This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:
1. Comments of the week: last open thread we talked about standing-room-only flights, and of course bean chimed in with some knowledge of the economics of airline travel (1, 2).
2. The rationalist community is holding various Solstice celebrations this month. I’ve been asked to advertise Seattle in particular, but there are other ones in NYC, Berkeley, Boston, Columbus, Nashville (Ohio), Silicon Valley, and Chapel Hill – see this site for details, and keep in mind some are as early as the 9th. Also, I think the Sunday Assembly is running a lot of them – the only ones I can certify as definitely rationalist-affiliated are Berkeley, Boston, Seattle, and (mostly) New York.
3. David Friedman (author of the legal systems book recently profiled here) is holding a San Jose SSC meetup at 3806 Williams Rd on Saturday 12/9 2:00 PM. Go for the interesting discussion, stay for the authentic medieval Islamic cooking.
Apropos of nothing but the latest news story about Al Franken …
I’m not a fan of Franken, but I think the attack on him for relatively minor offenses a fair while back, at a time when he was a professional comedian, is vastly overdone.
My opinion is that Al Franken has been swept up in a general surge of anger about entertainment-and-political-figures who abuse their power to sexually harass underlings.
It does raise the question of what he was willing to do off-camera, if he was willing to do those kinds of things on-camera.
For comparison, though, I’m thinking of similar charges leveled against other politicians and political appointees during my lifetime. I think I’ll limit myself to things that I can remember hearing on the news or in talk-radio. Franken’s misdeeds don’t rise to the level that many of these situations.
–Clarence Thomas, candidate for Supreme Court. There were stories that he engaged in lewd talk, and boasted of his sexual prowess to female employees while he worked at a department of the EEOC. One former co-worker at the EEOC claimed this pattern of behavior; five other former co-workers at the same department of the EEOC denied that he showed this pattern of behavior.
Final resolution: The charges did not derail Thomas from the path to a position on the Supreme Court. They did manage to make his confirmation hearing the most-memorable Senate hearings of the decade. And it did manage to elevate sexual-harassment law from law-school discussion to headline news.
–Bob Packwood, Senator. Women who worked in his office, and women who worked for lobbying agencies, accused him of sexual abuse and sexual assault. I can’t track down the details of the accusations, and I don’t remember hearing the details in the news…but I do recall that the investigating committee in the Senate forced Packwood to give his diary as evidence.
Final resolution: Packwood resigned from the Senate.
–Edward Kennedy, Senator. There were stories that he and another Senator would occasionally squeeze a waitress in a high-class restaurant into a “waitress sandwich”, so they could grope her in a sexual way. [1] Other stories circulated that Kennedy was a womanizer who had several affairs. I’m not aware of accusations of sexual abuse of women who worked under him.
Final resolution: on impact. Kennedy remained in the Senate until his death, several election cycles later.
–Bill Clinton. When he was Governor-running-for-President, there were rumors that he would occasionally invite female employees of the State government into hotel rooms and request sexual favors from them. After he became President, at least one woman laid a civil suit against him for such behavior. During investigations springing from that, he tried to worm his way out of admitting a sexual relationship with a woman who worked in/around the Oval Office at the White House. [2]
Afterwards, other stories of sexual misconduct came out. (These stories ranged from groping of females who came to discuss something with him while President, to allegations of rape that dated back to his time as Attorney General of Arkansas. [3] After he left the Presidency, there were stories that he flew on airplanes with a wealthy Florida businessmen who was running an illegal prostitution service on those airplanes.)
Final resolution: not impeached for sexual misbehavior, but impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice. First Presidential impeachment to go to trial during the 20th Century. He remained in office.
–Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Had a sexual affair with a staffer, while taking part in the impeachment process of Bill Clinton. [4]
Final resolution: resigned from the House of Representatives. Didn’t succeed at later attempt to win nomination for President, though this may have not been caused by the affair.
–Gary Condit, Representative. Had a sexual affair with a staffer. [5] That staffer died in suspicious circumstances, and her body was not found for more than a year.
Final resolution: lost to a challenger from his own party during the primary campaign for re-election
–Mark Foley, Representative. Possibly had a sexual affair with a Congressional Page. Exchanged sexually explicit emails with at least one such Congressional Page. [6]
Final resolution: resigned his position
–Larry Craig, Senator. Engaged in behavior that appeared to be seeking an anonymous sexual encounter in an airport bathroom. Not known to have engaged in sexual abuse of anyone in his employ.
Final resolution: a confusing series of gonna-resign, not-gonna-resign, plea-to-lesser-charges, try-to-reverse-the-plea-deal responses. Did not seek re-election.
–Anthony Weiner, Representative (and husband to a Huma Abedin, who worked close to Hillary Clinton in her Presidential campaign). Accused of sending sexually-explicit pictures to women. Not accused of sexual abuse of anyone in his employ.
Final resolution: Resigned from Congress, did not stop his mis-deeds.
Strange connection: Investigation in those further misdeeds also turned up digital evidence of Abedin/Clinton moving classified information on computer networks outside of the official, classified-information network maintained by the U.S. Government.
–Dennis Hastert, Representative. Was accused of breaking banking laws while making hush-money payments. The hush-money was for cases of sexual abuse that occurred many years in the past, when Hastert had been a teacher and wrestling coach. These allegations did not come out until after Hastert left office.
Final resolution: sent to prison for crimes related to money-handling, left his position at a lobbying firm.
–John Conyers, Jr. Representative. Has been accused by multiple women of groping of a sexual manner. Also accused of trying to force a female employee into a sexual relationship with him. [7] May have been paying hush-money to some harrassment victims.
Final resolution: Conyers just announced his resignation.
Strange connection: I just found a reference to Conyers being censured a decade ago by the House of Representative. That censure was for him forcing office employees to be baby-sitters and nannies for his family. He also used employees of his office as part of his re-election campaign.
It is very hard to believe that this previous investigation did not turn up any reports of sexual misconduct…but I find it easy to believe that those reports were ignored at the time.
–Roy Moore. State-level judge, and candidate for special election to U.S. Senate.
Accused of being too friendly with underaged girls at a date long past the statute of limitations. There is one allegation of an affair with such a girl, and many stories that he appeared to be attracted to such girls. (I’ve seen claims that the timeline doesn’t quite work for the one allegation of an affair…but I haven’t been able to study the story in any depth.)
Final resolution: not yet.
Conclusion: Franken may not have gotten to the should-resign level of misbehavior. But in the current political climate, it is very hard to defend a man who was willing to grope/force-kiss a woman on camera.
I’m happy that it’s become harder for politicians to defend themselves against allegations of sexual misconduct. However, I fear that if every politician who has ever done such things resigned from office, we’d need special elections for most of the elected offices in the country…
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[1] Every mention of Edward Kennedy scandals by his political foes would also mention the Chappaquiddick incident, which did not involve sexual harassment. That incident was old news by the time I first heard about it. A strong case can be made that Kennedy should have been prosecuted for negligent homicide in the Chappaquiddick incident.
It’s still possible to find copies of old editorials by feminists claiming that Mary Jo Kopechne would be happy to know that Kennedy supported feminist causes while he was in the Senate. I find such defenses to be obnoxious in the extreme.
[2] At every corporation I’ve been employed at in the United States, I’ve received training from HR about how not to commit acts that might be considered sexual harassment. Every one of those training classes included the statement It is impossible to determine whether an employee can consent to a sexual relationship with someone who has authority over them in the workplace. Thus, such behavior is considered unlawful sexual harassment, even if both parties think it is consensual.
For this reason, I do not consider Bill Clinton’s interaction with Monica Lewinsky to be an example of consensual sexual relationship.
[3] At the time that groping charges were laid against the President, some feminists wrote editorials saying that a man should get one free grope.
It’s still possible to find copies of those old editorials.
Again, I find such defenses to obnoxious in the extreme.
[4,5,6] I cannot consider these to be consensual sexual relationships, for the same reason that I cannot consider the Clinton/Lewinsky relationship consensual.
However, I can’t find any old editorials attempting to minimize the seriousness of the allegations against these officials…
[7] As stated above, I could not consider this to be a consensual sexual relationship. However, this accusation is that the official attempted to coerce an employee into such a relationship, not that the relationship actually happened.
I’ve been to a number of those training classes, and while such relationships were forbidden by policy, the training never went so far as to say they were unlawful by definition. I don’t think it’s actually true, either, though it’s obviously playing with fire (ask Andy Rubin, but also ask Bill Gates)
It is curious you leave out one of the more incendiary parts of that: UNDERAGE women.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. They should all go. Purge the sinners! Cleanse the earth with fire and fury! Mwahahaha… ahem.
But it is a bit problematic that the only penalty for sexual misconduct of any kind is losing your job. Many deserve just that, but some deserve better, and some deserve a hell of a lot worse.
It’s a cheap way for the Democratic party to signal virtue by comparison to the Republicans. If Roy Moore were a sitting senator whose red-state governor would promptly appoint a GOP replacement and Al Franken were running for reelection in a tight race with the ballots already printed, it would be Moore who was being pressed to resign.
Aside from the political considerations, I agree that Franken’s offenses are the sort that ought to be forgiven after a decade and an apology. The victims are under no obligation to accept the apology and offer forgiveness, but then the rest of us are under no obligation to pursue the case on their behalf. Statutes of limitations exist for a reason, and that reason doesn’t entirely stop at the courthouse door.
I agree entirely with the cheap way part and that it would not have gone quite the same way if it would have cost the Democrats that seat.
But as to the second part, I think you need to look beyond the initial accusation which was probably survivable, to the parade of women whose asses he grabbed while taking pictures including once he was a Senator. That’s not the crime of the century, but it is an abuse of power and it’s pretty clearly a pattern and not just a one time thing.
I don’t know anything about Franken except for what I’m reading, but it seems he was in show business (a comedian?)
And now this – not just one “dumb broad can’t take a joke” story from years back, but now women coming forward to say “Oh yeah, he liked to drop the hand any chance he got”?
It seems to be this weird confluence of being in entertainment and then getting power/fame, and translating that either into supporting political causes or getting into politics.
Maybe all political parties should make a rule never to accept any candidates or potential political representatives if they’ve ever had anything to do with the media/entertainment business?
Ronald Reagan tho.
He originally rose to prominence as one of the guys behind Saturday Night Live back when it didn’t suck, then developed a niche as a political comedian in the Jon Stewart mold two decades before Jon Stewart’s schtick took over the world. Wrote a book called “Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot”, which is a fair sample of his style.
Later he went into a career in real politics. Currently he’s a Senator for Minnesota.
So far, eight women have come forward with accusations against Franken. Three of those accusations came from after Franken began his Senate campaign in 2007.
The real clincher, I think, is that Franken has been calling his accusers liars. In particular, consider this case where Franken allegedly tried to kiss a woman and called it “his right as an entertainer”. Politico found two people who were willing to confirm that the accuser had privately told them the story years ago, but Franken nevertheless tried to deny that it ever happened. The “all these women are liars” defense has worked before, but the Democrats are trying to claim the high ground in a political moment where we start taking accusers seriously. Franken is a major obstacle to that plan.
It’s certainly unlucky for Franken that he’s the guy left holding the bag for activities that people have been getting away with for years, but he has nobody to blame but himself.
The other day, I was catching up on Sam Harris’s podcast and listening to his interview of Kurt Andersen from November 8 of this year. At one point, they were discussing who the Democrats might run in 2020 against Trump, and amusingly enough, Al Franken was the name to come up, with Andersen outright saying “No disrespect to Senator Franken, but he’s kind of the Democratic Donald Trump.” He had no idea just how on-point he was! Though given that Franken just resigned today, maybe he wasn’t so on-point.
I’m ambivalent on Franken as a politician or as a potential Democratic POTUS in 2020, but it does worry me that the punishments he’s facing seem to be the result of a reaction not to his specific bad actions but rather the bad actions of others. This is intrinsically bad, in the sense that it’s unnecessary harm to Franken himself, but I also wonder to what extent the Democrats are unnecessarily kneecapping our shot at taking back the White House with this. My intuition is that Franken was a long shot for the White House anyway (though back in 2013 I also would have thought Trump was a long shot for the White House), but the bigger concern to me is that I could easily see this sort of self-sabotaging behavior occurring in other contexts to other politicians when it comes to the Democratic party.
How much of it, in either party, is really infighting–one faction within the party using such accusations to eliminate a strong player in a rival faction?
There is speculation in some circles that Kirsten Gillibrand orchestrated Franken’s ouster in order to bolster her feminist cred for a 2020 run. I don’t totally buy it but she’s one to watch out for – she’s like a younger Hillary Clinton, except she has some actual charisma.
I’ve recently been looking into Ernst Haeckel, and I’m curious about what he may have written about how he thought about making his wonderful engravings.
There seems to be a fair amount of material in English about him and science (major early Darwinist), philosophy, artistic influence, and whether he was a proto-Nazi, but nothing turned up about how he approached making images. Perhaps he never wrote about it, perhaps it hasn’t been translated, perhaps I just haven’t found it.
I’m not saying he’s the first person I’d bring back from the past, but I’m sure he’d be fascinated by more recent biology and probably have something worth saying about it. And he’d make more art!
I have a long post about the economics of drug prohibition, which I thought might be of interest to other SSC-ers.
Drug prohibition attempts to increase the cost of drug use such that we deter users. But if you factor in the cost paid by those who continue to use (even granting that the higher cost manages to deter some users), you will find this to be a losing game. Upping the penalty doesn’t help, because the costs paid by the continuing users is higher than the “savings” for those who are deterred from drug use. I feel like prohibition advocates are making inconsistent assumptions about the rationality of drug users, as if users are oblivious to the (pharmacological) costs of drug use, but suddenly become supremely responsive to the (legal) costs of drug use. You can square this circle by making weird assumptions about how they treat different kinds of costs very differently, but that seems really ad hoc and comes off sounding like special pleading. If you make consistent assumptions about drug users’ demand elasticity/rationality, drug prohibition looks like a bad idea. Whether you buy my conclusions or not, this is a useful way to think about the issue.
Even granting that it’s a good idea to deter drug use, a system of taxes and user-licensing within a legal regime would save society a lot of costs. A legal penalty, like police harassment or jail time, is like imposing a tax on a good and then throwing away the revenue. With an actual tax, at least society at large can potentially collect the value of the added cost imposed on drug users.
I think it makes more sense to directly target the bad behaviors supposedly attributable to drug use, but if it’s desirable to directly deter drug use there are more humane ways of doing it than prohibition. I very much doubt we would have seen this recent rash of fentanyl-related “heroin” overdoses if people could buy pharmaceutical-grade heroin from a licensed pharmacist. We’d have more potential levers of control on drug addiction and overdose issues if there were a legal market.
Making something illegal isn’t about increasing the price, it’s about making it clear that society does not approve of that action.
It is fair to draw a distinction between financial cost of a socially approved transaction, and the social cost of a prohibited action. It’s expected that people will respond differently to social disapproval than they would to a simple price increase.
The best argument for drug prohibition is the argument against it. Atomised market society is bad society, basing our laws upon those principles makes everyone unhappy. Ban drugs for meta-ethical reasons.
On the object level, we should also take into account how damn annoying drug users are. Not just because they commit more crime, but because they stink of drug smells, talk a load of rubbish, make noise, leave drug paraphernalia around and influence others with their selfish hedonism. I would pay a lot of money to live somewhere where there were no drugs, or at least I couldn’t see any obvious signs of them, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Children of drug users?
All of this must also be taken into account also.
I am pretty much universally opposed to policies that are interested in “sending a message” regardless of whether there are any further benefits. They may make those sending the message feel better about getting to vent, but the messages are essentially never received as intended, and indeed quite frequently end up having the opposite of hoped for effects. But, of course, if people are committed to the policies regardless of the effects, because of the “message,” they will remain committed to the policies even when it becomes clear that they make things worse. Which is what seems to happen. Perhaps I am just too much of a consequentialist, but I find all of this insane.
I can think of cases where a change in the law, and accompanying propaganda, has led to changes in attitudes and behaviour.
The thing is, the main thrust of cultural change has been in the direction of individualistic liberalism. People don’t respond to punishment, because they receive alternative cultural signals. Signals telling them that society doesn’t agree with punishment.
I think individualistic liberalism is wrong, because it can actually only operate as a cultural/social phenomena. It’s a culture war, where one of the competing cultures pretends it isn’t a culture.
That’s why I want to punish drug use. Because the arguments for it are all about individualistic liberalism, and accepting those arguments means losing a battle in the culture war.
Okay, but we tax alcohol and tobacco in a way that suggests disapproval relative to other consumables, without needing to throw smokers and drinkers in jail. And in any case, if the expresses its disapproval of action A by enforcing policy B which makes the harms of action A worse and adds extra harms of its own, which is what GregS is arguing, then it would still be better to just not express that disapproval.
Well, that’s also true of legal drug users whom almost no one seriously proposes to (re-)criminalise – drunk people are often annoying, tobacco smoke smells at least as unpleasant as cannabis smoke (and really, the ‘smelly’ complaint only really applies to cannabis in the first place; most other currently illegal drugs are usually not smoked, and cannabis is the one drug where the harms caused by prohibition are most obviously disproportionate to the risks inherent in the drug itself). Heroin-injecting paraphernalia lying around is a distressing problem, but it is one made worse by the economics of the market pushing users towards injection (if everyone could just buy smokable opium, I’d expect a lot less injecting, though I don’t know what opium smells like so can’t say whether it would fall afoul of your other criteria), plus safe injection sites can do a lot to get needles off the streets.
Also, because of the fact of prohibition, you only notice the most annoying minority of drug users, because everyone else who has the sense to keep their use private will not be visible to you. By all means, continue to criminalise geniunely antisocial behaviours, enact zoning laws within which people may not use or sell particular drugs, but unless you have good evidence that the behaviours you complain of are the behaviour of the typical user, rather than the annoying tail of the distribution, you cannot reasonably claim that we should punish all users to curb the antisocial behaviour, rather than just punishing the antisocial behaviour directly.
Well, sure, if you and your neighbours want a dry village, or a dry region of a city or whatever, I don’t have a problem with that, as long as people have full exit rights, and those that do want to experience altered states of consciousness also have somewhere to go.
Don’t confuse worst case scenarios with typical cases – and also don’t forget that prohibition disproportionately drives off the people whose use of drugs would be least likely to be problematic in the first place. If someone neglects their child entirely because they spend all day either on heroin or committing crimes to buy heroin, sure, those children are almost certainly better off being taken into care. But if someone likes to relax with a joint after work, and once the kids are in bed, or the occasional capsule of MDMA at a concert or whatever, then throwing that person in jail, or even just damaging their future earning potential with an arrest record, is almost certainly going to be worse for their kids than just leaving them alone.
I know DrBeat gets a lot of pushback around here for framing everything in terms of the popular people punishing the unpopular people for being unpopular, but really, the War on Drugs makes more sense if viewed as a vehicle for allowing the popular drug users to punish the unpopular drug users for using unpopular drugs, than if viewed as a policy that is actually rationally tailored towards maximising any defensible public health goals.
This is definitely not true for me. I don’t like the smell of tobacco smoke, but it’s pretty easy to ignore. I’m hard pressed to think of a time when I smell marijuana smoke where it doesn’t make me feel like gagging, and actually gag in a few instances.
(I actually didn’t know what marijuana smelled like before moving to Portland and having to deal with people reeking of it on the train. The first time I smelled it on somebody, I really thought they had been sprayed by a skunk.)
I actually like the smell of tobacco smoke. It’s the residual smell that clings to your clothes for a couple days after you’ve been around people who’re smoking — ash? tar? — that’s really repulsive.
Marijuana smoke smells worse in the moment but doesn’t leave the same residue.
Apparently this is one of the many areas where tastes vary. Tobacco smoke definitely bothers me more than marijuana smoke.
I second Protagoras.
I’m not sure this is quite true. A lot of tobacco and alcohol taxes end up embedded into the price, such that the price is basically a black box for the consumer, who has no idea what the taxes actually are. For all they know, cigarettes are just naturally really expensive.
There is a tradition of using alcohol and tobacco that isn’t really embedded in ideas of liberalism.
If people were arguing for use of DMT because they wanted to become shamans or something, or smoking of cannabis in some specific cultural setting, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with them. I disagree with the idea that we should legalise drugs because individuals want to do it.
Individuals want to do what they are told to do, the correct place for rational decision making isn’t the individual within a society. The society comes first, the individual later. So what kind of society do we want?
I don’t have a problem either, actually. It just doesn’t seem very likely.
Yeah, bad parents – maybe. I don’t know what things would be like if we lived in a society that took responsibility seriously. Or if we managed to create a society amongst the lower-echelons that did.
@Mark, signaling societal disapproval *is* a means of raising the price of drugs. If it’s a cost big enough to deter potential users, then surely it’s a cost big enough to harm continuing users. That’s largely my point. If this cost is “in play” in the sense of affecting behavior, we should count it as harm in both places. There are far less costly ways to signal disapproval. You can make something “illegal” without having draconian penalties (or *any* legally specified penalties) or even a budget for enforcement (like marijuana in the Netherlands, technically illegal but with practically no enforcement). Or just have congress pass a toothless resolution.
“It is fair to draw a distinction between financial cost of a socially approved transaction, and the social cost of a prohibited action.”
Yes, it’s fair to talk about different flavors of “costs,” and in fact my post does this. What seems ad hoc is to suppose that people don’t respond to costs (like the pharmacological/social risks of developing a drug habit) but then respond powerfully to other costs (like social disapproval or actual legal penalties).
I feel like I preempted much of your comment in my post, even in my short summary of it posted here.
“All of this must be taken into account.”
I feel like I tried to do this, my apologies if it wasn’t very clear. I certainly didn’t duck any of these issues.
I pretty much second Protagoras and Winter Shaker’s responses. +1 to what Winter Shaker says about the most annoying drug users being the most visible. You don’t notice the ones who never develop nasty habits. If legalization led to a significant increase in use, the new users would look more like the invisible/non-problematic users, probably not like the visible self-harming users.
Legal prohibitions are, fundamentally, a way of shifting demand rather than a way of increasing costs.
Conscientious people will desire drugs less if the society that surrounds them tells them it is naughty. The cost is just a signal that indicates that society is serious.
(I don’t think you can achieve the same effect with nominal illegality but practical legalisation. People won’t take it seriously.)
So, the costs of punishment falls upon the unconscientious. That’s a good thing. Unconscientious people should be punished.
I would say that a cost has to have some kind of subjective psychological basis. It seems entirely likely that people will respond differently to different types of costs. Like the guys in the First World War.
People put social pressure on them, and they ended up living in mud for 4 years, getting bits blown off them, and inhaling poison gas.
How would you model the First World War, if not people discounting the physical risks, while responding heavily to social pressure?
Your post talks about anti-social behaviour that is already illegal – I’m talking about annoying behaviour that isn’t illegal. Perhaps it’s just far easier to ban drugs than it is to make being weird and smelly illegal. Those are significant externalities of drug use that it might not be easy to charge for directly.
I think you’re defining “nasty habit” as “other illegal behaviours”. I don’t see why new users shouldn’t be equally likely to engage in non-illegal but still annoying activities.
You could just as well say that legal prohibitions are a way of lowering the expected value of undesired behavior and that putting out propaganda saying something’s naughty is a way of creating social cost. I’m just not sure it predicts anything in the wild; either way it’s a statement about models, not about reality.
What’s paying rent here?
From my post, quoting and linking to another post that discusses these issues in more detail:
I still feel like I’ve anticipated and preempted this point. Granted it’s a long post, so it’s understandable to have missed it on the first pass.
My post explicitly shows a shifting demand curve. I go on to discuss high-cost and low-cost ways of accomplishing this shift. One can talk about “shifting the demand curve” or “raising the cost” but you don’t fundamentally get to a different answer just by using different words to describe it.
Social censure as cost. Conscientious people feel this strongly, and therefore don’t pay it, since taking drugs becomes unattractive. Unconscientious people don’t feel it, therefore they don’t pay it. Social censure is a free lunch, but conscientious people have to believe that society actually believes in censure, otherwise their conscientiousness will lead them to follow these real social signals (and ignore what is said).
If we don’t punish those who are unconscientious, we lose the ability to use this wonderful social censure tool to make society a better place.
If we decide that being smelly and weird is one of the negative effects of drug taking, and we therefore decide to punish people who are smelly and weird, we are also going to be punishing people who happen to be smelly and weird.
If we punish drug users, we are punishing people who choose to make themselves smelly and weird. The fact that they are selfish is a key reason to punish them.
We punish people because we often cannot make back the costs of their behaviour, and because it makes people happy to see justice be done, for the evil to suffer. It makes me incredibly happy to see bad people go to prison. That’s why we have punishment.
It makes me feel sad to see people paying their way out of trouble, because often it’s impossible to reverse the damage that has been done, at any cost. The cost of growing up with a horrible drug addict can’t be undone, certainly not from the income of the average drug user, so you end up with a de facto prohibition for all but the wealthiest, but lose the lovely social censure free lunch, and see selfish rich people prosper.
So. Key points. Normal people get happy when they see punishment of bad people. That’s why we have it.
Social censure can be a free lunch if conscientious people think that society is being serious.
The greatest externality of drug use is the motivation and mentality of the people who engage in it – this can’t be recouped by anything but a massive tax which would result in de facto prohibition, but in order to maintain social censure, it’s better to just ban it for all.
Applying social censure also costs. “Society” has a deep well of standing for applying censure, but that water table is is not infinitely renewable. As censure is applied in ways that more and more people privately consider unfair or odious, the wells start running dry.
This is problematic, because there are other places where that censure is the primary bulwark of civilization and of personal safety and trust. Society has overspent in censuring personal drug use, and so thus more and more people are being less persuaded when social censure is applied in other places.
As I think about it, this is even more worrysome, since the mechanisms of the culture war are powered by social censure, which sinks more wildcat wells into that water table, and drains away more and more of society’s credibility to do that censuring.
I have known two people who drank a lot–whether alcoholics in some technical sense I don’t know. Both had successful careers and, so far as I could tell, successful families.
That suggests two possibilities for the problems you mention. One is that they are a result of drugs being illegal. The other is that the drug use is itself the result of psychological problems that would manifest unpleasantly even without the drugs.
Those are only possibilities–it could be that many drug users have terrible lives and wouldn’t if the drugs were not available. But I don’t think the mere fact that there are drug users with terrible lives is sufficient evidence. There are, after all, non-drug users with terrible lives too.
@DavidFriedman Well said. I’ve said before that it might be more useful to think of these social problems as bad habits interacting with poor conscientiousness, rather than assuming that everyone who imbibes rolls the same dice and incurs a fixed probability of becoming a problem user. Most people probably face something like zero chance of becoming addicts, others a substantially higher chance. It’s worth pondering that perhaps low-contentiousness/low-impulse-control individuals, likely to have problems for other reasons, might be disproportionately attracted to drugs. A naïve observer might see this spurious correlation and draw the wrong conclusions about causation here. I’ve heard Maia Szalavitz call this “the clinician’s error,” as in the clinician sees a bunch of addicts (without seeing any of the far more numerous non-problem users) and assumes drugs are more dangerous than they really are.
I used to be more like you. Now, not so much.
First of all, I have enough older relatives who discovered first hand how shit opiates are at dealing with of chronic pain, and how effective (and CHEAP) agricultural cannabinoids are at doing it.
Two, I all but guarantee there are high functioning users of LSD, MDMA, and Ketamine in your larger extended social groups, that you would and will never know, and who very much do not “stink of drug smells, talk a load of rubbish, make noise, leave drug paraphernalia around and influence others with their selfish hedonism”.
If you don’t want drugs about, don’t have them in your own house. Everything else is none of your business.
When your knees, hips, and back start to give out, and your hands start to hurt, by all means, no cannabinoids for you. Ever. Can you precommit to that, now?
There are neighborhoods where I have to be on guard walking my dog because the heroin addicts leave their used syringes on the ground. I want those people locked up, which can be a rehab center as far as I care. Just lock them somewhere so the streets are safe.
Yeah, they leave used needles in the parks, little drug bags outside the schools, etc. etc.
Just completely selfish. Will legalising drugs and accepting the sovereignty of the individual – “no such thing as society” – make people less, or more selfish?
I say we’ve found a good way to identify the worst of the worst – send them to Mars or something.
If we also had private property enforcement this would not be an issue. Addicts and other wastes of human life could be physically removed. There’s no problem with heroin addicts leaving their needles on the ground in gated communities, and it’s not because the law, vis-a-vis heroin is any different there than it is in public parks in San Francisco.
@Matt M
You can’t enforce laws against homeless addicts; they have more powerful patrons than ordinary people.
The gated communities manage to keep them away somehow…
@Matt M
Well, yeah, that’s where the patrons live.
Make it a prescription pill or something else sufficiently clinical/dissocial. Medical treatment is not a hobby; I don’t go into the pharmacy and talk to the pharmacist about what strain of Tylenol is the best or purchase Tylenol paraphernalia.
I don’t even have much against pot smoking, for the usual libertarian reasons, but the whole “ohhhh medical marijuana, wink wink nudge nudge, say no more” schtick is profoundly dishonest. You want medicine, treat it like medicine. Treat it like a recreational drug and don’t be shocked when people question the medical need for it.
I use a compounding pharmacy. I do, in fact, talk to my pharmacist about what syrup and binders to use, and which active ingredients to use, even for my OTC cold and headache meds.
I don’t know if she can legally compound from cannabis tincture yet, but if she can’t, it will be soon.
Re demanding it be given to you in a “prescription pill or something else sufficiently clinical/dissocial”, probably with a billion dollar pharma rain dance behind it, it’s attitudes like that contribute to the “cost disease” that Scott has talked about before. You want a bottle of pills that you pay a 5$ copay for, that your employers insurance company pays 1000$ for, that some team of pharma chemists have spent a billion dollars on trying to figure out how to get it to to numb the pain in your back, without accidentally making you TOO happy and giggly as a side effect.
Or, coming at it another way, you insisting that it’s a medicine worthy of social permission only if it’s in a brightly colored pill in a plastic orange safety bottle with a funny brand name is a weird and is a WEIRD way of compartmentalizing, and little to do with underlying concrete reality.
Full disclosure, I’ve smoked pot twice in my life. Yes, I inhaled. The rising euphoria was amusing, the pain in my lungs less so. I haven’t since, despite it now being trivial for me to get legally.
Utter crap. There is such thing as generics. I can go buy a box of cold medicine for $15 and no third parties are involved. My objection, which you have completely ignored, is to the dishonesty involved in presenting recreational cannabis as a medical need.
So brave.
To reiterate, since you clearly didn’t read it the first time:
ETA response to your edit:
I think it’s a view shared by much of society that medicine is not supposed to be Fun!, it’s supposed to make you not-sick. If you want to take something when you aren’t sick, it’s recreational. Wanting recreational substances isn’t inherently negative. Fucking own it.
One, that OTC cold medicine still had a set of FDA rain dances behind it, that probably all told cost over a billion dollars.
Two, so, you want to buy your pot painkiller from Walgreens instead of the local pot shop? That’s not going to happen until a pharm drops the billion dollars. Two-and-a-half, and you want it OTC from Walgreens? LOL. Now you ARE smoking it! That’s not going to happen until another 30 years have passed, and another few billion dollar rain dances.
Besides, the legal pot shops *already* sells cannabis tincture extract infused into sugar and then wrapped up to look like an OTC pill. For a few bucks a pill. Have at it.
And so you completely invisible the growing cohort of people who are very much not members of drug counterculture who have discovered that the pot shops have the only treatment that works and that has ever worked for them. And as I said upthead, many of those people are relatives of mind, none of whom are or ever were recreational pot heads.
Also ref the upthread comment about Red Tribe exemplars in Missouri complaining about the lack of medicinal pot there.
Know what’s REALLY funny? There are two very large cohorts of deeply Red Tribe people who, because of their job histories, tend to suffer a lot of chronic pain, and who talk to each other, and who are very politically active: retired police officers, and retired combat vets.
In another venue I lurk on under another alias, I’ve been watching younger cops, older cops, retired cops, retired vets, and “corrections officers” become very heated with each other on this topic.
I don’t go to different shops for cold meds, digestive aids, and first aid supplies. Why should painkillers (one type of painkiller, even) be so special? Joe’s DayQuil Shop would not last long because people don’t make a hobby of taking cold meds. Pot shops are viable because there’s a recreational culture around it.
Thanks, but I don’t have a medical need.
Look, I agree, it’s stupid that Walgreens doesn’t stock cannabis extract painkiller right next to the aspirin. In a less stupid world, there wouldn’t have been the stupid multiaxal moral panic and demonization of the stuff a century ago, and today medications that used it would be as unproblematic as aspirin, and smoking pipeweed would be something done by weird old men over games of backgammon.
But we don’t live in that less stupid world, and the pot shops and the patchwork legalization with a lot of hypocracy is the both the lowest energy path back to sanity on this topic, and is probably the ONLY path back to sanity on this point.
And I reiterate, I no longer think that the “medicial” figleaf is entirely a hypocritical figleaf. The shit works, and people don’t have time to wait in pain, and their unwillingness to wait *IS* the energy source that is driving this path back to sanity.
Anecdotal, but I’ve noticed a distinct and startling upswing in people taking exactly the same pro-marijuana-for-pain-management-and-fuck-opioids line around here.
Maybe I’m wrong, but when you’ve got a bunch of middle-aged church-going types who are about the most central example of “Red Tribe” you could think of being bitter about the lack of medical marijuana in Missouri, I feel like we’re turning the corner on this issue as a nation.
Drug prohibition is going to be less effective on drug addicts but it’s going to be most effective on marginal users, that is, the number of people who decide to try a drug out for the first time. With prohibition, most rational people are going to decide that doing one of these isn’t worth the costs, regardless of the benefits. Yes, drug prohibition hasn’t brought down the number of users to zero but that doesn’t mean it is a failure.
“zero drug users” isn’t my standard for success. I’d settle for “passes a cost-benefit test under reasonable assumptions.” Prohibition fails even this low bar.
It’s the irrational users who become society’s problems; presumably these people don’t respond (much) to legal penalties or social disapproval. The rational users, we don’t have to worry about. That’s my point. You can make whatever assumptions you like about user rationality, but under no consistent set of assumptions is prohibition a good idea.
How do you know that it doesn’t pass a cost benefit analysis? Did you actually do an analysis or are you just assuming it wouldn’t?
There is not two distinct “rational” and “irrational” people. It’s a gradient. There is such a thing as marginal customers. Denying that is denying basic economics.
I don’t assume it. It is the conclusion of my argument.
Yes, it’s a gradient. That’s why I’m using demand curves in my argument. The demand curve implicitly captures this gradient: raise the price and you end up with fewer users (and users who use less frequently). Presumably it’s the marginal users who drop out first, and the more dedicated users who remain undeterred. I actually have a long discussion of this in my post, and how the social cost rises faster than the population of users falls off.
I think Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy and Michael Grossman nailed the microeconomics on this one. They came to a similar conclusion, being that you have to make heroic assumptions in favor of drug prohibition to resurrect it as “good policy.” You might want to read their paper The Economics of Illegal Goods: The Case of Drugs. Parts of it are dense and very formal, but most of it is readable and very clear-headed.
To steelman the prohibitionist argument; it may be the case that drug pushers are very sensitive to the legal costs of selling drugs. The fact that one has resort to dealing with the criminal classes to acquire heroin, rather than buying it at the local bodega, seems to be evidence in favor of this argument. Though this still doesn’t justify criminalizing mere possession for personal use.
With inelastic demand, the price rises so high that it inevitably attracts illegal suppliers. It appears that drug dealers are willing to endure very high costs to continue being drug dealers. Unless the supply curve has some weird cliff (again all attempts to revive drug prohibition as a good policy look really ad hoc to me), I don’t think this works.
AlphaGo is now better than a human at chess and shogi using basically exactly the same model-free zero knowledge architecture. (Arguably the best in the world at chess, though that’s going to depend heavily on available hardware–most computer chess tournaments use fixed and relatively weak computers by modern standards; AlphaGo needs a slightly beefier (though by no means unreasonable) substrate and some dedicated ASICs. But the fact that it can stand toe to toe with Stockfish is damn impressive.
The part that’s scary (in terms of AI alignment and so on): a number of people, even in forums that are very aware of superhuman AI and generally accept the idea, claimed that AlphaGo Zero was oversold as a general purpose framework. I believe someone either here or the subreddit explicitly made the claim that MCTS would never work well for chess; their given reason was essentially that MCTS can find brilliant moves, but also would insert dumb mistakes into its playouts; they believed that go so rewarded brilliancies that the good playouts could be found and rewarded in reinforcement learning, but that chess would punish the dumb parts of a playout too much. (At the time I rated this as “plausible, but unproven”–I am not a high level go or chess player and have not written battle-tested MCTS code.)
Looks like that’s entirely wrong. Which is both exciting and worrying.
Which human?
If it can beat stockfish, it can beat every human.
Then all is lost.
Strangely enough, chess is more popular than ever even though we’ve moved from it being a game where amateurs could understand and evaluate top level games to one where the cutting edge of play is inscrutable machines making moves that even the best humans don’t try to mimic. (Not really on topic, but still interesting to me.)
It was very interesting and you didn’t go off topic so much as bring my little goofy sub-thread back on topic.
@Rob K — any idea why it’s gotten more popular then? Is it just people reading headlines about AlphaGo or are people actually playing more chess now?
Between widely available chess programs and online play, it’s easier than ever to play a game of chess. And it’s easier than ever to find a competitive game, with someone else who is at your level. That last point should not be underestimated. In 1975, if you were an adult who wanted to take up the game, you could play with your family, but the next step up was playing at a club. There even the weaklings had been playing for years, so you faced a long hard climb out of the Pit of Always Losing. This is no longer a problem.
I’d add that, in terms of learning, you can also get engine analysis of your games online immediately after playing them.
Going online, instantly getting matched up with a similar-strength chess player anywhere in the world, and then immediately studying your game with a readout of your mistakes and suggested alternative moves is the some Edward Bellamy Looking Backward utopia shit, now that I think about it.
In the vast universe of tasks that can plausibly be solved by a general purpose AI framework, does the addition of Chess and Shogi to an approach that already plays Go even count as an improvement? There’s reason to believe that alpha-beta pruning would not do well at Go, but — while the hypothesis you describe is prima facie plausible — it’s not particularly shocking to find out that MCTS can also be used effectively for chess.
MCTS is a really really good approach for perfect information strategy games. That’s still far from general purpose.
Transcript of the oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2017/16-111_f314.pdf
I have a question for those that support the bakery owner:
Sometimes there’s a Supreme Court case where the outcome is very politically salient, but supporters of one side don’t agree with the rationale that turns out to be the strongest legal argument.
To give an example, in affirmative action in education the sole justification that the Supreme Court has accepted to justify it is that racial diversity enhances the educational experiance of all students. So any time there’s litigation over the question those on the pro affirmative action side dufully go to the Supreme Court and argue that the really really care about the educational benefits of diversity. But in reality this is not the sole or main reason people support educational affirmative action.
My questions is: is something similar going on here? The strongest argument for the baker is that that his cake baking is expressive activity. Akin to if he were a poet commissioned to write a poem celebrating the couples’ love for each other. Under this rationale there’s nothing at all wrong with the state forcing a staffing company to provide waiters and waitresses to a gay wedding as that’s clearly not expressive. But it is my sense that the out their in the population argument for the baker has more to do with either freedom of association in general or specifically with freedom of religion than it does with freedom of speech. Is that accurate?
For me personally, yes, that is accurate. This is not about speech OR religion, it’s about absolute freedom of association. Not only is “cake-making is expressive” the wrong argument, but “freedom of religion” is also wrong, because even the non-religious should enjoy freedom of association.
That said, I favor increasing liberty at virtually any cost, including using fairly dumb loopholes in the law. The left had no problem with getting Obamacare upheld by arguing it was a tax, even when all of their other utterances on the matter were loud declarations that it was NOT a tax. So I have no problem with “cake making is an expressive art” even though I don’t think that’s actually the relevant issue here at all. If the Supreme Court would actually entertain an argument that might lead to overturning all anti-discrimination law that would be fine by me, but since that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon…
I agree with Matt–specifically his first paragraph.
I would argue further that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are inseparable conjoined twins anyway. Good luck restricting one in a way that doesn’t impinge on the other.
I like to think the Founders knew this and put them in the same amendment for that reason.
It’s definitely possible to restrict freedom of speech without hitting freedom of religion (unless you are counting restrictions on (hypothetical) religions made up to get around freedom of speech laws): libel laws are an obvious example. The other way round is more difficult, but I think it is still theoretically possible: restrictions on e.g. halal slaughter would count.
I think there is some aspect of this.
I also think this is a correct way to point it out. To place the intuition in a non-culture-war context, dial the clock back to pre-Civil War. Assume a state repealed their prohibition on murder or otherwise created a ‘lynching exception’. Not only were fugitive slaves expected to be returned to their owners, but oftentimes, those owners would put together lynching parties upon the return of said slave. They’d invite all their friends, have a big cake with a statue depicting a lynching on top of it, and then proceed to kill the slave and have a celebration about the whole thing. An abolitionist (or just a person who believes in a positive right to life; to dial the culture war back up, imagine abortion parties) probably objects to either being required to bake a decorative cake or to provide waiters/waitresses for such an obviously evil party… but if they happen to be a baker, they’re probably going to press that argument in court if they think it’s more likely to garner five votes.
I don’t even quite know that it’s exactly freedom of association, as Matt M describes. It’s more that people haaaaaate feeling forced to support something they find morally reprehensible, in any way. The “morally reprehensible” part is likely doing enough work here to be the cause of why it’s easy to try to round it off to “freedom of religion”. Anyway, suppose the gov’t, being concerned that wedding cakes might not be readily available to homosexual couples, decided to implement a program which required all bakers to provide cakes to the gov’t. (Assume the gov’t bothers to pay them, so it’s not quite a tax or the National Raisin Reserve.) In turn, the gov’t distributes those cakes to homosexual couples who are getting married. That is the entire purpose of the program. Even though the bakers don’t technically have to associate with any homosexual couples, they know that they’re still being forced to support something they find morally reprehensible, and I think they’d still be upset… whether or not they have a suitable argument against the scheme for the supremes.
(The specificity of the objects required is relevant for many people’s moral calculus. They would probably be less annoyed if some portion of their tax dollars were used for the same program, without a specific requirement for production. After all, tax dollars are fungible and probably used for all kinds of things they hate, and this is a battle everyone lost long ago. It’s similar to the health insurance debates and why people hate being specifically required to directly fund birth control rather than have it provided from the general gov’t coffers.)
I’m not religious or libertarian but I still think freedom of association is a good enough thing on its own to uphold. Yes, there is the “discrimination against black people” argument but I don’t think freedom of association should necessarily be all or nothing.
Curious. What relevant distinction do you see between “discrimination against black people” and “discrimination against gay people”?
1) You’re born black.
2) There’s scant evidence anyone is “born gay.”
3) The baker is not objecting to serving gay people, but to participating in a gay wedding.
4) Discrimination against blacks was a society-wide problem. “Go to another lunch counter” wasn’t a useful solution when lots and lots of lunch counters were “whites only.” On the other hand, “go to another baker” is a simple and readily available solution to the problem as the vast majority of bakers will gladly take your money for your gay cake. Hell, tell ’em a sob story about the evil Christian who wouldn’t bake your gay cake and you’ll probably get a discount, or a free cake.
5) I have a sneaking suspicion this is more about sticking it to Christians than it is about standing up for gays. I strongly suspect that if homosexuals tried to commission a gay wedding cake from a Muslim bakery and the Muslims said “we are so sorry, we cannot do this as it is against the will of Allah” they would say “oh, that’s too bad, we respect your faith and will find another baker” and would be lauded for their tolerance. But because it’s Christians it’s sue, sue, sue.
Do you mean “gay” in the sense “experiences sexual attraction to the same sex” or “has sexual intercourse with the same sex”?
In any case, it’s not true there’s “scant” evidence about the biological basis for homosexuality. It’s true that it’s probably not “genetic”, since that doesn’t even make sense theoretically, but there are numerous studied physical differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals.
Not the same thing and not getting into this again.
I had no idea Lysenkoism survived the fall of the USSR.
2 has been extensively discussed, of course, so I will set that aside and chime in with my extreme skepticism about 5.
Is there a society-wide problem of gays unable to find services for their gay weddings?
If there is, then I could agree the problem is discrimination against gays, and the need for government to stand up for them.
If there isn’t, then it seems the problem is that there exist Christians who will not bake gay wedding cakes, and we need the government to stick it to them.
So, which is it?
Hmmm.
(2) seems irrelevant anyway; I wasn’t born knowing how to program, for example, but the fact that I learned doesn’t justify discriminating against me.
(3) is subjective, it isn’t like the baker has to attend the ceremony. (Unless that’s a thing in America?)
(4) depends on the assumption that everyone lives somewhere where there are lots of wedding cake businesses within easy reach, and where a reasonable proportion of them are likely to be non-religious or moderate. On the face of it this seems unlikely to be true everywhere in America. I assume you disagree?
(I will note that there might be many such businesses that would like to discriminate but are currently too afraid of legal and/or social consequences. That’s just speculation, though. We might find out, I guess.)
Red Tribers, not Christians. You’re absolutely right that a Muslim bakery would probably get a pass, unless the couple also happened to be Muslim, and then it’d be treated as a local dispute, not a tribal issue. But most of the people on the other side of this issue also think of themselves as Christian, and most of those that don’t, do think of themselves as respecting authentic Christianity (viz. what you’d probably think of as a neutered politically correct one). The modal objection to Red Tribe Christianity among Blues is not “there is no god, and Christians suck”, it’s “Jesus didn’t teach selfishness and hate” — whether or not the Blue in question actually believes in Jesus. This ties into the much greater emphasis on hypocrisy in Blue Tribe ethics.
New Atheist types are part of the coalition, but they’re considered an embarrassing fringe position.
@Nornagest: makes blues sound like Quakers in Moldbug’s sense.
I don’t subscribe to a lot of Moldbuggery, but I do think there’s something to his idea that Blue Tribe ethics — one strain of them, at least — are a sublimation or mutation of Puritan ethics.
FWIW objections #4 and 5 have some strong parallels to Rick Hills’ (well respected NYU law professor) take on the case.
For #4 the language he uses is a distinction between material and dignitary harms, and for #5 he suggests a shift in focus to the governmental purpose rather than the purportedly expressive nature of the activity.
His bottom line then takes off in a different direction — he supports a kind of federalism with respect to constitutional rights that is very different from current doctrine — but I’d thought I’d point out his work.
(The spam filter did not like my link. Go to prawfsblawg and look for the first RH post.)
Agreed. I think he’s most correct when revising pre WW2 Anglo-American history and a turgid insinuator when going on about policy.
I don’t think so. No one acts like this when talking about providing services to someone or something they find morally objectionable.
Assume you think neo-nazism is wrong. You own a hotel that neo-nazis would like to rent for a neo-nazi meeting to spread neo-nazi ideas. Would it be unreasonable for you to feel as though renting this space to the neo-nazis for the neo-nazi rally enables neo-nazism? Wouldn’t pang your conscience at all?
How do you feel about boycotts? Lots of people engaged in a boycott of Chik-fil-a restaurants in the US because the owners opposed gay marriage and did not want to enable such people. Were they wrong or foolish to do so?
On the meta level, everyone acts as though providing service to people doing Thing X contributes to Thing X, and if Thing X is objectionable they are either entitled to or required to refuse service to those doing Thing X.
Arguing that baking a cake for a gay wedding does not make you a contributor to or enabler of gay weddings is special pleading. I do not believe anyone would make or accept such an argument if one refused to bake a cake for a nazi party for nazis spreading nazism because they did not want to be party to enabling nazism.
Baking a cake for gay weddings enables gay weddings. Should one be allowed to refuse to do that while still baking cakes for straight weddings or be coerced by government force into doing it is the question.
It certainly wouldn’t pang my conscience. It WOULD pang my conscience if I decided to refuse service to the neo Nazis to hold a neo-Nazi meeting to spread neo-Nazi ideas, though.
I spoke out against those boycotts at the time, and I still object to boycotting Chik-fil-a for the reason of its owners objecting to gay marriage and monetarily contributing to it.
I also think gay marriage is an obvious human right and find the owners of Chik-fil-a to be morally reprehensible for objecting to it.
I would make and accept that argument. I consider Nazis some of the most evil people on the planet, and I consider being gay to be exactly as morally neutral as being straight. But I would find someone refusing to bake a cake for Nazis for the purpose of spreading Nazism because they didn’t want to enable Nazism to be just as reprehensible as someone refusing to bake a cake for gays for the purpose of a gay wedding because they didn’t want to enable a gay marriage.
I admit my opinions may not be common among those on my side.
For the sake of argument, let’s accept that as given. And to draw an analogy with my original question, let’s suppose someone wanted a cake for a party welcoming a black person to their neighbourhood, and the baker refused because they disapproved of black people and white people sharing the same neighbourhood. I think we can also accept as given that US society would consider the baker’s refusal to be unacceptable?
The differences between a gay marriage and a literal Nazi rally in this respect are obvious. What are the relevant differences between gay marriage and letting black people and white people live in the same neighbourhood?
@lvlln
Great. Assume your government bans Nazi symbolism and Nazism, like the government of Germany does. A Nazi comes to your cake shop and says “please bake me this nazi cake for our nazi party to spread nazism.” You would very much like to do this because of your commitment to freedom of expression, but the government will punish you. You are thereby compelled, by government, to violate your conscience.
Now do you understand the objection of the Christian cake bakers who would be compelled, by government, to bake a cake in violation of their conscience?
That society would find it unacceptable isn’t the issue. What you said was that baking the cake doesn’t necessarily contribute to the gay marriage. Of course it does, because that’s the way we treat everything else. I think one has to be deliberately obtuse to not understand “providing service to those performing Thing X contributes to the performance of Thing X.” And this isn’t just colloquially, we have laws about this kind of stuff. You can go to jail for providing material support to terrorists because obviously providing material support to terrorists supports terrorism.
The question is whether or not you should provide service anyway, or be compelled to do it anyway out of a higher purpose.
In lvlln’s case, he would make the nazi cake or rent the hotel to the nazi rally despite hating the nazis, and knowing his actions contribute to the spread of nazism, but because he serves a higher purpose: the protection of freedom of expression and assembly.
Do you deny that renting space for a nazi rally contributes to spreading nazism? If so, do you think someone in prison for selling weapons to terrorists is unjustly imprisoned?
What’s the reason the hypothetical person doesn’t want blacks and whites living in the same neighborhood? Is it just preference, or is there some compelling reason it violates their conscience?
ETA: Oh, and go read the oral arguments. Absolutely no one is arguing that baking the cake doesn’t contribute to the gay wedding except you. You really ought to file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court and let them know the whole point is moot because the cake doesn’t contribute to the performance of the wedding.
No, I said it wasn’t the same as participating in the marriage, which was your original wording. I wouldn’t have objected to “contributing to”. A misunderstanding, I guess.
I’m not sure it matters, because of course they’re going to say that it violates their conscience. They might even be sincere about it; there’s plenty of precedent.
Personally, I find it very hard to believe the defendants in the current case are sincere. It seems much more likely that they just don’t like gays much, and I think the plaintiffs probably felt the same way. But I should really suspend my disbelief, and I think you should seriously consider that the plaintiffs may be sincere as well.
I’m not particularly interested in the legal aspects.
This actually came up in the oral arguments as well. On p. 88, Breyer asks about the situation of someone whose religious beliefs were the same as the KKK’s, such that they objected to the message of racial equality on religious grounds, and the plaintiff’s lawyer, Cole, brings up Piggie Park. Some context:
I think this is one of the most important passages in the oral arguments, as it’s one of the clearest expressions of the argument the plaintiffs are making, but I’m too tired right now to get into it and oh-my-gosh-am-I-not-a-legal-expert.
That aside, though, I think it’s a mistake to speak at all about the sincerity of the religious beliefs. That sounds like an awfully difficult thing to test, and requiring more stringent proof of sincerity would necessarily mis-identify folks who are sincere. The simplest test is to ask whether they are a regular church-goer (let’s suppose they’re Christian) in a tradition with just those beliefs, but that’s easy test for, say, a Catholic while much harder for various Protestant denominations.
There are a few different aspects here, though I’m not sure they change the overall principles on either side:
1) Being black is self-evident. It requires effort to conceal that attribute. Being gay is pretty easy to conceal. If you’re by yourself, no one need know. Even if you’re travelling with your same-sex partner, it’s possibly still more likely that you’re just friends on a road trip together.
2) Importance. There’s a far cry between “nobody will sell me any food or lodging” and “we might have to settle for a supermarket wedding cake”. There’s no requirement for weddings to have cakes. It’s pretty difficult to survive without food or shelter altogether, though.
3) Social/legal acceptance. At the time the Civil Rights Act et al. were passed, there were strong social and legal forces prohibiting cross-race service. Eg. draining of swimming pool after a black woman put a toe in. Right now, same-sex marriage appears to have an majority of support based on polling.
Media organizations have to go desperately out of their way to find counter-examples. See: the rural pizza joint whose junior employee didn’t think that their employer would cater a gay wedding; whatshername – the one county clerk in the country who wouldn’t sign same-sex marriage paperwork.
4) Countervailing forces. Stereotypically, people in the wedding industry are disproportionately likely to be gay. Refusing to make gay wedding cakes means that much of the industry you work will is more likely to take offense and be less likely to direct customers to your business. So businesses who won’t make cakes for gay couples are more likely to face disproportionate business consequences, outside of broader social pressure and boycotts.
There’s an irony in the consequentialist exceptions that many libertarian-inclined people make for the 1960s civil rights legislation that seems rarely noted.
If the standards for intervention are systemic, how should the legal system go about judging whether such intervention is needed in a given area? How far should a gay or black person — or a woman seeking an abortion, for that matter — have to drive for something before the situation is no longer just? Is the standard driven by test court cases, or what?
One of the main reasons we have these deontic laws is because they’re simple. Systemic standards like those that would allow for the ’60s legislation would usually need monitoring and bureaucracy to figure out where to apply them, and the taxation that implies.
For what it’s worth, I don’t make that exception. I think discriminating against blacks (or Jews or short people) should be legal, on freedom of association grounds.
The closest thing to a persuasive argument I have seen on the other side, from Richard Epstein, is that southern discrimination was actually being enforced by southern local governments–if your restaurant let blacks and whites sit together the health inspector might show up–so businesses that didn’t want to discriminate were helped by being able to claim they were being forced not to by the feds.
Yes.
I think this is what you’d call a “Rosa Parks” situation, or at least what I’d call a Rosa Parks situation. Which is to say, this is an engineered point of conflict meant to be as sympathetic as possible and probably meant to set a wider precedent. With that said, I’m basically fine with this because I believe that freedom of association – as long as it does not present an undue burden to those who are dissociated from – is important. I.E., if you can’t buy a cake at half the shops in the city, that might be an issue, but if a few random businesses won’t serve gay marriages then it’s not really a big deal and you can easily find work-arounds. And I don’t think a lot of businesses will decide not to serve gay marriages, so I’m not too worried.
(Also; one can argue that, more than freedom of association, this is freedom of labor or work or whatever. You should have the right to refuse service, more than the right to refuse association. Those are similar and intertwined, but I think it’s worth distinguishing them.)
I’ll amplify AnonYEmous’ point that this is more about freedom of labor to me. I have a strong presumption that coercing someone to perform work for you is wrong. If my neighbor puts a sign up advertising his mowing service and I ask him to mow my yard and he refuses, I don’t think I ought to be able to coerce him to mow my yard. To me, it doesn’t matter what his reasoning is, whether it’s because I said something he didn’t like a week ago, because of my gender or race, or for no stated reason; I don’t think it is right for me to coerce him into performing labor for me since he owns his body and his labor.
The only caveat is if another set of property rights takes precedent. If my HOA–assuming it has gained jurisdiction over the neighborhood in a just way–has rules against discrimination, and each home owner consented to those rules, then it could be just for the HOA to enforce those rules against my neighbor that refuses to mow my lawn. Some people think local, state, or federal governments have just jurisdiction and consent of the governed, such that enforcement of their non-discrimination laws are just, but I haven’t seen compelling justification for these claims.
I just find it bizarre that people in the USA cannot refuse to do business with someone.
There’s a weird sort of totalitarianism in play where the only options people can imagine are that something is compulsory or forbidden.
During segregation, it was forbidden to serve African Americans. If you tried to run an integrated business in many places you were in violation of state and local law.
Now it’s compulsory to serve every protected class. If you don’t try to run an integrated business you’re in violation of federal law.
If someone argues against the latter, it’s seen as equivalent to arguing for the former. There’s no percieved middle ground between “I don’t want to be forced to do this” and “I want to force others not to do this.”
People expected, with good reason, that de jure segregation would simply get replaced by de facto segregation if there wasn’t any legal force backing it up. So a “middle ground” wouldn’t have really solved the problem.
That’s horrible.
Because people didn’t understand that market forces were pushing integration in the south, only to be resisted by state force. A law saying “the states can no longer require segregation” would have ended a lot of segregation almost immediately, and the rest of it slowly over time.
The infamous Plessy vs Ferguson was about a railroad that wanted to integrate its cars (for the purposes of efficiency), but the state law would not allow them to.
@beleester,
This is kind of the attitude that I’m talking about though.
Like think about it in terms of marriage. When there were anti-miscegenation laws, that was a bad thing. If tomorrow Congress laws requiring interracial marriages that would also be a really bad thing!
It’s not the state’s business whether or not people like one another. Once you find yourself “solving” other people’s thoughts and attitudes you’re already way out of line.
I think that in the long run social and economic pressure could have made inroads into de facto segregation, personally, but we’ll never know now and it may well have taken a long time.
That said, how do we -get- to that middle ground now? Do you think that the only way to EVER avoid segregation and cultural/racial discord is through top-down coercion? If so, that to me says that the idea of a multi-racial/multi-cultural society is fundamentally at odds with traditional western liberal principles. I hope that’s not the case.
More like “with human nature”.
It could just mean it needs to be jumpstarted.
@Anonymous
Maybe, but I’m hoping not.
@Incurian
Sure, but history seems to indicate that there are few things more immutable and permanent than “Temporary” measures enacted to correct extreme/emergency issues, which is precisely the problem I think we now have.
I don’t disagree, but that is a different argument. I’m not sure if I’m being nitpicky here or if that is an important distinction. Feedback would be appreciated.
I actually think the ‘artistic expressiveness’ is the important part of the argument. Otherwise, where would you draw the ‘association’ line?
Would it be OK if the bakers had refused to sell a gay man a donut? Or a large box that will be the centerpiece at their wedding later in the day?
What if the bakers had refused to decorate a plain birthday cake with “Happy 60th” for a gay customer?
Can the bakers refuse a commission on a wedding cake for a straight couple because they’d have to work with a gay wedding planner to create it?
I wouldn’t support business owners in the above situations – they strike me as outright discrimination. But I’m sympathetic to the bakers at the supreme court, and I think the “artistic expression” factor is the reason why.
Whereas I would support them in every case. It’s their shop, it’s their goods, and if they don’t want to do business with someone for any reason, including no reason, that’s it.
This is an excellent post, Brad. My only complaint is that you shouldn’t have linked the oral arguments; I went and read the whole thing at work when my boss disappeared after lunch. 😀
I’ve read the rest of the replies and it looks like there are people coming at this from all angles, which is nice to see, because I’m going to come at it from yet another angle…. I’m personally neutral on the question of freedom of association. It’s certainly an elegant solution to questions like this, and to the pursuit of private goods in general, but I’m concerned about the implications for the common good. At the risk of being eviscerated by Matt M, David Friedman, or others, I find it telling that there’s no mention thus far of public accommodation, which I see as a potential (and prima facie reasonable) corrective to the most serious excesses of freedom of association (to take an extreme example, all the grocery stores in your town refusing to serve you).
I’m not very sympathetic to the argument based on expression as was made. A number of concerns were raised: how to distinguish between what’s speech and what’s expressive, between what’s expressive and what’s not, and so on. I don’t know enough about the tests being discussed, and it’s been about five years since I’ve read any free speech cases anyway, so I’m not going to weigh in on whether they were being interpreted correctly or not—though you’re welcome to give your opinion as to the quality of these tests and their application if you like, Brad, that would be really interesting—but I’m surprised that Waggoner and Francisco are so quick to conclude that, yeah, sure, a chef or a hair stylist or whoever else is not protected. I’m surprised that a line like the following isn’t being drawn (this is totally open to criticism): a commissioned work such as a custom cake, a custom wedding dress, even a special restaurant dish I suppose, is a work of art of a different kind than those designed for mass consumption* (no pun intended). This explains why 1) Phillips was not willing to bake a cake for the couple, while 2) he did offer them any other cake in the shop, and 3) a chef probably shouldn’t be able to object to cooking the number five while 4) he may well object to cooking some kind of special performance dish for a guest of honor. This still raises a question about the makeup artist or the hair stylist—I’m still not sure about those, because I don’t know the kind of artistry that might be involved, but I think it’s at least plausible that it could be protected too.
This is at a tangent, but the most interesting element in all this to me, and something I only learned from reading the oral arguments you linked, is that the Civil Rights Commission did not choose to pursue the three cases in which a cake shop refused to bake cakes with messages hostile to same-sex marriage. Was there something more involved in those?—were the messages hate speech of some kind, or was this more like a cake with a quotation of Matthew 19:4-5? I found it difficult to take the questions over whether the commission had a bias until these were mentioned; depending, again, on the details of said cases—cakes—cases and cakes—they make the charge of bias a lot more plausible. But again, while that might be enough to decide this particular case, it’s really at a tangent as to what legal principles ought to otherwise apply to this situation.
*I don’t have a good argument for this, but to support the intuition: buying, say, a print of Pollock is a different thing than asking Pollock to paint something for you, don’t you think? Even putting on pre-order a limited edition print from Pollock (well, okay, he’s dead, so zombie Pollock) is a different thing than commissioning a painting, don’t you think?
Does it split into positive-rights/negative-rights? I can empathize with a “You are free from laws preventing association, but you don’t have freedom from laws compelling it” stance.
(I’ve got limited confidence whether that actually does fall under positive/negative differences, would appreciate correction if not)
That position is possible, and it does seem to match the sorts of laws we have now that we’ve desegregated, but offhand I can’t think of a rationale for it, apart from an appeal to something more fundamental like public accommodation.
Perhaps because this is a made up concept that holds no particular weight with any serious thinker, and depends on the obviously ludicrous logic that in order to exercise some rights (the right to trade with others), you must give up other rights (the right to freely associate). The doctrine of “public accommodation” makes no sense and should be abolished, as it is inherently antithetical to free association. I should not have to receive the state’s permission or accept it’s preconditions in order to trade with others, including “the public.”
I only meant it was telling in the sense that free association without public accommodation straightforwardly leads to the answer which you and others have given to this, while with it the answer is potentially different, or else much harder to come to; I didn’t mean anything else by it, although I see now that a plain reading would be condescending, and I’m sorry if I offended. That aside, though, I don’t understand how a right to trade coheres with a right to free association; if trade is always voluntary, there’s potentially no one for you to trade with, while if trade is not always voluntary, you’re in the genus to which public accommodation ostensibly belongs. I’m sure I’m raising a pretty 101 objection to ancap here, but that’s why I invited you and David to eviscerate me. 🙂
@Nick
I think before you even get to what you need to figure out who. In this particular case you have a very small business and so there aren’t a lot of different whos running around. The baker is also the owner is also the one taking the order.
But to see how you can get down to the level on an individual employee, consider Employment Division v Smith. That was an important religious liberties case. The plaintiff was a native american that had been fired from his job for smoking peyote. He applied for unemployment benefits and was turned down because he had be fired for cause. He sued claiming that denying him unemployment benefits for having been fired for having smoked peyote violated his freedom of religion.
As it turns out he lost case, but not because he wasn’t a proper plaintiff or because the court rejected the logic of the denial of unemployment benefits being causally related to religious freedom. Rather he lost because the court changed the standard of review such that a facially neutral law not intended to target religious practice would pass muster even if substantially burdened religious practice.
So going back to your proposed rule: does it apply to the individual chef or dressmaker or only the owner of the establishment? And on the flip side does it apply to the owner of the establishment if he isn’t also the chef or dressmaker? What about if it is a giant company (a la Hobby Lobby) — and there isn’t any single owner? Does that make a difference?
If you think there are no serious thinkers except radical libertarians, then sure these questions are easy. But for the other seven some odd billion of us it’s a bit tougher.
—
In terms purely of the strength of legal arguments in the light of current precedents, both the religious freedom arguments and the general freedom of association arguments are terribly weak. Religious freedom because of the case mentioned above (which happens to have been authored by Scalia) and the freedom of association angle because in a commercial context it is better thought of as liberty of contract and the Lochner doctrine died in the New Deal. And in case there was any doubt as to the latter, cases from the Civil Rights Era decisively put them to rest.
As I alluded to in the OP, that just leaves free speech. It’s not the greatest fit in the world, and is a bit of a tough sell, but it is certainly plausible (consider for example that the Supreme Court has held nude dancing to be expressive conduct.) But it shows why hair dressing or cooking hypos were abandoned so quickly. Those are clearly outside the ambit of freedom of speech.
Brad,
This is helpful, thanks. I recall Employment Division v Smith coming up in the arguments, but I haven’t read that one, and I see the relevance now. So if I understand the challenge right, the law, if facially neutral, may substantially burden an employee for religious reasons, with the result that a state may choose to accommodate Phillips in a case like this, but is not required to. Skimming the wiki summary, it looks like exemptions are therefore granted under a sort of “hybrid right,” so that the religious exemptions are really protections of other freedoms, like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly, or wherever individual consideration is required. So I suppose that to make it a religious freedom case, it needs to be a free speech case or something anyway.
I’m not sure the direct relevance to whether the person is employer vs employee. Is the idea that we need to determine whose speech or expression is being potentially compelled? Prima facie I’d suggest the baker, the dressmaker, the chef, etc, and not the shop, dress store, or restaurant. Or is the idea that the exemption only makes sense where the company is identified with the baker or baker’s family or whatever, because public accommodation applies to the company while religious exemption applies to the person? Sorry, I would normally look into this more and having a clearer idea what’s going on here before posting, but I’ve really got to run soon; I’ll be back on later though.
It was interesting reading the oral arguments (although I only got to page 13), because they talk about what I think is the pertinent issue. If the gay couple comes to the store and says they want a cake that says “To the happy couple of Bob and Joe,” I certainly think the bakery shouldn’t be obligated to decorate the cake that way if they believe that gay relationships are sinful. If the gay couple comes in and asks to buy a cake sitting on the shelf and requests no more decoration, denying that sale probably does go against the usual rules of public accommodation. And it seems the litigator on behalf of the bakery agrees with that interpretation. The liberals on the bench seemed to be surprised that the bakery was limiting their argument so much. It would be great if the court ruled 9-0 for the bakery under that interpretation, but that is probably to much to ask for.
I don’t think this is so much artistic vs non-artistic as creating customization in favor of a particular view one finds anathema. It seems terrible to me to force a baker to create something specifically for a cause they dis-believe in.
The fact pattern isn’t quite that clear. The plaintiffs didn’t come in and say we want a cake that says “To the happy couple of Bob and Joe” and the defendants didn’t say you can have anything you want except a cake that says “To the happy couple of Bob and Joe” (or equivalent). Ruling that such refusal would be protected by the First Amendment wouldn’t dispose of the case before them. Unless, I suppose, they ruled that *only* that such a refusal would be protected in which case AFAICT the bakers would lose, not win. Albeit perhaps on remand rather than immediately.
The plaintiffs didn’t come in and say they wanted a specific cake because they didn’t get quite that far in the original visit, but there’s evidence they had a specific cake in mind since the cake they ended up going with was a rainbow one, and there’s evidence that the defendant would not have refused them any of the pre-made (usual at least) cakes. Rereading it, Waggoner is less decided on the question of a pre-made specific cake (say, one with a Bible verse on it), claiming at pp. 9-10 that the Court could plausibly extend their existing compelled speech protections to cover a pre-made specific cake, but that their argument for the baker doesn’t depend on the Court doing this (they’re fine either way on that one). Waggoner also suggests that a plain cake may still fall under speech, but I take it that this is where we run into questions of art-as-speech and then the analogies to the makeup artist or chef or hair stylist become relevant.
To illustrate, as I understand it, Waggoner (I haven’t rechecked Francisco) is arguing that the defendant is compelled to sell a plain cake in the window, and he’s possibly even compelled to sell a pre-made cake that says e.g. “God blesses this union” unless the Court wishes to extend their test to protect that, but he is not compelled to sell an unmade cake with speech of that sort, or even, more dubiously, an unmade plain cake. Going back to the original circumstances, then, while there’s evidence they wanted a special cake, the plaintiffs haven’t actually said so, and are hardly required to, hence Waggoner’s need to fashion an argument to protect even a plain cake.
Less to the point, Kennedy’s questions in the first half were pretty sharp, and he’s certainly concerned about the dignity of gay couples—he doesn’t want to author an opinion which allows e.g. “gays need not ask” signs in the store windows or something—but he seemed concerned as well about the implications for religious folks in the plaintiff’s oral arguments. I was pessimistic going in, but I’m willing to bet 60-40 that the case is decided in favor of the defendants. If it does, though, I doubt it will be on the strength of the defendant’s actual arguments.
After reading both the oral arguments and the prawfsblawg article Brad linked in another part of this thread, I think they need to address Colorado’s purpose in enacting this law. It clearly was not enacted to protect material interests of gays, as there is no dearth of available cakes for gay weddings.
In fact at the time it was passed and the dispute between Phillips and the complainants took place, gay weddings weren’t even legal in Colorado. So if the couple were to walk into the county clerk’s office and say “hi, we’d like a gay marriage certificate,” the government would have refused them service, but when they walk into the cake shop and asked for a gay wedding cake, refusing them was verboten.
So it comes down to dignity. It is an affront to the dignity of the gays to direct them elsewhere for their cake. However, it is also an affront to the dignity of the Christian baker to compel him to enable behavior against his religion. prawfsblawg’s position is an extreme federalism that would defer to the state: each state gets to decide whose dignity is most important.
I disagree with this for two reasons. One is that our constitution does not equally weight religion and sexual orientation. One is explicitly spelled out in the very first amendment, and the other is not mentioned specifically at all, but implied in another amendment about equal protection. The thousands of years old religious traditions specifically protected by the constitution has got to trump the brand new institution of gay marriage that wasn’t even legal when the law was written and the actions took place.
Second, which affront to dignity is more shocking to the conscience? An individual or business insulting the dignity of another individual, or the state compelling an individual to abase their own dignity?
So, it seems as though the purpose of the law is to egregiously violate the dignity of the Christians. I don’t see how that stands. They should strike it down and Colorado can write a better law with stronger carve-outs for protecting religious liberty.
If they don’t, and this is decided on a culture war basis instead, I think I know where the next bump down the slippery slope will be. We will have once again put homosexuality as the good above all others.
I was arguing in favor of gay marriage 15 years ago, I voted for gay marriage when it was on the ballot in my state, I have attended gay weddings, I have photographed a gay wedding, designed and printed a gay wedding album, have gay friends, patronize gay-owned businesses (my hair stylist of over a decade is a gay man). Yet, I am now considered an anti-gay homophobe because I would prefer my children not be gay and will not expose them to pro-homosexual propaganda. Being insufficiently pro-homosexual is socially unacceptable and will soon be illegal.
I don’t think anyone who’s read my posts on this blog would consider me “anti-police.” But when I ask my five-year-old son what he wants to be when he grows up and he always, always says “police officer” because he “wants to catch bad guys,” I tell him, “FBI, son, FBI.” I don’t want him to be a beat cop. Nobody would accuse me of anti-cop hatred. But prefer him not to be gay and that’s anti-gay hatred.
So if this law stands, what will happen next is Christian wedding vendors who disapprove of gay marriage will be compelled to perform for gay wedding ceremonies. A photographer will shoot such a wedding, and perhaps not do as good a job as he would for a straight couple because his heart’s just not in the creative work while he’s violating his deeply held religious convictions. He will then be sued for discrimination for his unequal treatment, because while he performed the service he was insufficiently pro-homosexual, and that is not legally allowed.
I do not know where we will end up as our culture determines homosexuality is an unassailable, uncriticizable, unalloyed good, that supersedes all other interests including religion, speech, assembly, health, anything, but it’s looking awfully darn confusing right about now.
Ah, dignity.
From Reuters:
Unfortunately the Reuters article doesn’t contain the response. But the question wants to me want to slap Kennedy. Yes, such a sign would be an “affront” to the gay community. So what? Is preventing mere “affront” even a rational basis to restrict speech, let along enough to overcome intermediate or strict scrutiny?
What is the quote about the way to identify who your rulers are is to look for who you are not allowed to ridicule or offend?
This isn’t as clear as you think.
It’s true that there is “no dearth”. But it’s not clear that that fact is relevant in the current U.S. legal system. That is, it’s not clear how judges would properly take the fact into account given current laws and precedent.
So legally speaking the judges could be protecting the material interests of gays because counterfactually that decision is how gays would be protected under dearth conditions.
What happened, in effect, was that Colorado decided gay people needed some protections and so they added them to a list of protected classes. And the mechanisms of protection work a certain way that (possibly) has this result.
Whether a different system would or whether ours should is a different issue. Just because it could be nice (or, for reasons I mentioned elsewhere on this page, potentially expensive and onerous) for the law to be consequentialist in the way you would prefer does not make it so.
“You go to court with the law you have, not the law you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
Alito did bring this up during the oral arguments (pp. 65-66), and Ginsburg noted that not only that, but Colorado at the time would not have given full faith and credit to, say, a Massachusetts marriage either. However, I’m not sure that this is the sort of thing which could decide the case. First, because Colorado’s law about not discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation applies to businesses, not the county clerk, and second, because as Yarger points out, they could nonetheless have bought a cake for a celebration expressing their commitment to one another. Re the second, there’s no reason therefore to suppose that the event must necessarily involve a validly signed marriage license (which is of course impossible in Colorado at the time), and re the first, Phillips’ discrimination would presumably have extended to such a celebration-of-commitment.
But without regard to how the protections for gays impacted everyone else’s rights.
But the law is consequentialist. When supreme court justices decide cases they have to decide the case in front of them. They don’t just rule on an arbitrary, hypothetical case. If the consequence of a law is “unacceptable violation of rights” then they overturn that law.
If they don’t in this case, we just keep going right down the slope. As far as I can tell, in the culture there is no allowable excuse for anything that might be an affront to gays (see article I linked on female porn star who committed suicide after intense harassment for refusing sex with a gay man for health risks). You would think a woman’s preference for who she refuses sex with would be unassailable, but not when placed against a potential affront to gays. Politics, being downstream from culture, is following right behind.
Legal decisions have consequences. That doesn’t make them consequentialist.
Why and how would the question of everyone else’s rights depend on the extrinsic availability of cakes? How would there being no alternative sources for a cake make a requirement that would otherwise violate someone’s rights not violate them? That’s what you need to explain in order to make the case you want to.
I think everyone in this conversation gets it, but just to be clear the dignity/material harm distinction is one proposed by a law professor, not one that is currently embodied in any of the case law.
If we start by buying one of the arguments that this is at least on the spectrum of being a 1A case on account of expressive content, then we’re probably not in the land of rational basis scrutiny anymore. Even if they don’t go full strict scrutiny, the State probably has to present a rationale for the law, and this could come in. If they accept a broadening of scope in order to get out of this problem (“We just wanted to protect gays, generally“), then it’s potentially overinclusive. …maybe they’d still end up needing strict scrutiny.
I don’t think this is the most likely result, but I have underestimated the Court’s pro-free-speech reflex in the past.
@Standing in the Shadows
“To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?” — Kevin Alfred Strom
He’s a white nationalist and I think he was referring to Jews. But as Stalin once said*, being evil doesn’t mean you can’t come up with snappy quotes (sounds snappier in the original Russian I’m afraid).
* not really
I don’t think I understand this perspective. How can being asked to do your chosen job in a professional and non-discriminatory manner affront your dignity? If anything, it would seem more of an affront to dignity to assume that someone isn’t capable of doing their job in a professional and non-discriminatory manner and therefore needs special accommodations.
Not sure whether that’s a religion/atheism thing, or conservative/liberal, or maybe just inferential distances. Whatever.
@Harry Maurice Johnston
I think that most people would feel disgusted with themselves if they enabled certain behavior.
For example, lets say that you are a web programmer and a person asks to build a phishing website. Wouldn’t you feel disgusted to use your expertise to enable another person to steal from others?
Or let’s say that you are a recruiter and a person asks you to recruit suicide bombers for ISIS. Wouldn’t you feel some responsibility if you did that and the person killed many innocents?
Of course, those things are illegal, but I think that it is wrong to assume that what is legal is always moral and to force people to do that. It is very valuable to allow people to follow their own conscience to a decent extent.
@Harry Maurice Johnston
Can you give me an example of a sacred value of yours so I can make a hypothetical for you?
I don’t see why this should be difficult to understand at all. Imagine something that would be against your conscience to do, then imagine being forced by government to do it.
@Aapje
Those examples are different. If no programmers are willing to build the phishing website, it won’t exist, and likewise for your second example. But a wedding (or Nazi parade, to use another an example someone else brought up) can still go ahead without a cake.
But I don’t think this difference is the relevant one for Harry Maurice Johnston. He’s taking the view that discriminating against bad people is OK but discriminating against good people is bad, and it’s acceptable to make laws on that basis.
No, it’ll go on with a cake, just a cake from a different baker. I’ve worked in the wedding industry…it is super gay. There is no shortage of gay-friendly cake makers.
Yes, in practice. But ISIS will recruit people even if you personally don’t help them too, that doesn’t mean it’s OK to do so.
@Conrad,
Ah, that’s a much better wording. Thank you.
For the record, my immediate response was along the lines of: but we’re talking about religion, not conscience! However, the fact that you apparently considered them synonymous was enough of a clue to suggest that perhaps someone who sincerely believes in their religion actually would have a conscientious objection to violating it. Obvious enough in retrospect, I suppose.
(Kind of disturbing, but obvious.)
You’ve said that before; are you really sure it is true everywhere in the US, not just in your particular corner of it? According to the yellow pages, my home town has exactly one business that sells wedding cakes.
As I understand it, the following argument has no legal merit under current precedent, but it’s what I consider the philosophically correct argument on general principles:
If people don’t want to do business with Chik-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, or Orson Scott Card on the grounds that to do so constitutes tacit endorsement and enabling of their objectionable behavior, I think that the reverse follows: that a business owner can not want to do business with a customer on the grounds that to do so constitutes tacit endorsement and enabling of their objectionable behavior. I have trouble with any framework that allows that to go only one way, and would want to see violations of this symmetry reserved for really extreme social problems. Discrimination as it existed in the South in the 1960s met that level of severity, but I don’t think it does now.
To me, this is entirely orthogonal from the question of whether or not someone is morally correct in their decision to refuse service (if business owner) or boycott (if customer). I support the bakery owner having a right to refuse service. I also think they’re in the wrong morally when they exercise that right in this case, which is why it’s hard for me to get really passionate about it. My principles here aren’t as strong as I’d like, and I’m letting my object level beliefs get in the way, which is a bad habit.
I think that there IS a “compelled speech” argument possible in these TYPE of cases, but while it might be the strongest legal argument I don’t consider it to be the strongest philosophical argument. However, since (as you and Nick were discussing) they didn’t even get to discussing precisely what decorations and text the bakery would or would not create before refusing service, I’m not sure it applies.
I’d draw a distinction between people doing business in their personal capacities as sole proprietors or partnerships with unlimited liability on the one hand vs corporate entities with limited liability on the other. I think that distinction best embodies the historical notion that chartered organization (originally royally) had special rights *and* responsibilities.
You might not see this since it’s a late reply, but on it’s face that -sounds- sort of reasonable. On the other hand before I commit wholeheartedly I think I need to educate myself more on precisely what our current legal schema are -around- limited liability corporations. For example, I’m under the impression that we’ve structured things so that there are really strong incentives for even literal “mom and pop” businesses to do business as a LLC. It’s an area of the law outside my experience.
I’d argue that if you want the benefits you need to accept the conditions, whether you’re are a “mom and pop” business or not.
If the government actively punishes non-LLC businesses, that would be a different matter.
The most important benefit of incorporation is right there in the name — limited liability. If someone a baker owned as a partnership sells cakes with tainted eggs and a whole bunch of people get sick they can go after not only the assets of the bakery but after the assets of all the partners. Whereas if the bakery is incorated the most they can recover is the assets of the company.
This is a very vaulable right for the business owner and a corespondingly large imposition on the general public. In the old days, and to this day I belive in England, entities with limited liability were required to refer to themselves explicitly with the term Ltd. so the public could be aware that they were dealing with such an entity an exercise special care. We’d have to ask David Friedman to be sure, but off the cuff I’d think that limited liability is problematic from a libertarian perspective as it is the government essentially granting a special defense in tort to certain people.
Also originally the government made a case by case decision, usually taking into account the proposed corporate charter, whether or not to grant that right. As time went on it became entirely routine, but I think it is entirely reasonable to resurrect the idea that the special rights of incorporation, particularly but not exclusively limited liability, come with corresponding special responsibilities.
If we had such a distinction I would feel much more comfortable with allowing the non-favored corporate form to have considerably more freedom in terms of things like serving all-commers. Thus the public accommodation laws could be viewed as a quid pro quo instead of as a unilateral imposition.
I’m curious whether there are any other important differences between being limited liability or not, but this seems to me on the face of it to be a very fair tradeoff.
I’m not an expert on the subject, but a few other things I can think of: you probably will have to be taxed on a pass through basis, I don’t think a partnership can elect to be taxed as a c corp. And you probably can’t seek investment (equity or debt) from the public markets (i.e. “go public”).
In reply to Scott’s tumblr question on net neutrality (I don’t tumble, apologies if this has been answered) – yes, ISPs want to charge content providers (like Netflix) for things like peerage. Since over half of all internet traffic comes from 30 outfits, those companies often have direct connections to ISPs to pipe all their data in quickly. In many cases, they physically co-locate their servers inside the ISP’s facilities (“peerage”). This is how the internet is now. Good primer at https://www.wired.com/2014/06/net_neutrality_missing/ Most of the impact of these regulations will be on how these massive corporations treat each other and are allowed to do business (notably, Netflix was upset with Comcast’s plans in 2014 and made a huge public push for those Net Neutrality regulations, and won. They’ve since dropped out of the debate, because they got what they wanted).
What I find interesting is how much the net neutrality debate has changed in the last decade or so. During the Bush era (remember Ted Stevens and his “series of tubes”?) the debate seemed to focus on networks throttling down BitTorrent and other filesharing services. Now it’s all about Netflix, YouTube, and streaming. It used to be ISP megacorps versus everyday users, now it’s ISP megacorps versus content megacorps. Yet the rhetoric is more-or-less the same.
Oddly, I find myself more sympathetic to network neutrality now that the content we’re concerned about is legal. And in general I’m not seeing nearly as much of the pro-piracy rhetoric around “information should be free”, DRM being evil, etc. Though that may just be because it’s less relevant to me, since I can afford to buy stuff now.
A few people I know have suggested that we need NN because without it ISPs will crack down on VPNs, which are often used for pretty questionably legal purposes…
VPNs are also used for 100% legit purposes, like preventing someone eavesdropping when you’re using a public internet site somewhere.
My company has a VPN set up so you can work from home or when traveling. If my ISP makes it so I can’t work from home, I’m going to have some very angry words for them. I’m reasonably certain that you couldn’t reliably distinguish between good VPNs and bad ones.
I mean, I can afford and do buy stuff now, but DRM technology is still evil and it’s de facto technical function is still to punish legitimate users. To quote a recent EFF article:
It’s nice to not be a broke college student any more, the last things I can remember pirating are anime (because subtitles) and an audiobook a few years ago. The former has declined markedly since Crunchyroll went legit. Audible can eat a bag of dicks though, since it’s bullshit DRM prevents me from putting stuff on my exercise mp3 player. Similarly, Ubisoft took my $60 and ran when I bought the original Watch_Dogs and their crapsack system locked me out of my account. Because, y’know, Steam isn’t sufficient.
I have an audible subscription, and I strip the DRM out and convert my files to MP3 as a matter of course to get them on my little Sansa player.
That’s what I have actually! Can you recommend a good resource to learn how to do that? My cursory googling at the time (was ~3yrs ago) didn’t turn up anything actionable.
I don’t have an open link, but I’ll try to find it. The tool you want is called InAudible and I believe it links in with winLAME or a few other encoders
Thanks! I’ll take another around the web when I get home.
Recent article on the Atlantic talked about how the Black Lives Matter movement really focused the police violence situation on African Americans when it was a broader problem. It gives a pretty egregious case of a police killing of a white Texan argues that the debate should be broadened again to include more publicity of all police killings so instead of the debate being black vs white it could be people vs unjust institution. Thoughts?
Excerpt from lawyer describing police cam video of the killing:
“This kid was begging for his life. He raised his hands, did everything the cops told him to do. And then they just executed him. It’s bone chilling.”
I really fail to see how this is BLM’s fault. How does a group of mostly black people protesting against police brutality against black people preclude anyone black or white from protesting when the police are brutal against white people? Why is it especially their responsibility to highlight this killing as opposed to the many more white people in this country? Is this some kind of Copenhagen interpretation of ethics thing?
Yeah, that’s gonna end well.
From the article:
Friedersdorf is broadly sympathetic to BLM. At worst, he thinks that “Black Lives Matter and its progressive allies […] would do as much to advance its agenda” by broadening their scope. BLM can and probably will choose to keep its focus narrow, and that’s probably justified — but I don’t think Friedersdorf is wrong when he says that allies of BLM should be publicizing this case.
It’s really about the general antagonism and refocusing the enemy. If the enemy is “white people” then obviously they’re losing possible allies to their cause and antagonizing race relations. Of course, it’s a way bigger problem proportionally to the the black American community, but maybe there are ways of framing the situation to draw a broader coalition. Although I do admit this seems like the kind of issue that’s now just drawn into the broader “red vs blue” fight as opposed to being fought on its own merits. Which is very unfortunate.
The racializing of the problems of class society is a major way modern elites deflect and channel popular anger into forms which leave their own positions unquestioned, and in doing so retain power. Black Lives Matter did its job; it deflected meaningful critiques of police power into people sniping at each other over race on the internet.
BLM told white people (unintentionally at times, but vocally all the same) that they shouldn’t worry about the cops; it’s a black problem. And moreover, that if you want to fight it you had best focus on black victims and accept a subordinate role in the movement.
Wholeheartedly agree. “Wealth inequality? No, no, you should be worried about racial wealth inequality!” “Disparity between worker pay and evil corrupt oppressor CEO pay? Say, have you noticed that more of the evil corrupt oppressors aren’t women? That’s unfair!”
As I wrote above, how exactly is it BLM’s fault that a bunch of white people looked at the BLM and said “well if the blacks don’t like the police that then the police must be my friend”? Why did white people need BLM to explain to them whether or not they should worry about the cops? How come they didn’t know already they they should?
Because they presented themselves as a much more immediate threat to white people than the police.
Riots in major cities, unprovoked shootings of cops and massive years-long crime waves aren’t exactly endearing. Especially while rhetorically equating the police to white Americans in general.
It’s hard to imagine a better PR campaign for the police: “We’re just like you, and BTW we’re also the only thing holding back lawless anarchy.”
Who is ‘they’ supposed to be here? Surely not BLM?
Trying to claim if only BLM had chosen different tactics everything could have been great is disingenuous. The reason that was never going to work drips from every paragraph of your comment.
We’re both pseudonymous here, you can just call me a racist if you want to. Just don’t expect it to be the “I Win” button it is in real life.
And yeah, I hold BLM responsible for the riots and shootings their supporters have committed. I also hold them responsible for the pullback of police in many major American cities which has led to a national crime wave. Those are pretty much the only things of consequence that they can claim credit for.
I don’t need to call you anything. It’s right there for anyone to see. You think there’s a black team and white team and it doesn’t matter how abusive the police are, they are on the white team and that’s that.
I mean here you have unionized public sector workforces that went on an illegal work stoppage because they were upset that some people were calling for an iota of accountability in how they did their jobs. Normally you’d expect conservatives to be all over that one. Imagine if I was talking about school teachers? But the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Which is exactly why the idea that if only BLM had been more saintly that they would have won you and those like you over is a total joke.
I mean you’re right, we are pseudonymous here, so why even the threadbare fig leaf you are maintaining?
Previous comment was eaten.
Because it’s not a fig leaf. I don’t give a damn about being called a racist, I care a lot about the police shooting me when I reach for my registration, and I care immensely more about people threatening to burn down my city.
Ken White isn’t a saint, but I like Popehat (even if he wouldn’t like me much). He used to run a feature where each article was about cops shooting family dogs and then lying brazenly about their sizes and breeds to make them sound more threatening. One particularly memorable case involved cops shooting at a dog which was sitting next to a baby in it’s crib.
If Ken White ran on the platform of “For God’s sake, stop shooting people for holding cell phones!” he’d have my vote. I’d be very surprised if his followers started smashing storefront windows much less killing anyone.
Maybe that’s too saintly to expect from BLM and there’s no possible way that they could have organized without a four digit death toll. But that’s a really low bar to clear and it’s not on me if they can’t even manage that.
That’s the field BLM created.
I’m no fan of BLM but I have a hard time accusing them of choosing their strategy unwisely. They probably would not have gotten a tithe of the support they actually got without the racial angle. People like Conor Friedersdorf and Radley Balko have been trying for years to get people interested in the problem of police violence, to a general yawn.
Hi there! Checking in to point that we have two sides here: BLM and the police.
Of these two sides, one of them murders/rapes/tortures people for no reason, and are not brought to justice. For systematic reasons, e.g. no oversight, collusion between the police and prosecutors, and lots of similar things. They have been doing this for a very long time, far longer than BLM had been a thing.
Things in general have lots of causes, but if your read of this situation is “this is the field the BLM created” then you are outside the set of { people with reasonable ethical views }. In particular, the whole unaccountable murder thing just doesn’t seem to bother you very much. Not enough to suspend usual tribal stuff for a bit.
In other words, you, if you are indeed serious and not posturing for fun on the internet, need to be run out of polite civilized society.
Your views remind me of “this is a problem the Jews have created, what with their endless usury, and refusing to convert to Christianity, and the owning of small businesses.”
—
Actually getting murdered/raped/tortured is a type of situation where some measure of drastic action is reasonable.
Not helping, Ilya.
I know. I don’t like the police. I’ve had some run-ins with them myself. But BLM doesn’t care what the police do to me. They want to make it strictly a racial thing, where the side you’re on depends on the color of your skin rather than your uniform. So, since my skin is white, I’m stuck, by their framing, on the side of the police. This does not make me happy with them at all.
Fortunately, you are not the arbiter of the Overton window.
@The Nybbler
Why was there a completely blank canvas for them to paint on? Where do such a small group of people get all this power to define the terms of the debate for everyone?
You had all the time in the world to build a colorblind anti-police brutality movement under the banner of All Lives Matter. But somehow you didn’t you discover you wanted one until you could use it to throw in the face of BLM and as an excuse to support the mostly white guys with the snazzy uniforms and the guns.
It’s second amendment solutions, jacked booted thugs, and the blood of patriots in the abstract, but in the concrete it’s always “Hey I know that guy from down at the range. I’m sure he’s not lying when he says that the handcuffed guy in back of the police car was reaching for gun. Hillary’s emails, amirite?”
Brad, is accusing other people of bad faith the only thing you know? Or just the only thing you like?
There are quite a few groups out there that did. The internet-famous “Don’t Talk To Cops” vid predates BLM, as does Popehat’s War on Dogs segment Nabil mentioned (and it’s the end of the day so I can’t be arsed to google more examples right now). John Q. Public just didn’t give a shit until Toxoplasma got ahold of the issue.
ETA:
@Paul
C’mon man, not helpful.
Paul:
I might take your criticisms of my posts to heart if I this weren’t representative of the quality of yours: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/03/ot90-telescopen-thread/#comment-573304
But since it is, I don’t particularly care what you think of my posts. You may as well save your breathe.
George Soros’ money?
BLM’s real problem is that the vast, vast majority of cases they started riots over were justifiable shootings of dirtbags. I can’t possibly support people who are peddling lies like “hands up don’t shoot” about a guy who was trying to cave a cop’s skull in for telling him to stop walking down the middle of the street.
Ilya:
Your comment w.r.t. police is insanely overbroad. (Try rewriting it in terms of Muslims.)
*Some police* have murdered, raped, robbed, tortured, or framed innocent people. There are some genuine problems with making the justice system work to stop those crimes and punish them, given the position of the police within the justice system, the tendency of the rest of the justice system to give them the benefit of the doubt, etc. That’s an important issue, and one that BLM has been pushing. I don’t actually see anyone disagreeing with that, either.
I’ve seen three broad complaints about BLM:
a. Their rhetoric has turned police oversight into overwhelmingly an issue of race and tribal politics. This is a bad thing–it further divides the country along lines we were already divided on, and it make the problem harder to solve by convincing a lot of whites that this is only a problem for blacks, or that it’s just another iteration of blaming whites for everything in the political game.
b. Their protests have led to riots, and some of their supporters have been inspired by their rhetoric to assassinate police. (If you think the far right should be held responsible for Dylan Roof, it sure seems like you should accept BLM being held responsible for the police assassinations carried out by Micah Xavier Johnson.) That’s directly destructive, and also adds to the division in (a). IMO, if you want to convince middle-class whites to oppose police accountability, increasing urban crime + riots is a pretty effective strategy.
c. The second-order consequences of BLM protests and riots have arguably been to raise murder rates in major cities. There are about 1,000 people killed by the police per year (as far as I can see, mostly in the course of committing crimes), and about 16,000 people murdered total, so it’s pretty easy to see how we might get more deaths from raising the murder rate than we save by making the police more reluctant to shoot.
Any or all of these complaints may be right or wrong, but I think the only way to figure that out is to actually dig down and consider them. Excluding them from consideration because they’re offensive doesn’t seem likely to lead us anywhere good.
@albatross11
I can’t speak for Ilya, but I think I’ve at least sketched out answers to all three of those concerns.
To briefly recap:
a) absolves everyone other than BLM from responsibility for having done something about police brutality generally way before they had gotten involved. The complaint is of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics type (i.e. once BLM decided to address police brutality they needed to do it perfectly or they are worse than people that do and did nothing at all).
b) I think held responsible is too strong for the far right vis-a-vis Dylan Root, BLM for Micah Xavier Johnson, and pro life supporters for Robert Dear. There is overheated rhetoric in all these movements that ought to be toned down, but nothing IMO that rises to the level of complicity. Compare for example ISIS indoctrination videos, which I do think cross the line.
c) While BLM may be a but-for cause, the proximate cause is an illegal work action on the part of public sector unions (and quasi-unions). I don’t see why there is such a divergent reaction on the right to this wildcat work action vs say Reagan’s air traffic controllers.
This is pretty much consistent with what the article’s message is, from my reading of it.
I mean, wasn’t this the whole point that the All Lives Matter people we’re trying to make? Given how well that turned out for them I don’t see this getting mainstream approval.
Beyond that, BLM squandered its chance at police reform a long time ago: the approval rating for police is back at historical norms, largely driven by increased approval among whites. After all we’re well into our third year of the Ferguson Effect and the riots are still in recent memory. If it’s a choice between tens of killings by trigger-happy cops or thousands of murders by criminals that’s a no brainier.
Well, All Lives Matter, whenever it was presented, seemed just antagonistic to Black Lives Matter. Whenever I read about it, it was just reactionism to BLM. That just increases and redirects the conflict away from where it needs to be. The case is that police need reform, regardless of whether you’re white or black. But the BLM vs ALM debate turned it even more into something just about race.
I don’t believe it was. “All Lives Matter”, as I understood was a statement of rebuke against the BLM movement. Basically a “You are being racist for saying only black lives matter” trolling.
Of course the subtext of BLM was always “All lives matter, including black lives, but you aren’t recognizing that black lives matter.” But that is hardly a catchy slogan.
It’s perfectly possible to talk about problems of policing in general, recognize the ways in which police are being militarized (and have always been subject to), recognize that stereotyping by policeman will result in false positives and false negatives, all while recognizing that stereotyping of people because they are black is one of those problems.
When you have a black Republican congressman giving personal testimony on this issue, maybe it should be recognized as relevant.
I don’t have much confidence about the spectrum of uses of “All Lives Matter”, but I do remember that at the earliest point I started hearing that phrase (and the controversy about it), it was in a Kumbaya spirit that wasn’t really about anything. Various people were “yelling” “Black Lives Matter” and other people, when asked about that, would say “Of course, all lives matter.” Those people basically stepped into a cultural minefield and got pilloried for racism when they were more just clueless about the subject at hand.
Wouldn’t everyone agree that the dominant oppositional slogan is, by a long shot, “Blue Lives Matter”? That’s certainly the one I always run across.
I recall Hillary Clinton ran afoul of that. However, I’m not certain how big the blowback was because the article does the laziest type of reporting by quoting tweets.
I wish they had gone with “Black Lives Matter, Too.” I think it actually conveys the message better and more sympathetically, and without the potential objection that it’s [as] exclusive or decisive. Their acronym could have been BLM2, which is both catchy and distinguishes them from the Bureau of Land Management.
Of course, if you’re feeling trollish, you could go for ‘Black Lives Also Matter’.
This would be unattractive for the various radical campus types, who specifically desire to exclude whites.
Remember, “It’s okay to be white” is considered racist hate speech.
I don’t know to what extent that is a mainstream position.
“It’s OK to be White” falls under the exact same issue as “All Lives Matter”.
It is/was being deployed specifically as an attempt to troll.
Trolling or not, people could have reacted by rolling their eyes and objecting to it on the basis that it was obnoxious trolling. I’m sure some people did, but the stories I’ve seen on the incident show people objecting to it for being racist, which is exactly what the trolls wanted and I think it proved their point. Perhaps the “racist” reaction was less common than the eye-rolling reaction, but only the former made the news?
@Incurian:
If you go to Ulster and start waving around an “It’s OK to be Protestant” sign , you know what you are doing. You are implicitly filling in the other side of that equation.
Especially if you are Protestant, doing it in a neighborhood that is Protestant, and you are waving it in front of a house where Catholics live.
Last I checked, trolling is not racist or hateful unless it partakes of racist or hateful content. Obnoxious, yes.
“It’s ok to be Catholic?”
@Incurian:
You are just being willfully and perversely obtuse at this point. I will simply assume you are trolling from this point forward.
“It’s okay to be white” was indeed a successful trolling attempt. It wouldn’t have been successful if it weren’t true that the campus radical types think it’s not okay to be white, however.
“All Lives Matter” was at least in part a response to the belief that BLM wants to make black people a privileged category prioritized over all others. I don’t think it was trolling.
I’m really, really not. I would fess up to it.
I can kind of see your point of view when I think hard about it, but it doesn’t strike me as an obviously correct interpretation, and it’s definitely not so obvious that anyone who disagrees with you must be trolling. Your interpretation seems weird and deliberately controversy-seeking, exactly as much as the stupid “it’s ok” posters were, which is what makes them such an excellent foil.
Maybe you could make the argument that I’m privileged to be insulated from racism targeted at me, but that actually a lot of people have good reason to see this prank as actually racist. I would probably listen to your evidence to support that, though I’d be skeptical, because I don’t see any reason to suppose the posters were racist. If we dig below the literal meaning of the words, the implication [for me] is not “it’s not ok to be non-white,” it’s “I doubt you will be willing to agree with or even tolerate the literal meaning of these words because you spend a lot of time criticizing white people in uncharitable ways while expounding the virtues of people of color despite claiming to be anti-racist, and I want to expose you as a hypocrite.”
The second interpretation seems obvious to me, even if the truth of the message it is conveying is debatable. If there is a good reason to suppose the implication was “it’s not ok to be non-white,” please tell me what that reason is, it isn’t obvious, and I’m not the only one not seeing it.
If they had would you have gone out and marched with them?
The 4chan posters were a non-event. Quit trying to make fetch happen.
I was a little busy at the time, but in any case I’m not one for protests, so their name doesn’t affect my participation in them. I imagine your point is that they weren’t targeting people like me when they came up with the name. Fair enough, but a name change would have affected the way I thought of and talked about the group. It would make me less willing to believe nasty stories about them. I think groups need not only appeal to their core audience, they need to avoid pushing fence-sitters over to the other side.
@Incurian:
Do you know anything at all about the history of Northern Ireland?
Yes, a bit. I had a few instructors who were veterans of the troubles, and we used it as a case study for counter insurgency.
@Incurian:
So, if a Protestant pups up an “It’s OK to be Protestant” sign in a Protestant neighborhood outside of a Catholic families home … you really think “It’s OK to be Catholic?” is the implied message?
Were “It’s okay to be white” signs put up outside black homes?
You asked for the other side of the equation. As for the implied message, I would assume it’s “so stop oppressing me.”
I think that is/was (one of?) the motte/steel version(s?) of All Lives Matter.
Some proportion of the actual interactions seemed to be deliberately designed to antagonize-with-plausible-deniability, though.
(Of course there is/was Motte-and-Bailey stuff also going on with BLM as well).
I forget the title, but didn’t Scott once do a post on this issue, about how the media intentionally plays up the “borderline” cases because controversy and debate leads to increased ratings, whereas having a bunch of people nod in agreement that one case was clearly and obviously bad is boring and immediately ends the conversation?
The post is “The Toxoplasma of Rage” (and it contrasts the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in making that point).
I’m not sure where this belongs in this thread but BLM has defended at least two white people murdered by police, one male and one female.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-fresno-shooting-20160721-snap-story.html
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/7/24/16019440/justine-damond-police-shooting-race
@ Nancy.
Let me respond to the Justine Damond one, since it happened a few miles from my house, so I know the local scoop.
In this case, Damond called the cops about some incident in her neighborhood. When the cops drove up, she went to the window of the cop car to tell them what was going on. The cop in the passenger seat shot her dead.
This was an extra-ordinary shooting, as in this case the killed person was not a suspect at all, and was apparently killed only because the cop was so surprised to see her at his window. In my opinion, it was only because of the extra-ordinary circumstances that it made the news at all. Generally, it is only news when a cop shoots a Black person.
I observed no BLM reaction at all. Yes, as Brad says, just because an organization focuses on a particular area, that doesn’t mean that they are obligated to get involved in an adjacent area that others are concerned about. But in two previous police shootings of Blacks in the metro, BLM shut down highways. In this case where it was more clear than ever that the victim was innocent, one would think they would do SOMETHING in support. I do get the impression that the implicit meaning of BLM is “only Black lives matter.”
Instead you get comments like in the VOX article that complained of a greater reaction because she was White. Yes, the police chief was fired a few days later. But what came out later was that the mayor and police chief were already feuding, so the mayor was mostly looking for an excuse. In a local forum someone penned that there wouldn’t have been as big a reaction if the victim were Black. I responded that to the contrary, if the victim was Black, the whole city would have been shut down from the outrage. The police chief would have been fired even sooner.
It may be not so much that BLM is racist, but that the media is racist, and the local government is racist. As Brad says, there haven’t been strong forces against police brutality in the past. But that isn’t because there haven’t been plenty of groups fighting against police brutality, it is that they didn’t get the publicity that BLM gets. BLM shuts down highways and the police let them do this, because they are too scared to act against them. The media love the clicks they get from the racial conflict. It probably is only because it is a Black organization that they have been able to get traction. That is too bad, because focusing on racial aspect weakens the cause. BLM wants the focus to be on racist cops, when it makes a whole more sense to focus on violent and trigger-happy cops.
Is Scott going to clarify why “Against Overgendering Harassment” seems to have been deleted?
Did a Twitter mob get to him or something?
I don’t expect he’ll clarify. Presumably things he tags as “I’ll regret writing” are provisional at best.
Some people were saying that the studies he referenced didn’t support his point well on closer examination. Someone else was saying comments there were making them not want to visit the site. If not one of those, then it probably got undue notice elsewhere.
It’s a shame – it was probably one of my Top 5 favorite posts he’s written.
That said, I am increasingly of the opinion that “internet mob ends up getting Scott fired from his job and shunned by polite society” is moving from an “if” to a “when,” and dreading the day that it comes…
Dang, I missed it. My fault for not paying attention.
The discussion was warming up but I genuinely don’t think we were headed for a screaming row, so it’s a pity he felt he needed to take it down.
But I agree – too much bait for a witch smeller to pick up on and denounce him for crimethink. Unfortunately it is nowadays necessary to purge yourself before someone can set the mob on you for a forced purge.
He’s engaging in irrational behavior for someone with a chronic truth-speaking problem: living in the Bay Area.
Seriously, does anyone fear getting fired from psychiatry and expelled from polite society if they live in a red city?
Do you think medical doctors are all that vulnerable to Internet-based firing?
Well, a nurse in Indiana was fired for some lovely comments about how evil white people are.
@Matt M: “All white males should be killed at birth” is not the sort of inflammatory thing Scott says.
On the left coast, you get fired and ostracized for mainstream red tribe opinions. In Indiana you get fired for… well if you want to call that mainstream blue, I’m skeptical but won’t stop you.
Le Maistre,
I was responding to Nybbler’s very specific inquiry. Generally speaking, I think your point is solid, although I would suspect Scott wouldn’t be free to be himself if he moved to a small town red-tribe area. Speaking truth to SJWs might be okay there, but having a polyamorous lifestyle with transsexual partners might not go over so well in small town rural America’s version of “polite society”?
Heck no; I didn’t realize Scott had romantic relationships with transsexuals. Indeed I remember him admitting that he only likes to date and cuddle females… so if by transsexuals you mean self-identified transmen, he’s treating them as cute tomboys and that’s another mine field… but I admit I don’t know what we’re talking about.
Also I wasn’t saying he’d be happier in a small town. I specifically recommended a red city.
@Le Maistre Chat
Invariably?
What type of city are you referring to?
I live in Houston, Texas – and the city itself is still pretty dang blue. Anti-Trump jokes are routinely made during work meetings and nobody thinks twice about it.
I estimated that you could still get fired for being insufficiently SJ, but it’s probably twice as unlikely here as in the Bay Area. But it’s not zero.
Matt is probably referring to Scott’s former relationship with Ozy, who identifies as nonbinary but who, at one time, said they were okay with being called “Scott’s girlfriend”. Other than that I can’t speak for the exact gender dynamics going on there.
@Matt: Honestly? “Any Texan city besides Austin”, so beliefs updated. :/
@Matt M
I think a reliably Red Tribe city needs to be irrelevant and not at all trendy. Also probably southern.
Texan cities with functioning economies are probably out by now, but you might get by with places like Shreveport, Biloxi, or Augusta. I can’t imagine Bay Area SJW types looking to relocate to the shores of Lake Strom Thurmond.
Right, at that point we’re quibbling over the definition of “city” though.
Now I’m really curious about whether the SSC commentariat thinks traps are gay or not, but also terrified that topic is too explosive for even for this place to stay civil over.
Not my kink, not my problem.
Maybe my own cultural biases are showing, but:
A) why would that be in any way explosive? I think the whole encouraging pre-pubescent kids to consider whether they are trans/genderqueer would be far more emotional and we managed to discuss that previously.
B) Assuming we accept the fairly conventional wisdom that homosexual-heterosexual attraction is on a spectrum, how is a mostly-straight guy going for trappy femboy types not simply an indication that he is, well, only MOSTLY straight?
Because 4Chan is full of twelve-year-olds and people indistinguishable from… okay, no, that’s true but has bad connotations in this context. Because 4Chan is incredibly immature. Yeah, let’s go with that.
@Conrad: I’ve been hit on by humans that were obviously non-op MtF. I’d object to using “trap” for the whole phenomenon… some of them are yellow side-blotched lizards.
Males who call themselves she and date males are attempting homosexual acts, yes. Being a woman mentally means they have a very sympathetic birth defect, not that material reality changed to match their feelings.
I wonder if you’d call a female a trap for passing as a man.
I was just making a joke. I thought the whole “is liking traps gay” thing was a meme argument that people pretended was super serious business on which people have really strong opinions but in fact no one cares.
Also, liking traps is obviously gay.
Oh! I thought it was a super serious front in the Social Justice War and didn’t catch the 4chan context.
Being attracted to a trap isn’t gay so far as they do genuinely resemble a woman. Being attracted to a trap whom you know is a man* is an ambiguous case, seeing as knowing plenty of things about a person could inhibit one’s sexual attraction to someone one would otherwise be attracted to. Having sex with one, of course, is unambiguously gay.
*I leave aside the question whether the trap identifies as a woman; I’m only speaking of knowing the person’s anatomy.
Well joke’s on you, because the SSC commentariat has strong opinions on everything. 😀
Another dimension (pun intended) of the “Is liking traps gay” discussion is that it’s generally about anime characters, not about real people. So we get into the issue of how much being attracted to highly stylized and exaggerated depictions of humans reflects one’s actual sexual orientation wrt real humans. And given the fictional nature of the character, how much does the actual visual depiction of the gender of the human – female in the case of a trap – matter versus the knowledge of the fact that within the fiction in which the character exists, that person is biologically (and usually also psychologically) male.
That extra complication is part of what makes this discussion so darn fun, I think. And all that’s before it was declared that using the term “trap” to refer to any character was transphobic and contributing to the literal murder of transfolk, which obviously made it both a lot more and a lot less fun in various ways.
@Le Maistre Chat
A female that passes for a male is generally called a “reverse trap.”
@Nick: It’s not gay to be attracted to traps, but you may not have sex with them. This is the Rule for Trappist monks.
@Ivlin: I’m now tempted to go into professional wrestling as a reverse trap and call my signature move the reverse trap.
My only contribution to this debate is that I recently enjoyed flirting with a (I think non-op) trans woman, mainly because I really liked her make-up look, but I’d be pretty squicked out by the thought of having sex with her. Yes, I’m as confused by this as anyone.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/05/the-tax-bill-compared-to-other-very-expensive-things/#comment-574145
It’s coming back in a few hours.
Not sure- but it was a pretty good post. I’ve definitely been harassed in bars by drunk handsy women before, so I know he’s right that this isn’t just men (80% men sounds about right to me).
He struck the right tone of sympathy, truth-seeking, and care about those who are too afraid to speak out (or are ignored when they do).
Holy Mother of God. The startling amount of ignorance amongst the British political classes about Ireland, given all the current Brexit negotiations, has gone from “amusing” to “what the everliving fudge? how do these people even tie their own shoelaces?”
They’re all tripping over themselves to blame (the Republic of) Ireland for the mess, of course, nothing new there, but it’s their own goddamn nation here: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and they know nothing about it.
I really don’t know how the Unionists stick it (though if you’re the DUP, I suppose the one consolation is that even if the English can’t tell the difference between you and a Taig, at least you’ve got them by the short and curlies to the tune of £5 billion to prop up their government or else).
For those of you not English and thus with a legitimate reason to be ignorant: Northern Ireland does not have a Taoiseach. Enda Kenny and Bertie Ahern have never been Taoisigh of Northern Ireland.
This gentleman, who is a Member of Parliament and is giving an interview on Sky News so presumably is being treated as having some kind of informed opinion on the matter (and not simply “random nutter in a street vox-pop”) is not aware of that, even though they are the ones who have been (and if the restoration of devolution talks don’t go right, will be back to) ruling the place.
This is a bit like somebody talking about when George Bush was President of Canada. Someone from the far quarters of the world who doesn’t speak English as a first language and all these white guys look the same to them, that’s understandable. Senator Smith of the US Senate, not so understandable.
>nation
The UK is not a nation. It is a state, or country, or realm, or kingdom, but it is not a nation. Nations are genetic groupings of people. It houses four major (English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish) nations and a whole host of tinier ones.
Nations are genetic groupings of people.
I sit here agog for your explanation of the striking genetic differences between the English, Scots, Welsh, Irish (North and South), Cornish and Manx (possibly the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands may be different, and I’d allow you some wiggle room on the Scottish islands, particularly places like the Shetlands where it’s a toss-up if they should be Scottish or Norse).
I accept I should have said “state” perhaps, but it gets rather confused round here with Great Britain vs United Kingdom vs British Isles, not to mention most of the English apparently believing they still own the Republic of Ireland.
These differences don’t have to be large. These people here have intermarried for like a millennium or more, so they will be close, but geneticists are still able to discern things.
I think genetics are a silly way to define nations; culture (especially language) is better. A lot of the time they coincide, but if you use genetics as the deciding factor then you will claim that e.g. a person who falls just on the English side of your arbitrary English-Scottish genetic border but who is a fervent Scottish nationalist and entirely Scottish culturally is actually English, which doesn’t make much sense.
Are you a native English speaker?
Because I have never heard anyone competent in the English language use nation as a synonym for race.
The ordinary usage of words like, nation, country and state, is somewhat confused; but in practice nation is either a synonym for state, or it refers to a group of people who hold a common culture and language.
There is no sensible genetic grouping that would separate northern Ireland from it’s southern neighbor, or any given state of the former Yugoslavia from any other. Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians, are on a genetic level the same people.
Similarly no one in there right mind would consider Chileans to be a “race” in any biological sense, as they are descended from in almost equal measure from peoples form opposite sides of the world.
But Chile is most certainly a nation, and it’s people, I can attest, hold a strong sense of a nationhood. It is true that there is a correlation between culture and genetics, but centuries of conquest, immigration, and assimilation have rendered it weaker than you seem to imply.
Nations as an ethnic and social group is a classic political science definition. It’s as opposed to a State (a political grouping with a government and a military and so forth), and if the borders of a nation and a state are the same, then we call it a nation-state.
So Japan is a nation-state, but India is just a state.
It’s closer to “people” or “ethnicity” than “race”, but I have. That used to be the primary meaning of of the word, but nationalism (viz. the idea that natural ethnic/cultural groupings should have sovereign countries coterminous with their traditional homelands) won so thoroughly that it’s now most commonly used as a straight synonym for “country”.
@Nornagest
It’s true that nation has often been used as a synonym for ethnicity, but my point is that culture is not the same as genetics. There are plenty of ethnic groups, for example Latinos, and Arabs, who are very genetically diverse. There are also groups that are genetically homogeneous, and deeply divided by culture, or religion; for example the peoples of the Balkans.
@Nornagest: Yeah, people would say things like “The Rossiyan Empire has Jews and several Muslim nations as subjects, but only Christians are Rus.”
@rlms
To you, you mean. It makes perfect sense to me. The Polish expats who’ve lived in the United States for a couple of hundred years are still Polish nationals (and often citizens, but that’s irrelevant), regardless of their American culture. To the extent that they mix with the Anglo-Americans there, they might become substantially more actually American than Polish in some cases, but nationality is a spectrum, and we just assign names to the clusters.
@hyperboloid
I’m not. Races encompass nations.
For the Irish, sure. But plenty of the inhabitants of Northern Ireland are descendants of English colonists. This is why Britain still holds the area.
Don’t let any Croats, Serbs or Bosnians hear you say that. According to the data I’ve seen, they have some differences.
@Anonymous
If your Polish nationals identify as Polish (to whatever extent), then that is cultural. To distinguish between the definitions, we’d need to look at a person who was genetically Polish by your standard but not at all Polish culturally (maybe they were adopted and don’t know their ancestry). I definitely wouldn’t call such a person a Pole. Conversely, I would say that someone who is culturally but not genetically Polish is a Pole, but I expect you might disagree.
@rlms
I’m pretty sure there are some people like that, plenty of them, too.
Yes.
I definitely think that there is a Welsh look. Like Gimli.
Not too sure about Scottish and Irish, they seem to have a fair mix of types, to me. There is a kind of face you get in Scotland that you don’t seem to get anywhere else though – like that woman who is in charge of the SNP.
A nation once again,
A nation once again,
When genotypes merge
Then Ireland will be
A nation once again!
😀
Great Britain is the island with England, Scotland and Wales (at least, most of them, if it doesn’t technically contain e.g. the Hebrides). The UK is a political entity with the above three plus Northern Ireland. The British Isles is the broader geographical entity that includes the whole of Ireland (the island) and probably the Channel Islands.
It’s Time to Retire the Political Spectrum
by Hyrum Lewis
http://quillette.com/2017/05/03/time-retire-political-spectrum/
(Hyrum Lewis is Professor from Brigham Young University-Idaho)
If Left/Right is the wrong simplification, what’s a better one? I don’t expect no-simplification to be a workable position. A map is useful not just for what it shows, but for what it hides. If it tried to show everything, it would be unusably cluttered.
I suspect that:
a. Peoples’ views cluster together, so that some kind of one- or two-dimensional model of politics is actually pretty useful. (In the “all models lie, some models are useful” sense.)
b. The traditional definitions of left/right used today probably don’t track all that well with the best way to cluster peoples’ views.
I suspect there’s a whole vast literature in political science on doing PCA on voters’ beliefs about lots of different issues and inferring a good one-dimensional model, but I haven’t read any of it.
This may be the first time I’ve seen something described as a social construct that’s actually a plausible candidate for being socially constructed. I’m very excited.
That said, in a multi-party democracy you’re inevitably going to end up with a ruling party / coalition and an opposition party / coalition. So whatever the number of political dimensions there were originally, for all practical purposes there are only one or maybe two which matter. Calling the most important one in a given country left-right isn’t crazy as long as we remember that, say, the American left-right axis is different from the German left-right axis.
And the names of those coalitions (left vs. right) come from that realization.
In any system which allows policies to be implemented on anything other than consensus or autocratic rule, you will naturally end up with coalitional politics involving two sides.
Doesn’t this depend to some extent on the voting method used? It seems like proportional representation + parliamentary democracy gets you a several different political parties with noticeably different ideas that aren’t all that cleanly mapped to a single left/right spectrum.
But they will still either enter or oppose a coalition that forms the government. And that will roughly map to a binary nomenclature.
Even single issue parties will tend to end up in opposition or in coalition (usually in opposition, but not always).
To some extent you could say that the ruling coalition has to be in solidarity, but the opposition can each be opposed in their own way, but I don’t think it tends to map out that way. The heuristic of left/right is still valuable.
A party that strategically joins either of the two largest parties to get what it wants on its single issue isn’t well described as left just because as one particular moment in time it is in government with the left largest party. Admittedly such parties are fairly rare but they do exist in e.g. Israel.
@Brad:
I was trying to acknowledge that true single issue parties are something of an exception. But that doesn’t really make the heuristic of left/right less valuable.
Let me put it this way. If you have single-issue party, they are one of: a) very small, b) well ideologically aligned with one side of the coalition, c) will break up into left/right components, or d) separatists that will would prefer to fight their left/right battles among themselves.
Not much in that argue I’d object to, except that, like many essays (and again, this is something of which I am admittedly guilty) it’s long on analysis of the problem and very short on (practical, workable) solutions.
That said, I already agreed that applying the labels of “Right” and “Left” to the “evolving social constructs” that are modern political ideologies is a problem. But then, I do so for the reason that I consider their “evolving” to be a problem — a “Right-wing” ideology that differs substantially from the Right wing of centuries earlier is not truly on the Right — and because, in keeping with Xunzi’s conception of the Rectification of Names, I prefer that the labels be properly maintained with the meanings they held when initially coined, in the French Revolution — and thus all modern American ideologies of any significance fall in the category of the Left, meaning the need for different labels and axes to distingush them.
I’ve been thinking about various hobbies, and how they vary in price. Just to pin a target to the barn door, let’s pick $1 per day. What can you do for $1 per day?
Reading novels fits within that budget. Assuming you want to read one book per week, C$7 per week won’t let you buy a new novel every week, even at paperback prices. But you should be able to make it work by supplementing with used books and library use.
Martial arts won’t work. The cheapest rate for training I’ve seen here in Toronto is $90 per month, which is triple what the budget allows.
Playing chess works. You can afford to get a set, buy books to study from, and get a subscription to chess.com or another service. You can afford to occasionally participate in local tournaments, but travelling to tournaments is probably out.
Other options?
Most of my hobbies have considerable “start up” costs, but are very cheap thereafter.
Running: buy a pair of shoes. Shoes costing $n will last longer than n days.
Cycling: bikes are very expensive, but riding is free, and I reckon I spend less than $1 a day on materials for maintenance.
Get really keen on a single computer game. Start up costs include the game and possibly a computer if you don’t have a suitable one, but once you’ve got it you can play as much as you want. (“Gaming” more generally probably wouldn’t work because of the cost of new games and possibly multiple consoles…)
I was going to put in “playing a musical instrument”, because I currently don’t spend anything on it, but then I remembered that when you factor in the cost of lessons (which I had for several years) it becomes very expensive indeed.
Not a hobby of mine, but I might add cooking? You’ll probably spend more than $1 a day on ingredients, but given that you were going to spend money on food anyway (it could even work out as a negative-cost hobby depending on what you currently do for food).
Given that martial arts won’t work, you could think about the next best thing, which is, of course, dancing! I have no idea how much this would cost, though.
I’ve been looking at the prices of video games. A current console like the PS4 1TB costs more than the yearly budget, and then there’s the price of games, which are about C$80 for the new stuff. Slightly older games are cheaper.
The budget would let you play older games, like PS3 stuff, bought used.
So being a console gamer on this budget is doable, but it’s a stretch.
If you play on PC, where games are frequently available for <$5 and your gaming system does double duty as your everyday work system, you can make it work. But console is really a stretch.
Still, getting really good at a single game is a much cheaper idea. Becoming a grandmaster at Starcraft could keep you occupied for years.
Yeah, some of this accounting gets into issues of what the budget has to pay for. Do we assume this person already has a car? An internet connection? A computer?
Personally, for a working-to-middle-class person from the first world, I think we can assume they already have an apartment, a car, a TV, internet, a computer, and a smartphone.
I was surprised to learn that 84% of US households have a computer.
You should just be playing a roguelike, which is probably free and could take you a decade to finish.
(Is it time we had another roguelike thread? At the very least, I should thank suntzuanime for convincing me to play Sil. It’s now up there with Brogue as one of the only two roguelikes I play.)
PC games are definitely the way to go here. There’s a big startup cost, but most people already have a computer, so it’s debatable whether that should count.
There are loads of games that can keep you interested for hundreds and hundreds of hours, at extremely minimal cost. Factorio is easily a 300 hour game for $20, WoW comes in at half the budget ($15 a month) and can be played for arbitarily large amounts of time, Path of Exile doesn’t cost anything (maybe $15 for a little quality of life).
Depending on what kind of games someone’s into, I’m not sure you’d even need to change buying habits. Good games often last you a lot longer than a month or two, and there’s often an urge to revisit them down the road (I get really hooked on Path of Exile for like one month out of four).
Don’t forget mods! A good mod is as good as a free game.
I’ve gotten hours and hours and hours out of Madden 08 thanks to the modding and playbooking community.
The general slowdown in desktop CPU development over the last decade means the price of entry for PC gaming has come way down. You can dig an old office PC out of the trash, upgrade it with the best GPU you can afford, and play most modern games at medium-high settings. Most of the major game engines are multiplatform, too, so you can run Linux now and don’t even need to steal Windows.
Games can cost literally nothing – the biggest multiplayer games are free to play. I’ve been playing a lot of War Thunder lately, and it seems like the “salvage plus f2p” model is just how PC gaming is done in most of the world.
If you enjoy the work of cooking, it probably has negative costs. Eating at home is cheaper than eating out for comparable quality, especially if you have friends or family to cook for.
Martial arts could be done cheaply, maybe, if you have some space and follow videos on youtube.
A lot of the computer games I’ve played the most have literally cost me nothing–I’m a free rider on the whales on some decent ftp games have have already been mentioned in this thread. (And the computer I wanted anyway).
Board games can work if you find one that you get a lot of replay out of. The problem here is the temptation towards collecting expensive new additions.
Board games cost anywhere from $20 to $100 each; Settlers of Catan, the great classic, is almost $60 here in Canada. So a serious boardgamer could afford a new game maybe every two months. That seems workable. You have a group of players and meet one evening a week to play games. It’s often one of the favourites, and sometimes something new. Maybe you also play with your family. And if you’re really serious, maybe you get together one more night a week to play one of those games people really deep-dive into, like Scrabble or Squad Leader.
PC Gaming has to cost nothing besides moderately powerful hardware (I’m sitting on 5 year old hardware and it’s perfectly sufficient for my needs, even though I do spend a lot of time gaming), and internet access. You can play numerous free games of all genres, single or multi player, and in terms of quality you can choose anywhere between Newgrounds and AAA developers like Blizzard. The best F2P games also come without pay-to-win bullshit. Unless you’re a high-end graphics fetishist, there’s not much left to ask for.
Programming
You can get a cheap laptop for around $150 (or even better, getting a free old desktop computer is really easy). Then if you want to be really strict about it, you can keep it offline (because the cost of an internet connection could make it prohibitive depending on how you count it) and borrow programming books from the library.
Used paperbacks (e.g. at http://www.abebooks.com) are often way cheaper than $7. You can also pick them up at thrift stores and garage sales if you’re open to just browsing and choosing a book while you browse and not necessarily finding anything each time.
Or you could borrow books from the library. If they don’t have books you can usually request them, either from other libraries or that your library could purchase it.
Watch public television.
Drawing is cheap (even with very nice pencils!), challenging, and enjoyable.
Writing is even cheaper, assuming you already have a computer.
Plenty of sports.
I play disc-golf. No special clothing needed, a starter set of discs is about $20, and the local park has a course which is free to use (there are others in nearby towns). You can buy 2~3 new discs a month on $1 a day. Substitute other sports depending on what your local park supports (tennis, basketball, soccer are often options, good shoes can be expensive, but other equipment can be craigslisted for cheap if it wouldn’t otherwise be in your budget).
Performing arts – amateur dramatics, community choirs, dance and others may have local clubs with reasonable fees.
Thinking about SCA. It could be done.
If you want to fight, the lowest cost approach to gear, short of a friend who passes his down to you, is going to cost at least a couple of hundred dollars. If you don’t fight, the only necessary expenses are garb, which you can make for yourself with a few yards of cloth, and charges for events. Some events are free, many are inexpensive, so you could probably manage an event every couple of weeks.
Then there are things such as the early music get together (Monday evenings) and renaissance dance get together (Wednesday evenings) that my wife and daughter attend regularly, which cost nothing but gas to get to them.
I think one could be pretty active spending lots of time and minimal amounts of money.
Abdullah Ali Saleh, the former president of Yemen, was killed today, the latest victim of a devastating civil war (that he played no small part in starting). Saleh had stepped down in response to pressure during the Arab Spring, then a couple of years later joined his loyalists to a rebel movement (the Houthis). Just a day or two ago, he broke with the Houthis and reached out to the Saudi/UAE coalition indicating he was ready to enter peace talks. He was killed by the Houthis while fleeing Sana’a.
Dancing on the Heads of Snakes is an excellent modern history of Yemen. It was written prior to the Arab Spring (immediately prior, as it was published in 2010) and the author clearly had a good sense of where the country was headed since she included a prediction of a collapse of civic order by 2012. Saleh features prominently in the book, as the president for the last quarter of the twentieth century and solidly into the twenty first at that point. In the author’s description, he had an almost unrivaled mental map of the who’s who of Yemen, knowing which influencers to appease or honour to keep the various tribes settled down. The title of the book comes from a Saleh quote about what governing Yemen was like.
And now his dance has ended.
I like my hopeless orgies of bloodshed and suffering in which Anyone Can Die better in fiction than in reality. But it seems like Yemen (and Syria, and maybe Libya) are giving Westeros a run for its money these days in the crapsack world department.
Thank you for the news and the book suggestion.
Maciej Ceglowski (of Idlewords) went to Yemen in 2014 (!!!!!) and wrote a 3-article series about it on his blog: link, which may also be worth reading for people interested in the above.
Yeah, for sure. The shifting alliances would be fascinating if the whole situation wasn’t so tragic.
Thanks for the link.
Has anyone read Andy Weir’s new book Artemis? What did you think? I read it in basically a single sitting, so the plot clearly kept my attention. The actions of some of the characters did not always feel believable. The descriptions of welding did, though (disclaimer: I have never welded, although I have taken an engineering degree that included some classes on metals). Without giving spoilers, I thought the currency Weir came up with and where he located his fictional space agency were both clever touches.
I have not read it yet, but I’m planning to this winter!
I’ve heard people like his setting and world building but find the character(s?) underdeveloped or not necessarily likeable (opinions diverege on this last point). You’re thoughts here definitely seem to match these impressions. Good to hear that he’s still doing his research on the science!
Personally, if it has one-fourth as much of the AWESOME SCIENCE/NERD STUFF as The Martian and the character development of Ready Player One (i.e., cliches that aren’t too grating), I’d consider that a major success! It’s important to remember that his first book stuck out precisely for the AWESOME SCIENCE/NERD STUFF and had no character development.
I expect you’ll like it then!
btw, Weir did a Reddit AMA recently that was quite good (although if you’re really concerned about spoilers you might prefer to bookmark it until after you’ve read Artemis).
Question: Is there anything I can read about Predictive Processing theory that wasn’t written by Andy Clark?
After Scott’s review, I bought Andy Clark’s “Surfing Uncertainty”. However, I find it unreadable. For example, here is a sentence I picked by opening the book and blindly placing a finger:
I am excited about PP after Scott’s review and would like to read something more in depth, but Clark’s writing is too thick for me.
I have some tinnitus in my right ear, and I also have a way of shutting it down, generally for months at a time.
The method is to run my attention down a muscle on the side of my neck. I think it’s the sternocleidomastoid— it starts at the back of my ear and runs diagonally down the front of my neck. It sticks out if I turn my head towards the center.
Minor evidence of involvement of neck muscles– I’ve felt that turning my head included a sensation of pulling on my eardrum a couple of time.
I’m not sure how long I need to keep running my attention down the muscle, but I think it’s in the range of a few minutes.
I’ve tried stroking the muscle instead, but that doesn’t seem to work– I may not have kept it going long enough.
I’ve tried paying attention to the tinnitus while I do this– I wanted to see if I could catch the moment when tinnitus went away– and that definitely doesn’t work.
The idea for doing this just came into my head, apparently from nowhere. It seemed like it was worth trying and I was surprised at how well it worked.
There’s a technique at the bottom which helps some people and makes things worse for others. While I think my technique is so gentle it’s likely to be harmless, I also believe that anything which is strong enough to do good is strong enough to do harm, so it’s a gamble.
And that’s the specifics about my technique, the rest is a ramble about various things from the net about tinnitus.
I had the impression that doctors said there was nothing to be done for tinnitus, but apparently they do have some methods. Informal survey– what have you heard about treatment for tinnitus?
There are different sorts of tinnitus. Mine has some correlation with worrying. It isn’t the result of exposure to loud noise. I avoid loud noise because I find it painful– no rock concerts for me. I’ve had the good fortune to not be exposed to loud noise involuntarily.
I get a wooshing noise in my right ear– it ranges from just barely there to moderately annoying.
I haven’t seen any evidence people are looking into the possibility that loud noise might cause muscle tension which would lead to tinnitus. However, some drugs cause tinnitus, so presumably it isn’t all about muscle tension.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/tinnitus-ringing-in-the-ears-and-what-to-do-about-it
This article has what seems to be a thorough overview of tinnitus, including methods for managing it.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110112122504.htm
This article offers an intriguing idea of neurological treatment for (some types of?) tinnitus, but is much weaker about existing treatments.
Tinnitus and trigger points:
“Tinnitus is a multifaceted symptom that may have many causes (otologic, neurological, metabolic, pharmacological, vascular, musculoskeletal and psychological) several of which often occur in the same patient. Tinnitus can often be modulated by different kinds of stimuli. In this chapter we describe the results of a study of modulation of tinnitus from stimulation of myofascial trigger points (MTPs). MTPs are small hypersensitive areas in palpable taut bands of skeletal muscles found in patients with the myofascial pain syndrome where stimulation of MTPs causes local and referred pain. We found a strong correlation between tinnitus and the presence of MTPs in head, neck and shoulder girdle (p<0.001). In 56% of patients with tinnitus and MTPs, the tinnitus could be modulated by applying digital compression of such points, mainly those of the masseter muscle. The worst tinnitus was referred to the side that had the most MTPs (p<0.001); Compression of the trigger point on the same side as the tinnitus was significantly more effective than the opposite side in six out of nine of the studied muscles. Compression of MTPs was most effective in patients who have had chronic pain earlier in the examined areas."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLEZ2H1qeoM
20 minutes of pressing on muscles to see which ones might be involved in a person's tinnitus. This is something you can do for yourself. I've never followed the video when I have tinnitus, but I can testify that it's a pretty good head, neck, and shoulder massage.
I like that anatomical charts are superimposed on the man demonstrating the trigger point exploration, but if you don't like that sort of thing, you've been warned.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/22/health/magnesium-tinnitus-ringing-ears-partner/index.html
This one offers hope that magnesium might help tinnitus, but leaves out any connection to muscle tension.
https://www.healthyhearing.com/report/52726-My-accidental-triumph-over-tinnitus
Meditation on the tinnitus sound was very good for this man.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63etps/the_reddit_tinnitus_cure_attempted_by_people_with/
Tapping on the back of the head works well for some people with tinnitus, causes temporary relief (sometimes a good bit better than nothing) for others, has no effect for some, and makes tinnitus worse for others. I don't have a feeling for the proportions.
Just a data point:
I have very weak tinnitus: I generally don’t notice it unless I focus on it. Doctor had no advice beyond “don’t focus on it and maybe you’ll forget it’s there” (which actually is fine advice for me). Tapping on the back of the head (I hear this as advice on the internet) causes temporary relief. A few years ago when it was stronger and I heard it at night, I tried focusing on the sound (my idea) for ~20 minutes in bed to no real effect.
So I was recently reading Fredric Jameson’s ‘Archaeologies of the Future’, which is about Utopian fiction. One of the Utopian visions which Jameson discusses is ‘Utopies Réalisables’ by Yona Friedman, a French architect and urban planner. The book was published in 1975, and describes a dispersed network of societies, each their own ‘Utopia’. One of the two “fundamental mechanisms” of Friedman’s vision was the “right to migration”. I found this description from Jameson startling:
“think of our autonomous and non-communicating Utopias – which can range from wandering tribes and settled villages all the way to great city-states or regional ecologies – as so many islands: a Utopian archipelago”. (221)
Parallel invention? Or was there a reference to Friedman buried somewhere in “Archipelago And Atomic Communitarianism” (or in Moldbug, I guess)? Has anyone read ‘Utopies Réalisables’?
Tomorrow, I’ll spend the day doing software development and my evening playing Magic: The Gathering. Anyone have nerdier plans? Huh?
I could show you the spreadsheets I made for my mtg cube while running tensile tests on coating samples… but at some point some manly man (not me) is going to be manually applying the final product out of doors somewhere, so I suppose that’s marginally more butch than software development.
The tensile tests are unrelated to mtg? What kind of coatings are they?
Yes, unrelated. Deck coatings, window sealants, roof coatings, that kind of thing.
Sorry, I’m not investigating the poor quality of MtG cards, although that would be an interesting way to do it. Hmm….
I spent much of my spare time building a spreadsheet that would guide the selection of vagal nerve stimulator parameters, and if I get any further time I will try to optimize some SQL joins.
Can you clarify what that means? I might be quite interested in this data.
Me too. VNS for epilepsy, depression, or something else?
Oh it’s probably not that interesting. I’m an epileptologist, and I recently inherited a small group of patients from a neurologist who retired suddenly. The ones with VNS had invariably been programmed with strange parameters and I have been working them back toward normalcy. But I got kind of frustrated with figuring it out. So I built a spreadsheet that will do the grunt work for me.
My hypothesis is that stimulation current * on time / off time should be a reasonable albeit rough approximation of the overall density of charge delivery. And (even though the V in VNS stands for “voodoo”) charge delivery should have something to do with efficacy. If it all goes smoothly I may do a diddly little paper out of it. But I also need to see if anyone has thought about this idea already.
If nothing else, it’s a fun little spreadsheet!
Wouldn’t the nature of nerve firing introduce a nonlinearity (but maybe not at this time or space scale)? Like, if I dump enough charge for a nerve to fire, I could double the charge but the nerve hasn’t reset yet so it doesn’t do anything extra.
Very true, but the VNS doesn’t exactly operate like that. A VNS is programmed to have “on” and “off” intervals. During the off interval, no current is applied to the vagus nerve. During the “on” intervals, 250µs pulses of current are applied at (maximally) 30Hz. This stimulation frequency is well below what the neuron could respond to, given its refractory period.
(This is why my spreadsheet only makes a rough approximation of charge delivery. It’s good enough to compare different parameter combinations, but it’s not truly calculating charge delivery in the sense of battery output.)
I’m playing in a 4-card-blind MtG tournament, I’ve spent the past half hour on Gatherer compiling a list of decent creatures I can cast off of WW mana.
I’m also a software developer by day. I also run a biweekly tabletop game in a variant of the Mutants and Masterminds 2E ruleset (with modifications such as an HP system to replace Toughness saves) which I use to approximate the best parts of 3.5E D&D, and am running an ongoing campaign set in the Eberron universe. I’ll be prepping plans and encounters and so forth tomorrow evening.
But depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you get into M:tG, especially with crazy alternate multiplayer play styles, that can be super super nerdy as well.
What is the nerdiest MTG format?
I’m thinking Judge Tower. A format that’s designed to create a deliberately complex board state just to see who screws up the ordering of abilities seems pretty spot on.
Mental Magic would be my vote, you need to know a lot of cards offhand to play anywhere near optimally. And depending on how seriously your group takes it, 3-card or 4-card blind tournaments can end up with hours of Gatherer research.
Obviously some of you lost this game when you reached the word “spreadsheet”. I mean, that’s not even Pascal and everyone knows Pascal is for quiche eaters. The question of course is whether or not johan was using FORTRAN or assembly like a real programmer would.
I know well enough to not try with this game though. I use a quiche eater language (Python) although my work is vaguely adjacent to “possibly ending life on earth as we know it”.
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Just in case anyone missed it, I’m joking. See here.
Aren’t MtG players the nerds most harmed by capitalism?
You mean because of artificial scarcity?
That depends on how you play. In competitive Magic, some formats do give you a lot of freedom to construct a deck, and people not surprisingly want the most effective cards, which exist in limited numbers, so it gets quite expensive. Modern and Standard are like this.
In other formats, such as Sealed and Draft, you buy a small set of random cards for the tournament, and build a deck from them. That way, there is no pressure to buy expensive ultra-rare cards. Here in Canada, joining a Draft format tournament at a local game store costs C$15, which is very reasonable for an evening’s entertainment.
I think artificial scarcity is an important part of what makes collecting games fun for people. I am not sure how to disentangle fun from “harm” here.
There’s definitely a charm to working with a limited card pool, which is why a lot of people’s fondest memories of Magic is the early kitchen table days before they learned about all the cards, and won and lost on the backs of cards that would be terrible by tournament standards (freaking Rubinia Soulsinger). In that realm, not having access to everything is really important.
At some point someone goes on the Internet and learns how to netdeck, and past that point the game changes, now it’s just a massive puzzle with a bunch of interacting parts, and artificial scarcity is either making your habit fantastically expensive, or locking away some of the answers to that puzzle.
Draft kind of recaptures the feel of not having everything to work with, but you still know all the cards in the format if you’re doing it right, so it’s more a limited puzzle than the “holy crud what does THAT do” of the early days.
I’d say the harm comes from the intersection of capitalism and intermittent reinforcement, aka skinner boxes, though whether MtG players losing their wallets or WoW players losing their afternoons and evenings is the bigger harm is an interesting debate.
In any case, there’s ways to enjoy the hobbies despite this, but they are hazardous for some.
I’m not sure this model really applies to WoW anymore. High-end players aren’t as motivated by loot as they used to be. The game is now increasingly “accessible” with nearly all bosses on normal difficulty being pretty easy to defeat with standard gear, while higher-end fights have been made harder not by increasing gear requirements, but by adding a lot of complicated mechanics that must be executed flawlessly.
The legendary and AP systems are definitely examples of “spend lots of time playing or you won’t be as good as the people who do” though.
Granted, there are catch-up mechanics, but if you don’t have 75 artifact traits and your BIS legendaries you’re leaving performance on the table, and I still have raiders who don’t.
I’d probably spend that much time playing anyway, so I don’t mind too much, but some people don’t like doing random stuff in-game as much as I do.
As of now AP is no longer a time gate. AK is so high at this point that if you didn’t have 75 traits the opening of Argus it’ll come this week easy. The BiS legendary is an issue if you start a fresh toon now but not if you’ve been raiding on and off since the start of the expansion. And that seems like the pattern these days — mythic raiders play intensely for a couple of months after a new raid comes out and then sort of drift away until the next one.
What percentage of players do you think are mythic raiders though?
My whole point is that in vanilla, there was no raid “difficulty.” If you wanted to even see Ragnaros, you had to spend months grinding to get all your fire resistance gear just to get a ticket into a guild that could get near him. That provided a strong incentive for people who cared about lore to engage in the ridiculous grind.
These days, there is no grind. If you’re been playing any reasonable amount, you can clear a raid on normal the week it opens. You can probably clear heroic a few weeks later. And the gate on mythic is less gear-based and more mechanics-based (and guild-based, PUGs generally don’t handle mythics well).
@Brad: I basically agree with this, in AK’s current incarnation. However, this is the final refining of a system that for a long time was a significant time gate. Order Resources and logging in every 5 days to get AK? Trying to get decent Concordance ranks in 7.2.5? Much less forgiving to casual play. Technically the remaining Concordance ranks have a similar problem, although that’s a really small performance improvement.
On legendaries… well that’s basically the point. Yes, if you’ve been playing regularly this whole expansion or playing hardcore in bursts of activity, you’ll probably have one spec’s worth of legendaries. So… spend lots of time playing or you won’t be good as the people who do.
My main has something like 40 legendaries under his belt (all the ones for his class, plus like 5 or 6 of the BoA boxes), so it’s not a problem for me, but I have plenty of raiders who started late, changed class during the expansion, or changed specs, and don’t even have two of their top-tier legendaries yet.
@Matt: I agree that seeing all the content is much easier than it used to be in terms of grinding. I consider “seeing all the content” to be a fairly arbitrary metric though. If you want to play top-end WoW, you need to spend a lot of time playing the game (and thus a lot of months subscribed), just like you need a fairly expensive deck to play tournament Magic. Yeah, you can also play casual WoW (and still get through heroic eventually, although maybe not Ahead of the Curve short of being carried), in the same way you can buy a preconstructed or budget deck in Magic and play with your friends. I think the comparison is still apt.
Software development (fueled by a couple Meal Squares), probably some Magic solitaire on my phone at lunch, followed by leading a World of Warcraft raid.
I think I have the edge: you’ll be near physical people and in an amiable setting (until someone Wraths), whereas I’ll be yelling at people over Discord to save healing cds for phase 3.
What faction and server? I’m looking for a new guild.
US-Thrall, Horde.
We’re a 3-night not-really-casual raiding guild, 2/11H going into the second week, so nothing impressive but not total scrubs.
Ah, I switched to ally back in WoD and will be sticking with it for a bit.
One of my co-workers was recently promoted. Until we hire the replacement, I am covering this person’s work. Unfortunately, this worker left their A/R in quite a mess, which is probably going to take me a damn month to sort out.
On the plus side, we have a new employee that can shadow me while I am working through this mess.
No software development. Just standard Excel Wizardy like a few macros, some pivot tables, and some VLOOKUPs, which people seem impressed by here.
Now, at home…if I have spare time, I am just going to keep playing DA: I. I have 55 hours in, and hopefully I’m at Act 3 by now!
I miss the days when I could impress my peers with VLOOKUP (although maybe wasn’t so effective b/c I usually took three tries to get it right).
And then there was the time I got to show my group partner (in a college class!) that No, you don’t have to retype “=ADD(…)” in every cell in the column…
The bad part is that most people are vastly less productive because they don’t have fluency in these things.
Reminder that Index+Match is safer, more flexible, and ever so slightly more efficient than VLOOKUP.
A random complaint: it is annoying how many workplaces still have phone calls as a cultural practice. I am dealing with complicated accounts that require pouring over thousands of lines on a spreadsheet. There is no way to communicate this amount of detail over the phone.
I am reminded of a reconciliation I recently had with a client. She ended up printing out every single invoice on her account for the last 2 years, along with all the contracts, and had to book a conference room for all the paper-work. Then we had a 2 hour long phone call…with me sitting at my desk, reviewing digital copies of all the above as needed.
In the end, she only had two disputes, which she could have easily communicated via email. One of which was a delivery date dispute (whether something was delivered on the 14th or the 15th). The net effect was $100.
Were I her manager and saw this spectacle, I would’ve fired her on the spot.
Perhaps she craved social contact and this was like having her boss pay for therapy.
I’m spending the day doing software development and the evening playing Pathfinder, specifically the Kingmaker adventure path. That’s got to be at least a tie.
I’m working on a software version of Traveller, a D&D style tabletop game from the 70s. Come check it out: https://github.com/rickhull/traveller_rpg
Are you replicating the feature of the old Traveller character generation system where characters could die during character generation?
I want to get dog piled to see what everyone is talking about. A “dog-man”?
I’m going to say something left wing, and I’d like all of the right wingers to attack me with your best shots please.
We should tax the rich ’til the pips squeak. Spend money on libraries, schools, parks. Get our brightest and best working in industry, engineering, education and entertainment rather than thinking up new ways to manipulate and exploit us.
Tax financial institutions. Ban the speculator. Bin the adverts.
1. Shrug. We’ve had a marginal tax rate on the top income bracket of like 91%. That’s economically dumb, but not society-destroying.
2. OK
3. The entertainment industry IS about thinking up ways to manipulate and exploit us (and we can think of journalism as part of the entertainment industry.)
4. Shrug
5 & 6. It’s unclear what these mean.
I don’t think that entertainment has to be about manipulation – it’s only where the profit motive comes in, where everything becomes an impersonal process, that the ethical vision of the artist gets lost .
I suppose, you’ll always have pornographers, demagogues, fakey mcnews merchants – but if the true artist had independence, he would choose not to collaborate with these reprobates, and they would lose much of their power.
Use regulations to control price increases. Property speculators, buy to let landlords, land-bankers – they need to feel the hard press of regulation.
Adverts – we need to stop people from spending money on adverts. It is a waste of money. It doesn’t provide people with information, just gives them a little buzz they associate with something. Manipulation for the purpose of profit.
While I’m loading the ammo, why don’t you start by telling us what country you’re living in and what country you were born and raised in?
Is that relevant?
I’m a European. Living in Europe.
Then go for it. And the rest of us will see how much wealth your rich can pack with them when they leave for greener pastures.
Well, you can’t take land. You can’t take money.
They can take themselves – I suppose it depends on how far superstars are relevant to actual results (as opposed to ranked positions), and whether they can keep their discoveries secret.
Money is almost quintessentially the form of wealth you can take with you anywhere this side of the grave. I get that you probably mean to pass laws saying “you can’t take money with you if you leave!”, but that usually doesn’t work very well in practice.
If I have a “John Owes Me” note, and I take it away, and you never see it again, who benefits?
In that hypothetical, I benefit from your being a silly socialist who can’t think of anything better to do with foreign currency than dump it in a landfill.
Sensible rich people, if they flee Europe with a bunch of Euros or whatever, you’re going to see that money again. Coming from completely different rich people saying “I have some of your money which I wish to use to purchase some of your Siemens machine tools and North Sea oil and fine French wine”. If you refuse to accept it at face value, then the value of your currency collapses and probably takes your economy with it. If you do accept it at face value, then a bunch of people you were hoping would be building libraries, schools, and parks for your people will instead be making machine tools and oil and wine for ours. Or, alternately, a bunch of useful stuff that you were ultimately hoping to get in trade for your machine tools, etc, never shows up and all you get is paper that you had thought was already yours because it belonged to one of “your” rich people.
OK – so we’re on the same page. We’re talking about using money within the socialist economy, not just squirrelling it away and using it elsewhere.
And the mechanism is that a rich person with savings is going to use those savings to purchase machines, or whatever, and build a business in a foreign land.
Maybe. I’d say it’s a one off hit though, isn’t it, because once they’ve gone through their savings, their income is being taxed at the new rate and spent on internal investment.
Maybe I’ll just institute a big old export tax until the rich guys have used up their money pile.
Their income is being taxed at the usual rate in their new country, which is not part of your socialist utopia and so you don’t see any of those tax revenues.
I don’t think we’re on the same page. The scenario I am describing is, rich European businessman sees “utopian socialism” handwriting on the wall, takes his share of Europe’s wealth to the free world as cash (€ or £, and demand deposits rather than banknotes, machts nichts). Exchanges same for dollars (US, Singaporean, or whatever) and sets up business in his new home. You get only a single tax bite on whatever transactions he undertakes to liquidate his European assets before leaving; everything else is beyond your reach.
Meanwhile, a free world bank now flush with €/£/whatever, sells those to businessmen (not necessarily the ones who fled your socialist utopia) who want to buy whatever useful stuff your socialist utopia manufactures for export. Normally, to buy your export goods a foreign businessman would have to show up at one of your banks with $ to buy €, which would leave you with the $ you could use to buy useful stuff from the free world, but because your fleeing expatriates have stashed € in foreign banks, you’re on the hook for providing export goods roughly equal to their total wealth and getting nothing but paper in return. Export taxes, sure, but paid by your exporters and thus just internal redistribution in what’s left of your economy.
The expatriates will probably for sentimental reasons want to keep a vacation home in the old country, and maybe even make it their primary residence. If you’re not greedy about it, you can tax the cash flow associated with maintaining those estates – but if you try to use their domestic mailing address as an excuse for taxing their foreign earnings, they’ll just pull up stakes entirely.
And you’ll get to keep the land, factories, etc, they sell to local purchasers as they head out the door, but A: those assets will likely be hard-used and depreciated in the course of being run for maximum short-term profits during liquidation and B: per above, you’ll be using them to manufacture export goods of roughly equal value and getting nothing in return.
Or you can devalue your currency or declare autarky and see what that gets you.
No country in Europe does everything you propose, but all of them do something like it, to lesser degrees. To see how much it’s hurting you, try looking up the emigration and immigration figures for your country w.r.t. the US. Then wonder why, if you’re doing it right, people with options so overwhelmingly prefer a country that does it the other way.
Why don’t we look at the wealth of the people leaving the US compared to the wealth of those entering? Seems like the smart money, the people with options, they’re heading out.
Seems like the smart money, the people with options, they’re heading out.
What data leads you to that conclusion?
@chalid
To be honest, I had a suspicion that johan_larson’s comment was dubiously relevant. The percentage of USians living in the EU isn’t that much smaller than the percentage of EUians living in the US – 0.3 vs 0.5 – there could well be other factors involved – it’s not clear to me that there is a clear distinction between US tax policy and EU, etc. etc. You’d probably have to look into the history of how changes in tax policy affected migration.
That’s the kind of detail that ssc loves, but personally I think that you have to be very careful with introducing specifics into an argument. The argument rapidly becomes too complex and can’t be satisfactorily used to support any general statement.
The argument descends into nit-picking. “Oh yes, but the US army bases in Germany shouldn’t be counted… WAIT! What about diplomats stationed in Washington….”
Personally, I’d rather just say “maybe”. It leaves us in the same place.
Anyway, I didn’t really want to leave the comment unanswered, but I didn’t want to get into it, so I responded with another dubiously relevant nugget – the source for this is my impression that migrants from Mexico, Puerto Rico etc. have less money than US emigrants. That could be wrong.
Either way, it’s not relevant.
Thanks. Yeah, it seems difficult to answer to me too; I guess I incorrectly got the impression you were confident in your opinion there.
If rich people really were disproportionately leaving the country I’d certainly want to know about it – that’s the sort of thing that you might expect to precede a serious decline.
Maybe it would be more helpful to look at migration within the US or EU, since there are lower barriers to migration. North Korea probably isn’t doing anything right, but their lack of migration just proves they’re good at border control (although the dramatic instances where defectors do manage to escape probably says a lot).
I mean, normally I wouldn’t add my thoughts in because I am lazy, so normally I wouldn’t participate in a dog pile…in this case, you’re specifically requesting it!
re: tax the rich, I think most people over-estimate the amount of money we can get from the rich. To use some Tax Foundation data from 2014, the top 1% earn $1.97 trillion in taxable income per year. They pay an average rate of 27% in income tax (not sure if this includes the Medicare surtax). That comes out to $543 billion (rounded).
So, if you double the taxes on this group, you will raise an additional $543 billion. This would cover the deficit of $483 billion, with some left-over, which you should probably use as a primary surplus to start paying down some of that outstanding debt.
https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2016-update/
So, basically “tax the rich,” to absurd levels, will pay for reducing our current debt. It will not pay for any new entitlement programs. Hell I think until recently even Germany capped out the tax rate at a maximum of 50% of income combined across all levels, so I don’t think it’s even politically possible to get to 54%, and my prior is that it’s probably not a good idea.
If you want an expanded social net, you need to expand the regressive payroll taxes. Using Germany again as an example, Germans apparently pay a combined 19.325 for their payroll taxes, per Wiki The US figure is substantially lower, more like 8%. So if you want to expand the social welfare state? There’s your starter!
I could have more comments, and will add some later, but I have to go home at the moment!
To be fair, Mark didn’t mention entitlement spending. He said “schools, libraries and parks.”
Using doubled income tax for the wealthiest to get out of the red and spend a bit on those things doesn’t sound terrible.
Libraries and parks are cheap. Schools are hilariously expensive.
It’s hard to see in the US budget because most of it is funded by local property taxes that no one ever looks at, but school is one of the most expensive things we do. Leftovers from anything wouldn’t be enough to improve it much, even if I trusted the various departments managing different aspects of American schooling to use them productively, which I don’t.
Schools are hilariously expensive and funded by property taxes in the US. For that matter, so are libraries and parks. So if Mark was an American, I’d have had to push back. Here, these are things you get by soaking the rich with doubled marginal income tax.
For the record, I’m invested in real estate in a major left coast city, and I don’t trust local teachers and managing departments to improve education at all if I cast an altruistic vote to raise my property taxes. The coordination problem seems intractable.
“This would cover the deficit of $483 billion, with some left-over, which you should probably use as a primary surplus to start paying down some of that outstanding debt.”
By the same logic, cutting (or doubling) all federal spending on the the military would be insignificant, as it would only raise (/cost) an additional $600 billion. Instead of assuming that extra tax revenue would be spent on reducing the deficit, you could instead say that it would be enough to increase federal spending on education by a factor of 7*.
Germany is a pretty odd example of a country with a ridiculous tax rate, given that its current one is lower than the US’s (federal + state)! Plenty of countries (Belgium is the top one) range between 50% and 65%, Germany is relatively low in comparison to elsewhere in Europe.
Also, it’s possibly relevant that Mark is British (I don’t know where he’s thinking of enacting his proposals).
*Unless I’ve made some stupid mistake with the numbers, which is definitely possible as the potential revenue from increasing taxes on the rich seems ridiculously huge to me. If I’m correct, your argument has persuaded me in the opposite direction to the one you intended!
Shouldn’t that be a factor of 1/7 ($543billion, current budget ~$3.6trillion)? It’s far from peanuts (which is what I expected), but it’s not exactly fuck-you money on a federal level.
Oops, I a word (see edit).
Ah, yes, that makes much more sense now. Thanks for clarifying 🙂
RLMS,
You’ll notice from your graph that the US already has one of the highest marginal tax rates on the wealthy in the entire world, especially if the GOP tax plan goes through (it will eliminate deductions for state income taxes). US dividend income is taxed generously compared to a few other nations, but is still on the high side (and US corporations also pay among the highest tax rates in the OECD, which puts the US at the #3 spot for corporate+personal capital taxes).
http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLE_II4
Basically, when it comes to the rich people, the US is pretty much in line/high-tax compared to a lot of other nations. I use Germany as an example, KNOWING it is relatively low-tax, because lay people on the left typically think the US has a ridiculously favorable tax structure to the rich, and everyone else is much harder on the rich. This isn’t the case, but it is the case that virtually all these nations tax regular people a WHOLE lot more.
Several nations have maximum taxes that can go to the government. For instance, in Denmark, per Wiki, you cannot contribute more than 51.5% of your income to taxes. So the rate above I gave for the super-rich at 54% is illegal, IN DENMARK. The rate I gave for the US would also be SUBSTANTIALLY higher, because you need to factor in the state and local taxes they are paying: realistically they are giving up 60+% of their income to government entities.
We certainly have run-room to increase our taxes, if we so desire…but even taxing the US top 1% to levels that are extremely high even by OECD standards, would give us enough money to close the current deficit…which means we’ll still be in deficit in 10 years as the government finances continue to deteriorate.
Anyways, this isn’t any tiny deal! Eliminating the deficit is a big deal! It’s a lot of money! However, when talking to the lay people on the left (like my brother-in-law), I get the impression they think that the rich have SO much money, that “taking just a bit” (to use my BIL’s words) will be enough to entirely erase the deficit, fund universal college, universal pre-K, single-payer healthcare, etc.
That’s just NOT the case. You have take insane amounts of money, JUST to balance the budget.
I ran out of time to post any additional details, but this is usually my first point when talking to lay-left people when they talk about soaking the rich.
I’m okay with your point on military spending, and I normally make THAT point, too. To balance the budget by cutting military spending would require gutting the military. Like, we spend a LOT on the military, but it’s not so much that we can just cut a bit and expect enough money leftover to cover all the loose ends, AND increase the social safety net.
Basically everything will require raising taxes, AT THE VERY LEAST, on the Upper Middle Class, and probably the middle class, and maybe the working poor depending on what exactly your preferred government size is.
Where the US is decisively a low-tax nation is a single worker earning the median wage, like the other Anglophone nations:
http://www.oecd.org/ctp/tax-policy/taxing-wages-20725124.htm
Denmark is at 36% compared to the US 30%. Thing is, 6% is a lot when you’re talking about EVERYONE. 6% of US AGI of $9 trillion is $540 billion. That’s as much money as you get from imposing radical income taxation on the top 1%.
I realize I’m not fully answering Mark’s point here and bringing up several others, but typical lay-left people in the US are usually not on board with tax increases when THEY are the ones paying the increase in taxes. At least IME.
In respect to this specific post, the US government fiscal position is deteriorating. SOMEONE needs to pay the debt. If the rich don’t do it because you want to spend all the money on schools, someone else needs to do it.
The wealthy already lost those deductions thanks to the individual Alternative Minimum Tax (which unfortunately the Senate plan preserves, but I’m not so sure it does that much any more; it would affect the remaining $10,000 property tax deduction but I’m not sure what else)
My point is that talking about tax increases in terms of the extent to which they would reduce the deficit is misleading. If you care about reducing the deficit, the question is whether that should be done by increasing taxes or cutting spending (or both). But the question Mark is raising is how much could spending be raised if we increased taxes (keeping the deficit fixed).
In my experience, proposals for tax increases would cover more than the top 1%. What would happen if you increased the rate for the top 2%, or 5%?
Additionally, when comparing the US’s taxes to other countries, you have to take into account the fact the that the US has lower sales tax and I believe lower payroll taxes than comparable countries.
Simultaneous talk of maximum tax rates and “losing deductions” due to the AMT is double-counting, given that the highest AMT rate is 28%.
I don’t think that I want to use tax to reduce private sector net savings at this time. I’d rather use it to make nice things for people.
You could double the amount going to poor children with 500 billion.
I think you only really want to tax the rich if you disagree with how they spend their money. The purpose of consumption tax is to free up goods to be consumed, in the short term, by others.
The purpose of taxing the rich is to change the focus of investment.
It’s always worked in the past.
The amount of money we (meaning the US) spend on all of those things is pretty low, and could be increased several fold without affecting total spending very much. Mostly the government spends money on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security (i.e. lots of transfers to the richest age group, as well as massive distortions to the health market) and Defense (i.e. bombing random people in far away countries).
Financial institutions are taxed, presumably at the corporate tax rate (already the highest in the developed world). I don’t know how you distinguish speculation from other investment, which is pretty damned essential to a functioning economy. Advertising, marketing, and sales are actually quite important and their reputation as 0-sum games seems to be driven by the musings of ignoramuses.
I would say that speculation is investment in expectation of a price increase, without any expectation of, or effort to achieve, an increase in production/income.
Maybe you need some of that, to make a market. But there are times you don’t need it, too. Regulate.
I suppose you would say any secondary market is speculation and subject to the speculation regulation.
I find this very hard to believe.
“I don’t understand it, so it must be untrue.”
Is there a name for that fallacy?
The fallacy of the exaggerated operator?
[That is to say, when I say “I find this very hard to believe” I most definitely do not mean “this is impossible because I can’t understand it” – basically I’m saying – “please provide further information, I am not yet convinced.”]
I’ve always called it the Argument From Personal Incredulity.
Suppose I know that a huge wave of settlers is approaching some fertile but unsettled land, but the current owners of this land do not know about the settlers. I can buy some land, and then jack up the price before any settlers arrive. I haven’t improved the land, but what I have done, is make sure that anyone who buys my land *really wants it*. If someone buys underpriced land they have less incentive to use it most productively.
“I find this very hard to believe.”
When someone comes up with a new product, does everyone know everything about it instantly? No, of course not. Many people are skeptical of new things (conservatism bias) and you have to actively convince them to try it out.
OK – here it is.
I’m one of the few commenters here who is officially categorised as “other”.
I’m not left or right wing, and having now experienced the terror of the dog-pile, here is my neutral and fair ruling on that despised institution:
======
The right wingers of SSC operate according to basic standards of decency and show appreciation for the laws of argument. Where they stumble into ad hominem, they will accept righteous chastisement.
Low content bandwagon cheering is rare.
The official judgement:
If you are discouraged from stating your opinion because of the right wing dog-pile, then you are too weak, and must become stronger.
I hereby declare that from this day onwards, anyone tempted to use the term “right wing dog-pile” must not use that term, and must instead add the words “Please be nice, I’m not too sure of myself” to the ends of their comments.
As it is written, so it shall be done.
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If you’re trying to incite harsh responses, prefacing your comment with a statement that implies you don’t endorse the stance and you’re just curious about the arguments seems like a poor way to do that.
I would also point out that it’s hard to have really vicious fights about tax policy. Post something about refugees or illegal immigrants and we’ll see if the forum’s good nature still holds up.
Lastly, I would point out that politeness in argument is not mutually exclusive with making someone feel unwelcome. I can’t say if there’s an actual effect, since I’m not personally repelled and it’s hard to prove that someone didn’t make a post on a forum, but I have certainly seen polite, reasonable-sounding defenses of positions I find repulsive, and I can imagine someone feeling unwelcome because of it.
I think there’s probably still too many libertarians here. No, to truly bring out the dogpile here, you’ve got post something about how not only is Social Justice justified in getting someone fired for voting for Trump, but they should have showed up to the persons place of work and burned it to the ground with everyone there inside because the people there might have been tainted.
Or for a less obviously ridiculous way to get dogpiled, say something mean about how Scott Alexander is an entitled autistic white guy who doesn’t check his privilege enough and doesn’t understand obvious dogwhistles and is thus excusing and enabling horrible fascists like Trump.
Wouldn’t it be simpler just to praise the works of Sidles, Helicopter Jim, and b7s, and bemoan their banning?
Are you talking about James ‘The Dreaded Jim’ Donald, the first person named on the register of bans? Where does the ‘helicopter’ come from?
That’s him; he’s fond of advocating for giving “free helicopter rides” (as in the 1973 Chilean coup) to his political enemies.
A polite dog pile can still be intimidating.
What are the specific complaints people have other than “there are a lot of people who disagree with me?”
The dynamic of a dogpile is that you say something that lots of people disagree with, and so many people individually disagree with you, and you end up feeling like you’re in a me vs the world kind of argument. Even when the people disagree politely, you end up with more people than you can respond to. But when you say something really unpopular, you often get rather hostile disagreement, with an assumption of bad faith.
I’ve been in the situation before (on a well-run forum full of mostly smart and well-intentioned people) where I found myself arguing with like 20 people, some of whom started assuming evil motives for me, and claiming that I was dodging their questions when I didn’t respond to each one individually.
The main social norm I know for preventing dogpiles is to read the other responses to something you disagree with, and only post a response if your disagreement hasn’t been brought up yet. Otherwise, don’t post anything or post a short comment saying you agree with previous post X about why the original post is wrong.
This is especially bad here where you can get 4 comments of people disagreeing with you on the same points for almost exactly the same reason, 3 of them politely
This seems like a reasonable rule, I will keep an eye out for instances when it’s not observed. Do any particularly egregious examples come to mind?
@ albatross11, Incurian —
Very much agree with these points.
I think (though I can’t remember specific examples to back it up) that “dog-piling” tends to be more …severe? when the original post states something confidently instead of asking “what do people here think about…”.
(Mark did confidently state, but only after telling people this was a drilll :P)
On “egregious examples”, the only one I can think of is actually going the other way — the response ConradHoncho got when he discussed keeping LGBT+ media away from his kids seemed like dog-piling to me (idk if it is “extreme” dogpiling).
Some other examples — but this is vague enough I’m not even trying to search for them — perhaps some top-level comments by Guy From TN (or there’s a few other left-leaning posters who have started commenting recently but I can’t think of their names right now) suggesting a moderate-to-far left position. YES, I’m sorry, this is so vague it probably shouldn’t count as an example, but I’m mentioning it in case it jogs someone’s memory and hopefully they can point out a specific example.
FINALLY — VERY much like the norm of “read the responses before commenting so you don’t repeat others’ points” to prevent dogpiles and streamline conversation in general.
I’ve never felt like I was unjustly dogpiled, for what its worth. I appreciate when people give my ideas an honest consideration, and it sure beats being ignored.
However, I do sometimes have to monitor how much I post, due to the significant time investment in giving responses to so many people. It just comes with the territory of being a minority position.
I cannot believe this is coming up again. How much can you care about dogpiling if you know damn well that the last time the argument started up all over again?
One again — and good lord please let’s not re-litigate the object level — that argument was about a factual claim about the cause of a phenomenon. It was vigorous. A couple weeks later, Thegnskald said:
Which was a) a complete mischaracterization of the what was at issue in that discussion and b) do I even need to talk about b? Just read the self-refuting quote.
Just for the record I think I was justifiably dog-piled about it as my opinion is far outside the SSC mainstream. So, no hard feelings or anything.
@skef — my apologies for mis-remembering/mis-characterizing the discussion. Agree that there is no need to re-litigate the object level. I gambled that enough time had passed and the frame of reference was different enough that my mention of it would not re-spark the debate, but if I’m wrong I apologize (
and would consider deleting my post if you guys think that will help more than it will cause confusiong.looks like you can’t delete posts outside the edit window)@Guy in TN, @Conrad Honcho —
Glad to hear that! I think this means the blog and community is succeeding at fostering worthwhile discussion. 🙂
This is somewhat strong evidence that a) I don’t have a good understanding of dog-piling as people are considering it here, and b) I should take Mark’s advice and continue not commenting in politics debates here (which is fine, b/c that was already my intention) 😛
See, I would 100% support a system like that. I’m happy to admit my feebleness. I mean, its’ not like anyone can talk to me for more than five minutes and not notice it on their own!
Though I’m not sure I agree with your rosey estimation of the SSC comment section. I mean, that the guy who responded to my long and heartfelt post a about the need for a more polite and respectful society a while back with a single-sentence reply calling me a virgin loser didn’t so much stumble into ad hominem as throw himself into it with great gusto! :p
If you are discouraged from stating your opinion because of the right wing dog-pile, then you are too weak, and must become stronger.
So we’re living in a dogpile-eat-dogpile world? 🙂
The Dadaist trolling will continue until morale improves apparently.
Just because I agree with your conclusion doesn’t mean I respect your experiment. You can’t start with “I’m looking to be dog-piled, please show me how it feels” and expect it to teach you anything about either the other commonters behavior or your own reaction to it.
I like how Mark asked for a dogpile, got one he considered mild, proclaimed a conclusion about right-wing dogpiles on the basis of that experience, and that got a bigger dogpile that wasn’t even particularly right-wing.
The original post got eight one-level down replies (excluding Incurian’s one-line response as possibly a joke but including the responses posted after the conclusion). The conclusion got five (excluding Deiseach’s joke). So the conclusion response is actually a bit smaller (though I could see it being described as more “heated” – SSCers tend to care about acknowledging experimental biases :P)
(Now I want to go back an see how many top-level replies to past “dogpiles” — or even just average “long discussions” to what the distribution is… but I don’t have the time right now… maybe a project for the future.)
Well stated – I was observing the “heat” more than the actual reply count.
More seriously, this is a confounder I frequently see whenever anyone tries to analyze bias. A simple count isn’t good enough. If some newspaper printed eight pro-right articles and ten pro-left articles, but the pro-right ones were all on major issues and the pro-left were all fluff pieces on page 4, I don’t think people would consider that paper to be pro-left.
Now I’m wondering how you’d set up the parameters for dogpile analysis. It doesn’t appear trivial.
To help with the dogpile, you run into the problem that: income = consumption + investment
We can imagine a hard cap on personal consumption. No one can spend more than $200k/year on personal things! Any extra is taxed to fund libraries!
The problem is that the ultra-rich don’t actually consume all that much of their incomes. There are only so many cheeseburgers that someone can eat. So, nationalizing ultra-rich-person consumption won’t reshape society in any interesting ways.
To really transform things, you’d have to draw down ultra-rich investments, too. Instead of a rich person getting a farming-tractors or automotive robot, a town gets earth-leveling equipment for parks. The problem is that investment makes labor more productive. Attack it enough, and wages drop. There’s less absolute stuff to go around.
Taxes on the rich should probably be higher. Not sure by how much. Apparently they do pay a lot of the total tax money, so there has to be some kind of limit.
I guess.
Only if that comes with a restructuring of the entire system. As in, why are we teaching X, who does and doesn’t need to know X, why aren’t we teaching them Y.
I guess.
yeah, the question is how you do this. And given that this designation might include me in the future, include me out of this plan. I don’t mind working for a good cause or even being incentivized to do so, but I want to choose my own job.
I don’t think the first two are good ideas, maybe the first? Binning the adverts just means I have to pay for stuff and no one pays attention to them anyways, but when I do pay attention they are fucking annoying so, uh, go for it. Or bring in some Israeli ad agencies, whose shit is actually funny.
Internet advertising is a force for evil in the world. We’d be better off if everyone involved in that industry moved on to something more socially beneficial, like selling heroin to school children.
internet advertising is a force for me getting free stuff. Does anyone actually pay attention to it enough for it to be evil?
I guess you’re talking about how clicks have been incentivized, but that’s also a function of people not wanting to pay subscriptions, sadly
The incentives for chasing clicks are bad, but the massive effort to track everyone on the internet all the time to sell ads more effectively is much worse.
And especially, how do you incentivize more people into industry, engineering and entertainment, when you’ve removed one of the main incentives, the hope of getting rich?
Most people in industry or engineering just earn a salary and have no hope of getting rich (beyond getting quite decent pay). Most people in entertainment seem economically irrational.
Thing is, this is inherently a quantitative question. I think most people throughout the political spectrum are ok with some degree of progressive taxation – the question is just how much. When you say “we should tax the rich ’til the pips squeak” then I don’t know whether you mean a top marginal income tax rate of 40% or 60% or a wealth tax or something about corporate taxation or a specialized consumption tax or something else entirely, so I don’t know whether I actually agree or disagree with you.
1. The rich are being taxed approximately as much as they can be taxed. Any increases in tax rates will be very short-lived as the rich naturally adapt to the new circumstances. After all, they wouldn’t be rich if they couldn’t make and retain money, and that includes tax optimization.
2. The rich already do bear most of the burden of keeping the budget fed with fresh lucre. How much more do you want them to contribute? Don’t be greedy. Thank your local business owner for all the welfare he’s funding.
Spend your own money on libraries, schools and parks.
So your plan is to:
1. Abolish all welfare.
2. Simplify the tax code and lower taxes in general.
Right?
:insert slogan here:
@get our best and brightest working on and not
Quis custodiet? Who will bitch-slap the best and outfox the brightest to make them do what’s gooder and less bad than what they and think best?
When the Brits set up National Health, they didn’t chase down Albert Schweitzer and the world’s best neurosurgeons. They had a giant pool of medics with experience from two world wars, they aimed at okay care for the mass of the populace, they nailed it.
When Obama made speeches about Obamacare’s website he said it would work like Amazon’s website. Got applause, till people tried the website. What Obama didn’t do beforehand is make a phone call: ‘Hi Jeff Bezos. Nice billion-dollar business you got there. Shame if something should happen to it. Anything does, just call me for a favor, or trust in good government. Speaking of favors, I’d like you to loan me some website guys so Obamacare’s website will work at least as well as Amazon’s. I’ll expect a speech putting your good name behind it tomorrow. Please and thank you, bye.’ Obama didn’t become president without making a much more subtle and nasty version of that call to donors twice a day for years. But he never made it for Obamacare’s website, much less for the program itself, so both suck.
Why are you replying to me?
Which is a worse thing – waiting for the next Song of Ice and Fire book, or waiting for the next Elder Scrolls game?
Personally, I think I’ve given up on Song of Ice and Fire – I quite like the first three books, which I read about 15 years ago now, but I think I’m pretty much over the whole thing at this stage. Certainly can’t be bothered to re-read them and try and remember what the hell was happening.
Elder Scrolls – just feel incredibly annoyed by Bethesda not doing anything. I feel now about Bethesda the way I felt about George RR Martin in 2010, but it’s worse.
I gave up on GRRM just as I had given up on RJ before him (and never went back and read the Sanderson stuff). I try to avoid starting unfinished series now but don’t always succeed.
Never got into Elder Scrolls.
I couldn’t resist finishing the series, but you made a good choice TBH
I thought his books were the best.
Agreed, I really enjoyed Sanderson’s three books.
However, they are definitely WoT-as-interpreted-by-Brandon-Sanderson, so if you’re not a Sanderson fan in general you won’t like ’em.
I think interpreting WoT is just in itself a bad idea. WoT was good because of its many unique factors, and Sanderson dumped a lot of that out. Jordan’s WoT focuses on many distinct characters, has a main character who is going crazy and is not that powerful, and in general subverts a lot of generic fantasy tropes while not making a big deal out of it to the point of being obnoxious. Sanderson condenses the list of characters whose perspectives you see from, makes the main character OP and sane (this may have been Jordan’s original intent but it’s stupid either way), and gets pretty cliched. It seems like Sanderson’s way of avoiding cliches is to build new and interesting worlds, but with the world pre-built he didn’t have that luxury (although the WoT world isn’t that generic either really). I felt like a lot of conflicts were resolved in an extremely cliched way that pissed me off, and dumb stuff was added in as well.
There’s a point at which a prophecy is explained by the Borderland rulers. Upon reading the name of the person who said this prophecy, I instantly cringed and still do. Not because this person was important to the story; the name is just irredeemably stupid. As is this entire scene, in fact, because the prophecy basically says “if Rand reacts a certain way then all is lost”; OK, but if all is lost then all is lost, so why even bother with it? Either way you have to fight, so skip this prophetic crap and get to it!
Many scenes are resolved with last-minute saves, which aren’t even particularly surprising given the number of powerful characters with the ability to teleport, heal, et cetera.
The final battle between Rand and the Dark One is also irredeemably stupid. Why didn’t he just kill him, again? Oh, because then everyone would be extremely happy (but stupid). What’s wrong with that, you ask? Good question, and I have no answer. I guess it might be expected that a regular person wouldn’t think of it that way though, but it’s presented like some kind of powerful truth, when in reality it’s just idiocy. But in any case, why does Rand believe that he’s not just being lied to? The Dark One is the father of lies for fucks’s sakes, just kill him and figure it out later. If the consequences of his death are really so bad let the Creator fix it. By the way, why does the Creator even reveal himself at the end? Why doesn’t he do more to fix the problems of this shitty, fucked-up endless cycle, if he actually exists? Did that question even need answering?
To be fair, that’s kind of a trademark of Wheel of Time. I understand why Jordan was doing it — the eternal recurrence thing is a lot more obvious when you recognize all the names — but it doesn’t make it any less cringeworthy whenever they end up a little too on-the-nose.
At no point had I ever had that reaction to any name of any other character. Just that one specifically.
Actually, based on what you’re saying, it seems like that person’s name was actually important to the plot somehow? Not sure how that would be though.
I have no idea, I dropped the series somewhere around book 10 and never picked it back up for the Sanderson books. But pretty much every word with an apostrophe in it is a reference to something in real-world mythology. Sometimes subtle, more often painfully obvious.
The names for the Trolloc clans struck me as particularly ham-handed. Though to be fair those showed up early, and a lot of stuff in the first book was less polished.
This was my reaction to Dances with Dragons. Or rather to the wait for it. Never bothered to read it, since almost all the characters I remember are dead, anyway.
As far as Elder Scrolls, it’s a completely different genre, but I am enjoying the Elder Scrolls Legends online card game.
Elder Scrolls went MMO, and if Warcraft is any precedent, once you go down that road you never really come back…
Yeah, the problem with going MMO is that you have to invest your storyline in the MMO, and now there’s no continuity for people who aren’t playing the MMO. A hypothetical Warcraft IV would be completely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been playing WoW: practically every major lore character has been killed off or massively changed, and areas of the world have been introduced and destroyed.
Elder Scrolls has a much better shot at pulling this off than Warcraft does though. Typically their games take place hundreds of years apart without any character continuity between games (aside from the Daedric Princes, which are minor characters anyway, and completely consistent in their outlook). You don’t really have to worry about characters having changed through the MMO, because those characters are likely dead anyway.
The only big problem is that Skyrim had some serious story hooks going on, and if they ended up resolving the White-Gold Concordat thing in the MMO, that’s going to be really disappointing for players like myself who were looking forward to large-scale Thalmor fighting.
But honestly if they just jump the story forward three centuries and drop us into a jail cell in Black Marsh or Elsweyr, most players will probably be happy. I only know like 70% of what happened between Oblivion and Skyrim anyway.
I was late to the party on Song of Ice and Fire, given that I binge read the books a few months before Game of Thrones came out. So not much waiting exactly.
That said, given the steady decline in quality of the books I wasn’t very eager for the next one anyway. The last two books especially felt like half a book’s worth of material stretched out to the length of four books. I don’t think that we need an ending badly enough to justify two more books that bad or worse.
I feel the same way about Game of Thrones post season 5. Seasons 6 and 7 were awful and I don’t care how long it takes them to make season 8. My girlfriend and her roommates want to watch it with me so I’ll still end up seeing it but I would never see it on my own.
It’s OK – Skyrim is due to be released for digital watches, Fitbits and traffic signals any day now!
Try the Wizenbeak trilogy- it gets better from book to book, and Gilliland doesn’t keep saying he’s going to write a fourth one real soon now.
I seem to recall a SSC-adjacent individual who was writing a blog consisting of a tour of the pan-American highway via Google Maps, starting in Alaska, but can’t find it. Does anyone have a link or even recall what I’m talking about?
For those who don’t know me: I’m a fairly big game nerd. Tabletop, brainteasers, crosswords, video, you name it. One game caught my attention as being very appealing to this crowd: Exit/Corners. It’s a puzzle game within an episodic mystery involving five main characters, reminiscent of Japanime games with lots of character-driven dialogue. This one is based somewhere in Canada / US, however.
I’d love to see what y’all think of it.
http://exitcorners.com/
I’ve played for some 15 minutes now and I don’t appreciate the dialogue. I hope it turns out at least some of them are useful. First puzzle was neat though.
I’ll be honest: the first time I played, I got bored enough by the dialogue that I put it down and didn’t try again until a month or so later. And then I felt like it really hit its stride by episode 5 or so. By episode 8, I was hooked; this game felt MUCH smarter than many others I’d played in that genre. And Percon definitely groks cliffhangers.
Some of the puzzles get harder.
There’s a Reddit where people speculate about what will happen next. Episode 17 is the latest one; the story is about half done, according to the creator.
I’m really enjoying this – it’s not the most unique premise (they even lampshade how “trapped in a maze of puzzles by a psychopath” is a whole genre), but it’s very well-executed and it’s got a mystery that keeps me interested. Some bits I figured out in advance, some bits I didn’t see coming. I’ve got a few predictions that I can’t wait to see if they pay off.
EDIT: And after looking at the subreddit, apparently there were a bunch of other neat details I missed. Also, some of the puzzle conversations actually reveal character instead of giving hints. Which was a little annoying, since I tried to solve the puzzles with as few hints as possible.
spoiler alert (:
I played some more. I just like the riddles. The riddles are neat. Notsomuch the characters though. Anyway do you know what, was it B and N, what they resemble in the riddle where the other letters resemble units of temperature?
There are lots of scales, including D and N.
(Not bothering with rot13, since the following doesn’t really spoil the riddle in question.)
What Douglas Knight said. The scales in question were Newton and Delisle (N and D; I’m assuming you had a typo).
One nice touch I liked was that in my playthrough, Ink (the main protagonist) said he figured out C was Celsius and F was Fahrenheit, and that he just guessed at the D and N. I found this very in-character for him. He’s a lit major, and exactly no one I know of, even in science fields, has ever hinted that they know of any scales besides those two, Kelvin, and maybe Rankine.
Yeah, Ink’s explanations were a nice touch. I had to consult Wikipedia to find out about those temperature scales, so it was pretty reasonable for Ink to just guess at the solution.
There was another puzzle (“Sort by STR”) where I got fed up and decided to just push all the buttons in order, and that happened to be the correct answer. And lo and behold, that was Ink’s solution as well!
There was also another puzzle (the Royal Flush) where I thought about it logically and came up with a solution, and then Ink just says “Eh, I just grabbed all the high cards and it worked.” I felt a little unappreciated there, but oh well.
The “sort by STR” puzzle was solvable if lbh vagrecerg fge nf fgevat, engure guna fgeratgu. Gur vgrzf ner jrncbaf, ohg gung’f n erq ureevat. Gurl ghea bhg gb nyernql or va nycunorgvpny / fgevat beqre.
I couldn’t get the royal flush puzzle at the time, and was in a rush, so I talked to the others until I got enough hints to solve it. (Hints from the others is another nice touch.) Also, Ink’s explanation varies depending on how much you’ve discussed the puzzle; I didn’t get the denouement you did. So do the others’ reactions. Although I suspect their reactions are short term only; it’s probably too much to expect the writer to go farther than that. Still, I was impressed.
What are the current most trustworthy political fact checkers?
I had an argument about politics with a highly-politically-motivated family member that devolved to (uncharitably paraphrased): “do you have any idea what’s going on in this country? You would if you just used $MEDIA_SOURCE.” I am reasonably sure that $MEDIA_SOURCE is feeding her a pack of bullshit. I would like to be able to efficiently provide references on any given claim, but I don’t want to waste my limited life-hours thoroughly researching the Current Crazy.
My usual go-to for debunking urban legends is Snopes. I see from Google that they do politics too; I don’t know if they’re as good at it. I’m looking for something that’s reasonably comprehensive and widely considered trustworthy. I acknowledge that that’s a tall order, because any source that acknowledges stories that support Our Side are false will be assumed to be partisan hacks for Other Side. But I’m hoping something, somewhere will suit.
Ideally I’d like a single fact checker trusted by both Scott’s left- and right-wing commentators, but failing that I can deal with separate checkers suggested by each. To make that easier, please describe your wing and tribe when making suggestions.
Hypothesis: Anyone motivated enough by politics to be a political fact checker is too biased to be trusted to be one. (And these days “politics” is broad enough to include journalism, parts of science, much of religion, bits of history, etc.)
This is similar to the Hitchhiker’s Guide‘s ideas on political power.
That occurred to me. 🙁 I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask, though.
If somebody is that far gone, it might be best to try a less biased source on their own side, rather than seek out a truly unbiased fact checker.
I find the fact checker sites like Politifact or WaPo’s checks to actually be pretty good about listing the facts and the positions of both sides, but they sneak a fair amount of opinion into the write-ups that you do need to keep an eye out for. In particular I’ve found Politifact to be unreliable as to what counts as “mostly/partially true” vs “mostly false”, which are inherently subjective. This isn’t too much of a problem if you read the whole article, you’ll get a good idea of what exactly are the false and true parts and can judge their relative importance yourself, but you ought to totally ignore the frequent “Republicans are less truthful then Democrats!” articles that rely on straight counts of these subjective ratings only, and don’t account for any selection effects regarding which claims are actually examined.
I hesitate to list a particular example because I don’t want to get into a debate on it, but as an example, there was a fact-checking article on a Trump tweet that basically said “Germany owes NATO a bunch of money”. The article noted, correctly, that Germany (along with other NATO countries) has significantly underspent on it’s pledge to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense. I.e. it is true that they aren’t supporting mutual defense at the monetary level they agreed to. The article also noted correctly that this isn’t literally money owed to NATO in the form of a bill they failed to pay.
But the article spent much more time grammar lawyering the true meaning of “owe” and “debt” than was strictly necessary, and also went out of its way to be charitable to Germany’s underspending (“they’re getting better!”). In other words, it used a fairly trivial distinction (“Germany owes NATO money” vs. “Germany has not spent the money on defense it pledged to do in order to contribute to NATO goals”) to rate Trump’s statement a falsehood, when it would be just as easy to take the same facts and say, “Well, as a 140 character summary of the issue, yeah it’s largely true that Germany hasn’t met their financial obligations to NATO”.
Like I said, don’t mean to get into a debate on that particular issue, but if you’ll be so kind as to take my example at face value for the sake of argument, hopefully you’ll agree that that form of “thumb on the scale” editorializing is a common and easy failure mode of fact checking sites when there is any gray area.
Agreed. There was an example before the election where Politifact or Snopes rated what was basically the same claim (I think it was about the unemployment rate) as (mostly) false when Trump made it and mostly true when Sanders made it. But if you read the articles rather than just the headlines, they will reliably tell you whether a claim is blatantly false.
to add on to this, either politifact or snopes wrote articles commenting on the truthfulness or lack thereof of Trump’s predictions about the future, which triggered me to no end
the articles were like ‘this is unlikely’, but I came looking for facts, not your opinions about what next year’s facts will be
Wing: bog-standard right-wing Republican.
Tribe: Red.
I think all media is propaganda, because humans are naturally biased. Selection of stories to report or ignore or “facts” to check or not check are in themselves biased operations. Anyone who claims to be “unbiased” is worse than biased, because they’re also self-blind to their bias.
I find Snopes has a left-leaning bias. The way they do it is by strawmanning or weakmanning the argument. Remember, they get to pick what goes in the “Claim” box that they’re then stating is true or false. So the situation will be something like
Conservative person/outlet makes true claim A.
Snopes: “Claim: Conservative person/outlet claims B. FALSE!” where B is very similar to, but not quite A.
Snopes will then spend five paragraphs “debunking” B, that only a silly uniformed person could possibly believe, and then at the very bottom say “oh but what is maybe true is something like A.” The vast majority of people will just see “CLAIM: FALSE” at the top of the page and never see the switcheroo.
If you want to counter specific facts from your politically obsessed family member, I recommend either finding a “debunking” from a news source they already trust, or better yet, just go look at the source documents.
I think you’re best bet is that you get one fact checker who is conservative, one is who progressive and compare the two.
This.
As I often say, every outlet is biased, even if it tries hard not to be. It’s inherent to the venue. Space is always limited, and so bias is often in what you leave out that’s as true as what you put in. This is as true for fact checkers as it is for standard news. The most unbiased news source I can think of right now is CSPAN, and they don’t do fact checking articles.
Snopes used to be pretty good, IMO, back when it was just the Mikkelsons. Now that there’s more contributing writers, you can’t even trust them as much, sadly.
So the best alternative I see is to embrace bias and hit at least two sources. I find I can still trust most outlets to do a good job of finding everything that supports their respective narratives.
As mentioned, that’s an acceptable if lamentable alternative — but I still need to identify the specific two to use. Hence looking for suggestions from both sides of the aisle. I trust Scott’s commentariat to be a better judge of sources’ intellectual integrity than Google, which will likely just send me to the most popular source.
(now that I think of it, in the interests of reciprocation I should note that I’m a staunch Grey with Scott-ish left-libertarian politics. I’ve fought with friends and family on both sides of the Current Crazy; I’d rather not say which side in this particular case)
As a general rule, it’s useful in convincing a left winger of something to find a left wing source for information supporting your argument, and similarly, mutatis mutandis, for convincing a right winger. I like to cite the IPCC report in arguing climate issues with people who vastly exaggerate what the IPCC is saying.
For what it’s worth, my conclusion a few years back was that the Huffington Post was a relatively honest left wing source–not, of course, a fact checker. But that conclusion is based on a fairly small sample.
A few quick things:
I’m doing a reading of Worm on my radio show/podcast Wingardium Leviosa.
I’m heading to Seattle this weekend for PodCon! If there are any other podcast-adjacent SSCers in Seattle, I’d love to meet up.
So I found Cruelty Free Investing a couple days ago, via this Forbes article via a very non-sympathetic source.
Leaving aside my strong opposition to the goals and language of this group, I do wonder about the effectiveness of their lists – they have “good” and “bad”, with narry a shade of grey. In comparison, I see Givewell, and Seafood Watch and heck, even The Livestock Conservancy which all use a spectrum method of rating charities, ocean catch species, and heritage livestock breeds (respectively) by degree of recommended action. (Heck, even the NRA rates political candidates on a sliding scale.)
There’s a deeper question here, I think, about defining good and bad, and when an absolute is needed, and when things are more generally complex and what happens when we-as-a-society start pretending that the line between “ok” and “not okay” is broad and grey, vs narrow and pretty distinct. (That’s generally “arguing from edge cases”, isn’t it?)
But basically I’d like opinions from people sympathetic to the “Cruelty Free” group to speak on their perception of this tactic. Is this helpful? Supportive of your efforts? Something you’d tweek?
I think having only “good” and “bad” might be okay if and only if you’re very clear up front that you’re only calling out the best of the best and the worst of the worst.
If you’re trying to comprehensively rate every investment possibility, I think you need at least one or two shades of gray. Otherwise you’ll take heat from both sides over marginal cases – some percentage of potential allies will be turned off by your absolutism, and companies might be less willing to make efforts to win your approval. But your true believers will also get upset, because inevitably somebody in the “good” column will be found to have some flaw you were willing to overlook but your fanatics aren’t.
Adding a “marginal”, “questionable”, and/or “neutral” category could help mitigate this.
Right, it strongly depends on your goals I would think. If you’re looking to provide one additional data point to investors who want to consider social responsibility as one of many potential criteria on which they will validate investments, a sliding scale is definitely better.
But if you’re trying to provide a list of the best of the best to people who only want to consider socially responsible investments, good and bad works fine.
(Having some submission problems, sorry if this turns into a double post)
You need a black-and-white list if you want people to actually process and act on it.
Obviously for an individual investor it’s way less work to just look at a list than to process a bunch of numbers or, worse, essays. But that’s the less important thing.
More importantly, most money is managed by institutions these days. If you have an eight to nine figure sum of money to invest, you can go to a variety of asset management companies and tell them to invest your money in its own individual separate account subject to some overall constraints. If those constraints are in a simple form, like the Cruelty Free Investing list, they’ll happily do it for you, because that’s a standard sort of constraint that lots of people and organizations need for various reasons. If you made something much more complicated they’ll tell you that they can’t do it. (By which they mean you’re not worth it to have as a client, and that if they let all of their 500 clients put in oddball requests then their process gets hopelessly complicated.)
Alternately a mutual fund can market itself as being cruelty-free based on a list. Investment managers don’t have special expertise in animal cruelty so they want to outsource their cruelty metric to an external organization. If the metric was more complicated than a list (“we want the market-cap weighted average of cruelty scores in the portfolio to be less than 1.7”) then it becomes difficult for investors to monitor and see that their wishes are being respected.
Valid points, but this doesn’t rule out a black-white-grey list. Or, more accurately, an approve-disapprove-neutral list. Investors can ask for their money to only be placed in companies on the white list, or that it not be placed on the black list. The people making the list can avoid most of the problems of a black and white list, even if it’s not a nice numerical sliding scale.
Yeah I don’t deny that it might be better for users to have a few shades of differentiation – then one person could say to their asset manager “don’t invest in anything in list 1” and a more scrupulous person could say “don’t invest in either of list 1 and list 2.”
But my main point is that in the end some investment firm is going to need to be handed a binary list, and they are not going to want to take any responsibility for the list’s contents.
One similar thing I’ve seen is from religious organizations not wanting to invest in say alcohol or porn. The asset manager doesn’t want to take responsibility for deciding whether buying Time Warner might count as investing in porn.
More realistically these days, someone will lunch an ETF. I don’t think SHE is very well put together but it’s the sort of thing that’s going to get most of the “socially responsible” investment dollars.
I remember seeing Yudkowsky claim that these kind of funds are pointless, since decreased demand for a stock on an ethical basis that causes its price to fall will result in higher demand from investors without such ethical qualms, so the total investment will remain the same. Anyone knowledgeable have an opinion on this?
You get higher investment from the unscrupulous investors, but this does not completely cancel out the loss of investment from the ethical investors. And increased investment by unscrupulous investors is driven precisely by the price being lower, so you are hurting the company to some extent.
Cliff Asness spells it out:
https://www.aqr.com/cliffs-perspective/virtue-is-its-own-reward-or-one-mans-ceiling-is-another-mans-floor
I read a paper that made a convincing (to me) case that there is an effect on prices when some investors can’t or won’t invest in some assets. Those investors have to “pay” other investors to distort their portfolios away from the otherwise optimal portfolio. The change in price is of course a change in cost of capital for unpopular businesses.
Nevertheless, the effect is probably small unless the group of activist investors is huge. I doubt that this is ever a particularly effective form of altruism. Modeling it as cheap talk is probably, in practice, pretty accurate.
It’s also worth considering that if all of the socially responsible investors withdraw, that leaves only the evil, greedy, capitalists solely in charge of the company at that point, with no whiny dissenters to hold them back.
We certainly wouldn’t want to do this when it comes to politics. Imagine the left declaring that the best way to protest Trump’s policies is for left-wingers to sell their voting rights to Republicans.
Imagine the left declaring that the best way to protest Trump’s policies is for left-wingers to sell their voting rights to Republicans.
Damn it, don’t give me ideas!
Finals are approaching at my law school, leaving little time for my creative work.
But while I was researching for Contracts (without question, my favorite class) I started thinking about the legal principles involved in a contract with Satan. I quickly spotted an odd interplay between some passages in Genesis and some contract law principles.
Couldn’t help myself, and wrote an extended “hypo” around it:
http://www.theodidactus.com/dee-v-satan-an-extended-contracts-law-hypothetical/
I think it’s still pretty interesting even if you don’t know a lot about contract law.
When I was interning for a judge we got a case where a prisoner sued, inter alia, Satan and the Pope. Dismissed it for lack of proof of service …
Yeah, I have heard of cases like that.
Here, I guess, that problem got solved because we know Satan’s counterarguments.
Thought this was photoshopped when I saw it elsewhere, but no, this is how our Taoiseach turned up for an emergency cabinet meeting this morning.
Ah Leo, could you not throw on an oul’ tracksuit top or something and not be displaying your toned and fit body to an adoring nation at this hour of the morning? 😀
National supermarket chain is introducing this – any opinions? Useful initiative or gimmick? (I think this would be good for very young children and I’ve heard of PECs before, but what about any people here who are high-functioning – would this have been a problem when you were a kid?)
Isn’t that what you are supposed to do for an emergency meeting? Drop what you are doing and go to the meeting ASAP?
The emergency meeting was scheduled for 9 o’clock this morning,so if they rang him up at home at 7:30 and said “Hey, Taoiseach, we’re having an oul’ crisis sesh, just to let yeh know like”, he would have had plenty of time to forego his morning run and turn up properly dressed.
Plus he had time to grab an (easily identifiable) national newspaper to read in the car, so it’s not like he was out for his regular exercise and got the call half-way through the distance.
And as a matter of fact, he is the one who sets the date and time of any emergency cabinet meetings as Taoiseach, so he is the one who is having his department ring up the rest of them and say “Put on the suit and tie, Mick, yer going to get yer picture in the paper tomorrow morning arriving for the emergency meeting!” So all in all, there is no way he had to dash straight from his morning jog to Leinster House without even time for a shower and a change.
I have no idea what this is meant to signal (apart from “youthful, vigorous, urgency, springing into action at the drop of a hat to defend the national interest” and the likes, particularly after the little blip over “does being forced to accept Frances Fitzgerald’s resignation after defending her make him look weak?”) but this is Ireland – “urgent emergency meeting” means everyone only turns up ten minutes late instead of the usual fifteen to twenty 🙂
Can anyone recommend a forum for rock music, preferably one that is lively but not populated by children and jerks?
No. Rock is dead. Rock is dead they say.
Long live rock, be it dead or alive.
The metal-archives forum is pretty good, but it’s mostly about metal. You can always post about rock in the general section and get interesting answers, but the general section is not that active.
Is there a subsection on alternative metal? That could work…
The Facebook event link for Boston secular solstice links to the NYC page.
Are we witnessing the begining of Götterdämmerung (pinned thread on top)? Abramson presents a quite compelling story, meseems. (For a refresher, read the whole pinned thread.)
What are your predictions for Trump, Pence, Kushner? For the GOP? The USA?
I’ve put money on Trump being out of office by next year.
We talked about that once, I hope you got long odds on that bet! Mueller’s investigation looks serious, but impeachment in a year is nigh impossible. Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings took months even for a (relatively) straightforward perjury case tried by an opposition congress, and this’d be a complicated obstruction case tried by a supporting congress. And even if Mueller somehow finds a massive indefensible bombshell in the next year, I suspect Trump would be too proud to outright resign and would wait for the senate conviction.
What are your odds on Mueller actually finding any “bombshells”? They seem low to me, based on 3 assumptions:
1) the whole thing has leaked like a sieve, so I doubt they are sitting on anything
2) Mueller is already well outside the original scope he was supposed to be looking into (election interference) and digging around in the post-election activities of Trump’s staff
3) we’re already into the frustrated prosecutors game of “I can’t prove you did anything illegal, but I don’t like you, so I’ll nail you for procedural nitpicks”. I.e. Flynn going down for lying about his probably legal activities, and Trump being accused of obstruction (not officially yet, but that’s what the left wing pundits are salivating over) for not admitting that he knew that Flynn lied to the FBI about his probably legal activities.
Which is of course pretty much what the impeachment charges against Clinton consisted of – “you lied to us about the legal stuff you did!” and those were a farce too. But a farce driven by an opposition Congress who still wouldn’t convict. With a friendly Congress I doubt anything against Trump even goes that far.
Mueller probably won’t find anything incriminating Trump directly w.r.t. the Russia probe, but will almost certainly find sketchy deals a la Whitewater or Hillary’s infamous Cattle Futures trade, and probably more and bigger ones, given Trump’s general lifestyle for the last several decades.
That leaves the question of whether he will be impeached and removed given discovery of genuine wrongdoing from before he was president. Impeachment is about politics, not right and wrong–to impeach, they have to get a majority in the House to vote for it. To remove him from office, they need a 2/3 majority in the Senate. Both of those bodies are currently majority Republican.
I think we can model the decision as follows: to a first approximation, all Democrats will default to voting to impeach/remove, and all Republicans will default to voting against that. (This assumes some plausible case can be made for impeachment, but I’m assuming Mueller will find *something*.)
To overcome their partisan vote, each congressman has two things happening:
a. His view of what each possible vote he may cast will do to his political future.
b. His view of how important this issue is. (That is, you might vote in a way that would be bad for your political future if you thought the issue was important enough.)
We might break Mueller’s possible discoveries into three categories:
a. Serious national-security-impacting stuff, like actually knowingly working together with a Russian government disinformation campaign, or passing secrets to the Turkish government in exchange for campaign money, or whatever.
b. Serious stuff that doesn’t impact national security, like having paid bribes and knowingly dealt with the mafia when building casinos in the past.
c. Technical violations of the law that look like an attempt to get the bastard on *something*, like having violated some money-laundering/reporting or campaign-finance laws in some way that doesn’t look to have been otherwise particularly shady.
In case (a), I think he’ll get impeached and removed–Republican congressmen will care enough to pay a price to get him out of office, and their voters will be less inclined to exact such a price.
In case (c), he won’t be impeached, or if he is, he won’t be removed. Even Republican congressmen that despise Trump won’t want to burn down their political careers for such bullshit charges.
Case (b) is the interesting one, and I’m not sure how that will go. It’s also a little worrying to me, because Trump could easily end up in a situation in which he knows that he’s a free man as long as he’s president, but that as soon as he leaves office, he’s likely to be indicted by federal or state authorities. I don’t think it’s a good situation to have the president have that kind of incentive to stay in power. It’s really a bad situation, IMO, when there’s no way to negotiate a safe way for him to step down (like having Pence promise to pardon him–that won’t work for state offenses, and it’s possible we get multiple states who could charge him).
What’s the statue of limitations on things you expect in this category? I don’t know Trump’s business practices, so maybe you expect things that happened a couple years ago, but it seems more likely to have been longer ago, statistically and due to less need and more risk as celebrity increases–perhaps mitigated by increasing hubris.
That’s a good point. It’s quite possible he’ll have stuff in category (b) (serious violations that don’t really impact national security but aren’t obvious bullshit charges) that, for whatever reason, don’t really threaten to send him to jail, but might still be the basis of an impeachment attempt.
Impeachment as a sub-category of firing seems like a way to punish somebody when they are outside the limits of the law but have old skeletons come to light.
@With a friendly Congress I doubt anything against Trump even goes that far-
I can’t name one D party congressman who could vote against impeaching Trump and still get re-elected. The R party congressmen are overwhelmingly as Never Trump as they dare to be and still face their next election. Trump has the luck of the Devil himself but he’s obviously going to be risking impeachment for the next four or eight years.
Serious stuff that doesn’t impact national security, like having paid bribes and knowingly dealt with the mafia when building casinos in the past.
Would that work, though? He’s never held political office until now, so any bribes and so on would be as a civilian. Yeah, he could be got on criminal charges but that would be the same as for any other citizen. Can he be impeached as a president for crimes committed in his non-political life? And if he could, that doesn’t really make things better for Hillary if the whole insider trading thing is correct and that was an offence committed in her ‘civilian’ life, if it could be used to unseat her via impeachment. Do the Democrats really want to risk opening a can of worms that could be used against any future candidate, unless they can be positively sure June Moon is so squeaky clean you could use her as an operating theatre? (And given all the sex scandals committed by liberal cause-supporting men being revealed all over the place now, can they ever be 100% sure any possible candidate does not have some skeleton rattling away in the far back of a closet?)
Not insider trading. The obvious interpretation of the evidence is that it was a bribe to her husband, conveyed by fraudulently assigning, after the fact, the trades that made money to her, the trades that lost money to the person paying the bribe.
On your more general case, I think everyone assumes that impeachment has to be for offense committed in the office, not offenses committed in the past.
I’m not sure what would happen if after a President was elected the DNA evidence turned up proving that he had committed a murder a year earlier. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t be tried for the murder until he left office, don’t know if he could be impeached for it but doubt it.
@Deiseach and David Friedman
My understanding is that a President can be impeached for basically anything that Congress is willing to impeach him for (limited basically by their willingness to set precedents and face their electorates).
I wouldn’t place bets on the insider-trading scenario, but if there was a provable murder I’d bet on removal from office one way or another (impeachment if not resignation).
That’s a sucker bet – he won’t resign and Republicans won’t turn on him. Peter Beinart agrees.
Put some money on that, maybe? If you win, you get money. If you lose – hey, Trump’s out! 😉
I put a twenty on Trump for that exact reason. Should have embraced my inner trader and gone for the perfect hedge.
At what odds? I’d certainly take the other side of that bet at even money.
It’s currently 2:1 odds on predictIt, I’d absolutely take the Remain side at those odds.
Hmm. The only part I’m not sure of is about life expectancy. But I guess for a generic 71 year old man annual death probability is only 2.5% and so that shouldn’t change things much.
I think I’m going to buy some contracts, thanks.
@Brad
Trump’s rich, “out of pocket replacement of all possible organs” rich. I wouldn’t worry overmuch about his health.
Outside of science fiction, that doesn’t mean much. There are very few health situations in which an unlimited budget will make a big difference relative to what health insurance will pay for. Richer people do tend to live longer, but it isn’t because of better medical care (and probably largely isn’t causal at all).
@actinide meta
I know general well-being flattens out above upper working class, but does that hold for the far right of the bell curve?
How much does the promptness of medical treatment matter? The president has a doctor shadowing him, and the White House and Air Force One have emergency equipment+medication+operating tables.
Probably a lot. Treatment within an hour is a big deal for any kind of stroke/heart attack situation. In this case, though, it isn’t about being super rich, but about being president–I think Trump’s health prospects are not improved beyond baseline any more than Clinton’s would have been.
Putting the cutoff at say $250M and above for “can buy organs for cash”. Do these guys disproportionately make it to 90 as compared to people worth, say $5 million?
I know general well-being flattens out above upper working class, but does that hold for the far right of the bell curve?
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother lived into her 102nd year, and the current monarch of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II is now 91 while her husband is 96 (this is part of the problem with/for Charles; he’s now 69 years old, he’s been groomed to be the next monarch all his life and since she refuses to abdicate and there is no sign of her dying as yet, his entire life is wasted hanging around waiting and by the time he does become monarch, there may not be much time left to enjoy it – shades of Queen Victoria who lived to be 82 and her son, Edward VII who was 60 when he finally succeeded her and only reigned for nine years, dying when he was 69).
Holy cow, I feel like I’m looking at a pile of money on the sidewalk. Gotta not be lazy and buy some contracts like Brad.
I wish I could, but apparently even if my job allowed it (answer unclear: the Missouri Gaming Commission doesn’t appear to have caught up with Prediction Markets) PredictIt seems to have cut them off at the pass by playing it safe and not allowing bets from my state…
The only part I’m not sure of is about life expectancy. But I guess for a generic 71 year old man annual death probability is only 2.5% and so that shouldn’t change things much.
And 2.5% is almost certainly too high. I’d imagine that most of that 2.5% people who die at 72 have had some serious health events by 71.
Non-Americans can use BetFair (currently at 50%).
Are any betting markets set up to use bitcoin? That would make it pretty easy for an American to bet on a market that U.S. law didn’t permit him to bet on. Similarly for restrictions on ordinary online gambling.
It was at 4 to 1 at the time I made it. Probably shorter atm due to CBS tweets etc.
Seemed like a vaguely amusing use for £20 that wasn’t earmarked for anything else.
I gotta say, within a year seems nearly impossible to me, and I think there’s a good chance Mueller has him dead to rights on actual Russia conspiracy.
I don’t care if they get audio of him explaining his evil plan like a Bond villain, a Republican Congress ain’t gonna impeach.
Well, anything can happen, but I don’t think so. Everyone is getting really excited about possible impeachment and how far up the chain does this go, but they’ve already had to row back on “TRUMP ORDERED MEETING WITH RUSSIANS!” to “Somebody (probably Jared Kushner is the speculation) told him go meet the Russians”, which is not looking great as chances for “Finally a do-over and get the right result this time round!”
The most recent dogged enthusiasm for an impeachment eventually fizzled out in “what the exact meaning of ‘is’ is” and I can’t see this going anywhere either (unless somebody pulls out real provable footage of Vladimir himself in person giving orders to Trump about what he is supposed to do and what the Russians are going to do when hacking the election).
To remove him from office, they need a 2/3 majority in the Senate. Both of those bodies are currently majority Republican.
I think some of the recent glee over the Democrat victories is precisely this; hoping to unseat the Republican majority/majorities in the midterm elections and besides finally getting power back, the delicious prospect of being able to get Trump because now the Democrats are in control in Congress.
I don’t know how well that will work out, but we’ll see!
It’s been backpedaled even further. Now apparently it’s Kushner told him to talk to everybody on the UN security council (which includes the Russians) about supporting Israel.
None of this is illegal and is part of the basic job of foreign policy.
I would put the probability of Trump being removed from office at .001%. The Dems/left would be wise to stop pinning their hopes on impeachment (for what crime no one even knows) and instead figure out, I dunno, something to make people want to vote for them? Like jobs or taxes or healthcare or something? But instead I think they’re going to go into midterms screaming about Trump and Russia and lose.
As a Republican this is fine by me. Never interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake and all that.
One doesn’t have a basic job of foreign policy until he takes office. And it probably violated the Logan Act, but I’m of the opinion that the Logan Act is unenforceable for multiple reasons including desuetude.
So I agree with your underlying conclusion (not sure I’d put it quite that low, but low) but not all your reasoning.
I recall Obama getting some mockery for his “Office of the President Elect” seal, at least from some right sources. I don’t know how much foreign policy, if any, he was conducting, though.
I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, or if it should be changed due to new capability or norms, but getting a jump start on a job you have been given is a faux pas while conspiring to rig an election is “light treason.” If searching for the latter only reveals the former, it’s going to come off as a–what’s the technical term? nothingburger?
This seems like a rather absurd claim. You’re the legally designated successor to the Presidency. You will be doing foreign policy very soon. Your transition team getting a head start on is exactly the sort of thing they should be doing to make sure that you take over the Presidency smoothly. It’s possible that Trump’s team went past the traditional lines for the president-elect’s transition team, but I don’t know that’s the case, and I’d like it proved before I care at all.
The relevant historical predicates are: Kissinger allegedly intervening in Vietnam peace talks before Nixon took office and Reagan allegedly negotiating with the Iranians during the hostage crisis before he took office.
Both have been subject to the type of strenuous denials that imply the people doing the denying would think it was wrong to do so.
(The above is from memory, I wouldn’t swear to it.)
Buuuut…. not to pick nits, Brad, but the reason those cases may have been controversial, and hence memorable, is because they were interjecting themselves into the middle of active, hot conflicts at the time.
I don’t recall in 2015 or mid 2016 very much talk about conflict with Russia (recall “the 1980’s called, they want their foreign policy back” from the 2012 election debates), and certainly no concurrent life-or-death conflict between us.
Hold up (thinking while typing) if he’s meeting with Russia to start talks about going after Isis in Syria, that could be roughly analogous, then. Especially as it would be potentially a policy change.
Isn’t the story that Kushner sent him out to lobby countries to vote down a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements? That conflict may not be the hottest it’s ever been, but it is certainly an ongoing conflict.
My sense is that the norm is that the sitting President be given room to conduct US foreign policy until he leaves office. If the above is accurate they violated that norm. As I said they also likely violated the Logan Act, but I don’t think that law is enforceable today.
Eh… I’m generally in agreement with you except I see a qualitative difference between trying to get allies (or at least non-belligerents) on board with your incoming policy and interjecting yourself into ongoing, 2-party negotiations with a hostile foreign power.
But it’s not really enforceable, because an elect (of the presidential, not calvanist sort) could just make a public announcement of not intending to enforce a deal if it includes x or y.
To be above reproach, that’s the kind of thing that should be said to your predecessor in private–but there’s always the chance that it was, and they did not want to take that into consideration because of opposing policy views.
One of the things that Flynn talked about was Israel.
The other topic of conversation was the sanctions that Obama had just leveled against Russia for interfering in the election. That’s a pretty clear case of a hot issue. Flynn said “please don’t escalate”; Russia didn’t escalate; the next day, Trump tweeted “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!”.
My understanding is that Brad is correct that the Logan Act is a non-starter. Nevertheless, this is a pretty big norm violation (source):
Hitting the ground running is one thing, but if your goal is a smooth transition, then you keep the State Department in the loop, instead of secretly calling up the Russian ambassador and then lying about it.
Now apparently it’s Kushner told him to talk to everybody on the UN security council (which includes the Russians) about supporting Israel.
So how does “Trump is the president of the alt-right white supremacist Nazi anti-Semites” stack up with “go tell everyone support Israel”? I mean, it may be dodgy, but it does look like “He’s a horrible racist – well, except about the Jews” which would probably be the first time in history such a thing happened (open to corrections about Noted Historical Horrible Racists Who Liked The Jews, However).
@Iain
This is a case which seems excessively vulnerable to partisan spin. “The Trump team disobeyed precedent and the requests of the Obama administration to consult with Russia early” vs “Obama tried to impede Trump’s completely normal contacts with foreign powers before the transition”. I don’t have the time or inclination to figure out which is right, and most people are just going to believe whichever one they want to.
Note that candidate Obama met with a pretty long list of foreign leaders in July 2008.
I think it’s just assumed that those all stick together. You hate Muslims, blacks, gays, Jews, Mexicans, trans people, people who wear funny hats, etc. That’s the sort-of standard way those accusations are packaged.
Obviously, that’s nuts–there’s zero reason to think Trump is anti-Semetic, little reason to think he has any particular animus against gays, blacks, or trans people (he’s probably more positive toward gays and trans people than any other person who had a shot at the Republican nomination), and some reason think he dislikes Mexicans and Muslims. (Or at least that he thinks it’s in his interests to say so, whatever he really believes in his heart.)
@bean:
While I agree that people will see what they want to see, it’s not as hard to parse as all that. If there was nothing wrong with Trump’s team talking to Russia, why did Flynn do it secretly, and why did the Trump administration spend months covering it up?
When Mike Pence claimed on January 15 that Flynn’s conversation had had nothing to do with Russia, there were multiple high-ranking administration officials who knew it was false. At the very least, K.T. McFarland’s email went to Spicer, Bannon, and Priebus. But the administration continued to deny the story until the Washington Post’s scoop a month later.
If it’s all totally innocuous, why the cover-up?
As for whether it’s innocuous or not, I figure Mueller will turn that up in due course (or at least fail to turn up anything actionable, which I’d consider fairly dispositive), but come on, you have to know that “the innocent have nothing to fear” and “only guilty people have something to hide” have pretty much never been true. In the case of politicians:
Politicians and other public figures are incentivized to hide things with “bad optics” regardless of whether or not they are actually criminal or immoral. Here in the US, cases of corruption or treason serious enough to put a politician in prison are relatively rare, and politicians regularly break all manner of laws short of those most serious offenses and get away without actually being tried and convicted in a court of law. As a result, politicians rarely have to fear an orange jumpsuit and prison food. On the other hand, it is entirely possible for a politician to suffer serious harm to their power base, career, and earning potential without ever having actually broken a law. In fact it’s not even necessary for them to have done anything their base considers wrong for them to suffer negative consequences.
This means that a public figure thinks there is some strong benefit to him to take an action and is thus motivated to take it, the relevant question is not “How illegal is this?” but rather “How likely is this to end up in the public eye?”.
There are probably a few cases where deliberately cultivating an air of open and honest communication is an effective way to defuse potential hostile media/political scrutiny, but I’d argue that those cases are actually relatively rare and require the right combination of circumstance, social/political capital, and personal charm to pull off. In fact I think I want to start that point as a top-level comment in the next OT because it’s a conclusion I don’t like much.
In any case, this is why the mantra of politicos everywhere for decades has been ANDEMC: Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations. I think it’s safe to say that that is still “Best Practices” for politicians in their day-to-day operations. Of course, it’s also directly contrary to best practices when dealing with law enforcement hunting scalps, where the rule is “Say nothing at all to anyone until you have counsel. Then say the absolute minimum counsel directs you to say and nothing else to anyone else”. The problem so many public figures run into is that by the time they realize they should be running the “Talking With Law Enforcement” rules, they’ve already been running the “Be A Successful Politician” rules.
For added amusement, I was going to try and dig up one of Popehat’s posts about lies to investigators and talking to law enforcement, only to find that he had a fresh one ready.
@Iain
Sorry, but appealing to WaPo and NYT isn’t going to make your case to me. I don’t trust them on things like this. Just to be clear, I don’t really trust Fox or Breitbart on this either, but it’s just not worth my time to dig down and figure out what actually went on and how bad it was relative to precedent. I have a blog to write, and that’s much more enjoyable. Denying things that sound bad is standard political tactics, regardless of how things go. I’m hardly a huge fan of the Trump administration, but if they were as bad as a lot of the left says, they’d have never made it out of the primaries, let alone into the White House.
@Deiseach
I saw something on a lefty news site a few weeks back that “support for Israel” is now also code for white nationalism because:
1) WNs use Israel as an example of the sort of ethnostate they want.
2) WNs tend to believe in Jewish conspiracies, and so they support Israel so they’ve got a place for the Jews to go to once the races segregate. It’s not entirely unprecedented for Nazis to help and support Jews moving to the middle east.
@Iain
Because at the time, the media was screaming about Russian interference in the election and Trump being a Russian puppet (like now). Trump and his supporters would prefer to have friendly relations (or at least non-antagonistic relations) with Russia. The left and the neocons think Putin is the devil, but conservatives don’t really care. It’s outgroup vs fargroup. So, Flynn would like to extend an olive branch to the Russians, but if he’s seen doing so by the media this would further feed their collusion delusions, so he lied about it. This was very stupid and he got fired and prosecuted for it.
@Conrad
On a related-ish note, what did you make of the Comey firing?
After his performance in the 2016 election I don’t see how anyone could trust Comey. As a Republican, I was shaking my head that after laying out all the illegal stuff Hillary did, he then didn’t recommend putting it front of a grand jury. I also completely understand how Democrats could be very angry at him for discarding standard law enforcement ethics regarding minimal defamation to suspects: when you investigate Bob for rape and decide you don’t have enough to charge him, you do not then hold a press conference to announce all the rape-like things Bob probably did that fall short of rape. And then of course the re-opening of the investigation a few days before the election.
It seemed to me that Comey was playing “what’s good for Comey” politics and had no intention of stopping with Trump in charge. This was then born out by Comey’s leaking of information to the press, and worse, his own failure to recuse himself from investigating Trump and Russia when he knew his own FBI was paying for the phoney Steele dossier in conjunction with Hillary and the Democrats.
I would prefer an apolitical FBI, and Comey’s constant political maneuvering made it impossible for him to deliver that. Firing him and getting a fresh start with Wray was a very good idea.
@Trofim Lysenko:
Note that the Popehat article is talking about innocent people lying unintentionally or spontaneously while being interrogated. That’s not the same as a months-long campaign of obfuscation. (As another example: K.T. McFarland, whose emails about the phone call we can read, testified to Congress in July that she was “not aware of any of the issues or events described above”.)
It’s also hard to claim that the Trump campaign was trying to keep its stance towards Russia on the down-low when Trump was loudly complaining about the sanctions and tweeting about Putin being very smart and so on. By far the most parsimonious explanation for this is that the Trump team recognized that the phone calls had crossed a line and tried to cover it up. In other words, it’s a lot like the Nixon/Kissinger/Vietnam and Reagan/Iran cases that Brad brought up earlier.
(This is distinct from the question of whether it was illegal. I already agreed with Brad that the Logan Act is toothless, although the part where Flynn lied to the FBI obviously has teeth. If Mueller uncovers bombshells, though, they’re probably more likely to arise out of things like this sub-poena of Deutsche Bank.)
Iain, what sort of bombshells are you expecting from the Deutsche Bank records? Does it have to do with Russia or not?
ETA: Also, with respect to Flynn, it seems like you’re expecting strictly coherent statements from people, about what different people said and when. And you’re expecting that from the notoriously incoherent Trump campaign. And expecting that this lack of coherence indicates malice. I’m reminded of the famous President Reagan, Mastermind SNL skit. Trump’s a buffoonish idiot stumbling incoherently through political affairs he can’t hope to comprehend…except when it comes to Russia in which case he and his people are devious scheming political masterminds.
@Iain:
It’s not about the Logan Act.
Basically the argument is that the interference from the incoming Trump administration was with an ongoing counter-intelligence case. That is the underlying crime, not violations of the Logan Act.
@HBC:
If there’s meat on those bones, then I’m sure Mueller will find it eventually, and I doubt the Logan Act will matter.
I’m just saying that:
a) My understanding is that the Logan Act is generally regarded as unconstitutional, which is why nobody has ever been convicted for violating it.
b) Nevertheless, even the most skeptical of people should be able to see that the Trump team’s actions here were a clear violation of norms, and that the Trump team knew it and tried to cover it up. What that cover-up might imply is left up
to confirmation biasas an exercise for the reader.@HBC
Interesting article. We probably shouldn’t house counter-intelligence in a law enforcement agency (or vice-versa if you prefer to think of it that way). Especially given the constitutional doctrines that relax constitutional protections in a non-law enforcement context but are vulnerable to pretextual uses.
@Iain:
I generally agree with those things.
I was just saying that concentrating on whether the Logan Act is enforceable may be “missing it” altogether.
@Brad:
a) I don’t think espionage should be prosecuted or criminally investigated by the CIA (which I don’t believe it is).
b) I think espionage should be illegal, and criminally prosecutable.
A and B seem obvious to me. Am I missing something?
It’s not, that’s FBI turf. It’s an interesting question whether we should treat counterintelligence as an intelligence domain or a criminal justice one, though. I can see arguments both ways: it’s inherently entangled with foreign policy and it has more in common operationally with intelligence work; but you can’t fold it into the intelligence community proper without giving it license to operate on American soil and collect information on Americans, which I’m not sure is a good idea. (Leaving aside the extent to which they do it anyway.)
Maybe the way to go would be making counterintelligence its own department, the way a lot of other countries do.
Well this is interesting. The story about Mueller subpoenaing Deutsche Bank comes via Bloomberg from an unnamed source. Now an unnamed source tells Fox News no such subpoena exists.
Which I suppose makes sense. I don’t think you could get such a subpoena unless Trump himself were the target of a criminal investigation.
I don’t think the CIA should do counterintellegence, but I also don’t think the FBI should do counterintellegence. We have certain constitutional doctrines that allow government agents engaged in counterintellegence to take actions that wouldn’t be allowed in a law enforcement context without it poisoning the tree. The way this is currently dealt with is by having separate teams within the FBI do counterintellegence and law enforcement, but frankly I don’t trust these measures. I’d rather have a separate agency. Preferably not even in the DOJ.
I guess this isn’t exactly responsible to what the article was talking about, but it is what it made me think about.
@Conrad Honcho:
ABC claims to have received independent confirmation. (“…a source familiar with the subpoena told ABC News.”)
Handelsblatt, a German paper, also claims to have received confirmation. (“…sources familiar with the matter told Handelsblatt.”)
It’s worth noting that, although Fox does not draw attention to it, their denial is quite specific: “But the source tells Fox News there has been no subpoena from Mueller’s office to Deutsche Bank about the president’s finances.” Reuters said the subpoena was for “accounts held by President Donald Trump and his family”, Handelsblatt said “dealings linked to the Trumps”, and ABC said that “specific requests of the bank were not immediately clear”. If nobody is lying, that plausibly implies another member of the Trump family. (Jared Kushner got a $285M loan from Deutsche Bank one month prior to the election.)
@Iain
I addressed that specifically. To reiterate: Best Practice for national-level politicians and their retinues, regardless of the actual legality or morality of their actions, is “Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counteraccusations” whenever confronted with accusations of bad action/character. This includes entirely innocent and blameless politicians who have done nothing wrong.
So, because we know that long campaigns of obfuscation are SOP for innocent and guilty alike, your question “If it’s all totally innocuous, why the cover-up?” is a ridiculous question, along the same lines as the old (patently false) slogan of investigative/surveillance power that “If You Have Nothing To Hide, You Have Nothing To Fear”.
This is entirely orthogonal to the question of whether or not Trump and Co. have guilty consciences/ knew they were being bad/ were being bad/ were committing a crime. On that matter, as I’ve said before, I figure Mueller will turn up anything worth turning up, and I have pretty much zero interest in arguing that in the absence of the information he has available to him. I don’t have a dog in that fight one way or the other.
I just strongly object to the argument “If it’s so innocuous, why the cover-up” and all associated variations and forms of “concealment implies guilt”.
@Iain
It could be a weasel-word denial, sure, but ABC news is the same crew that put out the bogus “Flynn to testify Trump ordered him to contact Russians during campaign” smear last week. They’re about as credible as Infowars, so I will not be shocked if it turns out there was no subpoena.
Improprieties about exactly when and how Trump’s transition team started talking to the Russians are not going to convince 18+ Republican senators to vote to remove Trump from office. And if that’s the thread Mueller is pulling on, then it’s likely that “Trump colluded with Putin to rig the election” is a dead end. That was always a thin hope for Team #NeverTrump, not because Trump is too honest to have done such a thing but because Putin is too smart for it, but it would have been impeachment-worthy even by GOP standards and it is the scandal that was all but promised.
There’s a small chance that Trump will engage in unambiguously impeachment-worthy obstruction of justice in response to this, and a small chance that he’ll resign if he runs out of loyal staffers and his close family starts facing jail time. Also a small chance that he’ll start a nuclear war to distract everyone. But the most likely outcome is an even more isolated and embittered Trump still holding out in the White House and the GOP too afraid of his supporters to risk moving against him however much they’d prefer Pence.
So, who are the Democrats going to put up against Trump in 2020? Is it still Hillary’s Turn?
We’ll put up Hilary again if the GOP puts up Romney. Loser’s Bracket 2020.
I still don’t understand, by this logic, why this would be such a bad idea for Putin. Getting caught breaking US law is a lot worse if you’re trying to be president of the US than if you’re an outside actor.
Getting caught breaking US law is a bad idea no matter who you are. Actively colluding with Donald Trump to make Donald Trump president when you could just be quietly working behind the scenes to make Donald Trump president, greatly increases the chance of your getting caught, so don’t do that. Actively colluding with some guy who acknowledges debts and groks OPSEC might have a payoff that’s worth the risk, but Donald Trump is neither of those. If it’s to your benefit to have him in the White House, sure, leak DNC emails to Assange or whatever, but there’s no need to talk to Trump about it. Why would you even consider doing such a thing?
And yes, as bad an idea as it would be for Vladimir Putin to engage in such pointless conspiracy, it would be an even worse idea for Donald Trump with his greater legal exposure. But Putin is the veteran intelligence officer and politician here, so it’s his judgement rather than The Donald’s I trust to have avoided that gaffe.
The clear added benefit of active collusion is that, if it works, you have leverage over the US president in the ability to threaten to reveal the very bad thing he did.
There’s clearly a downside in the increased risk of getting caught/getting the potential next president angrier at you. But it’s not totally clear to me that it’ll be worse for Putin in the world where Elizabeth Warren becomes president in 2021 if she’s mad at him for his active dealings with Donald Trump than just for intervening in the election without coordination.
Edited to add: it’s also not clear how much it increases the risk of getting caught; seems like they got fingered in a pretty normal post-hoc computer security investigation way.
This isn’t to say that you don’t have a point, or that I think there’s definitely explicit communication waiting to turn up.
Yes, I’ve always said that the media and Democrats are doing Putin’s propaganda work for him by running with the line that he’s this all-powerful political mastermind who can control the fate of the world’s elections with a couple of FaceBook ads. And in doing so they’ve also handed him a diplomatic nuke. All he would have to do to send the west into a (further) tailspin is announce “HAHA, yes it’s true, I Vladimir Putin control your president, my puppet, ha ha!”
That trick never works. Or, more precisely, I don’t know of a single case of that trick ever working against an elected official in a democratic nation, and about five minutes of googling only comes up with speculation and conspiracy theories. Politicians seem to be basically immune to such “leverage” because, if they can win elections at all, they can almost always deny everything and keep their office anyhow. Conversely, if evidence of wrongdoing is going to seriously harm a politician’s career, it has to come from an absolutely unimpeachable source, and nothing impeaches an accuser’s credibility like “I tried to blackmail him and he wouldn’t give in – listen when I tell you about the very bad thing he did, damn it!”.
Possibly I’m missing something. Do you have examples of elected officials in mature democracies changing their votes or policies (as opposed to paying some cheap hush money) because someone threatened to reveal the very bad thing they did, or having someone actually reveal the very bad thing a politician did because they refused to submit? Because if the theory is that this is a thing that happens but there’s no evidence because nobody ever gets caught, that gets us back into conspiracy-theory territory.
Putin, being somewhat of an expert in this field, can probably be trusted to engage in the sort of conspiracies that work in reality rather than the ones that only work on the pages of second-rate thrillers.
@John Schilling
Yeah, this is a solid point – I can’t think of a case of policy blackmail (or bribery coupled with followup blackmail threat) of a major elected official.
That said, I can’t think off the top of my head of this type of election intervention (as opposed to the more straightforward “give cash to your preferred candidate” style that I assume powerful countries do with regularity in areas where they’re fighting for influence).
Putin, being somewhat of an expert in this field, can probably be trusted to engage in the sort of conspiracies that work in reality rather than the ones that only work on the pages of second-rate thrillers.
You mean the kind of thrillers that have man is poisoned in London hotel room by polonium laced tea plots? 😀
@Deiseach
By the inverse of the No True Scotsman principle, those are _first rate_ thrillers.
If these sources are correct, the British government was playing that game in 1940 – in the United States, planting dubious stories in the US press without acknowledging their true origin, to favor interventionist candidates over isolationists. Also here, which looks to be the authoritative source if you’ve got a spare $220.
Accusations of CIA interference in foreign elections are numerous and cover every possible form of meddling, but there’s too much noise to figure out what’s really true at the detail level.
@ John Schilling
Re: Changing votes to due to blackmail
I’ve got one – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8BJptvxCl8
This is a former Tory party whip: “For anyone with any sense, who was in trouble, would come to the whips and tell them the truth, and say now, I’m in a jam, can you help? It might be debt, it might be a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal in which a member seemed likely to be mixed up in, they’d come and ask if we could help and if we could, we did. And we would do everything we can because we would store up brownie points and if I mean, that sounds a pretty, pretty nasty reason, but it’s one of the reasons because if we could get a chap out of trouble then, he will do as we ask forever more.”
It is worth noting that during the British parliament-pedophilia scandal that broke in 2013-2014, it turned out that high level officials had indeed been covering up pedophilia by multiple MPs, and part of the allegations in the cover up – naturally quite difficult to prove – were that the cover-up was motivated by exactly this type of logic.
@MrApophenia:
It isn’t clear whether your quote is describing the result of blackmail or gratitude. “Brownie points” suggests, if anything, the latter.
How could you separate the two? “I’m your ally who got you out of trouble! Also, I know you’re a pedophile. So, gonna vote the way I ask or not?”
As David says, “brownie points” codes more strongly for gratitude than blackmail. And if you find it difficult to separate the two, the speaker doesn’t find it necessary to even try to separate “scandal involving small boys” with (financial) debt. The one could plausibly be blackmailable, the other, once paid, really isn’t.
Also, inability to distinguish between gratitude and blackmail suggests that a significant range of human experience has passed you by in ways that will make it difficult for you to understand how other people act.
The description isn’t of blackmail, but of bribery via debt.
https://youtu.be/XPTAjNVvrYg?t=192
“Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call on you to do a service for me, but until that day accept this gesture as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.”
I think it is a mistake to look at the set of charges that Mueller chooses to bring and assume that he doesn’t have anything else. Mueller threw the FARA book at Manafort, but (thus far) has let Flynn off lightly. Lawfare’s analysis, which I find compelling, is that this implies Mueller is after bigger fish. Flynn has made it clear that other members of the Trump transition team knew what he was up to.
If the Republicans retain control of the House and the Senate in 2018, impeachment is almost certainly DOA. If the Democrats win one or both, though, and Mueller continues his methodical advance, I expect fireworks.
Mueller is almost certainly after bigger fish, but if Flynn and Kusher are guilty of trying to set up an illicit(*) channel to Russia after the election, that strongly implies no such channel existed during the campaign.
(*) or dubiously licit then lying about it.
Dems winning the Senate in 2018 would require a electoral bloodbath. The class up for reelection includes everyone who rode Obama’s coattails in 2012. I can look around for the analysis I saw if you’re interested, but from memory it’s something like 6 of the 8 contested/purple state seats (many of which voted for Trump in 2016) are already held by the Dems. In order to win the Senate in 2018 the Dems would need to win all their safe blue seats, all the contested seats, and flip safe red seats. Unless Trump starts a nuclear war or the economy completely tanks next year I don’t see that happening.
The Senate math is definitely stacked against the Democrats in 2018. But more so, it is flatly impossible for the Democrats to get within shouting distance of a 2/3rds majority in the Senate unless large numbers of Senate Republicans who are not facing a 2018 election either defect or resign.
The president’s party always suffers in midterm elections, and the political climate looks pretty good for Democrats right now. (See, for example, the recent election in Virginia.) If the Democrats can hold all of their seats, they need to pick up Colorado, Arizona, and one more. Roy Moore is giving them a real shot in Alabama right now. If that doesn’t pan out, there are a couple of other vaguely plausible routes. Republicans are not particularly popular right now.
This 538 chat gives the Dems about a 30% chance of taking the Senate. It’s not model-based, and should be taken with several grains of salt, but 30% is roughly where they had Trump on election day. It’s a long shot, but it’s far from impossible.
Winning the House isn’t easy either. The Democrats have a significant edge in popularity, but the Republicans did a good job gerrymandering after winning all the state houses in the 2010 midterms, so the Dems need to win the popular vote by 7 or 8 points to take control.
The more control Democrats have over Congress, the more likely we are to see impeachment proceedings, even without further Mueller bombshells. The single most likely outcome, of course, is still that Trump serves out his term.
Predictit and Betfair both have markets for control of the Senate. Predictit puts 30% on the Democrats. I’m not sure how to read odds, so I’m not sure what Betfair says, but I think it agrees, except that it splits the Republican win into 50% majority and 20% tie broken by Pence.
@Iain
Eh, I think that’s an example of a heuristic that works until it doesn’t. FDR gained seats, George W. Bush gained seats in 2002, and other times the President’s party has gained in the house and lost in the senate or vice-versa. Does the President’s party tend to lose seats? Sure, but you can’t say “always,” and there’s plenty of times when it’s essentially a wash.
I would think this expectation would be a little more reasonable if the deck weren’t so heavily stacked against the Dems in 2018. There’s only 8 Republican seats even up for grabs in 2018, with 23 (or 25 considering D-caucusing Is) for the Dems. The Dems have to win 25 out of 33 elections just to stay where they are. And some of those Democrats are running in states where Trump won (Michigan, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, West Virginia).
And I haven’t seen evidence that Trump voters have turned on Trump or Trump’s policies. His disapproval numbers are about his personality more than his policies.
I don’t think a blue state staying blue means much. Trump got 44.43% of the vote in 2016 and Gillespie got 44.97%. Gillespie got more of the vote share than Trump did. Northam won by a bigger margin than Hillary because he picked up libertarians by endorsing weed.
This is further complicated by the fact that northern Virginia is basically a tributary of the DC swamp. And still further complicated by the fact that Gillespie was a GOP insider who eschewed Trump and campaigned with George W. Bush. “Guy who doesn’t like President loses means voters reject President” is an odd takeaway from the VA election. And certainly doesn’t predict anything about how voters in Michigan, Florida, etc will cast their ballots.
Pure fantasy. Alabamans do not trust the Washington Post and are not voting Democrat.
I’m not saying it’s impossible for the Dems to take the Senate, but the structural challenges (gerrymandering as you said, and the luck of the draw for the Senate class) would make it very difficult during a normalish political season. But combine the current hyper partisan environment with the, in my opinion, very poor choice of election issues by the Democrats and I don’t see it happening. When I imagine the campaigns next year I see a bunch of Democrats screaming about Trump, Russia, racism, muslims, and illegal immigrants, while the Republicans are talking about jobs, trade, the economy, taxes, and replacing Obamacare (for real this time!). I just don’t think the Democratic party has a coherent set of issues to present to the average American voter. And with the stock market through the roof, consumer confidence at historic highs, predicted 3.9% growth for Q4, upward wage pressure for the first time in a long time, I don’t see people voting their pocketbook wanting to abandon the current direction of economic policies.
My predictions are:
House unchanged: 60% confident.
Republicans pick up 2 seats in the Senate: 75% confident.
Republicans pick up 4 seats in the Senate: 40% confident.
BetFair gives the Democrats about a 15% chance of taking Alabama.
@Conrad Honcho:
I guess we’ll see in eleven months. For comparison, I’d be closer to:
House unchanged: 40% confident.
Republicans pick up two Senate seats: 35% confident.
Republicans pick up four Senate seats: 20% confident.
Most obvious ones to me are Warren and Gillibrand. Cory Booker seems likely. Cuomo, Jerry Brown, McAuliffe, O’Malley from the governor side.
There’s also always the possibility of Zuckerberg and Bloomberg…
If she wants it, doesn’t it have to be?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but Democrats are really backing themselves into a corner by completely going in the tank for all of this “Russia rigged the election for Trump” stuff, because that narrative strongly implies that Hillary did not deserve to lose, was not a weak candidate, etc.
She can run on the platform of “I would have won if not for Russia” and what does the mainstream left say in response to that exactly? They have no choice but to agree, to run her again, and most likely, to lose again.
Yeah, “we was robbed” is a great narrative for making yourself feel better, but a lousy one for figuring out what went wrong last time so you can do better next time. Next election, it is certain that foreign governments, corporations, interest groups, etc., will still be doing all kinds of things, fair and unfair, to sway the election or convince people to believe/do stuff that affects the election.
The idea that the 2000 election was stolen from Gore was held by a large number, possibly a majority, of Democrats. That didn’t result in their running him again in 2004.
Gore does not have the monomaniacal lust for power that Hillary has, however.
Yeah, I think if Gore wanted to run in 2004, he probably would have won the nomination.
They can plausibly say, “It shouldn’t have been close enough that Russia could’ve stolen it.”
But I think that instead, nobody will have to say anything, and the collective disinterest in running a loser again will peck any Clinton Presidential bid to death without anyone having to make a single coherent denial of her claim.
But the DNC leadership picks the candidate, not the Democratic voters. If Hillary still has influence and money then she’ll just get all the super delegates and that’s that.
I think that the DNC leadership is probably yet more united in its desire not to pick a proven loser than the voters are. The voters can perhaps be swayed with the “it’s unjust!” business. The DNC probably less so.
I don’t think “picking candidate who will win” or “picking candidate who will do the best job” is a useful model for how political parties, especially the DNC, picks their candidate. It’s mostly cronyism, and Hillary is way high up on the crony totem pole still. And plenty of people are fine with this.
Nah, that’s just face-saving. Hillary’s done; she’s not going to get any meaningful support from Dem party leaders now that she’s lost so publicly to such a weak opponent, and the party leaders were her core constituency. She has no popular base to fall back on, and she’s going to be 74 in 2020.
I’d give 10 to 1 odds against HRC being the nominee. I also don’t think much of the chances of most of the other names being kicked around in the media — Sanders, Warren, Booker. My guess is someone that even many mid-range political junkies haven’t heard of yet if they don’t live in the same state.
P.S. Cuomo is a nonstarter. He’s got negative charisma.
My bet right now is that it’ll either be Sanders or someone who can out-Sanders Sanders. I think that there’s a powerful faction in the Democratic party who believe that Sanders would have won and will aggressively interpret Clinton’s loss as evidence that the only way to win is to go extremely left.
I have somewhat weak confidence in this, however. 2:3?
I don’t have much insight at all into what the ideology of the eventual nominee was. So I wouldn’t want to make a prediction as to “someone that can out-Sanders Sanders”. I just don’t think it is going to be him. For demographic reasons, especially age, and for lingering bitterness reasons.
A core belief I have here is that the Democratic party apparatus lost major status by supporting Clinton, and that the people who have lingering bitterness against Sanders have lost a lot of ability to influence the outcome.
I think that age will only work against him if he either has a health event of some kind or himself decides that age is a blocker. I mean, he was probably too old in 2016, too; didn’t seem to be a major strike against him.
They will find another younger less problematic Sanders, with as many oppression Olympics checkmarks as possible. non-white non-male at least. non-straight non-cis and Muslim if possible.
I think that you have a faulty understanding of how this works.
There would definitely be a lot of interest in the Democratic party for a Sanders-like figure who was a little less old-white-dude, for sure (and Warren may be that person). The Democratic party will not nominate a gay trans Muslim woman for President. Not even a tiny bit.
@Standing in the Shadows
What are your odds on the Democratic nominee being Muslim, gay, or trans?
non-white non-male at least. non-straight non-cis and Muslim if possible.
I will bet you that the candidate is at least one of white and male. 1:1 odds?
@Standing in the Shadows
Who would this be? Point us at their Wikipedia page, because anybody who’s going to be running as the Democratic candidate for president is going to have one of those already. The party leadership isn’t able to just pull a random person off the street and make them a plausible candidate in three years; they’re pulling from a very limited pool.
This is the sort of logic that leads to, e.g., women targeting an eighty-pound body weight because they’ve heard guys don’t like fat chicks.
The Democratic Party will probably, in 2020, try to find a candidate with one of these characteristics. They may match several candidates each with one or maybe two of those characteristics against each other in the primary and see who the voters like. They won’t exclude cis-hetero white guys with the charisma and the reputation to make a decent go of it.
@Standing in the Shadows
The republicans have far out done us in the affirmative action department. In seventeen years they’ve managed to elect two mentally handicapped men to the highest office in the land. Which I for one think shows an admirably progressive commitment to supporting the differently abled.
Nine of the past ten Democratic nominees for president have been white, and eight of the past ten have been men. All ten have been Christian, or of a generally Christian background, though I can not attest as to the strength of their personal religious faith.
Hillary Clinton was a former US senator, and secretary of state, not to mention the wife of an ex president. Whether you think she got the nomination because of her qualifications, or because of nepotism, it certainly wasn’t some kind of ingrained preference for female candidates. Barack Obama was a member of a long standing democratic constituency, who was acknowledged, even by his most vociferous critics, as an incredibly effective public speaker.
I would like an explanation as to why electing the idiot son of an ex president, because in between doing lines of coke he managed to find Jesus, is less of an example of demographic favoritism than electing a black man. The implication behind all of this is that there is one particular minority that naturally ought to hold all political power; namely white men. Within that group the preference should be for the relative subalterns of the evangelical white working class, or at least elites who can plausibly impersonate them.
We have two political parties in this country, one that is willing in some exceptional circumstances to nominate people other than white men for higher office, and one that is willing to support magnificently unqualified white men, provided they can hold a pen long enough to sign a bill granting massive tax deductions to the owners of Gulf Stream G5s.
This is not helpful, and detracts from your more important point (that a party which has only ever nominated white Christian men might not be completely devoid of identity politics).
Ehhh, color me skeptical, no pun intended. Are you really suggesting that the major determining factor for why, for example, Trump beat out Ben Carson, as opposed to Carson’s more moderate to liberal stances on key issues with the GOP base?
For that argument to hold water I think you’d have to show examples of internal republican political disputes where, all things being equal including voting records and conservative bona fides, the voters preferred the white male candidate to female and/or non-white candidate.
Another helpful point would be demonstrating that black/hispanic/female/gay conservatives are under-represented as politicians relative to the number of black/hispanic/female/gay conservatives in the US. I honestly don’t know if that’s the case or not, do you?
Objection: Romney is not a Christian.
@Jaskologist:
Are we really going to get into internecine warfare?
If that isn’t “for the lulz” it doesn’t seem very helpful.
He’s got a point. Romney is a follower of a Christian-derived, but no longer Christian sect.
I wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way Jaskologist did, but it’s a valid point. Mormons are not the same as Evangelicals, and counting everyone under the heading of ‘Christian’ is not quite right here. Also, Sarah Palin deserves to be brought up. She was fairly well-received (at least in the early days), and she wasn’t married to a former president.
Mormons self-identify as Christian. I’m with HBC on this one, unless you’re trying to be funny, there’s little to be gained from this…
@Trofim_Lysenko
What liberal views does Carson have, apart from making one oddly pro-gun control comment a few years back? Given that Trump isn’t known to rigidly stick to right-wing principles (or any principles), I don’t think that’s the relevant factor either.
Purging heretics is it’s own reward.
Or, on point, to disprove an inability to overcome bias, it doesn’t matter what he thinks he is, it matters what his voters think he is. He’s evidence R voters will vote for someone who differs from them in at least one significant way.
@HBC,
Saying “Oh, they’re all Christians” is outgroup homogeneity bias. It’s steam-rolling some important differences.
@Iain
I withdraw the comment, and for the record state that I believe that George W Bush is a basically decent man of average intelligence, even if he was not up to the job of leading the world’s only remaining superpower.
I harbor real suspicions that Trump on the other hand may be entering his second childhood.
Nevertheless, Standing in the Shadows’ comment was nothing more than vulgar abuse, and as such I felt no responsibility to be polite or reasonable in response. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
@Trofim_Lysenko
Possibly, at least for some voters. You’re talking about two candidates who did not have very well articulated platforms, but my general impression was that Ben Carson was very much in the mold of a traditional Ted Cruz style Republican, with strong pro life, and small government credentials.Though I think Carson was to the left of Trump on immigration.
The most salient issue isn’t race (or even gender), but the intra-white identity kulturkampf of rural evangelical grievance. It is a brand of politics who’s roots can be traced back as far back as prohibition, when small town America looked with fear, and resentment towards increasingly prosperous cities teeming with European Catholic, and Jewish immigrants.
Looking at the cases of George W Bush, Sarah Palin, or even Roy Moore; there have been repeated instances in which Republicans nominated under qualified, or worse yet morally unfit candidates because of their ties to a certain kind of rural evangelical identity.
Furthermore what is notable about right wing identity politics is how negative much of it is. Look at the history of the Republican party. In 1960 Goldwater ran a campaign without any hint of a identity based grievance, by the time of Nixon you have the southern strategy, followed by Reagan’s overtures to evangelicals. By 1992, as Democrats are nominating a centrist southern Governor, you have ex Nixon hatchet man Pat Buchanan declaring a cultural war on behalf of the parts of the country that grew corn, and against the parts of the country that manufactured semi conductors.
This hostility reached such heights that by the 2016 primary the only real qualification to be the republican nominee was to project the maximal amount of contempt for urban cosmopolitan America. Which goes a long way to explain why the republicans chose a mad dog like Trump, mistaking his sociopathic abuse of his blue tribe neighbors for a genuine commitment to their cause.
Not that it’s particularly relevant, but, by most accounts, GWB is a man of above average intelligence.
@Whatever Happened To Anonymous
I’d like to know who these unnamed accounts are from.
Because that is very much not the impression I got from reading Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial”, a book that recounts the Bush Administration’s mismanagement and paralysis in the face of the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
Early in the book is an account of a meeting between George W. and Saudi prince Bandar Bin Sultan apparently arranged by the elder Bush in 1997 to help tutor the then Governor of Texas on foreign policy, at which G.W. apparently remarked that “I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy”. Remember this is a man who is a Harvard graduate, and the son of a former president, ambassador, and CIA director, who was considering a run for White House, and at no point in his life had he developed any strong opinions on international affairs. That could be charitably described as an incurious stance.
@hyperboloid
George W. Bush Is Smarter Than You
The impression I got of Bush II was that he was a fairly bright guy, but a conventional and not very inquisitive one, who played up his gaffe-prone good-ol’-boy image for political reasons. That tallies fairly well with all the personal accounts I’ve read, although I haven’t read “State of Denial”.
Not unnamed.
On one hand, this guy probably has a biased opinion on GWB, on the other, of all the accounts I recall, this is the most detailed and from the person in the best position to properly assess his intelligence, and he’s certainly smart enough that his judgement wouldn’t be worthless.
EDIT: Ninja’d by rlms
@RLMS
Off the top of my head he’s left of the GOP mainstream on medical marijuana (though as I noted in another post in this thread I think that’s more a matter of being ahead of the curve. The consensus is building on this one), immigration, and minimum wage.
I think he lost to Trump (in pairwise terms) because he had a lot of the flaws of Trump (incoherent platform and a lot of malaprops) without any of the advantages like Trump’s celebrity cachet or apparent charisma (I’m one of those people who find him really annoying to listen to and can’t sit through a speech without turning it off and finding a transcript, but I felt the same way about Obama so I think I’m an outlier here).
@Hyperboloid
I considered a longer response, but I’ll just say that I think you just spectacularly failed the political turing test, speaking as someone who has spent a good chunk of my adult life embedded in GOP Base heartland and Red Tribe territory without being part of the cultural, political, or social mainstream.
I’m not going to tell you your description doesn’t describe ANY real GOP base voters, but I think you’re making the mirror image mistake of the one pointed out by the various liberal posters when conservative commenters here try to psychoanalyze “The American Left” from the starting position that the median American Liberal is best exemplified by the shrillest and most aggressively awful SJW they can find.
@Trofim_Lysenko
I’m an ocean away from the Red Tribe, so I don’t know which topics are most important for them, but I would have put abortion and gun control as the big two issues, and I don’t think Trump (at least at the time of the election) gave the usual Republican signals on the first of those. My impression is that marijuana and minimum wage are fairly unimportant in comparison. Immigration lies somewhere between. So I think the main advantage Trump had in terms of policies over Carson is that he had a core group of supporters who really liked his attitude to immigration.
I generally agree with your analysis of why Trump beat Carson. Trump isn’t charismatic in the traditional sense of being able to give speeches that are universally impressive; his advantages in that area are that he is good at coming up with attention-grabbing/memorable phrases, and his persona is attractive to a core group of his supporters.
Abortion and guns are still live issues, but they were both much hotter topics 10-20 years ago. They still get trotted out every now and then, but every year that goes by without anything substantial happening makes them less effective as wedge issues. I don’t think I’ve had an unprompted conversation with a Red Triber about either in the last ten years. Well, I have about guns, but not gun control; that was an amateur gunsmith showing off his work to me.
I have found myself in that kind of conversation about immigration, the deficit, marijuana (opinion’s split on this one), housing prices, and homelessness. The last two are probably more regionally than nationally significant.
Abortion is pretty big, yeah (I was startled by the year round prevalence of anti-abortion political signage and displays when I moved to rural Missouri). Guns, I think it varies. It’s not that it’s in the top 3 among either the Red Tribe or the GOP base’s priorities (I think it’s maybe in the top 5, definitely in the top 10, and remember that those are highly correlated but not synonymous groups). It looks larger than it is from the outside because those people that DO care about gun rights issues tend to be highly disciplined single-issue voters.
Really, I think the number one is “The Economy Stupid”, number two is “health care reform”, both of which I think the GOP base is more incoherent on than the democrat base on.
1964.
Trump absolutely provided the typical assurances on these issues during the campaign. It was reasonable to question whether he held these beliefs sincerely, as he had indicated roughly the opposite beliefs in the past. However, it was also reasonable for Republicans to expect him to follow through on promises like appointing a SCJ from a list prepared by The Federalist Society.
@hyperboloid
An alternative reading is that Bush knew what he didn’t know. Looking deeply at a complex issue occasionally ends up with you leaving knowing more facts, but being a lot less certain about your conclusions. If this has never happened to you, then you haven’t been looking at hard problems.
There’re a lot of alternative readings. Simple deference, if the guy is there to be your teacher. A kind of polite over humility, especially if it’s understood you’re not being entirely serious. Without more context, it’s impossible to say whether that quote implies Bush is an idiot or tactful or keen or what.
Brad,
The odds are probably somewhat remote that we’ll both still be regularly commenting here in 2+ years, but I’ll take that for some nominal fee, payable to a charity of the other’s choosing.
My $50 on Hillary and your $500 on the field?
My only caveat is that the charity shouldn’t be one that involves mandatory public disclosures (e.g. one regulated by the FEC). Fair?
I don’t know what those are, but sure.
My go-to is usually the Mises Institute, but if that’s overly political and/or not really “charitable” enough, I’m happy to swap in AMF/Givewell/whatever.
No, Mises is just fine. If I win you can donate to WNYC.
Deal.
To be clear, my bet is that she wins the nomination, but I’m neutral as to whether she wins the general.
There’s no way Clinton runs. Sanders will probably run, even though he’s way too old. I would have said Al Franken until a few weeks ago. Really, I expect all the ambitious Dem senators and governors to come out of the woodwork for this one; as incumbents go, Trump seems pretty easy to run against.
Do you think Franken is definitely out? I was expecting more heat against him, but it seems like some combination of the fairly mild nature of the accusations against him and solidarity among his friends has kept him from being badly damaged at this point.
Franken may keep being re-elected to his senate seat if nothing worse comes out, but he was always a long shot as a presidential candidate (I don’t know what Iain was thinking), and the current accusations make him a much longer shot.
Franken wrote a book about the downfall of his hypothetical future presidency – back when he was just a political humorist, long before he first ran for office.
Honestly, I’m surprised he hasn’t resigned yet. There have been so many scandals lately, nobody will be able to remember that he’s (allegedly) just a groper and not a rapist.
What was the downfall of his hypothetical future presidency? Groping accusations? 😉
I don’t find a ton to like in Franken — my wife likes his books and they have always come off as grating to me, even when he’s taking positions I agree with — but Iain is not the only person who saw a Presidential bid for him. I think that right now, it’s fair to say that any individual name you put forward for the Democratic 2020 ticket is a bit of a long-shot, but Franken wasn’t a crazy idea.
I think that the mass of accusations right now works at least as much for him as against him, particularly in as much as many of the other accusations are considerably more salacious.
I think Franken is definitely out for the presidency. I’m not sure about the Senate. I think I would like to see him resign and plant the Democratic flag on the moral high ground, but until Conyers gets the hell out of office it’s hard to see how you can force Franken out for milder accusations.
(Confidence in opinion: low on Franken; high on Conyers needing to resign.)
Edited to add: And Conyers agrees!
Yeah, it seems like what’s come out against Franken so far isn’t remotely enough to justify resignation or voting against him. This strikes me as one of the problems with the common way that we blend together all kinds of different celebrity sex scandals, ranging from actual forcible rape (Weinstein) all the way down to what looks like innocent screw-ups or moderately asinine behavior with a sexual overtone (Franken). It would be better if we could somehow think of those separately, since the right responses (prison time vs telling the jerk to knock it off) also cover a big range.
@albatross11:
I continue to be convinced that America is “fucked in the head” when it comes to conversations around sex. There is a fundamentally hypocritical stance towards sex in the mainstream born from the underlying knowledge that sex is ultimately both desirable and necessary, and the relatively unquestioned belief it is sinful.
This infects the vast majority of the discourse on the issue, on both the left and the right. And it leads directly to the inability to talk meaningfully about the distinction between rape, assault, harassment, etc. The inability to distinguish between pedophilia, predatory statutory rape, and de jure statutory rape, etc.
Because that would involve talking about these things at a level of detail that makes people extremely uncomfortable.
HeelBearClub: Agreed. I think you can see this in everything from discussion of making birth control available for teenagers to sex offender mark of Cain laws. I don’t know how to make it work better.
I’ve written this article about a community in Slovakia that has almost driven itself into extinction. It may be of interest to the crowd here: http://250bpm.com/blog:113 HN discussion thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15830623
Thanks for the link. I’ll add it to the list of people being very vulnerable to memes.
What list is that? Link?
Just a list I keep in my head. The biggest example is in India, where there are (I believe) still dowries and dowry murder.
If you have a daughter and want grandchildren, the most sensible thing (unless I’m missing something) would be to encourage your daughter to marry someone from a different culture. There would be no risk of dowry murder, and you could contribute money to setting up your daughter’s household without being concerned that it would go to your son-in-law’s family.
There’s also an Irish custom (probably no longer in play, and Deiseach will tell me if I’m wrong) of giving younger children to the Church– again presumably causing one to have fewer grandchildren.
Thanks. It was very informative.
People who know game (paging Nabil ad Dajjal?): what’s worth reading? I’ve read and liked Mark Manson’s Models. His emphasis on integrity rather than faking it and running routines suited me well. But I suspect it’s not the whole picture, and I’d like to read a bit more. But the rest of the material I can get hold of seems… mixed.
I’ve seen “Juggler method” recommended by smart people, but I don’t think I was that impressed by the material I could find of his—basically a PDF of forum posts, I think. (Maybe he has better stuff that I missed?) Roissy turned me off (way, way off) at first, but on looking at it again (maybe after reading some worse stuff inbetween) it’s actually starting to look a little better—at least his prose is good, and I feel like the quality of thought is good enough that there might be some salvageable gems in amongst the dross.
Are there any others that are good or might be useful?
I might have some other related questions, but I’m reluctant to clog up Scott’s nice clean message board with them. If anyone’s willing to discuss this sort of thing by email, then let me know and/or drop me a line—you can see my email at the URL my username links to.
RSD has pretty much taken over the seduction training market.
But that’s a different question to whether they’re any good!
Isn’t that Tyler Durden’s thing? I’m a little bit creeped out by him, admittedly coloured by his unflattering portrayal in The Game. (I don’t know whether that portrayal’s fair.) He strikes me as a little bit of a sociopath, and I’d prefer not to read them.
I’ve watched some of their videos and it’s pretty impressive how they can walk up to girls and within minutes, seduce them. If they were frauds, then it’s impressive how long they’ve been able to sustain it.
Selection bias?
Yeah, they record a bunch of videos and then only show the most impressive ones.
On the other hand, is it really so hard to believe that people are going out to bars and meeting people and having sex with them? It’s not like it’s some improbable thing that requires debunking.
I’ve met many men in real life who have good game. From what I’ve seen with my own eyes, nothing in RSD’s videos strikes me as improbable.
If you are a socially awkward nerd who finds it unbelievably difficult to even get even below-average girls to kiss you, and you mostly hang out with other people for whom that is true, then yes – men who are successful at regularly obtaining sex from very attractive women appear to be some sort of demigods. It just depends on your frame of reference.
@Matt M,
Personal question, and feel free to ignore it, but how old are you? Because your description here matches up with me and my friends pretty well in my early to mid twenties. Now in my early forties, I’m happily married with three kids, and most of those friends have been similarly successful in pairing off. Not easy to hear when it’s you, but it may just be that your time hasn’t yet come.
Early 30s.
I sound more angry and bitter than I actually am, though. I have accepted the very strong likelihood that I simply will never have a normal romantic relationship and am fairly comfortable with it. No longer really actively trying to find one. Not worth the time/effort.
Now *that* outlook I find bizarre.
I’m an extreme introvert who hates most/all social interaction with the exception of “netflix and chill” (both in the literal and suggestive sense).
Not many women are willing to have a relationship that accommodates this. Or at least, not for less than $200/hr.
As I advance in my career and make more money and have less free time, my time to myself becomes even more valuable. I refuse to spend it in bars or going on long walks on the beach or whatever the hell it is girls want to do.
I’ll give you three tries to guess what the lowest value of this here NEO-PI-R result is.
I don’t want to be uncharitable, but that really sounds like sour grapes. (Nevermind that you don’t go to bars to find a wife. It’s like the antithesis of the place one finds wife-candidates.)
What are your expectations of a suitable female for you?
I’m happily married and have been for decades, and spend essentially no time in bars or walking on the beach. It’s true that I met my current wife by going to folk dancing at the university where I was teaching at the time–a colleague’s wife had suggested it as a good place to meet girls–and I don’t particularly enjoy folk dancing.
Or in other words, you should distinguish between activities that let you find a mate and activities you will engage in once you have found her. It’s worth bearing some cost in the former if the returns from the latter are positive. And I expect there are quite a lot of women who also don’t want to spend their time in bars or walking on the beach.
None of that implies that your choice is wrong, just that it might be.
I don’t care at all whether Matt M finds a significant other or not, nor do I have any opinion on whether it would be worthwhile for him. He’s in charge of his own life!
But I note that I know a lot of pretty strong introverts who have successful romantic relationships. And that I kind of doubt the power of insights that “guys who have no romantic success and seemingly little contact with women” have into women.
I don’t, man, there are a lot of introverted girls out there. Mrs. ADBG spends most of her time listening to books on CD, knitting, watching the CW shows, etc. She does not like going out much, does not drink, and has few friends. I know a lot of women like this.
But most of these girls do like SOME social activity. We had 25 people over for Thanksgiving and probably will have something like 20 over for Christmas. We usually have 20-30 people over my birthday, too.
So, yeah, you’ll have to make an adjustment for these kinds of social activities, at least for the introverted girls I know. I do a know a guy or two that are so introverted they don’t even like these activities, and it’s definitely a sore point their relationships. But it’s definitely worth it, at least from the guy’s perspective.
The problem is, as far as I can tell, extroverted men don’t necessarily prefer extroverted women. If anything, introverted women are in higher demand than average. So how do I meet a girl that sits at home knitting? I have no particular advantage here over the extroverted man. We’re both equally unlikely to meet her.
But if we both happen to see her at some random public venue (work, grocery store, whatever) he’s a lot more likely to approach her than I am.
I’ll also emphasize that yes, extremely introverted for me. Not slightly. Extremely. If it were up to me, I’d basically never leave the house. The whole reason I’m going hard into a lucrative but stressful career is the hope that I can retire in my mid-40s. Not to travel the world, but to move somewhere cheap and be a shut-in who plays video games all day. This is my aspiration for life. There are not many women who find that desirable. Even the self-described introverts.
Human. Female. Puts out. Doesn’t nag too much.
Those are my only demands. Everything else is a question of whether they are willing to put up with my habits.
I’ll also throw out that I think I have a lower sex drive than most men. Not zero, but lower than average. Which makes me less willing to sacrifice convenience and my own personal preferences to obtain female approval. I know a whole lot of guys who will move heaven and Earth for a slight chance at getting laid. Which is fine for them, but it’s just not really my style. And it’s further complicated by the fact that those guys are my direct competition. They want it more than I do, quite literally, so it’s only natural that I would lose out to them far more often than I would win.
Yeah, most girls will not find that desirable, and most guys will not find that desirable either. So your best bet is probably to just play MMOs and make friends with the girls that play those. I know several couples that met through WOW or Diablo or whatever.
Right. But even that’s tough. 90% of the “girls” I meet in WoW already have boyfriends. Like I said, introverted women are not waiting for introverted men. They hook up with the extroverted guys who approach them in real life.
It’s “sour grapes” in the sense that I am annoyed that the universe is set up in such a way as to result in an outcome where I basically miss out on a nearly universal human experience. But at the same time, to the extent that you believe “some people are really better off just being alone” I definitely seem like a pretty obvious candidate for that, right. I’m pretty well suited to it. I’m annoyed that there aren’t more people who think the way I do and who would find my qualities desirable, but hey, such is life.
@Anonymous
Could you explain what that image/table you linked to is, and what we’re supposed to be taking away from it? (And how that’s relevant to this discussion?) Because I, for one, don’t get what you’re trying to say.
@Kevin C.
Ekstrawertycznosc seems Polish for extroversion and his score is 0-70, suggesting that he is in the most introverted tier of this test.
I suspect you may see “obtaining female approval” as something separated from activities you actually want to be doing. Allow me to show you a different perspective: most (not all) things that “females approve” are actually good for you!
Taking the first stereotypes that come to my mind, women prefer men who are tall, rich, fit, powerful, dominant, intelligent, good at telling jokes… uhm, I probably forgot some important things, but let’s work with this.
Most of these traits you would want to have even if there was zero correlation with what women want, simply because they would benefit you personally. Being rich allows you to buy things you need or want. Being fit allows you to live longer and better. Dominant behavior and telling jokes are also useful outside sexual relationships, for example in your career. Therefore, even a rational asexual person should try to be more rich, fit, and socially dominant.
In this sense, men are the luckier sex: what is expected of us correlates well with what is good for us. Imagine yourself as a woman: you would be expected to have big boobs, be submissive, and not exceed average intelligence — but big boobs are otherwise useless, and being submissive and dumb, or just being perceived as one, may hurt your career. Here we have tension between sexual and professional expectations. But for men, these things are much better aligned.
Start exercising; not because women like it, but because it improves your life. Optimize your finances; not because women like it, but because it is good for you. Practice social skills; not because women like it, but because they are useful in million different situations. Etc. And if you do these things right, as a side effect women may suddenly become more interested in you. The worst case is that women will remain unimpressed, and you will only get a longer and more convenient life.
But I don’t particularly care about any of those things. I want money to the extent that it enables me to, at some point in the future, do nothing but play videogames all the time. I hate exercising. I hate being social. I’m already more successful in my career than I ever possibly imagined I would be and have little to no motivation to advance further.
I’m not super depressed or suicidal in any way, but I’m fairly agnostic towards living a long time. I don’t hate life, but I don’t particularly enjoy it either. It just is what it is.
Matt: it is 100% possible to learn to like exercise (possibly “retrain your mind/body.) Also consider that most people’s version of exercise is boring and unpleasant (running on a treadmill or doing circuits or whatever idiots in Planet Fitness do) but is also not actually good exercise.
If you do actually efficient and effective exercise, the kind that works muscles and releases testosterone, you will like it more than you expect. Lift heavy weights hard, then rest a lot. Rock climb. Do some jiujitsu. Yes, I’m biased.
OK, then you should troll the 29-35 demographic. There are lots of women who want to get married RIGHT NOW, and are willing to overlook a man’s weaknesses, as long as he can bring in the dough and make her pregnant. Just do your due diligence about finding out her true character; a review of her social media might help determine if she’s only suppressing her innate insufferableness.
Oh, and never reveal that your standards are low. That won’t help at all.
@Viliam
All those things have (sometimes enormous) opportunity costs, some people lack the traits to be good at those things and some people hate the experience of doing those things.
Your argument seems little more than the typical mind fallacy, like a famous rock star telling others to get into a band to strike it rich and get groupies going after them. That is horrible advice for anyone who doesn’t have rock star talent. Now, your advice is probably right for far more men, because the requirements are lower, but they are not non-existent.
I also fundamentally disagree that women only demand things from men that are good for them. For example, they commonly demand excessive stoicism, which is harmful.
@Anonymous
Of course, such women are presumably the most likely to leave the guy after the children are old enough and/or resenting him for not fulfilling more of her desires than having a sperm/cash dispenser.
That high risk of failure may be the best option for a very desperate man for whom being single is unbearable, or who really wants children or such, but it seems like playing Russian roulette.
@Aapje
Sure, sure. I’m just taking his requirements at face value.
@Matt M
A day spent playing computer games, with no worries about tomorrow, not having to do anything physically nontrivial, and not having to meet non-rationalists… that sounds like a day in paradise to me, too. Okay, I wouldn’t want every day to be like that, and I also have dreams other than playing games (e.g. I would like to create my own computer game at some moment, and I enjoy giving lectures), but I understand the appeal.
Still, maximizing your expected lifetime means (a) increasing the probability that you will indeed live to your retirement, and (b) increasing the time spent playing computer games when retired. There are pretty much just two things you need to do:
1) Eat healthy stuff, which more or less means lots of fresh vegetables, no refined sugar, and very little salt. If that sounds unappealing, that’s only because you don’t know how to use spices. At the beginning, the new recipes will be difficult, but do them three times and it becomes automatic.
2) The exercise can be minimized into 1 hour every other day, at your home, with breaks between the series spent browsing web.
@Aapje
The costs of new habits are typically greatest at the beginning. With healthy food and exercise, the initial costs are to read some literature, to learn new recipes, to find where to buy stuff, to install some minimum exercising equipment, and perhaps to set up a system of reminders. That can easily take 2 weeks worth of time.
But after this initial phase, you have the most important stuff at home, you know where to buy (or get delivered from) more stuff, you have memorized it, so now you barely spend any time thinking about it. It still costs you some time to actually cook the things and exercise; about 1 hour a day, if you do it right.
Financially, healthy food costs about the same as unhealthy food, and exercising at home is free.
Oh yeah, I should remind Matt M of the greatest risk involved: if he tries this and succeeds, a few years later everyone will dismiss his success with “this was easy for you, because you were already born fit; go check your metabolic privilege!” /s
More seriously, I don’t think this analogy fits here. If you try becoming a rock star, and you fail to get to the top, you spent a lot of time for maybe nothing. With healthy lifestyle, partial success still makes life better.
I agree; I specifically wrote about “most (not all) things that females approve”. Things like violent behavior and taking high risks for no good reason are stupid.
Nope. I’ve tried lots of different “kinds” of exercise. I haven’t enjoyed any of them. It’s not that they were all unbelievably miserable, just significantly less enjoying than whatever else I would otherwise be doing with my free time. Exercise never makes me feel good, never makes me feel better, more energetic, etc. Yes – going without it makes me slightly fatter than I otherwise would be, which makes me less attractive to women. Oh well. Don’t care. My life is my own and I choose to live comfortably and spend my time on the things I most enjoy doing.
I have been. I have more success now than I did in my younger days, sure. But still not much.
I guess at a high level, I have both explicit and implicit standards. My explicit standards are ridiculously low, as I said above. But, I also essentially refuse to change my own behavior to make myself more appealing to women. This, in a sense, creates a series of implicit standards that are rather high. Like, I myself have not said “I demand an introverted woman.” But if I refuse to compromise on my own introverted habits, that essentially creates a demand of “I require a woman who is fully comfortable dealing with an extremely introverted person.”
And yes, when you start to add up all of my “implicit demands” (i.e. – here is what someone would have to be okay with to desire a relationship with me), the list gets long and exclusive, such that my inability to find someone makes perfect logical sense, hence the fact that I’ve given up on it.
Whether or not this qualifies as me being “too picky” is probably up for debate. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that I have high standards. The only standards I have are that I won’t compromise when it comes to my inherent personality traits or my general comfort and philosophy in life.
I’d also point out that when women talk this way, people generally look upon it positively as some sort of heroic thing. “My man needs to love me for who I am or I don’t need him!” Responses are always things like “Good for you, girlfriend!” And yet, when a man says something similar, it’s all “Shut up and work out more. Make yourself more appealing.”
What is thy bidding, o summoner?
I haven’t read much in the last few years so there’s probably a lot of good stuff out there that I’m unaware of. That said:
The most helpful books I’ve read were Bang and Day Bang by Roosh V. Bang focuses on club game, which is hateful to me, but encapsulates the core insights. Day Bang refines that into a tool box which you can employ in the countless random encounters you’ll have with women during your daily life. They’re both pretty cheap so I won’t share the PDFs.
The only big weakness of those is that their age shows a bit. They were both written pre-Tinder and so they’re focused almost entirely on face-to-face pickups. That’s still the best way to meet women but for the best results you’re going to want to supplement that with a dating profile. There are a lot of resources out there for optimizing your number of matches but I can’t recommend anything specific. Once you’ve matched though, normal text game as he discusses applies.
Edit: re-reading your post, this seems like the opposite of what you want. IMO it might still be helpful but maybe not for you right now.
Also this isn’t exactly Game advice but there was an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit on supposed psychics and spirit mediums which really helped me tighten my Game.
Cold reading is a set of techniques that “psychics” use to make it seem as though they’re very insightful. The gist is that you make vague statements that invite the person to volunteer personal information and then repeat that information back to them as though it was what you were originally saying and they just finished your thought.
Another useful trick along those lines is the Barnum effect. I personally like to say two contradictory statements where both on their own are compliments. E.g. “I can tell you’re the kind of girl who wears her heart on her sleeve; it must be hard finding people who really understand you.”
It sounds really dumb but nothing makes a woman feel more connected to you then this sort of “deep insight” about her personality. It does lower your estimation of women’s intelligence after a while though so be careful.
Thanks.
I’m one of the luddites around here without a smartphone, so I’m not that interested in Tinder game right now. I am on OKCupid, and I think my profile on there is decent, but I’m not really active on it right now, nor did I have that much luck with it when I was.
I’m reading Day Bang now and quite like it, though I haven’t really put it into practice yet. I agree that it seems more ‘real-life’ and more practically useful than a lot of the night game stuff I’ve come across. I’ll probably try Bang next, even though, like you, I find clubs and club game loathsome.
I’ll check the cold-reading stuff, but I doubt my own ability to deliver it without rolling my eyes so hard I put my back out. But perhaps I can swallow my pride (or should that be integrity?) and give it a go.
Day Bang more or less stands on its own but I recommend reading both because it was written with the understanding that you had already read Bang. So there are concepts which he kind of glosses over rather than devoting as much page space to.
That said, putting it into practice ASAP is going to be better than waiting until you have a miniature library. This is a more, ahem, hands on sort of skill than anything and you’ll want practice. Set yourself a quota of approaches per day / week and see what works for you and what doesn’t.
Yeah I mean again this is just something that works for me. If it’s not something that you can naturally work into conversations then you should focus on other angles.
As for integrity, we were all nice guys once. It’d be great to live in a world where women were attracted to good men but that’s not our world. Don’t feel guilty about doing what works.
It’d be great to live in a world where women were attracted to good men but that’s not our world.
It’d be great to live in a world where men did not assume they had an automatic right to the attention of any random woman, and if they don’t get it that is the woman’s fault for not sufficiently appreciating them, but that’s not our world either.
Ha, I feel like we might be heading down a rabbit-hole for this one…
Niceness alone doesn’t seem to be an attractive attribute. You need to have other attractive traits, which includes being 6′ tall, having a square chin, playing guitar, sporting some stubble, driving a motorcycle, whatever. If you want to rely on “niceness” to attract girls (or guys for that matter), you’re gonna have a bad time. Your prospective dates will see a big “BOOOOORRRRRIIINNNNGGGG” sign on your forehead.
The nicest guy I know falls into this category. He is boring as shit and has few friends because of it. He is at least average-attractive, dresses well, and is an architect, so his online profile got him a ton of dates. But, because he was insanely boring, he never got any second dates.
He’s married now…I’m guessing mostly because he went through a match-maker and was matched to a girl who really, really wanted to get married, and hit that magical age of 30.
There’s a few people who share his interests….like me! But the normies won’t dig him.
It’s okay to be boring. I like to argue about Japanese monetary policy on internet blogs, and sometimes I play Dungeons and Dragons. But, you also might want to add in some non-boring stuff when you’re talking to the Normies. At least if you want to maximize your appeal.
Nothing wrong with maximizing your appeal!
I agree niceness doesn’t really do jack one way or the other. But the alternate approach to improving one’s social abilities towards charlatan level (not that this is wrong per se, depends what you do with it) is to find dates with similar weird preferences to oneself.
Granted, acting entitled to women (or men) because $$$ or degree or whatever will leave you cold and alone unless it’s a lot of money, but that’s because people who think that’s enough that people should even want to talk to you are at best boring boring boring like A Definite Beta Guy said. Although I mean it in a perhaps stricter sense. Dungeons and Dragons is great, and some of the women I’ve dated have really liked it too.
Old-timey “dating” advice is meant for old-timey circumstances. Being nice impresses the parents, who will have a reasonable expectation that their prospective son-in-law isn’t a shiftless outlaw who will beat their daughter and leave them to pay for any kids. Since nowadays parents have next to zero influence over who a girl sleeps with, nevermind marries, the usefulness of the niceness has gravely decreased.
Well, yes, I’m not totally inflexible about this. And I’m certainly past the point of thinking that niceless per se is enough (though that was probably my naive starting point). But I still hope to find strategies that work without totally losing my innocence.
Maybe it’s just a question of finding a persona that works without deviating too far from who I actually am. (Put that way, it starts to sounds a bit like what people call “congruence” in other contexts.)
No need to be so prickly, Deiseach. For what it’s worth, Nabil ad Dajjal’s observation goes the other way, too, as I’m sure he’d be the first to admit: men aren’t exactly drawn primarily to virtue in women, either. As far as courtship is concerned, we aren’t living in anything like a Just World, on either side, and those who want to succeed will do well to acknowledge this.
As far as courtship is concerned, we aren’t living in anything like a Just World, on either side, and those who want to succeed will do well to acknowledge this.
If it were acknowledged, James, I’d be less prickly. But I’ve read one too many plaints of Nice Guys who would love to find a woman to marry and settle down and have a family with, but those hussies and floozies only want the Bad Boy studs who’ll treat them bad and dump them! and guys with a long list of demands starting with “first, a woman has to be a solid 10”.
If it’s acknowledged “yes, generally when I’m looking for a woman sure I’d like to find someone to lead on to something more, but first impressions are I want an attractive – to my standards, which means generally accepted as hot – woman, not her plainer friend who may be a Nice Girl with a lovely personality who wants to find someone to settle down and have a family with, but she is not the leggy blonde I was looking for”, then great! But the Nice Guys often have this unstated caveat about “I want the Hot Girlfriend” and then blame women for (equally) wanting a Hot Boyfriend instead of Average Or Under It In The Looks Department Guy.
Mainly I’m prickly because it was stated in absolutes: “women are not attracted to good men”. What, no women at all in the entire world? And what exactly is your criterion or criteria for judging who is a “good man”? I take leave to doubt that someone anxious to describe themselves as a good man in this context is not operating on the same level general as the ordinary claimant of “I deserve to go to Heaven, I’m a good person!” (where “good person” means only “I’m not a murderer or rapist”, not any great admixture of virtue in the core personality).
@Deiseach
Chill.
Women strongly tend to want high-status, successful men. Men strongly tend to want young, attractive women. This has not changed since about forever. Both are willing to settle for someone on the same level of their respective totem pole, or at least did in living memory.
The problem is that the institutions that enabled the bottom half of the bell-curve to successfully pair up, marry, have kids and remove themselves from the dating pool don’t exist anymore. Hence a lot of single men and a lot of single women, both with unrealistic expectations (“10/10 hottie”, “twenty-something millionaire”), with very little bargaining power to get what they want (part-time, low-wage employment, no homemaking skills, etc) and no clue how to make a good attempt at it (what with the matchmaking social systems offline), nevermind knowing what they want.
I’m obviously a little biased here, but I really really don’t think this is true. Most “nice guy” I know (including myself) openly acknowledge that we’re never going to get a 10. We’d happily settle for 5s. My Tinder strategy is to literally swipe right on every single person. My match rate is probably <1%. For most men of similar attractiveness and social skills I know, it's the same approach and the same result. And you want to tell me my problem is that I'm too picky and not willing to compromise?
It’s a general point that is generally correct. For most women, a man being “good” is simply irrelevant. It’s not necessarily that they dislike goodness, it’s just not considered a positive. I think for most women “badness” isn’t necessarily a positive either, but the number of women who find “bad boys” appealing is certainly a lot higher than the ones who find “nice guys” appealing.
In terms of “who is a good man” I refer you back to radicalizing the romanceless. No, you aren’t entitled to sex just because you’re not some crazy ax-murderer. BUT, if the crazy ax-murderers are having five women fight over them while most women you know say “Gee, I wish I could find a man who isn’t a crazy ax-murderer…. oh, yeah, I know you aren’t one, but not you either…” then I think you are entitled to at least stand up and start asking what in the fuck is going on here…
Of course this is the territory covered in Radicalizing the Romanceless (the Henry post). But I think if crazy ax murderers are doing well, you might want to buy an ax. And watch _The Shining_ (Jack Nicholson version) for tips on mannerisms. A little false signalling never hurt anyone… at least not as much as an ax to the neck.
The idea of “rights” is too narrow. What people want to have is access to effective actions. (The exercise of rights is merely a type of effective action.) If men did not have the de facto right to women’s attention, it would look like [there is no strategy that reliably succeeds in getting a woman’s attention and men’s advances are usually rejected].
If this thread is any evidence, men have access to an action that is effective in getting women’s attention : they can use these manipulative dating games. It’s effective. And it’s only effective because that’s what women are selecting as effective. So, in the only sense that is important, men do have the right to women’s attention, insofar as they are willing to perform certain actions which women have selected for.
Women who complain about whiny nice guys are not fighting against male entitlement. They are simply reasserting the current definition of de facto male entitlement.
Moreover, women who complain about nice guys are the female equivalent of nice guys complaining about women.
Agreed, and that’s basically the premise of game.
1. Women respond well to jerks.
2. You want women to like you.
3. Here’s how to be the appropriate level of jerk.
So normally I’d avoid piling on, but since this is responding to my comment I actually have a unique perspective to add here:
I’ve heard this sentiment before online as well. Personally I suspect it’s a justification for not trying: you set the bar for success impossibly high so that you don’t feel as bad for giving up.
That said, I think there’s something that you’re missing: a man who ends up married to a good girl typically sees that as a success on his part, whereas a woman married to a nice guy typically sees that as a failure on her part.
Two illustrative anecdotes:
1. When I was single, there were a few times where I was (knowingly or not) sleeping with women who had boyfriends or fiancees already. From the women’s descriptions these were great guys but the disdain their girlfriends / fiance’s felt for them was just unreal. It’s not just cheaters either: most of my female friends and co-workers describe the men in their lives in the same terms.
2. My girlfriend is a wonderful woman and I’m lucky to have her. But in terms of looks she’s very plain: thin and healthy but about a 5 otherwise. The reason I dropped my two FWBs at the time and closed my dating profiles wasn’t because she was so much hotter than the competition, in fact it was quite the opposite. The traits which make her stand out are exactly those you would use to describe a prototypical good girl: chastity, fidelity, kindness and intelligence.
It’s been decades since I was on the dating/sex market and I was never very active or successful there, so cannot claim much expertise. But I think, partly from observation and partly from discussions here, that there is a real asymmetry in attitudes. As best I can tell:
Some significant number of women find bad boys more attractive than they find other men.
Men pursue the female equivalent not because they find them more attractive but because they think they are easier to seduce. Given equal chances of success they would prefer the conventionally virtuous woman.
Am I mistaken?
Asymmetry is probably not super significant in terms of preferences. Guys and girls will both prioritize attractive traits for short-term relationships and prioritize companionship traits or long-term relationships.
However, there is an asymmetry in what each gender desires. Guys typically have much stronger sex drives, and girls are in much, much higher demand. So the market outcomes and strategies for both sexes are obviously going to be different.
Most of the Nice Guys bemoaning their poor fortune is because no one wants to date them, because guys are just in low demand in general.
@A Definite Beta Guy
Which means that those high sex drive/desperate men have effectively messed up the situation for the low sex drive/less desperate men.
It seems that this balances out somewhat when quite a few women get desperate to have a baby before their fertility greatly falls and/or for men who are willing to effectively dedicate their lives to earning money for their wives. For example, in the classified threads, the only women who seemed to place ads for men, were those who wanted a baby daddy.
But this leaves men who are not interested in children and/or being treated as little more than an ATM in a bad position.
Furthermore, relationships that end seem to often put men in a bad situation, far more often than for women. So the risks are asymmetric as well.
So is it even worth it to try for a risk-averse man, who is ‘spoiled’ by not wanting an unegalitarian relationship, who doesn’t want to play or become a jerk? Why bother when the deck is so stacked against you?
@DavidFriedman, I find sexually adventurous women more attractive than conventionally virtuous women; for me it is not just a matter of having a better chance with them (that may not even be the case; I seem to usually not be their type). But I do not know how common that is. Always hard to judge, since people lie so much (including to themselves) about basically anything connected with sex.
@Protagoras: think I agree, for what it’s worth.
@Aapje
I probably wouldn’t use the term “desperate.” It’s just a market equilibrium. The only real problem is theoretically STRs, because unattractive girls will have a hard time landing an attractive guy for an LTR. It’s a revealed preference that a girl prefers a series of STRs with attractive guys, over a single LTR with an unattractive guy, if that is what she continually chooses.
I do agree things get easier for guys, but I think it’s a combination of several factors. A big one is that guys become more attractive as they age because they get bigger, and more successful. The same guy at 18 and 25 can be the difference between Pee-Wee Herman and Thor (as in the case of my brother-in-law).
There are certainly cases of women (and men) becoming more focused on LTRs as they get older, as STRs lose their appeal, much like going out to clubs and bars every night/weekend loses its appeal. This shift of focus to the LTR will benefit unattractive people of both sexes, but particularly unattractive guys, because that’s literally the only avenue where they can compete.
Wait, you’ll read Roosh, but RSD is too extreme?
Anyway, what Nabil said about putting it into practice is right: Go find some wingmen. Commit to going out a couple days a week. Commit to doing five approaches every time you go out. Accept that it might take you years to get good.
(When you’ve done that, you’ll have your own opinion, and you won’t need to to ask whether a book will mislead you if you read it.)
Did I mention you should find some wingmen? That part is really important.
I’m aware that Roosh has a nasty reputation, and for all I know it’s justified, but I haven’t found anything really objectionable in the game stuff of his that I’ve read. But sure, I wouldn’t really trust, in fact would probably steer clear of, his opinions on anything else. And it’s not exactly that RSD is extreme, it’s just that Tyler creeps me out in some way I can’t exactly put my finger on. But I haven’t actually really looked at any of the RSD material, so maybe it’s not as bad as I’d like.
The wingman thing is tricky. I’m not really friends with very many men! Least of all the kind who go out to pick up chicks. There’s one candidate I can think of, and I’ll ask him.
I agree that putting things into practice is important and it’s time I did. I actually do OK when I do go out (which is seldom). I’m a passable flirt, sometimes even a good one, though without it leading to very many closes. But I think to get any better I probably need to start clocking some real hours grinding my skills.
It’s been hard for me to put aside time for this up to now, because I have a full-time job and at least one really important project outside of my full-time job, and I’d been hoping to get the project to a certain level of done-ness before embarking on another one, but now I’m starting to think it’s time to bump game stuff up the queue.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus on evaluating the intelligence of penguins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZmx0jml1jk (some pretty spot on jabs at IQ researchers).
SSCers with extensive knowledge of psychiatry: what do you think of this Quora answer about depression? It sort of jives with some of the intuition I’ve gradually arrived at, but I really have no expertise whatsoever in this field.
It’s bad.
The first suggested reason is “The Red Tribe is doing terrible things, so of course people have the sads!” This seems really implausible, and useless, and flag-wavey, and spiteful. And wrong.
The second suggested reason is : some sort of constructive interference between manipulative pharma companies, patients seeking quick fixes, and obliging doctors. That could account for some of the increase. But, consider what it would look like if A. the prevalence of depression was independently increasing, B. pharma companies were trying to capitalize on an expanding market, C. patients had heard there were effective medicines and were seeking them out, and D. doctors were confident in those medicines and willing to prescribe them. It would look exactly like the situation described in the Quora answer. The world in which B, C, and D occur in concert without A to incite them is much weirder. The world in which B+C+D+!A occurs only in the instance of illusory depression is even weirder than that! So this second suggested reason is actually the absence of a reason.
As someone with only tangential knowledge, I’d point out that most anti-depressants are now generic medications. If you look at this list of anti-depressants, you’ll see that almost none are covered by patents any more. The few which are, are in categories where there are lots of generics available. Just about every anti-depressant you can name from TV commercials, etc., is now a generic.
Yeah. But I do kinda wonder what living in a media environment where we’re all constantly being milked for outrage is doing to our mental health.
That’s not either tribe’s fault (not the rank and file, anyway; there are institutions that I’d be happy to get out the torches and pitchforks for), but it’d probably end up looking like “the Red Tribe is doing terrible things” from the inside if you’re living in a Blue Tribe environment and aren’t feeling jaded or idiosyncratic enough yet.
Causation could go the other way. Could be that we’re just full of outrage, and this is how we are currently milking it, and this is better. For instance, we’re not burning people alive anymore.
The use of antidepressants has skyrocketed since 1986 because doctors decided that Prozac worked and was safe, so they treated more people. In theory this is good, except that it doesn’t work for mild depression and it is probably less safe for patients than older antidepressants (though safer for doctors). But regardless whether this was a good idea, it has probably had a distorting effect on the diagnosis of depression, so it’s pretty hard to tell whether depression has increased, or just antidepressants. Generic Prozac entered the market in 2001, which is probably the explanation of the particular increase mentioned in the answer.
I should say that increasing the usage of antidepressants was an improvement over the status quo levels of use. But maybe it would have been better to use the older antidepressants.
Am I just hopelessly biased and viewing anything to the right of me as right-leaning, or are the SSC commentators actually to the right of the lurkers?
We of the jack-booted right (because that’s the only right there is, as I am informed by hyperventilating concern pieces morning,noon and night) have tyrannised our way into seizing control of the means of production – sorry, wrong totalitarianism. Seizing control of the commentary boxes is what I meant to say.
We drive off, by dog-piling, any poor liberal/leftist who dares raise their bowed head and timorously type out a tentative opinion of their own. You can see this in action by going back in the history and reading the plaints of the driven-off. A certain former temporary participant is particularly plangent about the Evil Right-Wingers who stoned them so hard, they were forced to flee for their lives and abandon their experiment in empathy (sample lamentation from over on their blog: “Kind of like how “rationality” is perverted to support alt-right eumemes at SSC”).
Heh, heh, heh! Tremble before the fearsome conquering might of our eumemes, puny leftists!
The Rightful Caliph is also too pure and good for this world, so is too charitable and inclined to see the best in others and ascribe good intentions to them, hence why he does not smite mightily with the ban-hammer and crush our infestation.
Or, contrariwise, some of us are mouthier than others and when given a chance to express our opinions and views without being hopped on as “You’re a Nazi!”, we express ourselves with sprawling freedom and frequency, so we look more numerous and/or active than others who are not conservative/right-aligned/right-wing/alt-right/You’re A Nazi!
This is a phenomenon that [link to old SSC post which I think exists but am too lazy to look up]has been discussed before[/link]: the spaces which make a priority of being equally open to all parts of some ideological spectrum are going to get dominated by that part of it whose ideas are on the whole least tolerated elsewhere. I remember this being a major issues at /r/femradebates (haven’t checked up on there in a long time, though).
You’re thinking of Neutral vs Conservative.
Well from what I’ve seen, pretty much, yeah.
Indeed.
Well from what I’ve seen, pretty much, yeah.
Why change a winning strategy, Wolfy? 🙂
Good thing we’ve got brave mavericks like you to tell us so on every open thread, huh?
It’s a little unfair to use b*******s as if they were a central example, don’t you think?
It’s a little unfair to use b*******s as if they were a central example, don’t you think?
If you are referring to the person to whom I think you are referring, indeed they were not a central example of anything except extreme narcissism (if you turn up here of all places, refer to your self-proclaimed genius while commenting in text speak, and expect to be uncritically acclaimed as ‘wow tell us all about your startling insights into the red brain phenotypic divergence!’ with no “prove it, show your workings”, then you have another think coming).
But given that a substantial section of the commentors over on the sub-reddit like to roll their exasperated eyes about the right-wingers on SSC proper, given that the favourite accusation of bias by the left-leaning does involve “dog-piling”, and given that the person referred to above likes to toss off on their blog little bon-mots as follows, where people who don’t know the background to the ‘flouncing off declaring they’d been witch-hunted and online-stalked into a state of terror’ series of interactions are going to take their characterisation as fair, true and accurate:
then I am going to snarl right back at them. In my turn I am tired of the whole “if you’re not a card-carrying Democrat or even better a member of the Socialist party, an ancap or some other variety of rare political specimen, then YOU’RE A NAZI” attitude all too prevalent right now*, and I’m going to be just as broad-brush about THE LEFT AS ONE HOMOGENOUS LUMP until maybe possibly it finally sinks in that “hey, maybe a guy proudly proclaiming himself to be a Marxist and a Socialist should not be quite so enthusiastic about the modern resurgence of McCarthyism, maybe, you think?”
*EDIT: I don’t mean the general run of left-leaning/left of centre commentors on here, who are decent about not whipping out the YOU FASCIST RACIST NAZI card every time anyone challenges or disagrees with them, but this attitude is oozing in everywhere else online.
Why do you read that person’s blog? And can I have a link? I enjoyed many of her comments.
I remember stumbling upon it by googling a phrase that she initially overused. But that was… about a year and a half ago, wasn’t it? Anyway, if you are looking for it now, it’s startlingly easy to find.
I don’t follow it, I nipped over in the aftermath to see if I could figure out what the hell they were banging on about here with that social physics notion (it being their own blog, maybe over there they would DAMN WELL EXPLAIN IT?). Bad idea and I’m not going to waste more time fighting about or over it.
If you want to read it, do as I did – with my advanced hacker online stalking skills – and Google the name they used on here, you’ll find it!
Here is the link (ROT13):
uggcf://ovagpunbf.jbeqcerff.pbz
Ancaps and libertarians aren’t considered Basically Nazis? News to me.
They definitely aren’t on SSC — David Friedman is basically the pinnacle of respectability around here 😛
(Since I don’t hang out in any other fora where ancaps are common, I can’t speak to whether they’re are considered “BNs” elsewhere…)
I didn’t mean on here; we were talking about, well, the kinds of people who like to call other people BNs.
But this is what I mean. b*******s is pretty much the nadir of SSC commenters, which is an impressive feat considering some of the people we end up with.
As much as I may disagree with some of the self-identified leftists here, none of the current crop are anywhere near as bad, and smearing them with the same brush as b*******s isn’t helpful.
Can someone please give me a hint?
There used to be a frequent commenter here called bint chaos (no space). She was widely disliked, presumably for her alt-right beliefs about the violence inherent in Islam.
(Epistemic status: trolling)
I think that she is better called alt-left, basically a SJW, but with reduced charity for Islam, rather than the opposite; which is arguably a more consistent belief system.
Anyway, she said that she came here to learn to understand the Red Tribe using empathy, but she showed remarkable little ability to understand opinions different from her own or even accept that many people here are not Red Tribe. She also got schooled by David Friedman, who knows quite a bit more about Islam and many other topics than her and instead of admitting to being wrong, she just changed the subject and then later went back to the same claims. Mr Friedman is generally quite mellow, but I sensed him seething behind the keyboard, as she clearly managed to piss him off immensely.
After a lot of unproductive discussions, she eventually got banned. The comments just before she got banned are a good example of her driving our esteemed David Friedman to despair.
Being a know-all, and using weird jargon. Two things never tolerated in the rationalsphere.
I see a lot of left wingers say that the SSC comments and subreddit are really right wing, whereas right wingers are more inclined to say that lots of left wing stuff is tolerated, or they mention Scott’s commie tumblr friends. But I see more complaining posts written from the left wing POV. That’s one of the reasons I think this place and the reddit are pretty right wing—just the way I like it 🙂
If you want to be snarky, how about “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
Ooh, I have to remember that one.
When you’re used to oppression, becoming the oppressor feels like justice.
The left-leaning lurkers don’t much look forward to being treated as if they’re strawmen, as this post very, very well demonstrates, so they(we?) decide to spend their free time arranging flowers and drinking tea.
Ah, so the few leftists who comment (like me) are just the ones who don’t like flower arranging and rarely drink tea.
That’s clearly a sign you’re an alien or a barbarian. Everyone likes drinking tea at 5 o’clock each day.
The U.K. representation, even with the rest of the Commonwealth included, is not, I think, a majority here.
Well, clearly barbarians run rampant here then.
Just as a matter of curiosity, were the English barbarians prior to the arrival of tea in the 17th century? Tea as an afternoon meal in (I think) the 18th?
Definitely. Some people think tea is a signifier of high civilization, but it’s actually causal.
@DavidFriedman
The English were barbarians before the introduction of tea and Indian curries.
Arrange the tea, drink the flowers 🙂
Does this mean the Irish Breakfast tea I sometimes drink is actually plant nutrients? 😛
It’s all just hot leaf juice (heresy!) 🙂
I drink tea while reading this blog.
This comment chain inspired me to go make tea 😛
Coffee counts as a vegetable no?
I was already drinking tea the first time I saw this comment chain. Seeing it again reminded me to go make more.
I know this is your default mode, and that it reflects your general dissatisfaction with the state of the world, or something like it.
But seriously, why do you keep getting pass on this? Why is this aggrieved lashing out in enmity as a default posting style tolerated?
This isn’t good argument. It’s not charity or steel-manning. You actively scan for the internet for things that will make you angry, and then post them here attributing them to people here that you perceive to be in your outgroup.
I’m pretty sure this was supposed to be a child of the ‘is the SSC commentariat right-leaning’ post above that got made top-level by accident.
I know that (also Deiseach makes this “mistake” a fair amount, and I think it is actually intentional).
Note sentences like “(because that’s the only right there is, as I am informed by hyperventilating concern pieces morning,noon and night) “
Google’s Artificial Intelligence Built an AI That Outperforms Any Made by Humans
When I read that earlier today it scared the crap out of me. It still does.
It reminded me of this Eliezer Yudkowsky post from a month ago or so:
https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
Because if that isn’t the smoke starting to fill the room and telling you that there might be problems just behind the next door I don’t know what is. What’s the next headline on the topic gonna be?
I look at it a bit like a recipe that spells doom.. what combination of AI features do we need to be doomed and which of those do we have already?
And how much time do we have left to to solve the alignment problem or make enough progress to come up with a solution that might not work forever but buys us enough time to solve the rest of it?
I deeply fear that one day we’ll wake up and simply notice that it’s too late.
Want to make a concrete bet involving money on a specific thing you are worried about?
Why doesn’t EY note predictions about nuclear fusion being X years off (or any number of examples)? Because he is pulling a bait and switch, trying to make threatening AI seem inevitable to the same degree that flight and the A bomb now seem inevitable.
Why should we devote time and resources to AI issues when some madman could be in their basement using CRISPR to create a super virus that will wipe out all of humanity? We won’t know that it has happened until it is to late, but we can surely see the smoke (advances in gene manipulation) that make it possible. We absolutely have to do X, Y and Z right now (despite pretty flimsy evidence that X, Y and Z will prevent such an event from occurring).
This isn’t just (potentially) a waste of resources, at the end of WW2 there was support for attacking/bombing the Soviet Union on the basis that once they got the bomb they would do it to us. These people got a lot of ‘smoke’ correct, they were right about Stalin being evil, ruthless and all kinds of mean, scary and nasty. You can be right and still be wrong.
Architecture search is promising, and perhaps even scary, but I think this way of summarizing the news isn’t very useful.
It’s really not very surprising, given how “simple” the architectures of these classifiers are, that (carefully targeted) automated search can find small improvements. While this is impressive, take a look at figure 6 in the paper. Basically the “meta-AI” is just barely outperforming “random search”. (The paper refers to random search, without irony, as “considered to be a very strong baseline”)
So basically: it’s easy to slightly improve on the performance of human-designed CNN architectures, which like all human-designed architectures are optimized partially for understandability rather than performance alone.
Is income inequality in an ostensibly democratic, mostly capitalist Western country a net harm to society in and of itself?
Discussed here, Scott’s review here.
Thanks!
I don’t know, but it seems that the only two stable states are “high inequality” and “near-universal poverty”.
According to Wikipedia (1, 2), the Gini coefficient of the USSR in the 80s was significantly higher than that of the Nordics, and comparable to the US’s. Furthermore, having high inequality (as measured by Gini coefficient) seems to be pretty strongly correlated with near-universal poverty in the present.
I stand corrected.
Though it does raise the question of just how communist/corrupt the USA is.
Measuring the Gini coefficient of money in a society in which money is an insignificant source of power is stupid. But it’s not just an error, it’s propaganda. Soviet money existed solely for the purpose of getting you to make this error.
Why would Soviet money exist for the specific purpose of making you think the USSR had high inequality? Wouldn’t they want to suggest inequality was lower than it was, rather than higher?
@Placid Platypus
I assumed Douglas Knight was referring to Anonymous’ error in thinking that the USSR had relatively low inequality. As you say, the fact that their actual inequality was higher than suggested by their Gini coefficient strengthens my argument.
Yes, PP, exactly, Soviet money was manipulated to make it look like the Soviet Gini was as low as that of America, which is low by world standards. I should have been clearer than “this error”; I meant RLMS’s trusting of numbers and putting it in the same general range as developed countries, not the precision of America vs Sweden, or his general conclusion, which is correct and from which communist countries were outliers. It is mildly surprising that they could not make it as low as Sweden’s (if they failed, which I don’t buy because I don’t trust comparison between different sources), but that is false precision.
Anonymous,
Scandinavia doesn’t seem particularly unstable (and in so far that it is, it has more to do with migration issues, with is orthogonal to wealth distribution within a country).
Right.
This. National socialist Scandinavia looks like it’s maximized utils if high inequality is considered negative enough to not maximize GDP instead.
I think there’s a value to reducing inequality at the top and the bottom, so to speak.
At the bottom, people who can’t take care of themselves not getting some kind of help is socially corrosive, and heartless to boot. Meanwhile, those who can take care of themselves being in a position of precarity is also socially corrosive, morally troubling, and potentially dangerous – people will only want to play by the rules if they feel they’re getting a fair shake. My ideal society would be one where Joe Schmoe who plays by the rules can work a 40-hour week, have a decent apartment somewhere safe, decent food and medical care, have time off to crack open a cold one with the boys, the occasional vacation, etc. That’s a good society and stable.
At the top, I think it’s also socially corrosive to have people who are so wealthy they are completely disconnected from the rest. The biggest disconnect isn’t between the guy flying business class and the poor schmoes flying coach, or the person driving the BMW versus the people on the bus, but between first class/BMW and private jet/chauffeur. You don’t want a little article in the newspaper about how some hedge fund manager dropped several million on his daughter’s sweet 16, and you don’t want there to be people who think a 500k salary is poverty-level. Having people with that level of power who are disconnected from everyone but other super-rich is dangerous.
I’m pretty certain we have that society in the contemporary United States, except that we have to at least pretend that the medical care is The Best Possible and not admit that we are settling for “decent”.
Has there ever been a society where this wasn’t the case? I’d have a hard time thinking of one. There’s always a gilded class, and if they try to disguise that by not having actual money and just trading in favors as members of the nomenklatura, I don’t think that many people are actually fooled by that. And the people at the very top of the decision-making heirarchy, are never going to be people with firsthand experience with questions like “do I risk paying the rent late so I can have a mechanic check on the funny noise in the car’s transmission?”
If you think there is a society anywhere that didn’t suffer that sort of inequality, I’d seriously like to know what you think are the best candidates.
Because I think you’re wrong about the guy driving a BMW and flying business class not mattering. That guy always exists, but if we stop recognizing him as “rich” and treat him as part of the (upper) “middle class”, and particularly if he’s middle management at Joe Schmoe’s factory or office, then Joe can start to feel like he should have those things to – which will never be the case for the million-dollar birthday parties. This leads to the Schmoes spending themselves into debt for BMWs they can’t afford, and feeling resentful about economy-class seat pitches rather than astounded that they can fly across a continent at Mach 0.9 for a couple day’s wages.
That society does not exist in the contemporary US. There’s plenty of people who are in precarious situations despite following the rules and doing what amounts to 90% of their best.
And, no, there’s never been a society where there weren’t outta-sight rich people. But that doesn’t mean it’s good, and I think there’s more of those people/they’re more disconnected than there were, say, 50 years ago.
You do make a good point regarding “everyone should get a BMW.”
A decent apartment somewhere safe does a lot of the work. (So does decent medical care, but we collectively have been around and around on that one.) In objective terms we are living in a golden age of safe neighborhoods. There a few small exceptions here and there in e.g. parts of Chicago, but by and large safe is used as euphemism for desirable. Some of those elements of desirability are objective — like length of commute and park space, but there is a large positional element. And it is built in to the definition of a positional good that no everyone can get the best ones.
I assumed “Joe Schmoe” was meant to refer to the average or median American; sorry if I misinterpreted that.
But just as every society has its very rich without necessarily being dangerous, bad, or unstable (and I’m not convinced their mere number matters as much as you do), every society also has its very poor and yet we don’t consider them all to be dangerous, bad, or unstable. Outside of the extremes, how many Americans are in “precarious situations” in spite of their willingness to settle for a decent apartment somewhere safe, and how many bought that precariousness by insisting on a decent apartment in the Bay Area or a five-bedroom house somewhere else (and with it the home equity that allows them to imagine they can afford a BMW)?
@Brad
A golden age compared to the 70s, 80s, 90s, but maybe not compared to the early 60s, or the 50s. As for “decent apartment somewhere safe” I don’t mean the most desirable apartment somewhere desirable, but somewhere without roaches where you won’t get stabbed.
@John Schilling
When I talk about precarity (which is SO a word, spellchecker) I’m thinking more about employment. People getting by from short term job to short term job. Or, going a bit upmarket, university teaching being done by untenured profs and PhD students increasingly.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that getting the hard end of things should be restricted to people who don’t play by the rules – who either break the rules, or legitimately are lazy screwups, or whatever. This is a bit utopian, yes.
Could you expand on why it is bad? I can see three possible answers:
1. Because the money should go to poor people who need it more.
2. Because the existence of such people makes other people worse off (for example, John’s BMW point for the level below this one).
3. Because such people have too much political power.
These are all quite different arguments–one of them might be true and the others false. Is your reason one of them or do you have another?
Uhhhhhh, mostly 3, really. I don’t think it’s good that you’ve got a class of people who have so much wealth and power. Especially today, thanks to transportation, communications, etc technology, and with the ways the economy has changed.
A super-wealthy class more loyal to itself than to the peasants isn’t a new thing, but a super-wealthy class the wealth of which doesn’t come from land, or from owning all the factories in such-and-such a place… Kings were by and large not great rulers, but a king who screwed up too bad would probably end up sans head; he can’t just pick up his land and go to the next opportunity.
It’s not just that they’re extremely powerful, it’s that they can potentially move their skin out of any individual game, so to speak.
I am probably speaking heavily out of emotion here.
Thanks. I think my reaction is the opposite. They are neither wealthy nor powerful in comparison to the whole rest of the society–the richest individual in the U.S. has total assets more than an order of magnitude below the annual expenditure of the U.S. government. But they are wealthy enough to provide the privileged minority solution to some public good problems–one individual pays for what benefits many because the benefit to him is enough to make it worth doing.
In the political context, I think we are better off with both Soros and the Koch brothers than we would be with neither.
@ dndnrsn:
Interestingly, I think you’ve just re-invented the argument for giving the franchise only to landowners.
@dndnrsn
I’ll accept that for the sake of argument. But for how much longer before that? If the 50s and early 60s were some historically anomaly is everyone really entitled to live in that anomaly?
I come at this from having been a gentrifier several times. Even in a neighborhood where someone occasionally gets stabbed, which I agree isn’t ideal, that’s not at all the same as you are going to get stabbed. Stabbings aren’t randomly distributed.
If someone spends a large fraction of his income, or worse still makes a highly levered bet with more money than he has, to live in a “good neighborhood” it’s hard for me to have a lot of sympathy when he complains that he can’t make ends meet. I’ve lived in “bad neighborhoods” and I know from personal experience that “good neighborhood” is a want not a need. So it’s a like a guy with a Ferrari complaining that he can’t afford to take a vacation. Yeah he choose somewhere else to put his luxury dollars. That’s how it works.
I’ve been meaning to start a conversation in one of these threads hitting on this. Specifically, how much of what we think of as the “American Dream”–how living in a suburban house on one income with a dependable car, should be an option for everyone–is the result of the decades following WWII, in which American industry was largely untouched by a war that greatly damaged every other industrial nation?
Even the casualties that the US suffered in the war may have had the silver lining of paving the way for integration and allowing more women into the middle class work force without immediate reduction in wages.
Meanwhile, Germany, England, France, Russia, China, Japan, had a need for US goods that could fuel a steady expansion at the same time the development of rapid mass media could shape the perception of normal. How much of American exceptionalism comes from getting to fight in wars that haven’t touched our mainland for 150+ years?
One of the most striking things about the current concern over inequality is the extent to which it’s driven by the resentment of the near-rich towards the ultra-rich. I still think that someone who’s capable of driving a BMW and flying first class and experiencing it as deprivation, is disconnected from the rest of us in a more profound and potentially dangerous way than your hedge-fund manager.
I agree that’s what is going on. It seems like the most complaints about the 1% come from the 5% and 10%. But is a plausible alternative explanation to just plain envy (which to be clear I think is a good null hypothesis) that these guys being nearer to the 1% have better visibility into the ways that they (ab)use the power their wealth gives them?
A sort of far-group vs out-group argument?
Good point. I don’t think it’s 5% or 10% vs 1% though. It’s more, like, 1% vs 0.1% or whatever. The top percentile income in the US starts a little under $330k. That’s a ton of money by any reasonable standard, but a corporate lawyer making that is probably rubbing elbows with people who are top 0.1%, which starts around $1.5 million. In comparison, top 5% begins a bit above $150k, and top 10% a bit under $120k.
Paul:
I feel the same way about someone who’s sitting in a heated house with wood (not dirt) floors and no leaks in the roof, with indoor plumbing, who experiences it as deprivation.
What’s experienced as deprivation obviously depends on your expectations, and it’s not obvious that this is wrong, even though it can lead to (does lead to) a kind of hedonic treadmill where you feel like real success = being able to afford one notch higher quality of {house, car, furniture, etc.}.
Quality of life for Joe Schmoe is an important metric that doesn’t get enough attention. Right-liberals talk like economic freedom is more important than all the negative externalities put together, while the left comes across as believing that Joe is a privileged SOB who deserves nothing because there are so many poor Muslims and transgenders to put on the welfare rolls.
F that. If Joe plays by the rules, he should be able to find a 40 hour a week job that pays enough to support children in a safe neighborhood, not to mention able to find a future mother for his children without being tried for crimes against feminism or losing out to rich polygamists.
That leads us to questions of what a good life looks like, and how to support it. And there you get back into culture war stuff.
For example, I strongly suspect most people (with a US upbringing, at least) are happiest in something like a standard marriage where they have a steady job, a house, and a couple of kids. I suspect genuine membership in a community (church, private club, active in the neighborhood, scouts, whatever) is really important for this. I think single motherhood is usually pretty bad for the mom and the kids and the surrounding society, whereas stable married couples having kids are usually pretty good for the mom, dad, and kids, as well as the surrounding society. (Similarly, PUA types who go in for lots of casual sex are making the world a worse place.)
That leads to a certain set of ideas about how to make society better, which may or may not be mainly about government policies or laws. Steve Sailer talks about affordable family formation, which seems like a pretty good thing to aim for. Charles Murray talks about all the ways the lower class has lost all kinds of social capital and well-being over the years (more unwed births, less community involvement), and that strikes me as stuff I wish I knew how to reverse. I’m religious, and think most people would benefit from some kind of church, but I also think that those uninterested in church would still benefit from some kind of cohesive community involvement–private clubs, lodges, scouts, whatever.
That’s in some sense a conservative worldview, even if I don’t particularly think the government is the right mechanism for doing anything about it. (I mostly don’t–we could maybe tweak public benefits or family law to make things a bit better, but mainly this is about people deciding what to value and how to live their lives, and the law is an extremely blunt tool for shaping that.)
At a tangent, a good deal of this that I have observed is hobbies, in my case mostly the SCA.
That worked for me too, but my hobbies kept getting invaded by the culture war.
One of my last holdouts just announced Maoist style struggle sessions about “consent” in the Facebook group, with all the associated mindkilling. Refusal to participate is being noted.
The question, then, is what is the right mechanism for addressing the problem? Or is there no such mechanism, no effective way to address the issue? Perhaps the asymmetry between creation and destruction; it could be that social capital can be lost quickly but only built and accumulated very slowly.
Conservative worldview or not, I’m inclined to agree – so much so that I’ve sometimes thought about just pushing my atheism down and starting to attend church, just for some sense of being connected to the rest of the world. I don’t think I could, though, and anyway church attendance is really low where I live. Another option I’ve considered are charity causes, but those seem to only want donations, not volunteers.
To an extent, yes, but hobbies have the drawback that you need to be really interested in something to be able to make it the main component of your sense of community. And also…
… yeah, that.
I think that for something to be a community, it needs to be a) at least weakly mandatory (as in: no one’s going to forcibly drag you to church every week, but your neighbours will Disapprove of you if you don’t show up) and b) very difficult to get pushed out of. Hobbies always failed at the first, and they’re increasingly failing at the second.
I don’t know, really. About the best idea I’ve come up with is that we should try talking to our neighbours and coworkers more, those being the two groups of people we share a mostly-non-alterable circumstance with and who can’t easily get rid of us. Oh, and be nicer to our relatives, if we happen to have them.
ETA: Also on the subject of hobbies, my main one is roleplaying. And the roleplaying hobby is actively lecturing you to not treat it as a community. People are always quoting the Geek Social Fallacies at you, and what are those supposed Fallacies except different ways that people behave like their hobby is a community?
It’s not just that our society isn’t helpful in forming community bonds, it’s that it often actively fights back against it and tells us that such bonds are to be avoided.
If you’d like a long, somewhat rambling but quite interesting review of a book that touches on the loss of community from a perspective I hadn’t seen, try OSC on Third Places.
This sort of environment sounds really unfortunate and I’m sorry. Personally, though, while I’ve heard mention of Geek Social Fallacies on the Internet, I’ve never heard them in person. In my roleplaying group in college, we were, frankly, suffering from a serious case of numbers 1, 2, and 5 on this list. I’m personally a good bit to blame for this; I really pushed the “don’t ostracize” angle and felt a good bit of guilt when I arranged things that by design didn’t include people I really didn’t want along, and I was too afraid of the consequences to be willing to criticize friends and group members who, frankly, needed it*.
I hear what you mean about things moving away from being a community, but here’s one of my concerns: the geek social fallacies, at least if that list is representative, at best produce dysfunctional communities. Sure, people should be accepted as they are, but “as you are” does not have to be e.g. Captain Halitosis, to use one of its examples. And yes, ostracizing is unpleasant and frequently used for evil, but so are a lot of things, and used virtuously it’s a good and effective peer pressure tool.
That said, I’m not as sure as I probably sound. I’ve heard the testimony of folks who rely on such communities as their “refuge”; I’m not sure that’s healthy or that the status quo is the best way to do things, but I’m concerned that sometimes that’s someone’s only option. In other words, dysfunctional communities are better than no communities. And my thinking on this lately is that actually, if the community bonds were stronger, fallacy 2 could be defeated (family members and close friends can generally get away with criticizing one another, after all). 2 being to my mind the most pernicious, I think the others could be defeated or neutralized as well with that one out of the way: all that takes is a recognition that these are fallacies and that these ways of thinking are fixable. But this is just speculative.
*This whole section is me, so bad—letting things fester because I thought confronting them was the worse option:
A Hobby is not a community, at least not in this sense. But a local manifestation of it might well be. Do you mean lectured on-line in forums, or in person at meet-ups?
First, I do think that social capital of this kind is easier to destroy than create.
Second, I think government policy is a blunt instrument for dealing with most problems, including this one. There are places where we can maybe improve things around the edges, often by getting government to stop doing something destructive instead of getting it to fix something.
Third, most of the useful things that ever get done aren’t done by government. Communities aren’t built by passing a law, but by lots of people getting involved with one another and establishing ties and institutions. Getting involved in a church, or a local club or hobby, or a political party/movement at the local level, or boy scouts/girl scouts, or local sports leagues, or a local chess club, or whatever–that’s how you build a community.
Fourth, a bunch of stuff in modern US culture leads toward increasing atomization and isolation. Our media culture is corrosive as hell, and undermines all kinds of traditional values and norms of behavior. But there’s a lot more going on there. I’m not sure how to make that better, but it sure feels like the brokenness in our media culture is one part of the loss of communities. (Maybe it was just offering TV as an entertainment that provided the opportunity to stay inside and avoid talking with the neighbors.)
Until the culture warriors show up, and invade and ruin them.
They permit no realm, no magisteria, no reservation, no preserve, no space free from them. They invade all, and destroy all they invade.
Bitter? Me? Yes.
Look at that. From hobby to hobby horse in one post.
I would consider bad breath a perfect example of things you should not get thrown out of any community worth of the name for, to be honest.
That’s what I (tentatively) think, yes. I think human beings need some kind of larger context, and these days, there’s very slim pickings for those. Whether you enjoy rolling dice to hit an orc for 1d8+1 damage may be an absolutely horrible basis for a collective identity, it’s also the best thing a lot of people can come up with. And if the resulting communities are rickety, shambling horrors because they’re artificial and lack a healthy foundation, well… colonoscopy bags ain’t pretty either, but they’re better than nothing.
(though I’ll admit that I can sympathise with people who, to take a related example, just want to play games without being “gamers,” especially when “gamer culture” has a pretty hefty impact on what actually gets put into games – no matter how desperately some people need their own subculture, shouldn’t there be an option to enjoy a certain type of media without constantly being hammered by the often-questionable aesthetics of that subculture? I dunno. It’s an unhappy situation all around)
That’s a good point. If your group stays together exactly as long as it remains fun and no longer, then everyone who has a vested interest in keeping it together will be terrified of rocking the boat. If everyone accepts the group staying together as an end in itself, then you can have a blazing row and spend the next six months giving each other the stink eye… but the world won’t end, and eventually you might manage to move past it.
I can tell you that I’ve roleplayed with people I’ve absolutely despised, and still felt it was a valid use of my time. But then, that’s because I do in fact see “make roleplaying happen” as a goal in itself that goes beyond social interaction… so maybe you can’t form a true community if you’re intentionally trying to form a community, but only as a byproduct of trying to achieve something else? I dunno.
@Baeraad
Put me down as seconding your entire first paragraph. And your last — the ways in which our society actively dissolve and fight against strong community bonds seems like one of the most important things to consider and address when it comes to figuring out how to (re)build community. Plus the bit about hobbies as a poor substitute.
My unhappy suspicion is that to have the sort of thing that meets your (a) and (b) takes religion[1]. And, looking at the broad, global secularization trends, my further suspicion is that we’re in the middle of a centuries-long transition between religious forms, comparable to the “Axial Age” — as the old faiths prove unworkable for the demands of the new social and political structures. But, while the old ways are declining, and increasingly preserved only through deliberate disengagement from society (the Benedict Option/Amish model), it seems workable new ones have yet to emerge. Plenty of my fellow far-Right folks have been saying things to the effect of “we need a new religion”, but one cannot simply create a new religion on demand[2].
Or it could be the case that nothing can or will emerge to fill the void, that the human need for community cannot be met healthily under the conditions of modernity, and we will either be replaced by the better-adapted Vile Offspring, or else collapse, and the Amish inherit the earth.
@Randy M
Thanks for that link. Yes, the role of America’s zoning laws[3] and broad car ownership[4] are definitely significant. And I very much like that “third place” term. Plus, that bit about the need for men’s places and women’s places. Of course, the part that I have myself frequently said similar things regarding is the lack of unstructured, outdoor play for children. I’ll probably try to find a copy of that book.
@Nick
On one hand, I’ve apparently been pretty lucky at avoiding spaces where those “Geek Social Fallacies” have been in operation. But then, I’m a spergy introvert with a tiny social circle who’s never much participated in even “geeky” social activities in any sizeable group, so that may be why.
That said, I agree that dysfunctional communities seem better than total atomization, and that fallacy #2 seems to be the big one
@albatross11
Indeed, but that is a both a challenge in and of itself, and a necessary but far from sufficient condition.
Far easier said than done, particularly given the atomizing trends you note.
The media is almost certainly part of it, but I figure there are plenty of other factors with similar magnitudes. The nature of modern educational systems, and reduced ability of our children to socialize with adults, or outside their age groups at all (see Randy M’s link). The economy, with the decline in stable long-term employment and rising “gig economy”, and the concommitant demand for mobility and “rootlessness”. Secularization and the decline in traditional, communal religion. Diversity and everything Putnam wrote about in “Bowling Alone”. The assortive mating and class stratification that come with our highly-effective meritocratic sorting (and Murray’s “Coming Apart). And yes, just the development of TV alone probably eroded social ties. There’s plenty of “brokenness” beyond just media culture, and I don’t see how these trends can be meaningfully opposed.
What if it can’t be made better?
@Standing in the Shadows
I recently saw a bit of discussion on Tumblr[5] about this; more specifically, what comes after? Once a place gets “devoured” (their term) by the expansionist culture warrior faction, does it simply remain “devoured” forever, so that more of the world falls irreversibly into their domain, and, a la DrBeat, all is lost and only sweet, sweet death shall save us? Or does this sort of thing ‘burn itself out’? But then, what’s left after it burns out? Metaphorical ashes and wreckage, where everyone stays in their tiny safe bubbles and never reconnects? Or are there “green shoots” that come back, with new immunity to the tactics by which the “culture warriors” invade? Nobody in the discussion had much in the way of first-hand experience with “post-culture-war” spaces — they were mostly folks who either left or were forced out when the “invasion” came, and have yet to try to return — so it was long on speculation. Any insights?
@Brad
Less of this, please.
[1]by a broad, anthropological definition of “religion”, as per the likes of Stephen Prothero.
[2]Unless you’re L. Ron Hubbard.
[3]Put me down as another who thinks that the Japanese zoning system is more rational, though I doubt, for reasons of crime rates, politics, and culture, that it would prove near as workable here as there.
[4]Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice also holds the rise of automobiles and of suburbs as contributing to both “urban anonymity” and the decline of local control over the criminal justice system.
[5]Which, due to the nature of the platform, was lacking in the further depth I wish it had possessed.
@Baeraad
I think you meant “colostomy bag”, not “colonoscopy”. But otherwise, yes, I agree.
This relates to why I tend to push back against the valorization of “exit” in many of the circles I frequent. Because it encourages people to leave whenever things get tough, which brings atomization. Remember, Socrates chose death over exile, and ostracism is traditionally a serious punishment (recall earlier discussions of Friedman’s book, the Amish and the Romany, etc.). But instead, we rootless moderns rebrand “exile” as “exit”. As you noted earlier, the people we most need to increase interaction with are family, neighbors, and coworkers — which are those we do not, to a great degree, choose to “share a mostly-non-alterable circumstance with”.
It is indeed “an unhappy situation all around,” and it looks like every trend is toward it getting worse, not better. (Well, at least we can look forward to stronger, healthier communities for the few survivors in the permanently-preindustrial future after civilization collapses.)
I’m enough of a Christian contrarian to say “But Benedict Option!” Of course, I’m neutral on the question whether the Benedict Option stands any chance of working, so take that with a grain of salt.
A number of other interesting points raised; I’ll try to respond after work.
@Nick
Are you putting it forth as a counter-trend, pointing towards community-building rather that atomization? Well, first of all, that would require it to be an extant trend, rather than a mere (vague) proposal.
I’m not. I’m a frequent reader (though not a commenter) over at Dreher’s, and what I’ve seen there, and elsewhere, does not make me at all optimistic as to any possible effectiveness — particularly as Dreher takes great pains to distingush “BenOp” from “going Amish.” Because as I read the stats and trends on “the secularization thesis,” anything short of the Amish or Kiryas Joel models seems grossly insufficient to resist “universal culture” and the “atomizing” trends. And, as I and others have pointed out in previous SSC discussions, these have distinct advantages specific to them not readily available to any group who would try to emulate their example.
More importantly, such groups also already have strong communities with “thick” social ties. And they have not so much “demodernized” as simply resisted Modernity from the beginning. It’s one thing to maintain one’s community and culture against Modernity and dissolution, it’s another to rebuild them, against the trends, after they’ve already to a significant degree succumbed. (Maintaining an intact building is easier than rebuilding a partially collapsed one, holding one’s position against a current is easier than moving upstream, or whatever metaphor you prefer.) I see little evidence that this latter is at all possible.
We do, at least, seem to be in agreement that it takes (strong, organized) religion. But while you almost certainly disagree, I don’t see (non-Amish) Christianity as being at all up to the task.
I look forward to it.
Drat. Yes, I guess that’s what I meant. And here I actually did take care to check that it was actually a word – I suppose I should have thought to also check that it was the right word…
I wasn’t suggesting anyone be thrown out of a community for bad breath. But bad breath is also a perfect example of the kind of thing honest criticism and, if necessary, peer pressure ought to put to rest. And ostracism when used as peer pressure is not exile*, since ostracism is conditional and temporary by design; I’ve seen it fail before the desired effect is achieved simply because the folks employing it get tired of it.
*I’m aware the term is just as often used for the sort of indefinite exile that e.g. bullied children are subjected to, so mea culpa if my narrower use here was confusing.
Yeah, totally. But my specific concern here may be a bit different than yours; I’m thinking in particular of neurodivergent or socially awkward folks for whom the norms (if not always the culture) of geek communities like an RPG or gaming group make for an easier fit. In these cases you must in certain respects accept someone as they are, and it’s hard to know where to draw the line… it’s easy this way to fall right into GSF #2. This is getting uncomfortably close to a CW topic, but it was some of the discussions following the reproductive ants thing that got me interested in this. Digest those and I think you’ll understand where I was coming from here, and where the second-guessing that I voiced above still comes from; that it’s not my job, or anyone’s, to enforce Mainlander norms on the Islands, and whatever my motives, doing so may well be destructive, as Patterson suggests in the case of the tech industry:
So to recap, since this has gotten really long and rambling: I hope you can see how a few years ago, coming off of essays like that, I felt attempts at enacting even fairly basic standards may well be the Mainlander telling the Islanders how to act, but, looking back, may well have been me falling into an overly strict interpretation, namely Geek Social Fallacy #2. Hence the origin for my current concern as well as my second-guessing.
I think we’re still coming at this from different angles. I agree with the first paragraph, but the second paragraph confuses me—it sounds to me like all else being equal the second one is more like a real community, and the first one sounds more “strictly business”—like [generic, not specifically] you feel free to take your toys and go someplace else if someone’s wrecking the sandbox. But an exit strategy would quickly dissolve a community like that; so what means are being employed to keep it together, are you just tolerating the folks who wreck the sandbox, or are you using criticism or some form of peer pressure to bring them in line, or what? I ask because it sounds from the second paragraph like you believe the first is more like a real community, insofar as it’s united by a common purpose outside of just “keep folks together.”
I’ve written a lot now and I still want to respond to Kevin… I’ll try to get back to this later today.
# Nick:
I’m afraid that I feel very confused as to what you’re saying – you seem to be linking to three articles arguing in favour of accepting people (or at least groups) on their own terms, and then you say that they explain why you are in favour of stricter in-group policing?
Of course, if you’re just trying to say that you’re in two minds on the subject, I can relate to that. I don’t see any good solutions anywhere either. I think I instinctively err on the side of tolerance, though, due to being very conflict-averse – to me, pointing out bad behaviour is in itself terribly bad behaviour, so the behaviour pointed out needs to be really extremely bad to justify it.
As for how to keep a “real” community together, I guess the idea I was fumbling at was that it’s not something that you do from within, but something that is at least partly enforced by existing conditions. Traditional communities are based on simple geography – you’re going to see everyone all the time whether you get along with them or not, so you’d better learn to get along with them. Or if everyone is coming together to get something done that matters beyond their relationships to each other, then they need to manage to work together on the task at hand and the only reason for someone to get exiled is if they are being a hindrance to it.
As for the halitosis, I maintain that that’s one step removed from complaining that someone is victimising you by going around looking ugly – though I’ll admit that I have an abnormally weak sense of smell, which may play a part in that perspective. :p
Baeraad,
Right, I knew this was going to be confusing because I presented my more recent view first…. You’re right that I’m of two minds. A few years ago I was convinced to be much more tolerant; after seeing the results of that I’m less sure, and thought the Geek Social Fallacies (part. 1, 2, and 5) were a good codification of the assumptions I made which I think were in error.
I’m very conflict averse too, and I worry that this assumption—that pointing out bad behavior is itself very bad behavior—is a bad one. When I say above that I think it produces dysfunctional communities, I want to be clear that actually functional communities, by contrast, don’t need to abide by it. That’s not to say that they never do, or that they abide by some particular principle of straightforward criticism or something, but I think it’s generally a feature of dysfunctional communities and not functional communities. So if someone quotes GSF #2, it had better be followed with, “and friends deserve to know when they’ve gone wrong, and deserve to be told it tactfully and charitably” and not some awful alternative like “and incidental group acquaintance #342 deserves to be told off” which it might, in your experience, have been cover for.
Yeah I agree that—at least generally—a community is not a totally voluntary thing (your original other condition, I note, is that things be weakly mandatory). And your and Kevin’s examples of neighbors, coworkers, etc, are good ones. Need-based is another good one, with churches and other organizations fulfilling people’s religious and social needs.
@Randy M
Found a copy of The Great Good Place (2nd edition) at my local library, and have already checked it out and started reading. What’s interesting is the age: the 1st edition was 1989, and this one is 1999. And yet most of it identifies trends that are still relevant — because they’re still ongoing, and even worse now. On the other hand are the parts where it’s age shows: when he talks about “VCRs and satellite dishes”, and the total absense of the internent.
Okay, now I think I see what you mean. And it’s true, the people I know who live in more close-knit communities tend to be pretty vocal about what they don’t like about their neighbours, while at the same time showing every sign of genuinely caring about those neighbours. So excessive politeness may indeed not be a feature of a healthy community.
On the other hand, I question whether excessive politeness is the cause of an unhealthy community or just a necessary measure to keep it from going from “unhealthy” to “dead.” Like I said before, fandoms and hobbies don’t make for very stable communities – they’ll shatter if you put some strain on them. So if one of those is the only source of togetherness you can hope to have, your choice might just be to bite your tongue and let other people get away with acting badly, or else see the whole thing either break apart?
Or if not break apart, then turn into something even worse. I mean, this isn’t all conjecture, is it? We’ve seen what happens to online communities that react to the anything-goes anarchy of the net at large by deciding to call out any sign of undesirable behaviour. That never seems to lead to a healthier environment – it just leads to one where everyone is paranoid either about others hiding badness from them or for having their own badness exposed.
So I still think that excessive tolerance may be the best option in some situations… while admitting that those situations aren’t particularly happy ones. Unhealthy communities may be the best that some of us can hope for.
You mean doctors getting paid more than fast-food workers?
I’d agree with the notion that there’s generally too much income inequality, but that the optimum amount is nonzero.
How scientifically plausible is implanting knowledge directly into a human’s brain?
Like, is it realistic to think that, given the inefficiency of conveying information to another human through verbal or written language, it may one day be possible to “download” knowledge directly into a mind?
Basically, human A wants human B to know something, some complicated state of affairs that may be misunderstood if communicated through the ambiguity of language, or maybe it’s a simple packet of information, but human A wants human B to absorb it as quickly as biologically possible. It would also have the benefit of being completely unambiguous. The new knowledge human B has is identical to that of human A.
Note that I don’t necessarily mean Matrix style “I know Kung-Fu” learning. Nothing that requires muscle memory, just the transmission of semantic knowledge, or facts about the world, that one human wants to transfer to another.
The information also doesn’t need to be “true,” it’s up to the receiving human to verify it, but the receiver will be under no uncertainty as to what the sender means.
As far as I understand, as of now this is not merely highly improbable, but may in fact be impossible to achieve under the laws of physics we live in. This may in fact be impossible even if you postulate the existence of some sort of quasi-magical nanotechnology, which is itself very likely impossible under our current laws of physics. Human brains are just not similar enough.
Could you expand on that? If quasi-magical nanotechnology means Drexlerian nanotech, I can’t see any problem with it from the laws of physics.
If you’re going to say something is impossible, there needs to be a pretty strong justification for why you think so, not just that it seems hard. What scientific law says that it can’t be done?
I wouldn’t go so far as Bugmaster, but moving information from one brain to another via language is something we have complicated evolved systems to do. You seem to be imagining something that bypasses all that, which could only work better if it had substitute systems for accomplishing what our existing systems do (primarily, as Bugmaster notes, coping with the fact that brains are not all that similar to one another by translating the information from brain A’s encoding to some neutral format and thence to brain B’s encoding). So while I don’t agree with Bugmaster that it would be impossible, it would be enormously difficult.
My best bet is that, like a lot of sci-fi technology, this is feasible but not practical. I don’t really know for certain, as brain research is still in its infancy and there might be a big breakthrough that makes this simple and easy, but I doubt we’ll see a huge change there.
The biggest problem is, most likely, human brains are large neural networks that build upon set pathways that all converge on a roughly similar human experience. Trying to plug and play memories between these two systems would be like trying to open a Scrivener file with Word, both handle text but are simply not storing data in a way that’s readable to the other. That’s not even considering how different neural states might affect the stored data. Leaving aside non-neurotypical persons (for example, how would you render a schizophrenic’s hallucinations to someone who’s never experienced such a thing) Human memory is a very limited and malleable thing. Things change in size based on how scared someone is of the object, and their memory of events can be radically reshaped by things like phrasing and priming.
Now, this does bring me to a second point. Just as files can be converted its plausible that memories could be too. This does impact the whole ‘unambiguous’ part of your premise as any translation will have to make alterations and assumptions. It’s also, likely, a huge technical challenge. Unless memory is markedly more modular than currently thought there’d be seven billion (and counting) different formats that would all need to be interchangeable for memory transfer. A surmountable task, but not a small one by any measure.
Finally, there’s also an issue of reading. People have intrinsic bias, and at the neurological level this could be considered a facet of how they process information. If you give someone a memory about a clown you liked and they’re afraid of clowns, will they remember it with joy or fear? It’s another level of ambiguity that can creep into the system, and is especially worrying if memories turn out to be as lazy as some theorise. Communicating unambiguously might actually be easier in written form.
‘I met my best friend, Tim, at the coffee shop near work.’ Is pretty clear. A memory might be:
‘[I] met [Best Friend], at [Shop [Coffee]] near [Work]]’
Which could end up being read at meeting the receiver’s best friend near their office and very strange.
Anyway, tldr: possible yes, simple very much no.
@OptimalSolver
I suspect that the best chance to get something like that is cybernetics, where the human brain is augmented by a device that can store facts, do lookups, do calculations, etc. Basically, a smartphone connected to the brain. Of course, the question is whether it’s possible to connect the brain to such a device.
Yes, this is what I was thinking. The human brain is inherently limited in the amount of knowledge it can contain, or access. So I think having direct access to a large non-organic memory core seems to me to be the ideal solution. We don’t know if this is possible, but I don’t see why not.
I think the idea that one can receive knowledge outside of language is wrong-headed. It is language that humans excel at. Think about how animals communicate. Humans are many orders of magnitude better at communication than animals, and it is because of language. Of course language has ambiguities, but much less than any other method of communication.
People are working on the part where a computer can detect when you think: “Siri, what is the capital of The Netherlands?”
Step two is to feed the answer back into the brain, which may be very hard to do directly, because we evolved to interpret our senses. I’m not sure whether you can just add a high-resolution sense. But it seems plausible that we can make people hear voices or perhaps even see things.
@I don’t necessarily mean Matrix-style ‘I know kung-fu’ learning-
You’d think by now there’d be a coffin version of Dance Dance Revolution. Type in some labanotation, get in the coffin, strap the old bod to servomechanisms, be pushed through the physical motions of Baryshnikov or Bruce Lee. The body stuff is bound to be easier than the brain stuff.
My understanding is that you’d need sufficient knowledge about the recipient to be able to go in and implant the information in such a way that they’d want to believe that it’s true.
Plus, at some point, you would have to buy an airline.
I stumbled across the last SSC survey results today. I view the commentators here and on the subreddit as pretty right-leaning, so I was rather surprised by the decisively left-leaning political spectrum graph from the survey. Am I just hopelessly biased and viewing anything to the right of me as right-leaning, or are the SSC commentators actually to the right of the lurkers?
Not sure how you asking that question here and getting answers to it below would satisfactorily clarify the answer to this question. Unless thousands of people (lurkers) reply here, the answers you’ll get will be from but a subset of the people who originally answered the question in the survey. A likely biased subset. If the replies in the survey lean left, then most likely so do the readers (I don’t know or care, I don’t find politics interesting).
It might be possible to condition on lurker status in the survey and see if the political preferences of non-lurkers are different from those of lurkers.
If I recall, right-leaning SSC readers mostly fall under the autistic right, aka libertarianism, representing economic conservatism and social liberalism, rather than the more mainstream and socially-adjusted right that’s currently (always?) popular in the West, which espouses social conservatism and economic liberalism.
Btw, I reckon that social conservatism-economic liberalism is the default worldview of the average, non-aspergic Homo Sapiens. The most natural politics for human groups is something like ethno-socialism.
I’m a little confused by what you mean by economic liberalism. To me it sounds like “right-wing economically”, with economic decisions being made by individuals, and a very free-market-based economy.
Is this how you meant it? I got the impression you meant the opposite, but perhaps I misunderstood your comment.
Liberal and Conservative are terribly mangled words in american political discussion.
“Economic liberalism” here means, I think, left-wing economically.
Stop saying “autistic right”. It’s about as juvenile as saying “rethuglicans”.
I take it as a non-insulting and accurate descriptor, personally
The autistic right is not offended. 😉
There are some left types who post here, but the vast majority do seem to be on the right-far-right-alt-right-libertarian axis. Post something critical of Trump and watch them crawl out of the woodwork, or just read the last hidden-open-thread where Trump was discussed, but only if nausea is your thing.
As to why the left mostly only lurks? I do not know, it’s an interesting question though.
My suspicion is that it’s a positive reinforcement thing. As a left-winger* I find the comment threads a little bit intimidating sometimes, and I rarely get involved in political discussions here. (Having political discussions with multiple intelligent people who disagree with you can be educational, but it can also be exhausting, and it’s always time-consuming.)
*I think it’s worth pointing out that I’m not from the US, so when I say “left-winger”, I mean actually left-wing, not just free-marketeers with a different colour of tie.
I would be very much surprised if as many as ten percent of the people commenting support Trump. I suspect you are judging how right wing the commenters are relative to your immediate social environment, where roughly zero percent support Trump, not relative to the U.S. population, where considerably more than ten percent do.
Also, you may be seriously underestimating how many of the people in your social environment support Trump or have other views that are heretical in that environment. As you may have noticed, people here occasionally comment that they don’t post under their real names because having their views on issues related to politics known by their real world associates would have negative consequences. In that respect, the online conversation may give a more accurate impression of people’s views than the realspace conversation–although of course, in both cases, you are interacting with a very nonrandom subset of people.
It isn’t necessary to support Trump in order to bend over backwards to defend him and never get around to posting about the reasons you don’t support him.
Maybe all the times people calmly point out that he’s an embarrassing, unqualified charlatan go largely unremembered since they lack that hysterical emotional punch the media’s revenues are so addicted to.
Who’s bending over backwards around here to defend Trump? Every discussion I’ve read here involving Trump seems to be between people plainly critical of Trump on one side, and people also plainly critical of Trump on the other side, but trying to be more careful about how that criticism is applied.
This.
When the full propaganda press was on for the Iraq war, it got to where you almost couldn’t argue against the war without being asked why you liked Saddam and plastic shredders and rape rooms and Uday and Qusay. We got so used to everyone on TV or in print sticking in lots of “we all agree they’re horrible, let’s say some more about how horrible they are” that when you didn’t say that stuff, it came off like you were on his side.
This same thing has happened w.r.t. Trump. So much of the world can’t say his name without mentioning what a fascist Nazi anti-Semitic homophobic racist woman-groping monster he is, that when you say “well, yes, Trump is a terrible president, but I don’t think he actually eats babies for breakfast,” it comes off as some kind of support for Trump.
It’s not “never get around to posting about the reasons you don’t support him”, it’s “offer fairly bland unconcerned criticism of Trump, then get animated if someone uses the wrong word to criticize him”.
Basically, blue-tribe is the preferred outgroup of most of the prolific commenters here. Therefore, it is the hate of things blue-tribe that animates the political conversations.
“Trump is not a racist! He is not a Nazi!”
Fine, what is he then? Find your own words to “correctly” describe the authoritarian, nativist, faux-populist schtick he uses.
He is toxic to the political discourse and fundamentally incompetent for the office. He is doing damage to the country.
The saving grace of Ingsoc is that the Two Minutes Hate only goes on for two minutes.
@HeelBearCub,
More toxic than branding roughly a third of the adult population as nazis or nazi sympathizers?
Because that’s you literally right now.
I mean you don’t like it when people imply that every Muslim refugee is a terrorist or a gang rapist, right? Well you’re directly stating that an order of magnitude more people are the equivalent of kill-on-sight war criminals. That’s worse.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
No, HBC is not “literally” branding a third of the Adult population Nazis or Nazi Sympathizers, at least not in the post you’re responding to. He’s not even figuratively doing so.
@HBC
I’ll certainly agree with “fundamentally incompetent for the office” and “doing damage to the country”, though on that last one I suspect I draw the lines differently.
As far as toxicity of discourse, I disagree primarily because I think that political discourse started going increasingly toxic around 2000 and hasn’t stopped. In that respect Trump is simply a secondary condition, not even a comorbidity. Doesn’t make him not a problem, but the distinction is important because if you just try to address the secondary condition without doing anything about the underlying one, the secondary condition just comes back worse, or the primary condition proceeds until even more drastic interventions are necessary.
A demagogue. Since you asked.
As I have said repeatedly here.
Very good.
@Paul
That comment made my day. Thank you.
I may or may not chose to do something like that, in a time and manner of my own choosing. Same goes for Trump’s other less-than-fanatical detractors here.
In the meantime, if you falsely accuse someone of being a Nazi, who is not a Nazi, we are under absolutely not obligation to provide an alternate insult for the man before calling you out as a liar and deciding not to pay attention to you any more. If you want to insult someone, the burden is on you to pick an appropriate insult – and even then, to accept that not everyone who shares your distaste for the target will join in the fun. Failure to do either, marks you as a fanatic not worth paying attention to (except as a possible threat).
Don’t call people Nazis who aren’t actually Nazis. Ever.
There’s an arguments-as-soldiers thing going on here. If I say “Trump eats babies for breakfast,” and you say “No, there’s no evidence of that, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s all made up by some dumbass Facebook meme you forwarded to all your friends,” it’s pretty natural (and wrong) for me to interpret that as you supporting Trump.
Something I want to point out:
I never said Trump was a Nazi.
Nor did Brad.
I venture to guess that there are very few “leftie” commenters here who have. Moon. Someone else who is also banned (… knight maybe?)
What said is that plenty here “offer fairly bland unconcerned criticism of Trump [if any at all] then get animated if someone uses the wrong word to criticize him”.
Trump positions himself as a [faux]-populist, nativist, demagogue with impulsive authoritarian tendencies. Getting animated about whether it is appropriate to call Trump a racist or a Nazi is missing the forest for the trees. Maybe he is not “Nazi”, but “Yahtzee” sounds pretty close. People here are supposed to be steel-manning these things.
Calling the scientist who wore a handmade shirt with comic book characters on it a misogynist is wrong in a way that calling Trump a Nazi is not. There is a difference between these two “mistakes” in nomenclature.
Fine, what is he then? Find your own words to “correctly” describe the authoritarian, nativist, faux-populist schtick he uses.
Which then leads on to “If he’s a Nazi then the people who voted for him must also be Nazis”, which means calling the 46% of voters who voted for him all Nazis and we’re back where we started.
Including arguing over:
Something I want to point out:
I never said Trump was a Nazi.
Ah come on, if you say “Trump is not a Nazi! Fine, what is he then?” that does sound like “I’m saying he’s a Nazi”. I’m trying to rephrase what you said, and I’m still coming up with variants like “If Trump is not a Nazi, then what else is he?” and “If you would not call this kind of person holding these views a Nazi, what would you call them?”
I’ll accept your claim that you did not mean he was a Literal Actual Nazi, but the way it was put could lead to that kind of misinterpretation. Maybe better to leave out “Fine, what is he then?” which does carry the implication “Fine, what is he then (if he’s not a Nazi, you can’t, he’s a Nazi)”.
@Deiseach:
1. I don’t call Trump a Nazi.
2. Other people (not here) use the phrase Nazi to refer to Trump.
3. Scott, you, and plenty of excercised about how awful and unfair it is to accuse Trump of such a thing.
4. I point out that Trump is a (faux)-populist, “nativist” demagogue with impulsive authoritarian tendencies.
5. You accuse me of practically calling him a Nazi.
Now, if 4 isn’t accurate, you can get exercised about it.
But since 4 is, in fact, accurate, I would vastly prefer that people here be concerned about 4 and not be far more concerned about people using the term “Nazi” to refer to a populist, nativist demagogue with authoritarian tendencies.
When you are completely unconcerned about 4, I take exception. Because leaders who fall into category are quite dangerous.
Yes, there are things that make Nazis unique from 4. Being those things doesn’t make you a literal Nazi. But Nazi is a central example of the class comprised of 4s, so making a great deal of hay about the misapplication seems to miss the point entirely.
How do you distinguish between a (faux)-populist and an ordinary populist?
Actual populists have policy preferences that are actually populist.
Trump has almost no true policy preferences.
How can you tell? Populists who are successful enough to get attention express policy preferences that get them political success. Unless you can read their minds or have enough information on the rest of their lives to figure out their real preferences, how do you distinguish true from false?
Also, doesn’t your definition of “actually populist” depend a lot on your beliefs about what policies have what effects? Bernie Sanders conducted what I would describe as a populist campaign. For someone who agrees with his political views that makes him a real populist. If I disagree, think the policies he supported would make life worse for most people, should I label him a faux-populist?
Disagree. I always thought the standard definition of populism was basically someone who simply selects popular positions for the sake of obtaining power, and doesn’t really have strong philosophical beliefs of their own.
In this case, Trump would be the platonian ideal of a populist…
If your deeply held and well founded philosophical beliefs happen to also be really popular, I don’t think you’re a populist, you’re just pretty fortunate!
Doing something merely popular is not populism.
When he says things that are similar to:
“Those guys in Washington are screwing you because the system is rigged and nobody know how it’s rigged better than me. Only I can fix it.”
That is talking the talk of populism.
I’d suggest perhaps both?
By which I mean I think the suggestion from fion above (that left-wingers, particularly of the SJ variety, have to exhaust willpower reserves to post here since they are almost certain to be challenged) is likely true, but I think it’s also likely true that you’re interpreting certain signals (lack of specifically inflected vocabulary, the presence of unburnt witches, and so on) as coding “right wing”, since that seems an extremely common response to SSC from those left of centre who have not already been stung by purity crusades.
I think the commenters here include not very many mainstream American conservatives, and a whole lot of people who are both broadly right wing and serious outliers w.r.t. the rest of the world. Think h. beady, all trite, ethnonationalist, libertarian, and Moldbugian views.
Even a few people espousing such uncommon views seems like a lot, if you’re used to more common political and social ideas.
My impression, possibly biased, is that the most striking set of outliers is the one I am part of. There are a significant number of anarcho-capitalists here, almost certainly more than Trump supporters. Given that Trump supporters are more than ten times as numerous as libertarians, judged by the most recent presidential election, and only a small minority of libertarians are anarchists …
The Neo-reactionaries may be even rarer in the general population, but I don’t see as many of them here.
I should probably add that I’m guessing that well over half the people who comment here are in the U.S., so I’m using the U.S. distribution of views for comparison.
Huh, you appear to have found a variation of the term that isn’t banned!
> interpreting certain signal
You mean like the phases:
> unburnt witches
> stung by purity crusades
?
To my mind these signals are being interpreted quite correctly.
As signals of right wing views or of hostility to parts of the left? Those are not the same thing. I suspect there are quite a lot of people who voted for Hillary or, earlier, for Bernie who share that hostility.
I can’t imagine why Leftists people that have been “stung by purity crusades” would have issues with doctrinarian Leftists showing up to tell them how they’re right-wing monsters, can you?
The comments section definitely leans right, but there’s also the issue where the “left-right” divide here mostly concerns cultural issues, rather than economic ones. So you have people who consider themselves “left-wing” arguing for “right-wing” positions.
That’s just a limitation of a single axis political discrimination, even if people are frequently pretty clustered.
Name a right-wing position that is actually an outlier here?
Even things like equal rights for gay persons, which is the default consensus here, will be spoken about as if it is a right-wing position. In other words, there is actually denial that the right deserves criticism for their position on things like gay rights.
You see very little desire to actually criticize standard right wing positions.
I suspect that the following are all significantly under represented compared to their prevalence in the general population.
– Explicitly Natalist and pro-life veiws.
– Opposition to gay marriage and skepticism towards the wider LGBT etc… agenda
– Trump voters
– non-utilitarians
– Creationists, young Earth and otherwise.
– Theists in general
Check, check, pass, check, check, check.
@hlynkacg:
Do you realize that I anticipated this response and I that I already responded to it?
For example: I say “creationists comprise a rump, or even an outright majority, of the Republican party. This has negative impacts on policy decisions”.
The response I get is not “Yeah, that’s true.”
The response I get is “No they don’t. No one believes in the literal creationist position, it’s just signalling and a way to tweak the noses of the liberals. Plus, there is nothing wrong with being a creationist you elitist who is sneering down your nose at us.”
@HeelBearCub
Who said that?
There were several comments at some point recently to the effect of “Questions about literal 7 day creationism may be interpreted as questions about tribal affiliation rather than of factual beliefs.”
The rest of it I don’t recall.
@Aapje:
That is not a literal quote. It is merely meant to be illustrative of the kind of argument made.
Because there are important differences between small-c creationists and Young Earth Creationists, but polls insist on fuzzing them together. I for one believe “This has negative impacts on policy decisions” applies to the latter but not to the former, and am sick to death of people pushing the conflation to tar all theists with the YECs’s batshittery. Anyone who (rightly) speaks up for moderate Muslims should know better.
(YEC is heresy.)
@HeelBearCub
I don’t find it very convincing when you can’t actually produce a single comment stating that and have to paraphrase. I cannot judge how correct/charitable you are like this.
Gobbobobble certainly seems to dispute your claim that it was total denial and suggests that it was an attempt to counter a too strong perception of outgroup homogeneity.
@Aapje: Please remember these principles next time you are tempted to summarize what, say, “SJWs” or “feminists” believe without providing specific citations.
For the record, this is probably the conversation HBC is talking about. Sample:
I do not think HBC’s summary is excessively uncharitable.
@Iain:
I wasn’t thinking specifically of that series of comments, but it is a good illustration of the form of the conversation.
It’s relatively common here.
Another example would be various conversations that have occurred around “Gay Cake Baking” where various people have denied that the conservative houses any animus towards gay people at all that’s just crazy and the whole thing is a non-issue just leave
Britneythose poor Christians alone.Another would be conversations around abortion where there is denial that (the rump of) Republicans actually want to ban abortion or want to deny it to as many people as possible.
Another are conversations around whether (the rump of) the right maintains a belief in Obama quite possibly being (a) Muslim, (b) actually not born in the US.
It’s not mutually exclusive for a segment of conservatives to be anti-gay and a segment of liberals to be anti-Christian. What sort of justifications are you seeing for Gay Cake CW that isn’t of the form “This person doesn’t like gays and we shouldn’t force them to”?
This is literally what being pro-life means (modulo some qualified exceptions depending on how toxoplasma’d the participants are). Where are you seeing pro-lifers that deny this?
You can mock whackadoodle rump segments with nutty ideas when you stop vociferously denying that “SJWs” are thing worth conversation.
Your average mainstream Republican in the US is probably much more openly retrograde than the average right-winger here, even if the latter holds some views that are more extreme than the former. Emphasis on the “openly,” obviously, as we can’t look into people’s hearts of hearts (and I think misgendering people is a rules violation here?) but the political atmosphere in the US as a whole is one where a mainstream right-winger will misgender, support bathroom bills, etc, whereas SSC is a place where you have reactionaries and occasional crypto-fascists who don’t do those things.
@dndnrsn:
I feel like you only read the first sentence of what I wrote. See my response above to hylankcg.
You’re right. I think I read a lower post, then kicked it up a nesting layer. There is a tendency here for the right-wingers here to wash their hands of mainstream Republican tendencies, while not extending left-wingers the same courtesy.
EDIT: And then it took me two tries to get this post to the right layer.
-Support For Trump. (I can think of 2-3 frequently commenting Trump supporters, tops)
-Opposition to Gay Marriage. (again, 2-3)
Off the top of my head. Can you explain what you mean by “Even things like equal rights for gay persons, which is the default consensus here, will be spoken about as if it is a right-wing position” ?
gets the divining rod
One interpretation of that statement is that the mainstream right has assimilated the new status quo concerning “gay marriage”, and is now in opposition to whatever new madness the left is cooking up.
Another is that the old status quo could very well be said to be an equal rights position (and so is the new one, but that’s beside the point). Under the old rules, your orientation did not matter, only your sex did. Under the new rules, neither your orientation nor your sex matters.
I believe HeelBearCub is saying that those on the right here who support gay marriage often portray the issue as “settled” and therefore not really a left/right thing, when in fact there is still a good deal of opposition to gay marriage on the right.
Unless you exclude such opposition from the left by definition, there is also a fair bit of opposition to gay marriage on the left. This is probably just the nature of rapid social change.
And so with abortion, leaving us to quibble about the relative significance of different fair bits.
@GreyAnon
I don’t think so. I have a hard time believing HBC would complain that the problem with SSC right-wingers is that we’re agreeing with a traditionally left-wing position. That’s generally what a political victory looks like, although in this case that’s affected by the fact that I think most of here are non-standardard right wingers who never disagreed in the first place.
If that’s correct, then to the extent that’s the case, I think A) that’s because it reflects our own personal views, and B) is there really a “good deal” of opposition? My impression is that it IS settled, and there is about as much danger of moving back towards throwing gay couples in jail for sodomy as there is of Roe v. Wade being overturned: that is, basically none, barring a serious reversal of the opinion trend lines.
RLMS’ classification filed me as “right wing” which I won’t dispute, for sufficiently eccentric values of right-wing, but I spend at least as much time in other venues and IRL arguing with conservatives as with liberals, and I haven’t had to make an argument in defense of gay marriage in YEARS. Now the arguments are over transgendered people.
I don’t think think it’s an exaggeration to call Roe V. Wade the prototypical left/right issue in the United States. So, accepting your premises, “likelihood of being reversed” doesn’t seem to be a good measure of what HeelBearCub is talking about.
I think it’s more that the position “gay marriage opposition — that’s not on us” exists simultaneously with Eich martyrdom and “they want to force us to throw them a fucking parade” worries. There is an ongoing subtext of the disaster of liberals making those who object to gay marriage, or gay relations of any kind, unemployable. That’s not incompatible with those concerned just using that particular issue (repercussions for public objections to gay marriage or gay relationships) academically, but it doesn’t tend to come across that way.
@Trofim_Lysenko
To get my attention, simply “@Anonymous” is preferred.
@Trofim_Lysenko:
@skef has correctly interpreted what I am saying.
In other words, even for issues on which commenters disagree with the majority position of red-tribe and/or Republicans, they have no interest in expressing disagreement with that position, rather reframing it as if is it not the actual position held by those they support. This is essentially a tribal solidarity play.
Perhaps the “exception that proves the rule” is the immigration/borders debate, where the libertarian-right will disagree with the “nativist”-right.
I’m going to have to go back and look for some OTs on Gay Marriage, the whole Transgender Rights/Bathroom thing, and so on, because I have to admit I’m skeptical.
Define “support” in this context? As in vote for? give money to? If you mean “agree with on a given issue”, that seems like a tautology.
@Trofim_Lysenko:
This conversation feels slightly circular at this point, but, at the risk of repeating myself, “those they support” are conservatives and/or red-tribe and/or anyone who is the enemy of blue-tribe.
The context of this conversation was the general bent of the commentariat, so I intended “support” to be interpreted in that context.
@HBC
I get what you you meant by “those they support”. My concern was the generality vs. specificity of “support”. I can only control my own actions, and I think I’ve done a -fairly- good job weighing in with my opinions on issues where I don’t entirely line up with mainstream conservative opinion, but I’ll certainly try to be more vocal in future. Beyond that, I’m not sure what else I can do, short of prefacing my comments on unrelated topics:
i.e. “I disagree with the conservative mainstream on handling of immigration and gay marriage, but on the current topic of gun rights…” etc.
I think the behaviour HeelBearCub is talking about is certain people engaging in pedantry and whataboutery rather than disagree with mainstream right-wing orthodoxy. For instance, in discussions of gay marriage, making the completely useless point that gays have always been able to marry (people of the opposite gender). More generally, this happens a lot with Trump/Hillary. There aren’t many explicit Trump supporters here, but you’d still struggle to find a conversation about one of Trump’s bad points that didn’t end up with someone claiming “but Hillary… !”.
The people who do this don’t necessarily agree with the mainstream right on e.g. gay marriage, but for whatever reason they seem unwilling to be outspoken against them. I think you are “one of the good ones” — I don’t recall you engaging in this annoying behaviour, and I think I remember you pushing back against an anti-Islam argument at one point.
I mean, if the above chain is to be believed, even that is not enough. If you don’t explicitly denounce the right-wing people/ideas/things you don’t agree with, while also acknowledging that they’re a part of american right-wing mainstream politics, you’re being… dishonest, or evil, or something, I’m not even sure what the accusation here is anymore.
“Whataboutery” here is called “isolated demand for rigor” and is a legitimate criticism.
I’d totally buy commenters being to the right of lurkers. There aren’t a lot of places someone right-wing can go for smart discussion, so we gravitate here. The same isn’t true of left-wingers, and I’d totally buy a lot of them being driven off because dealing with smart people on the other side is hard. (This is not a criticism. I will often avoid political threads here because I just don’t feel like it.)
It’s true that there is smart discussion from right-wingers in this comment section.
There’s also basic right-wing crankery (especially the American flavor), and it gets no push-back from the smart conservatives commenters.
Left-wingers/liberals/socdems, on the other hand, are here and everywhere more eager to fight among themselves.
I think pushing back against cranks is a waste of time. The cranks won’t change their mind and the non-cranks already agree with you.
A boot forcing you to write intelligent, point by point refutations of every Sidles post, forever.
What JulieK said. I don’t want to have a coronary trying to argue with someone of the likes of say… Jim. I argue with people who I disagree with but who aren’t crazy. I don’t need to convince someone of anything to gain from the interaction, but I do need them to post coherent responses that I actually have a useful framing for.
You know the old joke about playing chess with a pigeon?
@Nornagest
The pigeon only moves his roo-koo?
@Aapje —
The pigeon will knock over the pieces, crap on the board, and strut around like it won.
When I was learning Portuguese, I came across the phrase ‘pomba enxadrista‘ – given as the closest expression in native Portuguese words to what we would call a troll in English (though they have also imported the English word in verb form: trollar), but it literally translates as ‘pigeon chess player’, and indeed appears to be drawn from the Eugenie Scott quote about creationists.
There’s also basic right-wing crankery (especially the American flavor), and it gets no push-back from the smart conservatives commenters.
Asking as a right winger (of the socio type) who has an interest in non-crankery discussions (of both the nutjob and annoyed spectrums of ‘cranky’) – can you expand on this? What *specific* “basic right wing crankery” do you see getting “no” push back? This is the sort of thing I’d like to know was annoying people across the aisle.
This is not to say that this would necessarily get a change – a vital part of most conservative/libertarian pov is you ain’t the boss a me – so there would be a fair amount of “yeah, yeah, whatever, I’m ignoring that” rather than overt disagreement in response to a comment where there was a lack of agreement. (Or: where a sufficent number of left-leaners were already jumping in. In my non-universal experience, right wingers are less apt to dogpile – or, are less apt at doing so, possibly due to apathy & lack of social competence.)
I would also warn people against assuming all other persons shared their own culture and taught responses to different things – what looks like factual support might not be emotional support, and vice versa.
Especially grating for me are the ecology, climate change, economy where it interacts with natural resources, and quasi-conspiracy theories about the motivations and morals of people who disagree with them on those subjects.
(I finally have a project rolling to work with climate scientists, I’m waiting for my hush money)
(I worked with oil industry researchers before (as an academic), I did not receive any hush money from them)
I agree that this thing is actually bad. However, I also think its a waste of time to argue about. I’m glad Brad is willing to pushback against Birthers or whatever, but I’m not going to spend my time on that.
“economy where it interacts with natural resources”
You still believing in peak oil?
@keranih For me, the base level lack of empiricism that doesn’t get pushed pack on is the irritating thing, especially at a rationalist website.
So a few OTs back, someone post some baloney about Chicago’s municipal elections, and Democratic primaries being the only accountability elections – which would be a neat trick, because Chicago municipal elections are non-partisan and there are no Democratic primaries. If you don’t understand how a thing works even at the most basic, elementary levels, why are you talking about it like you do? Especially when it’s used in service of nonsense right-wing talking points.
I might have a blind-spot here, so I am also interested in the crankery. A lot of the real world conservatives I deal with are very close to the Obama-is-a-Kenyan-Socialist, His-Name-Was-Seth-Rich variety. The various Red Pill boards I sometimes read have a whole host of other crankery that goes even beyond the Birther stuff.
It’s possible I am over-looking the crankery, but is that happening here?
I’ve argued against other conservatives elsewhere that AGW is a real thing and not a made-up conspiracy, but I haven’t read much here about it.
While you are correct that there are no party primary elections, this is a pretty credulous statement. It’s officially non-partisan, in that they don’t put a letter by your name on the ballot, but that doesn’t stop people from noticing which way your wind is blowing.
The spirit of the statement was not exactly outlandish either: getting the backing of the political Machine still goes quite a long ways here.
It’s not credulous, it’s the structure of the elections. I don’t mean “non-partisan” in the sense they aren’t Democrats, I mean “non-partisan” in the sense that the parties don’t control ballot access. Yes, someone can get the backing of Democratic Party apparatus, and then leverage that into an electoral victory by having the Democratic Party help them get more votes than their opponents. But getting the support of the Democratic party establishment doesn’t keep every other Democrat’s name off the ballot the way a partisan election would. There were four people running for Alderman in my ward during the last election, and they ran in the real municipal election, not in some tiny-turnout Democratic primary.
I think you must just buzz past it. There has been plenty, in long exhaustive threads.
Just to mention an episode that made me lose respect for a number of people here, during the election there were several regular posters who were either endorsing or “I’m not saying I’m 100% convinced of this, but…” right-wing conspiracy theories about Hillary’s health.
Did anyone express more concern about Hillary’s health than Donna Brazile?
I just added this to my list of “conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.”
@Philosophisticat
What sort of conspiracy? The fact that Hilary was in a conspiracy with the DNC is accepted and admited to at this point. In other elements, we discovered that members of the media were sending her the debate questions and the like.
The existince of the conspiracy is known at this point. And even The Washington Post (The Fix) responded to the ‘Hillary was just overheated’ claim, by pointing out that the temperature was only 80 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/11/hillary-clintons-health-just-became-a-real-issue-in-the-presidential-campaign/?utm_term=.9303264836cf)
Taking it as given that they were wrong in their explanation of the weird glasses, the collapsing and the lies, what is the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ doing that is useful?
This is the sort of stuff that was being cited favorably by commenters here.
https://www.dangerandplay.com/2016/09/11/sick-hillary-collapses-on-camera-is-saved-by-her-handler-clintoncollapse/
If you think this was all totally reasonable, then thanks for making my point.
@Thirqual:
(response to a question about what he meant by right wing crankery)
I can’t tell from this whether views that disagree with you on those subjects count as crankery, or only some specific and not specified ones.
I have long argued that we do not know either the magnitude or the sign of the net effect on humans of AGW. Does that claim fit your definition of crankery? If so, do you think you could yourself list all of the major effects positive and negative, with some rough estimate of magnitude?
I have no idea what your “economy where it interacts with natural resources” is about. Are you familiar with Hotelling’s analysis of the economics of depletable resources? That’s the framework I would expect an economist to use.
Also, you made a strong statement about people on the right never objecting to errors by other people on the right. I offered a counterexample from a few days ago (assuming you count libertarians as on the right–if you don’t there isn’t a right wing bias to comments here) and I don’t think I have seen you either retract your claim or support it.
So far as attributing bad motives to one’s opponents, that’s generally undesirable behavior in argument, but it seems in my experience to be at least as common by the climate orthodox attacking the skeptics as in the other direction.
@Philosophisticat
My recollection is that various people, including me, thought that there was non-zero objective evidence for this theory & that others got very irritated over debating this question at all.
It doesn’t seem like all that big of a stretch that a presidential candidate in the last month or two of the campaign might be hiding some health problems. And it doesn’t seem disqualifying to me that someone might suspect this was happening, after (say) Hillary Clinton collapsing on 9/11.
I’m not going to relitigate the debate, which was about a supposed neurological disorder and seizures and took place before Hillary’s pneumonia-related collapse. I consider the quality of the evidence cited in that discussion (I picked the wrong batshit Mike Cernovich post, by the way, it was this one: http://www.dangerandplay.com/2016/08/06/hillary-clinton-stroke-seizure-coughing-fits/) intellectually embarrassing crankery. Obviously, some of the other discussants disagree. Draw whatever conclusions you like.
Okay, most people agree with both:
@It doesn’t seem all that crazy that a presidential campaign might be hiding some health problems-
and:
@batshit Mike Cernovitch post-
So, why doesn’t The Lady’s Home Journal routinely have respectable doctors putting the case for and against every presidential candidate’s physical health? A strong focus on the personal health of the principals is inevitable in any politics without democracy. There’s too much money in presidential campaigns for it to pass for a New England town meeting or even Cicero’s De Oficiis. We accept thousands of armed bodyguards for a president. Why don’t we routinely see respectable ‘they might plotz’ articles about candidates in their seventies? Leaving it to outcasts makes it worse.
I think this depends on your definition of ‘crankery’. If this is your biggest exposure to conservatives in person, then I’d guess some of the open Trump supporters would look like cranks. Personally, there’s nobody here who is likely to commit the mistake I saw on my facebook feed recently of claiming that “the $900 billion/year we spend on welfare for illegals should go to veterans instead”. And yes, I pointed out the absurdity of that number ($900 bn/yr is 25% of all federal spending). That, I’ll classify as crankery.
I’ve seen a fair bit of outlier right-wing belief getting pushback from people I think of as broadly on the right. David Friedman and I[1] both pushed back on some of the anti-Islamic stuff posted by Conrad Honcho; John Schilling pushed back on a lot of the apologia w.r.t. the Charlottesville rally.
[1] David knows a lot more about Islamic law and culture than I do, so his comments are quite a bit more valuable. OTOH, it’s a stretch to put him on the right.
I agree that some right-wing commenters push back on crazy/stupid right wing people here, which is very helpful.
I also agree there are a lot of right wing people here that are some combination of crazy/stupid. Which is not helpful.
I agree with Scott’s general take on trying to deal with this — “I will just ban people based on fairly arbitrary criteria having to do with virtue ethics/my taste,” but I disagree with where he draws the line (waaaaay too permissive of tire fire level stuff).
—
In terms of general strategy, I think LW/LW-sphere loses by associating with/tolerating alt right/Moldbug types. In other words, a lot of downside, not a lot of upside.
From the LW/LW-sphere point of view, they would be a lot better off if abovementioned folks had their own forum, a sort of upscale Ask-The-Donald. Of course abovementioned folks will never agree to be driven off, because they are free-riding on an existing community infrastructure, while adding very little to it.
There was a spin-off during the [early banned term] era. It was called More Right, and in typical [banned term] aristocratic style, did not allow commenting beyond the occasional “letter to the editor.” The adherence to bygone norms was quaint but ultimately probably counter-productive.
To paraphrase Kent Brockman: “I said it before, and I will say it again — aristocracy simply doesn’t work.”
@Ilya Shpitser
Funny how it gets reinvented all the time in places avowedly anti-aristocratic.
It’s not even so much that this claim is false, so much as “why does it apply more specifically to these people than to other people” ?
I ride on norms of good faith and I provide them to others too, except to actors I specifically have marked as bad faith, and even then I give some faith to them. Have I done anything to build the infrastructure? Why or why not? Come to think of it, have you? Why or why not?
My experience is these folks don’t change their mind and won’t change the subject (e.g. Eugene Noir + his army of sockpuppets).
The LW/LW-sphere isn’t really about these topics.
Hence the “free-riding.” I am here because I am interested in biases, cognitive and otherwise.
I see very few people here, right or left, who fit that description.
Assuming you count libertarians as conservatives, that isn’t true. I fairly often point out problems with right-wing arguments on issues such as Islam, where I have some expertise to contribute.
For instance, a mere three days ago, someone else claimed:
I responded:
Is that sufficient evidence that what you just posted was false, or do you want me to dig farther back than Open Thread 89.75?
I think you feel targeted by my post. You are indeed one of the commenters I was thinking of in my post.
You are indeed one of the commenters I’m thinking of. The typical✝ libertarian (both local to this site and prominent as in what libertarian politicians say and vote for) takes on ecology and natural resources are right wing crankery and you are one of the examples. See also every discussion of climate change in this comment section. Could be worse, like item 4 here, so I suppose I should not complain too much.
Note that this comment does not address your selective use of logic when answering others, as in the non sequitur pointed out by Aapje in this thread.
✝many libertarian-id people in and around SSC have very non-typical libertarian views on those issues.
That was pretty nearly the orthodox view of Julian Simon on population forty years ago. Does the fact that the orthodox view he was criticizing has turned out, so far, to be strikingly wrong in its predictions give you any pause?
I understand that you may not want to debate these issues here, but do you think you could if you wanted answer my challenge on the issue of net effects on humans of AGW–list major positive and negative effects with some rough idea of their size?
Or does this get us back to the recent discussion of inside/outside views, where your defense for labeling my position as crankery is not that you know my arguments and can answer them but that you are confident that the authorities you trust agree with you?
Eh, can’t speak for anyone else, but for me it’s a simple matter of limited time and interest. I’m not particularly motivated to push back on something like the Birther stuff last thread because other people were already doing a fine job and with better references than I have access to off the top of my head.
I don’t have much to contribute that someone else hasn’t already covered, and I see no particular need to add a “Yeah, what HE said!” simply to establish that I’m One Of The Good Ones(tm).
Tangential, but I’d prefer not seeing such things anyway. One rebuttal, if it covers the important points, is enough for me, and dogpiling is a potentially serious problem (one I’ve been guilty of too). I’m often tempted to chime in with a “Yeah, what he said” too (and that’s across the political spectrum; I feel a pang of guilt whenever I don’t say “I agree with Brad,” because I feel like every time I’ve responded to him it’s been to disagree) and about 95% of the time I decide not to. Encourage the opposite and—in my admittedly super biased opinion—we might as well be instituting one of those comment rating systems and turning commenting into a popularity contest.
@Nick:
That’s all well and good.
But not everyone here is playing by those rules. Plenty of “Yeah, and …” posts.
Why do we do this seemingly every other open thread?
If left leaning posters and lurkers devoted the effort they currently put into grumbling about how right wing this place is, and hand-wringing about how the near-right posters don’t sufficiently denounce the far right cranks (do YOU like arguing with cranks of any stripe?), then the over representation of right wing readers would be “solved” to the extent that it’s a problem.
Rant off. Anyway, the real answer is “the comments are right leaning, but not in a way that really matches the way the USA as a whole is right leaning, and also there’s a good chance that whatever online place you think is centrist is probably somewhat left-biased relative to an objective weighting”. Or even more simply, the answer to both clauses of your question is “yes”.
Maybe we need a hammer and sickle open thread where all the crushed and oppressed left-leaning throw off their chains and freely and boldly comment on whatever in however a manner they like, while the scowling right-leaning running-dog lackeys keep quiet?
Didn’t we do one of those a while ago?
I think it turned out that it wasn’t very fun for them because the people complaining the most about it really just like complaining about the right-wing bias here. Taking it away by turning down the volume of Deiseach just leaves less fun things to complain about.
…Ok that was mean so more accurately maybe only Deiseach turned down her volume for a thread or two and the rest of the libertarians and conservatives don’t want to play nicely with this idea, and that’s why it didn’t work.
I skipped that thread also.
As did I.
The idea of having the right-wing posters go quiet for a thread was, I recall, almost entirely pushed by people on the right. I thought it was silly at the time, and I still do.
The argument has never been that the presence of right-wing arguments hurts our delicate left-wing feelings and we need a safe space to blossom. The argument is that:
a) As a factual matter, the commentariat leans right.
b) Mostly as a result of that, there are more low-effort boo-lights style posts directed against the left.
c) The quality of conversation would be improved if there were fewer low-effort boo-lights style posts.
@Iain:
(c) is the big point.
But in addition, I feel like there is a fundamental asymmetry to the argumentative style which really rankles. Essentially the repeated demand for charity, while failing to give it. The consistent standing on technicalities, etc.
Agreeing with HeelBearCub and Iain. The standards of charity and precision drop noticeably when “The Left” is being discussed.
We do? I (feel like*) I haven’t seen the specific topic of “is it just me or is the comment section pretty right leaning?” come up recently at all. I can’t think of any such discussions since I started following the OTs really closely in ~August. (But that’s weak evidence because I’m bad at this “recall an example” memory skill.) Maybe I’m conflating this question with discussion of the survey results, which I feel like WAS pretty common earlier in the year but has died down a lot.
BUT: @ManyCookies and other people in this thread —
I think I remember either an SSC post or comment thread that analyzed the survey data split up by “the whole survey” vs. “commenters”, but I can’t find it in the archives. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? Seems like it might be helpful to the discussion here.
As far as I can tell, the regular commentators (based on duck typing) are to the right of the survey and the effect is even stronger if you weight it by number of comments or words. As compared to US politics it is a strange sort of right but the nonetheless easily identified as right.
My estimated stats for comments on the most recent 100 posts (covering the 10% most prolific commenters, who account for about 80% of comments):
Left-wing: 24%
Right-wing: 34%
Libertarian: 21%
Other: 6%
Unknown: 14%
Details from the last time I did this here. List of commenters I put in each category (ordered by prolificacy) here.
Damn, I haven’t broken the top 100 this time. Not sure I did last time either.Corrected I did, I am stupid.
No, you did!
Ooooo… I read that totally wrong. I thought the list was in order of comment frequency. I didn’t see it’s just by category. Cool.
Thank you for linking this! And of course for doing the analysis in the first place. 🙂 It was the first thing the OP brought to mind, but I didn’t remember who posted it or when.
Considering that this is actually an “other” blog, others are badly underrepresented in the comment section.
Something must be done.
First order of business – right and left wingers should stop attacking each other.
It alienates political weirdos.
I would say my political position is skepticism of both economic and social liberalism as coherent views, but coming, ultimately, from a liberal place.
If I believed in Nazis, I would punch them.
I’m still libertarian, not right wing, despite that list. I called for legalization of heroin a few OTs back, fer cryin’ out loud.
Well, sure, now that the heartland is all into it …
Well I got sorted in libertarian, which is certainly true and how I would identify myself, but compared to most other posters here I probably belong in “right wing”, so I guess it evens out.
Yes, the border between right-wing and libertarian is blurred. I categorised people near it mostly on my perceptions of how vocal they are about libertarian economics in comparison to social issues.
I see I’m getting sorted as libertarian rather than “other” now. Was happier with the latter, to be honest.
IIRC, you made a comment that started “as some sort of libertarian” or similar, so I decided to reclassify you.
I’d need to see the context to be sure, but I think I was trying to describe others’ perceptions rather than my own identification.
I have no objections to my classification.
Thanks for doing this!
I don’t know if you want to more work on this, but I’d be interested in what happened if you ran the statistics counting only posts relating to politics. Ideally culture war stuff too, but that is probably much harder to classify.
If you were to run the numbers on posts rather than posters, would the results be much different?
Those stats are adjusted for number of comments (so I’ve assumed that proportion of political comments is roughly the same for different people). Without adjusting, the figures are 23% left, 29% right, 13% libertarian, 6% other, 29% unknown (there are a lot of infrequent commenters who I couldn’t classify).
I doubt this is true. For instance, I think I’ve reduced the amount of advocacy posts over time and it isn’t a large percentage of my posts, although if you count all my posts as “posts by right wingers” it might seem more lop sided here.
(eta: You’re plenty fair to make the assumption for modeling purposes.)
Sure, I should’ve said that the variations in each group average out to be roughly the same.
Thanks.
Huh. Just now noticed I was classified as right wing. I don’t think it affects the results much, since I don’t comment as much. But for the record, I believe libertarian is a much more accurate first approximation of my political views.
(I might defend right-wing viewpoints on the basis of having grown up with what I consider right-wingers a lot longer, but they’re simply not me.)
Was there an explanation of how you made your decisions? I think we’re collectively probably working from a lot of different definitions.
There’s no firm boundary between libertarian and right-wing (in terms of the categories), I decided fairly arbitrarily based on my perception of how vocal people were about economics vs how vocal they were about social issues. Or rather, that’s what I remember doing last time, and I copied the categories of people who appeared in the last list across.
I think the median SSC commenter is someone who is
-somewhat right of centre economically compared to the US as a whole, in the “but MARKETS!” sense
-in some ways, more socially liberal than the US as a whole (eg, I think the question “are trans women women?” would get a higher “yes” % if posed on SSC than if posed to all Americans)
-but, completely terrified that the “Hairdye NKVD” or whatever you want to call it is going to come and get them
And this last one really sets the tone. Charity when talking about the left, or certain segments of it, withers, standards of precision drop, etc. Stalin would probably be more popular here than the standard-issue left-wing college activist.
What does NKVD stand for in this context? I get what it refers to, but I can’t suss out the specific referents.
Predecessor to the KGB.
People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
The NKVD was the main Soviet secret police organization under Stalin.
@Randy M
Since none of the people above actually answered your question: it refers to the SJWs.
Hi Aapje–thanks, but I was wondering about the specific letters, I got the SJW bit from the hairdye qualifier. The affectation is distinctive, or at least stereotypical.
Народный комиссариат внутренних дел (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del) or People’s Commissars were the “internal affairs” department of the Soviet Communist party responsible for rooting out those who were insufficiently enthusiastic about comrade Stalin.
@Randy M
NKVD could be a covert reference to cultural marxism, although I don’t think that dndnrsn would mean that.
It’s probably just a claim that some people see the SJW as Stalinist.
That’s exactly what it is. To hear some people talk about campus-activist lefty types, they’re the straight up Cheka. Which, they aren’t.
I think you have an excellent point. I created an account to reply to this post, but asked myself before I did “Am I in a position to weather a harassment campaign?”. I am aware that this is a very low probability event, but have seen enough people harmed by such things that it weighs on me regardless. I attempt to remain charitable towards college activist types (I don’t like the term SJW) and their positions, but I am aware that I sometimes fail.
P.S. I now agree with the commenters who have requested a confirmation dialog on the report button; I hit it unintentionally when initiating this reply. Dndnrsn, please accept my apologies.
Stalin would probably be more popular here than the standard-issue left-wing college activist.
Are you saying we don’t need fifty Stalins, comrade?
Comrade, are you suggesting that one Stalin is not enough? Your lack of confidence in his ability to do the job himself has been noted.
Comrade devoted to the revolutionary struggle, your dedication is exemplary to us all, but you seem not to understand that it is not enough for us to expect Stalin alone to do the work of advancing the inevitable triumph of the proletariat, since that allows us to sit back and devolve responsibility onto the Comrade Leader. We must all become Stalin, as it were. Not fifty but a hundred, a thousand, a million Stalins!
He probably would. He’s better read, was more thoughtful, and had more interesting things to say, and was wrong in more interesting and illuminating ways than any possible campus SJW.
He’d also get around to liquidating me from the comments section somehow; possibly followed by real liquidation. I’ll pass on him. I can probably outrun at least some college activists.
@quanta413
It depends on whether we are talking about Stalin as an individual or Stalin as the head of a state apparatus. There are commenters here whom I would resist violently if they became dictators, but whom are quite harmless as keyboard warriors with no plausible way to gain power.
Let’s put it another way. If someone came here and started talking Stalin-apologist talking points, they would probably get more reasoned debate, fewer boo lights, more charity, than if someone came in and started talking campus-left-activist talking points.
There have already been people come in and talk campus-left-activist talking points. Several times, it seems. (It’s going to take years for me to read back all the archives.)
In general, they did not measure up, and most of their reaction to people responding to them was performance of outrage that not everyone immediately concurred with every one of their points / stands / demands / naked asserations.
I kind of wish that someone would, and do a better job of steel-manning their position.
I’m simply observing that they get an amount of dogpiling around here that far more offensive ideas do not get.
Steelmanning their positions is interesting, but inevitably runs into the problem that there is a major difference of worldview which affects everything. Trying to steelman someone’s position, when you have a significantly different set of priors, is hard not to turn into arguing for something like their position, but using your priors. Sort of like transposing a piece of music for a different instrument.
Nope, I think you’re failing charity & modeling now. Stalin is a big bug-a-boo on the right–haven’t you seen discussions about Hitler that find people adding in “but Stalin was worse!”?
I doubt you’ll find a right winger, let alone one here, who thinks Stalin is any better than modern SJW in anyway other than not being an immediate threat.
If you meant to say “the talking-points Stalin used” or something, than maybe. But that’s not Stalin-apology.
The reason Stalin was hated was the mass death in pursuit of that rhetoric, and that’s the key thing that would need to be apologized for.
You seem to expect more debate about more obvious matters. I’m not sure why you would. Strength of belief about a matter is not the only factor determining how much push back it will get.
@Randy M
Maybe I’m expressing this poorly. I’m not saying they wouldn’t get pushback. But I don’t think they’d get a certain sort of low-effort dogpile. “The kulaks got what they deserved and Ukrainians are all lying fascists” would get more substantial responses than activist-left shibboleths.
Stalin was good for at least one thing – stopping the leftism spiral. You weren’t allowed to be to the right or to the left of Stalin while Stalin was calling the shots. Historical Stalinism was, AFAICT, culturally to the right of the nowadays Cultural Marxists. In a way, he was to Russia sort of like Napoleon was to France, only more genocidal.
Probably because that sounds like A)trolling, B)obviously wrong to all intelligent readers, C)not remotely a threat to anyone in an English speaking country, whereas something like, say, “White privilege exists and significant steps need to be taken for any sort of justice in America” is much more likely to be someone arguing a position they hold, relevant to many here, and arguably true–hence the argument that ensues.
Who is not familiar with the expression “don’t feed the trolls?”
Okay, well, WTF do I know?
@dnd.. Yes but reasoned debate on SSC depends a lot more on the quality of the argument than the distance from the mainstream. I pride myself on listening to even outrageous opinions if they are rationally presented and make some sense. I am sure there must be some extreme fargroup opinions that are actually correct, but they just haven’t gotten a fair hearing yet. On the other hand, if I hear an opinion essentially identical to what I’ve heard 100 times before, and it didn’t make sense the first time, then I have less patience. It’s the 100 times before that somewhat explain the dogpiling of SJW’s (although I do agree that dogpiling is rarely a good thing).
A Stalin apologist is much less common, so is likely to get a polite audience while we try to suss out the point of view. A true apologist won’t get very far past that polite introduction, as folks point out the 10’s of millions dead. But if someone tries to argue for a new communist revolution sans all the dead, and makes a rational argument, I am interested.
Yeah, this is a place where we once politely requested someone to steelman holocaust denial for us!
Pretty sure that the people criticizing the most prolific commenters see that as a bug, not a feature.
@Trofim:
Almost no one here gives any truck to holocaust denial. Asking someone do a shit ton of transcribing work so you can either a) actually educate a soul in danger of being lost to dark forces, or b) demolish another crappy argument for holocaust denial seems like the kind of thing SSC can be very good at.
If holocaust denial failed to get demolished here, then I would that to be a bug, not a feature, but I don’t think that was happening.
In order to define a median you need an ordering.
The pattern you describe exists, but I doubt it is true of a majority of commenters, which it would be if that was the variable you were ordering on and your statement was correct.
I, for example, am not “completely terrified that the “Hairdye NKVD” or whatever you want to call it is going to come and get” me. I have sympathy for those who do feel that way–their worries may be legitimate in their circumstances. But I spent twenty-two years in a leftish Silicon Valley university and never had any problem with people attacking me because my political views didn’t fit with theirs.
You have tenure.
Does Allison Stanger have tenure? Even if she didn’t, I don’t think that’s the only determining factor here.
Actually, since I recently retired, I don’t have tenure any more. But I did.
I didn’t have tenure when I came to SCU, about twenty-two years ago, or at any of my previous positions. I made no attempt to conceal my views then, and saw no need to.
I think things are more polarized now than 22+ years ago.
@JulieK:
You may well be right. But having tenure wouldn’t protect me from forms of hostility short of trying to get me fired, and I haven’t experienced those in recent years either.
@David,
It would be very easy for you to get lots of publicity if you were ever mistreated because of your political views. This gives you some protection.
ITT everyone explaining to DF why his experience can’t possibly be representative. Have any of you considered that you might be the outliers instead?
@Brad
There is some evidence that economy students are strong outliers in being far more selfish than other students, which suggests that the field may be far less attractive to a certain kind of person. It seems to me that the power of SJWs often derives from them taking advantage of the lesser ability of high-empathy people to resist those who wrap their abuse and authoritarianism in an anti-oppression message. Economists may not be as susceptible to this. Authoritarians tend to gravitate to places where the resistance is weak.
Furthermore, even though Friedman’s beliefs are an obvious threat to the least capable in society from the perspective of social-democracy, the ‘Hairdye NKVD’ doesn’t seems to rally around the least capable, but rather around highly capable people who supposedly are held back. In other words, they primarily fight for the well-being of the highly capable black person or white woman, not the working class black person or white woman.
In other words, Friedman is probably their fargroup more than their outgroup.
Long winded question begging is still question begging.
Take this sentence:
It’s just assumed without arguing that:
A) SJWs exist
B) They have power
C) They deliberately manipulate people
D) They are abusive and authoritarian
E) That high empathy people are particularly vulnerable to them
You present yourself as some kind of sociological expert on so-called social justice warriors but give not the slightest hint as to where this expertise is supposed to have come from or what it is backed up by.
Did you really think this was a good faith effort to answer to the question “Have any of you considered that you might be the outliers instead?” To my mind you might as well have just said ‘no’.
Look, dispute their influence, numbers, general relevance, or coherence as a grouping all you like, but can we please knock off the “SJWs? What’s that? I ain’t never seen one” schtick?
@Brad
Zero good faith. OK.
You just keep complaining about how others make toxic posts while snarking all over the place.
@James:
1. I think you overestimate how prominent I am, or have been over the past forty years or so. I’m a big fish in two fairly small pools and a medium sized fish in one larger pool.
2. At least one of my colleagues was also a libertarian, was not especially prominent, and so far as I know suffered no serious harassment for her views.
@Aapje:
I don’t think that “you are asserting without support that SJWs have enough power to get someone fired at will, and then adding additional assertions to explain why they can’t get someone in the economics field fired” is a bad-faith argument. Your argument only makes sense if someone already shares your worldview that SJWs should have enough power to fire any professor they want, and therefore you need to come up with a special case to explain why economists are immune.
But the alternative argument, that they simply don’t have enough power to fire anyone they want, is much more parsimonious and equally plausible from my perspective. They seem like they have a lot of power because unjust, CW-related firings can make national news, but the odds that any given college professor will become the centerpiece of the culture wars are quite low.
substitute stalin for lenin and this is just part of the ongoing thing I keep saying to you; leninism (or communism, or however you want to call it) is a fringe part of the left now, and intersectionality (or Social Justice, etc) is its core
yeah there’s a lot of left communists but a lot of it is just as an add-on near as I can tell; they believe in equalizing race, sex, and then class as an extension of the idea of equalizing everyone, but they didn’t read Marx and have an epiphany. Moreover, the committed ones (think Current Affairs) clash with these guys at a low level. But not higher than that because it’d cause them problems. Especially since they (probably accurately) think that class should come first.
Anyways I don’t know how true specific parts of this statement are but I think it’s basically accurate on the whole and I also think that explains the problem; intersectionality is marked by a lot of really negative behaviors and by a lot of resistance towards people who try to point that out. Those against it even as a low level are potential allies; those for it accumulate badwill, as does the ideology, and with bad will comes outgroup framing (and thus outgroup homogeneity), plus bad faith. Personally, I try to be accurate about intersectionality – I think that’s more than enough to do it in. Some may object to what I view as accurate, and certainly have before.
Kind of an aside, but this reminds me of me noticing recently the same message coming independently from 3 of “intersectionality’s” whipping boys: Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Milo Yiannopoulos, who are center-left, center-right, and med/far-right respectively, all claiming to believe that the best thing to do right now is to always tell the truth. Of course, what is true and what is false can be under contention, but at the least it seems clear to me that “intersectionality” is very open about wanting to stamp down on things that are true if they believe that such true things lead to injustices – which is to say, “truth” is nothing more than a tool to use and discard as needed.
And I’m also reminded of my noticing recently a lot of people saying that the way to resist totalitarianism is to always tell the truth, and that fear of telling the truth is a sign that things might be headed in a bad direction.
No idea if any of this means anything, but certainly I think trying to be as accurate – and honest – as possible when describing “intersectionality” – or any other ideology, really – is likely to serve all of us well in the long run (even if it might cause lots of suffering to some of us in the short run, of which there’s no shortage of examples).
There’s a whole thread of discussion (we’ve had it here) about whether there are areas in which either:
a. All discussion should be suppressed.
b. True statements should be suppressed, perhaps to be replaced by reassuring / socially beneficial lies.
IMO, you can come up with lots of examples of times when truthful statements can cause a lot of trouble, but a systematic policy of suppressing truthful statements to maintain social cohesion seems like its enormously worse overall–like giving yourself cancer to cure your cold.
I think the bailey definition of intersectionality before it gets expanded out with lots of unwarranted implications is mostly fine actually. It’s not a super insightful idea but neither is it without value.
allow me to make a radical argument: the bailey version of everything is fine, and anything you think isn’t is just the motte
I don’t know if that’s actually true and there’s a whole lot of tricky word games I could play so it’s pretty hard to prove me wrong but uh, you know, just wanted to say that even though I agree with the statement, it might not really mean all that much in the grand scheme of things.
(Wanting to ensure the sun rise is fine, it’s just that once it gets into daily human sacrifice it’s a problem. Etc.)
@AnonYEmous
Yeah, it’s pretty hard to actually go against your statement except for some maybe really crazy ideas (Like the idea that the earth is not roughly spherical; I can’t think of a bailey there). I don’t have the energy to try right now although it might be interesting to try. But your statement might be true in a sense.
But yeah, I agree that the
baileymotte being true in this case doesn’t count for too much compared to themottebailey. It’s kind of a shame though, because I think there are some interestingbaileysmottes in cultural marxist spaces, but I don’t feel like I gain much from entering the dumpster inferno that is their standards for discussion.EDIT: Edited because I do not remember my medieval siege warfare analogies correctly.
Motte is the minimal, modest, maximally defensible position or definition.
Bailey is the broadest, most rhetorically advantageous, harder to defend position or definition.
I think you guys are using it backwards again.
@ Lysenko
Dammit. Thanks. Edited the one I still can. Fucking castles.
my official position on this is that, due to the fact that I’m bad at remembering stuff like this and that it’s pretty easy to derive the context, I refuse to learn which one is which
but maybe I’ll try again once I finish up finals, and thanks for the correction
@AnonYEMous:
Motte is like moat, which is probably a more familiar word for “castle defenses”.
If those sort of word associations help you.
And the bailey is what you bail out of when the heat’s on.
Or motte is like mound (I’m not sure how etymologically similar they actually are).
They do, and thanks
I’ve been through Miniluv and the hairdye NKVD already got me, so implying it’s paranoia really isn’t going to work.
Can you expand on that to the extent you can without piercing pseudonymity?
(is that even the grammatically correct formulation?)
Miniluv is a reference to the “Ministry of Love” in Orwell’s novel 1984 (I had to google it).
I don’t know what The Nybbler is referring to, but a similar thing he discussed: when the Google memo caused a kerfuffle this August he discussed his experience working at Google and arguing that the firing was symptomatic of intolerant left-leaning values in the company. I think this is the relevant open thread but I’m not sure: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/02/open-thread-81-25/#comment-531062 or else https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/links-817-on-the-site-of-the-angels/#comment-533569
Oh, no, I got the 1984 reference, I was referring to specifics of the incident. I remembered his references to personal experiences in Google and other related tech companies and am curious about the details.
“Thinking something is an outsize threat” and “paranoia” are not the same things. The occasional person gets mobbed. It happens more in some industries than others. The commenters here are, I think, on the whole more worried about the threat personally and the overall threat to society, much more worried, than I think is reasonable. I did not say that this was paranoid, nor did I mean to imply that. There are many other cases where people are inordinately afraid of something that I would not consider paranoia, either. As far as I’m concerned, the major threat of campus-left activist types (besides to their own mental health, as they tend to adopt ideas and styles of rhetoric that require reducing or eliminating their emotional defences and cause them to interpret everything in a way that certainly increases their overall levels of stress and unhappiness) is in the backlash they will provoke/are provoking.
To put it another way, if someone says “a shadowy cabal is harassing me using microwaves” that’s paranoia. If someone living somewhere safe says they’re concerned about the threat to them of violent street crime, that’s having an outsized estimation of danger.
Compare with fears of being wrongfully shot by the police. Sometimes this happens, and it’s genuinely awful when some innocent guy gets shot because the cop pulling him over misinterpreted something he saw, panicked, and started blazing away. And yet, it doesn’t happen very often per year, given the size of the country.
There’s simultaneously:
a. A real, unjust, bad thing that sometimes happens to innocent people.
b. A huge culture-war/outrage-farming incentive to do saturation coverage of some of these rare cases to get lots of other people scared and mad.
@dndnrsn
It also happens more to people with certain traits. Like, for example, nerdy & more autistic people. Hmmm, where can one find many such people?
PS. Scott Alexander was bullied by SJ people. Scott Aaronson almost castrated himself because of the extremist parts of SJ ideology. In general, SJ ideology seems to be a basilisk to many scrupulous people, who self harm due to it. Many nerds have experience with SJ people moving into and changing their hobby spaces, pushing them out. Etc.
Is that the case? If it is, by how much? Is it enough of a threat to justify the level of fear some people here feel?
@dndnrsn
There is no objective way to measure this kind of complex risk and there is no objectively right level of risk adverseness. People’s priorities also differ. A person who is into quilting (or whatever) and is pushed out of the only local quilting circle by politicization of his hobby may feel that a major part of his well-being is taken away. His next door neighbor who is into stamp collecting may not face any of that and may not feel threatened at all.
How can you tell if a person is right given their personal situation when you probably don’t have a full picture of any of us?
Would you talk that way about airplane accidents – one thing people tend to really overrate the chances of? You could apply the same reasoning, after all.
Airplane accidents are one kind of bad outcome, which mostly scales linearly with number of flights (when assuming first world airlines), but not really with any other personal aspects. Passengers with bad social skills aren’t worse at making planes stay in the air. We also have very solid statistics on the number of accidents and the number of victims, so you can just calculate the numbers. So you can quite objectively calculate a person’s risk based on their yearly number of flights.
Furthermore, you can also calculate that many people take bigger risks with much less fear, which gives an objective indication that they have an outsized estimation of the danger of flights or an undersized estimation of other risky behavior (or don’t merely care about the risk, but are upset about the lack of control).
The concerns that people have about SJWs and SJ people is multi-faceted. It’s personal risk of being witch hunted, negative effects on the culture of hobby spaces, fake science in service of an agenda, discriminatory policies being instituted, memetically strong lies being spread with various effects, expectations of the future, etc. There is no solid research that is done into the size of most of these effects and no reason to believe that it can’t get keep getting worse, except for backlash (it requires historical ignorance to believe otherwise). Furthermore, personal traits probably have an immense effect on the risk profile in many different ways.
I really doubt that you could somewhat accurately describe the risk profile that those who strongly oppose/fear SJ(W) people believe they have, on these many dimensions. Furthermore, I also doubt that you could somewhat accurately describe their traits and circumstances that are relevant to their risk exposure. I think that they can do both of these things a lot better for themselves than you can do it for them. So, while it is perfectly possible that some/many of them exaggerate, I don’t see how you are in a position to judge that.
If you had merely called them out on their lack of hard evidence, that would be valid, but by claiming to know better than them, you are making a claim that is less reasonable than those whose claims you dismiss as being unreasonable. After all, you actually have less information to base your claim on, nor do you even bother to address the complexity of the claims.
This seems like the exact opposite of the approach people here tend to take regarding the value of “lived experience” when stuff where the statistics are spotty or nonexistent comes up.
When this complaint was first being raised, we had a handful of common self-declared communist posters. I think they’ve migrated to tumblr since. Maybe the complaint had an aspect of self-fulfillment (in the prophecy, not self-help sense) as I think it’s probably more true now than it used to be.
But, then again we also used to have more outrageously re– erm, significantly dexterous posters, like Jim or Spandrel that were banned or got bored.
SSC overton window doesn’t reach as far in either extreme, imo, but the median has probably gone rightward.
I think Spandrel popped up again recently (as 天可汗).
True, but if you have to phrase it as “popping up again” that seems like an exception that proves the rule.
We’re talking about common commenters (Commonters?) who set the tone, not very sporadic posters.
I’m pretty sure 天可汗 is nydwracu, who I don’t think was the character behind Spandrel?
Still probably more dextrous than the current average, though.
I might have got them confused. All those people look the same to me.
Ah, cool! I always liked nydwracu (sp?).
I recall him switching from nydwracu to 天可汗 mid-argument several threads back, which should be findable with some digging, so I’d put a high confidence it’s him and not spandrel.
天可汗 is definitely Nyd, who is not Spandrel, who has also recently made a few posts but only on one thread, I think. Nyd was “novel responsive-ary”, but not inflammatory or rude about it like, say, Jim. I too would like to see him post more–but, fwiw, while I was irritated by multiheaded, I wouldn’t mind more posts from that perspective as well.
Yeah, I always liked nydwracu too. He’d come out with these really extreme positions, but there was real insight behind them, and I never got the feeling he was doing it to be edgy or to wind people up.
Multiheaded’s a lot ruder, but still obviously bright, and I wouldn’t mind hearing more from them if they can tone down the gulag fantasies.
Indeed so. It is much fun and illuminating to go archive binging back into the comments of posts here years past.
I know the term “lol” is overdone, but I really literally did lol when one such poster enthusiastically posted verses from “The Internationale”, like it was some sort of persuasive argument.
It’s too bad they ran away. If they can’t support their outlook under Scott’s umbrella, that is more evidence that they can only make their argument from the barrel of a gun.
>erm, significantly dexterous
I have no content-ful response to your comment, but I thought this was hilarious.
Isn’t citizencokane a communist?
You’re confusing Spandrel and —.
As a lurker commenting for the first time, I may have some insight to offer here. The survey results tracked my perception of the commenters here pretty well in this regard.
In my experience, people with mixed political opinions tend to classify themselves further to the left than others classify them. I am one example of this. I support strong individual rights (including gun rights), basic income, moderate immigration policy, and targeted regulation of free markets. I support the stated goals of the social justice movement but am deeply uncomfortable with their willingness to deploy harassment tactics to achieve them. I am an atheist and generally think that religion has too prominent a role in American public life. I vote a mixed ticket and vote in the Democrat primary, but have not yet voted for a Democrat for president. I answered “3” on the survey’s political spectrum question, and believe that this is still an accurate representation of my personal beliefs. Scott’s description a while back of “bleeding heart libertarians” is probably the least wrong political label I could apply to myself, though it’s far from a perfect fit.
People on both sides of the aisle seem to weight points of disagreement more heavily than points of agreement when estimating someone else’s position on the political spectrum. For example, I have several Democrat friends who assume I’m a Republican and several Republican Friends who assume I’m a Democrat.
So I think your observation is explained by the intersection of two biases (in some proportion that I don’t feel qualified to speculate on). First, as a person on the left, you’re more inclined to see others as being on the right. Second, many of the sorts of people who find SSC valuable are inclined to see themselves as further to the left than many would expect.
FWIW I hope you’ll comment more.
My 2¢:
I think the issue stems from the perception that you only need one right wing opinion to be a rightist but to be a leftist you need the whole slate of left wing opinions.
So if you’re a gay atheist in favor of drug legalization but you’re an immigration skeptic, you’re a rightist. If you’re in favor of wealth redistribution and anti-racism but you’re also a traditionalist Catholic, you’re a rightist. If you’re a bleeding heart libertarian in favor of gun control and single-payer healthcare but you know the FBI crime statistics, you’re a rightist.
So of course we “out-number” leftists. We’re the union of literally every ideology which isn’t #currentyear left-liberalism.
That can be entirely reasonable depending on what people choose to post about. If you, on rare occasion, offhandedly mention that you are in favor of wealth redistribution and anti-racism, but post multiple times a day about how evil abortion is, then yeah it make sense to consider you are right wing poster.
But I disagree there is an asymmetry. If a poster spends all his comments on calling other posters racists and talking about white privilege, but happened to have mentioned one time that he was a traditionalist Catholic no one would consider him a right wing poster.
I know what you’re alluding to, because you say this constantly, but to be honest I don’t really see it.
For example, I don’t really see Deiseach as being “a right wing poster,” at least not in the sense in which I am.
She’s very very skeptical about IQ and holds entirely conventional blank-slatist views on the heredity of intelligence. She’s equally skeptical of free trade and capitalism, with a definite class warfare vibe. And she’s vocally in favor of expanded social services with the caveat that she expects them to be properly managed. Whenever those topics come up, and they come up often, you’ll find her commenting from a left wing perspective.
She’s more Catholic than Nancy Pelosi, so that means she’s on the right regarding abortion and gay marriage, and she’s not a big fan of the Clintons personally. But that just makes her a bog standard Christian Democrat. If she’s counted as right wing on that basis, there’s not much ground left to the left.
What about Aapje? He’s my central example of a right wing poster that bizarrely counted as on the left.
As for Deiseach is a tough case because of the non-US bundle of positions, but I think you are soft peddling some of it.
For example some of the extended “it’s your own damn fault you are having problems” rants about social welfare cases go well beyond “with the caveat that she expects them to be properly managed.” It shades into something close to Reagan-esque. Likewise “not a big fan of the Clintons” is way underselling it.
I agree there isn’t any of the H B D stuff, but that’s hardly a litmus test for the right. There’s hardly an elected politician in the country that goes for that.
To be honest I don’t really have a strong impression of his politics as a poster. I mostly remember him posting apolitical things.
Going back through the last few OTs, it looks like he’s opposed to disparate impact and “listen and believe” but also in favor of porn and reducing the stigma associated with welfare recipients. So kind of vaguely centrist?
Maybe I just missed something but I’m not seeing him as strongly left or right.
I guess it comes down to orthodoxy versus orthopraxy?
The practice of the left is to fight to increase social welfare and to defend it against any threat of decrease. The doctrine is that there’s no such thing as welfare fraud or “undeserving poor.” If you show up at mass every week but you don’t think that 1 = 3 makes mathematical sense, are you in communion or not?
With the Clinton family, it’s certainly true that disliking them is evidence in favor of someone being right wing. Just like if you heard that someone listens to country western music. But a lot of yellow dog Democrats, my father included, hate Hillary Clinton and love country western music. Despite Her best efforts, the left is not defined by personal allegiance.
Sorry if I was unclear, I was thinking more in terms of ordinary voters and not career politicians.
There are a lot of things that many people believe but are never said in Washington DC. In fact that’s probably why our President is a reality TV star instead of a lawyer or general this time around.
Aapje is Dutch. When you live below sea level up becomes down, left becomes right, and consonants become vowels.
More seriously, US/Euro(/RotW) differences are further evidence that having only two buckets to shove politics into is fundamentally flawed.
One way I can see for the comment threads to feel more right-wing than the commenters really are: there are common beliefs / claims floating around that seem factually wrong or at least questionable, and many people here will challenge them. (An example is Scott’s post about people claiming Trump is a racist, when the evidence for that is fairly weak.)
It is easy to read that as “Scott’s posted a pro-Trump essay.” But of course he did no such thing, and he’s made his low opinion of Trump pretty clear. He just published an essay disputing one set of claims about Trump. He may be right or wrong in that essay, but it’s not supporting Trump, and it’s a hell of a stretch to call it right-wing.
Similarly, lots of us (Scott especially) have disputed a lot of SJW type rhetoric and claims and arguments. This is true, even though Scott appear, as best I can tell, to support most of the policy goals of SJW types. It’s easy to read this as Scott somehow being opposed to, say, gay rights or women in science or something. But of course Scott’s actual stated positions support those things.
Being fair to Brad I would self-identify as on the right, especially as social liberalism goes even more towards the left in my own country, so he’s not unreasonable to say I am conservative/right-wing (though I possibly may not be as right-wing as he thinks, or maybe I am more right-wing than I think).
My social welfare rants are not “there should be no social welfare, let the bums starve in the streets” because I do think social welfare is a necessary part of a working society in the modern age; too many stories from my family’s past generations of people getting sick and dying from not being able to afford sixpence for the dispensary doctor. What I do rant about are the ones that are gaming the system, and getting themselves into situations where they expect someone else to clean up their mess for them, and do nothing to learn from the experience or avoid repeating it the next time. There are misfortunates who cannot look after themselves and will be exploited and will always need help because, for instance, they will happily hand over all their dole money to a ‘friend’ who then disappears (or uses it to buy drugs) and leaves them in the lurch, and they can’t then understand “but I have no money, I can’t buy food, why can’t you give me more money now instead of telling me wait until next week for my next payment?” and I have nothing but sympathy for those people (and a lot of anger for the inflexibility that is built into the system).
But the slick operators and sly entitled ‘it’s my right to get what I want when I want it as I want it and it’s racism/sexism/other ism if you refuse me and I have all the rights and no personal responsibilities’ – I have no sympathy for them.
@Deiseach: Theodore Dalrymple?
Burkian conservatives and other true rightists are my far-group, because they are very rare in my social environment & they are politically powerless and face repercussions for their opinions in my country. I strongly favor the powerless and oppressed, so I have natural sympathy for them. They deserve criticism, but they get disproportionate amounts of it, so I don’t see the point of going out of my way to add onto that.
One of my strongest motivators is environmentalism and I have pushed back against global-warming critical posts here a quite a bit. I’ve voted for the Dutch Green Party, despite also believing that they have beliefs that threaten my individual welfare.
I regularly push back against (ancap) libertarianism and in favor of regulation, welfare, etc.
I criticize mainstream feminism for being sexist and too traditionalist in many ways, as well as often not believing in the most credible scientific explanations. I don’t see science denial as legitimate progressiveness.
Pretty much the same is true for anti-racism. It’s especially disturbing to me that racial segregation seems to be getting popular on the extreme left, which used to be an extreme right position.
I oppose large scale migration to my country because I believe that the carry capacity is being/has been exceeded. I think that many pro-migration advocates close their eyes to many of the negative consequences and especially how those negative consequences land mostly with the lower class. I don’t see migration to the West as a solution for mass persecutions or war for various reasons and favor spending loads of money to support refugees in the region they come from. I think that this will help refugees more than letting in a large bunch of refugees and then spend some decades fighting a cultural war to get these people integrated/assimilated (which is decreasingly possible, because current mainstream leftist dogma is that people should maintain their culture). Such a conflict then makes much more effective interventions impossible and otherwise makes it much harder for the West to make advances that benefit humankind.
Not letting refugees drown in the Mediterranean, but giving lots of money to countries in the region used to be an extreme right position in my country, but it is rapidly becoming the centrist position.
I think that the current EU destroys welfare states and demands EU-level solidarity that doesn’t naturally exist, which doesn’t work and will end up creating great animosity between nations and destroying the EU. Also, it’s not democratic enough, an extremely non-representative elite is make (extremely risky) decisions (ignoring the dominant expert opinion) without properly being held to account.
So…basically I am extremely miffed at what the left has been turning into over the last decades and especially the authoritarian arrogance with which dissenters are/were silenced, excluded and getting faux concern, while their concerns are systematically ignored. I feel betrayed in how it has mostly forgotten about helping the lower classes and has started bullying them. I also have huge issues with the centrists, center-right and extreme right.
I’m fine if you call this anti-left, for today’s mainstream leftism, but I don’t see how that necessarily makes me right-wing.
Anyway, the entire left/right dichotomy is bullcrap, so those labels are pretty meaningless anyway.
PS. I am also just weird, for example, I really like gun technology and I also support fairly strict gun control. Most people seem unable to have such a mismatch between their personal ‘likes’ and political positions.
I feel compelled to remark that I find it quite rude to have people speculate on my beliefs, but then don’t bother to respond when I give more information for them to base their assessment on. Apparently, they like to make claims with bad information and then don’t even feel the need to state whether better information changes that assessment.
This goes especially for the person who brought me up here initially.
@Aapje,
Sorry dude, I didn’t mean to insult you. I just didn’t think I had anything to add to your correction. I’m also sorry for forgetting that you’re Dutch, which is a very weird failure of memory.
In the spirit of the season, do you have any opinions one way or the other on Zwarte Piet?
Describing Deiseach as right wing for her positions on social welfare strikes me as odd considering she was the loudest supporter of welfare some months back; I remember that what got her banned was wishing, in the most rhetorically awesome way possible, hellfire and damnation on someone claiming that no one deserves welfare. In fact, as I recall what prompted her so-called “it’s your own damn fault” rants were people responding very positively to them because they came from her own personal experience in social work. I for one certainly enjoyed reading them and never got a have-you-tried-kill-all-the-poor vibe from them.
@Nick:
The vibe is more “have you tried killing everyone?” She is not a fan of people in general, by self-description.
That in itself doesn’t make her left or right, and on social welfare she is to the left on the US political spectrum. But she also doesn’t generally get animated by attacks on social welfare from the US.
Whereas she seeks out left-wing positions to get angry about.
If you feel so compelled, by all means remark away.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
No worry, Brad and I are in a passive aggressive snark duel, which will end with pistols at dawn (or the silent treatment).
As for Zwarte Piet, it seems pretty clear to me that the objections primarily stem from a increased disapproval of racism against black people & a belief by some (black) Dutch people that racism is holding them back. The actual racism is quite hard to address since very few are willing to defend it and not all that is blamed on racism is actually caused by it. So because of Toxoplasma of Rage reasons, the actual fight is over something that is not intended as racist, not perceived as racist by most people and which does very little to actually harm black people.
Zwarte Piet is a Dutch/Belgian addition to the Saint-Nicholas tradition, which is somewhat similar to Santa Claus except not created by Coca Cola. Like many traditions involving gift giving, eating candy and spending time with family, it’s very emotionally significant to many people, who see it as an important part of their culture. So it’s perfect for the culture war, since people will show up for the fight who will defend it tooth and nail, while on the other side you have people who didn’t grow up with that tradition and thus can’t understand why people don’t just give up the tradition.
Because a truthful case against Zwarte Piet is quite weak, most of the objections are falsehoods. For example, it is claimed that Zwarte Piet is a slave of the white Saint-Nicholas, even though there is no traditional story where he is a slave. There are stories where he is just a servant and stories where is a freed slave who voluntarily became his companion. To support the claim that he is a slave, it is claimed that he is dressed as a slave. Simply looking at pictures of Saint-Nicholas and actual American or Caribbean slaves shows that this is nonsense. Zwarte Piet has also always worn shoes, which slaves were not allowed to wear.
A more accurate objection is that Zwarte Piet is a black stereotype. It’s certainly true that especially in the past, but also occasionally today, there were and are depictions that were quite stereotypical (huge red lips and such). As Dutch society has become less racist, this has mostly disappeared, which I support. IMO, the current depictions generally have no substantial stereotypical black elements to them. If anything, Saint-Nicholas comes off worse, as he is now often presented as a demented old man who needs to be saved by Zwarte Piet.
However, the critics believe that having blackface/a black character is racist in itself. I disagree. I don’t see why eliminating black characters from a tradition makes our society less racist or more diverse. Blackface also has a big practical advantage. Many traditions involve hiding people’s actual identity behind masks to liberate the role-players from their normal identity, in their own eyes and the eyes of the audience. Saint-Nicholas hides his identity with a huge beard, which works because he is an old man. Zwarte Piet uses blackface for a similar effect. So family members (or famous actors) can play Saint-Nicholas or Zwarte Piet, while the children remain oblivious to this (deceiving children is a major part of the tradition).
Anyway, I think that the supporters of Zwarte Piet have been quite reasonable in listening to reasonable demands and don’t see why unreasonable demands should be catered to.
@Aapje,
Makes sense.
It makes me think about football mascots to be honest. My highschool had an (American) Indian mascot. The locals loved it and the native tribe which the team was named after officially endorsed them. Ultimately none of it mattered and recent arrivals who were offended successfully removed the mascot anyway. As far as I know they still haven’t gotten a replacement mascot.
Nick, thank you, but I worked in social housing (not social work); my boss’ boss had a background in social work and was a lovely, kind, warm-hearted woman while I would be totally unsuited for such a career – as you can tell, my advice to a hypothetical client would be more along the lines of “Have you tried not being stupid?”
Le Maistre Chat – since I worked in social housing, I have more of an appreciation where Dalrymple is coming from 🙂 But he’s still a bit too far to the right for me – I agree that some people do seem to make the same obvious mistakes over and over again and seem to expect magic fairy godmother help to drop out of the sky for them, but I disagree on the remedy; some people genuinely do need help and it’s not their fault.
Where I’d agree with him on learning to parrot activist rubbish is the example I think I’ve quoted on here before; the pair of white Irish-ancestry but born and raised in England sisters, who plainly had learned in their schools that kind of lingo, defaulting to “That’s racism!” “You’re racist against me because I’m English!” when they didn’t get their way.
Considering that everybody involved was white and Irish (or at least, as said, second-generation Irish), ‘racism’ was not the flaw here (the real problem was “you are not feckin’ well entitled to what you are looking for”). But they’d plainly learned (from attending public schools in multicultural London) the orthodoxy that the proper response to not getting what you want simply because you want it was “racism! this is racism!”. But declaring assumed anti-English prejudice (when they were basing part of their entitlement to social housing on being children of Irish people from the locality who had gone to England and so under the regulations had “a local connection to the area”) to be “racism” was ridiculous whatever way you look at it.
Deiseach, sorry if I misrepresented—I recalled that you had an office job of some kind relating to welfare, so “social work” was too broad of me.
No problem at all, Nick; I’ve been so scathing about “bloody social workers”, this is karma coming back at me or something 🙂
I think this still covers up an important distinction. Calling someone “a left/right wing poster” bakes in the assumption that the person holds corresponding views on all/most topics. Brad, you may not intend that implication but I think most everyone else reads it that way. “You are a poster with strong right-wing views on abortion” is more precise and entirely fair.
I think it is largely true that the posters here come from what Scott would call “blue tribe” backgrounds and/or currently reside in “blue tribe” environments. It is likely that their personal bubbles are politically liberal (I am intending to keep blue/red and liberal/conservative distinctions… distinct). If they want to talk about liberal policies and blue tribe values, they have plenty of opportunity to talk about that outside of SSC. But SSC may be the one place they can have reasonably intelligent discussions about their unorthodox right-wing views without risking being a pariah in their local bubble.
And really, it makes sense for people with unorthodox or strong views on a few issues to talk mostly about those issues, even if they mostly agree with their local bubble on other issues.
For example, consider a straight-ticket Democrat voter who nevertheless leans Trumpist on immigration issues. They believe strongly that Democratic electoral success requires moving right on immigration. In a discussion among Democrats, they may try to steer the discussion toward right-wing views on immigration. Does that make them a Republican? Of course not! They are a Democrat trying to shift the views of the party on immigration. The fact that they talk mostly about their views on immigration is because their views on the other Democratic planks are already accepted and unnecessary to discuss.
Basically, it’s important, I think, to take SSC in context. Yeah, in a vacuum the comment section is a discussion of views that lean right. But in context, it’s a bunch of blue tribers discussing the limited subset of their views that are unorthodox or even taboo amongst the blue tribe. If everyone here is a right winger, why are they posting here instead of NRO, or Breitbart, or Instapundit, or so on? I think it’s largely because, while what they discuss here may align with certain views on those sites, taken as a whole, the posters here would on the whole really not fit in with more red tribe or more conservative spaces.
It also strikes me that positions on specific issues among SSC posters may not fall nearly as nicely onto a left/right spectrum as is the case among the general public.
My intuition is that a lot of the way that issues cluster on the ideological spectrum is due to going along with your side, rather than having a common logic. If that’s right, then we should expect that the more people have thought through individual issues on their own, the more likely they are to have opinions that differ from their tribe/party/etc. SSC seems to me to attract people who are unusually willing to think through issues themselves, and to consider conclusions that are quite different from what their neighbors believe.
@gbdub
I see what you are saying but I think, maybe ironically, the way I’m looking at things is more charitable to the outgroup.
If right wing is pejorative then what you are saying makes a lot of sense. We wouldn’t want to call someone a right wing anything unless we were really sure. But if right wing is just some descriptor then it is no big deal to call someone a right wing *poster* even if “IRL” he is a left wing *person*.
Each poster knows how he votes, what organizations he belongs to, what his full range of political and ideological views are, how he treats other people. Each of the rest of us only can read what he chooses to post. I don’t see anything wrong with characterizing the output of those posts as they are.
Especially if we need to round off to a first order approximation — as we often do — it makes sense to say “oh yeah the SSC comment section is pretty far right”. If the context makes more detail appropriate then, sure, get into the question of religious conservatives vs libertarians vs H B D vs blue tribe dissidents vs etc, etc, etc.
It’s not so ironic considering not everyone has the ability to define what is pejorative.
That is, the average person does not see his opinions as wrong, even when they map 50+% to the right wing, but that doesn’t mean he can’t turn on popular entertainment and see more contempt towards the right than the left and not want to take up the label. So they aren’t right-wing, they’re “a moderate/liberal who thinks for themselves”, etc.
I’m going to stop before I bust out words like “internalized” and feel like a sociologist.
@Brad – I think your position might be self-consistent, but idiosyncratic. That is, you may not define left/right as potentially pejorative, and accepting your definitions your position makes perfect sense. But you can’t unilaterally declare that, and outside of you, labelling the SSC comments as “a pretty far right place” is going to carry some serious negative connotations that may not be well deserved. That is, to you, “right wing poster” just means “posts mostly right wing arguments”. But when you say “right wing poster” other people are going to interpret that as “right wing person with generally right wing views”, and you have no control over that interpretation (unless you describe your whole theory, but at that point you might as well just describe the poster more precisely).
Besides, even if it isn’t pejorative, “right wing poster” is still a poor descriptor for your original example. They aren’t a right wing poster, because they are not a right wing generalist. They are a pro-life poster. Being pro-life makes you (in the US) more likely to be generally right wing, but there are plenty of left wing pro-lifers, enough to make the assumption low value (so why make it if you don’t have to?)
Now, if your comment section is made up of a pro-life poster, a free-trade absolutist, a pro-gun poster, and an anti-illegal-immigration firebrand, who all exclusively comment on their pet issue, it might make sense to call your comment section right wing, even though labeling any of the posters right wing (might) be unfair.
to be a leftist you need the whole slate of left wing opinions
It certainly seems that way. I’ve mocked on here before the “women will be devastated by Trump’s victory as it threatens reproductive rights” kind of reporting, where it’s assumed ALL women want this one thing in the same way, hence ALL women will, should and must vote for the party promising they love, love, love Planned Parenthood. Women are treated as a monolithic block who must share the correct views (or else they’re gender traitors, not real women, etc).
There is the expectation that naturally, if you’re a decent, caring human being, you will have the whole smorgasbord of Acceptable Opinions: you’ll be all about checking your privilege, pro-LGBT+ rights, pro-abortion rights, want the highest possible minimum wage, of course have the right opinion on climate change, probably tending more now to being inclined to vegetarianism if not outright veganism, etc. etc. etc.
That someone might have congruent opinions with you on (say) old-school Labour issues like unions and working week hours and pay but not be in lockstep on structural racism or ‘it is a human rights violation and should be a prosecutable crime to call someone ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘xie’ even if it’s an honest mistake” is not acceptable and seems to be becoming regarded as unthinkable. Have the wrong opinion on any one of the slate, and you’re One Of Them (the deplorables).
In my experience, left-wing people (in the sense you’re talking about) tend to be much more hostile towards vegetarianism than right-wing people.
I’m sure you’re right. They have to put up with so much more of it.
Is this a general trend? All of the vegetarians I know lean or are on the left.
I don’t know. I haven’t met very many actual vegetarians (mostly just people that eat fish-meat instead of beef, and think that somehow makes them vegetarians), and I can’t find any reliable demographic data on vegetarians, but about half of the vegetarians I do know voted for Donald Trump. I do know that in India, where probably the majority of the world’s vegetarians live, vegetarianism is associated with right-wing Hindu nationalism.
It’s funny to watch the international Left flip values when criticizing Hindus. “Hindu nationalists evilly harass Muslims accused of killing cows!”
Maybe it’s not a distinction between commenters vs lurkers but regular readers but occasional readers? There were 5,500 responses.
No, I’m pretty sure OP is talking about perception based on the comments section vs. results of the survey of readers. I don’t think any of this allows us to distinguish reader frequency, and that frequency would have much less bearing on the discussion than the commenter/reader divide.
(Although one divide I think might be interesting — unfortunately don’t think we have any way to observe/analyze — is the divide between commenters in the Open Threads, lurkers in the OTs, and readers (possibly could split by regulars/occasional) who avoid the OTs. Hmm, and now this has me wondering if people judge the comments section leaning more by the OTs or regular posts more. I definitely judge by the OTs — especially the hidden threads — because the regular blog posts seem to very a lot more.)
I would like to see the word “veryance” be introduced as a word for “measure of how extreme a position is.” ie, “Despite the veryance in the academic social sciences political views, there is surprisingly little variance.”
Or,
“The rationalist position on ai threat shows great veryance from the public position, but remarkably low variance.”
Because I have an affection for effective affectation.
For anyone who missed it, and because I am getting in near the beginning of the thread, another meetup at our house in San Jose this Saturday.
This piece in the Washington Post is interesting:
We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.
I’m in broad agreement with it. Things change. We, Homo Sapiens, most likely wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for several mass extinctions in the past. In the future, our time will come too. Earth’s climate and surface have changed drastically throughout history. We should not bias the present so much, that we rob the future of any changes or new species.
Now, I don’t think that humans and human development should go around polluting the environment and killing organisms willy-nilly; I think there should be efforts to protect nature, conserve the wilderness and life therein. Nature has definite value. However, I think some environmental causes and movements go too far.*
Examples:California high speed rail
Itchy Algae
I am a professional field biologist. I find this piece to be very frustrating. Comments like
come across as bad-faith contrarianism. Yes, of course some living organism can kill you and humans would be better off without Ebola. We all know this. But what you don’t know from reading the piece, is that without biodiversity, humanity wouldn’t last a month, because biodiversity creates the ecosystems we rely on to survive. Throughout the piece, he treats biodiversity as if it is irrelevant or counterproductive to human flourishing, when in reality biodiversity is a necessary part of our existence.
I get that the author does not value preserving biodiversity in of itself, outside of human-survival interests. That is a peculiar moral viewpoint, but one that he’s allowed to have. I, however, enjoy going to zoos, aquariums, and taking wildflower walks. If these don’t factor into your moral equation, fine, but you have to consider that biodiversity DOES factor into many other people’s value systems.
And potatoes make more food than dandelions. This is not news. I don’t know why he spends the article dancing around the problem of how biodiversity interacts with ecology. Interconnected webs of species are what create the habitats we live in. Humanity still requires functioning ecosystems to survive. It is alarming to see an educated person dismiss this- does he not know how pollination works? Or food webs? Or how genetic diversity leads to greater resilience?
The impact of invasive species on native populations is well documented. The native populations often decline or go extinct, and there is ample literature on this. Instead of an anecdotal observation, why not actually ask the scientists who monitor this sort of thing? Probably because they wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. Once again, this comes across as a contrarian bad-faith argument.
His refers to the Sixth extinction four times in the piece. What he does not mention, is that in mass-extinctions, large land-dwelling animals are the ones that end up going extinct. His attitude of “The Sixth Extinction is happening, just get over it already” is far too glib for what would likely be the self-caused extinction of humanity.
In summary, if the concept that species naturally go extinct, or knowledge that the Earth will eventually be engulfed by the sun is new to you, then I suppose this article could be informative. But conservationists know these things already, and we have reasons why we advocate for the conservation of endangered species, reasons that the author fails to address.
I still don’t know it–all I have so far is your assertion.
I agree that if there were not quite a large number of species the ecology would not function well, if only because there are a lot of niches. But that doesn’t tell us whether eliminating, say, a random half of all species would or would not leave us significantly worse off.
You pretty clearly believe it would leave us much worse off (“wouldn’t last a month”). Can you support that belief with evidence?
During mass extinction, ~75-90% of species go extinct. The survivors of extinction events are usually not large land-dwelling animals. If humans survive the Sixth Extinction, that would be an anomaly.
Here is an article showing how body size effected survival rates during the Devonian http://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6262/812.
It is also well known among scientists that being land-dwelling was a good correlator for going extinct during the more recent Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
So chances are, humans won’t be among the survivors of the next mass extinction, because we still rely on ecosystems to survive. The effects of extinction events are something many scientists have studied. If I was going to publish in a major newspaper about how the Sixth Extinction is going to be a-okay for humanity, I would first want to interview some researchers in the field to make sure they agreed with the premise of “if human well-being is all that matters, the Sixth Extinction isn’t that big of a deal”.
This extrapolation is extremely questionable at best. Humans are anomalous in many ways compared to other animals. I don’t think the extinction probability of past large land-dwelling animals really tells us anything reliable about extinction probability of humans. How many other mammals are eusocial on the scale of millions? The 75%-90% range as defined is probably as good as the estimate gets.
Additionally, looking at the classic examples, the Permian-Triassic extinction lasted somewhere between thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. The Triassic-Jurassic and Cretaceous Paleogene probably took less than 10,000 years but no guarantee. Considering the massive exponential changes in human technology of the last couple centuries, I feel comfortable saying that if humans wipe themselves out, it probably won’t be in a way that any of them foresaw in time to prevent.
There is a rather distinct difference between “no ecosystem” (which humans currently couldn’t survive) and “massively changed ecosystem”. Humans have already thrived through multiple massive ecosystem changes they instigated. A lot of them were relatively local (continental scale), but still severe. Short of a runaway warming process where humans accidentally cook the earth or a global nuclear war of immense scale it is hard to see how humans could wipe themselves out within the next century or two. We may drastically lower biodiversity in the process of wiping ourselves out, but that’s pretty distinct from wiping ourselves out because we decreased biodiversity.
I feel like you are conflating “humans wipe themselves out via massive physical changes to the environment which also happens to kill almost all life” with “humans wipe themselves out by lowering biodiversity through their current pattern of expanding their settlements”. The author of the piece is obviously talking about the second type of problem and not the first. Europe is 3 times as densely settled as the U.S. Japan and England are 10 times as densely settled as Brazil. These are very rough estimates since not all land is equally valuable and a lot of countries import food, but the local ecological functions of Japan and England are basically independent. And also independent from those of the U.S. and Brazil. If wasn’t for global physical interconnections through the atmosphere and ocean, humans could pretty clearly drastically increase in population still (and maybe they can anyways, all we know is we haven’t hit carrying capacity yet).
The only real worries that could seriously threaten the entire human species have to be either global physical processes or humans murdering each other. Things like “global warming goes much faster than expected or we keep on slowly cooking ourselves for tens of generations”. Or “someone engineers biological weapon carried through atmosphere and it kills us all.” At least for the first problem, it’s pretty obvious at this point that no combination of governments in the world could react on time to prevent current projections with current technology or an easy extrapolation of current technology. Either there will be a major technological breakthrough, humans will adapt to a warmer climate, humans will engage in some sort of crazy geo-engineering scheme, or estimates will turn out to have been horribly off in one direction or the other. For none of these cases does the “loss of biodiversity” angle seem like a very useful framing of the problem. If biodiversity was maintained, but biomass productivity drastically dropped we’d still be screwed.
We do not know that. For starters, we are only producing the amount of food necessary with the current population by using large amount of non-renewable energy sources.
Now it is possible that we also will bootstrap from that to other sources of energy that will fill the same roles as (mostly) oil and coal. Possible is the key word.
@thirqual
Carrying capacity is not fixed over time. We could clearly build more nuclear power (which is non-renewable) and extend our consumption for a while yet. For that matter, we still have a lot of untapped oil reserves. In the longer run, we haven’t even come close to harvesting a significant fraction of the incident solar energy hitting the earth.
In the really long run of course, the carrying capacity is zero because we’re swallowed by the sun. So at some point, we’ll both agree it goes to zero (probably long before the sun thing though). But I feel reasonable claiming the next 100 years is very unlikely to be where a downshift suddenly occurs.
Scale is the critical question here. I don’t know what that level of biodiversity is needed to survive. I’m skeptical of anyone who would try to put a number on it, due to humanity’s understanding of ecology being still in a basic stage.
For example, in order to grow crops, you need soil. The thing about soil is that it has to be created by living organisms for organic accumulation. Row-crops are unsustainable at a given site, they rely on eroding down the previously built soil that that had built up from 1000s of years ago. We can’t create soil in a lab.
And pollinators are necessary for a good portion of our agriculture as well. You don’t want all of your pollinators to be the same species, because of the threat disease might pose (see: honeybees). How many species of pollinator do we need to survive? And the pollinators need natural communities to live in, such as trees, other flowers, things for their larvae to eat. And plants their larvae feeds on also need mycorrhizae in the soil in order to live. The base level of biodiversity we need may be far larger than what meets the eye.
I like to think of our biodiversity like a library. The loss of one book doesn’t matter. But at some point, those losses build up. It’s like asking “what is the most knowledge humanity can forget and still get by”. It’s not an easy question to answer, but at some level civilization collapses, and at an extreme level you could be faced with extinction. It’s not a question to take lightly.
We are producing nearly twice as much food as is necessary to feed the current population, because a lot of it is used to feed animals and a significant amount to produce alcohol for fuel.
@ Guy in TN
I mostly agree with you that it’s a question of scale with a great deal of uncertainty. The author is a biologist and I think the author was trying to push back though against the tendency to view biodiversity as a terminal goal rather than mostly a byproduct of other goals. I assume he still deeply enjoys nature himself, but accidentally managed to come off too strongly (actually he later apologized more than I think was good for debate and I would have preferred he defended his points in more detail).
But as to what I would consider closer to a terminal goal of directly benefitting humans: not wiping out the productivity of soil by draining an aquifer while piling salt on salt on salt into the ground, not wiping out pollinators, and not destroying low on the food chain producers. However as far as I’m aware, the most charismatic and beloved animals for ecological publicity (charismatic megafauna like lions) are among the least important to humans for sustaining environments etc. Humans kind of are charismatic megafauna and can pick up a lot of that slack even if we want similar looking ecosystems and not just healthy watersheds and sources of plants in an area. We’ve already devastated the big mammal population and clear cut a lot of forest in huge areas and those areas are still good for human living. I agree it’s bad to go straight to no forests, but forests are recovering in some areas as agricultural in those areas ceases (parts of the eastern U.S.).
I would guess that the optimal pattern for human development will often involve rather severe reduction in biodiversity in some areas (wherever is best for intensive agriculture although we need to get better at soil management; this may involve constructing sort of minimal ecosystems for our purposes) in order to spare a larger area somewhere else. These areas might be productive areas of ocean with carefully sold/distributed rights to harvest fish, areas to hike and explore, a source of new molecules, and/or good targets for studying evolution. But as much as I like hiking and rock climbing, I don’t favor a framing that focuses on biodiversity rather than on keeping things habitable, high quality, and as cheap as possible for humans. And sometimes this will mean offing some rare animals. I’d prefer to think carefully about which sort of ecosystems and ecosystem functions are most important to humans so informed tradeoffs can be made. Rather than having political battles focus on a framework of sacred values (preservation vs unrestricted harvesting) and the charisma of particular animals or plants (dolphins and whales are more charismatic, but insects are way more important to humans).
@DavidFriedman
This is a non-sequitur. The comment you were responding to pointed out that we are producing our food in a non-sustainable way.
Imagine that I earn $100k a year, I spend $200k a year and I’ve taken out a $300k loan with the local mafia. Then I have twice as much to spend ($400k) as I actually do ($200k). However, this is not sustainable because the mafia will stop wanting to give me loans at one point and then I’ll not only have to make do with $100k, but also pay back the loan. So what is really relevant is the gap between my spending and sustainable income.
Of course, your belief seems to be that it’s likely that my income will increase sufficiently to not only pay for the current spending, but also the yearly spending increase & that the mafia won’t cash the loan with jack-booted thugs before that happens.
There is no clear answer to whether you are right, but it is objectively true that you are in favor of taking more risks, effectively gambling with the lives of billions of people.
@Aapje:
My point is not a non-sequitur.
The quote I responded to started with “For starters, we are only producing the amount of food necessary with the current population by … .” We are currently producing much more food than is necessary with the current population, hence that quote was false.
It is possible that we could produce the amount of food necessary for the current population without using depletable resources–we don’t know, since that isn’t the amount we are currently producing.
That is not correct. All of the alternatives involve gambling with the lives of billions of people. The most drastic policy adopted in my lifetime to hold down population growth was China’s one child policy, which was quite literally a gamble with the lives of more than a billion people. Given that the predictions on which those policies were based turned out to be the precise opposite of what has happened so far–predicted increase in hunger and poverty in the third world, actual sharp decrease–there is some reason to suspect that the immense costs imposed by that policy were entirely unnecessary.
His attitude of “The Sixth Extinction is happening, just get over it already” is far too glib for what would likely be the self-caused extinction of humanity.
Yeah, the big extinction events take out whatever species are top of the tree at the time, and right now that’s us. Sixth Extinction would knock us off and let some scrabbling little whatsit get its chance to grab that empty niche and have its day in the sun.
One big difference between humans and more typical large animals. Large animals are usually rare. The correlation between size and extinction is probably due to the correlation between rarity and extinction. I suspect that rare small animals did not fare well in past mass extinctions.
Besides, humans have longer life expectancies in cold climates, dry climates, islands, isolated mountain valleys, and areas with a past history of “pollution.” All of those have a shortage of biodiversity.
Hey TN Guy, being a professional maybe you can answer a question of mine about bees?
I keep hearing about how the loss of honeybees would be devastating to flora in the US. And yet, I’ve also heard that honeybees are an invasive species, and so weren’t here some hundred of years ago. Obviously they weren’t needed as pollinators before they came to the Americas. Are they needed so much now because agriculture has changed so much since Europeans showed up? Or is the “honeybee as pollinator” issue one more BS thing people say just because they don’t know any better?
Hi Mark, I’m glad to answer your question.
You are right to point out the confusion, many pop-sci articles are missing some important aspects of the bee decline. Our primary pollinators in North America are not imported honeybees, but the native bees that were have evolved as part of the existing natural communities. The alarming thing about bee decline is that it is effecting all bees, including the native ones. For example the rusty patch bumblebee, native to Eastern North America, has declined so drastically that it was recently listed as an endangered species.
Bees really are fantastic pollinators, that is no myth. Their hairy bodies are excellent at getting coated in pollen. (Some other insects, like butterflies, are actually poor pollinators, and are largely leeching off of rewards that the flowers would be better off giving to bees).
Why doesn’t Chesterton’s Fence apply to “Should we drastically alter the environment?” Man vs. environment seems like the ultimate case of modernism vs. metis.
+1
This is a big, complicated, poorly-understood system on which our survival depends. Why shouldn’t I screw around with it in big ways I don’t really understand?
If the parts of the ecosystem had been deliberately adopted, we might have to find out what problems they were supposed to solve. As far as I know, they haven’t.
A Chesterton fence need not be deliberately adopted. It only needs to be consistently adhered to. Social customs largely evolve to solve problems in a non-deliberate manner – and yet these are the exact original subject of Chesterton’s conservative argument.
IE, the “fence” could consist of a tree that fell across the road in a storm, and was never removed despite the local community’s ability to remove it. Chesterton advises just as much caution in removing that “fence” too.
The reason the current climate is what it is is not that people in the past decided not to change it, however–they didn’t have the power or knowledge to. So your point is irrelevant to the particular case being discussed.
David,
Rather than climate, do you mean biodiversity?
@rahien.din
Probably. The argument holds for both–I’m more used to arguing about climate.
In the case of biodiversity, it’s a tiny bit greater due to human choices over the past century or two.
Leaving aside the correctness of jhertzlinger’s statement that this isn’t really analogous to the social traditions Chesterton’s Fence is about for the moment…
How drastically altered are we talking here? Europe and a lot of the U.S. are already “drastically altered environments” relative to before humans reached them. Europe was once covered in forests; it also had lions. Now, not so much. Seeing as Europe is actually a pretty great place to live, whereas you can’t live past hunter gatherer stage in the untouched Amazon, Chesterton’s fence doesn’t really suggest not drastically altering just any environments. But treating it as conservationism focused on humans rather than pretending the pre-human environment was teleologically designed to support humans maybe suggests a few things.
It suggests not making current continents significantly more polluted than modern Europe; it suggests not drastically altering the atmosphere or ocean. But we already have better arguments to be careful about this sort of things than analogies to Chesterton’s fence. Heavy metals at high enough concentration in your water will kill you and the same for lots of other things. We’re pretty good in the developed world at mostly avoiding this sort of things compared to how good we were at not poisoning ourselves in the past. There is however a lot of work to be done in other parts of the world.
Enough methane and CO2 emissions will drastically raise the temperature, etc. But there are already very good reasons to be careful about attempting any drastic cutbacks via reducing consumption of what causes all the pollution humans put out. The only cautious and politically palatable route forward at the moment is attempting to reach a technological breakthrough. If the problem was taken more seriously, perhaps we could transition more of our baseload power to nuclear or have a carbon tax, but I’m not holding my breath. Too many people are scared of nuclear power. And some environmentalists groups have even proven willing to fight against attempts for a carbon tax if they don’t get other unrelated things along with it (proposition in Washington)!
Roughly speaking, on the high emissions scenario, by 2100 we are talking about warming Minnesota to the current temperature of Iowa.
Because the underlying argument for Chesterton’s Fence is that the fence is there for a reason, even if we don’t know what it is. The current environment was not designed for us and we were not designed for it–human evolution, not to mention primate or mammalian evolution, occurred over a period during which climate varied by quite a lot, and humans currently prosper over a wide range of different environments.
It would make almost as much sense to claim Chesterton’s fence as an argument against the development of antibiotics or modern surgery or paternity testing. All of those changed features of the human condition–but not features that existed because past people or past civilizations had found them useful, or because past civilization that didn’t have them went extinct.
How far back are you going? The XKCD temperature timeline doesn’t look too promising.
Compare xkcd to the analyses in wattsupwiththat and JoNova.
I love xkcd, but as Penn Jillette says, “Don’t take dieting advice from a juggler.”
I don’t want to get into culture war territory, so I’ll just say I’m sceptical. This doesn’t seem like a case where it is safe to bet on the contrarian view turning out to be correct.
Would the xkcd timeline even show the current warming trend if it happened 10k+ years ago? That is, is the resolution of our temperature proxies (ice cores, right?) for that period good enough to pick out a 50-100 year warm spell, without it just getting smoothed into the rolling average? If you’re going to make “unprecedented” claims, it’s important to be able to have accurate proxies at the ~decade order of magnitude (since the current warming is geologically speaking very short).
Anyway, just a musing. The whole temperature proxy process is a bit of a black box to me.
I’ve increased my estimate of the probability of significant climate change from looking at that timeline in the wattsupwiththat post. It doesn’t bode well for denialists if the most convincing way you can justifiably edit the xkcd to minimise the dangers of climate change is by saying “we have no idea how temperatures will change in the future, the rapid increasing trend over the past century might immediately stop, or it might immediately stop and change to a decrease” (i.e. not drawing the plausible increasing continuation line).
If we’re supposed to be autistic sticklers for Bayersianism at SSC, that’s not how properly updating your priors works. You just shouldn’t update. If you update in the opposite direction of bad arguments whenever you read them, your beliefs will swing about wildly and nonsensically. Incorrect inferences and poor data can’t tell you anything. As one of the gurus said, reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
@quanta
I don’t think that’s accurate.
Presumably, if he had expected Wattsup to have a better argument then he’s perfectly reasonable to update on the issue of ‘convingness of my opponent’s arguments’? And if one considers convingceness to be correlated with the correctness of the argument, then he should also alter that correctness. Although, obviously, it is easy to overshoot.
Certainly, you can’t just keep reading bad arguments and have your posterior keep going up significantly. But you’d be making the same error if you just kept looking at good arguments and have your posterior change in that direction.
THe isue is that you shouldn’t change much on the ‘quality of argument’ front and should change even less on the actual issue.
@quanta413
I’m not updating on a bad argument, I agree that seeing someone making completely stupid arguments for a claim should not lead you to disbelieve it. But the source Doctor Mist provided looks pretty respectable, so I think there’s a high chance that they would use the strongest evidence available. Since the evidence they present is weaker than I would have expected, it’s sensible to assume the actual strongest evidence is likewise weaker.
This is analogous to damning with faint praise. If you say something “definitely has potential” (without any intention to deceive), that suggests it’s not very good at the moment.
@rlms
You are still doing it wrong. Follow the logic of the whole essay and not just the catchy title for the obvious extreme case. It doesn’t matter how nice somebody’s website looks or how smart they sound (although why you think this should correlate with their ability to make the best possible arguments for a point of view is beyond me; have you seen a lot of professor’s websites?), no matter how weak an argument they make it should not make you update in the reverse direction.
On top of that, if you had followed the second link and not just the first then updated completely incorrectly (you should have just not updated), you would have seen much stronger counterarguments to the xkcd graph (although they may still be wrong, I’m not going to go untangle some monstrosity of gluing different data sources together and applying adjustments. Not worth the time). If your past data uses a 300 year average smoothing (roughly, it’s much nastier and less consistent than this), then any warming that is shorter than that in the past won’t show up. In fact, due to this, the data is already missing past warming periods we have historical records for in the medieval period. If you run the smoother all the way to the present, the sudden increase at the end isn’t sharp. But if you suddenly tack on more accurate year by year data and undo the smoothing, then the warming will look incredible because you’ve obliterated any periods of warming less than a few centuries long from the data.
I feel like you’re representing Chesterton’s Fence here as ‘don’t change anything ever.’ Useful modern surgery exists today because we Do understand organs and processes in our bodies. Antibiotics exist because we Do understand chemical processes and the immune system. Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t require that we never remove a species from an ecosystem, only that we have really good understanding of the role of that species and good predictive power over what would happen were it to disappear in order to want to change it. Do we understand ecology that well? (that’s a genuine question, I am no ecologist)
No. It’s “before changing something think about whether there may be a good reason why it is as it is.”
If it is as it is because people decided to make it that way or decided not to change it from being that way, there is at least a presumption there may be a good reason for it. If it is as it is because it just happened, with no human choices involved, there isn’t.
Climate and species diversity are in the latter category, aside from a tiny increase in speies diversity due to recent preservation efforts.
Oh? It seems strange to me to discount the actions of non-human agents in this. I feel like there are definitely good reasons not to change situations that have arisen without human intervention unless we have strong understanding. How many times has the introduction of a species cost farmers or residents a lot of time and money to deal with, or altered growing conditions such that their livelihoods become untenable?
David,
I disagree.
The defining features of a Chesterton fence are 1. opacity of operation, and 2. adherence.
The deliberateness or consciousness of the fence’s construction or source is not so important. If a tree falls across a road, and is then used as a fence, it is just as much a Chesterton fence as if it was deliberately constructed.
Neither is the deliberateness or consciousness of adherence so important. (In fact, if people are consciously and deliberately using an object or custom for an intended purpose that it fulfills efficaciously, it is not opaque in its operations, and is therefore not a Chesterton fence.) If a tree falls across a road and then is used as a fence, without anyone exactly realizing that they are using it thusly, it is just as much a Chesterton fence as if it was used deliberately.
I also contend that “for a reason” connotes a certain deliberateness which renders the fence too narrow. If Chesterton’s fence may only apply to opaque-but-efficacious artifacts [things which people deliberately constructed to play a role for human societies, which they continue to fulfill, though we no longer understand their operations], these are a subset of [things which play a role for human societies, which they fulfill though we do not yet understand their operations]. This latter category falls within the scope of how Chesterton’s fence operates in advising us caution (irrespective of the source or intent of the actual object or custom), and this caution is Chesterton’s true intent. Furthermore, things in that latter category are definitionally worth preserving or approaching with caution. We neglect this latter category at our hazard.
If you want to restrict Chesterton’s fence to designed objects, you still need a word for this latter category. That word will operate in the exact same manner as your delimited Chesterton fence. It’s unnecessary.
Better that we call them all “Chesterton fences.”
–@rahien.din
— G.K. Chesterton
If it were literally erected by accident, or if it did in fact grow there, the second paragraph demonstrates that the principle does not apply.
“The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. ”
G.K. Chesterton, 1929
Per the source, it would appear that deliberate agency is a key element to Chesterton’s fence. And I concur: Some intelligence actively having decided to devote substantial effort to [X], is much stronger evidence of the general desirability of [X] than it simply having happened by accident and not having been found worth the bother of changing.
You can argue that Chesterton’s fence applies to the combination of the environment and human adaptations to it, but I think that’s a bit tenuous. However, the more general conservative principle “be wary of drastic irreversible change” is definitely relevant.
The key concept is adherence.
Let’s call Chesterton’s bluff : a tree falls across the road, blocking all transit. The local community starts using it as a fence – they adhere to it as a fence. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.”
I presume that you, the intelligent type of reformer, would reply, “Despite the fact that the local community is adhering to this fallen tree’s presence, it wasn’t constructed deliberately by humans. Therefore I don’t see the use of it, either. I will allow you do destroy it.”
Or, say a band of escaped lunatics had built a genuine fence, to which the community then adhered and allowed to persist. The origin of the fence is revealed to the reformers. You would similarly claim, “Let us clear away this fence the lunatics built.”
You would be dead wrong in both instances. And Chesterton would count you so.
The key passage in the second paragraph is “Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable.” IE, if it appears that someone saw a reasonable reason for keeping an object or custom, we should be cautious about removing it.
There is nothing in that passage about deliberate agency, and there needn’t be. If I leave a tree in the road after it falls, that is evidence that I had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody.
And sure, if an object or custom appears deliberately constructed, that provides evidence of a reasonable reason. But if a community adheres to an object or custom, that is also evidence of a reasonable reason. Chesterton provides us examples of common-sense reasoning here, but he does not delimit or restrict common sense.
In fact adherence is more essential. Chesterton fences are operationally opaque, and inconvenient. This means that, regardless of the intent in their construction, they would be quickly destroyed by any non-adherent community, long before the pair of reformers could arrive. We only ever encounter Chesterton fences because someone adhered to them.
So Chesterton’s fence is in fact an admonition to caution when we must choose between adherence and non-adherence. Deliberate agency is in no way necessary.
On the one hand, we have Chesterton’s words as quoted by John and I. On the other we have your headcanon. I’m going with Chesterton. It is true that there might be other reasons for retaining the fence built by lunatics; they are not the reasons given by the Chesterton’s Fence parable.
The Nybbler,
No, you’re arguing for a particular interpretation thereof. But you’re wrong.
I would agree that evidence of design and deliberate construction would increase our confidence that a certain artifact is a Chesterton fence. I do not agree that such evidence would be necessary.
As I pointed out, the operative statement is “Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable.” Deliberate agency in construction is not necessary to satisfy the “reasonable reason” condition. Adherence, however, is absolutely necessary.
The examples Chesterton uses are prefatory. They support or explain that operative passage but do not delimit it. For instance, escaped lunatics who build fences invariably do so with deliberate agency. If deliberate agency is necessary and sufficient to bestow the title of Chesterton’s fence, well, Chesterton did not seem to think so. The reason why he uses these examples is to demonstrate the reasonable-reason criterion, not to delimit the fence to designed artifacts.
And this is in keeping with how we use the concept of a Chesterton fence. It is frequently (and appropriately) applied to the types of social customs that were not deliberately or consciously designed for the important societal roles that they fill nevertheless.
The only defense that you can muster is “Well your interpretation is just headcanon.” (Which is an admission of defeat…)
You’re correct. Deliberate agency in construction is not necessary to satisfy the “reasonable reason” condition… but that’s not what it’s trying to do. Instead, deliberate agency is sufficient for “reason”, after which, we must understand the “reason” so we can determine whether it’s a “reasonable reason”.
First, I think you’re wrapping more into the concept of “bestow[ing] the title of Chesterton’s fence” than is warranted. Second, you’re simply fighting his direct quote. He didn’t say that deliberate agency was necessary and sufficient for reasonable-reason. Instead, he said, “It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street.” That is, even if deliberate agency -> reason, it is possible (though highly improbable) that the reason was, “Actual crazies in some isolated incident.” Presumably, we can still go learn that reason (I imagine such an event would be local publication fodder) and determine that it wasn’t a reasonable reason.
Example? Generally, social customs were originated by people, who deliberately chose to perform those actions. Presumably, they had reasons for choosing to perform those actions rather than to not perform those actions. They might have been good reasons; they might have been bad reasons. All Chesterton’s fence tells us is, “Go figure out the reason for cases of deliberate agency.” That is, the only claim is ‘deliberate agency -> reason’. This is why your previous claim:
…doesn’t work either. You’re just denying the antecedent.
Regardless of Chesterton’s intent, though, most social norms, religious practices, language, manners, neighborhoods, communities, etc., are more evolved than consciously made. And yet, decisions to bulldoze them and replace them with something rationally planned out will often work pretty badly.
Controls Freak,
I agree that agency is the salient issue. I also agree that if a thing seems to be designed, this increases our certainty of human agency – it demonstrates agency of construction. However, I do not agree that the appearance of design is necessary or sufficient to call something a Chesterton fence.
In order for a Chesterton fence to remain standing, each person who encounters it must allow it to persist. This is what I mean by “adherence.” If a thing could have (or should have) been destroyed, but everyone who has encountered it has withheld destruction, agency has been exercised – the appearance of adherence demonstrates agency of permission. Adherence is an iterative process, by which successive humans exercise agency. Therefore, the greater the evidence of adherence, the greater the evidence of agency. Thus, adherence is sufficient to fulfill Chesterton’s “good reason to believe it owes its existence to human agency” criterion.
Adherence is also necessary. Chesterton fences that are not adhered to will, definitionally, be destroyed, and thus can not be inspected. The subset of Chesterton fences that appear designed but have not been adhered to is definitionally non-existent. Therefore, the appearance of design is entirely dependent upon the appearance of adherence, and adherence is more necessary than design.
The appearance of design is not necessary. Chesterton’s (and his fictional reformers’) primary criterion is whether the object has a use. If an object or custom’s use is not transparent, but there is the appearance of permissive agency, then Chesterton demands that we consider that it does have a use. This holds whether the object or custom appears designed or appears non-designed. The obvious metaphor is a tree that has been pushed into the road to form a fence, which appears non-designed but should be regarded as a Chesterton fence nonetheless if there is evidence of adherence.
Increasing appearance of design may paradoxically decrease our confidence in a Chesterton fence. A mysterious but well-maintained ten-foot section of two-foot-high ornate, gilded wrought-iron fence at the bottom of the sea whose pickets spell out “EAT AT JOE’S” in Morse code and whose crossbars are wrought in the shape of a DNA double helix is a highly-designed object, and that appearance of design greatly increases our confidence that this object only exists due to a high degree of human agency. It also decreases our confidence that this fence is fulfilling a societal role. One aspect of its degree of design is its remoteness from human interaction, and another is the high probability of self-indulgence as its only purpose. When the appearance of design decreases our confidence that the object or custom has a use, our confidence that it is a Chesterton fence (an opaquely-useful object) also decreases.
—
You claim that I am fighting his words, and this is false. His operative statement is “Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody.” This applies equally well to designed and non-designed objects or customs. There is nothing in that operative statement that demands deliberate constructive agency.
As I have stated, Chesterton’s explanation of his metaphor is like a prefatory clause : this description helps explain but does not delimit the operative statement. Its interpretation is subject to the operative statement, and to the facts that adherence is necessary and sufficient, but the appearance of a reasonably-reasoned human construction is neither necessary nor sufficient. If you disagree, say why.
Instead, I would claim that you are only casually inspecting his words as quoted, without considering their true purpose, and thus are restricting the valid and essential societal role that this philosophical artifact was intended to play.
—
If those things are not true, then we must accept this corollary to Chesterton’s fence : if a custom or object does not appear to have been deliberately designed for the role it might fill, then you may safely destroy or modify it without trying to understand it.
This corollary is not reasonable. As has been noted, this would grant permission to destroy our evolved social customs without examining their use, which is exactly counter to the spirit and purpose of a Chesterton fence.
I don’t really want to take up the interpretive question of what counts as a “Chesterton fence” as he used the term. But if we stipulate that a “reason” for the thing is needed, that interpretation might not cut at a good joint.
Presumably for there to be or have been a reason for something, an agent must have undertaken to make or preserve the thing for that reason. So nothing that evolves has a reason for it.
But it seems to me that the relevant question is “Does this thing have a function?” And it’s commonly accepted that evolution produces “functional things”. The heart’s function is to pump blood, for example.
So the scenario that Chesterton describes does not seem importantly different than the one posed by an open chest cavity. “What’s that thing doing? Does it really need to be there?” Sometimes you’re pointing to an appendix*. Usually you’re not.
The complex interrelationship between species is not as tightly coupled, but there is a good deal that we don’t grasp, and our confidence that we won’t press on one or another tipping points rests on that incomplete understanding. The human extinction standard is also questionable. What if we tipped a point that killed, say, half a billion people? Wouldn’t that be really bad?
So I support the view that there are Chesterton-like reasons not to pull blocks from what could be the Jenga tower of ecology.
* I refer to the now-contested historical view that the appendix serves no purpose.
For instance, there is almost no one who thinks that our wilderness fire-suppression methods for the last 100+ years wouldn’t have been improved by first answering the question “what purpose do wildfires serve?”
And of course wildfires themselves have no agency, nor are they intentional. But we still would have been better off if we answered the question.
skef, HeelBearCub,
You are saying it better than I did.
—
Another example that occurs to me is deer hunting.
Way back when, deer hunting probably played an important role in simply feeding people. Now, it has evolved into more of a sport or pastime, one result of which is the luxury of venison. The other, more societally-important result of modern deer hunting is keeping the deer population in check, now that there are no longer large predators roaming their habitat.
This more important result is relatively opaque to certain modern, deer-loving reformers. (And, I presume, not truly the hunters’ primary concern.) And so, in certain places deer hunting was outlawed. This led to an explosion in the deer population and a subsequent increase in accidents and highway deaths – deer and human. Closer to the heart of the deer-loving reformers, it led to sicklier deer. Tragically, the initial proposed solution was “Pay professional hunters to cull wild deer” rather than “Make money off hunting licenses.”
Deer hunting was a Chesterton fence. It was serving a role that to the modern reformer was woefully unapparent, and stopping the practice of deer hunting led to unforeseen consequences. (Now that we know the role that deer hunting is playing, it is no longer a Chesterton fence.)
Moreover, despite the initial design of deer hunting (hunt deer for food) it has evolved out of that role into a non-designed and largely non-deliberate role (cull the wild deer herds). Though I am sure that hunters are aware of the societal benefit they provide, I believe that a hunter’s intent is not specifically to provide this benefit as though fulfilling a duty, but rather, simply to enjoy themselves.
Again, that’s not what the argument concludes. At least now you’re spelling out what you meant before by “bestow[ing] the title of Chesterton’s fence”, but you’re still just wrong about what it actually concludes. It does not conclude that the fence must remain standing. It concludes:
You can come up with other claims regarding what counts as a reasonable reason, but that’s simply a different claim
‘deliberate agency -> reason’. Not the other way round.
Please please please stop denying the antecedent.
Huh. You seem to have presented some reasons. Now, we could presumably engage in a post-fence analysis, and we may or may not end up allowing you to destroy it. Fancy that.
Controls Freak,
Time out.
I have been enjoying this discussion, but I don’t get much from your most recent response. You seem frustrated. And I am not confident that you follow me.
For instance :
Correct. It doesn’t. We agree? You don’t seem to understand my claim.
Furthermore :
You are not invoking that fallacy correctly.
Denial of the antecedent is a fallacy because there may be multiple P’s that lead to the same Q. IE, if P then Q does not imply if !P then !Q. [If I am in London I can go see a clock tower] does not imply [if I am not in London I can not go see a clock tower], because there are other other cities that have clock towers.
But this fallacy does not apply if there is only one P that leads to Q, IE, iff P then Q does imply if !P then !Q. [If and only if it I am in London then I can go to see Big Ben] does imply [if I am not in London then I can not go see Big Ben], because there is only one city with Big Ben.
Simply stating a claim and its appropriately-formulated counterclaim does not necessarily fall under “denying the antecedent.”
Besides, you may be better-served by stating what you think my claim is, and a more appropriately formulated counterclaim. Lobbing fallacy titles doesn’t help either of us in this discussion. Otherwise, I think I interpret this all as further evidence that you don’t understand my claim.
Furthermore, your original invocation thereof :
..is restated : “Your previous claim is merely denying the antecedent, because the only claim within the Chesterton’s fence argument is ‘deliberate agency -> reason.’ ”
“The only claim is ‘deliberate agency -> reason’ ” is the very claim I am contesting. You seem to have led off by inadvertently begging the question, somewhat.
This too is evidence that you just don’t follow me.
—
I’m not confident that me typing even more words is going to resolve that – this is genuinely lack of skill on my part. If there is anything you wish me to clarify, let me know.
You’re right. You’re doing a piss-poor job of this. Start again. Source your claim in his actual quote:
For example, points like:
…are nowhere to be found in that quote. So, perhaps you could point out to me exactly where he has said, “If and only if deliberative agency, reason,” or, “If deliberative agency, reason, plus there is only one thing that can produce a reason.”
You have tried forcing ‘reason -> deliberative agency’ into his quote multiple times… and then proceeded to argue, “But look, !P doesn’t imply !Q.” In quote:
This serves you in no fashion. We agree that !P does not imply !Q… because you haven’t established that he said anything about Q implying P.
Skef (whose comment you endorsed) embraced exactly the same problem:
Show me exactly where Chesterton said that.
You keep assuming he said ‘P iff Q’, and he didn’t. He said ‘P->Q’.
EDIT: At best, you tried:
…but you simply moved the “reasonableness” too early. Through the entirety of his statement, the reasonableness remains unknown. It’s not until after the reformer comes up with the reason that we can determine whether it’s reasonable or not. At that point, he thinks we may go ahead and actually decide what to do. The caution warranted by Chesterton is during the period when the reason isn’t even known, much less its reasonableness value.
You tried various versions of, “But we can have reasons to keep things even if it wasn’t from deliberative agency.” Skef embraced this:
…but that’s entirely downstream and separate from Chesterton’s claim. Things can have functions, they can have reasons (dare I say they can have teloses) without having deliberative agency. Great! That’s another, different argument for caution.
Controls Freak,
I will recap :
The “iff P then Q” statements were made to me in response to my original question, and it was claimed that they were plainly evident in Chesterton’s writing.
I countered that no, such statements are not plainly evident in Chesterton’s writing.
I have spent a lot of words to demonstrate why they are not valid interpretations of Chesterton’s writings. In fact, my use of the logically-valid form of antecedent denial in the case of iff-then statements was intended to demonstrate that these “iff P then Q” statements are not valid interpretations of Chesterton’s writings, because they violate the use/purpose/spirit of Chesterton’s writings*.
So we appear to agree on this very important point.
* Ironically, I am treating Chesterton’s fence in the manner of a Chesterton’s fence…
ETA: clarity
I wasn’t around at the time, but I imagine the old topic ban on two-tailed T-tests came about more or less like this.
No, they weren’t. Nybbler and John started from ‘deliberative agency -> reason’, and said, “If there is no deliberative agency, then the implication ‘deliberative agency -> reason’ doesn’t apply. That is, they said, “Chesterton claimed P->Q, but if you’re starting from !P, we can’t use P->Q to say anything.” Where, exactly did either of them say anything about “iff P then Q”?
You’re still trying to mangle claims of ‘Q->P’ into the words of people who never said that. I mean, how in the world do you read:
…in any way other than…
Controls Freak,
You seem to be genuinely angry. I’m happy to put forth further effort, I’m not confident that either of us is currently getting much out of our conversation. (Also, this thread has been succeeded.)
I don’t agree with what you’ve written in your last reply, but I’m merely going to register that disagreement. If you want to continue discussion, you could email me at fuht.onepn@tznvy.pbz
Thanks for helping me learn a few things in greater detail.
Cheers!
rahien.din
In my opinion, one of the biggest troubles there is that the people who care too much about the endangered species and similar issues are also against the ways to prevent that extinction in useful ways. It is like, those people would say (not a real example, just theoretical) “we are against the global warming as it will kill the polar bears”, but if you suggest a genetic modification of those polar bears that lets them survive the warming (and become actually useful for humans, maybe?), they would say that they are against that, too.
If you genetically engineer them, are they still polar bears? (Depends how big a change you make I guess.)
A lot of this feels like just-so-ism to me. Saying we should go with whatever extinction happens presumes that whatever goes extinct was going to do so anyway. There’s no rule saying all extinctions are fine, any more than there is one saying they’re all regrettable. Although I do appreciate reminding us that the former case can exist.
Moreover, there was a point in earth’s history where biodiversity was exactly zero on any scale you’d care to define, and now it’s “better” on that scale. Granted, it took a few billion years, but now that’s it’s up and running, you could pave over any 100-mile square of the world and it would likely grow back something within two generations. I feel as if our main concern should be more subtle than simply the reading on the biodiversimeter, but rather whether what moves in is something too expensive to live with, relative to the expense of managing whatever ecology we have right now.
Meanwhile, the general benefit to biodiversity is supposed to be similar to that of investment portfolio diversity. If that’s the case, then there might be a way to hedge disease threats by preserving small biocultures in relatively small parts of the world, possibly even in labs. Preserving entire rainforests makes less sense, since much of that biodiversity is consequently inaccessible to us when searching for cures or hardy lifeforms, and much of that diversity is also evolving ways to hurt us at the same time.
Are people born in the Bay Area genetically superior?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/opinion/lost-einsteins-innovation-inequality.html
Whatever that blotch in central California is doesn’t seem to be centered around the Bay Area – more like Santa Cruz. My guess is whatever counties those are have very little population and a lot of what’s there are techies who commute to Silicon Valley – whose kids become techies in turn.
One of those is Santa Clara county, which includes Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc.
They have left me stewing over how many breakthrough innovations we have missed because of extreme inequality.
This is the kind of sentence that annoys me. Yes, definitely there are lost opportunities where someone does not get access to good teaching, or can’t go to college because they need to get a job to support themselves, or they’re stuck in the middle of a rustbelt where their best opportunity is a job as a packing line supervisor.
But feck’s sake – “lost Einsteins” my arse. Some of us would stay lost even if you uprooted us at the age of two and dumped us into the California (or Minnesota also, I notice) red patch of Ultimate Innovation. This kind of “We could have had colonies round Alpha Centauri by now” pie-in-the-sky thinking annoys me because it’s based on nothing.
Hey, maybe all that innovation happened because of clustering of the right kinds of businesses, start-ups, universities and rich people going “take my money and spin straw into gold!” in certain areas, and not so much because of “every school child has their maths test results analysed and the Bright Kids get put on the track to achievement by making sure they aren’t raised by poor parents”! Maybe the solution there is to force big massive entities like Google to relocate to Dogpatch, so the dungaree-clad barefoot young Einsteins of the locality have an opportunity to be exposed to MODERNITY? Except there are many reasons this would not work and you would be told why this would not work.
How can we do so? We can stop showering huge tax breaks on the affluent and reinvest the money where it’s needed.
Or you know, full socialism to smash the capitalism system which not alone inculcates but only survives because of inequality. I’d be sympathetic to that approach, comrade.
We can work to narrow educational inequities.
Nicely vague. How exactly would you implement that? Always remembering, some of us kids are thick and all the “narrowed inequities” are not going to turn us into programmer entrepreneurs filing fifty patents a day.
Yet the new research also suggests there is one simpler approach to try.
Oh yeah, here it comes: money approach is too expensive and inconvenient, teaching approach is gonna have us fighting entrenched attitudes, here’s the One Weird Trick solution!
Children who grow up exposed to a particular type of invention or inventor are far more likely to follow that path. Growing up around patent holders for, say, amplifiers makes someone far more likely to become an amplifier-related inventor.
Well, gorsh! You mean the inequality is baked into the system from the start? How are you going to remedy that – make every wealthy inventor/patent holder adopt and raise twenty barefoot Dogpatchians? I admit, I’d love to see you sell that one to the Silicon Valley innovator crowd 🙂
Article has good intentions, but it is so head in the cloud: let’s assume there are a horde of kids who are really great proto-inventors out there, they don’t get a chance because they’re poor (or female, or minority), and what we need to do is, um, make sure they are the children of patent holders (who we’ve already established are likely to be not poor, not minority, and not from/living in deprived/non-urban parts of the country).
You’re not going to turn someone who was barely bright enough to get through high school into another Edison, but you might convince someone who was going to go into some kind of STEM field to concentrate on one that is more about practical innovation rather than one that is more academic, or more day-to-day practical stuff. The same person might end up working as an software engineer at a big company, or alternatively working for a startup in hopes of being the Next Big Thing, and it’s easy to imagine how the culture and environment in which they were raised might affect that.
How are STEM fields not leading to innovation?
I think a bigger problem is that so much brainpower is used for finding clever new ways of making the masses click on ads or thinking up new ways of making sure a video isn’t shown if the ad was circumvented by an adblocker.
I think that’s a good point – this article is talking about lost Einsteins, but what they are really asking for are more Edisons – guys and girls who are practical not theoretical, who are the engineers and not the cosmologists, the ones coming up with snappy ideas that can be patented for production.
I mean, you do need the Einsteins and pure research, but if he’s asking for “fifty patents a day! a hundred patents a day!” then invoking Einstein is the wrong image.
Well, I’m willing to bet they’re more autistic than average.
That’s a recent effect, and not even that large yet. We will see what happens 10 years from now.
If you asked me to identify the thinker who most exemplifies everything wrong with our current conversation on education and opportunity, it would be David Leonhardt.
Do people who comment here under a nom de plume find it awkward to go to meetups?
(I’ve actually met David Friedman under my street name, though it was twenty years ago.)
Should we start a custom of people at meetups wearing nametags with the name they post under?
I second this. At the one meetup I’ve been at (in Seattle), I put both my real name and my nom de plume on my nametag; I think that’d be a good custom.
I’ve never attended a meetup, but from what I’ve heard, this is already a standard part of the nametag at some of them.
Gravatars only.
Made me chuckle, Ornate J.
Some people don’t want to have their online posts follow them back to their real names, especially if they’re taking unpopular positions that could plausibly get them some trouble at work.
I don’t think there were any (other) frequent commenters at the meetups I went to (even the big one).
Aren’t you supposed to dress up like your avatar? Good thing that I never went to a meeting then.
Not really. The first time was a bit weird, but that was before Naval Gazing started. At the second one (and the one time I met up with people unofficially), I pretty much just went by ‘bean’. Which took some getting used to on my part, to be fair.
Yes, but not for that reason.
At Naval Gazing, I’ve finished the series on the Iowa. You can now read all 8 parts about the history of the greatest ship ever built. I’ll return to her (and her slightly inferior sisters) at some point, but I’ve found myself mostly focused on the ironclad/pre-dreadnought age in what I’m writing about now.
Also, is my posting here helpful, or have enough people started checking Naval Gazing directly? I’m thinking of stopping posting links here.
I’ve typically read the post at NG before you post it here. The addition of pictures has been a great help for comprehension and reading pleasure.
I still find the posting on SSC helpful, but I will probably still check NG if you stop cross-posting (just less frequently).
On an unrelated note, I was talking to friends about D&D, and one described a game where his group blew up an entire enemy encampment by hitting one ammunition store, which set off the nearest ones, which set off etc.
QL: “So it went up like a British battlecruiser?”
*awkward pause*
Third person: “Like a blimp?”
QL: “Yeah, like the Hindenburg.”
So congratulations, you have gotten battleships into my subconscious and made my references even more obscure 😛
But also more relevant, unless the Hindenburg was secretly smuggling ammunition to Nazi saboteurs in the United States. Though that would explain why Nazi saboteurs were so spectacularly ineffective during WW2.
I have a desire to write this up as a serious conspiracy theory.
And Roosevelt knew it, and thus refused to sell helium to make sabotaging Hindenberg easier….
Wasn’t this the plot of one of the Pendragon books?
Perfect for an April Fools NG post!
@quaelegit
I might already have plans for something along those lines.
I find that improbably amusing. Glad I could help you be more obscure, and, as John points out, more accurate.
The Hindenburg was not a blimp.
Nor was it a balloon.
True, but I can’t remember any high profile blimp conflagrations.
I think it is, but the more usual term would be “deflagrated”. “Conflagration” seems to be used in practice almost exclusively in the noun form
(And this is why you should edit immediately or not at all. gdub was responding to my original post, which used ‘conflagrated’ and wondered if it is a real word.)
Deflagrated? Really?! Those sound like it should be the opposite — it’s like flammable/inflammable all over again.
(But actually thanks for the vocabulary info!)
Please continue to post links here. I am uneven in my bookmark and feed maintenance, and this will mark the second time I have ‘discovered’ your posts.
I say ditto to Riothamus.
What’s been your cleverest investment?
Starting when I was young.
How young?
Courting my present wife.
What’s with the temporal language?
His current wife is his second one.
+1, best ROI.
Well, except for the quarter million in student loans, I guess.
Getting Alexander technique lessons.
Where did you get lessons? Care to share your experience with the lessons?
Learning Norwegian.
EBT
The best investment I didn’t make was buying issue #1 of Viz for 50p. (now GBP 700-12000).
I’ll let you know as soon as any of them pay off.
In the spirit of the first few responses, it was either doing a series of videography projects for my senior thesis instead of a film, or getting mad at my kitchen radio one night. Explaining why for either of them would require I doxx myself via biography, so I’ll leave it at that.
In what I take to be the spirit of the question, it was buying a Lebron jersey in 2004 for $20 and keeping it in mint condition. Once it’s signed I should be able to sell it when I retire and make enough money that I won’t have to work anymore.
Oh man, I agree you shouldn’t doxx yourself but that radio story has piqued my curiosity. I guess I’ll have to invent my own crazy story. (Although, nitpicky, but does getting mad at the radio count as an investment? *shrug*)
Good point. Getting mad at the radio wasn’t a choice. The choice was the way I responded, which put me on a new life path.
You decided to run for president and now you are in the White House.
I won on a platform of proposing a moratorium on procreation combined with a promise to ban the immigration of anyone under retirement age. Also, bring back powdered wigs!
My slogan was “Make America Gray Again.”
So far, it’s three Black Lotus cards. I got them for about $5 apiece back when they were new, in the 1990s.
It’s a tossup between the three Radeon 7950s I bought for cryptocurrency mining in 2013, or my bicycle. It’s pretty ridiculous how much cars cost to own and operate, and that this is considered normal.
A £10 course on Udemy which landed me my current job as a data analyst.
Which course? What skill level were you at prior to starting the course? Did you have prior programming/software eng. experience?
Bought a bunch of Apple stock at the depths of the crash in December 2007. Not so clever was selling it when I only tripled my money.
Right. I bought Netflix at 30 maybe 5 years ago, and sold it at 100. I’m a genius, I thought! Adjusted for a later split, it now goes for 1288.
Does anyone on here know someone who works for Sidewalk Labs and would be willing to put me in touch?
Fellow Tennesseans, Scott is teasing us–that’s Nashville, OH.
And that’s New York City, Wyoming.