between a wise man and a fool, the wise man learns more, because he listens, which is how he he became wise. The fool does not listen, which is why he remains a fool.

        I say, please tell us more about your views on Sharia. In particular, you wrote it’s “a good thing” that Muslims can’t see Islamic Sharia is evil bigotry. Please, tell us why you believe that. Do you have low expectations of Muslims, because most Muslims aren’t white? Is that why you would condemn them to the evil bigotry of Sharia? Winston Churchill called Islam madness, and a “retrograde force.” Do you believe the madness of Islam to be congenital, and incurable?

        Your comment also illustrated identitarian “liberal” virtue-signaling. If you are not ignorant, then you must surely be aware that the Obama administration deported record numbers of Christians from south of the border, while paying to bomb countries with Muslim majorities and then paying again to import displaced Muslims here. The administration said that bombing Libya did not constitute “hostilities.” (Those must have been really friendly “smart” bombs, donated “liberally” to the needy people of Libya. “Coming soon to a theatre near you, Hillary’s War: Let them eat bombs!”) And then, the same administration reportedly shipped some of Gadafi’s arsenal very “liberally” to Sunni militias in Syria, including reportedly al-Qaida. (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line) Explaining how it is “liberal” to persecute people and make them refugees, so you can feel good about embracing them, is going to require some impressive mental gymnastics on your part. You’ll need to make extra effort to explain how it’s “liberal” to displace and import Muslims (many of whom support Sharia) while simultaneously deporting record numbers of Christians (who oppose Sharia) and do actually “just want to improve the lives of their families”. I look forward to reading your attempts.

        • ashlael says:

          I think that’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation of what Vidur said. I would prefer it if people in these threads didn’t have to spend ages explaining what they really meant when it was perfectly clear to any fair minded observer.

          • curious says:

            I quoted directly. How was I not fair minded?

            For example, I’d be curious to know how you would “charitably” interpret his assertion that “only jihadists and some people on the “far-right” of politics embrace the interpretation of Islam that you put forward…stop with these wholly counter-productive comments.” The meaning seemed fairly clear, and clearly proved wrong by the links that I provided.

            BTW, in reply to your earlier questions, 20% of Syrians called ISIL a positive influence. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/15/one-in-five-syrians-say-islamic-state-is-a-good-thing-poll-says/) ISIL being Sunni, those would surely be Sunni Muslims, as are at least 97% of the refugees imported by NATO. Meanwhile, non-Sunni Syrians are sheltering with the Assad government, lest they be killed by the Sunni migrants (http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/16/europe/italy-migrants-christians-thrown-overboard/index.html).

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            I quoted directly. How was I not fair minded?

            You had a choice of interpretations, and you chose an uncharitable one.

            Now, no one who disagrees with you will want to talk to you because they know you’re not going to engage in any kind of give-and-take.

            If you want to understand the arguments against your position, don’t put words in your opponents’ mouths. Don’t interpret them in the least reasonable possible way.

            Basically, read your Marcus Aurelius quote, but imagine just for a second the possibility that you may be the fool and you’ll be on the right track.

          • curious says:

            Thanks @wysinwygymmv, I will continue to work at quoting more and interpreting less. I do think the particular comment at hand, politely calling me a jihadist or “right-wing”, and politely asking me to shut up, lacked any charitable interpretation. Calling my comment “wholly counter-productive” was likewise uncharitable, at best. Still, tone matters, politeness counts, and quoting works better than intepreting. Also, as I’m new to commenting here, I do bear perhaps the newby’s burden of making extra effort to prove worth talking to.

        • Surveys around the world have shown broad support for Sharia among Muslims

          Of course most Muslims support Sharia–Sharia is, by definition, God’s law. You might as well ask how many Americans support justice.

          The question is what the content is of the legal system they support. Can you point to anything in the doctrines of any of the four schools of Sunni law that endorses killing random civilians in places ruled by non-Muslims? I don’t know of any such.

          You can’t deduce Muslim law by quoting selected bits from the Koran. The Koran mentions wine drinking three times, and the first two imply that it is permitted.

          • Randy M says:

            Do those surveys indicate support for personally following Sharia, or support for seeing it imposed on other people via civil law & penalties?

          • curious says:

            @DavidFriedman, Pew surveyed support for terrorism also, finding substantial support, though less than for Sharia (http://www.pewglobal.org/2006/05/23/where-terrorism-finds-support-in-the-muslim-world/). Terrorism is an acute, potentially disastrous risk of Islam, while Sharia is ultimately a larger and worse consequence of Islam.

            @Randy M, the answer to your question is both, although the numbers do vary. Consider the case of Asiaa Bibi, a Christian women currently on death row for allegedly committing blasphemy. She faces death threats, Governor Taseer was assassinated for saying she should not be executed, a Christian minority representative was also assassinated for the same reason, and a terror bombing campaign killed many more people at courthouses that had applied secular law to one of the assassins. Generally speaking, and subject to some few exceptions, the higher the % of Muslims in a country, the more likely the Muslims in that country are to support Sharia. Islam is a package deal, and the process of Islamization is like bringing a camel’s nose into the tent: as you get more believers in Sharia, you tend to get more policies consistent with Sharia, until it achieves critical mass and then there’s no escaping it.

          • nimim.k.m. says:

            Well, it makes sense to argue that no religion is a monolith and it’s teachings are no invariant over time. So it makes no sense to claim that all who believe in Islam must be like this or that.

            But then again, we have this. Relatively recently a treatment of homosexual people in our refugee centers was a topic of discussion in the media here. Mainly, that they are abused (and occasionally raped, if that makes any sense) by the fellow residents, and in general fear for their lives, first in their day-to-day life in a refugee center, but especially so if the people back at home hear because that’s apparently even more terrible, so that they often don’t dare to tell about it to authorities. And it took months for the authorities to find out.

            State tv interviewed the whoever suffices for a religious representative of the mainstream organized Muslim community here. His reply was shortly: there is no problem, gay Muslims simply do not exist. End quote. And instead of outrage, that was simply the end of that line of discussion.

            And it could be argued that actually, that is just part of the original culture mixed up with Islam, and there really could be form of Islam that could be relatively okay with homosexuality (or that you can even find a historical evidence that some Islamic culture was okay with a form of homosexuality recognizable from classical antiquity).

            But frankly, that is quite academic discussion. There exists a significant contingent of people who call themselves Muslims, who don’t care much about which part of their conception of Islam is Islam and which part is local culture, because for them it’s all Islam, and they are totally not okay with homosexuals or apostasy or blasphemy or various other things we have learned to consider fundamental rights in the West. And the evidence points out that that contingent are not in danger of becoming insignificant in near future. Being a practicing homosexual or an atheist blogger is quite dangerous hobby in certain parts of world. I’m not exactly keen about the idea that refugee centers located in my country and operated by the government in the middle of Europe are one of those places.

        • PedroS says:

          curious, there are (unfortunately) many Muslims who subscribe to a violent and exclusionist interpretation of the Koran, but you should not forget the many Muslims who hold much more nuanced views. When you claim that “true Islam” is violent, you are abandoning all the non-violent, non-bigoted strains of Islam and effectively leaving “moderates” hung out to dry.

          I am obviously dismayed at the numbers of Muslims from certain countries who think that their religious laws should be binding as civil laws, but is that opinion really surprising? Hasn’t the legitimacy of laws throughout most of history depended (at least in part) in them not clashing with basic religious/cultural/philosophical precepts? Why would you expect that to be different in the Muslim world, or hold Muslims to a higher standard than the Pilgrim communities in Massachussets, the Fundamentalist communities who expect creationism to be given equal time in the classroom, or the people who would criminally prosecute vendors who do not cater gay weddings ?

          I do not think non-Muslims should present any of the strains as “the true Islam”: the struggle for the soul of Islam must be fought by Muslims, within their faith communities. We should, however, not embolden the most reactionary currents, nor give them any reason to show themselves as defenders of a beleaguered world view.

          • curious says:

            As for who is being “hung out to dry,” I would refer you to Jaskologist’s comment from
            January 30, 2017 at 11:03 am.

            I will interpret your comment charitably, but if I may say, the accusatory tone seemed consistent with the misguided “virtue signaling” promoted by Petrodollar-driven think tanks and media (see vox article linked above). I do not accuse you of intending to sound self-righteous, but your comment seemed to claim a morally superior plateau that I do not yield to anyone who advocates the spread of Sharia or Islam (which is a “retrograde force” that commands believers to impose Sharia wherever they can).

            In fact, the moderates from Muslim backgrounds are made worse off by importing believers. Consider the “honor killing” cases where people have been battered and in some cases murdered by their own parents for not following Islam. Islam says to kill apostates, blasphemers, disbelievers (including atheists, who are terrorists according to Saudi law), gay couples, and a long list of other people who have committed no crime in American law. By importing people who believe in Islam, you are jeopardizing the life safety of innocent people whom Islam commands believers to kill.

            Statistics in Britain show a disturbing pattern. Younger Muslims are reportedly less tolerant of people who don’t follow Sharia than older “Muslims” are. That reflects two changes. Many of the older ones left Muslim countries to get away from Islam, without technically renouncing it, which might get them killed for apostasy. (These might be the people you call “moderate”, because they keep peace with their families by pretending to believe in a religion that they don’t really believe. Alternatively, read about taqiyyeh, which encourages Muslims to lie about what they believe in order to serve Islam.) Many of the younger Muslims are economic migrants and/or children of polygamous families (which the British dole subsidizes). Surveys report younger Muslims are more likely to want Sharia, including making British law look more like Sharia.

            You can have Enlightenment liberty, or you can have Sharia, but you cannot have both. I believe the Enlightenment brought huge benefits to humanity and I do not yield any moral high ground to those who would spread Sharia, or Islam, which commands believers to impose Sharia wherever they can. Churchill rightly called Islam madness and a retrograde force. At best, you might compare it to opium addiction: you might cite some nice opium addicts who are successful, e.g. Bella Lugosi, but that doesn’t make spreading opium addiction morally superior. If some people like opium, I have no objection to them consuming it, but I do not agree with a policy combination of waging war across the Islamic world and then importing the consequently displaced Muslims here. It’s bad already they suffer from Sharia in their own countries, and if you want to help the “moderates” then you should advocate better human rights standards among our “allies” rather than importing believers here. The only beneficiaries from the policy combination of invade&import are those who wanted to spread Islam and thus Sharia, which all Enlightenment beneficiaries should oppose.

          • Alternatively, read about taqiyyeh, which encourages Muslims to lie about what they believe in order to serve Islam.

            Taqiyya is supposed to be limited to protection against serious threats. It’s primarily a Shia doctrine, developed in response to Sunni persecution.

            Do you have a source for your “to serve Islam” version? If not, I suggest that it may be another case of your absorbing factual misstatements from heavily biased sources.

            The analogous Christian doctrine is “Mental Reservation.”

            “In strict mental reservation, the speaker mentally adds some qualification to the words which they utter, and the words together with the mental qualification make a true assertion in accordance with fact.”

          • curious says:

            @DavidFriedman, you keep citing Wikipedia as if it were an unbiased source, even though Wikipedia is (a) expressly “not a reliable source” and (b) Wikipedia suffers from widely reported biases of its own. Also, you keep reverting to Medina and twice you have suggested that informed disagreement with Islam and Sharia results instead from “biased” sources.

            On Taqiyya, and Islam generally, you might do better with WikiIslam. (https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Taqiyya). You may find it better informed and less biased than Wikipedia.

            BTW, I found where I had first read about Hijra, and it did not mention Christians; my point was that non-Muslims had made a mistake allowing Islam, and today the KSA government persecutes non-Muslims there in the name of Islam, even excluding non-Muslims entirely from the center of what had been a non-Muslim city. You seem to focus on whether the non-Muslims of Medina included Christians or not, but it makes no difference which non-Muslims made that mistake 1400 years ago: Christians including Angela Merkel the Pope are making the same mistake now, importing large numbers of Sunni Muslims into NATO countries.

            As you have acknowledged, Islam commands Sharia. Please tell me, in what “Islamic Republics” do people have freedom of religion (including apostasy) and freedom of speech (including blasphemy)? (And please keep in mind the vigilante “Sharia patrols” that kill with impunity in technically secular Bangladesh, where 3 million non-Muslims were murdered in the latest Islamic genocide.) In what “Islamic Republics” can same-sex couples get married legally, or even live openly without fear of prosecution? I lose patience eventually with people who insist on importing a doctrine that says to kill us, and expecting everyone to respect the hateful fraud of a dead charlatan as if it were fact. I do favor the Enlightenment over Sharia, and if you want to call that bias, then say so, but please consider the fact that Enlightenment civilizations protect libertarians whom Sharia would kill for blasphemy.

          • On Taqiyya, and Islam generally, you might do better with WikiIslam. (https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Taqiyya). You may find it better informed and less biased than Wikipedia.

            This practice is emphasized in Shi’ite Islam whereby adherents may conceal their religion when they are under threat, persecution, or compulsion.[5] Taqiyya, as it is known today, was developed to protect Shi’ites who were usually in the minority and under pressure from the Sunni majority. In the Shi’ite view, taqiyya is lawful in situations where there is overwhelming danger of loss of life or property and where no danger to religion would occur thereby.[1] “

            Which is essentially the same thing the Wikipedia article said.

            my point was that non-Muslims had made a mistake allowing Islam, and today the KSA government persecutes non-Muslims there in the name of Islam, even excluding non-Muslims entirely from the center of what had been a non-Muslim city.

            The people who invited Mohammed to Medina were pagans who invited him because they were interested in the possibility of converting to Islam–and did. Why would they consider that a mistake? You seem to be identifying the actual inhabitants of Medina at the time with some other imaginary group of non-Muslims.

            Mohammed’s coming to Medina was unfortunate for the Jewish tribes, but they weren’t the ones who invited him.

            I prefer enlightenment law–which we are gradually drifting away from–to either Muslim or Catholic religious law. But demonstrating that Muslim countries at present are as intolerant as western countries in the recent past doesn’t tell us much about how evil Islam is as a culture.

            You are aware that male homosexuality was a capital offense in England in the 19th century? That Catholics at the time suffered legal disabilities, as Christians and Jews did in traditional Muslim societies?

            “in technically secular Bangladesh, where 3 million non-Muslims were murdered in the latest Islamic genocide.”

            Are you talking about the killings in 1971, when Pakistan was trying to prevent the secession of East Pakistan? If so, where did you get the idea that those killed were non-Muslims?

            The religious killings were much earlier, at the time of the partition of India into India and Pakistan. That was religious killing on a large scale, but of Muslims by Hindus as well as of Hindus by Muslims.

          • curious says:

            @DavidFriedman, since you like Wikipedia so much, you might find answers to your questions there, e.g. most of the murdered in Bangladesh in 1971 were Hindus, who were specifically targeted.

            As for the rest, there are reasons why westerners tend to consider “medieval” an insult, at least as applied to beliefs. In contrast, in the Islamic world, “medieval” appears to be a sign of purity. Because Islam prohibits blasphemy, it prohibits any change, and even any discussion towards change.

            Consider the case of Asiaa Bibi, the assassination of Governor Taseer, and the death threats facing his son. To advocate a libertarian belief, e.g. “people should have a right to say what they believe,” is capital blasphemy per Sharia. You can try to defend that if you want, but you cannot persuade; to the contrary, it makes me wonder what can have misled you so badly.

            As for your other questions, I will wait until you answer mine, since I asked you first. If you insist that Islam is equal to where the rest of the world was 1400 years ago, then I hope you can understand the obvious conclusion that we should pause for 1400 years before importing more of it.

          • @DavidFriedman, since you like Wikipedia so much, you might find answers to your questions there, e.g. most of the murdered in Bangladesh in 1971 were Hindus, who were specifically targeted.

            That is not what the Wiki article you link to says. It says that a majority were Hindus. Your claim was 3,000,000 non-Muslims killed, and that’s the estimate for the total number of deaths.

            If you read the Wiki article on the 1971 genocide instead of the article on persecution of Hindus, you discover that the three million figure, while embedded in Bangladeshi culture, is actually quite dubious. The estimate from the CIA and other U.S. sources was 200,000. Other estimates vary, but the highest one cited (by Rummel, also quoted in the article you cited but without citing his estimate) is half the three million figure you quote.

            Because Islam prohibits blasphemy, it prohibits any change, and even any discussion towards change.

            Discussions of change in the interpretation of the law is not blasphemy under Islamic law. And, of course, the interpretation of the law has changed over time. Indeed, it varies across the four Sunni schools of law.

            To advocate a libertarian belief, e.g. “people should have a right to say what they believe,” is capital blasphemy per Sharia.

            Can you cite evidence for that?

            I assume you don’t mean “it is possible that someone will murder you for saying that,” which is a very different claim.

          • Nornagest says:

            You are aware that male homosexuality was a capital offense in England in the 19th century?

            Damn near everything was a capital offense in England in the early 19th century; but most of the death sentences given at the time were not actually carried out, and I assume a lot of cases also fell through the cracks before the sentencing phase. Because of that, it’s hard to use the law code to judge how much social disapproval there was of homosexuality or any other moral offense; we could be talking equivalent to anything between pickpocketing (death sentence until 1808) and high treason. I would be more interested to know the number of actual executions.

            Of course, the same’s true for systems that nominally follow Islamic law.

          • curious says:

            @DavidFriedman, you make fine points and I respect your erudition, but I think the CIA estimate was likely understated. CIA had tended to get a bit distracted by the goal of maintaining Pakistan as an “ally” in the cold war against Russia, and that distraction has caused several adverse consequences. I accept the official Bangladeshi number, but even if the actual total is 1 million instead of 3 million, either number represents a terrible loss.

            According to Pew, around 80% of Pakistanis support the death penalty for blasphemy, which is why Asiaa Bibi is on death row (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/08/salmaan-taseer-blasphemy-pakistan-bibi). People who have said she should be released have faced death threats and/or been assassinated. Governor Taseer was assassinated by his own guard, who said it is the punishment for a blasphemer. Crowds turned out to cheer the assassin, even throwing rose petals. The late Governor Taseer’s son, who agreed with his father, lives in hiding due to death threats. The minority minister was also assassinated, for the same reason. This is not a mere theoretical “possibility” of getting killed. Whatever schools/madrassahs they attended, the vast majority of Pakistanis appear to support enforcement of the law as it is, as per Sharia, as Islam commands.

            Also, Islamic State supporters have published kill lists naming western blasphemers, including Americans living in America, and other “high value targets,” e.g. transit police. (https://ent.siteintelgroup.com/Dark-Web-and-Cyber-Security/site-intelligence-group-analyzes-kill-lists-by-pro-is-hacking-groups-in-new-report.html) 20% of Syrians called the Islamic State a good influence, and reportedly around 2% of “Syrian” “refugees” may have been Islamic State fighters. After the Islamic State acquired the ability to print genuine Syrian passports, even Hillary Clinton acknowledged (according to Wikileaks) that vetting was impossible. The Orlando jihadi and at least one of the San Bernardino jihadis had recently been cleared through different screenings, including personal FBI investigations of the Orlando jihadi who was licensed as a security guard, btw. In Bangladesh, Sharia patrols murder blasphemers in broad daylight with impunity. You don’t need many jihadis to constitute a vigilante Sharia patrol, and go around enforcing Sharia against people whose names and home addresses have been published by the Islamic State.

            Respectfully, identity and emotion seem more powerful persuaders than evidence and reason. Many who identify as liberals/libertarians have preferred to believe that Islam is no worse than Christianity, even if that requires going back centuries to medieval history. Since the Enlightenment, calling a doctrine “medieval” is not usually considered a compliment. Yet, a distressing number of “liberals” have insisted on importing a medieval doctrine that would result in doom for themselves and everything else they believe in. If Islam were so great, then the Muslims who live in Islamic countries would not want to leave for the infidel west, of all places. Yet, the effect of NATO bomb&invade&import policies has been to spread Sunni Islam, at the behest of Gulf states that believe in empowering Islam. Empowering and spreading Islam are not liberal, in fact they are the opposite of liberalism.

          • but I think the CIA estimate was likely understated.

            Certainly possible. But the figure you quoted was twice Rummel’s estimate, and the article you linked to gave the three million figure, quoted Rummel on the democide, and did not mention that his estimate was half theirs.

            My guess is that nobody knows the real numbers. My point was rather that you are forming your view of Islam by believing factoids selected to make it look as bad as possible. In this case, what you gave as fact was wrong twice over. The killing wasn’t simply Muslim against non-Muslim, since a lot of those killed were Muslims—it was a civil war over the secession of East Pakistan. And you took the highest figure anyone gave as if it was a fact.

            Governor Taseer was assassinated by his own guard, who said it is the punishment for a blasphemer.

            And the Prime Minister of India, Indira Ghandi, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards as a result of conflict between Sikhs and other Hindus. Rajiv Ghandi was assassinated as a result of getting involved in a Hindu vs Hindu ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

            Large parts of the world, unfortunately, lack the sort of freedom and tolerance we would like to see. That isn’t due to any particular religion.

            and reportedly around 2% of “Syrian” “refugees” may have been Islamic State fighters.

            I would want more evidence than “reportedly” to take such a claim seriously. And if true, either they are people who want out of the conflict and should be no problem or they are terrorist infiltrators, in which case we are unlikely to succeed in keeping them out (see below).

            After the Islamic State acquired the ability to print genuine Syrian passports, even Hillary Clinton acknowledged (according to Wikileaks) that vetting was impossible.

            It’s still impossible, so far as any serious terrorists supported by an organization with resources are concerned, even if you refuse to let Syrians in or Muslims in. The price of a stolen passport on the black market is only a couple of thousand dollars.

            The U.S. hosts tens of millions of tourists every year. How practical do you think it is to filter out a serious criminal from that flood?

            Empowering and spreading Islam are not liberal, in fact they are the opposite of liberalism.

            Free movement of people, however, is liberal. In the old meaning of the term.

      • curious says:

        P.S. You wrote, “What matters are consequences….” The consequences of “Hillary’s War” in Libya and the related war in Syria have been to kill hundreds of thousands, displace millions, spend billions, and pump Sunni Islam (and thus support for Sharia) into NATO countries. The motivation appears to have been a pipeline deal. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/aug/30/syria-chemical-attack-war-intervention-oil-gas-energy-pipelines) I don’t see how any of that can fairly be called liberal, or embracing human beings, but perhaps you can tell me.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Everyone else – the vast majority of Muslims who abhor terrorism, for instance – does not.

        Every time I read a sentiment like this, it just makes me think of the old jibe (at Reagan) — “The Ayatollah Khomeini thanks you on behalf of the Iranian moderates.” Sure, I’d like to think that the vast majority of Muslims abhor terrorism… but is that just typical mind fallacy? Or do a vast number, a large percentage, of Muslims really believe in eternal war against the unbeliever, death to apostates, death to those who draw Mohammad, etc?

    • INH5 says:

      Islam is very similar to the KKK and Nazis in every way except one: most KKKlansmen and Nazis are white, but most Muslims aren’t, so frankly it’s racist to tolerate Islam while condeming the otherwise very similar KKK and Nazis. Worldwide, in countries with Muslim majorities, most Muslims demand Islamic law, aka Sharia (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/22/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/), because Islam commands believers to impose Sharia. Even in countries where Muslims are only a minority, many advocate Sharia. Sharia is bigotry. Opposing bigotry is the opposite of bigotry.

      Could you drop the Worst Argument In The World and tell me what, exactly, you are afraid that Muslim immigrants who “support Sharia” will do? Do you think they’ll be able to get laws passed to cut off the hands of thieves, stone adulterers, and so on when the Christian Right, with vastly greater numbers and resources than American Muslims will ever have, has failed to ban gay marriage, ban abortion, or institute public school prayer?

      And that’s assuming that Muslim immigrants really do support Sharia in high levels. Even if they come from countries where a majority of the population supports Sharia, there are a lot of reasons why we might expect that people who both desire and are able to immigrate to the US would be less conservative than the general population of their homelands. And then there are the actual statistics…

    • aldi says:

      as fun as it is to idly construct qualitative models of politics from the quips of cartoonists, what did you mean by doing it in this comment thread?

  32. tmk says:

    You seems to have a model where you are presented with statements A, B, C, D and then write whether you agree with them and why. In reality you you choose which statements to comment on and how much you focus on each one. What you write about is often more important than what you write about each topic. That is what people are criticizing you over.

    • curious says:

      Thanks for offering advice, but I’m having difficulty understanding what you meant? I think everyone chooses which statements to comment on, and how much to focus on each one. Also, if people are criticizing me for choosing to write about the topic at hand, rather than what I said about it, then aren’t they saying they can’t bear to be proven wrong about this topic?

      I think some of them are experiencing cognitive dissonance. They identify themselves as liberal and smart, but in 2016 that identity got hijacked by advocates of war and Islam, which are neither liberal nor smart. My critics’ identity prevents them from accepting they were fooled by people and channels they trust. Instead, they feel compelled to denounce the President and all of his works, even if he ends a war (and thus the refugee crisis that war created) and stops the spread of Islam (and thus Sharia), both of which would be huge victories for liberalism. With NATO government and commercial media increasingly influenced by the military industrial complex and Petrodollars, people who consume those media and can recite their talking points like to identify themselves as smart. They may be book smart, but not street smart. They don’t like seeing facts that prove they’ve been fooled. That would explain why they criticize me for writing about this topic, because they cannot refute what I wrote. Nobody likes cognitive dissonance.

      • gda says:

        Curious.
        I actually found your posts refreshingly frank and factual, but I’m afraid that many here just don’t want to hear the truth about Islam as so eruditely expounded by you. Maybe it’s inconvenient to their worldview. and presumably a good number consider it “racist” by their definition of the term.

        • curious says:

          Thanks 🙂

        • Montfort says:

          Consider the possibility people may disagree with you for good reasons rather than a lack of intellectual curiosity or willful blindness. This is part of what we mean when when we say people should interpret others’ posts and ideas charitably.

          • curious says:

            Thanks, I do appreciate the advice, but I don’t believe cognitive dissonance is about lacking curiosity generally, nor even willful blindness generally. Rather, it’s a reaction to a painful situation, where objective evidence contradicts a deeply emotional preference. The evidence (what Islam says and what most Muslims believe) contradicts what some people prefer emotionally to believe about it. So, they must choose between (a) happily denouncing the evidence or (b) unhappily considering it. They prefer perhaps to direct their curiosity and vision to topics that have less emotional impact. Also, people operate in a social context, including rewards and penalties: the potential rewards for supporting Islam are many (see the vox article cited above), and the penalties for addressing what it says and what most Muslims believe can be severe; hence the Upton Sinclair quote above.

            Finally, the particular comment that I was accused of interpreting uncharitably (and not even fair-mindedly) said that “only jihadists and some people on the “far-right” of politics embrace the interpretation of Islam that you put forward…stop with these wholly counter-productive comments.” That was basically calling me a jihadi, or “far-right,” and telling me to shut up, even though phrased in seemingly polite terms. I wish there were a more charitable interpretation, but I do see a point about tone: for example, he did say please, and I didn’t, so his comment sounded more polite, which might appear charitable.

          • Montfort says:

            I wasn’t actually responding to you, curious, but to gda (comment replies are below and indented until you reach the max indent depth, and then things get ambiguous), though my point is relevant to us all. For cognitive dissonance to be the best explanation for people disagreeing with you, you really should first eliminate the possibility that they have different information, beliefs, and experiences than you that would lead a reasonably-clear-thinking person to their conclusions. It is possible you have done this, but it is much easier to think you have than to actually do it.

            I haven’t read the comments you’re referring to, and don’t really want to get involved.

      • tmk says:

        What I am saying is that even if everything Scott writes is true, people can still criticize his choice of which true things to say.

        Am I allowed to Godwin? Suppose some German intellectual in 1938 wrote an articles praising Hitlers investments in infrastructure, and about what a brilliant man Goebbels is. Should we see this intellectual as a great truth sayer?

        I will ignore the other part of your comment, as I see no connection to my comment.

        • curious says:

          Thanks for clarifying 🙂

          As for Godwin, you may if I may. In 1941, the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem moved to Germany, met personally with Hitler, joined the Nazi regime, and began exhorting Muslims to support the Nazis because of their similar beliefs. Ultimately, 100,000 European Muslims joined the Nazi SS, because Islamic and Nazi beliefs are so similar.

          In 2016, Democrats distracted from their own disastrous policies by choosing an opponent whom they imagined they could equate with Hitler (even though no similarities had ever been noted by anyone before, in 70 years). Per Wikileaks, Democrats spent more than a billion dollars in collusion with preferred legacy media channels promoting the eventual Republican nominee over his Republican opponents, and then demonizing him via distracting imagery that had never been associated with him before in his life. I suppose to people who are still living in that fake movie, any defense of anything the President does can seem misplaced, even when he happens to be right about something.

          The ironic consequence is, in order to protest an imaginary Nazi, the President’s opponents are embracing actual Nazis, or at least supporting very similar beliefs.

          • the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem moved to Germany, met personally with Hitler, joined the Nazi regime, and began exhorting Muslims to support the Nazis because of their similar beliefs.

            Alternatively, because he had been forced into exile by the British for his role in the Arab revolt in Palestine and, more generally, because the dominant colonial powers in the Muslim world were England and France and my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

            Here is a detailed account of Arab/Nazi interactions.

          • curious says:

            @DavidFriedman, I can acknowledge that alternative explanation especially wrt the Mufti personally, but the ideological attraction was mutual and Muslims continued much of the same agenda even after the war. For example, Israel got ironically a huge benefit from Arab anti-semitism driving Jewish civilians out of their homes after WWII. Anti-gay persecution continues worse in Muslim countries than anywhere else in the world today, and remains comparable to Nazi Germany. The Muslims and Nazis themselves agreed their ideologies had a lot in common, and I think they look much more similar to each other than either looks to libertarianism, for example.

          • The Muslims and Nazis themselves agreed their ideologies had a lot in common, and I think they look much more similar to each other than either looks to libertarianism, for example.

            You think the separation of state and law, which is a central doctrine of Islamic legal theory although not one always observed in practice, looks like the sort of thing the Nazis would have liked?

            Islamic literature is full of stories of holy men defying the ruler, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Ibn Hanbal, after whom one of the four schools of law is named, is famous in part for refusing to give in to Al Ma’mun’s order to agree that the Koran was create rather than uncreate, despite very severe pressure.

            On issues of state power, FDR was closer to Hitler than orthodox Sunni Muslims are.

          • Montfort says:

            famous in part for refusing to give in to Al Ma’mun’s order to agree that the Koran was create rather than uncreate

            For anyone else confused by this sentence, wikipedia.

          • You mean some people are not familiar with the conflict between Mutazilites and Asharites?

            What were they doing in the Ninth Century, sleeping?

          • INH5 says:

            In 1941, the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem moved to Germany, met personally with Hitler, joined the Nazi regime, and began exhorting Muslims to support the Nazis because of their similar beliefs.

            Mohammed V, the Sultan of Morocco during WW2, protected the Jews of Morocco by refusing to obey orders from Vichy officials to make his Jewish subjects wear the yellow star, and later to deport them to concentration camps. Clearly this demonstrates that Islam is not at all similar to Nazism.

            Miroslav Filipović, a Franciscan Friar, personally operated a concentration camp for the Nazi-allied Ustaše regime in Yugoslavia. It is estimated that 20,000-30,000 people were murdered at the camp under his command, and that he personally executed 100 prisoners. Clearly this demonstrates that Catholicism is very similar to Nazism.

            Lehi, a Jewish militant group in what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, attempted to collaborate with the Nazis during WW2. They twice sent a message offering to fight against the British in exchange for the Nazis helping expel the British from Palestine and transfer Europe’s Jews there. Both times the Nazis did not respond. Clearly this demonstrates that Judaism is very similar to Nazism.

            Or maybe it’s ridiculous to draw such sweeping conclusions based on single isolated anecdotes.

            Ultimately, 100,000 European Muslims joined the Nazi SS, because Islamic and Nazi beliefs are so similar.

            First, I’d like to see a citation for the 100,000 number, because the only example that I can find of the SS recruiting European Muslims is in Yugoslavia, and estimates put the total number of SS recruits in Yugoslavia, not just Muslim recruits, at around 42,000.

            Second, in Yugoslavia the Nazis also collaborated with Croatian Catholics, the Ustaše, and Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the (militantly anti-Muslim) Chetniks. Were those alliances because Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians have similar beliefs to the Nazis?

            Third, while some Muslims in Yugoslavia did collaborate with the Nazis, thousands fought with the Yugoslav partisans against the Nazis. As did many Serbs and Croats. What does this demonstrate about the similarity or lack thereof between Islam, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Nazism?

            Or again, maybe isolated anecdotes don’t tell you much.

          • Jiro says:

            Lehi, a Jewish militant group in what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, attempted to collaborate with the Nazis during WW2.

            Cooperating with the guy who has your family held hostage to get him to release your family really isn’t the same thing as cooperating with the guy who held your neighbor hostage because you hate your neighbor.

          • INH5 says:

            Cooperating with the guy who has your family held hostage to get him to release your family really isn’t the same thing as cooperating with the guy who held your neighbor hostage because you hate your neighbor.

            Both of Lehi’s contacts with Nazi Germany happened in 1941, before the Nazis decided on the Final Solution in 1942. At the time, the Nazis’ plans for the Jews of Europe still focused on deportation, though they were beginning to realize the infeasibility of that plan. The major difference between that and Lehi’s proposal was that the latter was planned to lead to the establishment of an independent “Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich” in Palestine, whereas the Nazis generally planned for the deported Jews, wherever they went, to be governed by an SS police state.

            Of course, my entire point is that it’s ridiculous to draw sweeping conclusions from isolated anecdotes like this. Lots of people either collaborated with or opposed the Nazis for a lot of different reasons.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          What I am saying is that even if everything Scott writes is true, people can still criticize his choice of which true things to say.

          They can, but doing so either misses or explicitly rejects one of the main overarching points of the exercise, which is specifically to avoid the traps of “I will avoid saying this true thing because it helps the people I’m fighting” and “I will avoid criticizing this flawed argument because it hurts the people I agree with overall”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Isn’t the point sort of the opposite though?

            If there are 99 true awful things about someone, and one false awful thing, and you spend 99% of your argumentation on the false one, ignoring the other 99… you aren’t actually presenting a truthful picture of the truth.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Scott’s three posts on Trump, and the discussion threads they spawned, were by far the best arguments for voting against Trump I saw throughout the entire election.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            No? They both contain equal truth content. That is fairly trivial.

            It makes far more sense to say “I agree with what a million other people are saying about these 99 things (Cf. what everyone else has been saying all year)” and move on to what you have to add that is novel and original, than to waste time, effort, and the reader’s attention retreading ground, unless the purpose of a piece is to act as a general overview or summary of all the claims. Neither Scott’s posts taken individually or Scott’s blog taken as a whole are an attempt to create such a general overview.

            I’d certainly agree that “You Are Still Crying Wolf” does not in and of itself, serve as a one-stop general reference. Someone who has been living in a fallout shelter since 9/11 who reads it and only it will not have a full and nuanced grasp of the truth value of all extant negative and positive statements about Donald Trump and/or right-wing voters and politicians in the United states circa 2016.

            That doesn’t strike me as a particularly trenchant criticism.

          • Jiro says:

            They can, but doing so either misses or explicitly rejects one of the main overarching points of the exercise, which is specifically to avoid the traps of “I will avoid saying this true thing because it helps the people I’m fighting”

            Remember when Scott refused to say true things rebutting anti-Trump claims until after the election, so that he wouldn’t accidentally convince someone to vote for Trump? I think that counts as “I will avoid saying this true thing because it helps the people I’m fighting”.

          • lvlln says:

            If there are 99 true awful things about someone, and one false awful thing, and you spend 99% of your argumentation on the false one, ignoring the other 99… you aren’t actually presenting a truthful picture of the truth.

            But if 9,999 other people are spending 99% of their time pushing forward the 1 false awful thing, it seems like spending 99% or even 100% of your time arguing about the 1 false awful thing is too little. Heck, if 9,999 other people are spending 1% of their time on that 1 false awful thing, 100% of your time debunking that wouldn’t be enough.

            Obviously all those numbers are made up, but the larger point is that truth telling being in response to the falsities being spread by other people seems like a reasonable thing to do.

  33. dalemannes says:

    Trump is great for US and the world. Creative destruction of an absurd web of lies from the left.

    • thetitaniumdragon says:

      Trump lies constantly. If your major fear is the far left, you’re crazy.

      Is the far left crazy? Absolutely.

      Are they really dangerous? No, not particularly.

      Remember, they’re your outgroup. But who tends to attack people?

      Actual deadly terrorism is mostly concentrated on the right, not the left, because the left is by and large pacifistic.

      • curious says:

        You wrote that “the left is by and large pacifistic.” That is of course why the Democrats’ 2016 campaign on behalf of war and Islam became incoherent. The primary beneficiaries would have been the corporate and Saudi sponsors of the Democratic nominee. Islam is definitely not pacifistic. Consider the Saudi flag, which says “There is no God but Allah, Mohamed is his prophet.” They underline that statement with a sword, like the sword they and the Islamic State use to cut off the heads of blasphemers, as per Sharia. That isn’t pacifistic at all. Worldwide, actual deadly terrorism is mostly concentrated among Muslim perpetrators, including killing other Muslims over theological differences within Islam. (http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/) In other words, even submitting to Islam is no defense against getting killed violently by Muslims in the name of Islam; in fact, it’s actually a risk factor, because apostasy is also a capital offense per Sharia. The left should denounce Islam, or else must abandon all hope of being pacifistic.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        @thetitaniumdragon – “Is the far left crazy? Absolutely. Are they really dangerous? No, not particularly. Remember, they’re your outgroup. But who tends to attack people?”

        “where’s your fucking furher now, bitch?”

      • dalemannes says:

        Trump’s tells silly reality tv style lies that generally don’t bother me. He probably lied about the inauguration crowd size or at least his press secretary did… I don’t care. Often his big picture rhetoric is generally truthful. The biggest lie he told that bothered me was challenging Obama’s birth certificate which seemed dumb.

        Obama and Hillary lie like lawyers. Their speech is this calculated manipulative persuassion to strategically mold the listener’s viewpoint. “Islam is a religion of peace” was coined by Bush 43 and continued by Obama. That’s not meant to be truthful, it’s meant to sculpt the listener’s viewpoint. Or his signature health care policy. The “you can keep your doctor” was the part that was absolutely a provable fact-checkable lie, but worse than that, the entire nature of the program was deliberately hidden, and the policy architects like Gruber are on record saying they pursued confusion as a political strategy because people would vote against it if you told them what it was.

        leftists don’t use violence against other westerners directly. That’s not a reasonable danger. Leftists are dangerous in other major ways I will save for another comment.

      • Cypren says:

        Actual deadly terrorism is mostly concentrated on the right, not the left, because the left is by and large pacifistic.

        I do not think that word means what you think it means.

  34. thetitaniumdragon says:

    Trump didn’t ban people from Saudi Arabia.

    Why? Because he has money there and would lose it.

    Saudi Arabia, lest we forget, is a major hotbed of terrorism – including 15 of 19 9/11 hijackers.

    I’m not sure what the last time an Iranian terrorist attack happened in the US was.

    This suggests his purpose in banning these people has nothing to do with terrorism, as the people who he is banning are not people who, by and large, have conducted terrorist attacks in the US.

    One can argue that banning Syrians from the US is a logical step – while yes, Syrians haven’t been responsible for many attacks in the US, ISIS is kind of a giant terrorist organization that didn’t exactly pop out of nowhere.

    But Iran? Iranian-backed terror attacks tend to be state-sponsored, and Iran isn’t stupid enough to attack the US, because we’d flatten them remorselessly.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      “Trump didn’t ban people from Saudi Arabia. Why? Because he has money there and would lose it.”

      The specific countries come from a list promulgated by the Obama administration.

      • Anonymous says:

        The specific countries come from a list promulgated by the Obama administration.

        Which is a good move where trolling is concerned, but not so much where efficacy of the treatment is concerned, unfortunately.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          I am pretty sure at this point that trolling is the intent. It seems clear to me that Trump derangement syndrome is a political asset to the right, and it seems possible that the Trump administration themselves understand this and are capitalizing on it. One way or another, the current madness is unsustainable, and the backlash seems likely to play to their favor.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:

            I am pretty sure at this point that trolling is the intent.

            Trolling is (typically) only words, not concrete actions.

            “I locked him out of our house and called the cops on him and asked a judge for a restraining order” goes past trolling. Even if you do all that to piss his friend off.

            These are real actions with real consequences that hurt real people.

          • Rob K says:

            There’s something really priceless about simultaneously stating that an action negatively impacting thousands of people’s lives and quite probably worsening our national security situation was undertaken for the purpose of trolling and referring to opposition to that action as “derangement syndrome.”

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “These are real actions with real consequences that hurt real people.”

            I apologize if “trolling” seems dismissive, and would be happy to substitute “a campaign of deliberate provocation”.

            [EDIT] – I observe that massive blue-tribe disapproval toward Trump didn’t stop him from getting elected. I observe that one of the more obvious drivers of Red Tribe support for Trump is the backlash over Blue Tribe hostility. I observe that Red Tribe has largely gained status independence from Blue Tribe. I observe that most of Blue tribe’s tactics are status-based: protests, marches, etc, and so are more or less completely ineffective in the current environment. I observe that a significant minority within Blue Tribe are loudly advocating violence, which I believe would be highly counterproductive to their cause.

            Blue Tribe appears caught in a trap: their leaders have stated unequivocally that Trump and the current Red Tribe ascendancy are completely unacceptable. On the other hand, Blue Tribe has no practical legal mechanism for enforcing its declaration now that the election is over. That leaves them mainly with illegal and hence highly unsympathetic options, and a base too hyped-up to accept inaction. Trump capitalizes on this by using small jabs of limited consequence but maximal symbolism to push them into rash action.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            Either way, you seem to be saying that applying this to holders of green cards and other valid visas immediately without warning was not because of any reasoning that it was warranted or desired for the sake of policy, but solely to anger Democrats.

            That doesn’t seem like it’s really any better.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            That is indeed what I’m saying. No, it’s not really better. It is in fact probably worse.

            This came to me as a snap reaction to the portland airport video, so it’s probably a mistake to say that I’m “pretty sure” about it. I would like to be wrong in this instance. That being said, see the logical chain above.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I can’t help agreeing with HBC on this one. It’s indefensible for the President to harm a subset of green card holders for the purpose of angering Democrats as a group. The President should be governing for the benefit of all US citizens*, and infuriating some of them because of their worldview should only happen as a sorrowful side effect of helping US citizens collectively.

            *Which means he could hypothetically harm green card holders who were a threat to us, but the subset “ones on vacation” is a sick joke.

          • @FacelessCraven:
            Either way, you seem to be saying that applying this to holders of green cards and other valid visas immediately without warning was not because of any reasoning that it was warranted or desired for the sake of policy, but solely to anger Democrats.

            That doesn’t seem like it’s really any better.

            I’m not FacelessCraven, but that’s my best guess at Trump’s motive, except for the “solely.” It isn’t better than alternative explanations, such as incompetence, but it has different implications for what he is likely to do in the future.

      • Urstoff says:

        Why is that relevant?

        • FacelessCraven says:

          Because it’s evidence that Trump didn’t pick the countries based on “where he had money”.

          • Urstoff says:

            I see, although the claim that this ban has nothing to do with terrorism still stands.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            The fact that Saudi Arabia isn’t on the list doesn’t prove that the ban has nothing to do with terrorism. The nations on the list aren’t world-famous for their salt-water taffy.

          • Chalid says:

            It is not very strong evidence. There are lots of lists of countries out there, he chose this particular fairly obscure list (as opposed to, say, the government’s list of terrorist safe havens), for a reason.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Chalid – True.

          • Urstoff says:

            The executive order explicitly cites 9/11 as something that may have been prevented if visa applications were more closely scrutinized.

            Perhaps in no instance was that more apparent than the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when State Department policy prevented consular officers from properly scrutinizing the visa applications of several of the 19 foreign nationals who went on to murder nearly 3,000 Americans.

            None of the hijackers were from countries affected by the executive order. Does the Trump administration think Saudia Arabia is a-ok now?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Urstoff – I have no idea. I guess we’ll see what happens.

          • John Schilling says:

            None of the hijackers were from countries affected by the executive order. Does the Trump administration think Saudia Arabia is a-ok now?

            The Obama administration did, both in the statute Trump cribbed from and in the “terrorist safe haven” list suggested as an alternative.

            And that’s not entirely unreasonable. 2017 is not 2001; a lot has happened in Saudi Arabia in the past fifteen years, including an uprising where Al Qaeda greatly overestimated its strength in Saudi Arabia and a concurrent ruthless crackdown by the Saudi government. It is entirely plausible that the people who posed a serious terrorist threat from Saudi Arabia in 2001, have since moved elsewhere.

          • Jaskologist says:

            The phrase “fighting the last war” comes to mind.

          • baconbacon says:

            It is entirely plausible that the people who posed a serious terrorist threat from Saudi Arabia in 2001, have since moved elsewhere.

            When discussing banning immigration from individual countries all that really matters is what type of passport the people can get. Most (all?) of the Saudi high jackers trained elsewhere and at least some arrived in the US with documents from SA.

          • John Schilling says:

            When discussing banning immigration from individual countries all that really matters is what type of passport the people can get.

            In 2001, Al Qaeda could readily obtain Saudi passports for their operatives. In 2017, this is much harder. It may well be sufficiently hard that there is no more danger in letting someone in the country on a Saudi passport than there would be in letting someone in on a French passport. Or maybe the Saudi passports still have a strong positive correlation with terrorism; I don’t know.

            The State Department does, and if their Obama-era list say Saudis yes, Syrians maybe not, I’m not seeing a basis for going after Trump on that front. Certainly not by invoking 9/11 and ignoring the fifteen years afterwards.

          • baconbacon says:

            The State Department does, and if their Obama-era list say Saudis yes, Syrians maybe not, I’m not seeing a basis for going after Trump on that front. Certainly not by invoking 9/11 and ignoring the fifteen years afterwards.

            The point isn’t “terrorists came from SA last time, so they will come from SA this time”, the point is that “they came from mostly stable areas last time, they will probably be able to route through mostly stable areas next time”. It is theater to ban unstable regions from immigration in the name of security.

          • Cypren says:

            @Chalid:

            It is not very strong evidence. There are lots of lists of countries out there, he chose this particular fairly obscure list (as opposed to, say, the government’s list of terrorist safe havens), for a reason.

            The list he chose is basically a subset of the terrorist safe haven list, minus the countries where the US government has well-established security arrangements with the government in charge and a significant amount of influence. What’s unique about the seven countries listed is that they all have either actively-hostile governments or no stable central government with which to coordinate.

            This seems quite reasonable and narrowly-targeted, to be frank, unless you consider any suspension of immigration privileges from any country to be an unconscionable violation of human rights. And in that case, I’m still waiting for the outrage from Obama’s 2011 suspension of Iraqi immigration to burst forth from the people who are attacking Trump now. Tu quoque may not be a logical proof, but it’s strongly indicative of how seriously you should take someone else’s emotional bluster over a topic.

            @baconbacon:

            It is theater to ban unstable regions from immigration in the name of security.

            Completely agreed. But theater has a long and distinguished tradition in politics, and in this case, it’s provoking Trump’s opponents into wildly self-destructive actions that will only cement them further in the public mind as extremists while he comes off as more and more reasonable by provably not doing all of the things they’re accusing him of.

    • dalemannes says:

      I agree, it’s probably more desirable to have ethnically Aryan Iranian immigrants than the ethnically Arab Saudis. But this is contentious discrimination.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      Trump didn’t ban people from Saudi Arabia.
      Why? Because he has money there and would lose it.

      This talking point seems to me gets the direction of cause and effect wrong.

      Trump does not invest in nations at random. Trump invested in Saudi Arabia and Egypt because those nations have the kind of characteristics such that they don’t belong on things like the new ban list.

      Somalia has barely-functioning institutions, weak control over its borders, a habit of getting invaded by neighbors and sponsoring piracy and other scary-to-us attributes.

      That is why we worry terrorists might easily go there, get official-looking local documents and thereby get into the US with less scrutiny than they should have, were we not to do something about it. That same combination of factors is also why Trump hasn’t built a nice 20-story waterfront hotel and slapped his name on it.

      Egypt and Saudi Arabia are politically stable, have decent infrastructure and institutions and are on our good side – those are reasons why they wouldn’t show up on a “countries of concern” list and also reasons why Trump might feel safe doing business there.

      TL;DR: If A is “Trump has no investments” and B is “Appears on the ban list” the per-country relationship isn’t “A causes B”, it is that both A and B are caused by the same third factor C which is “This country sucks.”

  35. greghb says:

    Maybe you could add a button for, “I generally liked and agreed with this post, no further comment.” That’s usually how I feel, but then when some post gets attacked I feel sort of bad and want to say, “Not me, anyway! I liked it!” But I don’t want to pollute the comments with something so vacuous. In general I’m strongly in favor of more voting / rating / structured feedback, on comments and posts. The Wolf post got sooo many views, do you even know if the outcry is disproportionately negative? With some buttons, you could know! Maybe. Worth a shot?

  36. JayMan says:

    Battle lines are being drawn my friend. People want to know if you’re with US, or if you’re with THEM.

    Anything less than saying Trump is absolutely wrong in every way and is an evil racist that must be defeated is construed as support for Trump, even though you in fact don’t.

    I’ve gotten similar myself. My aim is still to seek the truth. Plenty of BS has been hurled at Trump. It’s not just BS coming from him (although there’s plenty of that too).

  37. Chalid says:

    Isn’t this the lefty version of “take Trump seriously, not literally”? Some Trump supporters hear “ban all Muslim immigration” and then, quoting Peter Thiel, “what they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.” And yeah, not so much.

    Either way, the phenomenon is that a lot of people have beliefs about political candidates, which form through mysterious and mostly-irrational processes, and they interpret everything that a candidate does in the way that’s most consistent with those beliefs.

    • dalemannes says:

      Somalians aren’t generally terrorists, with very minor exceptions, they aren’t bad people, but recent immigration of large numbers of Somalians really didn’t go well. It wasn’t a good idea.

      Immigrating lots of Chinese and Koreans and Vietnamese (except Hmong) has mostly gone very well.

      This is discrimination. Saying this group did well, and this other group did not do well is discrimination. That is also completely reasonable.

      • Urstoff says:

        How has Somali immigration to the US not gone well?

        • curious says:

          Looking at the news from Minnesota, you can find some examples to answer your question. For instance, after Somali Muslims called for an attack on the Mall of America, a Muslim immigrant attacked a nearby mall by stabbing 10 people and “reportedly asked at least one victim whether they were Muslim before assaulting them, and referred to Allah ­during the attacks.” (http://www.startribune.com/st-cloud-mall-closed-until-monday-is-crime-scene-after-stabbings/393872071/) The article quotes people who knew the assailant, later identified as a soldier for the Islamic state: “a community leader and close friend of the family…described him as “the most assimilated kid in the neighborhood.””

          Video from the area, which has many Somali immigrants, shows for example a whole crowd of kids harassing a gay guy, stalking him. This happened in broad daylight, so he acted more amused than frightened, but it’s terribly easy to imagine a different result if he had been alone at night. They believe in a doctrine that says he should be killed, and in Somalia he could be executed legally or killed by vigilante Sharia patrols (as in Bangladesh).

          You could argue Somali immigration confers benefits, but those come at a cost. Due to comparatively small numbers so far, whether you think it’s gone well or badly might depend on whether you know anyone who got violently attacked or harassed in the name of Islam. Note that more than 99% of Somalis are Muslim: Islam commands believers to impose Sharia, which tends to crush all contrary beliefs, so most countries that have more than 20% Muslim population have currently more than 90% Muslims. The phrase “Somali immigration” becomes practically a subset of Muslim immigration. If you think Sharia is evil bigotry, which it is, then importing it seems unlikely to confer a net benefit to an Enlightenment civilization.

          • Urstoff says:

            There are 75,000 Somali-born Americans, and as far as I can tell, Minnesota (or any other place) is not under Sharia law (seems a stretch, then, to say we’re importing Sharia law). And coming here, I would guess, has had a huge net benefit for those 75,000 as well as many other people living in America. I’m not sure why those incidents you cite would disqualify Somali integration as “going well”. Is there some explicit criterion by which we judge that?

          • curious says:

            @Urstoff, I was merely answering your first question, but in the process I answered your second question also. Whether you accept the fact “the most assimilated kid in the neighborhood” became an ISIL soldier as evidence regarding integration is up to you, and depends probably on your POV. If you feel virtuous and therefore happy about conferring a benefit on Muslims born in Somalia, and don’t care about the Americans who get stabbed and/or harassed in America, then your criterion is what makes you feel good. If you or someone you cared about got stabbed or harassed, then you might feel differently. Looking ahead, Europe has imported many more Sharia supporters than America, so we might have an opportunity to see how that works out for them as we decide how many to import here. As a casino magnate might say, the odds favor the house: looking at Islamization around the world, it isn’t pretty, especially when the 20% population line gets crossed. France and Belgium might cross that line within one generation. If history is any guide, the non-Muslims will thereafter lament the early decisions to start down that road.

            Regarding the feeling of virtue, I might ask, why is it better to import Sharia supporters here, than to help them achieve freedom from Sharia in their own countries? Evaluating any policy, one must ask “cui bono:” who benefits? Most of the money spent importing Sharia supporters does not go to them. The primary beneficiaries appear to be those who want to spread Sharia (e.g. Saudi Wahhabis) and those who profit directly and indirectly from the Petrodollar gravy train (see the vox article linked above). Policies must be seen in context: while deporting record numbers of Christians, America has imported Sharia supporters. That does not benefit America, nor humans generally (unless you value Sharia supporters more highly than Christians, as Islam does). I would really like to see the mental gymnastics required to justify simultanteously deporting Christians and importing Sharia supporters and feeling virtuous about the combination; the only doctrine I’ve ever seen that could support it is Islam.

            I did not claim Minnesota was under Sharia law, though prominent Democrats have advocated it, for example Linda Sarsour called it “reasonable” and claimed it “makes a lot of sense.” Huma Abedin had also worked for a Saudi journal that advocates Sharia. Importing people who support Sharia does not immediately result in Sharia law, but it is a policy choice that tends in that direction, as many Lebanese could sadly tell you. Read also about Hijrah, which Muslims continue to celebrate: Christians made the mistake of welcoming Muslim immigration; the Muslims took over gradually and then persecuted the Christians and destroyed the churches, which are now banned in the formerly Christian city of Medina, as they are throughout Saudi Arabia. Immigration choices can have consequences more dramatic than, for example, climate change, and possibly on a faster timeline in France and Belgium (as happened in Lebanon).

          • Urstoff says:

            If you feel virtuous and therefore happy about conferring a benefit on Muslims born in Somalia, and don’t care about the Americans who get stabbed and/or harassed in America, then your criterion is what makes you feel good. If you or someone you cared about got stabbed or harassed, then you might feel differently.

            This is a completely silly false dichotomy. Both are people, and thus their moral value is equal. And allowing people to immigrate here is better than reforming their home countries because it’s a hell of a lot easier, and a much surer way to improve their lives.

            I’m not sure what your Linda Sarsour example is supposed to show. Her existence is no more a reason to bar refugees than David Duke’s is to deport American readers of Stormfront or any other group of white nationalists.

          • curious says:

            @Urstoff, the White House website devoted a whole page to praising Linda Sarsour as a “champion”. The new administration took down that page, but you can still find the URL and text in search results. If you see a White House webpage praising David Duke and calling him a champion, please let us know.

            Meanwhile, I am glad that you agree it was “completely silly” to value Muslims (many of whom support Sharia) more highly than non-Muslims (who would be persecuted by Sharia), even though Islam says to do precisely that. You did not answer though how you justify American policies that paid to import record numbers of Muslims while simultaneously deporting record numbers of Christians. I was really looking forward to reading how you would explain that.

          • Urstoff says:

            Where did I support such a policy?

          • Christians made the mistake of welcoming Muslim immigration; the Muslims took over gradually and then persecuted the Christians and destroyed the churches, which are now banned in the formerly Christian city of Medina, as they are throughout Saudi Arabia.

            Where did you get the idea that Medina was a formerly Christian city? The Medinese who met Mohammed and converted and eventually invited him to Medina were in Mecca on pilgrimage to the Kaaba, which means they were Arabic pagans, like the Meccans. The other major group in Medina consisted of three Jewish tribes.

          • Snopes summarizes the evidence for the negative claims about Linda Sarsour. What Curious refers to seems to be some tweets:

            @lsarsour May I ask: If you have an opportunity, do you plan to vote for Sharia Law in the United States?

            @RobertWildiris I don’t drink alcohol, don’t eat pork, I follow Islamic way of living. That’s all Sharia law is.

            She also tweeted:

            “If you are still paying interest than Sharia Law hasn’t taken over America.”

            Which is a correct statement, aside from the fact that medieval Muslims, like medieval Jews and Christians, found various ways of getting around their religion’s prohibition of interest.

            I don’t see anything there to support the claim that prominent Democrats have advocated putting Minnesota under Sharia law. You might as well claim that a Catholic who says he won’t divorce his wife because doing so is contrary to his religion is proposing putting Minnesota under canon law.

          • though how you justify American policies that paid to import record numbers of Muslims while simultaneously deporting record numbers of Christians.

            I don’t know who you are counting as “paid to import,” but if it’s Muslim refugees it was about 39,000 in 2016. About 38,000 Christian refugees were also admitted that year.

            By your “record number” do you mean “more Muslim refugees than permitted in before”? That seems to be true, but the number of Muslim refugees was considerably smaller than the number of Muslim immigrants in some past years.

            The deporting of Christians was because they were here illegally, unlike the Muslim refugees. As it happens I think deporting them was a mistake, but I don’t see the relevance of comparing that number to the number of Muslim refugees admitted.

          • curious says:

            Thanks @DavidFriedman for your first comment, about Medina 🙂 I don’t recall exactly where I read that Christians had welcomed Muslims. In any event, non-Muslims made the mistake of welcoming Muslims, and now all non-Muslims are persecuted and prohibited there. I’ll answer the subsequent comments separately.

            @Urstoff, I have yet to see anyone successfully justify the American policy combination that existed, i.e. paying simultaneously to import Muslims while deporting Christians. So, don’t feel too badly if you can’t. I did not accuse you of supporting it, but the Democrats campaigned on more of the same, so that would be the law now if we didn’t have the changes that occurred.

          • curious says:

            @DavidFriedman, I quoted Linda Sarsour calling Sharia “reasonable” and saying it “makes a lot of sense”. Here is the link to her Twitter feed:

            https://twitter.com/lsarsour/status/116922589967949824

            Again, many Muslims do support Sharia, including large majorities of Muslims in most countries that have Muslim majorities. Even in some countries that don’t have Sharia, majorities of Muslim voters support policies that are consistent with Sharia, which is illiberal bigotry.

            Your other comments are similarly easy to address. The record numbers referred to the 8-year period. The fact America was simultaneously paying to import record numbers of Muslims while deporting record numbers of Christians shows that the policy combination was never about embracing “human beings” or improving lives, but it was indeed the law at the time. Paying to import Muslims adds up to more than $100k per refugee, plus the cost of the wars that they’re fleeing, which NATO also paid for, plus the cost of crimes committed (homicides and other attacks, whether terror or not). And, as noted above, the motivation appears to have been a pipeline deal with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but somehow it got adopted and supported by identitarian “liberals” (not really liberal) even though the consequences were profoundly illiberal.

          • Urstoff says:

            I have yet to see anyone successfully justify the American policy combination that existed, i.e. paying simultaneously to import Muslims while deporting Christians. So, don’t feel too badly if you can’t.

            Why would I want to? You need to argue with what people say rather than some third party. We should let more Muslims in, as well as Christians, Hindus, atheists, Baha’i and any other religion or culture you care to pick. The net benefits (considering every person as equal in moral worth) far outweigh the costs. That’s the claim I’m making (which you haven’t tried to engage with), not some policy promulgated by some other group.

          • curious says:

            @Urstoff, I will address your claim directly. You are stating that your feeling of moral superiority that you get from advocating open borders and welcoming people who would kill you or your neighbors “far outweighs” your neighbors’ interest in continuing to live, and your own. You call it “net benefits,” revealing really that you count “benefits” only from the POV of your own immediate gratification. Far from being “moral,” your claim combines both selfishness and self-destruction, because you would risk the lives and futures of other people and their families in addition to your own, all for a misplaced feeling of virtue. Signaling such imaginary virtue may be rational in environments where it will be rewarded, e.g. organizations that receive Petrodollars in exchange for advocating Islamic interests (see the vox article cited above), but that doesn’t confer “net benefits” upon anyone other than yourself.

            Part of your comment sounds like you are merely advocating libertarian open borders, albeit with really lopsided priorities, but even libertarians acknowledge a need for national defense. Around half the American population say, rationally, we should not import people who believe in a doctrine that hates us. If you look at the history of Islamic migration (hijrah), you can see empirically they have a point: Islamic immigration tended to go very badly for the hosts, especially for anyone who believed in libertarian ideals.

            You can prefer to feel “morally” superior to people who choose rationally to protect their own families and communities rather than importing hostile strangers, but a better moral argument exists for building and protecting an Enlightenment civilization that respects rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That requires defending against hostile invasion, including by those who believe in Islamic Sharia instead of the Enlightenment. You can’t honestly have it both ways: either you have Enlightenment liberty, or you have Islamic Sharia, but not both. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

          • Urstoff says:

            Logorrheic argument by assertion. Keep asserting away.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            The net benefits (considering every person as equal in moral worth) far outweigh the costs.

            Why do you think every person has equal moral worth? Because they all have souls created in the image of God?

            Why do you have the idea that the responsibility of the USG is to go on a crusade to maximize world-wide utility?

            Talk about argument by assertion.

          • curious says:

            @Urstoff, as noted above, your comment was the one that represented argument by assertion. I based my comment on observable evidence: (a) what Islam says, (b) what Muslims say, and (c) what you said.

            Worse though, your assertions appear demonstrably false. For example, you assert “considering every person as equal in moral worth” such a benefit as to “far outweigh” non-Muslims’ interest in continuing to live. Consider the example of a serial killer. You assert the serial killer has as much “moral worth” as his next victim. Worse, you advocate giving the serial killer more opportunities, without regard to the cost to the victims, at least if he believes religiously in killing them. Considering the long history of genocides committed across Asia in the name of Islam, and the ongoing homicides, your assertion falls flat.

            The issue I’ve really been trying to understand though is persuasion, specifically identity&emotion vs facts&reason. I am trying to understand how some non-Muslim identitarian “liberals” became so deeply committed to the spread of Islam, which opposes much of what actual liberals believe in. I don’t know if I’m getting closer or not to understanding it, but I’ve appreciated the opportunity to discuss here with such obviously smart people. An issue with people who identify as smart, however, is they tend not to question their own assumptions. That’s what I perceive when you state your assertions with no empirical or theoretical basis, and deny (~assert the opposite of) evidence, and apparently feel good about it, as in morally superior. The virtuous feeling seems to overwhelm the ability to weigh objectively what Islam says and Muslims say.

          • Thanks @DavidFriedman for your first comment, about Medina 🙂 I don’t recall exactly where I read that Christians had welcomed Muslims.

            And thank you for your courtesy in this debate.

            I should add that, in my view, you are making strong statements about things you know very little about, based on what you have read by people presenting a one sided and badly distorted account. You might consider your having made a statement (about Medina) that was obvious nonsense to anyone with even a casual knowledge of the relevant history as a reason to be more skeptical of the sources of information you are relying on and the reliability of your beliefs.

            A point I made a while back–I don’t know whether you were reading the conversation at that point. Mohammed’s life, during which the Koran was, in his view, revealed to him, was centered on the conflict with his own tribe, the Quraysh, who controlled Mecca. He won that struggle in 632 and died the same year.

            The Koran’s talk about fighting the unbelievers is not about killing non-Muslims in Muslim controlled territory–under Muslim law members of other religions of the book (at least Jews, Christians, and Samaritans, sometimes others were included) are protected by the law as long as they are willing to pay the required head tax. It was not about killing civilians in territory not ruled by Muslims. It was about making war against non-Muslims–in context mostly the Quraysh (also the three Jewish tribes in Medina) but later applied to the Byzantines and Sassanids–in order to bring their territory under Muslim rule.

            The British Empire, as you may remember, made war against a variety of non-British peoples in order to bring their territory under British rule. Americans made war against the inhabitants of North America to bring that territory under American rule. Conquering territory is, unfortunately, normal behavior by polities that are in a position to do it.

            The main difference between Islam and modern Christianity and Judaism is that the latter are modern. If you compare medieval Islam to Medieval Christianity, the former is if anything the more tolerant society. Both of them conquered territory when they could do so and killed people in the process. The Muslims routinely permitted Christians and Jews to live at peace in the territories they ruled, with some legal disabilities. The Christians sometimes permitted Jews to do so, with some legal disabilities, rarely Muslims.

          • gda says:

            @DavidFriedman do you really consider Snopes as an unbiased arbiter, or are they simply a liberal-leaning website who self-profess to be “the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation”? Is your possible naivete in accepting their claim also a “reason to be more skeptical of the sources of information you are relying on and the reliability of your beliefs.”?

            Incidentally, nowhere on your website do I note any training in, or claim to profess, any particular expertise in Islam. It’s at least fair of you to express your criticism of Curious as being “your opinion” because, apart from an error in suggesting that Medina was a Christian city, in my opinion at least, your criticism of him/her is less than convincing.

          • @gda:

            Snopes didn’t offer a conclusion in the case I cited, it provided the evidence on which the claim I questioned was based, which I quoted. If you know of evidence other than that, by all means cite it.

            So far as Islam is concerned, you could find the evidence of my interest on my web site, but it would take a little looking. My current work in progress, a draft of which is webbed on the site, is a book on legal systems very different from ours which includes a long chapter on Islamic law. The bookshelf behind me includes six books on Islamic law.

            That aside, one of my hobbies for something over forty years has been the Society for Creative Anachronism and the persona I adopted was a North African Berber from about 1100 A.D., so I have done a lot of reading on medieval Islam. My wife and I self-publish a book on our medieval hobbies which includes a large number of worked out recipes from medieval sources, many of them Islamic, lots of medieval Islamic anecdotes used as fillers, and various other things on medieval Muslim and Christian topics.

            Since you asked.

        • AnonEEmous says:

          David, maybe you should include the most inflammatory tweet of all:

          “You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia Law if suddenly all your loans & credit cards become interest free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?”

          Also completely contradicts her claim that all Sharia is is “no pork alcohol and Islamic way of living”. I mean, at the very least that’s a very serious regulation of an industry, which is going to be a real law and not just some moral abstraction. But of course, Sharia advocates being taken at their word when arguing that Sharia is just a cultural abstraction is a norm.

          • Nornagest says:

            I suppose this is off-topic, but Muslims have figured out some very interesting ways of technically satisfying that requirement while still incentivizing loans: the most common one is similar to the rent-to-own system sometimes used for real estate in the West.

            But yeah, Islamic law is closer to the Halakha than the Ten Commandments — it’s quite comprehensive and has a real tradition of jurisprudence (several, in fact). And in the long run, I’d expect it to be just as flexible in cases where it turns out to be inconvenient.

          • Urstoff says:

            Loans and credit cards wouldn’t even exist then, would they?

          • David, maybe you should include the most inflammatory tweet of all:

            “You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia Law if suddenly all your loans & credit cards become interest free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?”

            What’s inflammatory about that? She is responding to someone talking about our living under Sharia law and pointing out that we are not.

            Islamic law, like medieval Christian law and Jewish law, forbids interest on loans (in the Jewish case only on loans to fellow Jews).

            I mean, at the very least that’s a very serious regulation of an industry, which is going to be a real law and not just some moral abstraction.

            If we were living under fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence (I think calling it Shari’a is a mistake, although a very common one), loans at interest would be forbidden, Muslims would pay zakat, non-Muslims jizya, … . Islamic law is a combination of law and morality, it includes statements about what people should do and about what they should be required to do.

            What does that have to do with the claim that this particular American Muslim wants to impose Islamic law on the U.S.?

          • Matt M says:

            “What does that have to do with the claim that this particular American Muslim wants to impose Islamic law on the U.S.?”

            I think it’s appropriate to be somewhat suspicious of anyone who says something like: “X is just a crazy conspiracy theory – nobody is calling for X….. but if we did have X things would be totally better for everyone…. just sayin!”

            While it’s technically true that pointing to a potential positive outcome of sharia =/ calling for sharia, well…. why else would you point to that if not for the purposes of advocacy…

          • While it’s technically true that pointing to a potential positive outcome of sharia =/ calling for sharia, well…. why else would you point to that if not for the purposes of advocacy…

            To respond to someone implying “the legal system of your religion is obviously terrible.”

          • @Nornagest:

            All three religions figured out ways of evading the prohibition on interest. According to Rodinson, one of the Muslim ways was borrowed by Christians, retaining its Arabic name.

          • And in the long run, I’d expect it to be just as flexible in cases where it turns out to be inconvenient.

            My standard example for Jewish law is the requirement to stone a disobedient son, which the scholars hedged about with so many requirements that it was argued that it had never happened.

            The two examples for Muslim law are the evidence requirement for zina, four eye witnesses to the same act of illicit sex, all adult male Muslims of good repute, and the requirements for the hadd offense of theft. The latter are less extreme than the Jewish case, but still eliminate a large fraction of possible cases.

  38. Error says:

    arguments aren’t soldiers.

    Trouble is, to most people they are. The dynamic Eliezer was arguing against in the original sequence hasn’t exactly disappeared in the intervening years.

    The reason you’re getting attacked on points that you have already answered in those posts is that people do not actually read to the end. They read until they think they have a counterargument, and stop there, because their job is done.

    (source: I used to link people to your posts as a starting point for related conversations. I gave up because the above is what kept happening. Stop the world, please; I want to get off.)

  39. J Mann says:

    It seems pretty hard to call the immigration ban “racist” without catching pretty much every other President from Clinton through Obama.

    Trump substantially limited immigration from 7 predominantly Muslim countries because he perceives them as an unusually high risk for terror. I think that’s a stupid decision as a matter of policy, but if it’s racist, then is

    1) Obama limiting the visa waiver program for those same 7 countries and for the same reason also racist?

    2) Obama bombing several predominantly Muslim countries by drone also racist?

    I guess you can argue that because the consequences are worse than #1*, Trump is a more harmful racist than Obama, or slightly more racist, but I don’t see you you say that it shows that Trump is racist but Obama is not.

    (* I don’t think the consequences are worse than #2, but since Trump is also doing #2, that might be moot).

    • aldi says:

      Obama is definitely a horrible racist. Democrats are indeed horrible racists. The democratic establishment is filled with people who systematically devalue brown lives. You are reasoning well.

      Trump just really brings it home and opens up the scope for systematic racism by appointing white supremacists to government and de-listing white supremacist terror organizations. It is a qualitative step up.

  40. dalemannes says:

    If all Scott’s predictions come true nothing really bad will happen. But how will Trump ruin the country? Where are the predictions suggesting something bad?

  41. hls2003 says:

    Have to agree with Scott on this one. The immigration executive order falls under the category of “explicit platform items Trump was expected to do.” The main difference is that the order is much more limited than Trump’s half-formed blurts during the campaign about “banning all Muslims.” This doesn’t do that even remotely.

    The green card holders inclusion, to the extent deliberate, was either foolish or malicious. That appears to be undone at this point – latest news reports suggest that the several hundred green card holders have been released, and not barred going forward – so it’s not a pressing topic, but it should still be noted.

    The executive order lists seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. They were specifically chosen as a starting point, per the language of the XO, because they were already listed in a prior statute from the Obama administration. Take a look at the political state of each of those countries:

    Syria – active civil war, ISIS presence
    Iraq – active civil war, ISIS presence
    Libya – active civil war, ISIS presence
    Yemen – active civil war, ISIS presence
    Somalia – near anarchy, persistent civil unrest, recent ISIS presence
    Sudan – active civil war (also counting South Sudan conflict as “civil”), some indication of recent ISIS presence
    Iran – no civil war, no ISIS presence, persistent enemy of U.S. and state sponsor of terrorism

    The most noticeable common thread is instability. Six of the seven are in active civil war or anarchy. Five or six of the seven have active ISIS presence, per news reports. The only outlier is Iran; which frankly can be chalked up to “we hate Iran and Iran hates us” much more than “we hate Muslims in Iran”. The directive of the XO is specifically to figure out what questions to ask and what information could be supplied to more thoroughly “vet” arrivals to U.S. shores; it makes sense that the listed countries would lack the wherewithal to provide adequate vetting on their end, specifically because they’re all active civil conflict zones (again, except Iran, which basically makes the list because they’ve been an antagonist for forty years). Thus the pause.

    To be clear, I’m against portions of the XO (and not just the ridiculous green card stuff). I think if implemented at all, it should have been implemented 100% prospectively and not affected anyone whose visa had already been granted, whether green card or not. Nobody should have been detained at airports. That was wrong. And there is certainly an uncharitable aspect to the refugee reduction (though the “right” number is complicated and I’m not prepared to accept slogans as arguments that the current or higher number is necessarily “right”).

    But overall, this is a much-scaled-back version of Trump’s bloviation on “ban travel from Muslim countries until we figure out what’s going on.” He campaigned on that. His Web site included the plan that countries (not Muslims) would be targeted – and they appear to be targeted on the basis of instability and ISIS presence much more than Muslim affiliation, since most Muslim countries aren’t targeted, even if they’re arguably sources of bad actors (like the Saudis), probably because they’re functional states with governments whose cooperation we believe can be relied upon, not unstable basket cases. This seems like the “seriously but not literally” thing again – liberals heard Trump say “bar all Muslims” once during the campaign, so they’re calling this a “literal Muslim ban.” Trump’s supporters heard “Muslim ban” and figured he’d slow things down from the problem countries. If the arguments now focus on “he’s stopping immigration from problem areas! See, Muslim ban!” he will lose zero supporters, and the left will only hurt its own cause. It may not be a good policy, but it’s not unexpected or even very anti-Muslim.

    • Sudan – active civil war (also counting South Sudan conflict as “civil”),

      South Sudan is mostly Christian and Pagan. It’s the north that is Muslim–and fought a long civil war against the south before letting it become independent.

      • hls2003 says:

        Yes. That’s why I noted that I’m still counting “civil war” status based on the ongoing conflict with South Sudan, because of the instability it represents, even though technically the ongoing cross-border conflict between the two is now interstate conflict (in addition to the intrastate conflict within South Sudan itself). Also, there’s civil unrest just within the north, with ISIS activity. E.g. http://pulitzercenter.org/projects/sudans-isis-problem

  42. akarlin says:

    I am noting many sites, despite their differing demographics – Arbital, PredictIt, and the major betting markets – are giving Trump a substantial chance of not making it as President through to the end of 2017. All agree on about a 20% of that happening!

    Triggered left-liberals? PredictIt is highly Trumpist (though shallow).

    I struggle to explain that. My own assessment is that there is a 95% of Trump making it through as President to the end of the year (and biological death is a significant component in that).

    I’m not one of those “America’s gonna break up anyday now” people, but if you do actually want to see serious racial unrest, assassinations, bombings, #RWDS, or even a West Virginia People’s Republic, then it strikes me that impeaching Trump is a great idea.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      Not following you, are you hinting there will be a secession movement if Trump is impeached? I would say the same thing I tell #Calexit folks: “you and what army?”

      • akarlin says:

        I don’t see how it can be considered to be totally out of the question.

        Red America has a lot more guns than the people protesting Trump, and the Army and siloviks love him (with the exception of the CIA’s upper echelons).

        Many people, especially poorer whites who have been economically shafted the past generation, view Trump as the first President who is truly “theirs.” Taking that away is very dangerous, which neither Democrats nor NeverTrump Republicans want to recognize. Especially if whoever replaces Trump proceeds to further spit on them by doubling down on economic globalism and/or ethnic minority identity politics.

        But secession and/or civil war is an extreme tail event. Below that there are plenty of other very undesirable things.

        Re-Calexit. Not comparable, there isn’t a large amount of passion behind it.

        • Ilya Shpitser says:

          I don’t think the Army would throw away the republic for Trump. Have you looked at his actual popularity numbers?

          Re: red America and their guns, they are welcome to try again. It would be a good chance to finish Lincoln’s unfinished business. Would also be a good chance to see just how edgy Moldbug’s edgy youths really are.

          • Anonymous says:

            Re: red America and their guns, they are welcome to try again. It would be a good chance to finish Lincoln’s unfinished business. Would also be a good chance to see just how edgy Moldbug’s edgy youths really are.

            Moldbug’s edgy youths are against any revolutionary activity.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            I think there is some disagreement in the community on this point. But I am trying not to annoy our host and dwell on this subject.

          • Anonymous says:

            Look, I’m one of Moldbug’s edgy youths, and I’m telling you that active support to any revolution is haram. Anyone who does is not one of ours.

          • akarlin says:

            The Army won’t interfere (at least so long as Trump’s removal is more or less constitutional) but they certainly won’t be very enthusiastic about putting down any resulting unrest. Might “lose” weapons shipments, etc.

            https://twitter.com/GamingAndPandas/status/823539052796375040
            Amongst the police, support for Trump is overwhelming. Very bad news for a potential post-coup regime with questionable legitimacy.

            It would be a good chance to finish Lincoln’s unfinished business.

            Which is what exactly?

            (I am assuming you don’t have in mind Lincoln’s post-war designs to deport the freed slaves back to Africa).

            Would also be a good chance to see just how edgy Moldbug’s edgy youths really are.

            Moldbug is an effete Silicon Valley intellectual who is on record as good as expressing support for gay marriage. Like, who even talks about him nowadays? The current year is 2017, not 2012.

            In this scenario, the folks you’d be up against will probably be considerably more hardcore.

          • eh says:

            If history is anything to go by, then soon after war breaks out Moldbug’s edgy youths will be happily committing atrocities, as will his commie neighbours, his vaguely libertarian work colleagues, his Mexican housekeeper, and probably even his cat.

            I don’t think war or civil unrest is something to look forward to.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            I certainly agree that war is nothing to look forward to. If this is what you thought I meant, I explicitly say here I did not. War is terrible.

    • Rob K says:

      Suppose Trump orders his agencies to refuse to obey court orders (as he may have already done, though it’s hard to say). What could congress reasonably do besides impeach him?

      • Anonymous says:

        But why would Republican Congress do that?

      • akarlin says:

        … as he may have already done

        Well, you’d need proof, not the lame kompromat that has been passed as such.

        You certainly don’t need any direct Trump order to explain their recent behavior. Morale in ICE must be high right now, and they have never shied away from going beyond their legal remits. They now have a guy in the White House who is explicitly on their side, so those bad tendencies of theirs are now especially magnified.

        Congress I suppose could try to impeach him on this basis, but unless they have a rock solid case, the ~30% of the American population who are his supporters (specifically his, not general GOP voters) will be extremely angry and that might lead to the bad potential scenarios I outlined above.

  43. Wrong Species says:

    Let’s recap the last couple years:

    Progressives accuse everyone who disagrees with them of being a racist
    People get annoyed with it
    Donald Trump comes in not caring about what he’s called
    He gets elected
    After some soul searching many realize that these things are related
    And after Trump gets elected president, they go back to calling everything they don’t like racist

    … Sounds about right.

    • lvlln says:

      After some soul searching many realize that these things are related

      Not seeing a whole lot of that, tbh. The same people who are claiming that it was related now seem to be the same people who were claiming that it would be related before the election.

      • Matt M says:

        Agree.

        While I’m sure that the upper levels of the democratic establishment are doing some soul searching, it sure seems to me like the average “Being Liberal” person on Facebook is doing absolutely none – and assigns blame to the following factors:

        1. Society really IS as racist as we’ve been saying it is.
        2. The Russians hacked the election.
        3. Hillary would have won under a normal system, only lost because the electoral college was instituted to help prolong slavery. Dems would have Congress if not for evil GOP gerrymandering.
        4. The media and the FBI intentionally biased things against Hillary.

        There is no real “soul searching” going on among rank and file leftists. They consider the election to be illegitimate, so no soul searching is necessary…

  44. Joachim Schipper says:

    I thought your earlier Trump post was a good counterweight, a role that SSC plays regularly. I wish you the best – maybe the tranquillity to ignore some people on Twitter?

  45. Controls Freak says:

    In the spirit of making predictions, I’d like to operationalize the harm here in some way. I don’t think we’ll be able to compute all of it, of course (we never can), but I’ll list a few things that I think are probably out of scope in general. I think it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be able to compute anything meaningful about the harm caused to green card holders who were temporarily detained, the number of people who would have obtained visas over the next three months, or the economic harm of not allowing that travel. (Note that the State Department dissent cable cited the total number of people in those countries and the total economic benefit of worldwide foreign travel. If approximate numbers for the expected rate of actual travelers or economic impact wrt the specific seven countries was easy to get, I’d expect they’d include it. Yes yes, maybe the numbers don’t support their narrative and they’re being shifty. I’d rather just assume that they’re hard to get.)

    So, I’d like to move the metric to refugees. We do have numbers on refugees, broken down by month and country of origin. The data set I got from State goes back to 2001. I think refugees represent a meaningful and visible harm. Meaningful because these people are often fleeing from war zones; if we simply take fewer, that has a real cost. Visible because, uh, I apparently have to see pictures of dying children when I log onto facebook now (Thanks, Trump!).

    I’ve already done a little processing on the numbers going back to 2011 (because I wanted to see what things looked like since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War; the data was arranged according to fiscal year in a kind of ugly fashion), but I can do other years if you have a real reason to shift it around. I propose a measure like, “What do you think the likelihood is that the total number of refugees admitted in calendar year 2017 from the seven relevant nations is less than one standard deviation below the mean for the years 2011-2017?” I think one standard deviation is enough to say, “This is a noticeable harm.”

    • AnonEEmous says:

      By the way, the refugees we take are the ones who have already made it to totally safe refugee camps. So the danger to any refugees we take is already effectively zero.

      • hls2003 says:

        You would also presumably want to consider potential harm to the country of origin. As originally conceived, the goal of international law on refugee status was allow people to safely leave conflict zones until the risk had passed, so that they could then go back to rebuild their homes and contribute to a new functioning state. Asylum for refugees has therefore usually been limited to people who faced some sort of ongoing persecution based on ethnicity, beliefs, etc.

        Which makes sense. If your side lost the ethnic cleansing contest, you need a new home. If you needed to flee because your home was being shelled, but the danger is now over, you could go back home. If effectively 100% of the refugees in question are productive stable people simply needing safety, then by removing them, you’re decimating the base of people who can go back and rebuild a functional society. That’s why refugee camps are a thing. Ostensibly it’s so that you don’t further decimate a damaged state by exporting all of its productive citizens.

        In contrast, if a measurable subset of the refugees are not productive stable citizens, it’s somewhat unclear why the West would want to import them in bulk.

      • John Schilling says:

        If you needed to flee because your home was being shelled, but the danger is now over, you could go back home.

        If your plan is to go back home to e.g. Syria when the war is over, and of all the places you could hang out in the meantime you chose the one that is two continents and an ocean away and less politically congenial to your ethnicity/religion than the various places much closer to home, then I’m going to seriously question your judgment.

        Or the sincerity of your claim to be a refugee who is going to go home as soon as the civil war is over. My model of Syrians or Somalis coming to the United States is that, whatever it says on the paperwork, they are here to stay and they are staying for the economic advantage. To the extent that this advantage is mutual, great. I’d still prefer the obvious truth be honestly acknowledged.

        • Matt M says:

          Right. If literally ALL you want is to be out of the war zone, why not just go to Turkey and stop there? Why bother trekking all the way to Sweden (or even more extreme, the US)?

          Note that I’m not morally condemning these people. If I was in there situation, I’d probably try to use this opportunity to immigrate to a nicer place with a better life, too. But the image that seems to be widespread is that for many refugees, the only choice is “comfortable life and generous welfare entitlements in distant majority-white democracy” or “immediately beheaded by ISIS in Syria” when this is almost certainly not the case.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Better than a war zone isn’t as good as their former life when Syria was not a war zone, and it’s probably not very close.

            Living in a border refugee camp may be better than being shelled, but that doesn’t make it good.

          • John Schilling says:

            Another thing that’s not going to be very close to their life in prewar Syria, is their life in postwar Syria. To the extent that there can ever even be a place called “postwar Syria” when all the good and decent people who could run a government capable of keeping order are living elsewhere.

            If you tell me that because some people are suffering the consequences of a war in their country, A: a third party should provide them a life in another country at least as good as the one they had before the war, and B: a third party will rebuild their former country to the point where it is at least as good as it was before the war, and C: they will then move back to their former country even though they are now living in a country at least as good as their former country ever was, then I absolutely do not believe this is actually going to happen and I am skeptical that you honestly believe it is going to happen.

            In which case, to the extent that I get a vote in how American taxpayer dollars are spent and who gets to cross America’s borders, I say you don’t get to use either until you come up with a more realistic explanation of what you are planning.

            If all you are saying is that the Syrian people want for all of this to happen, yes, certainly that is understandable but so what?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:

            Yeah, that’s fair as far as it goes.

            I was responding more to what seemed like the implied argument in “If I was in there situation, I’d probably try to use this opportunity to immigrate to a nicer place with a better life, too.” (not your words)

            This seems to suggest that what they are really looking to do is ditch Syria irrespective of the idea that it is a war zone.

          • Matt M says:

            HBC,

            I, for one, will freely concede that the majority of refugees are probably people who, were it not for the war, would have happily stayed in Syria.

            That said, there is probably a significant percentage of refugees who, if you offered them the deal before the war of, “You get to move to Sweden and the government will help you find a job and give you free food and medical care and housing until you do” would have happily accepted such a deal.

            And at this point in time, the two groups are indistinguishable.

          • Randy M says:

            I, for one, will freely concede that the majority of refugees are probably people who, were it not for the war, would have happily stayed in Syria.

            Do you mean the majority of people in refugee camps in Syria, or the majority of people immigrating to Europe and the US under the aegis of the refugee crisis?

            Because a large fraction of those aren’t even Syrian.

        • hls2003 says:

          That’s precisely it. International law on refugees excludes economic migrants. That’s why most refugee camps have historically been set up near the site – not just for ease of access to the refugees, but for ease of return when the danger passes.

          It is pretty obviously true that almost any citizen of Syria (or indeed, of Sierra Leone or Venezuela or Sri Lanka or many places) would be better off economically in the U.S. or Germany than their current country. That would be mostly true even in the absence of war, since our poor are rich by world standards.

          But if you take everyone who wants to enter for any reason, including economic, besides the deleterious effects on the Western host, you’re also decimating the ability of the source country to rebuild.

  46. In case you’re interested, I just published a post on my blog in which I criticize the widespread belief that Trump’s election unleashed a wave of hate crimes on the US and that minorities are no longer safe in the US, using data from the NCVS. I think it strengthens Scott’s argument in this post and in the one he wrote immediately after the election.

  47. GregQ says:

    Trump’s policies are often motivated by racism of the everyday bias-towards-being-more-scared-of-terrorists-than-the-situation-warrants

    Science Fiction author John Ringo wrote a post on this. It’s titled “Cigarettes Don’t Care”

    https://www.facebook.com/notes/john-ringo/cigarettes-dont-care/10154393644457055/

    Because cigarettes don’t care about policy.
    ‘The purpose of War is to change the (political) will of an enemy.’ Von Clausewitz

    By my brother’s analysis, we should know no-one lest we die at their hands. Beware, Tom, you’re more likely to be beaten to death by Dave with a violin than by a cigarette!
    But there is a particular issue to any form of terrorism (and we’ll get into why rioting IS a form of terrorism below.) Terrorism is a form of war. And war is an attempt to change policy through violence.
    This is what makes the deaths on 9/11, and all the other deaths, and the damage from riots, so very important compared to all the other violence. Why San Bernardino is more important than Sandy Hook, though the latter was an equal or greater tragedy.
    Terrorism is about trying to change politics. It is about trying to destroy the democratic process by the use of violence.

    Furniture deaths aren’t going to change the political process. They’re also not intentional. Terrorist deaths are intentional, and are aimed at changing the political process. And destroying people’s will.

    With all due respect, it’s not “racist” to oppose deaths from terrorism more than deaths from furniture. It’s. IMAO, the only intelligent position to take. Or did you mock people for their “overreaction to the early reports about Mathew Shephard’s death?

    Because furniture doesn’t have politics, but terrorists do.