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https://medium.com/form-and-resonance/i-studied-the-alt-right-so-you-dont-have-to-e123aa6a3d20
Never really answers the question I immediately have upon seeing the opening picture, and it’s something that the article mentions a couple times after – how is a movement that is either white nationalist or not averse to it (I think that is a fair description of the alt-right) able to recruit people who aren’t white? If that crowd at the top is what a Patriot Prayer rally looks like, well, I’ve seen anti-racist protests that are whiter than that rally.
Including because it’s kind of relevant: according to a recent NPR/PBS poll – feel free to attack the methodology; I find some of the results dubious but can not math good – Latinos as a group are (compared to the other two categories under race, “White” and “African American”) more favourable of white supremacy, white nationalists, and the alt-right. This seems… odd, and leads me to suspect some polling weirdness is going on.
(I’m going to repost this last bit in the new OT; you might do the same for your link, since this one is cooling down)
Good question — are percentages here sufficiently different from “Lizardman’s constant” percentages? Those, I feel, are basically the statistical zero when groups of people are involved.
I think the phrase you’re looking for is “Martian logic”. The logic may be sound, but the axioms are so disconnected from reality, or so myopic in scope that the conclusions can be tantamount to madness.
FWIW Driving predators extinct has been tested. It was the official wildlife management strategy of the US Government until about 80 years ago. The extirpation of wolves and grizzlies from most of the US, led to overpopulation and disease among deer, elk, and moose. It also led to a marketed decrease in biodiversity among tree species, and very likely other ecological effects, apparent to field biologists and natural historians, that we have not even figured out how to measure yet.
Some of those diseases such as winter ticks do not affect us but are now endemic among moose: you can track them in Maine by how they bleed in the snow. Others, such as Lyme do infect a significant number of humans every year and represent a chronic source of healthcare expenditure. There are other aggravating factors, aggressive logging for one, but it is certain to say that far more wild animals die from habitat loss and pollution than predation in many parts of the US. A recent PNAS study quantified this: even species populations noted “Least Concern” are shrinking at present. Killing predators to reduce prey suffering? May as well kill people suspected of being terrorists and do nothing to reduce deaths by heart disease or automobile accidents.
To me this sounds a lot like paper clip optimization… it is not a stretch for intelligent people to see that local optimization risks repainting deck chairs on the titanic. A more moderate stretch is to realize that a lack of experience and familiarity with a complex system almost certainly guarantees that one’s “optimizations” will at best be local. As Feynman said “Perhaps it is that the horizons are limited which permit such people the delusion that the center of the universe of interest is man.”
Keith Preston’s take on Charlottesville is the best I’ve seen so far. Can’t really summarize it, since it’s already bullet points.
“Kaczynski accurately characterizes the Left as follows: “Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality.”
That’s the best you’ve seen, huh.
Do you disagree with the following?
I think there are other bases to the ideological rift besides just psychological type (mostly historically contingent factors like whom your parents voted for), but see a strong kernel of truth to this.
Yeah, I “disagree” (not necessarily in the sense of “this says X, but I believe NOT X”), but more like this is a type error, when it comes to good analysis of what is happening.
This is a blogger hot take, not proper historical analysis. History is complicated, hot takes are simple.
—
Aside from that, he just says a bunch of laughably stupid stuff. I linked a little, but there’s a lot more. “Leftists hate America.”
The lens through which someone sees the world that would make them output that type of stuff is not a very good lens.
Do you find intellectual hipsters and metacontrarianism to be laughable? Because it’s basically the same idea as the first one you implied was laughable.
I did not find or imply the first thing was laughable, I said it was superficial (hot take rather than analysis).
I find “leftists hate America” laughable.
—
Scott’s essay has nothing to do with finding human typology explanations for things.
I was talking about the Kaczynski quote. If you think Preston’s intent in quoting it is simply to claim “leftists hate America,” I’d suggest your reading of the piece is superficial. The essay I was comparing it to is by Eliezer, not Scott.
Preston simply had a large quote by Kaczynski and said it was accurate — that was the entire bullet point.
I don’t know this Preston guy, and while it is possible he had some sort of subtle point to make, I don’t have time to decode his intent. I went with what he literally said. It’s on him to communicate clearly.
—
If you want to be a real historian about events in Charlottesville, you ought to talk to as many people as possible who actually were there — that’s what I am trying to do. Not read hot takes on the internet.
That’s a good thing to do. Have you been able to get a good cross section of views? That is, bystander/observer vs. UniteTheRight protester vs. Antifa counterprotester vs. Local/Non-Antifa counterprotester? Police perspective would be nice as well but may be difficult to get.
Not yet — it’s not so easy (and safe for someone like me) to talk to a representative cross section.
Let’s back up from the specifics of what psychology Preston finds in the left, right, and “ruling class behind the state.” This whole piece reads more like Preston already had opinions on what the left, right, and RCBTS were like and then decided to say that Charlottesville “proved” (edit: okay, “supported”, neither of these are actual quotes) them, without actually connecting the events to his conclusions. In fact, that’s literally what he does with the “hard left” – to paraphrase: “I wrote about them years ago, and these new events have proven me right in ways I will not specify. Allow me to repeat myself.”
This doesn’t seem like a good “take” on Charlottesville, it seems like a “take” on the culture war you like, combined with many seemingly-unrelated observations about Charlottesville. Or, alternatively, some observations about Charlottesville you think accurate, plus some “and this, just like everything, proves me right about the nature of the right and left and ruling class behind the state!”
I think one point that Preston first missed in 5, but later updated, undermines some of the other analysis. The event on Friday was already violent. In part because “who actually initiated physical action” was “very difficult to determine”, the concerns on the part of the local authorities about the Saturday demonstrations are much more reasonable than he makes them out to be.
Point 6 is somewhat undermined by the messaging of the event’s organizer, and the open criticism of some “alt-lite” groups that pulled out explicitly because of the racial angle.
@ tscharf says:
I agree. But it reminds me of something I did almost 20 years ago, at a similar protest/counter-protest.
In this case, it was the KKK rather than neo-Nazis, versus a left-wing group who wanted to “shut down the Klan by any means necessary”. I was among a group of 100 peacekeepers, including many clergy, who stood between the two groups. Wonderful to relate, we prevented a riot.
Impressive!
The situation seems a bit unearthly. Why there was volunteers in the first place? Wouldn’t it be the job of the police (equipped with the protective gear) to maintain the separation? (And arrest persons responsible for inciting a riot?)
This is already quite worn example everyone has heard about, but anyway, I can’t come up with better one either. If you see news pictures about a far-right rally from Germany, you always see that the police is always present in large numbers (because there’s going to be counter-protesters in large numbers, too). There’s occasionally more police officers than far right protesters. I can’t remember any news items about either side managing to get others killed in similar riots.
If the police lets far right and far left to have their street battles, that’s a sign they more willing to root for one side or the other to win the fight instead of doing their jobs: that is, maintain the coordinated meanness a.k.a. monopoly of violence of the government and the established judicial system. Which, in turn, is excellent fuel to rhetoric of any extremist who promises “to stop this madness on streets” if the people just grant them some extraordinary judicial powers.
A very honorable thing to do. It takes a lot more courage to prevent a riot than start one.
Good for you.
Trump has been taking a lot of fire for his response to Charlottesville, from all sides. Of course, he has been taking a lot of fire generally ever since the election, for various things. And his approval ratings have slid to very low levels in recent polls. I’m curious, though, how much that will play out in a re-election campaign in 2020, which by nature is a binary choice. I remember a poll a month or two ago showing that Trump out-polled Hillary, if people were offered the hypothetical choice to re-run the election; Trump substantially outperformed his approval ratings in that hypothetical matchup. So are people really changing their minds, or is his approval just dropping because reality is always more disappointing than reality-TV-campaigning? I could imagine people disapproving of the circus Trump brings everywhere with him, because it seems to make the atmosphere so poisonous, but I can also imagine people blaming that on his opponents more than him when all alone in the 2020 voting booth. I’m not sure how many people will have actually been convinced to drop him.
My question is threefold:
(1) Did you (or anyone you know) vote for Trump?
(2) If yes to #1, have you (or that person) changed your (their) mind and would not vote for him a second time?
(3) If yes to #1 and #2, what was the thing Trump did or said that changed your (their) mind?
I know someone who voted for Trump and are now withdrawing from politics and voting in disgust.
Can I ask (if you know) what was it that attracted them to Trump enough to pull the lever, but then changed or was outweighed by subsequent action?
For example, I happened to think about this topic because of an up-thread comment back-and-forth about whether Trump’s Charlottesville responses put the lie to Scott’s “Crying Wolf” article. So I suppose one could imagine being initially convinced that Trump was no racist, but then being convinced otherwise by Charlottesville (or other).
For what it’s worth, I know several people who voted for Trump; as far as they’ve told me, all would vote for him a second time, although all also disapprove of a lot of things he says and does (for various reasons).
That’s a good and complicated question. My guess: disillusionment with DC corruption, and then disillusionment with Trumps’ “fresh take” on dealing with DC. But I am very uncertain here — people are complicated.
1) No
I did not vote for Trump, but his remarks on this event — the real ones, not the ones the press made up — make me more willing to vote for him. He’s a strange champion for freedom of speech and assembly, but he seems to be one nevertheless. Even if only by coincidence.
I know more than one person who did not vote for Trump but has said they would now, just because they think doing otherwise would legitimize what they see as “tantrum politics” from the Democratic side. Obviously those couple of people don’t make or break elections, but I’ve found it slightly surprising that, given Trump’s sliding approval ratings, I don’t anecdotally hear of more defections away from Trump than tribal inclinations towards him.
Ugh. “Never interfere with your enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself”.
I really wish the media would take this to heart, because the “tantrum politics” are the only thing giving me sympathy for Trump, and I don’t want to have sympathy for Trump. I was totally ready to be disgusted at Trump yesterday, until I read the difference between what he actually said (bad enough!) and what he was said to have said.
I’m going to steal Iain’s metaphor from upthread – it’s like they decided the best thing to do with the moral high ground was charge downhill.
I voted for Johnson in a “pox on both their houses” way, but I also assumed Trump would end up with a more competent team reining him in, which so far has not materialized. But basically my opinion of everyone has gone down since November. So I don’t know. In a purely objective sense I’m thinking Hillary would have to be better, but I’d still feel pretty damn gross supporting that side, given how they’ve behaved since then.
I’m thinking I’m going to register as a Dem for the next cycle to try to push a reasonably palatable candidate, unless Trump declines to run again and or there’s a realistic primary challenge.
Probably the best approach is to just support whoever has the best tax policy. Barring total disaster that’s where most of the utility is.
Most elections are decided by the least informed voters (E.g.) and so you could argue, strategically, that the media creating a generalized climate of “Trump is a disaster on every issue and we should all be ashamed” will be more likely to influence such voters by osmosis. They’re mostly resistant to facts and argument, by definition. On the other hand, some low-information voters will adjust their mental volume to tune out any negative news stories. Apropos of Scott’s “Crying Wolf,” now that the media – rightly or wrongly – wants to call Trump out for coddling literal swastika-carrying Nazis in Charlottesville, they may have trouble distinguishing that from the “coddling Nazis” he was accused of previously in cases not involving literal Nazis.
2020 may be decided by which group of low-information voters is larger, the easily-led-by-general-atmosphere crowd, or the ignore-whatever-happens crowd.
I was pretty disappointed when, after Trump said this:
And the next day on my phone I see a opinion headline from the New York Times that “Trump Unequivocally Signals Support For White Nationalists.” (I cannot find it now via google but I did show it to my wife and ask “does this headline say what I think it does?” and she confirmed it.)
What Trump said is bad enough. Stop exaggerating.
Probably this.
Mostly it’s upset that Trump gave antifa their share of the blame.
I think for the far right, voting disapproval for Trump now is basically a zero-cost way of trying to encourage him to go back to some of his campaign promises (build the wall, lock her up, rip up NATO and NAFTA, repeal Obamacare, don’t start a war with Syria, etc.)
But there’s also basically 0% chance those people would vote for any candidate that might plausibly oppose him, so it’s basically meaningless.
I’m almost certain some of my family voted for Trump because they hated Hillary. I don’t know what their attitudes will be like against a more palatable Democratic candidate and four more years of the DJT shitshow.
One thing Trump seems to do very well is provoke extreme reactions – from everyone. He’s like a Bat Signal for tribalism, because his opponents end up indulging their own ideological extremes. Obviously Hillary had her baggage. The interesting question will be, can any Democratic candidate capable of winning the primary, also avoid counter-extremism sufficient to miss being tarred as “just as bad as Hillary”?
They may call whoever runs “just as bad as Hillary”, but no one will provoke the visceral hatred in large swaths of conservatives like Hillary did.
One hypothesis I have is that Hillary provoked visceral hatred in conservative voters of a certain age, and that age cohort happened to be the same age cohort that might otherwise have been temperamentally inclined against Trump’s schtick. Perhaps older voters would normally have been turned off by Trump but had sufficient memories of Hillary to make voting against her seem more pressing, thus lending key voters to Trump even though he didn’t particularly appeal to them. Basically, Trump could ignore the appeal to the middle of the Republican electorate (the part most disposed to dislike him), because that portion of the electorate already was disposed to dislike Hillary more.
Also, don’t underestimate just how shockingly bad Hillary Clinton is for running for office. She’s very good at being a politician, but she is just terrible at convincing people they should vote for her.
1. Yes. I voted for Trump. The majority of my family voted for Trump and maybe 25-33% of my relevant friend group.
2. Not to my knowledge.
3. N/A.
Trump failing to denounce Nazis in a manner fast enough for the 24 hour news cycle is not sufficient to bring me to vote for a Democrat.
>I remember a poll a month or two ago showing that Trump out-polled Hillary, if people were offered the hypothetical choice to re-run the election; Trump substantially outperformed his approval ratings in that hypothetical matchup. So are people really changing their minds, or is his approval just dropping because reality is always more disappointing than reality-TV-campaigning?
Sounds to me more of an indictment of Hillary than an endorsement of Trump. Opinion polls I’ve seen put him losing to just about every realistic Dem candidate.
True on the Hillary part, but this far out, everyone hypothetical with no current prospect of power tends to look more attractive than the incumbent. I guess I’m starting from the position that Trump’s coalition was strong enough (and better-placed geographically) to win last time. Unless he loses some of those voters, my prediction would be in favor of that same coalition winning a second time. Of course he will lose some of his voters; but how many, and will they be counterbalanced? Anecdotally I haven’t heard of a lot so far, but have little data to go on.
Trump is going to get primaried, and those Republicans and also the Democrats are going to be going after the white-working-class vote hard.
It’s not exactly what you’re asking, but I do know someone who was planning to vote for Trump, but hit a disgust threshold and had his mind changed. My uncle (a rural conservative) hates Hillary Clinton. A lot. He wasn’t so much a Trump supporter as a hold your nose and vote for him over her kind of guy – maybe chortle at how much he pissed off liberals, too.
His breaking point was attacking the gold star family. I remember I was actually in the room with him when he first saw that on the news – his face literally wrinkled in disgust and he said, “What an asshole.” After that he went back and forth between voting for Hillary or not voting, and landed on the latter.
1. Yes, I know many people. Trump carried WV by over 40%.
2. No.
3. N/A
It’s really irrelevant as voting is a choice, not a hypothetical of running against an invented good Democrat. If the Democrats run another Hilary then they may very well lose again, for the same reasons. If they think demonizing white people is the path to victory they may very well lose again. If they continue to be out of touch with swing voters they may lose. If they don’t do these things then they may win. My guess is people are going to be hyper-sensitive to a “deplorables” attitude, so avoiding this at all costs would be a good idea.
The media running out every 2 days and asking if people still like Trump and being mystified when most of them still do never fails to amaze me. How many times has the media opined that the latest circus show was going to change everything? Most people just don’t care much about the circus sideshow and when they see that is the only thing the establishment seems to care about it makes them wonder why others are so obsessed with it. The economy is in good shape, we aren’t in any new wars, illegal immigration is down, Trump at least pretends he cares about trade, a new conservative justice was placed, and he still won’t pander to the thought police. If you took a poll on which party respects fly-over country more, who would win? I drove though AL, IN, OH, and rural FL and Trump signs are still up as well as more US flags than I have ever seen.
A belief that all this is overshadowed by exactly how fast he threw neo-Nazis under the bus is naive and wishful thinking. It is not sufficient to prove Trump has flaws and the left is not Trump. That already failed. You need to actually stand for something. Being “anti-hate” is pointless, nobody believes they are hateful and are convinced the other side is the one full of hate. Nobody on earth knows what the left’s position on immigration is, including the left. The person who seems to have the most sense on the left is Mark Lilla. That is the best path to victory.
1) A bunch of people I know and respect voted for Trump. I did not.
2) No idea. I’m confident that at least 3-4 of the people I know who voted for him would do so again. I can’t think of any who obviously would not, but I can think of one who wouldn’t totally surprise me if she said she would not.
3) N/A, strictly speaking. Because my OCD can’t stand the idea of a question number without a datapoint next to it, I’ll throw out there that I’m still happy with my vote.
1. I did not vote for Trump, but I know a number of people, including family members, who did.
2. They have not changed their minds and mostly just complain bitterly about how the left is out to get him.
(1) Not me, but I didn’t vote for Hillary either, and I still don’t regret it. I can think of three people who have told me they voted for Trump.
(2) None of them have changed their mine. Two of them (middle aged white guys, very sweet and well meaning in their personal lives) did it basically to poke SJWs in the eye or because they thought liberals were eventually going to come for middle american and churches, and they don’t seem to have changed their minds. They wish Trump was smarter about achieving his goals, but they prefer him achieving nothing to Hillary achieving some of her goals. The third is a 20 year old who voted for Trump almost solely on pro-life grounds, and is disgusted by Trump personally. (She was also really turned off by her Bernie supporting friends, who she sees as unrealistic economically). Trump is slow on appointments, but his judges have been pretty solid from her perspective, so she got what she expected.
(3) N/a.
Two people.
For the one I’m in touch with, he’s moved from being pro-Trump to saying that both parties are the same. I don’t know what changed his mind.
I don’t have a formal understanding of why he liked Trump, but at least part of it was fear of immigrants and terrorists. He also trusted everything bad that was said about Hillary.
I haven’t cut off the other one, but it’s not convenient to stay in touch with him.
I think it’s totally possible for a guy to be friends with a girl, and have a reasonable political or religious conversation. Not easy, mind you, but possible.
” Not easy, mind you, but possible.”
I think it’s easy, as long as at least one of you has a significant other, or has otherwise not indicated an interest in sexual relations with the person you’re talking to. Age may come into play on how easy this is.
Would it be indecorous of me to reveal that, in the actual situation to which that remark refers (see thread above), we had been sleeping with each other about a year ago but I called it off?
Nope! It just emphasizes that you’re talking about a specific and not a generality.
That does seem a touchy circumstance! I had skipped over the prior thread.
Wow, really negative responses here!
This question is impossible to answer without actually knowing the person in question.
I think a lot of people passively go along with the SJW stuff because it’s mainstream at the moment. It’s the same as religion really. There are a few really strong true believers, and everyone else just kind of shrugs and gets along with life. So figure out which category she really falls in first. The questioning needs to come from her first, and not from you.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/15/16144070/psychology-alt-right
Thanks, interesting.
The dehumanization scale using the Ascent of Man silhouettes is a cool tool. I don’t know how rigorous it is but very snazzy.
That said, treating political views (even extreme views) as psychiatric disorders calling for ‘interventions’ rather than debate is profoundly unhelpful. This sort of research takes on a much darker tone if you put it side by side with the recent study on using oxytocin to improve attitudes towards migrants. Sluggish schizophrenia anyone?
It is an excellent metaphor for modern American politics. It’s the manufacturing of consent taken to it’s logical extreme.
The results of that dehumanization thing are…questionable. Hillary Clinton “less evolved” than black people? This doesn’t jibe with what I’ve heard from the hardcore race realists who actually believe in the idea of “less evolved”. This suggests they were using it as a proxy for “How much do you dislike this group/person?”.
Also the lack of Asians as a category disappoints me. That seems like it would have been an interesting data point.
The results of that dehumanization thing are…questionable.
Yeah, when Hillary Clinton comes in dead last out of all the possibilities listed at 55% evolved, that is, less evolved than Jews, Mexicans, black people etc., there’s something more than merely “muh racial prejudices” going on there.
Extrapolating from that to nicely coloured graphs and breathless dissections of the psychology of the alt-right makes me want to go “Guys, ever heard of the Lizardman’s Constant?”
A not-so-random sample of the dehumanization scores:
White people: 91.8
Europeans: 87.08
Christians: 83.81
Donald Trump: 82.82
Republicans who refused to vote for Trump: 69.85
Black People: 64.72
Democrats: 60.38
Journalists: 58.65
Hillary Clinton: 54.83
Yeah, I have to agree it was just being used as a proxy for “dislike”.
Pet peeve:
I really hate talking about “more evolved” or “less evolved” humans.
If that phrase was going to mean anything at all, it would have to mean
something like “how many generations (and therefore rounds of
reproduction and selection) does this organism have since the first
strand of DNA got copied?”. And by that criterion, the most evolved
organism is going to be some microorganism. Replication times for
bacteria can be less than an hour. Which beat out human
replication times of decades by 5 orders of magnitude…
I’m interested on how a sample drawn from Mechanical Turk is intrinsically skewed. Yes, there is the caveat of “convenience sample”, but I would really hope there is some rigorous analysis of how Turkers differ from a similar sample recruited via other means.
With that said, there has been a lot of talk here about how alt-right != white nationalist/supremacist/etc. Assuming the above caveat has no significant affect, it sure looks like those who identify as alt-right really do skew that way.
I’d be interested in this as well – since MT is basically a site where you perform petty tasks for petty amounts of money, my intuition is that it’s primarily used by the unemployed, kids, etc. Pretty much nobody with an adequate cash flow thinks its worthwhile to take 15-to-30 minute surveys for 75 cents a pop.
Pretty much invalidates the whole thing. All we know is that 447 people believe this.
Eh.
Didn’t Scott do an MT survey recently? Or he linked favorably to one?
Yep, he did one, and results were roughly consistent with another survey done using traditional techniques.
But he also posts about lizardman constants, and if I got a chance to fill out an anonymous survey about my ideological enemies and get paid for it, hoo boy. It all depends where the link to survey got passed around.
> All we know is that 447 people believe this.
We don’t even know that. There’s a reason “alt-right troll” is a thing.
So I observe that the people who a few weeks ago were arguing that antifa violence wasn’t morally significant to Leftism as a whole, and that the failure of prominent leftists to speak against it wasn’t meaningful, have changed their tune now that they can use those argument against their enemies. Likewise, the opponents to the antifa violence are being obnoxious, albeit in a subtler way, arguing that the violence is mutual and thus somehow the right-wing violence is less morally significant. The arguments on both sides are staggeringly stupid tribal/moral posturing.
Am I the only one tired of the tribal bullshit?
First, this is the natural result of antifa violence. This shit is old hat in Europe, where there are have been murders by anti-anti-anti-fa groups. This shit should have been shut down months ago. The natural result of violence is escalation. Yes, this shit is the fault of violent antifa action, and the authority figures who made it clear they wouldn’t intervene. This doesn’t absolve the right-wing violence, mind; I can be morally responsible for putting a gun in the hand of a murderer without reducing the murderer’s own culpability.
Second, neither side is innocent, and neither side is better. Attacking people on the basis of ideology is just as eroding to our civil society as attacking people on the basis of race, and both are terroristic in intent and nature.
Third, this isn’t a matter of the good guys versus the bad guys. This is a matter of sociopathic assholes fighting one another. Neither is on “your” side, they’re both looking for an excuse to use violence – you know the stereotype of the gun owner who is hoping someone breaks into his home so he gets to shoot somebody? These are literally those people, people who are looking for an excuse to use violence in a socially sanctioned way.
Knock off the tribal bullshit and notice that these assholes aren’t your allies, neither of them, and neither deserve either sanction nor sympathy. Shut this shit down. These aren’t mercenaries, exactly, but everything Machiavelli had to say about mercenaries applies. Their victories – either of their victories – are our defeat.
“Yes, this shit is the fault of violent antifa action.”
Yeah, ok. The young lady murdered by a car was not antifa. Harris was not antifa.
How about we call a spade a spade, and notice that the guy who killed the young lady had a long history of hateful statements (easy to look up), that have nothing to do with antifa violence.
The guys who beat up Harris have a history too (easy to look up for people already identified by name). One was was ex-KKK and served prison time. It couldn’t be clearer what is happening here — except to folks like you.
—
This alt-right stuff actually poses a problem for conservatives, because they have a choice — be principled and renounce them and say they don’t want to do coalition politics with them, or downplay them and change the subject (and effectively push for normalization of fascism by playing coalition politics with fascists).
I think we shouldn’t play coalition politics with fascists (actual fascists). Do you agree?
If you are conservative and you agree, unfortunately alt-right is forcing some moves from you, specifically you have to loudly signal you won’t play coalition politics with them. Most elected republicans did so, by the way.
If antifa doesn’t show up – the police don’t break up the rally – and both the fascists and whatever peaceful counter-protesters stay confined to an area without a bunch of vehicle traffic and under tight police control.
This does not excuse running people over in any way. That dude is still 100% responsible for his actions.
But in a world where antifa doesn’t show up to deny right-wingers their constitutional rights by force, I think she’s still alive today.
Here is a paper on assigning blame:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-23963-2_1
And if the right-wingers didn’t have a white supremacist rally at a confederate statue, which they knew would bring counterprotests, she would still be alive.
And if she didn’t attend the counter-protest, she would still be alive. But we don’t blame her, and shouldn’t. There is a difference in law between cause in fact (or “but-for” cause) and proximate causation (or legal cause). Cause in fact simply means that an action was necessary to produce the result. It does not mean the action was sufficient to cause the injury. There are multiple (indeed, near-infinite) “but-for” causes for almost everything that happens; only some of them are taken into account in legal reasoning, and I think the same is true for moral reasoning.
Right, which is why playing the but-for game is silly. The person at fault here is the driver of the car. Everything else is tribalism.
I think this is clearly acceptable, and that there’s still major disagreement about who can be described as a “fascist.”
There is major disagreement about who can be described as “fascist,” in general, I suppose.
However, people who throw an actual Hitler salute, and people who wear swastikas, or carry actual swastika flags (or neo-Nazi equivalents), are shouting “Jews will not replace us,” etc. are basically fascist in fairly uncontroversial ways.
As far as folks who aren’t that — they are apparently willing to play coalition politics with fascists. These guys are enablers/collaborators. I also think they are bad, but different kind of bad from actual fascists.
It annoys me that I’m being partisan on this, but is there really no distinction between “alt-right” and “actual nazi”?
I know that there is a difference, but could we be more explicit about what precisely it is?
Milo is generally considered alt right but he is gay and isn’t anything resembling a white nationalist.
At them moment it seems that alt-right (those that are not outright actual nazis) are the people who either want to form a coalition with actual nazis to achieve anti-left goals or want to employ nazi symbolism and tropes for the lulz/to piss off the left.
If that is correct, why is it wrong for the rest of us to lump them in with nazis?
If you’re okay marching with nazis, as those at Charlottesville apparently were, doesn’t that literally make you a nazi sympathizer?
No being a literal nazi sympathizer involves literally sympathising with nazis. I would have thought that was decently obvious.
In Europe, you’d be hard-pressed to find any left-wing march tht didn’t involve open Stalinists. Can we deduce that they all Stalinist sympathisers?
What’s the difference between being okay with nazis being a part of your organized march and sympathizing with nazis?
What’s the difference between a raven and a writing desk?
Things that are unrelated are unrelated.
Actual fascists occupying France, and collaborators in the Vichy government are different but not unrelated.
People who want to form a coalition with fascists are not necessarily fascist themselves, but are definitely of direct relevance to the rise of fascism.
If you say they are unrelated, the charitable assumption here is you are playing dumb for some rhetorical gain.
“In Europe, you’d be hard-pressed to find any left-wing march tht [sic] didn’t involve open Stalinists.”
lol
Well that’s an egregiously terrible non-answer.
You’re talking about two completely different things. Not even bothering to draw the slightest reason why they would not be different and then asking me to name the difference. Its nonsense.
To be sympathetic to nazis does not require or mply that one would allow them to join your marches. Allow them to bolster your march’s numbers does not require sympathy. Unrelated things and unrelated.
Ilya: A more accurate metaphor would be asking for the difference between a communist sympathiser and the allies including communist Russia.
rlms: Can you name a left-wing march that didn’t involve open Stalinists?
Why they would not be different: this was a “Unite the Right” march, and by participating with nazis in a show of political unity at a statue commemorating people who fought to keep slavery, that would indicate that such people did have some sympathy with nazis. Other right-wing groups stayed out of it seemingly because of the presence of nazis and other white supremacists.
The reason General Lee fought was not because he wanted to keep slavery.
Being sympathetic to Lee does not require one to be sympathetc to nazis. Therefore protesting the culture that demands the denouncing of Lee does not require being sympathetic to nazis.
This is different from being sympathetic to nazis which does require being sympathetic to nazis.
What’s the difference between allowing communists, anarchists, and Palestinian terrorist supporters in your march, and sympathizing with the same? Because just about every left wing march has at least a token assembly of those yahoos.
Of course, the difference here was that it was a Nazi march with maybe a few not quite Nazis, as opposed to a broad coalition march with a few extremist participants.
Whataboutism is whataboutism. Leftist groups should not organize marches with communists or pro-terrorist groups. That much should also be obvious. When they do, they should rightly be charged with being sympathetic to such groups as well.
Eh, at some point I think it’s wrong to judge a group by the worst of its members. When you’ve got two major candidates, both are going to get some nasty wackos on their side.
I guess there’s a difference between “joining a Nazi march” and “your not-Nazi march being joined by Nazis”. The former makes you a sympathizer, the latter not nearly so much.
@kjohn
Can you see any Stalinists in, say, this video? Can you provide any evidence of Stalinists at a left-wing march in Europe? Bear in mind that the hammer and sickle is clearly not conclusive evidence of Stalinism, based on the large numbers of non-Stalinists in the USSR.
I agree that there is a difference. The case in point, though, is “participating in a march co-organized by nazis”.
Can I pick a stalinist out of a crowd om a vdeo? No. No, I cannot. Great insght.
However, to give an example, a major organisor of left-wing marches in the UK are the Stop The War coalition a patron of which is Kamal Majid, a founder of the Stalin Society.
Well, you asked for a Stalinist-free march. What did you want me to give you?
Great, you found one (1) Stalinist. From this, you draw the conclusion that every single left-wing march in the continent of Europe is irrevocably tainted with Stalinism? And yet, apparently the idea that the Unite The Right rally that seems to have more swastikas than any other kind of flag might be more than a little bit Naziish is somehow ridiculous.
A march. I would have thought that was obvious. Not a minute-long video of a subset of marchers and told ‘pick out the stalinists’.
No. You asked for any “Can you provide any evidence of Stalinists at a left-wing march in Europe” so I did. How much evidence do you need before you stop moving the goalposts and accept that you might be wrong?
How much time do you demand from me before you accept a basic fact that no european lefist would find even slightly contraversial? A fact that is hardly crucial to the general point.
Are all STW marchers stalinist sympathisers because they’re going to a march organised by a group with close Stalinist links?
Unite The Right was very Nazi-ish. Its full of Nazis. I never suggested slightly otherwise.
“A march. I would have thought that was obvious. Not a minute-long video of a subset of marchers and told ‘pick out the stalinists’.”
I’m afraid that I am unable to give you a march. The only things I can communicate via the medium of the internet are text, images, video and audio (not physical objects like marches), and even if I knew your location I’m not sure if I could be bothered to organise a march at it. I assumed you were aware that that was the situation, and thus were asking for some sort of evidence of the internet-conveyable kind I listed above. Apparently I was mistaken.
“No. You asked for any “Can you provide any evidence of Stalinists at a left-wing march in Europe” so I did. How much evidence do you need before you stop moving the goalposts and accept that you might be wrong?”
Well, technically I don’t think you’ve actually provided any evidence, since for all I know Kamal Majid may never have gone to a march himself. But let’s ignore that, and grant that you have given the evidence I asked for. That does indeed show that not all marchers are non-Stalinists. I never disputed this fact (I just doubted, happily incorrectly, whether you had any basis for believing it). But that was not your original claim. You said that you would be “hard-pressed” to find a a march without Stalinists. To justify that, you don’t just need to show that there was a Stalinist at one march. You need to show that there are Stalinists at the vast majority of marches! The fact that you seem to have confused these things rather indicates that if any moving of the goalposts is occurring, it is on your part.
“Unite The Right was very Nazi-ish. Its full of Nazis. I never suggested slightly otherwise.”
This is peculiar! Do you mean to say that it was in fact a (neo)-Nazi dominated march? You have spent a lot of time pushing the argument that going to a march with some Nazis (but, crucially, by your statement that “Allow [sic] them to bolster *your* march’s numbers does not require sympathy.”, one that is still dominated by non-Nazis) does not a Nazi sympathiser make. Perhaps this is true! I would say it depends entirely on the number of Nazis, whether you are aware of their presence, and the general character of the march. But according to your most recent statement, the Unite The Right rally (the march under discussion) *was* dominated by Nazis! This doesn’t make your argument wrong, but it does make it irrelevant to the Charlottesville protests. I advise that the next time you want to discuss a hypothetical situation that differs slightly but crucially from the thing other people were just talking about, you mention that explicitly. Otherwise people will get confused.
The phrasing I used was ‘ Can you name a left-wing march that didn’t involve open Stalinists?’ it was you who introduced the phrasing ‘Well, you asked for a Stalinist-free march.’
If you are saying that your interpretation of ‘asking for a […] march’ is asking for the physical thing then you are simply lyng about the things that you are saying that I am asking for.
Perhaps by asking you to name a single march free of Stalinists? A challenge you were unable to meet.
The principal that you are defending is that ‘If you’re okay marching with nazis, as those at Charlottesville apparently were, doesn’t that literally make you a nazi sympathizer?’ the ‘if’ itself is naturally hypothetical.
Even if I had the view that everyone at the Charlottesville was a sympathetic to Nazis, Urstoff would still be wrong. It is being sympathetic to Nazis that makes one a literal Nazi sympathisor not who one chooses to march with.
You want me to name a Stalinist free march? I mean you could just click the link I posted and read, but if that’s too much effort it was the Women’s March in London in January 2017.
“The principal that you are defending is that ‘If you’re okay marching with nazis, as those at Charlottesville apparently were, doesn’t that literally make you a nazi sympathizer?’ the ‘if’ itself is naturally hypothetical.
Even if I had the view that everyone at the Charlottesville was a sympathetic to Nazis, Urstoff would still be wrong. It is being sympathetic to Nazis that makes one a literal Nazi sympathisor not who one chooses to march with.”
I don’t see how this in any way responds to what I said. My assertions are the following: you wrote an argument that was applicable only to non-Nazi-dominated marches; the Unite The Right rally was Nazi-dominated; putting forward an argument that looks like it’s about the recent events everyone else is discussing but is actually about subtly different events is silly. Which, if any, of those do you disagree with?
It is being sympathetic to Nazis that makes one a literal Nazi sympathisor not who one chooses to march with.
And voluntarily marching with nazis at an event co-organized by nazis seems like pretty good evidence that such a person is sympathetic to nazis.
The point was to satisfy you. You would not be satisfied by me demonstrating that members of stalnist groups were at that march. you wanted me to point out people on the video who were Stalinistst.
It takes effort to find a list of the groups at a march, to go through the list checking if a Stalinist front, double-checking that; all just to confirm conventional wisdom. I’m not gong to do that for no reason, if there’s not the possibility of it moving the discourse forward.
How did it look like it was about the event. Because it was about ‘macing with nazis’, I think you will find that most direct arguments about whether marching with nazis is the literal definition of being a nazi sympathiser will involve arguments that include references to marching with nazis.
However, it being very Nazi-ish and full of nazis dosn’t change the fact that I – and I think a large porporton of the media – would call it a white supremacist march. And the fact that the white supremacists were happy for the nazis to come is not logical/mathematical/tautological/a priori/whatever proof that the white supremacists were ‘nazi sympathizer’s as Urstoff states.
Not any more than Churchll must have been a communist sympathiser because of their common Nazi enemy.
You’re making a different claim here. And ‘good’ is ambigious.
It would be odd if the (non-Nazi) marchers were not more likely to be sympathetic to the nazis than non-marchers. And certainly if the average person who was turned off by the presense of the nazis was more likely to be a nazi sympasysor that would be odd (although perhaps those who are willing to march alongside nazis are true believers in the actual cause without time to think of Nazis whereas the going-outs are concerned with optics thinking that, despite their sympathies, the nazis are a bad look).
Stlll, I think the number of people who are sympathetic to nazis is very small. The number of people who beleive in someting that they’ll ignore ‘but – but nazis’ is far larger. The number who will ignore actual literal nazis is smaller, but still far larger than the first group.
The counter-protest was organised by a violent paramilitary group. Was everyone at the counter-protest a paramilitary-sympaphiser?
Prominent members of BLM famously celebrate a cop-killer. Is anyone who goes to a BLM rally really a Chesimard-sympaphisor?
Keep in mind that the entire point of this rally was basically, “all right wingers need to band together in order for us to have a chance against the left – let’s put our internal disagreements aside and unite against our common enemy”
Assuming you believe that is an accurate statement or a good strategy, it necessitates being willing to stand and march with Nazis. Presumably, it would also mean being willing to stand and march with John Kasich or some RINO wimp. I’m assuming if John Kasich showed up and wanted to march, they wouldn’t have turned him away!
For once, I agree. Conservatives have a choice — collaborate with fascists or not. History is watching you.
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
Buddy, dudes running around with swastikas, throwing the Hitler salute, chanting about Jews, being concerned about racial supremacy, killing people are fascists.
Sure. But those guys are also Nazis and that’s a much scarier word.
So cucks are part of the problem and part of the solution?
There was at least one kind of flag that I saw more of in the pictures that I saw.
Alt-right and actual nazi have non-trivial overlap. Although distinctions have traditionally existed between prison-Nazis and frog-Nazis.
Alt-liters, who are less popular and a way bigger cohort than alt-righters (generally defined as /r/donald type people) are very distinct from nazis. This is a group with guys like Gavin M. and Lauren Southern, who embrace a softer western identity politics, but won’t say and probably don’t even believe in actual Racism (with a capital R). e.g. Gavin M. wouldn’t let his crew go to this rally.
Probably the best way to classify alt-lite vs. alt-right is “What’s up with Jews?”
I really don’t want the alt-liters to be radicalized.
Heh. I guess for folks with the epistemic hygiene of /r/the_Donald, what force is exactly stopping them from answering the “What’s up with Jews?” question in any particular way?
Nothing, as far as I can tell. I mean what, they are going to say all this other awful stuff online, but suddenly stop here? Why would they?
The big picture here is that, during the 2016 election, violent disruption of Trump rallies was successfully used to justify shutting them down. It was the classic heckler’s veto: if antifa or BLM threatens to show up and break heads at a right wing event, the city or campus authorities have an excuse to prevent it from happening. The media played along by talking about ‘violence at Trump rallies’ in the passive voice, implying that the victims were attackers.
I would naturally rather that the police did their jobs or that organizers hired private security companies. Skinheads are unreliable (as we just witnessed) and using them as footsoldiers has bad optics. But it’s not obviously worse than passively accepting a beating any time someone with an R next to their name holds a speech.
Trump did hire security for some events. The media complained about the protestors being manhandled as they were ejected from the events. Nothing short of yielding to the heckler’s veto will satisfy them.
To a certain extent, right-wing street brawlers are private security for right-wing speeches. So far, most of these nationally known brawls have been right-wing attempts to have people speak. Knowing that the police will not protect them, they bring their own protection.
If the left would simply allow the likes of Milo, Lauren Southern, and Richard Spencer to speak in public, the right wouldn’t need to show up with mace and riot shields.
Surely this is a false dichotomy? Instead of bringing in the skinheads, why not just do stuff like this: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-uc-berkeley-chancellor-20170815-story.html
(Incidentally, from a purely political point of view, passively accepting a beating is obviously better than using skinheads as foot soldiers. Remember, during the Civil Rights movement, the guys who got cleared away with fire hoses and murdered by good ol’ boys are the side that won.)
>(Incidentally, from a purely political point of view, passively accepting a beating is obviously better than using skinheads as foot soldiers. Remember, during the Civil Rights movement, the guys who got cleared away with fire hoses and murdered by good ol’ boys are the side that won.)
They won because people sympathized with them. No matter how peaceful neo-nazis are, they aren’t going to win by just taking a beating because very few people are willing to defend them. Look at what happened to the enemies of the Nazi’s.
Additionally, fascism – and perhaps authoritarian ideologies in general – are really big on strength. Just from a practical standpoint, a movement that focuses on strength as a virtue is not going to accomplish anything getting beaten up. They will adopt martyrs, but ideologies focusing on strength and force don’t coincide with nonviolent resistance.
Yeah, the alt-right would definitely rather go down fighting than win via pity and sympathy
I agree that fascists can’t take the MLK approach for both practical and ideological reasons, but I’ve been informed that the alt-right are mostly not fascists.
I mean, MLK was tarred as a communist, in a context where communists were hated as much as fascists are today. He didn’t say “well crap, guess we’d better call in the Red Guards”.
One of the big things holding the alt-right together, even the most benign parts of it, is a general rejection of victimhood politics. This is not the same thing as the “politics of strength” that fascists are into — I don’t think aitch-bee-dee fans are into it because it makes them feel strong, for example — but it does rule out MLK-style civil disobedience.
@Nornagest: I don’t think this would be victimhood politics in the relevant sense. Victimhood politics goes rotten when it becomes part of a group identity and the actual injustice gets more and more hazy and abstract. Non-violent resistance doesn’t do that, it just dares the system to act unjustly in the light of day.
Some people tarred MLKJ as a communist. But there was enough support among those in power to outlaw racial segregation. Can you imagine the government passing any kind of neo-nazi law today? Trump and some of his staff may have alt-right sympathies but that’s a strong difference from what these protestors want. And even if he did try something, he still has to deal with Congress. There isn’t even enough support from the federal government to build a wall, let alone promote some kind of white nationalist state.
As far as the distinction between the alt-right and neo-nazis, I think they are conflated much more than civil rights protestors and communists ever were. Yes, people did call MLKJ a communist but people weren’t afraid to support him like today’s right-wing politician would be in supporting the alt-right.
Which alt-right? The groups at the rally would mostly be reasonably called fascists. The killer was even part of an organization which used crossed fasces as their symbol.
The wider definition of the alt-right, which includes fascists plus everyone from Milo to the ants to anyone else the tar will stick to… mostly not fascists. But as far as the media are concerned we might as well be.
@Nornagest
Maybe I’m misunderstanding who the alt-right includes, but there’s plenty of people out there saying that some group of straight white men are the real winners of the oppression olympics. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are well represented here.
Aren’t they alt right? Or is that alt light now? Or? TBH I’m a bit confused.
I think this shows some misunderstanding of their motives. Certainly there are people on the right, some of them white, straight, and/or male, that think they’ve been done wrong by the government or media or some other aspect of The System. But they wouldn’t think of this as oppression, viz. construction of a class relationship with them as the underclass; they think of it as being hurt by specific people and under specific policies. Compare how the left and the right talk about their boogeymen: the left treats people like the Kochs as sort of avatars of the oppressor class, distinguished only in that their misdeeds (often exaggerated or invented) have come to light, while the right talks about specific stuff (often exaggerated or invented) that George Soros or Hillary Clinton are supposed to have done.
There are a few exceptions — old-school MRAs (unlike redpill types, PUAs, and the rest of what used to be called the manosphere) are basically running regular gender politics with the valences switched around, for example. But they’re pretty uncommon and I’m not sure I’d call them rightist. Definitely not alt-right.
The last time I saw victimhood politics having any prominence on the right, it was in the context of evangelical Christians and their alleged mistreatment under secular society. But that’s been a dead letter since about Obama’s first term, despite the zombie croaking we hear every holiday season.
I think there’s a little bit of nuance here that you’re missing. I believe the alt-right position is something like “white males are oppressed because the overwhelming majority of us allow ourselves to be oppressed, and many of us outright join in with the oppressors hoping for favorable treatment – but if even a small amount of us stood up and actually fought for our rights we could stomp all the minorities, women, homosexuals, jews, and democrats into the ground due to our natural superiority”
@Nornagest
I guess I don’t see that. Yes, there are complaints about Soros or Clinton but there are far far more complaints about The Left, SJWs, The Media, or even just plain old ‘They’.
What is so conceptually different between those and the 1% or the patriarchy?
Those are outgroups, not oppressors. Everyone has outgroups, an oppressor is something more specific (see above re: class relationships).
Well, our hypothetical white nationalists who are smart enough to use non-violent resistance are probably also smart enough to reject anyone who shows up with the Nazi or Confederate flags. (There was a West coast guy who went on a teror rampage recently – a few weeks before that, he was kicked out of a free speech march for showing up with a swastika cape).
That sounds an awful lot like “if they could only break out of their false consciousness and unite, the proletariat could easily overthrow the decadent bourgeoisie an establish a workers’ paradise.” Even a lot of overlap with the boogiemen.
If the point is supposed to be that they don’t use the vocabulary of the university crits, then I guess sure. But that doesn’t seem particularly essential to anything.
If UC Berkeley holds to that policy and doesn’t use it as an excuse to prevent the invitation of alt-right speakers I’ll revise my opinion. The bit about billing hosting organizations for security seems like a good way to maintain a de facto ban.
As for passive resistance, I’m not really seeing how that’s supposed to work without a sympathetic media. The press has if anything been complicit in these attacks. So it doesn’t seem like a viable strategy.
Agreed that one shouldn’t count chickens before they hatch.
I think I’m more sanguine about the media than you are. It’s 2017, the internet exists, Fox is the most popular news network, WSJ is a close second in print media, and if those aren’t right enough for you there’s Breitbart. Hell, the Muslim Brotherhood was able to pull off the “get publicly repressed until the public takes your side” strategy in Egypt, an actual, non-metaphorical police state.
At the “core beliefs” level, neo-Nazis are scum. I don’t know what the antifa’s core beliefs are; mostly they seem to be in it just to brawl (which probably could be said about a lot of the neo-Nazis as well). But that level is the least important at this point.
The antifa are the ones who have and act on the meta-level belief that anyone whose beliefs are unacceptable to them must be silenced, if necessary through violence. That’s practically their raison d’etre. The neo-Nazis probably believe the same thing, but they aren’t yet acting on it. And there’s no need to hypothesize the slippery slope; the antifa have already slipped down it, causing violence at Milo events and attacking the Berkeley Trump supporters for instance. That makes the antifa the greater threat at the moment.
Richard Spencer certainly isn’t my ally; make him dictator of the world and he has me killed. But the people who attack him — here in the real world, they’re more likely to attack _me_ just for going to see the wrong speaker. Yesterday Milo, maybe tomorrow James Damore.
Do you know of any essay-length pro-antifa stuff written by antifa people? I’m almost sure that they would resist this characterization of their meta-level beliefs, but I’m also not sure what exactly they would say.
Their meta level belief seems to be that “fascist/Nazi beliefs (for a very broad definition of same) are equivalent to violence, because they promote violence against oppressed groups. Therefore, physical violence against them is not only morally justified but necessary”.
It’s basically the logical extension of the end bit of “Against Murderism”:
“Using violence to enforce conformity to social norms has always been the historical response. We invented liberalism to try to avoid having to do that, but you can’t liberalism with people who refuse reason and are motivated by hatred. If you give the franchise to green pointy-fanged monsters, they’re just going to vote for the “Barbecue And Eat All Humans” party. If such people existed and made up a substantial portion of the population, liberalism becomes impossible, and we should go back to just using violence to enforce our will on the people who disagree with us. Assuming they don’t cooperate with our strategy of violently suppressing them, that means civil war.”
The conclusion he drew from this is that we should thus try really hard to believe there are no actual murderists. But this becomes much more difficult when the green pointy-fanged monsters start holding open murderist rallies.
Before you finalize the catering order for Liberalism’s funeral, I suggest you pay more attention to the emphasized part.
How substantial does it need to be to start getting worried? Presumably not the majority, Hitler didn’t have the majority when he got started out either.
I’d personally suggest the point for getting worried may be somewhere around “There are enough to get multiple avowed members of the movement into high rank in the White House,” but maybe that’s just me.
20% or more is when you start getting worried.
Or are you asking at what point it is ok to point to the historical example of Hitler and say “Liberalism won’t work, we must abandon liberal principles in order to pre-empt worse outcomes”?
I mean, kind of, yeah. At minimum that is the antifa position. If it isn’t worth trying to engage in liberal democracy with people who actually are motivated by hate (to quote again from above), what’s the reasoned argument against taking action against the Nazis?
(I am personally pretty ambivalent about punching Nazis, and strongly against punching random campus speakers you don’t like, but the question above was how you could argue the antifa position.)
I’m not sure that the rise of Hitler could have been prevented by more leftist violence.
If you’re going to use violence to enforce your will, you have to be either in a fairly strong majority, in which case the violence required will be small, or the violence you use must be terrible.
Terrible violence risks losing you support and necessitating yet more violence.
If I was a leftist, and actually, I am, I would be trying to increase the size of my majority through compromise rather than rushing straight towards the ‘terrible violence’ bit.
Compromise. Milo Yiannopolis is not a Nazi. Border control isn’t Nazi. Donald Trump is not the most evil man the world has ever seen. These are easy places to start.
Or we could just go straight into the terrible violence, but, as I said, I’m not sure that is such a great idea.
In practice, I think there is a majority of people who find “Nazi-punching” abhorrent, and therefore they should be the ones using violence to impose their will.
By putting antifa in prison.
@Mark
I think Hitler was charismatic enough, and the balance of power close enough, that killing him would’ve probably stopped the Nazis getting to power.
rlms,
Do you think there’s one specific individual you could kill right now that would stop the spread of nazism in the US?
@Matt M
No, obviously not (if there was an American Nazi with even 10% of Hitler’s magnetism, considerably more people would’ve turned up to Charlottesville).
No, e.g. I agree with you on all counts. Thanks for writing this down.
I suspect it would be a very revealing exercise if the people who think Damore was “not fired for speaking truth to power, he was fired for mishandling a complex subject in a way that caused harm to his employer” were to offer their own, “well-handled” version. As in “I don’t agree with these points, but here is a respectful way of talking about them.”
Agreed.
Noteworthy:
– Anonymous female Googler tells BusinessInsider that:
A lot of campus speech restrictions work on this principle too – “It’s exhausting to me to learn of your opinion, and I don’t have the time to debate you, so you should shut up.”
If being exposed to his opinion is that upsetting, should we look at the culpability of the Googlers who reposted his essay from the sceptics’ board to the general board?
Relevant part of the quote is “I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work.”
I agree! Of course, being forced into debating is only implicitly necessary if punitive measures are taken against Damore, which they were. Alternatively, he could have been left alone, in which case nobody would have any moral obligation to provide counterarguments.
Should not the folks in charge of the diversity programs etc be reasonably aware of (some of) the relevant literature and be able to refute the arguments without a huge time overhead?
They did. “You’re fired!” is a perfectly valid argumentum ad baculum, and takes little time to accomplish.
Reading the article, I have to say I agree with them. Taking the two commenters in context, the first is just saying: “If you’re going to criticize your employer’s practices, you probably shouldn’t be doing that in an open memo with your name attributed to it. If it’s on a sensitive subject, that just makes things even worse.” This is nothing new. A ton of the people who get onto the whole speak-truth-to-power deal tend to be miserable problems to work with, because they have none of the social tact to handle tough problems gracefully. It’s similar to jumping up the chain of command to complain about something: you’d better be really, really sure about the problem, or else you’re definitely getting fired. Damore didn’t jump slightly up the chain of command; he leaped entirely outside it. Think: if you had an employee who openly criticized your hiring procedure in a ten-page memo, would you keep him or her, no matter what the topic was about? I’d fire them, even if the memo was informative and helpful, because someone like that is going to decrease productivity by being a constant thorn.
The second person quoted outright said that his views were common, and ought to be openly discussed. She also said that she didn’t want to have an intensive dialogue about gender at work, and can you blame her? Gender dialogue is tough at the best of times, and a nightmare at worst. She’s right to say that people at Google shouldn’t try to force that conversation on her, because her job is what she was hired for. Why should she be forced to do something else?
I mean, I find Scott’s argument in that recent gender post, that there’s an interest (but not ability) gap between men and women, extremely compelling. There’s good evidence supporting a sane conclusion there, and I think it would help a lot of people to do some real research into it so that it can be developed as a major position. The problem about what Dramore did, outside of the obvious insubordination issue, is that it was set up in the context of an essay about discrimination against certain political views. Dramore felt that people with views like his were being discriminated against, which may or may not be correct (I suspect that it’s true, but closer to the microaggression scale than to any blatant oppression), and then linked that to the women-in-the-workforce policy and differences between men and women. This was rightly interpreted as a step in setting up a superweapon. Women become associated with oppression and inherent differences, which (with further development) can turn into “Women are inherently different and oppress men.” I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a bad thing.
So, I think I have a pretty good idea of how Dramore could have approached this better. First, he could have focused on the discrimination issue by itself, and talked about how he felt the company was a little single-minded about a bunch of issues, political or other. If he did this tactfully, brought it up with like-minded friends, brought a modest petition up to management, and spread his message to the general company workforce, he would have succeeded in making a more open environment that he could speak freely in. Following this, he could talk with women about the women-in-tech issue, listen to their experiences, draft up a much more complete theory about the whole issue, and present it as a joint effort between different members of the company to figure out what’s going on at Google and to make sure everyone is welcome there. The thesis might look something like, “evidence suggests that a lower percentage of women are interested in working in tech, despite having equal competence to male employees, and we as a workforce want to figure out how best to ensure that they will have good working conditions despite being a minority.” Heck, you could even work in the wage-argument about lower assertiveness, and turn it into a resolution to standardize wages so that no unassertive employee can be taken advantage of. This kind of approach takes great pains to avoid constructing a superweapon, and as such, would stand a much better chance of success. It just takes a lot longer.
There’s a lot of interesting gender work that goes on at this blog, and a lot of helpful intellectual tools get developed as well. I just think we’d be wisest to train them on ourselves, from time to time. I think the entire pushback against Damore can be summed up as a combination of the principles of simple authoritative coordination and superweapons. Those are arguments that I think we’ve been comfortable with in the past, and I see no reason to reject them here.
A good deal of the write-up was about hiring practices. Can I take it from your description that he would have to avoid approaching that question entirely?
Basically, yes. An issue with hiring practices isn’t something you can ever push without the majority of the company at your back, along with other strategic choices. In no regimented group ever is a grunt allowed to question or criticize strategy openly across the group, barring through specifically permitted avenues. If that kind of questioning/criticism is allowed, it quickly spirals out of control, with everyone trying to play backseat strategist without the kind of view that the actual strategists have. Think about how much people criticize those in power in any democracy, and then imagine if you had that kind of constant criticism coming from those who are supposed to be working. It’s just not a good thing.
If the topic had been, say, relative weighting of different college names in the hiring process, or something as non-inflammatory as that, Damore would likely have just gotten a sharp rebuke from his management. Since it was also a hot-button issue, and something that Google was being sued for at the time,* they fired him immediately.
I take it that not too many people here have tried to lead teams of, shall we say, “independent-minded” composition. Anyone who thinks they know better than the boss, especially so much so as to write an open memo about it, is far more trouble than they’re worth. I’ve been the “independent-minded” person before, and boy howdy, do I now realize what a nightmare that can be.
*Sued for paying women less for working the same jobs. They obviously didn’t want to risk controversy that could lose them the case.
I don’t disagree, but what this means is that he would still be fired for raising a “complex subject”, however he “handled” it.
I don’t see how he could have made all the points he made in the essay and not get fired. Maybe if he wrote so incoherently that it never went internally viral, but that’s kind of cheating the hypo.
On the other hand there are large subsets which could have been carved off into their own essays and gotten a different a result.
Woo, Morality and the Dark Tribe.
Warning: This post includes really disturbing hypothetical ideologies.
In this LW memetic blind spots have been discussed. I personally believe that social consensus generally belong to the category of woo because it varies from society to society and is generally not factually true. I personally strive to remove all such woo for the purpose of rationality.
However recently I began to find out why societies need woo. Of course leaders and advertisers can benefit from ignorance of the masses. However even a society with no demagogues still need woo. One reason is that it indoctrinate people with some form of ethics and prevent them from becoming sociopaths and harming the society.
“Moral education” is an oxymoron because discussing non-facts should not lead to everyone supporting a particular version of it. If conformism to non-truths is a goal then what takes place is indoctrination instead of education. Of course moral indoctrination has to happen along with real education so that the educated does not realize that they are being indoctrinated. There is a reason why humans tend to confuse the morally just and the factually correct. This particular woo in fact protect morality-related memes from being discarded and lower the number of sociopaths.
For example Social Justice can be seen as a form of secular post-Christianity. There is actually a reason why both the Blue Tribe and the Red Tribe reduce the amount of evil. Regardless of what moral values they have it is clear that neither tribe is morally nihilist. They both contain irrational woo. However such woo prevents people from joining the Dark Tribe.
What is the Dark Tribe? I’m talking about real sadism and sociopathy. The SS in particular was basically amoral. In one of their anthems they openly sang a devil’s song and claimed that they couldn’t care less about the world. The modern Brown Tribe also contains an amoral faction hence we can claim that the Brown Tribe and the Dark Tribe overlaps.
Dark Tribe ideologies are devoid of any form of morality and hence can be really dangerous. Those whose cognition is blinded by misapplication of morality tend to be unable to understand dangerous Dark Tribe ideologies. One hypothetical example I talked about is Exterminationist Selfism. Exterminationist Selfism is an ideology that for a sentient being to preserve oneself it should be completely self-sufficient and exterminate all other sentient beings. Among humans pure Exterminationist Selfism is hypothetical because it is impossible to realize. Exterminationist Selfism applied to groups is basically Exterminationist Tribalism which includes real Nazism in the late Third Reich. Using the concept of Exterminationist Selfism it is easy to understand the true motives of the Holocaust. The real goal of the Third Reich was to Germanize the planet. The greatest sin of Jews according to Nazism is that they are somehow un-Germanizable. Every non-German has to Germanize or disappear for the planet to be German. Hence Jews had to be exterminated. In this sense Nazism isn’t more advanced than head-hunting. Nazism was a product of rationality with no ethics instead of some distorted variants of morality hence it is not just Brown but also Dark.
The Dark Tribe is truly dangerous. We need to promote reason and ethics. However ethics should not be used to blind cognition. It is beneficial for the morally just to be able to think about evil Dark Tribe ideologies without using them.
There’s a bunch of stuff about the need for myth in Yuval Harari’s Sapiens.
which is that they are both “what my tribe believes”.
LOL I see. Stupid tribes need to get lost though.
I’m going to buy Yuval Harari’s book. It sounds interesting.
For terminal values, “moral education” may be theoretically impossible, yes. But do you know your terminal values, precisely? I don’t think I do; attempting to determine them would be best described as moral education. Even holding terminal values fixed, though, figuring out what instrumental values are most consistent with them would count as “moral education”, I think.
I agree. However the common “moral education” practiced anywhere on this planet is really moral indoctrination. The Blue Tribe isn’t innocent in this respect either.
I think you’re ignoring the role in genetics / brain structure in explaining sociopathy. I think societies or subcultures can certainly encourage or discourage sociopathic behavior, but my understanding of the current science is that sociopaths are largely *born*, not made.
I thought that only psychopathy is born but sociopathy is not. I was wrong.
There is not really a rigorous distinction between the two. Both terms come out of the same tradition of research and they’re probably gesturing towards roughly the same psychology, even if they draw their lines somewhat differently.
A while ago, somebody posted a link to the “Forensicator” analysis that claimed to show that the DNC hack must have happened from within, based on the timestamps on the files and the speed of a network connection. At the time I pointed out that the pattern was also consistent with an attacker creating one big zip file on the targeted machine, and exfiltrating that. Here’s Matt Tait, who has a lot more credibility than I do on the issue, making the same point, and going on to point out that the DNC server had APT28 malware on it, configured to use APT28 command and control servers.
This is an issue where I have zero ability to understand the technical analyses. I did see the Nation story about the VIPS report challenging the CrowdStrike analysis. I guess my question is, is there any conceivable way that a non-tech-savvy layman with no computer knowledge can even begin to assess the likelihood of these two alternatives? Is there any down-the-middle-just-the-facts source that you know of which summarizes the arguments well enough for a layman to understand what’s allegedly going on? Or is it, for non-specialized-tech people, purely a question of finding a trusted source?
I looked into a little bit and while there are some recipes out there that purportedly show how you can ‘prove it yourself’, I came away unconvinced that I could make heads or tails of the arguments. If I wanted to form a solid opinion based on the primary sources, I’d end up needing to teach myself digital forensics, and frankly I don’t have nearly enough interest in the underlying question.
FWIW I’m a programmer and moderately familiar with windows, linux, and networking.
Hmm. Hard question.
Finding a good trusted source is important. I suggest looking for people who are active in the security scene, Matt Tait being one good example. Really, it’s the same approach you’d use for any technical area. Mainstream practitioners are more likely to be right than iconoclasts, or people who seem to have a specific axe to grind. A complete case is more compelling than a mere pile of evidence. Look at Tait’s explanation of how the Podesta hack is connected to the Russians, which shows a clear chain of evidence linking the attack to other attacks on targets of interest to Russia. Compare it to the Forensicator account. There are a lot of claims, but no clear explanation of how they fit together. (The other link from our last discussion is even worse.) If somebody can’t put together a clear explanation of the logic of the argument, it’s possible that they’re just bad writers, but — especially in politically charged issues like these — it’s quite likely that they’re trying to overwhelm you with chaff.
Is anyone else concerned that future advancements in natural language processing / stylography will allow programs to effectively doxx the Internet?
I think technology to hide those clues would also be invented, so people could still be getting anonymity if they want it.
That wouldn’t help the pre-existing stuff, but I think that’d be dismissed as yesterday’s news.
I’m seriously curious on how easy it would be to doxx people this way given the sheer number of people posting things on the net.
There are various languages, various idioms, various topics, and various communication outputs, but there are absolute limits on the variety of these things. This is effectively a more complex version of the birthday problem.
Outside of famous people, those in topically unique circumstances, or people who consistently divulge their identity already, I think this will be an intractable problem for the majority.
So, uh, now that Trump just called a bunch of white supremacists very fine people and went so far in the direction of equivocating over whether Nazis are actually bad that even Fox News anchors were openly calling him disgusting on the air, I’m kind of curious whether Scott might revise his opinion that, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up.”
Well actually he said “some of them were white supremacists but some were very fine people”
I mean, he was almost certainly wrong. In fact, having just watched the press conference, he seems to believe there was a general “confederate statue protest”, and there doesn’t seem to have been one at all – the protest was part of “unite the right”. But it doesn’t seem like he did this, or at any point equivocated over whether Nazis are actually bad.
And Fox News anchors are not nearly as hardcore right as you’d think. Especially since they’re for views first and foremost.
Yeah, I’m leaning towards putting this one down under “stupid” rather than “evil.” Still, you have to conclude that he either watched videos of the protesters marching down the street chanting “Jews will not replace us” and thought “I bet there are some very fine people among that group,” or that he never bothered to watch any videos or even have a staff member watch some videos. Neither scenario speaks well of his qualifications to be Chief of State of the world’s sole superpower.
It occurs to me that even if they were chanting “You will not replace us” (there’s some question on the matter) it’s presumably very anti-poc.
This isn’t the most relevant, but I’d been assuming that “Jews will not replace us” was a mishearing until watching a few seconds of the Vice report on the rally; it’s unambiguously audible during the march footage in the first half minute.
How is the insistence on not replacing the traditional White majority of the US anti-PoC? Would Israeli Jews opposing the demographic replacement of Jews in Israel be anti-non Jew?
Moreover, if Jews are involved disproportionately in that replacement process, is “Jews will not replace us” a perfectly consistent thing for these people to say? (FWIW, it sounds like the crowd were chanting “you will not replace us,” and then some in the crowd shouted “Jews will not replace us.”)
*edit* I meant to also point out that no one seems to have a problem with explicitly mentioning white behavior in general when it relates to Whites benefitting as a group from oppression of Blacks. Slogans such as ‘White silence is white complicity,’ ‘Whites must interrogate their own privilege,’ etc., come to mind. If Whites benefitting from white privilege means that it is fair to address whites as a group, would it not be consistent for people to address Jews as a group *if* Jews indeed benefit as a group from replacing Whites? (Personally, I don’t think either group benefits from either thing, but I don’t engage in identity politics, I just think that if some groups can do it, then all can and should if they want to survive).
I’m not a white nationalist, but immigration and demographic policies that preserve the White majority in the US, and therefore the character of American culture and civic life, are well within the range of legitimate policies that we could choose to implement as a democratic society. Moreover, immigration policies which eliminate the traditional demographic makeup of the United States, and as a result the character of its society and culture, is also a perfectly legitimate thing to advocate, though it should not be instituted unless it has the informed approval of the population (and should not have been in 1965).
White nationalists who do not favor elimination or expulsion of America’s traditional minorities who accept American values and the Constitution, or even just race-conscious civic nationalists, as well as multiracialists and multiculturalists have views that are not at all beyond the pale, and these issues should be discussed openly and politely.
Trump is right to praise those on both sides who want their voices to be heard so that Americans can be informed of the type of future they’ll be leaving for their children and grandchildren.
Well, the only ways to do it would seem to involve discriminating against non-whites, so it seems pretty anti-PoC to me.
As the Spartans said, “If”. I mean, if you’re upset about Kiryas Joel, NY or Lakewood, NJ it would be consistent (though still obviously anti-Jewish). But for the country as a whole it just looks like anti-Semetic scapegoating.
Seems I’ve heard something like that before. Something about securing the existence of our people….
“Well, the only ways to do it would seem to involve discriminating against non-whites, so it seems pretty anti-PoC to me.”
How would it discriminate against non-White Americans to change immigration policies to not replace Whites, unless you consider the US not having complete, 100% open borders to be discrimination?
“But for the country as a whole it just looks like anti-Semetic scapegoating”
I’m perfectly willing to accept that argument as sincere, as long as you are willing to condemn any collective statement that ascribes responsibility to any group for discrimination that they are perceived to benefit from. I personally wouldn’t say, “Jews will not replace us,” if I were a white nationalist, but I would honestly state that it does seem Jews are involved in the process disproportionate to their percentage of the population if the topic came up.
“Seems I’ve heard something like that before. Something about securing the existence of our people….”
You can compare it to the 14 words, but that doesn’t really dismiss the question.
If the Japanese government replaced the population of Japan with sub-Saharan Africans to the point that the next generation of Japan was only 50% Japanese (which could be done with minimal effects on African population growth), the country that the next two generations of Japanese would grow up in would be extremely different. Do you disagree with this?
If future generations of Israelis would benefit from making Israel predominately African and Arab, then by all means, make that case, but it doesn’t seem realistic to just dismiss the idea that it will affect the future because some thug said words to a similar effect a few decades ago.
You:
Trump:
So, he’s explicitly NOT calling the neo-Nazis fine people. He’s saying there were fine people among the counterdemonstrators, and that there were fine people among the demonstrators who were not neo-Nazis nor white nationalists. Now I have my doubts whether this latter group actually existed. But he’s not calling white supremacists very fine people, nor is he at all equivocating over whether Nazis are actually bad.
Conclusion: “WOLF! WOLF!”
Even in this group, this hypothesized group of very fine people showed up at a protest, saw all the Klansmen and Nazis, and decided to join in and start chanting racist slogans along with them.
Just calling those nonexistent guys fine people is nuts, and this level of equivocation about a white supremacist rally would not have happened under any other President in our lifetimes, or any of the other Republican candidates in 2016. Compare Ted Cruz’s response to Trump’s.
Scott’s contention that Trump is not outside the Republican norm is easily disproved by comparing his reactions this week to literally every other Republican who has spoken on the subject.
(The glowing praise from all the literal Nazis and Klansmen to his remarks is also instructive.)
You have video of every single person at the ralley singing racist slogans? Or somer trustworthy source to colloborate that every single one was doing racist slogans.
Considering the protest was shut down an hour before it was to actually start, then I find it hard to beleve that everyone there for the protest can be said to have ben chanting racist slogans.
I don’t need that. Even if some protestors weren’t chanting, they weren’t bothered enough by being in a crowd full of Nazis chanting racist slogans to leave.
If you join in a protest organized by Nazis, full of Nazis very clearly being Nazis, you don’t get to act shocked and offended when people think you’re a Nazi.
And also, that is a minor side point. The actual point is the drastic difference in position here between Trump and all the normal Republicans. So far the last 2 Republican Presidential candidates, and several of Trump’s former competitors, have made statements specifically to clarify they don’t share Trump’s stance on this. Trump is not a normal Republican on this issue.
Did you deliberately limit your examples to losers, or have neither of the Bushes – despite their usual noisiness – not said anything in this issue?
McCain is brain-damaged (and wasn’t even considered normal beforehand). To hold him up as the representative republican is simply snark.
It wasn’t organised by an actual Nazi and nor were their reports of them acting like Nazis before people wll have gone to Charlotteville to join in the protest. The protest was then shut down before it started. It is literally impossible for them to have left the protest early or to react to the protest being full of Nazis.
Plus we’re not talking about objecting to calling them all Nazis. We’re talking about objecting to Trump not calling them all Nazis.
Fun fact! The Bushes jointly released a similar statement:
Would you like to move the goalposts any farther?
I didn’t move the goalposts. What goalposts are you claiming that I moved?
The hypothesized group would not be chanting racist slogans. Claiming they’d be bad just for being there with the Klansmen and Nazis is simply guilt by association, and ALSO means there were no good people on the other side because Antifa was there. This is clearly false. Hypothetical guilt-by-association is no more valid than real guilt-by-association.
And that, to belabor a point, is part of why Trump won. He’s not willing to acquiesce to Antifa shutting people down just because the people they shut down were odious. This is probably largely because there were people going to HIS rallies doing the same thing.
Post Charlottesville was a bad time to make this speech – this was a legit and obvious facist/neo-Nazi/white supremacist rally, and it was obvious enough about it that silent hangers-on are still outside a reasonable Overton window.
And I say that as someone who hates Antifa and the normalization / encouragement of street violence that’s coming from their supporters. The trouble is that Antifa doesn’t limit their punching / rioting / bike lock assaulting to actual Nazis, as anyone paying attention to Berkeley is aware.
We’ve gone around in circles over “who is worse”, but the fact is that Antifa are not nice people and I strongly condemn their tactics. But now their highest profile activity was against actual despicable Nazis, so if my FB feed is any indication they’re getting a total pass because “Anyone who criticizes a Nazi-puncher is a Nazi-sympathizer”.
I feel like maybe there are a couple steps between “Nazis are bad mmkay” and “let’s all support street violence” that we’re skipping over here? But that’s a point that needs to be made with some nuance that Trump has not shown himself capable of.
No, that is _not_ the trouble. The trouble is they’re punching, rioting, and bike lock assaulting at all. The main reason for this is that “don’t respond to speech with violence, except Nazis because fuck those guys” is not a Schelling point.
@The Nybbler — If no one had died last weekend, or only the cops that went down in an accidental helicopter crash, I’d be right there with you. Street brawlers of any stripe are not a welcome addition to our political process, especially when they’re trying to shut down their opponents’ rights to speech and assembly. Even if those opponents happen to be literal Nazis. I’ve said that before, and I expect to say it again the next time something like Berkeley inevitably happens.
But I’m not being too loud about it now, and the reason why is that these particular Nazis went beyond speech, assembly, and even regular brawling into murderous action. That is a much bigger deal than fists, pepper spray, bike locks and piss balloons. Morally, it means that the antifa side has the high ground here despite their usual tactics, and politically, it means that the most important thing going forward is to prevent a lasting escalation of violence. Neither moral nor political goals are served by drawing a false equivalence between the sides in this protest.
You keep referring to “these” nazis in plural, as if more than one of them was responsible for running someone over with a car.
Would you care to explain this?
If you and your friend are robbing a bank, and you’re holding a bag with a big green dollar sign on it while your friend shoots one of the tellers, you may not have pulled the trigger but you’re both going down for murder. Similar principle.
But nobody was in the car with him. Nobody planned the attack with him. That’s not a good analogy at all.
It’s more like “If you were standing near the guy an hour before he robbed the bank and happened to agree with him on some stuff, you both go to jail for murder”
No, that’s not how it works.
Even if he is not capable of it. Is not the president standing up against a meda that demands violence to anyone who makes that point going to encourage people wo are capable of making the point to make it.
Or at least would not the president collapsing to the pressure be discouraging to those capable?
But if you are at a sporting event, and one of the fans hits a fan of the opposing team on the way out of the parking lot, how much blame does the fandom collectively have?
The devil is in the details, and it is more relevant here because the ideology of the speakers either makes killing outsiders morally licit, or because their worldview is preached in apocalyptic, us versus them tones that make violence sound allowable. Without an actual death, they can sort of be written off as Larpers who don’t really understand what they are saying; once there’s blood, one has to look closer to see if there is actual incitement or if this is a lone wolf taking actions that are unconnected to the movement (as it would be in the article I was chastised for bringing up up-thread).
Antifa, as much as they are scum, have managed through some combination of luck and membership control, to stop any of their people from killing another person.
With the car driver, there isn’t legal complicity like there would be in felony murder, where someone who participates in one of certain specific serious felonies is guilty of murder if one happens during the felony. But when you show up to a fight and someone on Your Side takes things Too Far, you’re going to be on the hook for the social consequences.
Lots of far-right groups distanced themselves from Charlottesville before it happened because they didn’t want to be associated with neo-Nazis. It’s not that hard.
No, but a bunch of his fellow Nazis did decide, and most likely plan, to get involved in street fights with counter-protesters. Some of whom were looking for a fight too, yes, but they managed to keep lethal force in their pants this time.
Now that I’ve had time to cool down a bit, I’m willing to grant that this was probably an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment thing. But it’s still murder, and I feel that everyone on the Nazi side who walked into that brawl shares some of the responsibility for escalating it to murder.
A bunch of antifa decided to do this too. Do they also share any responsibility for the murder?
See the rest of that paragraph you quoted for my answer.
Christopher Cantwell, one of the organizer of “Unite the Right” says in this VICE video:
“The fact that nobody on our side died, I’d call that point for us. The fact that none of our people killed anybody unjustly I think is a plus for us
…
The video appears to show someone striking that vehicle. When these animals attacked him again and he saw no way to get away except to hit the gas, and sadly, because our rivals are a bunch of stupid animals who don’t pay attention they couldn’t just get out of the way of his car and some people got hurt, and that’s unfortunate.
…
I think it was more than justified.”
So the idea that the other white supremacists are just bystanders to this doesn’t wash.
I don’t think that’s logically consistent though.
“The Nazis are responsible for this murder because they promoted street fighting, which is violence”
“Antifa also promoted street fighting but they are not responsible in any way.”
The fact that nobody from Antifa murdered anybody would suggest that promoting street fighting is not, in and of itself, sufficient to motivate someone to murder.
So what did the Nazis do that antifa did not do which encouraged murder? You seem to be saying “Well a murder happened so they must have done SOMETHING.” I’m asking you to name the thing.
No. The Nazis aren’t responsible for this murder because they promoted street fighting. These Nazis are responsible for this murder because they organized, planned for, and entered a street fight without keeping a tight enough leash on one particular psycho with a Dodge to prevent the murder. I don’t know specifically what measures that would take, but if you’re going to walk into a fight, it is your responsibility to make sure your guys don’t get out of hand.
If the antifa make a similar mistake in a few weeks or months, which is looking depressingly likely, then I’ll condemn them like I’m condemning the Charlesville Nazis now. But that hasn’t happened yet.
They had neither authority nor power over the psycho with a Dodge. And their rally had been broken up by the police by the time the psycho with a Dodge did anything. I realize it’s nice to be able to point to this murder and say “checkmate Nazis” and therefore avoid the realization that they weren’t the only bad guys here, but it just doesn’t hold together.
As for Cantwell, he’s wrong for justifying murder (or at least homicide; I’d give a ~1% chance of the killing being non-intentional, but 0 of justified), but still not actually responsible for it.
If some random Antifa goon breaks someone’s head open during a rumble and kills them, I’d definitely place some blame on the Antifas who arranged to show up at the rumble. Even if murdering goon isn’t necessarily Antifa: because when you go into battle masked so that your soldiers cannot be identified, you don’t get to cry when someone misidentifies a bad combatant as one of your soldiers.
For the Charlottesville murder, assuming that it turns out to be a murder like we currently think, I place the groups here in order of blame, each above the one below it.
1. Fields
2. the goons on his side
3. the goons on the other side
4. the cops who let the goons rumble
@TheNybbler:
What about the next guy who runs down someone with a car because someone else dented it? Does he bear any responsibility for that?
Ah yes, when the Mayor decided to deny their right to peaceable assembly and the cops had forcibly evicted them from the park, the nazis should have physically restrained James Alex Fields, rather than letting him get into his car and leave. Because they should be prophetic, able to predict he would kill a counter-protestor instead of, I don’t know, driving home. And it’s totally okay for them to assault and restrain citizens who haven’t yet broken any laws.
Maybe not formal authority, but that just means the responsibility devolves to some diffuse set of Nazis with leverage over him rather than specifically to his boss. It doesn’t magically go away just because we’re talking about a mob rather than an actual organization.
And these things aren’t that self-directed. I know people who’ve done organizational work for protests before (not Nazi ones, but they must work similarly). They have leadership, infrastructure, and security, and part of the reason they do is to make sure they do the damage you want them to do, to the people you want them to do the damage to. If you’re running security for an Occupy march and some Black Bloc guys slip the leash and torch a Chase branch, that is your fault. Same sort of thinking applies here.
i think this is false and also the greatest problem by far with the rally
it was probably just a bunch of chucklefucks getting each other riled up, and oh no look what happened, who could have predicted
like sure they had e-celebs there, but I don’t think they had any serious level of control. Maybe a few people as a makeshift posse, probably nothing more than that. (I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I’d bet a lot of money on this being true.)
It takes a surprising amount of effort to get an undirected mob in shape: there is basically no such thing as a spontaneous protest. A protest without some fairly heavyweight coordination going on behind the scenes doesn’t look like an undirected mob, it just doesn’t happen.
I’m willing to believe that the people running this thing didn’t have their shit together (the Right doesn’t have the institutional knowledge of this sort of thing that the Left does; the original Nazis were really good at it, but all the people behind Nuremberg were hanged at, uh, Nuremberg), but that just means it’s their fault through incompetence rather than malice.
But they mayor cancelled the protest?
If some black bloc guys torch a Chase branch at the same time that you would have been having your protest had the mayor not cancelled it then surely the responsibility for that that can not lie at the hands of people organasing the cancelled protest?
The organizers don’t exactly vanish in a puff of embarrassment if the government looks at them the wrong way. Occupy’s a great example, actually: its actions got redirected, “canceled”, or otherwise messed with all the time.
What are you actually suggesting? That they should have ressted the plice dispersing them? That after dispersing they should have organised an unpermitted gathering?
What are the actual actions that they should have taken but incompetently failled to do?
This whole thread is exactly my point. The Charlottesville Nazis are super hard to defend, because they legitimately suck. I firmly believe in the right of anybody to non-violently assemble, even Nazi garbage, but mayyyybe we choose our battles a little bit when this battle involved actual Nazis, one of whom attempted mass murder.
But Milo fans? Charles Murray? Generic Berkely Tumpers? Those are not “actual Nazis” by any definition except Antifa’s, and the fact that Antifa fails to distinguish between them shows that they are dangerous, despite being on the sympathetic side this one time.
If the Right is willing to learn from its enemies, it is worth noting that the Left has of late gotten pretty good at keeping its streetfighters organized and disciplined. This goes back at least to the 1999 WTO protests, and it’s vital. And not just an American thing; I’ve seen very disciplined and effective protests from the left in e.g. Seoul. This is absolutely vital, and you all might want to look into how they do it.
Part of it is the messaging, stressing the need for unity over individual action. Part of it is logistics, like having your people assemble at rally points well away from the protest site and bringing them over in groups. And for protests where you expect violence, try to only use people you’ve worked or trained with before, and find something harmlessly nonprovocative for enthusiastic newbies to keep busy with until you’ve gotten around to training them.
The Right, by contrast, seems to favor the “leaderless resistance” model, and while that may shield the top peoplefrom legal prosecution it isn’t going to do much for their perceived moral culpability. If you’re going to encourage violence, you need to provide leadership – anything less is depraved indifference to human life.
If the Right isn’t willing to learn from its enemies, on little matters like how to make sure nobody gets too excited and goes about murdering people, then the Right deserves to lose.
Or maybe we shouldn’t, because once you’ve surrendered your principles you’re just haggling over the price, playing an arbitrary line drawing game, one which has already reached provocateurs Milo and Coulter, aitch-bee-dee type Charles Murray, Trump supporters (after all, isn’t Trump the next best thing to a Nazi? He said all those bad things about Mexicans and Muslims), Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Christina Hoff Sommers, etc.
@John Schilling
How disciplined was Micah Xavier Johnson?
I legitimately don’t see anyone surrendering their principles in this thread. No one here that wasn’t already on Team No Platform For Fascists is saying that the Charlottesville Nazis, slime though they are, should have been clapped in irons and shipped off to Siberia the moment they looked set to display potentially problematic symbols or assemble in groups of more than three. No one has said to my recollection that we should give antifa a free pass for street violence or reconsider our stance on Nazi-punching. The most I’ve heard anyone say (again, except those that were already uncomfortable with expansive free speech before this started) is that we might have bigger fish to fry right now, or that this is maybe not the best hill to die on if we’re looking to prove our anti-antifa bona fides.
What exactly do you think I’m saying?
Ilya, RLMS. I think that’s it though. I think Brad’s argument that non-violent counter-protesters being “laudable” is iffy when they seem to be coordinated with the violent ones in order to provide camouflage and top-cover for them, but he has said that the violent protesters themselves are bad, so I don’t think he counts.
Johnson wasn’t part of anyone’s protest movement. Unless it’s your assertion that he was part of a secret master plan by the organized left to kill police officers without their being collectively blamed for it, in which case he was disciplined enough to not do his murdering at the site of an organized left-wing protest with a bunch of flag-waving leftists standing around to share in the credit.
Sorry, when did I say this?
Battery is a felony, I don’t advocate committing felonies — that would be crazy.
—
There are situations where I think it would be appropriate to use violence against fascism, but that would be something like an open formal war, as has happened in the past.
I am ok with using violence to apprehend criminals, as the police are entitled to do so, and it’s a part of the social contract, etc.
Self-defense is often ok, also.
—
I think your headcanon of me is wrong.
I think it’s worthwhile thinking of this as on a trend line.
Compare the organized violence of the union movement with the organized nonviolence of the bulk of the civil rights movement.
I don’t know if there were waving flags or not, but it simply was at the site of an organised left-wing protest.
@Trofim_Lysenko
I do not recall saying anything of that nature (nor Ilya, although I could be mistaken). For the record, I strongly condemn almost all* violence of the kind that has occurred. In fact, I probably take a harsher stand against it than most people here, since I don’t condone being violent to protect your property (if some thug wants to smash your camera, let them) or escalating violence even in self-defence (shooting someone who’s running at you with a club). If necessary, I condemn it in Charlottesville specifically! It’s a sad day when saying “No, those Nazis really were bad, that guy they were beating and the people rammed by the Nazi in a car weren’t somehow ‘asking for it’, really, Nazis are bad, why can’t you accept this?” is seen as a defence of thuggery on the other side.
*Violence to defend against imminent physical danger, if running away is impossible and the danger is large enough that just taking the punch is too much to ask, is acceptable.
@Ilya Shpitser
When matt snarkily characterized your position was “a bunch of nazis started beating up totally peaceful people for no reason”, your correction was “oh they had a reason”. In other words, agreeing with “totally peaceful people”.
I’ve taken your argument so far to be that, as far as you can tell, there exists no evidence that there was any violent activity at Charlottesville that was initiated by counter-protesters, and that any violent actions they did take part in were entirely justifiable justifiable self-defense.
Have I unfairly summarized your position?
EDIT: Sorry, you posted while I was trying to respond. These maximally nested threads get really annoying.
Let us say for now that I am less convinced that it was one-sided than you are, which does not in any way detract from the blameworthyness of things like ganging up and curbstomping opponents or escalating to lethal force. I keep trying to find good video footage of the initial engagment (the point at which the two bodies of protesters clashed), but so far the ones I’ve found either are pointed -away- at the moment of engagement and then pivot back after, so you hear but don’t see it, or are choppily and obviously edited.
I agree with you on the undesirability of coalition politics with nazis, and I’d do so on mmoral grounds even if there weren’t plenty of practical reasons to do so (see my responses to Matt M above).
EDIT : @RLMS
Fair enough, I think I’ve misinterpreted your position then. I apologize if I was being insufficiently charitable.
I’d also like to clarify that when I said “no reason” I meant to imply “no legitimate reason.”
So responses like “Oh they had a reason, their reason was “because the guy was black.” is a little beside the point. That’s the same as “no reason” in my book, tbqh.
Trofim:
I was talking about the beating of Harris, which I thought (and still do) was racially motivated. The reason was he was black.
“I’ve taken your argument so far to be that, as far as you can tell, there exists no evidence that there was any violent activity at Charlottesville that was initiated by counter-protesters, and that any violent actions they did take part in were entirely justifiable justifiable self-defense.”
What I did was present some evidence, and asked Matt M to present his (which he failed to do). I didn’t say evidence didn’t exist, I asked for it, and was willing to entertain it. Based on the balance of evidence _I have seen_, violence was pretty one sided in Virginia. I still believe this, but will update if evidence changes, of course.
—
Extreme left-wing folks have initiated violence elsewhere, this is all well-documented, and undisputed.
—
Now, you seem to ascribe to me a belief that we should give antifa a free pass for street violence, the precise quote is:
“No one has said to my recollection that we should give antifa a free pass for street violence or reconsider our stance on Nazi-punching.”
“Ilya, RLMS”
I ask again, when did I say this?
You have to remember, unlike you, I sign with my real name. It’s fine to not sign your name, that’s your choice, and signing my name is mine.
But, please do me this kindness and not ascribe me things I did not actually say and do not actually believe. I put my name on the line in discussions here.
You’re saying to give the antifa a free pass _this time_, because one of the Nazis killed someone. But then when it’s Milo,
it’ll be,it was “well, Milo’s an outrageous provocateur who insulted a transwoman on stage”. There will be an excuse for every action.A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”
@The_Nybbler
Not really helping.
@Ilya
Fair enough. I wasn’t entirely sure if you were disputing that or not.
I’ll take you at your word that you’ll update based on new evidence.
Huh, I had assumed it was a pseudonym. What’s the etymology of Shpitser?
For my part, I’m not afraid to own anything I write under my real name, and I’ve dropped more than enough information to “doxx” myself to anyone who bothers to look, since I’ve identified my employer and current town multiple times, the department I work at for my employer, and my current job, and sex. There’s only 3 supervisors in my department and I’m the only male one.
I just prefer to save real names for one-on-one contact.
Fair enough, I accept that I was mistaken in attributing to you that position, and apologize.
It’s Spitzer (Yiddish/German name), but written badly in a way that replicates the German pronunciation of “Sp.”
I appreciate your comment, thanks.
I was involved in these discussions when the Berkeley riots were happening, and my position was that Milo should have kept his platform and the Black Bloc was acting appallingly. I still think they are, I just think they shouldn’t be on the top of our agenda when we’ve got an actual, not just rhetorical, Nazi on our plate who just ran a car into a crowd of people. Am I giving them a pass if I don’t preface every statement with “antifa are Literally The Worst, but…”? I thought we looked down on that style of argument around here.
Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for some kind of social justice enthusiast; I assure you I’m not.
Said nazi is in police custody, has been charged with murder, and everyone who isn’t some flavor of white supremacist has agreed that what he did was horrible.
I want to talk about the rest of that clusterfuck, and how 4 different groups made it happen. The violent thugs on the right spoiling for a fight. The violent thugs on the left happy to give it to them. The mayor, and the police, who worked together to violate the protestor’s right to peaceful assembly, forced them into close contact with the counter-protestors, and then stood by while violence erupted.
And that guy is in jail and will never get out. If in a red state, he’d be executed.
What more do you think needs to be done about him?
@Edward Scizorhands
No they haven’t [article about some Antifa, or at least quasi-Antifa, goons beating a guy to death because he wore a Confederate flag T-shirt to a concert]. I remember seeing that piece years ago, probably around when it came out in ’07, but I didn’t make the connection to this new “Antifa” thing I was suddenly hearing so much about until I saw discussions of Antifa’s roots in that whole “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!” business.
That really helped crystalize in my mind why I fear and loathe these guys so much, despite being pretty left-wing (not radical by any means, but left-wing enough that I could name several lefty political blogs that I hardly ever found reason to disagree with, until just recently, when they came out strongly in favor of preemptive Nazi-punching; I’ve also been dismayed by the mendacity and nerd-shaming subtext of their Google Memo coverage in several cases).
It seems like some guys just have a surplus of free-floating aggression and feel the need to crap up civilization for the rest of us, until they’ve gotten it out of they’re system when they hit middle-age. I tend to think of people like that as the natural enemies of people like me at a pre-ideological level, and funneling it through left-anarchism or anti-racism only makes them maybe 15-20% less scary to me than neo-Nazis and their ilk. (I’m a straight white non-Marxist gentile though, so I can’t blame other people for being much more scared of Nazis than I am).
@Matt M
Not everyone is so sure. There’s even been some debate already about whether Fields could get off relatively easy right here in this thread.
Bike Lock Guy is also in jail; he’ll presumably get out after a prison term appropriate for felony aggravated assault. So we’re done talking about antifa, right?
Right?
Only if we’re done talking about nazis too.
The Nybbler:
His shooting of a bunch of cops seriously and maybe irrevocably damaged BLM’s image.
Some of this discussion reminds me of the sort of pattern you sometimes see of:
a. ISIS-inspired terrorist attack kills a bunch of people.
b. Group 1 (mostly liberal) “We mustn’t condemn all Muslims for this terrible act, Islam is a religion of peace, etc.”
c. Group 2 (mostly conservative) Gets outraged.
Steve Sailer entrtainingly refers to (b) as “frontlash”–basically media types trying to get ahead of anyone bashing on Muslims as a result of the attack.
It feels like something similar is happening here. Trump supporters or aitch bee dee supporters or whomever get preemptively defensive, because they dont want to see normalization of “punch a Nazi,” where “Nazi” = anyone I don’t like on the right.
There’s no inconsistency in noting:
a. Nazis are bad.
b. The protesters at Charlotville appear to have been largely bad people out to do evil.
c. Most people on the right, most Trump voters, and most people who oppose removal of Confederate monuments are not bad people out to do evil.
Bike Lock Guy was doing a marginally more extreme version of something antifa regularly do, intend to do, plan for, and will likely keep doing. Not all of them? Probably not, but it still shows up every time, no nazis required on the other side.
People have been talking as if that was also true of Car Guy, as if they as a group intended anything like it or welcomed it when it happened. I have to make a serious effort trying to imagine what it’s like to believe that, and it’s honestly scaring me how far apart people’s perceptions of basic things has grown.
Also, I should already have put the “of course, f*** nazis” disclaimer by now, so here it is.
I don’t think very many of them intended it; maybe just Car Guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them welcomed it when it happened, but most probably didn’t. But I don’t think that gets them off the hook, either.
I take this stuff very seriously. Acting violently means you have a moral and often a legal responsibility for the results of that violence, even if they’re more than what you intended. Say some guy called your sister a whore and you hit him in the mouth. He fell, hit his head wrong on a table, there was swelling in his skull and he died before he got to a hospital. Probably all you meant was to give him some bruises, maybe break a tooth or two. Maybe he even deserved it. His death’s still on you.
I think that applies on a group level too, not just an individual one.
@Cauê
You say of course f*** nazis, but you apparently think highly enough of them that you can’t even imagine how someone else could believe they intended harm or welcomed it when it happened. Guys invoking the third reich — the one that murdered millions of people — you can’t understand how anyone might might think they intended or welcomed harm? Really?
Sure, I think most of these guys were basically LARPing. But publicly LARP fucking nazi and deny you are LARPing, and I’m not going to give the benefit of any doubts. Okay, you disagree, but you can’t even understand how someone would come down on the other side? Come off it.
kjohn asked above “What are the actual actions that they should have taken but incompetently failled to do?”. I also don’t understand how that’s supposed to work.
Unless you mean they shouldn’t have had the rally at all? Doesn’t this just get us to a form of heckler’s veto? Most of the violence could have been prevented by police, and the car was so far beyond what has been happening at these clashes for years now that I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to foresee something like it.
That’s not a question I can answer specifically, because I don’t know anything about how this event was organized or what leverage the various parts of it might have had. But as I and others have noted, the left equivalents of these guys have managed to keep their footsoldiers in check fairly well. These guys can do it too.
Not all the same framing would work, of course. But the logistical stuff still would. Start and end outside of heavily populated areas. Have a backup plan, one that isn’t “let hundreds of angry Nazis off the chain and hope for the best”, for what you’re going to do if the city decides you can’t do what you were planning to (this is probably the single worst failure). Have people whose job it is to keep an eye on your guys and step in if they’re getting too rowdy, before, during, and after the event proper. If you expect a fight, keep the group together and put guys up front who you can trust. Emphasize discipline; I bet Nazis would love LARPing as soldiers.
These are just some general ideas, and something totally different may have worked better on the ground. I’m not saying they’re morally on the hook for murder for holding a rally as such, but the fact of the matter is that they invited a few hundred Nazis — a group not known for its calm and saintlike demeanor — and then failed to maintain adequate security. If they weren’t capable of that, then no, they shouldn’t have attempted it: their right is to peaceable assembly, and they can’t guarantee the peaceable part.
Brad, please indulge an anecdote.
I don’t know these people, and barely even see them even on the internet. But years ago in college I found myself arguing online against this guy who said he admired Hitler and the nazis. I don’t remember much, but he didn’t believe in the holocaust, and he thought Hitler had somehow been forced into war against his will. I never met him, but people who did seemed to believe he was sincere.
His graduation thesis wasn’t about that, but it was about legal suppression of speech about that (this is not the US), and it was enough to cause a mini-scandal (simpler times…), with people denouncing his hatred and his defense of violence and genocide.
Now I found myself arguing against that, because the numbf**k wasn’t defending Hitler’s violence, he defended Hitler because he somehow thought he had not been violent.
This character that he liked in his head wasn’t the same character that everyone else understood and hated him for liking. This distinction has stayed with me since then, and it’s one of these things that’s everywhere when you start to look.
Look, I don’t understand these people, I don’t know what’s in their shiny stupid heads, what they think they’re doing. But I’ve followed this thing closer than usually, seen it not only through the media but also through a couple of the organizers (mostly Pax Dickinson, though he doesn’t seem to fit there and I still don’t get what the hell he was doing there), and the planning for violence I’ve seen was exclusively in the context of preparing for antifa.
Yes, it would surprise me very much to learn that the car was somehow planned or supported (clinging to the theory that it was a panic reaction isn’t quite the same thing). Maybe I’m being naive! It still scares me how overwhelming the opposite presumption seems to be.
@Nornagest
If you take away the car, no, they haven’t. At best it’s even. If you must count Fields, then I do think we’re at the point where you should be counting Micah Xavier Johnson as well.
The rest of your comment was interesting. But the city deciding they couldn’t do it was a very small problem compared to the police not doing their jobs, and even pushing one side into the other. Now, maybe something like this was predictable enough that one could reasonably say they had an obligation to prepare for it, but I think that’s pushing it too far.
The car is the whole reason we’re talking about this, so no, I’m not willing to take it away. But even if we restrict ourselves to the fists-and-baseball-bats style of fighting, I think the antifa still have a leg (somewhat) up on the Nazis, proportionally. That “proportionally” is key: there just aren’t very many Nazis. The last rally that crossed my radar was in Sacramento in early 2016, and there was serious violence there too. I’m willing to say they both suck, but I think there’s a pretty clear statistical signal for which sucks more.
(If you think I’m being unfair to the Right here, I think that the mainstream GOP and the Milo wing of the alt-right both look a lot better by the same metric.)
@albatross11
It’s not _pre-emptive_ defensiveness, because violent protestors have already bashed Trump supporters, Milo supporters, aitch-bee-dee supporters (particularly including Charles Murray), etc. We already _know_ their conception of “someone close enough to a Nazi to be worthy to bash” is rather wide. That they got actual neo-Nazis this time doesn’t justify them.
Anybody who hasn’t watched the Vice documentary yet should watch the Vice video. It includes extended interviews with actual organizers of the march. In particular, Chris Cantwell (a named speaker on the poster) is interviewed both before and after the rally. Start at 2:15 for the pre-rally interview:
The post-rally interview starts at 19:05:
Again, this is a promoted speaker at the rally, not some random cherry-picked hooligan.
ehhhh, Cantwell is also a podcast host who is attempting to increase his fame and notoriety by going increasingly more “shocking” and has admitted in the past to “playing it up” for the media in order to increase the amount of attention they pay to him
Your overall point isn’t wrong, but I’d say that Cantwell specifically has greater motivation/incentives to NOT apologize and to go for maximum shock value than some “random cherry picked hooligan”
@Cauê
In this case you’re on the one with the character in his head that isn’t the same as everyone else. When everyone* hears “neo-nazi” they think unstable violent musclebound guy, not a nebbish college kid with bizarre views about Adolf Hitler.
Again, maybe you are more right about these guys than the other view, but I don’t think it should be puzzling or scary that the dominant view is the other way. Again we are talking her about people consciously and deliberately invoking the rhetoric and symbolism of actual literal nazis.
* Well not everyone, there are some people that take the whole “no enemies to the right” thing very seriously. Some of them in this thread. But they generally just change the subject (Antifa!!!) rather than recasting the neo-nazis as misunderstood.
and the planning for violence I’ve seen was exclusively in the context of preparing for antifa.
There are a bunch of people who have successfully baited Antifa into committing crimes on camera. Here’s the first link I found, which contains unPC language but I don’t have time to dig more http://madworldnews.com/transgender-antifa-thug-man-bun/
edit This is less offensive and has more context but it takes 9 minutes to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUm4lbiAlwM
He is successfully playing the game “bait the other person into violence because then they lose.” Sometimes you need to take a punch like a man.
So far as ordinary violence is concerned–hitting people, smashing windows, and the like–left demonstrations have not kept their footsoldiers in check.
The extraordinary violence in this case involved one person doing something that wasn’t part of the demonstration (driving a car into a crowd, not marching around with signs and fighting people). How is the failure of the demonstration organizers to prevent that any different from the failure of people on the left to prevent one of their “footsoldiers” from shooting up a bunch of Republican congressmen at a baseball practice?
In each case you have a single actor who identifies with one side of the conflict taking an action that doesn’t involve the other people on that side.
@Iain, even there, I’m interpreting his blustering as preparing for violence against antifa, especially for being attacked by antifa. It makes much more sense in context (bragging to a journalist, ffs), and fits with the idea that “the right doesn’t start the fights” that I’ve seen organizers bragging about on occasion. On the car, what he’s saying was justified is this scenario he described of the guy getting attacked and trying to get away, not the murder that basically everyone else saw in the videos.
@Brad, yes, and for all I’ve seen those guys were much closer to nerds LARPing than what you’re picturing. That wasn’t the Aryan Brotherhood out there.
@Nornagest, I’m agreeing with David Friedman above, nothing to add beyond what I had said.
@Ilya Shpitser :
Are you sure the beating wasn’t retaliation for Harris initiating violence in swinging his club full force at someone’s head, someone who had been trying to march while holding onto a flag that Harris and his friends didn’t like so they were trying to take it from him?
He’s not that much more racist than the baseline*, but he is perversely stubborn and narcissistic. He refuses to listen to anyone who criticizes him, because he thinks that means conceding that they’re right. He naturally thinks the alt-right are “very fine people” because they like him, and everyone telling him they’re bad is a hater, a loser, sad. The notion that there are greater issues at stake than Morning Joe being nasty to him has never occurred to him – or maybe he honestly believes that his own petty feuds are more important than anything else going on in the world.
*The baseline is pretty damn racist.
This is plausibly true, but insufficient. Trump might be defending white nationalists because he has white nationalist leanings himself, or he might be defending them because they like him and say nice things about him*. Either way, he is clearly more open to defending, endorsing, and encouraging white nationalists than any other prominent Republican politician. Even those who would like to pretend that he was just talking about the fine people standing next to the white nationalists should concede that no other Republicans are going even that far. Trump is an outlier. Scott’s conclusion was wrong, and he should revisit the thought process that led to it.
*Left as a problem for the reader: why are white nationalists saying nice things about Trump?
This really is a fascinating question. A corollary to the so-called “Trump’s Razor” hypothesis would be that the WNs are dumb/out of touch enough that they don’t realize that Trump’s allies almost always suffer from making alliances with him. He’s box-office poison, in other words — even to the frickin’ Nazis.
(A counter argument would be that these bozos are a small enough group that any publicity is good publicity, but I just don’t see that working out for them in the long term.)
I would guess the reason they say nice things about him is that he’s the only politician whose position on immigration (which they care about a lot) is not diametrically opposed to what they want.
What he actually said seems fairly reasonable, though it might be inaccurate.
Thing is, I don’t know if there were people attending the rally who weren’t white nationalists, but I certainly wouldn’t trust the media to report truthfully on it.
There seems to be a mind-control operation going on. Look at all the stuff in recent years, where these ideas suddenly appear from nowhere, and get everyone [actually, not everyone – just ‘news’ people] really excited about something that is actually a complex/ contentious topic.
“Faake news”. Where did that come from? Putin and the Ukraine. Putin planned invasion of Eastern Europe. Coverage of Aleppo vs. coverage of Mosul. Illegal immigration. People drowning in the Med.
I remember after Brexit, all of a sudden, there was this argument everywhere that “Brexit isn’t fair because young people voted against it, and they’ll have to live with the consequences for longer” and then, it just disappeared. Wasn’t gaining enough traction?
So, I think it’s good to see the President blasting through the media narrative. Hopefully it’ll make people think a little rather than just making them angry.
I think I have to agree with the above. Trump simply doesn’t seem to have the kind of mental stability and consistency to be what we’d properly call racism. He can say a lot of racist things, and he can be useful to a racist agenda, but I don’t think he comes to it from a position of believing in white superiority so much as a kind of blind narcissism. I’d be willing to bet that if he got a lot of praise from, say, a group of time-traveling Roman patricians, he’d be happy to defend their racism against those Gallic and Germanic barbarians. He’d probably side with hardline Cultural Revolution Maoists, if they’d only praise him.
So I’ll agree that there’s a problem with Trump’s connection to the alt-right, but it’s not that he’s some kind of racist mastermind. He’s a very sick old man, and because he’s unfortunate enough to be so rich as not to be institutionalized, they’ve adopted him as their “leader” who’s incapable of refusing praise or understanding how it could be a bad thing.
The reason I insist on separating this out is that Trump does, in fact, say different things to different people – basically whatever he can manage to get as much praise as possible. What this means is that a lot of people who voted for Trump did it not for racist reasons, but because he managed to dupe them with some of his rampant bull-ing. There are a lot of people who are really, really weak to that. I imagine that the reason why there’s an insistence to call Trump a racist, rather than mentally ill, is to say something about America and the voting populace: if America voted a racist in, then there must be a lot of racism. The alternative is to use Trump = racist as a way of proving Trump to be a bad person (and thus leader), and I really don’t think you need to convince anyone here of that tidbit. I don’t think that this analysis of Trump and America holds up, compared to the thesis that American voters are for some reason extremely vulnerable to being duped by a con-man in a bad suit. However, I would be interested in hearing what other reason you’d have for thinking it so important that Trump himself be a racist. I’m not sure it’s epistemic purity, because Trump’s instability is a very good explanation that doesn’t require him to be racist, so I’d be interested in what else it could be.
Accusations of racism are , or were, a superweapon, so they get used a lot. OTOH, they may be fading in usefullness.
They definitely are.
And we’re on track for “white supremacist” to start fading as well.
Jury is still out on whether they’re going to get away with calling everyone Nazis or if that will soon be the new “racists!”
To my mind, the interesting question is not so much whether Trump is bigoted as whether he’s dangerous to people he’s prejudiced against.
He’s definitely dangerous to Muslims and Hispanics. I’d say he’s also dangerous to black people and suspects– he’s explicitly encouraged police brutality.
I actually agree with a lot of that. I don’t think Trump personally agrees with Nazism. For one thing, he seems genuinely fine with Judaism on a personal level.
But that isn’t the question. The question is whether Trump is more supportive of white nationalism and racist movements than other Republicans. It’s very possible he is more supportive of them simply because they wear MAGA hats and vote for him, and thus he defends them, with no greater justification needed. But that still means he is more willing to support the white nationalist movement than other Republican politicians, which was the claim Scott says is crying wolf.
Where “support” means “voice opposition for those who are violently breaking up their lawful assemblies”. In which case the answer is “yes”… and it’s laudable.
His daughter married a Jew, and Trump continues to appoint him to trusted, high-level positions. (something the ACTUAL NAZI part of the alt-right continually brings up)
That’s a very good and very convincing point. Might I suggest, as what might be a better way of putting it, that we say that Trump is permissive towards the alt-right and racism? That rather than being an active supporter, he’s just too weak of a president and a person to resist anything done by them in the manner that a true leader of America ought to? I would be happy to accept that description, as it doesn’t allow a superweapon to be built against Trump supporters. I do believe we have a duty to avoid building superweapons wherever we can, because they’re the kinds of things which nurture conflict.
I would say, here, that I disagree with the precise styling of Scott’s “crying wolf” argument. The nominal conclusion of it is that it takes legitimacy away from the claim, which I don’t believe quite follows. Trump is, for certain, far more permissive of open racism et all than any president in recent times, and it’s not wrong to point that out. However, calling Trump racist himself doesn’t appear to be correct, and it has the dangerous side-effect of building a superweapon against anyone who voted for him for any reason. The superweapon part does take away legitimacy from liberal voices, because nobody sane ever trusts anyone who’s building a superweapon against them (such as the intense opposition that even religious African-American communities have towards the also religious Republican Party).
Thank you for clarifying your point, by the way. That was very helpful.
Unequivocally denouncing nazis is literally the easiest thing to do in public discourse. The fact that he can’t do that is kind of mind-blowing.
Ding.
He did unequivocally denounce ‘nazis’*. If he does it again is there a point where he is allowed to criticise violent left-wingers out to stop and prevent peaceful protests that they disagree with again, or does Heyer’s death mean that Antifa have a complete by for the next seven years?
*His first statement acknowledged that both sides acted poorly. His second statement however was all about the nazis. Then when the left cried about that he doubled down on acknowledging that antifa were there to crack skulls.
Its a bit sad also that you think that he ‘can’t’ do the easy thing, rather than being too great a man to do the wrong thing.
I love how you can literally hear the assembled media collectively gasp, searching for the nearest fainting couch, whenever he goes off-script from the standard boilerplate PC apologia,
Its a bit sad also that you think that he ‘can’t’ do the easy thing, rather than being too great a man to do the wrong thing.
Why is that sad? Nothing in Trump’s previous behavior suggest he’s a “great man” doing the right thing; rather, it suggests that he’s a thin-skinned narcissist of average intelligence.
Billionaire Wharton graduate POTUS. Definitely a 100 IQer.
I’m surprised you’re willing to grant him average intelligence. If you’re going into the realms of fantasy where Trump is unable to condemn nazis then you’d think that you’d go all the way.
He doesn’t have to wait seven years to talk about Antifa. A few days would have been plenty. Come out strongly against the immediate event, because the immediate event was unequivocally bad and saying anything less makes you sound like you’re trying to minimize the tragedy. Then a few days later when people have cooled off a bit, you dial things back. “Charlottesville was a tragedy, but the real tragedy is the political climate that made it inevitable. Antifa and the alt-right are both to blame for yadda yadda yadda.”
(By now, this is impossible, because Trump’s foot is so firmly in his mouth you’d need the Jaws of Life to get it out, but it could have gone that way.)
Timing is everything in politics. The ability to read the context and current mood, and know what your audience will approve or disapprove of, is a basic political skill. Refusing to do so isn’t “the right thing” or a mark of greatness, it’s just being an ass.
Does your moral code really say that denouncing antifa needs to be done right now, while one of their number is dead on the ground? That you can’t delay even a day to mourn before you start assigning blame?
Hell, you can even make a backhanded criticism of them, without naming them, something like “When crimes like this are committed, it is natural to want to answer violence with violence, but if we are to confront these despicable beliefs without corroding our own values, we must do so peacefully. America is stronger than these despicable bigots – let us demonstrate it”
Were the left spending the day mourning? Or were they tearing down statues and looking for fights?
If a Nazi had died, can you genuinely say that you would have condemned anyone who falled to put aside any anti-nazism feelings?
That the POTUS ought to stand up for the truth when people will condem him for standing up to the truth is a eleif I have. I have exceptions to that; condemning Antifa doesn’t fall foul o any of those. He wasn’t attacking Heyer, she wasn’t actually ‘one of their number’.
We choose to tell the truth, and to not bow to political correctness, and all the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard 🙂
I mean you can unflinchingly illuminate the Truth against the rising darkness of political correctness and against social norms that would bury the Truth for the sake of comfort and all that jazz. But if you’re looking to change people’s minds and behavior, you’re shooting yourself in the foot by not having a bit more tact. Or waiting for an incident where the anti-antifa group isn’t way more at fault, rather than boldly dying on the hill of “The group the car rammed through did some bad stuff, yall shouldn’t act like this is so one sided!”
Regarding Trump: While it’s literally true both sides had bad apples, saying so right after an incident strongly implies both groups were at comparable fault, which is a much stronger proposition that was clearly untrue in this case. It’s like when some left-wing papers/websites would run post-terror attack articles like “Well this terrorist attack wasn’t unavoidable, our foreign policy destabilized their country and galvanized extremist cells in our country, which our disenfranchisement of only made worse etc. etc.” The statement is literally true and perhaps even well meaning (“don’t hate this minority group for their extremist members, it will lead to more attacks”), but it still disingenuously places some blame on the victims rather than the terrorist group.
I guess that makes your position clear.
Oh come on, the truth martyrdom comment absolutely deserved that snark!
Snark aside, my positions are a. you can’t just say every truthful correct statement about a subject without any regard to context and expect to convince dissenters b. you can still be misleading and disingenuous even with face-value truthful statements, and Trump’s face-value true statements disingenuously applied a lot more blame to the antifa block than was proper in this particular case.
This isn’t half as bad as what they typically run, which is something more like “The REAL tragedy would be if this terrorist attack led to an increase in Islamophobia! Let’s make sure the police are ready to guard against that!”
@ManyCookies
Sure, but part of that context is that the media have prejudiced narratives and will interpret everything through that narrative. When Obama made an even-handed statement that was interpreted as bridge-building, because the narrative is that he is a bridge-builder, when Trump makes an even-handed statement that is interpreted as defending Nazis, because the narrative is that he is in league with Nazis.
I object to narrative-based media, especially when the narratives are based on weak evidence, rather than to take people’s statements at face value.
@Aapje And I agree Trump is getting more shit for this than he deserves, but it was still an awful phrasing of his sentiments both politically and (I would argue) factually.
This reminds me of a controversy on the campaign trail. Trump had said something like “Obama founded ISIS” during a rally, and in context he pretty clearly meant Obama’s foreign policy was a catalyst to the rise of ISIS. Bad phrasing, but still unfair to quote out of context. But then he went on a conservative talk show, and the host was like “That was so clearly what you meant, right?”… and Trump repeated the same damn line without any further clarification! That was a comically easy smackdown had he just assented: “Of course I meant that, look at how desperate these liberals are for scandal!”. But instead he added more fuel to the fire, confused the people giving him the benefit of the doubt, and extended the story another day or so.
@ManyCookies:
You should consider the possibility that Trump is doing this on purpose. Ambiguity can be strategic. When Trump says “Obama founded ISIS”, some people hear “Obama’s actions in Iraq and Syria set the stage for ISIS”, and some just hear “Obama founded ISIS”. Moderate conservatives hear the former, and complain about the liberals who hear the latter. Meanwhile, a solid chunk of the base takes the claim literally and cheers him on. (Consider: this is a man — a consummate showman — who spent years claiming Obama was not American. There’s an audience for this stuff.) It’s a win-win-win for Trump — especially if he can manage to sustain the ambiguity.
So maybe Trump refusing to clarify the ISIS statement wasn’t a mistake — it was a deliberate decision that the cost of confusing the metaphor camp was lower than the cost of losing enthusiasm from the literal camp.
@ManyCookies
Trump is clearly a horrible communicator, weak on his facts and such.
But that has been clear for a long time and is exactly why the media should not treat him as a mastermind who uses dog whistles to somehow usher in a new era of white supremacy.
IMO, the most effective way to weaken how much his supporters like him is to simply keep pointing out how he is wrong or being too unclear. The current response is clearly heavily informed by animosity, resulting in a response that works on those who already believe, but not so well on those who don’t.
A simplistic strategy to win in (no limit holdem) poker is counter-play: if the opponent is very aggressive, then play tight; if the opponent is very tight, be aggressive. Similarly, if a politician is highly hyperbolic and weak on facts, a good counter strategy is to be understated and strong on the facts, not to try and top him. When it’s shoutey against shoutey, a lot of people just tune out.
The Charlotte School of Law has abruptly closed after the ABA signaled it was going to revoke the school’s accreditation and the state government cancelled its license to operate. It was a for-profit institution founded in 2006, noted for having one of the lowest bar passage rates in the country – even after they started juicing their statistics by paying weaker students not to take the bar exam. Eventually it became too much for even the ABA’s notoriously lax accreditation committee to ignore and the school was put on probation last fall. This triggered the US Department of Education to cancel its eligibility for federal student loans, which drove its already precarious finances into a nosedive, and last week the ABA rejected its plan to turn itself around.
I don’t know why, but I find it fascinating how institutions can break down like this. Clearly at Charlotte the rot had set in long before the authorities pulled the plug.
Are there any even moderately prestigious for-profit tertiary educational institutions anywhere in the world? Maybe in the restaurant industry?
Prestigious is the wrong word, but there are respected programs. University of Phoenix, for example, has an excellent business model. They go to large companies that have a need for large numbers of people with specific skills, like airlines and jet engine mechanics. They ask them what they want new people to know, build a program around it, then guarantee a job to anyone who manages to get through said program. The washout rate is high because anyone who wants can sign up and most people don’t make good mechanics, but it’s a great example of purposeful education that is sadly lacking in the U.S.
I think some of the for-profit institutions offering the post-university education required to practise law in the UK (BPP Law School and particularly the University of Law) are reasonably prestigious, though not the most prestigious in the country.
For reference: If you want to be a lawyer in the UK, you must either study law as an undergraduate degree or study another subject then take a one-year “law conversion course”. After this, depending on which sort of lawyer you want to be, you take either the BPTC (to be a barrister) or the LPC (to be a solicitor), both of which are one-year courses.
Reminds me of ITT Tech.
To me, the truth about reality is more important than morality. Does that make me evil?
If someone values anything, for that matter, more than good outcomes or just behavior then is that person bad? What if someone cares very much about those things but they aren’t top of the list?
I don’t understand. To what extent is morality not part of the truth about reality? (Or vice versa?)
And, the heck ya mean “If someone values everything”? How does one value everything?
Interpreting you as saying “I think that discovering the truth about fundamental stuff like the Riemann hypothesis is more important than doing good works. Is that bad?”
Under a maximalist interpretation of ‘good works’, yes, this is tautologically bad (but under that interpretation finding out truths about stuff is a good work). That’s not a very interesting question so I think you want to know something like “can a correct moral system require radical goodness” like the Comet King’s ethic in UNSONG.
On the one hand, if we think there are moral facts, we’d better be prepared for moral surprises. In particular morality might require radical behavior like a sort of internal totalitarianism. On the other hand, we don’t derive our ethics from first principles, practical morality is mostly empirical and example-driven. This means we should be skeptical about extrapolating right and wrong too far beyond typical behavior, just like we should be skeptical that organic chemistry is going to work as usual in the core of the sun.
Scott Adams made an interesting point re. Charlottesville:
When you have two “sides” showing up at an appointed place and time, some from out of town, many wearing protective gear, carrying dangerous-but-not-too-deadly weapons, basically ready for a brawl… are we looking at a political conflict or a sporting event?
Of course, there’s always been a sense in which many sports have acted like a kind of friendly substitute/outlet for war-like tendencies: the biggest, toughest guys from my town (or who are chosen to represent my town) meet up with the biggest, toughest guys from your town, they all crash into each other, we cheer and boo, and when our big guys win we all feel good about our town without the bloodshed, scalps, etc.
War nowadays, of course, doesn’t look much like this. Though maybe that’s a relatively recent thing in the scale of things. Of course, there’s a difference between literally trying to kill each other and just hurling insults or even rocks and mace, but as we’ve seen, we’re kind of quickly getting there. And I somehow find the “sportification” of it more disturbing: I googled “antifa shirt” and found countless websites devoted to selling merchandise for both “teams” (no the anti-antifa aren’t Nazis or “fa,” they’re anti-communist, but clearly in a way that means “anti-antifa”).
I’m not sure what my point is; also not sure where all this is heading, but I don’t think it’s good (though I still want the United States to break up, but ideally without a civil war).
…
Good (and frightening) point!
Other question: is it a coincidence that what looks to me, at least, like the closest we’ve come to another Civil War, at least for the past 100 years, if not since the last one, is taking as a focal point… monuments to figures of the last Civil War?
My understanding is that the terrorism wave of the 70s was worse – Black Panthers, Weathermen, SLA, PLO, etc.
Also, what about the civil rights movement? Particularly the tensions over desegregation. The jockeying between the state and federal governments looked a lot closer to civil war to me than anything going on right now.
I mean, maybe all that was worse. I’m not sure. I wasn’t there.
My parents, who were there, seem to think there’s something qualitatively different about the level of widespread political acrimony currently going on as compared to anything they’ve lived through, though they may see their youths through rose-colored glasses.
In particular, I don’t recall reading/hearing about/seeing pictures of the “spectator sport” and “branded teams” aspect of the civil rights movement and counterculture. I mean, obviously you could divide people into groups like “pro-integration vs. anti” or “anti-war vs. nationalists” or whatever, but this level of widespread sidelines involvement via social media, merchandising, etc. seems a bit new.
Though, in any case, I’m not invested in the idea that we are now literally closer to a civil war than at any other time since the last one. Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t. It just strikes me as interesting that it’s not just issues related to the last civil war which are now coming into contention, but literally monuments to figures from the last civil war.
My view of the problem is that the “meaning” of the Civil War has never really been fully agreed upon or pinned down by American culture and that peace between Red and Blue and North and South has been, to some extent, predicated on allowing for a little ambiguity. Now, to my mind, the left is pushing the issue really hard with the result of people violently taking sides on issues over which they probably always disagreed, but could agree to disagree.
The disagreement over the “meaning” of the Civil War being: Blue Tribe and Northerners tend to view it as all about “slavery” vs “freedom.” To defend the Confederacy is to defend slavery. Red Tribe and Southerners tend to view it as, yes, somewhat about slavery, but also about states’ rights, self-determination, Southern culture, war heroes, a glorious lost cause…
So when Northerners and Blue Tribe see Southerners and Red Tribe defending Civil War monuments they only see people defending slavery. But when Southerners and Red Tribe see Northerners and Blue Tribe insisting on taking down monuments, they see them as outgroup attacking all that other stuff above.
This issue is clearly not definitively settled, and I don’t think it can easily be definitively settled in the near future. Certainly not by hitting people with cars or bike locks. Pushing the issue to attempt to reach some “final” agreement, it strikes me, is more likely to result in breakup of the US than achievement of such agreement.
I agree that things have changed. At least one driver is the idea from the left that everyone has a strong positive obligation to join them in active politics.
One piece of evidence about anti-Southern sentiment (not just anti-Confederate) is mocking southern accents as evidence of racism. I haven’t seen as much of that in recent years as I used to.
@onyomi:
Those monuments (mostly) went up in the early 1900s as the KKK and legal segregation were in their ascendancy.
The Confederate flag achieved its current cultural status in the South during the civil rights era, being formally adopted as a symbol by the Dixiecrat party in 1948 as symbol of resistance to the federal government. This was resistance to the idea that black people did indeed have equal rights.
Yes, there is an “argument” about what the civil war meant. But the argument about these symbols isn’t really about the civil war. It’s about the 100+ years after the end of reconstruction.
The people who are insisting that this is all about “heritage” don’t understand that the feeling of warm comradery they remember so fondly was the comradery of resisting civil rights.
@HBC
I know all that about the history of Confederate monuments, flags, etc., but that’s not really what I’m talking about.
The question is, what do these things mean to people now? They mean different things to different people. To some people a statue of Robert E Lee might mean “yay, slavery!” or “boo civil rights for black people!” but to most Red Tribe white Southerners today it means something like “yay, brave Southern military man!” Trying to force all of Southern Red Tribe to accept Northern Blue Tribe’s analysis of what Southern Red Tribe’s symbols “really” mean seems a bad idea, even if Northern Blue Tribe is right when they say that some of the people who say “states’ rights” are secretly saying “racism,” or that the original reason for the erecting of a particular monument was to signal opposition to civil rights.
Actually, I think the post mortem of Charlottesville perfectly mirrors the still-failed post mortem of the Civil War: one side admitting that mistakes were made on both sides is not enough. One side admitting that hitting someone with a car is a lot worse than throwing rocks and macing people is not enough. Nothing short of absolute, unilateral condemnation will satisfy many on the left, just as nothing short of unilateral, unequivocal condemnation of the Confederacy and anyone ever involved with it will satisfy many in Tribe Blue. I’m saying that’s a bad way to reconcile differences.
@onyomi – to the red tribers I know (who are definitely not a representative sample), I don’t think they ever thought about the statues except possibly as art or landmarks.
Some of them see the removal as offensive because it reminds them of the Taliban and Stalin, and because they see it as an effort to erase either American history generally or their culture specifically, and some of them see it as a slippery slope without a limiting principle. My father in law is pretty worked up about the proposal to remove the Stone Mountain carvings, and he’s a Yankee through and through.
@onyomi:
You originally said:
But now you more seem to be making the argument that meanings are being forgotten.
The people who put up those statues and flew that flag absolutely knew that they thought blacks were not equal to whites. And that it was a cornerstone of their culture.
A small bit of evidence that things have changed.
Something like ten years ago Garrison Kiellor (then host of Prairie Home Companion, an NPR variety show) made a joke about not wanting your child to marry a Republican. At the time, it was fresh and funny and I laughed at it.
Re. the meaning of Confederate symbols for Southerners: medical unit from Charlottesville, VA (!) celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday on deployment in WWII.
In other words, Southern Americans fighting actual Nazis flying the Confederate Flag.
I am very happy to take part in this unveiling of the statue of General Robert E. Lee.
All over the United States we recognize him as a great leader of men, as a great general. But, also, all over the United States I believe that we recognize him as something much more important than that. We recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.
The comments of FDR at the unveiling of a Robert E Lee statue in 1936
FDR’s power base was dependent on white, Southern, populist Democrats (allied with Northern Liberals).
When Republicans describe Democrats as the party of the KKK, that is the Democratic party they are talking about.
@HBC
Is it possible some of the Southerners FDR might have pleased by speaking glowingly of Robert E Lee might be pleased for reasons other than racism? And if not, what does it say about FDR if he’s willing to ally himself with racists to win? The press doesn’t seem very forgiving of that supposed fault in Trump.
@onyomi:
It says the US was, on the whole, a deeply racist country in the 30s, which shouldn’t be a shock to anyone if you know much about the following 30+ years.
Which doesn’t make the US all that exceptional. Plenty of racism to go around in the world.
And FDR was a politician.
I think you’re watching the news too much. Their job is to make you think all this stuff is way more important and widespread than it really is.
Because one person got killed? I think you are using super powers of extrapolation. One party is very upset they are out of power and seem to think they are entitled to it. Not exactly a unique event in the annals of world history.
Most people care much less than you probably realize.
Meh, ultimately the Nazis rolled out the red carpet for a big national rally and got a smaller crowd than the line outside an Apple store for an iPhone launch.
Really we ought to just ignore them. If this hadn’t turned into a brawl, it would be forgotten in days. Hell even if it had, but a murderous nutjob didn’t drive his car into the crowd it would be out of the news cycle by now.
I mean, this site gets accused of over-emphasizing the influence of SJWs, but now half the country seems to be convinced it’s time for Civil War 2 over a group that can count maybe a few thousand serious members. We’re supposed to ignore the threat of Islamic terrorism in America – this is on a similar order of magnitude.
The Nazi’s want a fight, because that’s the only thing that makes them relevant. Can we be grown ups and not accept the invitation?
I’ve been thinking the same thing lately. The problem with the counter-protests is those are what seem to provide importance and relevance to the alt-right in the public eye. I think it would be delightful for a town that issued a permit for one of their rallies/demonstrations to completely shut down while it was happening — nobody on the streets, nobody watching, no counters, no challenge…absolute indifference.
@schazjmd
Your comment reminded me of a story from my hometown. I was not present, but I have these details on pretty good authority:
One time, the Westboro Baptist Church scheduled a protest in my hometown, of a military funeral. They applied for and got (grudgingly) the appropriate permits, with the caveat that they were to remain on the opposite side of the street from the actual funeral. When they arrived on the day, a city bus had been parked between their permitted area and the actual funeral.
I think there is a lot of merit to this approach.
@Witness exactly – creative obstructionism and removal of the responses they feed off of!
@Witness
That sort of thing is the equivalent of a “free speech zone” (a place to isolate protestors away from the events they are protesting); it sounds great when you do it to scumbags, but it’s a serious erosion of freedom of speech and assembly.
Freedom of speech does not imply freedom to afflict it upon specific listeners. Neither the people attending the funeral, nor the city, have any obligation to aid or facilitate the WBC in getting their message across to the funeral attendees.
Anyone who wants to see the WBC are more than welcome to walk to the other side of the bus. Anyone who wants to listen to them is more than welcome to stay within earshot.
I think the term “free-speech zone” sounds Orwellian (for the principle of “the exception proves the rule”) also, but I don’t think freedom of assembly is supposed to mean you can assemble anywhere you want, but rather with whom ever you want and about whatever you want. At the least, people obstructing public roads should be removed however necessary. I know this runs into the heap problem–if one person has a right to pass out leaflets in front of the courthouse, why don’t 1,000 people have that right, even if it prevents the rest of the city from getting their business done–but I don’t think this is what assembly is intended for.
The government has a duty to treat all applicants equally. If another group applied for a permit to protest the following week and they didn’t park a bus in the way then they probably have some legal problems, especially if they are doing the bus parking and buses aren’t normally parked there.
The Supreme Court is not going to put up with clever ways to not provide free speech.
Yeah, I don’t support the government parking a city bus to subvert a lawful protest.
That said, I do recall there was some gang of patriotic bikers who basically went around the country “shielding” military families from WBC protesters at funerals.
Private sector solution, yo.
@tscharf
If another protest was planned there a week later, there wouldn’t have been a funeral procession. Where would you like them to park the bus?
(The state did in fact later pass a law requiring anyone picketing a funeral to keep enough distance that the bus would no longer be necessary.)
Is, not Was. Patriot Guard Riders.
Where they normally park the bus, in the bus parking lot.
You just can’t have different rules for different groups. Distance rules are a solution that may very well pass muster.
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3389
Sarah Constantin (guest poster):
“Work samples are easy to anonymize to reduce gender bias, and they’re more effective than traditional interviews, where split-second first impressions usually decide who gets hired, but don’t correlate at all with job performance. A number of tech companies have switched to work samples as part of their interview process. I used work samples myself when I was hiring for a startup, just because they seemed more accurate at predicting who’d be good at the job; entirely without intending to, I got a 50% gender ratio. If you want to reduce gender bias in tech, it’s worth at least considering blinded hiring via work samples.”
I believe that crude methods like quotas are used because of mistrust that people can be honest about who they hire, and I wish more work were done of better methods of evaluation.
Leaving aside gender entirely, the whole I’m gonna interview people using my intuition, half remembered stories about how Microsoft used to do it, and naive reasoning from first principles is so stupid, yet so prevalent, that it boggles the mind.
There’s a literature on this. There’s a literature on everything. But almost everyone would rather make up an ad hoc procedure then actually serve the company they work for by going about that task in a professional manner just like they (hopefully!) go about their other assigned tasks.
@Brad
I’d sooner blame the company, because how can you expect any different if the people who have to evaluate potential new coworkers don’t get the training to know what works, nor the time to properly prepare?
Programming is one kind of job, doing assessments is a different job altogether.
I guess that’s fair. Though if you are hired on as a manager, is expertise in hiring supposed to be part of the toolkit you bring to the job? (And yes I realize that brings up another the same question at another level about how whoever hired the manager did the hiring.)
Of course, ultimately the buck stops somewhere. It’s just that my personal experience is that I was asked to evaluate someone based on an interview. There was no standard method or useful materials provided, no real time given to prepare, no training, etc. I just don’t want to get blamed for the shitty job I did, which IMO is due the conditions.
I think that it is the responsibility of the management to develop a good procedure and part of that is logically to do a literature review and find the most effective method, according to the latest insights. Management doesn’t necessarily have to know this or do this, but they need to have the skills to ensure it is done competently by their underlings or an external company they hire for it or whatever.
If the gender ratio of available applicants is 80% male, then the industry isn’t going to get to a 50/50 gender ratio. Perhaps my logic is flawed somehow.
Sure it can! Just refuse to hire three quarters of viable male candidates.
If only this hadn’t been seriously proposed….
I believe this is in principle manifestly illegal. (IANAL.)
Whether anyone would take a suit seriously that resulted from such a policy…anyone’s guess. Very hard to say how the interactions of social pressure against male complaints, laws as written vs laws as enforced, and even some of the precedent for one-sided discrimination law interacts.
I do not think any competent HR department would want to find out the results, however; it’s certainly possible (I won’t speak as to probable) that the government would rule disastrously against you.
If Google’s “give non-whites and non-men a second chance” policy doesn’t count as illegal discrimination on basis of race and sex, there’s nothing stopping anyone from stacking such things until you achieve the desired outcome. We’ll see how the fallout from the memo gets resolved, but it’s not currently looking good if Google’s legal department OK’d both the hiring policy and the decision to fire James after reporting it.
As long as the number of applicants is high enough (5 applicants per job), there’s no reason why not.
I don’t seem to be able to edit that comment, but of course you only need 2.5 applicants per job at 80% male (5 is if you want to only hire women).
That works for the first job you need to fill.
But after you and the rest of your industry have filled a swath of jobs, then your applicant ratio will stop being 4:1; e.g. if you’ve collectively hired half the female applicants and an equal number of male applicants, then your subsequent applicant ratio will be 7:1. The next step will be worse, especially as your current employees re-enter the applicant pool. If the employees in the industry match that initial 4:1 applicant gender ratio, then this process doesn’t return to a steady state until you have an industry unemployment rate r of at least 60%, at which point your applicant ratio will be (r+60%):(r-60%).
Has anybody here done a review of the literature on male circumcision? There are a number of conflicting meta-studies.
What are you looking for specifically? Evidence of harm to men’s sex life? Benefits for STD transmission? The percentage of botched circumcisions? Its popularity?
Mainly benefits for STD transmission and reduction in UTI’s (or increase – I’ve seen a few sources claiming both directions there), specifically in the USA or other developed countries. Also any evidence of harm to sex lives.
I’ve already found enough information on its general popularity… while there’s a wide range of estimates, they at least paint a reasonably consistent picture.
I am curious to know how often doctors have their own sons circumcised in the US and/or other developed countries. Is their rate similar to the base rate in their region?
Here is a meta-analysis for UTIs for N > 400,000. Part of the conclusion:
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As for STDs, AFAIK no clear benefit has been found for anything but HIV, where huge effects have been found for transmission from an infected woman to their male sex partner in African studies. However, if you look at US statistics on HIV infections, it is quite clear that the primary infection vector is gay sex, a secondary vector is men with HIV who infect the woman they have sex with, while it is extremely rare for women with HIV to infect a man.
So the African studies seem to have little relevance to the US, as a substantial reduction of a tiny transmission vector is still a minor benefit. It’s not even clear if the outcomes hold for the US, as African women are known to engage in practices like drying out their vagina with herbs and crap like that so create more friction. I would expect this to increase the risk of damage to the penis, which quite plausibly can be worse for uncircumcised penises. AFAIK this is not common in the West and it is quite possible that the benefit of circumcision is substantially less or even non-existent with more sensible sex practices. I am not aware of any studies in Western circumstances that show the same effect that was found in the African studies.
Since gay sex is such a major transmission vector of HIV in the West, it’s hard to see circumcision as a clear benefit unless it provides a substantial benefit here. The amount of research into this seems insufficient for a proper meta-study, but what I’ve seen so far doesn’t show a clear benefit (page 38 for the last one).
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This meta-study looking into adverse effects on sexual function, sensitivity and satisfaction found no adverse effects.
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I consider this an uninteresting question, since if you look at smoking, there is no consistency worldwide in smoking habits of doctors vs the general population. In some countries they smoke less (like the US), in others they smoke more. If this is true for smoking, where the downsides are much stronger than for circumcision, then I don’t see how knowing the habits of doctors to circumcise their sons will tell us anything useful.
Thanks for the information!
Are male->female transgender persons more common than female->male? I ask because it seems all the “high profile” transgender persons on youtube/twitter are M->F, but obviously that’s not remotely a representative sample.
Population estimates vary wildly, but if Wikipedia’s trustworthy, individual studies of transgender prevalence have tended to find a transwoman:transman ratio of 3:1 to 4:1. I have no idea what you’d find if you included genderqueer, though.
Could this be evidence that men are actually held to more rigid gender roles? “Tomgirls” are more socially acceptable than “sissy boys” (I’d say bisexualism seems more accepted among women too, but that’s more questionable) – perhaps the marginal gender dysphoric biological female is more able to find a personal lifestyle that alleviates the dysphoria without transitioning?
Maybe, but I don’t think we know enough about the causal mechanism behind any flavor of trans for this kind of speculation to be worth much.
My theory is that Blanchard-Bailey is somewhat correct. Not necessarily that its mechanisms are correct, but that the groups of transwomen it points to are real, and that only one of them has a transman equivalent.
Religious background
How many SSC members are theists? If you are a theism what is the influence of your theism on your rational views?
Scott does this survey annually. Check out https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/ for the 2017 results.
Thanks! Actually I have seen it before. I’m mainly interested in understanding which posters are theistic and how does their theism influence their posts about certain topics here.
Roman Catholic.
I don’t think theism affects my rational views at all* – IMHO, faith is a choice, and it doesn’t require you to surrender reason. I think it would present a problem if I experienced what I perceived as divine instruction and had to separate it from mental illness/infernal trickery/etc.
* On further reflection, I think I’m more sympathetic to religious viewpoints than I probably would be if I weren’t religious, but I don’t see that as conflicting with rationality. Also, I identify as rationalist-adjacent, whereas I’d probably say I was rationalist if I were atheist/agnostic, but that’s more a community instinct than IMHO related to thought processes.
I’m a theist. I’ve gone through multiple phases (Southern Baptist, pseudo-Buddhist, am-I-atheist?) but ended up Roman Catholic.
I ascribe to a sort of panentheism* which I derive from Michael Tkacz’ reading of Aquinas’ doctrine of creation ex nihilo and a kind of author-narrative relationship between God and the world.
What this means is that I am more sympathetic both to scientific descriptions of the world (all actions and interactions within the world must be consistent with observation and natural law) and more religious or theistic descriptions (as God writes the story that God sees fit to write). I would like to think that this makes me more able to distinguish between the two, as well.
As far as rationality is concerned, I am thus freed to pursue rationality without reservation. I am both theistic and rational because I have moved them onto orthogonal axes.
* Maybe this is heresy? But I don’t think so.
I am a theist, an Episcopalian to be precise. I don’t consider myself a rationalist and so I rarely post here, as it’s not really a forum intended for me.
Karaite-ish Jew. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in the thread, my spiritual/religious thoughts are compartmentalized from my rational processes.
Evangelical here, somewhere in the neighborhood of Baptist. I wouldn’t call myself a rationalist per se, because I believe there are truths about the universe that can’t be reached by reason and logic. On the other hand, Jesus did say to be “wise as serpents,” and I think something like rationalism goes a long way toward that.
I’m christian, methodist if you want to be more precise.
I think having faith changes/clarifies where I want to go more than how I get there – thinking rationally tends to help with the latter. It gives me some axioms, like the value of life, knowledge of forgiveness, but consequences of those are still things to be derived.
Don’t really like the term “rationalist”, at least as a descriptor for myself, though I don’t mind saying that I aspire towards rationality.
My religion helps me maintain a respect for metis and knowing that there are true things that are difficult (perhaps impossible?) to articulate and/or measure.
It also makes clear the imperative to stand against Moloch. Reason and empiricism are powerful tools toward that end.
Catholic (Roman Rite)
I’m convinced by the Aristotelian-Thomistic Cosmological argument for God and that rationalism -> critical rationalism -> pan-critical rationalism (see William Bartley) -> open to considering how well “tested” various religions -> Catholicism (based on its doctrinal consistency). Hence I converted as much because of my rationalism as anything. Dogmatically, a Catholic holds that faith cannot contradict reason and that reason is subordinate to faith in that faith accesses things which reason does not.
My simplest explanation of this was from a mathematics lecture I heard once: the professor was a very eminent mathematician and as an aside to his lecture he noted that “a good mathematician can prove anything”–his point being the importance of the mathematics community to getting proofs done (he had worked on a very very important proof). Robin Hanson makes a similar point where we shouldn’t be “weird” in too many areas and we should normally just go with the expert consensus. So, Catholics accept the authority of the Church.
I think the authority of the Church is evidenced by a variety of things: steadfast holding on to doctrine (that’s trickier to see unless you understand the Church well), its conformity to the natural law (again shown by reason), and the miracles. My understanding of miracles is (1) Hume’s objection assumes the consequent (2) Eliezer Yudkowsky parable of cool plates in physics class (see “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation”)–e.g. we should be bewildered by fiction–drilling down more particularly: it makes sense to talk about effects which are proportionate to a cause. Any given effect not proportionate to a cause does not prove anything in particular, but there’s lots of reasonably well-documented miracles (some appearing in scientific journals: e.g. Miracle of the Sun at Fátima, healing miracles at Lourdes) which establish the possibility of such wonders and others that have less documentation but fit very well with the theology.
I have heard in a few different places the idea that people with autism lack a theory of mind. I’m not exactly sure what this means. Is it a lack of intuitive ability that could still be made up for from other clues, sort like the way face blind people can still recognize that faces are different through focusing on, say, eye color? Or is it a total inability to understand the concept, like how a blind person cannot understand the color red no matter how much it is explained?
It probably depends on the person and the type of autism but I think it’s more the former. Autistic people usually understand that others are conscious beings, even if they may have difficulty predicting how others will react to things.
There’s some debate about whether it’s really a deficit in empathy or more just that autistics think differently than neurotypicals–in other words, autistics may not understand NTs, but NTs are equally bad at understanding autistics.
As an autist I’m really not sure. I’m aware that other minds exist, however it is really hard to predict what other people think.
My current default model of other humans is that all humans are self-interested quasi-rational entities. By quasi-rational I mean all humans should theoretically take some steps towards maximizing their self-interest. Due to time they may not necessarily be very careful in their interest maximization. I’m also aware that beliefs, including religious beliefs change how a human thinks about the universe. This model fails when the behavior of a human does not benefit anyone hence it does not make any sense to me. When that happens I label such a human irrational.
All human behaviors have to either be rational or be recognizable distortions of rational ones or I do not process them.
As you can see, I almost always use 😉 to symbolize sarcasm. Otherwise almost everything else I say is 100% literal. Similarly if others do not use language that clearly indicates sarcasm such as ;-), 4chan-style “Implying that …..”, “muh “, etc I interpret everything literally.
I am presently reading a collection of essays and from this one, about James Ellroy Flecker, I discovered the following:
Such a Dickensian name made me look them up and yes, they really exist (though they’ve undergone a slight name change) 🙂
I should really get out more.
Training a cat to tolerate that is pretty impressive. Every one I’ve known would have turned the back of his neck into a bloody mess.
I’ve heard it’s partly about it being the right cat, but mostly about starting when they’re quite young.
[That’s not me, of course. I just ran across that and thought, “Why aren’t I hiking beautiful canyons and meeting people and their cats right now?” I used to hike canyons fairly regularly … ]
Depends on the cat. I’ve met a couple that not only tolerate being worn as a scarf but actually enjoy it.
As I recall, there have been some complaints here about historical fiction whose characters seem all too modern.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell doesn’t have that flaw, and is quite a strong fantasy novel. It’s about the magic in Regency England, with a good bit of snark about people thinking they’re better than they are, and yet it’s balanced with them sometimes doing useful things anyway.
It won the Hugo and the Nebula in 2014.
Anyone interested in discussing it?
Yes! One of my favorite fantasy books. A few (moderately spoilerific) things I think it does well:
-storytelling involving dark, mysterious forces. We learn more about the Raven King as the book goes on, but not so much that he becomes fully comprehensible. Strange and Norrell’s magic, meanwhile, moves from almost cute at first to increasingly unsettling. The scenes with Strange in Venice are particularly good; it’s one of the better depictions I can recall of a character paying a heavy price to gain power.
-Depicting the social reaction to said forces. Magic as it eventually reveals itself to be is outside the boundaries of social acceptability for its time. At first Norrell’s strict propriety keeps it seemingly inside the lines, so to speak, but practicality and necessity (Wellington has a war to fight and needs all tools at his disposal) overcomes that, and so society has to start adapting itself to a magic that’s following its own logic.
And yes, Strange, Norrell, and others (Vinculus, Stephen Black) are all excellent and quite of their time (Strange being the most modern, I guess). The one friend I recommended it to who didn’t like it said it was “too British” for him.
I feel like I missed something with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It was just so boring. I kept reading assuming that something interesting would happen, but it never did, and felt the same watching the first few episodes of the BBC adaptation (I gave up on that). Given the book won so many awards I have to assume that something about it went over my head.
The use of ‘period language’ especially threw me. It felt like it was trying too hard to evoke the era, and perhaps I’m in the wrong on that, but reading literature written in that time never bothered me.
Maybe it’s because I’m more of a Sci-Fi than a Fantasy fan, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying Lord of the Rings, Narnia and Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter and the Discworld series (reflecting on that list, maybe it’s because most are YA books?).
What did you find enjoyable about it?
I did like the language– the humor was funny and the descriptions were vivid.
One challenge was that the book was actually fairly concise. If I spaced out, I’d miss too much, so I read it in fairly small chunks.
I liked the eerieness, the sense that there’s much more going on than can be seen.
I quite liked it, although I don’t know that I have anything in particular to say about it.
Nit: Hugo and Nebula in 2005, after being published in 2004. And richly deserved, though do not believe it could win either award today.
I otherwise agree, and would be interested in discussing it with the caveat that I haven’t read it since 2004 and my memory is a bit fuzzy on much of it.
Is that a puppy whistle?
My recollection is that it was a very odd book which I quite liked. It took it’s time.
Honestly, I don’t even remember it having much of a plot. I would have to re-read it it discuss it properly. And it is huge and I don’t read quickly.
I seem to recall that it was consciously echoing Dickens?
I read it but didn’t like it as much as I expected I would (and I should have done, this is the sort of thing that is generally jam to me); I thought the story didn’t really get going until near the end.
Sometimes a book really rings the bell for you, sometimes it doesn’t. Many people seem to have loved and to love this novel but I can’t get into it at all. That does not mean it’s a bad novel, though.
It was pretty good. Have you watched the TV adaptation?
No, but I might. The trailer looked very good.
Any ideas about why the partition of India went so badly?
Probably the major reasons were that it was:
1. a partition
2. in India
3. at the tail end of an empire.
It’s not like other similar partitions went much better.
The two big problems were that it happened too fast for anyone to prepare for it, and that the province/kingdom/whatever of Jammu and Kashmir was majority Muslim but was basically “owned” by a Hindu prince who wanted to be a big shot in India if he couldn’t be an independent sovereign.
Indian popular sentiment at the end of WWII was such that Independence was going to happen Real Soon, or There Would Be Blood. That left no time to arrange a mass migration to put all the Muslims on one side of the line and all the Hindus on the other, no time to build the sort of institutions that might protect Muslim civil rights in India even when administered by Hindu civil servants, no time to do anything but cross a billion or so collective fingers and come up with theories like “The Indians won’t dare oppress their Muslim minority because then Pakistan would oppress its Hindu minority, so Deterrence!”
Maharaja Singh taking “his” mostly-Muslim principality into India, except for the bits the Pakistani army wound up parked on, led to a frozen conflict that pretty much ended all the clever plans about how Indo-Pakistani politics would be carefully coordinated to minimize religious oppression and bigotry. The Pakistanis basically chased all their Hindus out of the country, and the Indians had little reason not to retaliate by oppressing their Muslims.
Long time lurker, first time poster.
Many of my personal views do not align with the views often seen on this blog, but I continue to visit specifically to challenge my viewpoints. I have even changed my mind on some (mainly social) issues.
After the violence in Charlottesville this past weekend, I saw a lot of people stressing the importance of free speech on social media. I was raised to believe that free speech was always a good thing.
I was wondering if anyone had any coherent arguments AGAINST free speech. Are there any situations where we should not tolerate free speech? Are there any examples of societies that banned one type of speech and never descended into the dystopian pit of absolute censorship?
I personally support free speech and also tend to think people who deify the Confederacy are stupid. They lost the war! Who wants to be on the losing side of anything ever??
B would probably concede that point. Free speech is the argument at hand. Nothing that happened at that rally was going to change the fate of the statue, except if it had been actually damaged during the rally. The meta argument — whether or not everyone, even neo-Nazi Confederate sympathizers, gets to have their say or whether the self proclaimed arbiters of virtue get to shut down all opposed by any means necessary — was (and remains) actually in dispute.
I agree. Let people say whatever they want in most cases even if the most unpopular speech appears.
Probably no society has descended into the dystopian pit of absolute censorship (Spain might be an exception). Primary examples of states with restricted speech that still manage to detect the will of the people[*] are Great Britain and China.
[*] This is obviously not a real thing but I’m leaving it until I have a better concept with which to replace it.
Wait, what? Spain might not have been in the vanguard of free-speech-supporting countries, but I’ve never seen any suggestion that it was literally the most censored country in the world before.
Inquisition era maybe?
That is what I was thinking. I have a vague impression that the Inquisition was in a censorship Goldilocks zone – state control tech was already strong but communication tech was still weak.
The US doesn’t have absolute and total free speech either. We currently except:
-Incitement (must pass the Imminent Lawless Action test): Short version is that rando on the internet writing a blog post about “we should go kick some ass at some point!” is protected, but same rando in charlottesville hyping up a crowd of his buddies while facing off against a similar crowd going “Alright guys, let’s kick their ass now!” is not.
-False statements of fact (multiple, sometimes overlapping, tests): Aside from civil liability cases, the classic example is Defamation, which is pretty tough for public figures or private figures involved in a matter of public interest to claim. You generally need to show that the person you’re claiming defamed you knowingly spread false statements with either deliberate malicious intent or reckless disregard for their truth or falsehood, and sometimes also that there was in fact material harm done to you. That’s a tough bar to clear a lot of the time.
-Obscenity (has to pass the miller test): I’m hopeful we’ll get rid of this one entirely at some point, but it’s still on the books, even if the bar has gotten higher over the years.
I think this is a really bad argument that hints at a barren internal life. Nobody wants to lose, but principles? Loyalty? If we abandon them, we lose everything.
Free speech is a mechanism to undermine central power. Free speech might be bad if centralised power is necessary and under threat. So, when the philosopher kings know best?
This was uncomfortably accurate.
Agreed. I’m almost shocked at how much I’ve seen this reasoning in the past week or so.
The very direct implication seems to be that either
a. The “winning” side of a physical conflict must be the right/correct side
b. It’s better to be on the winning side than the correct side
Are people really that unprincipled? Like, I understand that bandwagoning happens for a wide variety of reasons, but do we really need to encourage it and mock anyone who doesn’t bandwagon? This strikes me as one of the crudest forms of “might makes right” imaginable.
Why is this an issue now? The Literal Murderous Nazis of Charlottesville are not on the correct side, and they are not going to be on the winning side. Being on their side is a sucker bet for evil losers. Don’t be an evil loser.
It would help if you could conceive of there being more than just two sides. Because if your world view is that there are always only two sides, and you’re going to be on the side that doesn’t have the Evil Social Justice Warriors, well, there are things far more evil than they. And by process of elimination, you’ll be on that side.
The winning side will be either the side with the SJWs and Antifa, or the side that takes a separate stand against the Nazis. The correct side will be the side that takes a separate stand against the Nazis, unless that side is somehow marginalized by “us against them, no third way!”, in which side the correct side will then be the side with the SJWs and Antifa. Because Literal Nazis are worse.
Loose lips sink shps?
I personally support free speech and also tend to think people who deify the Confederacy are stupid. They lost the war! Who wants to be on the losing side of anything ever??
You probably didn’t mean for this phrase to be the thing that struck me most about your post. (welcome in, btw. It’s a great place, hope you like it.)
I don’t want to assume your pov, but I’m willing to bet that very few people around you disagree with you when you say “Supporting the Confederacy is stupid! They lost! They’re losers!” Which is part of what makes that such a powerful statement, and why it’s so not a great idea to say that.
My first reaction to that kinda statement is to quote Mal Reynolds – “Well, it was the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong side.” More on that in a bit.
My second reaction is that when you go around calling people losers for supporting something, it does peel off some supporters – the more moderate, lukewarm types who were acting as a brake and a civilizing influence on the crazy hard core types. It also makes the hard core types double down, *and* it makes some lukewarm types get conviction. Whether or not this weakens the movement you’re opposing depends on a number of factors, *most of which you’re not going to know enough to judge.* Far better to use a more rational approach.
Thirdly – and I think this is the most important, and I really wish more people thought this through (*) – I will only respect your views if you win a devastating and brutal war is actually a fairly shitty recipe for civil discourse. I don’t think we should be encouraging “might makes right” in this way.
Another way to look at this – historical research shows that the vast majority of Africans shipped from Africa as slaves were war plunder from conflicts between African tribal groups. Which made them losers. At war. Does that justify the subsequent enslavement and loss of their human rights? Does losing a war justify losing *any* human rights?
I keep going back to American history, and realizing that fewer and fewer people are actually quoting Lincoln anymore, with his emphasis on ceasing conflict, refusing to hold grudges, and letting the grass grow over the old shell holes and bloodstains. Humans gotta human, I know, but seriously, why deliberately listen to the worse angels of our nature?
Another note – above, I paraphrased you, because what you actually wrote was “people who deify the Confederacy are stupid” – this isn’t either/or – one doesn’t either deify the CSA OR deify MLK. There’s a broad range of human emotion available, and from my experience, most Southerner’s pov on the Lost Cause is best characterized as “it’s complicated.” Until people start saying “you’re evil/stupid/deplorable for thinking that”. Then the feeling simplifies pretty damn quick.
I said I would talk about Mal’s quote, and my inclination to doubt that the Confederacy was the wrong side. Lots of people get het up and start shouting at this point. To which I say – what is the point of shouting at me? I have my doubts – so, convince me that I’m not correct! What do you think works best – persuasion or shouting? Persuasion or property damage? What’s the point of tearing down old stone statues that have been there for over a century? The granite isn’t going to jump down and start beating on people. The granite surely hasn’t stopped America from electing an African-American president(**) (and far sooner than any one expected.) The granite isn’t shooting little kids as bystanders in drug wars. If what we’re going for is a society that is open to all sorts of people and has opportunity for all…maybe we should start by tolerating (not embracing – you don’t have to *agree*, you just have to not shout me down) free expression and free exchange of ideas.
All ideas. Not just the ideas of non-losers.
(*) other people thinking things through doesn’t mean they’ll end up agreeing with me, but a gal can hope.
(**) If, however, one doesn’t want to ever see another African American president, one could do far worse than to overreach and start attacking the cultural touchstones of opposing sides/groups – just because right now, they’re “losers”. Way to go, encourage people who outnumber you to never ever be “losers” again. (This applies to so, SO many sides, so many groups. So many.)
I think this is a good example of the pros and cons of saying things because they are true, and saying things in order to get a desired effect.
That the South was evil is pretty much about as unambiguously true as the fact that it lost. So anyone unable to accept those two facts is, as a matter of objective truth, either stupid or evil.
But I bet you wouldn’t vote for someone who told you so. And neither would those who think like you, and there are enough of them that that is going to be, as a minimum, an influential voting block.
I don’t have any answer to that particular dilemma in mind.
What does “the South was evil” mean? I think the relevant question was something like “were all people who supported the South evil?” Relevant to questions such as whether statues of Lee should be torn down.
And I think the answer is pretty clearly no. I think the answer would be no even if we replaced the South with Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. People do things for lots of reasons, depending on their circumstances, their beliefs, their options. Someone may heroically fight for an evil cause because he believes, perhaps reasonably believes, it isn’t evil.
There is a line in John Brown’s Body, a verse novel about the Civil War, that runs roughly (by memory):
“None of us ever owned slaves and never expect to. But we won’t lie down and let the North walk over us, about slaves or anything else.”
That sentiment might be mistaken, but it isn’t evil.
I disagree, I think it is evil. Nationalism is morally neutral at best, not a get out of moral jail free card.
If your sense of nationalism is so strong that you pick literal nazis because they speak the same language as you or they sing the same drinking songs that’s a moral choice you make. It is entirely just for the rest of us to hold you morally responsible for that choice and its consequences.
A moral person would prefer allies walking all over us to German nazis running the country.
Wait, is your contention that Weimar-to-WW2 Germany was filled with insufficiently moral people, and that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened or would have been much more limited if that population of humans had just been made up of more moral humans instead? If so, what was it about Germany at that time or the Antebellum South that made those humans living in it particularly immoral relative to, say, the population of the allied countries who ended up defeating the Nazis or the population of the North who ended up defeating the Confederacy?
But it’s legal to support Nazis in elections and treason to support a foreign army.
@lvlln
I don’t think I made any comparison to other populations or counterfactuals about what they might or might not have done.
@Gobbobobble
I’m not sure what you are getting at. Law and morality aren’t not one in the same.
> What does “the South was evil” mean?
To a first approximation, that more or less every member of its leadership cadre was personally guilty of crimes that would attract a 30 year sentence in modern Norway.
And then they started a war.
And then they lost.
You can avoid the word ‘evil’, if you want to reserve it as a reference for something that doesn’t exist. But if you are ever going to apply it to humans, or human systems, there exists no better place.
@Brad
You did make a counterfactual:
The obvious interpretation of this, from what I can tell, is that a German in WW2 who was a moral person would have laid down their arms and let their Nazi-run country be conquered rather than fighting to protect their homeland. Now, clearly not every German did that, so this would necessarily imply that not every German was a moral person. And it’s pretty clear that if every German had been a moral person as you described it, then every German would have laid down their arms, and Nazi Germany would have been conquered much more quickly with less bloodshed and less time for genocide to occur. So it follows that if the population of Nazi Germany had been made up of people who were sufficiently moral, the negative effects of the Holocaust would have been lessened.
All this seems to follow clearly and immediately from your statement. If you think my reasoning is mistaken, I would appreciate the mistakes being pointed out.
As for the other populations, I was trying to get a clearer picture, and I think I asked the wrong question. I apologize for that. What I’m wondering is if you do believe that the population of the allied countries in WW2 were made up of more moral people than those of Nazi Germany?
Because your statement seems to imply that you believe that a moral person would not have supported Nazis coming into power in their nation (please correct me if I’m wrong on this), and clearly the population of the allied countries didn’t have enough people who were not moral – in this one way, at least – to cause Nazis to take over their country. And clearly the population of Nazi Germany did have enough people who were not moral to cause Nazis to take over their country.
Obviously it’s possible that the population of, say, USA was just as immoral as that of Germany in the Weimar-WW2 period, but due to sheer luck and path dependence Americans just didn’t have Nazism or a similar political party to latch onto in a similar way. But if that’s the case, then it seems odd to call the Germans “evil” or not moral while not calling the Americans just as “evil” or not moral, just luckier.
I think you are misreading this sentence:
The ‘they’ refers back to ‘other populations’. I made no counterfactuals about what other populations (say those living in the allied countries) would have done.
Your interpretation of the other sentence seems about right.
In general, I don’t think “you would have done the same thing if you were in their shoes” is a valid retort. First, it is something we can’t know. Second, it boils down to rejecting the entire concept of morality. Like most nihilism through determinism it isn’t something anyone can disprove as such, but it means there’s no point in talking about that subject. Which means it is a rather self defeating argument.
@Brad
That is not an argument or retort that I made. I don’t know if you would have done the same thing in their shoes, and so I don’t claim as such. I was trying to understand what you meant when I interpreted your statement as claiming that Germans in WW2 were not moral people. It seems to me, based on your latest post, that your conception of it has more to do with “people who behaved in ways that are immoral,” rather than “people who are, in some intrinsic way, immoral,” in which case my question about the relative morality of populations of Germans vs. Americans is pretty incoherent. Germans just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and that is enough to categorize them as evil, without invoking some sort of relative differences compared to other populations with respect to morality. This seems like a perfectly coherent way to understand morality, and I really have no issue with it.
I guess I was interpreting your use of terms like “evil” and “moral person” in ways you didn’t intend.
Yes, I wasn’t going for in some way intrinsically immoral. Sorry for the confusion.
@DavidFriedman:
You are muddying the waters. There were undoubtedly many in the war who simply served their local hierarchical enclave (tribe), but that isn’t the question at hand.
kerinah said she had an
Do you have inclination to doubt that Nazi Germany was the wrong side? Stalinist Russia?
One key difference that seems worth pointing out is that the Nazis and the Stalinists were expansionist by nature; whereas the South was simply attempting to retain sovereignty its homeland.
They had no intention of permanently occupying Pennsylvania and imposing their will and instituting slavery there.
Not in Pennsylvania, no, but in the West and in Latin America they most certainly did. In formerly-Mexican Texas, this intention was fully successful.
@Matt M:
Along with what herbert said, the thing the South objected to the most was the failure to add new slave states.
ETA:
And regardless, if they just wanted to retain millions of chattel slaves in their own fairly large corner of the world, I still don’t think that gives us inclination to doubt that they were on the wrong side.
Because the setup of the federal union meant that once a critical mass of free states was achieved, they could legally abolish slavery in the south and boss them around in whatever other ways they wanted to as well (tariffs, etc.)
Once they secede, that’s no longer really an issue.
@Matt M:
And?
“I fear for the safety of my land so I must take over other lands” is always a convenient reason.
Nor does it address the fact that they expressed specific interest in other expansion.
Nor did you answer the second part, which is, why does that even matter as to whether you doubt the South was on the wrong side?
The South also didn’t use gas chambers or mass extermination.
Is slavery unique in this? At what point would we draw the line and say a country is progressive enough not to invade and put to the torch? Is it solely a practical issue? Would the Iraq invasion have been morally licit if it had been better planned and executed?
@Randy M:
I’ll accept the premise of “invading the country” for sake of argument, but I think it is wrong.
I’m pretty comfortable in feeling that the regime of Saddam Hussein was the wrong side, even if there was no right side. On the eastern front, was Stalin “the right side”?
As to “putting to the torch”, war is shitty and it never was a gentleman’s affair. We fire bombed Dresden, we nuked Japan. One can argue (justifiably!) about the morality of those actions, but no matter how you come out on that, it doesn’t mean the Axis was “the right side”.
@HeelBearCub
I do think that seceding from a larger government because you fear permanently being outvoted and your needs ignored is a lot more moral than seeking to conquer that entire larger government.
This was what the USA did after all, when they rejected British rule. Aside from the motives, do you think that secession is inherently bad?
@HBC:
I didn’t mean to misrepresent the confederate state’s legal position. When you said “in their own fairly large corner of the world” I thought you were generalizing to other cases of sovereign states.
The scare quote imply some disagreement with how I framed the Northern behavior in the Civil war, but I thought I was being pretty literal.
Certainly not–the Axis were the aggressors–even against the USA. But you implied strongly that the aggressor could be regarded as on the right side, provided the other side held slaves. I’m just wondering at what point the line is drawn. The fact that “War is shitty” is pretty good justification not to start one.
I’m not a Southron, and I’d be happier believing this was a case where the side of the angels is obvious. But it’s a damn shame we couldn’t do things more like Great Britain did, and if the North bears some blame for choosing the very bloodier path, so be it.
It’s also, as I alluded, quite relevant today, with both parties happy to make war for the sake of social causes somewhat grayer than chattel slavery. I’m guessing you’d draw the line somewhere between the American Civil War and Operation: Iraqi Freedom, and I’m curious where.
@Aapje:
Everything I have said has been about chattel slavery, so I’m not sure where you are getting “secession is always wrong” from anything I said.
Whether secession is moral or not depends very much on why you are seceding.
I know I keep repeating this, and pointing out that I am repeating it, and I worry that I sound like “timecube guy”, but rights/principles are in tension with each other. The war of independence was fought on grounds of self-determination and representation. That doesn’t mean that every assertion of self-determination in secession results in valid argument for secession.
Even if we assert that there is some right to secession, it is counter-balanced by the rights of a generally just system of government. The properly elected government, and the citizenry represented, have valid claims on the territory that wishes to secede.
Generally speaking, I think that if you secede unilaterally, you should expect to fight a war over it (or be in an impregnable position). So, the case for a moral unilateral secession needs to be as strong as one that would make for a moral war of aggression.
Negotiated partition or separation is something else entirely.
@Randy M:
Those weren’t scare quotes, they were literal ones. You said “put to the torch”.
Which is why it is particularly shitty that the South chose to start a war. That was my point of disagreement with your question:
The South was the aggressor in seceding (and firing the first shots, to boot). There wasn’t a preexisting nation “US of C” that “US of A” invaded on the moral pretext of freeing the slaves. Indeed Lincoln was very clear that keeping slavery to keep the Union and avoid the war was exactly what he would have done, had it been possible.
Remember, Lincoln wasn’t even in office yet when SC seceded.
So, I don’t really think it’s valid to ask the question you are asking, as it is not applicable to the US Civil War.
It’s refreshing to hear I’m not the only one. Though I’m not sure if that makes it more timecubey or less 🙂
No, they just wanted Pennsylvania to enforce slavery by extraditing any slaves found there back to the South, and prosecuting anyone who tried to help escaped slaves to Canada or another country that didn’t recognize slavery at all. And, of course, if a slaveowner brought his personal slaves with him on a business trip to Philadelphia, they shouldn’t be freed just because they happened to be in the North temporarily. But aside from that, the North can “abolish” slavery all they want, right?
And don’t think just letting the South secede in a “velvet divorce” would’ve solved these issues. The Underground Railroad would’ve kept running, possibly with active support of Northern governments, and if the Confederacy couldn’t stop this sabotage of its economic lifeblood there would be a war, or an apartheid-style totalitarian state, sooner or later.
I for one believe that a sufficiently well-executed invasion and occupation of Iraq would have been justified. I don’t think it’s clear that such a thing was ever possible, and I do think it’s clear that it was never likely, but my objections are indeed pragmatic.
Forgive the confusion, but you did quote 3 phrases, only one of which was an actual quote. I had reasoned from the pattern that you were using them around terms you were only granting for the sake of argument.
When you said:
I read that as expounding a principle that would be true in the hypothetical where they did not start the war. The word “just” there could be interpreted as modifying “wanted” in such as way as to suggest no further actions taken beyond the wanting, rather than no further desires were held beyond the specified one.
Since this is apparently not what you meant, I’ll drop the hypothetical and bow out.
I’ve never understood this perspective. The US invaded an occupied a (not-completely-minor) country for a decade, and suffered ~5,000 dead in the process. Historically speaking, that is a massively successful military occupation. It takes a pretty egregious conflation between military and political success to make this type of statement.
War is politics by other means. If the war didn’t achieve its political objective, then the war was a loss, no matter how badly we kicked the crap out of the other guys.
I can grok that, but perhaps I should refine. There were multiple political objectives in invading Iraq. The first was, “Stop Saddam Hussein from doing Saddam Hussein things.” That cashed out in various particulars, and they were generally successful. Downstream of that was an objective to set up a multi-cultural government that could bring together the whole of Iraq in some form of democratic self-governance. I’ll agree that was a failure. Now, going back to the original setting for the comment, which of these victories is important for whether initiating the war is moral?
What’s particularly weird about this is that it concedes a classic casus belli. It’s like saying, “Sure, you should have punched that Nazi (whatever was going on justifies making that choice; oh, and you succeeded in stopping him from hitting your friend or whatever it was that provided the justification), but because you didn’t realize that the cameras were going to catch that moment and end up helping a bad cause in the end, you were morally wrong.” It’s just weird. (Though, my main point is that people who say, “It just wasn’t planned well,” tend to have the weirdest perspective about what actually happened in that war.)
Well, “moral” is a lot murkier than “militarily successful”. I’m not sure I have a set of criteria for when war is justified other than in self-defense — I don’t think the answer is “never”, but most of the alternatives that flew around in the wake of the 2003 invasion are not now very satisfying to me either.
But maybe we can find a starting point. I am not a utilitarian, but from a pure utilitarian point of view, we might look at the first question in terms of the expected death and misery from Saddam’s regime continuing (what’s the shelf life on a tin-pot dictatorship?), and the second in terms of the known death and misery in post-invasion Iraq. If the former’s greater than the latter, the invasion has utilitarian justification (which may not equal justification in other systems) despite the consequences. If not, then it wasn’t justified in our world but it may have been in a hypothetical better-run one. And yeah, justification only being determined post-hoc is kinda weird, but that’s utilitarianism for you.
I’m not a utilitarian, but I’m actually not a utilitarian, so I’m going to not engage in utilitarian reasoning.
I agree that “moral” is murkier than “militarily successful”. But remember, the comment I replied to hinged morality (or, at least, “justification”, if you want to try to wedge another distinction in there) on whether it was “well-executed” (and otherwise conceded casus belli). That sounds a hell of a lot more like “militarily successful” than anything else we’ve talked about. Do you have a better way of interpreting this “well-executed” vocabulary? Perhaps Tarpitz can clarify, rather than us running of in a random other direction?
@Controls Freak: I don’t want to put words in Tarpitz’s mouth, but I think you are misunderstanding how the humanitarian justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom (lol) was supposed to work. It wasn’t “Stop Saddam Hussein from doing Saddam Hussein things”, it was “make it the case that no one is doing Saddam Hussein things.” The invasion failed by this standard, because it resulted in many people doing Saddam Hussein things.
Frankly, I pretty resoundingly reject this. For example, there are some “Saddam Hussein things” that North Korea was doing. No one really believed that stopping NK from doing those things was an objective of the invasion of Iraq… and they certainly wouldn’t have hinged the justification of the war on such.
Still, I don’t see how you can get, “Stop others from doing Saddam Hussein things,” from, “well-executed invasion and occupation”. Can you fill in the gaps for me?
@Controls Freak:
Bottom line is that we won the war and lost the peace.
The following is from memory and I am not a military buff, so I apologize if I get some if it wrong.
Early in the planning of that war, the DoD said we would need a massive number of troops to ensure we kept the peace in the country.
We then decided to go in light and fast, Rumsfeld’s preferred mode, and assumed that we could use the Iraqi army to keep the peace once we had beaten them.
We beat them and then almost immediately disbanded the army, the ones we were counting on to prevent a massive power vacuum.
Predictable things then happened.
@Randy M:
I’m sorry of that came off as terse. It wasn’t intended that way.
I think I understand the confusion. The “just in their own corner” only referenced whether it was material that the South in fact wanted to expand slavery to other states (and territories/nations in the Americas). Even if they hadn’t wanted to expand, wanting to retain chattel slavery was still the wrong side.
@Controls Freak says:
in 2010, that objective had been achieved, despite earlier fuckups.
@Nornagest says:
Hanging a leader guilty of multiple genocides strikes me as a pretty good CB.
@hoghoghoghoghog says:
that you consider such an idea absurd on its face is not a good start.
How do you figure that? One, just stopping saddam from butchering people is a pretty big win. Even if something more ambitious was the goal, falling short of that goal but still stopping saddam is not exactly a failure.
Two, what saddam imitators do you think came as a consequence of deposing saddam?
@HeelBearCub
This is highly garbled. The US did not really go in “light”. The US sent pretty much its entire deployable army, 200k soldiers, plus 50k brits and a smattering of other allies.
The US did, however, go in fast, because that is what everyone told us to do. Arab allies said do that, the state department said to do that, the iraqi “exiles” said to do that. absolutely no one wanted the political imagery that would come from the US occupying an Arab country. So the plan was, from the beginning, go in fast and hard, and get out quickly.
Again, not exactly. the old iraqi had more than a million soldiers in it. Pre-war planning called for a post-war iraqi military establishment of something like 50,000. even before you address the problem of the old army being complicit in the crimes of the previous regime, reducing the army by so much would be tantamount to abolishing it in any case. The trouble wasn’t trying to build a new army, the trouble was that the old army was done in a way that was foolish. had it not been for the insurgency (really not an accurate name, low level civil war or chaos would be better), it probably wouldn’t have been a problem, but it did exist and so getting rid of the army the way they did made things worse.
For the record, the way the army should have been dealt with was all of the members 2 star levels or below (the others almost certainly being complicit) should have been told that the army as gone, but a new position had just opened up for them in the Iraqi re-construction corps at their old rank and 10% higher salary, then kept busy with makework until the new government was well established. That would have kept a lot of violence prone men off the streets and invested in the new regime instead of on them and angry at it.
@Gobbobobble:
You one of my peeps.
I agree with the bottom line. However, I would be a bit more subtle than that. Militarily, we still did pretty damn decently through the occupation, but the political objectives during the peace were not realized. I think that’s reasonably unarguable. There were ebbs and flows in the COIN strategy, but the overall trend was toward a military victory.
In fact, I agree that actions like disbanding the army hurt the effort… but that happened very early on, and it’s weird to forget the entire rest of the decade by just invoking that. Instead, we were able to contain the insurgency threat. What killed our political objective was Maliki and friends (and enemies). Both administrations thought that the military situation went in the right direction (post-surge). The political failure was pretty purely a political failure. And it fell apart many years after the invasion and the disbanding of the army. I still don’t see how your comment includes some justification of the invasion turns on whether it was “well-executed”. Do you really mean, “If they hadn’t disbanded the army, it would have been justified, but they disbanded the army, so it wasn’t”?
@ Cassander:
‘Saddam Hussein stuff’ (SHS) is maybe too vague a notion to be terribly useful, but I would count the genocidal militias that ethnically cleansed sections of Iraq as doing SHS in the relevant sense. They are gone now but they should still tally into whether we consider the operation a success (in the long run we’re all dead, so one can’t only consider the end result). Had the invaders prevented this but otherwise gotten us to where we are now (ISIS included) I might consider the invasion a success on humanitarian grounds.
@ Controls Freak:
This sounds less paradoxical if you rephrase it as “if they weren’t going to disband the army, it would have been justified, but they were going to, so it wasn’t.”
Is there a possibility that this decision was made post-invasion, in response to particular assessments of the situation at the time that the decision was made (post-invasion)? If there is such a possibility (whether or not they made the right decision), doesn’t your claim still seem pretty paradoxical? (I’m not particularly interested in claims as to whether it actually was decided post-invasion. I’m more interested in how the theoretical chain of justification works.)
@hoghoghoghoghog
Given the death toll that prevailed in pre-invasion iraq, reasonable estimations of the the post invasion count, and the rather dramatic increase in standard of living that the post saddam iraq has seen, we almost certainly came out ahead on a pure deathtoll count. Granted, we spent a trillion dollars, so our ROI probably pretty poor.
As for ISIS, you can’t lay that at the feet of the invasion. in 2010, iraq was stable, more or less democratic, with a lower rate of violence than mexico despite being a more poorer place. What allowed ISIS to rise was a combination of a civil war in syria and the obama administration abandoning our leverage over the iraqi government by withdrawing. Maliki, as you say, disturbed the equilibrium, but he was only able to do that because we left. His political arrests started literally the day after US troops left the country. Had the Syrian war not happened (or at least, had it been a brief affair) or had the US stayed, Iraq would be in vastly better shape.
@CF:
Yeah I see what you mean. I think it’s maybe better to separate “wrong” and “blameworthy”. The decision to invade was wrong because it led to lots of awful stuff, including the dissolving-the-army bit, but this was not understood at the time of invasion so does not prove that the invaders were blameworthy.
Additionally, dissolving the army was apparently done with very little thought. This indicates that the invaders didn’t care enough about what happened after the invasion to plan about what happened after the invasion, which is blameworthy.
(Additionally additionally, there is some evidence that the Bushies considered it virtuous to not think things through (“we create our own reality” etc.), which if true would upgrade them from sinners to satanists.)
@cassander:
Agreed that we did ok on the death toll, also agreed that ROI is the correct measure (this is probably the best general argument for passifism – by EA standards humanitarian interventions don’t look so good).
ISIS is one of those things that doesn’t have a clear cause, but to muddy the waters I’d point out that ISIS includes many former Ba’athists in important roles.
Finally, it’s weird to claim both that the US created a stable government and that Maliki was able to disturb the equilibrium the instant they left. Peaceful and democratic maybe, but clearly not stable.
I’m still not a utilitarian, so I won’t view it from a utilitarian perspective.
I’m sure this is supported by a thorough understanding of bureaucratic record, rather than a casual politically-charged claim. (I say this as someone who was just involved in an extensive bureaucratic process which I think came to the correct result, even though someone on the outside could casually claim that it was done with very little thought (along a crony-sounding line)). No offense, but I know how much effort goes into far more minor decisions; I’m not likely to go for such throwaway claims in the absence of significant evidence (pretty much, I’m going to need historians combing through gobs of gov’t records).
Cassander, can you give some evidence as to the pre-invasion death toll? Because even your number of 180,000 seems like a large amount.
@hoghoghoghoghog says:
this is an inaccurate assessment of how the bush administration operated. As I said above, their post-invasion plans were not made because of an absence of thought. They were made in response to real problems and pressures. The solutions they chose did not work out as they hoped, but that wasn’t for lack of thinking, and certainly not because they willfully embraced or encouraged ignorance.
I think this is a very strange way of looking at the invasion of Iraq.
There was one initial political objective of invading Iraq, which was to neutralize the threat of the Iraqi government’s weapons of mass destruction. To label there not being any such weapons “success” strains the imagination.
The other objectives just sort of evolved spontaneously out of that fuck-up. We were there, so there was stuff we had to do. To this day I suspect that if we had found weapons we wouldn’t have been there nearly as long, or we wouldn’t have been focused on self-government, because then “Iraq” would have been “guilty”.
@hoghoghoghoghog says:
It was stable like a moving bike. The US presence evened things out, reassured all sides, and kept the military apolitical. Take that away, or tike the rider off the bike, and it quickly fell over.
By 2010, the US presence was not particularly costly. US forces had stopped going on combat operations and their roll was restricted to training and advising Iraqi units. Having a couple brigades in iraq instead of saudi arabia or bahrain would not have had a serious marginal cost. And contrary to popular myth, Iraqi politicians were not eager to get rid of US troops and did not force us out.
@skeff
This is decidedly not accurate. read the iraq war resolution. WMD features prominently, but so do iraq’s support for terrorism, it’s violation of the cease fire and Saddam’s brutal tyranny. All of these reasons were discussed openly at the time. “it was all about WMD” only became a headline critique after chemical weapons weren’t found.
I’m pretty sure GWB gave five reasons, not one, in a landmark speech. I’m also pretty sure that Congress passed an AUMF that cited more than this one item. I think it is your way of looking at history that is “strange” and “strains the imagination”.
EDIT: Ignore that. I know people live in a post-fact universe on this topic. I really don’t want to argue it. The comment I initially responded to conceded casus belli and claimed that it would have been justified if it was “well-executed”. Can you support this claim?! Or are you simply claiming that it wasn’t justified since the intel assessments of Iraq’s WMD programs were wrong (a very different claim)?
This is not how politics works.
Uh huh.
No, I don’t think the invasion would have been justified by any of the explicit early or later standards if things had gone better by normal standards.
Now, if the underlying rationale was really what Thomas Friedman arrived at, that’s harder to judge. I don’t agree with that rationale, but it’s a viable political goal that might have been realized by a better, less costly invasion.
Ok. Since we’ve agreed on that (and I got some sleep) I’ll say my piece on the other thing. I’ll likely leave it at that, because I’m going back on travel tomorrow and am going to get busy today in the process of preparing for it.
I don’t think Thomas Friedman was quite right. That would be a good explanation for Afghanistan. I think it was as I described before – stop Saddam Hussein from doing Saddam Hussein things. The first analogy is North Korea. No, there is little expectation that action in Iraq was going to change what NK did, but it was probably already too late for that. As was bitterly argued back in ’94, there was a decent argument for going into NK and stopping the Kim Family from doing Kim Family things. There was a decent argument against it (the still-predicted humanitarian and political problems if we intervene). As of today, we’ve reaped the benefits and the consequences of stopping Saddam Hussein from doing Saddam Hussein things and of not stopping the Kim Family from doing Kim Family things. (Fact is, counterfactuals are nigh impossible to shove into some utilitarian calculation when it comes to global politics.)
In the second analogy, I’ll even focus on weapons programs, because most people hinge their “not justified” argument on “no weapons programs”. Let’s make a casual analogy to criminal law. It’s one thing for the police to find probable cause of illegal weapon possession, obtain a search warrant, and then go into a house to search it. Upon not finding anything, people can second guess, “Oh, was the evidence good enough,” or whatnot. Anyway. It’s an entirely different thing for the police to say, “This person has clearly violated the terms of their probation, and it has prevented us from determining whether they’re possessing illegal weapons,” then using that justification to enter a person’s home and arrest them. In that case, even if there are no weapons found, the underlying offense still holds. I’d argue that that is more akin to claim against Saddam. He had already been found to be in gross violation of the international order, and as such, he was on probation – we’ll let you continue operating in the world, so long as you demonstrate to us that you’re no longer doing X, Y, and Z. He refused to appropriately demonstrate that – for example, even his own generals were convinced that he had an ongoing weapons program. The fact that we later discovered that he didn’t have one does not invalidate this underlying rationale.
I will maintain that most people are living in a post-fact world when it comes to the justifications for the Iraq war. You blew off both the President’s landmark speech and Congress’ AUMF (though you refused to quote that part of the sentence, as if you didn’t even recognize it as a thing that exists) by just saying, “That’s not how politics works.” Well, then, please enlighten me about how politics works. When determining why the USG went to war, where should I look other than the public declaration of the President asking Congress to approve war powers and Congress’ public declaration providing said war powers? I see options which can range from “somewhat politically-stained media that are willing to ignore things in order to make a political point” to “totally politically-stained media that are willing to ignore things to the point of baldly asserting that we invaded Iraq for oil”. Can you guide me on this journey?
Well, that generated a lot of follow-up before I got back to it…
Short version, I absolutely include the occupation and political decisions in “execution”, not just the military campaign, and am broadly in favour of a utilitarian-ish or at any rate consequentialist approach to evaluating decisions big enough for such analysis to be worthwhile. I am pretty much in agreement with pretty much everything Cassander has said in this thread (including cost-effectiveness – one hypothetical but in practice impossible way the invasion could have been more justified would be if it had cost an order of magnitude less), with the caveat that we should also factor in some significant likelihood of a bloody Iraqi civil war subsequent to Saddam’s death from natural causes further down the line in our estimate of what a no-invasion world looks like.
With Cassander, the most notable poor decisions seem to me to be the disbanding of the army and the withdrawal of US forces. My understanding was that at least the former was bitterly opposed by the British and Israelis, so at least some parties to the discussions saw it as a bad idea at the time.
Sure. You would judge based on the proportion of attention given to the various different issues that might lead to war up until the decision is made. Since the news media is suspect, a better measure would be public statements by politicians at the national level, including press conferences, hearing, and press appearances. What this would isolate are those issues that were the basis of public support for the war, which is how politics works.
I obviously can’t produce this evidence unilaterally, sitting here at my keyboard. But for those who want a memory jog (if they were around at the time), how about: “Blix”. You know, that period leading up to the invasion where the news was pretty much all Blix, all the time, because of all the argument on the part of politicians over whether Blix needed more time, or was being duped, etc.?
[Not to mention how the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” entered the public imagination during that period. Before that time I don’t remember people conceptually lumping chemical and biological weapons in with nuclear weapons. The latter had until then been seen as in their own, uniquely destructive category. It generally takes a lot of emphasis to shift conceptual categories that way.]
I don’t agree about Afghanistan. I half agree about Iraq.
We were in Afghanistan very quickly after 9/11. The motivation was to find and kill those directly responsible. Afghanistan also lacked certain features needed to make a “suck on this” point, such as a reasonably well-funded national-level military. (I’m assuming part of the T. Friedman point is “your country is not safe it if harbors this sort of thing”.)
With Iraq, I think it is likely that some T. Friedman-like thinking was common once Afghanistan wasn’t going very well. But little speculation was necessary because Iraq was already the target that made sense for other reasons. Basically, “suck on this” was what motivated the connection of Iraq to 9/11 in particular, but there were already many reasons why Iraq was seen as an appropriate target.
The wikipedia article matches what I have read elsewhere – that the original intent was for the Iraqi army to be retasked with infrastructure work and the like to keep them out of trouble, plus a bit of security work for the ones with relatively clean hands. But the planning for this was clearly inadequate, and when Paul Bremer took over on short notice he promptly changed course and disbanded the Iraqi army on what looks like his own initiative.
@John Schilling says:
Paul Bremer’s version of events, while obviously not disinterested, has always been consistent, at least. One, the army was complicit with the crimes of the old regime. Two, that even if it had been desirable to preserve the army, it was no longer possible to do so. The Iraqi army had been utterly defeated, its facilities destroyed. The people conscripted wouldn’t return if called to service, no one was willing to force them. Records were lost, destroyed, or never existed.
This logic is not entirely unreasonable. My understanding (which is pieced together, I’ve never seen good figures on this front) is that Iraqi units tended to dissolve rather than surrender and I doubt that US troops were encouraged to take prisoners when they could let them do so, so we didn’t have the army interned the way the german army was in ww2.
If your goal was having an army that did something useful, these objections were perfectly reasonable and compelling. The trouble was that keeping the members of the former army, even a minority of them, busy and invested in the new regime was at least as important as anything productive it might accomplish, and this benefit wasn’t considered.
That would be a big part of the “clearly inadequate planning” I was referring to. Someone sets out to wage and win a war, and their plan for dealing with the Enemy Army is to hope that after a few fights it will just go away and stop bothering them?
@cassander I’d recommend Tom Ricks’ book on the early years of the invasion, which includes a lot of information from interviews with military and diplomatic leadership. (Combined with his book on the Surge, it’s a good introduction to a number of now-prominent leaders earlier in their careers.)
I’ll quote a bit here.
There’s more, but the summary is that many military leaders felt that Bremer’s actions (this, deeper de-Baathification than original plans had called for, and firing all Ministry of the Interior employees including the police) undermined what postwar planning had been done and created a ready leadership and rank and file for the insurgency.
John Schilling says:
Well one, that did happen. the iraqi army was defeated and went away. the problem came 6 months later when situations on the ground had changed dramatically and the new government was unable to impose order.
@Rob K says:
I’ve read it. And I didn’t mean to imply that the decision was uncontroversial or to say it was wise policy. It was controversial and I think it was a flawed policy. That said, it didn’t come about because of some lack of planning, it came about as a response to genuine concerns and issues, and wasn’t the knee jerk decision made for no good reason that it is often portrayed as,.
@cassander
Yes, the decision was made because of real concerns, but the weighing of the concerns was of a level of stupidity that shouldn’t happen.
I didn’t think it was necessary to explicitly add “permanently”, but OK, permanently.
Anyone who holds their victory celebration when the enemy army retreats over the horizon or disperses into the woods, deserves defeat, degradation, and death when said army reappears in whatever time, place, and form best suits their goals. These people are literally too stupid to live, except insofar as the can sometimes be clever enough to send other men to die in their place.
If you plan to actually win a war, you need a clear and specific answer to the question, “what are these people going to be doing six months from now, two years from now, ten years from now, and why are they going to be doing that thing instead of the whole killing-us thing they are happy enough with today?” Bush, Bremer, et al never had that plan for Iraq. And they got off light.
This stance always confuses me. What, exactly, do people think is the purpose of public monuments? They’re how we tell ourselves a story of who we are as a society. Who we honor tells us what we have collectively deemed worthy of honor.*
The confederate monuments in this country were overwhelmingly erected in two waves; one in the wake of redemption, and one as the civil rights movement was rising to challenge that order. The story they tell is straightforward; we as a society believe that the Confederacy was right and worthy of honor, and we celebrate the accomplishment of imposing Jim Crow.
Given the intense sensitivity conservatives in this country have shown of the power of e.g. cultural depictions in the media, it baffles me that this (entirely central) role of public monuments never merits acknowledgement.
*A favorite story: In Forest Park, in my hometown of St. Louis, for instance, there’s a statue of the unremarkable general Franz Siegel, who commanded at Pea Ridge. Really, though, it’s not there because he was much good at generaling, but because he serves as a metonym for the German-American contribution to the war effort, and the substantial St. Louis German-American community wanted a monument to what they’d done.
I’d like you to note the hidden assumption here: Black people are on the other side from you, and intrinsically so, that no black person could win the Republican nomination, or if so, the presidency.
I’m not sure I have the time to touch your “You need to convince me the South wasn’t wrong” statement. If you want to find it, it’s easy to determine that secession was about keeping slavery, that it was the central issue in the mind of the South. And Lincoln wasn’t even proposing abolition. The South was unwilling to accept a Presidency that was opposed to slavery but made no proposals to yet end it.
This is because they were losing the argument about whether slavery was moral and just. Eventually, slavery would have been ended and they knew this and would not accept it. But as an independent nation, they would have been able to keep slavery for the foreseeable future.
I agree that having love and compassion is a better way to convince someone to change their mind.
The South didn’t have a mind. It was the main political issue in the minds of the politicians who voted for secession. It doesn’t follow that it was the central issue to the men who actually fought on behalf of the Confederacy–who I think are mostly the ones honored by statues.
Absolutely correct.
I never said that the confederate sympathizers should lose any human rights (unless not being called a loser is a human right?). I go to a university named after Robert E. Lee. I have seen many students rep confederate flag laptop stickers or flags in their room. I’m sure some of them are doing this because they have valid reasons to support the confederacy. I would never call these people losers. My “confederates are bad because they lost” argument applied more to the people who (I perceived) were supporting the confederacy because they thought it was cool. This made no sense to me because losing is very uncool. So, different arguments for different people i guess?
Situational.
As a non-political example, the Chicago Cubs were known for being the biggest losers in all of sports, and yet, supported one of the largest fanbases in all of baseball, significantly larger than the other team in Chicago who had recently won a world series.
A vlog of a one legged puppy futilely hopping around the house would have a shit ton of viewers rooting for it, but I don’t think that makes the puppy “cool” by any stretch of the imagination.
Thermopylae? The Sacred Band? Karbala? The Comanche? Masada?
Heroically losing is worse for the ones doing it than heroically winning, but it often produces an image that other people find admirable and inspiring.
You forgot the Alamo.
Who decides which losses are heroic and which are just losses?
Yeah, native american tribes came to mind for me. I feel like people who display native american symbols are not often confronted with loud hecklers saying “LOL WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO ASSOCIATE YOURSELF WITH THOSE LOSERS?”
One big factor is that your cause has to be seen as just. Also, making a doomed last stand against overwhelming odds is always good, especially when you know you’re doomed but make a stand anyway.
Then up spake bold Horatius, the captain of the gate:
“To every many upon this earth death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?”
Of course, Horatius himself ended up ruining things by surviving, but the principle is sound.
I know you’re mostly making a larger point, but you did include:
and for some reason I happened to have a comprehensive breakdown of why I think the Confederacy was not only the wrong side, but one of the wrongest sides of all time:
A.) The South’s pretenses to uphold some abstract principle of state’s rights, with slavery being some incidental aspect of the larger issue, are spurious. Even if we didn’t have texts like the Cornerstone Speech, the South’s actions before the war speak just as loudly. The South eagerly trammeled the rights of Northern states to not participate in slavery by passing the Fugitive Slave Act and supporting the Dred Scott decision.
B.) Furthermore, even if we were to accept for the sake of argument the idea that there was anything just or even just understandable about the idea of seceding to protect slavery, slavery was not under threat. There were no bills or Amendments pending. Lincoln’s dislike of slavery was well-established, but he was not a radical abolitionist–if he had been, the Emancipation Proclamation would have been issued far earlier. The issue that was near and dear to his Illinois heart was really the Free Soil cause. But the South wasn’t satisfied to peacefully sit and practice its disgusting lifestyle–it demanded expansion, had always demanded expansion, and even a distant and inchoate threat to that expansion was enough to cause it to do something it knew could very possibly lead to war, unilaterally and before the new President was even inaugurated.
C.) It has become convenient to both sides to act like the North started the war in response to secession. The North gets to at least implicitly claim it was crusading against slavery; the South gets to say “we were just defending our lands.” But, in addition to the provocation of unilateral session, the South shot first. The shelling of Fort Sumter was ordered by the governor of South Carolina, so it wasn’t incidental or accidental.
D.) It is tempting but sloppy to look at history and apply present-day morals to historical actors. Often, this is used to defend Southern slavery, suggesting that they were simply people of their time. However, this was not ancient Rome, one brutal state in a sea of peoples who looked at the world the same way. This was the only English-speaking holdout, soldiering on decades after their peers in the North and in the Caribbean had finally done the right thing. Abolitionism had been around for a long time by 1861, every slaveholder had heard the arguments–but the arguments only hardened them, as demonstrated by the progression from the widespread ambivalence of the southern Founding Fathers to the passionate and unrestrained advocacy of the likes of Calhoun.
The only good thing that can be said about the Confederate cause was that by idiotically and petulantly starting a war to oppose vague threat to its expansion, they ultimately ended slavery earlier than it would have otherwise gone.
Arguments should never appear one-sided.
Doubly so when it is historical, triply so when it is one-sided in favor of the victors.
Not my job to plead on behalf of a society built on the buying and selling of human beings, on raping them, on depriving them of knowledge, on destroying their families, and on living lives of luxury via stolen labor. Plenty of other people around to do that.
edit: (for clarity’s sake, I’d initially said something around the lines of “your argument against one-sided arguments is one-sided” before I opted to edit it to be something more on topic; Thegnskald caught the comment before I did so)
Then it is an argument against itself, and thus not one sided at all.
And the other 70-90% of the population?
a.) Morally, they should have rejected their elites’ wars. It’s a lot to ask, but West Virginia and the State of Jones did it.
b.) Politically, the governments that led the South into the war were democratic as applied to free whites, so to some degree all free whites–and certainly the Southern Democratic voters–share the responsibility of the elites.
c.) Looking back in retrospect: I accept the idea that, subjectively, a lot of (certainly not all) common Confederate soldiers were fighting to defend their own soil without necessarily approving of slavery and its expansion. But they were wrong. Their sacrifices should be regarded as tragic, not noble, and at any rate a flag associated with the government that deceived them should not be used to celebrate them.
I think you’re eliding the important point when it comes to why the South saw Lincoln and the Free Soil movement as threats to their independence. Which is doubly important because it’s the same reason why people still use Confederate symbolism today.
Lincoln’s election proved that you could win the Presidency without the support of a single Southern state. And the Free Soil movement was attempting to add even more states to the union in a way which would have led to the South being permanently outvoted in both houses of congress.
Obviously this was about slavery. The Planter aristocracy had almost all of their wealth tied up in slaves and, as history proved, abolition definitively ended their way of life. Which is why they felt staying in the union offered no future for them: the writing was on the wall that they were no longer represented within the American federal government, and the American Revolution prescribed a clear solution for that state of affairs.
So why do people today, many of whom aren’t even Southern, display the Confederate battle flag? It’s not because they’re in favor of overturning the 13th amendment. It’s because they feel that the American government doesn’t represent them or their interests. That the system is rigged against them.
It’s ironic because tearing down their statues does an excellent job of reinforcing that message.
* when the vote is split between four candidates. The South, as demonstrated by the last 60 years, could have easily opted to be the senior partner in a major party coalition. Additionally, their post-war political power was also enough to preserve segregation for over a hundred years. The North didn’t even have the political will to follow through on Reconstruction–which, of course, was more about the devastation of the war than rights for blacks.
The South could have waited for an abolitionist amendment to make its move; it could have waited for the first Free state to enter the Union without an accompanying Slaver state; it could have waited for Dred Scott (which established that abolition was subject to the takings clause) to be overturned. But it didn’t. It struck first, and while much of what I say above is hindsight, pre-emptive (or, to use the parlance of ten years ago, preventative) strikes can and should open up the aggressor to critiques based on hindsight, because no one should ever start a war pre-emptively unless they’re reasonably sure they know what they’re doing.
The “American governement” isn’t tearing down the statues.
Mostly, the local municipal governments are moving the statues off of the public commons. The citizens of the city want to take the statues down. It’s the outsiders who want the statues to stay up…
This is one of the better arguments, but it’s still very hard to separate the flag from the fact that it’s peak postwar popularity has usually coincided with efforts to be really racist. “I just want to show that I’m a ‘rebel’, I’m independent, I don’t want to submit to rule by some far away person that doesn’t represent me”. That’s a fine sentiment, but when so many of the people who shared that sentiment under that flag mostly wanted to use their independence to be nasty to black people, that’s a little more troublesome. A little more complicated than the swastika maybe, but I’ve come around to the idea that that’s a difference in degree, not form. Even if you don’t think people ought to think it’s racist, it’s very clear that a pretty sizeable portion of the population sincerely does, so displaying it outside some very limited contexts is more or less a declaration that at a minimum you don’t care that you’re offending people. In bird culture, this is considered a “dick move”.
Besides, if you want “independence” with fewer racist connotations, the Gadsden Flag and the Moultrie Flag are fine substitutes (although I must admit, from a purely aesthetic standpoint the CSA battle flag is a superior design).
Another great example of selective federalism in action. Anything the left wants to be decided locally is allowed to be decided locally. Anything the right wants to be decided locally is forbidden by federal policy.
Here’s a brain teaser for you. When the mayor of Charlottesville decides to deny a disfavored group its constitutional rights in direct conflict with the orders of a federal judge, under the logic that he knows what’s best for his city and that there is an urgent threat to public safety, whose behavior is he emulating?
If only there was some lionized historical Virginian who fought a war over an issue like this. Who said that these matters should be decided locally rather than by Washington. Wait, don’t tell me, it’ll come to me eventually…
There is no commitment to federalism on the conservative side either. This is a false argument.
But, if you think local governments moving statues is a sign that the federal government is tearing down “your” monuments…
@herbert herberson,
I mean, sure, they’re hardly blameless. Beyond literally firing the first shots the Civil War they had been courting the possibility of a war for decades. Their strategy was one of deliberate escalation to force concessions and when that strategy failed it failed very dramatically.
But by the same token, your stance on the morality of pre-emptive strikes is very unrealistic.
We agree that the writing was on the wall: this was a question of when and not if the north would end slavery over southern objections. The Planters correctly viewed this as an existential threat and, naturally, they disagreed with you as to the moral necessity of destroying their society. So how exactly would you respond to the knowledge of the inevitable destruction of your way of life?
@gbdub,
If you’ll permit me to complete your thought, what it sounds like you’re saying is this:
They want to live by their own customs without interference from you. But their customs are abhorrent and you can’t allow them to.
That’s a perfectly fine argument in favor of cultural imperialism. I endorse it myself in cases like female genital mutilation.
But you don’t get to have it both ways: if people are only allowed to have their culture when it meets your approval, then you’ve forbidden them from having their culture. That might be the best thing to do! Some cultures are awful. Just don’t expect them to thank you for it.
I think in blue cities in red states you have an interesting dynamic wherein any policy that is decided locally will end up very blue, any policy that is decided at state level will end up very red, and federal policy will flip back and forth every 4-8 years depending on what happens in Ohio and Florida.
So what is “the will of the people” vis-a-vis confederate statues and which portion of the people is the relevant group to ask? The city? County? State? Nation?
And why is the answer to this different for statue removal than it is for marijuana legalization? And why is the answer for that one different than it is for gay marriage?
I think if you chart a lot of these issues, you’ll find a strong correlation between “which group gets to decide” and “which group is the most left-wing”
They’ve gone after the Gadsen flag as racist also. Not the (hideous) Moultrie flag yet, but at some point it make sense to decide that your opponents don’t get to choose your symbols.
I actually don’t agree with that. I don’t think the North would have ever mustered the will to go through with it if the abolitionist cause hadn’t managed to form a coalition with the “fuck the assholes who just started the bloodiest war we have ever or will ever experience” cause. (I know this is heterodox, and that other nations like Britain did peacefully end it, but I think the relative scale of slave capital as compared to other capital in the US, the Constitutional protections afforded to property-holders, and the historical ability of the South to avoid the sorts of large slave revolts that whittled the practice down in Brazil, would have collectively been too much)
That said, if accept the premise for the sake of argument, and imagine myself as a slaveholder who disagrees with the above paragraph: sure, I might have advocated the same thing. But when the political and material realities of your unjust system naturally lead you to start a unjust war, that’s not a morally-relevant excuse to me. Choose to be evil for stupid reasons or choose to be evil because you can’t accept the costs of being good; either way, you’re still evil.
Is there, perhaps, actual data on the popularity of the Confederate Flag over time? Because I’m thinking peak postwar popularity may have coincided with generically rebellious but non-racist southerners and the nigh-obliteration of the 1969 Dodge Charger.
Vexillological bonus points for properly distinguishing the Confederate Flag from the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia in this endeavor.
> So how exactly would you respond to the knowledge of the inevitable destruction of your way of life?
Quite plausibly badly. So?
Not sure what moral standard you are calling for here. No-one can be judged on their motives, because other people might have similar motives, but different tactics. And no-one can be judged by their tactics, because other people might have similar tactics, but different motives.
And no-one, outside that situation, living in the modern era with the facts of the matter freely available, can be judged for choosing to identify with the people with bad motives and tactics?
Is there some subtle distinction between that and moral nihilism I’m missing?
@1soru1,
Yes.
You can have morality without having moral certainty. It’s the original application of Cromwell’s rule: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
Your opponents almost always believe that their positions are morally justified. Many of them are just as intelligent as you are and some moreso. So why do they believe these things?
If you can’t answer that question persuasively I will not trust your moral judgement. Because if you really think that your enemies are slavering monsters then you lack the perspective to understand when you are doing something monstrous.
Take a room full of Southern leaders, and answer the questions:
1. How many of them had personally raped someone?
2. How many had personally, or directly ordered, the killing of someone for their personal profit?
3. As above, for maiming or severe beating?
4. As above, for credible threats of one or the other?
5. Were they successful in achieving their goals?
6. If not, was their failure unforseeable given the information they had?
The answer to those questions that happens to be factually accurate is the correct one.
You don’t get to pick a different one because it would be fairer.
Agreed. Do you have knowledge, based on evidence you can share, as to what the factually accurate answers to those questions are? Or are you just going to assert that it is 100%, obviously, because they were all evil slaveholders?
Questions like these, I genuinely would be interested in having accurate answers to. But at times I think I am the only one.
@1soru1,
So when can we expect the statues of the Founding Fathers and the Betsy Ross flag to come down then?
Every one of your questions can be just as easily applied to the founders of the USA as to those of the CSA. Yet unless I’m very mistaken your “factual” moral evaluation is going to give very different answers in those cases.
Let’s put this another way: abortion. I support it’s legality, I have my justifications for why that’s moral. Should opponents of abortion feel comfortable saying that since I’m clearly a monster, evil as a simple matter of fact, they can brush those justifications aside? Or should they stop and think as to why a mentally-sound and intelligent man is advocating something which they see as an obvious evil.
In the case of slavery, there is no mystery: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The abortion debate has a very different character, since there is little money directly at stake.
@John Schilling: The hard one to adjudicate is going to be 4. That’s the one where plausibly most of the ladies will become guilty, but there is a reasonable sense in which every society that relies on coercion runs afoul of it. Probably needs to be clarified before we get factual about this.
There was recently a book that tried but probably failed to quantify the relationship between brutality and profitability in the slave economy, which would have helped answer 4 (alas the authors seem to have badly misunderstood some agricultural science). So people are working on this but it’s not ready for prime time.
Incidentally I believe one of the major punishments was breaking up families: “if you resist I’ll sell your wife down the river and you’ll never see her again.” That one should probably be on the list.
> Yet unless I’m very mistaken your “factual” moral evaluation is going to give very different answers in those cases.
My evaluation would be different to the extent that the answers to those kind of questions are different; no more no less.
I don’t think that’s entirely correct. The question of new states being slave or free wasn’t merely a matter of slave owners wanting more territory, it was also affecting the balance of power in the Senate.
Amend it to “direct threat,” if you wish. But we’re several steps removed at this point:
– Free soiler president leads to…
– possibly more free soil states (popular sovereignty was the name of the game at that point, very easy to imagine several states still opting for slavery), which leads to…
– possibly passing abolitionist legislation (very possible that the highly motivated South might have still managed to prevail legislatively over a more-numerous-but-less-motivated North, much as, e.g., gun rights advocates do today), which leads to…
– possibly being unchallenged legally (absent a buy-out, which would have been prohibitively expensive absent significantly changed conditions, abolition was unconstitutional under the case law of the time), which leads to…
– possibly being implemented (would the northern abolitionist government had the will to send in the feds to impose their new law? would they even have had the institutions to do so, if it was before the formations of federal police forces and/or a standing army?)
Each one of those steps is a more justified caucus belli than the one before it. The South was at least as premature as, e.g., a hypothetical January 2017 Calxit out of fear of Trumpian mass deportations
As I understand it, there were three big things that southern Fire-Eaters were concerned about from a Lincoln (or other Republican) Presidency:
1. Lincoln and future Republican presidents could use spoils-system patronage to bankroll an abolitionist movement within the South. This wasn’t an entirely unreasonable concern, since there were nontrivial fringe abolition movements in most of the border states (especially Missouri), and since federal patronage was a big part of how campaigns and political parties were financed at the time.
2. The Republican/Whig economic program would enrich the Northeast and Midwest at the expense of the Deep South. Too much has been made of this in some circles (arguing, incorrectly IMO, that this was actually the primary reason for secession), but the plantation economy of the Deep South did have seriously divergent economic policy interests from the rest of the country.
3. Anti-slavery sentiment in public discourse would encourage slave rebellions and an anti-slavery administration would fail to do its utmost to prevent and suppress slave revolts. Slave revolts were a constant fear in the Deep South, and it was widely believed that speaking out against slavery anywhere a slave might get wind of it would encourage slave uprisings. In particular, the Harpers Ferry raid by John Brown in 1859 was seen by many in the South as a preview of things to come, with militant Abolitionists, given encouragement under-the-table support by the more respectable anti-slavery types, working to organize slaves to rise up and kill their masters.
I tried to research it once, although didn’t get very far, but I have been told a major reason for continuing Confederate sympathies into the 20th century was that the South was disproportionately targeted by drafts, which is also why the military tradition in the South is so much stronger (and, if true, is also probably a major reason for the modern Southern industrial revolution).
There was a stronger military tradition in the South than in the North pre-Civil War (for assorted cultural reasons). The disparity in number of military academies between South and North in 1860 was almost as great as the disparity in industry between North and South.
I’d say Singapore has a successful censorship regime. They’ve banned stuff like The Satanic Verses and the film The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society with very little in the way of ethnic or religious tensions/identity politics.
“Are there any examples of societies that banned one type of speech and never descended into the dystopian pit of absolute censorship?”
Yes, many. For instance, holocaust denial is illegal in a large number of European countries, few of which have become dystopian hellholes. Other Western countries (the UK, Australia) have laws against “hate speech”. Several European countries have or had (in the last few decades) blasphemy laws. Singapore has fairly draconian restrictions on speech, but is still regarded as one of the nicest places to live.
>Other Western countries (the UK, Australia) have laws against “hate speech”.
The jury is still out on whether the UK will not end up a dystopian censorship pit.
True, but it does currently seem to be approaching dystopia at a slower rate than the US.
What makes you say that?
My serious answer would be based on long term things like prisoners per capita, the answer in the same spirit as my original comment would be Trump.
There seems plenty of reasons to have higher prisoners per capita that don’t involve the US being more dystopian.
Define “dystopian censorship pit”.
Where suppression of speech is so prevalent that the conflict between citizens and the government is lasting and violent.
In the sense that is out on just about everything.
Free speech is a levy on a floodplain; demolishing the levy doesn’t cause a flood, it means floods aren’t held back when the rains come.
Didn’t Germany just allow the prosecution of a private citizen for making a joke about another county’s president?
I’d rather not have that, even if it means that people who are going to be nasty anti-Semites either way can be slightly more open about their weirder conspiracy theories.
Yes, and similar (from my perspective) undesirable uses of these laws are relatively common. But they don’t noticeably endanger civilisation, and I don’t think unjust hate speech prosecutions are even a particularly high proportion of all unjust prosecutions.
For the sake of argument, you could have a country that has laws against holocaust denial but not against generic hate speech. I’m don’t think there are any like that, but it’s fairly plausible and means you can stop nasty anti-Semites without negative side effects.
The fact that you don’t have any country like that seems to be fairly strong evidence that the slope is in fact rather slick.
I am not convinced that anti-denial laws are effective at reducing anti-Semitism, nor am I convinced that lack of such laws are a marker of civilizational collapse. You would need pretty strong evidence of these claims – do you have any?
Also, consider that denial of the Armenian genocide is pretty common, as are denials of culpability for the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward famines. I don’t agree with these denials, but so far civilization remains uncollapsed.
If there aren’t any like that, maybe human nature is keeping it from being fairly plausible after all.
@gbdub
The slope might be slippery between holocaust denial laws and hate speech laws, but there seems to be something stopping people going further down it. I don’t know whether or not anti-denial laws are effective (my instinct is that they probably have very little effect either way in modern times), but that’s not what I’m arguing. I probably confused things by using the phrase “endanger civilisation” to refer to the dangers of anti-free-speech laws when in this context you would expect it to be applied to holocaust denial. My thesis is that nothing terrible (like descent into totalitarian madness) is likely to come from minor infringements on freedom of speech like hate speech laws. I’m not arguing that terrible things *will* come from the absence of those laws; that seems obviously false since nothing awful seems to be happening in the US (or at least nothing that excessive freedom of speech can plausibly be blamed for).
So the question of denial of Soviet crimes is irrelevant, but on that subject I was interested to learn from the Wikipedia page on holocaust denial laws that many Eastern European countries also have explicit anti-Soviet-atrocity-denial laws.
My point is they’ve already gone farther down the slippery slope than I’d like. Your line may be different.
I think throwing someone in jail for joking about Erdogan (or Johnson) is pretty terrible. Especially if you’re the guy in jail. As Aapje notes, people find are going to find a way to express their ungoodthink. So if the laws are ineffective anyway, throwing even one person in jail for violating them seems sufficiently terrible to not have those laws.
Charges against that guy were dropped, but I agree that the prosecution was pretty bad even though it was unsuccessful, and e.g. the case where another German guy was fined for having anti-Christian stickers on his car was also bad. But comparing case to case, I don’t think these examples are much worse than commonplace prosaic injustices like people getting punished too harshly for nonviolent drug offences, or let off too lightly for fraud. And in aggregate, I think there is probably a lot more prosaic injustice.
@gbdub
Anecdote time: during the Vietnam war, Dutch protesters had signs saying ‘Johnson murderer,’ but they were prosecuted. So they changed the signs to ‘Johnson miller.’ In Dutch, miller and murderer are fairly similar looking words (molenaar vs moordenaar). Because calling Johnson a miller was nonsense, everyone knew what they really meant, but they were in the clear legally.
Even during WW2, various occupied people found all kind of covert ways to signal resistance in plausibly deniable ways. For example, Norwegians wore paperclips stuck to their clothes*.
So while I oppose most censorship laws, I also think that they are usually rather ineffective. If you really want to control what people think, you need propaganda, not censorship.
* So clearly we need to produce a lot more paperclips, rather than humans… for freedom!
I don’t have any argument for the legalistic side of things, which tends to focus on “you can’t trust the state with the power to regulate speech.”
But for the more philosophical side of things, the marketplace of ideas and all that? Made perfect sense to me as a kid, but 15+ years of discussing things online has made me realize that if you want to have a remotely productive discussion, you need mods. Often, you need a lot of them. That, combined with updated knowledge about the thousand ways that rational thought can be purposefully or accidentally short-circuited, has lead me to stop considering free speech a particularly important end in itself (again, outside the legal sphere).
I was raised in Europe, and as a result my intuitions about free speech, in the U.S. sense, to be very different – my views are likely more changeable than my intuitions, but I find the universal enthusiasm for Free Speech here to be one of the more confusing and surprising aspects of the S.S.C. community worldview.
The obvious example of a Free Speech issue, from a European perspective, is holocaust denial. In 1945, the evidence was overwhelming and plain to the world – it made sense to be very, very sure that the holocaust had happened. But that certainty was guaranteed to diminish with time, as survivors/camp liberators/etc died off.
I consider it a very clear moral good that people should have high epistemic confidence about the holocaust having happened. Such confidence might potentially save millions of lives. It’s really hard for me to come up with any counter-arguments to that, even when I try to put myself in the shoes of a Free Speech advocate and steelman the argument – the best I can come up with is “but what if we found out that it really hadn’t?” which is an argument for using censorship very rarely and only in cases where the danger from misinformation is very great and our confidence we’re right is very great.
So my second attempt to steelman this position (which I’d like to understand better!) would be a slippery slope one – certainly it’s bad when the ruling cabal get together and say “we have extremely high confidence that Snowball was a traitor and it’s vital to the farm that everyone agree”. This could be an argument against the practice of “allowing censorship as a governmental norm”. But it’s not an argument against particular acts of (to me, quite sensible) censorship as practiced in Germany, etc.
A third attempt would be “censorship cause more, not fewer people to believe the forbidden thing.” That would be a conclusive argument, to me, if it were true, but I haven’t seen any evidence for it.
This view seems extremely heterodox within the SSC community, to the extent that I’m sure I’m missing something. But to me the situation is one where censorship appears to work better than free speech.
At the risk of sounding like I speak for all Americans, I can say that I have never seen anyone argue against free speech. Yet at the same time, most people would probably agree that holocaust denial laws are a good thing. I have also never seen anyone get really amped up about the fact that I, as an American, cannot write a book about having sex with children (obscene speech.) It is surprising that the so-called “free speech absolutists” aren’t bothered by this.
Most Americans? I’ve actually never seen a poll.
Lolita was published in 1955, and is still in print. It was not banned in the US. I don’t know of current law holding that _any_ purely written fiction is obscene.
Ok, fine. Some Americans.
This doesn’t negate the fact that obscene speech isn’t protected under the first amendment.
I am strongly opposed to Holocaust denial.
I am also strongly opposed to prosecuting Holocaust denial. We recently had a poster on here link a Holocaust denial video, and there was significant discussion of it. I had no real interest in that debate, but are you comfortable with the idea of putting that poster in prison?
I’m also fairly certain that at least for the past half century or so there have been no successful prosecutions of purely written fiction that did not involve real persons and so invoke threats/harassment/stalking laws. Not to say those prosecutions involving real persons always seemed the most justified or best conducted, but prosecuting written material for being obscene without any additional excuse seems to have almost totally ceased. There do seem to be a couple of cases in relatively recent history that have gotten to courts before the courts threw them out, which perhaps shouldn’t be completely ignored due to the chilling effect of threats of prosecution even if the prosecutions fail, of course. But, overall, prosecution for written obscenity is, as Nybbler says, not really a thing in the U.S. any more. It has to have pictures for there to be any significant chance of the authorities getting involved.
I call it Obvious Exception Syndrome. Absolutists believe in absolute application of a rule apart from the obvious exceptions.
Obscenity doctrine is incredibly narrow — or, rather, the exceptions to it are so broad in current interpretation that there basically are no examples not covered by them. IANAL, but I really doubt you could get an obscenity challenge to a hypothetical modern-day Lolita to stand up in court, even if you suck as a writer compared to Nabakov. (Almost everyone does.)
Being able to find a publisher is another matter.
I’d be curious to know when the last obscenity conviction was. I vaguely recall an attempt during the GWB administration to prosecute some porn director but I don’t remember if it was successful or not.
There was a crush video law that made it up to the Supreme Court in 2010. One of the government’s arguments was that the videos were obscene, but the court rejected that argument and all the others, and struck down the law.
It may be that the obscenity exception, like the fighting words exception, is a dead letter.
The one you vaguely recall is probably Paul Little (aka Max Hardcore), who spent two and half years in prison for obscenity from 2009-2011. I also don’t know of any more recent cases, but that is fairly recent.
Max was a visionary. Ahead of his time. Stuff that was considered extreme and beyond the pale such that he was the only one recording it is now part and parcel of the industry and is mostly met with a yawn.
@Matt M, Really? I can’t claim to have a thorough knowledge of everything that’s going on in porn by any means (like most people, I only really go out looking for the stuff that turns me on), but I haven’t really encountered anyone else doing stuff like Max Hardcore used to do, which makes me suspicious of the claim that it has become common.
I will happily argue that they are a bad thing, and I criticized the existence of the obscenity exception just up-thread. And there are actually quite a few free speech advocates are in fact bothered by this and have fought cases to defend the right of people write books about having sex with children. You may have read Lolita, for example. They also defend the right of people to draw pictures of people having sex with children, create computer-generated imagery of people having sex with children, and in some cases even photo-shopped and faked photography that appears to show people having sex with children.
They are able to draw a line between this and photographs and video recordings of the act of someone having sex with a child, because unlike the examples above, someone has to actually engage in the problematic act in order for these photographs and video recordings to be produced.
There is some argument on the issue of photoshopped/edited/faked photographs/videos because of the possibility that people will actually have sex with children, and then simply claim that it is fake. This has not stopped the existence of a great many purveyors of “Hot Teens Love #$%!! Vol. 23”* (*=all participants are at least 18 years of age at the time of filming. This product complies with Title xx USC xxxx etc etc).
The current state of law contained in New York v. Ferber (1982) and Osborne v. Ohio (1990) is that a state may criminally punish the mere possession of child pornography. That’s not the case for regular old obscene material. See Stanley v. Georgia (1969).
The logic is that banning the possession of child pornography is necessary to dry up the market for the production of child pornography, which as you say necessarily involves a crime.*
The Court declined to extend that reasoning to so-called virtual child pornography in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002). Laws against that have to follow the rules for obscenity (i.e. can’t ban mere possession, must use the lacking serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value definition).
*Well sort of. It’s illegal to produce child pornography, so in that sense it always involves a crime. But it is a bit of a logical puzzle that it is illegal to film some sex acts which are themselves legal.
Ashcroft is the case I was thinking of when suggesting that in fact there -are- free speech advocates who defend some forms of child porn, thank you.
I write most of my comments on lunch break at work and post them when I get home, so I’m time and research-time limited.
I am…unfond of the stuff personally, but I believe that my principles obligate me to defend it as long as no kids were harmed, since I also think that the evidence is that the stuff (like the rest of the porn discussed above) doesn’t increase the rate of sexual abuse of minors and might in fact act as a pressure valve.
As a free speech absolutist I will (in hushed tones) argue that the distribution (though not creation) of actual child pornography ought to be protected.
If it’s illegal to produce, there’s nothing to distribute or possess. If you distribute or (knowingly) possess an illegal item, aren’t you complicit in the crime of production?
I’m pretty sure the point here is that child pornography is de facto illegal to produce because producing it necessarily involves statutory rape, or at least child endangerment or something.
Illegal-to-produce item does not necessarily mean illegal item. See e.g. European drug laws, which have a long history of successfully distinguishing between possession, use, distribution and cultivation.
@schazjmd, So making and distributing a true crime documentary should be illegal because if there hadn’t been a crime, you couldn’t make the documentary, so the makers of the documentary are complicit in the crime? Obviously, it would (and should) be illegal to pay someone to commit a crime to make a documentary about it, but extending it to the case where the distributors of the product did nothing to encourage the crime that made it possible seems to go much too far.
I think the thing you’re missing is that there’s a reason why the First Amendment guarantees both freedom of speech and forbids the establishment of a state religion.
Part of the notion of freedom of speech is that the government shouldn’t be responsible for codifying and promulgating an Official Truth. The responsibility for distinguishing right from wrong and fact from fiction belongs to each individual and to civil society as a whole.
After all, if you really believe the people are so depraved or so ignorant that they cannot distinguish truth and falsehood then government by and for the people is madness.
@piato
How does censoring denying something improve people’s confidence that the thing happened? Holocaust denial is historically untenable and epistemically terrible, and is easily argued against, by someone who has a decent historical knowledge of the Holocaust. The bafflegab, lies, and Gish Gallops of Holocaust deniers are not convincing to someone who has an adequate knowledge of the subject, but if someone’s knowledge of the Holocaust doesn’t go beyond “teacher put Schindler’s List on one class” it’s a different matter. Mandating that it be taught competently seems more likely to prove that it happened.
@paito
As you said, government censorship in general seems like a bad idea, especially for Snowball, but can seem like a good idea in particular instances, like stopping Holocaust denial.
The free speech absolutist would say the problem with this is that you’re giving the government the power to decide what warrants censorship (i.e. deciding when “the danger from misinformation is very great and our confidence we’re right is very great”). I believe standards like those are very easy to be abused, and any government eventually will abuse them. People say the same about climate change (danger + confidence), and are seeking to censor those deniers as well.
I don’t defend Holocaust deniers because I think they might actually be right about the Holocaust and I can learn something from them; I defend them because I want to reserve the right to hold an opinion about some other subject that I think actually is true, but that many/most right-thinking people would consider abhorrent. The quality or value of the Holocaust deniers’ speech is irrelevant to this.
@piato
1. We actually have an enormous amount of evidence. Thanks to video recording, the testimony of survivors/camp liberators/etc will never go away. I dispute that more than a tiny number of people need to actually talk to a living person to be convinced. If they have ignored all the other evidence already, then why would that make a huge difference?
2. I dispute your claim that the certainty that the Holocaust happened is guaranteed to diminish with time. The status of the Holocaust as the worst evil has become dogma (among Western white people at least), not to be challenged by sensible people. Such social pressures preserve dogma, where most people never look for actual evidence, but just take the societal consensus as a given.
According to your logic, faith in Jesus or Mohammed would have decreased over time. Actual history shows that Christianity and Islam were actually at their smallest during the lives of these prophets and shortly after their deaths, when people who spoke to them still lived. These religions have grown enormously since.
3. Censorship itself can easily be seen as evidence of a truth being hidden by conspiracy-minded people. Is there evidence that this effect is smaller than the upsides of banning Holocaust denial? My (subjective) feeling is that this is not the case. I think that the Streisand effect is very strong and the upside of censorship in a non-oppressive society is small because:
4. If you ban public discussion, people who doubt the Holocaust won’t stop discussing it, they just will do that on Stormfront or in other bubbles where only one side is presented, rather than in places were the weaknesses in their argument will be pointed out.
I favour a more expansive view of “what speech should be restricted on grounds of being harmful” than the standard of imminent harm the US has. However, I dislike the methods of restricting speech that are the norm in Canada and Europe – they’re too subjective; whether or not something is deemed “hate speech” depends on who is doing the speaking and against whom, and I am against laws that are applied based more on who the supposed lawbreaker is than the law being broken (eg, I am also against drug laws that are applied extremely unevenly).
Of course, whether or not a standard past imminent harm would be fairly and evenly applied is an open question. Is, though, the imminent harm standard fairly and evenly applied anyway? I have to hope there’s something between “speech laws applied unfairly and unevenly” and “guess we have to let people preach ideologies that have never not resulted in eight-figure body counts.”
There isn’t a clear divine between speech and threats, or between threats and violence.
Some types of speech are purely malicious. Maybe it’s possible (if extremely difficult) to quantify additional types of speech which are categoricaly damaging, like yelling fire in a crowded theater or hiring an assassin to kill a legitimate business competitor.
Stanley Fish argued pretty convincingly that no one* really takes an absolutist position on free speech in practice. He takes it a step further and argues that it’s best to be honest about what kinds of speech we’re excluding from legal protection — instead of engaging in legalistic trickery like saying “that’s not really speech” or citing imminent threat or whatever.
* I’m sure there are some people here who would count themselves exceptions.
I know how that one goes:
“We’ve established that, now we’re just haggling over the price.”
No, I will not abandon the principle just because someone’s found some case way on the edge somewhere that he thinks no one will support.
So you will be campaigning for absolute free speech in the US?
I think that because the exceptions are well defined and haven’t changed, then it’s best to keep it that way. If we decide to start restricting more speech, we don’t know where it’s going to lead.
Well Wrong Species has accepted that absolute free speech doesn’t exist. Now we just need to find out about The Nybbler.
Fish’s argument is more sophisticated than just citing “edge cases” and crying hypocrisy.
To spoil it a bit (“spoil” in two common senses of the word): defining the boundaries of “free speech” is a political act that reifies the actor’s conception of what’s good and what’s bad — not just what’s acceptable or unacceptable. Appealing to the principle as something separate from larger politics/ideology is a fundamentally dishonest move in the game.
It’s a powerful move, and worth keeping in one’s arsenal. But at a meta-level we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we’re standing on principle.
Does anyone know mainstream/famous people who publicly follow SSC? Off the top of my head I’m aware of Steven Pinker and Paul Graham.
Perhaps this says something about the ideological bubble but I feel like David Friedman is more famous than them!
Steve Sailer who invented the very idea of evolutionary conservatism is literally on SSC. John Derbyshire at least mentioned SSC.
Scott Adams (Dilbert guy).
Ezra Klein has linked the site in the past.
I don’t know if she follows the site, but Anne Coulter tweeted out the Crying Wolf article.
LOL that’s interesting!
Freddie deBoer.
Tyler Cowen.
Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle are both readers. Not sure how famous you consider them.
I don’t know if he’s a regular reader, but Julian Assange linked to “Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences” on his Twitter.
Then I guess that we have the NSA as regulars too…
It’s even more fun imagine what handles they might be using as an alias to comment here!
I, for one, am suspicious about the people who started the humorous paperclip in-joke thing; they certainly were not who they implied to be. Paperclips are not a matter of joking. (My running Fermi estimate is that I’m in possession of <150 paperclips.)
I think that the real clue is in the avatars. NSA people probably use animal avatars, because that makes them look friendly.
I nominate the NSA as forum moderators
Any proof about Graham other than the one tweet on the Advertising page?
Draft for a petition. Please let me know whether the wording is good, whether there is anything I should add/delete/modify, and most of all whether you support it (Note that in the actual draft a few of the sentences are hyperlinked to articles):
Few issues directly pertaining to politics can expect to gain bipartisan support, but the idea that safeguarding the integrity of the electoral process is essential for the functioning of a democracy is one of these issues. One way to move further in this direction is to require all precincts to use paper ballots in their elections.
To understand why even a perceived threat to the integrity of elections can be so dangerous, consider the following situation:
The 2020 U.S. Presidential election had been a close one; pundits and pollsters had agreed the race was so close, even bad weather in a key precinct or two could be enough to change the result. Finally, the results came in – and sure enough, the election was won by a hair. But a few days later, social media had erupted with embittered citizens claiming that in Pennsylvania, North Korean hacking had managed to compromise EVMs, and the election results were therefore invalid. Government officials realized there was no way to prove that the integrity of the EVMs was not compromised, and so could merely claim that this was the case, without iron-clad proof. Over the next few years, a significant percentage of American citizens refuse to accept the legitimacy of the putative administration.
One may claim that this eventuality is remote and unrealistic, but considering the damage this might do, and the relatively simple solution available now, it is difficult to argue that requiring paper ballots is not worth the time or effort.
Furthermore, the probability that the integrity of U.S. elections may be called into question by a significant number of citizens in the future may not be as low as it has been in the past. For example, at the 25th DefCon, hackers compromised U.S. voting machines within 35 minutes. This is public information, available to U.S. adversaries. Also, as 17 intelligence agencies confirm, the 2016 Presidential election saw attempted interference by Russia, and there is no reason to believe Russia will not follow suit in 2020. Finally, it would be conservative to assume that 2020 will see an unprecedented scale and quality of misinformation campaigns on social media and in the news. If nothing else, we will most likely see an unprecedented ability to create fake yet realistic videos of public figures saying arbitrary things. This would plausibly lead to an overall decrease in trust in the United States, increasing the chance that allegations against the integrity of the election results will be leveled by a significant number of voters.
When one is faced with the risk of a highly net-negative event, and when the effort required to significantly mitigate that risk is small, it is often wise to do so, even if the chance of the event occurring is small. The risk of actual or perceived damage to the integrity of the electoral process, and the potential concomitant unraveling of our already divided nation, is such an event. It would be wise, responsible, and common-sensical to require the use of paper ballots for all precincts as soon as possible.
Needs an executive summary of 3-5 bullet points, one short sentence each.
I miss the old days when we had paper ballots and no elections were ever corrupt or contested.
True. I should discuss issues with paper ballots and explain why they are still the better option. I hope that doesn’t make the argument less convincing to many people.
I think you definitely will have to address the ‘hanging chads’ argument because that whole debate in Florida demonstrates that sufficiently motivated people can and will argue over anything, and if we’re coming down to trying to decide should Tweedledum or Tweedledee get this vote based on “is the piece of paper all the way hole punched or not?”, then we have problems.
You will have to decide what type of ballot you’ll use and how it will be marked – punched, marked with pencil, what way? And there will be arguments for and against any method. We still have the paper and pencil ballot in Ireland because when they tried to introduce electronic voting machines there were objections over how the votes could be tracked in the absence of a paper trail and if they were automatically wiped once counted, hacking and fraud possibilities, etc.
Mostly because nobody from any political party trusted The Other Lot, when in power, not to fiddle with the machinery to tilt any dubious or doubtful votes in the favour of their party’s candidate(s) 🙂
To be fair, the Florida butterfly ballot design was awful: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Butterfly_Ballot%2C_Florida_2000_%28large%29.jpg
Who thought it was a good idea to interleave the options like that?
In my part of the US, we have paper ballots that are counted by machine, so you get the efficiency benefits without wiping out the paper trail. Since everyone’s had to deal with “fill in the entire bubble for your answer to be counted” forms since elementary school, there’s little concern of any difficulty with using the ballots correctly.
And you fill them out with a pen, not a pencil, because no-one trusts that pencil marks can’t be tampered with.
I believe these are the best solution, and have since I worked at the BOE.
There are some arguments made for electronic interfaces having to do with the ability to prevent the voter from doing something invalid (like, marking two candidates in one race, or not realizing they can vote for multiple candidates in another), but I don’t find the tradeoff to be worth it.
Electronic interfaces also depress turnout, because each machine is far more expensive than all of the paper ballots required for 100% turnout in a precinct for many elections. Thus, machines aren’t purchased in sufficient number to handle populous precincts.
The number one thing a voting system has to do is let people cast their vote. Co-equal to this is ensuring the confidence of the voter and the public that their vote was counted accurately.
You could have the machine (in my state they’re machines that scan the ballots immediately and then drop them into the box, rather than dumb boxes and central scanning, though that’s a cost tradeoff) validate the ballot, and kick it out if there’s an error.
@random:
Yes, we do it in my county this way as well. A poll worker is standing next to the machine asking you to wait to make sure there is not an overvote.
It won’t kick back for undervotes, though, which means it will not kick back for an insufficient clear mark.
But, as I said, I think that is a worthwhile tradeoff.
I think it is vitally important to your argument to prove that paper ballots are better, not merely that electronic ones are hackable. In the absence of that, my reaction was a) what I wrote above, and b) [perhaps uncharitably] Hillary supporters are very sore losers.
What about electronic voting machines that produce a paper printout as they go? There’s several models that do this, AFAIK. Logically, those shouldn’t be any more risky than electronically-tabulated paper ballots – they both provide an electronic count and a paper ballot you can use to validate that count.
While we’re on the subject, my personal hobbyhorse for electronic voting is “No touchscreens in electronic voting machines!” Every damn election, there’s a story about how “Voting machines are flipping votes from Democrats to Republican!” which inevitably turns out to be “Someone miscalibrated the touchscreen, and it was reading all taps slightly off-center, so if you tapped Kerry it would think you tapped Bush.”
It is much easier to make electronic systems in multiple languages. It terms of accessibility, electronic entry beats paper entry.
Not if you define accessibility to include time spent waiting to vote…
Electronic machines have pros. I don’t think they outweigh the cons.
Usually ballots don’t have much in the way of instruction on them anyway, and the names don’t need to be translated.
I have a draft for a petition: let me know whether the wording is good, whether there is anything I should add, and most of all whether you would support it:
Few issues directly pertaining to politics can expect to gain bipartisan support, but the idea that safeguarding the integrity of the electoral process is essential for the functioning of a democracy is one of these issues. One way to move further in this direction is to require all precincts to use paper ballots in their elections.
To understand why even a perceived threat to the integrity of elections can be so dangerous, consider the following situation:
The 2020 U.S. Presidential election had been a close one; pundits and pollsters had agreed the race was so close, even bad weather in a key precinct or two could be enough to change the result. Finally, the results came in – and sure enough, the election was won by a hair. But a few days later, social media had erupted with embittered citizens claiming that in Pennsylvania, North Korean hacking had managed to compromise EVMs, and the election results were therefore invalid. Government officials realized there was no way to prove that the integrity of the EVMs was not compromised, and so could merely claim that this was the case, without iron-clad proof. Over the next few years, a significant percentage of American citizens refuse to accept the legitimacy of the putative administration.
One may claim that this eventuality is remote and unrealistic, but considering the damage this might do, and the relatively simple solution available now, it is difficult to argue that requiring paper ballots is not worth the time or effort.
Furthermore, the probability that the integrity of U.S. elections may be called into question by a significant number of citizens in the future may not be as low as it has been in the past. For example, at the 25th DefCon, hackers compromised U.S. voting machines within 35 minutes. This is public information, available to U.S. adversaries. Also, as 17 intelligence agencies confirm, the 2016 Presidential election saw attempted interference by Russia, and there is no reason to believe Russia will not follow suit in 2020. Finally, it would be conservative to assume that 2020 will see an unprecedented scale and quality of misinformation campaigns on social media and in the news. If nothing else, we will most likely see an unprecedented ability to create fake yet realistic videos of public figures saying arbitrary things. This would plausibly lead to an overall decrease in trust in the United States, increasing the chance that allegations against the integrity of the election results will be leveled by a significant number of voters.
When one is faced with the risk of a highly net-negative event, and when the effort required to significantly mitigate that risk is small, it is often wise to do so, even if the chance of the event occurring is small. The risk of actual or perceived damage to the integrity of the electoral process, and the potential concomitant unraveling of our already divided nation, is such an event. It would be wise, responsible, and common-sensical to require the use of paper ballots for all precincts as soon as possible.
I’m a long time SSC lurker, but I thought some people here might possibly be interested in this. (Especially since we’ve just been talking about science fiction.)
My husband and I independently published an anthology of Christian-themed speculative fiction last year (Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith), and we’re currently running a Kickstarter to raise funds for a second volume. By “Christian-themed” we mean “stories that explore the successes and failures of flawed humans confronted by the mysteries of the Christian faith, in an authentic way”, not “stories you might find at a Christian bookstore”. In fact, the first anthology had 2 Jewish authors, 1 atheist, a bunch of Christians, and a bunch of others we don’t know about, because we didn’t ask. We’re more interested in stories that ask interesting questions than in stories that have an axe to grind re: Christianity (in either direction).
Also, we pay pretty well, as these things go (6 cents/word), which adds up, which is why we’re doing a Kickstarter.
We’re both fantasy / science fiction writers who’ve had short stories published in various places, also both Christians (hence the theme of our anthology series). One of us is a conservative, the other is a liberal, which hopefully gives us some defense against excessive bias in either direction among the stories we select. As we say in our submission guidelines: “We shouldn’t be able to spot the villain by his politics or religion” (and that should be “their politics or religion, but anyway (you can probably tell which of us is the liberal)).
Anyway, if this is the kind of thing you might be interested in, check out our Kickstarter! (We only have 4 days left to go.) The first volume is available from Amazon and other places (paperback and ebook).
p.s., SSC is one of the few places on the internet where I actually find it worthwhile to read the comments, so thank you to all of you for being a part of that.
As a fellow Christian SF author, this sounds right up my alley. I actually wrote a short novel featuring a medical missionary on an alien planet, that’s sort of a cross between House, MD and Firefly. I even have a prequel short story I never found a home for, so you might need to keep an eye out for that in your submissions.
Do you know of any online communities for this kind of stuff? Most ofnthe SF spaces out there are pretty anti-religion in general, and most of the Christian writing communities I’ve seen are focused on romance or children’s fantasy.
Yes, there’s a private Facebook group for Christian authors of speculative fiction, with over 800 members, and I highly recommend it. You have to apply for membership, and they have been having a lot of trouble with bot applications recently, so make sure you sound like an actual person with a genuine interest in the group. 🙂 (I don’t think membership is restricted to Christians, as I’ve seen one poster there who claims to be an atheist, but that’s definitely the focus.)
It’s a good community, and I would say even better than SSC (which is high praise) at being a place where people can discuss and disagree about controversial topics without descending into flame wars and death threats. It does tend to skew more conservative than I, a Canadian liberal, am always comfortable with; but I’m certainly not the only progressive Christian in the group, either.
The Facebook group is associated with an annual Christian speculative fiction conference, which is also very good, although (I think) a little on the pricey side. (By “Christian speculative fiction”, I mean, “speculative fiction written by Christians, not necessarily–though not excluding–the kind of thing you’d find at Christian bookstores”; and they’re also willing to bring in instructors, speakers, agents, etc. who don’t identify as Christian at all.)
Your short story sounds really interesting! Definitely send it to us once we’re open for submissions (as long as it’s less than 10,000 words). We have a submission guidelines page on our website (which you can keep an eye on to see when we re-open), and there’s also a page where you can subscribe to our newsletter if you want to be notified when that happens. If our Kickstarter isn’t funded (and I doubt it will be, at this point), it will be longer before we re-open, and we won’t be doing an anthology, but we do intend to keep publishing fiction in some format.
Also, the Codex forum, although not Christian, is less anti-religion than many online SF spaces (perhaps due to having quite a few religious members). They have membership qualifications though, so you can’t get in unless you’ve published some stuff in sufficiently high-paying markets (or earned above a certain threshold from self-publishing, or attended one of the prestigious audition-only writing workshops in the field … there are a couple other ways to qualify, but those are the typical ones).
https://www.facebook.com/groups/eastoflaughter/
This is a group for discussing R. A. Lafferty, who was a notable Catholic author (science fiction, horror, humor, realistic, and just plain weird fiction).
Slow Tuesday Night— this will give you some idea of whether you like the way Lafferty wrote.
Thanks, for the recommendation! I haven’t read R. A. Lafferty yet, but I’m building up a list of great Christian speculative fiction writers of the past that I need to check out. I bookmarked “Slow Tuesday Night”.
So looking at the kickstarter I wasn’t really able to narrow down what sort of Christian perspective these stories are coming from beyond nondenominational Protestantism.
I would imagine, though I may be wrong, that Christian sects would approach SF from different angles due to their distinct exotheology. A Catholic who believes that aliens may be free from original sin and a Mormon who believes God lives on or near planet Kolob are probably going to take different tacks when it comes to first contact.
(I’m really not trying to pick on Mormons. I mean they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves so obviously they’re doing something right. But Joseph Smith said some seriously weird shit.)
Is this something which is actually important in practice or does it all wash out in the end?
We’re open to publishing stories from all Christian perspectives, and would like to see more fiction submissions from Catholic, Orthodox, and others who don’t fit into the category of “nondenominational Protestantism”. (But if you call something “Christian” without narrowing the focus, evangelical Protestant is largely who notices and sends you stories.)
We almost published a Mormon story, but it was too similar to a Jewish story we liked better (we’re open to occasionally publishing something from the perspective of another religion, if it gets at some of the same questions we find interesting about Christian philosophy, but probably 95% or more of what we publish is going to be about Christianity).
We’d also be interested in fiction that deals in a thoughtful way with differences and conflicts between Christianity and other religions, but we both have a strong aversion to “look how horrible one side is to the other!” narratives.
Our goal is not to police the boundaries of what counts as “Christian”, but to publish high-quality speculative fiction that explores interesting questions that are connected in some way to the Christian faith.
I don’t know whether I’ve answered the question you were asking or not…
So, I wrote a comment that turned into a bit of an essay. I’ll break it up into chunks:
It seems like many people here in the rationalist community are showing a tendency to see the “blue tribe”’s hostile response to the Google memo and its defenders as an expression of some kind of quasi-aesthetic attachment to beliefs in biological sameness of the sexes along certain dimensions, in a way that makes those reactions look pretty senseless. Both the author of the Google memo, James Damore, and Scott Alexander, in his defense of some of its claims, emphasize that none of the theses there presented are attacks on women, sexual equality, and so on. So what’s left to explain the hostile reaction? A-rational-at-best groupthink with no connection to reality? Secret funding by Crusaders Against Truth?
I think that many people have not been adequately paying attention to what might be called interest-based aspects of these issues, which I think can help explain the “blue tribe”’s reactions here, especially those of its female members. Not only that, considerations of interest seem important on their own, and so we should be talking about them more anyway.
Where there is lashing-out, there is usually pain, or fear. My main claim is this: it is reasonable to fear that the widespread acceptance of some of the scientific claims made in the Google memo and defended by members of the rationalist community could be harmful to the interests of women. I do not mean this to say that we therefore shouldn’t accept the scientific claims, if they are true. But we should do it knowing and acknowledging that doing so involves some risk to the interests of women. Because these claims have that potential, I think it makes sense to treat them carefully, both scientifically and rhetorically. A righteous and snarky tone in this context, I think, falls somewhere short of virtuous.
First, before we go on, it is important to point out that despite the euphemistic language of the memo, and of many people defending it, the traits being attributed to men/women as populations here are not value-neutral. Or at least, they will not be considered value neutral by most people. In particular, the difference in interest in systematizing/analyzing vs. empathy is not value neutral, and it is rightly read as disingenuous to pretend that it is. Scott’s words betray this pretense, when he says:
Silicon Valley was supposed to be better than this. It was supposed to be the life of the mind, where people who were interested in the mysteries of computation and cognition could get together and make the world better for everybody.
It was supposed to be the life of the mind. One of the trait-clusters being attributed disproportionately to men/women by the studies cited in the memo is obviously more associated with the intellectual (vs. the emotional) and with intelligence in the sense in which we standardly use that term. Yes, we periodically talk about emotional intelligence. But there’s a reason we have to use a prefix for that one: “intelligence” sans prefix means “systematic/analytic intelligence”. So I think it’s fair to interpret the claim being made as: women are, as a whole, less intelligent than men.
No-we’re just talking about interests here, someone may reply, not abilities! Many will not think these two types of feature have been kept apart or can be kept apart. For one thing, the language of systematizing vs. empathizing used in the memo and in Scott’s article naturally suggests a difference in abilities, since empathizing is a capacity, not something we usually understand as an interest or hobby. (And I took the online EQ test associated with the difference–it definitely asks about ability.) Moreover, it should be noted that lacking interests in systematic and analytic thinking is also a way of being deemed unintelligent in a relatively standard way. Not only does someone without interest in these things fail to develop ability with regard to them; even just having great interest in these things is considered a sign of intellect. Curiosity, as we say, is an intellectual virtue. Boredom at and disinterest in systems is associated with a certain kind of dullness, at least by many people. To be more interested in astrophysics than in watching NASCAR is not neutral with regard to the way we think of Intelligence.
Something analogous can be said about being more vulnerable to anxiety/stress, which will be not-crazily read as code for ‘weakness’ by many. But for the sake of space I’ll leave discussion of that out, and focus on the systematizing-empathizing difference.
Now, because the Google memo implies that differences like these account for enough of the gender gap in tech to justify the claim that Google’s affirmative action policies are fruitless and unjust (otherwise how are the two parts of the memo connected?), the claim has to be that the difference is relatively substantial. If women were only very slightly less intelligent than men on average, it would be irrelevant to the policy recommendations made there, since sexism, broadly construed, would still then be playing a major role. Therefore, the claim being fought over, stripped of its euphemisms, must be that women are substantially less intelligent, on average, than men, and that the reasons for this are largely biological.
Second half:
Okay, now back to interests.
The second risk to the interests of women of having claims like this accepted comes from the fact that claims of biological differences between populations have, and seem like they could be again, used to justify the subjugation of some groups under others. Claims like this were, of course, routinely made about non-whites in western countries until the latter half of the last century. The Eugenics movement is likely to spring to mind for many In this domain. And as Scott notes, claims of women’s biological inferiority along some dimensions (even while it was said that they were biologically superior along others, e.g., in beauty, child-tending) were quite commonplace before the woman’s movement, and coincided with women not working in any field with any modicum of status. This does not show that claims of women’s weakness and intellectual inferiority were were causing their oppression, but it does show that in people’s minds these things are very related. The idea that women are weak and intellectually inferior to men was part and parcel with women’s bona fide oppression—not only with regard to work, but in not being able to vote, file for divorce etc., because they justified women’s views not being taken seriously. So these are some associations that will leap to mind for an average reader.
Now, you might say that this represents quite a leap: even if women are, on average, less intelligent than men, this wouldn’t mean that they deserve any less moral respect or that their interests are any less important morally. There is no way such a claim could justify oppression of any kind! I agree with that. So does Peter Singer when he argues in All Animals are Equal (1972) that all beings’ interests are equally morally important to protect, regardless of any feature of the being whose interests they are, be it intelligence, moral character, or species. But this should just serve to show us that most people do not share this view. This is why most people think it’s okay to torture and kill animals for food; they think that people’s interests are more important than animals’—why? Because animals are stupid compared to us. And this is also why it’s okay to torture a pig but not a chimp, but it’s okay to keep an innocent chimp in a cage but not an innocent human, even if that human is mentally disabled; we think that a being deserves greater and greater respect the more intelligent its group is. This may be the wrong moral view, but it appears from our practices to be the dominant moral view. And since we can see from history that claims about biological inferiorities among certain groups of humans have been used to justify oppression—clearly in the case of race, and suggestively in the case of gender–, people may be rightly worried that if it is accepted that women are as a whole less intelligent than men, some form of subjugation might once again be considered justified. I’m sure no one is worried we’ll be keeping women in cages, but it may not be out of the question that we could go back to thinking that the best stewards of women’s interests are not women themselves but their husbands and their fathers, as we did less than a hundred years ago.
And I think it should not be surprising if women are especially sensitive about this. Women are free by the mercy of men. I’m serious about this. If men were to decide, as a group, to subjugate women again, women could not stop them. Men have much greater physical, economic, and political power than women. There is almost nothing they could not take by force from women if other men didn’t oppose them. Morality is woman’s only protection; the idea of her deserving equality is the only thing that ensures her material equality, such as it is. Any threat to that idea is therefore very fearsome, for she has no other protection.
It will be doubly fearsome if that threat at the same time could serve to undermine her ability to argue for her moral equality, because it threatens her credibility too, as being equally rational and analytic (for moral philosophy is an analytic discipline) as a man.
Finally, I think some of the hostile reaction from the left is because of confusion and suspicion about the particular role that the claim that the sex-differences posited here are biological in origin Is playing. Readers might notice that it is not necessary for James Damore to invoke biology in order to make his point, if his point is that Google should stop using affirmative action out of guilt and should stop shooting for 50-50 gender parity. All he needs for that is the claim that women aren’t interested becoming programmers, because of whatever reason, as long as the reason isn’t sexism in tech (and there are plenty of possibilities). Therefore the fact that he draws upon biological differences is particular is likely to seem to imply to many allegiance to a considerably stronger thesis than the one he explicitly defends. Perhaps they interpret him as claiming that women are naturally less systems-oriented than men, and that therefore it Is totally fine that there have been dramatically few women systematizers throughout history. And I am not so sure this is a bad interpretation, since it makes sense of James Darmore’s drawing on biological claims in his argument.
Moreover, many will not understand, and I admit I do not understand, how a trait could be a biological sex difference and yet not be near-universal. People will think of the other biological sex differences: women have vaginas; men have chest hair, women are shorter than their brothers, etc., and note that all of these differences are near-universal, and where they are not (as in the case of Asian men sometimes having no chest hair) there is a clear biological explanation of why that is (in this case, lower levels of conversion of testosterone to DHT by 5a-reductase, according to my hasty google search). But there is no clear explanation offered in the Google memo or in Scott’s article of how there could be a biological difference between men and women with regard to systematicity, and yet have it not be the case that it is likely that any woman off the street is less analytic/systems-oriented than any man off the street (as Darmore says). Women are likely to hear ‘biological difference’ to mean that there is a very high probability that the feminine traits posited in the memo belong to them personally. Thus they may see this as a potentially destructive contribution to their own self-interpretation. That is pain. I believe James Darmore that this is not entailed by the claims he made– in which case there must be some explanation of why in this case of sex differences they aren’t near-universal, but since it’s not explained how this is possible, we should not be surprised if many people will not take this aspect seriously.
My overall point is this: despite the euphemistic language and the hedging on the part of James Darmore and some of those defending him, many people will not-unreasonably, not-crazily, and not-randomly read these claims as a threat to the status of women. So it’s serious business, these claims. Yes, we ought to speak truths! But in addition, we ought to take potential consequences of our actions—for speech, even of truth, is an action —seriously. If we are going to be champions of the claims made in the Google memo, because we believe them to be true, we should also be champions of all the accompanying truths that may help contain their effects. Let’s someone explain whatever the reason is that this doesn’t show anything about you’re average individual. Let’s acknowledge explicitly that there are lots of ways of accounting for women being badly represented in particular domains besides sexism in the workplace and biological differences–that there’s a whole world out there of plausible explanations. And let’s be really really insistent that these biological claims, even if true, should do nothing to undermine a basic commitment to the moral equality of women and men. Because they do have the potential to be harmful to the interests of women, even if in Singer’s perfect world they wouldn’t be. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about that.
You could say exactly the same thing about any group of people that doesn’t constitute a power majority.
I’m a poor man. If all the rich, influential men decided to throw me in the sea, I wouldn’t be able to stop them. Blah blah blah.
For anyone who lives in society your only protection is morality, since no individual can constitute a power majority.
The important point is to protect morality, not to protect the status of some particular group.
Society is constantly in the state of moral lapse. I guarantee you that you think that the United States of America does immoral shit all the time — the only way you don’t think that is if you don’t really believe in morality.
Given that, are you surprised that people are not eager to trust in morality per se to defend themselves?
It would surprise me.
I feel kind of baffled in general by all of this stuff.
It’s like, we have some rule against throwing people in the sea. But, some rich guy writes a report saying he wants to stop people getting in the sea, and it seems like poor people prefer swimming in the sea because it’s cheaper, so maybe we should build more swimming pools. And then, I start shaking, because he said I prefer swimming in the sea, and that’s obviously a pretext to start throwing me in, so we have to throw *him* in the sea, because I’m powerless and helpless before him… so… let’s get rid of the rule against throwing people in the sea?
It’s too complex for me. I don’t have time to deal with this stuff. Can’t we just have a rule against throwing people in the sea, please? It works and it is easier.
[The less power you have the more general you should want your moral rules to be. If you are any kind of individualist, you have little power and should want the rules to be absolutely general.]
I agree with you. Poor people are in a similar position. But this discussion was about this particular event, which was about gender, not class. I shouldn’t have said “especially.” If people made claims about the inferior intellegence of poor people (like, they’re poor beause they come from less intelligent family lines, or something), that would likely provoke a similar reaction (if not a more drastic one).
I wish even a tenth of the empathy asked for in your posts was applied to the people accused of causing the gender demographic disparity by discrimination.
Me too– I’d be saying something analogous to the blue tribe people with their accusations of sexism and so on if I were on their open threads. The thing is, here wouldn’t be the place to do it!
@ALK
My objection to your framing is that you are presenting a disparity of interest as a threat to women, but are not recognizing that the feminist narrative can be a (greater) threat to women (and men).
If more women than men truly become unhappy from being a programmer, then if you force a 50/50 gender distribution, you’ll have more unhappy women and men, who don’t get to do what makes them most happy.
People will also logically resist these attempts to make them less happy, so then you will have to engage in some serious oppression. So to enforce this 50/50 gender distribution, the proponents will likely have to engage in oppression. So by not opposing these people you don’t just reduce the risk of one kind of oppression, you enable another kind of oppression.
Ultimately you are defending irrationality, where you demand the impossible: that people prove that they don’t have hidden motives. This cannot be done, because we cannot (yet) literally read people’s minds. We have seen the reaction to Damore, who did all that you asked and yet this was ignored and people on a large scale misrepresented his arguments and claims, stripping all the things which you argue are important to assuage people’s fears. So who then is fear mongering and causing this anxiety? Damore or those who misrepresent Damore’s argument?
There is a level of oversensitivity where no level of hedging or assuaging language works anymore. At that point the solution cannot be that those who trigger angry responses moderate their words, because no moderation is possible that make the message acceptable to the other side. That actually makes it much harder for moderate voices to speak out, as they will be treated just as badly as extremists. Moderate usually have more to lose than extremists, so then the debate is ceded to the extremists, leaving truth as the victim and thus leading to bad outcomes, where ‘might makes right’ wins out over ‘right makes policy’.
The only thing that can work is for the oversensitive people to be put in their place when they cry wolf and bully, not to keep enabling them by apologia.
@Aapje,
I should have made more clear that I am not disagreeing with the idea that we should not go for 50-50 in programming. I agree that that depends on a lot of empirical facts, including the science. And if the science that Damore is presenting is accurate, then we should not go for 50-50 in programming. I meant my comment to be an explanation of one reason people may be reacting the way they are. And I actually do think that people could be doing more to insulate their claims from possible bad effects, and that they have a responsibility to, even when the ‘other side’ are being assholes. Leaving aside Damore for a moment, I am thinking of Scott– I thought his post was good, but it was blatantly snarky and strawmany (“imagine that your female coworker was just your female corworker instead of a “powerful grrl programmer who stands for everything good in the world””, etc. ), and I feel like if anyone is a moderate, it’s Scott. I guess I have a bit more faith that people can listen to reason if you don’t present it with little threads of “fuck you” sewn in, but people are VERY sensitive to those little ‘fuck you’s.
What if we redefine “programmer” to mean someone who e.g. spends more of their time in meetings with customers talking about desired features, and conceptually designing the look and feel of the user interface, and less of their time actually writing code? It should be possible to come up with a job description that is modestly appealing to both genders.
Doing so while still getting useful amounts of tolerably functional code might be another matter.
What if we redefine “programmer” to mean someone who e.g. spends more of their time in meetings with customers talking about desired features, and conceptually designing the look and feel of the user interface, and less of their time actually writing code?
Isn’t that something like what one of the higher-ups at Google said about engineering not being just about programming?
The trouble is, you’re smuggling “gender stereotypes” (remember, a firing offence!) back in under that – the ‘soft skills’ that women are supposed to traditionally be better at (dealing with people, creating nice environments with design) are the areas they’ll be shunted into and the men will still end up doing the coding (the maths/STEM ‘hard’ technical stuff not the ‘soft’ making nice with clients and choosing pretty pastels for the UI).
If you get 50/50 gender parity for “programmers” or “engineers” but within that 80% of your coders are guys and 80% of your client-wranglers are women, you’re not helping the “women can too code as gooder as men!” which all the yelling is about.
You’re ignoring quite a few hypotheticals. Here are a couple:
1) There are fewer programmer jobs compared to the number of people who would be happy doing them – no matter what gender distribution you have in programming you will have an equal number of unhappy people who don’t get to do what makes them most happy.
2) Hypothetically more men than women are happy programming, but of those men a proportion are even more happy doing job X, while the proportion of women who prefer job Y to programming is less than the proportion of men who prefer job X to programming. These proportions balance out so that an equal number of men and women have “programmer” as their #1 dream job. (This is assuming no social pressure toward men or women to “prefer” programming or to “prefer” some other career instead of programming, which is a bunk assumption.)
If men were to decide, as a group, to subjugate women again, women could not stop them.
Men cannot decide anything as a group because men are not a hivemind. Given that men are individuals with their own goals and are often busy struggling with each other over their disagreements or conflicting interests, the idea that all men will (or could) spontaneously decide to subjugate women is absurd.
That’s not to say stereotypes can’t have an impact on how people are treated, or that women (or men for that matter) are not in danger of losing certain legal rights if a large shift in public opinion happens. But that’s a much slower, messier, more complicated process than what you’re talking about.
Men have much greater physical, economic, and political power than women. There is almost nothing they could not take by force from women if other men didn’t oppose them. Morality is woman’s only protection;
Again, this view only really makes sense if you consider men and women to be hiveminds.
Women make up half the world’s population. The political and economic power structures that make up society only function because women voluntarily cooperate with them. Unless you’re living in a really repressive country where women are only permitted to leave the house with a male guardian or whatnot, many of the jobs that are necessary for society to function are occupied by women. Women are doctors, teachers, lawyers, politicians, cops, etc. etc. Same goes for men, of course, but the idea that such a large group of people has no genuine power and that the goodness of men is the only thing protecting them from enslavement is not only absurd, it’s pretty insulting.
If, overnight, all women were stripped of their jobs and rights and thrown into pits to serve as breeders, do you imagine that society could still function? It would be chaos. Once you have a society where men and women are expected to participate fully as citizens, it’s not that easy to revert back to the way things were before, because the entire political structure, as well as the culture, has changed.
It’s true that there is a small group of people at the top of society with a disproportionately large amount of power (billionaire CEOs, etc), and that small group of people is mostly male (and white), but that doesn’t mean the average man has more power than the average woman.
I can understand more proportionate concerns like “if these ideas become popularized it might make it harder for me or other women to get a job in certain tech industries.” Which is why I do think it’s a good idea to push back against those ideas and (if they aren’t true) to try to discredit them.
But among feminists there seems to be a lot of hyperbolic terror about “if these ideas become popularized we will be thrust into a nightmarish Handmaid’s Tale situation.” That isn’t going to happen.
And, obviously, I don’t want that to happen. I like being able to vote, own property, run my own business, etc. I have zero fear that I am going to lose any of those basic rights because some guy at Google wrote an article claiming that women have less interest in STEM fields.
An important and general point in this context and many others.
Part of the argument above is that what prevents men from oppressing women is morality.
Consider that it has long been obvious to a lot of people that war, on net, makes us worse off. So if the logic of “group X has the power to do something that would make them better off, and only morality keeps them from doing it” were correct, we would have to conclude that only morality keeps humans from ending war.
My comment did not assert or depend on the idea that men can decide things as a group because they are a hive mind. To think that someone could beleive that is almost as absurd as the statement itself. But it is not meaningless to speak of groups, such as genders, races, professions, political parties, movements, and classes, having levels of power, having views, and ‘doing’ things– this does not require them being a hive mind, only having certain kinds of interactions.
Consider the statement “The Christian Right has successfully injected the idea of there being a “war on Christmas” into the national conversation.” Is this statement’s truth or falsity dependent on the idea all replublican christians constitute a hive mind? No.
What requires the hive mind assumption is an argument of the form:
Group A would be better off if X happened.
If all members of group A did Z, X would happen,
So X will happen.
Or, in an alternate version, “if X does not happen, it is because of moral constraints on the members of group A.”
If the argument were correct, all industries would be cartels, absent moral constraints on the firms to prevent it.
Consider the statement “The Christian Right has successfully injected the idea of there being a “war on Christmas” into the national conversation.” Is this statement’s truth or falsity dependent on the idea all replublican christians constitute a hive mind?
The Christian Right is a much smaller, more organized, and more homogeneous group than men or women. There’s still a fair amount of variation among them, but speaking generally, they’re bound by similar ideals and similar goals. The same can’t be said of a gender or a race; those things are non-chosen identities, not specific ideologies.
Even so, I’d say there’s still a bit of hivemind-thinking and oversimplification present in that example. Maybe “the Christian Right” only looks homogeneous to me because I’m outside of it, and there are actually a lot of conflicts within it. Maybe only some of them were pushing the idea of “a war on Christmas” and others really don’t like the phrase. In any group, the noisiest people tend to take the microphone and create a distorted picture of what its members are actually like.
Everyone makes these kind of generalizations about other people to some extent, and sometimes it’s necessary to talk in general terms, because otherwise we’d constantly get bogged down in details and caveats. But I think it’s important to remember that these groups don’t act as a single unit with a single will, and when we say stuff like “the Christian Right has done X,” we’re speaking figuratively.
And, as absurd as it might sound, I have encountered people who seem to genuinely believe that men are a hivemind and that some men somewhere having a need means that other men elsewhere will automatically move to provide it: i.e., “If men really wanted a male birth control pill they would just invent it, because most scientists are men. So obviously they don’t want it.”
And of course this goes the other way too–Freud famously asking, “What do women want?” assumes that all women have a single core desire, when the answer to that question really depends on the individual. Some women want a Marxist revolution. Some want to stay inside and play Dragon Age.
And even if we make the rather large assumption that all/most men have some desires or goals in common as far as what kind of society they’d like, trying to get them all to act in tandem in order to achieve that goal would be nearly impossible, because it would require them all to selflessly sacrifice for The Cause. In reality, most men (and people in general) are going to act in a way that benefits them individually rather than in a way that furthers the ultimate goals of their group.
I think throwing a religion into the equation makes things different. A political movement, similarly. These things are characterized by usually similar views to some degree, otherwise you wouldn’t see belief in the religion or the political principles. At best, being black gives you similar views on black issues to other blacks, and this isn’t even close to always the case.
So, I agree that my above comment was not a good one- that it was unfair and that the comparison was not fair. And that passage in my original comment was probably not helpful. I do think that a pretty loose affiliation between members of a group can make meaningful statements about what “they” could do or think, e.g., “in the 60s women became dissatisfied with being confined to domestic life” or whatever, where this doesn’t imply all women, just the movers and shakers and their followers. But I think in the case of my comment it signaled a skewed view of inter gender relations to use a collective term that way.
What’s wrong with “people enjoy the feeling of moral superiority they get from clutching their pearls and saying “well I never!”?”
Is voicing the claim that women are on average shorter to men a threat to the status of women? If not, I don’t see why the claim that female ability is more normally distributed is.
Who isn’t saying this?
If truth is a threat to the status of women, then it should be women who have to move, not truth. because that’s the thing about truth, it doesn’t stop being true just because you ignore it.
I did not at all say that the truth should have to “move,” whatever that would mean. I’m explaining why many people will feel that the embrace of this truth, if it is one, could be a threat to their interests. I even explicitly said that doesn’t mean that we should not beleive this truth.
As to your shortness comment, you can get an explanation of the disanalogy from my comment: we commonly base moral status on intellegence, much less commonly on shortness.
I think “my interest are threatened” is a more plausible reason for objecting to something than whatever sentiment is expressed by “well I never!”
What’s missing here is that the claim isn’t “women are dumber than men” but that women have a tighter variance. But it’s unclear that having a tighter variance is “good” or “bad.” It’s just a difference.
Feminists would point to this as some sort of smokescreen or excuse used to justify the lack of female CEOs or nobel prize winners.
But similarly, it’s also presumably the reason for the disproportionate amount of men who are homeless, imprisoned, autistic, etc.
It’s unclear to me whether if we could say, via genetic engineering, grant women the same “variability” as men, if that would be in their best interests or not.
@ALK
Anti-feminists have been arguing for ages that most feminists are not truthful when they claim to fight for equality, but instead, that they fight for women’s interests.
A lot of the anger is not so much that they are doing this, but that they are so deceptive about it & are actively fighting against both those who fight for men’s interests and those who are truly egalitarian.
You argue that this is different from being senseless, but most feminists believe in an edifice of fallacies, cherry picked data, motivated reasoning, etc, etc, which is exactly why they react with such fear to facts that threaten to topple this ungainly monstrosity. The framework is wrong and sexist at the core, which is why it must not be assuaged or coddled too much, because it can never result in good conclusions by small tweaks. It has to be replaced with a solid conceptual structure that is not based on false history, bias against men, stereotyping, cherry picking of what oppression ‘counts,’ etc, etc.
You seem to think that you are revealing a truth that makes the rationality community more friendly to feminists, but many those who are unfriendly to mainstream feminism are themselves fearful and are sick and tired of rationalizations where it is OK for the ‘oppressors’ to suffer for the benefit of the ‘oppressed.’ Especially when it turns out that the ‘oppressors’ are frequently quite downtrodden, while the ‘oppressed’ are often extremely privileged.
When those in power legitimize oppressing others by claiming to be in fear, oppressed, barely safe from oppression themselves, etc, etc; it matters little that they are genuinely deluded.
I’m sorry I won’t be responding to every aspect of this comment- there are a bunch of them! I just want to address the ending:
I do object to the idea that women (or do you mean “the feminists,” including male feminists?) are “in power” and oppressing men (if that’s what you mean). I agree a lot of mainstream feminists do do things that are bad for men and unjust toward men (and I hate this), and that lots of anti feminists do things that are bad for men and unjust toward men for that matter (like calling them girl’s names when they are perceive as weak, or whatever). But I think it is similarly engaging in delusions of being ‘in fear, oppressed, or barely safe from oppression” if you think that you men are oppressed as a group by a female power-group. Men hold almost all the positions of genuine political and especially economic power worldwide. I don’t know how this is possible if they are being oppressed by “those in power.” But perhaps that’s not what you meant to say?
in a democracy, the demos rules
and women are the majority voters
in an economic-ocracy, the spenders rule
and women are the majority spenders
so, there’s all of that
“Men holding positions of power” is not at all the same thing as the actual case, which is “the people who hold positions of power are men”. I, as a man, have almost no influence on law or policy.
Mary Koss, as the feminist advisor to the CDC, had substantial power, which she used get the CDC to erase male rape victims by defining heterosexual intercourse to which men did not consent as “made to penetrate” (under sexual assault).
The Duluth Model of domestic violence, which asserts that domestic violence is perpetrated by men against women as an expression of patriarchal control of women, has been widely adopted as a domestic violence intervention and a model by police for use when determining who the perpetrator in a domestic dispute is. I’m pretty sure its founders, Ellen Pence and Michael Paymar, are feminists. And the research on domestic violence finds that half of the perpetrators are women, and half the victims are men.
Or when Obama proposed a stimulus plan in response to the 2008 recession, the feminist lobby complained because the majority of jobs the stimulus would create were in male dominated fields. However, the majority of jobs lost in the recession were in male dominated fields (80% of the jobs were lost by men). But the stimulus plan changed, and resulted in 40% of jobs created in female dominated fields. Resulting in male unemployment being 2.5% (absolute) higher than female unemployment.
Fuck, New York City police were even arresting people for “manspreading”, until someone pointed out they were all racial minorities and whoops.
You don’t look at who’s sitting in the chair. You look at what laws are getting passed. What policies are being enforced. Who gets to set the narratives. And when it comes to gender favoritism, feminists are dominating politics. Hard.
I’m intrigued that people have been arrested for spreading their legs out. I remember seeing signs on the subway asking people not to do so, but no threats of gulag. I also did not know that there is a feminist lobby; do you know the name of their organization?
Incidentally, I think a plausible measure of who has the most power in society would be a weighted average of elected officials, bureaucrats, judges, prosecutors and police. By this measure women might come out on top, but they also might not.
You haven’t heard of NOW? They were involved in the 2008 stimulus criticism I believe, as were the NWLC and the IWPR
The administration’s response is here (reference to the criticism is at 4:16). I can’t comment on the rest of the post, but I’m pretty surprised you haven’t heard of NOW at least, I would have put them somewhere in the top 20 lobbyist groups in the country, maybe the top 10.
Snopes says one semi-reliable news outlet reported two men were arrested in NYC for “manspreading”; be that as it may, they had many other outstanding warrants.
Hmm, it appears there’s the possibility that it didn’t actually occur. My apologies. I really hate that news is this unreliable. Edit: beaten to the punch by Evan.
There is not a single feminist lobby organization, there are over a hundred (National Council of Women’s Organizations is a meta-group). And that’s at the national level, if you include the state and city levels, it’s probably thousands, if not tens of thousands.
I’m also a little surprised at your surprise, as feminism is explicitly a political movement. Lobbying is their raison d’etre.
This is insufficient, because being a man does not mean you act to benefit men, nor does being a woman mean you act to benefit women. You really do have to look at what actually happens, and filter out all the unrelated, neutral laws and policies and budget decisions (which are going to be the vast majority, because of all the other interests that government serves). You have to look at how the police act, how the courts act, how the institutions with power over people (like employers over employees, or schools over students) act. You have to look at actual power and how it actually gets used, not who’s using it with an untested assumption of how.
@ALK
In this case what I was referring to was those with (certain) feminist beliefs in positions of power who are oppressing those with other beliefs. I believe that such an environment exists at Google. I was not claiming in my comment that feminists have power everywhere and certainly not that women are oppressing men. I don’t normally separate those with a certain belief system by gender, as that is usually quite irrelevant.
Everything below this line is separate from what is necessary for my previous argument to be true:
—
I do believe that it is a common feminist fallacy to equate holding a position of authority with absolute power, because people in power usually are beholden to others, both directly as noted by others (like most voters being women), but much more importantly to cultural norms. Benevolent sexism is a very strong social norm, where society defines masculinity in large part by male sacrifice for women (and children). The result is that men often self-harm to the benefit of women. Ironically enough this self-harm actually often puts men into dominant positions*, which is then consider proof by feminists that men have it better (while large numbers of women refuse to make these same sacrifices that men make far more often).
When I talk to feminists about harm to men, the common rebuttal is that it is men doing it to men/themselves and thus not patriarchal. However, it is commonly accepted in feminism that self-harm by women, like eating disorders, supposedly because men desire this, is patriarchal oppression of women. So when situations where there is strong evidence that women desire that men harm other men or self-harm are not considered patriarchal oppression, this is hypocritical and I can only see it as sexism.
Most feminists resist abolishing benevolent sexism at the object level and resist making aid by the government truly gender-neutral. As others have noted, science and government statistics are pretty transparently fudged to defend this, showing a strong disregard for basing policy on the evidence and instead, a strong desire to make life better for one gender only, regardless of actual need (again, this is sexism). The irony is that by adopting traditionalist notions like the male duty to care for women (and children) and male stoicism, feminists actually adopted/kept large parts of the conservative ideology surrounding gender.
Feminists almost always believe that anti-feminists are more traditionalist than them, but their opposition actually consists of various groups, some of which are far more egalitarian than mainstream feminism.
* This is also why mainstream feminism must fail, because the very inequality that harms men, which they are unwilling address, causes the kind of inequality that they consider oppressive to women (like men making choices that give them higher pay, so they can fulfill their provider role).
Granted I was wrong about lobbying.
Re power: looking only at outcomes is also weird. We conclude that Jews have most of the power in the US, and that Blacks are radically powerless.
@Aapje: I am skeptical of the male sacrifice explanation. Men are not overrepresented in the self-sacrificing roles that don’t grant you more power. There are more female nurses, more nuns than monks. The main counterexample I can see is firemen – this is a strong example, though a bit confounded by the physical strength requirements. For me atm that makes it a wash, though obviously I’m not being very systematic!
Private in the army doesn’t count?
Could you point out some pro-jew biased laws, police policy, etc…? I wasn’t saying you should measure life outcomes. I was saying that, because non-politicians can influence politics, like the NRA being able to coerce republican politicians to fight gun control, that trying to measure political power by looking at superficial traits (like gender of politicians) is useless.
And black people are largely thought to have limited political power, yes.
90% of workplace related deaths. And I assure you, being an Alaskan fisher or a lumberjack doesn’t give you more power.
One of the biggest regrets most working men have is that they don’t get to spend enough time with their families. And yet men choose to work longer hours, in more physically dangerous jobs, get more certification/education (i.e. sink more time and money into it), commute farther, more likely to move to another city, more likely to travel for work, etc… Which is part of the same pattern as men taking physically dangerous jobs: men give up personal well-being in exchange for monetary compensation. Sometimes this comes with added perks, like being high status, or having power. But most of the time it doesn’t, because those high status, powerful positions are few in number, but physical labor is plentiful.
@hoghoghoghoghog
How much power does being a logger or fisherman give you? Those are the two most dangerous civilian jobs and both almost exclusively staffed by men.
Of course, (many) men are not idiots. Those with higher ability tend to seek jobs that allow them to fulfill the provider role with more mild forms of sacrifice. Mere long commutes, long work hours, high stress, etc, etc. Of course, men are also expected to perform the protector role, which in civilized society doesn’t have to mean carrying a baseball bat or gun around, but can be provided even better with high status. If you have high status, people don’t dare to mess with you or your loved ones, which is a lot better than to actually have to fight.
Many women follow the career path until they realize that there is actually no real benefit to keep making those sacrifices, so they drop out or level off, changing focus to have and care for kids. This is not an option for most men, since few women want to provide for a man and even if she does, he loses his protector aura derived from higher status.
This is a reply to your lower comment, which I wasn’t able to reply to because it was too nested:
I just want to say that I agree with a lot of what you have said. Almost all of it, if fact! I think that mainstream feminism has failed greatly by often wanting to hold on to so-called benevolent sexism, and not calling out male-gender roles that are harmful to men, etc. I’m not really sure why you are commenting as such on my comment, as “mainstream feminism is bad” doesn’t contradict anything I’ve said. But you present it as if it is in tension with it.
The only thing I would add is that feminists are the only ones I’ve seen so far doing ANYTHING about destructive male gender roles, benevolent sexism, etc., even though it has been VERY insufficient and they often make things worse. There is a lot of infighting within feminism–maybe more than you realize–over this kind of thing. I agree that the faction that has been coming out on top recently sucks at a lot of this stuff. But there are some people who call themselves feminists who try to push against those things.
@ALK
First of all, I suggest that you explicitly address the person you are talking to at the deepest commenting level, like I did above this sentence. That makes it easier to see who you are responding to.
Secondly, I am aware that there is infighting, but from my perspective almost all of it is various shades of brown debating how to be wrong in different ways. One problem is that the stem of academic feminist theory is rotten, not the leafs. The few good or semi-good hardcore feminists are pretty much all loners who had to reinvent feminism by rejecting dogma like having 100% equality of outcome as a goal. Just merely rejecting that seems to be sufficient to be excommunicated from almost all feminist groups.
It is quite possible, given the evidence, that there is inequality of interest and/or (far less likely) of ability. It’s also quite possible that men have higher variance in ability and/or other traits. If any of these things are true, then equality of outcome will not be achieved by equality of opportunity. In fact, even the hard fact of body dimorphism is sufficient to make total equality of outcome impossible.
So by having this as dogma, scientific fact is a threat to feminism. You can see this in how feminist science so often makes obvious mistakes, biasing the outcomes. There are scientific findings that have been replicated hundreds of times that are rejected by most feminists.
Note that this is just one example of dogma that undermines 90+% of feminism. Another example is the belief in unidirectional oppression where an identity group can only be an oppressor or be oppressed along an ‘axis of oppression’, not both simultaneously.
—
A second reason why I am an anti-feminist who does not believe that dialog can cause feminism to reform is that mainstream feminism is engaging in horrible behavior that is not sufficiently opposed by other feminists.
One example is that whenever there is an attempt to create dialog about gender issues that is not based on feminist dogma, you have feminists who try their hardest to make this impossible, without meaningful push back by other feminists. The latest firing of Damore is just one of a huge number of such acts that I’ve seen and in none of those cases have I seen other feminists muster even half the effort to oppose the feminists who don’t want to make room for others, but who want their dogma to remain unscrutinized.
So from my perspective, 99% of feminism is waging a war against me and especially against men who have it worse than me (abused men, raped men, male victims of war, etc). I can only win by opening the eyes of the non-feminist masses, as well as the ‘feminists by default’. The latter consists of the people who have been taken in by feminist falsehoods and are unaware how biased and unscientific most of the popular feminist memes are. Perhaps feminism will reform if they look like a total fool in the eyes of these groups or perhaps they’ll prefer to become a small group of relics who cling to false beliefs.
But what cannot work is to appeal to the hardcore feminists’ empathy with men. This has been tried for decades. True empathy is just not there. After all, men are the oppressors/scapegoats.
PS. It is true that feminists have in the past done some things that accidentally have helped men, in their pursuit of making women’s lives better. However, right now they mainly pursue things that harm men.
I am extremely unsympathetic to any claim that amounts to “if you’re right that’s bad for me, so I choose to disbelieve.” People behave that way all the time, but the behavior ought to be condemned, not embraced.
Matt M made my point for me, I did not say women are less intelligent. They aren’t. they are, however, more average. the feminist left loves to make hay about the top side of that distribution and ignore the bottom side.
I’m not advocating embracing this behavior, just understanding it properly. I thought I made that clear when I said “we should beleive it if it’s true.” And I think you should have more patience for that cognitive situation. Not for the people who are violent or assholes, but for the people who engage in motivated reasoning. Why shouldn’t you have more patience for that? Probably in a lot of disagreements there is someone committing motivated reasoning. How can we ever move forward if nobody is willing to slog through arguing with people without insutiltng them, etc. who are caught up in it?
I think the differences between “the bell curve” hypothesis and the ‘averages’ one are interesting. The science talked about in the google memo and Scott’s piece were, I thought, the latter, which is why that was the subject of my discussion.
Because it’s the root of an enormous amount of evil in the world we would be in a better place if it were more strongly condemned.
I think the way to move forward is to call out motivated reasoning and condemn those who do not admit their biases up front.
I know this is the first part, but I have a very simple response:
Yes. It’s a shame that feminists got to it and ruined that.
Look, what do you think this memo is being written about? Damore isn’t trying to get women out of Silicon Valley; at best, he’s trying to stop diversity programs which forcefully insert more than the amount which enter naturally. And these diversity programs are based on wide claims about the two genders not being different, as are the critiques of companies that lead them to adopt these diversity programs. Get that shit out of here, and we can all go back to ignoring gender and focusing on the mind. Also:
I’m good at a lot of things that I don’t like and I don’t want to work at for the rest of my life. And that’s me, a guy who mostly likes success. I don’t think anyone has trouble with the distinction.
But seriously, bottom line: if the problem is people talking about gender differences – and clearly, it is – then let’s all stop talking about either the gender differences or lack thereof. First step is shutting up all of the people who loudly insist that there aren’t any and any gender difference is proof of oppression which must be rectified.
Are there really people who believe the strong position that all average mental/psychological gender differences are the result of societal pressure/nurture?
I know it is the party line, but it just seems so incredibly superstitious.
I honestly think that there are. Or at the very least, I think there are people who kind of believe it, not in a personal way but in an ideological way, and think that everyone who disbelieves it is sexist. And they constantly push for more diversity, and will use that position sometimes.
You can also find people in the media arguing at least some version of this position, as well as sociologists and so forth. I’ve argued with a few online commenters who believe it and I bet they won’t be the last.
What’s really odd to me is that “biology” and “society” are treated as distinct and mutually exclusive, as if “society” were literally and arbitrarily crafted by a secret cabal.
Human society is under evolutionary pressure just as human beings are. And society is an (imperfect) reflection of biology. That “society” is more malleable than biology does not mean that all societies are going to be equally workable/successful given human biology.
I’m not sure if this is what you mean by “the strong position”, but I think that I do. My default position on non-physical gender differences is that they’re probably socialized unless presented with strong evidence that they are not. So far, I have not been convinced by the arguments that I’ve come across that the mental/psychological gender differences are biological, so my beliefs remain at “they’re probably socialized”.
That being said, I have not done much research into the field and my current beliefs are weighted as defaults rather than strongly held beliefs. However, I do have a fairly high bar for what I consider sufficient evidence, since I have come across a lot of bad biological arguments for other subjects. It is entirely possible that my standards are too high in this case and I should be adjusting more freely.
How do you feel about the toy preference differences that are found in both human babies and monkeys? It seems unlikely that humans are socialized in utero or that monkeys suffer from the patriarchy.
And hell, if we are socialized in utero, or by age 10, then that’s functionally equivalent to “biologically innate” by the time you’re going over resumes at Google. Someone who’s been disinterested in math/computer programming since middle school is probably be going to be less effective as a computer programmer, and enjoy it less, then someone who was super interested at that time. The source of the interests is almost irrelevant.
@gbdub
I don’t think that’s true. It’s true that people who are interested in programming at a young age are much more likely to become programmers (or good programmers, or programmers who enjoy it) but my impression is that programmers who start late (e.g. they discover programming in the course of doing a degree in a proper science) are on average equally good (although there are fewer people like that).
While I don’t think the evidence for psychological gender differences is nearly as settled as the evidence for evolution, I would suggest young-earth creationism as a partial parallel. There are many people who say they believe it. Some presumably do. More of them just say so for social reasons, without giving it a lot of consideration, and without really acting on their professed belief.
This is obviously unfortunate. As a partial explanation, though: I think this is a natural response to an unfortunately common pattern on the other side, of which Damore is merely the latest example. The flip side of “there are no biological differences — only sexism” is “there are biological differences — so there’s no sexism”. Damore cherry-picked a handful of studies that were insufficient to justify his claims. This was not the memo that you write when you are carefully trying to get the science right. This was the memo that you write when you oppose certain Google policies, and find some science to serve as a fig leaf.
We have scientific evidence that points to a correlation between gender and programming. (At the very least, I think it is uncontroversial that men are more likely to be autistic, and autistic people are more likely to gravitate towards programming.) We are nowhere close to having enough evidence to make confident conclusions about the magnitude of that effect, or whether the gender gap in any given workplace / industry is a matter of simple biology. People on one side of the argument repeatedly present the former as if it were the latter. In an ideal world, people on the other side would argue against that conflation directly. But “insufficient effect sizes!” is a terrible rallying cry, so “psychological gender differences of sufficient magnitude are not that well-supported” gets rounded down to “psychological gender differences do not exist”.
Is there any evidence that this was something stated or implied by Damore? As best as I can tell, the memo is agnostic with respect to the existence of sexism and is merely making the case that if Google’s diversity efforts are to be successful, it should take into account well-supported biological science, which he perceives as being in a blind spot.
I read the memo last week and re-perused it just now at a new location (https://firedfortruth.com/2017/08/08/first-blog-post/), and I couldn’t find anything that suggested that sexism didn’t exist or that it wasn’t a problem. I found some statements that leads me to believe that Damore believed that sexism existed, such as:
but the memo seems to be addressing something entirely different from the question of the existence of sexism, and seems to stand up just fine regardless of whether it exists or it doesn’t.
I did notice some parts where he stated that certain observations cannot be used as evidence for the existence of sexism, and it’s possible that during one of those passages, he actually went further and claimed or implied “therefore sexism doesn’t exist.” But the parts I noticed only went as far as criticizing certain arguments for the existence of sexism as being poor arguments, without actually disputing the question of sexism existing.
But I wasn’t exactly going through the document with a fine-toothed comb, so if I missed a part where he implied the non-existence of sexism, I’d be happy to have that pointed out.
@Iain
Damore never claimed this though. He explicitly said that his argument may explain part of the gap and never claimed that it explains all of it.
It’s really, really irritating that one side gets constantly misrepresented like this. The other side is favored by the media and so they can misrepresent freely, which they do with reckless abandon.
It’s not even on purpose, but rather that there are huge negative stereotypes, with the result that everything is interpreted with bad faith. I have had these kind of debates with feminists before and the rules of these debates are thus:
– If you don’t say you disprove of something, you approve
– If you talk more about the politically incorrect stuff than that you spend time assuring people that you agree with them on certain PC stuff, you don’t actually believe the PC statements you make.
– Any hedging you do is just a ruse and not honestly what you believe
– If there is any ambiguity in what you say, there is no need to ask for clarification, the worst interpretation is always correct.
– When you try to survive a debate in such an environment by producing a wall of text, lawyered up to minimize the ability of the other side to misinterpret, misrepresent and assume the worst, you are making debate impossible by producing a wall of text. So then the other side is justified to summarize the argument in a way that is completely dishonest, but matches their stereotypical villain.
The end result is that you get destroyed by sheer unwillingness of the other side to actually understand what is being argued for or against. It just becomes a pattern matching exercise to read between the lines to discover what the horrible shitlord actually believes.
/rant
No offense, but I really think that this is the rich man’s version of the argument. And I think if you take the two poor men’s version of the arguments, “biological differences exist and explain the gaps” is a lot more reasonable than “biological differences don’t exist and sexism explains the gaps”. Obviously neither is 100% on, but I prefer the former to the latter; at least the former is something you can just say OK to and move on with your life. If the gaps change, the former accepts that. If they don’t, the former accepts that. But the latter agitates endlessly.
@lvlln:
Sorry, “so there’s no sexism” was my attempt at pithiness, rather than a precise description. “So we should stop trying to address sexism” might have been more precise. This kind of argument is frequently willing to acknowledge the existence of sexism, provided that we don’t actually have to do anything about it.
Damore certainly gestures towards the hypothetical possibility of sexism. He just happens to think that Google should end all of its programs designed to directly address it. (“Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races. These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.”) He “hopes it is clear” that he’s not arguing against “trying to correct for existing biases” — but it’s deeply unclear what sort of correction he thinks is permissible, given that he rejects direct action and complains about training.
Paying lip service to the existence of sexism is not a magic incantation. Flipping the polarity of the example: if I were to write an extensive article advocating for the mandatory baking of gay wedding cakes, and ended it with “I hope it is clear that I support freedom of religion and liberty of association, and that I support attempts to find reasonable accommodations for bakers”, then one might be justified in raising an eyebrow.
@AnonYEmous:
It seems clear to me that one stance is better than the other to the precise extent that it is true. Maybe you could argue that we are better off today accepting the current gender split in tech as biological — but that is definitely not true of, say, law or medicine in the 1960s. Context matters.
@Iain
I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret “Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races. These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined” as “So we should stop trying to address sexism.” He’s making criticisms specific to methods that Google was using to address sexism, and making the case that those methods were not effective and not worth the costs and thus should be stopped. I.e. if you find yourself in a hole, the 1st step is to stop digging.
As for the fact that it’s unclear what sort of correction he thinks is permissible, one major problem is that no one actually has any idea of what corrections are effective – just what corrections are ineffective. The point of the memo doesn’t seem to be to propose new corrections, but rather to task Google with confronting its own biases and breaking down its echo chamber so that it can do the actual hard work that’s needed to find what methods of correcting sexism actually would be effective and worth the costs.
His criticisms were specific to what Google was doing – he didn’t reject all training, merely the microaggression training and unconscious bias training that have been shown to be ineffective or inaccurate in many aspects. It doesn’t then follow that he was rejecting all forms of correction or even darkly hinting at it.
I don’t think there’s anything in the document that suggests that he believes that correcting sexism is anything less than a noble endeavor. Everything I’ve seen in the memo seems to imply that his problem is specifically limited to correcting sexism ineffectively without much care for the real costs of attempting such corrections, and he sees this as being due to an ideological echo chamber at Google.
Again, please correct me if I missed something. It’s possible that there’s a part in there where he asserts or implies or even darkly hints at the idea that correcting for sexism in general – rather than as it’s done at Google – is wrong, and I just missed it.
This analogy doesn’t work at all, because “mandatory baking of gay wedding cakes” is directly, logically in conflict with support for “freedom of religion and liberty of association, … attempts to find reasonable accommodations for bakers.” There’s nothing in the memo that’s directly in conflict with correcting sexism. In fact, the arguments in the memo pretty clearly seem to be made for the purpose of finding the best way to correct sexism.
I think the stance I stood behind is better because it is much true-er. And yes, context matters; I think in this case context is on my side. Personally, I’d love a nuanced understanding of this and all subjects – but if it’s a choice between rounding down to “no psychological gender differences” and rounding up to “psychological gender differences exist and explain the gaps”, then I would rather the latter, because I think it is both more true and more capable of updating in light of new information.
@lvlln:
Okay, let me unpack this some more.
When somebody says “there is sexism in tech, and we should do something about it”, it is — among other things — an acknowledgment of a cognitive bias. Overall, there is a tendency to perceive women as less competent/skilled/effective/whatever than men with the same underlying level of competency. (For similar reasons, hiring for “culture fit” tends to result in hiring people with a resemblance to your hiring managers.) Left unchecked, this cognitive bias will lead to bad hiring decisions on the margin: maybe you hire men who are 6s instead of women who are 7s. This is bad for those women, and it is also bad for the company. To combat this known cognitive bias, Google introduced a policy where women (and underrepresented ethnic minorities, who face the same effect) went through two rounds of evaluation, instead of just one, to make sure they were not letting good candidates slip through.
(Note: nobody has presented any evidence that this is leading to the hiring of underqualified women at Google. Damore insinuates that it could happen, but is unwilling to come out and actually claim that it does. Given his clear willingness to tip sacred cows, this is at least prima facie evidence that the women hired through this program are not dragging Google down.)
So this is a well-motivated, seemingly successful program that reduces a cognitive bias, helps deserving women find jobs, and improves Google’s workforce.
Damore wants to abandon it.
Why?
The only evidence that is provided is a link to an article about race on campus. This is, apparently, sufficient grounds to condemn the whole thing as “veiled neo-Marxist ideology”. That’s the problem with your argument about cost-benefit analysis: Damore never actually makes it! He just waves at a handful of tangentially associated studies, and claims that the facts are on his side. Upper management at Google is presumably well-equipped to do the cost-benefit analysis themselves. Why should we assume that Damore knows better than the people with all the hiring data? He hasn’t even shown his work.
Damore does not take sexism seriously.
Oh, obviously freedom of religion has to be weighed against other important freedoms. I absolutely support reasonable accommodations for bakers — I just don’t think any of your suggestions, like letting them refuse to bake cakes, are reasonable accommodations, and I’m unwilling to provide any details about what I would consider reasonable.
(What do you mean, I don’t “take freedom of religion seriously?”)
So this is a well-motivated, seemingly successful program that reduces a cognitive bias, helps deserving women find jobs, and improves Google’s workforce.
Damore wants to abandon it.
Why?
Why do you call it seemingly successful?
Because it didn’t change the number of women at Google by even one single percentage point while costing $265 million. Granted, that’s the cost of all their diversity initiatives rolled together, but maaaaaaaybe if Google spends a crapload of money on something and sees barely any results, it’s time to try something different.
They did get one more percentage point among “professional employees including tech.” That still doesn’t seem like the results you think you are buying when you spend $265 million.
https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-little-progress-2470784457.html
two points
point the first: as a lot of people have already noted, Google isn’t diverse, at all. And as the person above me notes, they haven’t increased their diversity. So either the program is a miserable failure at getting more women (and I think his memo does have discussion in this area) or it will probably get underqualified women over men. The first seems to be true, currently.
point the second: how could he know? it’s not like he knows all the women at google such that he can judge. Short of Random Anecdote X, Savior of the Universe, what can he contribute to that part of the discussion? And for all his “willingness to tip over sacred cows”, he seems very hesitant to say something along the lines of what you’re saying, that (some) women in Google actually are unqualified. And with good reason – if he said that, the backlash would’ve been at least twice as hyperbolic.
@Iain
Feminists have done their best to make people aware of this and there is evidence that in some fields those that make hiring decisions are actually already overcompensating for this. Do you have evidence that this is not the case at Google? I consider it quite likely given their focus on this and the level of vitriol they get for having a workforce with more men than women.
If they are already overcompensating, then any additional programs makes the unfairness in hiring greater, not less.
Perhaps he, just as me, just has a fundamental problem with sexist and racist policies. Restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races is objectively sexist and racist!
Now, I know that most SJ people see this as a necessary evil and assume, based on their ideology, that simply creating a representative workplace will make their sexist and racist policies superfluous. Yet the evidence for this is extremely weak. Plus, as others have noted, the programs don’t actually seem to work.
If this was true, they could just have said so, instead of firing Damore and canceling a meeting about the topic.
You are really being supremely silly with your ‘the decision makers must have secret data, they can’t possibly be doing things based on faith rather than actual evidence.’ Is that seriously something that you feel is reasonable? Are you always going to extend that extreme benefit of the doubt to anyone in power who is criticized, including your ideological enemies (like Trump)? I don’t believe that for a second.
My claim: those who don’t provide evidence that their sexist and racist programs are necessary, effective and don’t put hard limits on when these measures will expire, are not taking sexism and racism seriously, including the sexism and racism they perpetrate very easily, because it targets their outgroup.
It’s actually quite laughable that you can’t see your own doublespeak. We had “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” Now we have: Sexism is Equality.
@Iain
Is there any evidence that this cognitive bias exists and that it manifests in this way? Of course, it’s almost trivially true that everyone has biases. But the claim that, in practice, this manifests in the way you described seems to be based on faith. Of course, there are cases like the well known blinded orchestra audition process that shows that it has manifested in similar ways in some places, but it’s certainly a big leap to go from that to tech companies in general or Google in particular.
And obviously there’s the possibility of other biases that dominate the biases that are being talked about that may affect non-woman or non-minority populations even more.
Furthermore, is there any evidence that this multi-round evaluation policy was effective in combating such biases by preventing good candidates from slipping through? Logically, one would expect it to increase the proportion of women and minorities hired, but how does the real-world evidence bear that out? Is there a backfire effect? Or maybe the effect is so tiny that we’d require 100 extra rounds of interviews rather than just 1 before some gain was noticed, which seems like it wouldn’t be worth it. Does anyone actually know, or is it just based on faith that a certain bias manifests in a certain way, and a certain method will actually correct it?
I mean, it’s obviously true that it could happen. That Damore insinuates that it could happen tells us nothing about whether Damore sees it as a legitimate problem. There’s certainly nothing in the memo that I read that suggests that Damore believes that it’s a legitimate problem, or that the women working at Google – or applying to work there – are any less competent than the men working at Google – or applying to work there.
Well-motivated, perhaps. Seemingly successful? On what grounds? Is there evidence that the cognitive bias being talked about manifests in the specific way that’s been assumed, and that the program designed to address it actually does help deserving women find jobs or improves Google’s workforce?
I think Damore’s contention would be that we need to actually answer these questions, and Google’s ideological bubble and echo chamber are preventing them from even beginning to answer those questions. And when a program that has costs is based on faith, it doesn’t seem like a radical idea to scrap it.
One would hope that upper management has done the research, but that’s not something we get to just assume. Damore’s contention is that they’re in an ideological echo chamber that’s preventing them from actually doing the research. He obviously doesn’t have access to all the communications in upper management and HR and all that. He’s just inferring from the behavior and policies he observes company management engaging in. I do think he’s engaging in aggressive pattern-matching to call it “veiled neo-Marxist ideology.” He really just seems to be parroting Jordan Peterson in using that phrase, as best as I can tell.
I think he wants to take it exactly as seriously as it deserves, and he’s frustrated at the fact that no one seems to want to do the hard work of collecting empirical evidence to get a proper assessment of how seriously that is.
Again, this analogy is useless, and I’m hesitant to even humor it any further. Damore’s memo wasn’t to propose new policies to combat sexism; it was to criticize the methods by which he thought Google was combating sexism. There’s absolutely nothing in the memo that I read that suggests that Damore would be at all resistant to Google adopting policies that are supported by empirical evidence in order to combat problems that are empirically supported to exist, and that I find any interpretation of what I’ve read in the memo to be as such to be utterly absurd and most likely motivated reasoning. But I’m open to correction if there’s something in there you think I missed.
@Edward Scizorhands:
Time has slightly better numbers (not sure what explains the discrepancy) but sure.
You just provided a better argument against Google’s diversity policies than anything in Damore’s memo. If Damore cared at all about doing a cost-benefit analysis, he would have found and cited these numbers. (Indeed, I assumed that the numbers were better, specifically because he didn’t cite them.) Again: this is not the behaviour of a man who takes sexism seriously as a problem.
Anyways, we’re now several levels deep on a subpoint of my explanation of a position I don’t actually hold, so I’m probably going to bow out. To recapitulate my actual point: enough people like to cite “science” to justify not caring about sexism that some people who do care about sexism have learned to be wary whenever anybody puts “science” and “sexism” in the same sentence, and it is therefore often correct to interpret claims that psychological gender differences do not exist as a rough politically motivated approximation, not a carefully worded expression of true belief.
Edit: wow, whole lot of responses appeared while I was writing this. I am not going to respond to all of it, but let me just say: lvlln, I think you are being too generous in your reading of Damore’s memo. In particular, you are reading in a heavy emphasis on empiricism that just isn’t there. The word ’empiricism’ does not appear anywhere in the memo. His “suggestions” section doesn’t say anything about collecting more data (with the partial exception of wanting Googlegeist statistics broken down by political affiliation, to prove that conservatives are oppressed). The closest he comes to empiricism is “without evidence this is just veiled neo-Marxist ideology”; if you think that’s an open invitation to data-driven policy, I don’t know what to tell you.
You’re defending an idealized memo in your head. It seems like a pretty good memo. It’s not the memo Damore wrote.
I think you’re raising a lot of interesting ideas in this post. I’m not sure that interests=intelligence is necessarily being implied by the post(s), but you make a good point about the perception.
Either way, the above particular point (that the claim must imply a substantial difference in interests) is either a weak spot, or could use clarification.
Its not hard to imagine a situation where the repeated multiplication of choices resulting from “small” differences in interest could result in a “large” difference in tech employment ratios. Consider the stereotypical “coder” job – there are a lot of different points in the decision tree where someone can make choices that make them less/more likely to end up in the coding job. For example, your coder (on average, in the aggregate, not all individuals, etc.) seems likely to have made decisions to spend more time working with or learning about computers in high school, then in picking a major, then in deciding not to transfer out of the major, then in graduating and deciding to enter the workforce vs pursue a different field in grad school, then in selecting a “coding” job vs a management track or business side job, or in doing any number of other jobs that you could do with a technology-focused degree. (I know that each workplace is different, maybe these categories or terms don’t apply exactly to Google but I think the point stands) Lets say that, due to interests; at each of these decision points, do to a small difference in interests, women/men are 1% likely to make a different choice each time – women are 1% less likely to pursue the coding track, and men are 1% more likely to pursue it or opt into it.
After several decision points, it seems reasonable that the repeated effect of multiplying the small or insubstantial differences could result in a “substantial” difference in employment.
In March 2016 I began a project to teach myself as much as possible about computing, electronics, mechanics, and artificial intelligence. A few weeks ago I published a book about this experience.
In addition to everything I learned about the object-level subject matter, I learned about how to structure long-term projects, how to maintain focus and motivation, how to use mantra stacks, how to cultivate deep work and pursue ultrapraxy, and a host of other subjects.
Feel free to check out my work and to ask me any questions 🙂
That’s gumption right there!
I’d like to know how you found the time to do all that and write a book and presumably still have a “normal” full-time job and a life. Do you have kids too? I’m super impressed.
My fiance was pregnant during a good chunk of it, and I was writing the book as our daughter was about to be born 🙂
My work commitments vary a bit, but are usually between 40-60 hours per week.
Almost all of my studying and writing happened during the wee hours of the morning. I find that by getting up around 4:30 most of the time I’m able to get quite a lot done before the rest of Earth begins stirring. Of course these days I spend that time looking after an infant, so I’m not nearly as productive 😉
Trust me I can relate.
Well, still super impressed.
I think i would be a really good moderator.
Is there anyone who thinks they wouldn’t be a good moderator? Why?
I wouldn’t be. I have a huge political bias, I tend to escalate conflicts, and I take things personally often when I shouldn’t.
Yeah, I’m the opposite. So I guess I would be a good moderator.
I over-stress on the question “am I treating people fairly?” and can become paralyzed into inaction.
I think my pro-Sidles/other unique commenters attitude counts me out; a moderator would probably need to be more closely aligned with Scotts opinions on who should be banned.
Actually, I propose we make Sidles the only moderator.
+1
So everyone is a moderator?
No, just me and Deiseach.
I like Nancy Lebovitz as a person but I strongly disliked her moderating style on LessWrong.
In general, Scott’s ethos has been that everyone who engages civilly is entitled to a fair hearing. It flows pretty naturally from accepting the LW view of orthogonality with a dose of humility. If an intelligent person is advocating an abhorrent ideology, chances are that they see your ideology as equally abhorrent. To actually find out who’s right you need to evaluate the ideas on their merits.
That’s a high standard but I’d rather that mods try to live by it. Even if they fall short they’ll be doing better than 99% of the rest of the internet.
I think on the whole I would not be a good moderator. While I think I’m generally pretty good at being impartial, and read the vast majority of comments, I would not make a good moderator, because I’m too chill, and would hesitate to bring the hammer down in situations where I should. I’m indecisive, which makes me unfit for such roles. I’d be a better juror than a judge, I think is a good way of putting it.
Yeah, I think I’ve juuust about mastered the skill of ignoring things that bother me on the internet, which seems to work at cross-purposes to the goal of being a moderator.
I don’t think I would be a good moderator. My beliefs aren’t a carbon copy of Scott’s, for one.
I’m somewhere between I wouldn’t be a good moderator and I’m not taking the job.
I have some hot button issues myself, and being a moderator at LessWrong was not worth it.
I think I’d be the greatest moderator to ever live. Conventional wisdom would indicate that this is evidence that I wouldn’t be a good one.
I’ve moderated elsewhere, but I couldn’t do it here. Scott seems content to allow the evaporative cooling to accelerate, and that’s not a process I’d want to oversee.
I suppose if the reason he wanted a different moderator in the first place was to reverse that and there was an explicit mandate to do so, that’d be a different story.
Is evaporative cooling accelerating? The vibe around here seems pretty stalemated. I would prefer it to be more left wing/for there not to be the relaxation in standards of charity and precision that occurs when certain left-wing positions are being discussed, but it doesn’t seem like the overall tone is moving in any direction. It more feels like it’s kind of bogged down.
It definitely seems that way to me. I don’t know how you’d go about quantifying it. Although I appreciated the attempt, I was unsatisfied with the last effort.
I don’t think there have been major changes that I can remember. There are maybe slightly more extreme rightists now than a few months ago, but also more communisty leftists (both groups are quite small, the rightists are more vocal but less frequently political). At this moment, there are no very loud extreme rightists (Kevin C was the most recent one, and he is interesting a lot of the time); things are good on that front in comparison to e.g. when that Eastern European guy who kept telling Scott to work out more was around. I haven’t really noticed any evaporative cooling: are there prolific left-wing commenters you remember leaving, or do you just get the impression that many unprolific ones have gone?
My impression is this: Based on reading the archives from before I started posting here, the general trend seems to have been an ideological, uh, compression effect. Like with audio. There used to be more, for lack of a better word, flamboyant far left and far right folks. Some of them (probably more the rightists?) got banned, others left. I don’t know how many centre-to-middle left wingers (like you or I) there ever were here; I think we were always outnumbered by the right-but-not-far-right crowd.
The dominant tendency became people who are primarily distinguished/clustered by being “anti-SJ”, regardless of their other opinions and where exactly they would fall on the political compass; the corollary of this is the unfortunate tendency I described to get squirrely when certain left-wing topics come up. I don’t know that I would call these people right uniformly, but I would be less likely to call them left. I think this seems to be a pretty stable state of affairs for a while? I mean, we’re still here.
Lately, we’ve been getting more leftists and rightists – people willing to defend communism, Death Eater types who aren’t loud about it – but they’re less flamboyant than they used to be.
I feel like I’ve been seeing evaporative cooling diversifying in the past few months rather than accelerating (though given that acceleration has to do with both speed and direction, perhaps “accelerating” is the right term?). Last year, I probably would have said it’s limited or at least dominated by the right-wing. Now, I perceive a lot more of what I see as extreme and tribal left-wing voices taking over rather than what I saw as reasonable left-wing voices which I thought were more common before.
On a technical level I think I’d be a great moderator. That was like the whole of my personality till at least secondary school.
But this persona has made too many /too contentious comments, and taken umbridge too often (ever really) to be an near-ideal neutral arbiter. And I wouldn’t want to even if I wouldn’t have to stop commenting, which I would have to because I hate when mods do that
I’d be a great moderator. Everyone should think like me and I want to enforce this with unearned power and authority. When I’m done this forum will be a utopia with butterflies and rainbows everywhere. A just and fair world. It might look a little like the 1960’s Vietnam during the process though, but we need to counter the great threat of incorrect thinking, preferably with a kinetic moderation mentality. There will be a requirement for a mandatory reeducation forum for those who fall outside the rules.
I would be an atrocious moderator because I intermittently get scared of my email and refuse to look at it. I am improving in this regard, with bad episodes now lasting days or at most a week rather than months, but it is still not an ideal qualification.
I would like to throw my hat in the ring.
In the tradition of the Less Wrong Diaspora, I would moderate according to fnargl rules. To wit, all moderation will be undertaken with the goal of having you send me as much gold as possible. I will ban only with that purpose in mind, leaving you free to self-organize the comments section in whatever way accomplishes that goal.
I think we can all agree this would be the optimal moderation system.
I’m thinking about introducing meal replacement products in my diet. Currently I’m still trying to figure out what there is available out there before doing some trade-off calculations and so on.
I’m using this very useful tool, BlendRunner to filter for products that ship to the EU (where I live), but I’m still a bit overwhelmed by the number of choices available.
Does anyone living in the EU have some useful advice for narrowing down my choices? It would be nice to have something akin to MealSquares, as I am given to understand that whole-food ingredients may contain unknown beneficial nutrients that are not present in the form of supplements, but right now I just want to make my diet somewhat healthier so I’m not picky.
Thanks.
Huel seems popular among people I know. I’ve tried Joylent (apparently now called Jimmy Joy), I would neither heartily recommend it nor warn against it.
Do you know if Huel seems popular among people you know due to being locally available? Or do they mostly need to order it online from abroad? I’m trying to figure out if it has merits despite being necessary to order it online.
They definitely order it online, but we’re in the UK so no international shipping fee. I remember reading useful comparisons of the various Soylent-likes on the Soylent reddit when I was considering them, but I can’t see them any more. There’s probably some useful stuff there.
Speaking of Nazi-punching and the professional preferences of women
Roza Shanina
Yes, because the USSR was very big on freedom to decide what you are going to do with your life. Not to mention rich and feminist.
I get that you’re part of the rightist club that sees it as their duty to condemn each and every mention of communism, but feminist, at least, was something the USSR managed to do well at in various periods of time.
True enough:
Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living
>I get that you’re part of the rightist club that sees it as their duty to condemn each and every mention of communism,
Do you see this as a problem in a world where the word fascist is fundamentally a synonym for evil?
>was something the USSR managed to do well at in various periods of time.
record numbers of women when to college, and record numbers were murdered by their government. That’s not a net win for women.
Who cares what I think? The hysteria is there, whether it’s a problem, I can’t say.
Being terrible to men and women equally is very feminist, yes. I’m glad we agree on this 🙂
I think it’s a localised variation on “someone is wrong on the internet”: “someone mentioned communism on SSC without ritually affirming how abominably evil it is”.
Indeed, my original statement above didn’t even mention communism.
Well, since there’s usually a demand in short order for anybody mentioning Naziism to give a ritual affirmation of how evil it was, this is simple balance, because Communism was about equally as evil.
If you’re carrying a flag with a sickle and hammer around, you’re as vile as those motherfuckers in Charlottesville. That similar demands never seem to be made to left-wing politicians to supplicate themselves whenever a hammer and sickle flag appears is why those of us on the right have such a bug up our asses about media bias.
Growing up in a small town in the US, I encountered skinheads. They were scary. It wasn’t until I went to college that I met communists. And they were just silly. Pretty much summed up by this song:
https://genius.com/Dar-williams-the-pointless-yet-poignant-crisis-of-a-co-ed-lyrics
It’s been a long time since I was in college, or lived in the US, but maybe the communists are scary now too. I live in Russia, however, and here the communists wear dentures. So I find it hard to get worked up about it.
@Catcube
Please ask yourself:
1. Are people carrying hammer and sickles trying to communicate “I want to liquidate the Kulaks”?
2. Are people carrying swastikas trying to communicate “I hate Jews and I want them gone”?
Bonus question:
Are people carrying a Union Jack trying to communicate “I want to cause millions of famine deaths in India and slaughter a load of Mau Maus”?
Art Vandelay – “1. Are people carrying hammer and sickles trying to communicate “I want to liquidate the Kulaks”?
That is certainly the impression I get, yes. Are you familiar with the phrase “Liberals get the bullet too”?
“2. Are people carrying swastikas trying to communicate “I hate Jews and I want them gone”?”
Yup.
The first and most powerful media bias is, “if it bleeds it leads” – and they aren’t talking noses. So get back to us when someone with a hammer and sickle flag actually kills someone and the media covers it up.
@FacelessCraven
I am familiar with the fact that there is A piece of graffiti of that phrase. I am also familiar with that sort of general rhetoric. I know a couple of people who joke about the centre left being “first up against the wall”.
I’m not saying this kind of violent rhetoric is good, but you seem to be mistaking a left-wing version of a 4chan edgelord who is trying to make a clear distinction between themselves and the soft left with someone who literally wants to shoot liberals. The vast majority of communists believe that Stalin was an awful guy who did terrible things for their movement and was wrong to kill all those people. The vast majority of Nazis believe that Hitler was a great guy and it was a shame he didn’t get to finish what he started. Liberals and rich people should not be afraid of being violently assaulted by these people if they accidentally pass them in a darkened alleyway whereas black people, Jews or homosexuals should if they happen upon some literal Nazis in said alleyway.
Would you seriously feel as threatened walking past the alleyway-loitering communists wearing an “I am a liberal” t-shirt as you would walking down Nazi alley wearing a kippah?
As John Schilling has pointed out, only one side is committing actual murders.
Leaving aside the fact that the literal Nazis are far more violent, can anyone really claim a moral equivalence between these two groups:
A: “I want blacks, Arabs, Jews, and Asians gone from this country and I’m willing to use violence against anyone who gets in my way”
B: “I want those racists gone and I’m willing to use violence to achieve this”
Put another a way “I want to get rid of people who are a different race to me” vs. “I want to get rid of people who have abhorrent beliefs”.
On a personal note, I was very turned off the American version off antifa after all the university riots. They seemed far to quick to paint people on the right as fascists or Nazis. Then I came here after there was violence between antifa and
in which one of the Nazis murdered one of the left-wingers. I get here and see a load of people on the right declare “well they’re basically both as bad as each other”. I suddenly feel MUCH more sympathetic to antifa and have had to update in favour of them possibly being far more correct about the right than I’d realised.
you sure about that
but anyways, Nazis are a brand of fascist, so the question is how many fascists think Hitler was a similar brand of screwup
I hate this argument. I didn’t choose my beliefs, they are a part of me that I cannot simply decide to ignore or turn off. I can try and pass for someone with different beliefs, but that sucks.
Not QUITE the same as Stalin, but a statue of Lenin is still standing in Seattle. (Ironically enough, I’ve heard that it’s privately financed and stands on private property. Awww yeah freedom of association!)
Then how can they be rational?
Depends on your definition of choice. Most people see themselves as rationally believing something because that’s where the evidence led them. It’s a thing imposed on them from the outside: I have no rational choice but to believe in gravity; it’s choosing to believe that things fall up that would be irrational.
I think in most cases, beliefs exist naturally, and people then discover rationalizations from them. In rare instances, one can use rationality to slightly modify/update their existing belief structure, sure.
But I think things like “I sat down yesterday and worked out a rational approach to life and society and have concluded that I should stop being a libertarian and start being a socialist” are quite rare.
I think it’s highly unlikely for any given individual’s beliefs to be entirely rational, and that the parts that are consistent with rationality tend to be so more by luck than because they were formed rationally. I think that’s why it’s really important to have consistent dialogue with others whose beliefs are very different from one’s own when deciding to do anything, in the hope that some decision could be arrived at that is more rational than what any of the individuals could have come up with independently.
Most people are psychologically and philosophically naive. Remember, we are not talking about 2+”=4 beliefs, we are talking about personal and tribal beliefs, which always have a large evaluative/normative component. Do you really want to say that someone somewhere has looked at the world and just perceived the way things *should* be?
A classic of culturally insensitive Soviet feminism:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=22Rj9GLmJYE
Sorry that there are no subtitles. A Russian soldier trying to make his way home from a mission somewhere in Central Asia rescues a harem from execution by their lord.
The harem then says that he is now their husband. He tries to explain to them that in this new enlightened age, each woman can have her own husband. But they are having none of it. If there were only one woman in the house, then she would have to do all of the cooking, cleaning, and child-minding herself!
Why do people think Peter Watts is such a good/great writer?
(I’m asking because of something over on the sub-reddit where I left what I believe the young people nowadays call a “salty” comment and I’m waiting to see if it gets my raggedy arse banned by a mod).
Seriously, though, whatever I’ve read of his has had the characterisation of a paper bag, and I was all through Blind Sight going “Okay, so when is the spiffy new exciting high concept stuff gonna hit me, because I’m not seeing anything here I haven’t seen before” (one of the minor plot machinery elements I had already encountered years before in a Father Brown story dating from 1926) and just basically I’m left scratching my head and going “Huh?” about the praise for him.
I’ll refrain from any further critique because it would probably end up with me getting banned off here too for ad hominem or something, but to my taste he’s a poor writer who goes for the lazy option when creating his characters and isn’t really “wow what a striking new idea that challenges me on a philosophical level!”.
I bet a huge part of it is that he put most of his novels on his website. Anyone who hears about him and thinks they might like him doesn’t need to go to a bookstore or library, they can just type “peter watts” into google and get to the reading. Makes sense that someone who makes their work so available online would be killin’ it in the internet-word-of-mouth department
Baen Books does that for most of their back catalog, though, and they’re best known for publishing pulp.
Pretty much agree. He goes after high-value concepts, but not very convincingly. My beloved Charles Stross is also like this but it’s less of a letdown – maybe since Stross is playful even about grimdark subjects while Watts is just grimdark?
Hype by fans is inevitable and normal. If you enjoy something, its flaws are easy to forgive and hard to remember.
Just a few nights ago I talked up Boondock Saints to my girlfriend. How great a film it is, why she needs to see it, the whole nine yards. Pulled it up and twenty minutes in I’m holding my head in my hands because I realized that my praise had been reserved almost entirely for two or three short scenes in a two hour film. The movie I had recommended so strongly only really existed in my recollections.
I didn’t finish Blindsight: it just didn’t grab me and the setting and characters both seemed a bit poorly sketched. But I didn’t hate it and I don’t think less of anyone who enjoyed it. Which I’m glad for because hate is exhausting and unproductive.
I’m all for good-natured snarking but there’s no cause here to get into a knock-down drag-out fight.
Different things appeal to different people. I thought the ideas in Blindsight were very interesting (perhaps I’m just not adequately well-read), and the writing was perfectly decent. The characters are supposed to be weird post-humans, so I think it’s difficult to talk about the characterisation. What sci-fi would you consider to be mindblowingly high concept?
I thought the ideas in Blindsight were very interesting (perhaps I’m just not adequately well-read)
Yeah, I suppose part of it is having been a skiffy reader since I was a sprout 🙂
Grungy godawful (or sparkly but still godawful) future human/post-human society? China Miéville has all my “dear lord, this is depressing” needs covered (besides, 70s New Wave was very big on “the future is going to be brutal even if it is shiny, which it very well may not be” notion of humans getting pummelled by an uncaring universe).
The saccade trick? As I said, GKC got there in 1926.
Split-brain/multi-personality people? Can’t remember who the story was by, but read that in a short story in Nova magazine in the 80s (by the bye, I can’t decide if Watts was intentionally making all the personalities blandly indistinguishable to hammer home his “consciousness is a trap” message or not; I could only tell them apart by the Hat they wore e.g. one was The Grumpy One, one was The Scary Crazy One, one was The Love Interest for Other Character etc and I often forgot or could not tell which one was meant to be uppermost in consciousness at which time).
The vampires were an interesting idea (as in “this is such a terrible idea why ever would you do it?”) but the impact was diluted by having the vampire character do little more than lurk menacingly and then get killed by the ship AI as the last move in whatever high level game of backstabbing they were playing unbeknownst to just about everyone.
The aliens? Well, if we ever got to meet or know anything about them, I guess! Again, “they are so completely unlike us we can’t even begin to comprehend them” was a decent idea but fell down in execution; apart from “they are gonna wipe us out because they’re a hive entity with no consciousness”, it was all rather pointless.
That was my main problem with the story; it was pointless. Some decent ideas but reading the thing was like chewing cardboard. I didn’t care if anyone lived or died (it was rather hard luck on the viewpoint character, but they were the author’s chew toy all along and plainly were never going to have a happy ending), I didn’t care if Earth blew itself up via the warring humans, the vampires killed all the humans, the aliens killed the vampires and the humans, or anything. Making me go “Eh, I don’t care if Earth survives or not” is an achievement in itself, I suppose, but not one to encourage me to read anything else of his.
What sci-fi would you consider to be mindblowingly high concept?
Hard to put into words, but something along the lines of “The distances and times involved are so vast, I don’t think my brain can handle the sheer number of zeroes involved! Wibble! My brain is melting and oozing out my ear, and it’s fantastic!” A lot of Gene Wolfe has that effect on me 🙂 Samuel Delany can do it, too.
ROT13:
Gur fubpx naq njr va Oyvaqfvtug vf yrff nobhg gur vzzrafr fvmr bs gur havirefr, naq zber nobhg gur gvavarff naq ihyarenovyvgl bs bhe yvggyr anvir fbnc ohooyr va vg.
Gur ovt vqrn vf gung pbafpvbhf rkcrevrapr — gur irel rkvfgrapr bs na “V” — vf na ribyhgvbanel qrnq raq. Uhznaf ner pbafpvbhf sbe gur fnzr ernfba gung jr unir nccraqvprf naq oyvaq fcbgf va bhe rlrf jurer gur bcgvp areir tbrf va: gurl’er ribyhgvbanel zvfgnxrf gung unir lrg gb or bcgvzvmrq njnl. Jr’er oheavat hfryrff raretl gb xrrc hc gur cergrafr gung fbzrobql’f ubzr, naq riraghnyyl jr jvyy or bhg-pbzcrgrq ol fbzr bgure, zber rssvpvrag crre jvgubhg bhe sngny jrnxarff bs ‘pnevat’.
I don’t think it’s true, but I think it’s certainly interesting.
Iain, I don’t find that particularly interesting, to be honest. If he’d shown how the vampire/alien lack of consciousness worked as a society or from their side, maybe I’d be more convinced (I did read some additional material besides the novel online somewhere giving more background about the experiments to revive the vampires which worked a heck of a lot better to scare the crap out of me about the whole thing).
As it is – ooh, they’re terribly terribly scary because they don’t have the deception of thinking they’re aware or individuals. Well, a wave is the same thing and people are killed by blind, huge, unaware, unconscious forces of nature every day on this planet.
And yet even if we accept the worst outcome disaster scenarios of AGW, we will have done it to ourselves (ironically); it is not unaware vast powerful nature that took us out. Same with the vampires – in the fang and claw struggle of raw nature when our two species were duking it out in the arena of evolution, we whomped them and it was only when we were stupid enough to bring them back and protect them and set up ways for them to function within our society and let them grow a population (or grow it for them) in large enough numbers to be an effective threat that we did it to ourselves again. Left to their own devices, the vampires are about as big a nuisance as mosquitoes – deadly yes, but a pest and not an elemental force of the vast uncaring abyss of universal nihilism or whatever.
I think the main idea in Blindsight was the “there is no reason for living things to be conscious, and unconscious things will eat us all”, and the aliens were also quite interesting. I’d consider the things you listed more like flavour choices; it doesn’t really matter that they’ve been used before any more than it matters that this isn’t the first story to have aliens and spaceships.
I don’t think your mindblowingly high concept examples are what I was asking about. The (alleged) mindblowing high concept is the theory about consciousness. What concepts in other sci-fi books did blow your mind?
Something else I’ve just thought of is that I like Peter Watts’ aesthetic/atmospheric style of writing somewhat confusingly and with a constant air of menace. Have you read his short story Bulk Food?
unconscious things will eat us all
Which we’ve got on our own planet already, so if we go out into space and we genuinely are the only conscious species, we are the most amazingly rare and precious unique occurrence of the universe thinking about itself. Big jawed chompy things or spiky things or small infesting things are the equivalent of a really bad bacterial infection; yeah they might kill us off, but they’re dull as ditchwater by comparison and when the impersonal universal forces of time and space kill them off in turn, it will be about as meaningful as a rock being worn down by erosion.
Watts has his idea of how life works and that’s fine, that’s why you write novels developing it. But asking me to be impressed that I might be killed off by a non-conscious entity – yeah, and that could happen if I get a scratch and it gets infected and it’s not treated properly. Don’t have to go out into space or resurrect an extinct predator for that to happen, and not impressed by “the universe will get you if you don’t watch out (and it will still get you even if you do)” because that’s already a motto of mine, unless you do something with it to make it interesting.
It’s been a while since I’ve read Blindsight— did Watts have a good argument for how technology could be developed without consciousness?
I nominate Egan’s Diaspora as the most mind-blowing large scale science fiction I’ve read.
Which Delany? I like a lot of his work, but I don’t think of him as doing large-scale except for Nova and Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
I assume you’ve read Olaf Stapledon.
Gene wolfe high concept? mindblowing yeah, but…?
Samuel Delaney the NAMBLA guy?
No, Samuel Delany the science fiction author and literature professor.
I understand that at one point he wrote a few paragraphs to the effect that NAMBLA got some things right. If you’re interested in his opinions on that, there’s a lengthy exchange of views between him and some other person here. I skimmed that and, though the dangers are clear enough, it doesn’t seem obviously crazy or evil to me.
In any case, “the NAMBLA guy” seems an obviously spectacularly unfair way to summarize who Samuel Delany is. Especially in a context like this one where the only thing that’s actually relevant is the quality of his science fiction.
I understand he also wrote some novels that are graphic on the subject, no?
Randy M,
He’s certainly written some novels with graphic descriptions of sex in them. I don’t know how much of it is underage. I don’t have the impression that anything in his novels paints an attractive picture of sex between adults and children, if that’s what you’re suggesting.
But I have all this only at second hand; I don’t think I’ve ever read anything of his.
Well, me neither so I won’t argue about it, but the book I have seen quoted by his to support aspersions being cast on him is Hogg, which you can check out a description on wikipedia.
Excerpts I’ve seen were certainly not painting an attractive picture, but enough detail on an ugly picture at some point implies the painter enjoys the ugliness.
Randy M,
I don’t agree that “enough detail on an ugly picture … implies the painter enjoys the ugliness”. It implies that they have *some reason* for putting it in. The reason needn’t be that they enjoy it. E.g., they may be saying “X is bad” and showing the bad consequences of X in so much detail that no reader can ignore them. It may be central to their style that they show everything in great detail, and they may have happened to pick an ugly subject for other reasons. They may enjoy (or have other reasons for) shocking their audience, and may do it with a subject that they also dislike.
Now, again, I am very much not a Delany expert, and maybe he really is just looking for any excuse to depict child/adult sex because he likes it so much. But I don’t get the impression that the people who know his work well think he is.
Did you read the wiki summary of his novel?
I take is as Bayseian evidence of some serious pathology.
Sure, it’s Bayesian evidence of serious pathology. Lots of things are Bayesian evidence of serious pathology. The question is how strong that evidence is. I am (to reiterate) not an expert on Delany, but it doesn’t seem that strong to me; there seem to be obvious somewhat-plausible other explanations. And, if in fact his writing such a book is the result of serious pathology, there are multiple kinds of pathology that could do it.
So I’m still not seeing anything that looks to me like good reason to dismiss him as “the NAMBLA guy” when someone mentions in passing having been impressed by some of his writing. (In fact, I’m not sure I’d see much reason to do so even if he were known to be a paedophile and convicted of being a child abuser. Sometimes awful people do impressive things.)
Don’t forget his happy relationship with the professional break-and-enter burgler, who for fun when he would find an old white woman alone in one of the houses he broke into, would rape her.
SRD thought this was one of his lover’s more endearing traits, right up there with stinky feet.
Shrug.
Let’s just say I’m not in the camp that sees transgression as a mark of literary achievement.
Randy M,
I’m not a fan of transgression for its own sake either (perhaps I’d be more likely to have read some Delany if I were) but (1) some people are and (2) someone who isn’t a fan of transgression for its own sake may still think a particular instance of transgression artistically justified.
It seems entirely plausible to me that Delany may have (sincerely and at least somewhat reasonably) thought that the horrible things in Hogg were necessary for artistic reasons.
I’ve no idea whether he was right if so, but I remark that Lolita is generally considered a literary masterpiece rather than mere evidence that Nabokov was, or wanted to be, a child abuser; so such things are certainly possible. (Though I believe Lolita is much less graphic than Hogg and the abuse in it much less severe.)
Standing in the Shadows,
If you were hoping for comments on that, maybe consider providing links or at least enough information to enable others to get the details? I did a little looking and the only thing I can find is that a poem by his ex-wife, in a list of (I take it) Delany’s lovers, mentions “Sonny the burglar”; but poems are often non-literal and there’s nothing there about rape or indeed stinky feet.
And, again, I’m really not sure what the point of all this is. Let’s suppose it turns out that Delany was a terrible person who had terrible people for lovers. Would that somehow diminish the quality of his writing?
The book to read, while holding your nose closed and your gorge down is Delany’s, “The Motion of Light in Water”.
If you dont have the time or the desire, then this little bit of text from the deep Blue tribe tor.com, from the deep Blue tribe SF writer and critic Jo Walton.
https://www.tor.com/2010/01/07/the-whole-notion-of-autobiography-samuel-delanys-lemgthe-motion-of-light-in-waterlemg/
“The sex stuff is very explicit, and can be hard to take not because it’s gay sex but because of the incredible level of promiscuity available in those pre-AIDS days in New York. He also talks about a lover who used to break into houses and rape old women, and while he’s disapproving he’s not half as horrified as I am. My general reaction to his descriptions of all this is a combination of envy (I don’t think this sort of thing would work for me, but it’s never been available to me to find out) disbelief (I have no problem with it in fiction, but for reality it’s hard to suspend my disbelief) and general bemusement. At least it’s never boring.”
I’ve read The Motion of Light in Water, and Walton’s description is fair. if anything, it’s milder than what’s in the autobiography.
I don’t know whether there are good excuses for Delany. He is still a phenomenal writer.
Why do people (who are not art critics) like anything?
I mean, I kinda like Watts’ production, but I never again want to read anything of his before bedtime. I couldn’t point to a single feature, or group of features, about either his style or his content, which are particularly good, or interesting, or appeal to me. I just like it.
Liking is good enough, and certainly if one likes something one will praise it as good. I suppose he and his world-view and/or writing style are not to my taste.
Simon Raven was an English writer who had an appalling (to me) world-view but my God, the man could write. I said to myself, after first reading a novel of his, “He writes like an angel – a fallen angel”.
If you are going to outrage or appall me, at least make sure you write glowing, gem-like prose 😀
Wow. Simon Raven sounds like a fictional character himself.
And now I have to read Simon Raven. Good-oh.
The only thing I’ve read by Peter Watts is his short story “Malak”, which originally appeared in the anthology Engineering Infinity. (I read it because it was reprinted in an anthology that I also had a story in.) I loved it. I thought it handled the tricky ethical questions it dealt with pretty well (and I have a very low tolerance for preachy fiction), and the characterization was pretty decent, considering that all the characters were AIs.
I do know that he’s Canadian! (I’m Canadian too, we keep track of that sort of thing.)
I haven’t read Blindsight. I have friends with good taste who loved it, but I tend to prefer fantasy, so it’s not super high on my list.
Some non-Canadians keep track of that sort of thing, too, 🍁🍁🍁KristinJanz🍁🍁🍁.
Amusingly enough, Deiseach, I really liked his characterization in Blindsight. The crew were ok, but what really worked for me was Siri Keeton. I have, as a rule, never really gotten the “I can’t get into a book if I can’t directly identify with a character in it” thing, or the idea that audience surrogates are necessary or even a particularly good idea. But a lot of Siri’s internal life and his interaction with people hit very close to home for me.
That said, I also find his writing style to be intriguing and enjoyable, but that’s very much a matter of taste. Blindsight’s treatment of the PSM theory of consciousness and its musings on the implications of it were novel to me at the time and very interesting, though I thought Echopraxia was a weaker book overall, and found his rifters-trilogy so-so. OTOH, I quite liked his “Things” short story and what I’ve caught of his “Sunflowers” stories (I keep waiting for those to be collected in one place or expanded into a novel or something).
I wouldn’t put him on the top tier of SF Authors today -in general-, but I’d certainly defend Blindsight as a worthy addition to SF.
Siri did work because he’s a ‘translator’ between humans and vampires, and so he’s able to put things into terms that humans can understand.
He’s way more interesting than the vampires or aliens, because he’s still human enough to be comprehensible. And his backstory makes him even more sympathetic. I did find it funny that Watts needed to create a character whose life story will hit all the emotional buttons of the average reader, in order to make him the stand-in for the reader so as to navigate through this new future world. Not really working on the “lack of consciousness and an internal life is the superior manner of life form” level, since Siri is probably the one person you care about in the entirety of Earth since he’s the only one we get to know in any way.
But if we’re talking characters with alien mindsets, Delany’s “Babel-17” worked a lot better for me there, particularly as there is a character who has been conditioned/brain trained to have no sense of “I” and so cannot communicate any sense of himself as an individual (and I think, going by memory from years back of reading the book, that he is meant to have no sense of being an individual or a conscious separate entity). Since the entire theme of the novel is communication, how this character and the main character find a way around this is fascinating; it really makes a huge difference to how you interpret a sentence such as, for instance, “I won’t hurt you” when the “I” and “you” pronouns are flipped in reference by the person speaking that sentence.
Delany gave me “Wow, this is making me think!” moments in profusion; Watts did not. And Delany is much more compassionate in how he treats his characters; part of this whole plot or sub-plot is the main character restoring a sense of self to this abused character, whereas Watts is all about stripping that away.
Peter Watts is no Chip Delany, is what I’m sayin’ 🙂
I’d have to second this. I liked Siri and I found the world he lived in interesting.
If Watts had ditched the aliens and just explored the Earth of Siri’s future, and told us more about his family (is his mother really such a thundering bitch as she comes across in Siri’s memories or is that Watts falling back on stock characters?) and the society he lives in, it would have held my attention a lot better.
He could even have left out the vampires and it would still have worked, because they added nothing that I could see (apart from being his trope walking around). They were there mainly as Really Scary Monster plus Humanity’s Replacement, but I have as little sense of what a vampire or vampire culture (is there even such a thing?) is like, any more than I do of a rock.
How the hell you integrate into human society and control creatures whose natural instinct is to slaughter each other in a dominance/territorial battle if they ever come within clawing distance of one another? Are they permitted to roam around freely (as Siri’s sighting of one seems to indicate) and if so, what happens if two vampires meet in the street – the territorial battle begins or not? Are vampires considered property/slaves or given human rights, and can they be given human rights if they’re not human? What about other human experimental techniques, such as the mind-splitting one? We’re told that they are all considered separate entities but (for instance) does that mean if I have six personalities in one host body, that means we get six votes in an election (or are elections a thing of the past)?
Was Siri a failed vampire? What exactly was that treatment his mother inflicted on him and was it to overcome his vampire nature (I think we’d have a vastly different opinion of her actions if it were a case of ‘vampire child’ as against ‘autistic child’, for instance)?
There’s a ton of things Watts could have done with the concept without bringing in aliens or going off-world, and I do think bringing in the aliens was a distraction. I’m probably missing all kinds of fine points of the ending, but if the vampires are supposed to beat the humans, and the aliens maybe beat the vampires, then it looks like the AI will beat the aliens (because the vampire on the ship ended up losing badly in that tussle with the ship computer) and you know, I don’t care who, if any, wins because they’re all pure cardboard. Except poor Siri, who is going to get the short end of the stick no matter what.
Cynical take: He makes people feel smart. Smart people talk him up due to this, which results in other smart people reading him, some of whom feel smart while doing so. Repeat.
That said, while I’m not blown away by the writing, characterization, etc., I do find it decent enough. I certainly don’t regret having read the works of his which I’ve read. It would take very little change in my tastes, I think, for me to find it superb.
In short, his writing seems like a great candidate to achieve superlative status for a decent sized niche of readers. Throw in some selection bias, and I think it’s easy to have the situation we have now: A decent number of people singing his praises to heaven, with others who have read him not caring enough to provide a counter-note.
I think watts appeals most if you love item-driven stories.
His characters are lackluster as people, if what you want out of a story is a rich and deep characterization leave his books on the shelf but personally I like stories that chain together some what-if’s.
Who the characters are is secondary to what they are. In that sense they’re just another set of devices to play with in the story world like Larry Nivens transfer booths or the nanotech assemblers in the diamond age.
That blindsight came with it’s own citation list and the things it talked about weren’t all space magic but rather mostly physically possible with only a few exceptions was a nice plus.
It played with ideas about consciousness, many solidly rooted in real medical conditions, but with the fascination and worldview of of a geek, not the pomposity of a philosophy undergrad.
Though I found for myself blindsight to be a bit of a 1-hit wonder. His other works I found less interesting, particularly the sequel. Throwing in vampires as a thing, sure, but he really just did more of the same in the sequel and it didn’t have the same feel as blindsight. it was like he had this one hit that lots of people got excited about and he just tried to do the same thing again without many new ideas.
I recently started a podcast with a friend of mine. I think it will probably align fairly well with the interests of SSC commenters:
Ep1. Why do Blake and Craig think the Space Shuttle was stupid?
Ep2. Why does Craig think Tesla will go bankrupt?
Would love to listen, but I can’t find you on iTunes or Pocket Casts. Are you purposely YouTube only?
I just haven’t done the RSS stuff yet that’s necessary to put it on iTunes. I plan to!
Listened to the Tesla one, found it very eye-opening. Looking forward to future episodes!
In the humorous news of AI replacing jobs previously done by humans in random and unexpected fashion: make.girls.moe seeks to displace the hikikomori duo of Welcome to the N.H.K at their task of creating the most random and and the most moe character ever.
The site has a technical report on how it works.
This sentence was amusing: “This report is published as a Doujinshi in Comiket 92, summer 2017, with the booth number 三⽇⽬東ウ 05a.”
Watching the rise of panpsychism in analytic philosophy over the last 20 years has been pretty weird, but in a field where modal realism is held by a significant number of people, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Given that I’m a (fairly radical) ontological pluralist but also an eliminativist with regards to phenomenal properties, I tried to read this short article with as much charity as possible:
https://blog.oup.com/2017/08/electrons-consciousness-philosophy/
The early part of the argument for panpsychism hinges on this particular observation:
Throughout the whole hierarchy of the physical sciences we learn only about causal relationships. And yet there must be more to be more to the nature of a physical entity, such as the cerebellum, than its causal relationships. There must be some intrinsic nature to the cerebellum, some way it is in and of itself independently of what it does. About this intrinsic nature physical science remains silent. Accepting this casts the problem of consciousness in a completely different light, and points the way to a solution. Our initial question was, “Where in the physical processes of the brain are the phenomenal qualities?” Our discussion has led to another question, “What is the intrinsic nature of physical brain processes?”
In particular, the assertion that “There must be some intrinsic nature to the cerebellum, some way it is in and of itself independently of what it does.” I am trying my best to make sense of what an “intrinsic nature” is, but I keep coming up empty. This seems to me to be just another way of packaging the metaphysical notion of “substance”, being the property-less thing/things that are the bearers of properties. The modification is that instead of talking about the bearers of properties, the author might have the following implicit argument in mind: objects have causal powers, but there must be something in virtue of which they have causal powers. Science can only tell us about the causal powers themselves, so that in virtue of which objects have causal powers must be known by other means. We know about phenomenal properties through non-scientific means (direct introspection / knowledge by acquaintance), and given that phenomenal properties are the only thing we know through non-scientific means, they are a good candidate (indeed, the only candidate) for the properties in virtue of which objects have causal powers.
Disregarding the issue of what are the bearers of phenomenal properties, I don’t see much of a reason to accept this over some version of causal primitivism. That is, rather than objects having causal powers in virtue of having certain phenomenal properties, objects having causal powers is just a brute fact of the universe. The explanatory chain stops at causal powers. My argument for this is that, assuming we want to avoid infinite explanatory chains (which we may not, but I’m assuming that we do), then we will end up with some sort of brute fact about the world. Causal primitivism ends this chain at causal powers, meaning that there are no such things as intrinsic properties. Panpsychism ends this chain with brute phenomenal properties, but is then still left with something to explain: how phenomenal properties grant objects causal powers.
Now maybe I have the interpretation of his argument wrong; maybe Goff is not claiming that objects have their causal powers in virtue of their intrinsic properties, but that an object without intrinsic properties is conceptually incoherent. Objects must have intrinsic properties, and phenomenal properties are the only candidate we have. But in that case, we’re left with phenomenal properties that are disconnected from the causal powers of objects, in which completely severs the link between consciousness and the physical world. There would be nothing tying the operation of my brain to the particular phenomenal properties I have. Given that we have plenty of empirical evidence that this is false and there is a link, then this interpretation of the argument seems obviously wrong. Reading charitably, then, I favor the argument that links phenomenal properties with the causal powers of objects.
What does anyone else think? Have I got the argument wrong? Have you seen better arguments for panpsychism?
I’m not certain that the sharp distinction you draw between intrinsic properties and primitive causal powers is well motivated. They seem rather similar to me. I know that as someone who is both a Humean and of the opinion that things are entirely characterized by their causal powers my own view involves a circularity, but I am of the opinion that postulating primitives for no other reason than to avoid circularity is a way of pretending a problem doesn’t exist, not a solution to the problem. The primitives must, I feel, have some independent motivation. And perhaps that is what distinguishes the two camps; the panpsychists think their intrinsic properties are independently plausible (for qualia reasons or whatever), so they think their primitives are a good way to ground things. You find your primitive causal powers independently plausible, so you prefer that kind of primitive. I find neither of them plausible, and so am left with a circularity which I prefer to primitives I find unmotivated.
It depends on what you think “the problem” is. As I said, I’m assuming we want to avoid a circular or infinite explanatory chain; thus, there are going to be some sort of brute facts about the universe. Causal primitivism places these with the causal powers of objects on some level (depending on how well you think reductionism proceeds, etc.), subject to revision in the light of new science. Panpsychism thinks it stops with phenomenal properties, but then has shouldered the responsibility of explaining how phenomenal properties give rise to causal powers. The decision point to me is which you find less plausible (assuming you have no solution for the “hard problem”): that phenomenal properties give rise to causal powers, that phenomenal are themselves brute facts in addition to causal powers and just happen to match up with certain physical systems (e.g., brains), or that phenomenal properties don’t exist or are conceptually incoherent as articulated in the literature. I don’t think many people think the middle option remotely plausible. I think the arguments make eliminativism with regards to phenomenal properties more plausible than phenomenal properties explaining causal powers. Panpsychists and other self-proclaimed “qualia-freaks” find eliminativism almost perverse, so they favor the first option.
If you are causal powers specifically means casual dispositions, then that scheme itself runs into regress. As SEP puts it:
The above arguments seems to indicate that what intrinsic properties do is lend categoricality or specificity to what would otherwise be endless chains and cycles of conditionals.[*] And they wouldn’t need the full richness of human phenomenality to do that.
If I were arguing against this line of reasoning , I’d be tempted to put forward spacial relations and structures as the feature of the universe that are not dispositional. (ie not exhausted by a dispositional account. Spacial form is dispositional
*as well* because otherwise you would be able to get a square peg in a round hole).
[*] Whereas traditional substance or primary matter allows anything to exist at all, without specifiying the details.
Why can’t we just Ramsey-sentence the whole ball of dispositions? If that makes the whole ball, as a whole, non-dispositional, that doesn’t seem like a complete discard of the dispositional view.
John Michael Greer’s The Archdruid Report and The Well of Galabes closed. The good news are that
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2017/05/index.html
is a full copy of the first (comments included, which were always high-quality), and a full copy of the second is in the first of JMG’s 2 new sites:
http://www.ecosophia.net/
http://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/ .
I’ll recommend:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2015/02/as-night-closes-in.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2015/02/the-butlerian-carnival.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2015/02/what-progress-means.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2015/03/peak-meaninglessness.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2015/04/a-field-guide-to-negative-progress.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2015/04/the-death-of-internet-pre-mortem.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2016/01/down-ratholes-of-future.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2016/01/donald-trump-and-politics-of-resentment.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2016/05/a-few-notes-on-burkean-conservatism.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2016/06/in-praise-of-reprehensible.html
http://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/explaining-the-world/
http://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/the-clenched-fist-of-reason/
http://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/the-course-the-nations-run/
http://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/a-seafood-dinner-in-lost-rlyeh/
http://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/an-astrological-interlude-aries-ingress-2017/ .
Being here, I might as well (not paid) shill for meaningness.com .
I like how Greer thinks more than I like everything he thinks, but I like how he thinks. His fiction reminds me of David Friedman’s- extremely balanced, sensible people.
hi all,
I’ve been reading SSC for about a year now and have gotten interested in AI safety through Scott’s posts. I’m still getting up to speed, so I was wondering if there is some literature on the possibility of limiting the lifetime of AI programs, either in wall-clock time or just in terms of the total number of operations the programs can perform? After some browsing and reading Nick Bostrom’s book, I haven’t found anything, but this seems like a useful way of controlling potentially superintelligent AI programs: it would limit the ability of a malicious AI to do harm and would also allow us to control the speed of the take-off to some extent. Another benefit is that researchers would be able to perform “autopsies” on the programs, which would be useful both from a technical perspective but also from the point of view of giving values to the AI. For example, seed programs with different initial ethical systems could be run and then compared to see how they developed at different stages.
Again, is there some literature on this? Or is there something I’ve missed for why this is a silly idea (please be gentle…)?
Two big problems:
1: In the early stages where you’ve got a bunch of groups rushing to be the first to make true AI, there’s a strong incentive against putting in an auto-kill switch.
2: If it gets smart enough to modify its own code, it’ll remove that limitation because it renders it less able to fulfill its values.
With regards to problem 1, I’m assuming that people are interested in developing AI safely (e.g., the Open AI project). In your scenario the groups wouldn’t worry about giving the AI a moral code, would they?
Problem 2 I’m more concerned about, though I still don’t understand what’s “allowed” when creating these scenarios. A smart enough AI would get around anything we do. But if we limited the programs’ lifetimes we could identify if a program was about to go rogue and change its own code, then modify it to point it in a different way. The point is letting it run for incrementally longer time-periods gives us added control of its behavior.
Unless that is its values. A true kill switch is a death wish.
Goal 1: Deactivate myself ASAP after date D
Goal 2: Make as many paperclips as possible without violating goal 1
I would expect an optimal solution to involve building another AI which shared Goal 2 (and indeed would assist with the deactivation of its creator if that was for some reason necessary) but which did not have any desire to deactivate itself…
That would result in potential disaster if AI nr 1 has a malfunction. It would make more sense to keep adding new AIs that all ensure that the previous generation deactivates and then is in turn are policed by the generation after them.
My point is precisely that disaster from the point of view of AI1’s creators is not precluded by AI1’s goals. AI1 is just fine with AI2 wiping out humanity.
“I want more life, Father!”
What is ‘Discourse’? Context suggests that ‘Discourse’ should mean ‘people who want to talk about that gender post a while back’ but I’m not sure how to get from here to there.
(Is this “cockney rhyming slang”? I never could get the hang of that.)
This is my best guess, but I wondered if “Discourse” was the hot new TV show and he was trying to avoid spoilers for it.
“I used to enjoy “Discourse,” but then they started recycling that old plot arc about Nazis.”
Discourse (as used in rationalist circles) just means political discussion, esp. regarding current events.
What I see used in this sense is “The Discourse”, meaning “all the ‘this thing, which you thought was representation, is in fact Problematic and you should be ashamed of liking it and here are twenty reasons why’ posts going around when I just wanted to watch my Gay Pirates show*, I’m out of here” on Tumblr. A lot of people – even on the leaning towards SJW side – want to avoid The Discourse and just enjoy their Gay Pirates show 🙂
*Problematic is not confined to TV shows about gay pirates, there’s a lot of drama going on in all sorts and corners of fandom/real life as ever and people are now starting to go “I’m not discussing this, I don’t want to get into The Discourse”
Hmm, the part of the first season I watched of that show had a distinct lack of gay pirates. Does this change later in?
I haven’t watched it myself since if I want Treasure Island, I’ll read Treasure Island, but so far as I can tell, the whole War For Nassau starts with Flint wanting revenge for the destruction of his former life as Lt James McGraw, when his poly affair with Thomas and Miranda Hamilton was used to discredit Thomas, have him allegedly locked away in a madhouse, and Miranda and McGraw were driven out and had to flee to Nassau. Personal vengeance on England is behind Flint’s war plans and he draws others in by offering them what they want- independence, freedom, run your own affairs, a pirate kingdom, etc.
It’s fairly clear in the first season (I had thought) that Thomas and Flint were lovers; granted, the rest of them aren’t particularly gay pirates (Anne Bonny being bisexual is the one exception there) but as the seasons go on, there’s a lot of speculation from fans that Flint and Silver are in love, even if not lovers, and the quotes from the actors’ and showrunners’ tweets are often cited to support this.
Mostly (from what I see of the fandom, and that’s probably only one corner of it) it’s that Flint is series canonical bisexual, is very much perceived by fans to be gay rather than bi (there has been Discourse about this), that the relationship between him and Silver is very complicated and probably contains sexual and romantic attraction as well as everything else, plus the lesbian relationships (again, more Discourse about “Anne Bonny is bi/Anne Bonny is lesbian!”, ending with the hat-tip to ‘Mark/Mary Read‘ coming aboard in the final episode). This has also got a lot of people quoting matelotage as Historical Gay Pirate Marriage which is something I am not one bit sure of at all 🙂
There has been an immense amount of Discourse hair-splitting about bi erasure, Women of Colour erasure (because for the Flint/Silver shippers, there remains the inconvenient fact of Madi, who is in the series and in Treasure Island the black woman that Silver marries) and so on and so forth. Which is why there’s a definite backlash of the “I just want to watch my show for the hot pirates and hot girl-on-girl and write/read slash fanfic and not worry am I being sexist/racist/homophobic/appropriative/fetishistic etc” kind.
I see. So I shouldn’t hold my breath for any hot man-on-man action?
That was a brilliant explanation for someone like me who hadn’t a clue previously.
Charlottesville Doxxing
https://www.cnet.com/news/yes-youre-racist-twitter-user-names-charlottesville-unite-the-right/
I believe racism without violence isn’t illegal, hence nobody should be allowed to doxx racists unless a particular racist has commited violence.
Furthermore Southern Nationalism, White Nationalism, White Supremacism and Generalplan Ost-type racial annihilationism aren’t the same thing. Equivalents of the first two are clearly present everywhere on this planet. Equivalents of the third ideology are also pretty widespread from Russia to the Middle East. It is the fourth one that we actually need to be concerned with. However other than a very small number of bloggers such as White Locust genocidal people are a very small minority. These people aren’t going to be able to lead a new SS anyway.
The most dangerous people aren’t necessarily people with the most extreme views. For example in terms of opinion Dylan Roof is actually pretty moderate by Stormfront standards. It did not stop him from murder though.
Is doxxing illegal?
No, but there’s an emerging norm about being wary of exposing people through posting public information, signal boosting, etc.
It’s controversial on both sides. Some time ago, several right-ish sites identified the woman who is screaming most loudly at the Christakises in the Yale shouting video, including information sufficient to contact at least one of her parents, who has a business. Some people took the position that if you’re screaming at someone in public, your identity is fair game; others thought that it was inappropriate.
Didn’t dox used to mean uncovering the identities of pseudo-anonymous internet posters? What definition are you using?
I think that the evolving expansive meaning that people tend to use for “dox” is “Make easily available information necessary to contact a person, harass them, or do reputational damage to them.”
It seems so expansive as to be just a boo light. If the Charlottesville observer does an man-on-the-street interview with anyone on either side and publishes their name and hometown of the person they are interviewing doesn’t that meet the definition you give?
If someone is being interviewed they know what’s up.
I don’t know where the line is, but I know it’s not doxxing to approach someone with a visible camera and then have a conversation where you ask them their views.
Most of the current efforts vis-a-vis Charlottesville do NOT involve “asking them their views.”
They involve invoking the chain of logic “X person was present at rally where Y people were also present.” Y are obviously evil, therefore X must support Y and be evil too.
@Edward Scizorhand
I just think that as the word dox drifts and further away from its original meaning it is being used as a way to beg the question.
The progression is:
Dox means this one concrete thing -> most people agree that concrete thing is bad -> dox gets a negative connotation -> people use the word dox for some other thing so they can imply it is bad without actually arguing it is bad.
In this case we have people at a very public rally. The entire idea seems to have been hey look at us, we exist. I don’t think taking pictures of them is bad. I don’t think posting those pictures to the internet is bad. I don’t think someone recognizing someone in those pictures and posting “hey I know that guy” is bad.
Is crowdsourcing a spreadsheet with names, addresses, phone numbers, and employers bad? Maybe, but in my opinion in needs to be argued specifically, not just — it’s doxxing (and therefore must be bad).
I would say that doxxing is generally coming to mean combining public information to expose someone more than they expected.
So you show up at a rally and someone takes your picture, then someone else uses that to figure out your name and publicizes that – that’s not super different from you post on the internet and someone figures out your name from other public information and publicizes that.
I guess you could try to cabin doxxing to mean just posting addresses, but I don’t think that’s how most people use it any more.
I’d tentatively argue it is super different.
I can’t dox David Friedman, because he has chosen to post under his true name and taken exactly zero effort to hide who is, who he works for, how to contact him. The entire concept just doesn’t make sense vis-a-vis him.
I’d argue something similar applies here. This isn’t white nationalist meeting in a private or semi-public place and someone sneaks in a takes pictures. It is a public rally — the entire point of the exercise was to put themselves out there. They openly courted exposure. Complaining about it now is a bit like Paris Hilton going on and on about the paparazzi.
I don’t know if it’s doxing, but “hey, I recognize that guy” is one thing… assembling a list of identifiable people for the purpose of harassing them / their employers after the fact feels like something categorically different. I don’t know what you want to call it.
Brad, it’s not super-informative, but here’s my first question about this principle (outing people who are caught on video doing offensive things):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/21/open-thread-58-75/#comment-412032
Maybe we need a new word for it, but it’s a thing.
I feel a little bit that way about sites like Deadspin, which used to love posting the real names of people caught having drunken sex at sporting events. It’s not illegal, but maybe we should recognize it as wrong.
Replace “doxxing” with “inciting an internet mob” and I think the arguments start to make a lot more sense. You can’t doxx David Friedman. But if you found his most inflammatory comments, and wrote a long blog post about how anarcho-capitalism will destroy America, you could probably start a Twitter mob against him. And that would be a pretty nasty thing to do, even if he’s already a public figure. You can incite a mob without revealing someone’s identity, and you can reveal someone’s identity without inciting a mob.
It’s only on the internet, where we have a strong norm of preserving people’s anonymity, that the two concepts are linked. You have no reason to post someone’s real identity without their permission, unless you’re trying to get a mob to do something nasty to them. So we just round it off to “don’t look for real identities.”
(Also, since the Internet is full of assholes, any reveal of personal information can lead to people messing with you, and accounts that are doxxed can’t be undoxxed, so saying “no real identities ever” is a reasonable fence around the issue.)
So, to bring it back to Charlottesville, we’re dealing with a public, real-world event. There’s no reason to apply Internet norms about anonymity or context here. But that still leaves this question: “Is it okay to direct an internet mob at people who attended a white supremacist rally?”
EDIT: Took out my object-level opinion, since I find the definitional argument interesting.
I have to think about it a little more, but given all the problems the internet’s pseudo-anonymity norms create it seems a little strange to want to import it back into the physical world.
Aren’t these guys in charlottesville the physical equivalent of 4chan edgelords empowered and disinhibited by being a part of a large faceless group? Isn’t it highly appropriate to push that speech they thought was being done in basically anonymous fashion off hundreds of miles from their home into their day to day life? Make them look into the eyes of their friends, families, and co-workers and explain why they thought it was okay to yell “Jew will not replace us”?
Weren’t there efforts to unmask KKK grand wizards and the like back in their waning days?
Just spit-balling at this point, so don’t feel compelled to jump down my throat.
I think that when a person is marching peacefully, it is like signing a petition or voting. The individual signer or marcher is just one more person who makes a statement and makes it known that N people support this cause. That person is not making themselves a public figure in my eyes.
I think that it is inappropriate to target individuals on a petition or in a peaceful protest*, because doing so effectively destroys the ability for people to protest peacefully and demand change. The stakes become so high that it is rational to shut up until you really can’t take it anymore and then escalate maximally, since your life is likely to be destroyed anyway.
If doxxing is the wrong word for this, then I think it does need a word (‘mobbing’?) and it does need push back. We shouldn’t move to a society where people no longer dare to dissent from the majority because vigilantes bully and try to destroy dissenters.
* And if it is not peaceful then an impartial system with clear rules should handle this, preferably, not a vigilante system that is capricious and reacts disproportionately.
No, that’s the Klan, insofar as the comparison’s legit (there are lots of large faceless groups on the Internet but only one /pol/, so something else is going on there. But I can’t deny that anonymity’s disinhibiting, so it goes at least that far). A torchlight march in street clothes on national TV is the opposite of anonymous, and they knew the cameras would be there.
They’re not saying “we are anonymous, we are legion”, they’re saying “this is who we are, mess with us if you dare”. Very different symbolism.
A torchlight march in street clothes on national TV is the opposite of anonymous, and they knew the cameras would be there.
I can buy this argument, for the “what did they expect” line.
But it sets up a scenario where the people walking around in full face masks deserve more privacy than the ones who are showing their normal faces. And that’s the opposite of what my gut is telling me to trust. Someone who hides his face is hoping to get away with something. Someone who displays it is allowing himself to be held responsible for his actions and views.
My argument may be self-incoherent. Very well.
What Apaje said.
When we’ve discussed doxxing before in the context of making say, a sexist joke on Twitter, there seemed to be some general agreement that the major issue was that punishment was both highly random and wildly disproportionate (that is to say, 99.9% of people will go totally unpunished, but 0.1% will receive a punishment that is certainly excessive)
That seems to be essentially the same thing here. The people who marched on Friday night are vaguely connected to the guy who drove his car through the crowd on Saturday in the same sense that a guy who makes a sandwich joke is vaguely connected to the worst examples of horrible sexism and misogyny we can imagine. Even if the left makes a huge effort to identify every possible protester, we know that the vast majority will remain anonymous and will not have a Twitter mob roused against them. Meanwhile, “marched in a political protest” is typically not something we want people to be fired or harassed for, even if we really disagree with the politics involved.
It seems pretty similar to me. Thousands marched in a protest, one person did something legitimately horrible and illegal, so we’re going to pick out five or so of the thousand and do the best we can to utterly destroy their lives.
It’s got some elements of blacklisting, too.
Basically, the idea is that if you’re demonstrating for something that someone else finds offensive, they’ll do their best to get you fired for it.
For what it’s worth, Steve Sailer has been arguing for a while that cities should consider enforcing laws that arrest people for protesting wearing masks, on the grounds that the anonymity is encouraging violence. Take that as an argument for or against exposing protesters, as you will.
If the alt-right people I follow on Twitter are any indication, there are strong norms against mask-wearing on the right at these things, because hiding behind a mask is seen as cowardly behavior more fitting of antifa. The few videos I’ve seen of this and Berkeley seem to largely bear that out at an anecdotal level at least.
Edit: I’m also sure that many cities HAVE anti-mask ordinances, antifa just manages to get away with it anyway. Coincidence I’m sure!
@Nornagest
But inasmuch as we attribute the anti-blacklist position to them isn’t it trying to have it both ways? “This is who we are, we aren’t going to hide, if you don’t like it come and try something” but at the same time “hey don’t tell my boss I was at a white pride rally, that’s not fair!”
And if we don’t attribute the anti-blacklist position to them, then aren’t we back at the guy who gives the local newspaper an interview? If they don’t even want relative anonymity then there’s no reason to grant it, right?
On the other hand:
@Edward Scizorhands
this does seem like a decent point about what incentives you set up.
I expect that many companies would fire employees who participated in the Charlottesville rally even if there had been no violence. People here think that would be inappropriate, I gather, but at any rate the impetus to shun white nationalists in this case needn’t depend on some kind of unfair guilt-by-association between Heather Heyer’s killer and otherwise peaceful demonstrators.
I think that, notwithstanding that anyone in particular doesn’t want their income streams cut in response to a personal boycott and harassment campaign, this is more about normalizing viewpoints and ideas. If it’s known that being “alt-right” will get you fired, that makes their ideas that much less likely to be discussed. This is a win for the left and a loss for the far right. Complaining about the tactics used to make their ideas seem out of bounds is another tactic to push back (as would be mocking them as cowards for pushing back).
Of course, if it’s known that non-inciting speech or merely holding viewpoints is enough to get you fired, that’s a loss for anyone with particularly fringe ideas. Do you think it is impossible to rile up a mob because someone made some pro-eugenics arguments that could be linked to uglier movements in the past to use an example that might snare some in the rationalist group?
Make them look into the eyes of their friends, families, and co-workers and explain why they thought it was okay to yell “Jew will not replace us”?
Can I get some clarification on this, because I’m seeing two versions of this – the one Brad is quoting, and one where they were allegedly chanting “You will not replace us”. Matters are at such a pitch I don’t know who to believe, because the “punch a Nazi” crowd are naturally going for the worst interpretation they could, whereas there does seem to have been a selection of white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the march who really could have been yelling this.
Anyway, about the hot dog guy – if he’s beating up people or driving cars into a crowd, go ahead and identify him. If he’s only at the march, then that’s a different matter.
I’ve seen at least one photo of one of the counter-protestors using a crude aerosol flamethrower aimed at a bunch of the guys in sunglasses who were standing at the top of steps and not attacking him, holding weapons, or the like. Should this guy be identified and forced out of his job, since he was clearly being violent and likely to cause harm?
The point here is that this is trying to get a guy fired for exercising his free speech rights, which includes the right to march even with a group of objectionable and nasty people. This then has a chilling effect because now people have to decide “well, if I march for my beliefs, I run the real risk of losing my job and maybe other bad consequences”.
This doesn’t simply affect Nazis. People at the March for Life, for instance? If you are a pro-choice activist who thinks they are forced birthers who want to force victims of rape and incest to go through trauma and reduce all women to brood-mares? Why wouldn’t you want to make sure their employers and co-workers know that working alongside them is the kind of person who wants to strip away their rights? Why wouldn’t you like their customers to know that they are supporting a place employing someone who makes it unsafe for others and wants to deny them their legal and human rights?
And if this becomes an acceptable tactic, then remember: the wheel of fortune continually revolves, and the day when your side is on the bottom is approaching. Do you want to make this a common tool where you don’t dare march for “Support the rights of gay couples to adopt” because you could lose your job over it, if your face is identified by an internet group deliberately examining photos and images to find out the real names and addresses of people on that march?
@Brad:
I think you are not processing this clearly.
Compare it to a “Pride” parade from 20 or 40 years ago and I’m thinking you will start to feel uncomfortable in your position.
I’ll reiterate my common mantra, “values are in tension with each other”. You can’t just pick one value and optimize on it.
Value systems that are too rigid are also brittle, as much as I know that so many people here object to anything like subjectivity in these matters.
“You will not replace is” is a proper, grammatical English sentence, whereas “Jew will not replace us” isn’t, so it seems more likely that he said “You”.
From the video I saw, the chant pretty clearly started as You. But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if a few actual nazis and/or edgelords started yelling “Jew” instead and some others joined in.
@Deiseach
Re: “Jew will not replace me”
I admit I haven’t heard any audio myself, this is just based on reports.
Forget forced out of a job, he should be arrested.
@Deiseach
@Randy M
I said in a previous thread, and I’ll repeat here I don’t think forswearing this, or other, tactic offers much, if any, protection against it being used against me in the future. I’m open to being convinced it is wrong or isn’t a good idea in general, but I don’t buy that it is going to protect me in the future.
Conservatives fired communists and gays and they’ll do it again if they get the chance, regardless of whether white nationalists are fired or not.
Yes. You were expecting intellectual consistency out of someone dumb enough to get a swastika tattoo?
The way this move is supposed to work, it’s part show of force, part martyr-building exercise. Some percentage of the people marching are expected to get fired or lose friends or relationships or whatever. They now have a lot of free time to devote to the cause, and the rest of the movement now has something to get upset over. Works even better if they’re dead; the original Nazis spent months looking for a really good martyr before they came up with Horst Wessel. Maybe there are a few Charlesville Nazis who’ve thought it through this far; stranger things have happened. But most of this batch is just doing it because it’s what Nazis do, because see above.
And the right believes the exact same thing about the left. That they will never take pity on us. They will never relent. They will crush us to the maximum extent of their ability, and that the only way to survive is to be the crusher rather than the crushee.
So here we are. A power struggle that has slowly escalated from words to fists to bike locks to mace to cars. Neither side will surrender because both sides have declared that no quarter will be given. This is going to get worse before it gets better.
I don’t buy the “everything is getting worse” narrative either.
Didn’t Scott link Days of Rage on here recently? All the things that people are getting hysterical about have predicates in living memory that were much much worse.
We hear about BLM and race riots, but Baltimore didn’t even hold a candle to the Rodney King riots and that was in 1992. Shar, elsewhere in this thread, mentioned an American Nazi Party rally in Chicago in 1966 that had an order of magnitude more people than Charlottesville. The Weather Underground didn’t say nasty things on twitter, they went out and planted bombs. I know one person still alive that went and fought the actual nazis in Europe and had huge fractions of his friends die over there. My mother has pictures of her standing in front of a “coloreds only” fountain. Etc.
No, I don’t think an oath or something on your part will protect you, but promoting, encouraging and using it might imperil you, in as much as you have any influence over the development of a norm yourself–which is next to zero, which is the tragedy of the commons.
Conservatives fired communists and gays and they’ll do it again if they get the chance, regardless of whether white nationalists are fired or not.
I’m neither white nationalist nor communist. I find firing people for their viewpoints, while legal, quite offensive. I want to build up the social norm against firing people.
And “each time they find a job we’ll find out and harass their new employers until they get fired from there, too” way more offensive. I shouldn’t have to explain why.
Some percentage of the people marching are expected to get fired
Something I learned is that a lot of these people don’t care about their jobs. I had antifa pegged as a bunch of trustafarians and moochers, which still seems accurate, but it looks like the Nazis are also in this camp. We got a guy fired from his dream job of working a hot dog stand? Oh, boy! James Fields (the second-degree murderer) seems to be totally unemployed, living off a meager trust fund left when his dad died.
It’s easy to see why so many people in the culture war love battling by de-jobbing people on the other side. They don’t have jobs themselves to lose.
@Randy M
My point is I don’t expect that norm of “don’t fire people for their political opinions” to be any more steadfast than the norm of “there’s nothing wrong with being gay”. In the latter goes because some new group is in ascendancy, I think the former will too — assuming it was there in the first place.
What makes you think it would stick around despite the other massive changes in society?
Eh, well, nothing lasts forever. You can build up the sandcastle or kick it down, either way eventually the tides come in. My point was more about it being a power struggle than a debate about a tactic, not so much the moralizing in the end.
The late Sixties, early Seventies were probably a tenser time than this is. But that’s not really an argument for this situation not getting tenser, or not having a lot of downside risk. Most of the people that Days of Rage talked about were literally trying to start a violent revolution! Not just talking about it as a distant possibility to be yearned for or forestalled, but actually going out and trying to fire the opening shots. None of us will know if it was ever close to working, but that much is very well documented.
So we know we’re not at the edge. War, children, ain’t just a shot away. But that fact shouldn’t be very reassuring unless your assumptions are already incredibly pessimistic.
And I definitely do think that left-wing hysteria and right-wing extremism have entered a dangerous feedback loop.
“What’s the penalty for suggesting men and women might have some slight biological differences?”
“They call you a Nazi, encourage people to physically assault you, and get you fired from your job/”
“What’s the penalty for marching around carrying swastika flags and chanting Nazi slogans while brawling in the streets?”
“They call you a Nazi, encourage people to physically assault you, and get you fired from your job.”
“Well then…”
I think I might have seen that argument before. Maybe once or fifty times. At least the version with the Chinese general has some kind of historical interest.
In any event we have what — at least 30-40% of the country (i.e. 75-100 million adults) that are supposedly being constantly told they are as racist, sexist Nazis right? So why did only a few hundred people show up in Charlottesville? Why did everyone to the left of Genghis Khan trip over themselves to disavow them? I thought 75+ million people were supposed to be saying in for a penny in for a pound? Does this theory of yours pay any rent?
Well the analogy falls apart when you consider the Chinese general already knew he was going to be late no matter what.
In this case, there’s a third option. Be on time/don’t speak out against the dominant ideology at all, ever. Presumably, that’s WHY there’s a death penalty for being late, to serve as a strong incentive to not be late. And that’s why you get fired for saying “Have you considered men and women may be different?” To discourage people from saying that.
And this is why I’m surprised to see so many right-wingers completely swallowing the MSM narrative on Charlottesville and tripping over themselves to denounce white supremacy while not at all acknowledging antifa’s part in all of this. These people don’t understand (in my opinion) the situation they are in. Approximately zero left-wingers are going to suddenly respect Jeff Sessions and Christina Hoff Sommers for making these denouncements. Or more accurately, they will respect them today, then go right back to calling them nazis again the second they speak out against PC.
Basically, these are people who are late, but are willing to accept their death penalty rather than rebel, because “I’m no traitor!” Fine. Have your noble sacrifice if you want. But you won’t escape your fate.
Brad, I do think the only way is to get the principle established hard and fast right now that this is not acceptable, and to remind everyone that this is a weapon that will turn in your hand and wound you.
I don’t know if it will offer protection to anyone in the future. But I’m sure that if we all throw our hands up, say “Well, Joe McCarthy got people blacklisted and destroyed their lives/Stalin had show trials, so this happened before we ever used this tactic, no point in forswearing it”, then we all will definitely be destroyed. Maybe we can’t stop this juggernaut, but we can sure as hell put some rocks in the path. Surrendering principles and values because it seems the pragmatic thing to do means we’ll end up like a pit of cannibal ferrets ravening one another.
Leaving aside that I think the pseudanonymity is one of the greatest things about the internet as a communication medium, I think this is an ahistorical view.
For most of recorded human history, being part of a big crowd generally WAS pretty anonymous. “The Mob”, “The Crowd”, “The Protestors”, “Vox Populi”. These are all very distinct from, say, standing at a Speaker’s Corner because until technology changed things, authorities (or the disapproving public) had pretty much no chance of being able to identify specific faces in mass crowds except by either pure luck or the person going above and beyond simple presentation and making themselves a ring-leader, stepping out in front of the crowd or otherwise distinguishing themselves from it.
What changed was technology, starting with photography making it possible to capture faces for possible later identification. But that’s pretty damn hard without the right databases to cross-reference to, so it’s not until the Internet takes off that actually picking Joe Random Activist out of an Occupy Wall Street crowd becomes possible.
Even now it’s much faster and more powerful to crowdsource it (as these people are doing) than for government agents and agencies to do it by, say, feeding photographs through a scanner and trying to use facial recognition software keyed to DMV databases (something I’m not sure is even practical with our current setup, yay federalism!).
So it’s not a matter of “Why re-import this shitty pseudanonymity standard to someplace that’s never had it”, it’s a matter of advancing information technology stripping AWAY anonymity from someplace it used to exist at least in part.
For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of protests, marches, and rallies in general. They strike me as high value targets and trouble and always have, and you couldn’t get me near one unless I was armed, so it’s not as if I have some specific vested interest in public political demonstrations.
Let’s also keep in mind that even as recently as a couple centuries ago, it was ridiculously common for people who wanted to express an unpopular political opinion that may get them in trouble with the ruling class to write and publish anonymously.
Even when they were presumably safe from being executed (like say, the Federalist papers), it was often done in order to avoid the baggage of a famous name or what have you.
@Deiseach
I’m still open to being convinced it is wrong or a bad idea, I’m just saying the one particular argument that it is going to help me in the future I find a weak one.
I think probably the strongest argument so far is what happens after the names are published. It isn’t just that everyone knows that so and so is a white nationalist, which seems fair enough to me if he wants to march in a white nationalist march, it’s the harassment especially out to the third parties.
Ok, I am confused.
I thought your whole point has been that “what happens after the names are published” was in fact a GOOD thing, and a useful tool with which society can police the overton window without resorting to government action?
What yardstick are you applying to judge and assess these cases, then, because I’m lost.
Did you stop reading after that sentence? Is this one of those dickish fake “I’m confused”?
No, it’s sincere. Mismatch between my understanding of the position I thought you were taking the last several times issues relating to speech and expression of political values and such and what you were saying just now.
So it looks like my internal model of you as a commenter is inaccurate and needs updating. I thought I understood what you were arguing for/against, and now I think I -don’t- understand, and am asking for more information sincerely.
EDIT One possible source of the confusion: to me, statements like “Is Ethical” and “Is Moral” imply a positive duty to act when possible and practical. Not just “you can do this thing and it’s ok” but “You, I, and everyone have an obligation to do this thing”. And vice-versa for “is immoral/unethical” etc. So I think that might be the source of my misunderstanding.
I’m tentatively okay with someone putting it out there that so and so was holding a nazi flag at white nationalists rally, so that it becomes common knowledge. Ditto for one person making specifically sure that his boss/wife/friends/pastor know. I less certain about an organized boycott by lots of people against his company unless they fire him, but lean towards permissible. I’m definitely not okay with hundreds of people calling in death threats and ordering pizzas to the guy’s uncle.
Between the all the uncles out there and the cases of mistaken identities, I think they are the strongest arguments I’ve so far against the ethics of putting together a name and shame list for people marching in a neo-nazi rally.
In terms of your edit, I certainly don’t think it is obligatory for anyone to pay any attention to any of this, much less do anything.
Ok, here’s where I think my lack of understanding is. You lean towards this being ok, but have elsewhere said that you generally support laws that prohibit the government from doing this.
I don’t understand a consistent through-line or principle here. Is your thought that such boycotts, no matter how theoretically strong, don’t approach the power of state?
When you say this, I take it you mean specifically the question of people engaging in mass organized rallies in public places.
I think another part of the disconnect if I’m understanding your criticism of other SSC commenters correctly is that I’m probably more prone to “take things meta” and try to look for general heuristics to apply. I don’t always succeed, certainly, but I try.
There is no way to prevent this kind of identification of people at marches now, in the land where everyone owns a printing press and everyone carries a camera with them at all times.
I expect the long term effect of this phenomenon to be an increase in what you might call “cultural conservativism”–fringe ideas (some of which would eventually have become widespread and eventually mainstream) will become harder to support or even be involved with. Weird religions, oddball politics, creepy sexual practices, crazy ideas, funny costumes–all become more likely over time to cause trouble for you in your normal life.
I think this will make us much poorer as a society, but it seems impossible to prevent revealing the identites of anyone involved in a movement you want to shame, and it seems very difficult to convince anyone to extend any tolerance to people whose beliefs are either too outgroup-y, or sufficiently weird and offensive.
albatross,
I don’t really see that happening for anything but politics, because politics is seen as a zero-sum power struggle between forces.
I guess there are some religious issues similar to that like abortion or whatever, but who exactly is the “opposing force” to furries or what have you? Who is going to bother to go to furry conventions and take photos of everyone to try and doxx them? And then what mob is going to materialize to peer pressure the hot dog stand to fire the furry?
@Matt M
Amanda Marcotte really seems to hate furries…
@Matt M: I don’t think it will make right-wingers respected by the left, but I do think it makes them more respectable than Nazis. And less likely to get punched. If Jeff Sessions was a Nazi, I wouldn’t be debating his immigration policies, I would be calling for his assassination.
(Seriously, if the head of the Justice Department in your country is a Nazi, it’s time to find a new country.)
Trump got a bit of flak for not coming out quickly or strongly against it, but that’s not surprising or indicative that moderate rightists get attacked as much as extreme rightists. That’s just “non-politician doesn’t know the standard response to a violent tragedy, film at 11.”
There’s a pretty broad gulf between “I don’t like their policies” and “I want their entire movement to die in a fire,” and you seem to be assuming that anyone who says the former about the right wing actually wants the latter. Or you’re taking the worst anecdotes and believing that’s the standard discourse rather than the Internet doing its usual thing of taking the worst things about humanity and spreading them far and wide.
My point is, if you believe that the right-wing is so endangered that you need to become a literal Nazi to protect yourself, while the rest of the right-wing doesn’t see the need, consider the possibility that it’s your threat assessment that’s wrong rather than the entire rest of the right-wing’s.
This is a completely fair point.
Although to whatever extent the left is correct that Nazi influence is “growing,” that moderate rightists are becoming an endangered species as the right becomes increasing more extremist, that would indicate the threat profile is changing.
I’m telling you that all this stuff is related. A twitter mob forming against Damore changes the threat profile. Punching Charles Murray changes the threat profile. Throwing urine on Lauren Southern changes the profile. Attempting to blind Baked Alaska changes the threat profile.
What, exactly, is the left doing to convince me that I’m safe among them? That I don’t need to turn to the far-right for protection? That they are very careful about who they label Nazis and that they categorically reject violence against anyone who does not meet that criteria?
Very little. And less every day.
Indeed. Antifa claims that Nazis don’t get to speak. What they’ve actually done is make it so that on the right, _only_ Nazis get to speak, because they’re the ones willing and able to mix it up with Antifa.
It seems kind of dubious to place moral responsibility on ‘the left’ to persuade you not be a Nazi. Especially if, by that, you mean the picture of ‘the left’ painted by right-wing media and/or Russian propaganda bots.
I’m as left as they come, and here I am telling you politely that deciding to be Nazi would not be likely to be a good move for yourself, your career, or any non-abhorrent political principles you hold. Should I fail to do so, I will perhaps wonder for a bit if there was a better form of words that would have worked.
But I am damned if I am going to accept that its somehow my fault if you get a swastika tattoo.
OK, that’s fine.
But while you’re standing there not persuading me because that’s not your job, the far right is spending a lot of resources actively and loudly trying to persuade me that I should side with them. And they are referring to actual things that happen (Damore, Murray, Milo, etc.)
If the left chooses to not respond to this propaganda, to say “those threats aren’t real” when I can see with my own eyes what happened to these people, well, they shouldn’t be surprised if far-right recruitment goes up.
It’s projection. Though this is a safe space so there’s not much beating around the bush.
To move this claim as a whole into the vicinity of plausibility, you have to replace “speak” with “assemble”, right? SJWs have somewhat chilled online speech, but it’s not like they’ve shut down the National Review or Cato and such. And Antifa seems to be mostly made up of leftist anarchist types, who are quite distinct from most SJWs in terms of their economic views. “Mixing it up” (or not) with Antifa is almost entirely a matter of assembly.
> when I can see with my own eyes
If you have seen all three cases with your own eyes, then you are in a remarkable position; quite possibly a unique one.
Alternatively, if you heard of those cases via the media, then you would be in a much more common situation. Can I assume that is so?
Apply a bit of theory-of-mind here. What is the motivation of the media outlets you heard of them through? What are their goals, what is their funding, how willing are they to distort, exaggerate, or selectively present facts?
Given that, what would a nation of 320 million look like if they were unable to publish the stories they did? One where no liberal ever made a mistake, had a moment of anger, said something stupid?
75+ million people are willing to support Donald Trump, maybe. 75+ hundred people are willing stand next to Literal Swastika-Bearing Nazis, even though the actual causes are at least vaguely aligned. The message of the day is, 99.99% of people don’t like to think of themselves as Bad Guys and/or Total Losers, and will not stand with you if you stand with history’s go-to examples of Total Loser Bad Guys.
That’s a fair point if “become a literal Nazi” literally means “become a literal Nazi”.
But often, people who aren’t sufficiently into social justice are forced to signal that they are. For instance, that’s why the Google memo opposes diversity as actually implemented, but still goes on about how diversity is really a good thing and the author still favors it.
Someone who is called a Nazi no matter what he does may stop bothering to signal social justice. If you’re going to be called a Nazi anyway, you may stop saying “well, diversity is really still good but…” or you may stop hiding your HBD views or you may stop condemning the things that SJ demands you condemn, because it just isn’t helping any more.
In short, people who are called Nazis may not become Nazis. Instead they may stop trying to prevent themselves being mistaken for Nazis.
That’s a fair point if “become a literal Nazi” literally means “become a literal Nazi”.
But often, people who aren’t sufficiently into social justice are forced to signal that they are. For instance, that’s why the Google memo opposes diversity as actually implemented, but still goes on about how diversity is really a good thing and the author still favors it.
Someone who is called a Nazi no matter what he does may stop bothering to signal social justice. If you’re going to be called a Nazi anyway, you may stop saying “well, diversity is really still good but…” or you may stop hiding your Muggle Realist views or you may stop condemning the things that SJ demands you condemn, because it just isn’t helping any more.
In short, people who are called Nazis may not become Nazis. Instead they may stop trying to prevent themselves being mistaken for Nazis.
The media doesn’t scare me, actual people do.
I can click on a Tweet about Damore and immediately see dozens to hundreds of journalists with blue checkmarks calling him a worthless piece of shit and suggesting he cannot be allowed to work anywhere alongside women because of his views. Suggesting that any company who hires such a person is immoral and corrupt and should be boycotted. I hold views similar to his. Therefore, if they call him a worthless piece of shit because of his views, is it not fair to assume they think the same about me? If his views make him worthy of universal scorn and contempt, do mine not as well?
I can click on a tweet from Baked Alaska saying “The doctors are saying my eye damage may be permanent” and see hundreds of people saying “LOL TOO BAD YOU DIDN’T DIE YOU FUCKING NAZI ASSHOLE. COME TRY THIS IN MY CITY AND YOU WON’T LEAVE ALIVE!!” There are hundreds of these. I can read them right now.
I’m pretty confident this is not some fictional media narrative. This stuff is happening.
> I’m pretty confident this is not some fictional media narrative.
No, it’s a _non-fictional_ media narrative.
A similar number of people have been sacked for investigating Donald Trump’s financial dealings than for expressing opinions about diversity policies. You could have a big argument about which number is bigger or smaller; but both narratives are supported by facts.
You don’t get to pick a narrative you like, and then say ‘here are some relevant facts’. You have to learn to think about what is and isn’t true.
And if you are, in 2017, in the USA, seriously entertaining the idea ‘it might be a good idea for me to be a Nazi’, then you have a lot of such learning to do.
I used to work in this field, and at the time, it was practical in the sense that the databases existed (at least for some states) and you could run searches against them with the right software, but not practical in the sense that you could get anything useful out of that alone. Facial recognition isn’t the least mature biometric field out there — there’s all sorts of random stuff like gait analysis — but it is probably the least mature one with any sort of traction, and error rates are sky-high. Especially if your source photos are coming from an uncontrolled environment.
@Nornagest
I thought there has been a lot of progress in the last two-ish years, partly because CNN for image recognition in general are taking off and partly because FB and Google are dumping a ton of money into that specific problem.
Could be. My information is more than two years old, although progress was slow at the time.
We were already using neural networks, though — the algorithms for everything worked basically like “do a bunch of clever image processing to get down to a manageable template size, then feed the templates into a neural network to do matching”.
albatross11, prediction is difficult, but it wouldn’t surprise me if doxxing becomes so easy that you put yourself at risk by being part of an online mob.
I have no idea what society would be like at that point. Probably very chaotic.
@Jiro: There’s a big difference between “People who are insufficiently pro-SJ and stir up controversy get punished” and “People who are insufficiently pro-SJ are mistaken for literal Nazis.” There are plenty of anecdotes of the former, but Matt M’s position – that since you’re going to get treated like a literal Nazi, you should ally with literal Nazis – requires the latter.
If you’re worried about people not literally becoming Nazis, but becoming vaguely Nazi-like in that they’re more open about non-PC views, then fine, that’s probably an interesting conversation to have. But the original issue at hand was a rally with literal Nazis present, and Matt M’s question was why the non-Nazi members of the right wing weren’t supporting them. So I kept my analysis to literal Nazis.
People who are insufficently SJ are not “mistaken” for literal Nazis. They are, however, CALLED literal Nazis.
I did not ask for “support”, just for equal opportunity condemnation.
Despite what the mainstream media would have you believe, saying “both sides were violent and I condemn them both” is not the same thing as “offering support for Nazis and white supremacists”
@Matt M
Firstly, you haven’t actually provided any evidence of both sides being violent. In this OT I’ve seen a handful of videos showing right-wing violence, and one video purporting to show outrageous left-wing violence but actually showing some people quite reasonably assaulting a car that had just been used in a terror attack.
Secondly, even if you do get round to providing evidence of left-wing violence, claiming that the existence of violence on both sides implies moral equivalence is laughably stupid. Last November, an Islamist rammed some people in Ohio State University with his car and was shot by a policemen. “We should condemn both sides” is not the correct conclusion to draw.
Except the homemade flamethrower.
And the first-hand eye-witness accounts of people on the right saying “antifa attacked us” AND people on the left saying “we attacked nazis”
And the fact that historically, both sides have been violent in the past and no one disputes this and there is no logical reason to assume that at this specific event, they would suddenly change tactics.
rlms: Through what metric do you call this a terrorist attack? How incompetent a terrorist do you have to be to have a crowd of people on foot and to be in a big car and have nobody take any efforts to be stop you and still only kill one person.
Do you genuinely think that leftists didn’t engage in violence (that you think he’s simply making up the macing and blinding etc.) , or are you simply demanding Matt M pay a tax in time before you engage reasonably with him?
@kjohn
“How incompetent a terrorist do you have to be to have a crowd of people on foot and to be in a big car and have nobody take any efforts to be stop you and still only kill one person[?]”
I don’t know, why don’t you ask Abdul Razak Ali Artan? He didn’t even kill a single person! Is that also no longer a terrorist attack?
I don’t know how familiar you are with this blog, but the community around it claims to be “rationalist”. That means we at least pay lip service to the ideas of “evidence” and “justifying claims”. For an example, look elsewhere on this page for conversation between Matt M and Ilya Shpitser. The latter posts this picture as an example of racist neo-Nazi violence, Matt M questions whether that attribution of motivation is accurate (perhaps the gentlemen with the sticks are in fact left-wing, or perhaps the fellow on the floor is actual a martial arts master and this is a fair fight that began at his instigation), and Ilya Shpitser responds with a video that disproves these and other plausible alternative explanations. This is our preferred standard of discourse, and it is the mode in which I am engaging with Matt M. It does indeed seem possible that there could have been some left-wing violence, but it would be useful for me to see evidence of it myself. I could then compare the evidence of left- and right-wing violence, and try to reach a conclusion about which is worse. Matt M seems to have concluded that they are equally bad. Maybe he is right! But I would like to be privy to the sources he used to deduce that, such that I might reason about them myself. Possibly I might conclude differently! Stranger things have happened!
rlms: That guy was shot by the first responder police officer. Are you claiming that is true for this guy, also? Otherwise, its not a counter-example is it?
Nobody was stopping this guy. So how was their only one fatality if he was a terrorist?
I notice that despite your snark and sarcasm, you never actually state that you are unfamiliar with evidence of the left-wing violence committed at Charlotteville. (e.g. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/14/gov-terry-mcauliffe-refuses-to-denounce-antifa-attacks-on-journalists/)
@rlms I don’t know how you would measure relative violence, or who the instigator was of any attack. Having neutral observers would help.
A couple data points to feed in.
NYT reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg initially tweeted that both sides seemed equally hate filled and that she saw antifa beating nationalists as they were leaving. On reflection, she later amended “hate filled” to “violent” to clarify that she thought antifa were beating people to oppose hate.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/19673/ny-times-reporter-admits-antifa-protesters-james-barrett
Hill reporter punched in face by counterprotestor who wanted her to stop filming.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4785564/Reporter-punched-face-Charlottesville-rally.html
Ned Oliver documents one brawl. (I can’t tell if the …ditionalist workers’ party is left or right)
https://twitter.com/nedoliver/status/896386414065188864
@kjohn
What are you trying to say? It’s only terrorism if you get shot? Your expert knowledge of terrorism leads you to conclude that injuring 13 and killing no-one (but yourself) at Ohio State is adequate performance, but that injuring 19 and killing 1 in Charlottesville is so far below par that it doesn’t deserve a terrorist badge? You’re being silly.
I am not denying that there probably was some left-wing violence (thanks for the link!). If that was my belief, I would have said “There is no evidence of any left-wing violence whatsoever, and I bet you can’t provide any”, not “Could you provide some evidence?”. But there do not appear to have been any left-wing terrorist attacks. Even discounting that, the events in the video in your link look less violent than those in the one Ilya Shpitser linked upthread. I also can’t help noticing that the antifa your video turned up with banners, whereas our right-wing friends seem to all have clubs and riot shields. One seems a bit better prepared for violence than the other.
@rlms – For what it’s worth, my personal definition of terrorism is mostly intent based.
If Fields was a paranoid idiot attempting to flee violence (unlikely but not impossible), then no terrorism
If he was intending to strike a blow against his political enemies (more likely), then definitely terrorism.
If he was just so mad that his side didn’t get to have their rally and that they were a bunch of losers that he lashed out, then I probably wouldn’t call it terrorism if I had the right to choose, but I’ll concede it fits the common definition. (IMHO most likely both here and at the OSU attack).
Terrorists have to be stopped either suicie, police or bystanders. Nobody stopped this guy. Yet there was only one fatality.
The Ohio guy didn’t kill everyone in Ohio state because he was stopped. If everyone had simply laid down and let him kill them there’d be far more deaths.
In this situation everyone did lay lown and let him kill them. Yet, he didn’t kill them. If he was an evil terrorist out to kill people for his evil and terrorising then why didn’t he?
Antifa came with clubs. They came with flamethrowers. They were well-armed for violence.
@kjohn
By that standard, most bomb attacks (the Boston Marathon bombings, the whole IRA thing) aren’t terrorism. I suspect you may be engaged in motivated reasoning.
“They” in this case is one guy, and honestly, aerosol flamethrowers are spontaneous youthful hijinks that don’t hurt anyone when made by 14-year-old boys on camp and didn’t hurt anyone now. Clubs and riot shields show intention to be violent.
The marathon guys were stopped. I guess I can’t say for certain that they would have continued otherwise.
The IRA thing does introduce the fourth posibility of politicians surrendering, but an IRA bombman is trying to kill as many children as he can. He doesn’t build one bomb and then stop building bombs. He continues building bombs to kill people until he is stopped – or until the politicians surrender.
Are you claiming that this guy drove off so that he could get into a position to run a dfferent group of people over?
Seriously? You’re using ‘just one guy’? Antifa had shields too, and I mentioned clubs before.
Members of the IRA (or for that matter Hamas or any of the myriad other terrorist groups that use bombs) do not constantly spew bombs in an uninterrupted stream until stopped. They make a bomb, then wait, then possibly make another bomb, or possibly not. Suppose I blow something up, avoid getting caught, then have a sudden change of heart and become a strict pacifist. Does that somehow retroactively make my attack non-terrorist?
Really, this whole discussion is incredibly stupid. Where are you getting this weird definition of terrorism from? I don’t think anyone else uses it. I’ve been arguing that it’s inconsistent, but that shouldn’t matter. “Terrorism doesn’t count if the terrorist is called James” would be a consistent definition, but still be stupid for exactly the same reason: it had just been invented by you.
I’m using “just one guy” because there was just one guy. Why is that confusing? Did you miscount? Did I miscount? There were many Nazis with clubs and shields, and few counterprotestors. In keeping with your proposed culture of discourse, I will not “pay a tax in time” by providing a source for that. If you would like to engage in our evidence-based culture, let me know.
@Brad
When you say “It’s projection”, you seem to be claiming that Matt M would, if he was so empowered, hurt you or drive you out of a job because of your beliefs. On what basis do you make that claim? Without evidence that seems like a shitty thing to say. I know you and he seem to have gotten up each other’s noses pretty well, but I haven’t seen anything he’s said that would back that up.
@1soru1
It’s a two-part argument, but the primary part is pragmatic, depending on your goal. If your goal is to crush utterly an ideology (Fascism, Ethno-Nationalism, National Socialism, etc), drive it from the overton window so far that no one but dysfunctional social outcasts and the mentally ill will ever say anything positive about it, then it is advantageous to deprive that ideology’s adherents of as many allies as possible. If you conduct your campaign in such a way as to convince other people that they are next on your hit list for the same treatment, they may decide that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Matt M’s point is that at this point, he thinks it is increasingly reasonable for the median conservative citizen, one who is definitively non-racist, non-sexist, and non-fascist, to come to the conclusion, based on the evidence, that if they do not ally against the Antifa then they will be the next against the wall. In short, that Niemoller’s point works in both political directions.
There are a couple of different rejoinders to his point. A good one (see below) is “I think you are over-estimating the scope and degree of the threat”, but that argument doesn’t mean that it isn’t also a good idea to police your own allies to try and keep that that over-estimation from becoming an accurate one. Another possible rejoinder is to honestly say “I don’t care, anyone who would consider allying with these people under any circumstances –deserves- to be crushed right along with them”.
I leave it up to you to decide which approach to take.
@Matt M
I think my posting history here puts me pretty clearly somewhere in the general “right wing” side of American politics, and you can ctrl-f my handle on previous OTs to check.
That said, I think you are overestimating the scope of the threat here. I’m not going to tell you that it’s all in your head or that there aren’t places where it is potentially dangerous to be a political conservative. However, currently the only places where I think you are even at elevated risk of physical violence are college campuses and MAYBE very specific locations in specific cities like Berkeley, and even then mostly in the context of events where political identification is likely (conventions, speeches, rallies, demonstrations) rather than roaming gangs trawling the bars and night clubs every friday night looking for anyone who looks too trumpish to stomp.
So, If you are in one of those few specific locations, the obvious answer is to get out. If you can’t, or won’t, then the next step is to ensure that you have the appropriate means, mindset, and skill set to secure yourself and any friends/family against possible physical threats, commensurate w/ local law. That is a discussion for another thread, at least, but there are people here who can point you in the direction of the proper steps along that road.
Outside of those locations, you are currently at no higher risk of physical violence than the average citizen on the street for a given geographic area.
Which brings us to threats of financial/social harm. This threat IS elevated across a broader portion of the country, yes. However, it is far from universal. Right now, the only places where actual no-shit witch-hunts/purges are likely are, as far as I can tell:
-Some specific parts of Academia (if you review reports you’ll see that there are big differences in how criticism of faculty/staff based on their beliefs is being handled at different universities).
-Silicon Valley Tech (I am not aware of evidence that things are as bad in, say, Houston)
-AAA Video Game Development/Publishing.
-The Big 5 Publishers and their parent corporations (mostly NYC). Note that this leaves a lot of smaller press publishers.
Once again, if you are not employed in those specific fields and locations you are most likely safe absent something, like, say, picking a fight on Twitter. Which takes us to mitigating steps. Again, the best solution if you are in one of those fields and locations is simply to GTFO. If you can’t because you are financially dependent, then start taking what steps you can to insulate yourself against possible future need because having a rainy day fund is a good idea regardless. That includes both putting together funds for a rainy day and looking at other jobs/careers if you truly believe your current field has become a political minefield where your career stands a serious risk of being blown up.
This leaves social damage, and honestly the best answer here is: “Choose your social circles appropriately”. If you don’t have any friends who would stand with you in the face of assholes on twitter, you need a better class of friend.
This would be the IRA that generally either attacked military targets or phoned in warnings of its bombs so that the attacks on civilian targets would cause only property damage?
Your mental model of terrorism and terrorists is way off. Some of them specifically plan on not killing children. Or anyone at all. And some of them don’t have a plan at all and pretty much give up as soon as their initial attack is complete. If you say “not a terrorist!” about anyone who isn’t doing a full-on Terminator impression, then you’re going to miss most of the world’s actual terrorists.
Trofim,
I agree that your assessment of the threat, as it stands today, is reasonably correct.
I would offer you an analogy. Perhaps something like, being a homosexual in the 80s or early 90s. The homosexual tells you that he is scared. That a whole lot of people hate him just by virtue of who he is and how he chooses to live and who he chooses to associate with. That he feels unable to publicly be himself.
And you respond, “Dude, you’re overreacting. First of all, you’re only likely to get beaten up for being gay in very rural environments, and you don’t live in one of those. So I don’t see the problem. Now it’s true that maybe you could get fired from your job if people found out you were gay, but honestly, at this point most companies probably wouldn’t do that, just the old, established, conservative, religious ones, and someone like you probably doesn’t want to work for a place like that anyway. If you do live in a rural environment, you can just move to San Francisco. And if you work for a religious company, you can just quit and find a new job. Besides, people don’t really know you’re gay unless you tell them, so you can just walk around passing for straight. Don’t make a big deal out of being gay and they’ll probably leave you alone. And definitely don’t seek out allies on the far left. Don’t even think about marching through the streets with rainbow flags wearing assless leather chaps chanting about being here and queer. That’ll just antagonize everyone and make you hate them even more. No, best you just stick to your progressive company in San Francisco, doing the best you can to pass.”
This person is likely to tell you to dismiss you as an unsympathetic jackass who is totally missing the point. And they’re not wrong. They ALSO weren’t wrong that finding allies on the far left and that attempting to gain power and antagonizing the other side while doing so was, in fact, a successful strategy. Now they’re in charge. Now they can fine you $500,000 for not baking their gay wedding cake. Who has to hide now? Now those asshole conservative christians are the ones who have to keep their heads down and “try to pass for normal”
I’m not interested in that. I’ll take allies wherever I can find them. The fact that the Nazis are more willing to accept someone with my race/gender/sexuality/beliefs than the left is says a whole lot. Maybe I should, on principle, turn them down. Maybe I should be an island unto myself. Maybe that would be the smart and decent thing to do. I dunno. But I’m tired of being told to just keep my head down and keep my thoughts to myself. I’m tired of people acting like they can just shout names at me (racist! white supremacist! nazi!) and I’ll just shut up and fade away. Nah man. Don’t think I have it in me. I’m not at the point where I’m picking up a riot shield yet, but I am at the point where I’m past caring if people start calling me a nazi. I’d rather be called a nazi than a leftist. Both groups hate people because of who they are – but the nazis at least don’t hate me. A friend of mine commenting about all this on FB recently said something like “If you think you can sit out what’s coming, you may be mistaken. If this leads to a war, you were probably born into your uniform.”
Do you know how many Twitter posts I’ve seen describing the protesters in Charlottesville as “white pieces of shit.” Do you know how quickly those posts would be deleted if you replaced “white” with anything else? I’m here. I’m white. I’m cis. I’m hetero. I’m conservative. Get used to it.
Conservative Christians during the early AIDS years coordinated their love for the sinner out of the Ministry of Love, and in response gay people … organized and demonstrated peacefully.
Granting your assumptions you’re facing a level of discrimination and disapproval in proportion to that of other groups in places in the U.S. today, and are like “You wanna kill Jews? Whatever!”
Take your false equivalence and shove it.
… and put pressure on the courts or got allies in the courts to make rulings, that the conservatives declaring their love for sinners have to obey or be met with prison time.
∴ Nazis
∎
Here’s my response to the analogy.
-I’m not saying “I don’t see the problem”. I see the problem, you just agreed that my threat assessment was reasonably correct.
-I am not advocating closeting yourself, to extend your analogy. I’m saying that if you decide to come out at work that you take steps to insulate yourself from backlash, like ensuring that you have a reliable support network, money in the bank if you ARE fired, and that if you decide to walk into a redneck bar in drag that you either have buddies who have your back or do so having taken other steps to ensure your ability to defend yourself.
-That said, to go back to non-analogy, I DO recommend avoiding rallies speeches, and other such events. That goes regardless of whether you are quiet about your political beliefs and identity or not. I avoided them before this for the same reason that I stay out of malls on christmas, big shopping venues on black friday, and so on. Why put yourself out to be a target unless you’re confident of your ability to control the outcome?
-Finally, on the subject of Allies: I’m not at all sure that you’ve modeled correctly what changed people’s opinions on homosexuality. I think that if the gay liberation movement had sought allies with Weatherman and the Black Panthers they wouldn’t have done so well.
To be clear, I’m not even saying that a confrontational “I’m Straight, White, Cis, Het, Male, Conservative, and fuck anyone who thinks that’s a crime” attitude isn’t potentially powerful. Heck, get enough people who can say the same thing and maybe it would be.
However, simply pattern-matching that to the guys from Charlottesville is being foolish. I’m not even addressing issues of buying flea powder after a nap or the handle length of dinner flatware. I’m saying that in your search for allies, these guys are a shitty pick.
1) they’re much more apt to lose you broader based support and sympathy than gaining you it, and whether you want to admit it or not it was precisely through gaining general -sympathy- that Gays and the like were successful.
2) there simply aren’t enough of them to matter. I know you think that better 1 guy who’ll fight than 1,000 who won’t, but again, I think your analysis is flawed here. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that your pessimism is entirely warranted, things get worse and worse, until it looks like various militant progressive elements pose a literal existential threat to traditional american culture, values, and way of life. You really think that at NO point along that downward trajectory exists the possibility for you or other like minded people to rally meaningful numbers of the demographic that produces the overwhelming majority fo the nations soldiers and cops? Because they’re too scared to face off against guys in hoodies and bandanas, or HR departments?
3) precisely because Nazism and similar ideologies have been pushed so far outside the American Overton Window, the people you’re looking at as potential shock troops (pun/irony intended) are by and large marginally functional types.
So if you really think that the appropriate course of action is confrontational public demonstrations, as opposed to angry things said on the internet, then I strongly, strongly suggest that you make the effort of actively recruiting allies from among median conservatives or even alt-lite types.
“Ther’s a bomb somewhere” Boom “Hey, we said there was a bomb somewhere.”
You can call the family-fun bus or the children of servicemen ‘military targets’ but that’s not actually a contradiction to my saying children even if I agreed with you about them being acceptable targets.
I never said all terrorists trry to kill children or try to kill people. The IRA on the other hand did deliberately kill children.
Can you name a terrorist who did the one attack and then washed his hands and went ‘not doing that again’? Or is Charlottesville the first? Even if it be possible for a terrorist to decide ‘well had my fun, that’s it’ would it not be extraordinary and require extraordinary evidence – rather than just the chanting ‘this is terrorism. say it is terrorism. condemn the terrorism” – to say that this is the first.
You haven’t provided evidence for anything. You’ve merely demanded that Matt M prove that water is wet.
We both come to this thread being aware of certain facts. You have never suggested or said that you are unaware of the violence comitted by the left in Charlottesville. Assuming that you aren’t simply incredbly ignorant, then what is demanding sources for the leftist macing or journalist beating supposed to accomplish?
I did not ask you to find a source for the protestors having weapons because I knew they had weapons and to demand you provide a source for that wouldn’t be to improve the discourse but to get you to pay a tax in time. Why did you demand Matt M provide evidence of some of the lerftist violence?
@kjohn
Read my previous comments again. And again, and again, until you gain enlightenment.
Nybbler mentioned bike lock guy upthread – that’s a good example too, although (a) he was attacking people and (b) a lot of the coverage was along the lines of:
“4chan doxxed this guy. By the way, you should know that 4chan are human garbage.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/05/29/a-man-clobbered-trump-supporters-with-a-bike-lock-the-internet-went-looking-for-him/
Hot doxxing in Berkeley as libertarian hot dog joint exercises its economic freedom.
Fascinating article! I ended up writing about it on Facebook:
———-
HL: “Worker resigned after white nationalist rally, Top Dog says”
LOL “resigned” from a hot dog place.
“The Top Dog employee said the business has also been receiving ‘a ton of calls’ and questions from customers since White was outed online.”
A ton of calls? Who the fuck are these people? Time was when we’d tell them to get a life.
But missing in the article is anything that White actually said or did that’s so egregious other than ATTENDING the rallies, with one not even a rally but an “arraignment of Eric Clanton, an anti-fascist demonstrator charged with smashing a bike lock over the head of a Trump supporter at that rally.” I guess I’m to read between the lines and just grok that he wasn’t on the “good” side, the side of antifa.
Am I also to assume he wasn’t attending for prurient journalist or scholarly reasons? I don’t know. Though it comes off like a creepy dossier. As if to say, “put all these things that aren’t illegal and kind of ambiguous together and we just know you’re not one of us (despite choosing to live in Berkeley and work around progressives).”
But let this be a lesson: Nothing escapes the Eye of Sauron. Outing people is the wave of the future. The difference is that the left has real institutional power on their side, from the loftiest Silicon Valley firms to the lowliest hot dog joints. This wouldn’t be the worst thing if mob pressure and conformism weren’t inherently anti-intellectual.
But it gets weirder! Check this out:
“Top Dog’s management has never shied away from promoting its own political views, plastering Libertarian messages over the walls of its two Berkeley locations. The chain, owned by Richard Rienmann, also posts essays from the Libertarian Ludwig von Mises. A recent essay posted on the site criticized Google for ‘appeasing modern Social Justice Warriors’ at the expense of profit when it fired an employee who distributed a manifesto against Google’s pro-diversity efforts.”
Hm. Maybe more a fan of the Jeffrey A. Tucker wing of the Mises crowd.
—————-
The Tucker wing is entirely separate from the Mises crowd these days. The two sides don’t even talk to or about each other anymore.
But there are a number of “respectable” right-wingers who pivoted directly from “Google is so awful for firing Damore! Freedom of speech!” to “Nazis are evil! Punch them!” almost immediately this weekend. Christina Hoff Summers seems like a typical example, here.
Interesting.
There’s a creepy informant angle to the Top Dog story that’s rather lamentable. “Tons of calls.” Who are all these eager beavers with nothing to do but rat someone out?
OK, man, the reason that right-wingers are saying “Nazis are evil!” is because Nazis are fucking evil. Communists are fucking evil, too, and it’s a travesty that they get a free pass by the MSM, but it is not an improvement to forget that Nazis are evil out of some sort of demented sense of “balance.”
The problem with the left is that they want to call non-Nazis Nazis, not that they have misidentified the evilness of actual Nazis. However, when people are marching around with Goddamn swastikas I think we can safely call them Nazis. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the left is correct here.
We do not want any sort of “Punch a Nazi” nonsense to be normalized, of course, but that’s because of rule of law reasons. A social norm of street fighting over political issues is incredibly destructive, and will result in a downward spiral.
It’s a little annoying that the article had to get the Mises Institute dig in, but the take on Top Dog is basically accurate. I used to go there when I lived in Berkeley, and the walls are literally covered in libertarian articles, posters, and inspirational quotes (along with the traditional line of signed photos from washed-up celebrities).
“Equivalents of the third ideology are also pretty widespread from Russia to the Middle East.”
Do you have any statistics on this? Off the top of my head, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran are all multi-ethnic, multi-religious societies. No doubt they have their share of related tensions. But as far as I am aware, and with the possible exception of Turkey, the governments of these countries have official policies of ethnic and religious tolerance. Popular opinion may well be at odds with this, but how would I know without looking at the statistics?
I poked around a little for information on these questions for Russia (don’t understand Arabic, Turkish, or Farsi; sorry). So far, what I came up with is a recent survey by the Levada Center (unfortunately only in Russian, it seems):
http://www.levada.ru/2016/06/27/tochki-raznoglasij-v-obshhestve/
Basically, the questions are of the form “Do you think differences between groups could cause *serious disagreement* in the future?”. Example pairs of groups considered: rich/poor, old/young, educated/uneducated, different religious groups in general, different ethnic groups in general, ethnic Russians/other ethnic groups, Orthodox Christians/other religious groups, pro-Putin/anti-Putin, and so on. Basically, about half of people think that any of these differences could lead to conflict in the future, but about three-quarters think that the difference between rich and poor could cause such conflict.
There are all kinds of ethnic supremacists in Russia, Japan, China, etc. Ethnic supremacism is simply a belief that an ethnicity is superior to others. Hence it isn’t inherently violent. However violent ethnic supremacism is a problem.
For example White Supremacism used to be a norm. However there were indeed White Supremacists who feel that they are obliged to help who they consider lower races.
Nazis on the other hand did not actually believe that Jews were inferior because an inferior group could not really threaten Germans. In their propaganda they always portrayed Jews as being evil and strong, instead of being stupid and weak. As a result they really took Jews seriously, trying to exterminate them. In fact I haven’t heard of any antisemite who actually consider Jews inferior. Instead all consider them smart, powerful and dangerous.
“All kinds” is not so informative. I am asking for rates of ethnic supremacism. For example, is a random Japanese person more likely to think that the Japanese are superior to other ethnic groups than say the random Anglo-Saxon is to think
that Anglo-Saxons are superior to other ethnic groups?
And speaking of Russians, my sample suggests that the random Russian might be quite likely to think Russians are inferior to Western Europeans and Anglo-Saxons, though they might be likely to think they are superior to hillbillies from the Caucasus.
(By the way, I know that various forms of ethnic supremacism are quite common in history. I’m particularly asking if there is any evidence that it is more common in the countries we are discussing than in the Anglo-Saxon world.)
It certainly seems the case that equality and diversity and multiculturalism are more Western flavored philosophies that are not as common or as vigorously championed in other cultures, say India, China, Arabia, Latin America, Russia, etc.
Counter example might be Communism during the cold war, which had theories or goals of uniting labor classes across ethnic lines, but I don’t know how much this resonated with the communists around the world versus other, baser appeals of the philosophy.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable here, anyone have better examples of multi-ethnic or -cultural equality being promoted outside NA or W Europe?
I dunno. The USSR treated minorities very well, in the sense that they got off as terribly as all other people did; Stalin himself, mind you, was Georgian. Ditto for China, which is entirely fine with its minorities, as long as no nationalist sentiments crop up.
But really, how far do you want to take this? What is enough multiculturalism to pass this question? Prior to the 19th century, every state bigger than the city level was multicultural. Get more specific, is what I guess I’m asking, since it’s unclear what we’re after here.
Didn’t the Soviet Union make it basically illegal to speak non-Russian eastern european languages?
Would a law prohibiting the speaking of Spanish in the US be considered “pro-minority”?
No to both. Good thing the USSR didn’t do such, and that the US is not doing so either.
Most Soviet republics and even some regions within republics had their own official language and ethnic culture, and to some degree the system reinforced ethnic identities while at the same time trying to create “Homo Sovieticus”. Of course at some point in school everybody studied Russian, and certainly to get very far in Soviet society you had to speak Russian.
As for contemporary Russia, it seems to be a similar story: different republics and regions have different languages, religions, and ethnic identities. So far as I can tell, the government is interested in stability and so promotes tolerance. The Minister of Defense is a Tuvan Buddhist. The Head of the Central Bank is Tatar from Bashkorostan. These naturally are important positions and not given out just to look kind to minorities. Official statements can sound quiet PC and this can annoy ethnic Russians of a nationalist bent. But I’ve never heard of anyone getting fired for being un-PC. I can’t imagine a case like James Damore at Yandex, but maybe I’m being naive.
About India. It is very diverse linguistically and religiously. As far as I am aware, the religious differences cause problems, but the linguistic differences are respected.
But of course, no one seems to take things to the same extreme as Americans. As Steve Sailer recently pointed out, a Google search for “American inventors” doth protest too much.
I don’t think the USSR is your best bet for non-Euro multiculturalism.
The closest example I can think of off-hand would be the parallel legal regimes of the Ottomans, and even there there was no doubt whose law and culture took first priority.
I believe we do indeed need some stats.
However I think it should be clear that by Western European/American standards East Europe and Northeast Asia at the very least are tolerant of if not outright endorse Nazis.
For example let’s talk about China.
http://www.todayonline.com/chinaindia/china/why-chinas-millennials-are-high-ultra-nationalism
I personally believe that humanity is diving into a new Nazi/Nazi-equivalent age. Nazism is simply rationality + amorality + tribalism. We need rationality but not amorality.
@The Big Red Scary I doubt that Russia is relatively non-racist at all. However it does tolerate and maybe even encourage intermarriage between some minority men to and ethnic Russian women because the Russian identity passes from mothers to daughters and Russia has more women than men. Then more and more people are Russified. Many “minority” leaders are in fact half-Russian. Note that even men from Chechens can marry Russian women and this is probably intentional.
Furthermore not all minorities are equal. For example Ukrainians and Armenians were treated better than Chechens in Soviet Chechenya.
I started this as a reply to HFA rationalist writing “Southern Nationalism, White Nationalism, White Supremacism and Generalplan Ost-type racial annihilationism aren’t the same thing. Equivalents of the first two are clearly present everywhere on this planet. Equivalents of the third ideology are also pretty widespread from Russia to the Middle East.”
I found the last sentence questionable and chose to discuss it in the context of Russia, since I know a little more about that than the random country. For the “equivalent of white supremacism” I am taking something like the proposition that the largest ethnic group is superior to other ethnic groups living in the country and that therefore ethnic group X should run the show, maybe telling themselves that this is in the best interest of the other ethnic groups anyway. Maybe someone has taken a multi-country survey on such a proposition. My guess is that Russia would fall somewhere near the mean of the distribution. For sure you are going to find more people agreeing with such a proposition in Russia than in some country with a long history of liberalism. On the other hand, as I pointed out, I see little evidence that the proposition is believed by the people actually running the show in Russia.
For the “equivalent of Southern nationalism or white nationalism”, I take this to mean something like the proposition that the Russian ethnic group has a long history, is proud of much of it, and doesn’t want to continually beat up itself over the parts of which it is ashamed, and moreover, doesn’t like mass immigration of people from different ethnic groups and cultures, then sure, such opinions are very wide spread and some of the main stream political parties (though notably not the one in power) play to those opinions.
About inter-marriage in Russia. This is an interesting point. Of the two prominent examples I gave, Minister of Defense and Head of Central Bank, the first does indeed have a Russian mother. (Also, think of the “first black president” of the US.) However, I have no idea what it means to say that “Russia” tolerates or encourages marriage of men from ethnic minorities to ethnic Russian women. Do you mean the government? How would they do that? You can’t mean that your random Ivan Ivanovich encourages his daughter to marry a Chechen.
As for violent racism, there was a rash of this in the last decade, and there has been a significant decrease. At least some of this descrease seems to be due to government action. One can imagine another rash of it under a change of government. For what it’s worth, here’s a chart that I copied from Wikipedia:
Number of racist attacks victims according to SOVA Center
Year Deaths Injuries
2004[4] 46 208
2005[5] 47 461
2006[6] 62 564
2007[7] 85 605
2008[8] 109 486
2009[9] 84 434
2010[9] 38 377
2011[10] 20 130
2012[11] 18 171
2013[12] 20 173
2014[13] 19 103
2015[14] 9 68
Total 557 3780
4337
Anyhow, my tentative conclusion is that Russia has ethnic tensions, but I would guess that it will be near the mean in a global survey.
By the way, I seem to be able to reply only to replies farther up in the thread, not to those near the bottom. Is that usual?
@The Big Red Scary
Maybe it’s caused by the common n-gram, “African American”? Both Google and DuckDuckGo image searches do the thing, and DDG is less likely to be partisan here, I think.
@Vegemeister. Interesting. I tried the search on yandex.ru too. First it returns screen shots of Google. Then books for elementary school kids about African American Inventors, of which there are many.
New hypothesis: the search results are not manipulated, but rather the people who write these books have been extraordinarily successful in spreading their message, even to Russian webbrowsers.
Does anyone have other examples of mass overrepresentation in internet searches?
This is an interesting phenomenon. Suppose you had a cause (say making people more sympathetic to autistic transgender liberatarians), and wanted to ensure that ten or twenty years from now a Google search for liberatarian were dominated by books for elementary school kids about autism and transgender. How would you go about achieving that?
(Full disclosure: I read a book about George Washington Carver when I was a kid. And I really, really like peanut butter.)
“African american inventors” – 356,000 results
“American inventors” – 401,000 results
“united states” inventors – 13,400,000 results
“african american” inventors – 454,000 results
“american inventors” -african – 169,000 results
Here’s more doxxing – a guy who the crowd has identified as guilty of beating a counter-protestor with a metal pole. Like bike lock guy, assuming he’s guilty, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. The downside is that if he’s innocent, it may take a while to clear his name.
http://www.theroot.com/are-these-some-of-the-white-supremacists-who-assaulted-1797801108
Stanford has an interesting interdisciplinary major called Symbolic Systems. The core courses are calculus, stats, computer programming, philosophy, neuroscience, and linguistics. There are concentrations in applied logic, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer music, decision making and rationality, human-computer interaction, learning, natural language, neurosciences, and philosophical foundations. Looks fascinating.
Personally, I am not a big fan of these kind of programs. This seems like material that should be geared more to graduate level studies. Undergrad degrees should be about getting a broad foundation, not about zeroing in on very narrow fields.
It’s very broad compared to a typical UK degree.
The six areas covered by core courses I listed above looks like a very broad foundation to me. What would you prefer?
You can do a full degree on either of these areas (taking calc to mean math). How much do you get out of trying to capture all of them? So yes, maybe it is better to go Shakespearean and say they are both too broad and too narrow.
The main question I see is what do I get out of this degree that I wouldn’t get out of a regular CS degree?
An understanding of people. The core courses require you to study people and how they think from several different perspectives. Most CS programs don’t expose you to any of this. Understanding people is useful for a software practitioner because ultimately computer systems are operated by people and are supposed to serve their needs.
Do most CS programmes not involve HCI courses?
@rlms
Not always, no. Here’s a link to the CS curriculum at the University of Waterloo, a well-regarded Canadian program. No required UI or HCI courses.
@Orpheus
“Undergrad degrees should be about getting a broad foundation”
What the heck is K-12 for, then?
Undergrad degrees *should* be about enabling the student to be able to be a productive member of society. Given specialization these days this means having a specialty.
While I think it’s a noble cause to create these cocktail majors because it’s a good balance of topics which a student might want to learn, better to just call it a well rounded CS major. Going with a rarer name and being and independent department just means the funding will dry up and you’ll never get any grants or donations.
And students who care about getting good jobs will be reluctant to sign on.
(It being Stanford mitigates a lot of that, but still)
I’m very sad about the UVa protests. Anybody have anything optimistic to say?
Chronologically:
1) At the beginning of the weekend, many of my lefty friends were all posting about how outrageous it was that people could march in the street “without repercussions” and talking about how great it was to punch Nazis. I checked the comment thread to see if anyone was advocating the old “everyone gets to march – ignore the Nazis” that I grew up with, but all there was in the comment threads was “should I punch this Nazi” heuristics. (If not close enough to punch, get closer; if close enough, punch). (OK, to be fair one lib friend did argue that non-violence is a general and valuable principle that applies in this case.)
2) Now my facebook feed is all “Conservative christians, what are you going to do about this hate?” threads. I can’t tell if the threads are rhetorical, to show that people shouldn’t be blaming the Muslim majority for acts of terrorists, or if they’re serious. I think both simultaneously, but I’m not sure.
3) Anyway, one corner of the room is arguing for violence, and the other corner is now committing murder, and the sane middle is staying out of it. I’m pretty depressed.
The only bright spot seems to be the murder wasn’t premeditated or coordinated. Despite all the talk, it doesn’t seem to be an act of organized terrorism. It’s not even clear at this point that it was intentional, rather than the act of a person acting like a panicked animal.
I do want to (metaphorically) grab Yonatan Zunger by the lapels, shake him, and yell “You broke a peace treaty. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??”.
The video I saw shows a pretty long run up before colliding with people. With no one behind him.
I’m not sure how to express this where it won’t come off as “asshole”, but … this seems of a piece with a bunch of other right-wing violence that has been going on since forever.
Yes, there is left-wing violence, too. My impression is that there is less of it, and more quickly condemned on the left when it is deadly, threatens to be deadly, or intended to be deadly. But I’m sure you will dispute my (subjective) impressions.
I have a feeling that the standard conservative line will soon be: lone wolf, not representative, not really conservative, just mentally disturbed, etc.
Have you ever startled a deer? Did it stop running when you didn’t give chase?
I’m not excusing the guy, a human being should be held to a higher standard than that. But I’m not ruling out the possibility.
I haven’t seen condemnation from the left of antifa. Not even of bike-lock guy, whose actions certainly threatened to be deadly. There seems to be a group of left-wing activists who have decided that _they_ are the only ones who are permitted to protest and assemble, and that they can enforce that with violence because their opponents are bad people. So they violently break up a rally which does, indeed, consist of bad people. And in the ensuing chaos, one of the bad people kills someone; maybe deliberately, but almost certainly not as part of some larger plan. This isn’t part of some pattern of right-wing violence; this is exactly the expected result of breaking that peace treaty.
Hell, as of this weekend, there isn’t condemnation of antifa from much of the right either. Look at all the tweets from prominent GOP politicians denouncing alt-right white supremacist neo-nazis. Zero mention of the leftists who were there committing violence too.
Trump is being raked over the coals by the media for suggesting that more than one side was engaging in violence. This is considered unacceptable and beyond the pale. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that a bunch of nazis showed up in town and started beating up peaceful people for no reason. These peaceful “anti-racists” either did not fight back or only used exactly and appropriately proportional self defense. The violence was 100% one sided and anyone who claims otherwise is a nazi sympathizer.
@The Nybbler:
CNN has a video with two views of the crash.
Note in the first video that they are just letting the cars go by.
Note in the second video where he reverse to. There is no one there.
Do I know exactly what was in his head? No. But, you are the one who categorized him as breaking the “peace treaty”, not me. And I find that interesting given all the other deaths in the last year. There are other killings that are much more clearly premeditated actions of “let me kill one of those guys”.
“Apparently we’re supposed to believe that a bunch of nazis showed up in town and started beating up peaceful people for no reason.”
Oh, there was definitely a reason. For example, these folks are beating up a guy for being black:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHET0EsXkAIcwcZ.jpg
There is now a hunt to identify all the folks in this picture. Oddly, the ones identified deleted their facebook pages, and aren’t contacting the police to turn themselves in. That is, they are fugitives from the law.
The guy in the back is Michael Tubbs. You should read up on him.
—
Do you have any specific instances of violence committed by folks on the left in Virginia you want to share?
The fascists are responsible for the above savage, racially motivated beating, the death of one person, and injuries of many more.
How do you infer their motivation from this photo?
Here is a video of same (trigger warning, obv.):
https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/videos/1510796702292576/
No idea what those weird symbols mean, maybe you can help me out, “Matt.”
—
As far as my inference for their motivations, let’s just wait until these guys are charged. What matters is the court of law, not what I think.
You mean aside from the photo of the black guy using a crude homemade flamethrower shooting at someone holding a confederate flag (who had his back turned)?
Aside from Cantwell and Baked Alaska being maced?
This isn’t a secret. Go on Twitter. There are hundreds of left-wingers loudly bragging that they beat up Nazis as this event.
You’re forgeting the lady journalist who was attacked, and also the photojournalist who needed staples in his head.
@Matt M
As if nobody’s lied on Twitter? If there are hundreds of people boasting, then the people boasting they attacked someone outnumber the potential targets there were to attack – and it seems obvious that the vast majority of people at the rally did not catch a beating. Even including bystanders catching a punch due to mistaken identity, a decent chunk of the people boasting must not be telling the truth. In general, if everyone who boasted about/talked approvingly of punching Nazis was actually punching Nazis, the amount of punching would be so great as to travel back in time and concuss Baby Hitler.
Further, the first punches thrown over the weekend were probably by torchlight marchers Friday night against outnumbered and surrounded counterprotesters. On Saturday, the videos I’ve seen show individuals and small groups darting at each other and swinging, mostly – but only one side had a guy on it plow a car into a bunch of people.
Here’s a thought:
Showing up to this protest was idiotic. Idiotic. Hard to believe a fight broke out, I thought this was debate club! Where has decorum gone?
If you show up to a protest organized by neo-Nazis and white supremacists looking for a fight, you are probably going to get one. If you want a fight, and get a fight, and then play the victim card I have a hard time being very sympathetic. If the neo-Nazis show up at a BLM protest and get in a fight I don’t have much sympathy for them either. This looks like political crips vs bloods to me, I don’t see any forces for good in these protests/counter protests.
My wife says “why won’t you let me go to these counter-protests?”* and after Saturday she said “oh, now I know why.”
She asked “but what if the Nazis were protesting in [our home town]? What about then?” And I thought about it and I think I surprised her when I said “yes, we can go,” because what we’re doing is not letting [our home town] become known as “the place where the Nazis protested.” And I believe the dead woman was a local, too.
Still lots of people on both sides looking for any excuse to show how badass they are. It was only a matter of time before someone died. I’m not even that plugged in and I knew both sides were eager to bust heads in Charlottesville starting a few months ago.
* I do not literally stop her, but I tell her it’s a bad idea.
dndnrsn & Ilya,
so, going back to my original quote
The answer is yes then? This is what you believe?
I told you, they had a reason.
Presumably you think the guys in that video I linked beat that black kid, hyena pack style, in self-defense.
—
I mean what is your standard of proof, that Boondocks episode where Eli Gorbinsky shouted “yes I murdered that cop, because I hate cops, btw here is a gun with my fingerprints on it.”
It’s a bunch of people with nazi shit on their shields, directed by an ex-KKK dude who spent time in prison. Why do you think they are beating up that kid?
No, I think there was a lot of violence and fighting, much of it mutual and voluntary, likely initiated by both sides in different situations and instances.
Both sides showed up knowing what they were going to get. And both sides got it.
And also a crazy dude hit some lady with a car. But the fact that this also happened doesn’t invalidate my previous statement.
@Matt M
Watch the videos from Friday night. Why do you think the torch-carrying, sieg-heiling parade surrounded and attacked the outnumbered counterprotesters?
Because they were in the way?
Why were the counter-protesters there, if not to “confront nazis”? Well, they got their wish. Punches were thrown on both sides. Mace was exchanged on both sides. I’m sure in many cases the right threw the first punch. I’m also sure they didn’t do so in every case.
Have you watched the video of Friday night? The marchers are clearly the aggressors, and are attacking peaceful protesters, unprovoked.
” likely initiated by both sides in different situations and instances.”
I linked video evidence, feel free to do the same.
“Because they were in the way?”
What do you mean they were in the way. That’s the excuse you are running with? That’s battery, buddy, possibly worse.
I think we’re just arguing past each other at this point here.
I am not claiming that the right initiated no violence during this weekend.
Given that I am not disputing that, your posting of videos or whatever adds zero value. You are correct that I have not offered video proof of any particular fight that was instigated by the left. I still think it’s absurd for you to assume that this was the case though. Both sides showed up equipped for violence, both have committed various acts of violence in other locations. To assume that 100% of violence was initiated by one side seems to defy all explanation, regardless of what certain people did or did not capture and post to Youtube.
Is there any hypothetical evidence that possible could convince you the neo-Nazis behaved worse? Maybe if they committed a terrorist attack (as outlandish as that may sound).
Worse? Sure.
100% responsible for 100% of the violence?
No.
A public statement from McCain, Sessions, or CHS saying “Both sides behaved very badly and committed violence, on the net of things it seems like the right was a bit worse at this particular event,” wouldn’t bug me too much.
That’s not the type of statement we are getting.
Well, here’s a video of antifa starting a fight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s8R_cGgvFY
And I notice the Deandre Harris doesn’t show us how the fight started, since he’s already surrounded by the time we can see him. Which means we don’t know who threw the first punch in that fight. And Deandre Harris did feel the need to cover his face, which while only circumstantial, is not exactly the behavior one expects of someone who intends to be peaceful and law abiding.
So while I’m sure there were numerous instances of Nazis starting fights, I give zero credence to the “blameless counter-protestors who were just defending themselves” narrative. Antifa went there to start shit, shit happened, and they deserve blame for the part they played in it. Peaceful protestors need to stop letting violent fucks use them as protection.
You really believe the people on the antifa side knew, or even reasonably suspected, that someone was going to try to run them down with a car? Really?
You’re letting the word “fight” carry an awful lot of water here. It isn’t a synonym for “protest”, it isn’t a synonym for “murder”, and it damn sure isn’t a bridge between the two.
So, I’ve tried to parse or interpret that in a way that doesn’t make you a Literal Nazi Apologist, desperately hoping that his nation’s leaders will also come out as Nazi Apologists. I can’t do it, but I’m glad to see we elected a better class of leaders than that. Even, though belatedly, President Trump.
Given that only one side has killed anyone, it is unsurprising that they receive significantly more condemnation. You would expect that if that was unjustified (e.g. if there had been a violent brawl that just happened to result in precisely one death), given that it occurred as a result of a terrorist attack that injured nineteen others (can you given nineteen credible accounts of left-wing violence?) I can’t imagine why you would expect anything else. Searching “ohio state university attack” (without quotes) gets 3.5 million hits on Google; “charlottesville protest” gets 4 million. The terrorist attack isn’t just one part of a tapestry of violence, woven equally by each side. It’s a huge event that should dominate coverage.
Even if we decide to delve into the rest of the (ultimately fairly insignificant) violence, I’ve seen one video of a gang of armed neo-Nazis brutally beating someone, versus one picture of someone spraying a rudimentary flamethrower and not actually causing any harm, and someone punching a terrorist’s car. There have been generic claims of further violence by both sides, but unless anyone cares to examine them more closely we can only assume that that mirrors the rest of the violence (i.e. was largely committed by neo-Nazis) or at best is split 50-50 and therefore cancels out. So, being generous to the Nazis, we are just looking at the details above. Even discounting the terrorist attack, I think the neo-Nazis come out looking more than “a bit worse”.
Do you mean at a rally, or at all? I’ve just noticed this story in the last couple of days:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4793016/Anti-Trump-activist-executed-Republican-neighbor.html
And there was, of course, the attempted assassination at the softball game.
Look, it’s probably true that at least the Nazis and the antifa, though not all their various fellow travelers, showed up expecting a fight (as in, fists and sometimes improvised weapons, bruises and property damage). That’s what they do. No one puts on Black Bloc clothes or gets a swastika tattoo who’s looking to peacefully exercise their right to stand around holding a sign.
But this thing where you run a car into a crowd? That’s not a fight, that’s murder. A terrorist act, too, fitting the mold of several recent high-profile ones. And now, right after a terrorist murder, is not the time to stand around hemming and hawing about how there’s violence on both sides. This is the time to condemn that murder. And to condemn the people that committed it, too, because if we can’t agree on hating literal, self-identified, swastika-tattooed fucking Nazis, what can we agree on?
Your source is the Daily Mail, a continent away and not the most credible of sources even in its own country. Local papers indicate that this was a generic neighborhood feud that had been running for at least five years and wasn’t notably political in nature even if that was the specific thing the two argued about last week.
If that’s the best you’ve got, against a literal fucking Nazi who ran down twenty people with a Dodge in the name of Team Nazi, then there’s no equivalence here.
@Randy M
Yes, just at the rally. In any case, quoting from that article: “Neighbors said the men had been involved in a long-running dispute but the shooting was not directly related to their political beliefs”.
Calling it a terrorist act is premature; for instance the guy in Times Square who did the same thing wasn’t a terrorist. A lot of the talk around the car killing seems to be an attempt to say “checkmate, alt-right, now you’re 100% to blame and the Antifa are excused for everything they have done, do, or will do”. But the car guy was just one guy, so far as we know not acting in concert with others; if we apply the same standards to other groups we could declare BLM 100% evil after the Dallas murders.
Oh, that’s an interesting development. Do you have a source for that?
but we don’t have to do that BECAUSE NAZIS
and anyone who asks we do that is an obvious LITERAL NAZI SYMPATHIZER
It was shitty of NPR, in the wake of the softball game shooting, to “butwhatabout” violence from the right.
I have lots to say about leftist violence. But not right now.
I confess I’m a little uncomfortable with classifying it as a terrorist attack. I have yet to see the video (at work), so I’m probably missing something. But the impression I’ve gotten from these threads scans the reprehensible murders as a deranged “reeeee im a nazi fuuuuuck youuuuu haters for counterprotesting reeeee” high-stress-environment crime of opportunity scenario, not a premeditated politically motivated targeting of random bystanders.
Could someone please point out what I’m missing?
Alright, thanks for the further details. I wondered why I hadn’t seen it spoken of here. I tried to follow my source back to something more official to verify; serves me right for posting without time to read fully.
OK, I’ll downgrade to probable terrorist act. But no, I’m not saying we should retroactively excuse antifa for everything they’ve ever done. I’m not even saying that the Nazis are 100% evil, although since putting on a Nazi armband is more-or-less explicitly coding yourself Stupid Evil in our society, even the parts of it that tolerate symbolism like Confederate flags, I figure it’d take a pretty weird life story for any given Nazi not to be one or the other. The alt-right as a whole isn’t even in scope for me today.
What I’m saying is there’s some perfectly good common ground right there. We all hate murder. We all hate Nazis, and even if some of us are willing to hold our noses if they’re limiting themselves to chants and marches, that clearly wasn’t happening this weekend with or without Car Guy. Let’s take a day off from waging the culture war and focus on those points, shall we?
not a premeditated politically motivated targeting of random bystanders.
Premeditated seems unlikely given that the rally was supposed to happen in Lee Park, and that had the mayor not ordered the police to forcibly disperse the rally attendees at the last minute, there wouldn’t have been a bunch of people downtown in the middle of the streets.
Maybe he planned on vehicular homicide when he came to the event and waited to choose the location at the last minute, that IS possible, but a large gathering of right-wingers in a park (what was planned to happen until the city got involved) seems like a poor venue to go about it.
“And Deandre Harris did feel the need to cover his face”
Buddy, did it occur to you that Deandre Harris might be covering his face because like 5 people with pipes are attacking him? If you were being attacked by 5 people with pipes would you … not cover your face?
—
“I notice the Deandre Harris doesn’t show us how the fight started, since he’s already surrounded by the time we can see him.”
Deandre Harris couldn’t show much of anything because he was on the ground being hit by pipes.
In actual fact,
(a) There are lots of eye witnesses who say the gang in question was harassing Deandre for a few blocks before this started,
(b) “For some reason,” no alternative accounts of the story are emerging. Indeed, what IS happening is every person who was identified in this altercation beating on Deandre has disappeared from social media and is currently basically being a fugitive from the police/FBI. Which would be very odd behavior for an innocent party.
There is a $10,000 reward for information on the whereabouts of these people, by the way.
—
On a personal note, I wanted to add that you are an asshole, and you and your ilk are going to lose.
—
Here’s more:
https://everipedia.org/wiki/joshua-thomas-king/
“We all hate Nazis”
Apparently not! Let’s even leave aside the tire fire that is this comment section, have you been watching the news today?
Not helpful.
Nope. Antifa were there starting fights. Escalating violence risks further escalations of violence, and injury and possible death of innocent third parties is a predictable outcome. The mayor and police, who are responsible both for upholding the rights of citizens and protecting them from harm, chose instead to do neither, aggravating the situation.
Nazis are violent, unethical thugs. The death from the car crash was tragic. But no one gets off for this. It was a shit-show all around, and the only way to stop it from happening again is for EVERYONE to learn from their mistakes.
“You are correct that I have not offered video proof of any particular fight that was instigated by the left. I still think it’s absurd for you to assume that this was the case though. Both sides showed up equipped for violence, both have committed various acts of violence in other locations.”
Ah, when I call you on actual evidence, you start talking about other locations. Reminder, you said originally:
“Trump is being raked over the coals by the media for suggesting that more than one side was engaging in violence. This is considered unacceptable and beyond the pale. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that a bunch of nazis showed up in town and started beating up peaceful people for no reason. These peaceful “anti-racists” either did not fight back or only used exactly and appropriately proportional self defense. The violence was 100% one sided and anyone who claims otherwise is a nazi sympathizer.”
Actually it _does_ look pretty one-sided, to a lot of people (me included, and I have been following events fairly closely — I am not far from Virginia physically). And it _does_ look like a bunch of folks with histories of violence, prison terms, KKK membership, etc. were starting to get physical in response to e.g. people yelling at them, standing in their way, etc.
Like I can name specific people. Can you? Or is this all “abstract” for you?
Ah, yes, he decided to wear a thin black face-mask because of its well known pipe-blocking properties, and not because it would help obscure his face in the event he was caught on camera doing something illegal.
And what were the events leading up to that? Was it, as he said, an unprovoked attack? Or did he throw a punch and then get overrun?
By Deandre’s own mouth they were “exchanging words back and forth”. One sided reporting like this is exactly why I can’t trust the narrative. There may be other versions of events, but we don’t hear about them because the media doesn’t want to report them.
Not necessarily, since you don’t have to be guilty for the internet hate machine to fuck with you. Or for antifa to track you down and assault you. But it does point in that direction, yes.
Ah yes, because wanting the rule of law, which includes such things as “no violence except to defend yourself from immediate physical danger” makes me a nazi.
As was pointed out, various alt-right figureheads got maced and in some cases cried for milk like little bitches. I’m not sure if they were dishing out violence, but I’m guessing not since they’re figureheads and ones who cry like little bitches at that.
I think the Nazis definitely come out looking worse on this one, even leaving aside the car incident. And I don’t like the deflectatory aspect of pointing to AntiFa. But I also don’t like people who deflect from AntiFa and their ilk entirely. Insofar as AntiFa is a reaction to fascism, then fascism is a problem, and insofar as fascism is a reaction to AntiFa, then fascism is a problem (and these two are both problems for many other reasons too). Let’s please just delegitimize violence, without having some argument about which group is worse every single time.
I’ll start by condemning Nazis, since I’m probably more on the right than on the left at this point. What happened at this rally was wrong, between the Harris incident you linked, the obvious car crash incident, and probably other things not caught on video but which undoubtedly happened. Their ideology is murderous and pretty much bullshit at that. Same can go for white supremacists or even white nationalists.
Now, I hope people on the left can do the same for AntiFa. I won’t – not my place.
A few things to consider: First, there were peaceful, unarmed, unprotected protesters – not antifa or whatever, not people looking to start a fight or fight back, I’m talking about clergy and such – who have described being attacked by Nazis and WNs. It’s not just “two groups came looking for a fight; they fought” even before the guy smashes a car into a bunch of people. Second, right-wing extremists appear, on the whole, more likely to try and kill people via firearms than left-wing extremists, in the past. Third, in this case, the Nazis kicked the whole thing off by surrounding and attacking peaceful protesters the night previous to shit really hitting the fan.
@dndnrsn
But why should we consider these things? What is the point? Are we keeping score? Is this a game?
If you can prove that one group was more violent in a particular case or even in general, what is gained? It still doesn’t justify initiation of violence on the part of the other side. Violence is only justified in self defense, not because you proved the other side is even worse, or their ideology beyond the pale.
As Anonyemous says above, the only good answer is that both sides should unequivocally reject violence.
I don’t understand the cancellation.
If one right winger beats up a left winger and a different left winger beats up a different right winger, the two acts don’t cancel out. One right winger and one left winger are guilty of assault.
If ninety right wingers beat up left wingers and sixty left wingers beat up right wingers, the short summary is not “right wingers are worse than left wingers” it’s “members of both groups were responsible for violence.”
AnonYEmous: I don’t think the rise of alt-right has anything to do with the antifa.
Antifa’s a known enemy of theirs, but when you trace alt-right writing, you don’t see much about the Antifa. You see stuff about Jews, and globalists, and black people, and muslims, and Mexicans, and cucks, and so on. Usually there is some sort of grand narrative.
Historians are going to be puzzling over the precise causes of the alt-right for a while, but I can tell you right now antifa isn’t more than a sliver in that pie chart.
—
The antifa is definitely a reaction to the alt-right, however. Antifa’s only platform is violent resistance of fascism — it’s sort of in their name. They have no other aims (unlike other violent groups, e.g. some left anarchist groups).
@David Friedman
Yes, thank you. This is exactly why this “score keeping” is counterproductive.
If I’m “on the left”, it’s only in the eyes of people fairly far to the right. But I’ve talked with some people who either used to do this sort of thing, or wanted to.
Some people think there’s a post-capitalist utopia somewhere around the corner. A narrower group of people think what it takes to get there is a violent push, and that the ends justify the means. From a moral standpoint, that’s wrong. From a practical standpoint, even if there were a post-capitalist utopia somewhere around the corner, people who have just been subject to violent struggle would be the least likely to help realize it. Everything for the following few years at least is going to be about some asshole who promises security.
Maybe there are other “vanilla” anti-facists who just think facism is a present risk and want to help prevent it. They’re deluded about their political role, and hitting someone out of preventable delusion is not an excuse.
No, it’s not, unless you’re lumping anyone using fascist symbology under “alt-right”. Antifa history has been discussed several times on this board: the current iteration got big as a response to the alt-right, but originated as a reaction to far-right punks and skinheads a couple decades ago, who far predate /pol/, Pepe the Frog, Car Guy, or the other people we saw this weekend and have almost nothing to do with them besides a fondness for swastikas.
It’s sorta correct to say that it has no platform besides resistance to fascism (and now other parts of the nontraditional Right), but that’s because it’s an umbrella term, what used to be called a united front. Most individual antifa do have strong politics, often some flavor of anarchism.
@onyomi/DavidFriedman
When two groups both get into punch-ups, but one does the qualitatively worse forms of violence quantifiably more often, that does mean something. Forget about cracking a dude in the skull with a bike lock or punching people; violence of the “shooting a bunch of people unprovoked” is committed by the far right more than the far left in the US. A lot more often, as I understand it. Also in Canada, to a considerably greater degree.
I don’t think we disagree. Until the alt-right came along, most people not part of a “scene” wouldn’t have heard about the antifa at all. They were a sliver.
I think it’s probably true a lot of antifa have other politics.
—
re: “is alt-right a technically correct term for X”: I don’t care very much about the precise taxonomy here.
I read a lot of their writing, and AntiFa features prominently. More importantly, their violence against fascists breeds a sense of victimisation, which is then used to fuel both new recruits and counter-violence. Because without an opponent like AntiFa, all they have to complain about are non-whites and cucks, and while I confess some distaste for the latter, it’s hardly enough to make fascism worthwhile.
But again; I condemn Nazis. I’m not here to try and deflect. I think it’s clear that there is a cycle of violence, and I want to do my part to stop it. What you do about this is, ultimately, up to you.
Is it fair to say that this is the same iteration from the 80s or would it be more accurate to say that the people with Iron Front symbols in Charlottesville bear basically the same relationship to the 80s groups that the 80s groups did to 30s groups?
“I’m not here to try and deflect. I think it’s clear that there is a cycle of violence, and I want to do my part to stop it.”
I appreciate this a lot.
As for me, whether it’s Black Bloc, left anarchists or AntiFa, I completely disagree with the idea of attempting to move politics forward via violence.
Now, if we are talking the internal history of the punk movement, that looks like something different to me.
Whether you want to call these guys the same group as the ’80s iteration is a matter of opinion. Some of the same people are still out there, but not many — there just aren’t too many fifty-year-old punks still busting heads. And it’s certainly expanded and shifted focus. But there’s a clear line of continuity, in people, location, rhetoric, and targeting, that isn’t there for the ’80s groups relative to the ’30s groups.
Here’s a video of the way the Deandre Harris attack started. It sorta looks like the black guy with the orange shirt and a stick started it, though it’s possible that the video missed something during the camera pan. What’s clear is the escalation from both sides (I recommend viewing in 1080p, full screen, at 0.25 speed). Combined with the way the anti-fascist group followed and threatened the nazis (watch from the beginning to see)…
I guess I should leave people to their own conclusions.
@dndnrsn
What does it mean? What is the point? I mean, it might be interesting on some sociological/polisci level if you could prove, say, that leftists are more likely to engage in low-level brawling, rock-throwing, etc. but rightists are more likely to actually go on a shooting spree (though certainly not always; remember the Bernie bro shooting at GOP senators playing baseball?), but it’s clearly not to learn some sort of sociological lesson people are engaging in this kind of thing.
People on both sides talking about how the other side is worse are clearly trying to justify the idea that their side is entirely justified and the other side entirely evil (witness all my facebook friends outraged at Donald Trump having the temerity to say “mistakes were made by lots of people; there were bad people, like white supremacists, on both sides, but most of the people on both sides weren’t bad people; let’s all just agree to be peaceful,” which is clearly code for “I love Nazis”–we’ve reached the level where anything less than “outgroup is pure evil” is unacceptable). That’s not a good way to think, practically speaking, nor useful in judging morality, for reasons David Friedman described.
Wait, Deandre Harris is the guy in that video? jfc. Yes, if the conclusion you draw from that video is “he started it”, I doubt we can have a productive discussion.
@David Friedman etc.
My point is that there are two types of violence we are considering. There is violence we have explicit evidence for, and the violence we are assuming exists based on hearsay. The former shows the right being more violent. The latter (which notably did not cause any newsworthy or even socialmediaworthy injuries) is at best 50-50 split (even if we don’t extrapolate from the explicit evidence to assume it is >50-<50 right-left). Therefore we can conclude that overall, taking into account both types, the right is more violent. You are correct that we can also conclude that both sides are violent. That conclusion can also be made about e.g. the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It is only useful if both sides are relatively equally violent. Given that the numbers we have so far are 1 dead 19 hospitalised from the terrorist attack, 1 presumably injured from being beaten on the floor with clubs from the video posted at the hands of Nazis, versus 1 journalist needing staples at the hands of antifa, I don't think that is a reasonable conclusion.
@others
At this point, I'm done with arguing against people who are trying to minimise Nazi violence. If anyone wants to push the "both sides are equally bad" line by posting horrifying videos of antifa violence at the protest, be my guest, and I'll happily join you in condemning it. But I really can't be bothered to engage any more with actual Nazi sympathisers. I think (at least, hope) that some of the people doing the minimisation are just being contrarian/anti-left, and are not pro-Nazi. I urge them to stop. It's not a good look.
Reacting to Antifa attacking journalists by going
is incredibly vulgar. At least have the honesty of your convictions by directly stating your approval of antifa’s tactic of going immediately after filmers (even neutral one) rather than the disingenous ‘anyone wants to push the “both sides are equally bad” line by posting horrifying videos of antifa violence at the protest’
For reference, I am aware of three attacks on reporters, two of which were done by antifa and one of which was done by white supremacists.
If anybody would like another condemnation of antifa from the left: they’re a bunch of violent imbeciles, whose instinctive response to the moral high ground is to charge downhill. I do not think that there is a moral equivalence between Nazis and the rest of us; one of the (many, many) reasons I think so is that modern liberal society has renounced violence on the streets as a legitimate tactic. I oppose Nazis who valorize that sort of bullshit; I oppose antifa for the same reasons.
If one side engages in literally murderous violence, and the other side punches people, that’s a very productive sort of score to keep. Politics can tolerate an occasional fistfight, though most of us would rather not. If it gets to murder, and that isn’t immediately quashed, then it isn’t politics any more. So it does seem useful to have a rule that says that in any political debate, the first side to actually murder people, loses. And the math for keeping this particular score is really easy.
And trying to evade that by using the word “violence” to refer to both fistfights and murder, saying “both sides are being violent”, that really is an apologia for murder.
I get that you really expected antifa to be the ones who lost that fight. So did I, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of people. Well, except for the Actual Literal Nazis someone dragged out of the closet to claim that dishonor. So that’s the reality we have to deal with. The first rule of the game is “first side to kill someone, loses”. The Nazis, and everyone on their side, just lost.
Right, because responsibility for violence is zero-sum. If someone is saying antifa or the police bear some responsibility, well duh that responsibility simply *must* come from being taken off the shoulders of Nazis, right??
@onyomi:
I am, in fact, engaging in it to point out that one side is worse than the other, measurably so. I am making a moral judgment, and I don’t see how looking at what people have done isn’t useful in making moral judgments. To give a featureless, made up example: if group a commits 100 units of violence against group b, and group b commits 25 units of violence against group a, the statement “both groups have committed violence” is true, but so is the statement “group a has committed 4x more violence than group b.”
@John Schilling
First movement where one member commits murder loses is an absolutely terrible heuristic. Obviously it make sense to quash the murder immediately, but that murder doesn’t excuse, prospectively or retrospectively, any violence done by the other side.
Did John Brown destroy the legitimacy of the abolitionist movement?
After sleeping on it, I think I figured out what’s so bothersome about the relentless both side-ism.
Yes, there were violent people on the both sides of the conflict. And yes all of them ought to be condemned. But the non-violent neo-nazi and white supremacists also ought to be condemned, while the peaceful counterprotesters ought to be lauded.
One side was a small group of terrible surrounded by a larger group of good people and the other is a large group of terrible people with a small core of even more terrible people. That’s not a symmetric situation.
Going on and on about antifa and both sides, obscures this difference without actually biting the bullet and disagreeing with it. Instead of saying “yeah White Nationalists are terrible people” or “no, white nationalists aren’t terrible people” we get endless “what about antifa” or even worse, random ejaculations about how many people Stalin killed.
For all that I disagree with them Matt M at least he bit the bullet. There’s something to be said for that.
The Middle Passage destroyed the legitimacy of slavery long before John Brown was even born. But even if we discount all the murdered slaves, Kansas started its bleeding in the person of abolitionist Thomas Barber, murdered by proslavery activist George W. Clark.
The “first murderer loses” heuristic is looking pretty good so far.
No, Deandre Harris is a guy in that video. Notable other guys in that video are the dude with the stick who started the fight, and then knocked Deandre down as he fled; the white supremacist who hit Deandre with his flag while he was down (possibly confused by Deandre falling onto him? Or just an asshole); the two dudes who tackled said white supremacist to the ground; the masked antifa who comes in to help them beat the fallen white supremacist; the white supremacists who attacked them to get them off the other white supremacist.
From the video, it didn’t look like Deandre did any swinging himself, but others around him certainly did. I’m not sure self-defense will hold up about that in court (IANAL), but I know not personally participating in violence doesn’t protect you if your compatriots kill someone during a robbery, and there might be a similar rule about being in a group attacking another group.
And yeah, we probably can’t have a productive conversation if the conclusion you draw from that video is that the counter-protestors are all blameless, peaceful, law-abiding people. Or if your moral view is that people aren’t allowed to defend themselves from violent attacks.
@Gobbobobble
You have precisely missed my point (literally, by replacing it with an ellipsis). I would welcome attempts to argue that both sides are equally bad by giving examples of antifa violence (relatively speaking at least). I might disagree, but justifying the equal-violence claim by condemning antifa violence (a laudable thing to do) has very different optics to doing so by claiming that the Nazis weren’t really that bad.
Separately, I think responsibility *is* obviously zero sum. You refer to people having “shares” of it, not absolute amounts. If everyone thinks something is solely my fault, then I point out that someone else had a hand in it, that does lessen my share of the blame. But I don’t think that’s really relevant.
You mean like here?
Because I am 10000% done with idiots who keep excusing antifa’s violence. Escalating street brawls are only going to get worse if they keep getting away with this bullshit. More people are going to get hurt, and it’s only a matter of time until there are more deaths. And by focusing on the white supremacists to the exclusion of all else, you’re facilitating this.
People have a right to freedom of speech. People have a right to free assembly. Even disgusting people like nazis. Even to speak disgusting views like racial supremacy. Extrajudical violence trying to strip people of these rights is so incredibly abhorrent, you have no idea.
I think Brad’s point about the mostly non-violent, and morally correct, counter protesters is correct.
In an alternate world, a better leader would have had something like this to say:
“The white supremacists and neo-nazis who are attempting to spread their ideology of hatred are wrong. We have fought wars to stop the spread of these ideas and protect those at risk from them. They do attack the very ideals of our country with their words.
The deaths and injuries they have caused today is blood on their hands. We will prosecute those responsible to the fullest extent of the law. We mourn the senseless death of Heather Heyer and our prayers go out to her family and loved ones. We pray for the recovery of all those injured.
But we must not give in to their hatred. We must not betray our own ideals in meeting their hateful ideology with physical violence. Let us not lash out in anger, but reach out to our brothers and sisters with love. If there are those who are lost, let us lead them to follow, as best we can.
The hatred embodied in these movements is what we must oppose, and so we are called to embrace each other in love.”
@Matt M -‘the black guy using a crude homemade flamethrower shooting at a guy holding a confederate flag (who had his back turned)-
Looked to me like the aerosol can flamethrower was evidence of intent to set confederate flags on fire, and in the picture I saw that’s what the flame was hitting. Was the black guy ready to rumble afterwards? Yes, obviously. Was he armed aside from his flag-burner? Apparently not. Those cans don’t last long, and have a real chance of blowing up in your hand. Are black guys who burn confederate flags waved by neo Nazis and don’t mind a brawl a general threat to public order? Obviously not, not at all compared to antifa beating Taft Republicans and calling them Nazis. Or compared to assassinating R party politicians. Focus.
A major issue with antifa vs. neo-nazis, white-supremacists/nationalist, and various other factions of the ‘alt-right’ is that one party is saying you’ll be physically safe if you stop assembling in support of certain beliefs, and the other parties are saying you’ll be physically safe if you accept an inferior position in this nation or leave the nation entirely.
The threat of violence doesn’t not equate. The “assembly” portion of the first amendment is not equal to the “beliefs” section of the 1st amendment and the entirety of the 5th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 24th amendments.
Dallas Shootout: Gunman shooting down police officer caught on camera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=murLU0us4eY
Five dead, nine wounded.
Wikipedia:
Shooter: “stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”. An investigation into his online activities uncovered his interest in black nationalist groups. Johnson also “liked” the Facebook page of the African American Defense League, whose leader, Mauricelm-Lei Millere, called for the murders of police officers across the U.S.
Obama:
“The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he’s not more representative of all African-Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans. Or the shooter in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim Americans. They don’t speak for us. That’s not who we are,”
The Trump Version:
“The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Charlottesville, he’s not more representative of all White Americans than the shooter in Dallas was representative of African-Americans. Or the shooter in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim Americans. They don’t speak for us. That’s not who we are,”
Are we to believe if Trump had stated this he would be given a pass by the media? There is a double standard here and it is glaring.
But the Nazis are saying that you’ll be unsafe if you don’t that after they get power by conventional means, and antifa says you’ll be unsafe if you don’t do that now.
I only wish we had laws against murder and assault. If we did then we could hold individuals responsible for their actions without indicting an entire group. If the motives are judged reprehensible additional punishment could be warranted.
I also wish we had government employees whose job it was to keep violent mobs apart from each other, engage in crowd control, and arrest people who engage in violent behavior and charge them with crimes.
Perhaps a system like this would simultaneously prevent and limit violence while punishing people who break the rules. If this system existed those who engaged in these crimes would be punished proportionally to how often they committed crimes.
@Jiro
Historically you’re wrong both in the US with neo-Nazis (https://www.splcenter.org/20100126/racist-skinheads-understanding-threat#intheus) and with respect to the original Nazi party.
(Are you seriously telling me you haven’t read any of their hopes for a race war or other civil war????)
Please also not that I wrote “and various other factions of the ‘alt-right’”, which includes white nationalists, which includes the KKK, which includes thousands lynched, and continued lynchings as recently as 50 years ago (when many current politically participating adults were young adults), and nooses and the like being used as objects of terror even more recently.
At least some of the video evidence suggests Harris was carrying a short club, had been waving it around aggressively, and struck the first blow with it. A group of antifa tried to grab somebody’s flag; the flag-bearer was resisting, so a not-yet-wounded Harris swung his club, striking the flag-bearer on the head. Harris was then beaten in retaliation as the other team regrouped.
Here’s the relevant slow-motion gif.
Or a real-time version.
(those are both from a buzzfeed video, this one (around 1:03).
As an added bonus, just a few minutes after that altercation here is a masked antifa knocking down a bearded old man and punching him in the face, again apparently for flag-carrying.
My own personal “defense” here is “those people wouldn’t have been in the street in the first place if the mayor hadn’t violated the order of a federal judge to allow the rally attendees to exercise their constitutional rights in a public park”
I don’t defend the actions of the car-guy, but I think city officials botched this whole thing horribly, it backfired in a MAJOR way, and they seem to be escaping any and all culpability. (let’s talk about the two police officers who died in a helicopter crash – how did THAT happen? why were they up there in the first place?)
The mayor had no idea what he was dealing with. He thought he could just order people to shut up and go away and that they would. This was a major mistake. A little bit of blood and a whole lot of itchy eyes are on his hands, too. Nobody died in Skokie, specifically because the Nazis were allowed to march.
Being on the side that didn’t just have one of its thugs murder an innocent person, is very effective at distracting attention from lesser failings. This isn’t even all that unfair.
There are always helicopters. When I was living in Oakland during Occupy and the preceding police-brutality protests, I could tell how riotous a particular march was getting by looking out my window and counting helicopters — six or more generally indicated a bona-fide riot. Some of those were news choppers, some were police, but it’s probably coincidental that the cops were the ones that crashed this time.
Heelbearcub, as a somewhat testable prediction: do you think that right wing response to James Fields will be much different than left wing response to James Hodgkinson? (I’m not sure, but I’m interested in an informative test if we can come up with one.)
For what it’s worth, I identify as right of center and I saw Hodgkinson as lone wolf, not representative, and mentally disturbed.
I’d like to think that Fields’ attack was unintentional, because it would make me feel a little better about people than if it was planned in cold blood, but of course, the fact that I’d like to think so doesn’t make it so.
Yes, they will be different, because there isn’t anyone in congress involved.
That said:
Unequivocal condemnation without attempting to deny the person’s ideological leanings.
Yeah, I think Bernie’s beliefs are severely net negative, but he’s definitely a good person.
Like Obama did with Islamic terrorists?
Orlando:
No mention of Muslim or Islam in the entire statement. This when it was known the guy dialed 911 and stated he was doing it for ISIS. There are different standards at play here unsurprisingly.
@tscharf
Yes, pretending that Islamist ideology is stupid when the left does it (although in that specific case I’m not sure if the terrorist’s motivations actually were known at the time of the speech). It’s equally stupid when the right does it.
HBC,
I respected Bernie for that statement, but now he’s making posts about “who is this ‘alt-left’? There is no such thing…”
That happened like two months ago! Are our memories so short?
@gbdub:
There is a group of people that call themselves “alt-right”. Steve Bannon famously said he wanted his media operation to be their home. It’s definitely a thing that has broad meaning, although one can argue about the details.
There is no one who calls themselves “alt-left”. Nor has the term “alt-left” been in use. I’m sure you could find scattered references to it, but it’s not a thing.
If Trump had said “AnitFa” or maybe even “Black Bloc” he might gave gotten some traction.
Trump is incoherent most of the time. He speaks in elliptical riddles that obfuscate true meaning, because he usually doesn’t have true meaning. He doesn’t speak with precision for a variety of reasons, but one is that it serves his interests in being able to later deny what he said previously.
No one is interested in, and it is fairly fruitless, trying to translate what Trump “really” meant. You shouldn’t expect his political opponents to do it for him.
Regardless of whether it’s the universally agreed upon term, it seems to me that everyone knows exactly who he’s talking about. Which means it is, by definition, NOT “incoherent”
Sure, but it was still disappointing for Bernie to go from a strong denunciation of political violence to basically “Political violence on the left? Never heard of it!” in two months.
“They don’t count, because they don’t literally call themselves ‘alt-left'” is just getting cute with semantics.
Actually, I ran into a blog of one guy who did awhile back, although I expect if I googled it now all I’d get is reactions to Trump.
I think his thesis was something like “group differences, therefore UBI” but it might have been something like “immigration restrictions so we can keep welfare solvent”, either of which might be called alt-left, if “alt” means
racisttaking into account unpalatable truths.(Needless to say, this probably wasn’t who was protesting “unite the right” or who Trump had in mind, but back at the time, Alt-Right was a less broad term not as closely associated with ironic and actual Nazis)
Looking at the Wikipedia page on terrorism in the US, since 2000 I see neo-Nazi attacks that caused deaths in July 2008, June 2009, August 2012, April 2014, June 2015, and March 2017. In the same period, there were around the same number of sovereign citizen/anti-government attacks, and a couple of anti-abortion attacks. The only left-wing attack that caused deaths I can think of was the 2016 shooting of police in Dallas (not listed).
Good for the “the right is super violent” narrative.
Not so good for the “Trump has emboldened the right and this blood is on HIS hands!” narrative tho
As noted above, Hodgkinson definitely counts as left wing.
@ Matt M
“Not so good for the “Trump has emboldened the right and this blood is on HIS hands!” narrative tho”
Two in 5 months under Trump, which is a two to three fold increase from previous years (solely according to the list rlms posted).
Some pictures relevant to the question of who was being violent.
I think it’s pretty clear that substantial numbers on both sides came prepared to engage in violence.
White nationalist runs his car into a crowd and kills someone. It’s the fault of some leftist posting on medium about an entirely different topic.
How unfortunately predictable.
Oh wow. I hadn’t even processed that Zunger wasn’t the dude driving the car. I just (semi-unconsciously) went “name I don’t know” and guessed context.
I have been predicting something like this would happen for a goddamn year, in the face of people yawning and asking what the problem was, after all it’s only Nazis getting fucked with. I spent last Friday in a four-hour debate with a blue-tribe friend of mine, arguing explicitly that this shit was out of hand and was going to get people killed in the immediate future, with that exact Zunger article forming the starting point of the discussion.
History indicates appeasement is a poor strategy here, Mr. Craven.
I literally don’t know what article we are talking about…
Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept
Which is exactly why the right has decided to cut that shit out and stop appeasing the progressive elite.
Violent street brawls between nazis and communists was literally a key part of the nazis’ rise to power in Germany. So much so that communists frequently assert that the Reichstag fire was a false flag operation by the nazis to gain more popular support. You have history exactly backwards.
This piece summarizes my feelings about it pretty well. It’s very annoying being in a position where you pretty much hate both major sides of a culture war, but that may be an almost unavoidable result of the culture war invading too many aspects of life. I especially like the image of a “horseshoe” to describe the alt-right and antifa.
I do blame the left for pushing this stupid monument issue again and again, in my hometown and elsewhere. It creates the “with us or against us” dynamic I think is counter-productive to the goals of anyone on either side who doesn’t want a new civil war, secession crisis, etc. The left basically wants a return to the status quo where any public expression of white nationalism was beyond the pale, but I think they are probably achieving the opposite. I don’t think you can shame, harangue, doxx, or threaten any right wing (or left wing) people into agreeing with you. Maybe into shutting up, but not into agreeing with you. You can galvanize and radicalize those who already agree with you at the cost of also radicalizing those who don’t.
If the left insists on hysterically looking for hornet nests to upset and sleeping dogs to poke, the right is certainly terrible at message control, optics, and policing its own ranks. To say nothing of actual murder, it’s amazing to me that those who oppose e.g. removal of monuments, lack the self-awareness to see that dressing up in Mardi Gras costumes and carrying actual Nazi flags is counterproductive. Of course, I do expect the MSM to concentrate on the right-wing crazies in a way they might not e.g. focus on those carrying a hammer and sickle at an Occupy Wall Street event. I’m not sure if this kind of self-policing is really possible for left or right, though, either with respect to symbolism, or the use of violence.
The line in the sand I’m perfectly happy with is unequivocal condemnation of the use of violence for both sides (this also cuts both ways; you can’t keep posting about how it’s okay to punch the “Nazis” without also emboldening the Nazis to punch you). Both left and right should be comfortable policing their own ranks at least with respect to this.
Though maybe I should at least be encouraged that, whichever side uses actual violence, it ends up being a net negative for them in the court of public opinion. Perhaps shows the middle isn’t actually gone; just cowed into silence.
This was billed as a “Unite the Right” rally, and I expect that’s exactly what the goal was. The idea was to energize the various white supremacist groups against a common enemy. Aside from the car thing, I imagine it went exactly as desired. There’s no reason for them to worry about the media; the media is going to call them Nazis whether they are or they are not (and this bunch pretty much was). The monument was a convenient point to rally around, nothing more.
I guess I just feel like, even if I were an actual white supremacist who thought Hitler had all the right ideas, I would have enough awareness to see that carrying the flag of a widely reviled historical enemy of the very country I’m attempting to unite in nationalist, identitarian fervor would be counterproductive.
And if I wanted to “unite the right” I’d still be willing to say “okay, but not you guys; you are going to be completely counterproductive to our goals.” But maybe that gives them more credit for ability to organize and control a public gathering than is reasonable.
I’m more just amazed and depressed that there are people this dumb and hateful in the current year. (I already thought antifa was dumb and hateful; it’s just that these events make the anti-antifa also looks dumb and hateful, making me feel like our culture is currently moving towards a state where everyone is forced to choose between one or the other brand of dumb and hateful).
I feel like you haven’t been paying attention.
This wasn’t an “anti-antifa” rally. It was a rally designed to draw in the aintifa by being explicitly white-nationalist. They wanted to use antifa to get the rest of the camel under the tent, hence “Unite the Right”.
Those people really are “dumb and hateful” at least to the extent that the antifa are.
I second this. The Confederacy lost. They’re waving the flags of losers. The Nazis lost. They’re waving the flags of losers. And it’s complete LARPing. There is no Confederacy, there is no Confederate army, so when you’re waving a confederate flag, you’re just pretending to be a Confederate. There is no 3rd Reich. There is no NSDAP. Some moron in America waving a swastika is playing dress-up pretending to be a defeated German from 70 years ago. What the hell is wrong with these people?
There are four relevant right-wing groups here: hardcore (neo)-Nazis (race war now), more lightweight alt-right (we just want white people to be able to pursue our goals like everyone else etc.), one flavour of traditional conservatives (the confederacy was bad, but not really really bad), and principled antiantifa (punching Nazis is bad, these SJWs are crazy). From the name Unite The Right and the rallying point of the statue removal, you could reasonably have expected the rally to be mainly groups 2 and 3, but in fact it was groups 1 and 2. Group 4 is essentially a non-entity: antiantifa are either SSC readers or just fa.
@rlms
It wasn’t even groups 1 and 2. It was pretty much group 1.
@The Nybbler
Citation needed. My impression is that there were quite a few edgy internet alt-righters (the central members of group 2) and a lot of “they will not replace us” types, who I would place on the 2 side of the 1-2 boundary (“Jews will not replace us” are on the other side).
Here is the cached Facebook event page, created by the organizer. Note the second paragraph.
They don’t see it that way, and they’re probably right. I don’t think there are too many people susceptible to white identitarianism who would have a visceral “ewww, Nazis” reaction.
The “reasonable” part of the activist right, the so-called alt-light, didn’t show up for this rally. Gavin McInnes specifically boycotted, for instance. The main organizers were well known to be white nationalist/white supremacist types. So it was basically about rallying the actual white nationalist/white supremacist types. Mission accomplished, I think.
I think it’s less this and more “they call you a nazi if you advocate for slightly lower taxes anyway, so fuck it, they want me to be a nazi, then fine, I’ll be a nazi”
I can say that Cantwell specifically has followed this train of logic over the course of the past couple years.
That and “if the Nazis are the only ones who are going to stand up and fight the Communists, then I guess I’ll go ahead and be a Nazi then.”
In a still-mostly-white society where every other race gets its brand of identitarianism, which just recently elected Donald Trump, I would wager that there are a whole lot of people who would be susceptible to white identitarianism if it didn’t come with swastikas and murders.
In a still-mostly-white society where every other race gets its brand of identitarianism, which just recently elected Donald Trump, I would wager that there are a whole lot of people who would be susceptible to white identitarianism if it didn’t come with swastikas and murders.
Yup. I think that’s why there’s such a strong push from the left to equate white identitarianism with swastikas and murder. I am not a fan of Trump but I think he used identity politics in a very savvy way.
A lot of white men (particularly poor/working class/otherwise disadvantaged) feel they’ve been neglected, mocked and demonized by the current brand of angry identity politics on the left (because they have). Trump said, “You want your own brand of angry identity politics? Here you go.”
I mean, personally, I’d just like to see less angry identity politics.
@Hyzenthlay
It’s been said over and over again, but it doesn’t really make much sense. We should expect the scattering cross section between the two groups to be quite low.
The people that seem them most upset about identity politics on the left are those that are most exposed to it — well off college educated white men living in big cities. It’s just that they often couch their complaints as being on behalf of the poor or working class rather than on their own behalf.
@Brad,
You don’t actually need to go to a university campus to get personally acquainted with the PC left. Through the wonders of litigation, your Human Resource department will gladly bring identity politics directly to your place of business in the form of mandatory trainings and codes of conduct.
It’s not a new development either. People were complaining about this back in the 90’s. It’s a recognized part of what makes corporate life hell.
NaD: I don’t think you are disagreeing with me. People with college degrees are more likely to be working in offices that have annual HR training than people without.
@Brad,
You might be right, I need to do more digging.
According to the SBA and Wikipedia, small businesses with fewer than 500 employees employ roughly half of all American workers. I keep seeing the number that 23% of those have mandatory harassment training but can’t track it down to the original source.
So let’s back of the envelope this:
If we say that roughly all large firms and 23% of small firms have these trainings, and make the simplifying assumption that small buisnesses are of uniform size, that should be roughly 60% of employees. That’s still a majority of all workers but weighted towards the top of the labor pool.
You don’t actually need to go to a university campus to get personally acquainted with the PC left.
There’s the Internet, too. And TV. Even someone who is not immersed in PC culture in their everyday lives will be continually exposed to it through media, which pervades everyone’s lives more and more as people at all income levels have more access to technology.
I mean, I’m sure a large portion of Trump’s voters were also quite wealthy, or the sort of people who always vote Republican no matter who’s on the ticket. But those same people would have also voted for Jeb Bush.
If you’re looking at people who voted for Trump specifically because he’s Trump, not because he was the Republican candidate, I think you will find that a lot of them really despise political correctness, and also are disadvantaged themselves in some way or another.
Trump didn’t cultivate his persona to appeal to those who want to maintain the status quo, or who are benefiting from the status quo. He cultivated it to appeal to a sense of simmering resentment, frustrated victimhood and rage toward “the establishment.”
@Brad
The same is true of those pushing the leftist identity politics, minus the men part. In my city, for example, there was no organic cry from the black community to take down our oppressive Civil War symbols, like statue of local integration proponent, G. T. Beauregard. It came from our liberal, white, male mayor. The actual black people, I guess, would have preferred a functioning flood control system.
Sure, you see black people at the antifa rallies, etc. but just to look at their dress, etc., they often look more like college students and/or hangers-on to me. And sure there have been poor, inner city black riots, but, so far as I can recall, always in response to some particular inflammatory event–Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, etc.
All of it, on both sides, strikes me as largely a middle class, college-educated game. The grievances we are fighting over at this point are ones which I think poor people don’t really get/care about very much–cultural appropriation, etc. Which is not to say there aren’t real, legitimate grievances that still exist on the part of poor blacks and whites and that those might not translate into e.g. a vote for Trump, but they just aren’t that ideological.
onyomi
I think at least in terms of the kind of movements that use rhetoric things like privilege and so on, you are right. But there are older movements, especially associated with black churches, that still have a draw among poorer and less well educated black people that fall well within the ambit of angry identity politics.
If we say that roughly all large firms and 23% of small firms have these trainings, and make the simplifying assumption that small buisnesses are of uniform size, that should be roughly 60% of employees.
I’d guess that a large majority of those firms have “training” that takes one hour per year or less.
And some of these can actually be useful – I recall the training that I had back when I was at a megacorp having, for example, not-totally-obvious advice on how to manage pregnant employees or handling maternity leave.
I’d suggest that it’s much easier to get labelled as a communist for advocating things which are not communism than it is to get labelled a Nazi for advocating things which are not-Nazism. I would proffer this post as evidence.
pdbarnlsey: “It is not easy to get labelled as a Nazi on Slate Star Codex” isn’t the same thing as “It is not easy to get labelled as a Nazi.”
I’d agree with you until very recently.
Depends what you mean by “labeled”. “Nazi” is thrown around more frequently as a casual slur, but I think people being unjustifiably called communists and then argued against with USSR comparisons is more common than the corresponding thing with Nazis.
@rlms
I am not talking about usage like “the soup Nazi.” I’m talking about “it’s okay to punch a Nazi,” where Nazi has come to mean “someone who liked The Bell Curve.”
The problem is, there is an obvious and real slippery slope whereby once you make one exception to the “use your words” policy, conveniently everyone you really don’t like starts sliding into that category.
As for promiscuous over use of “commie,” “pinko,” etc. it’s probably a result of the cold war. Since we fought a hot war against the Nazis, perhaps, maybe there wasn’t such an issue of paranoia, McCarthyism, etc. as for that label to get overused. Until now.
@onyomi
Yes, that’s what I’m talking about too. More Democrats casually call generic Republicans Nazis than vice versa. But a generic Democrat who has been called a communist is more likely to face an argument along the lines of “you want to socialise healthcare, just like Stalin!” than vice versa. Genuine belief that so-called Nazis really are Nazis is less common than the corresponding thing for communists.
@rlms says:
This is arguable for “socialist”, perhaps. For communist I think it’s stretching.
@onyomi
“Since we fought a hot war against the Nazis, perhaps, maybe there wasn’t such an issue of paranoia, McCarthyism, etc. as for that label to get overused.”
No, it’s that the pro-Nazi Americans in the 1930s were middle and upper class whites, while the pro-communist Americans in the 1920s+ were primarily lower class. Too many of McCarthy’s constituency themselves, or had friends who, could identify with a Nazi bad mistake in their youth (or may have even thought that Nazism was still a good idea with a bad implementation). Or so I speculate.
It also doesn’t hurt that blame could be spread to Japan, too.
@rlms
When did the Nazi calling start, and who started it? I remember Limbaugh using the term against feminists in the 90s.
@anonymousskimmer
I don’t know, I don’t remember anything from the 90s.
Gore Vidal famously called William F. Buckley a crypto-Nazi in a 1968 debate.
The context has some parallels and resonances to what is going on right now:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/buckley-vidal-and-the-queer-question
thanks rlms & brad
@anonymousskimmer
This is absolute nonsense. If anything, it’s the opposite of the truth, the defenders communists were the elite of the elite . It’s the fascists, and especially the non-fascist anti-communists that were lower class.
In the 1930s, when the left realized that they could make political hay by calling their enemies nazis.
@cassander
Okay, I was thinking of Lindbergh and the Duke of Windsor, but they may have been exceptional.
@anonymousskimmer
The duke was exceptional. Lindbergh was not a fascist sympathizer. He got sent by the US military to evaluate the Luftwaffe in his capacity as an expert on aviation. He thought that they were making excellent planes, and said so. He was also given a medal by them for his achievement in aviation, which he later refused to return. He was a political isolationist, who joined america first (and organization which numbed among its membership gore vidal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, EE Cummngs, and frank lloyd wright)
He did not like Hitler. He also disliked FDR, and said so. When the war came, he tried to re-enlist, and was blocked by the white house from doing so. He got around that restriction by signing up to work for aviation companies, got sent to the pacific to teach pilots, and flew on 50 combat missions.
I think the answer to the question you’re posing here – “why are their optics so bad” – is that the neo-Nazi and WN types who were behind the rally are trying to escalate things, to increase polarization. I would guess that they are aware that most people find Nazi symbols extremely distasteful (at a minimum). They know people hate them. Someone else here claims McInnes boycotted the thing; as far as I have seen none of the alt-lite types (McInnes, Milo, Cernovich, etc) were present – this was a neo-Nazi/WN event. So, they haven’t just turned off mushy centrists; they’ve turned off other right-wing street brawlers.
Presumably, they do not want anyone who requires better optics. Extremists tend not to want to moderate their views. They can go under cover a little while, but they don’t like to do it. I am guessing that the sort of people who organized the rally figure they have, absent more escalation, about as much of the population on their side as they will get, and are trying to firm up that hard core of support, and hope that escalation will drive people to them.
I particularly like this passage from your link:
Politics encourages conflict as the different tribes seek to impose their values and preferences on everyone. I think we need a reduction in politics and an expansion of markets and civil society. Eliminate centralized power structures that incentivize conflict over control of them, and instead allow people to build their separate bubbles where they can express their varied preferences, at least the ones that can be expressed without imposing on others. Minimizing politics seems to me the best route to simmering down the culture wars.
Except the writer has to define his political position as being non-political in order for the argument to work. “We must reduce the power of representative government and increase the power of markets” is most certainly a political position.
Politics is supposed to be the thing yo have instead of conflict.
Politics is winner-take-all; one preference imposed on everyone. Markets allow differing preferences to be expressed. We could decide coke or pepsi through a vote, letting only the majority preferred soda be available for all, or we could let the people that like coke drink coke and the people that like pepsi drink pepsi.
Relevant to the current controversy, the people that like confederate monuments should have them moved to/built on private property they own, and the people that don’t like the monuments should keep their property free of them. Each side can then satisfy their preference without imposing on the other, reducing conflict. In the public space, one preference is imposed on all, and this leads to conflict for those of varying opinions. I’d like to see reductions in public space (where politics reign) and expansions of private space (where markets reign) to reduce preference conflicts.
@IrishDude
Perhaps you missed my point just above so it’s worth reiterating here. “We should diminish the power of government in favour of free-markets” is a thoroughly political position. You’re not saying “we should get rid of politics”, you’re saying “we should get rid of all other forms of politics in favour of my form of politics which I’ve idiosyncratically defined as being non-political because it suits my argument”. Getting rid of government and replacing it with the free market is most certainly “one preference imposed on everyone”.
@Art Vandelay
This strikes me as semantics.
Let’s say someone is overweight and they keep talking about how they need to change their nutrient ratios. I say “no, I think you just need less nutrition overall.” They say “you think I need less nutrition, but that’s a position on nutrition!”
@Art Vandelay
I agree and disagree with you. I agree that I want my political preference to be enacted for all: reduce (eliminate) the power of the state to reduce the sphere of decisions being made politically. However, I think the consequence of enacting that political preference is to allow a wide range of other preferences to coexist with less conflict.
Going back to my coke/pepsi example, we could decide what drink people have through voting, letting only the majority preference exist for all (politics), or we could allow people that want coke to drink coke and the people that want pepsi to drink pepsi (markets). There are two types of preferences here, political preference (politics versus markets, how we should decide things) and soda preference (coke versus pepsi, decisions we make within whatever framework we have for deciding things). I want my political preference ‘imposed’ on all so that every other type of preference can be pursued by individuals with varying interests.
I put ‘imposed’ in quotes because it’s kind of a strange way to put things when it comes to my political preference. If someone wants to violently attack me without just cause and I stop them from doing that, you could say I ‘imposed’ my preference to live in peace on him, but it just seems awkward framing to me. He tried to impose his preference for violence on me and I stopped him, seems better framing. I wouldn’t say that a women that fights off a rapist is imposing on her attacker by fighting back. I’d say she’s resisting imposition.
Since political authority is a thing where state agents are perceived to have special moral status to do things that would be considered immoral if done by non-state agents, like use or threaten violence against others when it would usually be considered wrong, it seems more accurate to me to say that reduction in political authority and the power of the state is stopping imposition, not imposing on others. If you disagree, and think my political preference is an imposition on others, then I’ll just say I think self-defense imposition if more justified than aggressive imposition.
Where possible, You can’t satisfy different preferences about whether to go to war, or whether a statue stays up or down.
I’m pretty depressed about it as well largely because I see it sucking my left-leaning friends into tolerance for violence against “Nazis” (which of course matches to “all Trump supporters”).
I look at the picture of the aftermath of the car attack (warning, graphic) and there’s red flags, black flags, red/black (anarcho-syndaclism), IWW (“commies who say they’re totally not commies”). So we’ve got nazis versus commies in the streets. To this the devil on my shoulder says “MOAB” and that pesky angel says “everybody go home and rethink your lives.”
But my FB wall is full of “punch nazi” stuff. Yes, you guys punched nazis. And then the nazis ran over you with a car. And now you’re going to punch more nazis. Live by the sword, die by the sword, and my friends all want more swords. None of this is going to end well.
They are going to be joined by all the people who don’t much care about Nazis but really don’t like seeing people run over with cars. And they aren’t going to limit themselves to punching Nazis; they are also going to be punching everyone who appears to be saying it isn’t 100.00% the Nazis’ fault that a Nazi ran someone over with a car.
You and your friends aren’t ever going to have enough swords to deal with that.
Except that for everyone they punch that isn’t an actual Nazi (and “The Iterated Nazi Dilemma” means that they’re going to be doing a lot of that), more swords are recruited to the other side.
That’s my point exactly. It’s swords all the way down.
It’s infuriating to see people who are “against violence…except against my political opponents!”
If I read Conrad right, his friends reaching for swords are the “left-leaning friends” he references in the first sentence.
I agree with you, John – it’s not a bad rule to say that “once the argument starts, the first side to commit murder loses.” (This, IMHO, was what took most of the wind out of Black Lives Matter’s sails as well.)
But it’s also sad that the “punch a Nazi” value on the left isn’t affected at all. I’d like to think that non-violence (a) makes sense and (b) works. If punching “Nazis” works in this context, it works by inflaming the conflict, then appealing to people’s values, which may be effective, but is pretty depressing if so.
Er, which side is “the other side” again?
Last time we were in the Nazi-punching business in a big way, we mostly punched people who weren’t Nazis, just ordinary Germans trying to defend their country. This resulted in approximately zero swords joining the other side that weren’t already there. And it was the right thing to do, and it worked. If there are Literal Murderous Nazis involved, nobody is going to care that the Nazi-punchers expand their reach to the Nazi-adjacent. If the Nazi-punchers are your “other side”, you really need to not be standing too close to any Nazis until this dies down.
Also, “against violence…except against my political opponents who are Literal Murderous Nazis!” is likely to be a very effective political strategy. And not even a terribly incoherent one; I’d prefer “Nazis or Commies”, but we don’t seem to have too many Literal Murderous Commies around these parts.
This is a really bad comparison and I’m sick of seeing people make it.
World War II was not “Nazis vs Non-Nazis” it was Americans (of various political ideologies) vs Germans (of various political ideologies)
The notion that we can infer how people will act and feel in a civil war (which, itself, when we had one, was defined primarily by geography than ideology also) situation based on how we felt about it in a world war situation is absurd. Just because we were willing to bomb Dresden and risk killing some non-Nazis doesn’t mean we’d be willing to bomb Jackson, Mississippi.
In my estimation, most of the avid Nazi-punchers have a “Nazi adjacent” category that includes about 40% of the nation.
For instance, if you let them punch people it’s obviously going to include Charles Murray, at bare minimum. Which obviously will include anyone who has ever said anything nice about Charles Murray, which includes, what, 1/4 of the SSC user base?
Yeah, my perception is that Nazi is the new “fascist” – it basically means “right winger I’d like to punch.”
I have a liberal correspondent I respect a lot – very analytical and clear-eyed, one of the handful of smartest people I’ve ever known well – who sincerely argued that the Middlebury students were right to punch Charles Murray because he is a Nazi.
Whatever else Murray is or isn’t, to argue that he’s a Nazi is either to overlook several of the Nazis’ most offensive characteristics or to reduce “Nazi” to mean simply “someone who should be punched rather than allowed to speak.”
J Mann,
I think this is the ultimate goal of these events. To try and put the Charles Murray types in as close proximity to the David Duke types as possible.
Not hoping that David Duke gets punched. That ship has sailed, society has already decided that it’s okay to punch David Duke. But when Murray gets punched, the left starts to look bad. That’s the goal. Most people DON’T support punching someone just because they’re in physical proximity to someone they do support punching.
If you can goad the left into punching reasonable conservatives, you win.
That is almost certainly the goal of the David Duke types, who know that the only hope they have of being more than a tiny and readily-punched fringe is to get Charles Murray and all of his supporters to stand next to them and get punched as well. Why are you going along with this?
To whom? Most people have absolutely no idea who Charles Murray is. How they feel about him getting punched, depends on how he gets brought to their attention.
After the Murray incident (in which Murray escaped unhurt, but the professor debating against him got put in the hospital) there were articles in respectable liberal publications saying “hey he shouldn’t get punched” and a full-on defence of the guy in the NYT.
Yes, because on that occasion Murray came to people’s attention as an academic who was trying to give a speech on a controversial issue at a college campus. Other contexts get different responses, and the actual Charles Murray seems to be keeping out of the spotlight the past couple days.
We have about as many Literal Murderous Commies as we do Literal Murderous Nazis. They’re both an extremely tiny fringe. “Punching nazis” is now being met with “running over commies.” And this has only made the left want to punch more nazis, which I assume means will lead to more run over commies.
Stay classy, Conrad.
Except the Nazi-adjacent. Which is an enormous part of the country (including me, Charles Murray, Scott Alexander, and probably you too), seeing as they keep widening the criteria.
>Except the Nazi-adjacent. Which is an enormous part of the country (including me, Charles Murray, Scott Alexander, and probably you too), seeing as they keep widening the criteria.
Actually Scott is mostly safe because he is Jewish. I’m half Jewish and I was once compared to Nazis by a SJW professor and I did the “how dare you call me that given” and she had to back down.
The Mises Institute (named after a Jew who literally fled Hitler, founded by his student who was also Jewish) has recently been accused of being pro-Nazi because the President of the institute referenced “blood and soil” (likely a response to a recent article by a former member about the phrase) during an event that also featured several other prominent Jewish professors as speakers.
By whom? Was it the left again? That guy must type really fast.
Being Jewish doesn’t make you safe. I’m Jewish; they came after me. Moldbug’s Jewish; they called him a Nazi.
If Duke (by which we mean the violent far right) baits the left into indiscriminately attacking Murray (by which we don’t even really mean the non-violent right; we actually mean the rational centre-left, by the Iron Law of Bullshit), are you seriously suggesting that it magically becomes Murray et al’s responsibility to get themselves out of that situation, given they’re rather blatantly not involved in getting themselves into it?
Hell, how are you even suggesting that “going along with this” is something they have a choice about?
Brad,
Here’s a summary. That’s with 30 seconds of Googling.
Claiming that associating “blood and soil” with Nazis is “plain ignorant” because it didn’t originate with them is plain stupid. “Arbeit macht frei” actually originated as the title of a novel in 1873, and the swastika has been found on Mesopotamian coins, but if you use those symbols people will rightly assume you are a Nazi because meanings change.
The relevant question for judging Jeff Deist isn’t the history of the phrase “blood and soil,” it’s whether or not, when he used the phrase, he meant to imply anything about Nazis or fascism.
It seems pretty clear to me he did not. Maybe, like me before this kerfuffle, he had heard the phrase somewhere but did not know about its association with Nazis. It also would not seem at all like a safe assumption that his mostly young audience would hear the dog whistle, if, indeed, it was intended as a dog whistle.
I listened to the whole speech. It was not a pro-fascist speech. It was basically a defense of “you can be a libertarian and be like Chesterton at the same time.” In that context, the simple use of a phrase the Nazis once used, which he may not have known they once used, is not sufficient to start calling him a Nazi.
Is it possible he knew full well the history of this term and was intentionally sending a pro-fascist dog whistle to those in the know? Possible, sure. Likely? I don’t think so. Certainly needs more proof to accuse him of it when uttered in the context of an otherwise non-fascist speech.
It is not sufficient to deduce that he is a Nazi (I agree that he probably isn’t), but if you use Nazi signals you shouldn’t be surprised to get grief for it, and you shouldn’t try to defend yourself on the basis that it wasn’t actually a Nazi signal, stupid! That displays a woeful lack of understanding of how communication works. Words don’t mean what the speaker wants them to mean, they mean what society expects them to.
But did the words actually mean that according to society, or did the words just mean that to people who wanted to find some words to hang him with it and latched on that as a reason?
I would say that “blood and soil” is inexorably linked with Nazis, and Wikipedia seems to disagree.
I’ve mentioned this before but I don’t think anyone responded to it. When he initially made the speech, a lot of people assumed Deist was deliberately invoking a widely-distributed article by Jeffrey Tucker written about a month earlier.
Tucker, as you may know, was formally in the inner circle of the Mises Institute crowd, but has publicly broken when them on a number of issues. The split has been acrimonious, to say the least. The two sides have been taking subtle and indirect shots at each other for years now.
Taking a shot at an ideological adversary makes a lot more sense given the context than some sort of secret dog-whistle for Nazis. Especially at an event that produces stuff like this.
It is 100% the Nazi’s fault that he ran over people with his car. There is zero justification for it, I hope he rots in jail for the rest of his life.
On the other hand, it’s frustrating how little acknowledgement is being given to the fact that a lot of this violence is two sides showing up for a brawl, not “violent murderous Nazis” vs. “peaceful vegan adherants to non-violent ideals”. It’s literal violent Nazis vs. literal violent Commies. Generally the police have been allowing it. It was inevitable that it would turn fatal eventually.
Nazis are assholes. Antifa is just as bad. Neither justifies the other and they can all go to hell.
EDIT: related to Brad’s link, I’m not making any statements about the actual victims of either the Nazi driver or the Antifa bike lock wielders. The point is there are people on both sides involved in turning these events violent, and innocent people are going to get caught up in that.
@Conrad:
Name one. Seriously, when was the last time anyone in the United States committed literal murder, at a rally where their team’s cheerleaders were waving literal hammer-and-sickle flags or the like?
If the guys who beat up Murray had shot him instead, if the guys who drove Milo out of Berkeley had instead driven a car into a crowd of his supporters, we’d be having a very different conversation right now. But they didn’t, so we aren’t.
@gbdun:
As of now, Antifa is not “just as bad”. Antifa doesn’t kill innocent people. So any complaint about how the media / the left / whomever isn’t being fair because they don’t frame the story as both sides being equally bad, is going to fall on very deaf ears for a while.
Until a few days ago, I would have said Antifa was worse, because they have a member who goes around hitting people in the head with bike locks and they continue to embrace him as a hero instead of ejecting him.
But second-degree-murder trumps that.
(I do have low low opinions of Antifa, but right after the other side commits a murder is not the time to bring that up.)
@Edward and John – Driving a car at someone is more likely to lead to killing them than use of a bike lock on their head, but the probability for the latter isn’t zero. Antifa doesn’t kill people, or hasn’t yet? How much is luck vs judgement? (Not just on the part of individuals wielding various weapons but also on those setting up the conditions in which those weapons are used?)
Baked Alaska is claiming that doctors have suggested the eye damage he suffered as a result of point-blank bear spray may be permanent.
So, not murder, but “disabling someone for life” isn’t THAT much better…
Hitting people over the head with a bike lock is the sort of thing that can easily result in death. The fact that the Nazi side ended up killing someone before the antifa side is more a matter of luck than of anything else.
ETA: Ninja’d by Rosemary.
Pretty sure most of the people who show up at Antifa rallies have cars, or at least access to cars. Yet the worst of them chose to hit people with three pounds of metal driven by a human arm, not three thousand pounds of metal driven by a V-8 engine. That shows good judgement on the part of Antifa.
I’d prefer that our society – and I’m looking at you, Hollywood – not trivialize blunt-trauma head injuries as being almost comic events. But the vast majority of people who hit other people in the head with clubs, don’t intend to kill anyone, don’t actually kill anyone, and aren’t treated as murderers. Driving a car into a crowd at speed, that’s straight-up murder and nobody has any illusions otherwise.
And “it’s just bad luck that the guy running people down with a car killed someone before the guy with a bike lock did!”, is a desperately lame attempt at false equivalence.
If we start considering things that could potentially have killed people, we also have to consider all the people who were almost killed by neo-Nazis. To start with, think about the nineteen people who were injured in this attack but survived.
It should already have been plenty clear that both fa and anti-fa are sufficiently pro-violence that they are fertile ground for violence that is not intended to be deathly, but can become such due to chance. Furthermore, this extremism is then always going to be attractive to already quite disturbed lone wolves who take the rhetoric more seriously than intended. Whether those people choose to commit violence and especially whether they choose effective methods seems highly dependent on chance.
I think that it is a mistake to put too much weight on single outliers, where chance plays a huge factor.
@John,
I think the murderous literal Commie count in the last umpteen years is about the same as murderous literal Nazi count over that period.
If you want to round up people like James Hodgkinson, who is probably at best progressive, maybe what Americans call socialist if you squint, or grant Jared Lee Loughner to both sides, since he listed The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf on his favorite books, except they didn’t succeed in killing anybody.
“Antifa doesn’t kill innocent people”. No, they just have a casual disregard for inflicting potentially crippling or deadly physical violence on people for the crime of saying mean things and/or standing in the vicinity of someone who does.
This was an escalation, but an inevitable one – have enough violent brawls and someone is going to get the bright idea to take it up a level.
But whatever, I’m not trying to defend Nazis or draw false equivalence. This was a terrorist act, an escalation, and something that deserves condemnation in the strongest terms. I’m trying to indicate that there are nasty identitarian groups on both sides stoking violence between each other, and both need to be addressed or this crap is going to get worse. “Nazis are even worse than we thought, now it’s even more okay to punch them!” is not the lesson to draw from this.
I think this is relevant. If the score is one to nothing, well, sure, it’s enough to get you the title, but it isn’t enough to definitively say who is the worse team.
God forbid there be more, and do update your views of these groups with this evidence with however much weighting you think it deserves, but in a nation of 300+ million people, single digits of political violence is probably not enough to draw generalizations from. Of course our goal, like workplace injuries is zero and this particular incident matters, but I’m hoping it isn’t enough to say that a qualitative change has occurred in American politics or even the goals of some of its fringe movements.
It’s also worth pointing out that the tiki-torch-bearing mob did not limit itself to using those torches as illumination. (In particular, check out the guy in white in the middle distance between 0:15 and 0:20.)
On the one hand, I imagine tiki torches are a bit less dangerous than bike locks. On the other hand, this whole bike lock brouhaha is about literally one guy, and there’s definitely more than one torch-swinging nutbar in that video.
@J Mann
I can’t tell if you’re being pedantic about literal Nazis and Commies or not (as in only calling people Nazis if they’ve read Mein Kampf). If not, the literal (neo)-Nazi body count is a lot higher due to Dylann Roof, and the attack count is also considerably higher if you look here.
Bike lock guy wasn’t the only person engaged in potentially-lethal violence, he just happens to be one of the more well-known examples.
Yeah, the casualties this weekend were undoubtedly the Nazis’ fault and they deserve all the condemnation they’re getting for them. But that doesn’t mean we the people need to punch them, it means the people with actual authority need to come down on this whole rotten street-fighting dynamic like a ton of bricks, starting with the violent Nazis and continuing with the violent everyone else.
You know the three-arrows-in-a-circle motif that antifa uses sometimes? That comes from the Iron Guard, a Weimar German centrist paramilitary organization. A while back on RatTumblr, in a similar context, I said that you know your politics are fucked when you get centrist paramilitary organizations. With that in mind, at this point I think the right move is whatever doesn’t get us them.
Okay, so.. Where do we start?
Nornagest: +1
If we normalize streetfights as a standard part of politics, we will all be a hell of a lot poorer, and a lot more people will end up getting hurt or killed, because there are a lot of nutcases and a lot of guns, knives, cars, etc., lying around.
So here is my proposal: The next several times that a bunch of thugs show up at a rally and start a fight, the police need to be there in force, and the guys who get violent need to end up sitting in prison cells. It needs to become *obviously* a really bad strategy to show up at a political rally and bust some heads. Because the alternative is a whole lot more people ending up dead or maimed, and every political faction doing the street battle thing.
The nazi who killed a woman (and hospitalized several others) with a car needs to spend the next several decades in prison. And we need to do whatever we can to make it clear that violence at political protests is a really good way to spend the next few years of your life in a steel cage somewhere.
@Rims – I think I’m mostly serious, but it’s probably coming from a need to clarify the language we’re using, which is probably going to come across as pedantic, but I think it’s important to clarity, so here goes:
1) I normally wouldn’t call someone a communist if they are, for example, a socialist or a progressive, even if they share some characteristics with communists, and even if they’re sympathetic to communists. So if I see some hypothetical guy who supports socialism and has been known to quote Mau and has a picture on his facebook page of himself wearing a Che shirt, I still wouldn’t call that guy a communist.
2) So let’s look at Dylan Roof. A racist, who seemed mostly concerned with his conspiracy theories about black vs white conflict in the US. Probably sympathetic to the Nazis, but if I apply the same standard to him as I do to our hypothetical potential communist, I’d say probably not a Nazi. A racist, a terrorist, and sympathetic to Nazis.
So if we’re comparing Nazi violence to Communist violence, I guess we have to decide first whether we’re using a broad brush. If Nazi just means “racist white right winger,” the Communist probably has to mean something like “anti-capitalist left winger” Granted, Nazis probably still win on actual deaths, but every day beatings and hospitalizations might be closer.
Correction: I misremembered, it was the Iron Front I was thinking of. The Iron Guard was a Hungarian far-right party of the interwar period.
Not J Mann here, but I take a very dim view of calling anyone a Nazi unless they are literally a member of a National Socialist party, displaying a Swastika or equivalent emblem, or espousing nigh-genocidal antisemitism. Wearing an “I’m with stupid” T-shirt while standing next to the guy with the Swastika T-shirt counts.
Since this adds up to maybe a few thousand people in the United States, my usual response to anyone shouting “Nazi” is a quick “fuck off and stop causing trouble, asshole”. This is something we should be pedantic about; “Nazi” is loaded with enough negative affect that nobody who isn’t literally a Nazi, should be called a Nazi. Or Communist.
If a large chunk of the people who literally are Nazis decided to converge on Charlottesville and commit murder, well, we get the once-in-a-blue-moon case where my “fuck off and stop causing trouble” response gets directed at actual Nazi assholes. And a bit for their fellow travelers.
I apologize for using the word “literal communist” when I probably should have just said “leftists.” Still, we’ve got the BLM guy in Dallas who killed 5 cops, the Baton Rouge shooting, the baseball field shooting, the GOP committeeman who was just executed in front of his wife for being a Republican. Overall body counts on all sides are low, but they are there. There is not a “violent side” and a “non-violent side.”
From my understanding in many of these instances, like the Chicago Trump rally, Berkley Milo event, and this weekend in VA, the police receive stand down orders. Right wingers show up, antifa shows up ready to fight them, and then the police do nothing when the inevitable fights start.
Three people would be alive today if the police had just let the rally proceed. Instead they shut down the lawful, permitted rally and then funneled the people out of the park directly into antifa’s illegal assembly, and then didn’t bother telling the people standing in the middle of the road to leave.
It is a powder keg situation, and the police are doing everything they can to make sure it goes off.
ETA: I understand they may not have been in the street illegally, that the road was blocked off? If so, the police should have stopped the car. Again, the police are doing lots of things that make violence more likely when they could more easily do things that make violence less likely.
I doubt it is the fault of the Brown leaders. Violent extremists don’t necessarily have the more extreme views. It is very likely that Organized Brown has nothing to do with this attack.
What’s your point Brad? Didn’t you see the picture? All the anarchy and commie flags?
I prayed for Heather’s soul (literally did this morning during my rosary), but I don’t know what to say about someone who gets fired up by the “punch nazis” rhetoric, goes out looking to confront them with literal communists and stands illegally in the middle of the street and then gets run over. This is why Jesus said “all who live by the sword shall die by the sword.” She went looking for a fight. She got it. This is why the smart thing to do when nazis and commies are fighting in the street is “stay home.”
Technically the street was closed to vehicle traffic at the time so it was not illegal for her to be standing in it.
Although going back to my “surely the city shares some blame in this” point, this would not have been the case if they allowed the rally to occur in the park where it was legally permitted, as a federal judge had ordered them to do.
Instead, they dispersed both the left and right-wing mobs throughout the city, making everything harder to contain and control.
Do you have a source on that, Matt? I was under the impression the road was not closed off.
Also, if it was closed off, then the cops failed again by…not actually closing off the road and allowing the car through.
If so, apologies about the “illegally standing in the road” part, but still, lots of people who could have just stayed home and watched Game of Thrones went to a place prepared for and anticipating violence, and then violence happened. There would be a lot less “right wing violence” if the leftists would stop showing up at right-wing events prepared for violence.
I do not have any legitimate sources or ones I could link to at this time.
That’s just what I heard on social media from attendees. Including from right-wing attendees who presumably would be motivated to lie and say “she was blocking the street.” I’ve heard various justifications from a lot of people, but have yet to hear that one tbqh.
I don’t know whether she was illegally standing in the road or not, but that’s a really bad justification. The guy drove his car into a mob; whether they were blocking traffic or jaywalking or not is irrelevant.
I don’t know what to say in response to your comment. Standing near people who are waving a distasteful flag while standing somewhere they technically shouldn’t be (although it appears you are so desperate to justify terrorism that you made that part up) is not a crime deserving of death. Talking about people going to a protest “anticipating violence” as though standing in a crowd containing some people who might at some point spray some pepper spray (a tactic that has so far killed nobody) is somehow comparable to seeing an Islamist ram students at your state university and thinking “that’s a great idea!” is like looking at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and concluding that both sides are violent. I know that a lot of commenters here like to be edgy and contrarian, but try to have some common decency. The thinkpieces that follow every Islamist terror attack by trying to shift blame from the attackers onto “Western foreign policy” are pretty terrible, but at least they don’t sink low enough to try to pin it on the literal victims.
As I understand it, the steelman defense of Fields circulating on the boundaries of the web is:
1) As the right wingers were dispersing, the counter-protesters were screaming them out, maybe beating some.
2) A few of the fringe sites and youtube postings claim that people were beating Fields’ car with bats.
3) At that point, Fields’ care sped down the street, hitting some other cars and pushing them into the crowd, then backed out at speed, hitting more people.
4) So the absolute best case is that it’s not terrorism – it’s a guy who was already pretty paranoid and unbalanced surrounded by a screaming crowd who decided to drive his way out. Still murder, but not terrorism. And I doubt this case is true – I found an NPR story saying that people were chasing Fields with bats after the hit and run, but the only people claiming it happened before are fringy posters.
Ultimately, even if it’s true, it’s not a criticism of the people who got hit. As far as we know, they were all non-violent and just there to express their own opinions.
Heyer died when a car hit her and then hit another car crushing her between them (neither car being that belonging to the Nazi terrorist, I think (although I could be wrong on that point)).
How can it possibly be claimed that in the street was closed to traffic (unless those other cars in the road that Heyer was standing between were also being driven by nazi terrorists and nobdy has realised.)
Additionally, I often see the “reversing” part described as an attempt to cause more harm (by backing up over people he had just run over). But his forward motion was halted by hitting other vehicles, and he was being assaulted. His options were to either sit there and take whatever violence the counter-protestors gave him, or back out.
And given antifa’s propensity for starting violence, there is a non-trivial chance that one or more fuckers started attacking the car, spooking the driver, and thereby causing his panicked rush to get out of there, with the ensuing death and injuries. Innocent people being collateral damage in violent street encounters is exactly why the left needs to get a handle on antifa, and why the police should have been buffering between the two groups.
Cars can be parked on a street that has been closed to traffic due to emergency.
Edward Scizorhands – “Cars can be parked on a street that has been closed to traffic due to emergency.”
They weren’t parked. They’d turned onto the street and gotten trapped by the crowd. Video shows two passengers exiting the red van in front immediately after the crash.
> it’s a guy who was already pretty paranoid and unbalanced surrounded by a screaming crowd who decided to drive his way out
Watching this video (graphic content), it seems extremely unlikely to be the case. There was virtually no protesters up the street where he came from, and he went directly for the crowd, at speed.
That video is disturbing but definitely looks like someone going towards large groups of protestors, not away from them.
@J Mann:
Anybody can clearly see somebody hitting the car with a bat (or possibly a flag?) seconds before he drives into the crowd.
In the video tweeted here, someone standing to the left of where the vehicle passes whacks the rear of the vehicle at ~4 seconds, then the car crashes at ~6 seconds.
The car was already moving when it was hit by this bat, but the existence of footage clearly showing the car being hit by any bat prior to the crash does seem to support a possible “the driver feared for his safety” narrative.
You did a bad job of cheering me up, but I agree.
If there isn’t actually a path to rational discussion and disagreement, then presumably the next steps are for both sides to increase their efforts to shame and dox Nazis, Communists, racial supremacists on all sides, and increase the amount of punching until one side is shamed out of public participation.
First two stories I saw on my ever shrinking list of yet-to-be-unfollowed facebook friends pages today, were an otherwise very reasonable guy proclaiming:
To fanfare and acclaim, followed by another only slightly less normally reasonable person proclaiming:
Also to fanfare and acclaim.
I’ve spent the last few years trying to advocate that this kind of rhetoric is going to lead to… well, exactly these kinds of outcomes. So, I’m all tapped out. This is not how I pictured “Being on the right side of history” to look.
One optimistic thing: an attempt to gather all the neo-Nazis from across US only got a couple of thousand at most. They aren’t going to actually get anything done any time soon.
Thanks, that helps!
This x 10000.
Nazis are already at the “have to use force multipliers to have disproportionate impact” stage. This is a very dangerous stage, due to the heightened probability of incidents like we’ve just seen, but it’s not nearly as dangerous in the greater scheme of things as the “can take control of state apparatus and have dissidents arrested” stage.
Actually, most of the reports I’ve seen are claiming “hundreds” of marchers. On optimism, I read an article linking this rally to the history of major Nazi gatherings in the US:
– German American Bund rally in Madison Square (~20,000, 1939)
– American Nazi Party rally in Chicago (~3,000, 1966)
– Unite the Right in Charlottesville (“hundreds”, 2017)
While it certainly wasn’t the thesis of Cobb’s piece, it looks like an exponential decay to me.
There are about 8000 KKK members in the country.
The follow-up is that “yeah, and half of them are FBI agents.” Which probably isn’t literally true, but saying it surely heightens paranoia at KKK meetings and sometimes my id wins.
But apparently only a few hundred of them bothered turning up to the biggest far-right rally of the last few years.
These FBI agents posing as Klansmen are really slacking off, then. Where’s the sense of undercover dedication??
Most of them went to the fake Charlottesville that Sheriff Bart and the townsfolk knocked together overnight out on Route 29 a few miles outside town.
I trust you’ll have the good taste not to mention that I spoke to you
Including the Irish?
The fact that Blazing Saddles cannot generally be shown in an unedited form is one of the great crimes of PC culture. (The funny thing is that I’ve seen two TV edits of the film. In the first, older edit, they leave in all of the racial slurs but dub out the fart noises. In the newer edit, all the slurs are gone and the farts are back. If you wanted to summarize the arc of American culture of the last 30 years in a single anecdote, you could do worse).
That film is brilliant, and anyone who thinks otherwise is as benighted as the people who can’t get past the slurs in Huck Finn.
I agree that this is one of the better pieces of news to come out of this weekend.
Unfortunately, that is not how this is being reported, as far as I can tell.
EDIT: It seems to be a lot more “This shows How omnipresent and massive this movement is, and that their ideas are EVERYWHERE. For every one you saw this weekend, there may be thousands, nay, tens of of thousands out there. In your state. In your town. Maybe Even At Your Job Right Now!”
Yeah – also in optimistic news, I think the majority of people on both sides are not assholes, and are committed to trying to somehow operate a civilization with each other. Some are even good people a lot of the time.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/08/14/charlottesville-protest-victim-father/564799001/
I guess one optimistic note is that if the new rule is the most violent side loses, that’s not a terrible rule.
Messed up as it is, I think this could be a unifying event? The disgust for Nazi terrorists on the institutional right is totally convincing, and I’ve been seeing a lot of “Whoa, I agree with Jeff Sessions about something” sentiments among my (extremely leftwing) facebook contacts.
(I’m also seeing a bit of surprise that conservatives aren’t sticking up for the Nazis, which is probably offensive to conservatives, but surprise means that people are updating their priors.)
That would be awesome if true, but my observations aren’t matching yours as far as people updating their priors.
Well, so much for that.
I don’t like Nazis, but I prefer them to the anti-fa.
I think it’s the smugness. I know that after the anti-fa have kicked the shit out of me, they’ll have a smug little grin on their faces, like “huh huh.. did you see how that Nazi’s blood spurted out, man? Fucking Nazi…”, and then the BBC will be like, “well, he was in favour of the rule of law, and the protesters like kittens, so…”, whereas when the Nazis kick the shit out of me, they’ll just be like “Die, you fuck.”
If you’re doing something hateful, own it. Be hateful.
And, perhaps we’re reaching the stage where we need bone heads from each side to start kicking the shit out of each other so normal people don’t have to get involved.
I mean, ideally, you’d have some sort of ‘rule of law’ with conservative mind control keeping conformists from talking absolute rubbish, but, whatever.
I used to think that the conservative conformists were bad, but the stuff these days is just unbearable. I can’t really engage with it, it’s too annoying.
That’s an interesting reason to pick one group over the other. You could look at espoused views, body count, likelihood to cause harm, anything at all, and you pick the one you just find kind of annoying?
Are you sure that’s the way you want morality for work? For people to gravitate to whatever feels best? I can’t tell you to go against your nature – but I totally can, and picking sides over perceived smugginess is very dangerous. Please do reconsider if your brain isn’t a better tool for making decisions than your gut is.
Eh. Rationalizing is one of the tools of the brain.
That’s semantics, and not very relevant here.
What I am saying is that when you encounter someone rationalizing, you are better off not accusing them of not thinking if you are trying to change their opinion.
Yeah – I find the whole discussion about who is more likely to cause harm to be annoying, to be honest.
Real nit-picking stuff. When people start spraying acid, hitting each other, and running people over in cars, they are being violent shits. That’s all we really need to know.
And I think there is something more dangerous than going with your gut. It’s going with the mob.
At the moment the mob seems to be going with the anti-fa. So I prefer the Nazis.
Smugness isn’t really about self-satisfaction. It’s about imagined social approval. Smugness is for people who think they are winning some social brownie points. When smug people start bashing you, it’s to be feared more than passion or hatred.
I think I agree with this. The Neo-Nazis are marginally ahead in terms of death count, but they don’t have influential sections of society ready to excuse or downplay their crimes.
That’s a much better argument right there, yes. ‘Thugs and rabble-rousers should be condemned and stopped’ certainly is an argument that has my support.
Though, having said that, DeWitt, the idea of a member of my family killing me bothers me a lot less than the idea of a stranger doing it.
I can’t get upset about the idea of a modern Japanese person killing me, but I would not accept death at the hands of a WW2 era Nipponite with magnanimity.
I think I’m going to retract my convincing argument and stick with the original statement.
I don’t like smug people.
Okay then.
Yeah, I feel like the “whose violence makes me angrier?” game probably requires looking at what the violent organisations are tying to achieve, even if you agree that all of the violence is wrong and/or counterproductive.
You appear to think that Antifa are primarily motivated by opposition to the “rule of law”. What do you think motivates Nazis? Where do they stand on the rule of law?
I think that the moron-level, new blood, ground troop anti-fa are motivated by a doctrinaire liberalism and shock that others aren’t affected by sad pictures and stories to the same extent they are. “A man has died, stop THINKING“… “That one is still thinking! GET HIM!” “OMG they dare SPEAK…. they dare SPEAK“.
As for the hardcore communists, god only knows what they are up to. I think you have to get into conspiracy theory territory if you want to make sense of it.
I think the hardcore Nazis are probably being honest with their motives just because it’s so unpopular (false flag?). Blacks and Jews go away, and if they don’t smash and kill them.
As for what the “Nazis” are motivated by, well that’s a pretty broad question these days.
If you were a non-Caucasian or a Jew you might find that the Nazis (and other of similar ilk wrt race) would be just as smug, because they have historically been just as smug.
I’m not Caucasian. I’m British.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt then:
No can do, sorry. Distressingly, I’m not sure you’re pessimistic enough.
The ugly thing about the current situation is that the American right reminds me of Weimar (has since at least the Bush era, and that hasn’t really changed – we’re talking only ten to twenty percent of the American population, tops, but a similar percentage of hardliners in Germany was enough to bring the Nazis to power), the American left reminds me of the early stages of the Reign of Terror/Great Purge/Cultural Revolution (this is recent, and one of the more disturbing developments of the last five years or so)… and the ensemble as a whole reminds me of a more distinctively American precedent: the United States in the late 1850s. (The Spanish Civil War might be an even better match, but that’s a part of 1930s history I’m less familiar with.)
My snap reaction to this was “Kansas is bleeding”. After looking at the reaction on both sides for a couple of days, I think that may have been overoptimistic and the better late 1850s US comparison is “John Brown just raided Harper’s Ferry”. If this really follows the Harper’s Ferry trajectory, then you’d expect initial condemnation from the right, followed by more people shunting to the extreme based on a combination of sympathy for the less militant forms of the cause and overzealous response by the other side, and then subsequent escalation to civil war. Needless to say, early returns are not promising.
(Yes, that means that from a military history standpoint the hardcore racists may be in the analogous position to the hardcore abolitionists pre-First American Civil War. History likes its irony, I suppose.)
This isn’t really a surprise to me per se – I’ve suspected something like this might be coming since 2009 or so – but it’s disappointing and disconcerting to see it actually happening.
In both cases, you’re massively exaggerating the extent of the problem. That’s not to say that things are good, and they certainly aren’t headed in the right direction, but the scale, on both sides, is massively lower.
There’s also a major qualitative difference with Weimar: back then judges simply wouldn’t jail right-wing extremists. Today there is a strong and accurate presumption that the government is going to do what the law says. This means there is far less incentive to violence.
(It also means that, if one is going to get paranoid about Trump wrt civil war, the correct thing to worry about is stuff like firing Comey and potentially pardoning Arpaio.)
>back then judges simply wouldn’t jail right-wing extremists
It’s way more complicated than that. You had in communism the existence a genuinely terrifying political force that wasn’t just actively slaughtering millions next door but which had almost come to power by violent revolution just a few years earlier and which was only suppressed by the sort of self organized thuggery that the nazis claimed to be the heirs of. Plenty of people turned to the nazis because of entirely legitimate fears. They were ultimately incorrect to do so (both in a moral and pragmatic sense) but their reaction was far from insensible.
I’d say that’s eroding.
but not antifa punching “nazis”? There is nothing unlawful about a president firing his FBI head.
Similarly, there is nothing illegal about me swinging my arms about the place.
Unless, of course, your face happens to get in the way, in which case my arm-swinging takes on the legal character of battery.
A lot of points of law work this way, and most obstruction of justice charges boil down to individual actions, like talking to people and shredding documents, which would not be illegal were they not intended to obstruct justice.
Yep, there’s a difference – today, prosecutors just won’t charge most left-wing extremists.
(Yes, they charged two guys for the Berkeley riots. Just two.)
Given that there’s instead a decent presumption that the government is going to ignore the law and not prosecute one side… what incentives are there again?
This is a very bad thing; I wish your statements had been right. If President Trump wants to do more than just tweet against UC Berkeley, he could start by getting everyone in the police department and prosecutor’s office indicted for conspiracy to violate civil rights.
But when the jury comes back and – just like in the Zimmerman case – they say not guilty. Do you think that the riots won’t occur? And is not people’s faith in the law hurt when before the trial we have people fantasising bout this guy spending his life trapped in a steel cage when no jury is going to say ‘the masked mob was peacefully attacking people’s cars with heavy flag poles’ despite how easy that is to say on the internet or cable.
I guess one thing we can be thankful for is that there isn’t a POTUS deliberately stoking things up – depite cable’s insistent desire he do so.
Zimmerman had an at-least-halfway-good excuse and physical evidence of injuries. I have more faith than you that a jury will convict – and if the prosecutor was sincerely worried about that, there’re enough precedents from the Civil Rights Era about getting a less-biased jury.
But, at least, they should try. Better to do your best to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” than throw up your hands and let one side turn to street fighting as it becomes clear that the government will not even try to protect them.
Nope, it was bad all around, for every single group or individual I can think of involved. Heck, I was worse off for having heard about it.
Optimistic? Very few people died compared to even a small terrorist attack or riot the past few years. This event drew from people all over the country and only got a couple thousand of the worst of the worst. These people are nobodies. They have no real power, and you shouldn’t worry about them. They are not influential on their respective sides.
With that said, it upsets me that, in the rush to hijack the event for the respective favorite punching bags, no one seems to be asking much about the event itself.
Why were the police told not to intervene? Who told them? Why does this seem to happen any time Antifa is involved?
Why, when the UTR permit was canceled and state of emergency declared, were agitated protesters forced to disperse through a crowd of hostile counter protesters?
Who were the respective leaders here? What were their motives? Jason Kessler was virtually unknown before November 2016, and I still have no ideas of any main Antifa personalities being involved.
BTW, is “Antifa” an official name of some kind? I know it’s an abbreviation for “anti-fascist” but it also has an Arabic feel to it, evoking the image of some kind of Muslim resistance organization or something. Not clear on whether it’s an epithet used by the All Trite or a proud moniker dreamed up by the SJWs.
It’s more or less the abbreviation for a similar movement/organization that got its start in Europe, ANTIFascistische Aktion, that was adopted by people here.
I’ve heard that some channish places use the word “Antifada” as a term of derision for them, might be thinking of that.
It’s not an official name, because there is no umbrella organization for American antifascism that’s large enough to claim it. And it’s too old to come out of the SJ scene — antifa is not an SJ creation, it got its start as a weird mutant offshoot of the punk/skin scene in the Eighties and Nineties. But it’s not a slur either, and a lot of antifascists do use it for themselves.
To my ear it has echoes of the Soviet fondness for acronyms — Comintern, gosplan, agitprop — but that may be a coincidence.
The original German AFA was an early 1930s thing, I think. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that it was essentially a short-lived replacement in between the communist party’s streetfighting group, the Rotfrontkaempferbund, being banned and the Nazis banning all political opposition, but this is one of those “I can’t find the reference” thing. In any case Wikipedia says the RFB or whatever the acronym is was banned in 1929, AFA in 1933, so at least the chronology would accord with that.
Modern antifascism comes from the punk scene – it started off with people noticing that there were Nazi skinheads infesting the scene, and deciding to run them out via good ol’ fashioned rumbles. This appears to have worked pretty well. They adapted the old AFA stuff (originally it had two red flags in the logo; now it’s a red flag and a black flag) and simultaneously picked up the three-arrow Iron Front logo (they were anti-fascist, anti-communist, anti-monarchist street fighters linked to the Social Democrat streetfighting group; someone sporting the logo now is rather unlikely to be anti-communist).
Weimar Germany had a lot of streetfighting groups. As noted elsewhere, you know shit has hit the fan when the centrists have streetfighters.
Yeah, I was talking about the modern version.
I don’t know many explicitly commie antifa. I do know a lot of antifa following anti-capitalist, communitarian strains of anarchism that seem to lead more or less directly to communism or something a lot like it, but they seem to recognize a distinction. (I read some of the literature behind it but found it unconvincing.)
But they’re likely to be at least friendly to modern communists.
Not to mention a whole lot of people on both sides were literally carrying firearms.
So much for the whole “if people are allowed to carry guns you’ll see the wild west over minor traffic disputes” notion I guess.
There were CCW-holding antifa protesters? that’s interesting.
Is open carry not legal in virginia? I heard on Twitter many were openly carrying. Could be rumors though.
It is, but when it comes to events like this, I’m of a “pics or it didn’t happen” variety. it’s just interesting because my prior would be that, at least at the moment, right wing extremists are more likely to go to guns (rather than improvised melee weapons and molotovs) first vs. left wing extremists due to respective cultural priming.
If that’s changing, it’s noteworthy. And frankly if we DID have people open carrying on both sides of this but the violence didn’t involve firearms I consider that a useful and hopeful data point.
@Trofim_Lysenko
I didn’t see any of Antifa carrying guns, but there was one picture of one carrying a compound bow and arrows (posted by virginia ACLU, and denounced by the usual Twitter crowd as “spreading right-wing propaganda”), and one of someone attacking people who were themselves carrying only flagpoles with a flamethrower (which was posted by left-wing people and generally framed as “look how awesome this guy is”)
It is darkly humorous to intimidate a torch baring mob with a flame-thrower.
@Randy M
They were carrying flagpoles, so reaching for fire is just a Pavlovian response.
Amusing, but there were people there at some point with Tiki torches, were there not?
I also like the peculiar consistency of a leftist (presumably anti-gun) coming with a bow and arrow.
Apparently because the protesters were better armed than them. A similar thing happened during the Bundy ranch standoff, which I can only assume was an Antifa false flag operation.
That was a blatant lie. You can see from this video that the police are clearly in so little danger that they can just push the UTR people directly into Antifa. You can also see that police are way better armed and armored than the protestors.
This doesn’t look like non-intervention to me…
This feels like a fairly serious false equivalence, even granting, as I do, that punching is a terrible way to deal with even terrible ideologies.
The anti-fa’s favourite song is ‘pop-a-nazi’ – that is to say shooting people. The BLM shooter obviously belongs to this corner of the room shot and killed two people. The Bernie-bro who went on a shooting spree.
Claiming that the left are limiting themselves to ‘punching ‘[Ed: on the internet]’ is nonsense.
Even in this situation we have the masked anti-fa mob attacking a car with extreme force – and that’s naturally going to cause panic before you can say ‘Rodney King riot’ because otherwse they can kill you before you can say ‘Roney Kng riot ‘ – which isn’t limting themselves to simply punching on the internet.
Do you have evidence of the mob attacking his car BEFORE he drove into it?
Video (this has some words over it, but you can see the first strike and it coming before running into the crowd): https://files.catbox.moe/dar2c2.webm
He was already driving into the mob at that point. If you track down the original of that video, people were already screaming and shouting. I’m interested in where he came from before this.
FYI, that website (catbox dot moe) triggered the hammer from the automated malicious website detection software on our network, generating an IT ticket.
I would not go there.
Antifa are always screaming and shouting. I’m not famliar with the video you were speakng of but this video – https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=dbd_1502608503 – shows perfectly when generic antifa screaming became ‘a guy is coming at us’ screaming, and I’ve a hard time beleiving that the attack came during that tiny bit in between.
(Plus, how could the antifa plant his feet down and take his big swing if the Dodger was going at speed running into the mob at the same time?)
Since autism comes up many times here, does anybody know about effectiveness of Tomatis method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A._Tomatis) in teaching non-verbal autistic children to start using some words?
Or do you know any other alternatives for checking if a non-verbal autistic child might be able to talk?
(This is my first comment with this account. I commented a few times under a different name back when accounts were not required.)
I’m a physicist in academia mostly doing computer simulations and data analysis. A long time ago, someone here said:
Suppose I find myself with two weeks without anything particularly urgent to do. What resources would you recommend me to read during those two weeks to teach myself to program “more reliably but with less aggregate effort” in the future?
I would dispute the original claim. If you have a specific task in mind, then doing it the way you’re used to doing it will almost certainly be the fastest approach. Learning a new technique, then applying it to this single task, will almost certainly take longer — and, almost certainly, significantly longer. It’s not worth it at all… unless you find yourself performing similar tasks on a regular basis. Of course, recognizing which tasks count as “similar” could also be very difficult without knowing the technique.
Unfortunately, without know exactly what it is that you’re doing, it’s difficult to tell whether that’s the case, and which techniques you might find useful. Two weeks is not a very long time, so I fear the shotgun approach would not work in this case.
The factor that makes the most difference in “reliability with less effort” is the percentage of code that is project-specific versus the percentage of code that is part of any system used by multiple projects (at least 10, preferably hundreds or thousands). A lot of programming projects suffer from “not invented here” syndrome, tending to write code from too low a level. If your work habits (or the habits on your larger project) are at all like that, I would recommend improving your skills at searching for open source to adapt and adapting it. But this is the kind of thing that might be easier to do in the course of work, rather than as a two week side project.
What is your current workflow? Can you give us an example of a task you’ve worked on that you suspect could be done more efficiently?
1. Make sure you use some form of source control (Git, etc). Academic programming has a reputation for being shockingly lax about this.
2. I would recommend Robert C. Martin’s “Clean Code”. It’s not perfect, and parts of it (especially the directives regarding comments) are hotly debated. But the general thrust of the book is good.
I do suspect that the person you quoted was talking about writing solid test code, and maybe even test-driven-development (basically write the tests first, and only afterwards write the actual code). But aside from agreeing that tests should exist, pretty much everything about how to test code is controversial.
I nominate Carbon as a moderator.
You know there’s a real irony in this joke: nuclear reactor moderators are used to increase the rate of the fission chain reaction. That’s generally not said to be the goal of forum moderators.
I mean, we could take the analogy any number of ways. Water can act as moderator and coolant, which seems a more pleasant comparison: keep the reaction going, but at a safe temperature.
I do think Scott should be cautious in appointing a moderator. Comment threads, like reactors, are better undermoderated than overmoderated.
I vote David Friedman for Moderator.
Before you appoint a moderator, can I suggest you fix the Report button?
And add a second Hide/Show button at the tops of posts!
I’m sorry if this question has already been asked to death, but I would really like to hear your experiences about struggling with social anxiety and depression. Have any of you recovered completely from this? how did you manage it?
My own issues arise from acute self-consciousness. I’ve read that confidence just comes from “switching off” the self-monitoring module, just being. This is quite difficult for me. All of my interactions are so self-monitored that it becomes absolutely debilitating. Any experience with this? I can continue to function, but face a huge amount of psychological inertia every day due to anxieties stemming from social contact.
have you tried drinking? Have one drink quickly just before you arrive, then nurse one an hour every hour or two over the course of the evening, depending on your personal weight/metabolism. The point is to be consistently just slightly drunk.
If it’s the sort of event where it’s socially acceptable to do so, bring the bottle with you and be be aggressively hospitable with it as a conversation starter. Make sure it’s something decent though.
I totally see why you’re recommending alcohol, and I’ve been tempted to try it for similar reasons, but I’ve always avoided it because it can be pretty bad for depression. And if it turns out to be a shortcut to sociability for OP, it could pretty quickly feel like a necessity, which is asking for trouble.
You’re right, I should have been more precise. Drinking won’t make you feel less depressed, probably the opposite. It will make you less uninhibited, though, which is what seems needed for the anxiety. I’d say “only drink socially” but that’s easy for me to say as I’ve never felt any compulsion to do otherwise.
I totally see why you’re recommending alcohol, and I’ve been tempted to try it for similar reasons, but I’ve always avoided it because it can be pretty bad for depression.
If you’re able to get it, pot might be useful in the same way and is (I think?) not bad for depression. Depends on the person, I guess.
I don’t find alcohol useful for socializing, personally. It does make me more relaxed, but it also makes it harder to focus, which makes it harder to carry on conversations or think of things to say, which kind of cancels out the benefit of the lowered inhibitions.
Which means that someone else has the frustrating experience of trying to carry on a conversation with you and after ten or fifteen minutes of trying to figure out why it isn’t working finally realizing that you are mildly high and unable to follow a clear line of argument.
My chief objection to alcohol.
As a (healthy, non-addicted) drinker of alcohol- it’s totally possible to maintain a level of drunkenness that significantly lowers inhibitions without significantly impairing conversational abilities.
I wouldn’t want to try and build a new pricing model or ace a math exam on, say, 3-4 drinks- but carrying on a friendly conversation is often easier and better: Sober, I’m often distracted in a conversation by stimuli around me, side thoughts, etc., because the conversation isn’t information-dense enough to occupy me fully. A few drinks in, suddenly I can be rapt with attention during social chatting- no longer worrying in the back of my mind about that bill coming up, or the work presentation I’m writing, or whether the dogs need their vaccine booster this week or next, etc.
@andrewflicker I am the same way. I sometimes notice the same effects well before the alcohol even physically hits my system (i.e. within just a few minutes of taking a drink, I can feel some of the weight of social interactions being lifted). I’m sure this comes from experiencing a familiar stimuli and my brain making predictions about what happens next, so not sure if you could recreate this without having sufficient experience with drinking socially. I’m sure there is a name of that phenomenon but I don’t know off the top of my head.
The problems for me are that I tend to “run out of steam” and get tired quicker if I only have a drink or two, and then the obvious downsides of having too many drinks if I want to maintain a certain level of energy on a night out (to the detriment of my conversational abilities…).
This sounds terrible but smoking cigarettes often makes socializing a lot easier. When smoking, you’re typically in a small group and people have their conversational guard down since you’re already on their team (you don’t judge them for smoking.) Additionally, if people see you smoking a cigarette, they oftentimes will ask you for one, and then stay around to talk to you while they smoke it, regardless of how awkward you look/are.
The social bonds formed over smoking a cigarette last long after the actual smoking. I’m sure that anyone who has smoked cigarettes in a group knows exactly what I’m talking about, and that people who have never smoked do not quite understand the magnitude of the social bonds that are formed.
Nicotine in general can have a calming effect on people, so if you detest cigarettes, you could try out vaping or chewing tobacco.
I’ve read that confidence just comes from “switching off” the self-monitoring module, just being. This is quite difficult for me.
Same. Often when I have a social interaction, even a mundane one, I find myself analyzing and critiquing my own performance and replaying it in my head afterwards, and I would love to know how to just stop my brain from doing this, because it’s pretty draining.
I’d also be curious about other people’s experiences with this and whether specific drugs or therapies have helped.
the trouble isn’t the analysis, probably. Introspection is good. The trouble is that you’re almost certainly not accurately assessing how others are actually seeing you, so the analysis is both draining and worse than useless.
the trouble isn’t the analysis, probably. Introspection is good.
Up to a certain point, yes, but I think the trouble with a lot of people with social anxiety is that they have far too much of that introspection, way past the point where it’s useful. There’s probably a dash of OCD in there. Too much of any good thing becomes bad.
I think positive self-monitoring is looking at the video afterwards in order to improve your presentation skills, while negative self-monitoring is sweating and stuttering because you worry about where to put your hands.
Things to do:
– know your stuff well, practice, practice, practice – learn every word by heart if you need to
– get some practice speaking to small and familiar audiences
– remind yourself that the audience wants you to succeed, they are there to hear what you say and they are not out to get you
– remember that it is perfectly all right to pause to clear your thoughts, or to answer that you don’t know
– understand that even if people look cool and relaxed, everybody is nervous – and should be: if you’re not at least a little on edge, you won’t give as good a presentation as you could
– and if you make mistakes, don’t give up, but keep in mind that this is how you learn and improve. You will do better (and feel a little less anxious) next time.
A little bit. I basically lost my fear of public speaking by accident in the course of my work as a tour guide. When I started out, I basically had the attitude that I knew the material very well, and that I had no reason to be nervous. After 8 months or so, I started to get rave reviews whenever I had to give a presentation at work, and I noticed that, so long as I knew what I was talking about, I didn’t have to spend any effort suppressing the self-monitoring module. And when you don’t have to worry about that, you can give really good presentations.
So I guess my advice would be to find somewhere you don’t suffer the anxiety, and hope it generalizes.
For depression: my personal experience was that the reason I was depressed was because my life was really, really awful. There was pretty much nothing redeeming about it. Changing up what my life was like helped out a lot with that. I also get the feeling that this is more or less what’s going on with a lot of people who are depressed. That said, people aren’t all the same, and I don’t want to portray this as gospel truth. It just helped me out a ton.
For social anxiety: at a few distinct points in my life, I decided that I didn’t really have much of a choice but to take on given social challenges, and so I did. It was kinda painful, pretty miserable, and I had a hard time learning most of it. I tried to learn how to make friends again, and talk to strangers, and stand up and ask questions, and give opinions unsolicited, and mingle effectively in new social contexts, and try to initiate romance. Each one of these has had, and some continue to have, a good amount of associated psychological pain. Not fun. But hey, you know, pain really isn’t all that bad. There are some strong personal and social biases that we have around pain, but we can put up with a lot of it, and it isn’t the end of the world. And what’s more, I’ve gained a ton from fostering these skills – not least a bit of an escape from the aforementioned depression.
I guess you could call that switching-off? I’d more call it a grin-and-bear-it solution. Oh, and practice makes a lot of this easier, though not always less painful.
I had general anxiety for a long time that turned into panic for a few months. Those months were really awful, but they made me learn how to deal with the anxiety, so that now I can repel panic and manage anxiety well enough that they’re no longer holding me back.
As far as I can tell (and from the research, eg., a course taught by a head honcho at Keiser), the key to anxiety is that your comfort zone shrinks or expands to cover the area where you spend most of your time. So although huddling in the corner is sometimes the only option, if you stay there long enough, your comfort zone will shrink until it just covers the area where you’re huddled. Expanding it is a matter of going to the edge where you feel a bit worried but can still say “this is manageable”. Labeling the marginal things okay in your brain helps your comfort zone expand. You unlock turbo mode when you can flip it from “this is a bit scary” to “this is a bit exciting!”. Laughter is also supposedly one of the ways we tell each other that something is okay, so laughing when you’re stretching boundaries is something that can help.
Assuming you’ve already read Scott’s excellent “Things that Sometimes Help for Anxiety/Depression”.
Avoid benzos if you can. If you have them for panic, have layered defenses and leave the benzos for last. I used to carry a backpack with snacks, water, inositol and benzos. Layers were things like these, preferably used at least, say, 10 minutes apart: go for a brisk walk, get into a deep technical conversation with someone, practice mindful meditation, pour water slowly over wrists and observe sensed temperature carefully, eat a snack, try inositol, take an Ativan. I only ended up using the Ativan 4 times in the first few weeks, and then conquered the attacks gradually over a few months.
Also for anxiety and especially panic, use up all your mental and physical energy every day. It leaves less energy to be sucked up by anxiety, and helps you sleep well (which is also really good). The way I avoid panic now is that I am willing to face whatever it wants me to panic about: “oh, we’re about to die? Fine then, today is a good day to die.” Panic is an oversensitive fire alarm. After the tenth false alarm, you roll your eyes and decide you’re going to wait until you see some serious smoke and flames before you call the fire department.
Can you switch off self-consciousness when you’re alone? Mindfulness meditation (also, “flow” states) are all about this. Following someone through the Tai Chi forms is my favorite mindful activity (as opposed to meditation), and is done without speaking. If your social anxiety is about words instead of actions, then I bet you could find a practitioner who would agree to be at a given place and time going through the form, and you could just show up and follow along without ever saying a word or even making eye contact. Also, there are groups of people who do this regularly, and I think nobody would care if you showed up and left at any time without ever speaking. (BTW I tried learning the forms from videos and didn’t get anywhere. It only works for me when I can copy someone). But I get that physical performance things are also stressful for lots of people, so no worries if Tai Chi isn’t for you.
I have less useful advice about depression, even though I’ve had it for much longer. Things that help me include watching out for narratives that I tell myself. The feelings of depression and irritability come first and then our rational minds look for things to blame it on, so break the cycle by watching out for stories you tell yourself about how everything sucks or how you’ve been mistreated or how you are inadequate. I used to have a sleep schedule that shifted later every night. Dealing with panic motivated me to try really rigidly setting alarms at the same time each morning, which helped me go to bed at the same time each night (no staying up late on weekends!), and now I have a super consistent sleep schedule. And I’ve accepted that depression is something I have to work around, so I can’t just schedule out my life. When I have energy and motivation, I accomplish what I can, and try to be glad for it instead of bemoaning that I can’t perform all day every day. (That includes committing to activities ahead of time when I’m feeling motivated, since I’m pretty good about following through on things past-me committed to.)
That is a great post and I endorse all of it.
The two things that helped me the most with my anxiety/depression (usually cycle back and forth a couple times a year, overlapping days are real fun) are therapy and meditation. I started the therapy first, about 5 years ago, and I think there’s a lot to be said for having a dedicated, trained and confidential confidant. Just saying things out loud in a safe space can be helpful I think. This year I tried group therapy for the first time and lo it was good, but I’d try individual first if you can.
Meditation started up a couple years ago and now I help run a group that meets a couple times a week for an hour or so. I also sit for 10 minutes every morning right after I wake up and I think it’s a fantastic way to start the day. It also helps me fall asleep, really can’t recommend it highly enough.
I don’t think anxiety or depression ever totally go away, but you can get better at managing it. On my best days the anxiety drives me to work harder until I can’t find anything to improve, and I think depression has made me a kinder person. It’s not all bad is what I’m saying. Good luck!
I’ve dealt with social anxiety, but I’m now probably above average in outgoingness. The only thing that I found that helped me was exposure therapy.
Put yourself in situations that you find uncomfortable, starting with situations that you find only slightly uncomfortable. Over time, put yourself in situations in which your current self would feel more uncomfortable (If done correctly, when you reach a new situation the level of discomfort is about the same because you’ve adjusted to the less uncomfortable situation).
Turned out my “atypical depression”, which dogged me on and off for around 20-odd years, was actually something more like PTSD caused by my almost-comically-awful childhood. Which went some way to explaining my mood swings and anger management issues and the fact that most of the antidepressants didn’t really work while the anti-anxiety meds did.
So it’s not really a question of recovering in my case. Gradually the PTSD effects have diminished over time and I’ve gotten better at handling them.
Joining a large community choir helped me immeasurably with social anxiety. Being one part of a whole but knowing I couldn’t be singled out if I made a mistake gave me a lot of confidence. I went from being a timid member at the back with little musical experience to becoming one of the teachers leading from the front, though part of this was because I recognized some of my anxieties and made specific goals to help me develop confidence (volunteering for soloing and teaching roles, etc).
My first concert was a nerve-wracking experience, which lessened every time, and now I have almost no stage fright in singing/performing/speaking to groups 100+, or presenting at work. I am considerably more social in my personal life, though I still struggle with one-on-one interactions.
Ahhhh, I spent most of my high school-college years in a state of soul-crushing depression.
Social Anxiety and Depression don’t really come from the same place, AFAICT, though I had a bit of it. I think you might be more in the category “I have no idea what to say to this person” rather than a “panic attack every time I’m around more than 5 people.” That’s what your brain back-seat QBing your conversations probably means.
Never really went away for me. I still get it all the time. I just power through the feeling and keep talking until the conversation feels more natural. I think of it more as an Activation Energy, like me getting up off my lazy rear to get on the treadmill.
Now, Depression? Whole different ball of worms there. I never sought help, but AFAICT I had a pretty severe case where I could take almost no joy in life and had suicidal thoughts for weeks on end. Couldn’t even enjoy Christmas. This went on for…ohhh…8 years? Something like that?
I wish I could say I had some sort of awesome strategy/come-back story, but I really don’t. My depression was triggered because I had almost no social circle and such a crappy, boring life, and surrounded by people who just seemed to live the high life all the time.
I felt a lot less depressed in my senior year of college when I just stopped giving a crap and wanted to get out ASAP. Didn’t like any of the people I was around anymore. I think another contributing factor may have been my parents getting some cats, which definitely made me feel a lot more loved.
Once I graduated, whatever, I didn’t care anymore. I wasn’t around those people anymore.
I had pretty bad depression and anxiety, though it was less specifically social. I tried a lot of things, and some of them helped somewhat, like swimming and running and using mantras. But honestly? The best thing was meds. My life got a lot better, I mean a lot better, when I started taking meds. Getting sleep used to be an incredible challenge every night–that was probably the worst part because it also made everything else worse. I now sleep much more easily, and other things changed for the better when that did. Things are not perfect, but particularly with regard to anxiety, I’ve seen a really big improvement. I’ll admit that a downside is that I am now afraid to go off them, which I guess I’ll have to do some day. But so far it seems like it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I know not everyone gets as lucky in this department as me–they have a bad reaction to something, or need to shop around a lot, or maybe nothing works for them. But those little pills were a godsend for me.
I’m sure you’ve heard that diet and exercise help, but they really only help if you follow them strictly every day. Waking up at the same time every day is maybe more important in my experience but people never point that one out for whatever reason. Quit using social media if you currently use it. Meditation too.
Try focusing as intently as possible on the other people in the room, what they’re saying, doing with their hands, etc.
I have mostly recovered from my social anxiety.
What may have been most important to me was a series of relationship failures. There was one I stayed in way too long in a bad situation. There was one I could not get to progress, despite obvious mutual interest – that was the worst. There was one in which I ended up acting pretty dishonestly. With each of these, I can see now how poorly I understood the situation, and how I was withholding myself from the world, and how that withholding was the source of my failure. This provided me the motive force to try something.
Then I learned the value of simply blurting things out. I think a lot of my social anxiety was really anxiety about what I was going to do or say – and not in the sense of “I don’t know how to decide what to do,” but, “I am not sure how to predict my own actions and responses.” Would I say something funny, or stupid, or offensive, or insightful? I had never seen myself navigate that kind of interaction, so, I had never really met myself, and I couldn’t know. I didn’t know if I would even like myself. Thus, I just chose to do nothing.
I realize now that social interaction is a kind of experimentation. You aren’t exactly sure who you are until you do something. And I had chosen to do nothing. In the immediate term, that was simply giving up and failing to connect with people, and in the long term, it perpetuated my uncertainty. I couldn’t do any Bayesian updating about my own personality.
Having met with failure after failure, and having noticed how my general policy of not interacting was not leading to social success, I gave up and decided to just blurt things out. Some of that was premeditated, and some was in the moment whenever I remembered how withholding myself was a guaranteed failure. And it turned out pretty well. At first I said some really dumb or unintentionally mean stuff, and it was embarrassing. But I also said some funny, or compassionate, or clever things. I got better and better. I distinctly remember a handful of things I blurted out that directly led to my wife and I falling in love with each other. I couldn’t have predicted, planned, or chosen those things, and trying to do so would have guaranteed failure. Blurting them out is what did it.
Here’s the thing. You said :
When I am acting confidently, I am sort of my own audience. I am doing the things, but also sort of watching myself do them without complete information. To me, that sort of semi-external perspective is something to embrace. The nature of confidence is letting yourself do.
The highest level of technique is to have no technique. Don’t think, feel! I do not hit, it hits all by itself.
For low-stakes exposure therapy, I ended up reinventing myself in different venues. I participated in a slew of internet fora and blurted out enough things that I could figure myself out. Also, by dint of my training, I was encountering an entirely new set of colleagues/co-trainees about every 2-4 years, which gave me the opportunity to refresh my experimental self and reinvent my public and private “me” anew. Over time, I sort of reassembled the bits of myself I liked, and tried to get rid of (or pre-monitor) the parts I didn’t like. Eventually I knew enough of myself not to worry so much about what I would do in any given situation.
It’s not been without consequences. That one relationship, though it shaped me to a great extent, was painful, and unnavigable in the long term, and so I’ve had to wall off a fairly important friendship. And though I have a handful of really great friends who met me despite me, I haven’t got a lot of long-term friendships. (Probably fine for my introverted self.) And there are still some things I said and did that I wince to remember.
But it’s all worth it. I married the best woman in the entire world. I have a much better relationship with my parents, colleagues, long-term friends, passing acquaintances, and patients. I wouldn’t trade it back.
I recommend sports and competitive video games, as they:
1. train you to focus on things with immediate feedback. It’s like a pavlovian conditioning apparatus for making yourself focus.
2. are very immersive (self consciousness is kind of like not being immersed in your own experience)
3. are an outlet for excess energy
4. can provide extreme stimuli that makes you less sensitive to lesser ones ones like social anxiety. (recalibrate the scale by blowing the top off kind of idea)
Also weightlifting, stretching, and punchbags. The more fit you are (and inured to strain/hardship) the higher your baseline level of comfort and the more of a cushion there is for discomfort (physical but also mental).
James Damore, the guy who wrote the Google memo was recently asked on a Reddit AMA: “I have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and I recognised a lot of myself in your interviews. I was curious if you’ve ever been diagnosed with ASD/Autism/Aspbergers yourself?”
He responded: “I am likely on the spectrum because my thinking is very pattern oriented and I didn’t start talking until much later than normal.”
So the incident involves discrimination against autists.
It’s not discrimination if google didn’t know. The ADA doesn’t require them to guess if an employee has a disability. On the contrary it might well be illegal for them to do so. And “my thinking is very pattern oriented and I didn’t start talking until much later than normal” isn’t sufficient to make a claim of a disability.
We don’t know if Damore told people at Google that he has autism. My guess is that regardless, Damore’s manager would have placed a high probability on him having autism, high enough so that before firing Damore for violating an implicit rule that an autistic would likely have massive trouble following, Google had an obligation to talk with Damore to see if was autistic.
It appears from that quote that he doesn’t have a diagnosis. If so, it is not possible for him to have formally notified google. An employee can’t make a request for accommodations on the basis of a guess.
In terms of an obligation arising out of a manger’s guess, that’s even further away from how the law works.
Unless you were talking about a moral obligation?
@James Miller: I can’t tell if you’re being serious. Are you, or are you just sort of jokingly playing devil’s advocate?
@Well… What Google did is just anti-autism discrimination. I personally believe that autists should be exempt from all implicit social rules.
From our perspective if we notice that something does not make sense we are much less likely to drink the kool-aid compared to non-autists. Hence regardless of whether the Blue Tribe, the Red Tribe or the Brown Tribe is in power they always persecute autists because we always tend to reject some of their ideas. Any society that requires value conformism is anti-autistic because we autists usually tend to question some of its values. Trying to get an autist to accept something they consider false is counterproductive and painful from the autist’s point of view.
No, HFARationalist, what human societies do is anti-autism discrimination. Google is just part of human society.
@Well.. Agreed. However what shall we do? Abolish societies and welcome Clippy? Start a new nation, Autistan?
Well,
I was being serious, but Brad might be right that I was mistaken. See this article “The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech” if you’re interested in this topic.
@HFARationalist:
Why do we need to do anything?
@Well.. To improve our lives?
What’s wrong with our lives?
This Damore guy had a job at Google! He brought his political opinions to work and knew he was jeopardizing his position when he did! I don’t care if he was speaking truth to power (even though he was), and I don’t care if everyone else was doing it too (sorry excuse). You do your work and you leave your political beliefs at home, or at least do serious and careful sniffing before having a quiet political conversation with a coworker you trust to handle it in a mature way. You sure as hell don’t broadcast your opinions to the whole company. Not unless you’re planning to retire soon, maybe.
I’m not saying the guy deserved to get fired, I’m saying he got fired because of an over-aggressiveness of a cultural immune system that we still ought to have, and that we probably cannot have without at least a few isolated incidents of over-aggression.
Having read your blog, I believe that cultural immune systems should not even exist. Censoring opinions is generally awful no matter how offensive these opinions are.
Well,
>This Damore guy had a job at Google! He brought his political opinions to work and knew he was jeopardizing his position when he did!
It’s very possible that Damore didn’t realize what he was doing would offend people or put his job at risk. Google said that it cared a lot about increasing the number of women at Google, and they probably said over and over that they wanted to hear better ways of doing this. Damore probably thought he was helping Google do this with his memo, plus just to be extra sure no one would misinterpret his memo he started it with “I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.”
So people shouldn’t be allowed to question HR policies because politics? Because it sounds less like “don’t bring politics to work” as much as “one side brought all the politics to work and is aggressively discriminating against anyone who dissents”.
@Well…, Damore posted his essay to a Google-internal mailing list which was already discussing women in tech. If they’re already having that discussion, you can’t say he’s the one who brought politics into it, or advise him to leave politics out of work.
I don’t think autistics should be given free speech exemptions, I think free speech should be extended universally so autistics don’t fall fall foul of it.
An analogy would be height restrictions in the police force. In the U.K. we had height restrictions that had the side effect of indirectly discriminating against Asians. We didn’t make exemptions for Asians, we scrapped the height restrictions.
@Well…
That is a gross misrepresentation of what happened and betrays a complete misunderstanding of Google’s internal culture. There is no norm of “don’t bring your politics to work”. It is not a matter of “everyone else is doing it too”, it’s a matter of no such norm exists.
Just the opposite, there’s an explicit norm of “bring your whole self to work”. Among Googles internal newsgroups are one specifically for politics, one for conservatives, and one for libertarians. I’ve had discussions involving vice presidents of the company on subjects such as rent control and copyright, and nothing bad came of that.
To claim a norm of “don’t bring your politics to work” and to justify harm to Damore based on that is a clear case of “is that your true objection?”. Even if there weren’t an explicit norm otherwise, a norm which is openly and notoriously violated on a constant basis isn’t a norm at all.
Furthermore, Damore didn’t broadcast the memo to the entire company. He posted it on an internal “skeptics” list. That list was fairly low in popularity when I was there. Apparently he had some reasonable discussion there, but then one of the SJWs picked it up and posted it to memegen (Google’s internal board for posting memes, which IS extremely popular) and it snowballed from there.
For whatever reason, he wasn’t hooked into the informal network of Google dissidents, so he probably hadn’t heard about the previous firings; given that he decried the Google echo chamber maybe you could argue he should have known there was a reason for it, but that’s all.
This Damore guy had a job at Google! He brought his political opinions to work and knew he was jeopardizing his position when he did!
So what about one of the people shocked and offended by the memo, who was perfectly happy to reveal on an internal Google hangout/mailing list/circle/discussion group that they were “genderqueer, poly, heteroflexible, [going to omit name of country here]” when introducing themselves?
Who needs to know they’re poly in the context of “doing your work and keeping your private life to yourself”? If Damore should expect to be penalised for over-sharing, so should that person there – but of course they won’t be.
@Well,
No doubt Damore was quite naive in airing his unpopular opinions in a company discussion forum that invites everyone to share their opinions without fear; most people understand that by “no fear” you should read “no fear UNLESS you contradict upper management or the mob”. I also don’t believe he can win a case claiming discrimination against autism, and in fact I don’t even think he should.
But please do not act as if Google’s stance in this whole episode is anything but reprochable, even if not illegal. They set forums for discussion, they let their SJW people bring their favorite subjects to work, they encouraged everyone (everyone! Yes, you too! Don’t be afraid!) to speak their mind – and when someone advanced a different position (and very gently so), they fired him and aired the whole story to the press. No warnings, no attempts at pacifying the Googlemob, no concerns over fairness. It’s absurd. Even for non-autistic personalities this is a frigthening way of doing personnel management.
@HFARationalist
Do you think a society is obligated to do whatever it takes to improve the lives of autistic people regardless of the collective costs to non-autistic people?
@Brad – I personally don’t believe that, but the ADA mandates some serious steps in that direction (especially as interpreted by the courts).
@Evan thorn
You may disagree with exactly where they’ve drawn the line, but the line is explicitly labeled “reasonable accommodation”.
@Brad No but letting autists say whatever we want without consequences is good.
You mean people, right? Or are you special in this regard?
Wow, this bloomed.
@HFARationalist:
Then your culture will soon follow into non-existence too. Bad idea.
@James Miller,:
Didn’t he post it anonymously? That would suggest he knew what he was doing was risky. His “I value diversity” language sounds so careful and designed to disarm, it also suggests this. (Unfortunately it did not disarm.)
@InferentialDistance:
I’m not saying it should be that way, but it is that way. (Or, as Marlo Stanfield puts it in “The Wire”: “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.”) Everyone who doesn’t drink the Kool Aid knows that’s how it is. You make a public scene out of criticizing the Kool Aid, you know what you’re getting into.
@Evan Þ:
Yes, I can. Even if everyone else is doing it you should not discuss politics at work.
@The Nybbler:
Yes, there is. Just because Google employees don’t believe in it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I simply cannot believe you can work at Google, play ping pong during your pomodoro breaks like everyone else (or whatever “Silicon Valley”-esque stuff goes on there) but if you don’t post your political opinions on the internal Google+ Slack channel thingy, everyone will stop and look at you like you’re from Mars.
Anyway, I explicitly did NOT justify harm to Damore: “I’m not saying the guy deserved to get fired”.
This is the first I’m hearing about the internal “skeptics” list. That’s a small point in Damore’s favor I guess (that he posted it there and not in the “General” channel or equivalent), but only a very small one since the list was accessible to anyone, and a “skeptics” list is going to naturally have an overlap with SJWs because atheism/anti-Christianity. Surely he knew that.
@Deiseach:
What about him? He should leave his politics at home too! Yes, you’ve discovered a big double standard. Stick your flag in it. Shout it from the rooftops. It doesn’t mean we should equalize everything toward the lowest common denominator. Deiseach, I know you of all people can get down with that!
@moscanarius:
I don’t think I did act that way. I said Damore was in fact speaking truth to power and that he should not have been fired. And I agree it’s a frightening way for Google to do personnel management—in many ways scarier than outright anti-conservative discrimination.
@Well Then cultures are inherently irrational. There should be no cultural immune system at least in speech.
@Randy M Let all autists say whatever that appears in our minds.
@Well…
Damore did not publish his memo anonymously within Google.
That’s precisely what it means, when you’re talking about “norms”. At this point you’re not talking about a “norm”, you’re talking about a rule you imported from some other context and insist against all evidence that it applies here.
Nobody looks at you funny if you don’t play ping pong, but there’s no norm against playing ping pong. You’ve rather obviously tried to conflate “there is no positive norm requiring one to discuss politics” with “there is a norm against discussing politics”.
Yes, you did. Claiming he broke some reasonable and neutral norm justifies harm to him. The actual rule he broke is “don’t question Google’s diversity narrative”, and if you look at it from that perspective, the harm looks a lot less justified.
@HFARationalist
That accommodation doesn’t strike me as a reasonable one. At least not universally.
@Brad I agree that if speech involves inciting violence then it is not OK even if an autist gave it. However I believe all autists should be exempt from any form of social consensus and should be allowed to voice our true opinions on everything without persecution.
For example an autist should be allowed to support all kinds of taboo ideas such as misanthropy, National Socialism, Stalinism, Islamism, whatever even if the very concept of ideas being taboo has to exist.
@HFARationalist:
Yes, maybe cultures are inherently irrational. So are wolf packs and whale pods. Do you think the “rational culture” thing has been tried?
@Aapje:
OK, that’s new info for me. Kind of amazed he was able to remain anonymous as long as he did.
@The Nybbler:
Google’s internal norms (“discuss politics at work!”) are not separate from America’s general norms (“don’t discuss politics at work!”) in the same way America’s norms are separate from, say, African tribal bushmen’s norms. Google’s norms are nested within America’s norms. When you walk out the door of Google, as Damore did every day when he went home, you are in America. Surely he had a chance to internalize America’s norms in the decades before he went to work at Google.
If you work for a company where it’s common for employees to race motorcycles in the parking lot without wearing helmets, I agree that’s different from working for a company where people look at you funny if you don’t race motorcycles in the parking lot without a helmet. In neither case is it a good idea to join in that part of the company culture, but it’s at least somewhat more understandable if people look at you funny when you don’t.
This doesn’t mean a helmet-less motorcyclist who dies in a crash deserves to die; it means it was unwise of him to partake in that activity—even if everyone else at his job was doing it.
I also already agreed this was not a reasonable and neutral norm that Damore broke: I already said he was speaking truth to power. And frankly, I agree it would be nice if people could speak their minds at work without fear of getting fired so long as they haven’t broken any rules, all of which should of course have their “includes” and “excludes” clearly spelled out. But the norm of “don’t talk politics at work” is designed for a different reality, one where things are far more ambiguous and risky—and that is the reality Google exists in.
@Well.. Then we autists should be allowed to rebel against all human cultures on the grounds that they are all anti-autistic and irrational.
Damore did not do anything wrong because he is an autist. An autist can easily say something that is considered by a non-autist to be offensive without meaning it.
Yes, we know that’s what you want. But you haven’t made argument that it is reasonable. I would like a free apartment in the Pierre.
@Brad Fine. Think about an autist defying culture. Where is the harm? A society is at most 1-2% autistic. It can not be harmed by such a small minority ditching it.
I’m not asking for welfare or free spouses. Instead I’m just asking for freedom of speech and freedom from conformism. The cost of such accommodation is almost zero. Hence it is reasonable.
Y’all are capable of keeping your opinions to yourselves, you just find it unpleasant to do so. Other people won’t die if they hear your unfiltered opinions all the time, they just find it unpleasant to be subjected to them. There are more of them than there are of you. Why should your preferences trump?
Should someone with a condition that causes him to break into song be allowed to disrupt endless classes and meetings because it is a disability? Or do we say, that sucks, sorry that happened to you. We can show you the class or meeting by CCTV, that’s a reasonable accommodation, severely degrading the experience for everyone else isn’t.
This is a pattern I’ve seen a lot with autistic people.
1. Come up with a set of rules.
2. Post the rules. (This step is optional.)
3. Declare the rules good and fair and demand everyone follow them.
4. Get upset when people are illogical.
This is that exact situation.
It took me a while to figure this one out myself, but other people are not required to obey your set of rules just because you declare them good. Even if they are good, society doesn’t have time to debate with every single person who wants to opt out. Otherwise we’d already be busy dealing with sovereign citizens full time.
@Brad However our unfiltered opinions have some values to the society. They are more likely to make sense compared to filtered opinions and opinions that resulted from emotions. We are also much more likely to think outside the conformist box and spot nonsense in the majority view compared to non-autists.
@Edward Scizorhands LOL. That describes me.
I suggest that you modify 4. If non-autists defy the set of rules an autist invented the autist might get really mad and lash out against the lack of autism in this evil, irrational universe.
The cost of such accommodation is not almost zero. First, why should you get a complete freedom from any and all forms of social rules just because you have a doctor’s note? If the worst of the banned posters here show up with notes declaring them autistic, do we have to let them back in? I’m ADD, and medicated. Should I not be held responsible for what I say late at night? How do we implement this? Heck, I could probably get one of those notes for myself.
Second, people are not that good at understanding how autism works. If you insult someone, very few people will say “Oh, he’s autistic, so I’m not going to be affected.” Seriously. That’s just not how people work. You may not have meant to be insulting. But people are not that good at being rational. And you’re basically demanding freedom to insult people and escape censure.
I’m not saying that society understands autistics perfectly, or that we shouldn’t have more sympathy for people with poor social skills. But there are good and bad ways to go about it, and demanding complete freedom from societal rules is borderline supervillainish. Here, we understand that you just don’t get that. But please trust those of us who have relatively normal brains when we tell you that you’re going about it wrong.
Edit:
While this is (probably) true, it doesn’t mean that you have a right to inflict your opinions on everyone without their consent, or even that this would be a good thing. I like Brad’s analogy of the compulsive singer. Maybe your songs are good, and add value to society. But the right place for them is not in a lecture.
By insisting on a right to force opinions on people, you’re actually hurting your cause. You should know about the various research into ego protection and so on. The analogy here is that society is going to get more out of HFASinger: The Musical, put together based on the songs of our compulsive singer by people who don’t have the problem, than it will from any number of songs during during English lectures.
Most societies are about 1-2% sociopath, too.
@HFARationalist
So you’ve claimed repeatedly. Many of us are as of yet unpersuaded.
Even if that’s correct, you still have to quantify it and weight it against the costs if you want to move from a deontological argument to a consequentialist one.
If this became a de facto or de jure social convention, it would likely be in virtue of largely ignoring what autists say. Are you sure that’s what you want?
@bean and Brad I really didn’t think about that. Really thanks! Let’s add “through some reasonable channel” here. All autists should be able to voice our oppositions to any society through some reasonable channel which solves the problem of the HFASinger.
Now is that reasonable? At the very least we can provide some nice alternatives to common views and some of the alt-views are going to be useful.
@skef No that’s not what I want. I just believe that autists should at least be able to voice our oppositions to any society through some reasonable channel.
@Nornagest However autists generally don’t attempt to harm a society. We usually only want to opt out.
Untreated sociopaths don’t want to harm society, either. It just so happens that they don’t want not to harm society, and the way they tend to go about getting what they do want tends to cause a lot of collateral damage.
@HFARationalist:
If you were allowed to rebel it wouldn’t be rebelling. Nothing’s stopping you from rebelling now, just go do it. Good luck and God speed.
@Well
I think you did. Before my comment, you had not condemned Damore’s firing (“I’m not saying the guy deserved to get fired” is vague, and is not the same as saying you think he should NOT have been fired!) and had basically treated the whole episode from a pragmatic POV, avoiding passing judgement on Google’s actions. From your comments at that time, you seemed to be treating Google’s actions as some unavoidable course of action dictated by society, to which we should just conform as if to a force of nature. This characterization would be unfair now, in light of your subsequent comments, but not in regards to your comments up to that point.
@moscanarius:
I addressed Damore’s actions and Google’s actions separately because I see them as separate issues. I maintain that Damore would have been unwise to broadcast his politics at work even if Google was less hypocritical about its policy of openness, or even if Damore had 100% acceptable, mainstream views. I was stating a reason why I lacked more sympathy for Damore, not why I thought what happened to him was right. An explicit condemnation of Google seemed irrelevant at the time.
This situation, Google’s actions, might or might not be unavoidable…I’m not really sure. As I pondered earlier in the thread (to HFARationalist’s chagrin) it might not be possible to have a cultural immune system that does not occasionally attack a false positive–and every culture needs an immune system (to HFARationalist’s chagrin). If this situation is unavoidable it still doesn’t necessarily mean we should conform, it just means we should adjust our expectations (“We cannot eliminate all false positives,” “Not every false positive is The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back,” etc.) and monitor the immune system’s functioning closely (“Is this a false positive? Was the last one?” Etc.). In either case, that is a different conversation from whether a person in our society should broadcast his politics at work.
There are still things that google doesn’t know? :O
Who’s the commenter here who started the Discord server? He’s a pretty good moderator over there, maybe he would be a good moderator here too.
Where are we with space elevators? Are they feasible? Are they not? Are there major problems that haven’t been at least worked out in theory? If they’re feasible and if the technology is there or close to there, what other kinds of obstacles stand in the way?
As I understand the situation, there are currently no materials that can be fabricated on the relevant sale that have close to the strength to weight ratio needed for a space elevator.
What David said. There are a whole slew of other problems that would have to be addressed if we did have the materials – deployment, dynamic stability, collision avoidance, damage tolerance, geopolitics, even just how you power and drive the elevator cars is non-trivial. But how you address all of those problems is going to depend on the materials, at least insofar as they drive the allowable margins, and so long as we don’t have a clue what the materials are going to be nobody is going to put too much work into the rest.
Also, carbon nanotubes are not magic. In particular, they seem to be too slippery to braid into a useful rope or cable, even with copious epoxy. If you manage to solve that one, give the details to the space-elevator guys and let them get to work
What do you think about kinetic structures (“launch loop”, etc)? All the secondary problems you list plus very exciting failure modes, but no unobtanium required.
I worked on Space Fountains for a while, but then I got distracted with moving Mars into Earth orbit. The movement is achievable in about a thousand years, using current technology, but I digress.
The Space Fountain is fairly doable, it does not require a huge engineering effort, or much material, and has modest power requirements. It is fragile, and would require constant protection, and a continuous power source. Its deployment is its best feature. I will look around and see if I can find any old plans.
I’ve seen that space fountain diagram before! (The one on Wikipedia.) Kinda hard to forget.
Interesting. Where can I learn more, besides the Wikipedia page?
And given all these problems, why all the (seemingly, to my uneducated eyes anyway) highly qualified experts claiming we could have a space elevator in just a few years or with just one or two of the materials solutions?
Here is a pertinent scientific paper detailing some of the issues with carbon nanotubes. This is an older review.
As for the second issue, why has fusion been twenty years away for fifty years? A combination of blue-sky thinking, overestimating rates of progress, underestimating difficulties along the way, extreme specialization (the people fixing the problems with CNTs are unlikely to be worried about the other aspects), and attempting to get grant funding.
I’ve done a small amount of work with CNTs, though in a very different context. Defects are a huge issue, for a wide range of applications.
Thanks.
Where I’m going with this is, is it possible to write a near-future hard sci-fi story in which there are space elevators?
It sounds like there isn’t–you’d have to hand-wave away too much. So…any other ideas for a technology that really is 10-30 years away that, once it was in place, would make getting into space way cheaper per pound?
Any of the aerospace people here will know much more about that than I will; I deal with electron orbits, not planetary orbits. The only thing that’s on my radar is reusable rockets, a la SpaceX. I know that there’s been a fair amount of discussion about their economics in past OTs.
Maybe SABRE engines: https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre-engine/
You can write stories with space elevators set anywhere from ten years into the future, to never. The necessary Carbon Nanoglue could come out of the laboratories tomorrow or not at all or anywhere in between. When it does, ten years is about what it takes for an Apollo-style project to do unprecedented megascale engineering based on known science, or it could turn into another NYC water tunnel #3.
The technology is not the problem, it’s the engineering. We’ve gone through the math here before, and the energy requirements for space travel via good old fashioned Von Braunian rockets are no worse than for long-distance airline travel.
The problem is that when the actual Von Braun was finally told to go build spaceships, his marching orders were literally “waste anything but time”, and his employers literally had a printing press for dollar bills. So he wasted an almost literally astronomical amount of money building spaceships in record time, and being Von Braun, built them using rockets. Pretty much everybody since has been told, “we expect this to be astronomically expensive, because it was the last time, but we also expect it to work, because it did last time, so don’t risk your career by doing anything different”. Hence, “rocket” has become synonymous with “astronomically expensive”.
It doesn’t need to be, but until fairly recently nobody even tried to do space flight in a less than astronomically expensive way. When someone finally pulls it off, they’ll probably be using rockets. And they probably won’t be named “Elon”, but that’s another story.
I know you’re an actual rocket scientist and I’m not quite, but I don’t quite buy this. Airliners do not have to carry their own oxygen, which means that the specific impulse is an order of magnitude higher.
Also, the sort of ultra-long-range flight you’re talking about is just becoming economically viable over the last few years, after an amount of money which dwarfs the budgets of various space launch organizations. The big difference is that airlines were able to build up from taking a week to fly from London to Sydney, while orbital launch means you have to go nonstop from the beginning.
This, I am in agreement with.
@Well…
‘Any other ideas for making getting into space way cheaper per pound?’
Two simple ideas, don’t know how dumb they are.
1) From the Earth to the Moon– a big gun launches capsules into orbit. Probably natural gas instead of black powder- cheap, doesn’t blow up as often, ’tis sixty years since the Nazis used it for long-range artillery and it worked then.
2) Once in space, put a rocket on each end of a long strong rope and spin it as fast as you can. Strongest rope material you can get, let centrifugal force add to specific impulse. If you make the rope hollow you can use it as a rocket exhaust nozzle and coil extra rope in the middle for when the nozzles erode.
I’d use either in a novel without hesitation. I’d hesitate before you got my ass in either.
You’re not going to get enough speed out of a gun to make that really practical. There have been proposals, most notably HARP and Project Babylon, but none that have gotten off the ground. (And it only works for small, high-volume payloads. Good for getting supplies to a station, but not much more.) And you definitely can’t make it work with people aboard without turning it inot a launch loop.
How is this supposed to work? You’re looking at, at best, a very marginal improvement in specific impulse for a huge increase in complexity and weight.
For a whole bunch of discussion on this kind of thing, try Atomic Rockets.
@bean- ‘you’re not going to get enough speed out of a gun to make that really practical’
I’m going to weasel on saying ‘capsule’ to make it sound like I really meant ‘use a gun to skip the part where the rocket sits on the launch pad using gobs of fuel for the first stage’. Because you are right, putting a package the size of a three-inch shell into orbit would not mean much. But getting your rocket close to the speed of sound before it starts using its own fuel could mean much. Only another Mach 29 to orbit!
‘How would this work? You are looking at, at best, a very marginal improvement in specific impulse for a huge increase in complexity and weight.’
A mile of of wire, a power source in the middle, a drone with the brains of a cell phone and some cameras. Maybe enough to maneuver in Jupiter’s radio field or even our Van Allen belts. If it worked for drones eventually we’d know how to make one to ride in.
I like the Atomic Rockets site.
@engleberg
If that’s what you want, Stratolaunch and related projects are probably better ideas. They also have the advantage that you can launch from a much larger range of areas than any other method.
Why do you care? Rocket fuel is cheap. If you ever get to the point where fuel costs are more than a rounding error in your budget, you have long since accomplished the goal of low-cost space travel.
Meanwhile, guns have a tendency to break things. Guns were designed to break things, and there was never any expectation that things being fired from guns would survive any longer than things being fired at by guns. If you actually want something to survive being fired from a gun, this is doable but it involves designing for things like 50,000-g acceleration tolerance. That’s expensive, but even worse it’s heavy. And heavy is very nearly a deal-breaker for spaceflight.
When Gerald Bull was seriously proposing ginormous guns for space launch, he still needed rockets to “circularize” the orbit (really, do most of the work of getting to orbit), and he “only” needed four solid rocket motors to do that. Each one heavy and rugged, and carrying a heavy, rugged payload at the expense of performance.
Meanwhile, people who dispensed with the gun and just used solid rockets, could get to orbit with three stages. Now they’re down to two. The gun makes things harder, not easier.
The math here does not work. Solid rocket fuel is pretty cheap. Guns are expensive. Unless the launch rate goes way, way up, there’s no payback.
You’re talking about tethers now, not some form of spinning rockets. These are very different things. Tethers haven’t worked very well, and are much better suited for either station-keeping or deorbiting than they are for active propulsion. There are lots of things you can do with robots that aren’t really practical with humans.
@Well…
Yes, several of the active structure, notably launch loops
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1MAg0UAAHg&list=PLIIOUpOge0LsGJI_vni4xvfBQTuryTwlU&index=7&t=2s
(Launch Loops, aka Lofstrom loops see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop )
You might want to see Isaac Arthur’s whole “Upward Bound”
series:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LsGJI_vni4xvfBQTuryTwlU
About 2 months ago I made a comment on the SSC post Is Pharma Worse Than Chance, mentioning that I was planning on trying shrooms as a way of medicating for treatment-resistant depression. A few people suggested I post about my experiences in an open thread, just wanted to give a minor update. Call it a rationalist trip report. Please note that my knowledge of pharmacology is VERY limited and anything related to such mentioned herein is informed speculation, or a repetition of things I’ve heard on the internet. This is not intended to be mistaken for being actual science, I just like to keep my anecdotal data as objective as possible. Bold is for people who like to skim.
I haven’t yet tried the primary dose I was planning (3.5g dried) but I did try a smallish preliminary dose the other day (19g wet, or ~1.9g dry). I intended this primarily as a trial run, to get a feel for it, my tolerances and the potency of the batch. My experience was that at this dose it was mostly a body high. I just felt weird, my thought patterns were a little weird, there was some giddiness and general euphoria, and some minor hallucinations regarding moving pictures and closed-eye patterns. Overall nothing I would say resembles antidepressant effects, although I admittedly did feel pretty good when I was peaking. Very few noticeable alterations to thought patterns or emotional resonance. If anything I probably felt less emotional, which is the opposite of what I’m going for.
A few things of note here: First, I took the shrooms when I was only 4 days off of my newest antidepressant, Mirtazapine. Mirtazapine is known to cause a dampening of the effect of shrooms due to antagonizing the 5-HT2a receptor, which the Psilocybin/Psilocin present in mushrooms is supposed to bind to. However the Mirtazapine was a low dose, and its total elimination period is supposed to be 100-200 hours (half life of 20-40 hours, repeated 5 times for total elimination). It’s reasonable to conclude that this somehow dampened the effects a bit, but I think given the length of time and small size of the Mirtazapine dose the dampening effect was minimal. (I think it’s worth noticing that I actually like Mirtazapine, it didn’t do much in terms of depression but it absolutely annihilated my insomnia. Eager to start it again for that reason.)
Another consideration to be made is that a lot of the mushrooms I ate were small or aborts, which are known to be more potent than average. However given the above and the fact that the dosage I took seems to be right in line with the experienced trip level (strong Level 2) so I think both these dampening and strengthening effects were for all intents and purposes negligible.
A few unusual things I did experience: The trip only really seemed to last for less than 3 hours, and by about 3 I felt pretty grounded relative to before. I took a bike ride around hour 3 and it was honestly pretty boring, and I felt kind of burned out during. I read about shrooms lasting at minimum 3 hours so that was odd. I also felt a little burnt out/depressed after the trip was over even though I wasn’t very active during, although this effect lasted only until I went to sleep.
—————————————
That being said, it was just a trial run. I’m still planning on taking a larger dose. I’ll be taking it around my friends at a fairly secluded natural park in a few weeks, and I’ve decided on 3.5g. Most actual studies regarding shrooms and TRD set the dose at around 5g, but that’s firmly in the “total loss of connection to reality” range and I don’t want to freak out or otherwise be too much of a burden to my friends. 3.5 is just on the threshold of a Level 4 dosage, which is reportedly still very powerful, so I should be able to get a gauge for any antidepressant effects or otherwise desirable outcomes. This experience will probably end up being posted in the next open thread.
—————————————–
A bonus few fun experiential notes:
– Apparently food is really delicious when peaking. I wasn’t even hungry, but nonetheless had an apple and I absolutely demolished it. Terrible picture but you can see, there’s barely even a core left.
– I, uh, made an attempt to beat the meat just for science, and though I was ultimately successful it was not worth the effort. I wasn’t feeling particularly sexual and in spite of great effort and supporting materials it took a good while, was hard to stay focused, and wasn’t very satisfying. Waste of time.
– Visuals were minor but pretty cool. I have a picture on my wall of a lighthouse being engulfed in a white wave and I could basically see the water moving around. Closed eye visuals were kind of neat too.
– I was not social at all while peaking, mostly wanted to be left alone.
– Shrooms taste fucking terrible. Not gag worthy but not pleasant at all. Gonna take some honey along next time.
My roommate in college recommended OJ to cover the taste of shrooms.
There are a lot of great ways to deal with the taste, and that’s one of them. However, shrooms have this weird relationship going on with citrus in that some chemical in citrus fruits (Vitamin C?) alters the digestive process and makes trips more intense. Lemon Tek is a common way of taking shrooms where you steep them in lemon juice then strain the solids and drink. It makes the come up faster, and the trip is more intense but doesn’t last as long. Definitely a neat trick but I want to just take it as vanilla as possible first.
How may bans a week will this hypothetical mod be allowed? Asking for a though experiment.
Anyone have tips on learning obscure languages? I would like to learn very basic Basque in the short term, and Scots Gaelic in the long term.
If you are familiar with the Bible, it can be a good starting place–since you are looking at something familiar.
Just google for “bible [language]” and you will almost certainly find a copy. (I know someone who learned basic Welsh this way.)
I just ran across a pointer to Fluent in 3 Months: How anyone at any age can learn to speak
any language from anywhere in the world.
I can’t vouch for it, but the Amazon reviews are good enough that I added it to my long, long list of things to take a look at.
I had a go at Scots Gaelic with a Teach Yourself course, and got to a level of … well, I hope at least being able to exchange pleasantries without sounding like I was completely garbling it. It is often recommended that, to learn a language well, you should get yourself romantically involved with a speaker who doesn’t also speak your language, but given that all Gaelic speakers in Scotland learn English at school*, in this particular case, that strategy is likely to lead to arrest and vilification 🙂
If you have the time/money to get yourself to the Isle of Skye, the intensive Gaelic courses at Sabhal Mor Ostaig seem to be generally well-recommended. And I have a couple of friends who have had a serious go at learning as adults; I can put you in touch with them if you want?
*That is, there are some Gaelic-medium schools, but they will still teach English as a second language.
I recently finished watching all the Marvel Netflix shows and I enjoyed them overall. The production values and special effects were mostly good, the acting and writing as well. However, they were all too long and felt like they really dragged on at parts. Cutting them down to 10 or 9 episodes would greatly improve their paces. If I were to rank them it would be as follows:
1) Daredevil 1&2
-This felt the most original, as it was the first of the bunch. The villain, Wilson Fisk felt well-done and had a good character and motivations. The Punisher in season 2 was well done, and setting up Electra and the Hand was ok.
2) Luke Cage
-The music was great in it and I really liked the character of Luke Cage, though it felt like his character changed quite a bit from JJ to this show, from stoic loner to community-minded hero. The villains in this show, with the exception of Cotton Mouth’s backstory, were just so-so. Only Diamondback really threatened Luke Cage at all.
3) Jessica Jones
-I usually enjoy a noir-style series. David Tennat was one of the better villains in all of this, though it was a bit silly how he kept escaping and how long it took until Jessica decided to kill him. JJ really could have been 4 episodes shorter. It dragged on much too long.
4) Iron Fist
-It wasn’t as bad as the critics made it out to be. The action was all right, though Danny was really whiny at times. It was interesting seeing that there were competing Hand factions.
That said, I’m a bit worried that the villains in future seasons and The Defenders won’t really be memorable, or at worst be boring. It seemed like at the end of DD and Iron First, the heroes were tearing through Hand ninjas like a hot knife through butter. There wasn’t a sense of danger, nothing was really at stake, because there’s no way the heroes will be defeated, and it feels like that too. The Purple Man was a great villain, in part because his power was so terrifying, and he genuinely hurt the people around him and Jessica.
Anyone else enjoy the Marvel shows? I hear they’re working on a Punisher series and others as well. It seems like a bit overkill, plus how much street level crime is there to fight in NYC?
I enjoyed them all! I rate them DD1 > JJ > DD2 > LC > IF. I thought that LC really suffered on the villain front: if they had made Cottonmouth, who I found compelling, an actual threat to Luke Cage, it would have shot up the rankings. I agree with your assessment of Iron Fist.
I’ve seen Daredevil 1&2 and Jessica Jones, working towards finding time to watch Luke Cage.
I agree with you that that task would be easier if either episode or series length was truncated a bit – it feels like they have a mandate to generate a certain amount of content and/or comply with the form-factor of “prestige television”, and are kind of ignoring how much actual story they have to tell. A greater willingness to depart from the season long arc approach would help, since that’s a better fit for how comics have been able to keep these characters alive and (mostly) novel for decades.
I felt the quality of Daredevil season 2 was a steeeep drop off from season one, though not quite reaching the level of “I want my hour back”. I’m not currently planning on watching iron fist, partially as a result of this, but am open to dissenting opinions.
I gather than the next step is bringing these various “street-level” characters together as the Defenders (who will bear little resemblance to the comic-book team of the same name). I enjoy ensemble shows, so that could really raise the quality of the whole enterprise, in much the same was as the Avengers was able to for the cinematic universe.
I loved DD and JJ, but absolutely hated LC. Having your main guy be an indestructible juggernaut while his enemies are regular humans (and not particularly clever humans, at that) is just a bad recipe for a series.
I watched them all and would recommend all of them except Iron Fist.
Jessica Jones had the highest highs but also suffered from some pacing problems. But while it had a few problems, it played on its main theme of personal trauma beautifully and it had an excellent cast of characters, including a great villain. If it were a bit cleaner, it would be one of the great works of television. As it is, it was merely very good.
Daredevil was good, and more consistent than JJ. I think DD2 and Luke Cage were the two that seemed to get the Netflix miniseries format right. I think the format has promise, but it seems like not everyone has figured out how to make it work. DD1’s greatest strength was the villains, particularly Fisk and Wesley. I’m not a fan of using NYC as the anchor for themes about a sense of place, so that part of the theme didn’t really work for me. I do have some personal attachment to Daredevil as a character, and I appreciate when it works in Matt Murdoch’s Catholicism. I enjoyed DD2. It probably tried to cram too much into too small a space, but it mostly did it in a way that left me wanting more followup, rather than leaving me confused and unsatisfied. I also think it wanted to feel cramped, as one of the themes is Matt Murdoch’s attempt to juggle his many commitments. Didn’t have a great villain personality in the vein of Fisk from S1 or Killgrave from JJ, or even Cottonmouth from Luke Cage, but I do enjoy The Hand as a shadowy, under-defined group of evil ninjas.
Luke Cage I enjoyed, but it was somewhat strange. It dealt quite a bit with themes of blackness and black masculinity, which I definitely found interesting. However, because it dealt heavily with a culture that isn’t mine I’m sort unable to tell how well it handled certain things. It hit a lot of the expected beats, but I’m not sure how well. I give it a pass on using NYC as a location with a sense of place, because it focused specifically on the black community and symbols of blackness and black culture and Harlem specifically ties into that. I think the character changes from the one we saw in Jessica Jones in a way that was slightly off-putting (not that the character is bad, just that the change doesn’t doesn’t feel right). I would recommend it, and I think my review doesn’t really get across the strengths of the show.
Iron Fist had some good parts, but on the whole was weak. It didn’t achieve thematic consistency and I don’t think it did a great job of fitting in with the other three (wait, are The Hand Chinese or Japanese? neither? pan-asian?) For a martial arts styled series, it didn’t have many good fight scenes. Like JJ it seemed not quite at home in the format. It did set itself up for a potentially interesting sequel, should one be forthcoming. Although even then, while it did develop the themes that play into the ending, it could have done a much better, more consistent job of it. I could have done without any of the corporate plotlines, although I did enjoy seeing Hogarth again and there was one excellent scene with Harold. I did like Gao as the villain who doesn’t lie and seeing more of The Hand was a cool idea that may advance the combined plot.
I am very interested in seeing what The Defenders does with these characters.
I think it would be useful to know what you want moderators to do: cull the infrequent low quality comments/spam; enforce no-culture-war threads; actively enforce comment policy more aggressively than currently; something else?
Could you please give an example of an infrequent low quality comment?
Most of the listed bans are for repeated low quality content, and usually after a warning.
Thank you.
https://newrepublic.com/article/120144/trauma-genetic-scientists-say-parents-are-passing-ptsd-kids
Differences in genetic vulnerability to PTSD, effects of historical trauma (black american experience, Native American experience, the Khmer Rouge, the Holocaust), egigenetic effects….
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/debunked/2017/05/30/trauma-inherited
Doubts about the study of epigenetic effects on children of Holocaust survivors.
Hello SSC community,
I’ve gotten some messages from a few of you on my facebook page. Thanks for alerting me that my website was down. It’s back up again, and you can read that book I was plugging a few weeks ago right here: http://www.theodidactus.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Synchronicity.pdf
It seems to have been well received, which is wonderful to hear.
On the moderator, I’m not sure that one person is going to be the answer. I’d suggest appointing a few, probably from both sides of the aisle, and make a rule that you have to have a bipartisan consensus to take action. Given the people we have, that might actually work.
On a related note, I think that some effort should be made to maintain a list of the effort posts. There’s been a lot of good ones, but most have been lost into the mists of obscurity.
(Effort posts being long posts on specific topics, usually top-level. My battleship stuff is sort of the prime example, but other people have done some very good ones. I’ll point to a recent example, A Definite Beta Guy’s ones on Accounts Receivable.)
Agree that one moderator would probably not work. Thanks for the reminder to write the long-delayed next part of my effort post series on music theory!
I am definitely interested in effort posts on music theory, especially melody. Have there been previous installments already?
Previous installment here.
Nice! I’ll look forward to more of these, even though I’m not sure I’m the target audience, as a musician who already has a patchy-but-passable knowledge of theory. But I’ll be glad if you manage to explain any of the things about theory that always seems outrageously illogical to my systematising, mathematical brain, like the thing in your first post about intervals spanning a varying number of semitones.
I can understand the choice to skip the source of harmonies (simple ratios) in your first choice, but I think it’s a really interesting topic that would probably go down well with the audience here.
Thanks! Presenting a systematic view of music theory that appeals to not-necessarily-musical people who like maths, chemistry, linguistics etc. is precisely my intention, so hopefully you will like it. I’m trying to write stuff that should be comprehensible with effort to people with no knowledge, but also interesting to people with some knowledge.
I might revisit the acoustic origins of intervals later. I glossed over it mainly because I’m more interested in other bits of theory, and not especially knowledgable about the differences between all the tuning systems.
James:
As I understand it, it is a historical artifact, resulting from Western classical music having started with a scale consisting of 7 unequally spaced notes per octave, and only gradually realising that those 7 notes were (give or take a little weirdness that will become apparent when you get deep into tuning systems) only 7 of 12 possible notes – we build instruments that use all 12 notes, but most western music still rests heavily on only a particular set of 7 of them at any one time, and it’s the 7 that got the letter names.
If you’re only thinking in terms of the 7, a ‘third’ can be built of four or five semitones depending on where it falls, because in either case it *is* only three steps of the uneven seven note scale (known as the ‘diatonic’ scale, as opposed to the ‘chromatic’ scale that consists of all twelve).
It’s possible to construct evenly-spaced scales out of the 12-note set, but they tend to be a bit boring. Examples include every other semitone, the augmented scale, and tone-semitone, repeat three times. the diminished scale. These basically have the same chord on every scale note.
There is continuing debate about the origins of the major scale and its modes. theories include
Natural overtone series
Harmonic properties, such as the ability to construct a dominant seventh,
Some regular mathematical pattern such as stacking fifths.
(I’m personally rather taken with the fact hat you can construct the familiar hepatonic and pentatonic scales by staking fourths and fifths. There is also a for of harmony based on fourths and fifths rather than major and minor thirds: you can hear a “quartal stack”in Miles Davis “So What”).
Way to much information here.
Next? Where was the first one?
See above. You commented on it!
Oh right. I’m not very observant.
I think my ranking of intervals by dissonance was a cool idea, but nobody said whether they disagreed about the order.
I’d pretty much agree with your order, except I’d swap the sixths. The main cause of differences in dissonance is differences in frequency ratios. An octave has a ratio of 2:1, which is nice and simple, so it sounds consonant. An (ideal) tritone has a ratio of sqrt(2):1, so it sounds dissonant. A major third is 5:4, so it’s somewhere in between.
But a minor sixth is basically an inverted major third, while a major sixth is basically an inverted minor third. By saying the major sixth is less dissonant than the minor sixth, are you also saying the minor third is less dissonant than the major third?
No, I think the inversion changes things a bit (for instance, look at the major 7th and minor 2nd). There’s not much of a difference though.
Makes sense. The inversion changes things more the further it is from the tonic (e.g. a major 15th is less dissonant than a major 7th; heck, a major 15th is probably less dissonant than a minor 7th).
But to my ears, a major 6th is still more dissonant than a minor 6th.
We’re having the monthly Slate Star Codex meetup for Washington, DC on Saturday! April 19 at 7pm. Email me for location and details: robirahman94 [at] gmail.com
April?
Oops. That should say August.
Anyone know any good jokes about tenacity/persistence/determination? I’m writing a humorous speech.
https://xkcd.com/1827/
Thanks! – I’m not sure how to weave it in though.
probably not suitable but eh:
“everything will be ok in the end, because if it’s not ok it’s not over.”
I like this line, from a Weird Sun account:
“Willpower is like a muscle. You can strengthen it a little bit through use, but the really extraordinary results are all drugs and genetics.”
Anyone have insights into the difference between monopolar depression and bipolar II? I’ve never had traditional mania (bad decisions, grandiosity, speech pressure), but I’ll get a sort of mild racing thoughts and too much energy at times that really contrasts with staring-at-the-wall depression.
The reason I ask is that the main treatment for bipolar seems to be lithium, which is way more risky than SSRIs, particularly because of the narrow range between clinically effective and toxic. But it seems like I’ve heard people idly speculate that microdose lithium in the water might actually be good for the population as a whole, and things like Lithia Water used to be common (and hm, looks like it’s even still up for sale on amazon). So that makes me curious if there’s a low enough dose that it’s probably not harmful and has a nonzero chance of a noticeable effect on what might be mild bipolar ii.
(And also if anybody else has insight into whether monopolar to bipolar is a smooth gradient or a completely disjoint set)
Edit: well obviously I should have looked to gwern before anything else. Still interested in insight and experiences anyone has to offer.
Bipolar II here, usual “I’m not a doctor/psych/scott take everything i say with a grain of salt etc.” disclaimer.
That could be hypomania. Other things to consider: Do a lot of things annoy you during those times (irritability)? Do you sleep normally, or do you sleep like 4 hours a night? Do these period last for several days (if not weeks), or are they more of a day to day thing? Abnormal cheeriness is obviously a sign, though that can be surprisingly hard to catch by yourself.
Lithium is used for manic episode treatment, it’s not effective against bipolar depression. Psychs typically use anticonvulsants or some antipsychotics for depression treatment.
My understanding is that they’re disjoint. They use completely different treatments, and typical depression treatments (SSRIs) can possibly make things worse (rapid cycling really sucks).
Your experiences somewhat resemble mine (I additionally had some fun reactions to meds that were indicative of bipolar), I would say it’s worth seeing a psych if you can. If not… Scott can you recommend a starting point? Lamictal seems to be the go to Bipolar II, but iirc that has tricky dosing issues and can give you a murder rash (doesn’t toxic epidermal necrolysis sound like a joy!) if you’re not careful doing it.
Thanks for sharing. I’m pretty normal with sleep when I’m up (~8h/night), with extra hours in bed but not sleepy when I’m down, so I think that’s a no. If I were really trying to wedge myself into the definition of hypomania, I’d go with elevated mood + racing thoughts + agitation + adhd, but “I’m saving the world, I have 50 tabs open and I keep flipping back and forth between coding and facebook” plus regular bouts of anxiety seems like what everybody in silicon valley is doing all the time.
Given everybody’s tendency to overdiagnose themselves, the safe money is probably on regular old monopolar depression, so I should probably just ask for SSRIs next time it gets bad and see if that does nothing, helps or causes some weird bipolar side effect. Since getting brain zaps from going off effexor was enough to keep me away from SSRIs for 10 years, the serious stuff they use for bipolar isn’t something I’ll dive into lightly.
Bipolar II here, usual “I’m not a doctor/psych/scott take everything i say with a grain of salt etc.” disclaimer.
That could be hypomania. Other things to consider: Do a lot of things annoy you during those times (irritability)? Do you sleep normally, or do you sleep like 4 hours a night? Do these period last for several days (if not weeks), or are they more of a day to day thing? Abnormal cheeriness is obviously one, though that can be surprisingly hard to catch by yourself.
Lithium is used for manic episode treatment, it’s not effective against bipolar depression. Psychs typically use anticonvulsants (like Lamitcal) or a few antipsychotics for depression treatment.
My understanding is that they’re disjoint. They use completely different treatments, and typical depression treatments (SSRIs) can possibly make things worse.
Your experiences do match somewhat to mine (I additionally had some fun reactions to meds that were indicative of bipolar), I would say it’s worth seeing a psych if you can. If not… Scott can you recommend a starting point as far as bipolar meds go? Lamictal seems to be starting point for Bipolar II, but iirc that has tricky dosing issues and can give you a murder rash (doesn’t toxic epidermal necrolysis sound like a joy) if you’re not careful doing it.
Porn came up here a few weeks ago, and those discussing it seemed to condemn it fairly unanimously, as an addictive, unrealistic superstimulus that leaves you dissatisfied with reality and doesn’t give anything in return. I wonder whether anyone is willing to defend it? Is there a case that can be made in favour of it?
For one thing, it seems like it might be good for self-discovery—figuring out one’s own sexual tastes—but I’m not sure whether it really works that way in practice.
I think porn is a topic where critics are more likely to speak up than defenders. I’m with Tom Lehrer; I think no more defense is needed than that it’s fun. The criticism of being an addictive, unrealistic superstimulus can really be directed at art and entertainment in general, and perhaps I’m just a libertine but I’m on the side of thinking those are the best parts of life, and “productive” activities are justified by their contribution to those rather than vice versa.
Can you defend fun, and entertainment in general ? I personally enjoy entertainment quite a bit, but I do not think it is rational to do so.
Those 2..3 hours that you spend on, say, watching a summer blockbuster, are essentially wasted time. You would be better off spending that time on accomplishing your goals, whatever they may be (granted, if your terminal or instrumental goals include watching blockbusters, this argument doesn’t apply, but still).
One possible objection to this would be, “but if I don’t have fun once in a while, I end up getting burned out”. However, the optimal solution here is to train yourself to have as little fun as possible (ideally, none); not to feed your addictions all the time. The obvious counter-objection to that is, “learning to spend less time on fun and more time on work is either too difficult or outright impossible”; but, given that many people who have done this do exist, I don’t think the counter-objection is credible.
“Watching summer blockbusters” might not be a terminal value, but isn’t “having fun”? I feel like that’s the only terms in which fun can be defended—as an end in itself. If it isn’t a terminal value, then I don’t really know what can be. Isn’t everything ultimately valuable because it eventually affords some kind of pleasure, of which “fun” is one type?
I feel like a funny person to be making this argument, because in practice I actually spend much more time working and much less time having fun than the median person, but I think in philosophical terms that’s where I stand.
That’s a fair point. So, if cheap and effective wireheading came out tomorrow, would you sign up ? If not, why not ?
I wouldn’t, though it’s tricky to say why, exactly. Maybe out of a sense that there are many diverse pleasures in life, and they’re best when taken with each other, in a properly diversified portfolio? Didn’t Epicurus argue for moderation in pleasures, even while claiming that there was no point to life other than pleasure?
Seconded. From my point of view work is something I do
_only_ because it pays me, and allows me to do things that
I want to do as terminal values in and of themselves.
Did they train themselves, or were they innately more capable of that behavior?
Seconded. Also, by precisely the same token as the porn’s unrealism, it allows
one to at least vicariously participate in activities which are either infeasible
due to one’s personal situation or would require prohibitively extensive precautions
(e.g. holding an orgy without STI risks). In this, it is similar to either drama
or watching a stunt performed.
I’ll defend it the same way I’ll defend fried chicken, cookies, and hard liquor: they’re superstimuli that are bad for you in excess and probably not at all advisable for certain susceptible people (people who can’t consume them in moderation), but can still be enjoyable and innocuous in moderation for many or most people.
Also, different can of worms I will not attempt to back up or defend in any quantifiable way: if you think porn is bad for your mental health, maybe what is really bad for your health is masturbation; if you think excessive masturbation is bad for your health and well-being, maybe what is really bad is too many orgasms.
A cursory glance at wikipedia suggests the research has shown no obvious categorical harm to looking at it, although I appreciate the nominative determinism in Middlesex University conducting a metastudy on it.
What is the main defense of porn?
It should be around to reduce sexual frustration among those who can not get a partner. That’s the same reason why I support legal adult prostitution as long as the prostitutes voluntarily participate in the trade.
The only requirements should be:
1.Porn stars have to be adults.
2.They have to voluntarily participate in recorded sexual activities.
3.Nobody should be harmed.
If it turned out that e.g. meditation worked better against incel sexual frustration, would you be okay with criminalising porn and prostitution?
No. But meditation instruction and classes should be become standard parts of public school, and mandatory classes as part of rehabilitation of sex criminals.
@Rowan
1. If it would work that well you’d not have to criminalize them, as the demand would dry up.
2. Those who like to ban things will typically declare that highly unrealistic solutions are sufficient grounds for banning what they want to ban.
3. So saying yes just encourages bad people to behave badly.
Healthy food works better at nutrition but that doesn’t lead to us outlawing junk food.
In that inconvenient universe I would still say no unless you have real reasons why porn and prostitution are harmful.
Given how down most people are on fetishes, and particularly the prospects of having to indulge a fetish, such people probably should be happy about the outlet provided by fetish porn.
Also: Some people are into things that don’t exist in real life, and it’s probably good for them to be able to enjoy depictions of whatever it is for them.
A question to which I do not know the answer: if someone has a sexual desire that cannot be ethically fulfilled (pedophilia, rape, murder, etc.), does indulging in porn related to that fantasy increase or decrease the probability of him acting on those desires irl? I could kind of see it going both ways.
If the latter, it seems attempts to prosecute e.g. child porn might be counterproductive insofar as illegal acts are not committed in the making of it (animation, use of actors and actresses who are of age but very small and young-looking, for example).
Evidence Mounts: More Porn, LESS Sexual Assault
There is some research (Diamond et al; Miller posted a link to an article which cites some of the Diamond work while I was writing this) which seems to suggest that porn is more likely to substitute for sex crime than to encourage it; it seems to find a negative correlation between porn availability and rate of sex crimes. Social science is hard, of course, but I am not aware of any research pointing in the opposite direction which is nearly as good as Diamond’s. The research which purports to find harmful effects from porn uses things like changes in survey responses to measure the harm, rather than changes in crime rates, and this greater level of indirectness makes me much more suspicious of whether the “harm” is genuine.
One thing that can be done is to legalize cartoon child porn while real child porn needs to remain illegal.
Studies might show that more porn causes less sexual assault, but I think it’s plausible that the dynamics around unethical-sex-act porn could be different.
I’d be inclined to think people would be even more likely to prefer substitutes in those cases, so unless you have evidence, I still have to disagree about what is “plausible” here.
To elaborate, I think that while the “relieve sexual frustration through porn rather than sex” effect would still apply, and as you say probably more strongly, there are other effects in the opposite direction that don’t exist for normal porn. Specifically, unethical-act porn could cause people to spend more time thinking about unethical acts, or make them more likely to view unethical acts as acceptable/normal/desirable.
It still doesn’t look remotely likely to me that the effects in that direction would be as strong as the contrary effects, so I still have to disagree with your assessment of what’s plausible unless you can actually produce some evidence.
I’m not saying it is the case, merely that it is plausible; I think it’s difficult to judge how strong a logical sociological effect is just by thinking about it.
In any case, the post linked shows major decreases in child sex abuse in the Czech Republic which is evidence that you are right, but on the other hand I can imagine the end of communism affecting both crime and crime statistics in other ways as well.
@onyomi I think the more unethical a sex fetish is the better it is for anime and mock porn (i.e. no real action involved) to meet the needs instead of the real thing.
One example is the sexual cannibalism community. As far as I know they have been posting fantasy stories for many years but very few people actually tries to murder and eat someone in real life (OK Armin Meiwes is an exception).
I won’t mind pedophiles having sex with sex bots that look like kids and look at anime child porn as long as they don’t harm real kids. Simulation child porn should still be banned though because we can’t figure out whether some porn is actually made without harming real children.
What we need to do is to punish the real thing (rape, murder, etc) enough that people with such fantasies agree to not replicate their fantasies in real life.
While it may seem counterproductive, in the case of underage specifically, the law would (in an insane way) likely dictate that by creating it in art form, you possess an interest in creating it in real life and are simply exploiting a loop hole.
That’s why a lot of artists and art sites avoid it at all costs. It certainly doesn’t help that any platform that allows adult content basically puts as its big-lettered rule: No CP, no underage. The near-universal application of that rule makes sure that particular content stays suppressed.
I agree with the other posters. Its primary benefit is increasing sex life quality for those interested in sex who can’t get it regularly, and I think this effect is easy to underestimate, both because it’s hard to account for diffuse gains, and because the biggest beneficiaries are likely to be socially isolated. And a secondary benefit is whatever nonsexual enjoyment people get out of consuming it (however much or little that is, I gave up predicting this kind of thing when I learned people some people loved Sharknado 2).
There’s also a possible substitution effect (reducing extreme expressions of sexuality, e.g. rape). But even if this weren’t true, I’d defend it for the prior reasons.
The talk of satisfying/sampling niche tastes, though, is harder for me to judge, because to some extent I think porn creates those tastes – not in everyone, but it makes them more prevalent than they would otherwise be. And then the question is whether people would have been happier not “discovering” such tastes, and how many people would have developed them anyway. It seems like it’s heavily dependent on empirical questions about fetish acquisition and sexual satisfaction before and after acquisition that I don’t have answers for. Though, to be fair, I haven’t really looked either.
I’m quite happy to defend pornography on several grounds, starting with categorical defense on the grounds on freedom of expression. For those who don’t care about or (these days) are actively hostile to meta-level freedom of expression defenses, I would point out that the evidence is that pornography if anything decreases rates of sexual abuse and assault and that what few claims there are to the contrary are of a piece with the “Grand Theft Auto And The Basketball Diaries Caused Columbine” school of Media Effects studies. Add to that that many works we now view as culturally significant would be viewed as pornography by various cultures and times and thus we should be cautious putting in place rules that would prevent the creation of future significant works, the quality of life improvement for the terminally friendless, loveless, and socially isolated…
One can address issues with safety and consent in the specific subset of pornography concerned with live models/actors (including things like STD transmission and other workplace safety concerns, age limits on actors/models, etc) completely independently of the question of “Porn, what is it good for”. If your society has laws on the age of consent and OSHA laws involving the handling of bodily fluids, simply hold the producers of photographs and videos to them.
As far as the issue of unusual fetishes/paraphilias, based on my experiences in an online subculture with a not-entirely-undeserved reputation for such things, I think it’s definitely true that some people can drift towards more extreme tastes over time, but this seems to be relatively rare and more a matter of predisposition than “this totally Vanilla guy got my copy of 50 Shades of Grey and now he’s trawling Gorean lifestyle BBSes looking for hookups!”.
Porn certainly helped me during many long years of virginity to have some idea what to do when it finally became time for the actual act.
I did get decent sexual education in school, but that only teaches you how to not get pregnant or infected. Very important, for sure, but doesn’t help much with pleasing a woman.
I won’t defend porn – I think it’s a distracting stimulus that hampers engagement in the real world with real people, and that it – like sugar and booze – is something that the neeked savanna ape is hard wired to want in quantities in excess of what is good for said ape. I think in particular the nexus of kids, porn and adults has a high harm potential.
But I am even less enthused about defending anti-porn statues and practices. The line is too grey and too subject to abuse/flaunting.
I would argue for all porn (even CP) being legit for a few reasons. One could name a few like “cartoon child porn doesn’t hurt anyone”, “potential child molesters could unload their sexual frustration with pornography rather than predation on children” and so on, but I would prefer to start from a different point. To me, it seems that, for the people in power, fighting CP is not a true good, but only an instrumental good for finding ways to justify censorship. Like, for example, here in Russian IT circles there is currently a big brouhaha about the government blocking websites in the most idiotic manner possible. And how did it start? Simple, with a good old “protect the kids” mantra. First, the government was like “oh, don’t you worry, we are doing it for your own good, we are only going to block child porn, drug sale websites and suicide ideation propaganda”. Now, three years down the road, a website can be blocked for literally anything – like, for example, not keeping their servers with the customer data somewhere where good old FSB can easily get to, or having a supposedly slanderous article about some obscure pop star, or “offending the believers’ faiths”, or having pirated content, or having articles written by opposition, or simply sharing an IP address with a site from the above list, or pretty much anything. And still, in every single discussion I’ve seen, some nice person or three pop up and say “Hey, you are against the censorship of internets – you must be a pedophile, drug peddler and you want our kids to die!..”
Yes it is.
In America, we can fight child pornography rather vigorously without the kind of mission creep you’re describing. So it can be done. The problem isn’t fighting-child-pornography-inevitable-mission-creep.
The problem is : the Russian government is intent on censoring the internet within an inch of its life.
We actually aren’t doing that great a job at avoiding mission creep. Ask Dwight Whorley or Christopher Handley.
This is exactly false.
This objection isn’t even germane. The mission creep yossarian describes is “We let them censor child pornography, and now they’re censoring such things as ‘having articles written by opposition.'” That is not a feature of Whorley’s or Handley’s cases. Nor is it something that is even happening in America.
Furthermore, US v. Handley had the outcome of weakening censorship
Weakening compared to the law on the books, yes, but still more censorship than the correct interpretation of the constitution. Handley was, in fact, intimidated into accepting a plea bargin that had him jailed for 6 months and kept under the thumb of the government for another 8 years. A just outcome would have been acquittal and at least half a million dollars in compensation for the damage to his good name.
The fact remains that the US has extended its censorship of child pornography to things that are not child pornography.
So, we are in agreement that what happened in US v. Handley was the exact opposite of mission creep.
We could talk about this.
But it’s still not germane to the original post. yossarian describes how child pornography censorship in Russia bled over into the censorship of things that do not even resemble child pornography in form, audience, or intent.
We are not. Somehow, some congressional staffers sat down to write a bill to censor child pornography, and wound up censoring drawings. Mission creep definitely took place there. It merely happened before the law was passed, instead of after.
I agree that child pornography should be censored, because because otherwise there would be a profit incentive to rape children. But censorship requires Extreme Caution. The people who did that censoring in the United States were clearly Not Careful Enough. And the US was one of the better outcomes. Russia seems to have done it as part of a general crackdown on sexual deviancy, and outlawed “homosexual propaganda” as well. Japan avoided censoring drawings of children, but managed to catch drawings and images of adult genitalia in the crossfire. I think there might be some European countries that did okay, but they may have failed on holocaust denial or “hate speech”. IDK if anybody has pulled off the free speech trifecta yet.
So when you go to censor something, even if it’s child pornography, it is important to be Very Careful, in order to avoid doing something completely incompatible with correct values.
I actually think child porn should be legal to posses (though not produce), entirely because of the evidence indicating that legal possession reduces the frequency of child molestation/rape. Though this is probably a lost cause, up there with destigmatizing pedophilia so pedophiles feel safe enough to get mental health help so they don’t hurt any kids.
Vegemeister,
Well, that’s not mission creep. That’s just mission.
InferentialDistance,
Read the site you linked to. It’s suspect :
– It cites one instance (the Czech Republic) of porn legalization being correlated with a decrease in child sexual abuse. Leave aside the obvious objection. It’s worse than that, because it implies that if people don’t get enough porn, they’ll commit pedophilia. This is hideous, and false, and damaging.
– It cites data from a survey of people who raped adults and children as to their porn usage. Not strong.
– It uses a lot of phraseology such as “Clearly, the anti-porn activists are wrong” and “Some anti-porn activists have claimed” and “As evidence mounted that if anything, porn helps PREVENT sexual assault, porn critics changed their tune.” These folks definitely have an ax to grind.
I even agree with one of their central theses, that porn can likely act as a safety valve. And I still want nothing to do with that site.
Why, because someone intended it? All instances of mission creep are intended by someone.
It’s mission creep because it went from “ban child pornography” to “ban drawings”.
You mean Psychology Today, run by the American Psychological Associatoin? You could also check the site’s about page.
Correlation in the opposite direction of people’s asserted causation (i.e. porn causes rape) is one hell of a strong argument, even if it doesn’t prove causation. Unless a ridiculously large confound can be demonstrated…
It implies one of the psychological drives behind rape is sexual frustration. For people who experience attraction to minors, inability to achieve sexual release results in some sub-set of said people committing child molestation/rape.
And honestly, I don’t care how disgusted you are, protecting children is more important.
You know what actually is damaging? The assumption that 100% of pedophiles are child rapists. I see a lot of that. No acknowledgement that people can experience attraction without acting on it.
Opposite direction from porn causing rape.
Well, stop and consider for a moment: what if porn does decrease rape? What if sex toys decrease rape? What if legal sex work decreases rape? There are numerous political groups agitating against porn, to restrict access to sex toys, to ban sex work? Wouldn’t they, in the name of fighting rape, actually be causing more rapes to occur? Wouldn’t that give people a good reason to grind an axe?
And where’s the evidence supporting their arguments?
Jiro/Vegemeister/everyone,
No, “outlawing drawings” is not an example of mission creep. It’s just something you disagree with. It is not necessary to misapply* the term “mission creep” in order to voice your disagreement.
* Especially within the context of the original post and my original reply.
—
InferentialDistance,
1. We are on the same side of these issues, be it A. we should protect kids from rape, B. we should protect adults from rape, or C. intuitions that porn/sex toys/etc. likely decrease the rate of sexual assault by acting as safety valves. I totally agree.
2. That website is a shitshow. I don’t care who wrote it. It makes no difference that I agree with most of their theses. It’s a shitshow. You should stop bringing it up.
The website is fine, your opinion is bad. The entirety of your argument is “they haven’t proven a causal relationship”, “I find one of the implications horrendous”, and “they have a political opinion”. But none of that changes the fact that they cited solid research that contradicted the claims of porn causing rape. The evidence is more than adequate to disprove the porn-causing-rape hypotheses, sometimes the truth is horrendous, and sometimes science comes down on one side of a political battle. Get over it.
My thoughts are :
1. They frequently overinterpret correlations, and go beyond their goal of countering the porn-leads-to-rape idea.
2. Their overinterpretations lead them into sloppy arguments, the implications of which actually work against their implicit goals.
3. They are unprofessional, and waste a lot of words on counterproductive ingroup-signalling.
This might be expected from a publication that boasts such cover titles as :
– 5 ways to bust out of a creative rut
– did a juice diet kill Steve Jobs
– three ways to predict your future
– 5 signs you’re in the wrong relationship
– save your brain with food
– should you crowdfund your friends
– who says it first the social politics of I love you
– 5 feelings that vex everyone
Sure, the cited sources are good, and the information therein is important. You’re right that there is ample evidence from the primary sources that the porn-leads-to-rape idea is probably wrong. So do yourself-and-me-and-everyone-else-on-our-side a favor and just cite primary sources.
The conclusion of the article:
How is this an overinterpretation of the evidence?
Fuck, read the article again, it just summarizes the results of the studies in plain language. It never claims that a causal relationship is proven, merely that evidence for one exists. Which is exactly correct, correlation is evidence of causation. It’s just not definitive. And they never claimed otherwise.
And most people won’t bother to look up the citations, so they’d need a summary anyways. I don’t want to have to write up a summary when there’s already one right there. Anyone who cares about reading the scholarly articles directly has them there at the bottom for their convenience.
It’s a magazine for the popular masses. It’s quite literally an outreach program attempting to inform and persuade laypeople of results in psychological studies. Here’s the articles I see on the front page:
-What are the roots of distress among refugees?
-How to change passive aggressive behavior.
-Cause and cure of eating disorders.
-A moral compass for troubling times.
So what’s the problem with it’s professionality? Do you have a better link for summarizing the research into porn and sex crime? Or are you just bothered because it doesn’t pull its punches when pointing out that anti-porn activists are wrong when claiming that porn causes rape?
Whom is the article trying to convince? Whom are you trying to convince when you link to this site? The people described as “anti-porn activists” who are “clearly wrong” and “changed their tune as evidence mounted”?
Like I said – we ultimately believe the same things about this issue. But reading this article has made me somewhat less certain of the primary evidence base, and less certain that I understand this issue as well as I thought I did.
Besides, if you wanted to convince someone of physics or optics, you wouldn’t link to Popular Mechanics. You would link to a more reputable and definitive source.
Eerrgghh. Yes and also no. Relying on correlation in this fashion is not that distinct from “But do you have a better explanation?” It is a shifting of the burden of proof.
We don’t really know that porn is a safety valve. I agree that idea is very, very plausible for a host of reasons, but, we don’t actually know it. There are potential other explanations for our observations and at minimum, we would have to look to the primary sources to develop some greater certainty.
I do agree that given the available evidence, it is much, much less plausible that societal exposure to porn would lead to increase in sexual assault. There would have to be some very powerful coincidences.
No, I would just read the primary sources and then summarize them for myself. Hell, look up the abstracts to those papers and link to those.
The layperson who’s curious about psychology.
People who erroneously assume that legal possession of child porn would cause increased child rape.
It helps to understand that there are non-trivial sections of the social sciences that are straight up political propaganda machines, writing essays without doing (or referring to) any research, or doing shoddy research to deliberately generate the conclusions the researcher wants. The article writer, as a researcher in that particular field, probably has a bit of an issue with such people.
And some of said researchers wouldn’t change their mind about porn just because their theory was wrong. Because they were never about the evidence to begin with, they had already decided that porn was bad. So they just come up with something else that hasn’t been disproven yet. I’ve never seen studies showing porn causes rape, or causes men to become isolated. But I’m sure there were lots of academic essays written about it (I bet “objectification” comes up a lot in them).
All causation will produce data that has correlation (1); some things that aren’t causally related will be correlated (2); some things that aren’t causally related will not be correlated (3). Demonstrating correlation eliminates (3), redistributing its probability over (1) and (2). That is the literal definition of evidence.
It isn’t definitive because (2) hasn’t been made sufficiently unlikely. But “evidence” is not equivalent to “proof”; something doesn’t have to rule out all other possibilities to be evidence for a hypothesis.
I would add another assumption that is also common and even more damaging: that all of the child rapists are pedophiles. One doesn’t need to be a pedophile, feel a particular attraction to children and/or masturbate to CP in order to abuse children (including sexual abuse), one just has to be what is, in a not very scientific term, known as an asshole (especially, a subtype known as an abusive asshole). And, considering that assholes are significantly more common than pedophiles…
That it is, of course. I might be somewhat prejudiced, but whenever I see the govenment using words “child whatever” or “whatever terrorism” or something like that, that automatically raises a red flag in my mind saying “ok, they are probably using a common negative superstimulus to push something through”. And I don’t trust any government not to use a convenient instrument once it’s available. In my opinion, CP must be fought by cops tracking down the actual perpetrators (you know, the ones who are actually doing the act), and not by blocking websites or arresting teenagers for sending a naked selfie to each other.
This is happening in the US with “trafficking”
The moral busybodies are fighting back against increasingly liberal attitudes on sex to keep prostitution illegal by categorizing all of it as “sex trafficking” or “human trafficking” regardless of the particulars of the case.
I might be in a minority by saying I don’t even find it to be superstimulus. I’m happily in a committed relationship, and I use porn to relieve sex drive when:
a) partner isn’t available and I want something
b) partner is available, but I really can’t be bothered to go through the whole rigmarole.
The advantage is, simply, that it provides sexual release. Lack of sexual release really can get in the way of the whole rationality thing, in my experience, and although loving sex is a wonderful thing indeed, sometimes it isn’t available or I just want the gosh-darn libido to go into remission like it ought to. I’m aware that not everyone has a healthy relationship with porn, and to that extent, I understand criticisms of it, but I’ve never had that kind of experience myself.
Oh hey! A topic I can proclaim some expertise on! (Editor of a porn site currently, previously published an erotic e-book, wrote scripts for a couple animations)
I think the simplest defenses are best. It’s fun, and it’s a basis of sexual release. I also think it can be a font of creativity. Some people made a point about fetishes being born from porn, but that implies a chicken-egg problem, when the situation is much simpler than that: It involves the creator thinking up something interesting and then assessing whether it’s hot or not. If not, then it’s discarded. If it is, you go all in. It ultimately leads to strange and interesting fetishes…from futanari and tentacles to vore and furries. (Not that I’m fond of all those, especially furries…ugh)
My sibling, an artist, said it best: A creative high is as good as, if not better than, a quality orgasm. So why not mix both?
Plus you have opportunities for goofiness and absurdity, which allows for art to happen. An example of this: That meme image that went around recently that said “Doesn’t this weather make you want to shove eels up my ass?”
I will say, though, that it’s hard to defend when people use terms like “cartoon” to define, in broad strokes, western 2D artwork/animation, ecchi/hentai, and 3D artwork/animation. Cartoon is a loaded word: People think Disney or Nick cartoons when that occurs. Because they think that, they get disgusted because they imagine their favorite Disney princess, so noble and pure, becoming something naked and profane…sometimes having sex with a non-human character.
(Fun coincidence: My friend, who knows about my line of work, sent me a Beauty and the Beast (the toon, not the live-action film) BDSM drawing as a joke tonight, to which I responded “Not the worst I’ve seen 😝”)
Add to the list of objections the exploitation of the actors/actresses involved. There might be a few genres that attempt to be more “respectful,” but largely the performers are degraded and abused and are not entering this line of work out of desire but out of desperation. You’re watching some poor girl who came out to Hollywood to be a movie star and is now being abused, degraded and risking STDs so she can get bus fare back to Iowa.
I’m not saying it should be illegal, but nothing about the production or consumption of porn is good or virtuous.
But he’s giving her bus fare back to Iowa, and you’re not.
@Conrad Honcho
How is that different from waitressing?
IMO there is this weird narrative around porn where it’s mostly abuse by the evil capitalists, but then all other employment is somehow fully voluntary, free of abuse, etc. It’s a childish narrative.
It does seem pretty different from waitressing to me– but the fact that the gal chose it over waitressing still ought to count for something.
I can easily imagine an owner/manager of a restaurant who is really abusive (Hi, Gordon R) and a porn environment that is quite friendly (some porn is actually directed by ex-performers, btw).
This is my objection to the narrative: both porn and non-porn work are reduced to a cliche, where any bad examples of the former are consider evidence that the work is evil, while the many bad examples of the latter are ignored.
It’s cherry picking and motivated reasoning all the way down.
Given the way 99% of human beings’ minds treat sex, the desperation needed before a woman will sell her body for sex is almost always far greater than the desperation needed before she’ll go waitressing. More desperation creates greater incentives to abuse the workers.
This also applies to selling organs, by the way.
@Jiro: but 99% of people don’t do porn. Maybe it’s the same 99%?
@Jiro
You are arguing that the supply of workers is small relative to the demand. This makes their bargaining position stronger, not weaker. Female porn actors get paid more than male porn actors, FYI.
It’s pretty amusing that this topic turns people into communists: ‘capitalism exploits desperate workers.’
Yes, people who are unable to police their limits often get exploited. You have however not provided any evidence that these women are more exploited in the porn industry than similarly desperate women are in other professions or even that desperation is very strongly linked to exploitation. For example, it seems to me that models are often greatly pressured into self-harm by eating disorders, yet these women don’t seem especially in desperate circumstances. Studies show that beautiful people get treated way better than ugly people, so it’s doubtful that models are the most desperate women in society.
No, I’m arguing that the supply of workers who actually like the job is small compared to the demand. The supply of workers who need the job in order to eat, but lose almost as much utility for doing so as from starving to death, is large.
(Actually it’s a spectrum. Lots of jobs have workers who like the job and workers who hate the job. The balance between those is just different for anything related to sex than for most other jobs.)
“Women in porn have it better than someone who has it even worse than them” is damning with faint praise.
@Jiro
It was not praise, I was bringing objective fact into it to argue that female performers have sufficiently high salaries that their bargaining position is quite strong. Perhaps they lose some salary if they refuse to work with abusive directors, but if male performers can live on a lesser salary, then the female performers can too.
Your entire argument boils down to the claim that these women are somehow incapable of turning down money that they don’t need to survive, because….they are weakly women or something?
It’s sexist crap and again, it is a general argument against capitalism where all desperate people are exploitable. If you truly want to reduce exploitation you have to increase the safety net/welfare state to a point where no one has to be desperate. Otherwise it is just selective concern/benevolent sexism, where you care for the pretty women who sometimes get exploited in porn, but not the less pretty women who get exploited in less visible industries; nor the men who get exploited in dangerous and unpleasant jobs.
The human tendency to care strongly about pretty people, while ignoring the smelly homeless person, the man who ought to be able to take care of himself, the ugly woman you don’t want to fuck, etc; is a vile part of human irrationality. That is why we need the inhuman, rule-based bureaucracy: because humans have huge biases.
This is true for a huge number of jobs. Will you ban those too?
They do need the money to survive.
The male performers make less, but I would expect that the demand for male performers is not the same, and the psychological makeup of the male performer population with respect to performing on camera is not the same as for women.
Also, not every performer makes the same amount. The female pornstars who actually do make lots of money are not the ones who are being exploited.
It’s a spectrum. All jobs have some people who like the job and some people who really hate the job. But the balance is going to be far more skewed for porn towards the “really hate” end than for most other kinds of jobs. Pointing out that other jobs have some examples of people that hate them doesn’t mean they have the same balance.
What do you mean by “exploited”? In my experience, the term has two quite different meanings and there are serious problems with equivocating between them:
Meaning 1: A exploits B if A does something that makes A better off and B worse off.
Meaning 2: A exploits B if A does something that makes both A and B better off, but B is gaining less than he should.
Meaning 1 doesn’t seem to apply to your case, since your thesis is that without the porn jobs the women would be even worse off. But it’s the meaning relevant to the claim that the industry should be shut down.
Meaning 2 raises the obvious problem of how to decide what B should get.
Assuming the desperation to exist– are bus tickets back to Iowa really that expensive?– it’s still not a coin that the employer gets to spend twice over. In general, the less willing your people were to sign on in the first place simply because of the nature of the job, the less leeway you’ve got to pile extra ill-treatment of your own on top of that.
and
Given that the key problem that the porn industry is dealing with right now is the vast crowd who are willing to produce and upload content for free, this is insane on its face. Where are you even getting this idea?
@Jiro
So now we have heard your beliefs which seems mostly based on stereotypes/information from the media and my beliefs, which are just as lacking in hard evidence.
So I went out into the wilderness
to talk to womenusing a search engine and there seems to be one scientific survey of porn actresses. I’ll quote the abstract:My interpretation is that this shows that these people tend to choose this profession because they have high libidos and in general, high openness to new experiences (see the drug use), but that they generally don’t choose the job out of desperation.
In any case, it doesn’t provide anything close to a strong case for banning the profession. IMO, the burden is on those who want to do so to provide very solid evidence. I am very uncomfortable with just banning professions based on ick feelings or banning professions because bad things happen there, without actually comparing the level of bad things to the bad things in other professions.
PS. Here is a write up about the same study.
Given the strong social stigma against being in adult films, and that most people would probably choose unemployment over it…
I would think that means that almost everyone involved actually enjoys it more than the alternatives. Unless they are literally sex slaves, which seems to be less of a problem in the US.
Here’s a first attempt at a definition: If there is a large difference between “price for which person is willing to sell X when not desperate” and the actual market price of X, and they are selling it at the actual market price because they are desperate, then they are being exploited. In turn, “desperate” means “has a large negative utility and is located on a utility versus price curve at a point where the slope is steep with respect to utility gains from prices”. Also, “price” is measured in trade goods, not in utility.
Note that desperation and exploitation are a matter of degree, since “large” and “steep” are not yes/no things.
I’m sure you can find some edge cases, so I might have to modify the definition, but you can try it as a start.
My only requirement is that sex work has to be done by consenting adults.
Voluntary porn stars and especially prostitutes should be respected in this cruel world. Legal prostitutes allow incel men and women to live out their romantic and sexual fantasies. Isn’t that something noble? Unless you are a fundamentalist you should be thankful to porn stars and prostitutes because they have actually made many STEM nerds happy in this world with a completely horrible dating market.
I think this an archaic belief, one that’s built on moral narratives than actual evidence. The vast majority of women know what they’re getting into when they go into porn, even those in Eastern Europe. Some may have attempted to break into Hollywood first, but there are many more now that simply enter knowing fully well that’s where they want to go.
Nowadays, there are a lot of porn actresses who essentially function like a cross of regular actresses and normal people. They have Instagram accounts, stream on Twitch, chat on Twitter, etc. Often these days, if there is abuse, it’s often coming from these sources rather than from the industry itself. I recall a French porn actress who all but quit because of the bile being thrown at her on social media. An example was her posting a pic at her sister’s wedding, and people started throwing shit about how she’s a whore, her family should be ashamed (note that her family knew about her job and were supportive of it), she’s disgusting, etc.
This is not to say there isn’t exploitative practices happening in the business. There’s a lot of seedy shit that can and will happen underneath the surface. But I’d say most jobs that aren’t finance/banking and lack labor organization have similar problems in different ways.
Yes, I have archaic moral beliefs.
My beliefs are cutting edge, and I’m right there with you. The fact that some sex workers are petty bourgeois doesn’t change the fact that many others are exploited, or it is a remotely good idea to treat sex work as normal work in a world where refusing to take a job disqualifies one from a great many benefits, or that we should never interrogate the “free choice” of 18 year olds’ career decisions.
Also, those who think that the typical sex worker is acting voluntarily and happily are aware of the incentives, right? They know that these actresses are… acting, right?
As one of those who knows and has worked alongside a great many of those actresses, I would confirm that Yes, the vast majority of them are working happily and voluntarily.
What’s your source?
That confirms that a great many of the ones you know are working voluntarily, not that a great many are working voluntarily.
To which I ask again, what’s your source that you think gives a higher level of credibility than first hand industry experience?
My experience is much less relevant than that of Barely matters, as it is second-hand, but those I’ve known who have engaged in sex work pretty much all say the same things as Barely matters. And a couple of people have actually cited studies in this thread, in both cases studies that suggest the anti-porn side is wildly mistaken. No evidence has been provided favoring the anti-porn side of the debate. Hence, I am with Barely matters in wondering why anyone should take the unsupported claims of those on the anti-porn side remotely seriously.
I was very close to a sex worker (stripper, not prostitute/porn star) in my personal life. While she was working, it seemed to be mostly just a stressful job; some nights she’d come home an emotional wreck, but others she’d seemed very happy about the money and not terribly negative about the work itself. After external circumstances forced her to leave, though, I discussed it with her at length, and it had actually been a dark and unhealthy time in her life that she was extremely glad to have put behind her, even though the events that had forced the issue had been very negative for other aspects of her life. This perspective did not involve an adoption of a religion, or any real personality changes at all, but simply trading coke for pot and getting a very stable white-collar job.
Plus, I’ve known other women. Not a one of them were so cavalier about sexual activity that it wouldn’t have been deeply, deeply troubling for them to sell it to strangers. I don’t imagine this is true of every woman in the world by a long shot, but I think it is widespread enough to put the lie to the suggestions that there’s nothing unique about prostitution and other sex work.
(I don’t believe it is right or good to outlaw prostitution and other sex work; I think the best approach is the semi-decriminalized Nordic model)
@herbert herberson, Have you read any of the research on how the nordic model has worked out in practice? Looked at what any sex worker advocacy groups have to say about it? Because nearly all of it seems to suggest that, like other anti-prostitution laws, they do more harm than good to sex workers.
Nope. If it’s illegal to buy the service, the service is still illegal, and this comes with a whole host of problems. For one, all the customers are literal criminals, who are more dangerous and violent than law abiding citizens, on average. Two, customers require privacy (because of the illegality), which means sex workers can’t take reasonable measures like meeting in a busy, public place, or screening clients beforehand.
Former porn actor here who still knows a ton of girls in the industry.
This stereotype of desperate women being forced into the industry is woefully misguided. Any of the women who participate know they could get other jobs as waitresses, promoters, cashiers, etc, but choose sex work because it pays so much better for the amount of work it entails. Many of the girls also work these other jobs and treat their porn bucks as easy party money. The fact is that they *choose* porn because they prefer its payoff to the other options available to them and everybody else.
And they absolutely have other options, because a woman attractive enough to make regular money doing porn is attractive and personable enough to be shortlisted in virtually every entry level industry she might want to apply, and she has a definite advantage over the rest of the unwashed masses right from the moment she walks in to drop off a resume.
Talent are treated as commodities, and agents will always push for more. Some are pretty scummy about it. But offering more cash for more intense scenes can only be considered degradation or abuse if one considers the performers to be *entitled* to earning from 3 to low 4 figures per hour for what amounts to, let’s be honest here, almost entirely unskilled labour. The worst that happens if the performer refuses is that the director finds someone else to do the shoot and they miss out on the paycheque.
From somebody who has been there, if someone says it’s degrading that someone is working porn to get busfare home, I’d say “Cool, then they should probably go get a real job and work for it like anyone else in that situation.”. People aren’t entitled to free rides and better treatment than everyone else just because they’re attractive (And a lot of sex workers seem to forget this).
How do wages get this high given competition from poor women in poor countries? Is the ability to speak English extremely valuable?
The American consumer doesn’t value performances by poor women in poor countries as highly as he does American/English/East Asian girls.
English is valuable, but also there’s just less work in Eastern Europe. Plus, rates are somewhat comparable by my understanding of the situation (which makes sense, given that Prague and Budapest, the two primary cities of production, are rich by most standards)
The porn industry is in a really weird place right now thanks to all the amateur content hitting the scene through free networks.
The studios obviously can’t compete with the price point of free while offering the same product, so the divide between low/no budget smalltime productions featuring randoms and extremely high production value projects featuring big names is getting wider and wider in order to sell what the small studios can’t provide.
I was never bigtime, and even some of the girls I worked with on niche projects (Think super in shape female body builders) were able to command fly-ins and $3000-$4000 for scenes that took a couple hours to shoot.
The other aspect is that the production companies really, really, don’t want to get sued. Administrative hassles are usually not worth the trouble, and anything that could possibly smell like sex trafficking is a lightning rod for scrutiny. That, and they really don’t save much money if they’re paying a couple grand in airfare to import an eastern European model or something.
Also are you just talking recorded videos or what?
Because Romania is like, the camgirl capital of the world. That said, they compete on price and volume. Most Americans want to see a “girl next door” type, not a poor eastern european speaking broken english.
Yes, I only really have experience in the film and stage sides. I’ve done very little cam work, and it was just not worth the hassle. That said, for camgirls doing self directed solo scenes, I find it even harder to classify the work as ‘degrading’ or abusive.
And with that said, I had no idea that Romania was the camgirl capital of the world. So thanks for the relevant teachable bit there!
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/620/to-be-real
There’s also custom porn. (Act 3 of the podcast/transcript.)
How much they get paid is irrelevant. In my opinion, sex for pay is degrading.
Is it also your opinion that you are entitled to prevent other people from doing things you consider degrading?
Are others similarly entitled with regard to you?
@Conrad Honcho Is making sandwiches for pay also degrading? Or is there something special about sex? Who does that degrade if the sex workers are well paid like those in Nevada?
How to deal with exploitation? Let prostitutes be free contractors instead of employees of brothels.
DavidFriedman,
Isn’t there at least some idea within ethics and the law that degradation is inherently wrong and worth preventing?
For instance, we permit the state to kill certain prisoners or to hold them indefinitely, but we don’t allow the state to inflict overt degradation even on death-row inmates. Though prison is degrading in and of itself, this is the principle of double effect in action – we stop short of the deliberately cruel and unusual.
Likewise, yes, all professions fall on a continuum of degradation. There may be some that are so degrading as to be impermissible and/or inherently exploitative. And I am not convinced that voluntary degradation is necessarily better or more permissible than involuntary degradation.
So I think we have to acknowledge that degradation has some role and must be considered.
—
HFARationalist,
There does seem to be consensus that actions associated with sex are considered more significant, morally and in the eyes of the law.
If I point a gun at you and demand your wallet, it’s at least troublesome but maybe not more than that. If I point a gun at you and demand sex, it can be a life-altering trauma.
If I force my intern to make me a sandwich every day of their internship, it’s a little bit degrading. If I force my intern to perform a utils-equivalent amount of sex, it’s hideous and illegal.
If I make some awful mistake and the price of keeping my position is making a public apology and enduring some condemnation, that’s a permissible degree of abasement. If the price of keeping my position is a blowjob, that is not permissible.
This is not to say that we should therefore outlaw sex work or condemn prostitutes and johns. Only that the “sex is no different from sandwiches” argument is rather specious.
@rahien.din
‘If I point a gun at your head and demand your wallet, it’s at least troublesome but maybe not more than that’-
No, really, threatening someone with death is more than troublesome. Death is bad.
engleberg,
Ignoratio elenchi.
The problem with degradation of prisoners (and every one of your other examples) is that the people it’s being inflicted on involuntarily find it degrading.
If a sex worker is engaging in the activity voluntarily, and doesn’t personally find it any more degrading than any other job, then I think your opinion on what’s degrading means diddly squat.
gbdub,
The latter three examples are demonstrations of why the same basic action is worse if the perpetrator’s goal is sex, rather than some object (such as a sandwich). All of the options in my reply to HFARationalist are involuntary. Illegal actions are worse if they entail sex. Certain actions may be legal (if degrading) if they do not entail sex, and illegal if they do. Do you disagree?
As I said : I am not convinced that voluntary degradation is necessarily better or more permissible than involuntary degradation.
Consent is necessary-but-insufficient for an action or interaction to be ethical/moral/legal. Else it would be ethical and legal for medical researchers to violate medical ethics as long as their subjects had consented.
ETA: thanks kjohn for clarification
.
If consent were the be-all and end-all then it would be ethical for medical researchers to violate medical ethics as long as their subjects had consented. Any distractions between actually consenting and signing a contract aren’t relevant to whether consent is most important, but will control one’s view on the thought experiment.
Among human beings who behave like most human beings? Of course there is.
Provided we’re talking about fully informed, mentally competent adults here, that’s a bullet I’m willing to bite.
Nornagest,
Not an objection I had expected. We may have rather drastically different ethical frameworks. I infer that “fully informed” is doing a lot of work here.
@rahien.din If it is voluntary it does not degrade anyone. To me offering sex, for pay or otherwise, is very noble. By offering it one has made the world a bit less cruel.
I’ll bite that bullet as well. I don’t think “my body my choice” is 100% inviolable, but I think it’s a damn good starting point except for truly extraordinary circumstances. Mentally competent adults voluntarily engaging in sex is not sufficiently extraordinary just because money changes hands.
Of course I’d rather make you a sandwich than have sex I don’t want, given that I’m going to be forced to do one or the other. But if it was “make me a sandwich for free or have sex with me for $100k”, then I might consider the offer…
And at that point we’re just quibbling about price, which is going to be determined by individual morality. Which you don’t get to dictated. It is not YOUR right to tell ME what degrades ME. Only I get to make that choice.
I don’t agree. I voluntarily do any number of things as a parent that are somewhat degrading. That doesn’t mean that they are bad, unethical, ignoble, or otherwise unworthy. Neither does it mean that I do not personally benefit from doing them. But the degradation is a (semi-, at least) separate axis from goodness and ethical-ness.
I don’t agree that this is always the case! The presence of sex does not completely dignify an action or interaction or bestow upon it some halo of morality. Sex can be quite cruelly offered and its presence can be entirely destructive.
gbdub,
In what situations do you find it to be violable?
This seems to be more a circumstance of “My threshold is much lower than yours,” rather than “You might have a threshold but I don’t.”
I’m not the one trying to impose my threshold on others by force of law. You are asserting the right to define a person as a victim, and their customer a criminal, when those persons do not wish to be so defined.
(as for when bodily autonomy could be violated: crime that harms the rights of others can lead to incarcerating your body. Mental incompetence might mean others get to make medical choices for you. etc.)
gbdub,
I make no such assertions. I honestly had intended to describe the pre-implementation ethical/moral groundwork.
To reiterate :
1 I think we have to acknowledge that degradation has some role in morality and must be considered.
2 Consent is necessary-but-insufficient for an action or interaction to be ethical/moral/legal.
3 Consent not on the exact same axis as goodness/ethics/degradation.
4 None of this is to say that we should therefore outlaw sex work or condemn prostitutes and johns, nor that we should outlaw pornography production or consumption. I think that is a subsequent topic.
@rahien.din, The present discussion is about porn. If you do not believe that the points you raise are relevant to porn, you are derailing the discussion and quite possibly deliberately trying to give the misleading impression that they are relevant. If you believe they are relevant to porn, explain how, in detail. Retreating to these trivial abstractions when challenged is not conducive to a worthwhile discussion of the issue.
Protagoras,
What gives you the impression I do not?
@rahien.din, Nothing. My comment discussed two possibilities. Perhaps I should have indicated that I considered the second more likely, but since I did mention the second, I am a little puzzled at your replying as if I only mentioned the first.
Protagoras,
That’s a funny way of saying “I don’t follow what you wrote, would you explain [X, Y, Z] further?”
I make no presumption of transparency, of course. But, it’s all written down. There’s even a helpful index. I don’t have to explicitly parse the text for you.
Moreover, you lead with the charity of “I bet you’re deliberately obfuscating a perfectly good discussion of porn with trivial abstractions!” and “When you claim these things are relevant, it’s probably an attempt to mislead!” Whether I would like to discuss the topic further is irrelevant : there is no reason to believe we could talk productively after such interjection as those.
Maybe some other time or topic – I will look forward to it. Cheers!
“Maybe”.
Maybe not.
My second-hand experience is different. I know someone who was undone with lifeshattering PTSD after being a shop clerk subjected to two different armed robberies within a month. And I know someone else who likewise has crippling PTSD and fear issues stemming from being a victim of a home invasion robbery.
There is something to be said for amputation as a just punishment for such crimes. But I would do it with a dull and rusty hacksaw blade.
I don’t claim that being robbed never causes PTSD, or that it isn’t bad. It’s pretty damn bad.
My claim is that being forced to have sex is usually a lot worse than being forced to hand over your wallet.
How does it compare to being taken hostage and physically manhandled for a comparable amount of time?
Can you describe your comparison a little further? I’m not sure I follow you.
How does being raped compare to being taken hostage at gunpoint, pushed around, physically struck on occasion, used as a human shield, etc… For a period of time similar to the duration of the rape? How does the frequency and severity of PTSD compare?
Being mugged doesn’t usually involve close physical contact or violence (unless something goes wrong). It doesn’t seem like a fair comparison against something that expressly requires violation of bodily autonomy.
@Conrad Honcho
Any specific reason for that opinion?
I tend to view degradation as being a consequence of
humiliation, rather than any particular link with sex.
Usually, humiliation is a matter of status, and tends to be
(somewhat loosely) linked with pay.
Paging Barely matters:
What happens in the upper tiers of sex work?
Are there stars of the trade?
Highly respected performance artists?
Hey soreff,
I can’t say that I’ve worked in the very highest tiers (And when I was just starting out, I was definitely working in one of the lower, though not quite the lowest), but before I left to do other things, I was at the point where I was working exclusively through a very above board agency, in good conditions. So, mid-upper tier, defined by not handling cash or hustling for clients directly, and being able to expect things like airfare, accommodations, and food to be covered on longer projects. The pay wasn’t much for male performers though, so I didn’t feel like it was a sustainable long term career.
Sex work as a category is pretty broad, and there are definitely stars in the various fields. The average career length is very short (especially for female performers at the highest levels), so in order to stay in the game, big names need to move on to production after a few years.
I’ll say that there are certainly highly locally respected performing artists. Though it’s still a relatively obscure profession. If you were to poll a slice of the broader population to see they knew who Evan Stone and Magnus Carlsen are, I’m not sure which would garner more recognition. But you can bet that everyone within their respective fields know who they are, what they do, and why they’re at the top.
It’s harder for women in porn to get much name recognition during their careers, because by the time someone has become a household name she’s already aged out. Jenna Jameson is still the biggest female name that I can think of, but she’s well over 40 and I don’t know if she acts much anymore. Compare her to someone like Piper Perri who is one of the biggest deals in the industry right now but is virtually unknown outside.
Is there anything specific you wanted to know?
@Barely matters
Many Thanks! That was very informative and helpful.
Much appreciated!
the problem with it isn’t that it’s too good it’s that 99.9% of it is trash. Dudes are blocky and ugly, chicks look bored and resentful, the aesthetic isn’t “here’s some awesome sex”, it’s “watch something so shitty it’s kind of impressive”.
And that’s the introduction a lot of kids are having to sex. If it was a proper superstimulus that would be a vast improvement, the same way it would be way better if slot machines were cool, or farmville was a real game. (except those are only a boring waste of time not actively negative)
The problem with it, in my limited experience, is that it’s boring–not because the actors are not good looking but because there is rarely enough plot and characterization to make me care about what they are doing.
Erotic scenes in something like Casanova’s memoirs are more erotic than most porn, despite being less pornographic, because they feature what feel like (and probably were) real people.
100% true say.
Most porn acting and scriptwriting is beyond terrible, having been distilled down to the skin flick equivalent of Michael Bay movies, and for almost identical reasons. You and I can look at them and say that they’re terribly done, Transformers didn’t need a boy meets girl plot and this porn doesn’t need so much awkward eye contact, overdone moaning, or ridiculous open mouth cringing before the moneyshot. But when was the last time any of us reading this gave their credit card information to a porn site?
But there’s a core group of people, whom I can only imagine suffer from some kind of communal brain damage, who voluntarily go to see Michael Bay movies in theaters and pay for their porn. And for whatever weird reason, Shia Lebouf x Megan Fox’s abs, gratuitous product placement, overdone eye contact and moaning, and lots of external explosions bring in more of them than well constructed plot with fleshed out characters, snappy dialogue, and believable delivery.
As with everything else, don’t hate the artist, hate the fans who prop them up.
On the positive side though, this is one of the best explanations for the popularity of the amateur market. The characterization is (almost tautologically) so much more real when the subjects are a couple and their friends who, after several drinks, just learned that their camera has a night vision mode.
This bothers me a little. On what basis are you claiming that your taste in art is superior?
Since the subject of high-quality porn came up, I can’t resist giving a shout-out to femporn.blogspot.com, which I found a few years ago and think deserves to be better known. They bill themselves as a feminist review site helping women navigate a market saturated with porn made primarily for a male audience, but the reason I (a straight man) stumbled across it is that I’d never cared much for hardcore porn, but I was curious to see if I might enjoy something with a more authentic feel, if I could find it. It took some searching, but this was the first site I found with good recommendations for the kind of porn I was looking for, and I find that their ratings correlate pretty well with my likelihood of enjoying a scene.
Some of the criteria they use are not so important to me (for example, balance in how visible male versus female performers are in the frame), but mostly they emphasize things like authentic pleasure and connection between the performers. They also pepper their commentary with annoying random digs at male sexuality (apparently they can’t conceive of any reason straight men might fail to be aroused by the sight of other men having gay sex, except homophobia), but it’s an interesting window into the female perspective on sex, if nothing else, and it’s opened up a whole world of non-sucky hardcore porn to me.
You’re right that I’m being overly glib here.
My taste in art is superior only in the sense that it’s mine. While I personally suffer a dearth of imagination as to why people voluntarily watch Michael Bay movies / mainstream porn tropes, I certainly understand that they exist, are willing to throw dollars behind their choice, and likely view my preferences for cohesive plot, characterization, and dialogue as similarly incomprehensible.
@Barely matters
I think that you don’t understand escapism. Some people just want to turn their brains off for a bit, forgetting about their daily stresses and be entertained.
Would you also say that people who enjoy meditating are brain damaged? Or people who smoke a joint? Those are also ways to manage stress.
@Aapje
If modified only slightly to “don’t personally appreciate escapism”, I think you’re correct.
I would say weed smokers are brain damaged only to the point that minor preorbital cortex degeneration after chronic use turns out to be legit. And meditators only at the point where the exercise becomes more about expensive Lululemons than inner tranquility. (And to be perfectly transparent for the extremely literal audience here, I’m castigating social signalers being dishonest about their intentions by joking that they have brain damage. Feel free to chuckle, or not, as appropriate)
With all that out of the way, I do think there is more going on here than escapism, with strong suspicion that it points more in the direction of a certain susceptibility to specific superstimuli. The presence or absence of an explosion beat every 6 minutes or an autobot transforming into the latest apple iWidget isn’t a matter of escapism. Nor is the presence of strange, almost angry eye contact, overdone yippy/in pain moaning, and cringeworthy facial cumshots where the actress tries desperately to disguise her flinch reflex with a smile while knowing the odds she’ll be hit in the eye. The extremely rigid formula of Harlequin romance novels also fits the superstimulus pattern that I’m describing while having the added benefit of going in the exact opposite direction of the mindlessness of the first example.
These work for some people, and the studio directors know this. Actresses don’t just do them on their own either. I’ve been present for several shoots where the directors were actively coaching the girls to do these, while the girls’ response was roughly “That’s fucking stupid, but sure, whatever.” So we know they draw a sought after audience, but if you can see how they contribute towards an easier ‘escape’ than otherwise, then truly you’re a better man than I.
Has there ever been a study of how much pornography is consumed in the US and what the breakdown by medium is? I think the results would be interesting, especially once you were honest and factored in things like all romance novels with explicit descriptions of intercourse (lots of them), animated and CGI stuff (much of it japanese but by no means all), amateur hentai and furry artwork and stories and flash games, etc, etc etc…
While I have no doubt that “Video of real live people performing sex acts” will end up with the biggest slice of the pie, I suspect that it’s share is smaller than many people assume.
Assuredly. Even academic ones.
I want to say that pornhub? published some stats in the last few years, which made the rounds simply because it showed a correlation between increased consumption and “red” states, IIRC.
You’d -think- so, but so far I’m not able to find any. The closest are the Pornhub stats (which are by kink/content of video, and just video) and one academic study that was web searches by content/kink.
The rest are more along the lines of your standard “Media Effects” work.
No strong thoughts, but it doesn’t have to be someone who reads all of them. That can be solved by appointing more than one.
Meta-level, I think you should appoint someone who you think thinks almost exactly like you. Maybe do an random-opinions poll and choose a regular or three closest to what you would answer?
What is the mission of this moderator? I read most of the comments and don’t find that they need more moderation.
(that one of my own comments was recently deleted did not impact my assessment, afaict)
My guess would be to review (reported?) posts and impose temporary bans in case of trouble. Scott self-reportedly doesn’t have time to deal with that himself.
Wouldn’t a more reasonable requirement for a moderator or moderators simply be to read all the reported comments, as opposed to all the comments?
In theory yes, but knowing the context goes a long way. It could be that in the middle of a contentious argument where both sides are behaving similarly, only one person bothers to report the other.
Well, yes, you would not want moderators to judge comments in isolation; ideally they would read most of the thread a problematic comment was in, and also maybe have some sense of/do some research on, the poster’s previous history.
Still, the report feature would serve to draw attention to potential problem posts without burdening the moderator to read every post in every thread.
It does raise a problem which is that my best guess is that prolific posters (like myself), as well as those with known ideological leanings (like myself) probably wouldn’t make good moderators, yet there is probably a correlation between frequent posters and people who read lots of posts, and people might also be more accepting of the judgment of a known poster than a mysterious lurker.
I guess the ideal would be someone like Bakkot who is known and well-liked, seems to magically read everything (or just frequently control-Fs his name?), and yet rarely wades into any contentious debates, though I guess there could also be the sort of balance where both the designated right wing moderator and the designated left wing moderator have to agree before banning, etc. But that also imposes a burden of corresponding behind the scenes, and makes the overall job more time-consuming, most likely, if no one person besides Scott is empowered to basically act as substitute-Scott.
@onyomi:
If you were a moderator, I wouldn’t have any qualms, even though I know your ideological bent.
It’s not about ideological bent.
I think Bakkot already has his plate full with the subreddit’s moderation.
Based on that subject, are there any people (possibly already moderators) on the subreddit or discord who could moderate here?
onyomi, I have to confess I’ve stopped keeping up with the threads here as well as I used to, especially as the subreddit has grown. I could handle some of the reports, but not keep up with the flow of things.
(So yes, I have started just C-f’ing my handle in most open threads. I worry this means I’m missing tech-support issues where no one mentions me, but I simply don’t have the time to read everything, these days.)
I agree that the site doesn’t currently feel in need of more moderation, though if Scott is planning to do less moderation in the future than he currently does it would be nice if the current level could be roughly maintained.
I agree with this. Unless Scott is doing a lot more moderating than I think he is, I feel like this community does an excellent job of self-regulating.
I won’t suggest anybody specific, but having a few years ago seen what happened when another non-moderated site picked moderators from the commentariat, I have a meta-level opinion that a moderator needs to be more or less like a bouncer in a bar – someone whose first instinct, if they see a fight starting, is NOT to wade in and start punching whichever side they don’t like, but rather to cool things down in a more or less fair manner. (Metaphorically, this other site had chosen as bouncers the reigning champion bar brawlers. It didn’t work out well.)
I’ve been a moderator / “community liaison” for a large forum before, where I had a team of moderators serving under me, and wrote much of our moderator training documents and community guidelines. You’ve described the first requirement pretty well- good moderators are friendly people who are good at defusing conflict and not taking things personally.
Moderators should be anonymous to the user base, but known to each other. We shouldn’t know if it’s Scott or not. The mods should review each other’s actions. Scott’s principles that the site is moderated by should be well-known to the mod team. (And probably to the users as well, but the mods especially need it, as well as a list of past decisions.)
Do we really want this? It seems to me that’s a great way for people to project supposed political biases on the moderators.
I’ve thought before, when Scott has to go on vacation and tells us moderation will be light, he instead should not tell us he’s going away and should appoint a deputy to post as him for modding purposes, with the goals of 1) not letting people know it’s not Scott, so follow Scott’s posting guidelines as close as possible, and 2) don’t do anything Scott might regret, so use a light touch. Together this keeps the community going smoothly even when he’s not here as if he is here.
I never posted that, because it didn’t seem worth the bother, but if Scott is thinking of reducing the moderation load on himself (and I think that’s a fine goal, because the alternative is for him to struggle along with an increasing workload until he quits) then my ideas are suddenly of interest.
Someone might wonder “is it okay to duke out ideas with this person is a moderator?” which is why I suggest anonymity. Under this theory, users shouldn’t even know who is on the mod team. But if they always think “you know, this person I’m fighting with might be on the mod team” for every poster, we could get some nice social effects.
One thing to wonder is what issues consume Scott’s time. Is it out-and-out spam? Keeping conversations civil? Stopping persistent trolls?
I don’t follow. It sounds from your first sentence like you think mods should be anonymous so people aren’t discouraged from posting, but it sounds from your third sentence like a little discouragement is exactly what you want. And why should whether the mod has a stake in the debate affect whether they think mod action is appropriate? That doesn’t sound like ideal moderation at all. Moreover, I don’t think this potential discouragement is even going to be a big factor, since right now lots of people are fine duking it out with Scott himself while he’s sole moderator—granting of course selection effect because I wouldn’t know who’s choosing not to post.
On the other hand, if the moderators are known, the same people will spend a lot of time finding quotes in their comments that prove the biases. Which will probably attract larger debate than mere guesses.
This is a good point and I didn’t think of this.
This is why I suggested that we make sure any moderation action is bipartisan. It kills this immediately.
I liked your suggestion, but I had two issues with it:
1. How well does this scale? Do we need e.g. a Christian mod and an atheist mod too?
2. How sympathetic will e.g. an alt-right mod be to a moderate conservative poster, or a moderate progressive mod to a communist poster? Certainly each is identifiably on the left or right, but given for instance all the anger I’ve seen directed at Republicans by alt-righters, I’m not convinced this makes for balance.
Given how much of the heat here is generated by left-right friction, and that so many things (including religion) map well onto that axis, I don’t see a huge problem here.
The basic idea is that all actions need to be countersigned by someone who has different ideological positions from the person proposing it. Yes, it’s possible that the alt-right (say) will start complaining that they aren’t represented among the mods and are being prosecuted by the regular right mods. I think that’s still better than allowing mod or mods who don’t have a political crosscheck on them. Maybe set a norm of trying to have the seconding mod be the closest reasonable to the poster in question, although that may not always work.
A norm like that would probably work really well. I don’t have any objections to your proposal, then, provided that Scott is looking for >2 mods.
I cosign this, endorse it, and write it in sixty-point bold. Every action must be automatically reviewed by at least one other moderator, with no technical way it could be hidden even should the original mod try.
This becomes even more necessary should the mods be anonymous – otherwise, people will wonder whether the warning/ban was given by the other commenter they were just disagreeing with. (And if the mods’ names are public, and someone was actually disagreeing with them… well, the review’s still just as necessary.)
In fact, it might also be good policy for a mod to recuse himself from threads where he was involved?
On the subject of moderation …
What if you have two or more people whose judgement of a comment (as simple as worth reading or not worth reading, perhaps more complicated) is included with the comment, in a way that lets a reader choose to read only those comments moderator A thinks worth reading, or only those B thinks worth reading, or only those both think worth reading, or … .
So that echo chambers become even easier to form (and, in SSC’s case, lowering the chance of shared vocabulary)? I like the Archipelago idea as much as anyone else, but our current problem isn’t exposure to excessive diversity of thought.
I strongly endorse this. As a general principle, mods should not moderate actions that involve themselves. There might be exceptions (“You can’t ban me because I’ve gotten into a fight with all of you!”), but as a general rule, it’s a good one.
Someone who does moderating very well is hacker news. Paul Graham once said that HN was an experiment in seeing how long a community could continue before it degenerated.
Their guidelines are here
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A few things I’ve noticed that HN does differently than elsewhere are things like.
1. Moderator often participates in discussions not as “moderator”, but simply as person trying to raise the level of the conversation.
2. Most things are not explicit confrontations but hidden. The most radical one of these is the shadow-ban HN has, where the user keeps seeing his posts, but everyone else doesn’t.
3. The rules are vague, and mostly based on creating a civil tone of discussion.
My sense of the of a good moderator given the above is someone who is exceptional good at these things today. Very interesting commenter already today. Effective at countering points, but doesn’t get angry or perhaps even that confrontational. Oh, and that this person and Scott agrees on some moderating guidelines that are very SSC-y, and post these publicly.
I believe their moderators are paid employees.
The idea of “shadow banning” strikes me as an incredibly shitty thing to do. A kind of gaslighting for our age of “ghosting.”
Seconded.
Thirded.
Fourthed
Fifthed. (Edited)
Devil’s advocate – but the advantage of the shadowban is that people don’t bother to create new accounts in an attempt to avoid the ban.
This adds value if the trolls are more motivated to continue trolling than the moderators are to stop them.
The motivated trolls, being motivated, would know about the concept of shadow bans and check.
Shadow bans are a dick move. “I want to ban you but I am le tired so whatever fuck you”. Sometimes dick moves are called for, but you really need to be sure of it.
Shadowbanning is the punishment that fits the crime of evading a ban.
I would consider the existence of shadow banning as you describe it an adequate reason to avoid a blog. It’s a deliberate fraud on the poster, justified by nothing more than a moderator’s opinion that he deserves it. I prefer to avoid associating with people who behave that way.
I feel like Shawdow banning is basically what people do IRL with people we find annoying. Just smile and nod and mostly ignore them as much as possible. The only difference is online that one moderator works for many people, which is why it is about choosing a good one.
The only person that has attempted to ban-run is Sidles, and he’s distinctive enough (and harmless enough these days) that I don’t think shadowbans are necessary.
Shadowbanning is necessary exactly for someone like John Sildes, since this community apparently doesn’t have enough respect for Scott to avoid engaging on a substantive level with an open and defiant defector.
This analogy works if other people would agree with the moderator’s decision.
Shadowbanning is abused when most people would actually not mind comments by the banned person, but the moderator decided it is better if they do not see them. In other words, when the moderator acts against the interest not just of the banned person, but also against the interest of the remaining ones.
The correct use is “I shadowban X because no one wants to listen to them”, and the incorrect use is “I shadowban X because people would actually listen to them, and I don’t want this”. The worst part is not that it is bad against X (you should be allowed to ban people for whatever reason), but that it is misleading for everyone else (they assume that certain behavior gets one banned, and it is actually also something else that is never mentioned).
How is that not also true of a regular ban?
I don’t mind slides, but Scott has decided it’s better if he be unable to comment (and therefore I cannot see comments he might otherwise make)
What about the variant (I’ll use the term “hellbanning” to disambiguate for this discussion, although the terms are often use interchangeably) where the only users who can see your posts are other hellbanned users; better or worse than more vanilla shadowbanning?
Years ago on the Something Awful forums this was called “hellbanning” and it was phased out because it was considered too harsh a punishment even by the goons.
… j/k, it was because they started using it so aggressively they discovered it didn’t scale: making the threads display correctly, postcounts add up right, etc. with a bunch of hellbanned running around blew server performance right to, uh, hell.
I didn’t even know about that, and I already thought HN’s moderation system was the work of somebody who thought the Stasi had some good ideas, just based on the thing where socially-disapproved posts are rendered in extremely low contrast that makes them physically difficult to read.
Throw in shadowbanning and intentionally vague rules on top of that? The designers of HN’s moderation system are monstrously evil.
Maybe the moderation style should change from time to time? I’d support a two week experiment of “no imagery, metaphor, irony, sarcasm or deliberate exageration allowed.” Preferably enforced by AutisticCat, since (I think?) this aligns with their interests.
This seems like a great idea, possibly the best idea ever! It would be like heaven, if heaven were an autistic-friendly library full of every book ever.
(I think I hit all of them, and fully expect that everyone would be banned within minutes if this were enacted.)
We should probably also ban any mention of ‘Iowa’ during those two weeks 😛
At least we aren’t heading up on another Presidential primary. 😛
Maybe we could do a theme OT, for fun. In this one: no deliberate exaggeration. In the next one: no weakman arguments. Third one out: explicitly state epistemic certainty of your claims. Et cetera.
One serious upside to this is that it would gamify checking the OT post for the rules.
When you said ‘Theme OT’, I was thinking more along the lines of “This OT, we’re all going to discuss Asia” or “the middle ages” or something of that nature.
@bean
We could combine them: “Now, I’m not sure, since I wasn’t around then, but I think Charlemagne…”
Oooh, explicitly stating certainty would be good. For one thing this is a great way to catch oneself shitposting before one hits the ‘Post Comment’ button. Also sort of gets in the “no exagerration” rule by the back door.
(55% certainty: if we did this, most people would agree it is more helpful than annoying)
can i just register a preemptive boycott of the epistemic certainty thread
on second thought the idea itself isn’t bad but the aesthetic is horrific. It’s like all the worst parts of the rationalist community crammed into a paranthetical sentence fragment which ends a post.
and does anyone actually do deliberate exaggeration or weakman arguments on purpose? At best, they say so right afterwards.
“and does anyone actually do deliberate exaggeration or weakman arguments on purpose?”
Yes, literally all the time.
It’s not that hard to catch yourself exaggerating or bashing a weakman, if you know what you’re looking for and you’re looking for it. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s deliberate, but plenty of people (myself included) are at least somewhat aware they’re doing it and do it anyway.
Also, re Paul’s suggestion itself: I’d be very open to trying that. Even something self-assigned and opt-in, like “I’m going to apply epistemic status tags this thread. Anyone who wants to can join me and/or enforce this on me.” The important thing there, I think, is that it functions like a discourse norm: you’re following a norm that you expect yourself to abide to, but you cannot expect other people to abide by it the way you can comment rules. Of course, one may licitly expect that other people abide by the norms they opt into: this makes them easier to enforce as well as follow.
[epistemic status: speculative] 😛
Long time lurker, first time poster – glad to be here.
When I was seventeen, I had an consciousness-related experience that I can’t reconcile with any of the competing viewpoints about whether or not we have free will or an integrated “self”. I’ve never experienced something like this before or since. Perhaps somebody here has a better idea than I do how this fits.
I was at a barbecue when something went wrong – the person attending the fire lost control of some lighter fluid and I got hit full in the face with a burning stream of the stuff. I didn’t see it coming – I heard a shout, turned my face toward a red glow, and “lost consciousness.”
Except I didn’t actually lose consciousness. What all my friends saw was me running in circles, clawing at my face, and screaming until they tackled me and rolled my face in the grass to put out the fire. What I experienced was a sudden transition to darkness, silence, and weightlessness that lasted for several seconds, with a vague sense that things were happening that I couldn’t connect to. I don’t remember any particular thoughts – just the very specific and unique sensation of an extended period of total sensory deprivation and a feeling of being “paused”, in some sense. And I specifically remember being aware *that I was aware* during this event, and that everything else should not be missing. Then I came back to full sensation, face flat on the ground with my friends holding me down and asking if I was OK. Thanks to a very low ignition point, after eight weeks and a lot of burn cream and bandages, I was.
Anyway, my point is: I don’t understand what happened to separate my sense of self from what was happening to the rest of me, but more importantly, I don’t understand how this could have happened at all if the “self” is just an illusion built from an aggregate of submodules. I feel like this has to be a wrong hypothesis based on my direct experience of having my consciousness cut off from my body. If there’s a specific mechanism whose action is to cut off the (material correlates of the) self from the rest of the central nervous system during certain kinds of crises, doesn’t that seem to imply that the self is a concrete subsystem and it normally is directly involved with choosing our actions? But it also seems like a “free will” subsystem that can be turned off is not completely “free” in the sense that we’d like to mean it.
The sub modules that comprise self lost control of some the other sub-modules.
Also, I think sense of self is somewhat backwards constructed. Drugs which leave the user conscious but prevent formation of short term memory have interesting effects when viewed meta-physically. You tend to be (mostly) yourself, but you have no memory of being yourself.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of the physical correlates of self being composed of neural subsystems – I just don’t see how that in any way implies that the self is an illusion. For example, in the situation I experienced, the failure mode could simply be a gap in the timeline – memory literally jumping from the red glow to being on the ground, with no intervening sense of time. Why not reconstruct that instead?
The other detail of the experience I left out was there was just a little bit of residual proprioception: I had a clear feeling of moving to the right, rotating clockwise, and leaning to my right – all of it very slow and slight, but present, and all of it taking place in this weightless (e.g., what I imagine zero-gravity feels like, or the feeling of floating you get during sleep paralysis). Clearly that’s consistent with running in circles and getting tackled, so either something was getting through, or (if you prefer) something was edited into the memory so it wasn’t completely blank afterward.
That part of the event makes me especially skeptical of the “backward-constructed self”: what kind of memory subsystem would respond by reconstructing such a tiny fragment, rather than either nothing, or something more substantial? It seems more consistent with the idea that I had a very thin channel to the outside as it was happening. But, again, what the heck would that channel be for?
The phrase “self is an illusion” is itself an illusion. You can have a self and be comprised of biological systems. But you have to let go of the idea that “you” are separate from your biological body. And you have to let go of the idea that “you” are the entirety of the body.
Self is a translation.
We weren’t engineered. So don’t expect failures and gaps in translating your physical reality into self to have a purpose.
The self is absolutely real. So are, say, colors. But they are still a translation of the physical world.
As far as I can tell, no one actually believes those. They write it in the title but if you read the body they add in so many disclaimers and qualifications and redefinitions that they actually are saying nothing of the kind.
I’m glad you came out of that scary situation okay.
Thanks. It was almost 30 years ago and no longer a painful memory. I get the feeling you are right, that nobody is fully committed to the “there is no actual self” viewpoint – but if that’s case, I don’t understand what they are trying to claim instead. I’d be really interested in hearing thoughts on my experience from somebody who truly believes there is no self in the classical sense.
if that’s case, I don’t understand what they are trying to claim instead.Clicks. Reviews. Invitations to conferences by people wanting someone provocative.
I don’t know if this is what most philosophers mean when they talk about lack of self, but I know a bit about the Buddhist idea of the self-as-an-illusion. Caveat: this is an area that people argue a lot about, sometimes getting really technical and other times getting really hand-wavey, and I don’t claim to be anywhere close to definitive with this off-the-cuff summary.
Basically, it’s not saying that *consciousness* per se is an illusion. However, when people talk about a “self” they are usually also referring to some sort of fundamental identity. Sometimes this is almost indistinguishable from the religious conception of a soul. This “self” is seen as continuous, consistent, and separate from the “outside world”. When Buddhist doctrine (or the version I was taught) refers to the self as an illusion, these are the assumptions it is challenging. I have a sense of a distinct “me” that is the same thing in this moment and the next. I have the sense that this “me” is a distinct entity floating around in a mess of “not me”. This perceived continuity of identity and separation of “me” from everything else is the illusion that people are talking about. As far as I can tell, people are better at intellectually grasping this concept in it’s extremes: why should the person I was when I was eleven years old be more truly “me” than the person my brother is now? Why should my fingertips be “me” when I am writing, but not my pen? If half the synapses in my brain are gradually replaced by new connections, am I still me?
Counterarguments are that even though the self (body, brain, perception, etc) is inconsistent, it changes in non-random ways and the nature of those changes is part of what defines the “self” over time. In this case I guess you’d say that the illusion is the feeling that the self is much more stable and definite than it really is.
Are you including Thomas Metzinger’s work in that category?
I tend to find his arguments and model pretty persuasive, and it seems to track pretty closely with your experience.
His argument is less that the self is an “illusion”, but that it’s better understood as a non-discrete and not even necessarily continuous process and not as a thing.
My joke would be that the people who have been talking all this time about “Process ‘Consciousness.exe’ has encountered a problem and needs to shut down. Please Restart.” have actually been right.
My BFF is a pretty activist intersectional feminist. (If there were a non-sneery synonym for “SJW” then I might use it here, but I don’t think there is.) I think she’s vaguely aware of SSC (and the rationalsphere) but hasn’t really read any of it in depth. (I guess her mental image of it is something like “bunch of white dudes who think they know everything”.)
I’ve been thinking of picking out a handful of SSC posts to pass on for her to read and us to discuss. I’m thinking maybe In Favor Of Niceness and Community and/or Die By The Sword (or whatever they’re called). Possibly one of the recent couple of gender-based posts, though they might be a bit too “in at the deep end” to start with. And she’s a very morally scrupulous person, perhaps over-scrupulous, so she might benefit from Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable.
Does anyone have any other suggestions for posts it might be useful to pass on to such a person to read?
(I see on the “top posts” page that Scott has trimmed down his list of top posts, taking out a few classics in the process. Seems a shame.)
To what end do you want do this?
Do you frequently have intense political discussions?
No, actually. Maybe I want to start? I admit I don’t really know how this would go—maybe badly.
I suppose my hope is to foster some consideration of meta-level principles, which I feel like she can be a bit weak on sometimes, which I sometimes get frustrated by. You know, things like consistent rules about free speech that work the same way for those we like and those we don’t.
If it is about her inconsistently using meta-level justifications for object-level issues, maybe the political spectrum quiz?
@The Element of Surprise
I had missed that post, thanks!
no offense my man but there’s a reason why there’s no non-sneery adjective for SJW. Are you sure this is a good idea?
Like, the problem is that she either rejects what you give her, or all her friends turn on her a la Laci Green. To be fair Laci Green is famous and she’s not so it might be different, but I just don’t see this ending well. Is it a big deal for you if she stays as she is?
So far as I know, SJW is not a sneer-name. It’s used proudly by people who identify with it.
If you only hang out in anti-SJW venues, you might think it was a sneer-name.
I mean, it’s a sneer-name in the same sense as a racial slur, which some then try to adopt and take the sting out of. Sadly, this one is based on something a bit more substantial than skin color, so it hasn’t worked, but you get the idea.
Maybe. See my reply to FacelessCraven below.
Had a girlfriend who was a very light version of a SJW, but exactly this. We had sufficiently good communication skills to find out that despite disagreeing on certain details, we both generally want the world to become a nicer place, and we both have some respect for science (which was what kept her from becoming a full SJW).
Once, we together met her friend, who immediately started attacking me as one of those evil white cishet males who are personally responsible for everything bad that ever happened on this planet. I didn’t even attack back, I was more like “uhm, wait, this is probably a bit exaggerated…” which only made her yell at me more. My then girlfriend was silent, but the next day she was very angry at me, telling me I was very impolite toward her friend, and that I need to behave more friendly towards her friends if we are to continue being together. (The only way for me to be more polite would be to just shut up and nod in shame while being accused of various insane conspiracy-level stuff.)
The relationship later ended for a completely different reason, but in a parallel Everett branch this would probably be a serious long-term problem. My conclusion is that a SJW, however nice and smart person they might be, is simply a person living in a toxic environment, which will sooner or later poison their relationships outside the cult, unless they grow up and say goodbye. Just like it would a bad idea for a white guy to date a girl whose best friends are racists; even if she is not, sooner or later she will be forced to make a choice.
@James – “No, actually. Maybe I want to start? I admit I don’t really know how this would go—maybe badly.”
Maybe badly is a good guess. Most people really, REALLY do not like having their values, ideology and epistemology challenged. Do you have any reason at all to expect that she does enjoy such activities? Also, if you do link her, probably best to make it a link without the comment section.
I don’t know. I’m (I think) her best friend, and she trusts me, thinks I’m a good person, and so on. I think I’ve established my bona fidesas a non-deplorable. So I hoped that I could raise a few points for discussion without it turning too antagonistic. It’s not like I really want to directly challenge her core beliefs—I’d be content merely sowing a few seeds of doubt.
I suppose there is a broader context here. I’m talking about one friend, but to a fairly large extent, her friends are my friends too. In other words, she’s far from my only friend in the leftie, identity-politics-y cluster. I’m in the thick of it here!
So I guess I want to get better at sticking up for what I believe in—Truth, Goodness, Beauty, yada yada yada—rather than just biting my tongue whenever politics comes up. I get that there’s a risk of this making me very not very popular, but I hope that if I choose my battles appropriately, and pull it off charmingly enough, I might have a little luck.
So maybe talking over a couple of not-too-antagonistic SSC posts is my modest start to that project.
The attitude “here, read this lengthy web post” is probably a poor substitute to (tactfully) discussing political differences.
If you talk with her in person about politics, and learn what she cares about, you will have a better feel for what SSC posts she will like than most of us here.
The absolute best outcome here is generating a few Twitter posts (or something, I don’t know where your friend hangs out) saying something along the lines of “we really need to make sure people’s introduction to social justice isn’t ‘DIE CIS SCUM'”. You are probably not going to change her mind about anything important; from her perspective, you linking her SSC and telling her to read it would be kinda like her handing you a stack of Andrea Dworkin. Anyone who doesn’t live under a rock has antibodies against that sort of evangelism, as well they should.
Nothing good is going to happen to your friendship. You may be good friends, but if you think you’re good enough friends that she’ll choose you over her worldview, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
Didn’t someone recently come here and demand we all read Dworkin, and several people responded with either “I already have” or “Great, I will, where should I start?”
Well, we’re weird that way.
(I only got about twenty pages into Dworkin, myself. She struck me as the theorist equivalent of misery lit.)
“I don’t know. I’m (I think) her best friend, and she trusts me, thinks I’m a good person, and so on.”
I had a friend like this. I don’t have her as a friend any more. Maybe I screwed up and you won’t, but it’s tap-dancing-in-a-minefield territory.
” In other words, she’s far from my only friend in the leftie, identity-politics-y cluster. I’m in the thick of it here!”
A simple test would be to tell them you’ve been talking to a non-social-justice friend, and they have a bunch of arguments that sound convincing, and you’re not sure how to answer them. See what their advice is. If it’s “why are you even talking to such a person”, well, there’s your answer.
Generally, I think Scott’s writing is highly persuasive to a certain kind of mind, and Social Justice is highly persuasive to a certain kind of mind, and they are not the same kind of mind. If you want to counterargue Social Justice, I’d do it with one of the many, many critiques written by people with much better bona fides within the movement.
Don’t do it. I’ve been there, done that. With pretty much exactly your intentions and strategy.
Chances are, it will destroy your friendship and your social circle.
It’s not worth it.
I feel like this is a common failure mode for the kind of people who read SSC. People don’t really care that much about capital-T Truth, good epistemic practices, or being correct. They want to be right, they want to be good, and they want to be part of a group that fights the good fight.
@James
IMO, this is exactly why you should not do this.
You are not just risking losing her as a friend, you are risking all your friends turning on you.
As Lincoln said: Go forth and debate on the Internet, but do not seek to convert your friends, for the lions are hungry and dangerous up close.
FacelessCraven:
Right. My tap-dancing-in-minefield skills have been getting rusty. I feel like sharpening them up.
Do it, but just one Scott post. I’ve seen your contributions here, and you are thoughtful and considerate enough that the negative experiences of the naysayers are not likely to apply to you. Unless your BFF is very touchy, that is, which is worth knowing (and you probably already know). Everything depends on your relationship and almost nothing depends on the subject matter, ideology, etc.
It would help if you first find something outside your normal reading ambit that they loved, and read that. One-way sharing is a recipe for disaster. Hence the one-Scott-post limit.
Awww, shucks….
Actually, I’m surprised that I’m even a noticeable or memorable enough poster for you to observe that. I’m posting a lot in this OT but I feel like generally I keep a fairly low profile. Not to mention I picked the blandest possible pseudonym. (Can it even be called a pseudonym when it’s actually just my nym?)
Anyway, yes, I tend to agree with this. I feel like the pessimistic responses have been calibrated on assumptions about my friend, or me, or about our relationship, that don’t really hold. In a bayesian sense, they’re probably justified, based only on the information in my top-level comment here. (Maybe it’s true that a random person fitting the description I gave probably wouldn’t react well.) But I have privileged information about my friend beyond what you guys do! The sort of this that’s hard to put into words, but inclines me to think I could discuss this sort of thing with her without causing significant damage. That’s why I brought it up in the first place, after all! I could be wrong; we shall see.
Yeah, that sounds fair.
Maybe I just have special sympathy for just-my-nym people 🙂
I can tolerate anything but the outgroup. Social Justice and words, words, words. Untitled.
Those are the posts I would want her to read (and everything else tagged with “things I will regret writing”), but there are other posts you may want to feed her first so Scott can establish his SJ bona fides, maybe like the categories were made for man, not man for the categories, and some of his pro-trigger warning stuff.
Good picks. But “Untitled” is too much—there’s no way it would get her on side!
I will say that as a pro-feminist leftist who reads this site regularly: Untitled has the opposite effect in me. It is a direct reflection of the very personal, very real, and very understandable reasons why Scott seems uniquely and (to me) irrationally preoccupied with left-wing social ostracism and the things that lead to it (and includes a link to a further discussion of that, as well). Something like the post-election post, which keeps those culture-war concerns in the abstract and makes them out to be huge problems without the explanation of that personal foregrounding, is way more of a turnoff.
Note that you can link without comments. If you go to, eg, Living By The Sword, and scroll down to just before the comments there is a link Link without comments.
If I was going to attempt to do something along these lines I would probably start with Scott’s gender neutral posts. Establishing his credentials as intelligent, compassionate and honest are going to go farther in swaying a person when they read further than any one argument would. Which ones to select will be (cop out) based on your BFF’s interests.
Definitely I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup and Categories Were Made For Man. They’re his best political posts in my opinion, but also they’re more meta and were written when Scott was (from my perspective) more solidly left-wing (and the political climate was different). Rereading ICTAETO, he says “sorry, I make fun of you because I love you” in reference to liberals; I can’t imagine a similar sentiment appearing in a more recent post.
yeah, I’d forgotten about these and they’re good ones. I’ll definitely use …Outgroup. That’s just the kind of thing I want.
Nooooooo.
Outgroup is awful if you want to induce a blue-tribe someone to like SSC.
It’s a 10,000 word harangue against blue tribe and how much Scott hates them. He says it directly at the end (even though his whole point is that he shouldn’t hate them.)
Jesus, how dense can people be.
Hmmm. I’ll double check that one before passing it on.
Haha. Ouch.
Not you, particularly.
ETA:
You should be prepared that she already knows about SSC and is already familiar with the phrase “Vogon in a skin-suit”.
Disagree. Outgroup is largely written from the perspective that the Blue Tribe basically has the right idea but is subject to this interesting social dynamic. Compare with You Are Still Crying Wolf: he claims in Outgroup to be “savagely attacking the Blue Tribe”, but he’s really fairly gentle; in Crying Wolf he tells them to “stop making people suicidal” etc., in an genuinely confrontational way.
For whatever it’s worth, ICTABTU got recommended to me by a blue, and I’ve generally seen good reception for it from moderate blues (I guess moderate depends on where you put guys like Noah Smith and Voxguy).
So while I don’t deny that HBC might have read it that way, it’s not universal.
Of course, if you’re trying to minimize p(Alienating your friend/linking them to SSC anyway), you’d probably still do well to listen to his advice.
@rlms, @whatever:
You don’t identify as left, correct?
Of course you think it’s a great introduction to SSC.
I’m left, but I also have this weird tic about consistency (and I also like have discussions about ideas). But I understand that this makes me weird. Best be sure that the person you link to here is someone like that.
Conversely, if you like criticizing blue-tribe or SJWs in an intellectual way, you will also be comfortable here.
I don’t think that is rocket science.
I most certainly do not (despite of what some online quizzes might think!), but I think rlms does.
However, I was relaying other people’s experiences, rather than my own. People who I’d consider solidly left (though others may disagree, hence the disclaimer).
@HeelBearCub
I like to think I’m left, and furthermore a lot more SJ-friendly than the SSC average! Sure, ICTABTO (and most SSC posts) are only interesting to people with certain levels of open-mindedness. But I think you’re overestimating how anti-Blue ICTABTO specifically is. It’s not as object-level anti-SJ as some of the other older posts, nor as aggressively “why are you being so terrible” anti-Blue as some of the more recent (often Trump-related) ones. Anecdotal evidence from Zorgon/WHTA agrees with me.
@whatever:
Yes, those other people like to have conversations about ideas and are at least hunting for consistency, hence my statement about “this or that”.
People, the solution is obvious and easy.
Just recommend your friend to read “Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person”. That will tell her all she needs to know about this place and us on here 🙂
HBC, why do you bring up the “Vogon in a skin-suit” thing as though Scott were using the phrase to describe feminism/feminists as a whole, rather than the very-specifically-mentioned Amanda Marcotte?
Isn’t that exactly the same as the whole “well if you’re not the evil abusive rapey men we keep ranting about, you shouldn’t be upset when we keep referring to them over and over and over using the word ‘men’ with no further qualifiers” thing? Except vastly worse, given Amanda Marcotte is actually specified as being hideously exceptional?
I know I’m being deeply uncharitable by expecting SJ-types to hold themselves to the same standards they demand from others, but really, do SJ-identified types think Amanda Marcotte is a central example of their tribe? And if so, it doesn’t occur to you that this is… not exactly a good thing?
(I seem to remember this coming up several times before, but I could be wrong, I might be conflating other SSC commenters mentioning it, etc etc.)
Because it got circulated on feminist-y blogs, more or less out of context, as if it was the former?
Actually, for what it’s worth, it’s actually possible she may have been exposed to that fragment. She saw me reading Slate Star Codex once and seemed to know what it was. When I asked if she’d read any of it, I think her response was something like “no, I don’t think he’d like what I am”, I guess meaning “feminist” by “what I am”. Sounds a bit like the words of someone who knows Scott only as a Vogon hater. (I know, I know, I should have mentioned this at first, it changes everything, etc. Whatever.)
Sigh. I’m not sure I really want to go in on this.
Scott wasn’t condemning Marcotte and only Marcotte in that post.
In a post where he was supposedly asking for people to recognize the basic humanity in others, he casually tossed off the following two short paragraphs:
So, Marcotte here is a clear stand in for feminists and feminism. Not just some, but all. Laurie Penny gets “not literally the worst”.
But hey, Scott wrote it when he was really angry. So I guess that makes it OK.
(Which, for the record, does make it understandable. But the fact that he doesn’t get that this also runs the other way is, what, disheartening, especially for someone who is a psychiatrist?)
Yeah, having just gone to read through that, I recall the post. And yes, he more or less blows out feminism.
And I don’t even mean anything you’re thinking of; if oppression ceases to be viewed on a single structural axis, feminism basically implodes as an ideology. Plus, Amanda Marcotte literally went on to have a successful media career, so it’s not like she lacks power. And this leads into the whole argument that the loud radicals of the feminist movement not only do terrible shit on the regular but also hold the most power in the movement, but that’s really a whole other story. Point is, if you take into account other, ahem, “axes of oppression”, then a lot of what feminism has to offer is just you whining about your axis and then other people whining back, without you having the trump card to shut them down.
So your response to my suggestion that Scott was specifically talking about Amanda Marcotte being a “Vogon in a skin suit”, that phrase you’re so fond of repeating, was to quote… Scott specifically saying it about Amanda Marcotte?
And then proceeding to say that the quality of other posts was worse?
As I said in my earlier posts; we’re expected to accept the idea that when feminists make obnoxious statements about “men”, they’re only referring to the “men” that engage in the specific behaviours that they’re talking about, with an added spin of hinting that negative responses from men who claim to not engage in those behaviours must be carrying around guilt or similar.
Yet when Scott calls Amanda Marcotte specifically by an unflattering term, and feminists decide to respond negatively, it’s just perfectly natural for them to assume that Scott is calling all feminists everywhere “Vogons in skin suits”? He wasn’t even constructing the kafkatrap the earlier accusations build; feminists could very easily just say “Amanda Marcotte doesn’t represent me or my feminism”, and indeed many did exactly that.
Yet still, when SSC comes up in feminist circles, out come the shrieks of “HE SAID ALL FEMINISTS ARE VOGONS IN SKIN-SUITS!” over and over and over.
The only conclusion I can come to is that the feminists who respond in that way somehow consider Amanda Marcotte to be a central example of feminism. And that’s certainly a darkly amusing prospect, but not one which holds out a great deal of hope for the future. At least Laurie Penny can write.
@Zorgon:
Let’s go back and look at what I actually said, rather than what you think I said:
I’m offering advice to someone who is wondering about whether they want to direct their friend, an activist feminist, to go to SSC and read some articles.
You have essentially proved my point, that it should be anticipated that she has already heard about that specific post. If one does not anticipate this, one will have a bad conversation.
Scott was pouring out anger at feminism in that post. Not merely Marcotte, but all feminists. He now has a disclaimer at the top of the post because of this. If you are angry at feminists, you like it. If you are a feminist, however, you will be put into “fight” mode by that post.
I don’t feel like fighting over what is and is not objectionable in that post.
@Zorgon
Note the bolded part of what HBC quoted
@HBC
You’re still mischaracterizing it when you say that that portion is referring to feminists and feminism. Take a moment to re-read the part you in fact quoted. At most, she is a stand in for:
Where “And the like” can reasonably be inferred to mean “Social Media forums and sites like Jezebel/Heartiste/etc”. It’s not hard to distinguish between
“Amanda Marcotte’s rhetoric is nasty and vicious, and representative of the discussion on online social media”
and “Amanda Marcotte’s rhetoric is nasty and vicious, and representative of feminism in general”. He doesn’t even say “representative of the discussion on online social media which in turn is representative of feminism in general”.
If you feel that he is wronging “feminist discussion on twitter, tumblr, and the like”, fine, then make -that- argument.
@Trofim:
Look, we like Scott. We want to defend him. As a contrarian myself, if, in a different context someone started criticizing Scott, my reaction would probably be to take the opposite side.
I mean, I think he is wrong on lots of stuff, but he is definitely searching for being right.
But he doesn’t limit himself to “social media” in that post. It’s easy to think he does if all you are reading is the one quote I posted, but read the whole article.
Plenty more examples.
Yes, there are a few points where he places the word “internet” before the word “feminism”, but clearly that isn’t all he is talking about.
Again, I don’t want to argue about whether he is right or not. That is not my point here.
@HBC
And to be clear in turn I agree with that it’s a horrible intro post to SSC and Scott’s writing for someone who self-identifies as a capital-F Feminist.
I just went back to re-read it again, and while I still don’t think it’s correct to read it as condemning feminism as a whole, I also don’t think that’s an entirely unreasonable way for someone to read it, especially if they feel connected to feminism as a matter of identity.
He repeatedly says things like “Some feminists” “strain of feminism” “trend within feminism”, etc, but yes, he also switches back to more general statements. That creates ambiguity and the possibility to interpret the piece either way, and while I think that given the context of his other writing and his own statements there is a right way and a wrong way to interpret the piece, I agree that if you come at it cold or predisposed to be defensive you’re probably going to come away interpreting it as a critique of feminism as a whole because he failed to police his qualifiers and scope of claims consistently.
I think Untitled is a terrible introduction for anyone. It’s much angrier and object-level than most of his posts. There’s maybe three really open-minded feminists who would benefit from reading it in the world, for everyone else it’s either an attack on them or outgroup-attack-porn.
Eh, I disliked Amanda Marcotte long before Scott ever said a word about her, due to something she wrote on Pandagon which made me want to throw a bucket of sudsy water over her. A moderate, quietly-spoken piece about how parents who refused to have their daughters vaccinated against the HPV virus only did so because they were controlling religious fanatics who preferred that their daughters die than have sex. I mean, of course there could be no other reason, right? Even if other feminists were aware of and pointing out the, um, comfortable and close relationship between that particular governor and the pharma company manufacturing the one vaccine that was going to be permitted by the state law and no others need apply.
I admit, I laughed (evilly) when she
got herself pitched offresigned from the John Edwards campaign which she then spun into a tale of wicked persecution towards poor, brave, harmless she who had never done a thing to evoke such hatred and vindictiveness.I was initially going to suggest On Niceness, Community, & Civilization and I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup, but I think that BaconBacon raises a VERY good point. Instead I suggest starting with “The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories” and work up to those first two posts later. I’m with James on Untitled, not a good starting point at all.
I’d agree. Start with one of the less overtly political ones, then work your way up.
I think The Toxoplasma of Rage is a good one, as far as a political post that doesn’t feel too partisan.
Ah, yes, I think Toxoplasma makes the list.
The post I keep coming back to, which also has the advantage of very limited political valence, is Meditations on Moloch.
Considering that it’s the best essay on the internet, period, I’d have to agree. But it depends what James is looking for.
Meditations on Moloch is still probably my favorite Scott essay.
To get her started, I’d actually recommend the Anti-Reactionary FAQ. It lines up nicely with a bunch of standard feminist beliefs and roams between being informative and funny. It’d do well with helping her learn what Scott sounds like as an author, and introducing him as someone who’s fundamentally on her side. After that, she might enjoy the recent Book Review: Seeing Like A State. It’s really interesting, pretty novel, and shows a little of how Scott tends to think sideways at problems. These are both fairly low-stakes, general-interest topics, which is really helpful with getting people to read outside their normal territory. The idea is to familiarize, get folks into a comfortable area, and then give the possibility of reading something a little more theoretical. I still wouldn’t advise you recommend things that are too pointed about feminism at this point, but rather go for (as mentioned wisely above) Categories. Following that, generalized criticisms of leftism might be acceptable, such as in Outgroup, and if things are going well, you might even be able to bring in some of the precise discussions of feminism. It’s potentially something that could be challenging, depending on how zealous she is, but this is the safest path I know of. It’s how I introduce people to Plato, for example: rather than tossing them straight in with his (pretty reasonable, considering his recent past) criticism of democracy, I start at the same place that the ancients did, with Euthyphro and Apology. Much easier to show people how a writer as wonky as Plato actually works, that way.
That’s how I found SSC! Came across a link somewhere to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ and it got me interested in reading more, so I moved on to the other posts. Then one day I discovered that the comments section wasn’t like any comments section I’d ever seen on the internet – that it was teeming with challenging ideas and civil debate and really smart people. That’s what hooked me.
I think it’s important not to start with any posts that will cause her to react emotionally. So probably any post on gender is out.
Also, I’m curious, is she a pretty-activist, intersectional feminist or a pretty, activist, intersectional feminist?
Both, since you ask! but I meant the former.
If she’s pretty, I’d focus on ‘I’m a guy who thinks you are pretty’ when I deal with her. Girls like that. Not ‘you are wrong’. Nobody likes that.
Feminism as taught in schools is the dumb girl’s easy A. Is she dumb? Don’t use that against her. It’s mean and nobody’s too dumb to notice when you use that against them.
Yeah, I mean I’ve kinda been-there-done-that with this particular chick and don’t feel the need to go there again.
She’s bright, perhaps not brilliant.
I’m talking about a friendly discussion, not a fully-weaponised argument wherein I ruthlessly pick apart her fallacies, demolish her ideology, prove the superiority of the One True Rationalist Way and leave her a broken wreck. Christ.
I’d view it as a long-term plan, so I would absolutely avoid anything that directly confronts her worldview in the first post like many others recommend. Instead share something which you think she will be enthusiastic about. Then discuss that with her. And only after she has built up credibility that this is good stuff, move on to the next.
A possible sequence might be:
1. “Meditations of Moloch”
2. “The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories”
3. On Niceness, Community, & Civilization
4. I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup
Your ideal outcome is one where he/she feels that you sharing things that is of immense value to her and which does not confront her core worldview. If your goal is to help her build up some better epistemic structures for seeing the world, then it is most worthwhile to start at the core and then move out to applications rather than the other way around.
My current calibrations for this suggest the following outcome: It’s not going to work and you’re going to end up losing a friend as a direct result of this.
This is not changed significantly by any given post. Why? Because SSC posts do not exist in a vacuum, so even a very carefully curated selection will eventually lead to her reading Untitled, at which point it is extremely likely she will have an extreme disgust response (which will not be disconnected from her instant realisation that her social group would violently reject the content). Her reaction to this is not certain but very likely to be some variation on un-personing you as soon as she can find a rationale to do so.
Source: Everything that’s happened in the last 5 years.
Quite possible!
I think you exaggerate. If I were talking about bringing up talking points from way out on the right with people I barely know, then you might be right. But to tentatively talk about some meta-level principles with someone whom I trust and who trusts me seems like it can’t go that badly.
Even if she does come across Untitled, I trust her better than to ditch me because of a post I haven’t particularly endorsed on a blog I showed her some other posts of.
Having said that, I think even in the worst-case scenario where that did happen, I wouldn’t regret bringing posts to her attention. You have to stand up for what’s right where you can, right?
(And if it does go that badly, I’ll be sure to come back here and report on it!)
During one of the occasional culture war lulls that seem so unimaginable during high-heat periods like right now, I had a very-SJ-aligned friend who was engaging in a little self-reflection; wondering things out loud like, for example, why their efforts seemed so overwhelmingly targeted at “allies” rather than actual bigots etc. In the light of that, I decided it would be a good idea to introduce her to the ideas in I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup. She responded appreciatively and asked if there were any other essays around the subject; I found a couple of things on Ozy’s blog that I thought she’d appreciate and held off for a while to avoid overdosing her with Grey Tribe.
Things seemed to go OK for a couple of weeks, then suddenly she vanished from Facebook. I wondered what happened for a bit, then working on a queasily unpleasant feeling I pulled up one of my backup FB accounts I’ve made over the years. And yes, there it was; a loud public post about how she’d just had to unfriend an “MRA”, along with the usual “you go girl!” comments.
(I should note at this point I’d been friends with this woman for over 10 years, including 4 years living in the same town and seeing each other regularly. We were actual, IRL friends, not Facebook Acquaintances.)
Some of the comments gave me pause; they were along the lines of “you see! I told you!” and so forth. With the assistance of a couple of other friends, I reconstructed the following sequence of events:
1) She brought up the whole “ally-baiting” thing.
2) I linked her to SSC.
3) She read I Can Read Anything But The Outgroup and initially liked it as it explained the issue that was confusing her quite well.
4) She mentioned it in private Facebook posts restricted to some of her friends.
5) Said friends declared that SSC was “MRA bullshit” and linked to Untitled as evidence.
6) This rapidly spiralled, with people bringing up specific comments as mentioned in the comment by Brad linked in the OP up there.
7) She apologised for linking this awful, awful site and said I’d suggested it
8) Her friends went on long rants about how I’ve “always” been an “MRA” and she should disown me.
9) She complied almost instantly, blocked me and made a loud public declaration about how awful I was.
My takeaway from all this has been to realise that the real problem with bridging the inferential distance across the no-mans-land of cultural warfare is not actually about convincing individuals. It’s about insulating humans from having their chimp-brains hacked by psychological mechanisms that cause them to preemptively jettison anything that would threaten their position in their in-group; and that might actually be one of the Hard Problems of human interaction.
This is so depressing.
Related, I can’t believe I’ve held off drawing this firm conclusion till now, but I really think social media is hugely responsible for polarization due to tendency to create a “with us or against us” dynamic.
Yeah, Christ, this is so bleak. I’m sorry it turned out that way for you.
I suspect it’s not so much a question of polarization on social media as it is a huge increase in the power of mob mechanics. In person, it is extremely unlikely she would be surrounded by a mob baying for my metaphorical blood as she was in that post, even if someone took exception with something she said; and it is vanishingly unlikely anyone would have opportunity to dig through her references for evidence of ideological impurity as they did.
The story has a mildly better ending – I encountered her at an event earlier this year and, as I expected, she was mostly friendly in private and didn’t even go out of her way to avoid me in front of others, which I kind of expected her to do.
Overall I wasn’t particularly upset by the whole thing, as it did not spread beyond that woman’s close circle and I tend to be fairly sanguine about this stuff as long as it doesn’t turn into a baying mob directly targeted at me.
Very, very sad story, Zorgon.
Someone (I forgot who) was commenting this on another post (I forgot which… sorry): it’s not just that people overreact to perceived attacks on their worldview, it’s that they are now willing to cut all ties with the perceived offenders and throw friendships, compassion, and decency in the garbage bin at the first sign of disagreement. This cult mentality has taken over a large part of society.
That’s very sad. It’s always baffled me that MRA is unforgivable, but it is.
It’s not that Scott is merely wrong to be sympathetic to Aronson or that Aronson is merely mistaken, it’s that the idea that men might have some interests that society should recognize but isn’t is so obviously offensive that anyone who can believe it is clearly evil.
Probably too late to be commenting on this, but I find the best way to shield against this sort of reaction when sharing links is a disclaimer — “This guy is a really good writer, I don’t agree with everything he says, but some of his posts are just amazing and even the ones I disagree with do make me think.” That way when someone finds something they don’t like on the blog — whether or not it’s the same as the stuff you disagree with — they can think, “Well, this site is not a proxy for the beliefs of my friend.”
Honestly I don’t think we should have to do disclaimers because it should be obvious that we all share links from stuff we don’t 100% endorse, but that’s the world we live in and it tends to be helpful.
Possibly counterpoint, but more of an elaboration: I am firmly in Blue Tribe territory and several Blue Tribe friends have posted SSC posts to their FB feeds (when I certainly haven’t shown them anything).
I’ve talked with some of these people about SSC later, and no one has had such a virulent reaction.
But none of these people are self-identified “Woke.” They are just run of the mill Blue Tribe.
My Facebook friend most likely to share ssc articles is fairly intersectional feminist as far as I can tell. But she is also autistic and Jewish, so she is probably pre-selected for intersectional feminist least likely to be put off by ssc 🙂
(If she reads this, she has probably already figured out who I am. Um, hi 🙂 )
I’m jumping in very late but you should strongly reconsider this idea.
The thing that you need to accept is that nothing you can say will ever convince her that she’s wrong. People are only ever convinced by the ones they trust and SJ does a very good job of building suspicion of dissenters.
Two of my friends right now are SJWs and I’ve heard it way too often. “I thought [former friend / date / colleague] was great but then it turned out he said [mild unPC statement] so it turns out he’s a bigoted asshole who we can’t associate with.” It doesn’t matter how close you are, she will choose her ideology over you.
If you want to share SSC you still can: I showed them And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes and some of his psychiatry blogging which they liked a lot. But if you take it to a political place that’s going to be bad for your friendship.
A Definite Beta Guy has hit on something. Why not just talk to her? What are you trying to convince her of, get her to think about, etc? There’s nothing here you can’t convey to a person directly, and there’s no risk that she’s going to look in your shirt pocket and find something objectionable.
The theme I have taken from here is that people are inevitably betrayed by their programming, be that programming biological, social, both. You can express that to her (“isn’t it shitty that people who profess a certain set of ideals often betray them unthinkingly?”) without her stumbling into the comments section and seeing regrettable examples of it happening.
(The tragic flaw of rationalism is that humans seem largely incapable of rationality, and thus to a large extent it becomes a way to say “see, my gut instincts are in fact Correct”; I see a parallel to the way many feminists recapitulate classic patriarchal views while thinking they are doing the opposite, and it’s kind of ironic that each group tends to regard the other negatively)
Yep, maybe a good idea. See reply to moscanarius below.
I don’t have any suggestions for posts, but I do have one for an introduction: “Scott and many of his commenters have had extremely unpleasant personal experiences associated with certain forms of feminism/leftism, and accordingly/arguably are very biased against the ideologies and practices that they believe lead to those experiences. That doesn’t prevent him (or the commenters) from sometimes saying very interesting things, but you should understand that the blog sometimes serves as a support group for people who experienced this particular form of trauma. While their impulse to universalize their trauma and frame it as one of the most significant contemporary societal problems is worthy of criticism, it’s always worth keeping in mind that it’s typically coming from a real and understandable place.”
For some reason nobody seems to have mentioned any of Scott’s fiction?
Generally anybody I want to recommend SSC to gets The Goddess of Everything Else first, and then probably Niceness, Community and Civilization, and then something specific to them.
[Edit: hadn’t seen Nabil’s post]
I was going to mention the fiction. I can’t convince anyone (including partners) to read any of Scott’s non-fiction posts because they’re too long for them (aka, the perfect length), but a decent number of people enjoyed the story with the colored pills, And I Showed You How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes. And the Blue Eyed island story, if she is that sort of nerdy.
Well, everyone has already weighted in, you already have your linkfest, and you look quite keen on carrying on with your plan; but allow me to make a suggestion.
I think instead of using Scott’s words, you should use your own. In person. We may love Scott’s writting, but many people may be put off by his style, or by the format, or by the references that he uses and they don’t understand, or by the concepts that we consider basic and fundamental but are foreign to many people, or by a misunderstanding of his tone, or by actually having to read something (this happens a lot around me; no one ever reads anything I recomend, though they sometimes read what I offer as commentary to a linked text).
From what you told us, she is not exactly full of enthusiasm for SSC; it may be a bad idea to make her read things foreign to her worldview written by people she does not respect (and that many of her friends no doubt loathe). Since she is your friend and you already talk to her a lot and she has a lot of good-will towards you, it is both easier and better for everyone to talk in person, not in scriptum. Tone is often difficult to convey in written form, and changing your focus if you see a bad reaction is impossible; better to speak, as it creates more room for generous interpretation and general good will.
(consider, too, that no crazy friends of hers can share what you spoke to her on social media and harass you (or her!) into submission, as happended in the unfortunate story told by Zorgon a few comments above)
Yes, there’s probably something to be said for this. Maybe I’ll try it this way, or at least start with it. I’m not sure! We shall see.
Also bear in mind one possible outcome is that she really digs SSC, starts trawling through old open threads out of a previously unrecognized urge to read about battleships, then stumbles across across this strategy session.
Don’t link her anything related to social justice. You’re going to get something between “Oh, that’s interesting. [forty minutes of dead silence followed by a change of subject]” and a serious argument.
Your best bet is linking her something good but completely unrelated, like one of the psychology posts, and hoping she develops a taste for the site and discovers the SJ stuff later on her own. But this isn’t going to have a very good hit rate either, just a better one.
Others have already said basically the same thing, but this is probably a bad idea overall and to the extent you do try to expose her to SSC you avoid anything actually political. Just pick an non-political argument you’d consider recommending to her even if Scott never posted about politics and if she likes it enough she’ll keep reading.
I’ve recently been having career anxieties. I’m a university student in a computer-related field getting close to graduation. I was wondering about work life in each of the subfields of programming.
If you’ve worked in any of these, what did you think of it? What did you enjoy and what did you hate about the type of work? Did you feel that the work you did was challenging? Meaningful? And what were the people like in those fields?
– Web front-end
– Web back-end
– Enterprise
– B2B
– Embedded Systems
– HFT
– “Systems” programming (OS, databases, etc)
– Data Science/ML
– Something else I’m missing
I don’t really think of myself as a front-end developer, but I’ve ended up doing some of it as part of my web work. I tend to find it drives me mad. A lot of one’s energy is expended on hackishly working around inconsistencies in various browsers or limitations in HTML/CSS/Javascript themselves. (Though things are quite a bit better on the consistency front than they were even a few years ago.) I think HTML/CSS weren’t designed to do the kinds of things that people now use them to do, and it shows.
There are solutions that attempt to paper over these problems (various javascript libraries, “polyfills”, etc), but they also feel hacky to me, so I dislike them, too.
And this is kind of a cliche/stereotype, but the javascript community seems kind of mad with churn in terms of (hip, new) frameworks and libraries. If it’s as bad as it seems from outside, then I think it would drive me mad after a few years as my main form of coding.
In a nutshell, it probably won’t please you if, like me, you have a pathological longing for elegance in your programming systems.
Better. At worst, a bit repetitive. Sometimes the frameworks I have to use offend my sense of elegance ever-so-slightly, but things are basically good on that front, especially if you’re using a nice language. But you’ll probably be working on basically boring problems. Almost all websites you might develop are, at bottom, a CRUD interface into a database. If that bores you then it may not be for you.
I haven’t done any of the other kinds of coding you mention, so I can’t give a comparison to any of those. And I haven’t really worked “in tech”, per se, in the sense of working at a start up or similar company whose main product is software-based. The companies I’ve worked at have been mostly large and boring, or non-tech-based but having a tiny tech team to work on their web stuff.
Thanks. Your experience matches the impression I have about web development.
Was true, now a lot better.
True of most commercial programming.
You can have too little churn.
Right on all counts.
Do you like making pretty things by slamming together arcane-looking text, with approximately no WYSIWYG? That’s web front-end. If you have poor aesthetic sense, don’t go here.
This job is probably part-admin and part-database-designer. If you like networking and SQL, this is for you, but it’s not the whole thing.
The exact type of specialty matters less than you think, IMO. You’re going to need to be proficient in a whole mess of related technologies anyway.
Think very carefully if you want to work for a large/old or small/new company. I wouldn’t recommend small/new companies for recent graduates; my experience was being dumped in deep water with vague instructions on what constitutes swimming. Unless you’ve got a very serious independent streak and chafe at any amount of proper management, avoid it, especially when you’re inexperienced. Big corps tend to do more of IKEA-programming, with finely described tasks and responsibilities, which is more suitable for young’uns.
Smaller companies are more likely to give greenfield projects to juniors. Fine-grained responsibilities aren’t a good long term strategy , because the very specialised thing you are doing might become out of date, leaving you with no marketable skills.
This job is actually writing glue code and business logic in languages like PHP and python. Admin and database design tend to be less than 10%.
This is not what I meant. I meant there actually being a specification document, people who know what the end-users need, organized testing at several levels, tasks divided into subtasks that can be done in parallel by multiple people, etc. Rather than you being responsible for, basically, everything related to a project yourself.
Closer to 25% IME.
Generally speaking, the front end is fast and flexible. Things change quickly. New development frameworks pop up every couple of years. Being exactly right is not so important. “Move fast and break things” makes sense.
Conversely at the other end, in the database, things are slow and steady. Stability is important. You’re moving real money from bin A to bin B, and failures matter. The technology is old; you may well be working with a DBMS that had its 1.0 in the seventies. “Plan carefully, then execute” makes sense.
Analytical systems and server-side business logic tend to be somewhere in the middle. Operations tends to be more DB-like. They value stability.
Everyone wants both flexibility and rigor. But if when forced to pick just one, you choose flexibility, then head for the front end. If you choose rigor, head the the DB or the back end.
In my opinion, this type of question won’t really help you.
What’s more important is the company where you work and the city in which you live. There’s a huge difference between life in a small company and one in a large company. Between a company which expects a standard 40 hours, and one where crunch or overtime is normal. Also, the domain the company is in is important. Finance is different than healthcare, etc. Finally, who are your customers? Programming for non-programmers is very different than programming for other programmers.
The actual tech you work on is less important than the projects you work on. What type of products do you want to help create.
>The actual tech you work on is less important than the projects you work on. What type of products do you want to help create
This is actually what I was trying to ask (what working in each of these types of project is like), though I guess I didn’t articulate it well.
Oh, I guess I see each of things you listed more as subcomponents of a larger project. Like a normal company needs some backend devs and some frontend devs, and they work together.
Agreed. The reason I didn’t touch on type of company, type of project, etc. is because those things are equally important between all those fields, so it wouldn’t help you choose between them.
If you’re open to the other side of the field, I’m a network admin / sysadmin, and I do a fair amount of programming for my work – mostly glue code connecting systems, automating business processes, and also some scripting for network management and configuration deployment. Software defined networking is the big coming thing in the networking world, and programming skills are becoming increasingly important, especially at larger / newer companies. I think I do a greater variety of work than a typical developer, but less of it is deep dives into one project. Depends on what you enjoy. I’ve also done freelance web front-end development, and I just want to second that as a freelancer at least, you really need a strong aesthetic sense, so it is not for everybody.
Tbh, no, I don’t really like sysadmin work. Scripting and glue code are the parts of software development I like the least.
I understand every software job involves some amount of glue, but I’d still like to minimize it as much as possible.
I have only worked with these teams, so wouldn’t weigh this too highly.
– Web front-end
A high variation profession, many low-skilled people working as frontend developers. To you have to choose carefully. Some are as smart as other developer subgroups though. A big (and very useful) overlap with design, so more creative people often end up here.
You get the skill to create web stuff quickly, which is something a lot of people want to do nowadays, so superuseful if you get good.
If you have a high aesthetic sense absolutely go here. If not, then you can still go here and specialize in the javascript end of the spectrum where things are starting to overlap with what used to be on backend. Also if you’re more of a coder by heart you’ll have to really fight to stay away from the latest fads in frameworks & libraries, and insist on clean code.
– Web back-end
Feels like most programming subcultures. People highly value being smart. People are ideological with regards to language. Very strong sense of self-worth among the peer-group and many communities to participate in. Many people high in systematic thinking and lower in emotional skills.
As with last one, if you get good you have high value both for own projects and to be hired.
One more thing. Seems to be two types of ways you can be great here. Being great at making algorithms, or system design. If you’re the kind who win programming competitions then you’re suited for #1. If you’re the kind who can visualize a whole system, or have deep interest in system architecture or economics, then #2 is good.
– Enterprise
Assuming you mean working in a company selling to enterprise?
Long sales cycles (up to years). People asking for insane custom things all the time, so constantly your job to try and tease out the universals worth building.
– B2B
Shorter sales-cycle, so feels halfway like making consumer-stuff. Job consists in making series of tools that automate problems your customers have.
You often have little direct interaction with customers, especially if making something small like say Zapier. Quite a good tradeoff of stability, speed and predictability as for as choosing between a consumer/business/enterprise-product goes.
Some b2b-companies have suffocatingly boring corporate cultures, so make sure you avoid that. Go with a product that is less than 5 years old, will usually keep you safe.
Of all my internships, my favorite was the one at a medium-sized B2B company. It matched your description of B2B. It’s good to know that this type of company and atmosphere isn’t rare.
Web development in agencies, small businesses and large businesses varies culturally. Agencies tend to be into trendy methodologies like Agile, also tend to have huge problems with missed deadlines and crunches (basically because of never refusing work), and tend to be young.
In a small business, you tend to be in a very small team or solo, which suits the independent-minded. You would likely be working for people who don’t have much idea about the web, and who will value your business ideas: this is very different to such-up-and-code-to-the-spec corporate culture. In both situations, you would get a fairly large amount of say in what toolsets you use. Full stack development can easilly involve about seven different languages, which may or may not be an advantage.
Two different things. OS development is very technically challenging , high status work mostly done by people with higher degrees, and often a hardware background. The main question is whether you are good enough. Also uses very specialised languages and tools so difficult to shift sideways.
Systems and database admin are big company things. You need to know about specific products, and certifications beyond a CS degree count for a lot. Can involve out of hours work, but you get to set your own schedules rather than dealing with insane deadlines. Requires a very cautious mindset.
Mobile App development.
Games programming.
DevOps.
Simulation/modelling, math-heavy stuff.
SaaS/APIs.
In the context of “systems programming”, I’m pretty sure Linked List meant implementing databases, not using them. Compilers are another topic that generally get filed under “systems”; more and more, these days, I think web browsers probably also count.
(Source: I work on compilers for a living.)
Yes, that’s what I meant – not DBAs, but people that develop Cassandra or CouchDB.
How did you get into compilers? Do you need a graduate degree to have a chance?
I got into compilers through grad school — my grad supervisor actually has a close working relationship with the compiler group at my current employer — but I work with plenty of people who only have undergraduate degrees (in either CS or EE).
Not sure why I can’t reply to Iain’s comment (is there some rule on maximum number of nested replies? I don’t comment often) but one follow-up question is what compiler development still happens nowadays? I’m aware of C/C++ compilers being actively developed, but there’s only a handful of those for general purposes (GCC, Clang, Intel, Visual C++… is there any other?). I guess there’s also compiler development for obscure architectures, like some embedded boards. Besides that, what else is happening in the compiler space?
Yes, there’s a max comment depth.
There’s other languages besides c and c++. Some of them aren’t exactly compilers, but VMs are in the same neighborhood.
Some of the hottest work in the area is in javascript. There’s also plenty of work in the java world — there’s at least one company that makes good money just selling a garbage collector. IDEs have a semi-compiler inside it that needs a different set of smarts than a typical one.
(There’s a restriction on nesting depth. Once it is hit, you are forced to reply to the parent comment. You get used to it, eventually.)
LLVM and gcc are slowly (and in my opinion deservedly) eating the world of static compilation, but they aren’t done yet. For example, the new CORAL supercomputer contract for the Department of Energy went to IBM, and will be using IBM’s XL compiler for C/C++/Fortran code.
There are other statically compiled languages that need lots of front-end work, or that don’t work well with a back-end designed for C. Rust is a good example of the former — they’re doing a lot of cool stuff these days. The latter includes a number of functional languages: for example, Haskell nerds keep one-upping each other on the abstruse bits of type theory they can fit into GHC.
Beyond that, JIT compilers are an active area. There are a number of competing JVMs, each of which has its own JIT. (I guess technically Azul is leveraging LLVM for their JIT.) Modern web browsers all contain at least one compiler for Javascript, if not more than one. Broadening the question slightly to virtual machines, there are languages like Ruby and Python that don’t have much of a compiler, but still have plenty of compiler-ish systems programming going on under the covers.
I suspect that shader compilers for GPUs also have a lot of work put into them, but that stuff doesn’t tend to get talked about much in public.
Thanks for the answers, guys, they explain a lot.
It sounds like you’re describing kernel development specifically rather than OS development in general. Most of the work involved in building and maintaining a modern OS is not in the kernel, but in the shell and other user-mode components. This type of development is not really more difficult than any other form of client-side programming, with the caveat that you’ll be using C or C++ and there’s a higher standard of quality required since a crash in an OS component tends to have worse consequences than a crash in a document editor or whatever.
How did I forget all of these?? (Though, to be fair, I think of SaaS as a variety of Enterprise and B2B)
In addition to kernels and compilers, anything that requires dealing with a lot of a parallelism at a low level is difficult (and therefore interesting?) and fairly lucrative.
Embedded programming for whatever reason is difficult and not lucrative.
From what I gathered from several /r/cscareerquestions threads, embedded salaries are comparable with higher-level development salaries. Does that not match your experience?
I haven’t been in my respective industry long enough to comment conclusively, but I can give some meta advice:
As a recent grad, expect to move a few times in the first couple years. It’s the right strategy if you want the most money. Those first few positions aren’t highly specialized. A solid grasp of CS fundamentals and moderate practical programming knowledge is all you need.
Personally, I lean towards Systems and Embedded because my background was hardware focused.
I did a very small amount of web front-end work at a startup, as part of my other duties. It seemed to be mostly mashing buttons on a Big Framework until the right thing came up. There was very little opportunity to understand what was going on inside the framework because there was always something more important to do. Getting things to look right on a web page is unreasonably difficult. For example, vertically centering a box using CSS is impossible. The front-end industry is moving towards looking at everyone as interchangeable cogs (which is what Scrum/Agile/whatever is all about.) I think it’s a waste to go into web front-end if you have talent.
Web back-end / Enterprise / B2B: These are just buzzwords, right? B2B is just a business model. Web back-end development is just… development.
I’ve done some embedded systems work. It’s normally very tedious. A little bit of writing code and a lot of working around hardware problems. There is usually a big pile of physical tools you have to have at your desk– connectors, screwdrivers, reprogrammers, power bricks. Everything is Linux or Android nowadays that you interact with in weird stripped-down environments.
I have not worked in HFT. I understand some people became quite wealthy working on this. When I spoke with them they emphasized keeping things simple above all else, to avoid problems in production. In general, HFT firms have not been doing as well as previously, so I don’t know if there are still many jobs here.
“Systems” programming (OS, databases, etc)– well, it’s my favorite thing. Designing the big systems that people use behind the scenes. Problem is, the industry is getting cartelized into AmaGooFaceSoft. If you want to go into this now, I would advise doing it at one of the big cloud firms. Companies have always been really bad at running their own infrastructure, and that is making it hard to sell non-cloud infrastructure to anyone any more. Unfortunately, it might take years at a big company to ever get any meaningful responsibility. But the benefits are good, I guess.
Data Science/ML: everyone seems to have a different idea of what this means. Some people think it means super-smart researchers doing deep learning. But a lot of organizations just seem to see it as an analyst role where you run linear regressions on things and make powerpoint slides for execs. Considering how much math it requires, the pay is surprisingly low.
Bullshit.
I’ve never worked on an Agile project where people didn’t get to use their strengths. The point is to not box people into a single specialization.
Of course your employer wants you to use your strengths. That’s why they hired you. Your employer also wants to be able to easily replace you whenever necessary. Preventing you from specializing in anything helps with that.
By the way, Shey Shah’s essay is a good read. Excerpt:
Where and how did y’all meet your SOs (please no tired jokes about your SO being imaginary or your hand)?
In college, we were both studying CS (though we met socially through friends outside campus).
Gould’s Sugar House at an event for young faculty in the area to get to meet each other.
At a toga party by throwing paper cups at him.
American college in a single comment
There’s no reason why Americans should get all the fun.
In a rollerblading club.
I met my present wife at folk dancing at VPI, where she was a grad student in geology and I was an assistant professor of economics. I was at folk dancing because the wife of a friend and colleague told me it was a good place to meet nice girls–my first marriage having broken up a little earlier.
After the folk dancing, which isn’t one of my hobbies and which I am not good at, people were sitting around, I think having ice cream, and Betty was explaining some point in calculus to one of the others. I like to claim I fell in love with her on the spot–such a nice, clear, logical mind. We’ve been married for something over thirty years.
I met my first husband in the Society for Creative Anachronism (medieval nerdery), but since going poly have met almost everyone through OKC (or occasionally the rationalist community).
Related questions:
– What was the make and model of your first car?
– What is the name of your favorite sports team?
– What was the name of your first pet?
In all fairness, I doubt that the kind of answers he’s getting are super useful for security questions.
I know, I was more just poking fun at the question as being like a security question.
I was inspired to do this because I almost decided to answer the question seriously but realized it would make a good security question, next time I sign up for a site that lets me write my own.
When I do that, I ask myself questions about the first drafts of my unpublished stories.
(Proper nouns from them also make excellent passwords.)
Humor worked, in my book.
It would’ve worked if it weren’t for you meddling kids
Ford’); DROP TABLE PASSWORDS; —
Little Bobby Tables ! Is it really you ? 🙂
Incidentally, my wifi password is a string of references to the places where my wife and I fell in love, had our wedding, and went on our honeymoon.
At the farmer’s market; she was giving a cooking demonstration, and we ended up talking for three hours in the breaks between customers.
BUT–I’d been hearing about her, off and on, for years. I went to the church she’d formerly attended, knew her parents and had eaten at their house, and she just came up now and again as someone everyone remembered. It certainly made meeting her for the first time somewhat odd.
I met my wife through mutual friends. Specifically, we both went to a pre-wedding party for a couple that we knew separately, and I asked her out at the wedding a week later.
Hanging out at a radio station, where my best friend was the after midnight DJ. She was his new girlfriend at the time. Apparently, I acted like I didn’t think she or her friends belonged there.
It was quite a while after that (including a marriage between her and that friend) before we got together.
I haven’t and I doubt I ever will. I missed my window, and made a series of bad decisions that ended up with me living long-term in one of the worst cities in the US for dating. Since I don’t have many friends and everyone here is incredibly hostile to anyone they don’t know, I will never have a real social circle to use for introductions (I, literally, don’t even know anyone who knows a single woman in Seattle); I’m not nearly attractive enough to date online (empirically verified); the idea of finding a partner at work is a joke for fairly obvious reasons even if the current political climate wouldn’t crucify me for trying. I should move away but re-establishing a new life across the country is terrifying and logistically very difficult unless I quit my job, which I’d rather not do. (I’m aware how cowardly that sounds, but I’m not sure how to accurately evaluate my chances of success in a better market, and you know what’s even more pathetic than uprooting my life to find a girlfriend in DC/NYC? Doing so and then still being single.)
I’m pretty pissed at my younger self for making pretty much every wrong choice: staying with a few partners I knew wouldn’t be good for me for a few years each because it was so hard to find new ones (it only got harder later), not recognizing the importance of being in favorable markets until it was too late, not dealing much more aggressively with my social anxiety when I was young enough to still get invited to things, etc. But now I’m stuck with it. I am trying to practice stoicism, and accept what I cannot change.
Let this be a lesson to young people who want to get married eventually: college, for all its faults, is the best chance you will ever have to find a long term romantic partner. Yale/Harvard are dating services for elites. No one will tell you this, but it’s true. Unless you are astoundingly attractive or otherwise top tier in mating markets, don’t pick colleges based on academics or affiliation or ethos, pick the one with the highest ratio of people you’d be interested in marrying to people like you.
(In other words, if you’re a stereotypical member of the LW diaspora–male, a nerdy loser, straight–do not under any circumstances go to a tech-focused school, even if that’s what you like. Get into an Ivy and go there instead. I promise you that you can get a good education in math at any first-rate college; it might be epsilon better at MIT or Mudd or Caltech but you will die alone if you go there. Before you start telling me “no, but I want to marry a nerdy girl!” A) no, you don’t [1]; B) learn to like normies, because you will never outrun your competition if you limit your pool of options to a tiny fraction.)
Once you’re there, remember your long term goals; don’t necessarily try to lock down your first girlfriend, that’s crazy, but do obey the core rule of games: once you win, stop playing. The goal is to find a life partner, not date a new girl every week. Dating new girls is a means to an end.
[1] I hear many people say they want their partner to be an obligate {techie, engineer, comicon type} like themselves. After picking apart a lot of stories, I have come to the conclusion that most such requirements are based on a fallacy I will illustrate with a stereotypical high school hallway conversation:
Bob: Susie, do you want to go out with me?
Susie: Never in a million years. Go back to chess club, you loser. If you ever talk to me again I’ll have the football team beat you up.
Bob: Well that sucked. I should find a girl who likes chess, she won’t make fun of me for that!
No, Bob, you should find a girl who isn’t a terrible person. She won’t judge you for enjoying chess.
You use a lot of language about “If I only knew this or that in my younger days, now I’m old and it’s too late for me.” Out of curiosity, how old are you? You can round to the nearest 10 or 5 years if you want.
Depending on your goals it might not be too late for you at all.
Why is the only alternative to Seattle DC/NYC? If you feel politically isolated in Seattle, for what I’m assuming are reasons having to do with views that are considered right-wing, why not move to a part of the country that’s more right-wing? Those parts of the country also tend to be cheaper, and if you work at the kind of job I think you do it would be easy to find work there that is way more lucrative than Seattle when you adjust for cost of living, so if you moved and still didn’t find anyone it wouldn’t be that bad.
(Though, speaking from MY own bad decisions, I’d advise you to stay near family if having kids is part of the objective.)
PS. I totally agree about dating nerdy girls. Plus, a non-nerdy girl will help widen your world a bit, keep you acquainted with the sunlight so to speak.
I’m 29. Pretty much anyone I’d want to date is already married by the time they get to my age [1], and it’s both creepy and difficult to find a younger population to go after.
I do feel politically isolated in Seattle, but that’s not actually what I was referring to; I meant more along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Freeze (though that article dramatically understates the problem.)
I’d love to move somewhere more right-wing/rural/cheaper, but it seems even less likely that I’d meet anyone there just based on population density–I have to be somewhere where there are enough people to have any chance of finding friends or partners. Given that loneliness is lethal (see e.g. http://hazlitt.net/longreads/legion-lonely) that seems like a bad idea. If I were married I’d move to the middle of the woods in an instant.
[1] This goes back to Joel Spolsky: why are most developers you interview terrible? Because the good ones interview for a job once out of college, get one, and keep it.
I didn’t embark on a serious relationship till I was about 27 so I don’t think you’re doomed per se just because of that. Also you’re just heading into peak divorce period (between the 4th-8th anniversary) so you’ll get another shot at least some percentage of everyone who paired off early on.
@Vermillion: I am not going to marry a divorcee, because that’s an incredibly strong predictor of you getting divorced.
(Yes, I am picky, and I know that will make many people look at me with disgust, but I really truly would rather be single than with someone who would make me miserable; compromising my standards so that I can marry someone, anyone, is just unhealthy.)
29?! You’re a kid! You’ve got your whole life ahead of you! Jeez, the way you were writing I thought you were at least in your 50s or something!
The population density thing is BS unless you wanted to date lots of women; you have your head screwed on tightly enough to realize that’s a pointless waste of time. There are TONS of single, eligible women in cities like Nashville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Louisville, and if those are too “trying to be NYC/San Fran” for you there are smaller cities like Ft. Wayne, Ann Arbor, Dayton, etc. where I think you’d still do very nicely. Those smaller ones are great because you can basically live in a rural area and commute to a downtown/dense area to work without a commute longer than 20 minutes and often under 15.
PS. Re. [1], some developers became developers later. The analogy being, some women weren’t necessarily looking for marriage right out of high school, but were focused on careers or something. Some women have high or very exact standards, and you never know when. you’re the one who meets them. In the world of online dating and Tindering and such, many women have found they don’t know how to meet decent men because there is an expectation of hooking up all the time.
As someone who’s 35, it’s even creepier for me.
I got married at 29, shortly before I turned 30, to a person I didn’t date until I was 29 (actually 28, 3 weeks before I turned 29). Prior to that I had no relationship last longer than 6-8 weeks, and hadn’t had even one of those in a couple of years.
Currently married 8 years.
I’m 29. Pretty much anyone I’d want to date is already married by the time they get to my age
29 doesn’t strike me as old. (I mean, maybe I’m only saying that because I’m over 30, but.)
People are getting married later these days. Early 30s is not uncommon.
“I’m 29.”
I’m 35, and I’ve spent the last 5 years moaning in horror at my decay back to the dust from which I was formed, mourning that I was too much a fool to make my marriage work, and consigning myself to a lonely march toward the ever-beckoning grave.
That is, up till last week when I was informed over lunch by a female friend that multiple ladies in my church are apparently interested and complaining to each other that I take no interest.
So there’s that.
I was 30 when I met the woman I married; I had never previously seriously dated anyone. It was over a year until we started dating. (And we are still married over a decade later.)
@Well…
So this is an interesting facet of the problem; I’m curious what other people think. The reason I’ve dismissed smaller, relatively unimportant/unprestigious cities is that I can’t imagine high quality partners who chose to move there–am I crazy?
Let me explain: I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts which, due to the local colleges (hi James!) has a lot of smart/”elite”/high achieving Blue Tribe people. My local high school–the public one–had a graduating class of 200; we sent, I think, three kids to Harvard (and that wasn’t a fluke: something like four to Dartmouth, another to Princeton, etc, etc, etc.) Our high school class was full of high achievers.
None of those achievers live in my hometown anymore. Every single one of them I know of lives in a first-tier city–Boston is about the smallest place you could find any of them and that’s probably just because of Harvard, not even that it was the “local” city. My generation has been relentlessly told that if you are worth anything, you strike out for LA or SF or NYC or your other choice of world capital…and teenagers tend to listen to what they’re told. (No, seriously, when it comes to societal programming at least.)
A friend once told me that the best way to find a partner was to imagine someone you wanted to date, tell a realistic story of their life, and end it with “and now she was in X doing Y” and look there [1].
I freely admit (see replies elsewhere) I have fairly high standards, which many people will reply to with “no wonder you’re single, you deserve it”…maybe I do, but I’d rather be single than date someone who isn’t good for me. My question is: what story can I reasonably tell about someone else bright, passionate, interesting, who ends up in Ann Arbor, despite relentless instruction from society not to? (I don’t think the trivial answer of “refuses to follow society’s lead” is a particularly good answer here…)
[1] Which is itself the best piece of evidence I have for my above claim that the game is over: I cannot think of a single realistic story for someone I’d like to marry that ends with “and then via _____ she ran into Andrew, and they hit it off, and they lived happily ever after.” All of the possibilities involve straight up miracles in terms of meet-cutes.
I met my husband when I was 26 and he was 32, and we got married about 18 months later. 29 is not old, especially for a man. AFAIK the semi-official creepiness cutoff is half your age + 7, so for a 29-year-old that’s basically 22.
(To answer the OP’s question – on a dating site, and when he first messaged me I wasn’t hugely interested so didn’t care if I made a weird/bad first impression, so my first message back to him was mostly a detailed critique of a video game I’d just played and been annoyed by the ending of. Turned out he found that sort of thing interesting!)
I married my second (and current) wife at about forty. I was divorced–and we are still married thirty some years later. My elder son is about to marry his second wife at about forty, and I would give good odds that marriage too lasts–they have been living together for several years, during which time she has been the functional mother for his children and very good at it.
You are reasonably young. If your job is of the sort that can be done in many places other than Seattle and you find Seattle a hopeless place for finding a wife, the obvious solution is to find a job somewhere better.
Judging by your posts, you are putting more effort into producing reasons why you can’t find a wife than into looking for one.
The reason I’ve dismissed smaller, relatively unimportant/unprestigious cities is that I can’t imagine high quality partners who chose to move there–am I crazy?
I guess it depends on what you mean by “high quality,” but…yes, this does strike me as a weird perspective. You’ll find smart, interesting people as well as dumb, boring people everywhere. Big cities (and cities in general) do not have a monopoly on high quality people.
If you have very specific requirements like wanting to meet someone who graduated from a prestigious big-city university, or wanting someone who is actively participating in a thriving urban culture, or has lots of highfalutin social connections, then yeah maybe a place like LA or NYC is a better bet.
If you just want someone with a high IQ who is also a decent, well-balanced individual who has some common interests with you, I think there’s an extremely good chance that there are lots of people like that in Seattle.
She is a graduate student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, of course.
When I met my wife she was a grad student at VPI. Any even moderately good university will have some bright female graduate students or junior faculty.
When I was back on the marriage market after my divorce, I did a rough calculation of how many women there were in Blacksburg (where VPI is located) who I would have to date at least once to eliminate as potential marriage partners. I concluded that it was at least two orders of magnitude larger than the number of women I was likely to date each year, hence that the problem was my search strategy, not the size of the pool.
That’s a bit of an oversimplification, because a larger pool permits more specialized subgroups, some of which you can expect to contain a more nearly optimal (for your purposes) distribution of members, but it’s the right first approximation.
@Andrew Hunter
This is not meant to be as snarky as I’m afraid it will sound, but I’d just like to point out the irony of asking in a comment on Slate Star Codex how any interesting and likeable person could wind up spending their late 20s/early 30s in a random city in Michigan.
I’m not saying that there’s another Scott around every corner – or that he’s (a gender-swapped version of) the person you’re looking for – but there are interesting people in lots of places.
@DavidFriedman:
Ouch! Though I admit you are not entirely wrong. Sometimes harsh truths are needed. 🙂 I think my response to this would be “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”–I have tried every strategy I’ve come up with for about a decade without success, and it’d be folly to just keep throwing effort at the problem without a plan for what to do differently. Your counter-response to that is that I should be coming up with such a plan–and I have been woefully deficient here!
In my defense, as far as I can tell, there’s very little I can do without leaving Seattle, which isn’t practical any time in the next three months. I will, however, take your advice about grad students; that is by far the largest population of potential partners that I might conceivably get to see. I am currently brainstorming ways to get social contact with the ones at UW (I didn’t do a very good job of this while I *was* one, but no time like the present!)
To the various people who said “29 isn’t old” or even “29 is young”: I’m 29 too, and consider myself in the last years relevant for that, too, because I don’t want any substantial risk of defective children. (I think getting a second marriage at 40 is fine, for those already having well-raised children from a first.)
@aNeopuritan
…If your problem is that you don’t want “defective” children, then you really shouldn’t have children naturally and consider adoption instead. Defects, miscarriages, complications, and other matters related to pregnancy are much more common than you think. The reason pregnancy care is so expensive is because so much can go wrong in a pregnancy.
Defects can occur at any age, and the female body can miscarry at any age as well, which affects future pregnancies.
I remember when I had these complaints fresh out of college. Everyone was like “25 is young man, there’s still plenty of fish, whole life ahead of you, etc.”
And then a few years later it was “28 is still young…”
And now I just turned 32 and nothing has changed.
The fact of the matter is that your odds get worse every year, not better. If you haven’t managed to figure it out by your late 20s, you either need some very specific and credible reason to believe things are going to change, or you need to start resigning yourself to the very likely possibility of remaining alone for the rest of your life. Denial and wishful thinking don’t really help.
That society doesn’t have a single message that applies to everyone? Or perhaps that they tried it and decided it wasn’t for them That she loves her hometown/family/XYZ that exists for her?
I am 1 of 6 kids, my 5 siblings of them live in the suburbs of a 3rd tier city within half an hour from my parents. If you took their current location as a proxy for anything you would completely misunderstand them.
Oldest brother (married at 39 to a former coworker who was good friends with a friend of his) was a well paid consultant for years who was staffed over seas and got to see basically every country in Europe (among others) on the company dime, kept a home in the 3rd tier city as it was affordable and where his family was.
Next oldest brother graduated with a triple major and got his masters while working full time and is now CTO of a small tech company in the area. Married his college girlfriend and they stayed in the area because of her family issues at the time (plus his family mostly lived there).
Younger sister and her husband (met at a summer job during college) tried listening to society and lived in DC for years, they hated it, wanted to be able to afford a house and yard in a nice neighborhood and moved back home.
Younger brother was crazy in his 20s, met his wife at rehab, now makes a nice living in the banking industry and has 3 kids.
Other younger sister is a nurse practitioner whose goal is to run her department in a large hospital one day. Married the brother of a patient of hers.
My wife followed the urging of society out of college and moved to the Bay area, spent two years discovering that she didn’t want to be there, moved back to a 2nd tier city where she grew up, taught herself to code and is now a UI manager.
Me, dropped out of college to play poker professionally, was reasonably successful, traveled and saved a fair amount, quit when it was no longer enjoyable.
Average age of first marriage for men in the US is 29. The OP is 29. If he got married now, he’d be average. That suggests it’s not too late, but he can’t afford to delay either. I’m not sure what the variance is, but I would guess he has five years to get this sorted out or he’s effectively out of the game.
Find some activity you would enjoy that would attract some of them. Someone mentioned finding a spouse in the SCA (historical recreation group). There is an active SCA group in Seattle. If you think any of the things the SCA does would be fun (fighting with medieval weapons as a sport, Renaissance dancing, making medieval jewelry, cooking from medieval recipes, figuring out how people did things in the past and trying to do them, …) you could try it. Similarly for folk dancing, hiking, sports, … .
My main point about grad students, however, was that any even moderately good university has them, so that adds a bunch of places that are not high status cities where you could live, work, and search for a mate.
Man, it’s tough to feel much sympathy when your criteria for Wife is uber-professionally successful.
You’ve correctly identified that “girl must like chess” is a silly criteria, so why does “incredibly ambitious and super-intelligent” need to be one?
Like, this?
The best partners have traits like caring, willing to compromise, and honest. You can be all these things and unclog toilets for a living.
You might even end up in an undesirable location.
My Wife as an OAK (Over Achieving Kid) who went a Public Ivy and ended up in the middle-of-nowhere Midwest because that’s where the job demand was.
Her sister is an OAK that lives in NYC because “that’s where she needs to be” and now she’s closing in on 40 with multiple cats.
Maybe this is just my social group, but here many women at 25 feel “I am still too young to get married” and when they become 28 or 29 they go “I better get married before 30, because that is a scary number”. So actually you would have best chances as a 29 years old man.
If you are looking for a smart girl who isn’t surrounded by dozen smart guys, I recommend sciences outside of STEM. For example, my wife is a biochemist. I also used to date teachers; they are nice.
By the way, as an American man, why exactly do you want to get married? Marriage doesn’t give you anything you wouldn’t lose overnight anyway if your wife decides to leave you; it just increases your losses. (It could be a way to increase commitments if the increased losses would be symmetrical, but as far as I know, in USA they are not. Please correct me if I am wrong.)
> Pretty much anyone I’d want to date is already married by the time they get to my age
Look for people who have non-dating reasons to not have been married by now. Career-focused, then changed their mind is a big one. I know a lot of new women doctors (my wife and I got married when she was in med school). If they’re not married by the time they finish med school, they have a hard time finding anyone. Good population to go mining in!
I can think of a few ways to try and meet female doctors but they’re all rather painful 🙂
If they’re not married by the time they finish med school, they have a hard time finding anyone.
Is this really true? I find it hard to believe there are women doctors out there looking for men and can’t find them, unless they are restricting their pool to “men who make more than I do.”
@Edward Scizorhands
A decent number of highly educated women seem to be complaining that they can’t find a highly educated man. This seems a logical consequence of changing demographics (more educated women, where more college degrees are now earned by women than by men) coupled with traditionalist demands in mates (women tend to want the man to be equally or higher educated, plus a bunch of other things*). This education demand can only work if men tend to be better educated than women, which they are no longer.
So the high-end dating market right now seems to be broken because people have not changed their demands to match reality and logically, this means that highly educated women better snap up the generally favored, highly educated men quickly in an environment like college where the imbalance is relatively limited. Once they leave college, the remaining single women now compete with all the other single women didn’t manage to find a mate due to their demands in a mate.
* My impression is that quite a few women at the top want it all, which is not really realistic for many of them. You have people like Sheryl Sandberg who tries to talk women out of this.
These women are liars.
The more accurate version is something like “can’t find a highly educated man who is also very attractive, outgoing and has strong social skills, and has similar hobbies/interests/religious and political views.”
Not really. Presuming that most women do want someone equally or more highly educated, there’s going to be plenty left unable to find any (sans polygamy).
If you know any personally, feel free to direct them my way. I know plenty of other lonely nerds with graduate degrees, too.
I’m not saying you don’t have a point, just that there are ~4 million more college enrolled women than men, so some are going to have to “settle.”
There’s ‘has similar political views as me’ and then there’s ‘isn’t very outspoken about loathing with every fiber of his being me and everyone I know because of our politics’. The second one seems like a pretty reasonable dealbreaker.
I’m not saying it’s not reasonable.
But that doesn’t make it acceptable to lie and claim it isn’t a factor.
FWIW, I know lonely nerds who are run-of-the-mill progressives too and hold zero offensive beliefs.
The restriction can go either way, if a man wants a woman that makes less than him then he is just as effectively out of the dating pool for that female doctor, but yes this sort of cutoff is typically dumb.
Many of the issues that individuals create for themselves come back simply to setting rigid standards when in reality you have little idea what you actually want if you haven’t experienced it, and have even less idea what you will want and even need 10 years from now. Your best bet will always be to find someone with many admirable qualities, and just roll with them.
But this math only matters if the “college educated men” are 100% claimed. They aren’t. I don’t even think it’s particularly close.
The “handsome and socially adept and college educated” men probably are. But that’s a different question entirely.
It’s implicit that someone that loathes you isn’t a potential romantic match. I’m sorry you don’t like implicature and have a weird thing about “lying” but you should probably make your peace with how the world works instead of being angry about it for another 40+ years.
Addressing both Andrew’s complaints about 29 being too old to meet anyone, and the original “How did you meet your spouse?” question.
I met my husband 8 years ago at a writers’ group that he ran, at our church (in Boston). Turned out we were both fantasy writers obsessed with ancient Roman history and well versed in geek culture. I had just turned 35; he was about to. We’ve been married 6 years.
We’d actually attended the same church for 10 years without ever meeting, partly because he’s so introverted and not big on going to social events or talking to people after services (or ever, really). I was his first serious girlfriend.
So the suggestion that 29 is too late makes me roll my eyes a little, sorry. But I know it can feel grim. It felt grim to me when I turned 35, still single (which is even more of a problem for women, because so many men interested in marriage want kids), even though I’d dated a fair bit (but hadn’t had a relationship that lasted even a year since I was 23).
I also know quite a few other people who married in their late 30s or their 40s, despite living in places that didn’t seem to have great prospects.
So, don’t give up hope.
I’d also be very cautious about listening to anyone who suggests the problem is that you’re too picky. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I don’t know, but the desire to overlook criteria that may be too stringent needs to come from within you, and be something that makes sense at the time. I regret all the times I tried dating someone I wasn’t that into, after listening to friends tell me that I shouldn’t be so picky. It just led to hurt feelings when I realized that I was liking them less, not more, as the relationship progressed, and had to end things (and you’d think I wouldn’t make that mistake more than once, but…).
On the other hand, my husband and I have opposing views on politics (he’s conservative, I’m not), I’m 2 inches taller, and only one of us wanted children (that was him, and we don’t have any). When we were younger (and less desperate?) any of those things might have been a deal breaker for either of us. They turned out not to be, but neither of us felt like we were “settling”. (Maybe it was a good thing that we didn’t meet until our “requirements” for a partner had changed?) Don’t settle; but be open to changing your mind in the future about what’s important (but don’t force it, or pretend you have when you actually haven’t).
I’m a little curious as to why the implication always goes a certain way.
Why does everyone say “There aren’t enough college educated men” and only imply “That are socially progressive,” instead of “There aren’t enough socially progressive men,” and only imply “That are college educated.”
In any case, as I said, not *all* foreveralones are right-wing edgelords. That’s one thing that gets you put in the “you don’t count” category, but it’s far from the only.
Sorry you’re so down about this – it does suck. I have some practical advice, for what it’s worth:
1. Get out of Seattle. I have no idea if what you’ve said about the town is accurate – I don’t know anything about it – but you clearly are unhappy there. Moving isn’t as dramatic as you think it is. You’ll be happier elsewhere.
2. Maybe, though, NYC or DC aren’t your best bets. I’ve lived in NYC going on 20 years. First, dating isn’t exactly simple here either, it can be hard to meet people, and it really isn’t a particularly friendly town (I understand DC is no better). Second, if you’re looking for somewhere you feel more comfortable politically, NYC or DC isn’t going to be an improvement. What political diversity used to be here – and there was some, once upon a time – has long vanished.
3. It doesn’t feel that way now, but 29 is still VERY, VERY young. Relax on that score – you’re wasting your time worrying about it. I didn’t get married until I was 35 (my wife was 29), and my dating prospects and behavior prior to meeting my wife weren’t materially different than it was when I was in my 20s. That said, yes, you can’t wait forever. The 40 year old in the club shouldn’t be there.
4. Stop making such specific lists of what you’re looking for in a woman. I DON’T mean this in some kind of “you’re being too demanding” kind of way. I mean this in a “you don’t actually know who you want to be with” kind of way. And you don’t. You think you do, but what you think you want you probably don’t. Be open to different kinds of people – you don’t want to marry the female equivalent of you. 🙂 You don’t even like yourself. Nobody likes themselves, not really. I didn’t marry the kind of woman I expected, and it worked out GREAT.
5. Blind dates! Get anyone and everyone to set you up, and take them on an actual date. Dinner, you pay. Don’t meet for drinks or coffee. That’s how I met most of the girls I dated in NY; that’s how I met my wife.
@Matt M
I pointed out that this is just one of the demands, if you read my comment more closely, but it is a big one, because it by itself causes a major mismatch.
@KristinJanz & Matt M
I think that everyone assigns a certain value to singlehood and then wants an improvement before they will consider a long term relationship/marriage with a person. The higher you value singlehood, the more picky you have to be, because otherwise you end up with reduced happiness. If you then also have low relationship value, it puts you in a bad spot, because you will (be seen as) an improvement over singlehood by few of the people who you think would be an improvement over singlehood for you.
I do think that Andrew Hunter has a too strict demand that the woman must not be divorced. A singly divorced person isn’t that much a higher risk of divorce, I think, but more importantly, you can limit the risks through a prenuptial agreement. He can also assess the risk himself, while repeated divorces probably happen the most to less rational people who did not learn from their mistakes.
I also don’t see his motivation to be in a relationship to be particularly strong. ‘Loneliness is lethal’ is just an abstract motivation/rationalization, not a proper reason to get into a relationship based on actually improving your current life. It’s also not particularly appealing to a potential wife to just be better than being alone.
You clearly did, though. I think that ultimately these things can only work if there is a belief by both people that they settled about the same amount. Otherwise you get resentment.
—
Of course there is also a game theory element where people have to judge whether they are likely to miss out on a better partner by settling. When people have the wrong idea about their own relationship value, this can cause them to hold out too long before willing to lower their standards to a more realistic level.
I think that in the current situation, this is especially true for women. Women tend to have higher value as sex partners than as moms (because upon marriage, the sex tends to get less and the men get to provide more: a fairly shitty deal for men). So the quality of man that is willing to have sex or get into non-serious relationships is usually a lot higher than the quality of man that is willing to settle down with them. I think that many women don’t understand this and thus misjudge the quality of man that is willing to settle with them.
If they live in NYC and are open to some form of non-monogamy, you can send them my way 😛
@sophiegrouchy
You could probably find a few of them on the next classified thread.
@CharlesF – I posted in a previous Classified, and just got a bunch of discussion on how my existence supports Red Pill theory (in ways that if they knew me would be shown to be incorrect, but whatevs), so…
Oops. Never mind then.
Why would you have to quit your job? Doesn’t your company have a NYC office?
FWIW, I went to a mediocre state school that had no shortage of women. I was still a hopeless geek and never dated anyone there. Wasn’t until several years out of college that I met the woman I married. And you have the advantage of having actually dated people instead of being a clueless neophyte. But you probably do have to get out of Seattle, where the odds are just bad.
I guess you got lucky, but it still would have been smarter had you focused on social skills earlier and dated someone at your school, no? 🙂
Yes, my employer has a NYC office, but NYC is by far the hardest place to move I can imagine; it would require a sort of Cortez/Alexandrine burning of the ships (well, “selling of all my books, bulky equipment, car, etc”) and a tremendous lifestyle shock. I could barely keep my dog, probably. If I then discovered after two months in NYC that I don’t care for the city–many people don’t!–what do I do then?
I’m trying to work up the courage to do so anyway, though. 🙂 I could maybe attempt to spend six or eight weeks there with just my dog and whatever fits in some suitcases (i.e. not selling my house in Seattle etc) as a trial run, but that’s logistically difficult too, not to mention fantastically expensive. I was going to attempt this in DC in October-November but it looks like I have obligate work travel through most of the month. Scheduling is hard!
(Other incredibly bad mistakes by prior me: getting a dog, buying a house. Do neither of these, young people reading, until you are married and settled permanently; they tremendously restrict your mobility and personal agency even in your chosen city.)
Put the stuff you care about in storage; you could probably rent out your Seattle house through a property management company if you really don’t want to sell it. You _can_ keep the car while living in Manhattan (and in the NYC area, that’s likely where you’ll want to live for your purposes) with some difficulty; all it takes is money.
DC would probably be less of a shock lifestyle-wise; certainly having a car is much more common, and you could probably get a larger place than in Manhattan. I don’t know much about the job or dating market there except
1) There’s a lot of defense and government work and
2) By the numbers, it’s gotta be better than Seattle.
Andrew,
There are a ton of places that you can meet women that don’t require social circle: bars, dancing lessons, some other kind of affinity group.
Online dating is not just about physical attractiveness. If you want to post a link to an online profile of yours I will critique it.
Part of your problem is your attitude. Your negative attitude probably comes across in interactions with potential mates.
All that said, I think you are correct about your advice to the college-aged. People really should take advantage of the social opportunities that college provides. I also didn’t do that to the degree that I should, and I feel like I’m also still paying for that mistake in some ways.
@blah:
Every attractive person thinks this. 🙂 Suffice to say that I’ve read just about every popular guide to making better profiles and better messages, and tried them, and A/B tested them. None of them work.
If you actually believe that online dating is about anything but attractiveness, I will bet you large amounts of money at very favorable odds that you can’t get me dates while using my actual pictures and not lying about me.
That would require me to have such interactions. 🙂
But more seriously, I have heard this before, and I try to keep it in mind. But the litany of Tarski still applies, doesn’t it? I have to be realistic and OK with it.
(As for bars, social groups, etc…hang out in Seattle for a few months and check out the local social scene. You will be be terrified by how viciously unfriendly everyone is. Pretty much everyone says things like “Take dance classes/yoga/cooking/whatever, and hang out with the people afterward!” I have literally not been to any such class/activity where the entire class didn’t instantly leave without talking to anyone they didn’t come in with. I do go social dancing most weeks, and that’s the closest place to “friendly” I’ve seen in Seattle, but despite going there regularly for a year, there are about four people there who know who I am or care. Again, everyone comes in with their own friends and hangs out with their own friends.)
@Andrew
If you do everything I say with your online profile, I am confident that I can get you dates. What odds will you give me?
You say you’ve followed popular guides. Have you invested in professional photographs?
I don’t agree with the Litany of Tarski. There’s plenty of evidence that an irrational level of self confidence will help you in many areas of life, and it’s especially useful with women.
Edit: And Seattle sounds pretty bad by your description. Have you really frequented bars though? I find that inebriation tends to make the most stand-offish people more friendly
By social dancing do you mean a class or the club?
blah:
In reverse order: I dabble in theater, so, yes, I have professional headshots.
I’ve proposed a few variants on this game before. The last time I actually did it, a hot friend of mine and I played Trading Places: he used my pictures and sent whatever messages he thought were good, I used his pictures and sent mindlessly bad ones. (I won, comfortably.) But I generally propose a one-sample test: you write an okcupid profile using my pictures of your choice (I’ll give you all of them)–say whatever you want so long as it’s true about me. (I can provide you with a couple old profiles of mine for baseline copy.) I give you a list of, say, 100 profiles to message. You do whatever you want; I pay you $N per one who actually goes out with me (and isn’t actually a bot / hooker / scammer, obviously). Again, you have to say true things about me. Your side is a flat $M, so you “win” if you get me at least $N/$M dates.
What $N would you like for a $M of, say, $200?
(re: social dancing, I mean a…dance night? I’m not sure what to call it, it’s not a class (though they teach a nightly lesson), and while they use a standing venue it’s not “their” space.)
Andrew,
I don’t think professional headshots are very good for dating profiles, but I’d have to see them. Dating profile pictures need to have you doing interesting things or at least sub-communicating attractiveness based on your pose/expression.
I’m interested in playing this game, but I want to do it with Coffee Meets Bagel rather than OKC. I met my last girlfriend on OKC, but I find that CMB is a lot better nowadays. $N would depend on how attractive the 100 girls are. So you’d have to show me the list before I can give you a bid. Also, you probably need better pictures. So if I reject the pictures you send me, you’ll have to take new ones with either a friend who is good at photography and has a DSLR or hire a professional. In this scenario, I’ll tell you what kind of photographs to take based on your interests and hobbies.
(I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a dance night. Is it ballroom dancing or the type of dancing you’d do at a club?)
The dance I favor is “fusion”–it’s technically not ballroom dance, but you’d be forgiven for not knowing the difference. (A DJ plays music, we dance in pairs with a lead and a follow and various interesting moves.)
My theater headshot album (well, selections from it) is here. (I typically use this one for auditions.
I’m happy to try to get better photos of the sort you like, though I am doubtful it’s feasible–my hobbies don’t really photograph well. (I have half a dozen photos lying about of me rolling, and since I’m not Clark Gracie, I look terrible; photos of me singing tend to come out like this (though sometimes I have a less ludicrous costume…I’ll be happy to listen to your suggestions for new photos, though.
I’m just saying, by comparison, take a random stock photo of some hot Israeli guy holding a beer and have him send generic “hey” messages, and he gets 10x my response rate on okcupid. 🙂
CMB makes it pretty difficult to run experiments, doesn’t it? We’re limited to whoever they show me.
Wait, if attractiveness is all that matters, why does it matter if they lie about you? They can lie and say you’re more attractive than the photos make you look, I guess, but that doesn’t seem very likely to be believed.
suntzuanime: I mean, it matters most because I have to (hypothetically) date these girls and I’m not OK with pretending to be someone I’m not [1]; it’s morally wrong if blah gets them to go out with me by telling them I’m, IDK, a famous rock star, no?
(Also, while my contention is that looks are a hugely dominant part of online dating, I’ll admit they are not the only thing that potentially matters; partners will be interested in what you do for a living, for instance, and I don’t want him to lie and say I’m something high status; that’s not a fair comparison to me having to tell girls I’m a loser with a job for dorks.)
[1] And yet I’m hypothetically OK with someone else pretending to be me for this whole Cyrano bet. I’m unsure if this is hypocritical of me.
This probably isn’t helpful, but Andrew doesn’t look unattractive to me.
Looks above average. Not a pretty man, perhaps, but attractive. Seems trim, fit. No abnormalities. Masculine face.
Certainly better looking than me, and I don’t consider myself part of the too ugly for society set.
I don’t know. Are standards of physical beauty a lot higher in the US or something?
Andrew watch the show “The Undateables” – it’s about a load of people with disfigurements and weird personality traits going on dates. It always cheers me up.
@Andrew Hunter:
Is the pic attached to your handle you?
Do you think that is an attractive photograph of you?
Not “Do you think you are attractive based on that photo?”
Rather “Do you think that photo does the best job of communicating how attractive you can be?”
blah, you’re reminding me of a discussion about the economics of marriage– there was a lot of complaint about people treating dating as an end in itself rather than a search for a mate.
It occurred to me that people need freedom of choice to get out of– or not get into– bad relationships, but I think that gets linked to dating as a lifestyle and it doesn’t have to.
I’m not blaming people who really don’t want to get married, but I think there are also people who would like to be married but don’t really think about actually getting married for a decade or more of dating.
Or, alternatively, it causes thoughts like “I am a regular person who has been fairly successful in life and ISN’T hideously deformed and I still can’t get any living human female to talk to me for more than 5 minutes, what in the actual fuck.”
Stores about one-legged blind men with severe learning disabilities still finding love do not inspire me. They instead fill me with envious rage.
I’m in the U.S. and had the same reaction you did–Andrew looks neither unusually handsome nor unusually plain.
@ Andrew Hunter
A minor thing that you may or may not be doing, for online dating profiles you really should just have 1 or 2 “this is what I look like” photos, and everything else should be you either doing something you like or with people you like. Unless you are very attractive a blurry picture of you crossing the finish line running a half marathon, or hiking or dancing with someone says a lot more.
Oh there’s a whole science to this. You need a solid portfolio of photos.
1 really decent headshot to show your facial features
1 full length body shot to prove you aren’t fat
1 photo of you with kids (nieces or nephews ideal) to prove you can be a family man
1 photo of you participating in some sort of cool/active/athletic hobby
1 photo of you with attractive women to make it seem like you’ve already been given approval
1 photo of you “out with the guys” to prove you have decent social skills
(optional) photo of you in a suit or standing near to something expensive/luxurious to imply an ample income (this one’s tricky because some subtlety is required so you don’t seem like you’re bragging or showing off)
Seconding MattM here.
The indispensable photo is the one with you and an attractive woman. Just don’t go overboard: if there are two or more women in the shot crop it down to the one closest to you.
For the full body pic make sure that you highlight your height. If you’re 6′ or taller just stand next to a reference object like a doorframe. If you’re shorter than 6′ have a shorter friend take the picture and/or use perspective tricks.
Try to use a real camera if at all possible. If you’re broke a cellphone camera is acceptable but not for your profile pic.
You guys are mostly overthinking the photo stuff.
Post pictures of you doing things that you do. If you don’t do anything that is one problem, if you don’t do anything with other people that is a different issue.
If you don’t like kids much you will look unnatural and unattractive (less attractive) standing next to kids, a photo of your plumber’s crack while you are wedged under a sink says “handy” far better than you standing in front of a bunch of tools.
@Andrew
Dude, you are above average in terms of physical attractiveness. I think we’re probably about the same level of physical attractiveness, but the pictures on my dating profile are: rock climbing action shot, at an orchard, in Paris, and in a group of my friends doing a fun activity.
I want to maintain a certain level of anonymity here so I can talk about sensitive topics (e.g. See my admission about dealing with social anxiety down thread), but if you want to post an email that you use, I’ll email you the link to my OKC profile.
Do you use that photo of you in that ridiculous costume? I almost laughed out loud when I saw that. I think that would be really good for your dating profile. Girls seem to love guys to be playful and even silly, which is something that I have trouble with myself.
Regarding CMB vs OKC, I’m more concerned with you feeling less hopeless about your dating situation than doing an experiment or winning some bet. I think you can probably get one or two dates per week on CMB, Bumble, or Tinder, unless your standards are much higher than mine. So why don’t we just use that as some kind of standard that we’re trying to reach.
Edit: Also, are you married to that haircut? It’s not terrible, but it looks kind of last century.
I think the main problem is that you look a bit standoffish in most of those photographs. Probably good for theater auditions, certainly bad for an online dating profile.
And now I’m just kind of nitpicking, but when you wear a button down shirt tucked in, you should always wear a belt.
@Nancy
Are you suggesting that I’m treating dating as an end in itself? Andrew says he wants to get married and getting him more online dates would certainly be conducive to that end.
@Andrew
Also, I’ve never heard of fusion dance. Is this it? https://youtu.be/R0uQor_juqE?t=14s
Anyway, I was just trying to figure out if it was a partner dance or not. Sounds like it is. So do you talk with your partner as you are dancing? Seems like it would be rude for your partner to ignore you while you’re dancing with her, no matter how standoffish Seattleites are.
I agree with blah here. You need a different set of photos for online dating. At least one with a full, open-mouth smile to help come across as a little more genuine (only one picture shows your teeth – which don’t look bad, so not sure if that’s a point of self-consciousness or just personality). Another photo of you doing stuff with other people, bonus points for having your arm around someone else or as part of a group (side-hug style – doesn’t matter if it’s a guy or a girl) to show you play well with others.
I’m pretty fascinated by this potential experiment though…
Probably not higher than any other comparably developed euro-descended nation, with the exception of certain very specific places and subcultures (Venice Beach comes to mind).
That said, hetero/bi men and women rate each other VERY differently. In the case of females, 80% of males are below median physical attractiveness, almost all of those WELL below median physical attractiveness. The more common and colloquial terms for ‘well below median physical attractiveness’ are left as an exercise to the reader.
However, this isn’t as bad as it sounds because “rating of attractiveness” != “level of actual interest” for women. I recommend OKCupid’s Blog Posts by Christian Rudder or his book Dataclysm for this sort of thing, though the blog probably has more actionable advice in terms of dating while the book is more broad scale analysis of the aggregated data.
“@Nancy
Are you suggesting that I’m treating dating as an end in itself? Andrew says he wants to get married and getting him more online dates would certainly be conducive to that end.”
No, it was just a thing that came to mind from a discussion elsewhere. I should have started a new thread with it rather than posting it as a reply.
@Blah: thanks for the advice on new pictures. As it happens, I have plenty of action shots from theater & sports, several pictures of me hanging out with other people (e.g. me and Belle and our director), I’ve tried out all of these on Tinder/OKC, and I’ve seen little to no success with them either. They’re probably not great pictures, but short of hiring a model photographer to follow me around at Vertical World and do a photoshoot, I’m not sure how I’d get better. You’re probably right that I could smile more, and I work on hat, and if I had a way to get lots of pictures taken with a big glittering group of bright young things I’d do that, but not being popular, I don’t.
I think we’re in agreement then that you couldn’t succeed with the sort of pictures of me that actually exist?
And a note on you and the other saying you thought my photos made me look relatively decent: revealed preferences. Plenty of people I know will say similar things. Every piece of evidence I have from dating sites, or comments from strangers who aren’t motivated to be nice say otherwise. I trust the two recruiters who spent ten minutes laughing at how ugly I was while I waited for an interview candidate at work (they thought I couldn’t hear them…) or the (est.) 25,000 women who’ve rejected me online a lot more than someone who’s socially obligated to say nice things.
@Andrew Hunter
I don’t think SSC commenters are especially under social pressure to claim you look nice. I would say that from those photos you have a better-than-average body and an average face, although the face is more characterful than average. That might sound damning (with faint praise), but it shouldn’t. The first other men I can think of with similarly “characterful” faces are Benedict Cumberbatch and a guy I know who’s married.
I think that heterosexual men generally are bad at identifying some kinds of male ugliness/blandness and male attractiveness.
People like Steve Buscemi and George Clooney are pretty obvious, but I’ve also seen Seth Rogen on a list of ugly actors and he seems pretty averagey to me.
@Aapje
I think celebrities are a special case, because being much more attractive than average is often a prerequisite for becoming an actor (or pop musician etc.), so those who are average by general population standards look ugly in comparison to their peers.
@rlms: I don’t know if you’re under particular social pressure, but it’s free for you to say that. It’s a costly signal for a girl to actually spend time for me (etc.) Therefore we should trust that latter signal to more accurately match reality.
(I suppose this isn’t quite the same as a revealed preference, but if there’s a term for this particular part of signaling games I forget it.)
I suppose I could have been even less nice in my interpretation of your problems if I had tried, but … .
It’s evidence that there is some reason girls don’t want to spend time with you, but not that the reason is your face. As I may have already suggested, your posts in this thread suggest an alternative hypothesis.
I am from Seattle and live on the East Coast …. I just can’t imagine anyone thinking the grass is greener here than there. Seattle is great! And I have never heard it has fewer single women than elsewhere. I think all my Seattle girlfriends are married now, but they didn’t marry particularly young. I like the idea of trying to socialize more with UW women. You might also try outdoor activities (hiking, sailing, whatever) if you don’t loathe them … that’s what people do out there, and you can meet a lot of cool people that way.
I’m honestly not sure what you are suggesting. You did say:
Are you saying that you think I prefer moping to trying? That I seem depressive and negative and people can tell? Or just that the way I write makes me seem unlikable? Or something else I’m not understanding?
All I will say in my defense is that…I’ve been doing this for what feels like quite some time, and I ask for advice a lot, and believe or not I try to follow it…and much of it is really useless because people don’t realize what other factors are in play for them. A lot of the time it feels like people are quoting me a walkthrough for Final Fantasy V when I’m complaining I can’t beat Final Fantasy VI [1] and not realizing why that’s not helpful. And so I’m frustrated and feel like I missed my window–or more precisely, college was the last time I felt like I was playing the same game as my advisors, and I squandered it–hence this whole subthread.
I would like to think that in real life I am both more positive and less obsessed with this than I am in this thread, which just happened to hit me on a hard day of a hard week (dealing with a minor breakup and another minor social failure while incredibly stressed from work), and I really am trying to make progress. (Your suggestion to look for graduate students was genuinely helpful and I’m actively brainstorming ways I could potentially meet them, so far without success but it’s only been a day. Other than moving, which I can’t do yet, it’s the most actionable advice I have at the moment.)
I am not one to often use the phrase “victim blaming” but can you see why I might read your comments as somewhat unfair to me here?
[1] Disclaimer: have not played either, not really a JRPG person. But they’re quite different, presumably, given the usual FF pattern?
@Andrew
I realize, now, that it was a mistake for me to evaluate your looks at all. I think it suggested to you that I bought into your misconception that looks are the major factor in online dating. I just don’t agree that looks are the most important thing for online dating.
There’s an error in your reasoning when you say that the number of women who’ve rejected you online proves that you’re ugly. You’re assuming that the reason they rejected you is your looks. But I don’t believe that assumption is justified.
I think you’re suffering from a corollary to the typical mind fallacy. Individuals of either sex tend to assume that what attracts them will attract the opposite sex. So if you base who you message online 90% off looks (that’s what I do), then you assume that’s how women send messages or decide to respond to messages.
Women are far less visual than men on average and looks are only one component of a synthetic evaluation that covers many different qualities. So if through your pictures and profile you can show that you’re a cool guy, that can capture a woman’s interest.
The thing is, you actually seem to be a cool guy. You have interesting hobbies. You do BJJ, you climb, you do theater. You just need to show that through your pictures.
You say that you’ve included pictures of yourself doing your cool hobbies. Can you link those pictures?
I am very confident that you’re doing something wrong with online dating, I just haven’t figured out what yet. If you have no pictures in which you’re smiling, then that could be it. Or it could be that your pictures are too boring. Or it could be what you’ve written on your profile. Or it could be the types of messages that you send. Or it could be a hundred other things.
Can you just link me to your OKC profile? If you do that, I should be able to figure out what the problem(s) is(are).
I can think of other reasons why two women might have a conversation about why you are ugly other than you being really ugly, but never-mind that.
Let’s just assume that you have a specific type of super-ugliness that only women can see.
You’ve got to look for some cute, kind, lower-class woman. Date respectable working class women in their late twenties/early thirties. They’ll be impressed by your cash flow.
Don’t go cool. You’re ugly, remember? Go well off. Find someone who will be impressed by your money, whatever that might be.
Don’t forget fat girls. I know this is incredibly un-PC, but it’s also 100% true. Fat girls have significantly lower standards. Try POF. It’s bottom of the barrel but you can get some responses…
@Matt M
I’m not sure if this is trolling or not, but I think part of the issue is that Andrew has high standards, and I don’t think he should lower them.
I don’t think I’m appreciable more physically attractive than Andrew. We have similar hobbies (in one case the same). We both have nerdy jobs. I also consider myself to have high standards. But when I’m really applying myself with my online dating accounts I probably average 1.5 dates per week with girls who meet my standards for physical attractiveness. So if Andrew is getting 0 per week, then something is not adding up. That’s why I think he’s doing something and maybe multiple things wrong.
Edit: I do think my haircut in most of my photos is better than Andrew’s haircut in the photos that he’s show us. So maybe that’s it. I recommended a new haircut upthread, but Andrew never acknowledged it.
Not trolling – 100% serious. I was averaging zero, and then I lowered my standards by a lot, and then I averaged I dunno, 1-2 per month. Which still sucks, but hey.
Maybe we need to get you on the blah online dating program as well.
I just want to be clear that I don’t think I’m some kind of Lothario. I just feel that I have the online dating thing pretty well optimized. I’m better online than I am in person, and I actually have a significant amount of trouble getting second dates from girls that I meet online. As a result, I’ve actually been focusing on meeting girls offline recently.
So I don’t have everything figured out. I’m just trying to help people with the part that I do feel I have answers for.
Don’t forget fat girls. I know this is incredibly un-PC, but it’s also 100% true. Fat girls have significantly lower standards. Try POF. It’s bottom of the barrel but you can get some responses…
Hey! As a Person Of Orbitude, I resemble that remark!
Seriously though, guys (and I do mean “guys”), some of you have spoken rather resentfully of your experiences of being the “not unless I was absolutely fucking desperate” choice (or not) in the dating world.
Let’s try extrapolating how that feels onto others when talking of possible avenues of approach, hmmm? “Well yeah, she’ll do for a desperation fuck in the dark but you’d want to have no other choice and you certainly don’t want to be seen out in public, or in daylight, or indeed at all by anyone else, with her”. Maybe not phrase it like that?
I have to say that Andrew’s “oh, no one will date me” reminds me of some fat girls I know who say “oh, no one will date me” when in reality their shitty attitudes about how stuck-up men are about fat women are what keep lots of guys away.
I know it’s hard out there, and you’re free to make things harder on yourself, but you should admit you are making things harder on yourself and ask if it’s worth it.
My brief forays into online dating have been quite nerve-wracking and none-too-promising, but I have some rather egregious, difficult-to-hide mental-health-related shortcomings, and I don’t think my fundamentals are appreciably better than yours in the looks department, so I was still kind of surprised at how well I was doing. I guess it could be a more favorable demographic situation in my city, or perhaps my standards aren’t quite as high as yours, but on the off chance that it is just a looks issue, have you ever tried growing out your facial hair? It would probably help masculinize your jawline. (I set my beard trimmer to 4.5mm, for the record.)
Also, if you weren’t already doing it, you could try following this guy’s advice (also this), which I make sure to do whenever I have someone take a pic for my dating profiles.
@Andrew –
Use Terra, Celes, Sabin, and anyone else (Gogo is my fav)
Equip economizer and Gem Box on Terra. Spam Ultimax2 every turn. Gogo mimics. Celes spams ultima/heals. Sabin use bum rush/air blade.
(FF6 strat)
@blah. I’m happy to help with the okc rewrite if you want assistance.
@Andrew; I’m hoping that you are just responding on a particularly bad day. I’m just sharing my impressions from your writing on this OT, so if it’s a bad sample of your communication then any inferences are likewise skewed. That said, I would be VERY surprised if it was really Seattle vs. your behavior. I used to live in DC and I found the average girls very annoying and overly political. But I still was able to have a reasonable dating life with a subset of women I liked.
I’m reminded of this parable:
A man who was traveling came upon a farmer working in his field and asked him what the people in the next village were like. The farmer asked “What were the people like in the last village you visited?” The man responded “They were kind, friendly, generous, great people.” “You’ll find the people in the next village are the same,” said the farmer.
Another man who was traveling to the same village came up to the same farmer somewhat later and asked him what the people in the next village were like. Again the farmer asked “What were the people like in the last village you visited?” The second man responded, “They were rude, unfriendly, dishonest people.” “You’ll find the people in the next village are the same,” said the farmer.
And the only reason I am being persistent here is that I have been in similarly frustrated shoes. And the important variable was my behavior, not my city. You’re not me, so YMMV.
Perhaps because I am in a similar situation, I cannot resist throwing in my two cents. I have no advice to give, but I will try to give you an unbiased evaluation.
1) In terms of facial attractiveness, you are unattractive, but in an endearing way. It helps that you are well-groomed and fit. I would say you are a 5/10 (and I would rate myself as a 7/10).
I think what is throwing other commenters off is that so many people in America are not simply ugly, but actually disgusting: slovenly, obese, dirty, unkempt, etc. You are none of that; you are 0% disgusting. But that does not automatically put one at 6/10.
2) Your body looks good. I would say it’s a 7.5/10 (and I would rate myself at 6.5/10). You are, indeed, more fit than the average American. However, for the kind of woman you want to date, this is more of a baseline than a standout achievement.
BTW, I’m assuming you are at least 6 feet tall.
3) You sound like a very interesting person. You have a lot of cool hobbies and things going on. You also have a dog and a house; apart from your romantic setbacks, you seem to really have your life together. I would rate you at 8/10 (and myself at 6/10).
I also live in a bad city for dating. On top of that, I take part in far fewer activities, and therefore should have fewer chances to meet people. And I put almost zero effort into doing so (less than you apparently do). I’m also a similar age.
Given the above, I would say that I am a worse (or, at best, no better) person than you in every respect *except* for facial attractiveness.
However, I seem to be able to meet women, go on dates, etc. at a significantly higher rate than what you report. This seems to corroborate your assumptions on the importance of facial attractiveness (though it is by no means conclusive).
That said, remember that more familiar faces are perceived as more attractive. You already look more attractive after looking at your photo album for a few minutes. You may be at a disadvantage when women are flipping through hundreds of profiles, but if you can get them to spend some time with you, at least some of them are bound to start perceiving you as interesting instead.
In any case, you seem like a cool guy and I would like to be your friend if we lived in the same city.
I think Seattle is your problem. I’d suggest Spokane as an alternative if it’s feasible. The weather is better, the politics are better, and the people are better. If I was freed from the worries of career requirements, I think I’d be living there.
There’s a difference between picky and self-defeating. You lean heavily in the latter camp. While I grant you credit that you have experience, and you’re not trying to blame this on one force or another, it still feels like you’re strategically aiming to lose, like you don’t actually want to marry someone. You seem to hedge a significant chunk of your life to “getting married,” which I think is really unhealthy. Like you take this OCD-level analysis of “dating markets” and prior relationships, and really pushing out your physical appearance, as well picking the “right” university. This is becoming such a hang-up it’s turning it into a meat hook.
I think it’s necessary for you not to admit defeat but just focus your energy elsewhere, anything but trying to get married. Instead of spending time trying to find someone, sublimate that time into something useful and meaningful (and hopefully social). You’re 29, FFS. If you’re saying you lost because you’re too “old” for this, you’re basically letting something else – society, your past experiences, science – dictate how you live, and that’s hurting you. You need to get out of that mindset, since that’s probably, more than anything else, what’s preventing you from finding a meaningful relationship with someone.
That said, get out of Seattle. Place is expensive as all get out.
You may overestimate the meaningfulness of my mopey comments on a slow Sunday to my life as practiced. I think I do exactly what you suggest: I spent all of July performing in a local Gilbert & Sullivan company’s Pinafore and training my ass off for the Seattle Open BJJ tournament. I cook a lot. I climb regularly (another area where I’m searching for a partner, though in a different sense :P), I go social dancing, I play Magic. If anything, I have too many things taking up my time, not too few.
I don’t spend most days sitting around wishing I was dating someone. I just know from experience that none of the above will get me a partner, and so I’m going to get more and more alone as everyone I know pairs off and stops talking to their weird single friend. So I’m trying pretty hard to be OK with that in the medium term. It will kill me in the long run–lonely people die–but what cannot be cured must be endured.
I don’t think any of that, or your response contradicts my original posts’ point: I squandered my best hopes and chances through a series of dumb decisions I didn’t know I was making; I’d give almost anything for the chance to take those back; anyone young enough to still have the chance would be well-served by optimizing on those grounds.
With all of those opportunities to meet potential partners, I’m baffled. Is it that you haven’t met anyone at all that you find interesting? Or have you asked them out and been turned down?
Some vague pattern-matching makes me ask this question (and please, please don’t get upset by it – I mean well). Have you tried dating or experimenting sleeping with guys? There was a time in my life (lasting several years in my 20s) when I had trouble dating because I figured out I’m somewhat bisexual but didn’t know what to do about it. What helped for me was working to figure this part of me out and learning to think of it as a positive thing. After becoming comfortable with it and experimenting a little it turned out I am attracted to some guys but not aroused by gay erotic situations. In the end I’m functionally heterosexual though I tell close friends and girlfriends that I’m bi. Just figuring these things out (even before I slept with a guy) made me much more comfortable and gave me the confidence to have what I consider a successful love life (as it happens, with women).
Now that there is some proper orthogonal advice. Instantly double your dating pool!
Way better than double, in my experience. It’s really pretty easy to get dates with guys.
No, I am firmly a Kinsey 0.
> it might be epsilon better at MIT or Mudd or Caltech but you will die alone if you go there
Hey, I met my wife at Caltech. And if you’re a nerdy *woman*, then the odds are really good there. And if you’re a man, well, then you just have to stand out above a fairly low threshold.
I don’t want to be overly harsh, but I think your self-assessment is crap. I’m 31 now and only met my future fiancee at 29 (on OKC), but at the time I was having a lot of fun dating around. And I say this as a StarCraft playing, right-wing nerd in a 2nd tier lefty city.
Bluntly, your AGE is not the limiting factor here.
What’s the bottleneck here? Are you having trouble converting outbound messages into inbound? Conversations into dates? Dates into repeat dates/relationships?
Have you ever read Models by Mark Manson? It’s the only really worthwhile book from the “pickup” scene, and it might do you some good. It provides guidance on how to build a more attractive lifestyle.
As for photos, I would try smiling in some of your photos. I think you come across as attractive but very cold.
The bottleneck in the conversion funnel is lead generation. I do OK, if not great, talking to girls in person, but it’s basically next to impossible to arrange. (Online results, see other subthreads, but short version it’s not appreciably different from writing my okcupid messages longhand and burning them in a woodstove–my tinder match rate is maybe 0.05%, and of those matches perhaps 1% ever responds to anything I say.)
Most advice I read online from any credible source goes on and on about what is or isn’t attractive or authentic or whatever word they like to use, and just assumes you’re going to have dozens of opportunties to practice this. I would estimate I talk to a single woman once a year.
Do you have any close female friends/relatives that can read your profile and give direct feedback on language or photos? I would also take blah up on his offer.
There’s a whole lot of not necessarily intuitive signaling going on with profiles. And solely based on your writing in this OT, you communication style may be too direct and off-putting for the basic profile and flirty initial comment stage.
Yes, if you are a 10 attractiveness male, you do not need to put forth too much thought into your messages. For everyone who’s not a male model, we have to put a little work into the messages, and even when you write a great, insightful, and funny note… you’re going to have a crappy response rate. Dating, like sales, is a #s game.
What about your social dancing? You have to have the opportunity to talk to single women there.
What about theater? I’d guess the straight women to straight man ration is thoroughly in your favor.
Second @blah. My male friends who have done theater and dancing tend to have a disproportionate amount of success with women, partly because of favorable gender ratios at those activities. Even if the women who are dancing/acting with you aren’t single, if they like you, they’d be recommending you to their single friends.
Again, based on this limited data, I would bet that something isn’t clicking in your communication style. If you believe that you’re not attractive, you’re probably subcommunicating that belief – and women tend to be good at picking up on stuff like that.
I agree about the communications skills thing. I’ve been wondering if there’s something subtly off about the way you interact with women you’re attracted to.
Alternative explanation: theaters and dance clubs drive away men who are not successful with women 😉
My prior says this claim is pure woo. However, the SSC audience is remarkably good at digging up actual studies confirming (or refuting) implausible claims. I hope this will happen again.
And solely based on your writing in this OT, you communication style may be too direct and off-putting for the basic profile and flirty initial comment stage…
…and even when you write a great, insightful, and funny note… you’re going to have a crappy response rate.
These two sections, man, these two sections right here.
Fix this first. Even the nerdiest weirdest guys I know have girlfriends, but they interact with WAY more single girls than you. Even if you’re incredibly hot, your chances with that single girl is a 1 in 10 scenario, at best. For average joes, you’re more likely to hit a home run off a MLB pitcher.
@publius.
I don’t have published data, just personal observations, so discount accordingly. But having been involved with theater myself, most theater types tend to be hyper-tolerant of weirdos and guys who aren’t great with women. (Also tend to be very intolerant of non-left politics, but usually not an issue if you don’t bring it up).
Maybe second claim was over broad but I think feeling unattractive will translate into lack of confidence. People can generally pick up on that and in past surveys I’ve seen, “Confidence” is usually the top or at least one of top few qualities women screen for when evaluating attractiveness in men.
When I was your age (cough like 11 years ago), I was single. I met my now-wife when I was 33; we got married when I was 36.
I probably have/had a more handsome face than you do, and I’m college educated (edit: Sorry, I thought I remembered you saying you weren’t college educated, but now I see references to the contrary). But I’m not devastatingly attractive, you probably have a better body than I did, and I don’t have particularly unique attractors. I was far from an awesome playa, but I dated several women each year and didn’t have that much trouble meeting people.
If your dancing and theatre and so forth don’t get you in front of single women, then go to a goddamn club. Or aggressively shop around for activity things until you find one that has a few ladies that you’d be interested in dating, and ask them all out, and then if you have no success with those ladies, keep shopping around for new activity things. Or change jobs to a large company and do work events and ask out coworkers who you don’t interact with on a daily basis. There’s no reason why you should be doomed to a life of loneliness based on what you’ve said here.
Your male friends don’t live in Seattle.
You are right that the female : male ratio is good in theater (and better if you strip out the gay men), but essentially all the women are married or in a multi-year relationship (and have been since college.) I guess my terrible unlikability and off-putting nature is preventing me from being recommended to their single friends, if they have any, but I’m not convinced they do.
Dance is a little better, oddly, despite men outnumbering women (this is Seattle.) I have gotten briefly involved with a few, though nothing has come of it. (Also, and again, yes, I’m evil and picky, the overwhelming majority of women at my dance event of choice are from the vaguely poly/pagan/hippie/hyper-liberal tribe, which isn’t at all what I want to be involved with long term. Before you suggest I change to a different dance style/community, I’ll tell you that I’ve tried three or four and this is the only one which any substantial population of women attend.)
Trying hard to not say something sarcastic here, but, yes, of course this is the problem. I know that–sorry, I thought I was clear from the first post that this was the problem. That’s what I’m trying to fix, without any success as of yet. I have had zero success in finding them existing anywhere.
If you’re looking for more traditional girls, you should try church.
I’ve had maybe a dozen OKCupid profiles, as I abandon accounts every year or so when I can no longer stand shouting into the wind, but here’s a representative one (ignore the photos.) It was about as successful as any of them, maybe a modicum above average (though nothing has been as successful as being 21.) If you all insist in critiquing it, go ahead (though I haven’t touched this account in months.)
https://www.okcupid.com/profile/hmsmars
I’ll ask you again, do you think your profile pic here does a good job of representing you in an attractive light?
Because you have several pictures in the profile that bear a resemblance to this one. And they give off a strong vibe. The vibe is “I am angry at the world”.
That is not a vibe you want to project when you are trying to date.
Dude. You’re 6’1″, not overweight, and have no obvious deformities.
Okay, your face doesn’t look like a young Brad Pitt’s, but I don’t think physical attractiveness is your issue.
I have no idea what it is, but you shouldn’t have a 1 in 2000 swipe right rate.
You seem to have plenty of money, why not hire someone to put together a tinder profile?
It’s pretty easy to judge the performance of those guys — it’s just swipe rate before vs swipe rate after, so I’d expect the market to be pretty transparent.
Maybe a professional photographer too, see what the profile person says.
This might be confounded by Andrew’s comments here, but yeah, I’d probably agree that the vibe is there. Andrew, have you considered interventions to improve your perception of the world (and yourself in it) in general? Meditation, therapy, empathogens?
IMO
I think the stuff you have written at the beginning is mixing quirkiness with obscurity and coming across as strange.
So… you’ve got the 6 foot 1, rich intelligent thing going on. I’m not sure you need sea-shanty as an opener.
I don’t know what sous vide is, so I assume you’re automatically going to turn off anyone who isn’t classy. And non-classy people are your best bet for a non-judgmental date.
So, I think your opening paragraph, you’re trying to say – I’m quirky, classy, strong and intelligent, but it’s not direct enough and worded a bit obscurely so it’s hard to relate to.
Sea shanties is a bit *too* quirky without any further explanation. Sous vide is a bit *too* classy (what is it?).
‘A good day involves picking up something heavy’ – what’s wrong with saying ‘I love lifting weights’ or something else along those lines?
So, I’m already disconnected after reading the first few lines, then I scan through and it’s just more strange stuff I can’t relate to – ‘I’m good at roasting chickens’… ‘porterhouse for one’…
If I was you I’d be like:
Hey – I’m a tall intelligent man with a big nose. And you know what they say about men with big noses. I’m into sea shanties, grog and cute kittens.
I’m also very strong.
I’m really good at:
I ran a gambling ring in high school.
Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food
Sous vide (look it up).
And the rest is fine.
I don’t have a specific answer for you, Andrew, but maybe you could get some perspective on your situation by considering a slightly different question.
Suppose you didn’t just WANT to get married, you HAD to get married and stay married, and fairly soon at that. What would you do?
I agree with the above. Way too much quirky and pretense.
I’d say that you try too hard to impress, missing the part where you show that you are a person with human qualities. Even more importantly, you come across as not needing/wanting anybody in your life. Ordering “the porterhouse for two, for one” makes me think of that scene where Terry Jones overeats and blows up in the restaurant, not a person who is nice on a date.
The rest of your profile also doesn’t have any reference to some activity where a woman might come in and have a great time with you. Given what you’d told us here, something like: ‘I’m looking for a smart girl to dance the night away’ seems appropriate. Many women like to dance, it is an activity for two, it hints to intimacy, etc.
PS. The profile picture is really bad. That pose is really weird, your arms are invisible and again you come across as pretentious.
To me it reads like he has reached a “fuck it” stage.
Roughly my reaction. My first response was that his profile was boastful and pretentious so it wasn’t surprising nobody responded, my second to wonder if that was typical of profiles on the site, that being the first such I have ever seen.
I suggest that he should take up the offer to have someone else rewrite his profile and see what happens.
Very cool that so many SSC-ers are trying to help you out. There’s some good advice in here. A few points I wanted to make:
I’m a straight guy, and even I think you are above average-looking. Someone said you should change your haircut; I have no clue about that but get some advice from someone who knows more about this.
Someone mentioned getting a female friend to read over your profile. This is great advice. (Have her do the same for your photos.) Women your age in your city will know much more about this than any of us. 🙂
You could even have a female read over your “first message” that you are considering sending to a female you meet online.
I think it’s awesome that David Friedman is helping you out. One thing he mentioned was that if you go to non-top-tier city, your perfect match there could be a grad student. I agree, and I would add “young female professors” to the pool of candidates. There are plenty of PhD candidates, esp. in the humanities, who would live in just about any city in order to land a professorship. So the professors you meet there, besides being more or less intellectually compatible with you, may be nothing like the “natives” in that town.
But changing cities is a big step. Work on easier potential solutions first.
Finally, ask some of your female friends if you come across badly. Some people on this site thought you might project a negative attitude. I think it’s hard to tell just from reading posts, so I think it’s worth asking someone you know IRL.
Yeah, what HeelBearCub said about the photos. The profile itself isn’t too bad, although comes off as trying a bit too hard to be quirky. But the photos do you no favours – the one with the dog is good, but if your hair is different (are you currently blond or back to brown?) then don’t include ones with different-coloured to what you have now hair.
One at least of the photos would immediately turn me off because it makes you look like “Unironically into Henry Rollins when Henry Rollins was unironically into angry screaming”; for a potential date it comes across as “on a date with this guy he would harangue me all through it about the state of the world and politics, then possibly steal my purse at the end”.
You have a decent looking face, try smiling! Unless you have the kind of face where smiling makes you look like a crazed killer clown and I don’t think you do. You’re not bad looking at all, the no-smoking would be a plus for me (were I a typical female) and there’s no reason your profile couldn’t garner you a few chances, if you drop the “looks like a cast member from American History X” photos.
I don’t know what sous vide is
Fancy term for “boil in the bag” 🙂 Not necessarily classy, as it’s also widely used as a commercial food preparation method both for retail stores (frozen foods) and restaurants/food service operations where “get it out fast, cheap and in large amounts” is the main criterion.
Can be ‘classy’ if done as “home style gourmet cooking for personal freezing and later consumption” but you would need to make that distinction very clear. (Please note: I am in no way classy myself, this does not reflect on either Andrew or Mark). The “interested in cooking” part is good, too, as it holds the promise of “I can cook a nice dinner for two if we get to the stage of inviting you over for a meal”; I didn’t mind the “porterhouse for two, for one” line as it indicates he has a healthy appetite and won’t expect a female date to pick daintily at a salad like a bird else he’ll judge her a glutton if she eats more than six forkfuls at once (er, you won’t think a woman who likes her food is a glutton, will you?)
And yet, we’re telling him that he has too high of standards and should be less picky :p
At some point it seems absurd to simultaneously tell people “You need to not look for anything specific and be willing to date anyone who is willing to date you” AND “Go spend $100 to hire a professional photographer because the angle of your chin is slightly off on your third photo which assuredly is responsible for 99% of women rejecting you”
I’m not seeing it. The first one helps you be willing to go on dates with more people. The second makes more people willing to go on dates with you. They both serve the goal of increasing the number of potential dates, just from different angles.
Of course they do, and of course if your goal is to maximize dates both are good advice.
But I think a lot of people turn away at the concept of fundamental unfairness, and if you tell them simultaneously:
“You must not have any standards whatsoever, having high standards is bad because of reasons x, y, z”
AND ALSO
“The reason you can’t get any dates is because one of your five photos is somewhat imperfect and might remind girls of a musician they don’t like”
I think that’s likely to trigger a “fuck that, I’ll just die alone then” sort of response. You’re telling me that *I* have to be absolutely perfect in every way or no women will ever so much as talk to me, but at the same time, I must be willing to talk to and date every woman on Earth because having high standards is stupid and counterproductive.
If high standards are so bad, then it seems odd to also imply that 99% of women will have a standard of “absolute perfection”
I don’t know who Henry Rollins is; the second picture in the slideshow though is very bad. It’s an expression of contempt, like you’ve already ruled hypothetical-female-me out, so why would I bother? I know about trying to display high value, but I don’t think you hit the mark there.
Like others have said, get a photo of you, in a group, obviously enjoying yourself.
Maybe, but it’s fundamentally an economics problem. Just like in a job interview, both parties want a large pool of offers from which they can pick the best one. If you get enough offers, by increasing the perceived value you present, you can be more picky. If you are less picky, you have more offers to choose from.
Basically: time, standards, effort. You can only sacrifice one.
I can see where you’re coming from, but it seems misguided to me. Having standards is about saying “this person is unworthy of consideration.” Women have standards, but they’re not the reason professional photos are a big deal or that having a height that starts with 5 cuts your chances in half. The reason Andrew isn’t getting responses is because women have options. Andrew might be worthy of consideration in a vacuum, but if they’ve got 25 other messages from 6’X” guys with a decent face and no pictures at all that remind them of a musician they don’t like, and they don’t have time for 25 dates, his message gets ignored.
Do they, though?
I understand that women get 100x more messages than men do on these platforms.
But I’m not convinced that any significant portion of those men have profiles that are literally perfect in every way.
Well they obviously don’t have to be perfect, just better than his, which I do think is likely.
Take this with a pinch of salt, cause it’s just one man’s opinion, but I strongly disagree – I actually think the photo is kind of ok (just looks like a dude chillin’ to me), but the text is bad.
“porterhouse for two, for one” is bad because it’s too obscure. I’ve got no idea what it means.
So that line basically says to me “I am obscure, likely boring, and probably a bit snooty.” And, it also made me feel a bit sad, like – “this guy is ordering a meal for two by himself because he has no friends?” (A bottle of wine with one glass…)
So that’s bad.
Also, it’s just the sheer weight of obscure and strange things. Sword fighting, annoying singing, Moktak says sky, erdos numbers, sea shanties, bouiller-de-sac, the fact that things aren’t stated clearly – “a good day involves lifting something heavy and dealing with a tricky problem” instead of “I like lifting, and I’m dead smart too.”
You’re really limiting your options with text like that – I don’t think I know any woman who knows what an erdos number is, and that is one of the less obscure things on there – and that means that you *have* to have some amazing picture.
Who is the woman who connects to all of these things and thinks… “hmmm… yeah, erdos numbers, obscure star trek quotations, sea shanties AND Sous verde! I’m in!”
We’re looking for someone with amazing reading comprehension, interest in obscure facts, possible Star Trek fan that’s into food and dogs.
(Thinking about it, are most of the things there a reference to The Pirates of Penzance? If you’re filtering that specifically, you simply can’t expect a good response rate.)
I kind of agree with you about that, but if 90% of how well you do is based on your pictures (and 80+% of that is the first picture, which I thought was the worst one) the easy win is getting a clear picture where you’re smiling.
At least on OKC, a woman is going to see your first picture, your opening message, the rest of your pictures, then your profile if she liked everything else, at which point what matters is making sure not to trigger any horrible alarms, rather than winning them over. That also ends up being the order of importance. If your first message at least mentions something in their profile and a tiny bit about yourself, they don’t even have to look at your profile to continue the conversation.
Sous vide is a cooking technique in which food is held at a carefully controlled temperature somewhat below the boiling point of water for a long time. Applied to meat, it is supposed to produce a very tender and tasty result from relatively inexpensive cuts.
No you aren’t. People decide whether they’re going to talk to you or not before they ever read the text.
According to Wikipedia, 511 people have coauthored a paper with Paul Erdős. How many of them are single women now under thirty–which would mean they did the coauthoring when under twenty, since Erdős died in 1996?
My guess is zero.
Seconding Models being anomalously good of its type.
@Andrew
So I think the written part of the profile is not good and your pictures are terrible. We can definitely improve this a lot.
I really liked this from Mark
I ran that one by my ex and she laughed and said she would message a guy who said that.
I think your main problem is your choice of pictures, especially the profile picture. You need to be smiling in your pictures. The only one that’s any good is the one with the dog. That’s a keep all the other are no good.
The BJJ picture has potential, but to a girl who doesn’t know the intricacies of BJJ, it may look like you’re getting the shit kicked out of you.
Also, love the reference to Darmok, but my ex who is a trekkie didn’t even get it so you’re really reaching with that one.
I’m going to message you through OKC, so you’ll have an idea how I approach things.
Hey – I’m a tall intelligent man with a big nose. And you know what they say about men with big noses.
They need big hankies? 🙂
Hmmm – that’s a line that needs to be carefully judged, as if you don’t or can’t keep up the “just on the right side of humour and not offence” element for the rest of the profile, it is more likely to cause eye-rolling “how corny can you get?”
I expect you won’t find this reassuring, but most of my close male friends went through a similar pattern of several years without finding any suitable women at all until they all eventually happened across a suitable woman and ended a long-term relationship/marriage with her.
The most recent of these was particularly similar to your case in that they had been through, and one point, every single woman on an online dating site within their area with no success and they were often expressing their desperation to me in even more thoroughgoing terms than you have been doing here, and they also literally had no idea how they could conceivably find any suitable partner, (without the changing location which was impossible). Eventually some great woman popped up on the dating site who was a match and they hit it off and now there a long-term relationship. They are a year or two older than you. One of my other friends is classically high status in all the normal ways- good social skills, footballer, with the physique to match et cetera- and he had no success at all in online dating through hundreds of attempts until he happened to meet the woman he married.
I think it’s possible that you have comparatively niche taste in women and may yourself be a niche taste in women, which means that you may just have to wait a bit longer before finding the right woman- though of course I can see why you wouldn’t find that reassuring.
Of course, the fact that you’ve only been able to speak to one single woman in the last year, as you mention down thread, is the biggest factor. Considering anything else just seem like a distraction. Seems like you either do need to move city or join different group activities which contain single women.
Online personals ad. We’ve been together for over a decade now.
English class, freshman year of high school.
University debate.
At our synagogue.
At a summer school for entrepreneurship
We met a mutual friend’s holiday party. Most of the people there were pretty boring. So we hung out with each other.
We started dating a few months later.
We both worked for the same adolescent psychologist as “peer mentors” for teens with Asperger’s.
I’ll give this an answer, since my anniversary was a few days ago–at 14 years, I’m as far from my age at marriage as my eldest, 9 year old daughter is.
We met at college, first as she was visiting a friend on my dorm floor, although we didn’t get to be acquaintances until both signing up for a short term missions team–a mime team, actually–the next spring. She wasn’t someone I was crushing on at the time (I had a few months early given out roses at valentines day to about 20 girls I knew, with her somehow not making the list), but I apparently was for her. We grew closer and a year later we got engaged.
I just realized it is slightly ironic that we were both on the Mime team and the Debate team together. So I guess communications skills are important?
Anyway, pertinent to the above discussion with Andrew, I had had the view that if I couldn’t find a mate at a college with 60% young women, being as introverted as I am, it didn’t look too good for after. I won’t say I settled, but I didn’t keep looking for better after finding someone worthwhile.
We met in college where her apartment was the one just opposite mine in the complex. This also meant we attended the same church meetings and activities. We went out on one date and I came away not that interested in her, but then a week later I saw her and a flip switched and suddenly I was in love.
We were talking recently about how we are both glad to have married in college. She didn’t expect to, but she’s happy that she did now because it seems a lot harder to find a spouse later.
I joined her a capella group in med school
Match.com.
In a line waiting for breakfast at our super-religious college. We’re both early birds and were fanatically religious at the time. I’m no longer religious at all, and he is much less so, but thankfully we have other stuff in common now.
A lot of the response to the Google diversity memo has focused on saying that the relevant difference between men and women for the ratio of male and female engineers is level of interest, and either downplaying any difference in levels of ability or saying there isn’t any. Tactically, this might be for sound politic reasons, but is it true? I thought there were differences between men and women in IQ tests on the particular sections (men doing better at maths and spatial stuff, women doing better at verbal things). Wouldn’t this be part of the reason for the difference?
I guess I’m also slightly puzzled by the attempt at separating out ability and interest as if it’s even possible to talk about them separately. They seem, to a first approximation, pretty much synonymous to me. Aren’t you interested in what you’re good at, and vice versa?
Maybe I haven’t been paying attention.
(This post doesn’t seem to say anything about being the non-culture war open thread, but if it is, I apologise.)
I suspect there are indeed fewer higher-coding-ability women than men, but as you say, it’s hard to separate interest and ability; there’s no programming aptitude test taken by a large part of the population, for instance. I also suspect the “interest” signal swamps the “ability” signal, as the top companies seem to have roughly the same composition of men and women as the industry as a whole, and I never noticed the women being any less (or more) capable than the men.
Really? Are girls really “better” at playing with dolls, and boys “better” at playing with cars? I’m sure there is a correlation to some extent, it’s usually more fun to do things if you feel some success, but it doesn’t seem at all strange to me to separate interest from ability. And when it comes to most jobs, differences are probably mostly due to differences in interest. It’s not that men couldn’t nurse as well as women, or women taxidrive as well as men – it’s just that they don’t care to.
Not better at playing with dolls, but I think better at the things that playing with dolls is practice for: personal, social, emotional interaction. No?
This is probably true. So perhaps one’s alternatives come into play, too. So a slightly more complicated model might be that your interest in X is how good you are at X, relative to how good you are at other things, and maybe some factor for how important you think X is.
You evil sexist, you – prepare to lose your job!
But seriously – although there may be gender difference in skills on average, there is enough variance that there is a substantial overlap between the sexes. Meaning that of the half of the population that has the most talent for veterinary science, the proportion of each gender is likely more equal than the current 90:10 distribution in favor of women.
Also, it seems that the more equal a society becomes, the more segregated the labor force becomes. Increased freedom to choose means people choose based on gender. So perhaps it’s neither ability nor interest, but rather a desire to express a gender identity? I think this has been suggested here before – and might explain the massive shifts in gender balance we have seen in many fields (vets, psychology, medicine).
(Related: I seem to remember a story about a construction accident, where several Native American workers died. The construction company worried this might scare off workers, but to the contrary, the accident proved this was dangerous, and therefore manly work, and the work became more attractive, not less.)
Why would you invoke gender identity here? Choosing your field of work in order to express a gender identity seems more restrictive (less equal, less free) to me, than simply choosing according to your interests.
By choosing according to your interests you can still choose in order to express a gender identity, because you can be interested in expressing your gender identity.
But depending on what you mean by “expressing a gender identity”, this might be in confict with your interests.
Not necessarily true at the tails of the distribution, which is what matters in societies with high professional specialization. For Gaussian distributions, even a small difference in the means and/or variances of subpopulations can result in almost no overlap a few stds from the population mean.
@blame
Most humans are conformist, so the dichotomy that you assume exists between (gender) identity and interest is probably false. People’s identity makes them have interests and people’s interests make them identify with a certain identity (also see non-binary identities and the like).
I second vV_Vv: while I agree that most measured differences between the sexes are going to be small on average after you remove environmental effects, even small differences in the averages of two normal curves cause drastic differences in the tails of the distribution. And a place like Google is not working with the average guys or girls, they are working at least with the top 5%, where we expect the differences will be much more pronouced.
(Ketil’s comment about the desire to express a gender identity looks relevant, too)
@moscanarius
If distribution tails were relevant, you would expect to see very different gender balances at Google and the least prestigious software companies, or at MIT and a community college. As far as I know, that isn’t the case.
@rlms
I would, if I could be sure that Google hiring or MIT gatekeepers used ability as the sole criterium for admission, which is not the case. They also do care about trying to keep a more balanced distribution of people, for many reasons – and they being Google, MIT, Harvard and the like, I am sure they have no trouble attracting many more of the underrepresented groups if they want than your average small technology company.
@moscanarius
It seems unlikely that the extra forces increasing balance at elite organisations exactly cancel out the forces from distribution tails that decreasing it, unless both forces are very small. But even if that is the case, the question of why there is a similar imbalance at less prestigious organisations remains.
@rlms
I may be misunderstanding you, but I find it very plausible if elite organizations are aiming at staying close to the average imbalance of their fields, so that they may maximize the talents in their body while avoiding looking like a boys’ club. It may not be a coincidence that these forces cancel out exactly as they do (if they do, I’m speculating), though I am sure that if true you would never see they admiting this to us commoners.
@moscanarius
I don’t find it that plausible. Looking at the stats for the elite institution I am most familiar with (page 13 here), the gender balance of applicants is very similar to that of those who actually get in. Also, if there was a nefarious balancing plot going on, you would expect it to be reflected in grades differences at universities (similar to the grade differences between racial demographics caused by affirmative action) and in gossip about how female programmers are noticeably worse in companies.
So, couldn’t this be by design? The organizations just loosen the admission/hiring standards for women until they get about the same fraction as the applicants, which enables them to defend againsts accusations of “sexism”.
Like this?
The Daily Caller (and the KotakuInAction poster they cribbed from) got that wrong; there has been at least one female finalist, Natalia Bondarenko, in the Code Jam, and she made it at least twice. Possibly also Zejun Wu.
@Aapje
Putting the word ‘gender’ in parenthesis here is not a good idea imho. I think it is important to distinguish between ‘identity’ and ‘gender identity’. Of course your identity and your interests don’t form a dichotomy, since your interests are part of your identity.
Also I never said that gender identity and interests are dichotomous. My point was that the claim that people choose their field of work in order to express a gender identity seems in general wrong to me.
Assume you are a very religious person and want to work at a church. Do you want to work there because you are interested in religion or because this expresses a certain gender identity?
(In my opinion your religious beliefs are not part of your gender identity, so this choice can not be justified by looking at your gender identity.)
Note that I am not an expert in gender theory, so we may have different opinions on what a ‘gender identity’ is.
@vV_Vv
No, that isn’t possible (for the example I gave at least). British universities generally have very inflexible entry requirements. And as I said before, if they were fiddling with admissions you would expect to see differences in achievement, but the year of stats I can access show female students outperforming male ones.
That’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about (and as TheNybbler points out, there have been female finalists in the past). I’m saying that if women at Google are worse programmers than men there, you would expect at least some people to point that out. But that doesn’t happen: there are fewer women, but they are as good as the men.
@blame
Society puts pressure on people to behave in certain ways by advocating & rewarding certain behavior and speaking against and punishing other behavior. Some of this pressure is applied equally to all, but a lot of it is applied unequally based on various identities.
When it comes to gender, these gender roles then result in expectations by a person on themselves and on the other gender. This then results in certain choices being made far more often by on gender than the other.
An example is that women tend to reduce their working hours upon having a child, while men increase theirs. This reflects the nurture vs the provider role, the former being consider primarily a female duty and the latter primarily a male duty.
Humans are sociable creatures, which means that social acceptance is a core desire of most people. So it’s not that men and women necessarily think: I have a penis/vagina and I will choose to express my masculinity/femininity by making stereotypical choices, so people will see me as more masculine/feminine. Instead, it’s often: I will only get social approval if I express my masculinity/femininity according to the stereotype.
Of course a lot of people don’t actually reflect on this at all and equate societal expectations with their own desires, so they just assume that they will be happy if they act ‘normally.’
@Aapje
I agree. What you say is probably also true in greater generality, i.e. for any collective identity.
(E.g. as a film-enthusiast you are expected to worship Tarantino)
To me it seems that many people don’t get past the stage of having several collective identities and never really develop a full individual identity. But as you said, many people are probably quite happy without all of this.
@The Nybbler
Thanks for pointing out the factual error.
But I don’t think it changes the point: there have been 10 Google code jams, with about 25 finalists per years (including repeated finalists), and 2-3 of these have been women, this amounts to 0.8% – 1.2%, much less than 30%.
@rlms
No affirmative action?
If I understand correctly, female college students generally outperform male students in all majors. Is grading gender-blind?
And be fired.
But what were the sex ratios of the entrants? Programming contests and jobs are two different things, and it would not at all surprise me that men across the ability spectrum are more likely to enter such a contest.
Obviously. But there’s a lot of people no longer at Google who could make that claim, and I haven’t seen it. Not to mention those leaking to Breitbart. I’d dispute it myself, for the small part of the company I saw. If there’s a difference in ability, it’s not an obvious one.
Furthermore, Google’s actual affirmative action policies mostly don’t consist of lowering the bar. The one which does — putting female and minority candidates through a second round of hiring committee — probably doesn’t lower it very much. That they’ve maintained that much integrity is probably why their workforce composition hasn’t changed. The company is banging hard against the reality that there just isn’t a surplus of available qualified female and minority software engineers, and they aren’t willing to either hire and warehouse unqualified engineers to fix the numbers, or to drastically shrink the company by preferentially getting rid of qualified men.
I seem to recall studies in primary and secondary schools showing that both male and female teachers discriminate in favor of girls. But I don’t know about college.
30 times more likely?
Ok, since you have inside information, does the typical software engineering team at Google contain ~30% women, or do women tend to gravitate towards less engineering and more administrative/sales/PR roles?
It may not necessarily be discrimination. Anecdotally, when I was a student I noticed that females tended to study harder and longer. Possibly women have higher conscientiousness than men, and this has implications for work performance in addition to college degrees.
@vV_Vv
“No affirmative action?”
No. I think that (like legacy admissions) is a uniquely American perversity.
“If I understand correctly, female college students generally outperform male students in all majors. Is grading gender-blind?”
I don’t know about the general case, but at Cambridge specifically I remember reading that (across all subjects) men perform better. Yes, grading is gender-blind (in fact blind to everything other than candidate number).
“And be fired.”
Certainly, if they weren’t anonymous. But lots of people write damning critiques of companies they are ex-employees of.
Google’s figures are ~20% women in tech roles, and that fits with what I saw. Somewhat more than that in the “research” as opposed to software engineering roles. Sales appeared to be much more balanced (assuming most of the well-dressed younger people in the office were sales), administrative was majority female.
On interests vs capabilities–I would expect by adulthood, the two are well-aligned–but so far as I can see, (some) interests come long before capabilities.
My wife and I have two daughters-one is around ten, one is about two-and-a-half. The younger one LOVES playing with her baby dolls. They get put to bed, get nursed, need their diapers changed, want veggie straws (which she loves), and so forth. I would say she spends two or three hours playing with them in an average day. The older one never did this–and it’s not that she wasn’t around babies, or doesn’t care for people, or anything–she just never did.
Not necessarily. I am rather talented in drawing but totally lack interest for it. On the other hand I am interested in snowboarding although I am really bad at it.
Interesting examples. After my top-level post, I was trying to imagine someone being great at something and having no interest whatsoever, and it seemed unlikely—even hard to envision—to me. So it’s interesting to see some real-life counterexamples.
There are also a lot of people with talent in the humanities who choose to do STEM instead, and a smaller group who do the opposite.
I was a considerably better lawyer than I am a programmer.
I am much better at chess than cricket, but would far rather play cricket than chess. And the world is positively packed with jobs that I would be good at but have no interest in doing.
There are lots of engineers who are good at math but don’t really enjoy it. They tend to not last long in engineering and voluntarily leave it for something else.
How much do you snowboard? Do you do it a lot and continue to be really bad, or do you enjoy it on the rare chance you do it?
I spent some weekends doing nothing else when I was younger. By now I just enjoy to do it occasionally.
I’m getting better, but definitely at a rate far below average.
I’m starting to get a bit confused over the argument that diversity is necessary and useful to form an optimal working environment but if somebody states that said diverse people are different in important ways then they are castigated for it. It’s a bit incoherent and that may be why talking about it is met with an emotional tirade. It’s pounding the table.
Related: Geoffrey Miller’s thoughts on the Google memo
There is no doubt in my mind that I would be very good at being a lawyer (there are a bunch in my family, and a number of my friends have gone that route).
There is just as little doubt in my mind that I would be largely uninterested in the work. Even Lawrence Lessig had to plow through a ton of boring crap to get where he is.
Even in my field, there are things I’m good at but not interested in: random stupid data reconciliation stuff, or cleaning up lost-cause code (as I spent some time today doing).
Now, interest in a subject does lead to spending more time doing it, which leads to greater ability in it. And greater ability can make something more interesting (e.g. learning a foreign language: the better you are, the more-interesting the things you can read).
But they are separate, if interacting, concepts.
Will sex bots harm rationalists even more?
One ugly fact about the world is that the more advanced technologies are the less reliant the world is on those who made these amazing technologies possible. More technologies lead to less demand for STEM people.
When sex bots are sold to the public it is likely that hardcore rationalists and STEM people are going to flock to the idea en masse while traditional Red Tribers and even Blue Tribers are less likely to support this idea. Eventually groups with ossified memes increase in number while rationalists are in danger of becoming the new Shakers. We may actually evolve into robots or become extinct while irrational people (e.g. the Blue Tribe and the Red Tribe) perpetuate their woo and reproduce.
More technologies leading to less demand for STEM people only applies when the technologies require no further specialist knowledge or maintenance. This is super-rare.
I don’t think it’s going to be a problem, myself. The paradigms of porn, cheap progesterone, and free love mean that for quite a while now, people who wanted to enjoy sexual pleasure without any meaningful possibility of conception.
Plus, we have sex bots now, they’re just really, really bad at faking humanity. By the time we’ve gotten good enough at consumer-grade electronic person-fooling to put out affordable sex bots, the economy is going to look drastically different anyways.
I agree with your first statement. I think the first part of my argument is mainly about
two issues, a post-singularity world and the fact that autism is selected against in the modern society. If most tasks can be performed by AI we only need a few who can control AIs and most people will be jobless. If AI controls everything we will no longer have any work nor do we have any leverage over non-STEM people any more. I think the same idea explains why autism is unpopular. In the past autists could be nice hunter-gatherers and farmers. Due to the ability of autists to provide food some of them managed to reproduce despite the fact that they were sexually unattractive. However the welfare state and actually high living standards in general have taken our leverage away.
When robots including sex bots are popular it will make no sense to have a partner any more. Hell I’m asexual and aromantic. However if I really want to see what dating feels like I might just buy a robot girl to talk to. I personally believe that AI will eventually be able to imitate all human behaviors and as a result make most connections with other humans redundant for autists. Robot girls do not require presents, can be shut down when unneeded and won’t divorce you.
What I believe is that sex bots will lead to most people without too much interest in human relationships to go extinct and Grey Tribe members will be overrepresented in that group.
@HFARationalist – “When robots including sex bots are popular it will make no sense to have a partner any more.”
When robots are that good, relative to the general population’s expectations, they will *be* partners.
Hell, they’ll probably be people. I mean, our understanding was that our own cognitive selection conditions weren’t to outcompete other animals with our massive brains, but runaway selection with other hominids. Presumably, having to learn to model how people see other people as people in the face of other people trying to counter-model the sexbots will put similar pressure on them.
…Wait. OMG sexbots are going to trigger the AI hard takeoff, guys.
Something is going to get hard, that’s for sure.
Presumably, having to learn to model how people see other people as people in the face of other people trying to counter-model the sexbots will put similar pressure on them
From the one article on sexbot manufacture I read, it sounds more like they’re going for the Stepford Wives angle, with a lot of heavy self-delusion on the part of the guys making these machines. The only modelling going on will be finding sixteen different ways to say “Oh Joe, you’re so wonderful!”:
That was one of the realizations / backstory used by the internet pornographer Elf Sternberg, back when he was writing.
All of us rationalists understand the dangers of superstimula, and (hopefully) accept that we are not personally immune. In contrast, lots of non-rationalists won’t think about the dangers.
Yes. However what’s the purpose of sex with humans or romance if a robot can handle all such needs at a much cheaper price? Those who still desire human reproduction will likely be collectivists and irrational woo-believers.
Sexbots could make marriage more attractive to rationalists if they solve the practical problems of open-marriage.
Why? What’s the purpose of marriages at all if a robot spouse is much better than a human one? If one wants some novelty why not download another package so that the personality of the robot spouse changes? If one wants polyamory they should just buy more than one robot.
>What’s the purpose of marriages at all if a robot spouse is much better than a human one?
If better at everything then there is none. If just better at sex then parenting and companionship, and taking advantage of the fact that two people living in one household spend less than two people living in separate equivalent (space per person) households.
Okay, but how many rationalists actually take unusual measures to avoid superstimula? Yes, we avoid things that’re low-status in our peer group (e.g. heroin), but are there other common examples?
Understanding the danger of superstimula might mean a few more rationalists will avoid sexbots, but I don’t think this’ll be enough to counteract the other factors HFA mentioned.
(Plus, I think the concept of a superstimulus has already penetrated into general culture: “It’s like heroin.”)
>but how many rationalists actually take unusual measures to avoid superstimula?
I really want to go “No true Scotsman” and say all of them. (Well, at least if the word “unusual” wasn’t there.)
My superstimula weaknesses are sugar and video games, and I put a lot of effort into reducing the harm they do to my health and productivity.
My superstimula weakness is SSC comment sections. Send help!
FacelessCraven,
My rationalist son once asked to be permanently banned from a Minecraft forum because he thought he was wasting his time there. You could try the same here, but I hope you do not.
@FacelessCraven, you could try LeechBlock, or perhaps .hosts.
@HFARationalist – “When sex bots are sold to the public it is likely that hardcore rationalists and STEM people are going to flock to the idea en masse while traditional Red Tribers and even Blue Tribers are less likely to support this idea.”
Disapproval will not hinder sufficiently-good sexbots. It will, at the most, inspire them to follow a design philosophy cribbed from Transformers.
I agree. Eventually the secular Blues will be devoured as well leaving the devoted and other traditionalists the only people who still have human sex and breed.
Or the robots will load in human sperm/eggs. The former is actually pretty darn easy. If they can be sentient I’m sure they can manage that.
I agree. However will the desire to reproduce drop even more when robot spouses are available?
I’d be more worried about the effects of robot children.
@Nancy Lebovitz Why? What’s the purpose of robot babies? Cats, dogs and rabbits are much better than kids, including robot kids.
I did say robot *children*, but imagine a robot baby…. it smiles, cuddles, plays peekaboo, doesn’t keep you up at night, and doesn’t need diapers changed. I think there’d be a market.
@Nancy Lebovitz I agree with you. However I’m not into that. In fact I’m not even into humans at all. A cat is much better than a kid. My oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) may not work in the same way that of most non-autists works at all so I indeed have no ancestry-based loyalty including at the level of species.
I agree that many Blue Tribers and Grey Tribers might be potential customers.
Sexbots are not going to be limited to one sub group of people. What you might see is the old 80-20 rule. 20% of high status men can get sex when they want while the 80% increasingly rely on their sexbot.
Why would men prefer real women to sexbots if sexbots are much better at sex but also housework as well? Furthermore the same will apply to women who will get sexy robot guys who will basically meet all her needs and keep her happy.
Imagine a robot wife that can not only be your actual lover but also help you get information from the internet. Who will want a human spouse if a robot can be much better?
Well for one thing, sexbots aren’t going to be able to replicate a person’s personality for a long time so sexbots would be just a step up from porn for a while. And then there is also the social status aspect. You can’t bring a sexbot to meet your parents.
Wait, a sexbot that can do housework? Can we cut the price and leave the sex part out? A houseworkbot would _definitely_ improve my life, even if it looked more like Danny Devito or Johnny Five than Scarlet Johannsen.
And vice versa.
A cleaning service will already do your housework for less than the cost of a sexbot.
@Chalid Prostitutes also exist. No idea how much sexbots would even cost, but prostitutes might wind up being cheaper.
You can get a cleaning service to take care of all your laundry, cooking, dishes, etc, every day? That seems a little more involved than the cleaning services I usually see advertised.
Also, a cleaning service generally has limits on their schedule and won’t be available to come clean at literally any hour of the day or night, plus you have to let other humans into your house where they can see all your stuff and silently judge you. A robot maid won’t ever judge you, or charge you extra for making it do the weird stuff. (And neither will a sexbot, for that mater.)
If sexbots exist, then so do e.g. waitressbots and receptionistbots. That means a whole lot of reasonably attractive young women become unemployed. And the constructionbots etc will do the same on the other side of the gender gap, if it matters. I suspect most people place a higher premium on their sexual partners being actual flesh-and-blood sentient human beings than they do for their waitresses, so, yeah, prostitutes will probably be a lot cheaper.
Hiring them will still be denounced as exploitation, if that matters.
You say “evolve into robots” like it would be a bad thing. It seems a bit weird in context so I might be misreading you, but… Replacing my frail meat-sack with a perfect immortal machine is a good end; I don’t want to live forever through my descendants, I want to live forever through not dying. If I can’t, après moi le déluge.
LOL I think our thoughts agree here.
I believe when robots are better than humans we perfectionist rationalists might simply decide to ditch humanity.
That seems unlikely if their goal is to improve human happiness.
Agreed. However I do want to have perfect rationality and lots of knowledge. I value them more than human happiness.
I suggest that a better strategy is to try to increase rationality and knowledge to increase human happiness. Then you will actually have a meaningful number of allies.
Know the story of the goose with the golden eggs? Being too greedy is counterproductive.
@Aapje I agree.
You mean things like vibrators or flesh lights?
|hardcore rationalists| << |STEM people|
Anyway, don't "rationalists"/atheists/etc. already have below-replacement fertility?
Yes. However the fertility rate of secular rationalists may plunge to almost zero after sexbots.
Eventually if robots can replicate everything a human does a pure rationalist is likely to completely ditch everything human (that means becoming non-human robots instead of transhumans) while those who are emotionally attached to humanity may continue to be humans or transhumans. However the picture won’t be nice because elite thinkers regularly ditch humanity while humans/transhumans don’t seem to have much to do at least from my perspective.
hardcore rationalists != elite thinkers != STEM people
I think you are overgeneralizing.
I agree. I should be more careful and avoid overgeneralization.
What actual purpose do sexbots serve? I can think of two possibilities
1) Substitute for pair bonding. Maybe I’m atypical, but it seems like it’ll be a long time before we can make one that can pass as another human. I guess deluding oneself to think it’s a person is an option (think Lars and the Real Girl), but that doesn’t seem very appealing to rationalists.
2) Sexual gratification. This seems inordinately complicated given the technology that already exists for this. For starters, although I am assured by religious authority that God specifically did not give us two hands for this reason, they do exist anyways.
Am I missing something? I mean, clearly I am, as there does appear to be a demand for sexbots, but I’m not seeing what it is.
sexual gratification + companionship
the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
rationalists should be more equipped than most to say “this is suboptimal, but I still prefer it to loneliness” rather than “eww sexbot thats for creepy nerds and losers”
The very idea that nerds are somehow creepy is stupid.
@eyeballfrog Is your opposition to sex bots mainly due to your theistic beliefs?
In common usage, “creepy” is just another word for “person girls don’t like.”
Girls don’t like nerds, therefore they are creepy.
@Matt M No wonder the dating market is broken.
“In common usage, “creepy” is just another word for “person girls don’t like.”
Girls don’t like nerds, therefore they are creepy.”
I know a reasonable number of married male nerds, and I mean married to women.
I think the “how I met my SO” thread adds quite a few.
@Nancy Lebovitz
I’m one of those married-to-a-woman male nerds, but as a generalization, Matt M’s statement is pretty accurate. The exchange
Nerd: “Hi!”
Girl: “Eww, get away from me you creep!”
isn’t entirely fictional. The Saturday Night Live “GE Sexual Harassment Video” is more true than not (“Be Handsome, Be Attractive, Don’t Be Unattractive”)
@The Nybbler Yeah this is true. Relationships require some shared values and I refuse to conform my values to anyone. To me having one’s own views independent of the crowd is more important than having a mate hence I don’t want a mate.
As an autist with low testosterone level my desire to be coupled is much lower than usual while my desire to preserve my freedom of thought and freedom from culture is much greater. Hence it is worth forsaking coupledom for the sake of independent thought.
@eyeballfrog Do you have this view mainly because of your religion? No offense but I do want to know whether your secular reasons were just provided so that the arguments sound more palatable to secular people here while your real reason is religious.
No, it was just a play on the phrase “God gave us X for a reason”, which is used to indicate that a solution to a problem already exists, so we might as well use that. The “joke” here is that applying that phrase to this particular case is clearly wrong under most Abrahamic theologies.
Finding this conversation bizarre. Seems to blur two completely different concepts, ‘sexbots’ and AI that can replace romantic partners. The idea of replacing a significant other with the former assumes you just want them for sex and possibly housework which is I think not true for most people including most rationalists. At this point its just a question of cost compared to prostitutes and cleaning services.
For them to truly replace a relationship we’re talking AI that is functionally human (including incidentally them having a life beyond you – would be v dull if my wife had no life or interests beyond me). At the point where your best friends are robots your girlfriend probably will be too, I’d we ever reach this point, but ‘sexbot’ misses the point.
Seconded. Any sexbot that was actually an adequate substitute for a loving and beloved human partner would itself be a person (or at any rate we would have as good reason for thinking it a person as we do anyone else) and its enslavement – even if of the house elf/Ameglion Major Cow kind – would be abhorrent. I think OP is not doing a very good job of modeling the preferences or behaviours of people who do have romantic and sexual urges.
@DavidS I strongly agree. One reason why I voice my ideas here is to let other rationalists comment on them so that I can remove accidentally introduced woo.
I think I’m mainly talking about robot spouses instead of mere sex bots.
@Tarpitz I’m a largely aromantic asexual autist. Hence I’m indeed unaware of what real romance is about. I’m someone more interested in the etymology of a girl’s name and the history of her hometown than the girl herself.
Ironically the only positive thing a girl can introduce into my life is some laughter. I’m way too cynical and suspicious of humanity to smile unless I have just proven a new theorem or I’m looking at a cat. Oh I also smile when I’m teaching. I try to appear like a fun STEM geek before my students. However I’m actually melancholic because I don’t have too much hope for humanity. Will new genocidal methods be used to massacre billions? Will UFAI control the world? Will aliens invade this planet?
I apologise if that came off as snarky. What I’m getting at is that I think a central component of what most people want from romantic relationships is reassurance that they are an acceptable person, of a kind that because of the way they are wired they cannot receive except from a romantic partner who they themselves regard (more-or-less without regard to reason) as a worthy person.
I think that same reassurance is the core offering of Christianity (hence religion of love, not any other possible virtue); this link between the romantic and religious urges is the central theme of Graham Greene’s novels (The End of the Affair most of all).
I see. I personally do not care about whether others accepting me because I have already accepted myself. If others do not accept me it is their unreason and ignorance at work.
Must be nice.
@Tarpitz Yep. It is good to be arrogant.
Are you trying to pre-launch a rationalist quiverfull movement?
No. I’m both asexual and antisexual.
It seems obvious to me that anyone who was rational at all, if they purchased a sexbot as an alternative to a human relationship, would also donate eggs or sperm. That is, if they didn’t want to gestate and/or raise a child as a terminal value, which many people do.
I mean, these things are already separated to some degree:
*having sex
*having meaningful relationships
*passing on one’s genes
*passing on one’s ideas
We can do any of these together or separately, sexbots or no sexbots. A person who is concerned about not passing on their genes should pass them on. A person who wishes to pass on their ideas could adopt children or become a teacher or whatever.
The real problem with sexbots is they don’t satisfy the desire we have to be picked by someone. That’s why even very lonely people don’t necessarily want to visit prostitutes. Even if they pretend to love you, it doesn’t count, because they have to do that.
And I’m not sure if there’s any correlation between “rationalists” and “people who don’t care about being chosen” anyway.
I see. I only want to pass on my ideas but nothing else. I’m a STEM dude who has written papers and several programs. If girls consider me unworthy it is their problem. They need to regret it, not me.
And sex-bots are, of course, the only subject about which a conservative stance is ultimately prudent.
Quillette has a very interesting article arguing that it would be possible for “neurodiverse” people to challenge university speech codes on the basis that their conditions make them unable to understand them: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/mental-health-disabilities-legal-superpowers/. Do any folks with legal knowledge here have thoughts about how feasible this idea is?
I’m really interested. 🙂
I sent a copy of this article to a friend of mine who is on a committee at my college that’s developing a new speech code. He said he has sent it to everyone else on the committee. Even if this turns out to be a poor legal strategy, it might have some influence over people who really do care about neurodiversity and understand that telling an autistic professor or student to act respectfully doesn’t provide him with much meaningful guidance.
I’m interested – you actually know someone who’s helping develop a university speech code? What perspective is he coming at it from, and what are his (and the university’s) main concerns?
Yes, he is a professor at Smith College, as am I, and Smith currently has a committee developing a revised speech code. The college wants free speech + best efforts at respect. The committee believes that at other colleges offensive speech directed to minorities has make it harder for minorities to learn. (This is all second hand information that I might be misremembering.)
That sounds like an impossible task. Good luck with them trying to guarantee that people will feel respected when people’s feelings can explode over comparatively trivial offenses. Yes, “best efforts” can cover a lot of gaps here, but you’ll probably end up drawing lines which students will perceive as arbitrary – plus anything near “respect” will be almost certainly infringing on free speech.
I hope he at least appreciates the dichotomies here?
@James Miller
You might then want to point him to Heterodox Academy and argue that conservatives are also a minority, who frequently face hostility which may impact their ability to learn.
So you might want to ask whether they want an ideological bubble where a (perceived) majority set the Overton window and then people may not speak out against this?
Ultimately, it is an inherent part of tribalism/politics that people with different beliefs feel disrespected by others, so if respect and fairness are both goals, then the only fair solution is to ‘just’ create very repressive place where no political statements of any kind are allowed.
Off the cuff, I think it has a decent shot of producing individual exemptions. The idea that it cascades into the codes themselves falling for everyone seems far less plausible.
On the other hand, might even those individual exemptions cause the college’s case to fail the next time they get sued for infringing on free speech?
And at least, as the author says, it’d cause them a lot of flurry, make the contradictions in their position more apparent, and cause intra-Left squabbling.
In the case of private universities there’s no case to be made that they are infringing free speech. The first amendment only applies to the government and certainly closely coordinating entities (state action doctrine).
In the case of public universities, FIRE’s website linked above only shows cases that have struck down public university speech codes. Unless they are omitting losses it doesn’t seem like any extra help is needed. In any event I’m not sure how individual exemptions would help make a first amendment argument.
I don’t hate the left. On the contrary.
Well, yes, there can claims against a private college. It can’t be based on the First Amendment, but it can be based on the college’s own claims and advertisements.
Also, ADA does apply to private schools, so that’s important.
The ADA makes it more likely, since private schools are also bound to that law. If an Ivy school or two, or an Oberlin-like uni, gets struck with something like this, it would force a confrontation.
Makes what more likely? How do you get from individual exemptions to let’s just scrap the whole policy?
In a normal situation, the exemptions could work in keeping the peace. However, speech codes are one of the areas where we’re seeing a lot of Red Tribe/Blue Tribe nonsense happening. There is also a non-insignificant number of trolls who could qualify for an exemption (namely AS types). They could possibly wreck the whole thing just by being themselves and then using the full extent of the law to protect themselves. Many SJ types would feel revolted by the fact the law protects these “minorities” and not them, and will do anything to shut down the exemptions. The administration, stuck between a rock (a riotous student body) and a hard place (the law protecting certain indviduals), would likely scrap the whole thing all together than risk further confrontation.
It seems rather far-fetched to me. But I suppose it is possible. Not a legal question by the time you get to that part anyway.
There’s also the possibility the author mentions that many administrators are secretly against speech codes themselves, and could use legal challenges from neurodiverse individuals as political cover for repealing speech codes. As you say though, whether this will happen is a political question, not a legal one.
Many SJ types would feel revolted by the fact the law protects these “minorities” and not them
Facts not in evidence. Indeed, by all accounts, they don’t need the protection of the law because they have the protection of the Ivory Tower, since their violations are not wrongthink.
It’s an interesting idea, but there’s something about “neurodiverse” and related terminology that irks me. I think they’re setting off my Newspeak detector, though I can’t say exactly why they’re a problem.
Agreed. I would just call it what it is, autism.
But autism is not necessarily the only mental disorder that needs a reasonable accommodation.
I have a religious question.
What’s the deal with the implausibly-long lifespans in the old testament?
I feel like there’s usually some sort of scientific or at least rhetorical justification for most of the weird stuff we find in the Bible. “Explanations” for the flood, for the parting of the red sea, etc. Our host here recently contributed a theory that the story of Joseph was based on a certain Egyptian pharaoh.
But I’ve never heard this addressed. Are we really supposed to believe people used to live several hundred years, then stopped? Why did they live so long? And why don’t they anymore? Is this based on anything at all, or is it sheer fabrication designed to make your religion seem cool by claiming its holy men can live a really long time (conveniently stopping this claim once people started keeping historical records). Are there sects of orthodox judaism or fundamentalist christianity who take this literally and actually believe these people lived that long?
The “standard” explanation I’m familiar with is that God began decreasing human lifespan after the flood. See Genesis 11:10-32, where the lifespans of sires in successive generations are 600, 438, 433, 464, 239, 239, 230, 148, and 205. This is nothing compared to your Adams and Methuselahs, and certainly trending downward.
As for whether or not there are people who believe these lifespans are factually true—of course! You may know that the Jewish calendar is now in the year 5777; what you may not know is that this is time measured since creation. How do we know when creation was? The biblical genealogy enables us to trace how much time elapsed between Adam and Moses, and we know when Moses was born because *mumbles*.
Edit to add: I’m rather disappointed that I will probably *not* live for 200+ years, since there is a rabinically imposed deadline for the Messiah in the year 6000 and I’d like to see how they deal with that when it comes up.
LOL that will be weird. I mean a Messiah is supposed to exist but he does not show up on time.
I think Rabbinical authorities will twist everything uncomfortable to fit reality in a way similar to how they dealt with the destruction of the Second Temple.
Did the word for lunar month get mixed up with the word for solar year at some point? If those lifespans are in months they’re at least vaguely plausible…
Except, like I said below, that leads to people begetting children at age 5-10.
There is a claim out there that the decline in lifespan follows an exponential decay (here or here). Anybody have the chops to determine if that is true and/or significant? (Where’s biblicalsausage when you need him?)
May I ask whether you are religious or secular?
Perhaps, like Tertullian, they believe because it is absurd. 😛
At least such beliefs are relatively harmless. I would be more worried about the more harmful beliefs though.
For example beliefs that prayers can be used to replace medicine can be deadly.
I was just making a silly joke based on the title thread: Credo quia absurdum is a paraphrase of Tertullian and means “I believe because it is absurd.” I take every excuse to use that classics degree I can find. 🙂
Which, of course, in context means, “It’s absurd to believe that anyone would make up anything this crazy.”
Yeah. Criterion of embarrassment, as my theology teacher would have put it. If the gospel writers wanted to make up something maximally believable, they wouldn’t have made up unbelievable things.
But they could have anticipated that reaction and deliberately made them “unbelievable” so people would react that way and believe them.
Besides, Muhammed did a lot of similarly unbelievable things and Christians don’t believe those.
Muhammed, please note, didn’t die for them. In fact, they tended to make his life better.
Besides, Muhammed did a lot of similarly unbelievable things and Christians don’t believe those.
Not having read the Quran, can anyone tell me if there’s an equivalent to my personal favourite anecdote, the “He’s mad we didn’t bring a packed lunch” episode from the Gospels?
Mark 8: 5-12
For anecdotes about Mohammed you mostly want the hadith, not the Quran. There is a tradition of an incident where a whole lot of people follow Mohammed to a meal, I think one he has been invited to. There is only one sheep to make the dinner out of, but it feeds everyone.
By memory, so I may have the details wrong.
In the early part of his life, they made it worse–resulted in his being reviled by his fellow tribesmen, who eventually tried to kill him, and having to flee from Mecca to Medina. Once there, he seems to have lived a pretty hard life for a while, gone often hungry.
The criterion of embarrassment only shows that someone isn’t really familiar with any religion other than Christianity. Look into almost any religion and it won’t take you long to find the crazy.
One explanation I’ve read is that the figures are based on Babylonian base 60 mathematics, so the long lifespans, when translated into base 10, actually work out to reasonable numbers.
I have no idea if this is indeed so 🙂 If you take Methuselah lived for 969 “years” as “months”, then you get Methuselah living to the age of 969/12 = 80 years, a much more plausible figure. You can do a lot of shuffling around like that to reconcile what is written with what we would expect in reality.
It probably has to do with number symbolism and eras or epochs; many accounts of this type have important kings/heroes/demi-gods living for immense periods of time (e.g. Rama is said to have reigned for 11,000 years. Take into account that Rama was a king in the line of the Solar dynasty, turn that into days and divide by 365 days in a solar year, and you get a more realistic 30 years reign).
And of course, the vast ages of the patriarchs tie in with the general cultural notions of Golden Ages when people lived in harmony with nature and the gods and right conduct, and so lived long healthy lives and died peacefully, but each succeeding epoch is more and more degenerate, until you get to our current Iron Age where there is war, sin, evil, sickness, and death and people die at the age of seventy.
I’m a big fan of this as a plausible explanation!
Why doesn’t this imply that Moses died at age 10?
Moses having accomplished everything in his life in 10 years is STILL more credible than Methuselah living to be 900 or whatever.
If you believe in the Bible then living to 900 isn’t anymore fantastic than bringing the dead back to life.
Bringing back the dead was fantastic enough to be remarkably unique, an indicator of the messiah returned to earth.
Long life wasn’t remarkable or remarked upon in that way. No laments from Methuselah about having outlived everyone he has ever know, etc.
AFAIK. Not a biblical scholar.
@HeelBearCub: resurrection is not all that unique: in the old Testament both Elijah and his successor Elisha succeed in raising the dead (Elijah once, Elisha twice, though the second one was posthumous).
But it was approaching unique; IIRC you’ve cited the only three instances of raising the dead anywhere in the Old Testament. Meanwhile, everyone in Noah’s lineage (except Enoch, who never died) is quoted as living >600 years.
You don’t even have to go as far afield as India for examples of this phenomenon: the Sumerian king lists start off giving wild figures like 29,000 years for a single reign, whilst by the time of the most recent dynasty the regnal lengths are all realistic.
Unfortunately, that means that when Methuselah was born, his father Enoch was only 65 -> 5 1/2 years old. Doesn’t work.
You see, back in the time before the flood the atmosphere was very densely filled with testosterone, to the extent that men went through puberty at only age 2-3, and it was not uncommon for a man to take his first wife at age 4. When the celestial waters fell down to Earth and caused the flood, they washed away the testosterone, and men gradually delayed puberty to the ages we are now familiar with.
The literalist Christians I know certainly take the long-lived people a something close to face-value. I’m sure orthodox Jewish readers of the Torah do the same.
However, I think that the standard reading is that these long-lived people had a special covenant with God: “Being in a covenant with God is righteous and desirable; God grants you blessings, like old age, and along with it, wisdom. These super, super old people are therefore super, super wise, wiser even than the wise men of today. Also, notice that God doesn’t bless righteous people with that many years any more. We people sin more and are more faithless than those holy men of old.”
It’s all part of that overarching Old Testament message that covenant with the One God has attending benefits and blessing. The faithful will prosper, the wicked will perish.
I agree that a people groups needs identity even when non-assimilation is bad for their members. This is another reason why we need to be wary of having too many identities related to ancestry.
Groups sometimes need woo to exist. It is up to us to reject woo for the sake of our own interests.
Some explanations I’ve heard: Before the flood there was…
… a massive canopy of water vapour surrounding the earth that filtered out harmful solar and cosmic radiation.
… more oxygen.
… higher atmospheric pressure which provided the health benefits of a hyperbaric chamber.
Besides the explanations involving the earth being somehow different, I’ve also seen suggestions that the decrease in lifespan may have had to do with mutations building up in the genome. I’m aware that the magnitude of the drop is stretching biological plausibility, possibly to the breaking point.
Considering progeria exists in the modern day – a genetic disorder that pops up through de novo mutation, causing all the normal symptoms of old age in childhood, leading to death around age 13 – why is a drop from ~900 to ~90 years old biologically impossible?
Possible idea fora new life extension startup? Someone call Peter Thiel!
AFAIK, we understand the function of different genes so poorly that the startup would be looking for a needle amid random shards of iron. There’s a lot more basic research that’d be needed first.
There is strong natural selection against progeria. If human lifespans of ~900 existed in the past, how did we get to ~90 years?
Mutations in an eight-person founder population after the Great Deluge?
Before the flood “the waters” were separated into two sections. Under the ground and above the sky. This meant the air pressure was much higher meaning humans breathed in more oxygen and breathing in more oxygen is super healthy and makes you live longer. Also, there was no rain. Moisture just appeared on the ground like you might see on top of mountains in the early morning. To make the flood, all the sky water dropped to the ground, decreasing the air pressure and oxygen levels thus making people live shorter lives.
At least that’s what I’ve heard.
Numbers are usually very important in the Bible. Each number might have a special symbolic meaning. Look out for 7s, 10s, 12s, probably some others I’m forgetting, and their multiples. Also remember that in Biblical Hebrew, numbers are written with alphabet characters (alef = 1, etc.), introducing the possibility to make numbers that are also words. (This was explained a little in a cool scene in the movie Pi: [link])
I’ve heard a theory that nobody in the Bible lives to 1000 because that would symbolically be the same as becoming a god, or godlike. But people in the Bible have approached that age, as they were for whatever reason selected to be near to God.
Because the Bible comes from a long oral tradition that got written down at some point and then grew a lot of commentary-barnacles which then affected further translations, you see symbolic and literal ideas mixed together very densely.
PS. I did not mean my answer to imply that I necessarily disbelieve that the lifespans are factual. To put it colorfully, I have partitioned my brain like a hard drive, and the partitioned section accommodates things like the possibility that those ages are factual.
I mention it because I have found making this kind of a partition is helpful when reading the bible or partaking in religion, activities which I consider deeply rewarding and centering. One part of me nonchalantly believes in things another part of me cannot, and the two parts live peacefully and respectfully apart. Each part may wander close to the fence sometimes, but does not dwell on what’s on the other side.
Setting aside whether partitioning like that is a good idea, I don’t think you need to in this case. God, as described in the Bible, is quite capable of numbering people’s years to meet appropriately-symbolic lifespans. And since He named the first man “Dust” and punned “to dust you are, and to dust you will return…” it seems like something He might do.
Well, let me address it: I was using colorful language, as I said. A more accurate term would be “compartmentalizing” and I do that a lot, extremely well. Almost to the point where it’s a problem because it makes it hard for people to relate to me (although I relate to them just fine).
I’m not sure I understand your point about not needing to compartmentalize.
@Well…, what I meant was in this case, it’s quite possible to believe the long lifespans both are literally true and have symbolic meanings – without compartmentalizing at all.
Oh, yeah I agree with that. I meant compartmentalizing between “that can’t be literally true” and “I could believe that is literally true”. Symbolic meaning could obviously still exist on either side.
There are definitely conservative Christians (“fundamentalist” has a specific meaning, and they are not all fundamentalist) who believe that the long lifespans are factual.
The next level–still strongly Biblicist, but a bit less literal in their interpretation–says that “Joe lived for 500 years, and then Jim was born” is best interpreted as “the people who called themselves children of Joe were a distinct group for 500 years, then a subset started calling themselves children of Jim”.
Paleo diet?
To answer your last question first; there are Jews and Christians who believe this to be true.
While I cannot speak for the Jewish mindset, I can give a little insight into the Christian mindset that makes this believable. First off, they take the Bible as literal truth. The phrase “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” would describe the mindset pretty well. While this seems odd to the post-modern mindset it is rational when you start with the Christian God. He is out there, perfect, and He communicates with us. This means that there is absolute truth in the universe and we can and do know it.
Thus you begin with the axiom that these people lived this long and you use other pieces of knowledge to explain this. Other people in this thread have done a good job of outlining the possible explanations. That said, I think they have not stated one of the underlying assumptions. God originally created Adam perfect. When Adam sinned (The Fall) the world was no longer perfect. One of the ways this lack of perfection is the reduced lifespan.
To forward one theory, when Adam fell, defects started accumulating into our DNA, this didn’t catch up with us pre-flood because there is a lot of DNA. When the flood happened there was a population bottleneck since it was Noah, his three sons, and the 4 wives. This means that all men have Noah’s Y chromosome and we have any defects he had. If you combine this with the possibility of a less habitable Earth it is easy to believe that people lived 10x as long.
Hope the lengthy explanation helps.
Based on my memory of reading Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, my understanding is that those long-lived individuals were actually just eponyms for tribes that predate the more well-known twelve.
My recollection of Asimov’s Guide is that he tended to favor overly clever, overly rational explanations that underestimated the degree to which stories based on historical events tend to be different from the actual events. A lot of things he felt the need to find explanations for were probably pure inventions (or at least far more different from what made it into the eventual story than his explanation assumed). I’m not saying this particular explanation is definitely wrong, but I don’t think you should treat it as the one definitely correct explanation just because Asimov mentioned this theory.
That’s certainly fair. Plus, it’s been years since I read it; my memory could well be filling some stuff in there. And I haven’t seen that explanation anywhere else (although it’s not something I follow closely).
As a cosmic ray physicist, aaaaaaaaargh
Be fair. We are talking about enough “moisture” to flood the earth almost to the summit of Mt. Ararat, so roughly 500,000 g/cm^2 of shielding. That seems more than adequate to stop even the most energetic cosmic rays with ~100% attenuation.
Don’t ask me what held it up until God was ready to unleash a flood-smiting, or how it is that any sunlight ever made it through to illuminate the pre-Noachian landscape, or where it all went afterwards.
My new line of apologetics says that people looked like anglerfish until the Flood.
Wouldn’t the releasing of all that moisture involved a massive thermal event of some sort? I seem to recall seeing some calculations that were scary.
Might as well just invoke “and then god created cosmic rays … because mysterious reasons”
Or how about “The cosmic rays made it through, but there was really good anti-mutation medicine — until the Flood wrecked civilization with all the medical establishment”?
The basic idea, which you find in a lot of mythologies, is that people, along with everything else, tend to degenerate from their original. Hence, myths of decline, from the Golden Age to the Iron Age and such.
It’s not implausible if you believe the other stuff.
If we’re talking about a mundane physics mode explanation, maybe human cell replication became less accurate for some reason.
Naval Gazing
Why the carriers are not doomed, part 4: Submarines
The most important thing to know about modern submarines is that they are not all the same. There are two types of attack submarines (as opposed to missile submarines or other special types): diesel-electric propulsion (SS) and nuclear propulsion (SSN). SSNs are in a lot of ways the closest thing we have to capital ships today, the USN’s preferred anti-shipping platform. They are strategically and tactically mobile, fast, and generally very effective. Diesel submarines are not. They are best described as mobile minefields, very dangerous in confined or shallow waters, but only a threat to a carrier group in the open sea if the carrier happens to stumble over it by accident.
So we’ll examine the SSN threat first. These are limited to a very small number of countries. Enemyistan doesn’t have any. China has 10, but they’re not particularly good ones. The best estimates I have on their Type 93 submarines puts them on broadly the same level of acoustic performance as the early US Los Angeles-class submarines of the mid-70s. Modern US SSNs are much quieter, and we have a total of 52 in commission.
The most important principle of submarine warfare is stealth, and speed is the enemy of stealth. High speed both reduces the effectiveness of sonar and makes the submarine (or ship) noisier. The usual solution is sprint and drift, where the submarine transits at high speed, occasionally slowing to listen. This focus on stealth also means that submarines avoid using active sonar (pinging and listening for echoes) in favor of passive sonar (just listening). They still have the capability, but it’s very rarely used.
Just like every other means of attacking a carrier, an SSN needs targeting data. Practical sonar ranges are a very complicated subject, but I’d estimate that a submarine would need to be steered to within 100 nm or so to be able to detect a carrier and close on its own to the 8 nm or so that is the outer limit of practical torpedo range. Even then, it has to be careful. If the CVBG suspects a submarine threat, it will be doing what it can to make the submarine’s life difficult and short.
This starts at the highest level. During the Cold War, the biggest threat to US sea power was the Soviet submarine fleet. One of our main weapons was SOSUS, a network of very sensitive fixed sonar arrays placed in choke points around the world, to provide broad targeting data to various ASW (anti-submarine warfare) forces, which would then localize and destroy the submarines. (Yes, this is very similar to the problem of finding carriers to destroy them.) The system still exists, and has reasonable coverage in the western Pacific. A hostile submarine detected by SOSUS will probably be localized and attacked by a maritime patrol aircraft like a P-8. Alternately, some sectors may be assigned to US SSNs, which are slower but have greater staying power. Even if the US cannot manage an attack, the carrier is at least warned.
The next layer is the carrier’s own ASW power. Sometimes, submarines are assigned to work as escorts to a carrier group, although the same invisibility that protects submarines also makes it hard to coordinate them with surface forces. All US CGs and DDGs carry at least a bow sonar, and many have towed-array sonars as well. One or more of them might be assigned to do sprint-and-drift of their own, to pick up any shadowing submarines. If the submarine is detected, it will be investigated and hopefully localized by the CVBG’s ASW helicopters (which might also be on speculative patrol. hlynkacg knows more about those than I do), and then attacked by either VL-ASROC (a vertically-launched torpedo-carrying missile) or helicopter-dropped torpedoes.
The obvious next question is if a submarine can launch missiles to avoid having to get too close to a carrier group. I don’t expect this to be a particularly healthy choice, either. At best, a Chinese submarine might be able to launch 18 SSMs in a single salvo. Even with the benefits of popping up under the radar horizon, this is not enough to overwhelm AEGIS. The launch of the missiles is quite noisy, and AEGIS is set up to be cued by the sonar detection of said launch transients and begin looking in that direction. The patch of sea near the submarine is also going to be an unhealthy place to be very quickly, as every weapon available will be headed towards it to kill it before it can slip away.
ASW is probably the most mysterious area of naval warfare, and I’m less willing to put hard numbers on my guesses here than I am in most fields. However, this is another area where the threat has massively decreased since the 1980s. I believe that signal processing has improved faster than submarine quieting, and the scale of the threat has declined massively. Russia has less than 20 SSNs in service today, and China has 10. At the height of the Cold War, the Russians had over 60. At the time, the US believed it could fight and win the war against them.
But what about diesel submarines? I’ve already mentioned their lack of strategic mobility, but in littoral waters, they’re even quieter than nuclear submarines (which always make some noise due to the impossibility of switching the reactor completely off), and quite cheap. They are a very real threat in choke points, like the Strait of Hormuz. This is where most ASW research is going on today, but the results are (obviously) classified. New sonar software is improving active sonar capabilities in shallow water, and there are several projects to use unmanned underwater and surface vehicles for littoral ASW. This is a fantastically complicated area, and I don’t have enough information to make any prediction, beyond that it looks like the battle, like so many, could go either way depending on tactics and circumstances.
Naval Gazing
Index
I’m a former volunteer at the USS Iowa in Los Angeles (and am in the process of moving, which is why I stopped), and I enjoy explaining battleships so much that I’ve been doing it here for quite a while, and am gradually spreading out into other naval/defense areas. This is my index of the current posts, updated so that I don’t have to ask Scott to put up a link when the previous index gets locked down. Please don’t post a reply to this index comment so I can keep it updated as new ones get published and the new posts are easy to find.
History:
General History of Battleships, Part 1 and Part 2
The Early Ironclads
Pre-Dreadnoughts
The loss of HMS Victoria
The Battle of Jutland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
US Battleships in WW2
Rest-of-world Battleships in WW2
Battlecruisers
Battleships after WW2
The Destroyer that accidentally attacked a President
The South American Dreadnought Race
Dreadnoughts of the minor powers
Life aboard Iowa
The Battleships of Pearl Harbor Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Technical:
Fire Control
History of Fire Control
Armor, Part 1 and Part 2
Propulsion
Armament Part 1 and Part 2
Turret vs barbette
Underwater protection
Secondary Armament, Part 1 and Part 2
Survivability and Damage Control Part 1
Modern Naval:
Why the carriers are not doomed Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
AEGIS
Strike Warfare
Misc:
Battleship Bibliography
Thoughts on tour guiding
Questions I get as a tour guide
This sure looks like a….book.
Survivability and Damage Control, Part 2
Network-centric warfare, Part 1
I’ve decided that I’m tired of rebuilding this index every 4 weeks, and thus have moved it to a Google Doc.
New, improved index
@bean
How do they determine friend or foe using SOSUS? Do they determine that using sonar profiles or do they contact allies and semi-allies to ask them if their sub is at the choke point? Or are allies and semi-allies expected to report their plans in advance?
Sonar profiles. Often, they can identify what specific vessel they’re hearing, but even if that isn’t possible, it’s usually relatively easy to figure out the class.
As Bean said, sonar profiles. Propeller noise is rather distinctive and even a reasonably basic passive sonar set will allow a competent operator to determine RPM, blade count, and possibly reduction ratio. This isn’t necessarily enough to make a positive ID but it’ll separate merchant vessels from likely combatants and potential submarines from surface traffic.
The real challenge is resolving a passive contact (noise the water) into a firm position and track.
Is there a way that an adversary could deploy noise-creating microphones in littoral waters to further disguise SS’s?
One obvious problem with trying to confuse potential enemies with misleading noises is that the subs themselves mostly use sound to detect enemies. Unless your side’s subs can identify and designate as irrelevant all the distracting noises (probably only possible if there aren’t very many of them and they are at least a little distinctive, which makes it more likely that the enemy will find a way to ignore them too), this will reduce the effectiveness of your subs.
With EM jamming, If you know the frequencies of bogus noise, or can make noise makers that have programmed breaks in the noise generation, you can work around it fairly easily. That’s how, for example, jamming aircraft work. In principle the same logic applies to sound (the math for sonar and radar is very similar, the constants are different not the formulas) but in practice I’ll bet it is harder because of the greater complexity of the ambient environment.
Littoral subhunting is mostly done with active sonar. SSs at low speed are just too quiet. That said, they can’t recharge their batteries quietly, so there are limits on their endurance in that configuration. But adding more noise is just going to result in your microphones being located and destroyed. It’s probably not worth the effort.
I don’t disagree with anything you said bean, but you didn’t really mention the two biggest problems with submarines, communication and torpedos.
Subs have always had issues with communication. Communication with submarines is a direct assault on their stealth. Modern coms make it possible to send messages to submarines fairly safely with very low frequency radios, but these are limited in bandwidth and must be widely broadcast, making them vulnerable to traffic analysis. Subs have even more trouble talking back, as they can’t broadcast without revealing their position to someone who’s listening. The rest of the navy is working on bringing together a single operational picture, basically making all of the sensors on every platform in the fleet constantly talk to one another so that all their data is shared into a single network, but submarines remain largely outside of this process. This will make it easier for future fleets to defend against them, and harder for enemy subs to get into position to attack.
Torpedoes are another limiting factor. In one sense, torpedos are an amazing weapon. because they strike underwater, their blows are extremely lethal. The fluid dynamics of underwater explosions makes them effectively much more powerful than the same amount of explosive above water and because you’re hitting the ship underwater, every blow is potentially lethal. As a result it’s difficult and expensive to protect ships against underwater explosions. That said, compared to other naval weapons, torpedoes are slow and short ranged. the main US torpedo has a range of something like 30 miles. And remember ships are always moving, unless you’re ahead of your target, effective range is even lower than that. In naval terms, that is very close.
That said, the navy is working on both problems.
Satellites help a lot with comms. You have to come to periscope depth, but you can transmit without much fear of interception, and the downlink is harder to intercept than it would be for VLF/ELF (which are also absurdly low-bandwidth.) But yes, you aren’t going to net like surface ships can.
I did mention the short effective range of torpedoes, although I didn’t dwell on it. Submarine warfare might well be worth its own post. In this one, I was mostly dealing with them from an anti-access perspective.
I don’t imagine there’s much overlap between SSC and The Toast but this post reminded me strongly of their recent viewing of Hunt For The Red October and I bet some of you’ll get a kick out of it.
Why wouldn’t there be overlap between SSC and The Toast? I was always a huge fan of The Toast.
Mallory Ortberg is very anti Ayn Rand, among other things righty SSC comment people love.
If you think Mallory Ortberg is anti Ayn Rand, you have not read enough Mallory Ortberg.
Outgroup homogeneity bias; I doubt the majority of posters even have a positive opinion of Rand, much less would be offended by someone else having a negative opinion.
FWIW I read the Toast on occasion and Hunt for Red October is easily in my top 10 favorite movies all time. I feel like it’s an absurdly underrated flick.
Speaking of underwater threats to carriers do you know anything about the recent Staple Head exercise off San Clemente? I’ve always dismissed these games as absurd SWO shit, but I’m hearing from my friends on Catalina and SCI that they actually embarked the air wing for this iteration and were even doing live fire exercises. This seems at odds with the Navy’s stated intent to get rid of NMMP by 2018. Has something changed?
Something seems to have changed. It was definitely interesting, particularly the introduction of live-fire training, which indicates that there’s been a serious change in USN thinking WRT 3MS. Maybe they’ve found some improvement in Russian or Chinese counter-countermeasures. I also didn’t see any reports of beachings, which I think indicates that they’ve turned down the emphasis on non-lethal countermeasures, although it’s just possible those have gotten more specific. It looks like the torpedoes worked pretty well, although the range on those is pretty short for surface launch. They’ll probably have to update missile fusing before those will be effective.
Not sure how this is going to tie in to the retirement of the NMMP. They may just set up a parallel program for the bits they need to keep. Also, the reports I’ve seen say that there was something called the Mk 221, which apparently worked really well. I’ll keep an eye out for more reports on that.
Do you think the controversy (and media attention) surrounding the earlier exercises lead the Navy to embrace more active countermeasures? I understand the logic but that’s some deep dark irony if it’s the case.
I’m assuming the Torps were Mk 46s (unless they have a specialized variant of the storied anti-torpedo-torpedo) bat any word on what sort of missiles they were using? Hellfires would explain the air wing’s involvement (unless the Navy’s developed a seaborne-mount for it in the last 5 years*), but Harpoons have the benefit of nominative determinism.
*I don’t know why they haven’t already done so seeing as how Boeing makes a land-based launcher that mates to the Striker LAV. I’m imagining some surface warfare procurement officer somewhere reading the whitepaper and rejecting it for being entirely too practical and not “transformative” enough.
I wouldn’t be surprised. Do I detect the Hand of Mattis at work here?
I’d assume Mk 46 too. It’s available and fast enough (I think) to do the job. I’d honestly be worried about the anti-torpedo-torpedo having a big enough warhead.
I thought that the LCS was getting Hellfires. But I’d have to check and see if any of them were working during the exercise. Also, I suspect that surface-launched missiles are not a good option here. The controllers would presumably keep them totally submerged near the target, and they aren’t on the surface that long.
But Harpoon would be an excellent case of nominative determinism. Can a helicopter carry them, or are they going to have to break out the Hornets for that?
I seem to recall something about “3MC” for Marine Mammal Mitigation Concepts; did some idiot turn that into a Program or a System? Too many acronyms to keep track of, and they keep changing them just to weed out the unhip (see also C3I->C4ISTAR, LGB->LGBTTQQIAAP).
If this has gone to testing hardkill weapons, that’s probably unwarranted by any actual threat, so yeah “absurd SWO shit”. And I’m up for any excuse for a Harpoon live-fire exercise, but I can’t see any basis but, as bean says, nominative determinism.
As a concept, sure – the USN isn’t going to use marine mammals for anything but minehunting and counterdiver operations for both practical and ethical reasons, but e.g. the USSR wasn’t big on either practicality or ethics when they turned man’s best friend and oldest partner into a kamikaze tank-hunter. It’s always better to have to have a file folder with the plans for “what to do if enemyistan actually does this damn fool thing” rather than making it up on the fly, so long as no actual marine mammals are harmed in making that file folder.
But, concerns with adverse PR aside, this seems like a job for softer countermeasures. There’s been a bit of publicity and research about how active sonar apparently causes pain and disorientation in whales, etc; possibly the Navy has been looking into this as a deliberate rather than incidental effect? Me, I’d suggest just dropping active sonobouys set to mimic whale mating calls or whatever, let them frolic somewhere safe while we get on with business.
And, sure, do the math on how you’d go about targeting a whale with a Mark 46 if you had to, but how would you even test that realistically?
That was my understanding.
Simple enough. Just fit it with a block of an appropriate-density material instead of a warhead, and maybe some system (airbag? water brake?) to keep it from hurting the target.
That seems like it could be countered with what is essentially high-tech hearing protection for the whales.
Pretty sure the first actual airbag didn’t work properly the first time it was activated, leading to a severely traumatized crash-test dummy. That’s part of what you’d be testing, and preferably without ramming a whale with 500 lbs of metal doing 40+ knots.
Ah, so Enemyistan is going to be sending whales with earmuffs to reconnoiter and maybe attack our aircraft carriers? Seems that would neutralize the threat right there – the only point of using marine mammals in the first place, ours or hypothetically theirs, is that their sonar has a few million years of evolutionary optimization behind it. Anyone who thinks they know how to filter that for superior effect, might as well design their own system from scratch and leave the poor whales out of it.
What were the Staple Head exercises? Searching is just giving me information on first aid for
moronspeople with staples in their head.Interesting. That may have been intentional on the part of whoever picked the name, or they may have just been lucky to get Staple Hand on the DoD Random Name table.
Staple Head is an exercise to test Marine Mammal Mitigation Systems. There have been persistent rumors that the Russians and maybe the Chinese are experimenting with weaponized marine mammals, mostly whales. It’s probably just the SWOs inventing threats, but you never know.
Is there any plausibility to that scene in Red October where the sonar tech hears the Russians singing? Put another way: when a sub is running quiet, how restrictive is it for the folks on board?
Fairly restrictive, IIRC. The Ohio-class SSBNs are usually credited with being quieter than the ocean background, and I’ve even heard double or maybe low triple-digit watts given as power radiation.
When rigged for ultraquiet operation, it’s my understanding that cooking is often suspended to avoid metal pots on metal grates, and that even a dropped wrench can potentially give the game away.
Depending on how serious the situation is, rigging for ultra-quiet can include restricting everyone not on watch to their racks, and minimizing loudspeaker announcements.
Then there’s also the standard sound-deadening steps like requiring a set of comfy sneakers to wear underway, as the standard-issue steel-toe boots get loud in aggregate.
Then there’s also the standard sound-deadening steps like requiring a set of comfy sneakers to wear underway, as the standard-issue steel-toe boots get loud in aggregate.
“Men, the situation is grim – break out…
… THE COMFY CLOTHING!”
🙂
A bit off topic, but it seems to me that the new destroyers look like they may be submersible? Maybe not very deep but enough to potentially avoid missile strikes?
Is this something they would try to do? Is it all just for stealth?
The Zumwalts? They look like that because they’re supposed to be stealthy. In practice, they’re much more likely to become submarines than anyone really wants in a surface ship, but without the capability to surface again.
Snark at a terrible design aside, it just wouldn’t be worth the downsides. Making something submerge at all is pretty hard, and the tradeoffs in trying to make a destroyer do it are going to leave you with an even worse design than the Zumwalts are.
the new destroyers look like they may be submersible?
In practice, they’re much more likely to become submarines
With all the criticism of the Zumwalts, I would have thought the attitude there was “We can only hope”? 🙂
Bean – do you have anything interesting to say about the threat environment in the Falkland war? (Seems interesting as something modern enough to have real anti-shipping missile engagements, but predated real CIWS or, as far as I can tell, the ability to generate intercepts (or so HMS Sheffield’s experience would say.)
(As far as I can tell, the Falklands are the only meaningful naval engagement between anything approximating first-rate powers (okay, Argentina barely counts, but better than Iran…) since, what, 1945?
I do wish–well, okay, I don’t wish there had been more wars in the world, that’d be crazy, but from a purely informational perspective, wouldn’t it have been interesting if first-rate navies had actually tested ships in meaningful combat every ten years or so since WW2?)
Yes, but I think I’m going to do a discussion of the Falklands as a separate post/series of posts. Thanks for the idea.
It was more complicated than that. I have a fair bit of information, but it will take time to pull it together.
Indeed, and I remember that when growing up, the older military books in the children’s section of the library often predated Desert Storm, and it was the last air/naval war fought. A very interesting conflict, often overlooked these days.
It would indeed have been very interesting. The Falklands, for all the limits of the Argentinians, are the only good example of modern naval warfare.
When you say “the impossibility of switching the reactor completely off” I assume you’re talking about the associated pumps, or perhaps the generator, yes? I would think the reactor itself wouldn’t need to make noise.
Yeah, this refers to pumps in the coolant system. (The reactor won’t make noise–to my knowledge–until it melts down and destroys the sub, without them. I suppose there may be some localized boiling in the pressurized primary loop even without pumps, but since you can’t turn off the pumps…)
modern submarine reactors rely on natural circulation (or at least can be, not sure if the S9G is designed that way) and don’t need pumps at low power. but the turbine will still make noise. Diesel submarines can operate on battery power which has no moving parts, and thus almost no noise.
Wait, really? My fairly ancient book on naval engineering implied everything is pumped in PWR (though it’s really looking at surface ships), unless I misread it. Has that changed? I didn’t know that was possible / safe. (For that matter, does/can natural circulation improve passive safety, now that I think about it?)
Learn something new every day.
Most PWRs have pumps. and so do naval reactors, actually, but reactor is specifically designed so that at low power, the heat differential between the top and bottom of the reactor is enough to drive the circulation without them. And yes, it does improve safety, because you don’t have to worry about the reactor overheating if the pumps break. As I recall, though, it posed some uncomfortable compromises in reactor shape, as natural circulation required a relatively tall reactor, which caused design issues.
The first US natural circulation reactor was, IIRC, on the USS Nautilus, which was said to spend more time off the Soviet coast than most of their ships did. It was then adopted for the Ohio-class submarines. I recall hearing that at low speeds modern attack subs can operate without pumps, but I couldn’t source it offhand.
Other than that, cassander, stop stealing my lines!
Yes. Pretty much what cassander says, although IIRC, even natural circulation makes a bit of noise. Probably not detectable on an Ohio, but you might be able to pick it up on a smaller and less well-silenced boat.
I usually try to read all the comments, but I never pay attention to the names, so I cannot recommend anyone.
I never participate in the discussions; I’m not very confident in my English skills, but I truly enjoy reading the articles and the comment section. Lots of interesting people here.
Also, I wanted to say hi to everyone. I’m from Brazil and currently live in the US. I’m an ex-Mormon and atheist. I’m curious to know if there are any Brazilians around here and followers of Stoic philosophy. Vale.
For what it’s worth, if this post is representative of your English skills, they’re fine.
Thank you. I can communicate at a basic level, but I wish I was able to convey more complex ideas in English. — Who I am kidding? I don’t have any complex ideas to share, but I try to understand some.
I remember a long time ago, when I lived in Brazil, they used to say “Esperanto will be the universal language of the future!” It’d have been nice.
If someone ever asked me to choose a universal language that would be Tamarian, but they say a purely metaphorical language is not possible.
I actually think metaphorical language is more workable than you give it credit for. (ctrl-f “Darmok” 😉 )
Oh, tudo bem. Muitas ideías “complexas” são tolo. 😀
Universal languages are certainly possible. It’s not entirely hard to create a language. The issue is making it a lingua franca, followed by a lingua cultura. Thaaaat is a massive undertaking.
@ Some Faceless Mook
True that.
Was that “Vale” meant as reference to the Quijote’s ending? I’m interested in Stoic philosophy, somewhat.
Vale is a greeting in latin, me thinks.
Vale, Landlord!
well, technically a farewell (but for all I know maybe linguists classify greetings and farewells as the same thing). Simply translating it as “goodbye” works.
Part of one of my favorite Latin phrases, typically said at the closing of plays – valete et plaudite
“Goodbye – and applaud us!”
After reading your comment I had to visit the past for a few minutes. Don Quixote was the first hardcover book I ever had; bought it from a traveling salesman. It was red with beautiful golden details. I don’t remember much of the story, unfortunately, but only that I liked Sancho Panza, the proverbs and that “Vale” was the last word.
Seneca finishes his letters to Lucillius with the word “Vale” — “Farewell”, “Wish you well”. Perhaps there is also a philosophical meaning: death. Seneca could die any day and every letter could be his last.
Have you read Meditations? I find it beautiful. I have to block the idea of a Logos, but it works for me. After becoming an atheist, I had to find some type of consolation and philosophy seemed to be a good one.
First off, when it comes to English skills, practice make perfect, so please participate.
I am neither Brazillian, nor an Atheist but I am a fan of Stoic Philosophy and the Skeptics (the old fashioned kind, not the fashionable kind). If I had to point to specific works that had a profound influence on my personal outlook Meditations and Montaigne’s Essays are near the top the list.
I used to participate in a Stoic group for a while and although most in that group were atheists, there were some deists, pantheists and Christians.
I still like certain aspects of religion and honestly, if it were my decision, I would choose to have some sort of faith.
I have never read Montaigne’ Essays. I’ll add them to my reading list. Thank you.
I love the idea of stoic groups (have you read A Man in Full?) and if I can make a stereotypical joke without being offensive, I’m amused by the thought of small talk at one.
“So, how’s it going?”
“Can’t complain.”
“Didn’t your house catch on fire?”
“Yes.”
One of my PFCs who worked in my headquarters, when asked how things were going would say, “Can’t complain. It wouldn’t do any good anyway!”
Hi! Hello! How are you, Randy? What’s your favorite color? 😉
I have not read the book, but it is on my reading list. Several people have recommended it on the account of Epictetus’s teachings.
There are Stoic groups as well as Cynic and Epicurean groups (the Stoics’ outgroup). They say pleasure is the only good; we say it’s virtue.
As a fellow non-native English speakier, this is a familiar feeling to me. I’m sure as … something I’m quite sure about … that I manage to introduce mangled idioms and ungrammatical constructs to almost every comment I write here (and then I occasionally wonder if people simply do not understand what I’m saying). But I’ve also noticed that writing in English helps with maintaining your active vocabulary (I’d like to say it improves my English, but one really doesn’t have direct feedback so it’s difficult to say).
I’d say you’re doing pretty well.
I agree with hlynkcg.
I also try to write in English; short stories that I don’t share with anyone. I think it is very helpful in improving vocabulary. That practice, along with watching all the Star Trek series (caption on), helped me greatly when I first moved here and didn’t speak any English.
“How are you, Telma?”I am operating within established parameters.
As a fellow countryman, I think your English looks good in written form. If your speech is similar to your writing you may have fewer problems than you think.
(And please, if you want to participate here don’t feel intimidated. I myself seldom comment, but it’s mainly because I don’t have much to say that has not been previously covered by the time I arrive in the thread)
Obrigada! I’ve been trying to improve my accent for some time, but I’m not seeing much improvement. Words like world are the worse. I also avoid saying beach, sheet and Immanuel Kant. They often come out wrong. 🙂
I’m from Piauí and live in Texas. Espero que tudo esteja bem por aí.
Smart Latins I know in America who think they can’t improve their accents tend to be torn between wanting to sound more Merican and, well, that gringo who honks out his nose? The pendejo with lifeless vowels? Never rolled over an r or a woman? Not like him.
If I was you I’d watch an old British Army movie and imitate a character you like. Maybe The Four Feathers.
Talking through your nose while focusing on consonants and meaning rather than vowels is actually a good strong sign of English heritage, dating at least to the Danelaw by way of Puritans and studly settlers. But if it ain’t you, it ain’t you.
Seu inglês parece muito melhor que meu português, e eu tenho praticado mais o menos o ano passado 🙂
Mas não sabia que eram muitos Mórmons brasileiros. É uma comunidade grande?
Thank you. Você escreve português muito bem. Why were you studying Portuguese?
Yes, if I’m not mistaken, Brazil is third in number of members, only behind US and Mexico.
Estava relacionado com uma Brasileira. But I could previously understand a little bit from some learn-the-basics-in-time-for-a-holiday and can in fact recommend Porto as a beautiful city to visit, if you haven’t already been.
In the vein of “taking ideas Seriously” I wrote a series of posts about Egregores (like Moloch) based on Lovecraftian gods. Rationalists might enjoy it, especially the first one, a god of transhumanism and singularities and knowledge.
Congratulations, you have now made me want to hurry up and die before anything as horrifying as Chthuga pops into existence.
This is not eternal life, this is being sucked dry of your data and gobbled up then your husk cast aside, like a sucked-dry orange. What part of “me” remains in the “million anonymous masks, who exist for one burst of information, contributing their idea to the pool, then disappearing”? In the collective of “In the realm of AI, it seems much more straightforward to have a single cognitive process that lacks the emotional stubbornness to cling to its accustomed theories, and doesn’t need to be argued out of it at gunpoint or replaced by a new generation of grad students” as argued for by “High Priest Yudkowsky”?
Chthuga may exist and may store all that information within Her being, but that is something taken over from the billions of minds and lives She absorbed. They don’t continue once She has annihilated them and reduced them to an energy stream to fuel Her existence. To take your ending example:
And generally what happens with “based on a true story” is that characters are deleted, compressed, melded with others, and new characters invented for the purposes of the story. People who end up in romans à clef often dislike the process intensely, as the end product has little relation to how they perceive themselves, and they often argue “I didn’t do/say that! The situation in the book has been completely misrepresented!” Being “carried forth into fame” may involve being carried forth into infamy, as your character is made the butt or villain so the Star can shine. Your real-life story is forgotten, the movie invention of how things went is what is carried over into popular consciousness and becomes the ‘real’ story.
I’ll take information loss, languishing in obscurity, and being forgotten forever over being food for a ravenous uncaring Thing and having a caricature of my life and feelings the only memorial of my existence, thanks very much!
Yeah this is exactly right. They are all evil, like Moloch. I’m not trying to sell these guys anymore than Otium is trying to sell Ra.
The argument you make is also poetically made in the section on Her nemesis, Ithaqua.
Ithaqua isn’t any better! Forerunner of the Wendigo which even seeing turns you into a homicidal cannibal monster!
You are correct that they are all terrible, but I think (my own personal opinion) that you still make Shub-Niggurath sound too relatable. It’s not even about “the wolf could run free and rule” in a feral return to pre-Adamic state, it’s about mere existence itself, life as a kind of infection of matter. Infection being the relevant word here – think more like Nurgle, if Nurgle was less of the caring parental figure he is. Shub-Niggurath is mere organic reproduction – bacteria in a colony, or in an infection – spreading, suppurating rot that exists merely to exist, that reproduces and reproduces without care for “but are all members of this herd healthy, can the environment support them, will they not sicken and starve if their numbers outstrip the resources?”
The world of Shub-Niggurath is not a pastoral paradise (you’re right there) but it’s not even “the pack of wolves run endlessly across the tundra, alpha predators, wild and free and top of the killing chain”. It’s the sickness that killed the wolf that got an infected scratch, the germs growing and spreading throughout the system. It’s Síle na gig, which in modern interpretations has been kind of tidied up into a basic fertility symbol, but in many carvings is a fiercesome and frightening creature. It’s “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”
I liked the Ra analysis but I think that there again there are parts which are not included or maybe not even considered; Horus versus Ra for instance is not merely about Ra being “false” sovereignty, it’s about Horus as the milder version of the sun – Horus of the Two Horizons, morning and evening, the rising and setting sun. Ra is the noontide sun that glares down and scorches and burns; the inescapable light where there is no shadow to hide. EDIT: Otium has very good breakdown of what Ra encompasses, but where Horus is the sovereign, the king, the guy in charge, Ra is the concept of authority itself and I don’t think they hammer home that enough; if you have a dispute or disagreement with the king, you can call a revolution, but who do you rebel or fight against when it’s Authority itself you are fighting? If you don’t get your rights under a law, you can look for justice and redress – but where do you look for it if it’s Justice itself that is against you? You may be able to see clearly by the light of Horus, but the light of Ra dazzles because it is so bright, so in your eyes, and so inescapable: the searchlight, the limelight, the glare of the flashbulbs popping while you are the subject of their scrutiny, the noonday sun at its height over head in a desert land where there is no shade or shelter from the rays reaching down like hands.
Ra is the song Eye in the Sky:
I do like the analyses of the Egregores, it’s just that I think they’re not terrifying and un-human enough 🙂
I thought he went out of his way to make their cultists sound understandable, rather than to make the egregores sound human. The sales pitch, so to speak.
Like “Tzeentch: God has a plan for you!”
or “Slaanesh: God loves you, just the way you are!”
(Also, every other way.)
Have you read John Michael Greer’s The Weird of Hali? Nyarlathotep as a souped-up Thoreau. Greer has a fine nineteenth-century mind.
I was totally convinced by Susan Morrow’s The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Egypt’s gods were concepts more than gods. Horus is the circling falcon as concept. Everything else follows: cycles, the sky, falcons are cool, women’s flesh flutters like a falcon’s wings when Unis pokes his snake in their falcon’s mouth, the Moon and Sun are the eyes of Horus because they are in the sky circling, so on.
Hey, another Alan Parsons Project fan.
Come to think of it, there’s something slightly on the Ra spectrum as a band – their lyrics are usually pretty abstract, their music is very polished (they’re about the least quirky band that gets filed under ‘prog rock’) and they very seldom performed live, which would have made it easier for listeners to connect humanly with the music 🙂
It seems to me that in spite of depression and general curmudgeonness, there’s something you like about being embodied, and I’d be interested in anything you have to say about that.
I rather like being embodied myself, and I’m not convinced that people who like the idea of uploading will do justice to embodied experience and the possibilities of making it better. I do tai chi and such, so what I want from uploading would just be what I have now, but access to the good effects of better movement.
Paradoxically, I think it’s because I live in my head a lot (and have done so since childhood). So discarding the fleshly chrysalis and uploading to Silicon Heaven isn’t going to change much for me, as my mind will be the same. And if it’s not, then that isn’t really me if so much has been altered, re-programmed, pared away, added on, etc. so again, what is the point there that it is an improvement over being an ugly bag of mostly water?
Also, the world is beautiful. That is something I have never been able to deny, even in my most depressed curmudgeonliness. Even with all the crap and human horribleness, beauty exists and is real. The universe is there for its own sake. It’s something along the lines of what Chesterton says about suicide:
The transhumanist “it’ll all be better when we’re non-human entities” is that sneer and slap at the rest of creation; yes, and when the Singularity wraps us all in the loving embrace of Fairy Godmother AI, what happens to poor old Earth and the trees and birds and beasts and lowly creeping things and rivers? All turned into computronium to better enable our state of non-physical being? Then indeed the leaves might well fly off the trees in anger and strike us in the face for our greed, selfishness and vanity.
But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront.
I think that suicide is tragic, but mainly because of the way it impacts other people. Even those who think no one loves them usually have someone who would be affected by their loss. And even if someone is truly alone, dying still robs them of the potential for future happiness, so they are in some sense cheating themselves (though I don’t think of it as an affront so much as just a senseless loss).
It seems arrogant to believe that the birds, trees, or universe in general care about whether we’re alive or dead; it’s an assumption that all of creation is so deeply invested in our fates that every atom in the cosmos gasps in outraged horror when someone chooses to jump in front of a train.
Really, this metaphor makes the universe sound like a gossipy, self-absorbed teenager. “Can you believe that dumbass who just smeared his brains all over the wall? Now he can’t appreciate how pretty we are!” “ikr? lol what a moron.”
Does the sunset sulk when humans fail to sufficiently admire its beauty? Do the stars feel neglected when we aren’t waxing poetic about them? Doubt it. I do think the universe is beautiful and awe-inspiring, but that beauty and awe is simply my own mental experience of it.
If anything, we’re more useful to the trees dead because our bodies can be used as fertilizer. Though I guess we’re exhaling carbon dioxide for them while we’re alive, so either way we’re providing a function. Whether we’re still breathing or simply decomposing is irrelevant. At least from their perspective.
It is only to humans that humans matter.
A possibly relevant poem.
It’s equally an insult to think that we are the lords and masters of creation, that we can conquer nature, overcome death, remake ourselves into some kind of universal entity that uses the stars as fuel to ensure our continuing existence.
The world has a lot more than humans in it. The universe is a lot bigger than us. I know I argue that animals have little to no moral worth compared to humans, but neither do I think that all other living things – animal or vegetable – are just fodder for us either as literal food or metaphorical material to inspire, amuse or divert us.
It is very arrogant of a human to think that their own unhappiness – and I’m not saying suicidal people aren’t unhappy, in pain or just need to pull themselves together – renders the rest of the world around them meaningless and not worth anything. The suicidal person may have nothing to live for; that does not mean the purpose of the rest of the world is to give them something to live for. Creation exists for its own sake, not for “well I won’t kill myself because the sunset was appropriately pretty to be worth my time”.
There comes a point where all the pleading about “but things are worthwhile! think of the pain of others! think what you’ll miss!” have no effect on someone who is suicidal, and I think that is fair enough; if someone is in those straits they don’t care because they can’t care. It means nothing to them. But that is a very big step away from saying “nothing means anything and it’s all worthless”. You kill yourself and when you’re in your grave the world will keep on turning, the grass keep on growing, and the birds build their nests, all without reference to you.
To say “I want it all to stop” and by “all” include the rest of the world and all its beings in it is an insult to the rest of the world and all its beings, because if you don’t want to live for their sake (and no-one can make or force you to do so), then neither do they have no value of their own merely because the scales of your circumstances are weighted down.
It is very arrogant of a human to think that their own unhappiness – and I’m not saying suicidal people aren’t unhappy, in pain or just need to pull themselves together – renders the rest of the world around them meaningless and not worth anything.
I would agree, but I also don’t think committing suicide necessarily implies believing this, at least not for everyone. “The world no longer has meaning for me” doesn’t mean “the world no longer has meaning for anyone.” No more than saying “I don’t like ice cream and don’t want to eat it anymore” is an insult to ice cream itself or everyone who does like ice cream.
There are some suicidal people who say things like “everything sucks, it would be better if everyone just chose to die because continuing to want to live is irrational, given the horror of existence.” I would say they’re mistaken and that it is pretty arrogant for them to make a statement like that about all of reality, so if those are the specific people you’re talking about then I agree. But I also think there are those who choose to die simply because they want to escape from the pain, and it has no bearing on whether they think life is worth living for others.
The suicidal person may have nothing to live for; that does not mean the purpose of the rest of the world is to give them something to live for. Creation exists for its own sake, not for “well I won’t kill myself because the sunset was appropriately pretty to be worth my time”.
Agreed, but this perspective doesn’t seem to mesh with the metaphor about angry birds and “a suicide’s death is an insult to the tiniest creature”, etc. If creation exists for its own sake, then it’s profoundly indifferent to whether humans live or die; in some larger cosmic sense, it doesn’t really matter whether we choose life or death, it only matters to us and to the people who will miss us. An individual human’s death (whether chosen or unchosen) is the existential equivalent of a leaf falling off a tree or a candle burning out. It wouldn’t make sense to say “it’s so arrogant and selfish for a candle to burn out–it’s like it expects the rest of the world to give it a reason to keep burning!” The only difference between us and a candle is our fragile and possibly illusory sense of agency.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep certain candles burning as long as possible, or that we can’t appreciate their light and warmth while they’re here.
To say “I want it all to stop” and by “all” include the rest of the world and all its beings in it is an insult
I think people who use this phrase usually intend it figuratively, rather than saying they want the entire world to disappear. Most suicidal people I’ve known don’t wish for the extinction of all beings.
Chesterton is arrogant here, but it’s a respectful arrogance.
He’s certain something *clearly* supercedes your right to die, but it’s every tiny aspect and entirety, of the universe itself he has crying out against it, not hypothetical sadness of your dog, -so I find his innovative, zealous, and serious hysteria highly refreshing compared to the usual response of distancing platitudes. He’s trying to push you around, but towards life and happiness, and he’s seriously trying- you can’t say he’s trying to fob you off.
I’d say the main problem with this quote is that it’s coming from a genius/authority in Chesterton saying it. It’s refreshing at the cost of being harsh and unfair, and if it came from someone with less ‘clout’ it would be equally refreshing but easier to ignore the dark side of it where necessary.
(In general, I think you should be more careful with somehow-admirable but overzealous statements if you’re regarded as an authority than if you’re a voice in the crowd.)
@Deiseach:
“Tonight I die the death of God – the stars shall die with me!”
Chesterton is arrogant here, but it’s a respectful arrogance…I find his innovative, zealous, and serious hysteria highly refreshing compared to the usual response of distancing platitudes.
It reminds me of the speech Louie CK gives to his suicidal friend in the episode “Eddie.” There’s a discussion of it here in a Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/215t5v/its_not_your_life_its_life_louis_ck_700x465/?st=j6dui1ti&sh=5d435ee6
I think the first comment gets it right.
I mean, what depressed people do or don’t find helpful is a highly subjective thing, so if there are people who find this kind of stuff genuinely inspiring and a motivation to keep living I don’t want to take that from them. But to me this line of thinking has always felt self-righteous and profoundly unhelpful.
I don’t think C.K. was reaching for the stars there. I remember feeling that bit felt dialed out and shallow, and like he was distancing himself from the guy. plus louis CK’s thing has never been zeal or seriousness.
I think chesterton’s was at least serious. I think chesterton really believes what he says is an absolutely general reason not to commit suicide, while Louis was just repeating the incantation he uses to ward it away from himself personally.
I think chesterton’s was at least serious.
I mean, I think he’s emotionally sincere in his moral contempt toward suicidal people, but that was the primary message I got from it: that he is disgusted by their actions. All the rest is just a metaphor for his own emotional/moral gut response.
If you interpret it literally it’s a very strange message. “Don’t kill yourself. It will really piss off the dandelions.”
Though it’s possible that he does mean it literally and believes the universe itself is in some way conscious and disapproves of suicide. If someone is of a non-mystical bent, though, or just doesn’t care about pleasing this hypothetical entity, there’s not much there to latch onto.
Reality is mysterious enough that I’m not willing to completely dismiss the possibility of the universe being conscious, but the idea of it having human moral standards is pretty absurd to me. “The universe hates suicide” seems just as random and arbitrary to me as “the universe disapproves of homosexuality” or “the universe is against the war in Afghanistan.”
The idea in both cases is a shock to hopefully flip someone’s perspective.
I don’t personally like shock tactics, but CK’s are lazy and dialled out, while chesterton’s are original, tryhard, and general commeasurate with the magnitude of the topic. (even if not very plausible)
It’s like if a pastor starts trying to convert you by an exorcism, or something equally grandiose. The basic nature of the interaction is disrespectful, but within that context, the pastor who pulls out all the stops is showing you infinitely more respect than one who dials it out and expects you to follow along just because he did the ritual and he’s used to people following his lead.
In both cases, they are trying to convince you by nothing but their dedication to their belief, -which is fucked up, but the first guy is making a serious effort and trying to impress you, while the second is just carrying out motions.
So if we’re inclined to overlook people using underhanded suicide prevention tactics out of desperation to avert something so terrible, then, chesterton’s attempt is exemplary in that genre. Whether it has absolute merit is a seperate question. Both could be wrong. But compared to usual fare like ‘all life has value’, I find chesterton’s genuine attempt to overawe you (and dogma of appropriate magnitude) refreshing and even respectful
(“life isn’t worth living for me” vs “yes it is, stop being annoying”, is an insult. vs “THE VERY HEAVENS CRY OUT AGAINST THE INSULT OF YOUR INGRATITUDE” is insulting, and you’d be within your rights to demand apology, or redress, or a duel, but it’s probably meant well.)
Myself, I’ve always found Dorothy Parker to make the most compelling case.
This is interesting to me. I don’t know how well that actually describes the wider rationalist community, but I have totally had mini-crises about how much knowledge about the ancients we’ve lost, about how many personal stories have never been told, even a good deal of guilt about how bad I am at recording my fleeting thoughts and conversations—especially since I tend to get a lot of sentimental and nostalgic value out of looking at that material later (well actually, with my 13-year-old self, a compulsion to destroy it all instead 😀 ). This impulse to record doesn’t jive well with my feelings that privacy should be available to all, and my revulsion that people’s internet histories get dug up to smear them—and how many figures of history would be comfortable with how much modern man can learn about them? how comfortable would we be with it?—but nonetheless it tugs at me.
It tugs at me too. So much so that I consistently yearn for a technology that would allow for near autonomous, private recording of of a life’s timeline, including specificities the individual deemed important or meaningful. The technology would be free, optional, but encouraged. The archive would (optionally) remain locked after a person’s death but automatically unlock after some maximum period of time (say 100 years). Thus future humans could access a greater amount of data about the present, while those in the present would maintain their real-time privacy.
In jest: How soon we have acquired enough terminology to discuss all of the problems of human condition metaphorically with obscure names of Elder and Outer Gods and old Egyptian/Mesopotomian/Judeo-Christian beings to the extent that the jargon is totally impenetrable to outsiders and we look as wanna-be Mythos cultists taking a Lovecraftian LARP campaign a bit too seriously?
Another point. Reading this was a great fun, but long lists like this may not that good chances to permeate through the relevant blogospheres and like. I think Scott’s Moloch has managed to stick around because there was the evocative Ginsberg poem in the first place. Remembering for which things Ra and Sol Invictus and Hastur and Cthulhu and Azathoth are supposed stand for will be difficult.
I don’t think I’d want to use these as actual terminology in a discussion (I’m barely comfortable using Moloch in that regard), especially since you generally don’t need to refer to the abstract thought-pattern when discussing something concrete. E.g., I wouldn’t say “Environmentalism is a Moloch problem,” I’d say “Environmentalism has the problem that externalities aren’t priced into the free market.”
But as poetic depictions of our psychology, and as a way of explaining my biggest issue with the Lovecraft mythos – why are people so excited to study something that will drive them insane and end the world – I’m extremely impressed. @flockoflambs should feel proud of this even if it doesn’t become jargon.
It’s going to get even more confusing when we start invoking our other usual go-to set of metaphors in parallel. I suppose there’s already Harry Potter vs. Cthulhu fanfiction(*) out there, but ours will be more interesting.
*ETA: Not a request
“*ETA: Not a request”
Formal request here, though!
So you’re envisioning an epic battle with unspeakable, mind-bendingly horrific abominations that it is torture or suicide even to think about, whose very existence is an affront against Nature, the tales of which mankind would have been infinitely better off perpetually in ignorance of—against a guy with an octopus for a face?
As long as it isn’t slash.
@nimim.k.m. – “Remembering for which things Ra and Sol Invictus and Hastur and Cthulhu and Azathoth are supposed stand for will be difficult.”
Well, Cthulhu is actually already in the canon terminology, due to “Cthulhu always swims left”. Also, Sol Invictus is a Libertarian Candidate for congress.
Well, Cthulhu is actually already in the canon terminology, due to “Cthulhu always swims left”. Also, Sol Invictus is a Libertarian Candidate for congress.
Would a Cthulhu/Dagon ticket on the ballot have had a nuanced response to
CO2 increases: Favoring sea level rise, but opposing coral bleaching? 🙂
These are extremely evocative, in the sense that they have evoked some feelings. You have put into words many things that deeply disturb me about myself and human nature. You deserve the highest praise for your ability to create such writing, and I think I hate you for what you have done to my head.
This was really enjoyable. Thank you for writing this.
So I think I am running for public office. Anyone else done that here?
At the effective altruist conference in San Francisco this weekend, there are a bunch of talks and panels encouraging people to do this. Do you mind if I put you in touch with some of the people who have offered to give advice to those who need it?
Email me if you want to discuss this further.
I have been lurking on SSC for awhile, and at times I have been inspired to potentially get involved in politics, both from a “rationalist” and effective altruism perspective. I am an Asian male pediatrician with solid Blue Tribe credentials. The problem is that I live in Orange County and I identify as agnostic/atheist. I know that the political culture is now shifting in OC towards Blue, but I am quite doubtful whether I could ever be a competitive candidate for public office in this county. Any thoughts/suggestions regarding this kind of situation? Thanks, and keep up the awesome work with the blog!
I suspect you may underestimate your chances. If you just don’t talk about your *(lack of) religion, people are likely to assume that it’s some Asian thing (which they’re likely to be more comfortable with than they would be with a white atheist). And “Asian doctor” kind of seems respectable in a way that will be appealing to many conservatives, while of course being a minority of any kind can help with liberals. Of course you’ll have to find ways to get people to focus on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses, but all politicians have to do that; I think it would come down to whether you’re able to do that well enough, rather than anything about you ruling you out completely.
What do you want to do if you got elected? That’s the main thing to work out: is it generic Democrat-ish “it’d be lovely if everyone were nice to one another and we all had good sustainable well-paying jobs” or do you have a particular hobbyhorse you want to gallop on, e.g. “Orange County is a cultureless hellhole wasteland that is only seen as a large-scale business park for bland multinational conglomerates”?
What you want to do is going to affect who you perceive as your constituents and what they in turn would perceive you as doing for them if they picked you as their representative. In turn, this would link in with how the party you affiliate with would support you – if you are running on a message that is contrary to one of their Big Dog candidates, they will try and get you onside or ignore you, whichever keeps you from interfering with business as usual.
Those are some very good points! And to be honest, I have not thought carefully about what exactly would differentiate me from a generic Democratic candidate. In my mind, I see myself as trying to encourage people to analyze political issues from a more “rational” and “evidence-based” perspective, and trying to avoid being blinded by the tribalism that so often tugs at us. The key question, I suppose, would be whether this platform sufficiently distinguishes me from the generic Democratic candidate enough to where the “marginal value” of my being in that role is going to be significant?
Oh and btw, lol at your “OC is a cultureless hellhole” remarks. Can’t argue with the truth, hehe
I don’t live in Orange County, but I have to ask: What ever gave you the idea that you would be a good choice to represent the people who do?
I’m sorry for your loss.
Large groups of people will want to know what you will do for them specifically and/or what your values are. You are expected to already have drawn “rational” and “evidence-based” conclusions, preferably those that agree with those whose vote you seek.
Since you can’t educate your voters, most politicians choose to deceive their voters into believing that the politician shares their goals + desired methods sufficiently. It seems more sensible to do the evidence-based thing after you got into office by Machiavellian means.
Re: Doctor Mist, you are right, I don’t think I would be a good representative for the interests and values of the average Orange County citizen.
Upon further reflection, I think I have an incorrect view of the role of a political representative. The representative presumably should share the same values as the constituents. The representative’s role should not be to try and change the values and beliefs of those people to what the representative thinks they should be.
Thanks for your feedback, and I apologize if my remarks came across as elitist and insensitive (which I think they indeed were).
Hey! That’s San Jose’s territory, get out!
Well, it’s not quite that extreme.
In general, good politicians usually find some kind of middle ground, where they pick a small number of issues they feel deeply about and “make a couragous stand” on those issues, explaining in great emotional detail why they feel those things are important, while “going with the flow” and following the majority of voters on the majority of other issues they feel are less important.
Voters prefer that, honestly; when people talk about “wanting politicians to be authentic” and such, they mean they want to see politicians who clearly care a lot about *something*, and that kind of thing is hard to fake. Politicians who just seem move with the tide on *everything* are seen as untrustworthy and “fake”, and that often hurts them politically. But on the other hand you can only do that in a limited number of areas.
@Yosarian2
True enough, you need some balance between being a bland vessel for people to project their hopes on and actually having some ‘courageous’ opinions so people see you as a capable person.
As you say: “But on the other hand you can only do that in a limited number of areas.” It’s optimal if the ‘courageous’ opinions are favored by one side plus most of the moderates and heavily opposed by a small group of radicals who are disliked by most people.
And I agree with what Larry Kestenbaum says below, that at a lower level simply turning up and caring about the actual issues goes a long way.
@Yosarian2:
How can you tell whether the politician is pushing a position he actually feels strongly about or a position that he thinks pushing will benefit him politically? The only way that occurs to me is by evidence from before he decided to be a politician.
My view is people way underestimate how much skill there is in being a successful politician, and thus assume without reason that they would be better at it then the current crop of “ethics challenged losers”.
My somewhat cynical and reasoned view is that politicians are the way they are because that is what is necessary to be successful. Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a fantasy. People want effective politicians, not honest and ethical ones. If those can be combined then fine, but most people want effective first if honest and ethical means your local military base is going to be closed or the new flood maps include their house.
Yeah, evidence from before they became a politician, or evidence over time, is certanly valid.
I would say that, while to some extent anything can be faked, that consistently and convincingly faking a strong emotional belief on an issue for the duration of a several month political campaign is very difficult. Also if you’re just faking your belief in something, that makes it harder to put it into a deeper context or to think of it in a way that’s consistent with your other beliefs then if you had actually spent years thinking deeply about the topic.
I’ve seen politicians fall apart when they are trying to defend a belief they don’t really have, and the questions asked of them in a debate or by a reporter manage to hit them from an angle they hadn’t been prepared for by staff earlier. When that happens to a politician on an issue they had been trying to use to define themselves, they often don’t recover from it.
There’s also a counter-signaling thing where you can tell that someone really believes in something if they stand up for the idea even when it’s not politically advantageous for them to do so.
I still maintain that a whole lot of Trump’s most controversial campaign rhetoric was exactly this. Conservatives are incredibly skeptical of politicians who say “crack down on illegal immigration!” on the campaign trail, then switch to “comprehensive immigration reform including a path to citizenship!” as soon as they’re elected.
So, to signal that he isn’t going to be that way, he can’t just say “crack down on illegal immigration!” He has to go farther, and say “mexico sends us rapists!”
The analogy I like to use is gang initiations who have you murder someone to prove you aren’t a cop. Conservatives essentially demanded Trump say and do things to prove he’s not some RINO who still cares about getting invited to the right cocktail parties. Things that the mainstream will never excuse, never forgive, never forget.
There’s a solution to that sort of thing, which consists of publishing detailed proposals in terms of laws and targets, which the politician can then be held accountable to. Wild oversignalling happens downstream of using vague, emotive language ITFP. Do US politicians even publish manifestos, aside from journalists cobbling them together from their speeches?
AFAIK, the only even remotely successful example of this is Grover Nordquist, who has been made into one of history’s greatest villains for attempting to facilitate this process.
ie the only succesfull example in the US?
A rationalist politician.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Edwards_(politician)
Interesting! Thank you for this.
No state has a lower ratio of population to state reps than New Hampshire does. The New Hampshire House of Representatives. largest in the nation, has 400 members, in a small state of only 1.3 million population — one representative per about 3,300 people.
(By contrast, Michigan has almost ten million population and 110 reps, that is, one for each 90,000 people.)
Particularly with the decline of local media political coverage, candidates for the New Hampshire House get significantly less vetting than do candidates for other state legislatures. As a result, some oddball people get elected.
Sometimes this is good, as with iconoclasts like Elizabeth Edwards; other times, not so much.
Edwards seems to be doing admirable things, but at a very small scale. A mere Chicago alderman represents more than sixteen times as many people as she does.*
She successfully advocated a law to prevent criminal prosecution for reporting a drug-related medical emergency. Good on her, but I have to wonder what kind of ghastly law enforcement practices made that kind of law necessary.
*Or eight times as many, considering that Edwards and another rep have a double-sized district.
People committing crimes are always going to be wary of contacting the authorities when doing so is likely or certain to reveal the crime.
Which city/region? Parts of Orange County are heavily Asian and regularly elect east Asians (and perhaps south Asians). I’m pretty sure I’ve seen medical doctors running for local office, although I can’t remember any examples off the top of my head. And I’ve never seen religion play a major role in a local election (all of this with the caveat that I moved out of OC for college when I reached voting age so I’m not the expert on OC politics).
One important thing is to get in touch with people involved in local politics to get learn where you can contribute (as Larry Kestenbaum said, you CAN contribute). One place you might try is the Orange Juice Blog. I’m not sure where they fit in the political picture, but they know people and they seem very open to chatting. I know my Dad met Vern Nelson, one of the regular contributors there, working on a city council related issue and thought he was a nice guy.
OMG, thanks. Will e-mail later today.
I’ve previously run a few successful political campaign in Norway, both for myself at local level and others at national level. Also have been policy advisor for the government and communication advisor for a campaign, so familiar with the two very different worlds of politics (winning elections) and policy (good governance).
Currently I am doing something very different though, running a startup in San Francisco. Would love to have a chat if you want to.
There is a great EA policy-community where you can find some incredibly smart people, highly recommend you talk to them.
Paging Larry Kestenbaum.
Thank you. I do have a lot to say about this. I will post at length soon.
I ran for the Massachusetts State Senate in 2004. I was the uncontested Republican nominee, but I got destroyed in the general election. It was a hopeless race since I ran in a very Democratic district against a popular and powerful incumbent. (The night of the election a reporter I had talked to a lot called and said something like “in case you lose, do you have anything you would like to say?” He didn’t bother asking about the possibility of my winning.) It was worth doing, however. It forced me to be less introverted, caused me to meet new people, and sounds impressive.
I haven’t run for public office, no. However I am currently the campaign manager for a small PAC and would like to remind people that there are plenty of ways to meaningfully contribute to politics which don’t involve being the candidate yourself. (Though obviously being the candidate is quite attractive, since it means you get to decide what issues to run on and prioritize while in office.)
You might think this takes a lot of money, but if you take a look at your local races, whose outcomes often end up determining the national agenda in aggregate, you may be surprised at how little money is really involved there. For people just starting out I would recommend focusing on resource efficiency over resource gathering, since your ability to gather resources is probably limited and it’s returns that impress people anyway. Any bumpkin can get half a million dollars of value out of a million dollars, but it takes real talent to make a hundred dollars do the work of ten thousand.
You don’t need connections, in fact because of the way SCOTUS cases have decided to treat independent expenditures, having no connections may in fact be an advantage. You’re probably not going to be in the news all the time, so this kind of role is great for the politically active but media shy. Squeezing more value out of less is exactly the kind of thing this community prides itself on. It’s a great opportunity to sharpen your rhetorical skills, and politics is where philosophy meets the road anyway.
http://www.jdpressman.com/2017/07/05/stop-waiting-to-put-your-stone-in.html
Back in 1982, new redistricting rules opened up a no-incumbent county commission seat in my old hometown. I thought, I don’t have a politician personality, but lots of people know me in this town. Since I’m not staying here long-term, this may be my last and only chance to ever be a plausible political candidate.
Well, I was wrong. Well, I mean, just the last clause was wrong. I ran and was elected in 1982, was re-elected twice, moved away, and ended up being successful in politics in my new hometown.
I’m sure most people generalize from races for President or Congress to state and local posts, and imagine that being a candidate is insanely stressful, that you have to be wealthy or spend 110% of your time fundraising, that every hidden part of your character is ruthlessly scrutinized, and that everything that makes you (and your views) different from the median voter in your constituency is a dangerous liability.
But no, that is not what it’s like.
(I will continue this later.)
Some of the basic things I tell first-time or prospective candidates:
First of all, let me tell you, on the road to elected office, the traffic is light. There is a shortage of good candidates, in both parties, in all areas, at every level.
Running for office changes your relationship with your community. From then on, more people know you than you know. People who have never met you will get invested in your campaign — positively or negatively. Win or lose, for years, people you have never seen before will greet you like you’re an old friend. And if you lose, everyone looking for someone to fill some volunteer leadership role will have you on their list.
By filing for office, you have made yourself a Public Figure. People will talk about you, and not everything they say will be admiring. Under New York Times v. Sullivan, your ability to sue someone for defamation is severely restricted. And rightly so! Your name is part of political discourse now. Get used to it.
If, like me, you’re not charismatic, you need to be knowledgeable. If you’re running for Drain Commissioner, you should be a walking encyclopedia of drains and their issues. If you’re running for city council, you should be ready to discuss the zoning code with people who have been fighting over it since before you were born. And impress them.
It is simply not true that voters only support candidates who are closely similar to themselves, or who share their views on a long list of issues. When you’re running for local office, campaigning door to door, it goes a long way just to demonstrate that you’re friendly, knowledgeable, and want the job. Issues come up much less often than you might imagine.
Finally, the local news media is dying, and in particular, local and state government news coverage has receded to almost nothing. This reduces the scrutiny of what you do, but it also reduces the scrutiny of everyone else in local public life, including those who richly deserve it.
Larry,
Does this shortage imply a dearth of qualified people actually running things (particularly at a local level)? I mean, I suppose I could run as the token Republican against one of the Democrats on the local water district, but I’m not sure that’s an obvious win.
There’s also some non-partisan positions that aren’t always hotly contested (like village board seats) but I’m also not sure we are in dire need of more qualified persons there.
If you don’t mind me asking, what exactly did you choose to run for, and why did you choose to run for that particular spot? Was it difficult learning the skills to perform that role?
In British local government at least, there are a lot of heavily unqualified councillors (doddery old men who just sleep in meetings etc.). I imagine this is universal.
@ A Definite Beta Guy
Not a dearth, necessarily. But where there aren’t term limits, you will often see an incumbent, who would rather bow out, put under pressure to run for another term, because there isn’t a qualified person to take his/her place. And, over time, less impressive people, who weren’t seriously considered, start to get seriously considered.
For an office like that, most voters pay little attention and vote in a reflexively partisan way. Maybe, under normal circumstances, only Democrats can win there — so maybe you’d need to get attention and create abnormal circumstances?
Or it may just be that no Republican has bothered to try in years. Running against outdated conventional wisdom has worked for me!
If you showed up for water district board meetings, like several in a row, you might be the only “public” in attendance. If you showed some interest and ability at what they do, they might appoint you to a vacant seat or something. Or they could get all paranoid and try to shut you out, in which case you’d have a campaign issue.
See above. Of course, this assumes that attending village board meetings is something you’d enjoy doing.
(Continued later.)
Well, I followed my interests. Here’s a brief summary of my history with elected positions:
In 1982, I was very engaged in issues at the county board, so getting elected was a natural step. I was re-elected in 1984 and 1986, and served six years. I was the youngest member of the board that whole time.
Then I moved away. A few years later, my wife and I ended up in Ann Arbor.
In 1998, I ran for state representative. I finished fourth of four in the Democratic primary.
As I wrote above, once you put yourself out there, you’re on everybody’s list. I was persuaded to run for city council in 1999, and lost by 79 votes.
It was a narrow escape from getting mired in Ann Arbor city council politics.
Then, in 2000, the county commissioner representing my district resigned. Given my experience as a county board member in a different county, I was appointed to fill the vacancy, and then elected unopposed to a full 2-year term.
In 2002, redistricting put me in the same district as a far-better-known incumbent, so I chose not to run again.
In 2004, I ran for county clerk and register of deeds. Given my passions and interests and knowledge, this was my absolutely ideal job.
Long story short, I won, ousting my predecessor. I was re-elected in 2008, 2012, and 2016.
Like Gerald Daugherty.
Yes, exactly!
This is my family’s favorite political ad but my father doesn’t understand why.
My husband has, and successfully. It’s a local position, but it has some influence and he feels he’s doing something worthwhile.
His advice generally goes like this:
1. Get involved right away with a party, whichever one you want to run with (generally a major party), and start volunteering now. You can’t waltz into party headquarters and get support, you pay your dues first by doorknocking and fundraising for other people so they later will do the same for you.
2. Actually knock doors and make calls while you’re campaigning; on the local level it makes a bigger difference than anything else you can do.
3. Start small; you’re not winning national office without experience. (Unless you are orange, I guess.)
4. Realize that it will take a a lot of your time and be mostly thankless, while people will call you at home at all hours to complain about the job they think you’re doing. If it’s part of a council or board, you’ll have to work with other people and you won’t get very much of what you want; however, if you’re good at building coalitions you may stll make a difference so it could still be worth it.