This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:
1. I’m on vacation for the next few weeks. I might schedule a few drafts to auto-post just so things won’t be totally quiet, but don’t expect to hear much from me until late June.
2. I’ve gotten a few comments and emails from people who are visiting the Bay Area and want to know how to meet the rationalist community there. Your best bet is to check the schedule for the community center and show up there when something interesting is happening (or just drop by whenever and hope for the best). If you’re really interested, you can stay in their guest rooms for a few days. You can also see bayrationality.com for (slightly) more information and event dates, or check the LW meetups page for more on meetups in San Francisco, San Jose, etc. I would like for there to eventually be a better and longer-term solution to this problem, but this’ll have to do for now.
3. Some people have complained that they like an SSC post and want to send it to their friends, but some of the comments are so bad that they’d be embarrassed for their friend to see them. Evan recently reminded me that there’s a Link Without Comments button at the bottom of every post.
4. Comment of the week is Aurel presenting some evidence against the lead-crime connection. Any thoughts?
Link without comments button only shows when you click through to the post, not on the main page.
Since 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil has repeatedly predicted that solar power is growing so rapidly that the world will soon get 100% of its energy from that source alone. As this simple record of his own words shows, his forecast date for a “100% solar-powered world” has shifted.
https://www.militantfuturist.com/all-of-ray-kurzweils-predictions-about-when-well-get-all-our-energy-from-solar-power/
So I guess a “Kurzweil unit” measures the number of years between the present and 2028.
My preferred example is the Friedman unit.
Going back to a SSC blog entry several weeks ago about DC Public School graduation rates, here’s a recent article about chronic student absenteeism (defined as missing at least 10% of the school year) in Maryland public schools. Reading the article, I can tell you no one needs to do a statistical analysis of the results to tell you that the rate strongly correlates with the incomes and races of the students.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/education/k-12/bs-md-chronic-absenteeism-20180604-story.html#nt=oft12aH-1gp2
Today, another article was published about the DC public school system’s continuing saga about this same issue:
‘High school seniors who missed more than six weeks of class would still receive their diplomas under an emergency measure approved by the D.C. Council, even as the city remains mired in a graduation scandal.
The measure, which passed Tuesday on a 12-to-1 vote, would apply only to students who meet all other academic standards.
…The vote sets up a potential showdown between the council and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), whose signature is necessary for the reprieve to go into effect.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-passes-emergency-law-to-allow-chronically-absent-students-to-graduate/2018/06/06/3aa128ae-6990-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html
I don’t really main a class in TF2 – I split my time based on what the team needs. I enjoy Engie, Spy, or Soldier the most, though, with a lot of time spent in Medic, Heavy, and Pyro too.
Since the Pyro got his jetpack I can’t put it down. It’s glorious to soar through the air and torch people when you land in their face, community still seems to have not adjusted to it.
As another commentator said, though, nothing beats a good Spy round.
What do people think of the voting system in _the Probability Broach_ where everyone forms whatever voting coalitions they want (geographic, professional, ideological, demographic….), and politicians are only in office as long as they get enough votes?
Why would voting patterns be any different? If it’s winner-take-all the incentives are still to form a 2 party duopoly because if you don’t vote for the lizard you hate least then the wrong lizard might get in.
note, I can’t find details on the Probability Broach voting system through from the summary it sounds like it’s written under a libertarian version of the assumption that if you get government out of the way then the world spirit will more completely incarnate and make everything awesome.
I think this is sometimes called Liquid Democracy, or alternatively here. So people have proposed it as a real political system. (I’m not sure if L Neil Smith took the idea from the writings of liquid democracy people or came up with it on his own.)
Speaking (as I did above) about strange political bedfellows, we had an odd situation here in Michigan over the past few weeks.
A proposal to legalize recreational marijuana in the state was submitted with sufficient signatures to make the November, 2018 ballot. It provides for a 10% excise tax on marijuana products, and specifies how those tax revenues would be used: 35% for K-12 education, 35% for roads, 15% to the communities that allow marijuana businesses, and 15% to counties where marijuana business are located.
The Michigan Constitution offers three options to the Legislature in this situation:
(a) enact the proposed law, word-for-word (which would cancel the statewide vote on the issue)
(b) put a competing proposal on the ballot, or
(c) do nothing.
Some Republicans in the Legislature were interested in the first option: pass the proposed legislation. Not because they wanted to legalize marijuana, but because they didn’t want it on the ballot.
It’s assumed that marijuana legalization supporters will turn out to vote “yes”, including lots of young voters who will probably also vote Democratic. Hence, Republican candidates would be less likely to win. Taking the issue off the ballot would presumably ease that threat.
Another reason is that (if it passed) a vote of the people would make the law very difficult to amend, requiring three-quarters vote of both houses. If the Legislature were to pass the exact same proposal that was petitioned for, they can later amend it by simple majority.
Such an amendment could easily nullify the entire proposal, by, say, indefinitely delaying the effective date. Or providing that marijuana legalization in Michigan wouldn’t happen until the US Congress legalized it nationwide. Or raising the excise tax to 100,000 percent.
Meanwhile, Democrats were happy to see the proposal make the ballot, based on the same theory that it would result in more votes for Democratic candidates. Hence, Democratic members of the House and Senate were unanimously opposed to the Legislature doing anything. Any action would have to be done on Republican votes alone.
So we had the odd situation of Republicans rounding up votes for marijuana legalization, while Democrats stood staunchly against it.
In the 38-member State Senate, a majority (all Republicans) were ready and willing to vote to pass the legislation, and then nullify it.
But Republicans in the 110-member House balked. Many of them were so strongly opposed to legalization of marijuana that they would not vote for the bill, even strategically to prevent legalization and protect Republican control of state government.
Word was that the House was more than 20 votes short of a majority for this strategy.
No action was taken before the Tuesday midnight deadline.
I bet Michigan voters will approve the proposal.
* Voters will decide marijuana legalization after Legislature fails to act (Detroit Free Press)
Somehow this reminds me of some old Yes Minister episodes…
kinda wonder how many normally “tough on drugs” Rep candidates will have their vote in favor of this thrown at them as a result. Trying to explain that “oh we were just trying to circumvent the state constitution” doesn’t feel like something they would be very willing to say out loud in order to explain themselves.
Of course, since they didn’t have the committed votes to pass it, the bill was never officially voted on. So there is no action to throw at anyone, except maybe the Republican caucus leaders who were openly pushing this idea.
What a fascinating story, thank you.
(source)
Money is fungible, so no it doesn’t.They can just reduce the other money paid for those things by the same amount, essentially letting them use the marijuana revenue for anything they want.
That’s true in general, of course, but if the proposal passes, there isn’t any obvious way for the legislature to prevent a significant amount of money being funneled to specifically those city governments which choose to allow marijuana sales. The fewer such cities there are, of course, the greater the bonanza per city.
It does set a minimum funding level, though. I remember a case of one of California’s maze of twisty little dedicated funds (all different) getting more revenue than it had eligible recipients to pay, so the state just had a pile of money they couldn’t touch.
California’s rules regarding public referenda are similar. It always struck me as kind of perverse.
@ dndnrsn
I think this is about where the thread crossed over from discussing the ideology and behavior of SSC commenters to arguing US foreign policy.
Responding to the quoted section: there is a sharp distinction between agreeing with or praising a piece of writing, versus endorsing every unrelated thing the writer has done or said.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s we had conspicuous examples of folks like senators J. William Fulbright (widely hailed on the left for opposing the Vietnam war) and Sam Ervin (acclaimed over his conduct of the Nixon/Watergate hearings) — who both had long and undeniable histories as advocates of racial segregation. We understood that (say) Fulbright-on-Vietnam could be appreciated as an ally without accepting Fulbright-on-Jim-Crow. I’m sure you could find essays on foreign policy by Fulbright in liberal magazines of that time.
In this era, there seems to be growing notion that an author’s (prior or later, real or perceived) crimes automatically refute or make worthless each individual thing he or she has written.
So, I don’t think that everything Frum says should be read through the lens of “this guy is a fairly low-level war criminal” but when he’s talking about stuff that’s relevant? Take his most recent article – about how Trump is a threat to decency, in part because of how he abuses his opponents, and his followers also. Did Frum not play a part in making political discourse cheaper and worse in the early 2000s? Was he not a part of the zeitgeist of “oppose invading Iraq? Why do you want the terrorists to win?”
This is written by the guy who is often credited with coming up with “Axis of Evil” – operatically vehement much? Maybe not as imaginative as High Communist jargon, sure.
Have you all heard the news about the Koch Brothers starting a big campaign in favor of free trade?
Think of the humorous ramifications to those leftists that base their ideology mostly on opposition to the other side. Trump is pushing hard for tariffs, but the Kochs are against them. Trump and the Koch Brothers are the two biggest bogeymen to opposition leftists, so what can they believe? If they are for “fair trade,” they seem to be siding with Trump. With fair trade, they go with the Kochs. I look forward to weasel words to get out of agreeing with either side.
Actually, I kind of wish the Kochs were having their big campaign against free trade. Then it’d be easy for the opposition leftists to make a decision, and free trade would get a big group on their side. Do the Kochs realize how many people think they are the epitome of evil? Any time they announce a big campaign, they’ve already pushed a large crowd in the other direction before a penny is spent. Maybe the Kochs are playing three dimensional chess and really are against free trade.
Leftists have been here before (for left of Social Democracy values of leftism.) Standard explanation is a conflict between factions of the ruling class. Petty Bourgeoisie is with Trump for tarriffs (Protectionist nationalism is often framed as an ideology of the middle classes under threat.), the Haute Bourgeoisie is for free trade. So they’ll look to seeing how they can make the split worse.
Bernie-crats were always going to be in favor of tarriffs, people at points left are probably wondering how to bring this to open conflict on the right and/or general strike conditions. If the Right-democrats support Koch and free trade it will go some way to splitting open the political sphere completely.
I don’t care for the Koch brothers, myself, but it is logically impossible for them to always be wrong in my eyes. Same with Donald Trump. Not everything boils down immediately to red/blue or left/right polarities.
For example, I cheered and appreciated Phyllis Schlafly’s opposition to endless copyright extension. This kind of thing happens often enough that there ought to be some kind of saying about politics and bedfellows.
I actually met and talked with Phyllis Schalfly, and was positively impressed.
The Koch brothers have been libertarians for a very long time–David Koch ran for VP as the LP candidate. The fact that people on the left think they are conservatives reflects the inability of those people to understand ideas they disagree with.
Given that the policy choices they advocate are well known, does it matter specifically which ideology motivates them?
Only to the extent that you’re interested in accurately modelling reality?
It does because a lot of their advocacy and policy choices aren’t well known or understood. The media situation with the Kochs is as if George Soros was consistently reported as being a communist. Some of my extended family is politically well informed (journalist or journalism related, and of the respectable type largely focused on politics) and was unaware that the Kochs are libertarians and surprised the Kochs had been advocating for criminal justice reform.
If you even google for it, mentions of it are mixed with silly conspiracy theories about Koch motivations, but they’ve given to causes like this for a while and it makes perfect sense if you have the slightest clue about libertarians.
I don’t think the policy choices they advocate are well known among the people who demonize them.
Googling around on [Koch marijuana] I find, in a story correctly reporting their position on that issue:
Does the person who wrote that realize that David Koch ran for VP on the libertarian ticket? That the brothers have been hard core libertarians for decades?
Another page introduces the fact that the Koch brothers are pro-immigration with:
“The Koch brothers are going rogue.”
What does the author of that think the LP platform position on the subject was when David Koch was the LP candidate for VP?
I’m not sure that’s a given. The Kochs are broadly perceived as being Generic Boogeyman Conservatives, and I don’t get the impression that their critics are making any great effort to distinguish between the strains of conservative wrongthink that the Kochs actually advocate and those that they don’t.
How widely known do you think it is, for example, that the Kochs are advocates of criminal justice reform?
Let’s get the Koch Brothers and Soros to do a collaboration on something. It will be grand.
“Let’s get the Koch Brothers and Soros to do a collaboration on something. It will be grand.”
Already happening. The Koch Brothers and Soros are currently both sponsors of the ACLU’s Campaign Against Mass Incarceration.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/do-the-koch-brothers-really-care-about-criminal-justice-reform/386615/
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2014/11/14/50-million-soros-grant-to-fund-aclu-for-reduction-of-incarceration/
Yeah, Soros and the Kochs agree on a lot of what could be described as the elite consensus.
This makes perfect sense to people who know that Soros is pretty much an arch-capitalist (and not a secret communist) and that the Kochs are libertarians (and not secret baptist white supremacists).
The Kochs are also pro-immigration and have supported efforts to save the Dreamers with DACA. The Kochs were opposed to Trump’s nomination, due to some deeply held ideological differences. They are supportive of the deregulatory agenda and tax reform though, and interestingly just spent money on an ad for North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp for her support for helping roll back some of Dodd-Frank.
Their basic position is they’ll unite with anyone to ‘do right’.
Oh that’s easy, the classic “It’s all a fake debate meant to distract us from the real issue of …”
I’m kinda curious how your mental model of “leftism” works. “Leftists are reflexively opposed to both Donald Trump and Charles Koch, but now Trump and Koch are advocating different sides of a policy, so the leftists’ heads must explode”? Yes free trade in general is a wedge issue for the left. There are people who opposed free trade from the left in 2015 who continue to oppose it from the left in 2018. There are other, different people on the left who supported free trade for a variety of reasons in 2015 who continue to support free trade in 2018. Neither the opposition nor the support were absolute, but more a matter of how to make sure the benefits of free trade were shared and the suffering caused by free trade was ameliorated. Of course, the specifics of how free trade agreements are implemented or destroyed are important for both domestic and foreign policy. Trade isn’t something I care deeply about, but it’s definitely possible to think that the specifics of Charles Koch’s vision for free trade would be bad while thinking that the carelessness with which Donald Trump has tried to destroy free trade agreements is also bad.
I thought I was pretty careful breaking out “opposition leftists.” I realize that I just made up this phrase for the post, but I tried to be clear that I was talking about those folks who seem to derive their positions by the people they oppose. I doubt that any of these people are on SSC, because the point of this blog is to actually think about positions. But I do think there are a substantial group of leftists that define their positions as being against whatever the bad guys are for. I think this is true because of the constant drumbeat of people that bring up either the Kochs or Trump as the evil other side for every post they make. I suppose to some extent this is these leftists just making up the beliefs of Trump or Kochs so can oppose them, and not actively trying to find out their positions to determine what they must oppose. (Since few of those who vilify the Kochs seem to know their true positions, based on discussion above). But still it is true that these that must oppose Trump/Kochs in every case will have difficulty when it becomes well known when the two disagree.
I think those folks worried about comments should trust their friends to be able to deal with non-phatic conversation – or they would hardly be interested in the posts here in the first place.
Anyone tried Beeminder? I’m looking for effective ways to battle akrasia and stay on top of a few weekly goals that I haven’t been too successful keeping up with. So, if you’ve used beeminder and can share your experience, or have other suggestions for techniques/apps that help with akrasia, I’d appreciate hearing about it.
Haven’t used it personally, but I remembered this post on Less Wrong where some people talk about it. Hope it helps.
There’s lots of useful reviews and additional suggestions there. That really helps, thanks!
I’d recommend it. I had a very productive month using them, though I did eventually get lazy and lose my money. A possible problem is that I really liked their product and felt they deserved the money anyway, lessening my incentive to not lose it.
There’s probably room in the market for an alternative service where you put something like $10,000 in escrow. In the event you fail to meet your goal they keep $4,000, donate $5,000 to NAMBLA in your name, and use the remaining $1,000 to rent a billboard with your picture and donation amount.
Did you stop using it after a month?
I did, but I’d consider using it again in the future (with a much higher dollar value) if I were to fall into a rut. As it stands it got me into a habit that I was able to continue on my own. Granted, the money was lost, but having experienced the initial success it was simple enough to kickstart it again. Instead of meditating every morning on lost money, meditate every morning on the future where you wake up 12 months from now and realize another year is gone with nothing to show for it.
Here’s a question. What’s the least cool instrument one can play?
Proper instruments only, please. Dead-simple musical tools like the triangle, that are only one of many contraptions in the arsenal of a percussionist, don’t count.
I’m gonna say banjo, the official instrument of squealing like a pig, boy.
Octobass. Not because it isn’t a cool instrument, but because it is impossible to be cool playing it.
Well, since there are only seven of them according to Wikipedia, at least it’s a very localized uncoolness.
I was imagining a bass guitar with eight necks. Now that would be cool.
I’m into bluegrass so a banjo is cool to me. Plus, I think Jason Bateman looks cool playing banjo here.
Banjos have been popular hipster instruments for a while, though.
Doesn’t that sort of prove its uncoolness, though? Hipsters are all about trying to revive things that are deeply, deeply out of fashion, like one-speed bikes and waxed mustaches.
I wouldn’t consider Mumford and Sons uncool, at least.
They became a lot less cool when they stopped playing banjos.
Acoustic guitar.
I’m going to take the obvious answer: the accordion.
Viola. As evidenced by the jokes.
“What’s the definition of a minor second?”
“Two Violas in unison”
“What do you do if your 4th Viola dies?”
“Move him forward a desk.”
“Why did the thief break into a home, steal nothing, and smash the viola?”
“He’d been sentenced to community service.”
My favourite one is
Kazoo.
Xylophone.
Reasons:
1) Felt-tipped mallets
2) Often color-coded and therefore dumbed down for children, and 2a) Very hard to play professionally
3) Used in the “Sex and the City” theme song
You clearly haven’t heard In My Arms, Many Flowers.
And it would only weigh 50 kg!
My vote goes to the hurdy-gurdy. I think the sample photos of the players say more than enough.
I’ll nominate the harpsichord. (And I have a good friend who’s a harpsichord player.)
Approximately no cool people play harpsichord: it’s pretty much all music geeks who like Renaissance music.
My school had a harpsichord, and what’s considerably worse, someone who could play it.
Just for the record, I play the five string banjo. But bluegrass; I’m not a hipster.
And in college I absolutely used it to pick up chicks. They see your fingers moving that fast and it gets ’em thinkin’.
Anything that is part of a bass section, with the tuba being particularly likely to get a wedgie.
8 string bass guitar detuned, played while wearing track pants and adidas shoes
I really want to say “anything with a double-reed”- who’s ever been impressed by a bassoon?- but I’m biased because I had to play the oboe in middle school and I really, really hated it.
A close second would be those sad, cheap, tinny-sounding electric keyboards with three octaves and no dynamics or pedals. I used to teach piano and it hurt my heart when a student’s parents were willing to invest in private lessons but wouldn’t get their child a proper keyboard/piano. Even if you are a master pianist, you will sound like a child on one of these.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
I’ve heard some double-reed instruments, notably shawms, are really loud. Perhaps they would score highly if we were looking for the most annoying instruments.
Drayneflete Carol
Our encampment at Pennsic is called the Enchanted Ground. The Enchanted Ground Defense Force is armed with shawms.
A shawm can drive a bagpipe from the field.
I dunno, does a vuvuzela count as an instrument?
No one is willing to step up and take a swing at the pipe organ? Or recorder?
It would depend on what you mean by cool, but a pipe organ is amazing and lots of people still play them and enjoy them.
I mean, look at and listen to this: Organ and Choir.
I was going to vote recorder! I say this as someone who owns sopranino/soprano/alto/tenor, who taught recorder classes in middle school, and who played in a church recorder quartet in high school: no matter how nice your instrument is or how well you play, people will have to make a conscious effort not to hear echoes of a class of six year olds making cheap plastic screech.
“Stairway to Heaven” though.
I dare you to listen to the intro to “Mr. Crowley” and say that the pipe organ isn’t cool.
What are the best rationalist community articles about these subjects? : Art, entertainment, passion/personal fit,
Anyone here that plays fortnite? I would like to add you as a friend in the game if so.
My username is: Vater1234
What? Comments on SSC have consistently been better than… pretty much every single other comment section on the internet I’ve ever seen.
Perhaps there are people for whom that is the problem.
Let’s taboo “better”: Smart comments? Probably not a problem. Different opinions? Uh-oh.
Regarding lead and crime – Kevin Drum responds:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/06/lead-and-crime-in-eastern-europe-a-hopeless-case/
Never played OW. But in TF2 I mained engineer. I was probably the only person who preferred the widowmaker to the pre-nerf Pomson.
I did something very uncharacteristic recently and voluntarily watched a Nostalgia Chick video. Specifically, about the ideology or lack-thereof of the First Order and by extension the Empire. One question which was obviously missing in that analysis, and which I would like your collective input on, was this: how comfortable was the average human subject of the First Order or the Empire before it?
Most people aren’t fanatics. They’ll nod along with propaganda but if you want them to do more than mouth slogans they’re going to have to have some skin in the game. So what did the First Order and the Empire actually offer their subjects?
It’s actually very unclear! I tried to summarize what we do know below, based on the films and animated series. It looks like the First Order contains at least pockets of affluence and security, although they really seem to hate kids (maybe one of them made fun of Snoke’s goofy name?). The Empire, by contrast, has the nicest city we see outside of their area of control and what we do see of a core world makes it look like a hellhole. In either case the vast majority of the places we visit are lawless borderlands which have seemingly changed little since the Old Republic.
Life Under the Empire
In the original trilogy, we only actually see three settlements on inhabited planets: Mos Eisley spaceport on Tattooine, Cloud City on Bespin, and the Ewok village on Endor’s forest moon. Both Tattooine and Bespin are nominally ruled by the Empire, but they only actually show up at either because they’re looking for fugatives. So while we see Stormtroopers running around setting up checkpoints, searching homes, and man-handling people that’s clearly an extraordinary occurrence in those places.
In the “Star Wars Stories,” Solo and Rogue One, we also see Jedha City on Jedha, a spaceport on Corellia, a mine on Kessel, and a village near an abandoned refinery on Savareen. This has a bit more meat, since we now get to see two worlds under direct imperial rule: the mid rim world Jedha and the core world of Corellia. The outer rim worlds are depicted similarly to those in the original trilogy and so aren’t really worth getting into.
Jedha City, AAK the Holy City, was a center of pilgrimage to the “ancient religion” of the Jedi, AKA the traitors who tried to seize power and assassinate the Emperor. The imperial occupation and mining of the Khyber crystals naturally doesn’t sit well with the populace and when we enter the story the insurgency there is too “extreme” for the Rebel Alliance to feel comfortable working with them directly. Imperial rule is a brutal occupation which ends in a wholesale massacre, but it’s far from clear how the Empire could have avoided an insurgency after the destruction of the Jedi.
Corellia is more interesting to me. Armies of human street children are controlled by alien mob bosses, evidently with the cooperation of corrupt imperial authorities. The Stormtroopers are nearly as obnoxious and incompetent as the TSA, hassling everyone who tries to get on a transport off-world. You can get out within a matter of seconds by joining the Imperial Military but the majority of recruits get sent to Planet Vietnam.
I haven’t seen Rebels, which probably depicts more worlds.
Life Under the First Order
In the two movies of the Disney trilogy we have so far seen a lot more settlements on inhabited planets but only one, Canto Bight on Cantonicna, which is actually under First Order rule. The vast majority of their territory is either newly conquered or in the Uncharted Regions although we can make some inferences given Finn’s backstory.
Canto Bight is the nicest place we’ve seen so far in the Star Wars universe after the end of the Prequel Trilogy but we’re obviously supposed to disapprove of it. The mall cops who run the place will tow your spaceship without a valid landing permit, but otherwise seem content to sit back and eat donuts quietly. There are Saudi Arabian style child slaves as jockeys for their Chocobo races, which is obviously bad. Supposedly all of the wealthy residents made their money through war profiteering, which seems unlikely but whatever.
We never see the Uncharted Regions but the First Order evidently has a devshirme system similar to the Ottoman Empire. They take children away from their parents and raise them from infancy on Star Destroyers to be the next generation of Stormtroopers. This is notably different from the Empire which, if Solo is to be believed, filled their ranks at least in part with teenage volunteers.
Don’t forget the Christmas Special! We see the Stormtroopers searching a wookie house, as well, so maybe that is just how they operated.
That’s a very good point, I had forgotten about the Holiday Special.
The Empire broadcasting Bea Arthur’s Goodnight but not goodbye as required viewing for all Imperial subjects should qualify as a war crime on the scale of the destruction of Alderon. I barely survived it myself.
That said, I’m not sure whether their treatment of Chewie’s family differs from what we’ve seen before. They’re looking for fugatives again, and it was unclear to me whether Kashyyyk was actually under imperial control in more than name.
Actually that’s a really interesting question. Good analysis too. I’d also point out a few of the softer implications that fall out from the grand military strategy of the Empire. And I don’t just mean their strategy on saving training dollars by teaching stormtroopers to shoot at carnival arcades.
The entire military strategy of the Empire hinges on massive, overwhelming and perpetually undeployed force. A Death Star is a nuclear bomb equivalent, and while using it once proves you both have the will and capacity to use such weapons, actually using them on your own civilian population regularly is a great way to ensure that you have no civilians when the dust settles. It is explicitly stated that the Death Star is there to save money on troops and ships required to garrison planets traditionally, which strongly implies that intimidation is the goal rather than actually popping planets.
The fact that the Empire is willing to spend so much on a superweapon for mere intimidation purposes is telling of their popular support. Or rather, their lack of faith in their popular support. Actually, it sounds more like they’re worried about being murdered in their beds by a popular uprising at any second.
Given their economy hasn’t imploded from rebellion, however, we can infer that there are power blocks within the Empire that wholeheartedly support the regime. Maybe cynically, maybe actually believing the hype. These are most likely the ruling classes of various planets as otherwise the Rebellion wouldn’t have nearly the fodder it has nor would the Empire need worry about a popular rebellion. But, given Alderans fate, its also clear that not all blocs are convinced and some are actively working against the Empire.
For the civilians it’s going to depend a lot on what kind of regime they live under. Collaborating governments’ citizens probably only see the lighter side of the Empire’s governance. Though they may grumble about their taxes being spent on Death Stars, they’re ambivalent to supporting of the regime. Neutral planets, those that the Empire doesn’t care about for some strategic reason, likely never see more than a star destroyer showing the flag. Their citizens either dislike the Empire or just don’t care. Their governments resent paying what is essentially protection money but don’t have the ability to do anything about it other than slip the Rebelion a few credits under the table.
There are no openly hostile governments. Not any more. But there’s plenty of places that had them and are now under direct rule. The Empire is not great at direct rule and tends to lead people at blaster point in every example we’ve seen so they are highly resented. However, these planets have little in the way of resistance so this is fine as long as the local rebels don’t get access to anything more powerful than anti-tank weapons.
Overall then, I’d expect there to be a few diehard Empire supporters. A majority of people in the ambivalent to disliking the Empire band. And a violent and angry minority.
As I said here after watching The Force Awakens (no interest in seeing TLJ), it looks like the New Republic was only ever a star-state, controlling one system with several habitable planets that we see Starkiller Base blow up. This implies that every star system is independent, groups like the First Order notwithstanding. The heroes of the OT created something that looks like the Warlords Era of China but with tens of billions of warlords. The First Order must operate by sending starships from system to system on a circuit of “tax collecting”, and planets could remain sovereign by building their own ships.
Basically, Tarkin was right. Galactic-scale government was only kept in existence by the fear of the stellar governors that supporting a rebellion would get their planet blown up.
Now the really interesting question is how did the old Republic collect taxes?
The whole thing with Starkiller Base and the Hosnian system hurts my brain. It’s a perfect example of why JJ Abrams needs to be kept as far away from established SF feanchises as possible. It’s Red Matter all over again.
That said, the explanation we got in the film for why losing one key system could cripple the New Republic sort of makes sense if you squint at it.
The Old Republic didn’t have a standing army and didn’t seem to see the need for one. We saw in Episode I that the Senate’s response to one member blockading another was to send in a pair of Jedi and there’s nothing in the dialogue to indicate that this was an unusually meager response. That was the whole impetus for Darth Sidious to mastermind the Clone Wars: he had to create a crisis serious enough that even the Jedi would have to sign off on his Grand Army.
The Rebel Alliance was never a particularly large force. Their fleet started out small and stayed that way right up until the Emperor’s death in Episode VI. Compare the fleet in Rogue One, which is not that huge to start with and is nearly destroyed by the end of the movie, to General Grevious’s fleet in the beginning of Episode III.
The beginning of Episode VII established three things immediately. First, that the New Republic doesn’t take the First Order seriously as a military threat. Second, that the New Republic’s nascent fleet, likely built around the core of the Rebel Alliance fleet, suffered huge losses in the Battle of Jakku which ended the war. Third, that when the New Republic was threatened by the revanchist First Order, General Leia saw building an entirely new Resistance fleet from scratch as a more viable plan to defeat them than to fight for war in the Senate.
So the New Republic started with what was probably a fairly small Starfleet. It suffered heavy losses in order to secure (seemingly) final victory over the New Republic’s only real threat. And the Starfleet circa the start of Episode VII is unprepared to defend the galaxy from a major military threat. From this we can infer that the New Republic doesn’t see the need to rebuild, much less expand, its relatively small fleet but keeps it around as a combination of nostalgia and as a Praetorian guard for the capital. They prefer a soft-power approach, like the Old Republic, but using local irregular forces instead of Jedi.
If that’s accurate, it makes sense that crippling the nucleus of the New Republic Starfleet and simultaneously decapitating the government before it could vote to rapidly raise more armies (a la the Clone Wars) would be a deathblow. If the First Order can fight one system’s defensive fleet at a time instead of facing a second Grand Army of the Republic, it makes sense that they would be able to chew through most of the galaxy off-screen by the opening crawl of Episode VIII.
I hate that scene so much. When they blow up that capital, I actually broke out laughing in the theater it was so absurd and hamfisted. the comparison to the destruction of alderaan couldn’t be more striking.
@it was so absurd and hamfisted. The comparison to the destruction of Alderaan couldn’t be more striking.
Yes! That was when I quit Star Wars. Expensive incompetence is annoying. It’s not like there aren’t any amazing astronomy pictures out there aching to be stuffed into space opera battle scenes.
When I saw that scene in the film, I didn’t understand which planets had been destroyed or why they were important. I think I assumed it was a random terror attack (considering the average IQs of the guys in charge of the First Order, firing their weapons at random planets would be in character). A few weeks later, I looked it up on Wikipedia or something.
I don’t buy that the New Republic ruled the galaxy. Leia was supposed to be the Sun Yat-Sen of the rebellion against the Emperor. Even though Mom Mothman was apparently Chancellor, Leia was central enough that she would have been nominating her brother Senator for Tatooine, her husband Senator for Corellia, etc. But if “the New Republic” only controlled the Hosnian system, these positions would be a bad joke, which explains why Han would F off to become a smuggler again and Luke a hermit.
I guess I have to disagree.
I absolutely buy that the New Republic as depicted rules the core worlds, and that their rule may even extend out as far out as it did in the days of the Old Republic. They don’t seem to have much of a standing army, really just the one fleet, but that’s seemingly more than what the Old Republic had prior to the Clone Wars.
Think about it like the EU. The military forces directly available to Brussels are embarrassing for a supposedly continental government. The European Union’s military manpower is only slightly greater than that of the NYPD. But if the European Commission decides that bananas beyond a certain curvature are illegal, member states may grumble but they go ahead and start throwing out illlegal bananas.
Why did Han and Chewie leave the Republic to become smugglers again? There’s no good answer in universe because it was a dumb attempt to pander to our nostalgia. Even if he did get sick of galactic government, it would have made infinitely more sense if he had set himself up like Lando on some pleasant but out of the way colony where he could run things his way. But there are limits to how far I’ll bend over backwards in my head-canon to accommodate dumb filmmaking.
I also have mostly lost interest in Star Wars after the two Disney main-line sequels. The last movie was just embarrassingly dumb and bad, with giant logic holes at every level. The last movie I thought was any good in that series was _Rogue One_.
The military forces directly available to Brussels include the most powerful army, navy, and air force on the planet. Possibly that wasn’t the Brussels you were thinking about, but it is not a coincidence that it is Brussels.
A republic, federation, league, or union, that has to call on its member states for armies and navies is a plausible arrangement. But if your republic/federation/league/union/whatever is faced by an explicitly military threat from essentially the same people they defeated in an existential military conflict a generation ago, then either there is a vast army and navy available to crush the revanchists, or the republic is a joke. If the republic is a joke, then the story should be about the real powers in the game, the Core Systems or Sector Governments or whatever, and at minimum we should be seeing how they deal with ridiculosities like the “New Order”.
@John Schilling,
Excellent point vis-a-vis Brussels and the central role of NATO defending Europe.
I can’t argue that it isn’t a joke by your criteria. I guess I just don’t share your annoyance with that. If someone made a movie set in the late 18th century that involved the assassination of the Holy Roman Emperor as a prelude to invading Germany, I wouldn’t be upset that we don’t get the play-by-play of how Prussia reacts. The focus of the story isn’t on the relationships between the German princely states, so that can be in the background.
Almost all of the scenes involving the New Republic were cut from the theatrical release. It’s not taking up a huge amount of narrative space that would justify getting into the nitty-gritty of how it’s governed. That would be cool to explore but that’s something I don’t fault the film for avoiding after the endless Senate scenes in the prequels.
I just realized I’ve made this unnecessarily confusing by referring to the Galactic Republic as the Old Republic. Blame my bad memory, I forgot that those were two different things.
A lot of Star Wars political weirdness makes sense when you realize its influences. Star Wars is heavily influenced by two things: The Hidden Fortress and American reactions to Vietnam. The Hidden Fortress takes place in Warring States Era Japan.
Star Wars is thus originally politically: “What if the Shogunate suffered a democratic insurgency.” The prequel trilogy is: “What if the Shogunate were a quasi-democratic government representing the daimyos, merchant democracies, peasant collectives, etc.” The sequel trilogy is: “What if the Shogunate suffered a fascist insurgency while the fascists simultaneously suffered a democratic insurgency.”
But in all cases, it remains the Shogunate. It has a central han (Coruscant, Imperial Center, Hosnian Prime). It has tozama and fudai daimyo/systems (Alderaan is tozama, naturally). It has directly administered han with some key military bases. It tries to play local lordly politics (such as by disbanding the Senate and replacing them with new overlords, the Moffs). And so on. Each of these individual entities is individually centralized but the overall system is feudal.
Just one. By itself.
Yes. Just as the US has one capital, by itself.
This is entirely consonant with the Japanese experience. When the Asakura Shogunate’s capital burned down, the entire country fell into chaos. If one of the two factions fighting over it had definitively won the battles of the Onin War, they probably would have dominated the whole island afterward. But they fought to a draw and led to a century of civil war.
You might say it was solo.
Those in the SF Bay Area, it’s voting day!
Anyone have strong opinions on any of the ballot measures?
I’m thinking over Regional Measure 3, the $3 increase to bridge tolls, and wondering if anyone has any good analysis on this?
Germaine Greer attempts the rare reverse motte-and-bailey:
Not all rape is really terrible, therefore rape in general isn’t that bad.
There’s downsides to making a category so broad all examples are non-central.
That is to say, perhaps the distinction between violent coercion and cajoling is bigger than that between eager and reluctant.
But is this really a fault in the law, or just popular discussion of the morality of it all? Surely the law is already capable of distinguishing violent rape from date rape from asking harshly etc. down the line, colleges withstanding perhaps?
As far as I am aware, no; there aren’t degrees of rape, except insofar as some might get prosecuted as sexual assault instead, of which there is a little more give to the laws.
I’d say it is less to do with the law as written, and more to do with fifty years of creative reinterpretation of the concept of rape to include as much bad sex as possible.
Have there really been fifty years of creative reinterpretation of rape?
—Violently assaulting someone to get sex is the central example of “rape”.
—Deliberately drugging someone to get sex fully deserves the same stigma.
—Seeking out sloppy drunk people at a bar / club / party because they are very easy to manipulate, even if you don’t personally drug them or use any physical force, is a little less central but still deserves heavy stigma.
—Blackmailing / coercing someone into sex with non-violent threats, such as a boss saying that they will only promote an employee if they get “a little something in return”, is a non-central example, and isn’t technically “rape” if you insist on a very strict definition, but still deserves a much harsher label than “bad sex”
—Two individuals consent to sex. Things take a turn / one of them changes their mind, and they speak out about it. The other individual doesn’t stop. This might be non-central, but is justifiably described as rape.
—Two individuals consent to sex. One of them changes their mind or has some reservations, but they don’t speak out in the moment. I understand that a level of fear and social conditioning can make it hard for someone to speak out in the moment, and I also understand not wanting to accuse someone of a crime if they didn’t know they were doing wrong. (Affirmative consent standards try to mitigate this by encouraging communication, but miscommunications and misunderstandings will always be inevitable, especially when intoxication and inexperience are involved)
This last example is the only scenario I know of where a “creative interpretation of rape” can end up netting you a lot of what’s simply “bad sex”. I might be wrong, but I think the past fifty years have mostly been spent pushing back against the other four examples in between that and outright violent assault. (Forgive me if you were just being hyperbolic with the phrase “fifty years”)
I was not being hyberbolic; the idea that rape is non-consensual sex is a change from what it originally referred to, which was something more like cattle rustling.
As our attitudes towards women’s rights / human dignity changed, the conceptualization of rape as non-consensual sex became the dominant way of thinking, which triggered sudden social changes when the implications of this started to fall out.
But our social attitudes are still informed by something more like “Stealing a valuable and irreplaceable commodity” than “Battering someone in a specific way”. Our social attitudes still reflect women-as-property ideals; they’ve been made into their own property, and thus the crime is against them, but otherwise attitudes haven’t actually changed that much. There is thus a horrible mismatch between our moral attitudes towards rape as a concept, and our moral attitudes towards the central example of rape, which at this point is probably more like “two people drinking and having sex” than “violent sexual assault”.
I guess I see what you mean. I had interpreted your comment as “fifty years of reinterpreting ‘rape’ to mean sex that is merely unenjoyable”, which I don’t think is true at all. Also, I think the large number of people complaining that rape accusations now frequently cover “two people drinking and having sex” means that it isn’t the central example. In the Me Too discussions, I’ve heard plenty of people suggest that my third example — blackmailing and coercing someone into sex with non-violent threats — doesn’t even qualify as rape, because those women could have just said no, they could’ve walked out the room, they could’ve reported it immediately, but they chose to go through with it. I could be mistaken, but I think I even saw a woman on Fox News making this argument. The use of physical force / drugs is still pretty mainstream as a central example.
mdet –
I may be misusing terminology; by central example, I am thinking of “The most common case as law defines it”, not “The example somebody thinks of”.
So there is a mismatch between those.
Do you count sex with a prostitute as rape? If not, then sex with a superior who will give you a promotion, or the Hollywood casting couch, or similar implicit quid pro quo transactions, probably shouldn’t be counted either.
I’d say those are different cases. A prostitute is in a situation where the exchange of sex for money is established at the beginning.
A boss making a change in an implied contract which didn’t include sex for money/promotion isn’t the same. It might not be rape, but it’s some sort of defection.
I agree that if it is introduced as an additional term it may be a form of contract default. But that doesn’t apply to all the examples, and it isn’t rape.
There’s kind of this spectrum of sleaze, maybe we can call it the Harvey Hierarchy
1) Hey little girl, make me happy and you’ll go places.
2) You want this part in my movie, get on your knees and perform.
3) You ever want a part in any of my productions, you’ll put out whenever I call for you.
4) You don’t put out, I’ll make sure you never work in this business again.
The second is transactional. The last is properly termed rape, I think.
I am uncomfortable with the comparison (not sure how I feel about prostitution, but I definitely think exchanging sexual favors for promotions and benefits at work is bad), but I’m not sure how to resolve it.
The only differences I can come up with at the moment are Nancy’s point about a change in the contract (“You didn’t tell me when I was hired that I’d have to give head to get ahead”), and a possibly related point that if sleeping with the boss is not an option for every employee, then there’s some discrimination going on. So if the boss tells everyone from the start “Sexual favors are a/the route to raises and promotions”, then the job is comparable to prostitution, but if it doesn’t come up until later then it’s (literal) sex discrimination / violation of contract? Ok, I guess…
Working as a prostitute isn’t an option for everyone, so working as a prostitute/secretary isn’t an option for everyone either. But the same is true for basically every other job; some people can do [X], some can’t. Fortunately, there is a diversity of jobs so this shouldn’t be a problem.
The bit where approximately nobody ever honestly advertises for a prostitute/secretary is, legitimately, a dealbreaker. Or nearly so; I can steelman scenarios where the social stigma around prostitution leads to economic advantage for tacitly negotiating camouflaged sex-for-benefits arrangements over explicitly negotiating prostitution deals. But tacitly negotiating sexual consent is tricky enough even if there isn’t money involved, and in practice there’s usually a strong element of fraud involved in such arrangements.
Is this the backlash by second wave feminists of later generations framing bad sex as rape?
That’s not quite how I read her although your analogy is clever. I think she’s just being intentionally provocative about the subset of cases where there’s a lot of fog so it’s not clear what happened.
I think by her serious reasoning, as far as I guess tell violent cases or cases where violence was threatened would still be assault, battery, etc. which are pretty heavily punished.
On the other hand, she’s clearly just provoking people when she says things like “I reckon 200 hours of community service will do – would do me. ” in reference to “In case you’re wondering whether with my apparently flippant attitude I actually have any understanding of the gravity of the crime of rape, I was violently raped days before my 19th birthday. I was beaten half-unconscious.”
I think what she’s saying is less crazy than it sounds. A trade-off of some more reliable and rapid but lesser punishment (like community service) in unclear hazy cases that a lot of people wouldn’t call rape (like some mutually drunken hook-ups) might be better than the current regime of very unlikely but large punishments. It’s less unfair to accidentally punished innocents, so it seems more reasonable to lower the standards of evidence.
I have heard from a number of people that they would never pursue rape charges against their rapists, given the disparity of the sentence to what they experienced.
Doesn’t sound crazy to me at all, although I’d favor rape be broken up into first degree, second degree, third degree, and misdemeanor, or something along those lines, if we don’t just treat rape as the less significant crime than the violence or druggings sometimes associated with it, and push for the heavier sentencing to fall on those other things instead.
Virtually all municipalities in the U.S. already do this, and have done so for decades if not centuries.
My vague impression upon googling is that those don’t cover as far as modern feminism and changing social mores would cover.
For example, this website says that in Washington third-degree rape “still involves “clearly-expressed” lack of consent or threat of harm to the alleged victim’s property”.
I can’t find any examples of misdemeanor rape except for some forms of statutory rape (which may be consensual, and thus when an 18 year old and a 16 year old have sex, it’s not clear to me how more recent mores would compare to the law).
There’s still a clear gap at least between Washington state law and modern college campus theory that sex is rape without an explicit verbal yes.
It all depends on your jurisdiction, and different rules apply. In my state there’s no such crime as “rape.” The crime is “sexual assault,” with the violent type being “first degree sexual assault” and the drugging / coercive type being second degree. Unwanted touching without penetration is “sexual battery.” Having sex with a person who consensually got drunk and is now so far gone they cannot possibly know what they’re doing but doesn’t slur out a “no” is not a crime in my state.
On the other hand, in Arizona, having sex with someone who you know or should reasonably know is too intoxicated to consent, regardless of your own intoxication, is one form of criminal sexual assault that can be punished.
I think it’s that sort of case people would like a different name and a lesser sentence for. I can agree that’s behavior that should be curtailed, and there would probably be a lot less outrage generated in lightly punishing such behavior if it weren’t called “rape,” which people equate with knife wielding psychos in a dark alley.
I’ve been getting 504 errors (took too long to load) sometimes when I reload ssc. Weirdly, they can show up in less than a second.
SSC becomes available reasonably soon– sometimes on an immediate second reload. Still, is anyone else getting this? What might be going on?
I forgot to mention– my comments do go through.
I use Chrome.
Just got that this morning. But I think that’s the first time it’s happened (at least for a while).
Yes. However, when seeing this while posting comments, the comments do go through.
It appears to be resolved.
So the gay wedding cake decision is out. The short version is they didn’t decide whether or not a person can be compelled to provide services for gay weddings against their sincere religious belief or not, or whether or not creating something for such a service constitutes “speech.” They decided that in this instance, they can’t compel this baker, because the Colorado Civil Rights Commission displayed such hostility to religion that he did not get a fair or impartial hearing. The counterfactual in which they made the same ruling but were not so openly hostile to religion is left up in the air. I’m a little bothered by that because 1) Ginsberg and Sotomayor disagree and say you can be just as hostile as you want so long as you rule in favor of the gays and 2) Kagan and Breyer say you still have to rule for the gays you just can’t be such a dick about it (or do a better job of masking your hostility). That’s not looking good for the freedom of religion / association / speech side.
As SSC has an interest in modeling thought process, extending charity, and detecting fallacious arguments, I thought it might be interesting to discuss the mode of thought of the commissioner who said:
This seems to imply that Christian opposition to gay marriage is mere rhetoric. Christianity doesn’t really oppose gay marriage, some homophobes are simply using Christianity as an excuse to do what they really want to do, which is hurt gays. I was immediately reminded of Fetal Attraction: Abortion and the Principle of Charity.
Freedom of religion was used to justify the holocaust? I’m going to need a cite for that.
Also,
I know the court only decides on cases before them, but they know that any loophole that they leave will only lead to another similar case in a very short time that they will have to take. Would it really be a blow to the rule of law to say “We do/do not think the law compels the actions in the general case, and in this particular instance, there are mitigating factors” rather than just pronounce the latter and let lower courts speculate on the former?
Actually it sounds like that is what they did, but perhaps not in an official matter?
They could have done half of what Ginsberg and Sotomayor wanted to do, which was to ignore the comments of the commissioner, because they’re either irrelevant in application of the law, or they’re irrelevant because the other 2 bodies deciding against Phillips did not show such hostility. From my understanding, the complaint of discrimination was first made to the Commission (where the hostile comments were made), which found probable cause of discrimination, and then they referred the case to an Administrative Law Judge, who ruled against Phillips (but there’s no record of this judge showing such hostility). This decision was appealed to the State Court of Appeals, which also ruled against Phillips.
So, sure, the Commission did bad with their bias, but that seems irrelevant when the judge and the appeals court ruled the same way without the open hostility. Were they right or wrong in their decisions? I think the SC could have answered that question one way or the other and given at least this one battle in the interminable culture war some closure.
Wasn’t part of the evidence for the commission’s “hostility” not merely their comments, but that they ruled in other cases that bakers were NOT compelled to produce cakes with messages they disapproved of? In other words, the ruling itself, regardless of the commentary that went into it, was not content neutral and indicated a particular hostility to religious beliefs.
So the punt it not just “this time be nice”, but “this time come up with a compelling constitutional reason to rule differently in this one case”.
Right, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. I think they are trying to pass the buck. Maybe they think the law is unclear, in which case they should pass it back to the legislature explicitly saying so. But “we’re only ruling on a technicality; find a perfect case and bring that to us, then we can rule on the law” seems useless and cowardly stance.
Perhaps it is due to some internal politics and some judges think a delay is the best they can do, or perhaps they see the principle differently and are extremely hesitant to overstep their role. I can understand and agree with them not wanting to make law, but eventually they or their successors will rule on the constitutionality of it.
@gbdub:
The cases weren’t exactly the same. Masterpiece Cakeshop wouldn’t sell cakes or cupcakes at all for gay wedding receptions, whether or not the cakes had messages. (The baker took the position that any cake was his artistic creation and would have involved him in the ceremony). The in the other three cases, a guy asked for a cake with an open Bible, then asked for a decoration with two groomsmen covered by a red X, and a quote from Leviticus condemning homosexuality. I believe all three bakeries said they would do a Bible cake, but not the X, and some said they wouldn’t do the Leviticus quote. (One bakery offered to give the guy a piping bag so he could do it himself). So those were arguably much more clearly about compelled speech.
I had a comment about this but I think it got eaten. I think that activist screwed up. He should have requested a “gay wedding cake” (white frosting, three tiers, little groom and groom figurine on top) because his Christian group was going to smash it in public as a statement against same-sex marriage and then seen what happened. Then it wouldn’t be an issue of “cake they wouldn’t sell to anyone” (cake with anti-gay statements on it) but a cake they would happily sell to people who didn’t wish to express the religious message the activist wanted to convey. Maybe they would still sell it to him, but I bet he could find some who wouldn’t, and there’s your apples-to-apples comparison.
But I also agree with Thomas, that it doesn’t matter that there wasn’t necessarily writing on the cake Phillips was asked to make. The courts have long held that many, many more things besides words count as speech.
I’m not saying there aren’t ways to distinguish the cases, some of them might even be constitutional. I’m just saying that my impression was that part of the Supreme Court’s basis for “hostility” was that the commission had failed to articulate those reasons adequately.
Anyway I agree with Conrad that the activists on the other side screwed up and overplayed it.
To me (and apparently at least Thomas) whether the cake has words ought to be irrelevant. A wedding cake is not “just a cake” any more than black armbands or red banners are “just pieces of cloth” or parades are “just people walking in a line”. They are inherently symbolic, and symbols have almost always fallen under “speech” for the purposes of 1A jurisprudence.
I’m normally pretty close to a speech absolutist, but I think buying a cake off the shelf is closer to renting a space than it is to requiring a minister to conduct the ceremony. Yes, having a gay wedding at your restaurant or reception hall might be seen as endorsing the wedding, but you’re not actually speaking.
Wedding cakes are very rarely “cakes off the shelf”. You don’t go to a place like Masterpiece unless you want custom work. And usually the bakery will at least show up and stage the cake, sometimes serve it (if it’s complicated) so it’s arguable that they would need to participate in some way.
But even then, “a cake at a wedding” is still a symbol, and once you’ve declared its purpose you’re asking the baker to be party to that purpose. An interesting example that was brought up was the discussion over whether designers ought provide clothes to Melania Trump for the inauguration – no one would argue that a generic “dress” is inherently political, but getting involved in tailoring a dress for a political event was (not too controversially) seen as political speech (or at least very very close to it).
I mean if the compromise was “I’ll bake you a plain tiered cake, but you have to do your own delivery and any custom decorations” I’d mostly be fine with that, though I don’t know how you get that into law or set a standard for other cases, and I’m not sure Masterpiece still wouldn’t have been smacked by the CO commission if they’d insisted on that.
He was willing to sell them a cake off the shelf. He was not willing to create a custom cake for the ceremony.
The culinary arts in general are clearly arts. Go watch Master Chef or something and listen to how the judges and contestants describe the vision they have for the flavors and presentation they’re creating. They clearly see this as an artistic endeavor. Cake making specifically is artistically judged, probably more so than other types of food preparation as flavor is often sacrificed to use materials better suited to aesthetically pleasing artistic construction.
Wedding cakes specifically are valued for their artistry. People spend more money on their wedding cake than probably any other single food item they will ever purchase. They meet with the cake maker, discuss their ideas, look at samples and photographs and follow trends. The mere presence of a wedding cake at a social gathering lets anyone who walks by and glances in immediately know they’re looking at a wedding and not a birthday or bar mitzvah or retirement party. People comment on the cake, photograph the cake, compliment the bride and the cake maker on its beauty, and clap and cheer when the cake is cut. This is clearly a meaningful symbol, imbued with purposeful communication.
I do not think this is true. From the decision:
Note also Footnote 5 in Ginsburg’s dissent:
I think the potential confusion is that he did not have a general policy against serving gay clients for non-wedding events, but would not sell ANY items for gay wedding events (apparently he also wouldn’t do Halloween cakes – so whatever you think about his religious beliefs, they seem to be sincere and affected the business for more than just gay weddings).
The particularly odd part about the whole thing is that the wedding in question happened 2 years before Colorado recognized same sex marriage, and 3 years before Obergefell. So in some sense Colorado was punishing Phillips for engaging in discrimination that the Colorado government was simultaneously engaging in!
@Iain
I stand corrected on selling cakes off the shelf.
@gbdub
Yes, Kennedy mentioned that. The decision is especially useless for guidance given the time frame.
Iain and gbdub are correct, although it’s worth noting that Waggoner conceded the case of already baked cakes in oral arguments. See pp. 4–6, in fact the very first question raised:
I’d say this is a tactical retreat from what Phillips actually said to the couple at the time.
I think at this point it starts to become tangled in another mess – IP.
There’s been cases where some meme creators and/or those depicted in them have tried to limit/remove their use in certain areas. I don’t think they’ve been particular successful in them but the internet is a bit harder to play gatekeeper than a store.
Could the baker state that his “works” are being placed in areas which he is against their use and push against this in terms of IP?
I think there are at least three separate questions that come up here:
a. What is the right way for the baker to behave?
If I were the baker, I’d bake the cake, because I don’t think gay marriage is evil. On the other hand, I don’t think less of the baker for refusing business in order to stay true to his religious beliefs–in fact, that raises my opinion of him a bit. Like a business staying closed on Sunday even though it costs them a lot of money, it’s a costly signal that they mean what they say about their beliefs.
b. What should the law compel the baker to do?
I’d rather see the baker free to refuse any business he finds offensive to his beliefs. I’ll agree that this means he can refuse to bake and decorate cakes for interracial marriages, and point out that it also means he can refuse to bake and decorate cakes for the local Nazis’ celebration of Hitler’s birthday[1]. And I’ll also point out that there is no indication that gays have any trouble buying wedding cakes–we’re not trying to break Jim Crow in the South in 1950 here. This is an exercise of state/community power over the conscience of this individual baker. This is something we’d be better off with less of, not more.
It seems to me like freedom to follow your own conscience in what jobs you will take on is pretty fundamental. Compelling people to do stuff against their conscience in the name of antidiscrimination law seems like a power that can be abused a lot of ways.
c. What does the constitution say on the matter?
I’ve long since stopped expecting the Supreme Court to just be looking at the letter of the constitution rather than their policy preferences when deciding on culture-warry cases, but ideally, they’d restrict themselves to what the constitution and existing precedent say, rather than making policy themselves. My not-too-well-informed guess is that in this case, the court is divided over what policy they think would be best.
That said, I don’t really know what the right ruling w.r.t. the constitution would be. (Though it’s really hard to believe that the constitution required gay marriages for all these years, but that was only noticed a couple years ago. That was another decision where the justices decided what policy they liked best. I agree with them on the policy, but IMO they massively overstepped their proper role. But that ship, like the one about wanting congress to declare wars, has long since sailed.)
[1] Though I don’t think political belief is a protected class the way race, religion, language, ethnicity, etc., are.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Political activities and affiliations are protected classes in California, for example; as far as I’ve been able to tell with five minutes of Google they aren’t in Colorado, although I did turn up one reference to “lawful conduct outside of work”. Suspect that might just be for employment law, though.
(I don’t think language is a common protected class either, although national origin is.)
A fourth question comes to mind: why would you even want to buy food from someone who openly hates you? Who knows what unsavory things he has done to it…
Well, they didn’t. It was a setup by activists. They knew before they went into the shop that they were going to be denied. The issue is not about helping beleaguered gays who cannot get cakes for their weddings because of rampant bigotry. I think one of the amicus briefs stated there were something like 67 other bakeries in the area who would make cakes for gay weddings. The point is to seek out and punish the tiny minority of conscientious objectors.
Also, while the gays might believe Phillips “openly hates them,” having heard Phillips talk, I don’t think that guy hates anyone.
Source? I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I don’t recall ever seeing any evidence for it.
A fourth question is what should the customer do. Is it right to try to force someone to provide a service that he does not want to provide because he views it as inconsistent with his beliefs?
The Supreme Court doesn’t have to take anything. Less than 1% of petitions to the court ever make it to oral argument. SCOTUS could easily have declined to grant certiorari to Masterpiece Cakeshop, in which case the decision of the lower court would have stood.
Cases appear before the Supreme Court when at least four of the justices agree that they are worth considering. In this case — given that the lower court had ruled against the baker — it’s pretty clear that Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Thomas voted to grant cert hoping that they could convince Kennedy to join them in a broad decision in favour of the baker. They were wrong, and had to settle for a much narrower holding.
As a result, the status quo remains in place, but with a warning that officials have to take freedom of religion seriously. Unless there’s a circuit split I don’t know about, I think that implies that bakers are still not allowed to refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings.
Okay. The previous summary made is sound more ambiguous (to me). Thank you for the clarification.
For the record, I agree entirely with Iain’s comment here, and in particular his last sentence regarding the import of the Masterpiece decision. Mr. Phillips is off the hook. Future bakers in jurisdictions with broad anti-discrimination laws, not so much. It will take years before a circuit split develops on this issue, if ever, and even after that the Court can continue ducking the issue if they don’t have a broad consensus.
The decision looks like a victory for PC– it’ll cost you if you can’t manage at least a display of tolerance. This may be a good thing.
I agree that it’s at least dubious that freedom of religion or religion itself was used to justify the holocaust. That was probably justified in terms of freedom of race.
Arg, please don’t shove that square peg in that round hole.
I don’t think “at least dubious” even comes close to how incredibly wrong the original statement is either. Executing specific religious groups is exactly the opposite of freedom of religion. The Nazis weren’t big on religious ideology either. The whole quote makes about as much sense as saying “freedom of religion or religion itself was responsible for the Soviet gulags”.
EDIT: I later realized that “freedom of race” may actually be some sort of dark humor.
And even if some Nazi had at some point uttered the phrase “freedom of religion” we can’t sacrifice words, let alone causes, because they are sloppily applied as cover for evil. We have to consider whether it is logically applicable, whether it is still an important principle within limits even so, etc.
If I start a murder spree slaying florists and say it is because flower arrangements offend my sense of beauty, that doesn’t imply society should start making the world ugly. My making an absurd leap of logic doesn’t invalidate the entire concept.
Off topic a bit, but this case reminds me why I hate “test cases” and really wish there was some way to deal with the issue of “standing” that didn’t require activists to target individuals.
Regardless of how you feel the issue ought to be decided, Masterpiece and its proprietor have been dragged through hell basically as a sacrifice to force clarification on a law everybody knew was going to be challenged up to the USSC in one way or another.
Frankly, I think the mere fact of being granted cert at the SC ought to prove that the constitutionality of the issue in question was doubtful enough to absolve the defendent. Especially in an issue like this where the defendent was an unwilling “test case” being used to apply an existing law to a novel purpose. Basically, the question of “do anti-discrimination laws compel artistic cake makers to serve gay weddings” was open enough that it seems really unfair to punish Masterpiece.
It really seems like it would be more just if there were a way to “pre-interpret” laws like this, rather than force activists to dragoon involuntary test subjects, who face real and potentially life altering consequences even if they win, to try out a legal theory.
+1
This is even worse in criminal cases, where you maybe spend a few years in prison before the supreme court gets around to hearing your case.
I hear you. I think the objection to that would be some combination of “the particulars matter” and “we have enough to do with real cases now you want us to spend our time on hypotheticals?” even though if they did that it would cut down on the cases they needed to rule on.
I mean obviously you would need to have some sort of filter, maybe an appointed or elected body of legal scholars whose job it is to come up with (hypothetical) test cases.
But whatever you choose, a filter that literally requires basically innocent people to be harmed in order to ask a question everyone wants asked anyway has to be one of the less good options?
I believe Mark Twain’s suggestion somewhere was that when Congress passes a law it should go to the Supreme Court to decide whether it was constitutional and only then come into effect.
But I can see some pretty obvious problems with that approach.
I think the biggest problem would be the commitment of the Court’s time. Since there’s already a distinction between facial challenges (contending that there is no way that the law could be applied constitutionally) and as-applied challenges (contending that the law is not applied constitutionally in practice, I think it’s at least plausible for all laws to go through some sort of facial challenge prior to enactment.
I believe the legal term here is “advisory opinion”. They do exist in some countries, of which Canada is probably the most respectable.
I also hate this aspect of the current system. Looking for arguments for it, though, I suspect the government would win even more cases when there wasn’t an actual injured party to show how their nice sounding laws were applied in practice.
The prohibition on advisory opinions comes out of the Case or Controversy Clause in the US Constitution. It is justified as a separation of powers concern: a Supreme Court that can make up its own cases out of thin air is dangerously close to a second executive / legislative branch.
Nevertheless, other jurisdictions do allow advisory opinions. In Canada, for example, they take the form of a reference question, and can only be requested by the federal government or a provincial government.
The Candian approach seems like a good compromise. There is still separation of powers, because the Court can’t invent questions for themselves. By requiring the questions come from the legislative branch, they also let the legislatures do the filtering – if you want to bring a case you don’t otherwise have standing for, you’d need to petition your legislator.
The one potential downside with such a system I could see is that if you had a fairly cowardly legislature, they could put any controversial issue into a highly ambiguous law and then force the court to eat the blowback from taking a side. But allowing the court to reject questions (basically requiring cert) or to rule very narrowly should probably corral that.
In my opinion the Case or Controversy requirement is a good check on a Court that has too few nowadays. But I do think that it served a useful purpose even back in times when the Court was less active. It helps avoid unintended consequences of “general principles” decisions when you require, as a matter of jurisdiction, that at least some of the consequences be demonstrated prior to taking the case.
I’m not saying it doesn’t have a purpose, or that it doesn’t serve as a check. I’m just of the opinion that there ought to be a way to achieve the same check without waiting until some private citizen is directly harmed by a known ambiguity in the existing jurisprudence.
Bear in mind that judges often love “facts and circumstances” analyses, multi-factor tests, etc. because they allow more judicial freedom and fewer hard cases (where a bright-line rule hurts a sympathetic litigant). Yes, such standards tend to create significant litigation costs due to uncertainty over the outcome, but it’s not the judges paying. (And the money flows to lawyers, and judges are all lawyers, so there’s a probably-subconscious thought process of “no harm done” in increased fees).
But in this case, I think there is a separate incentive for Kennedy to be vague and fact-dependent: exactly the chilling effect you are describing. I believe Kennedy wants to discourage future religious challenges asking for exemptions from anti-discrimination laws; he wants to protect Obergefell and he sees that too many exceptions could undermine his preferred rule. The best way to do that, without appearing too heavy-handed? Make it a “facts and circumstances” test. Then if a religious person wants to challenge it, he knows that he can’t win cheaply and easily by appealing to a bright-line Supreme Court rule that says he’s entitled to an exemption. Instead, he needs to be prepared to litigate all the way up to the Supreme Court and pray that he’s one of the tiny fraction of cases granted certiorari by the Court. There are going to be vanishingly few religious exemption claimants who are prepared to shoulder that uncertain process, which is exactly what Kennedy wants.
I’m not worried about chilling people who want to go through the whole process of appealing to the Supreme Court. I’m worried about people like the proprietor of Masterpiece who are basically sacrificial lambs for the sake of some other activist’s standing. (Yes, Masterpiece was the defendant here and could have renounced their right to appeal, but they were only brought into this in the first place because local gay activists wanted to resolve the open question in CO).
Right, I don’t disagree. Specifically, I think that the majority opinion leaves future religious dissenters in the position where they have to knuckle under unless they are prepared to be the sacrificial lambs and go all the way. The process is the punishment. Hypothetically, had the decision been broader (e.g. the Thomas concurrence), a religious baker confronted by an activist complaint could, fairly cheaply, hire a lawyer to write a letter citing that broad decision and telling the Commission / activist to get lost. Now, it’s true that the process could still be long and painful and expensive (this is the basis of lawfare) but it would be for both sides, and one side would know it was very likely to lose eventually, making lawfare litigation an unattractive proposition in the long run. In the current model, though, there’s no such certainty, so lawfare remains an attractive option.
Activists can always find test cases to fight other activists. And people who don’t have objections will just comply. A clear rule won’t change the behavior either of those two classes of people. But a religious objector who has two kids to feed and a $1,200 litigation budget? With a clear rule in favor of religious exercise, he might hold up the case and invoke it in his favor, at least at first. With the actual facts-and-circumstances rule, he’s more likely to keep his head down and keep quiet. Which, I believe, is exactly the outcome Kennedy and the liberal concurring justices want.
I tend to agree about Mr. Phillips. That said, being a party in a famous case is not all pain and suffering and bankruptcy, especially given how easy it is to fundraise over contentious issues. A lot of famed test cases involved people who knew exactly what they were getting into: for example, John Scopes agreed to be charged with the crime of teaching evolution.
The problem comes when we have to transition from legal theory to legal practice, to decide e.g. who the police are going to arrest today.
It is rare for a legislature to pass laws whose every possible application would be blatantly unconstitutional. Occasionally you’ll get something like an anti-flag-burning law, but those are mostly symbolic gestures that aren’t expected to have practical effect. If the law is intended to actually do anything in the field, it will be written to at least fit into a grey area where it isn’t slam-dunk unconstitutional across the board.
By the same token, it is basically impossible to pass a law whose every possible application would pass constitutional muster. See, e.g., the present example, because no matter what you think about about who should be forced to bake cakes for whom, if the implementation is “…on careful examination, we find that you are a Damn Dirty Christian, and therefore you have to bake the cake” then we’ve got a problem. And the enforcement is not decoupled from the law; having a Civil Rights Commission determine who has to bake cakes is going to lead to different results than having a Fair Business Practices Commission make the determination.
So either,
A: The court has to figure out in advance all the ways the law is going to be applied in the field, in which case they are going to miss a lot of important stuff, or
B: The court has to rule in favor of any law that would allow for some constitutionally legitimate application, in which case a lot of blatantly unconstitutional crap is going to go down under cover of “…and the Supreme Court said this was legit, so there!”, or
C: The court has to rule against any law which could possibly be applied in an unconstitutional manner, in which case we basically don’t get to have any new laws, or
D: The court has to wait and see how the law is actually implemented.
By prior precedent Ginsberg and Sotomayor are right. There’s a specific test for dealing with bias from a one member of a multi member panel to see whether it was outcome dispositive. See Mt. Healthy School District v. Doyle. Once again Kennedy went with his gut.
I agree with that. There was no reason to rule this narrowly. The Commission was biased, sure. And I think one can say “the commission” without having to say “one or two commissioners” because no one objected to the extreme anti-religious statements. In a decision-making body, silence does kind of imply consent. And regardless, the administrative law judge and the appeals court both ruled against the baker, and there’s no sign of bias from them, so were they right or wrong? Ginsberg, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer think they were right, Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas think they were wrong, how about you, Kennedy and Edwards? Can’t you just decide this thing for us already? Nope. Forever Culture War.
I’m not sure I agree with that. It’s saying that it’s rhetoric, sure, but I don’t think it’s saying that it’s mere rhetoric. I think the claim is that Christianity (as these people practice it) does really oppose gay marriage, and thus acting Christian in this manner hurts gays. Christianity isn’t the excuse to hurt gays, it is hurting gays.
The big problem I have with the quoted argument is that it’s begging the question – presuming at the start that this discrimination is wrongful discrimination of the same sort as the Holocaust and slavery, when that’s the very issue being adjudicated (something which I actually think is true, but which I believe needs to be properly argued for). And also a “Hitler ate sugar” sort of argument – presuming that it’s true that religion/freedom of religion were historically used to justify wrongful discrimination in the past, it doesn’t then follow that the next piece of discrimination that’s justified by religion/freedom of religion is wrongful. It doesn’t even follow that it’s a useful heuristic to err on the side of believing that it’s wrongful, not without additional data about overall wrongful/rightful rates of all the discrimination that’s been justified by religion/freedom of religion.
I think there ARE people who think it’s mere rhetoric. There are many Christians who are totally fine with same sex marriage and relationships. I’ve heard some of them say / some people point to them and say that any Christian who *isn’t* totally fine with same sex marriage and relationships is making a choice. “I’m choosing to love all people like Jesus said, you’re choosing to hate people because of some outdated line in Leviticus.”
In the case of Christians who oppose same sex marriage but accept contraception, I think this claim might be correct, but Catholics and others who go by natural law ethics are pretty consistent and coherent in their belief that sexual acts which aren’t consistent with procreation (including, but not limited to, same sex relationships) is wrong.
Yeah, a subset of fuzzy-headed Protestants. If you could let Martin Luther use a time machine, he’d recant and kiss Cardinal Bellarmine on both cheeks.
I send my briefcase to the point of Luther’s arrival, containing an ipad which will autoplay Pope Francis clips. Timeline preserved.
Well played, sir.
Catholics who are coherent in their belief aren’t amenable to this objection, but as long as we have prominent dissenters like Nancy Pelosi that’s not saying much—and we will always have Catholics like Pelosi. In fact, it may not help at all, because some will simply insist, “Those devout Catholics over there think contraception and same-sex marriage are awesome, and anyway Pope Francis said not to judge, so what are you doing living in the past?” Or compare the emails from Hillary’s server about founding Catholics United to change the Church, or the comments that social conservatism is “an amazing bastardization of the faith.” Color me pessimistic whether being Catholic is going to be a defense for long.
Sooo, Eastern Orthodoxy then?
Jaskologist is welcome to correct me, but I suspect Orthodoxy will fare no better here. They don’t have Pope Francis or bishops like Cupich, but unless I’m mistaken they don’t have the same philosophical, canon law, etc., resources to draw on either.
I was speaking for myself in that paragraph. If someone says “I live my life by natural law, including not using contraception”, then I’ll easily agree that they are not being “hateful” or “bigoted” or whatever by opposing same-sex relationships. Natural law passes my criteria for a sincere and deeply held religious belief that should be respected when possible, since Aristotle & St. Thomas Aquinas probably didn’t spend their lives writing countless ethical and philosophical arguments just so that, hundreds of years down the line, someone could have an excuse to not sell a cake. Anyone who thinks the pope’s “Who am I to judge?” meant Catholicism approves of homosexual acts obviously does not understand why the Catholic Church disapproved in the first place.
I agree. All I mean is that while you’re making (imo) a more reasonable judgment, most people won’t, and Catholicism’s at least as incomprehensible to progressives as other socially conservative Christianity. The distinction isn’t a difference to folks who think it’s a cover for bigotry or mere rhetoric, so in practice Catholics are in the same boat as conservative nondenominational or evangelical Christians.
Sorry if I’m talking past you here, mdet—we may just be speaking to two sides of the same problem.
In my opinion, I think the decision has all the hallmarks of being motivated transactional reasoning, designed for future unrelated fights, and actively hostile to Free Exercise protection in future battles.
Start with the majority opinion. Kennedy wrote it, which is clear from the sentimental tone and invocation of feelings as the highest good. Note these inclusions:
“The first [principle] is the authority of a State and its governmental entities to protect the rights and dignity of gay persons who are, or wish to be, married but who face discrimination…”
“Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth.”
“if that exception were not confined, then a long list of persons who provide goods and services for marriages and weddings might refuse to do so for gay persons, thus resulting in a community-wide stigma inconsistent with the history and dynamics of civil rights laws…”
It seems to me that Kennedy’s opinion is explicitly crafted to enshrine the feelings (“dignity”, “stigma”, “social outcast”) of gay couples as a compelling government interest. This means that, in the future, citations to Masterpiece will primarily be for the principle that it is a compelling government interest to bar any action which homosexual persons deem offensive enough to their dignity to make them “social outcasts.” It seems to encourage state laws to make social affirmation of homosexual persons mandatory (as opposed to behavior making homosexuals feel like “social outcasts”, which “cannot” be allowed). It is careful to reaffirm the means of doing so, anti-discrimination laws, and approvingly recites Employment Div. v. Smith to confirm its applicability to exactly this situation. The opinion even goes on to discuss hypothetical future cases, indicating that a pastor declining to perform a same-sex marriage is “clearly religious,” but that everyone below that level is up for grabs (i.e. hung out to dry).
So why does Phillips win at all? Look to the strategy of Marbury v. Madison. In Marbury, the Court created the right of judicial review by affirming it as a principle in a decision which reached the preferred result for the Court’s political opponents. Marbury, who was suing the Court’s political enemies, lost – but lost on the basis of the Court declaring its power to judge statutes unconstitutional (which was what the Court wanted in the long run). It was a “concede the battle to win the war” case. This looks the same. Kennedy clearly articulates every principle necessary to penalize future post-Obergefell Christians for refusing to embrace gay marriage (note that Kennedy emphasizes that Phillips’ objection occurred pre–Obergefell as a mitigating factor), while emphasizing a narrow window of victory for Phillips himself (the “animus” claim) adopted wholesale from Church of Lukumi v. Hialeah.
But why Church of Lukumi? And isn’t it encouraging for religious liberty that two liberals (Breyer and Kagan) signed on to give Phillips the win? These two questions are conjoined, and the division of the Court’s various opinions gives a strong clue how and why. Church of Lukumi is heavily cited by Kennedy’s majority opinion and Kagan’s separate concurrence relies solely upon that point for her vote. But Kagan’s concurrence primarily makes the argument that Phillips should have lost. Kagan argues that the Colorado Commission was correct to sanction Phillips and also correct to exonerate the pro-gay bakeries who refused to bake a cake with an anti-gay message. She then gestures in the direction of Lukumi and states that because Colorado did not rely upon the “obvious” distinction Kagan makes (in her argument with the Gorsuch concurrence) but instead relied on a non-content-neutral test of “offensiveness of message” (forbidden, she says, by Lukumi) then Colorado should lose. But note that this is a 7-2 decision. If Kagan’s concurrence were instead a dissent, Phillips still would have won, and perhaps on stronger ground.
Consider the following. Kennedy clearly considers Obergefell to be his legacy. He wants to protect it, and he considers the best way to improve its long-term enshrinement is to have the first decision after it be reassuring to religious libertarians while also discouraging future challenges for exemptions by religious persons. To do that he prefers to engender support amongst both the liberal and conservative wings if possible. So he determines that Phillips will win, on the narrowest possible grounds he can think of – Lukumi animus grounds – while reaffirming the validity of Obergefell while also including lots of language signaling that future religious plaintiffs (other than actual pastors / priests) would almost certainly lose. Since the conservative wing of the Court (represented by Gorsuch’s concurrence and Thomas’ concurrence) would have ruled with him on broader grounds, Kennedy could have created a 5-4 win and had his narrow Lukumi-based plurality opinion (compared with the Gorsuch / Thomas wider-scope concurrences). But plurality opinions are somewhat thin gruel for a “solidifying” decision designed to cement the legacy of Obergefell. Instead, he would prefer a full majority opinion on narrow grounds. But how to get the extra votes?
Knowing all this, Kagan and Breyer made a pragmatic decision. Based on Kennedy, they were going to lose anyway on narrow grounds, but rather than alienate Kennedy by provoking a 5-4 split, they chose to woo him by pretending to give him a stronger majority. In exchange, they no doubt encouraged him to beef up the language regarding gay persons’ “dignity” and the dicta which will be cited to shoot down cases brought by future religious persons. I fully expect that they also encouraged him to beef up the Lukumi language. But why would Kagan and Breyer want stronger Lukumi emphasis, since Lukumi is pro-Free Exercise? Because Kennedy’s opinion emphasizes not the language regarding religious freedom rights of citizens, but rather language on the government obligation of “religious neutrality.” This means that Kagan and Breyer (and Kennedy, for that matter) are looking ahead to the Trump Travel Ban case. Note that Kennedy makes sure to invoke “neutrality” heavily and includes the following quote: “Factors relevant to the assessment of governmental neutrality include “the historical background of the decision under challenge, the specific series of events leading to the enactment or official policy in question, and the legislative or administrative history, including contemporaneous statements made by members of the decisionmaking body.” This is the portion of Lukumi – taken rather out of context, I might add, given the facts of Lukumi – cited most often in the briefs against Trump’s travel ban. Kagan and Breyer are trading an essentially meaningless vote (instead of 5-4, the 7-2 Masterpiece vote on extremely narrow grounds that reaffirm pro-gay public accommodations laws and will help approximately zero future religious persons) in exchange for locking Kennedy into a strong emphasis on “religious neutrality” looking at “contemporaneous statements.” Kagan’s concurrence signals this by spending its entirety trying to address the Gorsuch concurrence, while explicitly stating that she believes Phillips violated the law. Basically, they give Kennedy a meaningless boost on Masterpiece in exchange for a very consequential Kennedy vote on the Travel Ban case which will probably lead to a 5-4 ruling against Trump.
TLDR: The Masterpiece case is good for Mr. Phillips, bad for religious liberty, and bad news for the Trump Administration in the upcoming Travel Ban decision. To be clear, my testable predictions are (in decreasing order of certainty): (1) district and appellate courts will interpret the Masterpiece decision narrowly, and bakers/photographers/etc. will continue to lose in state and federal courts in the near future; (2) the next Phillips-style religious objector to be granted certiorari by the Court will – in the absence of a substantial Court restructure, i.e. assuming same current composition – will lose on the basis of Employment Division v. Smith; and (3) Kennedy will join with the liberal wing to strike down the Trump Travel Ban.
Interesting analysis, thanks.
That was an insightful read. Thank you.
ETA: Yeah especially the part about the “contemporaneous statements.” That’s exactly how they’re going to use Trump’s “ban muslims” statements as justification for ruling against the travel ban.
ETA 2: Except Trump also had several other statements affirming his love and respect for muslims, knows many muslims who are wonderful people, etc etc. You don’t have to believe him, but there’s at least attempts at mitigation that there was not from the Commission. Shockingly, Trump is more nuanced than the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
If you read Church of Lukumi v. City of Hialeah, they describe a very different set of facts from Trump’s pre-election rambling to demonstrate animus. The city council was extremely determined, in their official legislative capacity, to bar the Santerias from the town. It’s not worth a whole review here but it’s a textbook case for a reason.
Personally, I had been hoping that the Travel Ban case might get a 9-0 or 8-1 decision in favor of the Administration, simply to send the message to the forum-shopped Resistance courts to cut it out with the “explicit plenary authority depends on whether you are a Good Person” stuff. I find that particularly corrosive to the rule of law, and I thought that the Court might want to signal the lower courts to calm down (since the Travel Ban is almost moot at this point). But reading this decision, I suspect we’ll get the opposite. In the long run, I expect that to be more consequential for the culture wars than the Masterpiece decision – people get madder if they perceive that only one side is allowed to win.
I just read the Wikipedia entry on the case. Yes, very different.
I’m not sure that will apply to the travel ban. From the article:
Well, stopping travel from war zones / terrorist hot spots / failed states where we cannot get documentation in order to properly vet people is a compelling government interest, beyond any dislike of Muslims. So the problem in Lukumi was that there’s no compelling government interest beyond dislike of Santeria. I don’t think that’ll be a problem with the travel ban case.
Rather disappointed by the result, as not a single one of the Justices used the reasoning that art by commission constitutes speech rather than public accommodation and is consequently protected by the First Amendment. To me it seems obvious that is should be the case both on Constitutional and practical grounds. The Constitutional argument is fairly straightforward: Since art is speech, it stands to reason that art by commission is itself also speech, and compelled speech is a violation of free speech rights, ergo individuals cannot be compelled to make artistic works without violating their free speech rights.
The practical side of it is somewhat more complicated. Without diverging into a long discourse into the nature of rights, i’ll just say that i don’t see the notion of protected classes as expressing and protecting some fundamental aspects of human liberty, but rather standing directly in opposition to it. It is a compromise, based on the observation that allowing all individuals to wield their freedoms of expression and association unfettered can lead to collective injustice. It’s a concession to the fallen nature of Man, a lesser tyranny acceded to in order to prevent a greater one. This means that it is entirely possible for it to grow into a greater evil than that which it was meant to defeat. Indeed it’s quite possible it has been so since the moment of its inception, though at present i do not believe that.
What i do believe is that since the idea of protected classes stands in opposition to some fundamental human liberties, great care must be taken in managing the tension between the two. There has to be some give in both directions, lest one or the other be so compromised as to be worthless. The concept of public accommodations exists to manage that tension, it provides a clear and coherent guideline of when to give to one side, and when to give to the other. The Masterpiece Cakeshop case is precisely the kind of situation where such a guideline is useful. It allows us to chart a course that protects public access to services, while still giving some refuge of self-expression to those who provide such services. In this specific case, it means that a bakery cannot refuse to sell cakes, but can refuse to sell custom cakes. This, i think, is a decent and workable compromise.
Justice Thomas’ concurrence was essentially making this point – wedding cake baking as expressive conduct equivalent to speech, the Colorado law thus forcing speech in contradiction of, inter alia, Boy Scouts v. Dale.
Yes i noticed that after writing my post. Normally i completely ignore Thomas, but this time it seems his reasoning was close to mine. It’s a pity his concurrence stands alone in that regard.
So setting aside Kennedy and Ginsburg a moment, what do folks think of the argument Gorsuch and Kagan are having in their opinions? It interested me when I read the opinions Monday, but I didn’t linger on it as I was at work. So here’s some not very organized thoughts on it now.
If I read Gorsuch right, he believes the Phillips case and the Jack cases both have the form:
1. The one requesting the cake is in a protected class, in one case sexual orientation, in the other religion;
2. The request is for an act of expression which would violate the requestee’s “personal conviction[s]”;
3. The rejection is not because of the requestor’s being in the protected class, but rather the content of the expression being requested (p. 4).
Interestingly, Gorsuch believes this is a case of the doctrine of double effect, although he doesn’t call it that in his opinion. (I’m here paraphrasing from the SEP’s discussion.) The doctrine of double effect was introduced by Aquinas in discussing certain ethical cases where there are intended consequences as well as unintended but foreseen consequences, with the result that evil but unintended consequences do not always make the act itself wrong. There are four conditions in Catholic moral theology for an act with double effect to be permissible, which the SEP quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia:
For the Catholic, therefore, Phillips’ case looks easy (though I am not a theologian!). Not baking a cake for someone is of itself morally indifferent. The bad effect (of refusing a service to a protected class) is foreseen but not willed. The good effect (acting in conscience) follows immediately, while the harm to a protected class is secondary. And acting in conscience is sufficiently grave to warrant the harm. Of course, Gorsuch is not Catholic, but he studied under John Finnis, a major figure in the “New Natural Law” camp, so it’s interesting to see the influence here. Gorsuch writes that the distinction is sometimes made in law, and in his reading of the Commission’s decision on Jack’s cases they relied on it (pp. 4–5).
Whether I’m right here hinges most on 4: is protecting Phillips’ conscience more important or less than protecting the dignity or the public accommodation of Craig and Mullins? I think so, but this where all the talk of the government having a compelling interest and stuff come in. It’s easy to see how one could come to a different conclusion depending on how serious the stigma or the inconvenience for gay couples is, though.
Continuing through Gorsuch’s opinion, I think he’s right to find this logic bad: “[The Commission] concluded … that an ‘intent to disfavor’ a protected class of persons should be ‘readily … presumed’ from the knowing failure to serve someone who belongs to that class.” Gorsuch goes on to suggest that objections to same-sex weddings follow from one’s religious beliefs in the same way that the same-sex wedding follows from one’s sexual orientation (5–6). (Whether a same-sex wedding follows from one’s sexual orientation was discussed obliquely in oral arguments; see pp. 86–88. By analogy with interracial marriage at Bob Jones University, if I understand them right, it doesn’t work to say that marriage is just something that you’re doing rather than someone you are.) If this is true, it makes the analogy between the two cases stronger for sure; it makes me wonder whether Gorsuch’s use of language like “personal conviction” above understates his case.
Anyway, the disagreement between Kagan and Gorsuch appears to be about how to characterize the act itself: is he refusing to bake them a wedding cake simpliciter, or refusing to bake them a wedding cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding? That is how Kagan reads Gorsuch, anyway, in her footnote on p. 3, writing further that Phillips would not have sold a cake that is perfectly suitable for either a same-sex or opposite-sex wedding. This can’t be quite right, because while Phillips said as much at the time, Waggoner admits in oral arguments he would have had to sell them a cake from the store window. (See Iain, gbdub, and I above about that.) But more importantly, if Phillips is to be compelled to make identical cakes this runs afoul of an example Gorsuch raised in oral arguments: suppose they sell a cake with a big red cross on it to the Red Cross or some other humanitarian organization (84). Now suppose the KKK asks for a cake with the same design. Same cake, completely different meaning. Cole pointed out the KKK isn’t a religion and hence not a protected class, but it’s not like it couldn’t be. Breyer makes the same point on p. 88, and Cole admits that if so he’d have to sell them that cake too.
So my final read on this is that I think Gorsuch has the better of it. That’s not to say it matters, of course. I think the point hls (and many others) have made about the composition and content of the majority is right and indicates this is no win for religious liberty. But it was an interesting case to read all the same.
If Kagan’s point relates to what actually happened, Waggoner cannot alter those facts with whatever later concession. (And, while I’m certainly not a lawyer, I would be very surprised if a laywer in a Supreme Court case can do anything but suggest. Her saying that can’t put any requirements on her client; only the ruling can. If Phillips today feels required to sell prepared baked goods to gay weddings (is that clear?) it’s not because of anything his attorney said.)
There may be no legal or philosophical conflict here, depending on how much work the “in the window” metaphor is meant to do.
If the Red Cross asks me to make them a cake with their symbol, and I do it for them, the expression is arguably a kind of utterance that traces back to the organization. That’s not quite the same thing as my having a red cross cake on display, or even my having a design book that includes a red cross. Or in another case, I might have a promotional deal with the Red Cross (including token donation) to sell cakes with their design on it.
In these other cases there is room to argue that I have less standing to object to the Klan buying a red cross cake. If I have the cake on display or the design book available I have indicated a willingness to produce such a cake without attaching any particular meaning to the symbol. In the case of the promotional deal it may just not be my business at that point if the Klan intends to subvert the symbolism.
I don’t mean to suggest that there is a bright line here. If my design book had a cross on one page and a color option of Red on another*, do I commit to putting those together on a cake for anyone? If that’s true of letters in a font then I’m also required to say anything a customer wants me to say, which goes against the premise. However, this seems like a reasonable test: if I’m willing to make and sell the thing knowing nothing (relevant) about the customer, then it’s plausible that I should be legally required to sell it to any customer no matter what I know about them. If, on the other hand, a request for a red cross cake raises enough suspicions that I ask “what do you want this for?”, then it’s arguable that I shouldn’t be compelled to make it on grounds of free expression.
Where would this distinction come down with wedding cakes? It seems like it would go like this: I could avoid baking a wedding cake for whatever reason as long as I was a busybody with all of my wedding cake clients.
* This was the original example I wrote out, but on reflection it seemed too ambiguous.
It’s possible I’m misinterpreting or misremembering Phillips’ remarks at the time, though I agree that from what I remember Phillips refused selling them, say, cupcakes for the wedding. But looking at the petitioner’s reply brief, Waggoner et al. write,
It’s baffling that Phillips’ lawyers would be allowed to say this here and in oral arguments if it really didn’t apply. Thomas also writes in his opinion,
Is this really how this works? The Court of Appeals “resolved” the issue, so that’s the line SCOTUS takes too? I am definitely confused here.
Your analysis of the whole “in the window” thing I mostly agree with. I agree there’s a spectrum here where refusing to bake a premade, extremely generic cake should be unprotected, provided we’re not throwing out public accommodation (and I should mention I’m generally in favor of public accommodations laws). And if I read them right, Waggoner et al. say the Commission actually permits refusing, say, a rainbow cake (pp. 12–13 of the petition brief above). So the gray area is cakes that could conceivably be sold to either a same-sex or opposite-sex couple. (It’s not clear whether Craig and Mullins wanted a cake like that vs e.g. a rainbow cake. They brought a folder of stuff, apparently, but it was never opened and specific designs never discussed.) The brief seems to think that doesn’t matter, on the grounds that context could change the meaning of one’s ‘speech’ in the same way the red cross cake’s meaning could be totally changed (24–27). I’m inclined, given what I said about Gorsuch’s arguments above to say this is right, but I acknowledge that this is tough to delineate.
The Supreme Court’s stated rules include that they won’t resolve a dispute they don’t have to.
These rules are more like “guidelines”, and if the Supreme Court wants to make a broad, landmark, decision, they will. But if they don’t, for various reasons (e.g. not being able to get enough justices to sign on to enough parts one way or another), they can always dodge any questions they don’t want to deal with.
The usually words people use for this distinction is that the lower courts are “fact-finding” courts, while the upper courts are concerned with interpretation of the law. The idea is that determining the facts of a disputed matter is rather tough. The lowest court was likely most involved in what could be an incredibly detailed record – immediate witness statements to law enforcement, physical evidence, later competing statements, and a whole host of credibility judgments. And even then, most determination-of-fact is done by juries, in a process that isn’t transparent to scrutiny by appellate courts.
The Circuit Courts are a little closer to all this action, but the Supreme Court is pretty divorced from it. They pretty much never even receive these detailed records. They’re usually going off the Circuit Court opinion (sometimes digging down to the opinion of the district court; and things are a little different for appeals from state courts) and briefs filed specifically to address the “Question Presented” (the official legal question the Supreme Court has set out to try to resolve).
It’s not uncommon for this to result in the Supreme Court deciding an issue, but not actually resolving the case. They’ll say something like, “The Circuit Court got the law wrong here, so we’re vacating their decision. The correct way to interpret the law is [something hopefully like, “If A is true, rule for X, but if B is true, rule for Y”]. We’re remanding the case to the Circuit Court to reconsider in light of this.” Even then, sometimes the Circuit Court will find itself kicking the case back down to the trial court for more fact-finding.
If the Court is comfortable that the lower courts did explicitly find a fact that is on-point, they may use it (as we see here), but the records differ on how clear the lower courts were in establishing particular facts.
Thanks for this analysis. I thought Thomas had the best stand-alone concurrence but the Gorsuch vs. Kagan dialogue was interesting. I also thought Gorsuch had the better of it. The part comparing religious beliefs to same-sex orientation was interesting. You used to see the argument more frequently back before a lot of states (and Supreme Court precedent) were trying to apply sex discrimination prohibitions to protect against sexual orientation discrimination. For example, in the Goodridge v. Massachusetts case, it was the Massachusetts ERA that was at issue, not any statute barring discrimination against gays. The argument brought by the petitioners was that barring same-sex marriage was sex (not sexual orientation) discrimination because a man could marry a woman but not a man. Opponents pointed out that there was no sex discrimination because both sexes were treated equally – a woman could marry a person of the opposite gender just as well as a man. Some opponents also opined that there was no sexual orientation discrimination either, because a gay man had exactly the same right to marry a woman as a heterosexual man. It looks sort of similar to Kagan’s argument – we’re not forcing Phillips to sell a same-sex marriage cake, he can just sell a heterosexual marriage cake to a gay couple.
Thanks; I should mention I thought your analysis above was great, especially because I hadn’t thought about the impact on the travel ban case at all. And I liked Thomas’s concurrence too—I was disappointed neither Alito nor Roberts joined it.
Good analysis. I’d like to touch on the Catholic morality. I am also not a theologian, but I am a practicing Catholic, a photographer, and have photographed two gay weddings for hire and attended a third as a guest, all before Obergefell. My moral reasoning for participating was that the actual sin involved is non-procreative sex acts or sex outside of heterosexual marriage. Being gay (or having same sex attraction) is not a sin, and a ceremony expressing your commitment to the person to whom you have same sex attraction isn’t probably not a sin, either. The sin is the act they were going to do in private after the ceremony, had almost certainly been doing long before the ceremony, and would continue doing whether or not I photographed the ceremony or whether the ceremony happened at all.
I felt like that put me pretty far removed from the sin in question, and without any culpability for it (as I said, the sinful act would happen even if the ceremony did not take place). I wouldn’t see it any different than, say, photographing a heterosexual wedding of people who used contraception for non-marital sex before the wedding, and were planning to use contraception for marital sex after the wedding. If I’m going to apply the rules to gays, it practically comes down to “don’t do business with sinners,” which means my only clients are Mary and Jesus and neither of them have ever tried to hire me.
Phillips obviously has a more strict interpretation of Christianity than I do.
Freudian slip? 🙂
I saw that as soon as I posted but for some reason the edit features aren’t working 🙁
I meant “probably isn’t a sin.”
Well, Jesus might have been able to hook you up with a wedding photographer job at Cana–he *did* cater the wine, after all. (Or at least the good stuff they served later on.)
I’m kind of curious about this response because I had always been under the impression that (non-cafeteria) Catholics took the distinction between ‘real’ versus ‘fake’ marriages very seriously.
Every so often you hear about Catholic not recognizing marriages, mostly when it comes to remarried divorcees. From what I hear that was a big part of why the current Pope is so controversial.
My traditional Catholic friends are generally too smart to talk about their beliefs in public, so I can’t say for sure how common it is among the laity. I may well be mistaken here.
Yes, the gay “marriage” isn’t “real” because it isn’t performed by the Catholic Church in accordance with the requirements for Catholic marriages. But there’s no Catholic prescription against attending or providing services for weddings that don’t meet Catholic standards. There’s no difference between a gay wedding and a Protestant wedding. Both are not the Catholic sacrament of marriage.
For my own wedding, I was a lapsed Catholic when I married my wife in a Lutheran church (just because it was pretty). When I came back to the Church later, my priest performed the Catholic sacrament of marriage for us so we were good in the eyes of the Church.
ETA: Yes, when you say Catholics take the distinction between “real” versus “fake” marriages very seriously, we’re talking about the marriages of Catholics.
Thanks, that makes sense.
When you do something like this do you have to do penance or something for ‘living in sin’ for the years that you weren’t in a sacramental marriage? Or is it retroactively licit because you got the blessing eventually?
Well, I was an atheist for a good 15 years so I had a loooooooooooooot of sins to confess when I went back. It wasn’t retroactively licit, it was sinful and forgiven.
According to wikipedia, marriages performed by other Christian denominations are still sacramental according to the Catholic church, and marriages between non-Christians are recognized, but not “sacramental”
I think the comparison to a couple using contraception is good though.
Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian military/political columnist, has some things to say about the connection between migrant flows and global warning.
This little detail convinces me the author is a liar and not worth listening to. (or ridiculously credulous and still not worth listening to)
Gwynne Dyer (he’s a man) has been writing for a long time and seems pretty darn credible on other political issues. I’m not saying he’s right on the political risks of climate change, but you are dismissing him on the strength of very little indeed.
Here’s Dyer on a broader range of issues, if you want a sampling:
http://gwynnedyer.com/2014/2014-year-ender/
That’s bullshit but I believe it.
My guess is that her source was thinking in terms of some kind of massive collapse of order in Mexico, with the government ending up more-or-less taken over by the narcos or just falling apart. In that case, you can imagine huge floods of refugees coming to the US, and chaos spilling over into the US. Both of those might plausibly lead a president (not just Trump) to deploy the military (probably National Guard rather than regular Army) to the border to close it up.
Yeah, but I want the military stationed on the border now shooting anyone who crosses illegally, so, sure I think it’s unlikely, but it did give me one of those wistful sighs.
Why shooting anyone who crosses illegally, rather than just arresting them and ultimately deporting them?
I mean, this is not some shocking new policy that nobody’s ever done, it’s the normal way illegal immigration is handled by everyone–you just turn them away at the border or arrest them, hold them for awhile, and deport them. At most, maybe jail people who are repeat offenders. This has the benefit that you don’t, say, kill a family including the little kids crossing the border illegally–something that even your allies (that is, the majority of people who want immigration laws enforced) will not support.
I’m mostly engaging in political hyperbole. Mostly.
Let him that hath two coats shoot the guy who wants to borrow one.
I think it’s more like “let he who hath two coats shoot the guy who tries to steal one.”
Do we need to even have joking about this?
If Gwynne’s source says he is concerned that the Army will be ordered to close the border because of a narcoterrorist takeover of the Mexican government, and Gwynne reports that the Army believes it will be ordered to close the border because of refugees from global warming, that still doesn’t leave Gwynne with much credibility on this issue.
I thought projections were something like 2-3 degrees per century. I realize this could have side effects but it seems like hyperbole or oversimplification to imply killer heat is a realistic forecast.
Am I wrong? Is the science actually predicting large swathes of uninhabitable lands in “the not too distant future”?
I think the worry is crop failure, particularly in the tropics, where craptastic agriculture already struggles to feed the population.
Is there a projection, IPCC or something, suggesting globally food production is going to be unable to meet demands? I think the population graphs are going to matter more than the temperature graphs in that case, especially if elevated CO2 levels promote agricultural growth in the more temperate regions.
Also, rain forests are incredibly fecund. I know this isn’t equivalent to growing grains, but it does suggest that the solution is to adjust crops grown, as clearly there are crops that thrive in very warm climates, right?
Here’s a very high-level summary from the IPCC 2015 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policy Makers. I can’t even begin to assess the credibility of these claims.
Thanks. That sounds reasonable, or possible at least, but it does sound more like climate change accelerates problems that will occur eventually and we had no plans for dealing with at any rate, rather than being a cause for novel suffering.
god damn does that phrase “limited evidence, high agreement” raise my hackles. I mean, the whole paragraph is sketchy (further erode food security is particularly rich), but I am hard pressed to come up with a phrase more calculated to make me mistrust someone’s analysis.
@cassander
High agreement that there is limited evidence, but the evidence that exists suggests conclusion X, seems like a reasonable statement, no?
@Aapje
To me, the answer suggests “we all want to think this, so we’re going to say it, even though there’s no real evidence for it”.
@cassander
They could instead ignore the evidence that exists, but why would that be better?
Individuals will vary in their weighting and interpretation of evidence. If the evidence is “limited” in the usual sense of the word, that should lead to some interpreters – considering all of the evidence, ignoring none – coming to a contrary conclusion. And many more concluding that there is naught but noise or having insufficient confidence to agree with anything. “Limited evidence, high agreement” almost certainly means that there is groupthink or worse enforcing a single interpretation of that limited evidence.
@apje
John Schilling has it exactly.
@cassander & John
Openly stating that the evidence is limited can be read as a call for more research and as a warning to not trust this claim too much. It definitely seems way more ethical than to present poor evidence as a solid fact, which is a rather common way by which a a single interpretation of the evidence is presented as fact (not necessarily on purpose, but often due to bias/ideology).
I feel that you guys are getting upset over a red flag that was intentionally placed.
Perhaps you guys think that the red flag is insufficiently overt, but can you agree that the intent is good?
@Aapje says:
Yes and no. Admitting where your evidence is weak is definitely good, but making strong statements on insufficient evidence is bad. Including the “Aggregate economic losses accelerate with increasing temperature,” clause makes me feel they’re trying to create that impression then protect themselves by following with a red flag that they know will probably have less impact than the foregoing clause. It feels weasely to me. I think the most honest way to write that sentence would have been “Global economic impacts from climate change are currently difficult to estimate.”
Right. I have absolutely no problem with the “limited evidence” part. I agree with you that the “limited evidence” part, should translate to “do not trust this claim too much”.
My problem is, individual variation in the assessment of a claim that people do not trust too much, will lead to a significant fraction of the individuals not trusting the claim at all, and that therefore the “high agreement” part should not be possible.
Among actual humans, the only way you can get high agreement on a claim that people do not highly trust, is if they are not individually assessing that claim.
The intent of the “limited evidence” warning flag is good. The problem is that, even after raising that flag, the community fails to recognize that it is not heeding that warning.
@John Schilling
I disagree. Let’s say that you only have one, n=10 study that shows a huge effect of an intervention. I think that people can then individually decide/agree that the study shows a strong effect, that there are no obvious flaws, but that due to n=10, the error bars are enormous.
That is not criticism of the IPCC report though, but of the community who interpret the report.
But they won’t agree that the effect is real, which is what the unqualified phrase “strong agreement” is understood to mean. “Study reporting X at p>0.2, is understood to report X”, is a tautology not worth mentioning.
Yes, exactly. Well, except for the detail that the report is a product of that same community. But the IPCC report has the virtue of accurately reporting the appalling behavior of its own community. And it is the community behavior, as illustrated by the report, that we are criticizing.
In the time span he is discussing, global warming might be as much as one degree Centigrade. That doesn’t make Mexico intolerably hot, or close to it.
And insofar as we have a basis for a prediction on food supply, it is that it will continue to rise, in part because a higher CO2 concentration increases plant yields. I know nothing else about Dyer, but this quote makes him sound like a nut.
I got interested enough to go to his web page and look at the archives, in the hope of finding past predictions old enough so we could see if they came true. So far the closest I came was one from February 2000:
I haven’t been able to find sales figures for 1999 and 2000, but looking at Monsanto’s sales in the seeds and genomics segment more recently they seem to be trending up, currently at about ten billion dollars a year, which suggests that the collapse predicted did not happen. Also, there were record sales in 2017, and 2005 was the date in which the billionth acre of biotech crops was planted. According to one webbed source, “GMOs are overwhelmingly dominant here [the U.S.] among the major crops, representing more than 90% of corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar beets, and canola.”
Perhaps someone else can find better data, but it looks to me as though that confident prediction turned out to be wrong.
I’m pretty new at the game and I have almost no experience with team FPS games in general, but for whatever reason I’ve taken to playing Moira. I appreciate her versatility and something about her control scheme just feels intuitive to me somehow.
My second choice is usually Mercy or Widowmaker, depending on the game and the team’s needs. I’m better at healing and sniping than jumping right into the fray. (I really like Ana in concept, because on paper she seems like she’d be ideal for me, but her abilities just seem too weak for her to really be effective.)
I don’t like tanking in general, but if the team really needs a tank, I’ve found I usually do decently well playing Zarya.
Can anyone recommend a good book, article or blog on Edmund Burke ? I’m looking for something that addresses his political philosophy in an introductory way but goes beyond the Wikipedia level
Ironically, Reflections on the Revolution in France was the 1790s equivalent of a long blog post. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of (Wo)Man were blogged in response to it. They weren’t the only ones; the flurry of responses to other’s articles was called the Pamphlet War.
I can second “Vindication of the rights of (Gender Identity)” as well. It’s a fairly easy read for 1794.
A while back Scott asked for insights into why melancholy depressed people have so much trouble in the morning. I’ve paid attention since then, and if Inside Out is right about the five fundamental emotions, I’d have to say Disgust is the part of my brain working overtime in the mornings. Which is interesting because I don’t think I could have named it otherwise, and now when I look back at other tough times, it seems like Disgust would also have been a good label.
Does this ring true for anyone else, and does anyone have other data or insights into the phenomenon?
I made a webpage that will let you jump to a random SSC article. https://random-ssc.herokuapp.com
Neat. Any chance you could make it filter out open threads? Those are the majority of the posts on this site, so the odds of getting an actual article are slim.
Oh good call. Yeah that shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll post here when I get that done, probably tonight.
I updated the app to filter out open threads and links posts. Lmk about any other suggestions!
Make the ssc link be https
(Where are you getting your list from? If you use https to connect, it will give you an https list)
Done. Thanks!
Don’t have a main because i like variety, so i switch between various heroes, usually picking something the team needs. It would be easier to list the heroes i don’t play: Doomfist, Reaper, Widowmaker, Anna, Reinhardt, Roadhog, Zarya, Lucio, Zenyatta, and Moira. The reasons i don’t play Doomfist and Reaper is because i don’t like their fiddly mobility mechanics, for Widowmaker and Anna it’s because i suck at sniping, Reinhardt is too short ranged, Roadhog is too weird ranged, Zarya too timing dependent, and finally Lucio, Zenyatta, and Moira are all too fiddly and complicated for my tastes. Everyone else, i can usually find something fun to do with them.
However the character i am unquestionably best at is Mercy. This is because i suck at multi-tasking. It’s so bad that when my Boyfriend watches me play he keeps repeating the words “you’re being shot at” over and over again because despite multiple flashing red indicators and rapidly declining health bar i rarely notice incoming fire, there’s just too much going on. Also i’m very bad at timing the use of my abilities, i usually use them either as soon as possible or never, which works very poorly with so many characters.
Mercy though, is the most straightforward monofocused character in the entire game. There are only two things to do: move and heal. And there is only one time to do them: immediately. Mercy practically rewards tunnel vision because nothing else really matters as long as you keep moving and healing. She’s high speed run n’ gun, all frantic action with little thought, and it fits me very well.
As an aside, i feel like i should hate Sombra. She has a bunch of complicated, fiddly, timing-dependent mechanics, the things i hate in other characters. Also her weapon requires good mouse-tracking whereas i can’t mouse-track for shit. So basically, i suck at Sombra, i suck at Sombra a lot, and i have little hope of getting better because her entire play style is completely at odds with mine, and yet i can’t stop playing her.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9uTScSgzrM
Mostly on board with what you’re saying, but out of curiosity, what makes you find Lúcio too fiddly and complicated? To me he’s the easiest support to play effectively – just stay close to the team, run around being hard to hit, and “pump it up” at peak team fight to heal faster. And just dump tons of sonic rounds into the fattest target. Plus he’s got his own pretty effective escape mechanism (speed boost) that doesn’t require any help from the rest of the team. Finally, he sort of naturally forces team play because your teammates are naturally drawn to his healing aura.
Whereas I really like Mercy, she’s the strongest pure healer, but I find her to be the fiddly one. Particularly her movement ability, which is great but can strand you in awkward positions if not used carefully. She can only heal one at a time, so you have to be constantly checking all the players and know which ones to prioritize.
My biggest challenge playing her is that she’s kind of the anti-Lúcio in terms of team play. Invariably I’ll get tempted to run off and heal some dude who Leroy Jenkinsed his way into a terrible position, and we’ll both die. Or I’ll be the last one standing (or the only one who knows it’s time to get out of Dodge) with no escaping teammate to latch onto, and I’ll die. Since rule number one of playing support is “don’t die”, I’ve been playing her less just because I die too often (relative to other healers).
Of course she’s no where near as fiddly as Zenyatta or Moira – just wanted to put in a plug for Lúcio.
The largest problem i have with Lucio is the “run around being hard to hit” part. Apparently doing this correctly involves wall skating, and as far as i’m concerned wall skating with Lucio is some kind of sorcery that probably involves selling your soul to the devil because i can’t do it. Also i can’t seem to get the hang of when to use the speed aura versus the healing aura, and unlike Mercy were it turns out you can just safely ignore the damage booster option on her staff, playing Lucio effectively actually requires knowing when to switch between the two. Amp it Up is even more hopeless, since the transition between “enemy contact” and “team fight” is completely invisible to me, which means invariably activate it either too early or not at all. Finally the push people off cliffs power is hilariously effective when used by literally anyone other than me, but a completely useless trap option in my hands. In short i can’t Lucio.
Whereas for Mercy her movement ability is incredibly simple, just use it literally all the time and at every opportunity. There is never a wrong time to glide, there is only wrong targets to glide to. And that’s the trick to playing Mercy, you don’t run off after the asshole who went off on a
suicidereconnaissance mission deep into enemy territory. When your team comes together right, playing Mercy is a frenzied rush of going ally to ally while dodging enemy fire, riding a cocaine high, and playing Ride of the Valkyries. When your team doesn’t though, then you sometimes you have to park your ass behind the payload and declare that anyone who is not helping the push is on their own.Honestly, if anything people seem to switch Lucio’s buff too often, and wall riding is overrated. Seriously just leave it on heal whenever you’re in contact with the enemy and you’re 90% of the way there. Pushing dudes off cliffs and epic wall rides make for cool Twitch videos, but if you spend much time trying to do either, you’re probably not doing your real job which is staying close to your team and keeping them alive. So don’t sweat if you’re not so good at those. Mostly I just use the push power to get tanks out of my face or bop people off the point in overtime.
But I’m never going to knock a Mercy main, wish it came as naturally to me!
What is the technical difference between drug use and drug abuse?
Context: I sometimes hear that “[recreational drug X] can’t be used, only abused”, usually in drug war propaganda. I’ve previously assumed that “abuse” just means “use that the System doesn’t approve of.” But I’m wondering whether there’s a real well-defined distinction that, say, doctors would recognize; given drug A with pharmacology B inducing behavior C, could a doctor distinguish “use” from “abuse” without reference to the political status of A?
Can’t say I find the source to be ideal but:
Pondering a complaint a thread or two ago, about the group way “SJW” is used here…
On the one hand, I think it is a reasonable shorthand to describe a set of bad behaviors. It is useful in a “jargon” sense – it skips over a lot of unnecessary specification, because people who discuss these matters generally know what it means.
On the downside of that – there are probably people who don’t know what it means, and use it in a looser sense to refer to a broader constituency – that is, everybody with social justice values, rather than the specific subset who misbehave. This provokes a motte and bailey effect.
On the flip side of that, there is a problem in that such misbehavior is generally dismissed as insignificant by those who share the values but not the methods. I’ll set that aside for the moment.
Suppose, for a moment, we coined the term “social justice bully” – that wouldn’t resolve the problem, it would just add a couple of extra steps until discussion returned to the same equilibrium it began at. We could substitute in some completely ambiguous terminology, and ban the common referents, so that conversations became sufficiently cryptic such that those who don’t understand the reason for banning the word are effectively kept out of the conversation.
So there is the start to my thoughts. Somewhat disconnected thought, however, arising from consideration of the use of such jargon:
I have frequently heard feminist terminology defended as being jargon, shorthand that becomes offensive when removed from the context in which it has a different meaning. So, given how annoyed such jargon makes me, I can see how the use of reciprocal jargon would annoy other people. (And maybe, if “SJW” pisses you off, maybe consider how jargon like “patriarchy” pisses other people off, because it is the same damned thing.)
But taking this a step further, if we imagine the Scott Aaronson equivalent of SJ, who is terrified of being the terrible person described by SJW, and is given incredibly vague and unhelpful advice like “Well, you aren’t one of them”, but always gets the sense he is being talked about anyways – and, because of aforementioned people who aren’t actually very specific about how they use the word “SJW”, is in fact being talked about…
Well, then, we have another working example of the sort of behavior we would like to be able to point at and identify as the problem. Our model gets a little more complete.
The question is – what is our more complete model useful for? We need another input. Something like a social power differential, but the problem with that is that the struggle immediately becomes to claim weaker status. Punching up / punching down are likewise flawed.
From a social perspective, is there a viable input? Is there a way of determining when “fighting back” is just “fighting”?
What norms can we possibly establish that forbid all of social justice bullying, and the sort of bullying social justice bullying is nominally trying to stop, and also anti-social-justice bullying? Because at a certain point, we are trying to bully perceived bullies into not bullying other perceived bullies, and that is, on consideration, not likely to solve anything.
It’s a snarl word, and it reduces meaning. There’s a group it gestures towards, but you also identify yourself as a member of another group that maybe is not so nice when you use it. If you mean to gesture towards, say, a certain type of left-wing activist, maybe just describe the type of person/group you’re gesturing towards. Sure, it isn’t snappy, but any snappy term could turn into a snarl word, as you note.
Why not just describe the behaviour, in any case? That’s probably better than what I tend to do, which is lazily gesture towards “that kind of campus left-wing activist, you know, the annoying ones, you know” or whatever. Because it’s clearly about behaviour, not beliefs; it’s not necessarily the content of any particular person’s belief that makes them the kind of person who you can’t discuss things with, who does purge-lite type stuff, etc. Some beliefs are more likely to produce that than others (eg, right wing or left wing authoritarians generally have more of a problem with opposing views than mushy-middle types) but there is a strange thing I have noticed where, out of people I actually know, it’s safer to express disagreement to actual radical leftists than people with fairly mainstream opinions. The majority of the people I know who give me that struggle session vibe have opinions that are not radical, even if they think they are radicals.
EDIT: One of the problems with this place is that standards of charity, precision, etc markedly decrease when “The Leftists” are the topic of discussion.
This is not a reasonable request. If a particular term is particularly offensive and there’s a different term you’d like people to use, then that is reasonable within limits. But nobody is going to describe a group or set every time they want to talk about that group or set; that’s basically why we have names – or, indeed, nouns – to begin with. And if the real objective is for people to not talk about the group for lack of appropriate terminology, to pretend that there is no group and that any relationship between the various members is entirely coincidental, then that’s not going to happen.
And if it is the case that any term for a group will turn into an insult, then either there’s something fundamentally wrong with the group or there’s fundamentally something wrong with the surrounding society. In neither case will attempts at language-policing lead to a desirable outcome.
The problem I see with SJW as used in SSC comment threads is that it sometimes ends up as a kind-of blanket dismissal. Some people with this label are busting heads at political rallies or trying to get people fired for their twitter comments, therefore let’s bash some other SJW types whose main offense is having ideas we disagree with[1].
I think it’s important to distinguish between bad behaviors (online bullying, rioting, trying to get people fired for their views) and ideas. One important reason for that is that I’d like to know what ideas I’m missing out on by being turned off by the visible bad behavior. Another reason is that those behaviors are tactics with no inherent connection to any ideology–I’m not any more okay with online bullying as done by people on the right than I am with it as done by people on the left.
[1] As best I can tell, I’m in broad agreement with a lot of what I take to be SJW goals–I’d like gays, transpeople, nonwhites, etc not to get bashed or hassled by the cops or otherwise mistreated, I’d like women and nonwhites to be welcome in all fields according to their abilities, just like men/whites, I’d like the police to be less likely to bash/shoot people and to have less impunity when they do, etc. But I think I have a radically different model of the world, which means that I tend to think of a lot of the SJW-ish ideas about how to accomplish those goals as being all wrong. However, I also have a kind-of hard time knowing how well I understand the best thinkers along SJW lines. Probably not too well, honestly. The craziest and least thoughtful people tend to be the ones who get the most attention.
Indeed. Some people use SJW to describe tactics, some people use SJW to describe goals, and some people try to muddy the distinction and use the former to discredit the latter.
If we’re discussing terminology, I would call the person literally busting heads at a rally “antifa” rather than “SJW”. Although I’m not sure to what extent “Antifa” is a group with formal membership vs any radical leftist comfortable with street violence (whether against property or people) as a tactic.
@mdet
One thing that is extremely cringey is when centrist (usually right-of-centre) or right-of-that sources talk about antifa as though there’s some unified group, let alone some kind of central organization. Ditto black bloc tactics.
Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the pseudo-radical types talk shit about antifa as an example of “toxic masculinity” which is… Well, wait until they found out what it took to defeat the real Nazis, who were considerably tougher customers than the guys nowadays.
I think this distinction between behaviors and ideas is a good point, but I also think one problem in this case is that the behaviors and ideas do have some inherent connection with each other. That is, SJWs aren’t just people who believe in accomplishing social justice goals (something many anti-SJW people agree with) but happen to behave in violent/bullying/shaming ways to accomplish them. It’s that they’re people whose belief in social justice leads them to behave in violent/bullying/shaming ways. The ideology informs the behavior.
As someone broadly aligned with SJ goals, I too find it frustrating at times when “SJW” is just thrown around to describe any sort of pro-SJ person, but I put most of the blame on both the SJWs themselves for encouraging this conflation (e.g. “SJW is just another term for decent human being”) and non-SJW pro-SJ people for not distancing ourselves enough from SJWs. That said, I find SSC to be extremely good in general about making this distinction.
You got the same pattern on the other side with regard to the Tea Party.
It is possible that it is actually the other way round? The ideology saying “it is okay to be violent / bully / shame, as long as you do it for the Greater Good” could be quite attractive to naturally violent people, who find it convenient to have a shield to hide behind.
(“Hey, I am improving the world by punching Nazis.” “How do you define a ‘Nazi’?” “Any person who disagrees with me, of course. I am the good guy, so by definition anyone who opposes me must be the bad guy. Now excuse me, there goes someone who was criticized on Twitter, I will try to break his skull.”)
@John Schilling
I don’t want to keep the group in question from being discussed; I mean, it’s a group I talk about. I know some really annoying-to-nasty people from university. But “SJW” as a term is now a sibboleth; it says as much or more about the speaker as it does about the subject. I think there probably is something wrong with the surrounding society; witness the euphemism/dysphemism treadmill in general.
It won’t be discussed by having people type out a fourteen-word phrase every time. It’s either SJW, or some other word/abbreviation, or no discussion, and it’s not going to be no discussion. So unless you’ve got a brief alternative that will produce more clarity than confusion, and won’t have the same problems as SJW once clearly understood, then SJW it shall remain.
That’s a good point. I suppose I should try to think of something.
@John Schilling
The best I can come up with is “pseudo-radicals” – they have a philosophy they believe is radical. But when you look at it, it’s often easy to integrate with the way things are already, it often wouldn’t remake society in any serious way, and it often amounts to demands for jobs, from administrative groups especially. However, this is a critique from the left, by and large.
I’ve been wondering about this myself. Most political movements have a word they prefer to use for themselves– as Nornagest says, an “endonym.” I haven’t really seen anything like that for SJWs, which is very strange. Maybe “woke”… but I haven’t seen this used that much.
Also, is “SJW” even a sneer word? There is a ton of approving discussion of “social justice” online.
The “Social Justice” part is definitely an endonym, and I’ve had people tell me unprompted that they were e.g. “into Social Justice”, so it’s probably appropriate to fold that into whatever subgroup name winds up being used. The question is, of the people who consider themselves “into SJ”, how many would also see themselves as “Warriors” for the cause, and how many of those are not also what the rest of us would call “the annoying ones, you know…”
“Social Justice Activist” would fit, but I don’t know if that’s what they actually calls themselves.
So now you are impugning everyone who wants to organize for justice?
SJW may be applied too liberally (pardon the pun) but it seems generally accurate (people who pursue social justice goals with a warrior mentality) and minimally offensive (outside of somewhat patronizingly implying that these people are hyperbolic, none of the terms are prima facie offensive).
“Pseudo-radicals” misses the mark. Some really are radicals, as I’ve said below, though most probably aren’t; but most of the objections to them that I’ve heard have nothing to do with their exact political stances and everything to do with their tactics for achieving them and their tolerance for people outside them. A term that doesn’t capture that isn’t going to be successful.
@Nornagest
Don’t radical tactics/strategies in general involve the acceptance of breaking eggs to make the omelette, a conviction that those on the outside are enemies or fools, etc?
The issue with the self-description ‘Social Justice’ is that it has the opposite problem that a snarl word has: it has a strong positive valence.
So while some terms may be biased against the group, that term is biased for them.
Who wants to oppose (social) justice?
@dndnrsn —
You have to believe in some of that to be a radical, but you don’t have to be a radical to believe it. And maybe more importantly, you can compartmentalize it: I’ve met some remarkably civil people who nonetheless held positions implying the overthrow of the United States Government. The “Social Justice Warrior” label gets a lot of its rhetorical punch from connoting that the people under it don’t compartmentalize in that way.
@Nornagest
But does that compartmentalization actually make them safe to others? If a ‘Bob’ votes for, gives money to or otherwise aids people with clubs who insist on smacking you on the head, Bob may not be a danger to you if you talk to him, but he does move a society towards being more dangerous for you.
It’s a dysphemism, and I try to avoid it if I want to reach the people it describes, but I don’t think it’s just a snarl word. We are ultimately objecting to a pattern of bad behavior, but that bad behavior is facilitated by a political culture, and that political culture is tightly correlated with the (modern instantiation of the) concept of social justice. I think we’d lose real information if we restricted ourselves to the behavioral side: do that and we drop the implication that social justice activism has a problem. And that’s an important implication — it’s what a lot of people are mainly concerned with, in this venue at least.
I’ll grant that “the leftists” is overbroad, and I don’t use it. I’ve been tempted to use it, though, because this particular activist culture enjoys so much hegemony over the politically active left in my neck of the woods.
(I don’t necessarily mean anything particularly radical when I say “activism”, though. Most of the ones I know in person really are radicals, but that’s probably an artifact of my social circles.)
This is my finding as well. It’s way easier to have a coherent argument with a Trot or a left-Anarchist than with someone who’s just joined the (Australian) Greens.
Possibly because the Trot and the left anarchist are actually interested in arguing about ideas. Most people aren’t.
I suspect this has much to do with the fact that, by nature, mainstream movements will tend to pick up more “normal” people, who are not strongly ideological. No one who isn’t a standard deviation or two away from the mean on the interested-in-political-ideology chart would ever become a Trot, so you will only ever meet Trots who are interested in political ideas.
Meanwhile, mass political movements, by nature, appeal to people who have a more normal level of ideological engagement with political ideas. I also suspect that, precisely because Trots are so rare, they are basically unable to use gang tactics. Meanwhile, a movement with broader political appeal will find it much easier to use such tactics.
The values lead to the behavior. Specifically, the values that no one who does not share those values is a decent person, and no one who is not a decent person should be tolerated in any context. That’s what gets you your “warrior”; the SJ comes from the rest of it. This group has no useful endonym; as several have pointed out, if they do refer to themselves it’s generally with a phrase meaning “the decent people”.
The difference is that feminists appear to deliberately pick jargon for that purpose, as “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words” goes into to some extent. There’s no plain meaning of “Social Justice Warrior” that’s more offensive than its meaning as referring to that group.
This is what I was getting at in a recent thread decrying conservative commenters use of labels. There is a difference between a label acquiring ill repute after being associated with a group and a group acquiring ill repute after being associated with a label that has a preexisting connotation.
Granted, over broad application of a label to figures not exhibiting the central tendencies moves from the first to the second.
We need to be able to talk about people collectively; people do take collective action. But we also need to be able to distinguish degrees, because actions exist on a spectrum with important distinctions.
I like that one. I also like “authoritarian left”.
1) There should be a word pointing directly at the aspect we don’t like (bullying, authoritarianism). “Warrior” is too general metaphot; it can also be turned around as a good thing. If you would call yourself e.g. a “warrior for equality”, there is no inherent stigma in that. Calling yourself proudly a “bully for equality” does not sound the same.
2) There needs to be a part that says “left” or something like that. Not because the right wouldn’t have its own bullies and authoritarians, but because those are simply a different group. Also, if you just say “bully” without further clarification, you are inviting the stereotypical general excuse: “you cannot call me a bully, because according to my ingroup’s private science, bullying equals bullying plus institutional power, and us demisexual otherkins do not have any institutional power; therefore I am free to bully you as much as want because it does not count as true bullying, but if you try to pay me back in my own coin, that would be bullying, and you would get banned from all places with anti-bullying code of conduct”.
That makes people think of Hillary Clinton rather than the people you’re actually taking about.
One version is “ctrl-left” (by analogy to “alt-right”) but it didn’t really catch on.
Some people refer to the group in question as “regressive left”, or “regressives”, to point to the irony that self-styled “progressives” are now defending political Islam (and all the regressive aspects it contains), calling for racial segregation and supporting restrictive codes of behavior with respect to sexual contacts of all kinds. I think it was started by Maajid Nawaz and taken up by Gad Saad and Sam Harris, among others.
Saying “SJW” has become bad signalling, so I try to make a joke out of referring to them, or say “those social justice types” or just say “those folks” and let people figure it out from context.
Speaking as a vaguely SJ-aligned type person, I favor “woker-than-thou.”
Gonna remember that one.
Surely that’s more snarly than “SJW.”
Sure. But it captures the essence so much better than SJW, and points out a really telling analogy to its namesake.
The only downside is the detail where the analogy breaks down: the holier-than-thou rarely break heads.
I like ‘woker than thou’. I was thinking ‘cosplay Stalinist’. This stuff is theater.
It’s a slur like “bible-thumper” with about the same value to offer discussions – a way for people to signal their contempt for the outgroup, facilitate motte-and-bailey maneuvers, and fill people roughly in the target area with ambiguous discomfort (“I’m religious – are they talking about me?”).
I’m swimming against the stream a bit here but the word SJW is useful exactly for the reason that you don’t like it. It doesn’t separate SJ politics from the bullying and gossiping of SJWs and it shouldn’t. They are inseparable.
I’m not claiming to be an expert but roughly half of my labmates and about the same proportion of my friends are SJWs. I don’t know what people are saying and doing at Berkeley or Oberlin but I can’t help but know what they’re saying and doing around me.
This is going to make my comment less accessible, but the best way I can come up with to describe the effect of SJ politics on the character of people I know is that it’s the purest form of slave morality. Everything that makes you stronger and more beautiful is problematic and thus opens you up to attack; everything that makes you uglier and weaker is safe. Instead of developing their best qualities and encouraging others to do the same, they build identities around their worst qualities and try to pull down anyone who is better than they are. It’s a total inversion of values which encourages a crab bucket mentality.
Incidentally, I’m very slowly reading Beyond Good and Evil at the moment and I guess it’s partly due to you.
Thanks, that’s actually really heartening to hear.
Beyond Good and Evil is actually my favorite book of Nietzsche’s. Unfortunately I have to rely on memory because my copy was stolen by a girl I hooked up with in college. There’s symbolism there but I’m not quite sure what it is.
Anyway I hope that you advance past where I am in terms of understanding Nietzsche. I got a lot out of them but didn’t have the time or patience for an in-depth study and the language barrier is still a problem. There’s definitely way more there that went over my head.
Not likely! I too am getting a lot out of him but I can easily sense that there’s a lot there that I’m not understanding and would warrant study. But that’s tricky when one has a full-time job, a time-consuming major project outside of work and other difficult reading.
It is perhaps worth noting in this context that while Nietzsche definitely had an enormous problem with slave morality, he also is quite explicit that it is one of the main elements leading to some of the most beautiful advances in culture and moral development. This is what The Genealogy of Morals, my personal favourite book of his, is about. For this reason, I think he might have a far more nuanced opinion of SJWs than you might think, although I’m sure it would be very critical.
I’m not sure whether this contradicts or corroborates your point, but one thing that I really like about the social justice circle that I don’t see anywhere else is that they can be incredibly supportive people. Like one story I saw get picked up by SJs recently where some internet rando said he hated it when women would comment compliments on other women they don’t know, and so he inspired a backlash where… dozens and dozens of women went around complimenting and encouraging each other. I know of multiple Social Justice accounts that make sure all their posts are accessible to blind users. Concern about toxic masculinity usually goes hand in hand with encouraging men (and people in general) to open up to their friends if they’re feeling troubled or upset, and sharing resources about how to see a therapist for cheap.
These are all objectively good things to me, and I know of no other political persuasion that takes the time out to do stuff like this (maybe religious conservatives who pray together?). I’m not sure whether encouraging fragility & victimhood as SJs sometimes do creates a need for a supportive and encouraging atmosphere, or whether “encouraging fragility” exists on the same spectrum as “being extra supportive” as a simple difference of degree, or what. But it seems not-unrelated to what you describe as the slave morality aspects
@mdet
Like always, it is important to have a balance in things. Social Justice seems to have a tendency to create these collective reactions, where people are not supposed to question them. This can create a very supportive environment, but also an environment where people with bad ideas/beliefs don’t get push back. It can also lead to witch hunts, rather than support, especially as strong support for one side in a conflict usually leads to strong opposition to the other side.
Also, a culture of extreme accessibility tends to create huge burdens on other people to accommodate. Here again I would argue that there needs to be a healthy balance.
In re SJWs using everything that would make a person’s life better as grounds for attack: I’m not sure I’d call it slave morality. I hate it, but I also find myself admiring the cleverness of it.
Also, if you start with great power implying great responsibility, it seems to lead to people claiming that they have no power, and therefore no responsibility for whatever damage they do.
A claim that is self-contradictory, as the ability to do damage is in itself power.
On the one hand, “SJW” can certainly be used overbroadly to tar adjacent ideologists that don’t deserve it.
On the other hand, arguments against using SJW can easily go overboard into being either standard euphemism treadmilling or a no-true-Scotsman attempt to shut down criticism of a group by requiring any mention of it be caveated by a string of a dozen adjectives.
On the gripping hand, there probably is a group to which “SJW” (or some very similar label) could be applied with reasonable charity, and such a label has value in describing a distinct set of ideologies (self-described as Social Justice) married to (and inspiring / justifying) a particular set of tactics for furthering those ideologies. If the problem is less the label, and more that the label is being abused – let’s police the use of the label rather than try to force a friendlier euphemism for the same thing.
If alternatives are a must, perhaps “Social Justice By Any Means Necessary”, or “SJ-BAMN”. Unfortunately, BAMN is already a distinct group, but then again BAMN is kind of a poster child for what people are gesturing at when they use the label SJW.
NAMBLA?
The problem is, the Anti-SJW movement treats SJWs the same way that SJWs treat social conservatives: vastly overestimating their social, cultural, and political power, to the point of dismissing perfectly valid statistical data and scientific research as enemy propaganda; seeing signs of their influence everywhere, to the point of constantly looking for enemy influence in completely innocuous pop culture works; assuming they’re automatically wrong about literally everything, to the point of reflexively opposing everything they support.
I also think there’s an important distinction to be made between social progressives in general (people who believe in egalitarianism, recognize that our society is not yet a fully egalitarian one, and understand that systematic discrimination exists and is a problem that needs to be dealt with) and left-identitarians (proponents of identity politics, who see people as fundamentally defined by their identity groups, view society primarily and perhaps even solely through the lens of identity-based hierarchies, and subscribe to an identity-based form of conflict theory). The term SJWs seems to be used to refer to both groups, without meaningfully distinguishing the first from the second. At best, there might be some acknowledgement that not everyone in the first group uses the extreme tactics of the second, but that still paints it as purely a difference in methods, without recognizing the difference in worldview.
I generally agree with social progressives, but I utterly abhor left-identitarians (though probably less so than a lot of the other people here, since I see them as more of a harmless nuisance than an existential threat to civilization, and far less dangerous to democracy and freedom than their counterparts on the social/cultural right).
This is true; I’ve gotten into disagreements here or on the Discord over their reach and abilities. It’s very easy to make a sort of nega-bubble where all you hear about is the all-powerful enemy.
Yes and no. The liberal view of social conservatives isn’t a bad fit to what’s going on — but it’s closer to the social conservatism of George W. Bush’s first term, or parts of Bill Clinton’s, than today’s. There aren’t a whole lot of them, they only have a few closely aligned politicians in office, and their ability to drive major change has so far been limited. But they’re seen, rightly or wrongly, as the face of their coalition by a lot of people outside it; their rhetoric is far more widespread than the culture that originated it; and they have politicians falling all over themselves to signal to them. There’s even a pretty good analogue to today’s media controversies: remember Jack Thompson?
It’s not a perfect analogy: social media is playing a role that’s totally new, for example. Insofar as we can follow it, though, it suggests that the people who’re worried about the hairdye Gestapo kicking down their doors in the middle of the night most likely have nothing to worry about. But on the other hand, it also suggests that the people who’re worried about what this is doing to the broader culture may well have a point — we’ve still got a hangover from the Moral Majority, almost forty years after its founding.
Myself, I think the movement may be past its peak. But I’m less concerned about its ability to do direct damage (though I’ve lost a few friends to it, and I definitely hold a grudge) and more concerned about the broader tendency towards totalizing politics that it’s contributed to.
I worry far, far more about the backlash than the thing itself, to be quite frank. Annoying campus people with a hard time harming people outside of their own clutches, who probably do more harm to themselves than to their opponents (both in the sense of “left wing circular firing squad” and in the sense that the equivalent of gang tats is shaving away emotional defences, because if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention) – but some people have gone waaaaaay too far in the opposite direction in, as it were, reaction. There are non-zero numbers of people whose reaction to being annoyed has been pretty disproportionate, to say the least.
How much is the SJW movement moving outside of student activists and into administration and bureaucracy at universities or in corporate HR? University of Michigan has 100 diversity, inclusion, and equity staff with total compensation around $11 million. I don’t know the particulars of their responsibilities, but my limited interaction with diversity, inclusion, and equity programs is they have heavy overlap with SJW ideas.
@IrishDude
This is where I start talking about “pseudo-radicals” – where are those staff getting hired from? When the students run into the president’s office shouting how they want more of those staff, they are effectively demanding jobs for themselves within a preexisting institution – hardly a radical demand!
(An aside: I think this is an unfortunate result of the vast bloat in administration at the expense of teaching staff: consider that U of M has just under 7k teaching staff and just under 19k admin staff.Iif that hadn’t happened, maybe the smarter ones of them would have a clear work-hard-and-network route to getting good tenured jobs as profs; instead, with all the proliferation of Assistant to the Secretary to the Assistant Dean jobs, the route to getting a decent job is different.)
However, here’s the thing. It’s just ass-covering. Universities are businesses; the biggest ones (not just private ones) have endowments with heavy investment, often to the point that the best-paid person on staff is the person who handles the investments. U of M has an endowment of $10.9 billion and a yearly budget of $9.5 billion – that 100 admin staff and $11 mil is a drop in the bucket.
So, I don’t think it’s ideology driving this, not ideology on the part of the admins. The senior admins will always follow the easiest route to protecting the endowment of what amounts to a peculiar sort of business, and the junior admins brought in because they have the right opinions will be turned into endowment-protectors because that’s where their paycheque comes from. In a way, it’s a real victory of capitalism.
This is silly. Universities aren’t run in a capitalist manner. And they function in a market with hordes of government barriers and subsidies to protect their position and fill them with cash. Even command-and-control set ups have to worry about budget or resources since the finiteness of resources is a fundamental limitation of the world.
@quanta413
Unlike, of course, any other industry.
Universities are still competing with other universities for students, and if they have infinite government money, why do my alma maters (matri? matrae?) keep hitting me up for cash?
I don’t have any thoughts on whether the diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) bureaucracy is radical or not, or ass-covering or not, but I do think this bureaucracy can have broad impacts that extend the reach of SJW ideas. This makes SJW a bigger deal than “Annoying campus people with a hard time harming people outside of their own clutches”.
Haidt and Lukianoff had an article on The Coddling of the American Mind that talked about how, in the name of protecting marginalized group, solutions such as trigger warnings, safe spaces, and focusing on microaggressions actually creates fragility, victimhood mentality, and inability to engage with critiques and a diversity of ideas:
“A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.”
How much is DIE bureaucracy creating programs or spreading solutions that end up causing harm to students, both those ‘being protected’ as well as those accused of microaggressions? How does spreading the idea that any disparity in any group implies a presumption of oppression affect the minds of students, both those looking for disparities (and therefore oppression) and those who are part of groups with disparities?
Campus culture doesn’t stay on campus either, as students at elite universities absorb (to some extent) the campus milieu and then go on to prominent roles in government, corporations, non-profits, and the media. If DIE bureaucracy negatively impacts campus culture, that will have ripple effects across society.
I recently watched a 1996 video of Peter Thiel debating political correctness and multi-culturalism, and it was eerily familiar to the discussion happening two decades later. Here’s one point he raised, which kind of addresses your “When the students run into the president’s office shouting how they want more of those staff” comment, with the context being why there’s more gender studies classes than economics classes, even though only a handful of students were gender studies majors and there were a magnitude greater number of economics majors:
“I would like to suggest to you is that this phenomenon is not being driven by a demand by radical students. I think it’s primarily a supply-side problem. It’s a problem that we have an oversupply of left-wing faculty who want to teach feminist studies classes and the way they teach them when people don’t want to take them is they institute graduation requirements. In Stanford they instituted a graduation requirement in gender studies a couple of years ago, though only about 30% of students even wanted to take it. I’m not sure that’s always the best indicator but it was not being driven by student demand, it’s a supply-side problem. Basically the radicals of the 60s got their PhDs in the 70s, they were associate professors in the 80s, and they have tenure in the 90s and it’s going to be with us for quite a while.”
@dndnrsn says:
Cats and elephants both have mass, so one jumping on you is no different from the other!
Degree matters. The government of course affects all industries, but it affects some more than others. Education is one of the least capitalistic industries out there.
quanta413 didn’t say anything about unlimited government money. The opposite in fact. As for competition, the various US military services compete over funds as well, that doesn’t mean that they’re behaving capitalistically.
@IrishDude
At this point, if you’re on a university campus, yeah, that’s the kind of territory this stuff happens. And I noted earlier, they’re often doing harm to themselves: you’ve got people who maybe already are more likely to have depression, anxiety, getting in a feedback loop about how awful the world is, and how only external change can fix individual problems, etc etc etc.
I question, though, the idea that people just absorb this stuff in university then carry it out. A lot of people just keep their head down and ignore it, a lot of people nod enough to get by then go and do whatever. People get more conservative as they age.
One of the reasons that universities turn out so many academics is a business reason: they can get PhD students to teach for a lower price than contract faculty, who will teach for a lower price than nontenured profs, who will teach for a lower price than tenured profs.
@cassander
There is clear businesslike behaviour on the part of university; sure, it’s not unfettered capitalism, hardly, but arguably universities at least feature more competition than the archetypal public-private mishmash monopolgy (like, say, privatizing hydro power or whatever).
What I’m saying is: protecting the university is different from Advancing The Cause. The universities now are practically hedge funds. Their investments are massive. If it became a better way to get enrollment, protect the endowment, etc, they’d all start creating degrees in Shitlord Studies and whatever. People are ultimately more self-interested than they are ideological crusaders; they are also very good at convincing themselves that their self-interest is an ideological crusade. One manifestation of this are the students screaming at the chancellor about oppression when what they want is jobs sitting in an office somewhere.
@dndrsn
Protecting and advancing one’s institution is not a businesslike behavior, or even a capitalistic one. It’s something all institutions do all the time, regardless of circumstances. The best you can do is try to channel that drive, not eliminate it.
There are about 10 universities with an endowment of above 10 billion, and about 100 above 1 billion. Harvard is practically a hedge fund, but almost no other school is. And even if we’re talking about Harvard, I fail to see what you think that proves. How would things be meaningfully different if these institutions didn’t have those endowments? What Cause?
I agree, but again, so what?
@dndnrsn
There are massive quantitative differences between the amount of subsidies and protections for various industries, and I’m pretty sure you know that. Universities are unusually highly intertwined with non-free market modes of resource distribution. Much like defense contractors are.
Your insinuation that I implied they have infinite money is ridiculous. I specifically said they were resource constrained because every system is resource constrained. I’ll quote the post you were responding to in case you don’t want to scroll up.
If you want to make a serious argument for why universities should be considered primarily a capitalist form of organization, kindly do so instead of just lying about what I said.
@cassander
However, they are operating as a business – they’re seeking customers, etc. Talk to professors, especially professors who have been around a while – they really don’t like the shift that’s come (in recent years, they would at least say) to thinking of students as customers who need to be kept at least minimally happy.
There’s a different dynamic of endowments vs tuition paid by students vs tuition paid by the state. The endowment of these is the easiest to protect – the legislature could cut funding, the student enrollment could drop, but a billion dollars is a billion dollars.
(Also, flipping to Canadian universities – I see that the admin to teaching staff ratio is rather lower than comparable American universities. I wonder what’s up with that?)
My point is that something that is often presented as this ideologically-driven thing is just the money getting followed. What a lot of people here see as an ideological takeover of university administration, I see as a domestication of something that maybe once was radical.
@quanta413
Certainly – but would anyone say that this showed that defence contractors were not capitalist enterprises?
I misread your post; it’s my fault for rushing. Could you cool the tone a little?
I don’t think they’re primarily capitalist organizations. But I think that there has been an increasing sense of schools as businesses. While it was never the days that old professors talk about, where they were like gurus sitting at the tops of mountains, there’s more of a sense of students as customers, more competition for students, more of a focus on the material benefit students get from going to university, etc. At the same time there’s been a shift towards squeezing more work from lower-paid academic staff, and a huge bloat in administration.
@dndnrsn says:
If talking about customers is enough to get you called a business, then most of the US government is a capitalist enterprise, which is clearly absurd. You’re setting the bar way too low. Like I said, ALL institutions have sources of revenue that they cultivate and clients that they serve.
If this were true, we’d see dramatic differences in the behavior of public vs. private universities in the US. For the most part, we don’t.
It’s both.
I believe we’ve had this debate before. Just because the radicals don’t get everything they’re asking for doesn’t mean that there can’t be radical change, especially if you look over time.
I think it is far to say that universities behave more like businesses than they did 50 or 100 years ago.
To what extent do private institutions benefit from public spending, though? There are also public institutions with large endowments – take the U of M.
I think it is primarily following the money. The admins, the student activists… Here in Canada we have the CFS/FCEE, the big student union. Their language is all social justice, but their behaviour is like some feudal lord; it is very hard to leave, even with a majority vote. The way they handle money is sketchy. They do sketchy stuff to get their preferred slates elected in subordinate student union elections. The student union leaders talk a great game about social justice, but when you look at their behaviour, they give themselves inflated salaries, they play fast and loose with other people’s money, and there’s this pipeline from the student unions to other sinecures. Not hugely charitable on my part, but I find it hard to believe they are motivated primarily by the cause.
If it happens slowly, in drips and drabs, over time, by definition it’s not radical change.
Sure. Sorry, I may have gone a little overboard. I only expressed anger because I’ve found that if I respond to snide remarks politely I get ignored. It’s hard to hit exactly how much anger to express to get someone’s attention but not so much as to be counterproductive.
Good question. They certainly have a lot of capital. But in this case, I wouldn’t imply that their behavior was some sort of feature of capitalism. I believe they would behave in an extremely similar way in a command-and-control situation.
I think this shift in behavior though is largely because their subsidies and funds increased (in the form of federal loans to students, the NSF, NIH, etc.). The extra money and rules attracted bureaucracy like food attracts flies.
Students aren’t really in a customer-like relationship exactly even if someone thought that was a good metaphor for the changes they’ve made.
If following the money was the main motivation, universities wouldn’t be ideological monocultures (to a first approximation). The ideology they chose makes sense in the political context they already had since the 60s. They could siphon money off with a totally different ideology or a mixture, but they don’t.
@dndnrsn
they’re much bigger now, that makes their behavior more visible, but I don’t think it’s materially different controlling for size.
A lot, but a lot less than public universities do.
you already summed it up when you said people “are also very good at convincing themselves that their self-interest is an ideological crusade.” One can be a sincere crusader and trying to line one’s pockets at the same time. In fact, I’d say that’s how crusading usually works.
This is nonsense. Cars are a radical change in society from horses, even though the transition from cars to horses took decades.
@quanta413
I think I got into this argument with, uh, cassander, was it? There’s capitalism the ideology/system, and there’s capitalism, which is what capitalists do. It’s hard to say a CEO isn’t a capitalist, even if he uses every trick in the book to capture government, glom onto subsidies, throw up regulatory obstacles to competitors, which is hardly in line with what a dedicated ideological capitalist would want.
We’d have to look at the timeline of this in different places though – it might just be that administration is fated to increase no matter what. See Parkinson’s Law.
I think universities spend a lot more time trying to keep students happy; at least, based on my experiences and war stories from profs, that’s what I think. Possible biased sample, of course.
Universities were more ideologically diverse in the 60s than today; a lot of the things which we ascribe to the 60s commonly happened in the 70s. I also wouldn’t say universities are an ideological monoculture, so much as right-wingers have seen their numbers dwindle. Why, they’ve got both kinds of ideology – liberals and leftists!
More seriously, I think there was a snowball effect. The early student radicals, who actually kinda were radicals, actually were fighting the power. The history of radicals actually getting power – any power, including extremely piddly power like command of a student union – is of those radicals ceasing to be radicals. They keep talking radical, but are quickly replaced by a combination of weaselly careerists and dead-eyed apparatchiks.
@cassander
Universities are qualitatively different than they were 100 years ago, probably starting post-WWII. Places that used to be more or less finishing schools now attract aggressive keeners.
Including more diffuse sources of public funding?
I think someone is only truly sincere if their words and actions really line up. That they think they do isn’t enough.
Political radicals usually want some decisive break, though. Had there been car radicals, they would have demanded all the horses shot, and if that meant there weren’t enough cars to go around and some people had to walk, well, it will be worth it when everyone has a car.
The word capitalism is perhaps too unspecific due to being used in many different ways. Capitalist is an even more poorly specified word.
Defense contractors are more capitalist than a state owned enterprise, but on the other hand, they’re a lot less capitalist than most other industries.
But even if they are partly capitalist, I don’t think they’re good examples of it. And even less so for universities. Most universities are have plenty of similarities to their colonial or medieval forebears and are sometimes the same institution.
Even in the 60s, my hazy recollection is left wing outnumber right wing 3 or 4 to 1. And the university right wing is not as hard right as its left was hard left. The hardest left of universities consists of apologists for communism in practice. Chomsky engaged in apologetics for the khmer rouge even after significant reports of how horrible they were; it took some serious piling up of evidence for him to admit they were not so good although he still claims his evaluation at the time was fine given the evidence available. And Chomsky is relatively honest and principled. The outnumbering of left to right is what now? Ostensibly something like 10 or 20 to 1? That’s less of a dwindling than an exclusion.
I mean, if you count those radicals being replaced by weaselly careerists who are themselves maybe this is true (Dohrn and Ayers for example).
Becoming the power isn’t necessarily a sign you gave up on the fight etc. It can also be a sign you won. And at universities, I think this is largely true. The center of politics at a university is what used to be radical.
Every ideology in practice is full of humans using it for greedy ends so the existence of careerists doesn’t seem like very convincing evidence to me that people who follow a social justice ideology aren’t about as sincere as the average person or maybe even a little more so.
In 1964, the Harvard Crimson poll found about 19% of the students supporting Goldwater.
I was astonished that it was that high.
The left wing included Maoists, but I don’t think they were a large fraction of it.
@dndnrsn
I think that the radicals are very good at creating a fear culture, based in part on more moderate leftists who have some distance to the issue having a strong tendency to pick sides with the activists based on their rhetoric.
For example:
It seems to me that there is also a strong tendency on the left now to see various issues as relatively minor, that I think matter greatly.
@quanta413
What would you say is the best currently-existing example of capitalism?
I’m not going to defend that; the lack of right-wing profs and students is an issue (for self-interested reasons: I’ve met so many left-wingers who can’t argue their positions for shit, because they’ve never had to) but I think you’re underestimating the gap between liberals and leftists (or, the shitty half-and-half types who seem so common).
Dohrn and Ayers and the others of their ilk are a great example of people getting conservative as they age. When they were kids they were willing to go underground and fight the system; they’re still left-wingers but now they’re basically reformists. The working-class and especially the black radicals, they mostly ended up in prison, dead, or exiled – Angela Davis is the only counterexample I can think of off the top of my head, and she was from a middle-class, educated family.
But their ability to get radical demands fulfilled has disappeared. The student union types who march every year for free tuition (which they will not get) talk about tearing down capitalism, but what they are really demanding is that the 80% of the population who do not have a university degree pay for the 20% who do, which seems like the opposite of progressive.
I don’t think they’re less sincere than the norm. But I think that the standard is higher for people who say “we’re sincere! We’re the good ones!” I expect a higher standard of behaviour from a priest than from Gordon Gekko.
No? NJs governor is trying to do it for community colleges.
And when they ask for things like more grievance studies requirements, more diversity programs, or segregated dorms for black people, they tend to get it.
@dndnrsn
The data actually shows that the number of moderates have declined with the same amount of percentage points as conservatives and I would argue that this is an even bigger issue, as moderates are the glue that keeps conservatives and progressives connected. It’s way easier to get bubbles and hard Overton Windows when there are two distinct groups, rather than a spectrum.
Community colleges are cheaper to run, I presume. Here in Canada, all the good universities are public and receive a lot of money already, and budgets tend to be tight. I would be extremely surprised if universal free tuition becomes a thing.
How common are these things? Back when I went to school, they just made us take one each of humanities, social sciences, and sciences, and had lots of “x for non-x” courses. Now it looks like they have some sort of cockamamie scheme involving more categories, but they’re all vague, and it looks like it’s just a formality. Segregation in dorms here is mostly for women’s dorms.
@dndnrsn
Keeping in mind the nonexistence of totally unregulated industries, the restaurant industry strikes me as being as close to the textbook many competitors, low barriers to entry ideal as it gets. Outside of all the standard regulatory cruft that anyone with employees or a building has to deal with, there’s not too much more besides health regulations. And restaurants come into existence and go out of business all the time.
The tech industry giants (Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft) seem pretty capitalist as well even if they do some government business. They serve enormous consumer markets. But they operate in a space with much higher fixed costs and very strong network effects, so their industry looks nothing like textbook examples of perfect competition. Still, Amazon is famous for being brutally competitive about lowering margins to win the competition.
Certainly compared to universities, my examples are vastly more affected by the incentives of a relatively free market system. I dunno if these industries are the most capitalist. I don’t have a system or knowledge to rank things that tightly. But they’re pretty capitalist as far as existing things go.
I don’t think I am. I just don’t really think the gap is that relevant to figuring out to what extent modern university politics is caused by money grubbing vs sincere ideology. The liberals like Christakis might be numerically more common, but they seem to have habit of ignoring problems until it’s too late. I think the most common position is just a sort of nonspecific leftism, similar to how most groups are filled with people who aren’t super into whatever the exact philosophy at hand is but just sort of go with the flow.
Sure, he moved from violent insurrection towards peaceful means. But he still calls himself a communist and I see no reason not to believe him. His blog is slightly more conservative than Marx. I don’t think his change in behavior is a sign he became more conservative in political views. It’s a sign he pulled his head out of his ass and realized how to actually make progress towards his goals. This is an improvement for his goals.
I don’t think they ever had that ability on their own in the first place. The idea that they were moral crusaders for justice fighting the man who swept evil before them is just romanticizing what happened after the fact. Far left wing thought isn’t that popular in the U.S. and probably wouldn’t be doing so well if they hadn’t shifted tactics and captured universities.
In theory, I agree that would be ideal. In practice, I don’t think it really holds.
Most people who go with the flow are going to go with the flow wherever they go.
His goals were a cockamamie scheme in which a bunch of university kids bombing draft centres would cause black people and blue collar whites to rise up and overthrow capitalism, of course with said university kids as the leadership. He’s still a communist, sure, but is communism capable of happening by process of reform?
But in so doing, it largely abandoned real radicalism, except rhetorically. They’re not bomb-throwers any more, they’re careerists; their shtick is screaming about smashing the white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy while simultaneously trying to shake down any elements of such within easy reach.
In practice, it holds if we hold it. I’ll take the business students over the hustlers who deny being hustlers.
Tell it to the List of Usual Suspects in tech.
That they also harm themselves is scant comfort.
That planes are relatively safe isn’t much of a consolation to people who die in plane accidents, but that doesn’t change that plane accidents are not a hugely productive thing to be afraid of. This is the sort of place where usually people will say “rationally, you should not be afraid of xyz; it is not very likely” but the Hairdye NKVD is feared.
dndnrsn –
I think a more substantial issue, to people, is that this wasn’t something they had to fear at all just a few years ago.
Huh. Can’t edit the last comment.
The other side of that is that what they have to fear is – being targeted for exactly the thing many people insist they have no valid reason to fear being targeted for, even as they are lambasted for group responsibility for other members of their group – who they are insistently told aren’t a real group but the default – doing exactly the same thing.
They’re told it’s super-bad when any group -except theirs- is targeted for being a member of their group. They’ve been raised being told how uniquely evil groupism is, how much people suffer from it, how if we aren’t constantly vigilant then groupism will come hurtling into our society and suddenly we’ll be shoving people into concentration camps or whatever.
You tell them all of this, insistently and loudly and authoritatively – and then act surprised when they treat members of their group being targeted as a big deal?
We have neither numerator (heretics burned) nor denominator (total heretics), so it seems to me it’s hard to say this isn’t something for a heretic to be afraid of.
@dndnrsn In the USSR, after Stalin, the vast majority of people, with the exception of loud dissidents, didn’t have much reason to fear the NKVD/KGB. But the fact that (would-be) loud dissidents had to fear it contributed to maintaining a system that was shitty for all.
@Thegnskald
Who’s this “you”? I would prefer to live in a world without the sort of political tribalism where the bad stuff that affects us is nuclear, the bad stuff that affects them is imaginary. Vary who “us” and “them” are depending on bubble or whatever.
In a perfect world, maybe people would be saying “let’s make it harder to fire people for stuff not directly linked to job performance” or something like that. But in a perfect world, maybe also people wouldn’t wait until after the identity of the shooter/bomber/bus driver had come out to figure out whether it’s a serious problem that needs attention or something to be swept under the carpet.
@The Nybbler
We don’t have any evidence either way – so let’s go with what you said? How do you feel about people on the opposite side of the aisle making political hay about their constant fear of threats that are, statistically, very minor?
@10240
I am pretty sure that it is safer to be a computer programmer who likes Jordan Peterson or whatever than a dissident in the USSR post-1953. Just a hunch. Both in terms of one’s chances of getting caught, and in terms of how bad the outcome is if caught.
The “you” is led by an implied “if”, and refers to society in general, not you specifically.
An equivalent construct would be “You punch someone, you get punched”.
I am not saying it is desirable. But it is important to diagnose the issue as a fully general one with the current approach to politics – telling white men “You shouldn’t be worried about this” when everybody else has been worried about this for years is just… unhelpful? You are just reinforcing the idea for them that they are particularly and specially valid for targeting because when they are targeted it is uniquely invisible as a social problem. You are singling a group out for complaining about being singled out.
Sure, it’s a fully general problem. I also look at this more on a meta than object level; I really like a bit from one of Ozy’s articles.
The people who say “fire them for their bad opinions” (regardless of their own politics; you get to see the right-wing version of this every time some 31-year-old contract instructor at a state school posts some spiciness on social media and a bunch of people start screamin’ ’bout firin’ that essjaydubya; for those with tenure, the history of academic freedom is more about conservatives trying to get leftist profs fired than vice versa) either assume that they could never be the victims of that, or that they’re already under threat and the other side started it.
I was in a place where the threat from the SJWs was in fact quite significant. They still talked about their constant fear of threats that were very minor. The actual level of the threat does make a difference; to use real examples, pretending you’re threatened by the mere fact that a lot of men are discussing an issue on a mailing list is a lot different than actually being threatened by HR.
But what’s “significant”? Are we talking 1% per chance per person with heterodox opinions to lose their job? 0.1? Is it significant enough to justify the amount of hate/fear?
I think also “pretending you’re threatened” is the wrong way to think about it. If it’s advantageous to feel threatened, rather than pretend to feel threatened, people appear to unconsciously self-modify to actually feel threatened. This is what I mean when I say they’re doing themselves harm; other people on the opposite side of the fence doing that isn’t good for themselves either.
I’ve told you before I’m not buying “We’re just alike, you and I”. I’m also not buying “there’s no real threat” based on just throwing around uncertainty about quantification. I know there’s a real threat because I’m personally aware of multiple people who got fired and more who got warnings from HR. I know of exactly zero who suffered measurable harm from microaggressions or any of the other “threats” that group uses to justify their rhetoric and actions against others.
That both sides make claims that can, if you squint a whole lot, be fit into the same form does not mean the claims are equivalent.
@dndnrsn Sure. Then again, you were obviously exaggerating when claiming that anti-SJWs claim that they are afraid of the hairdye NKVD coming after them. I’m not sure we disagree about the facts here.
I’m not sure about the numbers of people actually fired or otherwise overtly disciplined. But I do think it’s important to remember that you can’t always measure how big a deterrent effect is by how many cases show up in the news, nor even by how many times some overt spectacular punishment is applied.
As one example of that, I’ll point out that there have not been all that many instances of government whistleblowers being sent to prison or having thelr lives wrecked by a multi-year investigation that costs their whole life savings to defend. Would you take that as evidence that there is no deterrent effect happening from those very visible cases where a whistleblower ends up in prison for a couple decades?
@The Nybbler
I’m not talking about microaggressions. I’m talking about, say, anti-gun kids saying they feel unsafe in school, are scared someone is going to come in and shoot them. When, once you crunch the numbers, the chances of that happening are extremely low – the fear is extremely outsize to the threat.
@10240
We have in this comment section at least one person, who clearly isn’t a dummy (I mean, I don’t know how to make lightning boxes go, right) saying that the threat is real.
@albatross11
OK, that’s a good point. At no point have I said that it’s a good thing that this happens; I would prefer to live in a world where people only get fired for their views if their views are actually heinous (like, real Nazis, or real Stalinists, let’s say, not “round up to nearest totalitarianism”). But I think the amount of fear-reflex is outsized to the threat.
@dndnrsn Some threat? Sure. NKVD-analogous threat? I don’t think anyone claimed that. (As for my own NKVD analogy, I didn’t claim that the threat was equivalent to the NKVD, only that if there’s little threat for most people, that doesn’t imply that everything is OK.) (I don’t understand your “lightning boxes” phrase.)
“Hairdye NKVD” is just my pet phrase. “Lightning box” is what I call computers when I’m making fun of the fact that I was an arts major.
Huh, I always attributed the term to BBA, now I’m afraid all the leftist commenters are blending in in my mind due to my old age.
A leftist? Me? Why, I’m just an innocent little liberal!
I have borrowed the term once or twice. Give me a heads-up if you start charging royalties for it.
Sure you are, Iain.
I think the comparison to the Moral Majority and the religious right is good; it’s my preferred comparison. But I think there are some important differences, most importantly that social justice has not shown any of the organizational capacity or the crossover into mainstream politics that the religious right did.
For example, I can’t think of a social justice organization comparable to the Moral Majority, nor can I think of any social justice activist comparable in stature to Jerry Falwell, nor can I think of any major politician who owes their success to the social justice coalition in the way that Reagan or Bush II owed their success to the Evangelical vote.
Some of this is just due to the fact that social justice is more diffused throughout the culture, and perhaps some is due to the role of social media which allows for less top-down organization to exert pressure, but I still think that’s a disadvantage when it comes to actual political change. It will be interesting to see if that changes in the near future.
That’s an interesting comparison, and I think makes sense–but it definitely looks different depending on where you look from.
From my perspective, the Moral Majority was an attempt to change/manage the culture via politics, and had very little impact. The SJW-and-adjacent movement is an attempt to change the culture via the bureaucracy and the legal system, and has had huge effects. I don’t remember, and can’t imagine, that many Fortune 500 companies were actively supporting the Moral Majority via their HR policies: I expect that the majority of Fortune 500 companies have an officer in charge of diversity and HR policies aligned with SJW-ish goals.
As a rough proxy for the cultural penetration of each, I’ve checked to see what percentage of people today consider themselves “feminist”, versus what percentage considered themselves “born again” in 1980. I find that apparently 1/3 of men and 3/5 of women regard themselves as feminists as of 2016. Other sources come out with only 18% which sounds low to me, but I’m recording it here just in case. As of 2002 the previous all-time high for feminist self-identification was 33% in 1992.
Apparently, as of last year 29% of Americans identify as born again. Gallup combines “born again” and “evangelical” and gets 42% of current Americans. Annoyingly, I can’t find the data back to 1980, but at the same link I see that 40% of Americans thought the Bible was the actual word of God in 1980, which should hopefully not be a terrible proxy. The percentage never goes below 24% (in 2017).
I take this as evidence that the cultural penetration of social justice currently is on the same scale as that of the religious right in the Reagan era; and if that 18% is a more accurate number for self-identified feminists, it would seem to mean that religious identity still has more cultural penetration than social justice.
I think to a large extent, people have simply forgotten how powerful the religious right could be, but they absolutely did get corporate America to yield to their threat of boycotts, and were able to influence pop culture in their preferred direction.
I would guess the HR policies have more to do with discrimination law than with the cultural penetration of social justice, but I’ll let someone who knows more than me comment.
I would guess the HR policies have more to do with discrimination law than with the cultural penetration of social justice
I think of social justice as the weaponization of (anti)discrimination law.
@Eugene Dawn
The size of a group doesn’t necessarily match their (cultural) power. This is social justice 101 🙂
Different messages and actions may also differ in their effectiveness. Lots of white people listen to ‘gangsta’ songs, but fairly few of them mimic the trappings of that lifestyle.
Obviously not, but it’s a first approximation. If you have some countervailing evidence to suggest that the religious right was less powerful culturally and politically at its peak than social justice is now, then I’m certainly interested in it.
@Eugene Dawn
When was the religious right at it’s peak in the US? 1770? I’m not going to argue that the religious right wasn’t very powerful before large scale secularization.
If you are arguing about the period of the Moral Majority, then I would argue that they didn’t have the kind of domination of institutions like Hollywood, universities and such that the left does now, so there are far fewer informal checks and balances to social justice overreach.
The religious right may not have had Hollywood, but they certainly had their own media networks with non-trivial cultural reach; I annoyingly can’t seem to find viewership information for the 700 Club around 1980, but for example the Left Behind books appear to have sold about as well as the Hunger Games and Game of Thrones.
The religious right also had (and has) their own universities, and dominate(d) other institutions with wide cultural importance, notably Churches. The era of the Moral Majority was an era of religious dominance in American political culture: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan were both born again; three US Senators (including currently sitting Orrin Hatch) were on the board of directors of Christian Voice, the first major Christian Right organization; in the 1994 Congressional Elections 27% of the electorate identified as evangelical or born again. Here’s an article from the era that gives a flavour of how powerful the religious right seemed politically.
Does it compare to social justice today? I think it’s at least a plausible comparison, though obviously better numbers for both movements would help. But I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the comparison.
@Eugene Dawn
All of those things you name are aimed at and consumed almost solely by the religious right and thus at most reduce defection. Pillarisation is fundamentally defensive and anti-apostasy, not proselytizing.
For example, I have high confidence that the number of progressives at Liberty University is way smaller than the number of conservatives at Berkeley. The current situation exposes conservatives to progressive beliefs way, way more than vice versa.
Furthermore, those religious universities are ranked very poorly. If we would treat the religious right as a minority, their segregation in these shitty universities would be slam dunk evidence that we need to start busing students to aid educationally disenfranchised conservative Christians 🙂
Aapje:
That sounds plausible, but I wondered if it was true, so I looked around for data.
First, I found this from Liberty University:Article about the voting precinct in which Liberty University resides. This showed a really amazing skew toward Republicans–to the extent it correlates with how students feel about politics (probably pretty far), it makes the case that there probably aren’t actually many Democrats (or even moderate Democrats of the kind who might be expected to be happy to vote for Hillary over Trump, but maybe not Sanders over Jeb Bush, say). The totals there were 2739:140 ~= 20:1.
This article says that the vote in Berkeley went about 90% for Hillary and 3% for Trump. So about a 30:1 ratio.
Neither of these results are perfect–I think Liberty University is a heavily commuter campus (so lots of students don’t live or vote on campus), so lots of students voted elsewhere. And it’s in an extremely red part of the country, so any non-students in that same district are probably skewed pretty far toward Trump vs Clinton. Berkeley’s results are for (I think) the whole town, so catch a lot of non-students, and Berkeley is a famously liberal place.
What I think we can take from the numbers I could find in a quick Google search: The actual ratios of conservatives:liberals at Liberty University and liberals:conservatives at Berkeley are probably pretty similar. Based on this limited data, I’d imagine heavily overlapping posterior distributions on that ratio.
Addendum:
The Liberty article also gave numbers for third-party candidates: 137 for Johnson, 156 for McMullen, 4 for Stein.
If we put the support for McMullen into the “right wing” bin[1], we still get about the same ratio. (Even if we add Johnson into the right-wing bin, we don’t change the ratio much.) The biggest ratio I can get from this data is
(Trump+Johnson+McMullen) : (Clinton+Stein)
~= 21:1 conservative:liberal votes.
From the Berkeley results
Clinton. 57,750 90.4%
Stein 2,947 4.6%
Trump 2,031 3.2%
Johnson 884 1.4%
La Riva 298 .5%
If we add up all the left wing votes (Clinton, Stein, La Riva[2]), and all the right-wing votes (Trump, Johnson), we get ~= a 21:1 liberal:conservative vote ratio.
So basically, they’re about the same proportion.
Also, it’s interesting to note that among college freshman, things are not nearly so skewed. This poll shows about 35% of incoming freshmen are broadly on the left, an about 23% are broadly on the right. (There’s also increasing polarization, as I think shows up in most surveys of voters.)
[1] Johnson doesn’t really fit there, especially when we’re considering evangelical Christians, who are unlikely to be big fans of his support for gay marriage and pot legalization.
[2] La Riva is a Communist, so it seems safe to put her on the left.
I expect the city-wide figures to be more extreme than the student figures, since presumably some students will accept temporarily living in hostile territory to get a top education.
https://callink.berkeley.edu/organization/berkeleycollegerepublicans
Of course, I presume that it is merely one of the largest because progressive students feel secure enough to spread out over many different student run organizations, while conservatives tend to feel beleaguered and seek each other out for comfort, but still…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/07/why-liberty-university-is-requiring-its-students-to-attend-a-bernie-sanders-speech/
Of course, it may very plausibly be the case that progressives are more beleaguered at Liberty, so they hide much more.
PS. I have switched from the religious right to ‘conservatives’ to make my claim, which may be a mistake. Perhaps a large percentage of Republicans at Berkeley’s University are libertarians or other not-so religious right-wingers. Perhaps the religious right is more self-segregated than I think?
Sure, but on the other hand, the institutions that are/were under religious right control were much more dominated by them than Hollywood and universities are by social justice today. I’m sure that Liberty University is more doctrinal at teaching Christianity than any secular university, and I’m sure the 700 Club was more on-brand promoting their version of Christianity than Hollywood is at promoting social justice. I’m open to a model where social justice has wide but shallow dominance and the religious right had narrower but deeper dominance; I think that sounds plausible to me.
But there’s still the fact that, as indicated by the Left Behind sales, that there are still a lot of consumers of that media. Religious right stuff may have had a narrower reach than social justice, but it still had a very big reach, and a pretty impressive political and cultural clout.
By the numbers I quoted before, about 30% of the total right-wing votes went to Gary Johnson, and there appear not to have been any votes for McMullen (the “I want a conservative who’s not so Trumpy” vote) or the Constitution Party. So my first cut guess would be that a largish fraction of the right in Berkeley are probably more libertarian than religious right. But this is where better data would come in handy….
I think the data I’ve seen so far suggests about equal ratios at the two colleges. (That is, probably around 20:1 left:right at Berkeley and 20:1 right:left at Liberty.)
How would we determine whether Liberty or some other religious university is more effective at indoctrination of their students in religious right/evangelical Christian views than some left-leaning university is at indoctrination the other direction? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were right, but it’s not obvious to me.
A quick bit of web-searching suggested to me that you’re probably right, at least in terms of course requirements. Georgetown (a Jesuit university) requires about 5% of your coursework be in theology, and another 5% in philosophy. So at least 5% of your coursework could possibly be thought of as indoctrination (though probably more of the “you will have to learn and understand this material” kind than the “here’s what you are to believe, any questions, go ask the Dominicans and they’ll show you the instruments” kind. It looked like Liberty University required about 10% of your total coursework be religious instruction.
By contrast, it looked like Berkeley had *one* required course (American Cultures) that was pretty obviously SJW-oriented. Thinking of colleges recently in the news, I looked up Evergreen (no required courses at all) and Middlebury (I couldn’t find anything like a social-justice required course, but had a hard time figuring out if I was seeing everything.)
Among more standard state universities, Univ of Maryland has two required courses in basically diversity–that’s the same as Georgetown has in theology, which seems kinda appropriate to me as a comparison. From what I could tell, Univ of Missouri didn’t have any such requirement. (Though both also included humanities and social sciences requirements–I’m assuming you can do music and econ in those and dodge any further attempted indoctrination.
So my guess is that Liberty University is a bit of an outlier here. Other colleges seem to give you one or two required indoctrination[1] courses (theology, american cultures, diversity studies) and then a laundry list of optional courses, some of which will add on more indoctrination if you want them.
As another aside, I looked at Hillsdale College–another famously conservative college. They’re clearly trying to indoctrinate you into Western culture and the Western Cannon, but had no religious or theological requirements.
[1] This is judging entirely by their names; I have no idea how much these are open-ended discussions or how much dissent is acceptable. I’d expect the Georgetown theology courses to be pretty good at accepting dissent if it was well-expressed and well-reasoned, and the Liberty U and Berkeley/UMD diversity courses to be less tolerant of dissent, but that’s my impression, not based on any data.
I forgot that the progressives/Democrats at Liberty are not necessarily SJ advocates. So this issue would happen on both sides (but not necessarily to the same extent.)
Those are mostly four-unit courses. At Berkeley you need 120 units to graduate, so the American Cultures requirement represents 3.3% of your time there — not so far off from the 5% for theology at Liberty.
I went to a different school in the UC system, and my requirements included five credits in social justice topics — I forget the exact phrasing. But also five credits in political and cultural topics, and almost all the courses that counted for that were at least SJ-adjacent: I took an introductory political science class for it that ended up being centered around the history of popular revolutions and activism. There were a number of other requirements that could be difficult to satisfy without some level of indoctrination, although it was technically possible.
(This was several years ago. Things may have changed since then. And I was in a technical major — I’d expect a lot more indoctrination if I was in the humanities or, especially, some of the social sciences.)
I am curious about something, Lady Jane. And I guess it is a question for all of those who advocate SJ while being wary of the SJW extreme. I would like to know your take on the below.
One thing that really annoys me about the left politically is the strong tokenism. When a Black person runs for office, often the race of the candidate is treated as one of the major positives. Similarly for women running for office. I am constantly amazed at how often I hear someone say something to the effect that “oh yes, that person is a good candidate, but I would much prefer a woman.” And this blatant racism and sexism is said without embarrassment by educated people. And then there are corporations that brag about how many women or minorities are on their board of directors. It always amazes me that people think this affirmative action is so important that it is more important than getting the best people to run important institutions like government and large corporations.
So my question for you, Lady Jane, and others, is your take on doing affirmative action type hiring on ALL positions, no matter what level. The reason I ask in this thread is that I often hear in SSC that SJW’s are really just a small segment of leftism. But the sort of thing I describe is very prevalent on the left in the US.
This is complex, but I’ll try:
1) I agree it’s annoying and cringeworthy when the underlying preference is expressed in sexist/racist terms.
2) The underlying preference is based on at least two components:
2a) representation being a good thing in itself as it adds viewpoints/experiences and provides role models for the future
2b) The assumption that someone who is equally ‘best’ but from a disadvantaged background is actually either better because they got to the same point from a worse starting point and/or has other, unobservable good traits, for instance ‘grit’.
2c) AFAICT this is really no different from the conservative preference for christians, successful businesspeople, gun owners/hunters, married hetereosexuals, and people with a rural background. Except in that the left prefers (among other things, such as a working class background) persons from historically marginalized groups, which opens them up to the charge of racism/sexism.
2d) Specifically the Democratic Party in the USA may be following the simple incentive that providing opportunites for the groups that vote for you is a reasonable strategy to ensure they keep voting for you.
Considering your second point: “It … amazes me that people think this affirmative action is so important that it is more important than getting the best people to run important institutions” I suggest you’re bumping up against an unstated premise or rather using one yourself. Namely that at whatever point in the selection process you happen to be at, (a) there’s a meaningful difference in quality of applicants that’s (b) likely to have a noticeable effect on outcomes. This frankly is not my experience in life generally and most especially not with political candidates. At any stage, I experience the field of candidates as containing some obviously unqualified/unsuitable people and a field of candidates who could all do the job and I won’t kid myself into thinking any of them is vastly superior*, except maybe superior in appealing to my biases. Plus, even the ‘best’ will be working in an environment which I can only mentally model on a basic level and will be faced with future challenges and opportunities I can barely anticipate.
So, at that point, the notion that my subjective estimate of ‘best’ overrules the aspect of equal representation seems sketchy to me, at best. At worst, it’s an attempt to wrap a potentially unconscious bias for white males in the guise of ‘objective’ assessment.
* If there really is, he/she is likely to move on to bigger and better things soon, so support in the present depends on the expected time to departure and benefits during that time over someone who I expect to stick around.
This assumption is racist, because it assumes that a ‘disadvantaged background’ equates to race, gender or other one-dimensional trait.
A white Appalachian man from a trailer park is is probably more disadvantaged than many blacks.
Most of those examples are choices and/or are linked to ability, not traits like skin color that in themselves don’t make one more or differently competent.
I’d like to expand on brmic’s points a bit:
brmic’s point 2a) representation is good in itself–
The argument here is that, especially in representative systems, it’s important that citizens be represented by politicians who share their interests, and more importantly, black people/women/gay people have enough shared political interest– that are not necessarily shared with the rest of the population!–that they will be best represented by politicians from similar backgrounds.
For example, a black politician is, all else being equal, more likely to understand the challenges and issues facing black constituents. Perhaps more important than understanding the issues is prioritizing them. While it’s possible for a straight politician to understand gay issues, if they are not personally affected they may be more willing to de-prioritize them and trade concessions on gay rights for support elsewhere.
For both these reasons, one can think it is an active good to have politicians who represent groups that have a history of being disadvantaged politically, or that have not been well-served by the political process.
Since, as an example, black people and women were denied the vote, and have been subject to onerous laws that white and male politicians were willing to change only reluctantly, making sure there are black and female politicians is important as a safeguard against other similar injustices.
I like brmic’s analogy to small-business owners. A conservative might think it’s important to have politicians who have actually been in business, since they are more likely to understand instinctively the possibility that high taxes and regulation can be onerous and harmful, and are more likely to prioritize those interests. One might also argue that they have an expertise born of experience in business-related issues that other politicians can’t get (or can’t get easily) just by studying; a business owner is more likely to reliably support the interests of business as a politician.
The same idea holds for representation: a gay politician has an expertise born of experience in issues affecting the gay community, and is more likely to reliably support the interests of that community. This is especially important if non-gay politicians have a history of being unreliable in supporting these interests.
It may help to move away from American examples to find better analogies. I suspect that most Americans, including conservatives, would view very positively the development of a significant number of Christians being elected to Pakistan’s National Assembly, or being made government ministers. This is because Christians are discriminated against heavily in Pakistan, can be executed for blasphemy, and are currently not allowed to serve in high offices. The only major Christian politician I can find in Pakistan after a quick Google search is a mayor of Karachi who died in the 1920s. So, even if any particular Christian Assemblyman is a bit of a dud politically, it can still be an important and positive step for the Christian population of Pakistan to take some control over their political destiny, especially since non-Christian politicians don’t have a great track record at standing up for their Christian constituents.
The points above are all about politicians, but the argument can be adapted to corporate boards of directors and other scenarios, although not everyone will find each version of the argument equally convincing.
Eugene –
Would you be comfortable if everybody followed this line of reasoning? If white people has gone “Obama is a fine candidate, but he is not going to represent white people as well as a white person would have”? Minorities depend on majority support; this argument suggests majorities shouldn’t support minorities in pursuit of their own rational self-interest.
More, it has broader societal implications about the validity of segregation, as it implies self-interest is best served through homogeneity.
This isn’t a norm I want normalized.
Pakistan has some prominent Christian politicians, the problem is they tend to get shot by their own bodyguards.
@Thegnskald
I have a few answers to this:
1) This depends on the extent to which white people have common interests as white people. I, and I think most people, don’t find it particularly awful that “ethnic white” or white immigrant communities vote for people like them. I am not aware of much opposition to Polish communities supporting Polish politicians, Jewish communities electing Jewish politicians, etc.
Even for non-hyphenated white Americans, I think shared culture or region are valid reasons to support a politician. I certainly have no problem if Appalachian voters prefer Appalachian politicians, and if Appalachia were solely represented by carpet-bagging politicians from outside the region, I’d think there’d be merit in supporting a politician from the region.
The concern is with elevating a “white” identity over these sub-identities, and assuming that Irish, Italian, Polish, … communities have a set of shared interests, and that they do not share these interests with blacks.
2) This is why I think marginalization is important. If “white” voters as a class had a history of being shut out of the political process, until recently (or even currently) there had been only a handful of white politicians on the national stage, and non-white politicians had done a poor job of representing the interests of white people, I think there would be a legitimate argument that there is a class of “white” voters who share common interests exclusively. But, I think the evidence is very thin that this is the case. All but one president of the United States so far has been a white man; all but ten senators have been white; white men have had the vote since 1856 while blacks did not gain it until 1965; and on and on.
To an extent, a shared history of marginalization and disenfranchisement is what gives a bloc of voters a shared interest. Of course, shared culture, geography, and history matter too, which is how someone might regard “black voters” as a natural interest group despite their internal diversity in a way that “white voters” aren’t. Since all black people were, as a group and collectively, denied rights, they have a collective interest in fighting for their rights and fighting to maintain their rights. The same is not true of white voters.
This is obviously context-dependent: I think there’s an argument that white voters in Zimbabwe do share political interests. There are also edge-cases and judgement calls to be made. But I think there is basically no serious argument that “white male Americans” have been historically disadvantaged and that their interests have been underrepresented in American politics.
3) I think many white Americans do, in fact, vote based on their perceived racial interests, and have for a long time. Your phrasing seems to suggest that white Americans developed (or are developing) a racial political consciousness in response to a similar movement among black voters. I’d argue this is precisely backward: for most if not all of American history, the racial consciousness of white voters was one of the most important political forces, and black voters have had to develop their own as a response. In short, I think you are not giving due to consideration to the hypothesis that “vote for those racially like you” already was the norm.
This is less true for male voters and straight voters, but I still think more true than the opposite.
EDIT: to add as evidence the fact that in 1983, only 29% of voters would vote for a homosexual for president, and as recently as 1999 it was only 59% who said they would. Women do better, passing 50% in 1955, but it’s not until 1987 that the percentage of people who would vote for a woman reaches the lowest percentage recorded for those who would vote for a Baptist.
4) Finally, the argument I give in the previous comment doesn’t imply that black, transgender lesbians can only be represented by black, transgender lesbians any more than the argument that we need some business owners in Congress to represent business interests means that if you own a business, you should consider no other criteria. All it means is that, in a world where there are no or very few business owners in Congress, you should be happy to see one elected to Congress, all else equal.
I don’t think anyone thinks that black people should only ever vote for black candidates, or gay people for gay candidates. But, as mentioned above, there have been 10 black senators in all of US history. I believe there have been two openly gay senators (one of whom came out after his term was over). I don’t think it’s absurd to think that, this is too small a number to ensure that black or gay rights are reliably represented, and that on the margin, a few more black and gay politicians being elected is a step in the right direction.
Eugene –
From my perspective, the dramatic decline in white-as-as-interest-group has been a really good thing. The fact that we’ve had any black politicians at all is probably dependent on this.
Because a 20% minority, assuming as I believe you indicated that politicians at that level are basically interchangeable, is otherwise never going to be represented in that fashion; if everybody gives a 5% qualification nudge for having the same characteristics as themselves, the majority identities are going to win almost every voting contest, save the rare one where circumstances align such that randomly, there are either no majority identity candidates worth voting for, or where a candidate with sufficient minority identity groups can thus represent the largest voting block. So a gay man couldn’t get elected, but a lesbian black immigrant woman might.
Which is a parody of the root justification; if the long-term consequences of black identity is to ensure black politicians can’t get elected, because white people defect in the same sense, that isn’t a success for black people.
@Eugene super +1 on your most recent post. It’s rare to see this articulated this carefully and explicitly.
@Thgnskald
Your reductio doesn’t really work for the simple reason that there clearly are racial (and other) voting preferences that get people elected (or are at least a very important part of what gets people elected). Unequal geographical distributions of different groups is one of the obvious reasons why this can happen, there are others.
In a perfectly rational spherical cow world (aka a “post racial society”) of course it would be wonderful if different interest groups did not need to preferentially vote in their own members in order to ensure a certain degree of genuine representation of their interests. But we don’t live in such a world, and until we do there’s going to be a fundamental asymmetry in which those from disadvantaged groups have a practically- and morally-justified reason to preferentially support candidates from their own group, while those from the dominant groups do not.
This asymmetry is closely parallel to the reasons why “cracker” and the like are not equivalent to “n*****”.
Enkidum –
I am not arguing that there aren’t racial preferences, I am arguing they have declined, which has enabled more proportional representation.
If we acknowledge the reason black politicians have had trouble getting elected is that white people prefer/preferred to vote for white people, the argument that increased identitarianism will result in more proportional representation falls apart – that is what we had before, when no black politicians could get elected to a national level, and it clearly didn’t work that way.
We could restructure voting laws so that districts are created along more explicitly racial lines, so black people can vote in black candidates – but at this point we are just back to segregation as a solution.
This isn’t a solution, it is a regression to the problem we have been moving away from, with no explanation on why things will go differently this time.
Surely this depends on the voting system? In black majority districts, we should expect black politicians to be elected? This was indeed an aim of the Voting Rights Act, to make sure that white politicians wouldn’t gerrymander their way into never having a black politician elected.
Anyway, the original question was asking why social justice people celebrate when a black candidate wins, all else equal. The answer is that, because it represents a tiny improvement over the status quo in terms of minority representation. I agree a world in which everyone votes strictly in terms of identity self-interest is bad: that’s why social justice white people think it’s good to vote for a black candidate every now and then!
It also, of course, isn’t an excuse to only run lacklustre candidates who have the right identity. All of what I said above holds only as long as everything else is held equal. I definitely think you should prefer (your preferred good white male candidate to avoid running up against political differences) over Marion Berry; but if your choices are Marion Berry and Rob Ford, or (very god white candidate) and (very good black candidate), it’s not illegitimate to consider the criterion “will this improve representation for a historically under-represented group?” when making your decision.
I think our difference is: you are concerned that establishing the norm “if you feel like you’re oppressed, feel free to lean a little heavier on perceived racial/identity similarity when voting”, even if well-meaning for black people, will simply result in a white backlash. To some extent I share this concern, and I would definitely count myself as someone who finds a lot of current social justice rhetoric overheated, alienating, and counter-productive even when I agree with it (and I don’t agree with all of it). But I also think that identity is too ingrained to ever disappear as an electoral force, and to some extent it will be necessary to support candidates from excluded and marginalized identities in order to obtain fairer representation for those communities, and a greater chance of their interests being looked after.
It’s not the only, or primary concern, but it’s a concern, I think it’s valid for people to hold it, and I agree that arguments for it shouldn’t alienate people from other identities; but that’s true of all politics. Elsewhere we’re discussing the comparison of social justice folks to the religious right: the religious right certainly provoked a backlash, but I think that had more to do with their style than their aims, and I think even those like me who disagree with their aims would concede that it’s valid for religious voters to consider religious criteria when voting. They just shouldn’t be obnoxious about it. But “don’t be obnoxious about your politics” is a good idea in general, and one that is surprisingly often ignored.
The way I see it…
Some racial voting preferences (specifically, those of white people) have declined. Others have not, or at least not by nearly as much. White preferences declining was probably a necessary condition of getting more black candidates elected, and is A GOOD THING. But because of fundamental asymmetries which Eugene has done a very good job of articulating, we should not expect/want the same to be true of non-white preferences.
If that were the grounds for affirmative action, the pressure to hire people with different political, philosophical, and religious viewpoints from those currently dominant in the organization would be stronger than the pressure to hire people of a different race or sex.
At least in the academic world, which is what I have most direct experience with, the pattern is the opposite. In a department with zero Republicans, the fact that an applicant is a Republican isn’t likely to be treated as a plus. In a university where there is no faculty member willing to argue in favor of South African Apartheid, the fact that an applicant was willing to do so would be treated as a strong minus.
If that were the case, outcomes such as bar passage or graduation rates for students admitted due to affirmative action would be as good as for other students. They aren’t.
And if that was the motive, people observing outcomes would abandon their support for affirmative action. They don’t.
Even as the demographics change?
@Eugene Dawn
By setting out “white people” as the one group which doesn’t have “shared history of marginalization and disenfranchisement” and therefore isn’t supposed to have shared interests, you have given them common interests.
Once you say “OK black people, you’re allowed to have your interests” (which presumably conflict in some way with non-black interests, or they wouldn’t be specifically black interests), “Hispanic people can have theirs, and LGBT, and everyone else except non-marginalized people” you’ve now created a white-person-shaped hole begging for a constituency. There’s only so long you can play identity politics only for favored groups.
Why do you think white people are the only such group? I doubt many people think that tall people, or brunettes, or people whose name begins with ‘S’ share common political interests. More to the point, I think there is room for white political to have common political interests at a lower level than ‘white’–I’ve said that I think that Polish, or Italian, or Catholic people can have common political interests, as well as people grouped geographically, linguistically, or culturally. I guess my question is: what are the common interests that all white people (or white Americans) share, in distinction to other groups?
As an example, black Americans share (or, if you prefer, shared until recently–recently enough that the political effects haven’t worn off) the interest of not being collectively disenfranchised based on their collective identity as black people.
Hispanics, like Italians, Eastern European Jews, etc. share interests arising from their status as recent, culturally and linguistically distinct immigrants into America.
To answer the question for white people, I’d want to know: what culturally, religiously, linguistically, or historically, separates white people out from non-white people, in the way a shared immigrant experience carves out various immigrant groups, or the experience of slavery and Jim Crow carves out the black experience in America?
I wanted to edit, but can’t seem to, so I’ll add as a separate comment: even if you want to grant that white Americans have their own distinct interests, it still is moot for the purposes of this discussion, as they are clearly well-represented politically, and so there is no need for anyone to think that it’s necessary for proper representation to elect more white people.
The acceptance of discrimination against them for the purposes of “diversity”.
That’s a fair answer, although I have heard that for example Asian Americans are also affected, and so I’m not sure if this necessarily isolates white people as the affected group. But accepting it in the spirit in which it’s offered, I would suggest a social justice response as follows:
1) That discrimination is an attempt to rectify a prolonged period of even more serious discrimination against others, and so while there may be a shared interest, it’s not one that we should find politically very compelling; a social justice activist would regard it similarly to how a libertarian would regard the shared interest among the poor of redistributing everyone’s money to them: it’s unjust and so not a legitimate political interest.
2) Again, seeing that white people are quite well-represented politically, even for white people who think this is a legitimate interest, there’s little reason to prioritize voting for white politicians on the margin.
This is just special pleading. We stopped talking about justice and started talking about group interests a whole bunch of posts ago. Switching back to justice when you don’t like the interests of the group doesn’t work.
A specific answer here applies to affirmative action.
Right now, whites are massively outcompeted at the high end by Asians. We, in turn, massively outcompete blacks and hispanics.
Right now, affirmative action programs in education seem to harm whites relative to blacks and hispanics, but benefit us relative to Asians.
This makes whites an interest group with a shared interest–I’d like my kids to get into better colleges and get better scholarships, and so would a lot of other whites. So on this issue, we can probably make some kind of common cause–the optimal policy for whites being that we keep the de facto discrimination against Asians but eliminate the de facto discrimination in favor of blacks and hispanics.
Now, I prefer truly race-blind admissions to college–I think it’s morally and practically the better policy. But I don’t think there’s anything inherently *more* evil about whites trying to organize around college admissions policies that benefit them, than about blacks, hispanics, or Asians.
A claim that organizing to campaign for stuff that benefits your race over the common good is wrong seems pretty easy to defend, to me. A claim that it’s morally acceptable or good seems wrong, but at least logically coherent. But a claim that it’s evil when done by whites, but good when done by nonwhites, seems logically inconsistent.
This is applying a standard that could rapidly make any group questionable. No group is perfectly coherent. Why should an African-American who descended purely from African slaves and grew up in the South be grouped with someone with 1/8 African ancestry who grew up in a nice progressive upper class neighborhood and could easily pass for white, and be grouped with a recent Nigerian immigrant to Chicago. These three people likely have massive differences in culture, religion, language, and life experience. And the historical experience of a group is a metaphor that definitely doesn’t hold across individuals in a group.
The idea of a “shared immigrant experience” is begging the question. Some East Asian immigrants emigrate to Silicon Valley, make six figures, and are part of a larger group that dominates their local polity. Others East Asian immigrants immigrate to the cheap parts of LA, run corner stores, and don’t dominate their local government.
The boring answer is that racial groups are mostly coherent in the sense they are more genetically related to each other in some way than to outsiders. Overall genetically someone inside a group may be more closely related to an outsider (like our 1/8 African African-American) but there’s still some difference typically. This is definitely an example of the social classification making weird cuts compared to ancestry. But notice that there is still a limit. Rachel Dolezal doesn’t count as black.
As intermarriage increases enough, a racial group ceases to be coherent and likely forms a new ethnoracial groups. Like Spanish + Natives Americans of Mexico + a few Africans = Mexicans. So culture can clearly form new population groups or obliterate old ones. This social change tends to be tied to intermarriage or the lack thereof though so that the genetics of populations also change due to populations merging or splitting which can be more of a cultural phenomena.
I agree I got side-tracked on the matter of interests in general, so I’ll clarify: the reason social justice-types care about some group interests and not others is because of justice concerns.
The Mafia are a group who might well be able to come up with some common interests that they would like to be politically represented more. The mere fact of having interests isn’t enough to compel us to want more representation for a group, though, so we don’t need to worry that we’re committing an injustice by not electing mobsters to the Senate.
To tell if it promotes justice to have more representation for a group it matters how well the group has been represented previously, how strongly the group has collective interests that won’t be addressed without representation, and what those interests are. These are related criteria: we expect that historically marginalized groups will have been unrepresented, have interests that are less likely to be be addressed without representation, and by demanding an end to unjust marginalization, have more compelling interests.
But any of these criteria can be absent. The Mafia might satisfy marginalized, in a certain sense, and maybe under-represented (though maybe not, given the operation of certain urban machines), but doesn’t have very compelling collective interests.
White people as a group are not historically marginalized, are well-represented, and the common interest offered above would not convince a social justice activist of its justice.
Even if you accept the latter, the first two points might be enough to suggest that someone who wants to promote social justice can give “elect more white people” a miss as a priority.
I think this really misunderstands the social justice position. The argument is that affirmative action benefits the common good because it replaces the previous system where whites reserved access to college/public spaces/voting to themselves. It’s not that it’s good for black people to get jobs they don’t deserve, but bad for white people to do the same–it’s that for two centuries black people were denied the opportunity to get the jobs they deserve, and affirmative action is a correction to this.
You may disagree that this is the case, but this is the social justice position.
I’d also just like to emphasize that this started as an answer to the question of why social justice activists, prefer, all else equal, diverse candidates, so wandering into affirmative action takes us a little bit away from that. You don’t have to support affirmative action in all circumstances to think that it can be good to give some weight to the diversity of a candidate when evaluating them, as a way to try and promote representation for previously unrepresented groups.
I think this is probably the best objection to the social justice position, along with the question of how to tell when justice and redress have been achieved. However, one can still maintain a (weaker) belief that social justice necessitates voting for candidates from marginalized backgrounds, just with more restrictive criteria for satisfying membership in such a group.
Ultimately, I suspect that most people go with a “know it when you see it” criterion; it’s unsatisfying but I’m not sure there’s anything better available.
EDIT: to add that of course, in the social justice view, we can tell who is marginalized etc. by who would be affected by ongoing attempts to continue that marginalization (which, of course, social justice activists usually believe is still ongoing). So for example, if you would be disenfranchised by a proposed change to election law or affected by a bathroom bill you count as marginalized.
Of course, opponents of social justice will have reasons why this does not count as marginalization, and that’s fair enough, but everyone’s worldview is to some extent self-reinforcing. If you think voter ID laws are onerous and disproportionately affect black voters, then you’ll think anyone affected by those laws is marginalized, and hence there should be more effort to get representation. If you disagree, none of that follows. Obviously, to some extent if you reject the premises of social justice, you’ll reject social justice.
I just want to emphasize the logic, and gesture in the direction of why people find the premises convincing.
1) I agree with most of what Eugene has said, and Iain’s explanation below, although as policy I prefer class based affirmative action. I’d add that at a more emotional level, if you regularly hear about (or worse, live in) stories about “Black people still disproportionately impoverished, less healthy, less educated, and more likely to commit / be a victim of crime.”, then you can’t help but cheer when you hear a story “Black person has opportunity to become very successful, respected, and influential”, even if their competitor is equally talented, even if this specific black person didn’t personally start from the bottom. I know black people who dislike race-based affirmative action but would still say “We need more black people in office, in administrations, in boardrooms”. Is saying “That person is a good candidate, but I would rather see a successful [marginalized person]” still tokenism if you remove actual affirmative action biases?
I agree that intellectual & ideological diversity is more important than race or gender diversity, with the caveat that it’s much more acceptable to declare an idea to be dumb or beyond the pale than a demographic. I don’t think being a Republican is beyond the pale, I do think favoring South African Apartheid is beyond the pale. I support correcting for academia’s bias against Republicans with a mild, informal minority-viewpoint bias.
mdet:
It sure seems like there’s a big difference between:
a. Thinking that the election of Barack Obama as president was a heartening sign w.r.t. US race relations.
b. Choosing which candidate to vote for primarily or largely on racial lines.
In the case of (a), you’re thinking this is good news because it suggests that a lot of previously-very-strong barriers to black success have been lowered. (In the sense that there’s probably no way a black president could have been elected in, say, 1970.)
In the case of (b), you can imagine thinking there’s some reason why electing a black president would be an especially good idea, but you can equally imagine thinking there’s some reason why electing a white president would be an especially good idea. (Though “because we’ve never had a white president before” wouldn’t be one of the reasons you’d come up with for voting for the white guy.)
I’m not sure what I said is an objection to “core” premises so to speak rather than an objection to peripheral premises that are mostly held for convenience sake. It’s pretty irrelevant politically since most people aren’t deeply concerned about consistency of categorization. Like you said a lot of it is “I know it when I see it”. But less charitably at the margins between groups there’s “how should I identify to benefit myself”.
To extend the objection, it would probably be that giving in to tendencies to socially categorize this way (even if it has an obvious connection to ancestry or history etc.) is a mistake because it inevitably divides people into very solid conflicting interest groups. It’s less fluid and people feel a lot more strongly than an interest group of fishermen or hunters or what have you. I’d prefer strong norms towards not only blinding people to less relevant traits but getting them to blind themselves when possible out of habit. This is tricky though because complete blinding is often impossible and partial blinding is tricky. A complementary strategy is take make decision processes more explicit and interpretable by people outside of the decision making body so that it’s harder to hide biases and easier for people to challenge problems where they are by making it easier to understand the process.
Some reasons for ethnic or racial interest groups are good though. I don’t think total elimination of this sort of thing is possible; I think you could only really say that has been achieved when two groups are no longer really distinct due to heavy intermarriage. But then new groups form anyways etc. I just have a preference for less of it or a different form of it. India style tribal politics is sort of a nightmare scenario from my point of view. I don’t have any reference for any place that has no ethnic or racial politicking.
I’m thinking specifically of a black conservative friend of mine, whose position is along the lines of “Having a black person in office is good not just as a symbolic milestone, but because they will hopefully bring different perspectives and priorities to the job [Would a white Democrat have responded to Black Lives Matter the same way Obama did?]” but also “Affirmative action is bad because it promotes underqualified black people [as in your example of your black coworker who was put in a position she wasn’t ready for out of tokenism]”.
I basically agree with everything in your comment. I much prefer politics that doesn’t rely on “oppression Olympics”-style competition to discover who has been the most marginalized and therefore the most deserving of redress now. I much prefer a politics that emphasizes its benefits for everyone and that, if it targets the marginalized from improvement, does so generally, targeted at all marginalized groups equally. The catch is your last quoted sentence:
social justice advocates think that people are not, in actual fact blind to race and other identity, and so accurately identifying who has been/is marginalized requires some acknowledgement of the political salience of race/identity. We want to move past it, but think it is necessary to identify it correctly in order to redress it.
@Eugene Dawn
This may be true for race, but for gender there is a decent amount of evidence that this model is wrong.
For example, (partially) gender-blind hiring processes seem to have minimal impact on the gender imbalance of the people who are hired & in quite a few cases, it actually increased the gender imbalance (a little).
Female politicians in the US also seem to have an equal chance to men at getting elected, the real difference seems that fewer women become candidates. There is also evidence that this is mainly or solely caused by women’s reluctance to run for office.
Entertainingly, at least one reason I’ve seen bounced around for why more women don’t run for office is that, in our culture at least, having a powerful position makes a man more attractive to a lot of women, but that doesn’t seem to work the same way for a woman.
I have no idea how important this is–probably not all *that* big a deal.
I agree with what brmic has said above. In addition, I think there’s an even simpler explanation. From the viewpoint of the left, a truly meritocratic system is expected to select a variety of candidates, and diversity is seen as a sign that the system is working.
Less than a third of the US population is white men. White men hold the majority of positions at all levels of government. (On the Republican side, 97% of elected politicians are white, and 76% are male.) Unless you have a strong prior that the “best people” are all white men, this is evidence that the selection process is somehow biased.
When a corporation brags about having women and minorities on the board, it is saying: “look, our selection process is truly meritocratic, and you can tell because we have not just picked a bunch of white dudes”. People celebrate black candidates and female candidates because they see it as a sign that the barriers that were previously keeping those candidates out are being broken down.
It’s not that the left doesn’t care about finding the best people; there’s just a disagreement about how to find them. (And, as people have argued above, what “best” means.)
This depends on how broadly you define ‘selection process.’ Is it just the process of picking between candidates or does it extend to the way in which people become candidates?
A reason for a disparity may be that some groups have less chance to achieve the level necessary. Then you will get disparate outcomes even if the process that selects the winner from the candidates has no bias at all. Furthermore, one would expect that introducing bias at that level to counter the lower chance would then result in the selection of poorer quality candidates.
A reason for a disparity may be that capable people from different groups make different choices that are more or less equally challenging and important, but different. If capable women choose to be a pediatrician more often than men, but choose to be a politician less often, then making more capable men be a pediatrician and more capable women be a politician can have no effect on the quality of either profession, or can shift the quality of workers in both directions.
A reason for a disparity may be that capable people from different groups have different desires to use that capability to the maximum extent. Is there an obligation that a person with certain capabilities uses that to the maximum extent? Does society have a right to the best politicians that (can) exist? What if an optimal politician has to work 60 hours a week? Is a group that is less willing to work 60 hours a week the victim of discriminatory enculturation? Or is the group that is more willing to work 60 hours guilty of having internalized toxic meritocracy?
I could go on.
These conclusions are only valid if certain axioms are true. The evidence suggests that they aren’t.
Yes this is exactly what I hear people constantly say in my very Blue city. But I presume most people in SSC are smart enough to see how illogical that comment is. When you are picking people to run a large corporation, the best choices to do this should be people with skills in business areas such as law, finance, marketing, etc. What proportions of White people to Blacks or men to women have the highest skills in these areas? I would be very surprised if anyone says that the ratio of White men having these skills to Blacks or women is anywhere near to the same ratio as in society in general. Whether this has occurred because of racism or sexism or self selection is irrelevant to the company looking for a talented Board of Directors. Therefore, those companies that have a ratio of minorities and women on their Boards are almost surely purposefully picking members for affirmative action reasons instead of competence. To me the implication is that Boards don’t really matter — they are merely symbolic. And this is part of the reason that Boards are so weak so they can’t control management — they are picked for reasons other than competence. And the same rationale could be made for picking politicians based on skin color genetalia. I disagree with whoever said it above that candidates are pretty much equal, so we might as well pick based on such trivialities. Maybe that explains bad government in the US a bit.
Also, I read a few comments about how picking Blacks or women because they understand better the people with the same skin color or genitals. That sounds so backward to me. Something that would have been popular in the 19th Century. I grew up in a very Blue environment where I was taught that we shouldn’t judge folks based on trivial characteristics such a skin color or gender. I guess I’ve taken it to heart. It makes sense. And then I hear “well, except for these people, they should be picked BECAUSE of their skin color or gender.” This is exactly the wrong way to end racism and sexism.
There is a common failure mode of these efforts, where someone in a protected category (say, a black woman) is promoted way faster than she’s prepared for so the organization can get credit for the diversity of their top-tier people.
I know a woman this happened to, an old coworker of mine. She is a very smart, competent person, who was promoted into a moderately high-visibility management job as a token, probably about a decade before she would have been ready for the job. She was then given zero management responsibilities–sensibly, since she didn’t have the decade of experience needed to do the job. She eventually left to do some kind of other work. (I hope something that used her excellent mind to solve problems, rather than just her skin color to make numbers come out right.) IMO, the management at my organization kind-of screwed her over–if they wanted her in a management position, they should have put her in the management track and brought her along at the normal pace, so she could end up in that high-visibility management position when she was ready to do the job.
This is how Goodhart’s law interacts with affirmative action, and IMO it’s pretty destructive.
If you accept the premise that blacks and whites (men and women) have more-or-less the same abilities, inclinations, interests, etc., then it totally makes sense that you would interpret biases on outcomes (more whites than blacks graduating college, more men than women in STEM) as strong evidence of some kind of discrimination somewhere in the system. And you see this in the wording used by people thinking this way–there must be some roadblock keeping women from STEM careers, so let’s find it and eliminate it.
When you question that premise, that still doesn’t tell you that the differences in outcomes are *not* due to discrimination. It’s quite possible that you have both lots of overt discrimination and differences in abilities. But it now becomes an actual question–is this difference in outcomes due primarily to some kind of structural barriers/discrimination/etc., or is it primarily due to differences in abilities or interests?
I’d be a lot more comfortable with what I understand as the SJW-affiliated line of argument here, except that it seems to go along with being okay with overtly shutting down anyone questioning those premises. Lots and lots of people cheered the firing of Damore for raising those questions[1], and the outrage at Larry Summers for raising them at an academic conference about women in the sciences. And lots seem pretty comfortable with Charles Murray being excluded from the public square over raising the questions w.r.t. racial differences in intelligence. Rioting to stop Murray from speaking is a minority of people with SJW-affiliated beliefs; supporting no-platforming him seems to me to be supported by a majority, though I don’t have hard data on that.
[1] Of course, he didn’t raise them perfectly or in a perfectly diplomatic neutral tone. But nobody holds the other side of that discussion to those standards, so this is a pretty classic isolated demand for rigor.
Not everyone believes that you literally should never consider race or gender. Dr. King is famous for saying “not for the color of their skin, but for the content of their character”. On the other hand, when he wrote about the Black Power movement in his book Where Do We Go From Here, he said that he disagreed with the explicit or implicit idea that any demographic could succeed on their own because at the end of the day we’re all interdependent, but supported the idea that black people need pride in themselves, their history, and their culture in order to counter the loss of dignity suffered during slavery and Jim Crow, and that “Black Power, in its broad and positive meaning, is a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals. No one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power”. So even Dr. King wasn’t 100% colorblind. [Disclaimer: I haven’t read the entire book, but I have read this excerpted chapter]
I don’t think it’s racist to say that different groups of people grow up in different environments and have different histories and cultures that shape them and their life experience. The rapper Killer Mike recently did an interview with a black NRA member [spokesperson? vlogger?] where Mike talked about how the experiences of his black friends and family in particular, and black history in general, are what led him to be a passionate gun rights supporter. Now of course there are white gun rights supporters too, but Mike’s reasoning and motivations drew on a particular history, culture, and life experience, that overlapped with but wasn’t entirely the same as the things white gun rights supporters talk about (in my experience).
So yeah, that’s my defense of “seeing race”.
@Mark V Anderson
It depends what the ratio is. Your argument is that, whether due to discrimination or otherwise, we should expect black women to be a smaller share of the population of “competent board members” than white men than would be suggested by looking at their prevalence as a share of the population as a whole. If black women are 20% of the population and 1% of the “competent board member” population, any ratio of <1% black female board members would not count as evidence that competence was compromised in their attaining their position.
But if previously the percentage of black female board members was 0%, and is now .7%, it is completely reasonable for a social justice advocate to
a) celebrate the rise in black woman board members as a sign that discrimination and other barriers are being overcome
b) in the short- to medium-term try to promote a few more black female board members on the margin
c) ask that in the long run, the share should approach 20% (although maybe not for a while).
I think the biggest issue dividing social justice and non-social justice folks is whether black women aren't on boards in proportion to their share of the population is due to discrimination, but even putting that aside, it's possible to believe that black women are under-represented even relative to their share of the "competent" population, and were even more underrepresented in the past, and so increases in the share of black women in such positions is worth celebrating as a sign of the downfall of unjust discrimination.
This is a serious mischaracterization of the social justice position; akin to saying it’s absurd that French people understand each other better because they happen to live inside the same set of arbitrary lines drawn on a map of Europe, or people who live in the arctic understand the experience of living in the cold better simply because all of their addresses have a latitude coordinate of greater than 66 degrees north.
The answer is that latitude, or living in the borders of France, are proxies for in the first example a shared set of living conditions including long winters, extreme cold, etc., and in the second example for sharing a culture, language, history, and to some extent a set of shared experiences.
The argument is not that sharing a skin colour means that people understand each other better, it’s that skin colour, especially dark skin colour in the United States, is a proxy for membership in a group that has a shared culture, history, and experience.
It is of course not a perfect proxy, and one might wish that the connection between shared experience and culture on the one hand and skin colour on the other might go away. But similarly, France contains multitudes, and one might wish that national identity should one day disappear–and yet still agree that the category “French people” makes sense for now, and that on issues that affect Europe, “ask a French person” is a reasonable way to get a sense of how “French people” might experience those issues.
To return to my example before: imagine a Pakistani Muslim saying: “so Christians should vote for Christians because they somehow have some mystical understanding? Just because they both wear cross necklaces and pray in Latin instead of Arabic? Maybe Christians think that religious identity is important enough to vote on, but I don’t”.
Would you think this is a fair characterization of the position that Pakistani Christians have common interests by virtue of sharing a religion, and a social and political position in Pakistan?
@Eugene Dawn
An issue with this is that the proxy is used in an attempt to correct for the lesser chances that some groups have or are assumed to have, to achieve merit.
However, the outliers who are least negatively affected, probably because they life experiences are atypical, benefit the most from this, so you mainly help atypical people, undermining the entire goal of helping people who are representative for their group.
For example, let’s assume that some people voted for Obama to give a bigger political voice to a person with the “shared culture, history, and experience” of black Americans.
Obama is not descended from slaves, this is atypical for American blacks. He was raised in Hawaii & Indonesia, which are atypical places to grow up for American blacks. He is half-white, with a white mother, which is an atypical for American blacks. His parents divorced when he was young and his mother remarried with an Indonesian man, so Obama was raised by white and Indonesian (surrogate) parents. This is extremely atypical for American blacks, who are typically raised by African-American parents or less often by African parents, but rarely by white parents and even more rarely by an Indonesian parent.
It seems hard to find an American-born person with black skin who has less shared culture, history, and experience with African-Americans than Obama.
So if Obama speaks for black Americans, is his ability to do so not primarily dependent on his ability to empathize with those very different from him? If so, would a high-empathy white person with exposure to black culture necessarily do worse?
Of course, although he still would, in a counterfactual world where Jim Crow-type discrimination returns, still be affected by it; his wife and children are more typically connected to the American black experience, but he clearly shares common interests with them. He also, based on his looks, might have suffered racial prejudice or discrimination, and probably at least was more attentive to the possibility of such based on his looks, all of which would count as “sharing the black experience”.
But yeah, that’s all true, and worth keeping in mind when thinking about representation. The idea that a white politician might resonate strongly with the black community isn’t exactly alien; representation is funny like that. Here’s a JPost article calling Obama the first Jewish president. I still think it will be legitimate for Jews and Jewish groups, as well as social justice-aligned people to think it’s a big deal and (all else equal) a good thing when the first actual Jewish president is elected.
@Eugene Dawn
Sure, but…
John McCain has a fairly dark-skinned daughter (although from Bangladesh, so not of African and/or slave descent, but perhaps she is treated like she is in the US?).
Bill de Blasio has a black wife.
So if you accept that Obama can learn from people close to him, then why not white geezers like McCain and De Blasio? And why would such learning be limited to spouses and children? Many people have very close friendships.
I suggest William Cohen, he is Jewish and has a black wife, so 2 for the price of 1 😛
It would also be highly symbolic, since they were present when a racist and antisemite person attacked the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
To use another example, it appears that a fair number of middle/working class whites from flyover states chose Donald Trump as the guy to represent their interests. Trump’s life experiences are at least as far from those of the average working-class/middle-class white guy as Obama’s are from those of the average working-class/middle-class black guy.
Some responses:
Q: “What if it’s a pipeline problem, not a problem with the process of picking between candidates?”
A: Many of these issues are presumably pipeline problems. But the emergence of seemingly qualified minority candidates is itself evidence that progress is being made on pipeline issues. If primary voting is not sexist, but we’re seeing more women win primaries because more women are running, that’s still worth celebrating.
Q: “What if there are other factors, and the selection process isn’t actually biased?”
A: Hypothetically, there could be other evidence that explains the results we see without resorting to bias. Nevertheless, such a large gap is at least prima facie evidence of bias. (Note that I deliberately avoided the word “proof”.) You might personally interpret the sum of the evidence to indicate that there’s no real bias — but recognize that well-informed people can disagree in good faith.
Q: “What about Goodhart’s law? What if we overshoot and start selecting underqualified candidates?”
A: Goodhart’s law is a problem whenever we measure anything of value. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong to value that thing. In the long run, companies and political parties who simply promote underqualified tokens will lose to those that make a legitimate investment in finding and nurturing talent. Furthermore, the comparison isn’t against some perfect hypothetical; it’s against the status quo ante, in which qualified minority candidates were being passed over. It may be unfair when somebody is promoted a decade before she’s ready, but it’s more unfair if two decades later she still hasn’t been promoted.
Q: “But aren’t successful minority candidates mostly outliers?”
A: Well, yeah. If you’re talking about positions where the public is paying attention, pretty much all successful candidates are outliers. Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush are hardly a representative sample of the American people. If the left is correct that minority groups face disadvantages, then it’s hardly surprising that the minorities who manage to excel are disproportionately people who manage to avoid some of those disadvantages. Nevertheless, it’s not unreasonable to predict a correlation between the ability of exceptional minorities to achieve exceptional success, and the ability of ordinary people to achieve ordinary success.
@Iain
I agree with what you say, if ‘evidence for’ is interpreted in pretty much the weakest possible way. The outcomes are evidence for the explanations you claim they are evidence for, but they are (generally equally strong) evidence for alternative explanations.
Unfortunately, many people are content when evidence matches the explanation that fits their ideology and don’t actually notice that it also fits other ideologies and (thus) also don’t go looking for more evidence that actually shows which ideology is right.
@Eugene:
What is your view of affirmative action as applied against Asians? If the underlying motive is making up for past mistreatment rather than producing equality of outcome, shouldn’t they count as a group that should be discriminated in favor of, not against? The Nisei have a more recent history of being badly mistreated than blacks, and Chinese immigrants were being pretty badly treated at least through the 19th century.
And wouldn’t the same apply to Jews–again if the objective is to make up for past mistreatment rather than to produce equality of outcome?
I suppose the other part of affirmative action that doesn’t fit with the “repairing the damage of past discrimination” model is that a lot of the recipients of AA are first- or second-generation immigrants to the US. If your whole family moved here from Nigeria 10 years ago, then whatever else may be said about your family’s history, it’s pretty clear that US racial discrimination in education in the first 70 years or so of the last century probably doesn’t play a large part.
I didn’t mean to defend affirmative action in my post; I only meant to point out that Albatross11’s characterization of the rationale for affirmative action was missing an important point.
If pressed for an answer though, I think I would say that social justice reasoning would say that some kind of redress for Asian-Americans and Jews is just, but that for various reasons, affirmative action might not be the best kind of redress for these groups.
To connect to where this thread started, I certainly think it’s legitimate for someone interested in social justice to want to see, on the margin, Jews and Asians holding elected office, for example.
Repairing past damage is only part of it though: part of the social justice worldview is that, absent anti-discrimination law and so forth, racial discrimination would still persist (and in fact does still persist)–this would justify affirmative action for Nigerian immigrants because in the counter-factual world without affirmative action, they would be affected by discrimination.
As an example, Homer Plessy, he of Plessy v. Ferguson was 7/8 white, and phenotypically white, and still subject to Jim Crow laws. Hence, though it may seem unfair for someone who can pass as white to identify as black, I think the fact that such a person would, in the counterfactual world where Jim Crow continued to exist, be discriminated against by Jim Crow it isn’t necessarily unfair for that person to benefit from anti-discrimination law.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily hold true for all groups of immigrants, etc., I don’t meant to argue that literally anyone who can plausibly claim to be black should get affirmative action–only that it’s not so unreasonable as you might think, at least if you accept certain premises that are widely shared by social justice advocates.
Of course, whether those premises are true is very much at issue.
The problem is, the left-identitarians delegitimize the very standards that protect them from right-identitarianism. You really, really, don’t want to wake up white, straight, Christian identitarianism – the biggest victory of the civil rights (and gay rights) movement was largely breaking that up as a key bloc for identity politics. And the left will eat their own, since they are themselves a coalition of many identities with often conflicting goals. It’s hard to see how it’s a winning strategy in the long term.
The problem with distinguishing social progressives and SJWs is that most people (claim to) support equal opportunity, and much of the disagreement is over the extent that goal is not already reached.
Person A wants equal opportunity, and thinks it has already been mostly reached (or perhaps flipped over in some cases by affirmative action). He doesn’t loudly demand equal opportunity, as it’s unnecessary.
Person B assumes that equal opportunity would result in equal outcome, so from the lack of equal outcome he infers that we’re very far from equal opportunity. (This kind of thinking is very common on the left, and perhaps parts of the right.) He loudly demands equal opportunity, and is not going to stop demanding it until outcomes are equal. (Another reason A doesn’t loudly demand equal opportunity is that most people will confuse him for B.)
In A’s view, B is demanding equal outcome for all intents and purposes, and is likely to support measures (such as affirmative action and the disparate impact doctrine) that will, in A’s opinion, effectively lead to discrimination against men and white people. As such, in A’s view, there is little practical difference between B and left-identitarians, except that B has a lot of power, while the latter group perhaps doesn’t.
@Thegnskald
I’ve looked at a bunch of original sources and typically, it is offensive from the very introduction of the term. Even if the definition is technically neutral, it is typical that the examples are biased, the evidence is cherry picked to make one gender out to be the perpetrator, bad experiences are defined as structural when experienced by one gender and defined as incidental if the other gender, etc. At most one can argue that these sources are less offensive than the mainstream material, but it is really not fundamentally different. It’s more a matter of degree.
Ozy of the thingofthings blog has made an attempt to steelman feminism (across many blog posts), but she couldn’t do that by merely pointing to gender studies studies (sorry). Instead, she had to come up with her own arguments, which IMO is quite damning to gender studies as a discipline. An amateur blogger doing far better work than professors…
Are any of those posts of hers still up?
Ozy made many of these posts on Tumbler and then reposted them on thingofthings during 2014-2015. Unfortunately, they were not properly tagged, so it’s hard to find them. Here are a few decent ones:
On creepiness, where it is recognized that male sexuality is more easily seen as predatory and degrading and that the term also suffers from other ‘isms’ in how it is used. Furthermore, there is a recognition that female judgment is subjective and not automatically correct/just/etc.
Here Ozy addresses the wage gap, where she fairly present the common progressive anti-feminist view next to a more defensible feminist view.
About callout culture.
Intent is magic.
It’s all relatively philosophical and less grounded in data than some of Scott’s posts about the validity of Social Justice claims, but the writing actually addresses criticisms that come from anti/non-feminists.
PS. Ozy: “I use gender-neutral pronouns”
Just a little side note/peek at the past –
The W in SJW stands for Warrior.
It was originally worded like that as an ironic pejorative – the people it was trying to describe were very vocal but in no way action-oriented. Somewhat similar to what armchair-activism means now.
The various negative associations such as bullying, doxing, and so forth came from when various members of the community that were described as SJW actually went and did those things.
By the time they did, they already have fallen off the original definition of SJW as they were actively participating in prompting their philosophy albeit still relatively passively.
I’m not sure if that really requires a new term to describe this evolution but it has long since moved past its original meaning.
Another interesting tidbit – once a time Tumblrites referred not some SJW synonym/adjacent, but rather the various common stereotypes of sad lonely female teenagers on Tumblr that were using it as a diary similar to Myspace or such. There was once a small meme that tried to “ship” the stereotypical sad lonely males on 4chan with Tumblrites. The meme was short-lived but given the change, I think they might have taken away some lessons from Anonymous during their time together.
I don’t know if anyone else has linked to this, but this article is what looks to me to be an SJW-ish person (Nathan Robinson) defending the broad SJW movement while pointing out and disagreeing with its excesses. I disagree with a couple of the object-level issues he raises here, but at least this article seems to be laying out beliefs and a way of thinking that’s worth engaging with. (And ISTR that he and Scott have interacted via article/blog post on a few occasions.)
SSC people who lean SJW-ish (whatever that means): Is he a reasonable person to read to understand at least the sort of direction of your ideas? (The way a human b–diversity person might point to Steve Sailer or Greg Cochran, not as “this person speaks for me in all cases,” but rather as “this person is a reasonable representative of this set of views.”)
Assuming that you intended to link to this article (which is linked in the first sentence of your actual link): yes, that is quite a good summary. In general, I think Nathan Robinson is worth reading.
I refrain from using SJW because it’s both too aggressive and not aggressive enough.
In a hostile environment, it’s a useless term because it’s too broad: everyone who’s left-of-center on social issues gets called a SJW, and no productive exchange can be had.
In a friendly environment, it’s also useless, but because it’s too narrow: It focuses on the actions of really bad people while letting the ideas that motivated those actions off the hook, and terefore minimizes the problem by ascribing it to “just a few crazies”.
Start with a survey of music to see what you like, then branch out. One way I approach classical music is to use the Schirmer’s Library browsing method. Schirmer is a music publisher and you may recognize their buff and black covers for works by many composers. You may use software such as HookTube to find a Best of compilation, of which there are many for most composers, and for singer/songwriters and groups of all sorts.
You may find some favorites, with music that touches you, challenges you or transports you in some way, then use that to explore similar works. That is a highly individual approach, but why not?
What makes Overwatch work so much better than TF2? I’ve played and enjoy both but basically only play Overwatch now because:
1) It’s much deeper – with so many more heroes there will always be one that suits your playstyle / needs, and learning all those abilities and counters adds a lot of continuing interest.
2) The matches are much more fun – they actually conclude, for one thing, as opposed to never-ending CTF on 2Fort because it’s mostly impossible to actually score a capture, but also Overwatch seems to much more organically create / reward spontaneous team play (even when no one is using voice chat).
1) is a pretty obvious difference, but I’m stumped as to what Overwatch did to achieve 2)? The mechanics seem pretty similar overall, but the difference in play quality is stark.
On the subject #2, one factor is simply that there is a clock in every game mode. That definitely helps with the “actually concluding” bit.
As to rewarding team work, the basic mechanics of Overwatch are tilted slightly in favor of the offense, but they also depend on every member of the Defense to have been dealt with in order to progress the objective. The objectives are location based, and therefore serve as a focal point for both the offense and the defense. This encourages team fights centered around a relatively small geographic location.
If you think about most maps, they are either a) payload maps where the objective itself moves, or b) involve fairly substantial portions of the map that don’t see play as they aren’t germane to the team fight and simply serve as a time sink requiring travel time after respawn.
Thinking about it more, I’m inclined to agree with your second and third paragraph.
In particular, I think the “time sink requiring travel time” is really a surprisingly key component. This sort of naturally breaks the game into a series of distinct team fights rather than a constant meat grinder where neither side can gain an advantage. In any of these individual fights, death has a real cost – respawn is only 10 seconds but it might be 30-40 seconds before you can actually be back in a fight, and by that time that “wave” has been decided. If either side gains an advantage of two or more live players at the point of action (or if they wipe out certain key players, like a tank physically holding a point), they will almost certainly carry that action.
This forces some breathing time where you can check the team status and regroup for the next wave.
As you note, the maps are well designed to force action at certain key points, and also to promote an ebb and flow between offense and defense.
Some of it just seems to be that Overwatch has very involved devs that do a ton of testing before making updates and are continually rebalancing with apparent intentional goals of rewarding team play and avoiding making any heroes overly dominant or useless in the meta.
As some evidence of how well tuned the balance is, I’ve noticed the difference in play in the Arcade “total mayhem” mode, which doubles everyone’s HP, speeds up ult charging, and substantially reduces cooldowns for all abilities. One effect is that the games I’ve been in have been much more “meat grinder” – the extra HP makes it take longer to kill players so it’s hard to wipe a team before they get respawned reinforcements. The modified cooldowns make some heroes vastly OPed and others kind of worthless (in particular, Winston is nuts because he can more-or-less constantly use his jump and always have a shield up, and Soldier gets kind of lame because he relies mostly on his primary fire (which isn’t boosted) and he can’t deal enough damage during a Visor to take out multiple heroes).
As a big TF2 fan who has not gotten into Overwatch I want to point out that TF2 has most of these features in your original point 2 ; it’s just 2Fort that sucks. It might be CTF that sucks in general.
The best mode is the control point mode (I forget what it’s called). I prefer the asymmetric one with attackers and defenders, but the symmetric one is good to.
Your note that “also Overwatch seems to much more organically create / reward spontaneous team play (even when no one is using voice chat)” is almost exactly the sort of thing I raved about TF2 when it was new.
I was a big fan of TF2 (though I mostly haven’t played since the Orange Box days). I went back to it recently (i.e. this year)… and really Overwatch is everything TF2 is, but better (except the wacky humor, which is a big selling point for TF2).
For whatever reason last time I played 9/10 servers I ended up on were 2Fort. Maybe I just need to be pickier about where I play.
I will say that Overwatch doesn’t (or didn’t) have a CTF mode, and when they added it to the arcade – it kind of sucks. And the symmetric point control mode is my least favorite mode in “standard” Overwatch.
So my favorite TF2 modes (payload and multipoint attack/defend) are the most common Overwatch modes – that probably colors my opinion.
The other probably underrated item is that standard Overwatch limits you to one copy of a hero per team – a common problem in TF2 is too many players playing a single role, and while that can happen in Overwatch it’s less common (and there’s variety within the roles).
I’ve not played overwatch (will be the first game I try if I want to dedicate some time to an action FPS), but seeing as you centred things on 2fort, are you aware of stuff like jump-maps, bball, ammomod and MGE, competitive rollouts etc, in TF2?
Overwatch, does seem like a more hardcore game, certain it seems faster, (which has some tradeoffs -spy’s gameplay for example relies on the slower speed, but still ), but Overwatch’s default mode is what in TF2 would be a scrim set up outside the game by a third party service. -There is no competitive mode in the TF2 client (or at least wasn’t when I played), so there’s a much stronger dichotomy between casual and competitive play. In fact this paragraph in particular;
is (incidentally) preetty true of competitive TF2 and even some of the more serious servers if you have there’s anyone typing or on mic.
_
Also, about the meat grinder comment: well that’s a feature for some people. For two of the modes I mentioned that’s one of the main appeals. (Bball, which is instant-respawn flying rocket-launcher basketball, and ammomod, which is basically just relentless 1vs1 cage match mode.)
That’s more a symptom of 24/7 16v16 2Fort servers than TF2 itself. The early TF2 maps were very much designed for 9-12 player teams, and their design flaws (mainly too powerful chokepoints+lack of flank routes) were really exacerbated when servers increased the team sizes to 16v16. Overwatch’s Eichenwalde was a choke clusterfuck on release with 6v6 teams, imagine what it’d be like the teams were suddenly 9v9 or 12v12. Anyway TF2 is a lot more objective and team oriented on better maps and/or with fewer players.
Unfortunately Valve gave absolutely zero support for decent matchmaking or competitive play, so it was a pain in the butt to find consistently active servers that weren’t 24/7 Dustbowl or whatever, or to find out that competitive teams even existed. Whereas Overwatch made their matchmaking front and center from day 1.
@1 More subjectively, I’d say the TF2 classes are deeper and have a higher skill ceiling than individual Overwatch classes. Good Soldiers and Demos look very different from pub players spamming down a chokepoint (like myself), for instance.
So basically all the pieces are there but there aren’t enough servers playing in the more balanced / better team play modes. I’ll buy that (though I’d still say that some of the map layouts optimize for meat grinders).
I just don’t see though how TF2 classes are “deeper” – Oveerwatch has 3x the number of heroes, and the abilities in each class have a lot more variety.
You’re right though that TF2 classes have steeper learning curves, and definitely bigger rewards for more traditional FPS skills. Whereas I’d argue Overwatch has (some) heroes that require less “mastery”, but has a bigger meta and more rewards for understanding it.
I don’t understand how Soylent is an actual food product IRL.
Do SF fans like being as ironic as hipsters?
How do you define “food”?
Complex organic molecules necessary to sustain animal life, i.e. some combination of carbohydrates, protein and fats. Such as human meat.
I think I misunderstood your question. Are you asking why people consider Soylent to actually be food? Or are you asking about why anyone thought it was a good idea to make it?
ITS PEOPLE! Soylent is made out of people!
This! Who thought it was a good idea to make a bland technocratic meal replacement and market it under the name of PEOPLE! from an SF film?
Because if you give it a name that makes it sound like you’re committing cannibalism, it seems more interesting than the actual experience of drinking it?
Not that that’s a high bar. It’s a lot like drinking cold Wheaties slush, and it’s about as uninteresting as it’s possible to be without actually dying of boredom.
Someone who understands that both ironic and referential humour have a long and enduring positive track record, and could not resist the opportunity to deploy both at once?
Also i kind of feel like the Soylent Corporation could have avoided the brouhaha by just putting the plot twist in the brochures. Just wax poetic about how environmentally friendly and efficient it is to reprocess the bodies of the dead for the nourishment of the living instead of letting it all go to rot. It’s not cannibalism, it’s recycling!
Sure people will meet with revulsion at first, but that’s fine, those who find it unsettling can simply continue consuming Soylent Red and Yellow. Over time people will get used to the idea and the better taste and nutrition of Green will slowly win people over. It’s not like it looks or tastes like human flesh, or really flesh of any kind. It’s easy to just think of it as reprocessed product. Before long only a minority would be refusing to eat it.
The whole stupid conspiracy of lies covered up with murder was just completely unnecessary. Ultimately Soylent Green is a tale about the futility and stupidity of defrauding your costumers about your product instead of being up front and honest about it.
@Le Maistre Chat
Imagine that every time you were hungry, you could press a button and then suddenly you would be full. Not only that, but it would give you all of the nutrients you need. That would be pretty handy, right? You would no longer have to worry about food. You would only eat food that you really wanted to eat, not something to keep you going through the day. Soylent isn’t about replacing your favorite restaurant. It’s about replacing microwave meals. That’s especially appealing for a single person who hates cooking.
I think it is enough that there are a contingent of irony lovers who are also fans of sci-fi.
It also helps that it’s referencing a campy movie and not any actual incidence of cannibalism.
Do you mean you don’t understand how a food product could be successfully marketed under that name? Or that you don’t understand how a bland powder-based nutrient mixture intended as a meal replacement could garner enough interest to become commercially viable?
Both are, for me, the kinds of things I could understand if I wanted to, but I don’t want to.
“I just love Soylent. I’m losing weight, it’s affordable, it’s easy, and it’s fast.
I’m not somebody who hates food. I am somebody who loves it way too much. The best compliment I give to Soylent is that it is unoffensive. This meticulously well balanced human fuel is so delightfully bland in both flavor and texture that it triggers absolutely no desire to have a second bottle. It’s hands down the most successful meal replacement I’ve ever had.”
Looks like a decent weight loss aid for the wealthy.
From what I gather, Soylent started out as a personal curiosity project by a random blogger, and he named it as a self-deprecating joke. When he turned it into a commercial venture later, he kept the name so he could leverage the attention he’d already gotten rather than starting over and establishing a new brand from scratch.
Ah, so the ironic joke was personal and by the time he could commercialize it he needed to keep the name.
Even if it wasn’t an injoke I’d still call it that; the people going “hurr hurr it’s people” all over the place won’t actually convince anyone not to try it who wasn’t already never going to, and they’re giving you free advertising.
Which do you think goes better with the journos, “some nerd is making some weird meal replacement powder on his blog, don’t meal replacements already exist, whatever” or “someone made a food alternative and they’re calling it Soylent, there’s a headline.”
I went on a Soylent variant because I thought I could lose weight by taking 2/3rds dose of it (didn’t) and because, hey, $100 for six months worth of food!
If you’re in a “I need to sacrifice literally everything to achieve [goal]” sort of mode, Soylent is a good and extremely cost-effective replacement for food.
Are you missing a zero? When I looked into it I remember it not being all that cheap without making it oneself. Maybe things have changed though…
Well, official Soylent in bulk is $120 for 70 “meals” today, and I was only eating two a day, so I was off by a factor of two, but that’s still pretty good.
About a factor of six, I think.
Right, that’d be 35 days. Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense. I definitely remember a $100 package lasting a couple months at least, at two meals a day.
I’m not sure “$100 for six months worth of food” and “$100 for a box of food that lasts six months” are the same. At 400 calories per bottle, surviving for 6 months on 70 bottles would not go well at all.
Sorry if I’m being pedantic, I’ve just never understood the “It’s cheap” argument for soylent when $10-15/day doesn’t even outcompete some fast food.
Random question related to evolution:
Context: Humans have 46 chromosome I have looked briefly into how we got that number it appears to be two less than our previous ancestor. The best explanation I have found is that two chromosomes fused in a way that was viable for life so there was a population where some had 48, some had 47, and some had 46. Finally the two populations split.
Does there exist a current animal population that has an odd number of chromosomes in some members of the species? It seems to me that with the vary different number of chromosomes among different species there should be some that we know about that are in transition. Is that an unreasonable assumption?
Mules could be an example on the spectrum that you are looking for, as horses have 1 more chromosome than donkeys which is one of (the primary?) the reasons that their offspring (mules) are sterile. They are however close enough evolutionary to each other to create a sterile, but otherwise healthy offspring, making them a potential example of what it would look like if the group that humans split from was still in existence.
However this circles back to the question of how could the new human population have still bred with the old pre human population if having an extra unpaired chromosome can make you sterile.
While that is an example you acknowledge that a mule is sterile. I assume that if it is possible for there to be a viable population with a mixed number of chromosomes that it exists somewhere on the planet and if it exists that we would have found it. Those might both be unreasonable assumptions. It is a questions I have been wondering for a couple years now and thought this would be a good place to ask it.
It’s unreasonable to expect we’d have found that viable population with a mixed number of chromosomes. We’re still finding new species, and population studies of all known species just aren’t feasible.
Ah but mules (and hinneys, another donkey / horse cross) are not ALWAYS sterile, and female mules are more likely to be fertile than male ones. If you take the definition of a species to mean unable to interbreed, it seems that horses and donkeys are not quite separate species yet. So they are on your scale of a population with two different chromosome numbers in the process of splitting.
Eusocial insects such as bees, wasps and ants have different numbers of chromosomes within the species.
There are also insects and other species with X0 sex determination (where males only have one sex chromosome). But that may not be what you are looking for.
That is the start but I was hoping for something a little bit more advanced than insects.
It’s easy to get away with an odd number of chromosomes if you reproduce asexually. This crayfish has 3 copies of each chromosome, although the number of types of chromosome is even. This dog has 57 chromosomes.
People with Down syndrome have reduced fertility, but aren’t nearly as infertile as mules; nor are mules entirely infertile. I think that there are examples like mules that are fairly fertile, but I don’t know what they are.
Thanks for the examples but both of those fail to find what I am asking for, neither of them support the idea that the number of different species with different numbers of chromosomes could come about through either means.
Also, I think that reduced fertility rate of Down syndrome (and the other issues that come with it) would be very heavy selected against in a natural setting.
Are there versions of having one copy of some chromosome (other than X or Y) that don’t cause major problems in humans, and that leave the holder fertile? If so, you could imagine some situation where, say, hominid X has 22 chromosomes, humans have 23, but a human/hominid X cross sometimes ends up being okay with only one copy of one of the chromosomes, and then maybe having other offspring with hominid X with one or zero copies.
Right now I don’t believe common genetic screens would pick up chromosome duplication. There may be a population of healthy carries that have not been identified, but so far I know of no cases where duplication have been found without symptoms.
Wow. That’s a rather… noncentral example of a dog.
I should be able to answer this question better than I will, but let me try:
On the first question: humans are one of the many species that can have odd chromosome numbers. Robertsonian translocations between the acrocentric chromosomes (whose short arms are there mainly for rRNA coding, and are present in multiple chromosomes, so if two of them are lost not much is lost) can create viable, normal-looking individuals who may produce normal 46-chromosome offspring, “normal” 45-chromosome offspring, and “”normal”” 44-chromosome offspring (when mated with another person with the same translocation – see here, and here, and here). Fertility is lower, but not nonexistent.
Other species have even greater toleration for karyotype variation. In house mice, there are well-known chromosomic races created mainly by recent events of Robertsonian translocation, which are interfertile among races but less than within races. Some Hemiptera (and no doubt many other insects) have large variation of chromosome number within species; given insects tend to have very large fertility, it may well be that a fertility penalty imposed by a hybrid karyotype is not so straining if it can be counteracted by an advantegeous new genotype. Some species have holocentric/polycentric chromosomes that grant them greater tolerance for chromosomal rearrangements. In general, it seems like intra-species kayotype diversity can be more easily found in species that can make asexual reproduction, species with very high fertility, or species subjected to strong selection in diferent directions.
As to the second question: your idea is not unreasonable, but following it would not be a good heuristic to find species close to breaking away. As I said above, some groups of organisms are much more tolerant of karyotype variation than others, so finding it in them is hardly an important signal of speciation; and some are really, really intolerant of messing up the karyotype, so whatever chromosome number alteration happens will either be eliminated or fixed in few generations – likely before you can observe it.
The role of chromosomal rearragements in speciation has been discussed by biologists, but the picture is not very clear. A fertility penalty for inter-chromosomic-race crossing exists, but there is not much consensus as to how relevant it is, in practice, for evolution (there are many other factors around). If you like this topic, you can find some good discussions on the following links: Ayala 2005, Bakloushinskaya 2016, White 1969, Guerra 2016.
This is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. Thank you very much for taking the time to write up this response. I cannot say much other than this is what I was looking for, thank you again.
Last open thread I posted what I thought was an interesting seed for discussion:
So! Now is the time f or answering. When do you send your suitcase? To whom? How do you make sure they open it and pay attention? What storage medium do you use, and what information do you send?
My thought, since I don’t really have a good idea how to prevent world war I (it seems to me that given the alliances and opinion of warfare at the time, preventing the inciting incident would only delay the conflict) was to send something like Ken Burn’s Civil War documentary to perhaps Ben Franklin or George Washington. I think their natural curiosity would get them to check it out, and even if they didn’t believe in it, it would show a plausible story of a war more vicious and deadly than the one they had just come out of occurring within the lifetime of people they cared about. They wouldn’t need to remember any technical specs to have motivation not to kick the slavery can down the road.
Even in retrospect I don’t know what could have been done to prevent the US civil war, and just saying to the people founding the country “Hey, can you try harder to ease the tensions in the country please?” might not actually do anything that dampen their optimism at even trying to construct a government, but I would assume they would be better able to see potential solutions and possibly better able to envision and promote compromises to spare a lot of misery.
I still say that the most reliable method remains sending a bomb to someone you think really fucked things up shortly before they started fucking things up. Gavrilov Princip, Hitler, Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, all good targets.
That’s not the most efficacious solution possible, but it is the most reliable. The most efficacious package I think would be sending guns (I’m thinking flintlocks, but could be persuaded that something mechanically simpler might be better), powder, and instructions on how to make more back to the classical era. Primitive guns and powder are not particularly difficult to make, but are a decidedly non-obvious technology that took a long time to evolve. I’m not a big believer in technical determinism of history, but I will make an exception for guns, which I think were genuinely transformative because they ended the ability of non-settled peoples to stand up militarily against settled peoples. The trouble is I don’t have a reliable method for making the person I’m sending the box to take it seriously. So I go with the bomb.
Would upper class people open their own packages?
Depending on the era, you could possibly get something that doesn’t look like a bomb past the initial package-openers, but that raises the question of how you know you actually have the real target. In theory facial recognition software could identify when Woodrow Wilson is in the room, but can you train that software sufficiently from historical photographs?
Well, that was the era of the anarchist bombings, so I picked the worst possible target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_bombings The White House would be on high alert for anything weird.
A bomb-drone might do the job, since they would have no concept at all of the threat. Historical records could give you a good window of when he will be out in the open, but algorithimically verifying the target becomes harder.
I really don’t think you can trust any contemporary AI for this job. Particularly one you can procure by your own efforts and/or with a $10K budget. Your best bet would probably be to find a contemporary enemy of your target and give them some appropriate modern weaponry and whatever actionable intelligence you can find.
Wilson you’d want to get while he was still a professor. And depending on the exact rules, you could just send your package to somewhere where you know the target will be and have it explode immediately.
Woodrow Wilson? It’s very strange to see a historical death list including a terrorist, two dictators, and the Democratically elected leader of one of the entente powers. If your conservative convictions lead you feel the need to murder a Democratic president then surely the safe bet is Andrew Johnson.
Though I’m the last person who should be calling out typos, It’s Gavrilo, as the man was a Bosnian Serb. Gavrilov is a Russian surname.
Woodrow Wilson is far and away the most responsible for the terrible way that the end of WWI was handled. Getting rid of him and putting in place someone who actually has the faintest understanding of international politics would have potentially gotten rid of Hitler and WWII in Europe.
What bean said. It has nothing to do with democrats vs. republicans or even liberalism vs. conservatism, Woodrow Wilson was a monster in human form whose bungling got millions of people killed while totally failing to accomplish the few goals he had that were actually laudable. And the guy he beat in 1916 would later prove to be one of the most successful diplomats in american history.
Quite agree with the latter. What is the evidence for the former? IMHO, gross incompetence != monster
His views on race relations, including support / glorification of the KKK, would certainly be considered monstrous by most of mainstream society today. It may have been possible for a non-monstrous person to hold those views in the first decade or two of the 20th century, depending on what lies they had been told and by whom, but between supporting the KKK when the KKK was still a real thing, and maybe bungling a World War or two, I might just turn a blind eye to the proposed temporal letterbomb.
As John Schilling points out, woodrow wilson was uncoothly racist by the standards of 1915. He was also an enthusiastic eugenicist, a fairly ardent prohibitionist, and such a preening moralist that he actually said that he was invading latin american countries “in order to teach them to elect good men.” He was so sanctimonious in his dealings that Georges Clemenceau referred to him as Jesus Christ (JC) in his private correspondence. Wilson was really just a combination of all the worse aspects of the american psyche, the racism and parochialism of the south combined with the self righteous puritanism of the north.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson#Race_relations
Wilson had racist policies as well as racist ideas.
“During Wilson’s term, segregation was ordered in the Washington offices of the Navy, the Treasury, and the Postmaster General, and photographs became required for all new federal job applicants. When a delegation of black professionals from the National Independent Political League, led by newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, protested the discriminatory actions, Wilson told them “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen”, explained he was trying to “reduce friction,” and that he “sincerely believe[d] it to be in their interest”. When Trotter countered by arguing that it was “untenable… to maintain that the segregation is simply to avoid race friction” as black and white clerks had worked together harmoniously for fifty years, Wilson rebuked him, stating that if the League wanted to meet with him again “it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me”. Trotter was then ordered to leave the White House.[293][275] Under Wilson, racial segregation was quickly implemented at the Post Office Department, and many African-American employees were downgraded and even fired. Employees who were downgraded were transferred to the dead letter office, where they did not interact with the public. The few African Americans who remained at the main post offices were put to work behind screens, out of customers’ sight.[294] The Wilson administration’s pro-segregation positions were criticised not only by black leaders, but by their white allies: journalist Oswald Garrison Villard suggested that the administration had “allied itself with the forces of reaction, and put itself on the side of every torturer, of every oppressor, of every perpetrator of racial injustice in the South or the North”. Although Villard subsequently corresponded with and met with Wilson about the issue, no change in policy was forthcoming.[275]?
Huh, TIL. Thanks everyone!
Indeed. Speaking for such of the left as are willing to let me speak for them, I will say that contempt for Wilson is one of the few things cassander and I agree on.
No that was the French. Wilson was in many ways overly idealistic and an inept diplomat, and consequently the most important parts of his agenda were largely ignored by the other allies at the Versailles peace conference.
In 1918 Wilson made a speech before congress outlining US war aims as follows:
Some of these principles, in particular point one, are naive to the point of being unworkable. While others like point four on mutual disarmament would require very careful consideration for the needs of the various parties, as the superior industrial strength of Germany would give them a huge advantage over her neighbors even if both sides agreed to beat their swords into plowshares.
Nevertheless, when the Germans first sent out peace feelers they sought to use the fourteen points as the basis for negotiation. And if they served as the foundation for a post war world order it is likely that WW2 could have been avoided,
The essential cause of WW2 was Germany and Japan’s belief that having been frozen out of global markets by depression era protectionism, they had to seize territory to support their resource hungry economies. Whether in the Nazi dreams of lebensraum, or in Japanese imperial schemes in china and the pacific, it was this desperate hunger that drove the horrors of the nineteen thirties, and forties. A commitment to free trade and national self determination might well have avoided them.
Wilson took actions that enabled the french to do what they did, then failed to stop them out of his own ineptitude. Had he done nothing, you get a very different ending to the war. he is responsible for the consequences of his intervention.
these factors were knowable and known in 1918. Wilson should have taken them into account, he didn’t.
No, they couldn’t, because they were totally unworkable as you’ve already said. You can’t say “if we had done this impossible thing everything would be fine, so the fault isn’t the person trying the impossible thing.” Good diplomats, like charles evans hughes, realize that people besides themselves have motives, desires, and needs, and take them into account when designing their program. Wilson got his program directly from his own sense of righteousness and nowhere else.
Then it’s a shame wilson didn’t commit to either of those things.
I see Wilson’s three biggest bad moves with regards to the end of the war as the following:
1. Insisting on the abdication of the Kaiser and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as preconditions for peace negotiations. For all the Kaiser’s and the Hapsburgs’ respective flaws and crimes, constitutional monarchy is a significant and underappreciated stabilizing influence, and the dissolution of the Hapsburg monarchy destroyed the closest thing Southeastern Europe had to to a functioning multi-ethnic state.
2. Promising Germany that the final peace treaty would be negotiated on the basis of the Fourteen Points, and making this promise without consulting with France or Britain when they (France in particular) would have considered such a basis completely unacceptable. When France and Britain presented harsher demands at Versailles, as they did not consider themselves bound by Wilson’s unilateral promises, it seemed like a perfidy from the German perspective, and contributed substantially to the stab-in-the-back legend.
3. Explicitly calling for the establishment of monoethnic nationalist states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc) as a war aim. Since the ethnic communities didn’t actually form the clean lines on the map that Wilson might have imagined, this was a recipe for ethnic cleansing, marginalized ethnic minorities, and irredentist grievances. It also carved up Eastern Europe into a bunch of small states that lacked the ability to defend themselves against aggression by Germany or Russia without a lot of support from the other Great Powers. And it served as a legitimizing endorsement of ethnic nationalism: it’s no accident that Hitler’s claims against Czechoslovakia and Poland were couched in terms of oppressed German minorities and ethnic self-determination. Wilson didn’t invent militant nationalism by any means, but he did give it a pretty strong push.
No no no! You’re going about it all wrong.
The thing you have to realize that our current timeline is the result of someone else going back in time and giving Teddy Roosevelt 20 extra pages for his speech to save him from an assassin’s bullet so that he could go on and win a third term and save us from Taft’s mismanagement of the early part of the war. But when our antecedent timetraveller returned to the future, he discovered the world went terribly, terribly wrong.
His historical engineering attempt resulted in the biggest political upset in history: some crazy professor named Woodrow Wilson won with only 40% of the vote. He was such a clueless idiot that he mismanaged the war even worse that Taft did, which went on to result in a second war.
And because TR wasn’t assassinated, his cousin FDR went into politics and totally mismanaged that war as well. Mostly by being senile and having a white house full of——Oh yeah, that historical footnote about communism? That turned into a real thing that took over a bunch of countries and killed tens of millions of people——communist sympathizers. And because TR wasn’t assassinated explicitly because he was running for a third term, it never re-cemented the two term limit norm and this FDR character went on to serve four. Don’t even get me started on his threatening to pack the Supreme Court which resulted in their abandoning the duty to be a full and equal check against the legislature and executive. Also, introducing watered-down communism into the US as part of a “New Deal.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, WW re-segregated the government and military and overtly supported the KKK, setting back race relations 50 years. This resurgent racial animus was never adequately addressed and simmered for another 50 years before boiling over during a period of social unrest (about, among other things, a war against these communists that were trying their damnedest to kill tens of millions of people), amplifying it, and tearing the fabric of civil society apart.
Also, Trump.
Our only hope of restoring the timeline to its rightful flow is to go back and give John Flammang Schrank a more powerful pistol capable of penetrating TR’s eyeglasses, previously-increased-to-50 page speech, as well as his heart. A few million extra causalities here or there during the Great War is nothing compared to that.
As I said at the time, this is going to depend on the time-travel model we assume. If we go with the stated “Back to the Future” model, it’s got to be past-me that gets the package, because there’s nobody farther back that I can trust not to muck things up for present-me and I don’t feel like altruistically taking one-shot stabs in the dark for the sake of a hopefully better world exclusively for people who are not me.
But I don’t like “Back to the Future” style time travel, except for good silly fun. Where it excels. For more serious thought-experimentation, I’m going to have to insist on a consistent universe. And since I am presently unaware of any time travel in my history – indeed, have clear knowledge of a very detailed universe that includes no visible evidence of time travel – I’m limited to things that don’t change any part of history that I know about and don’t require past-me to know that there’s any time travel going on. That’s going to make it much trickier for me to do any clear good, and in particular erasing major past catastrophes is right out.
Mostly, I’m going to have to set up good things going forward, best accomplished by delivering great power to someone I trust to do good works in the future. But since I can’t handle the past agency parts myself, I’m going to need a different agent for that. I’ve got someone in mind, but since I’m posting under my real name I’m going to be vague and just say it’s a friend or family member that I trust to act in my interests, that I am reasonably sure will trust a letter from me with some strange requests, and who hasn’t interacted with me so strongly in recent years that their having acted as my agent would require extraordinary deception.
This simplifies the “make sure they open it and pay attention” part. Also the storage-medium question; CDs with ascii text and back-compatible document and image files should suffice if I need more bandwidth than paper will supply. I’ll be targeting maybe ten years in the past, though I’ll want to double-check my diary to see if there’s anything in my relation with [Agent] that would cause problems on that schedule. And I’ll include some newspaper headlines, etc, for the days and weeks following the package’s arrival. Also an up-front request for extreme secrecy, even from past-me.
First item, and filling most of your $10,000 cost allotment, ten one-ounce platinum coins (minted before 2011!) with detailed instructions to sell them in January 2011 and buy ~35,000 bitcoins. Also details on redundant secure storage from 2011 to present, for delivery to me immediately after I send out the package. This should net me a quarter of a billion dollars or so. I’d like it to be more, but I need something with adequate liquidity, vanishing into enough market capitalization that history won’t be distorted, and that won’t set off money-laundering alarms when I cash in. Well, nothing that can’t be explained away, at least, and it isn’t totally implausible that I’d have taken a $10K gamble on bitcoin in 2011 and sat on it ever since. But cashing out will still require great caution.
Also some mundane stock tips for [Agent], with instructions to use as needed for something like [Agent kids] college fund and to finance some of the agent-work I am going to be asking of them.
I can’t make disasters not happen, and I can’t mitigate the ones I know too much about, but there’s a fair number of disasters I don’t know much about. And Wikipedia seems to use a standard template including “number of fatalities” as a standard item. I think I can write a bot to do a crawl and use a probability function to pick out a few hundred of the worst-ish disasters of the past decade and provide a truncated summary (e.g. the stat block including date but not death/injury toll, and the “background” section). Then I cull the list for ones I already know about (sorry, can’t help you guys) and instruct [Agent] to send anonymous warning letters to the relevant authorities a few weeks ahead. The disasters will be the kind where a warning can’t or won’t stop them altogether or reduce them to non-noteworthy status, else Novikov and my random number generator would have selected them out of the list, but maybe it will knock the death toll down a bit.
There haven’t been any great personal tragedies to hit me or any of my friends/family in the past decade, or at least none that can’t be fixed with a few bitcoins today, so that part is easy.
Scientific progress I can maybe push forward five years or so wherever I bother to take the effort. Download copies of the most groundbreaking results of the past five years, and edit them into cheat sheets to be sent to disconnected and historically unsuccessful rival research teams 1d10-1 years before original publication. That can’t happen if the rivals will just do a quick replication and publish ahead of the original, so the die will have to come up “1” for the teams that would have done that in spite of my nudges to the contrary. Mostly, the rivals will turn out to have been historically unproductive because they were busy working on the next step with a ~5-year head start, and the next five years should see a significant uptick in productivity.
A collection of now-hopelessly-obsolete zero-day exploits, and detailed instructions on exactly when and how to use them to secure back-door root access to an assortment of interesting computer systems. Possibly including the NSA, though that might lead to an interesting loop where some exploit that I learned from Snowden and Snowden learned from the NSA, the NSA itself only learned when they found it embedded in one of their systems in 2012. So, maybe not. Ideally, I set this up in the form of a preloaded vintage laptop that can be abandoned in a ~2010 Starbucks, to minimize risk to [Agent], but I’m not sure my own hack-fu is good enough for that. But [Agent] knows trustworthy people who can do first-rate work, if it comes to that.
[Redacted because I’m posting under my true name]
Finally, and possibly most important, a description of events leading up to my being offered the opportunity to send this suitcase, ideally including photos of the people who made the offer. Take some of those stock-market profits, [Agent], and hire some investigators to see if you can find any of these people in the past. Say, working at a physics lab on some project that might lead to time travel, or boarding one of those special flights to Area 51. Do not interfere, but observe and report. Possibly infiltrate, if not personally then at least with that collection of zero-day exploits.
Because this is one gift horse that definitely deserves a thorough dental examination, and the sooner the better.
You don’t have to teach your target about safe key storage. You can generate the Bitcoin address now, keeping the key for yourself, and just give the recipient the address to move the keys to. He has no need to get anything back to you.
For fun, you can generate a key tonight, and then see if it has a bunch of bitcoin from years ago already, meaning that at some point in the future you sent the address to [Agent].
The plan I originally had in mind, since your last post on the topic, was to send some of my old physics and maths textbooks, and a collection of printed-out Wikipedia articles, to Isaac Newton circa 1666. Mostly I anchored on the textbooks because they were the first part I thought of, and “Isaac Newton before he invented calculus” would be the earliest human who could plausibly understand what he was reading.
Besides that, my reasoning was to change history early and substantially, bootstrap technology while also strengthening Britain and the British Empire because of course that’s the alt-history I’m into as a Briton.
But then I thought a bit, and even though Back to the Future rules are sticky, there’s still a lot of ways that that plan fucks things up and stops me being born, or worse.
.
So, instead, I’ll send a letter to my dad a few years before I’m born, just to set up myself and my family for a much better life. Tell him about decisions he will have regretted making, stock tips, the usual future-advice package, and then also some advice on what I’d like changed about my upbringing.
Also, because it’s “Back to the Future rules” (a phrase I’ll quote), I’ll ask him not to be hostile when his son gets overwritten by me in 2018.
Any opinions on Yemen?
I hadn’t realized how bad things were, but for anyone else who hasn’t been following, there’s a civil war going on between the Saudi/US backed government and Iran based rebels, and a substantial portion of the country is literally starving to death – the Saudis have blockaded the county to block Iranian weapons shipments to the rebels, and while there is apparently a lot of aid, the country side is contested enough to make it difficult to distribute.
Anyone have a more informed background, or proposed solutions?
https://www.patreon.com/posts/radio-war-nerd-w-18306166
Please, just no. War Nerd is someone who usually manages to mangle things in the most bizarre way imaginable. His takes on the A-10 and the fate of the carriers are almost painfully wrong, and I don’t see any reason to trust him on anything after that.
I *was* wondering whether you’d say anything stupid. You know, even if you happen to be right about the hardware, what do you understand about … anything else the War Nerd has written about?
I’m not going to claim that one mistake makes someone totally unreliable on everything ever, but when someone has been totally wrong on every issue I do understand, I see no reason at all to assume that he’s worth listening to on stuff I don’t. And given his credentials, some of the errors he’s made make me very suspicious of his intellectual honesty.
Can we have less of this sort of thing please? I don’t have any object level opinion about whether this “War Nerd” person is credible or not, but this is a needless response that just makes me find you less credible.
I get that maybe you disagree with Bean’s assessment, but it’s perfectly fair game for him to make that point. Even if one wanted to engage in tone policing, I don’t think the point was phrased unreasonably.
If you want to defend the value of a source you link to, maybe do that, instead of making ad hominem criticisms of people who don’t share your view.
One of my rules for evaluating information sources is to find somewhere that what they are saying overlaps with what you know and judge them by that. Bean is doing so, which strikes me as sensible. It isn’t guaranteed to give the right answer, but it’s a good deal better than nothing.
Banned for three months
There was (is?) a cholera epidemic in 2017. (Or apparently, started in 2016 and still ongoing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%9318_Yemen_cholera_outbreak). Everything I know comes from NPR and BBC radio segments and scanning Wikipedia. I remember a big deal last summer/fall about (trying to?) open up the blockade to let medical workers/outbreak response people in.
If its a struggle between KSA and Saudi over whose
puppetsphere of influence Yemen is in, it seems the best way to help the average Yemeni is to push the country into one camp or the other as quickly as possible so that people in the country can switch from destroying infrastructure to rebuilding it. However, I don’t understand the geopolitical implications of this, so maybe those would outway the lower-level positives? Also it did start as a civil war (I think?) so settling things internally might also involve killing or expelling a lot of people.Daniel Larison at the American Conservative has been yelling into the void about Yemen since 2015. Here‘s a recent retrospective.
The cynic in me wonders if the reason there isn’t more discussion of the Yemen situation is that liberals and conservatives can agree that we shouldn’t be involved, and everybody would rather talk about something they can fight over.
No proposed solutions, but here’s a bit on the background:
During the Arab Spring, Saleh, the president for the past 34 years, was “encouraged” to retire in the interest of regional stability. His VP, Hadi, became his replacement. This transition was with the backing of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In my opinion, part of the reason that Hadi was seen as a suitable candidate for a transitional leader was that he can’t muster much of a fighting force that would be loyal to him personally (he’s from South Yemen but sided with the North during the last civil war in 1994), so there was little risk that he would set himself up as a new strongman. He probably also didn’t have much of a chance at holding the country together. Due to some long-standing divisions in Yemen, the talks for setting up a new constitution fell apart and one faction, the Houthis, seized the capital city of Sana’a. Hadi fled. At some point (right before the Houthis took Sana’a, I think), Saleh had his loyalists (see the part above about fighting forces with personal rather than national loyalty) throw in with the Houthis. After the Houthis and Saleh loyalists had taken control of most of the populated western part of the country (they were at the gates of Aden, the former southern capital), the GCC (everyone mainly refers to Saudi, but the UAE is heavily involved too) intervened on behalf of Hadi. They had some initial success at recapturing territory, but for the past two plus years, the frontlines have been pretty static to my recollection. Compare the zones of control to an elevation map of Yemen and it is not hard to see why.
The Houthis are Shi’a, which contributes to the civil war in Yemen being seen as a proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are led by members of the former ruling caste before North Yemen became a republic so they weren’t simply imported by Iran though. Another aspect to keep in mind is that the governates of Saudi Arabia that border Yemen also have significant Shi’a populations and Riyadh doesn’t want them getting any ideas about independence.
Last year, it looked like Saleh was open to peace talks but then he was killed by his Houthi allies of convenience.
As you say, it’s a humanitarian disaster, with the stalemate functioning like a siege (and a siege within a siege for anti-Houthi districts within their zone of control).
The best outcome might be to divide the country again, but I don’t know.
The Saudis intervened/invaded to prevent their neighbor’s friendly government from being replaced by an Iran-friendly government that would quite likely promote unrest in its own territory by its mere existence. After their army proved unable to restore friendly/puppet control of the country, they shifted to a blockade/starvation strategy coupled with standoff tactics in order to reach their goal. I don’t believe for one minute that the “difficulty” of getting “aid” to the “countryside” (rebel-held or contested territory) is anything other than an intended component of the basic strategy.
The problem with a formal partition is the difficulty of enforcing the Saudi/Houthi border, which is somewhat analogous to the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. (nb: “North Yemen” is in the West, “South Yemen” is in the East. I don’t know how this came about.) The Saudis seemed to be more or less fine with the status quo ante, but I suspect that after the rebels got a taste of victory against both the Yemeni national government and to a lesser extent the Saudi ground forces they want more than what they started with. Unfortunately it’s going to take an awful lot of starvation for them to lower their expectations to whatever is acceptable to the Saudis, and I couldn’t say exactly what that is. The Saudis are quite patient at any rate.
That Iran pretty openly supports the rebels goes only so far in explaining the apathy of the “international community” towards the conflict. The Saudis have spent quite a lot of time and effort (and money, of course) on public relations/information warfare; generally nobody cares about Saudi Arabia’s activities in Yemen for the same reason they don’t care about its in-my-opinion comically oppressive domestic policies. From a military standpoint I find the evolutions of strategy by a well-equipped but very tactically-inept war establishment rather fascinating. Equally so, though I don’t know as much about them, the development of the Houthi rebels, and particularly their abortive attempts to develop a standoff capability of their own.
I have a lot more questions than answers on this one. It has been my impression that the Saudis have been the evil interlopers on this one, so why does the US support them? We should be trying to get the Saudis to back off, and treat this somewhat like the Myanmar issue.
Not that I know a whole lot about the status of Yemen and Saudi Arabia (or Myanmar for that matter). But at this point I don’t understand why the US supports the Saudis, even on a realpolitik basis.
I don’t know too much about the situation, but the two obvious reasons are
* Saudi et. al. are allies of the US, Iran is enemy. A Houthi victory expands the Iranian sphere of influence, and possibly causes instability in countries that are US allies.
* The Hadi government the Saudis et. al. support is the internationally recognized government of Yemen. The US, and the “international commuity” in general, usually supports the status quo, i. e. the same government they had recognized before the conflict, under the doctrine of sovereignity, unless they have a very good reason not to. The legitimate government of a country is considered to have the right to form an alliance with other countries, and to allow them to fight invaders or rebels in its territory. In this sense the Saudis are not interlopers, but operate in Yemen with the consent of the Yemeni government.
Exceptions to the above principle of status quo and sovereignity happen when e. g. an evil dictator is butchering its own people, and revolutionaries are demanding democracy (of course informed by geopolitical interests and alliances). E. g. in Syria, protesters originally demanded democracy, and got shot at. But in Yemen the Hadi government was itself intended to be a transitionary government towards democracy (not that this has ever had much of a realistic chance, and I guess plans of any such transition were put on hold with the renewed civil war), and the Houthis never had any pretence of demanding democracy.
So, while the Hadi government is far from being unambiguously the good guys, the credentials of Hadi as the evil dictator, and the credentials of the Houthis as the good guys are not strong enough to clear the very high bar required to suspend the status quo / sovereignity principle.
Btw the Houthi flag: “God is great / Death to America / Death to Israel / A curse upon the Jews / Victory to Islam”.
A step up from “Stop the Jews” Sharpie’d on old cardboard, I guess.
We just need to do some more drone strikes and help SA with some more bombing there, so we can win their hearts and minds!
I would assume because (a) Saudi Arabia is a US ally (b) Iran is a US enemy (c) Yemen is a state that’s directly adjacent to Saudi Arabia, so Saudi Arabia would really not like to have an enemy regime there.
I am guessing that it is because the Saudis have oil.
I don’t think that’s it.
Before the 2012-2016 embargo, Iran was the world’s third largest exporter of oil.
Nine percent of U.S. oil imports come from Saudi Arabia. That’s not a trivial amount by any means, but it hardly gives the Saudis the whip hand.
If Iran got into a dustup with Canada, that would be another matter…
Iran also has oil, and the US imports very little (<2% of total consumption) from either. It is important for the global economy, and thus for the US even if Trump et al don't want to admit it, that both Iranian and Saudi oil make it to some market, but there’s basically no chance that e.g. China is going to turn down Saudi or Iranian oil if it is offered. Thus no problem if the US wants to piss off one government or the other by taking whichever stand it pleases in Yemen, or even imposing a unilateral oil embargo.
As 10240, there are preexisting alliances and enmities that have more to do with flag-burning mobs than with oil reserves, and a strong status quo bias w/re sovereignty in international affairs.
My take on the pro-Saudi side: it sounds like the rebels aren’t too sympathetic – they’re not open to democracy or peace talks, and they are supported by Iran. It seems reasonable to assume that if an Iranian-supported antidemocratic ruling clique takes over a country next to Saudi Arabia, then Iran will increase efforts to overthrow or influence Saudi Arabia as well.
My take on the pro-rebel side: Maybe the rebels are bad guys, but the Saudis are no prize either. We haven’t been successful in helping the recognized government win the war, so maybe if we help the rebels win the war (at least through inaction), the collateral civilian damage will come to an end.
Neither one of those is very satisfying – the status quo seems to be resulting in years of civilian suffering, but if the result of letting the rebels win is to move the civil war over to Saudi Arabia, I’m not sure that’s a net win.
Unless you’re actually sending in your own people to run them (or at least actively meddling to choose who runs them), client states tend to be only truly loyal when they are weak and dependent on your support (in which case they are also often more trouble than they’re worth, requiring constant effort to prop up). The rest of the time, they’ll only side with you when it suits them (and sometimes not even then; being seen as a puppet of foreign powers is almost always terrible optics for domestic politics). So if the rebels win, the benefit to Iran will probably be smaller than you imagine.
I’ve never been a true professional musician, but in my 20s, I was gigging enough that it was about a quarter of my income. I could have survived on it if I had to. It’s really a matter of getting to know the bar owners in your area. I played with several different bands of several different styles and knew most of the owners/managers of live music venues in my area. I’d end up playing gigs until 1 or 2am a few times a week, and then working a regular 9-5 job on top of that. I miss it, but it’s not something I could get away with now that I’m 40 and have two kids.
This was supposed to be a reply to the person asking about pro musicians. Not sure why it posted as a top-level comment, sorry.
Re: Aurel’s comment on the lead-crime hypothesis: while lead levels in Polish people may be elevated, this study suggest that their levels aren’t ludicrously high – a median level of ~ 9.4 ug/deciliter for children near lead emissions sources. That’s high enough to be concerning by modern CDC standards, but not nearly enough to qualify for chelation therapy.
Moreover, that research also suggests that lead exposure in the former Soviet Union is related to point emissions sources – zinc and copper mills, meaning groundwater contamination. Moreover, the Soviets apparently banned leaded gasoline in major cities in 1956. Is it possible that lead exposure via the atmosphere is somehow neurologically worse than groundwater exposure?
Point emissions sources vs atmospheric exposure–that sounds likely to make a large difference.
Groundwater exposure will tend to be concentrated, while atmospheric exposure will be much less so. So you’d expect more-severe damage, to fewer people.
Think of lead as affecting impulse control, somewhat like alcohol. Two really drunk people in a crowd of 200 might fight each other, but it won’t cause a big problem. 200 slightly drunk people, on the other hand, can make fairly terrible decisions.
I’m not particularly good, but I play mostly as Soldier 76 or Junkrat (in TF2 I loved Demoman – just something fun about spamming high explosives from above) depending on the map and whether we are on attack or defense. I’m not twitchy good enough to play the snipers or the more finicky DPS heroes.
I don’t tank very often unless the team needs it. I’m a decent Reinhardt and am working on getting better at Orisa. Kind of hopeless as D.Va and Winston for some reason.
For support I used to favor Mercy but now play mostly Lúcio or Moira.
Excuse me if this has been brought up, but what if UBI *both* releases a lot of creativity and leads to more people who just drift?
This seems likely to me–it would mirror a lot of other shifts in our society. For example, my impression is that the relaxation of enforcement on a lot of social norms surrounding sex, marriage, and children simultaneously[1]:
a. Did a lot of harm to people at the bottom.
b. Didn’t do much harm to people at the top, and may even have helped them.
ETA: Not to push this into CW territory–my point is just that there are a lot of changes to society that work out differently for different people. Maybe a less contentious example is easy availablilty of online lectures and papers and classes and such: it’s pretty obvious that this benefits the subset of people who have the interest and personal initiative to use those resources to learn new subjects; most people won’t be all that interested in immunology or game theory or whatever, and so won’t bother. Every major change in society probably creates relative winners and losers within the society, even if it also raises all boats.
[1] With the caveat that gays and lesbians are probably a whole lot better off not being socially required to marry someone they’re not romantically or sexually interested in, across the board.
Any change produces relative winners and losers, unless the effect on everyone identical. What was interesting about your initial example was that it was presented as a situation where some people were absolute losers.
@Nancy Lebovitz
That seems likely, but I’d argue that greater creativity is not always positive. If loads of people give up their jobs that may be unpleasant, but actually help others, in favor of writing books that no one reads, making paintings that no one likes, being in bands that no one listens to and such, then doesn’t necessarily make society better off.
That depends on two big questions:
1. What exactly do we mean when we say that “creativity” is being released?
2. What is the proportion of creatives to drifters?
If creativity means people developing new tech startups or discovering scientific breakthroughs in math or computer science, that would certainly be valuable. Doing science properly is more expensive than ever but there are some fields, mostly where math and/or computers come in, where you really can make a discovery with an ordinary budget and an extraordinary mind. Likewise, there are a lot of barriers to entry in most industries but it looks like tech is still relatively open to newcomers.
If creativity means several hundred square miles of
graffitistreet art and a million new garage bands, maybe not quite so valuable. It might be fun for the participants but the net value is neutral if not negative. That sort of creativity isn’t worth subsiding more than it already is.Once we’ve answered that question, we can work backwards to see what the minimum tolerable ratio of creativity to drifting is. If we got one new Google per ten thousand drifters that might actually still be a good deal, from a cold-blooded financial standpoint anyway. If we got ten buskers for every one guy drinking himself to death quietly that would be a horrible deal from any standpoint.
There are a couple of more categories. One is useful but not especially creative unpaid work. For example, someone might throw parties. There’s nothing unusual about the parties, but they make life better for the people who show up. (We will optimistically assume that the parties aren’t annoying to people nearby.) See also putting on conventions.
Another possibility is malevolent creativity.
True. I for one would like time to spend with my friends doing board games/RPGs/whatever that isn’t completely eaten up by work or school obligations. In general the possibilities for lazy people like me would be a lot better than just video games and pot provided that we take the opportunity to rebuild relationships, families, communities, etc., which have been strained by things like work and financial problems.
I point out, again, that such discussions fail to distinguish between UBI at a level which is financially plausible today, which would be a few thousand dollars a year, and UBI at a level people would be reasonably content to live with, which would be something more like twenty thousand dollars a year–a level that is plausible only if we assume enormous increases in productivity first.
Somewhat related thoughts on UBI.
It is fairly obvious that we need combinations of traits to survive, a society of people working constantly would be awful and would be very limiting, but being extremely lazy is also awful. As importantly you need that balance within at least most individuals for it to work. 50 violent sociopaths and 50 extremely empathetic pacifists doesn’t not a well balanced society of 100 people make, but you can have 1 violent sociopath, 1 empathetic pacifist and 98 people with some combination of those traits functioning all together.
I think this extends to most, if not all, traits. There are two basic ways* to fail to finish a project, the first is simply to not put in the effort to complete the last steps needed the second is to obsess over perfection to a degree that it makes finishing functionally impossible as you perpetually add steps as you make progress. Working with an extreme of either type of person can be maddening, and there will come a point when you are simple better off without their help but that is only true from the point of view of someone who has both traits in some kind of balance. The urge the complete and the willingness to let go. From the extremely lazy person’s POV it is maddening to have to work with someone who constant tries to push them to do their job, they have been around and they know that their effort level barely impacts what gets done and everything necessary seems to get finished anyway. The perfectionist finds it irritating that you keep restricting their access to resources and preventing them from adding or subtracting features or polishing already finished sections.
The rub is that I don’t think that it is exactly set where on the scale you, or anyone else, will exist, but a range of where you can end up. I don’t think many people here would disagree that indulging a lazy person is probably going to make them lazier, but I don’t think that many would admit to considering that indulging the creative/industrious in the wrong way could basically lead them to compulsive behavior.
A concern, maybe the major concern, of mine about UBI is that it will amplify both groups. The lazy, it is obvious, have an opportunity to become lazier, but I don’t think enough credit is being given to the obsessive workaholic gaining more power. The more that the first group drops their productivity the more that the latter group will be relied on, and the more influence that they will have. This happens for two reasons, the obvious one is that the economy needs more productivity to support the growing, for lack of a better term, indolent class, but the less obvious reason is that the middle ground people, those who were motivating the lazy and moderating the obsessive lose half of their value.
In the long run the economic power shifts heavily toward the compulsive, and the political power towards the lazy and the middle class of conflict resolution specialists drop slowly out of sight.
*3 if you include incompetence and an inability to learn.
That’s a bet of mine. Unleashes a lot of creativity, and a lot of people quitting their jobs and going on the Xbox.
I wonder how the people that will use it for drugs/weapons effect any UBI. Will they break the system with a few horror news stories? Or would it be relegated to people over 25 or even 30 with no violent criminal history? Since a few of those can wreck the whole thing.
Seems likely it would.
By the way, I think that during the last conversation about UBI, a lot of people focused on whether people who are currently in the very low social class would suddenly deeply better themselves given an income (and, kind of implicitly, not much else in the way of change). I don’t think that’s the likely route to “releasing a lot of creativity” for the UBI.
Rather, like everything, it would work on the margin.
So there is currently a large class of people who are either college-educated or have some weird background that more or less classes them with college-educated people and who have some creative aspirations (whether those are artistic or entrepreneurial), but who are not terribly financially secure in their 20’s. A large percentage of them take the safe play and get conventional jobs. And then the line moves. As they get promotions and such, they give up a larger income if they want to take a couple of years to try to do their dream thing. They get married and start families. Etc. It’s not a stretch to say that a large percentage of them find that they are never in the right position to break out of “regular jobs.”
You don’t have to believe that there are great numbers of untapped geniuses in ghettos to believe that you’d see an increase in creative endeavors under UBI.
And maybe, if the numbers add up right, if there are a decently large number of people who currently enter the white-collar workforce who instead do creative stuff under UBI, that also pulls up some people who are currently on the cusp between “basically lucrative career” and “lower-middle class or lower class employed but without long term career prospects” into the career bucket in order to make up the deficit of solidly career people (who are now going off to do creative stuff, and/or creating new career jobs). And then maybe you pull some people who are on the cusp of “lower-middle class or lower class employed but without long term career prospects” and “underemployed” into “employed” to make up that deficit. And so forth.
I’m not certain that that would happen. It probably depends a lot on how much money you think there is on the table for people to seize if they could just be more entrepreneurial in their 20’s. But it’s definitely the more plausible story than, “And suddenly all the kids in the ghettos are building billion dollar businesses.”
It seems impossible to me that there aren’t people who are currently on the margin between “underemployed” and “truly unemployed” who wouldn’t tip over into “truly unemployed” as a first-order effect of UBI. The question is whether the first effect would ultimately, after it all shook out for a couple of decades, overwhelm the second effect, or vice versa.
“Excuse me if this has been brought up, but what if UBI *both* releases a lot of creativity and leads to more people who just drift?”
I think that’s the most likely outcome. UBI will just magnify/unmask the existing differences in innate creativity, work ethic, and leisure preferences across the population. It’s useful to research what people who are assured of financial comfort–such as trust fund babies, lottery winners, non-disabled lawsuit winners, and people who retire early and in good health–do with their time.
Some of them throw themselves at work they are passionate about, and a minority of those attain success. Most of them spend their time indulging in hedonism or entertainment (there’s a lot of world travel and hanging out with friends and family), and maybe spending time on hobbies they’re passionate about that make them little or no money.
The hard truth is that, even if you are passionate about something and try to make a career out of it, there’s no reason to expect anyone else to value the fruits of your labor enough to pay you for it. Moreover, even if you’re excellent in the field of work you’re passionate about, the odds are that you’re still not among the best, which is what you’ll need to be if you want to be truly successful. The world is littered with millions of great artists, poets, authors, inventors, game app designers, and other creative people who followed their passions and never got any real recognition or success (go to an art festival, identify the most talented artists, and then watch to see how much of their product they actually sell).
And if tomorrow machines liberated humans from drudge work, and the government provided a UBI, leaving everyone free to pursue their passions full-time without risk, finding ways to stand out would actually get even harder. You would get the chance to finally focus on writing that book, opening that indie coffee shop, or doing artistic photography, but so would hundreds of millions of other people. The competition would be incredibly fierce (also, there’s no economic law that says demand for “creative” goods has to increase 1:1 with the supply of those goods), the market for whatever zany good or service you have a passion for selling would be glutted, and the same ultra-talented, sickeningly ambitious, status-seeking people who succeed today would rise to the top of the pack in the New World Order as well. And of course dumb luck would continue to be a major factor.
Finally, what happens if machines become creative and start muscling humans out of those jobs? In that case, future people will REALLY have nothing productive to do, unless they find satisfaction in the act of making pottery, art, or music, etc. knowing full well they’ll probably get no money for it since machines do it better.
I think what you would see is a lot of very niche communities. “I write fanfiction based on the role-playing games designed around the spin-off to the version of Harry Potter where only even numbered books are canon” You have an audience of 12 or so, but they are passionate and interact a lot (which is good, since the whole goal is to use up free time). Maybe someone somewhere contributes art or science that lasts centuries, but for most people we are happy if they are able to find peaceful contentment.
Then we have thousands of youtube channels devoted to criticisms of art produced by Siri and Alexa’s descendants, and what the works say about our collective humanity.
In the post scarcity future, it’s “+1″‘s all the way down.
Or everyone will just play increasingly elaborate games of Football…
https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/chapter-1
Tangentially on topic and also a fantastic story.
How does one create a military from scratch? Suppose you are one of those countries like Costa Rica or Iceland that doesn’t have a military, and you’ve soberly decided you need one. Presumably you aren’t starting from zero in the men-with-guns department; you probably have police units, including some pretty darn hard-core police units, but you want something more than that. So how to go about it?
Wouldn’t the natural first step be to try to use your connections with some friendly country (US, UK, France, Russia) to get advisors to help train your army, or to get to send your future officers there for some kind of training? You’re going to be buying a lot of expensive military equipment, so probably lots of countries have some incentive to help you with your army-building process, even if they’re not looking for local allies in their bigger struggles.
There’s a lot of capability in the US in particular invested in building armies. The Green Berets are intended to be able to go into a country and build at least a light military force from scratch. That said, if you’re Iceland or Costa Rica, a better solution might be to hire Blackwater or the like. They’ll recruit a bunch of retired military people who have the skills you want, and send them over. This is increasingly common even as a way of training US special forces, because the instructors continue to impart their knowledge, but also can be home every night.
There’s also been at least a couple cases of countries having some success hiring mercenaries as military advisers when they couldn’t find a suitable patron country to provide the advisers. The South African company Executive Outcomes was hired by Angola and Sierra Leone in their respective civil wars during the 1990s. In both cases, EO performed some direct operations (looks like mostly commando raids and operating the occasional tank or aircraft), but especially in Sierra Leone, a big part of what they were hired to do was train and organize new military units for the host government.
In both conflicts, the side of the civil war that hired EO won enough success on the battlefield to negotiate a favorable truce, which promptly fell apart into a new round of civil wars once EO withdrew (it sounds like this happened under international pressure, since EO wasn’t terribly popular with major governments) and was replaced with UN peacekeepers. I don’t know enough of the details to say with confidence how much the failures of the peace treaties reflects EO-trained units only being effective while EO’s personnel were still around to take an active hand, and how much was due to problems with the UN peacekeepers.
@johan_larson
Iceland does have a military, consisting mostly of the coast guard and special forces. I’d build on these and get outside help from a country with a better army where possible.
Costa Rica has a small military that they don’t call a military. I’d build on these and get outside help from a country with a better army where possible.
The easy way is giving your national resources and opening up a base to a major power like the US/Russia/china as part of an alliance. Isn’t that how some got kickstarted in the 1900’s?
You can look up what Singapore did. One of the first things LKY did was organize a militia, after all.
From an Unz Review comment.
Who said which:
Adam Smith or Karl Marx?
(I cheated with the second quote, but the first is still interesting).
I assumed Adam Smith wouldn’t use the term “Capitalist production”.
Well, obviously the first is Smith and the second is Marx just because the reverse wouldn’t be “interesting”.
That said, as Orpheus pointed out “capitalist production” is a dead giveaway in the second quote – that’s “capitalist” as in the adjectival form of “capitalism”, which is an anachronism. And correct me if I’m wrong, but communists before the USSR and “socialism in one country” leaned a lot more AnCom, so it would seem weird to me if Marx said something that strongly pro-government.
The first quote is from Smith, part of a discussion where he argues that the first maxim of taxation is tax burden proportioned to income–the equivalent of a flat tax, except that he isn’t proposing an actual tax on income and does not, like most modern commenters, make the mistake of assuming that the burden of a tax on someone is measured by the amount he himself pays.
The second cannot be Smith, might well be Marx.
Paper claiming that a reasonable chunk (up to 13%) of the black-white academic achievement gap is caused by differences in temperature.
Grasping at straws, I think. The US scatterplots are rather scattered (note the enormous variation in the 60-70 degree range), and they make judgements based on average outdoor annual temperatures when most schools are out over summer and in cold areas there’s heating. All they’re picking up on, I think, is that test scores in the South are lower and that the South is hotter.
Where are you seeing this? From the abstract:
Similarly, your bit about the South does not seem compatible with stuff like this:
I’m skeptical that this will replicate. On the other hand, the obvious policy to pursue here is broadly reasonable anyway–install AC in more schools. So at least doing that wouldn’t do any harm.
The direction of the main effect (too hot –> students do worse) is plausible. Unfortunately, all of my instincts upon reading it scream “Garden of Forking Paths”. If you haven’t read Gelman’s blog, this is where the number of choices that can be made in analyzing the data allow the researcher a lot of degrees of freedom to find a “positive” result even in noise. We should figure a lot of their estimates would drop if someone tried to replicate (basically, when data is noisy, statistically significant estimates tend to over rather than underestimate magnitudes). They have a large sample, but immense amounts of uncontrolled systematic measurement errors between what was measured and what would matter.
For example, “We assign each high school to the nearest weather station, resulting in an average distance of 9.7 miles between a student’s test site and weather station being used to measure temperature at that site.” Ok, 10 miles is not a short distance. You can get temperature differences between buildings on the same block. This might not be a huge deal, but the way they’ve decided to instrument for temperature is pretty specific and could be sensitive to 1 degree swings (they look at maximum and at temperatures crossing a threshold). They later make a comparison limiting their sample to schools within 5 miles and say the effect gets a little bigger. But I highly doubt this is kosher, schools within 5 miles of a weather station are not otherwise identical to schools within 10 miles of a weather station. What happens to the number of urban vs rural schools, etc. etc. They really ought to show a plot of how estimates change as you go from within 1 mile of a weather station, 2 miles, 3, etc.
Maxima are notoriously noisy compared to means (although they then mean over a maxima because why the hell not? There’s no substantive theory here). And taking a continuous variable and switching it to # of days it exceeds certain bins is super sketchy. There’s no sensible justification for this.
Why not just use mean temperature over each school day or the temperature at noon? Why not bin on multiples of 5? How much do these totally arbitrary changes of specification affect the results? Garden of forking paths.
Their measurements of air conditioning penetration are super sketchy. Just read the section. It’s significantly worse than the temperature data. They change a categorical response to a numerical variable and average over it. That’s several free parameters right there alone. Not even counting how noisy they admit the measure is. Incidentally though, if you look at their maps, it looks like it basically flips the map of actual temperature.
Anyways, reading through the whole thing, there are more gems like
Theoretically, there are no solid quantitative reasons to prefer one of these strategies for changing the temperature measurements over time to a single variable. However, depending on the specification, you get drastically different results. This is a sign of the garden of forking paths affecting results.
I haven’t yet read through the entire section on air conditioning. I may get to it later, but I’m not super hopeful about that turning out to be worth my time.
But my overall thought right now is that the effects they are most excited about are sort of difference in difference in difference type things that we should be extremely skeptical about when there’s no substantive quantitative theory at hand. The boring already known results of higher temperature –> lower performance look solid, but no one really knows the cause of that. Notice though that their air conditioning “theory” kind of contradicts the primary result. If air conditioning worked, why do all the hot areas with plenty of air conditioning do terribly? The lack of air conditiong is worst where it is the coolest!
An interesting idea, but I think it’s unlikley the data is up to the task due to a lack of substantive theory and problems with the garden of forking paths and other systematic issues.
They did mention that the effect seems to be greater for schools closer to the weather stations which they reasoned as reduced measurement errors.
I think it is certainly possible, just as cold and cloudy days seem to make people more depressive. Not sure if this paper proves it though.
There’s fact they are using data from people who take PSAT multiple times (wait you can take it multiple times?) and not consider population bias…
I’m not sure if I buy the whole different ethnicities have differing effect rates for temperature explanations they give. Shouldn’t differences in income levels and housing take account of that? The fact they don’t include Asians also seems somewhat suspicious.
Plus I expect a decent location based variable to be included in most regressions and to have high covariance with temperature, making it hard to compare their estimate and previous ones.
How much did the US government pay for Barbary pirates not to attack American ships in the late 1700s? When I initially saw this Wikipedia page, I read it as being 20% of the federal budget each year, but on closer inspection it seems to be a total amount that is 20% of the yearly budget. But I can’t make either interpretation fit with the claims about Washington’s salary here.
I have a lot of problem with motivation/feel goodery. I am considering taking L-tyrosine. anyone taking it here with any advice?
Info about me: i live in sweden, havedepression, high functioning autism. i am on fluoxetine 60 mg
Have you tried changing your diet first instead of adding supplements? I think tyrosine is high enough in commonly eaten foods that supplementing with it is unnecessary.
What would changing my diet mean specifically in this case?
Look for cheap foods that have the supplements in high quantity, then add it into your diet.
Seaweed, soybeans, meat, eggs, dairy.
Will try to eat them
I haven’t played in a while, so there have probably been umpteen rebalance updates and stuff like that, but my main was D.VA. I like the fact that her cannons have no reaload so you can always fire, and her high health and flight ability makes her great to get in and harrass the enemy safely. The barrier ability can be flashed on and off quickly (or at least it could be when I played. I know they’ve changed it a few times) to selectively block a lot of stuff. A good D.VA is really hard to kill and annoying, because she has both tankiness and mobility.
Her barrier can still be flickered, but now there’s a 0.5 second delay after turning it off, and the charge got nerfed so it only lasts 2 seconds. She’s still good, but her barrier only lasts just long enough to get through a choke point, so you have to be careful.
However, they also gave her micro-missiles and the ability to shoot while flying, which has made her dive capabilities just amazing. She can boost in, burn down an isolated enemy, then boost out, sort of like Winston but with better guns.
David Friedman expresses a strongly negative view on revolutions. David, I wonder what’s your take on the American Revolution.
For fun, I will guess: the word “Revolution” here is a misnomer.
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether things would have turned out better or worse without the revolution, depending in part on what the alternative was. Adam Smith proposed giving the colonists seats in parliament proportioned to their contributions to the revenue of the empire and casually added that if that was done, in a century or so the capital would move to the New World. Canada and Australia didn’t have revolutions, and didn’t turn out strikingly worse than the U.S.
But I agree that the American Revolution wasn’t a revolution in the sense I was thinking of, since it was mainly against a foreign ruling power rather than an attempt to overthrow the existing local government–although, of course, there was a substantial fraction of the population supporting British rule.
Yeah, the American Revolution had its roots in a disagreement over the legal and moral status of the colonies with respect to Britain. The colonials saw themselves as having a status something like a modern Dominion (i.e. a state that owes allegiance to the British Crown and follows British foreign policy as a junior partner, but which otherwise functions as an independent state), but the majority faction in Parliament saw the colonies as being fully under the jurisdiction of the British government and having limited local self-government only on sufferance.
The ambiguity had existed from the get-go, but communication lag, difficulties in projecting power across the Atlantic, and Parliament’s lack of interest in trying to assert power in the colonies all aligned to keep it pretty much academic until the mid-18th century, when Parliament noticed that it could and did send fleets and armies across the Atlantic, and that the economies of the colonies had become a big enough part of the Empire’s overall economy to be worth the trouble of a serious attempt to tax and align with Britain’s mercantilist trade policy.
I’ve seen an analysis which said that the American War for Independence occurred between 1775 and 1781, while the American Revolution was a mostly political affair, happening mostly between 1781 and 1792, with some stirrings in 1776.
I’d be curious to read that analysis, really any good look at the “domestic front” of the american revolution, on either the british or american side. Any suggestions?
Sorry, I don’t remember where I read that. I don’t quite have a photographic memory, but I really don’t have a bibliographic memory.
A random thought I had: many people complain that the rent is too damn high, and a general principle of economics is that if you tax something you get less of it. But I’ve never heard anyone propose putting high taxes on rent payments.
A) Why not?
B) Has this happened?
C) What would the first/second order economic effect if San Francisco, say, charged 25% “sales” tax on all rent payments (assuming landlords didn’t find some trivial labeling workaround?) Obviously it would encourage more owner occupancy, but there’s only so much of that being desired. I also am not sure what effect it’d have on sale prices.
You would get less rental housing, not less high rents. If you tax something, gross prices will be higher than the original price, while net prices will be lower. If gross prices ended up lower (and of course net prices even lower), then demand would be higher than in the original situation, and supply would be lower, so such a price can’t be market clearing, assuming that the original price was market clearing.
I believe you’re agreeing with me in different words.
If you agree that taxing rent just means less rental housing without also decreasing the price, why do you find it surprising that nobody has ever tried a rent tax?
I too am confused. Unless the goal is to shift even more people into buying houses? But that’s already even more expensive.
The market is so constrained by regulations in this case, I’m not sure what else we’d see besides more roommates and extended families.
What 10240 and Iain said. They’re not agreeing with you. A tax on rents would raise the amount people pay and would decrease the quantity supplied of housing.
I expect it would decrease housing prices, since it would reduce the rent landlords could collect and thus make houses less valuable for use as an income stream. It would encourage conversions of apartments to condos as well.
Biggest losers are renters, who will be paying more. The SF market is so hot I expect the landlords would be able to pass most of the tax along.
One of the main things to consider when talking economist speak is that “costs” and “prices” aren’t quite interchangeable. As an example if you lived in a highly communist country they would often issue bread coupons, allowing a person to go to a store and exchange it for a loaf. In this context the “price” of a loaf of bread was one coupon, however the “cost” was often standing in line for several hours, or traveling a large distance to the store or both.
Taxes shift how those non monetary costs are experienced. In economic terms a tax on rent would be a form of rent control, where an absolute cap on rent would be modeled in an equivalent way to a 100% tax on rent over a level of X, so you idea has been tried in practice under a different name. Rent control leads to obvious outcomes, first is the decline in competition, second is a decline in the quality of the goods and third is an increase in the non monetary costs of the good. Each of these encourages graft and corruption.
For predicted effects on prices it is difficult to put a direction as you have to separate out the quality of the housing stock now with the quality later. The lack of competition restricts supply and pushes prices up, the lack of profit reduces the value of rental units and pushes competition for them down, pushes prices down. The lack of profit and competition reduces the pressure to maintain the units and encourages cost cutting as well, reducing the value of the units and pushing prices down.
The specifics would be determined by how the legislation was written and local factors but what you expect with such efforts is a combination of longer waiting times to find a place to live and lower quality of such places, I believe this is well documented in the literature on rent control.
It’s not exactly the same as rent control, though. Rent control results in demand exceeding supply, as the market clearing price is illegal, so some people just can’t find an apartment even if they could afford the market price (assuming the rent control is fully enforced). A tax below 100% doesn’t have this effect, as rents can be increased until demand decreases and/or supply increases (in theory; taxes close to 100% might have a similar effect).
As I said a 100% tax on rents above a certain level would work the same as rent control, a lesser tax rate would expected to have the same type of effects, but of a different magnitude.
Taxation can have the same effect. If the market clearing price for an apartment is $2,000 a month a 25% tax rate would mean that the landlord would only receive $1500 a month and you would expect supply not to meet demand.
The effect is the same. If the market clears at $2,000 a month and landlords see their returns on the same apartments drop from $2,000 to $1,500 then the supply of housing should drop. If the original market clearing price was based on a competitive market a significant tax increase will always lead to a shortage when compared to that price as landlord’s revenue will drop.
You are forgetting that quantity demanded is a function of price. Without rent control, quantity supplied goes down, price goes up, and it keeps going up until quantity demanded is equal to quantity supplied, just as without the tax.
The difference is that the price paid by the tenant is now higher than before, price received by the landlord (net of tax) is lower than before, and quantity is lower than before.
A rose by any other name. In the above description the price rises because the supply drops, under rent control the non monetary costs rise and/or the quality of the good drops. Under taxation we classify the shortage as “dead weight loss”, but the effect of both situations is similar for the consumer. Under rent control you get less housing at higher costs with non monetary costs dominating, and under increased taxation you get less housing at higher costs with monetary costs dominating.
You earlier wrote:
Rent control leads to a shortage–quantity demanded is higher than quantity supplied, so people willing to pay the legal price are sometimes unable to find anyone willing to rent to them at that price.
A tax on rent leads to a higher price of housing.
Both make potential tenants worse off, but in different ways. Only one produces a shortage, which is not the same thing as a high price. There is no shortage of diamonds, although they are expensive.
And rent control makes many current tenants better off by a transfer to them from their landlord, which is one reason it is often politically popular.
You wrote:
With the tax, supply is meeting demand–at a higher price.
@ DavidFriedman
You are using price, when you need to use cost.
Lets say I run a promotion for my store where everyone who shops there gets a free cookie (limit one per customer, no purchase necessary yada, yada, yada). I consider 2 options, first is that I will staff a table by the entrance offering every customer who comes in a cookie, the other is to have cookies at every register and give them to every customer as they check out, so anyone who wants their free cookie has to wait their turn in the check out line. The number of cookies ‘demanded’ will be a function of the price + the non monetary costs involved.
Demand is a function of cost of which price is one factor. When you can draw a supply and demand curve using price you are implicitly assuming that all non monetary costs are held constant. If my grocery store drops prices by 10% and you graph my demand curve to figure out my personal elasticity you are assuming that their location, availability, customer service quality etc all did not change.
When rent ceilings are put in place you get a ‘shortage’, that is there are more people who want to pay $1,000 a month for an apartment than there are apartments available to them. The price of getting an apartment is $1000 a month, the new cost of getting an apartment is 5 years on a waiting list and $1000 a month.
Lets say I pay $2,000 a month for an apartment, and the city passes a 90% tax on all rent > $1,000 a month. Will I expect to be able to rent the same apartment after the tax increase at $2,000 a month? It is a legal price to charge and to pay.
From an economist’s point of view what is the difference between causing a shortage by making something strictly illegal, and by reducing demand by making it a practical impossibility to provide a good at the previous market price?
With rent control I can just claim that supply is meeting demand at a higher cost, and the the cost now just includes price+waiting for 5 years for an apartment.
In the case of a tax, the increased cost is going to the government as revenue. In the case of rent control, it’s being dissipated in waiting times and the like.
You earlier wrote:
And that is still wrong. All you are arguing now is that it is also wrong in the rent control case, because you want to define demand as a function of cost rather than price. For some purposes that makes sense, but it doesn’t justify your claim that supply doesn’t meet demand.
In an ordinary market, quantity supplied equals quantity demanded at the market price. Would you claim that it doesn’t, because quantity demanded at a lower price is above quantity supplied at that lower price? If not, why do you make that claim when the lower price is the price without taxation and the higher with?
Would you claim that, any time there is a sales tax, quantity supplied doesn’t meet demand? That’s exactly equivalent to what you claimed for a rent tax.
Aren’t a lot of rentals unreported, especially rooms/basements? It’s something like 15-20% of suites, probably higher due to people having an incentive to lie on surveys asking them if they’re breaking the law.
It’s hard enough to enforce rules not involving money around renting. It would be even harder to enforce taxes, and non-reporting landlords would either get more money in their pocket by matching the legal taxed prices, or compete with legal taxed prices by advertising cheaper rent.
Unless you’re talking about renting property, in which case I don’t know.
I am a landlord and I pay high taxes on my rental income. At least 33% and maybe as much as 45%, depending on what income bracket I fall in on a given year.
We have to exploit other loopholes to try to get back to a sane tax rate (we don’t always succeed). For example, deductions on renovations of rentals, section 8 housing programs, mortgage interest deduction, etc.
If the rate went up even more I’d expect to see more under the table rentals (there are many already), more empty properties, and more tax optimized mega corps getting into the game. Not that that will stop our glorious leaders here.
High taxation of basic needs is unpopular, because it looks like sticking it to the common person.
Sure, govts get away with it in some places, for individual reasons.
– Fewer apartments for rent, due to marginal landlords being forced out of business, leading to higher prices on what is left.
– Remaining landlords, those who can deal with the change, jack up prices to compensate.
– Untaxed, illegal renting increases.
Question for those involved or familiar with US Pharma Laws:
Recently a bill called ‘Right to Try’ was passed. (I don’t know if it was just the senate or passed completely, i got the impression it was passed completely) — The law purports to give terminally ill patients the right to attempt non FDA approved drugs.
My assumption is that the folks on this blog would probably [by some majority] support this, at least in theory, insofar as it’s a conscious decision to go against a safety regulation for rational reasons. But pretty much all of the articles i can find about the law are negative or dismissive. One thing I hear brought up is that terminally ill patients are already able to try non FDA approved drugs, but the FDA has to approve this exception. The other thing these articles frequently mention is the importance of the efficacy standard; there’s a very strong implication that Drugs are only effective because they are required by law to prove that they are beyond all reasonably doubt.
My thinking was that if the FDA grants the exception in the overwhelming majority of cases, and does so relatively quickly, then this particular law would have no positive effect, and possibly a negative one. (on net) On the other hand, if my suspicion is correct, the approval would probably follow the same lines as the regular FDA approval process; that terminally ill patients would frequently die while the FDA makes up their mind.
But I don’t have any information in either direction on that. Does anyone know more?
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/561770/:
So this suggests that the FDA does approve in the majority of cases and sufficiently quickly. I certainly don’t see why this process would be like the regular FDA approval process, because the slowness there is AFAIK because of the demands on trials, which won’t be the case for the exception process.
In any case, I don’t believe that this kind of thing will save a lot of lives either way. Amazing new drugs that are way more effective are very rare.
Unfortunately a 99% approval rate doesn’t really imply anything useful, I would guess that it implies the opposite even. Either the FDA is rubber stamping most proposals or doctors know not to waste their time making certain types of proposals, or some proposals are ‘disqualified’ so the FDA doesn’t have to reject them, or a combination of the above.
This is potentially true but falls under the category of ‘unsure either way’
My biggest worry about this one is what the quacks are going to do. Getting your snake oil registered as a last ditch trial drug is already used as a way of adding a veneer of legitimacy. Those 1% of cases that the FDA reject? A lot are just garbage that would never work or are totally inappropriate for the disease in question. Allowing access to even more ‘drugs’ is more likely to drain desperately ill people’s wallets that effect a miracle.
I used to main Sniper in TF2, although I wasn’t very good at it. Never played Overwatch.
I just read Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea, about the conflict in the 16th century Mediterranean (particularly between the Spanish, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire). It’s some ugly stuff, especially when Crowley talks about how the Mediterranean coasts of Spain, southern Italy, and the islands in the western Mediterranean Sea became “lands of disappearances” – i.e. people living on the coasts would get kidnapped by corsairs based in Algiers and such and then sold into slavery. Sometimes in small numbers, sometimes by the thousands when one of the Barbarossa brothers was leading a raid. The Europeans did some slaving of their own, but it was small compared to the amount that North African raiders were doing (this was the Ottoman Empire at its apex).
And the naval wars over it . . . honestly, I can understand why all the silver and gold funneled into Europe did little to profit Spain in the long run. It just went in and was immediately funneled back out to pay for ships and armies.
Crowley’s book is a good introduction. For a more sophisticated take, there are two excellent books I can recommend, John Pryor’s Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 and John Guilmartin’s Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the 16th Century. The latter book is especially excellent and manages to do an amazing job of charting how galley warfare evolved the way it did over the course of the 16th century and why it finally died out.
“If we were to see the North/South divide in Europe from a perspective of something like historical justice, all this talk about the North supporting the lazy South and East would be reversed. There’s a reason British and French fleets were free to sail for easier, more lucrative conquests: because the people of the Eastern Mediterranean fought through centuries of raiding, enslavement, pillage, and sheer terror to hold the great Ottoman Empire at bay. Think of those EU fees as reparations.”
@aNeopuritan
1. Your link goes to a patron-only post.
2. Northern Europe is more than Britain & France.
3. This kind of historical cherry picking is merely persuasive to those who already believe in the conclusions. One can also cherry pick differently, for instance by arguing that Italy owes reparations to Britain & France for WW II and that Greece was saved from occupation by the allies in the same war, at high cost.
By the time the “Great Ottoman Empire” was a serious threat to the western Med, Greece was part of it, so any reparations would be owed in the opposite direction.
The forces that finally blocked Ottoman expansion at the first siege of Vienna included Austrians and Germans, and before that a good deal of the fighting had been by Hungarians. For the second siege of Vienna, the Poles and the Holy Roman Empire were the main (successful) defenders.
Heh, I was just going to bring this book up in relation to John Schilling’s comment above that “From about the dawn of recorded history, piracy has gone away when navies with actual warships took an interest.” I guess Spain didn’t have much of an “actual navy” or “actual warships” in the Med — and when they did, their strategy seemed to be, “deliver ships to the enemy and get tragically slaughtered”…
I’ve only read the first four chapters of the book though, so idk about later developments.
And on the silver and gold not helping Spain in the long run, I’m still curious why all that silver and gold getting funneled into armies and ships failed to build up industry and drive economic growth in Spain like it did in other places in Europe. Although I’m getting a sense a deja vu writing this comment so apologies if we’ve discussed this here before and I’ve forgotten.
Adam Smith frequently uses Spain as an example of what not to do in Wealth of Nations; they seem to have done a variety of things wrong. One of the things they tried to do is restrict export of silver and gold, which while not stunningly successful did slightly increase inflation and reduce importation of useful foreign goods, while enriching smugglers rather than more productive people. But there were many factors at work.
Galley navies are very different from what are generally thought of as ocean going navies. In order to be useful warships, galleys need to be about as fast as other galleys, which requires a lot of rowers and a very narrow hull. Lots of rowers consume a huge amount of water, only a little of which can be stored. And the lightweight hulls need to be beached frequently or they get waterlogged. This means that they can’t really capable of achieving command of the sea in traditional mahanian fashion, and thus weren’t particularly good at stamping out piracy. You could send out your galleys, but the pirates would just say home in their bases, watch you sail around, then come out when you ran out of water in a few days.
Actual navies with the ability to deploy ships for tours of significant length were much more efficacious about stamping out piracy, and spain’s genuine oceangoing navy was actually surprisingly small under the habsburgs, and it was needed in the atlantic far more than the mediterranean.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense, thanks for explaining! I saw your book recommendations above, and I’ve added them to my list in case the rest of Crowley’s book manages to interest me more than the beginning has so far.
I was under the impression that in the era of galleys, pirates were more in the habit of raiding coastal towns than chasing ships at sea, and that anti-piracy efforts mostly involved launching attacks on the pirate bases (since as you note galleys contained a lot of men, and in war galleys the rowers often doubled as soldiers, a force of galleys could land a large body of troops).
They did both, but that’s another good point. A lot of piracy in the mediterranean consisted of algerians landing forces going slave raiding and pillaging on spanish coastlines. The Guilmartin book actually goes into detail about this, and attributes some of the design differences between venetian and Spanish galley design to the spanish need to deal with that sort of raiding much more often than the venetians did.
Re lead and violent crime:
That’s a really interesting point that certainly calls into question assumptions about lead and violence, but I’m not convinced it’s all that conclusive. The two groups of countries were enormously different culturally, so it seems very within reason that they could have their lead signals be swamped by other cultural stuff. This seems very analogous to your recent article, Scott, of the US only incidentally having ‘typical’ suicide rates despite what’s likely a significantly increased rate due to guns. Guns increase our rate, but other effects decrease it enough to offset things. Couldn’t the same be true of lead?
Some mechanisms that come to mind, as someone not super educated on the cultures of communist countries. More fear of authority kept crime in check. Communism having some direct effect on poverty (which provides the main source of criminals). Sending dissenters to gulags and whatnot kept crime in check (sketchy considering US imprisonment rates not stopping crime, but who knows). Different reporting/recording habits.
The other big piece of evidence against the Lead Crime Hypothesis that I’m aware of is age cohort studies (those that looks specifically at crime rates by birth year), which tend to show a much, much smaller lead effect than the epidemiological studies that just look at the overall crime rate vs lead exposure lagged by X years. Basically, it looks like crime seems to correlate strongly with lead levels X years ago, both generally and within geographical locales, but crime by people of different birth years peak in the same calendar years, not at the same ages as you’d expect from the hypothesis.
Here’s one survey paper on the different results between the two methodologies, and here’s Kevin Drum’s quick take on cohort data.
Maybe the broken window effect amplifies lead-based crime? If a crime wave breaks out, more people are driven to crime as a result, regardless of their age; the effect is just more severe in areas with serious lead exposure.
NB: I realize that the broken window theory is highly controversial, especially for the eponymous minor property crimes, but I think it’s probably applicable to major crimes.
One hypothesis that I find intriguing but which has gotten very little attention is that the crime spike was due to a trough in institutionalization rates: crime went up as mental health reform reduced the mental hospital inpatient population, and went down again when mass incarceration really got going. The graph on page 56 of the linked article shows a really striking inverse correlation between institutionalization rate (prison + mental hospital population) and homicide rate.
The two big potential problems I see with this hypothesis are:
– Scott’s made some fairly compelling arguments that the additional prison population are not, by and large, the same people who would have been in mental hospitals before the 1960s.
– I’ve only seen the analysis for the US only. Does the correlation carry over into other countries which had similar changes (perhaps at different times) at one or both of imprisonment policy and mental hospitalization policy?
Note that that is about homicide, while Kevin Drum insists that lead only affects total violent crime, not homicide. Most people use homicide because they want to minimize reporting error, but not Drum, because
he wants to maximize ithe’s an idiot.No, this institutionalization hypothesis is ridiculous. Why isn’t the first point enough to damn it? It’s very easy to fool yourself with these time series. You aren’t picking out very many bits of data, just what time it went up and what time it went down. That’s what Steve Levitt and Kevin Drum do, too.
I don’t know about psychiatric institutionalization in other countries, but I do know that all comparable countries had the same run up in homicide (doubling 1965-1975) and none of them responded by increasing incarceration, and they all returned to baseline, usually faster than America (probably the difference was crack). So I conclude that prison has no effect.
I looked at the link to comparable countries. The US has a much more dramatic change in crime than every other country listed. Yes, there seems to be a slight increase in crime world-wide in the ’80’s or 90’s (explained demographically by rising average ages perhaps, or maybe all countries had somewhat of a lead problem?), but the US had a phenomenal increase followed by a phenomenal decrease. It appears to me that something beyond the world-wide trends is happening. Increased incarceration sounds like a reasonable guess to me.
What does it mean to be “the same change”? Most the countries doubled their homicide rates and returned to baseline. Similarly, American blacks and whites each doubled and halved. It may be weird, but that’s what happened, so that’s the right way to look homicide numbers.
Okay, I looked at the graphs again. I do see that other countries did about double, at least briefly, and then decrease. I was somewhat confused because the US baseline is so much higher, and also because the graphs include space below the zero, which makes the lower baselines look like they are changing less than they are.
I still am not convinced that the American data is very comparable to the other countries, partly because of the much higher baseline, and partly because every other country varied so much as to when they increased and decreased, and many increased for only a year or two.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that mostly the lead rates weren’t actually higher in the CEE countries, at least not in the way Cato wanted you to think, and the entire piece this was based on was just anti communist propoganda.
I don’t know about industrial sources, which were probably bad, but also fairly localized, but quick googling shows the Soviet Union started removing lead paint from residences in the 1920s, long before the US did, and then started restricting its use in gasoline in the 60s. Also they had far fewer cars in CEE countries at this time. I would not be at all surprised if it turned out part of the reason for the lower crime rates is that they had much less blood lead exposure.
At the very least, there needs to be far more evidence than a Cold War propaganda piece to prove that there is any puzzle that needs solving here.
I have a question for our resident naval experts (bean et al.) which fits neatly with the current topic of Naval Gazing:
I recently came across the topic of modern piracy. I knew this phenomenon beforehand, but always assumed, that this is a very small phenomenon and simply persists, because it is not cost effective for ship owners to do anything about it. This impression was reinforced by the comedic means (fire hoses!, flare guns!, electrified fencing!, simply switching the deck lights on!!) of defense employed by the ships (often sucessfully) in the few cases I came across this topic over the last 10 years. This seems not to be the case with estimated 10 billion+ damages per year. (http://www.criminaljusticeusa.com/blog/2009/10-shocking-facts-about-modern-day-pirates/) and some ship owners willing to pay security companies 120000$ (same source) for protection per trip. There is even a freaking NATO mission against pirates (http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_48815.htm)
Either I am overlooking something (I assume this to be the case), or this is a huge pile of money laying around. Since ships are not typically threatened by pirate ships with heavy weapons but actually boarded, the tactical side of defense against pirates looks pretty cheap and easy. I am quite confident, that for 120000$ as a one time expense it is quite possible to equip a cargo ship in a way, that unwanted approach let alone boarding is pretty much impossible. A couple of thermal imaging cameras hooked up to a computer should easily detect any approaching craft even if everyone is asleep and the craft is not detected by radar (engines are hot). This should give some early warning. With a minute or two to prepare, even a crew of only 3 or 4 people (as on most cargo ships) should be able to repel or disable any approaching small craft with commercially available 50 cal. rifles. Even if that fails, I can not see how the pirates would go about boarding a ship against resistance of 3 or 4 people people behind strategically placed cover.
Rough cost estimate:
– Computer with custom software 10000$?
– 6 thermal cameras 15000$ (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Raytheon-Thermal-Eye-250D-Thermal-Imager-Camera-FLIR-/282323048862)
– 4 M82 A1 against approaching craft 40000$ (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120131113833AAQZOb5)
– 4 AR15 against boarding 2500$ (https://www.slickguns.com/search/apachesolr_search/736676085002?op=)
– 12 steel plates strategically placed on deck for cover in case of attempted boarding 25000$?
92500$ + some crew instruction + this and that call it 120000$, sell the package for 500000$ and make 380000$ profit. The owner starts to make profit on the 5th trip…
No, it seems not to be impossible for a private ship to have weapons on board (http://www.yachtingworld.com/blogs/elaine-bunting/guns-on-board-for-or-against-10118).
What did I miss?
I already discussed this topic at our local LW/SSC meetup but we did not reach any satisfying conclusion due to lack of expertise.
Well, first off, you missed the biggest part of this potential business opportunity, because piracy off Somalia is down 60% from its 2010 peak and still falling. In part because of measures similar to those you discussed, in part because navies with actual warships took an interest. From about the dawn of recorded history, piracy has gone away when navies with actual warships took an interest.
Also, the bit where you can usually have guns on a private ship sailing into foreign ports, means 12-gauge shotguns, not .50 caliber Barretts. Those, you very likely don’t get back when you leave, you may not be able to bail out the sergeant-at-arms who admitted to owning them, and you may face questions from your insurance company and/or whatever national government loaned you its flag for your ship.
However, there is a workaround where a private security company sends a team to board your ship as soon as you leave the territorial waters around your port of origin, to debark before you enter territorial waters at the destination. They bring their own guns, and either hand them over to a team headed the opposite direction or just throw them in the ocean. The logistics to support that are part of the reason it can cost up to $100k. Plus, you know, the bit where you’re hiring them to maybe fight actual pirates, and if they’re going to get shot at for money it’s going to be a lot of money.
4-5 men with ordinary military rifles in 7.62x51mm or the like will usually suffice. Shotguns are not enough, when the pirates can stand off and use heavy machine guns to persuade you to surrender, but Barretts are excessive when you are firing from the deck of a 20,000-ton ship and they are firing from a skiff on the high seas.
This may be a silly question, but why don’t the major shipping companies buy weapons permits at the major ports for their own on-board security?
Even in countries / cities which are pretty strongly anti-gun bodyguards and private security can usually buy permits to carry weapons. Given that the weapons would logically be locked up as long as they’re not in dangerous waters it seems like an obvious deal for both sides.
Is it the boring answer, that they could do it but it would cost >$100K? Or is there some other reason that I’m not thinking of?
Not in the UK they can’t. Private security must be unarmed, if the police think something needs armed security guards they will guard it themselves.
Though one of the few reasons why a company can be given a Section 5 firearms licence (allowing it to own weapons that are otherwise prohibited, such as handguns and automatic weapons) is if it is providing security guards for UK registered ships, in which case the weapons don’t normally come anywhere near a port.
Because shotguns aren’t good enough, and permits for foreigners to possess military rifles are not available at any price in many countries. Well, any legitimate price; bribery may work, but has the potential for massive blowback.
And for that matter, having “their own” security, means not being able to disavow their own actions if the security team goes off-script and e.g. shoots up a fishing boat. Contractors are expendable, and claiming to have trusted the experts you hired for their expertise in e.g. international gun-control and self-defense laws might buy you a bit of distance from a bit of very ugly public relations.
I saw a report recently that there has been some piracy off the coast of Venezuela, so that could be the next hotspot. Venezuela’s military is probably too preoccupied to keep everyone with a fishing boat from going after targets of opportunity, but I bet they would highly object to foreign navies patrolling their waters.
The real problem with piracy is when it isn’t limited to coastal waters, but goes into international waters. Trinidad and Tobago and The Netherlands may have a sufficient military presence to keep it contained.
@EGI
It seems unlikely to me that the crew can or will be trained to use .50 effectively. Shipping companies try to minimize their crew to save money, so I fully expect a lack of training and instruction. Then when the pirates come, they’ll regret that, once things go bad.
Here is a video of actual shooting at pirates. As you can see, the situation is very messy. Even these guards messed up by having multiple people fire warning shots. More info.
In another case, fishermen were killed by Italian marines.
PS. Note that using cheap security guards (actual military is more expensive) seems to cost about $60k. So if your package sells for $500k, you need 10 trips to start getting ahead.
John pretty much nailed this one. For various reasons (which I don’t fully understand), anything beyond a flare gun is heavily frowned upon aboard merchant ships, which makes it hard to do this. You need approval from your flag state, your insurer and permission from any state you happen to call at. For instance, India doesn’t let merchant ships carry guns, period, and is an important port of call for ships passing the Horn of Africa. Private security companies avoid the insurance problem because they bring their own, and most of the issues with ports of call.
I’d guess it’s a holdover from the days of lightly armed merchantmen preying on their disarmed peers.
We’re talking just small arms here, so I’d guess the real concern is sailors in port hearing that some of their colleagues have just had a barfight go against them, “need” to be reinforced/rescued/avenged, and hey, we should probably break out the revolvers “just in case”.
That makes a lot of sense out of it. Of course, the obvious solution is to mount the guns on the ship and use weapons that aren’t particularly good in a barfight. .50 cal machine guns seem to fit the bill pretty well.
I assume we’re taking care to make sure all ships are docked at least two miles from the nearest bar?
I thought that was assumed.
But more seriously, I think that even drunken sailors are a lot more likely to say “let’s break out the revolvers just in case” than “let’s break out the .50 and hose down the bar”. I can still see why people don’t want armed merchantmen coming into their ports, but this does seem like a case where bigger weapons are better for almost everyone.
part of it is that you have to deal with not just the laws in port but the firearm laws of every state/country through who’s waters you sail.
Want to sail from new Orleans to portland, maine: if you’re within 12 miles of the coast (sometimes 24) you need to comply with firearms law in every single one of those states.
Want to get into the Mediterranean? Have fun complying with Spanish, Moroccan and possibly english law, all in the space of a few hours. You’ll have even more fun when you actually get into the Mediterranean.
So you don’t just need permission from any state you happen to call at but also from any you get close to.
It wouldn’t be hard for a ship to become subject to a dozen jurisdictions on a long journey and if you have 10 crew it might mean maintaining dozens of permits and if even one state gets bolshy about allowing armed groups of people into it’s territory or is just super-slow about providing permits or you have to change some crew members on short notice it screws everything up.
http://www.gibnet.com/fish/waters.gif
Ah, so my understanding that you just surrender your weapons to the port authorities and get them back when leaving was wrong. Who would have thought that redtape is the culprit if you can’t have a simple solution…
What if they pirate the software?
Split into DPS, Tank, and Support because I’m the sort of person who tries to fill a hole in the team before locking my main.
DPS: Soldier 76. Jack of all trades, he fits into any team composition, and I prefer steady DPS to McCree’s burst. Although in FFA, I’ve fallen in love with Doomfist. Slamming people into walls is tons of fun, and you have lots of chances to surprise people in FFA.
Tank: Reinhardt (with D.va as a close second). I’m good with most tanks, but Reinhardt seems to be the purest form of tanking – advance with your team, refuse to die, and utterly flatten anyone who gets too close to your team’s personal space. And again, decking people into walls is good fun.
Support: I’m best with Mercy, but I really need to put some time in to relearn her, I haven’t played her much since she was reworked.
In TF2, my main class was Heavy. I like parking on an objective and demolishing anyone who gets too close. And I don’t have the leet skills needed for Soldier or Demoman.
What a timely question, I actually just got off playing some TF2 for the first time in years!
My most consistent main would be Scout, but I’ve gone through long “main” periods on other classes: Pyro back when the Degreaser was absurd, battle engineer way waaaay before it was cool (get off my lawn mini spammers), and spy (who I suck at, but a good spy round is one of gaming’s highlights).
Trivial question: what kinds of music do you guys listen to, if any? What are your favorite genres/bands/individual songs?
I listen to all sorts of things, but my top genre is probably symphonic metal, with Nightwish being a recent favorite. (I get the sense that the metal community proper looks down on them a bit for some reason, but I dunno.) I also listen to a lot of soundtracks, especially anime stuff — particularly Shiro Sagisu. Also, Miracle of Sound/Gavin Dunne. He’s an extremely prolific musician who writes songs based on various fiction — mostly video games, but occasionally other stuff as well.
My favorite’s classical, generally Vivaldi or Bach.
I became a lot more fond of Vivaldi after I stopped playing his music in public school orchestras. The Four Seasons are actually pretty nice music! (Winter and Summer, at least.)
Dvorak still has my heart though <3
My tastes are pretty bipolar. I’d say my two most-listened genres are ambient and death metal. I have a small collection of Russian classical music that I absolutely adore, but do not know much about.
When it comes to metal, im pretty picky. I like blackened, grinding dissonance with really sludgy/doomy movements. The metal bands for me are Portal, Ulcerate, Primitive Man, Vermin Womb, Convulsing, and Abyssal. My album of the year last year was Primitive Man’s Caustic.
I’m an ambient musician (non-professional) myself so I focus on making my own rather than listening to a lot of others’ material. However some of my favourites are Prurient, Tim Hecker, Port Royal, Mogwai, Earth, and The Convoy.
I agree the metal community tends to look down on symphonic metal, mainly because it isn’t heavy enough for most metalheads and is too feminine. The bands that get away with it are Opeth, Katatonia and Alcest – but i’d call these more ‘folk influenced’ than properly symphonic. No doubt you’re already fully aware of Opeth, but just in case…Blackwater Park and My Arms, Your Hearse get my vote.
Some of my favorite bands (Alice in Chains, Mad Season) have done performances with orchestras, and I never much liked it.
I also never understood why groups like Apocalyptica don’t use singers (or at least didn’t back when I was listening to them) and instead would dedicate an instrument to playing the vocal parts. I always thought that sounded terrible.
Have you heard Apocalyptica’s “Path Vol. II”?
No.
Since you’re talking about metal, does anyone know of any good metal bands from the last 20 that don’t have any weird vocals(or at least keep it to a minimum)but are really heavy? They don’t have to be Freddie Mercury, just someone who doesn’t do those death metal growls or anything like that.
Metallica would be what leaps to mind. Or were you thinking heavier?
Rammstein?
Metallica is definitely heavy enough but they changed dramatically after the first four albums and those early ones don’t meet my 20 year cut off.
@Wrong Species
Ah, fair enough. I guess I’m one of those philistines that likes their more recent stuff as much as their old stuff. 😛
Hah! That’s a really good question. I’m coming up blank. I thought of Iced Earth, but a) they started in the 80s, and b) they have pretty extreme vocals as well (just no growling). It’s a damn shame that straight-up singing has gone out of fashion so thoroughly in metal.
Look to sludge and stoner metal.
Start with Elder. Ignore their first album and start with Dead Roots Stirring. Lore and Reflections of a Floating World are also very good (if a little proggier).
Torche play an infectious blend of sludge, stoner, doom, and… pop punk! They’re a lot of fun. My favorite of theirs is Harmonicraft, close second is Restarter.
Lo-Pan have a sludgey, stoner-y groove that just sound like driving. Check out In Tensions and Colossus.
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You have to try Opeth‘s Pale Communion, a great metal / heavy rock album from a legendary (but former) death metal band.
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Abbath‘s self-titled is a blend of black metal and hard rock. The vocals are weird, but they’re neither growls nor shrieks. More of a resonant, malevolent, bullfrog. It works better than you’d think.
If you are specifically wanting to avoid death metal growls, The Deftones‘ Koi No Yokan and Gore are heavy and dark, and still feature varied and evocative vocal performance. Chino Moreno is in a class of his own.
Voyager aren’t as specifically heavy as the other bands, but they’re very, very good, they incorporate influences from a variety of styles, and their singer has a really fantastic vocal timbre. Ghost Mile is one of my favorite albums.
Prong.
Yes. Here and here. The first solves your requirement on vocals by not having vocals.
A small note: if what you actually mean by ‘no weird vocals’ is ‘no harsh vocals’ I think it would be better to say ‘no harsh vocals’. ‘Weird’ is a value judgment.
It’s not harsh vocals that I necessarily have a problem with. Slayer and Pantera could both be said to have harsh vocals, but it’s not growling.
If you think about the fact that grown men are doing their best impressions of Cookie Monster, horror B-movie demons, and pterodactyls in an unironic effort to make their music sound cool, it is pretty weird.
You’re making a claim which you must know is literally false. But let me say it anyway: no, not everyone who is doing harsh vocals is doing so in order to sound like a cookie monster, or to make their music sound ‘cool’. If you think this is the case then listen to this song and tell me in all honesty that you think anyone is trying to sound scary. Or cool.
One fundamental function harsh vocals can have is to take supporting role. It is fairly common for them to melt into the rest of the music, while clean vocals are by their nature generally in the center of the music and draw the most attention. Moreover, harsh vocals have much less personality in them, in some cases none – by which I mean that there is no innate quality relating to the singer in them, the same way there is in the voice of everyone. In their purest form, harsh vocals just sound a certain way, and anyone can theoretically get there, it is just a matter of skill. It’s for those two reasons that I consider it a much more humble way of singing, certainly less intrusive.
An example of this is here.
The other and more important thing is that they open up a wide range of sounds and atmospheres that are simply not achievable with clean singing. Examples here, here, here
But take a moment to appreciate the fundamental asymmetry here. I personally tend to find male cleans, in particular, unpleasant and annoying in many cases. There are very few songs I could name that I don’t think would be improved by getting rid of male cleans and either replacing them with female cleans or harsh vocals or scrapping them entirely. Imagine me posting under the recommendation of anyone something like “this has male clean vocals, who wants to hear another man sing, that’s so gay!” without any comprehension of the complete subjectivity of that sentence. This is the level of critique you offered in your post.
A lot of clean vocals, across the musical spectrum, are bad, because a lot of singers don’t really know how to sing, and are fronting the band for other reasons: maybe they’re the best songwriter, maybe they’ve got stage charisma, whatever.
I’m not a huge fan of death grunts, that obnoxious screamo “my parents don’t understand me” voice, etc, but I do listen to some black metal (mostly more recent and less authentic stuff that doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a phone booth; also, fewer nazis) and I’ll take the good examples of that over people who try to sing clean but even with amplification are no good.
@sty_silver:
Yes, of course they’re not literally attempting impressions of those things; I was being a bit facetious. But I do think sounding like those things (and the vocalists know they sound like them) can more reasonably be thought of as silly than clean singing can be thought of as sounding gay, if for no other reason than male singing is pretty ubiquitous but Cookie Monster and b-horror movies and depictions of pterodactyls are pretty much the only other places where you hear those “harsh” vocal sounds. So unless you’re really “inside” the metal genre headspace, that’s what it will sound like.
By the way, I know about and appreciate the de-egoizing effect and background/textural functionality of those vocal styles. But I do think the intended effect is to make the music sound scarier/heavier/more dissonant (and yes, not ALL metal is aspiring to that, but most is).
The Estatic Fear song you linked to doesn’t contain those vocal styles, but still note that the name of the band is Estatic FEAR, and the subgenre (at least according to the description) is DOOM metal and that the image chosen to accompany the song is of an eerie black and white exterior that resembles a set you might find in a creepy “The Ring”-type horror movie.
Okay, so first off – what do you mean by “The Estatic Fear song you linked to doesn’t contain those vocal styles?” It does contain harsh vocals – I linked it as an example illustrating why the claims you were making are in many cases fairly absurd. Did you just not listen to enough of it, or did you mean that they don’t contain the particular style of harsh vocals you object to? I was under the impression that you object to all of it.
I have to protest to how you’re mixing things together here.
There is trying to sound heavy or scary, and then there is trying to sound dissonant. Sounding dissonant is a stylistic choice that I would consider perfectly valid. Similarly with your description of the band. I will totally grant you that the band is trying to evoke an eerie atmosphere. I would also totally grant you that the name of the band and of the album is in some fundamental sense meant to be unsettling. Those things are true for the majority of music I like – indeed for the majority of art that I like. I would not remotely grant you that they’re trying to sound cool, edgy, heavy, or scary.
I’d argue that the primary point of art is to communicate emotion, and many ways of doing that include being unsettling. Probably most ways of doing that involve being unsettling. If what you had said from the beginning was something in that direction, pointing out that harsh vocals often come in a package that’s in some way meant to take you places which aren’t immediately comfortable, I’d have immediately agreed. I find most music which doesn’t do that to be incredibly boring and I would even pity people who never go there because I think they’re missing out.
But what you did in fact say was
And the number of bands I like where I think this sentiment is accurate is 0. It certainly doesn’t apply to Estatic Fear. And in general, this doesn’t apply to most instances of harsh vocals (what are you even basing that on?). It probably applies to most Metalcore which is one of countless subgenres of metal. This is one of the bands you’re parodying here.
Only if you base what is reasonable on what most people think.
Ehh. I’m a metal fan, and 80% of metal vocalists are offputtingly bad to anybody who hasn’t spent way too much time listening to metal.
I practice growling, so I have an idea of the level of practice it takes to get even to “offputtingly bad”, which hopefully one day I will attain, but if your experience with metal tends to be the kind of metal most people recommend – which is to say, with great instrumentation and only mostly competent vocals – you’re going to come away thinking it -all- sounds like that. Bowser screaming from his castle as you approach the last level in the original Mario somehow makes cameos in a lot of metal.
If you’re not busy appreciating the way the growl is being used as an instrument – if you haven’t yet grokked that it is being used as an instrument – if you come at the growl as listening to somebody sing you a song, it is comical. Why are they shrieking like a pterodactyl? What are they trying to convey to me?
Silent Stream of Godless Elegy’s Ii Tsohg was the first song where I really grokked what they were doing; my initial reaction was “Why is the vocalist barking like a dog?” Then it clicked. It was a percussive instrument. That sounded sort of like a dog barking.
Yes, it’s weird. It is weird precisely in respect to “normal”, which is using your vocals to sing a song; using voice for, if the singer is halfway competent, melody. Crunchy vocals are rarely melody in a recognizable sense; they’re usually on the border between percussion and bass, because very few metal vocalists have the skill or talent for significant tonal variation.
(“Normal” is pretty weird itself, if you think about the tonal ranges singing often veers into and how we would relate to it if we weren’t already used to it.)
ETA:
Well… –
It’s probably more helpful to think of them as musicians first; they didn’t choose metal vocals to make their music sound a particular way, their music sounds a particular way so they try to theme their music to that.
A lot of bands went off in other directions – singing about Dyson spheres and quasars or doing emotive interpretation of classic films – but mostly they’re just one-upping one anothers’ ridiculousness. I mean, what are you going to growl about, given that you have committed to growling as a vocal style? The girl you met in the coffee shop?
Thegnskald: but why is the bottom 80% relevant for anything? I don’t bother with the bottom 80% in books, movies, tv shows, or music. I try not to bother with the bottom 95% in any of these things. If I’m judging any artform I’m doing it base on its best output. Don’t you?
Sty –
Because the 20% of talented growlers don’t necessarily work with the 20% of other talented musicians. And a disproportionate number of them seem to be shits who talented musicians don’t want to work with – Danny Filth, for example.
I don’t listen to In Flames for the growling, but the bass.
Likewise, Dimmu Borgir is a good band – but their growler can’t do the same growl twice.
Ok, fair.
Sabaton.
Sabaton is fun, but they’re at least a solid 8 on a 1 to 10 scale of silliness. Granted, most power metal’s pretty silly.
I think your scale might be off. Most metal I know is way more silly than Sabaton (if it even manages to make coherent sense).
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgou7flUKqE
And right at the 20 year cutoff. Though when they first came out, a lot of people were saying they were ripping off Pantera.
Try Soilwork, specifically the album A Predator’s Portrait. The vocals are more of a fast snarl and there is plenty of great melodic singing.
The musicianship and composition skills of these guys is incredible, and their influence on modern progressive metal is pretty clear.
Non-death growls:
Alestorm (pirate metal) – 10 years old
Manowar is old, but new content too. Try Gods of Battle (old style) or Gods of War – opera of the prose Edda.
Gloryhammer – Space 1992: Rise of the Chaos Wizard (yes, this as over-the-top as it sounds)
Death growls that work:
3 Inches of Blood
All of these are in my recently played, along with Pavarotti….
I have the most boring musical taste imaginable: I like the pop music of my youth +/- about ten years. Particular favorites: Good Vibrations, And Then He Kissed Me, Eleanor Rigby, Queen of Hearts, Go Your Own Way, I Hate Myself for Loving You. Also a lot of songs from musicals. Going outside of home ground, quite a bit of classical, country, and folk is listenable but very little jazz and hip-hop is.
I don’t listen to music much, but things I like tend to have interesting words. Joan Baez, Buffy St. Marie, Leslie Fish, settings of Kipling poems by various people, …
Pure instrumental music can be beautiful, but I find it boring.
I have Pandora stations usually built around a particular song, theme, or artist that I liked. I’ve been mostly listening to the “Top Hits” station recently (which was a pre-created one), but I’ve also got a “And We Danced” station, a “Broadway” station, a “Chainsmokers” station, and so forth.
Generally speaking, I like music that leans melodramatic and BIG.
Kestrellius — what makes you ask?
Anyway, for me:
60 Percent classical – Shostakovich is king
25 percent 80s style metal and pop-metal
15 percent 70s style prog-rock
Some people think it’s odd that I listen to so much classical but then blow out my speakers with Sabbath, Accept or Lee Aaron (Canada’s Metal Queen!)
Have tried to open my mind to the 90s and found only Anathema, The Gathering and Paradise Lost. Can’t stand most “growling.” As for the 20th century: Damone, Comedy of Errors and Effloresce — pretty slim pickings
Just random curiosity. Listening to music is a pretty substantial component of my day-to-day experience, but I don’t talk about it much.
Bach, a little Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, and Handel.
About the only thing more recent I listen to is Sons of Korah, which is an Australian group retranslating and putting music to various Psalms. Until I heard them I’d never experienced that tribal thing people get when going to concerts. I’d figured it would never happen to me.
Man, what a catnip post.
Quoting myself:
My steady favorite, to which I always return, is rock, preferably heavy. Sampling of favorite bands: Helmet, Soundgarden, Meat Puppets, Faith No More, Melvins.
In rap I favor random underground unknowns whose music videos look like they were shot on cell phones and convincingly suggest that the rappers featured therein probably are criminals first and rappers second. Example.
Jazz favorites: Andy Narell, Weather Report, the classics obviously, and there’s a Dave Douglas Quintet album, “The Infinite”, that has blown me away time and time again ever since I first heard it in high school. I also have some great African jazz CDs. I usually don’t like jazz with singing but Diane Reeves is amazing. I have a signed copy of Dave Brubeck’s “Time Out” and apparently it isn’t worth nearly as much as I think it should be.
Soul: I had a lot of James Brown mixtapes made for me growing up and now I enjoy whatever they play on my Pandora station seeded from one of his songs.
Gospel (black gospel, in case I need to clarify): The Winan sisters are awesome, but in gospel my favorites are more identifiable by particular songs I like, some of which have many variations. In general I like up-tempo choral stuff with interplay between the different choral voices.
Country: Brad Paisley is the single most talented man on the radio. I like almost everything I’ve heard by David Allen Coe, Dolly Parton, Randy Travis, and any of the three Hanks. Beyond that I have a few favorite songs, e.g. “Friends in Low Places,” “Some Beach,” “The Night the Lights Went Out In Georgia”, etc. Miranda Lambert is the only female country singer whose voice I really like.
Bluegrass: I have a few Earl Scruggs and Ricky Scaggs albums, they’re great. Steve Martin is awesome. Mainly I like whatever I hear especially if it’s up-tempo and features banjo.
Opera: Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and Carmen. They’re famous for a damn good reason.
Classical: Beethoven’s 6th, Bach’s cello suites, Barber’s violin concerto, lots of stuff by Sibelius, Griffes’s Poem for Flute (orchestral version), Debussy’s “Pagodes”, Borodin’s 2nd (esp. the 3rd movement), and see “opera” above.
Favorite “world” genre is gamelan , but my favorite “world” artists are Habib Koite and Toumani Diabate, both West Africans. I’m really into Indian music too, and I think Kadri Gopalnath might actually be my favorite Indian musician.
I’m also a huge Fiona Apple fan.
BTW, when I meet people and they say “I listen to all kinds of music” they usually don’t mean it as literally as I would if I said it about my own tastes, but I have met and befriended a few people over my lifetime whose music intake is as expansive and diverse as mine. The fact that I’ve met several such people kind of surprises me, but maybe it’s not actually that uncommon?
all kinds of music
+1 for the Brunching Shuttlecocks!
Am I the only one who was disappointed that they couldn’t easily find any acoustic zydeco speed metal music to sample?
I think “I have a more diverse than average taste in music” is one of those almost-ubiquitous beliefs that people hold regardless of the actual diversity of their music taste (like Dunning Krueger for driving ability and being a good judge of character). I would theorise that this is because people tend to only know the parts of their friends’ tastes in music that overlap with their own.
I think you’re right, but I think the reason is mostly out-group homogeneity bias. Music you’re not interested in is more likely to sound similar than music you are interested in. You therefore shrink the categories of the music you’re not interested in and expand the categories of music you are interested in. Hey presto, everybody else’s music tastes are more narrow than mine!
Typically when you hear “I like all kinds of music” it basically means something like “I like the music played on most of the popular FM stations in my city.” I.e. top 40 pop, rock, rap/hip-hop/R&B, and some oldies. Depending on what kind of circles you move in, you’ll often hear the suffix “except country” or be able to infer it when it’s not stated.
@Well…
Yes, exactly. I wrote about that “except country” thing here.
Yeah I think you’ve got it about right WRT “everything but rap and country”.
Re. constraints on country musicians, within my first few months of listening regularly to country music I found that almost all country songs fit into one (sometimes two) of the following four categories:
1. songs having to do with love and relationships
2. songs having to do with small town life or being proud to be from a small town; also includes songs about the narrator’s personal history which usually originates in a small town
3. patriotic songs
4. songs about partying/drinking/going fishing or on vacation, or wishing to do these things.
There is a smaller but still significant fifth category of songs having to do with law-breaking or living the lifestyle of an outlaw.
There are rare songs that don’t fit into any of these, e.g. “Cooler Online” but they are few and far between.
To be fair, I think the majority of songs of any genre probably fall into category 1.
I think I have an unusually non-diverse taste in music. It contains… maybe three clusters (blues-influenced classic rock – Guns n’ Roses, AC/DC, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith; folk/country-influenced soft rock – Soul Asylum, REM, Simon and Garfunkel, Brendan Benson; slightly electronic/goth-influenced soft rock – Pulp, Garbage). And those clusters are, you know, not all that distant from one another. It literally all involves guitars; it almost all involves white male vocalists singing (the sole exception being Shirley Manson).
It’s not that I hate everything (or even most things) outside that range. Much (even most) of it is perfectly pleasant. But I’d never buy it or seek it out.
Things I actually want to fire into the heart of the sun are pretty much limited to some very heavy dance music and male R&B singers with a certain vocal quality that I find hard to define but hits me like nails on a blackboard – examples include Craig David and Usher.
I’ve heard country (country and western?) songs about the importance of being yourself.
@Well…
Maybe you’re including them in the other categories, but there’s a large category of country songs about personal loss. The joke goes
— What do you get when you play a country song backwards?
— You get your house back, your wife back, your dog back, your truck back…
@well…
Agreed with what others said about your 4.5 categories. Most songs in any popular genre fall into category 1, and honestly that many categories beats most other genres hands down (how many categories of song do the Katy Perrys and Rihannas of the world sing?). But yeah, I think you’re more or less right about those being the main ones. I tend to listen to more deliberately weird country, which often has political or literary pretensions, so there’s maybe more there. But these days most of the songs are about bloody trucks, which is just annoying.
And sometimes you get country songs about vasectomies.
I can think of only one song about a truck (“Pickup Man” by Joe Diffie) and only one song about a dog (“Ol’ Red” by Blake Shelton) which is really more about lawbreaking/the outlaw lifestyle. (Or, arguably, it could fall into the love/romance category.) I’m sure there are more, and of course there are songs that mention dogs and trucks in passing (e.g. “Some Beach” by Blake Shelton mentions driving in a truck, “Way Out Here” by Josh Thompson mentions dogs), but I think it’s a mischaracterization to say that any significant category of country music could be built around dogs and trucks. (Contra David Allen Coe in the comical bridge and fourth verse to “You Never Even Call Me By My Name”.)
And yes, obviously most genres are mostly full of love songs or songs about relationships, but I still had to number it alongside other categories for the sake of completeness.
I agree country probably has more discrete song categories than, say, pop or rap, but I think rock probably has more categories than country.
There’s one called (or at least with the chorus that starts with) “I drive your truck”, though your caveat would apply; while it describes a truck and driving it, it’s about grief and friendship.
One thing confounding these categorizations within country music is that if you mostly listen to other music, you probably think of country in terms of what distinguishes it from other music. Pretty much any genre played on the radio will have lots of songs about love/relationships/grief/etc., so what sticks out at you is the images, sounds, etc. that are more unique to country.
Like if you just barely know “classical music”, the rule of thumb is Baroque music is the stuff with harpsichords. But if you listen to classical music a lot, you know that while a harpsichord is a good indication that the piece is Baroque, most Baroque music isn’t “about” harpsichord, and probably most of it doesn’t even use harpsichords.
Also I don’t know enough about either genre to say for sure, but “country probably has more discrete categories than rap or pop” seems to me to reflect ones greater familiarity with country more than any fact of the genres themselves. (How do you even decide which categories are discrete and which get lumped together?)
I decide by listening a lot and making a judgment call.
I think I’m familiar enough with pop and rap to compare them in a reasonably informed way with country.
At least for me, when I say stuff like this I mean “outside of classical music I don’t have strong/well defined enough opinions that I expect you to successfully cater to them, so I’m fine with whatever you want to play.” If you press me for specific names I can probably name a couple popular musicians or songs that my friends play a lot that I don’t hate, and then I’ll go back to talking about classical music 😛
Moreover, I’m pretty bad at remembering artists and song names (and especially connecting the name to the music in my head), so even though I know there are some artists/songs I dislike I usually can’t remember what they are…
In that case I have some recommendations for you, but I run the risk of you already knowing some of them:
Heavy Rock: Cog (esp. The New Normal); Gojira’s From Mars To Sirius
Jazz: Harry Mitchell. He’s a young virtuoso jazz pianist. For something a bit less pure, try the band Grievous Bodily Calm.
Country: Gillian Welch. Both Time the Revelator (older) and The Harrow and the Harvest (more recent) are great albums.
World: I trust you have at least one of the 20+ volumes of the long running Ethiopiques Ethio-jazz compilations? If not, get your hands on one, any one.
Edit:
It’s more common among metal listeners from my experience, because metal is a higher sonic-enjoyment hurdle to get over and because of the technical commonality with certain types of classical music.
Thanks, I’ll definitely check that stuff out.
Since you’re listening, just for fun I will point out how all the favorite rock bands I listed are connected:
Helmet‘s original drummer, John Stanier, plays with Mike Patton’s band Tomahawk. Patton (of Faith No More) has another band, Fantomas, that features Buzz Osborn (of the Melvins) on guitars. Melvins drummer Dale Crover took a turn as one of Nirvana’s many drummers. Nirvana at one time had hired Ben Shepherd (Soundgarden bassist) as a roadie and nominal second guitarist. Nirvana also featured the brothers Kirkwood (of the Meat Puppets) and covered a few Meat Puppets songs on their Unplugged album, since the Meat Puppets were a huge influence on Kurt Cobain.
There are probably numerous ways to connect all those bands but that is one of them.
I second the recommendation of Ethiopiques. It’s really, really good.
I downloaded “The Infinite” and damn is it good! I got to the end and was genuinely sad the album was over. New favorite. Thanks!
I love the sounds of the late 60s – 70s more than any other time period. The funk and psychadelic soul of Stevie, Curtis, Marvin, Earth Wind & Fire; the bluesy~jazzy rock of Led Zepp, Santana, early Chicago, and Steely Dan. Drifting towards and into the 80s: ELO, The Police, Prince, MJ, and some New Wave (90125, Songs From The Big Chair, and Soul Mining are good albums).
For the decades since then, some notable artists in my library:
Rap — Chance, Childish, Common, Das Racist, J Cole, Kanye, Kendrick, OutKast, Roots, Run the Jewels, A Tribe Called Quest, Vince Staples
Indie — alt-J, Bombay Bicycle Club, Django Django, Florence + The Machine, Friendly Fires, Glass Animals, recent Grizzly Bear, Streetlight Manifesto (leaning towards the brassier, away from the punk / metal), Tame Impala, Vampire Weekend, the xx
R&B / Neo-Soul — BADBADNOTGOOD, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Hiatus Kaiyote, The Internet, Janelle Monae, Kamasi Washington, Rhye, Thundercat
I also have a wide spattering of other music, although I don’t get much harder than Zeppelin in rock music, so no metal here. I haven’t listened to enough country music to have anywhere near an informed opinion, but the genre sounds really… flat to me. (Not “flat” as opposed to “sharp”, but “flat” as in not much going on)
Now that my musical tastes are all exposed, if anyone has recommendations of stuff in the range of this music profile, I’m all ears. (Well…?)
Alt-RnB-ish: Try Yusef Kamal’s Black Focus.
Rap: Brockhampton. If that isn’t weird enough, try Clipping or Death Grips.
“Indie”: You’d probably like Ballpark Music. Or Gang of Youths.
If you don’t already know him, you would certainly like Robert Glasper. Also Snarky Puppy/Dirty Loops. Like WashedOut, I also like Clipping (but they are a bit weird). A few years ago, a stranger on reddit let me know about Tha Los, who sounds uncannily Steely-Danish.
Rap – You might like Royce Da 5’9″, although he’s a bit more gangsta-ish than most of your list. But in terms of pure technique, he’s one of the best, living or dead.
I’m very into folk music, mostly Irish as it has the richest tradition that’s easily available. The Dubliners, The Merry Ploughboys, tons of artists who had their songs on big collaborations albums like Deanta, Clannad etc. and some more English bands like Wayward. I also like folk adjacent things, like filk from Leslie Fish, Bill Sutton, and such.
I’m also extremely fond of some indie, mainly Radical Face, and my favorite weird band is Gregorian. The Gregorian chant cover of Bring Me To Life is surprisingly appropriate.
Early modern music. It encompasses all music from before the 1800s; of that, mostly Bach. (1)
Vangelis (2)
I don’t mind: space age jazz, good film music, 80s pop, The Seekers, Inti Illimani … (3)
What is unusual in the above is that I’m interested in classical music except the one from the past two centuries.
Why are you less interested in the more recent classical music? And do you feel there’s a definite cutoff for your preferences?
I don’t think your tastes are especially unusual, although I have the opposite preference : I love classical music, but from 1850 onwards much more so. Some of my favorite composers are Liszt, Wagner, Scriabin and Messiaen (I have a taste for somewhat dissonant music).
Lots of jazz, blues, some rock, an increasing amount of classical (particularly late 19th- and early 20th-century composers–Vaughan Williams, Holst, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Dvořák).
It’s basically my father’s taste in music with a few additions. Something I’ve noticed is that musical tastes seem to be like languages–once you get past your teens, your tastes are more-or-less solidified. When I spent seven months in Brazil between high school and college I tried to get into Brazilian country music (sertaneja); I couldn’t. It’s simply too different.
(though I do find Indonesian gamelan music fun to listen to)
When was that? Did you try the authentic Brazilian funk?
(You click before reading the post to the end at your peril.)
(I want to see gamelan-metal – maybe we can petition Jokowi?)
I suppose Nightwish is a bit over the top and sappy for some metalheads – not for me, though (coincidentally I’m wearing my “Once” tour shirt today… awesome album).
My favorite styles, and some favorites:
– progressive metal – Fates Warning, early Dream Theater, Psychotic Waltz
– melodic/ symphonic metal – Nightwish, Therion, Iron Maiden, Warlord, Van Canto
– 70s prog/ proggish classic rock: Rush, ELP, Kansas, Styx
– currently looking into mid-60s and hippie era stuff: Yardbirds, Kinks, Zombies, Cream, Shocking Blue
Plus some folk/ medieval stuff, soundtracks and whatever I or my wife come across.
I like industrial and industrial metal, plus the odd anime soundtrack. Recently I have been listening to Turmion Katilot (Finnish metal act), Die Krupps (German industrial metal), and the Made in Abyss OST.
(IMO) Good-to-great metal-or-almost I think you’d take long to hear about otherwise: The Faceless (nearly Bay Aryan by geography, completely by ideology!), Kraken, Arandu Arakuaa, Armahda, Moonspell (mainly “1755” for me), Skálmöld, Balkandji, Magilum, Al-Namrood (reportedly metalheads where metal costs your head – the trvvmost), Ego Fall, Tengger Cavalry (best before composer left China (and former band) behind), Alien Weaponry.
If anyone has other recommendations in those veins (e.g. I think there were bands with lyrics in Mexican languages), I’m all ears.
I have > 3 months of continuous music properly collated and tagged in my itunes collection (2010 albums), and probably a month or more that I never got around to tagging properly (I went through a lengthy period of pirating music like crazy, which I no longer do, but I haven’t gotten rid of the collection). Someone above said that people underestimate the relative diversity of their musical taste, but I think I’ve got fairly objective reasons to say that I have pretty damn diverse tastes.
My most-commonly-listened-to genres would be folk (particularly traditional Celtic stuff and 20th-century North American), hip-hop/rap, country, soul/funk/r&b, jazz, and “rock” broadly defined, but I listen to a lot of other things as well. Probably most of the stuff other than hip-hop and country that I listen to is pre-1980. I was born in 1976, so for what it’s worth I don’t listen to much of the music of my teens, I have a handful of albums that have been on regular rotation for decades, but generally I tend to be exploring for new (to me) sounds, so >50% of my most played tracks over the past few months are ones I didn’t listen to 10 years ago. I was a big Pearl Jam / Nirvana etc fan when they came out, and I haven’t listened to anything they put out in a decade or more, the only thing vaguely connected to that scene I listen to on a remotely regular basis is Jane’s Addictions first three albums.
I was a big hair metal fan as a kid, which I’ve definitely grown out of, and while I can appreciate metal and some of it I love, I don’t listen to any of it regularly save the precursors such as Sabbath and Zeppelin. My parents had a large classical collection (~300 albums I guess), and I took a classical music appreciation course in my undergrad, so I know the canon reasonably well, but I never listen to it of my own initiation, which I feel a little embarrassed about since I do love quite a bit of it – generally post 1800 stuff, roughly Beethoven-Mahler. Similarly, in the 90’s I spent a lot of time dancing to house/techno, but other than a few choice albums (specifically, a few by The Chemical Brothers and a Ninjatune compilation) I never listen to it at home.
I’m pretty obsessive about music, as likely came across above, and I do things like make 4 hour playlists where the ideal is that each track flows naturally from the previous one, with strong thematic / musical connections between them, but I try to get through as many genres in as short a space of time as possible. Then I force my friends to listen to them at parties and generally no one seems to mind them.
I’ve been thinking a lot about “desert island discs” recently, a handful of albums that I’d bring with me after the apocalypse or whatever. Off the top of my head, my 10 would include:
Handful of Earth by Dick Gaughan – highly political Scots/Irish folk
Kind of Blue by Miles Davis – the most popular jazz album of all time, for good reason
R.A.P. Music by Killer Mike – highly political hardcore hip-hop
Something More Than Free by Jason Isbell – alt-country/Americana, ideally I’d be able to throw in some of his tracks from other albums including the work he did with the Drive-by Truckers, but that’s not the game I’m playing so…
Call Me by Al Green – soul/R&B – holy shit this is a good
El Corazon by Steve Earle – the guy who pretty much invented left wing alt-country
Sticky Fingers by The Rolling Stones – yeeeeah
Just as I am by Bill Withers – soul/R&B
5 Days in July by Blue Rodeo – a folk/rock/country album that any Canadian +/- 10 years of my age knows very well, at least the many singles
Aquemini by Outkast – one of the most-respected hip-hop albums from one of the most respected hip-hop groups of all time.
If you asked me to generate the same list tomorrow (or right now) it would be pretty different. Plus albums as opposed to individual songs restricts it quite a bit, as for obvious reasons there are way more great songs on generally mediocre albums than there are great albums.
Uh… wow that was long-winded. I’ve written a fair bit about music on my own blog, which I occasionally advertise here, so what the hell.
“You have three months of music in iTunes? Cool, I have a lot too. I have *opens library* twelve days. Oh. Ok yeah you win”
Your library sounds good, I’d definitely borrow some of your playlists if that was a thing we could do. (Spotify can, but if all your music is downloaded in iTunes…) And Royce da 5’9″s most recent album was pretty good. Only listened to the one album, but it wasn’t really gangsta rap, most of the songs were the introspection and vulnerability behind the bravado, with mental health seeming to be a recurring theme.
My mom makes playlists like what you describe, with genres ranging across pop, rock, R&B, new age, and world music. I’m not quite that meticulous, but one reason I try to have all my music downloaded instead of streaming like every other millennial is because I also enjoy categorizing and cataloging a library.
Royce recently realized he was an alcoholic and has stopped drinking, but kept rapping, which is a really interesting change. I’m definitely curious as to where he takes it in the future, because he could really do something special, I feel.
I just came across Black Thought’s 10-minute Funkmaster Flex freestyle, which is jaw-dropping.
I’ve often thought about trying to share my playlists, but spotify doesn’t allow you to do that unless you’ve got a paid account, and I dislike Spotify enough that I refuse to pay for it. And I tend to include enough tracks that aren’t stream-able (although Youtube usually comes through) that it’s annoying. I’ll keep looking for an alternative.
The best song for Mahler was covered by Tom Lehrer about his wife, Alma.
+1, and the rest of that album is fantastic as well.
I like a lot of sorts of music, though certainly not everything. Folk, filk, classical which isn’t hostile to the listener, rock which isn’t too different from the sixties (live drummers are a plus), early music, some jazz…. I’ll probably think of more. Not rap, and generally not metal.
As a general thing, I tend to like music with some lift to it.
I’m enjoying Harmonicraft– a little rougher than I generally like, but fun. It reminds me that while I can enjoy sweet harmonious music, I get a kick out of drones (I like bagpipes and don’t understand why so many people say they hate bagpipes) and modal music.
When I was a kid, I liked my music fairly fast. I’ve acquired appreciation for slower music that’s about emotional shifts.
What’s the weirdest music that you like? I’m always kind of surprised that I like a good bit of Sun Ra– it’s kind of avant garde, and as far as I can tell, it gets its interest from contrasting timbre rather than rhythm or melody. When I was a kid, it all sounded like traffic noise, and now only about a third of it does.
Tricky question – most of the music that I like, I don’t consider weird anymore. From an outsider’s perspective, stuff like Psychotic Waltz is probably pretty strange, though. I like a fair amount of complexity in my music, but there are definitely limits – the more avantgarde kinds of jazz cause me physical discomfort.
Thanks I’m not sure why I liked Psychotic Waltz, but I did.
However, the world needs a waltz version.
Probably Nancarrow (a more tuneful piece of his). Runners up are Xiu Xiu, Whitehouse, and of course Clipping and similar. Special mention goes to The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu.
For highest weirdness/enjoyment ratio, probably some Mingus, but I prefer his more normal stuff.
I’m not sure where Penguin Cafe fits on the weirdness scale, but I don’t know of anyone else doing the same sort of thing. Weirdness starts at about 25 seconds.
The JAMMS are fun– thanks for the link. I wonder whether a distinction should be made between weird with a straight face and weird which appears to be intended to be funny.
I didn’t find it very weird, but I really liked it, so thank you for sharing!
How weird tastes are is in the eye of the beholder. If i’m talking to my mum, everything I listen to will be weird. If I’m talking to Well…, he’ll probably shrug and call me a pleb.
Representative sample of potential weirdness (music Io listen to regularly):
Prurient – Rainbow Mirror – 3 hours of instrumental industrial noise-scapes
Primitive Man – Caustic – Doom metal, makes you feel like you’re being slowly bludgeoned to death with a spade. Heaviest thing I’ve ever heard.
Scott Walker – Bisch Bosch – Sarcastic opera vocals singing weird poetry/ sound-art over the top of gloomy minimalist instrumentals
Venetian Snares – Rossz Csillag Alatt Szulettet – frantic breakcore concept album interspersed with long melancholic classical interludes, often referred to as ‘the Hungarian album’ from legendary underground Canadian producer Aaron Funk. Samples Bela Bartok’s string quartets.
Ween – say no more
Here’s the Toronto Consort, an early-music group, playing Istampita Ghaetta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xn162C6ocE
Listen to that hurdy-gurdy wail.
Weirdest song I love:
Start a Fire by the Tigerlillies.
Hands down. The most annoying+catchy song I have ever encountered. (That seems to be the band’s forte: Terrible music that is somehow amazing.)
This is a great recommendation. I agree with that description 100%.
Buke and Gase
A girl named Arone plays a baritone ukelele. A guy named Aron plays a guitar-bass hybrid through two amps. Both of them play percussion with their feet. They are disjoint, surging, hypnotic, feral, and louder than they have any right to be.
NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Medulla Oblongata, this time at full volume
Revel in Contempt
Outt!
Houdini Crush
Cyclopean
My Best Andre Shot
Heh, skimming through the new comments, I tried to read this as another logic puzzle, but there didn’t seem to be enough information.
I object to this most crucial question being called ‘trivial’.
Different kinds of pop music from every era from the sixties through to the present, but lots of glam rock and eighties synthpop. T-Rex, Roxy Music, Scritti Politti…. I like David Bowie, but not nearly as much as everyone for some reason assumes that I would. Brian Eno’s vocal albums are great and his thoughts on music and art, as relayed in interviews, are always stimulating. I also have a soft spot for a weird, intellectual, ironist, Scottish songwriter called Momus.
When it comes to contemporary pop I share my taste with teenage girls.
I tend to like things that are light, glossy, pretty, well-produced. Apparently unlike a lot of the posters here, I loathe anything heavy, turgid, or ‘soulful’.
I do have an experimental streak but nowadays it’s languishing.
Any idea what you dislike about soulfulness? That being one of the main things I look for in music, it’s interesting to see a direct statement against it.
Good question, and one to which I don’t have a ready answer! I suppose I tend to see ‘soulfulness’ as a kind of phony, affected authenticity. And it’s not the affectedness that bothers me in that formulation, but the pretense of authenticity!
I feel like all music is intrinsically artificial and affected, insofar as it tends to involve obeying genre cues and producing recognisable signifiers. Given that, why pretend that it’s real?
What can I say? I like artifice and contrivance.
Sounds like the reason I heavily prefer studio recordings to recordings of live performances.
Interesting, thanks. I guess my response would be that everything you say is true of all forms of expression, including plain old conversation. That isn’t meant as a counter-argument, because I don’t think musical taste should be considered a proposition to defend, and I’m not interested in converting you or anything.
Perhaps one critical point you’re getting at is that in the case of a song (as opposed to conversation), it’s turning the emotion on like a tap – you’re not actually feeling the hurt over your breakup or whatever, you just are pretending to for the duration of the song. But isn’t that also true of acting? Do you dislike emotional films for the same reason? I dunno, like I said I’m not trying to argue with you, just find it curious that we have such radically different takes.
Also, with respect to Protagoras’ comment, it’s interesting that I have a strong attraction to live performances, and often prefer them to the so-called “real” song. Not always, and of course many artists are shit live. But I’m often more interested in a performance and interpretation than I am in a canonical truth.
Yep.
It is. And I wouldn’t say that I dislike emotional films, but I probably tend to be bored by films where prominent displays of emotion are a central component, especially if it’s for its own sake rather than in service of some other principle. I like emotion in my art, but I prefer it to be hinted at than indulged in to excess.
A bit of a non sequitur, but this throwaway line quoted in a Wikipedia article on a genre of French classical music song does a good job of describing my taste: ‘the French taste […] abhors overstatement and venerates concision and diversity’.
Me too! I always like talking about this stuff.
James, I’ve been interested enough by this conversation that I’m writing a longer piece partly inspired by it. I’ll send you a link in later OT when it’s done, assuming I remember. Thanks!
Cool! I’m around, so I’ll see it when you post it, if not necessarily straight away.
A lot, often even while I’m studying. Favorite genre would have to be progressive metal, but I tend to think that identifying with a genre is generally bad. Some of my favorite artists are Ne Obliviscaris, Kashiwa Daisuke, Joe Hisaishi, Agalloch, Persefone.
Some of my favorite songs: here, here, here, here, here. Ghost Love Score might have also made the list.
Lately, I’m much more interested in individual pieces that say something to me rather than albums or specific sounds (I blame Spotify and Google Play) but I gravitate to 80s-90s alternative sounding stuff, rap, pop, and some country.
Recent obsessions:
– I really like the soundtracks to the anime series Parasyte (dubstep) and Attack on Titan (grand war music with all kinds of drums), and should probably go back and get the soundtrack to the Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series.
– I went back and picked out some of Britney Spears’ catchiest tunes from her best of.
– I like sweet alternative electronic pop – early Pet Shop Boys, Such Great Heights, Kiss the Sky, etc.
I only have a handful of anime songs, but I think Kill la Kill had a great soundtrack
Most anime music sinks through my memory without a ripple. The stuff that sticks around tends to be weird, energetic J-rock or Yoko Kanno.
I don’t remember Kill la Kill specifically, but if it’s anything like the rest of Trigger’s offerings, it’s probably in the “weird, energetic J-rock” category.
Anime music is kind of like a dream – if you reinforce it after you finish the series, you can preserve and strengthen all those associations, and if you don’t they fade.
So for me, “Next to You” from Parasyte has some deep emotional responses, because it’s tied to several really gripping moments, and because I kept listening to it after I stopped watching.
I can remember that “Blumenkrantz” (the main villain theme) and “Don’t Lose Your Way” (the “heroes are turning things around by not giving up” theme) rocked in Kill la Kill, but I don’t have the same emotional association that I had when I was watching the series.
So I guess the moral is that if you add the most emotionally laden music to your playlist while you’re still into the anime, you’ll get some good workout songs.
also it was just a great anime.
[I literally just commented this, closed my browser by accident, and reopened it, and it’s saying I can’t edit because my comment was posted two hours ago… truly, I have achieved time travel]
Edit: It’s definitely weird, energetic J-rock + military sounding drums and orchestra. A lot of the songs seem to build and drop in a way that perfectly fits the engagement curve, so it feels like they’re hacking my brain to make them more enjoyable than they should be.
I find myself most often gravitating towards roots type music. Outlaw Country and folk music primarily.
Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings (and thus the Highwaymen), Dolly Parton, Kingston Trio, Hank Sr/Jr, Marty Robbins, Woody Guthrie, Simon and Garfunklel, Kenny Rodgers, David Allen Coe, Patsy Cline, Bob Dylan, John Denver, Gillian Welch, Allison Krauss, Carolina Chocolate Drops, etc etc.
Also like 90’s rap and classic rock.
I don’t consider myself to have particularly discriminating taste in regards to music. I like songs that I can sing or whistle along with, and can play in front of my kids, since I mostly listen to music via Youtube and listen to what it recommends based on songs I’ve liked, which includes country (I particularly like the male/female duets), Third Day, Savage Garden, (rock/pop? idk), Lindsey Stirling (techno-violin), Peter Hollins (vocal) & Celtic Women.
Folk music (“from its origin in the fifties to its heyday in the sixties”). I grew up with what I think was the original Limeliters.
Big band music. I was definitely born in the wrong generation. I can never hear Edythe Wright do “The Music Goes Round and Round” enough times. I recently discovered Jo Stafford on Sirius and was wowed.
Beethoven, Dvorak, Smetana, Rodrigo, Respighi, Grieg.
Enya, Vangelis, Harry Chapin, Ella Fitzgerald, Cat Stevens.
Weird Al.
I’m mostly a metal fan.
Death Metal
Mid-period Opeth are my favorite band. Their Blackwater Park is my all-time – it’s the album that introduced me to death growls and taught me to love them. Amon Amarth (rollicking Viking anthems), Dyscarnate (meat and potatoes modern DM), Temple of Void’s Lords of Death (everything death-doom ought to be), Demonical (excellent buzzsaw Swedeath), Skeletal Remains (old school death metal).
Thrash and Groove
Lamb of God (heir to Pantera’s reptilian groove), mid-period Metallica (particularly …And Justice for All)
Black Metal and Post-Black
Deafheaven (crushing, elevating, and emotionally gorgeous), Kvelertak (lush, sunlit, triple-guitar post-black), Abbath (a black metal legend rediscovers his love of Kiss and Priest and fun), The Great Old Ones (Lovecraftian, seductive, awestruck horror), Lantlôs’s Melting Sun (hazy, blissed-out, gigantic, post-black), Agalloch (druidic and misanthropic and elated), Cobalt’s Gin (just excellent black metal).
Progressive Metal
Between the Buried and Me (Colors is an absolute modern classic), Plini’s Handmade Cities (the only nu-prog I like), Soap Revelations (diverse moods, virtuosity without the deedly-deet), late-period Opeth (I miss the growls, but still very good). I can’t fucking stand Dream Theater.
Hardcore and Metalcore
Refused (The Shape of Punk to Come : a Chimerical Bombination in Twelve Bursts), Unearth (The Oncoming Storm is unsurpassed), Darkest Hour (chaotic and violent without resorting to inscrutability).
Tech-Death
Archspire (Relentless Mutation is a crystalline glory), Revocation (way catchier than tech-death ought to be), Rivers of Nihil (amazing organic sound, emotional notes no one else hits), Nile (some of my favorite riffs, insane drumming), Meshuggah (these guys are paragons).
Stoner/etc.
Elder are the best heavy psych band bar none, and Dead Roots Stirring will never leave my iPhone. Torche (heavy, delirious, and fun), Lo-Pan (sounds like driving a Camaro, baby).
Then there’s the metal that fits no particular category
Deftones (heavy and druggy and rhythmic and intelligent), Voyager (futuristic prog metal with great vocal performance), ALKALOID (just plain awesome), Isis (epic psych-y postmetal fronted by an angry bear)
Soul/Blues/etc.
Jamiroquai (if Stevie Wonder loved cars and sang acid-funk-disco), JJ Grey and Mofro (blue-eyed Florida swamp shuffle), Sam and Dave (they’re Sam and Dave), John Lee Hooker (gritty and down-home), Robert Randolph & the Family Band (amped-up upbeat soul with attitude and slide guitar)
Electronic and Downbeat
Justice (driving, rock-oriented synthpop), Ladytron (icy cool and bombastic), Zero 7 (unsurpassed chill), Moonchild (soulful and sweet), Telefon Tel Aviv (brilliant and brittle), CHVRCHES (full of bangers), Depeche Mode (gothic moods, engrossing soundscapes), Disparition (eerie, trippy, like an artifact from a nonexistent town), Kubbi (impeccably pixellated)
Jazz
Wes Montgomery (incredible indeed, classic), Coast (these guys are flat good), Pete Fountain (I just love dixieland jazz), No BS Brass Band (exactly what it sounds like)
Pop and Punk
La Luz (all-girl surf noir), Anna Burch (breezy, jangly, propulsive), Carly Rae Jepsen (tremendously underrated!), Charly Bliss (snotty, sweet, wicked, clever), Goldfrapp (sassy elastic stomp), Imogen Heap (fragmented, chorus-y, and soaring), As Tall as Lions (exceptional emo-pop)
Soundtracks
Darren Korb’s Bastion (like a Western set in the Indus), Matt Uelman’s Diablo II (spooky and daring), Nobuo Uematsu (I could listen to the FFVII soundtrack for the rest of my life), Front Line Assembly’s Airmech (robotic, organic, and engaging), O Brother Where Art Thou? (folk, blues, and gospel), Yoko Kanno’s soundtracks for Cowboy Bebop (exhilarating genre-bending jazz and electronic), Clint Mansell’s Pi (the claustrophobia of genius)
Everything Else
Lonely Mountain Band’s Second Breakfast (music from the Shire), The Raconteurs (jangly oversized garage rock), Rogue’s Gallery (modern interpretations of sea shanties commissioned by Johnny Depp), Skinny Lister (anthemic shanty-banging pub rock), The Cars (are awesome), Creedence Clearwater Revival (I don’t even care that they’re not from the bayou), Sparta (post-punk with all the anthemic power of early U2, amazing singing), Mozart’s wind concertos, Alasdair Fraser (wonderful Celtic violin), John Luther Adams (like watching the earth turn)
I’m gonna sit down with YouTube and your metal suggestions (and others in this thread!). I just can’t take growling/rasping/gargling thus so many otherwise promising albums are quick toss-outs.
Don’t toss out Opeth and Agalloch because you hear harsh vocals in one of their songs. They have one fantastic all-clean record each. That’s here and here. You can safely stay away from the rest of their discography though, I personally wouldn’t bother with modern opeth (which is also clean but boring)
You probably already know Primordial, but if not you should check them out (they’re a black/death/folk metal band). The Coffin Ships is my favorite song of theirs.
Great band, unique sound, good at what they do. And “The Coffin Ships” is truly excellent.
Overall they’re not my speed, though. I wish they would focus on their more riff-driven songs. When the guitars are playing the long tremolo-picked sections, it’s totally up to the drummer to generate any interest, and that dude is working really, really hard.
Have you checked out Nails? If you like metallic hardcore/powerviolence check them out. Old stuff is very grindy, newer stuff is more groove/blast/spinkick madness with more direct vocals.
Where do you stand on Liturgy (the American modern ‘black metal’ band)? A lot of people can’t get past the apparent pretentiousness, but if Aesthetica isn’t a virtuoso display of metal musicianship I don’t know what is.
I never really got into grind or powerviolence for some reason, but I’ll check them out!
I didn’t know them until you mentioned them, so I downloaded Aesthetica. Wow – that’s some unique stuff.
I don’t know that they’re black metal. Sure, it’s using the same tools of blastbeats, shrieks, and treble-high tremolo-picked guitars. But it’s so removed from the vsval black metal vernacvlar. It’s rhythmic and percussive and major-key. And that guitar tone is so glassy and brittle! Almost electronic-sounding. It’s achieves that romantic overwhelm, but through the repetition of abrupt figures rather than walls of sinister oppression.
It’s like the singer from Ghost Bath joined Astronoid and they made a black metal album by resequencing the intro lick from Day of the Eagle.
Also : they are tight as hell.
I highly recommend Splashdown. Universal Hall Pass has the same vocalissa, and has some amazing songs, but lacks some of the consistency.
Very nice! Only listened to the first couple of tracks off Halfworld but I like them already. Also, seems like it will be fun to sing.
Ever listened to Denali? Splashdown’s more trip-hoppy moments remind me a bit of them.
Surface is good. Going to have to listen to a wider selection on my commute tomorrow! Thank you.
Andrea Revel has a decent song called “White Noise” that is somewhat in this vein; unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy any of her other songs, as her vocal style works for me in that song in a way it doesn’t in others. (She doesn’t seem to quite have the knack of The Decembrists to use an unusual voice in a consistently effective way.)
When I was a teenager I listened to the same music my family and friends were into, but I never really got really into music until 2013 when I went to university and I started listening to Bob Dylan. My tastes have gradually expanded outwards from Dylan to similar artists, and to artists similar to artists similar to Dylan and so on. By this point I have fairly broad tastes, but they’ve mostly grown via this process. I guess you could summarize by saying I’m into the music of the 60s folk revival, from folk proper to stuff that’s fairly far removed from those roots.
Here are the first five artists from each of my Spotify Daily Mixes:
* Joni Mitchell, Greg Brown, Gillian Welch, Laura Nyro, Joan Baez
* Louis Killen, Bellowhead, Ewan MacColl, The Young Tradition, Shirley Colins
* Melanie, Dusty Springfield, The Mamas & The Papas, Dion, The Ronettes
* Karen James, Willie Thomas and Butch Cage, Wade Hemsworth, Jean Carignan, Tom Kines
* Hank Locklin, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Tanya Tucker, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
* Mary Gauthier, Kate Bush, 10,000 Maniacs, Joan Armatrading, Joan As Police Woman
This is a reach, but if you like Dylan look up a 60s guy named Tom Rapp; his band was called Pearls Before Swine — 60s folk with a bit of a trippy prog edge. Fine singer, sometimes compared to Dylan
Phil Ochs is also a great folk singer. I especially like him for his humor.
Lots of jazz, especially Gypsy jazz. Also piano jazz…I’ll see your Harry Mitchell and raise you Elliot Galvin. World music, especially west African…Salif KeitasSoro is wonderfully grand and gloomy. And, yes, I’ve got Ethiopiques. Some rock, with a leaning towards.sixties, psych, and spacey stuff….Hawkwind were a great favourite of my youth. Some classical, mainly guitar.
Instead of going through a full list, I’ll mention one that no one else has: Japanese surf rock, especially Takeshi Terauchi And Bunnys. One of my favorites for writing.
Thanks. I’m enjoying it.
I thought of another somewhat obscure suggestion, in the form of English hip-hop, with an exampple: Scroobius Pip
My tastes are particular rock/pop/indie genres that are pretty pedestrian:
Baroque pop (The Divine Comedy, Florence and the Machine, Camera Obscura, some Regina Spektor)
Folk rock/folk pop/anti-folk (The Mountain Goats, early Wye Oak, some Regina Spektor)…basically anything lyric-heavy.
Synthpop (Metric, Alvvays, CHVRCHES, Au Revoire Simone)
Canadiana (The New Pornographers, Barenaked Ladies, Alanis Morrissette, The Tragically Hip, Metric) thanks to constant radio play
I never had a word for what Florence + The Machine is, so thanks for Baroque Pop
Which reminds me– Rare Air— Scottish rock with bagpipes.
I fall in a similar range. The Mountain Goats, the New Pornographers, the Decemberists, Stars, Metric — basically, a smattering of indie bands from undergrad.
Is this because I have been too lazy to add new music to my collection since then? We report, you decide.
You might like Man Man, judging by your tastes.
I thought I had no interest in the music thread, but you’ve dragged me in! Iain, I like most of the same music you listed, and I used to really be into Man Man. I’m glad to see there’s another Man Man fan (fan fan?) out there.
Eugene –
Have you tried Honus Honus? Same vocalist, unsure of any other overlap.
Empty Bottle is fantastic.
ETA: Life Fantastic (Man Man, for everyone else) is possibly my favorite song of all time; I swing between that and Depth of Satan’s Eyes by Ghost. Life Fantastic is perfect. Black Mission Goggles is also great.
They aren’t the most consistent band – they have quite a few so-so songs – but the songs that nail it, really nail it.
I didn’t realize Honus had a solo career, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
While we’re having a productive and pleasant conversation on the dreaded topic of identity politics upthread (or downthread, I actually have no idea), allow me to thank you for pointing me to Honus Honus and his solo stuff. I really like what I’ve listened to so far!
I also second your recommendation of Nick Cave to a Tom Waits fan elsewhere, and am going to check out your other recommendations.
Yup!
I am fortunate to have two people with esoteric musical tastes I can draw upon. Voltaire might also be to your tastes; gothic cabaret music, basically, although he has a tendency towards immaturity that can be off-putting at times. (If nothing else, Voltaire makes an amazing seed for an online radio station – you’ll get an endless variety of unusual music.)
I listen mostly to metal – it is the common factor in my usual company.
Other odd pieces, assuming your tastes are similar to mine:
Trifonic (beep-boop soundscapes, better when nobody is singing)
Equilibrium (entertaining metal that doesn’t take itself too seriously)
Azure Ray (minimalist music that is good in isolation but gets depressing with prolonged listening, I recommend starting with “Sleep”)
Drip Fed Fred by Madness (this band varies between popular and forgotten; they sang the “This house, in the middle of the street” song)
Finntroll (lively black metal, similar to Korpiklaani at times, other times radically different)
Nekrogoblicon (comedic black metal – their music videos are great, and their songs are themed; Bears is a song about how frightening bears are to goblins, for example)
Unexpect – Feasting Fools is a good song to start with. A terrible caucophony that gets better with repeated listenings; it is avant-garde metal which is defined by what I can only describe as meta-melody.
Somebody mentioned Van Canto – their version of Fear of the Night is good. Most of their music is renaissance festival stuff, though, and less interesting.
I’ll have to dig through my library for other stuff. My memory isn’t great; there is a lot of stuff like Death of the Cog that is probably more to your style, but which doesn’t come readily to mind.
ETA:
Oh! “History of the Society Union set to the Tune of Tetris” is a fantastic song, if you haven’t encountered it before. It achieved a little bit of internet fame, but seems to have slipped back into obscurity since then.
If you like symphonic metal I can’t recommend Therion enough.
Vienna Teng. Or CSNY, sometimes. Mostly Vienna though.
It looks like metal is the most popular genre mentioned, and also the most differentiated into sub-genres.
Is this just a matter of demographics (men in a certain age range?), or is there some more interesting connection between liking metal and liking ssc?
I’m drastically surprised by the quotient of metalheads here.
Could also be that they’re more likely than the rest of us to reply to a ‘what music do you like?’ subthread.
You know, I remember asking a similar question 10 years ago and actually found an article on it: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3352230/Heavy-metal-a-comfort-for-the-bright-child.html
SSC also has a high proportion of intelligent people that are/were socially awkward and somewhat outcast.
Though I think James is also right that there’s some sampling bias towards them being more likely to reply. Or for whatever reason ‘pickier’ and end up having umpteen subgenres.
I would guess that people who are “into music” are more likely to reply, and demographics mean readers who are “into music” are disproportionately into metal (rather than e.g. jazz aficionados).
Metal tends to be more complex than other musical genres.
You don’t have to be intelligent to enjoy it – which is to say, most people who enjoy it are as average as everybody else – and just because you are intelligent doesn’t mean you will enjoy it – subjective tastes vary.
But metal is a lot more satisfying to listen to, if you are looking for complex melodies, and creative interactions between instrumentation. As a genre, it is probably experiencing the most novel experimentation of any genre over the past couple of decades. It is probably incorrect to even view it as a genre; it is more like a mirror universe of all other music. You can find bands that play polka metal. You can find bands that play traditional folk music as metal. You can find bands that play opera as metal.
Mind, there is a lot of pretty derivative stuff out there. People like a sound, and just listen to music that has that sound. But there is pretty much constant innovation; the latest genre I have taken an unexpected liking to is “Metal in which a guy is screaming wordlessly in a bathroom down the hall from the rest of the band”.
If you get bored with music easily, metal is the genre for you. Just mind that many if not most bands are just catering to people who like a particular “sound”, as changing will annoy their established audience, and move on when they get repetitive.
I recommend Korpiklaani to anyone who thinks they hate metal. Not because everyone will like them, but because it utterly fails to be what people expect. (Old Woman’s Dance by Silent Stream of Godless Elegy is a specifically good song for this purpose.)
Additional note:
Also, metal is pretty much the only genre in which most fans don’t really care what you are singing about, so it is an extremely international genre of music. It has been fascinating to watch bands who started in English for a larger audience switch back to native languages for most of their songs as they realize most of their fans don’t care if they understand the lyrics.
This means metal bands have a much wider audience than is usually the case.
Vodka by Korpiklaani was a good bit of fun– very fast and silly. I’m not sure that the metal was what I liked about. Their Tequila seemed like more of the same, though.
Yeah; I think Tequila and Beero Beero were both tribute songs to countries they had toured, and are a little repetitive.
A lot of their songs are about drinking, though, and most are lively and fun.
They are a style of folk metal, and have a vocal style called joiking; if you enjoy that aspect, there are more traditional folk music doing joiking. (I think it has appeared in two or three pop songs, as well, although I’d be hard pressed to name them.)
ETA:
For another fun song, they covered Pony Pony as Jouni Jouni.
Metal and EDM! It’s because these genres are our best shot at achieving the Romantic sublime through total overwhelm. “The joy of violent movement pulls you under.”*
Maybe people who are chasing Romantic sublimity are more likely to respond to the OP’s question? Or maybe SSC attracts a lot of reason-heavy people, and those people are drawn to Romantic sublimity sort of as their Jungian shadow?
From Black Metal Is Sublime :
From Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog – Romanticism and Black Metal :
From Finding Happiness in Angry Music :
* If you can tell me what that’s from without googling, I’ll buy you a coke.
Metal is for nerds.
Lots of metal and classical in here.
I’ve got a lot of love for what’s broadly considered EDM/IDM:
Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus, Emancipator, Little People, Blockhead, etc.
I’m also pulled to things with interesting vocals, experimental styles, psych-folk’ish?
Tom Waits, Braids (1st album only), Tidus, Daughter, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Alt-J
Also stuff that’s maybe prog’ish? I don’t know how these all fit together but it’s noodley:
God Speed You! Black Emperor, Ne Obliviscaris, Mouse on the Keys, TOE, Giraffes? Giraffes!, etc.
Also a soft spot for certain types of angry punk mostly from my youth:
Refused, Distillers, Camp Cope, …
You -may- like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, given that you like Tom Waits. Tupelo is a good song to start with.
Humanwine may also be up your alley. (Ignore the politics, if they aren’t to your liking; they think they have important things to say, but were probably deluded by the copious amounts of LSD they were probably on while producing their music.)
ETA: Also, in the electronic music sphere, Trifonic (not Triphonic – I mean, they might be good, but I haven’t actually listened to them) is one of my surprising new finds. Santa Rosa is a fantastic piece.
I’ve tried Nick Cave a few times and never really caught me. I feel like Tom Waits is an anomaly because I don’t really like any other music associated with him, however he’s my all time favorite artist.
Just listened to a few Humanwine songs… it’s good but like you said, some of the lyrics are kind of cheesy. I’ll listen to more and see if it grows on me.
Trifonic is good. I’d put them behind Bonobo, Emancipator, Blue Sky Black Death, Saltillo, etc. They end up in rotation though.
Any more suggestions?
I need to go through my music library; most of my recommendations are “What I have listened to lately” or just stuff I randomly remember.
Massive Attack was pretty popular back in the day, so you may already have encountered them, but some of their stuff is good if you haven’t.
I Monster is pretty good, albeit really odd; I think Daydream in Blue is a solid starting point.
Splashdown / Universal Hall Pass and Azure Ray seem like they may be a bit afield of your listed music, but they share some similarities, so you -might- like them. Mayan Pilot or Archer by Splashdown, Katrinah Josephina or Sally’s Song by UHP, and maybe Raining in Athens by Azure Ray? Those are tougher calls.
Man Man has been mentioned elsewhere and might be relevant. Likewise The Tigerlillies, who I guess might be considered punklike in spirit if not necessarily in terms of sound.
I’ll try to remember to pull up my library when I get home. And try to hunt down some of the electronica I used to listen to; much of it hasn’t aged well, but there might be some gems in there I have forgotten.
What I listen to most is 60s and 70s rock, a mix of British invasion, blues-influenced, and folk-influenced: The Beatles, The Eagles, Simon and Garfunkel, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, The Doors, Aerosmith, ZZ Top. Among modern rock, my favorite band is probably Shinedown.
I’ll also speak for several Country artists since no one else has, with my favorite subgenre being outlaw: Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, John Denver, Garth Brooks, and Alan Jackson.
I like listening to movie soundtracks. Because the score of a movie is not visible, it often surprises me how much it contributes to the ambience.
I mentioned the large amount of metal to a friend, and he said that punk was also music for disaffected people– there’s been very little mention of punk. Has it simply gone out of fashion?
Basically yes. There are only a handful of great punk bands that are drawing new people into punk music at the moment, the best example being Idles. I think this is because they take the best bits of the Johnny Rotten punk archetype and infuse it with a very bitter, very smarmy British brand of humour that hits all today’s political sweet spots.
The last echoes of the surface-level punk ethos died out in the early 2000’s with emo, which is definitely now out of fashion. The spirit of teenage aggression and rebellion has forked off into rap music, which has seen an explosion in popularity in the last decade. Trap artists like Post Malone and Lil’ Pump give the current generation of teenagers what they need: justification for apathy/indifference to the decline of the existing system, staunch proclamations of grandeur/badass-ness, repetitive catchy hooks, and fat bass.
I can believe all of that, but some of what people like is music that isn’t current, so I’m a bit surprised that I’m not seeing people who like punk from previous decades.
Punk is politically coded as the kind of earnest leftwingness that is almost entirely absent from SSC.
This is a good point. Given what you said I feel like there’s an opening for a sort of tech-savvy/hacker punk for those who don’t find rap all that appealing. Folk punk is a thing that’s niche but going fairly strong but appeals to a different aesthetic I think.
I used to main Scout in TF2. I never really enjoyed the game that much and kind of just defaulted to it as a big-online-multiplayer-population option after Halo 3 (a truly great online multiplayer game) died off. As such, didn’t have much interest in getting into Overwatch.
Puzzles/logic general
I like writing and solving logic puzzles, but I end up brute-forcing a lot of them because I enjoy the process more than I enjoy working out which math tools to use.
~~~
Example:
1) Alice wants to sit next to Fiona
2) Bert wants to sit next to Erin
3) Carlos doesn’t want to sit next to Alice or Devin
4) Devin doesn’t want to sit next to Alice
5) Erin wants to sit next to Carlos
How do you arrange ABCDEF so they all sit where they want? Which rule is redundant?
ROT13 qsnorp ehyr sbhe vf erqhaqnag
~~~~
What is this type of problem called? Is there a fast, elegant way to determine which rules of a system are redundant in problems like this?
Post your puzzles and logic riddles!
There’s multiple solutions to that puzzle, and each solution should work in reverse. Here’s the one I found with it’s reverse: QORPSN NSPROQ
I also don’t see how the one rule is redundant? If you remove that rule than this would be a valid answer: QNSPRO
I love puzzles of most types. I like cryptic crosswords, I like that one about the eye colours on the island, or that one with the prisoners and the switch, I’ve gradually been working through the GCHQ puzzle book…
But for some reason I really don’t like ones like your example. Or the ones where there are five houses and you know that “the person who lives in the blue house lives next to the person who has a poodle” and “the person who likes red wine does not live next to the person who does line dancing”… “which colour of house does the person who plays chess live in?”. I don’t know why – I just find them very frustrating and unsatisfying. Maybe because they’re just logic? But then I’m not sure what apart from logic is included in the puzzles I like… pattern-matching?
In elementary school we had a whole folder with copies of matrix logic puzzles of varying difficulty and you were free to take them to solve just for fun. You know, the ones like “Bob, Alice, and Carol are all going to the party, each brings a present and wears a shirt of a different color, Carol does not wear green and Bob brings a box of crayons… Determine who brought which gift and wore which color”. I found it very satisfying to fill in the grid, it was the same type of fun as solving sudokus. Would you consider this “brute-forcing”? Also it was fairly easy to figure out which rules were redundant, you just had to look for which rule gave you information you already knew.
Also, here’s a simple puzzle I made up for anyone who wants to try solving it:
The following are the first 6 terms of a finite sequence. Figure out the missing term and the last term in the sequence.
MP-4-20
JB-2-15
DC-7-2
AG-2-3
??-?-?
GB-18-18
Hint: This is not a logic puzzle.
Answer with explanation (ROT 13):
Gur frdhrapr vf onfrq ba gur HF cerfvqrapr naq ivpr cerfvqragf fgnegvat sebz gur zbfg erprag. Gur yrggref ner gur vavgvnyf bs gur ivpr cerfvqrag naq gur ahzoref ner gur vavgvnyf bs gur pbeerfcbaqvat cerfvqrag. Svefg grez vf zvxr crapr- qbanyq gehzc.
Zvffvat grez vf QD-frira-gjb, svany grez vf WN-frira-gjraglguerr (wbua nqnzf, trbetr jnfuvatgba).
Here’s one I made some time back. Don’t google it overmuch or you’ll find an entry on a puzzle site that includes the answer. It’s mathy but requires nothing more than google to solve.
Inspector Crumblesniff thinks he is on the verge of arresting a notorious Mafia hit man, but he needs your help. First, after a raid on Sal’s Stereotypical Pizzeria, he found an address book with these contents:
BRUNO, ALFONSO – 123 LOVEJOY
GIORDANO, VITO – 456 AINSWORTH
LANGELLA, TONY – 789 WYGANT
PICCOLO, SAMMY – 159 JARRETT
TOCCO, FRANKIE – 357 EMERSON
Next, by disguising himself as a table lamp, the Inspector was able to sneak in to Don Furfante’s secret base, the Piazza di Sei, and acquire the following job list:
PLUMBER – 2074123927971998088
PAPERBOY – 3907210679561031886
MAILMAN – 3724268395359054732
ASSASSIN – 4149097910918443572
GARDENER – 1394589336448442100
Unfortunately, the job list seems to be encrypted, and the Judge Maldestro will only issue a single search warrant. Can you figure out the killer’s address?
Nuthin? If it helps, there’s a gigantic hint in the flavor text…
Change “giant hint” to “necessary to find hint.”
I needed that spark but it enabled me to find out the answer.
Hint about the hint: Vg’f bar bs gur cebcre abhaf.
Another hint: There’s a flaw in the cryptosystem in that you don’t even need to decode the values: Lbh whfg arrq gb fbeg rnpu yvfg gur cebcre jnl. Ybbxvat ng vg sbe n juvyr, gurer ner bayl gjb nafjref.
That sounds oddly accusatory. Is putting hints in the description of a puzzle not extremely common? I mean, there has to be some kind of hook for the solver; otherwise “try to guess how i changed this number in to that number” puzzles get old real fast. If it weren’t for the sweet two-language dual pun hint, I would never have posted this!
In any event the hint is absolutely not necessary (especially for programmers) but I don’t think the solution would be satisfying without it.
Can you be more explicit? I don’t know how to find the answer with sorting alone, but I’m ready to be educated!
Sorry if that came off aggressive. But without that hint, the only hope is to 1) know you are on the right track, and then 2) write a computer program to brute-force all values for the hint. You wouldn’t take the effort to do 2 without 1, and you can’t have 1 without knowing the hint is essential.
I don’t know how to find the answer with sorting alone,
Orpnhfr gur rapelcgrq anzrf fbeg va rknpgyl gur fnzr beqre nf gur cynvagrkg anzrf. Gur bayl dhrfgvba vf vs gur anzrf ner SVEFG YNFG be YNFG SVEFG. Naq fvapr gurl jrer tvira va gur chmmyr va gur beqre YNFG SVEFG, gung cebonoyl zrnaf vg’f gur bgure bar.
Gurer vf ab arrq sbe N gb or gra naq O gb or ryrira naq P gb or gjryir naq fb ba frdhragvnyyl. Jura V ernyvmrq V unq gur evtug rapbqvat, V fgnegrq erirefvat gur flzobyf naq sbhaq gurl jrer nyy va beqre. Gur anzrf unq rabhtu punenpgrefgvp cnggreaf (Cvpbyyb, anzrf nyy raqvat va B) gung V whfg fgnegrq qbvat fhofgvghgvbaf naq jbexvat onpxjneqf. Vs rnpu yrggre unq orra fbzr enaqbz inyhr sebz gra gb svsgl-svir, gura lbh pna’g whfg fbeg gb trg gur evtug nafjre.
Well, I agree that the solution is too arbitrary without the hint, that’s why it’s there! It sounds like “key information hidden in the flavor text” is unfamiliar to some folks, which is a little surprising to me, but hey, it’s a big internet.
Unfortunately, the sorting method you described doesn’t really work. Onfr pbairefvba vf abg gur fnzr guvat nf fhofgvghgvba, naq vg vf abg cbffvoyr gb fbyir guvf chmmyr ol gerngvat vg nf n fhofgvghgvba. Zberbire, fhofgvghgvba pvcuref qb abg arprffnevyl cebqhpr nafjref gung fbeg gur fnzr jnl nf gur vachgf. Gurl pna va fbzr pnfrf, ohg qba’g va guvf pnfr. Gb frr jul, pbafvqre gur fvzcyr fhofgvghgvba [N=1, O=2, … M=26]. Va gung pnfr, VW=910 naq WV=109, lrg VW 109. N fhofgvghgvba pvcure *pbhyq* cebqhpr fbegnoyr nafjref, vs nyy bs gur fhofgvghgrq inyhrf unq gur fnzr ahzoref bs qvtvgf, ohg gung pna’g or gehr urer orpnhfr jr’er pbairegvat 12-yrggre jbeqf va gb 19-qvtvg ahzoref. Retb, vs guvf jrer n fhofgvghgvba pvcure, naq vs gur anzrf naq gur ahzoref obgu fbegrq va gur fnzr beqre, vg jbhyq bayl or n yhpxl pbbvapvqrapr.
Ab, gur rapelcgrq yvfg 100% fbegf ol anzr, naq jvyy sbe nyy inevngvbaf bs anzrf lbh chg va guvf chmmyr, nf ybat nf gur ahzore bs yrggref va rnpu crefba’f anzr vf gur fnzr (juvpu ybbxf yvxr n qryvorengr qrfvta pbafgenvag).
M rapbqrf gb n ynetre inyhr guna L, juvpu rapbqrf gb n ynetre inyhr guna K, … juvpu rapbqrf gb n ynetre inyhr guna O, juvpu rapbqrf gb n ynetre inyhr guna N.
Va n pregnva onfr gur tneqrare’f anzr vf 14,33,23,40,35,44,40,15,43,50,35,40. 14 vf N, gur fznyyrfg inyhr cbffvoyr va gung svefg cbfvgvba. 15 vf O, 20 vf P, 21 vf Q, rgp rgp.
BGBU, guvf vf pbzcyrgryl fbyinoyr vs 42 vf N, 20 vf O, 21 vf P, 52 vf Q, rgp rgp. Naq gura lbh pna’g whfg fbeg gur cnffjbeqf gb trg gur fbegrq cynvagrkg
EDIT: a bunch of five-letter words and how they encrypt. Complete sorting regardless of column. https://pastebin.com/Z3KvH5QV
Hah! You’ve misunderstood how base conversion works due to a bit of bad luck, and understanding why was almost like a puzzle unto itself.
Zl chmmyr eryvrf ba onfr pbairefvba, juvpu vf irel qvssrerag sebz n fhofgvghgvba pvcure. Jvxvcrqvn gryyf hf gung “n fhofgvghgvba pvcure vf n zrgubq bs rapelcgvat ol juvpu havgf bs cynvagrkg ner ercynprq jvgu pvcuregrkg, nppbeqvat gb n svkrq flfgrz”, gur xrl jbeq orvat “havgf”. Va n fhofgvghgvba pvcure, lbh pna oernx gur vachg hc va gb havgf naq fubj zr juvpu cneg bs gur bhgchg pnzr sebz rnpu havg bs vachg; va onfr pbairefvba, gurer ner ab “havgf” bs vachg, lbh unir gb qb n fvatyr bcrengvba ba gur ragver vachg gb trg gur ragver bhgchg. Naq vs lbh gerngrq onfr pbairefvba yvxr n fhofgvghgvba pvcure, ol oernxvat gur vachg hc va gb qvtvgf naq pbairegvat gurz gb gur arj onfr vaqvivqhnyyl naq gura pbapngrangvat gur erfhyg, lbh’q trg gur jebat nafjre.
Ohg jung nobhg gur rknzcyr lbh pvgrq? Lbh fnvq, “Va n pregnva onfr gur tneqrare’f anzr vf 14,33,23,40,35,44,40,15,43,50,35,40.” Naq gur tneqrare’f anzr (NYSBAFBOEHAB) va onfr 6 vf, va snpg, 143323403544401543503540. Va gung pnfr, gur N pbeerfcbaqf gb gur svefg gjb qvtvgf (14) va obgu bhgchgf, gur Y pbeerfcbaqf gb gur arkg gjb (33), naq fb sbegu. Tbfu, gung fher ybbxf yvxr n fhofgvghgvba pvcure. Naq vg fher ybbxf yvxr onfr pbairefgvba pna or qbar va havgf. Jung tvirf!
Nf vg gheaf bhg, gur bayl ernfba gung jung lbh qvq (pbaireg onfr ba gur vachg qvtvg-ol-qvtvg, engure guna nf n jubyr) jbexrq vf orpnhfr gur onfr lbh’er pbairegvat sebz (36) vf gur fdhner bs gur gur onfr lbh’er pbairegvat gb (6). Jura gung’f gehr, jura pbairegvat sebz onfr a gb onfr a^z jurer z vf na rira ahzore, pbairegvat qvtvg-ol-qvtvg jbexf svar, naq lbh pna fbyir n onfr pbairefvba chmmyr yvxr lbh jbhyq fbyir n fhofgvghgvba pvcure. Arng!
Naljnl, gur snpg gung pbairegvat qvtvg-ol-qvtvg cebqhprq gur evtug nafjre va onfr 6 jnf unccrafgnapr; va trareny vg qbrf abg (gel pbairegvat gb onfr 10, be 7, be nalguvat rkprcg 6). Naq fvapr zl chmmyr tbrf sebz onfr 36 gb 10, vg vf abg n fhofgvghgvba pvcure naq lbh pbhyq abg unir fbyirq vg yvxr bar.
Naljnl, onpx gb gur fbegvat. Fbegvat jbexf va guvf chmmyr (gur bhgchg fbegf yvxr gur vachg) orpnhfr gur pbairefvba shapgvba vf fgevpgyl zbabgbavpnyyl vapernfvat, zrnavat s(z)>s(a) vs naq bayl vs z > a. Frcnengr sebz gung, fhofgvghgvba pvcuref fbzrgvzrf fbeg naq fbzrgvzrf qba’g, qrcraqvat ba gur pvcure va dhrfgvba. Va cnegvphyne, fhofgvghgvba pvcuref trarenyyl jba’g fbeg vs gur bhgchg inyhrf inel va yratgu (fbzr yrggref rapbqr gb n 1-qvtvg ahzore naq bguref gb n 2-qvtvg ahzore). Naq fvapr guvf chmmyr pbairegf 12-qvtvg inyhrf gb 19-qvtvg inyhrf, jr pbhyq nffhzr gung *vs* vg jrer n fhofgvghgvba, vg cebonoyl jbhyq abg fbeg. Naq va nal rirag, gur fbyire pnaabg fnl jurgure gur chmmyr vf n fhofgvghgvba pvcure be abg, abe pna gurl fnl jurgure gur bhgchgf fbeg be abg, hagvy gurl’ir fbyirq gur chmmyr. Fb gur snpg gur nafjref qb unccra gb fbeg vf uneqyl n jrnxarff be n xrl gb fbyivat vg.
I couldn’t figure it out after trying lots of similar things to the correct answer and then looked it up. I will say that the hint is not that gigantic and only seems so in retrospect, like many a failed puzzle I’ve created running D&D games.
There are a lot more red herrings in that puzzle than I was expecting!
(I didn’t get it, by the way.)
I’ve been enjoying this blog by John Nerst, who appears to hang out in the comments here. In particular I recommend this post on what it means to assert that something exists. Here’s an excerpt:
There’s a shorter version here, in the form of a response to a question I asked in a previous open thread.
Reminds me of this, from Bertrand Russell:
(A History of Western Philosophy, pp. 153–4)
“If I replace the common meaning of this word with an idiosyncratic technical definition of my choice, we can see that my opponent’s position no longer makes any sense.”
Is this the most popular argument in modern philosophy?
The issue is that “common meaning”s of words are typically either inconsistent, incoherent, or limited to very narrow contexts, and that you thus can’t make rigorous philosophical arguments on the foundation of the “common meaning” of very many words.
Strict definitions are usually limited to far more narrow contexts than the more common meaning of words.
This is why motte-and-baileys are so attractive. One can make far-reaching claims using the bailey and then retreat to the motte when criticized.
Redefining words can very easily lead people to be rigorous when examining the word itself, but then, without even recognizing it, use the non-rigorous meaning when actually using the word in an argument.
I liked that post. I’ll check out the blog. Thanks.
Good post on a good topic.
Because of this comment, I am reading John Nerst’s blog, and it is excellent.
My 3 years old daughter is really good at drawing, for her age. Any advice for a parent how to help her further develop her skills? Given her age, I can’t really teach her things like “perspective”; so I don’t know in which direction to progress.
Is there some specific curriculum for drawing-gifted kids? Even if it would be for somewhat higher age, e.g. 6, I think it could be helpful. But if you know resources like “how to draw X simply”, that could probably help, too.
Mostly, give her lots of colors, paints, papers, clay, and generally enjoyable things to draw/paint/sculpt with.
Encourage her to draw things she sees herself, not necessarily to follow step-by-step tutorials. They’ll develop better observational skills, which is about 90% of the trick for drawing well.
In general (I’m biased toward impressionism and against formulaic, highly stylized comic art, fwiw), the “how to draw x” books tend to be counterproductive, even at a fairly young age. The trick is to look at the thing you want to draw in terms of line, shape, and lightness/darkness, rather than as a pre-determined, simplified symbol, which is a pretty strong temptation for most older kids, maybe because they have to manipulate symbols for years in school. Spending some time drawing and painting things she sees around her before going through formalized schooling is likely to help. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is dated, with sort of cringy pop-neurology, but has good exercises for when she’s a bit older and more self-conscious.
ETA: For older children, I recommend the elements and principles of design model (I teach art sometimes, and this is what I mostly use).
It goes something like: focus on one element (line, shape, value, color, texture, volume), and/or one principle (balance, contrast, movement, rhythm, emphasis, pattern), and find an artist who got it really well. Eg: focus on line and movement, go spend some time looking at Kandinsky. Then make some pieces that focus on that element/principle, in that case using mostly or only lines or varying thicknesses to show movement. Or, focus on shape and balance by creating a balanced composition using only the spaces around the objects, leaving the objects white (negative space drawing). Go through all the elements and principles in that way.
At this moment she has ~unlimited amount of paper, because any A4 paper that is only printed on one side gets thrown into the “paper Bunny can draw on” box by her table; and there is always some paper we need to get rid of. Also, she has an erasable magnetic board. And she uses Tux Paint on tablet. All of this, daily.
We tried clay, but so far she refuses to sculpt. She only likes to cut out shapes using the cookie cutters.
If it is not too much work, could you please give me a few more examples like this? (I mean “for X, look at Y”.)
I would say this is smashing advice for someone already showing art talent, but for many, the “how to draw” books can be quite useful for building some fundamental skills in , at least pencil drawing. I know in my art class days in middle school I certainly enjoyed drawing out of them, as clean lines were my weak point. I think the biggest thing would be to diversify as much as possible. Including dabbling in 3d media as well.
If you want to get good at any skill you need to spend time with people who are already good at that skill. If you’re not doing that then you’re just going to be wasting time flailing around trying different things that you think might work, but that probably actually won’t work, because you have no idea what you’re doing.
If you are serious about helping your daughter get good at drawing, sign her up for a class, or hire her a tutor or something.
I think as long as you don’t go full hardcore tiger mom mode, your daughter will thank you later.
A class is definitely a plan, but it has to wait a few months, because they typically start in September. I wonder if some art students would be willing to babysit.
That’s not a bad idea actually. But you want to pick an art student who can actually teach drawing. Not all of them can.
At age 3 most of what you want is simply someone who enjoys drawing, and can enjoy drawing with her. Repetition and enjoyment is more important than technique unless you are actively trying to accomplish something (ie put together a portfolio, or finish a project).
Depends if the little girl has long-term plans to really develop technique and become masterful at drawing or painting. (Or if you have plans for her to do that.) It would be bad but easy to cripple that possibility by instilling bad habits.
I think there certainly is truth in this, but art isnt like a trade type apprenticeship where there are some solid, hard skills that need to be passed along from teacher/influencer to student. I think lessons would be valuable in educating how to view subjects, and how to build some basic blocks of general skill, but I would be wary of someone trying to mold a copy of themselves out of my kid, if that were the case.
Why not draw with her? At 3, perhaps the more important thing is to maintain the interest. The upside is you get to create good memories with her. Also, look at a lot of beautiful things together. An eye for beauty is a really good thing to have for that kind of artistic endeavors.
Also, just to be contradictory towards laughingagave, I will recommend a series of how to draw xx books. If your daughter shows any interest at all in drawing human figures, Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth, Drawing the Head and Hands by Andrew Loomis is worth checking out. His books are no longer in print, so you might have to do some internet sleuthing to find the pdfs.
Anything by George Bridgman is also highly recommended.
At the end of the day though, getting good at art is really about commitment. She has to jeep doing it.
(I’m a visual effects artist. Those books were indispensable to me when I was at the beginning of my career and trying to improve my traditional art skills)
Thanks, I knew about Loomis, but not about Bridgman. Looking at it.
(By the way, boo Firefox! Since a few weeks ago, it marks downloaded files as infected not because of their content, but because of the domain they came from — the same file from a different domain is okay. So it actually tries to scare you away from using illegal websites. Pissed me off, so I want to spread the word.)
One thing you can do is encourage your daughter to practice seeing while she’s not drawing. Point at things and talk about what they REALLY look like. What shapes they’re actually made of, what colors they really are, etc.
Aside from that, if you really want to encourage her down that path (and always there’s the question “why not just let it be something she does on her own for fun?”), hire a private teacher. One who can really work with kids and will help your daughter reach whatever goals you think she should/can aim for.
I could even bring the magnetic board outside and try drawing the thing. (Daughter prefers to see someone else draw the thing first.) The colors won’t be there, but the shapes will.
She enjoys drawing a lot; the question seems whether she will be doing the same thing over and over again, or moving towards new things. That partially depends on her (how fast she gets tired of the old thing), but partially on inspiration from outside. As an example, she used to draw things as “one thing — one color”. (She would draw three bunnies: one fully red, one fully green, one fully blue.) Then she used TuxPaint where there is the magical rainbow color thing, and afterwards she started drawing objects with multiple random color (red head, one eye green, one eye blue…). Only sometimes she uses realistic colors. So the inputs matter.
We made some degree of effort to help our kids develop their art talent, and I think it kind of worked. My wife recommends a book called Drawing with Children, by Mona Brookes. She also got a lot of use out of blind contour drawing – both because obvious failures are obvious, and because they are funny. That also teaches some mental skills. I myself did some amount of challenging my kids to answer a question using art or to draw a response to some scenario. The questions were sufficiently weird that creativity was implicitly mandatory. I liked the results enough that I kept doing it. All it required was coming up with weird scenarios and then paying attention to the drawings they produced in response.
This is anything but a comprehensive response to your question; but I have always found it interesting that when my father-in-law (who has enough chops as an artist to have had shows in museums in a couple of different countries) sits down to work with my somewhat talented seven-year-old, he always spends much more time than I expected on mechanics: this is how you hold the pastel, this is how you blend strokes into a smooth background, and so on.
As someone who is very serious about drawing art, but who got into it pretty late in life for such a thing (~ age 20), the best advice I can give is give her a lot of opportunities to keep drawing. Also let her get frustrated and improve. For example, if she says her work is bad, don’t just say it’s good, say that she will eventually learn to do whatever is bothering her.
I’d have her do the following exercises once she gets old enough to have enough concentration and focus (I don’t have kids so I don’t really know, but I figure three might be a little young, but only a couple of years more should be enough). These were what, more than anything else, caused me to ‘get it’ and have massive and rapid improvement:
1
2
I’d put a copy of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty where she can see it.
TLP has a post working around the book “Drawing on the right side of the brain”, and the book contains exercises for improving basic drawing skills.
Thank you for the link. I usually hate TLP, but this is excellent because it isn’t about narcissism. Are there other posts you’d recommend that aren’t about narcissism?
Since I know someone will ask, the typical TLP post about narcissism is so vague about what he means by narcissism that it just seems like a narcissistic superiority dance.
People have posted some links so that it’s possible for me to tell what he means– narcissism is the desire to look good to oneself rather than actually doing something useful, I think. However, I still think he’s engaging in aggressive guessing other people’s motives, and he fails to allow for mixed motives.
Just by coincidence today I saw a recommendation that Daniel Coyle’s books on developing talent are a good read for parents in this situation — drawing or any other skill.
Not drawing specific, but parenting notes about supporting and encouraging kids who seem to show an interest/aptitude for something:
(1) interest is more important than ability, especially for young kids. If they are engaged enough in something to make consistent progress, even very slowly, they will have time to become very good.
(2) show an interest yourself, but don’t make the child’s experience about you. Whenever I want my kids to play piano, I sit down and start playing, then one of them will come and take over.
For drawing, specifically, I found the Monart/Mona Brooks book good for activities I could also do and discuss with the kids.
Getting too involved, yourself can be frustrating. In our parent group, almost every family has a story about “kid was interested in X, parent got involved and took over making it fun for the adult and not for the kid.”
(3) expect that the child’s interest levels will change, often dramatically.
This part is very difficult for me. As a parent, I don’t want to push my kids to do things that they, genuinely, find uninteresting, since there are so many great alternatives that they can (and wan to) pursue. However, any worthwhile activity will have some moments when it is hard or frustrating, and it is possible they would benefit from a push during/through those times.
if you find the right balance, let me know!
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is an interesting book that claims that if you learn to draw the wrong way, you will kinda have to restart from scratch if you want to draw the right way. It’s written for adults, but you might be able to read it and simplify the instructions in a way she can understand.
I used to play TF2, mainly as Pyro, secondarily as Medic. While there would often be too many Pyros there would almost never be too many Medics. I could also play fairly well as Demoman. My computer is Linux only though, so I can’t run Overwatch.
Any professional musicians here? I have a question.
How does the typical pro make a living? The few I’ve known have stitched together a living from multiple sources: teaching individual students, accompanying or leading church choirs, playing in an occasional band typically for weddings, and teaching classes in music history or theory in classroom settings. None of them have had “a job”; it has always been a bunch of gigs. Is that the usual way to do it?
Not a professional musician, but have many friends and acquaintances who are.
Most of them get by mostly on “a bunch of gigs”, but many of them have “a job” that is regular but a small number of hours, such as being the instrumental teacher at a school (the kind where students come out of class for half an hour for one-on-one instruction from the teacher; the teacher might only be in school one or two days a week).
A few of them are in orchestras, which I think pays them a salary which is enough to get by on. They do bits and pieces of teaching as well.
I think the short answer to your question, though, is “yes”. Most pro musicians do a bit of this and a bit of that. It sounds incredibly stressful and exhausting to me…
EDIT: my aforementioned friends and acquaintances are all UK-based. I’d be interested to hear if the situation is significantly different in different countries…
Years ago I had a full time white collar job while playing piano in a jazz quintet on the side. My experience with two of our members led me to decide to continue with music only as a hobby:
– Our surly bass player had converted from trumpet because he wasn’t getting enough gigs (good jazz bassists can always get work). He was a mid-50s Berkeley burnout, living in a craphole apartment, bitter about life, bitter about having to switch instruments despite having a couple albums out, bitter about having to make ends by teaching music in addition to taking any gig he could.
– Our fantastic trumpet player was a fine individual, one of my favorite people I’ve every played with. Was good enough to be seriously considered for the Ray Charles band. He lived in a craphole apartment and made ends meet by teaching privately, teaching at school, and taking any gig he could.
Was thinking about this the other week after I saw Kurt Elling at a club — he is one of the top jazz singers working today. Club was sold out, but that’s maybe 150 people. Meanwhile my wife and daughter saw lesser pop star Camila Cabello at a sold out show of 2000 people.
Adam Neely is a young professional jazz bassist living in NYC. He has a Youtube channel mainly dedicated to music theory but he has a few “day in the life” videos that are pretty insightful, if a bit nerve wracking. He does lots of little weird gigs through word-of-mouth in between big cheques, and I suppose makes some money off Patreon too. Check out his channel, if only for the theorycraft.
I have a few pro musicians in my family and can answer on their behalf. I will refer to them by letter.
A makes his living as a full-time electronic music producer. He gets money from ticket and merch sales for sure, and maybe from “residencies” too. (A “residency” in music is, as I understand it, where you have an arrangement with a venue to play shows there on a regular basis. I don’t know if you get the money as a regular fee or if it’s just they reserve your spot on the calendar and the money is still based off ticket sales from each show.) He might also get a regular paycheck from a label that puts out his music (not sure about that one, because I’m not sure if he’s on his own label or something these days), and I know at one point at least he was getting money from a lawsuit against someone very famous who had infringed on his copyrighted work.
Since childhood I haven’t been in close contact with B, who is a full-time singer-songwriter, but I think she makes a living by selling records and tickets and merch. She was writing a monthly or weekly column there for a while (maybe still is?) and might have been getting paid for that too, though I can’t imagine it was a substantial part of her income.
C plays the occasional wedding/other event but mainly makes her money by giving private lessons (on the main instrument she plays).
D is a friend and former coworker, not a family member; he has a “day job” but plays the occasional gig with his band, mainly for fun but sometimes for money. He says the best-paying and most regular gigs are shows for kids.
Then I also worked with a guy who made his money by composing film scores. I don’t know if that means he counts as a musician or not.
A high school friend of mine is a professional jazz trumpeter. He plays gigs and gives lessons. My former cello teacher seems to make his living the same way, plus he also teaches at music camps and occasionally works with other (sometimes very famous) musicians e.g. doing arrangements of their compositions. I know a lot of other professional musicians and it’s usually something like that.
In hometown of New Orleans, it’s mainly a bunch of gigs, though tourism and the very large number of bars, clubs, and restaurants that feature live music means that there are more gigs available than in many other cities. Quoting an article about the situation on just one street in New Orleans:
I don’t have any personal experience with the professional music scene anywhere else.
My girlfriend teaches at local music schools. Mostly kids, some adult students (which is how we met). She plays at events occasionally as well.
She has “a job” in the sense that she works through one set of schools most of the time, but she’s technically a contractor. Making ends meet is difficult. On the flip side, she gets plenty of off-hours.
Most pros I know teach either in school or universities as well (although I do know a lot of them from their work as teachers which presumably skews things a bit). Even the guy who was good enough to play with Bowie and tour in Asia didn’t earn enough from that to retire off it (in his 60s).
I can give you some info on the Classical Vocalist scene.
Many earn livings the way described by others, but there are a few other options.
Some make a living entirely off Church music, singing at 3-4 Churches, doing sung mass, etc.
Chorus work at a B-Opera House or above provides the most steady (and often most high-paying) employment, though it’s hell on the voice. Many people who could have principal careers go to chorus because of the stability.
Most Opera houses work by hiring principals for a production, this can work, but a sudden illness or a cancellation can destroy your income. Most doing this have teaching on the side.
Cover(Understudy) work can be very lucrative. If you can show you’ve experience in, say, 5 roles, you can get paid for being ready to step on stage at any house that needs you at short notice. Some singers rarely sing a note on-stage and pull close to 6-figures.
Germany, and Opera Australia, and a few other houses still work by having a “Stable” of full time singers on 2-3 year contracts for principal roles. these are usually lower paid than guest artists.
Germany also has a few Repertory Houses left, which take people on for the long term. However you’ll sing La Boheme one night and Les Miserables the next, and be a backup dancer in Aladdin the next, so it’s hard work.
Naval Gazing continues its look at the elements that go into building a modern navy, this time examining the problems of a Coast Guard.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that last week was Jutland Week, and all 7 parts have now been posted:
Part 1 – Strategic Background
Part 2 – Preliminaries and Run to the South
Part 3 – Run to the North and Deployment
Part 4 – End of the Main Fleet Battle
Part 5 – The Night Action
Part 6 – Aftermath and Analysis
Part 7 – Alternate History
Bean 2 questions:
1. Would you happen to be aware of the Jutland animated video on youtube? It seems to say awfully similar things to what you’re saying. I couldn’t really detect any points of disagreement between them. Did you have any thoughts on it?
2. I’ll be visiting the Texas (the Ship) in a few months, anything i should know to ask or check out in advance?
I’m aware of the video, and recommend it at the end of part 1. The reason the two line up so well is that the narrator of the video is also the guy who wrote the book I used as my main source. Nicholas Jellicoe is a lovely man and the grandson of that Jellicoe.
Can’t really suggest much for visiting Texas, sadly. If you run into a guide, ask them to tell you about something. I mean in the generic sense. Always made my day when that happened.
Today, I’ve decided to do an Open Thread. Talk about whatever, so long as it’s not culture war.
What sort of Navy could win a war with the Culture?
… sorry, I’m bad at this.
I haven’t read any of the Culture books but from what I’ve absorbed from the internet, the Navy can improve its chances with good ship names!
There was a battleship in Use of Weapons, I remember that.
Are battleships useful for waging Culture Wars?
Only when culture war turns into civil war, and let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
But we are still allowed to feel morally superior to the landlubbers, right? Because when I signed up for this gig, I was promised moral superiority!
Well taking the question both more and less seriously, what about that “show of force”/impressing civilians stuff you’ve talked about in the past? I guess that’s more diplomacy than culture war, but it seems like it could be related depending on the specifics.
(Also as cassander points out, great for moral superiority/self-esteem boosts!)
In any environment where threatening someone with battleship levels of force is remotely plausible, then we’re already much closer to Actual War than to the Culture War we have today. Battleships are impressive, but only a few lunatics expect the other side to start shelling them any time soon.
Sorry, I was thinking of the “goodwill tours” type stuff. I can’t find it right now, but I think you have a post on what battleships are good for, and this is one of the non-war things you mentioned (I want to say this was a post comparing the usefulness of batteships vs. aircraft carriers but I could be mis-remembering). The more I’m thinking about it the less I think it maps to any bit of what we call the “culture war” though…
And on topic, I’m enjoying the discussion of WWI in the actual naval gazing open thread 🙂
I think the post in question was either “Reactivation” or “Bringing Back the Battleships”. In either case, it doesn’t quite work. Battleships are amazing at giving an impression of firepower, but very few people are making decisions based on relative firepower in the culture war.
How useful are naval forces during civil war, anyway?
And I don’t mean some BS war of secession where the country neatly divides into two contiguous sides.
A proper civil war, where brother turns against brother, and everything’s a bit of a mess.
I could easily see the maximum size of unit able to decide which side they’re on without being paralyzed by mutiny being smaller than the size of unit needed to operate effectively.
The Navy is going to be the more technocratic of the military services(*). Their people are less likely to have been conscripted from the Oppressed Masses, and more likely to be middle-class careerists. Less likely to have been tasked with busting oppressed-mass heads in the buildup to the war, or otherwise living and working in close proximity to the oppressed. Less likely to have been corrupted or infiltrated by the opposition and/or opportunistic criminals. And more likely to understand the importance of keeping established systems and structures working as they always have, because poorly-run ships tend to sink with catastrophically fatal results in a way that Army bases don’t.
So a battleship would primarily be useful as a place from which the government can pull groups of a hundred or so men with reasonable assurance that none of them will sabotage the mission. That they have only modest training with rifles and little in the way of heavy weapons, is secondary to that concern.
Note that the Mexican Navy has been playing a key role in that country’s conflict with not-quite-revolutionary drug cartels, in large part because the Army cannot be trusted with serious operations. Though, the longer they are tasked with that role, the more likely they will succumb to the Army’s various maladies.
* Air Force may not count as a military service for this purpose.
I suppose these are no longer the days of Kiel and Battleship Potemkin.
Embarrassed by the comments? Oh my my my my my, now that’s a First-World problem…
I took “embarassed by the comments” to mean, “afraid that my near-Stalinist social circle could use them as a pretense to engage in one of their regular purgings and/or struggle sessions.” People have said this explicitly in the past.
If the person wants to share articles but doesn’t feel safe doing so, then the no comments link is a perfect solution. I enjoy it here, but comments from randos (or even the regulars!) isn’t a critical part of the experience.
I guess that’s one theory. Here’s another: some comments seem likely to cause more harm than good to their readers, generate more heat than light, and people don’t want to spread those. Reasons comments can generate more heat than light are varied and well-documented, ranging from being confused nonsense to being hurtful.
Maybe a useful feature would be to flag comments as “100% politically correct”, and then have a link which would display only those comments.
So you could easily share an interesting article, where the only comment would be “Scott is a kulak and needs to die”, and if something goes wrong, you could simply pretend that you shared it because you liked the comment, not because of the article.
And if people are too lazy to flag, perhaps we could make dozen fake comments, which would be displayed instead of the real ones.
Villiam:
Surely you’d want a blue-tribe-acceptable comments button, and a red-tribe-acceptable comments button.
People are amazingly bad at modeling what’s politically correct to other tribes, so I don’t think this would work well.
@Nornagest: AFAIR, what the research actually shows is that conservatives have a pretty accurate model of liberal positions, while liberals’ model of what conservatives think is completely off.
Beware the Man of One Study, Unless That Man is Jonathan Haidt and the Study is Agreeable to Your Preconceptions
@albatross11
Nope, the red tribe is used to being ignored by the neutral media. 😛
More seriously:
I see the “tribes” on a scale (dare I say: “bell curve”?). There are hardcore blue people who throw a hissy fit whenever a white male has the audacity to express an opinion other than utter submission to the latest Twitter dogma. Their equivalent hardcore red tribe people would probably be some religious fanatics who throw a hissy fit whenever something goes against (their version of) Christian values. The latter are not going to read this blog; and thanks to the filter bubbles, most of the readers here probably do not have such person among their friends.
Then there are the 90% in the middle of the curve who can survive a disagreeing comment or two.
So we really only need one filter.
For a sec I read that as referring Reason’s (the libertarian magazine) comments, which would definitely be a true statement.
Or: “Russian comments can generate more heat than light”
I don’t think it requires a near Stalinist social circle.
One of the nice things about SSC is the range of views–as I like to put it, from anarcho-capitalist to communist, from atheist to Catholic. But that means that any long comment thread is likely to contain comments that will be seen as inappropriate by someone used to conversations with a much more restricted range.
Other groups might see some of the comments as inappropriate, but I think there’s only one of those groups that will turn on you for the mere association with a website with inappropriate comments.
You think very, very wrongfully.
@DeWitt:
That’s my guess as well, but can you offer examples–groups other than left wing social justice types that respond with hostility to someone posting a link that includes a comment thread with comments members of that group strongly disapprove of?
This is the only blog I comment on regularly, and I don’t have a sufficiently extensive involvement with FB to offer examples myself.
I’m going to just echo what Anonymous said. There’s a pretty small, but extremely vocal sliver of internet people who would judge and condemn a person in their social circle because they shared a link that contained what’s perceived to be some form of heresy in the comment sections. And frankly, it’s not ancaps, atheists, or Catholics.
And to be clear, it’s not even progressives or most people on the left (hence, “near-Stalinist”). But it’s a concern that’s be voiced here before (which is why comment-less links even exist), and I think it’s worth framing it honestly.
You are being very uncharitable. The comment section here has a very different tone than Scott’s articles. And dominated by certain ideologies.
I’m curious as to what ideologies you think dominate here. I honestly don’t know if someone would find it too liberal or too conservative.
I fine the comment section basically centrist and generally in line with Scott, but I’d be interested to hear Scott’s opinion of it since I think like twice in the past month he’s mentioned being embarrassed by comments.
Scott is an unusually reasonable person, so I wouldn’t expect all of the comments, from any political position, to live up to his standard.
I observe more libertarians here than in most parts of online I frequent, but they strike me as more reasonable, on average, than libertarians and conservatives I see elsewhere online. I think that is true of people on the left as well–part of why I enjoy this place.
How much of your “dominated by” reflects the absence of those ideologies—I’m guessing you are thinking of libertarians and/or alt-right/neo-reactionary types—from the places you usually frequent?
I like Viliam, but upthread he said:
This is the kind of thing a person says when they are in a filter bubble that disproportionately serves them examples of the Other Tribe being terrible & unreasonable. /r/shitredditsays is an example of such a filter bubble, and look how they turned out. Note Viliam’s statement about possible far-right ideologues lacks the same sarcastic edge.
I’d generally describe Scott’s views as being fairly similar to my own: Slightly left-of-center on economic issues, but with a right-libertarian distrust of government regulations, crony capitalism, and centralization of power; very socially liberal, but also opposed to the tribalism and extremism of identity politics, while still willing to acknowledge that the social justice advocates have some points about systematic discrimination; and staunchly libertarian on civil rights issues like freedom of speech and freedom of privacy.
The comments section, on the other hand, seems to be mostly populated by a mix of Trump-style right-populists (i.e. strongly nationalistic anti-establishment conservatives, sometimes but not always of an ethno-nationalist bent, who heavily emphasize their opposition to the perceived excesses of the social justice movement and egalitarian ideas in general), Rothbard-style paleo-libertarians (i.e. right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are very socially conservative and/or nationalistic, rejecting the social liberalism of mainstream Reason-style libertarianism or Tucker-style culturally progressive anarcho-capitalism), and leftists (from center-left liberals to mid-left social democrats to far-left Marxists) who emphatically reject the narratives, methods, and goals of SJW-style identity politics. The militant anti-SJW mentality seems to be the one common thread uniting the majority of people here, with a few notable exceptions. It’s certainly enough to make me feel like the odd one out at times, and I don’t particularly care for SJWs myself.
That said, the level of civility in this space is astonishing, and far higher than almost any other discussion board I’ve frequented.
the comments section here? Because I really can’t think of anyone who fits those descriptions. Maybe Deiseach for the former, but she’s not American, so it’s awkward fit at best.
I’d call Deiseach a paleocon if I called her anything: she’s a religious traditionalist but not a fundie, strong on law and order, sympathetic to existing social programs but cynical about utopian schemes, critical of identity politics, not particularly anti-establishment. It’s an unusual standpoint for this forum but not an unusual one in the wild.
I don’t think we have any prominent Trumpists. We do have a few refugees from the smoking ruins of old-school enn-arr-ecks, who might be mistaken for Trumpists by an incautious observer but whose thinking is really very different.
We have a few Trump fans, but I can count them on one hand.
“old school en ar ecks” heh… I remember those. Back in the heady days of, what, 2014?
That’s, like, six decades in Internet years.
@Randy M
The old days? Those weren’t the old days. The old days were arguing with voldemort himself at UR when he still got into it in the comment sections back in 2008!
@Nornagest
Doesn’t “paleocon” usually have a racial, dare I say, racist, angle? Deiseach has a streak of social conservatism, but it’s more of the “you dang kids” variety than anything else.
Everything in American politics has a racial angle.
@Nornagest
One side finds it very convenient to assume so, anyway. I really think the mainstream U.S. right just genuinely don’t care about race.
@toastengineer: I’d agree that the vast majority of pro-establishment Mitt Romney type conservatives don’t actually care about race one way or another, though many of them are at best ignorant of and at worst indifferent to the conditions facing racial minorities in this country. Very few of them are actually racist in any meaningful way, if only because racism is generally considered gauche among the upper classes nowadays.
But among the more firmly Red Tribe populist and nationalist conservatives that comprise the base of the Republican Party, there’s a very small minority of bona fide white supremacists and ethno-nationalists, as well as a significant minority of people with less extreme but still firmly racist views, and an even more significant minority of people with ambiguously racist or xenophobic views (e.g. “I don’t have anything against blacks, I just don’t like hood people,” “I’m okay with immigration, but I don’t want people coming here from backwards cultures”).
The paleoconservative movement is small enough, obscure enough, and diverse enough that it’s hard to really do any kind of analysis of it as a group. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s probably a good deal more racists among the paleoconservative crowd than among either the Mitt Romney crowd or the “God and guns” crowd, but not to a point where you could define paleoconservatism itself as an inherently racist movement, as dndnrsn implied.
@Nornagest
Of course, Deiseach is not American, so the American obsession with race is presumably something that she has an outside perspective on.
@LadyJane
“I don’t have anything against men, I just don’t like toxic masculinity.”
“I’m OK with living near poor people, but I don’t want people coming here who reject Social Justice.”
I’d argue that the blue tribe are also just people, who tend to have the same weaknesses as the red tribe.
I think it’s worth distinguishing that position from racial prejudice. The fact that a fellow American has ancestors some of whom were from sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t tell us much about him, much less information than we get as a result of routine interactions with him.
The fact that someone is from a very different culture implies a good deal more, so the attitude in your quote is defensible in ways in which racial prejudice is not–different cultures really are different.
Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” is routinely assumed, by people who are not familiar with Kipling, to be about race. In fact it’s pretty clearly about culture. The point of the poem is the obligation of the civilized to uplift the primitive, to convert them into civilized, which would be impossible if the difference was racial.
And of course, in his Roman stories, it’s the British who are the “natives.”
I am, at a tangent, curious as to what “Rothbard-style” implies. How do you distinguish that from other styles of libertarians?
@Nornagest
What I’m trying to say is: who’s the biggest paleocon name? Sam Francis? I don’t think Sam Francis and Deiseach have much in common about what they talk about.
Pat Buchanan seems to be the most famous qua paleocon (which admittedly isn’t necessarily the same thing as being the “biggest name”).
Pat Buchanan and Deiseach probably don’t have a great deal in common either. Deiseach’s hobby-horse seems to be short-sighted people with impulse-control issues who expect the world to accommodate their desires, even/especially when those desires change. I don’t know if I’ve once seen her complain about them dang furriners.
Outgroup vs fargroup; controversial vs boring.
The far right does not follow SSC. To be precise, by “far right” I mean mostly the religious right, because people like “neo reaction” are just internet trolls. (No, they didn’t elect Trump. All of their votes together are less than a rounding error.)
SSC does not discuss far right topics. As far as I know, Scott wrote exactly one article about Jesus, and the article was meant as a joke. On the other hand, the popular far left topics (the identity politics mostly) are discussed here. Then the far left reacts in their blogs. Then Scott reacts to them. Then they call Scott an entitled white male. — There is no analogical interaction with the actual far right.
Therefore wasting sarcasm on the far right would be about as meaningful as writing a thesis on whether 2+2 equals 4.
I guess who is far and who is a troll and who is a “psuedo-radical” is in the eye of the beholder, but some that come to mind when speaking of far-right, such as Free Northerner, Spandrel, Handel, Steve Sailer, or Nydwracau have either commented to referenced SSC. The latter two don’t post much here or elsewhere afaik, and only the first one I know is religious.
It seems like defining “far right” just amounts to deciding whether someone on the right is inside or outside the Overton window.
In terms of preferred policies, my guess is that Sailer is probably mostly a generic Republican, but with more desire to limit immigration and less excitement about our next war/invasion/bombing/kinetic humanitarian intervention.
Here are my current guesses:
Sarcasm is toxic to a productive conversation. The possibility that someone might read your sarcastic remark about them should make you less willing to make such remarks, not more.
There are some who would say that because you comment on SSC, you are too far to the right to be a reasonable person. The reason they think that is because they have emotionally salient examples of far-right folks like Richard Spencer, and they aren’t close enough to the right to realize we aren’t all Richard Spencer. I claim you are making the same mistake in reverse: There is a decent population of Ozy type people who are reasonable and concerned with SJ issues, but you have emotionally salient examples of unreasonable people concerned with SJ issues who are clouding your perception.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Sarcasm just makes everything worse.
@Reasoner
Villiam statement that this seems to be a response to, does not state that all SJ advocates are unreasonable.
Perhaps he merely means to argue that SJ has a very large proportion of people like that, which seems like a defensible statement (especially since SJ theory provides justifications for bad behavior).
Sarcasm and most kinds of verbal cleverness make it harder to figure out what you’re saying. If you’re discussing important things, it’s better to spend that verbal cleverness on making it easy to follow your point (especially when your point is unfamiliar or surrounded by emotional/moral landmines).
You’re making this needlessly partisan.
Think about how long it it took James Macdonald to get banned.
Or probably the best case to illustrate this is that of the holocaust denier who only got banned when someone found a thread where he was cackling about ‘redpilling the rubes’ and insulted scott personally. (Iirc Scott is jewish).
It’s obviously not only stalinist-adjacents who might want to take an extra small step to cut out the place where people are saying who knows what.
Extreme reluctance in some circles to challenge antisemitism, including holocaust denial, can sometimes be a very specific phenomenon, not necessarily evidence of a more general tolerance.
It’s interesting that both your examples of bad commenters on the right end in bans. And I don’t remember anyone in that holocaust denial thread actually agreeing with him.
I consider a banning policy that is much more lenient than I’m personally comfortable with to be a feature, not a bug.
I understand that this may sound like a partisan argument, but I’m trying to frame it as neutrally as I can: if you can’t share an internet article with your social circle because you’re afraid they will scour the comments for either wrongthink or just asshole trolls and use those comments to judge or possibly ostracize you, you have a shitty social circle. Maybe my guesses about what that social circle is like (based on personal experience) comes across as partisan, but I tried to not sweep up any broad groups in my assessment.
Nitpick: I’m pretty sure you mean James A Donald, not James MacDonald (who’s a science fiction writer/EMT with, as far as I know, fairly moderate political views).
I dunno man. Ive hit upn some pretty infantile comments here on SSC.
SSC comments are way above average in terms of quality. Yet they’re still a problem, apparently. Geesh, how high does the bar have to be? At a certain point one risks being exclusionary and snobbish in the quest for perfect discourse. It’s biased toward the brainy and blessed.
Given comment-less links can be to the benefit of both us and the linked party if something is being posted into an echo chamber.
How is it beneficial for the echo chamber?
Because they can get exposed to Scott’s idea which is expressed in terms that make it palatable to the audience (by definition, given circumstances). The comments may give the chamber the chance to ignore the idea that the cross-poster wants considered.
Everyone knows that you shouldn't read the comments, but the reason why you shouldn't read the comments on SlateStarCodex is a little different from the reason why you shouldn't read the comments on, say, YouTube.
The reason not to read (all) the comments is that doing so leaves you no time to do anything else.
Hear, hear.
I can’t claim to have read every comment, but to me the SSC comment section is an oasis of reason in a universe of sites filled with inflammatory, worthless, crap. I don’t even bother to scroll down into the comments of sites like LA Times or Washington Post much less Youtube. Reddit may be the other exception as long as you stay away from anything political. On SSC even comments I disagree with are at least well articulated and, to my eyes, respectful.
If the comments here are supposed to so terrible, I wonder what they think is a good comment section/forum.
+1
Do you use Facebook? There are a lot of groups that run on a very narrow range of opinions with administrators deleting everything that is even slightly off or (gasp! (sorry, couldn’t resist)) critical.
This is similar to the experience during a campaign event.
This is for self-affirmation, of course, not for discourse.
I would expect that forums get poisonous whenever the population grows to >1 monkeysphere. Past that point, good moderation becomes less and less optional.
I find the SSC comment section less bad than almost anywhere else public, but it’s still gone vastly downhill in the last few years. We have a variety of ideologies, which is nice, but it does seem like a majority of the content amounts to “people on $OTHER_SIDE are terrible.” We’re not much less mindkilled than anywhere else, we just manage to not all fail in the same direction.
It looks to me like what views or ideas seem offensive depends heavily on what you’re used to hearing, and whether the speakers have enough social status to get away with saying offensive-sounding things until they’ve normalized them.
As an example, we had some pretty mainstream voices in our society speaking in support of torturing prisoners in order to get information to fight the war on terror. By my values, that’s pretty damned offensive and horrible. But enough high-status people discussed it and treated it as an issue to be seriously considered that it became normalized.
More recently, we’ve seen Trump’s statements about banning Muslim immigration be described as offensive hate speech[1]. But *bombing* Muslims, drone-striking them, or invading their countries–that’s *never* offensive to talk about–indeed, after we bombed Syria over the use of chemical weapons, that’s when some of the pundit class started calling Trump “presidential.”
My best model of this is that the Overton window (the bounds of acceptable discussion–the stuff that isn’t heard as offensive or problematic in mainstream discussions) is not the result of any intelligent process of deciding what ideas are good/bad or harmful/helpful. Instead, it’s the result of unthinking political/economic/social processes, with lots of people pushing things one way or another, but nobody really in charge.
[1] As opposed to just a really bad policy.
I would have said a small minority.
I suggest an actual experiment. Go down a recent comment thread, for this and some other post, and see what fraction of the posts actually fit that pattern.
@albatross11
I think the emblematic thing is the way that David Frum, especially, has been embraced by some mainstream left-wingers. He is, according to the Atlantic’s website, a senior editor there; it’s one of the major mouthpieces for respectable left-of-centre liberalism in the US. I’ve seen various people I know, liberals all, praise his anti-Trump articles. David Frum probably has more Muslim blood on his hands than Trump does, given his role in propagandizing for a war that saw the peace bungled, leading to chaos.
The attitude of some people seems to be, sure, killing foreigners is OK, but let’s not be crude about it, and that killing someone while ostensibly trying to help them (often in a particularly halfassed manner, if it wasn’t a bogus pretext in the first place) is morally better than excluding them for bigoted reasons.
@albatross11
One of the worst things about the Trump era is having listen to people who have invented an imaginary Trump to replace the sordid reality of the man now occupying the white house. Trump didn’t just say that he wanted to ban Muslims from immigrating to the US, he suggested murdering the families of suspected terrorists, using methods of torture “beyond waterboarding”, and pillaging Arab countries of their natural resources.
You may wan’t an isolationist anti-immigration president, but what you’ve got is an advocate of the most brutal and naked kind of imperialism.
Assuming that David Frum DOES have the blood of thousands of people on his hands for advocating military intervention, does that mean he should be treated as beyond the pale when he writes on healthcare or gun control?
I want to say no, his writing should be judged on its own. On the other hand, if a mass shooter who had killed two dozen people just so happened to write really great articles on the costs & benefits of environmental regulation, I’m not sure I’d endorse them. Is it just cause Frum didn’t personally pull the trigger, only argued for doing so?
mdet:
I think the right way to approach this is not in a moral frame (you have the blood of thousands on your hands, therefore you must not be heard from again)–it’s in a rationalist frame (one of the biggest and most important policies you have argued strenuously for in your career was a godawful disaster, so we should keep that in mind when you propose another policy decision). Also, if you think he was unusually dishonest or illogical in making those arguments, that might lead you to discount his future arguments because you think he’s just not that good at predicting what’s going to happen if we follow some proposed course of action.
@DavidFriedman
I probably won’t actually do that. Partly because it would be boring and frustrating and work, but I think mostly because I suspect that you are right; I’m overestimating the level of toxicity.
On second reflection a weaker version might still hold, though. I have the subjective impression that a lot of large subthreads start from somebody doing the Thing, and others being unwilling to let it stand (albeit not always doing the same Thing themselves). I think my brain may be counting such threads as if every post was toxic instead of just the originator. What would you think of “A majority of comments have at least one ancestor exhibiting the behavior I described.”?
David Frum should be regarded as some who, at one time, was either willing to countenance moderately high numbers of casualties for what he perceived as long term gains to peace, or was optimistic to the point of foolhardy. That should definitely color your perception of any wisdom he has on, say, healthcare policy.
It shouldn’t put him into the same category as an actual murderer who enjoyed personally ending peoples lives. It is conceivable that the latter person could be less harmful in a position of great power, but as part of the social contract we agree to shun actual murders until and unless great contrition is shown, debts paid, etc.
hyperboloid:
I’m not denying that Trump has indeed made offensive and terrible statements. I’m specifically saying that the statements about wanting to ban Muslims from immigrating were not any more inherently offensive than the common ones where someone proposes some more bombing of Muslims to set them straight, but they were taken as much more offensive.
Trump’s support for torture, alas, is mainstream Republican policy at this point[1]. Though normally its advocates prefer euphemisms (“harsh interrogation”). Was it especially offensive that Trump was open about calling what he wanted done “torture” as opposed to “splashing a little water in their faces?”
Trump says horrible things pretty often. But somehow, his *saying* horrible things is more offensive than when we actually *do* horrible things. (And we’re probably fortunate that he’s pretty ineffective as a leader, so he hasn’t managed to do many horrible things thus far.)
[1] And as best I can tell, it is a bipartisan consensus that nobody above the rank of corporal will ever face any serious consequences for honest-to-God war crimes done in the War on Terror. Hell, you can even end up as a Berkeley Law School professor or a CIA director with that on your record.
Error:
I think the construction “All those X are bad because….” is not super common on SSC, but it’s jarring and memorable (in a bad way) when it appears and is applied to your beliefs or those of people you identify with.
@albatross11 & dndrsn
I wonder if you reserve the same level of disgust for the defenders of our adventures in Syria as you do with those who advocated the iraq war. The US is somewhat less complicit there, though only slightly, and that war has certainly gotten more people killed, without the upside of creating a democratic country in syria, and with what should have been the knowledge of hindsight. Or if you prefer a more direct comparison, the Obama administration’s replacement of CIA abductions with drone strikes. Because your comments smells a little of pearl clutching and selective outrage to me.
cassander:
The way it looks to me is that our invasions and occupations in the War on Terror have been pretty disastrous, overall. They’ve cost us a lot of money, killed a fair number of our people, maimed a lot more, and killed piles and piles of foreigners, of whom probably fewer than 100 had anything to do with 9/11.
They’ve been paired with half the country accepting torture as an acceptable policy for fighting our war, while the other half kinda-sorta opposes it as long as nobody important has to do any jail time[1]. Also with a policy of assassinating US citizens on the president’s say-so, alongside about a million other scary expansions of executive power. I don’t see a lot of evidence that this has made us any safer, even from terrorists. (We’re a lot less safe from potential power grabs from the executive branch or intelligence agencies now, which is a lot bigger long-term risk for remaining a free country.)
I don’t think intervening in Syria was our responsibility. Nor do I think it would have been a good idea–given how badly our other interventions have turned out, it’s hard to see why anyone would expect that one to have gone well. (Note that the Congress under Obama seemed to share my evaluation.) Our intervention in Libya amounted to a commercial telling everyone on our shit list that they’d better get nukes ASAP, because if they disarmed and made peace with us, we’d turn on them as soon as it became politically profitable to do so. We’re still running soldiers all over Africa, and I imagine we’ll try really hard to get into another war there[2].
My preference would be to see us back off on the aggressive foreign policy. This seems to be happening, to some extent, probably because the public is broadly kinda disillusioned with the constant wars we seem to fight for a decade or two at a time and never finish. I’m hoping that the next couple dozen times that politicians and pundits decide that it’s time to go off and invade and occupy (or bomb until their government collapses) a foreign country, there will be enough skepticism about it to keep us from sticking our dicks into the sausage grinder for another decade or two.
[1] My preference would be for everyone involved in the torture of captives to get a one-way flight to the Hague for trial.
[2] Note that in the classic style of outrage-reporting on Trump, the story when those special forces soldiers got killed in Niger wasn’t “What the hell are we doing getting soldiers killed in Niger?”, it was “Trump’s call to one of the war widows was insensitive because X.”
What the heck? I must have tripped the filter.
@hyperboloid
The families of suspected terrorists have been killed as “collateral damage” and so have people who weren’t terrorists but were in groups that were considered a little terrorist-y looking. Torture worse than waterboarding has happened. I don’t know whether US military involvement has actually increased US access to oil.
Is it worse to do these things while pretending you are not, or to say that doing them is good?
@mdet
My issue is that Frum is in part – in a small way – responsible for the refugee crisis that probably helped Trump get into office and certainly helped the populist and far right in Europe. Respectable mainstream left-wingers will approvingly say “look, that Frum says Trump is a bad man!” when Frum criticizes trump for being, essentially, crass. Creating refugees seems to be more morally acceptable than refusing to accept them. This is an odd moral line to draw: if you set fire to someone’s house (or in Frum’s case, say “get the gasoline and matches boys, in that house lives a bad man!”) I think you are a worse person than someone who won’t let the now-houseless people crash on the couch.
@cassander
What selective outrage? I’m talking about Frum specifically because he’s gotten kudos for trashing Trump. If you want me to express my opinion about Obama foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa, here it is: disastrous! I can also condemn the Clinton administration if you’d like: it’s a bit odd to see Madeleine Albright, who has more dead Iraqis on her conscience than Frum, condemn Trump for maybe possibly kinda-sorta being a teensy bit isolationist, and promote American interventionism, which has been, like I said, disastrous in recent years. It has taken the form of going in, breaking something, half-assing the job of fixing it, and then getting out because it is no longer domestically popular.
Do you mean by advocating for Iraq, or for actions since? Certainly sans Iraq invasion the middle east would be dramatically different, but I don’t see the connection being so strong. Economic inequality is as much or more a motivation for the refugees as Syria war. As I understand it, Quadaffi (and other dictators?) were keeping the flow of migrants out of Europe until the west decided the lesson in Iraq was you just have to have your wars without boots on the ground, not that you can’t have them.
@albatross11
I’d contend that lumping all the interventions together like this is a dramatic oversimplification of the events in question that obscures important distinctions and turns a factual assertion into a defacto moral one.
Again as above. A lot of different things have gotten lumped together under the rubric of torture, many of which don’t belong there, imho.
Eh, I suspect that my list of dangerous executive power grabs is very different from yours but I don’t think the point is unreasonable.
We DID intervene in the syrian civil war. And we pushed our allies to intervene even more than we did.
Have you met us? We’re not going to stop, there is too much of the crusader instinct in American culture. The important thing is to try to make sure we do it better, because for damn sure we’re going to keep doing it.
I think the latter is clearly worse. The hypocrite erodes the norm less than the person that outright attacks it. In fact, in some cases the hypocrite strengthens the norm.
@Randy M
First, that “lesson” would not have been “learned” without a war in Iraq. The lesson that should have been learned was that removing a nasty dictator and creating a power vacuum doesn’t lead to everyone turning into liberal democrats and embracing the coming of the Kingdom of God Global Capitalism. Oh well. In the case of North Africa, removing the dictators there removed a big obstacle to both asylum seekers and economic migrants, both from North Africa and the rest of Africa, trying to get across the Mediterranean (by irregular means, of course).
Second, the mess in Iraq, Syria, etc caused by American intervention followed by bungled reconstruction (Syria wasn’t on Bush’s watch, but without Iraq, probably not Syria) created a flow of asylum claimants. Not, as you note, the majority of asylum claimants – and isn’t it still the case that most Syrian refugees are languishing in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, not trying to get into Europe? Without that flow of asylum claimants, some European countries would not have made decisions/pronouncements that caused asylum seekers (with claims of varying chances of getting accepted) and economic migrants (often passing themselves off as refugees) to think that Germany or wherever would take in everyone who showed up, give them apartments, etc (when in fact, the German government, among others, is now kind of desperate to get people with little no chance of getting asylum for whom there are not jobs to leave, but simultaneously cannot force them to leave, because the optics of German police/soldiers forcing civilians into boxcars or whatever are kind of terrible).
And then you’ve got populist and far right parties making hay off this. Even in Canada – where we hardly have boats of people showing up without documents; since Trump’s election there’s been people with asylum in the US (largely Haitians) afraid it will be taken away crossing the border, but nowhere near what Europe has seen; most refugees here are vetted overseas and the remainder are usually people who get here legally as tourists or students then claim asylum – there are all sorts of wild beliefs about a supposed threat posed by refugees, about how much government money they get, about how they are selected, etc etc.
David Frum played a small part in this whole mess. He was just doing his job, and if he hadn’t done it someone else would have, but there’s precedent that isn’t a legal defence.
@Brad
The hypocrite might erode the norm while creating a new norm of pretending that you are still upholding the norm. With the outspoken boor at least you know what reality is.
I’m just saying that the link from Frum to migrant waves and European reaction to those is pretty tenuous in causality (unless you are thinking of something beside the destabilization of Iraq and his somewhat minor role in it); there were many many potential refugees with or without the invasion; we aren’t talking about the population of impoverished Iraqis, but rather most of the population of Africa.
Without an invasion of Iraq, we may have continued to abide the dictators, or we might have intervened in Libya or Syria instead at some point over the last decades; if we did even after Iraq left us with high war weariness, why wouldn’t otherwise? It’s not like the Presidents since or elsewhere who weren’t Bush (or Blair, etc.) have been terribly restrained.
And even if there had been no invasions, eventually the waves of humans seeking to improve their lives would have crashed on Europe’s shores and the culture clashes seeing now would be no less for lacking the ravages of war as excuse or the culpability of interventions as mitigation. Borders are semi-permeable membranes, and there is a very high diffusion coefficient that technology magnifies.
It doesn’t mean Frum has good ideas, of course.
@dndrsn
I think this claim is so hard to sustain that it verges on the ridiculous. The proximate cause of the Syrian civil war was the arab spring, something that involved most countries in the middle east in varying degrees. The claim that invading Iraq in 2003 caused political unrest in a dozen or so countries in 2011 is rather extraordinary, and requires extraordinary evidence. Frankly, if anything, it gives credence to the wildest beliefs of the neo-cons, some of whom were convinced that a democratic Iraq would be an example to the rest of the arab world. It is a claim that has only been made in hindsight. Almost no one*, and certainly no one on the left, made the claim that the Iraq war caused the arab spring until it went badly and they could use it as a as a way to tar the bush administration with the failure of subsequent policy choices.
* IIRC, a few of those neocons did make the claim in the early stages of the Spring, but they were widely derided.
Are you claiming that sometimes hypocrites strengthen the norm because they might still punish others for violating it? Or are you claiming that hypocrisy itself can strengthen the norm?
Version 1 of your claim is defensible. On the other hand, hypocrisy at high levels can be more damaging than flagrant disregard. It really depends on the norm being violated, how strong it is, and on the surrounding groups. Flagrant disregard for very strong norms can be crushed and is usually not very dangerous, whereas hypocrisy regarding strong norms can push them towards being weaker norms. On the other hand, flagrant disregard for weaker norms can rapidly destroy them whereas hypocrisy probably leaves them intact.
Without American intervention in Iraq and subsequent bungled reconstruction, there wouldn’t be refugees from Iraq; I think there is a link between Iraq and Syria (see below) and US attempts to aid rebels in Syria helped make the situation there worse. Without those legitimate refugee claimants, there wouldn’t have been the situation of more marginal asylum claimants and economic refugees interpreting actions/statements of some European governments to mean that Germany or wherever was now open to anyone who showed up.
@cassander
You don’t see a link between Islamist radical insurgency in Iraq and elsewhere? They got a chance to build networks and taste some powder in the Iraqi insurgency.
EDIT: In both cases, I’m not saying Frum is the devil, or whatever. I’m saying that American intervention has been disastrous over the last 15 years, and Frum played his part in propagandizing for the first leg of it.
On hypocrisy:
People breaking a rule while paying lip service to it creates a situation of incomplete information that may cause more people to break it than is the case otherwise, keeps people getting into situations from making educated decisions, etc.
In the case of, say, concluding that the best way to take out some evil terrorist bad guy is to blow him up with his entire family while they’re having brunch, the president or whoever coming out and saying “we have made the decision to kill this guy, his wife, his sons, his daughters, his servants, and their dog” is probably going to be making the decision differently than if they define “combatant” so his sons are combatants, the servants are combatants, the dog was a guard dog, and then massage down the number of women killed, and if that gets out, then, so sad, a tragic accident, did not know they were there, oh well, these things happen.
If you can pretend to others, and to yourself, that a bad thing was an ugly but necessary thing, or an ugly but necessary thing was a good thing, you are more likely to do that thing.
@dndnrsn
Direct links are few and tenuous, and where they do exist, I think you’ve reversed the causation. It wasn’t that Iraq gave these people a love of insurgency, but that insurgencies attract particular sorts of people, especially when they’re being funded by outside players, which was happening from very early on in Syria.
@cassander
Softball players might lead to softball leagues, but you’re going to find more players when a softball league gets founded, and they’re going to be better players if it’s a bigger league, on average. Sure, if nobody cares about softball, there won’t be a league in the first place. The insurgency in Iraq was a proof of concept, along with various others, going back at least to the Soviet-Afghan war.
@dndrsn
Sure, but playing softball doesn’t get large numbers of players killed every season.
It wasn’t proof of concept, they lost, badly. It took a while, but they lost. When syria started up, it was two or three years later, in a different country for different reasons, largely by different people, and the survivors eventually joining back in. I think the most you can say is that the Syrian insurgency might have been made a bit more efficacious thanks to Iraq, but that effect pales in comparison to the billions of dollars of aid that came in with the blessing of the US.
It amazes me that someone would blame the US for the Syrian Civil War. It just goes to show that no matter what the US does, it will be blamed for all the worlds problems. The war wasn’t even started by Islamist militants. It was initiated by defecting military officers in response to protests which came about from events in Tunisia. America has very little to do with any of that.
Young men seem, in general, relatively willing to go to war given the chance of getting killed or maimed – which is hardly a secret. Especially if they believe they are fighting for a good cause.
They lost, but they gave the US a bloody nose – when you consider what the US gameplan and expectations were going in, I hardly think you can say the US had a strong victory. Regardless, I think we can agree that US interventionism in the region has been disastrous over the last 15 years. Frum played his part in the first leg of that.
@Wrong Species
Had the US gone all-in supporting the rebels, or had the US stayed entirely hands off (I doubt they would have supported Assad) things would not have dragged on as they did. Are we going to pretend the US didn’t support rebels?
I think this understates the role played by Iraqi insurgents in Syria: I am far from an expert on this stuff, but I believe it is pretty well-accepted that ISIS and the Nusra Front, two important groups of insurgents in Syria, were founded by a mix of ex-Baathists and jihadists, who met in American detention in Iraq; presumably without the invasion, there would have been no opportunity for these people to meet in such a fashion, and the Baathists in particular would be…I don’t know what they’d be doing, but something other than spearheading the ISIS invasion of Syria.
While this is compatible with your formulation, in that ISIS only came to Syria a year or so after the original protests, I think your version implies only a very loose connection between jihadist groups in Syria and those in Iraq, which I am not sure is true.
EDIT to say that I accidentally clicked “Report” instead of “Reply” when trying to respond to Cassander, so apologies for that.
@Wrong Species says:
This is true, but we did pour gasoline all over that fire by aiding the rebels and encouraging our allies to do the same
@dndnrsn says:
I agree completely, which is precisely why I think that arguing that iraq gave these young men a taste for warfare is silly. What it did is get a lot of people with a taste for war killed.
The fight in syria had little do with the US for almost 4 years. Hell, we were supporting the insurgents there! They were de-facto allied with the US!
Again, unless you’re planning on condemning basically everyone who supported anything we did in the foreign policy arena over the last 15 years, this reeks of special pleading or isolated demands for rigor.
@Eugene Dawn says:
They might be spearheading an organization with a different name, but they’d be doing pretty much what they are now. The connections between the groups you mention are indeed lose. Such is the nature of terrorist cells.
Pretty sure the report button is still broken
Perhaps, but we’re talking about alleged American responsibility for the Syrian Civil War. Which started in either March or July of 2011, depending on how you define “war”. The Nusra front didn’t exist as even a name until January 2012, and ISIS didn’t come about until April 2013.
No doubt some of the militants who would later comprise those organizations, drifted over the border to cause trouble in sparsely-populated Eastern Syria as soon as the Civil War gave them the opportunity. But the first 20,000 or so people to die in that conflict, were almost all Syrians killed by other Syrians for purely Syrian reasons. The same will almost certainly be true of the last 20,000.
This wasn’t ISIS’s war, and it wasn’t America’s war. Those players just came to meddle for a time.
@cassander
You make a war, you attract people, though. Some people who wouldn’t have a taste for war pick it up. Some people end up in it even if they don’t have a taste. Some people who might want war don’t have a war to fight in so they get in smaller kinds of trouble, or maybe even no trouble at all.
I thought we were referring to the Iraqi insurgency?
That’s pretty close to what I’m doing, with regard to US intervention in the Middle East and North Africa. The Iraq War might have worked out if there had been a hardcore commitment on the part of the leadership to figuring out how to do the job right, then doing that the first time. Instead, the only people who really look like they did their job well were the military, and that’s relative – a lot of the time they were being asked to do stuff they weren’t meant for (can’t be tooled up to fight a conventional war and do especially hardcore policing at the same time; something something can’t bend two bows). A lot of decisions were made for domestic politics reasons, and that’s a great way to make bad foreign policy/military decisions. The neocons who led the way were either deluded, deluding themselves, or lying – you go into a country with a major sectarian split, create a power vacuum, you better have a damn good plan for how to fix it.
It’s definitely not an isolated demand for rigour; I’ve already said this isn’t just about Frum or Bush. The Obama administration arguably managed to make the mess they were handed worse. They got involved elsewhere in ways that went bad – often doing the worst-of-both-worlds compromise (you see two guys fighting, either you stay out, or you clobber one; you don’t sorta jab a little and yell a few insults to one or the other side). And then of course there’s what Albright said:
I can’t think of a word for that other than “messianic” – American involvement in the Middle East and North Africa clearly show that if the US sees further than other countries into the future, then nobody else must be able to see at all.
@John Schilling @Cassander
Yes, I agree that the Syrian Civil War is more independent of America and the Iraq War than not; I certainly don’t want to endorse dndnrsn’s apparent argument that “without Iraq, probably not Syria”. However, he does say that there is ‘a link between Islamist radical insurgency in Iraq and elsewhere”, and I think this is supportable, and Cassander’s dismissal that “Direct links are few and tenuous” is unconvincing.
Lastly, I think Cassander’s response to my comment, that “The connections between the groups you mention are indeed lose. Such is the nature of terrorist cells” misses the point: Haji Bakr would not be a terrorist absent the invasion of Iraq. He would be an Iraqi Army Colonel still, not radicalized by time in an American jail. The fact that the ISIS invasion of Syria was undertaken by someone with a military and intelligence background, which presumably had some role in its success, owes at least in part to the invasion.
In the case of norms against torture, I think the argument would be that by upholding the norm in public while quietly having your guys apply the electrodes to the bad guys’ tender bits in a dark room somewhere, you at least are leaving the public norm intact. And in practice, if the whole thing had been kept hushed up, at least we wouldn’t have support for torturing prisoners as a mainstream political position.
dndnsrn:
Do you have a citation or something for the claim that without US support for rebel groups, the Syrian civil war would have been over a lot more quickly? I’m definitely not an expert here, but that sounds like a pretty strong claim.
@albatross11
Regarding torture, it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s a public norm against torture if torture is happening. The purpose of norms is to cause things to happen or keep them from happening, isn’t it?
Regarding the Syrian civil war, doesn’t it stand to reason that supporting the weaker side, or one side in a case where they are evenly matched, will prolong a conflict? If the goal was to make the conflict over as quickly as possible – and given that longer wars tend to be nastier, I think this is the humanitarian goal – they should have either offered overwhelming assistance to the rebels, or did nothing.
@albatross11 says:
It’s not just US support, but the support of most of the gulf countries as well. Maybe Syria would have fallen apart just as badly anyway, but I find that very unlikely. Also, external support and sources of funds tend to make rebellions much more murderous than those that have more grass roots support, which in turn tends to make government forces ramp up the violence as well.
@dndrsn
Your claim, as I understand it, was that the fighting in Iraq contributed to the fighting in syria as a proof of concept that you could bloody the US’ nose through insurgency and by giving a bunch of people taste for/experience with fighting. I think the latter effect is negligible and the former claim works against your case because the syrian insurgency wasn’t against the US. Did I get you wrong?
There absolutely was such a commitment. They got it wrong, at first, but then radically re-tooled what they were doing and managed to put things back together. The Bush administration took enormous risks in 2006. Bush fired most of his top defense team, generals and civilians, and brought in new ones with a very different new strategy and much greater investment. They did exactly what you claim you wanted them to do when it would have been a lot easier to pull out.
Domestic politics limits foreign policy always and everywhere. But frankly, I see less of that limit in the bush administration than I do in most US administrations. This is due largely to circumstance, they could have tried pretty much anything after 9/11 and people would have gone along with it, but the bush administration also made some hard choices that ran counter to conventional wisdom and popularity in 2006.
their entire plan was to avoid creating a power vacuum. They failed, but they had the sense to realize they were failed and change course, which frankly is more than can be said of most administrations.
I wouldn’t say that we think we see further, but that we believe our truths to be self evident goods and implicitly assume that the only reasons people disagree with us are stupidity or evil. We are definitely messianic, and we’re not going to change, which is why I think trying to make us better at crusading is a more valuable pursuit then trying to prevent crusades.
My complaint about Frum isn’t his foreign policy views, about which I know little. It’s that he makes confident economic arguments based on entirely fictional historical facts.
If he is as bad on foreign policy as on economics, it wouldn’t be surprising for his policy advice to have negative consequences.
cassander:
I’ll agree that torture can be slippery to define, but I think there’s a pretty easy shortcut: If a high-ranking government official erases the videotapes of it despite the possibility that this will get someone in trouble for destruction of evidence, that’s a pretty good indication that in their judgment, what was being done was probably illegal. If the intelligence community strongly argues that photos of your treatment of prisoners must not be released because they’ll be effective jihadi recruitment techniques, similarly, this is pretty good evidence that it’s torture.
Of course, the simplest way to think about it is to imagine exactly the same things we did, done to American citizens by the Iranian government to get information. (Say, waterboarding. Or inducing hypothermia by chaining them in cold rooms and dumping cold water on them. Or just chaining them in painful standing positions for hours on end, and occasionally slapping them around and slamming them into walls to keep their attention. Or…) Would we consider that torture? (Spoiler Alert: Yes, we would. And the New York Times would have no trouble at all deciding what to call it. It’s only necessary to come up with a euphemism when it’s Americans doing it.)
@cassander
In the former case, not just experience fighting for the guys on the ground, but building of networks, experience for organizers, that sort of thing. In the latter case, it probably fed the “guerrilla mystique” in general – not necessarily giving the US a bloody nose, but giving the power-that-is a bloody nose, and were a lot of the Arab Spring uprisings not predicated on the hope that they could get the US to at least send some air support?
Their plan to avoid problems from the power vacuum was evidently insufficient, given that it didn’t work. They changed course, and the way they started doing things differently probably did work, but it didn’t change that they screwed up at the beginning. Part of the reason was wanting to believe it could be done cheaply – nobody goes to war saying “this is going to be really expensive and hard!” – and part of the reason was wanting to avoid being seen as an imperial power.
I think also that you’re pattern-matching me to someone who loves him some Obama and thinks Bush (I want to throw in one of the old mocking nicknames, but don’t know what’s filtered) was the devil. I’m not a fan of either of their foreign policies.
Yeah, maybe, but getting better at crusading probably means fewer crusades. Doing a crusade right requires a big commitment. You can’t make many of those. Trying to do a big-commitment job with a small commitment makes nothing but trouble.
The US didn’t send any arms until 2013, long after the war had started. Syria also wasn’t 1980’s Afghanistan. The effort to arm rebels was half-hearted at best and never even attempted to overthrow Al-Assad. Hundreds of thousands of people would be dead even without the US sending in small arms and food to a limited group of rebels.
If they weren’t trying to overthrow Assad, then what’s the point of sending arms? To make trouble for Putin at the cost of prolonging a war by a little bit, or what?
Without meaning to endorse it (I don’t know enough to have a considered opinion), I have heard the claim that the US decision to arm the rebels is what prompted Russia to get involved directly, which may have made the fighting worse. As I say, I don’t endorse the argument, and anyway, presumably Russia bears its own responsibility for getting involved.
@dndnrsn
The idea was to force Assad in to negotiations with the rebels. They couldn’t even achieve that limited goal.
@Eugene
Those probably aren’t connected. The US’ half-hearted attempts to arm the rebels was on the decline by the time Russia started airstrikes.
@dndnrsn says:
Those most of networks got crushed and many of those organizers got killed. I think it’s far from obvious that the iraqi experience was a net positive for syrians years later.
The US did send air support fairly early in Libya, so it’s hard to disentangle those effects.
I realize that’s not your intellectual position, but you do seem to feel more heated about the bush administration than the obama. I don’t seem to see the same level of invective of the Samantha Power responsibility to protect crowd as I see for David Frum and the neocons, but maybe that’s as much my biased sensitivities.
I agree, and part of what I want to do is built the bureaucratic systems that are capable of and thus inclined to make them big, effective efforts. But if that’s what we want, I don’t think we get there by condemning everything we’ve done in the last 15 years as badly motivated and totally pointless. More expensive than it should have been, sure, but there’s a world of difference between Iraq and Libya.
Honestly I think that a huge part of it was giving into domestic political pressure to do something.
@Wrong Species
the US didn’t send weapons right away, but we encouraged the saudis to do so pretty quickly, and they didn’t even have the pretense of arming only he “moderate” rebels.
@cassander
Well, it obviously wasn’t a net positive (I know what you’re trying to say). In general, I’m really surprised at the decision-making regarding everything post-Iraq, that the lesson that vacuums are hard to fill well wasn’t learned.
Frum came up in light of albatross11’s post earlier – that shooting missiles at groups of Muslims that look maybe terroristy from high up in the sky is somehow more palatable than banning Muslim immigration. And that’s weird.
R2P is a bad doctrine because the Right To Protect is not accompanied by a Responsibility To Follow Through.
I maybe feel a bit more heated about the Bush administration because the earliest I was aware of politics beyond what my parents were saying was getting really disillusioned by a lot of the reasoning around Iraq. The rhetoric of “if you don’t support this particular bellicose solution, you don’t want to solve the problem at all, and in fact are pro-problem” really turns me off. Now I see it all over the place.
I don’t know even about badly motivated or pointless. The Iraq War could have turned out well, or at least better. I’m not even a rabid anti-interventionist. But “no intervention” is a lot more likely to happen than “good intervention” so…
@dndrsn
For any given intervention, maybe. But we will intervene somewhere eventually. If we learned anything from the obama administration it should be how hard it is for the US to do nothing, because they were quite temperamentally inclined against military intervention, and still did a lot of it. Thus, I’d think fighting the battle over doing it well will produce better results in the long run than the battle of should we or shouldn’t we.
In fairness – and I want to make it very clear that I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here, and that I absolutely do not actually endorse this line of thinking – an argument can be made that it’s morally preferable to commit acts of war for the sake of pragmatic goals like resource acquisition and geopolitical influence than out of a belief that the other side is inherently inferior/evil and deserves to be wiped out. After all, the government apparently seems to believe that it’s worse to threaten, beat, or kill someone out of racial animus than out of greed, which is why hate crimes are punished more harshly than financially-motivated crimes; it’s the same principle, just scaled up to the global level. A profit-motivated war is also a lot less likely to lead to outright genocide than a racial or religious war, even if the process of conquest and occupation still results in massive casualties. It’s also a lot less likely to lead to discrimination against people of the targeted racial/religious group living within the invaders’ country. In all likelihood, it’s that last one that’s at the forefront of most American liberals’ minds.
It seems like you are arguing against a strawman of genocidal war, but that’s not really on the table, is it?
War to wipe out the other side is not equivalent to “excluding them for bigoted reasons.” It isn’t.
@Cassander
It’s quite a stretch to blame the Americans for something they didn’t do, and something that was going to be done whether they suggested it or not. And I’m skeptical about the premise of your question. Obama wasn’t exactly buddy-buddy with the Saudis. Did he really try that hard to get them supply arms? And if so, was there really any arm twisting involved?
Randy M:
How about blowing up a few hundred Muslims and destabilizing a country for domestic political reasons? That seems at least as bad as bigotry in your immigration policies.
cassander:
An interventionist foreign policy isn’t something imposed on us by God. We can *decide* not to intervene in the next several kerfluffles. We can decide that civil wars in foreign countries aren’t really things we want to intervene in, because that seems to usually work out badly for us. We can decide that we don’t want to occupy some godawful place for a decade or two trying to do nation building, since we seem to either end up unable to pull out without causing a collapse (Afghanistan) or pulling out and watching things go to hell (Iraq).
So my vote is that we decide *not* to intervene, by default, in civil wars, that we decide *not* to invade and occupy and set-to-rights any foreign countries unless there is genuinely no alternative, etc. I’d even like the president to routinely ask Congress for an actual declaration of war before embarking on some multi-year commitment. This is something we can do. The president just refrains from ordering the military to bomb, missile, invade, or occupy other countries.
@albatross11
I think we’re going in circles? You already made that point and I was supporting it.
@cassander
Sure, intervention’s gonna happen. Sometimes it’s even a good idea. But one should always go in with honesty to themselves and the voting public, saying “this is gonna be hard, probably harder than we think, maybe a lot harder than we think.” I can’t think of very many cases of “this is gonna be easy-peasy” that went well that didn’t involve a grotesquely outmatched opponent and favourable circumstances. (In war in general, not just intervention)
@Wrong Species says:
I don’t think he had to try all that hard, but there was definitely a concerted effort to get them to do dirty work for us. And had we tried to restrain them, we could have achieved something.
albatross11 says:
We could, but we won’t. God doesn’t impose our foreign policy on us, but our culture does.
You can decide that all you want, but there are 320 million other americans, most of whom believe that democracy is Good, that dictators are Bad, and that if we go to town on the dictators, democracy will break out. We’ve been going for it about once a decade for a long time now, I don’t think we’re going to stop any time soon.
I’m not sure I’ll have time today for much back and forth, but I read the responses to my last post and I think I may have jumped in and taken a position I didn’t mean to.
When comparing actual torture, warmongering, extrajudicial killings and so on to talking about those things the former is always going to be worse. I think there’s any interesting conversation to be had if you hold conduct constant and look at hypocrisy vs open defiance but that’s not the one that matches the situation at hand. (So far as we know?)
If a high-ranking government official erases the videotapes of it despite the possibility that this will get someone in trouble for destruction of evidence, that’s a pretty good indication that in their judgment, what was being done was probably illegal.No, it’s a good indication that what they did looks bad on the evening news, which isn’t the same thing.
@Brad
I think there’s a new OT later today; I might start a thread and @ you in it. In general, I think I have an overactive emotional response to hypocrisy. Intellectually, though, I think it is dangerous, because it leads people to think problems are fixed, things are getting better, things aren’t getting worse, etc, when they’re not fixed, when they’re not getting better, when they’re getting worse.
A norm that survives but only for lip service to be paid to it isn’t really a norm. Or, it’s a norm that’s only selectively enforced, which is also bad.
jiro:
Let’s grant your premise that she had those videotapes deleted because she was worried about the domestic political consequences of showing them on the evening news. Now, maybe you can argue that while the treatment of our captives was so horrible it would have shocked the conscience of the American people and caused some huge political backlash against the CIA enhanced interrogation program, there was some chance that a judge and jury wouldn’t have convicted anyone because of some ambiguity on whether some specific kinds of mistreatment of captives were torture or not.
But if the footage was so bad that seeing video of these things being done to alleged terrorists was going to so shock the conscience that it would cause a massive public backlash against the program and the CIA, then it almost certainly must have met the plain-language definition of torture[1].
Anyway, this whole line of argument is really discouraging to me. Are there people actually arguing that water torture (the same techniques used by the Khmer Rouge and the Imperial Japanese Army and the Spanish Inquisition) somehow isn’t really torture? Or induced hypothermia? Or even beating people up (oh, sorry, “wall slamming and attention slaps”?)
I don’t mean to be uncharitable here, but I don’t believe that you or any other advocates of this position would keep the same definitions, if it were (say) Iran doing this to American captured soldiers. Nor do I think there would be a single US major media source who had any trouble calling these techniques torture in that case. This is a funny variant of the isolated demand for rigor–the isolated demand for lack-of-rigor. When it’s done to us, any old common definition of torture will do; when we do it to them, there’s a lot of nuance and gray areas and, well, whose to say, really, if a few mock executions, threats to rape your kids, or chaining you naked in a cold room soaking wet for a few hours is really crossing a line?
A conservative radio host said it wasn’t torture, but he agreed to undergo waterboarding. He changed his mind.
Comment sections can serve as a reality check when writers are just knee-jerking their agendas, or going through the motions to fill space and meet a deadline.
Scott A is pretty even-handed as well as informative, and his readership reflects that. Though sometimes I’d warn against operating heavy machinery while reading the comment section — drowsiness may occur.
Yeah i love the comments here. People who hold all kinds of different positions about everything actually communicate, and think. Of course not always, but anything over 0% is a freaking miracle.
+1
I mostly lurk because anything I ever think to say has either been said or shortly will be said by someone with greater clarity and depth than I could have managed. This is true no matter what position I happen to take.
At the risk of being uncharitable, the average person’s response to hearing something they find morally outrageous is to throw a tantrum, whereas here you’re treated to extensive (often very dry) descriptions of the errors someone is mistaking. In SSC jargon pretty much everyone here is a mistake theorist. I believe any objections to the comments stem from others being conflict theorists or not realizing mistake theorists even exist.
I don’t have the intellectual chops to do much more than lurk and occasionally provide an anecdote. I keep coming back because it’s refreshing to see intelligent debate that doesn’t rapidly devolve into ad hominems.
Not that I’m going to be using it, but sharing blog links is a pretty ‘first world’ activity so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, how harsh can your circumstances be if you’re in the habit of throwing out “my my my my mys…” to smugly provoke people?
Doesn’t seem like a very safe habit.
Not a habit, actually the first time in my life I’ve ever used or typed that phrase. Yes it was smug, but it just seemed to me that if someone is “embarrassed” by the SSC comment section they are too very easily embarrassed. I was surprised to see Scott mention this as an issue. So I hoped to provoke discussion but not provoke anybody in particular.
My feeling about comments in general is that if the shoe doesn’t fit, just don’t wear it.
I’m wondering if I’m Doing It Wrong.
I see a new post on SSC, log in, read it, and check the comments. It says there are “MMM comments since 1969-12-31 17:00”. I read through them (okay, sometimes I skim), sometimes add a few of my own, and then, time permitting, go back to my life.
The next day I log in again. It says there are “NN comments since “, so I start stepping through the results of a search for tilde-new-tilde.
What I see is a bunch of new comments. But there will usually also be a bunch that I read yesterday, and often I will notice nearby on the page comments not marked with tilde-new-tilde that seem interesting but that I’m pretty sure I didn’t see yesterday.
Does this match the experience of other people? Is there a workaround?
I haven’t gone to the trouble of setting up a little scratchpad near my computer to record the actual time that I last read SSC and entering that by hand in the “comments since” box: I don’t want to cater to my FOMO to that extent. But it does seem odd to me that in the same session I will see both false negatives and false positives. I suppose the false negatives might be comments that were displayed yesterday but that just didn’t register because I was skimming too hard, but since it’s sometimes whole long subthreads it doesn’t seem very likely.
Any thoughts?
You can click the ‘[+]’ next to the “_ comments since,” it will drop down a list of usernames and date/time pairs; clicking these entries brings you to that new comment.
Dunno about the accuracy issues; haven’t seen anything like that.
I sometimes check SSC on multiple different devices. The “new” comments are new since I last opened SSC on that device, so when I switch device I see a load of “new” comments that I’ve already read. From your comment it sounds like this isn’t what’s happening to you. Oh, and sometimes SSC logs me out and that makes them all “new” again.
As for messages that aren’t marked new that I haven’t seen, that happens too. Sometimes when I’ve left a tab open and it refreshes.
I’ve never had both problems in a single session. There’s so many comments, though, that my best guess would be that the ones that don’t say “new” but do look new are just caused by your skimming.
Note that the last time you visited the page is recorded separately based on whether you visited it at http:// or https://
Also, while it seems to be fine today, in the past server time has been about 20 minutes off of Pacific Time.
Is that the same as whether I read it logged on or not? I’ve certainly seen that.
I have fresh data. Yesterday I read IN SEARCH OF MISSING US SUICIDES, and saw, for example, Lillian’s comment about becoming homicidal on SSRI’s. It is dated June 2, two days ago. This morning I see that it is still marked as tilde-new-tilde, and the date box says
So I guess the problem is that something is keeping that date from getting updated when I leave the page, or when I reopen the page.
Maybe it’s because I usually open a tab for each of the last few entries and then read them? Seems unlikely.
Anyway, I’ll quite harping on his, unless the smart guys who have programmed our otherwise very nice commenting system have other things I could try in order to help diagnose it. It just seemed like a nice opportunity when I saw how early I had stumbled onto an open thread.
As I understand it, the comment system is vanilla wordpress. The ‘xx comments since’ box and new comment highlighting is done after the page with some custom Javascript. If you can figure out some reproducible steps to trigger the bug, it’s possible a friendly Javascript coder on the site could submit a pull request. Though, here’s what I expect is happening:
The site remembers last visits differently based on if you visit the site over http vs https. I’m pretty sure that it does remember the last visit correctly when you log in, however, if you visit the site at http then log in to comment, you will be redirected to https.
Delete all history items from SSC, double check all bookmarks you have to SSC are to the https site, and avoid clicking on the links in the emails you get when new posts are put up (I think the email links are http). This might help your issues.
Here i go i sharing some personal stuff that’s relevant to the topic and the only acknowledgement i get is as an example of the notification system not working right. Feels bad, man.
I do apologize. I happened to notice it because it was memorable, and used it as my example partly because it did stand alone and wasn’t part of a long and noisy thread. At the time I had less of a model of what was going on with the comment system and I thought other people might similarly have seen it pop up repeatedly.
Regarding your actual personal stuff: What a harrowing tale! The first time I read it, I thought, “Wow. I’m glad it all turned out okay,” but on rereading it I see that, while mostly true, that summary is still a little facile. Sorry again.
A lot of times I think it’s an issue of “what the hell do you say to that,” so trapped between giving empty-sounding internet compassion and saying nothing most people choose nothing.
If it’s worth anything, I had some pretty weird experiences with SSRIs too.
I do pretty much the same as you and it definitely feels suboptimal, but we might be stuck this way. I guess that’s what you get when you reinvent the ’90s BBS wheel in 2018 HTTP and javascript.
The worst is when I have an open thread open to read through the day (what else am I going to bounce off of when I’m bored at work?) and accidentally close my browser window or refresh the page and lose all my ‘state’ in terms of what’s been read and what hasn’t.
Anybody have time to make a SSC-to-Usenet gateway?
Thought on comments you’ve already read not being marked as read: I think maybe when you comment, it fetches new comments but doesn’t update the ‘last read’ variable. This might explain some of what you’re noticing.
This is exactly it.
Let me draw this out:
1. I read a post last night at 9pm.
2. The next day, I read a post and the comments at 10am. I see all the new comments since 9pm yesterday.
3. I comment at 10:30, which reloads the page. My “show new posts” is still set to 10pm yesterday. I am reading new comments since 9pm yesterday, which includes comments made between 10 and 10:30 today.
4. I finish and walk away.
5. At 2pm I reload the page. My “show new posts” counter is set to 10am, so I might end up double-reading the posts made between 10 and 10:30.
There isn’t a super-easy answer here. At step 3, this used to update to 10:30 at this step, but it meant you missed all the old comments, and it was fixed, which was good because we didn’t miss all the old comments, but it means we double-read some comments.
Maybe since I’ve drawn it out we can come up with a better solution. But remember that people tend to read sequentially down the page.
Hmm, perhaps.
What I’m seeing doesn’t quite match what you say. To use your example timestream, it seems that making the comment at 10:30 is locking my “comments since” date to 9pm yesterday even when I close out the 10am session. Then when I start the third session at 2pm, “comments since” is still 9pm yesterday, so I might see some comments for the third time. And if I make a new comment in that session, it locks the date down again, so when I come back a fourth session tomorrow, it’s still stuck at 9pm yesterday.
This may well be the price for the (entirely desirable) fix you describe to avoid missing comments. But I’m not sure. There must be two timestamps floating around: (a) the currently displayed “comments since”, which affects what comments are marked as “new”, and (b) the timestamp that should control the next session, which would normally be the start-time of the current session. Making a comment uploads new comments without changing (a), which means you don’t miss seeing comments. But the behavior I see makes me suspect that making a comment is causing both timestamps to get locked down to the original value of (a). I don’t see the rationale for locking down (b).
I’ve never programmed Javascript and wouldn’t presume to tinker with this anyway. Obvious workarounds are (a) manually update the “comments since” time when I log in, and (b) don’t shoot my mouth off so much, so that I might have an occasional session where I don’t actually make a new comment.
I take it back. I don’t think there are two dates.
If you end a session on Monday, the date presented on Tuesday is not the timestamp of your session, but the (earlier) timestamp of the newest comment visible in the Monday session. If there are no new comments when you read it on Tuesday, then the date presented on Wednesday will still be the timestamp of that newest comment.
Adding your own comment during a session just suppresses the updating of that single date. So if I add a comment every time I visit a thread, I will never see the date advance beyond 1970.
This is not a bug because, as Edward Scizorhands says, it means I won’t risk missing comments that come in when it updates because I add a new comment. There is room for an improvement, by maintaining two timestamps (as I assumed it did), but in the absence of any notion of how messy the context for all this machinery is, I gracefully surrender.
This has been educational in a mild way; thanks everybody.
Not especially related, but I keep finding myself having to log back in, and it always resets to comments since 1970, when time began.
“Leave me logged in” only lasts about 2 weeks for me.
Has anybody else forgotten how to do simple tasks that didn’t used to rely on the Internet? Last week at work, I was trying to find a document on seismic analysis. It was from UC-Berkeley, where they wanted $25 for a digital copy. I went through our library’s website to the journal subscriptions, and spent about 45 minutes trying various journals and repositories before concluding that none of them had a digital copy.
I then sighed and decided I’d have to try interlibrary loan to get it on hard copy. I then went to the library lookup page to find the nearest library that had it on hand, and the first result was US Army Corps of Engineers Library, [My City]. After taking a minute for the proper amount of embarrassment, I then wrote down the call number and went upstairs to check it out.
I don’t know when I forgot that checking the library catalog should be the first step, but I apparently did in the last 5 years or so. Anybody else forgotten that libraries will often have the stuff you need for free?
Not quite what you’re asking, but I have certainly forgotten how I actually did some things before the internet.
I remember being interested in visiting a buddy in another small town around 1980, and determined that there was just no viable bus route between the two towns — the trip required going through some hub that was ten times as far from either town as they were from each other.
But how did I determine that? I suppose I must have gone to my local Greyhound station and looked at a schedule or route map. But I have no memory of that. I couldn’t even tell you what part of town the Greyhound station was in.
The remarkable part of your story is that the offline route is still available. My suspicion is that “Books In Print” and the OAG, resources I used a lot in the old days, don’t actually publish their databases in hard copy any more, but it’s been a long time since I needed to know. (It’s sort of amusing how useless it is to try to Google ‘Is “Books In Print” still in print’.)
In Buenos Aires and its suburbs, we used to rely on a booklet called the T-guide, which functioned as explained in English (with pictures) here. Maybe something similar existed for other major urban centers?
I remember being shocked when I moved to the UK in the early 2000s (to a much smaller urban area than BA, but still with plenty of buses) and found that there was nothing similar. One had to replicate it by piecing together hardcopy maps, hardcopy bus timetables, and incomplete online information.
Bus schedules in the UK are still a mess, outside of London and maybe other major cities.
I lived in a smaller UK city for years. Pretty much the only reason not to drive a car was drinking alcohol. Otherwise, used cars were cheaper than in most of Europe and the congestion situation very decent, hardly any slowdowns. Why invest into buses?
I am always curious why intelligent communities like this here tend to be pro-public transport and anti-car? Environment? Electric cars. Congestion? Huge issue in the US, most large European cities, and London. Not a huge issue in smaller ones.
Living in a village, working in a smaller city close by, a small, environmentally friendly car is just the ideal way to get around. It is basically like a faster bicycle with airbags and far more package space. Why is it sort of considered a less enlightened option?
@nameless1
Dense cities give way more access to diverse people, culture, shops, etc. They also tend to lack the kind of social policing that you have in less dense areas.
Human outliers often move to dense cities, because these things tend to benefit them more.
Hence, Castro Street in San Francisco, not Castro Street in Salinas.
The car thing was Culture War before Culture War was named. Urban vs suburban and rural, individualist vs communitarian, spontaneous vs planned, freedom vs safety, etc.
The question is why it is such a huge issue. Is it really unavoidable, or is it due to policies that could be changed? For example:
1. Many cities, including SF and London, have restrictions on construction that result in a lot of the people who work in the city living outside of it and having to commute–the Green Belt in London being an obvious example. If it were possible to build apartment buildings on the Hong Kong scale in or next to San Francisco, a sizable part of the daily traffic jam commuting into the city would disappear.
2. It might be possible to greatly expand the highway network into the city–at what cost I don’t know.
Neither of those changes would eliminate the congestion on local streets within the city, only the commute congestion.
3. As I suggested a very long time ago (Chapter 16), a jitney system, a way of establishing hitchhiking for pay and so raising the average number of passengers per car, would permit much more transportation with almost no additional cost, since almost all of the costs would be ones already being paid by drivers with no passengers. Uber is a step in that direction, but one could go a good deal farther. That would ease in-city congestion as well as commuting congestion.
I guess is depends on what the mass transit looks like.
I live in Bratislava, where during the day buses go in 5 or 10 minutes intervals. So I don’t check the schedule; I just go to the stop and expect the bus to arrive soon. The buses are maybe 30% slower than cars, but you don’t have to spend your time looking for a parking place — sometimes the one who took a bus arrives sooner than the one who took a car. Buses are generally clean, people who use them are generally clean and nice; I guess that happens when the buses are the default option. (Seems like “almost everyone takes the bus” and “only the underclass takes the bus” are two stable solutions.) While on the bus, I can e.g. read a book; in a car I would have to focus on driving. The cost of the bus is about €1 a day when using a permanent ticket.
I don’t see a reason to use a car inside the city, other than as a status move. In the very few situations when it would be useful, I simply call a cab.
(When traveling outside the city, it becomes the opposite, because the trains are kinda crap here.)
The solution to traffic congestion is well known, and will probably not happen in our life times.
Traffic lines have the same cause as Soviet bread lines. Giving away goods at way under market price. If you simple price road access so supply can meet demand, traffic will flow at full speed, and an enormous amount of problems with modern city life will disappear.
Sadly, in this one area, market thinking is taboo even for most conservatives, so the Bay Bridge will most likely freeze over before it can be driven at the speed limit during rush hour.
@Squirrel of Doom
If you treat road access as a market, you find it’s a monopoly with all the effects of that.
While I’m sure the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey would love to charge profit-maximizing prices to cross the Lincoln Tunnel, I don’t think the resulting tolls (probably well into the $100s) would make too many people happy.
Hey, if they’ll pay it…
But yeah, politically it seems hilariously impossible. The idea of high tolls sounds fine to me though. Although I think it may be best to make more roads tolls, not just have a free vs. $20 option.
For a monopoly road owner I could imagine mandating that they manage prices only to maximize traffic flow, not profit.
Not sure if that makes a substantial price difference, but it should calm the worst fears.
Well, it would have some very good effects. Anyone willing to pay the price could drive this road at full speed whenever they wanted. That opens a lot of possibilities.
If they’d be “happy” or not is debatable, but anyone who paid the toll would do so voluntarily and consider it the best use of that money.
Also note that high prices would only be for rush hour. For the vast majority of roads – I don’t know about the Lincoln Tunnel – driving would be free most of the 168 hours of the week.
I expect the flow-maximizing price and the profit-maximizing price are pretty similar; once you’ve started making a bite in flow with your pricing, increasing price even more will make a bigger bite.
But even if it’s not, once you’re not talking about the provider setting prices for profit, you’re not really talking about a “market” any more, you’re just talking tolling policy. The good things you get from markets come from competitive ones; a government monopoly is not that.
How about we start with eliminating free parking and parking zoning requirements and go from there?
There’s no monopoly problems there. Any landowner can choose to complete with government parking if he chooses.
I am not sure about that. I’ve heard the claim that parking enforcement can be run mainly for revenue[1], or mainly for keeping the desired pattern of usage of parking spaces (making sure that stores that count on customers parking nearby keep getting a steady flow of business). I would expect that traffic fees would face a similar tradeoff.
[1] Like all forms of policing for a profit, this creates awful incentives. For example, making the rules for parking extra confusing so you can assess fines is a good strategy when you’re trying to maximize revenue.
Thinking more about it, I think there’s a more general pattern:
You have normal fees that amount to the predictable cost of doing something. That is, parking here costs $5/hour, or driving downtown at rush hour costs a $10 flat fee per day, or you pay 12% APR on your credit card, or whatever.
And then, you have fines of some sort to encourage proper behavior. Like if someone parks illegally, they get an expensive parking ticket. If someone drives in the HOV lane without permission, they get an expensive traffic ticket. If someone pays their bill late, they pay a $20 late fee.
The more general version of the evil pattern is to start using those rule-enforcing fines/fees to maximize revenue. That encourages opaque and confusing rules, tweaking the rules to cause more people to break them, zero tolerance for any violation of the rules no matter how trivial or unintentional, etc. It’s a way to bury the actual costs in a smokescreen of confusing rules and hostile enforcement, and it rightly leaves the impression that you’re being ripped off when you get hit with a surprise fee or fine.
I wish I saw a way to get our society to move away from this stuff. In policing, we need to move entirely away from it, but I wish I could entirely avoid businesses that did this kind of thing, too.
The other problem is that it’s hard to balance penalties such that they are actually punitive but not draconian.
On campus in college, parking sucked and any of the university owned spaces required expensive permits that were often impossible for students to obtain at any price.
But a parking ticket was only something like $20 and you could pay it online. So if you were rich or in a particular hurry, you’d just park illegally and pay the ticket.
Then again maybe that’s an appropriate outlet – most spaces aren’t really illegal or unsafe, just reserved, and there’s no reason not to give them to a person motivated to pay a high one-day price.
I want to minimize traffic lines because I want people to be able to use roads, not because minimizing traffic lines is a terminal goal of mine. Minimizing traffic lines by pricing people out of using roads won’t achieve my goal.
Also, if baking bread were as hard as building roads, fixing Soviet bread lines by raising the price of bread would have had the same problem. At some price, you’d not have any bread lines because only a small number of people would be able to afford the small supply of bread, and since baking bread is (hypothetically) hard, they couldn’t just ramp up the bread supply.
I’ll just point out that when traffic volume is set to the capacity of the road, traffic flows at full speed, which means more cars can pass through than under the current gridlock system.
Also, higher prices promotes car sharing, which should mean there are more people in each car.
So under my system substantially more people would be using the roads than today. I know intuition says that with higher prices fewer people would be able to drive, but as so often in Economics, reality is counterintuitive.
One last point: In the current gridlock system, people don’t pay in money to drive during rush hour, but they do pay a lot in time.
You can think of road pricing as rebalancing between the time-rich and the money-rich, rather than the poor and the rich.
I think for the vast majority of drivers, the dollars per hour tradeoff would be very attractive.
Even for the semi-fictional employed poor person who somehow can afford a car, it should often mean they can spend some of the time gained doing paid work and come out ahead.
There is a peak level of usage for maximizing throughput of a road. Adding drivers to the road over this level reduces the overall throughput. Proper metering keeps us at this level.
This level is probably the same one that maximizes revenue and probably the same one that maximizes individual speed, but not necessarily so, since I can think of weird cases where it’s not.
@albatross11 – I’ve heard that Berkeley parking is (or was?) run to maximize ticket revenue, not to maximize parking turnover. The merchants want to maximize turnover – people don’t spend nearly as much in hours 3 and 4 of their shopping trips as in hours 1 and 2. To maximize turnover, you should patrol each block every two hours. People will learn to not overstay their meters (or the free time-limited spaces), and will stay only 2 to 2½ hours. However, to maximuze revenue, you should patrol each block only every four hours. That way, people stay longer, and only occasionally get ticketed, but there are many more tickets written. And you spend half as much on meter maids.
@gbdub – in the early 90s, San Francisco had to raise parking fines downtown because the (mostly private) garages were charging *more* than the expired meter or red zone fines.
Some people still live without journey planners.
It’s kinda weird because sometimes you’ll be talking to an older person in my city and I’ll mention something about my commute and they’ll start talking about connecting busses as if they’re imparting the lost wisdom of the ancients and I’m just like “no… I’m pretty sure I have a close to optimal route already, see, when I simulate taking that route on my pocket-super-computer it’s slower by half an hour”
Because I only had to deal with big-city commuting in the post-smartphone era where it’s all kinda trivial and it can even keep track of whether a specific bus or train is delayed right now this minute while they had to spend ages looking up tables of bus/train routes and trying to find a reasonable routes if there wasn’t a direct one.
“Books in Print” is still published in hardcopy:
https://greyhouse.com/bowk_bip.htm
(FWIW, the search I used was: “books in print” reference)
Cool, thanks.
Maybe it was never a simple task, but I can’t imagine navigating a city I’m unfamiliar with without Google Maps (though apparently Tyler Cowen does this(!))
Having lost access to smartphones shortly after moving to a new town, honestly, it’s kinda better. You can still get a pretty good idea of where you need to go by looking the route up on Google Maps and memorizing some landmarks.
If you’re on foot, the trick is to keep your eye on landmarks on the horizon, as well as the sun/moon.
And keep a treemeat map on you.
I would expect “asking strangers for directions/recommendations much more often” to be a big part of the answer.
Back in olden days, we used paper maps, and plotted out our routes before heading out. Sometimes we drew simplified maps of the routes on blank paper, with main roads and intersections to turn at, since consulting the main map was difficult while driving.
I still draw little paper maps before I go out! I check Google Maps from my PC, but I haven’t got a smartphone, so once I’ve left the house I’m on my own.
Getting lost (even having to ask for directions) is really the most embarrassingly anachronistic thing nowadays.
It’s funny; I did well during the “unfold a roadmap and look at it and plan a route” era, and I do well during the “just program your GPS/ smartphone” era now. But there was this awkward in between time period when the main way I used to navigate was “print out a google map or mapquest of directions from my desktop at home and bring that with me”, and that was often a disaster because if I missed one turn on those directions I had no idea what to do next.
To be fair, what you are describing is not something commonly done even pre-internet era. Perhaps yes in academia but not in common society. That being said, I do occassionally have legit concerns with myself forgetting pre-internet/non wired tasks more common to daily life. Ones that may actually be beneficial to my brain if I were to exercise them. (Navigation is a good recent example, though more of the smart-phone era)