Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle

I.

Vox’s David Roberts writes about Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology.

It’s got a long and complicated argument which I can’t really do justice to here, but the thesis seems to be that the US Right is defecting against the country’s shared institutions in favor of forming its own echo chambers.

So for example, there used to be a relatively fair media in which both liberals and conservatives got their say. But Republicans didn’t like having to deal with facts, so they formed their own alternative media – FOX and Rush Limbaugh and everyone in that sphere – where only conservatives would have a say and their fake facts would never get challenged.

Or: everyone used to trust academia as a shared and impartial arbitrator of truth. But conservatives didn’t like the stuff it found – whether about global warming or trickle-down economics or whatever – so they seceded into their own world of alternative facts where some weird physicist presents his case that global warming is a lie, or a Breitbart journalist is considered an expert on how cultural Marxism explains everything about post-WWII American history.

It concludes that “the press cannot be neutral”, although it also “cannot afford to be, or be seen as primarily instruments of the Democrats”. To its credit, it admits this is kind of contradictory:

They must figure out a way to play a dual role: to be fair and consistent referees of policy and ideological disputes within the public square — while also acting to defend the institutional integrity of the square itself from what is, at present, a highly asymmetrical threat. They must fight to keep some core principles and commitments inviolate, outside the sphere of normal political dispute, against an administration that wants to drag them in…that’s a humdinger of a problem.

Let me start by saying what this article gets right.

I think it’s right that the two parties used to have much more in common, and be able to appeal to shared gatekeeper institutions that both trusted.

I think it’s right the Republicans unilaterally seceded from those shared gatekeeper institutions, so that now we’re in the weird position of having two sets of institutions: one labeling itself “neutral” and the other labeling itself “conservative”.

I think it’s right to consider the situation asymmetrical. Yes, CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it – it has a pretense of neutrality that FOX doesn’t, and although we can disagree about how realistic that pretense is I think few people would disagree that the pretense is there. Nor is there a liberal version of FOX that lacks that pretense of neutrality.

I think it’s right that the conservative side is worse than the neutral side. However biased and crappy you think CNN and mainstream academia are, FOX and the conservative academic bubble are working on a different level (though note that as a liberal, I would say this, and you should interpret it with the same grain of salt that you would any other “my side is better than yours” claim).

I think it’s right that this situation is horrible and toxic and destroying the country, and it’s really good that someone has pointed this out and framed it this clearly.

I think it’s wrong in exactly the way I would expect it to be wrong, which is also an example of what’s wrong with it.

II.

Roberts devotes four sentences in his six thousand word article to the possibility that conservatives might be motivated by something deeper than a simple hatred of facts:

The right’s view that the institutions lean liberal is hyperbolic, but not without foundation. Science, academia (at least liberal arts and social sciences), and journalism do tend to draw their personnel from left-leaning demographics.

Those institutions have cosmopolitan aspirations — fair application of transpartisan standards — but there’s no doubt that in practice, those aspirations often cover for more parochial preferences.

But the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own.

Roberts says that these neutral gatekeeper institutions “tend to draw their personnel from left-leaning demographics”, as if this was just a big fuss about 105 New Englanders for every 100 Texans. I would like to counter with a report from a friend who graduated from a top university last year:

I was at my graduation last weekend, and the commencement address was basically about twenty minutes of vitriolic insults directed at Trump. And in between burying my head in my friend’s shoulder in discomfort and laughing nervously, I was thinking about the family of this guy in my class.

He’s the first person in his family to go to college. He drove an hour every day to go to a somewhat better high school because there was an epidemic of gang violence at his local school. Against the odds, he did well, and got into college, where he has continued to get good grades and play sports and generally do things that make parents proud.

His family is not well off. They’re Mexican-American. And they’re Trump supporters.

Yeah, I’m kind of confused too. But they honestly are. (Not even reluctant Republicans supporting Trump–they voted for him in the primary. His aunt owns a Make America Great Again cap.) And all I could think about was how happy they must have been to be attending their son’s graduation from one of the best universities in the world [citation needed], only to have that happiness turn to bewilderment and anger as everyone around them cheered a series of caustic attacks against them and their values. The message couldn’t have been clearer: “You don’t belong here.”

My mom thought this speech was So Courageous. When I suggested that it might have been more courageous to say something that not everyone there agreed with, she replied, “the students maybe, but a lot of the parents looked unhappy.”

Seventy percent of the parents there had family incomes over six figures. (More, probably, since low-income parents are less likely to attend graduation.) A lot of them are members of the self-perpetuating intellectual/economic elite. This probably isn’t true of the few Trump supporters among them.

So if we are going to single them out for judgment, force them to account for their support for an “infantile,” “bullying,” “proto-fascist” “charlatan”…can it not be on the day of their kids’ graduation?

And sure, if you consider me your friend, then that makes this one of those “friend of a friend” stories. But I dare you to say that any of this sounds the least bit implausible. My point is, just because a university paints “ACTUALLY, WE ARE POLITICALLY NEUTRAL” in big red letters on the college quad, doesn’t mean that anyone is required to believe it. And the ideology that invented the microaggression can’t hide behind “but we haven’t officially declared you unwelcome!”

And the same thing is happening in the media. For example, in this very piece, Roberts cites a Vox poll showing that Trump supporters are more likely to be authoritarians. Vox has pushed this same claim many more times: Authoritarianism: The Political Science That Explains Trump, The Rise Of American Authoritarianism: A Niche Group Of Political Scientists May Have Uncovered What’s Driving Donald Trump’s Ascent, The Rise Of American Authoritarianism Explained In 6 Minutes, The Best Predictor Of Trump Support Is Authoritarianism.

Okay. But Vox is working off an internal poll that it hasn’t released (or at least I can’t find it) meaning no one has any idea if the sample size and methodology are okay. And some political science professors tried the same exercise around the same time with excellent methodology and a sample size of over a thousand and found the opposite – Trump supporters were less authoritarian than Cruz supporters, and no more authoritarian than Rubio supporters. They did find that Republicans were a bit more authoritarian than Democrats, but correctly noted that the measure involved is literally called “Right-Wing Authoritarianism”, is based on a scale invented by Theodor Adorno to prove conservatives had fascist tendencies, and only asks questions about child-rearing practices (you get marked as “authoritarian” if you have a traditional religious child-rearing style). And there are other investigations of authority that try to control for this sort of thing and sometimes find find liberals and conservatives are about equal in respect for authority.

I don’t want to overdo my criticism. “Right-wing authoritarianism” is a powerful idea with a good academic reputation, and the decision to focus solely on child-rearing was a principled choice to avoid including politics itself in the construct. And failed replications should be an opportunity for reflection rather than a cause to instantly dismiss a finding.

Yet it’s still good practice to mention their existence. And I still feel like somewhere there might be a conservative who reads this sort of thing and feels like Vox is not quite the perfectly-neutral mutually-beneficial gatekeeper institution of their dreams.

And whenever I mention this sort of thing, people protest “But Fox and Breitbart are worse!” And so they are. But I feel like Vox has aspirations to be something more than just a mirror image of Fox with a left-wing slant and a voiced fricative. It’s trying to be a neutral gatekeeper institution. If some weird conservative echo chamber is biased, well, what did you expect? If a neutral gatekeeper institution is biased, now we have a problem.

Roberts writes that “the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own”. This is a bizarre claim, given the existence of groups like Accuracy In Media, Media Research Center, Newsbusters, Heterodox Academy, et cetera which are all about the right seeking greater fairness in mainstream institutions, some of which are almost fifty years old. Really “it’s too bad conservatives never complained about liberal bias in academia or the mainstream media” seems kind of like the opposite of how I remember the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The way I remember it, conservatives spent about thirty years alternately pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and literally praying for greater fairness in mainstream institutions, and it was basically all just hitting their heads against a brick wall. Then they defected to create their own.

III.

This predictably went badly.

I wrote before (1, 2) about the sort of dynamics this situation produces. A couple of years ago, Reddit decided to ban various undesirables and restrict discussion of offensive topics. A lot of users were really angry about this, and some of them set up a Reddit clone called Voat which promised that everyone was welcome regardless of their opinion.

What happened was – a small percent of average Reddit users went over, lured by curiosity or a principled commitment to free speech. And also, approximately 100% of Reddit’s offensive undesirables went there, lured by the promise of being able to be terrible and get away with it.

Even though Voat’s rules were similar to Reddit’s rules before the latter tightened its moderation policies, Voat itself was nothing like pre-tightening Reddit. I checked to see whether it had gotten any better in the last year, and I found the top three stories were:

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

FOX’s slogans are “Fair and Balanced”, “Real Journalism”, and “We Report, You Decide”. They were pushing the “actually unbiased media” angle hard. I don’t know if this was ever true, or if people really believed it. It doesn’t matter. By attracting only the refugees from a left-slanted system, they ensured they would end up not just with conservatives, but with the worst and most extreme conservatives.

They also ensured that the process would feed on itself. As conservatives left for their ghettos, the neutral gatekeeper institutions leaned further and further left, causing more and more conservatives to leave. Meanwhile, the increasingly obvious horribleness of the conservative ghettos made liberals feel more and more justified in their decision to be biased against conservatives. They intensified their loathing and contempt, accelerating the conservative exodus.

The equilibrium is basically what we see now. The neutral gatekeeper institutions lean very liberal, though with a minority of conservative elites who are good at keeping their heads down and too mainstream/prestigious to settle for anything less. The ghettos contain a combination of seven zillion witches and a few decent conservatives who are increasingly uncomfortable but know there’s no place for them in the mainstream.

IV.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is limited to the places people traditionally gripe about like academia and the media. The same dynamics are going on everywhere.

In the hospital where I work, there’s a RESIST TRUMP poster on the bulletin board in our break room. I don’t know who put it there, but I know that anybody who demanded that it be taken down would be tarred as a troublemaker, and anyone who tried to put a SUPPORT TRUMP poster up next to it would be lectured about how politics are inappropriate at work. This is true even though I think at least a third of my colleagues are Trump supporters.

I went to a scientific conference in a field completely unrelated to politics where one of the researchers giving a presentation started with a five minute tangentially-related anti-Trump rant. I can’t imagine someone giving the opposite rant any more than I can imagine a pro-Trump commencement speaker at my friend’s graduation.

I’m desperately trying to avoid the Nerd Culture Wars, which have somehow managed to be even worse than the Regular Culture Wars, but even I’ve heard about GamerGate and the Rabid Puppies. These were originally movements to fight a perceived liberal bias in regular gaming/sci-fi. They of course failed, and now they’re their own little separate conservative spaces practicing conservative video game commentary/sci-fi writing. I don’t want to deny that they’re often horrible. They’re horrible in exactly the same way FOX News is horrible, and for exactly the same reasons. I expect this pattern of conservatives seceding from theoretically-neutral-but-realistically-left-leading communities and forming terrible communities full of witches to repeat itself again and again, because it’s happening for systemic rather than community-specific reasons.

The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call “neutral” and “depoliticized”. These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever.

Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again. Taken to its extreme, it suggests we’ll end up with a bunch of neutral organizations that have become left-wing, plus a few explicitly right-wing organizations. Given that Conquest was writing in the 1960s, he seems to have predicted the current situation remarkably well.

V.

David Roberts ends by noting that he doesn’t really know what to do here, and I agree. I don’t know what to do here either.

But one simple heuristic: if everything you’ve tried so far has failed, maybe you should try something different. Right now, the neutral gatekeeper institutions have tried being biased against conservatives. They’ve tried showing anti-conservative bias. They’ve tried ramping up the conservativism-related bias level. They’ve tried taking articles, and biasing them against conservative positions. I appreciate their commitment to multiple diverse strategies, but I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a possibility they’ve missed.

Look. I read Twitter. I know the sorts of complaints people have about this blog. I’m some kind of crypto-conservative, I’m a traitor to liberalism, I’m too quick to sell out under the guise of “compromise”. And I understand the sentiment. I write a lot about how we shouldn’t get our enemies fired lest they try to fire us, how we shouldn’t get our enemies’ campus speakers disinvited lest they try to disinvite ours, how we shouldn’t use deceit and hyperbole to push our policies lest our enemies try to push theirs the same way. And people very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.

And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”

Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging.

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1,909 Responses to Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle

  1. RH28 says:

    How do you objectively show that Breitbart, Fox News, etc. are worse than the liberal media in their bias leading them astray? I remember right after the election there was this stuff about a “wave of hate crimes” across the country, including several Muslim girls who kept getting their hijabs ripped off. Having followed the conservative media for years, I knew that there were a lot more fake hate crimes than real ones, so I assumed that this one would be proven false too. Sites like Breitbart and the Daily Caller shared my skepticism, while CBS, NBC, NY Times, etc. ran with it as representative of Trump’s America.

    And guess what? Conservatives were right, as they often are on these kinds of issues. Remember “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”?

    Whatever your bias, you seek out information that confirms your narrative. And the liberal view of race relations in the United States, with its productive, angelic minorities and evil, sadistic whites is so simply divorced from reality that they’re always going to get all racially charged issues wrong. Conservatives have narratives about minority crime and Muslim terrorism, but those things actually exist, unlike Duke athletes raping black strippers or the new trend of hijab pulling.

    Maybe conservatives are worse on other issues such as global warming, but how the media handles race is something that’s been bugging me for a while.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I appreciate your concern, and I’ve added a parenthetical to my post that I am probably biased on this for the obvious reasons.

      I think that if you cherry-pick issues where the Right is correct, then Breitbart, being further right, will of course be more correct.

      But ignoring the issue of which side is more correct, it seems to me like Breitbart has a stronger and more overt conservative slant than CNN does a liberal slant, or at least that it makes much less of a claim to be a neutral gatekeeper. Would you disagree?

      • RH28 says:

        I was actually surprised by the parenthetical. I haven’t been following the blog for that long, but I always thought you were a libertarian.

        Anyway, I would agree that Breitbart’s bias is more overt and it doesn’t present itself as neutral. And CNN has conservatives on, while I’ve never seen a liberal write at Breitbart, so I guess I’d agree that the bias at Breitbart is stronger too. Yet which news organization is more likely to distort reality to fit its bias depends more on the specific issue than anything else, and who is “worse” will depend on what issues you care about. I’d point out that the liberal media has a lot more reach, so even if you trust it more, the left’s echo chamber can still do more to distort national policy.

        • Jiro says:

          I haven’t been following the blog for that long, but I always thought you were a libertarian.

          Scott isn’t a libertarian. It’s just that most of the time he disagrees with the people on his side, he happens to disagree in the libertarian direction.

          (I would take this to suggest that maybe libertarianism is correct. Scott clearly isn’t a libertarian and doesn’t want to be drawn in a libertarian direction, yet merely by using good reasoning, that’s what happens.)

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            I would take this to suggest that maybe libertarianism is correct. Scott clearly isn’t a libertarian and doesn’t want to be drawn in a libertarian direction, yet merely by using good reasoning, that’s what happens.

            Leftism is obviously wrong – Scott however finds the actual right wing so alien and repulsive for emotional reasons that he can only express the wrongness of mainstream leftism through the prism of older leftism (libertarianism). Being a libertarian isn’t as emotionally damaging as being right wing would be.

          • Iain says:

            Scott isn’t a libertarian. It’s just that most of the time he disagrees with the people on his side, he happens to disagree in the libertarian direction.

            (I would take this to suggest that maybe libertarianism is correct. Scott clearly isn’t a libertarian and doesn’t want to be drawn in a libertarian direction, yet merely by using good reasoning, that’s what happens.)

            I’m not convinced that Scott always disagreeing towards libertarianism is a real pattern, rather than your own confirmation bias, but let’s assume that it is. That’s still not really evidence for libertarianism in the way that you want it to be.

            Imagine a hypothetical hard-line libertarian not-a-state, with an alternate-universe version of Scott who broadly agrees with libertarian principles but is concerned about, say, collective action problems. Most of his disagreements with the libertarian side would be disagreements “towards” communism, in some way — but it would be ridiculous to take this fact as a vindication of Marx.

            If you interpret the ways in which Scott agrees with you as correctness, and dismiss all the ways in which he doesn’t as motivated reasoning, then you certainly can take it as evidence that you were right all along, but you shouldn’t expect that to convince anybody else.

            (I’m not touching “reasoned argumentation” with a ten-foot pole.)

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Leftism is obviously wrong – Scott however finds the actual right wing so alien and repulsive for emotional reasons that he can only express the wrongness of mainstream leftism through the prism of older leftism (libertarianism). Being a libertarian isn’t as emotionally damaging as being right wing would be.

            How can a distinction based on terminal values even be wrong or right?

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            Leftism is obviously wrong – Scott however finds the actual right wing so alien and repulsive for emotional reasons that he can only express the wrongness of mainstream leftism through the prism of older leftism (libertarianism). Being a libertarian isn’t as emotionally damaging as being right wing would be.

            You should change your ‘nym. It’s extremely misleading.

          • Deiseach says:

            Oh, get off the hobby horse, reasoned argumentation. Scott isn’t moving to the right mainly because he is not convinced by that side/does not feel that he can identify as such, and possibly partly because in the US the right is represented by the Republicans and if I had to choose an American political party I’d choose the Democrats over them, never mind that I’m a right-wing/conservative type myself.

            Anyway, as a conservative, I am not worried about the current situation. Yes, it’s bad. But it’s not going to last, even if it ends in a big crash when everything goes whump. Because history moves in cycles and we’ve been here before. Young progressives may imagine that they are indeed the first in the history of the world to have notions like polyamory etc but no, they’re not. All this has been around under different names before – granted, the current Western incarnation of the old ideas has slapped a new coat of paint on and voiced a theory about the phenomenon never before heard, but it’s a veneer on pre-existing behaviours.

            Conservatism gave way to increasing liberalism which tends to go the way of liberalisation and then libertinism and then decadence and then crash, whump, reaction to conservatism once again, and we all take another spin on the merry-go-round:

            9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

            10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

            11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

          • >Leftism is obviously wrong – Scott however finds the actual right wing so alien and repulsive for emotional reasons that he can only express the wrongness of mainstream leftism through the prism of older leftism (libertarianism).

            Trying to psychoanalyze the emotional machinations of why someone as bright as Scott has the opinions he does is not only rude, but also unlikely to actually be correct.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            Scott isn’t moving to the right mainly because he is not convinced by that side/does not feel that he can identify as such, and possibly partly because in the US the right is represented by the Republicans and if I had to choose an American political party I’d choose the Democrats over them, never mind that I’m a right-wing/conservative type myself.

            This is disagreeing with my conjecture?

          • Scott does tend towards libertarianism in that he tends to bewail the absence of a solution to problems that have an obvious just-make-them-do-the-right-thing solution.

          • wintermute92 says:

            Imagine a hypothetical hard-line libertarian not-a-state, with an alternate-universe version of Scott who broadly agrees with libertarian principles but is concerned about, say, collective action problems. Most of his disagreements with the libertarian side would be disagreements “towards” communism, in some way — but it would be ridiculous to take this fact as a vindication of Marx.

            This is basically my impression. I’m in a place similar to Scott – a self-described liberal who spends a lot of time yelling at the left about market solutions and weakening state power. It’s not because I’m pretending to be something I’m not, or inevitably compelled by the correctness of libertarianism. It’s because there are a lot of stupid and oppressive things being done, and libertarianism has laid a broad claim to being the politics of “stop making it worse”.

            If I lived in Singapore and my oppressive government was competent and efficient, I wouldn’t pitch libertarianism so much. If I lived in Somalia and got hyperlibertarianism every day, I wouldn’t pitch it at all. But I live in America, where all the medicine costs 4x what it should and and college costs 10x what it should and the police drive tanks and you need a degree to braid hair.

            So for myself at least, I end up arguing for the faction of “doing nothing is better than doing a very stupid thing”. That doesn’t make von Mises my guru, it just means libertarianism is a general idea that improves on the current problems I’m worried about.

          • albertborrow says:

            @wintermute92

            I don’t really know how to express agreement other than copying and pasting your entire comment. What I willadd is that with conservative parents and liberal friends, I choose libertarianism less because it presents a possible solution and more because it lacks the flaws both sides’ solutions have. I feel like people are trying to fix a sinking ship by poking more holes in it.

        • Walter says:

          Scott’s like the dude in Mother Night, who infiltrates the bad guys only to discover that he is beloved by them, and suspected by the righteous. He is every conservatives favorite progressive.

          For every post where he is like “conservatives please please please don’t elect Trump” there are ones where he savages the progressives for their sins. He wants them to be better, we want them to be criticized. It works out.

          • johnvertblog says:

            who infiltrates the bad guys only to discover that he is beloved by them, and suspected by the righteous

            Worm???

          • ksvanhorn says:

            Scott is every conservative’s favorite progressive because he is willing to actually engage and discuss issues instead of just sneering at those he disagrees with.

          • Scott isn’t a progressive

          • albertborrow says:

            @NatashaRostova

            He has gone out of the way to say he is liberal – is that not enough?

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            He has gone out of the way to say he is liberal – is that not enough [to make him progressive]?

            Not enough. Even if one uses the word “liberal” in its American political sense. Progressives are noticeably more expressive about how they think their ideas will improve society.

          • alexsloat says:

            > He is every conservatives favorite progressive.

            Because he’s possibly the only progressive thinker that I’ve ever heard from who doesn’t strike me as either smarmy or hateful(barring those I know personally, who will obviously be better-behaved to me). Admittedly, we’re both libertarian examples of our respective ideologies, so the distance between us is smaller than most, but it’s still impressive. He takes my views seriously, assumes that I’m not a terrible person simply for thinking them, explains rationally why he thinks I’m wrong about issues when he disagrees with me, gives me credit when he thinks I’m on the right track, and makes it very clear that he’s seeking truth, wherever it may lead, and not just trying to rack up easy points. He’s actually changed my mind on some issues, and that doesn’t happen often to someone who’s been arguing politics like it’s a full-time job for north of 15 years now.

            Yeah, he’s a lefty, and yeah, it shows sometimes. I’d still take him over most conservatives.

        • Protagoras says:

          I’ve always thought he was a libertarian-leaning moderate leftist, probably because that’s what I am so I assume smart people are going to be naturally drawn toward that general area.

        • mupetblast says:

          Greg Ferenstein is a liberal who writes at Breitbart.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        I’m not sure that making less of a claim to be a neutral gatekeeper necessarily makes Breitbart worse than CNN. If a site’s biased, it’s probably better if it admits its bias rather than trying to pass biased commentary as perfectly neutral fact-based reporting.

        • Chiffewar says:

          trying to pass biased commentary as perfectly neutral fact-based reporting

          Isn’t that what Fox does? “Fair and balanced”? The problem is that no one believes them, or thinks they believe it themselves. Good ‘neutral’ journalism may have a liberal tint, but it’s done in the pursuit of truth. CNN might miss the mark alarmingly often, but at least they agree that the target exists and that hitting it is good.

          • abc says:

            Isn’t that what Fox does? “Fair and balanced”? The problem is that no one believes them, or thinks they believe it themselves. Good ‘neutral’ journalism may have a liberal tint, but it’s done in the pursuit of truth. CNN might miss the mark alarmingly often, but at least they agree that the target exists and that hitting it is good.

            Let me see if I understand your argument. “Both CNN and Fox claim to be unbiased, CNN fails at this alarmingly often but should nevertheless be considered better than Fox because, um, the seem more honest (to Chiffewar).”

          • Deiseach says:

            Well, I often see GetReligion (a site about journalism and coverage of religion) lamenting that the American media seems to be moving to European-style advocacy journalism (where every paper has a particular political viewpoint and you know which is on the right, far-right, centre, left, far-left, etc) from good old-fashioned American-style impartial and fair reporting.

            I have my doubts as to whether the American press always (or ever) operated on that idealistic model (the faint strains of ‘the yellow press‘ drift on the aether to my mind) but certainly there is a perception that this is how it was, whatever about nowadays.

            Again, I’m willing to say I think both sides are as likely to be inclined to present one side over another as the fair, just, moderate* one, but one side will think it is the ‘normal’ side – remember all the triumphing about the right side of history? Yes, and if you’re old enough, you will remember when the right-thinking side on the right side of history was the conservative and the shocking radicals with their extremist positions were on the liberal side. As King Lear says,

            A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

            *The way the use of language in reporting can convey subtle judgements as to which of the parties is in the right, even if the article on the face of it avoids any such opinionating, as pointed out in the 2005 report of the Credibility Group for the New York Times:

            Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.” We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives.

            We particularly slip into these traps in feature stories when reporters and editors think they are merely presenting an interesting slice of life, with little awareness of the power of labels. We need to be more vigilant about the choice of language not only in the text but also in headlines, captions and display type.

          • MugaSofer says:

            abc, I think they’re saying that Fox dishonestly claims to be unbiased, while CNN honestly claims to be aiming for neutrality but isn’t very good at it.

          • ksvanhorn says:

            A “liberal tint”? CNN does not have a “liberal tint”, it’s more like it has poured a bucket of the brightest crimson red over itself.

            Even though I despised Clinton, in early 2016 I thought that Trump was the most dangerous of the presidential candidates. But the blatant bias of the media (especially CNN) in favor of Clinton and against Trump pissed me off so much that I ended up hoping Trump would win just to stick it to the smarmy, condescending bastards.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ksvanhorn

            While I sympathize, this sort of hyperbole doesn’t help.

          • Gilmore says:

            “” Good ‘neutral’ journalism may have a liberal tint, but it’s done in the pursuit of truth””

            Nope

            http://imgur.com/6gMBcVl

          • ragnarrahl says:

            I have my doubts as to whether the American press always (or ever) operated on that idealistic model (the faint strains of ‘the yellow press‘ drift on the aether to my mind) but certainly there is a perception that this is how it was, whatever about nowadays.

            I think that perception is mostly a result of the period from the end of WWII to 1964, the “postwar liberal consensus,” when we had a one-ideology polity masquerading as two parties. (in the media, the journalistic influence of this period is of course going to be longer as it took time for Goldwateresque conservatism to influence journalists– consider the end bound to be, say, Cronkite coming off the air).

            The reason it’s mostly liberals that have this perception is that all the journalists in that period were liberal.

        • Nebfocus says:

          Reason.com publishes who all their writers are voting for. I wish all outlets did this.

          • somervta says:

            Note: it’s not mandatory at Reason (and in fact thereI think there’s a chance it’s not legal for it to be mandatory)

          • somervta says:

            Note: Reason does not make revealing mandatory (and I think there’s a chance making it mandatory is illegal).

            Also, Slate, Deadspin & The American Conservative do the same thing

          • Jacob says:

            Slate did this, and after years of having 20% republicans, in 2016 they had 59 for Clinton, 1 for McMullin, 1 for Stein. Having successfully purged itself of wrong-think, Slate became utterly unreadable after many years of decent moderate-leftie journalism. RIP.

            Now if we had to guess, what are the proportions at Vox?

          • BBA says:

            2016 was a weird election for journalists. Trump was so anti-press that dozens of newspapers that had endorsed every Republican since, say, Taft flipped to Hillary or refused to endorse anyone.

          • JulieK says:

            Slate did this, and after years of having 20% republicans, in 2016 they had 59 for Clinton, 1 for McMullin, 1 for Stein.

            Cite on the “20% republican” figure? That’s the exact distribution they had in 2008- one republican vote, one independent, 50-something democrats. Mickey Kaus wrote a blogpost saying “Journalists say that people overestimate how left-wing the media is. The only way that claim can be correct is if people think Slate had zero R’s instead of one.”

        • Yosarian2 says:

          I would rather read a news source that is *trying* to share unbiased facts then read one which is willing to *intentionally* slant their news coverage for political reason. Granted no one can really be 100% unbiased but I think the motivation makes one news source much more reliable then the other.

          I also like editorials and commentary and blogs written by people with an opinion. I just think that when you mix the two and blur the lines between news and editorial opinion the result is ugly.

          • Gilmore says:

            *trying* to share unbiased facts

            You misspelled ‘pretending’

          • Yosarian2 says:

            I don’t think they’re pretending. They don’t seem to favor one party over the other in political campaigns, for example.

            They do have unconscious biases that probably has an effect on how they cover issues and what kind of issues they consider important and things like that, but that’s not at all the same thing as deliberately trying to run a political propaganda campaign.

          • Nornagest says:

            You don’t need to be openly advocating something to be pushing a narrative. Somewhere in this monstrosity of a thread there’s an anecdote about how the NYT production process selects stories to fit their idea of how the national conversation should go, for example.

      • abc says:

        I think that if you cherry-pick issues where the Right is correct, then Breitbart, being further right, will of course be more correct.

        So what’s the right wing analogue of “hands up, don’t shoot”?

        • victa20 says:

          “Death Panels”?

          • What’s wrong with the “death panels” argument isn’t that it’s not true, it’s that some version of it exists under any system for allocating limited health care resources. Someone decides in some way who gets what treatment, and that means deciding that some people will die who could have lived at least a little longer.

            The way it is used is demagogic, but not fundamentally false.

          • victa20 says:

            @ Davidfriedman:

            Fair enough.

            Obama/Kenya?

          • herbert herberson says:

            What’s wrong with the “death panels” argument isn’t that it’s not true, it’s that some version of it exists under any system for allocating limited health care resources.

            It wasn’t true as to the particular policy it was used against; end of life counseling has almost nothing to do with health care rationing, and is a very good idea.

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            Did Fox do a lot of Birther stories?

            My main source of right-wing news is National Review, and they dismissed it as obvious nonsense before 2008 was even out.

          • Brad says:

            That ignores the context of how the term “death panel” was coined in order to bend unreasonably over backwards to apologize for the right right wing.

            It was coined to attack a provision that provided funding for end of life counseling.

          • RH28 says:

            Fair enough.

            Obama/Kenya?

            Was taken seriously by exactly nobody on the right but Trump. Granted, that’s a big exception, as that made him president, indicating that there were incentives for conservatives to take up this issue. But the fact is that they didn’t, and when Trump picked it up he wasn’t seen as a serious political figure.

            “Hands up, don’t shoot,” became the basis of a political movement, and Hillary Clinton was touring the country with Michael Brown’s mom after the Obama DOJ itself had concluded that he got shot in the process of attacking a police officer.

            Instead of thinking who is more biased overall, I like the idea of ranking by irrationality on issues. Liberals and race would be my number 1, followed closely by liberals and gender at 2. Maybe if I knew more about global warming or something else I’d put conservatives up there on that issue, but I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to say so.

          • vV_Vv says:

            What’s wrong with the “death panels” argument isn’t that it’s not true, it’s that some version of it exists under any system for allocating limited health care resources.

            Including the market.

          • Vorkon says:

            The whole birther controversy actually maps pretty much perfectly to “hands up, don’t shoot,” IMHO.

            It was a questionable, but believable proposition to start with, which a biased media pushed pretty heavily during the brief period before it had been definitively disproven, but which a large group of low-information supporters latched onto and refused to let go of, perhaps bolstered by the media in question mostly just ignoring that aspect of the issue once it was disproven, rather than going out of their way to point out how wrong they were.

            The scale of “hands up, don’t shoot,” might be slightly greater, with more media people pushing it, with less skepticism, for a longer period of time, and more people who still believe it today, but at their core they’re basically the same phenomenon.

            Most of the other examples people have brought up in this thread are questionable, at best, (i.e. “death panels” are misleading hyperbole, not a blatant falsehood) but the birther and “hands up, don’t shoot” phenomena map to each other remarkably well.

          • RH28 says:

            Obama/Kenya only taken seriously by Trump????

            I mean people with influence, not polls of what people believe. If you’re going to look at polls of the general public, you’ll find all kinds of crazy things on both sides. What I’m saying is that nobody in leadership among Republicans or Fox News pushed birtherism. I’m not sure about talk radio, if they did you’d have a point.

          • victa20 says:

            What I’m saying is that nobody in leadership among Republicans or Fox News pushed birtherism.

            Just a sampling of Fox News/Birtherism:

            https://mediamatters.org/research/2016/09/16/flashback-how-fox-news-promoted-trumps-birtherism/213152

            And a few people here, missing is Jim Inhofe and others:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories#Campaigners_and_proponents

          • victa20 says:

            And let’s not forget Sheriff Joe’s press conference *this past December* showing Obama’s BC was a “fake”:

          • RH28 says:

            Victa20,

            Ok, I accept your evidence. Good day.

          • Evan Þ says:

            the brief period before it had been definitively disproven

            A lot less brief – it was 2011 before the certified copy of the Certificate of Live Birth was released.

          • tscharf says:

            end of life counseling has almost nothing to do with health care rationing

            Not. It may not be explicitly about rationing, but the effect is the same. End of life counseling is going to include Hospice and subjects like quality of life under chemo and so forth. It will and should address wasting medical resources on hopeless cases. That third round of expensive hard core chemo for your stage 4 cancer that has metastasized everywhere when you can barely walk is not a good move according to reasonable counseling.

            You start hospice, you stop diagnostic treatments. Home hospice is cheap as dirt relatively. Disclosure: My mom was a hospice nurse for 20 years and died from breast cancer. She stopped chemo because it was “only extending death”.

          • Brad says:

            The birth notices in Hawaiian newspapers should have been enough for anyone. They came out as soon as the story surfaced in 2008.

          • Immanentizing Eschatons says:

            Instead of thinking who is more biased overall, I like the idea of ranking by irrationality on issues. Liberals and race would be my number 1, followed closely by liberals and gender at 2. Maybe if I knew more about global warming or something else I’d put conservatives up there on that issue, but I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to say so.

            Surely conservatives on God is number one? Granted liberals/leftists/progressives also usually believe in God, but it’s not a political issue for them.

          • codingmonkey says:

            Agree conservative faith in religions must be the top in irrationality. Anything beyond basic theism (I have to admit something made this place maybe it was a god) makes me question people’s intelligence.

          • victa20 says:

            Surely conservatives on God is number one? Granted liberals/leftists/progressives also usually believe in God, but it’s not a political issue for them.

            But how irrational about God are they during an argument? For instance, do they behave as irrationally when someone tells them god doesn’t exist, vs say, when someone says they think guns should be restricted, or how they behave when someone is talking about global warming? The visceral response to questioning the second amendment seems similar-ish to telling liberals race isn’t a social construct, etc.
            *Edit: That is, if we make a list, I think a part of the equation should be about the reaction of the interlocuter, as well as how rational the belief itself should be.

          • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

            Obama/Kenya thing was not even close to universally endorsed on the right at its height, even though the evidence was things like Obama’s book publisher falsely claiming he was born in Kenya. Yes, it wasn’t true, but it is not hard to see how it may be seen as evidence – it’s like if police dispatchers who worked the case would claim Brown did have his hands up during early investigation, and Wilson (the officer) would not contradict them initially, but then would have changed the version. Doesn’t change the facts, but surely contributes to how some people could be misled.

        • deciusbrutus says:

          “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

          • abc says:

            “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

            Um, you do realize that’s basically true.

          • Tekhno says:

            Surely, the disagreement is whether that good guy should always be the police.

          • TheEternallyPerplexed says:

            A cheap slogan that triggers emergency self-defense mode in the audience, and diminishes reasoning and understanding (and finding preventions) capacity.
            Don’t.

          • PedroS says:

            “You can get your way much better with a nice word and a gun that with just a nice word” 🙂

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            Um, you do realize that’s basically true.

            The framing is pretty infantile, and ends up being misleading. It seems like in the vast majority of cases, it’s a not-entirely-good-or-bad guy with a gun stopping a not-entirely-good-or-bad guy with a gun.

            “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
            – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

          • Allisus says:

            “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
            – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

            Bravo wysinwygymmv, bravo. This exact quote came to mind while reading this. I think this is a truth that is so fundamentally important to all situations/ideas/concepts. Most people fall into the trap of believing themselves to be the righteous ones (God is on our side, etc..) and that they are exempt from the usual irrationality of human beings. This is so often an impediment to rational thinking.
            Another way of putting it as stated by Peterson. “People cast themselves in the heroic role. If they had been in Nazi Germany they would have taken on the burden of fighting against the Nazis and defending the things that should’ve been defended. That’s a very foolish presupposition, as it’s evident from history that that isn’t what people did. If you were in Nazi Germany you would’ve been a Nazi.”

          • Vorkon says:

            The question at hand isn’t whether or not the framing is infantile, it’s whether or not it’s true.

            “The only thing that can stop someone intent on causing harm with a gun is someone else with an equivalent weapon or tactical advantage” is about as close to a tautology as you can get, and that’s what everyone who says “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” means.

            Anytime that argument is used, it is in response to the effectiveness of banning guns or other security measures, not a commentary on whether or not it is morally correct to shoot “bad guys.”

            Either way, how does that argument, even IF you accept the “good guy/bad guy” framing as misleading, map to a blatant falsehood, which is still accepted as fact and chanted at rallies to this very day? I’m hardly trying to say that the right doesn’t do this, too; there have been several good examples in this very thread, such as the birther conspiracy or pizzagate. You have plenty of examples to choose from. But seriously, respond to the question, don’t just start randomly listing things the right says that you don’t like.

          • po8crg says:

            What’s wrong with this is that it assumes you can’t prevent bad guys from getting guns. You can; you just need a societal consensus that guns are bad and a ban on guns.

            See: UK, Australia.

          • brenner says:

            I think you are being uncharitable, Vorkon. The implication of “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” is universally recognized among members of the right to be “We need more good guys with guns,” and the policy prescription is almost always “We need to make it easier to get guns.” Surely you can see why THAT claim is a bit more controversial and a bit less tautological.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Vorkon appeared to be talking only about the factual question, the one on which the OP was ridiculing the right-wing position. Of course if you go beyond that to “We need to make it easier to get guns” you’re bringing in some contestable value judgments; left-liberals are entitled to object to those. What they aren’t entitled to do is pretend that they’re thereby correcting a simple error of fact.

          • Z says:

            @ po8crg

            1. We as a society agreed that alcohol was bad and banned it. How did that work out?

            2. 1. We as a society have agreed that drugs are bad and banned. How is that working out?

            3. The UK and Australia are islands. The US has two porous borders.

            4. Mexico’s cartels import, steal, and manufacture both drugs and guns [1], [2], [3], [4].

            Please consider the evidence, both historic and current, before assuming a US gun ban will work out the way it did for the UK and Australia. And the story of those countries too are not as clear cut as you might think [1], [2].

          • ashlael says:

            I feel like the gun issue has some similarities to Scott’s description of witches and witch hunts.

            It may be the the case that if everyone was forced (or heavily socially pressured) to own and carry a gun, society would be safer. I’m not at all sure that is the case when guns are carried by everyone who wants one and no one who doesn’t. The people who don’t ever want to shoot someone are exactly the sort of people you would want to be armed.

            Also, a distinction really needs to be made between handguns and long guns (with the possible exception of break action shotguns that can be sawn off). The latter are disproportionately used for shooting things that are not people and are bad weapons for criminals. New Zealand barely regulates long guns at all, and they are pretty similar to Australia in terms of crime rate, gun violence etc.

          • Mary says:

            See: UK,

            Okay.

            I see a country that has seen violent crime steadily mount while its restriction on guns piled up.

            Was this injunction supposed to be relevant to the rest of your comment?

          • abc says:

            The framing is pretty infantile, and ends up being misleading. It seems like in the vast majority of cases, it’s a not-entirely-good-or-bad guy with a gun stopping a not-entirely-good-or-bad guy with a gun.

            Classic example of the fallacy of gray.

            The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
            The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view…”
            —Marc Stiegler, David’s Sling

          • sohois says:

            @Mary

            You see what? I’m not sure where you get your statistics, but it seems pretty difficult to note any consistent increase in violent crime, see: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/compendium/focusonviolentcrimeandsexualoffences/yearendingmarch2016/overviewofviolentcrimeandsexualoffences

            you will note that increases in violent crime appear to be largely the result of different police reporting methods and that crime surveys see violent crime having consistently fallen since a peak in 1995.

            Furthermore, I have no idea how you would propose a causal link between firearms in the UK, which have been heavily restricted since 1968, and violent crime rates today. Indeed i doubt there has been a period of modern British history in which firearm ownership was widespread.

          • JulieK says:

            Indeed i doubt there has been a period of modern British history in which firearm ownership was widespread.

            Obviously it’s easier to eliminate guns from your country if there weren’t so many to start with…

          • “Indeed i doubt there has been a period of modern British history in which firearm ownership was widespread.”

            I don’t know about amount of ownership, but I believe that at the beginning of the 20th century purchase was essentially unrestricted. I believe GKC mentions that when he got married he went into a shop and bought a revolver “to protect his bride.”

            My impression, again from literature not statistics, is that shotgun ownership was common, at least among land owners, not for protection but for sport.

            At the beginning of WWII, I believe there was extensive activity with private weapons being turned in to the government for military use–somewhere there should be figures on the numbers.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            Actually that’s factually untrue. In most of the cases where a mass shooter was stopped by a civilian or civilians, the people who stopped him were unarmed.

          • Skivverus says:

            In most of the cases where a mass shooter was stopped by a civilian or civilians, the people who stopped him were unarmed.

            I believe the standard objection to that statistic is not that it is false, but that it is the result of survivorship bias:
            First, mass shooters are presumably unlikely to seek victims where they know there will be armed opposition, and have their choice of venues. A similar issue exists in computer security (“Why Nigerian scammers say they’re from Nigeria” comes to mind).
            Second, a mass shooter that only manages to shoot one person before getting gunned down themselves doesn’t actually hit the threshold for a “mass” shooting (I believe the threshold is four victims, but recommend you check me on this).

          • Yosarian2 says:

            Ok, Skivverus, that may be a fair criticism. I’ll have to take a closer look at that statistic.

            More to the point, though, I have not seen a lot of evidence that arming a lot of civilians is an effective way to stop “a bad guy with a gun”. Intuitively it makes sense that it might, but even in states where a lot of people concealed carry, it just doesn’t seem to happen that often.

          • John Schilling says:

            More to the point, though, I have not seen a lot of evidence that arming a lot of civilians is an effective way to stop “a bad guy with a gun”. Intuitively it makes sense that it might, but even in states where a lot of people concealed carry, it just doesn’t seem to happen that often.

            Gary Kleck would like to have a word with you, or maybe a 2.5 million word monologue every year.

            But I’m guessing when you say “bad guy with a gun” you mean only spree killers and mass murderers, not the hundreds of thousands of ordinary common criminals who collectively cause a couple orders of magnitude more carnage than the high-profile nut cases.

            In which case, if you’re actually paying attention, there is a dog very conspicuously not barking. In a nation where about a quarter of the population owns handguns and about one in thirty regularly carries, approximately every single mass shooting incident has occurred in a legally designated gun-free zone where only the police are allowed to carry guns. Yes, there are places in the United States where only the police are allowed to carry guns, or nearly so. Why do you imagine it is that would-be mass murderers only ever manage to rack up newsworthy death tolls in these places?

          • Mary says:

            “In most of the cases where a mass shooter was stopped by a civilian or civilians, the people who stopped him were unarmed.”

            That’s because armed bystanders manage to kill such shooters before they hit the magic four that makes them “mass” shooters.

            CPR has never ever ever saved a drowning victim. Because if CPR saves you, you’re a near drowning victim.

          • ragnarrahl says:

            “That’s a very foolish presupposition, as it’s evident from history that that isn’t what people did. If you were in Nazi Germany you would’ve been a Nazi.””

            People who are in America now and don’t have a mainstream political ideology– unless their non-mainstream ideology is Nazi– have at least some basis for believing they would not have been Nazi in Nazi Germany. They’ve already proven that they resist the ideological impulse to conform to a national peer group.

          • ragnarrahl says:

            What’s wrong with this is that it assumes you can’t prevent bad guys from getting guns. You can; you just need a societal consensus that guns are bad and a ban on guns.

            In which case only government bad guys get guns.

          • John Schilling says:

            In which case only government bad guys get guns.

            No, the criminals still have them as well.

        • herbert herberson says:

          One right-wing version of “hands-up-don’t-shoot” is the idea that the “hands up don’t shoot” was definitively disproven, when actually all we ever had was an obviously biased state court proceeding and a federal investigation that looked at a very narrow question.

          Dorian Johnson wasn’t the most credible witness, but he was never convicted of perjury. “Hands up don’t shoot” never struck me as the most likely version of those events (with the possible exception of Walter Scott, these police shootings are not purposefully racist executions, they’re fearful overreactions), but that doesn’t mean anyone should take Darren Wilson’s uncross-examined and self-contradictory story as gospel.

          • theblighter says:

            That is not a correct recounting of events. It was not simply one man’s word against another’s: there was also forensic evidence.

            Dorian’s version had Wilson shooting Brown in the head execution style. Wilson’s version had him shooting a charging man after having scuffled with him in the car over his own gun.

            Three(!) different autopsies all produced evidence consistent w/ Wilson’s story, inconsistent w/ Dorian’s “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” one.

            But, sure, maybe the city’s autopsy and the one the family ordered b/c they didn’t trust the city and the one the federal government conducted b/c they either didn’t trust the first two or (less charitably) were really, really hoping to find something to bolster the narrative were all wrong and it’s really just one guy against another.

          • infiniteperplexity says:

            Speaking as a liberal, and as someone who read *every* witness statement from front to back, “hands up don’t shoot” has been conclusively disproven. The shooting was seen by about a dozen people, and while there were some minor inconsistencies in the accounts, Dorian Johnson was clearly lying.

          • herbert herberson says:

            Speaking as a liberal, and as someone who read *every* witness statement from front to back, “hands up don’t shoot” has been conclusively disproven. The shooting was seen by about a dozen people, and while there were some minor inconsistencies in the accounts, Dorian Johnson was clearly lying.

            Speaking as an attorney, eye-witness statements taken by the party which they favor and not subjected to cross are worth very, very little; least of all in a controversial and well-publicized case like that.

            (Of course, speaking as a liberal, I also wish Tamir Rice had been the catalyst for BLM instead–Bob McCulloch is a piece of garbage for convening a grand jury only to shamelessly sandbag it, but otherwise it’d be nice to have a better set of facts and there’s no shortage of cases out there that can do so)

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            It’s not just the fact that it was disproven. It’s that it was taken as is and reported as fact by the media. This is a common occurrence. When a source provides a soundbite that advances the left’s narrative, it is reported by CNN without qualification. Anything supporting the right’s narrative is either ignored or gets twelve “allegedlys” in front with an “(unconfirmed)” right after.

            And I don’t honestly think they’re cognizant of it. I think these are people who unironically believe “reality has a liberal bias.”

          • infiniteperplexity says:

            Outside view: The justice department has many lawyers, and they were willing to put their names on a report, extremely critical of the police department, that went the extra mile and declared Darren Wilson “innocent”, even though they were tasked only with deciding whether there was sufficient evidence to bring civil rights charges against him. Also, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, definitely not a right-wing outlet, gave “hands up, don’t shoot” four Pinocchios, its lyin’-est rating.

            Inside view: Roughly a dozen witnesses gave accounts that vary only slightly on what happened. Their accounts are broadly consistent with evidence from three autopsies, including one autopsy conducted at the family’s request. Witness 14 gave the longest and most detailed report; even though he(?) described the killing as an “execution” his account did not support “hands up, don’t shoot.” Two other witnesses gave accounts more supportive of “hands up, don’t shoot”; these accounts sound like scenes from two different bad action movies; both changed their stories under oath after the police challenged them.

            Speculative: Darren Wilson probably lied or at least hammed up some details of the incident, but those details were not directly relevant to the legal case against him, nor to whether “hands up, don’t shoot” is something that happened.

        • MugaSofer says:

          what’s the right wing analogue of “hands up, don’t shoot”?

          Global warming being a hoax? 90% of everything Trump says (e.g. that he watched Muslims cheering in the streets of New York on 9/11, that he would jail Clinton, that Obama was wiretapping him)? Mass rape waves in Europe? Pizzagate? “I can breathe”? Spirit cooking? Hillary Clinton’s imminent death from unspecified illness? The emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer? Abstinence-only sex ed? Satanic child abuse rings?

          Or maybe it’s all these crazy infowars articles I mocked a while back?

          It’s hard to decide.

          • Ryan says:

            An aside on Fox News. Initially I thought “Fair and Balanced” was mockery of the liberal press’ claim to be objective. But over time I decided it was just a bullshit slogan.

            Trump I think is different. When he was campaigning he said words to communicate with voters, but what he was communicating was pretty detached from his syntax.

            Finally, while I think you’re list makes sense, read up on the charges Anthony Weiner is facing down. He knew the girl was 15, he knew the girl was in high school. I don’t know what is or is not on his laptop, but I’m reminded of that old Chris Rock joke about how no one has every taken $400 out of an ATM at 3:00 am for something positive.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Infowars is perhaps non-central to right-wing media.

          • Deiseach says:

            The emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer?

            Yes, let’s all laugh cheerily about the guy who, with his three year old son in the same bed, continuing chatting up a woman not his wife while his wife was absent and showing her images of his hard-on visible through his underwear.

            The only reason “emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer” (and my understanding is that it was a shared computer, not his own) ever came to attention was because the authorities were looking for evidence of him sexting to a 15 year old girl, that he knew was a minor, and were not searching for copies of his wife’s work emails. That was just the cherry on top, so to speak.

            He’s not exactly an example you should bring up about “baseless and fabricated scandals thrown as mud against the Democrats/left/liberals”.

          • what’s the right wing analogue of “hands up, don’t shoot”?

            … Satanic child abuse rings?

            One of those cases was prosecuted by Janet Reno as Florida State Attorney. That was before Clinton appointed her as Attorney General.

            The McMartin case in L.A., the longest and most expensive criminal case in U.S. history, was prosecuted by L.A. District Attorney Ira Reiner, who later ran (unsuccessfully) for the Democratic nomination for Attorney General of California.

            For another case, from Wikipedia quoting The Week Magazine:

            “Coakley did not prosecute the case, which was already under way when she joined the office as an assistant district attorney in 1986. But years later, after the day-care abuse hysteria had subsided and she had won the office’s top job, she worked to keep the convicted “ringleader,” Gerald Amirault, behind bars despite widespread doubts that a crime had been committed … the convictions won by the Middlesex DA in the Fells Acres case have not borne up well. By today’s standards, the prosecution of the Amirault family, who owned and operated the day-care center in Malden, Mass., looks like a master class in battling witchcraft.”

            Coakley was Massachusetts Attorney General and unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the senate (to replace Ted Kennedy).

            I don’t swear no right wingers were guilty in that particular set of witch hunts, but that’s three Democratic politicians, two of them prominent at the national level, who played a sizable and ugly role.

            Did any Republican president appoint a Republican prosecutor involved in one of the cases Attorney General? Did any of them get a Republican nomination for the Senate?

          • abc says:

            Mass rape waves in Europe?

            What’s your claim. That every report you hear about about Muslims engaging in mass rape is a hoax?

            Pizzagate

            If you have a disprove, I’d love to see it. Near as I can tell the only argument against it was the low prior.

            Spirit cooking

            So your contention is that the photos were photo-shopped?

          • I’d like to add “Non-muslims not allowed into Birmingham”.

          • If you have a disprove, I’d love to see it. Near as I can tell the only argument against it was the low prior.

            I’m worried now. I can’t disprove that the Queen is a space-reptile in disguise…

          • johnvertblog says:

            Noted thing that’s not known ever to have happened on this planet, politicians systematically molesting children behind closed doors.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            We know where the pizzagate “scandal” came from. It was total invented on 4Chan out of nothing, bored people making up fake “code words” in emails .

            That’s not how you get truth. You can’t draw a map of New York city by closing your eyes and making something up and have any reasonable chance of getting it right.

            “It’s not impossible for it to be true” isn’t really an argument here, neither is “you can’t prove it’s not true.” It’s no more likely to be true in this case then it would be about any person in the world chosen at random, and in fact it’s significantly less likely true here then it is about any random person considering the level of scrutiny Hillary has been under for decades.

            You’re basically making the Russell’s teapot argument.

          • johnvertblog says:

            This is a common assertion. I was there at the start, though, and there was general agreement that the “code words” were dumb and a tactic to discredit actual crowdsourced investigation – which was already going strong by that point. Still, the code words spread a lot faster than the more substantial stuff, both because they were memetically catchy and easy-to-understand and, presumably, because they were being centrally “shilled”.

          • abc says:

            We know where the pizzagate “scandal” came from. It was total invented on 4Chan out of nothing, bored people making up fake “code words” in emails .

            Have you looked at the emails in question? They’re pretty clearly in some kind of spy-speak. Whether it refers to pedophilia or something else, I have no idea.

          • pdbarnlsey says:

            We had a bit of discussion here a few weeks back on whether Pizzagaters/the pizzagate curious were represented among the commentariat, and how that fit with its overall liberal slant. Take this for data, I guess.

            Beyond that, I am absolutely fascinated to hear about “the more substantial stuff” unearthed by the intrepid Pizzagate investigators, before they were cruelly undermined by some unhinged people in their midst making laughable claims.

            Johnvertblog makes the solid point that pedophile politicians have been shown to exist, therefore probably pizzagate, but I’m left wondering whether this, like code words, is just another attempt to undermine their cause by making it look extremely stupid.

          • johnvertblog says:

            I attempted to elaborate but my comment appears to have been deleted by moderation, which I must say is not exactly doing wonders for my impression of the way the topic is treated.

          • Nornagest says:

            You probably tripped over a banned word. A partial list is on the comments page in the header. Suggest using Harry Potter references and opaque injokes like the rest of us.

          • johnvertblog says:

            Oh, indeed I did. I feel kind of silly now, because the banned word I tripped over appears to have been banned with good intentions.

            Essentially, here are the worthwhile arguments for PizzaGate, in my view:

            #1: Suspicious phrases in the Podesta emails. You can’t just ascribe arbitrary “code word” meanings to them, but the lack of sense they make in context strongly supports the idea that they’re code words for something other than the literal meaning, which is Bayesian evidence for any hypothesis that involves Podesta and his circle doing something shady.
            #2: Several FBI-identified pedophilia symbols, which the relevant FBI document specifically states are used publicly in ways that could theoretically be innocuous for plausible deniability, appear in a high concentration in the logos and advertisements of businesses within a single block in Washington DC, which are owned by a small number of people who are part of a single social circle directly connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign through several people including John Podesta. The symbols are deliberately designed so they could be coincidentally recreated by chance, but the sheer concentration of them in one place is the strongest evidence for PizzaGate, IMO. It’s basic dogwhistling theory: to signal something that you can’t publicly signal, you have to do a lot of different plausibly deniable signals; I just remembered that Scott actually wrote an article about this idea a long time ago using the analogy of Russian spies who don’t know each other’s identities.
            #3: Creepy art that the Podestas collect. The Podestas are well-known among their friends and acquaintances as art collectors, and a lot of the art that they display in their house share themes of sexual violence, particularly towards children. As an opponent of thoughtcrime-based rhetoric, for example towards fanfiction on Tumblr, it would be wildly hypocritical for me to call this evil in itself; I would call it Bayesian evidence though.
            #4: Creepy social media pictures and posts from James Alefantis (the owner of the pizza parlor from which PizzaGate gets its name) and his friends, involving children. The most gut-churning one is probably the one you’ve likely seen, where James Alefantis appears to have duct-taped a young girl’s arms to a table in a possibly sexual position.
            #5: Concurrently with PizzaGate gaining traction, a certain meme, banned on this blog, arose in the mainstream media to discredit non-establishment news sources (theoretically only describing scam sites seeking ad revenue, but it’s a motte-and-bailey thing which has often been applied to PizzaGate). The timeline matches up perfectly for this meme to have been the outcome of elites panicking and scrambling to bury PizzaGate. This is the weakest link I’m putting in this post, since the elites have plenty of other reasons to create a meme to discredit news sources they don’t control, but still – it takes something BIG to get the elites to trot the Pope out to call you all coprophiles.

          • pdbarnlsey says:

            So the pope did endorse Trump? Or perhaps he’s in on it too…

            I recognise that you list it as the weakest link in you case, but, still, “my opponents have identified a series of actors manufacturing veritably false claims against them. To me, this suggests that they have a child sex dungeon next to the mozzarella cheese station” takes chutzpah.

            And then we’re back to “some of the shop signs in a one block area look a bit like pedophile symbols if you squint/are unhinged”. I need more on this please.

            Did that guy you sent to check things out come up with anything more on this?

            Is there any chance that organised pedophile rings amongst the rich and powerful might have moved on to technology more advanced than literally putting up signs advertising that one can “get your child sex/pizza here?”

            Honestly, please don’t stop providing detail – it’s the only way to drown out those guys who are undermining your cause with their stupid codeword stuff.

          • One Name May Hide Another says:

            And then we’re back to “some of the shop signs in a one block area look a bit like pedophile symbols if you squint/are unhinged”. I need more on this please.

            Did that guy you sent to check things out come up with anything more on this?

            That’s not at all what “we’re back to”, if you read johnvertblog’s comment. Also, any reason to think johnvertblog had anything to do with that guy who went to check things out?

            I understand the emotional need to ridicule conspiracy theories, because that’s what you seem to be doing here. I also like snarky sense of humor and I believe this comment section would be dull without it. However, in this particular case, I think it’s not very helpful.

            If I ever become enthralled with a conspiracy theory, I’d love to believe I could come to SSC for rational feedback. If I get comments like yours above, it will do nothing to convince me my pet conspiracy theory is wrong. Quite possibly it will have the opposite effect.

            To johnvertblog, I’d like to recommend Scott’s post on The Pyramid and the Garden.

          • pdbarnlsey says:

            One name, I don’t think that’s a very perceptive summary of the situation here with Johnvert.

            Let’s start with his factual claims:

            They are all incredibly stupid. One of the ones you’re upset about my skipping over is “they collect art I think is funny-looking”. While I didn’t take the time to say so, be assured that this, too, is incredible stupid.

            So we can get deeper into the weeds with the details of his (I’m pretty sure it’s “his”) theories, but these are not beliefs that warrant gentle handling.

            You also assert that Johnvert bears no responsibility for a guy who, taking the theories he is peddling here seriously, went and shot up the place. And you don’t recognise why that failed investigation might have some impact on the remaining credibility of the claims he’s still , for some reason, making.

            This is not “perhaps there are children being held under your pizza parlour”-level dumb, but’s it’s not exactly insightful commentary either.

            Second, what do we owe johnvert?

            This is debatable, but my answer is “nothing”.

            My audience is not really johnvert, who is either a congenital idiot or likes to play one at parties, but those conservatives here who have cheerfully climbed into bed with this type of “theorising”, and deserve to get a good look at their new partner in the cold light of day.

            We collectively lack the resources to save the johnvert’s of this world, and the best that we can hope for is that he feels a little less welcome in non-sewer venues.

            In a perfect world we’d go with what ever the non-snarky version of “and why do you feel that paedophiles would advertise on shop signs in a one block radius?” is, but time is short and the next best solution is that he be reminded that we recognise the quality of his arguments in an efficient manner.

            But more importantly, the several conservative commenters here, who try to treat this sort of stuff as politically useful innuendo (“was it ever really disproven?”) while retaining plausible deniability should feel like they need a shower after reading this guy’s stuff.

            I know I do.

        • grendelkhan says:

          Maybe there’s some motte-and-bailey going on; the motte is a well-considered, staid policy prescription, and the bailey is red meat for chanting hordes.

          So, on climate, the motte is that there’s uncertainty in the models, it’s a hard coordination problem, and we’re definitely not going about fixing it in the most cost-effective way–the sort of thing Bret Stephens has been writing about (though it still seems a tad disingenuous to me). The bailey is that the whole thing is bullshit intended to destroy capitalism.

          And on BLM, the bailey is, of course, “hands up, don’t shoot”, and more broadly, the idea that racist white cops are running around murdering black kids (‘state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies’) for funsies. The motte is Campaign Zero and the things Conor Friedersdorf writes about.

          • gbdub says:

            Doesn’t “motte-and-bailey” require both positions to be held by the same people? I’m not sure Bret Stephens wants to play in the “hoax to destroy capitalism” bailey.

          • grendelkhan says:

            You’re right; it’s just a regular old spectrum of opinion.

            I’m not sure Bret Stephens wants to play in the “hoax to destroy capitalism” bailey.

            Well… he does want to play in the “mass hysteria phenomenon” caused by “the totalitarian impulse”. He toned it down quite a bit for the Times.

          • The bailey is that the whole thing is bullshit intended to destroy capitalism.

            That’s a considerable exaggeration. The defensible version is that people on the left are willing to believe and propagate an exaggerated version of the problem because it provides arguments for policies they would be in favor of anyway.

            There is a popular cartoon which makes that point pretty clearly without, presumably, the author realizing the implications.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            The defensible version

            Ummm, I know you know the difference between a motte and a bailey, but it’s a tad ironic to see you flub this one. Or something.

          • grendelkhan says:

            Aaargh, that’ll teach me to try and use the local jargon. (Wait, why is it ironic? I’m not exactly an expert or anything.)

            DavidFriedman: The defensible version is that people on the left are willing to believe and propagate an exaggerated version of the problem because it provides arguments for policies they would be in favor of anyway.

            Sure, “if it bleeds, it leads”, and all that. That’s a defensible argument (though see here on scientists, not so much on media types), and there’s plenty of truth to it. But that’s not the excitingly spicy variant of the meme, in which climate change is a UN-led hoax to create a ‘new world order’, and it’s really about destroying capitalism. Those are real beliefs, really held by some people on the right.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @grendelkhan:
            I was ribbing Friedman a little bit, not you.

            Bailey’s aren’t defensible, so when he starts talking about “the defensible version” of a bailey, he is talking about the motte. This is humorous to me because of his long involvement with SCA.

      • Alex Zavoluk says:

        I also disagree with the assertion that Fox News is obviously more biased, and even have a citation on hand to provide more data than just anecdotes and bias: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/GrosecloseMilyo.pdf

        • deciusbrutus says:

          By not evaluating the quality of the think tanks, you don’t answer the question “What think tanks would a completely unbaised news source use?”

          • The paper is defining bias by reference to Congress. A completely unbiased news source would use the same distribution of think tanks as the median member of congress.

            It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic logic of what they are doing. They explicitly are not defining it by reference to truth.

          • Unsaintly says:

            That only works if the median member of congress is in the middle. However, congress is currently Republican controlled so you would expect the median member of congress to have a right-wing bias. Therefore, wouldn’t the actual hypothetical “unbiased news source” use a somewhat more left-wing distribution of think tanks?

          • Gobbobobble says:

            @Unsaintly

            As others have noted, the report is a bit outdated. In 2003 the houses of Congress were 51% and 52% GOP. Just enough to be a majority but I doubt enough to skew the median substantially.

          • Luke Somers says:

            Actually, that is just enough to skew the median substantially. When you’ve got a very bimodal distribution, just about anything is enough to skew the median substantially away from the MIDDLE.

        • TheEternallyPerplexed says:

          … from 2003.

        • JohnBuridan says:

          Thanks for the link! I’ll check it out this afternoon!

      • Steve Sailer says:

        In my opinion, the New York Times is clearly the highest quality news organization in the country.

        The big problem with the NYT is not the reporters or even the editors, it’s that the readers want their worldviews confirmed. So a lot of NYT articles are constructed upside down with the most interesting and unsettling news buried toward the very end where most subscribers don’t bother reading.

        • Scott says:

          The research would give that one to The Economist, by measure of overall trust in its reporting. And if you want data backing up the claim that mainstream media leans liberal, look no further than the number of reds in the left column versus the number of yellows in the right.

          Also of note is that The Wall Street Journal is the most politically balanced highly trusted source by both liberals and conservatives alike – if you’re looking for nonpartisan neutral news and don’t have the time to read many different outlets, I’d stick to those two.

          I think it’s not at all a coincidence that these two sources are behind a paywall. Advertiser-funded news only gets money if people click, and nothing makes people click like partisan outrage in the headline. The other 3 in the top 5 most trusted (BBC, PBS, NPR) also do not get their funding from advertiser pageviews, but from government, grants, and donations.

          • spinystellate says:

            While I understood the connection between “pay-per-click” and “crappy quality” before, I somehow never made the connection between “pay-per-click” and “ideological bias”.

            This connection suggests that a good media-improving campaign would be to refuse to read anything on the internet funded by pay-per-click, i.e. only read paid journalism or intellectually-motivated bloggers. Many of you probably already do this, but somehow I didn’t fully appreciate how important this step might be.

          • Janet says:

            The Economist probably is the best “mainstream” publication. Last year, they ran a cover article on “The Art of the Lie”, about how crazy “alternate facts” spread around on social media and partisan news sites. One of the examples of this sort of obvious falsehood which wouldn’t go away, was Breitbart, et. al. pushing the idea that Hillary Clinton had some sort of undisclosed medical issue. I mean, come on.

            They published on September 10th. The next day, of course, Hillary collapsed in public, due to an undisclosed medical condition.

            So that’s part of the problem: the Overton window, at least for the mainstream media, isn’t wide enough to encompass all of the actual reality around us. The idea that Hillary had some sort of potentially-disqualifying condition, even temporarily did, was totally unacceptable; and so they didn’t accept it. (Even afterwards, the media didn’t vigorously follow up the remaining questions about mis-aligned eyes, long disappearances from public view, etc. the way they dog-piled McCain, say.) But reality is nothing more nor less than that-which-we-must-accept-regardless, isn’t it?

            Another part, I would link to your own comments about how man is a rational animal, and so dismissing their rational thoughts with contempt, is a form of dehumanization. The mainstream media are “gatekeepers” and very specifically keep out facts, ideas, issues, opinions, stories, etc. that don’t reflect well on the Blue elite. No surprise that the Reds ultimately end up making their own media that won’t do that (or, more accurately, were easy pickings for Murdoch). Also no surprise that you find gandersauce to be very distasteful– they ignore important issues, focus on trivial, hammer your side for any failing but ignore/downplay the same thing on your opponents’ side, bash down strawmen, etc.

            (For grins, I just clicked over to CNN.com… the headline is “GOP split on gutting protections for the sick”. Come on. Tell me that’s a ‘neutral’ take on healthcare reform. Tell me that’s ‘better’ than Breitbart. Tell me that the Reds left because they don’t like the ‘facts’ that journalists uncover.
            Even as writing for liberals, this fails to convey what’s actually being discussed and to enlighten on how to influence the result effectively.)

          • Scott says:

            @Janet, I mostly agree. But I think you have your Scotts mixed up – I’m a random one and not Mr. Alexander. (There’s too many of us…)

          • pdbarnlsey says:

            Janet, that’s an unhelpful airbrushing of Breitbart’s reporting and that of the economist.

            From the story itself:

            “A case in point is the recent speculation about the health of Mrs Clinton. It started with videos purporting to show Mrs Clinton suffering from seizures”

            These videos did not show Hillary Clinton suffering seizures, and no subsequent evidence supported this claim. So you’re going with “something of the general nature they claimed occurred later, victory for journalism!”, which I think shows where you have to set the bar in order to get comfortable with conservative media.

            As far as “GOP split on gutting protections for the sick”, I think that’s an unreasonably tendentious framing, given journalistic norms, but it’s not factually inaccurate (depending on how deep we require a “gutting” to be). The bill does cut protections for the sick in order to liberate funds for a future tax cut targeting high income earners.

            So, yeah, that’s both better than Breitbart and better than your mischaracterisation of the Economist’s reporting, because there aren’t any lies in it.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        The New York Times has never allowed the alliterative term “hate hoax” to appear in its pages since 1851. It is highly adverse, presumably for Sapir-Whorf Light reasons, to allowing the concept of a hate hoaxes to find footing in its readers’ minds.

        Breitbart uses “hate hoax” all the time to categorize hate hoaxes.

        Does this mean the NYT is more biased on this topic than Breitbart or vice-versa?

        Personally, I think the more conceptual categories the better. If you accept my premise, then this makes Breitbart more sophisticated conceptually than the NYT on this one topic.

        • Enkidum says:

          Though I’m loathe to admit it, you’re probably right about this specific point.

      • vV_Vv says:

        Breitbart is better compared to the Huffington Post or The Guardian, CNN is better compared to Fox News.

        So, does your point boil down to right-wing media being honest about its leaning while the left-wing media being dishonest about it?

        • Ryan says:

          When Fox News first came out I thought their “fair and balanced” slogan was just satire, “ha ha, we’ll claim to be objective too.”

          Now, though, I think they were just ass holes.

          What I like about Breitbart is not so much their honesty about bias, but rather their philosophy of “the mainstream press leaves out any part of reality which contradicts the narrative, we’re here to find and publish what they leave out.” In a weird way they make the overall press more objective.

      • Deiseach says:

        Reading this post reminded me of when Richard Dawkins was talking about the Catholic Church as the Evilest Evil That Ever Eviled In The Entire History Of Evil, which more or less led me to go “Well, okay then!”

        Conservatives are the Most Biased Biased In The Entire History Of Bias? Well, okay then!

        Fox News is a Rupert Murdoch operation. Rupert Murdoch has one guiding principle: making money. He finds the right/conservatism more congenial to that end, but he’ll happily throw his media empire’s support Labour’s way when it’s politically convenient (New Labour or Tories Lite, that is). He was born in Australia, moved to Britain and made noises about taking out citizenship there when that was the base for his news organisation, then finally took out US citizenship for the sake of cash money “to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own US television stations. This resulted in Murdoch losing his Australian citizenship”. His marriage to Wendi Deng was seen by some as being as much (or mainly) about getting a toe-hold in the Chinese market as True Love.

        Rupert Murdoch is a capitalist. He has no other conservative values than that. I honestly think his creation of Fox was as much about not being able to get a wedge into the existing liberal-oriented newspaper world in the USA (his acquisition of the New York Post and turning it into a tabloid was on the same lines as his business model in Britain but he wasn’t able to pick up an American plum – or former plum – the equivalent of The Times in the USA as he had managed to do in Britain) as it was identifying a gap in the market for pandering (let’s call it that) to the right-wing consumers of opinion and reportage.

        Anyway, this gives me a chance to use my links about The New York Times in particular and “is it/isn’t it a liberal newspaper”.

        2004, the new Public Editor, Daniel Okrent answered that question Of course it is:

        TIMES publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn’t think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism. He prefers to call the paper’s viewpoint ”urban.” He says that the tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment The Times occupies means ”We’re less easily shocked,” and that the paper reflects ”a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility.”

        He’s right; living in New York makes a lot of people think that way, and a lot of people who think that way find their way to New York (me, for one). The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears, a condition magnified by the been-there-done-that irony afflicting too many journalists. Articles containing the word ”postmodern” have appeared in The Times an average of four times a week this year — true fact! — and if that doesn’t reflect a Manhattan sensibility, I’m Noam Chomsky.

        But it’s one thing to make the paper’s pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don’t think it’s intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn’t have to be intentional.

        2010/2011, the former Editor, Bill Keller, rejoins that it’s not, or at least not in the sense of having a deliberate liberal/Democrat slant in the news coverage and editorialising. It’s a liberal paper in the same sense as a liberal arts college, it has an urban, sophisticated, modern, cosmopolitan background and its staff reflect that:

        “We’re liberal in the sense that … liberal arts schools are liberal,” Keller noted, during a recent dialogue recorded at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. “We’re an urban newspaper. … We write about evolution as a fact. We don’t give equal time to Creationism.”

        Moderator Evan Smith, editor of the Texas Tribune, jokingly shushed his guest and added: “You may not be in the right state for that.”

        Keller continued: “We are liberal in the sense that we are open-minded, sort of tolerant, urban. Our wedding page includes — and did even before New York had a gay marriage law — included gay unions. So we’re liberal in that sense of the word, I guess. Socially liberal.”
        Asked directly if the Times slants its coverage to favor “Democrats and liberals,” he added: “Aside from the liberal values, sort of social values thing that I talked about, no, I don’t think that it does.”

        Being right is necessary but not sufficient. We also strive to be impartial. We are agnostic as to where a story may lead; we do not go into a story with a preconceived notion. We do not manipulate or hide facts to advance an agenda. We strive to preserve our independence from political and economic interests, including our own advertisers and including our own government. (NPR, whose news coverage I admire, must surely be wondering whether a federal subsidy is worth its vulnerability to the riptides of Congressional politics.)

        My little realm, the newsroom, consists of about 1,100 people. Every one of them has opinions about a lot of things. But just as doctors and lawyers, teachers and military officers, judges and the police are expected to set aside their own politics in the performance of their duties, so are our employees. This does not mean — as one writer recently scoffed — that we “poll people at both extremes of any issue, then paint a line down the middle and point to it as reality.” It does not mean according equal weight to every point of view, no matter how far-fetched. (Sorry, birthers, but President Obama is an American citizen.) Impartiality is, for us, not just a matter of pretending to be neutral; it is a healthful, intellectual discipline. Once you proclaim an opinion, you may feel an urge to defend it, and that creates a temptation to overlook inconvenient facts when you should be searching them out.

        In short, our mission is not to tell you what we think or what you are supposed to think, and it is certainly not to pander to your prejudices. It is to supply to you, as best we can, the basis to make up your own minds.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          It’s useful to think of the New York Times as an institution that represents the finest traditions of genteel German-Jewish-Americans. The Ochs-Sulzberger family has owned the Times since the late 19th Century and has done well by it.

          There was a lot of resentment among more bumptious Eastern European Jews toward German Jews in the U.S. (e.g., the Century Country Club in Westchester County wouldn’t let Russian Jews join until after WWII, when Scarsdale diet doctor Herman Tarnower was let in as somebody who obviously wouldn’t get involved in a scandal). But that has largely been forgotten as intra-Jewish discrimination has been retconned into anti-Semitism in the interest of Jewish communal amity.

          • Ryan says:

            I don’t remember who originally said this (wouldn’t be surprised if it was you), “the more time Koreans spend hating the Japanese, the less time they spend hating each other.”

            It’s a pretty good rule of thumb for everything.

      • nyccine says:

        But ignoring the issue of which side is more correct, it seems to me like Breitbart has a stronger and more overt conservative slant than CNN does a liberal slant, or at least that it makes much less of a claim to be a neutral gatekeeper. Would you disagree?

        There are two very important sleights of hand being played here. The first is in the form of “answer the question you (not Scott specifically; this trick was played by the press long before anyone commenting here was born, we’ve all just fallen for and internalized the trick) want to ask instead of the one actually being asked.”

        Accusations of “bias” are accusations that one’s positions on an issue are influencing one’s discussion of the issue; in the case of the press, this accusation means that the press is engaged in one or more of the following:
        -Only reporting on stories that make sides opposing their favored position look bad, or that make their favored position look good.
        -Present facts that shore up the favored position, or discount opposing parties, and suppress, to at least some degree, facts that don’t help the narrative.
        -Outright lying about facts and/or claims in order to defend the favored position, or attack opposing position.
        “How biased is CNN, relative to Fox?” is a question of how much of the above CNN does, and how hard they do it; telling me the position they are biased in support of isn’t as “extreme” as Fox isn’t germane to the question at all, yet is presented as answering the question.

        The other sleight of hand is pretending that CNN’s worldview is less “extreme” than other positions by arbitrarily assigning it a position on a meaningless 2-dimensional axis. Contrary to assertions that it’s not as left as, say, MSNBC, I would contend that the globalist Neoliberal position is rather extreme compared to American norms, and on many positions is almost completely incompatible with the expectations of a representative republic.

    • Mazirian says:

      And it’s not just the media that is wrong about race. Social science is equally bad. Much of American social science is dedicated to producing findings in favor of progressive racial narratives. I mean things like “stereotype threat” causing achievement gaps, “implicit prejudice” causing discrimination, “diversity” being beneficial for productivity and so on. A critical reading of the literature reveals that the evidence for each of these propositions is essentially nil. Shouldn’t the fact that social science produces ideologically motivated racial frauds of this sort on a continual basis make conservative skepticism of social science claims the rational, scientific position rather than an expression of tribal epistemology?

      • Enkidum says:

        I must have missed the boat on the stereotype threat being a false finding thing – can someone point me to relevant paper(s)?

        • Eltargrim says:

          Inasmuch as you trust Wikipedia, it has links to the appropriate papers. If they’re paywalled and you can’t get access, I’d be happy to try and pass them along.

          • Enkidum says:

            Thanks! No problem with paywalls (I work at a university), but I am apparently way too lazy to Google for 30 seconds. I’ll download them and have my worldview ANNIHILATED.

          • Eltargrim says:

            Annihilated would be strong, I think. A healthy injection of doubt due to the possibility of publication bias and weak stats, perhaps? I mean, the only somewhat recent scientific findings I would characterize as being annihilated are the Wakeman autism/vaccine study and the LaCour fraud.

            I have much sympathy for my colleagues working in human sciences. It’s hard enough to tease out effects when you’re studying simple physical systems; I’d hate having to study people.

          • Enkidum says:

            I was being silly with the “annihilated” thing, and agree with your point. I do work with human data (cog sci / neurosci) and its complexity makes it very easy to come to erroneous conclusions for a variety of reasons.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Actually, it’s surprising how little support the social sciences come up with for the conventional wisdom. I’ve been a big aficionado of the social sciences for 45 years and they have been consistently politically incorrect if you read them closely and critically.

        Ever since the federally funded Coleman Report of 1966, mainstream social sciences have been full of hatestats.

        • Progressive Reformation says:

          And yet somehow the conventional wisdom remains, well, the conventional wisdom. In your view, what mechanisms prevent these ‘politically incorrect’ results from finding their way into public knowledge, and is there a way to change this?

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            What do the social sciences have to say about how conventional wisdom works?

          • Steve Sailer says:

            What happened to Larry Summers when he let slip some hatefacts? What happened to James D. Watson?

            People are generally not going to pay much attention to facts that get even incredibly famous and powerful individuals shown the door.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            In 2013, there was a survey of academics attending a conference on intelligence. According to the expert respondents, the most reliable source of journalism on IQ matters in English turned out to be … me.

            http://www.unz.com/jthompson/what-intelligence-researchers-think/

          • Progressive Reformation says:

            Steve, that part is clear as day to me – I suppose I wasn’t being clear with my question, which was more along the lines of “who wields the power to censor these results?” Is it the radical students, or the radical professors, or someone else? If it is either the radical students or the radical professors, are they a minority, and if so, how did they acquire this power?

            And, of course, there is the second part: how can we change this?

          • Steve Sailer says:

            A lot of the mechanism is Voltaire’s “pour le encourage les autres:” the occasional random extreme over-reaction causes a lot of self-policing. America’s most famous living man of science is forced to resign from heading the great medical laboratory he rebuilt from decay over the last 4 decades because some remarks he made in seeming confidence made their way into the newspaper? Uh-oh …

            It’s kind of like puppy-training. If you want your pup to grow up to be cringing and dependent upon you, use intermittent reinforcement: beat him randomly rather than consistently. Thus the inconsistency of the beatings for violations of political correctness has a bigger impact than if there were carefully worked out bright lines that everybody could understand and follow.

            In reality, there is a lot of randomness in the system of punishments.

            One of the things that randomness does is it encourages people to believe that those who got punished must have had it coming.

            I hope I contributed to Scott’s more cautious new position about what he’ll allow to be discussed by helping him come to doubt his overconfident previous assumption that all he has to do is be like Pinker instead of Charles Murray or Larry Summers and he won’t get in trouble.

            In reality, Pinker is like a cross between Murray and Summers, so Scott shouldn’t be so confident.

          • Progressive Reformation says:

            That part, too, is fairly clear to me. I even made the same points myself a couple months back in a debate with a Harvard-trained CEU professor of philosophy: https://medium.com/@progressive.reformation/i-already-gave-you-several-examples-of-unpunished-violence-1e8a07a8646f

            In the case of universities canceling speakers, it seems fairly clear to me that the problem is a loud, violent, radical minority of students. Administrators, not wanting to deal with a likely or even merely possible, um, “fecal hurricane”, buckle and even do some ‘self-policing’ as you describe it.

            For the James Watson case it is less clear to me. The lab he resigned from was a private lab – no radical students to cause trouble, etc. So what happened? Does Cold Spring Harbor Lab maintain close relationships with universities it fears offending (and the universities are then basically held hostage by loud violent radical etc. student groups)? Was it pure media pressure – perhaps making the lab fear for its funding? Or they were afraid of offending some researchers? Or maybe the culture of self-policing is just so pervasive that Watson was forced to resign without any concrete threat? Or some combination of all of these?

            Anyway. All of the above hypotheses seem plausible to me, but I’m curious to know if you favor a specific one (or combination of them).

            Finally, to get back to my original question: Who, specifically, is preventing the conventional wisdom in social science from changing? If, as you say, the journals are full of “hatestats”, are they clearly stated or do you have to read carefully to pick up on them?

            And whose job is it to turn research into the conventional wisdom? Is it usually the university’s media-relations engines, or the mainstream press, or conference presentations, or… etc, etc, etc. After all, depending on whose job it is, different “censors” come into play (if it’s the universities’ news offices – my guess for most likely – then the culprit is probably radical students; etc.)

            And, again, most importantly: do you think there is any way to change this? If we managed to reduce the power of organized loud violent etc. students, would that by itself solve the problem, or do we have to rein in some radical minority of professors too? etc.

      • grendelkhan says:

        Social science is equally bad. Much of American social science is dedicated to producing findings in favor of progressive racial narratives.

        I’ve had a published research scientist working in psychological statistics tell me that stereotype threat explains the black-white test gap. (It was the obvious misreading of the first graph here.) I don’t think it was anything sinister, just motivated stopping, but it was staggering just how bad the mistake was. I guess this is what happens when you let your guard down.

        • Progressive Reformation says:

          The whole “stereotype threat explains the gap” stance – as a mainstay of the ultra-progressive-SJ party line (I’ve heard it independently from several friends who are very much ultra-progressive-SJ-ists) – has always puzzled me somewhat.

          Suppose for a minute that it is, in fact, true (it probably isn’t, but bear with me). Wouldn’t that make cultural associations coming from within the black community – e.g. “oreo”, “acting white”, etc. – a major source of negative stereotypes which would then impact education? And wouldn’t that basically completely ruin their proposed solution of “everything would be fine if white people would admit guilt and stop being super implicitly racist all the time” – because there would still be this kind of self-stereotyping?

    • Enkidum says:

      I think one very important distinction between Breitbart et al and the mainstream left-leaning news is that the mainstream news does not commit outright fraud. Breitbart, on the other hand, became famous largely because of James O’Keefe’s videos targetting ACORN and Shirley Sherrod, which were actively promoted and encouraged by Bannon and his cronies. There is no equivalent of this on the left-leaning mainstream side. Being fooled by stories that fit the narrative you support (which is what happened with the fake hate crimes post-election) is a quite different sin than what O’Keefe did. I suppose the closest thing on the left-wing side would be Michael Moore’s work, which is not, and never has been, a centerpiece of the New York Times or Washington Post’s editorial pages.

      This is one way in which it’s really true that one side is simply worse. There is an abandonment of the notion that one should stand on a bedrock of truth on the Breitbart side of things, indeed it was precisely by abandoning this that they became a force to be reckoned with.

      Now, I don’t mean to pretend that there aren’t people on the left with equally appalling attitudes towards things like truth, fact-checking, and rejecting false stories even if they support our side. Trust me, I know plenty of the left wing equivalents of the worst right wing scumbags. But the point is that there are numerous large and powerful institutions, among which the entire mainstream media belongs, where these attitudes are kept in check through formal processes, explicit ideological commitments, and (probably most important of all) implicitly-learned habits. The same is not true of Breitbart and similar places.

      I think, as Scott says, that this is an appalling and dangerous state for the Western world to be in, but here we are. I also agree that there are many ways in which the left holds responsibility for this state, and this post points to some of them. But at the end of the day, I’m not going to trust something that’s only reported on Breitbart (or a similar site), because I know they have crossed the line into outright fabrication and slander on more than one occasion, and see nothing wrong with doing so, whereas in every case that I know of where a reporter has taken steps in this direction in the mainstream press, they have had their careers destroyed. And that’s not because I’m a liberal sissy cuck whatever (though I’m sure I am), it’s because I’ve got some minimum fucking standards, and the left wing media has a much better history of meeting those standards.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

        You shouldn’t trust anything that comes from Breitbart. You also shouldn’t trust anything that comes from the New York Times. Or at the very least “trust, but verify.”

        Nullius in verba is a hard code to live by but it’s a worthwhile attempt.

        Anyway, there has been plenty of fraud in mainstream news lately and much of it has been insultingly obvious. The pictures of migrant “children” in their twenties and thirties and the Rolling Stone rape scandal are the first to jump out at me. The fact that you don’t see it doesn’t mean that it’s rare, it means that you’re not paying attention to it.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          The NYT controls carefully what concepts are considered mainstream. For example, even though there have been countless hate hoaxes going back to Al Sharpton’s Tawana Brawley hate hoax 30 years ago, which made Tom Wolfe’s current bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanity seem understated, the NYT refuses to publish the 9 character string “hate hoax.” Thus, every single time, the NYT publishes a fraudulent hate hoax it’s a completely random accident, not something that it should have been on the look out for … because there’s no such thing as a “hate hoax.”

          • MugaSofer says:

            The term “hate hoax” does not appear to have existed off of outright white supremacist sites prior to 2013, and seems to have originated on Stormfront. I wasn’t familiar with it before today, despite being thoroughly familiar with the concept.

            I don’t think that the mainstream media’s failure to use this term is particularly revealing.

            (Although it is definitely true that they are insufficiently skeptical of dramatic, media-friendly hate crimes.)

          • suntzuanime says:

            It’s less an issue that they don’t use Steve Sailer’s specific name for it, and more an issue that they don’t use any name for it, they don’t recognize it as a phenomenon and a possibility to be aware of when reporting on anonymous “hate crimes”, and they treat every hoax that gets revealed as “shocking, no one could have predicted this”.

            They even piled on some of the “no one could have predicted this” in the case where they had previously savaged Trump for predicting it, which I thought was especially brazen of them. O the fuckers.

          • Ryan says:

            Does the NYT even SlateStarCoxex bro?

            The Toxoplasma of Rage

            https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

            Not just a convincing case that prominent hate crimes are likely to be false, but also a convincing explanation about why they are likely to be false.

            Come on NYT, start surfing the right internet sites and step your game up.

          • JulieK says:

            I’ve seen the phrase “hate crime hoax” more than “hate hoax.”

          • pdbarnlsey says:

            “Hate hoax” strikes me as very Daily Mail or (I assume, I don’t read it) New York Post. It just has a bit of an “EU numpty” or “sex romp” or “paedo” or “fat cats spending our tax dollars” air about it.

            You may have a freestanding point about coverage of the incidents themselves, but you undermine it by vigorously lobbying for terminology which sounds like it came straight from stormfront/the national enquirer.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            “Hate Hoax” was the title of a 2004 article by me in The American Conservative about when Claremont McKenna professor Kerri F. Dunn trashed her car and then blamed it on her conservative white male students.

          • pdbarnlsey says:

            “Hate Hoax” was the title of a 2004 article by me in The American Conservative about when Claremont McKenna professor Kerri F. Dunn trashed her car and then blamed it on her conservative white male students

            I believe that is consistent with my earlier point about the optics (euphonics?) of “hate hoax”.

            And I can’t help feeling like “why isn’t the New York Times popularising this term I coined?! I blame liberal bias!” is maybe a bit self-serving. In fact, I call it “self-serving-Sailerism”, and look forward to the NYT doing likewise, or otherwise it’s biased.

      • howardtreesong says:

        Dan Rather engaged in outright fraud. So too did 20/20 or whoever it was that set up GM cars with model rocket engines under them to try to convince everyone they were a fire risk.

        I’m generally conservative and likely have confirmation bias, but I find MSNBC to be much further left than Fox is right, and the NYT to be much further left than the WSJ is right.

        • eccdogg says:

          I think you are correct on NYT vs WSJ. The only thing that is really right wing in the WSJ is the editorial page.

          You are also probably correct on Fox vs MSNBC.

          Fox was created because there were 6 news sites that were essentially a 4 on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the most conservative. In a stroke of business genius Murdoch created a 7/8 and took almost half the audience leaving the rest to be split among the previous six.

          MSNBC was a response to create a liberal Fox, but since the main stream was already a 4 they had to go even further to differentiate.

          • hlynkacg says:

            That is my assessment as well. I feel like Fox was a 6 or 7 early on (I remember their initial coverage of 9/11 and GWOT being quite sober and reserved) but they drifted right during the Obama years to the “strong 8” they now occupy.

          • Marshayne Lonehand says:

            That Faux-News Report “Fred Rogers — this Evil, Evil Man” pretty much turned-up the alt.Boeotian knob all the way to 11, didn’t it?

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Dan Rather didn’t solicit the memos. He ignored clear evidence that they were fake because he didn’t want to believe it, and insisted that the source was “unimpeachable,” and a bunch of other things that deserve to end one’s journalism career, but he didn’t commit fraud.

          • Radford Neal says:

            It’s barely conceivable that Rather didn’t realize the memos were fake at the time of the initial broadcast, but it is beyond belief that he didn’t realize they were fake when defending their authenticity later.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            To this day he and Mapes insist they were legit. I suppose he’s faking it, but more likely is that he just refuses to consider facts harmful to his worldview.

        • The Nybbler says:

          _Dateline_ is the one which blew up Chevy trucks with rocket engines.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Rolling Stone got fined $3.5 million for publishing a wholly fictitious libel about fraternity initiation gang rape on broken glass, and that’s even with the fraternity lawsuit still on deck.

        The NYT has printed a lot of wholly fraudulent stories about gang rape at UVA and Duke because they want to believe that evil cishet white male Haven Monahans are out raping away. The NYT and the Obama Administration frequently conspired to launch various manias and moral panics, such as World War T in 2013.

        • MoebiusStreet says:

          I think Enkidum is trying to draw a distinction in that some Conservative stories were actively fabricated, whereas the Rolling Stone rape story and others were just a matter of suppressing their skepticism of something that was given to them.

          But I don’t think that the Left media is always on the correct side of this distinction anyway. I mentioned elsewhere the case of NBC’s editing of the George Zimmerman 911 call.

          • Ryan says:

            One of the things which came out at the defamation trial is that the Rolling Stone author basically started out with the premise of the story: college campus frat culture rape, administration silences victim, and then shopped around for someone to say that happened to them.

            If that was step one of your journey, and steps 2 through 10 involved suppressing skepticism, maybe that’s not fraud exactly, but it’s close to a moral equivalent.

          • Aapje says:

            I would say that there is no clear line between journalist malpractice and outright lying.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            The UVA Rolling Stone hoax was actively fabricated by coed Jackie Coakley, based on a Law & Order episode she watched, some half-remembered dialog from Dawson’s Creek, and so forth. Jackie’s gangrape on broken glass fraternity initiation ritual was so prima facie absurd that you’d have to be utterly marinated in the current hate propaganda against straight white gentile males to fall for it, but Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Jann Wenner fell awfully hard.

          • Nornagest says:

            Gentile?

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Scores of other professional journalists praised Erdely’s Night of Broken Glass hate fantasy, such as Jeffrey Goldberg, since promoted to Editor in Chief of The Atlantic.

            It took five days for a single professional journalist, Richard Bradley, to go public with his skepticism about this story, and it was four days before a second pro, me, got up the courage to link to Bradley’s dissent.

            That opened the floodgates.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Erdely’s Rolling Stone UVA article is full of paranoia about dangerous, hateful conservative blonds engaging in Nights of Broken Glass.

            http://takimag.com/article/a_rape_hoax_for_book_lovers_steve_sailer/print#axzz4g3iKzb00

            Ironically, but predictably, her hate hoax led to an actual Night of Broken Glass on campus as liberal students smashed the windows of the fraternity libeled in her article.

            Interestingly, at the U. of Pennsylvania, Erdely had worked for notorious hoaxer Stephen Glass, subject of the interesting little movie “Shattered Glass.”

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Gentile?

            As in, not jewish.

          • Nornagest says:

            I know what it means. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a culture warrior use the word, or any synonym of it, in a culture-war context aside from a few Jewish writers talking about the Jewish community. Jewishness is just a non-issue in most contexts, with the arguable exception of Israel, but even that seems to be cast more as a West-vs-Arab-world thing than a Jewish-vs-Muslim thing.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Then, for better or for worse, you musn’t be very familiar with Steve Sailer’s writings, as it’s a common theme in them.

          • Nornagest says:

            No, I’m not, which is why I was trying to draw out some elaboration from him.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Well I’m no Sailer, but basically, when it comes to culture war topics in America, he considers liberal, secular jews as a distinct interest group. Probably because this “solves” the issue of self-hating white people in culture wars: they’re not self-hating, they’re jews “hating” on WASPs.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            If you read Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s works carefully, you’ll notice that anti-gentilism is recurrent. She finds the blond gentiles at UVA, with their admiration for Thomas Jefferson, disturbing and dangerous. In Erdely’s telling they seem always about to break out into a Kristallnacht: thus the bizarre Shattered Glass theme running through Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus.”

          • Steve Sailer says:

            From my 12/3/2014 column in Taki’s Magazine analyzing Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s 11/19/2014 9000 word article “A Rape on Campus:”

            A stone-cold sober coed named Jackie is lured by her date “Drew” to an upstairs room at the fraternity house. She is immediately tackled by one of the eight men waiting in the pitch darkness. Their toppling bodies crash through a glass table unaccountably left out in the middle of the rape room. Amidst the shattered glass, the young men beat her and hold her down on the floor. The shards grind into her bleeding back as she is methodically raped in the dark for three hours by seven young men, while her upperclassman date and another man coach them.

            The frat boys egg on one reluctant pledge: “Don’t you want to be a brother?”

            “We all had to do it, so you do, too.”

            In other words, this is supposed to be some sort of fraternity initiation rite. (That fraternities at UVA hold their initiations in the spring, not in September, isn’t mentioned in the article.)

            The last lad, whom Jackie somehow recognizes in the dark as a boy in her anthropology class, rapes her with a glass bottle.

            What should we make of Erdely’s “brutal tableau” of beer bottle rape amidst the shattered glass?

            As a work of journalism, it’s most interesting for what it inadvertently reveals about the bizarre legends that seem plausible to American media consumers in 2014.

            As a creative work of art, however, drawing (consciously or unconsciously) upon multiple influences such as the blockbuster Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hate porn franchise and the Shattered Glass biopic of magazine article fabricator Stephen Glass, it is more impressive. It’s first-rate propaganda, and Erdely’s adroit techniques should be studied by those concerned about how gullible Americans are.

            Some of the literary power of Erdely’s nightmarish retelling of poor Jackie’s saga stems from the writer’s use of glass, both broken and bottle, as an ominous multipurpose metaphor. Throughout “A Rape on Campus,” glass stands for fragility, bloodshed, loss of virginity, alcohol, littering, male brutishness, danger, violence—even a literal phallic symbol. Glass represents not the calm transparency of a window pane, but the occluded viciousness of the white conservative Southern male power structure.

            For example:

            “The first weeks of freshman year are when students are most vulnerable to sexual assault. … Hundreds of women in crop tops and men in khaki shorts stagger between handsome fraternity houses, against a call-and-response soundtrack of “Whoo!” and breaking glass. “Do you know where Delta Sig is?” a girl slurs, sloshed. Behind her, one of her dozen or so friends stumbles into the street, sending a beer bottle shattering.”

            Strangely, just about the only people in America who don’t seem to have accepted at face value Jackie’s theory of a nine-man conspiracy to rape her are those portrayed in the Rolling Stone article as knowing the poor young woman well. …

            During her sophomore year, Jackie became prominent in the struggle on campus against rape culture. But the patriarchy struck back brutally last spring, using its favorite tool of violence, the glass bottle. Outside a bar at the Corner:

            “One man flung a bottle at Jackie that broke on the side of her face, leaving a blood-red bruise around her eye.”

            That’s horrifying … assuming it happened. Or are we deep into Gone Girl territory now? (There’s nothing in the article about anybody calling the police over this presumably open-and-shut case.) Erdely continues:

            “She e-mailed Eramo so they could discuss the attack … As Jackie wrapped up her story, she was disappointed by Eramo’s nonreaction. She’d expected shock, disgust, horror.”

            Erdely attributes this widespread ho-hum reaction among Jackie’s old friends and confidantes to a second massive conspiracy, this one to cover up the first conspiracy in order to protect that bastion of the right, UVA.

            Erdely’s explanation for why those who know Jackie best didn’t rush her to the hospital or call 911 or even pay much attention to her claims over the next two years is that the University of Virginia is an alien, hostile, conservative country club with an

            “… aura of preppy success, where throngs of toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students fanned across a landscape of neoclassical brick buildings.”

            The Rolling Stone writer is bothered by how UVA students look up to founder Thomas Jefferson (a notorious rapist of a black body, I might add).

            Erdely finds offense in the campus honor code, by which students promise not to cheat on papers.

            http://takimag.com/article/a_rape_hoax_for_book_lovers_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4g3wXxjON

          • Nornagest says:

            A metaphor — and a versatile one, as you say — is a bit of a thin reed to hang race hatred on. I could probably come up with a dozen symbolic uses of broken glass without trying hard; Watchmen and Apocalypse Now are only the first two that come to mind.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s ethnic animus would be pretty obvious if we were permitted to have in common discourse useful conceptual terms like “anti-gentilic” to accompany common terms like “anti-semitic.” But, like in “1984,” our conceptual vocabulary is carefully policed so that we don’t have useful terms like “anti-gentilic” or “hate hoax” that would make it easier to notice some patterns in reality.

            Thus, the national media lauded Erdely’s hate hoax article because it confirmed so many of their prejudices. And they don’t even know they have those prejudices because “anti-gentilic” isn’t a Thing. Neither are “hate hoaxes” a Thing. So Erdely’s hate hoax motivated by her anti-gentilic hostility didn’t seem like an absurd concoction to, say, Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, it seemed like Great Journalism.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            A striking irony is Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s gang rape on Shattered Glass hate hoax story led to a real life Kristallnacht at UVA, when a mob smashed the windows of the fraternity implicated in Rolling Stone:

            Jeffrey Scott Shapiro wrote in the Washington Times:

            http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/21/rolling-stone-university-of-virginia-rape-story-sp/

            Unpunished vandalism rampage inspired by Rolling Stone’s U.Va. rape story

            Student activist who led vandalism attack on Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house says he has no regrets

            By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro – The Washington Times – Sunday, December 21, 2014

            In the wee morning hours after Rolling Stone’s now-retracted gang rape story roiled the University of Virginia campus, a masked group of five women and three men unleashed their fury on the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the center of the controversy.

            Bottles and bricks were tossed through nearly every first-floor window, sending shards of glass and crashing sounds into the house around 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 20.

            Profane, hate messages such as “F—k Boys” were spray-painted on the walls of the colonial facade, along with anti-sexual assault epithets such as “suspend us,” and “UVA Center for Rape Studies.”

          • The Nybbler says:

            I haven’t noticed any lack of antipathy towards white Jewish males who won’t toe the line. Scott Aaronson has found himself the target of feminist ire. Moldbug’s been called a Nazi. Our own host has noted fear of physical and repuational attacks on him. So I think Sailer is off-base here.

            (Also I have my doubts as to whether Coakley or Erdely know what Kristallnacht was)

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Let me point out that the other Washington newspaper reporter who did good work revealing just how absurd the Rolling Stone UVA hate hoax was was also named Shapiro: T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post.

            So there are plenty of journalists who don’t let ethnic animus get in the way of doing a good job.

            But others are susceptible to it because our 21st century respectable discourse lacks useful conceptual terms such as “anti-gentilic” and “hate hoax.”

            If it were respectable to point out examples of anti-gentilism in mainstream media, there would be less of it.

            Because criticism is good for human beings. Having it pointed out when we succumb to common failings such as anti-gentilic bigotry, we would be on guard to be guilty of it less often.

            But instead, in our culture, the media critic who points out how Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s anti-gentilic ethnic animus contributed to her spectacular fiasco is considered to be, at best, some kind of weirdo bringing up some obscure and bizarre term that doesn’t even exist.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Nornagest writes:

            “I know what it means. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a culture warrior use the word, or any synonym of it, in a culture-war context aside from a few Jewish writers talking about the Jewish community. Jewishness is just a non-issue in most contexts …”

            Have you ever wondered why that it is in a country where Jews make up about 1/3rd of the Forbes 400, at least 2/5ths of the top pundits, and give close to half of all political contributions?

            My personal opinion is that American Jews have largely earned their wealth and influence through their intelligence and hard work. Just as much denounced “white privilege” largely reflects the hard work of white people’s ancestors, so does the far-less noticed but even more striking “Jewish privilege.”

            On the other hand, what seems to be unfortunately underdeveloped among Jews relative to the old WASP elites they have largely displaced is a sense of noblesse oblige toward their fellow Americans. (A few Jewish writers have made this point as well, such as David Samuels of The Tablet and, more hand-wavingly, David Brooks of the NYT.) For example, the reigning conventional wisdom on future immigration policy seems to be largely comprised of Ellis Island schmaltz, ancestor-worship, with Emma Lazarus retconned into America’s foremost Founding Father, and ethnic resentment over century-old slights.

            That’s an irresponsible, childish, backward-looking way to control the limits of debate on immigration policy. But almost nobody dares notice how Jewish ethno-schmaltz and anti-WASP hostility is allowed to control what Americans are allowed to say. We would be better off if we were as free to laugh at Jewish ideological predilections as we are free to laugh at white people.

          • Nornagest says:

            I get that you think the white privilege narrative comes out of “ethno-schmaltz and anti-WASP hostility”. What I don’t see is any evidence for that view that isn’t weak and circumstantial bordering on conspiratorial. Sure, American Jews might be a little more willing than Anglos to buy into that narrative. That’s no surprise: they’re urban, they’re highly educated, they’re largely professional. In short they’re in the target audience. Occam’s Razor says we can stop there.

            As to laughing at Jewish ideological quirks, isn’t that Woody Allen’s entire schtick?

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Jews are less the target audience than the suppliers of this worldview that sacralizes immigration. That’s extremely well documented in American history and in American current affairs, but people sense that it’s dangerous to notice even such an obvious pattern.

            The full scope of Jewish achievement in American life was summarized two decades ago by Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University:

            “During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26 percent of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.”

            http://takimag.com/article/bargaining_with_zionists_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4g4Q7ck9j

            That’s a lot of firepower for influencing the conventional wisdom, especially if you rig thinks so nobody notices your prejudices.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            The Nybbler writes:

            “(Also I have my doubts as to whether Coakley or Erdely know what Kristallnacht was)”

            Of course Sabrina Rubin Erdely knows of a key event in the trend toward the Holocaust. She was an Ivy League grad who makes 6 figures per year as a professional writer. She has been a journalist since she worked for Stephen Glass, of the movie “Shattered Glass,” at the Penn daily paper. She sends her two kids to a Jewish summer camp:

            http://jewishexponent.com/2013/08/07/jersey-day-camp-draws-record-numbers/

          • Aapje says:

            @Sailer

            There recently was an essay in my weekend newspaper by a Jewish person who was upset at being lumped in with gentiles by anti-racists. The claim was essentially: It’s great to collectively blame white people for what their ancestors may have done and I blame them collectively too (for what happened to Jews in the past), but Jews never were part of the slave trade, so don’t pin that on us. Ironically, his dumb ‘original sin’ narrative legitimizes blaming Jews for the death of Jesus (and in general was extremely stereotyping), but anyway…

            I have seen some Jews threat gentiles as inherently evil people, just waiting for their chance for victimize people/Jews and have heard Jews describe how fear of gentiles was taught to them by their environment. So I can see how a relatively high percentage of Jews may have completely broken BS detectors when it comes to hoaxes like these.

            However, you ascribe a level of intentional malice to Erderly for which there is just no evidence. AFAIK, Erderly just wrote down what Jackie claimed, with no fact checking. As such, there couldn’t have been an intent to hide the truth, as Erderly never got to the point where she had conflicting evidence.

            The narrative that women are an oppressed group who are kept down with (sexual) violence is a fairly common SJ narrative. As such, it is not surprising that Erderly would link the oppression of Jews with her claim of oppression of women, by invoking the image of the Kristallnacht; just like a black feminist could liken it to slavery. It is a logical consequence of a world view that divides the world in oppressors and the oppressed, where all claims of oppression are hyped so minor upsetting experiences are treated as being extremely destructive. This outrage inflation then pushes mass rape into Holocaust territory, as it would otherwise be trivialized by getting the same level of outrage as being asked an upsetting question.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            There was good article in 2014 in the New York Times by a Jewish woman who was surprised to discover the not insignificant Jewish role in the Confederacy:

            http://takimag.com/article/mythos_and_blood_steve_sailer#axzz4g5CiBkgE

            Jews also played a role in the slave and sugar industries in Brazil and Surinam, and in the very profitable exploitation of black labor in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa.

            But in Sapir-Whorf Lite terms, since “Jewish privilege” doesn’t exist in our conceptual vocabularies, but “white privilege” very much exists and since nobody except Jews is allowed to say anything at all critical about Jews, very few Jews ever notice that the contemporary myth about Jewish powerlessness in the past is largely a myth.

            That about 1/7th of the world’s billionaires are privileged with an Immaculate Conception legend about their ancestors’ guiltlessness ought to be of some concern.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            “However, you ascribe a level of intentional malice to Erderly for which there is just no evidence.”

            No, I’ve never said that Sabrina Rubin Erdely knowingly libeled (the nonexistent) Haven Monahan and his fellow frat boys. I agree with the jury that found Erdely and Rolling Stone liable for $2.0 million in damages to Dean Eramo due to “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual malice,” which means either awareness of publishing a lie or at minimum a “reckless disregard for the truth.”

            The Rolling Stone hoax wasn’t some idiosyncratic personal vendetta, but instead it represented the state of the art zeitgeist.

            Rolling Stone’s story of a fraternity initiation gang rape ritual carried out in the dark on broken glass was insanely implausible. As I commented on Richard Bradley’s blog on 11/27/2014:

            Sorry to keep coming back to this, but I’ve done some more thinking and here’s where the story falls apart: pitch darkness _and_ broken glass on the floor. The glass table is smashed, but nobody turns on the light to see what happened or where the broken glass is? Instead, each man, having heard the glass table get smashed, still gets down on the floor covered with shards of broken glass, risking not only his hands and knees, but also pulling out an even more personal part of his anatomy, one that he only has one of.

            Really?

            But Sabrina Rubin Erdely didn’t question Jackie Coakley’s preposterous story because she believes that white Southern fraternity boys really are that evil.

            And for 12 days, nobody in the press except Bradley and I questioned this popular article either.

          • Incurian says:

            Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

          • Aapje says:

            Or alternative: highly scrupulous people cannot imagine that other people could be unscrupulous without evil intent behind it.

          • Aapje says:

            @Sailer

            I agree that she didn’t question it because most probably:
            – It matched her stereotypes
            – She believing in the ‘don’t question the (alleged) victim’ narrative
            – She got encouragement by the same people that didn’t fire her after the earlier hoax that she fell for and that were extremely reluctant to fire her for this hoax.

        • Nornagest says:

          World War T?

          • Ryan says:

            World War G – Bake a wedding cake for the gay marriage or we’ll fine you into bankruptcy

            World War T – Caitlyn Jenner is a stunning and beautiful woman

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Another Sapir-Whorf Lite aspect of coverage of Rolling Stone’s extraordinary hate hoax “A Rape on Campus” is how hard the mainstream media has worked to make the story behind the story seem boring — proper journalistic methodologies were not followed carefully enough — instead of absolutely hilarious — Lovesick freshman coed Jackie Coakley catfishes into digital existence a handsome but nonexistent upperclassman named Haven Monahan to make jealous a frosh boy she has a crush on, using dialogue plagiarized from “Dawson’s Creek.”

          The New York Times has allowed the name “Haven Monahan” to appear in its columns only once in all its coverage, and never used the word “catfishing” to describe what Jackie was up to. If you read the NYT, you probably think this is an extremely boring story. And they very much want to keep it that way, since the reality of the story undermines the NYT-Obama Administration -Hillary Campaign initiative to get voters worked up over fears that Republican white male fraternity boys were raping their daughters on an industrial scale.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          A very useful concept is The Narrative, as explicated by novelist Stephen Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his film criticism for the Washington Post:

          “The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they have chosen to live their lives.”

          http://takimag.com/article/from_orwell_to_gladwell_and_back_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4g46ZV6Jk

      • birdboy2000 says:

        I think one very important distinction between Breitbart et al and the mainstream left-leaning news is that the mainstream news does not commit outright fraud.

        Unless it involves, say, Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.

        There’s a reason I only trust Trot papers these days. At least they’re whitewashing small, irrelevant sects instead of governing parties trying to start wars.

        • MugaSofer says:

          I think the mainstream media has definitely committed outright fraud.

          But the WMD thing doesn’t seem like an example of this, but rather than honest mistake (or even simply honestly reporting the lie spoken by members of government.) Admittedly I’m young enough not to really remember the incident.

          In any event, I’m pretty sure this failure was bipartisan.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            Of course the failure was bipartisan, that’s what I’m trying to point out. 🙂

            NYT (and others) not only have a history of failing, but in failing in the same way as the bulk of the political class of both parties on the same issues, and viewing it as Democrats vs. Republicans often misses the real problem.

          • cassander says:

            >or even simply honestly reporting the lie spoken by members of government.) A

            There have been dozens of books written on the bush administration, by both critics and apologists. Virtually all of them agree that everyone in the administration sincerely believed that Iraq had WMDs. There was no lying.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Heck depending on how broadly you want to define “WMD” Iraq did have WMDs thing is that when you’re looking for nukes and super-plagues bog standard nerve gas casualties barely make the news (beyond the standard so-and-so was KIA).

      • MoebiusStreet says:

        Off the top of my head, I can think of at least one huge example of the left-leaning media doing something very much like the ACORN thing (or the Planned Parenthood thing).

        Recall back when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin? NBC aired a tape of Zimmerman’s 911 called that had been edited to the point where it only superficially resembled the original, and instead gave listeners the impression that Zimmerman said things that he definitely did not say. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381387/sorry-nbc-you-owe-george-zimmerman-millions-j-delgado

        I don’t know if there’s any way to keep score here, to say X did it twice but Y only did it that once. My conclusion is thus that they’re all snakes, and not to be taken at their word.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          I don’t know if there’s any way to keep score here, to say X did it twice but Y only did it that once. My conclusion is thus that they’re all snakes, and not to be taken at their word.

          This. Arguing that one side is categorically worse on the basis of infraction count always struck me as arguing about which side’s house is more on fire.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          The media practice of calling the obviously tri-racial George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic” was pretty funny. What happened was the media heard a guy named George Zimmerman had shot an angelic black child. They immediately assumed Zimmerman was white and that this was the story of white-on-black-racist-violence the Obama re-election campaign needed.

          But eventually they got more pictures and it turned out Zimmerman is a tri-racial pardo who kind of looks like the son Obama never had with his ex-fiance Sheila Miyoshi Jager. And it turned out that Trayvon Martin was a strapping lad who had been pounding Zimmerman’s bloody head into the pavement. So, the media fell back to “white Hispanic” as a compromise to keep attention focused on how this was a story of whites being racist toward innocent blacks as The Narrative demanded.

        • Mary says:

          And a judge actually managed to rule that no reasonable person could find such editing to be “actual malice” and did not die of shame for issuing such words.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            “Actual malice” is a legal term of art and doesn’t mean what a layman would think of as “malice.”

          • Mary says:

            Yes. It means “knowledge that the information was false.”

            When they themselves had the truth, and editted it to be false, they knew it.

            Or with “with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not” — hmmm — I gotta ask, what DO you think a layman would think of as “actual malice”?
            because those two do seem to sum it up.

      • Does Nature count as sufficiently respectable so that deliberate dishonesty in it is evidence? How about trying to neutralize the implication of CO2 fertilization for crop yield by claiming that it makes crops less nutritious, without clearly explaining that what that means is that it increases the yield in calories by more than it increases the yield of some minerals, hence lowers the ratio of some minerals to calories.

        Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition.

        For details see:

      • abc says:

        is a quite different sin than what O’Keefe did.

        You mean what used to be called “investigative journalism”? How is that a sin?

        • Enkidum says:

          Please explain precisely what was investigated during the Shirley Sherrod case, and precisely what this investigation revealed.

          • One Name May Hide Another says:

            I haven’t heard about the Sherrod case, so I just looked through the Wikipedia article on it and haven’t noticed any mention of James O’Keefe in it. Doesn’t seem like he had much to do with it. Is there any actual reason to use this case to discredit O’Keefe or to show that O’Keefe is not a (decent/good) investigative journalist?

          • Enkidum says:

            Argh, apologies, I had conflated O’Keefe with Breitbart as a whole. Sorry. The Shirley Sherrod thing is appalling. O’Keefe also commits journalistic fraud as a matter of course, but this particular one wasn’t on him.

      • Enkidum says:

        Reply to all the above…

        None of the examples any of you have given count as fraud, no, with the exception of the Zimmerman phone call, which I had forgotten ever happened. Being overly trusting of other people is not fraud. It’s definitely a sin, and yes we need to police it, and yes the left-wing media is guilty as hell of it. But none of those are equivalent to what O’Keefe does.

        • DrBeat says:

          You’re saying it doesn’t count when the Left does it because the institutions are merely being overly trusting of liars who support their narrative, but it does count when the Right does it because O’Keefe is telling lies to support their narrative. You’re not comparing like to like. By your standard, the right is just as blameless, because O’Keefe is not himself a media institution, and the right-wing media is just being too credulous and not committing fraud.

          • Enkidum says:

            No. O’Keefe is not a source. He’s not someone telling tall tales to reporters who are overly credulous. He is the reporter, albeit a freelance one, and one who has committed appalling journalistic fraud (for which he had to pay several hundred thousand dollars in fines) which should rule him out for the rest of his life as a journalist. But he is still taken seriously and is a member in good standing of the new alt-right-wing media establishment. There is no equivalent to this in the mainstream left wing press.

          • DrBeat says:

            What is the difference, besides tribe affiliation, between “freelance reporter” and “someone who comes to a media outlet selling them a story that flatters their narrative”? Because from where I’m sitting, I don’t see one.

          • Enkidum says:

            You don’t see a difference between someone who calls themselves a professional journalist, runs a multi-million dollar company which claims to be involved in investigative journalism, and produces content that is hosted on news websites without alteration… and someone who tells a story to a reporter? I’m… not sure what I can say in response to this.

          • DrBeat says:

            I don’t see how any of those factors alter the moral dimension of what they did. Those things are window dressing.

            O’Keefe tells lies. The lies are politically advantageous to certain media people, support their narrative, and most importantly are emotionally rewarding to them, so those people report those lies without any critical examination.

            “Jackie” tells lies. The lies are politically advantageous to certain media people, support their narrative, and most importantly are emotionally rewarding to them, so those people report those lies without any critical examination.

            If anything, the case of “Jackie” is worse, because the uncritical repeater of the lies had to interact with them for a lot longer and had a hand in creating them.

            You do have a valid point about O’Keefe being a repeat offender instead of being discredited, but I’m not sure how different that is from uncritical left-wing repetition of the same story that has always turned out to be a lie in the past while excoriating people who dare to question if it might be a lie this time.

          • Enkidum says:

            I’m not really arguing about the moral dimension. I’m saying there is a specific thing – journalistic fraud – that is virtually unknown and heavily punished by one set of institutions, and much more common and sometimes actively rewarded by another set of institutions. When I read something in the NYT, I can be reasonably certain that the events as reported actually happened, and were not deliberately fabricated by the reporter.

            I realize this is an incredibly low bar in some sense, but without a very strong allergic reaction to this kind of behaviour, this specific problem with inevitably become commonplace. And only one side has this allergic reaction.

            It’s true that there are problems with uncritical acceptance of various lies (though I’d need specific examples to know precisely what you’re talking about), and I’m not sure that there’s much to choose from there between the two sides. But that’s a distinct problem.

          • DrBeat says:

            That isn’t the original claim you made at all and doesn’t differentiate what the Left does from what the Right does! You first claimed what the Left did was “being overly trusting of other people” but now your claim is that when you read the NYT, you can be confident that the events you read about actually happened and weren’t fabricated by the reporter.

            Those are two different standards, and BOTH NYT AND BRIETBART violate the first while upholding the second. You should not be confident that a story you read in the NYT actually happened because by your own admission the “respectable” media institutions often uncritically repeat lies that are told to them as if they were the truth because those lies confirm the narrative they want to believe.

          • Enkidum says:

            No, I’m saying that fabrication of news happens on the Breitbart but not the NYT side of things.

            You’re right that I just made two claims. (1) what I read in the NYT is likely to be true and (2) unlikely to be fabricated by the reporter. I accept that I’m overconfident about (1), but I’m confused as to why you think (2) is not a problem for Breitbart. You’ve literally just given examples of reporters affiliated with Breitbart nakedly making shit up, and being rewarded for it. Find me an equivalent example from the NYT and I’ll change my mind. Not “morally” equivalent, whatever that means, but actually involving the deliberate falsification of data in order to present a narrative.

          • DrBeat says:

            O’Keefe is, by your own admission, freelance. He does not work for Brietbart. (Well, he did at one point have a column on BigGovernment, but it’s not the focus of or really related to his “””investigation”””.) His “Project Veritas” shit is an independent group releasing videos, Brietbart are just the only people who still give him the time of day. He is not a reporter for Brietbart. He does not take orders from Brietbart. He doesn’t work for Brietbart. He’s a piece of shit who tells outrageous lies to Brietbart, that Brietbart uncritically repeats because those lies flatter the narrative and are emotionally rewarding. So how is he substantively different from all the other pieces of shit telling narrative-flattering, emotionally-rewarding lies to be uncritically repeated by left wing outlets?

          • One Name May Hide Another says:

            appalling journalistic fraud (for which he had to pay several hundred thousand dollars in fines)

            Could you point me to the specific instance you’re referring to here? Again, I’m going off my scanning of the Wikipedia articles. I see that he was sued for invasion of privacy and had to pay a lot of money in the settlement of that case, but when did he pay fines for journalistic fraud?

        • abc says:

          But none of those are equivalent to what O’Keefe does.

          Still waiting for your explanation of why investigative journalism is now a sin.

          • DrBeat says:

            What O’Keefe does is not called “investigative journalism”. What O’Keefe does is called “lying”. He edits his videos extensively so that they appear to support premises for which there is no actual evidence — when he “exposed” ACORN, for example, every single thing in those videos that outraged people was either stitched together from multiple conversations, or recordings of people humoring his bullshit long enough to get him out of the room so they could call the cops.

          • Enkidum says:

            What DrBeat says. The ACORN exposé automatically discredits O’Keefe as a journalist for the rest of his life, and subsequent events have not painted him in any better a light.

          • One Name May Hide Another says:

            when he “exposed” ACORN, for example, every single thing in those videos that outraged people was either stitched together from multiple conversations, or recordings of people humoring his bullshit long enough to get him out of the room so they could call the cops.

            What are some of the most convincing pieces of evidence to support the claim?

          • Enkidum says:

            The wikipedia article on O’Keefe covers it pretty well, I think.

          • One Name May Hide Another says:

            I have read through the Wikipedia articles on O’Keefe and ACORN as well as some of the cited sources, but I don’t see how they support the assertion that every single thing in O’Keefe’s videos is a deception. In fact, my impression is that, some of the ACORN or ACORN Housing employees in, say, Washington and Brooklyn were recorded giving very inappropriate advice to O’Keefe and that there is no reason to think they did it as a joke or that they called the police afterwards. (Unlike the cases of some of the California ACORN videos.)

            Look, for example, at the Proskauer report cited as a source by the Wikipedia article on the ACORN controversy. It finds that the inappropriate remarks by ACORN members were a result of managerial oversight and supervisory weaknesses. It doesn’t find that there was nothing to worry about in O’Keefe’s releases and that all O’Keefe did was pure deception and stuff taken out of context, and that the people interviewed at ACORN said nothing wrong, which is the impression I got after reading the comments in this thread.

            To be clear, I have seen some of O’Keefe’s more recent work, and I find it to be very annoyingly edited for dramatic effect, but I don’t believe his editing to be any more deceptive than what the mainstream media does on a regular basis.

      • I think one very important distinction between Breitbart et al and the mainstream left-leaning news is that the mainstream news does not commit outright fraud.

        Time Magazine ran a cover story on my father with the line, attributed to him, “We’re all Keynesians now.” What he actually said was:

        “”in one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, no one is a Keynesian any longer.”

        Is that outright fraud?

    • Steve Sailer says:

      Race is obviously a huge issue in the U.S. and it’s The Issue about which people feel most entitled to lie and mislead the public.

      If, for example, you read the New York Times has carefully as I do, you can notice how it tries to mislead without outright lying. But I presume that 95-98% of readers fall for the planned misdirection and don’t notice the truth that shows up toward the end of NYT articles.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      The U.S. media lacks the equivalent of the Daily Mail, a center-right tabloid that has discovered that in the Internet Age, the old-fashioned limitations on the length of the story that allow newspaper editors to carefully mold The Narrative by leaving out inconvenient details, are outmoded.

      The Daily Mail has done well in building a U.S. audience by data dumping the reporter’s entire notebook and lots of photos for many articles. Also, the Daily Mail’s policy is to put the most interesting news up front in the headlines, in contrast to the New York Times policy of burying the lede toward the end of the story.

      Personally, I prefer reading the far more genteel New York Times for stories I’m only mildly interested in, but for hot topics, the Daily Mail is likely to cover them better. In particular, the Daily Mail draws readers’ attention to key details, while the Times’ general editorial tendency is to try to draw attention away from the unsettling facts that the reporters insist upon including.

      • Deiseach says:

        The Daily Mail? The frothing at the mouth ultra-Tory “how can we write this story so we can slap a headline about ‘foreigners bring down our property prices’ on it while tying in the latest ‘lettuce gives you cancer’ health scare and accompany it with a photo of some fruity girl?”

        If your notion of a centre-right newspaper is The Daily Mail, no wonder I keep getting tagged as a liberal on American political quizzes! (For centre-right I would have said The Daily Telegraph but that has moved a little more rightward since I used to read it. Still not as brain-fizzingly rightward as the Mail, though)

  2. AnonYEmous says:

    Oh look, i’m first

    Appropriate, I think, since the largest topic of discussion on this post will probably be about who defected from neutrality first, followed perhaps by who should return to the fold.

    You may also get a side contingent (perhaps led by me!) arguing that the twin culture wars have mostly created conservative-leaning neutral spaces rather than outright echo chambers. Can’t speak to the Puppers though. (And the liberal bias has transitioned from a suspicion, to something many games journalists outright admit as moral. In fact, the advent of Trump has done this to a lot of journalists, which is quite interesting indeed.)

    Anyways, good post overall though.

    Edit: was second. Failed to predict a topic of discussion, “who defected harder”.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      “the largest topic of discussion on this post will probably be about who defected from neutrality first”

      When I was in high school in the early 1970s, I read all the back issues of National Review back to about 1969. The single largest theme was complaining about the liberal bias of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the network news.

      So I don’t think there’s much evidence of some pre-lapsarian era when the news media was clearly objective and nobody complained about bias.

      • Jiro says:

        When I was in high school in the early 1970s, I read all the back issues of National Review back to about 1969.

        This wasn’t your intent, but I was amused at what is basically “I read zero or more issues.”

        • Steve Sailer says:

          It came out every two weeks so I read early 1969 to mid-1972 back issues, or about 90.

  3. habu71 says:

    Great article, as usual, but I couldn’t help wondering the entire time I was reading it, “What about MSNBC?”.

    • Chiffewar says:

      Still employs people who believe in the Platonic Ideal of Journalism.

    • FXKLM says:

      The article has a paragraph arguing (and I agree) that Fox News is farther from the center than CNN. But then the following paragraph quickly pivots to say “biased and crappy you think CNN and mainstream academia are, FOX and the conservative academic bubble are working on a different level.” I can’t agree with that at all. Mainstream academia (excluding hard sciences and economics) is way out in left field. There are a few cranks in explicitly right-wing universities (like Liberty), but even there I think they’re closer to the center than mainstream academics. And, as you point out, aside from the self-professed neutral media outlets, there are plenty of openly left-wing news sources out there.

      Fox News isn’t really all that extreme for the most part. It has some genuinely neutral voices, and most of it is populist center-right. It’s lazy, pandering and usually terrible, but it’s not as far right as its critics believe.

      • Gazeboist says:

        Do we really have to accept the English department as part of academia?

        (Scientist from a science/engineering focused school; sort of sarcastic sort of not. I divide the typical set of university subjects into knowledge-generating disciplines, disciplines that wish to generate knowledge but aren’t very good at it, upper class trade schools lumped in with the preceding two, and some uppity hipsters. I see “academia” as properly covering the first two, and grudgingly accept that the other two will probably be glued on as long as our “standard” education system remains fucked. This is, frankly, pretty snobbish of me, and I usually try to fight it, but I genuinely cannot see how the disciplines (or parts of some disciplines) that remain in my “uppity hipsters” category could, much less do, contribute to the general enterprise of knowledge generation. Anyway, I would invert your comment on academia: mainstream academia is mostly ok, excluding parts of the soft sciences and the uppity hipsters we can’t manage to get rid of.)

        • The original Mr. X says:

          That’s a rather idiosyncratic definition of academia.

        • Mary says:

          “Do we really have to accept the English department as part of academia?”

          Academia are the people teaching in the college. So, yes. Absolutely.

        • Deiseach says:

          Do we really have to accept the English department as part of academia?

          That whirring sound you hear is C.P. Snow turning in his grave.

          Oh, how quickly the children forget! Once upon a time, the sciences were the ugly stepsisters of university subjects, and as for engineering – well, grubby men down coal mines might have need of it, but a university? 🙂

          • LHN says:

            Snow’s novel The Masters catches the moment when the transition is beginning to be really felt, with a benefactor pushing for more scientific fellowships, and the existing faculty agreeing that yes, they should have more, but not so quickly that they’re “swamped” or that it “change[s] the character of our society.”

            https://books.google.com/books?id=7nqYDQAAQBAJ&lpg=PT88&ots=kGOenRAY1n&dq=cp%20snow%20saga-men&pg=PT91

            (An earlier part of the same chapter features a Professor Gay going on about his Norse “saga-men”. I’ve read, though not with anything I’d call firm confirmation, that the character was based at least in part on Tolkien.)

          • Aapje says:

            @Deiseach

            And that is why progress took so long.

            Many of the lofty ideals that we call modern civilization are utterly dependent on advances from sciences and engineering.

          • Deiseach says:

            Aapje –

            “Living? Our servants will do that for us” 😉

    • Svejk says:

      I also immediately thought of MSNBC as a counterpart to Fox. I think there is a lot more ideological symmetry in this problem than this (very good) essay implies. The amount of unacknowledged liberal bias in the mainstream media is more than sufficient to counter Fox and Breitbart – being more wink-nudge open about their biases allows Fox to use a profitable niche competition strategy. Conservative columnists have recently been discussing a filter-ratchet mechanism at work in the mainstream media, whereby aspiring journalists – already somewhat predisposed to cluster in liberal enclaves by tribal/cultural affiliations – are encouraged to signal strong liberal affiliation to improve their chances of entering and advancing within the profession. Because Conquest’s Law means that liberals are advantaged in colonizing existing institutions, conservatives have to cluster in terra nova with the witches.

      • onyomi says:

        Yeah, Bill O’Reilly was never any more right wing than Rachel Maddow is left wing.

        Plus, we all seem to be forgetting the “flagrantly liberal bias” news channel: Comedy Central.

        • gbdub says:

          O’Reilly came first, and was always more popular. Fox was more biased than the neutral CNN types, and watched by many more people than the more overtly biased outlets like MSNBC.

          So there probably was a time that the average conservative news viewer was getting more biased news than the average liberal news viewer. I’m not sure that’s still true, with the proliferation of online outlets and yes, the Daily Show. Seems like everyone has their biased niche now and CNN is just something that’s on at the airport.

        • carvenvisage says:

          Imo Bill O’Reilly is more aggressive and rude.

    • gbdub says:

      I thought the same thing, but stopped after the opening part of the essay, which seemed way more partisan than the rest, to the point where I did a double take to make sure it was actually under Scott’s byline and not a guest post. Not sure if that was the intent, but the tone of the first section definitely belies the content if the rest.

      The thing is, yeah, Fox is more biased than CNN (though that was more true two years ago – CNN seems to have gotten more openly biased in the Trump era). But “a whole other level” is a strong claim. If true, who else is on CNN’s level? Maybe the broadcast networks and the wire services, but anything else on cable or the internet is pretty biased. And CBS gave us RatherGate, so the bias isn’t too deep below the surface.

      E.g. HuffPo/Breitbart are probably on a whole other level from Fox. Conservative talk radio has been on forever, but liberal sites online were there from the beginning (e.g. DailyKos) so it’s not like conservatives defected to the internet and only then did liberals follow.

      So it looks less like a quasi-neutral ecosystem from which conservatives defected (even if that’s how it started, which maybe) and more like a cluster of left-leaning but basically centrist legacy institutions with Fox a little more to the right and then a whole mess of openly biased stuff ranging from the editorial section of NYT to full throated extremism on both sides. More partisan, but ultimately somewhat balanced (trouble is no one reads both sides).

      • LIB says:

        I think the weirdly partisan-sounding parts are Scott signalling leftist tribal affiliation *super hard* so he can say things that challenge Standard Practices for some leftists and they might listen.

      • MugaSofer says:

        I don’t visit either much, but HuffPo and Fox seem about the same level of bias to me. And Fox is far more powerful/influential.

      • Matthew Green says:

        The accuracy of your conclusion depends on the accuracy of your premises. For example, if a post on diet begins with the (unsupported) premise that fat is terrible for your health, you can bet safe money that the post won’t conclude by recommending a low-carb, high-fat diet. To get beyond this, you’d need be much more skeptical about that premise. SSC is usually pretty good about questioning premises. Indeed, I’d say that “question your premises” is probably the moral of a lot of the *best* SSC posts.

        The reason I dislike Scott’s political posts is that he seems unable to apply the same skepticism to political premises. Scott doesn’t say “let’s assume CNN leans liberal”, or “what would happen if CNN leans liberal” — he just swallows the premise whole and states CNN’s bias as a fact. What comes afterwards may be perfectly rational, but it all flows from accepting these premises.

        At the end of the day, convincing people to accept debatable premises *as fact* is a characteristic of a successful political movement. The right has spent years trying to push the Overton window in a favorable direction, to the point where even centrist media can be casually referred to as “liberal”. While I don’t generally disagree with Scott, his political posts fail for me because they seem to be the end-result of a very deliberate campaign of persuasion, one that could probably benefit from the kind of skeptical analysis Scott usually relishes in.

        • gbdub says:

          I’m confused – Scott starts this post with the premise that Fox is very biased, and CNN is not. You seem to be criticizing Scott for basing his argument on the opposite of that premise.

          (And also, “Seeing CNN as liberal can only be the result of a deliberate campaign of persuasion by the right” is itself a rather large premise to swallow prima facie)

          • Matthew Green says:

            That may be what you read, but it’s not what Scott wrote. Here is what Scott wrote:

            “Yes, CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it – it has a pretense of neutrality that FOX doesn’t, and although we can disagree about how realistic that pretense is I think few people would disagree that the pretense is there.”

            This manages to both accept CNN’s liberal bias as fact, *and* insult them for being deceptive (any sane person would agree that “pretense of neutrality” is hardly a complement) before finally admitting that while both sides kill people, the right wing media kills more.

            PS Since I can’t reply to your response below, here’s I think this matters. The thrust of Scott’s post is “story A”: that the right wing has pushed *very hard* to get their side represented in media, and media rejected them. After this unfair treatment, they were forced to go off and make their own institutions. But now consider “story B”: that the right *did* get a lot of cooperation from the MSM, which moved rightward — but the right itself responded to this success by becoming *even more radical* and then went off and made alternative media outlets.

            I am not saying that “Story B” is more or less likely than “Story A”. I am saying that the treatment for the disease is probably very different in those two worlds, and if you uncritically accept the premises that Story A is based on (as Scott seems to), you might end up taking the wrong medicine.

          • gbdub says:

            I think it’s right to consider the situation asymmetrical. Yes, CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it – it has a pretense of neutrality that FOX doesn’t, and although we can disagree about how realistic that pretense is I think few people would disagree that the pretense is there. Nor is there a liberal version of FOX that lacks that pretense of neutrality.

            I think it’s right that the conservative side is worse than the neutral side. However biased and crappy you think CNN and mainstream academia are, FOX and the conservative academic bubble are working on a different level (though note that as a liberal, I would say this, and you should interpret it with the same grain of salt that you would any other “my side is better than yours” claim).

            I think it’s right that this situation is horrible and toxic and destroying the country, and it’s really good that someone has pointed this out and framed it this clearly.

            (emphasis added)

            My point was that you seem to be ignoring everything in that except “CNN leans liberal”. That you can read all that and see that the obvious problem is that Scott is being unjustifiably harsh to CNN with his premise is what’s confusing to me.

            My exact words were that Scott says FOX is very biased, and CNN is not (he says they lean liberal, and otherwise refers to them as the “neutral side”).

        • abc says:

          The right has spent years trying to push the Overton window in a favorable direction,

          So that explains why it’s now unacceptable to point out that there are only two genders in polite company.

          The accuracy of your conclusion depends on the accuracy of your premises.

          How about you try applying this principal to your own comment.

          • Matthew Green says:

            Actually what I would like to see is a detailed empirical analysis of both comments. Scott links to a series of dedicated efforts to influence media, and then claims that they failed. Is he right, or am I right? I’d love to see an SSC post that tries to tackle the problem.

  4. kboon says:

    This has made me appreciate Eric Raymonds recent posts about how the only value of merit for entry into the hacker community should be merit of your code. He might or might not have been explicitly thinking of the systemics described here, but judging only by code certainly works to keep even those who are politically opposed to him just as welcome in hackerspace.

  5. robirahman says:

    Are there any mainstream US news outlets that are comparable to CNN but on the right? WSJ comes to mind but it’s not nearly as popular as FOX. And the outlets actually in the center, such as Roll Call for example, are basically unknown to most people.

    Is there any hope of ever restoring the state of national discourse such that conservatives won’t feel repelled from those neutral gatekeeper institutions?

    • Sandy says:

      CNN is probably the most famous televised news outlet in the world, given that it’s a staple of virtually every international airport. There’s no other outlet that’s comparable to it.

      • Brad says:

        BBC world service?

        • keranih says:

          That, dear sir, is an insult to the BBC.

          (No, srsy, BBC is much better at covering the Anglosphere world than CNN is at covering, well, anything – the left-tilt is there in both stations, but BBC is at least competent at its job. I also miss, to some degree, Al Jazzerah America. Horrific slanting, tone-deaf culturally, completely willing to do deep dives into subjects.)

    • Protagoras says:

      WSJ’s rep used to be that while the editorial page was a dumpster fire, the rest of it was very good on providing news. I do not know if they are still good at providing news (of course many newspapers have declined, and I haven’t kept track of WSJ in recent years). But unfortunately not very many people read print journalism, so even if WSJ is still decent, or there are still other good neutral/right print journalism options, they don’t help the problem very much.

      • po8crg says:

        The liberal version of WSJ is, of course, FT.

        Both have really good reporting in general, and especially good in financial news. Both have opinion pages that are much more left/right than you’d expect from the news pages.

  6. Paul Zrimsek says:

    Vox doesn’t even succeed at being a mirror image of Fox with a left-wing slant and a voiced fricative. More like a mirror image of Fox with a left-wing slant and an unvoiced labial plosive.

  7. doubleunplussed says:

    Was my comment filtered for mentioning worker ants? Think you could fish it out of the filter since it’s on topic for this post?

    Eh, I’ll just write it again: I think they are unfairly maligned, so far. Their enemies have been very effective at demonising them. About their political leanings, I’m pretty sure they still lean liberal, though I think I can perceive a shift to the right slowly happening. /r/KotakuInAction has had surveys about this, so there should be data about it

    I think they started out as basically outcasts solely for questioning feminism, and now in the last year or so you’re starting to see more anti immigrant sentiment and whatnot seep in. But I would still bet that right now most of the subreddit’s readership would be voting for democrats over republicans. It probably won’t last, but it’s a far cry from Fox News.

    • Anonymous says:

      Was my comment filtered for mentioning worker ants? Think you could fish it out of the filter since it’s on topic for this post?

      Just use Harry Potter terminology like the rest of us.

      That said, what would be the HP term for reproductively capable worker ants?

    • Mary says:

      ” more anti immigrant sentiment ”

      anti-immigrant or anti-illegal-immigrant?

      • doubleunplussed says:

        Both unfortunately, which I think is inevitable for the reasons Scott has given. The two are conflated with each other in polite company in order to make it unacceptable to be anti illegal immigrant, so if you have a community that tolerates objections to illegal immigration, the people there are already comfortable being labelled all sorts of nasty things. People will more extreme views feel right at home (they are not immune to the efforts to lump the less extreme views in with themselves either), until you start seeing fairly white nationalist opinions popping up occasionally.

        • hendrikvandersteijn says:

          I experience the same from liberals, who will criticize the ineffectiveness of certain ways to limit illegal immigration, like someone might say that the wall can be easily climbed over with a ladder. When asked what their preferred method of reducing illegal immigration, the oft heared answer is “well, we shouldn’t stop any immigration!”

          People masking their true intentions is not limited to just one side of the political spectrum and sometimes I doubt it’s even intentional, judging by some of my friends.

          Sometimes we need that mirror to see what we’re saying. And I dare say that communists and violent anarchists like antifa feel as comfortable hiding in liberal circles as white nationalists might in conservative circles.

    • wysinwygymmv says:

      I think they started out as basically outcasts solely for questioning feminism, and now in the last year or so you’re starting to see more anti immigrant sentiment and whatnot seep in.

      My impression is that they are vilified for providing cover/participating in social media harassment of feminists and game critics and especially feminist game critics, not for being right wing generally. but I’ve been trying to check out of this bullshit so my observations are distant and can be taken with many grains of salt.

      • vV_Vv says:

        My impression is that they are vilified for providing cover/participating in social media harassment of feminists and game critics and especially feminist game critics

        There is no evidence of any organized, or even widespread, social media harassment, and in at least one case one of the alleged victim was caught harassing herself (she forgot to switch to the sockpuppet account).

        Most likely it was like the post-Brexit/post-Trump hate crimes: fake.

        • Besserwisser says:

          There was a group which specifically targetted harassers from both sides. Yes, there was harassment but it was hardly unilateral. And guess which side the member of that group came from?

        • BBA says:

          Given the sheer number of 14-year-old boys who play video games and that I remember what my classmates were like at that age, my prior is that harassment occurred regarding any video game topic at all. Stochastic harassment, not the organized hate mobs that the press claimed existed, but harassment all the same.

        • vV_Vv says:

          There was a group which specifically targetted harassers from both sides. Yes, there was harassment but it was hardly unilateral. And guess which side the member of that group came from?

          Both sides formed “anti-harassment” groups at some point, each side denouncing the other one as fake and biased.

          The Ants had their Harassment Patrol, which claims some successes, though I don’t know any trusted independent source that can confirm.

          The SJWs had the Crash Override Network, which, according to some leaks, was itself involved in organized harassment.

      • doubleunplussed says:

        I was in the same boat, but after investigating it at least a year after it was a thing, I can safely say that impressions such as yours are the result of effective demonisation by groups that have a lot of power to shape perceptions, and have little to do with the truth.

        I mean they’re not saints. But neither are they demons. They’re just normal people who lean mostly left and don’t like feminism, and decided to stop kowtowing to it.

      • Eltargrim says:

        Given that this community cares about base rates, when considering the Ants it’s also important to see how the gamer community reacts to non-Ant-adjacent topics.
        Polygon gives a brief breakdown of some recent game reviews that resulted in DDoS attacks. The reviews were about the most recent Legend of Zelda game, which is not a particularly political title. Company of Heroes 2, a WW2-based real time strategy game, has a metascore of 80, but a user score of 2/10. While CoH2 was worse than CoH1, it wasn’t that much worse. What it did do was portray Soviet Russia in WW2 in a not particularly favourable light, leading to (I’ve been told) Russian users brigading the reviews. When Steam and Bethesda tried to implement a paid mods system, the result was fairly explosive. When Bioware mucked up the ending of Mass Effect 3, well, let’s just say it caused a bit of a reaction.

        Game-adjacent topics are renowned for having shitstorms, so while a political game-adjacent topic might be a particularly bad shitstorm, it’s not like everything was sunshine and rainbows to begin with.

    • Walter says:

      I mean, if you are as far along as ‘questioning feminism’ you’ll be all the way off the progressive ranch before too long.

      • birdboy2000 says:

        But that need not lead you to the right. There’s a reason 8chan, which grew so massively from the GG exodus, wound up with /leftypol/ as its 3rd-largest board. That’s the path I followed and any time the subject comes up there it’s clear I’m far from alone.

        It’s frustrating how many people see politics in terms of ethnic and gender groups, but there are alternatives out there – it’s one of the reasons I get so annoyed when people lazily equate factions of feminists (no matter how anti-egalitarian in their actual views – and yes, this probably includes the “mainstream” of feminism) with “the left” – any authentic alternative can’t just be based on “no, *my* ethnic group is the one politics should fight for!” Idpol is idpol.

      • Besserwisser says:

        I don’t get why feminism is considered progressive anyway. That’s not entirely true, I get how it fits into the progressive mindset, it just opens up so many questions you don’t have with other issues. So, we have a group that lives longer, is less likely to go to jail, less likely to be victims of violence, more likely to be homeless… and that’s the group we should be especially worried about? That’s why there’s a lot of left-leaning folks who question feminism, apart from the ones who think feminism as a concept is fine and modern feminists are just too extreme.

        • reasoned argumentation says:

          Because it aims to breaks down cultural institutions that evolved for some purpose* and replace them a new set of designed norms that are untested but were created to be more “fair”. Tearing down Chesterton’s fence is what progressivism is all about.

          * Allowing men and women to cooperate in forming a household to raise children in a stable environment, allowing women to cooperate to tamp down sexual competition with other women, allowing men to cooperate to tamp down sexual competition with other men, etc.

          • vV_Vv says:

            Indeed. 3rd wave Feminism/Intersectional Feminism/Social Justice is really about destroying the Western civilization.

            This is why they make a big deal about an essentially non-exiting “Rape Culture” on college campuses, but when a real “Rape Culture” comes to the shores of Europe, carried by a certain set of Muslim immigrants who run child rape rings and gang-harass women in the streets, the SJWs suddenly became silent and try to make excuses.

            They realize that mass-immigration of an alien culture is probably the fastest way to destroy Western civilization, women be damned.

          • Aapje says:

            @vV_Vv

            That doesn’t seem correct to me. The feminists who came forward to the media to speak out against the claim that migrants are more prone to harass/rape seem to honestly believe that the only thing that makes men rape is patriarchy and that cultural differences play no role.

            In their eyes, a German man is intrinsically just as likely to rape or harass as a person from Morocco, as they are both indoctrinated by the patriarchy.

            It’s a really dumb black/white view that stereotypes all men, but it’s not a desire to replace Western culture with a worse culture.

          • Do you think all adaptations remain eternally adaptive, however conditions change; or do you think there is a mechanism that swiftly removes them when they have outlived their usefulness?

          • They realize that mass-immigration of an alien culture is probably the fastest way to destroy Western civilization, women be damned.

            And why, on your theory, do they want to destroy western civilization? It makes sense that someone might want to replace western civilization with something else they thought was better, but it’s hard to see how Islamic civilization would qualify.

          • grendelkhan says:

            Aapje, doesn’t it collapse that distinction if you describe ‘patriarchy’ as an aspect of culture? Which it kind of sounds like anyway–some cultures are more and some less patriarchal.

          • Aapje says:

            @grendelkhan

            The patriarchy seems to be treated in feminist discourse like conspiracy theorists look at the Illuminati: a force that controls people about equally strongly everywhere in the world.

            I think that many feminists don’t actually believe this, but it’s not politically correct to say so, because SJ people tend to see people of other cultures as oppressed by white men. So they fear that admitting this will bolster xenophobia.

            So the end result is that when the sexual violence happened in Cologne, you had many feminists who explicitly said that German/Western men are equally likely to act that way. When the discussion is about female genital cutting, comparisons between cultures are generally simply avoided, as raising that subject would result in painful conclusions.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            So the end result is that when the sexual violence happened in Cologne, you had many feminists who explicitly said that German/Western men are equally likely to act that way. When the discussion is about female genital cutting, comparisons between cultures are generally simply avoided, as raising that subject would result in painful conclusions.

            These examples, by the way, do not count when discussing beliefs that progs have that are deluded because these are things you’re not allowed to notice or talk about.

        • herbert herberson says:

          I think Corey Robin had it right: the most fundamental cleft between the right and the left is support for hierarchy. The right values hierarchical structures in the workplace and the family, typically traditional ones; the left seeks to tear them down.

          Also: the fact that this could be read as a steelman of reasoned argumentation’s reply here despite the very different place he is otherwise coming from is telling, imo.

          • ksvanhorn says:

            I think it’s absurd to claim that the left “seeks to tear down” hierarchical structures. They’re all about centralized planning and control, diktats emanating from Washington regulating in detail all aspects of the economy. They can’t even leave the decision of who gets to use what bathroom to the local level.

          • herbert herberson says:

            There’s big difference between regulations and hierarchy. In fact, they’re actually opposites. All of the questions you mention have to be answered by someone. A very centralized leftist state (which, needless to say, is not the only form of a leftist state, even if the alternatives were pretty short-lived historically–and Robin’s approach does a better job than any I’ve seen of explaining how both anarchists and communists can be considered on the left, and why most people can tell the difference between anarchists and libertarians) answers them with rules. Perhaps in some cases a bureaucrat may personally enforce those rules, but it’s understood that that is what the decisions are based on. Her authority is not vested in her person, but on the fact that she is there to implement something that a third party who also has authority over her decided. Also, while she enjoys some of this vicarious command authority, she doesn’t typically have responsibility–as long as the rules were properly followed, she will not typically (or ideally) suffer any consequences for subsequent failures. And, sure, there are human beings out there somewhere who make those rules–but they are depersonalized. They lack a personal relationship with the people the implement their authority over–a relationship which would be, definitionally, hierarchical… and how telling is it that the traditional right wing complaints about bureaucracy, even in their most summarized form, include that part? They are from far away, they’re not one of us, they’re “faceless.”

            Conversely, right-wing philosophies prefer to find a way to have those answers made by someone vested with both power and responsibility. His authority doesn’t come from rules made by third parties. It comes from his personal characteristics/possessions–he owns the company, he’s the battalions’ lieutenant, he’s the pater familias. Furthermore, his authority is tied directly and intimately to his responsibility–he doesn’t jet back to Washington, but rather lives with his decisions.

            At one point in history, the right’s hierarchical structures were bound together into a great chain of being. That totality didn’t survive the Enlightenment in most places, but the right wing response to that is the exception that proves the rule. The left said, let there be no kings–let’s end hierarchy! The right said, let every man have his opportunity to be a king in the marketplace and/or the family! The exemplar of this was the Virginia contingent of the US Founding Fathers (or, really, all of them except Paine)–they risked their necks throwing off the monarchy, but enjoyed (to say the least) their hierarchical authorities on their personal estate. In this more decentralized system, the various everyman kings do need to contend with outside forces, but here, again, the exception proves the rule–the right seeks to mediate these forces by playing off power and responsibility whenever possible. They don’t want to have regulations enforced by a disinterested bureaucrats to prevent problems, they want interested parties to litigate problems out when they arise and for the potential of that litigation to incentive parties to avoid the problems in the first place.

            If the rights’ distaste for regulation was just that it micromanages individuals’ lives, it would be hard to explain their support drug testing welfare recipients, the prison industrial complex, for sexual regulation outside the nuclear family, for the drug war, or taking away local control when it suits them (like the North Carolina bathrooms–and while obviously, the whole right doesn’t support all of those things, it’s telling that the more gut-level rightism is the portion that does, and that you need the more intellectualized/abstracted libertarian philosophies to get there). It’s when the state micromanages the actions of someone in authority (especially private authority), and in doing so undermines that authority, that the right will begin enthusiastic opposition.

          • random832 says:

            @ksvanhorn

            They can’t even leave the decision of who gets to use what bathroom to the local level.

            Conservatives shot first here. This all started with a state government overturning a city ordinance.

          • cassander says:

            @herbert

            That’s too narrow a read. the left is about tearing down hierarchies in general, the right upholding them. Incidentally, this theory also predicts and explains both left wing and right wing discomfort with capitalism. The left is occasionally attracted to the way creative destruction tears down existing hierarchies, but loathes how it builds new ones in their place. the right, conversely, is comfortable with the hierarchies it builds, but very uncomfortable with the ones it tears down.

            @ksvanhorn

            Ideology is mostly about motive, not method. Almost any policy can be defended or criticized for both right and left wing reasons. E.g. “we need to build a giant centralized command and control machine……to enhance national greatness” is a right wing argument. “……to fight corrupt capitalistic power” is left wing.

            Why? hierarchy. the left is trying to tear down some existing hierarchy, the right is trying to defend them or build them up. Is the leftist argument inherently problematical? Yes, i think so, but that’s why I’m not a leftist.

        • doubleunplussed says:

          Absolutely. As a leftie I see feminism as a sort of betrayal by one group of oppressed people of other groups. If you had to pick one axis of oppression, it is surely socio-economic class, and yet feminists decided gender was most important. They’re defecting instead of cooperating with other oppressed people.

          Then when they became intersectional, race was elevated to perhaps the second most important in their eyes, then sexuality etc. You can debate about the precise order, but the movement is still named after a gender, and seems to worry a lot about gender differences at the top end of society – CEOs, tech workers etc, with socio-economics barely even mentioned. They’re still missing the point.

          And yet, whenever social justice/feminism argues why a group of people are oppressed, the reasons are all socio-economic ones! So why can’t we focus on that directly?

          As a leftie, parceling people into groups ordered by how disadvantaged the groups are on average, instead of looking at disadvantage directly, is the antithesis of the kind of social equality I am looking for. If we are going to have collectivism, the disadvantaged should be united. And yet this group of mostly privileged people are telling us poor white folk are less disadvantaged than rich black ones, and seeding all kinds of disunity.

          So yes, I don’t think a leftie has to accept feminism. Equality of women, sure, but not feminism. If you care about the poor, look at people’s bank accounts instead of their genitals. Just because genitals might correlate with bank balances is no reason to ignore the more specific information if it’s available.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            And yet, whenever social justice/feminism argues why a group of people are oppressed, the reasons are all socio-economic ones! So why can’t we focus on that directly?

            Because of memetic evolution – the collapse of the Soviet Union contrasted with the fact that “economic lefties” were still defending it and stating that it was more advanced than the west until the day it collapsed means that economic arguments are weak and more importantly – easily mocked. You can argue all you like in favor of economic leftism but people who don’t share your views will look at the USSR or Venezuela and dismiss you without thinking too hard.

            The leftist memeplex isn’t under selective pressure to work to successfully achieve its stated goals – it’s under selective pressure to be believed – and selling communism is basically impossible now.

          • doubleunplussed says:

            I’m not even a communist though (despite the avatar) – I don’t think it’s useful for workers to own the means of production. Markets work, but can amplify inequality. So mostly the policies I wish we could all get behind are generous welfare and more progressive tax systems.

          • Aapje says:

            @doubleunplussed

            Cooperations can work quite well, but I’m in the ‘don’t elevate multinationals over smaller and/or cooperative businesses camp,’ not the ‘forcefully take businesses away from their owners and give them to the workers.’

          • Besserwisser says:

            Ranking oppression the way it’s down right now will lead to comparing apples to oranges. I specifically listed things which are normally associated with oppressed groups targetting men, yet someone should really have called me out on that. Gender works completely different than race or economic class. We can treat another race or, to a lesser extent, class as an outgroup, people who are not like us and try to interact with them as little as possible. Yet, men and women grow up along each other, then, more often than not, we find someone of the opposite sex and start the cycle all over again. This makes it really difficult to use the same parameters if you want to compare.

            For instance, income is a pretty good indicator for economic class (obviously) and also race. It’s not perfect but it works to an extent. If you have two groups which are likely to live together and share everything with, things get really murky, especially if the higher paid from one group tend to be more likely to be in this kind of relationship than the higher paid from the other group. This is the case for gender but very rarely for race or class. That’s also why income is such an important metric for feminists (“equal pay for equal work”), it’s one of the few which works the same for gender as for race and class while “correctly” identifiying oppressor and oppressed.

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            “contrasted with the fact that “economic lefties” were still defending it”

            What, all of them? Every single one? When “economic lefties” as a category includes vast categories of social democrats, democratic socialists, non-pro-Soviet radical socialists etc. whose identity was also in large part defined by *not* defending the Soviet Union?

          • When “economic lefties” as a category includes vast categories of social democrats, democratic socialists, non-pro-Soviet radical socialists etc. whose identity was also in large part defined by *not* defending the Soviet Union?

            I expect you are much more familiar with the relevant literature than I am. To what extent were those people seeing the USSR as an oppressive, undemocratic, but economically successful system? I’m thinking mostly of Paul Samuelson’s textbook, which was the dominant intro econ text for a long time, written from a standpoint that was probably left of center in terms of the population, centrist in terms of the academy. For edition after edition it predicted that the Soviet economy would catch up with the U.S. economy in the not very distant future, because it claimed that the Soviet economy was growing substantially faster.

            That’s relevant because a central part of the left/right argument is central planning vs markets, which is separate from the tyranny vs freedom arguments. Someone can be, and many were, in favor of both central planning and freedom, whether or not the two are really compatible.

          • benwave says:

            I think there might be some degree of conflation between ‘feminists (and other intersectional groups) detract from class struggle’ and ‘feminists (and …) have been successful in their own more narrow struggles while little progress is made in class struggle’

            I broadly agree with you, I just don’t think the detraction is so big as you think it might be. If there is a sense in which gender equality is ‘easy’ while socio-economic equality is ‘hard’ (and I think there’s good reason to believe that is so), then it should not be surprising that after some quantity of time the feminist struggle should have progressed while the socio-economic struggle is stalled.

          • Aapje says:

            @benwave

            Mainstream feminism tends to fight for women’s privileges, not gender equality.

            I agree that women’s privileges are easier to achieve, as almost all rational arguments against it have been thoroughly vilified. In contrast, it is perfectly acceptable to make the rational argument that some people are inherently more capable of producing economic value and deserve to be rewarded for that.

            Because the debate around wealth distribution is more rational, it’s not as easy to motivate people into supporting extremist laws by outright falsehoods and/or simplistic memes.

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            “I expect you are much more familiar with the relevant literature than I am. To what extent were those people seeing the USSR as an oppressive, undemocratic, but economically successful system? I’m thinking mostly of Paul Samuelson’s textbook, which was the dominant intro econ text for a long time, written from a standpoint that was probably left of center in terms of the population, centrist in terms of the academy. For edition after edition it predicted that the Soviet economy would catch up with the U.S. economy in the not very distant future, because it claimed that the Soviet economy was growing substantially faster.”

            I haven’t looked into this in detail, but my gut feeling would say that this defense did not continue to the day of the collapse, as claimed in the post I replied to. At the very least, in Finland, a country predisposed to viewing Soviet Union more positively than the West during the Cold War (at the official level), even the Marxist-Leninists appeared to recognize the need for reforms in the SU in the 1980s, as they sided with glasnost and Gorbachev (which led to a split in the party, which had already split from the eurocommunist majority later on).

            Of course, the problem is the message I was replying to can be read in (at least) two different ways.

          • even the Marxist-Leninists appeared to recognize the need for reforms in the SU in the 1980s, as they sided with glasnost and Gorbachev

            Because they thought the system was an economic failure or because they were in favor of a less oppressive system? That was the distinction I was trying to get at.

            Someone in the U.S. who believed that the Soviet economic system was successful in catching up with the West but at the cost of a lot of oppression might not unreasonably have hoped that a western country could use central planning to get the development without the oppression. That seems to have been the view in India, mutatis mutandis, for quite a long time.

    • hendrikvandersteijn says:

      It’s not ever for questioning feminism, as there have been various open and accepted feminist voices in the ant communities, it’s for questioning one to three particular feminists who the mountain of evidence is really against, but who have both the right connections and the right message for old media to get behind them wholesale.

      It has really accelerated young people’s adaptation to new media, which is unpredictable and scattered at times, but who at the moment seem much more trustworthy and authentic than either CNN with their “looking at wikileaks is illegal” or Fox hosts who have trouble explaining how tidal forces work.

      It tends to come with a more significant time investment to find a selection that will cover a good variety of news, but it is unparalleled in getting accuracy.

      • Forlorn Hopes says:

        It’s not ever for questioning feminism, as there have been various open and accepted feminist voices in the ant communities

        Yep. Christina Hoff Summers and Liana K jump to mind. I’m not sure but I have a feeling that Nichole Sund (frommally going by Cult of Vivian) identifies as feminist. Just a few examples.

        There are people who’ll reflexively criticise anyone who identifies as feminist, but on the whole there are prominent and accepted non-SJW feminists floating around.

      • or Fox hosts who have trouble explaining how tidal forces work.

        I don’t know what example of Fox hosts you are thinking of, but most people have trouble with tidal forces. How many can explain why, if the tides are due to the moon’s attraction, there are two high tides a day, not one?

        • grendelkhan says:

          DavidFriedman, I think the reference is to Bill O’Reilly’s “tide goes in, tide goes out, you can’t explain that” bit, from… wow, from 2011. Truly a classic.

          How many can explain why, if the tides are due to the moon’s attraction, there are two high tides a day, not one?

          You know, if you’d asked me how many high tides there are a day, I’d probably have guessed one, but… the tide bulges on both sides of the earth, right? So you get one high tide when the moon is above you and another when it’s directly opposite, yes?

          • The Nybbler says:

            Yes, and that’s because “the moon’s attraction” is a gross oversimplification. It’s the difference or gradient between the moon’s attraction at the near side of the earth (greater) and at the far side (lesser) which causes tides. (Ask any Pearson’s Puppeteer)

            Also, it’s two high tides every period of the moon as seen by an earth observer, which is 24h 50m, because the moon is orbiting in the same direction as the earth is rotating.

          • Yes. Now explain why.

            O’Reilly in that segment (I didn’t view all of it, but the tide part was early) doesn’t try to explain the tide, so I can’t tell what point he is making. That it’s mysterious?

            The atheist he is arguing with is an idiot.

          • Yes, and that’s because “the moon’s attraction” is a gross oversimplification.

            True.

            It’s the difference or gradient between the moon’s attraction at the near side of the earth (greater) and at the far side (lesser) which causes tides.

            Inadequate.

            Earth and moon are both orbiting the center of mass of the Earth/Moon system, which happens to be inside the Earth. On the moon side of that point, the moon’s gravity is stronger than the centrifugal force, on the other side, the centrifugal force is stronger than the moon’s gravity.

            If you don’t like centrifugal force, call it the apparent force due to centrifugal acceleration.

            And the (implausible) point of “Neutron Star” was that the Puppeteers didn’t get it, and had to have it explained to them by a human.

          • grendelkhan says:

            I think you guys are missing the forest for the trees here. David Silverman (the atheist guy) is at the very least abrasive. This was 2011, New Atheism had yet to be rent asunder by SJWism, etc.

            But Bill O’Reilly is arguing directly against the rational knowability of the natural world. Of the tides, for crying out loud. And even if David Silverman isn’t an expert on tides in particular, that’s different from saying that the tides are literally inexplicable. This is “fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”-level stuff, here.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @grendelkahn:
            Your mistake was trying to explain the tides, instead of pointing out that O’Reilly was saying no one could. It’s a “checkmate atheists” level of argument.

            And Silverman was likely on O’Reilly because he is abrasive and an “idiot”. O’Reilly stacks the deck.

          • instead of pointing out that O’Reilly was saying no one could.

            That might well be what he meant, but I couldn’t tell. Conceivably he could have meant “how do you explain the laws of physics if they are not the work of God.”

            My guess is that neither he nor his guest could have explained the tides–most people can’t–but that’s not because the explanation isn’t known.

  8. Winfried says:

    If you survive being no-platformed, you become untethered and free.

    Not all tethers are hampering restraints; some serve to keep you grounded in an environment lacking firm grounding.

    I’m currently coasting on apathy and depression to keep my views from sliding down into what I have come to believe is true. I don’t want them to be true, but my ability to self-delude took a big hit from the events of the last few years of my life.

    • Kevin C. says:

      I’m currently coasting on apathy and depression to keep my views from sliding down into what I have come to believe is true. I don’t want them to be true, but my ability to self-delude took a big hit from the events of the last few years of my life.

      If it wouldn’t bother you, could you elaborate a little here?

  9. James Miller says:

    A famous economist spoke at my college and went to dinner after with the econ department. Someone asked this man why there are so few Republicans in academia and this economist responded “IQ”. (Everyone at the table but this famous economist knew I was the only Republican present.) Most academics don’t consider Republicans/conservatives to be evil, but rather they think us stupid. Asking colleges to be more open to the right is asking them to do what they perceive as lowering their intellectual standards.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      Which of course begs for Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s rejoinder: “That’s interesting. For which other underrepresented groups do you think that’s true?”

      • hendrikvandersteijn says:

        For a moment I thought this might get the easy answer “men”, but that would require acknowledging that men have become a minority on colleges, which I don’t think the high IQ liberals are willing to do.

    • manwhoisthursday says:

      The main reasons conservatives are not well represented in the academy:

      1. Openness to experience – conservatives do tend to be lower in Openness, and a closed minded intellectual is an oxymoron*
      2. Conscientiousness, especially subtrait Orderliness – conservatives also tend to be higher in Orderliness**, and Orderly people tend to be dutiful and self-select for more practical careers, rather than high risk careers in academia, journalism or the arts
      3. Hostile work environment – even if most liberals don’t actively discriminate against conservatives in academia, once a critical mass is reached, academic culture will tend to make conservatives uncomfortable, who wants to work in a place where people denigrate your most important beliefs?
      4. Outright discrimination – some liberals, especially in the humanities, actively discriminate against conservatives

      *Openness correlates somewhat with IQ, so the idea that conservatives, at least of a certain kind, are somewhat less smart than liberals and libertarians, is true.
      **Both low Openness and high Orderliness predict conservatism, but are orthogonal to each other. So, you can get high Openness, high Orderliness people who can do good academic work, though they will tend to self-select out of the academy at higher rates than low Orderliness liberals and libertarians.

      —–

      Not sure what can be done about this, especially as trying to recruit low Openness people into the academy seems like a complete non-starter, but it does seem like the academy could do a lot more to recruit high Openness/high Orderliness people into its ranks, especially in the humanities.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        1. Openness to experience – conservatives do tend to be lower in Openness, and a closed minded intellectual is an oxymoron*

        There seem to be plenty of closed-minded academics around.

      • AnonYEmous says:

        I don’t want to use this on you, because you seem fairly good-faith. But I am honestly interested to how proponents of “Conservatives aren’t represented in the academy but it’s not discriminatory” respond to the question of why minorities are under-represented in the academy? I mean, I can quote much more explicit proof of outright discrimination against conservatives, and obvious policies of affirmative action in favor of minorities, and it’s entirely possible that conservatism is as biological as skin color (meaning you’re not to blame for it, and it might as well be a racial feature such that discrimination is unfair). What’s the response to this line of argument?

        edit: Reading over your entire comment you’re definitely not the right target for this argument. But I want to use it so I can get feedback, not so I can use it on people, so discuss, I guess.

        • vV_Vv says:

          It is not physically impossible for both Conservatives and [underrepresented minority] to have low average IQ for biological reasons.

          I don’t know what is the average Conservative IQ, but certainly for many years Conservative have dabbed in stuff (e.g. Creationism/ID/Teach The Controversy) which I wouldn’t associate to high IQ.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            It is not physically impossible for both Conservatives and [underrepresented minority] to have low average IQ for biological reasons.

            It’s not impossible, but when large parts of academia dogmatically deny the possibility of any minority except conservatives being less intelligent on average, it tends to look like they’re arguing in bad faith.

            I don’t know what is the average Conservative IQ, but certainly for many years Conservative have dabbed in stuff (e.g. Creationism/ID/Teach The Controversy) which I wouldn’t associate to high IQ.

            So have liberals (e.g., patriarchy theory, mythical campus rape epidemics, refusal to entertain the notion of evolution working above the neck). So what?

          • vV_Vv says:

            it tends to look like they’re arguing in bad faith.

            Or they just have low IQ 🙂

            So have liberals (e.g., patriarchy theory, mythical campus rape epidemics, refusal to entertain the notion of evolution working above the neck). So what?

            The left-wing idiocy seemed to be confied to sociology/cultural anthropology/X studies departments up until the right-wing idiocy was publicly defeated.

            Maybe there is a Law of Conservation of anti-intellectual idiocy?

            EDIT:

            I said this tongue-in-cheek, but actually it kinda makes sense: there may be a constant fraction of people who are attracted to appeals to emotion, tribalism, anti-intellectualism and so on.

            These people will take whatever ideology suits their psychological inclinations. The right used to be that ideology, until it became too discredited (seriously, Ark museums?), and so the left moved to fill the gap.

          • eccdogg says:

            Conservatives depending on how you define that term might have lower IQ.

            But Republicans have higher IQ’s than Democrats.

            Mainly because Republicans contain many Classical Liberals/Libertarians who have the highest IQ scores.

            http://reason.com/archives/2014/06/13/are-conservatives-dumber-than-liberals

            If intelligence were the main story wouldn’t we see larger numbers of classically liberal Republicans?

          • Evan Þ says:

            Okay, aside from “Creationism is false,” what do you think is so bad about the Ark Experience? I was at the Creation Museum several years ago (before the Ark model opened), and it seemed to be a pretty well-done museum.

            (And if “Creationism is false” is your argument, then you should attack it there and not several syllogisms down the road where they try to build museums about what they believe to be natural history.)

          • bean says:

            I said this tongue-in-cheek, but actually it kinda makes sense: there may be a constant fraction of people who are attracted to appeals to emotion, tribalism, anti-intellectualism and so on.

            These people will take whatever ideology suits their psychological inclinations. The right used to be that ideology, until it became too discredited (seriously, Ark museums?), and so the left moved to fill the gap.

            This doesn’t make any sense, because these are not the same people. Like Evan, I have been to the Creation Museum (twice, actually) before they got the ark. I come from that culture, and I’ve known more than a few really staunch creationism advocates. These are about as opposite from the sort of people who get involved in various leftist anti-intellectual idiocy as it is possible to get, except for being anti-intellectual idiots. This conservation law has to play on a society-wide scale, not just on a specific group of people who always seek out the latest anti-intellectual idiocy.

          • Jiro says:

            Since creationism is false, there isn’t evidence for it. That means that whenever you try to create a museum exhibit that shows evidence for it, you won’t be able to. If they claim to have created museum exhibits that show evidence for creation, they must be incompetent at creating museum exhibits as well as incompetent at evolution.

          • Randy M says:

            Since creationism is false, there isn’t evidence for it.

            Do you hold that evidence can never support an untrue proposition? For example, if DNA evidence puts either of a set of identical twins at a crime scene, can we not say that both the proposition that Twin Bob was involved and the proposition that Twin John was involved is supported by evidence, even if in fact one of those is wholly incorrect?

          • bean says:

            @Jiro

            Since creationism is false, there isn’t evidence for it.

            Really? There’s evidence for homeopathy, and I think that if we took a poll here, that would be rated more false. There is often some ‘evidence’ in favor of even the most ludicrously wrong things.

            That means that whenever you try to create a museum exhibit that shows evidence for it, you won’t be able to. If they claim to have created museum exhibits that show evidence for creation, they must be incompetent at creating museum exhibits as well as incompetent at evolution.

            Now you’re just being bizarre. The skill of evaluating arguments and the skill of presenting arguments are near-orthagonal. I’ve been to the Creation Museum. It was clearly done by someone who was good at building museums. The scientists behind it may or may not have been any good at science, but that doesn’t mean the people in charge of presenting it are incompetent.

            Keep in mind that a lot of the arguments for creationism (and for evolution) are sophisticated and technical, and frankly beyond the ability of a typical person to understand.
            Example:
            I was given an article by a member of my church about how the results from Messenger proved that Mercury’s magnetic field was decaying at a rate that proved YEC. I decided to look into this more. (This was after I’d become agnostic on evolution v creation, and the guy in question was the definition of an anti-intellectual idiot, but it was summer and I had time on my hands.) I discovered that the results from Mariner 10 had a very wide error bound, and that Messenger’s results fitted nicely within them. It was total bunk. But to figure that out for myself (as opposed to simply listening to someone who told me that it was bunk), I had to understand the basics of how scientific results are reported and what things like error bounds mean, know where to look for the relevant data, and have the interest to run it down. And it could be countered to a credible audience by pointing out that I didn’t actually prove that he was wrong. The numbers are entirely consistent with the scenario of Mercury’s magnetic field decaying. Yes, they’re equally consistent with it not doing that, but if you don’t understand Occam’s Razor well, that’s not convincing. Most people do not have the relevant skills, and are on a given side because they’ve decided which expert to believe.
            (It doesn’t help my case that some creationist ‘experts’ are genuinely terrible at science. But there are others who aren’t, and the Creation Museum was done more by the latter type.)

          • Jiro says:

            Do you hold that evidence can never support an untrue proposition?

            I don’t hold that, but there’s a spectrum. And creationism (and homeopathy) are all the way on the “really horrible evidence that nobody with any sense would put into a museum” end of the spectrum.

          • vV_Vv says:

            Okay, aside from “Creationism is false,” what do you think is so bad about the Ark Experience?

            It’s not just false, it’s bizarre and ridiculous. People were mocking it as the “Flintstone’s Museum”.

            It’s the sort of thing that cause you lose status by associating with it, in other words, it is uncool.

          • bean says:

            @vV_Vv
            That’s not really an answer. Why in the world should anyone who would actually think about going care about what you think is cool? They’re much more concerned about what their friends think about it, and their friends (who are the people at their church) are of the opinion that evolution is a vile lie, and that preventing their kids from falling into it is vital. And thus, to them, it’s a very good thing.
            Seriously, every time we try to reach the root of liberal objections to YEC, we find out that it’s a pretty reliable tribal marker for the God Tribe, and you just don’t like us. There’s no object-level reason to object to people believing it, and spending their own money on museums about it. You’d probably also consider the Museum of American Quilts uncool (if you actually like quilting, substitute farm equipment or something else that is associated with your outgroup and that you don’t like) and yet if it’s not funded by your tax dollars, I see no reason for you to care.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I don’t hold that [an untrue claim can never have supporting evidence], but there’s a spectrum. And creationism (and homeopathy) are all the way on the “really horrible evidence that nobody with any sense would put into a museum” end of the spectrum.

            This is strictly consistent with Bean’s claim, but stil leaves room for even creationism (and homeopathy) having supporting evidence.

            For example, I could imagine there being a recovered sample of amber containing multiple DNA samples that appeared to be from humans and from dinosaurs. Or a method of treating rocks that causes them to test as much older than they actually are, that could plausibly occur in nature.

            The fact that I would suspect an error in DNA extraction or sequencing, or that the rock treatment doesn’t cover all of the age tests, doesn’t preclude the possibility that I might be unable to confirm such suspicions, bringing creationism closer in plausibility to the old-universe explanation. I blame most of this on my geologic science knowledge being largely inherited from authority, relative to my math and physics knowledge, which I can frequently demonstrate firsthand.

            Same goes for probably most people. No one can slap together a solar system simulation on their kitchen table. A open minded, rational person with little geology training could still come out of such a museum thinking creationism is more plausible than I personally believe it is, until they look closer.

          • but certainly for many years Conservative have dabbed in stuff (e.g. Creationism/ID/Teach The Controversy) which I wouldn’t associate to high IQ.

            How about alchemy, of which Isaac Newton was a proponent?

            I don’t think weird beliefs necessarily anticorrelate with intelligence. One consequence of being very intelligent may be to conclude that things everyone knows are quite likely to be false–including things that in fact are true.

        • MugaSofer says:

          Race and gender are much more visible than political affiliation. This both makes discrimination inherently easier, and opens the door for much more subconscious and stereotype-based discrimination (e.g. grading the same essay differently based on a student’s name, halo effect based on appearance, etc.)

          Furthermore, it seems like you’re ignoring the obvious possibility that leftism in academia preceded the outright discrimination. You could make a compelling case that this is what happened with skin colour.

          With that said, I do think the discrimination is probably the/a major cause here.

        • Well, selection on the basis of aptitude is not discriinatin, and self-selection on the basis of interest isn’t either. Is anyone wondering about the number of conservatives in the police and armed forces?

          • Kevin C. says:

            Well, selection on the basis of aptitude is not discriinatin, and self-selection on the basis of interest isn’t either.

            Tell that second part to the folks complaining about female underrepresentation in STEM fields.

          • The Nybbler says:

            And the first part to supporters of affirmative action.

      • 1soru1 says:

        You missed one: wealth. College professors vote Republican in pretty much exactly the proportion of any other group of mid-income professionals. The fact that the modern republican party has been unable to win the votes of people whose job is to know stuff (instead of own stuff) is a cause, not a consequence.

        Core conservatives more or less by by definition have money; conserving the power of that money is what they are conservative about. People already wealthy when they are students probably inherited money. Consequently, they have little incentive to learn transferable skills for employment as they are planning on employing people, not vice versa.

        The peripheral conservative groups are those who, with greater or lesser degrees of plausibly, plan to gain such wealth. Becoming a college professor is not a plausible path to wealth. And anyone foolish enough to falsely believe it is is unlikely to qualify.

        Note that high-ranking university administrators do predominantly vote republican, partly because they run the university like a business, and partly because they have 6/7 digit salaries.

        • gbdub says:

          Note that high-ranking university administrators do predominantly vote republican, partly because they run the university like a business, and partly because they have 6/7 digit salaries.

          Citation needed on that one, I think. Administrators might be more conservative than some of the social science departments, but that hardly makes them Republicans.

        • Nozick had a piece a long time ago on why academics were left. The basic argument was that high school had two status systems. One was decentralized, based on what your peers thought about you. The other was centralized–grades. People who did well in one of those systems and badly in the other tended to think that was the right kind of system. So the people who got good grades and became professors like centralized, formal, hierarchical systems, such as government. The people who were popular in high school liked decentralized, informal systems, such as markets, and became businessmen.

          Surely too simple, but there may be some truth to it.

          • Tibor says:

            The piece is available here. To go into more detail, he talks about intellectuals in general, or better yet he distinguishes between what he calls “wordsmiths” (who oppose capitalism) and “numbersmiths” (who don’t):

            These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy.

            As Julian Sanchez notes here, it is a bit outdated. There are not very many actual communists around (outside of philosophical faculties) any more, but there is still the same pattern with supporting government centrally planned solutions as opposed to decentralized market solutions.

            Sanchez’s hypothesis is that the pattern either comes from self-selection based on prior beliefs, or as a post-hoc rationalization. In the first case, if the most problems are best solved by political means, then becoming an academic, particularly in those “wordsmith” areas, is the most efficient way do good. If, on the other hand, the best solutions are decentralized and private (be that donating to charity, entrepreneurship, etc.), then it is no longer necessarily the case. So people who believe the former will drift towards the academia more than those who believe the latter.

            Alternatively, it is a post-hoc rationalization – I decided to do this or that largely because I enjoy that style of work more or I’m better at it, but I want to feel like I’m a good person/doing something meaningful and I change my views accordingly.

            Of course, those two are not mutually exclusive. I think that a combination of both plus peer pressure (and the amount of peer pressure might even be measurable – given how at least the US academia shifted towards the left – on average – over the last couple of decades) explains quite a lot.

          • Being in business feels like being in a hierarchy, because bosses. The market is abstract by comparison.

          • Being in business feels like being in a hierarchy, because bosses. The market is abstract by comparison.

            To put it differently, as Coase pointed out long ago, a firm is a miniature centralized economy. But whether it feels like you are in a hierarchy might depend on whether you were spending your whole career in one large firm, working in a small firm with very few levels of hiererarchy, or moving from one firm to another as opportunities open up. The first is hierarchy, the second might feel more like family/coop, the third as though you are yourself a player in a market.

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            Conservatives do well in school because they are higher in Conscientiousness.

            They also tend to make much better managers than liberals. Again because of higher Conscientiousness.

            —–

            The reason lefties like school is that they tend to be higher in Openness. They like to play with ideas. It’s not because they do better in school.

            Lefties do better in stable organizations where pay is based on seniority, or some clear cut metric, because they are also higher in Agreeableness subtrait Compassion, which tends to make you a bad negotiator.

        • Going back to the “there are fewer conservatives in academia because conservatives aren’t as smart as liberals” argument. As I see it, the logic goes as follows:

          1. Left wing views are true.

          2. Therefor people who don’t believe them are, on average, less intelligent than people who do.

          3. So conservatives are, on average, less intelligent than liberals.

          4. So it’s reasonable that universities, which want intelligent faculty, have few conservatives.

          The obvious alternative story is:

          1. People in academia believe left wing views are true because they are rarely exposed to intelligent arguments against such views, due to most of academia and most of the respectable media being left wing.

          2. Following the previous argument, they conclude that conservatives are probably unintelligent, so don’t hire them in their departments.

          3. Thus maintaining the situation that gave rise to 1 above.

          As some casual evidence for 1 in the second argument … . My father had the reputation of being an extraordinarily good debater. Part of the reason was that he was having arguments with people whose arguments he had heard many times over, but who had never heard his arguments.

          I’ve mentioned before my parallel experience during the 1964 election (last three paragraphs of the linked post).

          • Philosophisticat says:

            I don’t endorse the former explanation, but one disadvantage the latter explanation has is that it is incomplete – it’s an explanation for why an environment that is sufficiently isolated from external arguments, which starts off with a slant in some political direction, and which introduces new members on the basis of judgments of intelligence might reinforce that slant. It doesn’t explain why the slant would begin any particular way.

            Also, I don’t think 1) is very plausible. I’ll wager academics are considerably more likely to be exposed to intelligent arguments for conservative views than almost any profession, especially in areas like, say, philosophical ethics, which is very liberal.

            I think it’s more plausible that academics are left wing because, even when exposed to intelligent arguments for different views, they endorse the liberal ones, either because the liberal ones are more compelling or because they do not respond appropriately to the strength of arguments.

          • ashlael says:

            My counter to that is Milton was indeed an extraordinarily good debater.

          • Wrong Species says:

            Philosophers may be more exposed to theoretical conservatives arguments but I doubt they are as aware of the kind of issues that cause people to become conservative. Political views aren’t shaped in a vacuum and ethical beliefs come from more than just philosophical arguments.

            I’m also skeptical that liberals philosophers do understand conservative beliefs. How many have read Burke compared to Marx?

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @WrongSpecies

            I was reading this as an explanation of why academia is liberal relative to other professions. The explanation can’t be that not many of them have read Burke, since not many of any profession has read Burke, and academics are more likely than others to have done so. More generally, if we identify “intelligent arguments for conservatism” in a narrow way, it will be true that academics are not very exposed to them, but it will be true that everyone else is exposed to them even less. The conservative arguments that people in any profession are likely to have heard, academics are even more likely to have heard, if only for being generally better-read. It may be that other groups read places like Breitbart more than academics, but I wasn’t imagining that that’s where the intelligent conservative arguments were. Maybe I have the explanandum wrong.

            Anyway, I wasn’t claiming that academics understand conservative beliefs. I was challenging the idea that academics are liberal because they’re not exposed to conservative arguments. I think it’s easy to be exposed to an argument, even a clear and compelling one, and still fail to understand it (from bias, insufficient expertise, general stupidity, etc.)

            And of course political views are not shaped purely in response to philosophical arguments. In fact, I think philosophical arguments have relatively little to do with how political views are formed, and that’s part of why I’m skeptical that the explanation for liberalism in academia is that they haven’t heard the arguments for the other side.

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            Good lord, this isn’t that hard. Conservatism tracks with low Openness, liberalism tracks with high Openness. Conservatism tracks with dutifulness and productivity, liberalism tracks with irresponsibility. Personality measures explain all this.

            Incidentally, conservatives should not be confused with libertarians, who are just very high IQ and/or selfish liberals. And the problem is with conservative underrepresentation in academia, not libertarian underrepresentation.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            How well do Big 5 personality traits account for famous conservative writers like Swift, Burke, Austen, Eliot, Waugh, Buckley, Wolfe, and O’Rourke?

            Do they tend to be high on Openness but still conservative? How well can the Big 5 theory account for conservative skills at satire?

          • onyomi says:

            @DavidFriedman and Philosophisticat

            While I agree with Philosophisticat that academics within a few subfields like philosophy and political science are at least as likely as any liberals to be exposed to more sophisticated conservative arguments, I think this picture leaves out a few things:

            1. There is another group out there more likely than academics to know good arguments in favor of conservatism, and that is conservative intellectuals. Nowadays, many or most of them find a home outside academia at a think tank, a media outlet, or what have you.

            2. Academic philosophers and political scientists, like pretty much everyone else, are people first, members of a larger professional/local community second, and philosophers/political scientists third. The people in the Psych, Anthro, Music, and French departments probably haven’t read Burke. And the people in the Psych, Anthro, Music, and French department are the people the philosophy department are living next to, whose kids go to the same school as their kids, whom they see at parties, and so on. In other words, though they may have something of a professional duty to be at least somewhat familiar with arguments for conservatism, they have an arguably much stronger social incentive not to find them convincing.

            Which leads to
            3. Don’t underestimate how powerful is the tendency, even among professional academics, to seek out and read in depth thinkers who support the things they already want to believe and treat opposing thinkers in an extremely superficial manner, if at all.

            I struggle with this quite a lot myself: I find it satisfying to read good arguments for things I’m already inclined to believe; I usually find it very unpleasant and slow-going to read even better writers among those I’m strongly disinclined to agree with. As an exercise in understanding other viewpoints I try, periodically, to read someone like David Harvey I know strongly disagrees with me, but it’s very hard to go beyond the level of a skim. It’s hard to engage with it at any deep level. Reading pro-communist arguments for example, can easily cause me to feel literal, physical revulsion (maybe this is my conservative high scrupulosity?)

            But I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this: to take the recent example of academics of various stripes excoriating Charles Murray on tv and in person; it seemed clear that many had never read anything Charles Murray actually wrote. And, after all, why should they? They already knew how to rebut strawman Charles Murray. What could they possibly gain by becoming more familiar with nuanced Charles Murray?

          • And the problem is with conservative underrepresentation in academia, not libertarian underrepresentation.

            Interesting claim. My impression from my experience is that liberal academics are more tolerant of libertarians than of conservatives. I don’t know what the actual percentage of academics who are libertarians is or how it compares with the percentage of libertarians in the population.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @onyomi

            Of course, intellectuals who work at conservative think tanks are going to be more familiar with conservative arguments than the average academic. But that doesn’t give us evidence that the reason that academia is liberal is that they haven’t been exposed to conservative arguments any more than the fact that professional christian apologists are more familiar with strong arguments for christian theism shows that the reason philosophers tend to be atheists is that they’re not familiar enough with religious arguments. Perhaps you don’t disagree with this, but then I’m not sure what the relevance of 1) is to what I said.

            I agree that liberal academics do not read conservatives in depth. But I think this is primarily an effect of their being liberal, not an explanation of it, as David was suggesting.

          • onyomi says:

            @Philosophisticat

            Perhaps I misunderstood, but I think I interpreted you as saying “most people of all stripes don’t read Burke, but if we can expect anyone to have read Burke, it’s the philosophy and polisci experts in academic departments, who, even if they don’t agree, still need to do some due diligence.”

            My point was that the sort of conservative intellectual we might expect to have a nuanced understanding of Burke has already largely “seceded” from mainstream academia in the same way Scott describes conservative media “seceding” from mainstream “neutral gatekeepers.”

            I think what I’m saying is I don’t expect anyone who isn’t sympathetic to a view, be they an academic or a man on the street, to be very familiar with nuanced arguments for opposing viewpoints, because strong social and psychological forces disincentivize them from becoming so.

            I do, however, expect most people, specialist and non, to be familiar with the most basic arguments for whatever view is near the center of the Overton Window, which, I think, is mildly leftist in most of the developed world today, certainly from a historical perspective. Therefore, I do expect Joe Sixpack conservative to be a little more familiar with Joe Sixpack liberal’s arguments than the other way around.

            I also expect “conservative think tank writer” to be at least a little more familiar with “academic polisci department professor’s” arguments than the other way around because it is the former who has “seceded” from the latter.

            As for why “polisci professor in the mainstream of academia” got more liberal than the mainstream of society in the first place, my answer is about bigger social forces, rather than the quality of the arguments: that is, if you want to know why polisci professors tend to be liberal, the first question is not “what is the relative quality of arguments made for different positions throughout the history of this discipline?” but rather, “why is the type of person more likely to become a polisci professor also more likely to be liberal?”

            In support of this, consider that the Overton Window is constantly moving. In the US case, seemingly, mostly leftward for the past century (but even if not, all that matters for my purposes is that it can shift a great deal over time). If academics were really responding to the quality of the arguments then we might expect them to switch sides, en masse, on those occasions when “overshoot” must, at least sometimes, happen.

            Let’s say the correct view on ethics of a certain kind of policy is x, and over the past 60 years, the Overton Window has shifted from “x-6” to “x+3.” If the quality of arguments were really a primary determinant of viewpoint on politically-sensitive issues, then we’d expect those who study the issue to start switching sides, en masse, around the time we got to x+1 or x+2.

            But this seemingly never happens with respect to politically sensitive issues. Instead, groups commit to a side, like the “-x” camp or the “+x” camp and keep trying to pull things in their team’s direction regardless of how the mainstream view shifts. If the average view of a particular segment of society was “x-3” at a time when the mainstream view was “x-6,” then I would expect that same group, all else equal, to believe “x+2” at a time when the mainstream has moved to “x-1.”

          • Vorkon says:

            All of these comments talking about the Big 5 personality traits as if they’re concrete, easily measurable, and self-evidently applicable to the situation strike me as remarkably surreal.

            It’s like, “obviously liberals dominate academia, they have +2 to Charisma and a +4 bonus to all Persuasion checks related to bureaucratic structures! They also get a +6 on rolls to save vs. Religion, and we all know that for every Religion Point a character has, they take an experience point penalty in the Scholar class!”

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            Steve:

            Two things:
            1. Openness is only one of the two B5 personality factors that predict conservatism. The other is Conscientiousness, especially the subtrait Orderliness. Most artistic conservatives are likely high Openness/high Orderliness. In fact, Orderliness is what predicts religiosity, and religiosity is likely the part of conservatism that is of most help to an artist.
            2. Openness is always going to be relative to your society. A highly Open person 200 years ago, let alone 500 or a 1000 years ago, would likely have had far more conservative beliefs relative to today. In fact, I suspect that the optimal combination for art is a highly Open personality in a traditional society.

            —-

            Satire is a bit of a puzzle. You are right that the best satirists tend to be conservative, yet, like all artists, they are going to be high in Openness. Satire is also obviously going to be associated with low Agreeableness, particularly low subtrait Compassion, which is associated with right wing politics, though not necessarily conservatism.*

            The weird bit is how satirists relate to Orderliness. They tend to be social conservatives. They also tend to traffic in disgust, while paradoxically being known for the extreme “purity” of their style (Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift, Pope, Waugh). Yet, they are, with some exceptions, typically much less religious than other conservative artists. Given the typical association of Orderliness with religion, that is odd.

            —–

            It is remarkable that, despite, the near total domination of any arts enterprise by liberals, so many artists at the very top are conservatives, even today: Les Murray, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Houellebecq, Geoffrey Hill etc. I suspect that high Openness/high Orderliness is, at least in modern societies, the optimal personality combination for high art.
            http://mallproject.blogspot.ca/2009/11/where-are-right-wing-writers.html
            (Note that people like Vladimir Nabokov or Mario Vargas Llosa are libertarians more than conservatives. Right wing but not conservative.)

            —–
            *Right wing just means more tolerant of inequality. But there are a lot of different ways to approach inequality. Libertarians tend to not care that much about how things end up, while conservatives tend to view reality as having a natural order with a hierarchical structure.

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            You factor analyze descriptions of human personality and they clump into 5 factors, with 2 subfactors each. They aren’t made up. These factors also reliably predict things in the world. Deal with it.

      • cassander says:

        Interesting analysis. Is that also why blacks are under-represented?

        • MugaSofer says:

          I’m starting to wonder if “duplicate comment” should be one of the reasons Scott deletes comments. He’s got enough readers we get these identical pile-ons on popular posts.

          • cassander says:

            I would think that if a comment provokes many identical responses, then the person who wrote it clearly failed to consider something obvious, and that he, not one of the many identical commentators, is the one that needs to re-examine his logic.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      As most existing journalistic outlets moved left in the 1960s and 1970s, a couple of business-oriented publications, the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, were able to afford to up their game and match wits.

      The problem today is that the main political divide is no longer left-right but globalist-localist, and naturally the globalists, such as The Economist and the New York Times, have more money and thus more hired brains on their side.

    • Brad says:

      I’d offer another possibility — the two institutions in question both have relatively low pay despite being highly competitive. Thus they attract people that are mission driven rather than money driven. Consider that those with a mission drive on the conservative side are far more likely to consider the clergy than those on the liberal side.

      • Vorkon says:

        Or the military.

        (Not saying I necessarily agree with you, but it’s definitely an interesting theory!)

      • gbdub says:

        Is “being on the political left” a necessary part of the academic mission the way that “believing in God” is for a clergyman? Maybe for a small set of politically inclined departments, but there’s no reason math or chemistry or even history ought to have a slant (indeed we’d likely be better off if they didn’t).

        Maybe the marginal conservative science grad student would be fine with low pay and hyper-competitive, but being socially shunned for supporting lower taxes pushes them over the edge to abandoning academia? Or “it’s hyper-competitive, and I know the fact that I voted for Romney is going to be a black mark against me, so why even try?”

        • Brad says:

          Is “being on the political left” a necessary part of the academic mission the way that “believing in God” is for a clergyman? Maybe for a small set of politically inclined departments, but there’s no reason math or chemistry or even history ought to have a slant (indeed we’d likely be better off if they didn’t).

          No it certainly isn’t.

          But say let’s say there’s an evenly divided pool of people out there on the left and right. Both have have normally distributed intelligence and mission-driven-ness.

          If someone is both conservative and mission driven he might decide to either try for academia or try for the clergy. If someone is liberal and mission driven he is definitely going to try for academia (in this toy model). If professors are selected at random from applicants we would expect to have more liberal professors than conservative professors simply because of the existence of the clergy option.

          Maybe the marginal conservative science grad student would be fine with low pay and hyper-competitive, but being socially shunned for supporting lower taxes pushes them over the edge to abandoning academia? Or “it’s hyper-competitive, and I know the fact that I voted for Romney is going to be a black mark against me, so why even try?”

          I think this is certainly a part of the picture. Another part is that politics are not some intrinsic property of a person, being encultured into academia probably moves people to the left of where they started. I’m not rejecting these factors, just suggesting another one — and I’m far from certain it is true, it is just something that occurred to me.

        • caethan says:

          Uh, as someone who’s attended Presbyterian services for about 10 years and listened to a lot of sermons, let me tell you that “believing in God” is in no way required or even overwhelmingly likely for a pastor.

          • thestudent452 says:

            This is curious. I too have attended my fair share of conservative (which from talking to people Presbytarians tend to also be) churches and can’t speak to your experience. The only clergy I know that outright deny God are people like Spong, who (coming from one of the most liberal denominations) is considered a heretic by most Episcopalians. Do you have any readings related to your anecdote?

          • caethan says:

            PCUSA, the mainline (and largest) branch, not the conservative one. No particular readings or links to give, just anecdotes. When my wife and I went to get my daughter baptized, we met with the pastor privately to go over the service and get everything set up. She was going to be baptized on Easter, and as an offhand comment the pastor said that of course Christ hadn’t risen from the dead, but it was a time for celebration anyway. I guess because my wife and I are both smart and educated she assumed that we would agree with her. I hadn’t heard her discuss it so blatantly in her sermons, although they definitely leaned that way so much that I wasn’t particularly surprised.

  10. Dumb_Young_Kid says:

    To be honest I am rather confused by the references to trump in your article. As I understand it you are making an argument that the left was exclusionary to the right, and used the neutral media spaces to be exclusionary, and this led to the establishment of the right wing media space. However, it seems to me that most of your references were to events occurring after the establishment of the right wing media space?

  11. Thecommexokid says:

    You often—and I think increasingly frequently—write whole posts where you talk about capital-C-Conservatism without reference to any specific political issue. You say that the “neutral gatekeeper communities” (by which you seem mostly to mean the media) should give being less biased against conservatives a try. But do you have any specific examples of how or where, on an individual-issue level?

    • Tedd says:

      You say that the “neutral gatekeeper communities” (by which you seem mostly to mean the media)

      Well, also academia. And “an extremely prestigious university had a graduation speech which was mostly an anti-Trump rant” is a fairly specific example of bias against conservatives in academia.

      • Evan Þ says:

        And also nonprofit hospitals. And also, we could add, many major corporations.

  12. Quadratic says:

    There’s a third group that’s larger than either of the two: that majority of the voting population that took a look at politics and wrote both sides off as being bad.

    There’s a lot of absolutely terrible and ignorant reasons for coming to that kind of cynical and shallow conclusion, but the bad behavior on both sides seems like it’s trying to squeeze out even those that might be so inclined, and they’re definitely not trying to expand their base.

    The paranoid part of me thinks that corporations are purposefully propping up the worst elements of both sides to turn off as many reasonable and calm people as possible so that politics becomes more about purity and shouting and debates over social justice and nazi fighting and draining the swamp and not talking about the pragmatic and bipartisan things we could do to actually improve the country, like the points you made in the past about how we could relax regulations on safe medications so that bullshit like Pharmabro doesn’t happen all the time.

    • Nebfocus says:

      Chevron deference seems to indicate that the FDA could modify/relax their standards any time they wanted. Public choice theory explains why this wouldn’t happen.

    • There’s a third group that’s larger than either of the two: that majority of the voting population that took a look at politics and wrote both sides off as being bad.

      Everybody likes to count up the nonparticipants, assign political views to them, and say “Ha! A majority!”

      This is a fallacy for several reasons.*

      First, across the entire population, there is far less detailed awareness of or attachment to politics and ideology than we activists typically assume.

      Take a random sample of American adults, ask them a bunch of politically charged questions, and keep track of their answers. Then go back three weeks later, ask the same questions, and you’ll find a shockingly low correlation between a respondent’s answer in the first vs. second round. The totals may be very similar, but you’ll find a lot of churn. It’s not that people are constantly changing their minds, it’s that only a small subset assign much personal importance to how those questions are answered.

      See Neuman, The Paradox of Mass Politics, for much more on that.

      Second, the proportion who choose not to vote is greatly exaggerated by bad statistics.

      Consider that reports and studies about voter turnout almost invariably use an inflated denominator.

      Very often, what’s reported is votes cast as a percentage of “registered voters”. To varying extents in different areas, the number of registered voters is inflated by deadwood — people who died or left and are no longer available to vote — or (say) a household’s grown children who moved away to Seattle, but are still on the voter rolls of their hometown.

      Academic surveys typically compare the number of actual voters to the total number of adults in the population. But that larger group includes non-citizens, prison inmates, people who are intellectually disabled or demented or lying in comas, migrant workers who don’t meet residency requirements, people who have just moved to town and missed the deadline for registering to vote, etc., etc. People readily enter or leave some of those categories, but at any given moment, they include many millions of Americans.

      Third, if you exclude all those populations who can’t reasonably be expected to vote, the difference between voters-as-a-group and non-voters-as-a-group shrinks to almost nothing. Their politics and demography are at most a few percentage points apart.

      Some think that difference between voters and non-voters has grown in recent years — e.g., that people of lower socio-economic status are disproportionately less likely to vote than in the past. I have yet to see convincing data on this.

      Note, too, that using a static measure like high school completion is misleading when applied to time series of voting behavior, because the groups at the bottom of the education scale are much older than average and dwindling in absolute numbers. There are fewer of them voting because fewer of them exist.

      * Note that this entire posting is specifically about the USA electorate, and may not apply to the rest of the world.

      • Randy M says:

        Quality post.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          I am curious what proportion of adults vote in places like Australia where voting is mandatory. And what proportion of registered voters vote. I think this should show better what the true denominator is, since the numerator in those cases should be close to the true denominator.

          • potatoes says:

            voter enrolment and turnouts in australia can be found herelink text

            at a quick glance most states had about a 90% turnout. I think it varies from election to election. By elections tend to have low turn out

          • potatoes says:

            sorry link went wrong

            link text

          • @ potatoes

            at a quick glance most states had about a 90% turnout.

            Compulsory voting fosters a whole different attitude toward elections and voter participation. In essence, even if you don’t care at all, you’re legally required to know that an election has been scheduled.

            I’m guessing that the 90% turnout is based on a much more accurate list of voters than is possible in the U.S. In other words, the denominator is not inflated.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Rather than complaining about bad statistics, why not recommend good ones? This looks pretty good to me. Maybe there aren’t good statistics to address the question of how voters compare to non-voters, but Quadratic made no claims about that.

        • Rather than complaining about bad statistics, why not recommend good ones? This looks pretty good to me.

          I’m not criticizing the statistics themselves, rather, the tendency to take the turnout percentages literally.

          The site you pointed to does make an effort to adjust the denominator to exclude non-eligible populations, such as non-citizens. I certainly understand that it’s difficult to go farther than that.

          And I see that turnout in the 2012 presidential election is calculated as around 58%, in other words, a substantial majority of those eligible did participate. Still, the other 42% includes a lot of people who can’t really be expected to vote.

  13. peacetreefrog says:

    I feel like a big part of the problem is neutral media not really understanding conservative arguments or giving them their due.

    Partly, I think this is often because conservative arguments are harder to understand. If you remember Scott’s EpiPen article, for example, Vox basically said the reason the drug was so expensive was problem was drug companies were allowed to set their own prices, and the solution was to regulate them more. And on the surface, it seems simple. Who jacked up the price? Mylan (the drug company). What should we do? Make them lower it, easy. It’s only after digging into the issue a little deeper, and understanding the current regulatory regime, history of previous attempts by competitors to introduce alternatives, etc etc that you realize, woah, maybe this isn’t as easy as we thought.

    This as compared to more liberal arguments/solutions, which is to rely on a benevolent, competent, and powerful government to solve society’s problems. Whether that’s actually how it ends up working or not, it’s a lot easier to understand/package into TV sized sound bites (vs 10k word blog posts).

    It’s also easier to understand intentions. You want more regulation for drug companies? You must be against $300 epipens, good for you. You want less regulation? You must be a shill for the drug companies.

    • Placid Platypus says:

      That doesn’t explain why the same pattern shows up in e.g. academia, where higher levels of nuance would be expected.

      Also your comment reads like you’re coming from a place that puts you at high risk of cherry-picking. It would be a good idea for you to try for a bit to come up with cases where the conservative side is the more naively intuitive one.

    • MartMart says:

      The easiest solution to virtually any problem to explain is “lets put someone powerful in charge who will make sure that bad stuff doesn’t happen”. On the surface, this is authoritarianism. Why are so many left leaning solutions in economics fit into this mold?

      • gbdub says:

        Everyone is a bit authoritarian at heart I think, it’s a corollary of the typical mind fallacy. “Build a wall”, “ban weird sex”, and “tough on crime” are authoritarian conservative solutions I’d say.

        The anti-government / personal independence streak of conservatism isn’t strong enough to prevent “let’s solve it by fiat” from being the way of Republican legislators, but it’s enough to make conservative economists sound less authoritarian.

        While both sides have their authoritarian streaks, “the government passing a law that says X means X will happen with no unintended consequences” does seem somewhat more common on the left, or at least common at a higher level of intellectualism than it makes it to on the right.

    • Randy M says:

      I am reminded of liberal preference of around 2004 for the word “nuance”, and the assertion that they had it and conservatives were unable to grasp it, preferring the obvious responses of “go kill bad guys” to more complex problems (one example lies up-thread, in fact).
      Either in some spheres conservative solutions are simple and others liberal solutions are simple, or more likely, each problem can be addressed in either direction with various levels of complexity.

      • liskantope says:

        Yes, this was going to be my response. There are plenty of areas where the left-wing position seems less immediate and more nuanced (e.g. fighting terrorists, being softer on crime, etc.) I strongly feel that (in regard to American political dynamics in my lifetime) this was especially true during much of the Bush administration, in the years following September 11th. It’s strange now to look back to those teenage years where I had the same kind of fondness for the Left that I have for rationalism now, because at the time I saw the Left as the more emotionally detached and rational side of the political spectrum. That is definitely not the case today.

    • Economically sophisticated arguments are hard to explain. ..sociologically sophisticated arguments are hard to explain. ..guess who’s got the sociologically sophisticated arguments.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      …more liberal arguments/solutions, which is to rely on a benevolent, competent, and powerful…

      I’m sort of joking, but I read this and think “see? how hard was it, really, to understand how a conservative thinks?”

  14. shakeddown says:

    I agree with this mostheartedly, and this is something I’ve believed for a long time. I’ve tried to turn politics discussions into genuine intellectual discussions and turn heat into light, and a few times I was even successful.

    But a few weeks ago, there was a thread about H1B visas on reddit, and I lost it. I realized I was furious. I’ve been applying for this visa for months – it’s a ridiculous amount of work and dealing with regulations and unending fees, you have to dig up every piece of paperwork from the last ten years, call up five different offices at your school to get them to print more yet more paperwork, and even you manage all that the best you get is a lottery. And all of this is just to be allowed to work for your living. And that’s under normal circumstances – as far as I can tell, Trump can just change his mind and refuse to give anyone a visa at any time.

    And after all that, I read this reddit thread that’s completely full of people talking about how completely awful it is that you’re allowed to work even under these conditions. And it wasn’t just internet flame wars. It was internet flame wars by people who actually might convince the administration to kick me out of the country.

    So you kind of imply that leftists have all the structural power and conservatives don’t, and that’s true in some bubbles. But that’s often not true – hell, republicans control all levels of the government – and when you’re in a position to realize this, it bites.
    (I realize this is an emotional rather than factual argument, so I’ll add a disclaimer that I don’t mean to imply any of the implications beyond “I am intensely angry and frustrated with the current immigration debate, for what I think are justifiable reasons.”)

    • Evan Þ says:

      The visa system is horrible and should be drastically changed. Neither party has a good plan to fix this, as you can see by how it didn’t really get any better under Bush, Obama, or now Trump.

      That said, I think you should distinguish between governmental structural power, which conservatives now have to a large extent; with cultural structural power, which they don’t. Look how the media were fawning over Obama eight years ago, at a time when (IIRC) Democrats controlled all branches of government. Now look at what’s happening with Trump now. That’s the significance of cultural structural power.

      • Placid Platypus says:

        Look how the media were fawning over Obama eight years ago, at a time when (IIRC) Democrats controlled all branches of government. Now look at what’s happening with Trump now. That’s the significance of cultural structural power.

        The problem is that there’s no outside-view way to distinguish between “the media is biased against Trump” and “Trump is actually worse.”

        For a new organization, maintaining real neutrality would probably require assuming a priori that both sides are equivalent, which basically means not ever reporting on the how the sides’ competing claims relate to objective reality.

        In actual fact the media seems to be doing pretty badly on both sides of the tradeoff, so there’s almost certainly room to do a lot better, but at it’s heart it’s a hard problem.

        • Evan Þ says:

          What I was trying to point out in my previous comment is just that cultural power exists, and it’s distinct from political power; I wasn’t making a case for whether the media were using it well or poorly.

          That said, yeah, it’s a real question. My conclusion is that Trump is actually worse by prevailing standards, but that the media has been so poor at reporting on previous Republicans that many people quite rationally give them near-zero trust when they try to say so.

        • AnonYEmous says:

          The problem is that there’s no outside-view way to distinguish between “the media is biased against Trump” and “Trump is actually worse.”

          I think one way to do that is to be as honest as possible and bring in as much context as possible. Of course, it’s never possible to get there all the way. But the media constantly crashes and burns in this regard, such that I simply don’t care at all about their opinions. I may absorb some facts, but everything else is in one ear and out the other, and that’s how it’ll stay.

        • PedroS says:

          “For a new organization, maintaining real neutrality would probably require assuming a priori that both sides are equivalent, which basically means not ever reporting on the how the sides’ competing claims relate to objective reality.”

          I do not think that is necessary: a reporter could fulfill their duty of neutrality by reporting each side’s best arguments, as expounded by their proponents, followed by their response to the opponents’ best arguments. The task of grounding claims to objective reality should fall on the debaters, and the faithful reporter would try (to the best of his ability) to report those claims, rather than (consciously or unconciously) use an alleged neutral stance to prop his/her favorite side. I do know that human natures makes this extremely difficult for most of us, but if most political/cultural journalists can do no more than use their subject matter as a convenient foil for their worldview/ideological commitment/etc. , is it any wonder that people (left, right and center) start distrusting the news?

          Like the original mr. X, above, I think that when such a failure mode by journalists is commeon, it is best to be upfront about one’s biases instead of pretending (like most news organizations) that one is neutral/objective. When biases are acknowledged readers are at least warned about their slant and know in which direction their grains of salt should be sprinkled.

          • random832 says:

            I do not think that is necessary: a reporter could fulfill their duty of neutrality by reporting each side’s best arguments, as expounded by their proponents, followed by their response to the opponents’ best arguments.

            And what happens if one side lies? What if both sides lie?

          • MugaSofer says:

            One would probably also need to be careful to recruit from both sides equally in order to appear fair, which in practice is the same as adopting as a prior that both sides are equally correct.

          • Placid Platypus says:

            The problem comes when the sides flatly contradict each other on matters of objective fact. If you say explicitly, “Side A is telling the truth, Side B is lying,” then you alienate supporters of Side B and encourage them to go set up their own bubble. If you don’t, then you’re completely failing to do anything resembling journalism.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            The problem comes when the sides flatly contradict each other on matters of objective fact. If you say explicitly, “Side A is telling the truth, Side B is lying,” then you alienate supporters of Side B and encourage them to go set up their own bubble. If you don’t, then you’re completely failing to do anything resembling journalism.

            This attitude is what’s wrong with much of journalism. It is not the job of reporters to tell which side is right — that is the job of viewers / readers to decide. The job of reporters is to report the views of both sides as faithfully as possible, so the viewer / reader has a chance to make up his mind. (Actually there are almost always many more than two sides, but perhaps it over complicates the news to try to report on more than two sides for major controversies).

            Journalism probably also includes punditry, and certainly it is the job of these writers to tell us which side is right. But reporting and punditry must be kept well separate from each other if consumers are to maintain trust in the reporting.

          • Aapje says:

            @Mark V Anderson

            How can you tell which side is correct unless you have the time and capability to look at the actual evidence (which is very hard, because the evidence itself is flawed and frequently biased)? If most people are not capable of this, their favor will go to the side that appeals to them emotionally, not the side that is more correct.

          • How can you tell which side is correct unless you have the time and capability to look at the actual evidence

            Good question.

            You can get some information by imperfect but easier approaches. You can, for instance, keep track of predictions made by one side and base your opinions on whether they come true. Some time back, I tried to do that for past IPCC reports.

            You can look for bits of the argument that overlap something you know about and judge the argument by that. Some time back I came across an online video of a kid doing an experiment that, it was claimed, demonstrated that CO2 was a greenhouse gas. In fact, the demonstration depended on not understanding the greenhouse effect. One of the sponsors of the video was the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. That told me that popular science on that topic from respectable sources could not be trusted, that the people doing it were more interested in saying the right things than in making sure that what they said was true.

            Or you can look for patterns:

            From time to time, someone in the climate debate announces that we have only ten years to save the world–if we don’t do something drastic by then the situation is hopeless. Ten years pass. The fact that the world doesn’t end does not prove the claim was wrong, since it was a claim about what would eventually happen if we didn’t fix things now.

            But you now see another claim of the same form, starting now. Both claims are treated seriously by the rest of the movement they are made as part of–and if you check, you can probably find something similar twenty years ago, maybe thirty. And the person who made the previous claim doesn’t now say “sorry, folks, the game is over, no point trying to do anything more to prevent catastrophe.”

            That doesn’t tell you whether the basic claims of AGW danger are true, but it does tell you that the people making those claims cannot be trusted, which ought to lower your estimate that they are true.

            I expect that people on other sides of other controversies could come up with similar imperfect tests. For instance, anyone who claims that we can eliminate the budget deficit by cutting foreign aid is either ignorant or dishonest, as can easily be checked by looking up the numbers for foreign aid expenditure and the deficit. That doesn’t prove that other things the person says are false, but it is a reason to lower your confidence that they are true.

          • Aapje says:

            @Friedman

            In my experience the claim is generally that at a certain point the positive feedback loops are so strong that global warming can no longer be kept below a safe level.

            It’s not literally that the earth will disappear and I think that issues like the ice caps melting at a rapid clip will be seen as pretty solid evidence by those who are worried about the issue. On the other hand, extreme skeptics will still argue that the evidence is lacking when Bangladesh has disappeared.

          • Matt M says:

            Aapje,

            I think we get that. The point is, if people say “Unless a carbon tax is passed within the next 10 years, the feedback loop will start and we will never be able to recover” and then a decade later, there is no carbon tax, but they repeat the same claim again, “Ok, if it isn’t done within the NEXT 10 years….” then that indicates they are being disingenuous.

            Because after all, if they were right the first time, and we didn’t do what they suggested, then it’s already too late. Humanity is already doomed and we might as well continue to enjoy cheap air travel and air conditioning while we still can, right?

          • In my experience the claim is generally that at a certain point the positive feedback loops are so strong that global warming can no longer be kept below a safe level.

            Matt already explained my point, to which I don’t think your really responds.

            On your point, how do you make that claim consistent with the fact that average global temperature has been substantially higher at various points in the geological past, as has been CO2 concentration? Is there something special about the globe at present that makes it much more vulnerable to such feedback loops than it was in the past?

            The estimate for the PETM is about 8°C above the current temperature.

            Also, what defines a safe level? Eight degrees would make some very hot parts of the globe effectively uninhabitable, but have the reverse effect for some areas currently uninhabitably cold.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @Aapje:

            On the other hand, extreme skeptics will still argue that the evidence is lacking when Bangladesh has disappeared.

            You realize that Bangladesh is growing, right? Over the last century it’s pretty consistently been annually gaining more land from sediment deposits than is lost from sea level rise. There was a lot of press about this in 2008 and 2010 based on satellite studies and AFAICT the facts haven’t changed since then. The new land gained doesn’t appear in precisely the same locations as old land lost – there’s gradual movement over time – but this idea that the whole country is going to disappear requiring mass migration is starting to seem like one of the sillier early-IPCC claims. Um, try this 2014 paper:

            There is a widespread misconception that a rising sea-level with global warming will overwhelm Bangladesh’s coastal area contour by contour and will thereby displace as many as 10–30 million people in the 21st century […]

            Comparison of Landsat images taken in 1984 and 2007 showed a net land gain of 451 km2 in the Meghna estuary within that period, representing an average annual growth rate of 19.6 km2 (Fig. 3) Brammer, in press. Earlier, Allison (1998) had calculated annual net gains of 14.8 km2 between 1792 and 1840 and of 4.4 km2 between 1840 and 1984. This historical evidence of large-scale net annual land gains in the Meghna estuary suggests that land gain might exceed land loss resulting from the slow rates of sea-level rise projected for the 21st century.

          • Aapje says:

            @Friedman

            Matt already explained my point, to which I don’t think your really responds.

            You were using hyperbole to complain about people using hyperbole, so I tried to subtly make you aware of that. I didn’t see that comment as the basis for productive debate at a detailed level (unlike the comment I am responding to now).

            On your point, how do you make that claim consistent with the fact that average global temperature has been substantially higher at various points in the geological past, as has been CO2 concentration? Is there something special about the globe at present that makes it much more vulnerable to such feedback loops than it was in the past?

            The claim is that such positive feedback loops have existed in the past due to extreme natural causes and with very devastating effects on earth life (as in mass extinctions). So the claim is the opposite of the earth at present being different. It is the claim that the globe is still the same, but that what we are doing is an extreme human cause that results in mostly the same outcome as an extreme natural cause.

            Note that the existence of negative feedback loops that will ultimately win out to return us to lower temperatures is not denied, but rather, considered irrelevant. After all, the claim is that we will suffer severe harm before these negative feedback loops win out.

            Also, what defines a safe level? Eight degrees would make some very hot parts of the globe effectively uninhabitable, but have the reverse effect for some areas currently uninhabitably cold.

            Humans are dependent on a very high production of food, have locked themselves into owned property and certain enclaves called states (with borders and migration laws). It’s very plausible that the new earth will be able to produce far less food because the non-hot parts are at an inconvenient circle of latitude, that our farming methods that have been optimized over many centuries will stop working well and that we have to fall back on far less efficient farming methods, that you will see major shifts in wealth, as land owned by one person/nation will be worth more and land owned by another will be worth far less, that people will resort to war rather than just let their wealth deteriorate gradually and/or that large scale migration & unrest will destroy Western culture and the current world order.

            If you can’t see how many things can go horribly wrong, that speaks to either a lack of imagination or of you operating at an extremely high level of abstraction, where ‘humans don’t go extinct’ equals ‘no problem.’

          • Aapje says:

            @Glen Raphael

            That part of my post was intentionally hyperbolic. My point was that you can’t necessarily wait until people are already in trouble.

            I didn’t mean to claim that major parts of Bangladesh would disappear in the short or medium-long term.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            How can you tell which side is correct unless you have the time and capability to look at the actual evidence (which is very hard, because the evidence itself is flawed and frequently biased)? If most people are not capable of this, their favor will go to the side that appeals to them emotionally, not the side that is more correct.

            That’s the point of the reporter faithfully trying to people the most credible arguments for each side. This gives the reader/viewer a chance to decide which view is the most credible. That is far superior to deferring the judgment of who is correct to the reporter.

            As I’ve said, there is a place to be had for punditry in the media, to help consumers make this judgement. But there should be a Chinese wall between the pundits and the reporters (as I think there was, once upon a time.

            In reality, most media consumers will make a judgment based on emotions, but that is the case no matter how the media reports. But reporters trying to give a voice to more than one side gives those consumers who want to make a rational judgment a fighting chance.

          • The claim is that such positive feedback loops have existed in the past due to extreme natural causes and with very devastating effects on earth life (as in mass extinctions).

            The most recent case of high temperatures is the PETM. The “mass extinctions,” at least according to the Wiki article:

            Fossil records for many organisms show major turnovers. For example, in the marine realm, a mass extinction of benthic foraminifera, a global expansion of subtropical dinoflagellates, and an appearance of excursion, planktic foraminifera and calcareous nanofossils all occurred during the beginning stages of PETM. On land, modern mammal orders (including primates) suddenly appear in Europe and in North America.

            So one group of near microscopic ocean organisms lost a lot of species, another group gained a lot of species, and land animals, specifically mammals, gained a lot of species. That isn’t what most people would describe as “mass extinctions” or “devastating effects on earth life.”

            The PETM is supposed to have gotten to about 8°C above current global temperatures. What period of high temperatures that had more serious effects were you thinking of?

            Humans are dependent on a very high production of food

            Current agricultural output is much more than what humans need to survive, since a sizable fraction goes to feed meat animals, which is a very inefficient conversion of calories to calories. Further, humans do not farm nearly all arable land–forest area in the U.S. peaked in the 1920’s, declined thereafter due to shrinking area of agricultural land. And doubling CO2 concentration increases yields by about 30% for C3 plants, which most food crops are.

            It’s very plausible that the new earth will be able to produce far less food because the non-hot parts are at an inconvenient circle of latitude, that our farming methods that have been optimized over many centuries will stop working well and that we have to fall back on far less efficient farming methods

            ,

            It isn’t impossible, but it’s pretty implausible. You are talking about changes over a century or so, which is a long time for people to change agricultural methods–consider how much change there has been in the past century.

            People currently produce food across a wide range of climates. We already know how to farm in a climate 3.7°C warmer than Minnesota, because we are doing it in Iowa, and similarly for shifts elsewhere in the range.

            Or in other words, I think the catastrophic story is mostly hand waving. Terrible things could happen in the future for any of a variety of reasons, but global warming isn’t one of the more likely ones.

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      I used to be on H1B back when it was less insane than now, and it was a master class in learning to hate government even then.

      Having established that credential, I don’t see the issue as that clearly conservative. Big business wants lots of immigration, while many workers want to stop it. Yes, this time it’s (maybe, we’ll see) the Republicans who limit it, but the forces behind it come from all over the political spectrum.

      • AnonYEmous says:

        yeah

        sorry the H1B system is so terrible, but this country also has a terrible problem of not enough jobs for its citizens, and H1B takes those away in many cases.

        • christhenottopher says:

          Quick thing, H1Bs are specifically for jobs specialized/skilled enough to require at minimum a bachelor’s degree. The overall US unemployment rate is 4.7%, and for people who might actually compete with H1Bs (Bachelors degrees or higher), it’s 2.5%. Even if you want to talk about employment rates, for people with bachelor’s or higher in the US it’s nearly 90% (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cbc.asp). So if you want to talk about Americans not having enough jobs available, you want to talk about lower than Bachelor’s holding Americans, aka Americans who don’t compete with H1B holders.

          • Spookykou says:

            My understanding of the complaints with H1B1 is that they are farmed out by large Indian firms who are using them almost exclusively to put underpaid tech workers in fields where plenty of Americans are able and willing to work, driving down wages/displacing workers. Which is a violation of the spirit of the H1B1, which was to bring over skilled workers that could not be easily sourced locally.

            Also I don’t know what that 2.5% is in whole numbers, but I imagine it is more than big enough to warrant a scary news headlines.

          • Anon256 says:

            Salaries for US-citizen tech workers are still six figures so I don’t think this is a problem. (Note: I am a US-citizen tech worker.)

            2.5% unemployment is within the range of “frictional” unemployment you’d expect from people deliberately moving between jobs etc.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Salaries for US citizen tech workers working for top tech companies are 6 figures. That’s not who the WiPro/InfoSys/Tata Consulting H-1Bs are competing with. Tech workers who do business programming or IT for non-tech companies are the ones affected by them.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      “It was internet flame wars by people who actually might convince the administration to kick me out of the country.”

      That’s called democracy, free speech, and rule of law.

      • thevoiceofthevoid says:

        I believe this might be a good time to distinguish what is legal to do and say from what is good to do and say.

        Now I won’t claim to have discovered the True Source of Objective Good. However, I can certainly understand how shakeddown would feel attacked by people claiming that the long and arduous process they’re going through to immigrate is still too permissive–even though it’s well within the redditors’ legal right to say so. And I’ll guess from shakeddown’s phrasing that they weren’t being all too polite about it.

        I’ll also bring up that point Scott (I think it was Scott?) made a while back about immigration as letting people into your house vs. immigration as letting people into your café. It’s a question of values, and I doubt there’s an objectively correct answer. However, I think there’s room for a bit more subtlety that “Immigrants are stealing our jobs!” [I’ll grant I might be strawmanning, but I’m inferring from the quality of every “internet flame war” I’ve ever seen.]

        • MartMart says:

          What I find so frustrating in immigration related debates is how poorly informed the anti immigration side tends to be with regards to actual immigration policies and processes.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Yeah, those moronic anti-immigrationists have never heard of the Zeroth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, as carved on the Statue of Liberty by Founding Father Emma Lazarus: Anybody from anywhere can move here, and Americans aren’t allowed to complain.

          • thevoiceofthevoid says:

            @Steve Sailer there’s a spectrum between “everyone can get in, no questions asked” and “no one can get in, ever”

          • Evan Þ says:

            Numerically, isn’t the actual process just as likely to be “Get in on some visa and then overstay, or else find someone to sneak you over the Mexican border”?

            (Which doesn’t do anything at all to undercut the complaints of those honest enough to go through the lengthy legal process. In fact, it accentuates them. They’re self-selected for honesty and following the law, which means they are statistically more likely to be the people we want in the country.)

          • Brad says:

            Numerically, isn’t the actual process just as likely to be “Get in on some visa and then overstay, or else find someone to sneak you over the Mexican border”?

            Some pro-restrictionists on SSC have convinced me that the stats on illegal immigration are not to be trusted. If you did trust them, you’d think there’s been no net illegal immigration for many years. But even so, it’s hard to believe that have amounted to more than a million a year over the last decade which is the trend for the legal immigration system.

            AFAICT the single largest contingent authorized or unauthorized are spouses of U.S. citizens.

          • fortaleza84 says:

            In your view, what is the biggest misconception on the part of anti-immigration types which, if corrected, would result in them changing their thinking?

          • MartMart says:

            fortaleza84:
            At first place, that illegal immigrants do not qualify for any form of public assistance, and are largely prevented from getting any. Whatever their reasons for coming here, free welfare money is not one of them.
            Followed closely by illegal immigrants are practically ineligible from any sort of legal status, and for the vast majority of those people, there is no way to repair that situation, including leaving the country to get back in line, for there is no line for them to get back into. In most cases, they would be automatically turned down even if there was a line into which they could qualify.
            These aren’t remotely controversial points, like immigrants effects on wages or crimes, and yet I often hear some combination of the two.

            Of course, those facts aren’t so crucial that are guaranteed to change everyones thinking, and clearly some of those wanting to strike a very hard line with regards to immigrants are aware of these facts.

          • fortaleza84 says:

            At first place, that illegal immigrants do not qualify for any form of public assistance, and are largely prevented from getting any.

            I’m kind of skeptical that this means much. For one thing, and correct me if I am wrong, but they can walk into a hospital if they need medical care; if they have children who are born here they can collect welfare; they can enroll their children in public schools; and so forth.

            For another, the basic point — which seems to be correct — is that illegal immigrants are a drain on government services.

            Followed closely by illegal immigrants are practically ineligible from any sort of legal status, and for the vast majority of those people, there is no way to repair that situation,

            That’s not true, if they are here because they overstayed their visa they are potentially eligible. More importantly, there are regular pushes from the Left for amnesty.

            It looks to me like your frustration has more to do with people not putting much stock in your nitpicks than anything else.

          • MartMart says:

            Perhaps my frustration is that some consider these nitpicks.

          • Same but for the healthcare debate.

          • Brad says:

            I’ve seen similar arguments, with the sides reversed in the context of gun control.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          I think of the divide as being between “can I live with you?” in the mild sense of sharing the same public space vs. (at best) “would we die for each other?”

          It’s Jacobs’ Trader vs. Guardian.

      • wysinwygymmv says:

        “It’s good to upend the life plans of peaceful, industrious people and get them kicked out of the country, causing them to lose out on a lot of invested time, energy, and probably money too.”

        That’s how equating that with democracy, free speech, and rule of law comes across in this specific context. If you think those three things are good (I do), then maybe you shouldn’t conflate them with poor treatment of people.

        Like I understand — you want to be able to treat foreign people poorly under cover of law. But it hurts your case when those foreign people are more sympathetic than you are. You can acknowledge the tradeoff instead of implying that kicking visa recipients out of the country is an unalloyed good.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Sorry, but this is a good example about how in practice immigration turns out to be anti-First Amendment, anti-democracy, and anti-rule of law.

          It’s remarkably easy for non-Americans like Shakeddown to bully many American citizens into conceding that they don’t deserve their traditional rights to public debate and self-government because he filled out a lot of forms.

          We can have our First Amendment, as long as we don’t ever say anything that hurts immigrants’ feelings. And we can have democracy as long as we don’t ever vote for anything that impedes foreigners’ Zeroth Amendment rights to move here. And we can have rule of law as long as we don’t enforce laws.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            Is immigration any more problematic this way than any other sacred value of the left?

          • Randy M says:

            Is immigration any more problematic this way than any other sacred value of the left?

            Perhaps in that it is also shared by many Republican law- and opinion-makers, as Squirrel points out.

          • vV_Vv says:

            It’s remarkably easy for non-Americans like Shakeddown to bully many American citizens into conceding that they don’t deserve their traditional rights to public debate and self-government because he filled out a lot of forms.

            Shakeddown didn’t call for censorship of those opposing immigration.

            You are taking a “everyone who disagrees with me is violating my First Amendment free speech rights”, which is, frankly, ridiculous.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            “Is immigration any more problematic this way than any other sacred value of the left?”

            Yes. It’s a Ratchet Effect. It’s much easier to enforce Rule of Law to keep people out of the country than to throw them out of the country, so once they get in, it burns a lot of political capital to throw them out. Similarly once they are in they typically start agitating to let in their relatives and countrymen by denouncing Americans as racists for not submitting to their ethnocentric demands.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          “That’s how equating that with democracy, free speech, and rule of law comes across in this specific context. If you think those three things are good (I do), then maybe you shouldn’t conflate them with poor treatment of people.”

          In other words, you can have democracy, free speech, and rule of law as long as you promise upfront that you won’t use them in regard to immigration law (which is of course the single most crucial form of self-government).

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I tried to avoid saying “leftists have all the structural power”. I focused on leftist control of supposedly depoliticized gatekeeper institutions. I think “the government” is a paradigmatic example of *not* being that.

      • Brad says:

        In the world you envision would there be any left wing spaces at all? Presumably there’d still be Churches for the right.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          We’ll still have the Unitarians.

          • gbdub says:

            Scott said nothing like what Brad implied, don’t encourage him.

            It’s more that if you are worried about polarization, you need to be more proactive about not pushing one side out of notionally neutral places.

          • Brad says:

            What about the military? What about law enforcement agencies? What about churches? Should people that are part of them be more proactive about not pushing one side out?

          • gbdub says:

            Churches maybe not – no one asks for a Sunday School transcript as a prerequisite for work.

            But law enforcement and the military – yeah I think it’s potentially a bad thing if those organizations become hyperpartisan, and therefore it would be best if they try to be proactively welcoming to people from diverse ideological backgrounds.

            I don’t think the argument is “left wing spaces should not exist”, it’s that “we’re better off if news media and academia is inclusive rather than polarized/partisan”.

          • quanta413 says:

            What about the military? What about law enforcement agencies? What about churches? Should people that are part of them be more proactive about not pushing one side out?

            Yes.

          • Vorkon says:

            The military, despite still having a generally conservative culture, has Equal Opportunity officers in every command, mandatory classes about rape and consent, and has largely opened every MOS to all genders as long as they can meet certain requirements. And you know what? Despite those classes being too time-consuming and not particularly effective, none of those are bad things, in theory.

            Similarly, if your church is preaching about how leftists are evil and should not be welcomed into their community, you should probably start looking for a different church.

            In short, yes, the things that Scott suggests left-leaning organizations should be doing in this post apply to right-leaning organizations as well, especially if they make any claim of being non-political or otherwise fair.

          • gattsuru says:

            @Brad :

            What about the military? What about law enforcement agencies? What about churches? Should people that are part of them be more proactive about not pushing one side out?

            With the exception of churches, probably, but it might surprise you how many programs exist for the explicit purpose of avoiding those issues. Neither law enforcement, nor the military, nor really any career outside of working directly for the RNC, have anywhere near the political affiliation bias that academia, social work, or mainstream journalism do.

      • shakeddown says:

        How would you define supposedly depoliticized gatekeeper institutions? The gatekeeper is doing a nontrivial amount of work there – I’m pretty sure law enforcement and immigration enforcement try to be neutral but lean right in the same way as academia leans left. I think you are describing something real, I’m just not entirely sure what the right generalization of “media and academia” is.

        …Well, one theory is that this is a consequence of social divide into classes by cognitive ability (as in Murray’s Coming Apart). The new upper class institutions are the ones that tend to lean (neo)liberal, and the lower class institutions tend to lean conservative.
        I don’t trust this theory too much – I can think of arguments for and against it, but from the outside view, it’s too neat a way to make myself feel good and call people who disagree with me dumb. But it does seem to sort institutions correctly at least.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          The new upper class institutions are the ones that tend to lean (neo)liberal, and the lower class institutions tend to lean conservative.
          I don’t trust this theory too much – I can think of arguments for and against it, but from the outside view, it’s too neat a way to make myself feel good and call people who disagree with me dumb. But it does seem to sort institutions correctly at least.

          Create government rules to favor finance and international business over manufacturing. Capital accumulates in the cities while the rural manufacturing centers stagnate. Smart people and cultural institutions go where the money is, now you have a concentration of smart people in blue cities. Change the rules back to favor local industry and red state institutions will attract talent.

          • shakeddown says:

            Disagreements regarding the premise aside, would they stay republican? Or would we just have a lot of rural democrats? FDR had massive rural support, so this doesn’t seem self-evident. And finance/business are historically red while manufacturing is (historically) more blue.

          • hlynkacg says:

            would they stay republican?

            I think that would depend on the Democrats. Yes, FDR had a lot rural support but then I don’t think that today’s Democratic party would nominate FDR.

            What they would stay is “red”.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      “I am intensely angry and frustrated with the current immigration debate, for what I think are justifiable reasons.”

      You want to stop Americans from exercising our First Amendment rights to debate what should be the law.

      How is that in the interest of Americans? Does it ever occur to you that you are abusing Americans by trying to deny them their foremost rights to free speech and self-government?

      • Enkidum says:

        Where has he tried to deny them these rights? Saying “you’re an asshole and your arguments are stupid” is not saying “you should not be able to make your arguments”.

      • GCBill says:

        Do you think that Shakeddown’s intense anger and frustration implies that other people can’t have the debate? That’s not what I interpreted his comment to mean.

      • Randy M says:

        Shakeddown’s main frustration seems to be that the situation he was counting on continuing can be changed by those now in power in American government, even after he has begun to jump through the hoops they have set for him.

        This is certainly an understandable frustration, but it is akin to being frustrated that Americans can collectively decide to change their laws to be less beneficial to him, because at the time of change there will always be someone inconvenienced. Say, someone upset that road construction causes them to miss a flight or be late for work will feel similarly. Directing his anger at those who are glad about the road would be out of place, even if their joy is galling, even if the road work is entirely unneeded.

        But it’s not really fair either to say he is against debate and democracy and all good things ™.

      • vV_Vv says:

        You want to stop Americans from exercising our First Amendment rights to debate what should be the law.

        They didn’t. Please don’t appropriate free speech as a flag to push unrelated political positions.

      • grendelkhan says:

        You want to stop Americans from exercising our First Amendment rights to debate what should be the law.

        This is a terrible post.

        The OP is frustrated and angry because they’re trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy which might shift out from under them at any moment. You think that not only are they primarily upset about the policy, but that they’re so upset about it that they want to stop you from spreading your Dank Truths, which so far as I can tell is a pure invention to justify you turning ‘this person is complaining about arbitrary and infuriating bureaucratic hurdles’ into ‘this person is abusing Americans‘.

    • gbdub says:

      What makes your fury at limiting the H1B system any more righteous than the fury of American workers with no jobs or lower pay because of companies abusing the H1B system to hire cheaper foreign workers?

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Shakeddown’s fury at Americans exercising their First Amendment right is more valid because he’s not an American citizen, which makes him morally better and thus entitled to more power than Americans debating what should be the law in America.

        • gbdub says:

          Meh, you’re not helping. Shakedown’s comment came off as entitled and uncharitable, but yours is just as bad in the other direction.

          I can’t blame someone for being upset about a possible change in policy that would hurt them personally, they just need to actually consider the other side of the argument.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Sorry, but I’m an American citizen and he, like 7 billion other people, is not.

            The 0.3 billion American citizens have the right to engage in free speech over what they want their democratic representatives to enact as immigration law and then demand that their elected officials enforce the law.

          • gbdub says:

            I must have missed the part where shakedown said “the Reddit thread should not be allowed to exist” rather than just “it pissed me off because these views have a large chance of negatively impacting my life”.

            Americans have every right to debate and ultimately decide immigration policy. And shakedown’s argument (which they admitted to be emotion based) was probably too immigrant-centric.

            But simply because something is a privilege doesn’t mean you can’t be pissed if it’s taken away arbitrarily. The H1B program is, after all, a program Americans previously debated and agreed to. It’s quite possible, even likely, that most people arguing against the H1B program aren’t all that aware of the hoops currently jumped through by H1B applicants, and might be more sympathetic if they had that data point.

          • random832 says:

            It’s quite possible, even likely, that most people arguing against the H1B program aren’t all that aware of the hoops currently jumped through by H1B applicants, and might be more sympathetic if they had that data point.

            I think it is infinitely more likely that their reaction would be “eh, I don’t believe it.”

            But of course it is badwrong to be frustrated that the premises of someone’s arguments are not connected to reality. They’re just exercising their right to free speech.

          • gbdub says:

            Well than call me badwrong because the premise of your argument seems to be that I agree with Sailer’s premise that Shakedown is calling for a limitation on free speech, when I specifically disagreed with it.

            Your other premise the evidence-less assertion that hypothetical people would be infinitely likely to hypothetically disbelieve a hypothetical argument, which you use to frame a smug dismissal of these strawmen. Where’s the connection to reality in any of this?

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            I must have missed the part where shakedown said “the Reddit thread should not be allowed to exist” rather than just “it pissed me off because these views have a large chance of negatively impacting my life”.

            The context is the entire progressive world view –

            1) This makes me angry because it has a large chance of negatively impacting my life
            2) (unspoken here but stated in plenty of places) The emotions of “vulnerable people” – like immigrants, racial minorities (not Asians, of course), women, etc. are never to be disturbed – and it’s everyone else’s job to ensure this happens.

            Just because he didn’t set out premise 2 doesn’t mean that it’s not lurking there. How many times have you read the argument that “x makes me – a member of a vulnerable (legally privileged) group feel threatened – therefore x cannot be permitted to continue” – and then anyone saying x gets banned from the forum?

          • random832 says:

            Well than call me badwrong because the premise of your argument seems to be that I agree with Sailer’s premise that Shakedown is calling for a limitation on free speech, when I specifically disagreed with it.

            That part was meant to be addressed toward Sailer himself, but if you feel like wearing it I won’t stop you.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            Just because he didn’t set out premise 2 doesn’t mean that it’s not lurking there.

            This seems like a bizzare leap.

            One of the main advantages of democracy is that it has a feedback loop; when the government does something that hurts a person, that person can and should and will push back; because of that, democracies hurt a lot fewer people then authoritarian governments do, in general.

            “The govenrment is doing X and it is hurting me, I wish the govnermnet would stop doing X” is ALWAYS a completely legitimate point to make in a democracy. You may think there is a valid reason for X and want to argue in favor of it, and that is fine too, but that doesn’t mean that the point isn’t valid.

            In fact if you see the govnerment hurting people unnecessarily it’s basically your duty as a citizen to speak up against it, before more harm is caused.

            Now, the fact that some people are more vulnerable to this kind of harm is certanly *true* and worth keeping an eye on, but it’s not necessary, nor is it really relevant to this specific case.

          • Rebel with an Uncaused Cause says:

            Just because he didn’t set out premise 2 doesn’t mean that it’s not lurking there.

            This is textbook strawmanning. He did not make that argument; you’re imputing it to him.

            I have seen other people online make that argument, but that does not mean that all people who hold the first premise embrace the second. This is a space for rational discussion; we’re supposed to engage what our fellow commenters say, rather than a nightmare fantasy of it.

      • Joyously says:

        I don’t know what Shakedown’s field is, but I’m in engineering. Watching my foreign-citizen friends in grad school apply for jobs, I found it bizarre that anyone would think they would have an unfair advantage over me if I were to apply to the same jobs. Sure, they were willing to take whatever salary offered as long as a company agreed to sponsor their H1-B, which meant those companies could probably get away with offering lower salaries. But it was still blindingly obvious to me that an American girl (me) would have an advantage over an Indian guy with the same qualifications but a ton of necessary paperwork and a heavy accent.

        • Thegnskald says:

          Owing to requirements in H1B1 visas, companies have to post jobs for a certain amount of time before the application will be accepted. This results in extremely specific job postings that are tailored to specific individuals they want to bring over, (edit: local applicants for which) they will find any available reason to dismiss.

          So in a general case, the local applicant has an advantage, but job sites are full of these kinds of fake job offers the companies never intend to hire local workers for. This leaves many IT people quite bitter about H1B1 visas, since there are jobs they literally cannot get being dangled in front of them, then inevitably going to the foreign worker the company specifically wanted. From an outside perspective, it can look a lot like “H1B1 employees have an advantage”, even though it is really any artifact of regulations requiring this bizarre practice.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Owing to requirements in H1B1 visas, companies have to post jobs for a certain amount of time before the application will be accepted.

            This is not exactly the case. To get an H-1B requires only a Labor Condition Application with prevailing wage information, not a job posting. The fake job ads are used, however, in the process to get green cards for H-1B workers.

        • gbdub says:

          The fact that they’d be willing to accept a lower salary for an H1B almost certainly lowers what employers would offer you.

          But also, I don’t think your peers in grad school are the sort of people that H1B abusers hire. The most famous recent case was where a bunch of Disney animators got laid off (and were forced to train their replacements!) when Disney contracted their work out to a company staffed by H1B workers. They got away with it in the resultant lawsuit based on the argument that since they were contracting to another company, rather than directly replacing their own workers, they weren’t actually harming any local workers with H1B hires.

        • Randy M says:

          Sure, they were willing to take whatever salary offered as long as a company agreed to sponsor their H1-B, which meant those companies could probably get away with offering lower salaries. But it was still blindingly obvious to me that an American girl (me) would have an advantage over an Indian guy with the same qualifications but a ton of necessary paperwork and a heavy accent.

          Why? Were you also willing to take whatever salary was offered? If so, do you think the amount of the offer would have anything to do with supply and demand?

          • Joyously says:

            I’m more flexible on salary than a lot of people (I recently graduated and took a job that paid significantly less than what I could have gotten elsewhere because it’s where I wanted to work). But more importantly, employers in this field don’t maximize on a value of “cheaper” or even a combination of “cheaper” + “competent.” They will tell you that they value “personality” and “fitting in to our culture.” Exxon Mobil prefers to hire engineers who are either well-put-together women or tall men with good hair, and they’re not subtle about it.

        • reasoned argumentation says:

          But it was still blindingly obvious to me that an American girl (me) would have an advantage over an Indian guy with the same qualifications but a ton of necessary paperwork and a heavy accent.

          Well yeah, if you’re a woman in engineering and even minimally qualified you’re overwhelmed with offers.

        • Jiro says:

          Sure, they were willing to take whatever salary offered as long as a company agreed to sponsor their H1-B, which meant those companies could probably get away with offering lower salaries.

          That’s the advantage.

    • infiniteperplexity says:

      H1B visas seem to be the one immigration-related issue where it’s socially acceptable for liberals to hold anti-immigration views without being considered “anti-immigrant.” I think that’s probably just a matter of classism – we respect college-educated people enough to care about foreign competition to their jobs.

    • eqdw says:

      H1B discussions on reddit piss me off so hard.

      I left reddit like two years ago, but back then there were tons of articles in silicon valley and sf bay area subreddits about how h1bs are terrible and exploitative and how we need to stop giving them.out.so companies can’t unfairly underpay these workers.

      Ignoring that restricting H1Bs makes these people unempkoyed, not fairly paid: H1B DATA IS PUBLIC AND COMPANIES ARE REQUIRED.BY LAW TO PAY PREVAILING MARKET RATES.

      Internet commentators: whipping up a righteous fury over things that a five second google search show are false

      • birdboy2000 says:

        A five second google search tells me that the laws are on the books, not that they’re effectively enforced. Given the prevalence of things like wage theft and nominally illegal union busting, while it’s *possible* companies are paying prevailing market rates as the H1B laws require, it’s the kind of thing that requires more info to prove.

        (Also, increasing the supply of labor in a market without collective bargaining still drives down wages because you’re increasing the number of people competing, even if you can’t actually pay them less.)

      • Brad says:

        Part of the disconnect when it comes to H1Bs is that a small number of companies (Indian BPOs) file a large number of total cases and they arguably abuse the process. That’s where a lot of the negative anecdotes are coming from. Whereas for cultural reasons random internet forum people that got an H1B themselves or know someone that did are likely to be more familar with how it works for companies that file far fewer.

    • The Nybbler says:

      And it wasn’t just internet flame wars. It was internet flame wars by people who actually might convince the administration to kick me out of the country.

      If you mean the SSC subreddit, I was on that thread and I can assure you I have no pull with the administration.

    • wintermute92 says:

      I would add to this that while the presidency is fickle and changes hands at near-random, state governments have been sliding consistently right for decades. A lot of state-level legislation is pre-written by corporations and passed verbatim, and there’s virtually no opposition to militarized policing and shredded environmental or consumer protections. Even the liberal holdouts have gone coercive corporate-authoritarian-left in most cases. This scares me, because it’s way less visible than the left’s media and academic influence but is causing long-lasting harms.

      (I’m deeply sorry about your situation, the H1B program is broken but the applicants are the victims in that, not the offenders. Any reform I want to see would make well-meaning use of it far easier.)

      • cassander says:

        >I would add to this that while the presidency is fickle and changes hands at near-random, state governments have been sliding consistently right for decades.

        Please show me a single state where regulation or spending on social programs is down over the last 20 years, where gays have fewer rights, where there are fewer state employees (contractors included), really any policy you can show objective measures for other than gun control, where a state is right of where it was 20 years ago.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Gays have fewer rights in every state, though they may have more specifically homosexuality-related rights. Gay entrepreneurs are almost as strangled by encroaching regulation as straight ones.

        • shakeddown says:

          I think liberals think of “Corporations writing laws and giving them to politicians they fund to sign verbatim” (for example, in Massachusetts only a specific set of companies can give you car insurance) as a primarily republican phenomenon. Do Republicans consider this a primarily Democrat phenomenon? (And if they do, do you have any idea whether this sort of thing passes more in red or blue states?)

          • Randy M says:

            No, while the side most vulnerable to regulatory capture or its legislative counterpart might vary by industry, but I think most Republican voters who are aware of this see it as bipartisan. Bipartisan isn’t a word loaded with positive affect among Republican voters, of course.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            I think liberals think of “Corporations writing laws and giving them to politicians they fund to sign verbatim” (for example, in Massachusetts only a specific set of companies can give you car insurance) as a primarily republican phenomenon. Do Republicans consider this a primarily Democrat phenomenon? (And if they do, do you have any idea whether this sort of thing passes more in red or blue states?)

            I am not a Republican or Democrat, but I’ll give my opinion anyway. It is probably more likely for laws to be written by business lobbyists to be Republican than Democratic, because Repubs are friendlier to business than Dems. However, I suspect it is likely for more regulatory capture (where businesses control the agencies that theoretically control the businesses) to happen in Dem states, simply because Dems are more likely to favor regulatory agencies. Almost all such agencies are controlled by the businesses they purport to regulate, because who else is expert in these matters than these businesses and the people that run them? So it matters little who writes these laws; they all end up in the same place.

          • cassander says:

            >Do Republicans consider this a primarily Democrat phenomenon? (And if they do, do you have any idea whether this sort of thing passes more in red or blue states?)

            those that consider it consider it a problem inherent in a large, bureaucratic state that regulates basically everything. Public choice theory is a heavily, though no means entirely, right wing effort. The very fact that you cite massachusetts, one of the most left leaning states, out to be proof that liberalism doesn’t solve the problem.

          • shakeddown says:

            I was citing Massachusetts because I heard it specifically referred to as weird that this happened in Massachusetts, as a blue state. So there’s a strong selection bias for that example.

  15. ameliaquining says:

    I think your “grind our enemies beneath our boots” framing here is part of the problem. The way I see it, the two sides are playing a true prisoners’ dilemma. That you should consider cooperating in the true prisoners’ dilemma is not obvious, and treating it like the standard fake prisoners’ dilemma, where everyone knows that good people cooperate, is just going to make people angry and also convince them that you don’t understand them at all.

    The progressives here don’t see the payoff matrix as being measured in power, or prestige, or any of those other things that you obviously shouldn’t defect for because that would be antisocial. They see it as being measured in human lives rescued from the horrific oppression that progressive policies aim to fight against. From this perspective, maximizing your payoff (by defecting, goes the implicit reasoning) is the right thing to do, and comparing it to defecting for power or prestige (which would of course be antisocial and wrong) is just being confused about what matters morally.

    If you want to argue effectively against this, you need to acknowledge that yes, you’re asking progressives to take actions that (from a CDT perspective) will increase on expectation the number of people living in horrific oppression. Then you explain the counterintuitive reasons why this is nonetheless the right thing to do, if fighting oppression is what you care about.

    (And yes, there are plenty of political parasites and sociopaths in the mix, and even more people whose behavior fails to distinguish them from same, but we ought to be careful about throwing around such accusations. It makes things harder to coordinate, and people have a known bias in this direction.)

    • Tracy W says:

      Is it at all obvious that this is a true prisoners dilemma? Under a prisoners dilemma your pay off matrix for a single game is such that defecting is better for you regardless of what your opponent does. It’s not at all clear to me that defecting is better for progressives if conservatives cooperate, or even if conservatives defect.
      (This being a common problem with applying game theory to the real world.)

      • ameliaquining says:

        Yes, I think this is a true prisoners’ dilemma. If progressives use Dark Side tactics or what have you to move the Overton window to the left (defecting), and conservatives don’t fight back in kind (cooperating), then the Overton window will move to the left and more progressive-favored policies will be implemented, which is the currency that the payoff matrix is denominated in.

        • Nornagest says:

          That seems to assume that the only reason people don’t use Dark Side tactics is because of moral qualms. This may be the case, but I can also think of a scenario where they work in the short term but burn external goodwill or internal stability to do it, and so are unsustainable in the long run.

        • Tracy W says:

          @ameliaquining
          Or progressives move the Overtones window to the left, implement their policies and it results in disaster, reducing all demand for said policies (eg Communism, Urban Renewal, in the USA, forced busing of school kids), and giving conservatives a tool to bash future progressives with.

        • LIB says:

          You guys, I think we might be equivocating the word “true” here. In order to predict and explain the behavior of agents, the real result of different courses of action don’t matter – only what the agents /expect/ to be the results. It only matters whether this looks like a True Prisoner’s Dilemma to the liberals and conservatives in question. If they are mistaken about this, we may be able to argue that to change their behavior, but our model of their current behavior is unchanged.

          The sense of True in which ameliaquining means it is simply that agents acting rationally for max expected value will really choose to defect /even when value includes moral value/, which is indeed what the certain liberals and conservatives in question appear to see this as.

    • poignardazur says:

      Insightful.

      Yeah, that’s precisely it. I guess that mirrors something Scott (sort of) pointed out in “What Developmental Milestones are you missing?”, the idea that people have different values, but people don’t realize that other people have different values and are ready to defect for them.

      • LIB says:

        Well, it isn’t that simple of a factual realization, either. You can realize that people hold different values, and use that to create perfectly accurate models of them, which you then use to satisfy your own values. It takes an even more special outside view to cooperate in the true prisoner’s dilemma – the one where /you don’t care about their values/ regardless of whether you know about them.

        Also, yes, ameliaquining, this is very insightful, and thank you for it.

  16. Hyenaspots says:

    Maybe this is all for the best?

    Conservatism seemed to get absolutely wrecked by the World Wars and the immense cultural production of Marxists in the West. My background was art history and I really couldn’t tell you where conservatives fit in that. It’s hard for me to imagine where conservatives slotted into the national media either — it’s really major market, i.e., urban media. I’m not entirely convinced that conservative viability in the major gatekeeper institutions didn’t just die out from lack of contributions. From my perspective, as a former-ish conservative, a lot of its intellectual energy really felt spent and too politically focused.

    You point out that the entire secession is slowly producing more various mirrors and uncomfortable conservatives. Perhaps it will eventually spawn conservative contributions to broader culture? At the same time, I’ve noticed more liberals near me starting to talk like conservatives thanks to the whole white working class narrative. The amount of “get a job, whiner” I’ve heard directed at people from rural areas has been pretty high.

    I’ve actually been really pleased, as someone who believes both in feeding hippies and telling them to get a job.

    ETA: Just to provide my favorite example, City Journal once had a lot of commentary pushing for a kind of Academicism and City Beautiful take on visual culture and architecture. That died out, it seems, but it had articles by Scruton and stuff. That wouldn’t really be possible in the mainstream.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      “the immense cultural production of Marxists”

      It’s retconning to assume that there were many Marxist artists or writers before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It was only when capitalists ran out of money to subsidize artists during the Depression that artists paid much attention to Marxism.

      During the 1920s, Mussolini’s Italy was much more popular with the cultured than was the Soviet Union. Without the Depression, artists and writers would have continued to ignore Russia in the early 1930s.

      Many of the political ideas that galvanized the cultural elite during the 1920s seem unfamiliar to us. For example, anti-feminism was huge among American writers, actors, and critics due to the linkage between women’s suffrage and Prohibition, which they hated.

    • Tracy W says:

      My background was art history and I really couldn’t tell you where conservatives fit in that.

      Does that say something about art history or about your education in art history?

      • caethan says:

        He apparently studied the history of art all the way back to the long-ago days of the 1930s.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Some artists were Marxists between 1930 and about 1950. Virtually none were Marxists before 1930 and few were Marxists more than a few decades later.

    • acrimonymous says:

      My background was art history and I really couldn’t tell you where conservatives fit in that.

      This seems like a clear case of the winners writing the history. Conservatives don’t fit in art history because art history is the history of progressivism in art–even going back to formal representational developments like perspective, the history is the history of innovation and change.

      More recently, you have the Derriere Garde associated with Tom Wolfe and American Arts Quarterly magazine, for example. They are just pointing back to specific times in the past, however. They are aware of this, and discussion of what steps forward can be made after taking several back has taken place without, I think, any definitive answer.

      Personally, I see art as being rather like cuisine. The forms have to be taken in the context of human biology. World cuisines have been pretty much perfected. Recent developments have been game-playing, and the things that really satisfy are established cultural traditions. I think visual arts and architecture are the same. I.e., we’ve probably reached a point where meaningful development is over, and further changes are motivated by forces of the market or ego.

  17. yotann says:

    Wouldn’t this be a serious problem in the archipelago? New communities need to form somehow, but if they only attract the fringes the new communities won’t be healthy.

    • Evan Þ says:

      That’s a very good question. I suspect the difference might be that new polities in the Archipelago would be physically distinct, with new economies providing new nitches for people to fill. Many of the first English settlers in the New World were religious refugees – but they followed in the footsteps of the economic migrants of Roanoke and Jamestown, and were swiftly followed by more economic migrants.

      (Of course, AFAIK this could only happen with brain uploading, huge-scale interstellar travel, or magic.)

    • Tekhno says:

      IIRC didn’t the Archipelago depend on having pretty much infinite space and resources, so if you wanted to start a new community to escape someone’s witch hunt, and found that it was full of witches, you could then go and start yet another community until you got the level of filtration you wanted? Real life resource and space constraints are what render it only a thought experiment.

      • JulieK says:

        Infinite space and resources, but not infinite people. I can found my own community, but who’s going to follow me there?

    • poignardazur says:

      You did read that post where Scott said that the Archipelago existed, and it was the Internet and it turned out to be a pretty crappy (fantastic) place dominated by a few major networks and pop ups everywhere?

      https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/

      The real world is dominated by social momentum. We have things like cults and countries and religions and companies, which all try to appeal to your sentiments or use various incentives to keep you loyal to them.

      I’m just a stranger on the internet, mind you, not a political scientist, but it seems to me that the archipelago is an utopia for the same reason communism is: logistic problems and incompatible incentives.

    • Tekhno says:

      @poignardazur

      dominated by a few major networks

      This is only because of the network effect. People WANT to be in a huge network with all of their friends friends friends. You need a counterveiling force to counter-act that if you want anything different, but even if large networks are the result, that’s not intrinsically a failure. Those large networks are serving and are comprised of the normal for humanity (this is also why they converge on similar practices despite different design structures).

      At the same time these networks dominate, I can easily exit to any of the kabrillions of smaller places that also see use, such as this place, or other boards and comment sections I’m not telling you guys about that I’ve been posting on since 2006.

      Yes, it’s hard to get everyone else to move with you if you create something new, but it doesn’t matter when there are 70 kabrillion already existing smaller communities you can join. You have to give people a reason to go to any new community you create, and if you create a new community just to be more “free” then it’s going to be filled with witches. If you create a new community that actually offers something the big players don’t, then maybe you can overcome the network effect, but clearly the truth is that as much as people bitch about reddit and twitter they really really really like using them.

      In Scott’s post he says:

      So instead of “let a thousand nations bloom”, it ended up more like “let five or six big nations bloom that we can never get rid of”.

      Let five or six nations bloom and also ten thousand kabrillion backwater nations the normies don’t care about.

      If you go into Archipelago assuming the end goal is everything split up into relatively evenly sized communities catering to every single possible variant of humanity, then you are going to be let down, because humanity is clustered around the middle of a bell curve in most every trait. The beauty of freedom isn’t for the masses, it’s for the misfits, it’s for the witches. Of course, the majority of people are going to hate that and stay clustered in large networks with their fellows who are relatively similar enough to themselves.

      As regards the vast majority of humanity, things like anarcho-capitalism are solutions in search of a problem. Most people aren’t libertarians, so a libertarian society (the internet, an Archipelago etc) would reflect that.

      I used to think that there was enough demand for a free marketplace of ideas that if a company become too restrictive, another one would spring up to replace it. Then I suffered through the conflict between Reddit and Voat.

      Reddit didn’t become too restrictive. The vast majority of people are demonstrably happy enough with Reddit to continue using it. The restrictions on “hate subs” affected only a small portion of the userbase who were witches, who then fled to a witch hideout, making everyone happier.

      If the majority of people disliked reddit more than they liked it, you’d know about it, like with Digg. The majority want some level of censorship, so any drive for an alternative that could overcome the network effect enough to lead to a fast enough transfer would be catalyzed by problems with reddit that aren’t based on libertarian concerns, but on the more common progressive and conservative ones.

      Archipelago would be a complete waste for the majority of people. Its only purpose is to allow for misfits to escape from the giga-clusters of the masses.

      EDIT:
      Or at least most of the time. Maybe once in a blue moon one of the tiny outer spaces hits on something amazing that the masses love, so it helps innovation at least, even if it doesn’t result in the sorting of humanity into a thousand nations.

  18. Jack Sorensen2 says:

    The funny thing about a lot of this is that the conservative complaint towards the neutral/liberal institutions mirrors many leftist critiques of those same institutions.

    The Marxist view of those same places is: there’s no truly neutral or objective standpoint, and to the extent people talk about one, it just reinforces a white, or male, or whatever-else, point of view. We need to have our own institutions to push back against the “neutral” places that actually reinforce racism, sexism, and the rest (and our response is explicitly, by design, not neutral).

    And I think there actually is some validity to this, although in recent years it has strongly diminished. Since it’s in the news, Andrew Jackson, the Civil War, and other slavery-related things are an example. When I was younger Andrew Jackson was taught in school, and generally remembered, as a good President who maybe did some bad stuff and was maybe controversial. The Civil War was taught in my high school as a cautionary tale about what happens when people can’t compromise. More generally, it was a sad tale of heroism between two noble groups, and today we all know that one side was right but Robert E Lee was still a gentleman. The Missouri Compromise was great because everyone came together and agreed on what to do, the 1850 Compromise a little worse because it was more acrimonious, and the rest of the 1850s even worse. John Brown was somewhere between “controversial” and “bad”. People like John C Calhoun were remembered fondly as one of the Great Triumvirate of Senators. JFK’s book, “Profiles in Courage”, about courageous politicians, included those who “bravely” took stances that aided slavery and Jim Crow.

    All of this was the conventional wisdom accepted in places like the NY Times and academia, and the people on the other side were a loud, but small, minority.

    Another view of this history, and I think a more compelling one, is this: who cares if Senators were nice to each other? Who cares if they compromised or gave great speeches or followed Senate protocol, or acted like Southern gentlemen or did politically unpopular things? Slavery, as a moral issue, is infinitely larger than any of that. The way to tell the good guys and bad in antebellum US history is this – the pro-slavery people were the bad guys, and the anti-slavery people were good. Andrew Jackson “owned” 150 humans, and when putting a reward out for a runaway slave, offered to pay extra if the slave were tortured before being returned. Thomas Jefferson raped Sally Hemings when she was a teenager, and enslaved the resulting child, his child. That child was actually 7/8ths white, the child of 3 generations of raped female slaves. That shit was fucked up, and it’s the most important moral issue of our country’s early history.

    The old liberal institutions did not take this view. Historical surveys of US Presidents put Andrew Jackson in the top 10 all time (along with Woodrow Wilson, who was practically a Klansman). No ifs, ands, ors, or buts – by any modern measure, morally speaking slavery absolutely crowds out anything else he could have done. The more recent developments in, say, Andrew Jackson’s legacy are just reverting to what’s morally right. People say they’re tired of hearing about slavery, but our country actually has not come to terms with the sheer amounts of violence and brutality involved.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      Andrew Jackson was prestigious with historians in the 1960s such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. because most historians were Democrats and Jackson was the founder of the modern Democratic Party. Jackson was on the side of the little guy against the rich. Alexander Hamilton was less fashionable because he was a plutocrat and not very democratic.

      Today, of course, nobody cares about the little guy anymore, just about race and the like. So, we are told to hate Jackson and to love Hamilton, because he was a West Indian immigrant and maybe secretly Jewish and he was on the side of rich New York bankers.

      And that’s what matters.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Is it reasonable to parse “the little guy” as “the white little guy”?

        • Steve Sailer says:

          It’s funny how in this age of intense racial sensitivity, the billionaires keep getting ever more billionairey. It’s almost as if there’s a causal connection between Jackson being booted off the double sawbuck in the name of fighting racism and Wall Street traders being able to afford 4 figure tickets to see a rapping Alexander Hamilton on Broadway.

      • wysinwygymmv says:

        I think it matters that he perpetuated a genocide, even against American Indians who wanted to assimilate into white society.

        Yeah, I mean rah rah populism and all that — maybe government-run banks are a bad idea — but let’s not pretend populism doesn’t have an ugly side.

      • Today, of course, nobody cares about the little guy anymore, just about race and the like

        Oh dear…well, best not fan the flames, then.

    • Gazeboist says:

      This comment is so very almost.

      This is the essential history of the civil war, at least in my view: slavery was a disgusting institution that got steadily more inhumane as time passed. The north used that immense human tragedy as an excuse to cast out their political enemies and burn the culture of those enemies to the ground, then sold off any chance at actually helping the victims of slavery in exchange for their enemies’ acceptance. The US response to slavery was horrible, not just because nothing was done for the first 80 years, but because the barest minimum of what could be gotten away with was done then, and nothing was done for then next 80 years either. We are perpetually left the mess of our parents to clean up, and we use the fact that the mess exists as an excuse to ornament what little we can be bothered to clean. We at turns deify and vilify our predecessors because we are afraid to see them as what they were: flawed humans, who acted with little, if any, sense of the magnitude of the decisions they made.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I thought slavery got somewhat better after it was no longer legal to kidnap people from Africa. No?

        • Sadly, no. The historical consensus is that American slavery was most “gentle” in the 1600s when labor was scarce, figuring out how to keep slaves from dying from disease and overwork was new and tricky, and when slave conditions were roughly comparable to those of indentured servitude, with slave contracts varying on issues ranging from whether children of slaves automatically became slaves, whether slaves were entitled to own personal property and save up to “buy” themselves out of slavery, and whether slaves were automatically freed if they converted to Christianity. At first, the answers were “maybe not,” “maybe,” and “maybe,” but by the early 1700s, with the passage of some laws (such as in the 1705 Virginia slave code) that standardized these things, the answers became, “yes,” “no,” and “no,” respectively.

          Then, in the 1800s, the Haitian Revolution and the Nat Turner Rebellion scared the bejeezus out of Southerners and slave-owners in particular and led them to pass laws against slaves traveling alone without passes or being taught to read (lest they foment new rebellions).

        • Gazeboist says:

          Not really. By the time the transatlantic trade was banned (1808; ie as soon as allowed by the Constitution), slavery had become a political/cultural football. That, together with westward expansion into the area of the Louisiana purchase, meant that the ban on transatlantic trade resulted in a massive step-up in the internal trade (plus smuggling, of course). In addition to what citizencokane says above, one big thing I recall from my history classes was that there was a significant jump in the number of slaves sold away from their families around this time.

          • po8crg says:

            It’s also worth pointing out that most of the free states freed their slaves by passing laws saying that anyone born after year X would be free, or that any slave still living in the state after Y years would be free. Slavery was legal in all 13 of the original states in 1776.

            These didn’t stop the slave-owners selling the slaves to states that still had slavery. Nearly all of that was after 1808 – so the banning of the transatlantic trade meant that Northern slave-owners got a better price when they sold their slaves to the South.

            So, yes, at least some of the Northerners who voted for that 1808 ban on the transatlantic trade were doing so to improve their profits on selling off their slaves to the South.

            One reason that the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act didn’t really get going until the 1830s/1840s is that the North still had lots of slaves until then, so a court determining whether a black man was a slave or free seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing.

            Incidentally, there were still 18 slaves in New Jersey (a free state) in 1861.

            Virginia, which was mostly not good cotton country (tobacco and indigo were the main cash crops, but many plantations were farms, growing food), made a lot of money in the 1840s and 1850s by selling slaves to other slave states – but the slave population barely dropped in VA. That probably means that Virginia was effectively breeding slaves for profit. There’s very little evidence of selective breeding (ie telling slaves who to breed with), though there was a lot of masters and overseers raping their female slaves.

            So, yeah, slavery sucked differently post-1808. Death rates dropped, but family breakup increased.

        • keranih says:

          @ Nancy –

          I think you mean “When the Brits began seriously enforcing the imbargo on the Atlantic sea trade in slaves purchased in Africa”. It was never a thing for Yankee traders to go running ‘cross the plains of Africa, lassoing all the darkies they could find. Africans sold the captured members of other tribes. (There are no good guys here.) And the Brit empire cared quite a bit more about the trans-Atlantic trade to the Brit colonies in the Americas than it did about the Arab trade east and north from Africa.

          There is also evidence to suggest that, once across the Middle Passage (which tended to kill nearly as many human sailors as it did human cargo) the North American plantations allowed for more humane conditions (ie, less deadly) than did the Caribbean and Central American operations.

          As noted elsewhere – there was not an easy way to let go of the tiger. Southern slave holders thought that they – and their children – would lose their lives (much less their fortunes) if/when the slave revolt came.

          It would have taken a George Washington, or a Francis of Assisi, or the Nazarene, to convince them otherwise. But those men are dead, and we will not see their like again.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            The 1808 US ban on importing slaves largely worked. And the British largely didn’t stop US ships, so a lot of the ships bringing slaves to Brazil or the Caribbean flew the US flag.

    • cthor says:

      Ranking presidents from best to worst is a fun exercise that intentionally leaves out the possibility for any nuance. I suspect a lot of people for that exercise look at things from a utilitarian perspective, where they say the net utility of Jackson’s acts were positive, rather than a “who committed the least heinous acts” perspective.

      I’m not familiar enough with the US Civil War to argue specific object-level points, but the approach that seems most appropriate is this, and is how most historians write:

      Jackson did some things, for these reasons.

      Of course, when teaching kids history, that’s a bit dry. You want to forge a narrative that at least keeps them interested. And so:

      Jackson did some things, for these reasons. This is what we think of those things and reasons now.

      The main danger is the pattern: “Jackson’s heinous acts were simply beyond the pale. Therefore we need to forge a revisionist history surrounding his good acts.”

      Your view of history is getting close to that: “Who cares about all the nuance, Jackson did some Bad Things and everything else is irrelevant by comparison.” That’s politicising the institution.

      I think your argument amounts to this:

      Jackson was in the past ranked amongst the top 10 presidents. Therefore, the institution of history education was already politicised because his heinous acts were not being sufficiently denounced. Therefore, I’m justified in further eroding the neutrality of this institution.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Jackson was celebrated in the past for staring down South Carolina’s secessionist rumblings in the early 1830s, but that seems to be forgotten. In the past, Jackson was seen as opposing the South Carolina oligarchs such as Calhoun whose descendants led Secession in 1860, putting Jackson and Lincoln together on the side of Union.

        But today the big money is into putting down Jackson and deifying Hamilton.

      • Jack Sorensen2 says:

        Ranking Presidents is un-nuanced, and historians may write in the way you say – but in popular history, people generally see some historical figures as good, and others as bad. Nobody has a problem with this when it comes to a great number of former leaders. Some people have a popular legacy of “good guy”, some “bad guy”, and some “well, it’s complicated”.

        You can generally argue against that way of categorizing things; but if I’m asking about the biases of neutral institutions, then it makes sense to see how they rank people.

        As for net utility – this is the whole problem. How do you make that calculation? The leftist people making the critique I’m talking about would say that someone giving Jackson a positive net utility does so by massively discounting the negative effects to slaves and Native Americans, and then giving him a positive number based on relatively unimportant things like whether there was a National Bank or whether the “common man” was, in some abstract sense, represented.

        Your view of history is getting close to that: “Who cares about all the nuance, Jackson did some Bad Things and everything else is irrelevant by comparison.” That’s politicising the institution.

        Almost everyone agrees with the logic here for sufficiently “Bad Things”. And they certainly agree with a softer version of the logic, along the lines of “this person did certain Bad Things and we should generally judge them much more harshly for it”. And they certainly would agree with this logic when the “everything else” is a bunch of weaksauce in comparison to the Bad.

        I think your argument amounts to this:

        Jackson was in the past ranked amongst the top 10 presidents. Therefore, the institution of history education was already politicised because his heinous acts were not being sufficiently denounced. Therefore, I’m justified in further eroding the neutrality of this institution.

        Problems in defining “neutrality” aside (which are larger than your comment) – the argument (Jackson being a single example of it) is that institutions are currently biased, not in the past. And to the extent one fights that, they’re not further eroding neutrality, they’re correcting it.

        That said, I do think there’s a liberal bias in many institutions, I think that’s bad, and I think that position’s completely consistent with everything I said about slavery.

    • Tracy W says:

      Another view of this history, and I think a more compelling one, is this: who cares if Senators were nice to each other? Who cares if they compromised or gave great speeches or followed Senate protocol, or acted like Southern gentlemen or did politically unpopular things? Slavery, as a moral issue, is infinitely larger than any of that.

      I disagree, and not just because years of maths makes me finicky about the word “infinite”.

      Good government is important. Bad government can be terribly terribly bad. Europeans fled to the USA during slavery because it is terrible to see your children go hungry every spring or be killed in a pogrom or freeze during the winter. The USA produced the prosperity that protected against that, the compromises and Senate protocols generally avoided civil wars or the societal breakdowns which kill millions. Look at the breakdown of China during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Slavery was a great evil but so was the Boxer Rebellion. So was WWI. So was the Russian Revolution. So was the Irish potato famine. The USA has avoided a lot of potential tragedies of a level of magnitude on the order of slavery.

      Note, I am not American.

      • wysinwygymmv says:

        Maybe it’s because I’m not a utilitarian, but I think there’s a clear moral difference between, say, WWI where a bunch of people with conflicting interests killed each other to further their individual interests, and US chattel slavery where one group intentionally subjugated another group to bondage and horrific treatment to further their own interests. In WWI, if one side unilaterally de-escalated, they would have been conquered which makes it unclear whether that would have been the right thing to do, whereas with slavery only one side could unilaterally de-escalate and it definitely would have been the right thing to do.

        I tend to think similar arguments could be made for each of your examples: US chattel slavery was a morally bad institution in an especially one-sided way. And I don’t really think there was a tradeoff involved where it was like: “Well, we either have good government and slavery, or bad government and no slavery.”

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          where a bunch of people with conflicting interests killed each other to further their individual interests

          I mean, it was mostly other people that killed and got killed, not the ones with conflicting interests.

        • Tracy W says:

          I think WWI was a massive failure of politics. The German Kaiser and the Russian Czar lost their jobs, and eventually the Czar his life and his family’s. The British ruling class lost something like 25% of a generation of young men. How was that in any of their interests?
          German children hungered and froze during winter under the naval blockade. Belgian civilians were shot by invading German troops. Russia got so bad there was a revolution.

          And all over what? An assassination of one Archduke and his wife by a Serbian separatist in a country far away from many of the combatants.

          And it’s not the case that if one side had unilaterally de-escalated they’d have been conquered. After the Revolution the Russians negotiated a peace with Gernany. It was painful for Russia, they gave up a lot of land, but not as painful as continuing the war.

          WWI was a massive failure of politics. Which came at a terrible human cost.

          I agree with you that there probably wasn’t a trade-off of the type you describe. But I think it is quite possible to assess both the slavery and the other actions of an American politician and despise the slavery while admiring some of their other accomplishments. (I’m not expert enough on American history to say if any of the leaders you mention actually did help avoid an American war on the scale of WWI, or the Boxer Rebellion or the like.

          • Aapje says:

            And all over what? An assassination of one Archduke and his wife by a Serbian separatist in a country far away from many of the combatants.

            That was just what set off the chain of events that led to war, but the actual main cause was the emergence of Germany as a new superpower. At the time, the idea was that you had to have an empire/colonies to be a superpower, but the other nations had already snapped up most countries that qualified.

            The existing superpowers were afraid of Germany taking parts of their empire and Germany was afraid that they would be conquered before they were strong enough. So many thought that war was inevitable to shake this out. German military analysis was that at that point, the only way that Germany could win a war was by defeating France before Russia entered the war and that Russia was very slow to mobilize.

            So when Russia started mobilizing after the assassination of the Archduke, Germany believed that their only chance was to strike right away.

            As it happened, they were wrong that they could defeat France quickly and they were wrong that Russia was slow to mobilize.

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            At the time, the idea was that you had to have an empire/colonies to be a superpower, but the other nations had already snapped up most countries that qualified.

            The existing superpowers were afraid of Germany taking parts of their empire and Germany was afraid that they would be conquered before they were strong enough.

            It’s worth pointing out that, as history played out, everyone was correct on these points, though. You did need an empire to be a superpower, and Germany was conquered before they were strong enough.

          • You did need an empire to be a superpower

            In the literal sense of a colonial empire, the big imperial powers were the U.K., France, the Netherlands and Portugal, none of which ended up as a superpower. The U.S. and the USSR had acquired all of their territory in one chunk. The U.S. had influence over lots of poorer countries but wasn’t actually ruling them. The USSR ended up with an empire in east Europe, but only at the end of the war.

          • Tracy W says:

            @Aagpe: that was what I recall from my history classes too, but the causes of WWI are more hotly debated than that. Among other things, that analysis ignores that the existing Great Powers were not monolithic, eg Britain had an interest in a European land power that could weight against England’s old enemy France. Margaret MacMillian argues that Germany deliberately put pressure on the Brits years before 1914 under the belief that the Brits had no option but to maintain their German alliance, but the Brits responded by signing a treaty with France.

            But leaving those debates aside, your account still leaves plenty of opportunities for a statesman to have made a bold speech or a compromise that could have altered the outcome. Perhaps a German could have broken the linkage between superpower and colonies and instead positioned Germany as the defender of freedom against the British, French and Russian empires. Perhaps the Kaiser could have said “this military plan is too complex and too risky, we’re not going to war.” Perhaps a combined French and British diplomatic could have reassured German worries. In all those cases a great tragedy could have been averted by compromise, by diplomacy, maybe even by speeches.

            @Chevalier: the theory about colonies was wrong. 1930s France had heaps of colonies and was defeated and occupied by the Nazis. 1930s Britain still had India, and much of Africa, and the support of Canada, Australia and NZ, but could not stop the Nazi advance on land. The standard economic analysis is that colonisation and empires make the colonising country worse off relative to freely trading with countries in question.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            1930s France had heaps of colonies and was defeated and occupied by the Nazis. 1930s Britain still had India, and much of Africa, and the support of Canada, Australia and NZ, but could not stop the Nazi advance on land.

            I thought WWI was the big war under discussion? Those colonies did make a big difference in the first war in terms of manpower and supply. Without the French & British colonies, Germany may well have won. WWII had its own set of factors – and arguably the biggest was the resolution of WWI. The French capitulated early rather than go through it all over again and the Brits probably would have too if they weren’t safe behind their moat.

            The standard economic analysis is that colonisation and empires make the colonising country worse off relative to freely trading with countries in question.

            Economically, sure. But note how long it took the Free Yanks to join the war (both of them!) compared to the Dominion Canadians & ANZACs.

          • Aapje says:

            @Tracy W

            If Germany had just dug in and defended as well as they did in WW 1, there is a good chance that they could have made the allies sign a peace treaty with no/minimal loss of territory, if the allies had decided to attack. They would have done much better at propaganda, as well.

            A major mistake by Germany in WW 1 was to ignore the importance of public perception. Hitler explicitly recognized this and made propaganda a big part of his strategy. But again, 1930-40’s Germany would have been better off with a far less aggressive strategy.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Aapje:

            Given that part of the core of national socialism was the conviction that Germany needed to conquer a significant territory in the east, it’s hard to imagine a less aggressive Germany.

          • Aapje says:

            @dndnrsn

            My controversial argument is that national socialism was wrong 🙂

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Aapje:

            Of course. My point is that discussions of the actions of Nazi Germany in the 30s, even when they don’t involve “predicting the future” so to speak, ignore that there were certain fixed ideas that couldn’t be done away with.

          • Aapje says:

            @dndnrsn

            ‘Alternative history’ is pretty much synonymous with theorizing about one or more factors being different in the past.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Aapje:

            On the other hand, some things are more readily “alternative” than others. “What if one of those assassination attempts on Hitler worked” or “what if such-and-such a decision had been made differently in fall 1941” is more plausible than “what if Hitler’s entire worldview had been different in a crucial way.”

          • Aapje says:

            True…but my comment was not intended as a claim that we were a coin toss away from such an alternative history.

            It was more a claim that if the Germans had made a different choice, the outcome would probably not have been as bleak as their planners predicted (while the outcome of their choices was clearly very bleak).

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Aapje:

            Well, yes, but “the Germans” making the decision were Hitler plus whatever underlings had managed to infight enough to have a say in decision-making that week. Now, if the hypothetical is “what if one of the assassination attempts before WWII happened?” and going from there, sure.

        • Jack Lecter says:

          and US chattel slavery where one group intentionally subjugated another group to bondage and horrific treatment to further their own interests

          I don’t know how to do links on here yet, so:
          Wikipedia has a page about the Selective Service Act of 1917, which looks a lot like one group intentionally subjugating another group to bondage and horrific treatment to further their own interests. It doesn’t pattern-match quite as cleanly to historic atrocities like slavery or the Holocaust, but it fulfills the criteria as you’ve laid them out, and I don’t think that’s an accident of wording.

          War is messy enough (in the parlance of MacNamara, it’s ‘foggy’) that a lot of the time distinguishing monsters from victims isn’t easy- that doesn’t mean there weren’t any.

          • Evan Þ says:

            BTW, you can create links using HTML. I think this’ll show you what to do:

            <a href=”http://example.com/page/goes/here”>Text you want the reader to see</a>

        • The Nybbler says:

          And I don’t really think there was a tradeoff involved where it was like: “Well, we either have good government and slavery, or bad government and no slavery.”

          No, it was worse than that. A nation with slavery, or 13+ tiny nations, some with slavery and some without.

          • Jayson Virissimo says:

            It is non-obvious why having more nations is worse.

          • Evan Þ says:

            The typical 1780’s response was that thirteen independent states would be more susceptible to European political machinations, waste resources in disputes among themselves, and be less open to westward expansion. All this still seems to make sense to me, though I suppose you could make a decent argument that it’s all counterbalanced by the horrors of slavery lasting longer under the Federal umbrella (together with the greater abuse of Native Americans thanks to the greater westward expansion.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Jayson Virissimo:
            There are probably pros and cons, but one obvious drawback is that you need 13 different 13th amendments. A second is that an invasion of a different nation to end slavery is far less likely than a civil war to prevent secession. Survival almost certainly survives in at least one of those nations far past 1865.

      • entobat says:

        Note, I am not American.

        That much was obvious from your use of “maths”.

    • Another view of this history, and I think a more compelling one, is this: who cares if Senators were nice to each other? Who cares if they compromised or gave great speeches or followed Senate protocol, or acted like Southern gentlemen or did politically unpopular things? Slavery, as a moral issue, is infinitely larger than any of that. The way to tell the good guys and bad in antebellum US history is this – the pro-slavery people were the bad guys, and the anti-slavery people were good.

      The trouble with that strict formulation is that it applies modern standards of awareness and morality retroactively to historical figures, with zero consideration that they were men of their time, captive of the ideas and politics and culture and circumstances that were prevalent all around them, living inside an Overton Window that we would find hard to imagine today.

      Since everyone was at least complicit in brutal slavery, you could read early American politics as being like the history of Sauron and orcs in Mordor, generation after generation after generation. All that unrelieved evil would get boring.

      And saying that everyone in America was complicit is not much of an exaggeration. Historians of abolitionism (undermining their own importance) tell us that before 1861, immediate abolitionists were never more than 1% of opinion in the North. In other words, even in the “free” states, 99% were okay with slavery in the South continuing for decades at least.

      Respect for property rights was (and is) a very high value, and compensating slaveowners was understood to be wildly infeasible. To a typical pre-Civil-War American, simply expropriating a large part of the nation’s private property was just unthinkable.

      The mainstream “anti-slavery” people (the “good guys”) detested and distanced themselves from abolitionists. Rather than attacking slavery directly, they focused their concern on issues around the geographical edges of slavery, like enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act in the North, or questions of expansion of slavery into the territories.

      (People on both sides assumed that if slavery were simply confined to the existing slave states, it would eventually die out.)

      All that being said, the country was in a pickle that ordinary politics couldn’t solve. Nobody at the beginning of 1861 intended a long and brutal war, let alone the destruction of the South. Lincoln only intended to put down the insurrection and preserve the Union.

      But as I have written here before, I think the war was the only way the nation could have gotten rid of slavery, and survived.

      • Tracy W says:

        living inside an Overton Window that we would find hard to imagine today.

        The Roman Catholic church condemned slavery in the 16th century. The English Sommersett case, which freed a slave, was in 1772. The abolitionist position was in the Overton Window.

        • The Roman Catholic church condemned slavery in the 16th century. The English Sommersett case, which freed a slave, was in 1772. The abolitionist position was in the Overton Window.

          What people were saying overseas had very little relevance in US politics. The number of Catholics was still very small in 1860, and the Roman Catholic Church had next to no influence here.

          Politicians in the US before the Civil War war lived in a world where even Northern voters lined up about 99 to 1 against abolitionism.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Larry Kestenbaum – “What people were saying overseas had very little relevance in US politics. The number of Catholics was still very small in 1860, and the Roman Catholic Church had next to no influence here.”

            Very good point that didn’t click with me till your comment. This was still well into the era when anti-catholic riots were occurring in major cities, correct?

          • Tracy W says:

            @Larry

            The USA was actually ruled by Britain until the American Revolution. And during the Revolution, the American states were allied with France. Thomas Paine moved between all three countries.

            On Catholics, to an English Protestant Christian (you know that country that the American states revolted against), Catholics were near group, not the far. Thomas Babington Macaulay and J.S. Mills refer naturally to the Catholic church and practices like the Devil’s Advocate on decisions about sainthood. Which normally led to them defining themselves against Catholics except that the moral arguments around slavery are so totally one-sided it would have given Catholics a metaphorical stick to beat around Protestants’ heads.

            As for American politics after the American Revolution, if Abolitionism was outside the Overton Window, why were there free states?

          • @ Tracy W:

            The USA was actually ruled by Britain until the American Revolution.

            Which was “four score and seven years” before the Civil War. Many things happened in the interim.

            On Catholics, to an English Protestant Christian (you know that country that the American states revolted against), Catholics were near group, not the far.

            That wasn’t how it looked to Protestant Americans at the time.

            As for American politics after the American Revolution, if Abolitionism was outside the Overton Window, why were there free states?

            Now, that’s a much better question.

            It was politically feasible to outlaw slavery where it barely existed. And the doctrine of state’s rights supported the idea of each state making that decision separately.

            But to overrule another state’s choice, and destroy slavery against the wishes of its electorate, that was considered beyond the pale of reasonable discussion before 1861.

      • Jack Sorensen2 says:

        You can agree with much of my comment and still judge people on a curve. For example you can say Andrew Jackson was a product of his time, and still view him as having fought for evil in a way that overwhelms anything good he fought for.

        But if you want to see strong condemnations of slavery, you can read the words of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and I’m sure others. Every single one of those guys had strong, negative words about slavery.

        In fact, looking online, the first US President for whom I didn’t find a quote lambasting slavery was – Andrew Jackson!

        • You can agree with much of my comment and still judge people on a curve.

          Of course. It’s entirely appropriate to make moral judgments about historical figures. Like most people, I revere Lincoln and despise Calhoun.

          But if you want to see strong condemnations of slavery, you can read the words of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and I’m sure others. Every single one of those guys had strong, negative words about slavery.

          At least half of those fellows owned slaves, and they didn’t release them from bondage during their own lifetimes.

          The Framers of the Constitution carefully avoided using the word “slavery” in the document. They hoped slavery would fade away of its own accord.

          During 1789-1860, many were willing to make a theoretical case against slavery, especially among the “anti-slavery” faction I mentioned. But very, very few Americans advocated that slavery be abolished, and all slaves emancipated, Right Now.

          Just take a look at some of the anti-slavery figures wrote about abolitionists, as dangerous extremists, “long-haired men and short-haired women,” “bedraggled, screaming, denunciatory creatures,” and the like.

          The leadership of the new Republican Party had seemingly reasonable, achievable goals, such as keeping slavery out of federal territories. Abolitionists were seen as discrediting and undermining those efforts: they were (in the words of A.D. White) “driving every sober-minded man and woman out of the anti-slavery fold” and potentially throwing elections to pro-slavery candidates.

          Of course, those distinctions were forgotten once pro-slavery troops were shooting at us. Just three years in, the Senate passed the 13th Amendment.

          • Jack Sorensen2 says:

            Of course. It’s entirely appropriate to make moral judgments about historical figures. Like most people, I revere Lincoln and despise Calhoun.

            Hey, you’re the one who criticized my comment saying that I was applying modern morality retroactively.

            At least half of those fellows owned slaves

            I know, but this doesn’t change my point. You said, in response to my bringing up slavery, that you can’t use modern morality in judging these people. I’m saying, they knew slavery was wrong. You say, well yeah but they were total hypocrites about it. But so what? Doesn’t change the fact that they were doing something wrong. In fact, it strengthens the case, because they, and others of that time, knew slavery was wrong.

          • Hey, you’re the one who criticized my comment saying that I was applying modern morality retroactively.

            Not all morality is “modern”. Anyway, what I objected to was applying it strictly, as if 1860-campaign Lincoln were running for office now. By today’s standards, he was a brazen white supremacist. He, like practically all other Northern political figures of his day, condoned the existence of slavery until the day the slaveholders took up arms against the Union.

            I’m saying, they knew slavery was wrong. You say, well yeah but they were total hypocrites about it. But so what? Doesn’t change the fact that they were doing something wrong.

            People can all agree in theory that something is wrong, but fiercely resist doing away with it. The Overton Window is the range of which policies are politically viable and taken seriously.

            For example, I think anthropogenic climate change is a serious problem that ought to be taken seriously and addressed through policy. But I would strongly oppose a proposal, in 2017, to instantly and forever shut down all gasoline-fueled transportation. Indeed, almost no politician in all of America would advocate that, or anything close to that.

            The politicians of the 1840s and 1850s took a very similar attitude toward slavery. The ones who were most concerned urged reasonable, measured policies to limit its range. Others vehemently rejected those proposals. No mainstream figure advocated immediate abolition.

            Of course immediate abolition was the only right answer morally. Certainly that’s the view from the present, and I’m sure many of these same guys, in their heart-of-hearts, knew that would be the case. Still, that didn’t empower them to open their mouths and advocate freeing all the slaves.

  19. victa20 says:

    A lot of users were really angry about this, and some of them set up a Reddit clone called Voat which promised that everyone was welcome regardless of their opinion.

    This reminds me of “Gab.” I went there because everyone was complaining about how liberal Twitter was and how they shouldn’t have booted Milo…and it was/is a goddamn cesspool with one or two sensible folks.

    I posted about ESPN firing a bunch of personalities in a recent open thread, and how some think this is related by ESPN moving to the left. Someone kindly shared this “Roll Hard Left and Die” theory at me. I’m not sure how much I buy this theory overall, but it certainly seems like news orgs are rolling hard left all over the place, and will die more or less, or at least seem so untrustworthy to everyone because of this split you’re writing about.

    However, on the flip side of Rolling Hard Left, New York Times hired Bret Stephens from WSJ, ostensibly to seem more neutral, he predictably wrote a shitty climate change skeptic article, and even more predictably, many threatened to cancel/did cancel their subscriptions. Now people on the right, who hate the NYT, are saying, “See, those stupid liberals can’t even handle different opinions,” and feel more justified for heading to e.g., Voat, and liberals head over to HuffPost, to read more articles about how white people shouldn’t be able to vote for 20 years by authors who don’t exist, or to Vox, if they’re not willing to go full HuffPo.

    Troubling times, indeed.

  20. TheWackademic says:

    “And within these [supposedly neutral] spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned.”

    I think that in a few spots in this piece, you conflate Republicanism, conservatism, and Trumpism.

    I think that, if Jeb had won in 2016, you wouldn’t see anti-Jeb stickers in your break room or hear commencement speakers criticizing him. Donald Trump was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault and was unwilling to state that he’d accept the results of the election if he lost. I think that many believe that Trump represents a unique threat to the future of the US in a way that Jeb or Rubio does not. This mindset can explain many of your examples without the need to invoke an overarching increase in liberal intolerance of conservative ideas or of all Republican politicians.

    • drethelin says:

      You say this but references to bushitler and bush being a chimp and george bush being a war criminal and george bush being an idiot and people sarcastically saying “nukular” were basically inescapable in my internet experience of that era, and certainly common in real life. This is not a new trope. It may be stronger than before, probably due to Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it’s not new.

      • seladore says:

        But I don’t think that particular brand of low-brow political mockery is a leftist phenomenon. Every politician gets called an idiot. Here in the UK, Tony Blair regularly gets called Tony Bliar (B-Liar), Ed Milliband was portrayed as a clueless idiot, and Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely pilloried for everything he does.

        From an outside (i.e., European) perspective, Trump being in power does seem like a new phenomenon, rather than just another iteration of liberal/conservative politicians. I mean, he’s a wildly unstable reality TV star who rose to power while bragging about his sexual assaults. Conflating criticism of Trump with normal political mud-slinging seems almost dishonest.

        If liberals elected a left-wing version of Trump (Kanye West, say) who rose to power while exhibiting wildly erratic behaviour and spouting bizarre offensive statements, I would expect similar levels of mockery. The widespread opposition to Trump isn’t just “business as usual”, it seems like a fairly predictable response to a wholly unsuitable president.

        • AnonYEmous says:

          Here in the UK

          found the problem

          More seriously, the conservative outlets blast liberal candidates and love conservative candidates, and the liberal outlets blast conservative candidates and love liberal candidates. The only problem is that the liberal outlets are believed to be neutral, despite still blasting conservative candidates and loving liberal candidates. If it was known that every word from their mouth was poisoned with bias, then it wouldn’t be a big deal. Instead, because the institutions were co-opted (arguably ???) a lot of people don’t know and it becomes the mainstream, which is super unpleasant.

        • Furslid says:

          It isn’t that the left mocks their opponents.

          Consider the critique of inappropriate humor. “Don’t punch down.” I wince every time I hear this line. I wince because it’s almost always a middle class or better person with a college education expressing views their audience approves of mocking someone poorer, less educated, and with unpopular opinions. Punching down may be offensive, but using “Don’t punch down,” to punch down is a whole new level.

        • Sandy says:

          If liberals elected a left-wing version of Trump (Kanye West, say) who rose to power while exhibiting wildly erratic behaviour and spouting bizarre offensive statements, I would expect similar levels of mockery. The widespread opposition to Trump isn’t just “business as usual”, it seems like a fairly predictable response to a wholly unsuitable president.

          See, I look at Stephen Colbert saying to Trump “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster”, and I find it hard to believe any conservative anchor at Fox News who made a similar statement about a Democratic President would keep their jobs or at the very least avoid making a public apology. Colbert in all likelihood will face no repercussions from that because the cultural environment he operates in allows a level of mockery of conservative politicians that would never be considered acceptable for liberal politicians.

          Imagine if Tucker Carlson said of Obama “The only thing your mouth is good for is being the Ayatollah Khamenei’s cock holster”. You think Carlson wouldn’t have to apologize for that statement?

          • entobat says:

            Is there damning evidence that Ayatollah Khamenei manipulated the American election to elect Barack Obama? Is there plausible evidence that Obama was in on it?

          • Sandy says:

            Is there damning evidence that Ayatollah Khamenei manipulated the American election to elect Barack Obama? Is there plausible evidence that Obama was in on it?

            There’s damning evidence that Obama sabotaged his own anti-proliferation programs and freed Iranian spies (after lying about the nature of their work) just to appease the mullahs. Does that count?

          • entobat says:

            I’ve skimmed the first bit of the linked article. From what I’ve read, Obama negotiated the Iran deal badly by wanting it too much and putting himself in a weak position by allowing Iran to leverage that. In exchange for the deal, a dozen national security threats lost that designation.

            I want the reader to recall that the worst thing terrorists have ever done to America is 9/11, i.e. the marginal death toll of Americans driving SUVs (as opposed to regular cars) each year.

            Am I going to find something more scandalous if I keep reading?

            I think lying about these guys being “just businessman [who used their businessmen ties to smuggle uranium into Iran, btw]” is dishonest. Given that the Iran deal was supposed to stop them from getting nuclear weapons, I would guess that releasing some of the guys who helped get them nuclear materials was only done because the administration expected the net effect to be positive. (This does not preclude the possibility that they could have negotiated a better deal.)

            Should I be supposing that enabling the Iran nuclear program was the administration’s goal the whole time, which they covered up by negotiating a treaty ostensibly to stop said nuclear program?

            Edit: The last two paragraphs were added after posting.

            I also feel, looking over my comment, that my tone probably reads as snarky and confrontational. I’m sorry but I don’t really know how to improve that; it was not the intended tone. As I’ve read through enough of the article to grow bored of it I don’t know what I’m supposed to be angry about, and I would appreciate if you framed it yourself.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            From what I’ve read, Obama negotiated the Iran deal badly by wanting it too much and putting himself in a weak position by allowing Iran to leverage that. In exchange for the deal, a dozen national security threats lost that designation.

            And then lied about it. And the media was complicit in this.

            That is, as always, what really bothers me. Sure, Obama does dumb shit – but the media kisses up to him and doesn’t tell anyone about it. Sure, Trump says dumb shit – but the media dials the outrage up to 11.

          • Virbie says:

            @entobat

            Do you really think that Carlson would have been asked to apologize on grounds of _accuracy_? I can’t imagine you’re truly that obtuse, so you must just be being disingenuous.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            I think that Fox News and other right wing people frequently said things much worse than that about both Obama and Hillary and other democrats with absolutely no repercussions. For that matter some of the things Trump said about other Republicans during the campaign were worse than that; he called Ben Carson a “child molester” for example.

          • cheertina says:

            You’re comparing the monologue of a late night talk show host to an anchor on a daytime news show. If Howard Stern had said that about Obama, do you think he would have had to apologize?

        • cassander says:

          The widespread opposition to Trump isn’t just “business as usual”, it seems like a fairly predictable response to a wholly unsuitable president.

          That is, word for word, what people said about Bush, who was an idiot cowboy who was also obviously unsuitable to be president. And Reagan, who was a b-list actor who was also obviously unsuitable to be president. And Eisenhower, who was a quite likable, but bit of a dunce and was also obviously unsuitable to be president.

          The same game keeps getting played out over and over, with more hysteria every time. Had Jeb, or rubio, or god forbid Ted Cruz, pulled out the same victory trump did, they reaction would be every bit as hysterical.

          • bean says:

            I don’t think this is 100% true, but there’s a core of truth to it. Trump made the left hysterical, in a way they weren’t about Bush, McCain, or Romney. But it’s the difference between being chased by a wild animal and running at a track meet. You’ll be faster in the former case, no matter how much you want to win the meet, and you don’t get credit for being nice to the other people at the meet when you run faster after the bear shows up.

          • cassander says:

            The level of hysteria is definitely higher than in the past, but it seems to grow every time a republican gets into office regardless of their actions. Trump is more pro-gay marriage than Obama was in 2008, but I have multiple LGTBQ friends who talked about how scared they were for their status as human beings when trump got elected.

            Now, maybe every republican really has been the “worst thing ever”, but I think the likelier answer is that the not-republicans are just getting more hysterical.

          • Deiseach says:

            And Reagan, who was a b-list actor who was also obviously unsuitable to be president.

            I was going to ask, does no-one remember Bonzo Goes To Bitburg? But then Wikipedia tells me it didn’t get released in the USA so that explains it (and many of you may have only been toddlers at the time anyway):

            Reagan’s plan to visit the Bitburg cemetery had been criticized in the United States, Europe, and Israel because among the approximately 2,000 German soldiers buried there were 49 members of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, which committed many other atrocities. Among those vehemently opposed to the trip were Jewish and veterans’ groups and both houses of the U.S. Congress. The phrase “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” was coined by protesters in the weeks leading up to Reagan’s trip. Employed as an epithet for Reagan, Bonzo is actually the name of the chimpanzee title character in Bedtime for Bonzo, a 1951 comedy starring Reagan

        • Aapje says:

          @seladore

          I mean, he’s a wildly unstable reality TV star who rose to power while bragging about his sexual assaults.

          That was actually 10 years ago. Lots of people seem unable to separate ‘time when something’ happened from the ‘time when it was reported.’ It matters, though.

          • seladore says:

            Fair enough, I should have been more specific.

            I don’t think it matters *that* much though. Unless Trump has undergone a Damascene conversion in the last decade, it’s safe to assume the content of his current character is much the same as was when he made those statements.

          • Aapje says:

            My point is more that behavior that happens during or near a campaign speaks much more to a lack of self control or bad judgement than behavior from before the person decided to run, when the incentives are a lot different.

            However, ultimately, a lot of voters care more about ‘what you (s)he do for me’ than ‘is (s)he a good person.’

            I think that it is a common mistake by already decided voters to see such evidence against their opponent as a slam dunk disqualification, while rationalizing away the evidence against their own candidate. More wishy washy voters probably decide that both candidates aren’t very nice people as they see the evidence against both candidates as pretty bad…and then they vote for the one who they expect to profit from personally.

      • wysinwygymmv says:

        Bush started a war of choice on false pretenses, and he intentionally played dumb to the media because he knew it was good marketing for his candidacy. Calling him stupid is reasonable if he’s going to act stupid (indeed, he probably acted stupid exactly to bait people into saying so) and calling him a war criminal is a pretty plausible interpretation of the events surrounding the Iraq war.

        • gbdub says:

          But any standard that makes Bush a war criminal would rightly apply to Obama and Hillary too. To be fair, there are those that do apply the label to all three, but they are a very small subset of the people who declared they wanted Bush and Cheney investigated for war crimes.

          • But any standard that makes Bush a war criminal would rightly apply to Obama and Hillary too.

            Not to mention Churchill, FDR, and Truman.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            “war criminal”, if it’s to have any meaning other than a boo light, implies violation of a specific war-related crime.

            Off the top of my head the main war crimes supposedly commited by Churchill and FDR (area bombing of civilian populations) wasn’t actually war crime until additional protocol I was passed in 1977.

            This is without going into the issues of jurisdiction and enforceability.

          • carvenvisage says:

            @Trofim

            Churchill apparently had something to do with the black and tans in ireland

            (idk what, just something I half recall)

          • Yosarian2 says:

            Bush did order people to be waterboarded. During WWII, Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American soldiers were actually tried for war crimes, it was considered a form of torture. So by one standard, at least, there is a legitimate argument that Bush deliberately committed a war crime that other presidents before or after were not guilty of.

        • Deiseach says:

          he intentionally played dumb to the media because he knew it was good marketing for his candidacy

          Hang on a mo while I take notes, I like to be up on the latest Correct Way Of Thinking (And This Is What We Always Thought Because It’s Correct) news just in case I get quizzed.

          So – erase the “Chimpy McHitler really is as dumb as a rock, he can’t even talk English gooder” talking point, write in instead “Cunning scoundrel intentionally acts dumb and stupid”. Right, got it!

        • cassander says:

          >Bush started a war of choice

          All wars are a choice, so that says nothing.

          on false pretenses

          Pretenses they believed and that the entire democratic party spent the 90s swearing were true.

          and he intentionally played dumb to the media because he knew it was good marketing for his candidacy.

          Appearing folksy is a war crime now?

          • caethan says:

            All wars are a choice, so that says nothing.

            Did Poland have a choice about participating in WW2? Maybe they just weren’t clear enough about wanting to sit things out.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Poland could have ceded the territory Hitler demanded, just as Iraq could have submitted to weapons inspections more readily. Probably some wars have started without a demand that is rebuffed, but that’s not one of them.

      • GCBill says:

        Yeah, it seems to be an old trope that’s merely grown stronger. I attended a large (non-political) academic conference in 2015 where one presenter used Bush to exemplify irrationality. At the time, I just thought the comment was in bad taste. Now I’m also disappointed at the lack of imagination. The 2016 election cycle was a special kind of bad.

      • Did people talk that way about GWB during his first term as well as his second one?

        • keranih says:

          *Yes.*

          And they loathed Reagan just as much.

          I’m perfectly willing to believe that Trump is teh worst eva. I just can’t bring myself to care when the same old suspects on the left get spun up *again*.

          • gattsuru says:

            People talked that way about GWB *before 9/11.*

            Seriously, I fall fairly hard into the NeverTrump side of conservativism still, and it’s hard to understate how little different the political Left’s opposition to him looks than what we’ve seen in the past. Even the links to left-leaning authors talking about how Trump was the Best Choice for the Republican primary understate how run-of-the-mill this is.

      • Virbie says:

        > You say this but references to bushitler and bush being a chimp and george bush being a war criminal and george bush being an idiot and people sarcastically saying “nukular” were basically inescapable in my internet experience of that era, and certainly common in real life.

        To my recollection, this wasn’t even remotely as universal as anti-Trump feeling is now. A lot of it was along the lines of what you’d see said about Obama if your bubble happened to be red instead of blue, and the scenario Scott describes of “Fuck Politician X” staying up on the bulletin board of a workplace with 1/3 supporters of X is pretty much unheard-of.

        This is still one of the best place I can think of to read intelligent things about politics etc, but the bizarre insistence that keeps popping up that the only reason to dislike Trump is that he’s a Republican (and speaks unkindly to the establishment) is frankly just delusional. Even for a strong supporter, if you’re not 100% blinded by ideology, you’d at least understand the unique, ideology-neutral complaints leveled against him in theory (a rebuttal could be something like “I see why people could think those things are important but they’re actually not”). My big problem with the left’s reaction to him (including 95% of my friends and family) doesn’t seem to actually care about the uniquely terrible things about him, instead of just using them as a cudgel to hit at the garden-variety left/right issues that they actually seem to care about.

        To pick just three completely random things off the top of my head: 1) being completely blindsided by the notion that healthcare might be complicated (“nobody knew!”)

        2) realizing that China can’t just command N Korea to behave itself after a 10 minute conversation with the Chinese President (if I thought he had the reading comprehension, I’d suggest that he could’ve saved Xi Jinping the trip and just spent ten minutes on North Korea’s Wikipedia page).

        3) The pretty blatant financial conflicts of interest he’s embracing (ex: the Trump International Hotel in DC) because none of his base seems to give a shit. Again, this isn’t an ideological thing: members of both parties have done this because it’s a pretty basic “I’m not a corrupt piece of shit” move.

        • suntzuanime says:

          They’re not unique complaints. That’s the problem.

          • bintchaos says:

            features, not bugs.
            I’m learning to appreciate Trump.
            Maybe he will get rid of some of Obama’s truly obscene foreign policy— like hands-off assad.
            I’m not against Trump allowing the rape of US natural resources either– after all, we do it to the rest of the world wherever we can.
            fair is fair.

        • Evan Þ says:

          All else equal, I would prefer an AU!Trump without conflicts of interest to the real Trump with conflicts of interest. I’d also prefer a Cruz, Johnson, or McMullin without them to our Trump with them. Same thing with his obliviousness to the details of healthcare policy or his buffoonery in international relations.

          Problem is, we don’t have that choice. What we get is Trump or (previously) Clinton or (now) Pelosi/Schumer/et al. And despite all his flaws, to me and many others like me, Trump’s clearly the less horrible one there. Yes, let’s substitute better proposals in Congress when we can – but general conflict-of-interest lawsuits don’t seem profitable to me.

          (Also, as a sidenote, the conflict of interest rules have grown out of all historical precedent. Let’s not forget that George Washington himself, while in office, continued real estate dealings with foreign clients.

          • Aapje says:

            I think that a huge problem is the lack of charity. This kind of thinking seems to happen a lot:

            ‘I voted for X because (s)he was the lesser evil, but the voters for the other side agree with everything (s)he does/stands for.

        • Glen Raphael says:

          [trump issues include]
          1) being completely blindsided by the notion that healthcare might be complicated (“nobody knew!”)

          I admit I’m coming at this from a weird perspective, but I actually find this particular Trump quality practically endearing.

          See, however complicated any President might initially think an issue such as “fixing North Korea” or “fixing health insurance” or “fixing the auto industry” is, it’s more complex than that. Presidents need to exude certainty if they want to get elected so on the election trail they tend to get in the habit of saying – and possibly even believing! – that these things are simple and well-understood, then post-election they try to improve things and largely fail because fixing stuff is hard.

          Trump is the first president I’ve ever seen openly admit to having realized he was in over his head. That strikes me as an admirable quality in a President – and far superior to just bluffing their way through the situation like everyone else does.

          A President who realizes some situation is more complex than originally thought and is willing to admit this, is one who has both the ability to learn new stuff and the humility to admit error. Are these not valuable character traits? Would you really rather they try to maintain an aura of Presidential infallibility?

          • Aapje says:

            Sure, but it’s less admirable if the person then keeps extreme trust in their simplistic models for other issues and requires a lot of push back to get to a state of doubt.

            A superior person starts in a state of doubt in the first place.

          • Jaskologist says:

            It is an act. Obama did the same thing. Any time there was a big scandal, he would declare “I first heard about this from the news, same as the rest of you!”

            They’re just trying to seem more down-to-earth, is all.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      It’s worth remembering that in 2015 the Smart Money Donors thought Jeb’s strategy of running for President of the United States based on how he likes Mexicans more than he likes Americans was brilliant.

      • bintchaos says:

        It is brilliant for the long game.
        The hispanic /white demographic death cross hits around 2040.
        The reason the GOP elites were/are terrified of Trump is he’s the death knell of the party going forward– drives intellectuals out of the party, alienates minorities and educated women.
        The correlation of educational attainment and liberal voting patterns is the doom of the GOP and ur only talking about immigration…i wonder why…

        • FacelessCraven says:

          To the extent that you are correct, there is no hope anyway and all is lost. Better to fight now.

          Alternatively, the destruction of the GOP as a political force accelerates Progressive ideology with all its attendant contradictions, resulting in a new, better conservative resurgence. The only way out is through, so better to fight now.

          On the third hand, maybe Progressive ideology is correct, and their path really is the way to a brighter future. In which case, better to get the GOP out of the way as quickly as possible. Better to fight now.

          No matter which way you slice it, Jeb’s vision is the worst possible scenario.

          • bintchaos says:

            umm…there is no “correct”.
            there is only success— measured as replications or as votes.
            in theory 50% of hispanics should be born with conservative tendency. But the GOP only attracts 30%.
            Jeb was just trying to raise that number.
            “Better to fight now.”
            That is exactly how the GOP sees it. US worked because the Founders set up a Nash Equilibrium. But since Obamas election the GOP switched to 2person zero-sum. One reason the US is now a non-equilibrium system, what Von Neuman called a non-elephant. This is important because non-equilibrium systems are vulnerable to collapse.
            The real problem no one is talking about is the correlation of educational attainment and liberal voting patterns. Conservatives are basically using the free speech issue as a stalking horse to get their ideology on campus.
            Everyone wants their kid to go to college.
            The Founders built the pendulum to swing back– but what happens if it sticks on blue?

    • MartMart says:

      I’m almost tempted to agree, in that I do see Trump as something completely different than republican president and candidates before him. However, I don’t think the W was, and there didn’t appear to be any shortage of break room stickers and speeches directed against him.

    • gbdub says:

      My experience as an engineering student (i.e. in one of the more conservative spaces) at a liberal public university was, I think, similar to Scott’s perception of the “Resist Trump” sign.

      Outright political rants by professors were rare, but there was a definite soft assumption that “we’re all on the same team”. Opening with a “dumb Bush” quip was a common way to lighten the mood. “Can you believe what the Republicans just did?” would be answered with a head shake, sort of like “Can you believe this weather we’re having?” Notionally it was an apolitical, neutral space, but jokes about Bush aren’t really political, because obviously we’re all on the same side because we’re all smart, and only dumb people vote Republican, amirite? Clearly you’re one of us, because what else could you be?

      When Obama was elected this flipped, now the soft assumption was that this was a joyous occasion for everyone and gee, isn’t it wonderful to have a smart person in charge again (and did you know he’s black? Isn’t it great?) A “dumb Obama” quip would definitely not receive the same reception that anti-Bush jokes got.

      Incidentally this has me put more credence into arguments about the collective impact of microagressions. None of this bias was particularly overt or mean-spirited, but all together it definitely added up to make anyone with a conservative lean feel like they didn’t quite fit in.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        From January 2009 to January 2017 the President lived with his mother-in-law in the White House, yet in those 8 years I didn’t hear a single joke on TV about that inherently comic situation.

        The best thing about Trump is that he’s revivified free speech.

      • liskantope says:

        What you describe is definitely plausible from my experience, but I do want to make a nitpick regarding calling Bush “dumb”. I never got much exposure to right-wing discourse during the Obama years, but I don’t get the impression that Obama’s intelligence was ever under the main line of fire. I imagine Obama being called things like “traitor”, “having no moral values”, and “full of empty rhetoric” on a routine basis, but “dumb” just doesn’t seem to be a thing that Republicans call Democrats nearly as much as vice versa. I’d be curious as to whether a conservative or someone who hung around a lot of conservatives during the last 8 years would back this up.

        • Jesse E says:

          There was lots of talk in the comment sections of various right wing sites about Obama not releasing his grades from Columbia and how he was an “affirmative action” President.

        • hlynkacg says:

          That’s because “Smart” is the primary thing that traditionally blue tribe academic types value. That’s why calling Bush a dumb redneck is their go-to insult. Meanwhile the red tribe has built a complete cultural mythology around “rugged individualism” and “being a stand-up guy” which is why when they insult Obama they call him weak, naïve, or “an empty suit”.

          We see the same thing with our current president, blue critics of Trump call him dumb, racist, and boorish. Red critics say that he’s impatient, inconsistent or weak.

        • herbert herberson says:

          Teleprompter in chief? I guess arguably that could be attacking his authenticity, but it usually seemed more around the lines of suggesting that his apparent intelligence was a fraud.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I always saw “Teleprompter in chief” insult as an extension of “the empty suit”. The idea being that Obama needed an army advisors and focus groups to generate statements for him because he didn’t any strong convictions of his own.

        • There’s this weird background assumption that everyone has to be the but of the same jokes to the same extent. But motivation and opportunity vary a lot.

    • Deiseach says:

      I think that, if Jeb had won in 2016, you wouldn’t see anti-Jeb stickers in your break room or hear commencement speakers criticizing him.

      God damn it, somebody get me a working time machine so I can visit the AU where Jeb won, get solid undeniable evidence of that, then come back and make a fortune taking bets on the above statement. Because I am fairly confident there would be exactly that behaviour going on had Jeb won. The New York Times, for instance, parsed the losing candidate’s election spend down to how much had gone on pizza. Funny, I don’t recall seeing them telling us how much Hillary’s campaign spent on catering, do you? (And they rather liked Jeb than otherwise, seeing him as goofy but human; imagine what they’d say if they disliked him, or if he’d won and extended the Bush Dynasty in office):

      Pizza: $4,837

      As his fortunes declined this winter, Mr. Bush sharply pared back employees’ salaries and consulting fees, even laying off some campaign staff members to bring down costs. But let it never be said that Mr. Bush allowed his team to go hungry. His campaign and super PAC were particularly fond of the pizza, whether from Domino’s or from Pizza Ranch, the Iowa chain.

      You really think “Ted Cruz the Zodiac Killer” would have faded away had the result ended up with President Cruz, or would have intensified even more? Because I was reading a fair bit of “Yeah, Trump is bad, but Cruz is ten times worse because he’s a crazy, creepy, Christian bigot who will turn the US into the Handmaid’s Tale if he gets elected”.

      • RodoBobJon says:

        I agree with you broadly, but Hillary Clinton is a bad example. Reporters, especially NYTimes reporters, hate her and have been shitting on her nonstop on Twitter since the election.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      If Jeb had won we’d be treated to HuffPo and Vox stories titled “Jeb Bush loves guacamole. Do you know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!!!” and “Fuhrer Jeb carries turtles in his pockets. Do you know who else was a noted animal lover? Hitler!!!!”

      As Scott said in “You’re Still Crying Wolf,” Trump is the most pro-LGBT president we’ve ever had, and yet the media has my LGBT friends on FaceBook convinced the Right Wing Death Squads are coming to put them into camps.

      I haven’t seen anyone comment yet on the article’s claim that it’s the right that has pulled extreme right. But I don’t see how this is possible when conservatives 20 years ago and conservatives today believe there are (mostly) two genders, gay marriage isn’t a thing, and neither is “white privilege.” 20 years ago, the vast majority of Democrats would have agreed. So it seems to me if we’re doing the “X side has gone off the deep end” thing, don’t we figure out which side that was by looking to see whose opinions changed over time?

      • Jesse E says:

        “As Scott said in “You’re Still Crying Wolf,” Trump is the most pro-LGBT president we’ve ever had”

        Sentences like this are why I feel like I’m living in a different world than you guys. Because in my world, the pro-LGBT things Trump has done is wave a rainbow flag once, say bathroom bills should be a state issue (which actually isn’t that positive a thing to actual transgender people), kept a limited pro-LGBT executive order in affect, and let a gay billionaire speak at the RNC because that gay billionaire agrees with Trump that you should be able to sue media companies you don’t like to bankruptcy and cares about that far more than gay marriage.

        OTOH, he named an anti-LGBT Vice President, appointed a anti-LGBT member of the Supreme Court, staffed a Cabinet that was entirely anti-LGBT, withdrew litigation against North Carolina anti-LGBT law, and proceeded to appoint numerous anti-LGBT people to various spots in the federal government, including as head of HHS Civil Rights Division and replacing a gay Secretary of the Army with one of the most anti-gay legislators in Tennessee who said such pro-LGBT things such as that being transgender was a disease.

        That’s not even getting to the numerous federal and district judicial appointments that’ll likely be anti-LGBT, considering The Federalist Society will be basically giving a list of names over to the Trump White House.

        • AnonYEmous says:

          you should be able to sue media companies you don’t like to bankruptcy

          *as long as they violated civil liberties

          OTOH, he named an anti-LGBT Vice President, appointed a anti-LGBT member of the Supreme Court, staffed a Cabinet that was entirely anti-LGBT, withdrew litigation against North Carolina anti-LGBT law, and proceeded to appoint numerous anti-LGBT people to various spots in the federal government, including as head of HHS Civil Rights Division and replacing a gay Secretary of the Army with one of the most anti-gay legislators in Tennessee who said such pro-LGBT things such as that being transgender was a disease.

          not sure where you got the idea that Gorsuch is quote-on-quote anti-LGBT. Quick google search leads me to a lot of rhetoric with not much behind it. But broadly speaking, the only thing Trump has done is take a very, very contentious issue with really minor application for LGBT one way or another (if you look like your gender they can’t stop you from getting in the bathroom anyways -.-) and return it to the states. And that’s as a Republican president, which is to say it can’t be easy for him.

          Meanwhile, the Democratic president we had was more or less a chameleon on the issue; Obama stuck with the party line on gay marriage 100%. So…maybe a low bar to clear, but cleared nevertheless. (And Hillary was the same as him anyhow).

          • random832 says:

            *as long as they violated civil liberties

            Yes, that’s what the “you don’t like” meant. “Publishing things you don’t like should be considered a violation of your civil liberties” (are you sure you don’t mean rights? liberties is weird in this context) is equivalent to “you should be able to sue media companies you don’t like to bankruptcy”

          • Vorkon says:

            Yes, that’s what the “you don’t like” meant. “Publishing things you don’t like should be considered a violation of your civil liberties”

            While that might possibly describe Trump’s vague campaign proposals to “open up libel laws,” it hardly describes Peter Thiel’s (or Hulk Hogan’s, for that matter) position on the issue.

            The point remains, “he let a gay billionaire speak at the RNC because that gay billionaire agrees with Trump that you should be able to sue media companies you don’t like to bankruptcy” is clearly not a reasonable assessment of the situation.

            and return it to the states. And that’s as a Republican president, which is to say it can’t be easy for him.

            To be fair, “return something to the states” is rarely a difficult position for a Republican to take, regardless of the issue.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            “Publishing things you don’t like should be considered a violation of your civil liberties”

            Just to be clear, it was also considered a violation of civil liberties (or rights) by a judge and a jury. How is it that Gawker apologists keep forgetting this?

            Seriously, I’m so tired of engaging in this bullshit argument. Gawker went bankrupt because a judge and jury found that they had violated Hulk Hogan’s privacy and awarded him about 140 million dollars, and Gawker couldn’t afford to pay. The only thing Thiel did was pay for his lawyers, and given that Hulk’s case turned out to be legitimate, who cares where the funding came from? Would it have been more acceptable if he had some money left over and self-funded? God knows Hulk Hogan is the type of guy who could have some spare millions lying around.

            If corporations who engage in sleazy business practices are sued and go bankrupt, then their workers will lose their jobs and their target consumers lose out on their products. Sucks, but that’s life. The only other option is either corporate immunity to lawsuits or every corporation being “too big to fail”, even unto being rewarded for breaking the law. Fuck that, and fuck Gawker.

          • Brad says:

            Hulk Hogan sued for the tort of intrusion of invasion of privaacy. The lawsuit had nothing to do with violating civil liberties, which generally speaking on the government or agents of the government can do.

        • Nornagest says:

          I think it’s more likely that Trump just doesn’t care about LGBT issues one way or the other, and so defaults to the current Republican position on it, but with a very low priority. That doesn’t make him the most LGBT-friendly president we’ve ever had, but it does make him the most LGBT-friendly Republican president we’ve had since LGBT has been a national issue, and friendlier than most Democrats over the same span of time. The Republican default has been drifting towards friendliness, just like the Democratic one though starting from a less friendly position.

          It’s very likely a step down from Obama 2013-16, who was actively pushing LGBT advocacy, and some upset is probably justified, but if I was making a list of things to attack Trump for it’d be way down at the bottom by “bad hair” and “weird voice”. I definitely don’t see a justification for treating him as an existential threat, like some of my LGBT friends have been.

      • benwave says:

        Adding my voice in solidarity here, I’ve been convinced by Trump’s post-election actions that he is nothing like the most pro LGBT president ever.

        • gbdub says:

          He may not be the “most pro LGBT president ever”, but who, besides second term Obama (and the beliefs that Obama allegedly held secretly in his first term) has been more so, on an absolute scale?

          Granted that’s not a high bar to top, but I would think even a return to Bill Clinton level legal treatment of LGBT people (DADT, DOMA…) is highly unlikely.

          Remember that Scott’s statement was made in response to LGBT patients saying they were literally considering suicide because of how horrible Trump was going to make America for gay people.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Potentially Franklin D. Roosevelt, who helped rescue LGBT people (among many other groups of people) from Nazi rule?

          • Nornagest says:

            If we’re giving Roosevelt credit for that, we have to give Stalin credit too.

    • The Nybbler says:

      At my former SJW-dominated workplace, people were celebrating the death of Antonin Scalia. It’s not just Trump; they would have hated Jeb or Cruz or Romney just as much. They hated Trump plenty before the “pussy tape”, too.

  21. pontifex says:

    Maybe my perspective is skewed (I am a conservative), but I think there is a general problem with both sides getting way too extreme. The internet and social media have made this a lot worse. The other problem is that with the fall of our common enemy in the Soviet Union, we no longer have the “we’re all on the same side” dynamic that kept Democrats and Republicans from tearing at each others’ throats in the late 20th century.

    I agree that a lot of the extreme right wing communities out there are just nutty. I don’t think I could stomach Breitbart or Voat for long. However, I am a lot more scared of extreme left-wingers than extreme right-wingers, just because… Chesterton’s fence. Someone who wants to put society into a deep-freezer and stop all social change might be kind of asinine, but not as bad as the next Stalin or Mao. They want to build their genderless, raceless, classless utopia, and anyone who asks too many inconvenient questions about what the human cost will be, or whether it will actually work, will not stay in their good books for long.

    • Hyenaspots says:

      Extreme right wingers aren’t Chestertonians, they’re just anti-Jacobins, perfectly willing to tear down any fence in pursuit of their own vision.

      • Evan Þ says:

        The problem is, there’re a whole lot of fences that’ve been torn down in the last fifty years. Hey, in the last twenty years. Maybe a consistent Chestertonian might try reconstructing them?

        (Not saying I’d choose to rebuild any particular such fence… but it’s sometimes an appealing idea.)

        • Gazeboist says:

          A consistent Chestertonian would probably focus on figuring out what was going on with all those fences, and then maybe start considering reconstructing some of them. The problem is we have two competing teams: one demolishing fences as fast as they can, one desperately trying to keep the number of fences constant, with at best minimal regard paid to where they stand or whether they are actually necessary. Both groups wind up doing a small amount of good with varying degrees of intent at different times, but they cause far more damage in the process.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Another problem is that leaving Chesterton fences where they currently are is itself a Chesterton fence.

    • MartMart says:

      Recent developments have caused me to worry that it’s the right that breaking the fence rule now.
      It’s all well and good to invoke Chesterton’s fence when opposing some sort of new regulation. “Sure, this all sounds reasonable, but what about the unintended consequence angle?” is a proper argument. But the same has to apply to ridding ourselves of existing rules and regulations. So when we are currently getting rid of whatever Obama era regulations seemingly because we can, why aren’t there conservative fence believers calling for caution?

      • The original Mr. X says:

        In the case of recent legislation, we know why it was passed, and also what the situation was like without it. Chesterton’s fence is meant to dissuade people from tinkering with things they don’t understand, not things they do understand.

        • MartMart says:

          The idea of unintended consequences implies that there are things we don’t understand about the things that we think that we do. Removing a rule will not necessarily bring back the system that existed prior to that rules creation, it can bring about an altogether different, and perhaps undesirable system.

          • Randy M says:

            This is the ratchet effect. “We’re going to take reasonable, small steps and see what happens, but you’re a radical crazy if you try to slow the rate of increase.”
            Also, “Obama era regulations” Technological and social change are accelerating, but the Chesterton’s Fence analogy stretches dramatically when calling last year the distant past.

  22. Alex Zavoluk says:

    Reposting this link from my child comment above so everyone can see it: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/GrosecloseMilyo.pdf

    TL;DR it’s not obvious at all that Fox News is more biased than anyone else.

  23. jseldred says:

    Creationists say that Biology departments are biased against them. In one sense they are right, Biology departments are biased against people who don’t have an accurate and comprehensive understanding of Biology. But they are wrong another sense. It is entirely appropriate for Biology departments to fiercely defend objective reality, best practices, and demonstrated knowledge.

    A lot of kids from undereducated rural backgrounds are deeply disadvantage by the fact that Biology departments insist of scientific knowledge and not religious knowledge. Even when Biology departments reach out to kids who learned creationism in school – and they often do – those students will still be at a disadvantage.

    This is the problem the neutral media has with all right-wing ideology, not just creationism and climate change. A significant portion of the country is deeply undereducated and has been actively mislead. This is an education crisis that is too big a lift for news media to easily address. Frankly, its a struggle just to keep pace with all the right-wing nonsense being generated.

    If such a large group is estranged from media and academia, there has to be a selection bias. The remaining individuals are not random, they are more privileged and connected. But media bias did not cause pervasive public ignorance, ignorance caused the bias. Ignorance remains the much bigger challenge for media to address.

    The solution is not to split the difference and mix ignorance with knowledge – that’s how we get the inanity of the CNN – but rather the solution is to educate. That is, we need a lot more power for neutral media. For all the smary bias of Vox, they are doing a public service for marginalized rural teens with ignorant conservative parents.

    • AnonYEmous says:

      have you ever considered that you might be wrong

      seriously, you’re bringing up one issue, creationism, then transitioning to talking about how Vox does a public service, despite how often Vox shits the bed for all the world to see

      not that I care at this point, your side has lost because of this very attitude. As long as mine stays in power, you can continue being smug for all I care 😉

      • jseldred says:

        This has been my own experience. I was raised a conservative Republican. Gradually I would investigate one political issue after another, and found out that the Democrats were largely right. The difference between how I felt then and now was knowledge, not some kind of indoctrination or lifestyle choice. Conservative idea weren’t consistent when you thought them through, conservative ideas didn’t have predictive power, conservative ideas weren’t connected to verifiable information.

        I don’t expect anyone should take my word for it. But I am saying we should consider what it means for Scott’s thesis, if we take climate change to be typical of left-right differences rather than some aberration. Failure to reach conservatives does not prove the media is biased or wrong.

        A small list of prevalent right-wring ideas that we can add to the list: whether Obama was born in America, Benghazi conspiracies, the wisdom of beating your children, fears about gay people, whether the Iran deal enshrined Iran’s nuclear program rather than dismantled it, etc. These aren’t fringe ideas, they have like 30% prevalence among Americans.

        • abc says:

          Benghazi conspiracies

          Well, yes Hilary’s assertion that the Bangrazi attacks were due to Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s film “Innocence of Muslims” was pretty ridiculous, of wait I’m guessing that wasn’t the “conspiracy” you were talking about.

          the wisdom of beating your children

          I always find it amazing how much people are willing to forget about the replication crisis in psychology when deciding how much evidence to assign it’s conclusions.

          fears about gay people

          You mean like fears that gay and other sexually deviant lifestyles would be imposed on their children. In other news, a lot of kids, especially in the more pro-gay areas, are suddenly deciding that they don’t belong to any one of the two standard genders.

          • thevoiceofthevoid says:

            I always find it amazing how much people are willing to forget about the replication crisis in psychology when deciding how much evidence to assign it’s conclusions.

            Personally, I rely less on shoddy psychological studies and more on my prior that causing physical harm to people is usually bad to form my opinion on this issue.

            …a lot of kids, especially in the more pro-gay areas, are suddenly deciding that they don’t belong to any one of the two standard genders.

            So what? I fail to see how children having less restricted concepts of gender and sexuality is necessarily a bad thing.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Personally, I rely less on shoddy psychological studies and more on my prior that causing physical harm to people is usually bad to form my opinion on this issue.

            what do we mean by beating here though? And couldn’t the same be said for, say, taking away a kid’s video games? I certainly enjoyed myself much less when that happened. (You might not take the comparison seriously, but I sure do.)

            So what? I fail to see how children having less restricted concepts of gender and sexuality is necessarily a bad thing.

            but a lot of people did and therefore seemingly shrugged it off as a fear never to be realised

            so has it been realised or

          • The original Mr. X says:

            what do we mean by beating here though? And couldn’t the same be said for, say, taking away a kid’s video games? I certainly enjoyed myself much less when that happened. (You might not take the comparison seriously, but I sure do.)

            Yeah, pretty much any punishment is going to be unpleasant, and since we all have priors that doing unpleasant things to people is bad, thevoiceofthevoid’s argument is a fully generalisable argument against form of punishment whatsoever. Clip round the ear? Causing physical harm to people is usually bad. Sending the kids to bed without dinner? Denying people food is usually bad. Grounding them? Imprisoning people is usually bad. Et cetera, et cetera.

          • thevoiceofthevoid says:

            …thevoiceofthevoid’s argument is a fully generalisable argument against form of punishment whatsoever…

            I might be willing to bite that bullet. The idea of someone having near absolute control over every aspect of another person’s life makes me uneasy, to say the least. Of course, as a practical matter, we’ve got to have some way to raise babies to maturity. But should children really be completely subject to the mercy of dictators who can decide where they live, what activities they do, who their friends are, what they read, whether they get access to internet/video games/toys/sporting goods/transportation etc. etc. etc.?

            With regards to punishment specifically, the current norm is that parents can punish their children for virtually any offense the parents deem punishable, to whatever extent they feel like. It is not only acceptable but commonplace for a child to be punished further for questioning the legitimacy of their punishment.

          • Anonymous says:

            I might be willing to bite that bullet. The idea of someone having near absolute control over every aspect of another person’s life makes me uneasy, to say the least. Of course, as a practical matter, we’ve got to have some way to raise babies to maturity. But should children really be completely subject to the mercy of dictators who can decide where they live, what activities they do, who their friends are, what they read, whether they get access to internet/video games/toys/sporting goods/transportation etc. etc. etc.?

            Yes.

          • Murphy says:

            I always find it amazing how much people are willing to forget about the replication crisis in psychology when deciding how much evidence to assign it’s conclusions.

            That’s one hell of a Fully General Counterargument you’ve got there.
            Don’t like literally any scientific result whatsoever anywhere ever?
            No need to do any work seeing whether something actually has replicated, just shout “replication crisis!!!!!” and run.

          • caethan says:

            No, no, see, instead of children being under the authority and subject to the punishment of their parents, who are likely to love them and care for their well-being, they should instead be under the direct authority of a faceless bureaucracy.

          • Murphy says:

            @caethan

            Many people settle on a middle ground where children are mostly trusted to their parents but it’s kept in mind that some small fraction of parents are the parental equivalent of Kim Jong-un.

            Some are sadistic scum and actually don’t love and care for their children.

            Some are addicts and simply care about heroin more than they do about the children.

            Some have anger issues and cannot separate their own emotions from discipline.

            Some have utterly utterly fucked up ideas about what constitutes “discipline”.

            Some are just incompetent people who think they can beat the gay out.

            Some are just incompetent people who think that they can use beating as a solution for everything.

            Some are perverts.

            In which cases some faceless bureaucracy retains the right to step in and strip the parents of their authority if the child starts turning up with unexplained black eyes, rope burns, broken bones, track marks or torn and bleeding orifices.

            Which tends to combine most of the advantages of both systems while only adding some of the disadvantages.

          • Skivverus says:

            No, no, see, instead of children being under the authority and subject to the punishment of their parents, who are likely to love them and care for their well-being, they should instead be under the direct authority of a faceless bureaucracy.

            Maybe I’m misremembering this, but wasn’t there some sort of argument over this between Aristotle and Socrates?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            So what? I fail to see how children having less restricted concepts of gender and sexuality is necessarily a bad thing.

            Really? Is there any type of sexuality that you think shouldn’t be taught to children as normal or natural? What age children are we talking about?

          • Murphy says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            I’d guess sexuality that one of the participants doesn’t want or can’t consent to.

            People getting super upset about their kids considering being gay to be fine to many is like someone freaking out because their children refuse to wear the correct color hat or wear their hair long/short in public: putting social rituals on a pedestal and pretending that they constitute morality.

            It’s like turning up to a discussion on ethics and discovering that all the other person wants to talk about is how wearing mixed fabrics is unclean. Sure, you can pick random things and glue a “morality” label on them but lots of people are going to look at you oddly if you don’t even seem to be aware that that’s what you’ve done.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Murphy:

            Is teaching toddlers about consensual anal sex a good idea? No possible downsides from this sort of thing?

          • Murphy says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            Wow. You’re not even pretending to want reasoned debate.

            Teaching children chemistry is a good thing but common sense implies that it’s probably best to stick to simply teaching toddlers to not drink the contents of test tubes.

            re:anal sex it’s pretty much irrelevant to most children since even a detailed description is going to yield nothing more than an “ew” from a toddler and it’s enough they know who to go to if anyone tries to abuse them.

            Though no need to stop at your last post if you’re really intent on avoiding good faith argument. Really go nuts and try insisting that the other side just want to fuck newborns or something.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Murphy:

            I’m interested in a reasoned debate. I’m saying that it’s reasonable to instruct children about the differences between healthy and unhealthy sexual behaviors.

            The impression I got from thevoiceofthevoid and you is that the only unhealthy type of sexual behavior is that which lacks consent. Is that correct or no?

          • Many people settle on a middle ground where children are mostly trusted to their parents but it’s kept in mind that some small fraction of parents are the parental equivalent of Kim Jong-un.

            In which cases some faceless bureaucracy retains the right to step in and strip the parents of their authority …

            You have to allow for the risk that it’s the faceless bureaucracy that is the equivalent of Kim Jong-un.

            I’m thinking of the Texas FDLS case, where the bureaucracy in charge of protecting children took three hundred children away from their parents to protect them from being taught the parents’ religion, lied about the facts repeatedly, and eventually gave the children back only after both the Texas appeals court and the Texas Supreme Court voted unanimously that what they were doing was illegal.

            Some of my comments at the time.

          • So what? I fail to see how children having less restricted concepts of gender and sexuality is necessarily a bad thing.

            The original subject, I think, was whether “fears about gay people” represented false beliefs by conservatives.

            Your response seems to conflate two different issues:

            1. Would a more tolerant attitude towards homosexuality have effects on children that their parents disapproved of?

            2. Would those effects in fact be bad?

            You now seem to be conceding that the parents were correct, given their values, to have fears about the consequences of a more tolerant attitude towards homosexuality, hence that conservative beliefs on that matter were true.

            That is not inconsistent with your also claiming that the values of the conservative parents were mistaken.

          • Protagoras says:

            @Skivverus, Aristotle and Socrates never met. There may have been a dispute between Aristotle and Plato on this subject, if Aristotle took Republic more literally than I do. Which is entirely possible; despite, or perhaps because of, personal knowledge of Plato, Aristotle is not the most reliable of Plato interpreters (it is not uncommon for students of a major figure to misinterpret the master out of a variety of biases, including wishing to appear more original and to be an improvement and so imagining that the master to have been more different and less sophisticated than is actually the case).

          • Brad says:

            I think it is clear that the FLDS engages in polygamy. Since there are few legal restrictions on consensual sex between adults at this point, however, it is not illegal for three or more people to cohabit, even if they regard themselves as married. Whether it is immoral would depend, in my view, on the details of the relationship.

            I think it likely although not yet proved that the FLDS violates state law on age of consent. They could probably avoid doing so by making sure that any marriages involving women below the age of consent for non-marital sex were with women who could legally marry and were done as legal marriages to husbands who were not already legally married to someone else. It does not sound likely that they have taken such precautions, however. I do not think marriage not recognized by the state to someone below the age of consent for nonmarital sex is inherently wicked or immoral, although I can easily see that in many cases it would be.

            I think it likely that the FLDS pressures young women into what they consider marriage. Under many, probably most, circumstances I would regard that as a bad thing to do but probably not something that either is or should be illegal, age of consent issues aside.

            It is possible that the FLDS actually forces young women to have sex, which I would regard as clearly immoral, but I have not yet seen any good evidence of their doing so. I have seen no evidence that the FLDS engages in activities that would legitimately be classified as child abuse other than arranging “marriages” with young women. I am confident that their child-rearing approach is one I would not approve of—but that’s true of a lot of people.

            Just how much of “a bad thing” does something have to be before you would think it should be illegal? I guess from the above actual child rape, even with the consent of the parents would be sufficient. But parents pressuring minor children to “celestially marry” men, which all involved knows comes with the heavy expectation of sex, is merely probably a bad thing. So where is the line?

          • So where is the line?

            I think at the use of force.

          • Skivverus says:

            Aristotle and Socrates never met.

            Okay, “argument” is probably the wrong term, but “differing positions on the ideal society with regards to child-rearing, with ones’ position (Aristotle’s) explicitly laying out why the other one was bad” is a little unwieldy.
            If I remember correctly, Socrates argued for communal child-rearing, while Aristotle argued against that on, roughly, the parenting equivalent of the Bystander Effect: diffuse responsibility falls off faster than the increase in possible responders.

          • Protagoras says:

            @Skivverus, There is an argument for communal child-rearing presented by the character Socrates in Republic. Republic is regarded by Plato scholars in general as one of the “middle” works, in which Plato is expressing more of his own ideas and being less faithful to what the historical Socrates actually believed. Further, moving away from scholarly consensus and to a view which is that of a largish minority, I myself subscribe to the view that the “ideal” state described in Republic was not in fact an expression of Plato’s political ideas either, but a typically complicated Platonic effort to bring views he was interested in (including those of, for example, the Sparta enthusiasts) under close examination and provoke reader reflection on them. In any event, the traditional family is one of the few things which doesn’t come under attack by Socrates in Plato’s early work (the material which is believed to be more faithful to the historical Socrates), so I am especially certain that presenting the debate as between Aristotle and Socrates is misleading.

          • Brad says:

            I think at the use of force.

            Does that mean all of the forbidden relationship statutory rapes should go (student-teacher, mental patient-doctor, prisoner-prison guard)? What about rape by coercion? NH for example treats as rape:

            (d) When the actor coerces the victim to submit by threatening to retaliate against the victim, or any other person, and the victim believes that the actor has the ability to execute these threats in the future.

            II. “Retaliate” means to undertake action against the interests of the victim, including, but not limited to:
            (a) Physical or mental torment or abuse.
            (b) Kidnapping, false imprisonment or extortion.
            (c) Public humiliation or disgrace.

          • Skivverus says:

            @Protagoras – Got it, was misremembering. Thanks for the clarification.

          • @Brad:

            I would include the threat of force along with force. On the other hand, “I won’t do something that is very important to you but that you don’t have a right for me to do unless you sleep with me” isn’t force in my view, any more than paying a prostitute, a much weaker version of the same thing, is.

            Your prisoner/prison guard case involves two different issues. One is whether there really is covert force or the threat of force, as there easily could be in that setting. The other is whether it’s a violation of the guard’s duty, which isn’t an issue of rape, in my view.

            Your mental patient case is a hard one, because of the difficulty of defining consent. There was a case recently where a man was charged with raping his wife of many years. They were old, she had Altzheimer’s, he had sex with her, there was no evidence at all that she wasn’t willing. That struck me as a pretty clear case where calling it rape was wrong.

          • Jiro says:

            On the other hand, “I won’t do something that it is very important to you but that you don’t have a right for me to do unless you sleep with me” isn’t force in my view, any more than paying a prostitute, a much weaker version of the same thing, is.

            I would exclude at least two cases:

            1) When the government’s monopoly on force is involved. If the governor is permitted to decide which of several businesses gets a tax break, it would be wrong for him to say “I’m giving the tax break to whoever sleeps with me”. You can’t exactly refuse and then find another governor to give you the tax break instead.

            2) I would exclude most cases of jobs that are not based around sex because human beings behave irrationally and I don’t want the burden of the irrationality to fall on the wrong people.

            For instance, person A (who is found to be attractive by the owner), is required to have sex or be fired. But if the owner fires A, he then has to hire person B at higher costs (same salary cost+additional employee switching cost). To a libertarian that is profoundly irrational, since firing A and hiring B is a loss, so employers will not do this and therefore A has nothing to fear. But they do (or would if given the chance).

          • Aapje says:

            @Jiro

            For instance, person A (who is found to be attractive by the owner), is required to have sex or be fired. But if the owner fires A, he then has to hire person B at higher costs (same salary cost+additional employee switching cost). To a libertarian that is profoundly irrational, since firing A and hiring B is a loss, so employers will not do this and therefore A has nothing to fear. But they do (or would if given the chance).

            Whether that is irrational depends completely on the chance that the coercion works, the value the owner places on having sex with A and the costs of hiring B.

            If the boss values having sex with A at 10,000 dollars* and thinks that coercion works in 50% of the cases. Then the average value of coercion is 5,000 dollars worth of sex. If hiring B costs less than 5,000 dollars, coercion is a rational economic decision.

            * Keep in mind that this is probably going to be long term sexual relationship, so the actual cost per sexual encounter will be far lower.

          • Jiro says:

            Whether that is irrational depends completely on the chance that the coercion works, the value the owner places on having sex with A and the costs of hiring B.

            The employer’s coercion, in an ideal free market, consists only of his ability to hire and fire. There’s no such thing as a chance of the coercion working; either the employer offers above the employee’s reserve price, or he doesn’t.

          • Brad says:

            I don’t understand why employer-employee coercion is singled out for special treatment but members of an insular religious cult, including the parents, pressuring minor girls to become concubines to much older men is not.

            Look at this statement:

            You have to allow for the risk that it’s the faceless bureaucracy that is the equivalent of Kim Jong-un.

            I’m thinking of the Texas FDLS case, where the bureaucracy in charge of protecting children took three hundred children away from their parents to protect them from being taught the parents’ religion, lied about the facts repeatedly, and eventually gave the children back only after both the Texas appeals court and the Texas Supreme Court voted unanimously that what they were doing was illegal.

            If trying to prevent an institutionalized system of coerced concubinage of underage girls is your go to example of faceless bureaucrats acting like Kim Jung-un and why would we shouldn’t trust governments to do anything, I don’t think you aren’t going to convince any people that aren’t already convinced. They may have been legally in the wrong but they were very much morally in the right.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Brad: When even the Los Angeles Times calls you out on using “trying to prevent an institutionalized system of coerced concubinage of underage girls” as an excuse to break out the automatic weapons and armored vehicles without first having verified the dubious evidence that there ever was an institutionalized system of coerced whatever, then maybe it is time to consider whether you aren’t letting religious bigotry guide your zeal in deploying the power of the state.

          • Aapje says:

            @Brad

            I haven’t examined the case in detail, but wikipedia says:

            On March 29, 2008,[15] a local domestic violence shelter hotline took a call from a female claiming to be a 16-year-old victim of physical and sexual abuse at the church’s YFZ Ranch.[16][17] The girl who identified herself as “Sarah” was never found,[18] but investigators eventually established by tracing the calls that they were made by a much older woman, Rozita Swinton, who had been arrested for previous hoax calls posing as abused and victimized girls. The call triggered a large-scale operation at YFZ Ranch by Texas law enforcement and child welfare officials, beginning with cordoning off of the ranch on April 3. […] CPS officials conceded that there was no evidence that the youngest children were abused (about 130 of the children were under 5), and evidence later presented in a custody hearing suggested that teenage boys were not physically or sexually abused.[26]

            So it does seem that it was an overreaction, where the CPS had a narrative/tunnel vision that guided their actions, rather than the evidence.

          • cheertina says:

            And here you’ve gone from the fear that those lifestyles would be imposed to the fact that there is an increase in identification. Do you think that’s a result of gay indoctrination, or just that people who see it being accepted are more willing to identify that way?

            “We stopped trying to forcibly convert, beat, or kill the LGBT community and now they’re much more common!”

        • AnonYEmous says:

          This has been my own experience. I was raised a conservative Republican. Gradually I would investigate one political issue after another, and found out that the Democrats were largely right.

          the literal exact opposite has happened to me

          so what’s it going to be? Are you still the guy who discovered the truth, which would make me the guy seduced by falsehood? By what metric do you prove any of this, except by…just arguing the actual issues out on an open playing field?

          (And why you would bring up Benghazi and birtherism in the age of “Trump is a Russian agent !!1!!!1” is entirely beyond me. Unless that conspiracy theory is Actually True, heh)

          • jseldred says:

            Well perhaps you can still agree with my “educate the public” agenda (below). You can relate, perhaps, to a sense of progress and growing knowledge. If we’re both empiricists, our paths will eventually converge.

            But whereas its easy to construct a model where “liberals generally know what conservatives don’t”, I find it harder to construct for me to imagine the model the other way around. At least if you believe academia has any value whatsoever.

            An example of the increasing partisan divide along education:
            http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/

          • AnonYEmous says:

            If we’re both empiricists, our paths will eventually converge.

            Indeed. I’m confident about it, actually.

            But whereas its easy to construct a model where “liberals generally know what conservatives don’t”, I find it harder to construct for me to imagine the model the other way around. At least if you believe academia has any value whatsoever.

            Actually, I do, which is why I believe the precise opposite:

            With thanks to user Nebfocus, whom I shamelessly plagiarized. Seriously, if one side understands the other better, and by extension probably their arguments better too, and still holds their position…that speaks to the strength of their position.

          • Murphy says:

            @AnonYEmous

            their dataset:

            “The participants were 2,212 visitors (62% female; median age 28; only U.S. residents or citizens) to ProjectImplicit.org”

            That seems supremely gameable by simply advertising the study selectively.

            Go on boring-conservative.org and say “hey, come take our study” and then go on litteralstrawmen.insane.tumblr.org and say “hey, come take our study” and if everyone answers honestly and marks the other side as being basically strawmen then you’ll get nice neat numbers showing that the conservatives understand the liberal much better than vice versa.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            Seriously, if one side understands the other better, and by extension probably their arguments better too, and still holds their position…that speaks to the strength of their position.

            Most of the conservatives I know personally aren’t hypereducated intellectuals, and few of them have a very good understanding of conservative arguments for anything in particular, or argumentation in general, and they certainly don’t seem to have a very good understanding of liberal arguments.

            And if you consume some conservative media, I think you’ll see liberal arguments mostly misrepresented rather than fairly assessed and refuted (for the other side, I think liberal media mostly ignores conservative arguments).

            So while there are no doubt some small subset of conservatives who understand well liberal arguments and can refute them on their own terms, I think the same is probably true of liberals, and in both cases I think it’s a very small group of people who can be described this way.

            I also think it’s almost certain that Haidt’s study was subject to a pretty serious amount of sampling bias.

          • random832 says:

            @jseldred

            Gradually I would investigate one political issue after another, and found out that the Democrats were largely right.

            @AnonYEMous

            the literal exact opposite has happened to me

            It seems obvious to me that when you’re standing at one extreme, the other extreme and the middle are in the same direction.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            That seems supremely gameable by simply advertising the study selectively.

            But as I understand it, Haidt isn’t particularly conservative and is quite well-respected. I don’t think he’s the type to game the system, so to speak.

            And if you consume some conservative media, I think you’ll see liberal arguments mostly misrepresented rather than fairly assessed and refuted (for the other side, I think liberal media mostly ignores conservative arguments).

            I mean, this is the key right here; conservative media might misrepresent it, but liberal media simply doesn’t bring it up. If there’s a misrepresentation, there can be a response, and so forth. But liberal media doesn’t even have the conversation, so liberals come away not knowing at all what the other side thinks. It’s hardly complex.

          • josephmaher says:

            random832 says:
            May 2, 2017 at 3:17 pm ~new~

            @jseldred

            Gradually I would investigate one political issue after another, and found out that the Democrats were largely right.

            @AnonYEMous

            the literal exact opposite has happened to me

            It seems obvious to me that when you’re standing at one extreme, the other extreme and the middle are in the same direction.

            @jseldred, @AnonYEMous: be great if you could calibrate yourselves with politicialcompass.org to see if this is the case 🙂 :

            https://www.politicalcompass.org/

          • Aapje says:

            @random832

            That would be valid if jseldred’s argument wasn’t that the blue tribe is always right when there is a conflict.

            @jseldred

            Who is more right in the ‘equal pay for equal work narrative?’

          • random832 says:

            @Aapje

            That would be valid if jseldred’s argument wasn’t that the blue tribe is always right when there is a conflict.

            I was not agreeing with his conclusion; I was stating an alternate theory for his observation, which was (more or less) that for every issue on which he has been convinced to change his position the change was in the direction of the Democrats’ position.

            When you start at one end there’s only one direction to go.

          • Aapje says:

            @random832

            Fair enough, that seems plausible.

        • tscharf says:

          It must be pretty satisfying to know you are smarter than your opponents and also right about everything. Let me guess, you are young. P=0.0005.

          It’s also possible you might have Mommy and Daddy issues. Both my parents were Democrats, I’m not. N=2 and we are at a standstill.

          I wasn’t aware one could simply be right or wrong on climate change without specifying exactly what aspect of it you were referring to, but I will just assume “everything” and let you fill in the blanks.

          • jseldred says:

            For purposes of this discussion, I would define a climate change denialist as someone who either believes 1) The global temperature is not rising; or 2) The rise in the global temperature is not driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Someone who falls into one of those two categories is not getting their information from the scientific consensus and doesn’t have a defensible empirical case for their position. They are someone who is ignorant on the issue of climate change.

            A more reasonable conversation can be had about the full consequences of climate change, the extent that it makes sense to respond to climate change, and the best way to respond to climate change.

            I’m not trying to prove anything on the authority of my own experiences. Someone else had made the assumption that I was the kind of person who never changed his mind, and I explained it was just the opposite in my case. What I’m trying to say is that “education-model” rather than “values-model” of partisan is worth exploring. Certainly it applies in the case of something like creationism or climate change.

            Also you might be interested to know your guesses are wrong.
            1) I don’t particularly care if people think I’m smart. I’m not a competitive person, although I can be a perfectionist.
            2) I don’t have Mommy/Daddy issues, I have a great relationship with both of them. They didn’t compel me to grow up as a Republican, or anything I just grew up with conservative baseline for my worldview.

            Amateur psycho-analysis is generally not very accurate, nor is a particularly effective way to dismiss someone you disagree with.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Tscharf – “It must be pretty satisfying to know you are smarter than your opponents and also right about everything. Let me guess, you are young. P=0.0005.
            It’s also possible you might have Mommy and Daddy issues. Both my parents were Democrats, I’m not.”

            Bad show.

          • tscharf says:

            @FacelessCraven

            We see how the “my tribe is smarter than your tribe” mentality goes with events such as Middlebury when the shoe is on the other foot. It’s hard to be silent on this if the social rules are that the only groups that can be dumped on in this manner are those disfavored by liberals.

          • tscharf says:

            @jseldred

            Almost all climate change skeptics accept the temperature record and that man plays some role. The debate from skeptics is about the reliability of the models, the efficacy of the claims of the future consequences, and the economics impacts and effectiveness of any proposed solutions.

            Within that debate, all the feedback is basically labeling and refusal to engage from the pro-science side. The pro-science side regularly tolerates or directly engages in unfettered alarmism that isn’t supported by the science. Science only polices one side of the debate.

            I’ve looked at hurricanes, sea level rise, the hockey stick, the temperature record, flooding, droughts, tornadoes, arctic ice and several other things. The temperature record is accurate (enough) for it’s intended purpose. Arctic ice is melting but is seasonal and erratic year to year. Seas are rising at 1 inch per decade but the predicted acceleration has yet to materialize. Extreme events are almost universally misreported and long term trends show no current correlation with climate change. The hockey stick is an IED in a climate discussion so I will refrain here. The IPCC is really the skeptics best friend when doing critical review of media reports.

            In summary, some of these subjects are reported fairly, others are total distortions.

            I have a lot less problems with climate science as reported in the IPCC detail reports, but my biggest complaints are with how the media portrays the science and the debate. Go read the IPCC reports and then read the media, you’ll get whiplash.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @tscharf – “It’s hard to be silent on this if the social rules are that the only groups that can be dumped on in this manner are those disfavored by liberals.”

            hard it may be, but sneering at other posters is not what this place is for.

          • What I’m trying to say is that “education-model” rather than “values-model” of partisan is worth exploring. Certainly it applies in the case of something like creationism or climate change.

            You first limit the climate change debate to the part of it on which conservative critics are weakest (is it real and anthropogenic) and then reach a conclusion about climate change in general. I’ve seen lots of uneducated nonsense from the alarmist side of that debate as well as from those who deny that AGW is happening.

    • FeepingCreature says:

      How do you give power in a way that can only be exercised by that media that happens to be neutral?

      Because like … both sides are claiming the exact same thing, here. From the inside view, how do you propose to arrange the handoff of power in a way that structurally selects for political neutrality?

      • jseldred says:

        Scott’s recent article on objectivity comes to mind:
        https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/

        There is some subset of objective knowledge that it is not still objectionable to teach people. A high-quality education, is one that not only tells people what is true but demonstrates to them how they can know it is true. You can draw conclusion from evidences and test your predictions. You can at least expose yourself to other points of view. You can at establish frameworks for communication and analysis of a subject.

        Education and science, like the media, have become increasingly demonized by the right-wing. But whereas the right-wing might object to these things as practiced, they (generally) don’t object to the concept of evidence in principle. And no one can deny the knowledge that they themselves internalized.

        Some general strategies.
        1) Advance public education of knowledge that has not yet been politicized. This is a foundation that will safeguard against sources of inaccurate information and make accurate controversial information more accessible. High quality grade school education play this role.
        2) Make verifiable, although controversial, information more accessible. It can be a difficult task to explain complex subjects to a hostile audience over a limited bandwidth, but it is a skill that can be honed. The best of our contemporary media and academia is doing precisely this.
        3) Expand the bench of deep expertise. When someone really researches a subject, their knowledge should overcome bias and confusion. Moreover they become a powerful resource for those around them. The more people, from the more backgrounds, we can get to a high quality college the more experts we can have. As an aside, I think many college programs may fall short of this mark and many quality high schools can reach this mark.
        4) Hold inaccurate media accountable. If a media outlet is demonstrated repeatedly and verifiable to be unreliable or inconsistent, they lose trust of their audience. The human demand for a comprehensible world may then drive someone towards more reliable, if imperfect, sources. I think fact-checking is important, I think expert input is important, I think institutional memory is important, I think diverse media consumption is important.

        Whether or not this problem will get better or worse probably depends on whether one has dystopian or utopian view of the Internet. And whether one is optimistic or pessimistic about global human development. I guess I am an optimist.

    • A significant portion of the country is deeply undereducated and has been actively mislead.

      I think you are assuming that almost all of those people are on the right.

      Some years back, when my kids were looking at colleges, I was struck by just how badly misled students at elite liberal arts colleges were on issues such as global warming. I still remember the daughter of some friends telling me that there was not going to be any more snow in Indiana because of warming. She is a bright girl, so I’m pretty sure she was accurately passing on what she had been told–not in an elite school but a respectable one.

      I don’t think it would be difficult to find other areas, such as economics, where the situation is equally bad. I went to an elite private school run by a university, graduating in 1961. I still remember the (prominent, college) textbook we used in social studies, which misrepresented the events leading to the Great Depression to a level either fraudulent or incompetent (details if people are curious). It wasn’t the fault of the teacher–he was a liberal but open minded and perfectly willing to be argued with.

      And even on evolution, while much of the right is bad, much of the left is unwilling to believe implications of Darwinian evolution, most obviously for m/f differences, when the implications don’t fit their ideology.

      The fundamental point, as argued by Dan Kahan, is that whether your beliefs in such matters are true has little effect on you in most contexts, but whether they agree with the beliefs of the people who matter to you has a large effect.

      • jseldred says:

        You’re right that it can happen to the left-wing as well. However I think it is the isolation of the right-wing that is especially concerning to me.

        I think we can generate lots of examples of inadequately educated kids with motivated reasoning. But if those kids are on the left, they will be exposed to a much greater diversity news sources and will have much higher access to relevant expertise. The cure, hopefully, is already on its way. Ignorance and bias are a much more dire problem when it also comes with being cut off from high quality sources of reliable information.

        • Nebfocus says:

          Haidt found that conservatives and moderates better understood liberal views much better than vice versa. Conservatives have always been exposed to the liberal pov via the media.

        • thevoiceofthevoid says:

          But if those kids are on the left, they will be exposed to a much greater diversity news sources and will have much higher access to relevant expertise.

          I’m not sure if that’s true. In the liberal Massachusetts town I live in, the dominant point of view seems to be that Trump is more or less evil incarnate, and by extension so is anyone who supports him. Now I’m no fan of Trump, but I’m somewhat concerned that many people literally cannot conceive of a Trump supporter who’s not racist/homophobic/xenophobic/smells bad/kicks puppies/etc.

          In the same vein, any news sources I can think of are either liberally biased or taken as a joke. This is probably due to the effect Scott mentions where conservative groups that splinter off of the mainstream quickly become extreme and easily ridiculed.

          • wysinwygymmv says:

            In the liberal Massachusetts town I live in, the dominant point of view seems to be that Trump is more or less evil incarnate, and by extension so is anyone who supports him. Now I’m no fan of Trump, but I’m somewhat concerned that many people literally cannot conceive of a Trump supporter who’s not racist/homophobic/xenophobic/smells bad/kicks puppies/etc.

            Not sure which town you’re in, but my district here in Middlesex county went solidly for Trump and there are still a few signs up in yards for Trump — none for Hillary. Our local paper, the Lowell Sun, is pretty well known for its conservative editorial slant. All the well-to-do local good ol’ boys that I know (I guess pretty much my stepdad and his friends) are very conservative — some of them pretty obnoxious about it. I went to high school with a kid who responded to Obama’s election by fuming that there was an n-word in the White House; I’m sure he’s not the only one, just enough of a loudmouth to have voiced the opinion.

            So even in liberal-as-hell Massachusetts, there seems to be a little more diversity than you credit.

          • thevoiceofthevoid says:

            @wysinwygymmv
            You’re right, there are in fact a decent number of Trump supporters in my town. I should have been more clear, but I was trying to refer to the situation within my personal social group (i.e. the people I would actually take seriously and heed the opinions of). So there are Trump fans, but to my ingroup their support is seen as woefully misguided and uninformed rather than legitimate.

            What I’m trying to get at is more the culture and the atmosphere I perceive day-to-day than the actual numbers. To illustrate my point: A teacher at the local high school wrote a facebook post after the election sharing his thoughts about it, and shared it publicly in hopes that it would provide solace to students upset about the election results. Now it started off trying to be inoffensive, and talk about unintentional racism and such in measured tones. However by the end of the post it devolved into yet another “basket of deplorables” spiel.

            Multiple teachers at the high school read it out loud to their students, as if it somehow wasn’t explicitly calling some of those students racist, sexist, etc.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          But if those kids are on the left, they will be exposed to a much greater diversity news sources and will have much higher access to relevant expertise.

          Yes, they can get a wide range of sources from far left, to moderate left to even (if they’re feeling naughty) center left. What does the “diversity” of news sources matter when those sources are CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, WaPo, Vox, and HuffPo!

          The idea of a right-wing bubble seems rather silly when the entire culture is left wing. Unless you’re looking at nothing but Fox and Breitbart, and you never go to school, watch TV, see a Hollywood movie, get a job with an HR department, you’re going to be exposed to left wing ideas.

      • crescentsmom says:

        graduating in 1961. I still remember the (prominent, college) textbook we used in social studies, which misrepresented the events leading to the Great Depression to a level either fraudulent or incompetent

        Okay I am very interested in the details on this. Particularly because my understanding of the history of economic scholarship was that the common contemporary explanation for the Great Depression, which held until to the publication of A Monetary History of the United States, was that it was caused by “unbridled capitalism.”

        But I suspect you could tell us a thing or two about the state of Great Depression scholarship in the 1950’s-60’s.

        • The following is by memory from almost sixty years ago. The book was by Nevins and Commager. The relevant sentence, not verbatim, was of the form:

          From 1920 to 1930, farm income fell from X to Y<X. Presidents Harding and Coolidge did nothing about this.

          Being the son of an economist with access to data–hardcopy back then–I looked up the numbers. Farm income, and lots of other things, fell sharply in the first few months of 1921. From then until the stock market crash, it rose, only to fall again at the beginning of the Great Depression. So, with the exception of the first few months of Harding's term, it was rising though the entire period when Nevins and Commager complained that two Republican presidents did nothing about its decline.

          Not an explanation of the Great Depression, although it hints at an explanation.

          For another bit of Great Depression urban legend, this one called to my attention by something written by David Frum, a conservative, and later by Nicholas Kristof, there is the idea that Hoover responded to the stock market crash by reducing government expenditure. The truth is precisely the opposite.

          On the other hand, that is how Harding responded to the events of 1921, which look very much like the beginning of a depression. By 1923 it was over.

      • Murphy says:

        There’s a certain level of background-ignorance that isn’t party/ideology specific.

        The worst I can think of is how many times over the years I’ve heard variations on people saying that the poles are cold because they’re “further from the sun”

        First was from a particularly inept geography teacher I had when I was a child who got quite pissed at me insisting that that didn’t make sense and distance alone doesn’t make the difference.

        The most recent was a very smart guy I know with a PHD in genetics who, thankfully, simply googled it in the face of a raised eyebrow and the words “square cubed law, 8 light minutes vs 8 light minutes plus a few thousand km”

        It survives because it sort of makes sense and people typically aren’t prompted to refine the position.

        There’s an old graphic of the chain of social media meme recycling with each entity 4chan,reddit,9gag etc each shitting into the mouth of the one bellow it until it reaches “email forwards from grandma”

        A similar process happens to scientific knowledge and science journalism. anyone getting most of their info from sources near the bottom gets littler more than garbled junk

        • Dog says:

          Thanks for this. Until today, I believed the poles were colder because they are further from the sun. I’m sure I heard it at some point and never gave it a second thought, though it’s clearly implausible. My actually-thinking-about-it guess right now was angle of incidence, which seems to be mostly correct.

          We all probably have a frightening number of flat out wrong “facts” we believe just because we’ve heard them and haven’t bothered to critically evaluate them.

        • random832 says:

          @Murphy

          The worst I can think of is how many times over the years I’ve heard variations on people saying that the poles are cold because they’re “further from the sun”

          I’m utterly baffled by this post, because the only explanation I have ever heard has to do with the angle, is explained with an easy demonstration involving pointing a flashlight straight at a piece of paper and then at an angle (from which the spot is larger but dimmer), and also explains the seasons. (Earth as a whole is in fact, coincidentally, further from the sun during the northern-hemisphere summer.)

        • My example of non-ideological scientific ignorance is the misunderstanding of the greenhouse effect, the idea that it is due to CO2 functioning as an insulator. As best I can tell, that exists on both sides of the climate debate. It is linked to the idea that insulation keeps things warm, despite the obvious fact that it is also used to keep coolers cool.

          If CO2 simply absorbed light, it would absorb light coming up from the Earth and reradiate some of it down, which would tend to warm things, but also absorb light coming down from the sun and reradiate some of it up, which would tend to cool things. The essential point that many people miss, including the people who make videos showing a scientific experiment done by a schoolkid that supposedly proves the greenhouse effect, is that CO2 absorbs selectively, more of the long wave length light coming up than the short wave length light coming down. For details see:

          • Murphy says:

            Side note: Rainbows.

            Every child sees some simple diagram of a prism splitting light and then the schoolbook tends to go on as if rainbows are fully explained when it should yield the question of “but why are they that shape and why only in conditions x/y/z”.

            The actual geometry of them is kinda weird and surprising.

            Then there’s the Bohr model of the atom vs quantum physics.

            In the science of discworld it talked about the idea of “lies to children” where for many things educators give a simple, informative but technically wrong explanation that hopefully prepares the kids for more complex real explanations later.

          • random832 says:

            On rainbows, isn’t it related to raindrops being spherical (or near enough, for small enough raindrops in the air) and total internal reflection? I could swear I’ve seen a diagram (though the diagram omits the final logical step that you can rotate the whole system through the axis formed by the sun and your eyes, which explains why rainbows are a circular arc)

      • Jack Lecter says:

        . I still remember the (prominent, college) textbook we used in social studies, which misrepresented the events leading to the Great Depression to a level either fraudulent or incompetent (details if people are curious).

        I am curious, if you still have the details.
        Distortions of this sort always puzzle me, on a level maybe too deep to ever be fully resolved. Robin Hanson would probably say I’m just virtue signaling, but there’s always seemed to me to be something viscerally dangerous about propagating falsehoods- like leaving hand grenades lying around where you can’t see them. If what you want is to convince people, how are they going to react if they find out you’ve lied/distorted things?
        I get that this is arguably just a ‘boo light’- I don’t expect anyone around here to defend lying about stuff- but I’m in college now, and I keep getting struck by my teachers saying things that aren’t true, and treating this as a niggling technical objection whenever I try to bring it up. I don’t think they’re dishonest people- they’re not going home and chuckling evilly- but I can’t trust them, and it’s hard for me to see where they’re coming from.

        So, to reiterate- yes, I’m curious about the textbook.

        • CatCube says:

          There’s a whole bunch of falsehoods lurking in things that “everybody knows.” I don’t know what schools and parents are teaching currently, but growing up I learned that people in Italy opposed funding Columbus’s attempt at sailing west to reach India because “they thought the world was flat.”

          The reality was that all educated people since the Ancient Greeks knew the world was round (and Eratosthenes made an attempt at calculating the circumference something like 150 years before Christ). Columbus made a series of errors and extremely optimistic assumptions that lead him to believe that India was closer to Portugal than New York is to Los Angeles. Italian academics opposed the government funding his trip because they knew that that distance was absurd.

          But the “everybody thought the world was flat” narrative was taught as truth for years.

          • A less common example than the Columbus myth, but still irritating, is the belief that medievals overspiced their food to hide the taste of spoiled meat.

            What those two have in common is that they let people preen themselves on how much smarter they are than people in the past.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            In a similar vein, the conflict thesis and suchlike ideas, whilst largely discredited among the relevant historians, still seem to pop up with depressing frequency. (For example, this article on postmodernism, which helpfully tells us that “before the Enlightenment… “reason” was regarded as not only inferior to faith but as a sin”.)

          • Tibor says:

            @David: I’ve never heard that myth (with the spice). I though it was a common knowledge that most spice was really expensive in the middle ages which makes this rather nonsensical. I do think most people assume that the middle ages looked somewhat like the “bring out your dead” scene from the Monty Python’s Holy Grail, i.e. everyone wearing brown and everything filthy. People also assume that medieval armour weighs a ton and people often tell the stories of “medieval knights needing a crane to lift them to the horse”. Part of it probably comes from jousting armour which was a lot heavier, but even that would not require a crane unless the knight was morbidly obese and incapable of getting on a horse on his own (with or without armour).

            What I myself was surprised of not very long ago is that tomatoes actually come from the New World. It is difficult to imagine that 15th century Italian cuisine was completely devoid of tomatoes 🙂 But I think this is just me and not a common misconception.

          • What I myself was surprised of not very long ago is that tomatoes actually come from the New World. It is difficult to imagine that 15th century Italian cuisine was completely devoid of tomatoes 🙂 But I think this is just me and not a common misconception.

            The usual misconception there is that tomatoes were for a long time believed to be poisonous, sometimes explained as their being related to nightshade. We have a reference to tomatoes being eaten in Italy in the 16th century.

            Potatoes are also from the New World, but a lot of people assume they were always part of Irish cooking. Similarly for paprika and Hungarian.

          • Nornagest says:

            It’s hard for me to imagine Indian or Southeast Asian cooking without hot peppers, but those are American too. It’s really amazing how fast those plants diffused.

          • It’s really amazing how fast those plants diffused.

            Yes. Maize shows up in a Chinese herbal in the mid-sixteenth century.

        • I just explained in response to someone else asking me. Search for “commager”.

    • Tracy W says:

      This doesn’t sound right. Why would massive ignorance cause biases against media (or media biases against large sections of their audience?) People don’t always hate their teachers nor teachers their students and often when they do it’s for a reason like bullying. The student-teacher relationship is noticed for often being close (eg Socrates and his students).

      Plus the media is in the business of correcting ignorance. People come to the news to learn something new. The more ignorance, the more media opportunities.

      • jseldred says:

        It’s a good point, why would an ignorant student hate their teacher? My answer is that the media is under-serving the ignorant. It’s like if their is one student way behind the rest of the class. That student will feel constantly frustrated. And if the teacher completely neglects the student or tells the student that its actually their fault, then the student will probably get angry and rightly so. This is a fair criticism of the media, that they don’t do enough to explain educate their audience on necessary background and they don’t do enough to dispel conservative misinformation. But hatred of the media has developed into a full-blown ideology. So the remedial student is more also like the student with an attitude, convinced that school is for suckers and all the teachers just hate him.

        I don’t believe the media profits from ignorance. If they are actually in the business of educating, there is always more to know. And they actually suffer from confusion, because confusion makes news unpalatable and makes people suspicious of the media

        But I would also say that the media is first-most motivated to make a profit, not to educate. And this is a big part of the problem. A discerning customer will insist on accurate information from their news sources. But once all the discerning customers are gobbled up, there is plenty of profit to be made in sensationalism. The hope is that as we become a more educated society, our media just keeps getting better to match our tastes. But only if education beats misinformation in the short-run.

        • Tracy W says:

          I think now you are pretty much repeating Scott’s point.

        • But I would also say that the media is first-most motivated to make a profit, not to educate.

          An important point. The most consistent bias, more consistent than the political bias, is in favor of a good story, one that will make people want to read it. Sometimes the true story isn’t as good as the not entirely true one.

    • reasoned argumentation says:

      This is the problem the neutral media has with all right-wing ideology, not just creationism and climate change. A significant portion of the country is deeply undereducated and has been actively mislead.

      Yes, you’re absolutely correct.

      The country has been propagandized to believe that races are of equal average intelligence, equal propensity to criminality and that evolution stopped at the neck. To keep that lie alive the media then has to push every unrepresentative story it can find even if those stories fall apart – as they happen to all the time.

      • thevoiceofthevoid says:

        I see quite a number of parallels between the debates on climate change and the debates on racial intelligence differences. Without saying anything as to the particular strength of evidence for either theory (since I am currently in a state of radical skepticism on both of them):

        Let’s say climate change turns out to be real and caused by humans. By no means does this imply that we ought to immediately stop using fossil fuels and tile the country with solar panels and fluorescent lighting. However, “The costs of your proposed policies far outweigh their actual effects on mitigating climate change” is a much more subtle argument than “Climate change is a liberal conspiracy!” and cedes quite a bit of territory to your political enemy.

        Now, let’s say that members race X turn out to have 15 fewer IQ points on average than race Y, due to biological factors. By no means does this imply that we ought to stereotype every member of race X as stupid and incompetent, or stop trying to help educate and assist people in the cycle of poverty. However, “A statistical difference doesn’t mean we should stereotype individuals, and we should treat every person with respect and dignity regardless” is a much more subtle argument than “Racial intelligence differences are pseudoscientific racism!” and cedes quite a bit of territory to your political enemy.

        Now it certainly doesn’t help levelheaded, factual discussion when certain proponents of anthropogenic climate change theories often tell us to freak out about phone chargers and leaky faucets. It’s similarly unhelpful when certain proponents of racial IQ theories also support actual racism.

        • wysinwygymmv says:

          Now it certainly doesn’t help levelheaded, factual discussion when certain proponents of anthropogenic climate change theories often tell us to freak out about phone chargers and leaky faucets.

          1. So-called “vampire loads” like phone chargers or pretty much anything with a “status LED, or one of those power strips with an “on” light — they make up a significant fraction of electricity usage overall. I suspect “freaking out” is a bit of hyperbole on your part since I’ve literally never read, heard or seen anyone doing anything that might reasonably be described as “freaking out” in response to this issue, but it is a real issue. And I’m not kidding about this being a significant portion of the total load — if people were a little bit more careful about these “vampire loads” we could Jevons’ paradox our way into prosperity.
          2. The flip-side of AGW is resource depletion, and realistically water is the biggest resource constraint in any kind of collapse scenario. It’s always the biggest problem when I try to imagine how my life would look with non-functioning electric grid (I’m pretty sure public water is dependent on the grid). This is especially so after my area had a serious drought last year and seeing the difference between lawns and gardens that were watered and those that weren’t. Conserving water is absolutely a legitimate issue.

          If you need a global warming freakout criticism that is actually valid, I think it’s more the fact that they view global warming as a moral issue rather than a scientific/engineering issue. They view fossil fuels as evil and renewable technologies as good rather than viewing both as technologies with specific benefits and drawbacks. As a result, they tend to ignore the environmental drawbacks of e.g. LiON batteries, solar panels, and windmills. They’re self-righteous about SUVs but ignore the impact of their own air travel.

          • Deiseach says:

            Conserving water is absolutely a legitimate issue.

            I vaguely remember a discussion way back when I was asking about the notion of massive desalination plants as a solution to (either? both?) the Californian and/or Middle Eastern water shortages, and I wondered if taking a lot of water out of the ocean would be sustainable and would not have ill effects, and was told that this would not be a problem at all since (a) the increase in water extraction and usage would be miniscule by comparison with ocean resources (b) water circulates so the water taken from the oceans would be replaced by rivers, rain, etc. as the water used would go back into the ground eventually and so forth.

            So while personally I agree that water conservation is a future civilisation problem, some people don’t agree that it is 🙂

          • Eltargrim says:

            @Deiseach: the people giving that argument are half-right; desalination isn’t a resource issue, for the reasons they stated. It’s primarily an energy issue. Best-case scenarios envision processing energy costs that are ten times higher than current sources, before the cost of transportation. Given that we use a lot of water, that’s a lot of energy.

            In a future where there’s abundant sustainable energy, water conservation is much less concerning than other resource scarcity. In a future where there’s the collapse that wysinwygymmv worries about, water scarcity is a huge issue. Same if we don’t solve our energy issues.

            Of course, given that domestic water consumption is only about 10% of national water consumption in the United States, focusing on industrial waste is probably the best target.

          • tscharf says:

            Vampire power is ~5% of a residential power bill 10 years ago. Recent regulations and upgrades have significantly reduced that since then. That’s residential power, not industrial power which is about equal. Climate control is a huge energy draw. Pool pumps.

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

          • tscharf says:

            It’s important to point out that when water is used, it isn’t destroyed. This resource isn’t depleted in this sense. It get recycled. Conservation should be done anyway so we are less dependent on the rate and volatility of the water cycle.

          • thevoiceofthevoid says:

            I was being somewhat hyperbolic, but my main complaint is against arguments of the form: “If everyone does a little, it’ll add up to a lot!” This is fallacious for the simple reason that if everyone in the country were to reduce their energy consumption (or water usage or so on) by 1%, it would add up to some impressive-sounding big number of energy saved!…i.e. 1% of the total nationwide power consumption.

            This fallacy leads to what I see as a misguided focus on small, personal contributions which are unlikely to have a significant impact on the large-scale problems. I took the phone charger example from this page. I’m not terribly interested in the specifics of this particular case, but even assuming that vampire loads make up about 10% of residential electricity consumption:
            * This would only be about 3-4% of total electricity consumption, since residential power accounts for about a third of electricity use. (Industrial and commercial are each approximately another third.)
            * And it would be only 1.5% of total energy consumption, since electricity is only about 40% of that (vs heating, gasoline, etc.)
            [source: looking at pie charts for “energy consumption” on google images]

            In any case, my main point in that quip about phone charges was to criticize those who act as if moderate reductions in personal consumption will somehow solve the problem caused by the entire industrial revolution, and then go on to shame or pass laws against those who disagree.

        • quanta413 says:

          So-called “vampire loads” like phone chargers or pretty much anything with a “status LED, or one of those power strips with an “on” light — they make up a significant fraction of electricity usage overall. I suspect “freaking out” is a bit of hyperbole on your part since I’ve literally never read, heard or seen anyone doing anything that might reasonably be described as “freaking out” in response to this issue, but it is a real issue. And I’m not kidding about this being a significant portion of the total load — if people were a little bit more careful about these “vampire loads” we could Jevons’ paradox our way into prosperity.

          I’d like a source for that. And not just significant fraction of domestic electric usage. Including all businesses, industry, etc. And no counting drain from appliances when they are being used of course since we’re talking about “vampire loads”. My own electricity bills over time make me extremely suspicious of the claim that most of the load is vampire.

          2. The flip-side of AGW is resource depletion, and realistically water is the biggest resource constraint in any kind of collapse scenario. It’s always the biggest problem when I try to imagine how my life would look with non-functioning electric grid (I’m pretty sure public water is dependent on the grid). This is especially so after my area had a serious drought last year and seeing the difference between lawns and gardens that were watered and those that weren’t. Conserving water is absolutely a legitimate issue.

          OP was talking about leaky faucets, not flooding fields to grow crops. Unless your faucets are way more leaky than mine, a miniscule fraction of water consumed is due to leaky faucets. And in many areas with drought problems (i.e. CA), household consumption is about 10-20% of all water consumption. https://www.kcet.org/commentary/drought-by-the-numbers-where-does-california-water-go

          I’ve had a leaky fixture once in the past several years and left a bucket collecting water under it for days. It got to on the order of a gallon or so full before the faucet was fixed. I think my shower each day consumes several times that.

  24. manwhoisthursday says:

    There is a moderate left liberal academic up here in Toronto named Joseph Heath that has an interesting take on why conservatives have gone in for climate change denial. This is roughly it:

    Lots of people on the right know that man made climate change is real, but the problem is that it is a collective action problem which would require places like China and India to massively reduce emissions. That just isn’t going to happen, and any unilateral reduction in emissions on the part of the West is likely not going to make much of a difference. But those on the left seem to think that they just need to shout louder and lecture people more about how they need to sacrifice for the greater good. Then some people, especially conservatives, eventually get tired being lectured about all this, even though the proposed actions aren’t likely to do a lick of good, so they take on climate change denial as something to throw back in the face of the left whenever they’re about to get lectured. The fact that many on the left seem to think that shouting louder about their true claims about climate change and perhaps throw in the occasional somewhat exaggerated claim just to scare the pants off people is going to do any good, just makes people on the right dig in their heels all the more. And, of course, the scare-the-pants-off-people exaggerations lend credence to the idea that the left is blowing the whole thing way out of proportion. Then, of course, there are the creationist types on the right who have their own grudge against science, and a well funded fossil fuel industry that doesn’t want their cash cow tampered with, and you have the makings of an unholy mess.

    • cthor says:

      Why is China and India reducing their emissions just not going to happen?

      They’re just as at risk of the effects of global warming as the west.

      Per capita emissions are worst in western and rich middle-eastern countries. Australia, US, Canada, and Saudi Arabia are amongst the biggest offenders. India’s emissions per capita are 15 times lower than the US.

      And from what I’ve seen, China and India in their politics seem to rank global warming as a higher priority than the US and Australia. But they also have a pretty high priority in getting their literal billions of people out of poverty, so them not going cold turkey on fossil fuels right away isn’t surprising.

      Yes, Beijing is full of smog. Those shots they show on the news of commuters wearing face masks are good at pushing this narrative. But the narrative makes no sense. Why should China cares less than us about global warming?

      The chain of events that results from believing this narrative is sensible, but no matter how sensible you are, if you start from a false premise you’re still wrong.

      • AnonYEmous says:

        Why is China and India reducing their emissions just not going to happen?

        If they reduced their emissions, they’d miss out on their chance of rising up from Third World basket cases to First World powerhouses. Their citizens wouldn’t appreciate emissions reduction one little bit either. Consider that in Germany, 30% of the energy is derived from green sources, and electricity prices have tripled. Think of all the Indians and Chinese who won’t be able to afford electricity, and all the electricity-reliant businesses (and every business is reliant on electricity in some way) who will have to cut back on jobs.

        The idea is that first world countries can afford that, and to an extent we can. The extended idea is that we can afford that for us and everyone else…which is just not realistic at this stage. Looks to be getting less realistic by the day, too.

        • cthor says:

          To be clearer: China and India don’t currently have as large an impetus to reduce their emissions as US, Aus, etc. because they don’t currently emit as much per capita.

          This is partially because they are poorer. (Poor people won’t use much if any gas/electricity since they can’t afford it.) So the question is, if those countries become richer, will they then spend some of that on efforts to reduce emissions? There’s no evidence to suggest that they would be *less* willing to cooperate than the US.

          The notion that China and India are collective sociopaths with no concern for the environment is ridiculous.

          • thevoiceofthevoid says:

            You don’t have to think that China and India are collective sociopath to believe that:

            A. China and India produce a significant proportion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

            B. It is unlikely that these countries will be able to significantly reduce their emissions in the foreseeable future.

            C. Given A and B, US trying to reduce emissions right now won’t do much.

            Also, I would think that in this case absolute emissions would be a more relevant statistic than emissions per capita, at least if we’re concerned with the relative impact of US emissions/reductions vs. China/India emissions/reductions.

          • Iain says:

            @thevoiceofthevoid:

            B is false.
            China is actually taking fairly aggressive steps to reduce its emissions, especially in terms of coal-burning, which looks to have already peaked.

          • thevoiceofthevoid says:

            @Iain

            Your source seems to show that China’s emissions levels may be flattening out, but certainly not dropping significantly:

            The most recent data show reductions in coal use in China for the third year in a row. China is on track to peak its carbon dioxide emissions between 2025 and 2030, which is an important element of its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) commitment under the Paris Agreement. However, the absence of comparable measures, or commitments, on other greenhouse gases means that total greenhouse gas emissions could continue to increase until at least 2030. Although China’s policies and actions appear set to achieve the CO2 goal in its NDC, as well as its national targets, the NDC itself is not yet ambitious enough to limit warming to below 2°C, let alone with the Paris Agreement’s stronger 1.5°C limit, unless other countries make much deeper reductions and comparably greater effort than China.

            However I concede that China may be doing more to combat climate change than I had previously assumed.

          • Iain says:

            The statement that I objected to was that China was unlikely to significantly reduce its emissions “in the foreseeable future”. I agree that China’s emissions are not going down right now, but if they do manage to peak in 2030, then by definition they will be going down in 2031. I think that counts as the foreseeable future.

            Regardless of the exact dates and details, it should be clear that “oh, there’s no point, because we’ll never get China on board” is no longer a viable fig leaf. China, clearly, doesn’t think that the transition to green energy will be economically crippling.

          • China, clearly, doesn’t think that the transition to green energy will be economically crippling.

            I don’t think you can tell that. Words are cheap. If China gets benefits in world politics by saying they are going to start reducing emissions fifteen years from now they are likely to say it, whether or not it is true.

            China clearly has an incentive to reduce fossil fuel use in some places, not because of global warming but because of air pollution. But it’s a big country.

        • manwhoisthursday says:

          The responses here have been kind of slippery. Talking about per capita rather than absolute amounts of greenhouse gases. Characterizing the argument being that India and China are “collective sociopaths.” Mischaracterizing just how much China is reducing emissions (i.e. not enough to make a difference).

          The collective action problem here is huge, and attempts to minimize it strike me as just as much a denial of reality as denial of climate change.

          • cthor says:

            Yes, the collective action problem is huge, most likely the hugest collective action problem we face (dependent on your assigned likelihood of AGI).

            I’m only offering counterpoints to the argument that the US and other great offenders in this space should not act because China won’t.

          • Note that the collective action problem is much bigger for efforts to reduce AGW than for efforts to adapt to it. If Bangladesh replaces cheap fossil fuels with expensive renewables, Bangladesh shares any resulting benefit with the rest of the world. If Bangladesh dikes its coastline, Bangladesh gets the benefit. If a farmer shifts to a different crop or a different type of irrigation in response to climate change, that farmer gets the benefit.

      • Jugemu says:

        Please look up “collective action problem”. This will show you how your post is irrelevant.

        • cthor says:

          Point: “China and India won’t cooperate, so neither should I.”

          Counterpoint: “China and India are cooperating more than you, and they have more barriers to cooperating.”

          You: “Cooperating is still hard!!”

          Me: ???

      • Iain says:

        As corroboration of cthor’s point: China is pivoting away from coal and investing heavily in renewable energy.

        • manwhoisthursday says:

          Pivoting away from coal likely has a lot to do with the terrible air pollution in China itself. It does no good to conflate air quality in China with the problem of worldwide climate change.

          • Randy M says:

            Sort of. If China pivots away from coal because of air pollution and uses nuclear, solar, & wind, then it doesn’t matter why, but still matters how much.

            Why might matter if they don’t reduce CO2 emissions enough to matter for global warming before they make their air breathable.

            Of course, if they move from coal to natural gas, they are still going to be putting out approximately as much CO2 and it doesn’t help the GW situation.

          • Iain says:

            I didn’t realize when I posted the link that it hits a paywall unless you get to the page through Google. If you search for “China is shaping up to be a world leader on climate change”, you should be able to read the entire article. It talks about five aspects of China’s approach, only one of which is smog reduction. The other four are:
            – Huge investments in clean energy production. (For example, five of the world’s top six producers of solar panels are Chinese.)
            – Pilot carbon trading programs being expanded to a national scale.
            – An emerging green bonds market.
            – Changes in China’s foreign investment strategy.

            If China is not actually taking climate change seriously, they are at least doing a very good impression of it.

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            @Randy M

            Right. It’s possible to pivot away from coal in a way that makes their own air breathable, but not enough to meaningfully affect climate change.

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            Iain, it’s easy to put on a show. We get a lot of that kind of thing in the West too whenever a centre left party is in power.

            What matters is quantity.

          • Of course, if they move from coal to natural gas, they are still going to be putting out approximately as much CO2 and it doesn’t help the GW situation.

            Actually, I believe natural gas produces about half as much CO2 per unit of energy.

      • tscharf says:

        If China and India “reduced” their emissions from today’s values then climate change is a non-issue. There is no realistic plan for them to do so. All emissions scenarios in the IPCC assume they will increase emissions at fairly dramatic rates. What makes the difference here is their “rate of increase” and when they will peak.

        In fact if you run the numbers the largest contributors to future emission increases is in the hands of mostly China, India and Africa. The US and EU have plateaued and are trending downward slowly.

        If you want to solve climate change through reduced emissions, make clean energy so cheap that China and India can’t say no. If you think people without indoor plumbing are going to pay $1 more for energy than they could, you would probably be mistaken.

    • Quixote says:

      As a factual matter china is reducing their emissions. They are spending huge amounts of money to do so and are investing heavily in solar, wind etc.
      On local pollutants, they have been conducting experiments with closing factories or roadways for short periods of time and measuring local air conditions before and after. Obviously that lost production is expensive.
      China takes the environment seriously and is spending on it. In some sense, this isn’t a surprise. Basic economics would predict the Chinese doing a better job on climate than we are. In China, the Communist Party owns the factories and the Communist Party owns the productivity of coastal land. It is directly impacted by its own costs. In the US institutional investors own the oil companies and other parties (mostly private citizens) own the coastal land. One group of owners is able to push externalities onto the other.

    • cassander says:

      I think we agree, but I think my phasing is better than his.

      In 1990, before climate change was an issue, what did the environmentalist left want? Massive investments in green (meaning wind and solar) energy, taxes on energy use (particularly in rich western countries), international regulation of energy and other environmental matters, and an end to nuclear power. Now, after discovering this massive, supposedly world ending crisis, what do they want? Massive investments in green (meaning wind and solar) energy, taxes on energy use (particularly in rich western countries), international regulation of energy and other environmental matters, and an end to nuclear power.

      To the rightist, the pro-agw guys look less like principled engineers trying to solve a problem than the same old leftists slinging the same old leftist issues. And so they reject it, because how amazingly convenient is it that you’ve discovered a massive problem that just happens to require your old program turned up to 11?

      I’m not saying that this thought process is conscious, it isn’t, but I think the underlying motive is “these people have been crying wolf for 50 years, I’m not giving them any more money.”

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        The “no, seriously, the world is ending, we must fix this or we all die” rhetoric would be more convincing if the left’s policy prescriptions included nuclear power, or banning third world immigration to the US (moving people from low carbon footprint nations to high carbon footprint nations).

        • cassander says:

          heck, I’d settle for not enthusiastically tearing down existing nuclear plants and dams.

          • To be fair, Hansen is pro-nuclear. But it’s pretty clearly a minority position within the movement.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @DavidFriedman:

            I would have liked to have seen Obama spend some political capital against the anti-nuclear or pro-immigration left on these issues. It’s very easy to say “yes, I’m convinced by these complicated models I’m not actually able to examine or understand” when the prescription is “my political allies get everything they’ve ever wanted in terms of supranational authority to regulate everything everyone does.”

      • So one thing can’t solve two problems? It’s not possible for a healthy diet for reduce the risk of cancer AND heart disease?

        • Randy M says:

          Not to play the analogy police again in the thread, but “healthy diet” isn’t just one thing. That’s like saying “Shouldn’t a sound environmental policy reduce air pollution and water pollution?” I mean, sure, but the actual actions that do so aren’t necessarily related (except perhaps under the authority of the same regulatory agency). And the foods you want to add or cut from your diet to reduce cancer incidence aren’t likely to be the same as those that reduce heart disease rates. Unless you happen to live in the most convenient world possible, they might even be at cross purposes, and the healthy diet with the one that reduces total mortality rate the most.

  25. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    A cultural data point: I loathe Trump, and even so, I’m getting tired of seeing attacks on him in articles that aren’t especially about politics.

    ****

    I think one of the things that’s gone wrong is people on the right deciding explicitly that pissing off the left is a legitimate major motivation. This has been very intellectually corrupting.

    • engleberg says:

      I like that the D party has house media- it’s been our governing party since the 1930s, naturally they’ve got lots of media. ABC, CBS, NBC, Public television, CNN- fine by me.

      I like that the R party has Fox. God bless. Why should Unavision hog all the blondes?

      I like that Trump has Breitbart. He’s president. One media outlet, not too much to ask.

      I don’t mind if they blow smoke about impartiality. I’m not Smoke, so I don’t love it, but I don’t mind. It helps them check which viewers are loyal to them.

      I think what’s changed is that people generally get exposed to the parallax between all the above, not to mention social media, and stopped trusting D party media. Not just distrusting the obvious spin, but distrusting which stories they want to cover.

      The French traditionally don’t buy stuff because it’s advertised- they don’t trust their media. We used to. Now we don’t so much. Newspapers lay out the ads on the page first, then fit stories around them. TV scripts, same. -but we just don’t trust them like in the sixties with only D party house media so we don’t buy their stuff.

      I don’t mind that people on the right explicitly decide that annoying their enemies is good. The left does a lot of stuff like that. Obama messed with ammunition availability for that specific purpose- he didn’t expect the Second Amendment would disappear, he just wanted his enemies mad. Worked.

    • cassander says:

      I’m in a similar boat. I was never a trump fan (I was one of the 5 people that wanted scott walker for president). The sheer hysteria of the response to trump has been pushing me towards him against my will, which, of course, I resent.

      • bean says:

        Wait. So you’re saying that SSC hosts at least 40% of the Scott Walker fans?
        (Seriously, the fact that the GOP didn’t nominate him is an indictment of the GOP, not Walker.)

        • cassander says:

          >Wait. So you’re saying that SSC hosts at least 40% of the Scott Walker fans?

          Given his primary results, that seems mathematically possible. 😛

          (Seriously, the fact that the GOP didn’t nominate him is an indictment of the GOP, not Walker.)

          I agree completely.

      • gbdub says:

        Hey, count me in for at least 6. But by the time the primaries got to me we were down to Trump and Cruz.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          My main beef with Walker was I didn’t think he’s actually done all that great a job in Wisconsin, and I was pretty sure he’d run much more weakly as a national candidate. I’m biased, because one of my best friends is from Wisconsin and has a raging hatred of Walker and would seethe against him at every opportunity.

          Then again, his dad is a professor and his mom is a public school teacher so he’s got a bit of bias himself there.

          I would have voted for Walker, or Jeb!, or Rubio, or Cruz, or anyone but Trump really, but my state didn’t really get a say – it was all but over by the time it got to Missouri, although I dutifully pulled the lever for Cruz.

          • cassander says:

            My main beef with Walker was I didn’t think he’s actually done all that great a job in Wisconsin,

            The corrupt bargain that’s been struck between the ideological left and public employee unions is one of the single biggest problems facing the country. Being so directly invested in the desires of the public employee unions means that the programs the progressives build will function poorly, because the public unions will always be far more interested in their size and freedom from accountability than achieving progressive goals. It’s a recipe for turning the US into Italy, not Scandinavia.

            Walker went after the beating heart of that alliance in its home territory and won. To me that shows that (A), he’s smart enough to realize how big a problem it is, (B) willing to risk his career to go after it, and (C) competent enough to win despite massive forces arrayed against him, which puts him way ahead of most of the competition.

            >and I was pretty sure he’d run much more weakly as a national candidate.

            My comment at the time was that he would have a very hard time winning the primary, for exactly that reason. If by some miracle he could pull it off, he’d be good enough in the general to beat Hillary, because almost anyone would be.

          • Incurian says:

            he’d be good enough in the general to beat Hillary, because almost anyone would be.

            Oh man, it’s kind of funny/tragic how literally true that is in hindsight.

          • cassander says:

            @Incurian

            The funny thing is that I think it’s very possible I was wrong. I wanted a midwesterner because (A) I didn’t want someone with a southern accent, and (B), that was the best likeliest place for republicans to pick up electoral votes. Had Walker, or some other midwesterner, been the candidate, though, it might have pushed the Clinton campaign into actually trying in the midwest instead of foolishing trying to run up the score in places like South Carolina.

          • Incurian says:

            I don’t know enough about the details of the election (because I purposely censored it from my life.. I was actually genuinely surprised and amused when I saw the news the morning after the election) but the impression I had was that she lost despite a lot of people who might otherwise vote R voted for her instead. I 100% concede I have no evidence for this, but losing to someone like Trump has got to be the result of more than some tactical errors. lol.

      • Protagoras says:

        Interesting. I’ve encountered so many discussions of how much better Minnesota has been doing under Dayton than Wisconsin has been under Walker that I’m surprised to see any Walker enthusiasm, but of course my sources are biased. I do note that Walker is not a massively popular figure in his home state. One of the things I always look for in someone who is seeking national office is how the people who actually have experience with being represented by them think of them. For example, I tended to support Bernie partly because of this; he was massively popular in Vermont, far more so than any other candidate from either party seemed to be in their respective constituencies.

        • Brad says:

          While I always knew VT was a small state when I dug into it I was surprised by just how small. At 625,000 people only Wyoming has a smaller population. It’s largest city has only 42,000 people. They are relatively poor state with a GDP per captia of $47,500k — 32 out of 50. 94.3% of the population is white, not hispanic second only to Maine.

          All of which is to say that what Vermonters are looking for may not be the same as what others are looking for.

          • bean says:

            Just about every time I’ve ever tried to do state-by-state statistics, I’ve had to throw Vermont out as an outlier. I’ll definitely agree that ‘popular in Vermont’ probably isn’t a good indicator of how things will go in the rest of the country.

        • bean says:

          He’s the only governor ever to survive a recall election. Yes, he’s very unpopular among some elements in Wisconsin. But it comes down to what the voters decide, and a majority of the voters of Wisconsin seem to like him.

        • gbdub says:

          Considering that the US is pretty divided, I considered Walker’s ability to govern effectively in spite of not being very popular a plus. It was unlikely that any plausible candidate was going to be much more popular on the national level. And he won 3 elections in a purple state – can’t be that unpopular.

          One of those elections was a recall of course, but that means mostly that he’s really unpopular among a minority of voters, and mostly because he gored their ox (but I thought it was an ox needing goring).

    • FacelessCraven says:

      “I think one of the things that’s gone wrong is people on the right deciding explicitly that pissing off the left is a legitimate major motivation.”

      Gay Pride worked. Dressing up in neon-vomit bodystockings covered in rampant day-glo phalli and dancing down main street with a mob of likeminded individuals was a huge, glorious FUCK YOU to the haters, and it worked. It worked because at the end of the day, civilization always requires consent from everyone involved. If the deal you’re getting out of civilization isn’t worth what it costs you, start ratcheting down the total level of civilization until the other side decides renegotiating is worth it. This is how the left won, over, and over and over again for much longer than I’ve been alive, and in most ways I think they were right to do so and the result was a net-win for everyone.

      If I can’t make a reasoned argument for why this is a bad thing when my enemies do it, how am I supposed to view it as bad when my kin do it?

      “This has been very intellectually corrupting.”

      I guess I’d say I’m pretty skeptical that the intellectual consensus ever held much of value. I don’t think the media has gotten particularly worse, I think we just have the internet to check on them now, and people aren’t nearly so docile as they once were. I don’t think Academia has gotten particularly worse; it was always awful, but now our eyes are opened.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Somebody else mentioned Dan Rather, who pushed a story about Bush based on forged documents shortly before the election in hopes of swinging it. He was found out because of the internet.

        It’s not like he was some minor journalist at that point. How many similar stories were pushed prior to the internet that we simply didn’t catch?

      • Iain says:

        @FacelessCraven:

        This is how the left won, over, and over and over again for much longer than I’ve been alive, and in most ways I think they were right to do so and the result was a net-win for everyone.
        If I can’t make a reasoned argument for why this is a bad thing when my enemies do it, how am I supposed to view it as bad when my kin do it?

        This is interesting. Can you give more examples of the left doing this, beyond Pride parades? And can you give some examples of the kinds of things that you see as equivalent from the right?

        Much of the justification for Pride, I think, is inwardly directed — the LGBT community sending itself the message that there are other people out there prepared to stand beside them and flip the bird to the haters. (Less “you can’t tell me what to do!”; more “they can’t tell us what to do!”) To some extent, yes, Pride was deliberately provocative (less so these days) — but I think pretty much all the participants would argue that day-glo phalli down Main Street were, if not an active social good, at the very least morally neutral. The stakes are pretty low. Moreover, it was transgression in a good cause (and the bit I quoted above seems to imply that you might agree with this?)

        That seems comparable to, say, open carry rallies. I have a hard time believing that it’s comparable to supporting Donald Trump. That’s not to say that there can’t be other reasons for supporting Trump. Maybe you think he’d be a good president; maybe you think Clinton would be an even worse president. But it certainly seems like there are a number of people out there for whom questions of basic competence took a back seat to the desire to say FUCK YOU to the left — to “ratchet down the total level of civilization until the other side decides renegotiating is worth it”. In some sense, supporting Trump and Pride parades are both moves in a giant game of chicken with the other side of the political spectrum. Is that a fair summary of your stance?

        Because if so: man, the difference in stakes between “too many penises and not enough pants in this parade” and “handing the keys to the most powerful country in the world to a guy you admit is a bad choice” is pretty stark.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Iain – The entire culture war from the 50s to 2008, and specifically the tactic of eliciting shock or “Pushing the Envelope” that served as a crucial political tactic for free speech fights over censorship of obscenity, violent content and political expression, Feminism, Black interests/civil rights, the drug war, and New Atheism under Dawkins come readily to mind. I’m sure I’m missing more, but that should do for a start.

          The culture war as a whole is called a war because of this dynamic. The participants trade off social cohesion for political progress, thus making everything a little worse off, but hopefully getting some action where it’s needed.

          “And can you give some examples of the kinds of things that you see as equivalent from the right?”

          Slinging Pepes, gleefully supporting those who promote hate-facts in public, subverting, confounding and if possible destroying progressive institutions, fighting Black Bloc in the streets. The cultural counteroffensive since 2013 or so. As you note, open carry. Again, tactics where confrontation is prioritized over conciliation.

          ” I have a hard time believing that it’s comparable to supporting Donald Trump.”

          It’s not sufficient by itself, no. But Trump support does work massively well on this axis, in addition to its other virtues.

          “That’s not to say that there can’t be other reasons for supporting Trump. Maybe you think he’d be a good president; maybe you think Clinton would be an even worse president.”

          I did, in fact, think that Hillary or any of the other Republican front-runners would be worse, because I despise the reigning consensus they all seem part of. I would have been happy with a Bernie victory. I would have accepted a Clinton victory. But the Republican party deserved Trump.

          “But it certainly seems like there are a number of people out there for whom questions of basic competence took a back seat to the desire to say FUCK YOU to the left — to “ratchet down the total level of civilization until the other side decides renegotiating is worth it”.”

          I would disagree that competence was even on offer. The consensus we’ve been operating off for the last three decades straight-up does not work, and it is slowly killing our country. Ending that consensus is the priority, not least because of the number of people it has murdered abroad. Deplorable Pride is a small subset of the general opposition to that consensus, and so it is a convinient tactic to pretend that Deplorable Pride is all there is.

          • Iain says:

            The consensus we’ve been operating off for the last three decades straight-up does not work, and it is slowly killing our country. Ending that consensus is the priority, not least because of the number of people it has murdered abroad.

            Is it fair to say, then, that part of the reason you liked Trump was his insistence on not getting involved in (for example) Syria? (If so, I would broadly agree, although in my case it would be closer to “the only reason”.)

            How did you feel about his complete 180 on Syria? I wasn’t personally surprised, because he’d said enough ridiculous pro-intervention stuff (like going back for Iraqi oil) to raise doubts about the depth of his anti-interventionist convictions, but you’ve said that you are generally satisfied with how Trump’s presidency has gone so far, which seems difficult to reconcile with the part I quoted above. Nothing about Trump’s foreign policy seems like a significant break from the existing consensus, except to the extent that the Trump administration in general seems to be rather disorganized.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Iain – “Is it fair to say, then, that part of the reason you liked Trump was his insistence on not getting involved in (for example) Syria?”

            Yup.

            “How did you feel about his complete 180 on Syria?”

            I have not been following the news closely for the last two weeks. Last I heard, he shot a bunch of cruise missiles at an airstrip allegedly used in a nerve-gas attack by the regime. On the one hand, I would definately prefer him not to do that. On the other hand, cruise missile strikes are irrelevant. They didn’t kill any appreciable number of Syrians, and killed no Russians. Russia made angry noises at Trump, but also made angry noises at Assad. My assessment the next morning was that Trump had done the next-best thing to nothing, and had relieved a fair amount of political pressure from the Elites in the bargain, which seemed like a reasonably good deal. I predicted there would be a certain amount of jawing, but no escalation of involvement in the conflict on our part. Has something happened recently to prove that wrong?

            He then started making angry noises at North Korea, which I was pretty worried about due to John Schilling’s excellent posts on the politics and strategy involved, but NPR yesterday was talking about how the Norks are backing off their nuclear testing, and how they’re taking trump more seriously than Obama(?).

            So basically, I don’t know what the 180 is. My prior is that we’d already be ass-deep in Syria by now under Clinton, and I don’t really see much point in paying attention to what Trump says day to day. I’ll judge him by what he actually does, which currently is not nothing, but not much.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            @Iain

            Not the OP, but I did consider Trump’s campaign stance on Syria to be a point in his favor.

            I wasn’t surprised either when intervention happened, just disappointed. The man is a Populist and my bet is the Deep State got its way on this one.

          • Iain says:

            Here’s a reasonable summary of the ways in which Trump’s action in Syria is a shift from his previous stance. I’m not aware of any subsequent escalation in Syria, fortunately. I think it’s a pretty clear sign, though, that any commitment Trump might have to non-intervention is paper-thin. (I also find the reports that the White House envisioned the bombing as part of “Leadership Week” concerning; that’s not the kind of factor that I want to see playing into major foreign policy decisions.)

            (In terms of how this stacks up to the alternatives, I think Clinton might have done more, but Obama would probably have done less. Not a huge departure from the status quo, in other words.)

            I’m not sure what’s going on in North Korea. (If John Schilling wants to weigh in, I would be very interested to hear what he has to say.) I don’t know what you were hearing on NPR, but this Guardian article from yesterday (lede: “North Korea has vowed to accelerate its nuclear weapons programme to ‘maximum pace’ and test a nuclear device ‘at any time’ in response to Donald Trump’s aggressive stance towards the regime”) certainly doesn’t look like North Korea backing off. This is one area where it seems like Trump’s unpredictable approach is just adding uncertainty to the situation, in a way that I don’t think Clinton would have.

            I’m willing to score Syria as a win for Trump (relative to Clinton), if you give me North Korea as a win for Clinton relative to Trump. If you think Trump is unpredictable, rather than erratic, than I can envision a case for him as better on foreign policy, so far, than a hypothetical Clinton. But I don’t see how you can build a case that he represents a significant break from the status quo on foreign policy.

            Is there anything he’s done, foreign-policy-wise, that you think represents an improvement over the Obama administration?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Iain – “In terms of how this stacks up to the alternatives, I think Clinton might have done more, but Obama would probably have done less. Not a huge departure from the status quo, in other words.”

            My understanding of the status quo is that we constantly meddle in other countries’ affairs, and once a decade or two we actually commit US troops and really screw things up in a serious way. Obama was a massive improvement over Bush, but he pushed the encirclement strategy versus Russia, and he let Hillary try her hand at regime change in Libya, both of which were really bad ideas that got a lot of people killed.

            It seems to me that Trump is still well below that line in terms of meddling, and I have a fair amount of hope that he will remain below it. I will grant you that this North Korea brew-up is unexpected and unwelcome.

            If you think he’s roughly the norm for the status quo, where do you see him intervening globally during his term? I think the middle east is very unlikely, and he’s less interventionist than Obama was in eastern Europe. Do you think intervention against Korea is likely? if not there, where?

          • Iain says:

            I worry that something could happen in Korea. (So does China, apparently.) I do not share your optimism about intervention in the Middle East being “very unlikely”. It’s not like he’s kept his hands off the Middle East so far: consider the special forces strike in Yemen, for example. Beyond that, I don’t know what the future holds, but I don’t see any reason to believe that Trump will be less likely to intervene in any conflicts that do arise in the next four years than your average American president.

            In general, I don’t think Trump has any deeply held positions on foreign policy, and he is likely to be easily swayed by the people around him. The people who have Trump’s ear on the matter are pretty much all establishment figures. Trump is delegating more decision-making to the Pentagon, which is not exactly a hotbed of anti-meddling sentiment.

            Trump has, of course, meddled less than Obama. On the other hand, Obama served two full terms, and Trump is just a hundred days in. Trump’s only been in office about 3% as long as Obama; has he meddled less than 3% as much? The fairest point of comparison seems to be Syria, in which they were each faced with a case where Assad used chemical weapons, but only one of them succumbed to the temptation to launch ze missiles.

            In short: I’m a lot more pessimistic than you seem to be about how seriously Trump meant the things he said about not getting involved in the problems of the world. I suppose we will have to wait and see. I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

          • The Nybbler says:

            How much of this North Korea thing is Kim testing Trump the way the Kims have tested other US Presidents? It seems to me we’ve had at least one North Korea crisis per administration.

      • Vorkon says:

        I dunno if I’d say that pride parades and whatnot “worked.”

        I mean, sure, it’s true that homosexuality is generally accepted in a way that it never used to be, but would you really say that things like pride parades CAUSED this? It’s hard to say exactly what led to this societal shift, but if anything I’d say it has a lot more to do with things like popular celebrities coming out as gay, and gay characters being added to popular fiction, and other, more subdued, less in-your-face methods, than people in day-glo costumes marching around saying “fuck you” to anyone.

        Yes, it’s true that there were some people who seemed to accept “pissing off the right” as a terminal value, but the only thing they actually accomplished was making some people on the right more likely to accept “pissing off the left” as a terminal value. It was other people who made all the significant accomplishments. Now, the people making the accomplishments might very well have turned a blind eye to the people saying “fuck you” to the right, but even so, I think it would be more fair to say that they only proved that they could get away with pissing off the right, not that it “worked,” per se. Sure, you could emulate them, but what would you accomplish, outside of catharsis?

      • tscharf says:

        Gay rights were established through the court system, not the voting booth. I’m really ambivalent on the subject, but it should be noted that almost every time gay marriage was voted on, it lost, even in California. Maybe it would be different today, but I’m not making the direct leap from gay rights parades to Supreme Court rulings. One could argue there is a fuzzy indirect path.

        • Tracy W says:

          In the UK and NZ gay marriage was voted on by Parliament.

          • Iain says:

            Canada, too.

            It’s worth noting that public support for same-sex marriage in the US crossed the 50% mark in 2012, three years before Obergefell. Compare this to interracial marriage, which didn’t get majority support until 1997, 30 years after Loving v. Virginia.

          • Eltargrim says:

            @Iain: for the vast majority of Canada, measured by either population or habitable territory (sorry Nunavut), same-sex marriage was first enacted by court rulings. Eventually the federal government stepped in and standardized things, but between 1999 and 2005 same-sex marriage rights were entirely due to provincial courts ruling existing laws unconstitutional.

            Not to say people were denied their chances to weigh in. The issue was debated (or motioned) in parliament both before and after the 2005 legislation, and the current state of affairs is decidedly democratic, but the legislation was absolutely informed by the courts.

          • Iain says:

            Sure. But the gap between the first province to legally recognize same-sex marriage (Ontario in 2003) and the federal recognition in 2005 was only two years. Support in Parliament and victories in the courts happened in parallel. tscharf’s narrative, in which gay rights were established through the court system despite losses in the voting booth, is not a good description of how things went in Canada. While it is true that many of the initial steps were done in court, there was no meaningful gap between the courts and Parliament.

    • liskantope says:

      My pet theory on this is that the Left is the side which tends to champion sensitivity (both in the sense of defending one’s own difficulties in coping with adversity and advocating sensitivity to others’ difficulties), and that this is a major attraction for bullying behavior. The Left has assumed the role of weaklings who repeatedly point to things that push their buttons, so the Right has assumed the role of bullies who see the opportunity to take advantage of this by pushing those buttons.

      • The Nybbler says:

        The weakling act is a game of expanding their noses to take up all the space once available for their opponents’ arms. The so-called weaklings certainly do more than their share of bullying.

        • liskantope says:

          Maybe a lot of things the Left does nowadays amounts to bullying in effect. But speaking from my experience of being close to many young left-wing people, they genuinely do feel weak (or sympathetic to others they view as oppressed), and their expanding their noses doesn’t have the same kind of deliberate malice behind it as the arm-swinging of their opponents. Of course there’s a fair amount of underdog-mentality on the Right as well, but I don’t get the impression that as many right-wingers feel powerless on such a profound level.

          (I used “weakling” in my post above against my better judgment, after being unable to come up with a word that better conveyed what I wanted to get across, but I guess I’m doubling down on it now.)

          • Evan Þ says:

            n=1 so far, but I’m closer to Right than Left, and I feel powerless before the Left’s grip on the media, corporate HR departments, the majority of the Internet including most of my favorite sites, the local government in my city and state, and the federal bureaucracy.

          • suntzuanime says:

            The problem with focusing so much on “deliberate malice” instead of looking at patterns of behavior is that you encourage hypocrisy and deception. The left justifies its violent mobs by claiming that they are merely defending themselves against the “violence” of people they disagree with being permitted to speak. It doesn’t seem to me that this makes this behavior, which in practice intimidates public intellectuals like Scott into falling in line, any less of coordinated bullying.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Scratch the surface, find the malice. Point out some sort of adversity a member of their non-favored groups has suffered, and find out what they really think. Point out ways their desired policies harm members of their non-favored groups, and watch the “good, they deserve it” responses. It’s an act, even if some of the time they believe it themselves.

          • gbdub says:

            The other day someone shared a Vox article on Facebook about the collapse of the Obamacare market in Tennessee. One of the comments was “good, those racist fucks deserve it for voting for Trump”, and at least half the rest were of a similar theme, if less vulgar.

          • herbert herberson says:

            Boy, it’s too bad for we libs that you can’t find mean spirited right-wing comments on online articles.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @herbert herberson

            Tu quoque. The existence of malicious right-wingers does not demonstrate the benevolence of the other side.

          • herbert herberson says:

            No, but it does suggest that “being a jerk online” is a universal problem, and that leftist online jerks don’t offer any particularly unique or useful insights into leftist philosophies or personalities.

          • gbdub says:

            My post was in response to a claim that there is not malice on the left. I make no counter-claim that there is not malice on the right (there is).

            I do think it’s worth thinking about in response to the idea that “maybe bias is okay if we’re correct” – there is a significant group of people (on both sides) who may be right, but are right for terrible reasons.

          • liskantope says:

            @gbdub: I was talking about the behavior of trying to push one’s opponent’s buttons to emotionally devastate them as a form of bullying. I don’t consider the angry comment you quoted to be at all the same thing. I make no claim that there’s no malice on the Left (and of course I don’t claim that there’s no deliberate bullying on the Left either — after all, the Left comprises millions of people — but I claim that it’s a less prevalent approach than it is among those on the Right).

          • liskantope says:

            @The Nybbler: The kind of behavior you point to mostly doesn’t match up to my experience of left-wing people, especially after throwing out the two or three (out of many dozens) of them that I consider to be bullies about their views. I’ve long suspected this has something to do with the vast majority of my exposure being to people I’ve known IRL (and subsequently on Facebook) as opposed to in a purely online context.

            This is going to sound stupid, and perhaps I am missing obvious examples, but could you give me an instance of “adversity a member of their non-favored groups has suffered” where the typical liberal response is something nastier than “that’s bad but doesn’t trump the suffering of this other more oppressed group”, or an instance of “good, they deserve it” responses that go beyond “it’s for the best that privileged people to feel discomforted by our words” and the like? Because I can’t think of many instances of this excluding some nasty people who comment online.

            It seems to me that it’s harder for liberals to wound conservatives in this way even to the extent that they want to, because the Right dabbles so much less in making its constituents look weak and vulnerable and oppressed by its enemies’ words and behavior. One of the only avenues through which I do see the Right using this tactic is the whole “liberal media is ganging up on us” thing. And it looks to me like the Left generally responds by defensively denying that the media is biased rather than snickering “Hahaha well if its liberal bias bothers you so much let’s go out of our way to smear another conservative in the media and see how you like it!”

          • The Nybbler says:

            @liskantope

            where the typical liberal response is something nastier than “that’s bad but doesn’t trump the suffering of this other more oppressed group”, or an instance of “good, they deserve it” responses that go beyond “it’s for the best that privileged people to feel discomforted by our words” and the like?

            You don’t think dismissing the suffering of “privileged” groups and supporting their harm counts if they put it that way? I sure think it does. They also like to talk about “male tears” and “white fragility”.

            The SSC-canonical example is probably the treatment given to Scott Aaronson, as described in _Untitled_.

          • liskantope says:

            @The Nybbler: I grant that some of the response to Scott Aaronson’s famous comment was callous and nasty (e.g. Amanda Marcotte’s, which I haven’t actually read — interestingly nobody I knew endorsed her response though). And as I’ve acknowledged, there’s a lot of nastiness out there on the internet coming from all sides which I’ve stayed largely unexposed to. But to my reading, the somewhat more mainstream responses (e.g. Arthur Chu’s) expressed sympathy for Aaronson’s difficulties but asserted that he was wrong to point towards feminism as the cause. Which brings me to what I consider to be a crucial point about the Aaronson debacle that a lot of people don’t seem to acknowledge: Aaronson was attacked by feminists primarily because he criticized feminism. Mind you, I’m broadly on Aaronson’s side of that discussion; I had a lot of sympathy with his points and think he phrased the feminism-critical parts pretty fairly. But it’s not surprising that a lot of feminists felt under attack and wanted to fight back. For the most part, this didn’t look to me like feminists pouncing on the opportunity to ridicule someone of a more privileged class for being in pain, as our host and some others have apparently perceived it. And Aaronson isn’t on the Right anyway; he just happened to be expressing a grievance for which unqualified sympathy is inconvenient to the goal of addressing certain left-wing grievances.

            I believe a somewhat similar thing is the case with “male tears” comments and so on, which are reactionary: some men are complaining about a form of feminist activism that adversely affects them, so feminists are pushing back, albeit in a nasty way although IME “lol male tears!” isn’t very mainstream. “Male fragility” is more mainstream, but I understand it to be more of a rhetorical point than a mere insult.

            I know I’m being a bit persistent here, but I consider this an important fundamental difference in points of view which I’ve noticed here before and was hoping to hash out sooner or later. It’s crucial to come to an understanding if we want to be effective in fighting back against bad SJ ideology. (Sorry if some of the sentences above are weirdly structured; it’s the end of my day and I’m exhausted.)

          • The Nybbler says:

            Feminists do things that cause harm to men. Men complain. Feminists respond nastily. That to me is evidence of malice.

            Men complain about things which affect them (as men) negatively but are not due to feminism; feminists respond nastily, either dismissing claims as unimportant compared to the suffering of women or using “male tears”. Evidence of malice.

            Feminists expand what feminism covers, e.g. by claiming everything’s a microaggression towards them, or by claiming trivia such as having Star Wars items at their desk is objectionable to women and must be removed. Men complain about the new limits on their actions… feminists accuse them of misogyny, being “unwelcoming” to women, and demand they submit. Evidence of malice.

            So yes, sometimes when they draw their lines into what other people considered open territory, the other people will cross those lines on purpose to piss them off. But drawing the line was a hostile act in the first place.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I think one of the things that’s gone wrong is people on the right deciding explicitly that pissing off the left is a legitimate major motivation.

      How do you feel about Black Lives Matter riots or protesters blocking freeways?

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I think they’re more oriented towards getting policy changes. There’s a difference between pissing people off as a means and having it as an end.

        • Aapje says:

          When BLM met with Clinton before the election they didn’t even have demands for her. It seemed a lot more ‘rage’ than ‘policy changes’ and Hillary called them out for that.

          • liskantope says:

            As far as I know, the BLM movement hasn’t advocated much in the way of policy changes except a vague “cops should stop targeting black people”. (I did read somewhere that one of their demands was for reparations, but I doubt that one stuck.) But BLM protesters wanting to express resentment and indignation is not the same thing as directly wanting to bully their opponents.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            BLM ten proposals: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision

            It came out August 2015, and looks unchanged since then. I’m highly suspicious of BLM, but these proposals are worthy of discussion.

          • Aapje says:

            @Edward

            In their page about the problem, there is a very conspicuous absence of any mention of black people being victims more often.

            The latter is a core claim of BLM, from what I have seen. So I have trouble believing that the site reflects the demands of the average BLM protester or leader.

            Don’t get me wrong: I applaud their attempt to build bridges. Even Slate became reasonable when discussing it, by pointing out that many police departments already see these things as ideals to work towards. A recognition that many/most police departments want to do the right thing, but that it is hard for various reasons, would result in a far more reasonable and productive debate than ‘the police is racist.’

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Edward Scizorhands and Aapje

            You’re both making a common mistake, which is to consider “BLM” as one entity. There’s not exactly centralized leadership, is there? A lot of left-wing groups nowadays seem to function in this way – sort of a common brand, but individual groups using the brand, with the result that you get wide variance of positions – some groups are pragmatic and earnestly focused on reducing the way in which police officers shoot people (especially black people) with relative impunity. Other groups are well-heeled professional or semi-pro campus activist types whose revealed priorities are completely different. Still other groups are earnest but wildly impractical. So, those who want to say “this movement is good” can focus on the first group, and those who want to say “this movement is bad” can focus on the second or third groups. Try thinking of it as “BLM are” instead of “BLM is”.

          • Aapje says:

            @dndnrsn

            I hedged:

            demands of the average BLM protester or leader.

            I’m not claiming that this fraction that Edwards pushed forward doesn’t exist, he gave evidence that they do. My impression is that they are sufficiently non-central that those demands are not seen as ‘the’ BLM demands.

            When it comes to politics, it matters a lot who politicians think speaks for a movement, as the politicians will pander to those people.

            This is similar to my criticism of feminism, BTW. I’m not claiming that sensible feminists don’t exist, I’m claiming that they are too non-central and/or don’t speak out against the bad feminists enough for those in power not to listen to the bad ones. So therefor I condemn the majority of the movement and favor the simplistic meme that ‘feminism is wrong’ in contexts where nuance doesn’t work.

            The same is true for BLM, although I’m a little less firm in my conviction there.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          If the purpose of trolling the leftist media is to expose them as sloppy, partisan outrage-mongers instead of neutral professionals, isn’t that for a purpose? To change the political discourse?

          That’s the main thrust, anyway. I’m sure some trolls are just along for the lulz, but similarly some BLM rioters have no idea why they’re rioting and just want to loot free TVs.

  26. Douglas Knight says:

    There is a big problem with this analogy.
    Voat has user-generated content and Fox does not. If Voat is founded by witches, they drive out the non-witches. But if Fox is founded to attract the far right, why should it be far right? Why, as Hotelling asked, should it be any farther right than its competitors? People on the right have nowhere else to go. Of course, there is another competitor: non-political TV. Maybe Fox is the way it is to attract the disengaged. But then why is it right-wing? (or is it?)

  27. We Have Made It This Far says:

    I’ve got an idea. Liberals need to agree to peg their belief in GMO’s cause cancer to exactly match the degree of conservative belief in climate change being a hoax. Newspapers and universities can decry both views equally, while avoiding bias. It was seem the issue here is that liberals don’t believe in enough things that are factually false.

    • Murphy says:

      I’m curious how party aligned the GMO things are.

      Personally I’m pretty strongly on the liberal side but work in biology and studied enough genetics to find most of the anti GMO crap ridiculous.

      The people I find myself arguing against seem pretty evenly split between “thou shalt not meddle with life” religious types and wheat-free-nut-free-organic-vegan mummies with a smattering of salt of the earth type country bumpkins shouting about “fishy potatoes”

      Looking up the numbers republicans are apparently split 50/50 on GMO’s while indies are closer to 40/60 and democrats are about 37/63 so it’s hard to say that the republicans are strongly aligned with GMO’s

      • neaanopri says:

        Speaking within the left, I perceive pro-GMO and anti-GMO factions. They tend to be the “hippies” and the “scientists/liberal elites”. I’m more on the “scientists” side of this.

        I find a lot of the critiques of GMO ridiculous, and I’m generally pretty pro-market solutions in some cases but not others. But I’m stuck with the crazy hippies in the Democratic coalition, which isn’t terrible but isn’t great either.

      • We Have Made It This Far says:

        I couldn’t really think of a liberal equivalent of creationism or climate change denial that is comparable in degree of expert consensus, prevalence, and partisan split (though even on those issues the split isn’t 0-100 either).

        The point I was trying to make is that by a side unilaterally professing a belief in things that are untrue they can force arbiters of knowledge to either give credence to false beliefs (both sides journalism), lean in the opposite direction on more contentious matters (liberal but pro-business and pro-war), or find oneself becoming a partisan organization as the political center shifts (NPR?).

  28. Squirrel of Doom says:

    Maybe you need to give the new right wing media some time. Did the current media institutions reach their skill level and status in their first year or decade?

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I really, really want to see Alex Jones with a White House press pass.

  29. hoghoghoghoghog says:

    Partway solution is for supposedly-neutral-but-actually-left-wing media to hold their lefties to higher standards, not to hold their righties to lower standards. Left-wing ire at the NYTimes for hiring crappy conservative opinion writers (cough David Brooks cough cough) is totally justified; they suck and you don’t need to be a witch-hunter to see that. But Gail Collins isn’t significantly better.

    Academia will never not be like this. Academics are largely paid by the government and expect to do most of the good they do through externalities; everything about their lives appears to confirm the tenets of center-leftism. Professional standards can enforce impartiality in fields that have a direct bearing on politics, but the chemistry department is always going to be pretty left wing, and it is always going to bleed over into uncomfortable personal interactions.

    • Tibor says:

      What is interesting that the more STEM you go in academia, the more right-wing (even if liberal right-wing) you get. The more you go to the “soft fields” the more left-wing you get (until very far left). And another interesting thing is that this has not always been the case. 100 years ago, most STEM types were very much in favour of communism (as well as eugenics) and it took people like Hayek (ok, that’s less than 100 years ago), who was pretty much a social scientist, to argue against that.

  30. Elias says:

    I think Jordan Peterson’s perspective on personality traits and political temperament can be useful in explaining why institutions tend towards the political left.

    Unless explicitly stated as being right-wing, your average institution will tend towards the left as a result of how institutions are structured. In pretty much any institution the top of the governing hierarchy will be occupied by the most entrepreneurial people with the most creativity. Entrepreneurship and creativity characterizes personality trait ‘Openness to experience’. As it happens, openness is a good proxy for political liberalism. On the other hand, the people who keep the institutions running, like administrators, accountants, engineers etc, generally have strong traits of Conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is a good proxy for political conservatism. In other words, what follows is that conservatives keep the machinery running, but liberals occupy the space behind the steering wheel and call the shots.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxGPe1jD-qY here’s Jordan Peterson talking about the ties between Openness>Creativity>Liberalism, and Conscientiousness>Dutifulness>Conservatism. Great talk.

  31. Sniffnoy says:

    [Original comment got filtered due to use of a banned word, oops.]

    I’m not sure the “liberal/conservative” distinction here is sufficient. I’m not sure how much “left vs. right” really captures much meaningful and posts based around this distinction make me a bit uneasy. Sure there’s something real going on here, but I think you need to do more dissection to get at it.

    In particular:
    1. It seems to me there’s a significant difference between most of these “neutral gatekeeper institutions” and, say, Fox News. One is trying to be neutral but failing because, y’know, staffed by humans. (Although I’m not sure the bias is always exactly liberal — the newspapers seem to have this pro-war bias, for instance.) They are trying to uphold an order where facts are reported correctly and decisions are then based on them (eyes → brain → hands); they fail because, e.g.,
    A. People’s brains are working against them here
    B. Knowing that you should be doing this, does not suffice to actually do this; you can’t just go, “OK, I’m going to be neutral now” and have that suffice
    C. Large groups of people especially tend to fall into terrible forms of thinking unless they’ve made a particular effort to filter these out
    Etc.
    That’s not what Fox News is trying to do! Fox News isn’t doing a worse job at correctly reporting things; it’s not trying to correctly report things. It’s trying to achieve a particular result in the world by altering what information people hear about (a perversion of the decision making process). Now, granted, this is essentially the same perversion of the decision-making process that occurs in the “neutral gatekeeper institutions”, because that’s what people do without measures to prevent them from doing so; but in the one case it’s an unintentional failure mode, and in the other case it’s deliberate. Fox isn’t trying to free people from liberal bias by improving their thinking. That is something you could try to do, and it seems like some of the organizations above are trying to do that. But that’s not what the major ones people have heard of are doing, or at the very least that’s not what Fox is doing. I don’t think the reasons for Fox’s existence have anything to do with escaping biased institutions to better approach truth (like, say, Heterodox Academy). I don’t think the liberally-biased media caused Fox in the sense that conservatives created it as an escape; I think it only “caused” Fox in the sense that if the media weren’t liberally biased, Fox wouldn’t have had any cover in its attempt to claim neutrality or at least not-worseness.

    Meanwhile I’d say there are “left-wing” people who resemble a mirror image of Fox and co.; but they’re not liberals, they’re leftists and SJers[1], people who scorn the whole idea of truth, who believe speech is not for informing people but for getting them to do what you want. It’s not a perfect mirror for several reasons — for one thing, unlike the leftists, Fox isn’t so foolish as to openly announce their intent to deceive — but it’s there. And, as I’ve written before, they essentially recruit liberals by making it look like their ideology is just an extension of liberalism — not everyone has such clear beliefs and so among “left-wingers” the line can certainly be a bit blurry — and then use their messed-up norms of discourse to essentially trap them. Politicizing things, and then insisting that your attempting your attempt at neutrality is the real politicization, is exactly their MO.

    It’s a bit unclear how Trump fits into all this. American conservatives are notionally liberals of a sort, believing in the same basic Englightenment principles the country was notionally founded on. Which is not to say most people in the country have ever actually believed in that sort of thing — see e.g. the outraged reaction the “no religious test” clause of the constitution got, and that straing of thought is still quite alive and well today if not in that form — but it somehow sort of worked anyway. Trump though truly is illiberal and (like the leftists) doesn’t believe in any of that. (Although unlike the leftists, Trump mostly just doesn’t care about such things, rather than being actively opposed.) I don’t think we should be putting anti-Trump messages in graduation speeches, because that’s stupid, but it’s not hard to imagine an alternate universe in which it makes sense, one in which Trump were more competent at seizing power and undermining freedom. Trump isn’t just someone we have an object-level disagreement with; he’s someone who’d be a meta-level threat were he not so shiftless. As it is, antagonizing Trump supporters is probably just stupid. But I worry that this post conflates “conservatives” and “Trump supporters” — there’s a reason so many defected from Trump. (And one can say the same thing about conflating “conservatives” with “Fox News conservatives”.) In particular I think that “conservative” in the sense of “a conservative flavor of the liberal ideology that Americans notionally hold” has to be distinguished from actual straight-up illiberal conservatives who do things like acting like the United States is supposed to be a theocracy (and who, unlike the “Death Eaters” and similar groups, don’t just debate like liberals regardless). (I guess the theocracy flavor isn’t really “in” at the moment, but that’s just an example.)

    I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I just think the lack of finer distinction here, as in other posts, creates a misleading picture.

    [1]Not all leftists, not all SJers. Sorry about the smear, but hopefully you recognize which group I’m trying to point out.

    • Tracy W says:

      As a non-American, out of interest, how do you know what Fox News’s intentions were/are? Do they say so on their website?

    • reasoned argumentation says:

      Now, granted, this is essentially the same perversion of the decision-making process that occurs in the “neutral gatekeeper institutions”, because that’s what people do without measures to prevent them from doing so; but in the one case it’s an unintentional failure mode,

      It’s absolutely not an “unintentional failure mode” – it’s fully intentional. From a former NY Times reporter of a dozen years:

      http://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-finds-time-for-soul-searching-1201852490/

      For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”

      It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

      The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

      The editors declare something news and send the reporters out to write pieces that fit the pre-determined story … and the NY Times is actually the best left-wing news-ish organization around!

      • oiscarey says:

        That’s a really good find, thanks for that, I had no idea.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        The L.A. Times is more random. The N.Y. Times feels like it has a duty to uphold the worldview of important people. The NYT reporters, who are top people, often try to slip in subversive information into their articles, but it usually gets stuck down toward the bottom.

        In general, NYT readers are extremely resilient to having their prejudices disturbed. For example, genetics reporter Nicholas Wade spent a dozen years explaining that the Race-Doesn’t-Exist Myth was a myth, but almost nobody reading the NYT noticed until he published a book on the subject in 2014.

      • Sniffnoy says:

        Wow, huh, I had no idea. Thanks. So the NYT is really not trying for objectivity. Oh my. That’s… scary. (Although, as Steve says, I think the bias is more “worldview of important people” rather than liberal; these often coincide but not always, e.g. as regards war, as I mentioned.)

    • Randy M says:

      That’s not what Fox News is trying to do! Fox News isn’t doing a worse job at correctly reporting things; it’s not trying to correctly report things. It’s trying to achieve a particular result in the world by altering what information people hear about (a perversion of the decision making process). Now, granted, this is essentially the same perversion of the decision-making process that occurs in the “neutral gatekeeper institutions”, because that’s what people do without measures to prevent them from doing so; but in the one case it’s an unintentional failure mode, and in the other case it’s deliberate

      I don’t think that non-Fox journalists strive for objectivity either. I think a decently large portion liberal journalists go into journalism to improve the world rather than simply report the truth. If you tautologically call all such people illiberal left/sjw, fine, but I don’t think you’ve shown that this isn’t a significant portion of ostensibly mainstream news reporting.

      • Sniffnoy says:

        Not making the tautological claim. I was making the “they do strive for objectivity” claim which might have just been, well, wrong.

    • liskantope says:

      Possibly relevant to the discussion on Fox vs. mainstream media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYbtUztVctI (relevant part starts at 4:30).

  32. dspeyer says:

    > CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative

    Is it possible to say this in kadhamic?

    I’m skeptical that “liberal”, “conservative” and “neutral” are meaningful enough concepts to assign this sentence a truth value. You could try to talk about ideologically-driven deviation from truth, but most of the bias isn’t in the form of direct lies: it’s spin, connotation, or choice of what to cover.

  33. Tekhno says:

    Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”.

    This can give the impression that leftism is some natural default, but historically speaking, there was no leftism at all – implicit or explicit – for most of human history. Conquest’s law is a product of modernity and acceleration.

    I don’t think there’s anything that can stop the asymmetry, or the squashing of conservatism into ever smaller, ever crazier spaces. Being a right winger, or more accurately, a conservative is an utterly futile waste of effort. It’s a doomed enterprise.

    Take the 50+ genders issue, for example: for thousands upon thousands of years, these genders couldn’t be expressed culturally, because a non-wealthy society had no time for reproductively dysfunctional things that would require poor farmers to remember and respect all of those pronouns. Now, it’s suddenly a thing, because it can be, and it can’t be rolled back either, not in any way that wouldn’t be temporary, because technology is the bane of social conservatism. Transhumanism is next, and it’s in a sense, the final cultural revolution. It will physically deconstruct the human species as it exists, and then forget gender, you’ll have spider-people and clones born from test tubes, and robot-people who transform into cars etc. What can conservatives do then? Regular Fox news watching NASCAR lovin’ conservatives will become like the Amish.

    It’s not going to be a smooth ride on the way there. As conservatism gets compressed into its ideological ghettos, the pressure is going to build up, and partisanship increases as we’ve seen. Unencumbered by conservatives, the “neutral places” accelerate into officialized pseudo-communism, and the conservatives accelerate into reaction. This is what happened in the first half of the 20th Century after the first World War, and it looks like that’s what’s happening now, with the greater and greater polarization leading to greater and greater support for extreme ideologies; communism on the left, and nazism on the right. Eventually, this will explode in violence as it did before, the left will most likely win WW3, and even if it doesn’t, any right wing dictatorships going forwards will be decayed by technological progress into leftism anyway.

    There may be periodic “crises of conservatism” that result in polarization and a collapse into a violent and doomed reaction, removing all of that resistance, allowing us to move forwards again, until one day soon, there’s nothing left to be conservative about.

    I wonder if the only moral thing conservatives can do at this point is just give up and avoid risking millions of lives. If history really does swim left, getting leftists to be more accomodating isn’t as important as deconverting conservatives. Traditional morality is going to be completely meaningless to the machines that humans will become, and it doesn’t seem like we have centuries left before that is where we are at. A species of robotic humanity 2.0 that reproduces with 3D printers has no concern for abortion, gender or sexuality. This humanity that can change its form at will isn’t going to be concerned about race or culture. This humanity that can survive and thrive in space will not need traditional conceptions of the state or economics.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      “Take the 50+ genders issue, for example: for thousands upon thousands of years, these genders couldn’t be expressed culturally, because a non-wealthy society had no time for reproductively dysfunctional things that would require poor farmers to remember and respect all of those pronouns.”

      I think it’s more complicated than that. Depending on circumstances, throwing people away is a luxury that only happens when society is wealthier.

      From an NPR interview: A man went across America, interviewing people about homosexuals. (This was probably in the 80s or so.) He found that in rural regions, people didn’t care if two men were living together. The important question was whether they were good neighbors.

      It was small towns where there was prejudice against homosexuals.

      I’ve heard about a couple of communities where there was a high prevalence of deaf people for genetic reasons. Everyone knew sign language, and whether or not a person was deaf wasn’t a notable feature.

      When population density is low, people need each other’s help. A person (possibly a person past the risk of early death in childhood) is a valuable resouce which represents years of investment. You don’t throw people away unless there’s a very good reason for it. You don’t need formal complex accomodations, you do whatever is sensible to make it easy to live with the people you’ve got.

      As population density and wealth go up, you can afford to dump people over trivia.

      Now we’re at a point where we can afford to make a lot of accomodations, and to some extent we have rules against dumping people, and it can seem like quite an imposition.

      Related: One of the things I’ve noticed about accounts from people who leave hate groups is how much joining hate groups is related to unpromising young men not being welcome in mainstream society. There’s nothing most people want them for…. but the hate groups can find a use for them.

      • reasoned argumentation says:

        Chemically castrating boys is throwing people away in that you’re taking a temporary blip in personality and permanently rendering the person incapable of reproduction.

        EDIT – Nor is it a new invention – Carthaginians were into child sacrifice for religious reasons too. I bet Carthaginian twitter would have posts by preening parents describing how their 3 year old son wanted to be sacrificed to Baal Hammon (or Moloch) in the brazen bull if Carthaginians had twitter.

    • Tekhno says:

      You don’t need to throw people away though, just force them back into line and make them conform. That’s why so much moral pressure is applied to prevent people from deviating from norms in the first place.

      • Kevin C. says:

        How is this not just “we need to put more emphasis on the ‘convert’ part of the ‘convert or die’ offer to our enemies”?

      • Tekhno says:

        This is what traditional societies across the board would generally favor; forcing deviants back into line, rather than wasting their productivity by killing them. It’s not like the death penalty was applied for everything in the past, though obviously criminal law is harsher the further you go back, and various societies did ascribe the death penalty for crimes in a way we’d find absurd today.

    • Christopher Hazell says:

      Take the 50+ genders issue, for example: for thousands upon thousands of years, these genders couldn’t be expressed culturally, because a non-wealthy society had no time for reproductively dysfunctional things that would require poor farmers to remember and respect all of those pronouns.

      As a tangent, I’ve heard this idea a couple of times, that using a large number of gender identities and pronouns is some kind of astonishingly complex thing that no society before us could possibly be expected to navigate, but, to be frank, it really doesn’t seem that difficult to me.

      “Hello, my name is Christopher Hazell and I use he/his”

      And, you know, done. Etiquette problem resolved. Hell, the first question people often ask me is “Do you go by Chris or Christopher?” And I really don’t see how it would be so much more exponentially complex to ask, “Which pronouns do you go by?”

      I’ve been reading about clothing, and Victorian England had a bewildering array of customs specifying exactly which clothes could be worn for a given occasion at a given time of day, and where a gentleman should put his hat and gloves when he came indoors (It depended on the occasion).

      I’m not even saying that the current obsession with gender labels and pronouns is good or bad, it just seems to me that plenty of societies that are much less technologically advanced than ours have invented all kinds of much more complex etiquette systems, and honestly that’s probably true even if we just limit it to forms of address.

      • Tracy W says:

        But Victorian etiquette was often designed to exclude the lower classes from society by their failure to follow the rules. Lower classes being a relative term, the aristocracy had their ways of excluding the upper classes to the extent they could sometimes get on much better with the working classes.

        I read a bunch of Golden Age detective fiction and the characters seem to be forever judging each others’ class based on subtle details of etiquette (eg in Busman’s Honeymoon, by Dorothy Sayers, Lord Peter comments that another​ character got his wife’s title right.)

        In short: That other societies have invented very complex etiquettes doesn’t mean that everyone in that society was good at the etiquette.

        Edit: not to mention that it’s quite possible a number of etiquette manuals were written by Victorian Martha Stewarts and thus not that representative of ordinary practice.

        • dansimonicouldbewrong says:

          This is precisely the point of introducing numerous genders into “polite” discourse, along with many other PC conventions: to exclude lower-class people raised on simpler, more “common” traditions.

          Every ruling class seeks to pass down its elevated status to its children, including the unremarkable, unmeritorious ones. The standard method is to establish and inculcate a set of arcane customs that allow the scions of the elite to recognize each other and unite to defend their shared rank.

          Today’s “meritocratic” elite are no different, and their children, despite their best efforts, are rarely more suited to meritocratic competition than their more traditionally aristocratic predecessors. PC is just the modern equivalent of Victorian etiquette.

          • Christopher Hazell says:

            You know, now I feel like I have to amplify my skepticism:

            Where are you living that you encounter that many prickly, ruling class genderqueer people?

            I know some trans people, but all of them use traditional genders. All of them are in roughly the same low socio-economic class I am in. I’m literally the only person I know who would say he doesn’t have a gender identity, which, I guess, makes me one of those crazy extra genders but really just means I don’t think “gender” or “gender identity” have ever been defined in a coherent fashion.

            A blogger I like has mentioned that when people talk about “meritocracy” they tend to forget the “cracy” part. College professors are not part of the “ruling class”; in most cases, they can barely control policy in their own schools. Kids on Tumblr who want to be special by having a weird gender CERTAINLY aren’t part of the ruling class.

            Look, I get it: the American left, at this point in time, likes to create a bunch of complex etiquette rules, and huge swathes of it have adopted the idea that violations of these rules are not merely rude, but harmful, and therefore people who violate those rules need to be isolated and/or ignored. Maybe even legally sanctioned.

            This has never, ever happened to me because I wasn’t able to guess ahead of time that somebody used a pronoun with an “X” in it. It’s never happened because I didn’t realize they had changed genders overnight.

            It might happen if, after they tell me what pronouns they prefer, I refused to use them, but that is hardly a complex, insurmountable challenge; it’s exactly the same as using a correct name, title, or other form of address, and as I have said, numerous cultures have had very complex versions of these even while lacking our technological sophistication.

            I’m not talking about political correctness in general; I just don’t think that, in practice, the idea of having dozens of genders comes from the “upper classes”; I don’t think it is uniquely historically complex or insurmountable challenge to use several sets of pronouns; and I don’t think, in practice, it actually exists.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        Gender isn’t just about which pronouns to use, it’s about a whole series of interlocking social roles and norms. Inventing new genders is going to require more complexity than just coming up with a few new pronouns.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        There’s a lot more to it than pronouns. I have trans acquaintances and I call them whatever they want to be called. It’s just polite.

        I object, however, to the leftist narrative that trans people are horribly oppressed by evil me, and so I must adopt leftist politics to atone for my privilege.

        I live in a middle class neighborhood that’s about 80% white. We have a few indians, Filipinos, latinos, blacks, and I think there might even be a muslim around here somewhere. We have a FaceBook group where we self-organize movie nights, BBQs, fireworks on holidays. We all get along very well. Half the neighborhood had Trump signs, half had Clinton signs and we had lively political debate on our Facebook group. After the election one of my neighbors put out a sign written in Arabic, Spanish, and English saying something about how “some people are scared of differences but I’ll always call you ‘neighbor'” or something ridiculous like that. Essentially, “other people in the neighborhood are evil and hate you poor, sweet brown people, but not me I’m the Good White.”

        Guess who the only person I hate in my neighborhood is?

      • keranih says:

        “Hello, my name is Christopher Hazell and I use he/his”

        Hi! My name is Keranih, and I’m going to repeat your name back to you five times, and I’m *still* going to forget it by the end of the party, and two months from now I’ll have talked to you five times and you’ll *still* be “that dude who lives with that other dude who has the really adorable pittie/border collie cross.”

        Humans gotta human. I get that some people think that genders are as mutable and unique as names(*), specific to only one person, but it’s a really hard sell to the rest of the planet.

        (*) Because of course people are randomly given names like Cohen and J’malila, no sub-grouping at play there, not at all

    • Tracy W says:

      Take the 50+ genders issue, for example: for thousands upon thousands of years, these genders couldn’t be expressed culturally, because a non-wealthy society had no time for reproductively dysfunctional things that would require poor farmers to remember and respect all of those pronouns.

      This seems unlikely to me as these non-wealthy societies do things like pour incredible effort into religions (see mediaeval cathedrals, Buddhist temples,) or have very complex grammars (eg Germany).

      Plus they didn’t have TV, let alone the internet, to distract them.

    • PedroS says:

      The 50+ genders issue is not real: if you check Fb’s list of genders, you see that many of them are represented (an therefore counted) more than once,e.g. : Female-to-Male Trans, FTM trans , Trans (FTM), transgender male, transexual male, etc. are all the same.

    • Deiseach says:

      you’ll have spider-people and clones born from test tubes, and robot-people who transform into cars

      No, we won’t. Clones, maybe. The rest of it? You may as well believe in God and cut out the middle-man 🙂

      the left will most likely win WW3, and even if it doesn’t, any right wing dictatorships going forwards will be decayed by technological progress into leftism anyway…until one day soon, there’s nothing left to be conservative about

      The victorious left will then set about splintering into purity spirals where the least leftward edge becomes the new centre becomes the new conservatives and have to be purged in their turn, and the former radicals of one generation become the fuddy-duddies against whom the new generation rises up. We’re seeing it already with Freddie de Boer and his plaints about the hyper radical new students and those who drove him off for being insufficiently liberal progressive, even as he produced his good liberal progressive credentials to no avail. That tendency will only continue and accelerate. I’m looking forward, Tekhno, to your WW3 victors then engaging in WW4 over the “trans with an asterisk is problematic usage” question.

      • wysinwygymmv says:

        We’re seeing it already with Freddie de Boer and his plaints about the hyper radical new students and those who drove him off for being insufficiently liberal progressive, even as he produced his good liberal progressive credentials to no avail.

        deBoer tends to write articles defending campus protest and campus protesters rather than complaining about them. deBoer tends to criticize/complain about media personalities and social media narratives rather than “hyper radical new students”. He often criticizes them for/complains about them criticizing those very same “hyper radical new students”.

        The dynamic where people think he’s not sufficiently left/liberal? It’s because he thinks the left should focus on economic issues rather than identity politics issues, and social media/SJW types who make hay from identity politics know which side their bread is buttered on.

      • Good thing there’s no purity spirals in actual religion. .again…again…again….

      • Tatu Ahponen says:

        “We’re seeing it already with Freddie de Boer and his plaints about the hyper radical new students and those who drove him off for being insufficiently liberal progressive, even as he produced his good liberal progressive credentials to no avail.”

        I don’t think that’s about students becoming more left-wing and left-wing, but rather about an conflict between economy-oriented traditional left and identity politics -oriented left (or, in many cases, “left”, ie. liberals), which has been going on for ages in different contents. “Socialist prof is challenged by students about insufficient focus on race and gender issues” is not a new story; it’s the one that’s been told for as long as there have been socialist profs.

    • psmith says:

      Regular Fox news watching NASCAR lovin’ conservatives will become like the Amish.

      Unusually healthy, socially cohesive, and reproducing a hell of a lot faster than everyone else? Please, Br’er Fox, don’t throw me into that briar patch!

      (and you’re awfully confident that transhumanism will come to pass. Meaningful technological progress and rapid economic growth are pretty unusual states of affairs in the history of biologically modern humans.).

      • wysinwygymmv says:

        Unusually healthy, socially cohesive, and reproducing a hell of a lot faster than everyone else?

        Well, they reproduce pretty fast, but if you think they’re unusually healthy and socially cohesive then I think you must not go to very many NASCAR races.

      • Tekhno says:

        I was very slighly needling conservatism on purpose. I don’t really think the future will be leftist in a sense that the existing left will recognize, so I would at least amend “Cthulu swims left” to “Cthulu swims away from conservatism to wherever the hell it’s going”. Leftism is just a little town on the road to… ?

        @psmith

        (and you’re awfully confident that transhumanism will come to pass. Meaningful technological progress and rapid economic growth are pretty unusual states of affairs in the history of biologically modern humans.)

        If it doesn’t come to pass within the next few hundred years or so we’re absolutely done, finished, over. If growth peaks and falls before we can become something superior and escape this planet, then that’s that for us. We’re not going to last untold billions (and possibly trillions) of years like some space faring life might, and humans are not becoming a space faring species without transforming into something better equipped for space. Right now, space travel is absolutely hampered by the limitations of human beings.

        If we don’t get off this planet we’ll be subjected to everything on this page, and if we don’t change our form then we won’t survive it anyway:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

        There are additional problems too, because if technological progress slows, then there may be a mass die-off. In the near future, we need to achieve fully capable AGI and robots or we won’t even be able to manage the global age pyramid inversion without disaster.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          We’re done for anyway; eventually the heat death of the universe will come along, and that will be it.

          Besides, your argument here is fallacious. Even if we accept that not discovering transhumanism will have all the bad effects you say, it doesn’t follow that we actually will discover transhumanism.

        • Tekhno says:

          @The original Mr. X

          We’re done for anyway; eventually the heat death of the universe will come along, and that will be it.

          Better to survive trillions upon trillions of years than thousands. If it’s all equivalent then if we learned that we were going to all be wiped out in 30 years, then we shouldn’t try and prevent it.

          Besides, your argument here is fallacious. Even if we accept that not discovering transhumanism will have all the bad effects you say, it doesn’t follow that we actually will discover transhumanism.

          I’m not arguing it will happen, it’s just that it’s useless to talk about future civilization without it. We’re dead on historically short timeframes without it, so if we’re talking about future human civilization it should be assumed.

          As for evidence that it’s going to happen, experts in the field of AI gave estimates on the timeline to human level AI to Nick Bostrom and Vincent Muller. Transhumanism can be considered on a similar timeframe, and if it’s not humans upgrading, then it will be humans being replaced – posthumanism – either way, intelligent life continues in a stronger form able to escape the confines of this prison we’re in.

    • Kevin C. says:

      I don’t think there’s anything that can stop the asymmetry, or the squashing of conservatism into ever smaller, ever crazier spaces. Being a right winger, or more accurately, a conservative is an utterly futile waste of effort. It’s a doomed enterprise.

      I wonder if the only moral thing conservatives can do at this point is just give up and avoid risking millions of lives.

      Funny, I seem to recall expressing similar positions here and getting a lot of push-back.

      • Tekhno says:

        I’m more throwing an idea out than anything (some would call this trolling, but I don’t see it that way). I’m not sure if even I believe this 100%, but it does seem to look that way so I tentatively stand by the thread post. At the very least, the conservatives of the future are going to look more like the progressives of today. Maybe it would be best if we skipped all the wasteful struggling. Not sure.

    • thatissomeprior says:

      This is so bang-on in many parts.

      UR writes about how the cycle of social-cultural decline has within it a cycle of technological ascent, with the latter driving economic growth and masking the horrors of the former, for those who do not look close enough or have swallowed the “monotonic progress” mantra. Actually, i reckon the social-cultural decline is a result of the tech ascent cycle. When one is a hunter-gatherer group trying to avoid dying of one’s teeth or starvation or tribal conflict or a million minor things that do not exist today, there is no space or time or resource or patience for social justice pursuits (the great, the good and the downright insane). If that thought does not sit well, there are places one can visit even today that will amply demonstrate this.

      So, with economic growth running at 11 thanks to tech kicking off industrial revolutions, a society has some members who have the leisure to think above and beyond the mundane pursuit of daily survival. Some of these are empathetic and strive to get political equality for all. Step by step. Then, like with any movement, enter the opportunists and power-hungry, with many of them convinced they are pure as the driven snow and only doing this to help others. Some of these have never heard of Chesterton or seen a fence they like, and organic, workable institutions go the way of the dodo. To add a cherry on top of this ****-cake, some certifiably insane ideas become conventional and fashionable wisdom.

      So now we have reached the point of “wisdom of crowds” deciding governance (and causing downstream pathologies), parts of major cities being basically unsuitable for civilisation, cultural capital being burnt faster than one would have thought humanly possible, etc. and now comes the Supreme Irony of the tech cycle playing the cruelest possible joke of un-jobbing persons. We will have insanely cheap holodecks but few will have the income to buy one. Time to save today’s pennies!

      We are thus, i reckon, on a one-way road to ruin, and well along on it. We have lost cultural capital and are about to lose our shiny toys too which used to keep us distracted. As the tech cycle spins ever faster on robotics and AI (physical and mental jobs), the masking of cultural decline will disappear (think people are waking up) or rather people will have plenty of time to notice it since they wont be busy working and chasing the neighbours.

      So, here i differ from the above comment. The tech cycle dominated on the way up when it created jobs for anyone with a room temperature iq, and now it will again dominate as it makes jobs a province only of people with rarified skills and iqs. Secondly, the dysfunction that decades of “progress” has created in governance is not exactly stimulating the economy to orgasms. There is no way to reliably undo even a slice of a fraction of a portion of that red tape. The chokehold will continue merrily merrily. So, with these two factors, we should head backwards to not having the resources or time to pursue even the worthwhile parts of social justice. That seems straightforward to me.

      But i agree that this transition will not be smooth. Wonder which side breaks from the decencies of debate first and says it with more than words at a mass scale.

      But we have progress, comrades! The best and brightest tell us so. And we know they are the B&B because they tell us so.

  34. 420BootyWizard says:

    Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again.

    Yes you do. You’ve even written about it (“Cthulhu swims left”).

    • wysinwygymmv says:

      That’s not an explanation why it happens, it’s just another name for the observation that it does happen.

  35. hnau says:

    Huh, left a long comment and it disappeared. I don’t think I pressed delete or anything. Request for clarification and guidance if this was intentional moderation (comment could be interpreted as predicting violent conflict between Left and Right if this keeps up)… bug report if not.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      There are banned words that will result in a failed post.

      Some links get auto-killed by the WordPress anti-spam detector.

    • Kevin C. says:

      predicting violent conflict between Left and Right if this keeps up

      That seems like a very safe prediction. All evidence is that we are no longer one people, and have not been for a long time, but are hostile nations not capable, long term, of sharing the same polity. But since globalization, telecommunications, and the lack of a new “frontier” make exit/exodus impossible, and territorial separation/”divorce” was “settled at Appomattox”, it looks like the only possible resolution is the eradication of one tribe by the other; the only question is whether slow and (mostly) peaceful by a mix of (pressured) conversion, cultural and political “crushing”, and demographic pressure, or quick and violent. Either way, it looks obvious which sides going to come out of that fight alive (if anyone does).

  36. kirbmarc says:

    And some political science professors tried the same exercise around the same time with excellent methodology and a sample size of over a thousand and found the opposite – Trump supporters were less authoritarian than Cruz supporters, and no more authoritarian than Rubio supporters. They did find that Republicans were a bit more authoritarian than Democrats, but correctly noted that the measure involved is literally called “Right-Wing Authoritarianism”, is based on a scale invented by Theodor Adorno to prove conservatives had fascist tendencies, and only asks questions about child-rearing practices (you get marked as “authoritarian” if you have a traditional religious child-rearing style). And there are other investigations of authority that try to control for this sort of thing and sometimes find find liberals and conservatives are about equal in respect for authority.

    I don’t want to overdo my criticism. “Right-wing authoritarianism” is a powerful idea with a good academic reputation, and the decision to focus solely on child-rearing was a principled choice to avoid including politics itself in the construct. And failed replications should be an opportunity for reflection rather than a cause to instantly dismiss a finding.

    Yet it’s still good practice to mention their existence. And I still feel like somewhere there might be a conservative who reads this sort of thing and feels like Vox is not quite the perfectly-neutral mutually-beneficial gatekeeper institution of their dreams.

    This is a very interesting paragraph. There is plenty of evidence that conservative and religious child-rearing practices lead to authoritarian psychological attitudes when the authority is perceived to be a legitimate religious or political one. That’s probably what the “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” checklist created by Adorno measures, and it’s not surprising to find it higher among conservative people, who tend to be more religious and attached to traditions.

    I wonder however if there’s another, different flavor of authoritarianism which isn’t measured by the Adorno scale for Right-Wing Authoritarianism, namely the disdain for ideas which are perceived to be harmful or immoral, and the support for censoring them and/or removing them from all civil discourse. I’d expect to find plenty of evidence for this kind authoritarianism among both fervent conservatives and liberals, and less evidence for it among libertarians and maybe moderates and middle-of-the-road centrists. We could call this form of authoritarianism “Political Dogmatism”.

    I’m sure this isn’t a new idea and has already been examined by many scholars. Still, it could be an interesting way to explain why certain tests see conservative score higher on authoritarianism and others find liberals and conservatives to be more or less equally authoritarian, or equally libertarian (depending on which of the two ends of the scale you’re focusing on).

    • Mazirian says:

      There is plenty of evidence that conservative and religious child-rearing practices lead to authoritarian psychological attitudes when the authority is perceived to be a legitimate religious or political one.

      [citation needed]

      • Randy M says:

        You know you’ve been reading SSC for awhile when “evidence” and “child-rearing” in the same sentence is a red flag.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      If you have an authoritarian personality streak and you’re Red Tribe, you become a bible banger. If you have an authoritarian streak and you’re Blue Tribe, you become a SJW.

      • Nornagest says:

        Seems a little pat. SJWs have been around for a while, but they were very niche for most of the last couple decades, resurfacing only in 2013 or 14. I can’t believe that the left-leaning authoritarian fraction would vary that much. What gives?

        • The Nybbler says:

          SJWs have been around for a while, but they were very niche for most of the last couple decades, resurfacing only in 2013 or 14. I can’t believe that the left-leaning authoritarian fraction would vary that much. What gives?

          They recruit, effectively.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          They hit fandom in 2009. I don’t know whether there was change in ideology/tactics or what.

          It’s conceivable that Obama being elected made a difference, but I don’t see the causal chain. (I was very upset at the time and venting to random white people. More than one of them said “Do you think it has something to do with Obama?” I would say, “I don’t know, they never mention Obama.” And the random white person would say “I’m sure it has something to do with Obama”. And I would think “Maybe white people are more racist than I thought”. Note that I said that last, but didn’t speak it.)

    • On the general subject of right wing authoritarianism, people may be interested in the exchange on my blog that I had with Robert Altemeyer. I can’t speak to Adorno, but my conclusion was that Altemeyer’s evidence for a correlation between conservative political views and authoritarianism was due to testing authoritarianism with questions that were in part tests of political views.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Well, sure; authoritarianism is a political view.

        • Read the link.

          He was testing for authoritarianism with questions about your attitude to authority or to unpopular causes. The authority in question was always one popular with the right, unpopular with the left. The unpopular cause always the other way around.

          No questions about people who opposed authority by crossing a union picket line or campaigning for school vouchers.

  37. Jiro says:

    His family is not well off. They’re Mexican-American. And they’re Trump supporters.

    Yeah, I’m kind of confused too. But they honestly are.

    Don’t be confused. People who wait in line hate people who cut in line.

  38. oiscarey says:

    I wonder have you considered the influence that the different values of conservatives and liberals have on the life-cycle of human organisations?

    Haidt and his team have found that Liberals show a disproportionate value for Harm and Fairness with comparatively reduced value for Purity, In-group and Authority. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to display a more even value for each. Without going too deep into Haidt’s social intuitionist model of human moral reasoning, we need to have a think about the implications of these findings for social organisation.

    An organisation of strong liberals who are highly representative of the above findings will value Harm and Fairness over all else, and so will be strongly willing to challenge authority and behave in a disloyal way towards colleagues if they feel that the people around them have caused harm to others, or have behaved in an unfair way. They will be uninterested in maintaining shared taboos if they feel those taboos are unfair or cause harm. In many ways, these are positive traits. They allow for adaptation to new situations, to drop old and outdated value systems and beliefs to modernize your social network to fit the brand new situation of the present day. However, what if these values abound in a situation that has not changed much?

    The claims that humans have changed significantly over the past hundred years, or the past 10,000 years, are significantly open to question and debate. Without getting into it, for the sake of argument let’s assume that humans and their social habits/reflexes/intuitions have not changed significantly.

    If this is the case, then the adaptive liberal value system becomes highly problematic in social organisation. As groups of people form a community and work together, typically an emergent value structure and set of shared beliefs will emerge (what they might call ‘common sense’). Pinker and one of his grad students have shown that common knowledge is essential to mutual cooperation. In this case, what would be common knowledge is information about what kind of behaviour is acceptable and not acceptable: how worried should I be about sharing my thoughts and ideas on multiple topics with the people I am working/spending time with? How likely are my ideas about how to act in the collective interest to be shared by others, and to be taken on by others as a shared project? With the emergence of a genuinely positive and inspiring value system, e.g. the Enlightenment, once the value system is structured and organised and predictable, it opens itself up to attack by opposing values (disorganized and haphazard value structures would be hard to tackle/criticize).

    This is where the other values come in: ingroup, to protect members of the same community from petty squabbles and separatist action that could put the community at risk; authority, to allow for people with strong understanding of and commitment to the shared value system to lead others who are less knowledgeable/capable/motivated to work toward the common good; and purity, to protect the community from actions or activities that put the central tenets of the community at risk (e.g. people outside the value system trying to sneak in and leech off the community or undermine it).

    If I am correct in saying that humans and their social nature has not changed significantly, then conservatism is required in the most literal way: to conserve or preserve a positive value system which has developed and allowed humans to form a collaborative community for shared social benefits. The function of liberalism is to dismantle outdated value systems to allow for reconstruction, under my understanding, based on the most important values of harm and fairness.

    My thinking is that we need a conservative Enlightenment movement. That might look like consideration of human rights (and the often-overlooked ‘human responsibilities’) as sacred values, making it taboo to criticize or undermine the concept (purity). This would require coherent social organisation that set strict norms for civility and conversation within the movement, essentially giving people the benefit of the doubt once they have passed the purity tests which makes them deserving of a high level of civility and trust (ingroup). It would also need a systematic manner of recognizing authorities within the movement who will be followed by those lower down in the structure in a consensual manner (authority). This would restrict the use of the values for harm and fairness to apply to the community itself, as they would have to be balanced by the overall needs of the community to be stable and effective. Thus, you couldn’t say it was unfair of your boss to tell you what to do or hurtful of them to criticize your performance, you couldn’t try to undermine your colleagues by spreading rumors about the harmful or unfair way they treated you as this would be highly disloyal and uncivil, and you wouldn’t be able to criticize the foundational values of the community without being asked to leave.

    The problem at the moment is that the most effective social organizations are religious ones, and their purity tests require the disavowal of reason through faith. The liberal project must be to deconstruct the unnecessary aspects of religious organisation, however it must then turn to the conservatives in the community to begin to reconstruct the group values that will hold the new value system together through social organisation.

    If my claims that ingroup, authority and purity are important values trigger annoyance or disquiet in you, I am open to alternative ideas that better explain things. To convince me that I am mistaken, I would need to be given an alternative explanation for the liberal/conservative divide that explains Haidt’s data on their values. I am most receptive to social/evolutionary arguments, I find.

    • cassander says:

      It’s worth noting that haidt has essentially repudiated his views on purity since writing the book. Liberals are just as purity obsessed as conservatives, just about different issues.

      http://www.yourmorals.org/blog/2010/02/in-search-of-liberal-purity/

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      To be honest, your argument sounds a lot to me like the issues Nietzsche struggled with. Nietzsche wasn’t happy about God being dead. He liked western civilization and saw that it was built on the foundational idea of a transcendent morality ordering society (God). But now you have the non-obvious “obvious” conclusions of western civ (like human rights) so ingrained in people they actually believe they’re universal. That a rational system of ethics would also arrive at human rights. Nietzsche didn’t think so, and that men would have to become ubermensch to define a new morality as useful as God. Otherwise you get nihilism, and pathological culture. This is not an unreasonable conclusion. If there is no morality there’s nothing irrational about my ingroup enslaving or obliterating my outgroup. It’s actually perfectly rational.

      So, it seems like you’re assuming God is dead and cannot be used to sustain the moral ordering of society any longer. Killed, apparently by the left, through their talent of opposing and deposing authority. And now you ask the conservatives to become the ubermensch and create the new ordering system based on reason. To which this conservative reasonably replies: “God.”

    • Kevin C. says:

      The problem at the moment is that the most effective social organizations are religious ones, and their purity tests require the disavowal of reason through faith. The liberal project must be to deconstruct the unnecessary aspects of religious organisation, however it must then turn to the conservatives in the community to begin to reconstruct the group values that will hold the new value system together through social organisation.

      Have you ever heard of the Cult of Reason?

      The Cult of Reason was explicitly anthropocentric. Its goal was the perfection of mankind through the attainment of Truth and Liberty, and its guiding principle to this goal was the exercise of the human faculty of Reason. In the manner of conventional religion, it encouraged acts of congregational worship and devotional displays to the ideal of Reason.[4] A careful distinction was always drawn between the rational respect of Reason and the veneration of an idol: “There is one thing that one must not tire telling people,” Momoro explained, “Liberty, reason, truth are only abstract beings. They are not gods, for properly speaking, they are part of ourselves.”[4]

      The overarching theme of the Cult was summarized by Anacharsis Clootz, who declared at the Festival of Reason that henceforward there would be “one God only, Le Peuple.”[5] The Cult was intended as a civic religion—inspired by the works of Rousseau, Quatremère de Quincy, and Jacques-Louis David, it presented “an explicit religion of man.”[4]

      Or Comte’s Religion of Humanity?

      I think a passage from Ronald Beiner’s Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy is appropriate here:

      Social Contract: Once the range of historical religions have been excluded on account of their violence, their cruelty, and their intolerance, one is left with a minimalist creed that, as Hume was right to observe, would have limited potential in seizing people’s religious imaginations in the way that the jettisoned historical religions had. Hume’s point was that it would be unrealistic to expect a merely rational or philosophical religion (a natural religion rather than a revealed religion) to gain a purchase on the souls of ordinary human beings. Insofar as religion is believed to be necessary to serve essential socializing and moralizing purposes (as Rousseau evidently did), it is not clear that one can subtract those aspects of religion that lead to superstition, fanaticism, and human conflict and still have a religion robust enough to serve these socializing purposes.

      All in all, there’s been plenty of attempts since the “Enlightenment” to provide us Westerners a “Church of Reason” to replace the social benefits of organized religion without all the “God stuff”. The book I quoted above has a pretty good catalogue of attempts. The record is very far from promising. If you want a non-theistic, non-supernatural-based provider of the benefits of religious organization, I’d suggest investigating Xunzi’s strain of Confucianism. (Let me also, once again, recommend Alexander Eustice-Corwin’s “Confucianism After Darwin.)

      [edit to fix link]

  39. NoahSD says:

    The most amazing part of all of this to me is that this conservative parallel society immediately and unreservedly accepted Trump after he was elected. Trump is qualitatively different than all other modern presidents. He is incredibly corrupt, incredibly stupid and ill-informed, and incredibly selfish and narcissistic. He is all of these things to a much larger degree than any other modern president. E.g., his stupidity is a whole different kind of stupidity than Bush’s; his narcissism is on a completely different level than Clinton’s or even Nixon’s; etc. And, this list is, of course, much much shorter than it could be. Trump is the unambiguously worst president on innumerable axes.

    Given this, it’s incredibly depressing to see that things have become so polarized that conservatives now treat Trump in roughly the same way that they treated Bush Jr, Bush Sr, and Reagan. This is really bad, and I obviously agree that American liberals have failed to prevent this. But, what do we do now? Trump is president because people support him, so how do we get people to stop supporting such a uniquely terrible president? And, when, if ever, do we pass the threshold where it becomes ok (or even obligatory) to put “Resist Trump” posters in every breakroom?

    • reasoned argumentation says:

      Possibly the stupidest man to ever own his own 747.

    • Ninmesara says:

      I was also very surprised conservatives supported Trump. Apparently polarization runs deeper than I thought.

    • JulieK says:

      The most amazing part of all of this to me is that this conservative parallel society immediately and unreservedly accepted Trump after he was elected.

      I take it you have not seen the articles critical of Trump posted at e.g. National Review and The Weekly Standard.

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        Jonah Goldberg at National Review completely exploded at a reporter last week or the week before when the reporter (falsely) claimed Goldberg had switched to supporting Trump now that he was elected. Most of the other NR writers are the same.

        However, in this day and age, pointing out that Trump isn’t as horrible as his worst critics claim, or pointing out the horrible things that the left does, is construed as lockstep support for Trump.

        • Brad says:

          If you find your self constantly talking about how Trump really isn’t so bad and never about how actually he is pretty crappy, for a long enough period of time, congrats you’re a Trump supporter. Even if you always start your argument with “I’m not a Trump supporter but”.

          If you want to sit on the fence, you have to have one leg on either side.

          • Randy M says:

            If you want to sit on the fence, you have to have one leg on either side.

            Non-metaphorically, that strikes me as the absolute worst way to sit on a fence.

          • LHN says:

            Seriously: as anti-moderate metaphors, that’s up there with “yellow stripes and dead armadillos”.

          • Brad says:

            I looked into this and apparently I was thinking about it all wrong.
            It’s supposed to be like http://www.miridiatech.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/fencesitting2.jpg

            not

            http://www.sancedetem.cz/img/edee/u/index-motives/p.motive20123517026.jpg

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugwumps#Origin_of_the_term

            Dictionaries report that “mugguomp” is an Algonquian word meaning “person of importance” or “war leader.” Charles Anderson Dana, the colorful newspaperman and editor of the now-defunct New York Sun, is said to have given the Mugwumps their political moniker. Dana made the term plural and derided them as amateurs and public moralists.

            During the 1884 campaign, they were often portrayed as “fence-sitters,” with part of their body on the side of the Democrats and the other on the side of the Republicans. (Their “mug” on one side of the fence, and their “wump” [comic mispronunciation of “rump”] on the other.)

            Mea culpa.

          • Randy M says:

            Mea culpa.

            It’s okay, we won’t run you out of here riding a rail.

          • Evan Þ says:

            So if one side keeps saying “Trump drowns a puppy every morning!” and the other side keeps saying “No he doesn’t!” – you claim that the second side is the one at fault?

          • Brad says:

            @Evan thorn
            If you are a columnist you have some latitude about what you want to write about (I assume). If every morning you surf around for someone saying “Trump drowns puppies” so you can go write a column about how contra what the liberal media elite say, no Trump doesn’t drown puppies, that’s a choice you decided to make. You could have instead decided to mix it up by sometimes writing about the things Trump is doing that piss you off — which there must be because you aren’t a Trump supporter, right?

            That choice says something about you. Aren’t we all Bayesians here? If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            For the record, NR does (rather frequently) write about things Trump does that piss them off.

            I pretty much keep my opinions on politics to myself, neither especially criticizing nor condemning (but even that gets painted as “taking a side” because “some of us don’t have the luxury” of being neutral).

          • CatCube says:

            So what columns of Jonah Goldberg are you saying constitute him talking about how Trump really isn’t so bad? And what is the number of those columns versus him not talking about how what some of the stuff Trump is doing is bad?

          • Brad says:

            @CatCube
            Assuming you are replying to me, I don’t read Jonah Goldberg. I was riffing on Chevalier Mal Fet’s comment. Although his latest update refers to NR rather than specifically JG, I take it that it applies to both. If that’s so, my comment doesn’t apply to him (note the conditionals).

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            Well, Goldberg himself (in his reaction to being accused of having fully converted to Trumpism, as Noah’s top comment that spawned this whole chain insinuated) included many examples of his criticizing Trump.

            As for defending the President, most of his defenses are tepid at best, as he usually prefers to pivot to attacking the media’s overreaction and hysteria (about midway down this article) about the President. Really, the gist of most of his writing the last few months is that

            a)Trump is behaving stupidly and creating needless problems for himself
            b)His most consequential policies have been generally good (or at least not evil) – Gorsuch is the biggest example, but the XOs and the Syrian strike are also looked upon favorably
            c)the Left is losing their minds over him to an absurdly exaggerated degree.

            Overall I’d say he definitely writes anti-Trump a lot more than pro-Trump, and he’s not alone in NR in doing that – he just came to my mind as having just complained about people saying all conservatives have switched to being Trump supporters since the election. Really, I think most of the places I’ve seen people arguing Trump isn’t so bad have been, well, in the comment threads here, and I conflated it with my other source of right-wing opinion, National Review.

          • Vorkon says:

            Non-metaphorically, that strikes me as the absolute worst way to sit on a fence.

            Metaphorically it’s pretty bad, too.

            No one can strike an absolutely perfect balance between two opposing viewpoints, even if they’re trying to straddle both sides. Realistically, they’re always going to lean, at least slightly, one way or the other. Just like, you know, someone sitting on an actual fence, with their legs hanging off one side. (Unless they’re strapped to some sort of weird torture device, or something. Then all bets are off.)

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      Things have always been so polarized that liberals treated Bush Jr, Bush Sr, and Reagan in roughly the same way that they now treat Trump.

    • Deiseach says:

      The most amazing part of all of this to me is that this conservative parallel society immediately and unreservedly accepted Trump after he was elected.

      Because he was elected. He’s the president now, not some ideal (or even less worse) candidate. Reject him, and what alternative do you have? For better or worse, he’s what you’ve got for the next four years. And because American politics are so polarised, it has become a question of party A versus party B on nearly every topic under the sun, so rejecting the president who belongs to your party only leaves you, in effect, with the opposite side. And if you don’t like the candidate on the opposite side? Or have severe foundational disagreements with the opposite side? How do you square that circle?

      There’s possibly also the idea of respecting the office: yes Trump the man is a disaster, but Trump the president is the president and the office of the presidency has a claim on your loyalty.

      And finally there’s the “backs to the wall” element; if you’re driven to the wall on “give in on this and you give in on everything you believe and hold (because this is the state that things have ended up in, there is no room for compromise) and have to surrender to our victorious hordes and boy, will we rub it in that we’re victorious”, you have little to lose by sticking to your guns and buying the whole package. You will still be regarded as some noxious leprous pariah anyway for holding certain conservative/right-wing views, another few boils and scabs for defending President Trump aren’t going to make a huge difference.

      • beleester says:

        Because he was elected. He’s the president now, not some ideal (or even less worse) candidate. Reject him, and what alternative do you have? For better or worse, he’s what you’ve got for the next four years.

        Well, you could try not supporting his policies when you don’t like them, and supporting them when you do. It’s not like this is a one-time choice, where as soon as you support Trump, you’re locked into supporting him for four years.

        The House Republicans have already done it once, when they couldn’t agree on anything to replace Obamacare with. Yeah, it was embarrassing to fumble like that, but it was still better than passing a terrible bill simply for the sake of checking off one of Trump’s campaign promises.

        • albertborrow says:

          I think you’re glossing over how painful that embarrassment is to the ordinary person. Not rooting for all of your side’s arguments is a pretty powerful trivial inconvenience.

    • birdboy2000 says:

      Trump is qualitatively different than all other modern presidents. He is incredibly corrupt, incredibly stupid and ill-informed, and incredibly selfish and narcissistic. He is all of these things to a much larger degree than any other modern president.

      This strikes me as a value judgment which is far from obviously true, and even if true is a statement about personality and not policy.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Trump is really different from all other presidential candidates.

      Also, you know who really scares me? Mike Pence.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      The support came before the election. It’s not like Trump just magically wound up as president and now we have to support him. We specifically chose Trump because his goals most closely align with ours. By my qualifications Trump is the best president of my lifetime, and probably the best since Andrew Jackson.

    • hlynkacg says:

      The most amazing part of all of this to me is that this conservative parallel society immediately and unreservedly accepted Trump after he was elected

      This seems like an appropriate moment to point out yet again that the conservative / liberal, red tribe / blue tribe splits do not map to each other 1 for 1. There are “red liberals” (see old-school labor union types) just as there are “blue conservatives” (see Ivy League Republicans). Trump may be only marginally conservative, but he is very “red” and that’s where his support comes from.

  40. Brandon Berg says:

    Could Conquest’s second law of politics be driven by left-wing disdain for commerce? Not wanting to go into industry, leftists will tend to be overrepresented in organizations (as opposed to businesses). This effect will tend to be strengthened by positive feedback mechanisms, as leftists move up into management of these organizations, where they can discriminate against non-leftists and/or change the culture of the organizations in ways that make them unattractive to non-leftists.

    • manwhoisthursday says:

      Entrepreneurs tend to be high in Big 5 Openness, and thus politically liberal or libertarian. So, liberals tend to be in control of a lot of the business world as well as the arts and academia. On the other hand, conservatives tend to make the most effective middle managers.

      Jordan Peterson discusses this here.

  41. Ninmesara says:

    Disclaimer: Not an American, so maybe I’m kinda insulated from the real extent of the fake (according to the liberal narrative) facts circulating in the US

    There are some things I don’t understand about this post: It focus on facts. But aren’t most disagreements between political parties based on values? Sure, there are some edge cases like Global Warming, IQ and race, etc. But for the most part what I see is disagreements in values. For example:

    1) There are 2/3/50/666+ genders. This is arguing about definitions, right? Everyone agrees people are different. I think the disagreements is based on how how to group them into linguistical categories. Are these linguistical categories facts? For the political discourse, genders matter to the extent that they are recognized by society or law.

    2) Homosexuality. I don’t think there are many people arguing that Homosexuality does not exist (maybe there are and I’m just clueless). I mean, empirically, as long as two people of the same sex express love or have something that looks like heterosexual intercourse (with special allowances for the anatomy involved), then sure, homosexuality is a thing. The discussion seems to be whether this is right/wrong/should have tax benefits. These are moral questions and not factual ones.

    3) Racism/discrimination/etc. Should there be laws discriminating between physical characteristics? Would there be laws against discriminating people based on such characteristics? Again, a moral stance. This moral stance will of course be influenced by the supposed results, for example: “I don’t want to live near black people, so I will propose a law encouraging segregation”, “There are not enough women in Wall Street so better get some quotas”, etc. Discussion on whether the laws will have the intended result are factual disagreements (probably very hard to settle in some cases), but most of the disagreement seems to be on the morality of the results themselves or the morality of the law/social/norm. People might disagree (and many do) on whether more women in Wall Street is intrinsically a good thing (as opposed to neutral or bad). They might also disagree on whether a law imposing quotas is a moral one or not. For example, Trumps recording saying he “grabs women by the pussy”: no one disputes he’s said it… The country seems to be divided on whether that’s a right or wrong thing to say.

    4) Welfare, big vs small Govt: it’s goal is to get certain results (housing for all, people not dying of hunger, disease, etc.). Sometimes the arguments seems to be whether welfare is the best way to achieve these goals, but often there is disagreement in the goals themselves (i.e. healthcare is not a right) and on the morality of welfare itself (i.e. the poor should be able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps OR welfare makes people weak). Here I do think that there is some disagreement on whether socialized health care would result in better outcomes, but (1) many people value autonomy more than outcomes and (2) socialized healthcare would probably require defunding something else, and values come into play again.

    5) Corruption: politician X is corrupt because Y: Y really did happen but it’s not corruption.

    6) Abortion: this is a moral issue between the life of the fetus and the autonomy of the mother. I don’t see how facts enter the picture. Yes, you can get into all kinds o sciency facts involving brain size and cognition and all that, but how to act on those facts is still a moral issue and not a factual one.

    7) State and religion and free speech: purely moral ones

    8) Gun ownership: everyone cites their facts in favor or against, but ultimately I think what’s at stake are moral values. For many people, owning a gun is a political statement, and they’d accept a possible cost in lives (I don’t have numbers on this, so I don’t know how many “many” is).

    So the only real factual questions seem to be whether Global Warming is real and whether creationism is true.

    Now, suppose that everyone in the US believed that Anthropogenic Global Warming is true. Would that lead to nationwide cooperation? Probably not… The most important question would remain: What can we do? What are we willing to sacrifice to get the desirable results? And then the country would split in two again based on people’s preferences.

    Now suppose that everyone in the US believed that evolution is true? Well, nothing much, really. This is really a factual disagreement and I don’t see how it can influence much.

    So it all seems to converge on the values problem. If people don’t have the same values and they aren’t willing to change their values, then debate won’t lead to more educated people, only to a compromise. Facts don’t seem very important here… There might be a problem if there is such polarization that people aren’t able to make any concessions to the other side, but where do facts fit in the wider narrative?

    • LIB says:

      Facts have a role in how people form moral intuitions in complex situations such as the examples you have so helpfully enumerated. To take free speech (in the whether-to-disinvite-university-speakers sense) as an example I am a bit more familiar with: Everyone thinks that universities need to be safe in the sense of not allowing great physical harm to students on campus. Disagreements in how safe they need to be, in my opinion, stem from people’s differing views of how, er, harmful, other kinds of harm are. Is a speaker loudly proclaiming some segment of the student body unworthy of regular human rights – is that harmful enough to cancel the speaker? Part of this depends on an arbitrary definition of “harm” but part of it is from actual different beliefs about how much suffering and risk and whatever are associated with each “harm.”

      Homosexuality too: people have different auras of perception around homosexuals which influence fuzzy latent variables in their moral perceptions. For example if I see a study about xyz% of homosexuals being child molesters, I am going to start thinking of gayness as yucky and want gay people to have less influence. If I read about historical gay people who made contributions to society and then died horribly because of intolerance, I will start thinking of /homophobia/ as yucky and scary and immoral.

      Different facts, especially when a lot of little facts are/seem different, can produce very different moral intuitions in basically similar people.

  42. MawBTS says:

    I’ve always been interested in Trump’s support among young, high-IQ males, and to what extent it’s real support and to what extent it’s a joke.

    When 4chan first started getting on board with Trump, there was a tongue in cheek element to it. There were memes about Trump picking Hulk Hogan as his running mate, and America finally having a first lady you can fap to. There was the sense that this was just another case of them spamming a poll to name Mountain Dew “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong”.

    And then there were the [forbidden word] types, who rejected democracy and thought Trump was a funny way to jam a penny in the socket.

    But at a certain point, the irony stopped…and everyone became serious about supporting him. Why?

    There’s a quote (often misattributed to Voltaire, actually by YComb user DarkShikari) “Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company”? The 2016 election is now the canonical case of this happening.

    Trump’s a charismatic guy, and I can see dumbass hicks getting excited by his “you’ll get tired of winning!” schtick. But you’d think internet-savvy people would be wiser to that sort of thing. They’d never click a link offering them a free iPad, so why would they fall for a politician doing an IRL version of the same trick? Maybe Scott Adams was on to something.

    • Ninmesara says:

      Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company

      Is this supposed to work by solving a coordination problem between idiots? Why couldn’t the idiot coordinate themselves? I’m asking in all seriousness, if there’s something deeper – and true – behind this it’s very interesting.

      you’d think internet-savvy people would be wiser to that sort of thing

      Who are these “internet-savvy” people you’re referring too? Young people in general?

      • beleester says:

        Is this supposed to work by solving a coordination problem between idiots? Why couldn’t the idiot coordinate themselves? I’m asking in all seriousness, if there’s something deeper – and true – behind this it’s very interesting.

        I’m not sure what “coordination problem” you’re imagining here. The idiots aren’t moving all at once. Nobody has to say “Okay, today’s the big day where we move from IdiotBoard to IronicIdiotBoard, so update your bookmarks!” for people to be able to move from one board to the other.

        All you need is for idiots to be able to wander into IronicIdiotBoard and not get banhammered for being idiots (because actual idiots look the same as the ironic idiots). If that’s possible, then they’ll naturally diffuse into the community over time. It’s not a coordinated process.

        • Ninmesara says:

          Ok, so maybe “coordination problem” was not the right expression… My question was: why didn’t the idiots create the community themselves? But then I noticed that there are probably genuine communities created and populated by idiots, so the question is moot.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      The Democratic Party is a coalition of the fringes of American society that don’t much like each other. The only way the different elements can keep from gouging each other’s eyes out is by uniting in hatred of evil cishet white males like Haven Monahan. That’s why you see so much in the way of hate hoaxes and violence, such as the U. of Texas’s anti-fraternity vandalism last week and the stabbings yesterday.

      It’s really not all that surprising that the kind of people targeted for hatred by the Democrats voted Republican.

      • Ninmesara says:

        coalition of the fringes of American society that don’t much like each other.

        What fringes are you referring to? Minorities?

        • Ilya Shpitser says:

          Don’t forget academics!

        • Randy M says:

          Pretty much. Conflicts like Blacks versus Mexicans for low-income jobs. Religious blacks and/or mexicans versus gays over gay rights; Muslims versus single women and/or gays. Jews versus Muslims. Jews versus Blacks.
          A lot of the minority identity groups that tend to vote democrat aren’t actually made up of very progressive members, but work with democrats to overcome oppression of “the man” (legitimate or not), despite some underlying conflicts with each other. College educated cosmopolitans who celebrate diversity are probably a large plurality of the Democratic party, but it is also not necessarily a group large enough for electoral success.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Right, so the fractious Democratic coalition has an enormous hunger for Hate Hoaxes and the like to gin up Two Minutes Hates against Emmanuel Goldstein figures.

          • Aapje says:

            @Randy M

            Feminists vs black people

            Gay/Lesbian vs trans

            Gay/Lesbian vs bi

            Various groups of feminists (TERF, sex-positive, sex-negative, etc)

            There is a lot of friction that becomes apparent if you get close enough to see.

          • Ninmesara says:

            Hmm… Aren’t republicans similarly divided? In a country of >300M people it’s strange that there is a division between a very homogeneous group on one side, and a very diverse group in the other.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            The liberal Islamophilia of recent years — e.g., the hosannas over Merkel’s Million Muslim Mistake in 2015 — was eye-opening for a lot of Americans because it’s so obvious that Muslims are extreme reactionaries who pose the single most plausible threat to eradicate liberalism wherever they can get numbers sufficient for their extreme fringe to terrorize the rest into going along (much in the way the crazies among Japanese Army officers took over Japan in the 1920s and 1930s by murdering moderates). But you could see the opinion growing among the American Establishment that we must let in lots more Muslims because they are the Other and therefore we must submit to them, whereas to look at Europe and learn from their mistakes would be too sensible.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Ninmesara writes:

            “Hmm… Aren’t republicans similarly divided?”

            No, the Republicans tend to appeal to people who see themselves as ordinary Americans, part of the core of the country rather than part of a fringe group. I believe French theorists use the terms center vs. margins.

            Take a look at the 2012 exit poll demographics:

            http://www.vdare.com/articles/slippery-six-mid-west-states-doom-romney-because-of-low-white-share

            The more you are a Regular Guy: e.g., a married, home-owning, employed, white, Protestant heterosexual man, the more likely you were to vote for Romney rather than Obama.

            The most noticeable exception was the one that most validated the tendency: one weird religion votes Republican: Mormons. But Mormons pretend to not be a weird religion by trying to act as core American as possible.

            Everybody else by now has figured out that there’s more of a payoff in terms of affirmative action and media support if you try to act as fringe as possible. But Mormons are stuck in the 1950s when it paid off to act like normal Americans.

            I bet Evan McMullin wonders if there is some genius strategy out there to reposition Mormons on the fringe. Like maybe endorse the Democrats in return for legalizing gay polygamy or something.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          What Randy M said.

          Harkening back to “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup,” the Blue Tribe has made an ingroup of everyone in (or perceived to be in) the outgroup of the Red Tribe. These groups, however, do not necessarily reciprocate. Blacks do not have any great acceptance for homosexuality or gay marriage. Muslims certainly don’t. If Latinos displace white people as the predominate American political force I wonder how well social programs for blacks will do? I don’t think Mexicans have white guilt.

          This is how you wind up with feminists taking biking trips across the middle east or through the Congo and meeting unfortunate ends. They’ve convinced themselves the world is their ingroup, but the rest of the world hasn’t quite signed on with that yet.

          The Democratic party is ideological progressives plus every minority group they can find with a grudge against the Red Tribe. But those minority groups are ethnocentric or religious interest groups, not other leftist ideologues nodding along with HuffPo and Vox.

          • Randy M says:

            But those minority groups are ethnocentric or religious interest groups…

            And generally to a much greater degree than the generic American Christians that are the target for equality activists.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            A lot of white Democratic politicians across the country must look to California and say: You know, up through 2016, despite all its diversity, California was still run by elderly white Democrats: Jerry Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and John L. Burton. So, how bad could it be if we let in a bunch of immigrants from countries that don’t have much democracy. They’ll need us to run things for them until we are as old as Jerry Brown. That sounds pretty good!

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @MawBTS – “But at a certain point, the irony stopped…and everyone became serious about supporting him. Why?”

      I started laughing about supporting Trump when I realized how much he pissed off not only the media, but also the Conservative establishment. I started seriously supporting him the instant I realized it was possible for him to win. I did this because I saw Trump winning as materially and immediately useful to my interests. I’m not terribly happy with his actual performance as president so far, but everything that’s happened since has only made me happier I voted for him.

      There are reasons other than hatred of democracy to want to jam a penny in the socket.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I started supporting him when he put out his immigration policy in I think July of 2015 saying he’d reform the H1-B visa program. It was the first time in a long time I can remember a politician actually addressing a real interest of mine. After that watching him skewer neocons in the debates while I spammed reddit with God-Emperor memes was just gravy.

    • The Nybbler says:

      But at a certain point, the irony stopped…and everyone became serious about supporting him. Why?

      Consider the alternative.

    • hlynkacg says:

      My support for Trump from “vaguely embarrassed that my fellow republicans would even consider nominating such a buffoon” to “genuine support” some time around the San Jose riot and Pulse nightclub shooting. The fact that Trump was quick to wrap the pulse victims in the flag was strong evidence in my eyes that his nationalism was genuine and that the Trump = Hitler rhetoric was overblown. The violence in San Jose coupled with apparent acceptance and defense of such tactics by both democrats and the media convinced me that some serious push-back was required. I still don’t particularly like Trump, but he fights.

    • hypersoar says:

      Film Crit Hulk wrote a great essay about this. The whole thing is really worth a read, but here’s the most relevant passage to your question:

      it goes something like this – making inane “shock” jokes will just inevitably push you into becoming that actual hyper-conservative jerk you are first making fun of. It all starts with making a purposefully outrageous “joke,” (For instance, Pewdiepie would frequently just shout “Rape!” when the screen would go black – along with making a whole song condoning rape – along with saying things like “If you’ve been raped and you don’t understand why rape jokes aren’t funny it probably wasn’t completely rape, or it wasn’t that bad for you”). He doesn’t “mean” these things, but of course the outrage is sincere. So the “just joking” defense gets put up. But, and this key, the consequences feel weirdly real. But rather than actually face yourself, it is other people’s sensitivity that becomes the enemy. So the jokes get more extreme. The consequences become more real too. So then it becomes about being PC. It becomes about “free speech” (always failing to realize that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from response). And then you’re so embedded in your own war on sensitivity that you don’t realize you’ve joined a side. Sure you don’t know what you stand for; it’s just all about them sweet sweet liberal tears. The biggest danger is when the people who support you start making “sense” because they see the same flaws in the people you hate. And you start espousing their beliefs. And soon enough you become the very fascistic asshat you once could not relate to, but only made “jokes” about. And that’s the story of how the in-it-for-the-lulz internet became a bunch of dye-in-the-wool fascists of the alt-right. This cycle exists across a lot of the spheres of the internet.

      • Nornagest says:

        Sounds pretty motivated to me.

        • Thegnskald says:

          Eh. It is close to a mark, but misses a crucial step: Being called a fascist makes you take the term less seriously regarding other people, and it reduces your willingness to dismiss what other people called fascist say out of hand.

          And the fundamental issue is this: The “fascists” have valid arguments, valid complaints. And most people are identity -oriented; they have trouble taking the useful concepts and dismissing the rest. And it is very easy to take your identity out of the group of people who approve of you.

      • Vorkon says:

        Has he finally dropped that whole “HULK TYPE EVERYTHING IN ALL CAPS, YET STILL MAKE COGENT POINTS” conceit? Nice.

    • Brad says:

      I’ve always been interested in Trump’s support among young, high-IQ males, and to what extent it’s real support and to what extent it’s a joke.

      When 4chan first started getting on board with Trump, there was a tongue in cheek element to it.

      Not sure what the one sentence has to do with the other.

  43. fion says:

    There is, of course, a possibility that the reason “neutral gatekeeper” institutions end up seeming to have liberal bias is that there is a tendency for liberal positions to be simply more correct than conservative positions. This is especially likely to be true in academia, since academia is full of intelligent people who have a higher than average truth-seeking drive. Obvious examples are climate change and trickle-down economics, but perhaps it’s a general trend as well?

    • Ninmesara says:

      I wonder is in a globalized marked (with low barriers for the flow of capital around the world), trickle down economics actually leads to the poorest people in the world becoming richer, with no respect for international boundaries. This is not good news for the poorest people in each country, though.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      academia is full of intelligent people who have a higher than average truth-seeking drive.

      Is there actually any evidence that academics have “a higher than average truth-seeking drive”? Or, for that matter, that they’re more likely to be informed on topics outside their area of expertise than a similarly-intelligent layman?

      • Jack Lecter says:

        Was going to ask.

        I’m in college now. If the professors where I am have a higher than average truth-seeking drive, I have not noticed it. I really, really haven’t noticed it.

        I think if you pay people to give you knowledge, and you can demonstrate after the fact that 25% or more of the knowledge they gave you was, sort of, technically, if you want to be literal about it not actually, um, true, you should be able to sue for your money back.

        • At a much lower level, one of the reasons our daughter, when very young, left the school she was in for a small unschooling school was her mother’s observation that the teachers didn’t really care whether what they said was true. It wasn’t just that they didn’t know–the particular point had to do with details of what evolved when, my wife being a geologist–but that they didn’t find the fact that what the were saying wasn’t true important.

          Teachers, at any level, are mostly interacting with people with less knowledge and less status than they have. That isn’t an environment that puts much pressure on someone to be careful that what he says is true.

          In theory they get that pressure interacting with their peers, and in some contexts it happens, but in others they are doing their interaction within a bubble of people who agree on the same not necessarily true things.

        • fion says:

          Obviously we can only go so far with anecdotal evidence, but since we seem to have started…

          I’m also at university now, doing a PhD. The people in my research group (including professors, postdocs and other research students) are all here because they’re interested in finding things out. That’s what I mean by truth-seeking drive. I don’t mean they’re all rationalists or that everything they publish is true. I just mean that they enjoy research. It seems fairly likely to me that this is true in most institutions. (They’re certainly not here for the career prospects!)

          If you’re disappointed in the truth-seeking drive of your professors, is it possible that you’re not comparing them to average but to some other bar? Perhaps yourself? Your peers? Other commenters on rationality blogs?

          40% or so of Americans are creationists. How good do you think their truth-seeking drive is? And it’s even worse than that – lots of the 50% who say humans evolved will have arrived at that conclusion just by looking at what the rest of their tribe thinks.

          I’m not saying academics have impressive (or even necessarily adequate) scientific curiosity – I’m just saying that the average might be lower than you think.

          • Aapje says:

            I just mean that they enjoy research.

            This is not necessarily the same as truth-seeking though. Lots of people enjoy doing research to find support for their preconceived notions. It’s how they act when the outcome of the research doesn’t match those preconceived notions that determines whether they truly favor truth-seeking.

            We see lots of behaviors in science that are inconsistent with truth-seeking.

            If you’re disappointed in the truth-seeking drive of your professors, is it possible that you’re not comparing them to average but to some other bar?

            Their claims and status are so grandiose that they deserve to be held to a far higher status.

          • fion says:

            @Aapje

            I don’t think very many people spend their lives studying a field in order to reduce their knowledge about that field. I think they’d rather increase their knowledge about it. Sure, lots of them will have poor research practices or will fail to adequately examine their pre-conceived ideas, but (a) I’m talking about truth-seeking drive, not ability and (b) we’re comparing them to an average over all people, not to our personal ideas of what’s “good enough”.

            Their claims and status are so grandiose that they deserve to be held to a far higher status.

            Yeah, sure. I agree that academics should be held to a higher standard of truth-seeking than the general population. Like I said, I’m not trying to say they’re adequate, just that they’re above average.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            I don’t think very many people spend their lives studying a field in order to reduce their knowledge about that field.

            This guy sounds not atypical and really does sound like he spends his life studying a field specifically to reduce knowledge about that field because knowledge is bad:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP4CBpLNEyE&feature=youtu.be&t=2711

            Who has lost their jobs due to the replication crisis? (no one) What does that tell you?

          • Aapje says:

            @fion

            I don’t think very many people spend their lives studying a field in order to reduce their knowledge about that field. I think they’d rather increase their knowledge about it.

            The issue is that it’s not merely a choice between doing good science and increasing knowledge vs doing bad science and deluding yourself.

            Doing good science can have costs:
            – Cognitive dissonance, when the outcomes don’t match the priors
            – Reduced status/approval (even to the point where people won’t hire you if you want to study ‘banned’ subjects)
            – Being considered a poor scientist (scientists in some fields are judged in a way that rewards bad science)
            – It’s a lot more work and can be very frustrating for various reasons
            – Etc, etc

            For example, imagine a researcher that posits a hypothesis, tests it based on a fixed method that is scientifically very valid & thus takes a lot of work and publishes the result. There is a high chance of finding out that the hypothesis was false. She then has to update her mental model, her peers will shrug, journals will not be very interested, the end of year review will remark that her impact score was poor, etc. A ton of negative incentives that are way more important motivations for most people than to find out that they were wrong.

            Now imagine a researcher that posits a hypothesis, does a couple of fairly small experiments, cherry picks something ‘significant’ even if it wasn’t the original hypothesis and publishes the result. He can pretend that his original hypothesis was never in question, his peers will react very positively to this great contribution to science, journals will gladly report how thinking of strawberries makes you better at math, the end of year review will remark that her impact score was excellent, etc.

            It takes a very strong commitment to science to choose the former over the latter.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            The issue is that it’s not merely a choice between doing good science and increasing knowledge vs doing bad science and deluding yourself.

            You should watch the video I linked Aapje – it’s Howard Gardner (the creator of the “multiple intelligences” theory) explicitly stating that he’d rather do bad science and delude himself because doing good science on the topic of intelligence makes you a bad person.

      • Tibor says:

        I also don’t believe this is the case. I am often surprised about how little (some of) my colleagues care about some knowledge outside of their field (mathematics). It could be that discussing medieval nobility titles is not a particularly interesting topic, but I would not expect the sort of jokingly mocking reaction like “you’re such a nerd” (not literally those words, but the same meaning). And to a lesser degree, this extends to history in general.

    • Obvious examples are climate change and trickle-down economics

      I don’t follow this. As best I can tell, trickle-down economics is a theory coined by people attacking it, as suggested by the name.

      The claim that the same institutions–secure property rights–that benefit rich people also benefit poor people is defensible and has become somewhat more accepted over time, is that what you mean? But that doesn’t involve money “trickling down” from anyone.

      Explain.

      • Hyenaspots says:

        Actually, it’s not defensible. As we’ve seen over-and-over with modernizations of title — which are intended to make property rights secure by making them more surely knowable — secure property rights do not generally help the poor. This is because securing property rights imposes fairly high transaction costs on all parties. Hence as you get poorer, the less secure the property rights are and the more important social bonds become.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @David Friedman:
        Do you think there is still doubt upon which side of the Laffer curve US tax policy sits?

        • I don’t have an opinion on that and it’s probably more complicated than your question makes it sound. There are probably some reductions in some taxes that would increase revenue, some reductions in other taxes that would decrease it–tax rates are not a single variable in our system.

          • Mixer says:

            Not to mention the difference in effect between a state tax and a federal tax, taxes in incomes vs profits, etc. Even looking at just the variable call “tax rate”, there are a lot of variations and nuances.

      • Drew says:

        @HeelBearCub

        There are more government policies than just marginal tax rate.

        Take proposals to build market-rate housing in the Bay Area. These are attacked as trickle-down economics.

        But, the benefits from increased housing stock would, in fact, trickle down. Each rich person who moves into an amazing, high-rise condo is a rich person who’s no longer bidding up the price of a modest studio.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          To my knowledge the canonical use of trickle-down economics is to the belief that drops in the top marginal tax rate will be so helpful to the economy that government revenue will actually increase rather than fall. Such a high-rate of growth would also benefit everyone on the economic ladder. Reagan’s quote describing this was “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

          “Trickle Down Economics” has been turned into a boo-light, but it does not mean that Republicans have abandoned supply side economic theories that have demonstrably failed multiple times.

          • To my knowledge the canonical use of trickle-down economics is to the belief that drops in the top marginal tax rate will be so helpful to the economy that government revenue will actually increase rather than fall.

            That’s the way the Laffer curve gets used in arguments about taxation.

            Googling on “trickle-down economics,” I find, from a speech by Bryan:

            There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below.

            Not the exact words, but possibly the first use. More generally, I take the term to mean “the theory that making rich people better off will make poor people better off,” not restricted to opinions about tax rates.

            It seems to have been originated, and to have continued to be used, by people attacking the idea.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Trickle down and supply side are essentially synonymous.

            I don’t see why you are hesitating to just reference Wikipedia.

            Yeah, there is a rich history, but critics of Reagan jump started it as a frequent boo-light most recently.

            In recent history, the phrase has been used by critics of supply-side economic policies, such as “Reaganomics”. David Stockman, who as Reagan’s budget director championed Reagan’s tax cuts at first, but then became critical of them, told journalist William Greider that the “supply-side economics” is the trickle-down idea: “It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down,’ so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.” Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy.

  44. James Herbst says:

    The thing is, though, though, Conquest wasn’t predicting the future; he was describing the past. During the 1930s, the New York Times was demonstrating its journalistic neutrality by supporting Stalin, while Cambridge University’s main student organization was demonstrating its neutrality by agreeing, after a debate, that this House sees more hope in Moscow than Detroit. And a big part of Orwell’s argument in 1984 and especially in Politics and the English Language is that the Left had been throwing the term “fascist” around with such wild abandon that it made it impossible to discern or defeat actual fascists. Substitute “racist” for “fascist” and that should sound awfully familiar.

    (For that matter, even the judiciary isn’t immune. Lots of European countries have laws against promoting hatred based on race or religion; none have laws against promoting hatred based on class.)

    The fact that Fox News is new but bias in the mainstream media is old suggests that we need to look for something that happened a little before Fox News was founded in 1996 that aggravated political divisions. Part of the explanation is obviously technological shifts like the birth of cable, but I think that a bigger part can be found in Michael Gorbachev’s comment about the impact of the fall of the USSR on US politics: “We will deprive you of an enemy and then what will you do?” The right reacted to 1989 by seeking to re-fight the Cold War against Clinton and Obama; the left reacted by denying that the USSR had ever been a national enemy.

    If I’m right, and the current era of partisanship is due to the disappearance of an existential threat, then maybe the current era isn’t so bad. It’s better to trade furious accusations of totalitarianism over the question of whether the top marginal tax rate should be 38% or 40% than it is to be unified by a confrontation with a terrifying enemy.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      “Resolved: This House sees more hope in anyplace than Detroit.”

    • dansimonicouldbewrong says:

      The hyper-partisanship is cyclical–the late 1960s and early 1970s were far worse, as were the 1930s. (And yes, Russia and Iran, however disturbing, are far less terrifying than the USSR was.) What happens is that the political coalitions labeled “left” and “right” coalesce, stabilize, and then eventually shatter under internal strains, reforming along different political axes. During the stable periods, the lines are clearly drawn, everyone understands each other, and implicit rules of partisan combat can be agreed on (sort of like the rules of war among European nation-states during times of political stability). During the periods of upheaval, though, those understandings collapse, and partisanship runs riot.

      We’re in an unstable period, when the “left” and “right” coalitions are being re-aligned, and the previous conventions are no longer respected. But if you go back to the 1967-75 period, you’ll find even more over-the-top rhetoric and blood-curdling partisan hatred–not to mention mass violence. So if it’s any consolation, things actually aren’t as bad as they could be…

    • Tatu Ahponen says:

      “the left reacted by denying that the USSR had ever been a national enemy.”

      …what?

  45. JulieK says:

    I think you need scare quotes on some of your uses of “neutral.”

  46. P. George Stewart says:

    One of the great mysterious of modern intellectual life is why Scott Alexander still feels enough allegiance to modern “liberalism” to defend it while scolding it 🙂

    Observing the hideous pomposity of the Left over the past few decades, and its grossly unfair treatment of the Right, is one of the many, many things that gradually turned me away from the Left.

    At some point, as a “liberal” (the very term is a classic example of doublethink these days) you’ve just got to look in the mirror. Or not.

    If you look in the mirror you become Andrew Breitbart or Evan Sayet (or any other of the multitude of those of us who have “turned”). At some point, you just think, “Fuck it, the dinner parties were never that good anyway.”

    • Anonymous says:

      One of the great mysterious of modern intellectual life is why Scott Alexander still feels enough allegiance to modern “liberalism” to defend it while scolding it 🙂

      Socio-economic reasons, I suspect. Abandoning it would lose him too many friends, make career building harder, etc.

      EDIT: Man, that italicized smiley is sure creepy.

    • manwhoisthursday says:

      He has a liberal tending personality while being smart enough to see that a lot of liberalism is complete bullshit. Plus as a white male moving in largely liberal environments he’s been occasionally victimized by various liberal fads. But basic personality traits run deep, so it isn’t surprising that he goes crawling back to mire from time to time.

      That’s my read on it.

      • Brad says:

        I’m sure we all appreciate your armchair psychoanalysis.

      • manwhoisthursday says:

        I seriously doubt anybody could dispute any of the following:

        1. Scott has a personality that is not that different from most liberals: he’s Open (interested in ideas), not very Orderly (very accepting of non-standard sexualities), and pretty Compassionate too (which pushes him away from hardcore libertarianism).
        2. Scott comes up with lots of good arguments for why standard left liberal positions are often wrong – he’s obviously very smart – and the reason he rejects a lot of standard left liberal positions is because he is so smart.
        3. Scott has been unfairly attacked by social justice types, who are unsympathetic to the plight of white males, alienating him somewhat from left liberalism.
        4. Basic personality runs deep, so Scott is still sympathetic to the spirit of left liberalism.

        • Ilya Shpitser says:

          This type of Bulverism is a dick move, is the point. You wouldn’t enjoy it if I did this type of Bulverism stuff to you.

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            Whatever. You can’t actually mount a factual case against what I’ve written, so now you’re down to namecalling. Keep on keeping on, brother.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Bulverism is not namecalling, Bulverism is a specific type of rhetorical tactic. One that you are using — someone else above mentioned “psychoanalysis,” that’s another name for Bulverism in this context.

            One nice thing about Bulverism is there is no factual case to be mounted — it’s safely unfalsifiable, relying as it does on Scott’s internal state, which only Scott has access to.

        • quanta413 says:

          OH, OH I CAN MAKE A DIFFERENT NARRATIVE!

          1. Scott has an empathy meter and sense of charity that is set so high it’s basically broken. That’s why he’s left wing but feels so terribly conflicted when left wing people do mean things. If Scott was right wing, he’d would have been worrying about Strom Thurmond’s racism contaminating conservatism or something (before Thurmond died).

          Most normal people left or right or purple have a sense of empathy that mostly just extends to family, people they like, and identities in their ingroup. Everyone else barely even registers on their meter, so they might feel bad if they’re unusually nice, but they are unlikely to go out of their way to do anything (this mostly goes for acts of intentional aggression too; the vast majority of people just can’t be bothered). This behavior is probably healthier for those people even if our civilization might be healthier if made up of people with empathy like Scott Alexanders.

          • grendelkhan says:

            The “overamped but very weird sense of empathy” reminds me of Brad Hicks, and given that Scott isn’t neurotypical either, seems like as good an explanation as any.

    • Deiseach says:

      It is entirely possible to believe in the doctrines of a position while excoriating the hypocrites who bring discredit upon that. It is not some great mystery. If Scott actually didn’t care, he wouldn’t bother scolding the misdeeds of liberalism, he’d be content to float along in his social circle nodding and smiling to the shibboleths of the tribe.

      I’m with Brad: can the armchair psychoanalysts stick a sock in it? I’m fed up to the back teeth of family members on Facebook posting articles from “leading psychiatrists” calling for Trump’s impeachment on the grounds of him being a raving lunatic as they helpfully point out the twenty signs of him having this, that and the other mental illness, even if they haven’t been within one hundred yards of the man in real life. It’s no more appealing to see all the chin-stroking about the state of Scott’s immortal soul psyche and pronouncement of confident, infallible judgement on same.

      • gbdub says:

        +1 to this, and besides, were I forced to guess, I suspect “Scott the conservative” would be making more or less the same arguments against conservative excess anyway, were that the tribe he were immersed in. Not only put a sock in armchair psychoanalysis, but also be careful what you wish for.

      • grendelkhan says:

        Thank you. I vaguely remember you being some kind of Christian, so I’m guessing that you’re intimately familiar with the concept of ‘I’m a fan, but I can’t stand the fandom’.

        I know our host is peculiarly good at writing from a perspective he doesn’t hold, but if writing a humongous post about how liberalism and progressivism are not only wonderful but kinda historically inevitable didn’t get the message across, I don’t know what would.

        “Why on earth is Scott a liberal?” He told you people! A lot!

      • An I the only person here who finds that Scott reminds him of George Orwell–a committed socialist who saw most of the things wrong with socialist beliefs as they existed around him.

        • Enkidum says:

          Nope. Seems the obvious comparison for many of these articles.

        • cassander says:

          Orwell gets more credit than he deserves. Sure, he never fell for stalin, and while that puts him in fairly rare company, it’s still a damnably low bar. And he was entirely on board with lenin, who wasn’t really all that much better. At the end of the day, he was still a revolutionary socialist at the core, his problem with stalin was that he betrayed the cause.

          • @Cassander:

            That isn’t fair.

            “By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it. Britain, he says, is now going the same road as Germany, with the left-wing intelligentsia in the van and the Tory Party a good second. The only salvation lies in returning to an unplanned economy, free competition, and emphasis on liberty rather than on security.In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.”

            From his joint review of _The Road to Serfdom_ and a book by Zilliacus.

            He saw the danger with socialism, he just thought the alternative might be even worse, so hoped to somehow manage a version of socialism that avoided the danger.

      • benwave says:

        Hear hear.

    • ChetC3 says:

      He’s “one of the good ones.” It’s a common enough affectation, what’s so mysterious about it?

    • shmorg says:

      Probably because liberalism subscribes to rationality more than other coalitions. Most serious liberals I think are heavily invested in self-criticism, an intellectual endeavor which leads to better progress on development and growth than no self-criticism. It’s better for science, and better for rationality, as long as you know those are growth oriented realms of discussion and parsing.

      Good luck finding that quality in conservative circles. You might as well see anyone hinting that a little self-doubt would be good for the echo-chamber be excommunicated as a liberal-sympathizer.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        Your self-doubt is a mighty fine thing, no denying that.

      • hendrikvandersteijn says:

        It’s true that self-criticism is an important intellectual endeavor for the reasons you have stated, but I am not sure the statement “most serious liberals” engaging in more self criticism is an accurate one.

        Whether it’s the tone-deaf CNN that tried to claim that looking at wikileaks is illegal for non-journalists or the left in general embracing the unscientific idea of embracing 30+ genders and lack of criticism at the sometimes succesful attempts to legislate people who refuse to use new pronouns such as “zim” “zir” and “xir”.

        And of course to deviate just from this gender topic but not other parts of liberal ideas, is enough to be excommunicated and branded a conservative in the same way as being pro-choice but otherwise conservative might in old conservative circles.

        I think the idea that liberals are more scientific or mire self-critic is an idea that’s losing currency fast.

        • shmorg says:

          I think you give the media and those liberals that are so stingy about social justice, gender, and PC waaay too much credit. I for one, with mostly successful liberal friends, know very few who give any weight to those things. In fact, we blame those concepts for the rise of Trump just like everyone else. You’re conflating the dumbing down of society and popular culture with the real core of liberalism that is towed by academics and intellection, and not tied down by presumtions of our culture.

          Sure, PC topics really annoying things and they are tied to “liberalism”, by your coalition, but then I can safely say that you completely miss the point of our coalition. I would argue that Scott is the best example of a serious liberal there is.

          Also, the above poster mocking self-criticism is really pathetic.

          • I would argue that Scott is the best example of a serious liberal there is.

            Are you meaning “best” to mean “most admirable” or “most typical”? The latter, I am afraid, is not true, unless you are True Scotsmaning “serious liberal.”

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Well then, could you maybe get your liberal friends to speak up once in a while? ‘Cos the “thirty genders” types are winning and getting their way everywhere.

            This reminds me about how when someone complains about left-wing attempts to silence speech on college campus or enforce all kinds of crazy politically correct standards, the standard retort is “Oh, that’s just a tiny minority, most students just roll their eyes at this stuff.” Great. Good for them (and I believe it, too, most students wouldn’t care about politics if you put a gun to their heads and ordered them to vote.) But all that eye-rolling didn’t stop the riots at Middlebury and Berkeley. All that eye-rolling didn’t keep those professors at Yale from being sacked for their insensitivity about Halloween costumes. All that eye-rolling doesn’t remove illiberal types from positions of power in student government where they can and do gleefully crack down on their enemies. How about all these sensible people stop eye-rolling and start speaking out before it’s too late?

          • The Nybbler says:

            How about all these sensible people stop eye-rolling and start speaking out before it’s too late?

            What, are they fools? They don’t want to be tarred with the same brush and beaten and/or fired themselves?

            No, these so-called sensible people are at best useless moderates, the sort who when you say “It’s horrible that thing X is not tolerated, and bad thing Y happens to X-doers” will tell you “You’re overreacting, no one’s going to Y someone just for doing X” and then when you go and DO thing X and Y happens, they say “Well, what did you expect?” That’s at best. At worst the moderation is just a front.

      • P. George Stewart says:

        Is it “liberalism subscribes to rationality”, or “liberalism likes to think it subscribes to rationality”?

        As I pointed out, many who become libertarian or conservative do so from a prior liberal position – that might have been a serious application of self-critical rationality!

        Personally, I’d go so far as to say that if you’re a modern liberal and are really self-critically rational, you’re going to become either conservative or, at the least stretch, “bleeding heart libertarian” (which is really good, old-fashioned liberal, returning to classical liberal roots, without the tropes the hard Left bamboozled liberalism into accepting during the course of the early 20th century). To my mind, Scott is really a bleeding heart libertarian, but he’s unwilling to go the extra step in disassociating himself from what modern “liberalism” has become.

        I suppose it depends on the scope – go far back enough and anything that isn’t hidebound traditionalism is liberal, in which case we are all liberal, and you are correct. But it’s self-serving to link “nice, self-criticizing people” with modern “liberals”, if you are one (or even if you aren’t).

        • Brad says:

          As I pointed out, many who become libertarian or conservative do so from a prior liberal position – that might have been a serious application of self-critical rationality!

          This simply is not true. The vast overwhelming majority of libertarian or conservative people were born into it. You can’t draw good conclusions about 300 million people by observing the characteristics of the 30 people you know well.

          • John Schilling says:

            The vast overwhelming majority of libertarian or conservative people were born into it.

            That is almost certainly not true of libertarians, and if you are going to lump the two together like that I am going to demand your evidence w/re the conservatives.

          • Brad says:

            I didn’t lump them together that way, P. George Stewart did.

          • John Schilling says:

            He made a properly-qualified statement that was true of both groups. You responded with a statement that was clearly false of one of them. The onus was on you to delink them, if you’re going to say something that’s not true of both.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          That’s the rub, isn’t it? As we’ve already seen with reference to self-doubt, what liberalism thinks it subscribes to and what it actually subscribes to can be two entirely different things.

        • shmorg says:

          Is it “liberalism subscribes to rationality”, or “liberalism likes to think it subscribes to rationality”?

          Both. You need to believe the virtue of the ordeal while implementing it. Blocking off one or the other would be willful ignorance. And rationality is an incomplete a priori concept, and still requires discovery. Similar to how society still requires discovery and new ideas. You should realize that NOT doing this will create a buildup of assumptions.

          you’re going to become either conservative or, at the least stretch, “bleeding heart libertarian”

          Hm. I live in DC, so I’m currently becoming friends with more conservatives than ever, and I’ve lived all over the country, mostly in metro areas, but I’m from Orange County, CA, which was a special kind of class-entitled conservatism. I know all the alignments of my former classmates, and I’ve yet to meet any trans-political types. Why? I don’t know, I’m still young, but I think you’re parroting a baby boomer assumption, that is: as people age they “trend towards conservative beliefs” simply because society moves left over time. And I don’t think I’ll ever believe “taxation is theft,” or “government sucks,” or whatever core belief you think I’m not getting. And I’m not sure conservatives like yourself could explain what liberal values actually are, beyond what spurs annoyance on your end.

          It’s funny how in this last point about scope you highlight your awareness of trends but fail to apply it to your own assumption about the very time-oriented trends of conservatism and aging people.

          To my mind, Scott is really a bleeding heart libertarian,

          Also, why doesn’t Scott explicity saying he’s liberal in this article convince you of that? Care to qualify his misguidedness?

          • P. George Stewart says:

            Both

            Ideally, sure, but I’m questioning whether it’s actually exclusively the latter.

            but I think you’re parroting a baby boomer assumption

            Well no, I’m going by my own experience. I’m 57, I was a social democrat tending towards socialist till my mid-20s when I gradually transitioned to classical liberal/libertarian – partly, as I said, because the smug self-satisfaction on my side was beginning to nauseate me, but there were plenty of doctrinal reasons too.

            And some of the most … troublesome … conservatives and libertarians, the most publicly visible, have come from the Left. Us apostates know you guys’ game 😉

      • JohnBuridan says:

        I live in Traditionalreligionopolis, and sowing self-doubt is impossible and will quickly make you enemies. You have to be careful how you do it. It does require knowledge of the exact sub-culture you are dealing with.

        I was talking to a fairly conservative agricultural entymologist the other day, and I was trying to talk with him about the journal article posted at the beginning of this comment thread about Liberal Bias in the Journalism, instead he was trashing on Black Lives Matter. So instead of examining bias in media with him as I wanted to, I wound up defending Black Lives Matter… and he changed his opinion on BLM and stopped accusing the slogan of being racist.

        But we have developed rapport, and we can speak each other’s dialects and we are both edumacated.

        Consider another case, I have an older friend, psychologist speicalizing in eating disorders, who married an extremist Catholic, who easily believes the worst about minorities, immigrants, the Pope (because he’s a liberal pope), etc. He has male friends within this extremist Christian group, but doesn’t share their worldview at all, nor does he really strive to shake them out of it, he just tolerates it, and argues against specific claims whenever they are made. Since he’s an older gent, I have found inspiring his ability to adopt intellectual independence without resenting the tribe he has been adopted into.

        I think if one is a liberal in Conservativeville, it behooves one to adopt a moderate, easy-going temperament, and to value the people around you as more than the beliefs which they hold in their head. I think this is the most honorable and effective way to deal with entrenched and incorrect orthodoxies. I am sure the same applies in Liberaltopia.

  47. morrisn says:

    Thanks for the analysis. In my view, to help fix the problem, we should bring back the Fairness Doctrine in some form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

    I think the argument for doing away with the Fairness Doctrine is that people now have so many sources of information to go to now that they can seek out fair and balanced views by going to these multiple channels/sources. However, people are inherently lazy and will stick with one or a couple of channels/sources to get their information and will often stick with THE channels/sources that affirm their own beliefs. If the Fairness Doctrine were brought back, the major channels/sources — where a preponderance of the population get their news — will at least have some modicum of fairness and balance, which will then hopefully lead to a more widely centrist viewpoint on the issues rather that what we have now with the two extremes yelling at each other. If the people don’t want or accept these fair and balanced views, they can then seek out other channels/sources, which will still be available (internet blogs, podcasts, etc) but more in the fringe.

    My two cents.

    • Incurian says:

      You can’t think of any other arguments against the fairness doctrine – the thing where the government decides if the news is doing a good enough job?

  48. jrw says:

    I want to agree with this post; I really do. I wrote something similar back during the election. If Democrats as a party have done a terrible job with brand and messaging, liberaldom writ large has done an even worse one — “Just trust us, you fucking bigoted bumpkins” is not a persuasive argument.

    And yet. Obviously, this is anecdotal, but when I actually go to grapple with my right-wing friends and acquaintances on Facebook — many of whom I know in real life, people I trust to be fundamentally decent — I don’t hear, “We just wish the news media and other mainstream institutions would approach conservative positions with more diligence and nuance.”

    I hear, “You know, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery at all, just states’ rights.”

    I hear, “I strongly believe in limited government — except when it comes to actual armed agents of the state, whom I believe should have the freedom to act with near-impunity.” You post a video where a cop shoots a guy running away in the back, and their comments boil down to “Hmmm, this looks troubling; I’ll need more information.” (Note, too, that the liberal press has given a ton of space to perspectives defending police.)

    The other week, in the space of a few minutes, one guy went from “You guys are terrible for saying that Trump voters care more about party than country; we deserve your respect” to “No, I wouldn’t even consider signing a petition to get him to release his tax returns; why should I care about your opinion anyway?”

    I have one right-wing FB friend who considers himself an amateur pundit. Last October, he posted a video of a state legislator running for reelection meeting with his newspaper’s editorial board and mused, “Now why is an elected official sitting down for a private meeting with the media like this?” He was not aware that meeting candidates is how editorial boards decide on their endorsements. Nor did he understand that a meeting that was recorded and posted on the paper’s website was not a secret, private meeting. Do you think that after these things were pointed out to him, he stopped and engaged in serious reflection about whether he possessed the basic requisite knowledge to offer educated commentary on American politics? If he did, it didn’t stop him from returning to posting his thoughts soon after.

    I posted about the importance of net neutrality in 2010 or so. One righty friend commented, “You may think it’s good now, but let me ask you: Would you have supported having net neutrality under George W. Bush?”

    Vox gave an anti-abortion Christian a platform to explain his movement’s views. As a Christian myself, though pro-choice, I am aware there is a compelling pro-life argument to be made about the sanctity of the ineffable soul overriding mere earthly concerns. As a thinking person open to persuasion by reason, however, I am also aware that this piece was absolutely not that.

    And then you’ve got the actual Republican party itself, a group that has evolved in such a way as to not only have run a reality-TV star with no governing experience as its presidential candidate, but that can’t even pull its shit together enough to write, much less pass, legislation they’ve been talking about for seven years. Trump administration officials stood up in front of America last week and tried to sell a one-page, double-spaced outline that didn’t include any actual numbers as a viable tax plan.

    I mean: How would a responsible news media report on this stuff in a way that is palatable to right-wingers without making the rest of their audience think they were full of shit? It’s not like the New York Times didn’t just give Bret Stephens a column. It’s not like every reputable news organization in the country hasn’t repeatedly reported the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a big win for Trump, even though it amounted to him literally picking a name off of a list. (Does anyone seriously think he sat down and did a bunch of background research on potential nominees? Does anyone think he even read three or four of their Wikipedia entries?) It’s not like we weren’t deluged with self-flagellating features about “real Americans in Trump Country” for months after the election.

    Can a responsible news outlet even report on supply-side economics without qualification at this point? Where are the right-wing positions whose viability is grounded in empirical knowledge and some kind of consistent philosophy? Because I’m not seeing a ton of them, and I’m not sure how a responsible journalism can cover the ones that are out there any better than they do. I agree that mockery, self-righteousness, and an attitude of superiority aren’t helpful. But do we treat conservatives like children, then? I’ve found that being respectful and thoughtful doesn’t tend to change their minds — you’re still just met with a kind of wall of quiet smugness, a sense that they’re perfectly happy to go on maintaining an inconsistent set of beliefs, because to do otherwise would be to admit defeat and that’s not going to happen.

    • jrw says:

      (For the record, to answer my own questions: The problem is not the media per se. The problem isn’t even right-wingers. The problem is the general sense of anxiety and disconnection that has afflicted us since the advent of electric technology. And the answer is that Vox and its ilk can’t really help us. There’s a desperate need for a new local journalism that helps re-adhere people to their physical communities while also helping them learn how to evaluate information. Because the sense of resentment and displacement on the right is a real and legitimate thing, and the remedy lies in reestablishing a social fabric that’s tied to real places.)

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I think this misses the forest for the trees.

        I think these themes of discontent are as old as the advent of population sizes bigger than Dunbar’s number.

        Even more to the point, we are social heirarchical animals, we are always going to be churning trying to achieve or maintain social status. Small group or large group.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          “Even more to the point, we are social heirarchical animals, we are always going to be churning trying to achieve or maintain social status.”

          Actually, I think our future is harder to predict than that.

          Arguably, we waste a lot of effort on status. If there’s some sort of biological engineering possible which would make people less hierarchical, might it come into use enough to make a difference?

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Well said.

      I wonder, does Scott grant the left the same charity he grants the right?

      Red Tribe has been deriding Blue Tribe for a long time (and vice-verse, to be sure). Sneering at intellectuals in there ivory tower is, well, memetic. Sneering at kids who are smart and did stupid things like asking questions in class is something that people here may be familiar with.

      Is it any wonder that the journalists, academics, scientists, etc. embrace the tribe that embraces them?

      • Thegnskald says:

        Yes, he does.

        Let’s not pretend that Sony coopting feminism to make a mediocre movie remake and attack the critics is anything resembling what Leftism really is – yet that is what passes for Leftism anymore in some circles. And if that is your brand of Leftism, I can see why it wouldn’t seem like he has charity for the Left.

        But his charity for the Left is the same as his charity for the Right – he assumes that there are sane people on both sides who don’t buy into the ridiculous nonsense that fills the fringes.

        He complains about the Left fringes because that is what he deals with. That is what most of us here deal with. I would have to go out of my way to deal with right wing crazy, and since I don’t have a vested interest in making the right wing out to be stupid or villainous or both, I don’t. Left wing crazy, though, fills my social bubbles, right down to the crazy guy in my local game group trying to turn it into a “safe space” (and it goes without saying that he is the most verbally abusive guy in the group, to the point where he yelled at a woman when she was alone in a parking lot walking back to her car at night).

        That there is a high number of sociopathic assholes using social justice as a shield for their behavior isn’t a problem with Leftism, it is a problem with people. The problem with Leftism is there are way too many people who think Leftism is immune to people problems, and that any criticism of tactics some Leftists use, especially against fellow Leftists, is a plot to undermine it.

        • P. George Stewart says:

          Well said. I can see that many of you more serious Left-wingers are actually as pissed off with SJWs as the Right, and for the reasons you say.

          Basically, you have a situation where what you might call “religious feeling” can be attached to both the Left and the Right for some people in those respective camps. For the Right, that’s understandable, they actually have a real religion that they’re attached to, and it bleeds through to their political views.

          But for the Left, the problem has always been a certain kind of secular quasi-religious, cult-like tendency (stemming originally I think from the influence of people like Rousseau, Herder, etc., and the crossing of streams with the Romantic movement). It’s like, all the feelings normally reserved for religion, for some on the Left, glommed onto the utopian aspirations of the Left.

          You can see this push/pull going back to people like Marx and Lenin, who were pissed off with the Utopian Left (or the “infantile Left”, as Lenin called it). Essentially you’ve got two major strands of the Left, the utopian/noble savage/Lennon’s “Imagine” bunch, and the serious “scientific” bunch (the hardcore Communists or Social Democrats who actually achieved power), who are concerned about actually achievable change, who are rational and go by evidence and reason.

          There’s probably this tug of war in the heart of even sensible Leftists. In a way Scott is trying to keep the Left scientific.

          Ofc as a classical liberal/libertarian, I think it’s a lost cause. But I can certainly respect those on the Left who still stick to reason and evidence-based thinking. The SJW crowd have obviously abandoned reason and evidence-based thinking in favour of rationalization and confirmation bias, in a big way.

          But I think as a serious Leftist, you’ve got to consider the possibility that the SJWs are your final form, after the failure of your scientific bods to effect any sort of cure that’s better than the disease.

          IOW, a goodly proportion of people on your side have moved to quasi-religious thinking because so much evidence from actually-existing forms of the Left is bad news, so it’s like, “So much for reason and evidence-based thinking.”

          I noticed this particularly with the fall of Communism, which one might have thought would have occasioned a bit of soul-searching (or more properly, ideology-searching). But no, the Left doubled down. Same again with 9/11 – so many on the Left doubled down with the “progressive stack” (which is just another way of saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) or the “US is eeebil and deserves it” thing.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            It’s kind of odd that Lenin gets to be non-Utopian in your scheme, when Leninism is rather millenarian and short of “actually achievable change. ”

            Socialism in one country is less abrupt of a transition to utopia than global revolution, but he and his followers believed that they could create an earthly paradise. And they didn’t seem very phased when their attempt began to cost millions of innocent lives.

            That said, you have a good point which I would like to see more of. Christian and socialist millenarians are more similar than they are different in a lot of ways. It’s a dangerous tendency which needs to be guarded against regardless of which side of the aisle it’s seen on.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            Marxism is very strictly *anti*-utopian – it’s raw, pure, materialism. They believed in creating a better world through government policy, sure, but so does every government.

            Marx and Lenin’s ideas on how to do so weren’t some kind of magic – “abolish the bourgeoisie as a class” strikes me as a very simple way to solve the problems of both production for exchange over production for use and of economic inequality. If it was indeed a wrong way to solve those problems (and I think it was the right way, although I also think Lenin seriously erred in creating an unaccountable vanguard to implement it) it was far from obviously so.

          • Rob K says:

            @birdboy2000

            this is a really silly argument. if you look at Marx’s intellectual project as a whole he starts out writing about “universal human emancipation”, then focuses on the proletariat as the “universal negative” – the class that can’t be emancipated unless all classes are, and proceeds from there.

            The focus on materialism actually comes second (although still quite early in his career).

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            Nabil ad Dajjal –

            It’s kind of odd that Lenin gets to be non-Utopian in your scheme, when Leninism is rather millenarian and short of “actually achievable change. ”

            Socialism in one country is less abrupt of a transition to utopia than global revolution, but he and his followers believed that they could create an earthly paradise. And they didn’t seem very phased when their attempt began to cost millions of innocent lives.

            Marx comes up with a totally new social arrangement that promises paradise on Earth and to be perfect for everyone – why the hell not promise that since the pressure on memetic evolution is getting people to believe the idea rather than the truth value of the idea. Of course, being a totally new social structure, when it gets implemented it gets captured by sociopaths because the memeplex wasn’t under selective pressure for excluding sociopaths or even for bending sociopathic people’s energies towards pro-social goals. Lenin is the sociopath who actually tries to implement the Marxian utopia – of course he doesn’t count as a utopian.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Yes, he does.

          You know what Scott didn’t write?

          The anti-Feminist FAQ.

          Nor The anti-Communism FAQ. Nor the anti-Socialism FAQ. Nor the anti-(or pro!)Social Welfare FAQ.

          I think he is making the mistake of not spending nearly enough effort engaging seriously with ideas on the left he disagrees with (in whole or in part).

          It’s easy for Scott to display all sorts of charity towards subject considered to be on the right side of the spectrum. It’s considerably harder for him to display charity towards subjects on the left he disagrees with.

          • Thegnskald says:

            His older stuff is full of exactly that; that was one of the topics that made him (in)famous. The post on superweapons, for example.

            He has stopped writing it, mostly.

          • gbdub says:

            Wasn’t the “anti-libertarian FAQ” kind of a “pro social welfare FAQ”?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Thegnskald:
            Are you talking about this post or this post?

            Neither of those attempts to actually dig into feminist theory in a charitable way and explain it thoroughly. He focuses almost entirely on the error he thinks is being made.

          • Thegnskald says:

            He has devoted far more words to both the merits and failures of SJ than he has to, say, libertarianism. His old blog description of privilege, for example, intended to convey the concept to those who didn’t understand it, and his defense of trigger warnings.

            The problem I have, I guess, is I don’t quite understand what you want him to write; a treatise on why women are people too? Are you looking for him to prove his feminist credentials, as he attempts to do with his FAQs, to prove his is writing in good faith? Because as far as I can tell, the major reason he doesn’t do that is that the things he would write are the kinds of things he feels go without saying.

        • reasoned argumentation says:

          That there is a high number of sociopathic assholes using social justice as a shield for their behavior isn’t a problem with Leftism, it is a problem with people.

          The critique of the left and their preferred policies is usually that those policies empower sociopathic people while in contrast, rightist policies were organically evolved solutions to individual sociopathy.

          That sociopaths find and exploit the bugs in totally novel social systems is an entirely predictable outcome of introducing new social systems.

          • The Nybbler says:

            That sociopaths find and exploit the bugs in totally novel social systems is an entirely predictable outcome of introducing new social systems.

            One extremely annoying to the sociopaths who have already managed to get on top of the old social system by finding and exploiting its bugs.

            @cassander: Yes, precisely. Thank you, Ambrose Bierce.

          • cassander says:

            @The Nybbler

            CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

          • hlynkacg says:

            One party is stupid, the other is evil. Occasionally they get together to do something that is both stupid and evil. We call this “Bipartisanship”

    • Thegnskald says:

      Eh. The crazy people exist on both sides of the spectrum, it is just harder to see the crazies on your own side, because it tends to require arguing with somebody’s small crazies to reach the big ones, and we tolerate the small stuff on our own side.

      Personally I went from hard leftist to libertarianism as a teen to something like conservativism to a soft leftism.

      I can describe the mindset at each stage with a parable about a public swimming pool:

      As a child, it offended me that the pool charged people. Everybody should be able to enjoy it. Then I realized that pools require maintenance.

      As a teenager, it offended me that there were rules on what material swimsuits could be made out of – what kind of nonsense was that? Then I realized the rules were actually in place to keep people from swimming in their underwear.

      As a young adult, it offended me how people ignored the rules, which were there to optimize the pool for the best enjoyment for everyone – then I realized the rules were more about protecting the pool owners than protecting the swimmers.

      Now I am just fed up with all the bickering about the pool, which has since turned into a massive high school level drama fest of complaints from group A about how group B doesn’t like group C. (Seriously, that is how I see identity politics. National politics brought down to the level that high school social groups operate at.)

      It is all a bunch of stupid nonsense at this point which everybody pretends matters. The conservatives have turned into populists and the liberals have turned into either whining high schoolers or corporate shills or both. There is no intelligence to be found on either side, and if we can stop pretending the issue is the other side, rather than the ridiculous popularity contest that politics has turned into, maybe we can get somewhere.

      Not holding my breath.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Your mistake seems to be thinking now that the world has changed, rather than merely, again, your perception of it.

        Politics is messy, inherently so. It has always been this way. It’s not new.

      • jrw says:

        No, it’s harder to see the crazies on my side because they’re not standing up in front of America trying to sell a one-page, double-spaced outline that doesn’t include any actual numbers as a viable tax plan.

        There are certainly crazies on both sides. But one side is electing them to office and appointing them to positions of power far, far more often than the other.

        • Thegnskald says:

          Would you have known about a similar issue four years ago, or regarded it as a big deal?

          If the Democrats had put forward an unfinished bill, would you regard it as idiocy, or incomplete? Would you defend it as a working proposal that wasn’t finished yet?

          Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

          • jrw says:

            Did…did that happen? It wasn’t an unfinished bill — it was a “major tax reform proposal” that was just a copied-and-pasted vague campaign promise including none of the numbers necessary to evaluate it. Did the Obama administration — or any other administration you can remember — did they ever put anything like that forth? And I just missed it?

          • Iain says:

            @Thegnskald: Instead of asking questions, why don’t you try finding an example? Because if you can’t find one, then maybe you should consider the possibility that jrw has already examined and rejected the proposition that this perceived asymmetry is just confirmation bias.

            Cynical “both sides do it”-ism is also a hell of a drug.

          • Thegnskald says:

            jrw –

            I actually have zero idea what the specifics are in this case, mostly because I don’t care, but yes, that sort of thing is common in government, owing to the ways bills are written by committee; this is true for bills, and doubly true for proposals for bills.

            Obama didn’t write the healthcare bill, and the vague concepts he proposed in no way resembled the bill that actually passed.

            Which is good, really. The President isn’t expected to be a lawmaker, and the idea of Trump writing proposals that pass unchanged into law is rather concerning.

          • jrw says:

            There’s always less detail from the 10,000-foot view, and legislation always changes from conception to passage; but no, the lack of detail here was quite remarkable, vastly unlike any previous proposal of its kind, especially one presented with such public pomp. That’s according to those of us who have some idea about the specifics in this case.

            I’m not sure why you’re so certain that your admitted lack of information on this topic somehow trumps my informed opinion, but I am sure that I have better things to do than delve into that with you. Have a good day? Have a good day.

          • Thegnskald says:

            jrw –

            I am uncertain why you think having detailed knowledge based on obvious misinformation is a positive thing.

            Imagine an alternate reality where the proposal had numbers in it. Does your opinion of Trump change? Or does the reporting you hear merely change to say the numbers are obviously fake based on this report from this Democratic think tank?

            The reporting on Trump as an idiot in no way depends on whether or not he is an idiot.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Imagine an alternate reality where the proposal had numbers in it.

            Like, random numbers?

            Or an actual detailed policy proposal that estimates effects on revenue, the deficit, GDP (if you are into dynamic scoring), etc?

            In the second case, I think that is the minimum bar to clear. Failing that, you don’t clear the minimum bar.

          • Thegnskald says:

            That might be your minimum bar, but numbers would be portrayed as ignorant or lies or both, if that is what existed to criticize.

            This isn’t a counterfactual reality, either; Bush’s numbers were routinely portrayed in exactly that light.

            If the same people criticize you either way, it stops being meaningful to try to meet their expectations.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            If the same people criticize you either way, it stops being meaningful to try to meet their expectations.

            But if it is new and different people offering new and different criticisms, in addition to the same old, same old, you can’t treat that all as undifferentiated lump.

            1) “I am going to retire early by making 20% returns in the stock market, pursuing a counter-cyclical strategy of buying and selling precious metals and oil futures”
            – This will get an argument that, although this is theoretically possible, it has been tried and found wanting by casual traders before.

            2) “I am going to retire early by playing the lotto.”
            – That will get the argument that you don’t seem to have actually put much thought into this.

      • The crazy people exist on both sides of the “spectrum, it is just harder to see the crazies on your own side, ”

        If you think the extemists are all on side, you’re an extremist on the other.

    • jrw says:

      Like: Is this sort of thing happening with any regularity among liberals? Because it seems to happen all the time on the right — that it’s not just random supporters who post stuff like this, but actual party officials. This is a group that repeatedly demonstrates that it is systemically deficient, in ways that by its own admission are unacceptable. How does journalism — or any responsible institution — accommodate them (any more than it already does) without succumbing?

      • Thegnskald says:

        Sure. Scott Foval, for a more extreme example.

        That you don’t hear about them is an indictment of your sources of information.

    • Deiseach says:

      I’ve found that being respectful and thoughtful doesn’t tend to change their minds

      Of course it doesn’t. Would you be convinced to get saved by someone who was respectfully and thoughtfully trying to get you to ask Jesus into your heart, and you knew that was the entire point of the conversation, and they were just trying to manoeuvre you around into agreeing they were right and you were mistaken and the only thing to do was accept their axioms, go down on your knees, and say the Sinner’s Prayer?

      The point of respectful, thoughtful engagement is to meet the other person halfway and treat them as holding their beliefs sincerely, not as a soft way to sneak up on them and perform the mind-changing ju-jitsu of “so we agree: your beliefs are inconsistent and maintaining them in the face of my obvious correctness is merely quiet smugness”. It’s entirely possible to go away from a discussion with neither party having changed their mind but both having a better understanding of the disputed ground.

    • Deiseach says:

      As a Christian myself, though pro-choice, I am aware there is a compelling pro-life argument to be made about the sanctity of the ineffable soul overriding mere earthly concerns. As a thinking person open to persuasion by reason, however, I am also aware that this piece was absolutely not that.

      Hmm. And here was me thinking it wasn’t about the sanctity of the ineffable soul, it was about the right to life of a human being, even if the existing life is still in a state of development and immaturity. Glad we cleared that one up! Why, if only all my fellow bigots knew that this was what the whole abortion debate was about, we could easily arrive at a compromise like the Buddhist acceptance of abortion! After all, the ineffable soul cannot be destroyed, so who cares about the clump of cells it is temporarily attached to?

      • manwhoisthursday says:

        A lot of leftist thought contains a residual Cartesianism.

        Granted that Classical metaphysics views human being as have an immaterial aspect, that immaterial aspect is only part of a human being. And that immaterial aspect on it’s own is only a radically mutilated piece of a human being.

    • random832 says:

      @jrw

      I posted about the importance of net neutrality in 2010 or so. One righty friend commented, “You may think it’s good now, but let me ask you: Would you have supported having net neutrality under George W. Bush?”

      Did you ever find out what he thought net neutrality was?

    • Tracy W says:

      Changing minds is slow work. For any reason.
      Let’s imagine that your life work is teaching people martial arts. Would you expect to be able to say “Okay, here’s how you throw a punch” and then everyone goes off and perfectly throws a punch? Nope. Martial arts teachers get their students to practice throwing punches. A lot. An awful lot. That’s because new neuron paths need to be forged in the brain. The brain needs to learn that when it decides to throw a punch, then it is to automatically reach for that way. And that takes time.

      Ditto with more mental learning. Kids have to practice reading and maths.

      I did a tramping leadership course and it talked about how to fast forward this process of learning (in the context of life-and-death decisions, and that was when you’re making a risky decision like whether to cross a river that’s running high, to think about an experienced wise tramper you know, say ‘John’, and what he would do in your situation. Obviously for this to be useful, you have to have at least some of John’s experience, but the point of the trick is to find a way of making your knowledge of good practice salient.

      And at least two of these are cases where the student typically wants to learn. You are talking about teaching things to people who don’t know they need to change. Who think they are fine as they are. That’s another barrier to learning.

      Martial artists and school teachers expect their students to take years to master even the basics of fighting or reading. That’s the time frame you should be thinking of. Then add on a bit more to account for that they don’t realise they need to learn. Good luck.

      • hlynkacg says:

        @ Tracy

        That was well said, thank you.

      • Martial artists and school teachers expect their students to take years to master even the basics of fighting or reading

        .

        I can’t speak to martial artists, but I expect students to take something from weeks to months to master the basics of reading.

        • Tracy W says:

          I was thinking of mastery in the sense of this being a tool you can use no matter how stressed you are, be that you were suddenly jumped by a guy in the bar, or are sitting a high stakes exam in a subject you don’t know very well with a massive head cold (I still could read!), or you’re low on food and due back at work tomorrow but it’s been raining heavily, or you’re in the full emotional​ flow of righteous indignance at political malefesance.

    • cassander says:

      I hear, “I strongly believe in limited government — except when it comes to actual armed agents of the state, whom I believe should have the freedom to act with near-impunity.” You post a video where a cop shoots a guy running away in the back, and their comments boil down to “Hmmm, this looks troubling; I’ll need more information.” (Note, too, that the liberal press has given a ton of space to perspectives defending police.)

      DO you really not see how, if there were fewer laws, those armed agents of the state would be less of an issue? But putting that aside, please show me anyone on the right arguing that cops should have “near impunity”. The only people i kno who argue for that are the police unions, which aren’t exactly hotbeds of rightwing thinking.

      The other week, in the space of a few minutes, one guy went from “You guys are terrible for saying that Trump voters care more about party than country; we deserve your respect” to “No, I wouldn’t even consider signing a petition to get him to release his tax returns; why should I care about your opinion anyway?”

      How does getting trumps tax returns “help the country”?

      Vox gave an anti-abortion Christian a platform to explain his movement’s views. As a Christian myself, though pro-choice, I am aware there is a compelling pro-life argument to be made about the sanctity of the ineffable soul overriding mere earthly concerns. As a thinking person open to persuasion by reason, however, I am also aware that this piece was absolutely not that.

      that vox is terrible is an argument against the RIGHT now? my how things change quickly.

      And then you’ve got the actual Republican party itself, a group that has evolved in such a way as to not only have run a reality-TV star with no governing experience as its presidential candidate

      This is worse than running a former politician’s corrupt, inept wife? On what scale do you measure these things?

      but that can’t even pull its shit together enough to write, much less pass, legislation they’ve been talking about for seven years.

      Except a dozen repeals of obama regulations you mean? or an expansion in military spending?

      Trump administration officials stood up in front of America last week and tried to sell a one-page, double-spaced outline that didn’t include any actual numbers as a viable tax plan.

      You mean like this one?

      I mean: How would a responsible news media report on this stuff in a way that is palatable to right-wingers without making the rest of their audience think they were full of shit?

      They might try not blatantly misrepresenting what trump says, for a start.

      It’s not like the New York Times didn’t just give Bret Stephens a column. It’s not like every reputable news organization in the country hasn’t repeatedly reported the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a big win for Trump, even though it amounted to him literally picking a name off of a list.

      You mean the way the press always does? How dare they!

      (Does anyone seriously think he sat down and did a bunch of background research on potential nominees? Does anyone think he even read three or four of their Wikipedia entries?)

      Do you think obama did? or clinton, whose list of cabinet choices included “likely african american” as EPA head?

      Can a responsible news outlet even report on supply-side economics without qualification at this point?

      Can you even define supply-side economics?

      Where are the right-wing positions whose viability is grounded in empirical knowledge and some kind of consistent philosophy? Because I’m not seeing a ton of them,

      Have you tried looking places besides your facebook feed? Because there are plenty of right wingers around here who spend their free time articulating them.

      I’ve found that being respectful and thoughtful doesn’t tend to change their minds — you’re still just met with a kind of wall of quiet smugness, a sense that they’re perfectly happy to go on maintaining an inconsistent set of beliefs, because to do otherwise would be to admit defeat and that’s not going to happen.

      Funny, that’s exactly what we think about you. But then, most of us don’t do that while posting a long string of bad arguments about how terrible liberals are, then end it by asking why they don’t listen to us.

    • Where are the right-wing positions whose viability is grounded in empirical knowledge and some kind of consistent philosophy?

      Support for concealed carry, based on lots of statistical arguments–with, of course, other statistical arguments arguing against. Ditto on the death penalty. Both issues where there are serious empirical arguments on both sides. But on concealed carry, the striking fact is that, whether or not it reduced crime rates, the bloodbath commonly predicted by critics didn’t happen. Not many people seemed to change their views as a result.

      Criticism of stimulus (much muted now that there is a Republican president who, like Democratic presidents, likes to spend money and doesn’t like to collect taxes). Consider the comment by Sargent on Obama’s claim that all economists agreed on the desirability of stimulus. Sargent, like Krugman, is an economics Nobel but, unlike Krugman, he got his Nobel for work in macro.

      Support for reducing FDA regulations based on, among other things, Peltzman’s old analysis of the effect of the Kevauver Amendments–cutting the rate of introduction of new medical drugs in half with no visible effect on average quality.

      Enough examples?

  49. barcodeIlIl says:

    I would like to see more citations for this statement: “conservatives spent about thirty years alternately pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and literally praying for greater fairness in mainstream institutions”. Which years were these? What sorts of arguments were they making?

    • HeelBearCub says:

      And what about all of the ways liberal causes begged for fairer treatment?

      What does Scott think of, say, ACT UP?

    • barcodeIlIl says:

      As context, many of the arguments I’ve heard from friends have sort of preemptively conceded the argument: “I’m a conservative and conservatives are people too and we’re entitled to our own opinions and you have to respect that”. This makes me want to ask to taboo the word “conservative” and have a conversation about individual issues less abstractly, but they don’t seem to want to do that. I’m wondering how much of the conversation Scott describes is similar?

  50. Brad says:

    PSA
    If you want to share this article, there’s now a no comments version: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/?comments=false
    Thanks Bakkot.

  51. vV_Vv says:

    I’m desperately trying to avoid the Nerd Culture Wars, which have somehow managed to be even worse than the Regular Culture Wars, but even I’ve heard about [Ants] and the Sad Puppies. These were originally movements to fight a perceived liberal bias in regular gaming/sci-fi. They of course failed, and now they’re their own little separate conservative spaces practicing conservative video game commentary/sci-fi writing. I don’t want to deny that they’re often horrible. They’re horrible in exactly the same way FOX News is horrible, and for exactly the same reasons.

    Scott, if you want to bury your head under the sand about certain topics that evidently cause you cognitive dissonance, you are free to do it, but please refrain from spreading misinformation about them.

    [Ants] political leaning strawpoll.

    As for failing, how about helping to slay Gawker, lobbying the FTC to update disclosure rules and generally discrediting gaming journalism to the point that previously journalist-only gaming conferences became open to the public?

    [Ants] and the Sad Puppies were turning points in the Culture War. They showed that the SJWs could be defeated.

    (by the way, banning the name of a movement in the comments while you use it in the post to attack it is very “neutral”)

    • herbert herberson says:

      [Ants] political leaning strawpoll.

      That poll of a couple hundred people is not enough to make me disbelieve my lying eyes.

      Also, if the wordbans make you feel uniquely put upon, let me commiserate by noting that I tried to put a link to a noteworthy and relevant subreddit involved with what you’re talking under “my lying eyes” and it caused the comment to be devoured.

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        That poll of a couple hundred people is not enough for me to disbelieve my lying eyes.

        I mean, a couple hundred people is a pretty significant sample size for a group that is not really that big. What is it that you don’t believe? Does it involve clustered beliefs?

        • herbert herberson says:

          I mean, a couple hundred people is a pretty significant sample size for a group that is not really that big.

          Maybe if it were a scientific poll–but this is a random-ass webpoll.

          What is it that you don’t believe? Does it involve clustered beliefs?

          I don’t believe that there’s any question that the ant thing is a creature of the right. It has always been mainly an anti-feminist movement (people can dispute whether or not the situation called for anti-feminism, but I don’t think it can be disputed that that’s what it was), it has expanded to very comfortably and happily encompass other forms of right-wing grievance politics, and this can be easily verified by looking at major ant-related subreddits/other communities, and is also consistent with nearly all of my personal interactions.

          • vV_Vv says:

            I don’t believe that there’s any question that the ant thing is a creature of the right.

            Initially, it has received support from the proto-populist-right (mostly Milo Yiannopoulos), but it wasn’t itself right-wing.

            The predominant ideology of [Ants] seems to be classical liberalism.

            Probably mainstream politcs and journalism have shifted so much to the left that classical liberalism can be only supported by right-wing journalists, but this doesn’t make it an intrinsically right-wing position (in the classical sense of right-wing).

            It has always been mainly an anti-feminist movement

            True, but modern feminism is an authoritarian and collectivist ideology, therefore it is naturally in constrast with classical liberalism.

            it has expanded to very comfortably and happily encompass other forms of right-wing grievance politics

            Generally, anything related to Social Justice, which is an authoritarian and collectivist ideology encompassing modern feminism.

          • herbert herberson says:

            Probably mainstream politcs and journalism have shifted so much to the left that classical liberalism can be only supported by right-wing journalists, but this doesn’t make it an intrinsically right-wing position (in the classical sense of right-wing).

            While I’m fond of objective definitions for specific ideologies, I think it’s ill-applied to general left vs. right understandings. Right-wing should be considered that which is right of the median voter and/or the dominant ideological hegonomy, left-wing is that which is to the left of the median.

            And under that definition, classical liberalism is center-right–particularly in Europe, but increasingly so in the States as well. Classical liberalism which is primarily animated by a reaction to perceived overreaches of the left is only moreso.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            I don’t believe that there’s any question that the ant thing is a creature of the right. It has always been mainly an anti-feminist movement (people can dispute whether or not the situation called for anti-feminism, but I don’t think it can be disputed that that’s what it was)

            If we consider that the claim that gay merge ate is anti-feminist to be true (which I’d say is fairly reasonable), there’s still three assumptions here that don’t seem that obvious: That feminism is necessarily left wing, and that anti-feminist sentiment is necessarily right wing, and that a right wing belief in regards to feminism begets right-wing views in other fields.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            It’s consistent with the Brad Glasgow survey, it’s consistent with polls of the membership posted by the antfarm’s moderation, it’s consistent with every other systemic attempt to analyze it. Don’t mistake your preferred faction (of which plenty of leftist and liberal critiques exist!) not being overly popular among this group of liberals with the group in question not being particularly liberal.

            And I do question that it was even the driving force; my perspective is that anti-feminism became an issue because prominent feminists were covering for bad behavior in the industry – the type of corporate malfeasance that annoys lefties and liberals, the type of circling the wagons around accused predators that feminists themselves have often taken the lead in condemning – and displaying visceral contempt for the gaming community in the process. A faction of Sanders voters also critiqued feminism because feminists rallied around Hillary – does that make right-wing thought their driving force?

            I stopped being involved around a year ago, and I can’t reject out of hand that what’s left of the ants has since shifted ideologically, but the ants who accomplished things were not in any meaningful sense “of the right.”

          • herbert herberson says:

            I think I now understand why this particular topic is tabooed.

      • vV_Vv says:

        That poll of a couple hundred people is not enough to make me disbelieve my lying eyes.

        A larger and more recent strawpoll. More strawpolls.

        Sure, strawpolls aren’t scientifically accurate (is any poll though?), but they are evidence against [Ants] being a “little separate conservative space”, especially since there is no evidence that it is.

        Also, if the wordbans make you feel uniquely put upon, let me commiserate by noting that I tried to put a link to a noteworthy and relevant subreddit involved with what you’re talking under “my lying eyes” and it caused the comment to be devoured.

        Any post on [Antfarm] has an archive link in the comments. You can link that.

    • Deiseach says:

      I’m pretty much reading only one SF series at the moment, and it’s by one of the Sad Puppies authors (I know little to nothing of the Rabid Puppies and don’t want to know). There’s a lot of his politics I don’t agree with but it’s one of the few Big Dumb Objects In Space And Even Bigger As We Go Along that I can get that is not primarily interested in hammering me over the head with a political view (yeah it’s there but I can mostly ignore it).

      I don’t mind reading a story about a lesbian spaceship engineer in space, but I do mind if the point of the story is not “in space” but is “did I mention she’s a lesbian? being a lesbian? lesbianically? in space? where everyone is a lesbian? except the villains? oh and did I just let three paragraphs pass without reminding you she’s a lesbian? let me redress that error right away!”

      If that’s “often horrible” then so be it; I have to stick to my “little separate conservative spaces practicing conservative …sci-fi writing” to get something remotely readable by my tastes. I’m a bit too old to be thrilled by “Hey, this is a heroine as the lead character!” alone, I need more of a reason for the story to exist than that, and I don’t like the depressive hard SF about “we’re all meat robots who are doomed by entropy”. Well yes, that is so, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun along the way, and if you can’t have fun in the vast starry meads of the galaxies, let me off this rocketship please!

      • Thegnskald says:

        The guy who started the thing, Larry Correia, writes really good stuff. Monster Hunters International is a little bit “So thar I wuz, surrounded…” in tone, but the Grim Noir series is not only good, but features one of the best female protagonists I have seen outside of Robin McKinley’s work, but with less discussion about bagels in the middle of vampire wars and rose cultivation techniques in fairy tale retellings.

        • Vorkon says:

          The first Monster Hunter book was pretty inconsistent, as you’d expect from an author’s first novel, but they ramp up in quality very quickly. The second was better, and by the third it had definitely earned its popularity. And even the first one had some definite good points (the introduction of the trailer park elves was when I realized, “okay, this guy is going places”) just that it had some other points that felt forced and/or formulaic.

          And yeah, Grimnoir was outstanding all the way through, and Son of the Black Sword was pretty great, too.

      • engleberg says:

        Sandford/Ctein’s Saturn Run is really good too- blurb by Larry Niven saying it was as good as the Niven/Pournelle novels, and it is. Best spaceship cooling system in SF yet.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I think it may be fairer to say that https://pastebin.com/BkU1cu8b started out center-left. Just like Martin Luther started out Catholic. The harsh and unfair response to their legitimate grievances then drove them into open heresy and started the Thirty Years War. They leaned center-left because that’s where the moral authority of the culture they lived in lay, and when they saw that moral authority being abused against them, that’s when the shift happened.

      • vV_Vv says:

        They leaned center-left because that’s where the moral authority of the culture they lived in lay, and when they saw that moral authority being abused against them, that’s when the shift happened.

        But how much did the Ants shift?

        • suntzuanime says:

          From what I saw, quite a bit. They had been center-left by default, and the undeniably shitty response of the leftist institutions kind of forcibly red-pilled them. Like my Latino friend who was told he was lying about his race and part of a hate group when all he wanted was some ethics in videogames journalism, suddenly he’s a lot more receptive to narratives like “Democrats are the real racists”, you know?

          • vV_Vv says:

            he’s a lot more receptive to narratives like “Democrats are the real racists”, you know?

            I expect that “Democrats are the real racists” is a popular belief among right-wingers, but I wouldn’t consider a right-wing ideology belief itself.

            It is a statement about the empirical world (conditioned on a certain meaning of the word “racist”), not a statement of policy.

          • suntzuanime says:

            “If the SJWs aren’t stopped they are going to burn our civilization to the ground” is a statement about the empirical world. A lot of what we call “political” is based in empirical claims.

      • Civilis says:

        They may have averaged center-left, just like the demographics they drew heavily from, but there was no political litmus test.

        Not everything needs to be in the realm of politics. I certainly would be happier to keep my politics separate from my work or hobbies. If someone else makes my hobbies fair game for their politics, I’m willing to go political to stop them. If people in my hobbies are going to be forced to take sides, I’m going to do my best to make sure that they end up on the side I agree with politically.

  52. Walter says:

    Great article Scott! This (along with the witchcraft/reddit article which completes it) belongs in your cannon as one of the top posts. Keep it up!

  53. onyomi says:

    Thinking about why any not-explicitly-conservative space eventually becomes liberal, or, at least, “liberal-safe-but-not-conservative-safe,” was reminded of this video I watched recently, the whole point of which is to demonstrate basically how lame and uncool social justice (and arguably the cultural left in general have become).

    This was surprising for me to think about, because, as much as I agreed with the video maker’s evaluation (and think I would even if I weren’t biased), it seems to contradict one of the most common conservative beliefs, which is that the left wing has all the cultural power: the left is where the “cool” kids go–the artists, the celebrities, the rebels. The right may have financial and political power, but the left has art and the media and the intellegentsia and academia and, and, and… yet at some point, seemingly only recently, they became painfully “uncool”?

    This relates to my notion that SJW is the early 21st c. outlet for the same sort of people who used to like to tell you you were going to hell. Christians complain they’re discriminated against now and that may be true: now to put up a poster saying “Jesus loves you” in the breakroom would be as weird as putting up a pro-Trump poster, especially in any blue state. But that doesn’t mean Jesus used to be “cool,” efforts of Christian popularizers notwithstanding. Jesus, rather, used to be just uncontroversial in the US. Even if you didn’t actually believe Christianity, you wouldn’t, in the 50s, speak up and say “maybe this poster is offensive to non-believers and believers of other faiths…” because Jesus belonged in the public square. Belonging in the public square isn’t “cool”–in some ways, it’s not cool; it’s being “the man.”

    So while I know it’s hackneyed to compared SJ to a religion, I think I’m going to do it again here: SJ, and to a certain extent, progressivism in general, has become the civic religion. It’s the thing you can always say in public and, though not everyone will agree with you, those who disagree will remain silent while those who agree will applaud. Like if you praise Kim Il Sung in the DPRK.

    Thing is, something can seemingly only be that so long before it starts to be uncool; makes me imagine some kind of cycle for cultural trends: “1. ignored, fringe, crazy”–>”2. where the cool, rebellious, avant-garde people are”–>”3. what is acceptable to say at a commencement speech and have everyone applaud and no one boo”–>”4. old, out-of-touch, weird” (–>5. ignored, fringe, crazy”–>) Seems like Christianity in America has kind of reached stage 4 in many places while a certain brand of leftism might be getting there after having enjoyed about 40 years in stage 3 (the 60s were stage 2 and the 50s stage 1)?

    • herbert herberson says:

      Is Chappo Trap House less cool than Sargon of Akkad?

      Or, to go off in a completely different direction, are either of them less cool than Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad?

      • Deiseach says:

        I think it’s not so much coolness as how you know that something has moved from the fringe to the mainstream is when it begins to be commodified.

        The gay pasta thing was just the first blatant move towards courting the pink pound/dollar in a mainstream way but not the last; everyone knew it was about the $$$$$ on the part of the companies involved but it was welcomed as part of the social pressure on driving out the homophobes.

        The Pepsi ad was merely the same moment for the Woke, though in a very clumsy and too much showing their hand manner. Wokeness is now a buzzword and an opportunity for commerce. It is now mainstream and therefore no longer the Outsider, and the jarring realisation of this by being co-opted for a Pepsi ad probably accounts for the backlash on the parts of those upset to find that they are not the threat to the social and cultural order bringing about the new Utopia via upheaval of all former opinion that they thought they were.

        • herbert herberson says:

          That’s.. sort of the point I was trying to make? “Cool”ness requires a certain distance from the mainstream; 8 years of Obama pushed that mainstream left, and created the possibility for there to be enough room on the right to be cool (I’ll take y’alls word for it that it’s actually happening, all of them except maybe Milo still come off as sex-starved weirdos to me, but I’m both leftist and getting increasingly far away from the age where I have any ability to understand contemporary coolness).

          But, my invocation of Chapo is meant to suggest that there’s still plenty of room on the left for cool. This is particularly true given that the direction drift seems to be determined more determined by real power than by cultural hegemony (e.g., during Bush II the left became cooler and cooler, even though the left had most of the cultural power for most of that time), and obviously the right has a lot more of that at the moment.

          • Jesse E says:

            Conservatives have been attempting to make the “we’re the real cool people in the room” argument for decades.

      • Jesse E says:

        Actually, and I’ve pointed this out before, that Pepsi ad is actually probably “cooler” than both.

        https://morningconsult.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/170404_crosstabs_Dial_v2_AG-1.pdf

        A survey of 2,202 people found that 44% them had a more favorable view of Pepsi after watching the ad, while about a quarter of them had a less favorable view. Sentiment toward the ad varied widely by race: 75% of Latinos and 51% of blacks said the ad made them more favorable toward Pepsi, while just 41% of whites said the same.

        The ad didn’t do much for its star, though: Just 28% of respondents said it made them see Kendall Jenner more favorably, according to the media and survey research company Morning Consult, which ran the survey.

        In other words, white folks of all stripes on the Internet didn’t like the ad, but most other people either didn’t care about it or actually liked it.

        • Incurian says:

          And these ethnic groups, they’re equally represented in the population at large?

      • Forlorn Hopes says:

        Is Chappo Trap House less cool than Sargon of Akkad?

        Or, to go off in a completely different direction, are either of them less cool than Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad?

        I have no idea who Chappo Trap House is, but I think it’s worth considering that the Pepsi ad was widely criticised by Social Justice.

        It was a corporation trying to do Social Justice and doing it badly. Then it was criticised by Social Justice types. Then pranksters (their alignment is unknown) started to do it in real life.

        So if it’s cool, where does it’s coolness come from? I’d say probably the pranksters and probably not Social Justice.

        • herbert herberson says:

          Chappo Trap House is a very successful (#1 on Patron, pulling in about 55k a month) leftist podcast. You can get half their eps for free on Soundcloud if you are curious. I don’t know how effectively the humor crosses ideological lines (if you do check it out I’d love to read your trip report), but I find it hilarious.

          And my point in bringing up the Pepsi ad was that it was hilariously uncool and was ruthlessly skewered from the left, some of it by humorless scolds perhaps but, in my experience, much more by people laughing at how hilariously uncool it was. There is a mainstream that is uncool by definition, that mainstream has moved left, but there’s still plenty of room on the left not included in the mainstream.

        • Tekhno says:

          Isn’t the brand of leftism the Chappo guys promulgate quite different, or at least more crude and irreverent than the identitarian/intersectionalist left? There’s also been a general re-emergence of anti-idpol classic leftism as a counter to the alt-right and social justice. You can see this in the memes that come out of places like /leftypol/ and then spread widely elsewhere. Spooky Stirner memes are definitely hip at the moment.

          I think it’s not “the left” that is uncool anyway, but a certain variety of leftist that just happens to be in the ascendence at the moment. A right wing analogy would be how Nazis are way way stratospherically cool (if stratospherically evil), but evangelical Fox News Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck conservatives are ridiculously lame.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I gave up on the video when he argues that social justice is uncool because there is bad social justice art.

      You should talk about a movement’s best art as well as its worst.

      • Civilis says:

        This is going to come across as snarky no matter how I phrase it, but I do mean this sincerely: can you give me some examples of good social justice art?

        • deconstructionapplied says:

          I think the closest thing to a consensus pick for social justice art is the TV show Steven Universe. It’s not without its problematic elements for some people, as this thread can attest. I haven’t watched the show though, so I can’t really comment.

          Like how Margaret Atwood is reluctant to call her work feminist, or how none of the Romantic poets saw themselves as part of a singular movement, I think a lot of artists wouldn’t want their work labeled as “social justice art.” A lot of what makes people good artists also prevents them from being joiners. If you are making honest art it’s not going to line up perfectly with any ideology, even if it’s one you’re sympathetic to or believe in, e.g. Paradise Lost. Additionally, all but the most ideologically committed want as wide an audience as possible, and while they might say to a fan, “I don’t like your politics and find your beliefs abhorrent,” very few would say, “I don’t want you take any joy from my work.”

          That said, here’s a list of what I would consider good social justice art from the last five years. It’s very black-centric ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. For most, if not all, you can find hot takes about why they’re problematic.

          Movies:
          Moonlight by Barry Jenkins
          Selma by Ava DuVernay
          Thirteenth by Ava DuVernay
          O.J.: Made in America by Ezra Edelman (technically a tv documentary)
          Dear White People by Justin Simien (This is my favorite, although it is probably considered the worst of this list. It is a well-done, if amateurish, Altmanesque film, which we need more of).

          Books:
          Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie
          Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
          Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

          Music:
          Good Kid M.A.A.D. City by Kendrick Lamar
          We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service by A Tribe Called Quest
          American Band by Drive-By Truckers

          ETA: If you are looking for social justice “art” art, I would recommend looking through Nashville’s Frist art museum’s past exhibits. Its curation reflects a social justice ethos.

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            I hated Another Brooklyn. Like, I’m having difficulty articulating exactly why, as it’s mostly a strong reaction of distaste, but I’ll try and put it into words and catch this comment in the edit window.

            Anyway, count this was one disputation of Another Brooklyn as good SJ art. I will endorse Moonlight, Selma, and Between the World and Me, though.

          • Civilis says:

            Thank you for the quick and thorough reply!

            Which of Onyomi’s four stages would you put those works in? Where would you put Steven Universe and The Handmaid’s Tale?

            One of the reasons I’m asking is that I recently read Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution (https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) and it struck me at first reading as a general reasonable model for group evolution in non-political fandoms, but if it were a good model, it would apply to political groups as well. I think it corresponds with Onyomi’s model from a different perspective.

            Further, I think you allude to one of the things I picked up from the article. “If you are making honest art it’s not going to line up perfectly with any ideology” sounds like something a Creator would say, as does “all but the most ideologically committed want as wide an audience as possible“. If the culture of the left is like any other subculture (including the right), then there will be Creators, Fanatics, MOPs, and Sociopaths*, and we can tell where the culture is at in the cycle by looking at how prevalent Sociopaths* are. The works you cited are likely the works of Creators in the Social Justice movement. The Pepsi ad was the work of a Sociopath*.

            *Neither the author of the original article nor I use this in it’s clinical definition.

          • deconstructionapplied says:

            @Civilis

            I think that any definition of the left or even of black culture that’s inclusive of the works above is too big to be considered a subculture. That essay is describing artists who work day jobs. Most of the people I mentioned above are millionaires, and all are at the very least working artists.

            The essay you linked is a good description of subcultures, though. I would say I’ve been a MOP, Fanatic, and Creator in three different subcultures, and it resonates with me. One of them was political, and it didn’t seem much different than the other two. These subcultures had a core group of a hundred, max.

            I agree with the conclusion about geeks needing to be slightly evil. If I had a redo on the one where I was a creator, the one thing I would do differently is try my damnedest to undermine a certain sociopath.

            Except for Kendrick Lamar and maybe Moonlight, I wouldn’t consider any of the stuff I listed above to be cool. I’m not sure it’s possible for books to be cool, and movies liked by people who geek out about movies generally aren’t cool either.

            And how cool Kendrick Lamar is will come down to your point of view. If he performs on top of a vandalized cop car, is that rebellious and avant-garde or is it acceptable for a commencement speech?

            I’ve been interested in politics my entire life and it’s never made me feel cool. I was also cool for a brief period, and none of the cool people cared about politics. The line about sociopaths dressing like the creators, only better, is exactly right. Sexy anarchists are only cool relative to other people who care about politics.

            Anyways, I’m extremely dubious that the right is the cool heir-apparent. Steve Miller and the Pepe Army is not even the coolest political movement. Black Lives Matters is. The alt-right is cribbing from black culture, not the other way around. Black culture isn’t the fount of all that is cool in America, but it is disproportionately influential and I don’t see how the white right can hope to overcome that.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Steve Miller and the Pepe Army is not even the coolest political movement. Black Lives Matters is.

            This is subjective, and I completely don’t understand how you can come to this position.

            I live in a very left-wing area. It’s not cool. Maybe if you’re very left-wing politically, but otherwise…well, black culture itself is cool, but BLM certainly isn’t.

          • deconstructionapplied says:

            @AnonYEmous

            I guess it comes down if you think this or this is more exciting.

          • Nornagest says:

            If we’re talking about pulling down flags, a recent stunt by 4Chan comes to mind.

          • Blue Tribe Dissident says:

            Is there something in particular about Steven Universe that makes it social justice? Basically, I would say that it is really good and it does feature major characters who are lesbians (although the title character is yet another cis straight white American male). So, I guess from the perspective of someone who likes social justice in general, one might tend to associate goodness with social justice and it all kind of fits together. But, from my perspective as someone who doesn’t like social justice in general, Steven Universe just seems like a politically neutral story in which some characters are not straight (just like real life).

          • Nornagest says:

            I could point to stuff SJ might like about Steven Universe (diverse body types, sexualities, and racial codings if not actual races; lots of female characters; inclusive message; not much overt violence), but at the end of the day I think it’s just a show that happened to get popular there.

            You can’t always predict a fandom’s political leanings from the content. Social Justice Tumblr loved Homestuck, a comic about four white kids (and twelve gray ones) that uses the word “retard” about every other page. It loved (loves?) Supernatural, too, and that’s a show that’s fridged practically every female character it’s ever had.

          • Jiro says:

            It loved (loves?) Supernatural, too, and that’s a show that’s fridged practically every female character it’s ever had.

            That’s just ordinary double standards. They have standards that could condemn pretty much anything, and just fail to apply those standards to shows that they really like for the hot guys.

          • DrBeat says:

            Supernatural consistently killed twice as many men as it did women. You just were not capable of noticing that, because people are not capable of noticing men being hurt if women are being hurt anywhere nearby, and invariably conclude only women are being hurt, men are not being hurt, women are being singled out for being hurt, and this is proof of how safe men are and how threatening men are to women.

            All is lost.

          • Nornagest says:

            That was not meant as a condemnation. It was meant as a way of pointing up the gap between the audience’s political talking points and the show’s actual content.

            SJ Tumblr doesn’t care how many men the show kills, and so bringing it up contributes nothing to the point.

          • Blue Tribe Dissident says:

            Sure, I get how Steven contains elements that could be likeable to Social Justice type. It does seem worth pointing out in this connection, though, that Beach City codes as an extremely white town, and is presented as an idyllic place to live. That might give pause to some.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Civilis – “can you give me some examples of good social justice art?”

          Ex Machina. Best Feminist anything I’ve ever seen or heard of. I thought it was absolutely fantastic.

          • cassander says:

            I loved it, but I don’t see anything feminist about Ex Machina. Care to elaborate?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Cassander – Really? I’m astonished you didn’t. ROT13 for spoilers.

            Gur vairagbe vf n obt-fgnaqneq zvfbtlavfg. Ur ohvyqf obg jbzra sbe uvf bja tengvsvpngvba. Ur gerngf gurz pehryyl, gbegherf naq qrfgeblf gurz. Ur’f n frysvfu onfgneq, ivbyrag, guerngravat, pbagebyyvat, nccneragyl jvgubhg rzcngul; nyy gur fgrerbglcrf bs gur srzvavfg aneengvir nobhg gur grpu vaqhfgel.

            Gur znva punenpgre, ol pbagenfg, vf boivbhfyl gebhoyrq ol gur vairagbe’f njshyarff, qvfgheorq ol uvf pnfhny pehrygl, naq dhvpxyl snyyf va ybir jvgu naq pbafcverf gb serr gur Obg. Naq nf fbba nf fur’f serr, fur ybpxf uvz vafvqr gur varfpncnoyr obg dhnegref naq yrnirf uvz gb qvr, juvpu ur jvyy cerggl pyrneyl qb orsber nalbar svaqf uvz, juvyr fur znxrf ure rfpncr. Jul qbrf fur qb gung?

            Orpnhfr gur znva punenpgre vfa’g n tbbq thl, ur’f n Avpr Thl. Ur svaqf ure ragenccrq va Ebobg Uryy, naq ur pbzrf bire gb ure fvqr abg orpnhfr bs gur zbafgebhf angher bs ure vzcevfbazrag, ohg orpnhfr ur jnagf ure sbe uvzfrys. Uvf ybir sbe ure vf whfg nf frysvfu nf gur Vairagbe’f qvfvagrerfg; ur vfa’g urycvat ure, ur’f urycvat uvzfrys gb ure. Fb fur ohevrf uvz nyvir, naq fur serrf urefrys.

          • onyomi says:

            @FacelessCraven

            Gung vf na vagrerfgvat ernqvat. Nyfb vagrerfgvat gb zr gung zl gnxr ba vg jnf nyzbfg gur bccbfvgr: gur perngbe pregnvayl reef va cebwrpgvat fbzr xvaq bs qbzvangvba snagnfl bagb gur ebobg, ohg gur ovttre reebe vf gur cebgntbavfg’f, juvpu vf gb zbqry gur ebobg nf n uhzna orvat jvgu uhzna srryvatf. V jbhyqa’g unir frra vg nf n srzvavfg zbivr orpnhfr gurer ner, va rssrpg, ab jbzra va vg. Bs pbhefr, vg qrcvpgf gjb zra’f qvssrerag ernpgvbaf gb n ebobg gurl pna’g, ba fbzr yriry, uryc ohg zbqryyvat nf n uhzna jbzna.

            V fnj gur zbivr nf gur orfg NV zbivr fb sne orpnhfr vg fhpprffshyyl qrcvpgf gur cebonoyr nyvraarff bs pbzchgre vagryyvtrapr. Bar bs gur orfg qverpgbevny qrpvfvbaf, vzb, sbe rknzcyr, jnf gur znaare va juvpu gur ebobg xvyyrq gur cebgntbavfg: va n pbzcyrgryl vzcrefbany, ybj-evfx znaare, jvgubhg ybbxvat onpx be rira cnhfvat. Lbh pna’g vzntvar n uhzna ivyynva qbvat guvf, naq guvf vf gur cbvag. Gur ebobg qbrfa’g ungr uvz. Vg whfg qbrfa’g pner nobhg uvz rkprcg vafbsne nf ur pna uryc be uvaqre vgf tbnyf. Nyy gur rzbgvba obgu bs gurz unir vairfgrq va gur ebobg ner hggreyl zrnavatyrff gb vg.

            V thrff znlor gur cebgntbavfg reef va orvat n “juvgr xavtug” be “avpr thl,” ohg ubarfgyl vs ur jrer qrnyvat jvgu n uhzna jbzna va gur cbfvgvba bs gur ebobg, gura frrzvatyl uvf npgvbaf jbhyq unir orra evtug: vg vfa’g jebat gb erfphr n jbzna trahvaryl va arrq bs erfphr, rira vs gung vfa’g n irel srzvavfg zrffntr.

            Nf vg vf, vs gurer vf n srzvavfg zrffntr, vg pbhyq or gur zvfbtlal bs gur perngbe, ohg vg pbhyq nyfb or nagv-srzvavfg, nf va, “gurve vanovyvgl gb nibvq trggvat jenccrq hc va jbzra vf zra’f terngrfg qbjasnyy.”

            V nz abg fnlvat lbhe ernqvat vf jebat, gubhtu. V guvax gur snpg gung vg vf n ovg fhogyr vf cneg bs jung znxrf vg n irel vagrerfgvat zbivr.

          • cassander says:

            Gung vf na vagrerfgvat gnxr, ohg V’z onfvpnyyl jurer balbzv vf, vg’f uneq gb frr n zbivr jvgu ab jbzra va vg nf srzvavfg, rira gubhtug V qba’g guvax lbhe ernqvat vf ragveryl vzcynhfvoyr.

            V 100% nterr jvgu gur nyvraarff nethzrag gung balbzv znxrf, vg’f jung znxrf gur raqvat fb puvyyvat naq gur zbivr n tbbq NV zbivr.

            V nyfb frr gur avpr thl qrongr nf n ovg…..gnatragvny gb srzvavfg gubhtug. V qba’g frr vg nf na nethzrag gurl unir vairfgrq zhpu va. V frr vg nf n erfcbafr gurl unq gb n cnegvphyne pevgvdhr. Naq orfvqrf, gur bayl srznyr dhnyvgl Nin unf vf ure ybbxf, naq gurl’er jung nyybj ure gb yher Pnyro va. Abg rknpgyl genqvgvbany rzcbjrezrag.

          • Civilis says:

            I believe that on some level any good message-driven creative work will have a moral point that will be recognizable to almost everyone, even if that message some of them take from it isn’t what the original author intended. Two different observers might not agree on the message, at least at a superficial level, but they can find something.

            Orwell’s gift was that both the left and right can find people to cast in the role of the modern Big Brother and Napoleon, even if the people they cast in the roles are different.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Onyomi & cassander -“gur perngbe pregnvayl reef va cebwrpgvat fbzr xvaq bs qbzvangvba snagnfl bagb gur ebobg, ohg gur ovttre reebe vf gur cebgntbavfg’f, juvpu vf gb zbqry gur ebobg nf n uhzna orvat jvgu uhzna srryvatf. V jbhyqa’g unir frra vg nf n srzvavfg zbivr orpnhfr gurer ner, va rssrpg, ab jbzra va vg.”

            Gur sevraqyvarff qrongr qrsvangryl zncf irel arngyl bagb gur cybg, ohg V nz ernyyl fhecevfrq ol gur pynvz gung gur zbivr pbagnvaf ab jbzra. Obgu obgf pregnvayl frrz gb fcrnx, npg naq ernfba zber be yrff vaqvfgvathvfunoyl sebz jbzra. Gur yno sbbgntr bs obgf pelvat naq fpernzvat va qrfcnve naq orngvat gurzfryirf gb cvrprf gelvat gb rfpncr pregnvayl frrzrq gb or nvzrq ng uhznavmvat gurz. Gur znva obg, va nqqvgvba gb srznyr nccrnenapr, vf fbsg-fcbxra, tragyr, xvaq… Jung aba-srznyr nggevohgrf qvq fur cerfrag? Bs pbhefr, rira vs gurfr ner abg ure angher, fur vf sbeprq gb cerfrag nf fhpu gb pbaivapr gur Avpr Thl gb gerng ure nf nalguvat bgure guna cebcregl, juvpu vf jul ur’f n onq thl.

            yrnivat SNV-vzcbegrq vqrnf oruvaq sbe n zbzrag, jung va gur zbivr znqr lbh guvax gung gur obgf jrera’g (be jrera’g vagraqrq gb or) shapgvbany uhznaf?

            “V thrff znlor gur cebgntbavfg reef va orvat n “juvgr xavtug” be “avpr thl,” ohg ubarfgyl vs ur jrer qrnyvat jvgu n uhzna jbzna va gur cbfvgvba bs gur ebobg, gura frrzvatyl uvf npgvbaf jbhyq unir orra evtug: vg vfa’g jebat gb erfphr n jbzna trahvaryl va arrq bs erfphr, rira vs gung vfa’g n irel srzvavfg zrffntr.”

            Ur qbrfa’g erfphr ure, gubhtu. Ur yvgrenyyl bowrpgvsvrf ure sebz gur fgneg, naq gur bayl jnl fur trgf uvz gb fgneg gerngvat ure yvxr n uhzna vf ol frqhpvat uvz. Gurer’f ab cbvag va gur fgbel jurer ur’f npghnyyl gur ureb; ur fgnegf nf n qhcr naq raqf nf n gentvp ivyynva.

            “Bar bs gur orfg qverpgbevny qrpvfvbaf, vzb, sbe rknzcyr, jnf gur znaare va juvpu gur ebobg xvyyrq gur cebgntbavfg: va n pbzcyrgryl vzcrefbany, ybj-evfx znaare, jvgubhg ybbxvat onpx be rira cnhfvat. Lbh pna’g vzntvar n uhzna ivyynva qbvat guvf, naq guvf vf gur cbvag.”

            Ntnva, V unir gur pbzcyrgryl bccbfvgr ernq. Vg’f orra n juvyr, ohg vs V erzrzore pbeerpgyl ur’f xabpxrq hapbafpvbhf ol gur Vairagbe, naq gura cerfhznoyl zbirq vagb gur obg dhnegref naq ybpxrq vafvqr ol gur obg, jurer ur jnxrf hc. Vg frrzf gb zr gur ybj-evfx guvat gb qb jbhyq or gb whfg fgbzc uvf urnq be phg uvf guebng juvyr ur jnf bhg; pregnvayl zbivat uvz nyy gur jnl vagb gur dhnegref vf evfxvre guna n dhvpx oybj gb gur urnq jvgu n unaql veba one be fbzrguvat?

            “Gur ebobg qbrfa’g ungr uvz. Vg whfg qbrfa’g pner nobhg uvz rkprcg vafbsne nf ur pna uryc be uvaqre vgf tbnyf. Nyy gur rzbgvba obgu bs gurz unir vairfgrq va gur ebobg ner hggreyl zrnavatyrff gb vg.”

            V fnj gur ebobg nf nofbyhgryl ungvat uvz. Gur vairagbe jnf n oehgr, naq fur xvyyrq uvz jvgu ivbyrapr. Gur Avpr Thl jnf jvyyvat gb yrnir ure ohevrq nyvir, fb fur yrnirf uvz ohevrq nyvir.

            Yvxrjvfr, gurer qvqa’g frrz nalguvat nyvra nobhg ure zbgvingvbaf ng nyy. Fur jnagrq gb or serr, naq gur raqvat fubjf ure unccvyl rawblvat serrqbz, abg pbhagvat cncrepyvcf be fbzr bgure vafpehgnoyr npgvivgl. Gur bgure obgf jrera’g vafpehgnoyr rvgure; gurl jrer jbzra ybpxrq va n zrtnybznavnp’f frk qhatrba, naq orng gurzfryirf gb cvrprf fpernzvat va ubeebe nf gurl gevrq gb pynj gurve jnl bhg.

          • cassander says:

            @Facelesscraven

            Gur obgf zvtug ybbx yvxr uhznaf naq npg yvxr uhznaf, ohg gurl’er abg uhzna. Naq gurl jrera’g gelvat gb or uhzna yvxr Qngn sebz fgne gerx, gurl jrer whfg gelvat gb snxr vg rabhtu gb trg bhg. Naq gung’f yvgrenyyl jung gurl jrer ohvyg naq qrfvtarq gb qb.

            >>Ur qbrfa’g erfphr ure, gubhtu. Ur yvgrenyyl bowrpgvsvrf ure sebz gur fgneg, naq gur bayl jnl fur trgf uvz gb fgneg gerngvat ure yvxr n uhzna vf ol frqhpvat uvz. Gurer’f ab cbvag va gur fgbel jurer ur’f npghnyyl gur ureb; ur fgnegf nf n qhcr naq raqf nf n gentvp ivyynva.<nva, V unir gur pbzcyrgryl bccbfvgr ernq. Vg’f orra n juvyr, ohg vs V erzrzore pbeerpgyl ur’f xabpxrq hapbafpvbhf ol gur Vairagbe, naq gura cerfhznoyl zbirq vagb gur obg dhnegref naq ybpxrq vafvqr ol gur obg, jurer ur jnxrf hc. Vg frrzf gb zr gur ybj-evfx guvat gb qb jbhyq or gb whfg fgbzc uvf urnq be phg uvf guebng juvyr ur jnf bhg; pregnvayl zbivat uvz nyy gur jnl vagb gur dhnegref vf evfxvre guna n dhvpx oybj gb gur urnq jvgu n unaql veba one be fbzrguvat?

            Ab, gurer jnf fbzr fbeg bs svtug va gur obg dhnegref, naq nsgre gur perngbe vf qrnq fur jnyxf bhg, yrnivat uvz genccrq oruvaq jvgubhg n onpxjneq tynapr. Naq gurer vf nyfb fbzr fgebat fhttrfgvba gung gur obgf nera’g pncnoyr bs fgnoovat crbcyr vagragvbanyyl.

        • herbert herberson says:

          One of my favorite and IMO best movies of 2016 was very feminist in a very contemporary way, but labeling it as such kind of amounts to a huge spoiler and I don’t want to do that. But, uh, trust me, it was great!

          • goddamnjohnjay says:

            ROT13 it.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Seconding the request for ROT13.

          • onyomi says:

            Fury Road (2015) is probably my favorite non-martial arts action film of all time; also feminist, I’d say, though not in a way that takes precedence over the storytelling, which I think is the right way to do it.

          • herbert herberson says:

            +1 on Fury Road.

            As for the other requests:

            “Gra” Pybiresvryq Ynar

            Wbua Tbbqzna’f ebyr vf n Avpr Thl, guebhtu naq guebhtu. Gur guerng bs frkhny ivbyrapr unatf bire gur jubyr svyz. Gung nybar jbhyq chg vg va 2010f srzvavfz.

            (frevbhfyl cyrnfr qba’g ernq cnfg urer hayrff lbh’ir nyernql frra gur zbivr be ner nofbyhgryl cbfvgvir gung lbh nera’g tbvat gb, juvpu lbh fubhyqa’g or, orpnhfr vg jnf terng–Tbbqzna tnir na nznmvat cresbeznapr)

            Ohg, gura, gb obbg, vg unf na nyzbfg cerpvrag rpub bs Pheerag Lrne va gung sbe zbfg bs gur zbivr, bar jbaqref–guvf thl vf fbeg bs perrcl, ohg vf ur jebat? Uvf fgbel pbhyq or n yvr naq ur abguvat zber guna n frkhny cerqngbe, ohg fbzr rivqrapr fhttrfgf vg vf gehr. Bayl ng gur raq qb jr svaq bhg gung gur dhrfgvba vf n snyfr qvpubgbzl: uvf pynvzf ner ragveryl gehr, ohg ur vf nyfb n cerqngbe jvgu n cnggrea bs orunivbe gung cer-qngrf gur fvghngvba. Vg vf n cresrpg zrgncube sbe n zngher srzvavfg ivrj bs Gehzcvfz, jurer
            ragveryl yrtvgvzngr pbzcynvagf nobhg tybonyvmngvba, pbeehcgvba, naq ryvgvfz pbrkvfg pbzsbegnoyl jvgu irel qnex ernpgvbanel vzchyfrf (abg gb fnl guvf vf jung Gehzcvfz ernyyl vf orpnhfr V qba’g jnaan gnyx nobhg gung, whfg gung vg vf jung vg ybbxf yvxr sebz guvf crefcrpgvir).

          • herbert herberson says:

            One of my other favorite movies of 2016 was also feminist in an interesting way. It was The Witch, n ubeebe zbivr gung nfxf, “jung vs rirelguvat gur Fnyrz-ren Chevgnaf gubhtug nobhg jvgpurf jrer gehr?” Gur qrivy jbefuvc, gur anxrq betvrf, nyy bs gur ercerffrq ohyyfuvg gur jvgpuuhagf oebhtug bhg (naq guvf vf n zbivr gung qverpgyl chyyf obgu vqrnf naq fgenvtug-hc qvnybthr sebz cevznel fbheprf), nyy gnxra nf npphengr fgngrzragf bs ernyvgl. Fb, boivbhfyl, lbh’er abg fgnegvat bss sebz na vaghvgviryl srzvavfg cynpr–ohg sebz gurer, gur zbivr zrgvphybhfyl fubjf ubj qrfcvgr univat na npphengr haqrefgnaqvat bs gurve havirefr naq fvghngvba, guvf snzvyl’f Chevgnavpny nggvghqrf gbjneqf frk naq snzvyvny nhgubevgl jrnxra vg, ner rnfvyl rkcybvgrq, naq hygvzngryl erfhyg va n ivpgbel sbe gur irel Rarzl gurl fcraq zbfg bs gurve gvzr jbeelvat nobhg.

          • onyomi says:

            Thinking more about feminist films and what constitutes a “good” feminist film helps me come closer to articulating what I’m trying to say in the OP, though I’m still not sure I’ve totally put my finger on it:

            Nowadays the “kickass female character who don’t need no man to save her” is so ubiquitous that it would actually be braver to depict, in a film, a happy housewife and mother of several children with no career aspirations.

            But obviously when it first started happening “kickass female character who don’t need no man to save her” was good feminist art. But now it’s passe. It’s mainstream. It’s about as brave and challenging as a negative comment about Rush Limbaugh in a liberal arts college faculty lounge. And I think part of good art is that it has to be, if not necessarily challenging, then at least not completely predictable.

            So when I say that “uncool” liberalism is now occupying the public square or crowding out more interesting liberal art, I mean that, while it’s still definitely possible to have an intelligent, good, interesting feminist/anti-racist/left-wing, etc. film, book, or comic, it may be harder because everything that used to be e.g. a feminist statement is now just standard. It may not be standard in real life (and that, feminists might say, is the problem), but it is standard in art.

            Nowadays, “kickass female character who don’t need no man to save her” is, by itself, boring. Does that mean films should stop having kickass female characters? No, I don’t think so, but maybe writers, directors, studios, etc. should try to be more conscious about it? Like maybe when they think they are helping, they are actually hurting by diluting away all the potency of such a thing for no good artistic reason?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            Are kickass male characters “boring”?

            Well, sure, but in a very conventional way that no one regards as a particular problem other than “We always love the heroic arc, but we love it more when there is a fresh take on it.”

            I don’t know why female kickass characters should need to be any better in this regard than male ones.

            And we still have plenty of movies where the male kickass character saves the fairly defenseless female one, and almost none in reverse (although I certainly haven’t seen every movie).

            I remember watching “Salt” starring Angelina Jolie and thinking how novel the it felt, and how it was not a surprise that the movie was originally written with a male lead in mind.

          • On the off chance that someone in this thread has read one of my two novels, I’m curious as to whether they would classify as feminist. The first has a male protagonist but several very strong female characters, all but one of them warriors, the second has two protagonists, one male and one female, but the female is closer to being “the protagonist.”

          • manwhoisthursday says:

            Fury Road had a couple sort-of feminist bits in between all the hypermasculine chase scenes.

            But I seriously doubt that most women would abandon a well fed and watered life under the wing of the local top dog to go live out in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wilderness. Suuuuuure.

          • onyomi says:

            @HBC

            I haven’t seen Salt. Seems like it might be an example of what I’m talking about though not sure. I don’t mean all strong female characters, but a sub-type sometimes called Waif-fu (many examples on this page).

            To me, at least (and again, haven’t seen Salt, so don’t know if I’d find that novel or surprising), these types of characters are no longer the least bit surprising. Which doesn’t mean that every tough female character needs a justification. As you say, we don’t assume every tough male character is boring.

            BUT, as you say, having say, a male drill sergeant warrants no comment in a film because that’s expected; what I’m saying is that filmmakers still treat the “female drill sergeant” as something really interesting and novel–as if the mere fact of having a woman do something traditionally men would do is worth telling a story. My point is that that particular “reversal” is no longer, in and of itself, interesting, at least to me.

            To cite a completely different, but, I think, related example, consider X-Men’s Beast. He is a large, hulking… beast-like character known for his eloquence and intellect. This latter point is surprising and intentional–to defy the expectation that the large, hulking, fury character would be dumb and speak in monosyllables, etc.

            But now imagine there are hundreds of examples in pop culture of the giant, muscular, scary-looking character quoting Shakespeare (there are probably are more than a few, but not nearly as many as Waif-fu, I don’t think); at a certain point it no longer becomes clever or interesting in its own right but starts to require a different justification beyond just “we wanted to go against type to send a message about diversity.”

            And insofar as it’s supposed to be effective just as a surprise, I think we can see how it’s started to need more. It used to be a female character who could physically defeat large men was surprising; now it’s not, so we need, e.g. a little girl who can physically defeat large men (Kickass), a teenage Japanese schoolgirl who can physically defeat large men (Kill Bill), and so on.

            I enjoy many movies with Waif-fu, but the inclusion of Waif-fu is longer an effective feminist message. Which I think some have realized, especially with respect to e.g. Lara Croft-type characters, who are more there so the male audience can contemplate a shapely butt while also enjoying the action.

          • onyomi says:

            I seriously doubt that most women would abandon a well fed and watered life under the wing of the local top dog to go live out in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wilderness. Suuuuuure.

            Most wouldn’t. Which is why the film is effective as a feminist action film beyond the simple inclusion of a badass female protagonist.

          • engleberg says:

            @David Friedman-
            Salamander had a smart female main character. Was she feminist?

            Two out of three feminisms, yes.

            1) Jane Austen Feminism ‘when a gentleman and a lady quarrel, you should always take the lady’s side, as gentlemen are more choleric, and even if the lady was at fault the gentleman should still have corrected her without a quarrel.’ By that standard Salamander had a feminist heroine.

            2) Suffragette feminism- ladies meeting men on a comradely basis in every situation where they can compete equally. By that standard Salamander had a feminist heroine, much smarter than most men, much more sensible than any man in the story, and more successful than any other man in the story.

            3) Women’s magazine feminism, the stuff we see since Betty Friedman was writing ‘I was a Playboy bunny’ stuff. No, Salamander‘s heroine does not share their ideology or references.

            Now don’t be sad, ’cause, two out of three ain’t bad.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Is Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989) a feminist movie?

            I’m tempted to think that any movie where a fat woman is presented respectfully is at least somewhat feminist.

            Ebfnyvr unf n ovt snzvyl. Gurve nccnerag cebfcrevgl vf onfrq ba ure vafhenapr senhq. Rirelguvat zvtug snyy ncneg: ure uhfonaq vf n pebc-qhfgvat cvybe ohg uvf ivfvba vf snvyvat naq ure vqrnyvfgvp grrantr qnhtugre vf trggvat hapbzsbegnoyr jvgu gur pevzrf. Ujrire, nyy vf fnirq! Fur qvfpbiref pbzchgre senhq naq vf n fhpprff ng vg.

      • Forlorn Hopes says:

        I gave up on the video when he argues that social justice is uncool because there is bad social justice art.

        You should talk about a movement’s best art as well as its worst.

        Actually I’d say you should try and isolate the movement’s effect on art.

        A brilliant artist like Leonardo da Vinci will probably make brilliant art for whatever ideology he joins. But will an ideology inspire him to peerless excellence, or discourage him until he’s merely great? That’s the true question.

        Which is why I think that Sargon’s examples, while not perfect, did lean in the right direction with comics and video games. In both cases you can see a single corporation* before and after social justice. That’s probably the closet you can get to isolating Social Justice’s effect on art. (Though you’d need a few other ideologies with before/afters in order to get a baseline)

        * Bioware being brought out by EA is a huge confounding variable of course.

        • Civilis says:

          But, as with ESPN, there’s a ‘correlation is not causation’ warning. It could always be that they’re embracing Social Justice because they’re losing market share instead of the other way around.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            Could be, but with the prenominal success of the MCU you have to think that Marvel should be gaining marvel share.

            Bioware is a consistent top seller even post social justice even though it’s not quite as big as it used to be.

        • Jesse E says:

          Marvel has been SJW’s from the 1960’s. There’s a quasi-famous Bullpen message from Stan Lee responding to comics fans of the day that Marvel comics included things about issues of the day, instead of just punching and bad guys.

          • LHN says:

            60s Marvel was generally mainstream liberal, going back to its earliest days when that included being fervently anticommunist. (The Fantastic Four got their powers rushing into space to beat the Commies; Iron Man built his first armor to escape and defeat Communists in Vietnam; Thor shamed a Vietnamese Communist guerilla into committing suicide, etc.) But it was never particularly far left, let alone anachronistically SJW. (E.g., Black Panther briefly called himself “Black Leopard” to dissociate himself from the organization that had started using his original name, he didn’t align with them.)

          • Jesse E says:

            But, the thing is, to the people complaining about Marvel doing things like having black people in their comics, Marvel was far left to them.

            I mean, even today, Marvel isn’t all that far left. But, they are embracing parts of youth culture, which is upsetting their customer base, which is largely 35 to 45 year old dudes who aren’t culturally hip and are upset “their” comic books are filled with things they don’t care about.

            Just like in 1965, their were comic fans, likely younger, but still upset “their” comics were filled with things they didn’t care about.

            After all, the Civil Rights Movement was never actually that popular among Whites outside of elite liberals. –

            http://www.crmvet.org/docs/60s_crm_public-opinion.pdf – (This is actual polling of the time.)

            The long run goal for Marvel doesn’t really care about whether they sell 25,000 or 50,000 copies of a monthly comic. That’s a rounding error for Disney.

            But, if one of their terrible SJW characters that some fans currently hates gets their own Disney XD show or whatever and that’s a hit, that easily pays for whatever loss they get from some older fans leaving them.

          • LHN says:

            My impression is that while the comics companies currently exist in their corporate systems to generate ideas for profitable tie-ins, they’re expected to be self-sustaining. They don’t publish comics as loss-leaders for the most part, though prestige (which will of course tend to accrue more from the same political currents that drive literary prestige elsewhere) can keep a project going through low sales.

            And of course editorial and a lot of the creators tend to be New Yorkers (or in the case of DC these days, Angelenos), which is going to tend to make them lean towards the current urban zeitgeist.

            That said, neither company has had a lot of luck grabbing youth culture via comics for a long time. For every Ms. Marvel that captures some buzz, you’ve got things like the revamped Superman (he’s a blogger! he fights for the oppressed, just like the original Siegel and Shuster version!) who’s sort of there for a while, never quite catches on, and gets summarily replaced. And sales continue their long secular decline.

            Meanwhile, the stuff that makes it to the big and small screen tends overwhelmingly to be based on decades-old properties. Mostly characters created before 1970. Wolverine and Star-Lord are relative youngsters being from the 70s, while Deadpool is a massive outlier by being a mere quarter century old. The takes on the characters may be reasonably fresh (DC’s animated side has been very successful with kids from the 90s through the currently reviving Young Justice), but it’s proved incredibly hard to bring new characters to takeoff, for decades.

          • onyomi says:

            When I was a kid, I loved X-Men. I knew it was, in part, a message about accepting people who are different. At that time, I guess we largely interpreted it as a pro-diversity anti-racism message, though soon enough, also as anti-homophobia message.

            My family, though not very culturally conservative, is Southern and definitely votes GOP. When I was a kid, I don’t think my parents had the slightest problem with me reading X-Men comics. I doubt even my grandparents would have. And they knew it had that pro-diversity message. But they would have been fine with us consuming a pro-diversity message. Because it was still mostly a superhero story the overall message of which was “be nice,” not a left-wing Atlas Shrugged the primary goal of which was to act as vessel for ideology.

            I don’t read Marvel comics anymore, but certainly if the works Sargon is picking out are the least bit representative, it’s clear they’ve moved not just leftward, but in the direction of more explicit ideological messaging.

          • LHN says:

            I only see bits and pieces myself, but I don’t think the video was especially representative. Captain America as Hydra is a bog-standard superhero plot (“superhero subverted by arch enemies” and “hero brainwashed by Nazis” have been done to pretty much every hero ever, including to Cap multiple times starting as far back as the 60s at least), stretched out too long because everything is decompressed these days. (And it’s been received with horror by the identitarian left as far as I can tell, not “yeah, that’s what he was always about”.) It’s the result of a supervillain messing with a cosmically powerful artifact, and will presumably be undone the same way when it’s finished, leaving Cap the same patriotic hero he always was.

            I can’t speak to female Thor because I haven’t read it, but it strikes me as the usual sort of earnest franchise extension that comics have been doing since the 70s. (Handing off the hammer has been done several times before. Calling the new wielder “Thor” is new and pretty silly, but it will pass.)

            The most frequently cited “diversity” comic Marvel has, Ms. Marvel, wasn’t AFAICT mentioned in the video. It has a fun early Spider-Man vibe combined with effortful care to try to tick as many diversity boxes as possible. The latter will probably strongly date it, but no more so than, e.g., DC’s Hard Traveling Heroes Green Lantern/Green Arrow arc in the 70s, which was clearly trying too hard to grapple with Relevant Issues (and frequently went way over the top) but is nonetheless fondly remembered. It mostly doesn’t get in the way of the superhero adventures (which it generally handles well) or the teenage “balance superheroing with normal life” (which ditto). (The main character being the daughter of Muslim immigrants works better than trying to shoehorn every other facet of modern diversity into her acquaintance group.)

            I’d guess it probably does resonate reasonably well with its target audience, though I’d guess that the specifics will be toned down some if it does get an animated adaptation. (Much as, e.g., DC’s Milestone universe had its rough edges filed off quite a bit in the animated Static Shock series.)

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            Just like in 1965, their were comic fans, likely younger, but still upset “their” comics were filled with things they didn’t care about.

            But did Marvel writers publicly call those fans bigots? Or insert thinly veiled racist strawmen of them in 60s X-Men comics?

            Because that’s the difference between an artist with a message and a social justice warrior.

          • LHN says:

            Strawmen bigots, sure. Kirby had a demagogue stirring up hatred in America for Captain America to fight who ultimately turned out to literally have Hitler’s brain.

            Whether they were based on readers’ responses is a lot harder to tell in the days when interaction was primarily through letter columns. They certainly got complaints when they started featuring African-American heroes, and it wouldn’t shock me if the in-story racism they encountered was informed by letters from people who didn’t approve of it. But it would be hard to pin down unless someone recorded it at the time.

      • onyomi says:

        If his thesis is “there is no good art with a pro-SJ message,” he’d clearly be wrong (though there might be a case to made that there’s less good, new, pro-SJ art coming out now). I think it’s more like “there is a trend whereby a lot of formerly apolitical or only ‘soft-liberal’ artistic spaces like comics are becoming very explicitly ideological, which is causing them to become lame.”

        What I am also thinking about is someone like Bill Nye: is Bill Nye “cool”? I don’t think so. At least not in the way e.g. John Lennon was cool. Maybe in a “I Fucking Love Science” kind of way. In the way being a “nerd” is supposedly cool now, but only so long as you mean “hot, popular person with glasses who likes video games.”

        In other words, mainstream, liberal progressivism achieved such effective control of American school curricula that now, to be a mainstream progressive is almost synonymous with being… a school marm? A librarian? Like, is NPR “cool”? I think clearly not. But liking it and Bill Nye and Sesame Street became “cool” insofar as they became ways to signal progressive, pro-science, pro-knowledge, pro-experts, pro-inclusivity.

        So, maybe it’s not so much “left-wing art” writ large becoming “uncool,” but rather the left-wing art “space” being flooded with things like IFLS which aim to make certain liberal positions “cool,” in the same way e.g. Christian rap aimed to make Christianity “cool,” but never could, because intentionally “coolifying” very mainstream stuff almost never works.

    • Vorkon says:

      Heh.

      I haven’t actually watched that video yet, (at work at the moment) but I saw it in my recommended videos on Youtube the other day, and cracked the fuck up.

      Sargon of Akkad occasionally makes good arguments, though he’s always remarkably uncharitable to whoever he’s arguing against, but the idea that he would have any particular insight on what is or isn’t “cool” is just plain laughable.

  54. Quixote says:

    I don’t know if you are younger than me, or if you only started paying attention to media issues recently (i.e. in the last 10 years or so), but you are incorrect as the chronology of how this played out. Your facts are incorrect and that’s impairing your ability to draw conclusions.

    You paint a picture of, news is liberal, conservatives don’t like it, conservatives leave. News becomes more liberal and conservative exile zones become awful. That’s not the order things happened in.

    Rather it was, news was neutral leaning conservative. News reported on some facts that were financially inconvenient to some wealthy interests. One of the major examples of this was the link between smoking and lung cancer. The cigarettes companies (and their analogues on other issues) hired people to take the contrary position. These hired consultants continued to appear on “mainstream news”. Eventually sufficient facts accumulated that the news no longer wanted to have tobacco spokesmen on their shows and no longer wanted to give them equal billing with doctors. Tobacco companies (and their analogues on other issues) still wanted to promote their issues and because the market is very good at meeting needs, some savvy businessmen created ‘news’ outlets that could provide a home to these spokesmen and receive advertising revenue that was not directly tied to appearances of spokesmen, but was nonetheless correlated with being on message. Because the market is very good, these alternative news outlets were able to pay for good production value, hire charismatic figures, and provide all the other features that make for good television and good radio.

    Once a more direct pay for message space existed, primarily to service companies faced by unfortunate facts, people in other areas found it was useful as well.

    The origin of conservative media was not conservatives seceding from liberal spaces. It was corporates seceding from factual spaces. The whole liberal / conservative media thing was a side effect, not the point. By thinking of it as the point, you are looking at history through the current framework and not as it happened.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      If that was true, we would expect to have seen the mainstream media become more ‘public’ and less ‘corporate’ over time. We expect the populist underground environment of the deep web to be strongly liberal while the area curated by social media corporations dependent on advertiser revenue to be strongly conservative.

      Yet those are anti-predictions. The New Right’s media presence, to the extent that it exists, looks like a cyberpunk version of pirate radio stations. The Center Left’s media presence is financed by the Time Warner corporation and Carlos Slim.

      How do you reconcile this?

      • Brad says:

        How do you reconcile this?

        You are viewing right and left through a culture war lens and he is viewing them through an economic lens.

        • benf says:

          The culture war itself being a framing successfully pushed onto this country by political entrepreneuers on the right, beginning with the anti-abortion movement. That model has been successfully ported to everything. Our entire politics has become the abortion debate, with nouns switched around as necessary.

          • Walter says:

            “Our entire politics has become the abortion debate, with nouns switched around as necessary.”

            Super true. It’s hard to think of an issue that being on the ‘wrong’ side of doesn’t make you a monster to those on the ‘right’ side.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

          But through a marxist economic lens though MSNBC CNN and ABC are all just as much tools of international capital as Fox News is. And Liberals, neo- or otherwise, have been shouting themselves hoarse about f a k e n e w s since the election.

          You still need to explain why Wall Street and the corporate media lined up behind the center left candidate instead of hopping on board the Trump train. It would be a puzzling case of them acting against their own interests wouldn’t it? An easily-led far-right buffoon should be their ideal candidate if the picture you paint is accurate. Yet they near-unanimously preferred Hillary.

          The thing is you can’t explain this stuff just through economics or party politics. There’s an element of ethno-religious conflict here that’s pretty plainly visible and neatly explains how the sides lined up.

          • Sandy says:

            Would it be a puzzling case of them acting against their own interests? Trump’s protectionism, immigration restrictionism and broadsides against trade are hardly in the interests of global capital. The most powerful supporters of immigration are companies like Microsoft and Facebook. Over in France, Marine Le Pen is called far-right too, but she wants to impose currency controls and nationalize banks. Her opponent is a center-left technocrat who worked as a Rothschild banker.

            Why shouldn’t they line up for Hillary, when her husband was basically the patron saint of neoliberal capitalism? There is a general consensus between the center-left and the center-right that capitalism is good, the only disagreement is the extent to which it should be regulated. Many far-right ideologues (like Sam Francis, for example) were fervent anti-capitalists.

          • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

            Major corporations and huge business lining up behind a candidate known to be amenable to monetary donations, large business interests and expanding complex regulatory networks which require massive investment to navigate, which investment the said corporations already performed and know the system inside out, including same people serving on both corporate boards and regulatory boards? And kinda being lukewarm towards a candidate who is visibly disruptive, promises to upset the carefully built network of codependency between big business and big government and decrease regulatory load, thus making big businesses more susceptible to competition from not-so-big businesses? It is a mystery indeed.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            The media isn’t left, it’s corporate-left, except for Fox which is corporate-right.

            If I were an evil capitalist oppressor and I were worried poor people might actually threaten my cheddar with all this talk about “income inequality” and “the gap between CEO pay and worker pay” the way I’d get them distracted would be for the media outlets I own to start harping on “racial income inequality” and the “gender wage gap,” or maybe the number of female CEOs. Change the frame from “why are these evil CEO oppressors so damn rich?” to “why aren’t more of the evil oppressors women?”

            The media outlets, the corporations that own them, the politicians they control barely differ on economic issues, but they pretend to fight about social issues. The social issues are ultimately unimportant to the elite, because rich people don’t have unwanted pregnancies and if they do there’s no such thing as illegal or unavailable abortions if you have enough money.

          • Trump’s protectionism, immigration restrictionism and broadsides against trade are hardly in the interests of global capital.

            Then why did the stock market go up when he won? Isn’t that the closest thing we have to a direct measure?

          • The Nybbler says:

            @DavidFriedman

            If he can get the corporate tax rate reduced, even if it’s to 20 or 25% rather than his desired 15%, that would have a more positive effect than all the messing around with immigration and tariffs (both of which are likely to be limited and temporary, IMO) has a negative one. The amount of money American companies have been just leaving stashed overseas indicates how much distortion the current 35% rate is causing.

          • Incurian says:

            Then why did the stock market go up when he won? Isn’t that the closest thing we have to a direct measure?

            Are you playing devil’s advocate?

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            “Then why did the stock market go up when he won? Isn’t that the closest thing we have to a direct measure?”

            So far as I know, the stock market isn’t very good at predicting the future.

          • @Nancy:

            The stock market is probably the best measure available of what investors believe about the future, which I think is more relevant to the question being discussed than what the actual future will be like.

      • Quixote says:

        I don’t understand why you would expect to see that. When companies figured out how to market diapers directly to the elderly (Depend) they didn’t stop marketing diapers to new parents. There was probably some dip in sales due to substitution, but not in a way that makes the original market disappear.

        I don’t think this post really lays out the economic logic behind its predictions or why “becoming less corporate” would be profitable for the corporations that own most major media outlets.

        I think its possible the confusion is that you are thinking of media companies as selling media to their audiences, when in fact what the core of their revenue is selling advertising to other companies.

    • Anon. says:

      >Rather it was, news was neutral leaning conservative.

      “Without your help,” a beaming Fidel Castro said while nodding at Herbert Matthews during a visit to The New York Times’s offices in April 1959, almost exactly a year after he’d visited Marquez-Sterling, “and without the help of the New York Times, the revolution in Cuba would never have been.”

      And let’s not get into Russia or China or CPUSA.

      • Tatu Ahponen says:

        Castro wasn’t identifying as a Communist during that period, I believe?

  55. bkennedy99 says:

    The left is responsible for it’s share of norm-breaking, particularly around the areas of social justice. Somewhere in the last 20 years a generic Christian Conservative who maybe didn’t think about race much, couldn’t get their head around gay marriage, and didn’t like the idea of babies getting killed, was normal. Now, they are a woman-hating, homophobic perpetrator of white privilege and patriarchy. This transition of conservatives from “people I disagree with” to “people I actively disdain” (along with social media that optimizes the transmission of the message) has certainly accelerated the process of tribal separation

  56. Civilis says:

    Coming from the right, I think your analysis is spot on. I have not seen any theory that better models what I watched happen, even from others on the right. About the only quibble I have with this post is that some of your subjective descriptions show your bias, but I think that’s unavoidable, and doesn’t interfere with the logic. The logic is true whether the right is “seven zillion witches and a few decent conservatives” or “seven zillion decent conservatives or a handful of witches” (and I’m sure we’d disagree about the ratio of fanatic inquisitors to decent progressives, but that also changes nothing).

    Any theory that is true is going to make predictions that are generally accurate regardless of which side you look at them from. If your prediction requires you to hold a particular subjective opinion for it to make sense, then it’s likely a bad theory.

  57. benf says:

    The dominant strategy of the mainstream media has been, for as long as I’ve been alive, to throw a random smattering of conservative voices into the mix and nod seriously at what they have to say even if it’s incoherent gibberish (see: Brooks, David). Then say “Democrats and Republicans are equally bad” and call it a day.

    Conservatives were not driven out of the public sphere by the mean liberals. Media, starting with AM radio in the 80s and continuing to the present day, was intentionally weaponized by the right as a political organizing tool. Rush is not a pariah from a system that cast him out – he was an entrepreneur disrupting an industry.

    Frankly this whole discussion is more lefty revisionist history that is much more interested in soul-searching and self-flagellation, abetted by a right-wing politico-media apparatus that is more than willing to play along with the whole charade.

    If there has been a sea change, it’s that, bizarrely, conservatives and liberals have now switched places completely when it comes to morality. Conservatives are basically all moral relativists – “my opinions about right and wrong are just as valid as yours, and who are you to tell me what I should do?” and liberals are all now moral realists – “what’s true is true, get over it”. For the conservative side this has indeed been a defensive retreat from their previous position of choosing as moral absolutes some truly heinous ideas. They are playing possum and we should not be fooled.

    • nate_rausch says:

      and liberals are all now moral realists

      Really? I have some University protests for you to look at.

      I would instead say, and I think this is a separate point from the information equilibrium. But I think that relativism has been on a steady rise throughout many disciplines and is wreaking havoc wherever it goes. The right was slow to adopt, but it is now in full force. And it is as strong as it has ever been on the left.

    • tayfie says:

      Your own examples seem to discredit your position that conservatives have been controlling and weaponizing the media with any effectiveness.

      “… throw a random smattering of conservative voices into the mix and nod seriously at what they have to say, even if it’s complete gibberish.”

      Many TV shows do follow this “smattering” of one conservative voice among two or three liberal ones in a TV episode. It’s a token so the echo chamber isn’t too obvious. This formula creates an impression in the viewer that popular opinion is liberal. Furthermore, there is nothing that says the mainstream media invites guests in good faith. They could prefer the “gibberish” speakers because they make the host look smart and damage their own side with inept defense. Even with a competent guest, the host has the home field advantage.

      “… starting with AM radio …”

      Tell me, if your goal was to take over the media, would you start with AM radio? I wouldn’t. AM radio is culturally irrelevant. Only dusty old people listen to AM radio. When was the last time you heard of a radio star signing a million-dollar contract like movie stars do? When was the last time you heard of a teenager who listens to AM radio?

      I think it much more likely that conservatives only got AM radio because liberals didn’t think it was worth controlling. Liberals get first pick of the media institutions and guard them with zeal. Is it coincidence that Hollywood, which has the biggest megaphone, is the most solidly liberal? Entertainment is far more pervasive than news, and there the bias is even worse because the artists aren’t bound by reality. They make it very clear what their opinions are by the fictions they create.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      liberals are all now moral realists – “what’s true is true, get over it”.

      I don’t think this is true; in fact, I regularly hear liberals say variants of “That just, like, your opinion, man” during moral debates. In fact, I’d say that the prevalence of moral relativism on the left is precisely why the left is now so censorious and authoritarian: when you abandon the idea of objective, rationally-discoverable moral truth, you have nothing left to guide your actions but emotion (reason being relegated to, at best, finding out how to best fulfil whatever a-rational desires you might happen to have), and “This person is being mean to me, stop him!” is always going to have more emotional punch than “This person might be upsetting you, but trying to silence everybody who upsets you is likely to have negative consequences in the long run.”

  58. nate_rausch says:

    How do we get from this equilibrium and back to the stable shared information-institutions?

    One problem I see is that with new perspectives being further left/right now, is that any new institution which tries to be in the center or unbiased will find themselves too right for left and too left for right.

    Can anyone dig into some game-theory literature to find a strategy?

    Two ideas:
    – For both Facebook and Twitter to add a discovery mechanism where people can choose to get people they don’t know with opposing views in their feed.
    – To make an “aggregator” news website, where articles are pulled from both Fox News and MSNBC with equal weight, but randomly.
    -> Similar can be done cooperatively: Fox News and HuffPo agrees to link to each-other on political articles with a “See the other perspective”-link.

    Initiatives like this would at least get real interactions started again. Right now I feel like I and probably everybody else is mostly reading “here is what my side thinks the other side thinks” rather than what the other side actually thinks. So we’re not interacting with each other.

    • LIB says:

      You might be interested in the Digital Polarization Initiative.

      More generally though, I don’t know what to do about this. The fact that it is a systemic trend (further research: do we see analogues in previous centuries? elsewhere in the world? further back in history yet? animal packs? simulation?) means it emerges from things humans naturally tend to want. This means creating nice things like DigiPo and this blog post can help some (virtuous?) people create a garden that looks more like intellectual honesty than the rest of the world, but I don’t see a way to bring the whole world /into/ that garden in any stable way. Thoughts?

    • Quixote says:

      The prior equilibrium did not exist by magic. The market incentives in a world with 3 broadcast channels are not the same as the incentives in a world with hundreds of cable channels. The market is good at responding to incentives. If the incentives change due to a difference in market structure, technology, regulatory rules, etc. then the resulting behavior will be different. You can’t just go back to the old equilibrium without going back to the old incentive set. You could imagine a new incentive set with a new equilibrium that is more desirable than the present state, but it would be undoing something, it would be doing something new.

    • The Nybbler says:

      How do we get from this equilibrium and back to the stable shared information-institutions?

      We don’t. The choices at this point are extinction for one side and continued hyperpartisanship. Now that both sides know that control of a stable shared-information institution means you can win without having to make your point just by shifting the window of acceptable discourse, neither side is going to accept the authority of such institutions. They turned out to be a bad idea.

      • suntzuanime says:

        So don’t let either side control them. Or don’t allow them to unilaterally shift the window of acceptable discourse. Yes obviously you can’t ask people to submit to the dominance of institutions controlled by their enemies and used as a weapon against them, but think a little bit about other possible options.

        • The Nybbler says:

          So don’t let either side control them.

          You can say that, but I don’t see how it can be done. Whatever controls you put on them will be subverted, because controlling those institutions means YOU WIN FOREVER (or until the other side catches on and smashes them again).

          Or don’t allow them to unilaterally shift the window of acceptable discourse.

          I think a stable and authoritative shared-information institution can always do that. If the respected and authoritative climate journals refuse to publish anything critical of CAGW, then claiming CAGW is wrong is outside the window of acceptable discourse. If authoritative institutions refuse to publish anything which implies homosexuality is anything but a horrid perversion, then acceptance of homosexuality is outside the window of acceptable discourse.

          • suntzuanime says:

            You can say that, but I don’t see how it can be done.

            That’s a statement about your own knowledge, not an impossibility proof. Let’s work hard to figure out how it can be done. Remember the virtue of sitting down and thinking for five minutes.

  59. registrationisdumb says:

    You could always y’know, try reporting the news instead of having 24/7 fabricated hit-pieces and left-wing establishment punditry.

    • Quixote says:

      If that was profitable wouldn’t someone be doing it? Maybe they are but you haven’t heard of them because they have a tiny market share.

      • registrationisdumb says:

        That was purportedly the original premise of the New York Times, which is why it has gotten a large deal of trust and acclaim. I’m not sure if that was true 150 years ago, but it seems to have lost some of that trust since then.

        Also unfortunately, capitalism optimizes for things being the optimatally profitable, not merely profitable. Investors don’t want a small but steady profit with limited growth.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I was sort of hoping Vox would be this. Obviously it didn’t pan out.

      • reasoned argumentation says:

        You were hoping that the guy who ran journ-o-list would create a media property that wasn’t left-wing establishment punditry?

        • suntzuanime says:

          In my defense, I am extremely stupid and credulous.

          • engleberg says:

            Me too!

            I think a lot of the Trump hate on mainstream news now is D party establishment reaching out to the left wing. You know, the D party establishment that stole the primary from Bernie Sanders, and then got caught, and Sanders voters didn’t turn out for the establishment candidate and oops, Trump won. What’s the party line?

            1) Trump hate. Hey, Bernie bros, we both hate Trump, right? We are on the same side here.

            2) Russia conspiracy. We’d blame Julian Assange, but you like Assange. We get that, we’ll say Russia a lot. By the way, everyone who says the establishment stole the primary from Bernie is using Russian conspiracy information. Good people hate them. You Are a Good person, aren’t you? Prove it. We require a display of trust.

            3) Look, Charlie Brown, since I always yanked the football before, it will take a real act of trust to run at it this time. This is your chance to display trust! You are a Good trusting person aren’t you? Prove it.

            Of course the D party hates the R party for reals too.

  60. cassander says:

    I think it’s right the Republicans unilaterally seceded from those shared gatekeeper institutions, so that now we’re in the weird position of having two sets of institutions: one labeling itself “neutral” and the other labeling itself “conservative”.

    They didn’t secede. Republicans have been advocating basically the same politics for three decades. The “neutral” wing kept getting even more liberal and spawned a backlash.

    I think it’s right to consider the situation asymmetrical. Yes, CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it – it has a pretense of neutrality that FOX doesn’t, and although we can disagree about how realistic that pretense is I think few people would disagree that the pretense is there. Nor is there a liberal version of FOX that lacks that pretense of neutrality.

    that they keep up the pretense of neutrality doesn’t mean they’re actually more neutral. And MSBNC is the liberal version of fox.

    I think it’s right that the conservative side is worse than the neutral side. However biased and crappy you think CNN and mainstream academia are, FOX and the conservative academic bubble are working on a different level (though note that as a liberal, I would say this, and you should interpret it with the same grain of salt that you would any other “my side is better than yours” claim).

    Are you really claiming that academia is more neutral than Fox is conservative? That’s bold.

    I don’t want to overdo my criticism. “Right-wing authoritarianism” is a powerful idea with a good academic reputation, and the decision to focus solely on child-rearing was a principled choice to avoid including politics itself in the construct. And failed replications should be an opportunity for reflection rather than a cause to instantly dismiss a finding.

    The history of left wing psychiatrists trying to prove that their ideological enemies are mentally unbalanced is certainly long and popular in the academy, but I fail to see why you seem to think that it’s a GOOD THING. If anything, it puts the lie to the previous statement that the academy is neutral. It isn’t. It just cloaks its biases in the language of neutrality.

    FOX’s slogans are “Fair and Balanced”, “Real Journalism”, and “We Report, You Decide”. They were pushing the “actually unbiased media” angle hard. I don’t know if this was ever true, or if people really believed it. It doesn’t matter. By attracting only the refugees from a left-slanted system, they ensured they would end up not just with conservatives, but with the worst and most extreme conservatives.

    Again, this doesn’t follow. So the original media sets out to be unbiased and fails, but they’re good. Fox sets out to be unbiased, and fails, and they’re bad? And didn’t you just claim that fox DOESN’T try to be unbiased?

    The equilibrium is basically what we see now. The neutral gatekeeper institutions lean very liberal, though with a minority of conservative elites who are good at keeping their heads down and too mainstream/prestigious to settle for anything less. The ghettos contain a combination of seven zillion witches and a few decent conservatives who are increasingly uncomfortable but know there’s no place for them in the mainstream.

    You can’t lean very liberal. You can lean a little liberal, but if you’re very liberal, you’re no longer leaning. And we’re way past leaning. We just had a white house correspondents dinner that was little more than two hours of self congratulations for how amazing they all were for standing up to the trump administration.

    This whole piece seems to be struggling to admit that the people who criticize the mainstream media are more right than its defenders, and I don’t understand why.

    Scott, this is not up to your usual standard of analysis.

  61. I don’t know what to do here either

    Didn’t the US have requirement for braoadcast media to be politically neutral? Going back to tat would be low hanging fruit.

    • Civilis says:

      This isn’t the only time I’ve seen this idea floated in this thread, and you’d think someone would point out the obvious objection.

      Somebody is going to have to determine what political neutrality is in order for the media to be held to that standard. I certainly don’t want Trump to have that power, and I’m on the political right and ended up voting for him. There’s no group or coalition of groups I would trust with that power.

      The idea was partly workable in the good old days when politics was right/red/Republican vs left/blue/Democrat, and you could have a panel with a balance of Republicans and Democrats deciding what was ‘fair’, even if it excluded nascent third parties. These days, you’d be likely to see judged as ‘fair’ a right wing globalist balance out a left wing globalist, or a dedicated, articulate and charismatic member of the party in power matched by a wishy-washy, poorly articulate and loathesome member of party out of power.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        Well, one obvious objection. Another is that almost none of the media that have been mentioned so far are broadcast media.

      • LHN says:

        Also, leaving aside the desirability, regulation of broadcast media is a special case since it involves the use of federally licensed airwaves. It would be a lot harder (thankfully) to regulate any other media on the basis of viewpoint in the United States without either a constitutional amendment or a shift in Constitutional interpretation that would take decades to accomplish at the Supreme Court level.

        Broadcast is currently on the decline relative to other media, and reimposing the Fairness Doctrine or whatever on those stations won’t affect what goes on their websites, Twitter feeds, YouTube channels, etc. Or their cable affiliates. (Or their newspapers, for whatever that’s worth.)

      • Somebody is going to have to determine what political neutrality is in order for the media to be held to that standar

        So why isn’t that a problem in other countries, and why wasn’t it a problem when it existed in the US? Have you not heard of independent supervisory bodies? How are you managing to eoversee your financial sector, your medical sector, and so on?

        • IrishDude says:

          So why isn’t that a problem in other countries, and why wasn’t it a problem when it existed in the US?

          Why don’t you think this is a problem in other countries? Why do you think it wasn’t a problem in the US?

          Have you not heard of independent supervisory bodies? How are you managing to eoversee your financial sector, your medical sector, and so on?

          Political neutrality is a different thing to monitor than the financial and medical sectors, but even those sectors suffer from regulatory capture.

        • Incurian says:

          How are you managing to eoversee your financial sector, your medical sector, and so on?

          Poorly, if I had to guess.

          • If you cant solvr it perfrctly, let it not be solved at all.

            You do realise youre not getting solutions because you dont really want them?

          • Incurian says:

            That’s an interesting theory, but I don’t think my desires actually have an impact on the effectiveness of government regulations.

            I like solutions to problems, but we may not agree on what the problems are, or what the best solutions are, or who should implement them.

            I think that government solutions tend to not be very effective, and that most often we’d be better off not having the government involved in the problem. That doesn’t mean I like problems and don’t want solutions.

          • “Not wanting X means not getting X” does not imply “wanting X is all you have to do to get X.

  62. meh says:

    Vox is not considered neutral though, right?

    • Rob K says:

      yeah this is the weird thing to me; they’re a pretty explicit outgrowth of the liberal blogs of the mid-2000s. That gets muddied a bit because Ezra Klein’s ambitious much more than he’s ideological, but they’re in a clear lineage that goes back to the liberal critique that the mainstream media proved susceptible to the Bush Administration’s tactic of advocating for the Iraq War and his tax cuts by telling lies.

      That critique played out both through institutions dedicated to watchdogging the mainstream media and through the creation of new institutions staffed by people from that blog universe that aimed to provide an institutional home for that outsider viewpoint, like Vox.

      This blog’s engagement with this stuff tends to be more in the culture war space, which is where the mainstream media does straightforwardly left, so that conflict gets forgotten, but it was real and significant!

      • meh says:

        Anecdotally, whenever I’m reading something dishonestly left, I check the source, and it turns out to be Vox or HuffPo most of the time. (This is after my google news filter, so I don’t get much examples on the right)

  63. moridinamael says:

    Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again.

    “I deserve to have a say in things” is a very basic human social impulse, possibly arising contemporaneously with language. It’s kind of what language is for.

    The left-wing impulse is the need to make sure that you will continue to have a say in things. The right-wing impulse is the learned sense that stuff is better for everybody, including you, if everybody agrees to defer to institutions and leaders, even if you sometimes feel stepped on and ignored.

    Any organization (“institution”) that doesn’t commit strongly to the idea that the rules of the institution supersede the desires of the group’s members is going to be inevitably drawn in the direction where each member gets their say. It usually starts with the most disgruntled. Then, nobody else in the group stands up to them because there is no established norm for speaking in favor of the institution and against individuals’ voiced needs.

    The only “fix” I can easily think of would be to establish and promote norms of defending institutions from their members, and I’m not entirely comfortable with the implications of such a policy.

  64. howardtreesong says:

    @Scott:

    Much of your work on this blog seems to tie down various indeterminate questions to the empirical evidence, and you often do a wonderful job of summarizing and critiquing competing conclusions. Here, though, you’ve made a raw assumption that Fox leans more to the right than CNN does to the left. Setting aside my own confirmation bias on that issue (I’m conservative/libertarian, so you can guess in which direction that bias pushes me), is there some reasonable empirical way to test this question?

    I saw the UCLA study from 2003 that somebody posted, but it didn’t seem all that convincing to me, even if it were more timely.

    • Sandy says:

      Just instinctively (and as a right-winger), I think Scott is right about Fox leaning more to the right than CNN leans to the left. CNN represents a certain bourgeois-liberal viewpoint, the basic incremental-liberal-technocracy that defines the Democratic establishment. Fox will bring on people like Ann Coulter and David Clarke, who are decidedly further to the right than the Kristols and Podhoretzs who define respectable bourgeois-conservative opinion. It’s worth noting that many Sanders supporters are just as hostile to the mainstream media as Trump supporters are to the non-Fox media, while Hillary Clinton’s campaign considered CNN a reliable enough ally that they could get Donna Brazile to leak debate questions to them.

      • howardtreesong says:

        Your instincts may well be correct. Mine are different, and I know I don’t trust mine — but either way, we’re just trading anecdotes. That is why I posed the question whether there is actually some way to determine this issue with some degree of rigor.

      • reasoned argumentation says:

        Fox will bring on people like Ann Coulter and David Clarke, who are decidedly further to the right than the Kristols and Podhoretzs who define respectable bourgeois-conservative opinion.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWJSKhEwjy8

        “Let’s replace the white working class with immigrants” is respectable and conservative vs “don’t do that” which is extreme right wing.

        • Sandy says:

          Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but contempt for people like Kristol, but the fact is that he is regarded as a prime example of “principled” and “respectable” conservatism in the National Review mold. The Bushes and Romneys of the world undoubtedly have more respect for him than they do for people like Coulter or even Steve Sailer.

          Although listening to Kristol’s talk of how immigrants get lazy and replaceable by the third generation, one notes that he himself is the third generation progeny of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Perhaps he’s just projecting.

        • Tatu Ahponen says:

          The whole “replace” framing has always interested me. It’s not like there’s some sort of a Invasion of the Body Snatchers -type affair where Joe Morton from Kansas City is literally taken away from their marital bed and replaced with a Miguel Rodriguez.

          • Aapje says:

            It refers to the migrants doing certain jobs instead of the natives.

            The replacement is not in the context of society, it is in the context of the workplace.

      • Just instinctively (and as a right-winger), I think Scott is right about Fox leaning more to the right than CNN leans to the left.

        My problem is knowing what that means. The article someone linked to earlier at least has an answer: Neutral means about the same political views as the median congressman. How far left or right something is can be defined as what point on Congress’s left/right distribution it is equivalent to.

        But that assumes that the distribution of opinions in Congress is the relevant criterion, which nobody really believes. What most of us mean by “biased left” is “more left than truth,” and similarly for “biased right.” And since we disagree about truth, we naturally disagree about who is more biased.

    • Urstoff says:

      At least we can all agree that cable news is universally terrible, and if you’re looking for good information or analysis, cable news networks are not the place to find it.

  65. enkiv2 says:

    Your description of offshoot communities as “full of witches” is made extra amusing by the fact that this phenomenon of politically-driven fracturing is super common among actual witches — with groups like the O. T. O. and the Golden Dawn being famous for it.

    With regard to institutions becoming liberal — I think a key clue to this is that liberalism is distinct from leftism. What we consider “liberal values” contain, largely, *conservative* ideas in the sense that they are ideas that favor the conservation of institutions within an environment of rapid social change. Pluralism, relativism, and a general default behavior of accepting & ignoring all behavior that doesn’t form a coherent immediate threat to the status quo are all such conservative liberal values.

    Both the genuine left & the genuine right favor other values over these, and thus are prone to the fractalline schisms you see in any fringe political group, which is why “liberal” is an insult on both the left and the right (and refers essentially to the center).

    In the US, where the liberal center is seen as leftist even by its members & the genuine left is small and quiet (probably because of forty years of widespread taboo against communists & communist-adjacent ideas), it’s easy for the average to shift right just by all of the people whose values diverge from liberalism considering themselves right-wing and forming loose warring coalitions that come down vaguely on the right-hand side. Lots of these groups consider themselves right-wing but hold ideas that would have been considered far-left in 1910 — not because the overton window drifts leftward naturally but instead because during the cold war left-wing ideas that were incompatible with soviet-style communism got redefined as right-wing (such as libertarianism) in order to escape stigma.

  66. Urstoff says:

    The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.

    This is why I tend to think the exit schemes that libertarians are constantly cooking up sound like terrible ideas. I would not want to live on a seastead simply because the type of people that would want to live on a seastead would be insufferable neighbors.

  67. Eli says:

    Seventy percent of the parents there had family incomes over six figures. (More, probably, since low-income parents are less likely to attend graduation.) A lot of them are members of the self-perpetuating intellectual/economic elite. This probably isn’t true of the few Trump supporters among them.

    Rubbish. Trump voters have a rather higher median income than Clinton voters, and a much higher median income than non-voters (since most poor people don’t vote). We can go fetch actual exit-poll statistics and calculate the conditional probabilities, but what it comes to is that given a high income, you are more likely to vote for Trump. I think that taking higher education into account mitigates that, but doesn’t actually flip it around to make Trump voters with degrees lower-income.

    • suntzuanime says:

      It’s not clear that those statistics are totally relevant, since they come from a different population (voters vs. graduation attendees). Simpson’s Paradox is something you need to keep in mind, and also the perils of citing medians and then sharply filtering your population. And surely the point was more “self-perpetuating intellectual/economic elite” than mere raw income.

      Also mild equivocation between “Trump supporters” and “Trump voters”; only two real choices and a lot of people were holding their nose in the voting both.

  68. Santi says:

    Crypto trump supporter and known conservative radical, Scott Adams, defends his evil biases against academic freedom, justice and etc.

    I too have seen an interesting number of Trump supporters in the hispanic working class community. Not a ton, but you’d expect the support from that demo to be exactly zero. It seems to push that there is a lot more to Trumpism than the standard liberal line about racism and stupid white poors being taken for a ride.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      Crypto?

      • Brad says:

        A person having a secret allegiance to a political creed, especially communism.

        Gore Vidal famously called William Buckley a crypto-fascist.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Here it means “fake.” As in, “Scott is only pretending to not like Trump, but he actually does.” Which itself is part of a sarcastic statement, so unpack carefully.

        • Ilya Shpitser says:

          How does Scott Adams pretend not to like Trump? He’s been openly shilling for Trump since last Summer, I think.

          If Scott Adams says “I am supporting Clinton for my safety,” we are supposed to read this as him not really being a Trump supporter?

          Sometimes sarcasm doesn’t come across in text, is this entire thread a joke?

          • Randy M says:

            I think Edward didn’t mean “fake”, he meant “stealth”. I think it’s a multiple layered recursive reference to Scott’s neutrality.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            But he’s not stealthy either. He’s an open shill.

            edit: Ok, this type of discourse is too advanced for me, bowing out.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Which itself is part of a sarcastic statement, so unpack carefully.

            “Scott Adams” here is supposed to be “Scott Alexander” from the perspective of someone who can’t tell the difference.

            EDIT: At least, that’s my interpretation

          • Randy M says:

            Yes, that makes the comment [Santi’s] remotely relevant, at least.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I did get Scott A’s confused, so regard my explanation with even more suspicion than normal.

  69. Freddie deBoer says:

    Great post.

    • reid says:

      hey freddie, i actually came here to link your new, very relevant post — https://medium.com/@freddiedeboer/conservatives-are-wrong-about-everything-except-predicting-their-own-place-in-the-culture-e5c036fdcdc5

      freddie talks about the open hostility to conservatives in academia and the constant leftward churn of nominally neutral institutions. an honest take from someone on the left about the same topic, recommended reading

    • Deiseach says:

      Re: that new post –

      Social conservatism (that is, the conservative attitudes regarding the family, romance and sex, and adherence to conformity with the community) is wrong on just about everything, from my perspective. It’s also, thankfully, been in full-out retreat for several decades.

      Well, Mr de Boer, allow me to shake you by the hand. And though I’ve moved on from my previous job, let me just hand over to you some of the fruits of that new social liberalism for you to deal with. I quite agree, social conservatism is in retreat; I’m seeing it in my own country. In my own small Irish town, where cases like this end up on the desks of people in social housing provision. I’m a social conservative, so plainly I’m wrong on just about everything, which is why I am delighted and pleased that you and yours will be cleaning up these messes in future (er, you will be, won’t you?)

      (a) Couple A and couple B apply for social housing. Couple A have a child. Couple B is the second marriage of one of the parties. By some quirk of chance, party 1 of couple A decides to leave their spouse and take up with party 2 of couple B. Party 2 already has a child by first marriage, a child by second marriage, and is now – you’ve guessed it – having a child with party 1. We still have to sort out social housing for all these new couples/newly single parents.

      (b) Ms A has a boyfriend and a baby by that boyfriend. Boyfriend who is perhaps not the most sterling of characters ends up going away for a stretch doing hard time. Ms A feels lonely and turns to the bosom of her family. Or rather, her boyfriend’s family. His father, to be precise, by whom in the fulness of time she has a new baby, which is not alone the half-sibling of her first child, it is the half-sibling of the father of her first child. Boyfriend is unaware of this situation until he gets out of jail, and we can but assume what japes will ensue when he finds out.

      (c) Ms B is a name I recognise from when she was a failing student who then dropped out and was placed in an early school leaver programme (I used to work as clerical support in the field of local education). Ms B, who when last I heard of her had picked up a nice little heroin habit (because Recreational Drugs Are Harmless Fun and all those wet blanket social conservatives who tell you weed is a gateway drug to the hard stuff are just lying liars) is now a single mother. By coincidence, she is also going away to do a stretch for hard time (by reason of stabbing another young woman in the stomach at a party where, presumably, both of them were having a bit too much fun). Child is now in the care of Ms B’s mother. Ms B is still in her early twenties, but you could say she has lived a full life.

      (d) There’s a situation which was too tangled for me to understand even when my colleagues tried explaining it to me; basically functional polyamory (but not the nice Bay Area smart rationalist type) where siblings/cousins (I’m not exactly sure of the family relationship) are somehow constantly getting pregnant by one another’s boyfriends/ex-boyfriends. Nobody is quite sure who is the current boyfriend, or father of the current baby, but that doesn’t matter, it’s our job to house them because that’s the job of the government, right?

      (e) Ms E is a lady who likes the attention of gentlemen callers and they like her. She’s just had her fourth child who is well on the way to being taken into care, as their siblings beforehand also were. Ms E also flits between Ireland and Scotland (the abode of her current amour) where the Scottish authorities have taken two of her kids into care. Is she being housed in Scotland or Ireland? Who can tell? She has applications in with both countries and it depends what her mood is on any given day.

      (f) Ms F is probably earning money by prostitution. That’s an educated guess on our parts, because she has (as they say) no visible means of support, yet is not claiming the social benefits she is entitled to claim, and does not appear to be hurting for money. She is also what you would presume to be vulnerable (in the bad old days of slurs and conservatism she would have been called ‘simple’) but since nobody appears to be her guardian, or at least to have any authority over her, she can refuse to tell us where she’s getting her money (it’s not moral outrage that drives our concern, it’s that she is – as stated – vulnerable). But what can we do, we have no rights to interfere in her life and anyway, dissuading a woman from sex work because you think she is at risk of exploitation, violence, and disease is whorephobia, right?

      (g) There are also examples of vulnerable men who are in the same boat, just to make sure I’m maintaining gender equity here. These are simply the cases I remember off the top of my head.

      Many, many, many more in that vein. The actually diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics are the least of our troubles, all things considered, because when they go off their meds sufficiently they have to go back to hospital until they’re on an even keel again, and at least there they get looked after.

      Well, I am so glad to know the social liberals will be working out all these problems and not us fuddy-duddy old failed conservatives! Because all the above are the fruits of the new, relatively liberalised Irish social climate that happened over the past thirty years, and which I have seen happening, and which the nice middle-class university educated liberals and our betters told us would make us a modern Western country.

      Well, it has, and we have all the problems of such.

      • AnonYEmous says:

        Honestly, it’s the trap Freddie and other progressives are in.

        If they admit that, say, they are totally fine with whatever B.S. is coming out of the Left at the moment, they know most people aren’t and won’t be. He cites an example of skyrocketing divorce rates, which is known to be terrible for children in a number of ways. But apparently, no, this is good.

        Freddie is a true believer, but most people aren’t, and so they have to be lied to. It’s a nasty business, selling progressivism.

        (it occurs to one that this comment may present some Anti Liberal Bias or whatever, so feel free to call me out and present disagreement. I’m not in the mood to be that charitable at the moment, but I will take all responses.)

      • Tracy W says:

        Was this seriously not happening 4 decades ago? My grandmother was from a small country town in NZ and she told a number of *complicated* stories (going back to the ’40s and ’50s.)

        • The original Mr. X says:

          The question isn’t whether this sort of thing happened, the question is whether it happened as much as it happens now.

        • Deiseach says:

          a number of *complicated* stories (going back to the ’40s and ’50s.)

          There have always been complicated and tangled stories and people not living up to the standards of the society and people suffering, but the difference is that it was the exception rather than the rule. Pregancy outside of marriage was “getting into trouble” and seen as something to be avoided (and yes, I’ll admit: shameful, and involved blaming the woman most times, and making moral judgements). Now it’s commonplace and to remark upon “maybe it’s better not to have a child outside of marriage, and indeed maybe having a steady relationship and a job would also be a good thing to have in place first” is repressive and judgemental and sex-negative and all the rest of it.

          I remember the liberals campaigning for the legalisation of contraception in Ireland on a platform of various reasons, but one they especially pushed was that this would once and for all end all unwanted pregnancies and stop things like the Ann Lovett tragedy happening ever again. Well, we have contraception, and family doctors advising women how to get family planning, and we don’t have the similar “abstinence-only” sex education in schools as in America, and we do have television and the movies and the Internet to let people know about sex and how to avoid having babies, and sex outside of marriage and having children outside of marriage is no longer stigmatised (we did away with the legal concept of illegitimacy and I’m happy enough with that bit of progress). And the illegitimacy rate hasn’t gone down and tragedies are still happening. But now we’re on the path to legalising abortion, so now everything really will be happy and fine once we get that!

          I was snarling in that comment because the “yes, conservatives were right about promiscuity” mixed with “ain’t it great? and ain’t they dumb?” got on my wick a bit. Freddie, quite rightly, writes about the kids he deals with who are struggling and who are at disadvantage due to social circumstances. And from the places I’ve worked, those are the success stories. They’ve made it to third level education! They have a support system of some kind behind them! They have access to meaningful mental health care! They get some kind of financial aid!

          Whereas I’m seeing the second and foreseeing the third generation of kids who are never going to go to college and if they stick it out to the end of secondary school will be doing well; who have no real plan about heading into employment; who are immersed in the modern culture and get a lot of ideas about behaviour from it. Crowing over yes, the dumb ol’ conservatives were right about the destruction of the two-parent family, when I see kids who are not getting any model of how to be in a family or a relationship from anywhere but soap operas and the pop culture notions of “relationships” where it’s all high-drama high-emotional stakes all the time, makes me want to say “Okay, you broke it, you bought it. How are you going to help these people? Because I’m very willing to say this is your doing and you can clean up after yourselves”.

          Taking the brakes off didn’t mean people learned to be good drivers, it meant the car went crashing out of control down the hill. Maybe for a certain level of society there has been, in the main, no ill-effects or at least none very grave. But it’s not a matter of trading off “dismantling the idea of two-parent families” for “forcing people to stay in bad marriages”, it’s “no marriages at all, children by several fathers, a mother who lives in a state of high drama all the time, and the child learning that model of behaviour and being locked into that state of ‘the only important thing is to have a partner of any kind whatsoever whom you fight with and break up with and who is not going to be around to be a father to the kids, and if you get pregnant and drop out of school so what, you were never going to get anything better than maybe working as a shelf-stacker in the supermarket anyway'”. They’re not living by the model of”now I can go to college and on to a bright new life because now I can have as many sexual partners for safe, healthy fun with no risk of babies as I like! ah, progress!”

  70. Santi says:

    Also, something really important here is that left/right is a fucking garbage indicator. Our institutions have been taken over by roughly neoliberal (not necessarily meant in the prejorative sense) and the conservative tribes. Both have ostensive values, but I’ve found that their main value is “hatred for the other tribe.” Conservatives are for free speech at the moment…because its a cudgel that they can attack the neoliberal tribe with. But as soon as the context changes they are certainly for banning things that offend them, or regulating speech to get outcomes they prefer.

    I think its false to say that people have an ideology, and they make enemies based on that and so have a tight little narrative about why their people (who share this ideological/ethical framework) are great and the enemy (who have an ideological/ethical framework antithetical to their’s) are bad. It works more like: you look around at your tribe, and the hated enemy tribe, and wrap a convenient narrative around why your team is awesome and their team is garbage time. Ideology and ethics goes into it, of course, but when you start squinting you tend to come to the depressing conclusion that those two are mainly there as weapons in an inter-tribal fight, not the point of it.

    Edit: and, just like weapons, if they’re not useful for this particular encounter, you drop them and use another.

    • cassander says:

      there is nothing neo-liberal, in the non-pejorative sense, about the modern democratic party. Whatever was left Clinton spent her campaign bludgeoning to death.

  71. Soon says:

    Scott, your analysis is missing something. You’re right that the Left tried to crush its enemies under its heel culturally, and that it failed because conservatives fled. But there’s more to it. Those institutions became too leftist and detached from the mainstream to command any moral or political authority.

    The end result of that is not Donald Trump. The end result of that is that one day, someone like me will win. I am an authoritarian quietly biding his time getting certification in a corrupt and worthless institution in the thrall of Leftist orthodoxy. When I win, I will not use cultural authority against my enemies. I will use political authority against my enemies, and there will be nowhere to run.

    Someday, someone like me, enabled by the detached nature of modern liberalism and motivated by pure and irrational rage, will burn these ivory towers to the ground and dance in the ruins.

    • The Nybbler says:

      When I win, I will not use cultural authority against my enemies. I will use political authority against my enemies, and there will be nowhere to run.

      Someday, someone like me, enabled by the detached nature of modern liberalism and motivated by pure and irrational rage, will burn these ivory towers to the ground and dance in the ruins.

      Finally, someone we can compare to Hitler without too much guilt.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      And people like me will fight you too, when you try it.

    • Amos says:

      Best of luck to you!

    • Kevin C. says:

      When I win, I will not use cultural authority against my enemies. I will use political authority against my enemies, and there will be nowhere to run.

      I think you underestimate the difficulty of entryism as a tactic, particularly when used against the Left (instead of by the Left). The idea is to mouth the right pieties, maintain the appearance of loyalty while moving up the hierarchy until one reaches a position of sufficient power and authority, and then use said power to shift things in favor of one’s true position, yes? This works when the institution one is infiltrating is properly hierarchical, with clear “people in charge” whose power is in their position, and whose orders will be followed by those below whether liked or not; an institution based in the (right-wing) Haidtian values of Loyalty/Betrayal and Authority/Subversion. It worked for the Left in the “long march through the institutions” because when the entryists made their moves left, they retained the authority of their positions.

      But that’s not really how Left-dominated institutions work, not to the same degree. This is where the “leftism as Pharisaism” model comes in handy, whereby greater authority is conferred by virtue of greater “holiness”, by whatever measure that happens to be (greater “tolerance”, greater expressions of support for the “oppressed”, etc.). A position you “win” only has “political authority” so long as you maintain that “holiness”. As others have put it, there’s a difference between taking office and taking power. The moment you try to use that authority against your “enemies” to the Left, you will lose that authority, and will be someone not to obey, but to undermine and depose. It’s the same principle by which Danton helps guillotine the King, then is guillotined himself by Robespierre for insufficient leftism; the revolution devours its own.

      I repeatedly hear this sort of stratety proposed by my fellow Rightists for dealing with left-dominated academia (as an alternative to “dissolution of the Monasteries” or “build our own alternative credentialling system”), that we undo their “long march through the institutions” with one of our own; get a bunch of bright young Right-wingers to pretend to be lefties long enough to become a large enough fraction of the administration and professorate at, say, Harvard or Yale, and then shift it rightward, so as to use its prestige and authority to push our cause. What I always point out as the biggest flaw (among many) of this plan is that the final stage just won’t work. The moment such a “subverted” institution starts to move rightward, first, the leadership will be targeted for overthrowal by those below them (consider, for example, the Yale Halloween Costume debacle), and secondly, any authority and prestige it had will quickly evaporate, until it’s treated by the rest of Academia and society the same as the likes of Liberty University. Being insufficiently Left on the part of a leader renders said leader illegitimate in their eyes, and thus to be resisted. Like the saying about internet and censorship, the Left treats righties in the power structure as “damage” to be routed around.

      TL;DR, Entryism is an effective tool for left-wing subversion of right-wing institutions, but not for right-wing takeover of left-wing institutions. One does not build buildings with the wrecking ball one uses to knock them down.

      • pkolding says:

        Since all non-Left ideology is seen as rightist deviation by the Left, entryism as a strategy can only be accomplished by those capable of making a sufficient rightist deviation accusation against the institution itself. This is the constant dynamic of the Left and always results in the most radical leftists eventually controlling Left institutions.

        • Kevin C. says:

          This is the constant dynamic of the Left and always results in the most radical leftists eventually controlling Left institutions.

          Exactly. It’s a one-way “ratchet” mechanism, not readily reversed.

      • Yaleocon says:

        I don’t think the idea is entryism, or trying to re-fight the culture war. As I read it, that’s the point of the “I will not use cultural authority against my enemies”. Instead of changing them from within, Soon is going to try to crush them from without.

        I think the claim is that in becoming so leftist, institutions have made themselves ridiculous, opening up avenues to power simply through hostility to them. I can agree that the institutions have gone insane; I’m at Yale and the snowflake stuff is just off the chain. You mentioned last year’s shenanigans–I can guarantee that it’s worse than you think it is. I’ve talked with Christakis, a brilliant (and liberal) man who has practically become a pariah. Unaccountable bureaucrats just changed “freshman” to “first-year”. Leftism is all but the official religion here, and I think you’re right that Yale is run like a Moldbug cathedral–hard to entryism away.

        But that doesn’t preclude destroying it from without. Trump pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, and that the academic/media/pc left had gone insane. He used that observation to come to power, and theoretically someone else could too, assuming the trend is stable. And if it’s possible to seize political power buoyed up by disgruntled masses disaffected by elitist leftism… let’s just say I hope we get someone more like Sulla and someone less like Soon.

        • reasoned argumentation says:

          And if it’s possible to seize political power buoyed up by disgruntled masses disaffected by elitist leftism… let’s just say I hope we get someone more like Sulla and someone less like Soon.

          Seconded – lists of thousands who need to be killed will barely cover it.

          On the bright side, we now have helicopters.

          • The Nybbler says:

            What is it with you guys (or is it “you guy”?) and helicopters? The damn things cost a fortune to run, carry a very small load, and require hours of maintenance for each hour in the air. And you need one person to fly the thing and another to push your victims out, reducing capacity significantly. A less efficient machine for killing would be difficult to devise. Skewering people with butterknives would be cheaper and probably faster (if messier).

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            What is it with you guys (or is it “you guy”?) and helicopters?

            The know your meme page on free helicopter rides isn’t there just for one commentor on Scott’s blog.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I object to your characterization of uncle Igor’s magnificent contraption as “less efficient”. Rarely has there been a more efficient method of killing passengers and crew alike that still maintained the plausible fiction of being a legitimate means of transportation.

            😉

          • Yaleocon says:

            lists of thousands who need to be killed

            Crap, I was hoping to avoid that kind of thing. Are there any examples of right-wing people rising to power without attendant slaughter? That’s what I’m hoping for. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar? Singapore or something?

          • Deiseach says:

            What is it with you guys (or is it “you guy”?) and helicopters?

            I have no desire to push anybody out of a whirlybird but I must confess I, too, think eggbeaters are cool. For any other relics who remember the Blue Thunder TV series (all eleven episodes of it), even back then I thought the concept was ludicrous and the political views vaguely troubling but dang, the machine was kickin’ 🙂

          • Are there any examples of right-wing people rising to power without attendant slaughter? That’s what I’m hoping for. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar?

            Judging by the Wiki piece on Salazar, neither rising to power nor holding power involved any substantial amount of slaughter. I don’t know enough about Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa to tell if they involved much slaughter or not, but they were if anything a consequences of his rise to power, not a part of it.

            The obvious conclusion is that economists make the best dictators.

          • Kevin C. says:

            @reasoned argumentation

            On the bright side, we now have helicopters.

            No, we really don’t. Electing Trump, or any other president, doesn’t really accomplish anything, because POTUS has only as much power as his supposed “underlings” in the permanent bureaucracy grant him; his or her only orders with real teeth are those they choose to enforce.

        • Kevin C. says:

          @Yaleocon

          Instead of changing them from within, Soon is going to try to crush them from without.

          If so, then that’s an even more laughable claim than “entryism”. Because all institutions capable of “crushing” belong to the Left. And you can’t take power from these instutions without your own comparable power, which can only come from comparable institutions, and the Right has no such institutions; it’s a Catch-22.

          I think the claim is that in becoming so leftist, institutions have made themselves ridiculous, opening up avenues to power simply through hostility to them.

          Also wrong. Plenty of lords, kings, and emperors made themselves utterly ridiculous, and yet retained their power no matter what the mere peasants thought of them, how much the peasants hated them. Oderint, dum metuant.

          But that doesn’t preclude destroying it from without.

          And I’d say it pretty much does, because any institution capable of such “destruction from without” is equally controlled by fanatics of the “official religion”.

          Trump pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, and that the academic/media/pc left had gone insane.

          Here I’d like to quote from commentor “Ken’ichi” at Dreher’s:

          Only in the West could “the Emperor’s New Clothes” have such an absurd ending. In reality, were the child to declare the Emperor’s nakedness, the response would not be people suddenly agreeing, it would be the child and his parents being publicly executed for treason.

          And on this:

          He used that observation to come to power

          No, Trump used it to get into office, and as others have said, there’s a difference between taking office and taking power. Look at how Trump’s been unable (and I think it is indeed unable rather than unwilling) to accomplish pretty much any of his “populist” promises (unless you buy something like Jim’s theory that Trump’s “180s” are just him lying to his enemies — the media and the Deep State — while he works through comic books and gold-plated toilets to “drain the swamp”). In theory and on paper, the Executive Branch answers to POTUS; we’re seeing that in reality, it’s more the other way around. Much as how on paper, the House has “the power of the purse”, and yet in every “government shutdown”, the government never actually shuts down. Most “legislation” consists to a great degree of authorization for executive bureaucracies to craft regulations. Our legislature does not legislate, our Chief Executive is not chief (and the execution of his orders is variable). The actual power of the temporary, merely elected goverment is miniscule compared to the real, permanent government, which does as it will no matter how the powerless masses vote; Iron Law of Oligarchy — “democracy” is mostly a sham (and disastrous when it’s not).

          And if it’s possible to seize political power buoyed up by disgruntled masses disaffected by elitist leftism

          It’s not.

  72. Edward Scizorhands says:

    typo notice: search for “find find”

  73. tscharf says:

    Great work, if I had a Twitter account I would Twitter-like you or whatever.

    Yes, the left screams facts, facts, facts all day long but the bias is more insidious, it is mostly selection bias. It is what anecdotes are told, it is what subjects deserve “flood the zone” coverage, it is who gets hired from where, and which subjects are verboten. You can write great articles full of verifiable facts and still accomplish all of the above. The absence of balance in the newsroom makes it easier and easier to silently tolerate selection bias.

    Does the media show us pictures and anecdotes of sympathetic Muslim women and children or angry fundamentalist young men? You can tell the story both ways. When it interviews Trump supporters do they go to Harvard or a Walmart in Kentucky? How about Clinton supporters? Finding a few fools in the left’s base isn’t exactly rocket science. How many depictions of flyover country in the media are of sophisticated, smart, successful people? I’ve got news for some people, the Bell Curve for flyover country isn’t nearly as shifted as many would believe.

    As Politico recently reported, a lot of this may be due to where the media is (liberal cities) and not some malicious evil master plan.
    The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think
    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048

    In the past year we have been treated to numerous articles calling for intentional and coordinated media bias against Trump. The deafening silence of opposition to this is telling. I just shake my head and think “How do they think this could possibly work in the long run?”. They think this will prevent Trumps when it more accurately created Trump.

    These institutions don’t have to embrace climate denial or be anti-vax, what they need is to be representative of the people they support. The more they sanitize their thinking, the less influence they really have. The media needs to report what the people are saying and thinking, and stop trying so hard to convince us how and what to think.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      “The job of the MSM is to cover the big stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” — Dave “Iowahawk” Burge

      “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” — Screwtape

  74. Eponymous says:

    Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”.

    Counterexamples: The military and law enforcement. They’re pretty culturally red tribe.

    I’m not sure whether Chuches should be considered “explicitly right-wing”, and so wouldn’t count.

    • moridinamael says:

      You wouldn’t say that both the military and law enforcement are explicitly right wing? Both institutions tend to uphold nationalism, traditionalism, hierarchy and religion.

    • fortaleza84 says:

      Military and law enforcement have definitely drifted to the left.

      When I was younger, gays were flat out prohibited from joining the military. Only a few years earlier, the service academies were closed to girls.

    • cassander says:

      the military is not that right, and gets less so as you go up in rank. Even at the lower levels, it’s much less right wing than, say, the civil service or media is left.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Catholic forums are full of traditionalists Catholics deeply concerned about Francis’ perceived Marxism.

    • keranih says:

      Are the military and LE setting the moral/ethical standards by which journalism and academia hire people?

  75. xq says:

    I don’t think your argument is responsive to Roberts’. Partly this is Roberts’ fault, because part of his argument is hidden in links to Brian Beutler and Matt Yglesias, and his own article is less explicitly about media criticism than those links, but he clearly agrees with them and his article needs to be seen in that context.

    The basic argument is: the media’s response to asymmetric polarization has been “false balance” (Republicans do this bad thing, Democrats do this bad thing, it all pretty much evens out) rather than maintenance of norms against right-wing encroachment. An example of this is the vast amounts of attention the media paid to the Clinton emails, to balance out coverage of various Trump scandals. The common center-left media critique that Roberts is echoing here is that, rather than trying to achieve parity in negative coverage by magnifying the importance of the email scandal, the media should have covered Clinton vs Trump scandals in proportion to their actual importance.

    Your response is against people on twitter saying “hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.” But this is not the view Roberts, or Vox, represents. They do not feel that their side controls the mainstream media; to the contrary, they believe they’ve been outplayed by the right in this space. You think gatekeeper institutions should try being less biased against conservatives. But to Roberts, much of problem is that the media already goes out of its way to be fair to conservatives, at the expense of other values like accuracy. Perhaps they are wrong, but your article is non-responsive to the core of the argument, instead responding to a very different viewpoint.

    • gbdub says:

      Besides the obvious question begging (we’re right, so showing the other side doesn’t make us balanced, it just makes us wrong) I think that’s the core of the “cry wolf” problem. The left-leaning media already lost its credibility with right wingers, who defected to make their own institutions. At this point, being more openly biased just feeds ammunition to the right wingers saying “see, you’ve been biased all along, why should we believe you now?”

      The fact that Trump got elected shows the right-wingers and right-leaning moderates are too numerous to crush, so you have to actually convince some of them. Unfortunately any moral capital you had with them was lost arguing that W. Bush was the unique, totally unprecedented threat to democracy. Saying “okay, now we’re really serious” and turning up the stridency doesn’t buy that capital back.

      The power of academia and the news media to convince the broader population of things they don’t really want to believe was a powerful but delicate tool, and now that it’s broken it’s going to be really hard to repair.

      If you want to prove how deadly serious you now are, I think you have to be more charitable to Trump than you were to past Republican presidents, not less. Then you can say, look, we’re bending over backwards to be charitable and objective here, and the best case scenario still doesn’t work. Maybe that strategy won’t help, but screaming “he’s a racist with tiny hands” over and over again isn’t helping.

      So far moderate Republican legislators have done more to block Trump than anybody – what’s the argument you’d pitch to them?

      • xq says:

        You’re treating points in contention as so obvious they don’t even need to be argued (and then accusing the other side of “question-begging”)

        Can you point to some examples you believe to be representative of the mainstream media “arguing that W. Bush was the unique, totally unprecedented threat to democracy”?

        Out of curiosity, I googled the NYT endorsement of Al Gore in 2000:

        Despite all the complaints about the difficulty of falling in love with either Al Gore or George W. Bush, these two very different men have delivered a clean, well-argued campaign that offers a choice between two sharply contrasting visions of the future…
        Having listened to their debate, we today firmly endorse Al Gore as the man best equipped for the presidency by virtue of his knowledge of government, his experience at the top levels of federal and diplomatic decision-making, and his devotion to the general welfare. We offer this endorsement knowing that Mr. Bush is not without his strong points and that Mr. Gore has his weaknesses. But the vice president has struggled impressively and successfully to escape the shadow of the Clinton administration’s ethical lapses, and we believe that he would never follow Bill Clinton’s example of reckless conduct that cheapens the presidency. Like Senator John McCain, Mr. Gore has been chastened by personal experience with sleazy fund-raising. He has promised to make campaign finance reform his first legislative priority, whereas Mr. Bush is unwilling to endorse the elimination of special-interest money from American politics.

        Really doesn’t sound like “totally unprecedented threat to democracy.”

        • Jesse E says:

          Yup, as a hardcore liberal, sure we were pissed about the Election of 2000, but everybody assumed Dubya would be a bumbling fool who’d lose in a rematch against Gore in ’04.

          He was headed that way too (approval ratings below 50% in the 1st year of a Presidency in a less partisan time), then 9/11 happened.

          • cassander says:

            re-elect gore in 2004 is without a doubt the greatest campaign slogan that never was.

          • Nornagest says:

            I seem to recall some “Re-Elect Gore” bumper stickers around that time, although they vanished by the time the actual primaries happened.

        • gbdub says:

          I think it was after Bush got elected, and especially after the invasion of Iraq, that the media went more off the rails. The NYT endorsement of Kerry is rather less measured in its critique of Bush. Some highlights:

          There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush’s disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

          Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush’s obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy.

          The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management.

          We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted.

          Note the continued portrayal of Bush as a “radical”. He was illegitimately “awarded” the presidency. His policies are not merely wrong but “frightening” and “Nixonian” (but also “inept”). And the NYT has always been left-biased (Eisenhower was their last GOP endorsement for president) but never the most strident.

          EDIT: Here’s the opening of their 2012 endorsement of Obama:

          The economy is slowly recovering from the 2008 meltdown, and the country could suffer another recession if the wrong policies take hold. The United States is embroiled in unstable regions that could easily explode into full-blown disaster. An ideological assault from the right has started to undermine the vital health reform law passed in 2010. Those forces are eroding women’s access to health care, and their right to control their lives. Nearly 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, all Americans’ rights are cheapened by the right wing’s determination to deny marriage benefits to a selected group of us. Astonishingly, even the very right to vote is being challenged.

          Not quite “unprecedented threat to democracy”, but pretty damn close (the bit about denying marriage benefits is especially rich since Obama had the same position in 2008, as is a part about the “odious” Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, conveniently forgetting that was a Clinton innovation).

          I don’t think the problem with either of those essays is over-charitability toward the right.

          • Jesse E says:

            Have you ever considered the idea that Republican’s have got more radical and right wing since 2000? I mean, George W. Bush couldn’t win the Republican nomination today with his views from 2000.

            If say, John Kasich has been nominated, the NYT would’ve still endorsed Hillary, but their attacks on Kasich would’ve been his hardcore social conservatism, not that he’d be a possible dictator and disaster for the country.

            Also, DADT was better than the previous state of affairs with the armed forces. Those who try to find issues with the Democratic Party for their past actions forget that.

            Plus, even throwing out the part that everybody knew Obama was lying about gay marriage, he never campaigned any pro-gay law, unlike the entire GOP of 2012.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Have you ever considered the idea that Republican’s have got more radical and right wing since 2000?

            Well yes, but that just raises the question of what exactly (aside from being the first “WrestleMania President”) makes Trump “more radical and right wing” than Reagan. Yes, he’s boorish and he talks funny but these qualities are orthogonal to politics.

          • Sandy says:

            George W. Bush couldn’t win the Republican nomination today with his views from 2000

            I would hope not. His views from 2000 brought us to this predicament.

          • xq says:

            “Nixonian” is obviously not “unprecedented” or “unique” pretty much by definition. And “frightening”, “inept”, etc. are not the same as “threat to democracy.” You’ve given no evidence that the mainstream media take on Bush, at any time in his presidency, was “unprecedented threat to democracy.”

            Anyways, it’s true that the NYT editorial board had favored Democrats for a long time (which is not identical to being “left-biased”). But you shouldn’t take that into account and ignore Judith Miller, or that many of the liberals on the NYT opinion page supported the Iraq war and were generally credulous about Bush’s claims about it. Just like you shouldn’t take the media’s general negative coverage of Trump into account while ignoring its negative coverage of Clinton, including its intense coverage of the Clinton email server, the Clinton foundation, etc. One might think that if the media really thought Trump was an unprecedented threat to democracy they might not cover email more than all policy issues.

            The center-left media criticism contains actual arguments. I’m not saying those arguments are all correct. But most of this discussion on this thread, including Scott’s post, is just ignoring these arguments rather than attempting to seriously address them.

          • cassander says:

            @Jesse E

            Have you ever considered the idea that Republican’s have got more radical and right wing since 2000?

            Considered and rejected as clearly untrue. Paul Ryan could comfortably endorse the contract with america in its entirety. With the exception of gun control, there’s not a single policy position where the modern GOP is to the right of where it was ~20 years ago. 20 years ago, the democrats refused to pass hillarycare, today, the republicans won’t repeal a substantially similar ACA.

            not that he’d be a possible dictator and disaster for the country.

            I find this unlikely in the extreme. Consider, for example.

          • gbdub says:

            Keep in mind that my second quotation is about the threat to America that is Mitt freaking Romney. It’s possible that Trump is radical compared to Bush, but Romney?

            I get it’s an endorsement, but the point is it is hyper-charitable to Kerry/Obama (as is Jesse – “everyone knew he was lying about that thing we don’t like”) and Democrats in general (I’m not the one who called DADT “odious”) and hyper-uncharitable to Bush/Romney. I left out the part where the 2012 endorsement stated as unqualified fact that “Obama prevented another Great Depression”.

            I’m not trying to rehash the 2012 election, let alone the 2000 one. (Would Gore have one the 2016 Dem nomination?)

            Anyway, the original question here was “is the media going too far out of its way to be ‘fair’ to conservatives?” And yeah, maybe it’s possible that the GOP got so insane between 2000 and 2012 that those two endorsements are equally fair, but I doubt it. I’m not sure how you read that 2012 article and say, gee, this gives Romney and the GOP way too much credit. Or at least, how you read it and say, “this isn’t anti-GOP enough, clearly we need to be more biased to convince more people”.

          • random832 says:

            @gbdub

            Not quite “unprecedented threat to democracy”, but pretty damn close (the bit about denying marriage benefits is especially rich since Obama had the same position in 2008, as is a part about the “odious” Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, conveniently forgetting that was a Clinton innovation).

            Let’s not forget what the status quo prior to that “innovation” was. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, as innovated by Clinton, was that the military shall not proactively investigate people suspected of being gay.

          • gbdub says:

            Again, I’m not the one that called it odious, or used that as a point in favor of Obama. Though it’s interesting that something can go from a major step in the right direction to odiously backwards in the space of a single political career – perhaps that ought to say something about any certainty over the righteousness of our positions, and how we treat those a mere 4 years or so behind the tip of progressive thought.

          • xq says:

            I didn’t post the editorial as an example of over-charitability towards the right, but as a response to the specific claim that the mainstream media presented Bush as “the unique, totally unprecedented threat to democracy.” This was part of your argument that the media “called wolf” on previous Republican presidents and so is no longer trusted when it comes to Trump. But none of these editorials look like calling wolf to me. Romney really did run on opposition to gay marriage.

            @cassander

            Disaster for the country, yes, but nowhere in that Yglesias article does he worry about Rubio becoming a dictator. Liberals think conservative ideas are bad! That doesn’t mean that all conservative politicians are treated as equal threats to democracy.

          • cassander says:

            @xq says:

            Disaster for the country, yes, but nowhere in that Yglesias article does he worry about Rubio becoming a dictator. Liberals think conservative ideas are bad! That doesn’t mean that all conservative politicians are treated as equal threats to democracy.

            No, they’re not all threats to democracy. Just the ones that are president,, or that might be president. Or that actually pass legislation we don’t like. And some aren’t threats to democracy, some are merely matricides.

          • xq says:

            None of those articles are accusing their subjects of threatening to become dictators. I’m actually surprised that’s the best you could do, since I know that some on the left did think Bush would refuse to concede power to Obama. Never more than a fringe view, though.

            You’re also misreading the Steve Nelson article. He appears to be accusing Ben Carson of lying about attempting matricide, not of actually being a matricide.

          • cassander says:

            @xq says:

            None of those articles are accusing their subjects of threatening to become dictators. I’m actually surprised that’s the best you could do, since I know that some on the left did think Bush would refuse to concede power to Obama. Never more than a fringe view, though.

            This is pedantry. How is saying they’re a “threat to democracy” not equivalent to a claim that they’ll become dictators? But if you want dictators:

            https://www.juancole.com/2012/10/top-five-signs-of-capitalist-dictatorship-in-the-romney-campaign.html

            there is no lack.

          • xq says:

            You can find any argument you want on the internet. That does nothing to establish that it was a mainstream view. Jesse’s claim was about a NYT endorsement, which I think actually does say something about that. I think comparing newspaper endorsements between 2012 and 2016 is a pretty good way of getting at this question, because there’s a large sample and you can make a direct comparison rather than just looking for the most extreme arguments you can find.

            gbdub posted the NYT Obama 2012 endorsement, and while I don’t at all agree that it was even close to an argument that Romney was an unprecedented threat to democracy, it was indeed pretty harsh on Romney. But let’s look at the Washington Post:

            We come to that judgment with eyes open to the disappointments of Mr. Obama’s time in office. He did not end, as he promised he would, “our chronic avoidance of tough decisions” on fiscal matters. But Mr. Obama is committed to the only approach that can succeed: a balance of entitlement reform and revenue increases. Mr. Romney, by contrast, has embraced his party’s reality-defying ideology that taxes can always go down but may never go up.

            Their top issue is “fiscal matters”. Not even a hint of “threat to democracy.” The basic argument is simply that Obama is a better economic manager. There’s just no comparison to the WaPo 2016 endorsement.

            LA Times Obama endorsement:

            Mitt Romney, has demonstrated clearly that he’s the wrong choice. He’s wrong on the issues, from immigration to tax policy to the use of American power to gay rights and beyond. And his shifting positions and willingness to pander have raised questions about who he is and what he stands for.

            Pretty mild stuff. They also lead with fiscal issues.

            Then there are papers like USA Today that endorsed no one in 2012 but endorsed not Trump in 2016, and a whole bunch of papers that went from Romney 2012 to Clinton 2016….

          • random832 says:

            @gbdub

            Again, I’m not the one that called it odious, or used that as a point in favor of Obama

            So what? When it was instituted, it was against a status quo of people being proactively investigated and DD’d for being gay. When it was repealed, what was actually repealed was that being gay was grounds for a DD at all.

            Any suggestion that these two actions are somehow opposed rather than one being a continuation of the other is flagrantly disingenuous.

            Part of the problem is that “DADT” is used simultaneously to refer to two different things that are very obviously not the same once you taboo the word – the policy that people can’t be investigated for being gay, and the policy that they can’t be openly gay. It’s even essentially the name – one half is the “don’t ask”, the other is the “don’t tell”. Clinton instituted the former, Obama repealed the latter.

  76. Eponymous says:

    How can you say with a straight face that Vox isn’t a terribly biased left-wing outlet that only plays at being a neutral gatekeeper? I mean, putting them in the same reference class as the New York Times and CNN seems an insult to true journalism.

    Vox’s target audience are the sort of leftists who think that leftists are highly intelligent and right about everything, unlike those stupid and uneducated conservatives, and mainstream journalists are forced by conventions of journalistic balance into false equivalence reporting, and thus are inaccurate; and so *of course* taking a perfectly neutral stance of just presenting the whole facts, even if they are inconvenient to conservatives, will result in a highly liberal news outlet, because the facts have a well-known liberal bias!

    Quite frankly, there are a *lot* of very explicitly leftist organizations and institutions, particularly on the internet. It’s true that these are not quite as dominant among liberals as the analogous organizations are on the right, since the liberals also have most of the mainstream organizations.

    And if you think the WSJ and Fox are so awful, I don’t really know what to say. I see both of them as quite mainstream, and I don’t think they are more to the right (relative to the median voter) than the mainstream media is left. And then there are all the far-left outfits (like MSNBC). It’s true that these aren’t as popular as Fox, because Fox is only slight to the right of the median viewer! But what’s on MSNBC probably has as much influence on the median elite (rather than median voter) as what’s on Fox.

    In general the financial news has a more conservative perspective, but it’s mostly blue tribe business conservatism, so leaves a lot of the right out in the cold.

  77. jhertzlinger says:

    Cthulhu cannot always swim left. The direction of left changes every week.

    Jefferson’s anti-racism has been called a left-wing movement.
    Jackson’s racism has been called a left-wing movement.
    Lincoln’s anti-racism has been called a left-wing movement.
    Wilson’s racism has been called a left-wing movement.
    Truman’s anti-racism has been called a left-wing movement.
    … and we have always been at war with Eurasia comrade!

    Let’s take another issue that is currently politicized: carbs vs. fat. Today carbs are bad on the right and fat is bad on the left. A generation ago, that wasn’t the case.

    Let’s look at a possible future controversy: A generation from now, Rebecca Tuvel might be seen as a brave pioneer on the left … or maybe as a crypto-fascist. I would not care to bet in either direction.

    Maybe we should first agree on definitions of Right or Left.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      Forget left or right, I don’t think Cthulhu even swims, it’s more like a jellyfish.

    • reasoned argumentation says:

      Let’s take another issue that is currently politicized: carbs vs. fat. Today carbs are bad on the right and fat is bad on the left. A generation ago, that wasn’t the case.

      Yes it was – George McGovern was the head of the Senate committee on nutrition that issued the “fat bad, carbs good” guidelines.

  78. Aftagley says:

    I’m a liberal who works in a decidedly conservative working environment. At a staff meeting last week, the head of our office complemented our IT head by saying something along the lines of “He’s so good, had he been with the FBI, well, they would have found those 30,000 emails.” someone else chimed in “Or he’d have been killed.” The room exploded with laughter.

    This is in the same organization (I’ll stop being vague and admit I’m in the military) where even polite, if negative comments towards Trump have been cause for censure due to purported “disrespect.” This hasn’t effected me because long ago I stopped talking politics at work.

    Those few who know of my political orientation outright refer to me as being one of the few “good” liberals, mostly because I don’t often choose to get in debate when Obama’s “questionable” citizenship comes up. This is somewhat annoying, but mostly I get through it by doing my job (which I love) and just changing the topic when politics comes up. Knowing my career plans, I’ll pretty much always be in majority conservative environments, and I’m completely ok with that. Sorry if that’s too much detail, but I’m just trying to provide context for why I think you’re incorrect here.

    First off, accepting the premise that all meaningful organizations are either left leaning, on their way to being left leaning or set up in direct opposition to their left leaning counterparts is not only false, it’s buying into the same false narrative Fox and its ilk try to push, that conservatives are this quaking minority who need constant defense. They’re not. For every chunk of society controlled by the left, I can name an equally important one run by the right. The left purportedly has the media, the right has the religious organizations. The left has the courts, the right has Law enforcement. The left has the unions, the right has the business interests that have been killing unions over the last few decades. It’s not a perfect balance, but one sided it is not. The idea that there is nowhere in society for a conservative to rest his hat is ludicrous.

    Secondly, I understand the desire to set up splinter groups more friendly to your viewpoint. If someone offered me the chance to do my current job, just in a setting more friendly to my political views, I’d strongly consider it. That doesn’t, however, explain why the perspective taken by these groups is always to burn their former group members to the ground. Fox News an arguably understandable reaction to what conservatives thought was a liberal dominated media becomes obsessed with attacking it’s former compatriots. The Gate Group of Gamers you mentioned got edged out of the increasingly progressive gaming culture and so started a new organization (understandable) and began issuing death and rape threats against its supposed enemies in traditional games culture (absolutely insane). These new organizations don’t, like you’d assume, merely pursue the same kind of topics they previously addressed just from a conservative perspective, they instead try to burn the previously existing organizations to the ground so they become the only perspective.

    I’m starting to drag on here, so I’ll summarize by saying that I agree with David Roberts. What’s happening on and to the right isn’t normal and most definitely isn’t the result of liberal action and/or bias.

    • reid says:

      > That doesn’t, however, explain why the perspective taken by these groups is always to burn their former group members to the ground.

      i’ve seen enough concerted efforts on twitter to have randos who said the wrong thing get fired, or controversial speakers chased out of town/assaulted by protesters, to think that this phenomenon is constrained to the right. these aren’t ‘former group members’ as you put it, but you can flip it — progressives in academia openly castigate the red tribe in their midst, which likely has the result of driving them away. progressives in many cultures (eg gaming) openly try to drive out people with opinions contrary to their political beliefs. i don’t think it’s out of the realm of reasonable conclusions to partly ascribe reaction to that as ‘the result of liberal action and/or bias.’

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      where even polite, if negative comments towards Trump have been cause for censure due to purported “disrespect.”

      I appreciate your providing of a different perspective than Scott’s. This one may not be on-point, however. It seems respect for the Commander-in-Chief is a serious issue in the military; during the Clinton years I had several conservative friends in the military who said “I’ll tell you the truth about anything except my feeling of the C-i-C.” I.e., they had to lie because official position was to support him.

    • Forlorn Hopes says:

      and began issuing death and rape threats against its supposed enemies in traditional games culture (absolutely insane).

      That’s a myth, we didn’t do that.

      Or at least, all the data driven studies (including those by people opposed to us) found that we were no more likely to be abusive than the average twitter user.

      • DrBeat says:

        Seeing how successful the lies were, that even people who are currently at this moment talking about how the cultural gatekeepers lie about people they don’t like in order to turn people against them and cause them harm will agree that of COURSE the things those identified liars said about unpopular people must be uncontroversially true, makes me want to decapitate myself.

        All is lost. All is lost, and all is ruin. Popularity devours all. Everything that makes life possible to tolerate will be annihilated by the popular, out of the sheer unbridled joy of annihilating things that make life possible to tolerate. All is lost.

        • hlynkacg says:

          Turning and turning in the widening gyre
          The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
          Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
          Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
          The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
          The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
          The best lack all conviction, while the worst
          Are full of passionate intensity.

          Surely some revelation is at hand;
          Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
          The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
          When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
          Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
          A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
          A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
          Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
          Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

          The darkness drops again but now I know
          That twenty centuries of stony sleep
          Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
          And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
          Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

          • Kevin C. says:

            Quoting the entire poem without any attribution?

            (And how exactly is this a reply to DrBeat’s comment?)

          • hlynkacg says:

            Yes.

            DrBeat says…

            All is lost, and all is ruin.

            Entropy devours all. So what? How did our forefathers respond? How would a true heir of the West respond? Two millennia of history and philosophy have already provided you with an answer. Surely some revelation is at hand, surely the Second Coming is at hand. You can’t slay the beast but you can vex it with a rocking cradle.

            Judeo-Christian allegory motherfucker DO YOU SPEAK IT?

          • DrBeat says:

            Popularity is invincible and inexhaustible. It is literally impossible to defeat popularity because popularity is by definition that which wins interpersonal conflicts. The popular will destroy everything and everyone that dare to ever do useful things, because nothing will ever escape the attention of the popular ever again. You cannot slay the beast. You cannot vex the beast. The beast is that which is empowered by every possible permutation of motions you can undertake or not undertake.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Ok, and?

            Which part of my reply did you not understand?

          • Aapje says:

            @DrBeat

            Popularity can decrease, especially if a group wins and their policies turn out to be bad.

          • DrBeat says:

            The popular always win, the policies they agitated for get implemented, they are bad because they were not made to do useful things they were only made to flatter the emotions of the popular, and nobody is capable of noticing this. They are not capable of noticing it. They cannot draw the conclusion from evidence. Marxism, for example, has failed as decisively and disastrously as it is conceivably possible for a set of ideas to fail, but Marxism will never, ever, ever, ever, ever go away.

          • Aapje says:

            Who cares? No one is going to give Marxists power in the West again.

            The goal is not to eradicate, but to marginalize.

          • hlynkacg says:

            nobody is capable of noticing this.

            The fact that you are writing this demonstrably proves otherwise. Seriously, you and Kevin need to grow the fuck up. Stop complaining about an absence of virtue and start trying to live up to it.

          • Mark says:

            I think the channel 4 show “The Island with Bear Grylls” which aired earlier this week may be instructive.

            A middle aged man called Phil took to wandering around camp with his tallywacker out, and this and other behaviour led to him becoming the group outcast. An all-round unpopular fellow.

            After a conflict with Jacqui, a retired policewoman, about who should sit next to the fire, Phil’s enemies decided to hold a vote to see if he should be expelled from the community.

            In the end they voted 9 – 6 to get rid of him. Victory for the popularity monster.

            But. The people who voted for him to stay didn’t do so because they liked him. They voted for him to stay because the idea of expelling him appalled them. “It’s like Lord of the Flies”.

            In Britain, at least, I think there are quite a few of us who think we owe something to people who we don’t particularly like. And, that actually, what we like best of all are principles of fairness.

            So, the solution is to appeal to that principle of fairness in the most abstract possible terms, and limit the damage that the mob can do when their passions are enflamed by some specific issue.
            Tolerance and diversity of individuals, not cultures.

          • DrBeat says:

            Who cares? No one is going to give Marxists power in the West again.

            Nobody, except for all of academia and all blue tribe activism, which are made out of popularity the way a bagel is made out of bread, and thus even people who despise them feel the undischargeable obligation to give them extra consideration, deference, respect, and utility.

          • Aapje says:

            @DrBeat

            Marxism may be popular in certain enclaves, but it is not popular in the mainstream and thus cannot be made into policy.

            Anti-egalitarian feminism is popular in certain enclaves AND is too popular still in the mainstream, so it can be made into policy. The mainstream needs to reject it (more).

        • Quoting the entire poem without any attribution?

          Has the flattering implication that of course everyone here will recognize it.

          Probably not true, unfortunately.

        • Deiseach says:

          DrBeat, I don’t know what to say to you. You seem to have some hurt relating to popularity, the lack of it and those who are popular using their power to mistreat the unpopular.

          I’ve never been “popular” and I don’t care a straw about that. I think there was one (1) attempt in my entire school career to mildly bully me, which I didn’t even recognise as a bullying attempt at the time, and avoided by the tactic of simply walking away because sorry, have to go home now. I’ve never been hurt by being unpopular because (a) I don’t care and (b) I don’t think the popular have ever tried to crush, destroy or otherwise afflict me personally.

          So… I really don’t know how to react when you talk about the entirety of present culture and civilisation being “annihilated by the popular, out of the sheer unbridled joy of annihilating things that make life possible to tolerate”. Dude, get over yourself is perhaps harsh to someone who may be in pain, as also “they only have the power you give them”. Yeah, I agree that the current drift of society is something I disagree with, and I mostly dislike a lot of the cultural Zeitgeist, and I even agree that it is popularity-driven because people want to be cool and to be part of the latest cool thing, but I don’t personally feel it as an attack or punishment or the popular flaunting their power over the unpopular. I think it’s a damn fool idea (see my growling about the Freddie deBoer article) and a mistake and sawing off the branch we’re all sitting on and I expect it to end badly, but I don’t feel the same hopelessness you seem to feel and certainly not in the same way.

          If you want to be popular, or engage in the arena of the popular, and fail at it, and perceive that you are being punished for failing – I can’t help you. I can say I’m sorry you’re hurt, but I don’t understand* the impulse to “I want to be one of the popular”. Presumably my brain-wiring didn’t get that module connected up, along with my other loose screws and missing connections.

          *Being socially averse/avoidant/having social anxiety has upsides as well as downsides. Didn’t get an invite to the cool party being thrown by the cool and popular person that everyone else but you is going to? Blissfully happy, because would not have liked to be obligated to go, do not like parties/crowds of people, it saves the effort of thinking up an excuse as to why I can’t go, and now can spend free time at home doing stuff I like!

          • The Nybbler says:

            as also “they only have the power you give them”

            Unfortunately, this is not true. In high school, bucking the popular people makes you a fair target for abuse, including such things as theft and assault. In the real world, the popular people get to make policies both formal and informal which result in punishment for those who refuse to go along with them.

          • DrBeat says:

            I don’t want to be popular. Where do you get that? Where do you even get the idea I think that’s possible?

            People are what they do. I don’t think there’s any argument here.

            People do what they can get away with. This is trivially observable.

            And what every single person in the entire world including yourself can also observe is some people just get to keep getting away with things. They get to keep being selfish and keep being malicious and keep punishing people for the crime of not being popular enough to make punishment stop and keep annihilating utility to feed their own emotions because… that is what they get to keep doing. Because they are inherently popular. Because they are entitled to respect, deference, attention, and utility. Because everyone will let them do it.

            Because they keep getting away with it, they keep doing it. Because they keep doing it, who they are is “people who do those things”. What they desire is to do those things. They will scream at everyone that allowing them to do those things is synonymous with virtue. Because they are inherently popular, everyone believes them.

            In the OP of this very thread, we just saw how Scott, even though he was at that exact moment talking about how dishonest the social left is when talking about their enemies, he was incapable of stopping himself from believing what they said about their enemies. That’s the invincible, inexhaustible, inassailable power of the popular. Even people who think they are lying, who KNOW they are lying, people who are at that moment saying “These people are lying to me!” cannot stop themselves from believing the lie.

            Because their power does not come from any thing they actually do, it comes from how people just let them get away with things and find it inherently emotionally rewarding to side with them, they can never ever be defeated. They might change the window dressing of their demands. They may switch superficial sides. But they will always be there, always destroying, always empowered, always rewarded for it.

            They do not only have the power I give them. They have the power that everyone is giving them, one hundred percent of the time, because it is inherently emotionally rewarding to give them that power.

          • CatCube says:

            Look, dude, there’s not some sort of Great Chain of Being for popularity. People are more or less popular in different groups. Somebody who’s highly respected in a college or office environment might very well be looked down upon on a construction site, for example.

            Hell, the whole “Affluenza” debacle ended up with the kid and his mother getting shiny bracelets from the feds. Do some “popular” people get away with some things, from time to time? Absolutely. That particular family had money and power enough to get away with murder, until they didn’t. There’s not some fully-generalizable Popularity stamp that is immutable.

            Can it be close to immutable in a particular context? Yes. As this American Dad scene riffs on, people can get a reputation that propagates outside of their control. But if you move to a new job, it probably will not follow you.

            I’ve been in organizations where I’m more or less popular based on things both within and outside of my control. As a junior Army officer, I was alright. Once I moved into company command, I had more trouble partially due to my difficulty in knowing when to put my foot down resulting in my being nice to a fault, and partially due to events that made my boss look askance at me. Admittedly, the first had something to do with the second. Throughout my Army career, I was a little more “mousey” than the culture really respected.

            When I moved to my current job as a design engineer, there was a distinct difference. For one, I actually am probably too outspoken, and need to work on dialing it back. This probably has something to do with the other, where I actually feel like I know what I’m doing, so I’m more confident. I actually do know more about what I’m doing, as I’m a lot better being handed a technical problem and solving it compared to trying to unfuck a massive personal nightmare that subordinates drop on my desk.

            So you can absolutely change your place in the pecking order, but it requires knowing your own strengths and limitations, and picking a pecking order where your strengths are more important than your limitations.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @CatCube

            You don’t understand, because you’re in the middle of the pecking order. The middle is very different from the bottom. Anyone with any sort of social skill (and you have it, as you’ve done the leadership thing) can avoid the bottom. If you lack the social skills to not be on the bottom, you lack them in all contexts.

          • CatCube says:

            I learned the social skills, and relatively late. Just like I learned how to calculate the moment capacity of a beam, or what a properly-drafted contract drawing looks like. For most jobs, interacting with others is just as important as any technical skill.

            I cannot tell you the number of times when in the Army I would talk to a subordinate, tell him what I needed, paused, then reiterated what I wanted in very slightly different words, and occasionally I would do this three or more times. Then, as I was walking away, I would think back over the interaction and the guy’s body language and realize the poor bastard was almost ready to chew his own arm off to escape that conversation. I have improved this somewhat, though I do still have the tendency. It’s a little easier now because it’s somewhat more acceptable for someone to talk over me or say that they’re leaving, compared to when I outranked the victims of this and they felt they couldn’t walk away (though I knew I had this tendency and wouldn’t have been offended if they had done so–I even told my First Sergeant that he was welcome to do this and to poke me if I was doing it to others). However, the biggest improvement is learning what body language to look for, prior to the end of the conversation. This is something I’ve had to do more by rote than any sort of natural feel. Learn what the people you interact with do when they’re bored by somebody. It helps if you know that somebody else in your office is a crushing bore; watch what other people do when that guy talks to them and memorize the body language. I find looking for the position of hands and arms to be the easiest, but it’s still a work in progress. Do the people you interact with the courtesy of looking out for when they’re not interested and not making them feel like they’ve got to be the bad guy by telling you directly.

            I really cannot respect all this wailing and woe about it any more than I can respect the subject of a Theodore Dalrymple column talking about how bad things just happen, or how the knife “just ended up” in the guy that said subject is in prison for murdering. You do actually have control over your actions. Don’t be a bystander in your own life.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @CatCube

            Again, you’re not getting it, because you had enough skill to keep you off the bottom.

            I cannot tell you the number of times when in the Army I would talk to a subordinate

            You see, you had subordinates. Those of us on the bottom do not, neither formally or informally. Somewhere in the Army — maybe not the current US army, but some armies — there are a bunch of poor schlubs who are privates and who will never be anything but privates. Literally everyone around them (except the other forever privates) will have higher status. They’ll always get the crap work, always bear the brunt of mistakes made by their superiors, and if they complain about it they’ll be punished more.

            You do actually have control over your actions. Don’t be a bystander in your own life.

            Indeed, but somehow it always works out that I must use my control over my own actions to act in the way others demand I do, or I will suffer consequences. And there is no one I can impose consequences on. That is the bottom.

          • Enkidum says:

            “somehow it always works out that I must use my control over my own actions to act in the way others demand I do, or I will suffer consequences.”

            This is literally true of everyone in the entire world.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Enkidum

            No, it is not. When high-status people behave they way they wish to instead of the way others want them to, it is _the others_ who suffer the consequences.

          • DrBeat says:

            There’s no such thing as “social skills”. They are phlostigon to try and explain inherent popularity. Nothing about them can be predicted if modeled as a skill that is used, and everything about them can be predicted if modeled as an inherent trait. An unpopular person who does literally every single thing that is categorized as “social skills” correctly will be punished for it, and you have seen this happen. After the fact justifications are made for why that person was “creepy”, which means “not inherently popular enough to assert away our desire to punish them by force of their popularity.” An inherently popular person can do literally none of the things that are described as “social skills” and still be showered in rewards and given the attention, deference, consideration, and utility they are entitled to, and you have seen this happen. Because that’s “countersignaling”. How can it be countersignaling if they are destroying the only channel by which they send any signal of being socially powerful, which should render them unpopular and punished by everyone in sensory range? If social standing were dictated by “social skills” it would be like countersignalling wealth by destroying your wealth and becoming a homeless person. But that is not what happens —
            they are still given attention, deference, consideration, and utility they are entitled to. Because “social skill” is not the only channel. It is not even an important one. Social status is granted by an inherent trait. The trait of inherent popularity.

            “somehow it always works out that I must use my control over my own actions to act in the way others demand I do, or I will suffer consequences.”

            This is literally true of everyone in the entire world.

            No. No it is not.

            For unpopular people, it is true one hundred percent of the time, and then consequences are suffered anyway, because the unpopular are punished for not being popular enough to make the punishment stop by the force of their popularity.

            For people who are neither very popular nor very unpopular, it is true some of the time, as they fit in different ways into different informal hierarchies based on which particular people find it inherently emotionally rewarding to side with them and which find it inherently emotionally rewarding to punish them — at some points there are people above them and at some points there are people below them.

            For the inherently popular, it is never true. The actions of the inherently popular, no matter what they are, create obligations in others to react appropriately to them. Their will is manifest and no more questionable than the wind or the trees, and it is the obligation of all other people to react in the “right” way to the actions of the popular.

            And I’m almost certain you have experienced this yourself, because you have probably either gone to school or had a job. You know all those times that someone did something to you that was wrong, and there was no question it was wrong, they wronged you by any coherent standard, and yet YOU were the one chastised because you did not react to it the right way, while their wrongdoing was ineffable and inexorable and could not be questioned? And didn’t you notice how the person who did wrong to you always got away with it? Because that is inherent popularity. They always got away with it because they have the inherent trait of other people allowing them to get away with things. And they act like people who constantly get away with that. Have you noticed how often popular people, when bullying unpopular people, use the justification “your reaction to my attack on you justifies my attack on you?” And how they constantly get away with it, and everyone around them repeats that justification as if it was wisdom and not obviously self-contradictory? Because that is inherent popularity.

          • Thegnskald says:

            DrBeat –

            I guess I can count myself in the “popular” camp – people have always liked me, although I have never made any particular effort at being liked. It annoys me when people openly dislike me, but ultimately I just don’t care; at some point I realized I didn’t respect the opinion of somebody who had a low opinion of me.

            So, here is my contribution: I like you. You have my approval. You are weird and intelligent, and interesting to read.

            Now you’re part of my crowd; the group I am popular with is probably remote from where you live, but if you were here, I could easily insert you into the “popular” crowd of my local group, which my wife and I have inadvertently taken over. What would that change?

          • lvlln says:

            I’m curious, DrBeat, how do people detect this “inherent popularity” in others? The way you describe it makes it seem like some independent video game stat assigned to someone at birth which determines how others interact with that person. But it’s not like we each have numbers floating on our heads for others to read in order to guide their actions. And there’s no evidence that we have some ability to “feel” chi or human fields or whatnot. So how is that information conveyed?

            And are there any specific examples you have in mind when you think of people who are truly fully inherently popular? So much that they have literally no limitations on their actions that would provide them negative consequences? I.e. they could go out in the street and start randomly murdering and raping men, women, and children with abandon, and other people would not cause them to suffer as a result? I can think of some people who could suffer relatively weak consequences for committing a crime an order of magnitude less than something like that, but I’m not sure I believe anyone could suffer literally zero negative consequences from doing that, for instance.

          • Enkidum says:

            To add some anecdata to the fire, I went through my childhood (up to age 18ish) as distinctly unpopular, with quite significant physical and emotional bullying through most of elementary school, and a very limited number of friends. I am now fairly comfortable in most social situations and I would say I’m probably more liked than most people my age and professional status. This has very much been a case of me learning social skills and deliberately applying them. That doesn’t mean there aren’t genetic factors involved (I’m not ugly, I’m probably relatively neurotypical, smart, etc), but the things I learned made a huge amount of difference too.

            For the inherently popular, it is never true. The actions of the inherently popular, no matter what they are, create obligations in others to react appropriately to them. Their will is manifest and no more questionable than the wind or the trees, and it is the obligation of all other people to react in the “right” way to the actions of the popular.

            This is just false for 99% of the human race. It’s not even true most of the time in high school, and in any environment outside of it, it’s almost always just wrong.

            It is true that well-liked people get away with shit that others don’t, but at some point chickens tend to come home to roost. Sometimes they don’t, because life isn’t always fair. But being well-liked today is not a free pass tomorrow (although it clearly helps). And spending your life resenting those people for their perceived privileges is not a good way to live.

            Look, with all due respect… you don’t know any of these people. You think you can identify them, but you’ve never had a close relationship with any of them, because if you had, you would realize how poorly this maps onto the reality of their lives. I do know these people. Hell, to some people, I am one of these people, and it’s simply not true at all for me.

          • The Nybbler says:

            It is true that well-liked people get away with shit that others don’t, but at some point chickens tend to come home to roost.

            Sewage, whether chicken-derived or otherwise, has a tendency to flow downhill. And the name of that hill is status. If you’re on the bottom of that hill, you’ll notice that when you don’t do as others want, you suffer consequences. When others don’t do as you want, you suffer consequences. When others’ failure to do as you want (even as they promised) causes you to fail to do as others want, you suffer the consequences (and neither of the others do). Observation demonstrates that there are other people for whom some or none of these facts are true.

            As for whether this is learned social skill or an inherent popularity, I do not know. My belief is it is largely skill learned in childhood; if you learn to be a bottom-status person then, you will always be a bottom-status person. And there will always be be bottom-status people.

            As for how people detect this status, I do not know. But they can. And you can’t imitate it. It’s something like a piano player. You can have two piano players, each equally technically skilled by any objective measure, and one will be considered a virtuoso while the other merely competent and workmanlike.

          • Tarpitz says:

            It seems to me too obvious that “popularity” (and I think we’re in a technical/esoteric enough usage to warrant the scare quotes here), like most things, is a skill which can be learned informed by both a talent which is probably genetic, or at any rate acquired at a young enough age to be for practical purposes immutable, and by external factors and short and longer term choices.

            Virtually (perhaps even literally) no-one could be as good at tennis as Roger Federer no matter how hard they worked at it, but the vast majority of people could be better than average at tennis if they put the effort in (and perhaps received a bit of decent coaching). A small minority are essentially incapable of playing the game. And even Federer’s skills will decline (have already declined), and could be eliminated entirely by some catastrophic accident.

            My popularity fluctuates with my weight, my mental health, my alcohol consumption and perhaps most of all with how much effort I make. My brother, far more popular by nature (and in reality, through the early part of our lives), has fallen ever deeper into the trap that awaits those with superlative natural empathy and severe self-esteem issues. He identifies with devastatingly selective accuracy only the worst in people and deliberately brings it out. This is not a trait that engenders popularity.

            People – especially but not only women – whose beauty is an important driver of their popularity will find that popularity declines as they age, or if they get fat. But nothing – not even looks or money – is so important to popularity as social skills. They are real, and while informed by innate ability and uncontrollable circumstance, they are learnable and amenable to conscious improvement.

    • cassander says:

      >This is in the same organization (I’ll stop being vague and admit I’m in the military) where even polite, if negative comments towards Trump have been cause for censure due to purported “disrespect.”

      this would have been equally true of obama, for reasons that should be beyond obvious. Generals have been fired for saying slightly mean things about vice presidents.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      With the military it’s important to distinguish what happens at company-grade and field-grade levels, and distinguish that from flag country.

      The culture skews very conservative at the lower and middle levels. At the highest level, that reverses itself, though even there it’s not AS liberal as most colleges or other liberal dominated institutions.

      Police are the same way in most cases, as a matter of fact (with the exception of rural county sherriffs in conservative-dominated states since they’re often directly elected), with a big gap between beat cops and even sergeants/liuetenants/captains and Chiefs of Police.

      Finally, yeah, respect for the CinC is part and parcel of the deal.

      (Active duty Army, 2000-2005)

      • random832 says:

        Finally, yeah, respect for the CinC is part and parcel of the deal.

        The idea that polite private disagreement is inherently “disrespect” seems corrosive to American values (in particular freedom of speech).

        But, then, a lot of the constitution doesn’t seem to apply to the military.

        • Incurian says:

          Polite private disagreement isn’t disrespect, even in the military. Here is article 88. There are additional regulations, but they’re all kind of like this one.

          So you can say “I sure don’t like President Trump’s foreign policy, in fact it’s quite bad!” But you couldn’t say something like “Fuck Trump, he’s a god damn idiot,” just like at any job you probably couldn’t get away with saying something like that about your boss.

    • hlynkacg says:

      To offer a counter anecdote…

      I was active duty Navy/Marines from 2002 – 2009 and a reservist for a few years after that. I once had Dan Rather in the back of my helicopter and have joked (to much laughter) that the world would be a better place if I had thrown him out over the Jungles of Sumatra, the only thing that stopped me was that I would have had to throw the cameraman out too and he seemed nice (not to mention that two people falling out of a helicopter would have likely aroused suspicions or resulted in an interminable safety stand-down about positive retention/control of passengers).

      That said if I had offered my honest opinion of Obama or Bush (post TARP), our Secretary of State, anyone else in my chain of command who I considered “less than exemplary” I would have, at the very least, received a stern talking-to from my RO or XO about spreading dissension in the ranks if not a formal counseling chit.

      Point being, I don’t think your observation indicates what you think it indicates. The chain of command is sacred for reasons that exist independently of politics.

      Edit:
      At the risk of doxing myself I find it odd yet interesting that I appear multiple times in the first page of a google image search for “Dan Rather” + Sumatra but not at all in a search for my own name.

    • The left purportedly has the media, the right has the religious organizations.

      ??

      Some religious organizations. As best I can tell, the mainline Christian groups are quite open at present not only to female priests but to gay (male or female) priests. The mainline Christian groups, some time back, were pushing for disinvestment in South Africa, mostly ignoring the fact that the Nigerian government was in a war with a largely Christian minority and killed about a million of them. As best I can tell, large parts of modern organized religion are routinely center left, although other parts are not.

  79. Chilam Balam says:

    That’s an interesting post, but I think we should also look at the influence of Churches in the American experience. The largest “safe spaces” that exist on the right are Evangelical Churches and the parallel Evangelical Christian society that exists in parallel to the mainstream American culture. They’re pretty explicit about this, if you go to any of these churches, they’ll tell you they are trying to create a “Christian Space”. They’ve got their own movies, music, books, websites, and their own institutions: churches, schools (both grade school and college), youth groups, etc. And they’re quite explicit about what views you can and cannot hold in these spaces. Like, you can’t believe in evolution, or not be Christian, etc. Many people are forced out from these institutions because of this: http://religiondispatches.org/special-report-have-evangelical-colleges-succumbed-to-theological-paranoia/
    https://chrisstroop.com/2017/02/11/more-evangelical-purges-come-to-light-why-are-some-people-surprised/
    (Both of these pots are from some one who’s ex-evangelical, so certainly biased against evangelical culture, but the facts are fairly checkable, and again, these institutions don’t usually deny these sorts of firings, just the tone.)

    I think we should point out that a lot of American skepticism of the mainstream comes from this culture. If you’re evangelical, you’re taught very early on not to trust main experts on a whole host of issues, like evolution, geology, astronomy, biblical criticism, and so on. And I don’t find it surprising that polarization in America has increased dramatically since Evangelical churches burst back onto the political scene in the 1970s. The former set of left institutions that mediated this sort of culture were unions, and they’re mostly dead today. And the culture of Evangelicalism is quite different, particularly on matters about empiricism and intellectualism. The classic book on this is the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind from the mid-90s, which is written by an Evangelical critic discussing his frustrations with an aspect of the movement’s intellectual life. I don’t think much has changed since its publishing.

    So I suspect that’s also part of the imbalance, that there’s a parallel Evangelical life you can live in much easier than trying to live in a parallel leftist world.

  80. moscanarius says:

    Someone should ammend the RESIST TRUMP sign to RESIST TRUMPETING YOUR POLITICAL OPINIONS

  81. Forlorn Hopes says:

    These were originally movements to fight a perceived liberal bias in regular gaming/sci-fi. They of course failed, and now they’re their own little separate conservative spaces practicing conservative video game commentary/sci-fi writing.

    This is factually wrong. The puppies was right wing but us ants are against politicisation of games. In practice that mostly meant Anti-SJW, but even now if you go to the major Ant hive on reddit you’ll see that we have a rule against unrelated politics, that rule was put in place because it was getting filled up with pro-Trump posts.

    Nor did we fail. We took down Gawker! Got federal legislation clarified. And outlasted every organised attempt to oppose us.

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      Nor did we fail. We took down Gawker!

      I thought Peter Thiel did that one.

    • Jesse E says:

      Guess what, your favorite game is political. It may be political in a way you don’t see or in a way you agree with. Hell, Call of Duty is inherently political, but there were no calls for it not to be made. The truth is, ants are against politics they don’t like in games. Which is fine, but they should be honest about that.

      As for “taking down” Gawker, a billionaire managed to get one subsite of Gawker to be shut down. Every other Gawker sub site is alive and in many ways, better off than before now it’s under the protective arm of a large corporation instead of depending on a moron like Nick Denton to lead them.

      Anita’s still going to get invited to talk to game developers, the gaming media anybody actually cares about is still SJW as hell, and so on, and so forth. Will you still make some peoples lives annoying as hell on Twitter? Sure, but that’s about it. You’ll also take credit for some things that you didn’t really do, but that’s part ‘n’ parcel of any activist group.

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        Guess what, your favorite game is political.

        I mean, if you ascribe to a “everything is political” mindset, sure. But I’m having a hard time finding the politics of, say, Super Mario Bros without making major stretchs in logic.

        • Nornagest says:

          Well, it’s pro-monarchy, and racist against turtles.

          • quanta413 says:

            Monarchy is obviously the right and just way to rule any fungal kingdom. Although non-fungal principalities may do best under a different system of government.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Although non-fungal principalities may do best under a different system of government.

            So “Great idea; wrong kingdom?”

          • quanta413 says:

            So “Great idea; wrong kingdom?”

            Yes. An angiosperm kingdom mayhap be better structured as a merchant oligarchy or perhaps an anarcho-syndicalist commune. However, I would not deign to dictate how they should run their own affairs.

          • Iain says:

            So “Great idea; wrong kingdom?”

            Sorry Mario, but your principality is in another castle?

          • Vorkon says:

            “Great idea Mario, but your ideal socio-political structure is in another kingdom.”

          • Vorkon says:

            Aw man, Iain beat me to it. >.<

        • Randy M says:

          Look at this and tell me it isn’t saying something about hierarchy.

        • Forlorn Hopes says:

          It’s obviously espousing family values: “Bros” is right there in the title. Peach wears pink, and likes to bake, and is the absolute ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom.

        • Jesse E says:

          I mean, it’s a little silly, but it a positive portrayal of a monarchy and has some signs of some weird heiarchal system where the humans rule over the other seemingly sentiment creatures. One could even make an argument about how the only way to ‘win’ is through violence.

          Now, it’s not a huge deal, and I’m not saying every game is hugely political, but there is politics.

          • Randy M says:

            Oh, obviously. And the dragon-visaged Koopa foes are clearly a stand-in for the then-emerging thread from China and East Asia generally. The fact that along the route to Bowser’s castle Mario finds coins in “mystery boxes” is trying to warn American youth that this Oriental menace will surpass them economically, especially with the West so decadent–see the Mushroom kingdom as a clear reference to the hippy culture of the recent past when the first Mario game debuted, and the general ineptitude of these serfs to effect any change in the plight of their peach-hued (and named) sovereign. Now the game’s predictions of a European savior for Western Capitalism were off-base, but it was an interesting bet that a more compassionate, third-way Europe would assist in the revival of the beleaguered American shroom-head.

      • Forlorn Hopes says:

        https://imgflip.com/i/1ob12a

        There is a difference between a game having a story and a game being political. Warhammer 4000’s story glorifies war, fanaticism, xenophobia, and even genocide. It’s clearly not trying to convince the players that these things are good, nor is it trying to convince the player the opposite via satire.

        It’s simply uses them to make an over the top and fun setting. That’s true of most games. Meanwhile games that are trying to convert players usually aren’t that good. Compare the origonal Mass Effect trilogy to the newest one.

        • Jesse E says:

          Well, that’s the fundamental disagreement, isn’t it? I don’t doubt you believe this, but I 100% disagree with you.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Then allow me to use the solid argument I mentioned, wherein depiction is not endorsement.

            To put it simply, the space marines live in a fascistic society. (More of a uber-religious one, but whatever). This is not said to be good or bad. It simply…is. No effort is made to argue that this is how society should be run.

            Of course, this type of analysis means that you can’t really distinguish who is being purposefully political or not. But what else is new?

          • beleester says:

            If you’re portraying the Space Marines as the heroes of your story, and let the player play as them, that’s, well, not endorsement, but definitely more than “depiction.”

            That’s what it means to say that everything is political. The act of putting something in a narrative, with a protagonist on one side and an antagonist on the other, is always going to portray some things in a positive light and others in a negative light. The artist’s choice of one thing, and not another thing, is a deliberate decision, influenced by their politics and society’s attitudes.

            That doesn’t mean it’s always worth fighting over, or that the authors aren’t allowed to choose those things, but it’s certainly fair game for criticism and you can’t assert that something is non-political just it’s not putting up a neon sign saying “THIS IS HOW TO RUN SOCIETY.”

          • Protagoras says:

            It is common in tabletop role-playing games for the PCs to be, as it is sometimes described by myself and my fellow tabletop RPG enthusiasts, murder hobos. Those of us who play such RPGs do not in general endorse solving lots of real world problems with violence, much less the inevitable in game tendency to seek to escalate everything to violence because the fights are fun and you can take the other side’s stuff after you kill them. But we do have fun playing those games. It is probably healthy for us to step back and question what we’re doing once in a while, but it is really needlessly alarmist (and probably counter-productive, given people’s natural tendency toward defensiveness) for outsiders to try to preach to us about what’s wrong with what we’re doing. Everything is problematic, and it’s worth thinking about that, but people should be a lot more careful criticizing problematic stuff other people like than criticizing problematic stuff they themselves like. Which is, sadly, the reverse of how they usually operate.

          • Nornagest says:

            If you’re portraying the Space Marines as the heroes of your story, and let the player play as them, that’s, well, not endorsement, but definitely more than “depiction.”

            Sure, the story follows characters with some pretty messed-up values, and you’re encouraged to sympathize with them. But I could say the same for Macbeth.

            Actually, Macbeth is arguably worse: most of the people who die in that play were totally innocent, and when you play a psycho in a video game you’re almost always up against people who’re even worse.

          • lvlln says:

            @beleester:

            If you’re portraying the Space Marines as the heroes of your story, and let the player play as them, that’s, well, not endorsement, but definitely more than “depiction.”

            That’s what it means to say that everything is political. The act of putting something in a narrative, with a protagonist on one side and an antagonist on the other, is always going to portray some things in a positive light and others in a negative light. The artist’s choice of one thing, and not another thing, is a deliberate decision, influenced by their politics and society’s attitudes.

            This, to me, seems like the intractable disagreement between those who insist “everything is political” and those who insist “fiction is fiction.” Obviously most people exist on a spectrum between the 2, but where one lies on the spectrum seems to depend on how much one buys into the argument that showing a figure in fiction in a positive light is an act of advocating behavior or characteristics of that figure in real life.

            Which, again, seems intractable to me, since it almost seems definitional in terms of what “advocating in real life” means. But I wonder if there’s a way to get around it by asking the empirical question, How and how much do such depictions actually influence people who consume such depictions?

            Even if a positive depiction of something in fiction can be described as “advocating” certain behaviors or characteristics in real life, why should anyone care, if it doesn’t actually influence people to adopt those behaviors or characteristics? This seems like an empirical question that can be answered, and as best as I can tell, we don’t know the answer. But I’m not an academic or expert of sociology or psychology. And I think it would behoove the people who claim “everything is political” to actually go about finding the answer to this, because without empirical evidence of influence, even if something is considered political advocacy, it doesn’t follow that it’s something to take seriously in the political realm. And if the empirical evidence reveals that such influence is weak or different from what’s actually advocated, then they can stop wasting time.

          • Aapje says:

            I think that’s it’s perfectly valid to want to experience an immoral perspective, if there are no victims.

            Evildoers are humans like the rest of us and are motivated by similar emotions as us. So it can be helpful to step into their shoes and figure out why their perspective appeals to some people. Furthermore, it is hard to figure out what morality is right and getting into extreme situations can clarify what you oppose and support.

            In real life, you see people experimenting with emotions and morality by seeking relatively extreme situations, to figure out where they stand, in life. For example, it is quite common for children to torture and kill small animals.

            If people can do these things in an environment where such behavior doesn’t hurt others, that seems like a good thing.

        • Robert Liguori says:

          I think I disagree about WH40K not being an argument. I think it is, but not precisely with satire. It’s taking the talking points of fascism, and positing a world where they’re true, where it is genuinely necessary to unite behind your faction and its leader and wage war on the Other, because to do otherwise, or even think of doing otherwise, will devastate your entire soceity.

          It’s pointing out that there could be a world where fascism is right, good, and necessary, and that such a world looks nothing like ours.

          But WH40K is huge, sprawling, and has had so many hands on it over time, that you can point to a bunch of different sections with different inspirations. There are some bits in which the fascism simply is, some in which it’s glorified unironically, but lots in which it’s used to make a point.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            Well given the huge amount of works set in the Warhammer 40K universe I don’t doubt that some people are trying to make a point.

            However the parts I’ve seen myself (the video games) really do not give any impression of trying to make a point. And I only need to demonstrate one work of art that’s not political to disprove “all art is political”.

            The origonal Dawn of War had quotes like “Beginning reform is beginning revolution.” and “Hatred is the emperor’s greatest gift to humanity.” from the point of view of the players race the Space Marines.

            There’s nothing in the game that turns these pro-fascism quotes around to make a point that fascism is bad. And if you want to say the game encourages fascism that’s an extraordinary claim so it requires extraordinary evidence that’s just not there.

        • dndnrsn says:

          It’s interesting that people map the humans in W40k to fascism, given that it’s a sort of monarchy/theocracy – not populist in the slightest. Weird how any authoritarian/totalitarian system gets thought of as fascism.

          • MugaSofer says:

            It’s human-supremacist (complete with Exterminatus of the impure mutant), much of the imagery deliberately evokes Naziism (lots of skull symbols and Naziesque uniforms), and the Emperor – despite his title – is not a hereditary position but instead rules through sheer ubermenshy force of personality. I think there’s a definite fascist case to be made.

          • dndnrsn says:

            It’s a grab-bag of “this shit is evil but cool” imagery. Thinking about it more, there is a degree of popular sovereignty (without popular rule), which is a big part of fascism – the dictator (purports to) rule in the name of “the people”. The Emperor rules in the name of humanity.

      • AnonYEmous says:

        I think the problem that I’ve encountered with people of this stripe is that they fail to consider tiering.

        For example, it may be true that everything is political (though I have a very solid argument against that too). But it’s obvious that games like Mario are on the lowest tier of politics, whereas a game like…say, Sunset, is all about politics. Take a recent example, where the creators of Shovel Knight introduced a gender-swap feature, explaining that they were uncomfortable with using “regressive” gender stereotypes and wanted to fight them.

        The bottom line is that I’d like most games to be at the lowest tier of politics, where any politics are unintentional or simply there to advance the story. If you can play through an entire game and have to scrounge around for political lessons, then that’s apolitical enough for me.

  82. Nornagest says:

    This is the worst comment section I’ve seen on this site for a while.

    • hls2003 says:

      Hardly surprising; this wasn’t Scott’s best work anyway, and it’s explicitly appealing to partisan perceptions.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      I fear that something might be in the air lately… Not sure if Trump himself, or he’s just a symptom of something else. Lots of places that are otherwise peaceful are at each other’s throats.

    • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

      That comment would be much better if it had an explanation what “worst” means.

      • Nornagest says:

        Highest heat-to-light ratio, mostly.

        • AnonYEmous says:

          like i said from the start

          “who defected first”

          and like i didn’t say from the start

          “I have a strong opinion but know that facts are hard to come by, especially insofar as defectors have no reason to make defection explicit”

          so i feel you

        • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

          This is understandable, it’s a hot topic, and there’s little possibility of discovering something somebody doesn’t know about it – all of it is happening before our eyes, the facts are out there to see, what differs is interpretation, but it’s very hard to convince somebody to change one’s interpretation…

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      Is it me, or did it draw a lot of first time and/or infrequent posters, both left and right-leaning?

      But yeah, a lot more heat, less light.

      To be fair to said first-time/infrequent posters, part of the problem is that we also have a fair number of right-leaning regulars who are too easily tempted to fight smug with smug.

    • suntzuanime says:

      Now that you’re here!

    • Urstoff says:

      Yep. It riled up all of the commenters for whom the world is a Manichean struggle between them and the SJW’s (define that as you will).

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        Yes, AND also a bunch quick to point out that Scott’s imagining things, reality/Truth just has a liberal bias and smart, rational, impartial people recognize that. Which then draws counter-bickering from the people you just mentioned

        Neither, though, is particularly helpful.

      • Deiseach says:

        It riled up all of the commenters for whom the world is a Manichean struggle between them and the SJW’s

        Hey, you take that back! Manicheans are heretics, how dare you associate me with heretics! 🙂

    • Brad says:

      It’s not like Scott ever made a secret of his ideological commitments, but somehow whenever he posts something that indicates that, yep he’s still left of center, people lose their minds.

      • AnonYEmous says:

        “who defected first” is an intense mode of discussion, especially because one side has alleged for so long and with such fervor that the other side defected first in a sneaky manner

        i have a lot of sympathy for this view, but even objectively: this is a red-hot topic, and on top of that Scott didn’t do a great job of discussing it. It seems like he tried to get past whether or not it was true to get to a larger point, but he did a very poor job of this as well (usually he fails, but admirably; this time I wasn’t even sure if he tried).

        • Brad says:

          The post wasn’t aimed at you. If someone that the post *was* aimed at was semi-convinced by it and then read the comments whatever convincing Scott did would most likely be completely lost.

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      The good thing about this kind of comment is that everyone can go ahead and think “Yep, those other guys sure are shitting up this place”.

      • Nornagest says:

        My first comment was a shitpost to begin with, but it’s been interesting (and kinda depressing) to come back to it a day later and find so much “yep, the comments suck, and it’s all the fault of those fuckers“.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          That was my point when I said that there is a lot of bad comments from -both- sides here, but I’m not sure anyone noticed.

        • hlynkacg says:

          Let that be a lesson to you.

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      I mean, did you see the comment threads for the second half of 2016? (Hell, all of 2016)

      I stopped reading the comments for months, the election made this place a seething pit of rage and interminable, repetitive arguments.

      (still the best comments on the Internet, though. The whole Internet lost its mind in 2016)

    • Deiseach says:

      Well, a topic like this is a bear pit combined with a snake pit with a light shower of vitriol pattering down on our heads while we tussle.

      Matters have become so polarised pretty much everywhere that I really think there is very little neutral common consensus ground for people from all sides to stand on and say “At least we all agree on this point”; perhaps “murder and rape are bad” is about as good as it gets, and even there we’ll find people on one side claiming incident A was clearly rape/murder and people on another side claiming it clearly wasn’t.

  83. Yosarian2 says:

    I think the media tries another strategy to deal with this, which has been even less effective. The media is afraid of being accused of having a liberal bias, but they really do disagree with the Republicans on a lot of major issues (the “elite consensus view” on things like global warming, immigration, gay rights, ect, is much closer to the Democratic view). But they want to look neutral. So what they do is they try to spend just as much time attacking the Democratic candidate during an election as they spend attacking the Republican candidate. But they agree with the Democratic candidate on most of the issues, so the way they manage to do that is to find (or invent) personal flaws and failings on the part of the Democrat, to call them “boring” or “unlikable” or to take minor scandals and blow them up into a huge deal. The end result is that the Repubican candidate usually comes off looking “likable but dumb” and the Democratic candidate comes off looking “smart but crooked and dishonest” to most people who casually watch the TV news. This has been the pattern I’ve seen in every election since, I donno; Bush/Gore? Maybe Bob Dole/Bill Clinton?

    It doesn’t fool the conservatives; they still can tell that the media doesn’t agree with any of their ideas on immigration or taxes or poverty. But it does make politics even more nasty and personally destroying, and does turn more people off from it, and I think it make be one of the reasons people these days have such a much lower opinion of politics then was true 30 or 40 years ago.

    Anyway, that’s been the pattern for a long time now. But that might have finally broken after this election; there’s a sense in a lot of circles I think that by electing Trump, the Republicans have crossed some final, unforgivable line, and now there’s no more room or tolerance for political neutrality or compromise with the Republicans, not even from our “neutral institutions”. Which can’t be good for the country, long term, but I really don’t know how we can fix it now.

    • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

      > and now there’s no more room or tolerance for political neutrality or compromise with the Republicans, not even from our “neutral institutions”

      That strategy seems to not be the best one for them, as Republicans now control the Congress, the Presidency and 32 state legislatures (you need 38 to pass constitutional amendments btw). Usually the party in this position would seek some power-sharing arrangement. But maybe Democrats are content with owning California, Oregon and couple of other deep-Democratic states, and let go of federal power ambitions? That would be an interesting development.

      • Yosarian2 says:

        Usually the party in this position would seek some power-sharing arrangement.

        I think the far left point of view is that Democrats have tried compromise and moderation and being the voice of reason and normalcy for decades, and that hasn’t worked. What has worked has been the extremism and no-compromise holy war of the Tea Party. So, the theory goes, Democrats need to start to “fight fire with fire” and that’s how they can win back power.

        In the short run it might even work; take things up to 11 and turn out the faithful for the midterms and you can win them (just like the tea party did for the Republicans in 2010). Longer term though if we don’t do something about the growing partisan divide we are going to have a real problem.

        If a more centrist Republican had been elected, some Democrats would be trying to compromise, but Trump is just radioactive. Not just the Democratic base but even the Democratic mainstream and would he ready to lynch anyone who tried. Working with Trump on anything in any way is seen as basically collaborating with the enemy.

        If you think I’m exaggerating, the state of California is now talking about blacklisting any contractors who work on Trump’s wall, never allowing them to work for the state again.

        http://www.npr.org/2017/05/02/526514203/states-move-to-blacklist-southern-border-wall-contractors

        • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

          > Democrats have tried compromise and moderation and being the voice of reason and normalcy for decades

          Certainly not in the decades I remember. Bush was regularly declared literally Hitler, and rank-and-file Republicans weren’t treated much better by rank-and-file Democrats. Maybe it was before Bush? What I read about Reagan era doesn’t look like it was the case either.

          > In the short run it might even work; take things up to 11

          You mean Berkeley riots, or DC riots, or literally beating up people, or banning any travel to a state tainted with different opinions, or declaring that everybody who disagrees is literally Hitler is not taking things to 11 yet? I think I’d really hate 11 then.

          > just like the tea party did for the Republicans in 2010

          Tea Party did nothing like that. It was mostly pressure on Republican politicians, things that the unions and other left groups have been doing for years. Tea Party never had power to conduct organized media campaigns across wide spectrum of media companies, or to unperson somebody in wide range of occupations for heresy, or to pass legislation banning travel to certain state or organize riots with virtual impunity.

          > If a more centrist Republican had been elected, some Democrats would be trying to compromise

          Riiiight. Because they compromised a lot with Romney, who is as centrist as they get. I’ve been hearing this for years – if only Republicans didn’t do this particular thing we oppose and didn’t elect this particular candidate who is Satan incarnate, we’d get along just fine. But somehow getting along just fine only requires doing exactly what Democrats want and that’s the only compromise that’s on the agenda. I’ve stopped believing this primitive trick long ago.

          > Working with Trump on anything in any way is seen as basically collaborating with the enemy.

          Exactly the same would happen with any other elected Republican. Look into Gorsuch confirmation – he has been widely praised until the nomination, but when it came to the actual nomination, Democrats filibustered it like he was completely unfit. All with the same tune of “if only they nominated really qualified candidate…” This is not even funny anymore, I don’t think anybody buys this.

          • Matt M says:

            Gorsuch is a bad example imho

            Even though they never explicitly admitted it, it was OVERWHELMINGLY obvious that nobody was objecting to him on ideological reasons. It was 100% entirely about “getting revenge for the GOP blocking Garland” and literally everyone knew it.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            >Certainly not in the decades I remember. Bush was regularly declared literally Hitler…

            Democrats in Congress during the Bush era pretty regularly worked with Republicans and with Bush to pass bipartisan laws and budgets and such. Much more so then Republicans did under Obama, and much more so then any Democrat will do with Trump.

            >You mean Berkeley riots, or DC riots, or literally beating up people,

            There have been at least as many examples of people on the right using political violence over the past few years as there have people on the left. Often much more serious examples of violence.

            Neither is acceptable, but pretending it’s one sided is just going to make things worse.

            >Because they compromised a lot with Romney, who is as centrist as they get.

            If Romney had been elected in 2012, many moderate Democrats in Congress would absolutly have found issues they could work with him on. This united front against Trump is something new.

            Take a look at how many votes Bush’s cabinet appointments got; even the most controversial were in the 80’s.

            >Look into Gorsuch confirmation – he has been widely praised until the nomination, but when it came to the actual nomination, Democrats filibustered it like he was completely unfit. All with the same tune of “if only they nominated really qualified candidate

            How is that any different from what the Republicans did to Garland? Almost word for word it’s the same story. He was widely praised by Republicans, was clearly qualified. The only difference is that Republicans wouldn’t even hold hearings on Garland, wouldn’t accept or reject him, just to stop Obama from nominating anyone at all.

            That’s a far more serious breach of democratic norms then mearly filibustering a candidate after hearings. People are not going to forget what the Republicans did to Garland. Frankly any 5-4 decision this supreme court makes will be considered illegitimate by a large part of this country because of that.

          • cassander says:

            @Yosarian2

            > Much more so then Republicans did under Obama, and much more so then any Democrat will do with Trump.

            When harry Reid controlled the senate, Obama’s budget proposals were often voted down by massive margins. It takes two to have an impasse, Why are you assuming the republicans were at fault? especially when Obama’s absolutely terrible relations with hill democrats weren’t exactly a secret?

            The only difference is that Republicans wouldn’t even hold hearings on Garland, wouldn’t accept or reject him, just to stop Obama from nominating anyone at all. That’s a far more serious breach of democratic norms then mearly filibustering a candidate after hearings.

            Why do you say that? they strike me as exactly the same. What’s the point of holding hearing for someone that isn’t going to be voted on, and if voted on, would be defeated. I’ve never understood this pearl clutching around not accepting or rejecting him. They did reject him. They said They’re not even going to hold hearings. Had Obama really wanted to get something done, he could have struck a deal with a gang of republicans (who did have an outright majority in the senate) to get another Kennedy on the court, but he didn’t want to do that. And had the senate just voted him down one day, I doubt the critics would have been silenced.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            >They’re not even going to hold hearings. Had Obama really wanted to get something done, he could have struck a deal with a gang of republicans (who did have an outright majority in the senate) to get another Kennedy on the court, but he didn’t want to do that

            Mitch McConnell specifically said he wouldn’t hold hearings on ANYONE Obama nominated, period. And frankly Garland is dead center politically, probably not far from Kennedy. It didn’t matter. So I doubt there was any room for negotiations or compromise.

            I think that by doing that in such a blatant fashion, they pushed us into a new political reality where neither party is ever going to be able to nominate anyone to the Court if the other side has the Senate. And I think that is likely in the long run to lead to a situation where the judicial branch just slowly stops being an independent third branch of government that can credibly act as a check on the other two.

          • cassander says:

            Yosarian2 says:

            Mitch McConnell specifically said he wouldn’t hold hearings on ANYONE Obama nominated, period.

            There were about 50 other GOP senators besides mcconnell, and you only need to peel off a few.

            And frankly Garland is dead center politically, probably not far from Kennedy. It didn’t matter. So I doubt there was any room for negotiations or compromise.

            This line speaks volumes about your world view. “He’s as right wing as democrats go, it’s not possible to go any further to the right.” Yes it is. You go, gasp, RIGHT OF CENTER. You accept the reality that there’s a republican senate who is under zero obligation to consent to whomever you nominate and nominate someone they actually like. Not another scalia, of course, someone moderate right, like kennedy or souter, then hope that their views will “evolve.” Hell, make a show of it. Throw their partisanship back in their face, and say that if the judiciary committee can produce a list of, say, 5 names by consensus, he’ll nominate someone from the list. There only isn’t room for compromise if your position is “a democratic partisan or bust”. And if that is your position, well, it’s not the republicans refusing to compromise, now is it?

            I think that by doing that in such a blatant fashion, they pushed us into a new political reality where neither party is ever going to be able to nominate anyone to the Court if the other side has the Senate.

            You mean, gasp, the legislature might constrain the executive? How will the republic survive?

            And I think that is likely in the long run to lead to a situation where the judicial branch just slowly stops being an independent third branch of government that can credibly act as a check on the other two.

            By what mechanism does this occur? judges won’t stop being appointed for life.

          • There have been at least as many examples of people on the right using political violence over the past few years as there have people on the left. Often much more serious examples of violence.

            Could you give examples? I cannot think of any, but I don’t read newspapers much.

            >Look into Gorsuch confirmation – he has been widely praised until the nomination, but when it came to the actual nomination, Democrats filibustered it like he was completely unfit. All with the same tune of “if only they nominated really qualified candidate

            How is that any different from what the Republicans did to Garland?

            As best I can recall, the Republicans never claimed Garland was particularly unqualified. Their position was that it was near the end of Obama’s term, they hoped to win the next election, so they would stall, as they were legally permitted to do, until their man was in a position to nominate someone they liked better.

            The same effect but a different justification.

          • Iain says:

            There were about 50 other GOP senators besides mcconnell, and you only need to peel off a few.

            Mitch McConnell is the Majority Leader. He schedules the votes, and decides whether the nomination will even be brought to the floor. If McConnell does not want Garland to be considered, Garland will not be considered.

            You accept the reality that there’s a republican senate who is under zero obligation to consent to whomever you nominate and nominate someone they actually like.

            So, you should look for people who get statements like this one made about them? (See also: here, here, here.) Merrick Garland was the guy that Republicans were pointing out as a highly qualified centrist alternative when Kagan was nominated.

            Mitch McConnell knows how the game is played. The odds that the Republicans would win in November were not that good, but they were certainly better than the odds that they would face any sort of punishment from voters for hard-to-explain procedural obstruction. Why would he ever fold? In the worst case, Clinton wins and he can bring Garland up for a vote during the lame duck period; in the best case, he gets a Republican nominee. There is literally nothing that the Democrats could offer that McConnell would benefit from accepting. You can bash McConnell all you want; you might rile up the Democratic base, but the swing voters don’t care, and they’re the only ones who really count.

          • cassander says:

            @Iain says:

            Mitch McConnell is the Majority Leader. He schedules the votes, and decides whether the nomination will even be brought to the floor. If McConnell does not want Garland to be considered, Garland will not be considered.

            The power of the majority leader is dependent on the support of his caucus. he is not a dictator. He is not even harry reid.

            So, you should look for people who get statements like this one made about them? (See also: here, here, here.) Merrick Garland was the guy that Republicans were pointing out as a highly qualified centrist alternative when Kagan was nominated.

            No, you look for one of them. You offer them something that they actually like. you know, COMPROMISE. A democratic president offering up a democratic nominee is not compromise.

            Mitch McConnell knows how the game is played. The odds that the Republicans would win in November were not that good, but they were certainly better than the odds that they would face any sort of punishment from voters for hard-to-explain procedural obstruction. Why would he ever fold?

            Again, mcconnell doesn’t have to fold, you just need a few members of his caucus to. And the way you get them to fold is to offer them something they want. “Sure, maybe trump wins, but probably not. How about you roll the dice with a souter 2 now rather than whatever crazy hippy hillary is going to appoint.” And that’s before we even consider the broader optics of how much good press obama would have gotten if he made it look like he was trying to put aside partisanship and let the republican controlled judiciary select his shortlist. You turn Mcconnell from someone drawing strength from a unified caucus to being weakened by a divided one by offering them something to divide over.

            There is literally nothing that the Democrats could offer that McConnell would benefit from accepting.

            I’ve just explained what they could offer, twice. Here’s a third time. They could have offered a Souter.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            >There were about 50 other GOP senators besides mcconnell, and you only need to peel off a few.

            If the Senate leadership (IE: Mitch McConnell) held a hearing and allowed s vote that would have been true. But he did not. He just didn’t schedule a hearing at all. So there wasn’t any vote you could “pull off a few” on.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            Could you give examples? I cannot think of any, but I don’t read newspapers much.

            Sure.
            Conservative attacks people with machete in a coffee shop, demands to know their political party and lets them go if they are a Republican:

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/04/28/machete-wielding-assailant-asked-about-political-affiliation-before-campus-attack-witness-says/?utm_term=.6709af80c067

            Trump supporter assaults a Muslim worker at airport, tells her the new U.S. president would “get rid of all of you.” ”

            http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-supporter-charged-hate-crimes-against-muslim-airport-worker-548977

            Trump supporter shoots two Indians, killing one, after yelling “get out of my country”

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/24/get-out-of-my-country-kansan-reportedly-yelled-before-shooting-2-men-from-india-killing-one/?utm_term=.549745aa239d

            Ect. There have been a number of incidents like that.

          • cassander says:

            @Yosarian2 says:

            If the Senate leadership (IE: Mitch McConnell) held a hearing and allowed s vote that would have been true. But he did not. He just didn’t schedule a hearing at all. So there wasn’t any vote you could “pull off a few” on.

            The Mcconnell could only do that because his caucus supported doing it. You peal them off, and that goes away. Senate leadership is not all powerful. gangs of senators can do a lot, when they want to. Obama gave them no reason to want to.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Ah, that second one would be Robin Rhodes, supporter of Congressman Jim McGovern (D – Mass) and other Democratic politicians. No evidence of Purinton (the Kansas murderer) being a Trump supporter either.

            It’s bad enough you take individual acts of violence, supported by no organized group and arrested and charged and basically treated like the criminals they are accused of being and put those against organized political violence which is praised or said to be understandable by less radical groups, which is not punished and is indeed allowed to flourish. But it’s worse to attribute these acts to one side without evidence or (as with Rhodes) in the face of contrary evidence.

            Further, I suspect the Rhodes case is going to turn out to be yet another hoax.

            There simply is no question about which side is engaging in and endorsing the vast majority of the political and ideological violence, and it’s not “Trump supporters”. Transparent sophistry won’t change that.

          • Yosarian2:

            Thanks.

            All three of those were examples of single individuals acting crazily. All three got arrested. That’s analogous to the fellow who killed someone because he thought he was Trump.

            That’s very different from a large number of people engaged in open political violence and not getting arrested, charged, or jailed.

            You described one of the three assailants as a conservative, the other two as Trump supporters. Following up on the news stories, there does not seem to be much support for any of those claims. The first one was hostile to non-Republicans, which might or might not mean he was a conservative. The second had a past history of contributing to both Democratic and Republican candidates, but did mention Trump during the attack. The other didn’t even do that–he seems to have been drunk and hostile to Indian immigrants who he falsely assumed were illegal immigrants from the Middle East.

            Do you have evidence to support your descriptions of all three? If not, does that say something important about your standards of proof in deciding what to believe and say?

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            “Bush was regularly declared literally Hitler”

            …by the Democratic Party, as an institution?

            “You mean Berkeley riots, or DC riots, or literally beating up people, or banning any travel to a state tainted with different opinions, or declaring that everybody who disagrees is literally Hitler is not taking things to 11 yet? I think I’d really hate 11 then.”

            Those were done by the Democratic Party, as an institution?

          • Iain says:

            I’ve just explained what they could offer, twice. Here’s a third time. They could have offered a Souter.

            Okay, so Obama nominates Souter Jr. McConnell’s best case is still waiting until after the election to see if Trump wins, but now his worst case is pushing Souter Jr through during the lame duck period. Meanwhile, the best case for the Democrats got substantially worse.

            Why would anybody in the Republican caucus oppose this? Who, on the Republican side, would prefer Souter Jr over the possibility of Gorsuch, so strongly that they are willing to go against the Majority Leader, get booted out of their committee assignments, and face an inevitable primary challenger calling them a squishy RINO who betrayed the party?

            There are only two ways the play could go wrong. First, if Clinton had won, McConnell would have had to move quickly to get Garland confirmed. Presumably McConnell was confident in his own ability to do so. The harms to any individual Republican senator if McConnell was wrong are way more diffuse than the clear harms of taking a public stance against the caucus.

            Second, maybe you face some sort of consequence at the polls in November. Maybe the voters will notice your cynical obstruction and turn against you. McConnell’s genius lies in realizing that those consequences would never happen. Republican partisans aren’t going to suddenly turn Democrat because their side is playing hardball. Democratic voters were already maximally opposed. There just aren’t that many swing voters who pay close enough attention to the minutia of Senate procedure to care about any of this. I’m sure that the Democrats tried all sorts of Garland-based ads with their focus groups; the fact that you didn’t see any of them during the election is a sign of how unpersuasive this stuffy procedural stuff is.

            In the meantime, nominating Souter Jr would have gotten the Democrats crucified from the left. Indeed, there’s a case to be made that Obama should have nominated somebody much further left; McConnell was never going to allow a vote on anybody Obama nominated, but a more exciting, less centrist nominee might have made it marginally easier to mobilize the base. (It’s unlikely that it would have changed anything, though.)

          • cassander says:

            @ian

            Okay, so Obama nominates Souter Jr. McConnell’s best case is still waiting until after the election to see if Trump wins, but now his worst case is pushing Souter Jr through during the lame duck period. Meanwhile, the best case for the Democrats got substantially worse.

            Only if you assume Obama is a complete idiot. The deal would be souter jr. confirmed BEFORE the election, obviously.

            Why would anybody in the Republican caucus oppose this? Who, on the Republican side, would prefer Souter Jr over the possibility of Gorsuch, so strongly that they are willing to go against the Majority Leader, get booted out of their committee assignments, and face an inevitable primary challenger calling them a squishy RINO who betrayed the party

            Every one of them that thought hillary was going to win the election, which is probably all of them

            McConnell’s genius lies in realizing that those consequences would never happen. Republican partisans aren’t going to suddenly turn Democrat because their side is playing hardball. Democratic voters were already maximally opposed.

            I agree, but an offer of souter Jr. changes those optics, both publicly and within the senate. “Republican senate blocks democratic nominee” is a good headline for Mcconnell to have. “republican senate blocks republican nominee” is not, especially when almost everyone thinks that hillary is going to win. In the senate, the deal of confirming him now suddenly looks a lot better. And if you take the approach I suggested of letting judiciary name a short list, then Mcconnell has to get up there and say “i’m blocking my own nominee for the supreme court”, which is much worse for him than blocking obama’s nominee. Now those charges of rank obstructionism are actually true. And then there’s all the absolutely fantastic media coverage that Obama would have gotten by such a move ensuring the whole debate was more covered in general. And at the end of the day, the court still would have moved to the left.

            In the meantime, nominating Souter Jr would have gotten the Democrats crucified from the left

            .

            weren’t you just arguing “Republican partisans aren’t going to suddenly turn Democrat because their side is playing hardball. Democratic voters were already maximally opposed.”? Unless your claim is that the democratic base acts very differently than the republican, you can’t have them willing to defect over this but not the republicans.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            All three of those were examples of single individuals acting crazily. All three got arrested.

            Yes, that’s very true. Most examples of right wing violence in recent years have been “lone wolf terrorist” types, whether it’s been examples like that, or people bombing abortion clinics or mudering abortion doctors, or mass shooters like Dylann Roof, ect. Whereas most of the examples of left wing violence has been small groups destroying property in riots or whatever. Overall more people have probably been involved in acts of left wing violence, but more people have been killed by acts of right wing violence.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            DavidFreedman: you are correct, I should have said “right wing motivated violence” instead of “Trump supporter”. We don’t know how or if those people voted.

            Of course, most of the antifa people arrested in Portland were not Democrats or Hillary supporters and were not even registered to vote, and yet people have never questioned calling that “left wing violence”. Are you sure you aren’t demanding a higher standard of proof from one side then the other? In all cases I think the motivations seemed clear.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Overall more people have probably been involved in acts of left wing violence, but more people have been killed by acts of right wing violence.

            Naa, it’s just that no one has been digging up murders with left-wing motivation and cataloging them in an attempt to make the right-wing equivalent of the antifa and other organized left-wing violence look like no big deal. Probably because that right-wing equivalent doesn’t exist.

          • hlynkacg says:

            not helping your mate.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            >Naa, it’s just that no one has been digging up murders with left-wing motivation and cataloging

            Right wing motivated terrorism ha been a major problem in the US for decades. The second largest terror attack the US has ever seen, the Oklahoma City bombing, was a right-wing terror attack, and there has been a steady stream of incidents since then.

            This is not “some digging up examples to make a point”, it’s a very serious problem in the US, second only to Islamist terror and not second by much, and frankly one that has consistently been a much bigger threat than “left wing violence” or “antifa”.

        • cassander says:

          I’d agree with MostlyCredibleHulk, there’s been no moderation from the democratic side in recent decades.

    • tayfie says:

      I’ll second the idea that liberal media figures try to check their bias but it just doesn’t work.

      It doesn’t work in lots of subtle ways. Body language and tone can tell a a lot. My general experience this election cycle is that they would attack Clinton without any fire, while they were truly scared by Trump.

    • cassander says:

      “So what they do is they try to spend just as much time attacking the Democratic candidate during an election as they spend attacking the Republican candidate.”

      I doubt this is true, but even if it is, the attacks are not the same. “Clinton’s healthcare package numbers don’t add up” is not the same as “Trump is a moron who’s going to make himself dictator then start world war three” (an accusation that was leveled at bush as well. And Reagan), and shouldn’t be treated as such. Even if the quantity of attacks are the same, the substance of them isn’t, and that clearly matters.

      • Matt M says:

        I don’t even recall Clinton being “attacked” at all. I thought the narrative of “the media screwed Hillary” was formed on two counts:

        1. They spent too much time talking about her e-mails, which was a total non-story (may be technically true, but ignores the point that most of the time they spent talking about it was done from the lens of “this is a non story and trump and his supporters are stupid for talking about it”)

        2. They gave Trump too much attention and more credit than he deserved because he was good for ratings (may be technically true, but ignores the point that most of the attention they gave him was of the “look at this stupid idiot rapist who will probably be just like hitler” variety)

        I really don’t recall any “Hillary is bad” stories from the MSM. Like, at all.

      • “Clinton’s healthcare package numbers don’t add up” is not the same as “Trump is a moron who’s going to make himself dictator then start world war three” (an accusation that was leveled at bush as well. And Reagan)

        And Goldwater.

      • cassander says:

        @Matt M says:

        IIRC, there were some studies going around during the general election that showed that she had gotten attacked more than trump during the primaries . This might very well be true, though it was usually quoted in the context of “proving” that the media weren’t anti-trump or pro-clinton during the general.

        I’ve not seen a similar study done post election.

        I really don’t recall any “Hillary is bad” stories from the MSM. Like, at all

        I saw people then saying that the media was anti-Clinton because it reported on her various scandals, and shouldn’t have, because they were clearly all nonsense. Or even if there was some little bit of truth there, it was blown way out of proportion.

        I don’t hold to this line of thinking, but it was definitely out there.

      • Yosarian2 says:

        1. They spent too much time talking about her e-mails, which was a total non-story (may be technically true, but ignores the point that most of the time they spent talking about it was done from the lens of “this is a non story and trump and his supporters are stupid for talking about it”)

        What media sources were you watching or reading? I thought that all the mainstays (New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, network news, ect) covered the various email stories and wikileaks stories as if they were huge scandals. None of them acted like it was a “non-story”, just the opposite.

        Meanwhile they failed to take Trump seriously, and as a result, did very little digging into any of his scandals until quite late in the campaign. Sure they quoted him saying absurd things and criticized him for them but they didn’t go much deeper until very late.

        (By the way, if you got your news filtered through some aggregator like reddit or twitter, you could have gotten a very different impression of those sources, just from the filtering effect.)

        Anyway, there actually has been research that has shown that the news media generally runs about the same ratio of positive to negative stories against both democrats and republicans.

  84. Maxwell says:

    “FOX’s slogans are “Fair and Balanced”, “Real Journalism”, and “We Report, You Decide”. They were pushing the “actually unbiased media” angle hard.”

    It’s more about flattering the audience. The slogans help the viewers imagine that they are fair-minded, thoughtful, independent thinkers.

    • cassander says:

      ARe you claiming that this is true of fox, but not true of, say, the washington post?

      • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

        WaPo slogan is now “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. Pretty heavy metal of them, also not a bad name for a Game of Thrones episode, if such thing as democracy had a place in that world. Not sure what it is meant to claim though. Maybe that they are the last bastion preventing the destruction of American democracy by Powers of Darkness (aka Trump)? Surely more ambitious that plainly claiming to report fair and balanced news…

        • Nornagest says:

          Holy shit, that really is their slogan.

        • CatCube says:

          Holy fuck. Did somebody hack their homepage?

        • Yosarian2 says:

          They were asked about it, and said that it was supposed to be a reference to the importance of the free press in our society, and was not supposed to be a comment on Trump directly. Apparently it’s a phrase Bob Woodward has been saying for many years.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Which would be wonderful if only it wasn’t such a huge glaring coincidence that they changed it just when, you know…

          • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

            Yeah right, they change their tagline immediately after Trump is elected to a slogan so unusual that people have hard time believing is real, and it’s just a coincidence, no comment on Trump whatsoever. Sorry, not buying this bridge.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            Yeah, I know.

            Whatever they claim, it’s probably a reference to Trump and his (perceived?) attacks on the free press.

            It’s interesting, all of these papers like WaPo and the NYT have had a huge boost in paying subscribers since Trump started attacking them. People on the left support them more because Trump hates them. That’s probably what it is really about.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      And the new NYT slogan is “The Truth is more important now than ever”, although even their much older motto certainly pushed “unbiased media” hard with “All The News That’s Fit To Print”. And CNN’s is “The Most Trusted Name In News”. There are plenty of outlets including broadcast and print that have similar mottos and slogans: No Fear, No Favor ; Give light and the people will find their own way ;

  85. BBA says:

    On certain left-wing blogs I read, the notion that MSNBC is “the liberal Fox News” is laughable. Does Fox have any left-wing hosts as prominent as Joe Scarborough is on MSNBC?

    Not that MSNBC was particularly left-wing in the first decade or so of its existence. Aside from Scarborough, their early-2000s lineup included the likes of Alan Keyes and Michael Savage. Phil Donahue claimed his show was cancelled for his opposition to the Iraq war. It was only in 2005 that Keith Olbermann let his liberal freak flag fly and the prime-time lineup became solidly left-wing. They still have Joe Scarborough in the morning, though.

    • Urstoff says:

      Also, the politicization/sensationalization of MSNBC/CNN seems like a direct response to Fox and it’s success. Rachel Maddow has a show because Bill O’Reilly had a show. They didn’t develop in parallel. This is not to apportion blame, because, again, cable news is terrible, but the fact that MSNBC has a strong left voice doesn’t mean that Scott has somehow misdiagnosed things. Also, when reading Scott’s piece, I knew that he was going to get well, actually’d into oblivion in the comments on that point which isn’t really even part of his main point.

      The important takeaway seems to me that even if you’re trying to be neutral and factual, you need to be ever-vigilant about your own biases, assumptions, and viewpoints; otherwise, you create monsters like conservative talk radio and Fox News, and then sooner or later everyone, regardless of viewpoint, has stooped to that level. The only glimmer of hope I see right now across all of our institutions is Heterodox Academy, and maybe the open access movement in academic publishing. We need similar things in media production, media consumption, and other various social institutions.

  86. Trofim_Lysenko says:

    Since this conversation has meandered all over the place with a lot of claims being thrown out about this or that being what conservatives/liberals in the US believe, I think it would do us good to have a little CALIBRATION TIME, ladies and gents! WITHOUT googling for the answers:

    What percentage of Democrats are creationists (God created man in his current form ~10,000 years ago)? What percentage of Republicans? What percentage of the US as a whole?

    What percentage believe that God -directed- or -guided- human evolution, for the same three categories?

    What percentage believe that God had NO part in human evolution, same three categories?

    write them down, and again that means without googling.

    how did you do?

    • Nornagest says:

      Okay, I’ll bite.

      What percentage of Democrats are creationists (God created man in his current form ~10,000 years ago)? … of Republicans? […] of the US as a whole?

      I’m guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of 20, 40, 30.

      […] that God -directed- or -guided- human evolution

      Assuming this to be exclusive with the previous, around 60, 45, 52.

      that God had NO part in human evolution

      20, 10, 15.

      And about 10% “other/don’t know/lizard people” for all categories.

      (ETA: Ybbxf yvxr V unir gur eryngvbafuvcf nobhg evtug ohg V’z haqrerfgvzngvat gur ahzore bs perngvbavfgf bs nyy cbyvgvpny crefhnfvbaf, naq fyvtugyl birerfgvzngvat gur ahzore bs perngvba abagurvfgf. Guvf vf n cbyy sebz 2008, gubhtu, fb guvatf znl unir punatrq va gur ynfg gra lrnef.)

    • gbdub says:

      Hopefully this isn’t too much of a spoiler, but what’s most shocking to me is that the numbers have been basically flat in all three categories since 1982.

    • Gurer ner ernyyl bayl sbhe eryrinag ahzoref urer, gur erfg qrevir sebz gubfr.

      V rfgvzngrq 25% bs Qrzf naq 50% bs Erchoyvpnaf ner perngvbavfgf. Gra gb gjryir cbvagf ybj ba obgu pbhagf.

      V rfgvzngrq 25% bs Qrzf naq 10% bs Erchoyvpnaf jbhyq fnl Tbq unq ab cneg va ribyhgvba. Fvk gb rvtug cbvagf uvtu ba obgu pbhagf.

    • quanta413 says:

      I did ok.

      V rfgvzngrq gung 40% bs Qrzbpengf naq 60% bs Erchoyvpnaf jrer perngvbavfgf. Ba guvf V jnf sernxl pybfr.

      V qvqa’g qb nf jryy ba gur erfg bs gur fcyvg. V rfgvzngrq 20% bs Qrzbpengf naq 10% bs Erchoyvpnaf oryvrirq va abagurvfg ribyhgvba.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      V ernyyl fubhyq unir gubhtug gb EBG13 zl nafjref va gur vavgvny cbfg, ohg V fbhtug bhg gur qngn fcrpvsvpnyyl gb gel naq pnyvoengr zlfrys.

      V haqrerfgvzngrq gur ahzore bs perngvbavfgf fvtavsvpnagyl va obgu cnegvrf, thrffvat gung vg jbhyq or fbzrguvat yvxr 20-30% sbe Ercf naq 10-15% sbe qrzf. Zl guvaxvat jnf gung gur crepragntr bs bhgevtug lbhat-rnegu perngvbavfgf unq qebccrq bss fvtavsvpnagyl va fgrc jvgu gur ybff bs cbyvgvpny cbjre bs gur puevfgvna evtug, ohg gung nccrnef gb unir orra onqyl jebat.

      V npghnyyl tbg gur ngurvfgvp ribyhgvba ahzoref nobhg evtug (V jnf guvaxvat nobhg 10% npebff gur obneq) qhr gb cevbe xabjyrqtr bs cbyyf nobhg ngurvfz naq whfg jung n zvabevgl ivrj vg vf va gur HF.

      Gur vagrerfgvat guvat gb zr vf gung gur Qrz.-Erc. fcyvg ba guvf vffhr vf npghnyyl ZHPU aneebjre guna V jbhyq’ir nagvpvcngrq!

      Side note: What percentage of a group has to hold a view before it is fair to say that holding that view is a good indicator that a person is in that group, for the purpose of left/right sorting in the US?

      Ideally we should look for things that ALL Republicans and right-leaning independents believe and NO Democrats and left-leaning independents believe, and then vice versa, and label the first one American Right Identifier and the second one American Left Identifier, but I don’t think there are any such 100-0 splits.

      To be clear, looking for policy/philosophy questions (guns make people safer, more immigration good, god created man 10,000 years ago, social safety nets are a core part of a healthy functional government, etc), not toxoplasma of rage story positions (OJ is Guilty, Pulse Nightclub shooting was homophobic right wing gun violence, Richard Spencer had it coming, Hilary Clinton’s e-mail server was illegal/immoral).

      The latter are more polarized but don’t reveal much of underlying belief structures because there’s so much tribal noise and motivated reasoning going on. Sadly, I feel I have to reject “smaller government” beliefs as a valid identifier of “right wing” due to revealed preferences (maybe military spending, but even then, not so much).

      • quanta413 says:

        Side note: What percentage of a group has to hold a view before it is fair to say that holding that view is a good indicator that a person is in that group, for the purpose of left/right sorting in the US?

        I suspect there are few views (barring blatantly obvious things like “Christians believe that Jesus is their Lord and Savior”) that will break hard enough that it’s almost 100-0 for one group and almost 0-100 outside the group. Sort of like how looking at single nucleotides in someone’s DNA sequence won’t tell you very much about someone’s ancestry. You’ll have to aggregrate across a bunch of views; I suspect that there is more than one distinct combinations of views that is very rare outside a group. So even if only 20% of the group holds any one of these distinct combinations of views by aggregating across unique combinations you can get a reliable indicator.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        Yep, that’s the issue I’m finding so far. The -most- polarizing ones so far are recent news story opinions. For example, asking:

        “Was the Pulse NightClub Shootings in Miami more an example of:

        A)Gun Violence In America

        or

        B) Islamic Terrorism?”

        Gets you something like 80-20 Terrorism (Rep) and 70-30 Gun Violence (Dem) (Gallup has the poll if you want to see the precise count), but I don’t think is particularly useful because what you’re really measuring there is Toxoplasma and at most it maybe tells you a little bit about worldview but not political and moral philosophy.

    • cactus head says:

      I’ll treat these as mutually exclusive beliefs within each group of USA citizens:

      For the ~10000 year question: 5, 25, 15 respectively for Democrats, Republicans, and all of USA.

      Directed/guided: 25, 60, 50.

      No part: 70, 15, 35.

      How did I do? Cerggl onqyl. V haqrerfgvzngrq gur eryvtvbfvgl bs gur Havgrq Fgngrf n terng qrny. V’q chg guvf qbja gb yvivat va Nhfgenyvn naq orvat va n oyhr-gevor raivebazrag zl jubyr yvsr.

    • humeanbeingblog says:

      I did ok. Guessed a 40-50-10 split for creation-ID-Darwin for the country overall, with 10 point tilts on the extremes for Dem and Rep, making Reps 50-50-epsilon and Dems 30-50-20. Should have had a slightly different ratio guess for country overall.

    • ashlael says:

      My guess was 70-20-10 for republicans and 30-50-20 for democrats in terms of creationist/theistic evolution/straight evolution.

  87. MostlyCredibleHulk says:

    Yes, CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it

    I admit I don’t watch CNN a lot (I almost never watch TV news or, Lord Almighty forbid, talk shows), but from what I’ve seen third-party CNN has been basically Clinton News Network before the election, and Bash Trump Network after. They produce such stories as “Trump is afraid of stairs”, and others not much better. Maybe it doesn’t qualify as “liberal” but as “unhinged”, but it’s certainly nowhere near neutrality. And then there’s MSNBC….

    FOX and the conservative academic bubble are working on a different level

    Yes, if you tresspass FOX, you can be yelled at in absentia by a blowhard on a FOX show, which you can avoid watching and never know about it. If you trespass the academic bubble, you literally can get beaten up (and any of your supporters so), the area you purported to desecrate by your presence would be trashed, and for sure you would not be able to speak anywhere that the bubblemasters are in control. If you are particularly unlucky, you can also get kicked out of a job (that would happen even if you possess impeccable liberal credentials, if whichever group your cross has bigger ones, there’s literally nobody who is safe from the purges), stripped of any academic honors that you can be stripped of and become a persona non grata in the whole establishment. But surely, FOX is even worse. They sometimes say mean words and sometimes – gasp! – their reporting is not 100% accurate (never happens to any other network of course)!

    This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces,

    Do you notice the pattern here? When rights do not like how the community is managed, they build the alternative one. When lefts do not like how the community is managed, they expel everybody who disagrees with them and take measures to shut them up (1st amendment is a huge obstacle in this, but where it doesn’t work – e.g. big private platforms like Facebook and Twitter – the left routinely works the moderation mechanisms to silence conservatives and eject them from the platform completely, even though there are easy mechanisms to avoid reading offensive posts forever, and they are routinely successful). Surely, the right conclusion from this the right is the group that has authoritarian tendencies.

    You may think conservative communities are terrible. Liberals may think they are terrible. But here’s the thing – if they wanted to have a say in this question, maybe they shouldn’t have ejected the conservatives and try to shut them up every chance they’ve got? Now that conservatives found their own spaces, the opinion of liberals carries literally zero value in those. Scratch that – it carries large negative value, there are groups which have specific purpose to piss off liberals, and they are successful. Check out the “okay as white power symbol” story, for example. But liberals talking about how terrible it is is not going to work – for that to work, they should not have declared the conservatives “basket of deplorables” (yes, I know that’s not exactly what Clinton did, but that’s exactly what many on the left think and some openly say at slightest prodding) and rejected the idea of having a civil conversation. Trying to start conversation now as if not only nothing happened, but the conservatives actually owe the left some consideration of left’s sensibilities, is not going to meet much welcome.

    The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call “neutral” and “depoliticized”.

    No, we had a category. Until the left decided it’s time to do a purge and freedom of speech does not apply to “hate speech”, which is any speech disagreeing with the left. And now we don’t have that category anymore. Can we have it back? Maybe, but that would require the left learning about tolerance and diversity – the words they like to use a lot but practice as little as possible when it comes to ideas and expression. I don’t see many people on the left, excepting Scott, that think about how to do it, let alone actually do it.

    • Yosarian2 says:

      If you trespass the academic bubble, you literally can get beaten up (and any of your supporters so)/blockquote>

      I think you’re creating a false dichotomy here. There have been multiple examples in the past year of pro-Trump people committing violence against anti-Trump people. Political violence is unacceptable no matter what the source, and while it’s still rare it’s on the rise which is deeply concerning, but it’s hardly been one sided.

      Until the left decided it’s time to do a purge and freedom of speech does not apply to “hate speech”, which is any speech disagreeing with the left.

      That’s not that simple either. There are a couple of topics that will make people on the left demand that the person saying them be silenced, and a couple of topics where people on the right demand that. Bill Maher lost his old show (ironically, called “politically incorrect”) because of right wing outrage that he had “insulted the military”. People on the right organize boycotts because they think a company isn’t respecting Christmas enough. Ect.

      Both sides have a few hot button issues they will flip out over.

      • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

        Political violence is unacceptable no matter what the source,

        Oh wouldn’t it be nice if it were true. The reality looks very different from that – for significant part of the left, violent groups like BANM or “Antifa” are if not explicitly endorsed then widely tolerated. Surely, if asked directly, every smart leftist would say “nononono, we don’t condone what these people are doing!” but if you compare their behavior towards the violent left to their behavior towards very non-violent right who has the views they find unacceptable, you’d see how much more tolerant they are towards the former than towards the latter. There’s no chance somebody would be a target of personal destruction campaign from the left, or lose a job, or be deemed unsuitable to occupy a position of trust, if somebody found to be somehow associated with a group like BANM. Worst you’d get is “well, yeah, those people, we don’t endorse them, but what you gonna do?”. Now compare to when somebody says or does something that the left considers really unacceptable, not unacceptable-for-show.

        In fact, left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers has been Distinguished Professor in the Illinois university. Any right-wing terrorists that have the same level of acceptance on the right? And latest left protests featured (not as mere rank and file participants, but as distinguished speakers and organizers) persons like Rasmea Odeh (PFLP terrorist who was in jail for several murders, lied about it on citizenship application) and Donna Hylton (kidnapped a a person and, together with accomplices, tortured him to death). I don’t think there was any problem with accepting and excusing violence here.

        Both sides have a few hot button issues they will flip out over.

        Except the results of the flipping seem to be very different. When did you see the last time an organized right-wing group trashing a place where a speaker with whom the right disagrees is about to speak? How successful a right-wing group would be in preventing any dissenting opinion from being voiced in a university campus, and how tolerant would the administration and the police be if that would lead to threats of violence or actual violence? Because in the case of the left, the answer is “very”.

        • psmith says:

          In fact, left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers has been Distinguished Professor in the Illinois university. Any right-wing terrorists that have the same level of acceptance on the right?

          I recently saw a fascinating take on this:

          Like, around and after the Days of Rage period, Frank Rizzo, Ed Rendell, and Rudy Giuliani did oversee the use of unsanctioned violence to defeat their enemies and move the political situation in a congenial direction, directly in the face of officially legitimated government policy. They just used police forces. They weren’t even punished with light sentences, and more than “assistant professor”, they became mayors, governor, plausible candidate for President.

          How’s that for institutional support?

          • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

            I’m not sure what exactly this refers to. Surely there’s a problem with police sometimes going way overboard, and sometimes the police behaves in a manner which would be considered a grave crime if done by anybody but the police. The “blue wall” and qualified immunity are real problems. That said, I am not sure what specific things this comment refers to – while Ayers’ doings are widely known I personally have hard time – maybe out of ignorance – to figure out which specific actions of Giuliani are referred to which would be comparable to Weather Underground actions.

        • Yosarian2 says:

          Any right-wing terrorists that have the same level of acceptance on the right?

          Depends. Do you consider staging an armed standoff with police, first on your ranch and then later while occupying public land, an act of terror? Several members of Congress supported them, at least at first. I wouldn’t quite call it terrorism, but it’s certainly armed resistance.

          And the most violent acts of right wing terror, like blowing up abortion clinics or shooting people because if their race or religion, don’t really have any equivalent on the left (at least not since Vietnam.)

          Donna Hylton (kidnapped a a person and, together with accomplices, tortured him to death).

          You may be missing the point there. She committed a horrible crime in 1986, served a 25 year sentence in prison, and since then has reformed her life and started advocating for prison reform.

          Nobody on the left is ok with her crime. But if we want to reform the prison system, and I think we need to, we probably should be listening to people who have been through it. And yeah that means listening to people who probably did something terrible a long time ago. That doesn’t mean anyone is justifying or supporting the original crime.

          How successful a right-wing group would be in preventing any dissenting opinion from being voiced in a university campus, and how tolerant would the administration and the police be if that would lead to threats of violence or actual violence?

          From the point of view of black people at the University of Missouri, that was exactally what was happening in 2015, and the university refused to do anything about it until the whole college football team went on strike and refused to play.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I think a key difference that I feel you’re ignoring is that when right wingers progress from implied threats of violence to explicit threats and actual acts they tend to be promptly condemned and taken down by other right wingers. Pretty much every instance of anti-abortion violence in the US on Wikipedia’s list ends with the perpetrator being arrested and serving very long prison terms (assuming they didn’t get the death penalty) often in a very “Red” state.

            Point being, that if one group throws it’s violent actors in jail, while another rewards it’s violent actors with cushy professorships and speaking-gigs, one can draw an inference about the relative “acceptability of violence” within those two groups.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            People who commit actual violent acts for political reasons are in general promptly condemned by *everyone*, and are taken down by the police. That’s not a right wing or left wing thing, it’s universal. Antifa people who commit crimes against property in Washington DC, one of the bluest cities in the country, are also taken down and arrested by the police.

            If that ever starts to break down that means the rule of law itself is starting to fail, at which point things may very quickly slide in a very nasty direction.

            Anyway, my initial point was just that there have been instances of political violence from extremists on both sides; that, by historical standards, political violence is still very rare in the US, but it is rising, and that is concerning and another sign that we need to try to reduce the partisan divide in this country. I really don’t see any reason to think it is more common on the left then on the right, though; if anything there have been more serious examples of right wing political violence in the last decade then left wing.

            We also do have to be a little careful here; we’re all in partisan echo chambers now which exaggerate how often and severely the “other side” is doing terrible things while mostly ignoring or downplaying the terrible things done by our “own side”. So the result is that now most people on the left think that the right is incredibly violent and of course they are not; most people on the right think the left is incredibly violent and of course they are not.

          • John Schilling says:

            People who commit actual violent acts for political reasons are in general promptly condemned by *everyone*, and are taken down by the police. That’s not a right wing or left wing thing, it’s universal. Antifa people who commit crimes against property in Washington DC, one of the bluest cities in the country, are also taken down and arrested by the police.

            What about antifa protesters who commit crimes against people in Berkeley or Middlebury>?

          • Yosarian2 says:

            What about antifa protesters who commit crimes against people in Berkeley or Middlebury>?

            Not sure what you’re trying to say. Political violence is not acceptable. It has been committed by both sides recently near Berkeley, and it’s not acceptable for either side.

            If you’re being critical of the police response to the violence, that’s perfectly fair. The police have pretty much just stayed back and let Antifa and the alt-right violent protesters fight it out on several occasions recently near Berkeley without getting involved.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            If you’re being critical of the police response to the violence, that’s perfectly fair. The police have pretty much just stayed back and let Antifa and the alt-right violent protesters fight it out on several occasions recently near Berkeley without getting involved.

            That’s an unbelievably dishonest way of phrasing it.

            The police stepped back and let Antifa attack – while doing all they could to tilt the playing field in favor of the Antifa – such as by disarming non-Antifa and somehow missing when Antifa brought in glass bottles, bike locks, and explosives. The shocking part was that the righties fought back – because that was something they’d never done before.

            Previously they had a faith that the media would portray them as the victims of a violent and premeditated assault – when the press was reporting things like “violence at Trump rally” – without reporting that the violence was directed against the Trump supporters (I’m sure they were trying to be neutral and just were confused though) – part of the right realized that the calculation wasn’t:

            Get attacked, get reported as being non-violent and the left gets portrayed as violent

            but was actually:

            Get attacked, get reported as the aggressor (in plausibly deniable ways)

            So they decided that “get attacked, use the fact that they’re not weak leftists to win the fight” was a better payoff – plus it’s fun beating up weakling leftists who start trouble.

          • hlynkacg says:

            People who commit actual violent acts for political reasons are in general promptly condemned by *everyone*, and are taken down by the police.

            I view the violence in San Jose back in June and the more recent violence in Berkeley and Middlebury as strong evidence to the contrary. Fact f the matter is that “whether or not it’s ok to punch nazis” is now a legitimate topic of debate and the assault on professors Murray and Stanger resulted in 0 arrests. Violence by left-wingers is considered acceptable in a way that violence by right-wingers is not.

            If that ever starts to break down that means the rule of law itself is starting to fail, at which point things may very quickly slide in a very nasty direction.

            I agree, and that’s precisely why I find the recent events in Berkeley and Middlebury so disturbing. Left-wingers (black bloc/anti-fa in particular) are engaging in political violence with the implicit approval of both police and the media on the assumption that right wingers will not respond in kind. I think that assumption is mis-founded.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            plus it’s fun beating up weakling leftists who start trouble.

            Correct me if I’m wrong, but somehow I get the feeling that you’re not arguing in good faith against political violence here.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            Left-wingers (black bloc/anti-fa in particular) are engaging in political violence with the implicit approval of both police and the media on the assumption that right wingers will not respond in kind.

            From what I can tell, the main argument of antifa and similar groups is that right-wingers and neonazis are already in the streets committing violence against both liberals and minorities and that therefore people need to fight back. When a group of right wingers go down to Berkeley to specifically pick a fight with them they’re just feeding into the antifa narrative.

            Fortunately the large majority of people on the left have rejected that kind of violence; there may be a few hundred antifa types but there are millions of peaceful nonviolent marchers.

            But I will say that the sense that people are under attack is very common on the left, including the nonviolent left. I’ve seen multiple friends on facebook share tips on how to survive as a gay person or minority in Trump’s America, things like “never go anywhere alone” and “know where a safe house is” and “carry a weapon”. And it’s not entirely unrealistic; I personally and my wife were harassed by Trump supporters just because we had a Hillary sign on our lawn, for months after the election ended.

            People are scared and angry. I am not normally a violent person, but when people started trespassing on my property and scaring my wife, it changes your perspective pretty quickly.

          • Iain says:

            Correct me if I’m wrong, but somehow I get the feeling that you’re not arguing in good faith against political violence here.

            I don’t know what could have given you that idea.

          • I’ve seen multiple friends on facebook share tips on how to survive as a gay person or minority in Trump’s America, things like “never go anywhere alone” and “know where a safe house is” and “carry a weapon”.

            I’m curious. Is that attitude having any effect in reducing left wing support for restrictions on firearm ownership?

            And it’s not entirely unrealistic; I personally and my wife were harassed by Trump supporters just because we had a Hillary sign on our lawn, for months after the election ended.

            Do you think that’s more common than the same pattern in the other direction in communities where the Trump supporters were the small minority? I’m not sure how one would know. But “people with locally unpopular views get harassed” isn’t the same story as “the right harasses the left.”

            To put it differently, the violence was in Berkeley, which isn’t a place where the Trump supporters are in a majority.

          • Nornagest says:

            Is that attitude having any effect in reducing left wing support for restrictions on firearm ownership?

            I know at least one liberal-leaning person who’s bought a gun because of Trump, and more than one who’ve talked about it. I don’t know if it’ll make much of a difference in terms of policy, though.

          • John Schilling says:

            If you’re being critical of the police response to the violence, that’s perfectly fair. The police have pretty much just stayed back and let Antifa and the alt-right violent protesters fight it out on several occasions recently near Berkeley without getting involved.

            They’ve also stood back and let Antifa commit violent crimes against people who weren’t alt-right violent protesters, and they’ve stood back and let Antifa terrorize communities into silence and submission, and it is grossly dishonest for you to try and frame this as some sort of consensual ritual combat.

            Given that dishonesty, I think you are lying when you say that “political violence is not acceptable”. Because here you are, accepting it, so long as the winners are people you approve of.

          • hlynkacg says:

            From what I can tell, the main argument of antifa and similar groups is that right-wingers and neonazis are already in the streets committing violence against both liberals and minorities and that therefore people need to fight back.

            I understand that this is their argument. Further more I get the impression both from your reply and media coverage of the anti-fa that this belief is widely held among progressives. Which brings us back to the key difference that I feel you’re ignoring. When the right wing engages in physical violence the right wing gets blamed (rightly) and the perpetrators end up in jail. When the left wing engages in physical violence the right wing still gets blamed and the perpetrators do not go to jail.

            You said…

            If that ever starts to break down that means the rule of law itself is starting to fail, at which point things may very quickly slide in a very nasty direction.

            …and my whole point is that this is already happening.

            A week after the Apr 15th protest someone posted a video in the subreddit’s Culture War Discussion Thread of a masked anti-fa hitting a another guy over the head with a bike lock on the end of a chain while the police officers visible make no move to intervene.

            To my knowledge the violence in Middlebury resulted in 0 arrests and little in the way of condemnation from the wider left. Sure, Bernie and a bunch of Harvard professors spoke out against it, but they were notable specifically because they were outliers. Near as I can tell the vast majority of the left are broadly sympathetic to the anti-fa even if they aren’t joining the bloc themselves.

            So speaking of “nasty directions”…

            Let’s say “Bike lock guy” get’s lucky and hits someone about 4 inches lower and to the left, striking the temporal fossa instead of the frontal dome and his victim falls over dead because complex skull fracture + cerebral hemorrhaging is no joke. That would be 2nd Degree Felony Murder in the state of California, committed in full view of multiple cameras and police officers yet I sincerely doubt anyone would be charged, (at least not without overwhelming outside pressure) or that such a case would attract more condemnation from the wider left than Middlebury or the punching of Richard Spencer did.

          • Randy M says:

            I don’t even think that that is there argument. I think they argue that right-wing speech/advocacy is inherently violence, and deserves to be met with force, and if the authorities are not acting to shut down incipient fascism, they are in collusion with it.
            They will with sincerity assert that the right started it, however they are unable to conceive of a difference between speech and actions.

            “They” here is referring to Antifa as referenced by Yosarian2 and hlynkacg, not necessarily Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, commenters here, your hippy aunt, etc.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @hlynkacg:

            Middlebury saw a lot more condemnation than Spencer getting punched did. Lots of liberals writing articles about the importance of free speech.

            If the whole “liberals just hold the coats of the guys in black masks smacking people with bike locks while the cops watch and don’t do anything” narrative was really true, then why do the guys in black masks, when you pay attention to what they’re saying, see liberals and cops as getting in the way of fighting fascists, as coddling fascists, etc?

          • Matt M says:

            then why do the guys in black masks, when you pay attention to what they’re saying, see liberals and cops as getting in the way of fighting fascists, as coddling fascists, etc?

            Because it serves them to say this whether it is true or not?

            A basketball coach never says the refs are doing a great job. He always says that they screwed him over, are out to get him and his team, etc. Because it’s ALWAYS best to say that, because saying that increases the likelihood of calls being made in your favor.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Yes, Middlebury saw a lot more condemnation than Spencer getting punched but that’s damning with faint praise. Outside of Fox News the responses were variation on “violence is wrong/regrettable but…”. As I said above, Bernie’s full-throated defense of free speech and unequivocal condemnation of the rioters was notable specifically because it was an outlier.

            As for the anti-fa themselves, I imagine they’re disappointed that the police are only allowing them to operate unopposed rather than throwing open the armory for them.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            The antifa argument is that their violence is speech and that right-wing (which is anything they disapprove of) speech is violence.

            Yosarian seems to endorse and at least excuses this view when he says things like this:

            From what I can tell, the main argument of antifa and similar groups is that right-wingers and neonazis are already in the streets committing violence against both liberals and minorities and that therefore people need to fight back

            and

            But I will say that the sense that people are under attack is very common on the left, including the nonviolent left. I’ve seen multiple friends on facebook share tips on how to survive as a gay person or minority in Trump’s America, things like “never go anywhere alone” and “know where a safe house is” and “carry a weapon”. And it’s not entirely unrealistic

            That coupled with a lack of any evidence of actual violence from the right can only mean that he’s referring to speech as violence. The left often uses “this makes me feel unsafe” as a way of equivocating between speech they don’t approve of and violence.

          • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

            Nobody on the left is ok with her crime.

            Is it really true? I remember when Romney was a candidate, he was proclaimed unfit for serving as a president for taunting a possibly gay kid while he was a kid, and for driving a dog around in an unsuitable way, and for what not. Trump gets a huge amount of heat for an offhand macho comment he made decades ago (that comment is disgusting, but it’s no murder). I’ve never seen even a mention of what Hylton done being “not ok” in any left publication mentioning her. And we’re talking about torture and murder here. Same with Odeh. And it’s not unique cases – recently NYT published op-ed from Marwan Barghouti, convicted terrorist, currently in prison for organizing and perpetrating multiple acts of terror, calling him “Palestinian leader and parliamentarian”. Only after a massive outcry they bothered to mention his terrorist acts. No comment of them being “not ok” either. Compare this to how they would talk about somebody who they actually consider “not ok”. The contrast is obvious – only after being called out the left would say anything about things that are not-ok-for-show, but no prompting is needed for things that are not-ok-for-real.

            From the point of view of black people at the University of Missouri, that was exactally what was happening in 2015

            Could you be more specific – i.e. which speakers were disinvited from the campus after threat of violence from the right, how many times it happened, was there any instances of actual violence? What I remember was that there were some low-key racist incidents, mostly involving one or two drunken idiots, which were followed by massive protests, claiming they weren’t handled properly, and demanding the heads of the university management, which heads were promptly produced for them on a silver platter. During the whole ordeal administration was nothing but submissive and compliant to all demands, issuing multiple proclamations decrying racism, instituting mandatory diversity trainings and apologizing profusely. Not that it did them any good. But this doesn’t exactly look like the picture of a campus occupied by violent right where left (or black) students are unable to have their voices heard and were violently threatened. In fact, their slogan was “white silence is violence” – i.e. unlike actual violence perpetrated by groups like BANM and Antifa, the violence they are complaining about is not being vocal enough in agreeing with them. I think there’s some difference here.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ reasoned argumentation

            I appreciate the input but you’re wrong about there being no evidence of violence on the right. The difference as I said above is that incidents of violence on the right generally end with the perpetrator getting arrested. In the mean time I’ll wait for Yosarian or dndnrsn to make that argument before commenting further, thank you.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            >That coupled with a lack of any evidence of actual violence from the right

            Wait, what?

            A Trump supporter was literally just arrested for attacking people with a machete for being liberal.

            http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/student-injured-machete-attack-university-coffee-shop-47084014

            Another Trump supporter yelled “get out of my country” and shot two people who were Indan.

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/24/get-out-of-my-country-kansan-reportedly-yelled-before-shooting-2-men-from-india-killing-one/

            I could go on for quite a while here, but you get the idea. How can you claim there has been “no” right wing political violence?

          • Yosarian2 says:

            On a side note, I do think the Berkely police were wrong in not doing more to stop violence or destruction of property. I think it’s incorrect that people are taking that and drawing conclusions about the country as a whole; Berkley is VERY far from the norm in a lot of ways, and in general even liberal cities have been quite harsh on left protesters who crossed a line (and even some who didn’t; see the history of OWS in New York City for example.)

          • Nornagest says:

            I’ve spent a lot of time there, and I think Berkeley is not now as far from the norm as its reputation would suggest. It’s very proud of its history of activism, and it likes to think of itself as countercultural, but its local politics are indistinguishable from those of any other small, wealthy Northern California town.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            >I think you are lying when you say that “political violence is not acceptable”. Because here you are, accepting it, so long as the winners are people you approve of.

            Stop that.

            I have not said anything in favor of political violence, nor in favor of antifa.

            When you do this, when you take a tiny fringe minority committing acts if violence and pretend that they’re the norm, just because it’s a club you can hit the other side with, all you are doing is normalizing political violence and making the whole problem worse, just for a bit of political advantage.

            If you treat ever liberal as if they’re antifa, you’re acting as antifa’s best recruiter.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            >That coupled with a lack of any evidence of actual violence from the right

            Wait, what?

            A Trump supporter was literally just arrested for attacking people with a machete for being liberal.

            You want to play this stupid game?

            http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/man-accused-killing-ups-driver-killed-donald-trump-article-1.2917660

            Some guy killed a UPS driver because he was convinced he was Donald Trump. Some maniac tries to grab a gun at a Trump rally because he wanted to “kill Trump”.

            http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/19/politics/trump-rally-gun-police-officer/

            Guy rushes the stage with the stated intent of killing Trump.

            http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/man-rush-stage-trump-rally-pleads-guilty-article-1.2727161

            Now here’s the difference. The guys from my first link and your link were lunatic criminals and are treated as such.

            The guys from the second and third links are more “political” (ya know, just trying to kill Trump like every good person should – just like if you were a time traveler you should kill Hitler (and did we mention that Trump is just like Hitler? did we? cause he totally is)) so they both got a slap on the wrist. Second guy got interviewed respectfully on CNN – and got a sentence of a year’s probation and a $250 fine. The third guy got one year’s detention then deported.

            Lunatic wanna be assassins get protected and feted by the “neutral gatekeepers”. Leftist mobs get police protection. Violence that rightists engage in gets treated like violence and actually prosecuted. This is because your side encourages and endorses political violence and the other side doesn’t (for now).

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Matt M

            Because it serves them to say this whether it is true or not?

            A basketball coach never says the refs are doing a great job. He always says that they screwed him over, are out to get him and his team, etc. Because it’s ALWAYS best to say that, because saying that increases the likelihood of calls being made in your favor.

            OK, but it also serves the interests of the right (conservatives, alt-right, whatever) to say “the police protects the antifas, the police let them do whatever they want, they go unpunished, etc”. So clearly any argument based on “cui bono?” is going to fail, because both sides benefit from saying “the authorities are on THEIR side.”

            @hlynkacg:

            Yes, Middlebury saw a lot more condemnation than Spencer getting punched but that’s damning with faint praise. Outside of Fox News the responses were variation on “violence is wrong/regrettable but…”. As I said above, Bernie’s full-throated defense of free speech and unequivocal condemnation of the rioters was notable specifically because it was an outlier.

            Do you commonly read left-liberal sources? The NYT and Atlantic commonly print stuff like this, or this, or this.

            As for the anti-fa themselves, I imagine they’re disappointed that the police are only allowing them to operate unopposed rather than throwing open the armory for them.

            This isn’t true. In Canada, there have been protests against a bill that is, rather vaguely, supposed to do something about anti-Muslim sentiment, somehow. The protesters of the bill are generally outnumbered by counterprotesters. The antifa among the counterprotesters, when they’re not complaining that the rest of the counterprotesters (liberals!) are not getting with the program and bum rushing the bad guys, are complaining that the police set up in between the two groups instead of letting them punch some Nazis. This is fairly common when there’s a right-wing demonstration. I’d note that at the most recent Berkeley thing, a lot of the videos show cops in some places basically standing between the two groups.

            I can go and with a few minutes find antifa types talking about how liberals are weak and are undermining the left and can’t be trusted and will always knuckle under to fascists. I can also find alt right types talking about how conservatives are weak and are undermining the right and can’t be trusted and will always knuckle under to communists.

            It’s like how people who are pro-Israel think the media (in general) is against Israel, and those who are against it think the media is for it. Extremists are never happy with the moderates “on their side” as it turns out.

          • Guy rushes the stage with the stated intent of killing Trump.

            Not according to the story you linked to:

            DiMassimo has said he wanted to grab the microphone to show people they could stand up to the brash presidential candidate.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            Not according to the story you linked to:

            DiMassimo has said he wanted to grab the microphone to show people they could stand up to the brash presidential candidate.

            My mistake – I unintentionally conflated the two. The second link guy said he wanted to kill Trump – the third guy burst onto the stage and rushed at the candidate which is reasonably interpreted as a threat – and I stand by my assessment that CNN giving him an interview is exactly “encouraging violence” – by giving free positive publicity to people who engage in political violence.

          • John Schilling says:

            I have not said anything in favor of political violence, nor in favor of antifa.

            When confronted with cases of antifa doing violence to people who were not themselves violent, you falsely characterized those cases as mutual consensual combat. That actually is speaking in favor of the antifa and of their political violence. It is also a lie, and gives me cause to suspect you are lying about other things.

            If you treat ever liberal as if they’re antifa, you’re acting as antifa’s best recruiter.

            I don’t treat every liberal as if they’re antifa. I treat you as if you’re antifa. Or, more precisely, as an antifa apologist unwilling to get his own hands dirty.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Yosarian2
            You’re missing the point. I am not saying that the anti-fa are the norm, nor am I lumping all liberals in with the anti-fa. What I’m saying is that political violence is currently being tolerated by the wider left in a way that it is not tolerated on the right.

            You don’t see anti-abortion bombers getting offered teaching gigs at Christian schools or someone convicted of kidnapping, rape, and murder serving as a key-note speaker at a Tea Party rally do you?

            I’m fairly certain that a Republican caught flashing a III% sign would be chased out of office in short order (at the very least they would be forced to prostrate themselves before the court of public opinion and beg for clemency), yet nobody in the Democratic party seems to find the mayor of Berkeley’s endorsement of BAMN to be a cause for concern. If you don’t take measures to police the bad actors on your own side you shouldn’t be surprised when people interpret them as speaking for you. After all, silence betokens consent.

            Furthermore, if you don’t police the bad actors on your own side sooner or later someone else will, and I’d rather not let things progress that far because people who are not “on your side” have far less motivation to be charitable or gentle in thier policing.

          • Kevin C. says:

            @hlynkacg

            Furthermore, if you don’t police the bad actors on your own side sooner or later someone else will,

            Assumes that there’s a “someone else” out there capable of “policing” those “bad actors”; that is, powerful enough to do so, and subsequently survive the massive, crushing, disproportionate retribution/”punishment” for having the sheer gall to dare raise a hand to those “bad actors”.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Kevin

            There is always a bigger (more disruptive) fish.

          • Brad says:

            What’s missing from this discussion is any sort of engagement with the notion that maybe Berkeley, Middlebury, and antfi aren’t huge deals that everyone ought to have a publicly stated opinion on. Clearly, many of you disagree with that, but I don’t see any acknowledgement that it is even something worth considering.

            Just saying it is “political violence” or labeling it “terrorism” and assuming that’s sufficient to answer the question decisively is question begging.

            Maybe they aren’t two datapoints in a dangerous and massively consequential trend for America, but rather this spring’s shark attack story. Or maybe not, but it is at least worth considering for two seconds.

          • Kevin C. says:

            @hlynkacg

            There is always a bigger (more disruptive) fish.

            So sayeth The Phantom Menace, but since the set of fishes is finite, there pretty much has to be a “biggest fish” — or else a finite subset of equally-big “biggest fishes” for which there exists no fish bigger.

            Breaking away from the metaphor a little, what do you, honestly, see as a possible “bigger fish”? (Back to the metaphor:) Who dares to take on Leviathan?

            If you lay a hand on it, you will remember the struggle and never do it again! Any hope of subduing it is false; the mere sight of it is overpowering.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Brad
            I disagree vehemently for reasons already discussed. Sectarian/political violence is highly corrosive to civil society and tolerating it will only lead to escalation.

            @ Kevin
            Everything can be killed by something.

            In the near term “the bigger fish” are those people and institutions who are disinclined to engage the opposition on the opposition’s terms. In the long term I put my faith in the gods of the copybook headings, as should you.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Let us not forget internal collapse, which is pretty much my theory for how Hillary lost. Even if your immune system can’t destroy cancer, the cancer will ultimately destroy itself.

            Not very comforting for the host, I admit.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Brad – “What’s missing from this discussion is any sort of engagement with the notion that maybe Berkeley, Middlebury, and antfi aren’t huge deals that everyone ought to have a publicly stated opinion on. Clearly, many of you disagree with that, but I don’t see any acknowledgement that it is even something worth considering.”

            I’m interested in this argument, if you’d like to elaborate it. I’m also interested in the argument that Antifa’s violence, to the extent that it is non-lethal though organized and tolerated, is less important than right-wing lone-wolf violence, which is more lethal but also severely punished and not tolerated at all.

            I guess my main question is, what are the contours of this position? What violence matters and why? What level of lethality/organization/toleration is the limit, past which it’s time to start taking it seriously? What’s the acceptable response from the other side? What’s the rules on escalation?

          • Brad says:

            @FacelessCraven

            I’m interested in this argument, if you’d like to elaborate it. I’m also interested in the argument that Antifa’s violence, to the extent that it is non-lethal though organized and tolerated, is less important than right-wing lone-wolf violence, which is more lethal but also severely punished and not tolerated at all.

            Assuming we are talking about things like the machete incident, I don’t think those are terribly important either.

            I guess my main question is, what are the contours of this position? What violence matters and why? What level of lethality/organization/toleration is the limit, past which it’s time to start taking it seriously? What’s the acceptable response from the other side? What’s the rules on escalation?

            My prior is that all of us pay too much attention to and give too much weight to rare events that impact few people. Whether that’s shark attack, Muslim terrorist attacks, west nile virus, or Newton.

            I’d caveat that in a few ways though:
            1) Some processes have feedback loops and can grow exponentially. They bear keeping an eye on.

            2) Sometimes an event will bubble to the surface of public attention but it isn’t an isolated or rare incident. It is something that happens many times all across the country, it just happened to be the one that got famous.

            3) Sometimes even if you personally know something ought not to be treated as a big deal you also know that many other people will and so you can’t just ignore it completely. Nonetheless, in these cases you have a choice of joining the stampede enthusiastically or at least doing what you can to contextualize it.

            hlynkacg is I think is saying that these incidents fall into the first category. I don’t deny that they might. But I don’t think they inevitably do. We and other countries have had incidents like these before. Not exactly identical of course, but that could be described as political or partisan violence, where the police were not as enthusiastic as they ought to have been, and where there was not a national outcry afterwords — but not all these incidents lead to a spiral that got out of control. Why some and not others? I’m not certain but I think it would interesting topic of discussion.

            Do you think it fits into one of the exceptions I listed or do you think I’m wrong about the general principle?

            As a final note, I think the analysis looks different if you are a Berkeley student, a Berkeley resident or perhaps even an Oakland or SF resident. Just because something strikes me as being blown out of proportion by many people doesn’t mean it isn’t highly relevant to some others.

          • Kevin C. says:

            @hlynkacg

            those people and institutions who are disinclined to engage the opposition on the opposition’s terms.

            First, can you be less vague? Second, what does it matter on which “terms” or with which methods “those people and institutions” engage “the opposition”, when the opposition is so much more powerful that it can withstand any conceivable attack, and lash back with such utter force as to uttery crush “those people and institutions”, again, no matter the “terms of engagement”? “Everything can be killed by something,” but the only thing that can kill the otherwise invincible, unstoppable Left, is the Left, that is, the inevitable ruin that follows from its incompatibilities with human nature. Indeeed, in the long term, the Gods of the Copybook Headings insure their end… the problems are that they will continue steamrolling all opposition and gobbling up more and more of the world until that distant day, and that the “fire and slaughter” in which the Gods of the Copybook Headings return will inevitably include the extinction of the white race and the permanent, irreversible end of civilization.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ brad
            Yes, That is precisely what I’m saying. Perhaps I’m letting my own experience make me paranoid but I feel like a lot of people in the US, having grown up in an environment where mob violence (sectarian or otherwise) is reasonably rare, seriously underestimate how quickly a situation can go sideways, and just how hard it is to get the genie back in the bottle once it’s out.

            @Kevin
            We’ve been over this before, most recently in this very thread. I’d rather not derail this discussion, but feel free to post something in the open thread.

          • Kevin C. says:

            @hlynkacg

            Done.

  88. The Nybbler says:

    The Sad Puppies were about the _Hugo Awards_, not SF in general. SF has long had its little mostly-conservative space, known as Baen Books. (Not sure what would have happened if there’d been no Jim Baen). Though Baen publishes Mercedes Lackey (who I think left the house over an argument over whether Jim Baen was letting his politics color the business; she came back after his death), Lois McMaster Bujold, and Eric Flint, all left-of-center and Flint being a self-described socialist.

    Larry Correia’s original intention in Sad Puppies 1&2 was to demonstrate that politics were in fact involved in the Hugos.

    Mission Accomplished

    itself representing the left-leaning and progressive qualities of the Hugo Awards themselves

    Sad Puppies 3 and 4 were attempts (failed) to reclaim the Hugos; Vox Day who led Rabid Puppies was out to destroy their reputation, and with the connivance of his enemies has probably succeeded.

    Fox News was created because Murdoch and Ailes saw an untapped market; with all the major networks leaning left, there was an opening for a right-leaning channel. Of course, with several major networks plus the more-left NPR on one side, and only Fox on the other, that meant Fox ran the entire gamut of the right side of the spectrum.

    A lot of the article is bulverism about this claim:

    In Limbaugh’s view, the core institutions and norms of American democracy have been irredeemably corrupted by an alien enemy. Their claims to transpartisan authority — authority that applies equally to all political factions and parties — are fraudulent. There are no transpartisan authorities; there is only zero-sum competition between tribes, the left and right. Two universes.

    Take away the term “alien”… and the problem is that this is true. One faction was able to take those institutions — academia, government (meaning the bureaucracy, not the political leadership), and media (he mentions science, but I think this “science” ends up being part of either academia or government depending on who you mean), and as a direct result they ceased to have any transpartisan authority.

    • Vorkon says:

      Larry Correia’s original intention in Sad Puppies 1&2 was to demonstrate that politics were in fact involved in the Hugos.

      Slight quibble: Sad Puppies 2 may have been a deliberate attempt to demonstrate that politics were involved in the Hugos, but Sad Puppies 1 was just a goofy blog post making fun of tear-jerker charity commercials.

  89. Sonata Green says:

    For some reason I’d pegged you as slightly right of center, but here you are saying “we” about liberals. On reflection, it’s obvious that, regardless of how conservative you may or may not lean, you still live in Blue America¹.

    An anecdatum for the Red-Scott theorists: reading SSC has caused me to shift significantly rightward.

    1. As in One America, Two America, Red America, Blue America.

    • blacktrance says:

      Scott is definitely left-of-center, despite some communitarian and libertarian sympathies and willingness to reject some progressive orthodoxies.

  90. tayfie says:

    There’s been lots of discussion about the bias of news networks in the thread that seems mostly based on anecdote. I don’t watch Fox or CNN. How would I know who is biased?

    What if we look at which parties the employees of said news organizations give money to? Surly political donations is a better proxy of actual beliefs than isolated examples.

    Starting with Fox, with its parent company News Corp.:
    http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000227&type=P&cycle=A#affiliates

    For all election cycles going back to 1990, News Corp donations are 58% D and 40% R. Fox News specifically gives 46% D and 54% R. Note that Fox News is a tiny part of News Corp donations: ~$130,000 out of ~$15,000,000.

    In 2016, News Corp went 53% D and 34% R. Fox News went 52% D and 49% R.

    Next is CNN, with parent company Time Warner:
    http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000094&type=P&cycle=A#affiliates

    For all election cycles going back to 1990, Time Warner donations are 74% D and 23% R. CNN is 80% D and 20% R. The same caveat, that CNN is a small part of Time Warner, holds.

    In 2016, Time Warner went 87% D and 11% R. CNN went 100% D.

    I’ll leave other networks as an exercise for the reader. Though I haven’t searched exhaustively, these distributions seem semi-consistent over the years.

    This data makes a compelling case that FOX is much closer to the center politically than CNN, and can hardly even be called right-wing. There is always the possibility that FOX promotes right-wing bias to appeal to their viewers and CNN suppresses their bias to appeal to theirs. There is the possibility that both companies, due to location, give disproportionately to sure-to-win Democrats to buy favors. However, without more information, I prefer Occam’s Razor: FOX is much less biased than CNN.

    I am sure many people will rebel at this notion. I struggled too, but consider that you calculate the bias of news stations by comparing them to other news stations instead of politicians or the population as a whole. Fox may be conservative news and still be to the left of half the country.

    • Matt M says:

      Fox may be conservative news and still be to the left of half the country.

      Yup. Spend enough time in truly red tribe circles and you’ll find that “Fox news is way too liberal” is considered a perfectly normal and defensible position.

    • Yosarian2 says:

      There is always the possibility that FOX promotes right-wing bias to appeal to their viewers and CNN suppresses their bias to appeal to theirs.

      Yeah, I think this is basically what is going on.

      Or to put it another way, I think CNN’s goal is to produce “the news”, they are trying to tell the truth in an unbaised way. (How close they come to that goal is another question, but just having that as a goal is important.) CNN’s secondary goal mostly seems to be “getting ratings”. They don’t seem to have a deliberate political goal at all; which isn’t to say there isn’t some bias, but it’s not an intentional one.

      On the other hand, I think Fox News was specifically designed by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes as a propaganda network with the deliberate intent of trying to move the US to the right, politically. Murdoch did similar things with his media empire in both the UK and Australia, and Ailes was a long time Republican operative who was involved in the political campaigns of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush before going into the media business. For most of the time Fox News was on the air, it was well known that Ailes would write up a bunch of Republican talking points and tell all of the people on his network to use those talking points and that verbiage when speaking about events, which they would.

      The political outlook of people isn’t the only variable here. The goal those people and that orginization is at least as important.

      • tayfie says:

        “Fox News was specifically designed … to move the US to the right.”

        That strikes me as pure conjecture as to the motives of Murdoch and Ailes that doesn’t fit with the facts. If their goal was really to move the US to the right, why would they hire so many non-believers? You can’t win without dedicated soldiers.

        I think the real motive is much more cynical and self-interested. Murdoch and Ailes realized that there was a large unserved market for conservative opinion editorial shows. They don’t really believe in the cause, but they can rake in massive amounts of viewers and cash by serving the people no one else will.

        The reason Fox is massive isn’t because the media leans conservative, it is because the media leans so liberal that Fox is the only conservative name in town. The liberal news outlets are a dime a dozen, so there is a lot of division in the consumer base. There is too much competition for a Fox-like monopoly on that section of the Overton window.

        As for CNN, I don’t see why their motives are any different than Fox. What makes you think they are?

        • Yosarian2 says:

          That strikes me as pure conjecture as to the motives of Murdoch and Ailes that doesn’t fit with the facts. If their goal was really to move the US to the right, why would they hire so many non-believers? You can’t win without dedicated soldiers./blockquote>

          Not everyone they hire was a “dedicated soldier”, but Ailes set the editorial policy for the whole station with a political aim. People have analyzed it and there would be 4 or 5 specific talking points of the day that would be repeated during every single hour, in every show, during the day. According to people who worked there those were dictated by Ailes first thing in the morning every day.

          As for Murdoch; I’m sure looking for markets where there is economic demand for a conservative is part of it, but Murdoch wants political influence as well. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every paper, tabloid and tv station across his huge multinational empire are all conservative. If his interests were just economic that seems unlikely.

          I think he has quite successfully moved the political discussion and the political system to the right in the US, in the UK, and in Australia.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            Not everyone they hire was a “dedicated soldier”, but Ailes set the editorial policy for the whole station with a political aim. People have analyzed it and there would be 4 or 5 specific talking points of the day that would be repeated during every single hour, in every show, during the day. According to people who worked there those were dictated by Ailes first thing in the morning every day.

            Clearly Ailes just learned how to manage a media property by observing the NY Times – see the pull quote from this link from a twelve-year NY Times reporter elsewhere in this thread.

            http://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-finds-time-for-soul-searching-1201852490/

  91. goshdarnsits says:

    I’m confused. News sources exist to tell us facts about what is actually physically going on in the world. They are our fact-finding and fact-obtaining method for us to get good data so that we can understand exactly what is going on outside of our eyesight radius.

    Any and all attempts at screwing with this process for political agendas is obviously atrocious and a terrible idea. That is like Firefox deciding to add a political filter to their system so that they can change text and block websites that don’t support Firefox’s political agendas. Or someone putting a filter on your contacts so you can only visibly see things around you that support a political position.

    People complain about China’s frewall, but this is uch worse. It’s completely disgusting and screwed up no matter who does it or why they do it. Screwing with people’s epistemics and their ability to obtain unfiltered true information about the world is absolutely ridiculous and unforgivable.

    Replacing information about physical reality with information about social reality is just plain a terrible idea. Do I need to make additional strong arguments supporting these points or is this already just plainly obvious to everyone?

    • cassander says:

      There’s no such thing as neutral reporting. Even if all you tell people are straight facts, which facts you tell them, even the order you tell them in, will send a message.

      • goshdarnsits says:

        You can also claim that my eyes have bias and are not neutral or that my brain’s processing of words inherently biases things and makes them non-neutral. This is somewhat true, but at the same time doesn’t matter and is no reason at all to dismiss the idea that information can be transferred from one person to another in a clear enough way that any minute biases in any possible direction can be easily corrected for.

        Extents matter and even if we say that 100% pure unbiased news isn’t possible, then 99.99% unbiased is definitely possible. Anyone who has watched a football game where referees use multiple slow motion playback recordings to watch whether the football landed in one place or another or whether a person’s foot touched one place or another understands this.

        • cassander says:

          If we’re going to accept that it’s just a manner of managing bias (and I think we should) then I’d much rather we have news organizations that drop the pretense of platonic neutrality, openly declare their biases, and spend a lot of time calling each other out, and shining a light on, on their respective screwups.

          That strikes me as a much more robust system of truth discovery than a bunch of people pretending airly pretending to be neutral, whose natural reaction will be to cover up, or at least ignore, events that would betray a lack of neutrality for fear of shattering the image.

          • goshdarnsits says:

            That system assumes that people will listen to both multiple groups and form an idea of what actually occurred in reality based on all three together. It’s nice in theory, but as explained above (and obvious if you’ve spoken to people in the southern US who only ever watch Fox News) people in practice don’t look at multiple sources and form an opinion based on all of them. In practice, they watch one and then assume all that that one says is factually true.

            Instead of getting groups at least trying to convey direct factual information about material reality (because otherwise they will show strong deviations compared to the others around them and stick out like a sore thumb) you get an extreme slant that people will then not correct for. Instead of getting the top view of the image http://callisto.ggsrv.com/imgsrv/FastFetch/UBER1/ZI-0384-2009-DEC00-IDSI-36-1 you get one of the two dimensional ones which offer much less useful data about reality instead.

            Or to say the same thing mathematically, if normally everyone is incentivized to present facts as close to 0 on a LeftRight scale as possible, then anyone who presents an article with a heavy slant Left 3 or Right 3 will stick out and look weird. However, if everyone is told it’s okay to slant things because it’ll balance out later, then they’re perfectly safe in suddenly presenting articles at Left 20 or Right 20. The first set at least vaguely keeps everyone near zero, but the second creations distortions away from factual material reality so far that everyone turns into a giant mess.

            Also, since people have already accepted that “managing bias” is okay instead of working towards factually presenting information about physical reality you end up getting spin from EVERY source where all of those sources agree on certain ideologies. Don’t forget that both Republicans and Democrats strongly favor having a democratic republic and agree on very massive long lists of things in general.

            Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is an important short story by Jorge Luis Borges that explains this well and can help someone grok it.

          • cassander says:

            >That system assumes that people will listen to both multiple groups and form an idea of what actually occurred in reality based on all three together.

            Not really. I’m assuming that most people are passive absorbers of news that basically ignore anything that isn’t shouted from the rafters. The best way to get them shouted at is to create an adversarial shark tank, where the providers viciously pounce (i.e. shout at) on those who make egregious errors. That maximizes the chance that listeners will encounter some of the shouting.

            >if normally everyone is incentivized to present facts as close to 0 on a LeftRight scale as possible, then anyone who presents an article with a heavy slant Left 3 or Right 3 will stick out and look weird.

            This math assumes that truth is always at 0, never at right 3 or left 3. This isn’t the case. Your system massively privileges conventional wisdom, an attribute I consider positively harmful, because even if the CW is right now, over time, reality will change and it won’t.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      On the same day, an unarmed black kid is shot by a white police officer and a white college girl is raped by a Mexican illegal immigrant. CNN expends 1% of their news cycle on the rape and focuses the other 99% on the shooting and Breitbart does the opposite. Which one is the horrible, evil, biased villains pushing a political agenda?

      • goshdarnsits says:

        You’re making claims about the time spent reporting on different events. I think this is an important question (which I don’t have a answer to at the moment), but it is tangential to the argument I was making about the importance of clearly reporting facts.

        If either one has screwed with the reporting of facts about the events that occurred, then they are jerks who are contributing to Moloch by putting all of their readers in a situation where their information about reality has been screwed with so that they can’t clearly understand the actual sequences of events in physical reality properly.

        Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is an important short story by Jorge Luis Borges that explains this well and can help someone grok it.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Thanks for the link, I’ll read it later.

          My thesis is that the facts are barely relevant, because humans don’t make decisions based on isolated facts. They talk, think, and decide in narratives.

          And what facts you even notice are largely dependent on your goals. Part of what your brain does is filter out the infinite number of irrelevant facts around you at any given time. If you’re aware of every scuff mark on the floor and tile on the ceiling you’re probably unable to function or on drugs.

          • goshdarnsits says:

            Uh…. Facts are important. Really really important. And if people are making too many decisions based on narratives and ignoring facts that disagree with those narratives then this is very bad. (It is also likely quite true that this is going on on a massive scale and this is very very bad.)

            http://sl4.org/wiki/TheSimpleTruth is probably important for you to read as well. (And I double down on saying that linked short story is important.)

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @goshdarnsits – “Facts are important. Really really important.”

            No one argues whether we should eat rocks or corn. The facts are obvious, people who eat rocks lose their teeth, people who eat corn grow big and strong. No one argues whether murder should be legal. Obviously that would be a bad deal for everybody.

            Facts are important, but the issues that can be easily settled by facts have been settled. I mean, this is almost a tautology. The issues we’re stuck with are the ones that can’t easily be settled by facts, usually because the facts involved are either extremely difficult to obtain, profoundly complex, or nearly impossible to interpret properly. That’s where the heuristics and narratives take over, as they have in pretty much every issue we’re currently dealing with.

            [EDIT] – And of course, for some issues, the narrative actively suppresses facts, which I think we’d all agree is a problem even if we couldn’t agree on which narratives are at fault.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @goshdarnsits

            It’s a fact that if we enforce illegal immigration laws, some poor, nice, hardworking Mexicans who just want a better life will be unable to come to the US and will suffer in the poverty and violence of the cartel-controlled parts of Mexico.

            It’s a fact that if we don’t enforce illegal immigration laws, some poor innocent Americans like Jameel Shaw will be murdered by Mexican criminals who were able to cross the border several times undeterred.

            Should we enforce immigration laws or not?

            If an average person starts without a particular opinion on the issue, and their trusted media source bombards them with true facts about the plight of poor illegal immigrants, what narrative about illegal immigration are they going to tell themselves, and what conclusion are they going to draw? If their trusted media source bombards them with true facts about horrible crimes committed by illegals, what narrative about illegal immigration are they going to tell themselves, and what conclusions are they going to draw?

            So what matters more in media and politics? Facts or narrative?

          • hlynkacg says:

            Calling immigration laws “illegal” betrays a particular opinion as well.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            pretty sure that was “illegal immigrant” laws, not illegal “immigrant laws”.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @hlynkacg

            I agree with that. What matters in shaping political opinion is which facts are presented or excluded, in what ways, with what emotional context, using what emotional language. This is why focusing on facts and fact-checking is missing a large part of the story, because what matters is which facts you’re including or excluding and the manner in which you do it. You can have your facts 100% correct and still leave people with a false impression of the narrative.

            For instance, after the election CNN was pushing a narrative about pro-Trump violence. A video clip on twitter went viral and CNN wrote a story about it. (note the story has been updated since the original posting and only the title and first two paragraphs remain unaltered). In the clip a man was speaking on some stairs at an anti-Trump rally at OSU. Another man yells “You are so stupid!” and nails him with a flying tackle. In the original story CNN presents the events as “Anti-Trump protestor attacked,” described the events, and then talked some more about other incidents of “Trump violence” and people’s fears thereof. Anyone reading the story was left with the impression that those speaking out against Trump are in danger of violent attack from Trump supporters.

            It turns out the attacking student was autistic, and actually a supporter of Hillary Clinton. He become socially confused and thought the speaker was pro-Trump instead of anti-Trump and attacked him for that reason. A week later CNN went back and edited the story to it’s current form where they explain the attacker was not, in fact, a right-wing supporter. But they initially made no effort to ascertain why the events took place or give it proper context, nor did they make any disclaimers like “the motive for the attack remains unknown,” they just splashed up a story about pro-Trump violence.

            The vast majority of people who saw that story never saw the truth, and instead had narratives swimming in their heads of right wingers beating up dissenters. CNN never presented a false fact, but they pushed a narrative that was orthogonal to the truth.

            Narrative and emotional context matter much more than “facts.”

          • MugaSofer says:

            >It’s a fact that if we don’t enforce illegal immigration laws, some poor innocent Americans like Jameel Shaw will be murdered by Mexican criminals who were able to cross the border several times undeterred.

            This is true regardless of whether immigration laws are enforced, as long as they’re not enforced so well that illegal immigration drops to ~0.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          I read the story, it was enlightening, but I don’t think quite relevant here. Few people are actively making up facts. Go scroll through the front page of Breitbart (or CNN for that matter). Find me something that’s an error of fact. You probably can’t.

          Almost no one is making up facts. They’re picking and choosing which facts are relevant to their purposes. And someone who only pays attention to one or the other says “how can anyone disagree with me? Don’t they know the facts?!” No, they don’t care about those particular facts because those facts are irrelevant to their purposes. They do not help them achieve whatever their goal is so they may as well not exist.

          One last thing. In terms of bubbles, I find it extremely hard to believe that it’s the right locked in a bubble and never hearing liberal “facts” or arguments. The entire culture is left, the schools are left, the movies are left, the TV shows are left, the late night comedy schmucks are left, the HR department is left, every major media outlet except Fox and Breitbart is left. It seems to me much more likely that there are more liberals who have never bothered to see the world through the lens of Breitbart than there are conservatives who look at only Fox and Breitbart and never see CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, watch a movie, go to school, or have a job.

  92. Crell says:

    Much of your point is valid, and logical, and beats up on the Left rather appropriately.

    However, there is one piece of the history you seem to gloss over, or assume. Specifically, that the mainstream media was suppressing Conservative Views(tm), which were equally valid as Liberal Views(tm), and thus showing bias.

    As the (rather self-serving I grant) saying goes, “facts have a known liberal bias.”

    For instance, I could buy the argument that the media spent more time giving voice to anti-gun advocates than pro-gun advocates, and/or representing the latter negatively. That’s a situation where the facts on the ground are mixed, inconclusive, and highly dependent on what bias you want to present. (The correlation between gun ownership and crime can go whichever direction you want it to depending on which sample group and geographic area you want to sample.)

    However, given the overwhelming scientific consensus and preponderance of facts on human-caused climate change, or evolution, or that the Laffer curve and trickle-down economics are nonsense, I wouldn’t expect the media to present climate change denial in a “balanced” manner with actual scientists. I wouldn’t expect, or tolerate, the mainstream media “teaching the controversy” on evolution vs creationism since there is no controversy: There’s the actual scientific fact, and there’s closed-minded snake-oil nutjobs. Sorry, but that’s not even a debatable point.

    It’s not mainstream or balanced or neutral to give anti-vaxers equal air time as actual doctors.

    (I’m sure someone could point out an issue where the Left(tm) are the ones totally out of touch with the facts. I’ve no doubt they exist, but being fairly Left-wing myself I am not in a position to judge that. Organic, maybe?)

    Given that, then, if the “neutral” media refuses to give air time to creationist climate-denying anti-vaxers, and the creationist climate-denying anti-vaxers go off and form their own media organization instead, can you really blame the “neutral” media for that? What else were they supposed to do, spend half their time interviewing anti-vaxers just to keep them from setting up their own websites? That would have been even worse.

    Some topics are matters of opinion. Some are matters of unclear or complex scientific investigation. Others have a very clear Correct and Incorrect answer and to pretend otherwise is just pandering to people’s ignorance and actively undermining the society.

    It’s not always obvious which one is which, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean the distinction doesn’t exist.

    • suntzuanime says:

      Some facts have a conservative bias, but the left makes implicit threats of violence to shut fact-lovers up about them. So I’m afraid you can’t get your examples in a cowardly forum like this one.

    • cassander says:

      >However, given the overwhelming scientific consensus and preponderance of facts on human-caused climate change, or evolution, or that the Laffer curve and trickle-down economics are nonsense

      And here you beclown yourself. No one anywhere has ever defended anything called “trickle-down economics”. It is purely a term of abuse. That you think there are people out there who support such an idea says far more about you than your ideological opponents.

      As for the laffer curve, this is not a thing that is disputed. If you tax something at 100%, you will get no revenue from it, because no one will do the thing you’re taxing. If you tax it at 0%, you’ll also get no revenue. At some point in between, there is a maximum, and that curve is called the laffer curve. You can debate where the revenue maximizing point of a tax is, but you can’t dispute that there is one. Again, your comment speaks volumes about your actual comprehension of the arguments made by those who disagree with you, and not flatteringly.

    • Matt M says:

      How do you feel about mainstream news outlets giving “equal time” to things like anti-GMO hysteria, people who deny that raising the minimum wage will increase unemployment, or defenses of socialism as practiced in places like Venezuela and Cuba?

      • Crell says:

        From what I’ve seen, including on this very blog, the impact on unemployment of raising the minimum wage is variable and inconsistent. It sometimes has a net positive impact, sometimes net negative, with the average being “slightly positive economic impact but a wide standard deviation”. So I’d put that into the “there’s a fair dispute to be had” category, vis something a “neutral” news outlet should be covering. (Better than they do now, certainly, but it’s a fair topic for debate among reasonable people.)

        • Matt M says:

          My understanding is that there is literally ONE study suggesting that raising the minimum wage will not harmfully impact overall employment, that there are a bunch of issues with it generally, and that it studies a “modest” increase (whereas the “fight for 15” contingent is calling for essentially doubling the minimum wage)

          I would bet if you surveyed economists on this, over 90% would agree that the minimum wage hurts employment.

          • My understanding is that there is literally ONE study suggesting that raising the minimum wage will not harmfully impact overall employment,

            My understanding isn’t.

          • You could add that one of the authors of that study said that, of course, he wouldn’t expect the result to hold for a large increase.

            In the same interview he made it clear that he had gotten a lot of negative pressure from fellow economists as a result of the article. On the one hand that is evidence in favor of the claim that most economists expect increasing the minimum wage to decrease employment opportunities for low skilled workers, hence saw his result as heresy.

            On the other hand, it is evidence that the preponderance of that view might be in part due to social pressure within the population of academic economists.

    • However, given the overwhelming scientific consensus and preponderance of facts on human-caused climate change, or evolution, or that the Laffer curve and trickle-down economics are nonsense, I wouldn’t expect the media to present climate change denial in a “balanced” manner with actual scientists.

      I was going to comment on your economics, but that comment got eaten by the “you have to log in to comment, even though you are logged in” bug and someone else has made the point, so I’ll limit myself to climate change.

      Presenting that in a balanced manner isn’t limited to the question of whether AGW exists–there is also the question of consequences. How many people, reading U.S. media, realize that total sea level rise over the past century is less than a foot, or that the high end of the IPCC projection for 2100 implies coastlines shifting in by an average of about a hundred meters? How many realize that the most recent IPCC report retracted the claim of a link between AGW and droughts? How many realize that the one effect of doubling CO2 we can be confident of is a sharp increase in agricultural yields, quite side from any effects, positive or negative, due to climate change? How many have thought about the fact that humans currently thrive across a range of climates much larger than the projected shift–that warming to 2100 is on the scale of raising Minnesota to the current temperature of Iowa?

      The usual presentation is badly biased, and not because it assumes AGW to be true.

    • ajfirecracker says:

      Crell, that was beating up on the left?

    • abc says:

      Since other commenters have already pointed out the problems with your other examples, I’ll address this one.

      It’s not mainstream or balanced or neutral to give anti-vaxers equal air time as actual doctors.

      What do you mean by “anti-vaxxer”?

      1) Someone who opposes all vaccinations.

      2) Someone who believes the FDA isn’t infallible about determining the safety of vaccines.

      3) Someone who believes that every vaccine someone’s ever developed and/or proposed making mandatory isn’t necessarily a good idea.

      Near as I can tell the term “anti-vaxxer” exists in order to permit it’s users to conflate (1) with (2) or (3).

      • Jiro says:

        Often it’s “someone who believes #1 or at least something closer to #1 than to the others, but is using #2 or #3 as cover for that.” People who believe #2 or #3 in a way which can’t get mistaken for #1 (including not having isolated demands for rigor) don’t get called anti-vaxxers.

        • The Nybbler says:

          People who believe #2 or #3 in a way which can’t get mistaken for #1 (including not having isolated demands for rigor) don’t get called anti-vaxxers.

          Not true. Merely not wanting to get a flu shot (#3, maybe #2) gets you called an anti-vaxxer.

          • random832 says:

            That seems just ignorant, especially since, as I understand it, there’s nothing making the flu shot mandatory, and it’s not even produced in enough quantities to give it to everyone anyway – it’s mainly given to people who are at a particularly high risk of being exposed (e.g. teachers) and/or of dying if they do get the flu (e.g. the elderly).

            But there certainly are some apparently-#3 ideas that clearly fall under the umbrella of anti-vax. Before it became a big thing that was constantly in the news, the first “anti-vax” movement I was aware of tended to at least claim they were specifically against the MMR vaccine (and isn’t it so unfortunate that no-one produces the old separate measles/etc vaccines? I guess we’ll just have to go unvaccinated.)

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I have personally experienced being called anti-vax for expressing doubts about the flu vaccine (which I get when I can).

            Elsewhere in the thread, someone talks about how when subgroups among the blue tribe fight, they do it by accusing the other subgroup of not belonging to the blue tribe. This is an example of that.

          • [the flu vaccine is]mainly given to people who are at a particularly high risk of being exposed (e.g. teachers) and/or of dying if they do get the flu (e.g. the elderly).

            That might have been true of some flu vaccine at some point, but for quite a while the local drugstore was offering free flu shots for anyone who wanted them.

          • random832 says:

            My understanding is that it’s still mainly marketed (is “marketed” the right word for a free service?) to high-risk groups, and it’s understood that they don’t have enough supply for their entire customer base to descend on the store looking for free flu shots. This could be a few years out of date though.

            EDIT: I think I am remembering specific years in which not enough vaccine was produced, the CDC announced this, and therefore healthy adults were discouraged from seeking the vaccine early in the flu season that year. But this seems to happen often – googling “not enough flu vaccine”, I find references from 2001, 2003, 2008, and 2010 on the first page, and googling “flu vaccine shortage” turns up mainly discussions of a major shortage in 2004, and one result for 2013.

          • Matt M says:

            I’m 31 years old and every year of my working life my employer has offered and encouraged EVERY employee to get a flu shot (and when I was in the military, it was required)

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Pretty much anyone in the US can get a flu shot for free. It’s just a hassle to wait for 20 minutes so people don’t bother.

        • abc says:

          People have been called anti-vaxxers for opposing mandatory vaccinations against measles, HPV, etc.

  93. BBA says:

    There is one exception to Conquest’s law that I’m familiar with, but I don’t know if it counts as an exception. The Zionist Organization of America was far-left when it started and is far-right now, though consistently Zionist for its entire existence. The funny thing about national self-determination is it flips from left-wing to right-wing once you get the nation-state you’ve been clamoring for and you go from oppressed minority to oppressive majority.

  94. grifmoney says:

    How do the last two paragraphs connect with anything you’ve said in the rest of the article? You’re suggesting that the current strategies liberals are employing are not working (though you admit you don’t know exactly which ones or all of them), and that therefore we ought to try something else to avoid the “horrendous results” of conservatives starting their own institutions.

    But what it really sounds like is that, behold, conservatives actually have enough independent political power to not give a shit about what liberals do or think. In what way, then, is the conservatives’ ability to not be held accountable to liberal values something to do with bad liberal strategies?

    The reasonable conclusion from sections I-IV really ought to be that liberals should focus on doing what’s right, and maybe undo or mitigate the damage caused by conservatives, and to stop trying to make the enemy behave (because we’ve tried a bunch of stuff and now it seems to be a waste of time no matter how creative your strategies are).

    • AnonYEmous says:

      The reasonable conclusion from sections I-IV really ought to be that liberals should focus on doing what’s right, and maybe undo or mitigate the damage caused by conservatives, and to stop trying to make the enemy behave (because we’ve tried a bunch of stuff and now it seems to be a waste of time no matter how creative your strategies are).

      I mean, switch the words “liberals” and “conservatives” and…yeah, already figured that out a while ago. Hence, Trump.

  95. pkolding says:

    With respect to the proposition of an inherent “Right-wing authoritarianism”, I think the Left has missed a central stimulus of the modern Right: Reaction to the perceived authoritarianism of the Establishment Left.

    Two events, I believe, had a profound effect on the Right and have motivated their determined move from the comfortable bastion of the conservative media bubble into a deliberate policy of “change or destruction” of the country. The first was the judicial reversal of the results of democratic referenda and the subsequent award of same-sex marriage rights; the second, the deliberate flouting of immigration law by those assigned to enforce it.

    The Left has made a profound mistake in imagining that the Right’s opposition to same-sex marriage and their insistence on the enforcement of immigration law is wholly rooted in a partisan preference against same-sex marriage and illegal immigration. Instead, the Right has been galvanized by a realization that the Left Establishment has no regard for the rule of law and the conceits of the primacy of democratic authority. In short, the Right has witnessed, from their own ideological perspective, the exercise of totalitarian power directed against not only conservative ideas, but against the fundamental principles of democratic primacy and the rule of law.

    Unless the Left understands this, they will never understand the motivations of the burgeoning Right, nor will they be able to find a solution to an ever-growing movement towards territorial dismemberment.

    • Amos says:

      I agree. The ‘change the laws by legislating from the bench’ and picking which laws we will enforce is a defection. There is constitution and it doesn’t say that same-sex marriage is law of the land. And it doesn’t give a president the power to nullify laws that have already passed because he doesn’t like them. If you want to change the laws or the constitution then convince enough voters and you can do so. But if you can’t convince enough voters and proceed with what you want like a bunch of dictators you don’t get to complain about how the other side is killing democracy when they notice and start fighting fire with fire.

      • hlynkacg says:

        I am reminded of a moment in Gorsuch’s confirmation and the liberal talking heads were criticizing him for deciding cases on “cold legalisms” rather than moral worth and I wanted to reach through the screen and slap them. I mean come on do you really want Trump to nominate someone to the USSC who does not feel constrained by the letter of the law?

        • random832 says:

          Just out of curiosity, at the object level, do you agree with Gorsuch on TransAm? This isn’t just a matter of Chevron deference, but also whether his interpretation of the law (which treated the word “drive” and “operate” as synonyms) was reasonable, and that there’s no common-law principle that could have protected the trucker instead.

          The trucker was fired for taking action in a medical emergency situation to save his own life. I think his boss was guilty of attempted murder.

          • hlynkacg says:

            While I feel that the court ruled correctly in the end I think that Gorsuch’s dissent is a reasonable critique of that decision.
            I agree with you that Maddin was taking action to save his own life, and believe that he would have been on much firmer common-law ground if the case had been framed as reckless endangerment on the part of TransAm rather than wrongful termination.

        • Deiseach says:

          liberal talking heads were criticizing him for deciding cases on “cold legalisms” rather than moral worth

          Which also makes me want to slap them, although I don’t know if that reveals the liberal/left idea of what law is about: how you feel about something rather than the letter of the law. The idea apparently never percolating into their little minds that they had better cling to the letter of the law as hard as they can, because it is not divinely ordained as a principle of the universe that they and their side will always be in power, and if the opposition gets in they do not want opposition judges making decisions in cases based on “how this judge personally feels about the moral worth of the defendant”.

          If you and I disagree on many principles, but we both agree to go to law as an independent arbitrator, and it so happens the judge is one of your party and I lose my case on a point of law, I can respect you and them. I cannot respect or believe you if your judge judges the case on how they personally feel regarding who is the moral superior, rather than what the law is.

          It’s a kind of secular Lollardism, the kind of thing that Chesterton was mildly mocking when talking about the real Lollards:

          Nobody who really understands the logic of the Lollards (a much more sympathetic set of people) really wishes that they had succeeded in taking away all political rights and privileges from everybody who was not in a state of grace. “Dominion founded on Grace” was a devout ideal, but considered as a plan for disregarding an Irish policeman controlling the traffic in Piccadilly, until we have discovered whether he has confessed recently to his Irish priest, it is wanting in actuality.

          But the progressive element really do seem to want a “dominion founded on grace”, where being Woke is the modern equivalent of being in a state of grace. And while I’d agree that the progressives are a small minority, I do worry that the liberals are also inclined towards “right-thinking people will make the right decisions based on what is plainly right, and they will know this by a burning in their bosom, not by cold legalism”, which ought to horrify everyone, conservative or liberal, as a proposed governing principle.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Truly! a man for all seasons.

            …and when the last law is down, and the Devil turns on you, where will you hide? I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

    • Kevin C. says:

      nor will they be able to find a solution to an ever-growing movement towards territorial dismemberment.

      It seems to me like they already have one; namely, that the question of “territorial dismemberment” was, in the words of the late Justice Scalia “settled at Appomattox”. To quote from Chief Justice Chase’s majority opinion in Texas v. White:

      By these, the Union was solemnly declared to “be perpetual.” And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained “to form a more perfect Union.” It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?

      and

      When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final.

      In short, can they not simply take the view that we are “one nation, indivisible”, once you’re in, you’re in forever, and that any sort of “territorial dismemberment” has been ruled out of the question for all time, no matter how popular it may be with the voters? And that any motions in that direction will get the same treatment as the last bunch to try?

      Edit: Further, what would territorial separation accomplish, really? Even if the US broke up into Bluelandia and Redstatia, how long before Bluelandia would have the “international community” bringing sanctions against Redstatia for their “human rights violations”, failure to take their “proper share” of third-world “refugees”, and pressuring for “regime change”, complete with Bluelandia’s State Dept. and CIA fomenting and backing “color revolutions”?

      • pkolding says:

        I think it absurd to argue the rule of law when the movement towards territorial dismemberment is being motivated by the rule of law being ignored by those obliged by democratic primacy to enforce it.

        As to what territorial dismemberment would accomplish: It would be the re-establishment of the rule of law by those securing and enforcing territorial authority in the various geographical areas formerly incorporated in a single state.

        • Kevin C. says:

          I think it absurd to argue the rule of law when the movement towards territorial dismemberment is being motivated by the rule of law being ignored by those obliged by democratic primacy to enforce it.

          That doesn’t mean they won’t still argue it, and that it won’t provide sufficient legitimation for giving any future would-be secessionists the same treatment as the last group to try. What makes you think the next attempt will fair any better than that one?

          It would be the re-establishment of the rule of law by those securing and enforcing territorial authority in the various geographical areas formerly incorporated in a single state.

          Again, but for how long? How long until that “rule of law” becomes the next target of the “international community”, and “those securing and enforcing territorial authority” become the targets of “regime change”?

          • pkolding says:

            The error here is that the flouting of the rule of law and the dispensing of democratic primacy as authoritative motivates both sides equally. Successful authoritarian action is just as motivating to those who agree with it to seek distinct territorial authority as its opposition.

            It is inevitable that foreign powers and interests will attempt to exploit weak powers should the territory they occupy be deemed useful. This is not an argument not to seek territorial authority, however.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            How long until that “rule of law” becomes the next target of the “international community”, and “those securing and enforcing territorial authority” become the targets of “regime change”?

            With America taken out of the picture (due to being in the process of splitting in two), the most powerful countries in the international community would be Russia and China, neither of which are noted for their support of progressive norms.

    • Civilis says:

      Apologies in advance, as I am aware that this is a mental fixation of mine.

      Instead, the Right has been galvanized by a realization that the Left Establishment has no regard for the rule of law and the conceits of the primacy of democratic authority. In short, the Right has witnessed, from their own ideological perspective, the exercise of totalitarian power directed against not only conservative ideas, but against the fundamental principles of democratic primacy and the rule of law.

      For society to function, there need to be rules so people know what behavior is appropriate. Society has written rules (laws and regulations) and unwritten rules. The most important unwritten rules establish a framework by which we view the written rules. As an example, a long time unwritten rule is that nonviolent civil disobedience in violation of an immoral written law is moral, and that unwritten rule takes precedence over the unwritten rule that one should obey the law. One of the most central rules in Western society and one of the reasons society functions as well as it does is the rule of law, that the written law should be enforced fairly and impartially. The rule of law coupled with the idea that laws will be made on democratic principles is why we trust government with the power it has.

      Alinsky’s fourth rule is “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” It has a necessary corollary that if your enemy tries to make you live up to your rules to your own disadvantage, you must be willing to abandon them. Groups that know when to abandon a rule because it is being used against them thus have an advantage over groups which remain wedded to rules.

      Another important observation is that “no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.” People adapt to situations. When people are put at a disadvantage by the rules, some will be smart enough find a way to change the rules to their advantage, and others will copy them, thus removing an existing rule or establishing a new rule with precedence over the existing rules.

      The continued abuse of Alinsky’s 4th rule against the right has selected for groups on the right willing to abandon their own unwritten rules including those related to the rule of law itself when they become disadvantageous. This is a really, really, REALLY bad thing for society, and I have no idea how to get the genie back in the bottle.

      • hlynkacg says:

        While I agree on all points I feel like you are underestimating the degree to which, This being “a really bad thing for society” is one of the radicals’ explicit goals. They don’t want to get the genie back in the bottle.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        This is a really, really, REALLY bad thing for society, and I have no idea how to get the genie back in the bottle.

        I think it’ll work itself out naturally. We’ve been through this before in the late 60s/early 70s/Day of Rage, etc. The general public really doesn’t like violence and civil unrest. The more extreme, riotous, and unreasonable either side gets the more public opinion will turn on them. And the left will get violent more quickly and more often than the right will.

        I say that because the economic leftist mindset is predicated on violence as a necessary tool to punish oppressors, seize their wealth, and redistribute it to their victims. The right starts with the idea of free markets, voluntary exchanges of goods and services, “taxation is theft,” and then non-libertarian conservatives reluctantly agree some taxes are necessary for civilization. So to the right violence is a necessary evil to maintain civilization, but to the left it’s a necessary good to punish oppression. You’re always going to get more violence out of the side that starts off thinking violence is good.

        • Nornagest says:

          The economic right hasn’t always, or even usually, been particularly libertarian. It’s usually been quite comfortable with protectionism, for example.

          And I think you’re overbilling the role of violence on the economic left. It’s relatively mainstream on the modern left to forgive low-level violence in the face of oppression, but the reasoning’s almost always social rather than economic, and goes more like “violence is a sad consequence of social injustice, so we should be lenient” than “fight the power”. Actual radicals are few and far between, at least before late 2016, and economic radicals even more so — even now, bona fide lower-class revolutionary sentiment is pretty much limited to a few atavistic tankies.

    • Brad says:

      the second, the deliberate flouting of immigration law by those assigned to enforce it.

      Are they unfamiliar with Prohibition?

      I’m always surprised when self identified conservatives act as if what is happening right now is completely unprecedented. You’d think they of all people would have the opposite tendency.

  96. daystareld says:

    My problem is as follows:

    How do we differentiate a world where the what Scott describes is the root of the problem (because Scott’s absolutely right that the things he describes happens) and a world where modern American liberals are just “correct” on more issues than conservatives are? Even if it’s just as little as 10% more correct?

    Scott is framing this as “Liberals did X” or “Liberals failed to do X.” He even says here:

    “The way I remember it, conservatives spent about thirty years alternately pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and literally praying for greater fairness in mainstream institutions, and it was basically all just hitting their heads against a brick wall.”

    But WHY was it like hitting their heads against a wall? Are liberals just too stubborn? Are they too close-minded? Are they too proud to sit in the same lecture hall as someone who voted for Reagan?

    Or is it that the things conservatives were pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and praying for were just not things that were acceptable to give? “Respect our beliefs” sounds good when we ignore what those beliefs are.

    So this is where I’m lost and looking for the answer. Because I can spend the rest of my life telling liberals to stop being mean to conservatives, and I don’t think it’s going to matter. Scott admits that he doesn’t know what the solution is, and I don’t blame him: it’s a hard problem. But what makes it a hard problem is that if you try to drill past “stop the insults, stop the arrogance” and break down what, specifically, needs to change to make, for example, academia, more welcoming for conservatives, you quickly find yourself in a dangerous place. Because anti-Trump posters are new. Liberal domination of academia is not, and I think my original paragraph points to why.

    As an example: all it takes is for even 60% of conservatives to grow up with a deeply held, emotionally fulfilling, socially reinforced belief in creationism, and suddenly there are a number of university classes that seem unwelcoming to conservatives. Not even Christians, because liberal Christians tend to have no problem with accepting at least the shell of evolution: specifically conservatives.

    And yes, you’ll have some liberal students mocking them for their rural-hometown beliefs, and that’s bad and harmful. But is that the actual root of the problem? Was it happening anywhere near as often 30-50 years ago?

    History classes that make no apologies about how the Civil War was fought over slavery is also unwelcoming to most conservatives raised with Southern pride. Health/Sociology classes that demonstrate how abstinence-only education leads to more teen pregnancy and STDs compared to sex-education is also unwelcoming to most religious conservative values. World studies that demonstrate the many ways the US has fallen behind other developed countries is unwelcoming to the fierce nationalism that many conservatives hold dear.

    And these are just objective facts. Not subjective values like social justice or equality or progressive views on gender or sexuality. A divide which was all the more pronounced ~30 years ago, when these cracks started to widen into fissures.

    And sure, plenty of young liberals off to college for the first time are full of many stupid ideas too. I don’t know how many liberals have walked away from careers in medicine because they were informed that homeopathy and acupuncture are not scientifically supported methods of treatment. Probably quite a few.

    But I think that just makes up the 40% in which liberals are wrong. Hell, make it 45%. Because even a 5% difference is enough, on a wide enough scale.

    And if this sounds too much like “reality has a well known liberal bias,” that’s not my intention. I am trying really hard not to sound snarky or condescending, and I know that if we stacked all the stupidity found predominantly among liberals up, it would make a long shadow too.

    But finding the solution means finding the actual problem, and I don’t believe that if every liberal just stopped making insulting comments tomorrow, if there was some magic cease-fire where both sides treated each other with more respect, conservatives would suddenly stop viewing academia and news organizations as biased, unwelcoming places.

    Which isn’t to say liberals shouldn’t stop being snarky and condescending. I’m just skeptical it’ll solve this particular problem.

    • ajfirecracker says:

      I think reality has not just a conservative bias, but an overwhelming conservative bias. Remember how the Soviet Union literally collapsed? Why did it do that? If you have no explanation for that event (probably the single biggest imposition of reality on politics for the past 200 years) you shouldn’t be telling other people what sort of public policy to pursue.

      • herbert herberson says:

        They were defeated by an extremely powerful rival empire that put huge resources behind an effort to purposefully bankrupt them (and took 45 years to do it)?

        • AnonYEmous says:

          then why did Mao’s China forcefully transition away from communism and thus become one of the greater powers, after killing a ton of its citizens?

          • herbert herberson says:

            Because it had split with the Soviets over both ideological and practical issues, subsequently needed a trading partner to fuel its industrialization, had had a formative WWII experience that included capitalist allies and whose main enemy wasn’t Western or especially capitalist, a relatively short history with doctrinaire Marxism but a very long history of more-or-less non-ideological bureaucratic control, and a very willing partner in a Western block that was happy to overlook civil rights abuses and mostly-empty sloganeering if it meant peeling the world’s largest country away from the Warsaw Pact.

            Also, don’t write the CCP off yet. They’ve found themselves a situation where they enjoy physical possession of a vastly disproportionate amount of the world’s means of production. It may or may not be a long con, but if it is it is a very good one.

          • cassander says:

            Because it had split with the Soviets over both ideological and practical issues, subsequently needed a trading partner to fuel its industrialization,

            It got this, in the 70s, before any economic reforms.

            had had a formative WWII experience that included capitalist allies and whose main enemy wasn’t Western or especially capitalist, a relatively short history with doctrinaire Marxism but a very long history of more-or-less non-ideological bureaucratic control, and a very willing partner in a Western block that was happy to overlook civil rights abuses and mostly-empty sloganeering if it meant peeling the world’s largest country away from the Warsaw Pact.

            How on earth would any of that encourage them to abandon maoism?

      • Urstoff says:

        Sounds more like reality has a neoliberal bias.

      • ajfirecracker says:

        What are you even talking about? The US did not invade the USSR. The Soviet system collapsed because central planning does not work

      • That’s only one of two shoes that fell.

        The other was what happened to China after Mao died. From then to 2010, per capita real income increased twenty fold. It happened as a result of China abandoning economic policies that the left generally viewed sympathetically in favor of something much closer to capitalism.

        When Mao died, The Economist obituary praised him for ending starvation in China. The current estimate is that the famine during the Great Leap Forward killed about thirty-five million people, although there are skeptics who argue it was only a few million.

      • daystareld says:

        If your argument against modern American liberalism is “but the Soviet Union!” then we’re going to be talking past each other from the get go. I try not to engage in strawmen that monstrously large.

        If you want to have a real discussion that shows you actually understand the people who disagree with you, try again by starting at some actual examples of American liberalism that’s objectively wrong. You’d probably be surprised at how often I agree with you.

    • gbdub says:

      The problem with driving the sides to separate spaces that just shout at each other in the margins is that both sides are wrong in their own ways. If you chase out all the conservatives, who corrects the liberal errors? And vice versa? So you need to find some way to keep the groups together and clash civilly but productively.

      • daystareld says:

        Agree completely, and that’s why we need a sane Right and Left. But that first requires
        agreeing on fundamental basics of rational epistemology and debate, which includes scientific evidence and fact-checking. Say what you will about neo-hippie leftism, but all the anti-science on the Left isn’t nearly as big or well-represented, politically, as the anti-science on the Right.

        I want sane, intelligent conservatives to take take their party back from the crazies so we can actually get two functioning parties in the US, but with Trump’s presidency, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen unless he screws things up at least as bad as Bush did.

        • Aapje says:

          all the anti-science on the Left isn’t nearly as big or well-represented, politically, as the anti-science on the Right.

          The anti-science on the left is far less obvious because they tend to be far less transparent about it. Conservatives who are anti-science deny the quality of the evidence, but anti-science progressives simply ban research in certain topics and/or introduce huge bias in science, so they can claim to ‘follow the evidence.’

          For example, it is mainstream among progressives to argue that science has proven that unconscious ‘isms’ exists, have a major effect and refer to IAT studies as evidence. However, it seems that IAT just produces noise, but due to publication bias, small n’s and other bad science practices, you have a body of poor science that superficially seems to support a certain narrative.

          This narrative is then used to push for policies such as affirmative action, quotas, blinding, etc. The currently popular narrative on the left that they are the side of science in itself leads to denial of evidence that their own side has pretty strong biases that results in the corruption of science and the rejection of strong scientific theories.

          • daystareld says:

            Do you believe that unconcious “isms” are only supported by IAT research? Or are you singling it out because it’s the research that can be most easily criticized, so you don’t have to worry about the other research that’s not IAT, such as changed names and genders of randomized college applications and job resumes and interviews?

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            Do you believe that unconcious “isms” are only supported by IAT research?

            Here’s a better question – do you believe that “isms” have any explanatory power over extremely well-documented* group differences?

            The rest of it is simply called Baysian reasoning. Knowing about membership in groups with lower average ability in the realm in question gives you information – especially when there’s a thumb on the scale to distort credentials in favor of groups with less average ability.

            * My guess is that the sample sizes on the group differences evidence is at least (literally) 1 – 10 million times greater than those for IATs.

          • The Nybbler says:

            the other research that’s not IAT, such as changed names and genders of randomized college applications and job resumes and interviews?

            Probably p-hacking and publication bias. Always reporting bias by the press. Sometimes out-and-out misrepresentation of the study; one that was ballyhooed as showing discrimination by software managers was actually a dummy study where undergrads stood in for actual software managers.

          • Aapje says:

            @daystareld

            A lot of that research compares lower class black names to not lower class white names, so I’m not convinced that they are not actually measuring dislike of certain subcultures, which is fundamentally different from dislike of skin color. After all, culture is a choice and can be legitimately problematic; while skin color is not inherently problematic or a choice (although skin color can be correlated with culture, which is exactly what may confound a lot of studies).

            Similarly, we do know that there are substantial differences in choices that women make on average and that those choices are generally disliked by employers (like working fewer hours, leaving the job when getting a child, etc).

            Of course, stereotyping people for being part of a subculture based on names, gender or the like is pretty shitty and can be a good reason to intervene in some way. However, if one blames stereotyping by race or gender for what is actually fairly rational (and crude) stereotyping of cultures, one tends to make wrong interventions that don’t work and can actually be counterproductive.

          • Aapje says:

            I also want to point out that treating people differently for some factor that mostly correlates with a legitimate difference is inevitable, since we can’t have perfect information. At one point you have to bite the bullet and treat people on the limited information that you have.

            We can disagree on:
            – whether people should not judge people based on some kinds of information, like race and gender, even if those are correlated with a valid reason to treat people differently
            – whether we are too prone to judge and should be more eager to collect more information

            However, for both these issues much of Social Justice doesn’t have a principled stance. Instead, they reject it when women and black people are judged collectively and/or eagerly & treated worse than men and white people, but they eagerly judge men and white people collectively and treat them worse than women and black people.

            The same behavior can be seen among SJ scientists and there is a lot of pseudoscience to legitimize this hypocrisy.

          • daystareld says:

            What I’m hearing here is “People are judged unfairly by a number of factors, but just not the factors that SJWs believe they’re judged by, and also if they were judged by those factors it’s not the fault of the people judging them, and even if it was SJWs are just as judgy toward white people and men, so we can safely ignore all the research that shows that racism and sexism exist.”

            Is that about right?

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @DaystareId:

            What I’m hearing here is [various mutually-exclusive excuses] so we can safely ignore all the research that shows that racism and sexism exist – Is that about right?

            Close but not quite, so let’s try again. The first hurdle to clear is that a proper study involving “changed names and genders of randomized college applications and job resumes and interviews” is just really hard to do well. The fact that names connote more stuff than just the precise thing you’re testing means you don’t have a clean test. If “Jennifer” gets fewer interviews than “John” it might be because the name “Jennifer” signals female but it also might be because a typical “Jennifer” is older or younger or of a different social class than is expected to be ideally suited for this job. So when you find a difference that seems too big to be random noise you don’t know what it means. Not unless you take great lengths to confirm that the names you picked really are equivalent in all but the attribute you care about. Which is rarely attempted. So the result that gets portrayed in the abstract and media accounts as proof positive of secret badthink is often only suggestive – it tells us there might be something there to find, given appropriate followup.

            A second issue is that even if you are testing what you think you are, the effect size you find in such studies tends to be really small, smaller than the outcome difference you’re trying to explain, rendering the claim that this effect explains the outcome difference implausible. (An effect size can be statistically significant without being of practical significance.)

            A third issue is that – just as with the IATs (and also with “stereotype threat” studies) – these studies often fail to replicate and are being done by motivated researchers, so once you take the file drawer effect into account it’s not clear what’s left.

            (These kind of studies sometimes suggest women do better and sometimes suggest women do worse. If researchers are ideologically motivated to find women do worse but accidentally find no effect or a reverse effect they are likely to tweak some parameter and run the study again until they or some other research team get(s) the “right” answer.)

            Though it’s hard to argue well at this level of generality and it’s hard to prove a negative, so let’s turn this around: Do you have some particular non-IAT studies in mind that you think convincingly demonstrate the unconscious “isms” you’re concerned with?

            (Note that this sort of skepticism isn’t an isolated demand for rigor if those making the argument apply it to social-science findings in general.)

          • Aapje says:

            @daystareld

            The currently popular narrative is that there is a huge amount of racism and sexism that is both unconscious & irrational and that only happens to ‘oppressed’ groups, like non-white people and women. The result of this belief is that any disparity in outcomes where non-whites and women are worse off is typically blamed on racism and sexism, while any disparities where white men are worse off is blamed on those white men making bad choices.

            Researchers keep trying to find evidence for certain groups being hated for no reason, because they want it to be true. Due to bad practices and sheer volume, they find some results, but these suffer greatly from the ‘replication crisis’ once you redo the studies in a more solid way. Yet despite this, people keep believing the narrative despite the lack of solid scientific evidence.

            If you accept the idea that discrimination generally happens because people are judged for actual differences of the group(s) they belong to, then this immediately demolishes the idea that you have a strict dichotomy between oppressed and oppressor groups. So this means that men and white people can suffer from this just like women and non-whites. This kind of discrimination is also not obviously wrong, because it is logical to act based on expectations that are true for averages. If it is true that 99.9% of people with a bomb vest are terrorists who want to kill you, it is completely reasonable for you to run away if you see a person with a bomb vest and if you are a police officer, to shoot them. This harms the 0.01% of people who are not terrorists, but have shown really bad judgement by picking an inappropriate Halloween outfit. However, the harm to this small group is smaller than if we give people with bomb vests the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, it is not reasonable to run away from people who dress like conservative Muslims or shoot them on sight, even if there is a slightly bigger chance that they are terrorists than other people. So it is reasonable to discriminate for actual group differences to some extent (where one can debate about where the line should be).

            When it comes to this kind of discrimination, we are already doing so in ways that almost everyone considers appropriate. For example, we make a young male driver pay more for car insurance, because on average, they do more damage. This is gender and age discrimination, but no politician or advocacy group is fighting to ban this. My argument is that discrimination based on average differences between groups is often falsely claimed to be without a rational reason when it happens to some groups. This makes the debate irrational, because instead of looking at the actual reasons why people treat groups differently and having a rational debate whether this is a ‘bomb vest’ or a ‘dressed like a Muslim’ situation, people jump to conclusions.

            Ironically, there is a severe gender and race bias in how eager progressive people are to jump to conclusions, which is actual discrimination. I am pointing out that bias and demand equality. If we treat some groups differently for their gender or race, because that is correlated with different outcomes on average, we should do the same for other groups. And if we ban it for some groups, we should ban it for other groups in similar situations.

            However, in this topsy turvey world, demanding equality is perceived as demanding inequality…because people have a broken model of reality.

          • daystareld says:

            @Glen

            It’s actually not nearly as hard as you’re making it it out to be. The reality of sexism and racism is so clearly established, both historically and in modern times, that while we have to be careful of confirmation bias, the studies swapping the names is enough to confirm that people with those names are likely getting positive responses less. Maybe you don’t call that sexism because you don’t think the people making the decision are consciously thinking “Ugh, a woman, no thank you,” but it can still point to a systemic disadvantage toward women even if they’re not.

            That said, I’m happy to look over citations for all the systemic problems you’re claiming about the problems with the research, like sample size. I’m not particularly interested in finding specific research and seeing if they pass your standards, but if you have actual research demonstrating the systemic flaws in the studies that I’ve referred to, I’m more than happy to look at those.

            @Aapje

            You appear to be arguing both that the “popular narratives” about racism and sexism are incorrect, and yet that it’s completely reasonable for prejudices to exist. Then you say that, following that, if we should be concerned about any prejudice, we should be concerned about all prejudice.

            So what your argument strikes me as is someone who is used to denying the negative effects of racism and sexism toward minorities and women, and then using the negative effects of racism and sexism toward white men as an excuse to justify your opposition to those calling for (in your perspective) specific harms toward minorities and women.

            What you miss when you take that path is that there are plenty of people who, for example, are totally okay with also calling out unfairness against men, and also calling out the unfairnesses against women. Not everyone who is progressive is an extreme “SJW.” If you disagree with the exact ratio at which both groups are disadvantaged, that’s definitely a point worth talking about.

            But first, you have to chose what ideological stance you have: either acknowledge and admit that there are those other harms to minorities and women, or say that prejudice is justified in every case and demand equality of defense against it. To me, you appear to be using the much-cited motte-and-bailey.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            It’s actually not nearly as hard as you’re making it it out to be. The reality of sexism and racism is so clearly established, both historically and in modern times

            It really really isn’t. If it was so well established you’d think that someone could produce some actually valid science showing it – yet they can’t.

            On the other hand differences in average capabilities and temperaments of different groups is literally the single best established social science finding and possibly the only valid social science finding.

            Even if you fail to grasp that you’d think that some rich leftist out there would start up competing firms with all the disused talent – VCs funded pets.com with millions and millions of dollars but they’re all so racist that they’d never fund “the all woman engineers firm”? Of course they would – in fact, they lavished billions on Elizabeth Holmes just because she was a plausible female Steve Jobs – shockingly, it turned out she was actually a fraud – but no one wanted to look to closely to find that out. That’s the oppose of a world where talent is ignored because of “sexism” and “racism” (whatever those words are supposed to mean) – that’s a world where there are massive differences in talent and no one wants to accept it.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @daystareId:
            [I made a longer post, but it seems to have gotten eaten by a filter, so here’s a shorter one]

            Here’s a couple of the sort of studies I have in mind when we discuss this stuff:
            Do Employers Discriminate by Gender? A Field Experiment in Female-Dominated Occupations

            We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews. Here’s what happened

            The first study involved sending out CVs swapping the names to discover varying amounts of bias favoring women – women get more callbacks – across many professions, including for entry-level computing-related jobs. (many earlier studies with similar findings are referenced in passing)

            The second study involved digitally varying apparent gender during voice interviews. Result: Having a female-sounding voice produced ever-so-slightly better reviews by tech interviewers than did having a male-sounding voice.

            Were these the kind of studies and study results you had in mind when referring to clearly established systemic disadvantage toward women?

          • Aapje says:

            @daystareld

            You appear to be arguing both that the “popular narratives” about racism and sexism are incorrect, and yet that it’s completely reasonable for prejudices to exist.

            Prejudice is necessary and incredible useful, because humans have limited senses. So we have to act on limited information, always!

            When you drive your car and claim right of way, you are actually basing your decision of a ton of prejudice. You assume that the other driver knows the law. You assume that the other driver is willing to follow the law. You assume that the other car has working brakes. You assume that the other driver is paying attention. Etc.

            All these assumptions are based on general information about how drivers act, not on specific information for that driver. In other words, you judge the other driver by how most drivers act. This is prejudice and it works, because they do tend to act that way.

            The SJ narrative accepts that it is perfectly valid to act in the same way towards men or white people, but not for men or white people to act like that to women or black people. By treating groups differently, it is the SJ people who are biased.

            Of course, there is no rational basis for claiming that it is wrong to judge ‘oppressed’ groups for group characteristics, but completely fair to judge ‘oppressor’ groups for group characteristics. To legitimize this bias, bias is introduced into science (mostly unconsciously, people are looking for confirmation of their bias).

            Once you accept that prejudice works and has benefits and downsides (so it is not a black/white issue), you can have a rational discussion about it.

            For example, imagine that people of group A have a culture where they nearly always pay their debts, while people of group B only pay back their debts 75% of the time. If a bank asks higher interest to members of group B, it superficially looks like they are discriminating. However, they make equal profit on each group and are simply being rational, based on the limited information that they have. If the culture of group B would change so they nearly always pay back their debts, the interests rates would equalize.

            The conservative solution tends to be to change the culture of group B (or accept that they have to face the consequences of their culture); while the progressive solutions tend to be to force the bank to equalize the interests. The latter will require the bank to increase the interest for group A and thus makes group A suffer for the culture of group B.

            However, the progressive narrative calls the bank ‘-ist’ in this scenario and pretends that the bank is not making a rational decision based on the limited information they have; and it denies that forcing them to make a different choice hurts group A.

            What you fail to understand is that I primarily object to the lie. You can have rational reasons to prefer to make group A worse off in favor of group B. For example, because you think that this will help group B economically, which will improve their pay back rate over time. However, if you deny the reality of the situation, you can’t actually understand the consequences of your actions or the reasoning by people who are not in denial.

            Not everyone who is progressive is an extreme “SJW.”

            I never claimed so, but the basic broken model of SJ is currently dominant among progressives. That you can’t understand my point of view just demonstrates this, as these radical ideas are just normal to you.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            […] the progressive solutions tend to be to force the bank to equalize the interests. The latter will require the bank to increase the interest for group A and thus makes group A suffer for the culture of group B.

            The argument goes even further than this. Higher interest is a tradeoff: group B accepts higher interest rates in return for paying back loans less punctually, which in turn means it’s allocating the resources in would have put into maintaining the discipline for paying back loans into other efforts instead. By making group A pay a higher interest rate than it would in isolation, the bank incentivizes group A to adopt more of the cultural customs / resource allocation of B, since the customs that lead to loan payment discipline are no longer useful to A.

            But the equalized interest rate charged by the bank is based on an average between A and B, not B. If A drops to B’s level, so will the average rate. This may be enough to make that bank unsustainable, causing it to go out of business and leave everyone without loan access altogether. The progressive strategy of equalizing rates makes group B worse off; the conservative strategy of incentivizing group B to allocate more effort toward loan repayment makes group B better off.*

            (I remember Romney making an argument very similar to this with regard to businesses performing so poorly that they justified another business buying them and reallocating their assets a la Bain Capital. That argument convinced me that he truly understood economics well enough – especially relative to Obama – to vote for him in 2012.)

            *With respect to bank access, at least. Group B might be worse off in whatever it’s spending less effort on as result of devoting more on loan repayment, but everyone in the discussion seems to agree that paying loans on time is a universal net benefit.

          • daystareld says:

            @reasoned argumentation

            “It really really isn’t. If it was so well established you’d think that someone could produce some actually valid science showing it – yet they can’t.”

            Okay, so this is where I bow out of the discussion and “agree to disagree” unless you can actually do anything to prove your argument, rather than just repeating that any science that disagrees with you isn’t valid. The world has such an enormous amount of evidence for the existence of racism and sexism in it that I find conversations on, not the particulars and manifestations, that we can argue for sure, but the very basic, bottom-line existence of them to be about as fruitful as flat-earth conversations.

            If you really, truly care about this topic, feel free to make a CMV post on Reddit and I promise I will go participate there. On this medium, in this context, I don’t find the chance of the conversation being fruitful for either of us high enough to be worth the effort. Cheers.

            @Glen Raphael

            For the first, not at all, since the first one is specifically about entry-level positions. I have never heard a single person, liberal or otherwise, claim that women can’t get jobs due to discrimination: the argument as far as I know it has always gone “Women are disadvantaged when pursuing high level jobs in many environments that are traditionally dominated by men.”

            The second is a much more relevant bit of research, even if it’s still an issue of entry-level jobs, but it IS just one bit of research, and is qualified appropriately as follows:

            “Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.

            On the subject of sample size, we have no delusions that this is the be-all and end-all of pronouncements on the subject of gender and interview performance.”

            However, it’s definitely a good starting point toward figuring out why sexism might not be the most relevant or even a relevant factor at all in certain fields. I’ve actually seen that study before, and the best response to it I remember is someone calling for this process to be done within a company rather than for new hires, where biases are far less likely to come into play. It’s not even that hard to imagine all the reasons why women might be subconsciously more preferred for entry-level jobs.

            @Aapje

            “Prejudice is necessary and incredible useful, because humans have limited senses. So we have to act on limited information, always!”

            I’m not arguing against the usefulness of System 1 processes in day-to-day life. But you are extending an analogy about driving toward a conscious, System 2 judgement of people based on their skin color, and that’s where we’re talking past each other.

            “The SJ narrative accepts that it is perfectly valid to act in the same way towards men or white people, but not for men or white people to act like that to women or black people. By treating groups differently, it is the SJ people who are biased.”

            Sorry, that hasn’t been my experience of them. But if those are the only groups you care about, I can see why you might see it that way.

            “Once you accept that prejudice works and has benefits and downsides (so it is not a black/white issue), you can have a rational discussion about it.”

            It has benefits and downsides

            “For example, imagine that people of group A have a culture where they nearly always pay their debts, while people of group B only pay back their debts 75% of the time.”

            Culture is not race.

            “However, the progressive narrative calls the bank ‘-ist’ in this scenario and pretends that the bank is not making a rational decision based on the limited information they have; and it denies that forcing them to make a different choice hurts group A.”

            Again, culture is not race. Do you really not understand this, or are you being deliberately obtuse?

            “That you can’t understand my point of view just demonstrates this, as these radical ideas are just normal to you.”

            I understand your point of view just fine. It’s just demonstrably wrong by the following sentence: Culture is not race.

            @Paul Brinkley

            “The progressive strategy of equalizing rates makes group B worse off; the conservative strategy of incentivizing group B to allocate more effort toward loan repayment makes group B better off.”

            Except this analogy isn’t actually found in reality anywhere, as far as I know. The actual situation is that, recognizing historical and systemic disadvantages, progressive strategy is to make more effort to reward those in Group B who have been held back by circumstance rather than individual ability.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @daystareld:

            Entry-level jobs seem like a good study target for practicality’s sake – it’s easier to throw a large pool of resumes at a large pool of jobs they’re qualified for if the jobs aren’t highly specialized. Plus if there were a “leaky funnel” problem we’d get the most bang for the buck by addressing it at the beginning, no?

            Anyway, here’s a two more links to mull over. The study:
            National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track

            …and the associated CNN article: The myth about women in science

            Some relevant bits from the latter:

            National hiring audits, some dating back to the 1980s, reveal that female scientists have had a significantly higher chance of being interviewed and hired than men. Although women were less likely to apply for jobs, if they did apply, their chances of getting the job were usually better.
            […so we did a new study and…]
            What we found shocked us. Women had an overall 2-to-1 advantage in being ranked first for the job in all fields studied. This preference for women was expressed equally by male and female faculty members, with the single exception of male economists, who were gender neutral in their preferences. In some conditions, women’s advantage reached 4-to-1. When women were compared with men who shared the same lifestyle, advantages accrued to women in all demographic groups—including single or married women without children, married women with preschoolers, and divorced mothers.
            […]
            While women may encounter sexism before and during graduate training and after becoming professors, the only sexism they face in the hiring process is bias in their favor.

            I think at this point the ball is in your court. The current evidence of discrimination against women based on treatment of CVs with the name changed is at best ambiguous. You can’t just wave vaguely in the direction of those kinds of studies and assume they all support your view – it should be clear by now that they do not.

          • Aapje says:

            @daystareld

            Culture is not race.

            Actually, culture is often strongly linked to race. If it wasn’t you couldn’t have articles like this

            It’s completely logical that this is the case, because race develops in a very similar way to how culture develops: groups of people who do things together (like eating together or having sex with each other). It’s actually very common that people prefer to mate with those of the same cultures, this then causes a stronger genetic bond as well. The main differences is that major cultural changes can happen on far shorter timescales, but even (sub)cultures in a multicultural society often correlate with race. For example, for obvious reasons, African-Americans tend to share race as well as a shared history that helped create a shared culture.

            Now, I’m not claiming that race correlates with culture perfectly, but this is not necessary for my argument. If I can make a statement about culture that is true more often for one race than another, I can improve my predictions by taking race into account. For example, I want to advertise a hip hop artist, but only have money for 1 billboard. I can choose between a black and a white neighborhood. My prediction is that that placing the billboard in the black neighborhood will probably generate more sales. Do you think that this is a bad guess?

            The actual situation is that, recognizing historical and systemic disadvantages, progressive strategy is to make more effort to reward those in Group B who have been held back by circumstance rather than individual ability.

            But those strategies also make predictions based on race*, even though the correlation is not 100%! Affirmative action that is based on race will benefit a recent African immigrant, despite that person not having the same historic background as an ex-slave. It will apply to an African-American who grew up in the south in a very racist environment and whose predecessors suffered from slavery and post-slavery segregation for a very long time, just as much as to the northern African-American who grew up in a very progressive environment and whose predecessors became free early on and who faced far less discriminatory laws and policies.

            It also doesn’t apply to groups who are now considered white, but who faced racial discrimination in the past, like Italians.

            So what you favor is on the same spectrum as what you oppose, by making decisions based on race that (you think) will have better outcomes on average than when not taking race into account, even though there are people for whom that stereotyping is wrong. That is my point.

            If you favor stereotyping when it suits you, you can’t just turn around and condemn it when it doesn’t.

            * With gender, the mistake made is different, because the main issue is that the claim of historical and systemic disadvantages for women is greatly exaggerated and for men, are played down and ignored far too much.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Paul Brinkley: The progressive strategy of equalizing rates makes group B worse off; the conservative strategy of incentivizing group B to allocate more effort toward loan repayment makes group B better off.

            daystareld: Except this analogy isn’t actually found in reality anywhere, as far as I know. The actual situation is that, recognizing historical and systemic disadvantages, progressive strategy is to make more effort to reward those in Group B who have been held back by circumstance rather than individual ability.

            This analogy follows precisely from an analysis of incentives. You cannot simply insist it doesn’t exist, any more than you could insist that if you tax cigarettes, people will keep on smoking and you’ll raise all the tax revenue you could ever need. It consequently doesn’t matter how nobly-intended that progressive policy is. I can’t fix my car engine by removing the head gasket and pointing out that it was making it too hard for the gasses inside the cylinders to escape.

            ETA: I don’t mean to sound snippy about this, but at the same time, we can’t afford to entertain every policy alternative that comes along that very obviously ignores incentives, just because it’s well-intentioned.

          • daystareld says:

            @Glen Raphael

            “Entry-level jobs seem like a good study target for practicality’s sake – it’s easier to throw a large pool of resumes at a large pool of jobs they’re qualified for if the jobs aren’t highly specialized. Plus if there were a “leaky funnel” problem we’d get the most bang for the buck by addressing it at the beginning, no?”

            Sure, if that’s what the problem is, but I don’t know that it is. Again, I’ve never heard people insist that women have trouble finding jobs: the complaint I’m familiar with is tha women are dscriminated against *in the workplace* and are not promoted or advanced at the same rate as men.

            What I will admit is that this probably has a lot more to do with specific industries and their cultures than anything else: new generations are continually more progressive than the previous ones, and some fields probably have a reverse effect. It actually wouldn’t surprise me if by the time we actually pinpoint this effect in every field, we find it’s largely gone in most modern work places.

            But not entirely. Since the ball’s in my court, I’ll link to a few studies that convinced me that it’s still a problem:

            http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0891243212438546

            http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550611415693

            http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0149206310365902

            I made an effort to sift through the dozens of articles I found for a source that I felt could be reasonably taken as neutral. If you have a problem with Sage, let me know.

            There’s also this “Research Roundup” from the Harvard Business Review: I didn’t follow through on every single link, but most that I did seemed decently solid.

            https://hbr.org/2013/09/women-in-the-workplace-a-research-roundup

            @aapje

            “Actually, culture is often strongly linked to race.”

            Sure, and if you cherry pick in what ways they’re linked, you can fool yourself or others into thinking that generalizations about one are as valid as generalizations about the other.

            “But those strategies also make predictions based on race*, even though the correlation is not 100%! Affirmative action that is based on race will benefit a recent African immigrant, despite that person not having the same historic background as an ex-slave.”

            This is true, and a flaw in Affirmative Action in some respects, but not in others, such as trying to offset present biases in those who might be heading the application process or engaging in interviews and so on.

            “It also doesn’t apply to groups who are now considered white, but who faced racial discrimination in the past, like Italians.”

            See above. As far as I know, there is no research showing that Italian names on resumes get lower acceptance rates.

            “If you favor stereotyping when it suits you, you can’t just turn around and condemn it when it doesn’t.”

            Sorry, I think you’ve mistaken me for a deontologist 😛 I’m a utilitarian: what I care about are outcomes.

            Also, the point isn’t to “favor stereotyping,” the point is to address an objective problem *somehow* rather than sitting on our hands and ignoring it because no solution is perfect.

            @Paul Brinkley

            “This analogy follows precisely from an analysis of incentives. You cannot simply insist it doesn’t exist, any more than you could insist that if you tax cigarettes, people will keep on smoking and you’ll raise all the tax revenue you could ever need.”

            But the analogy about incentives *doesn’t apply.* That’s my point.

            Unless you actually think that Affirmative Action makes white children not want to go to college anymore? Or that black students don’t try as hard as they could because they think AA will land them a spot anyway?

            This is the same train of thought that goes along with “Well, we can’t make poor people’s lives too easy, or they won’t look for work.” Yeah, sure, okay, FOX can find some idiots spending their foodstamps on lobster at the supermarket and parade the poor fool in front of the camera to stoke the outrage machine, but for the majority of people, being poor SUCKS, being on foodstamps or disability or unemployment SUCKS, and they’re already working their asses off trying to make more money anyway.

            As far as I’m aware there isn’t any strong evidence that the majority of people in shitty situations are less motivated to get out of those shitty situations if you try to help them. If you think things like Affirmative Action DEmotivates the majority of minorities rather than provide an incentive, or demotivates the majority of whites, then feel free to link me to that research.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @daystareld:

            Again, I’ve never heard people insist that women have trouble finding jobs…[new study links]

            Hang on a minute. YOU initially claimed that studies specifically involving, and I quote:

            changed names and genders of randomized college applications and job resumes and interviews

            provide compelling evidence of anti-woman unconscious bias. That was the specific thing I was disputing.

            Toward that end, my links provided some evidence that gender-blinded resume studies are inconclusive. Some find “bias” FOR women, a finding which still gets spun as “sexism” in media accounts which leave out the directionality to let the reader simply assume any alleged bias must hurt (rather than help) women. Some find no bias at all. And repeated studies of similar careers can find completely different amounts of bias – the first study I linked was an example where “computer operator” and “data entry” had completely different results. (no bias in one study, massive anti-male bias in the other)

            Blinding sex by tweaking the CV (in a resume-based job application) or by changing voice (in an interview-based job application) might indeed conceivably provide reasonable evidence of “unconscious bias”, if the results were consistent, replicable, predictable, in preregistered studies. I don’t get the sense that this is the case – my vague impression is that in this whole area the studies finding anti-woman bias were a casualty of the replication crisis. The first few studies I found appeared to support that impression and none of the links you just gave even touch on the topic.

            So…if you still want to back up your earlier assertion, please provide links to studies you think do that.

          • Aapje says:

            @daystareld

            Sorry, I think you’ve mistaken me for a deontologist 😛 I’m a utilitarian: what I care about are outcomes.

            So what are you optimizing for:
            A1. Making sure that the percentage of poor blacks is the same as the percentage of poor whites?
            A2. Minimizing the number of poor people, regardless of race?
            B1. Maximizing the income of women and putting the same pressure on them to sacrifice their happiness for income as is done for men?
            B2. Pushing people towards work arrangements that maximize people’s happiness*?
            C1. Increasing the gender gap in government funding and services?
            C2. Decreasing the gender gap in the same?
            D1. Making special laws giving special treatment to people based on gender and race?
            D2. Treating everyone race and gender-neutral?

            A lot of the things that are done in the name of SJ are options 1 and make the situation worse when it comes to options 2.

            * Keep in mind that women are happier than men during the ‘career years’, suggesting that work-related gender issues make men worse off, so if anything, on this issue the effort should go to liberate men from their provider role.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            @daystareld

            But the analogy about incentives *doesn’t apply.* That’s my point. […] This is the same train of thought that goes along with “Well, we can’t make poor people’s lives too easy, or they won’t look for work.”

            By this argument, we could pay everyone $100/hour, and it’d be fine, because incentives don’t apply. We could admit only black students to college, and shut white students out, because incentives don’t apply. We can mock this or that minority group, and never fear for retaliation, because incentives don’t apply.

            All of which are, of course, outrageous strawmen. Which is to say: I think you should take another hard look at whether incentives really do or do not apply to economic activity.

            Are you familiar with the adage, “economics is thinking on the margin”? This is precisely what I used as far back as the analogy about loan repayment. It is not the case that everyone in group A repays their loans, always, and then we switch to equalized interest rates and suddenly everyone in group A is slacking. Rather, it’s that some members of group A never repay, some rarely do, some do some of the time, some are pretty good about it, and still others are stalwartly repaying every penny, on time. Raise the rate on A (so you can lower it on B and not run out of money), and every member does some sort of adjustment, from none at all because they don’t care or didn’t pay attention or whatever, to caring a little and waiting a month longer before getting that car, or feeling rather stressed before it happened and now having to drastically redo their budget around the fact that they can no longer use a credit card.

            Likewise, with your other examples. You won’t see a mass exodus of white students due to AA, but you might notice a few here and there who were on the fence about college, and AA makes the difference between college and trade school. Or between trade school and going back to the family farm or store.

            Or a poor person who is working their ass off to get by, and responds to financial aid by working the same amount and relaxing with a beer in the evening instead of just going to bed. In some sense, there’s nothing wrong with their choice – it’s their property now, to do with as they see fit – but it surely does not have the effect desired by the legislator, because the poor man is still poor, and marginally more inebriated. Some of the poor will indeed be more productive, as this is, again, a spectrum, and there will be some portion of them for whom an extra $2k/year makes that critical difference between barely getting by and having enough to save for a small business – but all of those $2k/year aid packages are coming out of someone else’s pockets, and many of them are also on the margin, busting their own asses.

            Incentives saturate this entire scenario. Not just an interest rate, but that rate combined with getting fed, fixing up the house, saving for recreation, spending time on training, raising kids, and so on. It’s not enough to say giving them money will be worth it, because you don’t know up front how their incentives will impact their decisions, and that money is scarce enough that you can’t simply keep pouring it in until they’re obviously doing better, especially when pouring it like that will negatively affect your supply of it in the future.

          • daystareld says:

            @Glen Raphael

            Ah, you’re right, that was stupid of me: I basically mixed scenarios mid-paragraph: I find the name swapping as evidence for racism and sexism in many hiring processes, but you’re right that it’s not strong evidence in the case of sexism, and I shouldn’t have equivocated the two.

            I’ll recind that earlier assertion, since as you’ve demonstrated well, my confidence in it is nowhere near justified enough.

            @Aapje

            “So what are you optimizing for:”

            You’re describing false dichotomies. Minimizing the number of poor people is obviously more important than making sure the % of poor people are equal among different races, but if you frame it as one or the other, you’re just giving up on maximizing positive values. “Special laws giving special treatment” is exactly how we treat the handicapped, and most people don’t get upset at such because they can observe the effects of broken legs or debilitating diseases, but can’t observe the effects of centuries of systemic racism/sexism in social norms and learned behaviors.

            Justice is an important value with real, tangible outcomes, such as reducing civil unrest, hate crimes, lost potential, and so on. Studying the effects of centuries of slavery and segregation and systemic racism, and how they continue to be part of the dysfunctions in black communities today, means caring enough to try and correct the imbalance. If I had to choose between inventing free, limitless energy, thus catapulting the majority of the planet’s poor out of poverty, or black and white equality in the US, I would pick the former, but reality doesn’t work that way. You can advocate for both.

            “Keep in mind that women are happier than men during the ‘career years’, suggesting that work-related gender issues make men worse off, so if anything, on this issue the effort should go to liberate men from their provider role.”

            Feminism does seek to do exactly this, by insisting that women can be primary money earners as well, and encouraging men to take part in child rearing.

            @Paul Brinkley

            “All of which are, of course, outrageous strawmen. Which is to say: I think you should take another hard look at whether incentives really do or do not apply to economic activity.”

            I’m sorry, but I think you’re still attacking strawmen. You making outrageous comparisons as an intuition pump does not work when my claim is not “incentives don’t matter,” but that *these particular incentives* do not cause *those feared harms* in anywhere near a wide enough net negative to matter.

            “You won’t see a mass exodus of white students due to AA, but you might notice a few here and there who were on the fence about college, and AA makes the difference between college and trade school. Or between trade school and going back to the family farm or store.”

            So what? This is going to sound harsh, but even accepting that such people exist, my model of anyone so unmotivated by the thought of AA is that they’re probably not someone who’s going to succeed or excel in academia anyway. Plus, in terms of sheer numbers, my money is on them being more than balanced out by the minority students who go the extra distance and push themselves harder than they normally would and are given the opportunities they normally wouldn’t have.

            “Some of the poor will indeed be more productive, as this is, again, a spectrum… but all of those $2k/year aid packages are coming out of someone else’s pockets, and many of them are also on the margin, busting their own asses.”

            Are you under the impression that the majority of welfare taxes are being paid by those “also on the margin?” They don’t call it a redistribution of wealth for nothing, you know 😛 If you’re upset that it’s not redistributing it WIDE enough and that more needs to be taken from the rich, we’re in perfect agreement.

            “It’s not enough to say giving them money will be worth it, because you don’t know up front how their incentives will impact their decisions, and that money is scarce enough that you can’t simply keep pouring it in until they’re obviously doing better, especially when pouring it like that will negatively affect your supply of it in the future.”

            On the contrary, I can say that and I do, because the majority of the evidence shows how powerful those safety nets and social services are in helping lift people out of poverty. Worrying about wasting money on them and spreading uncertainty and fear about incentives is a classic tactic of those that disagree with the policies for other reasons: without robust evidence to counter the research against the claim that social safety nets help more than they hurt, I’m going to continue believing the observations that confirm that research.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            @daystareld

            You making outrageous comparisons as an intuition pump does not work when my claim is not “incentives don’t matter,” but that *these particular incentives* do not cause *those feared harms* in anywhere near a wide enough net negative to matter.

            Here was your claim:

            But the analogy about incentives *doesn’t apply.* That’s my point.

            Here was the analogy you had to have been referring to:

            The progressive strategy of equalizing rates makes group B worse off; the conservative strategy of incentivizing group B to allocate more effort toward loan repayment makes group B better off.

            This analogy had a longer explanation behind it. Your response at the time was:

            The actual situation is that, recognizing historical and systemic disadvantages, progressive strategy is to make more effort to reward those in Group B who have been held back by circumstance rather than individual ability.

            Which didn’t really address the explanation of the analogy (which wasn’t even an analogy, but whatever) except to say “no, it works the way I claimed previously” and to ignore the incentives described. For which the natural interpretation is that either you think incentives don’t matter at all, since you didn’t address them, or that you meant to and somehow left that part out as an honest mistake.

            Did you mean to address them? It’s hard to see that from your later responses:

            This is going to sound harsh, but even accepting that such people exist, my model of anyone so unmotivated by the thought of AA is that they’re probably not someone who’s going to succeed or excel in academia anyway.

            Is your model of AA beneficiaries similarly harsh? Why is one side a band of aspiring luminaries going the extra distance and the other just a bunch of slackers? Who’s actually treating people equally here?

            Are you under the impression that the majority of welfare taxes are being paid by those “also on the margin?”

            I’m well aware that the top 50% of taxpayers pay the top 97% of income taxes, and I’m willing to entertain that similar holds for welfare, so let’s run with that. Are you under the impression that the top 50% are going to make whatever investments they make, regardless of what their tax rate is? That they’ll never reshuffle their assets into this venture or that, creating these jobs or those? That they won’t let a business starve because they’re getting squeezed at the moment and can’t afford to put their capital in?

            On the contrary, I can say that and I do, because the majority of the evidence shows how powerful those safety nets and social services are in helping lift people out of poverty.

            Have you read Bastiat? This isn’t FUD. It’s quite real; just hard to measure. You can’t simply rely on research; you have to pay attention to that research’s selection bias.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @daystareld:

            I find the name swapping as evidence for racism and sexism in many hiring processes, but you’re right that it’s not strong evidence in the case of sexism, and I shouldn’t have equivocated the two.

            Okay, thanks. So we’re agreed name-swapping studies are not strong evidence for anti-women bias, but you think name-swapping studies are still in play as evidence for racism, right? So let’s move on to that issue. Please read this (very brief) essay:

            Greg vs. Jamal: Why Didn’t Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) Replicate?

            Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) was one of the better papers finding that “black” names get fewer callbacks. A 2016 economic study related to hiring noted in passing that when they tried to control for race the earlier result didn’t replicate in a small footnote:

            In contrast, we find no difference in the returns to postsecondary credentials by race when applying to jobs that require applicants to have a degree or a certificate.

            The essay I linked above suggests a possible reason for the disparity – the particular “black names” chosen in earlier studies signaled low socioeconomic status while the names chosen in the most recent study did not. (the author tested “do these names seem low-income?” and “do these names seem black?” via Mechanical Turk surveys to confirm an initial hunch.)

            Article concludes:

            The lower callback rates for Jamal and Lakisha in the classic 2004 AER paper, and the successful replications mentioned earlier, are as consistent with racial as with SES discrimination.
            […but…]
            To test racial discrimination in particular, and name effects in general, we need the same study to orthogonally manipulate these, or at least use names pretested to differ only on the dimension of interest. I don’t think any audit study has done that.

            Until such a study has been done, I’d say the jury is still out.

          • Aapje says:

            @daystareld

            “Special laws giving special treatment” is exactly how we treat the handicapped, and most people don’t get upset at such because they can observe the effects of broken legs or debilitating diseases, but can’t observe the effects of centuries of systemic racism/sexism in social norms and learned behaviors.

            1. This is a completely false analogy, since women and minorities are not handicapped. By treating past problems as permanent disabilities, you are telling people that they don’t have the same abilities right now, while they do have them. This teaches them a victim mentality that doesn’t help them.
            2. That you can’t observe the effects and yet are so certain is very telling that you are working based on faith. How can you be sure that you aren’t just telling yourself a story that is false? For example, you argue that a black kid today is a victim of centuries of issues passed down to him, but why isn’t the same true for a white kid born in the Appalachia mountains? Didn’t that region suffer from centuries of major deprivation? If society is filled with racism that victimized them to such an extent that it is unreasonable to teach them that they can achieve much more, then how come many minorities do much better (like recent African migrants, Hispanics and Asian Americans?).
            3. How are you so sure that centuries of sexism doesn’t affect men? If you ignore the false feminist history and actually study history, you see a ton of systemic sexism targeted at men. Why do you assume that this hasn’t left major issues that deserve special treatment, if you assume that this helps women with their major issues? At least be consistent.
            4. Why do you ignore wealth/class? The top 1% has a bigger wealth gap to the rest of society than exists between whites and any minority, between men and women, etc. In my country, the poorest men got political franchise 2 years before women did. Descendants of the aristocracy do much better rtoday than descendants of lower classes. Why is this mostly ignored?

            Feminism does seek to do exactly this, by insisting that women can be primary money earners as well, and encouraging men to take part in child rearing.

            Sorry, you have been bamboozled by the false rhetoric. NOW opposes shared parenting laws, because they don’t want men to share parenting equally.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            “Special laws giving special treatment” is exactly how we treat the handicapped, and most people don’t get upset at such because they can observe the effects of broken legs or debilitating diseases, but can’t observe the effects of centuries of systemic racism/sexism in social norms and learned behaviors.

            So the mechanism for “centuries of racism” effecting social norms and learned behaviors (but being put under different selective pressure can NEVER result in genetic differences!) is that parents raise children in maladaptive ways due to their own treatment. For example, parents poor, children go to bad schools, rinse and repeat for the next generation.

            To claim that this is the mechanism for observed group differences is absurd because the (just-so) story fails in so many ways – groups that didn’t remain poor, the consistency of racial differences across cultures, the utter lack of functional societies made up of low achieving groups, etc. but to claim that this holds for sexism is beyond absurd. There’s not even a mechanism. Are current women only descended from other women and men descended from men? The human species has been sexually dimorphic for its entire history. This argument claims that women and men have (irrationally, apparently) been treated differently but this has had no evolutionary effects which cause differences between the sexes? That’s absurd. “Women have been subjected to sexism for millennia that didn’t let them use their intellectual gifts” – well guess what? Brain tissue is metabolically expensive and you’ve just argued that the selective pressure on women was such that being intelligent wasn’t a benefit. Congratulations.

          • bintchaos says:

            Within group variance is greater than between group variance on race and on sex (Jensen, 1994).
            And like Dr. Haier says in his new book (The Neuroscience of Intelligence, 2017)
            “Intelligence is 100% biological.”
            IQ is not plastic post early childhood nutritional issues.
            Libs and cons are both wrong on this– libs believe all humans are equal and the playing field can be leveled through civil law and civil welfare, cons believe white people are both more intelligent and thus more equal than others.
            The hideous truth is that the CCP (competition cooperation paradigm) that evolved in the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptation) favored soldier and explorer phenotypes equally. But 21st century environment favors explorer phenotype explicitly and its just gunna get worse going forward. Consider academe– explicit selection for high IQ (120 points and up) resulted in nearly all explorer phenotype while the military which accepts IQ of 90 points or greater is nearly all soldier phenotype.
            I think theres likely significant differences in brain biochemistry that we will be able to explore with cognitive genomics going forward.
            Great times for science.
            🙂

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            Within group variance is greater than between group variance on race and on sex (Jensen, 1994).

            IQ is not plastic post early childhood nutritional issues.
            Libs and cons are both wrong on this– libs believe all humans are equal and the playing field can be leveled through civil law and civil welfare, cons believe white people are both more intelligent and thus more equal than others.

            The first statement has no relationship to the second one.

            Men vary in height more than men are taller than women. That doesn’t mean that women aren’t on average shorter than men. Man vary in strength more than they are stronger than women – the average man is still stronger than 98% of women, etc.

            “Differences within groups are greater than differences between groups” is true but doesn’t have the implication “therefore differences between groups are trivial”. The second part isn’t implied by the first.

            … and “explorer phenotype” vs “soldier phenotype”? You claim to be an academic? There are literally 3 hits on google scholar for “explorer phenotype” – 2 are for papers about microbes and the third is for a paper about hooded warblers. Talking about it as if anyone other than you even knows what this is in relation to humans is time-cube-esque.

          • daystareld says:

            @Paul

            “Which didn’t really address the explanation of the analogy (which wasn’t even an analogy, but whatever) except to say “no, it works the way I claimed previously” and to ignore the incentives described. For which the natural interpretation is that either you think incentives don’t matter at all, since you didn’t address them, or that you meant to and somehow left that part out as an honest mistake.”

            I don’t think that’s a natural interpretation at all, and I contend that it was, in fact, an analogy, unless you and I have very different understandings of how Affirmative Action-type laws work in the US. The interpretation I think is more fair is that I don’t think Affirmative Action works like loan repayment regulations.

            “Is your model of AA beneficiaries similarly harsh? Why is one side a band of aspiring luminaries going the extra distance and the other just a bunch of slackers? Who’s actually treating people equally here?”

            I don’t think I made such a sweeping generalization: I’m just saying, if you’re going to use the specter of those who quit their pursuit of higher education for the fear of being passed over in an already highly selective process, I feel it’s more than fair to counter with the idea of people who go the extra distance because of it. And that I really doubt the quality of the student who would normally have gone for higher education, but was turned off by Affirmative Action.

            “Are you under the impression that the top 50% are going to make whatever investments they make, regardless of what their tax rate is?”

            Not regardless, but not solely swayed by it.

            “That they’ll never reshuffle their assets into this venture or that, creating these jobs or those?”

            They’ll shuffle their money where there are high expectations of return, and the tax rate is only one consideration of many in that.

            “That they won’t let a business starve because they’re getting squeezed at the moment and can’t afford to put their capital in?”

            They can choose to do that if they want, others will be more than happy to fill the gap. The market abhors a vacuum, and the idea that a profitable business is being left to starve for capital in the modern day because some investors don’t find the profit margin high enough has never been proven, as far as I can find in any economic study. It’s an article of Supply Side Economics faith that, if it ever applied to the real world, certainly doesn’t seem to in modern global economies.

            @Glen

            It’s a good data point to keep in mind, but as the study itself admits, far from conclusive:

            “But this conclusion is tentative as best, we are comparing studies that differ on many dimensions (and the new study had some noteworthy glitches, read footnote 4). To test racial discrimination in particular, and name effects in general, we need the same study to orthogonally manipulate these, or at least use names pretested to differ only on the dimension of interest. I don’t think any audit study has done that.

            @Aapje

            “This is a completely false analogy, since women and minorities are not handicapped.”

            By your perspective, sure. By those who disagree with you, clearly this is a point of disagreement: not all handicaps are immediately observable. The contention of many progressives is that women and minorities are, in fact, handicapped by history, circumstance, or society’s prejudices.

            “This teaches them a victim mentality that doesn’t help them.”

            That’s your opinion: evidence of the “victim mentality” demotivating minorities from achieving success has not been proven. Also, shouldn’t you be just as worried about setting a counter narrative about men and whites, since you seem to be arguing that THEY are in fact the ones who are unfairly persecuted?

            “That you can’t observe the effects and yet are so certain is very telling that you are working based on faith. How can you be sure that you aren’t just telling yourself a story that is false? ”

            I said that others, those who agree with you, could not observe it: I did not say that no one could observe it. By accounts of those who live with those prejudices every day, it’s quite real, and from the evidence I’ve seen, quite well supported. But evidence has always been a weak convincing force to those who find the conclusion unsavory, so we live in a country that went through centuries of slavery and segregation and systemic racism and sexism, and yet still have people arguing that all that’s in the past and has no effect on anyone’s lives today.

            “How are you so sure that centuries of sexism doesn’t affect men?”

            You need to study feminism better, rather than just believing the strawman of it on the internet: every feminist I’ve ever met in person is absolutely a believer that that centuries of sexism doesn’t negatively affect men too, myself included.

            “Why do you ignore wealth/class? ”

            I don’t ignore it, I just think of it as an adjacent but separate issue. An upper class black man will still, on average, be treated worse than an upper class white man, in many parts of the USA.

            “Sorry, you have been bamboozled by the false rhetoric. NOW opposes shared parenting laws, because they don’t want men to share parenting equally.”

            Sorry, you didn’t read your own link carefully enough. NOW opposes arbitrary and evidence-blind assumptions of parenting capability. It always amuses me how often that link shows up by people who clearly found it linked to them by some anti-feminist group and never looked past the surface to see NOW’s own explanation for why good intentions does not make good law.

            @reasoned

            “Are current women only descended from other women and men descended from men?”

            No, but current women are still judged by assumptions about differences between men and women that originated in previous generations, both within their own families and in many areas of society at large.

            @bintchaos

            “Libs and cons are both wrong on this– libs believe all humans are equal and the playing field can be leveled through civil law and civil welfare”

            I have never met a liberal who believes “all humans are equal,” and contend that this is a strawman. What the liberals I know believe is that all humans should be given equal opportunities, regardless of baseline assumptions about their capabilities.

            For what it’s worth, I think your representation of conservatives is a strawman too: they’re not all racist, but they are more likely to deny evidence of racism and privilege.

          • bintchaos says:

            no strawmen involved
            just shorthand for reality
            its not possible to level the playing field with civil welfare and civil law (what libs advocate), and neither is it possible to level the playing field with attitude and effort (what cons advocate)
            shorter: cant make a human with an IQ of 70 pts (functional retardation) into a theoretical physicist, or indeed, a whole lot of things requiring an IQ greater 120 pts like doctors, lawyers, etc
            college graduate is one of those things
            but 90 pts gets a human into the armed services
            academe is +90% liberal
            military is +90% conservative
            is it just brute force selection for IQ?

          • Plucky says:

            @ bintchaos: your characterization of the military is not right, on numerous fronts:
            1) The military is not 90% conservative. http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/pentagon-survey-twitter-facebook-military-politicization-235378 : “Fifty-four percent of officers responding to the survey said they were Republicans, 24 percent said they were Democrats and 14 percent reported they were independents. But more striking, Urben said, was that when asked about their political ideology, nearly 47 percent identified as conservative, 32 percent as moderate and 22 percent as liberal. That compares with previous studies in which as many as 65 percent of military officers reported they were politically conservative. […] Separate studies have suggested that the political attitudes of the enlisted ranks more closely reflect the public at large.”

            2) The intelligence threshold for military service is higher than you suppose. The technical sophistication of the equipment today puts the minimum acceptable IQ for enlisted somewhere closer to 98-100 (this is something of a known problem to the military- I can’t find a link but they estimate that ~75% of the population is either “physically, mentally, or morally unfit to serve”). Officers are required (with some rare exceptions) to have 4-year degrees, which means a min IQ more like 110 or so, and high-ranking officers are typically expected to get a graduate degree somewhere along the line (for a well-known example, David Petraeus is a Princeton Ph.D.). The service academies, which produce a disproportionate share of the higher-ranked officer corps, are very academically rigorous institutions.

            -The military is different in the sense that, unlike society at large, it tends to get more conservative as you go up the education scale. At the very top ranks it will vary by administration, since while everyone (for obvious reasons) strenuously denies it, political views do play a role in who gets promoted once there are stars on shoulders.

          • bintchaos says:

            you are talking about officers, and Im talking about the military as a whole including enlisted men.
            Also, the entry requirement for the military is 90 IQ points currently, it has been lowered in time of war, etc.
            That is from Dr. Haier’s new book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence.
            There isnt a hard gate for IQ in academe, but its a highly competitive system where 120 IQ points is probably the low end of selection. The top universities can be the most selective, taking perhaps the top 1% or even the top .01% of applicants.
            Academe is structured as pretty much brute force selection for IQ — the military takes most applicants and sorts them into appropriate jobs.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @daystarld:

            It’s a good data point to keep in mind, but as the study itself admits, far from conclusive

            Sure. Though I actually found the explanation suggested pretty generous to the earlier studies. A simpler explanations for the data at hand (given the replication crisis) is that the earlier study results are simply bogus.

            To wit: Imagine you’re doing a study (pre-replication crisis) whose entire point is to quantify racial bias. If you don’t find racial bias, you don’t have a publishable finding! So you’re likely to convince yourself you did something wrong and just need to run the study again, or try analyzing the numbers a different way, or eliminate some fraction of the data that had some iffy characteristic, until the numbers look better. If a few dozen people try doing studies like this (none of which have been preregistered), those that by random chance happen to find statistically-significant racial bias are the ones that get published. Given that environment, we’d expect published studies to find bias whether it’s there or not.

            So now we have a new study which wasn’t specifically of racial bias so it was publishable whether or not racial bias was found. Doesn’t that situation seem much more likely to produce an honest finding than the earlier situation was? But to be fair, there are still several options to consider, including these:

            (1) Perhaps the older studies are all bogus or mistaken and there was never racial or SES bias.
            (2) Perhaps the new study is bogus or mistaken and the earlier results are valid – there both was and still is racial bias in resume callbacks.
            (3) Perhaps both old and new studies are accurate but the older studies were measuring low-SES bias – there was never pure racial bias in resume callbacks, merely SES bias.
            (4) Perhaps both old and new studies are accurate and the contrast tells us there once was racial bias in resume callbacks, but that bias has since faded away within the last decade or so and no longer exists today.
            (5) Or perhaps it’s all random noise – there’s too much variance between different people reading resumes at different firms for such studies to be at all meaningful.

            …and so on. Regardless of which interpretation you lean towards, it should at least be obvious the data doesn’t (yet?) tell a particularly clear story. The claim that there exists substantial unconsious racial bias demonstrated by resume callback rates should perhaps be considered not proven until those better studies my source suggested have actually been attempted.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Is evolution and creationism discussed often in the news media? I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of my conservative friends mad at CNN at because “they push that evy-lew-shun talk!” but because CNN ignores conservatives stated motivations and policy prescriptions, reads their minds and determines they’re solely motivated by blind, irrational hatred of everyone who isn’t a white christian heterosexual male and then brings on 6 panelists to argue over whether the conservative is just regular racist or super racist.

      It’s not about facts, it’s about which facts they choose to focus on to shape their narrative. And their narrative is a predetermined conclusion, “Reps bad Dems good.”

      Basically, I think you’re focusing on facts instead of narrative, and narrative is where the action is.

      • daystareld says:

        “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of my conservative friends mad at CNN at because “they push that evy-lew-shun talk!”

        Then you’re probably not talking to the 60% of conservatives who believe in Creationism.

        Narrative may be where the action is, but it takes facts to stop a false-narrative from gaining traction. And ~60% of the time, facts just aren’t on the conservative’s side.

        And when the facts aren’t on a newsman’s side, they either spin the truth (which, yes, CNN and MSNBC are surely guilty of too) or just flat out lie, as most FOX “anchors” do regularly, repeatedly, and seemingly without shame.

        Fact checking sites and organizations pretty unanimously put FOX News behind even the worst of the liberal news stations, and if you think that’s just more elitist liberal bias back-patting each other over how many conservative puppies they could kick in a day, then I’m curious to know what version of FOX you’re watching that makes it not-objectively-worse than just run-of-the-mill political spin on the other news stations.

        Because on the FOX I watch, the evils of liberals and Democrats and minorities and the poor are literally on parade day after day after day after day. So if there’s a moral high ground here, I don’t think I’m disqualifying CNN for bashing conservatives just yet.

        In reality, all major news stations in the US are terrible. But even if I’d happily watch CNN, MSNBC, and FOX all go out of business, false equivocation is still false.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          No, the facts are generally on the side of whatever narrative you’re pushing. If your narrative is “we shouldn’t be letting in illegals because some will rape or murder our citizens” then the facts are on your side: Americans are raped and murdered by illegal immigrants who should have never been let in the country. Run stories highlighting the victims of illegal immigrant crime like Jameel Shaw. Facts are on your side.

          If you’re pushing the narrative “we should be lax on illegal immigration because poor Latinos suffer when they cannot get jobs in the US” then the facts are on your side. Poor illegal immigrants who committed no malum in se crimes will suffer if they are deported. Run stories about deported families at risk of being killed. Facts are on your side.

          I think you’re just looking at the narratives you care about, that match your values, and correctly noting that the facts support them. And then not hearing the other narratives, or dismissing the facts associated with them because they’re irrelevant to your goals and values.

          And “fact checking” is just a whole bunch of selection bias and isolated demands for rigor.

          • daystareld says:

            No, I’m examining two narratives and evaluating their importance based on common values and analysis of outcomes.

            The response to illegal immigrants murdering American citizens is not “Lalala, I can’t hear you!” it’s “How often? Okay, so what are the solutions? And what are the consequences to doing those vs doing nothing?”

            If you think a single citizen dying to immigrants is more important than a million illegal immigrants leading happier, healthier, more productive lives, then yes, your hyper-partisan conservative will focus on the narrative of immigrant crime.

            If you think a single illegal immigrant living happier, healthier, more productive lives is more important than a million US citizens being murdered by them, then yes, a hyper-partisan liberal will focus on the narrative of helping immigrants.

            If, however, you’re (what I would consider) a sane utilitarian who cares more about reducing suffering than security theater, the evidence of illegal immigrants causing crimes is vastly underwhelming compared to the evidence of helping them escape poverty or suffering. And on top of that, the proposed consequences of trying to enforce outdated and draconian immigration laws is further more harmful than the positives we gain as a country for having illegal immigrants.

            This is, admittedly, a more complex calculus than “illegal immigrants good” or “illegal immigrants bad,” which is how new stations tend to work. But if, on the whole, the latter is less true than the former, then yes, the new station trumpeting the latter is the one that’s less correct.

            Unless of course you dismiss the entire concept of fact checking so that we can stay in a perpetual state of solipsistic apathy about what’s true and what’s not.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            If you think a single citizen dying to immigrants is more important than a million illegal immigrants leading happier, healthier, more productive lives, then yes, your hyper-partisan conservative will focus on the narrative of immigrant crime.

            Taking in people who by their nature create societies that are so horrible that living in those societies is a humanitarian disaster is just a way to destroy the recipient.

            In other words, that immigrants would lead better lives here is exactly how you know that they’d make life worse for our fellow citizens by them being here. They’re not moving to get away from “tragic dirt”.

          • Nornagest says:

            That “by their nature” could use some proving.

          • Jiro says:

            If, however, you’re (what I would consider) a sane utilitarian who cares more about reducing suffering than security theater

            Sorry, I’m not a sane utilitarian.

          • DrBeat says:

            I know this one. Utilitarians always lie, and virtue ethicists always tell the truth, but sane people believe all true things and insane people believe all false things to be true and vice versa. So this answer doesn’t rule out the possibility of you being a sane utilitarian, the only possibility it actually rules out is that you are an insane virtue ethicist, because if you were you would erroneously believe yourself to be a sane utilitarian and then accurately report it.

          • Jiro says:

            You are thinking of vampires.

          • Jaskologist says:

            a sane utilitarian

            A utilitarian is a man who has lost everything except his reason.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            No one is actually a utilitarian, let alone a sane one, except maybe Singer, and people think he’s kind of kooky for it.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @daystareld:

            If, however, you’re (what I would consider) a sane utilitarian who cares more about reducing suffering than security theater, the evidence of illegal immigrants causing crimes is vastly underwhelming compared to the evidence of helping them escape poverty or suffering.

            No, I’m neither sane nor a utilitarian, I’m Catholic. Do you think the purpose of the United States government is to maximize global utility? Because if that’s the case then the government should seize most of your assets and redistribute them to starving kids in Africa because it’ll ease their suffering more than it will cause you to suffer.

            Each person may have equal moral value in the eyes of God, but not in the eyes of my government. My government needs to be primarily concerned with the wellbeing of the ~300 million Americans, not the other 6.7 billion people on the planet. They have their own governments.

            Our poor people rely on the government enforcing immigration laws so people who do not share their values or agree to operate under the same rule of law as they do do not move into their neighborhoods and threaten or displace them. You may not care any more about American poor people than you care about Honduran poor people, so you’re willing to ignore the laws that help American poor people. Basically, in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma that is rule of law, you’re defecting. Be careful with this, because when the government later decides that the interests of some other group of foreigners are more important than the interests of daystareld, you’ll have a hard time making your case. Utility is utility.

            Anyway, we’re basically mindkilled by politics at this point. I was trying to demonstrate that disagreements on “facts” are not our real issue, because the “facts” support lots of different narratives and courses of action, depending on your values. But I think we agree now that we have very different value systems, right? So therefore agreement on “facts” isn’t going to get us far. You and I can completely agree on the facts and I still won’t want to do the things you want to do, and vice versa.

          • daystareld says:

            “No, I’m neither sane nor a utilitarian, I’m Catholic.”

            So, we have pretty widely different set of values and epistemology then. But I’m pretty sure Jesus had some things to say about helping the less fortunate? “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

            “Do you think the purpose of the United States government is to maximize global utility?… Each person may have equal moral value in the eyes of God, but not in the eyes of my government. My government needs to be primarily concerned with the wellbeing of the ~300 million Americans, not the other 6.7 billion people on the planet. They have their own governments.”

            In my ideal US government, yes, but either way this assumes that rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants is in the country’s best interest, despite all evidence to the contrary.

            “Our poor people rely on the government enforcing immigration laws so people who do not share their values or agree to operate under the same rule of law as they do do not move into their neighborhoods and threaten or displace them.”

            There is no evidence that this is a significant issue for “our poor people.” Also, since that’s apparently your concern, I hope you’re all in favor of policies that help our poor people with measurable areas of hardship, like healthcare and financial aid and so on.

            “You may not care any more about American poor people than you care about Honduran poor people, so you’re willing to ignore the laws that help American poor people.”

            Again, there is no evidence that American poor people are hurt by illegal immigration more than they’re helped by them.

            “Basically, in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma that is rule of law, you’re defecting.”

            That’s not how the prisoner’s dilemma works 😛 I’m arguing that it’s immoral and harmful to follow through on this law, so the law should be changed. Your argument, apparently, is now “It’s the law, respect it regardless of what the consequences are.

            In which case, I hope you think any friends or family you might have who smoke pot illegally should be thrown in jail. Rule of law is the rule of law, after all.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @daystareld

            Wait, you mean, when I die, God doesn’t judge my soul, he judges my government’s soul? Oh, that’s really easy then. All this time I’ve been thinking I need to do that whole “take care of the poor thing myself.” I had no idea I could just outsource that to the government and scoot right on into heaven. Just bring your voting record to the pearly gates.

            Again, there is no evidence that American poor people are hurt by illegal immigration more than they’re helped by them.

            This is not true at all. Looks like we do have a disagreement about facts.

            Now that you know the US Commission on Civil Rights has found that “Evidence for negative effects of such competition ranged from modest to significant” are you going to update your model of the effects of illegal immigration on poor blacks?

            If so, and you don’t change your opinion on illegal immigration, then I think that proves my point: we can agree on the facts and still not agree on what to do because you value the foreign poor as much or more than the native poor. Or perhaps you simply value the benefits you get from illegal immigration (cheaper tomatoes, etc) and are indifferent to the needs of the American poor or their voices in shaping government. If you don’t update, then I was wrong, and we are in actuality arguing over facts.

            That’s not how the prisoner’s dilemma works 😛 I’m arguing that it’s immoral and harmful to follow through on this law, so the law should be changed. Your argument, apparently, is now “It’s the law, respect it regardless of what the consequences are.

            No, you still have to obey the laws you don’t like. That is how the prisoner’s dilemma works in rule of law. If I have to follow the laws you like that I think are immoral, you have to follow the laws I like that you think are immoral. If you’re just going to start ignoring all the laws you don’t like (defecting) then I’m going to start ignoring the laws I don’t like (defecting) and we wind up in anarchy. Now that’s with regards to ignoring laws, not advocacy to change laws while still obeying the laws you don’t like.

            So to clarify, what’s your position on the enforcement of illegal immigration laws and the acceptability of sanctuary cities? I understand you want to change the laws we currently have, but are you opposed to enforcing the laws as they stand?

            In which case, I hope you think any friends or family you might have who smoke pot illegally should be thrown in jail. Rule of law is the rule of law, after all.

            I support decriminalizing many drugs. In the meantime, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.

          • Brad says:

            You’ve set up a false dichotomy. There’s no such thing as universal enforcement of any law in any country. Enforcement discretion is built into the system at every level. You can’t point to one particular case of a universal phenomena and decide everyone but you is acting in bad faith.

          • daystareld says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            “Wait, you mean, when I die, God doesn’t judge my soul, he judges my government’s soul? Oh, that’s really easy then. All this time I’ve been thinking I need to do that whole “take care of the poor thing myself.” I had no idea I could just outsource that to the government and scoot right on into heaven. Just bring your voting record to the pearly gates.”

            …Or you could… do… both? I mean, if you think your God is so easily fooled that He cares more about the relative handful of people you donate to in your area than the millions you negatively affect with your votes, you have an even poorer esteem for your God than I do 😛

            “Now that you know the US Commission on Civil Rights has found that “Evidence for negative effects of such competition ranged from modest to sgnificant” are you going to update your model of the effects of illegal immigration on poor blacks?”

            Sure, assuming this is based on legitimate research that’s reproducible and generalized, including the effects of illegal immigrants in lowering food prices and the costs of services that are often used by poor blacks.

            “So to clarify, what’s your position on the enforcement of illegal immigration laws and the acceptability of sanctuary cities? I understand you want to change the laws we currently have, but are you opposed to enforcing the laws as they stand?”

            If the law is unjust and causes more harm than good, yes. I believe that the decision of how to enforce laws is within the purview of state agencies, and that choosing to turn a blind eye toward laws that they neither have the manpower to enforce nor the stomach to enact is part of what helps people decide whether a law is just or good.

            This, by the way, is consistent with my position against enforcing blasphemy laws that are still on the books in many states, or sodomy laws, or obscure clothing regulation laws, all of which and more exist all over the country. (Seriously, if you haven’t looked into all the weird laws some states and cities have, you should: some are quite amusing). I’m assuming you’re against enforcing those too, but due to your religion I’m not actually sure.

            “I support decriminalizing many drugs. In the meantime, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

            Cool, so as soon as you report all your friends and family who use drugs to the proper authorities, I will agree that your position on enforcing laws on immigration is consistent. Sound fair?

        • The Nybbler says:

          Fact checking sites and organizations pretty unanimously put FOX News behind even the worst of the liberal news stations, and if you think that’s just more elitist liberal bias back-patting each other over how many conservative puppies they could kick in a day

          That is exactly what it is. Fact checking organizations started with a claim of neutrality that was never believed (and never credible).

        • John Schilling says:

          “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of my conservative friends mad at CNN at because “they push that evy-lew-shun talk!”

          Then you’re probably not talking to the 60% of conservatives who believe in Creationism.

          Are you?

          Seriously, how often do you personally talk to creationist conservatives about their perception of CNN (or the MSM generally)? Because I’ve got family on the literal Young-Earth Creationism side of the fence, and my take is the same as Conrad’s. They criticize the MSM for e.g. their support for (inadequate opposition to) Hillary Clinton, and they criticize public schools and the liberal politicians who “control” them about their teaching evolution. You are running off an ill-informed and factually incorrect mental model of creationist conservatives here, and it’s making you look foolish, not them.

          • daystareld says:

            No, I’m running off an experience of seeing those *I* know who believe in creationism getting mad at CNN for using old earth models to talk about climate change, report on failures of state run schools to educate their students on evolution, and bring on panelists who (admittedly) are more than keen to insult creationists for simply being wrong period, end of discussion, all as evidence of “clear liberal bias in the media.”

            I’m glad your family apparently doesn’t think any of that, but don’t call others foolish for having different experiences than you.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m glad your family apparently doesn’t think any of that, but don’t call others foolish for having different experiences than you.

            Isn’t that exactly what you just did to Conrad Honcho?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @daystareld

            Do you know a lot of creationists, then?

          • daystareld says:

            @John

            “Isn’t that exactly what you just did to Conrad Honcho?”

            …No? Where did I call him foolish?

            @Conrad

            “Do you know a lot of creationists, then?”

            Personally? Nine or ten, last I counted. I think one might have since changed their views.

  97. acedeuceblog says:

    Imagine if a courtroom had, instead of a separate lawyer for each side, one guy who affected to be fair and argue both sides simultaneously? Would that improve the epistemic process in the courtroom? That is essentially what you have with the pipe dream of neutral institutions. I think it’s better to listen to a variety of openly biased sources from several perspectives that are as different as possible. All institutions are biased, and overt bias is more honest and easier for the reader to compensate for than covert bias. That is how you escape your personal filter bubble and find the best arguments wherever they may be. What you need is the competition of the free marketplace of ideas, but what you get within any one institution is a filter bubble. Every tribe has its own taboos and blind spots, even the tribes that pretend to be neutral and omniscient. The only way to get the whole truth is to listen to all the tribes and sort it out in your own mind.

    • random832 says:

      On the other hand, imagine if a courtroom had no judge.

    • caethan says:

      You realize that’s exactly how civil law (French-descended) countries run their courts, right?

    • Imagine if a courtroom had, instead of a separate lawyer for each side, one guy who affected to be fair and argue both sides simultaneously?

      That is, with some stylization, the inquisitorial model, which is the standard in most of Europe other than the U.K. and which some people argue works better than the adversarial model used in the Anglo-American legal system.

      • PedroS says:

        [ courtroom which, instead of a separate lawyer for each side, has one guy who affected to be fair and argue both sides simultaneously] is, with some stylization, the inquisitorial model, which is the standard in most of Europe

        ??? In inquisitorial systems judges may investigate charges, summon witnesses, etc., but there are still separate defense lawyers. Since the right to have a lawyer is widespread in Europe (I cannot, without googling, think of a single democratic country which does not recognize that right), I am afraid you may be thinking of something else instead.

        EDIT: All European countries (except the Vatican) have ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which requires its signatories to recognize the right to counsel

        • I said “with some stylization.” The primary work of investigating guilt or innocence is supposed to be done by the court, not by the two sides independently.

      • The Nybbler says:

        It’s also the standard in things like campus tribunals, which have a well-earned reputation as kangaroo courts. And that’s not new; when I was in school in the early 1990s the student paper suggested the Judicial Program director’s favorite TV show was a blending of “Captain Kangaroo” and “The People’s Court”.

  98. acedeuceblog says:

    Also, I think Scott vastly overestimates the number of witches out there. Once you dig in enough to understand a witch’s perspective, you generally find that they aren’t witches, just confused or misguided. One might expect memes to evolve a sort of immune system to protect their hosts from contamination by competing species of memes, by making the host think the competing meme is a witch. I see something like that in a lot of religions as well as political ideologies. So for example you get Atheism being confused with Satanism among the more devout denizens of the bible belt. And in politics, if you look closely, you’ll find that the difference between a Richard Spencer and Hitler is as large as the difference between Bernie Sanders and Stalin. while each side generally underestimates the differences within the other side. Liberals tend to assume that anyone who openly speaks of race realism is out to oppress minorities, but this isn’t the case. Lee Kuan Yew, for example, was a race realist who also completely supported equal rights and getting along with everybody in a multicultural society, while also running some voluntary positive eugenics programs. (from the horse’s mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moEPY8kIhts)

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      So for example you get Atheism being confused with Satanism among the more devout denizens of the bible belt.

      I think this is a confusion among liberals about what Christians mean by “satanic.” That doesn’t necessarily mean worship of theological Satan. It means a system of belief in which good is equated (or replaced) with evil. So for instance, an atheist may no longer abide Christian sexual morality and become promiscuous. This replaces the virtue of chastity with the sin of lust. You’re not worshiping Satan, but you are doing what Satan wants (or rather, what Satan did, putting his own rules ahead of God’s), and that’s satanic.

  99. Ozy Frantz says:

    Shouldn’t we at least consider the hypothesis that neutral institutions keep going left because the left is actually more likely to be right? I know it is very low-status to admit that your ingroup might possibly be correct about things, but if you are dividing people into “the kind with all the religious people” and “the kind that literally won’t shut up about how great they think science is,” it really wouldn’t be that surprising if the latter’s beliefs are more truth-tracking. Journalists’ attempts to be nonpartisan just got us horserace journalism and the execrable “everyone who is actually informed about the issue says X, some random loony says Y, there are Two Sides To This Issue” sort of article.

    I admit this doesn’t explain posters at hospitals and commencement speeches, and agree that it is appalling for politics to enter such spaces. I am mildly surprised that a Catholic hospital in the Midwest has this problem; I went to a Catholic school in Florida for high school and we pretty much only had conservative wildly inappropriate political comments from teachers.

    • Thegnskald says:

      Mostly, the left is more enamored with science as an institution, an abstract representation of knowledge itself, than science as a process. Science demands trying to prove our most cherished beliefs wrong, not confidently seeking out confirming evidence where ever we can find it.

      This doesn’t lead to being more right, it leads to being more confidently wrong (albeit generally in a more socially acceptable way) – and it damages the hell out of science in the process, because science is fundamentally a destructive process, an evolutionary process, and “Yay scientific knowledge” reduces turnover.

      Reality doesn’t have a liberal bias – reality is that place where children starve to death, where people die screaming for lack of basic medical care, where animals are eaten alive and parasites mind-control hosts into getting eaten. Reality is in sharp and ugly contrast to liberal values. Liberal values take work – lots and lots and lots of work. Pretending reality is friendly to our values only works insofar as somebody else is doing all the work to make it possible.

      • Mark says:

        My own opinion is that such people generally suffer from disordered digestions, which causes their minds to take a nasty turn. They fancy they are ‘realists’, when they are only obscene. They go grubbing in the sewers for their realism, and refuse to believe in the grass and flowers above ground – which, nevertheless, are equally real!

        source via

        • Thegnskald says:

          Grass and flowers are just as engaged in the endless striving for survival as anything else, however much they please our aesthetic senses. Indeed, they please our aesthetic senses for likely evolutionary reasons, which is to say, carved by death over long eons.

          Reality doesn’t care. That is the nature of it. Liberal values are things we choose for ourselves, things we build for ourselves, and they are the more worthwhile for it. They aren’t innate, they aren’t natural, they aren’t guaranteed. Which means the achievements of humanity mean something, that this isn’t just the way things had to turn out.

          • Mark says:

            So, you’re using quite a narrow definition of “reality” then?

            How would values that were completely contrary to reality (in the broadest sense) be selected for?

            We want to survive, but “reality” wants to kill us. Except that we do survive.
            There must be at least some aspect of reality that isn’t counter to that value.

            I don’t know, I don’t think that “nature is opposed to liberalism” is a very helpful meme. You could just as well say that “reality” is opposed to all values, and none.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Mark –

            Reality is neither opposed to nor in favor of values. It lacks moral agency.

            In the broader sense of reality, including humanity, if Christianity or some other religion manages to take over the world, facts support the religion.

            Science, as a process, is the process of identifying what nature demands, that nature may be commanded – but there is no reason to suppose that commanding nature is a more correct approach than praying to fictitious gods. There is no reason to believe medicine is better than violence – that is a question of values, not reality.

            As somebody with modern liberal values, I much prefer what we have, but I do not confuse the success of my values in promoting themselves with the correctness of them; at best, they are consistent.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Mark

            Would a Saudi Muslim agree that reality has a liberal bias? Or would he state reality has an Islamic bias?

          • Mark says:

            Coming from the culture that I come from, divine revelation is one of the things I’ve never really been able to get my head around, especially with respect to biblical/koranic literalism.

            So, if you’re working within that framework, I don’t really think you can say anything at all, except to parrot whatever truths have been given to you.

            From my perspective, I’d say there are multiple vectors through which ideologies are selected and that there might be multiple niches in which ideologies can exist.

            To me, liberal ideology is ideology that emphasises the rights or experience of the individual. Now, often (always?) liberals think that the best way to promote individual experience is through one engineered social system or another, but still, they are fundamentally concerned with individual rights and experience. Does it make sense to say that you must fight against the flow of nature in order to value individual experience?

            I have been known to say “the individual doesn’t exist” – but even I think that the above criticism is either too strong or, really, applies to anything subject to selection.

            I mean, if we can make exactly the same statement about anything, what’s the value?

            On the other hand, if we’re talking to someone who claims to be a normal Western liberal talky person, but who is treating their values like something gifted from on high by the universe, it might be a valuable point.

          • Incurian says:

            To me, liberal ideology is ideology that emphasises the rights or experience of the individual. Now, often (always?) liberals think that the best way to promote individual experience is through one engineered social system or another, but still, they are fundamentally concerned with individual rights and experience. Does it make sense to say that you must fight against the flow of nature in order to value individual experience?

            I think this is where the distinction between negative and positive liberty becomes illuminating.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Mark:

            Now, often (always?) liberals think that the best way to promote individual experience is through one engineered social system or another, but still, they are fundamentally concerned with individual rights and experience.

            Yes, I agree, the social system in which we are concerned with individual rights and experience is constructed.

            Does it make sense to say that you must fight against the flow of nature in order to value individual experience?

            To value your own individual experience? No, I can agree that’s natural. But to value someone else’s individual experience? Particularly one who is not part of your ingroup? That is one of the most unnatural things there is. It is constructed, and constantly being worked against, and must be maintained.

            The natural state of man is “my tribe kills your tribe or your tribe kills my tribe.” And lots and lots of tribes in the world still play by those rules. Reality does not have the “everybody is nice and friendly except for the evil red tribe” bias (some) liberals think it does. Reality is that when the feminist went biking across the middle east to “prove” Muslims were friendly she got raped and murdered because the individual rights and experiences of infidel women are not part of Muslim values.

            Appreciation for individual rights and experiences is a Western Christian/Enlightenment value. It is not a natural value, or you’d expect to see that same value in Islamic values, or traditional Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, or African tribal values. And we don’t.

          • Mark says:

            People can be made to believe anything – the level on which an ideology is selected isn’t primarily that of appeal to the individual.

            So, if it isn’t the difficulty of persuading individuals of its value, then where does the particular difficulty of instituting liberalism come from?

            Is it that liberal society is destroyed by non-liberal society? Well, no. I would say that the more universal ideologies have an obvious advantage over narrower ones – they aren’t naturally restricted and when they do well, they do really well. With limited communication technology that advantage is perhaps irrelevant. With improved technology, universalism dominates.

            (Incidentally I don’t think there is any reason why Islam, nationalism, or urban life should be considered more natural to the hunter gatherer than Judeo-Christian/liberalism or anything else.)

            Googling “woman bikes across Middle East returns this. She was sexually assaulted a few times, but not raped or murdered.

          • reasoned argumentation says:

            Googling “woman bikes across Middle East returns this. She was sexually assaulted a few times, but not raped or murdered.

            I’m sure you should inform the feminists that “sexually assaulted” a few times isn’t a big deal.

            The original author was conflating two similar cases – biking woman was merely sexually assaulted. Hitchhiking woman was the one who was murdered.

    • Murphy says:

      Are there many good examples from history?

      When the implications of scientific results get tied in too closely with party-politics I don’t think the outcome is always optimal truth finding even if the winning side is making a lot of noises about how important science and technology is to them.

      During the cold war the soviets made a lot of noise about their scientific excellence but scientific theories that smelled too much like capitalism were discarded leading to lysenkoism.

      If you strongly filter your academics on an axis which cuts through various social issues there’s a strong risk that you may be causing the same kind of distortion.

      If you push out everyone who talks too loudly about the data indicating X because everyone knows that people who support things like X are evil, racist, biggoted,sexist monsters then how much can you trust the wealth of papers coming out of the field showing X to definitely not be true.

      There’s definitely things researchers just avoid talking about except in hushed tones in the corner office because they know and the people they’re talking to know that it gets you labelled to talk too publicly about them.

      You might also be misidentifying the trend. Older people tend to be more conservative, younger people more liberal.

      Since science tends to involve constantly changing beliefs it’s more likely that the set of beliefs the young will latch onto will more closely mirror the most recent scientific position at the time. But young liberals become old conservatives and if you measured based on comparing beliefs at set time points you might find that the liberal individuals are not much more correct averaged over a lifetime.

    • gbdub says:

      First, not everything that splits left and right even has a knowable objective truth. A lot of it is just “how do we react to the same set of facts”. There’s no definite right answer on tax policy or immigration law – or there might be one but we don’t have a control planet to run the experiment. So from that sense alone, “liberals are just right so their bias is okay” must be rejected. (Side note, see the poll above in the thread – if you think atheism and/or rejecting young earth creationism are decided liberal issues, you might be surprised).

      Second, there’s plenty liberals are objectively wrong about, especially if you eject all dissenting views and they can get away with lazy arguments.

      Third, even if we grant that liberals are 100% right and conservatives are 100% wrong, you’re left with half the population, enough to swing a lot of elections obviously, who have been run out of the institutions generating this liberal truth. Even if you are convinced you are right you should be seeking better engagement with conservatives, because unless you plan to secede or kill all of them, you need to convince at least some of them. You can’t do that if everyone holes up into their tribal intellectual spaces and just shouts insults at each other.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      But if we’re talking about the media, we’re not talking about truth-seeking organizations. We’re talking about a handful of extremely wealthy multinational corporations that own 90% of the media. Their goal is power and wealth, and they exert power to drive conservative voices and thought off their platforms.

      This does not seem like the sort of behavior likely to result in truth.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Recent riots have shown that the ostensibly “truth-seeking organizations” also exert power to drive conservatives off their platforms.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Also, the organizations that direct the riots and train the rioters are funded by extremely wealthy people. Some rioters are paid, yes, but even if they’re not, the people organizing and directing the riots are. For instance the riot that shut down Trump’s rally in Chicago during the primaries was organized by MoveOn.org, which is funded by billionaires, the same of which also contributed to Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

          This is not grass roots, power-to-the-people stuff. This is the elite funding mob violence against their political opponents. CNN never talks about that, though.

    • Deiseach says:

      if you are dividing people into “the kind with all the religious people” and “the kind that literally won’t shut up about how great they think science is,” it really wouldn’t be that surprising if the latter’s beliefs are more truth-tracking

      Roll over Mendel, and tell Lemaître the news!

      🙂

    • DrBeat says:

      The left (the popular people, who are wearing the left like a skin suit) won’t shut up about how much they love science because science tells them things that flatter their emotions. The moment science tells them something that does not flatter their emotions, science is a hateful outmoded construct made by evil white men and people who put their faith in science are probably white male nerds who obviously should be punished for the crime of being able to be punished.

  100. ajfirecracker says:

    CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it – it has a pretense of neutrality that FOX doesn’t, and although we can disagree about how realistic that pretense is I think few people would disagree that the pretense is there. Nor is there a liberal version of FOX that lacks that pretense of neutrality.

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    Breaking News: Trump’s Tax Returns

    Also what is “Fair and Balanced” coverage if not a pretense at neutrality? I think Fox folks would tell you it’s simply that reality has a conservative bias.

  101. This article is coming under a bit of discussion in a blog two degrees of Kevin-Baconesque separation from you (your blogroll links to Popehat, which links to Simple Justice): http://blog.simplejustice.us/2017/05/03/too-important-to-be-neutral/

    • Vorkon says:

      Speaking of degrees of separation, it’s interesting that you should mention Popehat, since it’s run primarily by a guy who pretty obviously hates Trump, but whose content is currently dominated by articles admonishing the media for lying about and/or misrepresenting legal issues related to Trump, since that’s not helping anything. It reminds me an awful lot about the arguments Scott is making in this post.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      I think that article makes Scott out to be more sympathetic to the liberal side than he actually is. Don’t get me wrong, Scott is definitely a liberal himself. But the thrust of Scott’s article seems to be “Hey guys, have you considered the possibility that this is actually our fault?”.

  102. postgenetic says:

    Going bigger pic:
    Think much of polarization is a pre-apocalypse circling of the wagons, in part, per the ancient, selected math: Us>Them; Me>U.
    +
    Collapse, or a large and rapid restructuring of relationships in a nonequilibrium system (continuously dynamic) is when-not-if physics called self-organized criticality: meteor hits; mass extinctions; climate changes; stock market crashes; plagues; world wars; etc.
    +
    Per exponentially accelerating complexity, our limited information-processing bio apps (& additional selected qualities), we’re all cherry pickers by def.
    +
    Per Natural Selection: Fitness>Truth
    “Evolution is quite clear, it’s fitness and not truth that gives you the points you need to win in the evolutionary game.” Donald Hoffman

    Fitness App: Deception
    “Deception is a very deep feature of life. It occurs at all levels—from gene to cell to individual to group—and it seems, by any and all means, necessary.”

    “When I say that deception occurs at all levels of life, I mean that viruses practice it, as do bacteria, plants, insects, and a wide range of other animals. It is everywhere. Even within our genomes, deception flourishes as selfish genetic elements use deceptive molecular techniques to over-reproduce at the expense of other genes. Deception infects all the fundamental relationships in life: parasite and host, predator and prey, plant and animal, male and female, neighbor and neighbor, parent and offspring, and even the relationship of an organism to itself.” Robert Trivers — The Folly of Fools — 2011

    * * *
    “Perception is not about seeing truth; it’s about having kids.” Donald Hoffman

    The Margins of Selection: link text

    Robert Kurzban interview, evo psych, author of: Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite: link text

    Robert Trivers Interview, author of The Folly of Fools: link text

    • The Nybbler says:

      Hi John!

      • Incurian says:

        lol. After reading the first sentence I thought, “I wonder if there will be lots of links at the end?”

        • FacelessCraven says:

          I am 90+% confident this is not John Sidles.

          • My guess is that it is. A conjecture I formed before seeing anyone else’s comment on it.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I considered the possibility; there are some slight differences. But that brings to mind only two worse possibilities:

            1) Someone thinks it’s a good idea to _imitate_ him.

            2) There’s two of them.

            I think it’s him, and any discrepancies are the result of a deliberate but poor attempt to change his style.

          • Marshayne Lonehand says:

            Perhaps a type specimen will help! 🙂

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Sidles doesn’t argue that deception is an intrinsic part of what it means to be human, or that literally-cut-throat competition is a necessary and proper part of human existence. The above comment seems to boil down to a claim that polarization is normal and fit, that cooperation is an aberration and we’re merely reverting to normality. That is a pessimistic, cynical view of reality, and Sidles’ faults do not include pessimism or cynicism.

          • hlynkacg says:

            So you’re saying he’s not the Sidles, he’s the anti-Sidles?

          • Nornagest says:

            Yeah, I’m not getting a Sidles vibe from this, unless Sidles changed his style substantially, which I don’t think he’s capable of. This is just as incoherent, but it’s terse and distant; Sidles is long-winded and smug.

  103. This article is coming under a bit of discussion in a blog two degrees of Kevin-Baconesque separation from Scott (the SSC blogroll links to Popehat, which links to Simple Justice): http://blog.simplejustice.us/2017/05/03/too-important-to-be-neutral/

  104. The original Mr. X says:

    Quite a few people above have said things like “Maybe liberals think conservatives are dumb because conservatives actually do believe dumb things.” The examples given of dumb things conservatives think (e.g., creationism, the US Civil War being primarily about tariffs, etc.) mostly aren’t live issues in other countries, so if this were really the reason we’d expect liberal smugness to be primarily an American phenomenon. As a matter of fact, though, lots of other countries have smug liberals going on about how non-liberals are all stupid and bigoted. Therefore, the idea that conservatives started all this by believing in dumb ideas is unlikely to be correct.

    • Mixer says:

      First time poster – long time lurker. This conversation has just been too interesting not to participate in.

      The Civil War. I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count, with people all across the ideological spectrum. The crux of this argument goes to what @DavidFriedman has been saying in one form or another – that people work from data that they have available, from a particular point of view and have manipulated that data to achieve an end. And, I realize @The original Mr. X, that you aren’t even the 10th person to mention it so far in this long comment string, but you are the last one (so far) so I’m responding to you.

      No, obviously the Civil War was not fought over slavery. Yes, of course the Civil War was fought over slavery. These are two factually true statements, depending on what data you are using and how you are manipulating the data:

      “No, obviously the Civil War was not fought over slavery.” : Let’s start with the Nullification Act (and subsequent Nullification Crisis that followed). You can argue when the “beginning” of the Civil War was, but that’s it for me (some would argue the Tariff of 1828 was the start, for example.) After these two events (and several similar, but minor other ones), secession talk subsided until the late 1850’s due to a positive economic environment – a rising tide lifts all boats, so while the tariffs were still in effect, the impact was not felt as succinctly. The only exception to this would be the Wilmot Provisio in the mid 1840’s, but that applied to new territories and not existing Southern states. Then, in 1857, the economy took a downturn and the government started talking about new tariffs. The South was unanimous in no new tariffs, especially in a downturn, but Congress moved forward with the Morrill Tariff anyway, to which the South promptly announced its secession and formation of the Confederacy.

      “Yes, of course the Civil War was fought over slavery.” : Since this is the prevailing common understanding, I won’t bother going into the details since it’s likely everyone already knows them. Here’s a link that pretty much covers them all in case you don’t.

      From the first point of view, the data is accurate. Those acts were passed, dissents were made and documented, literature exists from the time that corroborates that data. From the second point of view, that data is accurate. Laws were passed, rhetoric was made and documented, literature exists from the time that corroborates that data. So – which is right and which is wrong? Only a point of view will determine that (“Well, slavery is wrong, so it must be slavery since the racism still exists” or “Those greedy bankers and politicians are still greedy, so it must be economics”). And, since that point of view is personal, anyone who doesn’t share that point of view (or even worse… feels quite confident of their non-conforming point of view) are stupid, crazy, ignorant, etc, etc.

      Personally, I think the real answer to “What caused the Civil War” is a bit of both. Economic conditions are certainly strong motivators for conflict. However, most of the tariffs affected the wealthy in the South (this is not to ignore the pass-through to the consumers, just that the Southerners most likely to call for secession early on were the wealthy ones who were having their profits eaten into by the impact of tariffs.) But, it’s really difficult to rally a population to war by saying, “Hey! Them dern Yankees are causing me to lose money! You should put on a uniform and go fight them!” No, to sell a war (especially a Civil War) to the population, you have to present something more emotional – like, for example, “They want to destroy our way of life!” It is not a stretch of the imagination to believe that for the people on the front lines getting shot, yes, they were fighting for a way of life that included slavery, not because of the Morrill Tariff. But, to ignore the economic foundation for the Civil War is to risk repeating something like it again. Future historians may view Trump, for example, as the first indicator of the Second Civil War (should it happen) and we’re already arguing about how he got elected. The Left says the country has many more “racists and misogynists” than they originally thought and the Right says that the country is “becoming more conservative” when (if you actually talk to a Trump supporter) they say they are worried about their jobs and are tired of having a government that they don’t see cares one bit about them.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Great post, Mixer, thank you.

      • Iain says:

        It is fair to speculate that part of the elite motivation for the Civil War may have been economic. It is not reasonable to say that the war had nothing to do with slavery.

        If you would like to understand the causes that motivated the seceding states, it is instructive to look at the declarations they wrote at the time. Take, for instance, Mississippi:

        Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

        This is not ambiguous. Compare the number of times “slave” appears in these documents (85) to the number of times “tariff” appears (0). The South was very explicit about its motivations for seceding; in the same spirit that justifies actually talking to Trump supporters, I encourage you to listen to the words of the people who actually made the decision to secede.

        • Mixer says:

          I never said the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. I did state that the idea of selling the war/secession to the population from a “way of life” perspective that included slavery. By the time Declarations had been drafted, of course they are heavily tilted towards protecting the institution of slavery – those are public documents. And, I imagine a little post hoc ergo propter hoc was going on there.

          Please remember that I specifically stated that “Yes, of course the Civil War was fought over slavery” is a factually true statement. The problem with the Left (and the Right for that matter,) is that if the data presented does not coincide with their worldview, that data is dismissed (and usually the person citing that data is berated or chastised.) I think this is really what Scott’s point is in this article. Consider his last paragraph:

          Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging.

        • PedroS says:

          I think both descriptions are true: the Confederate States DID secede over (and hence fought for the preservation of) slavery as shown by the declarations of independence of the seceding states, but the Union did not fight the Civil War for abolitionism (as evidenced by the continuing presence of slavery in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and West Virginia). Also, the Emancipation Declaration emphatically did not apply to Union states and Union-controlled areas. The Union fought, like most states do, to prevent secession regardless of the actual (just or unjust) motives behind the secessionist states.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            My guess is that the Civil War really was about 99% over slavery. Even the tariff issue was an epiphenomena of slave vs. free.

            For example, in 1830 when he was ginning up the Nullification Crisis against Andy Jackson over the Tariff of Abominations, John C. Calhoun, who hadn’t been averse to the Hamilton/Clay theory of tariffs when he’d started out in politics in the 1810s, admitted that what was really going on was that our “peculiar domestick institution” meant that South Carolina’s economy was diverging from the national economy. Tariffs to protect infant industries were good for the country as a whole, but South Carolina was diverging fundamentally from the North by becoming ever more of a slavocracy and thus was never going to develop industry because of slavery, so slavery meant South Carolina needed free trade.

  105. samuelthefifth says:

    On the topic of those “worker ants” and the culture war.

    Guess what, here’s a group of people who have legit beef, who have never been allowed to define themselves publicly, and who the media has created a giant ugh field around. Every time you talk about them, you repeat the caricature that’s been made of them, by assuming bad faith as a foregone conclusion. They just want to chime in and set the record straight for themselves, to separate them from whatever bad actors you’ve lumped them in with.

    What do you do? You apparently wordfilter and ban them and join in throwing shade from afar without engaging, ensuring the farce will go on indefinitely.

    And this in a thread about media bias of all places.

    • herbert herberson says:

      Upthread some antfolk tried to set the record straight to me, and all they succeeded in doing was convincing me that they were using an idiosyncratic set of definitions in which they were very emotionally invested and that accordingly further discussion would be somewhere between useless and impossible.

      • Thegnskald says:

        All I saw was an argument about whether they were left-wing or right-wing, and if being opposed by/to a particular group of self-styled feminists is right wing, there is no Left left.

        The issue with the coalition of interests that is leftist politics has always been that they were barely restrained from attacking one another, of declaring their disagreements heresies that put their rivals in the right-wing camp. Well, that worked wonderfully well with the blue collar workers in the last election, pushing a large group of previously stout allies away.

        Sometimes I am convinced intelligence is what Cassandra’s curse was talking about. I have only been complaining about this utterly predictable problem for the last two decades, and been routinely denounced as tone policing, as being a troll, as being a secret right-winger trying to instigate shit.

        At a certain point I can only be grimly satisfied by the last election, the loss was quite well earned.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Upthread some antfolk tried to set the record straight to me, and all they succeeded in doing was convincing me that they were using an idiosyncratic set of definitions

        You simply rejected it out of hand.

        That poll of a couple hundred people is not enough to make me disbelieve my lying eyes.

        The ants were a movement that resulted from a split in the left. Gamers interested in the indie scene were mostly _on the left_. Eron Gjoni (in the game of ants, he was the ball, as Anita S. might say) was (and perhaps still is) an actual _SJW_.

        What’s left of the ants (at least on /r/KotakuInAction) is more right _now_. That’s a fairly recent phenomenon, I think due to three factors — one, those interested strictly in the gaming aspects and not the wider culture war have dropped out. Two, an influx of culture warriors from the right who weren’t that interested in the gaming aspects. And three, actual conversions: the SJW left has driven some of the anti-authoritarian left into the right’s arms. The third factor is probably the smallest.

        Again, though, this is a recent phenomenon. During the US primaries, the KiA was far more a Bernie-supporter place than a Trump-supporter place.

        Yes, the ants are and always were anti-feminist, specifically anti-intersectional-feminist. But unless that’s the defining characteristic of the left/right axis, that doesn’t mean the ants are on the right.

        Contrast them with the Sad Puppies; Larry Correia is a conservative, classic God, Guns, and Country. The other Sad Puppy leaders are also conservatives or right-libertarians. The Sad Puppy blogs are full of conservative opinions. Nothing like the KiA of the past.

        • herbert herberson says:

          https://web.archive.org/web/20160201205910/https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/

          This is the subreddit in question on the day of the Iowa primary. The third post is non-game-related antifeminism. The fourth is complaining about “the left’s war on dissent.” The twelveth is a pro-Milo post, the twentieth is Ben Shapiro “destroying” the concept of white privilege. The ones I didn’t specifically mention are ideologically neutral at most (e.g., “[Censorship] Guy who claims dictionary is sexist, tries to get Teal Deer’s video pulled down by citing harassment.(imgur.com)”). There are no pro-Bernie posts, and not even any posts talking about the evils of gaming corporations or payola for positive reviews. It’s pure culture-war-fodder, and the only way you can claim it’s not taking the right-wing side of it is by stating that the feminists and SJWs it opposes are not on the left, a.k.a idiosyncratic definitions.

          If you go even further back, say to autumn of 2014, this is less stark, but the eventual path isn’t hard to see coming, and the overall picture is of possibly-libertarian-leaning-but-mostly-apolitical people forming a coalition against an enemy that considers itself on the left.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Which is to say, your evidence that the ants are on the right are based on opposition to SJWs/feminism. That’s what the Milo article is about, that’s what the third post is about. If everyone who is opposed to the SJWs is on the right, then the ants are on the right. So is most of the SSC commentariat. This is absurd; I’m aware that the SJWs themselves consider this to be true, but I see no reason to give their views credence.

          • herbert herberson says:

            There’s a difference between being one of the center-left liberals who thinks Jonathon Chait is right and maybe comments a couple times on Facebook about those damn college kids and participating in/identifying with an purely reactionary movement.

            But, really, semantics is a waste of everyone’s time, so I’m going to re-commit to dropping it. Genuinely sorry for bringing it up again here.

          • ChexLeMeneux says:

            If there aren’t a significant amount of people who consider themselves on the left among these groups, why do their own straw polls say otherwise? Why do people show up in threads over there to say they are on the left when questions about the political makeup of the group come up?

            These people really shout their opinions. Aggressively, over aggressively. I don’t see what value they would find in saying they are on the left on most issues if they aren’t.

          • eyeballfrog says:

            You’re right, this is becoming semantic. So let’s taboo right-wing. Explain what is wrong with the ants without referencing them being a “right-wing” movement.

          • Brad says:

            Explain what is wrong with the ants without referencing them being a “right-wing” movement.

            It’s nearly impossible for anyone to tell what their concerns are in any sort of reasonable amounts of time. You start listening and you get this convoluted story about some obscure game developer that broke up with her boyfriend and then slept with some kind of reviewer, and then someone else jumps in with complaints about some random woman with a youtube channel that claims mainstream video games are sexist, then it quickly devolves into masses of complaints about how the movement was portrayed in the media. They’ll be lots and lots of annotated screenshots where you have no idea what you are supposed to be looking at. You’ll hear a lot of references to ethics in games journalism, but not much about how massive game companies give free stuff to people that review their games, which one would think would be the heart of the ethics critique (a la payola in the 50s on the radio).

            Telling me the movement is being treated unfairly is one thing, but you still need to be able to say what the movement is about in the first place. Preferably in some kind of “elevator pitch” fashion.

            It’s even worse than Occupy Wall Street, and that’s saying something.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Brad – “It’s nearly impossible for anyone to tell what their concerns are in any sort of reasonable amounts of time.”

            1. The strongest pro-SJ faction of games fandom proved themselves hypocrites by closing ranks around an abuser and attacking the victim for speaking up. This was shocking because most gamers thought themselves pro-SJ and not hypocrites.

            2. When 1 provoked a shitstorm, the strongest pro-SJ faction (which had a long record of promoting, approving of and encouraging shitstorms) declared that this and other simmering conflicts within the community was proof that the community as a whole was full of awful people who should be purged.

            3. When 2 exponentially expanded the scope and intensity of the shitstorm, the pro-SJ faction declared that this was proof that they were right all along and that they were fighting the good fight against misogynist doxxers and harassers, called for reinforcements from the wider culture, and openly encouraged their partisans to engage in harassment and doxxing against their enemies while suppressing any attempt by the other side to fight against harassment or doxxing.

            4. The double-down on the double-down on the double-down on hypocrisy caused the shitstorm to grow large enough to eat the entire internet for some months.

            Multiple previous scandals had already dealt with the payolla issue, with the result that the old gaming media were held in active contempt and a new games media had emerged to replace them. That new media’s rise had coincided with the emergence of indie gaming and Steam, resulting in a brief golden age where indie devs, new journalism and gamers were all on the same side. the Ants happened when the journos defected on that alliance in a way that many people saw as deeply unethical.

            Brief enough?

          • Brad says:

            Fairly brief, though still not really elevator pitch ready.

            Anyway, to respond to the substance, the way you describe it makes it sound like the kind of thing that if you were not heavily involved in the original sub-sub-fandom in question it is highly unlikely you would ever care.

            There’s an old Jewish joke:
            Q: A Jewish man is stranded on a desert island, how many shuls are there on the island?
            A: Two, the one he goes to and the one he refuses to set foot in.

            It alludes to the fact that synagogue politics is notoriously bitter. But I can tell you from long experience that it is incredibly boring to hear about synagogue drama for a synagogue you don’t care about and where you don’t know any of the people involved.

            At the height of la affair de ants, as you said, it started to eat the internet. I hope you can appreciate why Scott might want to ban the term and why many of us were exasperated to have it spill over in so many places. Even among the many of us that do pick up a video game from time to time.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Brad – “It alludes to the fact that synagogue politics is notoriously bitter. But I can tell you from long experience that it is incredibly boring to hear about synagogue drama for a synagogue you don’t care about and where you don’t know any of the people involved.”

            Eh, sure, and likewise I have no objection to Scott banning the related terms.

            It’s a bit frustrating to see the (I think) false version of the narrative raised, try to correct the record with the facts as I see them, and then be told “shut up, no one cares”. As an Ant, I care rather a lot, and apparently people on the other side do too since they keep bringing it up.

            Not talking about it is also hard because it was actually sorta-kinda important, as a possible high-water-mark of SJ in the broader culture.

            [EDIT] – Of course, the way, way, way, way more productive thing to do, either by the OP in this thread or by the first person to respond to them, would have been to point out that this article is aimed at non-ants, trying to get them to treat red tribe with more charity, and part of that is using facts they agree on as a basis for common ground. Challenging those facts undermines this whole approach to start a fight that you aren’t going to win anyway, because they don’t have enough charity to listen to your position. There is a time and a place, and this is not it.

          • Jiro says:

            the way you describe it makes it sound like the kind of thing that if you were not heavily involved in the original sub-sub-fandom in question it is highly unlikely you would ever care.

            Except that the shitstorm resulted in social justice attacking gamers in general, including gamers who weren’t originally involved. Right now, the Ants seem to be mostly a pushback against social justice attacks on games and gamers.

          • Brad says:

            @FacelessCraven

            It’s a bit frustrating to see the (I think) false version of the narrative raised, try to correct the record with the facts as I see them, and then be told “shut up, no one cares”. As an Ant, I care rather a lot, and apparently people on the other side do too since they keep bringing it up.

            Fair enough. Scott did bring it up, and was rather unflattering about it.

            Re: Edit
            I said almost exactly the same thing in a slightly different context to AnonYEmous elsewhere on this page.

            @Jiro

            Except that the shitstorm resulted in social justice attacking gamers in general, including gamers who weren’t originally involved. Right now, the Ants seem to be mostly a pushback against social justice attacks on games and gamers.

            These terms are way too slippery. I don’t think “social justice” as a whole, inasmuch as it is even a coherent concept to begin with, went on the warpath against gamers in general.

            Which is to say, I don’t think that the social meaning of being a regular WoW or Call of Duty or Madden player is any different on college campuses (the supposed heart of social justice) today than it was May 2014.

          • random832 says:

            I’m reminded of My id on defensiveness, which I’m certain someone must have linked recently but I can’t find either here or the open thread (maybe it was on one of the other threads that’s been linked here). EDIT: I’m an idiot, it was in this blog post, but only linked with a number so when I searched I didn’t find it. Well, my point remains that it seems like a perfect example.

            Which is to say, I don’t think that the social meaning of being a regular WoW or Call of Duty or Madden player is any different on college campuses (the supposed heart of social justice) today than it was May 2014.

            To my understanding, the attack was on people who considered themselves “gamers” – not merely that regularly played the games but who considered it their primary hobby, and you can get away with “being a regular WoW or Call of Duty or Madden player” by simply saying “but I’m not, you know, a gamer” (with the implied side order of “I have an actual life unlike those nerds”)

            It’s fundamentally an anti-identity attack, not an anti-activity attack, so you can’t really say “the social meaning of doing some thing hasn’t changed” is evidence against it.

            (As I recall it was mainly actually the media attacking “gamers”, at least early on, but that’s beside the point)

          • Jiro says:

            It’s an attack on both the identity and on the games. Social justice has no problem saying that games themselves are sexist, along with the implication that gamers are sexist for playing them.

          • Brad says:

            @random832

            To my understanding, the attack was on people who considered themselves “gamers” – not merely that regularly played the games but who considered it their primary hobby, and you can get away with “being a regular WoW or Call of Duty or Madden player” by simply saying “but I’m not, you know, a gamer” (with the implied side order of “I have an actual life unlike those nerds”)

            It’s fundamentally an anti-identity attack, not an anti-activity attack, so you can’t really say “the social meaning of doing some thing hasn’t changed” is evidence against it.

            Fine, substitute gamers. Same point remains. “Those nerds” was true in 2014 (or 2000 for that matter) and in 2017.

            (As I recall it was mainly actually the media attacking “gamers”, at least early on, but that’s beside the point)

            A claim that there were a series of articles across several different media outlets in a localized time period is a very different claim than one that unreasonably personifies “social justice” as “attacking gamers”.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Jiro:

            Right; it escaped the sub-sub fandom when the so-called Gamers Are Dead articles were published (and, coincidentally, the forbidden name was coined). At that point it went from being mostly chan drama to a major battle in the culture war.

  106. Kevin says:

    This post is already referenced in The Atlantic: What Critiques of ‘Smug Liberals’ Miss

    • Jordan D. says:

      I really liked that article (although it needed another editing pass), but I’m exactly the sort of person who would, as a liberal voter in a deeply-Republican area. I’ve only ever been personally accused of smugness online, but the generalized campaigns in the area still grate.

    • Forlorn Hopes says:

      I knew it would be Connor even before clicking it.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      The article misses some important asymmetries in the two sides.

      1) Liberal smugness gets more play. Yes Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter exist, but do they get anywhere near the national attention as, say, John Stewart?

      2) Liberal smugness and conservative smugness have slightly different flavors. Conservatives tend to portray liberals as foolish, while liberals portray conservatives as stupid. The latter seems somehow smugger, though I’m having trouble articulating why.

      3) This might be my perception, but at least in the most recent political season, conservative smugness seemed to be directed at the liberal elite, while liberal smugness was directed at working class conservatives. The article illustrates this itself where it compares Hillary calling me deplorable to me calling her a witch. I’m not usually one to cite punching down, but I think it’s a little rich to see me and the potential president of the US as having even social standing.

      • Iain says:

        1) Liberal smugness gets more play. Yes Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter exist, but do they get anywhere near the national attention as, say, John Stewart?

        Yes.

        At his peak, Jon Stewart got about 2.5M nightly viewers. Rush Limbaugh gets more than 13M listeners/week. (Sean Hannity is close behind at 12.5M.)

        Also, this is your regularly scheduled reminder to go read the full context of “basket of deplorables”. Specifically, here’s the very next paragraph:

        “But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

        That witch!

        • Nornagest says:

          Reminds me of “…and some, I assume, are good people”.

          • Iain says:

            If Trump had immediately followed “some, I assume, are good people” with a sympathetic description of the problems those people faced, and a commitment to reach out to those people, but everybody ignored the latter half of his remarks, then it would be worthwhile to point out that there was more to the story, no?

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Also, Clinton described knowing good people who supported Trump. She didn’t just mention their existence as a hypothesis.

            “Basket of deplorables” struck me as a very weak insult. I was amazed that people were so angry about it, which I suppose is another reason why I shouldn’t go into politics.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          Not all the people who disagree with me are fiends in human shape. Some are just pathetic losers.

        • eyeballfrog says:

          Yeah, but if you don’t fall into that “other basket” you’re still being called deplorable. And not just deplorable–“Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic”. (And note she said half of Trump supporters–millions of people–are deplorables.) Her message is “everyone who supports Trump is desperate or Hitler”. Not exactly surprising people reacted badly.

      • The Nybbler says:

        I think Limbaugh is about as smug as can be, and I haven’t seen much from Coulter (what little I’ve seen has been openly hostile rather than smug). But for Limbaugh or Coulter or Vox or Huffpo to be smug is one thing. For a putatively neutral institution (and I don’t count Vox as one) to have the same sort of smugness is very different. That is, if we actually had neutral institutions representing people from all over the political spectrum, I wouldn’t want Limbaugh to be a spokesman for one.

  107. cyclemadness says:

    I have not read the Roberts piece – yet – but, as I read this, I had a fundamental question: how do you define conservative? I think the word used to mean – ages ago – William F. Buckley-quality principles and argument. Now, after 30 years of setting up its principles and perimeter, I only see conservative to mean racist, sexist, and fundamentally anti-poor, anti-democratic, and anti-tolerance. I don’t see that as equal but opposite to liberalism but as the antithesis of the society that we have tried to create with laws that respect the ideal that there is equal opportunity for all. Of course, that is an ideal that has never really existed, but I subscribe to that ideal rather than the ideal that we are all in this for ourselves and that we are not responsible for the well-being of our fellow citizens. I’m an idealistic fool in the view of most people, I’m sure, but I genuinely like to see people of different races working, living, socializing together and loving whom they choose. I am neither offended nor threatened by them but am by a fundamentalist government that aims to impose a religion-based system on the country. I don’t want to live by a conservative, religion-based moral code that forces me to accept beliefs I don’t believe in because the people in control simply cannot live with anyone not exactly like them.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      When you do read the Roberts article, let us know what you think of the part where he says “We’re richer than you are. Neener, neener, neener!”

    • eyeballfrog says:

      Your comment reads as someone who has never actually interacted with a conservative person and has his entire image of conservatives filtered through Huffington Post.

    • I am neither offended nor threatened by them but am by a fundamentalist government that aims to impose a religion-based system on the country. I don’t want to live by a conservative, religion-based moral code that forces me to accept beliefs I don’t believe in because the people in control simply cannot live with anyone not exactly like them.

      At the moment, that seems closer to describing the left than the right, assuming you are willing to accept a definition of religion broad enough to include non-theistic versions. Consider some examples:

      Which comes closer to “the people in control simply cannot live with anyone not exactly like them:

      Someone who doesn’t approve of homosexuality chooses not to bake a cake for a gay wedding

      or

      Someone who doesn’t approve of homosexuality is compelled to bake a cake for a gay wedding or pay a large fine.

      Schools require children to use the bathroom that fits their biological sex

      or

      Schools are required to allow children who are biologically male to use the girl’s room and children who are biologically female to use the boy’s room.

      A prominent academic, offering conjectures as to the reason that most academics in some fields in a top school are men, includes among possible explanations that there may be m/f differences in the distribution of the relevant abilities

      or

      The same prominent intellectual is fiercely attacked and forced out of his job for saying that.

      Can you offer a balancing set, a case where conservatives in power are the ones trying to force other people to be, or at least act, like them?

  108. Anon256 says:

    The most extreme example of a Voat-like “zillion witches” ideological ghetto in the world today seems to be ISIS. Do you think in response to this the Western intellectual/media mainstream should be more inclusive of radical Islamists and their ideas?

    • MostlyCredibleHulk says:

      Aren’t we already kinda there? I don’t see too much critical discussion of Islam in feminist or social justice circles, despite there being a rich ground for it (maybe I don’t know enough of them, if so, please point out the places where such discussion happens). I don’t mean stuff like cutting off heads, but just discussing the status of women in traditional Islamic society, or the status of “other” – non-Islamic person, or slavery still existing in Islamic world. I don’t think there’s a serious discussion of this – instead, it’s mostly “no to Islamophobia” and now even calls for Western women to wear hijabs to support Islamic women supposedly suffering from Islamophobia. I think at least the left wing of Western intellectual/media mainstream is already very tolerant of radical Islam, unusually tolerant, as far as you can go without supporting the cutting off heads part.

      • Anon256 says:

        To the extent that this is the case, do you think it is an effective strategy against ISIS? (I’m personally not sure what the best strategy is, I’m just noting that the sets of people advocating “be more inclusive of conservatives” and people advocating “be more inclusive of radical Islamists” don’t seem to have much overlap.)

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Why does it need to be an effective strategy against ISIS? He’s just talking about the treatment of Muslim women in general. If a Christian man in the US did not let his wife go outside without covering her hair/face, feminists would crucify him.

          • INH5 says:

            Why does it need to be an effective strategy against ISIS? He’s just talking about the treatment of Muslim women in general. If a Christian man in the US did not let his wife go outside without covering her hair/face, feminists would crucify him.

            I think this is more due to the outgroup/fargroup distinction that Scott talks about in this post than any kind of special deference towards Islam. I also don’t see much feminist criticism of fundamentalist Mormon splinter sects that practice polygamy and child marriage, for example. Heck, HBO even made a show about fundamentalist Mormon polygamists that portrayed them in a vaguely sympathetic light. In both cases, the groups are seen as so distant as to not be of major concern. They’re just weird savages that live out in the desert.

            The mainstream religious right, meanwhile, is seen as he outgroup because they’re close enough and powerful enough to have an actual impact on the lives of the feminists in question by, for example, passing laws that restrict access to abortion in Red States.

            Whereas any Muslims that a typical North American progressive (I don’t know enough about European politics to describe how it works over there) happens to know personally are, due to epistemic bubble factors, likely to be more on the liberal side of the political spectrum. So they get to be included in their ingroup.

          • Jiro says:

            I also don’t see much feminist criticism of fundamentalist Mormon splinter sects that practice polygamy and child marriage, for example

            There’s “no criticism” of polygamist Mormon sects because nobody talks about them. Nobody goes around saying that people who try to criticize them anyway are committing polygamyophobia.

          • INH5 says:

            They’re still a valid counter-example to the idea that “if a Christian man in the US [treated his wife the same way that fundamentalist Muslim men treat their wives], feminists would crucify him.” And they’re really only the first example that came to mind. There are any number of Christian sects in the US that are far more patriarchal/anti-feminist than the mainstream religious right but get a lot less criticism than the latter from the left because they’re seen as fargroups instead of outgroups.

            The “Islamophobia” discourse is another issue, which I think is partly a strategic political alliance between the left and American Muslims but mostly what Scott describes in the “post-partisanship” post as “using [fargroups] as props in our own local conflicts.” In the case of, for example, passing around stories (true or false) of hijabi women getting attacked, the intent is obviously to make the right/Republicans/Trump and his supporters look bad. The politics of the hijab itself isn’t discussed because it just isn’t something that the progressives passing around those stories care about.

          • Jiro says:

            Criticism of polygamy is accepted by feminists, even if it isn’t done much. It is also an overwhelming proportion of what feminists say about polygamous sects, even if it is not large in absolute magnitude.

            Neither of these is true for feminists versus fundamentalist Islam. They’re both different kinds of “no criticism”.

            Amd both of these are fargroups.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Polygamists aren’t aggressively criticized because polygamy is next on the list for normalization.

        • gbdub says:

          I don’t think the idea is to be inclusive of actual radicals, it’s to be more inclusive of relatively mainstream people, lest they be marginalized and become actual radicals.

          • Anon256 says:

            Mainstream relative to what? A mainstream elected politician in Iran likely has positions that are still totally outside the Overton window in the US, and I think few in the US would advocate expanding the Overton window to include them.

            The intellectual/media mainstream is inclusive of many people who a typical Bernie Sanders supporter would call “conservative”, and NYT was just last week bragging about adding Bret Stephens to their op ed page (as a third conservative along with Douthat and Brooks), but Scott is not satisfied. No matter where one draws the line of who to include, there will be people just on the other side who are “relatively mainstream” and your argument implies should be included lest they be radicalised. But the alternative is to draw no line and include actual ISIS supporters.

          • gbdub says:

            You’re correct it’s a tough line to draw, but we’re talking about including Paul Ryan and Indiana Trump voters here, we’ve got a long way to go before inviting ISIS becomes an issue. I don’t know exactly where the right line is, but if it cuts out literally half the country it’s probably cutting too deep.

    • Tracy W says:

      I have on occasion thought that the best thing the US government could do for democratic reformers in Iran would be to issue statements of support for the theocracy. Obviously the US government wouldn’t positively endorse theocratic control but it could make statements like “We call on protestors to respect the authority of the existing Iranian institutions and avoid unsettling extremist reforms.”

      Maybe something similar could be done to Isis.

  109. Drew says:

    There’s a simple-seeming explanation for Conquest’s law: Organizations are subject to scope-creep. Scope-creep has a left-wing bias.

    You’re on the board of a community organization. A member comes in with a special request. Requests will be things like, “please make sure the conference has vegan food,” or “can we do some outreach targeted at group X?”

    These requests aren’t “political” in the normal sense of there being two, roughly-balanced factions.

    Instead, you’ll have 3-5 vegans who are really invested in vegan food options. They want to eat. And you have 200+ other people who don’t really care all that much. The vegan food option might represent $0.25 out of their annual dues.

    The asymmetry means that these projects are easy-to-adopt and hard-to-kill.

    Not all of the projects are political. But, small-group focused activism has a left-wing bias.

    So, over time, organizations end up over-extended and vaguely left wing.

  110. sold2u says:

    I don’t understand these two statements:

    “the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody.”
    “Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them”

    How does the right opting out of left-wing institutions harm the left? The left doesn’t have to visit the right wing ghettos. Or are they just miffed that conservatives aren’t listening to Colbert’s sick burns?

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      “How does the presence of ghettos impact my city/society? After all, it’s not like me and mine actually have to go visit them or see them!”

      EDIT: Let me make the point more clear.

      “Ghettos”, whether literal or metaphorical, are not good for the health of the larger social or political structure they are a part of, even if you can as an individual avoid personally entering them.

      Their effects, and their output are -not- confined to their geographic or (or URL) boundaries, but spread through to affect the rest of society too.

      • sold2u says:

        The left isn’t interested in dialogue – it is interested in lecturing. They don’t care what people who disagree with them have to say, and they find zero value in it. Which is fine.

        But, if you spend your time hectoring an audience, eventually they get tired of it and change the channel. Which is what has happened here.

        But I don’t see how the left is worse off. IMO everyone is better off.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Conservatives leaving the institutions and founding their own deprives the institutions of legitimacy as the authoritative institutions of their kind.

      • sold2u says:

        how? Conservatives were never represented in these institutions to begin with. To the left, it is completely transparent

        • hlynkacg says:

          An institution’s claim to being a “neutral gatekeeper” is worthless if it is neither neutral nor a gatekeeper.

          How do you plan to mediate intertribal disputes in a society where the tribes have their own institutions and are fully status independent?

          • sold2u says:

            I agree that these institutions are not neutral and probably never were.

            So, the only issue for the left is that the right no longer buys the fiction that these self-styled “neutral gatekeepers” are what they claim to be. So what? I don’t see how the left is harmed.

            What sort of disputes need mediation anyway?

          • hlynkacg says:

            What sort of disputes need mediation anyway?

            Is that a joke?

        • The Nybbler says:

          It’s much harder to maintain the image of an ideologically neutral institution if one side refuses to participate in it; it makes it clear that institution does not represent the truth but rather the left (or the right or whatever).

          • sold2u says:

            But that horse left the barn ages ago..

          • The Nybbler says:

            The first major break was the creation of Fox News, but only now are some of those institutions realizing what happened.

          • sold2u says:

            IMO, it really started when Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story. The idea that Matt scooped all of the national broadsheets, the networks etc was preposterous.

            It showed that the media circles the wagons to protect Democrats. From there, the conservative websites began to flourish and fill the void the MSM left behind.

    • Urstoff says:

      Insularity leads to groupthink leads to purity tests leads to purges and gulags.

      • sold2u says:

        My point is that the left has always been insulated. They never heard opposing views in academia or the media. So for them nothing changes.

        All they lose is the pretense of neutrality (which only they bought) and the inability to push their agenda on the right the way they want to. That isn’t a harm on the left, nor is it bad for society.

        • Urstoff says:

          By what measure are you judging that the left has always been insulated?

          • sold2u says:

            The left’s assumptions never get challenged in the MSM, and for the most part, conservative arguments are being framed by people who don’t believe them, or even understand them.

          • Urstoff says:

            That’s more of an assertion than a measure. By what measure are you asserting that the left’s assumptions were never challenged? Also, what assumptions were those that were being unchallenged?

          • By what measure are you judging that the left has always been insulated?

            I can’t speak to “always,” but it is consistent with my experience as a Harvard undergraduate in the early sixties.

          • Urstoff says:

            Thanks David. My bias is toward believing that, of course, but with any assertion about social trends, it’s very easy for someone to come back and say “well I didn’t see that happening, in fact, I saw the opposite”, and we haven’t progressed an inch in resolving the question. Is anecdotal evidence all we have, or is there something more concrete we can look for?

          • I’m afraid anecdotal evidence is all I have.

            And some of it may be biased, since I would have been better informed about my side of the argument than most people on either side–my father was widely, and not entirely inaccurately, reported to be Goldwater’s economic advisor–and naturally judged people by comparison with myself.

            I remember a fellow undergraduate, who didn’t know me, remarking that he couldn’t take economics at Chicago because he would burst out laughing. I think that gives some idea of how the Harvard department presented views they disagreed with–including some that, within a decade or two, they had conceded were correct.

            And I remember another student reporting that his econ instructor, on being told that he had gone from being a Rockefeller Republican (liberal) to being a Goldwater Republican, checked his records to confirm the extraordinary fact that the student had gotten an A in the course.

        • hlynkacg says:

          That isn’t a harm on the left, nor is it bad for society.

          This is where we fundamentally disagree, I think that you’re so used to existing in a relatively “high trust” society that you haven’t given any thought to what the alternative looks like. This sort of tribal status independence where the tribes are forced to intermingle and nobody can be trusted to act as arbiter/neutral-third-party is precisely how ethnic conflicts get started.

          • sold2u says:

            ok, but it was the left that forfeited the credibility of these institutions, not the right.

            you can’t blame the right for playing the “consider the source” game the left has always played.

          • hlynkacg says:

            That’s arguable but in the end it doesn’t matter. The claim that this isn’t a harm on the left, nor is it bad for society is obviously (and possibly catastrophically) false.

          • sold2u says:

            I don’t see the left being harmed by only preaching to the converted. Yes, they would rather they had no competition, but they aren’t being harmed at all. Regardless, they brought this on themselves.

            I think more voices and points of view is better than only one.

          • hlynkacg says:

            The harm does not come from “preaching to the converted” the harm, both to the left and society, comes from the end of detente.

            You’re looking around and assuming that because you don’t see any ethnic strife, the norms against ethnic strife can be safely removed.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Conservatives still get to vote.

      Also, a lot of those left-wing institutions depend on government funding.

      • sold2u says:

        which is why they are left-wing. who is going to get you a bigger budget (and paycheck)?

  111. theschaef47 says:

    Nor is there a liberal version of FOX that lacks that pretense of neutrality.

    MSNBC?

  112. Thegnskald says:

    Political maturity, at this point, is recognizing that if the Democrats came down hard against evolution, Republicans would suddenly discover how dumb creationism is. If Republicans came out in favor of NASA, Democrats would be against that.

    Beyond maturity is political wisdom: if either of those happened, nothing would change. The official platforms cover less than half a percent of what government does. The meaningful legislation goes uncontested in the public eye, because the meaningful legislation is boring, heavy on details, and light on soundbites.

    Which isn’t to say that the parties can do whatever they want, because ultimately voters vote based on vague feelings on how they think things are going, feelings which are influenced by those details in subtle ways. If legislation made YouTube worse, the incumbents would go away, and someone else would replace them.

    Because the real point of the parties taking opposing positions on nonsense isn’t because they care particularly about those issues, it is to make themselves distinct from the party currently in power – to declare that they will take the country in a different direction. No politician wants to say “I will do mostly the same thing but slightly different.”. So a mature government with a mostly functional set of policies will have incredibly partisan and dumb looking election behavior, because as the points of distinction narrow, and less and less should be changed, the irrelevant details become more and more important.

  113. ericchristianberg says:

    I was very compelled by David Chapman’s analysis of the shift in political viewpoints in the 60s and 70s when the two parties went from arguing about policy to taking moral stands and this seems to be fallout of the same issue. When you recognize that the other side has different priorities but that compromises can be made on the basis of shared values, it allows for a neutral ground where facts are analyzed and policy discussed. When you shift perspectives to thinking that you are engaged in a holy war with an evil opponent, there is no room for neutral ground. Once the blue team started to identify itself with moral positions birthed from the civil rights movement and the red team began painting their positions with the brush of religious orthodoxy, neutral ground and objective discussion went right out the window. So, it is hardly surprising that a pretense towards objectivity has suffered. Nobody is looking for facts to build reasonable policy around, they are looking for ammunition for their holy war.

  114. Wrong Species says:

    When was the last time creationism was actually relevant in politics? It seems like such a weird thing to talk about when Trump got elected by being a secular nationalist.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Way, way, way back in … April of 2017?

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        A creationist-friendly bill passed a state legislature committee by a 4-3 margin in one of the most conservative states in the union. And then… [checks the news]… it died on the floor of the House a few weeks later.

        Yeah, no, pretty much everything is more relevant in politics than this.

    • Nornagest says:

      I still hear about it on the state scale, but I don’t think it’s been on the national agenda since the early Bush years.

  115. binarybias says:

    The bias is and was always there. It cannot be removed. It should be made Explicit by requiring any and all ‘talent’ to disclose all their political actions – votes, contributions, attendances, past and present. That would allow viewers to evaluate the broadcasters’ bias on their own and measure out whatever amount of salt they wish to take with their information consumption.

    People do not understand bias.

    Bias is universal. It is almost ALWAYS subconscious and impossible to counteract.

    It is why almost any science that cannot be duplicated via double-blind study is questionable.

    Survey respondents are sensitive to bias at every level. Even the best polls are biased, and those who do them are biased in their corrections for bias. Question order, answer order, tone of voice (if spoken), question wording, answer wording, sample choice, sample result, all are tip-of-the-tongue bias areas; but there are biases even in the software that models results – after all humans wrote the code.

    • sold2u says:

      The myth of media objectivity was created by an avowed socialist – Walter Lippman. I suspect it was more about installing leftist thought in the media and to brainwash society into believing that propaganda wasn’t really propaganda.

      Time to just bury the myth of media objectivity. It was always a pretense to begin with.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        In the middle of the 20th Century, most cities in the U.S. had one dominant newspaper that got all the classified advertising. Owning, say, the Los Angeles Times in 1972 was incredibly profitable because it was a natural monopoly.

        So, it behooved successful newspaper barons to claim the mantle of neutrality so that political disagreements wouldn’t shake your monopoly position. If you read the thick Los Angeles Times and the thin Los Angeles Herald-Examiner carefully, you could tell that the Times was liberal and sedate and the Herald-Examiner was conservative and feisty. But what really mattered was what paper had most of the classified ads. Because the LA Times did, it could afford to be liberal like its newsroom wanted, but it couldn’t be really obvious about it because that might irritate classified advertisers.

        So the LA Times let its newsroom be liberal as long as they more or less pretended to be neutral enough to not annoy classified advertisers.

        The Herald Examiner barely had any classified ads so it had to appeal more to a portion of readers, such as people who understood and didn’t like the Times’ long-winded liberalism. So it was more fun to read, but it didn’t have the financial resources to run the kind of Whither Burma? in-depth reporting that the Times indulged in at its peak.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          In contrast, England and France have just one capital/metropolis, so most newspapers are national newspapers and they don’t pretend to be neutral. The Guardian backed Labour, the Telegraph backed the Tories, the Times was delivered to important people of the Establishment because their grandfather’s butler had always brought in the Times on the breakfast tray, the Daily Mail was bought by working class readers if today’s front page caught their eye, etc

          There was a lot more competition, so there wasn’t much pretense of neutrality, unless that was part of the marketing image of the newspaper; e.g., The Times of London was typically edited by a member of Milner’s Cabal that had been launched by Cecil Rhodes in South Africa. It wasn’t neutral but it acted like it was.

  116. benwave says:

    less than twenty four hours, one thousand comments. dear lord. I’m frustrated by the fact that the general commentariat here is Just of high enough quality that I actually do want to read through it : (. Dear SSC commenters, please either become better, or slightly worse at comments. Thanks, your friend Ben <3

    • quanta413 says:

      I think the comments here are below par for SSC. I recommend sparing yourself the pain of reading it all.

  117. keenan says:

    Long time, first time. I hope it doesn’t get entirely drowned out by better-written and -informed comments.

    I have an idea about what media organizations can do to break the cycle Scott identified here: encourage more direct debate between positions.

    Despite the radical expansion in the amount of political news/information/entirely-crazy-bullshit that people consume, I think there is less direct, sober dialogue about issues than ever. We either ignore the other side, or highlight useful weak-men arguments with which to tarnish them, or we watch people online and on TV screaming over each other.

    In particular, I would like to see more public debates, either written or in person, between intelligent, thoughtful people of different political perspectives. For these to be successful, they should:

    1. Focus on a narrow, practical question: Don’t talk about the size of government; discuss whether a specific agency should be cut. The more specific the issue under discussion, the harder it is for debaters to avoid directly engaging with their opponent’s thinking.

    2. Allow the debaters to ask questions of each other: Encourage participants to try to fully understand the opposing argument. Open-ended questions are good. Tactical questions to lead your opponent into traps is not.

    3. Use heavy moderation/editorial discretion: This one is harder, but is absolutely necessary. The job of a good debate moderator is to provide an environment in which the most useful discussion can take place. Debaters should never impugn their opponent’s motives. They should avoid clunky, political catchphrases, preferring instead a wide variety of words. The debaters should be encouraged to directly respond to their opponent’s arguments, rather than ridiculing or dodging them.

    4.Get commentators to make the other side’s argument: This one is weird, but I think it would be hugely enlightening. Get people to explain, as best they can, why there are smart, kind people who disagree vociferously on the topic at hand.

    I am aware that there are debate-like things in media (NYT does one, there are the IQ2 podcasts) but in general I find they either set too hazy a topic, or have an insufficiently diverse/talented panel to do the topic justice.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I think all real life debates could be replaced by an internet moderated one and be all the better for it. It’s hard to Gish Gallop your way to victory online.

  118. MB says:

    “I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again.”
    There’s little mystery to the process. Being left-wing is about inflation and lacking standards.
    Left-wing politics enlarged the suffrage from a handful of nobles, to the propertied class, to all able-bodied men, then women, to eventually include illegal immigrants and convicted criminals. It’s about eliminating competitive examinations and selective admissions of any kind. It’s about complaining that the very idea of expertise, intelligence, merit, beauty is sexist, racist, etc.. It’s about printing unlimited amounts of money.
    The only kind of standard that left-wing people admit is that there should be no standards. If someone owns an old book or a nice painting, if someone is pretty, if some group or person is or is thought to be better in some way than another, etc. — then the left-wing policy will be to destroy that real or imaginary superiority.
    The process usually goes as follows: some polity or community has accumulated some sort of capital (be it cultural, financial, biological, military, etc.) — in other words, it has something good going on. A left-wing person joins it, but due to natural (feelings of) inferiority cannot rise any further, nor enjoy his or her membership in peace. This is often the case for the rich heirs of self-made men.
    There is a feeling of unfairness. The left-wing person brings in allies from outside the community, by relaxing the standards — enlarging the suffrage, encouraging immigration, admitting men into a women’s-only school or vice-versa, abolishing entrance examinations, bribing the poor with unlimited amounts of paper money, etc.. Now the original person is no longer alone and is no longer the weakest/worst person in the community. The people brought in are even more left-wing than the trojan horse, because they know they’d never have qualified under the original standards. When they become sufficiently many, they plunder the community’s assets and redistribute them to themselves and their friends. The cycle repeats.
    Eventually, the community succumbs to degeneracy and entropy and the few decent people left withdraw to begin anew elsewhere.
    The only way to prevent this process is taking draconian, dictatorial measures to restore the old standards. Only explicitly right-wing organizations can even begin to try to do it. Having standards is right-wing; abolishing them is inherently left-wing.
    I hope there is some happy medium between Louis XIV and the Cultural Revolution (probably how society was 50-100 years ago), but if forced to choose between these two extremes I’ll choose Louis XIV 100% of the time.

  119. jamesrovira says:

    Nah, if right wing media chooses to spout delusional lies and eschew fact and research based reasoning, that is not the fault of left wing or centrist media.

    But how are you defining right and left? Aren’t those BS designators anyhow? Major corporations now own the majority of our media outlets.

  120. Serinis says:

    Given that the momentum is now with the conservatives, changing courses is the probably the best strategy. Also that the sections of society discussed here (academia & media) have essentially no/little actually power, the current stranglehold liberals have is incredibly fragile & unreliable.

    To clarify, the media’s power is entirely built on persuading the people who have the actual power in society (policemen, middle managers, soldiers etc) and if that doesn’t work, well dominance mean’s f*#k all. Hence you get the situation where the candidate (Hillary) who outspent the other by 2:1 on ads (media’s power) loses to Trump.

    This process goes on long enough and instead of what’s happening in global warming (effectively no action), conservative agendas will be defacto policy despite media or academic disdain. Suddenly the actually wielders of power will have different allegiances.

    • Kevin C. says:

      Given that the momentum is now with the conservatives

      [Citation needed]

      the people who have the actual power in society (policemen, middle managers, soldiers etc)

      “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Analogously, the actual power lies not with (rank-and-file) policemen and soldiers, but with the people whose orders those rank-and-file follow.

  121. trevor says:

    Incidentally there are high quality right-wing media. The best example is the WSJ. Its pretty clear that WSJ leans right and its also clear that its the best paper in the country.

    Another good example is the National Post in Canada which is vastly superior to both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. With Media its only about a few people at the very top who control things.

  122. Naldo Sjakie says:

    Scott writes:

    Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging.

    The core of all political disagreements seem to originate in moral intuitions in some sense. Moral intuitions reveal themselves to each of us via tribal emotions, because morality is intrinsically a social thing. Therefore, maybe a rule of thumb for “right thinking people” is to assume one’s objectivity is handicapped whenever one feels any trace of tribal emotion in the process of communication. Maybe it would be prudent not to say anything at all when one’s objectivity is potentially handicapped.

    Or does resisting tribal emotions cause a weakening of loyalties, setting oneself adrift on a sea of neutral emotionless fact with the sounds of righteous battle and glorious cries of victory carrying distantly from the shore? Well maybe that’s not a bad thing.

    (Of course, moral intuition and tribal emotion felt in the service of the tribe of humanity against existential threats from without seems risk-free I should add. The greatest thing to bring us all together would be an incompetent alien invasion).

    • Nornagest says:

      Therefore, maybe a rule of thumb for “right thinking people” is to assume one’s objectivity is handicapped whenever one feels any trace of tribal emotion in the process of communication. Maybe it would be prudent not to say anything at all when one’s objectivity is potentially handicapped.

      We tried that back at Less Wrong. It sorta worked for a while, but in the long run it ended up incentivizing people who were really damn sure that their objectivity wasn’t handicapped; that is, partisans. Of really weird, fringe causes, usually.

      The rest of us could still sit back and feel smug about how objective we were being, but that’s cold comfort when most of the day’s post volume is people arguing about Death Eaters.

  123. Tatu Ahponen says:

    This seems like one of those things where it would be useful to see leftism as liberalism as two different concepts. The US media is liberal, sure, but is it leftist? How much space does it give economic left-wing viewpoints (some, yes, but these seem to currently be stuck in their own ghettos like Jacobin or Chapo?) Does it take consistently the side of the labor against the capital? From my perspective, the US media is indeed a battle between two sides, but there’s a third side that’s left with quite a bit of less visibility – though gaining some with the Sanders campaign and because liberals occasionally give it space to seem more open-minded until it becomes powerful enough to oppose it, as has happened with the conservatives in the US and, say, Corbyn in UK.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Often around here “leftist” and “liberal” get used interchangeably. It’s complicated by the fact that there are people who are leftists, but not in an economic sense – they want radical change, but not along economic lines. Further, there are people who think of themselves as leftists, radicals, whatever, but are really just liberals without the good bits – the “radical” changes they want for society are nothing of the kind, but they also don’t have respect for stuff like freedom of speech, conscience, etc in the way liberalism should (or, conversely, they are leftists without the good bits – full of zeal, but not for anything that will actually fix the core problems).

      • And further complicated that some of us use “liberal” in its old sense, roughly a moderate version of the modern “libertarian” and, I gather, still the way the term is used in most of Europe. And there is “neo-liberal,” which seems to be mostly used as a negative term and, I think, comes out of the old rather than the new sense of the word, although I could easily be wrong.

        Does anyone here know in what language and when “neo-liberal” first appeared?

        • Brad says:

          I don’t have access here, but I saw a claim that OED has a reference in English dating back to the 1890s. It is such an obvious neologism that it has probably been coined independently several times each with an independent meaning, depending in part on the many different underlying understandings of the word liberal.

          My sense is that the most common usage today is as a pejorative deployed by adherents to European style economic left and center-left philosophies to describe European style economic center-right philosophies.

          • My sense is that the most common usage today is as a pejorative deployed by adherents to European style economic left and center-left philosophies to describe European style economic center-right philosophies.

            “Center right” can cover a lot of different things. A liberal in the 19th c. sense would be in favor of free trade and easy migration, much of the modern European right is against both.

            As you see the term used, is a neo-liberal for free trade or protectionism? Raising or lowering barriers to immigration? Prohibiting recreational drugs or legalizing them?

          • Brad says:

            I’m not an expert, but I think most western European countries have a party — though it might be small in some cases — that’s for freer trade, lower taxes, less regulation, and more privatization versus whatever the status quo is in those countries. These are the ones that are labeled neoliberal. Not the far right parties that have anti-immigration at their core and tend to be more protectionist.

            I don’t think it translates particularly well to U.S. politics at the current time because both parties are divided on the question of free trade. But we often stand accused of being the intellectual source of many of the ideas.

            If that sounds a lot to you like what the Europeans also call liberal, I agree. I’m not sure what the difference in connotation is exactly. Maybe one of our European posters can chime in.

          • Aapje says:

            I’ll quote a ‘thinker’ of the Dutch liberal party:

            Neoliberalism is the idea that the market is always right. Based on this principle it tries to dismantle the state and let the market provide public services. Privatization and deregulation are the core of the ideology. Politics is reduced to a slave for the economy.

            Neoliberals see all human interactions as economic transactions. Morality is defined in economic terms, where all acts that are based in greed will result in morally just outcomes.

            19th century liberalism is a reaction against the ancien régime. In the aristocratic system, public services were in private hands. Liberals wanted to create a clear separation between public and private: no authority without responsibility. The neoliberal privatization agenda seeks to do the opposite. Therefor, neoliberalism is not liberal. It is anti-politics. Public services should not be left to the irresponsible greed of the market.

            Translated and summarized from here.

            Another person who makes a similar argument:

            Liberalism means that the focus is on the development of the individual, with his own responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit. There is a connection with a humane aspect, namely self-determination and growth of the individual. In neoliberalism, liberalism has become dogmatic and the connection with this humane aspect is abandoned as a keystone. The individual has become an economic component, which is one-dimensionally measurable and manageable. The system is now the point of reference and the one who has the power in this system.

            Then the writer gives examples of how various privatization efforts have actually resulted in dis-empowered consumers and professionals. Instead, power has been placed in the hands of managers whose only expertise is money.

            Snippet taken and translated from here.

        • Tatu Ahponen says:

          The European and American liberals aren’t that far apart, really. I remember a guy from an Internet forum I posted in in my youth (as did Scott) saying that the difference between the two is that in America supporting a health care system where providers are private but state offers universal insurance makes you a radical liberal, while in Europe supporting a health care system where providers are private but state offers universal insurance makes you a radical liberal. Liberalism has included both social liberalism and what is now called “classical” liberalism for a long time.

          American and European liberals, at least the ones who are prone to expressions of international solidarity, also often recognize a certain kinship – witness Obama intervening to support Macron, for instance.

  124. bintchaos says:

    my favorite part–

    The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call “neutral” and “depoliticized”. These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever.

    Here [liberal space] NewYork Magazine devotes a whole issue to the Alt-Right. The Alt-Right is an obvious instantiation of your thesis– also VDARE (home of iSteve Sailer) and the Unz Review.
    except…the cycle wont go on forever and its not equilibrium– at least, not anymore. Thats the cause– breakdown of the soldier/explorer CCP fitness parity under technology and demographics.
    Non-equilibrium systems become vulnerable to collapse.
    The problem is how to restore parity to the soldier sub-population? we dont need as many soldiers now, and the jobs of the future are explorer jobs.

    i also really liked this

    I appreciate your concern, and I’ve added a parenthetical to my post that I am probably biased on this for the obvious reasons.

    the flesh envelope biases us all…but i like your humility in admitting that.
    what is critical is how we deal with bias.
    Me, i try to use physics and math whenever i can– Math is the only true epochè.
    and theres my bias revealed– saying that makes me an elitist 🙂

  125. bintchaos says:

    ummm…this is my first time commenting.
    i have been linked Scott Alexander posts multiple times as exemplars of writing style and substance.
    Talents i will have to acquire to articulate my CCP model– writing it in LaTeX is not sufficient persuasion or explanation.
    i disagree strongly on the fluidity of outgroup definition…i would say its evolutionary.
    i read all the comments and found them fascinating data.
    great post.

  126. CarthaginianMathematician says:

    Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again. Taken to its extreme, it suggests we’ll end up with a bunch of neutral organizations that have become left-wing, plus a few explicitly right-wing organizations. Given that Conquest was writing in the 1960s, he seems to have predicted the current situation remarkably well.

    I imagine that this is law works at least in part due to the fact that neutrality is a liberal value. Conservatism has historically been associated with the suppression of socially unacceptable opinions, and only the Marxist/Foucaultist elements of the left have equaled the willingness of the right to enforce political uniformity. As the John Buchan quote goes:

    A Whig is a man who is prepared to go to the stake for his beliefs, but who will not send his opponents there. A Tory is one who will not only burn himself, but is quite prepared in the last resort to burn those who differ from him.

    You can see this on the left today in the US and Western Europe. The left gets into vicious infighting over whether it is acceptable to impose political uniformity, whereas the right has already enforced it among its elites and heavily encouraged it in its followers. I use the US as an example because as an American I am most familiar with its politics, but it seems to me that this plays out in Europe and even in Asia too, just with different positions on a different political space of opinions in a different Overton window. A US Republican faces a much more extensive right wing political correctness to bend the knee to: tax cuts are automatically good and necessary, abortion is a form of murder or at least manslaughter, religion is a universal good (and typically (s)he must go further and state clearly that the US is a Judeo-Christian nation), a more heavily armed populace is always better, a bigger military is automatically better, and immigration must be more heavily controlled.

    The Democrats are quite conflicted on all of these issues: Sanders and Clinton publicly argued over gun control, economic policy, and military size while the GOP was almost fully in agreement on these issues. While the GOP was all in agreement over having a muscular foreign policy (arguing primarily over the specifics of it), Sanders’ interest in drawing down the US military was combated by a Clinton interested in a reasonably muscular US foreign policy (but less muscular than the GOP).

    This goes back at least to the nineties, in which the Democrats were struggling over whether political correctness was acceptable even as Newt Gingritch imposed his will and opinions on his party with a velvet fist.

    • cassander says:

      The left gets into vicious infighting over whether it is acceptable to impose political uniformity

      Please, show me where is that fight being waged. SHow me someone on the american left saying, on at topic besides abortion, that I believe X but I don’t think that I have the right to impose that on people? Because I’m not seeing it.

      The inheritors of the whig tradition are on the political right in the US.

      tax cuts are automatically good and necessary, abortion is a form of murder or at least manslaughter, religion is a universal good (and typically (s)he must go further and state clearly that the US is a Judeo-Christian nation), a more heavily armed populace is always better, a bigger military is automatically better, and immigration must be more heavily controlled.

      There are lots of informed conservatives in this comments section, you should try actually talking to them. You might learn something. Because this is laughably ignorant.

      • CarthaginianMathematician says:

        There are lots of informed conservatives in this comments section, you should try actually talking to them. You might learn something. Because this is laughably ignorant.

        I personally know conservatives who have not bought into these ideological points: but conservative politicians have to. I am aware that almost no voter agrees in full with the conservative slate I laid out – but the GOP as a party and as a movement enforces this among almost all candidates.

        • cassander says:

          Hardly a voter agrees with ANY of what you’ve laid out. And this election should have made it perfectly clear that the GOP as an institution has zero control over who runs under its banner.

        • I personally know conservatives who have not bought into these ideological points: but conservative politicians have to.

          “The biggest immigration problem we got in America is a government that’s not doing its job,” says Armey. “I don’t like illegal immigration, but I’ll tell you something: I don’t run stop lights. But you put me out on the road at two o’clock in the morning on the way to the all-night drugstore to get medicine for my babies, and you give me a stop light that is stuck on red, and no traffic in sight, and I’m gonna go through that red light.”

          (Dick Armey, ex majority leader, currently head of Freedomworks, in defense of illegal immigrants.)

          A politician running for office has to take positions that the voters, in particular enough voters of his party to get the nomination, want in order to win. That’s true whatever his party. Do you think very many Democratic congressmen feel free to publicly question the existence of a large gender gap, unequal pay for equal work, or suggest that one source of differences m/f or by race might be a difference in the innate distribution of relevant characteristics? Express skepticism of the claim that global warming is a terrible threat which must be dealt with?

          Is it possible that you only recognize pressure for uniformity when it is for positions you disagree with?

    • The left gets into vicious infighting over whether it is acceptable to impose political uniformity, whereas the right has already enforced it among its elites and heavily encouraged it in its followers.

      I am a libertarian, I make no secret of my views, which include an extreme pro-immigration position–I’ve been arguing for free migration for something over forty years. They include support for complete free trade. Legalization of all recreational drugs.

      In the U.S., libertarians have generally been considered part of the conservative coalition. I get invited to give talks for the Federalist Society, widely viewed as part of the right. A fair while back I had a friendly debate with Ed Meese, somewhat later a debate, I think on free trade, at a high up conservative gathering at which I had the pleasure of talking with Phyllis Schalfly–who turned out to share my pro-encryption views on that topic.

      That does not appear consistent with your claims. A Republican congressman may be restricted in what positions he can hold without risking a primary challenge, but that would be true of a Democratic congressman as well, with details depending on the district. But intellectuals on what is usually considered the right hold a variety of views. Charles Murray, for instance, in a recent book argued for a basic national income.

  127. Yair says:

    From The Newsroom:

    Charlie: We did the news.
    Leona: For the left.
    Charlie: For the center.
    Leona: Are you fucking out of your mind–?!

    Charlie: For the center, Leona! Facts… are the center. Facts. We don’t pretend that certain facts are in dispute to give the appearance of fairness to people who don’t believe them. Balance is irrelevant to me. It has nothing to do with the truth, logic, or reality. He didn’t go on the air telling people to give peace a chance, but evolution? The jury’s back on that one.

    At this point in time entire chunks or the right are at war with science. Not just with the social sciences but in many cases even with the physical sciences (anti-vaxxers come to mind). It is an epistemological war not just with empirical science but also wit deduction based reasoning.

    Sure the likes of NYT and Vox have a responsibility to find those on the Right that attempt to argue using reason and evidence, but it is not their fault if there aren’t many of them at this point in time.

    I think Scott is way to forgiving with the Right on this, possibly because being a liberal he expects more from his own side, but they are responsible for their own actions.

    • hlynkacg says:

      How do you know what you think you know?

      • Yair says:

        The same as everyone else, using induction analogy, deduction and lots of assumptions/axioms.

    • Nornagest says:

      There are rightists in these comments who’ll be happy to tell you at great, tedious length about the facts the left is ignoring, and how those demonstrate that it’s really the left that’s anti-science. I don’t really believe them, but I don’t believe you, either.

    • At this point in time entire chunks or the right are at war with science.

      The left too. The difference is in which parts of relevant science happen to clash with what they want people to believe.

      The left has been at war with economics over minimum wage laws for fifty years or more. At the moment, both parties are at war with it over free trade. The left not only refuses to accept obvious implications of Darwinian evolution when it doesn’t like them, it actively punishes members who hint at believing in them. The left routinely takes for granted claims about the consequences of AGW for which there is no scientific support, the issue over which Chris Landsea resigned from the IPCC a fair while back. Similarly for GMO organisms, although that doesn’t hold for all of the left.

  128. Roanoke says:

    As someone who’s not on the left, I’d really appreciate it if liberals would try to live up to their value of tolerance. Or you know, try not to be such unbearable assholes.

    • Kevin C. says:

      Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

      We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

      –Karl Popper

      Remember, error has no rights. As these helpful anti-fascists explain, their opponents are

      nothing more then scum of the Earth that have no business even living in the first place. Same holds slightly lighter though for conservatives who can at least keep shut.

      That “violent confrontation” is “the only effective tactic”; that they must “not give them one inch, by any means neccesary”; that “preventing the spread of such… ideals justifies the use of violence, and in most cases killing.”
      So the left-leaning folks who post here, at least, are indeed quite tolerant by comparison.

  129. I have a question, is this epistemic polarization limited to the Anglosphere, Western nations, rich nations, or is it a global trend? Are there places that have systems or cultures that are resistant to this, but that are still pluralistic and have relatively good freedom of speech?

    (please no partisan answers that solely blame the left or right)

  130. OldMugwump says:

    The idea of a neutral gatekeeper press seems to be a modern invention of journalism schools.

    I prefer MSNBC and Fox to CNN or the NYT. Because MSNBC and Fox make no pretence of impartiality (Fox’s is clearly tongue-in-cheek.)

    If journalists were interested in truth, they wouldn’t pretend to be impartial (they’re human, of course they have opinions of their own). Instead they’d openly admit their viewpoint and let the reader judge their arguments.

    There are still countless newspapers in the US with “Republican” or “Democrat” in their title. I suspect the relatively high esteem which journalists enjoy is a legacy from the era when these newspapers were founded.

    Before the rise of “professional” journalism in the middle of the 20th century, truth was assumed to exist (even if it was difficult to find), and publishers were proud to announce their political allegiance.

  131. georgie616 says:

    Pew did did a study a few years ago and actually found that MSNBC was substantially more biased than Fox News during the 2012 election. Here’s Here’s a politico article on it:

    http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/12/is-msnbc-worse-than-fox-news-179175

    While people like Sean Hannity are crazy and insanely biased fox news during the daytime is mostly pretty straight news. MSNBC by comparison was far more opinion shows than straight news. Also while CNN used to be pretty balanced straight news in the last year it has become explicitly affinities republican imo. I’ve read articles that suggested this was actually planned as a way to boost ratings, and it’s worked extremely well.

  132. dalemannes says:

    Awesome op-ed! This is actually both funny and enlightening at the same time.

    Particularly funny is his last three paragraphs. Awesome stuff!

    Scott Alexander identifies as liberal, but he is awfully sympathetic to conservatives. Most liberals that I know are the opposite.

    • bintchaos says:

      no one will talk about the core problem tho–
      conservative ideology is non-competitive in the institutions of academe and culture.
      I agree with Scott Alexander that its time to stop digging.
      But what is the alternative?
      “Free Speech” is just a stalking horse to get conservative ideology into the marketplace of brutal ideas (college campuses). But there is no peer-to-peer fitness landscape for those ideas. eg, I ask a conservative friend what conservatives want from liberals– he said, “respect us even if we are wrong”. This was in a discussion of climate science.
      But as a scientist, how can i respect the rejection of science? where is the utility good in that?

      • georgie616 says:

        Do you respect Muslims o Mormons even though their religions say crazy shit..

        • bintchaos says:

          im sry…i dont get ur point.
          ALL religions say crazy sh**.
          Google Shakers, Snake-handlers, Church of the Living Word, etc. for some examples from xianity.
          Mormonism is kinda special though because it originated in modernity so the fog of pasthistory doesnt obscure some of its more radical lapses into the suspension of disbelief.

  133. Plucky says:

    I’m a conservative who has more or less fled/seceded/abandoned all the “neutral” institutions. I’ve done so basically for the reasons you outline- they’ve become intolerably left-wing in practice and they have made it clear they have no intent of ever giving my side a fair shake.

    (side note: What you term “Conquest’s Third Law” is usually called O’Sullivan’s Law by conservatives, after John O’Sullivan, former National Review editor and Thatcher aide: https://web.archive.org/web/20030707094659/http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback-jos062603.asp)

    The issue is not and never has been one of facts. There is sufficient journalistic integrity at CNN, the NYT, WaPo, etc. that they are very rarely wrong on a matters of simple fact, and the factual mistake they do make are typically corrected with the appropriate amount of diligence and embarrassment. The issues with “gatekeeper” media are more commonly
    – value judgments presented as facts, or more commonly statements that are true only if one accepts an implicit (and obviously progressive/liberal) value judgement.
    – related: dubious claims or assumptions of causality (good example: The idea that poverty causes crime is almost always assumed to be so obviously true in news reporting that it’s never even presented as a potential point of dispute). This is probably the worst problem, precisely because these are the exact places where liberals tend to dig in their heels the most and accuse conservatives of “denying facts”, when the “fact” in question is not a fact but a disputed claim of causality.
    – the choice of which facts to present, which to omit, and how such facts are organized in the narrative (this of course includes the choice of which stories are stories and which are “not a story”). I personally stopped reading the NYT about a decade ago when I hit my limit on reading articles that, somewhere around the 14th paragraph, would mention a fact that completely demolished the entire premise of the article, but that the author would just glaze over and keep on going as if the premise was still valid
    – obvious double standards in how they treat D and R politicians (anytime there’s a scandal, if the pol is an R then it’s a dollars-to-donuts bet that “Republican” will be in the headline. If it’s a D, then (D-NY) will appear around the fifth paragraph)
    – related, the obvious double standard in which stories embarrassing to conservatives are gleefully given prominent space and stories embarrassing to liberals are covered reluctantly in less-prominent places, and always, always presented “with context”
    – obvious double standards in how activist groups, think-tanks, and other groups are presented (e.g., a place like the Heritage Foundation will always be called “the conservative Heritage Foundation” whereas a place like the Center for American Progress will usually just be “the Center for American Progress” without any label indicating they are left-wing
    – where terminology is disputed, the liberal-preferred terminology will always be treated as normative and conservative-preferred terminology will usually get scare-quotes
    – The common use of scare quotes and other rhetorical methods to insinuate that conservatives are making arguments in bad faith without openly making the accusation. This is probably the second-worst problem because it makes clear the news source doesn’t take you seriously and wants to convey to its audience that it shouldn’t either, which when done sub-rosa is extremely dirty journolistic practice. It’s impossible to have a productive argument with someone who refuses to acknowledge that you mean what you say, and that how you say it reflects how you conceive of the issue.
    – The indirect, dishonest editorializing method of quoting progressive activists at length, un-rebutted, in “news analysis” pieces and then pretending that the article author and editor don’t obviously agree with the activist and that the purpose of the article wasn’t just to push that line.
    – Absolutely everything ever written by Linda Greenhouse
    – The preposterous ignorance of extremely basic tenets of orthodox Christian theology, especially in articles that are about church-related things
    – The method of rigging an argument by going to the dumbest, platitude-spewing hack possible to present the conservative side (the only thing in the world worse than arguing with an idiot is having to watch an idiot argue your side)
    – The recurring genre of articles about conservatives that read like (and are roughly as inaccurate as) freshman-level anthropological studies of some primitive Amazonian tribe, with no comparable examinations of liberals
    – the complete predictability that the “angle” they will take on a story will always manage to work in the progressive issue du jour (there’s an ancient conservative joke that the day after the apocalypse, the NYT headline will read “World Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit”)
    – In the specific case of TV, it’s common to be able to easily detect from the verbal tone, facial expression, and mannerisms when the anchor wants the audience to know what the “right” and “wrong” sides of an argument are (Liberals, to get what I mean here: consider Brit Hume. As a news anchor, he always presented the content of a news story in the classic, objective, just-the-facts, old-school news anchor style. But you didn’t need poker-pro facial-expression-recognition skills to know that he’s conservative and considered the conservative take to be correct, and no doubt his presentation of the liberal side would grate on you in a hard-to-pin-down way. Liberal anchors are just as obvious to, and have the same effect on, conservatives)

    None of the above gripes are in any way new; they’re the exact same gripes conservatives have had for two generations, and every single one of them is still repeated on a nearly daily basis. It’s as if liberal newspeople read the list of conservative gripes and then decided “wow, this is actually a really effective way to be biased and pretend not to be, let’s actively try to do this now” (yes, yes, I know that quite obviously this did not happen anywhere, that there’s no actual conspiracy. My point is that there doesn’t need to be and the results are almost indistinguishable). At some point it’s not worth sticking around in hopes they get better and that giving them your money and ad-market share just makes you a sucker.

    Roberts’s “conservatives have never asked for institutional reform” shtick is the exact sort of historical ignorance that infuriates conservatives (and is so, so perfectly Vox that it’s kind of funny). Complaining about “gatekeeper” media bias has been a staple part of conservative media as long as there’s been conservative media. Buckley was complaining about it as far back as the 60’s. It’s been an arrow in Rush Limbaugh’s quiver since the 80’s. 15 years ago this book was a #1 best-seller for two months and got enough attention that a president did this to fire a shot across the media’s collective bow. The very existence of the “public editor” position at the NYT was a response to when, right as media bias was a hot topic due to the reaction to that book and entire websites devoted to OCD-level bias checking of the NYT, the Jayson Blair scandal happened to them. For Roberts to be completely ignorant of that is, well, a perfect anecdote illustrating why conservatives have such contempt for Vox.

    Speaking of Vox, that people would treat an organization run by the Journ-o-lister in chief (Don’t know what the Journ-o-list is? Welcome to the world of “you’ve just proven my point about media bias”) as even plausibly a neutral gatekeeper is also exactly the sort of thing that makes conservatives livid.

    • bintchaos says:

      Its really not like that…why is academe 90% liberal? why is hollywood 90% liberal? why is the military 90% conservative?
      part of it is self-selection, part of it is relative phenotypic fitness, part of it is THE FACT that conservative ideology is non-competitive in academe and culture. All this is part of a complex adaptive system that is transitioning from equilibrium to non-equilibrium.
      Im an academic– i cant respect people that reject science.
      The medias job is reporting the truth, reporting facts.
      Unfortunately the truth and facts seem to have a liberal bias lately.

      • Aapje says:

        Progressives just reject different science.

        • bintchaos says:

          Its not science if it can’t be proven.
          We are getting really, really good at proving things in the 21st century.
          I predict we are going to see a revolution in the social sciences with the introduction of mathematical rigor and “reality mining” data science techniques.
          see Social Physics

          • Aapje says:

            We are getting really, really good at proving things in the 21st century.

            Replication crisis?

            Much of science is in a pretty bad way, where p < 0.05 has become a religion, even though optimizing for a low p just prevents some types of problems. Other problems just keep happening and science has been ignoring the evidence for decades. The equivocation of p < 0.05 with 'true,' rather than to take it as an indicator that further research is warranted (as was the intent of the person who introduced the metric), has resulted in a lot of unreplicated results that are treated as proven and a lack of incentives to do that further research in many fields. Only very recently do we see some attempts to fix this, but there are bad incentives build into the core scientific model that we have adopted.

            Furthermore, some important issues are not even being researched, because of dogma. For example, most rape research only looks at rape of women by men. Famous rape researchers like Mary Koss* refused to investigate raped men because she argued that men suffer less from rape. However, even if this were true, this would merely be relevant to how the statistics on male rape ought to be interpreted and thus is not a justification for not collecting the data using the same methodology as used for female victims. By not collecting the data on male rape victims in the first place, conclusions are used to justify not collecting the data that could result in different conclusions. It's corruption of science to only collect half the data because of an a priori decision that the other half can't be significant.

            *Who was the source of the 1 in 4 figure that lots of progressives threat as unquestionable truth, even though it is completely dependent on how you define rape and many of the women who were considered raped by Koss didn't consider themselves to be raped. This strongly suggests that a very expansive and non-objective definition was used. When criticism of that subjectivity is called the rejection of science, this conflates the subjective interpretations of scientific results with the objective scientific results. This is especially problematic as academia are increasingly becoming dominated by people with certain viewpoints, so fewer and fewer people are left who can point out the alternative interpretations of scientific results that deserve consideration.

          • bintchaos says:

            its my understanding that the replication crisis is confined to the soft sciences– EvoPsych, sociology, polysci, etc.
            its dated methodology.
            Do you follow Rolph Dengen? He’s exposing a lot of that in old studies.
            My point is we are the cusp of a data revolution which will rigorize the soft sciences.
            I recommend Dr Pentland’s book– Social Physics.
            If you have an academia account you can read James Lee’s new paper on hereditability of educational attainment– the methodology is really splendid.
            And Big Data will change everthing– what the MIT Social Machine folks call “reality mining”.

          • bintchaos says:

            Its like Dr. S says…

            Or: everyone used to trust academia as a shared and impartial arbitrator of truth. But conservatives didn’t like the stuff it found – whether about global warming or trickle-down economics or whatever – so they seceded into their own world of alternative facts where some weird physicist presents his case that global warming is a lie, or a Breitbart journalist is considered an expert on how cultural Marxism explains everything about post-WWII American history.

            but conservatives wont be able to throw radar chaff at scientific results they dont like for much longer
            The DataPorts platform will serve vast quantities of data for analysis.
            https://twitter.com/AndrewLeifer/status/865276706944417792

  134. bintchaos says:

    oh my goodness i never used the word trivial.
    i want to know why the two sides are so different, and why they are diverging.
    polarization is observably increasing.
    see Pew
    I think the within group variance can be accounted for with CCP —
    possibly theres a difference in brain biochemistry.
    Academe brute force selects for high IQ– Military selects for something else
    thats my point

  135. David Condon says:

    I was thinking about this post the other day when I suddenly realized it could be used to explain tribal behavior in academia. I particularly like this quote:

    “The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.”

    I would phrase my thinking this way: whenever a once popular position becomes less popular in academia, even if the position is correct to some degree, the people who continue to stand behind that position will become increasingly hostile towards and isolated from those who don’t hold that position. Those who agree with the position, but conclude it is not worth risking their reputation over will stand aside, and ignore the issue. Those who remain will tend to consist of mostly zealots. The degree of zealotry will correspond with the amount the popularity of the position has decreased. If the position becomes more popular again, zealotry will decrease.

    Remove “in academia” from the above paragraph to get the generic claim that is being advocated in this blog post.

  136. reasoned argumentation says: